Have You Not Read - S1:E3

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

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Saints. I'm Dylan Hamilton. With me, Michael Durham and David Castle. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask for you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

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Thank you. And today we have a few questions. I say a few. We have loads of questions from David yet again and his list that he has so graciously given to us.

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And we do appreciate it because I wouldn't come up with any of it because I'm here unprepared yet again.

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But first we're gonna start out with some questions about the Bible, how we are to interpret it, and how we use it for a standard.

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The first one that we've picked out of the long list is, the Bible is fine for a standard, like where it tells you where it tells us to love one another, but not where it commands us to kill homosexuals.

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Why should we follow a God that tells us to kill gay people? Yeah, that's a great, that's an interesting question.

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Very often questions come in two forms. Sometimes a question is being asked by the curious, and other times a question is being asked by the skeptic.

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Sometimes questions are a avenue, a medium, a bridge to get to understanding, knowledge, and it's asked from a humble position hoping to learn.

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Other times questions are asked as a barrier, as a shield to keep away from particular authority.

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So without knowing the intent of the question, just answering it outright is,

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I would be hard -pressed to find anything in the Bible that would instruct solid church members today, you know, people who are called to love one another, love their neighbor as themselves, and so on and so forth.

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Can you point to a text in the Bible that tells a church member to go out and kill homosexuals?

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I'd be pretty hard -pressed to find one. When you do go and read the relevant passages that would cause the anger or concern, depending on the reader, you would find that homosexuality is an abomination to the

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Lord, that it is deserving of the death penalty, and that, as with all the other case law in the writings of Moses, that to bring a charge of homosexuality, first of all, you need to have what you have with everything else, two witnesses.

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And in this particular case, to achieve this, it would have to be very blatant, like Sodom and Gomorrah, where the homosexuality, the sodomy, was rampant and it was in -your -face and egregious, and God showed what

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He thought of that with bringing His judgment. And He did send two of His own witnesses, if you recall, who witnessed the attempted sodomy of not only

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Lot but these angels, and then God brought judgment upon the whole city for their complicity in that.

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So, when we look at the prohibitions on sodomy in the

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Old Testament, we are told that it is abomination to God, and that the civil authority in Israel was to bring the death penalty, but they weren't instructed to do that in such a way that broke their own law of, you have to have two witnesses.

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So it wasn't some sort of hate -mongering, we're going to look at people and we're gonna like maybe accuse them of something that maybe they haven't done, or so on and so forth, and just go around and just start lynching people or killing people without due process of the law.

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So the idea that the Bible tells Christians to go kill homosexuals is absolutely wrong.

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It doesn't say that. It does say that homosexuality, not only the act of sodomy, but also the desires of sodomites, are an abomination to the

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Lord. So if we're going to be offended about something, be offended about that, and don't make those false claims.

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But I think that's just a starting point to trying to get into this question. The other part, of course,

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David, is why would we appeal to a standard that in some fashion says, hey, homosexuality proven in the case law in Moses deserves death penalty, and also love your neighbor as yourself.

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Why should we be using a standard like that? I think that's where the question is going to. The context for this question, this was not something that I pulled out of my own head.

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It was put to a member of my wife's extended family. Without revealing too much on that side of the family, this individual says,

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I'm never going to go to Chick -fil -A because they think that I should die.

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I'm not going to go to Chick -fil -A because Christians would rather me be dead.

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And then this person, having been raised in church and knows their Bible, was referencing, as you did,

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Leviticus 20, 13, which says, if a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act.

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They must both be put to death for their guilty of a capital offense.

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Homosexuality, end of the Mosaic Law, was guilty of the death penalty. And that same book,

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Leviticus, says, love your neighbor as yourself. So this individual, taking a plug at Chick -fil -A, taking a plug at his mother, taking a plug at the church that he hates, says,

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I'm not going to follow any God that wishes me dead. And I'm certainly not going to eat that chicken sandwich.

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So little tongue -in -cheek, he was a dig, but there is a point.

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He was making a fair point that was not properly answered. They said, no, they don't want you dead.

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And he could just hold up the Bible right in front of it, says, yeah, they do. That's your Bible.

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And so can you have that person sitting in front of you, and now that you know, it was a loaded question.

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It wasn't, I'm kind of curious on the Hebrew and why, you know, when you translate that into Greek, and then it comes in, you know, what are we talking about?

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It says, no, it says, because of who I am, you want me dead. And he's using

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Leviticus 20 to prove that. So can you unpack that question for us?

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Can you say, what are the layers underneath it? I mean, you're probably starting with the idea that it's because of who

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I am. How would you respond to that person who knows what the

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Bible says, kill the gay person, love your neighbor as yourself? That seems to be a contradiction.

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And even if it isn't, why would I follow that kind of a God anyway? How would you respond to this person who is obviously filled with not just anger, but betrayal, looking at his own family and saying, you want me dead?

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So it's deeply personal. Yeah, absolutely, deeply personal. I think that this is the kind of accusatory statement in question that is being used as a kind of a, not only as a weapon, but as a kind of defensive weapon of,

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I'm going to attack you as I push you away. Right, and this is the kind of question from a skeptic, the hermeneutic of suspicion, not the hermeneutic of submission, wherein not only are you being unloving and unrighteous and unholy, because you want gay people dead, but you're also being inconsistent because your

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Bible is absurd, because it's inconsistent, saying love your neighbor and kill your gay neighbor.

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So you're illegitimate because you're unloving. Your Bible is illegitimate because it's absurd.

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I don't think that the person actually truly believes that everybody who is a

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Christian and reads their Bible and goes to church desires gay people to be dead, but it is a wonderful rhetorical device, and it helps to feed victim mentality, and this is common to a lot of the

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Gnosticism of our day, in which you build your world of special knowledge, and this has been drenched with victimhood.

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So you have to go around telling yourself that the people with power and the people with influence and so on, they hate me, they're after me, they're going to kill me, so on and so forth.

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So this is common across many different forms of this standpoint of epistemology or ethnic

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Gnosticism, whatever terminology you want to use. The question is, how do you answer this person and break through, or at least how do you answer them in a way that even if you're not able to reach the person, you're going to be rooting

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Christians in their faith as they listen to the answer? At the very least, we always need to give someone the

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Word of God. So the Word of God is imperishable seed, Peter says in 1

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Peter 1, and the Word of the Lord does not return void,

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Isaiah tells us. So whatever answer we give, we need to give Scripture. So I would say that starting with love your neighbor as yourself, who gets to decide what that love is?

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Jesus. Right, Jesus needs to say it, Dylan. Has to find it. Yeah. Because everybody's going to be defining that differently.

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Obviously, somebody who thinks that Chick -fil -A would poison him if he went in there to eat a sandwich, because they're all

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Christians, and therefore they all take up the passages in the

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Bible where God pronounces judgment, and they are filled with holy hatred because of these passages.

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Well, I don't think that the person actually believes that, but even if they do, it'd be disproven pretty fast.

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Because Chick -fil -A is not a thoroughly

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Christian organization, so on and so forth. Even the founder who took the stand or whatever later on said he regretted ever bringing anything up and making that stand because it caused so many problems in his business and life, and so on and so forth.

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So it's not like some sort of stalwart, you know, we're going to go after the gays or whatever, and if it were only so that every

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Christian would take up the Bible and feel just the way that God feels about everything. But in fact,

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I would say if there's anything to say, I would go ahead and acknowledge the fact that that is exactly what

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Leviticus says, and I would clarify that it would be done by due process of the law.

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But I would also say, you know, in fact, it's way worse than you think. And I just want to make sure that you're clear on this.

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It's way worse than what you've said. Because it's not about Christians today hoping to kill gay people.

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I don't know any Christians who want to kill gay people. The worst part of it is that God is a holy

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God, and He has wrath against sinners. And it's way worse, Jesus Himself said, do not fear man who can only kill the body, but fear

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God who after killing the body can cast the person into hellfire, eternal hellfire.

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So Jesus says it's way worse for God to hate you than for Christians to hate you or people to hate you, okay?

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Now, that's a very different answer than I've heard in the past where most people, especially in the

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United States, especially in a Baptist or a fundamentalist background, would say, yes, that is what

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Leviticus says, but that's Old Testament. And that's not what you just did.

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Right. So I think that because the important thing is not that they're gay. The important thing is that they're a sinner before holy

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God, and they need to be saved. And it is a point to be made that even though sins are weighted differently, and some sins are worse than others, even though that is the case, they are put together in lists to remind us just how thoroughly sinful we are on so many different levels.

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And it wasn't just that the Old Testament said that people who engage in sodomy should die.

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The Old Testament also says that people who give a false prophecy or worship a false god and encourage others to worship false gods also should die.

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So it's not just gay people, it's Hindus, all of them. And it's also

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Buddhists, all of them. Muslims, all of them.

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And the cults, the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, so it's way, way, way worse than you think.

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And in fact, it's also the Baptists, because there's a whole bunch of them that are like lying gluttons and drunkards.

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And the Bible says in Psalm 5 that God hates people who lie and steal and shed innocent blood, and that God's wrath abides upon sinners.

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So it's actually just way, way worse. You may be gay, but you're not special when it comes to the judgment of God.

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We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is death, and that applies to everybody.

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So it's actually way worse. And I would encourage you not to be afraid of Christians, not to be afraid of men, not to be afraid of Baptists or Chick -fil -A employees.

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And I would encourage you to try out their sandwiches, because they're pretty good. But I would say that you need to fear

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God, not man. And the Bible says the fear of man is a snare. So don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid of Chick -fil -A.

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You need to fear the Lord and hear what He has to say, because He's your maker, and you need to get right with Him.

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He's made a way for you to be right with Him, and He gave His only begotten Son to die on the cross, shedding

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His blood under the wrath of God for your forgiveness, and mine, because, boy, do

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I need it too. So I think that those kinds of questions are legitimate to a point, even though if they're being used as a defensive weapon and they're kind of trying to stab you and push you away at the same time, they have no idea how far worse it is.

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They think they've hit you with the worst possible thing, but they have no idea. So your answer is de -escalating and disarmament, basically.

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You've taken away that victimhood that they thought they could use as the weapon, and you've shown them that, no, it's not all about you in this situation.

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And I think something can be said, too, for a humorous disarmament in this situation as well.

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And just answer plainly back, yes, Chick -fil -A does want you dead. They also want me dead.

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Have you seen the seed oils that they use to cook all of their food? And in some of these situations, too, because that's what they're using.

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They're just using bitterness. They're just using a symbol of that bitterness in order...

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And the same thing goes for the statues or the schools named after Confederate generals.

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It's just a tool to get what I want. And when you answer that way or you answer humorously, a lot of times you can disarm these people from their bitterness that is their weapon.

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Yeah. And I think that as far as a...

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If we're going to be working at this from a presuppositional angle and to get at the root questions, the root assumptions that people have, then a rhetorical device like, oh, it's way worse than that, helps to get started on that road to run that reductio.

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And somebody who's really intending on hating on Christians and hating on the

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Bible, if they start hearing from a Christian, oh, it's worse than what you think, they might be even interested initially to say, oh, you're going to give me some more dirt?

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Yeah. Yeah. And then instead of giving them dirt, you give them gospel. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, because that presuppositional methodology

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I've learned is nice sandpaper right up front, especially if you use it that way. And you got to have some of those rhetorical devices as salve on those wounds later on.

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You can ask Darrell about me using it as sandpaper. I've done that quite a bit. I had an honorary basketball coach one time, and we were on a school trip, and he was helping chaperone or whatever.

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And we were at, I think it was Romanos State Park over there in Watonga. And there was a deep spring -fed pool that's very crystal clear, and there's a little bit of a pier.

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You can kind of stand out on it. You can look all the way down. It's very interesting. In any case, my basketball coach was sneaking up behind me because he was going to give me a big shove into the pool, and I knew something was wrong because all the other guys on the team went super quiet all of a sudden.

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And so I turn around, and here comes my basketball coach, arms out. And I didn't even have time to think, but I grabbed his arm, and I just pulled him right down past me.

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And then he went in the drink, and I stayed dry. He asked me later, he said, how did you do that?

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I said, I don't know. But sometimes people come raging and launching at you.

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They just kind of use their momentum to say, let's just keep going with this and see where we end up.

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That's, you know, it's judo. That's what it was apparently. Well, the way you addressed it was interesting.

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And I think that that can be applied to a number of different, you know, the texts.

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You know, everybody's got, you know, six bullets in their gun. They have their verses that they know.

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It's, let's see if I can make this Christian dance. You didn't avoid it. You said, yes, that's there, and it's actually in a long list.

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Oh, and by the way, it's far worse than you think. And then you expanded that to, you know, adultery, and you expanded it to idolatry, expanded it to basically to include everybody in the world.

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And then you included yourself. And not only do we have a holy God, we have a sinful humanity.

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I'm in that boat. And let me tell you about Jesus. Yeah, exactly.

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I mean, he just kind of came full circle. Didn't, it was just, it was an interesting, I don't want to call it a technique, but an overall strategy that seems to work regardless of the question that's being put to you.

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Yeah. We have, of course, we have the other part of the question. I think you identified it.

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You said it was a different way of answering the question than which is typical because a common refrain, a common response to the question about Leviticus or these prohibitions.

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Well, that's in the Old Testament. Right. So what's the, how do you take that approach as far as an answer, a non -answer?

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What do you think about that, Dylan, David? That's like leaving Tom Bombadil out of the movies.

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You're leaving out part of the story. Nice reference. Good reference. Good reference. Well, yeah, you're kind of leaving out a big section of the spine that held the story up when you read it.

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So maybe Tom Bombadil wasn't that good of an analogy. No, it is quintessential.

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It is truly the essence of a lot of American Christianity steeped in dispensational thought that, to overuse an overused phrase, unhitches the

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New Testament from the old. It had its place. There was reasons for it. I mean, you can hear everything from, well, they were in a war.

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They needed, you know, they couldn't have childless couples and they needed more soldiers and we couldn't have male -to -male because we needed more people.

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They needed to expand, you know, all these practical reasons, but never addressing that Exodus and Leviticus are expansions of the

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Ten Commandments. These are a statement of the holiness of God.

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This is the law of God, which is a reflection of his character. And he says, this is bad.

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This is why. And here's all these other things that are really bad. So when they say, well, that's

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Old Testament, then you're saying, is God no longer holy? Does God define holiness?

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What is that now? Has holiness changed? Right, yeah. Yeah, and that seems to come from a specific type of dispensationalism because I don't see

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Johnny Mac necessarily discounting Old Testament law like maybe some others do.

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I know that phrase, unhitching the gospel comes from Stanley, but is that, you think that characterizes most dispensational hermeneutics?

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Definitely classic dispensationalism when you're dealing with the founders of DTS, Lewis Barry Schaeffer, you're definitely dealing with that kind.

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And John MacArthur uses this analogy. He says, well, I'm kind of a leaky dispensationalist.

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It's like I have a blue shirt and gray trousers and I'm being shot at by both sides on the

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Civil War. I mean, he does have a dispensational framework, but he has a great respect for the

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Old Testament. He's a personal hero of mine, even though I have come to disagree with many things.

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There tend to be secondary issues, but now we're dealing with the application of parts of the

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Bible, and that can't be a secondary issue. Yeah, so it comes back to your hermeneutic, how you're going to read the

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Bible and interpret it, which is, again, dispensationalism is a hermeneutic, not really an eschatology.

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It's a hermeneutic. Which kind of leads us into our next question that we're going to get into here.

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If you use the Bible to prove that the Bible is true, which is what you basically did in your answer to this question, isn't that just circular reasoning?

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Why can't you just use the scientific method to prove that the Bible is true? If you can't, are you admitting that it isn't scientific or even logical?

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Well, you can't use the scientific method to prove the scientific method. Bingo. And if you employ your reason to defend your reason, well, then we're pretty obviously running around in circles right now.

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And the reason why the Bible sustains the Bible is because it is the

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Word of God. And if there is a complaint against that, you know, this is, you can't use the

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Bible to prove the Bible, then you have to tell me why that is so. And when you give me a reason for that,

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I'm going to ask you to sustain that reason. And then when you give me a reason to sustain your reason, then you're guilty of the same thing that you're complaining about.

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The postmoderns observed something that the Bible had already observed many generations before, that it is absurd to deny

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God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge and understanding. You want wisdom, you have understanding, you want to have knowledge.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of that. That's where it begins. And that's because that's the way

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God created the world. That's how God created us. God made us in His image. And thus, everything in terms of proper reasoning and thinking begins with fearing

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Him. And He has revealed Himself in creation. And He has revealed Himself in His Word supremely.

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He's revealed Himself in Christ, who is the light of all reason. And He is the lens through which we are to see everything.

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And He is the center of the space and time, the whole universe around everything. Everything orbits around Christ.

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And this is what the Scriptures testify to. So the question is not so much about, can you justify the authority of Scripture by some other authority?

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That's ludicrous. Because whatever authority you're using to justify the Bible, the Bible is under that authority.

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And we're explicitly told not to take God's Word and make it subservient to under the authority of any other thing, whether it be

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Baal or it be reason or anything else. Or the state or whatever it may be.

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So the fact of the matter is, is that I'm going to be employing my reason and my senses to engage with creation, engage with the

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Scriptures and so on and so forth. But I'm not going to then say my reason is the authority or my experiences, my senses are the authority.

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What I observe is the, no, everything that I reason and everything that I experience, I must bring into submission to the

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Word of God or the Word of God will, which speaks to all of human experience, will tell me what this is.

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I don't get to say what it is. The state doesn't get to say what it is. Philosophers don't get to say what it is. God gets to say what it is.

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And He has given us a true word, a perfect word to do that.

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So if somebody, you know, complaining about things like, isn't that circular reasoning? I say, well, what we're talking about here is our presuppositions.

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What we're talking about here is our first -order authorities. And mine is the revelation of God in Scripture.

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Okay, what's yours? And have you thought about that? You actually used the, you said using reason to prove that reason is reasonable.

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That is, you know, a circular argument. I mean, essentially, if you're using the scientific method, you say, well, my hypothesis is that logic and reason is the best way to determine truth.

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I'm going to think about that logically and reasonably, and I'm going to reach the conclusion that logic and reason is the best way to determine truth.

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And you're just engaged in circular reasoning. And if I understand the argument that you just made correctly, if I'm going to use logic and reason, or scientific method, or historical method, or take your pick, chicken bones thrown into a circle, then you've just made what we call the

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Word of God subserving it to that, or you're using something else higher to prove it, then it's no longer the

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Word of God. Right. And I would say that this isn't, like, this doesn't mean, then, that everyone's left in their own little bubble of circular reasoning, and, you know, all communication and knowledge is lost to the void in between everybody's circular experience or circular authorities or so on.

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It's postmodernism. Right, because there is, when you have the postmodern approach or the standpoint of epistemologists talk about that there is a point outside from nowhere from which you can see all these things, well, this is their invention of a god.

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They are still insisting that as they speak from their unique experience, which nobody can understand, using their words, which only they can understand, that other people should understand them and agree with them.

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And they have no idea why, so they invent some vague notion of a god, and they don't call it a god, to make sure that this communication is still possible.

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But it just proves the absurdity of it. But because we live in a world of there is creator and there's creation.

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We live in a two -ism, not a one -ism. So because God is

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God and we are not, and he is outside of his creation, he sustains creation, so on and so forth, even though we are limited, we are finite, and so on and so forth, there can still be communication.

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There can still be understanding between us, even between people of different languages and different cultural groups and so on.

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You can make yourself understood to them over time. You can do that. Why is that even possible?

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Because of God. I think that when we're concerned about whether or not the circular reasoning, obviously no one should be on my own authority.

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I can do what I want, think what I want, and there's obviously concern about that. But I would put it this way.

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When we think about the fear of the Lord, okay, the fear of the Lord, we're going to be living according to the word of God, the word of God is our authority, and so on.

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If that is pushed to its limits, and let's say, let's look at some point in history where that was pushed to its limits, to the intensity of living under the authority of the word of God.

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Let's think about those moments in history. The days of peace under, what,

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David and Solomon, high points maybe, the rest and victory under Joshua maybe we could think of in history, the

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Puritan vision and the good that we can see there. People would dispute that, but then again, what's their standard?

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I would say in comparison to that, what happens if you make reason King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

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What do you get? You get the French Revolution. You get massive death.

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Yeah, and what happens if you— Marxism. Well, Marxism, but then even in Marxism, what happens if you make materialism, the writing of the scientific method, the supreme authority, and you just do everything in terms of materialism, material is everything?

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Well, I would say that that would be the intensity of Marxism and communism and so on. And let's look at when they ran that to its nth degree, what happens there?

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These things are not neutral. It's not like up for grabs. You can believe what you want. There are consequences for what you believe.

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And when the fear of the Lord is in operation, you see all sorts of blessings and all sorts of good.

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So there is a real difference. And when we get that accusation of circular reasoning,

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I think what is being misunderstood a lot of times is something that is integral to the way that we defend the faith as well, like in 1

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Peter 3 .15, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Right there, we have already made the creature and creator distinction, right?

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So that circular reasoning that we have is under the lordship of Christ, whereas the circular reasoning that they engage in is completely autonomous and in and of themselves.

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They worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. Right. And then we have the natural consequences of that that we find in Romans 1.

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They're giving up to futile thoughts and mind. Professing to be wise and become fools. Right.

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And then you have the results that we know what the results are going to be, and we've seen it play out time and time again with the

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French Revolution, with Pol Pot, with Stalin, all these leaders who have worked under these frameworks that are circular reasoning, but outside of the lordship of their creator.

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Yeah. So I would, you know, so again, with the accusation of circular reasoning, you know, it's way worse than you think.

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But we may have a segment on Have You Not Read. Now's the time on Have You Not Read where it's way worse than you think.

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I'm up for that one. Yeah, yeah. All right. So since we've, you know, spoken from our own authority so much tonight and we have so much circular reasoning, our last question for this segment is,

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I find reformed people very arrogant. Most of my interactions with reformed Calvinists have been very negative.

35:42

You have a reformation festival every year, so you obviously like the reformers. Do you have people like that in your church?

35:49

Or have you encountered that? I like learning about these great people of God in the 1500s and 1600s, but how do

35:55

I deal with people like this? How would I keep from doing it myself? Yeah, well, there's a lot of Calvinists who will say knowledge puffeth up,

36:05

I think, is the King James. And it's not unique to Calvinists or reformed thinkers or so on and so forth.

36:13

It's not unique to that. The danger is in acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge and, wow,

36:25

I can understand all these systems and I have a better handle on theology than you do, and now we're going to have conversations where I prove that and that kind of thing.

36:38

I think someone once said that if you say that you're a

36:44

Calvinist and you're arrogant about that, you don't understand Calvinism, right?

36:49

Because the whole idea is that whatever grace you have in your life, whatever love you have for Jesus, whatever understanding you have of the

37:00

Word of God is entirely by the grace of God. And that if there's somebody sitting across the table from you who—that person loves

37:13

Christ, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God, that He was born of a virgin, lived a righteous life, died a redemptive atoning death on the cross and was raised the third day, is ascended to the right hand of God and is coming again, that person believes what they believe by the grace of God as well.

37:34

And if they haven't fine -tuned the ordo salutis about where regeneration and justification and adoption all land, right?

37:49

And if they don't have a clear conception of election and the eternal decree of the

37:54

Godhead and so on and so forth, wouldn't you say that their growth and their understanding and appreciation of their salvation is something that has been absolutely assured by a sovereign

38:10

God that He'll bring to pass? Right? He who has done a good work in them, He will continue it to the day of Christ Jesus.

38:17

Jesus is gonna wash His bride with the water of His Word. So if you really are a Calvinist, then you should have absolute confidence that God is gonna be working

38:27

His truth in their life and that they're gonna grow more and more confident in His grace, more and more confident and joyous in who

38:36

God is and how He saves people. And there is no need for necessarily some sort of avid debate where I prove

38:51

I know more about these matters than you do. Now, I understand why that happens.

38:57

I think it happens because the glory of young men is their strength, right?

39:03

The glory of young men is their strength. And their strength of knowledge. Exactly. And there has to be a contest.

39:08

There has to be a struggle. We like to fight. Yes, exactly. And so... We call it iron sharpens iron.

39:14

We call it, I mean, I have been in wonderful discussions and part of it is my military background where after a mission, you would not believe the debriefs.

39:24

It is brutal. And if somebody doesn't like you, they're not gonna be hard on you in the debrief because I don't want you to improve.

39:35

In fact, I hate you so much. Everything you did was great. I hope you die next time. I mean, that's essentially it.

39:41

Strategic thinking. But if somebody is picking apart everything that you're doing and sharpening that iron, it's because they want you to come back the next time.

39:52

And it was also a term of respect because you can take that. And I remember having that level of a discussion with another guy actually from the

40:02

Air Force base who was a fellow pilot, was an F -16 pilot. Those guys are really brutal. And we're just going... They don't blink either,

40:08

I've noticed. And we're just going back and forth, back and forth. And my dear friend,

40:13

Jason, who is listening to this, he was appalled.

40:20

That is not how Christian brothers speak to each other. And of course, between the two of us, we're like, what are you talking about?

40:27

This was awesome. We had a great time doing it, but we didn't realize that other people seeing it, it was harming them or hurting them, or they didn't quite understand what was going on.

40:42

So perhaps there's a place for it, maybe behind closed doors, maybe at my kitchen table. But that level of ironing, sharpening iron, although we can justify it, what are the possible second or third order effects of that?

40:57

Somebody with a different perspective or a slightly more gentle heart, not wanting to kind of see that kind of stuff.

41:06

It seems like it's useful, but there is a danger. – Well, there's an opportunity for discipleship here because we have lost the ability to distinguish between a quarrel and an argument.

41:19

And arguments are good. They are... They can often be very godly arguments.

41:26

But a quarrel... Because there was arguments in the New Testament where things were coming out of that argument, truths about the gospel and the function of the church were clarified, and things moved forward in a way that advanced the gospel mission.

41:40

But people in general have lost the ability to distinguish between a quarrel and an argument. A quarrel is where there's an unrighteous use of anger, where there is personal attacks made, or people are getting angry because when their beliefs are being critiqued or pushed or questioned, their pride is wounded, and then they respond in the flesh, and you have yourself a quarrel.

42:08

That is not the same thing as having an argument, which, of course, is going to take some energy and it's going to be spirited.

42:15

But people in general don't have a sense of the difference between those two things.

42:22

But when I say the glory of young men is their strength, I understand sometimes

42:28

I think that there is an intensity and a zeal to try out these truths and to see how they fit in the real world.

42:38

And there's such a zeal in some sense of, I want to tell others and have them see as well these humbling yet important truths that should make a big impact for the church.

43:00

When I head out to our piece of land out in Okfuskee County every once in a while with some young men from here, from the church, they'll come with us, and they'll see a sapling somewhere.

43:12

You know, it's about five or six inches thick, and it's been targeted for removal.

43:18

And they're not going to wait for me to get the chainsaw up and take care of it in 90 seconds.

43:25

They go get my axe, and they start wailing away. I often offer, hey, if you just wait about five minutes,

43:33

I can get this chainsaw going. Oh, no, no, no. They want to take down that tree bit by bit with the axe, because the glory of young men is their strength.

43:46

And so there is a need to test these things out and to earn their spurs theologically, doctrinally, to see if they can prove the truth of God.

43:57

So I think that there is some good in that.

44:04

But it is a common complaint about Calvinists or Reform people or so on that, oh, you guys are just, you know, you're just arrogant or whatever.

44:14

It may possibly be that there are folks who are.

44:19

It could also be that if someone is very confident in what they believe and can back it up with a lot of Scripture because they thought a lot about it, they can be perceived as arrogant, especially when they decide to go dump truck mode in that.

44:41

I think anybody who has done a lot of study in the Scriptures is ready to do some discipling and helping others, but they need to be thinking about the people that they're conversing with.

44:51

How do I love this person and share with them the things of the

44:58

Word of God and help them on to Christ? There needs to be a concern for the person more than for the system.

45:11

That takes wisdom, maturity, and that usually comes by making mistakes.

45:19

And the glory of old men is their gray hair, their silver hair. So we need to learn how to wield the axe before we get to pick up the chainsaw.

45:27

So if you aren't sharpening the head of the axe and if you aren't being precise with it, how dare you try the gas engine?

45:34

And I think in defense, even though I'm not a young man anymore, scare quotes, because I have a little bit of gray hair underneath this beard.

45:42

In defense of young men, I do think there's more place to let them fail in their zeal than sometimes we give them.

45:53

And a lot of times when you have this response or this question, it's projection, right?

45:59

So my intelligence and my ability to wield the sword of scripture has been proven faulty by this young buck who has read a little too much

46:10

Van Til or whoever. And now my pride is hurt. And so I'm going to project that onto him as something that's arrogant.

46:19

And not that I've seen too much of that in my own experience, but that is sometimes the case.

46:27

And we need to be careful. And if we're going to disciple these young men, letting them know, hey, you actually did a good job of wielding the axe that time.

46:36

You know, and not just pulling on the reins every time. Sometimes you got to kick them with a spur and let them go because that's what they need.

46:45

And holding them back every time, they're going to feel that. And their testosterone, their strength is going to feel that.

46:51

So I would like to make that case at least to where it's not always so.

46:58

Even though we, as people who want to practice the grace of the doctrines that we believe in and temper ourselves first, check ourselves first, sometimes we can let that young man free and let him go a little bit and let him have to say sorry every now and then.

47:17

Because he's going to need to learn how to do that as well. So you did not give the response then that I've heard often is doctrine divides.

47:28

Stop it. My friend told me to stop reading this kind of stuff because it is, it's just going to create division.

47:42

No creed but Christ. Just read the Bible and you should stay there.

47:48

It was a point of disagreement obviously that we had. But that's not what you just said.

47:55

You said there's a way to properly encourage but that young man needs more discipling.

48:04

And the new office that you've just been appointed to, I mean that's part and parcel of being more of a leader in the church.

48:13

Yeah I like to take the analogy of every time you take a step up in level in sports or athletics, the speed changes and so does the audience and so does the stance.

48:24

So you're coming into 12 and under now having just exited 10 and under coach or kid pitch and everybody's bigger, everybody's stronger and everybody's got another pitch now instead of the fastball.

48:38

So what you have to understand when you come into that and it's a baptism by fire most of the time, but a good coach will let you know that everything has changed.

48:48

And so some of it is yes these young men are firebrands, but some of it also is a failure or a oversight in discipleship where we have not prepared them or we have not tested them ourselves.

49:02

Like one of the best things my dad ever did for me was he did not let up on throwing me fastballs the first time

49:11

I got up to hit a pitched ball. My dad was a college pitcher, he could let it go. And he didn't really back off much for me, he zipped it in there and I was the better for it because I knew how to handle the next step.

49:23

Every time I came up to the next level I already had the speed down. And so if we can do this for young men and women when they come to these situations, and we're not going to get them all right, like there's going to be that one kid who's an anomaly who at 12 years old is throwing like 75, and you know those guys they go on to bigger and better things anyways.

49:44

But preparing them for 90 % of what they're going to see is part of our discipleship, kind of what we're talking about.

49:51

We have to prepare them just for that next level and some of the stuff can be avoided.

49:57

I agree. All right. Okay, so that is the end of our questions for today.

50:03

Now we'll move on to our other segments, which we enjoy quite a bit.

50:08

And the first one we're going to go into is this week in witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan.

50:18

Can you spot it out in the wild? Have you spotted it out in the wild this week, Michael? Yeah, I saw some sorcery at work the other day.

50:30

And this is where you bring two things that don't really belong together, but you bring them together anyway. And there was great wailing among the priests and priestesses of the pagan witchcraft the other day about a political race in Virginia.

50:52

And there was a lot of witchcraft going on with their words, a lot of soothsaying, making things really confusing on purpose.

51:03

They were employing words that have been lately invented to cover other words, and they were using words that have been re -enchanted with new meanings.

51:11

That was all very much in play because that's the normal thing. But I saw a new bit of sorcery that I hadn't seen before, where they put two things together and mixed them.

51:22

And one man, his eyes were down a little bit.

51:29

I think it was a kind of a line that he had either worked on or been handed to him. I don't know if he was really comfortable with this bit of sorcery, but he got it out.

51:38

It wasn't like a natural thing, but he got it out. And he said that the election of this new governor in Virginia was the

51:49

Delta variant of Trumpism. And you just, you got to,

51:54

I mean, it's a wonderful bit of sorcery to take a virus, a virus, and to take that and combine it with Trumpism, which again, this is not only a, this is, of course, an invented word, but it's not really covering anything.

52:17

This is more magic. This is kind of like a magic thing, and they're using that, but they bring it together.

52:24

It was a very impressive bit of sorcery. Anybody who votes against the left, it's because they are part of Trumpism.

52:40

And then we have a definition for all what that means. And there, and again, because of the work that they've been doing with COVID and so on, and defining it and politicizing and so on, then the idea is that people who don't vote for leftists are deadly to everyone, deadly to the nation, right?

53:09

Because the Delta variant of Trumpism. So it was a very neat piece of sorcery. I don't know if people caught it or used it or believed it, but there it was.

53:21

I mean, the idea that you just expressed was, I think, quoted by Joy Reed, MSNBC, who literally said, this is a, this election and the

53:34

Republicans who pushed it through are a threat to national security. They are a deadly threat.

53:41

So this guy used these words, put them together, Delta variant of Trumpism, called it a deadly threat.

53:52

Wow. He just kind of expressed the same idea, but he used word sorcery to do so. And he's saying there's not a vaccine for that, right?

54:00

There's not a vaccine for the Delta variant yet. So there's not a vaccine for the Delta variant for Trumpism either.

54:07

Right. But basically, you see, the main idea is, okay, so the witchcraft is the praxis of paganism.

54:19

And paganism at its essence is despair. It's just despair and fear. So it's no wonder that as they begin to talk about things that it's all about fear.

54:30

So we're going to talk about, if there's a virus, we're going to approach it and it's going to be about fear.

54:35

If there is a political dissonance from our position, then we will talk about it in terms of fear.

54:46

And so this is just, they're just showing their paganism time and time and time again.

54:51

It's despair, despair, despair. You know, there's no solutions here. There's only problems.

54:57

The global warming, whatever, the climate change venue that they just had.

55:04

What is it all about? I mean, it wasn't about saving the ozone layer as they all flew in and flew out.

55:10

It wasn't about saving fuel and saving lives. It was about, this is a great meeting of the high priests and priestesses of paganism, and they come together to stoke despair and fear.

55:24

There's no hope this is going to end poorly and badly. So with that in mind, you know, that's just, you know, just kind of observing how they work and the witchcraft is the praxis of paganism where words are either invented or redefined or brought together in ways that they shouldn't be or the ethical sense of those words are changed and so on and so forth.

55:52

And this keeps everybody in despair so that they are at some level eliminating hope from the dictionary.

56:00

Now, the direction I thought you were going to go when you said taking two things that didn't go together.

56:05

I thought that you were going to have, you're going to bring up Winsome Sears, who is the new lieutenant governor -elect, former

56:15

Marine, immigrant from Jamaica. And I don't know if she's first generation or her parents brought her over, but Jamaican.

56:27

And she's been accused of, this is an example of white supremacy.

56:34

Yeah. Like Larry Elder, the new face of white supremacy. Trevor Burrus So is that bringing two things together, sorcery of words, or is that another form of witchcraft?

56:46

Mark Bailey This is enchantment. Trevor Burrus Okay. Mark Bailey Because what you have is here is an immigrant. And of course, people on the left are,

56:53

I mean, because they're materialists, they are so obsessed with the outward appearance of people.

57:01

If there is a man who decides he wants to be a woman, all you have to do is change his outward appearance.

57:08

And the left would immediately say, oh, that's a woman now. Nothing changed except his outward appearance.

57:15

And then they say, oh, well, now that's a woman. Trevor Burrus Do you even have to do that, though? I mean, at this point, it's just pronouns.

57:21

You can change pronouns. Mark Bailey But even like there's a young lady who is a practitioner of witchcraft, and she's on social media sites and so on.

57:34

And she wears different colored armbands. And this is kind of a – she tries to teach people how to do this.

57:41

And the different color of your armbands tells people what genders you're feeling like at that particular moment in time.

57:46

And you can switch them out and let people know. There are physical indicators.

57:51

Trevor Burrus Aren't they just a mood ring? I thought this went out in the 70s. Mark Bailey Yeah, yeah. This is a gender band.

57:57

Trevor Burrus Gender band. Mark Bailey Gender bands, okay. And so what you're doing is letting everybody know my pronouns are going to be color -coded.

58:05

So when you see these, then you know what kind of pronouns you're supposed to use. But it does matter about physical appearance.

58:13

So a big, burly man who's just doing manly things, full beard, whatever, when he says, identify as a woman, people look at him like, you know, you're mocking victims, right?

58:26

Because they know he's not actually identifying as a woman. He's giving no indication on the – because the left are materialists in their paganism, the oneness of their paganism is materialism, they have to have some indicators on the externals.

58:40

And so that's why they're so focused about the level of melanin in somebody's skin. They are so focused on the outward indicators of this, that, and the other, okay?

58:49

But now watch what happens. They have their terms. If your skin is dark, then this is what we believe about you, right?

59:00

That you need all sorts of other people to do things for you. You're not able to do them on your own because your skin is dark.

59:08

You're automatically a victim and oppressed, and there's no way that you can ever get out of it, okay? That's what the left believes about you because of the color of your skin.

59:15

They're unable to treat people as individuals. They have to treat people as groups. Or groups of groups. And they've given them an orthopraxy.

59:22

If your skin color is this, you must also think and do as such. You must live as oppressed if you have this skin color.

59:30

And if you don't, then you are a traitor to the other people who have that same skin tone.

59:35

Exactly. And then we're going to check your skin color, and then we're going to check your outward appearance to see what gender you're identifying.

59:43

And if it's not obvious, then you're going to use wristbands to tell us how we're supposed to identify you. And all of it's about external identification, okay?

59:51

And they talk about what's on the inside, but they don't really believe it. Now, here's the thing that happened with the

59:57

Lieutenant Governor -Elect in Virginia. Here, she's carrying with her all of these terms that they're used to talking about.

01:00:07

But even though she has... Okay, here's a female, dark -skinned, immigrant, so on, okay?

01:00:16

That's like the big three. Right, exactly. They should be ecstatic, but they're not. So immediately what happens is they pull out their magical wards, and they do enchantment.

01:00:31

Enchantment is where you have a term, and you have an established term, and then you redefine everything underneath it.

01:00:38

So the established term was a female -colored immigrant, okay?

01:00:44

Those are established. But then what they did was is that they changed everything underneath, right?

01:00:50

It's like, and changed what that meant for her. You could look at it that way, or you could look at it another way, and say that they decided to...

01:01:03

I said, what's the reverse of enchantment?

01:01:08

Going the other direction, we're going to slap a new definition on you. You may be all these things, but we're going to give you a new term.

01:01:16

Anything but the obvious. It's always an act of deception. It's always an act of deception.

01:01:24

So you're saying the practice in paganism is always toward despair?

01:01:29

Yes. Right, so in saying that, since that's the practice, what can we expect of the teleology?

01:01:37

What's the end and purpose of all this despair? Is it stated out there, or is it found in scripture?

01:01:45

Right. So when you think about the ways in which the pagan idolatry worked, okay?

01:01:55

At time and again, the people were following after Baal and the Ashtoreth and all these other pagan gods,

01:02:03

Molech, Chemosh, and so on. And nothing they ever did fixed the problems they were in.

01:02:09

But they did it anyway. And they would go even more and more zealous. They couldn't get

01:02:15

Baal to answer them on Mount Carmel, so they kept on intensifying and intensifying and intensifying.

01:02:22

And people would say, didn't they feel foolish when they couldn't get Baal to answer? No, they were used to that.

01:02:28

They were totally used to that. They didn't ever think that fire was going to come down out of heaven from Baal. They were used to Baal not answering.

01:02:34

The spectacle was in them cutting themselves. They were trying to prove their dedication to their

01:02:40

God through the chaos and the self -mutilation going on there.

01:02:47

That was what proved the reality of Baal for them, with the intensity of their self -mutilation.

01:02:55

The intensity of their dedicated despair before the face of Baal was what made

01:03:00

Baal real to them. And that reminds me of the Psalms that you went through before getting into Daniel.

01:03:08

They become like their idols. Yes, deaf, blind, you know.

01:03:13

Yeah, exactly. So, it's really about the people who can become chief practitioners of the false gods.

01:03:24

The more false gods, why in paganism can you not just have one false god?

01:03:31

Right, because Islam is a cult of Christianity, right? They have their

01:03:36

God, but it's like in the Mormons, technically you have many gods in Mormonism, but they just talk about the one

01:03:43

God and Jehovah's Witnesses and so on. In the cults, there's one God. In paganism, in outright paganism, there's a multiplicity of gods.

01:03:52

And why is that? Because the way, the tale -offs of paganism, where is it all heading, is it may be despair, despair, despair, but if you can become a chief practitioner or a chief devotee of one of the gods, this brings you power.

01:04:10

This brings something to your life that you can feel like maybe you can get a little bit of control and have a little bit of something, even in the despair.

01:04:18

Like riding a god's, you know, a demigod's coattails? Exactly. So you have to have several gods and goddesses in paganism because, you know, like, well, all these people are worshiping this god, they've kind of got it locked up, but what about this one over here?

01:04:36

So on and so forth. And so there is, there's no getting out of anything.

01:04:44

There's no solution. There's no salvation. There's only trying to make it easier on yourself.

01:04:50

So centralized earthly power. Like we're going to have all these gods and we're going to choose one to serve, that way our priesthood can centralize all the power, wealth, and whatever they can on themselves while having an oppressed or at least a controlled populace underneath them.

01:05:13

And then you have— But you got to get in quick. You got to, all the good seats will be taken. But this is why

01:05:18

LGBTQ has the plus on it. Because you're going to keep on adding gods. You're going to keep on adding new identities and new priesthoods and new priestess classes.

01:05:29

You're going to keep on adding on pagan identities or pagan deities and devotees.

01:05:36

You know, I'm the high priest of, you know, whatever abomination specialty that I have. And then you have yours.

01:05:43

But then you watch the competition between them, right? There is, and there's not some nice competition going on.

01:05:48

But that happened in the pagan world too. One of the things was interesting in the book of Daniel reading about Belshazzar, who kept on calling himself the son of Nebuchadnezzar.

01:06:00

Because he wasn't actually the son of Nebuchadnezzar, but he succeeded some failed kings of Babylon because some of them started worshiping other gods other than Marduk.

01:06:13

And then the priests of Marduk felt threatened and, you know, certain people had to go. You know, and so when

01:06:19

Belshazzar came in, you know, he was like, oh, I'm, you know, Nebuchadnezzar.

01:06:25

Yeah, you know, the guy who really supported Marduk worship in most of his career.

01:06:30

I'm, you know, I'm totally the son of Nebuchadnezzar. And whatever these guys say I'm supposed to worship,

01:06:36

I am totally about that because if I don't, you know, they're going to off me. But there were lots of gods in Babylon, but there was also competition to keep certain things the chief gods.

01:06:45

And so today you have you have the chief god of science safety.

01:06:51

You have you have a chief god of of climate. You have a chief god of sexual identity and you have a chief god of racial identity.

01:07:00

And they're all shoving each other around trying to get elbow space, hoping to have hoping to have preeminence.

01:07:07

And there's and then there's all these other tiers that aren't as important. And these lesser gods are, you know, but they're still out there.

01:07:15

But this is classic paganism. So when you described the followers of Baal cutting themselves, knowing that Baal wasn't going to answer, but that wasn't really the point.

01:07:30

They needed to display their devotion. Yes. The word that came to my mind was virtue signaling.

01:07:37

Yes. We're going to make sure that everybody sees my devotion to this particular mindset or to this particular god.

01:07:47

And I am in despair. I know it's not going to work anyway, but I need everybody to see how virtuous

01:07:53

I am. So a virtue signaling is basically just a new way for, you know, guys to cut themselves.

01:08:02

Yeah. And this is not actually a term, but to coin the term victim signaling is like virtue signaling in that I'm not only going to support all the right causes, but I am going to continually project that I am under threat.

01:08:19

I am being attacked. This is why you have invented scandals, right?

01:08:27

Jesse Smollett, you have invented scandals where look, victimhood, victimhood, victimhood.

01:08:35

The victim signaling is as important as the virtue signaling. We have to keep this an important issue.

01:08:45

This is, you know, we're going to pass a bill against lynching because, yeah, that's a huge problem that we have these days, right?

01:08:52

But we're going to pass that bill against lynching. Well, this is part of the, you know, every time

01:08:59

I go driving, every time I walk out my door, I'm under attack by the police. Well, that is not true, but that's called, that's victim signaling.

01:09:09

And so the person who asked the question, you know, it was like, you know, Chick -fil -A, I'm never going to eat Chick -fil -A and all

01:09:15

Christians want to kill me. That's victim signaling. That's part of the pagan worship.

01:09:21

I'm going to get up and yell and scream before Baal and cut myself, and I'm going to bleed before Baal because that makes

01:09:28

Baal real. I'm going to, I'm going to not only champion Baal, but I'm going to be, you know, look at my devotion, look how victimized

01:09:37

I am. And that's why this is so particularly gross when Christians engage in either victim signaling or virtue signaling.

01:09:45

Yeah. When we start playing that pagan game. Yeah, it's funny that some people are like, you know, some people in the name of Christ or Christian, you know, professing is like, well, well,

01:09:54

I'm just going to go out and say I'm a victim too, because I'm a Christian and I'm oppressed. Nope. There's verse after verse after verse of God coming after Israel and highlighting their sins and saying that you were not standing up for the oppressed.

01:10:20

Correct. So there was an indictment on Israel to not to stand up for the oppressed.

01:10:28

So when those on, you know, there are Christians who will quote, quote that says, that is exactly what

01:10:35

I'm doing. I'm not victim signaling. I'm not virtue signaling. I am literally pulling open

01:10:42

Isaiah and I don't want to do the same thing that Israel did. I am standing up for these oppressed.

01:10:49

How, how do you respond to that? Oh, I would say that, that, that we ought to be absolutely biblical in acknowledging that sin occurs, you know, between person in person, and that there could be whole systems of corrupt sin that are in play, that totally ruin and destroy.

01:11:08

And that many, many of the Psalms give praise to God, you know, and ask God to overthrow the wicked individuals and the wicked systems that bring oppression against people and so on.

01:11:19

So the Bible is full of that. In fact, the prophets often, when they are preaching, they preach against, they preach against idolatry.

01:11:28

They preach against immorality and they preach against injustice. And those three always go together.

01:11:34

They always go together. And so we should be against injustice. Absolutely.

01:11:41

And with injustice, there's always idolatry. And if you try to get rid of injustice without getting rid of the idolatry, it's going to be a miserable failure.

01:11:49

If you try to get rid of the immorality without getting rid of the idolatry, it's going to be an absolute failure.

01:11:57

The immorality and the injustice, that went away when the idolatry went away.

01:12:03

The idols have to fall. The false gods have to fall. And so those are the things that got chopped up.

01:12:11

Those are the high places that got destroyed. Why? Because we have to get rid of all this immorality and idolatry and injustice.

01:12:19

Well, you have to get rid of the idols first. And that's why we should be concerned. Anytime we see systems of injustice, we got to know that there's idolatry somewhere and we got to attack that idolatry because injustice should not be allowed to remain and continue.

01:12:33

So also the immorality. So the problem with what happens today is that people begin, because the idols are not being dealt with, we've begun to say things like, we've begun to defend immorality, defend immorality in the name of justice.

01:12:54

And to say that anybody who's against immorality, that they are promoting injustice.

01:13:03

Right? That's where we are today. And why is it that we're defending immorality in the name of justice? Because the idols are still standing.

01:13:12

So we should definitely be against all systems of oppression, systems of injustice, identify them for what they are.

01:13:19

But we should not only take the light of God's word and say, that's a mess. You know, inner city

01:13:25

Chicago is a mess. Inner city New York is a mess. Inner city Minneapolis is a mess.

01:13:31

Inner city any Democrat controlled city is a mess. Inner city any city, inner city

01:13:37

Oklahoma is a mess. And there's all, you know, the entire federal prison system and the state prison systems are massive tokens of injustice in our nation.

01:13:51

What is the idol? Well, we have to go after the idol.

01:13:57

And the only way that idols get taken down is by repentance from sin and faith in Jesus Christ and submission to the entirety of God's word.

01:14:11

And I don't see that happening. I see a lot of, we're going to allow people their false gods and their false gospels and their false conceptions of the word and their own.

01:14:22

We're going to let them carve out little private areas of sin. And then we're just going to deal with this injustice thing over here on the side.

01:14:28

But we're not going to take care of the idols. Well, that doesn't work. I'll give you an example. In the book of Jeremiah, near the end of the last king, in there, was it

01:14:44

Zerubbabel? No, it was Zerubbabel. Zedekiah, no, it's coming to me, it's coming to me.

01:14:54

After Jeconiah came Jehoiakim, and Jehoiakim, was the guy with the

01:15:01

Z, it's killing me now. Have I never read? Great plug.

01:15:06

Yeah, it's a good name for a podcast. Well, and as you're looking for it, what

01:15:12

I'm imagining is we're on the one side of the trench, or the

01:15:21

Christians that are virtue signaling, they start on one side of the trench, they cross the trench, and they cry out to Yahweh, but then they're bloodletting themselves.

01:15:32

It's kind of the analogy that I'm coming up with in my head, as you're saying that you're crying out to our

01:15:38

God, but you're practicing your supplications as a pagan might, and you're right there with the pagans, and you're right there supplicating to those idols in the exact same way, but you're using our

01:15:53

God's name to do so. Right, yeah, and so covering over in incomplete repentance, and covering over protection of idolatry in the name of Christ, Zedekiah led the people of Israel into a covenant saying, hey, look, we have injustice on our hands.

01:16:13

We have not been releasing the slaves every seven years like we've been supposed to. Things are bad in our nation because we're allowing oppression to go on.

01:16:22

Zedekiah says, let's make a covenant, and let's release these slaves. We can't allow injustice to remain.

01:16:29

So they all agreed in the name of justice, let's do the right thing, and let's let these oppressed people go free now.

01:16:36

Okay, so they all agreed, and they did that, but you know what they didn't do? They didn't get rid of the idols. The idols were still there.

01:16:43

So right after they let them all go, they started taking them back, and the whole thing failed, and this is what happens when you're so concerned about injustice that you don't actually take out the idols, and you might say that you are, or you may do so in kind of a holy name of whatever, but you have to submit yourself to the word of God for all of your definitions because injustice is injustice because God says so according to His terms and what that means.

01:17:15

And if you're defining injustice in ways that are not biblical and fighting injustice with a definition that is not biblical, the reason why you're doing that is because the idols are still standing.

01:17:28

Anything to add, David? No, how can you fight injustice if you can't define justice?

01:17:34

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've gone a little long with that segment, but I do not want to skip our last segment that we usually do here on Have You Not Read, and that's what are we thankful for?

01:17:45

We'll start with Michael. All right, well, I'm thankful for this season of Thanksgiving.

01:17:56

It's a spiritual discipline to be thankful, give thanks in everything, and it's a sweet season.

01:18:04

I prefer Thanksgiving to many other holidays just because it's such a good opportunity for me and my family and our kids just to be intentional about that and really to make our thanksgiving to the

01:18:18

Lord clear in front of all kinds of relatives who live every day in absurdities and they need to know that they live, whether they want to or not, they live under the authority of Jesus Christ, King of Kings.

01:18:33

And thankfulness is the thing that was absent in Romans 1. They were not thankful, and thus they...

01:18:41

So in Thanksgiving, you have so much opportunity just to praise the Lord and rejoice, and I just love this season.

01:18:47

Amen. David? I drove in from DFW today, arrived back at my house at about 1.

01:18:59

No, about 11 p .m. or so, and I came home.

01:19:07

I have... Because I'm in the travel industry, I am in so many different hotel rooms, and I have a little crash pad in Dallas, and then

01:19:22

I had one in Chicago. Even though you have...

01:19:28

All the beds are made up and you have little soaps and you have maid service, it's not home.

01:19:34

You're not comfortable there. I'm in other people's houses, or I'm a guest at my mom's house, or we go and sometimes it's like, hey, guys, this is my home.

01:19:46

You guys wanna come over and we can have dinner or something? It's nice, but you're always a guest in somebody else's house.

01:19:54

I came home today, and I got to see my wife and my daughter, and we just had...

01:20:00

It was a sweet afternoon. And so if I came in in a really good mood, it's because I got to be home today.

01:20:09

I actually took my wife's car to go get the oil changed, and she was just really appreciative because she's like, got this going on, this going on, this going on, and she just needed some help, and I was able to help.

01:20:21

And then I was able to watch some silly TV show with my daughter. We just had time.

01:20:29

So I'm very thankful for home. For my family. Well, amen to that.

01:20:34

I've been gone for the better part of today, but not the better part of a month like you spent.

01:20:40

So I completely do not understand how you do that, but I understand the feeling of coming home and having it be home and getting the opportunity to help your helpmate as well.

01:20:53

I know even though I've been gone all day long, I look around and there are still things to do, and it's not like my flesh would have done in times past where I would ask why isn't this, what's going on here, you know?

01:21:11

But having been home with that young tornado I call Killian, we know that not everything's going to get done, and maybe not anything's going to get done that day, but handling him, and that's the greatest work that we're going to do.

01:21:26

So being able to go home and help our helpmates is something that we can be very grateful for as well.

01:21:32

I myself am thankful for work in this offseason.

01:21:39

I've made a switch from lawn mowing to driving a distributive truck for a company that sells sweets, and I'm just happy to be able to do that, continue to support my family, but the entire time be refined by the things that I get to consume while on the road.

01:22:01

We have a weird, awesome blessing to have jobs in this country that allow us to grow with the things we've been given, the tools we've been given.

01:22:15

And for the last week and a half, I have been just tearing into podcasts and audiobooks.

01:22:21

I don't even know if there are enough that have been made for me to get through this winter, but we'll see.

01:22:27

I'll try to get through all of them. But I'm very thankful for that, and I'm very thankful to be here with you guys, and I really enjoy the iron sharpening iron discussions.

01:22:37

And this isn't even argumentation, but I really enjoy the conversation that we get pulling these questions out of the world and answering them with Scripture.

01:22:49

And we appreciate anybody and all who listen and support this content.

01:22:54

Please rate and review and share. And we hope you join us again when we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?