Matter of Theology joins to talk Politics

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00:08

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

00:16

I think that what's fascinating... You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here.

00:22

Yeah, but what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions but you don't do it with your own.

00:29

Because I... That may be the case. And there's that confirmation bias coming up again.

00:37

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:54

All right, well, we are live. Apologetics Live. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:59

What? Isn't this... This is a matter of theology. This isn't Apologetics Live.

01:05

No, no, no. This is Apologetics Live. It's Thursday night. It's 8 o 'clock. We're recording live. No, we...

01:10

Matter of Theology records on Thursday nights. Oh, yeah. But you're not live.

01:17

No. So how in the world did I end up here? But, I mean, I would like to thank you for inviting me onto my show, you know, so that...

01:24

Well, the reason that I'm on here is because, well, it's Thursday night and we're live.

01:30

And I think you had a Matter of Theology podcast. Didn't you have a thing where you had

01:35

Chris, your co -host, saying that you weren't going to be around, but he ditched you to be in Florida? That's right. He did ditch me to go to Florida.

01:43

Yeah. Like, I mean, who does that? Exactly. So we had to do something. And so we're combining both

01:50

Apologetics Live and Matter of Theology. That's right. Which, by the way, it was really just a ploy so that I could slip in and be the most returning guest to Matter of Theology.

02:01

That's really what it's all about. With that, I will bring in Dr. Silvestro and Pastor Justin, who are also part of the team here at Apologetics Live.

02:10

Welcome to the Matter of Theology podcast as well. As a matter of fact, if I had a chance to go to Florida and skip out on anything with Andrew, I'd go to Florida.

02:20

You know what? I think if you went to Florida, I think you would still get phone calls from Andrew while you were there.

02:26

I would. For the record. For the record, I was in Florida. He skipped out.

02:31

He was on his way to Florida, decided, no, I'm going to turn right around and head back home. Okay? Just for the record.

02:38

And we'll save why he did that on the second hour, just so that we don't bring that into the

02:45

Matter of Theology. They're going to have to come listen to Apologetics Live to hear why Anthony turned around. That's right.

02:51

But, you know, with Chris not being here, we had to get two extra guys to cover for Chris.

02:56

No, actually, actually, we got, you know, because we have another person.

03:02

We actually brought in from the Rap Report podcast, Bud, because he's, so we have four people to replace

03:10

Chris. You know, when you got a guy like Chris that just has so much scriptural knowledge just right off the top of his head.

03:18

I mean, I can't cover that. Okay. So I need help. Your co -host Chris has

03:24

Thomas Watson on the top of his head. That's about it. You know, that is about it.

03:31

Watson's the man. Yeah. You can't get Chris to stop talking about Thomas Watson. That is true.

03:37

Yeah. Don't get him started. So what we figured we would do, because for Apologetics Live, and I should let folks know if they want to come in, just go to apologeticslive .com,

03:49

apologeticslive .com. And if you click the little duck, that's the

03:55

StreamYard link. And that gets you in with us to be able to join us for tonight.

04:01

So with that, what we're going to look to do tonight, though, is we want to basically

04:08

I hope this isn't a shock to anyone, Drew, but I think we had an election that a lot of Christians are like all worried about.

04:16

Yeah, we did. It's the end of the world. Yeah. This was the one that we had so many of, you know, the

04:25

Lord's anointed prophesy about this. And then that fell through.

04:30

And they had to tell the right, right? Yeah. And then we had all this QAnon nonsense that was supposed to take place.

04:38

And now neither one of them are trusted. But yeah, people are flipping out about this election.

04:46

You know, Trump isn't president anymore. What are we going to do? The world's going to melt down.

04:53

America's going to crumble because Sleepy Joe is now in the White House. And who knows, you know, before, you know, full dementia sets in and the 25th

05:03

Amendment is invoked and then we're left with Kamala Harris. Okay. But there's two concerns that I seriously have with Joe Biden being in the

05:11

White House. One, it's a much bigger basement. It's going to take him longer to come out.

05:16

And two, I hope that he has Secret Service with him because he's going to get lost. Yeah.

05:22

Like, you know, I'm just saying, you know, I could just see it now. Can someone find the president?

05:28

You can't find him. Just let him draw himself a map with crayon. Well, now, wait a minute.

05:33

In reality, don't they have an elevator into the skiff down there? And it's like a padded elevator,

05:39

I believe, too. So I think they should be okay. I can't speak about that, but I do know someone that's been in the elevator.

05:48

So, I mean, look, there's a lot of Christians, I think, that are really, they put way too much hope in a president, in hoping that a president was going to make this country more moral, which is really what

06:03

I think a lot of them were looking for. I think that's called Post Mill, isn't it? Yeah. And Drew is outnumbered here.

06:13

Again. Oh, it's Drew Post Mill? Sorry. Yeah. I mean, not really. No, hold on. I just believe that the

06:22

Great Commission is going to be successful. So if you want to call that Post Mill, we can call that Post Mill.

06:27

I just believe in the victory of the gospel in the world. So carry on. Yes, carry on. Yeah. As long as it doesn't take seven dominions.

06:37

Yeah. Now that I will speak against. I'm not about the seven mountain mandate and all that.

06:43

Why not? It works so good. We have someone who's,

06:50

Ted is saying, good afternoon from Sydney, Australia. God bless you, brothers, for your great work.

06:56

Thank you. Thank you, Ted. I'm glad I can bring the great work to this show.

07:04

I like this. And Drew, thanks for having me on. No problem.

07:10

I already like it. No problem. This is the most humble show in podcast history.

07:16

I'm writing a book called Humility, Be Like Me. There you go. Perfect. I found out the other day that somebody had said that one of the new ploys was to use the fake book background from Zoom or to just use a cover deal for your back.

07:38

And so what I did is I made sure that my background looked exactly like a prison.

07:44

You look like you're in a holding cell. There's no doubt. So, Bud, you and I were recording earlier this week, actually

07:50

Wednesday, yesterday with Phil Johnson, and he had a Zoom thing that he had where he had the background.

07:56

It was looking like he was in prison. I was trying to convince him to stay with that the whole time.

08:04

Oh, that would have been good. But I'll let folks know, if you're watching on YouTube and you want to make sure we answer any of your questions, make sure we don't miss it, or just want to show your support, there is a

08:16

Super Chat button. So if you click on the little dollar sign and click that, you can ask a question that donates to Striving for Eternity, and that's a nonprofit, so you can count it as a tax write -off, and that shows your support, and we will always read what those say.

08:37

So Ted's asking, can we put in a pre -book order for that book? He wants a copy.

08:44

He wants to know how to be humble like Drew. We do have a question here.

08:52

For folks who do need to know, if you're on Facebook, on apologeticalive .com, there is instructions on how to get your name to show up so it doesn't say

09:00

Facebook user, because I doubt your parents named you Facebook and their last name was Drew, I'm just saying.

09:10

Anthony, you want to read the question there? Absolutely. So I have a question. Should churches consider church discipline for members who emphatically and consistently support wicked and godless policies, such as voting unapologetically for the

09:25

Democratic Party? I struggle with understanding how to reconcile such a position with a biblical worldview, so I'm curious as to how elders should handle this.

09:35

You know, that kind of goes in line with the statement that was made on one of Andrew's posts, where he actually dealt with this entire situation, and somebody had made the statement that Andrew was a devil worshiper or something along that lines, because he actually dealt with how

09:58

Christians are supposed to respond in the situation of the president we have and whatnot. And I think it kind of goes along with that.

10:07

You know, there are a lot of people who don't know the politics, they don't know what's going on, and they don't understand it.

10:14

You know, I've talked to many people today, you know, I just can't believe that, you know, Biden in 36 seconds, he signed 10 executive orders, and he took away the

10:24

Keystone pipeline and he opened abortion there, but we didn't know that was going to happen. Well, if all the media you ever get is from the left wing socialist media, the fake news, and things like that, you're not going to hear everything that's out there that's talking the truth, and you get pigeonholed into a narrative.

10:46

If that's all you ever hear, well, you think that everything that's, you know, pie and sliced bread when it comes to what they're doing, and so you're going to vote for it if you don't know where to search, you don't want to listen.

10:59

Yeah, and that's for folks on For a Matter of Theology, that is Pastor Justin Pierce of Tennessee, regular here at Apologetic Live.

11:06

But, you know, I think as I think about this, we've done a couple Apologetic Live shows on this, but I find it hard to believe that someone that professes the name of Christ could understand the

11:20

Democratic Party and support it. Right, I agree. What if they don't understand? And that's the difference.

11:27

I think that's where you have grace. I mean, you have to understand that people are learning. Yeah, yeah.

11:33

Now, so what I would, how I would answer that question is… Post Mill Way.

11:39

Yeah. If it's Post Mill, you beat them until they submit. That's right. That's right.

11:45

Until faith gets infused. Until it's put in. All the infusion. So for the listeners,

11:52

I'm not a pastor, but I am here with pastors. But you cosplay a pastor, right? Huh?

11:57

But you cosplay a pastor. That's right. Just like Raphael Warnock. I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express at some time in my life.

12:05

But in talking about that, is that a church discipline issue? I wouldn't say that's necessarily a church discipline issue.

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I would say that's a discipleship issue. That's a part where a pastor or an elder needs to take this person aside and actually break down what the democratic platform is.

12:21

Because at its core, the democratic platform is nothing but the sins of Romans 1.

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So if you've got a pastor that understands that, they need to take this person aside and they need to go through the sins of Romans 1 and explain how that relates to the democratic platform.

12:36

And then, so that they can see that. And that's more of a discipleship issue than I would say a church discipline issue.

12:43

A church discipline issue is something that relates to more of a personal ongoing sin that refuses to be repented of.

12:51

Yes. This is almost close to, Bud, what we did on the Rap Report podcast when someone asked a question after we dealt with the subject of masks.

12:58

And they were being told they'd be disciplined out of their church if they didn't wear a mask. The church had a policy that you had to because they thought it was a law.

13:07

So I think there are a lot of things that people are abusing church discipline with.

13:12

Yeah, I would agree. And I agree with what Drew has said. You want to show grace and you want to presume when you run into somebody like this that they need to be taught.

13:23

Maybe they genuinely don't understand. Now, once you go down that road of discipleship with them, you're going to find out pretty quickly,

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I think, whether or not they exhibit the very fundamental description of what a disciple is.

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Are they willing to learn and react and submit to what Scripture would clearly teach? If they refuse to do that, then you might be migrating into a different area that could eventually lead to discipline.

13:48

But from the outset, I think you approach it as a discipleship opportunity that someone needs to be taught.

13:56

Bud, it's good that you agreed with Drew on his program. I'll pay you later.

14:02

Speaking of payment, here's Jeremy Howard threw five bucks our way. So here's a question he gave a

14:07

Super Chat. Is Michael Heisner's Divine Council teaching dangerous?

14:13

Any of you guys familiar with that? I'm not. Bud, I'm counting on you.

14:19

Are you? You know, like, everything about everything. No, no. My default position is if it's somebody

14:25

I don't know, they're dangerous. Michael Heisner has whacked out views on creation, and so once I hear that, they're dangerous.

14:36

Oh, there you go. What's his view on creation? Very similar to Tyler Vila's. Ah, okay.

14:43

So he takes more of the polemical argument for Genesis, or at least Genesis 1 and 2.

14:48

Well, I mean, that's what they want to call it. Let me just give folks what that is in case Jeremy or others don't know that.

14:55

So when it comes to the first two chapters of Genesis, you have a couple of different views. You have some that will say that it's actually teaching an old

15:01

Earth view and that the Earth could be very old, some that will try to say that it's teaching evolution, some that won't.

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You have the biblical position, which would be that it's clearly laying out a literal six -day creation and one day of rest, 24 rough hours of time.

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And then you have the polemical or literary arguments, and what those are is they try to say that this is actually a polemic for the

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Jewish people against the Egyptians as they came out, and this is them giving a polemical argument.

15:37

So for some people, I can't say it's for all people, but at least for some people,

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I think it's a way out of having to deal with whether a young or old Earth. It's a way of just saying,

15:50

I don't deal with the issue. It's just a polemical argument. It's not trying to teach whether the

15:55

Earth is old or young. But Jeremy, I would have to get a hold of the book and read through it to be able to give you a better answer.

16:03

Sorry about that. But let's talk, Drew, about theology.

16:09

Yes. That's kind of your podcast, Matter of Theology. So in a matter of theology, how do we deal with some of the things that we're looking at in our culture as far as the way some

16:22

Christians are viewing this whole election and now President Biden?

16:28

Yeah, well, I mean, you touched on it when we first started, and that's where people put all their trust and all their faith in the position of president rather than in the sovereign

16:39

God and the Savior, Jesus Christ. So when people look at whoever the president is, they start evaluating how things in the country are going to go, and then they base really their faith off of that.

16:54

So they view America as the new Jerusalem, the Republican Party as the apostles, the

17:01

Democrats as the Pharisees, and the president as the Savior. So what they're really doing is they're viewing

17:09

America. They're reading America into Scripture, and that's the wrong way to do it, right?

17:15

America isn't the Savior. America is a nation that will rise and fall like any other. But what we need to do as Christians is we need to say, okay, this is a man that's raised up by God, and we first need to understand that God raises up the leaders.

17:32

He just uses the means of the vote for the people to raise up the leader. God raised up Pharaoh, right?

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So he raises up the leaders in our nation, and he will raise good leaders to bless the nation, or he will raise wicked leaders to judge a nation.

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Now, what we as Christians need to do is go, no matter who is in the seat of president,

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God is on the throne, right? Christ rules and reigns now, and we need to be serving him, not the president.

18:03

We need to be looking to Christ as the Savior, and that whoever is sitting in the position of president,

18:09

God put them there for his glory, and we need to serve God through that, whatever that may mean or whatever that may look like.

18:18

So say we have something coming down that's on the horizon like the

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Equality Act. The Equality Act is really going to punish people for speaking out against things like homosexuality and transgenderism.

18:33

Well, what do we do as Christians? Well, we don't cower and we don't hide and we don't run, right?

18:38

We don't go into our Christian ghettos where we feel safe. We actually say, no, we are going to stand on Scripture alone, and we're going to proclaim the truths of the gospel, regardless of what it costs, because that's how the church advances.

18:58

The church has always advanced and done its greatest work when the times seem the darkest. Okay, look at the first century, the establishment of the church through the apostles going out and preaching the gospel.

19:11

There was mass persecution going on all over the place. Nero was taking

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Christians and burning them for his garden parties. So persecution going on all over the place, but the gospel spreading like wildfire.

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You have the Reformation where we're reforming worship, we're breaking away from Rome and Christians are being persecuted.

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The gospel spreads. The Reformation went from Germany, it went to Switzerland, it went to France, it went to England, it went to Scotland.

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It came all the way across the pond through the Puritans here to America. When it seems the darkest, that's when

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Christians should actually rejoice because now there's ample opportunities to evangelize and spread the gospel.

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Now you don't have to go searching for them. You preach the gospel, they're coming to you. And now that's just more people to preach the gospel to.

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So how Christians should view everything that's going on right now is we should say, well,

20:18

I'm going to rejoice because now these are more opportunities for me to evangelize and for me to stand upon the truth of God's word.

20:27

Yeah, and I think that this may be a good question to bring in now because there's someone that's asking this question, because this is really underlying a lot of what you're saying.

20:38

Joe asked this question on Facebook. Why are people indifferent to doctrine?

20:43

I'm reformed, but I have an SDA, which stands for Seventh -day Adventist. SDA pastor, friend who

20:50

I disagree with, is not big on doctrine, which is troubling. So let me first, before you jump on that,

20:58

Drew, I'll just put it this way. I think part of what—the reason SDA pastor isn't going to be interested in theology is because they have family theology.

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And that might be why is their focus isn't so much on the theology as much as it is on other things.

21:17

But he brings up a good point. So it's up there. Why are people indifferent?

21:23

So let me first kick this off to Drew. And then I want to ask Anthony, Dr. Silvestro, what he thinks on that as well.

21:31

So Drew, why do you think people are indifferent toward theology? Yeah, people are indifferent to doctrine because people don't like for their view or their specific doctrinal teaching to be viewed as wrong.

21:44

That's why today there's many Christians, believing or professing

21:49

Christians that we can talk to. And we'll say, well, that's how you view it. That's how you view that.

21:55

And we've come into this place of relativism. Well, if relativism is true, then you can't know anything because there's no standard by which to measure anything.

22:05

So people don't like discussing doctrine or their indifference to doctrine because they don't want to actually have to examine what it is they believe.

22:14

Doctrine divides. That's right. Thank God. Well, actually, you bring that up.

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And there's an interesting thing about doctrine. It does divide, but it also unifies.

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And people will always sit there and say, well, I posted the quote that we'll have on the

22:35

Rap Report podcast that drops on Sunday. I was asking Phil Johnson, how do we deal with these times that we're looking at right now?

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And there's a lot of Christians that are concerned. And he goes, well, I'm not a pessimist. I'm a Calvinist, which

22:49

I thought was a great line. He knows God is covered. And I had someone that responded going, why can't we all just put these doctrine things on the side?

22:58

It's just not that important. And my response was, is that your doctrine? Yeah, right. And he doesn't even realize he's trying to teach me something about how

23:09

I should treat doctrine, ignoring the fact that he's doing a doctrine. So he then was like, you know, he's like, are you just looking to have an argument?

23:16

I said, no, I'm trying to show you have failed argument. He goes, I'm not trying to make an argument. I said, OK, so you don't understand what doctrine is, nor do you understand what an argument is.

23:24

Yeah. Yeah. Doctrine just means teaching. Right. So people talk about, oh, you're just indoctrinating people.

23:32

Well, either I'm indoctrinating them or you're indoctrinating them. One of us is. Yeah, one of us is. Yeah. But let's look, we got five of us here.

23:39

OK. We obviously all don't agree on our doctrine. I mean, four of us have a proper view of end times.

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And yeah, I was actually going to point that out myself. I thought it was spectacular.

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All that all that stuff that Drew was just, I mean, just the vitriol and just the power and that we're going to win.

23:59

And I saw this. I saw this thing where these guys are saying, saying that the dispensational, you're the escape, escape artist.

24:06

And I understand why people say that. I do, because actually the church I grew up in, they would always teach, you know, it's going to get bad.

24:15

It's going to get bad. But don't worry. Before anything bad happens, Jesus comes and takes you home. And I and I said for the longest time,

24:22

I was like, man, I'm just so ready for that. I'm just so ready for that. Just, you know, Lord, take me home. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to me.

24:29

And then I did something that made everybody mad. I read the Bible and when

24:35

I read that, I know when I read the Bible. I, what, what caused me to say letters, though, just the red letters, just read.

24:44

But actually what I did is I read the Bible and it actually informed me that, no, we're not going to our own personal fight and our own personal jihad and our

24:56

Christian jihad or whatever. We're not going to run in and take over. We're not going to take dominion. We're not the ones going to be doing this.

25:02

It is God himself that's going to do it. Christ himself is going to do that for his own glory and by his own power.

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Actually, he tells us when he's going to return, what it's going to be like, he says, for as it is in the days of Noah and the time of Lot, that's the way it will be when the

25:15

Son of Man returns. And I haven't, I don't know about you guys, but I haven't seen any demons running around yet. You know,

25:21

I mean, I know we've probably seen some demon possessed people, but not like what we're talking about with, you know, Lot and Noah and the things that are going on with that.

25:29

We haven't seen that level of, you know, national worldwide depravity to that point yet.

25:36

And it's going to get worse. But here's the thing. I want to point this out, though. So we see we have five of us here that don't all agree theologically.

25:45

And yet, what does our doctrine do? It doesn't divide us. It's actually unifying us.

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Because even though we have our differences, we know where those differences are. The core issue of how we come to Christ, we have the same.

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That's unity. That doctrine gives us unity, even though we have some differing views.

26:07

Now, if I can speak into that a little bit, some of the best and most edifying conversations you can have are with believers who hold to a slightly different doctrine than you, you know, kind of like we do.

26:21

Because what does that do? It drives us to the scriptures and it takes us into deep dives into the scriptures so that now it's not our discussion isn't really about, you know, you're wrong.

26:32

You're wrong. You're wrong. And I just beat you over the head back and forth. Now, our discussion goes, let's go to the scriptures and let's unfold the scriptures.

26:40

So we're so now we're all being edified just by diving into the scriptures. That's that's incredible.

26:47

That's I totally agree. And as soon as you repent of that position, we're all going to be in perfect.

26:56

And, you know, I wanted to I did say I wanted Dr. Sylvester to answer that. So, Dr. Sylvester. Oh, look, an empty chair.

27:04

He's probably gone off to repent. He went off to repent of his bad teaching. You know, which reminds me of the debate that I had with a black

27:12

Hebrew Israelite. And I debated an empty chair because no one would show. Oh, come on, Mike. For those who don't get the joke of either of those.

27:23

So I had a bunch of black people. It's a challenge to debate me. But every time we'd set that up, they would disappear.

27:29

They wouldn't show up. So we finally set up a debate. And I just said, well, I'm going to do it anyway. And the moderator introduced me.

27:35

I did my opening. He goes, I'm going to let the black people introduce himself. And we put up an empty chair. And so I actually debated an empty chair.

27:43

And we had someone come on to this show a couple weeks ago on Apologetics Live. And he wanted to debate me. And, yeah, he never came in.

27:52

He just sat in the private chat calling me Mike the whole time. My name says Andrew, like right down there.

27:58

How successful were you with the empty chair? I didn't see that. So did it go well?

28:04

He gave a really good argument. But it was a little empty in the end.

28:10

I got you. OK. So, oh, look, Dr. Sylvester is back. So now that we're done making fun of Dr.

28:16

Sylvester, maybe he can answer the question and stop being such an empty suit. Oh, wow.

28:22

Oh, man. He'll repent later. Yeah. Why do you think doctrine is so important?

28:30

I'm asking you because you just last night did a whole talk about the issues of our social system and things we see in responding to social justice.

28:40

Is theology important in these matters? Well, you have to unmute yourself.

28:48

He's a professional at this, folks. Here's the issue is what is our standard of truth?

28:57

Right. This is anytime we decide anything or we think about anything,

29:04

I should say, we have to go back to what the ultimate standard is. And as Christians, our ultimate standard is always the

29:11

Bible. And so when we talk about doctrinal issues, so this could be among the

29:17

Christian cults out there versus what we would in general believe about the gospel, or we talk about the issues of last night, social justice, and going through why is homosexuality wrong?

29:30

Why is transgenderism wrong? Why are so many of these social issues wrong?

29:35

Well, the standard is not our personal opinions. Our standard isn't laws of society or what government says.

29:42

Our standard has to go back to Almighty God. So that was the context last night in working through social issues and how we teach people to use the

29:52

Bible as their source of truth. Having said that, let's go back to the question regarding Seventh -day

29:58

Venice. Here's my biggest problem. It's a cult. Amen. And unfortunately, way too many

30:05

Christians don't know that or don't understand that. And I run into this issue all the time with my pet peeve,

30:13

Roman Catholicism. So invariably, almost everywhere I speak, when it's not in a specific church, like a

30:22

Baptist church, almost anywhere I speak, like what I've been doing the last couple of Wednesday nights in this large gathering, there's always

30:30

Catholics in the crowd because they've been welcomed by other Christians who say – who think that they're brothers and sisters in Christ.

30:39

The Catholics tell you that they are brothers and sisters in Christ. And so nobody thinks to look at the doctrine, look at the issues, look at what the gospel is according to the

30:51

Bible and what the false gospel is according to Roman Catholicism. Well, we see the same thing with Mormons.

30:57

We see the same thing with Jehovah's Witnesses. We see the same thing with Seventh -day Venice. They're just really, really sneaky about it.

31:05

And so that's my first issue is Christians need to start waking up to these cults that are out there, and they need to see – they need to understand what the gospel is, how to defend the gospel, and then understand how to talk to these other

31:19

Christian – or to these Christian cults. And I'm seeing Cluck Commander that rather than playing with chickens tonight, he has got a pretty interesting book, and I should probably tell a story about this book because,

31:34

Andrew, you know about this, but you don't know about the update. So last week,

31:40

I spoke with this large group, and I did a talk called Morality, Rights, and the

31:46

Proper Role of Government. And so when we want to understand how do we properly interpret Romans 13, 1

31:52

Peter 2, we have to go back to why did God establish government in the first place?

31:58

God established government as a way to protect our rights. And where do rights come from?

32:04

Well, they're tied to God's morality. And where does morality come from? Well, they're tied to God. So it's a really interesting chain to talk through.

32:11

Having said that, I get done with my talk. I advertise my book and Andrew's two books.

32:19

And I had somebody come up to me after the live Q &A. People just come up to you and ask you questions.

32:25

And so one female kind of waited to the end, and she comes up to me, and she says, hey, you know, I got a question for you.

32:31

How do you know that everything in this book is true? And I said, well, you know, my ministry partner, he spent –

32:39

Thank you. Thank you, Laura. He spent 12 years – Fourteen. Fourteen?

32:45

What? Short, sorry. So he spent 12 years, really it was 14, studying the doctrines of these cults.

32:56

And he took what he learned, went to leaders of those cults to say, hey, am I representing your religion's rights?

33:04

And every one of them signed off on it, and Andrew published it in his book. So I explained this to her, and she says, well, you know,

33:09

I think there's a couple of errors. And I said, well, where? And she goes, well, in this section on LDS. I said, interesting.

33:16

What do you think is wrong? And she started to talk, and then I said, by the way, are you

33:22

LDS? And she was. So I had an opportunity to witness to her now for about 15 minutes.

33:30

Mind you, she's at this group that is largely Christians and patriots, but they get

33:37

Catholics in there, they get apparently a Mormon in there, and a few others. So she was there. She asked me those questions.

33:43

I witnessed to her hardcore for 15 minutes, told her it's a cult, told her all kinds of stuff, that she needs to get right with God, and she needs to repent and put her trust in the real

33:53

Jesus. And she ended up leaving after that, and that was fine.

33:59

We parted on good terms. So I go speak at the same group last night, and the event organizer comes up to me and says, hey, you asked me about this girl,

34:10

Nicole. And she says, I don't know who she was. I don't know where she came from. But last night, my friend said, hey, did you meet my friend

34:20

Nicole who was there? Because she talked to your speaker about her religion, Mormonism, and thank you so much with the time you spent with her that she's now really questioning what her beliefs are.

34:34

All right. Well, that's great. So I said, praise God for that. I said, hey, if my phone number, my wife's phone number, we'd be happy to meet her for coffee, whatever we have to do.

34:43

But it's wonderful to see. And here's the thing is that we have to be willing to have these conversations, these hard conversations with people.

34:52

It is way too easy for us to say, oh, well, say you believe Christ. Okay, cool. You must be good.

34:58

You must be that one Catholic that is okay. You must be that one Mormon that seems okay.

35:03

It's not. Well, especially now. Hey, listen, we got a question that came in.

35:09

Matt Slick from Karm .org says, what's the topic? We were going to talk about Matt Slick and all the bad theology.

35:16

We were talking doctrine and how it causes division. And that's Matt Slick, right?

35:22

Yeah, yeah. Of course, now he's – and look, he even says, he says, ah, sounds good.

35:28

Very worthwhile topics. That is a great example of just grabbing two – that is called proof texting right there, folks.

35:36

I grabbed two totally different comments out of context and slammed them together.

35:43

I'm going to hear that from Matt tomorrow. So the thing, though,

35:49

I think as we look at the election – and by the way, Anthony, that's cool that I got to hear the follow -up to that.

35:56

Yeah, you didn't know that yet. We're waiting to hear the rest of the follow -up. But here's the thing.

36:03

We have a lot of people that I think have invested way too much time –

36:08

James Watkins, Flying Demon Babies is a topic. For folks who don't know, Flying Demon Babies, they're going to have to go to Netflix and look at Nephilim and then listen to Pastor Frank Mollison to get that inside joke.

36:20

They actually became aliens, didn't they? Yeah. Well, if they become aliens, then Matt Slick is going to love that.

36:27

He'll buy into it. So here's the thing. When we look at this,

36:34

I see a lot of people who have invested way too much time, too much energy into politics.

36:41

I did last week, Bud and I on The Wrap Report, we did one on political activism, and I put the link there to the website.

36:49

If you go to strivingforeternity .org and just search for political activism. But it's very interesting that that really hits it.

36:58

And the one thing that people really get upset in that article is that I ask the question, do Christians know the

37:04

Republican Party's message better than the gospel message? I get more heat on that one line in that article every four years.

37:15

And it makes me wonder. I mean, it's like, Bud, you and I just interviewed Phil Johnson from Grace to You. And one of the things he mentioned is that MacArthur's book on—

37:26

Why Government Can't Save You. Yeah, Government Can't Save You is the least popular book that he has.

37:35

So what you end up seeing is that there's a lot of people that don't want to have a biblical view of government from a

37:43

Christian perspective. And so, Drew, I know you've been kind of thinking about this for a bit. And I know

37:50

Bud and I have talked. We've done two shows on The Wrap Report on this. But what is—we're going to get to that.

37:58

We have that coming. I just didn't want to forget it. No, I have it up over here.

38:04

Don't worry. And by the way, I see Phil in the backstage, and he was holding up the book, What Do They Believe, as well.

38:10

So kudos to Phil. We'll put him into—there he is.

38:15

See? He's going to come in in a little bit because he's got a question for us. But when we look at this,

38:22

Drew, and we think about the Christian and the relationship we should have to government, what relationship should we have to government as a

38:33

Christian? Because we're seeing a lot of Christians that are really nervous about things going on right now.

38:41

We've been saying theology counts and matters. So how does that help us in times that could cause anxiety like this?

38:49

Yeah. I mean, our relationship to government, and it was mentioned earlier, Romans 13.

38:57

And that's been over 2020 with the whole COVID stuff and the shutdowns. Almost every pastor was saying we need to adhere to Romans 13.

39:08

But the government is put in position by God, raised up by God, to wield the sword of justice.

39:19

So they are to punish evil, and they are to act righteously.

39:27

But they're to do that according to God's standard, to God's law. And our law system is actually set up through English common law, which

39:37

King Alfred established that basically just by the book of Deuteronomy, using that. But our relationship to the government, we should say,

39:46

OK, when government acts justly, we should follow and submit to government.

39:52

So a good example would be like John MacArthur. When all this COVID stuff first happened, they didn't know the extent of what was going on.

40:00

All these reports were coming out. And so John MacArthur faithfully said, OK, we don't know the extent, but we're going to submit to what our governing authorities say.

40:11

Due to Romans 13, we don't know what's going to happen. And so they did that.

40:17

But then once it started coming out that what they were saying wasn't actually true, they said,

40:22

OK, well, we're not going to follow that anymore. We're going to open up. We're going to continue to preach the gospel.

40:29

People just started showing up because they missed the fellowship and things like that.

40:34

And then the government tried to shut down the church. And then people were saying, well, he's not adhering to Romans 13.

40:43

But he did initially. So he initially submitted to them and what they requested of them because they didn't know.

40:52

But once it started coming out that it was just fraudulent numbers and everything like this, they said,

40:57

OK, we're going to serve God rather than the government. And ultimately, that needs to be our relationship.

41:03

We need to we need to serve God, not serve government. But we need to acknowledge when government acts righteously, we need to or in what appears initially, as in the case of John MacArthur, did in the best interest of our neighbor so that we're loving our neighbor.

41:19

Then we submit to them. But going back to something that you said earlier.

41:27

People, Christians, professing Christians, they are more interested in political discussion and political dialogue than they are

41:38

Bible dialogue. I've had people say that they hate debating the

41:45

Bible. So they'll debate me about not debating the Bible. And then they'll go to debate politics all day on Facebook.

41:54

And I go, what's wrong with you? Right. Politics is not your savior.

42:01

The gospel is your savior. Do you have proper doctrine? Do you know this Jesus that you claim to follow?

42:07

Let's talk about these things and then let's address the politics. Because there are so many people that adhere to the

42:16

Republican Party as the savior. And just for the listeners, I'm going to say the

42:22

Republican Party is not the Christian Party. OK, it's not. So stop looking to the

42:31

Republican Party to be your savior and as the party of God. It's not. But we need to restructure our priorities.

42:41

If you care more about debating and dialoguing about politics than you do teaching the word of God to your children, there's a problem.

42:52

There's a huge problem. And you need to reorganize those priorities. And so we've viewed government as the top thing, politics as the top thing that we need to be discussing.

43:03

And it's not. We need to first be discussing the gospel, Christ, God, and then how we are to live submitting to God first.

43:12

And then how do we submit to the government in light of submitting to God? I don't know if everybody's noticed or not, but if you've been following anything, you've noticed that we don't actually have two parties now.

43:26

We actually have one party. And then the other, if you want to call it the offshoot of that one party, is just there to tell us what we want to hear.

43:35

And I don't care which side you're on. You know, and the thing is, is what I've noticed is when you have had some people that have come in that have have been attempted at being astute or righteous of doing what was right.

43:53

You have the never Trumpers, you have the never, you know, whatever, whoever you want to call it. It doesn't have to be Trump. Anybody would say, you know,

43:59

I'm not going to adhere to this person because they're not they're not godly enough or they're not politically correct enough.

44:06

Or, you know, all of the different positions are being said. I keep going back to Daniel.

44:13

I noticed that in Daniel that he submitted and that he submitted to the government, to the authorities.

44:19

And Nebuchadnezzar was much worse of a tyrant than anyone that we've had.

44:25

He killed anybody he wanted to. He lifted up anybody wanted to. He abased anybody who wanted to. He did anything he wanted in all of his province, which was the whole world at the time.

44:36

And it was given to him by God to do so. Daniel, chapter four, chapter three.

44:41

You see that God was the one that gave him that right and authority and charged him with that.

44:47

And that's the example that we see that, you know, Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar that you are the one who has been put in place by God.

44:57

And yet Daniel would never submit to Nebuchadnezzar or anyone else trying to force him into a worship or a pagan worship or anything that would cause him to compromise his faith.

45:10

And that's where we stand. Old and New Testament tells us that exact same thing. You know,

45:15

I think it's a theonomic view that says we have to have the absolute perfect, you know, theocracy or the theonomic president or whatever else.

45:25

And I'm not blaming all the onus. But I'm saying a lot of a lot that I've talked to, they will come down to this.

45:31

I will never vote for so and so because they don't fit that dynamic. And I say, wait a minute. Hold on. We want to find the most most upright person that we can find for leadership in our context.

45:43

Because you think about it. Nebuchadnezzar wasn't ever voted into office. Right. We get the privilege of voting, whether it's corrupt voting and all of the

45:55

Dominion voting systems and everything else have have done away with all that. You know, that's another debate.

46:01

But we get the privilege of voting right now. And some places don't. Right. But even whether we do or not, we need to to pray for and hope for the best government officials that we can see that God would bring in.

46:15

And one last point. I'll be quiet for a minute. But Andrew has said it many times.

46:21

Now that Biden is the president by hook or by crook, however, he is president. We need as Christians to be praying for him, for his salvation.

46:30

And for Kamala Harris, for her salvation. And we need to be praying that that God would use them for his glory and our good and that we're able to proclaim the gospel in whatever situation we're in.

46:45

Yeah, that's right. And so so if you listeners, if you want a quick summary of the two party system, the

46:53

Democrats and the Republicans, the Democrats want to steal your money. The Republicans want to pass legislation to steal your money slowly over six years.

47:00

OK, so that's right. It's the same goal. Let me wrap this up and then we got some other things we want to do.

47:10

We have some stuff that for a matter of theology to do. But the way I see this, Drew, is

47:15

I see this as there's far too many Christians that are trying to make America moral again.

47:22

And it never was. Yeah. Yeah. So the problem with that is they don't want to make righteous.

47:28

And that's that's the real I think the real underlying issue that we have here is as Christians, we want to see

47:35

America righteous. Yeah. And they want to see America moral. And there's two different ways you go about doing that.

47:42

If you want morality, that's OK. Legislate it. Go to the government. That's where you go. But if you want righteousness, you go to Christ and you hear the gospel.

47:50

Right. So so the reason we're not seeing any either of those take place in our country is a failure of the church, because the church has quit preaching the gospel from the pulpit.

48:01

And then the people are not equipped to take the gospel into their everyday lives and preach the gospel. You know, of course, as an as an addendum to this, and I agree with you guys on all this stuff.

48:11

So, Drew, and this is a lot of stuff I've been teaching on in what you said about a proper view of Romans 13. There's one one point we have to really make sure we understand.

48:20

The government has no business in the church. Right. And it's it's both biblical and and in America, it's also guaranteed in our

48:29

Constitution. Ultimate Romans 13, it's there. Right. So once the government starts to interfere in our church and our way to worship, when they start to try to be the leader over the pastor who's the leader of the church, we got problems.

48:44

And that's where we have to we have to be able to push back and say this is not a righteous government. So so I go that far in terms of what we need to be doing and protecting ourselves, because then then we have the ability for pastors who who understand that right to continue to teach their their people right to go out and share the gospel the way they're called to do.

49:03

Last year is an absolute disgrace on the church. That's that the church was literally paralyzed across the country and people were paralyzed in their pajamas on Sunday mornings.

49:12

If they even decided to watch church. So it's it's it's terrible to think about.

49:18

I'll say one other thing, too. One of the things that was that's been disconcerting to me in a lot of the groups I've been speaking in over the last couple of months is that there are there is a lot of patriots who are not

49:29

Christians. A lot of Christians who are patriots first. Yeah. Yeah. And those groups look almost the same.

49:36

Yes. I've been teaching lately. I've been having to pull people back and say, hold on a second.

49:43

Your master is not government. Amen. There is not a political party. Your master is

49:49

God. Your master is his his book. And that is what we are to be going by with everything that we do.

49:58

And so the reason why we can be patriotic is because God guarantees the right. That we're also guaranteeing our constitution.

50:05

There's that connection. It's just you got to get the order right first. It's God. Yeah. Yes. That's right.

50:12

Well, you know, Drew, there's something you and I got to do here. Yeah. So I'm going to put everyone else in backstage just for a little bit here while we take care of some matter of theology business.

50:22

Now you can quit. You can stop yelling at me. Yeah, because you had a giveaway.

50:28

Why don't you describe your giveaway that you had on matter of theology? Yeah. So the giveaway we did was we're giving to three winners a copy of the death of death and the death of Christ and the mortification of sin, both works by John Owen.

50:41

And there are two works that every believer needs in their library. So we we had these extra copies.

50:49

And so we said, well, let's just do a giveaway through the show because we want to bless people with giving them these works.

50:57

And so we reached out to you or well, we had the idea and then you reached out to us just to get things right.

51:05

And then basically you've been staying on top of us about doing it. Yeah. So we have a giveaway.

51:13

And so the nice thing about this is the computer generates it. So you have, from the looks of this, almost 50 entries or 50 people that entered and almost 750 entries.

51:22

Now, I did see you had you had one person who really wants to win there. They're like a quarter of all the entries.

51:27

This person went out. But so let's let's hit the button and see. And our first winner is

51:33

Chris Honholds. Oh, yeah. One. Hey, there you go. There we go. How did you get in here?

51:39

I don't know, but I think I entered him. OK, the second winner is. Oh, you didn't tell me

51:46

I can't put it in. Only one person can win once. Chris Honholds once again. Chris Honholds again. OK, let's see.

51:53

Three times. Chris is a three time winner. He gets them all. What is he going to do with with all those?

51:59

That's basically what happens. Chris Honholds wins anything that goes. Let's go for real now. That was that was fake.

52:05

That was just for Chris's benefit. All right. So we have we have three people to pick from and we'll we'll use whether they're verified or not.

52:15

That means Chris Honholds, since he didn't verify, can actually win this. We click the button.

52:25

This will be funny if Chris actually wins. Did someone say they knew that was going to happen with Honholds?

52:30

All right. Well, one one name we're going to have to disqualify because it was me and I was in there to test.

52:42

All right. So with that, the first winner.

52:48

Is. Drum roll, please. And Anthony, you're not going to like this one.

52:55

Donald Jacks. Donald Jacks is one of the winners. The second winner. Is Travis Lawson.

53:05

Travis Lawson is the winner. And then I have to pick someone that replaces me.

53:11

Travis, my son's name is Lawson. So. And the third is. Elaine, no last name, but we have the email, so do not worry.

53:23

We will get ahold of you so old of you and we will get your address and we will send those in the mail.

53:28

All right. And so we have just before we we ended the the matter of theology podcast.

53:36

I'm going to bring Phil in here. He has a question that may work out well as a teaser to have some of the matter of theology.

53:45

Want to hear what Drew's answer will be on Apologetics Live. I don't know because it may have something to do with something that is interesting to Drew.

53:54

Phil, how are you? I'm doing good. I'm just reading a really good book here. What do they believe?

54:02

I just started, so. You know what? Put that down and pick up some Vantill. I've been wanting to read

54:10

Vantill. You can read Clark, too. If you can read

54:16

Vantill and understand it, you get kudos because it's not easy. So, Phil, what question did you have for us tonight?

54:25

Well, I have a family in Canada and they're under shutdown orders and people are getting huge fines for breaking one little rule.

54:33

Walking in the wrong place or to get groceries at the wrong time. Crazy things. There's pastors up there being fined and threatened to jail for keeping their churches open.

54:43

So I'm I'm trying to encourage my family. They're Christians. How do I encourage them?

54:49

How do we prepare for things like this that will probably come in the near future here?

54:55

Right. Here's where we should just cut it off of Matter of The Hour. They have to come over to Apologetics Live to hear

55:01

Drew's answer, but we'll see where Drew decides to cut off. So is your question how do how do we prepare for that here in America?

55:12

Yeah, yeah. Now, I don't think that will happen here in America just because constitutionally they can't do that.

55:23

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, did I get to. Did you not see what Pelosi did with with the

55:30

State of the Union speech? She's ready to do that with the Constitution, too. She doesn't mind ripping that up.

55:36

Yeah, well, none of the none of the liberals do. That's why they think we actually need a new constitution.

55:43

AOC has said that. But I would say you keep meeting.

55:50

You serve Christ. You keep meeting mainly because going back to Romans 13.

55:56

Romans 13 is we are to come under submission under our highest governing authority. What is our highest governing authority here in this land right now?

56:04

It's a document called the Constitution. So the Constitution puts restrictions on the government for doing such those things, which is why

56:15

Dr. MacArthur opened up again and other churches really didn't even close. There are some smaller churches that we don't even know their names because they didn't get recognition.

56:28

News coverage that didn't even close. So I would say you keep meeting.

56:33

You know, the people need a place to go where their hope is preached and the gospel is proclaimed, where there can be that fellowship and that unity.

56:42

Because once you start closing things down and you start shutting people off, that's when people start panicking and they start getting depressed and they start freaking out about stuff.

56:52

No, we need unity. We need fellowship. I mean, the Christian walk is one that is not done alone.

56:58

It's one that's done in fellowship. So we need to gather together as often as we can. So if they threaten that here in America, you keep meeting because our

57:08

Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing those things.

57:16

All right. So, Drew, just to give you a chance to close out your show, we're going to continue with Apologetics Live.

57:22

But anything you want to do to close out Matter of Theology, maybe let people know that eventually Chris is going to make it back from Florida where he's been just basking in the sun on the beach.

57:31

I'm sure. My fear. Bud seems to think that Florida is always sunny, but I went down there and there was no sun and it was cold.

57:41

He blames it on me. Andrew just has a way of bringing the cold with him.

57:49

But no, you know, Matter of Theology, we used to put out episodes every week.

57:56

That's going to be slowing down now just because I'm going to be pulled away, focusing on some other things.

58:03

I'll be in sporadically, but Chris will be the main host with doing that and coming up with topics and having guests and things like that.

58:14

So I'll be in and out. But Chris will be the main host from here on out in Matter of Theology.

58:21

I was really just sticking it through for the giveaway. I said, you know, when you do this giveaway and I'll stick it through for that.

58:30

If you won your own giveaway, is that it? That's it. Even though I've got the entire works of John Owen right here,

58:37

I still wanted to win my own giveaway. That's right. But I mean, we are excited for what 2021 is going to bring, because regardless of what people think, it's a good time to be a

58:50

Christian. It's a good time to proclaim the gospel because now people are going to be coming to you just because you're speaking truth.

58:58

They're going to come hunting you down, saying you can't say that. And guess what? Now you get to tell them, you know, even more.

59:04

So we're excited for Matter of Theology and some of the things we've got planned. Cruciform 2021.

59:11

Chris is a speaker. I'm a speaker. Andrew, you're a speaker. It's going to be, 2021 is going to be just a good time for us.

59:19

So we can't wait. So we hope that if you're turning into Apologetics Live, that you'll tune in to us as well.

59:27

Because basically everything is a Matter of Theology. There you go. So as we continue with Apologetics Live, the thing that we end up seeing is that there's a lot of people who are really struggling with these things.

59:45

And we have to recognize that, but we have to put it in some balance. Now, we got some other folks that came in for some questions.

59:54

And again, folks, if you want two ways to make sure your question gets asked. The one way to make sure your question gets asked is a super chat because you're supporting the ministry, keeping this going.

01:00:03

So we're going to make sure we answer that one. And the way to do a super chat is on YouTube. Just click the little dollar sign when you ask your question.

01:00:09

Another way is to come in and ask a question. Now, John has been here. We have him listed as. So actually,

01:00:15

I should ask Phil. Phil, do you have any other questions since you're here? I don't think so. Thanks, guys.

01:00:20

Appreciate it. If you have another, just come on back in. We're going to bring in the Cluck Commander, a .k

01:00:26

.a. John. John, do you believe Biden legitimately won the presidency?

01:00:32

Okay. Humble Clay is asking the question. Constitution, do you believe Biden legitimately won the presidency?

01:00:40

It depends on how. No, I do not believe that he legitimately won the presidency. This is

01:00:46

Pastor Justin Pierce. I just want to make sure that since I get the top of the hour and the question was here.

01:00:51

No, he didn't legitimately win. However, because he did by hook or by crook, he is our president and we will be praying for him.

01:00:59

Yeah, well, see, and that's where I say it depends on how you define legitimacy, because he's legitimately the president because the state's delegates had declared that.

01:01:08

Now, here's here's the reality, folks. Even if Trump had won the popular vote, the delegates still could have given their vote to Biden or vice versa.

01:01:20

I mean, there's plenty of people that were asking for the delegates to give their vote to Trump because of the questionable ballots and whatnot.

01:01:29

So when you say legitimate, I would have to say yes, because our system is set up where we have delegates that select.

01:01:37

They bring those delegates to the Senate and the Senate then reads them and accepts them.

01:01:44

That process did happen. Do we believe that the reason that the delegates went the way they went is legitimate?

01:01:52

I would have to say no. And I heard a video. Justin, I think you shared this today. The video where and I don't know who was

01:01:58

I was talking, but he was asked the question, you know, basically, you know, what was there?

01:02:04

Was there any fraud in the election? And his answer was basically, if there was no fraud, then these states would be releasing their findings and not trying to tear it all up.

01:02:14

Yeah. They wouldn't be, you know, getting rid of the evidence so that we can never go back.

01:02:20

And, you know, you know, you have to think about it. The thing is, as a

01:02:25

Christian, look, I want the best for this nation and I want the best best for the people here. But as a

01:02:31

Christian, the best is Jesus Christ. You know, I don't I don't look to the government. I don't look to the government to be my by my hope.

01:02:40

And, you know, Donald Trump, you know, whether you think he was a good man or a bad man, he's not the hope and he's not the devil either.

01:02:48

You know, he's he's maybe somewhere in between. Everybody here on this stage that has had any conversations about Donald Trump.

01:02:56

We've all admitted that none of us believe that he was saved. None of us believe he's Christian. But wait, why is it that we don't see this from the left?

01:03:04

I mean, seriously, this is an interesting thing to bring up, because all the all conservatives can sit there and say, yes,

01:03:10

Trump is not good. He's done some stupid things. We can we can say that what happened at the Capitol, that those people that, you know, one out of every thousand maybe that was there, even less went into the

01:03:21

Capitol. Most of those that were in the Capitol were just taking photos. But we could say that's wrong. Here's the thing.

01:03:27

You don't hear that on the other side. You don't hear about seven months of tearing down monuments, breaking into capitals, burning cities, burning police cars, ousting the police.

01:03:37

If you want to talk about an insurrection, an insurrection is what happened in Portland where they they said they were their new country and the police and all law enforcement had to get out.

01:03:46

And what what did the government say? OK, we'll leave. That's an insurrection. OK, that's actually an insurrection by like a definite definition type.

01:03:57

What happened at the Capitol was not it was a protest that got out of hand, just like they say, the

01:04:05

BLM. But when the BLM does, it's like we're supposed to receive that and accept that and let them talk. Well, seven months that you telling people this is how you get your voice heard.

01:04:13

Guess what? The Democrats created that. But you don't hear them on their side allowing any negative talk.

01:04:20

You can't even mention the fact that Biden is listed by name now in a

01:04:25

Ukrainian criminal investigation. You can't mention that. You can't mention the fact that his son is been is investigated, is being investigated by the

01:04:34

FBI. Can't mention that. You can't have any of that. There's honesty on the on the conservative side.

01:04:41

There's dishonesty on the liberal side. So, well, two words, biblical words, a little out of context, strong delusion that they're incapable.

01:04:53

They genuinely are incapable. They're they're so deceived with, you know, with their ideology.

01:05:02

They're loyal to their ideology. It's it's just depraved.

01:05:07

And they're incapable of seeing that and not to get all theological. But I appreciate what Justin said in response to the question, is

01:05:16

Biden legitimate? I want to back up and be a little more theological with what we've mentioned a couple of times,

01:05:23

Romans 13. There is no authority except from God and those which exist are established by God.

01:05:29

So is he legitimate? Yeah, maybe not because the states were legitimate in their in their voting.

01:05:38

But certainly God has orchestrated his presence in the presidency. And that's where we come back to the doctrine of sovereignty.

01:05:47

Yeah, we can talk about legitimacy or fraud and things like that, because you got to say

01:05:56

Biden received more votes than Obama. Yeah, really? I don't think so.

01:06:02

So the question. With Biden, I mean, Biden, you had euphoria. Yeah.

01:06:08

And you're going to tell me a guy who can't even get 40 people at a rally. I mean, the real reason that Biden had a virtual inauguration is so no one was surprised that no one showed.

01:06:20

Right. I like what you know, I think, but it was you that might have said this, that the reason he had all the military was so.

01:06:25

So someone would show up. Yeah. But let's get

01:06:31

John, you had a question earlier. Let's get to your question. Hello, guys.

01:06:37

How are you all doing? Well, you sound like you want to be on a soap commercial.

01:06:44

That was a great voice. I'm going to tell you, that's a great voice. I'm going to tell you. All right.

01:06:50

And your question. Thank you very much. OK, well, the question is this. I was watching earlier a video from Dr.

01:06:58

James White, and apparently it seems as if he's making it very clear that he's leaning more towards the.

01:07:09

That post mill to put it in the wrong theology.

01:07:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I don't recall. I thought he was before.

01:07:23

Now he seems to be influenced by Jeff Durbin, along with the theonomy kind of guys.

01:07:31

And along with the eschatology position of millennialism. Now, I know that Drew kind of was excited about that, but I personally,

01:07:43

I disagree with the view. It's just a view and eschatology view. And I don't you know, I'm not going to condemn

01:07:48

Dr. James White or Drew or anyone else who who has that position. But you're so much more gracious than Andrew.

01:07:57

Yeah. Yeah. Hold on. I allow you to be wrong. I don't criticize you if you want to be wrong. To get your thoughts on problems of disposition or that position of post -millennialism.

01:08:19

Why is it? Why is it a flawed view? OK, John, your your video is breaking up a bit, so I don't know.

01:08:28

Question is your question about the view of post -millennialism or is it that James White is changing his position?

01:08:36

Which which is the question? Your guys's view of post -millennialism.

01:08:42

And. Is it a is it a concern that Dr.

01:08:48

White is leaning towards that? Well, I think

01:08:54

I think there's at least four of us here that's going to price who's wrong for post -mill.

01:08:59

So we should let Drew. Well, I would say to jump in there. I would say there are views of post -millennium post -millennialism that are concerning and that are absolutely wrong.

01:09:12

Ones that take the full preterist view that deny the second coming of Christ. That is a heresy that needs to be rejected.

01:09:19

The seven mountain mandate, which is put out by IHOP, Kansas City, Bethel.

01:09:27

That needs to be absolutely be rejected. Let me do this first, because we got

01:09:33

Phil in the private chat was like, OK, what is the difference between on mill, post mill?

01:09:38

So let me let me just do this real quick. Give an overview of the three positions so people know what they are and then and then get into them.

01:09:45

So you have three main end times use pre -mill, post -mill, mill.

01:09:51

So pre -mill stands for premillennial. In other words, it's the idea that that Christ will come back before the thousand year millennial kingdom.

01:10:03

So Christ will will come to be on Earth. He'll reign through that millennium. Post -mill was is going to be he's going to come after the millennium.

01:10:11

So there's going to be this thousand year period. Christ is going to come back. Millennial is that there is no millennium.

01:10:19

We're actually in it. It's an extended period of time. It's not actually a thousand years. It's a it's a figurative thousand years.

01:10:25

So it's a long period of time. We're in it. And at the end, it's just that's it. It's over. Now, when you talk premillennial, there's a couple of different views of premillennial.

01:10:35

You have you have historic premillennial. You have which is just there's some minor differences there.

01:10:41

I would say I don't think there is big. But then when in premillennial, the main thing that you want that people talk about is pre -tribulational, mid -tribulational, post -tribulational.

01:10:52

So pre -tribulational is that the church is going to be taken up from the Earth prior to the seven year tribulation.

01:10:59

Mid -trib is going to be that they're taken in the middle. And post -trib is that at the end of the seven year period, before the thousand year period, the church will be raptured up.

01:11:11

There is another view called the pre -wrath. It's very similar to the pre -mid or the mid view.

01:11:17

It's just a little bit before the wrath comes, but it's basically a mid view. So those are the three views.

01:11:24

We've been joking about that Drew is post -mill. I'm premillennial, pre -tribulational.

01:11:32

I think Dr. Silvestro, Bud, and Justin are the same. Well, actually.

01:11:38

Okay. Yeah. Which are you, Bud? I'm post -mill. Oh, are you? Oh, yeah.

01:11:45

You wanted one thrown at you? I'm sorry. I didn't catch that. I was going to hold up my, you know.

01:11:55

Yeah. But look, I think your answer is right. I had this conversation with a brother after lunch today with regards to where do we land on this?

01:12:06

And the fact is you've got these three views, which for at least 500 years since the Reformation have been considered orthodox.

01:12:15

If you go read the Puritans, which I have spent a few years reading Puritans, which is why

01:12:20

I gave an amen, not an a women to the Thomas Watson reference earlier. You get the sense that these guys, when they discuss eschatology, it really isn't a post -mill kind of kind of way.

01:12:34

Now, I'm no scholar on any of these. So I just qualify that to say, look, we're going to show a lot of grace to people.

01:12:41

I'm not going to argue eschatology with anybody. My fundamental issue is do I trust

01:12:46

Christ? Am I living for Christ? And do I know that he's going to do the right thing when the time comes?

01:12:52

And that's fundamentally where I try and point people. So, yeah.

01:12:58

Yeah. And I mean, and I'm no eschatology scholar either. I mean, I'm only more recently.

01:13:04

Well, that's clear. I'm only more recently. True. Now there are two of us.

01:13:11

The eschatology discussion. But from from the arguments I've heard, I'm more persuaded to the the post -millennial position.

01:13:25

Yeah. And I'll say this, you know, I guess part of, John, your question was, you know, like, is it dangerous?

01:13:30

Should we have concern? I guess I'll tell you where I have concern. My concern is really that Dr.

01:13:38

James White, who has been teaching theology at the seminary level, you know, for years now.

01:13:45

Has been has over 100 professional debates. This is not a type of guy who doesn't take theology lightly.

01:13:55

He takes it very seriously. I mean, I believe he's got a whole, you know, thing of theology matters, you know, that, you know, it's he focuses on theology.

01:14:07

The thing that's concerning to me, John, is that he could go from his Reformed Baptist church to this other church and have major theology shifts at his age.

01:14:20

Having studied theology for so long, I get more concerned with that. He's changing on his end times view.

01:14:27

He's changing on his view of theonomy. And he he once said on his radio program that or implied that theology was closer to Islam than Christianity because of its use of the law.

01:14:39

So yet he's going to a church that would teach theonomy. I just I look at this and I get concerned when somebody can make major shifts in their theology.

01:14:51

It's like, well, what what were you teaching wrong for all those years? And it's not you know, I could see it if it's something while I haven't studied this out.

01:14:58

But then I studied it out and now I've changed review. But he studied these things.

01:15:03

He taught these things. That's actually more concerning to me. I think that when it comes to end times, we're all wrong.

01:15:12

Every one of us, we don't know where otherwise we'd change. But I think there's elements where what we're trying to do is we're trying to gleam into something that we don't have enough detail.

01:15:23

You know, we look at we look at some of these future prophecies. And you think about the first before the first century, they had all those first coming prophecies and they got a lot of them wrong.

01:15:33

Why? Because the prophecies are sometimes like a political cartoon. You get the big picture.

01:15:39

You don't get the details. And so much of this end times view, what we're doing is we're fighting over the details.

01:15:47

And those details are things I don't think we're going to have right. But the big picture, I mean, clearly we all agree

01:15:52

God wins. We can have unity on that doctrine. But I think that where you're going to get into the differences for me, it's going to be how do we look at the scriptures?

01:16:03

I'm not so interested in what is my theological system say? But I'm going to look at what the scriptures say.

01:16:08

And so when I come to something like the 70 week prophecy in Daniel, and then

01:16:14

I look at these three views, only one can explain, in my opinion, can explain those 77 year periods without having to do games with the interpretation.

01:16:26

In other words, I can read those as two different periods that add up to 69 seven year periods consecutively.

01:16:34

And then there's a period where the Messiah is cut off. And then later is a seven year period.

01:16:40

I can read that. But if you're an amillennialist, you have to say, well, the first either you're going to say that the first 69 are literal, but that last one, either the last half is figurative or the whole week is figurative.

01:16:54

The whole seven year period is figurative. You end up having to play some games with it. I'm not sure what actually the postmillennial guys do with the 70 week prophecy in Daniel.

01:17:07

I'm not as familiar with postmill enough that I've engaged with folks on that.

01:17:13

But I think that the reason I hold to what I hold to is because I think it's most consistent with the interpretation of scripture.

01:17:20

Are there going to be areas where I'm wrong? Sure. I know that I am. I just don't know where. So that's my position.

01:17:26

I think that's a good topic for a future show. The 70 weeks. Yeah, we could do that.

01:17:32

You know, I'm just I'm reminded. Theology, then I will be a four time guest. I remember a couple of times in Q and A's back from.

01:17:43

Oh, that's good. I thought you were going to say Q and on. So good. No, no, no, no. Q and A with Ligonier when they had

01:17:51

Ligonier conferences and R .C. was still here. And he would get this question a few times. What's your eschatology?

01:17:57

And his response, you know, he had that way of just responding off the cuff that sort of diffused everyone.

01:18:04

But but didn't make a point. What's wrong with you people? He would come back and say, you know, it depends on who

01:18:11

I read the last. So if I read a postmill guy, that's persuasive.

01:18:16

It's biblical. I can understand it. But I can go read a premill guy. And oh, wow, that's biblical.

01:18:22

That's persuasive. So eschatology is important.

01:18:27

We don't disregard it at all. But I think we've got to show some grace here, just like you mentioned,

01:18:33

Andrew, that we're not all right. But ultimately,

01:18:40

Christ is. And that's where we need to be focused. So, yeah, I think you have to have the particulars of the gospel right.

01:18:49

Yeah. And now where it plays into the eschatology, ultimately, because there are different views of eschatology and we all may be wrong and miss it in certain points.

01:19:03

But I think the key thing in our eschatology is if we deny that Christ is returning for his bride, then then we're wrong.

01:19:12

Absolutely. You know, you mentioned full preterist. And so let me define that for folks that don't know.

01:19:19

There's views of partial preterism, full preterism. And it's the idea that full preterism would say that all of the prophecies were fulfilled already by 70

01:19:29

A .D. That was the completion of them. And every future prophecy was fulfilled.

01:19:35

The reason we'd say that's a heresy is because of what Drew's saying right now. Because what that does is that says that there is no more.

01:19:45

Right now, there's nothing coming. This is the millennial. It's the millennium.

01:19:51

It's a millennial kingdom. And this is the best it's going to get. And Christ comes in and just kind of, he purifies what his part of the kingdom is.

01:20:03

But it's no actual purified kingdom. And the problem with that is, is there is no real cleansing of God's kingdom.

01:20:15

And what you guys are talking about is absolutely fair and correct. When the question comes up, what about Dr.

01:20:22

White or what about any one of us? Like Andrew said, we all have those viewpoints.

01:20:29

I have very strong views when it comes to the end times. And everybody knows that on Sermon Audio.

01:20:35

I've got multiple sermons and discussions about my viewpoints on the end times that I've put out there because I want people to know.

01:20:45

I have a major problem with the dispensational view that says, don't worry, everything's going to get better.

01:20:52

And you don't have to put up with anything. Nothing bad's going to ever happen to you. It's all going to happen in the future.

01:20:57

But God's going to come in and take you out. No, that's not what the Bible says at all. We're going to go through it, and it's going to be bad.

01:21:04

Isn't that the post -millennial view, though? What I'm telling you is it's also an unlearned dispensational view where there have been people in the dispensational camp that have come out with this idea that there's a rapture coming before anything gets bad, and it is wrong.

01:21:27

I'm going to tell you, yes, I believe 100 % in the rapture. I don't have any problem with it. But I will say this.

01:21:32

It's not escapism. I read the article on the AOMN, and that's a straw man.

01:21:41

I wish people would quit calling the dispensational view of the rapture an escapist view because it's not.

01:21:48

If you read the Scripture, we are clear that we're all going to go through terrible times coming.

01:21:57

It's going to be terrible. It's going to be bad. That's why I say when stuff like what we're seeing going on in the world today happens, as a dispensationalist,

01:22:07

I can say I expected that. I mean, go try and sell that view to a

01:22:14

Chinese Christian right now who has no rights, whose pastor has just been arrested and taken wherever and may never be seen again.

01:22:23

So, yeah, that extreme view is certainly… Books don't sell in Chinese. What? Books don't sell in Chinese because it just doesn't…

01:22:31

The prosperity culture doesn't fly when there's persecution going on. Well, while we're on this subject, if you don't mind,

01:22:38

I want to put in Irresistible Truth. He did a super chat. I was going to put that up. I've been waiting. I was waiting.

01:22:45

And for the record, he said, hey, will someone answer my question? I'm scrolling up, scrolling up, scrolling up, trying to find the question.

01:22:52

And then I saw you put in there and said, hey, well, if you make it a super chat, it gets asked. So he did that.

01:22:57

I finally found it when I saw it. So Irresistible Truth, thank you for the $10 donation of Striving for Eternity.

01:23:04

But your question… He puts this. CRT, and let me define that. CRT stands for Critical Race Theory.

01:23:10

If you don't know what that is, we are going to answer it. He also uses SJW. That stands for Social Justice Warrior, just so you guys, if you're not familiar with the terms, have them.

01:23:20

So CTR has infiltrated so many churches. How are you guys dealing with CTR and SJW narratives that pastors have submitted to?

01:23:32

Seems like they submit to secularism over God. At Acts 29 Church, tons are leaving.

01:23:38

So I'm going to throw this one to Dr. Silvestro. He's been doing a lot of the work for Striving for Eternity on this.

01:23:45

And we have a seminar. Folks, if you don't know what these things are, Critical Race Theory, Critical Theory, Social Justice Warrior, if you're not familiar with that, if you're not familiar with the things that we're going to be saying here,

01:23:57

I encourage you to contact us. Contact us at Striving for Eternity. The way to do that is you can email us.

01:24:03

Just email is info at strivingforeternity .org. Info at strivingforeternity .org.

01:24:11

It's important, too. You need to learn this and understand it. Everybody needs to learn this one right now.

01:24:16

This is a critical thing. We will come out to your church, Dr. Silvestro, myself, either one of us or both of us, and help teach your church what this is.

01:24:28

Anthony, let me throw this to you, if you could answer this question for Irresistible Truth. Absolutely.

01:24:34

We've been teaching this for almost two years, Andrew. I don't know if you realize that. We're one of the first ministries out there that's put together a systematic theology on this.

01:24:43

I think part of the reason is because my background, as you know, coming from a

01:24:49

Jewish background after the Holocaust, I was trained to look for this type of behavior.

01:24:55

I saw it early on. I'm not alone. You could see people writing about this in the 70s. It's not unusual, but we struck this very early on, and people criticized us.

01:25:10

That's right. People told us the things that are happening today would never happen.

01:25:16

We said, yes, they would. The things we say are going to be happening in the next couple of years, they're saying it's never going to happen.

01:25:22

You were wrong last time. You might be wrong again. Yeah. Okay, let's start off with defining both of these terms, and we'll show you how they're almost one and the same today.

01:25:33

Critical race theory is an idea that came out 1940s, 1950s

01:25:39

Black seminaries. Basically, it states that within the fabric of society is woven this inherent racism and oppression.

01:25:51

White people have, through institutions, through laws, through everything.

01:25:59

The entire fabric of society is literally made to be against the

01:26:06

Black man, is to oppress the Black man. That's literally critical race theory. Now, what's interesting is that this critical race theory was first used to raise up groups like the

01:26:20

Black Panthers. What we see today with Black Hebrew Israelites are literally offshoots of this critical race theory that was taught years ago.

01:26:27

Martin Luther King is an offshoot of this stuff. And what they've done is they've – well, let me get to that in a moment.

01:26:36

That's critical race theory. Critical race theory has changed today, and it's actually better termed critical theory, and here's why.

01:26:46

Because when we look at the social justice movement or social justice warriors, as stated here, it is people who believe in equality in everything or equity in everything.

01:26:56

And this is equity on the input as well as the output. So that means they believe everybody should start off equally in life.

01:27:03

Education, healthcare access, money, you name it, it should be equal. And it's also an equity of outcome so that whatever you do in life, in the end, you should all be the same as well.

01:27:15

I know, sounds pretty crazy, right? It's literally impossible to do. But that is what social justice teaches.

01:27:22

This comes from Marxist philosophy. So what was once an economic philosophy for equality transformed into cultural

01:27:31

Marxism. That is literally the same thing as social justice. And what it has done is it says we want equality not only in race, not only in economics, but we want equality everywhere across the board.

01:27:45

And so when people feel like they're being oppressed in whatever they feel like they're being oppressed in, they claim that they have a right to not be oppressed.

01:27:54

They have rights that are being oppressed, and so therefore they want to fight for those rights. And this is where social justice has really taken off because it's really not about race anymore.

01:28:05

Even though they put that out there at the forefront, what it's really about is the homosexual movement, about transgenderism, homosexual marriage.

01:28:14

It's all of those types of social issues. Abortion, this is all part of social justice. And this is why when you went and looked up the

01:28:21

Black Lives Matter movement, that out of the top 13 things they used to have on their website, the top four of those 13 were dealing with what they believed to be race issues.

01:28:32

The last nine were social issues. So their big impetus was really social issues more than anything else.

01:28:40

Now, critical race theory, which was focused mostly on the white fabric of society that oppresses blacks, has literally morphed into critical theory, which is the white fabric of society that has oppressed everybody who seems to be oppressed today.

01:28:59

Now, I seem to be vague about this, but I want us to be really clear. Critical race theory, social justice, and the like, cultural

01:29:08

Marxism, is an atheistic philosophy. And I know there's people on this show right now that disagree with me on this, but you can go back to Karl Marx's writings, you can go back to the

01:29:17

Frankfurt School writings, you can go back to all those philosophers' writings. They were atheists, or at least claimed to be atheists.

01:29:24

And they promoted this stuff knowing it was directly against what God taught in the

01:29:30

Bible. Now, as they lay that out as a foundation, this is the thing that's really important.

01:29:38

We need to look at every one of these issues, and we'll start with race. What does the Bible have to say about these things?

01:29:47

And first and foremost, it's one blood, one race, according to the Bible. Everyone's from Adam and Eve.

01:29:54

We're all just different shades of brown. And so therefore, even using the term racism is a secular concept, comes from evolution, comes from different monkeys or monkey -like creatures that have evolved to different types of people.

01:30:08

Some better evolved than others. That's where that comes from.

01:30:14

So the Bible teaches one blood, one race. The Bible gives prescriptive words in terms of who we can marry.

01:30:23

Men can only marry one man, can marry one woman. One woman can marry one man. We see that abortion is a ridiculous thing today.

01:30:35

We see the people fighting over when does life begin, right? You got heartbeat bills. You got bills that is maybe only the time of when somebody gives birth is when we should be banning them, and yet what does the

01:30:47

Bible say about life? That life begins at conception. So what the problem is with pastors is that they have to take every one of these things and get out of the issues that they see in society, right?

01:30:59

People fighting back and forth, which is a secular world, people full of sin fighting over these issues.

01:31:05

They need to take a step back and say, wait a minute, what does the Bible have to say about it? How does the

01:31:11

Bible address race? See, if there's somebody in my church, and I'm not a pastor, if I was, if somebody was in my church who claims to be a

01:31:18

Christian and is racist, is sinning against somebody because of the color of their skin or the shade of their skin, then the first thing that you need to do is call that person to repentance and then to teach them what the

01:31:29

Bible actually teaches regarding race. When it's an unbelieving world, this is where I have a big problem, and then

01:31:37

I'll end here and let everyone else kind of come in. Critical race theorists and social justice warriors, among other things, want to destroy what they believe to be an oppressive fabric of society.

01:31:48

They want to institute all kinds of laws, and here's the reality. You can't legislate sin.

01:31:55

You can try to, right? I mean, we have laws in the books not to murder, not to steal, not to do all kinds of things, and yet people continue to do those things.

01:32:04

Why? Because of the evilness of their hearts. When you look at critical race theory and social justice, as Christians, we have to recognize, do these problems exist out there?

01:32:13

Absolutely. There are issues that exist out there. We do see racist stuff that happens out there, but it comes from unbelievers that don't understand where morality actually comes from.

01:32:26

It comes from unbelievers who don't understand one blood, one race. It's people who don't have a heart change, and so pastors, rather than kowtowing to these movements, what you need to be doing is teaching the gospel to your congregation and how to go out and proclaim the gospel, because the way these things get changed is not by destroying society or trying to pass laws.

01:32:47

You fix these things by proclaiming the gospel so that you see God change hearts and minds to be able to see the truth.

01:32:55

Yeah, now you mentioned that CRT, all these things were basically started by atheists.

01:33:05

So you had Karl Marx, which his philosophy was applied to economics. Then right after Karl Marx, you had

01:33:12

Gramsci. Gramsci took Karl Marx's philosophy and applied it to society, and Gramsci believed that the biggest threat to what he was doing was the church.

01:33:22

So his goal ultimately was to dismantle the church. Now, when you get into CRT and how it is infiltrating the churches, and that's true, it is infiltrating a lot of churches.

01:33:35

CRT and intersectionality, its focus is partiality. It shows partiality.

01:33:42

So you have to elevate certain people and move other people down on the totem pole, and you have to view people in terms of by their gender, by their race, by what kind of job they have and all these things.

01:33:56

So it deals impartiality. Well, the problem is in the church with the gospel, God does not deal impartiality.

01:34:04

We are all viewed equally as sinners deserving death. So that's why it's important to preach the gospel that all deserve hell, that none of us are worthy of the gospel.

01:34:15

But once we come into relationship with Christ, now there is no more Jew. There is no

01:34:20

Greek. There is no slave. There is no free. We are all one in Christ Jesus. That's what Paul tells us. Now, in referring to Acts 29,

01:34:28

I just came out of an Acts 29 church, and Matt Chandler, as the president of Acts 29, wholeheartedly buys into this nonsense.

01:34:37

He did online webinars about white privilege. When the

01:34:44

Dallas shootings took place, he had Dallas police officers that were members of his church.

01:34:50

He didn't talk to any of them. Instead, he brought members of the oppressed community up on stage and asked them to talk to them about police brutality.

01:35:01

Well, that ended up driving out a lot of the police officers that were in his church. When the

01:35:07

George Floyd incident took place, Acts 29 put out an article, and you couldn't get out of the first paragraph of that article without the mention of systemic racism.

01:35:22

Systemic racism is what makes critical race theory possible, or the idea of systemic racism is what makes critical race theory even have a leg to stand on, because what systemic racism says is it says that built into the system is racism.

01:35:40

Well, the problem with that is you can't show us any laws that deal in racism, that says it's okay to discriminate.

01:35:49

Now, maybe 50 years ago, you had a case with Jim Crow laws and things like that, but today, you don't have that.

01:35:57

Systemic racism does not exist because there are no laws into the system that promote discrimination based on anyone's race.

01:36:09

So critical race theory has to attach itself to something that's non -existent in order for its teachings to actually be viewed as valid.

01:36:25

I think one of the things that I think with it is there is an issue, and this is why several of us got together.

01:36:33

There were about 75 of us that got together and signed a letter to John MacArthur to have him add his weight to something we were working on, and that is now what's known as the statement of social justice in the gospel.

01:36:47

And you can go search, just do a DuckDuckGo search on social justice in the gospel. You'll find the statement.

01:36:52

There's, I think, almost, I don't know how many tens of thousands now have signed it. But we put that together because we saw that social justice was starting to have an impact, a negative impact on churches, on the gospel.

01:37:07

And we felt strong enough that we needed to put a statement out of what we affirm and what we don't affirm. And what

01:37:14

I see with social justice is it affects the gospel message. It goes right back to what we started talking about at the beginning part of the program.

01:37:21

Are we about morality or are we about righteousness? See, social justice is not about righteousness.

01:37:30

It's about trying to make everyone equal, which is impossible. There's never going to be everyone equal.

01:37:37

Right now, Joe Biden is president of the United States. If he's going to sign this equality document, which,

01:37:44

Drew, we never got to, if he's going to sign the equality document, guess what? Then I get to be president.

01:37:52

Anthony, you get to be president. Drew, you're president. You're president, you're president. Everyone's president.

01:37:58

Yeah. We all should just march into the White House and say, this is my house. I can live here because I'm president too, because we have to have equality.

01:38:05

And you go, wait, that doesn't work. You better not say that too loud. Yeah. Well, this never will work.

01:38:12

It is something that's being used to actually oppress people. It's something that you end up with.

01:38:20

When you look at what Mao did in China, he comes in and says, it's not right that all these wealthy people have the land, and you poor people, you don't own it.

01:38:32

You just have to work it. And so, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So what does he do? He promises he's going to take the land from the rich, give it to the poor.

01:38:40

Does that sound familiar like anyone else? Right? So that's what he's going to do. So what ends up happening?

01:38:46

He just takes the land away from the rich, gives it to people who don't know how to manage it. They just knew how to work it.

01:38:53

Now they have to actually manage it. They don't know how to do that, and now they're having problems. Government comes in, and people start getting violent.

01:39:00

So what does the government do? We're going to take away the guns because that'll prevent the violence. Okay, that sounds good. They take the guns away.

01:39:06

Then people are going, we can't manage this. What do we do? Government says, that's okay. We'll take the land, and you can work for us.

01:39:12

In the end, the people were in a worse position than they originally were. They went from being in a position of having someone who is accountable to the government have to, you know, take care of them, to now the government, who has no accountability, have to take care of them.

01:39:28

Now, Michael is saying Robin Hood theory. Wrong. It's not. Robin Hood, and I'm glad you put that up, because Robin Hood is a great example of what we have in our country right now.

01:39:41

Do you have the true Robin Hood story or the false? Here's what

01:39:46

Robin Hood we think of today. We think of Robin Hood that he was taking from the rich to give to the poor.

01:39:52

That's the liberal lie. That is not. Go read Robin Hood. That's not what Robin Hood was doing.

01:39:58

He was stealing from the government, or taking from the government, who was stealing from the people and giving it back to the people, the poor people that the government was ripping off.

01:40:07

That's right. See, the liberals don't want to tell you the true story of Robin Hood, because it exposes what they're doing. They're the ones stealing from the poor.

01:40:18

And what we're trying to say, you know, what Robin Hood would be saying is, no, we need to take it from the government who's illegally taking it and give it back to the poor.

01:40:25

Give it to who rightfully earned it and deserves it. That's why Robin Hood is actually a very good thing to look at, because it shows you the differences that we have.

01:40:35

But what you end up having is that what Mao did and what we have arguing today is, well, we need equality.

01:40:40

We need to have, you know, we have too many rich. We should take from the rich, tax them, give it to the poor. But what ends up happening is that all that that's going to do is it's going to oppress those poor.

01:40:51

They just don't know it yet. Right now, they work for people, and they have a government that's over those people to give accountability.

01:40:58

Soon, that middleman's going to be gone, and we're all going to be working for the government, and there's not going to be any accountability. So where this gets into with the gospel, though, is that it has a different gospel message, because now what the gospel message becomes is about righting wrongs of the past that you never actually did.

01:41:17

Family members never actually did. It's just that because you have some sort of lack of melanin in your skin, you're guilty of something you and your family never actually did.

01:41:27

In fact, let's just think about this argument. When the argument is that because you lack melanin in your skin, you have whiteness, and you're guilty of the slavery from hundreds of years ago, there's a problem there.

01:41:40

How did we get the slaves in the slave trade? That was by black kidnappers.

01:41:46

Yeah, see, people don't realize that the blacks were slavers too. So now who do you blame? Do we blame the blacks who were the slavers that sold them to the whites?

01:41:55

Because then all of a sudden, that becomes the problem. They probably don't talk about that in that, you know, was it 1689 group?

01:42:02

Oh, wait, no, different group. That's not right.

01:42:09

Andrew, you do bring up a great point talking about how even the Atlantic slave trade, you know, how they came over here.

01:42:17

But what people also don't realize is you can go to states like South Carolina alone, and in South Carolina, there were 200 black slave owners.

01:42:27

Yeah. Yeah. One thing to point out too is you got to think about the fact that you've got your 1619 project is, you know, is to actually to up up in it.

01:42:39

Yes. Billy Cockrell is right. Irish and Scottish slaves as well. I am a descendant of those those which he speaks of.

01:42:48

We have to see that the 1619 project is an effort to upheave our nation and say that the nation truly was founded when the first slaves were brought here from Africa.

01:43:03

If you go actually do the actual research, you have slaves that have been in ownership through wars throughout history.

01:43:11

And what we have is as a failure to actually recognize that America was the only country that fought itself and fought itself to free people who were of slave ownership.

01:43:25

And it was whites. It was whites who fought. Okay. And Humble Clay says this.

01:43:30

I was going to mention this. But, you know, the first black slave owner in America was a slave owner in America of a black man was a black man.

01:43:38

Yeah. Okay. The reason that became legalized in America was from a black man putting another black man into slavery.

01:43:47

And you have to think about it. We live in a culture that has fought itself to better itself.

01:43:54

And it's unlike any other culture. But I want to point out, too, that we're talking about socialism or communism or any other ism of government authority.

01:44:05

The Bible doesn't say to submit only if you like it. Okay. And I have to stress this because I go back to Daniel because I've read a lot in the studies

01:44:14

I've done in Daniel is the oppression. The physical torment that the these men were put under the selection process, the things that they were that happened to them.

01:44:28

And it was all used by God to reach to the highest people, not just Nebuchadnezzar, to the highest in the leadership who saw

01:44:38

God work in the midst of their paganism, their depravity, their wicked dictatorship.

01:44:45

You know, the evil that they did. You're going to worship these these idols and everything they did. And I just I really want to point this out that as Christians, we don't have to lose hope and put our hope and strength, even in America, that's going to fall.

01:44:59

It's going to falter because when any nation turns its back on God, they will fail.

01:45:05

That nation will fall. Let me address something Michael says here. He says, as I said before,

01:45:11

Christians have always fought against slavery. Now, this is the thing that because some people argue that Christians fought for slavery.

01:45:20

There were people that did use arguments from the Bible for slavery.

01:45:25

But let's be clear on a couple of things here. One, there actually was a book called

01:45:31

The Slaver's Bible. And it's interesting because they rip out a lot of things out of that Bible that they would read to slaves.

01:45:38

And what you end up seeing in that Bible, you know, one of the things that's missing out of Exodus? Yeah. Where it's where you cannot kidnap another human being.

01:45:48

Yeah. They kind of left that one out. They cut out anything where it talks about, you know, people who are slaves being equal, equal human being.

01:45:57

Right. So. So, yeah, you had people that used religion. OK, for that purpose.

01:46:05

But you have to realize that's being done today as well, that people use religion.

01:46:11

I mean, do you really believe that a guy who can't even pronounce the word Psalm goes to church every week and is now president?

01:46:18

I mean, seriously, I was going to mention this and Irresistible Grace says the same thing. Cattle slavery was never in the

01:46:23

Bible. And that's the second thing I want to bring up. Slavery in the Bible is different than the slavery that we often think of.

01:46:29

The slavery we think of is the African slave trade. That's not the slavery that's in the Bible. The slavery we have in the

01:46:35

Bible is an economic slavery. And when you see the laws in the Bible about slaves and slave owners, you will see that is on the slave owner.

01:46:44

It's the slave owner's responsibility to care for the slave. It is not that he owns them.

01:46:50

You see that it's not property. The slave owner gets paid a half day's wages. The slave, if he runs away and a cattle run away and you find it, you return the cattle because he's property.

01:47:02

You don't return the slave because he's not property. There's a difference there in scripture. We see that the laws are for the master to care for the slave.

01:47:11

He can't just do whatever he wanted. So we have to understand that there are differences there.

01:47:17

Now, I wanted to, you know, I wanted to say when we look at this, though, when we look at critical race theory, there, you know, it is a difference of are we trying to right the wrongs on earth?

01:47:30

Yes. Are we going to recognize that every if I ask all five of us here, whether we have grown up and felt oppressed at some point in life?

01:47:42

I'm going to assume that we most of us would say yes, because we can always look for that. We can find a way that in some of us, it'll be easier than others.

01:47:51

I mean, it might be easier for me, you know, being raised Jewish in an anti -Jewish neighborhood.

01:47:57

And so, you know, what you end up having is that we can find things that you can say, well, we were oppressed.

01:48:06

But you know what? The question is not let me try to get someone else to right the wrong for that oppression.

01:48:14

The question is, OK, I was oppressed. How do I how do I learn from this?

01:48:19

How do I improve? How do I become better? I get more of an education. Then I find that you see countless examples of people who fought to better themselves in this life.

01:48:30

That's the difference that we have in the gospel. Is this the message of critical race theory is it's not your fault.

01:48:38

You can't do anything about it. You need the government to help you out. You need us as your savior.

01:48:44

And when churches are saying that same message, they it's the wrong message of the Bible, because the message of the

01:48:51

Bible is you need God as a savior. God's the one who saves, not the government.

01:48:56

We've been talking about in the first hour. It's God who saves. He's our savior. He's who we need. We turn to Christ and live.

01:49:03

We don't turn to government and live. And CRT can only be promoted here in America because everywhere else in the world, they're oppressing themselves.

01:49:12

And you see tribalism running rampant all throughout America. So you have the

01:49:17

Chinese that hate the Japanese, right? It's tribal. You have the Irish that hate the English.

01:49:22

It's tribal. Only in America can you actually promote CRT. Well, but you also have to think about it.

01:49:30

The CRT theory is actually only being promoted to advanced one group.

01:49:36

And you have to think if you're Jewish, you don't count because you're white. But if you're Asian, you doubly don't count because you're smart.

01:49:44

And so we have to get rid of that. Don't even talk about all the oppression they were under.

01:49:49

Justin, let's do it this way. Let's look at more recent history. Seriously, recent history. If you're black, you can riot for seven months on the street, burning cities, toppling monuments, taking over towns, burning police cars, taking over police precincts, stomping into Capitol buildings, stomping into courthouses.

01:50:10

And that's not insurrection. You need to have your voice heard.

01:50:15

But when people who felt oppressed because they felt that people stole an election and they wanted their voice heard and they wanted people to investigate, then all of a sudden that didn't count.

01:50:26

That was insurrection. Well, in all fairness, that was just called the summer of love. Anthony was going to say something.

01:50:34

I guess the two things. So first of all, I am I am a mill when it comes to time.

01:50:39

So so let's explain that.

01:50:45

Let's explain that. Hold on, Anthony. We got to explain. You can't just leave inside jokes and not explain.

01:50:52

OK, so what Anthony refers to is the fact that Anthony likes to go over time. When I let Anthony run the show, he goes over time.

01:50:59

OK, that's what that's referring to. He loves to just say these things and not explain them.

01:51:05

So I think most people get the I'm ill part of the joke. Yeah. OK, let's say one other thing.

01:51:14

Pastors, churches, when you understand the Christian, well, professing

01:51:21

Christian roots of critical race theory, social justice and whatnot. We mentioned the name

01:51:27

Karl Marx earlier. Drew mentioned the name Grimsky. They were part of the Frankfurt School.

01:51:32

You had a lot of other philosophers that all believe the exact same things and were teaching them.

01:51:38

Some were were public about it. Some weren't. Karl Marx did a lot of background stuff and a lot of other guys did his bidding for him.

01:51:45

It was really interesting. But but here's the issue. Karl Marx wrote his book in the 1850s.

01:51:53

We see lots of stuff being written throughout the entire 1700s and 1800s. But his was kind of the big book somewhere around 1875 to 1880.

01:52:03

We're not really sure the early dates, but this is where the Christian socialist fellowship started that we know of.

01:52:12

And this is both in Europe and in America. And it was promoted by these guys.

01:52:17

And so you literally had fellowships of pastors who were being taught these critical race theory issues, social justice issues, cultural

01:52:27

Marxism issues before we knew it was cultural Marxism. They're being taught this stuff. And the pinnacle of this came in 1917 because one of those influential pastors is a guy named

01:52:37

Walter Rauschenbusch. And he wrote in 1917 a book called A Theology of the

01:52:43

Social Gospel. You want to know where the heresy comes from that Martin Luther King Jr.

01:52:49

had in that he didn't believe in the atonement on the cross. It goes back to one of the guys he studied, which is

01:52:56

Rauschenbusch. Rauschenbusch believed that Jesus didn't die on the cross to atone for sins of those who repent and believe.

01:53:05

He instead believed that Jesus went to die on the cross for the social injustices of the world and to make them right.

01:53:12

And he literally writes the six different points of social issues that Jesus died for, according to him, in 1917.

01:53:21

This is kind of what came out of this Christian socialist fellowship.

01:53:27

And so the roots of everything we're seeing today in the church literally goes back to that issue, whether pastors recognize it or not.

01:53:36

That's the exact same thing that was being taught in the black seminaries in the 1940s and 1950s that gave rise to critical race theory officially.

01:53:45

And what has given rise to all stuff we've seen in the last 70 to 80 years. So I just want to make sure people have that context.

01:53:53

I just wanted to point out one thing that kind of goes back to the question.

01:53:58

What do you do with a church? What do you do with pastors? One of the things you need to recognize is that they don't have a full grasp on what the gospel does.

01:54:07

The gospel truly transforms you. And what that means is that those guys are forgetting the second half of Ephesians 2.

01:54:16

We're all familiar with the first half. You know, you were dead in sin and trespasses, but God, but then you don't understand that there was a division.

01:54:25

And it was a divinely orchestrated division between Jew and Gentile. And it says that Christ in Christ, that hostility, that wall of hostility is broken down.

01:54:35

Most Christians don't understand that they don't have a full grasp on the gospel. And that's why it's such a subtle threat to the gospel, because we hear something like justice.

01:54:45

And we think, well, certainly scripture speaks to justice a lot. And we believe in justice and we want justice.

01:54:52

But the issue is, and Andrew alluded to this earlier, when scripture talks about justice, it's on the basis of righteousness and not your rights.

01:55:02

It's not about what you have a right to. It's about what God's righteousness demands and in Christ, what he gives to us.

01:55:11

That's the subtle attack of CRT on the gospel. And churches that promote that are either being deliberately ignorant because they want to appeal to a culture that seems to be going in this direction.

01:55:26

Well, guess what? I don't care where the culture goes. What does scripture tell us? What does it teach us? So I would respond by saying, you know, go to your pastor and say, explain

01:55:37

Ephesians 2, 11 through 22 to me or 21. Explain this to me, because there's the response to social justice.

01:55:46

There's what matters. And Anthony does a great job with the seminar that he does on it.

01:55:51

So I'm sorry. I'm just a guest. I just wanted to know. I just I want to be conscious of time and wrap up.

01:55:58

But there's two things I want to do. Drew, I want to start with you. We'll do this kind of quickly.

01:56:04

You know, we have a lot of people who are very much upset when it comes to the things they see going on this last year with COVID, things like that.

01:56:13

I want to I want to talk to you and then have Anthony share something. So with you to start.

01:56:20

And, you know, you were talking with me today about a guy you work with and what's been going on.

01:56:27

So I want you to share that story as an encouragement to people that are really getting depressed with things going on with COVID and, you know, the elections and everything else.

01:56:38

They're getting depressed. So I want you to share that story real quick. Yeah. So a guy

01:56:44

I work with, he's a nonbeliever. He's he's a kid, about 21. And I feel weird saying that because I'm in my mid 30s.

01:56:53

You're a kid to me, so. So but he's about 21 and he missed two weeks of work because he had

01:57:01

COVID. He gets back and everyone on my where I work knows that I'm that I do a podcast.

01:57:09

They know that I'm devout in my beliefs. They know I stand firm. But this kid comes comes to me and he's asking me questions.

01:57:18

And, you know, and really he's asking me questions, you know, about eternity.

01:57:24

He's asking me questions about different views of Christianity and Roman Catholicism and all this stuff.

01:57:30

And I go, hold on. We need you're talking about question 976. OK, we need to go back to step one.

01:57:37

You need to know the gospel. So we just start we start there and we start talking about him.

01:57:43

But this was a guy that, you know, everything that's going on, panic ridden in the media.

01:57:49

He gets sick with COVID. And so now he's questioning things and going.

01:57:56

Well, what's happened is that in some of the other people that he works with are atheists.

01:58:04

But he's coming to me personally. And I work for FedEx. So so he loads my truck.

01:58:11

So he comes into my truck to talk to me personally about these things.

01:58:16

And so I just give him the gospel and I tell him it doesn't matter who the president is.

01:58:22

Doesn't matter what the media says. It doesn't matter about a disease. What matters is who the king and sovereign is, who the

01:58:29

Lord is. And that's Christ. And you need to repent and you need to come to him. You need to know him because if you know him, none of this other stuff matters.

01:58:39

Then a disease, even though it has a 99 percent recovery rate, is not going to bring fear into you.

01:58:47

Whoever the president is, is not going to bring fear into you. As long as you know the king, the one who rules and reigns now, sits on the throne now, who is in control now.

01:58:59

That is what is most important, because and this is to people also freaking out just about the election and all this other stuff, who are worried about their liberties and their freedoms being taken away.

01:59:11

Look, your liberty and freedom here in America doesn't matter. The true liberty and freedom is found in Christ, where he liberated you from sin and death.

01:59:21

That is the freedom and liberty that you need to be concerned about. Amen. Amen. That's right.

01:59:27

So now I want to give, you know, and we're just about on Anthony time. So we're just about two hours.

01:59:34

So I timed this just right. Actually, if I take another 30 seconds to lead into Anthony, Anthony can answer on Anthony time.

01:59:43

So we'll go a little bit long. And if we go long, it's all on Anthony. It's his fault for as long as we go, you know.

01:59:51

But in a serious note, Anthony, you weren't here last week. We kind of talked about it.

01:59:56

I wanted to give you a chance to explain really a miracle. I think you and I would agree, too, that happened.

02:00:04

And, you know, something we never expected, prayed about it for many years.

02:00:09

So why don't you share what happened last week, week before? Yeah. So praise

02:00:15

God. Right. So, you know, most of my family and most of my wife's family are not saved.

02:00:22

And and we're not we don't hold back. We we share their family members, maybe maybe more harshly than we should at times.

02:00:32

But my dad is is has always been over at my house. I mean, two, three days a week for dinner.

02:00:38

Just he lives right on the corner. We've had a great relationship over the years and great with our son, who's now 13 years old.

02:00:46

Well, we've witnessed it, my dad, for years. And he's one of those guys who always had head knowledge, but, you know, no repentance.

02:00:52

I mean, just continue to live his life. He's had it all in life. And so we we've we've always prayed for him.

02:01:01

We've witnessed him. I know, Andrew, as you've been at the house many times here, you've witnessed to my dad as well.

02:01:08

And people have. And and, you know, he has the same old answers, right?

02:01:14

Well, my dad went to the hospital back in November. He was diagnosed with double lung pneumonia.

02:01:21

And unfortunately, rather than figuring out what type of pneumonia he had, they just assumed it was covid.

02:01:26

They were in a covid unit, got covid. And it's in Canada, didn't even die of covid. Covid went away, ended up dying of double lung pneumonia.

02:01:33

They couldn't they couldn't figure out and fixed horrible diagnosis in doing all that.

02:01:40

Having said all that, when my dad first went in, we all assumed my dad, healthy 67 year old, was going to come out in a few days.

02:01:49

So when you went into the hospital, I know second, third day in, I said, you know, my dad was complaining.

02:01:56

He was having a hard time breathing on full oxygen mask. And the meds they were using just to sedate him weren't really working.

02:02:06

And and so I said, you know, dad, you think breathing now is hard. Wait till you see what hell is like. Pretty harsh, right?

02:02:13

That's the soft. That's the soft way of saying it. You know, sometimes you've got to just throw it out there.

02:02:18

Right. But, you know, we're all thinking he's going to get out of hospital here in a few days. My brothers were critical of me.

02:02:23

My mom was critical of me, even though they had been divorced for the last, I don't know, 15, 16 years now.

02:02:30

And as I toned it down, I just continue to give Bible verses every day to my dad and encourage him and whatnot as my dad's getting worse.

02:02:38

So on day eight of my dad's hospitalization, I asked, I texted him, asked him what he needed to do with work.

02:02:45

I said, you know, even when you get out of here, it's going to take you weeks of recovery before you can go back to work.

02:02:53

And my dad's response was this. I don't care about work.

02:02:59

I had hours of reflecting on my life and what's important. I ask God to forgive my sins and to follow him.

02:03:05

He's my savior. My dad proceeded that with saying that in his time thinking, that's everything that we've told him he recognizes is now true.

02:03:20

And that was stunning to me. But of course, you know, in my mind, I'm like, OK, is this really true?

02:03:26

Or is he just saying this because he's laying helpless in a hospital bed for eight days? You know, guy who's unbelievably strong and healthy, right?

02:03:36

Well, I asked my dad what it meant to be forgiven. How do you know you're forgiven?

02:03:41

And he said, pray, pray for his forgiveness. I'm learning. He knows what I mean in my heart.

02:03:47

And I cried at the same time. I'm like, wow, that's pretty amazing.

02:03:55

On day 12, my dad showed fruit of salvation. So four days later, he sent a text to my youngest brother who is closest with our mom.

02:04:07

Again, they divorced 15 some years ago after 30 plus years of marriage. He said, Domenico, tell your mom

02:04:13

I need her to forgive me for how I treated her all those years. To this day, I can't figure out why.

02:04:19

None was her fault. I asked God to forgive me also and wash my sin and I will follow him as my savior.

02:04:26

Wow. Absolutely amazing for me to get to read that text.

02:04:32

I called my dad. So, you know, my dad was on oxygen a lot. He could barely speak because anytime he took the oxygen off, his lung capacity was dropping.

02:04:41

But I called him right after that. And as he answered the phone, he could barely utter out a word.

02:04:49

But in the background, he had Psalm 23. I don't know how he got it there. But Psalm 23 was playing in the background on this never ending loop with two other psalms.

02:05:00

And it was it was absolutely amazing to me. My dad ended up just a few days later having to get sedated because the oxygen wasn't working so well.

02:05:10

They ended up putting a ventilator on him, which, you know, they have to drug you and essentially knock you out for.

02:05:16

And so my dad literally repented and came to Christ just a few days before he was knocked out.

02:05:24

And and that was the last time that we've been able to communicate with him at all. He ended up dying on January 9th.

02:05:30

He lasted a long time on the ventilator. Times that he would slightly get better and he would get worse, a little bit better and a little bit worse.

02:05:39

And it just trended down the whole time till he passed. But, you know, what's what?

02:05:46

It's bittersweet. We were really close with my dad. But I've said to many people that I would

02:05:53

I would give anything for my dad to be in heaven and die today rather than him live another 20 years and go to hell.

02:06:04

And I prayed for years that God would do whatever he had to do to my family members to bring him to repentance.

02:06:13

And, you know, it it took it took God to put my dad on his deathbed after all that time.

02:06:21

He was, as Andrew knows, was wealthy and headstrong.

02:06:29

And and God put him exactly where he needed to to bring him to repentance and faith. And so one of the reasons

02:06:34

I think about Michael, the atheist, you know, we've talked with him a lot.

02:06:40

And he was in here tonight. He had he dropped out before he got a chance. We didn't get a chance to talk to him. And and I just I just think, you know,

02:06:47

God can use the worst of of us. He uses for his glory.

02:06:54

And for, you know, I've told people so many times that and this offends people because, you know, it's a

02:07:01

Calvinistic understanding that I've told people so many times that God is perfectly willing to put any

02:07:07

Christian in any situation. He wants to put them in what no matter how bad it is so that someone will come to know

02:07:13

Christ by his divine power and his his spirit, that he's willing to do that.

02:07:19

And he is capable of doing that for his glory. And I would tell you that that's just such a great story.

02:07:25

Well, you know, it's like it's like Humble Clay said, here's, you know, don't give up, never give up. And, you know,

02:07:32

Nicholas in the private chat is saying, thanks for sharing, Anthony. This is how I've been praying for my family.

02:07:37

He earlier said my my eyes are fighting back tears right now. Mine too. Yeah. I mean, you know, folks, you know,

02:07:46

I do know. I mean, I've I've shared the gospel with Anthony's father. I've shared the gospel with his father in law.

02:07:52

Both men were hard to share the gospel with. Clearly, they heard it before.

02:08:00

Before I got there, for sure. But this is the thing I want to leave as a parting encouragement.

02:08:08

We can sit and look at all the things that have been taken away from us this the last 12 months.

02:08:14

Or we can choose to look at what Christ is doing in the last 12 months.

02:08:22

And that's that's the perspective I want to leave you guys with. Just just to think about. We're getting we're going to move into a period where many of us think that it's going to be a very dark time.

02:08:32

Yeah, I do. But the one thing I would say is this. You choose what you're going to do.

02:08:39

Are you going to focus on what you've lost out on? What you what you don't have anymore? What you the comforts you want to have?

02:08:46

Or are you going to focus on what Christ is doing here on Earth? That's the thing. Just real quick, just to let you guys know, we could use your support at Striving for Eternity.

02:08:59

If you would like to support us, just go to striving for eternity dot org slash. Actually, it's donate or donation.

02:09:05

I got it. I got to check that. I think they the new website has it as donation, I believe. But just go to to striving for eternity dot org.

02:09:12

And there's a support or donate button at the top. We would appreciate that.

02:09:19

You know, COVID has been a tough year. And if you're finding value out of this ministry, out of what we're we're putting together and the materials we have, the things we do.

02:09:29

If you get value out of that, would you consider supporting us? The reality is, is things are getting tougher to do ministry and it's going to continue.

02:09:39

And you're going to see a lot of ministries that are going to fold because they're going to they're not going to want to put up with the pressure.

02:09:46

But we want to produce good material to equip you guys for the future we think is coming.

02:09:53

And we can only do that with help, with your help. So if you consider donating, just go to striving for eternity dot org.

02:10:00

And there is a support SFE button at the top or menu. And just click on that and that will take you to the page where you can support us monthly would be great because we do have monthly expenses.

02:10:11

But if you could support us, that would be wonderful. And until next time, just remember to make strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.