The Book of Nehemiah Part 5

Let's pray and we're going to get started. Lord Jesus, again, as we open your Word, we ask your Holy Spirit to help us to rightly understand what you have revealed, so that we may properly believe, confess, and do according to your

Holy Word, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so there was a question that came in, a good one, by the way, good question.

And the question has to do with the Gospel of John, chapter 20, where Jesus says to his apostles after his resurrection, here's what it says, and it says, when he said this,

Jesus breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they have forgiven them.

If you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld. And so the question relates to, well, didn't the apostles receive the

Holy Spirit here? Not necessarily. The church historically has not understood that as the time when they received the

Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is received on the day of Pentecost. So the Lutheran Study Bible provides a good note to this, to, you know, to kind of help us frame what's going on here.

And so in the Lutheran Study Bible, it says, verse 22, breathed on them, a

Greek term used only here in the New Testament. It's kind of a, it's what's called a hapaxlegomena.

It's like a one -time phrase. It only appears like, it's unique to it in how it's phrased.

So Jesus' words formed by breaths of air delivered the Spirit to the disciples. And then here's what the

Augsburg Confession says, that bodily breathing proceeding from the body with the feeling of the bodily touch touching was not the substance of the

Holy Spirit, but a declaration by a fitting sign that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the

Father, but also from the Son. So the idea here is Jesus says, receive the

Holy Spirit. It's basically him saying, you're going, it's his way of saying by a sign, you will be receiving it.

So, but you'll note that what's given here is the authority to forgive sins.

That's kind of the big bit that is the emphasis of this text.

And verse 23, then the Lutheran Study Bible says, these words show that the keys are given to all the apostles alike, and that all the apostles are sent forth alike.

In addition, it must be recognized that the keys belong not to the person of one particular man.

So the Roman thinks the keys belong to Peter, but it's, all y 'all receive the

Holy Spirit, and if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven, right? So this is a gift given to the church.

Many and most clear and firm arguments show this for Christ speaking about the keys, as for example, if two of you agree on earth, therefore he grants the keys first and directly to the church.

This is why it is first the church that has the right of calling and the right of, you know, the, so a good way to think about it is that Lutherans take this text, then put the emphasis on the actual office of the keys, and Christ visibly, and you know, visibly breathing on them and saying, receive the

Holy Spirit, is his token that they will, on the day of Pentecost, receive the Holy Spirit. And then once that has all happened, then, you know, the idea here is you go out and forgive sinners.

Go out and forgive the penitent, and the impenitent, you retain the forgiveness. And that's really what the emphasis of this text is.

So it's, this isn't a mini Pentecost ahead of time. This is a sign or a token by Christ, you know, leading to when they actually did receive the

Holy Spirit, and that is on the day of Pentecost, right? Okay, now let's take a look back at Nehemiah.

Hang on, I need to get there. Okay, we are working our way through the book of Nehemiah.

I'm going to back up just a little bit and continue with this amazing prayer. And, you know, the fact, hmm, let me, hang on a second here.

I want to do something. I, okay, the law was read, yeah, feast of booths celebrated.

That's where we left off. Okay, we left off the feast of booths. We're in the chapter nine. Chapter 10, we're going to have to deal with a thorny topic.

So be ready for a thorny topic, and it's a hot topic today because of, well, because of Nazis.

So I'll explain when we get there. Yeah, that's a thing. So after they celebrate the feast of booths, and I made mention of the fact that,

I think it's the prophet Ezekiel that mentions that in the new earth, the feast of booths will be a feast that is celebrated in perpetuity as part of what we, as part of our worship on the new earth.

That is a fascinating thing, and it makes perfect sense because every single one of us, we are sojourning through the wilderness, heading towards the promised land.

And the wilderness is not a dry season in your life. It's the time in between your baptism and the time you die.

All right, so this, we are in our wilderness sojournings. You'll note that all of us are sojourners here.

This is not a place to lay down eternal roots and to build a family that lasts into eternity. This is not the place for that.

In fact, if you think that that's what you're intending to do, good luck because look what happened to me.

Yesterday, I was 16 years old. I had a 28 -inch waist, six -pack, washboard abs, and then

I woke up this morning and okay. No, I will not be able to,

I will not be able to build a thousand -year Reich, anything of the sort. All of that is out of the question.

So, but that being the case, then you recognize then that the story of the exodus is all of our stories.

We're participants in the exodus. Christ is exodusing us out of this sinful earth and bringing us into the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

And it's a whole planet, a renewed earth, and something that we all get to look forward to.

And none of you will recognize me when we get there. It's going to be fantastic. I'll say, haha.

And you'll go, who are you? You know, I'll say, I'm Rose, bro. And you'll go, no. So, all of that being said now, we're into chapter nine.

And here is this humble prayer. The people of Israel then confess their sins. So, remember they were despondent.

They were sad last week. And they were told not to be sad. And so, the whole point of like kicking back up the

Feast of Booths was to give them something to celebrate. They were truly convicted upon hearing of the word of God, of their sin and the rebellion and their apostasy, which led to their exile in Babylon, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the sacking and destroying of the temple and of the walls in Jerusalem.

But they've rebuilt the walls at this point. The temple is still not done yet. But we read, so on the 24th day of this month, the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and sackcloth and with earth on their heads.

You think Ash Wednesday's intense. Okay. And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.

And they stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of Yahweh, their

God, for a quarter of the day. For another quarter of it, they made confession and worshiped

Yahweh, their God. On the stairs of the Levites stood and they cried with a loud voice to Yahweh, their

God. Then Levites, and it said, stand up and bless

Yahweh, your God from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise.

You are Yahweh. You alone, you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.

And you preserve all of them. Now this, my catechumens, does this not sound like first article stuff from the catechism, right?

God has made me and all creatures and he sustains us. Now, a little bit of a note here. I think we could do a little excursus because today

I didn't preach too long. So I have some time. I either have time to do a long.

What? It's a miracle. That's right. It's a miracle. He didn't preach forever this week. Okay, so let's talk about this here.

Watch what is going on. So you have made heaven, Shemaim, the heaven,

Shema, of heavens, Shemaim, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.

Now this is an interesting thing. When we go back to the book of Genesis, in the book of Genesis chapter one, it says, in the beginning

God created the heavens, Hashemaim. God made the heavens and the earth.

So we've got to be careful biblically to make distinctions, proper biblical distinctions, when we deal with the term heaven.

If I say people, when they die, if there are Christians and they confess Christ, they go to heaven.

What am I talking about? If I were to say that Jupiter exists in the heavens, what am

I talking about? Right? So when it talks about God created the heavens and the earth, it's plural,

Shemaim. So we always understand it in this sense, where the, okay, we talk about the heavens, we're going to have to talk about several different things.

There's a first heaven, and the first heaven is the sky. That's where the birds live, and the clouds do their thing, and smoke rises too.

So, and airplanes fly across it. That's the first heaven, it's in the sky. Second heaven is where the stars and the planets live.

And the third heaven, the heaven of heavens, is the place of God's abode. So this is where the cherubim and the seraphim and the heavenly angelic army exists.

This is where Christ has ascended to. Does that make sense? All right. And here's the interesting bit, is that in saying that in the beginning,

God created the heavens and the earth, that is our only reference point, and I mean it.

It's like our only data reference point to saying, okay, even the angels are part of creation.

But we know they're creatures, but they exist, I don't know how to describe it, other than to say they live almost in a different dimension.

You know, as we kind of understand dimensions, that might be a right way of looking at it. But, and that dimension, that where the heaven of heavens is, is outside of time and space, which is hard to,

I can't, I still can't wrap my head around it. I legitimately, every time I think about it, it bends my head into a pretzel, and things start falling off.

It's, I cannot perceive a reality apart from time and apart from space, but time and space is a creation of God, and he exists outside of it.

And so if you were to, I've seen somebody try to model it this way, is if you were to take, if you were to say, from the perspective of eternity, you take all of human history, you can like put it into this, you know, this like large bottle, a diorama, and it goes chronologically.

You can walk your way through it day by day by day. It has a beginning, it has an end, and you can kind of, you can like interject yourself at any point in it, because you're outside of it.

Okay, but the person that's in it, in the system itself, is bound by the rules of the whole system, and they can only, they can only move forward in the, you know, in the plane.

It's, that's the easiest way to look at it, that still hurts my head, but that's kind of how this works.

So we talk about this, you'll know that they are confessing here something in their prayer that is now embedded in scripture that is important to us, but most importantly is this other bid.

And you preserve all of them. That means

God is active in his creation to this day. Now what does deism teach?

You know, okay, what's deism? You know, God, God is not involved.

He, God, yeah, so the way the deists, and you think of the deists, the famous deists are like the founders of the

United States, Thomas Jefferson and others. I think these guys are clause agnostics.

That's a whole other story, but they, they, for whatever, believe that God cannot interfere in the creation, cannot do it.

And so Thomas Jefferson, the Thomas Jefferson Bible, he took an exacto knife to a copy of the

Bible, and anywhere in the scriptures, specifically in the New Testament, where it records a miracle done by Jesus, he takes his exacto knife and just cuts it right out and gets rid of it.

Okay, he said that cannot happen. God cannot intervene in the creation. God, because a miracle would be

God intervening. But I would note here, these people are not even talking about that.

They're talking about the daily preservation of life that God brings us, which means God is constantly working behind the scenes to make it possible for us to eat bananas, you know, from, you know, from South America, here in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and also

Minnesota, for a reasonable price. You know, these are all these different ways in which God is preserving and now, and caring for all of our needs.

If he weren't, if God were to basically take his preserving hand and sustaining hand off the creation, how do you think you'd fare?

I think we'd, we wouldn't fare too well, right? So there's some wonderful confessions here.

And so you, and the host of heaven, they worship you. Hebrew word here, savah, the army of heaven, the armies of heaven.

You know, host, again, I always, whenever I see, we, English speakers, we hear the word host, we're thinking of people who run around with a platter, you know, would you like some more hors d 'oeuvres?

You know, would you like to top off your champagne for you? That's, that's not what we're talking about here. Savah is army.

You are Yahweh, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur, the Chaldeans, gave him the name

Abraham, and you found his heart faithful before you and made with him the covenant to give to his offspring the land of the

Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, the Girgashite, the Uptite, and the Balletite.

And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous, right? And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt and heard their cry at the

Red Sea and performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all of his servants and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers, and you made a name for yourself as it is to this day, and you divided the sea before them so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths as a stone into mighty waters.

By a pillar of clouds you led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire in the night to light for them the way in which they should go.

You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy

Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant.

You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them."

Now a little bit of a note here, considering the day that we live in, all right?

Good statutes and commandments. Good statutes and commandments.

Ten commandments, are they good? Yeah. Okay, how do certain philosophers, nihilistic philosophers, view the

Ten Commandments? Restrictions or even worse? Okay, so Nietzsche, did

Nietzsche like the Ten Commandments? No, he did not like himself, but he did not like the

Ten Commandments at all. And here's the issue, is that Nietzsche's nihilistic attacks against the commandments get rolled up into fascist ideology, all right?

And so let me tell you their meta -narrative. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with this idea, but the

Nazis did not like Jews. Are you guys aware about that? Yeah, I would say that they harbored some murderous intent against them, you know, and maybe even acted on a few of them.

Yeah, all right. But all that being said, one of the assaults that the

Nazis picked up from Nietzsche was an attack against the

Ten Commandments, and their view was that the Ten Commandments were commandments that the

Jews had concocted for themselves while in slavery, and that these represent a series, basically these are slave commandments.

This is how you get along with others when you are under the boot and you are being oppressed.

And so Nietzsche would talk about, he would say, listen, you know, if you are a sheep, you have one set of commandments, and according to sheep, wolves are bad, bad wolfy.

You just ate my daughter sheep, okay? Bad wolfy, okay? And so sheep would have one set of commandments, but wolves would have another.

And so he used this analogy that in the wolf species, eating sheep is a good thing, and is a salutary thing, and is done in strength, not in weakness.

And so they argued, why on earth would we want to adopt a moral code from a bunch of people who were slaves, telling us we can't murder, we can't do things like this, that's just weakness, right?

And so this was their way of dismissing the moral commandments of God, and so it's a fascinating thing today.

Now, we live in a day where there is now a resurgence of that kind of thinking, and I hate to say this, we've got a five alarm fire raging with invisible confessional

Lutheranism right now, and it's not good. In fact, let me just give you a small taste of how bad it is.

So if you follow me on Twitter, and I'm not recommending you do this, for the last six weeks now,

I've been going after a group of people that we've labeled the Mollerites. These are followers of a fellow by the name of Corey Moller, who was recently excommunicated from the

Missouri Senate for the shenanigans that he's been up to. But one of the things that Moller does is he teaches that genocide isn't murder.

And this is one of his followers. Genocide isn't murder. The Israelites were commanded to exterminate heretics in Joshua.

You're just obsessed with the cult of nice, as so many fake modern

Christians are. Did you ever think you'd see a day when people were arguing for genocide?

And seeing some of their other followers, they got involved in this.

They all use these anonymous accounts. You don't really know their names.

And this guy even has the word LARP in his name. He says genocide can involve murder, but it's not synonymous with murder.

If you disagree, you would have to allegorize away what happened in Canaan or condemn the

Bible as wicked. And I'm just thinking, you guys legitimately don't know the Scriptures. Now, is it true in the

Scriptures that God commanded Israel to devote to total destruction certain groups of people?

The answer is yes. That was God's judgment. And the children of Israel were

God's means by which that judgment would take place. But let me ask you this.

Did Adolf Hitler have a command from God to murder 6 million

Jews? No. Okay. And you'll note I use the word murder.

That's genocide. Now, you'll note that you can look at other...

Have the Marxists engaged in genocide? I think of the old Soviet Union. Did Stalin ever engage in genocide?

You bet your bippy he did. Yeah, he'd be probably worse than Hitler. I think the number was like 10 million for Stalin.

All right.

So, socialism in the 20th century between... By the way, fascism is a form of Marxism.

It's just a weird spinoff of it. 100 million people died in the 20th century.

They were unalive. I think that counts as genocide. Did any of those ideologues, whether they be

Marxist or fascist or Nazi, did any of them have any command from God to engage in genocide?

Does anybody today have a command from God to engage in genocide? No. Right.

You shall not murder. Okay. So, when a tin penny despot exterminates a large group of people and genocides them, there is no command of God for anybody to engage in such a thing.

Now, in the context of the church, are we to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the

Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, or are we to take nations and put them into mass graves? It's the first, right?

Right. Exactly. But you'll note we now live in a time where people... Well, this guy says, you're accusing

God of commanding murder. You're a heretic here. No, I'm not. And you'll note these guys are defending this idea that somehow we can embrace genocide today.

And my question is, who are they plotting this against? Who are they hoping to engage in this non -sinful genociding of?

I know.

I know. It's just absolutely terrible. It's almost worse than an atheist because these people claim to be believers.

Right. They claim to be believers. And in the name of Jesus Christ, I'm going to hold out the option of genocide.

Yeah. How big of a group? Bigger than you think.

It's a five -alarm fire. I don't know what their total number is. I would say back in 2017, there might have been a couple of dozen of them.

My best guess now is they're in the thousands. Yeah. Can you elaborate further on how socialism morphs into fascism?

Okay. So the question is, can I elaborate how socialism morphs into fascism?

Okay. The best book on this is by a fellow by the name of Ze 'ev Sternhell. And I think it's...

Hang on a second here. I'm going to do him an injustice if I do this by memory. Hang on a second here.

Amazon .com. We're going to look for Ze 'ev Sternhell. It's the rise of fascism. Hang on a second.

Ze 'ev... Too many E's. Ze 'ev Sternhell.

Here we go. And yeah, the birth of fascist ideology. So this is the work that's out there.

And unfortunately, it's not cheap. If you want it in hardcover, it's 71 bucks. Kindle is only 40, and that's a bargain.

Sorry. This is an academic work. But in here, in this book,

Ze 'ev Sternhell actually explains where it comes from. So during the time between the wars, okay, so the first fascist theorists were actually

French and Italian. And what was happening is that after the World War, World War I, you had the

Marxists really... They were a growing party, and there was a really good chance that the western part of Europe would have ended up as Marxist.

However, there was enough people that were pushing back against it because Marxism is a form of collectivism.

And what I mean by that is if you were to say, what does Marxism believe regarding an individual? Individuals do not have rights.

And this is a reaction against the Enlightenment. So if you remember, the founders of the

United States, they were part of what was called Enlightenment thinking.

And they believed that the individual had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, that philosophy leads to something called individualism, which is an error in and of itself, where the only thing that exists is me and my own decisions.

You want to see individualism run amok, just take a look at what's happening here in the United States, where you have people who are legitimately claiming they have the right to self -identify as a piece of bacon.

Okay, you know, it's just nuts, okay? You can self -identify as anything. That's individualism run to its logical conclusion.

But on the other end of it, you have the collectivist ideologies of which fascism is a part of, and this idea that what matters is the collective, and that your will has no bearing on anything.

It's what you are able to contribute to the survival of the group, that you are the group and the group makes the decision, and the leadership needs to be drawn from the group and embody the goal and the vision, the vitality of the survival of the group.

So that's kind of how Marxism works. But here's the issue, is that it's one thing to convince a bunch of, for the best way of putting it, serfs living on really bad conditions farming in Russia, as opposed to people who own individual properties and have assets and things like this in Western Europe.

And so what happened is that Marxism was picking up steam, but it wasn't picking up steam in a way where it was going to be amassed as a whole, because people didn't want to give up their private property for the collective.

And so in France, you had a revisionist group of Marxists, and that's literally what they were called.

They were called the revisionists. And what they did is that they took Marxist theory and they changed some bits of it.

And they came up with what they called an anti -materialist form of Marxism, which is basically saying that we are going to embrace the collective without the mandatory thing of everybody surrendering their assets to the collective.

So the French were the ones who came up with this anti -materialist form of Marxism, which then it picked up steam with some of the thinkers in Italy who were called syndicalists.

And the syndicalists picked up on this anti -materialist form of Marxism. They embedded it in their thing, and it was then they the ones who gave birth to fascism.

Now if you don't know what fascism is, fascism denies the existence of the individual. You do not exist as an individual.

And as a result of it, the only thing that exists is the volk, the community, the nation.

And you, your worth and your value, in fact your right to even live, is based upon your ability to contribute to the survival and the thriving of your group.

Yeah, right, unless you're in charge. Okay. And so fascism became very popular.

And what happened is that it's kind of like conservatives as we think of them. The closest thing to that in Italy at the time, the fascists that waged war against the conservatives took over the conservative wing, got rid of all the old school conservatives, became the only form of conservatism, and that led to their rise to power.

So we can now be collectivists, but I can still own private property. I don't have to give up my house.

And so that's how this gained steam. And then Hitler comes along, and I've been reading the rise and fall of the

Third Reich. Holy smokes. Boy, Nazis are stupid.

I have no other way to put that. They are like fourth, fifth grade, mental level school boys.

And anyway, holy smokes.

So Hitler comes along, and he is instrumental in taking fascism and adopting a form of fascism that he melded with German nationalism.

And then of course, his unique spin and hatred on the Jews. So before he was a

Nazi, he was a staunch German nationalist. And he harbored a grudge against what he considered to be the men who betrayed

Germany by surrendering. He believed that the German military had won the war, but that the bureaucrats had surrendered, and as a result of that, they had betrayed

Germany. And so he harbored this real big grudge and this conspiracy narrative that these guys didn't know what they were doing.

And one of the things that happened as a result of the Treaty of Versailles is that Germany could no longer be a monarchy.

So the Habsburgs were deposed, and a forced republic was put onto Germany that everybody hated.

And it was a really inept group. And so the Marxists and what would become the

Nazis were constantly going back and forth against each other. And Hitler had other people as part of the party in the early days of it that helped kind of philosophically fill this whole thing out.

And so they borrowed heavily from the Italians regarding bringing fascism in.

But Nazism isn't just fascism. Nazism is something completely different. It's fascism with German nationalism.

And then, of course, they called themselves national socialists, and there's a reason for that, because they were actually socialists.

That was their economic policy. That's where the term Nazi comes from. I don't know if I've answered your question satisfactorily, but if you really want to know all of the philosophical bloody details, then there ends up Sternhill's book,

The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Yes.

So the thing I'm praising God for right now is that we don't have a strong fascist leader right now.

Now, there's no one person we can all point to and say, this is the guy that's going to lead

America into greatness. I don't know if you've noticed, the current office holder of the

President of the United States is not exactly known to be the brightest bulb. And he falls upstairs, no doubt.

Okay. Praise God. Okay. But all of that being said, what we're missing here is a

Fuhrer. Okay. But these guys are legitimate. The guys I'm they're trying to put the foundation for a

Fuhrer to come and step into history and step onto the scene. Well, didn't the rise of Nazism also have a lot to do with the world stage at the time?

Yes, it did. The League of Nations and the fact that everybody was so, at least in Europe, kind of reeling.

Hitler was adept at scratching their teammates. Germany was the one that got stuck

Yeah, so the circumstances of the time really contributed to the rise of Hitler because as crazy as his narrative was, it had a ring of truth to it, despite the fact it was still false.

So with the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was strapped with a huge bill for reparations for starting the war.

And then almost concurrent with the signing of the

Treaty of Versailles, you just have a few years later, the crash of the American stock market, which led the world into the

Great Depression. And I kid you not, before the stock market crashed, you could get one dollar with four

Deutsche Marks. Okay. After the stock market crash, things got so out of control, it would be one billion

Deutsche Marks to the dollar. Okay, where people's entire savings accounts were wiped out.

And unless you had billions of Deutsche Marks in your account, you couldn't even buy food.

And so into that financial turmoil. So on top of this, they're paying reparations.

Hitler's narrative was that it was the Jews who caused the crash in the stock market, because the

Jews were the ones who were suffering because of reparations, because all the economy is run by the Jews, according to Hitler.

And so they crashed the stock market in order to basically make it so that they would devalue the Deutsche Mark, which would make it then easy for them to pay their bills for the reparations.

And that was all part of the narrative. And so you'll note that that type of economic upheaval is not common.

It happens from time to time in human history. But that really punctuated economic upheaval at the time legitimately led to Hitler being given credence for what he had to say.

And it made it sound like he wasn't cuckoo banana towns, which he was, but instead made him sound like he knew what was really going on, and he was going to put a stop to it.

And then wasn't Chamberlain the British Prime Minister? He was kind of a weak leader as well.

Yeah. And then was it Woodrow Wilson? Okay, so Woodrow Wilson was the

President of the United States at the end of World War I, who set up what would be the League of Nations, which was a complete mess in and of itself too.

So let's just say that there were a whole lot of factors that conspired that led to the rise of fascism.

But here's the thing. I can tell you what's causing the rise of it in our day right now. And that is that Marxism in our country has gone bananas.

It literally has. Where the political left is basically shoving transgenderism down our throats and punishing anybody who would speak out against it.

And you'll note that the big two backlashes this year...

Any of you still drinking Bud Light? None of us shot...

Here's the funny thing. I never drank Bud Light. Praise Jesus.

I was boycotting it before. There's a reason to boycott it, because it's not beer. And then, of course, when was the last time we shopped at Target?

Oh, Target. Well, maybe that's the reason why we don't shop there, because it's expensive. Walmart for us.

But the point is that we haven't been there. But you'll note that... I mean, how many days away are we from June?

We all know what's going to happen, right? You're going to have churches and everything just goes rainbow for a whole month, right?

And I've said this in the past. I'm still going to stand by it. I'm not a prophet or a son of the prophet. I can just connect the dots.

And the dots look like this. It was a novelty, not more than a decade ago, when certain churches during the month of June began flying the pride flag.

We are now to a point where if your church doesn't fly a pride flag in June, you're going to stand out and be targeted.

That's where we're going. And so here's the thing. With the extreme left the way it is, and the other bit of all of this, hasn't the media just completely shoved the issue of race down our throats since the

George Floyd thing? Yeah, the 2014 race riots.

That's right. In Missouri, right? Yep. So you'll note,

I did a video a couple years ago during the lockdown for a group of people where I took on, what was her name?

That lady I took on, who writes about white fragility. Oh, Robyn D 'Angelo.

Robyn D 'Angelo. I did a thing about Robyn D 'Angelo where she did a video for the Methodist church.

And in that video for the Methodist church, basically argued that everybody who's white and everybody who's a male, they're automatically racist.

And it's like, what? And so I argued against it based on the eighth commandment, you should not bear false witness against your neighbor.

I'm not guilty of racism. That's ridiculous. But you'll note that for years now, we've been told we're racist because we're white.

We're racist because reasons, right? And none of it makes any sense.

And so with all of this going on, wokeism embroiled with it, the transgenderism issue and all this kind of stuff into the midst of all of this, which you're going to know a lot of this is driven by Marxism.

Now Marxism's mortal enemy has re -emerged onto the scene and we're going to watch Rodan and Godzilla go after it.

Okay. It's just going to be a mess, but fascism is on the rise again.

And I don't mean some new form of it. I mean the old form of it. The guys

I am critiquing legitimately hate Jews. They are openly calling for Black people to be resegregated, re -enslaved, and those that won't being sent back to Africa.

They literally argue, I kid you not, they argue that Black people, because of thousands of years of demon worship, that their

DNA has been changed and at the DNA level that's why they have higher instances of crime.

That's just a polite way of saying we're white supremacists and we're white supremacists because Blacks are inferior to us.

They engage in eugenics and all this other stuff and it's their arguments and they're doing this within the context of the church.

This is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. But the thing is this, what they're fighting against is evil, but what they're fighting it with is evil.

And it's like if I had to choose between Marxism and fascism, my answer is neither. Okay. Christianity isn't on that coin.

Christianity is something completely different, but these guys would beg to differ. So how do we get off on this topic?

I think it's my fault. Okay. So all that being said, we got to this point where it said good statutes and commandments.

Thou shalt not murder is a good commandment because it is a commandment that comes from God.

And here's the thing, the Jews didn't invent the Ten Commandments in slavery. They were given them by God after they were freed from slavery.

Yeah. Well, you can't tell it. I'm going to be censored for that one now.

I get canceled like every other week. So it's just like a standard part of my day.

Their newest attack is they're saying that Josh is gay. So yeah. I kid you not.

That's their newest attack. They're saying Josh is a closeted homosexual. I apparently forgive.

What do I do? No, no. You Barbara, you require all the members of Kongsvinger to confess all their private sins to you so you can blackmail them.

That's right. That's right. So all you new members of Kongsvinger, we need to schedule your meeting with Barb so that we can blackmail you.

Okay. You went through it already? Good for you, Steve. You got a questionnaire?

No, they can't defeat my argument, so they have to attack me. It's the craziest stuff.

But anyway, good statutes, good commands. God's Ten Commandments are not slave commands.

These are the actual moral standards of God, and it has nothing to do with weakness.

A good way to think of the commandments is that they are not a fence that fences us in.

They are a guardrail that keeps us from falling off a cliff. That's the right way of thinking about God's good statutes and commands.

And you made them known to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes.

A law by Moses your servant, you gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst.

Bread from heaven. Sounds like the Lord's Supper. Water from a rock. Sounds like baptism to me.

You'll note the types and shadows right there. And you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them, but they, our fathers, acted,

I love this word, presumptuously. Every single heretic

I have ever covered is guilty of this. Acting presumptuously.

Presuming things about God that are not true, that are not in scripture, and anyway.

So they stiffened their neck. They did not obey your commandments. They refused to obey, and they were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.

But you are a God ready to forgive. Love this. So note, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, but you forgive.

This is how this works. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.

You did not forsake them. Did they deserve to be forsaken? Yes. Did God forsake them?

No. Even when they had made for themselves a golden calf and said, this is your God who brought you up out of Egypt and had committed great blasphemies, you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness.

Now I'm going to point something out here. This prayer is chock full of scripture.

This prayer is the direct fruit of the revival of the hearing of God's word that is taking place in the time of Nehemia and Ezra, and you can see then in this prayer, they've not only heard the word, they've believed the word, and they're able to pray the word back to God.

This is not a prayer written by somebody who's biblically illiterate. Lord, I just want to thank you just for the,

Lord, I just want to thank you for flowers in the spring, Lord, because they're really pretty and they smell good.

Okay. You know, this is something way beyond that. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from them by day nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go.

You gave your good spirit to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their mouth, gave them water for their thirst.

Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness and they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell.

All right, we're going to have to end here with swelling feet or non -swelling feet because I got to get over to the manual.

So, we will pick this up from this point next week, Lord willing. So, peace. We'll see you guys, if Lord permits, next time.