103. How to Have a Lasting Legacy (Interview with Douglas Wilson)
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In this conversation, Kendall Lankford talks with pastor Douglas Wilson about living a post-millennial legacy. They discuss the practical implications of post-millennialism and how it affects daily life. They also explore the importance of obedience, planting seeds for future generations, and building culture in the home. Douglas Wilson shares his journey to post-millennialism and the impact it has had on his perspective. The conversation highlights the significance of eating together, Sabbath meals, and reading together as a family. They conclude by discussing Douglas Wilson's latest book, 'American Milk and Honey.'
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- 00:04
- Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 103,
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- How to Have a Postmillennial Legacy, an interview with Doug Wilson. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.
- 00:31
- This is a special episode where we get to talk for a second time with Pastor Douglas Wilson.
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- Last time we were with Pastor Wilson was in August of last year, even before we'd officially launched our
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- YouTube channel. So he was our first video inaugurating that voyage, and now we're back.
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- And since then, I think you've set fire to Disney. You've built a flamethrower. You've done a lot of stuff.
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- So help catch us up with what's going on out in Moscow. Oh, the flame. I can't.
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- It's hard to explain to you how much fun the flamethrower was. The video was thrilling.
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- I wanted to buy one. I was, like, appealing to Session, please, can we get one? One thing about it, maybe you saw the size of the tank on my back, and it had a mix of diesel fuel and all the works.
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- But if you put that amount of fuel in a car, it would drive you, depending on the mileage, you could get maybe to Montana from here.
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- But that tank would empty out in four minutes.
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- Oh, my goodness. It was an awful lot of energy coming out of that thing, and it was just a blast.
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- Yeah. If you're listening and you don't know what we're talking about, no quarter November 2023, that was the intro video.
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- It's excellent. Totally recommend that. What else has been going on out in Moscow these days?
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- We're just doing what we do, Lord's Day to Lord's Day, preaching the
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- Word, meeting with people, planning, teaching classes. It's basically the same thing we've been doing for years.
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- Amen. Amen. Well, that's sort of what I want to talk about today. We've been in this series called A Practical Postmillennialism, and I want to make this doctrine practical.
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- One of the things I was really excited to talk to you about is how do you have a postmillennial legacy?
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- Talking about practical, how do you live your life today so that it will echo until generations to come?
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- That you'll have something to show for it. When you stand before the king, he'll say, well done, my good and faithful servant.
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- That's what I wanted to ask you about, because there's so much you've done. You've written like 50 books. You've written more books probably than I've read.
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- You've started a classical Christian school movement. You've inflamed
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- Moscow and put your mark on Moscow, you and Christchurch. You've got a family that loves
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- Jesus. Your life has just been a wonderful show of faithful work.
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- I wanted to talk to you about legacy, because it's more than just theology that jungles around in our head.
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- Before we get there, just so we can level set everything, what is postmillennialism, and what does it mean?
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- Okay. Just a quick synopsis. The three main schools of thought, postmillennial, amillennial, and premillennial, all derive their names from where they place the second coming of Christ with regard to the millennium.
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- In Revelation 20, it's the only place in the Bible the millennium is mentioned by name.
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- I like to joke that the millennium is a thousand years apiece that Christians like to fight about. The nature of the fight has to do with where we think the second coming is placed with regard to that millennium.
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- The amillennialist, the ah is a term of negation, meaning that there's no literal earthly millennium at all, and that we reign with Christ in the heavenly places in a spiritual sense, and then at some point in the future,
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- Christ will return, but without reference to an earthly millennium. So, it's amillennial.
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- The premillennialist believes that Christ is going to return and usher in the millennium.
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- He's going to return physically to earth, and then he is going to reign physically on earth for that millennium, after which is the resurrection of the dead, the eternal state.
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- Most premillennialists are dispensational also, but they all share that in common.
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- The Lord comes, and then the millennium comes. The Lord ushers in the millennium, so that's premillennial.
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- Postmillennial is the belief that Christ returns at the conclusion of the millennium, and that the millennium is brought in not by the second coming of Christ, but by gospel preaching, church planting, discipling the nations, and this will at some point usher in a golden age where all
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- Christ's enemies will be subdued, and with one exception, that one exception being death, and then
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- Christ will return, conquer the last enemy, death, and then we enter into the eternal state.
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- That would be the postmillennial view. If you read a ton of books, some of the older postmillennial guys thought of the millennium as the last 1 ,000 years of the church age.
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- Contemporary postmillennialists tend to identify the millennium with the church age generally, but that's not a huge difference.
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- How did you come to it? I grew up as a kid in an evangelical home in North America, so I was generically premill, because that's what everybody is, right?
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- My folks weren't dispensational or anything like that, and they didn't really teach us anything. I just caught it from the surrounding atmosphere, and over time, as I knew the general sketch of things, the premillennial schematic, but I just couldn't see it arising out of the text.
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- I'd read my Bible, and I could explain the system, but I couldn't get it to just unfold naturally from the text.
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- By this point, I was a pastor, and I abandoned any—I was nothing.
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- I remember joking to someone, look, Jesus is coming again. Don't push me. Don't ask me anything more than that.
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- So I was a nonmillennialist, and I would guess for maybe two or three years. I was just reading the
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- Bible and reading other books and that sort of thing, and I was reading a book by David Chilton, Paradise Restored.
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- This was in the mid-'80s, and I wasn't even a Calvinist by this point.
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- I became a Calvinist in 1988. So in the mid-'80s, I was reading Paradise Restored, and I had loved
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- Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, a book on economics, but I didn't really care for Paradise Restored because his hermeneutic was a little bit gaudy for me, too many eggs in the pudding, a little too much.
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- But I was reading the book anyway, and I was reading along, and in the book, he quoted a verse out of 1
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- Corinthians 15, and that verse was, For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
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- And when I read that verse in the book, something snapped in my head. I was a nonmillennialist.
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- Something snapped in my head. Oh, he must reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet.
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- In premillennialism, when Christ returns, the first enemy to be destroyed is death.
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- Right? He just returns and raises the dead. And here, he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet, the last enemy to be destroyed is death.
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- And I thought, oh, so Christ is reigning now at the right hand of the Father. All his enemies are going to be subdued gradually over time.
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- The leaven works through the loaf. The mustard seed grows slowly. It's an incremental sort of thing.
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- So when that thing snapped in my head, it was like one of those
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- Transformer thingies or Iron Man putting his suit on. Everything, this postmillennial worldview just assembled in my head, and it was a lot of fun.
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- Now, it was one of the few paradigm shifts that I've gone through that was fun.
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- That is awesome. I totally get that visual, because that's sort of the way it happened for me.
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- I was reading J. Stuart Russell and Ken Gentry and didn't know what was happening to me.
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- But it's a lot of fun going through that process. You said earlier something that stuck out to me.
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- You said that Jesus himself in the premillennial view will come and do these things. But on the postmillennial view, it's preaching.
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- It's planting churches. It's all of that. So what does that actually have to do with the way that you live your life?
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- How does that intersect with the things that you're doing now? Why does it matter what we believe about the end times,
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- I guess, is maybe the question I'm asking. Okay, so all Orthodox Christians believe that God is the one who does this.
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- The issue is whether Jesus does it personally, having come back to earth, or whether it is the
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- Spirit of Christ working in his bride that accomplishes. But it's the
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- Lord who does these things. This is the practical difference that it makes.
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- In 1 Corinthians 15, 58, at the conclusion of that great chapter on the resurrection, Paul says, your labor in the
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- Lord is not in vain. So basically, don't be disheartened.
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- Your labor in the Lord is not in vain. The things that you are doing in service to Christ, in obedience to him, these things are not worthless.
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- Right? So too many Christians sort of are punching the clock. They're saying, you know, this world's not my home.
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- I'm just here in this hotel, and then I'm going to go to my permanent home.
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- Well, oftentimes, if you're on the road and you're staying in a hotel, you put the suitcase over on the bench they have for it, and you want it to be sort of organized, but you know you're going to be out of there in two days.
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- And that has an effect on how you set things up. That has an effect on how you live.
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- Well, if you believe that we are just sort of transiting through, and that's all this is, then that's going to affect what you invest in, how you think about institutions, how you think about children, grandchildren, great -grandchildren, and so on.
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- But especially if you believe that the world is going to end within the decade.
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- Right? So in dispensational pre -mill circles, they'll say, well, we're in the last generation, or this is, these are the last days.
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- And one of the most unsettling things that a post -millennialist can say to someone who's steeped in the pre -mill way of thinking is something like, which
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- I've often said, is I believe that we're still in the early church period. And I believe there are thousands of years ahead of us, and there's a lot of time for the concrete that we're pouring to set.
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- There's a lot of time to build on what we're doing. And let me give you just, I think, the most weighty example of this, and then move down to the trivial.
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- If you think, I've got, by the Lord's kindness, I've got three kids, I've got 18 grandchildren, and I've got two great -grandchildren just arrived.
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- And if things keep up this way, I am going to be in 200 years the ancestor of maybe 300 ,000 people.
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- Wow. Okay? And then if you push it out another couple hundred years, a couple million people.
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- Okay? Everyone with kids, on average, if their kids are marrying and having kids, they are the ancestor of thousands of people.
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- Okay? Now, and this goes to a question I think you mentioned earlier, what practical difference does this make?
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- Okay, well, those descendants of mine were privileged to meet two of the great -grandchildren, but I don't know that we're going to meet all of the great -grandchildren, right?
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- In fact, I'm pretty confident we won't meet all the great -grandchildren, but we've met the first wave of them.
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- Our only connection, so go out to two greats or three greats, great -great -great -grandchildren.
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- Our only connection to them is through the people I know now.
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- My only connection to the future is today. Okay?
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- Obedience is always today. Obedience is never mañana. Obedience is never down the road.
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- I'm going to get my act together. What God wants me to do, it's sort of, this is the message of the
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- Bible. Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts to the way you did in the wilderness. Obedience is today.
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- And obedience today is the clutch. This is the way to let out the clutch that drives tomorrow.
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- All right? So I can love my great -great -grandchildren by loving my children.
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- All right? By looking, how can I be an obedient father?
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- How can I be an obedient husband? How can I be someone who lives in the light of the gospel today?
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- And so planting, and this applies to child rearing, it applies to being a grandparent, it applies to planting institutions.
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- I've become firmly convinced that planting little tiny seeds is a radical act.
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- Right? So you mentioned, you know, starting different institutions, which we have a college and a publishing house and a
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- K -12 school. But all of them, all of them, when we started them, were little rinky -dink affairs.
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- They're impressive now. And someone says, oh, you started that, and you started that, and you started that, you started that.
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- It's like someone saying, you planted that redwood tree? Well, yeah, but it wasn't that size when
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- I, it was like this tall, this tall when I planted it. And it was entirely within my scope to plant a redwood seedling.
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- I can handle that. That's really good. All right? All right. And, but the trust comes with, okay, we can,
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- Paul says, planting and watering belongs to Paul and Apollos, but God gives the increase.
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- Why does growth happen at all? Well, growth happens at all because God is the
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- Lord of life. He's the one who makes that happen. I don't know. You throw yeast in the dough.
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- I don't know what's going on. Why, why does it, why does the dough rise that way?
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- Why does the seed grow into the mustard tree plant? Why does, well, that's
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- God's business. That's not our business. Our business is to simply be obedient now. He tells us to plant the seed now, go do it now.
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- And this goes back to something I realized when I first became post -millennial in the aftermath of, um, it was,
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- I mentioned it was the one thing that was fun. We were, um, Nancy and I had bought our first fixer -upper home, and that's where we were living when all this happened.
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- And I was, uh, out in the, I was out along the back alley planting a hedge and, um, a
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- Siberian pea, if you care about it, it was a Siberian pea hedge.
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- And I was planting these little, those little seedlings. And I realized that I could not do this anymore without envisioning this hedge full grown.
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- It was, um, there, and there are a lot of evangelical Christians who, when they do anything, they start a dental practice or they plant a hedge or they buy a home and they say, okay, we've just signed the papers.
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- We bought our home, but it's all gonna burn, man. Right. Moreover, it's all gonna burn inside of two years.
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- That really affects, um, your engagement with the surrounding culture.
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- In the famous words of one Bible teacher, dispensational Bible preacher, you don't polish the brass on a sinking ship.
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- If, if this whole thing is going down, you don't invest anything into that.
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- That's what you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Right. And, um, and then this, this, the mentality is that God somehow got himself embroiled, you know, this world is
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- God's Vietnam. And, uh, he got himself embroiled in a land war in Asia.
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- And that was a, that was a bad move and the whole thing's going down. And so the rapture is going to happen and it's going to helicopter us all out of Saigon.
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- Um, and then, and then it's all over. Yeah. Well, that is going to affect how
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- I, how I behave in Saigon today. Yeah. Right.
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- But if, but if I believe that Saigon or Moscow or whatever the town
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- I'm in, if I believe that 500 years out, this town is going to be as full of the knowledge of the
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- Lord as the waters cover the sea. And I want my efforts today to be a contributing factor toward that.
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- It may be just a little, uh, if the earth is going to be full of the knowledge, well, that's a lot of water. And my contribution might be just a teaspoon full, but it's not nothing.
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- I think you really hit on two major defeater beliefs that, that I think most people struggle with.
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- Number one, do we even expect that Christ will have victory? Um, I was reading in Isaiah two this morning, um, how they will no longer learn war under, under the reign of Christ.
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- And I was thinking to myself, you know, in a dispensational view, they do learn war again. They, they learn a lot of war at the very end and they, they rebel even against Jesus.
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- So, um, expecting victory and, and knowing what that means and what, and where that's going to lead world history,
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- I think is massive. Another thing you said that I thought was really good, um, was not planting fully grown oak trees, but, but being responsible for planting acorns, basically.
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- Um, that is so good because how often do we look at someone else and we say, well, they have, they have eight kids.
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- I could never do that. Or they have, they've done this. I could never do that. And then we, we psych ourselves out.
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- Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. We, um, the Lord said very poignantly sufficient under the day is the evil thereof.
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- Don't worry about tomorrow. Each day has enough trouble and you're going to have your hands full being obedient with the things that God has assigned to you today and content yourself with that.
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- Don't, don't be trying to eat enough food for the next six months. Yeah, the stomach, the stomach doesn't work that way.
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- So talking about those little things, uh, let's just start in the home. That's where most people, um, are gonna, are gonna see this happen.
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- I think that's where the battle is going to be waged the most, uh, commonly. Uh, what are some little things that we can do now today that matter that over generations and over centuries are going to have a massive impact in Jesus's kingdom?
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- They're going to be the teaspoons that you were talking about. Uh, yeah, this is, um,
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- I'm going to speak culturally for a minute, but it ties in the context of the home and I'm bringing it into the home when, before I was post mill,
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- I was puzzled by something that I, um, so I first got into it because I was reading the reconstructionist guys because they were making a serious effort to apply the
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- Bible to everything, economics, banking, foreign policy, everything.
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- And I didn't always agree with what they were doing, but at least they were making a serious attempt to, to see the
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- Bible relate to the world around us. And out of all the
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- Christians that I was reading on cultural affairs, uh, they were the most trenchant, the most critical, the most insightful about how dumb everything was that we were doing, just how, and, and that was, and I really appreciated what they were teaching me about, um, you know, fractional reserve banking or, you know, they, okay, this is really stupid.
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- This is not good. This is bad. This is bad. This is bad. And by the way, they were all post -millennialist.
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- The world is getting better and better. And I go, how can you put those two?
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- Why is the most insightful, trenchant criticism coming from people who are post -mill, right?
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- Well, they had, they were looking at these things and they had solutions in mind. The Bible reveals what we're supposed to do.
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- For most, for most evangelical premillennialists, they're, they are biblical enough and Christian enough to see how stupid our governance is.
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- Most evangelical Christians who believe the Bible don't have to be persuaded that we really are living in clown world.
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- This really is clown world, but, and this is where it gets practical in the home.
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- The more insightful and conservative a premillennialist is, the more likely the home is to be dominated by fear.
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- Fear, anxiety, worry, what kind of world are my grandchildren going to grow up in?
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- Okay. Do we really, do we really want to have a pastel of grandkids so the Antichrist can kill them all?
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- And then they start seeking out what you might call, you know, porn web, fear porn, websites that just sort of, and then there's this boo, boo, boo.
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- And one of the things that parents, I think, are required to provide for their children is instruction on how the world works.
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- This is what the Bible teaches. This is the way the world is. And there's a discrepancy between what the
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- Bible teaches and the way the world is going. And you have to teach that discrepancy without instilling fear.
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- Okay. And unfortunately, the one of the ways a lot of Christian parents avoid fear -mongering with their kids is by pretending everything's okay, just sending their kids to the public school and trying to fit right in.
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- Well, then that's the frog being boiled in the pot. They're in the process of going native.
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- If they're staying faithful to biblical ethics and biblical concern, it's almost impossible to do that with a pessimistic eschatology without giving way to fear or even a practical level.
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- No, we're not going to have more kids. My parents knew some missionaries in the midst of the
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- Second World War who didn't have kids because they were convinced it was the end of the world.
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- Okay. So what happened is they made themselves artificially barren, and I think that's because the theology was barren.
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- That's heartbreaking. So that's really insightful in the sense that if you have that worldview, you're going to either go to fear or you're going to go to assimilation.
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- It's either one or the other. How is it different with post -millennialism, especially as a dad?
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- Yeah. So kids thrive on confidence.
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- If dad's a rock, and of course, mom too, but dad's confidence and faith in God is going to help secure her because she's going to be more concerned with how the kids—women are much more earthy and practical on, yes, but what are we going to do?
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- We need more than your fat theology books. We need to do something with our kids.
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- So his faith can secure her, and mom and dad, both united in faith, they're living in Middle Earth where Saron's doing his thing, but they've got this little
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- Rivendell that they're in, and the kids thrive on that kind of confidence.
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- The age is full of dragons, from which we should conclude that our task is to raise dragon fighters.
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- Yeah, that's great. You ever read George MacDonald?
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- C .S. Lewis talks about him. Yes, read a bit of him. Yeah, I was reading his little book, and he was talking about how all little girls should be princesses, and it really captured my heart.
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- I was starting to implement it with my daughter, and now I'll tell my daughter, you're beautiful, and she'll say,
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- I know. She's got this wonderful confidence. It's not pride. It's just she's secure in who her daddy says she is, and it's so good because I think you're absolutely right that why would we hamstring our children with a bunch of fear and a bunch of anxiety?
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- I've talked to too many folks who said, why would I have children in this time period or this day, and that's the symptom that you're talking about.
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- That's right, and even if the fear doesn't take the form of flop sweats, it still affects your planning.
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- I think we ought to be planning for 500 years out, not five years out.
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- Yeah, so if you're going to instill confidence in your children, that's one thing, but you can instill all kinds of confidence.
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- What other things would you encourage fathers, mothers to bring into the home?
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- If it's their Rivendell, if it's their little Garden of Eden where they're cultivating all of these things, what are some practical things that you would encourage mom and dad to do?
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- Let's not take for granted that they know these things. What would you tell them? I would say this is going to be pretty basic.
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- I would eat together. If 70 % of your meals are taken leaning over the sink, there's a problem where you just cook the hot dog and you're on your way out, or you nuked the
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- Hot Pockets and you're on your way. I would say that the liturgy of the home should revolve around dinner.
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- Our family sits down to dinner and we debrief from the day.
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- We have a hot meal. Companionship, I think, is essential.
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- The word companion comes from the Latin com, which means with, and panes means bread.
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- Someone who shares bread with you is your companion. So you want to make sure that your children, your wife and your children, and then your grandchildren are your companions.
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- When our kids were growing up, there were obviously exceptions if we're on the road or something would occasionally happen.
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- But 95 % of the time, six o 'clock, we're sitting down at the meal together.
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- Then as our kids grew and left the home and got married, we instituted a
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- Sabbath meal every Saturday night. We observed the
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- Lord's Day from six o 'clock Saturday night to six o 'clock Sunday night. We kick it off with the
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- Sabbath dinner. We ran a Sabbath dinner in our home.
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- We hosted for 20 plus years. Nancy and I moved in with my dad during his last four years to take care of him.
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- While we were staying with him, we sold our house and then built the house where we are now. The Sabbath dinner was taken over by my youngest daughter, mostly.
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- The other two kids host it sometimes, but it's now hosted at one of the kids' house.
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- Then we are now in our house and we host it again occasionally. But this is something that we do on a weekly basis.
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- What you're doing is strengthening the tie that binds. At Sabbath dinner,
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- I ask catechism questions to the younger kids.
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- I welcome any guests that we have. Welcome to our table. You're good to have you here. We pray.
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- We toast. This is the day the Lord has made. Everybody responds. We will rejoice and be glad in it.
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- Then we sing and then we eat together. That is not just a culture -building thing.
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- The ties that bind are cinched tight in that.
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- You're creating culture. Correct. I'm fond of saying you can't fight a culture war.
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- You can't have a naval warfare without ships. You can't fight tank warfare without tanks.
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- You can't fight culture war without culture. What many conservatives have failed to do is they go out there to fight the culture war, and all they have is a party platform.
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- All they have are talking points. But you can't fight a culture war with talking points.
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- You can't fight a culture war with ideas. You have to have embodied ideas.
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- You have to have incarnational ideas. So the post -millennialism has to be hot and on a plate in front of you.
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- That's so good. One of the things that you've impacted me on, and you didn't know this, but this idea of Sabbath meal.
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- I believe you know Grant Van Brimmer, who's in Maine. I went to his house and had a
- 34:06
- Sabbath meal, and I thought it was the best thing ever. I was like, where did you learn how to do this? He told me that you had done this, and he had reached out and got the liturgy from you.
- 34:15
- I was wondering if we could post that in the show notes of this episode, just a simple family worship liturgy, the
- 34:22
- Sabbath meal that you guys do. Just encourage other folks to give this a shot, to try to build culture in the home.
- 34:29
- You know what I mean? Yeah. Send me an email, and I'll reply with either a template or a thing, just so long that everybody knows that it is adjusted over the years, depending on the number of grandkids, depending on the thing.
- 34:48
- But it'll give you a rough idea. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that idea. We've done that in our home ever since, past year and a half we've done these.
- 34:57
- Our church has even started to do this as well, where we have feasts seven times a year, and we go through basically the same format, building culture in the church as well as the home.
- 35:07
- It's been phenomenal. It's been, I think, incredible, actually. Yeah. It is potent.
- 35:14
- Then at the Sabbath meals, make sure that you're laughing, telling stories, having a good time.
- 35:22
- It needs to be a get -to, not a got -to. People need to look forward to it.
- 35:31
- One of the advantages of doing it Saturday night is that when we were hosting,
- 35:38
- Nancy could work on it during Saturday. Then when the Lord's Day starts at six, the food's hot, we're all ready to sit down, and she gets to participate in the rest as well.
- 35:52
- Everybody pitches in on cleanup, and then leftovers on Sunday. One of the disadvantages of the big
- 36:02
- Sunday dinner, some families do a Sunday dinner after church, which is what I grew up with.
- 36:07
- That was the pattern that was more common in North America then.
- 36:14
- What that does is it's a workday for mom. Yeah, that's a good point.
- 36:22
- This is a strange question, maybe, but what do you think about the quality of the food?
- 36:27
- I think that if the food is really good, and people want to be there, and there's a vibrant atmosphere, there's wine at the table, that's culture building.
- 36:38
- That's not to pick on church potlucks. Potlucks are great, and they serve a purpose, but having good food, good wine, good music in that way, how do you feel like that even helps facilitate and even maybe you could say is post -millennial of us?
- 36:58
- That's absolutely correct. The best wine should be at the Sabbath dinner. It should be the best meal of the week in presentation and in people's favorite food.
- 37:11
- That doesn't mean you can't have comfort food, but it should be the food that everybody loves.
- 37:21
- Yes, very much so. One time, I forget what the occasion was, but I think it was for a
- 37:26
- Sabbath dinner. I was walking through our laundry room in our house where we lived then, and Nancy was in there ironing cloth napkins.
- 37:39
- I said, what are you doing? Why cloth napkins and then ironing cloth napkins as opposed to paper napkins?
- 37:51
- So, I asked her, not adversarially, but why are you ironing cloth napkins?
- 37:58
- She said, it's Reformational. That's the point you're making.
- 38:04
- How are we going to overthrow the principalities and powers? Well, we're going to sit down together and laugh and have a good time in the presence of God.
- 38:17
- There's so much more that I could ask you. I know that we're running up on our time together. Is there anything else, just practically speaking, that you would encourage families?
- 38:26
- I know sometimes it's budget issues, right? To have a nice meal is straining on the family, so you have to actually pre -plan and not be reactionary.
- 38:36
- You have to say, no, this money is for our meals. Things like that. What are some other things that you would share to just help us as Christians build robustly
- 38:45
- Christian culture? Yeah, the best food and all of that, it should be evaluated in accordance with where God has you.
- 38:58
- It doesn't have to be the best food in comparison to what the Duke and his lady up in the castle on the hill are doing.
- 39:05
- It simply has to be your best. So, when people are of straightened means and they go to church, they should go in their best clothes.
- 39:15
- It's going to be their best clothes. They're going to appear before the Lord. They don't have to dress up to impress the rich guy, but they're appearing before the
- 39:28
- Lord, and they should put forward their best. So, I believe this is not for people who are well -heeled, who can afford to be pious.
- 39:42
- This is for every man. Every person should be able to do this sort of thing in the presence of God.
- 39:53
- I should mention another thing, eat together, pray together, sing together,
- 39:58
- Sabbath meals together. I would also want to mention reading together. So, our kids grew up being read to, and we would oftentimes read devotional stuff between the meal and dessert, or just reading books,
- 40:18
- Lord of the Rings, reading Narnia stories. I would read to the kids and read, and there was one time, it was an exciting part of Lord of the
- 40:27
- Rings, and the kids wouldn't let me stop. I read for like three hours.
- 40:35
- So, basically, read together, and it should be, again, a get -to, not a got -to.
- 40:41
- Yeah, that's so good. That's so good because we always function under the tyranny of the urgent, especially, you know, men with our jobs and everything else.
- 40:50
- But I love the example that you're painting, that every day, I was home at six, we ate, we spent time together, we built culture, and that's what's going to last.
- 40:59
- That's what your post -millennialism has taught you. That's the legacy that you're going to leave, and I love that so much, and I hope that that vision has been clearly caught by anyone who's watching this today.
- 41:11
- Brother, what else are you working on? I know you just came out with a new book. It's on,
- 41:17
- I can't remember the title of it. I just saw it, though. American Milk and Honey? Yeah. Yeah.
- 41:23
- That's on the promises of Deuteronomy and anti -Semitism and the place of the Jews in our covenant theology.
- 41:31
- That's not a hot -button topic now, right? What's that? That's not really a hot -button topic. It's a hot -button topic.
- 41:37
- I didn't write it after a bunch of these things blew, but the fact that they blew when they did was, okay, that was almost like a higher power at work.
- 41:48
- I noticed the timing of the book and the Christ is King controversy, and I was like, how does he do it? Right.
- 41:55
- Well, it wasn't me that did it. Things like that happen because Christ is
- 42:01
- King. Amen. Amen. Brother, thank you so much for being on today. I really appreciate you.
- 42:07
- I'm thankful for your ministry, and by your faithfulness there, the little saplings are getting planted here in Massachusetts, so we're thankful for you, brother.
- 42:16
- Thank you. God bless. God bless you. Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast.
- 42:22
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- 42:29
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- 42:41
- Thank you so much for watching. Check out all of the material that Doug Wilson's doing at Canon Press. There's a ton of resources on there.
- 42:48
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- 42:54
- And again, thank you for supporting this show. We will see you again next time on the podcast. God bless you.