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Today, we're going to be talking about socialism. Ever hear anyone tell you that Jesus was a socialist? And how the church, as described in Acts chapter 4, is a picture of socialism? Yeah, they have no idea what they're talking about.
When we understand the text.
Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text promotes sound doctrine while exposing the faulty. Here's your host, Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. It is Friday, and typically on Friday, I'm taking a question from a listener or a viewer of our videos and responding. And usually the question has to do with a video that's already been made.
Asking for clarification, that sort of a thing. This one has to do with a video that has not been made yet. This comes from Sam in Illinois. He says, dear, what could you do a video about how Jesus wasn't a socialist?
I've been hearing this fantasy argument since college, and that was some time ago. Usually the person making the argument will reference Acts 4, though they probably don't even know it's from Acts 4, about how everyone in the church had everything in common and they gave up their possessions and property and there was not a needy person among them.
I'm seeing that argument a lot more often with the recent popularity of Bernie Sanders. If there's anything you can do, I'm sure it would be a big help to those who face this kind of question. Thanks for all that you do, Sam, appreciate your email.
And in fact, there is a script that's kind of floating right now, but we've not yet finished it. I was visiting with one of my elders earlier this week about finishing that script on Jesus was not a socialist.
I get about halfway through it and then there's some different directions that I could go with it. I've just not figured out how I want to conclude that script yet. So there is a video in the works of what video in the works about how Jesus was not a socialist.
Was he? Was he a socialist? No. According to 1 Timothy 6, 15 and Revelation 19, 16, Jesus is the king of kings and Lord of lords. So if Jesus was going to promote any type of government, it would probably be a monarchy.
All right. But furthermore, when we look at the church as it is presented to us in Acts chapter four, what we do not see is a picture of socialism. Let's look at it. Acts four. I'm going to start in verse 32.
Now, the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power, the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all.
There was not a needy person among them for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles feet. And it was distributed to each as any had need.
Thus, Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles feet.
There's that passage. That's the one versus 32 through 37 of Acts chapter four that gets used to describe the church as being a socialist church. That's not socialism. Socialism is forced. These people were giving freely.
The love of Christ was poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit, and they were doing what Paul says in second Corinthians nine, seven. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion.
For God loves a cheerful giver. But socialism is not cheerful. It's oppressive. The government takes the middleman gets and the citizens receive not so much. And what they do get is not what they expected.
Costs more than they were promised and comes at a way lower quality than they would like or probably need. There's no free enterprise because the government owns and controls the businesses and redistributes the profits among the workers and the community according to what they think is fair.
That's socialism. And for those out there going, no, no, no, no, no, but democratic socialism, that's what we want. There's a big difference. No, there's not. It's exactly the same. Just go to the website for the Democratic Socialists of America and search for an article entitled.
Doesn't socialism mean that the government will own and run everything? That's the name of the article. The article starts out by saying Democratic Socialists do not want to create an all powerful government bureaucracy.
Well, I'm glad we got that cleared up. But in the very next paragraph, they state, we believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them, the corporations and the businesses.
Well, how do you do that exactly? By creating an all powerful government bureaucracy, which they said, that's not what they want to do. That's how silly this whole thing is. In fact, I would venture out to say that democratic socialism as a term is way scarier than just regular old socialism, because it's exactly what Vladimir Lenin claimed was necessary for communism.
He said democracy is indispensable to socialism. In other words, he needed democracy to usher in socialism, which, of course, became the gateway to communism. As Lenin also said, the goal of socialism is communism.
He presented himself as a democratic socialist. The whole democratic socialist argument is silly anyway, because the United States of America is not a democracy. We're a what class. We're a constitutional republic.
The Constitution gives us the what and the how. And the Declaration of Independence gives us the why these documents are necessary to know and review. And our public schools are not teaching them. This is why something like 80 percent of millennials would vote for Bernie Sanders.
They neither know our own government documents, nor do they understand world history. Look, our founding fathers knew what they were doing. It's not like they had no knowledge of governments on planet Earth or they were trying to create something that just wasn't a monarchy, which is what we came from in Europe.
And they just happened to luck out with a republic. They understood that in order to establish freedom and uphold that freedom for generation after generation, the rights of the minority could not be left subject to the ever changing will and opinions of the majority.
And that's what a democracy is. It's mob rule. In a socialist government, the majority could rule to take away your home or your business or even your children. If more than half of the public can be persuaded to want something, they rule, which is what the word democracy means.
It means the rule of the people. This is exactly the kind of thing our forefathers wanted to protect future generations against. So we have a constitutional representative republic, a government that is limited by law from either ruling the people or being ruled by the people, the mob rule.
OK, so the example that I've heard to explain this goes back to the Old West. Say you had a guy who was guilty of robbing a bank and gunning a person down and a posse of thirty five riders on horseback give chase and they capture the gunman.
They vote thirty four to one to hang the gunman and he gets hanged. And now there's one less gunman in the Old West. That's what would happen if our country was a democracy. But in a representative republic grounded and established by a constitution, the thirty five riders chased down the gunman and they vote thirty four to one to hang him.
But the sheriff steps in and he says, no, according to the law, you can't hang this man. He deserves a fair trial if they refuse this man's rights. The sheriff and his men will be rounding up thirty four vigilantes who took the law into their own hands.
So the mob is quieted by the law and they return the gunman to town where he's put in jail awaiting a trial. A jury of his peers is assembled and they listen to the evidence and determine a verdict. Now, even here, the majority doesn't rule because it's not the majority of the jury that makes the decision.
The jury has to be unanimous or the gunman goes free. The rights of the gunman are not in the hands of the will of the majority. They are subjected to the law to further the point that the United States of America is not a democracy and even less a socialist democracy.
The word democracy does not appear in the Constitution. It doesn't appear in the Declaration of Independence, nor will you find the democracy in any of the constitutions of all 50 states. When I was in college, I had a scholarship to be on a debate team and my debate coach handed me a copy of the Federalist Papers and told me to read it.
And I did. I don't know that it made me a better college, a college debater. I don't know that I was a better debater after reading the Federalist Papers, but I sure appreciated our American heritage more than I did before.
My entire scholarship in debate was worth that one book, was worth being handed that book by my debate coach and being told to read it. You can read the Federalist Papers for yourself at the Federalist Papers dot org.
In essay number 10 of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote the following. Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Huh. As short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. So the short of it is this. We neither want democracy, nor do we want socialism. It's short lived because it becomes communism. It's violent in death because, well, just take the Old West example I gave you.
Ultimately, the will of the mob is forcibly played out and you will assimilate to the will of the mob or we will destroy you. Now, bringing this back to the original question, does this sound like the church in Acts 4?
No. Not in any way. And let me tell you this, folks. You have to learn this by studying history. You cannot learn this on Bernie Sanders website. Sanders will not tell you what socialism is, nor has Sanders even defined what democratic socialism is.
I'll even play you the tape. This is from the Democratic debate. Now you understand why they're called Democrats, right? This is from the Democratic presidential debate on October 15th on CNN. The voice you'll hear is Anderson Cooper asking Bernie Sanders a question about democratic socialism.
Senator Sanders, a Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?
Well, we're going to win because first we're going to explain what democratic socialism is and what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost 90 percent, own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.
That it is wrong today in a rigged economy that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top one percent. That when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right except the United States.
You see every other major country saying to moms that when you have a baby, we're not going to separate you from your newborn baby because we are going to have but we are going to have medical and family paid leave like every other country on earth.
Those are some of the principles that I believe in. And I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.
OK, audience applauds at the end. That was his full answer unedited. Now, I want to go back through that answer again and I'm going to break it down. So let's go back to the beginning of Senator Sanders response.
Well, we're going to win because first we're going to explain what democratic socialism is and what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost 90 percent, almost own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, that it is wrong today in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top one percent.
OK, let's stop there.
This is not democratic socialism. He's not giving you any kind of definition. What he's doing is the same thing Donald Trump does. He's just a lot less brazen about it. Bernie Sanders is telling you what you should be angry about.
That's how this works. The candidate tells you why you should be angry, what you should get free and why you should vote for me. And again, Trump is doing the same thing. And they're both from New York City.
The statement that he makes in there about how about a rigged economy. Yeah. Funny thing about that. The economy has been rigged by the Democrats. All right. Anyway, let's move on. I'm going to skip the whole here's what you deserve free part and get to part three of.
His answer. And I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.
I think Marco Rubio had a great rebuttal to this. If you want to be like Sweden, Denmark and Norway, then go live there. The Boston Globe already poked holes in this answer from Sanders. The article was entitled No, Bernie Sanders.
Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia. One of the things the article points out is that Scandinavia's current prosperity is actually the result of, quote, free market policies, low or moderate taxes and limited state involvement in the economy.
Unquote. Whoa. So these Scandinavian countries are not prosperous because of democratic socialism. They're prosperous because of capitalism. In 1993, Sweden declared their experiment with socialism as a colossal failure.
Denmark has come to a similar conclusion amid sharp concerns about welfare abuse and an eroding ethic under their socialist policies. The article concluded with this statement. Scandinavia's quality of life didn't spring from leftist policies.
It survived them. So, again, when we're looking at the success in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we're looking at countries that have been coming out of socialism for the past 20 years. Socialism has always been a wretched form of government.
There are so many different forms of it under many different names, but they all come back to the same thing, a disastrous mob rule that undermines our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, not upholds them.
The Declaration of Independence, second paragraph states, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I state that because I'm going to come back to it a few sentences later, still in that second paragraph, we read this prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.
And accordingly, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. In other words, our forefathers had the wisdom and called for the wisdom to understand that if history has taught us anything, mankind is going to suffer more often than he is going to live in the lap of luxury.
Sometimes evil people rise up and take advantage of others. What we should not do in the middle of a situation that will eventually pass is overreact and completely change our system of government, which has done us well for 240 years now.
There has been nothing like it in the history of the world. Folks, I tell you that those evil people exist now within our government, killing 3000 babies a day, defending some kind of right to kill over a million children per year for profit, passing laws that make it OK and make taxpayers pay for it, changing the law to celebrate and encourage homosexual intercourse, telling boys it's OK to be girls, legalizing recreational drugs.
The list goes on and on. These are some of the evils that we are enduring in our country right now. Rather than changing the system of government to fix the problem, let's remove those evil people who are in those positions destroying our constitutional republic vote for life, period.
If a candidate is not for defending the rights of the unborn, he's against the Declaration of Independence, which states that among these inalienable rights endowed by our creator, our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The first inalienable right listed in our Declaration of Independence is life. Folks, if a candidate is against life, don't vote for them. They are against the fundamentals of the establishment of our country, which is why Bernie Sanders values something like democratic socialism.
He doesn't even value life, let alone the basics of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Don't vote for a candidate that is for abortion. They are for death, period. You're voting for the death of children.
As for us who are the church, because I mean, ultimately, I've gone on a rant here about socialism. I got that. The question was about the church. I gave you the description of the church. You can find further descriptions of the church in places like Ephesians chapter four, verses 11 through 16.
That's how the church should operate. Read Colossians chapter three. All right. First Timothy two, one through four. I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.
This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God, our savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Step one, folks, let's get on our knees. Let's get on our knees before our God and king and pray that he would not destroy this nation for the sins that we are guilty of and the blood that is on our hands.
Instead, he would turn the hearts of our kings, of those who are our elected representatives and senators and governors, our president, our Supreme Court. Pray that these people would listen to godly counsel, would turn from their wicked ways, would seek the forgiveness of God and would lead by example the people of this government toward repentance and the worship of our God and king.
If it's going to say in God we trust on our money, then let us live that way. We can say one nation under God in our pledge of allegiance, but we don't live that way. I hope our government leaders will lead by example, but we shouldn't wait for them to do that.
I mean, we as the church need to be that light, salt and light, as Christ had called us to be. Hebrews 10, 23 through 25. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful.
And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another. And all the more as you see the day of the Lord drawing near, folks, paying your taxes is not caring for another person.
I mean, there's also this altruistic idea behind democratic socialism and this this thinking that the government's actually going to do what they say that they're going to do and they're incorruptible and they won't be dipping their own hand into the money chest and helping themselves.
Come on. When have you ever seen the government behave like that? The government is cold and uncaring, and we need to be those that are the hands and feet of Christ reaching out to one another. There are instructions in scripture about paying our taxes and there's instructions on loving your neighbor, as Paul said to the Galatians, Galatians, chapter six, verse 10.
So then, as we have the opportunity, let us do good to everyone and especially to those who are of the household of faith. We have an obligation to care for those that are within the church first. But then we also need to be reaching out to those who are outside of the church, taking the gospel with us as we go, the gospel being ever present in our message, because we could change this country into some kind of utopia.
But unless hearts are being changed with the gospel of Christ, then this is all for nothing. We would be condemning this nation to hell anyway, just by living a comfortable life for a little bit of time that we're here on Earth.
Our Lord Christ is returning and he is going to usher in his peaceful kingdom. And we will live there forever with no more pain, no more dying, no more hunger or thirst, no more weariness, no more sin.
That's the kingdom that we're looking forward to. In Hebrews chapter 10, it talks about how the heroes of the faith were not looking for a land of this Earth. Otherwise, they might have had the opportunity to return there.
But they were looking not for an earthly kingdom, a heavenly one. And that's what we need to be looking toward as well. Preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who are here on this Earth, in our country and even beyond our borders, so that those who hear the gospel would repent of their sin, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and they will be saved.
I can think of no better way of concluding than with Revelation 22, 20 through 21. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.
This is a protection of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find us on the web at www .utt .com.