Should Christians Tear Down Statues of Satan?
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A statue depicting Baphomet was erected by the Temple of Satan in the Iowa state capital, which sparked much debate over how Christians ought to respond. On one hand, many Christians believe that the statue should be left up but peacefully protested so that freedom for all religions is preserved. On the other hand, many Christians believe it should be torn down as many israelites did in the Old Testament when idols were erected. In this ep
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- Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.
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- We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll answer the age -old question, should
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- Christians tear down statues of Satan? Now, Tim, as we start this episode, what
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- Bible verse do you have for us? Tim Mullett Yes, 1 Kings 15, 11 says, And Asa did what was right in the eyes of the
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- Lord, as David his father had done. He put away the male cult prostitutes out of the land, removed all the idols that his father had made.
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- He removed Maka, his mother, from being queen mother because she had made an abominable image for Ashtoreth.
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- And Asa cut down her image and burned it at the Brick Kidron, but then the high places were not taken away.
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- Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was wholly true to the Lord in all of his days. So, there's a passage that's somewhat relevant.
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- Okay, so in that passage, they are tearing down the false idols, right?
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- And they're presented as the heroes of the story, right?
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- Yeah, but I mean, obviously, that's Israel and America's not Israel and all that, so it has no relevance.
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- This does not apply to us at all. Pretend this passage does not exist.
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- We're a secular republic and, you know, like pluralism and secularism and, you know,
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- I may not agree with your right to worship Satan, but I will fight to the death for it. Which sounds so weird.
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- If you just remove your, like, okay, just pretend you're an
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- Israelite, for example. First they came for the Satanist and then I did nothing, you know, and then they came for the
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- Mormons and I did nothing and then they came for me. So, you know, it's fair. Put yourselves in the shoes of an
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- Israelite way back in Old Testament times and you somehow have the ability to look into the future and then see that this is how
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- American Christians interact with other religions, right?
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- What do you think they would think about us in terms of our faithfulness?
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- I don't know. A bunch of whips. I guess it is a hard hypothetical just because, you know, most
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- Jews reject Christ to begin with, right? But it's hard to imagine many of them would applaud, you know, our brave stance to defend religious freedom, right?
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- Right. Well, I mean, it's hard, yeah. It's difficult to make that case for religious liberty in the way that, you know, the
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- American experiment is done from the Bible in particular. So, I mean, it's very difficult to make that case as if, like, religious liberty is actually a good thing.
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- In fact, I mean, you know, as you read through the Old Covenant, one of the things you're going to find is, like, that is, like, the opposite, man, you know?
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- So, I mean, I'm not going to pretend like these are easy questions to answer related to the covenantal differences, you know, the difference between the
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- New Covenant and the Old Covenant and, you know, how Christians relate to the law right now and how they relate to, like, you know, as members of the
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- New Covenant and all that. So, I'm not going to pretend like there's just easy answers to all these things for sure.
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- But then I think what becomes weird is, I mean,
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- I can understand how an individual can say, hey, as members of the New Covenant, we're not Israel, we're a church, we've been given a different mission, we've been given a different purpose, and then, you know, you've got to obey
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- Romans 13 and obey the laws of the land. And, you know, I don't think that we want to be, like, vigilante terrorists or whatever else who are just going in and, like, certainly bombing, you know, whatever false religious temples are in the country and everything else.
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- So, I mean, I think, like, with the statue of Satan kind of issue, you have a current– there is a kind of logic that says, hey, you know, how far do you take this, right?
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- Sure, yeah. Like, meaning, like, if you're going to praise a guy for going in there and desecrating a
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- Satan statue, you know, what does that mean? Like, what are the intentions? Which, by the way, we should probably mention that this is actually what happened, right?
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- So, and I think it was Idaho, right? They, in the state congress building, they allowed the
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- Satanic temple to put up a statue of Satan, yeah, for I think 30 days because they have some rule according to their congress building or rule for their congress building that any religious institution is allowed to do that.
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- And, you know, Christians were obviously upset about it. I think a bunch of them protested outside of the building, and then someone decided to go in there and knock the head off the statue, right?
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- So, that's why we're talking about this subject is because that's what happened as a
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- Christian went out in there and we're essentially trying to figure out was he right or did he sin, right?
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- Right, yep. So, but keep going. Yeah, I mean, that's essentially the question.
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- Was that, like, was that an act of submission to Romans 13 and everything else?
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- Like, was that an act of subjugation? Was that Paul's strategy? Did Paul go into, you know, see all the idols in Athens and encourage a revolt and, you know, encourage all the
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- Christians to tear them down and everything else? I think that those are all fair questions to ask about Christians related to, you know, our strategy and related to our mission, related to the covenant that we're under right now.
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- You know, what are the entailments of these things? I think those are all fair questions to ask. But, I mean, I think, you know, obviously, like, you look at the left and there's comparisons made to the left along these lines, too.
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- Like, meaning, like, the left has been doing this for years, right? Dude, yeah.
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- Like, going and desecrating these, you know, southern, you know, statues and tearing them down and defacing them and everything else.
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- So, I mean, like, there is part of this discussion to where you may be dealing with something like an inescapable concept.
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- Meaning, like, it's not, like, whether or not there's going to be blasphemy laws in your country.
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- It's just, like, what are the protected things? And so, I mean, the left has been doing this for years and getting away with it and no one really cares, right?
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- So, like, the issue is there's some moral awareness that, hey, this is evil. It must be stopped. And so, you know, you can have people on the right who are looking at that and saying, hey, yeah, well, like, what do we do, you know?
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- Maybe we shouldn't have that up anyways. And so, you know, a lot of it just, there is some sort of relationship to where we are in this current moment.
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- Like, where are we at in this current moment in history? Yeah, I think there's like a question, too, of when you, just from a governmental perspective, not necessarily like a spiritual one,
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- I think you do have to ask yourself, is the satanic temple an actual religion, right, by the standard definition?
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- Because they would argue that they don't worship a deity, right? So, you know, we would say as Christians, from a biblical perspective, they are a religion and they do worship a deity.
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- And it's either they worship Satan or they worship themselves, but either way, they do worship a deity.
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- But then there is the question of, hey, does the temple of Satan get the same, you know, protections afforded to them by the government that Christians would or Catholics would or, you know,
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- Muslims or whoever else who have, number one, have been established for, at this point, you know, thousands of years.
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- Number two, acknowledge a specific deity or, you know, multiple deities.
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- And the satanic temple, as far as I understand it, was mostly started just as sort of a, you know,
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- I don't know if I would say necessarily like a satirical purpose, but borderline satirical, essentially just trying to push the boundary and, you know, make all the same arguments that Christians would make in an attempt to try and defeat
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- Christians, right? Yeah, so you're in a really weird situation. So, meaning like you're in a situation where you have the
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- First Amendment, which basically says that Congress is going to make no law, which, you know, respecting the establishment of a religion.
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- And, you know, in the context of how that was originally given, I mean, I think there's a good discussion to be had about like what that means, like meaning
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- Congress is not going to establish a state Christian church, like a federal Christian church or something like that.
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- That's what that intent is to be made. But then, you know, what's happened is like we've taken that as like basically a statement that is supposed to be creating some sort of wall of separation between church and state and everything else.
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- And so, meaning like you have the left for many years who are basically trying to remove any vestige of Christianity in every single public governmental space imaginable, right?
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- So, like if that's the rules, like if that's the rules, it's like the people's job to like the government needs to remove all this, right?
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- Like you have to keep God out of politics, you got to keep God out of the public square and everything else.
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- Well, then like the idea of having a public square, which is devoted to like you have to replace
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- God because of this supposedly separation between church and state, but then you're replacing that with like the active worship of Satan, you know?
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- Yeah. So, there's some sort of hypocrisy there in, you know, should Christians call them on that.
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- I would say that, yeah, obviously, you should call them on that kind of hypocrisy. If we have to remove the Ten Commandments out of the courthouse because there's some sort of, because of a misunderstanding of the separation of church and state, like this principle of church and state, separation of church and state, which is not even in the
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- Constitution. If that's what we're doing, then, you know, obviously, like that wouldn't entail putting a
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- Satan shrine in our, you know, courthouse, would it? So, like pick the rules here, like we have to decide what the rules are.
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- And so, I mean, I certainly think that like you're living in a culture society where like you were not, like this is a democratic form of government.
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- We do have a Constitution. This is about we the people, so to speak. And so, then if you have a government that, like even under the terms of our
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- Constitution, if you have a government who is, you know, acting in an unlawful way, we have a responsibility to resist them for sure.
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- And so, I mean, I think there is like a legal discussion we had at that point to say, like, are they acting in a lawful way by displaying a
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- Satan statue in public? And then, you know, do we have a moral responsibility under the
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- Constitution to, you know, resist that kind of thing? And so, you know, the individual who did that,
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- I mean, you're going to have to play it out court. But I mean, that's how you challenge the system anyways. We do have a system of courts that are designed to settle these kind of disputes.
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- And so, you know, this is part and parcel of the thing. So, then, you know, the guy who did that, yeah,
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- I mean, he obviously did that, and then he turned himself in and said, hey, we're going to settle it in the court, right? He's basically just saying, hey, you don't have the authority to do that.
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- You don't have the authority to put a Satan statue up in there, and I'm challenging it, and I'm going to challenge it through legal means.
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- And, you know, obviously, you know, there wasn't any violence done to people at that point, right?
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- So, he didn't go on a murderous rampage. He just says, you don't have the authority to put that statue up in the way that you think you did, and I'm going to call you on it.
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- And so, certainly, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of issues that are revolving around this subject that certainly are hard, but I mean,
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- I think the reaction that many people have is, many Christians have had online is definitely to be encouraged by the act instead of just, you know, more of the same.
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- But then you have, you know, you have people on both sides of that for sure. So, you know, basically what you're saying is, hey, this person's coming along and challenging the idea that governments should put up statues of Satan, right, in their buildings.
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- Is that, and then they're going to take that to court, which taking it to, I mean, you know, taking it to court is implying, hey, this is something that has to be arbitrated.
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- It's not necessarily clear right out of the gate, the right and the wrong, right?
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- At least, or at the very least, it implies, hey, if this person is found to be in the wrong, it will be clear and it will be arbitrated out that way, right?
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- Yeah, so we don't, like, a lot of people, what happens in these kind of discussions, a lot of people misunderstand the kind of government that we have in general.
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- And so, like, we don't, like, the issue is, like, we're not under a monarchy, okay?
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- So, like, we're in a different kind of government that people have had before. So, we have a constitution which is the highest human authority over us as a document.
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- That's what we have. So, we have, like, the constitution which is supposed to be the highest authority over all of us.
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- And then we, like, we're a representative democracy. Like, we're like a constitutional republic, right?
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- So, like, we elect representatives that are bound to fulfill the terms of, like, the terms of their office as laid out by our governing documents in that way.
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- And so, you know, under, like, under the kind of government we have, we have a government where we're mandated as, like, by the constitution with this responsibility to overthrow tyrants, okay?
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- Yeah. So, like, this is, like, different than, like, this is a different kind of government than being under, like, a monarchy, right?
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- So, but then what people do is they treat, like, the president as if he's our king or something, right?
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- Yeah. And they treat, like, these courthouse officials as if they're our kings.
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- And so the way they think about it is, like, very different from the way the government actually is meant to be formed. So, they think about it as if, like, your county rulers are, like, your king, and then their king is, like, the city ruler, right?
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- And then their king is the state ruler, and then their king is the federal ruler. And that's just not the way it works.
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- And because the confusion is so pronounced, like, you can get to a point where, like, the presidents, each time they get elected to office now, they're, you know, signing executive orders as if they're kings or something like that.
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- And so, but then our government tells us that we have a duty to resist them when they are taking on powers that are not delegated to them by the constitution.
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- So, it's your duty to resist them. And then you have a judicial branch, which is going to judge who is in the right in those encounters, right?
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- So, a lot of that is just, like, that's the nature of the kind of government that we're under. And if you make the assumption that we're under some sort of, like, you know, system of kings, right?
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- With higher kings and other kings, like, that's just a bad assumption about what's actually happening with the kind of government that we're under.
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- So, then, you know, you do have to ask, did they have the constitutional authority to put that Satan statue up in there in general?
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- And, you know, by their own logic, they don't, because, like, by their own logic, they've… And I don't even think this is right, but,
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- I mean, they're saying, hey, you got to take Christianity out of the public square. So, if you got to take the king commandments out of the courthouse, then you need to take the
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- Satan statue out of there, too. You know, I don't even think that's a right interpretation of the constitution, but certainly, if it was fair, it's fair, right?
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- And you should be able to call them on the cards on that and say, hey, like, what are you doing? Are you even thinking about this right, you know?
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- So, I mean, certainly, it's a messy system for sure, and I think there's a lot of moving parts here.
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- But then, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you're going to have to have some sort of courageous…
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- Like, we're basically, we've inherited something that was, I think, largely good, and then we're trying to toss it out.
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- And, you know, the only thing that… Like, Christians are either going to try to stop them from shoving more depravity down their throat to where…
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- Meaning, like, if you're going to add to our government that now our government is going to be advocating for the public worship of Satan or something like that,
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- I think you're in a place where it's like, hey, you can stop it when it first starts, or you can just let it go on for years and years and years and to a point where there's no way to stop it, right?
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- Yeah, and I think that's where a lot of Christians who were encouraged by the toppling of the
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- Satan statue are at. I mean, just personally speaking, I think that's where I'm at with it is, you know, yes,
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- I think it needs to be arbitrated out in the courts now, and I think that's probably a good thing, and I was encouraged that the guy willingly turned himself in afterwards, trying to demonstrate some sort of acknowledgement that, like, hey,
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- I understand there's… Under the current system we live in, whether it's being interpreted correctly or not, there are consequences for actions, and I'm willing to take on those consequences for my actions.
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- But then I was still encouraged by what he did because of what you're talking about right now.
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- I think the people who push this kind of stuff, they hate
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- God. They hate the true God, and they are trying to do everything they can to get away from Him, right?
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- And worship themselves, and ultimately they end up worshiping
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- Satan, whether that be… They're worshiping
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- Satan by unknowingly carrying out his work for him, or they just actually literally worship
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- Satan. And I think the more that you just kind of sit back with your hands crossed in your lap and you say, hey, while they do have a right to do that,
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- I think you're just going to see people more and more taking that, and then trying to take more with it, right?
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- And so, yeah, I mean, you can sit back and fight for the
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- Satanists' right to worship Satan, but he's not going to fight for yours to worship the true
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- God. He's not going to fight for it. And so, you're just letting them take power, letting them take power, letting them take power, letting them normalize worshiping
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- Satan, letting them normalize blaspheming the true God, and then eventually it's going to get to a point where it's not just like a, hey, you worship your
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- God, I'll worship my God. Eventually, I mean, you see it right now. Like you said earlier, there are blasphemy laws in our country.
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- They're just not related to the true God. They're not related to the Christian God. They're related to things like Satan, apparently.
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- They're related to certain races. They're related to certain sexes, right?
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- They're related to the transvestite stuff. I mean, you are not allowed to blaspheme certain ideas.
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- I mean, you basically had a bunch of citizens who just let the government entrench those kind of practices and habits as normal without any challenge.
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- Yeah, and look at where it got us. Right. So, I mean, it's just like if the first time that ever happened, you had all these demonstrations and tearing down the flags or whatever else, you may have stopped it at the very beginning.
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- But then at this point, it's just so far gone to the point where it's like, hey, what are you going to do at that point?
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- There's no cultural momentum behind it. But then the first sign of the Satan statue going up, you stop it.
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- It may at least curb that element of it for sure. But I mean, someone's going to have to be willing to go to jail for it.
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- Someone's going to challenge it in the courtroom. So, in thinking about the
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- Romans 13 aspect of this, because you get sent to jail for doing what, or because this guy did what he did, he gets sent to jail.
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- Does that immediately imply that he is violating Romans 13? Well, that's what
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- I mean. I mean, you have a system designed to involve a series of challenges to the government when the government oversteps its authority.
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- So, we're not like a government. Our constitution is a governing document. We're not a government that has set itself up to worship
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- Satan, right? Yeah. But then the idea is we could transition into one if no one stops it.
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- Yeah. So, we don't have a constitution that is set up in such a way that we have declared
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- Satanism to be our official religion as a country. But then what's happened is you have a governing document, and then you have…
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- I mean, the founders of our country understood how this works. Evil men are going to take more and more power upon themselves.
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- And so, we just watch them just take on a lot of illegitimate power, right?
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- Yeah. So, you're in a situation where if conceptually you think about it this way, you imagine you're at school or whatever, and then the bully decides that he's your king, right?
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- Uh -huh. So, then he begins to go around and give his orders or whatever.
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- I mean, you can imagine a scenario where the entire school then is listening to this bully as if he's the ruler of the school.
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- And then once that becomes enshrined as normal, then you have everyone else coming along and lending their support to it.
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- So, then functionally you have this phony kind of petty kingship that's been set up that it just becomes the state of affairs, right?
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- Yeah. By virtue of the fact that everyone is kind of going along with it. That's what they're doing.
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- Whereas if someone were to step in at the very beginning and say, hey, you don't have any authority to do this, man.
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- I'm not going to listen to you, laugh at you. What a joke. It could stop it at the very beginning, right?
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- So, there's this concept of taking illegitimate authority. That's a concept that's actually real.
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- There's a concept of taking illegitimate authority, and our constitution acknowledges that people can do that.
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- They can take illegitimate authority upon themselves. So, then when you're thinking about that as it relates to this topic, or just thinking about it more broadly, our government has done that in every conceivable way.
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- They've taken upon themselves all this illegitimate authority to where the way that our constitution was set up is you have a bunch of states who came together and who delegated certain prerogatives to the federal government, and all other prerogatives were reserved to the states.
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- So, that's turned into just this top -down hierarchy that everyone is just going along with, but that wasn't the original arrangement.
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- The original arrangement was the states were voluntarily submitting themselves, delegating certain responsibilities to the federal government, and they would reserve all the rest of it to themselves.
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- But it wasn't like a top -down system. It wasn't that at all. But now, it's like, functionally, we've just gone along with these kind of things for years.
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- But, I mean, you can imagine this next iteration of this thing where, let's say that the
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- Antichrist reveals himself, or whatever, and whoever he happens to be, let's say that he reveals himself and he sets himself up as the king of America, or whatever, and we all go along with it.
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- The issue is, and then he establishes the worship of the beast as the primary religion of our country, and he just does it by his kingly fiat, or whatever.
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- Well, you do have a system of government set up where you can challenge that. You can say, hey, you don't have authority to do that, okay?
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- So that's the kind of government that we have, and then you work it out in the court system. So the courts are going to declare, which one was the lawless one here?
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- Was the federal government declaring the national religion to be beast worship?
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- Was that the lawless act, or was it the person who said no to it? Does that make sense? Yeah. So that's where, just because someone gets thrown in jail, well, that's what would happen if you're at the schoolyard bully situation to where you say, hey, no, whatever, right?
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- Well, the group of thugs get you and take you and hold you down and beat you up. That doesn't mean you did anything wrong, but someone's got to arbitrate now who is in the right and who is in the wrong if you're saying no to it.
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- Does that make sense? Yeah. That's what our judicial branch is designed to do, is to declare who was the lawless one in this encounter, and did the government have the authority to do that?
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- But I mean, you can imagine the situation. We've just kind of let them declare
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- LGBTQ stuff to be our national religion at this point, right? Yeah, I mean, they're hanging the flags up on the
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- White House. Yeah, so I mean, they're not allowed to hang the Christian flags up, are they?
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- Because of this great wall of separation between the church and the states found in Thomas Jefferson's letters or whatever.
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- But I mean, the issue is, we have a government where you're designed to challenge certain things, the lawfulness of doing that.
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- And I think primarily, it's better to take it in the form of a legal challenge and sue them.
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- I would think that would probably be a better thing to do in general. But then I think, yeah, very quickly, we could just be a government that is devoted to the worship of, the explicit worship of Satan, if we don't stop it.
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- If no one's willing to say, if we just go along with it, then you don't be surprised what happens, for sure.
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- Yeah, and I mean, when you read about all of the Old Testament stories of people tearing down statues and idols to false gods,
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- I can't imagine that those typically went well with everyone, right? I mean, there's obviously, in all the encounters,
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- I think a lot of times they did it at night because they were too afraid. But I mean, there is this element of,
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- A, you take ownership of, this is our nation, this is our people, we're not going to go this way.
- 30:07
- And there's some courage that's necessary to do that. Particularly, I mean, we're not like a monarchy here, you know?
- 30:17
- So, the government is supposed to represent the people in this way.
- 30:22
- They're elected representatives, they're not rulers. So, there is a we the people, we won't stand quietly for this kind of thing element of it.
- 30:32
- And so, yeah, there's a lot of issues at play here, for sure. Okay, well,
- 30:37
- I think that's a good place for us to wrap up the conversation on. And yeah, like you said, I mean, things have been changing so fast, and so much power has been grabbed, not just by the federal government, but certainly by progressives trying to advance their ideology.
- 30:54
- I mean, the slippery slope thing, that's not a fallacy. I mean, just look at the way things have progressed, look at where we started even just five, ten years ago, and look at where we are now.
- 31:06
- You'll see that this isn't just some sort of, hey, you do your thing,
- 31:11
- I'll do my thing. This is a, you know, from the left, it's like a, hey, you are also going to do my thing.
- 31:19
- Or, hey, you're going to celebrate. You don't have to do my thing, but you're going to celebrate my thing.
- 31:24
- And you can't disagree with it in any way whatsoever. And so, I mean, you know,
- 31:31
- I don't necessarily want to put down someone who's,
- 31:38
- I'm having a hard time just trying to process exactly how
- 31:44
- I want to say this, just because I'm sure there are people, there are well -meaning
- 31:49
- Christians, who are going the religious freedom route, and they're arguing for that because they don't want
- 32:03
- Christianity to somehow be made illegal or something like that, because they could foresee that being what happens later on down the line if you abandon the whole religious freedom idea, right?
- 32:19
- But then at the same time, I just think you're already seeing that happen, right?
- 32:24
- You're seeing it right now. You're seeing, I mean, there are blasphemy laws in our country, and none of them have to do with God.
- 32:32
- They have to do with people worshipping themselves, worshipping the created rather than the creator.
- 32:38
- And so, whatever the religious freedom crowd is afraid of is already happening.
- 32:46
- And if you just sit back and allow it to happen, then, you know, you're kind of just inviting it on yourself and kind of sticking your head in the sand,
- 32:56
- I think, personally. But certainly, this is something that we all need to think through, and we all need to decide how do we act, what is going to honor the
- 33:07
- Lord in our specific context with the specific agreements we have with our government right now.
- 33:14
- How do we interact with people who are pushing religions that were essentially created to try and get rid of Christianity out of every major institution possible, right?
- 33:28
- By trying to use all of the same rights themselves, they're essentially trying to steal rights that they don't have any rights for because, like we were talking about earlier, the
- 33:40
- Satanic Temple, I mean, it's not really a religion in the traditional form. By the traditional definition, it's not a religion, but then they're arguing that they need to be treated like one.
- 33:52
- And it's not that they necessarily care outwardly about advancing the worship of Satan.
- 34:02
- I mean, really, they do. They do care about that. They just don't think that they do. For them, it's more about getting
- 34:08
- God out as much as possible. And so, we have to figure out as Christians, how do we deal with that?
- 34:15
- Because that is a big deal. And if we let it go, and we just let it fester and fester over years, it's going to continue to look worse and worse for us as Christians.
- 34:25
- So, with all that being said, we certainly appreciate all the support that we get from you guys week in and week out.
- 34:32
- We appreciate the interaction that we get with you online through comments on the
- 34:37
- YouTube videos, through interacting with us on Twitter, on Facebook. And if you want to follow us, you can get more content that we're putting out over on those social media platforms.
- 34:48
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- 34:56
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- 35:03
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- 35:10
- YouTube channel, subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and give us a five -star review. Those are some free ways that just take a few seconds for you, but certainly help us out a lot.
- 35:20
- And until the next episode, we'll see ya. Transcribed by https://otter .ai
- 36:21
- Transcribed by https://otter .ai