Social Justice with Dr. Anthony Silvestro

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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What we have for you today is something a little bit special. This is basically from our recent

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EquipJersey conference. And today's message comes to us from Dr. Anthony Silvestro.

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And his topic was dealing with the issue of social justice. I hope you find this helpful, because what he's going to do is go into defining what it is, and then help us to understand why this is such a threat on Christianity.

01:32

So you do not want to miss today's episode. Make sure you share this with a lot of other friends.

01:44

Welcome to the Rap Report with Andrew Rapaport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

01:51

This is a ministry of striving for eternity. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

02:05

I'm teaching a really tough topic today, because we've all heard of the social justice movement, right? It's out there.

02:12

And one of the things that has not been done yet, as far as I've seen, is a systematizing of what's going on in the social justice movement, and how it's literally on the verge of wrecking the church, wrecking society in general.

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And so I want to navigate through this, and there's some tough waters that we have to walk through in talking about this.

02:36

And there's been guys who've spoken on this. What I'm hoping to bring is the biblical approach and understanding of what social justice is, why we're seeing some pastors trying to mix together this understanding of social justice, which is social justice in the

02:57

Bible in some degree. Yes, it is. But the context of the way it's being used today by people outside the church and importing it into the church is what's not biblical.

03:12

And so we're going to try to navigate through this. Now, there's guys out there who have given 15 to 20 hours of lecture on all the aspects of the social justice movement.

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I'm going to be giving about 40 to 50 minutes that we're going to try to tie some stuff together.

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So we're going to give a brief overview, and then we're going to walk into the biblical aspects of this.

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And the way that we're going to tie together social justice and marriage is, I think what we're going to find is that we understand when

03:44

Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me. He is the source of truth.

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The Bible's word is the source of truth. Everything has to be measured up against that standard.

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And so we want to look at how marriage is being destroyed, how this gender inequality stuff has permeated into the church, how just gender in general, being able to name your own gender whenever you want, how that's infiltrated a church.

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Because what these things are doing is they're undermining truth. And it's all part of the post -modernist mindset that's out here.

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So that's what I hope we can appreciate today by the time I'm done speaking. So social justice.

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These are a number of things we're going to be covering today. The understanding of race in the context of social justice in the

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Bible. What is intersectionality? Marxism, social justice issues, LGBT and the other 50 -some letters that follow that movement.

04:52

I think it's up to 50 -some. Sin and repentance. What is biblical repentance?

04:59

What is sin according to the Bible? Reparations for slavery. And mind you, while this is the topic today, there will be other ideas of reparations coming.

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This is just the start of it. And then we see social justice again in the

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Bible. So what is a good working definition of social justice?

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And it would be what I have up here. It's this concept used to describe the movement towards a socially just world.

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Now granted, this is in the minds of certain groups of people. And it's all about trying to give basic human rights and equality to everybody.

05:47

Again, whatever that means. Because we have to navigate through what these definitions mean.

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What does equality actually mean? What do rights mean?

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Where do rights come from? I would surmise to you that there's a wonderful book written by J.

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Lucas, The Rights Fight. He says, where do our rights come from as American citizens?

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Most people would answer, what? The government. But where do rights really come from?

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It's from God. There's no doubt, there's a reason why in the

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Declaration of Independence it said that we're given certain inalienable rights endowed by our creator.

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In plain English. And so this is where rights actually come from. But we're going to see how this movement has kind of moved the goalpost in what equality is and in what social justice and human rights are.

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And so the whole idea is that society in general, and as a whole, can't benefit in the best way possible unless you have this so -called equality of rights and everything else that is even among every single individual across society.

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And so it used to be that this movement started as a global movement in social justice.

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We're going to navigate a little bit of that history. Then it was applied to solely people of African American descent.

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And now, very quickly, it has moved to anybody who puts themselves in a class that would not be a white, male, middle -aged, middle class and above, straight

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Christian. I think

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I said straight. Maybe straight isn't a good word anymore to use.

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I don't know. So let's do that one more.

08:13

There we go. So critical race theory. There's this permeating idea of critical race theory.

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And it talks about how, again, because this whole social justice movement started, generally speaking, in the last couple decades as a movement of African Americans and how they've been oppressed, this has been applied really to every single class out there that isn't what

08:40

I just mentioned. And so what critical race theory does is it says, well, the reality is that we have racism that exists.

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Now, would we acknowledge that racism exists in this country? Yeah, it does.

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Does racism exist in the church? Yeah, it does.

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Does it exist in even the best of churches with the best of preachers? Yes, it does.

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But how do we navigate this biblically is going to be the question. Well, in the critical race theory, we have this racism that is supposedly woven into the actual fabric of society so that the entire society we see today, businesses, banking institution, you name it, and racism is supposed to be the underlying fabric tying the whole thing together, that the entire system of capitalism that we have in this country is based in some sort of fabric of racism.

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And therefore, the whole fabric of society is based on what is called white privilege.

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Now granted, it used to be white privilege. Today it is white, male,

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Christian, heterosexual, and all the other monikers you want to put on that.

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It's that privilege today. And so therefore, that this fabric of society that allows people to work, to live, to do everything they want to do, is supposedly all set upon this white group of men and that it marginalizes everybody who is outside of this group.

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Now what I find interesting about this is that when you take the word race, where does race come from?

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This is where some of my apologetics background comes into play. And we're going to talk about this a little bit later. I would tell you the

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Bible says there's one blood, one race. We're all descended from Adam and Eve. That's biblical, right?

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So we have people who would be called white today, but if you put them up against a white piece of paper, they're not white.

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And say they put somebody who's black today on a black piece of paper, and they're not black.

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Or you've got Italians who are like a fair mix between. All it is is you have different amounts of melanin in your skin, pigments in your skin, and where it is within the layer of your skin.

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That's where race comes from. I will also tell you that on the opposite side of things, when we talk about race and how society is trying to make a caste system with races, there is only one logical place that you can come up with racism.

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Actual racism. How can we look at races that whites would be superior to everybody else, and that mongoloids would be less superior than whites, but more superior than Africans?

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How would this occur? Well, I can tell you that Time Life Books came out with this in the 1950s.

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This was part of a number of books out there. Time Life had a major thing about this, to which you cannot find these books anymore.

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They've been erased. You can't find them. Just like when the

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Muslims were dancing in the streets after 9 -11, Dayton, Ohio, you can't find video footage of this anymore.

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So Time Life Books did this. They showed that there were different types of monkeys back in the day, millions of years ago, and those monkeys evolved into different groups of monkeys.

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Naturally speaking, with evolution, some groups are going to evolve differently than other groups, and you've got the caucasoid ones that were the ones that were superior.

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I'm not making this up. This is what it is. The reality is that racism has to be tied only to evolution.

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Because if we're all made from Adam and Eve, which we are, we're all one blood, one race. If we're made from what they called at that time five different types of monkey species, then of course one could evolve differently than the others.

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So this is where it actually came from, and obviously time has gotten rid of that.

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It's hard to find books, although if you do a Google search, you can still find books that teach us on these theories, older books.

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And so race, what I find interesting about critical race theory is that it used to be a biological thing, and understandably so, right?

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Again, the only way race could come up and you could distinguish between the races, some being evolved better than others, is through evolution.

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But race is now looked at as not a biological thing anymore. It is looked at actually as a social construction.

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And so that its means is, because it's a social construction, its means is to allow white men who constructed it to suppress or oppress everybody else.

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Again, the underlying tones of critical race theory. And so this critical race theory was developed in the mid -1970s when they tried to detach it from biology and attach it to mentality.

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And it was a response to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, which they felt that there was too slow of progress from the

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Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and so they had to force their hand a little bit more.

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And so now today we see a number of so -called scholars who are studying these types of disciplines and trying to change the relationship that they see between race, racism, and power.

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Again, all constructed by the white man suppressing. So there's several tenets of critical race theory that we have to look at.

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Number one is centrality and intersectionality of racism. So we're supposed to see that racism exists everywhere in American life.

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It exists in our thoughts. It exists in our personal relationships, in our workplace, in our educational and judicial systems.

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And that it's not just the actions of individuals, but it's the actions of entire institutions, systems, and culture that is the actual way of life.

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So that's what's being taught about critical race theory. I should probably put the next slide up.

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So number two, the challenge -dominant ideology. So when we talk about racism, especially, and this is why it's a difficult subject, right, as the white, straight,

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Christian, male, middle -aged, middle -class, or above, I'm supposed to be the least likely person to ever speak on this at all.

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And it's because the fabric of society that this is woven into, what's that?

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Yeah. The very fabric of society that this is woven into is because of me and my people.

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So I shouldn't be able to talk about this at all. But I'm part of that dominant ideology according to these scholars on this.

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And that they say that it's impossible because it's woven in the fabric of society and we're raised within this fabric of society that it's impossible for me to be colorblind.

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It's impossible for people to be colorblind. So that means that no matter what, because of the fabric of society we're raised in, that automatically we're going to be part of the oppression.

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There's also the commitment to social justice. And so people of color are supposed to continue to take a stance on this issue, and they're being raised up to take a stance on critical race theory.

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And of course today it's not just people of color that the scholars would have said starting in the 1970s.

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It would now be all kinds of groups that feel that they're oppressed. So I hope one thing that we're understanding is that this is a movement that's changing.

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And that's why this is such a difficult thing to put your finger on, and why I think a lot of pastors and a lot of just church people are struggling with how to go about this.

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Because again, I acknowledge, is there racism in the church? Yes. Is there racism in society?

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Yes, there is. But what's being talked about in these tenets of critical race theory is that it's not just individual racism.

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It is actually woven throughout society. And that it's going to happen no matter what.

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And that they have to fight against it. And then we see the importance of experiential knowledge.

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So you have somebody who gets oppressed, and because they are within an oppressed group, so let's say homosexual this time, homosexual feels they get oppressed.

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Because of their experience, that now should be applied to every single homosexual ever.

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Which means then that it also should be applied to every, so not only is it every homosexual person that's been oppressed, but then every single,

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I'm sorry, every white male Christian, straight, middle class, and above, that we have universally been the oppressors as a group.

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And then number 5, the use of an interdisciplinary perspective. This is where, not only is it woven into the fabric of society, but it's also within every single discipline out there.

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So every class that ever gets taught in college and high school, it's woven into. The thing

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I really want us to appreciate in this is that the idea is, look, if I would be racist against somebody, that would be my individual sin.

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That should not be applied to the group. What is going on in the social justice movement is that they're taking the individual sin and trying to apply it to everybody.

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And that's why this is a global type movement. And that's why we see it hitting in every avenue and from every direction as we're going.

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And why it seems like it came out of nowhere, but yet it's everywhere. So under the critical race theory umbrella, we're going to start to speed it up a little bit after all of this explanation, is that there's several things that fall under this umbrella.

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Intersectionality, Marxist philosophy and cultural Marxism, deconstructionism, Rauschenbischism, and black liberation theology.

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So intersectionality. This says that many disadvantaged groups exist. And that there's increased oppression for the more inclusion you have with disadvantaged groups.

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Okay, what does this mean? So, as I said, racial identity, gender, nationality, disability, sexuality.

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Those are five of a myriad of different things within this intersectionality thing.

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It's a Venn diagram, right, for mathematics. So, what's your race? If you are white, then you are not even in the circle.

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Let's say you're black. You now are in that entire green circle. Now, if you are female, right, because male is the dominant, right, so everything else, which is only female, despite what they tell us today.

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Just make sure we clear that up right away. If you're female, well, now you get to be in the purple.

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But this is what's really cool about this intersectionality, is because if you are black and you're female, you're even more oppressed.

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Yay, right? Nationality, depending on what nationality.

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So if you're not an American, a European descendant

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American, you would also be able to put your name into the circle nationality. If you are straight, and have always been straight, you don't get to be in that circle at all.

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If you are anything else, you get to be in that circle. So now imagine if you are a, if you are black, female, homosexual, and you are from Africa, which probably you would be, at least descendants, you have four spots of oppression that you intersect in.

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Now, what this also means is that if you are a, let's say, let's pick on,

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I don't know, whoever, let's pick on Chinese. Let's say you are Chinese, but male.

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You will only have one oppression against you. If you're Chinese and female, you're more oppressed.

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So therefore, whose voice should be heard more? Well, the female

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Chinese person. So what's going on today in intersectionality, why you see so many people identifying with so many different groups, is the more groups they identify with, the louder their voice gets to be, the more they're supposed to be heard, and the more you're supposed to take their word as truth, in terms of what they've experienced.

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So that's what intersectionality is. You literally get points for every oppressed group you belong to. I see a lot of, like, squinging of face.

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I know, this is really difficult to talk through. It is, as a Christian, this is mind -numbing, right?

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It's absolutely mind -numbing. But this is what is being taught throughout culture, and this is what's being brought into the church at a very highly successful rate right now.

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Marxist philosophy. So I don't know how much of you understand about, how many of you understand about Marxism.

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But, say, one? That's cool. Maybe a couple. So Marxism in general was supposed to be just about equal distribution of wealth.

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That was it. And so this came out a little over 100 years ago. The idea is that there's supposed to be no private property, and it's supposed to lead to socialism, which eventually would be endgame communism.

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So to understand what this is, a lot of people mix these three terms together.

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So we have to understand that we have capitalism way on one side, and we have communism way on the other.

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A purely capitalistic society would be a society where you can be entrepreneurs, business owners, you go out and work as much or as little as you want, and you earn what you get, and everything's owned privately.

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On the other side of the fence, you have communism, which is the endgame for Marxism, is that you have everything owned by either the government or a dictator or a very small group of individuals that are very wealthy, and everything else is owned by the state.

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And so these are the two polar opposites. Marx's philosophy is the philosophy that's to get you from capitalism all the way to communism.

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And as Marx's philosophy gets put into place, that's what we call socialism.

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So the socialism ideas is what's being instituted as we speak in America, and it's been going on for 50, 60 years now, getting instituted as an endgame to go to complete communism.

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So when we see things like socialized medicine, health care, this would be a socialism type issue.

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When we see that living wages are being promoted out there, this is a socialism issue.

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When we see free higher education, socialism issue. It's a complete redistribution of wealth.

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Why Marxism started to become popular is because there was an idea, biblically speaking, when we are a business owner, as I was for years up until last

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October, literally I buy the time of employees. I pay for that.

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And so as an owner, I pay for the time and people, because they give their time, they earn a fair wage, whatever that wage is.

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In a capitalist society, if they don't like the wage, they go find another job. So that's what that is.

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Marxism has said, well, wait a minute, if you have all these guys who are working, yeah, they're being paid to work, but they're working, they're only getting what they get, and that they're earning much more money for the person who's paying them.

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So therefore, well, wait a minute, why is this fair? If we're doing all the work and all the owner's doing is sitting back and hiring people, shouldn't we share in the wealth as the workers?

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That's Marxist philosophy. And so that redistribution of wealth within a company is what has been put across into an entire governmental structure over time.

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It is a complete redistribution of wealth. Now, of course, from a business owner perspective, where some dangers occur here is that we understand in capitalism when you are an owner, you do something that the workers don't do, which is take risk.

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And so when you take risk, that's why you tend to make more profit, because you take the risk.

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Usually you're the one who had to invest, right? So that's where capitalism, again, is rooted in.

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So when we get into cultural Marxism, this is an atheistic philosophy.

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And what's happened in recent time is this Marxism that was only supposed to be for redistribution of wealth has now been put across all of society.

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And so it's not just a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, but it's also a redistribution of rights in their terminology.

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So that means that the oppressors who are generally, again, the class of people

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I said, they would also be people who would be business owners. They'd be the wealthier people. And so you have to destroy not only the business model that's out there, but you have to destroy the entire fabric of society that allows them to even exist.

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And so it's not just about business, but it's also about race.

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And so this is where the expansion of Marxism has come into what we today call cultural

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Marxism. Now because of cultural Marxism, which has been supposed to get

29:38

African Americans and other minorities into equal wages and everything else, it has also had a side attack, which is probably the biggest attack of all.

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It's the attack on the family. It's attack on marriage. It's attack on God -giving two genders, male or female.

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It's, again, trying to destroy the entire fabric of society. And we're going to see how this kind of works out here in the next several minutes as well.

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So when we look at cultural Marxism and the understanding that the workers are oppressed by the owners, well, then they say, well, blacks and other minorities are oppressed by the whites.

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Well, we also have heterosexuals that oppress the homosexuals. We also have able -bodied people oppressing disabled.

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We have what they call cisgendered, which would be biblically gendered folk, suppressing trans folk, people who think they can switch their gender based on how they feel every hour.

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And the list goes on about oppression. I know, your heads want to explode really soon.

30:59

I apologize. Are you controlling the slides up there?

31:04

Oh, I can do them. Yeah, that's why I'm getting confused. Well, you know what,

31:11

I'll just trust you to do it then. I'll stop. I'll just kind of give you a finger then.

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Deconstructionism. The first finger. And I'm not oppressing you by doing that.

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So deconstructionism. Who has heard the term deconstructionism before? So for those of you who haven't, this is tied to postmodernism.

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This is where we are taught, when we go to the art museum and we look at a wonderful painting on the wall, we are taught to look at the painting and say, hmm, what does this mean to me?

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What do I get out of this painting? Rather than what we're supposed to be doing, which is looking at a painting and saying, what did the painter try to convey through his painting to anybody who views it?

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Well, guess where deconstructionism is being applied to today and has been for quite some time?

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Lots of places, especially the Bible. How many of you have been in a

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Bible study before where you've got people sitting around a round table, six, eight people, you take out your verse for the day for your

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Bible study and say, what do you think this verse means to you? Oh, that sounds really nice.

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What does this verse mean to you? Oh, that's nice, even though it's different than hers.

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What does that Bible verse mean to you? This is deconstructionism that has gotten in the church for years.

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Well, that same deconstructionism is what is being applied to the Bible in every facet.

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That same deconstructionism is being applied to the Bible in terms of what a family is, what a biblical marriage is, what gender is, oh, and a whole host of other areas, such as one of my pet peeves, evolution.

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So we're deconstructing what's being written there and we're putting our own ideas into it. This is postmodernism at its best.

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This is where postmodernism operates, is the idea that your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth.

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You interpret this a certain way, I interpret it my own way. You interpret this Bible passage your way,

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I'll interpret it my way, and forget about what God meant to say. That's deconstructionism.

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So we have a guy named Rauschenbusch who came up with his own thing.

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So he was a Baptist pastor, 1861 to 1918. He wrote a book called A Theology for the

33:49

Social Gospel. And what was interesting about him, and this hasn't really permeated church until recently, is he had an idea that sin didn't belong to the individual, but it belonged to the entire institution.

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So you already have murmurings of Marxism going on.

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Socialistic processes have been going on in this country for a long time now. Progressivism has been going on since about 1905 officially.

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So he now writes a book in 1917, right before he dies, that tries to give an answer to all this, basically taking individual sin and placing it upon that same society that is supposedly oppressing all kinds of groups of people.

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So therefore, with his book, all white people must repent of their institutionalized sin against minorities.

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All rich people must repent for their institutionalized sin against anybody who's not rich.

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All heterosexuals must repent against anybody who is not heterosexual, homosexual, or anything else.

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And so what we are hearing today in the church can be traced all the way back to this pastor and some of the teachings that have been going on for many, many decades.

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There's something called liberation theology, which started as what we call black liberation theology in the 1970s, same group of scholars that worked with critical race theory.

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They wanted to liberate black people from the oppression of the whites.

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Of course, today this liberation theology has permeated everywhere, and it's now liberating any oppressed group from the oppressor.

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Now, who do you think the biggest oppressor in this country and this world is?

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They blame him. They blame him. The biggest oppressor is

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Christianity. Which is why we're the ones being under attack. Have you ever noticed something?

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When I had that intersectionality thing up there and I talked about nationality, why is it that Christians talk about homosexuality as a sin and we get vilified for it?

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Muslims kill homosexuals on a regular basis. They shoot up a gay bar, kill over 50 people a couple years ago, and the news won't report on it for 5 days until Fox breaks the news it's a

36:46

Muslim. There's a number of people who did afterwards.

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Well, Bill Maher is one of the few guys that says that the only thing holding back Muslims is

37:00

Christians, Christianity. He recognizes it. He hates both.

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He does, because he hates God, but he recognizes the issues here. The ultimate oppressors are

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Christians according to liberation theology. When we understand the liberation of all oppressed groups, of all the things we've talked about in the last half hour or so, it is literally a targeted attack against Christianity, the one source of truth, the one group of people that can stand up against all the nonsense that's going on today.

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We have another thing called egalitarianism.

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This is the last of the grouping. This is equality in everything.

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Political rights, social rights, economic rights, civil rights, within the church, the rights of the female versus the male.

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We see Beth Moore abusing that quite well. What does

38:12

Voti say about that? Something about if it didn't bother you, you better...

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I can't say amen, you better say ouch. There's this idea of egalitarianism.

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Again, this should make sense in light of what we've talked about already, that everything needs to be completely equal in every way, completely tearing up the supposed fabric of society that has oppressed every single group out there and made all kinds of inequality.

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Therefore, social justice issues, to be able to attain a total equality for all, we see things like systemic racism being talked about, that it's a system that is allowing racism to permeate, that there's income and wealth inequality because of the fabric of society, because of the system, and so that's got to be toppled.

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The LGBTQ and the other 50 letters rights, that they've got to be allowed to do really whatever they want to do to attain equal status, and we see the same with marriage and gender rights and gender roles.

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And so as Christians, we're all here, we're brothers and sisters in Christ, we understand that we have one authority, and that authority is

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Jesus Christ. That authority is his word, Scripture alone. And so what I want to do for the rest of the time here is how do we apply

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God's word to the social justice issues of today? I hope that the way we've laid this out already, that your minds are turning and you're starting to see what social justice actually is and how it is at every turn completely against the

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Bible. At every turn. And so systemic racism.

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Again, do we acknowledge racism still exists? It does. Unfortunately, it does.

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The thing is, how do we define race as Christians? Is this a sin of the individual or a group of people?

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That's a big question here. And so we go to the Bible and we see Genesis 3 .20, the man called his wife

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Same Eve because she was the mother of all living. Every single human on this planet has descended from Adam and Eve.

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One blood, one race. We read in Acts 17 .26, So while different nationalities exist, different people groups exist that have some different characteristics, ultimately, one blood, one race.

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Another way we're equal is that when we die, we face

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God on Judgment Day, are we going to have to account for the sins of the racist sins of everybody else?

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No. Who are we going to account for? Us, as individuals.

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We're going to have to account for that. And so therefore, because we're individually sinning against God first and then horizontally to others that we've sinned against, that each person must repent and confess his or her own sins.

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Not an institution, but confess their own sins in order to receive forgiveness. What about income and wealth inequality?

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We have a number of mistaken premises. So Marxism will also teach that, again, because the workers have earned a fixed wage and there's profits above that that the owner gets, that there's inequality there.

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And because of that inequality and not sharing the wealth, the rich have become wealthy by exploiting the poor.

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Now notice the shift in words here. On one hand, in a capitalistic society, somebody who takes the risk, who invests their money in taking that risk, is the one who's going to reap more rewards.

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And yet, that's not what's being propagated in the social justice movement. They're saying that it's not reaping rewards, it's that you're gaining stuff that you don't deserve because you are oppressing the worker.

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You are exploiting the worker. You're exploiting who they would call the poor and the working class.

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And so therefore, we have to have socialistic programs like welfare, the tiered taxation models, quotas, and everything else to try to even everything out.

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And yet, what do we find? Do they really fix things? No, they generally cause more problems than they solve in the long run.

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And yet, the want for the social Marxists, for critical race theorists, is that they want to redistribute all wealth whatsoever.

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Now, from a Christian perspective, we don't assume that the wealthy are beneficiaries of ill -gotten gain.

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We don't assume, to begin with. Now, could there be people that are rich that are exploiting?

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Well, of course, there could be. But it's not our job to assume somebody is in sin because they're a business owner or because they're a manager.

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We as Christians have a responsibility and an expectation to be a good steward of one's wealth because all wealth comes from who?

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It comes from God. And then when we have social programs, they tend to disincentivize everyone from working hard in both income and job position.

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Imagine if you were in a college class and the teacher said, you know what? All you guys study.

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You take your tests. But what we're going to do is we're going to take an average of all the test grades and then everybody in this class is going to receive the average grade.

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How many of you would be really upset by that? So imagine some of you work really...

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Before the professor would announce this, you'd work really hard to study if you wanted a DA. And if you didn't care, you just wanted to skirt by and get a

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D, you wouldn't work so hard. What do you think would happen after a couple of tests go by?

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Eventually nobody studies, right? That's right. That's exactly what happens. What doesn't happen is you don't get the guy who's supposedly oppressed all of a sudden working really hard to attain this level.

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You have this level staying exactly where they're at because they're like, oh man, I'm going to be pulled up freely? That's awesome.

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I'm going to continue to not do anything or do even less. And the worker, or the one that's up here, is going to be really upset over time, and what do they do?

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They start to work less and less. Now, imagine communism.

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Will there be incentives for people to go to medical school? Yeah. That's about all it is, right?

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Because otherwise, there's not going to be an incentive for somebody to devote the time and study to go there, or to do any type of higher education, or to do anything they want to do in life, because they know ultimately it's going to be taken away from them and given somewhere else.

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And so we have to look at what is wealth redistribution anyway? If you're taking from the rich and giving to the poor, what is taking here?

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Stealing. It's thievery. And what does the

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Bible teach in terms of giving the rich to the poor? Because look, does the Bible talk about social justice here?

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Does it say that we're supposed to take care of the widows? Yeah. But does somebody come and put a gun to your head and say, give to the widows?

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Yeah. You don't have guns. It'd have to be a squirt gun here. It'd be a squirt gun.

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They're not allowed to have guns here in New Jersey. Squirt guns, maybe. So, you know, the

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Bible says that we're to give out of the goodness of our hearts. We're not being stolen from, but we're supposed to give out of the goodness of our hearts.

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That's what the Bible teaches. A very different concept than what the social justice warriors are preaching today within churches.

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Ultimately, we also have to understand God's sovereign. He gives to whom he wills. And when we look at the parable of the talents,

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I think one of the things that can get glossed over pretty easily, and I think we're all familiar with the parable of the talents, is that each servant received a different amount to begin with.

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They weren't all given the exact same amount. And then when they were given different amounts and they earned some, they earned from it, right?

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The one with more earned more. Percentage -wise the same, but earned more. What happened?

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So they had different returns, but ultimately God viewed their faithfulness in terms of the work they did with the talents, the investment they did with the talents.

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So God gave them different amounts, but they were literally graded upon what they did with it. And so I think it's another way to look again at the parable of talents in light of what we see today in society.

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LGBTQ rights. They seek total equality from society. And so what happens?

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When we get away from God's design in marriage, we see homosexuals and everything else wanting to destroy marriage.

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They want to destroy the truth of marriage. They want to pretend that God didn't just make them male and female, but he made a whole spectrum within, and that being male or female is not what you are born with body parts -wise, and what your

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XX or XY chromosomes say throughout your entire body, but instead that it's about what you think you are, what you believe you are.

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And that there has to be a degree of tolerance that if you're not within that group, you need to tolerate, which means bow down to what

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I believe, because what I believe to be true is my truth. They forget the other half of postmodernism, by the way.

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Intolerance. And so you have to believe what they believe, and that's what you've got to do. And yet we look at what biblical marriage is, as I covered a little bit last year, so I won't go into terrible detail, but when

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Jesus was asked about divorce in Matthew 19, he answered back what biblical marriage is.

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And he quotes directly from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 to talk about this as a one -flesh union.

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Adam took a rib, made Eve, brought her back to him, bone to bone, flesh to my flesh. This is his wife now.

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And that they were also given a dominion mandate. So they were to multiply, fill the earth, take dominion over it.

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You can't take dominion by multiplying across the earth if you're not one male, one female.

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Biblical view of gender rights. We have to understand gender is inseparable from our biological body parts.

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And so one of the things I brought up last year is our entire body, depending on the study you look at, is made up between 30 and 60 trillion cells.

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I'm going to use the number 60. It doesn't matter what number you use. But 60 trillion cells, half the cells in my body, half the 60 trillion are going to be red blood cells or they're going to be sexual gametes.

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They're going to be sperm for me. We're going to clear that up right away.

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So the other 30 trillion cells are going to say either XX or in my case

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XY. Every cell other than red blood cells and the sexual gamete cells.

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Doesn't matter how many body parts you lop off and try to reform, my entire body is still screaming, guy, can't separate it.

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But why gender roles are trying to be brought down is because of people like Beth Moore who don't accept the biblical role that God gave them.

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The Bible teaches complementarianism. It teaches that there are certain roles. Look, men and women, are we equal in the eyes of God?

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Absolutely. We're both Imago Dei, so we're both equal. Yet, God assigns some specific roles to males and some specific roles to females.

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It's just the way it is. And I'll tell you, from a personal standpoint, and you'll hear this from a lot of people in church, as you're married and as time goes on and you continue to grow in biblical roles, that you start to see

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God's beauty in marriage when you see the roles of the male and the roles of the female when they're being done the way the

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Bible would teach. And I can guarantee you that a lot of problems that happen in marriage, including my own, happen when those roles, according to Genesis 3, don't quite go according to plan.

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And so, we can see this easily in what the ramifications are. And yet, we have in church today women wanting to teach something that they're not called to do, women wanting to be pastors, women wanting to become pastors.

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We see all kinds of issues within the church because of this. And you're going to see it in the nuclear family as well.

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So when we look at males and females in family, is when you take a male out of a household and a home is raised by a single parent female, does that kid learn the role that he's supposed to or does he seem to be a little bit off?

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Same thing happens if a male, a single parent male raises a child.

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We know, and you see this in psychology, that there's a major difference in kids who are raised in a home with a father and a mother versus ones that are single parent homes.

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And what we're starting to find is people who have grown up being adopted into two male homes or two female homes, how different they are actually from what you see in a single male and single female home.

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I'm sorry, a married male, male, female home. And so as we close up here, because my time is almost up.

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I might be one minute past right now. That's not true. I know that's not true because I've got 50 on here right now.

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So we have to understand sin. All humans born with original sin, we're all born with a sin nature.

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And then as Hebrews 9 .27 says, and just as it's appointed for man to die once, after that comes judgment, we're going to be accountable for our own individual sin.

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We're not going to be accountable for group sins, so to speak. We can only repent for sins we personally commit.

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But yet we have this context of generational sin out there, right? So institutional sin. And so in the

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Bible, people will take out of context certain passages that talk about kids and grandkids being punished for the sins of their father and grandfather.

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And so they take this passage, rip it out of context and say, look, this is the institutional sin that we see today.

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Generational sin we see today. And yet, if we take it in proper context, what does it say?

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The reason why we see the generational sin, so to speak, is because the fathers, I'm sorry, the kids and the grandkids do the same sins in general as the father and grandfather.

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And yet when they break that sin, when they don't do that sin anymore, they're not accountable to that sin.

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They're not accountable to the sins of their father or grandfather. Exodus 25 says, the soul who sins is the one who will die.

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And the last one we're going to come to now is reparations for slavery. And it's based on the same false premise we've talked about today that individuals today are responsible for the sins of past generations.

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So even though my family personally was not here in America at the time of slave trade, my dad came here in 1967, my mom's parents came a few decades before that from Europe, nobody in my family is responsible for the slave trade.

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Yet, because I am part of the oppressor group as a white male

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European descendant and everything else, I am supposed to be responsible and therefore have to give reparations for it.

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And they often take out of context Zacchaeus in Luke 19, 8 verses 10.

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And so we have to understand this properly. It says this, And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods

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I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. And Jesus said to him,

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Today's salvation has come to this house since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

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Look, Zacchaeus, was he told you need to go and pay back everybody?

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Out of the goodness of his heart and understanding his own sin against the people he sinned against himself personally is who he went to go pay back.

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And that's why it was a fruit of repentance there. Very different than the way it's being taught today in the social justice movement.

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They will use it, but they rip it out of context. It's their best text to use, really. And you know, so the gospel, what is the gospel?

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This book is the gospels being changed today. For I delivered you as a first report, and so I also received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the

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Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. This is the gospel by which we are saved.

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And this is the gospel that said that Christ died for my sins and that through his death, burial, and resurrection paid the penalty for my sins through God granting me repentance and faith.

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And so as I wrap up now, I hope we have at least some understanding of the social justice movement.

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Again, it's hard to do it justice in 55 minutes.

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I hope we have an understanding of kind of what's going on, the thought processes out there, and maybe how we can combat it in talking about what the

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Bible actually teaches, especially about what the Bible teaches about sin and repentance and what the gospel is.

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So on that, I thank you, and we'll close in prayer. Lord, I just thank you for bringing us together, and Lord, what a hard topic to be able to teach on,

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Lord. Lord, I just ask that you raise up bold leaders within the church today,

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Lord. I know we have some out there, Lord, so I pray that you raise up more, Lord, and correct the ill thinking that is going on in the church today that is seeking to destroy the church, seeking to destroy the inerrancy and sufficiency of your word,

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Lord, first and foremost, because that's where the ultimate attack is against. It's not against white males,

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Lord, who are of European descent and heterosexual and everything else, Lord. The attack is against you, and we just pray that you raise up leaders.

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Lord, we pray that you raise up everybody in here to be speaking boldly against this movement and be able to, with gentleness and respect, be able to teach people why this movement is anti -biblical in every way.

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In your holy and precious name we pray. Amen. This podcast is part of the

59:36

Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org

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