So Much Deception - Ligon Duncan Part 2

All right, everybody, part two. That's right, part two.

I got a lot of feedback about Ligon Duncan. And a lot to think about, there's just no question about it.

And I think it's very obvious that what I said in the first video about people greatly respecting

Ligon Duncan in the past, and just the feeling, the general emotions about just watching a man lie just so comfortably is pretty widespread.

And I understand where you're coming from, I really do. So there's a lot to consider. One person on Twitter, he actually made a very good comparison,

I think. And it's to King Saul. It's to King Saul, he sees

David out there winning, he sees David out there working and doing things that he lacks the courage for, he lacks the constitution for.

And instead of being encouraged by that, and instead of feeling like, wow, I've got someone that's for me doing this kind of work that's really not for me,

I'm not the right person for it, but there are right people out there for it, I can do my work and he can do his and we can work together for the

Lord. Instead of that, he becomes demoralized and he becomes angry and he becomes bitter and he seethes and he fights against David to his detriment.

It's just a very apt comparison, I think. Lincoln Duncan is a demoralized man and he's seen his efforts have success and then he's seen them dwindle and he's very upset about that.

And so instead of encouraging guys that are out there saying, hey, we can do this, we can disciple the nations, we can actually do it, it's actually gonna be accomplished and actually there's jobs for different people.

It's not just pastors and evangelists, it's everybody. Everybody can get involved and everybody can take ground for the

Lord and we're seeing success. Right now, they're small successes. The juggernaut is still pretty big, but the

Lord is on our side, we can do this. Instead of encouraging guys like that, he is doing the exact opposite.

He's trying to destroy guys like that. He's trying to destroy ministries like that. And I'm not even talking about me,

I'm talking about the actual ministers that are out there, the pastors that are building this kind of an ethos for their people.

And then, of course, it includes guys like me, but I'm not his primary target, of course.

His primary target is Moscow mood. His primary target is guys like Ogden and things like that.

And it's really a shame, it's really a shame. You read the story of King Saul, and it's a tragic tale, you know what

I mean? It's a very tragic tale. And I think that Ligon Duncan here, this is a tragedy. You know what

I mean? This is not, we have fun on this channel and I'm gonna continue to have fun, that's just what I do. But deep down in the foundations of this, this is a tragic tale.

And so we're gonna continue and we're gonna get after it and we're gonna have a good time. So, let's begin.

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Okay, here we go. Western, and I could go down a list of wonderful institutions where the

Bible is believed and theology is sound. They know they're out of step with their culture.

They know that. And so they've already taken a step to being marginalized.

And they're okay with that. And that's, to an old guy like me, that's very encouraging because my contemporaries, we were living in a time where there was at least outwardly evident church growth in our culture.

A lot of that was nominal. A lot of that was superficial. But because of that, we bought into worldly aspirations.

I wanna be pastor of a big church. I wanna have a big salary. I wanna drive a big car, live a big house and that sort of thing.

And my young people come to seminary, they know that that's not their future.

Their future may be a bivocational pastor. Their future may be planning a church in a bombed out department store in a dying small town.

And they're up for that. They just wanna be faithful. Yeah, and that can't but encourage me when

I see it. That is encouraging, and that's many of the people that choose the path that the

Moscow mood kind of encourages. They recognize that too. And even worse, it's not just that they're against the culture, but they know they have to contend with guys like Ligon Duncan as well.

And so ministry dollars aren't gonna be coming their way. You know what I mean? They're not going to get the support from the acts 29s of the world and things like that.

So it's actually even more of a uncomfortable situation for guys like that.

And even more so, the positions that often some of us take, they preclude us from working for certain kinds of companies and so being bivocational doesn't necessarily mean you work for another company because you could get canceled and get fired and you're more fragile that way.

And so they're doing the hard work of going independent or building their own business and things like that.

And so what he just said is very encouraging. I completely agree, even more so with people that are willing to confront the evils of the culture in addition to the rest of the mission from God.

We don't neglect the other stuff, but we also do the stuff in the public square that is necessary, the kinds of things that like John the

Baptist did and stuff like that. So very encouraging. I agree that whole kind of change in focus,

I think is very encouraging. So good on you, Ligon. I was talking with a mutual friend of ours recently and I was asking him about an issue in our cultural moment.

And he was like, yeah, I'm in India right now with 500 pastors who have no idea what you're talking about, but they're going out and risking their lives every day for the gospel.

And even as a historian, you think back, I mean, Arianism, I mean, several centuries of darkness, will the deity of Christ prevail in the church?

So this little cultural flare up in light of history, in light of what's happening all over the world, it's not a big reason to be discouraged.

And I get it, these kinds of cultural turns that were - So this is something they bring up later as well.

And so we'll probably cover it later in more fullness. But I noticed this and a bunch of other people noticed this too.

And we talked about it in the last video. It's like the fact that India doesn't understand or doesn't get it or doesn't care about our problems doesn't mean our problems are not real.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about them. India is India and we're the United States. Like, yeah,

I'm sure Indians have a lot more or different problems than what we have. And maybe they're even more intense and maybe they're worse.

Okay, that's fine, but that's India, right? I'm not an Indian, right? I live in the

United States, I'm an American. And so it only makes sense that I would be more wrapped up in the closer context to me.

And woke people try to do this all the time where they try to make you feel guilty for being concerned about your own communities more so than the communities of others.

And it's like, that's how it works. It has to work that way. Most of your time is spent on your own issues, your own family, and then a little bit more time is spent, a little bit less time is spent on your community and a little bit less time is spent on your state and then your nation and then the world.

I mean, the world can only take up so much of your time and your concern. And it's just so stupid.

You get online, you're like, well, don't you care what's going on with the Uyghurs? And I was like, well, first of all, I don't know what's going on with the

Uyghurs. And second of all, I live in New Hampshire. You know what I mean?

Like, if you wanna spend your time talking about and doing things for the Uyghurs, I'm not saying don't do that, but it doesn't make sense for you to expect someone that lives in New Hampshire to do everything that you're doing.

I've got issues that are not in my immediate context that I care deeply about, but I don't expect you to care about them because you're a different person.

It's a very, very, very weird comment. What about the people in China? They're laughing. Okay, what's that got to do with me?

We're living through and we're living it through a cultural turn. What happens is Christians have historically gone different directions in how to navigate those cultural turns.

And I can show it to you at kind of every age and stage and in every sort of geographical area of the globe.

And you look at China, I mean, one reason you have the three self... Yes, Christians have gone different, have employed different strategies to navigate cultural turns.

And there's potentially more than one strategy that's faithful, right? That's true.

But not all of those strategies are faithful. And so that's why you've got Ligon Duncan going woke.

Ligon Duncan is woke. And he decided that his strategy would be, well,

I'm gonna go woke. I'm gonna go along with this, with the crowd doing evil in this one. And that's my way.

And he actually even enunciated this once. He said that he's going woke essentially because he doesn't want the

LGBT guys to get his grandkids or something like that. So it's like a pragmatic thing.

See, I'll go a little woke, just so you don't come after the grandkids with the gay stuff. And that's not a faithful option, right?

Going along with the masking and the vaccines and all that and insisting that Christians have to do it in order to be righteous.

That is an option. You can go that route. It's not a faithful one though. And so let's make sure we get that straight, right?

Yeah, there potentially could be more than one faithful route to go. But there's a lot of non -faithful routes to go.

And sadly, many evangelicals have chosen that route. And Ligon, at least on a couple occasions, has chosen that route.

And I personally believe that this video is also an additional signal of the route he's chosen to go.

And it's not a good one. It's not a faithful one. Churches, and you have house churches, is Christians took a different turn in how do you deal with communism.

Now, I'm not commending one as equally good as the other, but I'm saying

Christians, when they're faced with these kinds of totalizing influences and demands from the culture, they will tend to go a couple of different directions in how they try to navigate that.

And we're seeing that right now. And the big thing in our culture, it's gender, marriage, and sexuality. That drives so many things in our culture right now, whether you're gonna be accepted, whether you can be employed, things of that nature.

Wow. All true. Speaking of gender and family and stuff related to that, should we abandon the term complementarianism and start using the term patriarchy?

Yeah. What an interesting and weaselly way to present that.

It's just, when I heard that, because I have listened to this part, when

I heard that, I could not believe it. It's like, should we abandon the term complementarian and then go with the term patriarchy?

As if that the only real difference is the term. It's not about the term.

It's about the actual content. It's about the thing itself. And the way he presents that is like, it's just the term.

I just don't get it. Like, why do that? Why ask a question in that way?

Because the answer you're gonna get is not gonna actually be a real answer to the question. It's gonna be an answer about the terminology.

And the facts are that complementarianism isn't enough. It isn't.

And we're gonna see why it's so strange. Maybe I shouldn't call it weaselly.

Maybe he's just interested in the terms for some reason. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe Sean DeMars doesn't know that patriarchy is different than complementarianism.

I'm not gonna assume that he's asking in a weasel way. That was my mistake. I'm gonna take that one back. Retract. Maybe he just doesn't know.

I think complementarianism is a better term than patriarchy for the very reason that the term was chosen in the first place.

I get that the term is a recent term. And I think John Piper and Wayne Grudem and Mary Cassian sat down one night at a hotel outside of Wheaton, Illinois and came up with, hey, that term that we go with.

But what they were trying to say is there were already people that were into patriarchy in the bad way that we see it out there today.

There were already people like that around. And so they want to say, no, no, we don't want to use patriarchy like that because we're not trying to baptize misogyny and abusive authoritarianism and all this kind of stuff.

We're trying to express what the Bible says about the way that men and women are to relate to one another in marriage and in the church.

So you see the problem with asking the question that way? Because he gets to be so vague. He gets to just kind of say, well, it's like we intentionally chose it because we didn't want it to be patriarchy like the way it is out there right now, the bad way, because we don't want to baptize misogyny.

So is he talking about Michael Foster? I think so. I don't mean you specifically,

Michael. I mean just your perspective. I think he is talking about that, but he doesn't say it.

And again, this goes back to just the skilled nature of deception here.

He's like, he doesn't really say that he's talking about Eric Kahn and Michael Foster and people like that, but you kind of get that impression that he is, but he's not really.

So you see what I'm saying? The deception here is really a high level version of deception.

And so it ends up being a worthless question. You know what I mean? We should be complimentarianism.

We should have the term complimentarianism because we don't want to be like the misogynists out there. Well, who are the misogynists?

There are people out there that have a bad version of patriarchy. Are you just talking about those people?

Or are you talking about guys like Foster and guys like Joel Webbin and stuff like that? I don't know. I don't know.

And so I still think the term is a good term, but the key is of course, that we are teaching the truth from scripture and it is going to be uncomfortable to teach that truth from scripture, no matter what terminology you use in this culture.

It's sort of pick your poison. Because people, it does not matter how far you bend over to be helpful and bring people along.

It's like no good deed goes unpunished. But it is effective though. I mean, because the thing is, yeah, they're right.

Like some people, if you're a complimentarian, they say you're misogynist anyway.

Of course there's extreme cases, but then there are plenty of people that would say they're complimentarianism that I would say they're pretty feminist.

And so it is effective. That's why they do it because it is a way to sort of be softer.

And so you don't gain everybody, that's true. You don't gain everybody, but you do gain some people that hold views that are contrary to scripture.

You'll get some people out there that'll say, well, I'm complimentarian, but I believe that we could have female pastors as long as they're not the lead pastor, or as long as they're not a paid pastor or a teaching pastor.

Like they've got all kinds of views that are, but you see, so this is the thing. Like, again, the deception here is very layered.

It's very skilled. Yes, you're right. Like some people here are complimentarian and all they say is, oh, you're a misogynist too.

But some people don't. So yeah, you don't win them all, but you win some by bending over and doing all of these other things.

And so again, it's just, it's very slippery. He's a very skilled liar.

It's as simple as that. He's a skilled deceiver. This area. Yeah.

And you've probably seen the thing. Kathy Keller tells the story in her, in one of her little books that they had discipled this young woman along at Redeemer Church in New York.

And complimentarianism is one of the things that they teach as part of the core teaching of the church.

And this woman gets ready to join and she says, now wait, do we have women as pastors and elders here?

And Kathy said, well, no. I mean, we are convictionally, we believe in qualified men to serve as pastors and elders.

And the woman looks at her right in the eyes and said, I feel like you just told me that my father was a child molester.

Wow. You know, so it, you know, all of that careful, slow, sweet discipleship, bringing somebody along and you're looked at like you are a monster.

And so it doesn't matter what you call it. If you believe what the Bible says, there are gonna be some people in this culture utterly offended by that.

And my personal view about that is, that means that you should never put it on the back burner. You need to be upfront with people.

Let me tell you the three things you're gonna hate about that. Get fired in the interview. We do that in our church membership classes.

Here are the five distinctives. We're complimentarian, we're cessationist, we're, you know. Yeah, because what we don't want is for you to join the church in a year later and be like, what?

Yeah. Okay, since you brought up Kathy Keller, our brother. All right, we're gonna stop there.

Shorter episode today. But anyway, again, I want you to understand like, and there's a lot more coming, you know,

I've already done two videos on this and it's probably gonna have four or five more. It ends up just being such a, it ends up being just such a masterclass of deception.

You know, where, you know, you kind of get this impression that he's like, again, people from this view, they talk about others without talking about them.

So you can never check your facts and they try to set it up so that they can't be wrong because they never actually said the thing that they didn't say.

But they lie by equivocation, they lie by omission, they lie by framing it incorrectly.

It's a very sneaky, Ligon Duncan is very sneaky in this video.

And it's a shame, it's a real shame. Anyway, that's it for today. I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.

♪ Fuego, mi amor por ti es puro fuego, es mi amor por ti.