Truthscript Tuesday: Oppenheimer, Jeremiah 29:11, & Johnny Horton

Welcome, once again, to TruthScript Tuesday on a Wednesday. I feel like that line from the

Lego movie, if anyone's seen that, I think there's a line in there about Taco Tuesday on a

Thursday. And that's how I feel. I couldn't get to it yesterday. And we haven't done TruthScript Tuesday for a week.

So I missed last Tuesday. So I thought, you know, I got to do it, even if it's on a Wednesday. So we're going to go over a number of articles.

We actually have six articles today, so it might be a little bit longer, but I don't think that some of these articles will take as much time.

But I'm going to be summarizing some of them, some really good content this week on the TruthScript website.

Before we get to that, though, just want to remind everyone that we have a men's retreat coming up on September 21st through 24th in the

Adirondack Mountains, the beautiful Adirondack Mountains in New York. We have a number of speakers, Tom Rush, Andrew Rappaport is going to be there from Striving for Eternity Ministries, E .D.

Robles, some of you are familiar with his podcast, Lance Nidihara, who's actually a really accomplished chef.

He's won the TV show Chopped, if you've seen that. I think he won it twice, if I'm not mistaken, but he's worked with Ray Comfort and Living Waters to produce some of their material.

So he's going to be speaking. And then my own dad, who's also a pastor, Scott Harris, is going to be there and I'll be there. The main speaker is

Tom Rush. He's going to be talking about some of the experiences he's had in the military and in ministry.

He's a pastor. He was an officer, though, I think in the Marines, if I'm not mistaken. But he is going to talk about what being a real man is and how to be a real man in these challenging times.

So it's overcomingevilconference .com, overcomingevilconference .com, you can go sign up there.

And if you go there, there is a feature I should probably mention to everyone. There is a carpooling feature.

So if you're traveling from a distance, you can click on this carpooling feature and it will show you some of the there's a waitlist, too.

If you if you don't see something, someone coming from your area, you can join a waitlist if you want to carpool. But you have someone coming from Ohio, someone coming from Pennsylvania.

And I know I saw this morning someone join the waitlist, I think from New Jersey, if I'm not mistaken.

So you can do that. And that should help coordinate people's rides who are coming from distances.

I know that's a concern for some. But I mean, if you're anywhere in between any of these places, too, you can contact that person and say, hey,

I'm on your route. Can you pick me up in Pennsylvania? And if you're coming from a place that's south of there, for example, anyway, we're looking forward to a great time at this conference.

I would highly encourage you. You're not going to get a better bang for your buck than the beautiful Adirondack mountains in the fall foliage season, the peak of it with great food, with great, great speakers, great fellowship.

And there's plenty of times to enjoy the outdoor environment there while you're there. So everyone who went last year that I talked to said they had a wonderful time.

And so we're looking forward to another wonderful time this year. All right, let's talk about the TruthScript articles that we have on the website.

So I'm I'm just at TruthScript dot com, the main page here, and I will remind everyone if they want to submit an article, they can scroll down to the bottom of the page.

There is a submission tab. I think it's published. You press publish and there'll be guidelines for what's expected and then you can create an account and you can be part of TruthScript as well.

So this week, we're going to start with some articles from last week. Actually, we're going to start here.

Christian, here are four reasons to skip Oppenheimer, the movie Oppenheimer. And this was written on July 26 by David Harris, the president of TruthScript, my brother as well.

And and he goes over some of the ethical questions. There's two camps that one camp says that dropping the atom bombs was wrong.

It's not it's not morally justified to purposely target noncombatants. And then another camp says, yeah, but if we didn't do that, we would have to invade

Japan and there would have been, you know, 10 million deaths, American deaths or there would have it would have been worse.

So dropping the atom bombs, I mean, comparatively was morally justified.

So David doesn't take a firm stand on this because that's not the purpose of it, really.

But he just says that despite the release of Christopher Nolan's trombone blasting, rapid scene switching, dysphoria inducing

Oppenheimer last week, we'll have to keep waiting for the film for that film, perhaps indefinitely, the film that deals with these issues,

I suppose. So so it doesn't you would think that this gets into that that moral dilemma, but it doesn't.

Apparently, I have not seen the movie. As the title indicates, I'm recommending you skip Oppenheimer. And he says, regardless of what the winsome evangelical bloggers might tell you.

And he gives a few reasons, he says. He goes to Philippians four, eight, he talks about the things we're supposed to think on finally, brothers, whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable.

If there's any excellence, if there's anything worthy of praise, think about these things. He talks about Ephesians 511, which says, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

And he says, Oppenheimer doesn't actually fall under either of these.

There's nothing worthwhile in the film that will inspire you or help you live life in a way that's give you gives you a perspective to help you live life in a way that is makes you a better person.

I mean, some film can really do that. There's some of my favorite movies. You think of like Chariots of Fire. You think of Ben Hur.

You see some of these great movies, some of the great Western movies, even they give you an example of courage, of standing against the odds, even when it costs you.

They give you examples of sacrifice for the right things. And that can inspire you. That can help you in your walk with the

Lord, in your daily life. This doesn't do any of those things. And if it was to expose evil, if it was just to show, hey, this guy is evil and it shows evil for what it is.

I mean, there's something maybe worthwhile there, but it doesn't even do that. There doesn't do either one. And so he says, you know, that that's really there's there's no moral advantage you gain from going to a movie like this.

He says that there's shameless prostituting.

There's, I guess, some very sexually explicit scenes. So you succumb to that if you go to a movie like this.

There's a disturbing detachment. He says there will be some predictable reactions among evangelicals to Oppenheimer.

The typical response in the blogosphere will probably be a recognition that the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II was unjustified and sinful.

The movie demonstrates this by insinuating that Oppenheimer felt guilty for his role in developing weapons.

Unfortunately, this response misses something monumental going on in Oppenheimer in the wake of statues and war memorials being torn down over the last decade across the

West. Many have noted that the low hanging fruit that's been erased would give way to a wider, more comprehensive attack on our history.

And that would one day include World War II heroes. I have predicted that myself, and I've done it because I've just said, look, my other podcast conversations that matter.

I've said, look, the first time nuclear weapons were ever used in history on a civil civilian populations in a context in which you had

United States military men and prominent figures saying racially insensitive things about their enemies in Japan.

And it was common. It was accepted. Cartoons were made about it. You have the fact that the army was segregated at the time when this was all going on, racially segregated.

And there's just there's too much there that I don't understand how you you can't take you take down a statue of Robert E.

Lee. How do you escape taking down a statue to like the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima? The only thing that seems to have saved the

World War II vets is really two things in my mind. One is that some of them are still alive. There's still a few of them alive.

My grandfather is one of them. And and even though, you know, their kids are still alive, so the boomer generation remembers them.

So it's very hard to rip down that history when you have people directly connected. That's grandpa.

That's dad. But as you get farther away from that, they'll they'll be less of a connection.

You also have their sacrifices and so forth and memorialized in film. But those films,

I would say there's still some films like that. But the films now are like Oppenheimer. It's diminishing. But the second reason that I think there's been this kind of chief elevation of the

Nazis is the worst iteration of any political government in history. The worst regime that's ever it's ever existed.

And the United States was morally right to oppose the Nazis. And because Japan, you know, they sided with the

Nazis, that this means that the United States can be absolved of any guilt, whether that's dropping nuclear bombs, whether that's carpet bomb or whatever they called it was a carpet bombing.

But they bombed, you know, a lot like in really nasty ways.

Places like Dresden, whether it's I mean, war has wars, messy war is always going to have messy elements to it.

But there were some particularly bad things that that happened even on the Allied side. And and you could use those.

You could use those to say, well, we should take down these statues, which I would be totally against. But anyway, that's making a longer point here.

I think I think that's pretty much the point that David's making here, too.

And there's not there's a nihilistic trend, very common other movie genres. But World War Two has this idealistic sacred shield protecting it from deconstruction.

That shield appears to have been lowered. That's significant. That that line there might be the most significant thing about Oppenheimer that.

The World War Two movies now are not I mean, you see this with Civil War movies, by the way, you see this with movies about the war between the states from, you know, you have like Getty Gettysburg and then you had gods in general.

So it's probably the last movie that still showed some forth some honor, some you had the Hunley you had gone with the wind.

You even had some of the Disney movies made in the 60s that touched on Civil War things that saw both sides generally as honorable and standing up for what they thought was right.

And and so, you know, this was just the common it humanized.

This was just a common theme until you get movies like Cold Mountain and which I haven't even seen the whole thing.

I turned it off. This is worthless. You get movies. I mean,

I don't even watch movies on that subject today that come out because they're worthless. They are they're all about deconstructing something, most of the time inaccurately, like Free State of Jones.

Very inaccurate. It's it's stuff like that. And so anyway, that they're doing it to World War two now is where it's starting.

The beginning of that process is starting is what David's trying to say. He says it's by elites for elites.

It's critically acclaimed. So the people in that's generally bad now, right? If the Hollywood industry likes it.

And you get the sense that this is a film you need to believe is highly important and valuable.

So there's this kind of peer pressure that if you don't think it's highly important and valuable, you must not have good taste. Film's not interesting.

It's not really entertaining. The trailer made it seem like it would be intense, but it's just bland.

It's mostly political drama. So conclusion, I was extremely excited for Oppenheimer. I've eaten up much of Nolan's past work,

Christopher Nolan, especially the prestige and inception. I'm a sucker for the mind bending, have to watch it again to understand plot lines.

But he said that's not what Oppenheimer is. So anyway, that's that's the review of Oppenheimer.

Don't go see Oppenheimer. I guess go see, I don't know, Mission Impossible instead or something. And and I actually did see that movie, so I can say that it's pretty clean.

I'm there might have been a few. I don't even know if there are words in it, to be honest with you. I don't remember anything significant.

It was just an action adventure movie. So maybe that's the one you need to go see. Gospel Coalition would be telling you right now.

You should probably go see the Barbie movie, I think. But we haven't done a review on the Barbie movie. I don't know that we will at TruthScript.

If someone submits something, we'll take a look. But that's on Oppenheimer. The second piece

I want to go over is by Pastor Troy Skinner. He's written before for TruthScript. Is Jeremiah 2911 about personal prosperity?

This is a great topic and not a lot of material is on this topic, correcting the misappropriation of it, because people take

Jeremiah 2911 for. I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord plans for prosperity. And they say, that's for me.

The Lord knows the plans I have. He has for me. And these are plans for me personally. And he says, look, you're ripping it out of its context and applying it to something that it wasn't intended for.

Jeremiah 2911 is a comforting verse. And I suppose it should be a comforting verse. And so it gives you some background.

He says, God set the nation of Israel apart and specially cared for his chosen people.

And you see that throughout the Old Testament. They entered the promised land. Their obedience to the law would bring blessing. Early in their history, the

Israelites demanded a human king. The kingdom split in two. So you had the northern and the southern kingdom. They ignored the warnings by a number of God's prophets.

100 years later, Jeremiah brought a similar message to the southern kingdom, as had been delivered to the northern kingdom.

Judah failed to learn from the negative example of their brothers to the north. So most of the southern kings practiced idolatry and committed abominable acts.

It was in the midst of this rebellious climate that Jeremiah was called to speak to God's people. And so there is this element of judgment.

He's telling his countrymen, time's up. This is the primary thrust of the book. It's no wonder Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet.

He was preaching a death knell against his own people. Can you imagine going to your own community and start just saying, look, time's up.

You have rejected God. Judgment is coming. It'd be hard. Can you imagine doing that to your own family, your own countrymen, your own kinsmen?

It's very difficult. So he had an unpopular message. False prophets contradicted it.

It was an unpleasant truth. Jeremiah even used the language of a new covenant, though, which other than in the book of Jeremiah is only used in the

New Testament. It's tempting to understand Jeremiah 2911 in this context. However, this glorious renewal isn't talked about until chapter 30.

So he's saying this kind of light at the end of the tunnel. Pastor Troy Skinner doesn't think that's what

Jeremiah 2911, I guess, is about. So it isn't the context of the passage leading up to Jeremiah 2911.

Jeremiah would be charged with treason for what he wrote in chapter 29, mainly that the Jews shouldn't fight against exile.

God had a plan for a remnant of his own people, and it involved going willingly to Babylon, where they would actually work with their captors.

Jeremiah wrote a letter telling the exiles to settle down and raise families in Babylon. The letter in Jeremiah 29 told the exiles to peacefully seek the benefit of the nation that took them captive.

Another verse that maybe is taken out of context, too. This is the verse that the Tim Keller types love to use about valuing the city that you're in.

You've got to love New York City or something. Of course, you should seek the welfare of the places that you are, whether city or not.

But the whole point of the context is, look, you should be in the promised land. If you had obeyed, that's where you'd be.

But this is where you are because of disobedience, so you need to make the best of it. That's the whole point. So it's not so much about seeking the welfare of those who are unbelievers around you, although that's a good thing.

It's about making sure that you put down roots, temporarily at least, in the area that you're in for the good of your people.

Don't pine for something that is better, even though it is better, because this is what

God has for you right now. That actually would make the application that the Kellerites give a little different, if you think about it.

Yeah, New York City is not a great place to be or something like that, but don't pine for something better right now because of your disobedience,

God puts you in New York City. That's not the application they want to make, but I digress. Jeremiah told the exiles that after 70 years,

God would come to them and fulfill His promise. The 70 years of Jeremiah can be understood in a variety of ways, but one way or another, the principle of fulfillment should be understood as arriving at the cross of Christ.

So God is sovereign over history, and He chooses pagan nations like Cyrus to bring

His people back to the promised land. In doing these things, God sets the stage for the central point of human history, which of course is the coming of Christ.

So what's wrong with seeing Jeremiah 29 .11 as merely a verse to comfort the individual Christian? If we see the only personal blessing in this verse, we can lose sight of the context of judgment and tribulation.

The message of this verse was delivered in a letter from Jeremiah to God's chosen people when they were in exile.

The people were at that very moment experiencing judgment, yet there is this promise of astounding restoration that would come through that judgment.

Here is an indicator of the ultimate judgment that would bring the ultimate restoration approximately five centuries later.

Then he ends it with, he says, the 11th verse in Jeremiah 29 can certainly bring comfort to the individual, but this isn't a verse aimed primarily at the individual.

Jeremiah is writing a corporate letter to a group. In this verse, when God says He has plans to prosper you, He is talking about a corporate you.

In certain parts of the U .S., this verse might better be translated as, I know the paths I have for y 'all, declares the

Lord, plans to prosper y 'all and not do harm to y 'all, plans to give y 'all hope and a future.

God has a plan for a whole people, and that plan for His people is accomplished through the saving work of Jesus. Inappropriately, seeing this verse as primarily a message to the individual is to minimize the grandness of this word from God.

He will prosper and not harm an entire nation of believers through the epochs of human history. Here's the main point that Pastor Skinner is bringing out here, which is a really good one.

Most of the time, this is applied to God bringing about the best possible outcome in your situation, because He blesses those who are called according to His purpose.

It's in that vein of He won't leave you or forsake you. There are these precious promises, and Jeremiah 29 .11

is kind of lopped in there. Things are going to turn out good. They're bleak now, but they're going to turn out well because God loves you and He wants to bless you individually.

Sometimes there's a sense of like, because you're doing the right thing. This trial doesn't make sense because you've been doing the right thing, but it's going to turn around.

Jeremiah 29 .11 is more about like, you messed up. You did the wrong thing. You're in judgment. You're going to have to hanker down where you are, even though you don't want to be there.

Down the road, though, don't worry. God will deliver you. It ain't now, though. You have to bear the punishment for disobedience.

That's at least what I'm picking up from this. That is about Jeremiah 29 .11.

We have another biblical article here from my dad, Pastor Scott Harris, who will be at the

TruthScript conference, living in the time of the judges. This is actually a fairly simple article.

He just talks about what the book of Judges really gets across, the point it gets across.

Proverbs 16 .25 says, there's a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. Judges illustrates this.

America has historically functioned with a comparatively high level of personal freedom because of the moral virtues of the society influenced by Christianity, but that's changing.

We've had God's blessing because of that, but that is changing. As an increasing percentage of the population rejects

God, there has been a corresponding decline in self -control. That's what we're seeing around us.

It resembles Israel during the time of the judges. One of the things I was thinking about this morning is you can see during the split kingdoms,

Northern and Southern Kingdom of Israel, if you read 1 and 2 Kings, you're going to find that there's a pattern of mostly bad kings.

You don't get too many good kings. Hezekiah is a good king, but he stands out. There's just not too many.

I don't know what the percentage is, but that ratio is pretty high. Evil kings, more of them than good kings, minority of good kings.

You look at the judges, and it's even worse, I would say. You have these temporary little blips where God raises someone up to do a certain work, and then they may even fail.

They may not even be—you look at Barak. He couldn't even have Deborah hold his hand.

You look at the judges, and this is a period of leaderlessness, essentially. That's the same thing we have now.

We talk about managerial elite theory and so forth, but you can see that even though you don't have the

Industrial Revolution or modernity or any of those things, you do have a similar scenario in the Book of Judges in the fact that you just don't have any leaders.

People aren't respectable. You don't have enough of those kinds of people that are willing to sacrifice, that have the loyalty of their people.

We're in that situation now. We're in a similar situation where we just—I mean, why is Trump doing so well?

Of all people, really, Donald Trump, with all his personal moral failings and everything, why does he have the trust of people?

This is a longer conversation, but it's because mostly, I think, because there's such a dearth of trust in people who have lied, who have let their constituents down, who have said they're going to do something and they don't do it, who are about personal advancement and not loving their own people.

Trump has managed to convince people that he actually is more authentic, even despite his failings, that he actually loves people, that he actually has their best interest in mind.

That's really all it is, in my opinion. Because he's so hated by people who do want their own advancement, who don't care about people, it serves to boost his credibility.

People have lamented, why Trump? Why not someone else? Well, it's simple, in my mind, because where is the someone else?

There really aren't people, at least operating at that level, who managed to make it to that level before being disqualified for some reason, that can convince people to trust them.

So anyway, we're living in that time. The first reason for the failure of the theocracy and the need for judges was the incomplete obedience of the people and driving out, destroying the people that had been in the land.

So because they didn't destroy the Canaanites, this was a big problem. God reveals in both Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 7 that Yahweh, your

God, will clear away these nations before you, little by little. You will not be able to put an end to them quickly, for the wild beasts will grow numerous, too numerous for you.

Before his death, Joshua promised them that God would drive out the pagan nations as promised if they would cling to and obey him.

If they would not, then he would not drive them out and they would become a snare and a trap. And that's exactly what happened.

So their failure to obey meant the pagan nations are still around them. And after Joshua and all the generation that followed him died, there was another generation after them that did not know the

Lord, nor yet the work which he had done for Israel. So you have a generation that forgets their history. That's the next step.

So they disobeyed and they forget their history. Sound familiar? By the time of the judges, the current generation didn't have even a memory of their godly ancestors.

And then you have idolatry. Without a memory of what God has done or his commands, they serve the Baal and the Asherah. And so they fall into idolatry, and that brings more chastisement from God.

And they mix with the pagan nations. A major factor in the pagan nations influencing Israel was intermarriage. This was in direct violation of God's command that they do not mix with the nations of Canaan.

So they intermarry with people that have a different tradition, different faith. And it's hard.

This is one of the things that I've noticed, even with the whole debate over LGBT stuff, when someone has a family member who claims to be one of these identities, things often change.

That person could have been orthodox in their theology against it, and then things change because you have someone in close proximity to you who is now advocating the thing that you opposed, but you don't want to reject them.

And you feel like if you reject their ideas, you reject them. And that's just the way humans work. This is why

God warned, look, if you willfully bring in these pagan peoples and you think you're strong enough, you're not, you're going to succumb to their ideas at some point, or at least you're going to soft -pedal it.

And when you soft -pedal it, that's just a stepping stone into succumbing to it. And then they reap the consequences of their disobedience.

They did what was right in their own eyes, and that led to chaos on the social level.

It's just basically saying we shouldn't be surprised at what's happening in the West. We've seen this show before, and I think that's a good observation.

It's easy, especially for political conservatives, to get lost in the theories. I know

I sometimes will just think a lot about what did modernity do to us and looking at things as extensions of that, which modernity did a lot, but there are just some basic things.

If you just open a Bible and you read it and you see what God says, you can see clearly what's actually happening.

And the solutions are fairly simple in a way. There's complicated, certainly ways of,

I guess, administering some of these solutions, but the principle is we've got to get back to God.

We've got to get back to honoring God. Now, how do we do that? That's where you can get into discussions, but that's the simple solution here, a return to obedience.

And then there's an article that I wrote called Russell Moore Loses His Religion. I'm not going to go over this one because I already did a podcast on Conversations That Matter, my other podcast, where I talk in detail about Russell Moore's book.

But this, if you want it tight, here's a review of the book that just gets to the point, hard -hitting.

Russell Moore Loses His Religion on truthscript .com. Then we have an article from Charles Jacoby, Daily Worship, A Reminder Against Subjectivism.

And he talks about the importance of daily worship. This is convicting for even me. We've been enjoying—so he talks about enjoying family worship.

And he says that it has not only brought us closer to the Lord, but it serves as a time for us to commune with one another.

And that's so important to remember, that your family worship time is not just about you coming to the

Lord, although that's the main thing. It's about you together doing it, and in that process, a bond forms.

The sweet moments are great. It's double the joy to encounter things in Scripture together we had not before. Those pleasures aside, it's dawned on me.

There's a derivative benefit of daily worship. One night before dinner, I was in quite a mood.

The week was stressful, he says. I had loads of PhD research duties on my plate. I was scheduled for two presentations, an exam, and some other research obligations were looming over me.

I was walking around the house in a cloud of cantankerousness. My stress was visible in my appearance and likely audible in my tone.

I was not controlling my emotions like I ought to. Solomon says, he who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his own spirit is better than he who captures a city.

I wasn't capturing any cities. Thankfully, I recognized how I was acting before meeting my wife at the table.

I knew we would soon worship together. It came to me that my attitude was in the way of things, was jeopardizing the time, and would soon ruin the pleasure of eating a handmade meal.

By the way, that's great. For wives, just know your husbands appreciate those handmade meals. Anyway, a pleasure that is more than mere eating.

Yes, it is. And turn the air sour before worship. What a shame. Could I be so pompous as to facilitate the liturgical exercise of worship in an ungrateful state?

Facilitate them before the triune God? I tightened up, once aware of my ire. Shortly after reading the law, confession, and catechesis, my emotions had faded.

Soon, I was settled. It is beautiful. This keeps you regular as far as your homeostasis is maintained, your spiritual homeostasis, when you cultivate this.

So he talks about how his emotions subsided. Daily worship trains us to hone a certain mastery over ourselves, to override what we feel in the moment, and eventually obtain how we ought to feel, and how we ought to act according to context.

The primary mechanism that trains us is the expectation of worship itself. Those who practice it are daily benefactors.

And so, man, this is a great insight, in my opinion. I'm going to just skip ahead here.

He says, consider how being ingenuine is contra the modern subjectivist mindset.

Often, the modern mind takes the inner and impresses it on the outer, letting one's emotions and subjective states rule the day.

Authenticity is the chief virtue. So that is very true. You're supposed to be authentic. Even if that authenticity is something evil within you that's part of your sin nature, at least let it out.

Be authentic, right? And he says, this is wrong. This is not how we should behave.

We shouldn't prize that. And of course, oftentimes, here's the deception. What we think of as authentic is not even authentic.

There's a distinction between—there's your sin nature, and then there's, I guess you could say, your created nature.

There's the way that God created you to be, right? And in the second Adam, in Jesus Christ, there's a restoration.

There is the ability to do those things for the right motive that God has given to us.

So there's this restoration and this overturning of the sin nature and the expected complete defeat of it at the time of glorification.

And so you have the sanctifying process that you're in, where you're putting to death the deeds of the flesh, and you're able to do it because you are redeemed.

But even in man's state in which he's not redeemed, there are—Jesus talks about this.

Would even an ungodly father give his child a snake when he asked for a fish? No, because there are these instinctual things that are part of who you are that are good things

God gave you. They don't necessarily give—if you're a non -Christian and you don't have the right motives, it's not a heavenly good.

It doesn't please God enough to gain His favor. It's not something that can apply to your redemptive status at all, but it is the outworking of something good that God created, though marred by sin.

And so anyway, what am I trying to say? The bottom line here, what I'm trying to say—and this is not in the article,

I'm just saying this—is that the authenticity movement, if you want to call it that, seeks to take things that you feel are important and make those your—and wear those on your sleeve and shout those things out.

But it's really more of a justification for your fleshly desires, not the way—so your authentic self, let's say, is you're a man, right?

But if you do this transition and you say, I'm not a man anymore, I'm a woman now, that's supposedly now your authentic self.

Of course, it's not your authentic self. Of course, it's not the way you were designed, but it is the way that you feel. It is the way that you think, based on experience, you should be.

So experience becomes the chief way to figure out your authentic self and who you are.

So he says, look, he talks about Romans 7, for there I know there is nothing good that dwells in me that is in my flesh, for the willing is present in me, but the working out is not good.

So he says, look, there's a sin nature here. This authentic self is not good. We have to conform, and devotional life helps you conform to a standard, to the right thing.

And regular time in the Word with your family is important for that reason.

So anyway, it's a good article. It's a convicting article. And then the last article that I want to talk about is—I like this one.

This is from Pastor Seth Brickley, Seeing God's World Through the Music of Johnny Horton. Now, some of you might not know who

Johnny Horton is. He died, I want to say, like in 1961 or so, or I guess 1960.

He died November 5, 1960. So yeah, I mean, unless you are very old, you wouldn't remember his songs on the radio or anything.

But I happen to know who Johnny Horton is because, like Seth, when I was younger, I guess my dad had a

CD and we listened to some Johnny Horton. And some of his classics are like North to Alaska, Whispering Pines, The Battle of New Orleans.

That'll still show up on the oldie station. And these were Americana music.

It was music about the United States, music about the beauty of the

United States, the history of the United States, the heroism. And he talks about being a child going to—on a road trip to Alaska.

And during our vacation, we saw God's beauty and creation from Seward to Fairbanks. Alaska is unlike any other state.

It has oceans. It has—he talks about the beauty of Alaska, and I've been there, and it's incredible. It is incredible. While we journeyed through this majestic land, we had

Johnny Horton with us the whole way. As we drove and listened to his songs, it was as if he was in the car singing with us.

And the reason everyone knows Johnny Cash and not Horton is that he—Johnny

Cash had a full music career, something Johnny Horton was not able to fulfill. So he wonders, you know, what if Johnny Horton hadn't died in that car accident?

Would we—he would probably be a household name, right? And that would have been a great thing because he was so patriotic and Americana that, you know, he could have used that,

I suppose. But anyway, he says that they were listening to his music, and he says what you can tell listening to Horton's music is that he loved the world that he lived in.

In North Alaska, he describes the gold rush in Alaska, winding rivers, the northern lights running wild, found in the land of the midnight sun.

He describes the old white mountain just a little southeast of Nome. I presume this mountain is referring to Mount McKinley, now called

Denali. So he talks about that. In a different song, Whispering Pines, he captures the pleasant sight of pines as they move in the wind.

In this—in his songs, he also highlights the deep love that is found between a man and a woman. So, of course, love songs are part of this.

He talks about those. These are—these are instincts given by God. In Scripture, Adam was so smitten by Eve that he wrote a poem to her.

This is—this is the last—at last, his bone in my bones and flesh in my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

Lastly, Horton's songs are patriotic. We live in an area where American elites are trying to deconstruct our past, but Horton celebrates the past.

The song, The Battle of New Orleans, the World War II song, Sink the Bismarck.

Jim Bridger, he even writes a song about the Confederate Army called Johnny Reb. And in 1958,

Horton sang the song to the final surviving Confederate soldier. And so, he says that Johnny Horton was able to see the good in even—in

Confederates, in all kinds of different people from America's history who had heroic attributes.

Horton's music shows the image of God displayed in him. He recognized what a wonderful world God created through his beauty, shown in nature through the good order and romance and the story of American history that God has written.

And by the way, I should—I should probably pause there. Some people's antennas might go up. What do you mean God has written the story of American history?

Well, he's written the story of all people's histories. This isn't saying that America is the new Jerusalem or Israel. It is just saying that, look,

God is—this is in Providence, which is something people used to talk about a lot more. In his Providence, he is accomplishing his purposes as mysterious as they can be through the complex history of a people.

By all accounts, Horton was not a believer, but at his funeral, interestingly, his dear friend Johnny Cash read scripture from John 20 that describes the resurrection of Christ.

Even though this old singer did not appear to be a child of God, I am grateful for him. As God's image bearer, he showed me something of God through helping me see this world better.

For that, I will always thank the Lord for Johnny Horton. So this is actually an interesting piece to come right after this piece on daily worship, because the piece on daily worship is saying that, look, we have this sin nature, and we need to come back to reality.

We need to come back to what the scripture says, and that will help us. Then this piece on Johnny Horton says, look, even someone who is not a

Christian can recognize certain things. I do not think they contradict at all.

I think it is true that, as I said before, we have certain instincts that God has given to us from creation that are good, like caring for your young, for example.

These are good instincts. When people do not do that, even the non -Christians say, that is a psychopath. That is someone who is not normal. Because they have fallen so far into depravity that they have rejected the

God -given instincts that are just basic to all humans. Johnny Horton, whether he was a

Christian or not, there was a cultivation there of some good things, some things that he was able to see the world, the good things about the world that God had made, and sing about them, whether that was in history or in nature.

That is, I think, one of the reasons I tend to like Johnny Horton. There are a lot of singers that I like that some of them might not be

Christians, and authors I like, and movies I like that the directors probably were not Christians necessarily, but they are showing something good about God's world.

Even they can recognize, as Romans 1 talks about, these attributes of God. Of course, they suppress some of them.

The deeper into sin you get, the more you suppress. The more deeper into idolatry, but it does not mean

God has not given them the mechanism or the instruments for ascertaining that kind of beauty in creation.

That is True Script for today, True Script Tuesday. Do not forget, overcomingevilconference .com,

and you can sign up for the men's conference. I look forward to seeing those who come there.

There is financial aid available for those who need that. Just contact me at info at truescript .com.

There is information over at overcomingevilconference .com. God bless.