"Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" and The Social Justice Christians - Part 1 - The 5th Commandment

Do you remember when Dr. Ligon Duncan said this? Well, I think you can worry about it in life. Don't ever worry that Ligon Duncan really grooves on cultural

Marxism, okay? This is the dadgum second commandment.

Sounds like he's not kidding. Sounds like they're not kidding either.

At the time, I didn't really have too harsh of a critique for him because it's very vague what he's saying, though somebody called me a thunder puppy because of it.

It's like a compliment. It's like the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. He's talking about the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself.

That is what he's talking about. What I wanted to do, because he was not that clear with this,

I wanted to talk about the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Love is not up for debate.

It's not for us to decide what love means. Lots of people quote love your neighbor as yourself, but they have no idea what love is.

In fact, they promote things that are unloving. My argument is that social justice warrior

Christians, socialists, liberals of all stripes, they have no idea what love is.

In fact, even though they will say love your neighbor as yourself, they break that commandment at every turn.

I was going to call this series the dadgum commandments, but I'm not entirely sure that dadgum isn't just a cutesy way of saying goddamned, and I'm not going to say that because that's actually a third commandment violation.

Anyway, I'm going to review this whole idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, the second greatest commandment, and I'm going to talk about each way that we apply that.

One of the things that you may or may not know is that the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself, is actually a shorthand way of saying the last six commandments of the 10 commandments.

The first four are about loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength, all that stuff.

The next six are about loving your neighbor as yourself, and so the fifth commandment is what we're going to talk about today.

The fifth commandment is honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land that the

Lord, your God, gives you. Jedi Slime, myself!

Your move. You fool! Attack, cannoli!

Attack, cannoli! Now, here's the thing.

This commandment is a very shorthand summarized way of saying something a lot more in depth, and it's really about respecting and loving authority.

Yes, you should love your father and mother, of course, but it's not just natural parents that it's telling you to respect and obey.

It's really all superiors. People that are older than you, people that are in places of authority, so pastors, elders, in your family, like your grandparents, for example, this commandment would apply to them.

You should honor your grandparents as well. Also your older brother, even. Just someone that's, even if it's your brother, your older brother, someone that has advanced age than you.

And also your civil governing authority. So this commandment would apply to Donald Trump. You're supposed to honor

Donald J. Trump, and the reason you're supposed to do it is so that your days will be long in the land that the

Lord has you in. And so this is the thing. So this is not my idea. This comes straight out of the

Westminster Confession, so Dr. Ligon Duncan would have to agree, and all Reformed Christians really have this idea of this is what honoring your father and mother means.

It's about respecting authority. And here's the thing, what are you supposed to do with a story?

How do you respect them? Well, there's lots of different things. You should revere them in your heart and your behavior. You should pray for them.

You should imitate what's good about them. So when your father, you don't imitate everything your father does, but you imitate the things that he does that are good, his virtue, his graces.

You should obey his lawful commandments. So in other words, if your father tells you to do something that's not right before God, you don't obey that.

Just like if the government were to tell you to do something that is not right before God, you don't obey that.

But everything that they do say that is lawful, according to Scripture, and Scripture defines what is lawful, by the way, yes, you should obey that.

That's part of the reverence and the honor that you owe those in authority, your superiors.

And again, it's not just your parents, your natural parents, you're supposed to. Here's another thing that the

Westminster Confession says, that part of the honor that's owed to your authorities, to your parents, to civil government, including

Donald Trump, is to bear with their infirmities. See, that's an interesting one right there.

Cover them in love. Interesting one as well. And so here's the thing, so if you don't do these things, instead if you envy them, you have contempt for them, you rebel against them, things like that, mock them, different kinds of things like that, especially if some of the commandments are lawful and you rebel against them, well, that's breaking the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother.

This is a standard reform definition of these things, this is not my idea. And the fifth commandment we know is the one with the promise, if you don't do these things, that's probably the end of your civilization.

And here's my claim. I think that liberals and socialists and social justice warrior Christians, they break this commandment just by their very ideology, just by the nature of what they promote.

And as I said, I'm going to show you why I think that. The commandment is about authority, right?

Authority figures in general. And the commandment is, you can see that, this is very clear, not only in the way that the

Old Testament scriptures apply this commandment, but also the way the New Testament scriptures apply this commandment as well.

When Paul says that you should give respect and you should obey governing authorities, that's an application of this fifth commandment, there's no question about that.

And so my opinion is that the entire SJW system is an affront to this commandment.

The whole ideology is an affront to the fifth commandment, it breaks the fifth commandment. It's not loving your neighbor as yourself.

And the reason why I say that is because SJWs tend to divide the world into two categories, the oppressed, you know, the minorities, people that are being oppressed, and the oppressor.

And the oppressor is essentially what they perceive as those in the authority class and the people that are in authority or in positions of power.

And the whole system seeks to undermine that. That flips the fifth commandment on its head. When you say love your neighbor as yourself, part of that is to love those in authority, to love the overclass, even as the underclass.

And so you should listen to them and respect them when they do and say things that are lawful. You shouldn't be sowing seeds of covetousness and division.

And so the next time somebody has frustration with the white cis males that are in authority and leadership in their home, in a business, or in the state, and they say that the solution is we need to tear down all the hierarchies.

Have you ever heard that? I'm sure you have if you've watched my videos. Tearing down the hierarchies is an affront, is a violation of the fifth commandment.

That's a fifth commandment violation. And so when somebody says you should tear down the hierarchies, you should respond. That's a violation of the fifth commandment.

Hierarchies are good. Hierarchies are ordained by God. And so if you respect those hierarchies, you will be good in the land.

Your civilization will continue. And when you start to say, well, we should tear this thing down, we should completely start from scratch.

We should, we should tear down all hierarchies. That's ungodly. That's a fifth commandment violation. Feminism in the church is a clear fifth commandment violation, by the way.

When you say that females should, you know, usurp power and become elders and lead the church and dismantle the patriarchy in the church, that's a fifth commandment violation.

It's just that simple. Now this doesn't mean that authority can't be wrong. Now it isn't, you don't blindly obey everything that the authority tells you.

That's not correct at all. But what it does mean is that you owe people an authority. Do reverence in your heart, word, and behavior.

You owe them prayer and thanksgiving. Do you pray for your, those in authority? Do you thank God for them?

That's one that I think we all need to hear. It involves imitation of their virtues and graces, the things that they do that are good, that are, that are effective and godly, imitate those things.

That's what, that's what the fifth commandment requires of you. Willing obedience to their lawful commands and counsels and do submission to their corrections.

That's a tough one. That's a tough one. That's required as part of the fifth commandment. Fidelity to defense and maintenance of their persons and authority according to their ranks and the nature of their places.

That's another one that we need to hear. This is the one that I think we all need to hear. What you owe those in authority, everyone in authority.

You owe them, bear with their infirmities, covering them in love so that they be, may be an honor to them and their government.

Now does everything I just said there, does that describe any, the posture of any never

Trumper that you know? I didn't vote for Trump and I didn't recommend that anyone do it. I, in fact, I recommended people do not, should not vote for Trump, but does the, do the never

Trumpers that you know, exhibit any of those things? If the scripture says the fifth commandment requires your posture be with Donald Trump.

By the way, simply saying that people didn't treat Obama that way is not a good excuse for that. In fact, that's a third commandment violation to say, well,

I can do it because people didn't respect Barack Obama in this way. That is a third commandment violation.

And so if you don't do these things, you don't act in this way towards Donald J. Trump, you're in violation of the fifth commandment.

I think you should repent and start obeying the fifth commandment. Speaking of Trump, the motto itself, make

America great again, that one really riles people up. Have you ever heard someone say, America was never great?

You know, they get all smug, America was never great, not for, not unless you were a white. An easy response to that of course is if America is not great, then why are people so desperate to get here?

That's a kind of a snarky response, you know, that we have to open up immigration because America is so terrible. But you know, we got to maybe refrain from that sometimes and realize that this person just violated the fifth commandment.

That whole attitude of America was never great, that's a fifth commandment violation. Because the reality is, there are good things about America that we should imitate, even in America's past, even back in the slaveholding past, imagine that.

Every slaveholder was not completely evil in every single thing that they did. There were some things that we ought to imitate.

There were some things that we can look at John Edwards and George Whitefield and say, wow, we should really respect those people and honor them in the ways that they exhibited

Christ and in the ways that they didn't, we shouldn't. It's just that simple. We can be nuanced like that, right? It's not all or nothing.

And so we don't want to look at the past with rose colored glasses, but we also don't want to look at the past only looking at the bad because that's a fifth commandment violation.

You know, if Paul could, I was thinking the other day, if Paul could write Romans 13 sitting under Roman, pagan

Roman rule, as wicked as we know that they were, I'm sure that we as Christians can find some good things about the

United States of America that we should seek to perpetuate and emulate. If you don't, if you can't, that's a fifth commandment violation.

What about economics of this whole thing? Right? And a lot of SJW desires come down to power and money.

They want power and they want money that they feel like they're owed. You see, here's the thing. The very first sin that this section of the

Westminster catechism talks about when it comes to inferiors and superiors is envy and covetousness, envy and covetousness.

I think it's clear that power and sometimes even financial standing minorities in the church say, well, we're owed this.

We want what you have. We want the power that white people have. We want the economic standing that white people have.

And that's covetousness. Let's just be honest. That's a fifth commandment violation when you say that those in power, those who you perceive are in power, because there's plenty of blacks and minorities in power.

That's the other reality. That's just a lie to say that there isn't. For goodness sake, we had a black president for eight years, but yet we're somehow still a white supremacist nation.

I don't get it. I just don't get it. But that's fine. That's fine. But the thing is, when you envy and covet what those in power have, and you're even willing to even bend the law to get it, in some instances, through like social engineering and socialism, basically stealing to get the power and money that those that you perceive in power have.

Well, that's a fifth commandment violation. It also violates other commandments as well, but we'll get into that some other time.

What about those in spiritual authority? I mentioned George Whitfield and John Edwards and the Reformed Fathers.

People often just dismissed, shot down, because they own slaves or something, and they're white supremacists, racists.

Was John Edwards even saved? Asking ridiculous questions like that, that's a fifth commandment violation.

I remember seeing someone say, well, I follow black theologians, I don't follow white theologians because of X, Y, Z.

Again, that's just not honoring your father and mother. That's a fifth commandment violation. What about living pastors and elders?

Have you ever read the articles that tell you to confront your pastor if they're not woke enough? Your white supremacist pastor who doesn't believe in the social justice the way you do and diversity initiatives, confront them and then eventually leave if they don't listen.

That's a fifth commandment violation. All the slander that you're hearing for the white church. I'm sorry.

That's a fifth commandment violation as well. And you see, here's the thing, what about the actual posture of fathers and mothers?

Like biological fathers and mothers. Have you seen the articles? Have you seen the tweets?

Have you seen the videos that just sort of flip that on its head? I mean, here's the thing, the whole idea of conservatism is that there is something that our parents taught us that is worth conserving.

Progressives seem to think no. Basically everyone before this generation, our parents were bigots.

Our parents were prudes. Our parents were racists. You see that posture in this movement all the time where it's like, well, the younger generation is really the one that has this right.

And the generations before this, were they even saved? That's a fifth commandment violation.

And I think that this whole movement, if you really look, I mean, I've kind of only mentioned a few things, but if you really look at this whole movement, what you'll find is that there's fifth commandment violations all over it.

And so if Dr. Ligon Duncan wants us to really respect that daggum second commandment, love your neighbor as yourself, well, is the social justice warrior movement loving their neighbor as yourself with this fifth commandment?

I don't think so. All you gotta do is search Trump and racist or something like that, and just search

Never Trump, the hashtag, and you'll find tons of that stuff coming out of Christians' mouths. It's a fifth commandment violation.

Anyway, we're going to go through each of these commandments. Next week, we're going to do the sixth commandment. And basically, we're going to find that this social justice movement, socialists, liberals, they're not really loving their neighbor as herself.

I hope this is helpful. God bless. Fuck. Good lordy.