Keep sharing good news without ads.
No description available
All right, let's jump right into it. I've been thinking about this for quite some time, but it came back to mind because of the events from this past weekend with Kosti and all that kind of stuff. By the way, I've been told it's Kosti, so sorry, Kosti.
I wasn't doing that intentionally. I thought it was really Kosti. I thought I could be wrong, but I landed on Kosti and I landed on the wrong place. But in any case, I went to public school. You can't blame me for that.
So anyway, what I've been thinking a lot about in the past few months is just, I've seen a lot of guys with legitimate ministries, legitimate pastors, good, solid brothers that I love and respect. And if I had theological questions, I would have no problem going to them to get their input or whatever.
I'm talking solid guys, right? I'm not throwing shade anyone's way right now. I've seen a lot of guys that have been publicly expressing sort of exasperation or anxiety about this conflict that they sense in themselves.
And the idea is that on the one hand, it's almost like a gut instinct. They know that the culture war is important, and so they're engaging in it. And again, it's like a gut instinct. Like they probably couldn't express why it's so important, but they do feel like it is.
But their conflict is that they think that this kind of contradicts with their hard-held belief that Jesus's kingdom is not of this world. They believe that those two things, they don't necessarily jive, and they've kind of publicly been lamenting this conflict that's within them.
Like they're not sure about how to move forward because they don't think that the culture war that they're engaged in necessarily combines with the belief that Jesus's kingdom is not of this world. And so I've seen many, many tweets that have basically been expressing this dilemma.
And I've been thinking, why is it that it seems so apparent to me that these things don't contradict, right? Like how have I been inoculated to this? Because the truth is that the culture war is the only war.
Yeah, yeah, I think I've pinpointed how it was I got inoculated to this. And really, it's nothing about me. I think that it was, if I believed in luck, I'd say it's luck. But providentially, when I became a Christian, very early on, one of the first theologians I found was R .J. Rushduny.
And I mean like not right away, but like very early on I found Rushduny. And one of the first books I read from Rushduny is a very good book that I don't think is very popular because I hardly hear anyone ever talk about it.
It's a book called The One and the Many. And the reason I found it was just by accident. Like I was in a used bookstore in New York City. If you've ever heard of The Strand, it's this like huge, like multi-level used bookstore that you could get lost in it for hours and just barely scratch the surface of the store.
And I went to the Christian section and I saw the Rushduny book and I bought it because it was cheap and I read it and it's really good. It makes this case. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay.
That's not what this video is about. But it makes this case that the philosophical problem of The One and the Many is it can only be legitimately answered by the Trinity, by Christian theology, Trinitarianism.
And the way a society answers it over, and it goes through history, you know, how Egypt answered it, how other countries answered it. And it basically determines what your culture's like. It determines how your government operates.
It determines the stories that you tell. It's stuff like that. And so basically what he's saying is your theological, philosophical presuppositions determine what your culture is going to end up as. And of course, the only answer he presents to this philosophical problem is the Christian Trinity, in any case.
So it always kind of seemed, and I think Francis Schaeffer makes this point too, that like culture and how things are, what people do is downstream from your core kind of theological, philosophical beliefs.
So it's connected. It's just, it always has been connected in my mind since I've become a Christian, right? And so I don't think that this is that big of a problem because the culture war is the war. It's evangelism to a certain degree.
And I think we kind of get this, right? Like, you know, you guys that have ever evangelized or done street preaching or street witnessing or whatever, you know this is true, right? Like people that you encounter, they believe all sorts of things about the way the world is that aren't true.
Like because our culture is not fundamentally ordered on Christian presuppositions anymore, because something went wrong along the way, we tell ourselves stories that aren't true. We tell ourselves stories that are lies, you know?
And people think that, you know, God is not there and God didn't create. And those two ideas, they have an impact on everything else that happens, right? You know, whether it's transgenderism or the abortion thing or, you know, homosexuality or whatever it is.
I mean, there's so many things. There are so many lies that our culture tells about the family or about all these things. And they all come from the fundamental idea that God is not there and God has not created and he's not spoken to us in his word.
And so when you're witnessing, you're fighting that culture war because the culture has evangelized people in this awful upside down system for decades at this point. And so the people that you encounter when you're confronting them with the truth, with the true story, right?
About how God created the world in six days and he rested on the seventh day and we fell and Adam, and then of course, the second Adam comes and saves you from your sins and he's the Lord of the universe and all of these things, we replace their fake story with the real story.
And that's what evangelism is, right? I think that the culture war is just evangelism externalized. It's just like the aggregate form of evangelism. Like when you're talking to an individual about the Lord, they're gonna have specific sins and specific lies and specific things that you're going to want to address, right?
But when you're talking to the culture at large, it's going to be more of just the aggregate form of evangelism. So we need to replace the lies and the stories that the culture has been telling for decades.
And we're at war with those and we're replacing it with the true story of Jesus Christ, forgiveness of sins and all of that kind of thing. I really do think that that's what the culture war is, right?
That's what it is. It's just not as specific as if you were talking to a specific person. If you've got a specific person in your life and they're a lesbian and they, of course, they've believed a very important lie about lesbianism.
Yeah, you can be more pinpoint precision when you're evangelizing that person and you know them, you've got a relationship with them and things like that. But public evangelism is different. And I think it looks an awful lot like the culture war.
Obviously, we understand that if you win the culture war, but people aren't getting saved, then that's worthless. But the thing is, you can't win the culture war without people getting saved because you might win little battles here and there, but ultimately the war is lost because God is there.
What is spoken in his word is true. His creation is his creation and things work the way he says they work. So if someone's not believing that, then you haven't won the war. So anyway, I think that's really kind of the disconnect here like the culture war is not anything different than evangelism, except it's in the aggregate form.
It's not your friend or your neighbor specifically. It's just the culture in general. And I think my favorite culture warrior, Paul, makes this point because he actually addresses this connection between what you worship and who you worship and what you do, right?
And this is from Romans 1. We've all heard this so many times. This is from the Christian Standard Bible. And they title this section. I know this is not inspired, but I really like how they titled this section.
Starting at verse 26, they title it From Idolatry to Depravity. From Idolatry to Depravity. These are the words of God. For this reason, God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their persons the appropriate penalty of their error.
And listen to this. This is the key part. And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. They are filled with unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness.
They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.
Although they know God's just sentence, those who practice such thing deserve to die. Listen to this. They not only do them, but they applaud others who practice them. They not only do this stuff, but they also promote it.
They support it. They applaud it. They give approval to those who do it. This is the culture war right here. Paul's talking about the culture war. He's like, look, this is the depravity, right? They do evil, and they also promote evil.
They publicly promote evil. It's one thing if somebody's doing evil in secret, and they don't tell anybody because they're ashamed of it, and it's not really accepted in society, the evil that they're doing, so they're hiding it.
That's one thing, and that's damning to that person, right? But he says, you know you're in trouble when not only are people doing it, but they're proud of it. They're boasting about it, and culture approves of it, and everyone's like, yeah, let's do it.
Let's get it, and it's like that's a whole nother issue. That's the culture war. See, that's the thing. It's evangelism in aggregate form. It's not only that people are sinning, but they're also creating a society or attempting to.
This is impossible. You can't create a community or a society around depravity. It doesn't work, but they're attempting to create a society whose foundation is depravity, which ultimately means its foundation is in idolatry.
That's the point Paul's making. They worshiped and served the creation rather than the creator, which led to not only them doing all kinds of evil, but also promoting all kinds of evil and pretending that it's good.
That list of sins, gossip, slander, god-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, all of these are the virtues of a pagan society. This is the United States that it's describing here, not specifically, but definitely the United States as well.
And so I don't think, you know, guys, that you need to be worried about how to harmonize the culture war with the fact that Jesus' kingdom is not of this world. No, no, the culture war is simply evangelism in the aggregate.
That's all it is. So there's really no, you don't have to be conflicted about it or concerned about it. That's all we're talking about here. I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.