Max Lucado’s Apology for Having Spoken the Truth, Ravi Zacharias Scandal, & Yes, Mildred, He’s a...

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Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Tuesday, and here we are.

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It's a little dangerous when I actually put out what we're going to talk about, because then I sort of have to do it. I didn't used to do that, and I may rethink doing that in the future, actually.

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But I was out on a short run today. I would rather have done a long run, but I'm going to tell you something. You younger guys enjoy your youth.

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I am discovering that as I am knocking on the door of 60, which

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Riche Pierre, the Frenchman of Prescott, on the other side of the glass, babbling away in French in a cowboy hat, will tell you, because he's considerably older than I am.

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And hence, I'm drawing much wisdom from his having experienced these things for decades.

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But as you get older, trying to be an athlete is basically pain management.

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PRs used to mean personal records. Now it means primarily recovered.

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Whatever injury you just happen to experience, and half -time you don't even know why.

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That's where I've been. I coughed today while walking. It's like, oh! This is so much fun.

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Anyways, enjoy your youth. But I did manage a short run, and I was listening to something that I want to start off with, because I was already thinking about the program today, and about the topics we're going to be looking at, specifically at the

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Lucado Apology, together with Chris Hansen.

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Is that the guy on Bachelor, Bachelorette? He's been doing it for 15 years at least, maybe longer.

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Frenchmen are supposed to know these things. He's in there going, I have no idea.

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I'm not going to admit anything here. No way. Anyway, Drew Brees last summer, it's almost like there is a specific template.

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It's like a statement that you have to sign about how you've hurt people's feelings, and you didn't know, and you're so stupid because you're a white privilege, and so on and so forth.

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They all say the same thing. But I was already thinking about that, and the other things we're going to talk about in the program.

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So this morning, I mentioned him in my sermon

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Sunday night, so I might as well just dive in the deep, deep end of the pool and just...

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Well, of course, we've been doing the Sweater Vest Dialogues for a year, so it's hardly an issue. But I was listening to BlogMA blog.

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I have the Canon app on my phone. Someday there's going to be an Alpha Omega app, someday, maybe.

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Harrison, hey, my wife is listening live. And you know what's wild?

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That came through on my watch. I'm thinking about future debates.

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This is a possibility. Oh, yes. What? How many people in the

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NSA also read that? It's not the NSA I'm worried about.

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It's the CCP that I'm worried about. What's the difference? That's exactly right.

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You are right. So Chris Harrison is the poor fellow who, by the way, what he did is he dared to call out cancel culture and, of course, got canceled for calling out cancel cultures.

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How it works in our day today, once again, remember, the hypocrisy is purposeful.

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It's not these people just don't know what they're doing. It is very much intentional, at least on the part of the elites.

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Certainly, a lot of the younger people, they've never been taught how to think critically.

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They have been taught what to think, not how to think. Certainly, their hypocrisy is just all they know.

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That's the only thing their worldview can produce. But the reasons for that go to the elites.

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Anyways, so I was listening to Blogamay blog, which is

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Doug Wilson's blog, and what he does is he will record what he writes.

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So it appears in writing first and then appears in audio format with Doug reading it, which

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I always find somewhat humorous because then he can put his own inflections on his own words, shall we say.

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And he was talking about the whole issue.

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Well, it's titled John Piper and the Fire in the Attic is what this particular one was about.

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And he had talked a little bit about the empathy test, the empathy issue, which there's a

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Man Rampant program featuring Joe Rigney that I know Summer got in all sorts of trouble for mentioning that.

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Because if you want to offend the newest voters, the young voters, say anything that could possibly cause emotional trauma because immaturity, emotional immaturity, is now the watchword of our society.

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And you are to empathize with everything. I feel you, man. I understand.

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And this is the new definition of love. If you're to love as Jesus loved, then you have to feel what everyone feels.

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This is, believe it or not, and young people are going, well, yeah, I don't know. Large majority of people seem to feel that by empathizing with someone, by allowing their emotions to determine your emotions, that you are loving.

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And in fact, all definitions of being loving, including in the Christian church now, have something to do with this idea of empathy and entering into other people's emotions.

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And of course, the scriptures never tell us to do that. We're to bear one another's burdens and we're to weep with those who weep.

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But you don't do that by turning your emotions over to somebody else. You help someone else with your strength in their weakness.

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You do not give up your strength to become weak like they are weak. That's what the body is about.

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When there's someone else in the body who's stronger than you, then you draw strength from them.

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You don't insist that they drop down to your level. And that's one of the big problems today on many levels.

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So anyways, he was talking about that. And he was talking about how this entire woke mess is based upon just fundamental alterations of the categories of epistemology and what is maturity and what is love.

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And once you inject the woke mess into evangelical theology, to use a, hey,

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I'm going to use a movie example. How's that? Y 'all impressed? Okay. The movie's over 10 years old, but I'm doing the best

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I can. Remember at the end and spoiler alert, remember at the end of iRobot where Sonny has gotten the nanites and so the cop gets down there and jams the nanites into the computer brain and kills the bad computer that's running all the robots and all the little red lights go off and stuff like that.

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Injecting woke categories into biblical theology is like taking those nanites and boom.

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And the result is brain death. And that's what you've got because all the categories get changed, everything gets inverted, and the stuff we're seeing today just flows directly from all that.

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Then came this section and I listened to it twice and obviously grabbed the written format.

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Let's listen to what Doug says here. In the meantime, coming back to yours truly, I anticipate that I will be getting whiter by the day.

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This is because I'm engaged in ongoing controversy with woke evangelicals and the woke evangelical tries to steer whatever church or movement he is in by means of his or her hurt feelings.

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So far, lots of people are letting them. The short form is this, you are in deep sin because I am sad.

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And the sadder I get, the worse you must be. And so it is that the sadder these people will get, the whiter

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I will get, and because they have embraced a gospel that forgives nothing, cleanses nothing, and restores nothing, things look to be really sad.

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There you go. Once the controlling epistemology is no longer epistemic, but emotional, once the driving issue...

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and woke preacher clips on Twitter and I think over on Gab is picking up by the way, guys.

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It really is. You have to follow enough people, but I've followed enough people and it's starting to be like Twitter.

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What? Yeah, we've got our own account. I gabbed that. I put that out there and said, hey, give us a follow and stuff like that.

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What? Okay. Yeah. Well, no one knew about that anyways. So anyway, that totally blew where I was going there.

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So here we are and people's emotions are what we are supposed to be.

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I was talking about woke preacher clips. When you listen to these formerly orthodox preachers who have now succumbed to the guilt, they have become convinced.

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I had conversation with, and then name your intersectional group, with my black brothers, with my

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South Sea Islander brothers, with my Asian brothers, with my transgender brothers, with my homosexual brothers, with whatever.

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I had conversation and I discovered that my words have brought pain to others.

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And so I must, I must repent. And I will repent again next week and I'll repent again the next week after that.

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As far as I know, I'm just now going to be in a constant state of penance because there's no forgiveness in any of this, anywhere, anyways.

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But I'm now embracing it because I just feel terrible that I made someone feel sad.

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This is now the ultimate cultural heresy is to make someone feel sad.

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And of course, at the same time, you then think back on how many times you have heard people say, well,

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I read in the Bible that it said such and so, and man, I would never worship a

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God like that. That makes me feel terrible. Well, okay. There you go. There was a day when we would have turned around and said, well, that's because what the

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Bible is saying is true and you need to repent and change your mind. Repentance, not a big thing today.

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I think that may be the one word in all of scripture that has just become the least popular thing possible.

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Or it's been redefined. Everything's been redefined. Repentance is now embracing someone else's emotional state as determinative of truth.

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That's what repentance is. Well, that's not what repentance is biblically.

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And so once again, we have a problem here. So short form, you are in deep sin because I am sad and the sadder

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I get, the worse you must be. And that really explains what happened when we look at the

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Max Lucado situation. You probably read about it.

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The National Cathedral, which is no longer the National Cathedral. It's not the

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People's Church or anything like that. It's just a dead monument to formal religion in Washington, D .C.

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But Max Lucado was asked to speak there and immediately cancel culture came after him.

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Why? Because long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away,

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Max Lucado, almost 17 years ago, preached a sermon, wrote an article.

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It's an article that was then purged from the internet just recently, probably within the past few weeks.

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And I thanked the gentleman. I threw out a tweet and said, hey, netgeeks,

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I had found it on archive .org. I had found it on archive .org,

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but it was one of those things where it was broken up into sections and it just looked to me like only the first section had been saved and then section two

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I couldn't get to, section three I couldn't get to, so on and so forth. So I threw out a help. I need a netgeek.

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And it probably didn't take an hour until a netgeek who follows me said, here's the file and had it all for me.

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Thank you very, very much. But this was from 2004. And look, today, basically the mindset in our society is if it's prior to 2014, if it's prior to Ferguson, it might as well be prior to the

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Civil War. It might as well be, there's slaverships coming into every port.

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Maybe we can just go back to the Vikings are doing the

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Blood Eagle in small towns all over the place. I mean, there's no civilization before 2014.

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And so this was 2004. So this was ancient history. And if you read, it starts off on May 17th, 2004, the state of Massachusetts recognized a thousand same -sex weddings.

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A cultural bomb exploded. This week, senators will vote on the Marriage Act, a constitutional amendment that defines and protects one man, one woman in marriage.

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What does the Bible have to say about this? What does God have to say about gay marriage? I can't think of a more timely topic.

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This is what Max Lucado is apologizing for. Okay. He is apologizing for saying the recent move toward legalization of homosexual marriage leaves many people searching for answers.

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On one hand, they see no problem with the idea. They have homosexual relatives or friends. They watch Will and Grace or Ellen's Generous on television.

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They look at such people and think, what's wrong? Why would same -sex marriage be an issue? Yet at the same time, unrest rumbles within.

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How will homosexuality impact our culture? What about the spread of disease? If gay lifestyle and gay marriage is endorsed, what follows?

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Polygamy? Legalized incest? If we can't draw a line, will lines be drawn at all? Many wrestle with such questions.

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Those of a Judeo -Christian background ask a more fundamental question. What does God say about gay marriage? For the

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God -fearer, God's voice trumps all polls, politicians' studies, and sitcoms. So it is to this question we turn our attention this morning.

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Dividing the three sub -questions will offer a helpful outline. The sub -questions were, what does God say about marriage, where he affirms primarily a biblical concept of marriage and that it was established by God?

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What does God say about gays? He talks about some of the key texts while trying to be as friendly, maybe would be the term,

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I don't know, as possible. But he says, from start to finish, scripture categorically condemns same -sex intimacy.

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Why? Some answers found our concluding point. What does God say about gay marriage? And he says, legalization of gay marriages will erode the traditional family.

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Legalized gay marriage will lead to legalized polygamy and other deviations, which by the way, he was right. The highest reason of ever proposing gay marriage simply is

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God does. And God does because he loves us. Marriage restores us to our

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Adamic state. Where does that leave the church? Compassion. Yes, homosexual activity angers

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God, but who among us has not angered God? It wasn't homosexuality that caused Jesus to cleanse the temple. It was self -righteousness and greed.

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Two sins that dog all of us, but let there be no gay bashing among God's people, no arrogant parading of signs.

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There is no justification for gay jokes. Do we mock the alcoholic or shun the gossiper? Let's show the same grace to the brother or sister who struggles with sexual sin.

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Now, I would say, by the way, I stopped there. That's fine. That's wonderful. But again, where is the

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R word? It's repentant homosexuals. That's the issue all the way through.

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Then he quotes 1 Corinthians 6 .9. He says, Ex -gays worshiped in the early church. Ex -gays worship in this church.

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Notice it's ex -gays. So in other words, there has been repentance that has been brought about.

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So I urge you to honor God's plan for the home by nurturing your own. Also, prayers and prayers for our national leaders, especially pray and thank

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God for those who are taking the lead and taking the heat on the Federal Marriage Act. I urge you to contact your senators and representatives.

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Think this one through carefully. We cannot budge. Too much is at stake. 2004.

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Purged from the internet. Purged from the internet. It is gone.

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It has been erased and instead, February 11th, 2021.

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Max Licato to the Washington National Cathedral. Dear Cathedral community, it was a high honor to serve as your guest preacher on February 7th, 2021.

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It has come to my understanding that my presence, excuse me, my presence in the Cathedral is a cause of consternation for many of your members.

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I was invited to Washington National Cathedral to preach on the topic of the Holy Spirit. My desire was to highlight the power of the

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Spirit to bring comfort in this chaotic times. However, instead of that sermon, many only heard my words from many years ago.

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2004, I preached a sermon on the topic of same -sex marriage. I now see that in that sermon,

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I was disrespectful. I was hurtful. I wounded people in ways that were devastating.

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I should have done better. It grieves me that my words have hurt or been used to hurt the

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LGBTQ community. I apologize to you and I ask forgiveness of Christ.

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Faithful people may disagree about what the Bible says about homosexuality, but we agree that God's Holy Word must never be used as a weapon to wound others.

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To be clear, I believe in the traditional biblical understanding of marriage, but I also believe in a

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God of unbounded grace and love. LGBTQ individuals and LGBTQ families must be respected and treated with love.

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They are beloved children of God because they are made in the image and likeness of God. Over centuries, the church has harmed

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LGBTQ people and their families, just as the church has harmed people on issues of race, gender, divorce, addiction, and so many other things.

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We must do better and serve and love one another. I share the cathedral's commitment to building bridges and learning how to listen, to really listen to those with whom we disagree.

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That work is difficult, it's hard, it's messy, and it can be uncomfortable, but we need it now more than ever.

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Respectfully, Max Licato. So, once again, we now have a sound biblical statement from 2004.

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Only 17 years. 17 years is a very short, short period of time.

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I know for younger people that sounds like a long time, 17 years is a tiny, minuscule amount of time.

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And in 17 years, you can go from saying what he said, which included at the end, we cannot budge, too much is at stake, to I must ask forgiveness of you, and I ask forgiveness of Christ.

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It is important for us to recognize why so many have done this, and why so many more will do this in the future.

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Someone like Licato has always been focused upon speaking graciously.

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Grace and speaking graciously are beautiful things. But they become nothing but sticky sentimentality when they're removed from gracious truth.

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Truth vitalizes grace.

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It makes it powerful. It makes it real. If you want to be gracious to someone, you direct them to that which is true, because since they are made in the image of God, when the

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Spirit of God begins to work in their heart and their mind, they will long for truth. So the most gracious thing you can do is direct someone to truth, to exalt truth.

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Now, what is said in this apology is reprehensible. It is reprehensible.

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It's shameful for any minister of the gospel to have said 17 years ago what was said biblically, that God condemns homosexual sexual activity.

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He does. That is the biblical truth. That is unquestionable.

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That God defines marriage, and that to rebel against God's ordinance is to sign the papers of one's soul over the culture of death.

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Culture of death. We tend to think the culture of death is only about either abortion or euthanasia.

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It's much more than that. I've pointed out many times on this program that the entire

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LGBTQ revolution is intimately connected with the culture of death.

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When you convince a 13 -year -old girl to mutilate her body so she will never be able to have children, she will never be able to hold a child to her breast, and yes, that's called breastfeeding.

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I don't care what idiotic hospital thinks it should be called chest feeding. It's beautiful, and it's natural, and it's right, and it is to deny that young woman of a beautiful part of her life.

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That's culture of death. That's culture of death. It's all connected together.

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It's all a part of rebellion against God's ways. Christ says he's the life and secular totalitarianism offers nothing but death.

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It's just the polar opposite. This is what we're up against, and to properly identify these things 17 years ago, but now to bow and scrape and grovel at the power of the mob in rebellion against Christ as a minister of Christ is absolutely reprehensible.

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You say, well, you don't know what kind of pressure he was under. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. You better believe

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I know exactly what pressure he was under. Some of us just don't even want to enter into those places anymore.

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I know what pressure he was under, and I simply say to you that when the mob comes to you and says deny what

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Christ taught that from the beginning he made them male and female, you only have one choice.

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It's called martyrdom. You can't go, well,

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I'm so sorry I hurt you. You don't have the right to say that. You have an audience of one.

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The only thought across your mind should be, did I honor or dishonor the truth of Christ 17 years ago, and am

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I dishonoring or honoring the truth of Christ now by groveling in front of the rebellious mob that demands my head because I dared follow

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Christ 17 years ago and said so? Not the first, not going to be the last.

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He's not going to be the last. But notice the centrality of the emotional life of individuals.

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I was disrespectful. How? Oh, you can't respect

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Christ. You can't respect his truth. You have to be respectful toward those who are rebelling against Christ.

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Oh, I was hurtful. I was hurtful.

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Could we stop just for a second? Just for a second. How many of Jesus's parables were absolutely hurtful?

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I mean, the Jewish leaders knew that he was telling stories about them, right?

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They were hurt. Their feelings were hurt. And Jesus still told the parables because there's something more important than hurt feelings.

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There are a number of things more important than hurt feelings. Every society that's ever become a great society knew that.

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We've lost that, which is why our society in its current form is doomed. It's simply doomed.

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This kind of childish, pandering, complaining, give me a safe space, no society run by people like that is going to last more than a few years.

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There are plenty of societies waiting to come in and the adults will take over. No two ways about it.

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But think about all the things that Jesus said and did that absolutely fail the standard that Max Lucado has now embraced.

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I mean, wow, the offense. I'm not even talking about Matthew 23. I mean, that's the pinnacle of insult and condemnation and judgment.

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But, you know, the parables like, you know, bring these people in front of me and kill them for their unfaithfulness.

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Hmm. Yeah, that's I was hurtful. I wounded people in ways that were devastating.

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Again, this sounds exactly like what Chris Harrison said. This sounds exactly like what

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Drew Brees said. It's like it is a template that is just, you know, the woke people carry around their phone, says here, accept this file, put your name in it, say it.

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That's how it works. That's how it works. It grieves me that my words have hurt or been used to hurt the

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LGBTQ community. Do I have to say this again? Yes, I do.

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There is no such thing. Oh, as a political block, as a as a as a unidentifiable entity to slander people.

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Sure. But on any logical foundation, especially once you put the

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T in there. You just blew the whole thing up because there is no L or G or B if T is true.

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OK, there can be no G if there are not men. There can be no

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L if there are no women. There cannot be not certainly B requires both.

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So that can't be there. So it's an incoherent. Collection of sexual perversion and deviancy.

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Just thrown together in a mishmash that that you now cannot offend.

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But to say I apologize to you, that's bad enough. I apologize to you for having spoken the truth to you.

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If he had said I was wrong about those biblical passages, I was wrong about marriage.

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If he had said that, at least we have something to deal with. He said none of that because he goes on to say, well, I still still sort of believe in the traditional view of marriage.

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Can you accept me? No, they won't. Even that will be used against you. Haven't you figured that part out yet?

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There's no satisfying this mob. But I apologize to you and I ask forgiveness of Christ.

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I ask forgiveness of Christ for having spoken his truth. Unbelievable.

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Absolutely, positively, unbelievable. This is what comes when you give in, you collapse to our modern age.

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I guess you raised that for a purpose. I did. Once you're done, you need to hear this because you you don't know about this.

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I didn't know about I can hear you. I mean, I saw you mentioned Max this morning, but I didn't really know any of this, you know, doing other things, right?

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You start going through it and I realize, oh my goodness, you know, we've we've been going through some of our older recordings, trying to make sure that we have track of everything in order and finding what media may have been missed along the way.

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And I found a tub of DVDs and CDs this morning and Jan and I are going through them.

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And I pull out, I kid you not, from 2004, a conference that you did back in Long Island.

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And you know what the topic was? Gay marriage. And my first thought was, this is not on the web.

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We must get this on Sermon Audio as soon as possible. You know why

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I thought that? Because it was the right thing to do. People need to hear this.

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They need to hear this message. They needed to hear what Max said in 2004, too. They need to hear it today more than ever.

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Not him capitulating and surrendering. Or apologizing. Or apologizing.

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But that's that's surrender. I mean, good night. Well, it was surrender. Yeah. Total capitulation. So it's an interesting juxtaposition there.

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Find something from 2004, get it out there. And they're scrubbing the net.

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They're trying to get rid of it. They're trying to get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Well, so I obviously, as with our next topic, there may be people that God used

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Max Likado at some point in their life. And you're looking at this and you're going, how can this?

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But that's not what you said before. I forget the first program where I used the phraseology of tsunami of apostasy.

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But I've used it many, many times. And I don't care who you think is just all that and a bag of chips.

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Your faith cannot be based upon some name, some person, some preacher.

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God can use a crooked stick to draw a straight line. And you can discover as you mature in the faith that some of your earlier heroes in the faith didn't have it all figured out.

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And maybe they will do things that just leave you going, what? You will not be held accountable for them.

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You're only held accountable for yourself. Your roots must go deep. And the tree with the deep roots is unmovable for every one of us.

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Those roots cannot be dependent upon some big name or even unknown name, but still someone outside of yourself.

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Those roots have to be deep in the soil of God's truth. That's where God has planted you.

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That's what you need to be working on right there. So you don't have this kind of thing happen to yourself. So there you go.

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All right. I'm hesitant now a little bit to address the

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Ravi Zacharias situation, primarily because I was sent right before the program, right before the program,

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I was sent some comments, I guess, from Facebook, from family members,

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Zacharias family members, pushing back on RZIM and how

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RZIM has handled the situation, the production of the report that came out last week, who was interviewed for that, sources of information and things like that.

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Now, I looked over what was said, they weren't really in order, so it was a little bit hard to follow, but I looked over it and I didn't see any counter -argumentation against really the testimony that had been given from the various women and the issues that were raised by, well, the report itself said, and if you're not familiar with all this,

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I'm sorry, I'm just gonna have to assume that most people in this program are well aware of the fact that Ravi Zacharias of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries passed away last

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May. And just to summarize a few things, for a number of years

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I had been aware of some websites and some people out there, because they like to make me aware of these things, they'll hijack threads on other topics and do stuff like that.

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And so you don't always know, but I knew that there were questions, I think it was 2017, the sexting thing came out in regards to one woman and pictures, and that was vociferously denied.

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And then the other thing that I knew was boiling more and more, which has not been a part of this discussion at all, had to do with Ravi's degrees and what he claimed about them, where he claimed to have gotten degrees or where he claimed to have taught.

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And there were people raising a bunch of questions saying, but he didn't, he doesn't have the background that he has claimed that he had.

40:56

And so I knew about that stuff. I knew about that stuff a couple of years ago.

41:04

And some of them might say, well, why didn't you dig into that? Because that's not what I do. Well, you did with Ergon Kanner. Well, that's because he was claiming to do what

41:10

I actually do by name with the people I actually debate. So that was something

41:16

I had to do. I didn't want to, but had to. And that was easy. I mean, let's just be honest.

41:24

That was a real obvious one. As I've said before,

41:29

I've never met Ravi Zacharias, never communicated with Ravi Zacharias. I was the beneficiary of some funding in 2006 and 2007 to learn

41:41

Arabic from a, just moving the neck or I thought you were going, huh?

41:50

Yeah. 2006, 2007, there was a group that was funded by, or partially funded, at least partially funded by RZIM that was helping people in doing studies on the subject of Islam and I was given funding and that's how

42:09

I paid my Arabic tutor and that's when I studied Arabic. I think it was, might've been through 2008.

42:16

I don't remember, but I just knew that there was some connection to RZIM somewhere back in the back, but never, never been there.

42:24

I met, I think one guy that was sort of high up in RZIM at one point at some conference someplace.

42:33

And of course, Nabeel Qureshi ended up working for Ravi Zacharias Ministries, I think right up to his point of his death.

42:43

But I didn't know the people. There was no way I could have in any way have talked to anybody, even if I had had specific concerns.

42:53

And I admitted in an article, or at least in a response online sometime in the past week,

42:58

I think if you added up everything that I've listened to, grand total, I never read a

43:04

Ravi Zacharias book. I may have listened to a grand total of four hours because there have been times

43:13

I have critically interacted with stuff that Ravi Zacharias said about Roman Catholicism.

43:19

He spoke at that thing at the Mormon Tabernacle with Richard Mao.

43:25

And at that point I had said, well, at least he spoke the truth. I'm uncomfortable with the some of the things that were said, but it's a whole lot better than Mao's disaster.

43:38

So we had interacted at some point with stuff that he had said here on the program, but I had no contact with, would not have been able to get in contact with Ravi Zacharias, even if I had tried, just didn't have that kind of a connection.

43:54

And I just get the feeling most reformed people don't. I mean, I guess he did speak at the

44:00

Ligonier Conference. I've seen a lot people saying, you know, looking back, that was weird.

44:05

That just didn't fit in with everybody else. And it was strange. I don't know. I can't comment on any of that.

44:15

In a very brief period, I think on Saturday morning, I wrote a little article that I posted on a couple of sites,

44:29

Gab, Facebook, it was primarily Facebook, cross -posted to Gab and Twitter and stuff.

44:35

And I covered what I was not hearing from almost anybody else, because now everybody's had a comment.

44:43

Ray Comfort had put something out. I listened to Ray Comfort's comments, and I linked to that when I wrote my article.

44:50

Because he had touched on, I think, a key important aspect of all of this.

44:57

And then Todd Friel, I listened to Todd Friel's comments this morning on the subject.

45:04

And David has put a YouTube article out on the subject.

45:14

And everybody's got their take. Everybody has got their, David Wood, I'm sorry. Everybody's got their take.

45:21

And everybody's seeing this lesson or that lesson and all the rest of this stuff.

45:29

But what I emphasized in my article, a lot of people picked it up, and I was thankful for that, even though it really wasn't meant to be a freestanding article.

45:39

What I basically said was, I saw no evidence that Ravi Zacharias was a churchman.

45:46

He held ordination in a rather diffuse denomination.

45:55

Was it Lions Christian Missionaries, something like that? Christian missionaries, something along those lines, yeah. But to my knowledge, was not called as an elder in a church.

46:07

Did not function in that way. Did not have regular teaching responsibility.

46:15

And given what the report said, and I'm going on the basis of the report, and I can see how this is a possibility.

46:27

If RZIM is taking this opportunity to remake itself into a social justice warrior movement, then that raises all sorts of questions.

46:49

And I don't know. If the report, which seems to be fairly, well, okay, the report's done by an outside group, obviously, who shouldn't have any horse in the race, in essence.

47:07

But the information that was provided to them was primarily provided to them by RZIM. And what

47:13

I read in the family statements was, there was stuff that wasn't provided to them.

47:21

Maybe there'll be some pushback and something in the future. I don't know.

47:26

But the things that were said, that seemed to be factually documented, regarding months overseas alone in Southeast Asia.

47:44

And then the other thing, which I've mentioned to a bunch of folks, the ability to spend money, funds with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in them, to be able to pay for a massage therapist's training, this has something to do with the ministry?

48:11

I mean, I buy a Kindle book on Amazon to convert to MP3 to listen to, to ride, to do a program on the dividing line, and I'll eventually get something from Rich that says, what was that for?

48:29

And it was $9 .99, not $40 ,000. And so I, you know, the first thing

48:36

I said was, look, I'm sorry. You can't spend that kind of money and people don't know what's happening.

48:44

There are bean counters. They may be quiet people who never say a word to anybody, but they're there.

48:51

Somebody knew something was going on. Somebody knew those funds were being used for something and they were having to put vague, strange explanations in the comment box.

49:04

Basically, somebody knew something was going on. And of course you've got the, well, he was put up on a pedestal and he was just so much smarter than everybody else and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

49:17

And hey, if that happened, well, that's on RZIM. That's on the people there.

49:24

But you see, if you're in the church, that's where that's supposed to be kept from happening.

49:32

And I know, believe me, I know there are pastors who create churches just for themselves.

49:40

And those are normally disasters waiting to happen, right? You get these mega personality cults.

49:49

And when that pastor falls, as frequently happens, dies, happens too, apostatizes, whatever, these huge empires just collapse and take a lot of people with them.

50:08

But what's supposed to happen, since there is no office of apologist, is there is supposed to be some type of accountability and some kind of balance, some kind of balance.

50:21

And if you're actually a minister and you're supposed to be speaking and teaching, then

50:28

I've said from the beginning that apologists, how many times have I said this? Apologists have no place outside the church.

50:37

You being gone from a fellowship for months at a time, these apologists that every week, they're at some other place other than the place where people know them.

50:51

It's not difficult to fool people when you're traveling, you can put on the right clothes, use the right talk, easy, easy to do.

51:05

You can't do that amongst people that you live amongst, that they know you, they see you, they observe you.

51:14

And so my article anyways was saying, this is where the problem is. There's no church accountability, there's no fellow elders, and you might say, well, come on, would anyone really hold you accountable?

51:28

Yeah. If I went Ravi on somebody, my fellow elders, well, all three of them are taller than I am, and one of them by a long shot,

51:40

I wouldn't know. Luke would turn me into a pretzel and wouldn't hesitate to do so.

51:47

But there didn't seem to be any of that accountability in that context.

51:54

And many apologetics ministries chafe at the idea, chafe at the idea.

52:01

That they should be under the care of elders, because let's just be honest, many apologists consider themselves quite superior to those elders.

52:12

Those elders don't know about apologetics what I do, right? It's true.

52:21

That's just the way it is. So I wrote the article, and what it says about the church and things like that, stand by that.

52:32

But as we go forward from here, I will be very, very interested at what happens if there is any pushback, if there is any modification of the report.

52:51

I mean, the report talks about pictures, dates, going back in the memories of,

53:01

I think, three different phones, maybe four, forget how many they were. I mean, that's pretty hard documentation because the phones were in the possession of the family.

53:19

I would struggle a little bit with post -mortem condemnation if there was no chain of custody, and if there is a possibility that these phones could have been tampered with so as to create.

53:35

But since it was combined with testimony and things like that, I mean, there are issues here, there are evidentiary issues, there's no question about that.

53:49

But if the report is true, then one thing that crossed my mind as I read it was that it indicated that there were continuing inappropriate pictures and texts being exchanged within a few months of the man's death.

54:14

So if that report is true, then that raises the issue of what do you do with the man's books?

54:25

What do you do with the man's lectures? What do you do with the fact that maybe you yourself had been greatly helped and assisted by what this man did?

54:39

And you may be able to determine. I mean, there are literally people right now that are sitting out there, and you can look at the dates, because there were dates provided in this report, and you can go,

54:57

I was greatly helped by a talk that Ravi Zacharias gave at such and such a place, and it was right in the middle of a horrific, sexually based exploitation of a woman or whatever else.

55:24

And that person's sitting there going, what do I do? Do I just give up on all of it?

55:29

Do I just throw it all out? How could God have used someone like that? How could someone live two completely separate lives?

55:39

Let's lay it out all on the table. It is one thing for, and here again, this is where the church thing comes in, because my understanding is he held ordination, so that makes him a minister.

55:59

It means he's claiming to fulfill the qualifications for an elder, and no elder fulfills those qualifications in perfection.

56:10

You'd have to be sinless. Only Jesus can do that. Okay, so you got to start off with every minister of the gospel is a debtor to grace, every minister of the gospel is a sinner, and so you can say every minister of the gospel is a hypocrite.

56:25

I mean, that's what makes teaching expositionally and verse by verse so hard, is you can't avoid anything, and that means you have to end up preaching on the sins you know are your greatest weakness.

56:41

No question about it. So the standard is not perfection, the standard is repentance, and that's the point.

56:49

If he was doing this without repentance, and I've seen no one saying that there was anything.

56:55

I didn't see anything in the family stuff. I've seen people trying to defend him, but they had no evidence.

57:01

It's all like, well, on his deathbed, you have a person who knows the truth and is purposefully acting in such a way as to live two separate lives, to say one thing and do something completely different, and that knowing non -repentant hypocrisy is the real issue.

57:37

That's what everyone's going, so what do you do with someone like that? I mean, let's leave all the other controversy aside.

57:44

If the facts in the report are accurate, was this man even a believer?

57:52

Because there's so many people, I just can't possibly believe that he couldn't be given the things that he said, and yet, how do you go from standing in front of a whole group of people and saying x, and before you got there, you've already set up the parameters to meet with someone after you're done to do the things that he was supposed to be doing?

58:20

See, it's not like he repented, and he fought, and he spoke, and then he falls because he's alone, and because he was unwise, and then he's broken, and he's sorrowful, and he's reaching out for help.

58:38

That's the whole thing. That's the thing about this whole situation is, where is anybody saying that he ever did anything other than to hide this?

58:51

Knew what it was, engaged in it in secrecy, paid money to keep it secret, threatened people when they got too close.

59:02

Where's the slightest sign of repentance? It's one thing to have somebody who slips and falls, and slips and falls, and is reaching out, and people help me.

59:13

That's totally different than decades, because now there are accusations that go back literally,

59:24

I think, 30 years, and if what you've got in the past, what the last verse?

59:32

2007? So 13 years. If you've got stuff that goes 17 years before that, and it's consistent for 13 years, it's sort of like, yeah, it's probably true the 30 years ago too, but that kind of consistent expression of a suppression of knowledge, secrecy, never reaching out, nothing like that.

01:00:02

Man, that's hard to go, yeah, I can see a Christian doing that. No, you can see a

01:00:08

Christian struggling. You can see a Christian falling, but this kind of just constant, purposeful, and by the way, this is the other thing that concerned me, and this is the other thing that, again, the church helps in this.

01:00:31

A lot of people made the same comment, and I've only listened to four hours, I can't comment, but a lot of people confirmed to me that, yeah, those topics such as purity, holiness, the importance of the church, those were not a part of what he was talking about normally.

01:00:52

He was very much philosophical, epistemology, world religion, and okay,

01:00:58

I get that. I mean, I talk a lot about Islam, is that supposed to mean something?

01:01:06

But again, when you're in the church, you end up having to talk about those things, and he didn't seem to put himself in a position where he had to.

01:01:12

That raises all sorts of questions and issues. It really, really does. So, what do you say to the person?

01:01:20

Well, again, the content of truth is, if something is true, it is true because God made it that way, not because the way that he communicated it to you.

01:01:38

So, it's a funny example, but I was blessed as a young person in high school, even before then, by good old

01:01:48

Jack Chick. You know, he had some hard -hitting tracks calling you to repentance, you know?

01:01:56

Did what I read in Jack Chick's tracks, now, was there stuff in there that I now go, well, yeah, sure.

01:02:04

But have I thrown all that out? No. And did it matter that decades later, he identified me as the

01:02:12

Antichrist? No, because I knew that what was causing him to do that was his radical

01:02:19

King James -only fanaticism, and that did not make the truths that he had brought forth from Scripture any less true, even though he's calling me the

01:02:31

Antichrist. Okay, that's pretty crazy, but there you go. So, the truths that Rabi Zacharias enunciated are either true because they're consistent with divine revelation, or they're untrue.

01:02:47

But who Rabi Zacharias is doesn't make them true one way or the other. And God may have used that very flawed instrument, or that hypocritical instrument, that false teacher, if he was a false convert.

01:03:06

He could have used that to still communicate to you at the time you needed to hear those truths.

01:03:14

So, there you go. There are lots and lots of lessons to be learned.

01:03:22

And I think we're probably not done with this. I have made this, and by the way,

01:03:30

I did state this fairly straightforwardly, and I've only had people agree with me.

01:03:37

If anyone has disagreed with me on this, they haven't come out and said it directly. But you read the little article

01:03:46

I wrote, right? And some people, for some reason, confused what

01:03:53

I was saying. I said, RZIM does not need to be hiring consultants and going out on an apology tour.

01:04:00

I wasn't talking about the private investigators they had already hired, obviously.

01:04:06

Why would I even comment on that? That's past tense. They've done their job, they provide their report, whatever.

01:04:13

Now, I'm talking about some of the stuff I read about in other sources, that they're hiring people and they're going to be going out and trying to do this, that, and the other thing.

01:04:22

I believe, in my personal opinion, what RZIM should do is disperse what they have, because it's large ministry.

01:04:32

It was. I'm sure it's contracting rapidly right now. But they have international offices, spin them off, give them sign over, whatever office equipment, whatever they have, to those.

01:04:51

If those people want to do that, change their name, go do their thing. My understanding from Rich is that a 501c3 can only give its stuff to other nonprofits, right?

01:05:04

Correct. Correct. No one actually owns a nonprofit organization. So if the nonprofit is to close its doors, it by law is required to disperse its assets to other nonprofits.

01:05:17

So if that's the case, then what I said was they need to disperse their assets, other nonprofit organizations, turn off the lights, close the door, and end it.

01:05:35

Legacy ministries are notoriously difficult. We haven't really had the discussion yet, because neither one of us really wants to admit we're quite that old.

01:05:44

We still got years ahead of us, we hope. Ten? Okay.

01:05:52

There we go. Ten years. There you go. Tens. Tens. Oh, tens.

01:05:58

I don't know. My dad's still going at 89. We haven't really had a discussion about it, but we can have it on the air right now.

01:06:13

I'm not interested in legacy ministry. I don't think that's the measure of a ministry, is that you can make it go on and on and on, because it had the name of such and such a person.

01:06:27

I'm not into that. And I can think of people, I can think of ministries that have tried to do the legacy thing in the past, and it didn't work.

01:06:38

There's no legacy here. If this report is true, this is not a legacy you perpetuate in the first place.

01:06:45

So you turn off the lights, you take the signs down, you lock the doors, and you say we're done.

01:06:54

We'll be good to pay the bills. Yeah, that's always good. But that's my opinion.

01:07:00

That's what I think needs to take place. Yeah. I got one thing I want to dovetail onto this. I noticed this before the show started.

01:07:07

Richard on Twitter says, I find it perplexing to observe so many Christian bloggers, quote unquote, writing about the fall of RZIM.

01:07:17

Perplexing part is their immediate fascination with diagnosing the ministry. Where were the voices like Dr.

01:07:23

Oakley's 1689 beforehand? Only speak to it now, it's burned down in flames.

01:07:30

And what, look, for years, I would get emails saying, why aren't you investigating

01:07:37

RZIM? And we would see stuff on Twitter, we'd see stuff on Facebook, here and there.

01:07:43

Look, the point here is that we didn't know anything. We had no way of knowing anything. And that's not what we do.

01:07:52

We are not private investigators. And do not have the resources to do such things. No. So the point is, if you don't know nothing, then you say nothing.

01:08:01

You keep your mouth shut, and that's what we did. In this situation, you responded to an official statement by the organization admitting guilt.

01:08:14

Right. And that admission of guilt was based on the results delivered to them by an independent investigative organization.

01:08:22

There's integrity throughout. This is an honest broker involved in this. Well, we hope anyway.

01:08:28

Well, we hope, but that's how they claimed it. I mean, if you're gonna, look, if you're gonna write that statement,

01:08:33

I mean, that statement's a big deal. Oh, yeah. And so, you know,

01:08:39

I have a hard time believing that they did it on purpose without evidence. Well, the evidence, it's without a doubt, the evidence is extremely damning, and there would have to be some tremendous spinning, purposely seeking to mislead this organization to overthrow the conclusions they came to.

01:09:01

But in regards to the statement, we had no connection to these folks. We were not living with them. We're not ministering with them.

01:09:07

We weren't doing, you know, people have told me, but this is hearsay, but I have read that when people in the organization started raising questions about finances, about the inappropriateness of Ravi being alone so much, things like that, that they got frozen out.

01:09:32

Well, I didn't know that. Todd Friel said this morning in what

01:09:37

I saw, he said, yeah, there was smoke, but you can't always tell where the smoke's necessarily coming from.

01:09:45

And those of us that weren't close enough to be able to identify anything, you know, there have been house fires in our neighborhood.

01:09:53

You go outside, you smell it, but you don't know where it's necessarily coming from. You can't, you can't, you don't go banging on your neighbor's door if you don't see it coming from his house.

01:10:02

So, sorry, it's not, it is not my job to go around going, you know, because now in hindsight you can go, well, you know, he never seemed to do this, or he never seemed, that's, that's so easy to do in hindsight.

01:10:18

Yeah. That's, that's. But the bottom line here is we weren't in a position. It's not what we do.

01:10:25

Nope. And when you did say something, it was in reaction to, in response to an open letter that the organization itself put out, being quite frankly transparent, which in this day and age is rather rare.

01:10:41

So, you know, I mean, folks, you can nitpick at this from the cheap seats, you know, as an apologetics organization with just two of us, we, we know as we've looked around for the many years, we've seen what causes things in other organizations to make those organizations fall apart.

01:11:02

And there's a reason why we're small in some regards. It's on purpose. Well, that's true.

01:11:08

We've, we've, we've outlasted a lot of them. Yeah. No, no two ways about it, but yeah. No, if, if you're, if you're even intimating that we knew something, we didn't.

01:11:17

All I knew was what I saw online, like anybody else. It's all there is to it. So there you go.

01:11:26

So that rather unpleasant issue, I have a feeling is going to continue to develop.

01:11:36

And by the way, it was back in December that they said that they were expecting in January to release a full report.

01:11:45

And I, I said at the time, I said, well, this doesn't look good, but we'll comment when the full report comes out, because this is an apologetics ministry.

01:11:58

Our ZIM apologetics ministry, we're an apologetics ministry, we'll comment. And I think that some of the things we've always insisted upon would have really helped in that situation.

01:12:12

And I guess I just, I'll just throw out here. It really seems to me that once the monetary figures get really huge, the natural appropriate safeguards turn themselves off.

01:12:34

You start defending a kingdom and our ZIM was a kingdom.

01:12:40

There are only a couple apologetics organizations that'd be a kingdom. You can think of the other one. Once you've got, once you start getting into seven, eight digits, like annually, yeah, that all of a sudden creates the wrong firewalls and turns off the other good firewalls.

01:13:08

That's just been my experience over time. So anyway, there you go.

01:13:13

Okay. Last thing for today. Sunday night after church,

01:13:25

I was going over to my, going over to visit with Eric and Summer and spend some time with the

01:13:35

Grands, with the Munchkins. And it's always good to see them. Of course, we had just seen them at the service, but it's, you know, go over and have dinner and do our thing.

01:13:48

And it's just sort of what grandparents do. And so sometimes we eat there.

01:13:54

Sometimes we have a meal there. Sometimes we pick something up on the way. So Kelly and I were doing our, we are very, very fancy.

01:14:02

You know, only the best. We were picking up four items from the dollar menu at Taco Bell and the guy at Taco Bell.

01:14:13

Oh, okay. I'm not going to talk about that. Anyway, it was bad. Anyways.

01:14:19

So I get a, I get a text message from the troublemaker in Texas, who is now the frozen troublemaker in Texas.

01:14:29

As all troublemakers in Texas are currently completely frozen. Wow. I'm sort of glad that missed us.

01:14:38

We wouldn't handle it even as well as them because I mean, the closest snow plows are in Flagstaff.

01:14:46

There's no two ways about that. But and they wouldn't let us borrow them anyways.

01:14:53

They'd be busy up there. They wouldn't have time to come down here. We'd be gone. And every one of our saguaros would just fall over on top of our houses and kill us.

01:15:02

So that would be the end of that. So anyway, I get the text message from the troublemaker in Texas.

01:15:10

He says, what's all this stuff I'm hearing about you and post -millennialism? And this is like,

01:15:19

I don't know, maybe 45 minutes after I get done preaching, because we have the

01:15:25

Lord's Supper afterwards and then we sing a few songs and then there's, you know, people that I greet and things like that.

01:15:31

It takes a while to get out of there. And in fact, they had turned the lights down to the last light.

01:15:38

Just one light on in the whole room before I finally got out of there. But I'm just I'm just chuckling.

01:15:46

And eventually I went on Twitter and I'm like, oh, well, there's funny memes and, you know, a few threads developed here, there and everything, but not much.

01:15:55

But Sunday evening, if you haven't seen it, I preached a sermon. And what

01:16:02

I did is I looked at, and of course, this could have been a five or six part series quite easily.

01:16:12

But I looked at Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 42, verses one through four, and 1

01:16:24

Corinthians chapter 15, verses 20 and following. And basically what I presented was this.

01:16:32

When you talk about eschatology in most contexts in the past, you've been talking about people trying to identify who the

01:16:46

Antichrist is. People trying to connect the rise of the European Union with the ten headed beast of Revelation.

01:16:55

People commenting that a Apache attack helicopter looks somewhat like the locust in the

01:17:03

Book of Revelation. Or you end up bogged down in charts and discussions of how you map

01:17:11

Daniel onto Matthew 24, onto Revelation, whatever.

01:17:19

And I burned out on that eschatology a long, long time ago in Bible college.

01:17:28

And eventually, I don't know, I forget what year it was, sometime this century anyways.

01:17:35

We're 21 years in, and I'm still not used to saying this century. It still feels odd.

01:17:42

But sometime in this century, I listened to a study from an amillennial perspective that talked about this age, the age to come.

01:17:51

I said, that sounds good. And so I said, that's where I'll go. But it wasn't any kind of,

01:17:58

I read 10 books, and I read all the other views, because I was raised in the premill perspective, so I already had those books.

01:18:09

Even when I decided, I should dig deeper into this. I just didn't have the passion to do it.

01:18:18

And I knew in my mind, this is a weak area. You shouldn't have an area of systematic theology where you're just sort of like, no, could we not?

01:18:34

And part of it I know was just the heat that it, the fact that even good brothers and sisters

01:18:43

I know of, for some reason, you start talking about that one subject, it's like, and you can't just sit down and have a meaningful chat and conversation about it.

01:18:53

What do you think? I'd take a different view of that. No, it's always warfare.

01:19:00

And it's just like, I've got enough warfare in other areas, I don't want to get into it. Obviously, going to Apology at Church, Jeff and Luke and Zach would all identify themselves as postmillennialists.

01:19:14

And so Jeff's preaching through Matthew 24, very helpful to me. I'm sitting there,

01:19:20

I'm learning. I'm going, well, I hadn't thought about that. Let's think about that.

01:19:26

And then early on, I mean, before I was an elder there, the guy said, here, here's

01:19:35

Joseph Boot's book. Here it is. Free advertising in the back there from Ezra Institute, The Mission of God, A Manifesto of Hope for Society.

01:19:47

It's postmillennial. It's theonomic, general equity theonomic.

01:19:56

It's anti -Radical Two Kingdoms. And it's just so well done.

01:20:02

And it was very challenging. And I got done, actually, I listened to it. And I got done with it.

01:20:08

And I'm like, all right, I need some more books because it's not that there's not other stuff going on in the world, but I started to see then that, okay,

01:20:22

I've got to come to conclusions on this. I can't keep putting it off.

01:20:31

And so this was the first book that I had read that was a positive presentation of postmillennialism.

01:20:42

Look, the fact of the matter is most people hold an eschatological position and they haven't read any other position but their own.

01:20:50

All they've heard is someone saying that position is wrong because of X, Y, and Z. Right?

01:20:57

I mean, that's where most people are. Most people do not sit there and read a four views book and go, oh, that one.

01:21:05

Okay. Um, most people you've been raised with the tradition or something along those lines, your favorite radio preacher does that.

01:21:15

And so I think I'll go that direction. Fine. So I get the books.

01:21:20

I start figuring out who's who, but I'm still interrupted by lots of other stuff going on until all this stuff started last year.

01:21:33

And so I'm already getting a diet from Jeff and Luke and Zach and stuff, but then last year starts and now the emphasis is upon where are we going in the future?

01:21:48

And what if we're, how do we, because when I had joined, I had talked with the guys and I'm like, you know,

01:21:54

I understand where you're coming from. I just want to make sure you understand that I see periods of intense judgment and darkness.

01:22:05

And they said, oh yeah, the idea that post -millennialism means everything is get better and better and better and better.

01:22:10

Just a straight line up to everybody's converted is ridiculous. That's not how it's happened in the past. There've been ups and downs and God judges nations and cultures and sure.

01:22:21

Fine. So when I really started thinking about the great reset, what's going on, the rise of global technocratic totalitarianism, which is all around us.

01:22:34

Um, and what that was going to mean, especially for people who are grandfathers, because I'm going to tell you,

01:22:44

I've said this in this program before, the things that change you, you get married, that changes it.

01:22:54

You have kids that changes you. Your kids have kids and that changes you more than you'd ever expect it to.

01:23:03

Just all there is to it changes your perspective. You finally start seeing long -term in a way that you just can't until you're looking in the eyes of that precious little girl, that precious little boy, and that's your kids, kids.

01:23:21

And that means they're going to have kids and then they're going to have kids. And you really have to start thinking long, long, long -term.

01:23:31

And I had not been along. There are certain eschatologies that do not fit well with long -term thinking.

01:23:42

And so as I started struggling with that, then I started asking the serious questions and digging into the question, can you get to an eschatology?

01:23:54

It isn't based upon trying to figure out what 10 headed monsters look like or what they're supposed to represent.

01:24:03

And that's when I read Greg Bonson. I've got Ken Gentry.

01:24:09

I've even spoken in years past at conferences with Gary DeMar. And yes,

01:24:18

I've been listening to Doug Wilson as well, Blog and Mayblog and everything else. Yeah, that's nice.

01:24:29

And going out to man camp, for example, I had already come to my conclusions, but I watched an excellent video that I mentioned in the sermon,

01:24:40

On Earth As It Is In Heaven. And there was a 25 -minute conversation that's on,

01:24:48

I think, put out by CrossPolitik with Toby Sumter, Doug Wilson, and Gary DeMar that basically says, well, what now?

01:24:57

Once you embrace this perspective, what now? And I found that extremely useful, extremely helpful. But when people have been saying, well, what tipped the scales for you?

01:25:06

I had a friend just today. And by the way, most of my friends have been like, eh, now you have to really think through that.

01:25:14

Thanks a lot. But they mean it in the proper way. My good friends have been like, well, okay.

01:25:21

All right. So there you are. You're a post -millennialist now. All right. Well, I haven't really given it a lot of thought, but listen to your sermon.

01:25:30

And that's Psalm 2, that's Psalm 110. They do seem to be saying the same things.

01:25:37

And then they're quoted all the time in the New Testament. So you've got the apostles quoting. And now I'm going to have to think that through.

01:25:43

And I appreciate that. I appreciate the response that I've gotten from them, especially because they all know

01:25:50

I'm not going to be beating down their doors going, okay, now it's your turn. That's not the thing.

01:25:58

What happened for me, really, if there was one line, just one line that I would point to and say, it's when this hit me that I went, oh, yeah.

01:26:18

It all of a sudden goes and clicks together. It is from a text that we have memorized in the current catechism question we're doing in church.

01:26:32

We do catechism. People who think we're just crazy,

01:26:37

I don't know what, apologia. We actually, we do a catechism question in every service.

01:26:43

And our kids learn the catechisms. And that's how we are.

01:26:49

And right now we're doing the question from Keech's Baptist Catechism about the offices of Christ and the third office, how does

01:27:00

Christ function? How does he fulfill the function of King? And the verses, plural, and I'm thankful it was verses that we chose to memorize were

01:27:13

Psalm 110, 1 and 2. Now, Psalm 110, 1 is the verse that is quoted most often in the

01:27:21

New Testament of any book, of any verse in the Old Testament. Genesis 15, 6, Psalm 110, 1, Psalm 2 is up there.

01:27:30

These are verses that are repeatedly cited and hence clearly as a part of the

01:27:37

Apostolic Testament. If what happened in Luke 24, where Jesus opens the scriptures to disciples, and if that's sort of our paradigm, then you know that Jesus opened those texts up because his disciples then quote from them over and over and over again in their writings.

01:27:59

So Psalm 110, 1, I know all about because why? I've been debating that one with Unitarians.

01:28:05

This is the Anthony Buzzard abused text. Yahweh says to my

01:28:11

Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

01:28:19

And so you have Yahweh speaking to my Lord. And remember,

01:28:25

Jesus uses this as the means of stumping the

01:28:34

Jews. He asks them, all right, if the Messiah is the son of David, then how can

01:28:42

David call him Lord? And then he quotes Psalm 110, 1. The Lord says, my

01:28:47

Lord sits right here. And they can't answer him because they don't understand how the

01:28:52

Messiah can be more exalted than David himself is. They don't understand the incarnation. And the crowd likes to do that.

01:28:59

And it's interesting in both Matthew and Mark, this is where Jesus says, how is it that David says ennumity by the spirit, emphasizes that this was said by the inspiration of the spirit of God.

01:29:20

But then look at verse two, because we memorized verse two. Yahweh will stretch forth your strong scepter from Zion.

01:29:29

So the Yahweh who says, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

01:29:37

That Yahweh says, he will stretch forth your, the Messiah's, strong scepter from Zion saying, and then using an imperative form in the

01:29:53

Hebrew, and that is translated accurately in the

01:29:58

Greek septuagint, by the way, rule in the midst of your enemies, rule in the midst of your enemies, not rule up in heaven while your enemies run everything on earth, not rule in a small little corner.

01:30:21

And they don't even know you're there. That would not be the function of a scepter of strength rule in the midst of your enemies.

01:30:36

Now you might say, well, how do you know that that's being fulfilled in Jesus? Cause maybe it's just verse one. Well, what is, what is verse four of Psalm 110?

01:30:43

The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. What you are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.

01:30:49

Oops. That gets quoted a lot about Jesus, doesn't it? Yeah. So the whole

01:30:54

Psalm is about Jesus. And this is about his rulership amongst his enemies in power.

01:31:07

And when I looked at kata kuriui in the

01:31:12

Greek septuagint, so kata and then to, it's the verbal form of kurios, to rule as Lord.

01:31:26

You connect that with what already came in Psalm 2, bring justice to the nations and the command there between the father and the son, ask of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.

01:31:41

And this is about his, his enthronement. Cause that's what, that's what Acts 13 says.

01:31:47

When he's raised from the dead, see at the right hand of the father. That's what this is about. That's what Daniel seven's about. And in that context, ask,

01:31:55

I will give you the nations for your inheritance. Did Jesus forget to ask? And so then don't have time to go through Isaiah 42, but there's a bunch of stuff there.

01:32:08

Then you look at first Corinthians chapter 15 and you have the true eschatology passage.

01:32:17

This is first Corinthians chapter 15 verse 20 is about as eschatological as you can possibly get.

01:32:23

And I'm going really fast here because I already did is already, but one,

01:32:29

I never spell things correctly. First Corinthians chapter 15, most of us just sort of look at this and go, well, that's the resurrection chapter.

01:32:39

Yeah, it is. But notice, but now Christ has been raised from the dead.

01:32:45

The first fruits of those who are asleep for a sense by a man came death by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. So we're talking overarching issues here, right?

01:32:54

We're, we're not, we're not talking about, um, that strange passage in Matthew about some of the dead coming out of the, and going in, greeting people in the

01:33:05

Holy Jerusalem. And it's the only thing he's ever said about. Now, this is overarching. This is the big picture stuff.

01:33:11

Okay. So for as an Adam all die. So also in Christ, all will be made alive, but each in his own order.

01:33:18

So just as in Romans five, you have the two humanities, one in Adam, one in Christ here, you have the same thing and you have an order and a

01:33:26

Togmah tee in his own order, Christ, the first fruits, then those who are

01:33:32

Christ at his coming, then I to talk, tell us, then comes the end.

01:33:40

When he hands over, he delivers the kingdom to God, even the father. When, when he has abolished pass on arcane

01:33:49

Kai pass on XUC on Kai dunaman, he has abolished all rule and every authority and power.

01:34:02

He has abolished it. Now, how does he do that? How does he do that?

01:34:12

I had just the sort of this general idea. You get to the end and everything's falling apart and, you know, left behind a lawnmower running, running in the, in the yard because the guy was money's lawn just got raptured and his sneakers are sitting there or something.

01:34:30

I don't know. And cars are crashing and planes are falling out of the sky and it's just an instant boom.

01:34:37

And so the day before the enemies of Christ were flourishing and they were corrupting children and they were corrupting governments and they were just having a heyday.

01:34:53

And then, and maybe seven years later, if you get into all the pre -trip, mid -trip, post -trip, all that kind of stuff, then maybe seven days, power comes down and you got blood up to the horse's bridles.

01:35:07

And that's how he does away with all these powers is instant

01:35:13

Armageddon. Until I realized that what's in the background of this text, especially verse 25, for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

01:35:29

He must reign. It's a process. And yeah, you could just spiritualize it if you wanted to.

01:35:36

You're going to say, well, he's going to reign the church and the church is going to be this small little group over here. And it's this little light of mine and you can do that, but it's a process.

01:35:50

And if Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 42 are the context for what

01:36:00

Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15, then it's a process of victory. It's a process where he has, look at the language, for he must reign.

01:36:13

What do we see in Psalm 110? To reign.

01:36:19

He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

01:36:24

That's Psalm 110 .1. That's bringing justice to the nation. Psalm 2.

01:36:31

That's what the servant does. And that was the other thing that caught me in Isaiah 42. Because Matthew quotes that whole section from Isaiah 42, and it was about not breaking the reed and the flickering flame.

01:36:45

And I've never understood what the world that was about. I never got it. I'm almost 60 years old.

01:36:52

I never got it. You might say you're stupid. Okay. I am, but I never got it.

01:37:00

I just, I don't know how, but the before and after it's, he will bring justice.

01:37:07

He will do justice. And how does he do it? Like the leaven in the lump, it slowly goes through all of it.

01:37:14

The kingdom grows and it goes from a small seed to the huge plant.

01:37:20

And it does so slowly, almost imperceptibly, not whammo,

01:37:27

Armageddon power. So he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

01:37:33

And the last enemy that will be abolished is death. This is the most eschatological.

01:37:38

I mean, the term eschatos occurs in verse 26, the last enemy that will be abolished is death.

01:37:49

And so all of a sudden I'm like, these are the controlling texts.

01:37:55

And so the difference is, and this is why I'm, you know, there's already people out there that they want to argue about this thing over here and that thing there.

01:38:04

And I go, wait, wait, you know what I find so attractive about this?

01:38:10

You know what? I don't care. The people are going to dismiss me and all the rest.

01:38:17

This starts at the top, creates the structure and then orders everything downward.

01:38:24

It's consistent. It's, it starts with the main and plain texts.

01:38:31

And so far, I haven't seen anybody who has argued that, well, no,

01:38:37

Psalm 2 isn't about Psalm 110. And that's not continued. That thread's not continued in Isaiah 42. And it just happens to be that those seem to be the verses that the apostles are quoting all the time in the

01:38:48

Bible about Jesus in the new Testament. No, no one has tried to argue that, well, you know, no, those texts really aren't connected to one another.

01:38:58

So if they are, the technical term for this is intertextuality. You have a theme in the

01:39:05

Old Testament that then becomes fulfilled in the new. And when

01:39:12

Paul, in talking about eschatology, eschatos ekthros, 1

01:39:18

Corinthians 15, 26, uses the same terminology from Psalm 110, you have to go, oh, this is purposeful.

01:39:31

This is purposeful. And that makes you sit back and look at the

01:39:38

Great Commission. And again, I'm sure he's not the first one to have said it, but he emphasizes it.

01:39:47

Doug Wilson says it well. He says, if you simply go to make disciples and you don't therefore go, you're sinning.

01:39:59

What? Well, think about the end of Matthew. Jesus comes to disciples and he says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

01:40:12

Therefore, go and make disciples. You see, if Jesus didn't have all the authority in heaven and earth, then he doesn't have the right to tell you to go make disciples of all nations.

01:40:23

But because he has all authority in heaven and on earth, therefore, go.

01:40:31

Because you're representing the king. You're representing his commands. Therefore, go.

01:40:41

Now, it seems to me real quickly that one of the primary pushbacks

01:40:47

I've gotten is that, well, an optimistic amillennialist says all the same things.

01:40:54

You don't need all the rest of that stuff. You don't need to have to go to the lengths of postmillennialism.

01:40:59

Yeah, we believe all that. Really? Where it comes down to where I can't go, well, yeah, okay.

01:41:12

We're all saying the same thing. There are certain of my friends that there's not a difference between two positions. I think there is.

01:41:20

And I think where it comes out is that if Jesus has all authority on earth and we are his followers, then we have to tell the people who will someday stand before him in judgment that they are under his authority as well.

01:41:43

We can't just keep that within the church. We have to call the nations to obedience and to justice, real justice, biblical justice.

01:41:56

That's what I see to be the power of recognizing the centrality of these texts. They are the ordering texts.

01:42:04

Every doctrine has them. Every doctrine has places where scripture roots a truth and then orders everything that goes around it.

01:42:14

We all know that. And here they are. Here they are.

01:42:23

I think it has everything to do with answering the question of, what are we going to do if in fact, and I raised this in a sermon, if Jesus is subduing every one of his enemies, have you ever seen a greater enemy than secularism?

01:42:44

Secularism in its essence is a denial of the Lordship of Christ in every aspect of life.

01:42:52

With the rise of Darwinism, you have the negation of every aspect of what

01:42:59

Jesus came to do. The Bible tells us that all of life is purposeful and designed. The new religion of man says all of life has no purpose and is random.

01:43:10

Therefore, there is no judgment. There is no transcendent meaning. It is the absolute negation of everything that Christ stands for and proclaims to be true.

01:43:26

How do you destroy secularism? How do you wipe it from the collective memory of mankind?

01:43:37

Well, I suppose you could just do it. Hey, you know, if Christ wants to come tomorrow and do that, fine.

01:43:43

I'm not going to. Look, as long as we're in heaven together, I'll take the jabs of all the amillennialists that want to throw that out there.

01:43:52

That's fine. But if he follows the same process that he has in the past, if Christ has been ruling in the midst of his enemies for 2 ,000 years here on earth and has been subjugating them, and I think

01:44:09

I could argue that he has, then what if the way he chooses to do this, this greatest enemy, is to give the world over into the power of that enemy for a period of time?

01:44:25

Great darkness. There's been periods of great darkness in the past in human history that we all look back upon and go, not doing that again.

01:44:36

Let that system destroy itself. It could be very costly and become a monument to its foolishness.

01:44:46

So that would never be repeated again. Is that possible? You have to have an explanation as to why we're going to be facing the things we're facing, the tribulation and trouble that we are facing.

01:45:02

And you have to have an explanation as to what motivates you in your Christian worldview to do everything in your power to communicate the faith to the generation and the generation after that to come through the darkness.

01:45:20

Escapism ain't going to do it. Escapism ain't going to do it. And I'm not saying that's all there is, but escapism isn't going to do it.

01:45:30

Those are the things that were motivating me. Those are the things that were pushing me along. As I said, I mentioned that video that would be of assistance to some people.

01:45:39

Joe Boot's book, Mission of God. Greg Bonson's book on post millennialism. Only the first half because he didn't actually write the book.

01:45:48

Greg Bonson didn't write half the books that are under his name today. Stuff that he wrote has been collected together over time and put together.

01:45:55

And so about the first half was really his argumentation on all the forms of millennialism and things like that. And as you would expect from Greg Bonson, it's pretty straightforward.

01:46:04

Not much wiggle room in there. And of course, folks like Gary DeMar, Ken Gendry have been cranking stuff out for a long, long time.

01:46:14

Very, very useful materials that I would suggest you take a look at if you want to further analyze and consider.

01:46:23

So there you go. There's that. All right. So that's the program for today.

01:46:29

I plan, I don't know how much time I'm going to have. I've read some books that I want to review.

01:46:38

I read Embodied by Preston Sprinkle this past weekend.

01:46:45

I'm talking with some folks as to maybe doing a mashup show with some other people to respond to that.

01:46:51

So it might be a little while until we can arrange something like that. If not, then I'll get to it.

01:46:58

I'm working on, it's going to take hours to put together, but I'm working on a early church fathers discussion in regards to Roman Catholicism in response to Catholic Answers that we want to do in the big studio, put stuff up on the screen, do a full response to Trent Horne's presentation at a

01:47:18

Catholic Answers conference recently. I've got his whole presentation put together now, and so now

01:47:25

I need to put the counter presentation together. And so working on lots of stuff. But I don't know what that means about Thursday.

01:47:34

We'll just see. We've still got stuff coming in and Rich is putting stuff together and we've got to test things and do all sorts of stuff.