Social Justice: A Biblical Perspective on Today's Issues

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report iconAndrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

1 view

0 comments

00:00
Social justice. Yeah, we've heard a lot about that, but not as much recently, but is it still dangerous?
00:09
Is it really something new? You many of us think that it is, but yet, as we're gonna see in this episode of The Rap Report, well, it goes all the way back to Paul's day?
00:26
Yes, it does. This is gonna be a sermon that I had preached on Colossians chapter 2 verse 8, dealing with the issue of social justice and a warning against it.
00:39
There is some dangers in the church when it comes to the issue of social justice. So I hope that you'll not only listen to this episode, check it out, but also please share it with a friend.
00:54
Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
01:01
This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
01:14
Pastor Caleb is not expecting much from the sermon. There's only a half a page of sermon notes. Man, you know,
01:22
I'm starting to wonder. All right, so if you wouldn't mind turning in your copy of God's Word to Colossians chapter 2.
01:31
Colossians chapter 2. We are going to spend our entire time in one verse.
01:40
Now that doesn't actually surprise any of you, maybe, but you know my previous congregations would be surprised that I could do one verse in one hour.
01:49
But I think Pastor Caleb said we had we had until five? No. But let's just, and this may not be your tradition, it is my tradition growing up, but I think it's a good tradition to rise for the reading of God's Word, even though it's one verse.
02:11
If you can rise, that is. But this is what God, by the inspiration of the
02:18
Holy Spirit, wrote in Colossians 2 .8. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the traditions of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ.
02:41
Let's pray. Lord, we ask that in this time that you and the person of the
02:46
Holy Spirit would illuminate your Word to our understanding and application.
02:52
Sometimes your Word has hard things for us to accept, but it is your
02:59
Word that we submit to, and we do not, as Gabe said, try to make your
03:04
Word submit to what we want. We submit to your Word. So we ask,
03:11
Lord, that when our culture comes up against your Word, that we would stand strong in what it teaches us.
03:19
May you help us at this time to better understand this text of Scripture. We ask in Christ's name, amen.
03:25
You may be seated. Yesterday we were at a conference talking about how to conquer, the
03:36
Built to Conquer Conference. One of the things with that idea of that conference is the fact that if we are going to look to conquer in this world, we are first going to have to understand the worldly dangers that are out there.
03:54
We need to know who the enemy is. We need to know it so we can stand up against it, but we're not going to know it by studying all of the world systems that are out there.
04:07
We know it by studying the truth, and it's with the truth that we can then combat every worldly danger.
04:17
And this is basically Paul's argument. We're jumping in the middle of a book, in case you guys didn't realize this, but Paul actually didn't write with chapters and verses in there.
04:29
It was never meant to be read that way. It was meant to be read as a complete letter, and we're jumping in the middle.
04:38
Paul is dealing with a view in his time known as Gnosticism. Gnosticism is this idea that certain people were more enlightened than others.
04:51
They felt a superiority in this enlightenment that they had. And in that, it would teach certain things, like it would teach that anything physical, like this pulpit, is bad, but anything spiritual is good.
05:05
The influence of that within Christianity had an effect that there's several books that were written to combat the early views of Gnosticism.
05:15
In fact, what you end up seeing is that much of the New Testament has to remind people that Jesus is human.
05:24
This is why Jehovah Witnesses, they point to that and say, see, he's man, he's man. You ever wonder the question, why did so much of the
05:30
New Testament have to remind people that Jesus was man? I mean, Jesus called himself the
05:35
Son of Man. At some point, don't you think people would be like, why do you keep reminding us you're a human being?
05:41
Who do you think you are? Right? You only remind people you're a human if everyone thinks you are something like God.
05:50
But the Gnostics believed that Jesus was not human because he was God. They denied his humanity.
05:59
The Gnostics had a view that in their thinking, they had an enlightened knowledge and therefore, we would call this pride, but therefore in their minds, when people would explain the truths of God's word, they would look down on that, saying, you're just ignorant.
06:19
You're not enlightened like I am. Now, I know, you guys have never heard people talk like that today.
06:26
I get it. Gnosticism is still alive and well.
06:33
And this is the argument Paul is talking about. And as we go through this, what
06:38
I want to do is spend some time breaking down this text and then look at how we can apply this to our culture, to issues that we have in our day.
06:53
So as we look at this, he says here, see to it that no one takes you captive.
07:04
This is a difficult word. We have two of these type of words that we're going to deal with in our text that is used only once in the
07:12
New Testament. That becomes hard because now words change over time. How do they get used?
07:18
You know, there was a time when FDR was, for those of you in public education, he was one of our presidents held four terms, just saying.
07:27
But FDR was called a gay man. That did not mean he was a homosexual.
07:35
It meant he was happy. You see, words can change. So when we get words like this, it becomes a little bit more difficult because you have to dig into the way the words were used at that time in different Greek literature.
07:48
So this word captive, though, has the idea of a worldly philosophy that is going to enslave the people.
08:01
The meaning of to captivate is to enslave, to rob, to carry off as booty as if in the spoils of war.
08:10
It means to, as a verb form, to lead astray, to seduce, to gain control by being carried off as booty.
08:22
Interesting that the imagery of the word he is going to use here has the idea that there are people that he's saying, do not let people carry you off and enslave you into a false philosophy.
08:40
It has the idea not only of slavery, but in the idea of philosophy as brainwashing someone into a religious false belief.
08:53
It is to use a philosophy to control someone, to get them to do what you want, to give up of their own thinking, to take on your thinking so that you can control that person.
09:09
That is the idea behind this. This captivation is to deprive someone of the truth to enslave them in error.
09:21
It strips them from truth and replaces it with falsehood in a way to make it impossible to escape.
09:28
It seeks to plunder the person and leave them without anything trapped in a false system.
09:36
This is what Paul is saying in the first century with their culture, with things that's going on with them, with Gnosticism and warning against because the ideas of Gnosticism would entrap people.
09:49
When they would get caught into this, they end up getting their pride where they think, well, I'm just more knowledgeable than you.
09:56
This is not unusual. We see this with plenty of world systems.
10:02
The good news is striving for eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.
10:12
That's right, the art and science of interpreting scripture. The bad news is somebody attending might be really upset to discover
10:19
Jeremiah 29 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to strivingforeternity .org
10:25
to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. Many of the cults do this to try to control people.
10:35
It's one of the signs of a cult is that they can keep control of people. Outside of the
10:43
Bible, this word was used to refer to carrying off a man's daughter to plunder his house and seduce a maiden.
10:53
That's the idea of what these false teachers that come into the church are looking to do.
11:00
They don't need to do this outside the church because the enemy doesn't need to work in the different worldly places because they've already given themselves over.
11:18
The enemy wants to work within the church. And so when the church, as you heard in Gabe's testimony, when the church just rests on its laurels as if we don't need to make a difference in this world, we don't need to bring
11:32
Christ to this world, then what happens is it's like easy prey. This is no different than what
11:38
Paul was dealing with. People that make themselves easy prey. So he gives a command for them to not give themselves over to this, to not allow someone to take them captive, to seduce them.
11:53
I find it interesting that the idea of the word has the idea of seducing because we have to then realize that just because someone says things that sound good, just because we have someone that says something that might make us feel better about ourselves or look better in society, doesn't mean we follow it.
12:16
We have a warning from Paul that we have to see to it that no one takes us captive to carry us off.
12:26
What false teachers want to do is they want to infiltrate the church and carry people off, robbing them from the truth into error so that they can enslave them, and the goal is to lead them into captivity.
12:43
These false teachers want to enslave others with the draperies of spiritual language that leads to sin and death.
12:52
Oh, it sounds spiritual. They know the Bible well.
12:59
So does Satan and the demons. They actually tremble.
13:08
Some of these false teachers need to do a little bit more of that. But what we see here that Paul is saying that these false teachers will come in amongst the church looking to infiltrate and lead some astray.
13:28
How are they going to do that? Well, he tells us here, see to it that no one takes you captive.
13:34
How? Through philosophy. We'll start with that one. This is the other word that's used only once in the
13:41
New Testament. It makes the study a little bit harder, but philosophy is, it's a, this word here is used in different Greek literature to be a hollow speculation or the love of wisdom or the sciences or the aspiration toward the sciences.
14:00
Now, before Socrates, I know I'm dating myself, he was a friend of mine in high school. No, I'm not as old as Pastor Caleb.
14:09
Among the priests, before Socrates, this word had the idea of moving toward the sciences.
14:18
Now, not the sciences like we think of them today, but they still had the study of science.
14:24
By the way, the study of science was the purpose of it back in the day was to have a knowledge, an understanding of the world
14:35
God made. Sounds different than what people call science today. What people call science today
14:43
I call scientism, because it is a philosophy that tries to captivate and draw people away from the truth into a false science that is not really science, it's a religion.
15:01
And if you want to debate me on that, my flight doesn't leave until six. But it was the idea of trying to study the natural world to better understand
15:14
God. It was narrowed down in the question of origin.
15:21
How do we know God exists? How do we know what created everything?
15:30
And so we end up seeing is that they try to understand the basic elements of life through philosophy and studying, asking questions.
15:43
By the way, you may know the famous quote that many professing atheists, I say professing atheists because there is no such thing as an atheist.
15:50
They profess to be an atheist, but Romans 1, the truth tells us that they know
15:56
God exists, they suppress that truth and unrighteousness. And this is one of the ways that we should not give ourselves captive to the world's philosophies.
16:05
Do not accept their arguments. So when someone says they're an atheist, I say, no, you only profess to be one, because the
16:11
God who knows everything says you know he exists. You see, the subtlety of this captivity is we sometimes take on their language and let them dictate to us the language.
16:27
Don't concede it. There is no such thing as an atheist. But long ago, atheists will talk about, you know, the fact of,
16:37
I think therefore I am. Famous quote that people use to try to say, see,
16:43
I think I exist, there is no God. If anyone actually studies the history of that, it was someone studying philosophy who wanted to try to prove where's everything come from.
16:56
His conclusion was, I think, therefore I exist, and the part that professing atheists drop out is, therefore
17:03
God. The fact that we exist, his argument was, is the evidence that God exists.
17:14
Because we could not exist without him. Socrates ended up using the idea of philosophy as an aspiration toward wisdom.
17:23
The idea of just not knowing things, but knowing how things relate to other things.
17:32
So the idea became something of more than just the obtaining of knowledge, but knowing how that knowledge fits into the rest of the world.
17:45
Plato ends up using the idea of philosophy to talk about it as the knowledge of reality.
17:54
And that ends up leading to more of what we end up seeing with philosophy, with Aristotle who ends up narrowing it more, he starts getting into some of the metaphysics and trying to answer some of the things of how we can take this knowledge, apply it to the world, and make sense of it.
18:11
And then we end up seeing, as it starts taking on more of a religious aspect, is that it talks about the goal of happiness.
18:22
That philosophy was this idea that would lead us to happiness. And yet, the problem,
18:28
I think, one of the problems in America is too many people are on that pursuit. They're looking for happiness.
18:35
And God never promised us happiness. He promised us joy.
18:41
There's a big difference between the two. Happiness is in what happens. Your circumstances. Circumstances change.
18:50
You're happy when your spouse tells you how much they love you. And then you're sad when, because you're looking at your spouse and you just run into another car.
18:59
Your situation changed and you're suddenly not happy. But joy is in both.
19:06
Because joy is something you have in a source that is beyond you, Christ.
19:12
So with a joy, we can have joy even in bad circumstances. In fact, 2
19:18
Corinthians chapter 5, a great chapter to read, Paul's argument there is the more that our bodies fail, the more that we fall apart, the more joy we have in being with Christ.
19:31
The more our bodies start to fail, we look forward to Christ. See, happiness can't give you that.
19:38
And this is what the Gnostics were trying to argue for. They wanted happiness. Wait, isn't that the
19:44
American way? Right? We say a pursuit of happiness. Yeah. Now, Scripture does not condemn philosophy of itself, but it does condemn a specific part of philosophy, a human philosophy.
20:03
The pursuit of knowledge is not bad. Understanding how knowledge fits with other things is not necessarily bad.
20:10
To learn more, to understand how God created the universe and put us in it for what purpose, all that is good.
20:16
But starting to take that now and make it about my happiness and not what
20:23
God has done is bad. And it feels good to be happy.
20:33
As listening to someone who grew up in Florida, went to all of the, you know, to the bush gardens all the time, he says, you know, it was funny, he says, these amusement parks, they tried to manufacture happiness.
20:52
And they fail. Because what do you do? You sit in line all day. Paying for food you would never eat, but you pay four times as much for it.
21:02
But they're trying to generate, to create a happiness. It's a manufacturing, a human manufacturing of something that is, that they're trying to create that is not in our control.
21:19
We should not be focused on our happiness. And this is one of the ways that Paul is saying that they lure people away and seduce people because people want to be happy.
21:34
I mean, who wants to suffer? No one. Right? None of us want to suffer.
21:42
And yet, it's intriguing and enticing to have, oh, look, we can give you happiness here.
21:48
If you believe this system, you'll be happy. I'm sure that Gabe, when he was arrested, wasn't happy.
21:59
But he was probably joyful. Would that be accurate? This is the thing.
22:05
What Paul has in view here is not a philosophy in general of this type of teaching that they were dealing with where they would integrate our working with God's working in our regeneration.
22:20
No, he's trying to make it clear that this, that system can't work.
22:26
Oh, it has truth. And every single man -made religion has one thing in common with, a couple things in common with it.
22:33
But one is they all have human effort added to how you get right with God.
22:40
And it doesn't matter how much you add. I mean, if I give you a bottle of water and tell you
22:46
I only added a little bit of cyanide, you're probably going to say, thanks, but no thanks.
22:55
You see, when we add human effort to what God has done, we no longer have the truth.
23:02
But it makes us feel better. And this is what Paul's dealing with. People who are luring people away with the idea that, yes, you can have
23:10
Christ, but you can add to it too. These religious groups are who he has in mind here.
23:19
The fact that somehow Christ is not enough. And so the philosophy of the
23:27
Gnostics had this idea that there were spiritual forces, whether they refer to them as angels, demons, but it was the fact that they would intertwine the material world with the immaterial in having these elements that would somehow influence them to have a superior knowledge.
23:52
And in that superior knowledge, they realize that really what we have to do is work with God because, well,
23:58
God is inside of us. That's language we still have today. God is everywhere.
24:04
He's all around. And therefore, I am God. It's the same teaching we see today.
24:12
And so what Paul is arguing against with this philosophy is that he's trying to make clear that this idea of a philosophy of happiness and having a mixing of us and God as if we are
24:28
God or we can work with God is false. He ends up arguing that a bit in Athens.
24:38
This is in Acts chapter 17, 17, 16 to 31, if you want to turn there.
24:46
But he says, now, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him at the observing of the city full of idols.
24:58
So he was reasoning in the synagogue and with the Jews and the
25:04
God -fearing Gentiles in the marketplace every day to those who would be present.
25:10
And some of the Epicureans, the Stoic philosophers were conversing with him.
25:18
And some said, what is this idol babbler wish to say? Others say he seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities because he was preaching
25:27
Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the
25:33
Apagos saying, may we know what this new teaching is you are proclaiming, for you are bringing a strange thing to our ears.
25:45
So we want to know what these things mean. Now, all the
25:51
Athenians and strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling and hearing something new.
25:59
So Paul stood amongst them and said, men of Athens, I observed that you are very religious.
26:07
And then he starts with a sermon starting from their idol to an unknown God. But this is the idea of what they would do in Paul's days, just sit around looking for something new.
26:19
And they're looking at Paul saying, this is strange. And so that this philosophy is something that is, it's a very subtle thing that Paul's saying that it captivates through good pursuits.
26:35
It sounds good. So one aspect of what carries us away is philosophy.
26:42
The other, he says, see to it no one takes you captive through philosophy or empty deception.
26:50
The idea here of empty is it's to be void of something. Empty handed, foolish, worthless, without purpose, destitute, something that's untrue or seamless, senseless, sorry, to make empty or to be nothing.
27:08
Now, in case you're wondering what nothing is, let me be clear. Nothing is what rocks dream about. I say that because when you look at the world and their religious system of science, you get guys that have
27:24
PhDs. So if you have a PhD, you sound brilliant. Stephen Hawkins wrote a book trying to explain the creation of the beginning of the university wouldn't say creation.
27:35
He said, what we have to understand is that in the beginning, there was nothing and that nothing was something.
27:43
Now, I'm a street evangelist. I was outside of New York University and I ended up with a
27:49
PhD physicist. Now, if you ever get worried that you might get challenged on a street being asked something that you're not going to have an answer to, when you get a
27:58
PhD physicist, you're probably going to be challenged with something you have no clue what he's even talking about.
28:05
But well, I'm quirky and I'm me. So I just asked him, you know, you're saying that there was nothing and that nothing was something.
28:15
Is that what you're saying? He said, yes. I said, so that something was really just nothing. He's like, well, yeah, you have to understand that there was something there was just nothing.
28:26
Now, I realized that I'm in trouble because, you know, I might lose the crowd here because he's going to be way intelligent and talk over my head and I'll look foolish.
28:34
So, well, I just have fun. So I just went off for about 20 minutes saying, you know, I may not be as smart as you, you got a
28:40
PhD, but to me, nothing is nothing and something is something. Nothing's not something. Something's not nothing because if it's nothing, it's really nothing.
28:45
But if something is something, so you can't have something that's nothing and nothing that's something. And I kept doing that until everyone in the crowd started laughing.
28:51
I knew I had them on my side. But you see, that is the philosophy of this world to say, well, nothing, because there was nothing in the beginning and it somehow became everything.
29:03
And they say, we're the dummies. Right? No. So with this idea of nothing, it's the word that means it's empty.
29:14
It's the idea of figuratively to be vain of something, to be without any meaning or sense.
29:22
So this deception that Paul is referring to is the idea of it's a nothing one.
29:28
There's nothing to it. I mean, Paul's trying to say that they're taking people captive with a deception has nothing behind it.
29:39
That's why I don't fear when I have a PhD physicist coming up, because I know no matter what he challenges me with, he has nothing.
29:49
And I have the truth of the creator of the universe. I'm not going to back away from this.
29:55
I'm just going to state it as fact. You know why? Because God knows more than the PhD physicist. And so what we see here is this deception is the idea to deceive, to entice, to trick, to lead astray, or to cause someone to wander, to mislead, or cause someone into delusion by treachery.
30:22
It's describing the idea that you take someone and lead them away from what they believe into falsehood.
30:31
In the noun form of this verb, it refers to give a false impression or an appearance.
30:39
It refers literally to someone that tries to trick or bait someone. Metaphorically, it is the idea of to fraud or to cause to deceit.
30:50
The basis of the trickery is not so much in ignorance, but in desire.
30:57
So in other words, they're not trying to just prey on people's ignorance of something, but to draw them away with what they desire.
31:08
It comes in the idea of this desire of being a pleasure or an enjoyment.
31:15
And so what he's saying is that what they try to captivate people with is a desire that's empty.
31:23
It has nothing to it. I used to counsel at a live -in addiction recovery center.
31:30
We had a thing we always used to say to the men when it came to sin. See, sin will, it always looks better than it is.
31:38
It always will take you further than you want to go, and it'll hold you longer than you want to stay.
31:43
And when you have guys that have given their lives over to drugs, they understand that.
31:49
But I've also always said that those guys probably understand what the Christian life should be better than anyone that never struggled with drugs.
31:55
Because the drug addict understands what it means to be completely, utterly given over to something.
32:04
They want nothing more than get whatever that drug is or whatever that addiction is. I was counseling a guy, he lost,
32:11
I think it was like a 10, 15 million dollar business that he had. Wife, kids wouldn't talk to him because he just loved cocaine.
32:21
But that desire he had for cocaine is the desire we should have for Christ. But his desires pulled him away from looking for what it should be at Christ, and he gave himself completely over to something that was empty and took everything from him.
32:37
And that's what Paul is saying here will happen with us. This idea of this empty deceit, there's nothing behind it, there's nothing to it.
32:50
And so he says here that this philosophy and empty deceit, he describes it this way.
33:00
He says that it is according to the traditions of men. Traditions by themselves are not necessarily a bad thing.
33:11
We all have traditions, habits, things we do. Growing up, for those who don't know,
33:19
I grew up Jewish. And growing up Jewish, we have certain traditions, and the purpose of those traditions are to remind us what
33:26
God did for his people. So when we sit at a Passover meal, we are to sit and ask certain questions.
33:35
Why are we having this meal and having all these things? It's all to remind us what God did for the people of Israel in Egypt, bringing us out of slavery into the promised land.
33:47
And the whole idea of that Seder, it is, well, for any of, you know, kids, you'll really appreciate that you don't go through it, but it's like three to four hours of just teaching about what we read about in Exodus.
34:00
And it's long and it's boring, but, you know, but the whole purpose of it is to remind us.
34:07
And so traditions could be good. We have a tradition in church called communion.
34:16
That's a good thing, right? It reminds us to reflect back on what
34:22
Christ did for us, and we partake it together, reminding us the unity that we have in Christ.
34:29
It's a beautiful tradition, but those are traditions God has given us. What Paul is talking about here is traditions of men, things that will be used to pull us away, traditions that they would have.
34:45
Back then, you had the, like, the book of Galatians, which would talk about the fact that you had traditions of men that they should eat certain foods, wear certain clothes, get circumcised.
34:57
How many of you Gentiles are glad that we go with baptism and not circumcision anymore? Yeah, glad that's not the sign of the covenant anymore, right?
35:10
I'm glad that God bid that for eight -year -old boys when they don't remember it, but the reality is that we had traditions that they were putting in saying, no, no, no, you have to keep these things to be right with God.
35:25
You add that to what Christ did, and these are the traditions of men.
35:34
It's the idea that you have here is that it is something that the men are creating habits that keep those people that they enslaved trapped in that captivity.
35:47
You keep doing these things because what traditions should be doing is bring you constantly in meditation to the object of that tradition.
36:01
So, if the object of that tradition is God, then all of that tradition is going to bring you back to a meditating and thinking about who
36:09
God is and what he has done. That's what communion is. But if the tradition is based on what you do, then where is the object of your focus?
36:22
What I do, it's me, it's self, it's pride. And that pride is what ends up enslaving us and captivating us into that false teaching.
36:35
And so this is what Paul is saying is that men are trying to pull people away so that they meditate on error, meditate on false thinking, meditate on this false philosophy, and it makes people feel more spiritual when they're acting fleshly.
36:53
It's sinful behavior masked in spiritual language. You may hear it like this, if you love your neighbor, just fill in the blank because they use that for everything under the sun.
37:07
If you love your neighbor, you'll go get a vaccine. If you love your neighbor, you'll wear a mask. If you love your neighbor, you'll be six feet away from each other.
37:16
And Fauci just said, oh, I just made that number up. It sounded good. Two feet was too close. Eight feet was too far.
37:22
Okay. But this is how, if you don't do this, you don't love your neighbor.
37:28
Doesn't that sound good? I mean, it sounds Christian. Isn't that the Bible? To love your neighbor?
37:37
If the object of loving your neighbor is yourself or your neighbor, it's a bad tradition.
37:45
The reason we love our neighbor is because we love God first.
37:52
I got news for you. If you're not loving God first, you're not really loving your neighbor either. So he says here, he warns that it's according to the traditions of men.
38:06
And then he says, according to the elementary principles of the world. This idea of elementary principles in the
38:14
Greek, this is, the root word just means to be in a line in a row, to be in rank.
38:23
Metaphorically, it means to be, to step out of line. And so the idea of this word ends up being, it was used in ancient history to have the idea of Plato's four elements, which is air, wind, water, fire.
38:40
It then became the idea of the stars in the universe. But then, see, the
38:46
Gnostics ended up using that, and this is what Paul is dealing with, to refer to a spiritual realm and to these invisible deities that seem to influence the things of our life.
39:03
And so it's these elements that we see. Paul uses this word in other areas of the
39:12
Bible, and I don't have time to get into all of it, but I just want to go to Colossians 2 .20,
39:17
where he says, if you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, you do not submit yourself to the decrees as such.
39:32
See, what Paul is saying later in this book, he's using the same word to point out the fact that these elementary principles are something that we died to.
39:46
We are no longer part, we are part of the physical world, but we died to the physical world to be alive to Christ.
39:55
So our mindset should not be on the here and now, but it should be with Christ.
40:05
Now, there's one more part to this text, but I'm going to take a break from the text to now get into how can we apply this to our culture.
40:17
There is a religious philosophy that has captivated many, even within the church, seen clearly in the last half a decade.
40:34
You heard in Gabe's testimony some of this. The same effects that we see in the false teaching of Gnosticism, we can see in our culture today in the false religious system known as social justice.
40:49
Social justice sounds good, except it's not social and it's not justice.
40:58
It's a false religious system that seeks to captivate people and enslave them and lead them ultimately to a lake of fire.
41:10
Now, do you notice in our country that no one was going and quoting from the
41:16
Quran to argue for social justice? Why?
41:22
Because they're already part of the world system. They're on the same side.
41:28
They're already teaching the falsehood, so they don't need to be drawn in from one falsehood to another.
41:36
That's perfectly fine. No, what he argues here to the
41:43
Colossians is the fact that they who come into the church, they infiltrate and want to draw you away from the truth, not from error.
41:51
If you're believing error, that's perfectly fine with a false system. No, they come in and use biblical language if you don't do what's best for other people.
42:05
I mean, isn't that biblical? Shouldn't we care for other people? Well, see, but the object is not caring for other people because it brings
42:13
God glory. The argument for social justice is somehow you're caring for other people to right a wrong you never did.
42:22
I never in my life owned a slave. My family never owned a slave, but I do have family that were slaves in Germany.
42:34
I don't see anyone trying to march for that, actually. Wait, no. After October 7th, they marched against it.
42:40
Yeah, silly me. You see, the reality is that they want to use biblical language because they want people that are in the truth to draw them away into a false religious system with language that sounds good, sounds biblical, sounds like something
43:02
God would want and impossible to achieve. There is absolutely no end to social justice.
43:13
There's no way to end it because if you're going to say, well, we got to right the wrongs of what happened to blacks in this country, that at some point we're going to make...
43:23
So the idea is, well, we got to make it wrong for the whites. Well then, now we got to right the wrongs done to the whites by what?
43:29
Enslaving the blacks again. It never ends. You see, it's a system that really is based off of a selfish entitlement mentality of,
43:41
I want for me. And what this captivity does is, and Paul argues the same with the captivity of his day, is that it draws people in because what it does is give people a euphoria of acceptance.
43:56
When you agree with them, they feel that they're right when their conscience is screaming out that they're wrong.
44:03
So what do they want to do to deaden the conscience? Get more people to agree with them. And that's why when they would demand, you must comply.
44:19
Well, you must comply because they want to feel better about saying a boy is a girl. That's the most ridiculous thing ever.
44:30
They want us to take them serious when they can't even figure out a boy is a girl. Empty deception.
44:38
What is the result of it? Nothing. There's nothing behind it.
44:44
There's no science behind it. Oh, they try. I do a live stream on Thursday nights and anyone can come in.
44:53
So any of you guys have questions, you can come in. But on Thursday nights, anyone comes in.
44:59
I had a friend of mine who wrote a book. Are you tired of pillows that go flat or every couple of years you, they smell bad and what are you going to do with them?
45:10
You can't wash them because that ruins the pillow. They don't stay in that same shape. Well, my pillow is the answer.
45:17
Get a my pillow. These are premium pillows that never go flat. You can wash them as many times as you want.
45:25
And best of all, they're made right here in the USA. Go to mypillow .com.
45:31
Click on the radio listeners and use promo code SFE. That stands for striving for eternity.
45:37
Or you can call 1 -800 -873 -0176.
45:43
That's 800 -873 -0176 and use promo code
45:49
SFE. From a creation science perspective, he's being trolled by a
45:56
Rutgers PhD professor. And so the professor came in. So I just had a little bit of fun because I knew my friend
46:04
Nathaniel wouldn't mind and I just backed out and let the two of them debate for like an hour and a half. And I understood very little of it.
46:10
I mean, they were just like talking up here. So we get done and I said, okay, Professor Dan, I just got a question for you.
46:18
I know that, you know, we've been told Supreme Court justices can't answer this question. What's a woman?
46:25
He's like, oh, we don't have enough time to go into that. I need a whole semester to teach that.
46:33
I go, I don't. Says it right here. A woman is what God created her to be.
46:39
Male, female. This is the truth. He wants to, he needs all this kind of creative language and big words to deceive people into thinking he knows better than me because he's got all the big words in the science degrees.
46:54
I don't need any of that. I have God's word. I need nothing else.
47:02
But this is what they want to lead you astray with. With a system that is going, it's basically a
47:11
Marxist system if you are unfamiliar with Marxism. The idea is you'll hear words of equality and equity.
47:20
It's very interesting because when you hear them use them, they use those words as if they're interchangeable. They are not.
47:27
Let me illustrate it this way. Equality would be if we were to run a race, equality means we are all going to start at the same start line.
47:38
Equity is that we all finish at the same time at the finish line.
47:45
Now, why is it impossible? Well, quite simply, if when
47:50
President Biden, I was going to say when he was alive, but when he was awake, sorry. When Biden would argue for equity, my argument is then why is he upset that all of us are not president?
48:08
We see equity means we all finish together so we all have to be president. Can that work?
48:16
No. It's a system, an empty deception that will never possibly work.
48:24
What it really is, is a system to deceive people, to take from one class of people and give to another class of people for the purpose of empowering the thieves.
48:35
And if you want to see whether that's true, just look at what Elon Musk is doing. Look how upset they are.
48:42
But the reality is that this system is looking to deceive and it has nothing to provide for it.
48:50
Help you feel better about yourself. You know why so many of these people that march for social justice are angry?
48:58
Because they're trying to find happiness in something that won't provide it. That's why
49:04
Gabe and his church is saying they can sit there with a hymnal and sing glory to God and be rejoicing in what
49:12
God has done. And even if being arrested can still rejoice and be happy because they're not trying to look to self but to God.
49:24
And that subtlety is very important. I have the privilege of traveling around the world and in doing such
49:36
I get to see a lot of church services and the songs that are sung. Do you realize that many of the churches in America have given into this deception without even noticing it?
49:51
I had a, I would, when I was pastoring I had to, I'd sit in like in the front row and I had the guy who would do the music and he always knew this was a bad sign when
50:00
I'd point in the air, point to me, point in the air, point to me. That was, who's this song about?
50:05
God or me? Who's the focus? You see most of the churches today don't sing about who
50:13
God is and what God has done. They sing about me and if they sing about God it's what
50:20
God did for me because I'm so great. That is the subtlety of this philosophy that pulls people from having their meditation on God and start to focus on self.
50:35
So is there a solution to this? I think so. Paul in this passage gives us two warnings and one solution.
50:43
We see it in the phrase here, according to. He says that this deception occurs, it's according to the traditions of men and according to the elementary principles of the world.
50:57
Those are the two warnings to be watching out for. The solution is to avoid these, this false doctrine that captivates people with their philosophy and empty deception.
51:11
The solution is according to Christ. The only way to combat falsehood and false religious systems like social justice is not by government, it's by Christ.
51:28
Trump is not the solution, Christ is. To combat error we start with the truth of God's Word.
51:40
It starts with truth, it ends with truth, with Christ all the way through.
51:46
It starts with the gospel. The solution to the problem of our culture with social justice is not to debate social justice, not to show the errors of it and to sit there and try to show how it won't work.
52:02
It's the gospel, first foremost finished. The gospel is the solution because that's the thing that is holding them captive is that they don't have the truth.
52:19
The truth will set them free. That means we need to know the truth.
52:27
We need to study the Word of God so we know the truth because Christ is the truth.
52:38
We can sit and complain about our society all day long or we could do something about it.
52:46
I think we're in a unique time, we said this yesterday at the conference, but we're in a unique time in American history.
52:54
We have a reprieve and that's all it is. Anyone who thinks the Marxists aren't coming back, you're wrong.
53:00
They're looking to come back with a fervor and next time they'll look to throw us in prison right away because they don't want the truth.
53:09
We cannot rest on our laurels. We cannot say, oh, oh, there's a reprieve. Suddenly it's okay to talk about Christ.
53:16
It's okay to, you know, like Gabe was saying in the 80s where it was like okay to be a Christian and then under Obama it wasn't.
53:25
And people are like, oh, it's just like a reprieve, like I can feel better about saying I'm a Christian again. That's not enough, folks.
53:32
We need to bring Christ to this world. They need the truth.
53:39
The solution is Christ. It is according to Christ that we prevent people from being captive.
53:46
It is according to Christ that they are set free. Take advantage of this reprieve we have in this country.