Cancel Culture & Critical Race Theory + Bible Q&A with Steve Gregg | Spokane, WA • 8.18.2021

must have been about a week ago i was watching a news program and uh something currently in the news at the time was uh barack obama's 60th birthday party which ended up being a coveted super spreader and uh that was what the news was about but it's showing footage from it and uh the commentator was uh sort of mocking obama because he had a a gray hawaiian shirt on and he says he says does that kind of defeat the the purpose of hawaiian shirts aren't they supposed to be bright and colorful he says no one has gray hawaiian shirts and my wife said you've got one i thought yeah so maybe maybe we could just say since i didn't get a chance i was a little late on celebrating obama's birthday uh in honor of his 60th birthday i wore my gray hawaiian shirt like he did at his birthday party all right so yeah i've been asked to speak about christians in the cancer culture and um uh and crt critical race theory uh all are in very interesting subjects intriguing subjects to christians uh of course i've i've heard and said things about crt and i know some basic things about it but i realized that it's a pretty complex thing and it's a legal theory that began at harvard law school and as you begin to look at the vocabulary of itself it's very confusing stuff so i spent some time last night uh online researching it and making long notes i had pages of notes and uh thinking once i wrote i thought wait i only have one hour and that's just going to be part of what i'm talking about so i i was really hoping i could really give sort of an analysis of critical race theory but the truth is it's really really confusing and i think that i can say in uh with much less detail i think i can give the impression of what's wrong with it uh and why we need to be concerned about it but it's not just critical race theory it's the whole woke phenomenon in our culture that's so threatening to christians and particularly uh the aspect of cancer culture which is you know that's what enforces all these woke views you've got a bunch of new woke views about gender and race and all kinds of things and it'd be bad enough if they were just floating around there and convincing a number of people and you know people are being deceived and going to hell but but worst of all there's there's this other element now freedom of speech is now being resisted and condemned by the woke culture so that all these other things that are so controversial and so bizarre can't even be discussed openly once you try to discuss them in any kind of an open forum you might get fired from your job as some people have you might be um you know kicked out of your your college class if you want to dialogue about this kind of thing uh you might be taken off the radio i haven't yet i've been i've but i mean for more than a year i've been thinking well that'll probably happen eventually i'm glad it hasn't yet uh you know and you can be of course taken off social media which is the main means by which modern people communicate with each other uh so in other words the thing that's most to be alarmed about besides how alarming it is that we now have a culture that calls good evil and evil good is that the ones who call good good and evil evil are not being allowed to speak and uh you know there's always been for example conflict in this country in the educational system between something like creation and evolution and and those who believed in creation have been effectively pretty much cancelled in the school systems but we still have access to everything else communication wise we're not being obliterated from the face of the earth our voice has not been totally silenced but there is an attempt now which there has not really been in the same way in my lifetime which has been a long one to really just cancel us to to uh silence us to make sure that if we don't agree with them we are demonized and uh ridiculed and and then simply silenced one way or another at this point of course we are not facing death for our views we're not facing even imprisonment for in most cases unless of course you won't make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple or something like that you might be facing prosecution in certain states like this one uh but for the most part the the persecution has mainly been in the ideological and the media and the communication realm it hasn't really they haven't really come after us and dragged us out of our houses yet and either taken us to the guillotine or the or the or the concentration camp and i know just even making those statements makes me sound like a weird paranoid conspiracy theorist except i'm not i actually i'm just a person who reads history you know and the bible and uh those who don't study history as it has been said are doomed to repeat it and it's obvious that although i'm sure our leaders have read history and they want to repeat the worst parts of it most of their students and universities have been sheltered from knowing anything about history so that they can become a part of the next basically fascism and so that's that's what's going on now let me tell you why christians in particular have to be alert to this i had almost said alarmed by it well if if we mean alarm like we wake up when the alarm goes off and we're not we're not oblivious anymore then we need to be alarmed if we're sleeping if we're slumbering if we're not awake we don't need to become woke but we need to become awake and in fact being alarmed however often has the connotation of being afraid but we shouldn't be afraid except i mean there are things frightening about the situation but we're always told not to fear and there's good reason not to fear as long as we don't fear imprisonment or death and rejection from the world and things like that which of course christians have always been commanded not to fear those things however christians in our society in our lifetime have never really had to seriously think about those things much less fear them i mean the idea that we have to learn to not fear persecution not fear death not fear prison camps and so forth uh it really hasn't been in the forefront of most americans minds because for many centuries those in western civilization have lived in a secular world that embraces christian values to a certain extent the major ones at least morality in western civilization has largely corresponded with uh the the broad strokes of morality in the bible and that's because western civilization was you know infiltrated by the bible very early on and eventually you know nominally converted to the bible for a long time but that's that was a long time ago but good ideas remain for a long time but they can be chipped at and they can be removed if you simply have a significantly ignorant populace and that's what our education has deliberately produced in the last generation or two you've got people who uh i'm not saying no one's no one's educated but there's i'm talking about the general knowledge of history the general knowledge of morality the general knowledge of even any deeper philosophical thing it just hasn't it just goes like water off a duck's back on the average high school student certainly and frankly college student too and and more and more even people of our generation i mean mine it's like they've lost their wits they i think i think they don't want to be canceled by their children and their grandchildren so because they have no roots and no foundation in christ they've always considered themselves christians but they've never really had to have that tested it's been a comfortable ride um now they face the possibility their children will disown them or their grandchildren never speak to them or their children won't let the grandchildren see them i mean this is happening to many many christian families and suddenly we feel like well it feels like i'm being persecuted i don't like this well get used to it it's not a strange thing as we shall see but because we have been acclimated all our lives in a land of fairly peaceful coexistence between the secular world and the uh and the church uh this is something that we have to realize the bell has to go off the the bell has to ring and wake us up it's it's not that way anymore the world changed while you were asleep and you just woke up and realized wait a minute when did free speech become a vice when was when when did it become evil to to believe in uh you know traditional marriage you know how when did that happen well it like happened yesterday officially but they've been working on it for decades and we weren't paying as much attention we knew about it we even complained about it we just couldn't imagine that the whole culture could become as deceived as it has and how does a culture become deceived by the church failing to teach the truth we thought that most people with or without the bible are pretty much smart enough to know basic truths but now i mean the woke-ism is they actually say that rational dialogue and even mathematics is racist you know it's evil well how can mathematics be racist well it comes from you know it was or it's there's certain you know uh rational ways of thinking about things that that are said to be distinctly uh aspects of whiteness or whatever as if whiteness is in itself a bad thing but the point is it's like the world has gone crazy and and it's just like the curtain opened on this developing craziness that's been going on behind the curtain behind our uh we haven't paid attention enough and suddenly we wake up say what world is this what planet am i on what are these people thinking i mean don't you many times a week at least hear something in the news or from someone talking about something you know normal subject but they're way off the norm and you say what what are they thinking how can they be that crazy well i think what we've learned is as it says in jeremiah they've rejected the word of the lord what wisdom is in them you know the idea is we thought at least people who aren't christians had some wisdom we didn't realize to what an extent the wisdom of western secular people was a pensioner on their biblical heritage and even people who have never been christians never pretend to be christians never want to be christians they they hold christian views most people um you know most people would say yeah you know love your neighbors you love yourself do to others as you'd want done to you isn't that like an obvious ethic doesn't everybody know that no not everyone knows that we learned that from god we learned it from his word and his word although not consciously followed by the majority of the people in our country has nonetheless educated the foundations of our civilization to the point where even people who weren't actively pursuing knowledge of the word of god still had enough of a residual knowledge of it that they seemed like they had some common sense because the word of god is wisdom and we have we have recently learned that not only have they thrown the bible out of our culture everywhere except in the church and sometimes there too but they've with the absence of the bible there has they've lost common sense which is what wisdom often is uh it's just it's like foolishness has has come in its place and we have just not been aware of it and i believe that satan has launched an almost unprecedented and maybe the word almost should be omitted attack of global deception now satan's always been the deceiver he's always deceived those who are in darkness paul said if our gospel is hit it's hidden from those who you know the devil has blinded them and that they might not come to the knowledge of the truth sure i mean the devil has always been blinding people that's his life that's his historic career but i don't know of any time in history when on every continent some of the same deceptions are are simply spreading as if having no resistance at all now there is resistance it comes from the church but as to the degree that the church's voice is canceled and no one's allowed to hear it except those people who still wander into a church building maybe and hear someone preach and some of those do it just by accident but it's not being done deliberately as much many many fewer americans go to church than did even you know 30 years ago it's a different world and when you when you don't have access to the bible and most people now who are secular don't pay any attention to the bible they don't realize that that's where all their common sense came from is from the influence of god's word you throughout god's word there's no foundation for reality anymore and suddenly two and two might equal five and you might get an a on the test where you say that uh because really there's no objective reality if there's not the word of god there's nothing to define objective reality you'd think science would do we're living in a scientific age well the walker are not even in favor of scientific evidence they want to say you know scientific evidence isn't true it's what you feel about it that's true and so we really we think what happened and i think what happened is the devil has been um released as it were to deceive the world in a big way which had never been quite so colossal at any time since the since the gospel arrived and um we do not yet know how this will how it will turn out but it's not going in a way that's extremely encouraging for christians i would say that people i mean the movement is of of the satanic culture is deliberately trying to banish common sense any sense of reality any even belief that there is such a thing as objective truth and certainly all moral sensibilities that is why we need to be talking about this is why we need to be aware of what's going on around us and it's not just that it's not just that a lot of people are being deceived but this time those who are deceived are not willing to peacefully coexist with christians it's been throughout my entire lifetime the majority of americans have not been christians and therefore i would have to say they don't believe the bible as much as they may have thought they did but they didn't mind that i was a christian as long as i was not in their face at least if i was in their face they might get annoyed but they they knew christians are out there and they believe things and in fact to a large extent the world kind of agreed with some of the stuff christians believe but now it's not just that they disagree it's that they are intolerant that we even exist as a counter voice to theirs and they're doing everything they can to make sure that doesn't continue to be true uh when it comes down to day life life the result of this is that christians are encountering in their workplaces in their schools in their neighborhoods a lot of times in their churches the influence of wokism which is an outright rejection of biblical teaching biblical norms and and it to the degree with the hostility is so great that people are in fact fired or kicked out or cancelled uh because they simply don't tow the party line it's no longer considered to be courageous to stand against the tide you know you stand against the tide you may be courageous but we hate you we're going to silence you um and that's how that's the world we now live in this has affected parents obviously in a really major way because many of us grew up at a time where there was such a thing as sanity moral sanity in the culture and where it was fairly dominant now we're raising a generation of kids that didn't know anything about that culture all they hear about in school at least and on children's tv or in the library story reading hour you know i mean all they know is that you don't have to know whether you're a boy or a girl and maybe you can't know and you know it's what you feel like today or tomorrow uh there's no reason why a person can't be gender fluid can't be a man today and maybe next week be a woman i mean why not gender is just a mental construct same thing with race it's a mental construct and that's what critical race theory teaches race is not a genetic or biological reality it's a mental or societal construct they say we'll talk more about that in a moment but these are ideas that we think i don't even know where that idea comes from i don't even know how that what that even means and yet my kids not mine but the kids that are being grown growing up in this system now are definitely being bombarded and christian parents really have their hands full we we did in my generation too when we were raising our kids but now the ones the younger parents god bless you man you you are there's a war over your children you might be tolerated till you get old and die maybe not but they want your kids they even say so i'm sure many of you saw the video put out by the the gay men's choir of san francisco called you know we're coming for your kids you know uh i mean we knew that i knew that but i didn't expect them to say it out loud you know i i usually the enemy doesn't tell you their strategy outright but uh it's like they just felt it's safe to do so now we are so disenfranchised we are so marginalized as christians they can say anything they can just tell us hey here's what we're going to do see if you can stop it and so this is a totally different world than any of us knew as much as probably even 5 10 years ago 20 years ago less less than 20 years ago barack obama said he believed that marriage is a man and a woman because of his deep faith he said he was convinced that marriage has to be between a man and woman by the time he ran for reelection he didn't believe that anymore but now if you say what he said you are going to be fired from your job good chance you won't necessarily but some have found themselves to be so you will be a hater you're a racist and a sexist and all that because you believe what what the icon of of liberal politics the hero of the left said out loud and officially 13 years ago i mean this is how fast things are changing so get ready now one reason i think this is kind of an unprecedented uh deception that has come up on the world i know i know the world's been deceived and a lot of times when christians say oh the world's worse now than it ever was what they mean is the way we understand bible prophecy of the antichrist is closer than he ever was and we see a whole bunch of degeneration of norms in america and so forth but people i've heard people saying that for like 40 or 50 years and they were wrong it wasn't the worst that it had ever been they were simply not aware of history if they had to live in times where even in israel in the old testament when barbarian hordes would come raiding through and slaughtering you know the men and raping the women and slaughtering the children breaking their heads open against walls and that's that was not even a war crime that was just war you know war as hell get used to i mean there's some awful awful times in the past especially in pre-christian times if people were saying 20 years ago these are the worst times ever they simply did not know what they're talking about if they said it now in some ways there'd be truth in it of course you and i are not experiencing the horrors that many people have experienced or do even now but the the thing that makes this unprecedented is no matter how bad things have been there never was a time when society would say you know you really can't say for sure what gender you are the doctor when you're born and says it's a boy really has no basis for saying that because a boy isn't a biological thing it's a gender attitude it's a gender identity that's such nonsense any intelligent person any intelligent atheist who said that is absolutely nonsense 10 years ago i think unless they were of course of the frankfurt school which invented critical race theory and it's it's marxist by the way in case you don't know it's it's a marxism thing uh karl marx you know and his philosophies took over russia and china and north korea on the grounds that marx taught that all of history is a class struggle between the you know the rich and the poor and so for different classes uh the bourgeoisie and the proletariat so forth but that didn't work in america the communists would like to have america too but the class struggle has never really been really a felt reality here there's a strong middle class most people are not dirt poor or incredibly rich there are some at either end but the average person doesn't feel that they're in economic warfare against the richest you know and and the whole class struggle that marxism depends on for its revolutionary fervor just it never really worked here but they now have make all of history a racial struggle the idea is to put people in two classes that have to hate each other okay if it's not gonna be economic classes we can make it racial classes and that's what critical race theory is here to do it arises out of marxism and many of the other movements that have just appeared out of nowhere in the last couple of years uh also have appeared out of marxism and that's not some kind of a mccarthyin paranoia saying that the founders themselves say so they're unashamed of trying to do in this country trying to bring marxism and overthrow all the all the constitutional norms that this country is built on now i'm not a huge flag waver i'm i'm for the kingdom of god i'm not a one of those people think america is the kingdom of god as america goes you know the kingdom of god goes not necessarily but we have to say that america has played a very important role in modern history it has been the main dispenser of frankly political freedoms of and and of uh missionary christianity i mean america is a bad country in many ways now but its standards and its principles it was built on have allowed there to be more more people have been lifted out of poverty by the american philosophy of economics and and politics than anything else in the world has lifted people out of poverty i mean america has been good for the world okay it hasn't been internally good all the time there's a lot of sin in america but the way it was formed has been good for the world but they want to overthrow it they don't want that particular kind of good for the world because it does yes in terms of as long as american values are embraced totalitarianism really has an uphill struggle uh to to prove to take over and that's the problem i think for them now i said that this is a satanic deception i'm sure for people who don't see the danger in it or who aren't christians to hear someone say that i'd say oh boy this is you know this is totally uh you know fundamentalist uh superstition uh paranoia no it is satanic jesus said satan is a liar he's the father of lies lies come from him in revelation 12 and in revelation 20 says that satan is the the one who deceives the whole world uh decepti and jesus is the truth so the voice of christ the voice of god the word of god is the only real immunity against deception now it's an interesting thing that paul said in 2 thessalonians 2 i'm sure many of you are familiar with it but it might be a surprise to some of you that paul would say this in second thessalonians 2 he's talking about the man of sin the son of perdition that comes and you know deceives it says in the second chapter beginning let's say around verse let's just take nine it says the coming of the lawless one is according to the working of satan with all power signs and line wonders and with the unrighteous deception among those who perish because they did not receive the love of the truth now don't forget that particular line this happens because they did not receive the love of the truth but it gets more shocking than that in verse 11 he says and for this reason god will send them strong delusion what god will send them strong delusion it's obvious so that they should believe a lie that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure and unrighteousness they they did not love the truth so god said well you apparently don't know what you got when you got the truth you don't know what you've got you don't value the truth you don't deserve it if you don't love it you don't deserve it so since you love not truth i'm gonna send you more of what you love love and that's strong delusion so you'll believe a lie now this is a judicial judgment upon a society whether that's what's going on in america or not can be debated i'm not i'm not trying to make this an eschatological talk i'm not here to say this proves jesus is coming soon you know he might be but he might not be that's i'm not talking about eschatology i'm talking about uh principles if a society does not love the truth when they have it god apparently judges well you don't appreciate it you can't have it if you don't love the truth i'll send you strong delusion and you'll believe a lie now satan is the one who deceives the world but this says god send strong delusion you have to realize that satan has not been able to deceive the world as long as god has been unwilling to release that strong delusion and if god does release satan he will deceive as many as people as god lets him and i have a very hard time believing that that is not what is happening in our society right now no since i had more free access to the truth here our founders you know they they were not all christians but they all felt the bible was the word of god and or at least it was something that everyone should follow and christianity thrived here as it could not in europe because of the oppression of say catholic kings and popes and things like that and so america kind of was founded with a lot of freedom for people to know the truth and then there's been revival after revival after revival in america's history to kind of bring people back around the truth has had uh free access to people and people have had free excellent truth but let's face it they didn't love it i mean some did you who are in the room probably are among those who do love the truth but you know a lot of people who don't and they probably outnumber you and what what can we expect that god would not judge a society that has had this stewardship this great privilege and has squandered it paid no value to it yeah okay now it's your turn other nations that didn't have the truth they've been in strong delusion forever but you haven't but now it's your turn you deserve it not you in this room god looking at a society like ours yeah we do deserve it in fact people have been saying we deserve it for a long time remember that old that old line i think is in the 70s i think it was attributed to ruth bell graham billy graham's wife she said if if god doesn't judge america he's going to have to revive sodom and gomorrah and apologize that was probably uh overstated at the time but it was popular at times even when in the 70s to to champion the idea that america has turned from god and were worthy of judgment um and i suppose by some standards that could have been true but it's far worse now so we definitely we can't say god is unfair in giving our nation strong delusion we've been begging for it rejecting the truth and you reject common sense when you reject the truth now this particular deception that is embodied in uh critical race theory and some of the other movements of the volcanism uh it's it's a it's a great deception it's very orwellian if you've read george orwell you know that the way that tyrants deceive people is by giving euphemistic names to their evil plots you know uh a government agency that is there to obscure the truth and replace all the history books with fake history it's called the ministry of truth you know i mean this calling something the exact opposite of what it really is and and that's a an old marxist tactic it's a death it's a devil's tactic calling good evil and evil good okay so what do they mean when they use the word social justice what could sound more perfect than that who could object to a term like social justice hey count me in god's all about justice yeah but that's not what they mean when they say social justice what they mean is the overthrow of actual justice in favor of a substitute for justice that is actual injustice in its uh in its application and i'll talk more about that in a moment but social justice is just a good example of a euphemistic name given to something that is really the opposite of what it sounds like it's talking about another term like that is anti-racism actually crt or critical race theory has as a as a second name for the movement they call it anti-racism but it is institutionalized racism to the core as we shall see i'm just giving you some examples how about the moment black lives matter who would dare deny that has any christian ever believed that black lives don't matter don't christians all believe that human lives matter and black people are humans and therefore we've never doubted it and yet if you say to a black lives matter person well yeah of course black lives matter all lives matter that's a racist statement wait how did that become a racist statement that's like that's like a martin luther king statement yeah but martin luther king was a racist too according to crt they do not think that the that martin luther king and and his ideas of judging a person by the content of their character rather than cover skin they think he was misled they believed he was naive and they are not into him he's not a hero to the crt movement at all he would not join them if he was alive today because of what they believe and we'll talk about that but but again black lives matter certainly that's a extremely positive sounding phrase it's entirely true black lives do matter but the movement that calls itself by that which was founded by marxists they have publicized that they were marxists it doesn't teach that black lives matter it teaches that criminal lives matter and police lives don't it's a movement against law and order it's a movement against the punishment of criminals which and this is not a racist statement this is a fact i know crt doesn't like facts they think facts are racist well no wonder they do here's a fact 13 of the american population is black men or it's black just black um so six or seven percent are black men do you know what percentage of violent crimes and murders are committed in this country by black men 50 percent the the 93 percent of americans who are not black men commit half the crimes the seven percent that are black men commit the other half now this is considered to be all right really by crt because these people are just acting out their anger and frustration because of the systemic racism that has been endured but you don't count them as criminals you certainly don't treat them as criminals you treat them as criminals if you're a cop you may go to jail for treating them as criminals now if you treat a white man as a criminal who does the same thing and do you treat it just same way no penalties no complaints this is not a black lives matter movement it's a anti-law and order movement if if a person believes that black lives matter their main concern socially will be with abortion because abortion kills more black lives more than a hundred times as many black lives as police do why not target if you like black lives why not target the abortion clinics because the abortion clinics are woke too the wokes got to stick together the people who who who started black lives matter they are not against abortion and yet black lives are slaughtered by the millions every decade by abortion but they they would protect it even though they even know that margaret sanger who started planned parenthood the large the nation's largest purveyor of abortions she started out she was a nazi she was a like a clans person she didn't join the clan but she gave speeches to an approving clan audience her position was we need abortion because we're getting too many black babies and they put the vast majority of planned parenthood clinics in this country are in black neighborhoods because they want to make it real convenient for black people to kill their babies now i think black lives matter and therefore i'm against i think all lives matter and therefore i'm against abortion altogether but if i was campaigning for the well-being of blacks in particular abortion is what you go after first if you say i think black lives matter but i really mean the criminal blacks who get their punishment from law enforcement they're the ones we're supposed to say matter and even those you know let it be a man who's been imprisoned for years a man who committed armed robberies who stuck a gun in the at the stomach of a pregnant woman while his buddies robbed her house uh and then he was you know on had taken a fatal overdose of drugs and died in custody he's like the patron saint of black lives matter his they they've got statues they'll tell down tear down the statues of people who did great things and they'll replace with a statue of a man who was a career criminal and died resisting arrest as a criminal for passing bad checks and and taking a fatal overdose of fentanyl you know this is not a a real movement in favor of black lives it's favoring a particular kind of black lives over others and a real christian say of course black lives matter but unfortunately i can't use that slogan because it means something it belongs to a a movement that is seeking to undermine justice and righteousness and uh and even black lives it's undermining black lives because the the biggest killer of black lives they're not bothered by that i'm i'm bothered by it how about the phrase antifa what's that short for anti-fascism antifa means anti-fascist if you've seen these guys in action you've never seen anything more fascistic in this country than the actions of antifa and the people that they're attacking have done nothing to qualify as fascists and this is euphemistic deception start a movement that is dedicated to evil and give it a name that makes that's the opposite of what it is and no one can speak against it this is how the deceptions uh perpetrated even the expression equal rights during the time when um same-sex marriage was being debated they said well gays should have equal rights shouldn't they shouldn't they have the same rights we have yeah i do believe they should i'm not against gays having equal rights but i never had the right to redefine the word marriage for the world marriage is a word that's been in the language for thousands of years and it always meant something in particular it's a good word it's a necessary word to describe something that's fundamental to society we can't do very well without it and if i'd come up and said listen i have the right to change all the dictionaries and change the meaning of marriage for everybody and you can't disagree with my definition people just ignore me i have no right to do that but if i'm one of the three percent who identifies as a gay person and i say i want to change the definition of marriage well they're asking for a special right that no one else has ever had changing the language for everybody against their will that's not an equal right that's a special right that's exceptional privilege i've always believed gays should have the same civil rights that anyone else should have don't we no of course we do but to have rights that none of us have and that being rights to destroy civilization to undermine the the foundations for for everybody else that's not really an equal right but that's called equal rights for gays equal marital rights well before they change the definition of marriage to include same-sex marriage most states already gave gays all the rights washington state certainly did all the rights that married people you could they could visit their partner in the hospital they you know they could you know i mean we know that i i happen to be here teaching them in rural washington the week that the gay marriage thing was passed and i remember the discussion on the radius and they've already for months had granted every privilege except the word marriage but they're not satisfied until they have the right to change that word so it means nothing and that's what it does they haven't given it a new definition have you heard the new definition of marriage to the gays of goodness i haven't it's now a word that once meant something specific it now means nothing in particular two people love each other they won't live together they don't have some legal civil rights together uh okay well but what if it's a man and his three daughters want to be married to each other what if it's a a woman and a dolphin that actually happened in england in florida years ago a man wanted to marry his television and he went to court for the right to do that i don't think he granted it because that was too many years ago now now the courts wouldn't have any basis for denying him sure okay you're married to your tv what is marriage it's nothing in particular it's a foundational thing the first institution that god created as a basis of a righteous human race to perpetuate itself it now for the first time it's been totally shredded there's no meaning to the word they didn't change the meaning they just eliminated the meaning now it's a word without a meaning this is total deception total confusion freedom of equal rights that's these who doesn't believe in equal rights i believe in equal rights but how come the woke people get to you know take that word and apply it to something that has nothing to do with equal rights and now they own it and this is because this is how satan deceives and this is how certain servants of satan have always deceived especially revolutionaries of of the marxist ilk and i'm not making this political but that's a fact that's how soviet russians you know persuaded the masses that's how china did i mean there's an awful lot of force involved there too obviously the revolution but i mean the the people who became convinced of it became convicted because it was described them in terms that sounded so virtuous and yet the terms are deceptive that's how the devil deceives now i did say i'd say something about social justice and about crt and tell you why i don't first of all why social justice is not justice first of all you don't need to add the word social to justice real justice is social by definition justice is how people treat each other it's the principle upon which righteous behavior is conducted between human beings that's social you add the word racial justice social justice economic justice whenever you add uh whenever justice becomes hyphenated it becomes something that's not justice anymore it's something to give somebody else preferential treatment which is what justice doesn't do and social justice the main difference between that and biblical justice is that biblical justice is that a person is responsible for his own behavior and will or should receive the consequences of his own behavior and if his behavior is criminal well he'll be punished for it doesn't matter who he is he's personally responsible no one else will be punished for his crimes that's injustice but he'll be punished for his crimes now social justice theory is different and that is people are not responsible for their own actions groups are responsible for group actions white people are responsible for the oppression of black people now frankly i never had a black slave and neither did anyone i've descended from and many of the black people in this country have never had an ancestor that was a slave yet because i'm part of a white race and there are people here who are part of a black race the group the white group is guilty even though it has nothing to do with any actual actions you've done it's simply an assignment of guilt to a category instead of to actual actions true justice is what god does on the last day god's perfectly just he says give every one man according to his works whether it's good or evil this is said again in the bible and again in the bible this is what justice is that you if you do righteousness you should have a reward for that if you do evil you should have a punishment for that that's justice there may be other things besides just like mercy to be considered but justice is something very specific it is the enforcement of the rights of individuals against the wrongs done to them by other individuals but not by groups true sometimes whole groups are of a certain evil mindset the kkk for example the whole group you know there's there's not a good one among them a good one wouldn't be in their group unless he's trying to infiltrate them and change them but i mean let's face it the kkk thing the nazi party things like that the whole group is bad but they're not a racial group they may be identifying themselves racially but they're just an ideological group you can certainly be guilty for holding evil views as a group that's identified by its evil views but a whole race of people no i mean that is not what the bible teaches for one thing when people say you know white people generations ago afflicted black people well so reparations are owed really again my people didn't do anything to any black people some white people did but my ancestors don't come from that region where they were doing that and by the way there were black people who had black slaves too in fact the black slaves that brought over here were kidnapped from their families by other black africans who sold them to european slave traders the the kidnapping the enslaving was done by native african tribes you know once the slaves were released here after the emancipation of the slaves in this country this country wanted to do a favor to blacks who felt uncomfortable here and had been taken against their will from africa and america established a country in africa called liberia it's it was populated by former american slaves and european slaves and they set up their own government run their own you know what they do they have slavery a black society with black slaves slavery is not the white man's sin it's human humanity's sin every society in the world practiced criminal slavery until england abolish it under the influence of christians and then america abolished it and then of course anyone who's enlightened had to agree that it was bad so it disappeared from the civilized world it's still practiced by the way by muslims and by uh indigenous people in african continents so you know but to make us like oh the white people they're evil they they're the slave owners so just being white makes you evil ah let's face it just being human makes us evil but it doesn't indebt us to another group of sinners who are also evil just because our skin color is different than theirs but group justice is what social justice is it's it's called identity politics you're loyal to the group identity the racial identity or whatever that you that you happen to identify with and then no matter whether they do good or evil you you're favorable to them and there were frankly white americans who had made this mistake even when i was young i'd hear people say my country right or wrong you know no a christian doesn't say my country right or wrong a christian says what's right is what is demanded if my country is right the better for it if it's wrong the worse for it it's not my identity as an american that identifies my approval of other people who are that identity it's behavior justice real justice is all about individual behavior everyone will receive his own reward for things done in the body the bible says you know this idea that someone's guilty because their ancestors had slaves you know the bible says a son will not die for his father's sins and a father won't die for his son sins the soul that sins will die there's no culpability that transfers generation to generation you're not guilty for what your father did according to the bible under the law of moses and deuteronomy it's actually forbidden you can't put a person to death for what his dad did and the verse i just quoted is from ezekiel chapter 18 and verse 20. you're not guilty for anybody but you did now by the way if you incited them to do it if they did it under your influence and you share some guilt for that to be sure but if it was someone before you were born you bear no guilt for it go in peace and sin no more you know i don't condemn you but but social justice will and crt will which is a branch of social justice now we all know that there has been injustice done in societies and most societies have in fact showed favoritism to the powerful and to the rich and it's the poor in the in the bible the prophets are always complaining that the judges are not giving justice to the widows and the orphans the ones who don't have enough money to grease the palm of the judge and get you know and through their bribe get their way favoritism toward the rich in is an injustice and it's it's worldwide i believe it happens here too in this country i mean a rich famous politician who's found criminal he's going to go to a country club prison you know if he goes anywhere hillary clinton hasn't gone anywhere yet she's too influential i mean frankly again without seeking to be specifically political but just talk about justice you know the things that a conservative person is sometimes jailed for some of the guys who worked for trump for example going to jail people who aren't conservative are doing them all the time saying equal things doing equal things worse things and there's just no concern there's no enforcement that's because there's certain kind of preferential treatment especially to the good old boy network to the to the powerful and the rich and uh i mean there's reasons why nancy pelosi isn't in prison and it has nothing to do with her behavior so i know that sounds very political but hey can can i help it if one political party has chosen evil as a way of life and the other political party has its share of evil too but has not officially endorsed evil as a value you know that's just i can't help that that's the world i'm living in and i can't not say so but the bible makes it clear that it is wrong to show favoritism to the rich in the court but it also says it's wrong to show favoritism to the poor your group is not judged by a group identity a guilty rich man should be punished the same as a guilty poor man an innocent poor man should be exempt from prosecution as much as a guilty rich an innocent rich man there's god does not respect persons and that's the thing justice is impartial critical race theory and social justice theory are not impartial justice is colorblind i don't care what race you are if you do a crime you do the time if you're a good person you get the reward of a good person but that's considered to be not true you know if you're if you're part of an oppressed race then your rage justifies going out and doing criminal acts burning down buildings breaking windows even those of the establishments owned by other black people as we know we had a summer of that enraged black lives matter and antifa people going and burning down cities burning on you know uh here a small group of unarmed people march on the capitol on january 6 and they're still in jail now seven months later and having their trials yet haven't even been charged yet but whole masses of people go violently burning police stations and so forth and what what these people did in in washington d.c going into the capitol unarmed and doing no harm to anybody uh that's called an insurrection they've got to be judged as if they're traitors but those who are building down gov burning um government buildings in seattle oh they're just you know it's a mostly peaceful protest by some people who are justifiably angry you know so this is social justice and this is also what critical race theory leads to critical race theory i'll put it very briefly is the idea that racism is not something that's an attitude that you have personally it's not something that you have done now let me just say this racism has historically meant you think that your race is superior to another race and that frankly any person of your race is superior to any person of that inferiority that's racism that's not what critical race theory says no you don't have to have that attitude to be racist you just have to be white you don't even know you're racist you are continually doing these micro aggressions without knowing it you you you ask a person a question about what country they're from oh that's a racist microaggression that's just there's an underlying systemic attitude that cannot be avoided whiteness is oppressive being a white person you're an oppressor if you're a person of color you are oppressed now tell that to barack obama you know it's like the idea of critical race theory is that the whole system is rigged against people of color that the white people in order to preserve their power have placed systems in place that will prevent people of color from succeeding and just by being a white person and not protesting against that you are part of the problem you are part of the you're a racist too because this it's the system that's racist and if you're part of the system you're a racist and of course if you're a black person you can't be a racist because you're part of the race that's oppressed so so there are no racist black people they can say anything they want about how much they hate white people or how evil white people are or how much every white person who dies of any tragedy deserved it that's not racist because they're part of the oppressed race it's impossible for them to actually be racist racist has to do with what white people are by dent of being white not their attitudes they can be a white person being married to a black person raising black children but he's still a racist because he's white it's whiteness if you haven't heard that yet stay tuned you'll be hearing it everywhere i'm i'm already here everywhere i don't know where you've been but this is critical race theory and again people are judged as groups not as individuals and if you are white everything is your fault and you can't get over it you can protest it you can join the black lives matter women you can do what you want you'll never be free from racism but you can be continually penitent for your incurable racism you can humble yourself you can loathe yourself you can apologize that you have been so evil as a white person even if you can't think of any time you've ever disliked a black person i mean i think there might be some black people i've disliked there's a lot of white people i just like too but it has nothing to do with what color they are i'm actually voting for a black governor in california i didn't vote for a black president but had nothing to do with his color but you see that's what critical race there is everything is racial racist for example if you own a store and two men walk in a black man and a white man who do you serve first well if you serve the black man first crt says you did that because you don't trust him you want to get him out of the store faster if you serve the white person first you do that because you think the white person is more important and you're showing favoritism to it you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't you just it everything is racism now of course if you say to someone who's into crt which is almost everybody now including a lot of pastors if you say but wait i i've never had ill feelings toward any person of any uh toward any races i've never judged anyone by what color their skin is i've never never been able to understand why anyone would it's just not in me they say oh you're a racist you just don't know it or a liar yeah but you see when you say something that's sensible and evidence-based wait i'm not a racist i've never i've never told racial jokes i've never been hard on racial people of another race i've never had any interest in doing so i don't think lower of them i think of them by their character not by what color they are they'll say now that's that's an evidence that i'm not a racist but they'll say no you are and if you don't say you are you're just in denial you need to be woke you need someone has to wake you up so in others they don't need any evidence i have evidence that i'm not a racist by the standard definition but they can redefine racism and make you just no you're white that's what that's what racism is as being white oh okay but now can you prove that that's what racism is they don't need to they've got the media on their side they've got the universities on their side they've got everything on their side except for the faithful church and they want to get rid of that too although some of the churches out of fear of man is going their direction now what are we supposed to do we live in a culture like this they're coming for us and that's not a fear-based statement i'm not afraid in fact from the time i was in in the 70s when i went to this year i actually thought this kind of thing would happen a lot sooner than it did and i was ready for it i just thought well suffering for jesus there's a glory in that bring it on i mean i wasn't a hero but i just thought i've had a biblical worldview in my life and the apostles when they got beaten and told to not speak anymore in the name of jesus they were being canceled they said well whether it's better for us to obey you or god you have to decide that but we already know the right answer we're gonna obey god we cannot help but speak those things they get busted again they're out preaching again they bring it in and beat them again and they say we told you not to do that and peter said we have to obey god rather than men i don't have to submit to your ridiculous rules especially when they're not according to truth i am bound to agree with truth and especially to obey god they lived in a canceled culture when someone says we're going to kill you if you don't stop preaching in that neighborhood be silenced or be your way or our way we'll silence you how i mean that's extreme cancel culture and they just said do your worse i mean we're not afraid to die first of all but you see christians they are not all but many are because it's never crossed their minds all the years they've been christian never crossed their minds that persecution could be a reality for them not here in america certainly and now they're saying wait looks like it's kind of creeping up on us creeping it's leaping you know and and many are not ready for that but if you have not in the past been serious enough about your faith to say oh this is what i signed up for persecution cancellation defamation maybe in prison maybe death who knows i signed up for that when i signed on the dotted line i'm following jesus here i'm taking up a cross you know i'm ready to go she said he that seeks to save his life will lose it and he means to save your life by compromise it's not wrong to eat when you're starving or to drink when you're dying of thirst that's saving you that's not or go to the hospital when you need medical that it's okay to save your life that way as long as you don't compromise your principles but he that seeks to save his life by not being obedient to christ by not being loyal will lose it but he that loses his life for my sake she'll find it that's a that's a standard i knew that when i got saved no not what i got to say but when i entered the ministry as a teenager that's that was just part of my world view if it wasn't part of yours adopt it because it's christianity it's what christianity is let me give you real quickly what to do first thing don't think it's strange and that's our biggest problem it seems strange what that's not what i'm used to people used to let me live and let live they didn't try to make me shut up well peter said don't think at any strange thing in first peter 4 12 think it not strange brethren when you encounter fiery trials as if some strange thing was happening to you well why isn't that strange certainly strange from my experience yeah but not from the what jesus said to expect if jesus tells you expect something and it happens that's not strange he never lies and he did say something very much like this in john chapter 15 verses 18-20 said if the world hates you you know that it hated me before it hated you that's why it hates you it rejected christ our society rejected christ in the bible some time ago now they've decided to decide we don't want jesus we don't want anyone talking about jesus they just they hated me before they hated you if you were of the world the world would love its own yet because you are not of the world but i have chosen you out of the world therefore the world hates you okay so it isn't all that strange is it it's only strange with reference to our past experience it's not strange for christianity christians throughout the world throughout history have been imprisoned and beaten and killed for their faith if they knew how frightened that thought makes many american christians they think where have you been didn't you know what's going on you know christians have been imprisoned and killed for for centuries the other another thing is you need to be of course confident and unintimidated if you're afraid to die if you're afraid to be rejected if you're afraid to be unpopular because you told the truth and this goes for you kids and teenagers too it's harder harder for teenagers now because all their friends are woke if you're gonna be a christian you're gonna have to say hey i'm gonna be armed with the truth what if i have the truth i've got nothing to fear i remember when dwayne geisha a creationist who debated evolution slot was in a meeting i was at and and someone asked him does it ever kind of freak you out or scare you to know that you're going up against some of the biggest name scientists in your debates you're debating them publicly does that ever scare you says and he was very honest and he said no never occurred to me he said he says when you know the truth it's a very empowering thing you know you can't be afraid in a debate if you know that you have the truth because the truth always has the best arguments now we're live in an age where people don't want arguments anymore having an argument is white letting people do and be what they feel like they are that's woke everything else is white uh white privilege white identity whiteness is a bad bad word but you know you're right if if you do and there's a very uh cool verse in daniel chapter 11 that says and it's not talking about our time it's talking about another time during the maccabean period but but what it says should be applicable to all time it says in daniel chapter 11 verse 32 those who know their god shall be strong and do exploits this is at a time when the uncompromising hasidim the jews who are going to stick with the law were actually their lives were truly threatened by antiochus epiphanes the pagan oppressor he actually made it a capital offense for them to circumcise their children which god required them to do it was a capital offense for them to own a copy of the scriptures the torah it was a actually a capital offense for them to even to keep sabbath and if they did keep sabbath they couldn't even defend themselves if they were attacked and so these syrian soldiers would attack them on the sabbath and and the jews were keeping sabbath they just wouldn't defend themselves they they were faithful to the covenant they had with god they this has canceled culture coming down hard and that it's in that context that daniel says but those who know their god will be strong and do exploits well we we're supposed to know god too i'm afraid too many people in the churches who've always identified as christians might not know their god and i i i shared my testimony i think earlier or somewhere maybe it was one of the morning sessions but when i first walked into calvary chapel i was 16 years old and it was the jesus moment it was full of people who were recently converted mostly hippies and so forth and i sat down next to a guy who looked like a hippie and he he said he asked about if i knew the lord so yeah i was raised a christian i've known the lord for years and and when he said what's the lord been doing in your life i i didn't know what that meant to me god wasn't quite that real i mean i knew about god i knew everything about god that i know now but i knew about it knowing him is a different thing it's not the same thing to know your bible as it is to know the author it's not the same to read a biography of a person and feel like you know them then to actually be acquainted with them and interact with them and and have them in your life i'm afraid too many christians as as i think a.w tozer said have known god only by hearsay we've heard it we've read it we believe it we don't reject it so i guess i know god but what's he been doing in your life what he's supposed to be that real that he does things in my life you know like a real person uh yeah yeah he's supposed to be real those who know their god other than by hearsay will be strong unintimidated shadrach meshach and abednego were living in a canceled culture too in babylon they had to bow down to the idol that everyone literally everybody was bound down to because there were severe consequences for not doing you'd be thrown in a fiery furnace a very unpleasant way to go and they wouldn't they wouldn't bow nebuchadnezzar says why don't you bow you don't aren't you afraid of the fire furnace if you don't if you don't bow down to this idol i'm going to throw you in the fire furnace who can deliver you then and they said well uh o king we don't even have to answer you but our god is able to deliver us from the fire furnace and even if he doesn't we're not going to bow down in other words yeah we're we really believe if god doesn't want us to burn up you can't make us burn up but if he does want us to burn up then that's okay that's what he requires of us because he we know our assignment we cannot compromise we know what god's claims are on our lives we can't allow man or all men or the government or our job whoever holds our job in their hands or even the approval of our children we can't let that make us compromise and nothing is more painful about the cultural culture than the fact that children cancel their parents and grandparents that's the most painful part losing your job that can be painful too make you angry maybe but when your kids say i'm sorry you don't you're not acknowledging your white privilege they've got it too but they're not acknowledging it that makes them virtuous that's virtue signaling is when you say you know i know i'm a racist okay but i don't know i'm a racist and the simple reason is because i never have been well then you are canceled because you you're denying your white privilege okay or something else you're pro trump or some other thing that is definitely against the woke thing and i'm not here to say people should be pro-trump i'm just saying that's many parents have been canceled for being pro-trump i don't know of any that were cancelled by the children for being pro-biden because the people who are pro-biden are the ones who do all the canceling if you're not woke you're not interested in canceling people you actually want open discussion everyone who isn't woke thinks open discussion is a profitable thing let's hear your opinion i'll hear you you hear mine let's think about this let's talk about this it's on the woke side that there's a no discussion aloud it's totalitarian and it's oppressive and it's not it's not going to change it might be destroyed or overwhelmed but it's not going to change woke-ism is not going to get more tolerant because by definition it doesn't care about truth it cares about power and these are the the deceptive ways in which they pursue that power through deceiving children and so forth yeah it hurts like heck for your kids to say you're unenlightened i'm sorry i can't talk to you anymore and i've actually had some of my children do that they frankly i couldn't stop them but but they came around they came back two of them are still kind of woke but they decided me being out of their life was not fiscally good for them anyway uh we need to know where our loyalty is we need to know god if you don't know god you are not going to be strong at a time like this and you will not be a hero you not do experts you won't be saying go ahead put me in the fire first i'm god's not yours you do what you want god will deter my feet that's that's the attitude of a person who knows god if you know the truth then you are not afraid of being proven wrong by people who say you're a liar and if you know god then you're not afraid of tin horn dictators and and fools frankly who have decided they don't want to know the truth well die for jesus if it comes to that you know i sometimes think i really don't want to go to a concentration camp a firing squad would be okay that's pretty quick even a guillotine though it's kind of gross but you know that's okay that goes quickly but a concentration camp i'd like to avoid that they think you know what if i do get put in a concentration camp what a great fellowship there to be in there where else you're going to find a bunch of people who really have christian convictions that they won't compromise you know that'll be a great church man do not be afraid of what men can do to you god bless you and so that is basically all i have time to say i actually have a few a few more points but we need to take some time for q a also so i'm going to hand it over you van that was not watered down [Music] we're not i didn't know we had that option okay thank you very much that was that was awesome um and if you're in here tonight and you heard this message and you feel god is calling on you to give your life to the lord i would love to pray with you afterwards just grab me after the meeting tonight because i hope we're convicted after that amen all right here's the first question so if we are headed in the u.s towards serious christian persecution i don't at all fear the idea of losing my life in fact i long for eternity with christ and probably have lots of life left to live but i have young children which is where the fear comes in how do parents of young children handle the potential bodily life risk when needing to stand for the truth that is that is the hook you know if you didn't have your kids you could endure anything but you your instincts and rightly so are to protect your kids from anything i remember when my kids were little i before i had kids i was looking forward to martyrdom i actually thought there's no greater way to go you know everyone's going to die of something very few have the privilege of dying for jesus you know it's a really small percentage of christians or people that can die that way but everyone will die of something i always thought you know if i go to heaven after i die and i'm talking to the martyrs and the apostles and the saints and and sitting around you know showing their scars and telling war stories and yeah i i died you know they they uh hung me upside down on a cross or and shot arrows into me and and they uh skinned me alive and fed me to dogs and things like that those are pretty impressive horses if they turn to me i didn't have to say yeah well i i kind of died in a roller coaster accident at the theme park you know i there's there's i want to have a heroic story if god will allow it i may not be i may not be worthy of it i may not be privileged to but if i'm gonna die anyway if i could die for jesus that'd be my first vote you know now when i was before i had kids i actually contemplated going to eastern europe i never did make that trip i didn't have the money but there was still the iron curtain there i thought about i'd read brother andrew and his god smuggler and i'd read worm brandt and these people and i thought i'd love to go and preach in the underground church and maybe get arrested maybe maybe go to prison for christ i didn't have a wife for kids but when i had kids my attitude toward christ was the same but i thought i kind of hope that doesn't happen to me until my kids are at least grown you know i mean but she said if you love wife or children more than me you're not worthy man we have to just say trusting god is what christians are called to do god knows better than i do what i can or should or cannot do for my kids he knows how to protect them i know whom i believed and i'm persuaded that he's able to keep that which i've committed to him against that day and my children have been committed to him i do believe my children will not die without faith i i actually my prayer is not that they'll get saved before they die but they'll get saved a long time before they die so they can serve god but god knows what's best that the point is i think i can save my children sometimes when i can't but god can and if all my trust is in god of course it'll break my heart to see anything happen to my children but do you know how many christians have had their kids taken from them or indoctrinated in you know soviet schools and things like oh it's horrible but god is faithful and we don't know what he will do but he won't be able he won't be unable to do what he wants to just because you're not there now when i was young uh with young children i was actually looking overseas looking for what country could i go to and it was i'll tell you the truth is because this international treaty united nations international treaty for the rights of a child was being seriously considered during the clinton administration hillary was pushing it pretty hard and it the treaty for the rights of the child is another one of those euphemisms that's fake it has nothing to do with the rights of children it has it was to take all the rights to your children from the parents and give it to the state there were no rights of children involved it was deprivation of parents of the rights to raise their children and giving it to the state so one of those another lie another lying term analogy that sounds okay but i thought hillary might get it through thankfully she didn't and they left office so leaving the country was a moot point but i seriously was considering you know i need to take my kids to panama i need to take them to i actually went to bolivia to look around with some friends who were interested in that i mean i've always been that aware of the danger sometimes more aware than was necessary sometimes i was ahead of the curve you know and therefore i guess wouldn't say paranoid but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really after you remember that but i don't know just trust god what else can you do really i mean you can homeschool them and make sure that they don't get indoctrinated with the school's stuff that gets to be pretty labor-intensive if even all your friends kids are indoctrinated but if you're very good teacher of your own children maybe they can go to school and come home and you can detoxify them you know never know i there you gotta do what you can do and leave the rest with god that's pretty much the way it is with everything you keep doing your best pray that it's blessed and he'll take care of the rest you know all right next question another one from last night if there is what epistle gives us a view of how church services were conducted in the new testament times or can we get a picture of what went on from several or more than one epistle well some some books about actually kind of spend part of their focus on the decorum and protocol of the of the meetings but in many cases especially first corinthians there's no no book in the bible more than first corinthians that has more to say about conduct in the church meeting and order in the church meeting the problem with it is it's mostly a corrective epistle rather than telling us how they normally did it paul's reacting to how the corinthians were doing everything wrong getting drunk at communion you know being disorderly throughout their whole meeting and paul's you know rebuking that and saying you have to do everything in order but he doesn't really lay out a protocol for the church meeting now i don't know that there needs to be a protocol most mostly when people meet together something has to be organized or else everyone's going to be you know the preachers we heard in cats you know you really have to have some things say okay we start at this time and we face this direction we and we're going to spend this much time doing some things and do something else that's protocol that's that's a program we call it you know uh we don't there's no particular program that the church is described as following in the bible we do actually have from justin martyr in like the second or third century a description of the church meetings that in his time he said we gather together about dawn on sunday and uh you know we i think i think he said we sing a hymn to christ and and uh you know we we pray and you know then some of the leaders get up and and speak about them they read something from the memoirs of the apostles and make comments and exhort us to obey them and then they have we take the bread and the wine and the deacons take the bread and wine out to the homes of people who are sick and not there there's there's actually some description of the things that were included in their service in justin martyr's time but when acts describes what the church did on the day of pentecost and afterwards it just says they continue daily in the apostles teaching and in fellowship and in prayer and in breaking bread now those certainly remained the major elements of christian gatherings and frankly the major justification for christian gathers to be taught the word of god to pray corporately to fellowship and in those days to eat together the the fellowship was called the agape feast in the first few centuries and that's where they took communion actually taking green was part of the whole dinner and and the fellowship the table was uh a part of their fellowship now most churches don't have that now and i'm not saying they have to but i mean churches sometimes have a potluck or something but and that's good but there's no prescribed order of these events there are elements that are important elements that can be included in various forms in various times so i no there isn't one book now paul of course in first timothy chapter 2 gives some just a little bit of you know again corrective for the most part of things that need to be corrected acts uh in in reading actually occasionally have a little bit of information about what went on in a meeting but no the to tell you truth there is not one scriptural protocol that is a template for the church meeting and in my opinion christians should just gather like they get together like family to learn about christ to learn what he said to learn how to do it to encourage each other to minister to each other in gifts if there's some prophets there let them prophesy a few of them uh you know if there's someone who's got an exhortation let him give it i mean there's that's what the gifts of the spirit are for they're to be exercised in a meeting i will close this answer with this one thing in first corinthians some people say that paul envisaged a meeting where everybody shared their gift in the meeting because he says how is it brethren when you come together everyone has a doctrine or has a tongue or an interpretation or a revelation and they says let everything be done in decently in order so they say see paul wanted everybody to have something to say in the meeting he didn't actually prescribe that he described it he says how is it brethren you corinthians when you come together everyone wants to talk everyone wants to have the platform once in a while everyone wants to do something but whatever is done let it all be done decently in order the only thing he prescribes is decency and order when he talks about everyone wanting to share he said that's how it is that's descriptive not prescriptive but certainly to have multiple people sharing is is if there's gifts and the holy spirit wants to speak through more than one person i think i think that's good all right next question what actually happened on mount transfiguration well um when jesus was walking down the mountain with his disciples afterward he said tell the vision to no one so some people think that the disciples just had a vision we know that moses and elijah appeared were they really there or was that just a vision of them you know jesus was glorified visually his face shone like the sun his wife was whiter than any uh you know launderer could make and so forth it says uh you know um but did all that you know happen objectively or did the apostle were the the apostles privileged to have a vision which revealed the glory of christ and the the message of the transfiguration to him i i'm willing to believe that moses and elijah really were there and that this really happened objectively but since jesus said don't tell this vision to anyone it's at least remotely possible that the disciples were having a vision like john had on patmos or like zechariah had of you know joshua the high priest being accused by satan before the throne of god i mean that joshua wasn't really there that was a vision it's like a dream and so i don't know i'm just i'm willing to just say it happened just the way it's described and it's not just a vision they had the more important thing is what did it mean what was the purpose of it and i believe the purpose of it is very distinctive moses and elijah represent the law and the prophets these were the authorities that the jews including the three disciples that were with jesus there had always been obliged to obey they listened to moses and the prophets that's the authority of the old testament and when they saw moses the prophets with jesus they thought wow these guys associate with him let's build three tabernacles we'll have a camp meeting here all weekend we'll make one tabernacle for moses one for elijah one for jesus implying let's keep all these guys around as long as we can but that it says peter said that because he didn't know what to say and what happened is a cloud came down and moses and elijah disappeared and only jesus was left and a voice from heaven said this is my son hear him in other words if you're thinking about keeping the law of moses and keeping the old testament and jesus now that's mixing things up that are not the same jesus is not on the level with moses elijah they just came to pass the baton to him they just came to endorse him and go this is the one you'll hear now you're not listening to moses and elijah from now on you're listening to this one my son and i think that is the message that god was trying to get across in the transfiguration which would go along with hebrews chapter one right right god who at sundry times and diverse ways spoke to our fathers through the prophets has now spoken through a son or his son all right these uh next questions kind of go hand in hand so i'll read them both and let you take them both at the same time what are the signs of the second coming of jesus and what do you think the mark of the beast is and to go along with that is it uh something a christian can get without realizing it or is it tied to obviously to idol worship or to purposely getting okay it's hard to give short answers about anything but especially about this i remember uh listening to a christian radio station once many years ago in the and the preacher said jesus said we're supposed to look for the signs of the times so we're supposed to know how how near his coming is and i remember having thoughts at that time saying no i don't remember that jesus said we're supposed to be looking for signs of the times the term signs of the times appears one time in his teaching but he's rebuking the pharisees because they have not recognized the signs of the times that they were in not future times he said you can discern the sight of the signs of the sky and know what the weather's gonna be like why can't you discern the signs of the times so he's not talking about the end times there's actually no phrase in the bible signs of the times referring to the end times um and again this the the term only appears that one time so and i remember thinking too why would jesus say look for the signs of the times what am i supposed to do about it suppose i saw a distinctive sign is that there it is jesus has come back sometime not very long from now well why do i need to know that so i can get prepared why am i unprepared what so i get serious about god before he comes well why am i not serious about god now am i allowed to have forewarning to kind of get my act together when i've been neglecting him jesus said if he has he's given a servant a duty to give food to his other servants he says blessed is that servant if when his master comes he finds him so doing but if that evil servant says in his heart my master delays is coming and he gets to eat and drink with the drunkard and and party on and get drunk and uh beat his fellow servants he says the master of that servant will come at an hour that he does not expect him and we'll cut him in two and give him up his portion with the hypocrites now you notice jesus said i'm coming when you don't know and that's what he said be watchful be ready because your masters can come when you do not expect him so if if jesus is coming when we do not expect him why would he give us all kinds of reasons to say oh it's soon now it's soon forewarning ten minute warning you know now also when the disciples said to jesus just before he ascended will you at this time restore the kingdom to israel he said it's not for you to know the signs or the seasons that the father has put in his will but you'll receive power when the holy spirit comes upon you and you'll be my witnesses in jerusalem in judea and somewhere into the ends of the earth you know it's just keep busy doing what i told you to do don't worry about times and seasons that's not yours to know anyway it's amazing to me how many christians and how many preachers and teachers almost make it a career of teaching about the signs of the end time i have to say during the jesus movement 50 years ago i was subject to such teachers and we were very much sure and how lindsay told us jesus had to rapture the church before 1981. hal lindsey who wrote the late great planet earth he was on a christian tv show in the 70s and he said he says i'm either a hero or a bum this is a literal quote i'm either a hero or a bum if the rapture happens in 1981 i'm a hero if he jesus doesn't come then i'm a bum i've heard no more from him about his self-image since that time but other people who are even more respectable than he like my pastor at the time he thought jesus had to come because the signs were coming that's why i didn't go to college i was offered a full ride college scholarship by my grandmother but i said wait jesus is coming to say i don't want to graduate after the rapture you know and i knew that wouldn't be possible because i was pre-trib at the time but the point i'm making is we were all urged to be mindful of the fact that jesus is coming soon some people didn't have children for that very reason some didn't get married for a while i got married hastily because i was part of the pre-rapture rush they called it and it was a bad choice frankly but um other people call themselves bachelors of the rapture but they're not anymore but that was 50 years ago there was this sense we were being encouraged to believe jesus is coming soon jesus is coming soon now i don't know how this is considered to be a good thing to know because we don't know jesus said it's not for you to know why do people devote whole ministries to trying to say we know it's at least it's the season this is the general time jesus is coming back soon she said that's not for you to know how about if we teach people what is for us to know and in deuteronomy 20 deuteronomy 29 29 says the secret things belong to the lord but what he has revealed are for us and our children that we might learn to do all the words of this law you know do what you're told don't worry about the things you haven't been told god has his secrets let him have his secrets if you're not ready when he comes back that's just no one to blame but you he said occupy until i come occupy serve god be a christian don't say i had a i witnessed to a guy in my high school a senior high school class and uh and he was very you know snide and so forth through the whole semester i witnessed him he did not become a christian but he'd always say well when i see him coming in the clouds i'll say i believe i believe i think well i don't think you'll have time exactly but i think some christians almost have that idea too not when they see him in the clouds but when they see you know russia march into israel then that's going to be the sign that's what my pastor said or you know something else israel has become a nation it's got to be in this generation they said they were wrong a couple of generations have come and gone since israel became a nation so these uh you know one thing i can say about those who think that they are reading the signs of the end times and they're pretty sure of themselves and these are the bible experts it it says so right on the back of their books they're bible prophecy experts and these are the experts who teach nothing but bible prophecy and one thing that can be said about every one of them that's said this is a sign the end is near they've all had one thing called they've all been mistaken and they're the experts i'm not an expert on anything so i'm not going to try to tell you what the signs are because i don't think there are any given now you might say what about matthew 24 didn't say there's wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and diverse places yeah but that's where he's when he was asked when the temple would be destroyed the disciples said jesus said not one stone of this temple be left standing on another it's all going to be thrown down it was in 1870 40 years later and he said well okay i'll answer your question you're going to hear of wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and pestilence but that's not it that's not the end he says the end is not yet you know they'll deliver you up to nations you'll have to bear witness to me throughout the world before the end comes but anyway jesus did not actually give any actual science i will say this though he did indicate that god has a plan and he's not likely to come back until that plan has been fulfilled and there's at least two aspects of that are revealed one is this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all nations and then the end will come that's got to happen the other thing is that paul and jesus both said the church has to become mature by whatever standard he is measuring by and that statement about you know the kingdom of god is like a seed comes first up the blade then the head then the mature grain in the head then when the grain in the head is mature then he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come so the maturing of the church and the evangelization of the world are certainly projects that god has been working on for 2000 years and i don't think he's going to abort the projects for no good reason before they're done it says of jesus in isaiah 42 4 he says he will not fail or be discouraged until he's established justice in the earth and the islands will wait for his law so jesus isn't going to say well this is getting taken too long i'm getting a little tired here it's been two thousand years well a day to the lord is like a thousand years a thousand today he can he can take ten more days of those of that length if he wants to uh he won't get any older you know he's not going to run out of injury and he won't even be discouraged if it takes long because he knows he's not going to fail so the main thing for us is to see if we're going about his business the first recorded words of jesus when he's 12 years old was did you not know i must be about my father's business that's a good thing for you to say too um now i don't know of any signs of the times but i do know that jesus is going to come back and he's going to accomplish his work beforehand i believe now the other thing was about the mark of the beast this is obviously a very different thing some people think it's not because they think that's part of the signs of the times but the mark of the beast i was told when i was young that the mark of the beast is going to be a laser tattoo now 50 years ago that was a very sexy technology invisible to the naked eye but you put under a black light and it shows right up you know boy that's high tech and so they said we're gonna have instead of credit cards we're gonna have a laser tattoo with our credit number on it and we're gonna at the point of purchase we're gonna have to show that thing under the black light and no wonder it's black light it's satanic you know and and you can't buy or sell without it you know so that's what it's going to be well the theory hasn't changed just the technology has now they say it's a chip that's a new technology that's come up in the last 50 years a little chip you can put understand that's the new sexy thing you know oh the devil's going to use a computer chip after all they're already putting computer chips in animals in florida yeah yet true but animals don't buy or sell anyway so i don't think i don't see how that would have anything to do with it but i will say this i have come to see revelation in a different way over the years of studying it i may not be right you know why i know that because so many people have different views and they think they're right if i think i'm right i could be like one of them i will say i have read 50 commentaries on revelation and digested them into four different views into a 600 page commentary on revelation called revelation 4 views so i'm at least familiar with different views doesn't mean i got i know the right one but my view is that this is symbolic and because it says the beast will require people to have his mark or his name or his number wait that's not even all the same thing do we get a choice when the marketplace comes you want the number the name or the mark the mark is quite stylish actually it's it's a nice little brand it's a circle with a you know pitchfork in it you know it's real nice or maybe you don't like the number maybe you're more of a math kind of guy or how about the name are you if you're real loyal and you want to advertise the name no why would there be a choice like that if we're talking about something literally put on your hand what is being said here is this i'll tell you this the next verse in revelation which is revelation 14 1 says and i saw the 144 000 on mount zion having their father's name in their foreheads oh okay do christians have god's name laser tattooed on their first or does god give them a chip you know with his name in it i don't think so having a name on your forehead was a very common and familiar phenomenon in the roman empire when the book of revelation was written most people in the roman empire more than half were slaves and a fair number escaped and were recaptured the common practice of a escaped and recaptured slave was to be branded on his forehead or his hand the reason for the hand and before it is because you can't cover those with clothing as easily as you can cover almost any other part of your body so is the hardest thing to conceal about yourself is what's on your hand or your forehead and it would be a brand like like people like cowboys brand cattle you know it would be it might be the the owner's name or his logo his brand could be anything but the point is having somebody's name or brand on your forehead or hand meant you were his slave and everyone could tell by just looking at you at a glance they they know who your master is the man with something on his forehead a mark or a name advertised everywhere he went whether he wanted or not that he had a master and he was the servant of that master now to a roman citizen reading about having the mark of the beast on your hand of herd whether literal or not it would be understood that means these people are his slaves and it's obvious that they are his slaves and the people of god it's obvious that they are god's slaves the distinction between god slaves and man's the devil's slaves is it it's so obvious it's written across your face now the hand and the forehead were significant also in the old testament because in deuteronomy 6 and several other places in the law god said take this law of mine and bind it on your hand and between your eyes now the jews some of the jews actually took that quite literally they created what they called phylacteries boxes that they'd actually strap across their head you can see this in israel today or on their hands or on their wrists and these are boxes full of scripture passages because god said i want you to you know bind my law to between your eyes and on your hands jesus made fun of the practice he rebuked the pharisees you make your big phylacteries but you're you know you're not really following the law you know god didn't care how many pieces of parchment you had in a leather box strapped to your arm that's not what makes you a person of god what does though is that your hands which is your works and your thoughts represent your head are subject to god your your thoughts and your actions are devoted to the service of god just as the devil's people their thoughts and their actions differ from ours in this very respect they are devoted to the devil in his ways and therefore i believe that a jew or a roman reading that passage would say oh i get it god's people have his brand on there for it the devil's people have his brand on their foreheader hand and that means you can tell whose servant they are how by the way they think what comes out of their mouth by their hands their actions and that's how christians are different than the world we're we're transformed by the renewing of our minds we think like god thinks we think like jesus taught us to think we don't think like the world does our works are of a different character they're in obedience to god as servants i believe this whole passage is symbolic now you might say oh that's pretty dangerous what if they really do come to your house and make you take a mark i've had people ask me that when i give this exercise well if they come to your house and they say here it is you know put out your hand we're going to stamp you with this will you take it my answer is over my dead body but not because i think it's the mark of the beast but because i think the government's already too intrusive i don't want government having any more control or over me than they already have less is better and you know i'm not going to take it willing they can hold me down and give it to me but see the very fact that they could they could have three guys hold me down probably one would do i'm not that strong and have another guy put on me against my will now i'm going to hell yeah why because i got the mark of the beast that's the question could it be done to you against your will how could god judge anybody by what was done to them by someone else rather than what they did to themselves what they chose for themselves that's why it can't be something just a physical mark because anyone could do it they could do it in your sleep they could knock you out they could hold you down you could take the mark of the beast which dooms you to the lake of fire and you didn't even agree to it right so and another thing that always seems strange to me is why would god decide who goes to the lake of fire based on how they purchase their groceries i mean isn't that what the mark of the beast is thought to be that's you can't buy or sell without it you've got it you've got to cash the society you want to buy something you've got to have the mark or if i don't want to take the mark well then you're going to starve you won't be able to buy your groceries also what god cares about is how i buy my groceries is it okay that i have a debit card i resisted that for a long time thinking this is starting to look suspicious you know i'm going to do cash only transactions you know but but now the debit cards pass they eventually they're going to probably have cashless economy at least they're working on it the bible doesn't say there will be a cashless economy by the way you thought it did but that's a deduction and not a very reasonable one from the statement if you don't have the mark of the beast you can't buy or sell so that must mean it replaces cash because we buy ourselves cash maybe it could mean that but certainly not the most obvious or reasonable thing to think the most reasonable thing to think is that people won't buy from you or sell to you if you're a non-conformist you're not going along with the world system just like the nazis did to the jews if you're a jew we're not going to buy from yourself you the roman catholic the popes had had papal bulls saying it's illegal to buy herself from the waldenses who happened to be the evangelicals of the period people who were obedient to god have often been persecuted through boycott and even even the jews who weren't christians were persecuted through boycott by the germans and that to me it's one thing to say you can't buy or sell because we just don't take cash here it's another thing to say you can't buy or sell because we don't like you and we won't support you and we want nothing to do with you and you're cancelled and i think it's it's the people who think differently and act differently that'll be cancelled and now will there ever be a chip put under people's hands could be you know there's a lot of things the bible doesn't actually predict but happen and a lot of things governments do are deliberately mimicking what they think the bible predicts i heard back in the 70s that in brussels the center of the common european common market which hal lindsey said was the ten nation confederacy for which the beast would come that they had a computer that's taking in all the information about everyone in the world and the locals the people who work in the office call it the beast wow that's significant yeah i guess it tells you that they've been reading revelation and they think they're doing it you know lots of times prophecies are self-fulfilling but they're not really what the prophecy said it's what somebody thought the prophecy meant and they figured we're going to do that you know so i know maybe it would be marks on hands for it but certainly no if somebody puts a mark on your hand against your will no you're not going to go to hell for that that's the answer that's the short answer all right next question if 10 percent is required tithe in the old testament what is meant for the new testament you know the tithe is not commanded in the new testament though many churches teach it and i have to be honest with you i think a lot of pastors are zealously teaching tithing because they are afraid the church will not be financially supported adequately if people aren't put under that law of course churches that actually teach tithing rarely get tithes from everybody anyway it is said that of all the evangelical money in the united states like three percent of it ends up going to church or missions things like that so despite all the pastor's teaching you're required to tithe it's just not happening people don't like to be told what they have to do on the other hand people don't mind paying for a good meal at a restaurant if it's good food if the church is feeding people typically people will support it and so i've always considered if i want support i'm not going to think about the money anything about feeding people you know and let god put it on their heart if they want to give but it turns out people do and uh i remember when chuck smith's calvary chap was growing mightily in the jesus moment other pastors saying how do you how do you get people to give how do you get people to support this big thing he said i don't know i just the people just love to give you know when people love god they love to give if a church can cultivate a congregation that loves god and is fed and they appreciate being fed they'll give it'll happen remember when david was gathering money to build the temple to hand it over to solomon it says the people kept giving and giving giving he finally said hey listen stop giving we've got more than enough now these people just love to give now a person who loves god loves to support the work of god therefore do the work of god minister to the people who love god and there'll be no you don't have to tell people they have to give 10 jesus never said that you have to give 10 now he did tell the pharisees that in tithing they were doing the right thing because they were under the law the purpose of the tithe was to support the tabernacle and the temple staff and there was a lot of them by the way the levites were one out of 12 tribes of the whole nation and they all had to be supported by the tithes so you know 10 percent was by no means an excessive amount to support a whole tribe but it was it was part of the maintenance of the temple and the tabernacle we don't have that temple or tabernacle anymore and some people the the uh many churches teach a doctrine called storehouse tithing because malakai said bring all the tithes into the storehouse and test me by this says the lord see if i don't open the windows of heaven and proud of blessing you're unable to receive and so preachers say the storehouse you're supposed to bring your ties to the storehouse where is the storehouse well they say the storehouse is where you go to get your food your church is what feeds you your local church you're getting fed it looks like you owe your tithes to the local church well the problem with this first of all is that what we call a local church today didn't come into existence in the first or second or third or fourth centuries and after a protestant reformation what we have in the form of denominational groups and churches came along malachi knew nothing about local churches neither did the apostles except that every christian in town was in the church every christian in the world was the church the church that is the temple is the global church local churches are more like synagogues were the local assemblies for the jews but they didn't give the tithes to the local assemblies they must have given something to support it but but the tithes went to the temple to support the levites that was what tithing was for the levites are gone the priest is gone the temple is gone as far as like no the tithe is gone too jesus didn't ever enforce it he did say to the pharisees you pharisees you're hypocrites because you pay your tithes but you neglect the weightier matters of the law justice mercy and faithfulness you should have done that and not neglect the other notice he did say in paying your tithes you are indeed doing your duty as jews under the law that was your duty but you neglected more important duties jesus never suggested nor did the apostles that tithing was a standard for christian giving what is the opposite or what is the alternative to it the alternative is this jesus said in luke chapter 14 and verse 33 i believe it is he said if anyone does not forsake all that he has he cannot be my disciple so the the standard for the christian is 100 you know i say what i'm supposed to you know not live in a house not drive a car not have clothes not have money in the bank well that's not what he said you have to forsake it peter and the other apostles said lord we have forsaken everything yeah but peter still had a house he still had a boat he still had fishing gear he could still go fishing again jesus even had him use it you know it became jesus's transport back and forth across the lake once he told peter we got a tax coin you need go catch a fish and get it from his mouth peter first took everything but he still had stuff but it now belonged to jesus before he was a follower of jesus it belonged to him 10 percent belong to god now these apologies 100 belongs to god 100 belongs to jesus but jesus doesn't say you have to divest yourself of it all there are things god wants you to do they take equipment you have to wear clothes you have to raise your kids there are obligations that god wants you to meet those are done for christ's sake and therefore his money is used for it we are stewards we're not owners of 90 and we have to surrender a tax to god for 10 we are stewards of everything we have that's what it means to be bought with a price and be not your own you are a slave and what you've been given is to be managed for your master that's what stewardship is i think of joseph as a great example of a steward because that's what he was he was a slave in potiphar's house he owned nothing but he got exalted to a position of responsibility because he was faithful his master gave him more responsibility he handled the whole household he handled all the money in the household he fed the other servants he probably had a nice bed and a nice room and probably wore nice robes to the glory of his master but he didn't own them he didn't own the clothes he wore he didn't own the house he lived in he didn't own the money he handled that he knew that belonged to somebody else but his duty was to make sure that all these things were used for the advantage of his master because if joseph had said hey you know i could pocket a little bit of this and buy myself a little you know retirement home on the french riviera he would have been put in prison faster than he was he would have been a criminal he probably would have hanged anyway because he'd be stealing he seemed to have a lot of stuff if you didn't know who he was and you met him on the street or saw and how much money you think there's a wealthy man yeah he was handling a great deal of wealth for someone else and that's what a steward is that's what someone who is not their own has been bought with a price but has been entrusted with two talents or five talents or ten times and the masters do business with this until they come and i'll see how much you profited me from that that's what jesus said we are we're stewards a steward owns nothing that he handles when you become a follower of jesus you forsake all that you have that is you transfer the title of everything including your family including your home including your car including everything not nothing left out if you don't forsake all that you have you're just not going to be a disciple now once you've forsaken it god can say okay i need someone to drive this car for me because i have a lot of cars i usually assign someone to drive it for it why don't you drive this car for me it's my car you drive it this house why don't you live in it maintain it and put up this family of mine and take care of them for me everything you do that ordinary people do you're now doing it for god because it's his now as you are but it also means that once you've met all the responsibilities that ordinary people have to meet you if you have something left over that's his too and you have to decide how much does my master want me to spend let's say on entertainment maybe some i'm not saying the master wouldn't agree with the sermon why don't you go out and just take some time off you know it's not like entertainment's evil it's refreshing it may be something that a hard-working person needs some of and the master knows it go ahead and spend some of that on that but you've got to realize whatever i'm going to spend on what i would call myself i've got to be able to in my own conscience justify this is what god would want me to do with this portion of his money because it's his money he doesn't get 10 percent he gets 90 i talk about this a little bit in my recent book and i mentioned that you know when jesus healed 10 lepers and they went away and one came back uh you know he didn't say wow that's ten percent not bad interest on my investment here no he said where's the other nine aren't they all supposed to come back and thank me you know when you give 10 to god and you consider the others he's gonna say yeah that's ten percent where's my other ninety percent where's the other nine you know that's mine too isn't it now this is why some people when they understand this don't want to be christians and they shouldn't be they want jesus to negotiate a different kind of a deal for them but he doesn't negotiate he's not a businessman negotiating and compromising with to make a bargain he's a king kings give orders their servants obey them now he's a good king if you're not if you're not following him as your king it doesn't mean you're free now you're following a king that you're in bondage to and he doesn't love you at all you've got to serve somebody you know it's maybe the devil or maybe the lord you're going to serve somebody you're not going to be free of kings there's no freedom of kings there's the kingdom of satan the kingdom of god you're in one or the other the kingdom of god is delightful jesus paul said the king of god is righteousness and peace and joy in the holy spirit what's the kingdom of satan unrighteousness and strife and misery and depression and you see plenty of evidence of that from people who are not following the king these days ma'am next question is there a difference if we use the english name of jesus or is it more spiritual or is it different if we use the greek version or or or more the hebrew version is more often what people are wondering about you know the name jesus of course is not what jesus's parents called him they didn't speak english jesus is an english word the sound the j sound doesn't even exist in the hebrew or the aramaic language and jesus was raised in an aramaic speaking family and spoke aramaic of course everyone spoke greek too because alexander the great had conquered the region 300 years earlier and imposed the greek language on everybody but people had the greek language and they had their native language so everyone was at least bilingual a lot of them knew latin too so it'd be trilingual but the point is uh jesus native tongue was aramaic there was no j sound obviously no one called him jesus and some people say therefore we shouldn't call him jesus because that's not really his name and there's only one name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved and isn't it's not jesus because the disciples never called him jesus they called him yeshua yeshua that's that's the the hebrew pronunciation for joshua which was his name jesus comes from the greek jesus which is of is is a greek term and it's not yeshua and therefore we're told we better learn how to pronounce his name right it's sort of like what the jehovah's witnesses say you got to call him jehovah even though they don't realize that's not the right pronunciation either yahweh is much closer but uh you have to come to jehovah but they say if you pray and you don't call him joe how's he gonna know who you're talking to they actually say ever had them you ever talked to your jw you know if i want to get you i don't i don't just say hey you i call your name then you know i'm talking to you so how are we going to pray without calling him jehovah he might not he might think we're talking to molech or something or baal no i don't think he's that stupid i think god's smart not stupid but the truth is this shows a problem jehovah's witnesses think you pronounce it jehovah people who are a little more in touch with hebrews they know it's yahweh or there's a shortened form of yahweh in the bible yah in fact one of the psalms says extol him who rides on the clouds by his name by his name yah now i've heard people say we should call jesus yah we should call him yahweh or at least yeshua or maybe it's really yahushua some people say it's yahushua or yahushua after all the name joshua the man joshua in the old testament whom jesus was named after even in the hebrew he's sometimes called jehoshawa he's called hoshea and he's called joshua three different pronunciations for the same guy's name now this can get really confusing if god's really a legalist about how you pronounce his name now i personally am not a legalist about how people call my name if i go to live in a hispanic spanish league company and people want to call me esteban instead of steve i know who they're talking to i know that's their version of my name i'm not such a narrow-minded jerk i say how dare you call me my name in your language and people say why do you call jesus jesus why don't you call him yeshua because i don't speak hebrew i'm an english-speaking person now the disciples when they wrote to the gentile world wrote in greek to greek speaking people they never used the word yeshua they used the word jesus now i've heard people say the word yesus and this is from people who don't know anything about language they heard it from someone said i guess that makes sense first time i heard i thought i don't think that makes sense but i'll look it up make sure sure enough they were wrong jesus does not mean hail zeus the word zeus plays no part in the word jesus the word zeus is spelled differently than s e u s but jesus is the greek transliteration of yeshua because the greeks did not have a j sound uh i'm sorry they didn't have a sh sound the greeks in the greek language there's no sh sound they had to substitute with just a simple s so instead of yeshua it's jesus sure there's an s on there but it's it's literally a greek intonation of the word yeshua using greek sounds familiar to the greek tongue and is it wrong for them to call him jesus apparently not the apostles all calling that in the in the epistles in the gospels you get the originals of the gospels in greek it's always jesus it's never yeshua the greek new testament never uses the word yahweh or yeshua why because those are not greek words people who speak greek usually have greek forms and names i don't speak greek or hebrew i speak english the intonation of the name jesus in english is jesus now i don't care if someone wants to call him yeshua he's familiar with people doing that they did that when he was around here on the earth but he apparently doesn't mind being called jesus either or else the apostles were certainly offensive to him by writing the bible and i have no reason to believe that he who did not object to having his name recast in the greek pronunciation would have an offense in having it recast in spanish as jesus or english as jesus or in german as jesus i mean every language has its own way of pronouncing things god is not a stickler for pronunciation if you have a speech impediment and can't pronounce yeshua it's not going to count against you and if you don't have a speech impediment and don't want to use the word yeshua but you want to call him by the name that he's called in in your culture in your language that's fine it's not a different name it's the same name in a different language and so you know people find all kinds of ways to be legalistic i should say legalistic people find all kinds of ways to be unnecessarily legalistic you know if you want to be legalistic about keeping the law or the ceremonial laws or whatever that's one kind of legalism i don't i don't favor it but when you have to make up stuff to be legalistic about you really got a problem i think you know you really have maybe should see somebody about that because because it makes god out to be so thin skinned i don't think you pronounce my name just the way i prefer god doesn't look at that stuff he's looking at your heart he knows who you're praying to and he knows why you're praying to him and he knows you know your motive supreme he knows that you're calling him by his name as you have become familiar with it and it is his name it's just in a different language than the one jesus spoke on earth so that's my thought about divine names there's a divine names movement that's actually pushing you have to call god yah or yahweh or jesus yeshua or yahushua or or actually there's about a lot of different divine name movement people they each have their own hebrew way of pronouncing jesus and you have to say it their way or else you don't have the right name and so i mean you have to become a hebrew scholar not a modern hebrews a scholar of ancient hebrew to know exactly how this is supposed to be pronounced but that's just not the kind of thing god cares about pronunciations all right next question this will be the last question tonight and the ones that didn't get asked will get asked tomorrow night in first place so the last question tonight is is it all right to get cremated because when we talk about the resurrection of the dead in the end right cremation right i will say there's a lot of evangelical pastors and teachers i've encountered that believe it's wrong for a christian to be cremated i was surprised when i was looking at hank handygrass bible answer book to see that he thought it was wrong to be cremated but i've met a number of pastors who want to talk i was surprised they thought it was wrong to be cremated now the best argument against cremation is that in the bible people wanted to be buried with their fathers they wanted to be in tombs and when people were burned up after they were killed it was usually bad guys that somebody was trying to show some indignity toward them by desecrating their bodies and so forth but that's a heathen attitude what happens to my body after i die is not consequential because i know what's going to happen to my body whether they bury him or not it's going to go back to the dust and ashes it's it can go there quickly in a fire or can go there slowly with worms eating it and pooping it out their back ends and then and then okay there's two ways to become dust and ashes but it's going to happen you know so i really i don't know if god's he says listen we're not in a hurry let's not burn it up now let's let the worms do it what's it matter when jesus comes back he's going to have to deal with a lot of dust and ashes if he's going to raise the dead and it doesn't matter if they became dust and ashes the week after they died or the century after they died they're still destinations almost everyone who's died in history is dust now if that's going to be a problem to god in terms of resurrection then he must not be the god who created adam out of the dust you know he doesn't have any problem with that and by the way a lot of martyrs have been burned up again something that someone else can do to you can never be counted against you by god if somebody burns my body into ashes after i'm dead what's that got to do with me am i my heart's the lord i'm saved can i am i just doomed because oh oh steve i'm sorry to say it but they just burned your body up can't raise you from the dead sorry i don't think god's that powerless again or that stupid but you see what does it take well they say well how can how can you raise the dead when in fact people who died years ago and are now dust you know the tree roots have grown through their coffins and taken up the elements of their body into the tree and became apples and someone else ate the apples and now your atoms are in that other person who knows how many others after centuries of this or if you're buried at sea and the fish ate you well is god gonna have to hunt down those fish well they probably won't even be alive anymore maybe they were eaten by somebody else too god has a a big chore on his hands hunting down all those atoms that were part of our body to put them back together but the bible doesn't necessarily say that all the atoms in my body have to be there in fact none of the atoms that were in my body when i was born are there now every cell in my body has changed over to a new generation of cells not all at once certainly that'd be strange but every cell has its life and it's death and is replaced by another cell every seven years you've got a whole new set so is it the body i was born with or the body when i was eight years old that's gonna be resurrected or the body when i'm 70 years old or 80 when i die obviously no matter which cells come and go it's still me what makes them me they all have the same dna what makes me different than you more than anything else is that every cell in my body has a distinctive dna code that yours doesn't have yours is a different one all god has to do is keep a data bank of the dna he doesn't need the original cells or even the original atoms he can take all new ones and form them from that he can clone too you know i mean the point is even humans can solve some of those problems now with their technology but god's god if he promised he's going to raise you from the dead he knew very well most people who died in jesus name were already dust and some of his disciples were burned at the stake and some christians die in flaming airplane accidents or in a house on fire and they get burned up they're cremated not on purpose but still it's the same thing now the only other thing that needs to be said is that some people think it's not really a problem for god to raise ashes of course but isn't it sacrilegious to burn up a body and the argument goes the bible says that our body is the temple of the holy spirit and it would certainly seem sacrilegious to go to the temple of god and burn it well my body is only the temple of the holy spirit while i'm in it while it's alive god's not the god of the dead but of the living you know he's you know he moved in to live with me here the holy spirit bears witness with my spirit that i'm a son of god and he dwells in me as long as i dwell in me but when i'm absent from my body i don't think he says i'm getting i'm gonna hang around you've gone ahead you know i like it here this is a pretty cool body you know no he's he's only here because i'm here he's only in you because you're in you when you're not there anymore uh it's not his temple anymore and therefore what is done to a dead body is not done to you or to god or to a temple of god it is uh it's a failure to think those things through i think that cause many pastors to feel like it's immoral or something to cremate i don't see how that can be okay and thank you steve let's give my hand [Applause]

Channel: SteveGreggVideos

Views: 1,144

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Gregg, The Narrow Path, bible, God, Christian, Christianity, evangelical, church, Bible study, seminary, Jesus, cancel culture, CRT, Critical Race Theory, racism, whites, white supremacy, white privilege, black racism, black lives matter, antifa, BLM

Id: Y3nfBdaaH6w

Length: 137min 36sec (8256 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021