Lexicon and Vocabulary for a Changing America

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together. It's reasoned, relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio. And now the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. I read a quote recently that said, When the world changes, all commitments must be renewed. I'll explain about that quote in just a moment and why I felt led to use it in today's show, but I want to welcome you to TNG Radio.

My name is Alex McFarland. And folks, this is a really interesting time. Frankly, it's an unsettling time in the life of our nation because for the first time in our Congress, in our government, are elected Muslims, openly gay officials, pro-drug, pro-marijuana legalization officials. But overwhelmingly, pervasively more and more, our House and Senate and our seats of government are getting occupied. The driver's seat is being put in the hands of progressives.

So what we're going to do on today's show, we're going to talk about the lexicon and the vocabulary for a changing world. These are some things you need to know about, and I want to read a scripture from Isaiah chapter 5. And as I'm sure you know, Isaiah was written about 750 years before the birth of Christ. Isaiah has 66 chapters. Amazing, this major, major Old Testament prophet. Sometimes Isaiah is called the miniature Bible because the prophet Isaiah talks about the virgin birth of Christ, the fall of Satan to become Lucifer, the end of time, the millennial kingdom. And so much in Isaiah, again written centuries before the birth of Christ, really does share the Gospel and portend the coming of the Savior and his ultimate kingdom. And in Isaiah chapter 5, it talks about, beginning at verse 11, woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink, that they continue until night, and they are inflamed by wine, and the harp and the veal and the tabard and the pipe and wine are in their feasts.

But they regard not the work of the Lord, nor consider the operation of his hands. So in other words, they party all day long, they party all night, they engage in just debauchery, because they don't know God, they don't know salvation, they don't even consider the work of the Creator. And verse 14 talks about because of the great number of people that reject God and just pursue sin and that which is false, therefore hell hath enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure, and their glory and the multitude and their pomp and he that rejoiceth shall descend down into it. So hell is open wide.

The mouth of hell is an immeasurably large portal for so many people that reject God and reject truth and follow sin. Maybe in Matthew 25 41, Jesus had this in mind when he talked about, quote, hell prepared for the devil and his angels. You see, man was never intended to go to hell. God so loved the world that he sent his Son to be the Savior. In fact, Jesus was designated to be the Lamb that would take away the sin of the world before the earth was even created. And so God in his love, he knew that we would disobey and we would sin and we would deserve judgment, but God sent his Son to be our Savior. But in light of this, the fact that there is a plan of salvation and there are warnings against hell and the promise of heaven, but people still disbelieve. In verse 20 of Isaiah 5 says this, and if ever there were a verse for our times, this is it.

And it does relate to the word list I want to go over with you in this program. Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. These are different types of ethical relativism. They are putting forth evil, but they call it good. And they condemn that which really is good and call it evil. And they put out darkness and they call it light and they condemn true light, they call it darkness. And they promise sweetness, but it is really bitterness. And they condemn truth and they say that that would be a destructive road.

We are in those times. And with an election coming up, I want to say listen very carefully. You, dear friend, need to care about the future of this country, not because your home is not in heaven. If you're a born-again believer, truly our ultimate residence is heaven. We are citizens of God's kingdom.

And people might say, well, why would we care about this country? I mean, you know, the world is growing darker, evil men wax worse and worse. Well, the Word of God tells us that we are to pray for kings, for those in authority, that we may lead a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

That's 1 Timothy 2, 2 through 4. You need to care about this country. You really do have an obligation before God to care about the spiritual condition of the country and the leadership of the country so that we may have an America that is most conducive to the spread of the Gospel. Now I want to give you some words, and these are very important because it might sound like silliness.

It might sound like nonsensical talk, what these words say, but what they really mean, and the meanings that are held closely by those who use these words and phrases. But we need to talk about this because as we near the 2020 election, listen, if you, like myself, are going to try to see the President get re-elected and his Christian Vice President Mike Pence, if you are thankful that Brett Kavanaugh, who believes in the Constitution and believes in the sanctity of human life, and he believes in freedom of religious expression, your constitutionally protected rights, and he believes in what's called natural law, that's moral truth. If you're saying, hey, I'm glad that he was confirmed to the Supreme Court as I am, be ready, folks. Be ready to be shamed, embarrassed.

There'll be attempts to humiliate you by professed Christians. Now stay tuned. Very important show. We're going to come back after this break on today's edition of TNG Radio.

From I am a Watchman Ministries, here's today's I am a Watchman Minute. Can apparent contradictions in scripture be resolved? Yes.

Here's two examples. 1 Samuel 14 notes that Absalom had three sons, but 2 Samuel 18 notes that he did not have any sons to continue his lineage. Is this an error?

No. Absalom did have three sons, but they all died very young. Number two, the gospels note that Jesus was crucified at two different times, the third hour and the sixth hour, but that's because two different systems of keeping time, Roman and Hebrew, were referenced. There are apparent contradictions in scripture.

However, all can be resolved with a little research. I encourage you to take advantage of free I am a Watchman resources so you can grow in knowledge and confidence in the Word of God. Be bold. Be faithful. Be a watchman.

I am a watchman dot com. If you're a Christian parent, you of course want to instill a biblical view of life in the hearts of your children. If you're a pastor, you want to offer ministry that draws young families to your church. This is Alex McFarland encouraging you to check out my new book and video curriculum, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. Why do bad things happen? I interviewed hundreds of children, ages five to twelve, and we address actual questions from actual children, the spiritual issues that are on the minds of your kids.

Did Jesus ever sin? The book and video lessons are great for groups of any size and was produced with the goal of equipping kids to stand strong for Christ in any situation. The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, the book, study guide and video series. You'll find it at AFASTORE.net.

That's AFASTORE.net. You know Romans 1 16, it says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. That's what your kids need before they go to college. That's the theme for the 2019 TNG Christian Apologetics Youth Camp, July 29th through August 2nd at Camp Cale, North Carolina. Speakers include, of course, Alex McFarland, along with Daniel Ritchie, Andy Laurenson and Miki Addison. Exciting worship every night and rock solid teaching every day.

And yes, it's a summer camp with all the summer camp activities your kids would expect. The TNG Christian Apologetics Youth Camp, July 29th through August 2nd at Camp Cale. To learn more and to register, call 800-YES-GOD-1, 800-YES-GOD and the number one, or email info at truthforanewgeneration.com. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex McFarland is a voice you can trust to speak the timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. You're listening to Truth for a New Generation Radio. Welcome back to TNG Radio. Truthforanewgeneration.com is our website. Alex McFarland here. So glad to have you with us.

We're talking about lexicon and vocabulary in a changing America. And while we continue on this topic, I do want to encourage you to visit our website and look at my speaking calendar on alexmcfarland.com. A lot of exciting things coming up for 2019, not the least of which is our summer camp coming up, The Truth for a New Generation Summer Apologetics Camp.

Listen up folks, it's July 29th through August 2nd. We've got great speakers like Will and Miki Addison from the American Family Radio Network. Daniel Ritchie, one of the most inspiring speakers you will ever hear in your life. Andy Lorentzen, one of America's premier youth experts. He's a great speaker and he's really an expert on youth and youth culture. I'll be there. Now we're going to do all the fun camp stuff, ropes course, kayaking, you name it, but we're going to have 15 sessions on worldview, apologetics. What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?

How do I defend my faith? And last summer we had students from nine states. They loved it. Listen, mom and dad, youth leader, parent, your teens will love this. And I know we have young people listening. This is the summer camp experience that you don't want to miss, Truth for a New Generation. Here's what you do if you'll go to the website truthforanewgeneration.com.

Truth F O R, truthforanewgeneration.com. It's coming up quick, but you still have time, July 29th through August 2nd, and it will be a five day experience that will touch your life forever. So we hope to see you there. The other thing I want to tell you is that all of our broadcasting events and publishing, that's what we do. We're presenting the gospel, defending the faith, equipping believers of all ages, and we do this through broadcasting events and publishing. We do two radio shows, a television show. We do events large and small. We do events of 200 people. We do events of 2,000 people all over the country.

And then publishing. And by God's grace, we distribute 40 to 50, sometimes 60,000 dollars worth of literature a year. And all of these things that in 2018, as far as we know, brought around 3,000 souls to Christ, we could only do it with your help. And so please pray about sending us a gift, a tax-deductible gift in any amount you can write to us at P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404.

Or you can donate online. And we'll talk more about that in a moment. But before the break, I was talking about the fact that as we near the 2020 presidential election, be prepared for certainly the left, but even professed evangelicals, using words like the words I want to give you in this list.

Listen very carefully and I'll unpack some of these. Words like social justice. Words like gender fluidity. Speaking of our Constitution as quote a living document.

They'll be talking about being progressive, not regressive. Classism. Safe space. Hate speech. Freedom of belief. Collective liberation. Shaming.

Distributed intelligence. We'll come back to that one. And of course the big tolerance. They're words like calling out. So and so is called out for their intolerance or their hate. And words like shading.

In other words, if I'm going to make you feel bad for having a belief or having a conviction, I'll throw shade on you. Now one of the reasons I felt led to do this program, I'm a student of architecture. I love architecture. And there's a genre of architecture called brutalism. You know, we were in the postmodern era.

In other words, we don't believe in truth anymore. And there have been architects like Frank Gehry who he almost took Frank Lloyd Wright, you know, one universe farther. Frank Lloyd Wright was pretty avant garde and did things that were not conventional. But there are architects today that are just they don't even want to follow the building code. And they feel like if they're going to fully express their creativity, they shouldn't even have to follow any rules.

And some of the structures they make look weird, and they leak, and they are not even safe to be in. There are architectural styles like, you know, early American and craftsman and mid century modern, atomic ranch, art deco, but now there's a whole school called brutalism. Because listen, we're living in the postmodern, post truth era. Sometimes people talk about hyper modernism.

Everything is just crazy, high speed, ADD, on the web, clicking through websites, scanning, just a glance for a fraction of a second. And we really are in a changing world fundamentally because, like I said in Isaiah 5, 20, we have cut ourselves loose from the Word of God, the reality of God, the truth of God, and now people are making their own truth. And part of the whole progressive movement traces itself to two names, and I don't know if you know all these names, and if you don't, that's fine. But in the mid 20th century there was a French philosopher named Michael Foucault, and he wrote a book about insanity and the state.

Now listen carefully. The structure of the West that was based on Christianity, they call that insane. And if we want to set ourselves free and really be reasonable, we've got to get rid of God and get rid of truth and get rid of reasoning and rationality.

In other words if you believe in God and Christianity and truth and reason and logic, to them that's insane. And so listen, if architecture today is brutal, if it's postmodern, no design, no rhyme or reason, it really is an outflow of philosophy that was being sown in the classrooms 50 years ago. Sometimes it's politely called continental philosophy, but it really was this anti-Christian, anti-truth worldview that was based on three things.

Listen carefully. Anti-realism, relativism, and subjectivism. Michael Foucault and his peers would have denied the reality of the real world. There is no reality. We make our own reality. And there are no moral truths.

The world is relativistic. We call the shots. And then ultimately the God is my own perspective. Subjectivism. There is no objective truth.

Everything is subjective. I call the shots. Now stay tuned, because I want to go over some words that you need to know and some concepts that where this topsy-turvy, upside-down, 180-degrees, out-of-phase world came from, it's all going to make sense, and we're going to give a Christian response to it when TNG Radio continues.

Stay tuned. As we take a break, let me tell you about three tens, three books that will answer questions that come your way from others, or even yourself, about the Christian faith. Book number one, Ten Answers for Skeptics. Today's skeptics are looking for authenticity, integrity, and straightforward faith. And in this book you'll learn how to answer intimidating questions, identify the root issue behind those questions, and dismantle the spiritual bombshells dropped by non-believers.

Those usually end up just being a puff of smoke. Number two, Ten Answers for Atheists, where Alex looks at the philosophical assumptions at the root of atheism and agnosticism exposing logical, historical, and conceptual fallacies. Alex shares clear explanations of beliefs and biblical answers to those questions that often leave you stumped, but no more. And number three, the ten most common objections to Christianity and how to answer them. You know, many Christians hear these objections and have a crisis of faith, but Alex and Dylan have been around. They've visited many places and talked with many people through the years and can offer straight answers that will give you confidence and understanding about your beliefs. So the three tens once again, Ten Answers for Skeptics, Ten Answers for Atheists, and the ten most common objections to Christianity and how to answer them.

Find them wherever Christian books are sold or at alexmcfarland.com. At Liberty University, you'll earn more than a degree. You'll earn the satisfaction of seeing what you can accomplish and what God can accomplish through you.

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Welcome back to TNG Radio. You know, a lot of what I'm going over today you can find in my book, Ten Issues That Divide Christians, published by Bethany House. You can find it online. You can find it anywhere.

We've got it in our own e-store as well at alexmcfarland.com. Ten Issues That Divide Christians, I will say it's a meticulously footnoted book. Several hundred endnotes and footnotes because we know that when we make claims we have to be able to back them up. But let me go over kind of where the world is and how it got there. There was a book by a man named William Lind, L-I-N-D, called Who Stole Our Culture? And it talks about the Frankfurt School. Now in World War II Germany in Frankfurt there was a school and to escape the oppression of Hitler they moved to America and now the Frankfurt School is housed at Columbia University. And really this Frankfurt School that was influenced by the continental relativistic philosophy of Europe that is tied to Michael Foucault and Simone de Bouvier that was really the champion for egalitarianism.

All this gender fluidity that you can change your gender by thinking about it traces itself to a lot of these European pagans really. I have to say they were atheists. They scorned Christianity. But the Frankfurt School was really the birthplace of political correctness and neo-Marxism.

And there was a man named Antonio Gronsky. He was an Italian Marxist in the 1930s. And he understood this, that the only way to change the Western world was to defeat the Church because they couldn't understand it. They believed that if they promised money and a free lunch to the workers that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would follow the communists and the Marxists. But interestingly enough the rank and file people in Europe, many of them were true to the leaders. They couldn't understand it. And Gronsky and a lot of the Frankfurt Marxists understood the people in Europe had a moral compass. It was the residue of their Christianity. So listen carefully to this phrase. There was quote the long march through the institutions end of quote.

Now think about this. The Marxists in Europe, this is 70, 80, 90 years ago, they saw one obstacle standing against them and the implementation of communism and socialism and it was the Church. And not only the Church and the moral sensibility that that imparted to the population but the schools that were largely based on Christianity too. So quote the long march through the institutions. That was their understanding that they had to infiltrate the schools, the churches, the governments to destroy Christianity and they could implement their Marxism. And the Lind book, Who's Still Our Culture, will help you understand that. And you've got to understand that here in America since the post-war era, really since I would say 52, 53, 54 and the push to make our public schools anti-American, anti-constitutionalist and certainly anti-Christian, this really began in earnest about the time interestingly of the youth culture movement of the 1950s. And the post-war era was very prosperous and affluent. Suddenly kids could have a car or at least have access to a car.

Youth had their own music and suddenly there was this wedge of distrust and really animus between teens and adults. Nowadays political operatives have leveraged this so much and I want to say this is why you need to be praying for our Constitution. There are voices that purport to be Christian.

There are voices that want to shame you for trying to defend our country. They want to make you try and feel bad like you're not being Christian. If you believe in responsible immigration, if you believe in American sovereignty, if you believe in our friendship with the nation of Israel, even things like the constitutionally protected right to life, you're not being Christian. And some of the words they're using are like the word social justice, which really is a word that comes to us from a Christian, Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers. He uses the word social justice, but it's not like the liberals today use it. To Hamilton and those that were trying to implement this newly penned Constitution, we could only have a just culture as if we had God and morality. Now it's amazing in the Federalist Papers, like Federalist No.

15, to have money without morals. Hamilton uses words like tragic and imbecilic and repugnant and irreconcilable, absurd, impractical, to think that we can have a government and a society without God. Keep your eyes open and your ears attuned for the word moral witness. They're going to be professed Christians that they're going to say, look, if you stand for Donald Trump, you've compromised your moral witness. False.

False. Let me say, the president and his cabinet is probably the most pro-Christian cabinet in our lifetime. I would appeal to your constitutional responsibility like the Bible says, praying for those in authority, that we could have a culture most conducive to the spread of the gospel. Now, Alexander Hamilton from more than 200 years ago, he talks about those that want to look good in the eyes of an ungodly world. He says this, is respectability in the eyes of foreign powers a safeguard against foreign encroachments? And the answer is no. Listen, those leftists, those pagans that so many professed Christians so covet their approval and their respectability, those people don't care a thing for the word of God.

They don't care about our constitution and the blood that was shed to birth it and to preserve it. Listen, number one, know Jesus. Number two, know his word. Number three, let the Holy Spirit strengthen you to stand for truth. We're in a battle. And back to Isaiah 5, what happened that hell had to be enlarged? What happened that they called good evil and evil good? They abandoned the word of the Lord.

For the salvation of your soul, the preservation of our country, the perpetuation of our freedoms, we have to know the word of God and stand for it. TNG radio is made possible by the friends of Alex McFarland Ministries, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. That's P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. Call us at 877-YesGod1.

That's 877-YesGod and the number 1. Or give online at AlexMcFarland.com. While you're there, listen to Program Archives, read Alex's blog, invite Alex to speak at your event, or contact Alex with a question or comment. AlexMcFarland.com. Thanks for listening today and join us again next time as we bring you more truth for a new generation on TNG radio.