CGR THURSDAY 051123 Part 2

Good morning.

How are you? My passion is the fight for freedom. My father fought for World War II defending our country. Today we are no longer fighting with guns. Instead, we are fighting an ideological battle for control of our country by contributing to causes that support your constitutional rights.

I am Patriot Mobile. That was a shooting gallery up there. I could hear the tremble in his voice. She suffered a very severe being. The video is pretty graphic. Justice for us seems almost impossible.

It's not fun to watch somebody die and they knew she was in mortal peril. They have not asked the hard questions. Why was the Capitol intentionally unsecure that day? The FBI had information about security concerns before January 6th. They're out for blood and they're getting it. They appear to be winning. Were the actions of the Capitol Police out of line? Were there violations in use of force?

Now I describe it as an inside job. I'm ready to do whatever God calls me. There's an old Chinese saying my ancestors learned before the Communist Party took over our country. The family is the essential unit of human society and that you must have honor and defend your family.

But it's not always easy to do. When the regime gives the order, you have to kill. My heart was pounding. I felt my body bouncing and twisting on the floor. They put numbers on our shoulders, then separated us into rows of even and odd numbers.

I was number nine. My brother, he's still in prison. And my sister, she was sent to a labor camp without a trial. But there's one piece of evidence but there's one piece of evidence they haven't been able to destroy yet.

I left everything behind. If I can't expose what they did to us, then all of our suffering would be for nothing. Welcome to Chosen Generation with your host, Pastor Greg Young. But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people that you should shoe forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light, which in time past were not a people but are now the people of God, which had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy. And now, Chosen Generation, where no topic is off limits and everything is filtered through biblical glasses. And now, here's your host, Pastor Greg. And welcome back to Chosen Generation Radio, where no topic is off limits and everything filtered through biblical glasses. Thanks so much for being here. I know you have a choice on where you could listen each and every day and hour number two, hour number two. And I'll be jumping in here in just a second. I had to take care of a couple of quick things before we jumped back on air. Don't forget, we'll be doing India because of daylight savings time.

This is funny. So we do daylight savings time here in the United States. They don't do daylight savings time around the world.

They don't participate in daylight savings time in India. So we used to be 11 and a half hours difference. And now, because of daylight savings time, we're like 10 and a half. Well, between that and now it's summer. So the sun goes down an hour later.

So everything went backwards. So we used to do our time at 9am. So like right now, we would be doing or no. Well, yeah, actually, right now, we would be doing 9am Eastern. So right now, we would be doing our India service under normal.

That's what we were doing. But because of the time change, it's sunny there now. So you can't take a projector and project an image. Who's going to see it?

It's on a sunny wall. That works so good, Dr. David. That half hour that they have always kills me when I have to talk to them or have meetings on Zoom or so forth. It's like, they don't even have a standardized.

I mean, they're standardized. It's just half hour off every other time zone. Yeah, it is kind of funny, isn't it?

Right? Yeah, that took me a minute to get used to. It's like, it's what time? It's half hour time. Okay, so I got it. I'm sitting there going, okay, I'm going to calculate those numbers and add that in and this and that.

And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? But yeah, it's a whole different banana. But at any rate, it has definitely impacted that particular piece. But we will have that coming up. So it'll be the bottom half of next hour is when we'll do India.

Because like I say, it's just a time change kind of a thing. But please be tuned in for that. We have been seeing just incredible, incredible, incredible outpourings of the Spirit of God during those times, which has just been precious. And we are so incredibly grateful for that. So I hope you will join us for that. But right now I welcome Dr. David Wormser to our program.

Dr. Wormser, welcome back. I know we've done a lot in covering Israel, but I mean, things over there, you know, just continue to be at a very heightened rate. And and I think it's important for us to address that.

But not only not only are we addressing that, but I think we're addressing the the social and societal concerns I was talking in the last hour. I don't know if you saw the story or not. Two police officers that I that I highlighted were murdered. One of them was a police officer in Wisconsin who did a pulled over for a traffic stop a DUI driver had driven his vehicle off into the ditch. And some some good Samaritans had stopped to try to help him. She pulled over also to try to assist him and, you know, observe that he was intoxicated.

So she went back to the vehicle, her vehicle to, you know, she because you have to do that, run the plates. Well, when she got back to him, he pulled a gun out and shot her. And and ended up killing her. Turns out that he was a convicted rapist, who had done already done, I think something like five years, got out in 2019, was still on a 10 year parole. And obviously, he knew that, you know, being pulled over on a DUI like that, and potentially getting charged with a DUI was probably a violation of his own rights. And so he was probably a violation of his parole.

Which means which meant that he was probably going to get busted back. And rather than rather than face that music, he he he lost it in his drunkenness. And he kills this police officer. And then he gets down the road and turns the gun on himself and kills himself.

Oh, the societal issues are really the issue. Well, and then let me so let me tell you the other story. So the other story was in in Chicago, a black female police officer, 24 years old, beautiful lady. And and everything about her.

I mean, just, you know, just to really just such a, you know, sweet life. And comes out of her her house, I guess she'd just gotten off shift. She comes outside, I guess maybe to get some out of a car, I don't know. But four youth jumper and shot her up and killed her. And then we then it turns out that those four youth had already stolen a vehicle. They they killed her took her gun, and obviously with no remorse, went and sold her gun before the police finally caught all of them to 19 year olds and 18 year old and a 16 year old.

Unbelievable. You know, we see it with governance. We see it with the defund police. We see it with the overall delegitimization of law enforcement. We see it with their border policy. We see it with every aspect is the progressive left has decided that every norm and rule of society is under attack. Yeah, because they're about unraveling society.

It's not just about winning elections, Democrats taking control, or anything like that. It is about a revolutionary agenda to unravel society. I mentioned in one of the previous programs that one of the great Russian writers Dostoevsky had a chapter in one of his books, The Devils, where he describes the anarchist point of view, which is that you have to go back to Mount Sinai.

And then you reverse the process. Mount Sinai is about making the first modern nation essentially around an idea of law. And you unravel the law, then you have violence.

People return to their paganism and worship of the golden calf. And eventually the lawlessness and blood creates such chaos that people scream for the Pharaoh and want to go back into Egypt into slavery. That is the anarchist's mind. And that is the connection between their totalitarian mindset and anarchism, which seems to be contradictory, you know, where one is complete chaos and the other is complete control. But in truth, it's a method to get from chaos to control. But they need blood, they need lawlessness, they need to unravel every element of society. And that's what you really are seeing right now on the streets of America.

Yes, absolutely. I think what you're seeing is ultimately the crisis of the Enlightenment. I mean, I hate to, the Enlightenment, you know, we have this idea that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were great, wonderful things and the Renaissance was great. But what the Renaissance was was about balancing faith and reason. That we have reason and we have faith and it's God's charge to us essentially is to balance our faith and reason, to understand reason through faith and so forth. The Enlightenment over time became, especially the later Enlightenment after the French Revolution, became a rejection of faith altogether. Reason trumps faith. Reason eliminates faith.

Faith is superstition. And I think what you're seeing now is society can't organize itself around that principle. And we've talked about it before, the man becomes God. And totalitarian, so you create a man-made God, the totalitarian ruler, the Stalin, the Robespierre and the French Revolution.

So you make man-gods. And that's what we're seeing now, where there's no rules. Anarchy is completely the objective of half of the politics of America right now, in order to achieve a breakdown where people then turn to these ideologies of enslavement that have their man-gods. Ultimately, I think that's how you have to understand Israeli politics. That's why what's going on there is a microcosm of what's going on here, is that you have a battle over the soul of Judaism and the soul of the Jewish state underway. And the left is not willing to give up without a fight.

They're losing in Israel, but they're not willing to give up without a fight. So that's really how you understand that. Now, then we have all the external stuff with Islam and the Iranians and so forth, but internally that's what's going on. But the West really has a big choice to make in the next, in this generation and the next, which is are we going to shore up the foundations of the West that evolved over 2,000 years? Or are we going to go back into sort of the dark ages, where we don't have any structure of values that we all refer to and that we're all surrounding?

And ultimately, you can't derive a structure of values without faith. It's interesting to what you're talking about, because, you know, we've got, I don't know if you looked into Vladimir Putin's speech that he just gave on what they call Victory Day in Russia. No, I didn't see the speech.

I heard about it, but I didn't see it. But he talks about this, you know, breakdown of the West and the destruction and the embrace of, you know, the mutilation of youth and all the things that we identify as being bad. But, you know, this is a old Soviet tactic to highlight where the West is going wrong.

And there is a truth in that, because the West is, I mean, we have lost our moral bearings. But to pretend that the Soviet Union is somehow the answer to that. See, this is what communism does, right, David? They assist in the tearing down. And that is the tactic of Stalin and Lenin, then to say, we're the ones that have the answer.

Turn everything over to us. That's exactly the dynamic that I add to it. Also, the animal farm dynamic that was in George Orwell's Animal Farm, which is in addition to tearing down the structure of society, the laws of society, every basis of organization of society and religion, they also tear down education and create dumb people, people who cannot understand anymore that they're being hoodwinked. So they dumb down the population by making them illiterate, essentially, culturally illiterate. And there were books already in the 80s about the cultural illiteracy of America, there were things, any educated American, no matter what faith, and no matter what level of education, I mean, by educated American, I mean, just about all Americans, you know, 50 years ago, if you gave a fairly basic biblical reference, it was a shortcut for a lot of comprehension, because everybody understood it. When Lincoln talked about a house divided, he was of course having a bit, that was a biblical reference, and everybody understood it. He didn't need to go into a 30 minute discourse about what a house divided means, and this philosopher said that, and this one, everybody knew what that meant. Because cultural literacy in the United States was very high.

We all understood whether it was a Greek reference, a Christian reference, whatever reference, we understood our own culture, and we were educated enough to have these discussions based on these shortcuts and complex ideas captured by a fairly simple reference. Now we have a dumb population who doesn't understand our own history, doesn't understand our own faith, doesn't understand where we came from. They don't understand the literature that has formed the West, whether it's Homer and the Odyssey that the Greeks produced, or Caesar's Gallic Wars, or the Bible, or Machiavelli, or anything. They don't, the Federalist Papers, there's a fundamental ignorance over the foundational ideas of the West that are now in America, and this is intentional. This is, because once you take that away, and you can, I mean, when you listen to somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, the first thing that jumps to mind, and for those of us who are older, is my God, you got an education in one of the top schools in the country? You know, this is really, you know, stuff in civics in high school that we knew was wrong.

Well, it's, you know, and you mentioned about, you know, the Enlightenment and the overlaying of the Enlightenment, you know, if you do a quick search on that, you quickly discover that the Enlightenment for, you know, the next hundred years was identified as an anti-religious movement, as something whose purpose was anti-God and the destruction. And it's only been recently that it is, that that concept has changed. And again, folks, this is the danger of what they're doing. They're rewording, rewriting and renaming historical truth and historical fact. It's why the biblical lens that I try to talk about here on the program and bring to these things is so important. And I hear, you know, the other thing that I hear regularly, frequently, well, you know, I've come to believe that, you know, the Bible is not accurate.

It's not actually true. There's, you know, that man got into the middle of all of it and kind of messed it up, and you got to go back and, you know, and you better read the Hebrew and you better read the Greek. The danger now with all of that is, is that again, it's a whole lot of layers of interpretation, David.

Okay? You're going to be hard-pressed finding, you know, a purer version. And personally, I really still believe that the King James Bible and how it was translated is probably the best and most accurate translation of any of those that are out there. Yeah, I mean, unless you want to go learn Greek and for some reason want to read the Greek.

There's, there's just no look, the King James version was, was a genuine attempt to translate as accurately as possible these texts, and I think they did a pretty good job. And remember, a lot of the really nuanced details, while they do matter on some level, the big ideas are the first things that need to be laid down. When we talk about various tracts in the Bible, you know, last week we talked about the Tower of Babel and the use of homogenous bricks, that the whole edifice to try to reach and replace God is based on the leveling of man and creating a homogenous automaton, a structure of automatons, or uniform, without any individuality and so forth. Well, you know, you don't need to have an absolute precise understanding of the, understanding of the, of the language of the Bible to understand an idea like that. And that, that's the most important thing is that it's the big ideas are the most important structures that need to be understood. And, and I would argue as well, relative to, again, going back and what you're going to, you know, what people might, might study about the Greek, be very careful.

Westcott Hort literally wrote their own Greek dictionary in order to attempt to support their Greek interpretation of, of their Greek version of the Bible, which is why in the late 1800s, it was all thrown out and considered heresy because they literally rewrote definitions for Greek words. Yeah, no, I know. I know that that's an excellent point.

You know, I did that when my wife who was originally Israeli came to the United States, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I taught her the wrong meanings for words because it was fun. Yeah. But that's, that's exactly what you're describing here is, uh, you know, I, I'll give you a good example of exactly what you're saying is the word hubris and you hear people use the word hubris as pride. Hubris doesn't mean that it's a, it's an attempt to make America into a Greek pagan idea, which is, uh, hubris is a Greek concept that means that you think as a man, you can overcome the fate that is preset for you by the gods.

Wow. So, you know, you have Odysseus, the gods said you were going to sleep with your mother and kill your father. And Odysseus thought if he just exiles his mother, blood, et cetera, that he'll avoid that fate. And hubris really means that the reason why they're trying to make it pride is because, you know, pride is one of the sins and, and they're trying to make it a Greek pagan.

They're trying to, if you want America to go backwards in time and reject Christianity and, and return us to sort of pagan roots, then you start distorting the words that way. Sure. Absolutely. Well, and, and that's, and that's the whole point. And you know, one of the things that I point people to, and some understand it, embrace it, others don't, and I've talked to a number of scholars about it.

I'll, I'll, I'll throw this to you. I don't know if I've ever said this to you before, but in the 1960s, the Vietnam war, there were only two ways that you could get an exemption to not fight. One was religious exemption and hang on. I've, I've, I've, I just forgot the, the, the, the, oh, academic. The other one was, I think was, was an academic, but at any rate, there were, those were the two ways that you could, that you could get excused.

So you didn't have to go and fight. And so you had the communists were the ones predominantly, the student activists were the ones that got those exemptions. And they went into our, our higher education system. They went into the universities and then they went into the seminaries. And if you look at where the, the, the translations, the split, the fingering out of the different types of translations, the, the re-embrace by the way, of Westcott Hort and the new Greek dictionary, which were thrown out 70 years earlier as being heresy, all of that was embraced. They discovered the Latin Vulgate.

They discovered the, the, the, the, the manuscript that was somehow in a, in a desk drawer at the Vatican that had been there for a thousand years and nobody saw it. Come on, give me a break. Come on.

Okay. I mean, you know, they, they discovered all of these different old quote unquote manuscript evidences that threw everything into confusion and, and then ask yourself, why, who would be the author of confusion? Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, Satan is the author of confusion.

We know that. And, and what do you need to get people confused about if you're, if you're, if you're going to try to mess with their belief system? Well, the word of God, this is the word of God.

Timothy, Paul writes to Timothy and says, all scripture is given for inspiration. There's a reason why Jewish children are taught the Pentateuch, are, are, are, are given the task of memorizing the Torah. There's a reason why passage into adulthood is dependent upon their ability to be able to recite those verses and exhibit those characteristic traits. And if they don't exhibit those traits and can't recite those verses in Jewish culture, they're not an adult.

You cannot be a man. That's what a bar mitzvah is, that you have to, you have to, and by the way, it's also a function of literacy that, that you have to, you have to know how to read. So faith is an instrument for creating universal literacy. And this is also important because, you know, in this modern world, there's this idea that people of faith are somehow more primitive and superstitious, actually faith is really a true, there's a number of indicators. I mean, first of all, by the way, the King James version that you mentioned, one has to really look how they created the King James version. They went back to the original thing. They did all this thousands of years of interpretation and they put it aside. I mean, they didn't not know it.

They were aware of all of it. They were aware of anything that made sense, but they went back and they did not know it. And they looked, these people knew Hebrew, they knew Aramaic, and Aramaic of course was what Jesus spoke. And they knew Greek, which was the first translation of it so that you could see. And they knew, they, but they knew Greek in its original context because it wasn't really an agenda there. So they based it on those primary texts translated directly into English. PAUL 55 men, 55 of the world's greatest scholars of the day gathered together to hammer this out.

PAUL Exactly. And if all 55 agreed on this sentence, then obviously that's what it meant. If there was disagreement, they would have to get together and then they would consult maybe the Greek text and so forth. But they, what I'm trying to say is the King James version is pretty close to the raw original put into English.

And you know, that's, and the interpretation was moved aside. The second thing about this issue of intellectual life and faith, when you look at what happened in the sixth, seventh, eighth century was because of the rise of Islam, the center of the Christian world was blown to shreds. Because the center of the Christian world was the Mediterranean and Syria fell, Lebanon fell, Israel fell, Turkey fell. The whole Christian world was essentially blown up in the middle. And, but, which was unfortunate because what you saw between 300, again, modern people like to say, oh, Rome was in terminal decline.

The Muslims came, they essentially invaded a dead horse, big deal. The truth was there was this upturn in Roman culture after about 300 AD because of the adoption of Christianity. You saw a demographic expansion and economic expansion, of course, and economic expansion, of cultural expansion.

And most importantly, you saw dramatic scientific expansion. And when the Muslim armies took over the lateral littoral areas of the Mediterranean and collapsed Roman culture in, with Roman Christian culture in the Mediterranean, you started seeing the monasteries of central and Northern Europe becoming the repositories of intellectual thought, translation, Greek thought, a religious thought, but also of science. And in other words, religion was the vehicle through which science was carried forward.

The rest of Europe was in the dark ages, but in the monasteries, agriculture, physics, all sorts of things were being examined, studied, mathematics, and advancing. So this whole idea that religion was the agent of intellectual suppression, because there are primitive people who don't want to know things. The truth is it's the secular communist world that wants to suppress knowledge, wants to suppress education, wants to induce illiteracy. Which is why Islam is embraced by them, because Islam pushes back on these advances.

They have lied and tried to attempt to steal advances and label it and put their name on it as the conquering entity. But the reality is that they were not the ones who did it. No, they weren't. I mean, I think one really has to look at this golden age of Spain with a grain of salt, apart from the fact that Christians and Jews were considered dhimmis and really were suppressed. And there wasn't such a liberal flourishing of freedom that we try to make out today. A lot of the stuff that was going forward were actually Christians in exile.

If you take the court of Baghdad under Al Mansour and so forth, the great evidence given of the rise of Islamic greatness, which is in Iraq, what is today in Iraq, and then the across the Osha Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and in Andalusia and in southern Spain, you had a similar thing going on. What you see is it's really the Christians who were involved with the literature. They were the ones who were reading Greek.

They were the ones who moved forward scientific thought. And when it started challenging Islam, within 200 years, it was just a total crushing of all scientific thought. The other thing was, there was never any large scale literacy other than in the Christian and Jewish communities of the Muslim world. Islam, even today, is largely not literate. The literacy rates in the Muslim world are very, very low. And they go after, I mean, they go after the Muslim world. They go after the Muslims. And they go after, I mean, for example, if you want in India to see where the where did the Muslims come from, they came from the lowest strata. They're the ones who were converted, the untouchables, that caste that is, that it was their way out is to convert to Islam, but they were, of course, the lowest caste. So they also had the least literacy scientific. And, and let's, and let's also be clear, too, because we deal with a lot of the lower caste in India.

Well, that's what I just was gonna say, David, that is exactly what I was gonna say. And that is, that's what, you know, has created friction for us, with whether it's the Sikh or the Hindu, the nationalist movements of Sikh and Hindu, is because of the fact that for them, they need that lower caste to remain low. They need them to because they're because there's a larger number of them. So they need them, you know, it's like, it's like any oppressed peoples, when the numbers of the oppressed peoples outnumber the elite, the elite need the oppressed people to remain dumb.

Right. And now in Islam, you've got a push and pull that you see over time, constantly repeat itself is they give a little room to the intellectuals among them, the people, they let some knowledge rise up, and you start getting an elite that has some real scientific intellectual desire to pursue. And all of a sudden, that doesn't take very long, but it challenges the political foundations of Islam.

And at that point, you see the crushing. So we now see after the 50s and 60s, where you sort of saw this secularization of Arab culture and so forth, you saw the Islamic fundamentalist response. This is not the first time this has happened.

This is like the fifth time this has happened. Because ultimately, especially Sunni Islam, you cannot get you really can't allow for a broad based critical analysis that we so take for granted of life of faith of everything. I mean, for us, faith is a journey to understand God too. So knowledge is important. Sure. For them knowledge challenges doctrine at some point.

And then it's crushed. Well, it challenges their their, you know, their human individual absolute authority is what it does. Yeah. Okay. Because remember, then in these in these autocratic, religious, you know, cults, it's all about personality. That's why you have somebody who's trying to be who's trying to be the caliph.

Okay. You know, they they pretend as though they are exalting the prophet or they are exalting their their God. But the reality is, is they want all eyes on them. They want all eyes on on on that person. And then they want all eyes on that person and and their commanders. And anything that interferes with that becomes a threat.

Correct. And and and Christianity is about all eyes on on Christ and and all eyes on the Father. And all glory to God. And God elevates the individual the Word of God says that humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and in due time, he will exalt you. Well, his exaltation is just like it was for Israel, the smallest tribe, the smallest family. And he took that family and he elevated that family.

And then he showed all of the other nations around. And he said, Here is an example of what happens for you. If you do what I've asked you to do, you also can walk in this blessing. But you need to turn your eyes to me. And you need to follow these these laws, these regulations, these things that I've said, because they will be health to your bone and and good for the marrow of your bone.

And you'll and you will live long if you will do these things. That's right. You know, but Islam's locked, it's locked on so many levels, the dynamic you described is critical to understanding Islam. Another dynamic is the political, since it's a wedding of the political and spiritual into one. There's no there's no there's no division of power at all in Islam. And where that came from was from its beginning, you know, after after the fourth successor to Mohammed, the fourth successor, essentially, was the was the nephew of Mohammed.

Okay, go back to the early Sunni-Shiite split, where did they split? The Sunnis, the Shiites basically believe that the succession went to to Ali. And and and as a result, he should have been the successor and his successors should have been the successor. But the corrupt governor of Syria, who was cousin to the previous one, the third successor, decided the corruption would end under Ali. So he launched a coup.

And when he won the coup, he actually defeated Ali. When he won the coup, theologically, there was a crisis in Islam who appointed you. And he said, well, God did. God appointed me because I won. And and there was a sort of determinism, if I succeed, it's only be it's it means that I am God's agent and I am really the voice of God. So first of all, you started getting almost the deification of the of the successor of the caliph. But second of all, Sunni Islam became essentially this idea that humans have no free will. And as and everything is just an automated action reaction phenomenon, actually not an automated action reaction phenomenon. Everything is just God's will.

So humans don't have any. So what's very interesting is his son was on the throne and there was a philosopher, Hassan al-Basri, who said, but wait a second, we're supposed to be good people. We're not. We're supposed to resist evil. And if we don't, we'll be we'll face God on Judgment Day. Now, why have God makes us do everything? Why would he make us do evil and then judge us?

That's awfully cruel. So, of course, this threatened the political power of the caliph in Syria, because he if you start saying man has free will, then his coup was a free will. Right. And and so he invited this guy to Damascus. And as he arrived, he beheaded because he was a political threat.

This is a problem in Sunni Islam. We believe that God created us in his image, gave us certain faculties. Our knowledge was increased as our sin in the Garden of Eden. But we ate from the tree of knowledge.

The tree of knowledge. And and so we have faculties of independent thinking. And God, like a good father, he lets us learn our own lessons and so forth. Of course, he knows.

And he chastens us along the way. I mean, you look at the way I mean, look at the exiles, you know, that he did with Israel. Look at look at the you know, the dragging off right to to Babylon, you know, which which was which was the result of a of a rebellious Israeli, you know, Israelite people. Why Moses couldn't go to go go into the promised land.

He didn't didn't follow the rule. Yeah, yeah, we have free will. And and the bottom line is, that creates terrible political problems in Islam, because it means the ruler has to maintain this idea that humans don't have free will. They're essentially slaves to him, because his success is preordained. I mean, this is if you resist his will, you're resisting the will of God.

So it makes him God, essentially. Well, and and and, you know, you can draw a parallel again, this is this is the reason why the Puritans fled England. Yes, because the king of England decided that that that, you know, that he had the divine right to basically make everyone subservient to him.

And and and to violate the rights and the liberties that were guaranteed to them by God in in reality, through through scripture through what the Word of God says, precisely. And by the way, it's also what led to the Glorious Revolution in in England in 1689, which is where the Bill of Rights that we have essentially comes from Magna Carta. The Magna Carta was earlier, but the Bill of Rights was in 1689. Okay, the Bill of Rights is essentially, if you look at our constitution, it's a legal document, right basically says governments are required to do x. Britain did not do x requirements or governments need to do y. Britain didn't do y. If you look at the x, y, z that's listed in the Declaration of Independence, that's almost a verbatim lifting of the British Bill of Rights of 1689. Hmm.

Because, again, same thing. There was an attempt, a totalitarian attempt to impose Catholicism on the nation. Right. The result was a reaction, a religious reaction that was grounded in the idea of individual rights. Well, and that and that part of that was what created, right, the the battle between the Catholic Church and Protestantism.

Correct, correct. Because the reformation of Martin Luther was also that when he, when, you know, it was him saying, hey, wait a minute, no, you guys have carried this too far. You have elevated your will above the will of God.

And here are the the list of things wherein we believe that you have violated God's will and God's intent. Across Europe you see the same reaction. Machiavelli is also a reaction to this. Machiavelli came out of Florence.

Florence is where essentially a simple question was put to the Pope. He was acting like one of the local potentates, one of the local princes. He had an army.

He interfered in the politics of the city. And yet he had the Catholic Church behind him. And opposed to him were the local princes who ran Florence. And basically they told the Pope, listen, you can't do both. You can't use your position in the church to have a political position in Florence and then have an army, which is a supreme political institution, and impose yourself on Florence.

At the same time, you know, you got to choose. And the result was the reformation in Germany, but it started in Germany. But there was also the beginning of what something very similar happening even in Italy in the Renaissance, which was the reduction of the Pope as not anymore. He was sort of put aside as then the ecclesia, the figure of spirituality, but he lost his political role.

So there it went the other direction. But nevertheless, they split the political role. They understood there had to be a balance between a politician can't become the Pope. A politician cannot become the chief priest. The politician cannot become the caliph, the successor, because if he's still playing politics, he's using religion. He's not a religious man.

And that is essentially what happened across Europe and in England. It was people put forward saying, if we're religious, we have these rights. Well, the 95 Thesis, I was trying to remember that, but the 95 Thesis that he nailed to the door of the church in 1517, which was predicated on his doctoral studies. We would call it doctoral studies today, but of his studies of the word and poring over the word and saying no.

And really, one of the biggest issues for him was the one of indulgences. Because just like Paul writes and says, if you're preaching a Jesus other than the one that we have taught you, then you're following the wrong guy. And what Martin Luther was saying to the Catholic Church at the time is, is you've lost your way, because you're suggesting that people are buying their way into heaven.

When our entire belief system is predicated on the idea and the fact that Messiah came, laid down his life, and that he and he alone is the bridge and the pathway back to the Father. And you're suggesting now that suddenly people need to add something to that, which is what Paul spent all of the book of Hebrews arguing vehemently against. It was essentially using your political power and wealth to purchase your way to heaven, or supposedly purchase your way to heaven. And subsequently then only certain individuals now could do so.

Correct. And you had poor peasants that were literally signing over their houses in order to get an indulgence, in order to try to make sure that their names were written in what they believed was going to be the book of life, predicated on signing over their property to wealth barons. Exactly. So not faith, but means, became the judgment of religiosity. And that is... And if they didn't have that, then they might have to sign over a daughter, they might have to sign over their last cow, you know, whatever it took, or even sign themselves over as an indentured servant and become a slave to someone. Exactly.

Something, by some means, but you were creating this despotic situation. Exactly. And it was really the introduction of wealth and politics into faith, that rather than faith is the foundation of faith.

Yeah. And again, Islam has a terrible problem with this. But in Christianity, the Reformation did address this issue. Machiavelli, which, by the way, was only a decade before Martin Luther, was also tackling this issue. So they're trying to separate that political power from the power of the church and open it up. But I don't know, you know, the United States was founded as a big reaction, as part of the Reformation.

It was part of what happened. The early enlightenment was that. It was the early enlightenment. It was this idea that the pope doesn't control all knowledge, isn't the final word of God.

Right. Where it happened after the French Revolution is you started getting the tendency toward rejecting all religion and religiousness all together. And that's where the enlightenment went off the rails. But the United States is an early enlightenment renaissance country.

What you see in Europe is not. It's a late enlightenment. And what you see in the progressives in the United States is a late enlightenment. They hear the word of God. It's a late enlightenment. They hate religion. Yeah. Well, and yet they mask themselves in it for the purpose of infiltrating the church so that they can change the church's doctrine and dogma, which is something that they hate.

And so they want to change it. And when you start, what ends up happening, I was reading a little bit about Carl Lentz. He was the very famous or became somewhat famous as a minister at Hillsong. And of course, the leader of Hillsong had his own issues and had to step down.

But Lentz was the one that was in New York who had an addiction issue, drug addiction issue, and then also was unfaithful to his wife. And they're working on, he and his wife are working on, they just celebrated, I guess, their 20th anniversary, but she's giving him forgiveness and so on, which I agree with, by the way. Marriage is a covenant.

Under God, marriage is a covenant. And forgiveness is a mandate of the faith. And you work through those things.

And it's not easy, and I get that, but you work through those things. But he was talking about, and when you look at what he had been teaching, some of the things that he had embraced, he embraced the homosexual lifestyle issue. He embraced some of the very liberal leanings. Well, why? Because now you peel back the onion and you say, okay, there's an individual who was not just having an issue with his own adulterous behavior and addictions, but he couldn't get any victory. He wasn't winning.

He felt like, I'm losing. And if I judge them, right, for what they're doing, predicated on what I already know is in my own life, I can't make those two mix. I can't line that up. So it's easier to just say, yes, I'm going to accept what you do, and then I'm going to give myself a pass. And all I'm saying here is, is that then we're not recognizing the full measure of the power of what the cross is really about, which is a transformed life. Yeah. I think that's perfectly put. Absolutely. So understand, I'm not coming down hard on Mr. Lentz over the real, but understand that that compromise makes room for more compromise, and God doesn't want us to have to compromise. That's why he sent Christ, so we can overcome, so we can have victory now.

And we need it. So there's also a difference between forgiveness and acceptance of something. If a person does something wrong on one level, one has to forgive him, but one shouldn't take what he did as wrong, take what he did wrong and make it as right. Absolutely. There's still consequences that you're going to have to pay for the wrong that was done, and those consequences have to be dealt with. Right.

And then I'm talking about on the level of also getting free. For example, if you're stuck in or trapped in a particular lifestyle or addiction, I believe that in Christ, in Christ, that's why Paul writes about crucifixion. You are crucified with Christ. In other words, that old nature, which is a part of what is understood in the Jewish teachings, right, about the sin of Adam that came into the world, and why there was sacrifice, why there was blood, why God required sacrifices. Yeah. By the way, in the Holocaust, one of the most horrible things that were done to people wasn't mass murder only. It was the dehumanization that preceded the mass murder.

It was the reduction of humans down to the animal level. And a lot of Holocaust survivors will tell you that the re-humanization process involved resurrecting the soul. And the only path to resurrecting the soul was to recognize the forces of good and evil that reside in you, and the choice to resist the evil and do the good. That was the process of reawakening the soul. Until then, they were dead. They were basically organisms walking. Yeah.

Zombie organisms walking without a soul. And that is so important. So, not to erase right and wrong. Forgive, but not to erase right and wrong.

It's a path to dehumanization. When you erase, you kill the soul. If you eliminate the concept of right and wrong, the soul becomes meaningless. Well, and, you know, you don't understand the goodness of God without recognizing the evil and the monstrosity of sacredness. And the devil. And what evil is.

And what evil is capable of. All right. We got to take a quick break. Top of the hour. Hang with me, if you would, for just a couple minutes. I'll be right back. You're watching Children Generation Radio. I'm your host, Pastor Greg.