The Scattered Nation

This is a Clearview Original. And that's the magic of using real natural muscadine grapes. Muscadine grapes have two extra chromosomes than regular table grapes have.

Those extra chromosomes provide a much needed genetic ability to help build your health. Unlike other fruits or berries, the muscadine grape can resist mold, bacteria, and viruses without the use of harmful chemicals. Yeah, but the problem is I'm very rarely in the mood for grape juice.

Well, good news. You can head over to MightyMuscadine.com and see that they have an entire lineup of products designed for everyday use. If you work out, they have protein powder. I know you wash your hair and brush your teeth, right?

Not very often. That's gross. But if you're a normal person who does, they have shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste. They have a one-a-day dietary supplement. They have body lotion. I'm telling you, these guys have it all. Sounds expensive. Not at all. All of their products are extremely affordable.

Even for a skin flint like me? I'll tell you what. I'm going to let you in on a little secret because I like you so much. I'm going to give you this promo code.

It's T-O-D-A-Y. Promo code today. You use that promo code at checkout and get yourself a sweet discount. And every single dollar you spend using that promo code helps us here at the Clearview Today Show. Don't miss this opportunity to supercharge your health and well-being with the incredible power of Mighty Muscadine. Visit their website now.

That's MightyMuscadine.com and use that promo code T-O-D-A-Y. You're listening to Clearview Today with Dr. Abaddon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Ryan Hill.

I'm John Galantis. You can find us online by visiting ClearviewTodayShow.com. Or if you have any questions for Dr. Shah or suggestions for new topics, send us a text to 252-582-5028. Or you can email us at contact at ClearviewTodayShow.com.

That's right. We want you guys to help us keep the conversation moving forward. You can do that by supporting us supporting the show online. You can do that by sharing it with your friends and family. Leave us a good five star review on iTunes or Spotify. Absolutely nothing less for any reason.

We'll leave a couple of links right down there in the description so you can do just that. The verse of the day today is coming from Ephesians 5, verse 30. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. It's important to be part of the church. The church is the body of Christ, and it doesn't just mean that's a fun, little, cool, clever title.

That is what you are. That's how you spiritually function as the hands and feet of the gospel of Christ. The church body is so important, and it's one of the things that I think Christians take the most for granted.

It's the most expendable thing in their lives is the church. This verse is so interesting, the word that it uses, because the terminology that Paul is using here, he's not saying that spiritually, metaphorically, in an ethereal sense, we're members of the body. Think about yourselves similar to a body. He's saying of his flesh and of his bones.

That's right. Of the physical body of Christ. What does that mean for us? That means a physical resurrection one day.

That means that one day our bodies will be made new, just like Christ's body was made new. Dr. Shaw actually wrote a paper on that, and I believe that paper is getting published. If it's getting published, or if it's not been published yet, right?

No. No, it's not been published. I was going to say we'll leave a link, but we're going to come back to that. Maybe we'll post a link in the future, but a lot of research has been on that.

Of his flesh and of his bones, that's very, very, very significant. I think we did episodes on that. We did episodes on this. We did.

I'll link to those in the description. All that to say, this is a very, very important passage that deserves a second read. That's one of those that, for me, I would read it and just skirt right past it. That phrase is significant, and it's chosen purposefully in light of the rest of scripture. We want to help you guys get connected to God's word. You can do that by downloading the Date the Word app.

They're a partial sponsor of today's episode. It's free right now on iPhone and Android. Go ahead and download it.

Every single day connects today's date to God's word with the hope of making it more memorable for you. Download it now. Put it off. You know you're going to forget.

You're going to forget when you get home. Download it now. Now.

I am having some trouble getting my head into the game today. This is an adult radio show, right? It is, yeah. It's a show for...

I mean, kids can listen to it, but you're not going to get very much out of it, I would expect. Sure. I've got two youngins at the house. You do. You've got five.

I do. Kindergarten graduation was here at Clearview not very long ago. For the first time in a while, I did not have a kindergartener that was graduating this year. I'm so sick of children's songs.

Oh, also yesterday was sports camp. And so there was... I'm so sick of children's songs being around me and in my atmosphere, I don't know what to do. I have children's songs on repeat constantly.

You've had kids for the past 11 years. I have. And so you've... It's just been around. It's just part... it's not even just children's songs. They're just songs. Yeah, at this point, it's just the music that's around me.

I'm about three years in and I am going crazy. If I have to hear, oh, a silly hat, a silly hat, I wear it on my head because that's where it's at. One more time. Silly hat, a silly hat, I wear it on my head because that's where it's at. And I know it looks as funny as can be. It's Gavin's favorite song and it's all he ever wants to listen to.

The other one that I heard, this one I didn't even know was a song, but Nicole and a lot of the older people knew this. I love Jesus better than ice cream and ice cream is really good. Scooby Doo. I love Jesus better than ice cream and ice cream is really good. Scooby Doo.

I love Jesus better than ice cream and ice cream is really good. Scooby Doo. I'm not going to finish it. Oh. The fourth line says exactly what the first three said. So what is, is it Scooby Doo the dog or is that just like yabba dabba doo, we're happy? I think it's like yippee, Scooby Doo. Yeah.

The thing is they don't leave. It's not like you listen to a song and it's like, oh, okay, cool. I heard it and now I'm done. It's just on repeat. Okay, so let me, this leads me into something.

Let me test your millennial here for a second. Sure, sure, okay. So long ago there was a show with puppets and one of them was a lamb named Lamb Chop.

Oh yeah, I remember Lamb Chop. Are you tracking? I don't remember the song. I'll tell you that right now. I'm just going to ask you to finish the lyrics, okay?

Ready? I don't know that I can't. This is the song that. Oh, I can't. I couldn't tell you.

I don't know. This is the song that. The song that never ends? But it's not. It's this is the song that doesn't end.

Oh. That's one of those Mandela effect things. Because I think it's, this is the song that never ends.

That's what I remember distinctly. But it's the song that doesn't end. But this is the song that doesn't end.

Oh. Yes, it goes on and on, my friend. And it sure does. It goes on and on. If you know the song, you know that it repeats over and over again. But I could have promised you up and down that it was this is the song that never ends. And when I found out this is the song that doesn't end, I was mad. I was angry. It's just one of those things where like kids' songs of my day I felt at the time were the pinnacle of music.

Of course. But now that I'm listening to even get, because Silly Hat song is not new. I was singing the Silly Hat song when I was a kid. Baby Shark, not new. Baby Shark, yeah, that's not new.

There was one that I still feel as an adult that never gets old. I can't think of how it starts. Dance the night away. Worries for another day. Let the music play. Down in Fraggle Rock.

Oh, yeah. It took me a second to get there. I was like, I don't remember this one. I didn't remember Fraggle Rock. That's still a bop, even to this day. That's a good one. But anyway, it's sort of like a gripe.

I don't think today's an official gripe vibe, but I'm so sick of kids' songs being around me. Because now I'm working. I was in the back hallway yesterday with Elizabeth and Ellie and Adam.

We were putting a video rack together, screwing stuff in. And I'm like, I love Jesus better than ice cream. And they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I mean, I love him better than ice cream. I don't know what to say.

But ice cream is really good. They're like Scooby Doo. Right.

It's just nonsense. It's not that I hate them, it's that I hate that I love them. Right, right. I hate that I can't hear it once and be dumb. It's got to stay with me all day. It's just part of my life.

Because I guarantee you, later on in the show, Dr. Shaw's going to be talking about something and I'm going to have, I love Jesus better than ice cream going through my head. I'm not listening to him. I'm listening to Scooby Doo. A hundred percent. Those little children's song ear worms. Yeah. Write in and give us your child's song ear worm.

Maybe it was from your childhood or maybe you're a parent and one of the kids' songs has infected your mind. Write in and let us know what that is. Two, five, two, five, eight, two, five, zero, two, eight. Or you can visit us online at clearveetodayshow.com. Stay tuned.

We'll be right back. Elizabeth, my darling bride, what would you say is the most beneficial thing you could do for yourself in the morning? Probably drink an entire pot of coffee when sitting.

I'd say that's a close second. No, the best thing you can do for yourself is to start every morning with a daily devotional. Only being one to talk about.

Well, as it turns out, we have two. Right now, you can unlock the power of daily inspiration, wisdom and spiritual growth in our devotional series, Thirty Days Through a Crisis and Thirty Days to a New Beginning. Written by our pastor, Dr. Abaddon Shah, and his wife, Nicole, the Thirty Days devotional series is designed to reveal new biblical truths every single day.

That's right. And every day is a new revelation to guide you on your Christian journey toward a more meaningful and purposeful life. You can pick up your copy today from our website. That's ClearviewBC.org, where you can grab both books on Amazon, Apple Books and Audible.

That's Thirty Days Through a Crisis and Thirty Days to a New Beginning by Abaddon and Nicole Shah. And don't forget, these are only the first two in an expanding devotional series, so keep your eyes peeled for future installments. Thanks for listening. Now, let's get back to the show. Welcome back to Clearview Today with Dr. Abaddon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You can visit us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com, or if you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, send us a text, 252-582-5028. That's right, and we are here once again in the Clearview Today studio with Dr. Abaddon Shah, who is a Ph.D. in New Testament textual criticism, professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and the host of today's show. Dr. Shah, I've got to ask you, what is the one children's song from When Your Kids Were Little that is still in your head to this day? Oh, my goodness. Um, I would say The Muppets.

Okay. Yeah, this was a, um, no, I'm sorry, not Muppets, Sesame Street. Sesame Street, um, I mean, I can see it, but it was, it was stuck in my head. It was something about the Lammy, you know, the Lammy, like a lamb who is known as Lammy and that's in that show, and I can't remember now.

Here, I'm gonna look it up. Sesame Street, if you look it up, it's gonna instantly snap back in there, it's gonna be there forever. Sesame Street had some good songs, but theirs didn't, theirs didn't really stick out as much in my head. Was it Lem, was it Lembaba with the count?

I know there's a count in there. Or was it Bert and Ernie? I don't know, but it was, it was a, it was a song, and maybe if Nicole wasn't here, she would, she would remember that song just like that, because we watched that videotape, okay, because when I'm talking about CD, I'm not talking about DVD, I'm not talking about Netflix. Yeah, this is a VHS tape. This is on VHS tape, on repeat. And it was just... Was it this? It could be, yeah.

Try that. The wee little sheep in the barn, and the way I learned it, yeah, that was more fun. Yeah, strum it, Luis. Strum it, Luis. No way this, this is the one. Look at the little, they love it. When they get the chorus, yeah, here. That's the song.

Oh my God. No way. That's the song.

And they were singing. No way. That's it. No way. So this was not a made up story.

No, no. We found it. We found it.

Listen, we found it. It only took us five minutes. Good job, gang. We did it. Yay. Yay. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Oh my goodness.

Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. All right. Love it. So this is a hard shift. I don't even know how to segue out of that.

There's not really a segue out of that. We wanted to take some time to respond to Bill Maher, who went on The View. Everybody's talking about it. And we wanted to talk about it not just because everyone else is talking about it, but because he said some really interesting things, and I think it's very rare to see someone who's on the left. I think it's pretty safe to say we all lean very conservative. We lean on biblical, Judeo-Christian values. And man, this is such a tone shift, but I'm doing my best. It's so rare to see someone who's on the left actually call out when the left has gone too far.

And I think with a lot of these things, especially like woke culture and the things that we're seeing on the campuses of universities, they have 100% gone too far. And it's nice and refreshing to see someone who leans left to say, hey, this is not what we should be standing for. Yeah, and ever since all this began, since October of 2023, when Israel was unjustly attacked, Bill Maher has said quite a few times, especially with the recent protests on college campuses, that this is not right. And how this is ludicrous that a nation is attacked, and yet immediately they are being labeled as the perpetrators.

How in the world? People have been butchered, killed, raped, still missing. And we're not even talking about soldiers, we're talking about innocent people, women and children gone. But the protest is against them.

Yes, yes. And it's weird because it's all wrapped up in this coat of moral virtue. We are the good guys, these young, I don't even want to say naive, these young twisted individuals on college campuses who know nothing about the world, nothing about the complex socio-political issues of the Middle East.

But we're good people for this. Well, and Bill Maher even goes on to say in that episode, he said, I find it just absolutely ludicrous, I find it astonishing that we can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. It's crazy to me that that is even up for debate. That's right.

The problem is with some people who are on the fence on this issue, I believe there is an outside force that is behind this. I don't believe all these students on campuses, just because they have a backpack does not make them a student. And they have already proven that they've arrested people and they say, do you go to school here? Nope. Do you go to school here?

No. So there are people who go to school there. There are professors who got arrested and all that, but not everybody on the faculty was there. Not everybody on staff was there. Not everybody from the school was there. It's a handful of people who are in there.

I'm not going to deny that. But majority of the people are outside forces who come in to cause chaos, to cause this problem. And I would love to see the ones that do go to school there are not causing chaos, because they go to school there. They have vested interests there. They pay tuition, or more likely, their parents are paying tuition. And so the ones who are causing chaos, the ones who are really causing the most trouble are, like you said, are not ones that go to school there.

Are outside elements. And I think even that's a leadership principle for us, is that when you don't have vested interest in something, it's very easy to tear it down and to cause chaos. Right now, the narrative is that we are a divided nation, where you have the moral superior left and the wicked corrupt, but still very much in power right.

And that's the narrative that sells. So we wanted to take this time to applaud him, because, like you say, he's far from an evangelical. He's far from a Christian. He's far from a good, godly influence. And yet he is saying things that line up with our biblical values. So to not say it would kind of feed into the narrative.

So we do want to take the time to say, hey, this is a good thing that this man is saying, and he should, like Dr. Shaw said, he should be saying more good things like that. Well, it's interesting that whenever someone who is far right, who is on the far right hand side, conservatives will look at them and go, that's too far. We don't align with that.

That doesn't represent us well. But that seems to rarely happen with people who lean to the left. Which is why everyone is talking about this clip right now.

And this only happened a couple of days ago at the time of recording. That's why everyone's on The View. Right. Correct.

So I would say, OK, so we have identified the outside elements who are causing trouble. So let's set them aside for a moment. Their purpose is only to steal, kill, and destroy. I mean, tomorrow, whoever is the hand behind the puppets will move them to a different direction. They'll go do that.

So that's how they work. There is an element who is really for it. They have educated themselves. Unfortunately, they have come to believe the lies. And they are fighting for this with a passion. OK, I get that.

But then there are people who are in between. Not quite sure. Should we? Should we not? I had people come and ask me, this is back in October, November, about how do you respond to this?

What do you do? Because I've read this, and I'm hearing this, and I'm hearing that. To them, we did several shows to educate them and help them realize what is the truth about Israel? What is the truth about the land? What is the truth about the politics of terrorism?

And so we did several shows, and I even preached on it, talked to people, explained to them what's going on. So this show, in a sense, we're not dealing with the extreme elements who have been brought in and paid elements, I would say. I don't have any evidence for that, but it sure looks like it. I'm not even, in a sense, addressing those fringe people who are sort of convinced that this is a cause they're going to fight for. Okay.

All right. I don't know what to say other than, please go back and re-educate yourself. I'm talking about the other in between who are wondering, is this really the case? Is this really what's going on? And I'm also hoping to address those who understand these issues and then know what's going on. Hopefully this will encourage them to know that people like Bill Maher are speaking out, so they're not alone. They're not the crazies. They're not the Bible-thumping fundamentalists who say the typical party line statements.

There are people coming out and saying, yeah, something's wrong with this. True. True. And it's important that you have that, especially in media, because you're only ever getting half. I think that was another thing that you pointed to.

If you watch just your party's media, you're only ever going to get half of the story because they're not going to tell you the other half. And so that's kind of what we want to do. It's not fence-sitting that we're doing. It's just giving facts.

And any time you do this, just know it requires courage. Yes. True. Yeah.

I've seen pastors more silent than a bunch of Buddhist monks in a monastery up in Tibet who have taken a vow of silence. Right. But you have people depending on you.

Your flock is depending on you for the truth. Right. That's right. And it doesn't make you perfect in everything. People are not perfect because they take a pro-Israel view. That does not mean that in every area of life and viewpoint that they will line up perfectly right. There's only one perfect person, and that is God.

That's right. OK. Only his view is always right. The rest of us, we have to realize that we are fallible human beings. So when you take a stance like this, just know it's risky. It requires courage. It requires education.

And God will honor you for that. And it doesn't mean that you have to be perfect. Now I know of a person who took a stance, and this is going back to the 1880s. 1880s. So this is talking about right after the Civil War. And this person was Zeb Vance, Zebulun B. Vance. A friend of mine clued me into this months ago, and he said, you need to read that speech. And I said, what speech? The scattered nation speech by Zeb Vance. Zeb Vance was a Confederate general colonel.

And then he was a lawyer, became Confederate colonel. And again, I don't agree with his views on slavery and any of that. Absolutely not. Everybody knows that.

But in this speech, he laid out a case to support the Jewish people like no other in the history of the world. Wow. Unfortunately, people don't know that.

Well, there's no care to know it, because he wore the wrong colors and he believed the wrong things. Right, right. And even in the speech, I don't agree 100% with that speech, because there are statements he made, I'm like, oh, you didn't need to say that.

Because otherwise, your case still stands, putting that in there, and especially judging them by today's standards, it's like, oh, you really messed up. Yeah, true. And I don't agree with him. True.

But the case that he does make for the Jewish people is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to read a few things. Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to hear that.

Absolutely. So he says like this over here. He said, though dead as a nation, as we speak of nations, they yet live. Their ideas fill the world and move the wheels of its progress even as the sun, when he sinks behind the western hills, yet fills the heavens with the remnants of his glory. As the destruction of matter in one form is made necessary to its resurrection in another, so it would seem that the perishing of the Jewish nationality was in order to the universal acceptance and the everlasting establishment of Jewish ideas. Never before, listen to this, never before was there an instance of such a general rejection of the person and character and acceptance of the doctrines and dogmas of a people. Wow. It means you've taken the values that come from the Judeo-Christian principle, especially the Bible, the Jewish book, but then you have rejected the people. Yeah. You've taken the good from them and then taken it for yourself, cast them aside. He goes on to say, we regard with unlimited admiration the Greek and Roman, but reject with contempt his crude and beastly divinities, the Greek gods and Roman gods.

We affect to despise the Jew, but accept and adore the pure conception of a God which he taught us and whose real existence the history of the Jew more than all else establishes. Wow. I mean, it's a very different time period in which he wrote that speech, which he gave about hundreds of times. Wow. The same speech? Yeah. The Scality Nation was a speech that he gave hundreds of times. Incredible. He was invited all over.

Churches invited him, synagogues, of course, political societies invited him to come and give that speech. Again, like I said, and I'm repeating it, I don't agree with everything he said because a couple of paragraphs, I wish you could just take them out. Yeah. I mean, that's a weapon of the woke culture that we live in, and I think that's even something that we've talked about on the show and we'll talk about more.

But you can, like you said, you're only going to get half. If he says something, and this is the climate in which we have to speak today, you have to clarify because I felt like in the past it would have just been accepted that, of course, I can like something that this person said and not like something else he said. That's not the case anymore. So we do have to clarify, even with Bill Maher, this guy has said something that we agree with. Doesn't mean that I like everything that he says.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't agree with Bill Maher. Not one bit.

Not one bit. Don't support wholesale, but at the same time, if they say something that agrees with you or supports your side, it's okay to validate that. And part of the responsibility of having a platform like we have is to inform people of some of these good things. You will be a better person for having taken this speech into consideration. You will think differently about God's chosen people, and that's really the goal of what we're trying to say. I want to read for you guys another part, because this was about the time.

So when we were talking about 1880s, this is when persecution began against the Jewish nation or Jewish people in Russia. And so he begins to talk about them. I mean, this is a long speech, and I was blown away how much Zeb Vance or Zebulun Vance knew about history.

Unbelievable. I mean, he goes into Greeks and Romans and Carthaginians, just all of them, and he's talking about them all. And so anyways, I'm going to find that section where he talks about, yeah, right here it is. He's talking about the persecution that is going on in Russia. Let me see, it's a very long speech, by the way.

Oh, I can imagine. By the way. But anyways, he's talking about how sad it is that this is happening in the Russia of the time, and he's calling them to stop. I actually went to Zeb Vance Elementary School while Dr. Shull's looking for that, and I always wondered why it was called that, and then having to learn about, who is this guy?

What is it that he did? It's very influential around our part of North Carolina. For those that are not local or don't know this, we live in Vance County.

100% Vance County. I went to Zeb Vance Elementary School, and this is a person who I feel like contributed so much to this conversation, but is so unknown outside of this circle of North Carolina, this really northern circle that kind of borders Virginia. Outside of this, if you say the name Zebulun Vance, most people will be like, I don't know who that is. And he is known as a supporter of the Confederacy, as a supporter of slavery, so that's a good reminder to us that the mistakes that you make, or the things that you believe wrongly, maybe will be known more than the good things that you contribute. And this is why we need to understand the history of the United States is not a perfect history. It is a checkered history.

But if you try to revise that history and take out all these names and peoples who were fallible, you miss how the world works. We're setting our kids up for failure. We're giving them a vision of a world that does not exist.

That's true. A world without so-called bad guys, according to you. We're trying to create a utopia out of nothing.

There's no foundation at all. We're trying to just make it by force of will, this is going to be our ideal utopia. But the world doesn't work like that. And it is not ideal.

It is not a utopia. Because sooner or later, the man's heart, a human being's hearts are wicked. Somebody else now is going to control someone else. It's always that way, right?

It always happens. So then how are those people going to fight back when there's nothing in the past to show them how to fight back? So exactly. I think that was one of the things that got highlighted on the view is that all of these women are sitting around and they're saying, but don't you care about the people who are being killed? And Bill Maher is saying, it's a war. This is what war is. Have we forgotten what war is? Well, newsflash, we have. We are such a soft, privileged nation that we have never, I've never experienced war.

I've barely ever been in a fight. So this is what wartime looks like. Of course it's horrible. Nobody's saying that it's good.

It's good that people are, but it's expected. You've attacked Israel. Now we're in a war.

This will happen. Just to give a quick context, Zeb Vance was in Charlotte, okay? And in that city at the time, so we're going back to the post-Civil War 1880s, barely 500 Jewish people. So he was not writing it because they were funding him or they were giving him money or whatever.

There was no vested interest other than, okay, yeah, a few synagogues invited him. So what? Right. He was the governor of the state.

Yeah. I mean, he made it. So he did it because he felt it was right. He grew up Presbyterian. His mom taught him the Bible, in fact, gave her a very, very Hebrew name, Zebulon, one of the tribes of Israel.

So he grew up with that teaching, just the way I grew up with that teaching, he support God's people. You have a Hebrew name as well? Yeah, Abaddon.

Abaddon. Yes, of course. So here's what he says about what was happening in Russia at the time. He said, the recent barbarities inflicted upon them in Russia revived the recollection of the darkest cruelties of the Middle Ages. That is one crying outrage, one damned spot that blackens the fair light of the 19th century without semblance of excuse or the shadow of justification. That glare of burning homes, those shrieks of outraged women, those wailings of orphaned children go up to God, not only as witnesses against the wretched savages who perpetrate them, but as accusations also of those who permit them. How sad it is again to hear that old cry of Jewish sorrow, which we had hoped to hear no more forever. Then he says, how shameful it is to know that within the shadow of so-called Christian churches, there are yet dark places filled with the habitations of cruelty.

No considerations of diplomacy or international courtesy should for one moment stand in the way of their stern and instant suppression. And I mean, he goes on and on. I encourage people to read it.

And again, remember, I've said it for the third or fourth or fifth time, there are points in there that I absolutely disagree with. But there are a lot of good things in here that I believe we need to listen and we need more people like him today. Today was helpful for you write in and let us know 252-582-5028, or you can visit us online at clearytodayshow.com. Don't forget, you can partner with us financially on that same website. Every gift that you give goes not only to building up this radio show, but countless other ministries for the Gospel of Jesus. Lots of great content coming your way the rest of this week. Make sure you guys tune in. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow on Cleary Today.