Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. And let's see what else we've got going. We've got a lot of stuff going on. Now, I started a little bit late and got buried.

I had to clear the cache on my browser and I forgot that it wiped out all my login information on stuff. So I, at the last minute, had to get in there and get back in there. Alright, so today's going to be a little bit of an unusual call because I have a friend, Andrew Rappaport, and I'm going to introduce you to him in a little bit. He'll tell you about himself. He knows about Jewish stuff, Hamas, what's going on in Israel. We thought it would be good to talk about that.

And so that's what we're going to do. Let's get him on the air right now. Andrew, you there? Hey, brother. How are you? Doing alright, man. How are you doing, buddy? Good, good.

You know, it is Friday. We should really start with, I want to take my shot at doing some hate mail. See how good I could be at rating for hate mail if I was to write hate mail for you. I don't know. Well, you could try, but there's some real experts out there. I could try.

Yeah, there's some real experts out there. But, folks, we've, Andrew, how long? 15 years, I guess? I don't know. Yeah, well, more than nine because it took nine years for you to ethically buy me a meal.

Ethically. Oh, that's true. Embarrassing.

It was great. Yeah, the joke is that he would always outsmart me, and he would. He would always outsmart me buying a meal, and we'd go someplace together, and I'd get 20 minutes, or they'd go pay the check. He'd already paid it.

I mean, you know, all the time. And then one day, his 100th show for something on YouTube he was doing, and I had- Apologect Live. It was the 100th episode of Apologect Live, and you were on.

That's right. That's right, I was on. And what I had done was I had ordered for you, what, sushi, and had it delivered to your house.

And when you moved, you forgot that, you know, I'm slick, and you gave me your address, and I sent it to you. And on air, you had to admit that I finally got you, and it was epic. It was great, so it was a lot of fun. It was epic. I ate it in front of everyone to see that, yes, you got me a meal. That's right, I finally did. People loved it.

It was an ongoing thing. You were beating me for years. All right, so let's get into the issue here of what's happening in Israel, and why don't you introduce yourself. I know, you know, you are, I'm going to use the word loosely, Jewish, and you can explain about that.

Go ahead. Yeah, so I was raised Jewish bar mitzvah, you know, 10 years of Hebrew school. And, you know, one of the things in Hebrew school is, you know, we would learn, they would teach us, and I know you know this, Matt, but they would teach us to look for the signs of the next Holocaust.

And I've used that for years to say that there would be a Holocaust here in America, it would just be with Christians and not the Jewish people. But I have studied, you know, Israeli history for years. My father was part of the Zionist movement, if you are not familiar with that. That was the movement that, you know, looked to create the state of Israel in 1948.

And it continued on afterwards to, you know, in those many years to keep that state what it is, and to keep the, you know, basically the constant warfare that is going on over there. And a lot of people have been asking with what's going on with Israel, like, what's the big deal with Gaza? Why is Hamas doing this? And there's a lot of sympathy, as you see in the news, for the Palestinians. And there's a lot of misinformation that's really out there that a lot of people don't know because they don't study, you know, Israeli history, Israeli politics. And the thing is, you know, one of the things, Matt, a lot of people are talking about is that the people in Gaza are being oppressed by the nation of Israel. And one of the things I often ask people is to say, who owned the land that we call Israel before 1948? And most people think there was a state called Palestine, but it was owned by, it was a territory of the United Kingdom.

It's the United Kingdom after the Holocaust that decided, with all the Israelis returning to Israel and wanting to have a state of Israel, that the UK is the one that gave that land over. And there would be fighting that went on, there was a six-day war and whatnot, that they got their land masses. And as happens in war, sometimes people get displaced.

That often happens during warfare. The people that were in Gaza, you know, people may hear the names Hamas that's in Gaza. They're the ones who run the government there. And people say, well, they're being oppressed. In 2005, Israel, in an agreement, had left Gaza.

They walked away. They don't run Gaza. So when you hear people talk about the oppression that's happening to the people in Gaza, that's from their own government. Israel provides water and electric to Gaza. Now, the Palestinians are supposed to be paying for that, but they haven't paid the bill.

So they're getting free water and free electric. When we talk about water, you have to understand that place is a desert. You look at all the Arab countries, it's a desert. And people are saying, hey, you know, it's not fair that these people are not being allowed to go in and live in Israel and take, you know, they're being, and they are trapped, okay? There's water on one side of Gaza. The other side is Israel. But there's also a third area, a third border, and that's Egypt. And what you don't hear the media talk about is the fact that Egypt was asked to open a gate so that the Palestinians can go into Egypt.

And they said no. So you have this mass area of Muslim countries. When you look at Israel, Israel is the size of New Jersey. It's relatively small, especially compared to all of the Arab states. And none of the Arab states are taking these Palestinians in.

So the question that has to be asked is why? And it's a really simple thing to think about. It really does come down to oil. You know, it's a fact that many countries get their money or their oil from the Middle Eastern countries, and that those countries get their money from all these other countries, the US and elsewhere.

And so it's a simple thing. The other countries prefer to keep peace in there. Now, Matt, you're old enough to remember, I'm sure, the Iran-Iraq wars. That went on for decades. And that was what the Middle East was like.

They were warring against each other. But in 1948, when Israel became a state, there became a common enemy. All the Arab countries don't necessarily get along, but they stopped fighting with one another, focused their fighting on one area.

A small little area the size of New Jersey. And what ends up happening is you have a sort of peace in the Middle East with all the Arab countries by having them funnel in all their attention in Gaza and the West Bank, two areas that were part of the land of Israel that Israel has given over to territories known as Gaza and the West Bank. They're controlled by their residents. Where the Palestinians that live in Gaza are not allowed to enter into Egypt to work, but they are allowed to enter into Israel to work. The only thing, and Matt, I know you're going to really appreciate this, you'd probably want us to do this here in this country, but the one thing they have with the people who come in, the Palestinians that come into Israel, they're not allowed to vote.

We wish that would be in the case in our country. The immigrants that are coming in illegally, you can come in and you just can't vote. The Dems are lying sacks of crap and they want everybody to vote so they can get their power.

Sorry, but that's what is going on. And if you want proof of that for the audience to know, this is one thing that Republicans are never really good at doing too often, but they did one thing when Barack Obama was president. Barack Obama wanted to give amnesty to all the illegal immigrants that were here in America. Republicans actually passed a bill that Barack Obama vetoed that gave him everything he asked for except for one thing.

The immigrants that got amnesty could not vote for 20 years and he vetoed it. That tells you that it was all about the vote then. And that's a lot of what they want there. They want to have battles going on. Iran funded what happened on Saturday. They've admitted to it. Hamas has admitted to it. And just keep in mind that our government freed up $6 billion that was given to Iran to use. And Iran is now saying, okay, well, we helped fund this attack.

Now, thankfully, that money has been re-frozen by our government, but it took a little bit of pressure for that. But the thing is that you have governments like Iran, like Russia, like all these other countries, that are willing to fund the war that goes on with Israel. And every time that Israel gets bombed, and this has been going on for years, where either in the West Bank or Gaza, they shoot some missiles into Israel, Israel shoots a couple of missiles back, and then people say, okay, okay, everyone calm down, and it settles down.

It's usually at the time that they need, when Hamas or whatever is up for an election, they shoot some missiles in and say, see, we're the ones fighting the enemy. And what you have to understand is that this is a very different culture than the Western culture. The Western culture, we believe in life. Because of our Christian, jail Christian values, life is important.

And we value human life. And if you listen to what the Palestinians and those that are supporting it are saying, they don't. I mean, it's their own words if you watch Al Jazeera, they're calling for death. They want their own people to die to further the political agenda.

That's a very different way of thinking. And this is the thing I think, especially for Americans, to recognize is that we have a value for life, and we want to see people be treated because they're made in the image of God. But you're dealing with a group of people who, they put their military weapons and barracks and all in hospitals, in schools, in residential areas, so when they do get bombed, they say, oh, look at all the innocent life. And in fact, Israel, after the attack on Saturday, was actually sending messages to everyone's phone in Gaza saying, get out of these buildings, we're going to be bombing them. And the Palestinian government was saying, no, stay, don't you leave. They know it's going to get bombed. But it's almost as if they want the casualties to show on the media. And people say, well, can you negotiate with this?

Well, let's examine it. They went in, came into Israel in an unprovoked attack. And if people want to say, well, they're oppressed and this is why they did it, they didn't go after military sources. They didn't go to the military barracks. They went to a music festival. They went to kibbutzes, now a kibbutz, many people may not know what a kibbutz is, but basically a kibbutz, they're living off the land. You're living there, you're a little community, you take care of yourselves, you grow your own food.

Hold on, I stayed in one once when I went to Israel. Look, we've got a break, so hold on, okay? We'll get back to you, all right? Hey, folks, if you want, you give us a call, 877-207-2276.

Do you want to talk about this issue? Just give me a call, we'll be right back after these messages. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone, welcome back to the show. We're on the air here with Andrew.

Andrew, you still there? Yes, so you stayed in a kibbutz? Yes, I did. By the Sea of Galilee, and we went there on the first tour. I was in Israel, and it was really nice. We had our own little room, a nice little place. They told us what was going on. They treated us very nicely, very well, and I remember it favorably.

It was great. Yeah, so the kibbutzes are like a little self-contained community. They really don't have involvement so much with political things or military things, and yet they went, what they did on Saturday was to go into, they parachuted into a music festival, taking hostages. The numbers that I've been hearing is from both sides, is close to 1,000 people that they took hostage. They were taking women and children that were going through kibbutz and just taking people from there that weren't fighting, weren't part of the military. So this was not a military thing, and we have to understand that because if you're going to say, well, we were feeling oppressed, then you'd fight against the Israeli government. What they've done is they've taken hostages and brought them back into Gaza, and if you read the reports, many women were not treated well.

They didn't care whether you were American or there's the one German woman that was literally our word to death, and they paraded her body around. They brought her body in to show it in Gaza. They beheaded 40 babies that they took pictures of. What is a baby going to war?

No. This was an act to try to really demoralize the Israelis and get them to just back down. What did they do? They ended up taking the hostages and hiding them in all the areas to say, hey, if you retaliate, we're going to kill these hostages live on air. So when you hear people calling, well, we've got to negotiate and we've got to not retaliate and get along, how do you get along with people that have no respect for human life? One of the things you have to understand is that the first time I was in Israel, 38 years ago, I learned that really the Palestinians, the Arabs that live there, they're raised, many of them raised generation after generation to believe that everything that is wrong in their life is because of the state of Israel. It's because of Israel that everything is wrong. And really it's their own government who is not giving them the things that are needed.

Their own government takes the funds that are given for aid and keeps it for themselves to keep themselves in power. And we're seeing, and it's amazing how when this first happened, Matt, I know you study this stuff, you study the politics, you study history, and you look at this and see how quickly they went from, we're going to stand with Israel to Israel's fault. Israel was attacked, unprovoked.

They didn't attack the military, they attacked people. Kidnapped them, take them back to Gaza who were just enjoying a festival, a music festival. And people are saying, well, you've got to negotiate with them. It's hard to understand the prejudice that people would have generation after generation being taught that everything that's wrong in their life is because of some other country.

You're not going to negotiate with them. And I think a real reason what the fear is with this, and the reason this happened when it did, is because, and many people don't know this because it wasn't really touted too much, we had a president, Donald Trump, who managed to negotiate four of the six peace treaties that have been done with Israel in the Middle East. He did four of them in his four years. And the way he did it was different. Everyone said you couldn't negotiate peace.

He did something different that no one else did. Everyone tries to get peace negotiated with Israelites and their enemies. What he did was he started with the friendly countries. He was working with friendly countries to do peace deals with the hope that it would start to snowball and more and more would happen. Well, there was a peace deal being worked with Saudi Arabia.

That was before Saturday. And if Saudi Arabia would have signed a peace deal, that would then be the biggest country to have a peace deal with Israel. And I think that countries like Iran had fear of that because then they end up losing some of the political power that they all have of being enemies with Israel. And there's a vested interest for these countries to have war in Israel, but you notice that they're not getting themselves involved. These countries will support it. And what happened on Saturday is that Hamas called for the whole world to come in, the whole Arab world, to come and fight all at once and put an end to it. And thankfully we haven't seen that yet.

Thankfully the other countries haven't come in. But what you're seeing is you see countries like Iran or Iraq or the others who will fund these groups, let them go fight, let them get attacked back by Israel, but they don't get themselves dirty with it because I think a lot of the goal that we have to understand is that they keep their own peace by letting others fight against Israel. And you have to understand what's going on there.

That's a big part of it. They're getting funded to keep this going, Hamas and Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the group that's in the West Bank. And Hezbollah is actually more of a danger because of the fact that they're closer to the capital. When we look at it, you have a lot of people who are being taken hostages right now. I mean, there's hundreds of people killed, hundreds to maybe even thousands that are hostages, and they're trying to say, well, Israel shouldn't go and get those people back. And Israel has been doing everything they can to say, we value life. And this is the thing I think that a lot of people, even Americans, don't really understand.

I mean, Matt, you know what it's like online. I changed my profile picture on Facebook to be the Israeli flag. I had people that told me that I'm part of a cult, that I'm a racist because I put a flag up there.

You and I saw plenty of people that did that with the Ukrainian flag. No one accused them of that. Everyone supported Ukraine fighting back when Russia attacked them unprovoked because they wanted oil. And so what did people do?

Say, well, they have a right to defend themselves. But when it comes to Israel, suddenly it's somehow different. Why? Why is it different? I think it all comes down to oil.

Do you remember when Barack Obama was president and there was the issue that occurred in Syria? Well, hold on. We've got another break coming up and it's a good place to stop for the moment. And we'll be right back.

Okay, buddy. So folks, we're talking with Andrew Rappaport. He'll introduce himself a little bit more later in the show and what his ministry is and what he does. But we'll be right back after these messages. Please stay tuned. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. We're on the air with Andrew Rappaport, and we'll do one more segment and then we'll get to the callers who are waiting after that. We'll just do it on different callers on different topics. We'll do this one last segment with Andrew who is... Well, Andrew, why don't you just introduce what you do and what your ministry is really fast and where they can get a hold of you.

Yeah, sure. I'm with a ministry called Striving for Attorney Ministries. We're very much aligned with CARM.org, a great ministry that you should check out as CARM.org if you haven't been to CARM's site. I'm not saying that you have to go to CARM.org to get to heaven, but why take the chance?

That's right. Yeah, but we do a lot of similar things. We focus a little bit more on discipleship where CARM is focused a little bit more on apologetics, but we do a lot of similar things.

We do podcasts together and things. And since I know you have listeners who consider themselves black Hebrew Israelites or now they just go by Hebrew Israelites, you and I talk about that a bunch, people will say I'm a fake Israelite because I'm from the tribe of Levi. Actually, I'm specifically what's called the kohine, and it's a family that would be taking care of the temple elements. And the way they know that is after the temple was destroyed, they write down the genealogies because it was important to them. And so my family tree would be of the Levites. So it's been a thing where Israel has always been important.

You and I both this past year got to go to Israel together and see the land. And when you think about that, Matt, how important was water when we were there? Critical.

I mean, it was critical. It's everywhere outside of Israel. It's a desert.

Yes, it is. And yet Israel has the technology to irrigate and water the land, and it's a fruitful area in the midst of a desert. And that's one of the things that many don't like because Israel is self-sustaining. They have the technology.

They worked hard on the technology. When you look into Gaza, if you go and you check some of what was going on, they were ripping up the pipes that Israel put in for water and using those to launch missiles. Now they come out and say that Israel is being the big meanies because they're not providing water. The Palestinians destroyed, at least the Palestinian military, destroyed the way of delivering water so that they could shoot missiles into Israel who was providing them with the water.

That's what you have that you're dealing with there. I remember when I was in Israel many years ago, and we went into, I think it was Palestine, we were on the bus, and as soon as we crossed the wall, the terrain was different, underdeveloped, dirty, trash everywhere. But in Israel, clean, organized. It was a world of difference, and it really shocked me. I had no clue about it, but when I saw that, it was like, oh my goodness, it was night and day.

It's the culture that is so bad. One, do you remember when we left Israel into the Palestinian areas this last time that you and I were there together? Remember, we'd see those huge houses. Those houses were owned by basically the Palestinians that have lived more in America but have family there, and they buy these huge mansions because they can afford it and can live like kings out there, but they don't stay there.

They're not there all year round. But you're right, and that's a big thing, is that the economic difference between the two is so vast, and what people don't understand, they want to blame Israel, but none of the Arab countries, I mean, go look on a map. Anyone who's listening, go look up on a map right now and just look at that area, look at the size of Israel, look at the size of the Arab world, and you end up realizing there's plenty of Arab states that could easily take all the Palestinians and give them homes and give them land where they could have not in Israel. But they don't do that. They actually refuse that. It's because they want to have this battle going on.

They want that to happen. Hey, we've got a caller here. Let's get to the caller. Let's get to Duke.

I don't want to add you in here, Duke. Andrew's on the phone. Do you want to ask him a question? If you can hear me, Duke, can you hear me? Yes, I'm sorry. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you now.

Yes, I've got your mouth. Apologies. No problem. It's okay. So you have a question for Andrew?

Yeah, and allow me to get to it real quick, if I may. I was disappointed to hear him cite, and it's frankly a propaganda term, about the 40 beheaded babies. And we've seen where the reporter that first broke that, I think her station was like A24 in Israel. I could be wrong.

I'm driving, so I can't look it up on my phone right now. But she has since disavowed that reporting, and the Israeli government has disavowed it. Interesting. You know, as he spoke a bit about Ukraine and some of the differences, I don't know anybody on my side or people that I associate with that blindly supported Ukraine against Russia. You know, because of the actions of the Ukrainian government in the Donbass for so many years. Let's stick with the Israeli government.

You know, it's a common truism that, sure, absolutely. The first casualty in warfare is the truth. And again, this is not a defense of Hamas.

You know, what they did was atrocious and horrendous. But it's beyond interesting that the entire Israeli intelligence community missed all of the indicators from logistics communication staging movement for this attack. And we've seen a tremendous amount of emotion to whip up support for Israel to go in to clear out Gaza. And we've seen, disappointingly, a lot of calls from prominent Jewish leaders on social media for what is essentially genocide in Gaza. And I think it's important that in the context of this that we try to avoid a lot of these emotional appeals and stick to it. I'm wondering what his thoughts are on how did Israel miss all of this?

Yeah. I don't want Andrew to jump in. We have all the protests that are going on around the world, even here in the United States. Why are they calling for deaths to Israel? Why are they calling for it to wipe out Israel? Israel is not calling for a wiping out of the Arab world or even of Gaza. They were never asking for that.

But when you see these protests, they're the ones asking for genocide. They went into a country, and you mentioned the intelligence failure. What was our government doing? Our government is supposed to be one of the elite in intelligence. Were we too focused on trying to find supposed domestic terrorists of January 6th people?

And to see how we could find a way to get Trump to be guilty of something that we were not paying attention to the rest of the world? So when you say it's propaganda, I would say, are you falling into the propaganda of the Marxists that want to continue this? Because when you listen to what they're saying on Al Jazeera, they're calling for the eradication of Israel. That's genocide. Israel is not saying for the eradication of Gaza. That's only coming from Palestinians who are saying that. Netanyahu hasn't said that. Hold on. If I may respond to that, I am not defending anyone protesting for the eradication of Israel.

Absolutely not. And as far as the American intelligence failure, I completely agree that the Patriot Act has been abused, and their focus is the wrong place. But the failure of U.S. intelligence on this notwithstanding, the Israeli intelligence apparatus is quite significant, especially there in the Levant. And the claims that they completely missed this when we've had U.S. congressmen come out and say, no, we've had it covered in a brief that they were given warnings prior to, I'm saying it's a completely valid question to say, how did they miss this?

And at the same time, the effort of... We've got about one minute, guys, before the break, so we'll wrap it up and then we'll go. There was very general responses, just like we knew 9-11. We knew that they were targeting planes to be used as bombs, but we didn't have the details of it. We were caught off guard with September 11th the same way. Much of what's going on in Gaza is that it was all done underground, and so they weren't able to see what goes on underneath the ground.

That was a big part of the surprise of it, and using tunnels and things like that. There was an intelligence failure, and I think that Israel needs to get to the bottom of that. But when you talk about the genocide, it is propaganda to say that it's the Israelis that want to eliminate Gaza. That's the propaganda because they're not calling for the eradication of Gaza, but the Palestinians are calling for the eradication of Israel. So, when you talk genocide, you've got the wrong side on that. There's the music, guys, guys, guys, guys.

There's the music, we've got to go. Thanks for having me on that. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Hey, call back? We can talk some more about it sometime. Hey, folks, we're out of here. May the Lord bless you. Oh, we've got one more break.

That's right. We've got a break, and we'll be right back after these messages. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show.

It's me, Matt Slick, and that was an interesting conversation. I want to thank Andrew again for coming on. If you want to get ahold of him, his ministry is Striving for Eternity.

Striving for Eternity, just check it out and you can get the information there. So, let's see, we have Jeff waiting, but it's not activated, so I can't click on him. So, let's get to Chara next. Chara, welcome, you're on the air.

Hi, Matt. I just have a question. I don't know if you've ever watched the series that's called The Days of Noah. No, I haven't.

Who puts it out? Well, so, it goes through, there's four parts, and it goes from the beginning of Noah, clear till right now in Revelation, and basically what it's saying is there's a parallel, parallel, parable, I can't pronounce it. So, between The Days of Noah and The Final Judgment, and in the part three is the question, what I have.

So, in the series, they put up all the verses, which I went along with it in the Bible, and read and all my owner's stuff, and that's what I'm calling. So, in the part three, it talks about how the Roman Catholic Church changed the Sabbath to Sunday. It's put out by some of the Adventists, right.

Okay, yeah. The SDA is basically a cult, and so you've got to be very careful with what they say. So, yeah, what they're saying is that the Roman Catholic Church changed the Sabbath day to Sunday, and now modern Christians who are practicing church on Sunday are following the mark. Right, yeah, and that's a ludicrous claim.

Basically, it's stupid. The SDA group, started by Alan G. White, says that Jesus is Michael the Archangel. Some believe in Trinity, some don't. Some teach you've got to be, you can only worship on Saturday. If you worship on Sunday, then you're going to hell. They have good dietary rules and stuff like that.

That's great. And there's a lot of debate about the issue of salvation in them, because they teach the issue of the investigative judgment, where salvation is based in part on what you've done. And then there's the issue of Satan being the sin-bearer, who says he'll be cast upon him and he'll be cast out, which is false, which is heresy. And they teach annihilationism, that the dead cease to exist in punishment, which is another false teaching.

So, not to say that they can't get some good stuff in there on that documentary, but it's an SDA thing, and I just can't recommend anybody follow or study anything in the SDA group. Okay, you've been so put out by them because they're putting that stuff. And look, here's something I can use very quickly and very easily to refute this idiocy, and it just makes me mad, that's why I call it idiocy, because it is. This idea that the Roman Catholic Church changed the Sabbath to Sunday, and if you worship on Sunday, blah, blah, blah. Alright, so here's what the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 14. He says, one person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike.

Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. Now, it goes on, it says, whoever observes a day observes it for the Lord, and he who eats does so for the Lord. Now this is Romans 14, 5-6. I ask SDA people, I say, look, if Saturday's the day you're supposed to worship on, why does Paul say that you make up your own mind about it? Why does he not say you have to worship on Saturday?

He doesn't do that. And then they give me lame excuses for this, but that right there just shows that they're wrong. So, there's a lot more I can say about SDA, and I wouldn't put too much credence to what they say about the 7th day, the days of Noah thing.

It might be accurate in a lot of areas, but I just don't know. In fact, I know I'm going quickly here, but when I was at the National Religious Broadcasting Network, I don't know, four years ago or so, the SDA had a booth there, and there's that bald-headed guy, I'm not mocking him, I don't care, he's basically baldish, and he's the guy who does all the talks. And I saw him, I walked up to him, I talked to him, I said, look, my name's Matt, I'm a Christian apologist, I'd like to have a discussion with you on some SDA doctrines, particularly on salvation. And he said to me, not interested. Now, I said to him, the Bible tells you to give an answer to everyone who would ask you. I said, I'm not some average guy. I said, my website's big, I do radio, etc., I've written books. I said, I want to talk to you about this.

And he just refused. So the SDA are not into, generally speaking, they're not into anything of debate whether their views can be cross-examined and held up against scripture. So I would recommend you stay away from them, and not trust what they say.

Sorry, but that's what it is. But if you were to want to know about the days of Noah, I would go to Answers in Genesis and see what they have to say. They're a much better group, and that's what I would go with. Now it does say, as it was the days of Noah, so shall it be the days of the coming of the Son of Man. Now that's Matthew 24 and Luke 17, and there's going to be problems that are coming back. We know that.

We have a lot of problems in the world. But for now, I would just say don't put too much credence in what the SDA is saying. Okay. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

You're welcome. Alright, well God bless. Alright, let's get to Jeff from Iowa. Hey, Jeff.

Welcome to On The Air. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? Doing alright. Hanging in there, man.

What do you got, buddy? Oh, that's great. Me too. Me too. Great Friday. So, my question for you is, Matt, and sorry if I'm inarticulate, I can't believe I'm talking to the great Matt Slick right now.

Wish my wife thought that. Pretty much. My question is, what are your thoughts on the decline of Christianity in the Western world, and first off, what do you think is the cause of the decline of Christianity? The decline of Christian faith is, I suspect, it's just an opinion that's not been tested or researched, that it has to do with creature comforts in Western civilization that have made Christians apathetic to the world. And that, combined with the rise of secularism and its mockery and attack on Christianity, has caused a lot of Christians to not do much. And, dare I throw a third thing out, I don't believe enough pastors and teachers are, pastors and elders are doing their job in churches, equipping the Christians for the work of ministry, but they're babysitting and teaching mamby family theology. And so Christianity is on the decline, and some people call America post-Christian. I don't call it post-Christian, I call it anti-Christian. That's where I believe we're at, okay?

Okay. Also, I was just wondering if you had any ideas on what the solution to that would be, and how we would maybe get back into an era where Christianity is more popular and maybe on the rise. It's easy, but it's not easy. What we're supposed to do is focus on the Lord Jesus Christ and get on our knees and ask God to cleanse us of our sins and teach us the things we need to repent of. And then what we need to do is start loving one another as Christians, so that the world can see that we are followers of Christ. John 13, 34, the world will know that you're my disciples, but the love you have for one another.

And the love that we have for one another is conditional, and it's partial. The world recognizes, doesn't see much difference between the Christian faith and secularism in a lot of areas. And if Christians would start picking up their cross daily and fall back after Christ and living sacrificially, then God will bless the truth of the love that's reflected in their own hearts from that source which is Christ himself.

The world will see it. And along with this, the truth of who God is needs to be taught by the pastors and elders. They need to teach doctrine. And we need the doctrine of love, we need the doctrine of Christianity and of God and things like that. And if that were to happen, the world would change. Okay.

Sounds great. Yeah. That's what it is. And if Christians would just believe the Bible and start doing what it says, but they don't. I mean, send people out into the world. And you would say it's an issue of Christians getting too content maybe or just not putting in enough effort to show their faith? My opinion is they're not believing the word of God completely. They are gathering teachers that... Let's put it this way. I teach truth the best I can. I'm not saying pastors and elders don't do that. And I know a lot of good pastors and good elders who teach a lot of good, solid things and are good, godly people.

But unfortunately, they're the exceptions. But there was a church of a thousand people where the music was great, everything was great, the messages were comforting. And over ten years, this church grew from zero to a thousand. And then they said, Matt, could you come in and preach for six months? And the pastors are covering from whatever.

I say, sure. I'd say, but I'm going to preach biblically. Do you think the church would grow or do you think it would reduce in size?

I believe it would reduce in size. And maybe it's because of my bad preaching and my horrible personality, maybe. But I would suspect that it would be because I would do such things as on Wednesdays, we're going to have classes on how to equip you with the doctrinal knowledge you need to be able to answer people. We're going to have classes on how to do marriage counseling. I'm going to teach you the theology of marriage so you can work in other people's lives. We're going to get groups together who go out into the neighborhood looking for opportunities to serve people with no money received.

Whereas it might cost you how to fix cars, mow lawns, and do whatever. And we're going to start reaching out. We're going to equip our Christians and reaching out for people in the ministry. And we're going to set it up so that maybe once a month we have a barbecue or something where everybody from the area is just invited and we don't preach at them. We just let them know we're here for you.

I believe this is the kind of stuff that needs to be done. And how many Christians would sign up for that? Not everybody could do that, of course. I mean, there's elderly and young and the infirm and things like that. And people are just plain old scared, and I get that. There's enough people in churches where this should be happening on a regular basis.

All over America it should be happening. It's not. Well, thanks for your input, Matt. It's always great hearing from you, buddy.

Okay. Sure, now call my wife up. Tell her how great I am, because you said the great Matt Slick. So you have to let her know how great I am.

I'm always working it. We love you, Matt. Thank you. Well, God bless whoever that is. God bless you guys.

All right. It's Luke Jones. That's your biggest fan.

What's that? It's Luke Jones. He's my roommate.

He's your biggest fan. Well, hey, you guys. We don't have the time for another call or somebody will end the show with you guys.

It's so hard. How long have you guys been listening? All show. Four foot years. Oh, good.

That means you're so smart. That's good. Three years.

Three years. I've been listening to you, Matt, on the radio. Wow. I love you. Amen. Well, appreciate it.

Appreciate it. Pray for this ministry. Pray for me and for Unction and to do the will of God, not my own. But pray for the expansion of this ministry and support we needed as well. Yes, sir. So I appreciate your support and your prayers, man. Okay?

Mm-hmm. All right. Well, God bless you guys. No, God bless you, Matt. Well, thanks.

I love the music, so we've got to get going. All right. Hey, folks, that's a nice Friday, Friday the 13th, which I didn't tell you what that means and how it came out of Egypt most probably. But nevertheless, on Monday, God's God-willing, you can give me a call then. And I hope you have a great weekend. Pray for Israel. Pray for our churches and pray for our country and even our leadership. And the Lord bless you. God bless. Bye. I'm powered by the Truth Network.