The Ben Shapiro Show - The Religious Decline of the West | John MacArthur

00:00:00.000 It just so happens that the politicians have basically co-opted sin and turned it into their platform, which forces people who understand a biblical definition of sin to be the enemy.

00:00:16.000 It's not that we're trying to take over the world.

00:00:18.000 It's not we're trying to take over the United States.

00:00:21.000 It's we're just trying to uphold righteousness.

00:00:26.000 John MacArthur is an American pastor, prolific author, and the host of the national Christian radio and television program, Grace to You.

00:00:32.000 He's been the pastor of Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Sun Valley, California, since 1969, and serves as the Chancellor Emeritus of the Masters University and Seminary in Santa Clarita.

00:00:42.000 Since completing his first best-selling book, The Gospel According to Jesus, in 1988, John has written nearly 400 books of biblical commentary on themes such as finding truth in our modern world, the shaping of the Twelve Apostles, and extraordinary women of the Bible.

00:00:54.000 His expositional preaching and deep theological insights have made him one of the most respected and influential evangelical leaders of our time.

00:01:00.000 During the COVID-19 pandemic, he made headlines for his defiance of lockdown orders arguing the government had overstepped its bounds in restricting religious gatherings.

00:01:07.000 Los Angeles County sued MacArthur's church for refusing to close down according to local mandates.

00:01:11.000 MacArthur and his congregation held their ground, countersuing and winning, by utilizing precedents set by a Supreme Court decision ruling that certain public health restrictions could not be applied to houses of worship.

00:01:20.000 Los Angeles County ultimately settled the suit, paying $800,000 in legal fees to Grace Community Church.

00:01:25.000 In today's episode, we discuss the decline of religious life in the West and the degradation of biblical teachings in American churches.

00:01:31.000 John also addresses the challenges of convincing the upcoming generation to live a life of faith, the importance of cultivating a sense of community membership, and the Christian understanding of the Jewish people.

00:01:39.000 This is a conversation you don't want to miss.

00:01:41.000 Welcome to another episode of the Sunday special.

00:01:43.000 Pastor MacArthur, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:01:52.000 I really appreciate it.

00:01:54.000 It's my pleasure.

00:01:56.000 Good to be with you again.

00:01:57.000 So, let's start with sort of the status of religion and Christianity in particular in modern America.

00:02:03.000 Obviously, those of us who believe in the Bible, whether we agree on the New Testament, we'll get to, I'm sure, in a little bit.

00:02:10.000 But those who believe at least partially in Bible and biblical morality, let's say, we've been lamenting the downfall of church attendance in the United States, the lack of biblical adherence in the United States over the course of the last several decades.

00:02:23.000 And we're seeing all of that come to a head.

00:02:24.000 Do you think that's a trend that is going to continue?

00:02:27.000 And if so, how exactly do we reverse the decline?

00:02:31.000 Well, it's obviously a trend, and there may be a number of things contributing to it.

00:02:36.000 I don't want to get too technical, but first of all, many, many churches have lost their sense of transcendence.

00:02:44.000 It's like going to a rock concert.

00:02:46.000 It's like going to a TED Talk.

00:02:50.000 It's like going to hear somebody tell you you're really a wonderful person and you can speak your own world into existence.

00:02:56.000 It's psychological, sociological games.

00:03:00.000 But it lacks the transcendence.

00:03:02.000 It lacks the sense of connecting with God, with finding reality in an invisible means of support beyond yourself.

00:03:13.000 So many churches are, I mean, they're pumping the prosperity gospel, you get what you want, or they're just talking about being a better human being.

00:03:23.000 That just doesn't lift you up.

00:03:24.000 That doesn't elevate you.

00:03:25.000 That doesn't take away the fear of death.

00:03:28.000 That does not give you some kind of existential reality that you can cling to that transcends life.

00:03:36.000 And I think another reason people don't go to church is because it's so confusing.

00:03:41.000 So what is the form of Christianity that represents accurately the scripture and the word of God.

00:03:49.000 I think another thing that contributes to indifference toward church is the crushing disintegration of the family.

00:03:58.000 And people are finding their community online.

00:04:02.000 They create their own fantasy community, they create their own You know, virtual world of relationships.

00:04:12.000 So they don't need real community.

00:04:14.000 They're not dependent on the intimacy of, and many of them don't even understand what that intimacy is because of the breakdown of the family.

00:04:23.000 So, and there's also an effort to destroy anything traditional, anything historic, anything ancient, anything even 10 years ago.

00:04:35.000 In favor of whatever the new zeitgeist is.

00:04:38.000 So there's so many things that assault the church.

00:04:41.000 Those are some of the things that come to mind.

00:04:43.000 So, the biggest decline that we've been seeing in terms of religious adherence in the United States, and the most important, has been in Protestant denominations.

00:04:50.000 And obviously, Jews represent a very small fraction of the population.

00:04:54.000 Catholics represent still a fairly small minority of the population religiously in the United States.

00:04:59.000 It's been the secular decline in Protestant adherence over the course of the last 50 years that really has been devastating for the nation.

00:05:07.000 So, for people who are looking at Protestantism.

00:05:10.000 You asked the question before and I'll ask you.

00:05:14.000 How does somebody who's interested in going to church determine what is a Bible-believing church that's worth their time versus a church that maybe has a Pride Progress flag hanging off the door and claims to be speaking in the name of the Gospels?

00:05:26.000 So let's go to the real issue here.

00:05:31.000 A church that is faithful to Scripture, a synagogue that is faithful to Scripture, bears moral authority.

00:05:38.000 I mean, it exists to say, this is what the Lord has said.

00:05:43.000 This is what God requires.

00:05:45.000 This is divine mandate.

00:05:48.000 This is the morality that leads to blessing and disobedience and disregard for this morality leads To cursing, you could say.

00:05:58.000 So, the bottom line is, if you're living in the culture that we're living in, where you want absolute freedom to do anything you choose to do, to establish your own set of rules, your own truth, your own standards of morality, the last thing you want Is to step into some place that's going to call into question everything you're choosing to do in your life.

00:06:23.000 And it's going to exercise authority over you.

00:06:27.000 The church to be the church, and I think this is true in Judaism with a synagogue. 0.98

00:06:33.000 If you're going to be a faithful Old Testament synagogue, then you have to lay down the law of God. 0.94

00:06:41.000 If you're going to be a faithful church, you have to lay down the standard.

00:06:44.000 And it is not to crush people, it is to bring them into divine blessing.

00:06:51.000 I mean, that goes back to Deuteronomy, right?

00:06:53.000 Do this and you'll be blessed.

00:06:55.000 Don't do this and you'll be cursed.

00:06:58.000 So I think because the natural fallen heart is bent towards sin, The church is not an inviting place to go if it's faithful to proclaim the Scripture, because then that brings people under guilt.

00:07:15.000 And why would they go to be basically held up before God and threatened with judgment?

00:07:24.000 But that's the message of the church, and that's what leads to the good news of the gospel, that Christ died to pay the penalty for your sin, and through Him you can have complete forgiveness of sin, so that the church becomes the family of the forgiven, and all the blessings of God are dispensed there.

00:07:43.000 So, how much of this is going to be self-correcting, and what needs to happen in terms of church in the United States in order to fix it actively?

00:07:51.000 Because, you know, one of the problems that is faced by, I think, Protestantism in certain senses, Judaism, not as much by Catholicism, which has a centralized authority, obviously.

00:08:01.000 Catholicism, theoretically, can enforce from the top, although increasingly they're not doing so.

00:08:06.000 Protestantism, by nature, is much more diffused in terms of sources of authority.

00:08:11.000 There are a variety of pastors who are interpreting in a variety of ways.

00:08:14.000 Judaism has something similar.

00:08:15.000 There's no hierarchical structure.

00:08:17.000 So, given the lack of hierarchy, how exactly can you ensure that more churches are spreading the gospel?

00:08:25.000 And by the same token, is it just a matter of waiting until people become disillusioned with secularism and kind of wander their way back to the proper church?

00:08:32.000 Well, there's certainly some truth in that.

00:08:35.000 But Hosea said it in a simple statement.

00:08:37.000 He said, like people, like priests.

00:08:39.000 I mean, the people can't rise higher than whoever the spiritual authorities are in their life.

00:08:44.000 I mean, when you've got a guy, like the case that's going on with that Miller guy down in the South, where his wife committed suicide and all these horrible things going on around that, and that guy is a pastor?

00:09:01.000 What would we expect to come out of that except the chaos that manifests itself eventually?

00:09:06.000 And time and truth go hand in hand.

00:09:08.000 You can't hide forever.

00:09:10.000 So I think that the primary issue is leadership.

00:09:14.000 I mean, it's the same thing in any field.

00:09:17.000 You never rise higher than the leadership.

00:09:19.000 I mean, we know that politically.

00:09:21.000 We know that in every aspect of life, business, education, and everything.

00:09:26.000 So I think the church suffers from really, really chaotic Inconsistent leadership.

00:09:34.000 The church, you know, if you're dealing with people with deep needs, hurts, pains, illnesses, this is a perfect place to become rich at the expense of those people that you abuse.

00:09:49.000 And so people counterfeit religion.

00:09:52.000 And they make themselves rich.

00:09:53.000 So you're trying to sort out not only the false leaders, but the weak leaders, the unfaithful leaders, the untrained leaders.

00:10:04.000 So that is really the issue in Christianity.

00:10:07.000 I had a reporter ask me one time, who is in charge of the Christian movement?

00:10:13.000 And I said, Well, unfortunately, nobody is in charge of that movement.

00:10:20.000 And it's that, that is, on the one hand, good, because you don't have the hierarchy dictating everything.

00:10:29.000 But on the other hand, you have to live with what you get.

00:10:32.000 So I think it's a leadership problem and the call for Genuine, honest, godly, virtuous, kind, compassionate, loving, truthful leadership in the church is more necessary now than ever in my lifetime.

00:10:50.000 So, as somebody who's spent your life teaching faith and spreading faith, what is the best way to teach faith?

00:10:55.000 It seems almost a self-contradiction in terms, because obviously faith is something that you have to believe or something you have to feel.

00:11:02.000 How can you teach belief or feeling as opposed to what you would do in, say, a science class would be to teach the scientific process, teach falsification, teach evidence.

00:11:11.000 How do you teach somebody faith?

00:11:13.000 What's the best way to approach somebody with the faith?

00:11:16.000 That's really a good question, Ben.

00:11:18.000 And the answer is this.

00:11:20.000 The only faith that makes any sense is faith that has an object that can deliver what you expect.

00:11:31.000 I mean, if you say, I'm a person of faith, what do you believe in?

00:11:35.000 Who do you believe in?

00:11:36.000 I mean, that could be the ultimate folly if you believe in the wrong thing.

00:11:40.000 I mean, you can get on a five-story building and say, I have faith that I can fly.

00:11:47.000 We had that happen in our church.

00:11:50.000 Just a few weeks ago, we had a guy who had come off some drugs and climbed up on the highest point of our church, and I guess he thought he was Peter Pan or something.

00:12:01.000 and flew and killed himself.

00:12:05.000 Tragic!

00:12:06.000 This is not a person from our church, but somebody in the community.

00:12:11.000 I don't know what he believed, but if you're going to believe, you better believe in the right thing, because it's the object of your faith.

00:12:19.000 It's the object of your faith.

00:12:21.000 Who do you believe in?

00:12:22.000 What do you believe in?

00:12:23.000 What are the truths and the standards that you can anchor your life to because they're valid, because they're validated, because they're proved by actual evidence?

00:12:38.000 Otherwise, it's folly.

00:12:39.000 Faith without the right object is foolishness.

00:12:43.000 So, let's say you have a skeptic who comes to you and says, listen, I don't believe in the Gospels.

00:12:48.000 I don't believe in the veracity of the Bible.

00:12:51.000 Prove it to me.

00:12:52.000 How exactly are you going to convince me that this is something that I should spend my time on?

00:12:57.000 Do you start with the values of the Gospels or do you start with the story of the Gospels?

00:13:02.000 What's sort of the way that you lead people into faith from your perspective as a pastor?

00:13:07.000 Well, there are a number of categories.

00:13:11.000 You could start with the idea of fulfilled prophecy.

00:13:16.000 You can go back to the Old Testament, and many, many times God said something was going to happen, and it happened.

00:13:22.000 I mean, it happened in the Old Testament just the way God said it was going to happen.

00:13:27.000 So you have those kinds of historical things.

00:13:30.000 You also have the miraculous element validated by eyewitnesses throughout all of redemptive history, throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.

00:13:39.000 You have thousands of people who saw the risen Christ, for example.

00:13:46.000 You have the apostles who who were scattered and fearful when Jesus was arrested and crucified.

00:13:56.000 Three days later, He's risen from the dead.

00:13:58.000 And if you question that, then you have to ask, how is it that the disciples from being fearful turned into these bold proclaimers of the risen Christ and literally gave their lives in martyrdom for a message they knew was true.

00:14:15.000 So, historically, you can go back and you can look at the history of Scripture.

00:14:19.000 You can see fulfilled prophecy.

00:14:22.000 You can compare the Old Testament with history.

00:14:24.000 That's one of the things that I studied under a guy named Charles Feinberg.

00:14:29.000 A Jewish guy who was really basically trained to be a rabbi, went to Johns Hopkins, got a PhD in archaeology, studied under William Foxwell Albright, the leading archaeologist of that era.

00:14:41.000 And he spent his whole career as a former guy being trained for a rabbi, studying biblical archaeology and showed how it paralleled the actual accounts of the Old Testament.

00:14:54.000 But I think the most compelling thing that Christianity has to offer is the person of Jesus Christ, the historical Christ, and the fact that Christ does not come across as somebody created by a committee or a bunch of deceivers.

00:15:11.000 The moral character of Christ, the wisdom of Christ is so transcendent.

00:15:18.000 So I think there are a lot of ways you go at it, but I would just say this in a general sense.

00:15:24.000 Read the Bible.

00:15:25.000 Just read the Bible.

00:15:27.000 It has the ring of truth.

00:15:28.000 It defends itself.

00:15:29.000 It's like a lion.

00:15:31.000 You don't defend it.

00:15:32.000 You don't defend a lion.

00:15:33.000 You open the cage and let it out.

00:15:34.000 It'll be okay.

00:15:36.000 And the Scripture is like that.

00:15:37.000 It's like that even morally.

00:15:40.000 There's something in the heart of people that resonates with biblical morality.

00:15:45.000 Obviously, their sinfulness fights it.

00:15:49.000 But the law of God is written in every human heart.

00:15:52.000 That's part of being created in the image of God.

00:15:55.000 And you can fight that law, you can resist that law, you can violate that law, but that law is there.

00:16:02.000 That is part of being created in God's image.

00:16:06.000 And I think if your heart is open to To the truth.

00:16:10.000 You go to the Word of God, and I've seen this now for all these years I've been in ministry.

00:16:16.000 The ring of biblical truth is so powerful to a person who honestly reads the Scripture.

00:16:25.000 I just tell people all the time, go to the Scripture, read the Bible, and let it defend itself.

00:16:31.000 You know, one of the things that you mentioned there, and obviously as somebody who's spoken his entire career as a Jew about why Christians need to go back to church and re-engage with the Jesus of the New Testament, the perversion of Jesus into a sort of namby-pamby, bizarrely androgynous Creation from from Haidt Ashbery is one of the stranger things that's happened over the course of the last 50 or 60 years in American life.

00:16:54.000 The attempt to turn him into a sort of bizarre pacifist with nothing of morality to say.

00:17:00.000 People who are out there, major politicians, will say that Jesus was out there to teach non-judgmentalism and tolerance, which is like, I don't know if they lost the ability to read a book or if they never just understood the book they were reading, but I don't see that at all when I read the New Testament.

00:17:15.000 Well, no.

00:17:16.000 Look, they didn't kill Jesus because He was so kind and generous and compassionate. 0.98

00:17:22.000 They killed Jesus because He exposed the hypocrisy of the religion of the Jews. 1.00

00:17:29.000 And that was nothing new, and you know that from Jewish history.

00:17:32.000 In the Old Testament, I mean, God had a hard time getting them to conform to His law, even after Deuteronomy, where He said, Command you to do, you'll be blessed.

00:17:44.000 If you don't, you'll be cursed.

00:17:45.000 I mean, we all know the history.

00:17:47.000 They wind up worshiping Baal. 0.94

00:17:50.000 They wind up offering their kids to Molech. 0.99

00:17:53.000 Trying to keep them on the straight and narrow was a very difficult thing to do.

00:17:58.000 So, when Jesus arrives, there are true believers in Israel, for sure. 0.99

00:18:06.000 You know, Joseph and Mary, his parents, Elizabeth and Zacharias, the priest, and Simeon and Anna at the temple when they brought Jesus in to be Introduced to Judaism.

00:18:19.000 And you have true believers.

00:18:22.000 But Jesus confronted false religion in no uncertain terms. 0.74

00:18:27.000 And He confronted irreligion in no uncertain terms.

00:18:31.000 And much of His ministry was pronouncing judgment.

00:18:36.000 You either come to God for forgiveness and salvation, or you're going to come under divine judgment.

00:18:45.000 That's the real Jesus.

00:18:47.000 I wrote a book called The Jesus You Can't Ignore.

00:18:49.000 And that is the Jesus that at the beginning of His ministry went into the temple and made a whip and cleaned out the buyers and sellers.

00:18:57.000 And then He did it again in the Passion Week three years later at the end of His ministry.

00:19:02.000 And then He stood outside the temple and said, not one stone is going to stand upon another in this temple.

00:19:08.000 I'm going to bring it all down because it's corrupt.

00:19:11.000 And one of the illustrations of that corruption was the widow who gave her last mite.

00:19:17.000 And Jesus says, this widow gives her last mite. 0.99

00:19:20.000 She has nothing left.

00:19:21.000 What kind of religion takes the last coin from the hand of a widow? 0.99

00:19:26.000 And he pronounced judgment on that temple.

00:19:28.000 And it wasn't long after that that the Romans came. 0.92

00:19:31.000 In 70 A.D.

00:19:33.000 and everybody knows what happened to Jerusalem, which is exactly what Jesus said would happen.

00:19:39.000 In the meantime, of course, obviously there were true Jews. 0.94

00:19:42.000 The New Testament says not all Jews are true Jews in the spiritual sense, in the sense that they love God and love His law and want to honor Him.

00:19:52.000 So, I think this is the big issue with religion.

00:19:58.000 He said, you hate me because I told you your deeds were evil.

00:19:58.000 Jesus said this.

00:20:04.000 So, that is the big issue.

00:20:08.000 Look, this is what Biblical Judaism does. 0.97

00:20:12.000 It confronts evil and sin.

00:20:15.000 And this is what Christianity does. 0.98

00:20:16.000 It confronts evil and sin.

00:20:18.000 So, if you're happy with your sin and you love the darkness rather than the light, why are you going to go hear that?

00:20:27.000 There has to be something going on in your heart where you've reached a point of deep conviction, a deep dissatisfaction, where you begin to hate the sin and the effects of the sin, and you're looking for deliverance from sin.

00:20:43.000 At that point, you find a place where the gospel is being proclaimed, the gospel of forgiveness.

00:20:52.000 And sometimes it's tough to find.

00:20:54.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:21:57.000 So do you think that, you know, obviously there are many distinctions between Judaism and Christianity.

00:22:01.000 One of the distinctions that may have been pressed too hard upon, but I'd like to get your take on it, is the distinction between sort of faith and acts.

00:22:08.000 the sort of way that Judaism perceives itself, and Maimonides certainly describes it this way,

00:22:12.000 is that the acts precede the faith. That basically the way that you bring people

00:22:17.000 to faith is through acting in the way that the Bible suggests. That you set up a track record

00:22:22.000 of success by acting in moral ways, and because you're now living in the realm of godly morality,

00:22:27.000 you're living what God wants you to live. That the belief is sort of a natural

00:22:31.000 manifestation of that, whereas Christianity, conversion in Christianity

00:22:35.000 seems to be faith first and then works later, meaning accept the primacy of

00:22:39.000 Christ and then the acts will naturally follow because you've accepted the

00:22:43.000 authority and primacy of Christ in your life. Is that distinction too hard a

00:22:47.000 distinction? What do you make of that? Well I think both of those things are 0.69

00:22:50.000 true. I think how can I convince somebody to be a Christian if they can't see the 1.00

00:22:58.000 transformation. I mean what am I trying to do?

00:23:02.000 I can't say to somebody, you need to be obedient to the law of God, you need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you need to be obedient to God's law and God will bless you, if my life isn't a demonstration of that.

00:23:18.000 So, yes, my behavior Greg gives grounds for somebody else's faith.

00:23:28.000 Oh, look, you're like... I mean, there was a philosopher in Europe who said, show me your redeemed life, and I might be interested in believing in your Redeemer.

00:23:39.000 I mean, that's so foundational.

00:23:41.000 So basically, if you're ill and you go to a doctor and the doctor finds a way to cure you, and you go to all the people who have your same illness and say, hey, this guy can cure me, and I'm a living illustration of that, that's the proof.

00:23:56.000 So I think, in a sense, both of those are true.

00:23:59.000 Somebody has to have the behavior that validates the faith.

00:24:04.000 And then the faith comes and the behavior follows in another person.

00:24:09.000 That make sense?

00:24:10.000 Yeah.

00:24:11.000 No, that does make perfect sense.

00:24:12.000 I mean, this is some of the stuff that you talk about also in the war on children is because when you're raising kids, it really is coincident you teach faith and act at the same exact time.

00:24:22.000 I mean, the reason that you teach a kid that something is good or bad when the kid is three, four or five years old is because God says that it is good or bad when they are three or four or five years old.

00:24:31.000 And so they're simultaneously learning to believe in the veracity and truth of the moral system you're teaching and the veracity of the God who gave them that moral system and makes them successful in life through that moral system.

00:24:43.000 And that's something that you talk about in your book is deeply lacking.

00:24:45.000 We now live in a world where people seem to have taken up this sort of Rousseauian view of how you should raise children.

00:24:51.000 They just expose the children to the elements and you don't make any choices for them at all.

00:24:55.000 The best form of parenting is non-judgmental parenting.

00:24:58.000 But that is, in and of itself, a form of judgmental parenting.

00:25:00.000 You've judged against a moral system, in favor of an amoral system, and then you expect children to be able to navigate that.

00:25:07.000 Yeah, I mean, the worst thing you can do with children is let them decide what they're going to believe and what kind of morality they're going to follow.

00:25:17.000 I mean, you'll have a disaster in your home at three years of age.

00:25:22.000 I mean, they have to be conformed.

00:25:23.000 That's why Proverbs says, spare the rod and spoil the child. 1.00

00:25:28.000 You know, you have to discipline.

00:25:30.000 There has to be, literally, there has to be some pain connected to dishonest or lying behavior or unkindness or whatever, and attitudes as much as actions.

00:25:45.000 I mean, I've been thinking about that, watching the university conflagrations going all over the place in this country, and I'm thinking to myself, who raised these kids?

00:25:57.000 Where is all this massive kind of uncontrollable hatred, anger, ignorance, rebellion, destructiveness come from?

00:26:08.000 This is the product.

00:26:11.000 This is the product of the parents of those young people, clearly, this integration of the family.

00:26:18.000 So much of it is screaming women. 1.00

00:26:21.000 And weak men, and abysmal ignorance, and hatred even. 0.99

00:26:31.000 And then you give them the bullhorn? 0.97

00:26:34.000 You know, you give the bullhorn to the kindergartners?

00:26:38.000 This makes no sense at all.

00:26:41.000 But if you think that children have been the target of the last 20 years, just look at the universities.

00:26:50.000 And they can't, with an undisciplined life and a life of almost hedonistic freedom, they arrive in a university and come under the influence of some ideological activist who can basically lead them to do anything he wants them to do.

00:27:08.000 And if it's rebellion, all the better, because that suits the immature heart.

00:27:14.000 So this is the proof of what's been going on in the parenting process over the last 25 years.

00:27:21.000 I think that so many of these protesters are representatives of a fundamentally anti-religious belief system, because the religious belief system has a few key predicates, a few key principles.

00:27:32.000 Some of those are, you do have the willpower and ability to change your own life.

00:27:37.000 That you're responsible for your own actions before God.

00:27:41.000 The idea that there is an unchanging moral system, a moral right and a moral wrong, that has nothing to do with your self-proclaimed status as victim.

00:27:50.000 And I think there's a reason that so many of these protesters are burning the American flag.

00:27:53.000 They don't believe any of this stuff.

00:27:55.000 They've decided that the system itself is fundamentally corrupt,

00:27:58.000 controlled from above by powerful people, and they're all going to link arms

00:28:01.000 and march upon the system, which is why you see this bizarre spectacle 0.99

00:28:05.000 of people flying gay pride flags in solidarity with terrorist groups that kill gay people. 0.97

00:28:09.000 Like, it's not about their common shared interests between one another, 0.96

00:28:13.000 it's about their common shared interests against the societal superstructure

00:28:17.000 that has provided for their prosperity and success.

00:28:20.000 Well, you're absolutely right.

00:28:21.000 I mean, that's absolutely right.

00:28:23.000 But it wouldn't matter.

00:28:23.000 It wouldn't matter what it was.

00:28:26.000 I was talking to a guy yesterday from Brazil, and he said they're fighting the same battle with wokeness.

00:28:34.000 And I said, well, wait a minute.

00:28:35.000 Do you have a sort of an oppressed Category of people?

00:28:39.000 Is it like natives of Brazil? 0.99

00:28:42.000 Is it like some ethnic group?

00:28:43.000 And he said, no, it's LGBTQ.

00:28:47.000 The wokeness issue is that they are the oppressed people in the society.

00:28:54.000 And it just strikes me that when people want to rebel, they'll find any reason to rebel.

00:29:00.000 And that's what I see in the hearts of these kids.

00:29:03.000 They were raised in families where they didn't know how to face the challenges of this world.

00:29:07.000 A family is where you learn by observing.

00:29:11.000 You watch how your parents love each other, how your parents resolve problems and issues.

00:29:18.000 You figure out how to live life by looking at the model and example of your parents and grandparents.

00:29:24.000 These kids, it's as if they were raised in the jungle without anybody to show them what to do.

00:29:31.000 And somebody opened the cage and turned them all loose on the world.

00:29:36.000 And it could be anything that could sort of activate that rebellion.

00:29:41.000 I remember some years ago, an interview with a student who said, I want to protest.

00:29:46.000 I'm looking for a good cause.

00:29:48.000 It's that kind of mentality.

00:29:51.000 They want to rebel, and that rebellion finds its origin in the fact that I'm God.

00:29:59.000 There is no transcendent authority outside of me.

00:30:03.000 This is how I feel, and I'm going to demand that what I feel be considered as the most important issue, and I'm going to scream until people get the message.

00:30:13.000 You know, as I've mentioned before and as you've been talking about, I think the curative to this is, in fact, not just going to church, but being involved in a church community.

00:30:21.000 So, you know, in my community, obviously, I think that the Jews have this right, and Jesus had it right originally because he's pro-Sabbath, the basic idea that On at least one day a week.

00:30:31.000 You are supposed to remove yourself from the world around you and you are supposed to be in the community with compatriots who believe in the living God is the way to do it.

00:30:40.000 So, you know, we don't use electronics.

00:30:41.000 We all live within walking distance of the synagogue.

00:30:44.000 Every seventh day we are spending 25 hours with one another engaging in everything from prayer to Bible study groups, having lunch with one another.

00:30:52.000 The problem is this.

00:30:53.000 religion and faith practice, they're in the water, they're in the air that's around you.

00:30:57.000 And when we separate that off from regular life, it's like, these are faith principles that I believe,

00:31:01.000 they're apart from me and I believe in them.

00:31:03.000 That's not how most people historically have lived their faith.

00:31:06.000 It really is not about what you think, it's about what you do and what you are in the world.

00:31:10.000 The way that I engage with my community and the way my kids engage with my communities,

00:31:14.000 they're engaged in the community from literally the day they're born.

00:31:17.000 In Judaism, obviously, we have circumcision on day eight, and the thing that we say during the circumcision ceremony

00:31:23.000 is that the child should be dedicated, l'chuppah, l'torah, l'maisem, t'oviyah,

00:31:28.000 meaning to the wedding canopy, to the Torah.

00:31:31.000 Well, that is all exactly right.

00:31:33.000 And that's why I wrote the book, The War on Children.

00:31:34.000 the eighth day, like from when they're born, they're born into a system of obligations

00:31:39.000 and social networks and social fabric.

00:31:41.000 And when you rob children of this, they become free radicals and they don't know where to go.

00:31:45.000 And then they do end up creating identities around terrible things.

00:31:50.000 Well, that is all exactly right.

00:31:52.000 And that's why I wrote the book, The War on Children.

00:31:55.000 The War on Children starts, well, it really starts in not wanting to have children.

00:32:01.000 I mean, you don't wanna have children, You know, buy a dog. 0.94

00:32:05.000 And then it moves to, if you do get pregnant, kill the child in your womb. 0.93

00:32:10.000 And if the child survives, you know, let the culture raise him. 0.99

00:32:15.000 It's easier for people.

00:32:17.000 I mean, it's amazing.

00:32:18.000 It's easier for people to take a kid and put him on a drug than it is to turn off the cell phone.

00:32:25.000 I mean, it's just one thing after another after another leads to the irresponsibility.

00:32:25.000 It makes no sense.

00:32:30.000 But you're absolutely right.

00:32:31.000 God's complete plan based on the family.

00:32:36.000 Father and the mother loving each other and raising the children according to the law of God so that their lives could be blessed and so they could have well-ordered societies.

00:32:48.000 And God has built in some things, like even in an individual sense, the human conscience.

00:32:55.000 You know, it screams at you, accusing you or excusing you based on your conduct.

00:33:01.000 That's the law of God in the heart.

00:33:04.000 And the next barrier is the family, where the father's authority and the mother's authority, as we find out in Proverbs, even to the point of corporal punishment if need be, is part of channeling that child down the right pathway.

00:33:20.000 And if it gets past that, then the society steps in, and God even gave the society the sword.

00:33:27.000 They don't bear the sword for nothing.

00:33:28.000 They have a certain amount of authority to coerce people to obedience and conformity that allows for well-ordered societies to function.

00:33:37.000 So God has done just built into the common grace of the world, things, mechanisms that help correct people

00:33:47.000 and put them in the path of blessing.

00:33:49.000 And when all of that disintegrates, when you reject the police, when you reject the authority,

00:33:55.000 when you reject any authority at all authority, when you have no parental consistency,

00:34:01.000 no moral leadership in your home, where there is no morality at all.

00:34:07.000 I mean, you can believe whatever you want about morality and think that the consequences are going to be good.

00:34:15.000 In spite of the fact that you violated the law of God, who is the Creator, who knows how His creation functions best?

00:34:21.000 When all of that is disintegrated, and really, you're right, at the bottom of all of it is a rejection of God.

00:34:26.000 They don't want a divine, transcendent, sovereign judge ruling on their lives.

00:34:35.000 Yeah, and in rejection of God lies rejection of man.

00:34:37.000 This is the part that I think the post-Enlightenment thinkers got totally wrong.

00:34:41.000 I mean, the basic idea is that God created man in a particular way, in his own image, which means that you do have a nature, and that nature is in fact fixed.

00:34:51.000 As a human being in certain particular ways and that God has created roles and jobs for you across your life.

00:34:57.000 I mean, if you go back to the book of Genesis, God puts Adam in the garden and he's actually got a job in the garden, right?

00:35:02.000 He's meant to cultivate the garden, which is a beautiful place.

00:35:05.000 Everything's fine.

00:35:06.000 It proceeds man.

00:35:07.000 Man gets there and it's his job to actually maintain and cultivate the garden.

00:35:10.000 He fails in that job because he violates God's commandment and he gets thrown out.

00:35:14.000 And so what does God do?

00:35:15.000 God says you're gonna have to till the ground.

00:35:15.000 God gives him more work.

00:35:17.000 God says that you're going to have to die at some point.

00:35:19.000 You're gonna have to be a father now, right?

00:35:20.000 He doesn't have kids until he leaves the garden, right?

00:35:22.000 This idea that human beings, they find their identity in the things and roles that they play across the course of a lifetime, not in how they feel.

00:35:31.000 That is the fundamental distinction in terms of identity that our society, I think, is breaking down upon.

00:35:35.000 It's foundering.

00:35:36.000 Because it used to be that a human being, the way that I've talked about this, I say, you want to know what human beings are and what we aspire to be?

00:35:43.000 Go to a graveyard, go to a cemetery, and look at what's on the headstone.

00:35:46.000 What's on the headstone is always loving father, loving husband.

00:35:49.000 It's the thing that you did for the members of your family, for your community, and for the world that actually define you.

00:35:55.000 But the way that we define ourselves online is, how do I feel today?

00:35:58.000 It never says on your headstone, felt terrible, right?

00:36:02.000 It never said, there's no emoji on the headstone, right?

00:36:05.000 Your feelings are irrelevant to what your life actually is supposed to mean in front of God and in front of your family.

00:36:11.000 Yeah, I don't know if you've seen Jonathan Haidt's book on The Anxious Generation, but he looks at that whole issue of the cell phone and the internet from 2010 to 2015 as this mega shift in dealing with teenagers and young children, where they shifted away from building relationships, real relationships with real people, to building bizarre kinds of Relationships with people on the internet, falsified, fanciful, you know, fabricated kinds of things that took over their lives.

00:36:47.000 And you can see it from that time on.

00:36:50.000 What you have as a result of that is all these teenagers who have anxiety and bipolar and ADD and whatever it is, and ultimately, you know, the escalating Figures in suicide and self-harm and all that, because they're disconnected from what makes life life, what makes life fulfilling, and that's real relationships with people that you love and love you.

00:37:16.000 You know, one of the things that you've been hit with that's been fascinating to watch is what I think is an enormous amount of projection on the part of certain people in politics, and that is this accusation that religious leaders are getting too political.

00:37:29.000 And that seems a bizarre sort of projection, because again, The thing that I've seen over the course of my lifetime is stuff that was considered radically uncontroversial when I was growing up is now considered radically controversial if you maintain exactly the same position in 2024 that you maintained in, say, the year 1995.

00:37:45.000 So if you maintained in 1995 as any religious Christian would have, going all the way back to the time of Jesus, and for a thousand years before that, under Judaism, that, for example, marriage is between a man and a woman, That was considered apolitical in 1995.

00:38:01.000 Today, if you're a pastor and you say that, now you're politicizing matters.

00:38:04.000 Or if you say that politics of abortion, that this matters because abortion matters to Christians, now you're considered political.

00:38:11.000 What do you make of the projection that you saying the same thing that you've always said is now political as opposed to people on the left who are just, you know, they're just saying political stuff but that's what they do because they're political and really you should bow down.

00:38:23.000 So, I grew up in a world where Democrats had a sociological view.

00:38:30.000 They had an economic view.

00:38:31.000 Republicans had a sociological and economic view.

00:38:34.000 It was never a moral issue.

00:38:36.000 It was the workforce and the ownership.

00:38:43.000 Those were the two parties.

00:38:44.000 The Republicans were the ones that created the jobs and the Democrats are the ones that worked the jobs and finding out a balance there, you know, was what the political leaders were supposed to achieve.

00:38:56.000 That all went away early in this century when Politicians began to make their platforms moral or immoral, from my standpoint.

00:39:10.000 When you start saying it's pro-LGBTQ, it's pro-homosexual, it's pro-abortion, it's pro-transgender, you know, we got your back, we got your back. 0.72

00:39:25.000 Everything has shifted from the economic You know, definitions of the past into these moral issues.

00:39:34.000 So, as a Christian, I'm still talking on a moral level.

00:39:39.000 It just so happens that politicians have stepped into the moral world and created chaos.

00:39:47.000 So, for me, I have to vote for what is righteous.

00:39:51.000 I mean, I don't always have a clear-cut option, but you take the best of the options that are put before you.

00:39:59.000 So we all want to uphold righteousness in this society because we want to represent God rightly and accurately.

00:40:07.000 And if Christians and the people of the faith in Judaism hold to the law of God, then that should show up in how they vote.

00:40:17.000 It should show up in their willingness to say, I'm going to stand against this trend because it violates the Word of God.

00:40:25.000 That's not Christian nationalism.

00:40:28.000 It just so happens that the politicians have basically co-opted sin and turned it into their platform, which forces people who understand a biblical definition of sin to be the enemy.

00:40:44.000 It's not that we're trying to take over the world.

00:40:46.000 It's not that we're trying to take over the United States.

00:40:49.000 It's we're just trying to uphold righteousness.

00:40:53.000 That attempt to treat everyone who is Christian and voting as a Christian nationalist is total insanity.

00:40:59.000 I mean, the reality is that this country's liberties were rooted in Christian virtue.

00:41:03.000 I mean, that is just a reality.

00:41:05.000 All of the founders, including the founders who consider themselves more deistic,

00:41:08.000 believed in the virtues of the Bible.

00:41:10.000 I mean, even Thomas Jefferson, who is maybe the most deistic of the founders, his great attempt was to strip the Bible of miracles, but to maintain the morality of the Bible, which, of course, I don't think is quite possible, but he attempted to do it because he understood the inherent value of Christian morality.

00:41:25.000 The attempt to say that Christian morality itself, which is the basis of all of American development, that that is somehow, if you want to maintain that, An aspect of Christian nationalism is though you're a theocrat forcing everyone in the United States to convert or die, which is the attempt by the media to recast this term Christian nationalism into something that it really is not.

00:41:46.000 It's such an Orwellian exercise, the attempt to say that if you believe in Jesus or you go to synagogue or you go to church and you believe that the biblical morality upon which our entire civilization is based is good and ought to be effectuated in our culture and ought to be supported by the government on a broad level without In sectarian ways.

00:42:06.000 Forcing people to adhere to particular religious beliefs.

00:42:08.000 That if you believe those things, that you are somehow a 13th century Catholic theocrat or something.

00:42:15.000 Like that's such a bizarre take.

00:42:17.000 And obviously meant to dissuade religious people from even engaging in politics at all.

00:42:22.000 Yeah, and that's the point.

00:42:25.000 They like to keep us out.

00:42:26.000 They want to keep us out of the public discourse.

00:42:29.000 That's for sure.

00:42:32.000 That is the legacy of secularism.

00:42:35.000 I mean, that's where secularism takes you.

00:42:38.000 Religion is an affront. 1.00

00:42:39.000 Religion is an attack on secularism. 1.00

00:42:44.000 And you have this secular society unwilling to bend to the law of God.

00:42:48.000 I mean, you have the president saying, if you're transgender, we've got your back.

00:42:54.000 And when I heard him say that, my reaction was, what are you going to do? 0.96

00:42:58.000 Push him over the cliff from the backside?

00:43:01.000 I mean, what you're doing for somebody who's in that kind of transgression, and then that kind of pattern.

00:43:08.000 You ought to have their front, and you ought to stop them from what they're doing, rather than have their back and shove them down that path any further.

00:43:16.000 But secularism hates the truth, and it will do anything it can to label it and vilify it, and, you know, that's what we have going on.

00:43:26.000 You know, one other thing, Ben, I wanted to mention to you.

00:43:31.000 There's a story in the Old Testament that is pretty compelling.

00:43:35.000 When Israel came out of Egypt after the captivity and they were headed toward the Promised Land, the first group of terrorists that attacked the Jewish, attacked the stragglers, it says you remember, were the Amalekites. 0.99

00:43:52.000 Amalek.

00:43:53.000 Amalek was a grandson of Esau.

00:43:55.000 Esau had an axe to grind, obviously, because Jacob got the covenant right, and Esau sold his birthright for a meal.

00:44:05.000 So there was some hostility there, but you go a couple of generations later, and you've got Amalek.

00:44:11.000 He's the first terrorist, and he leads a group that raids them. 0.77

00:44:16.000 And God says, They have to be destroyed. 0.99

00:44:21.000 They have to be destroyed.

00:44:23.000 And in Deuteronomy 25, verses 17 to 19, as Israel stands on the edge of going into the promised land after wandering in the wilderness, God says to them, I want you to destroy the Amalekites. 1.00

00:44:35.000 I want you to destroy all of them. 0.92

00:44:37.000 All of them. 1.00

00:44:38.000 I want you to destroy their animals. 0.99

00:44:39.000 And he goes through the whole litany of things. 0.93

00:44:42.000 Because they are a deadly, deadly force in this world, and I need you to be my instrument of judgment.

00:44:52.000 Well, I don't know if you remember the story.

00:44:54.000 They battled the Amalekites, 1 Samuel 15, and Saul was the king, and Saul was told to wipe them out, and he didn't do that. 0.98

00:45:05.000 He allowed some of them to survive, and he allowed Agag, the Amalekite king, to live, and he didn't kill him. 1.00

00:45:13.000 He didn't cut the head off.

00:45:16.000 Fast forward to the end of the 15th chapter.

00:45:19.000 Samuel comes up and Samuel says, Saul, you didn't kill Agag.

00:45:24.000 And then Samuel does this amazing thing.

00:45:27.000 He hacks Agag to pieces, which is an amazing act. 1.00

00:45:33.000 And he did it because God told him to do it.

00:45:36.000 That group of people were so dangerous, they were so destructive and so deadly and so threatening to the plans of God for Israel that He wanted them wiped out. 0.92

00:45:50.000 They didn't do that.

00:45:52.000 Fast forward to the book of Esther a few hundred years later, and what have you got in Esther?

00:45:58.000 You've got Haman.

00:46:00.000 who is an Agagite, who is from the line of Agag and the Amalekites. 0.89

00:46:06.000 And he plans genocide for the entire Jewish race. 0.70

00:46:12.000 Right?

00:46:12.000 In the book of Esther.

00:46:14.000 And Mordecai and Esther come to the rescue.

00:46:18.000 It wasn't until the Persians completely wiped out the Amalekites that the God's will was fulfilled in that judgment. 1.00

00:46:28.000 Now, you might not like the fact that God is a judge, but when God determines that I'm going to protect my people Israel, And you're going to attack my people, Israel. 0.70

00:46:39.000 I have a plan for my people, Israel.

00:46:41.000 As the New Testament says, so all Israel will be saved.

00:46:45.000 There's coming a kingdom He will fulfill.

00:46:47.000 Every promise He ever gave to David, every promise He ever gave to Abraham, every promise ever coming through the prophets will be fulfilled when Messiah establishes His kingdom.

00:46:57.000 God is going to preserve that people.

00:46:59.000 And if you are a threat to that people, Historically speaking, God says you need to be removed.

00:47:07.000 And I think about that story so often when I think about This is like the modern version of Amalek.

00:47:16.000 And until they're wiped out, this is just going to go on and on and on and on.

00:47:23.000 And I know, I don't want to be callous about things, but God has, in His sovereignty, made a decision for the preservation of Israel into the future, into the kingdom of Messiah.

00:47:37.000 That's His plan.

00:47:39.000 That's His promise.

00:47:41.000 You can be a part of that by coming to the Messiah and being a part of His kingdom, but if you attempt to destroy the very people that are the heart and soul of God's plan, then you come under the judgment of God.

00:48:00.000 And I think Israel is acting, even though they're a secular nation in the large sense, because salvation is individual, not national.

00:48:11.000 I think their desire to protect and preserve them And to fight in a really a terminal way against those who would destroy them follows the divine pattern of God for the preservation of that people until He fulfills His plan for them.

00:48:31.000 Your point with regard to Hamas is particularly true, and I just want to clarify here. 0.78

00:48:35.000 When you have a force that is dedicated to the extermination of every Jew on the planet, which is what Hamas openly says, if you are a member of that terror group, the moral position for anyone would be to end that terror group and destroy them wholesale.

00:48:48.000 And Israel has done, actually, an extraordinary job in attempting to distinguish civilians, even civilians who are sympathetic to Hamas.

00:48:58.000 The fact that there are so many people in the West who seem to lack moral clarity in what is easily the most morally clear conflict of our time is a source of astonishment to me, but I think really can only be explained by, again, an anti-biblical perspective that substitutes a narrative of victimology in favor of a narrative of right and wrong.

00:49:16.000 No, that's exactly right.

00:49:18.000 But you also know in the Old Testament, God said to the children of Israel, when you go into the land, destroy the Amalekites. 0.99

00:49:27.000 Destroy them. 0.99

00:49:28.000 Because I'm bringing judgment down on their heads for their sins. 1.00

00:49:34.000 I mean, they're like a cancer in the world. 0.99

00:49:37.000 And we all understand everybody's going to die, right? 0.57

00:49:41.000 We're all going to die.

00:49:42.000 The wages of sin is death. 0.61

00:49:43.000 Ezekiel said, the soul that sins, it shall die.

00:49:48.000 And in the conflicts of life in this world, death is a reality.

00:49:52.000 And it can happen.

00:49:54.000 The good news is Death doesn't have to lead to eternal hell.

00:49:59.000 It can lead to eternal heaven.

00:50:01.000 And that's where Christianity comes in and says, in Christ, there is the promise of forgiveness of sin, everlasting life in heaven.

00:50:11.000 And when you die, that's where you're going to go.

00:50:15.000 So, and I think about that with We worry about what collateral damage is going to be done.

00:50:23.000 The message is, look, you don't know when you're going to die, and you need to make sure your life is right with God.

00:50:28.000 You need to make sure your sins are forgiven and you have received the gift of salvation so that when that comes, You can enter into his presence.

00:50:38.000 So, preaching the gospel is, you know, what the church's role in the world is to be.

00:50:46.000 But I think at the same time, we have to warn the world that death is coming to everybody.

00:50:51.000 You may die in a raid.

00:50:54.000 There's collateral damage.

00:50:56.000 You may die in an accident, a disease.

00:50:58.000 It's inevitable.

00:51:00.000 It's inevitable.

00:51:02.000 God, there's going to be wages for sin.

00:51:05.000 We just need to make sure that we're prepared to enter into God's heaven.

00:51:09.000 So, let's talk for a second about Jews and Christians.

00:51:11.000 We referenced it at the top.

00:51:13.000 Last time we spoke, we had some extensive conversations on the differentiation between Jews and Christians.

00:51:19.000 Obviously, I'm not offended at all by the fact that Christians want me saved.

00:51:22.000 I'm quite flattered by it, that people care enough for my soul that they want me saved.

00:51:25.000 after death. And so I've never found, you know, anybody attempting to convert me to be offensive

00:51:32.000 or dangerous in any way. Again, I think that that's quite a good thing. There's been an attempt,

00:51:36.000 I think, to divide Jews from Christians by some nefarious actors out there who

00:51:42.000 can't hold two thoughts in their head at one time.

00:51:45.000 The thoughts being that yes, Christians would love Jews to convert, and the second thought being that also Jews and Christians have an awful lot in common. 0.60

00:51:53.000 You can hold both those thoughts in your head at the same exact time.

00:51:56.000 What do you think that Christians' relations with Jews should be like?

00:51:59.000 How should Christianity approach Jews? 0.96

00:52:01.000 Well, first of all, Ben, I have to say thank you for letting me come back again.

00:52:07.000 I was pretty direct last time we talked.

00:52:10.000 And I know that's what you're referring to.

00:52:11.000 I didn't hold back.

00:52:12.000 You asked me then, what's the difference between the Jews and the Christians?

00:52:16.000 And I said, it's your view of Christ.

00:52:19.000 And that is still the issue.

00:52:23.000 The Apostle Paul said, I could wish myself a curse for the salvation of my people Israel.

00:52:30.000 So, you know, that's what I carry in my heart.

00:52:32.000 Do I want you to be saved through faith in Christ?

00:52:35.000 Yes.

00:52:37.000 Do I want the Jewish people to be saved?

00:52:40.000 Do I want them to come to the truth that Jesus is actually their Messiah? 0.54

00:52:44.000 He has to be because He fulfills Isaiah 53.

00:52:48.000 He fulfills so many other Old Testament promises.

00:52:50.000 Because He was a miracle worker who rose from the dead, He validated all of that.

00:52:55.000 Do I want the Jews to believe? 1.00

00:52:56.000 Yes.

00:52:57.000 Paul, he actually said, I could wish myself a curse for the salvation of my people, Israel.

00:53:05.000 So yes, we want the Jews to come to the knowledge of Christ as their Messiah.

00:53:14.000 That is basically driven by love.

00:53:19.000 When people ask me about what I feel about the Jews, my response is, you know, unfortunately I was born a Gentile, but I'm trying to overcome that.

00:53:32.000 Everybody I love the most in history is Jewish.

00:53:35.000 You can start with Abraham and run the gamut all the way to the New Testament and Jesus and the Apostles.

00:53:42.000 And I think true Christians have a profound love for the Jewish people because they understand that God loves them in a unique way.

00:53:54.000 You know, God said, I didn't choose you because you were greater than any other people.

00:53:58.000 He said, I chose you because I set my love upon you.

00:54:02.000 Richard Wolff years ago said, how odd of God to choose the Jews.

00:54:07.000 Which was, you know, in a sense, I suppose, an easy-to-understand statement.

00:54:13.000 Why that?

00:54:15.000 Well, the answer is, God says, because I chose to love them.

00:54:18.000 I chose Abraham, and I chose his descendants.

00:54:22.000 Because I'm God and I can do what I want, and they're the ones I chose.

00:54:26.000 But the fulfillment of that choice, as far as Christianity is concerned, comes in the salvation that comes through the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.

00:54:37.000 So the prayer of Christians is always that the Jewish people would see Christ as their Messiah.

00:54:45.000 And all I can ask of Jewish people is, Read the four Gospels. 0.92

00:54:51.000 Just keep reading it and see if you don't find the awakening in your own heart that He is, in fact, the Messiah that He claimed to be.

00:55:00.000 I don't think there's any gimmick.

00:55:02.000 I don't think there's any strategy.

00:55:04.000 I don't think we need to get you into an auditorium and play some mood music to convince you I think.

00:55:12.000 Read the New Testament, that's all I can say.

00:55:14.000 That is the revelation of the Messiah.

00:55:20.000 And you read it and open your heart to the Lord and see if He doesn't convince you that Jesus is your Messiah.

00:55:28.000 That's the joy that I would have for Israel, for you.

00:55:32.000 The response the Jews usually give to that poem, how odd of God to choose the Jews, is, it's not that odd, the Jews chose God.

00:55:39.000 Which is also accurate to Mount Sinai and the Jews opting in by saying, we will do and we will hear at Mount Sinai. 0.93

00:55:50.000 And I think that in the end, for America, You know, that's what I'd love to see is a more Christian America in which more people choose God.

00:55:57.000 That's going to require more leadership like yours.

00:55:59.000 It's going to require more powerful Christian leadership.

00:56:01.000 It's going to require people who are willing to engage in community-minded ways.

00:56:06.000 It's going to require actually putting obligations on people, and this is something that I discover with my own children every single day.

00:56:11.000 I have four kids under the age of 10, and if you don't give them anything to do, they fritz out.

00:56:17.000 And I think that we're a society that has given our kids nothing to do.

00:56:20.000 We give them no duties.

00:56:21.000 We give them no obligations.

00:56:22.000 We give them no tasks.

00:56:24.000 What kids want more than anything is a series of responsibilities.

00:56:28.000 There's nothing kids want more than responsibility.

00:56:30.000 And giving them responsibility, giving adults responsibility, is the thing that's missing in a society that's completely now about lack of responsibility.

00:56:40.000 Yeah, just to validate that, Grace Community Church, where I've been pastor for over 50 years here, when COVID came, we had to shut everything down for a few weeks.

00:56:52.000 But then we decided this isn't right.

00:56:54.000 You know, the government is not the head of the church, Christ is.

00:56:57.000 So we opened the church, and I remember the day we opened the church on that Sunday, we had over a thousand children.

00:57:03.000 We had balloons everywhere, right in the middle of COVID.

00:57:06.000 As you remember, we defied the state of California.

00:57:09.000 We got into a lawsuit.

00:57:10.000 We won the lawsuit.

00:57:13.000 The church just began to explode at that point.

00:57:16.000 We've probably had 3,000 new people come to our church since that point.

00:57:23.000 And the draw turns out to be families with children.

00:57:28.000 So that in the last two years, We have created two homeschool programs where we work with parents in two different groups for homeschool.

00:57:41.000 We have started two hybrid school, which means half the week it's homeschool, half the week it's classroom.

00:57:50.000 We actually now have a full-blown K-12 Full Christian school.

00:57:57.000 So we have five different options to train children.

00:58:03.000 Because parents are saying, you got to help us.

00:58:06.000 We have to escape the threat of public education.

00:58:12.000 And if you want to build a church, you know, go after the children.

00:58:17.000 Be a protector of the children.

00:58:19.000 It's amazing how families will gather.

00:58:22.000 Well, Pastor MacArthur, it's, as always, an honor to see you.

00:58:25.000 It's wonderful to spend the time with you.

00:58:26.000 I really appreciate the time and the insight.

00:58:29.000 My pleasure.

00:58:30.000 We miss you in Southern California.

00:58:32.000 Well, I miss you, but not Southern California.

00:58:35.000 Really appreciate it.

00:58:37.000 Thank you.

00:58:47.000 special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

00:58:50.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

00:58:53.000 Editing is by Chris Ridge.

00:58:55.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

00:58:57.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:58:59.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

00:59:02.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:59:04.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

00:59:06.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:59:09.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

00:59:11.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:59:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 09, 2024

The Religious Decline of the West | John MacArthur

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