The King's Hall - The Deified State

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00:00:36.100 When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death.

00:00:40.360 It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

00:00:45.260 Mao Zedong

00:00:45.880 In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong had grandiose plans to bring China out of its rudimentary economy

00:00:54.720 and form her into an industrialized paradise.

00:00:58.700 The West was far ahead of China economically, 0.55

00:01:01.220 and no cost was too high to catch up with the Western world. 0.95

00:01:05.640 His plans were to be accomplished in a mere 15 years.

00:01:09.200 This plan was known as the Great Leap Forward. 0.70

00:01:13.100 The Chinese propaganda machine began its work to bring about its desired revolution.

00:01:18.880 They began with farming. 0.75

00:01:20.440 It started with the confiscation of farmland from landowners.

00:01:24.720 The peasant classes were unleashed with absolute confidence in their historically self-perceived victimhood from wealthy landowners.

00:01:32.900 There was a peasant revolution of sorts that aided the government's work of confiscation so it could be redistributed to its peasants.

00:01:42.000 The methods of the government-backed peasants were brutal and led to the execution of one million landowners.

00:01:50.120 Things started off well enough for the peasants after receiving farmland and the redistribution from the government.

00:01:56.420 In the first two years, they had enough to eat, and the state took only a reasonable amount of grain and taxes for use of the land.

00:02:03.960 During these first few years, the peasants were doing so well that they offered tithes and offerings to Chairman Mao.

00:02:10.420 He became a sort of Lord of the Harvest.

00:02:13.340 But Chairman Mao became quickly uncomfortable that a new class of landowners would be created that would be equally difficult to uproot.

00:02:21.420 These peasant families were made to give the land to the community, opening the door for Chairman Mao's vision of a new human lifestyle.

00:02:31.300 Communities were organized into collectives consisting of up to 2,000 families. 0.90

00:02:36.920 They owned nothing.

00:02:38.680 Houses, animals, land, tools, even pots and pans became the property of the collective.

00:02:46.380 People were not allowed to cook their own meals anymore. 0.86

00:02:49.440 Nurseries and compulsive schools freed women from their maternal duties to work in the fields of progressive China. 0.89

00:02:56.220 The family unit disappeared. 0.86

00:02:59.100 Children were taken from their parents and given to the collective for care and education.

00:03:04.060 All men and women were in separate barracks. 0.56

00:03:07.260 They were forbidden from living a normal married life.

00:03:11.220 The sexual relationships between husband and wife were regulated.

00:03:15.480 If men and women were caught having relations outside of regulated times,

00:03:19.060 they were publicly humiliated, leading to a massive number of suicides among women out of shame.

00:03:26.900 The government controlled everything, even down to the planting distance between rice seedlings.

00:03:32.260 They dictated when, where, and how certain crops were to be grown.

00:03:37.100 Having such tight-fisted control over the farming practices of these collectives

00:03:41.300 meant that the crops were grown in the wrong fields at the wrong time.

00:03:46.220 The resulting harvest dwindled.

00:03:49.220 Less and less food was being produced.

00:03:52.100 The little that was produced was shipped to the Soviet Union

00:03:54.820 to pay interest on loans for factories purchased by the Chinese government.

00:03:59.600 The people had no families, they had no money, they had no food, and they had no possessions.

00:04:06.900 People began to starve.

00:04:09.060 Entire collectives were starving to death in one of the greatest famines in modern history.

00:04:15.400 One report shows the horrors of the length starving people will go through to get anything to eat.

00:04:21.620 A Chinese government official had heard rumors of a community that was attempting to sustain themselves on a very strange food.

00:04:29.600 This official, desiring to confirm these almost unbelievable reports, traveled to a remote province in Chezuan.

00:04:38.480 The sounds of the village greeted him before the people.

00:04:42.160 These sounds were not what one would expect to hear on the outskirts of a village.

00:04:47.500 The sounds of children playing and people chatting.

00:04:50.780 It was not the sound of men working and animals complaining.

00:04:55.200 He was greeted by the sounds of agonizing death moans.

00:04:59.540 One can imagine, with what great hesitation, he slowly walked into the village where he found people waiting in line, naked,

00:05:07.360 their shriveled bodies baking under the heat of the sun.

00:05:11.360 With shock and disgust, the officials saw, at the front of the line, what appeared to be a massive mud pit.

00:05:17.680 This mud was a white porcelain-colored mud the locals called Guan Yin.

00:05:23.120 The next person in line reached into the white mud pit

00:05:26.320 and shakingly grasped a handful of the mud and began to eat it.

00:05:32.040 Mud, you see, when consumed by humans, begins to dehydrate in the bowels.

00:05:37.760 It eventually turns into concrete, leading to a slow, agonizingly painful death.

00:05:44.660 One has to think that the official witnessed one of the closest things to hell on Earth.

00:05:51.040 That village in the Shenzhen province had consumed over 550,000 pounds of mud.

00:05:58.720 The Chinese government has been slowly declassifying its meticulously kept documents.

00:06:05.420 Chairman Mao's glorious plan of the Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of 45 million people.

00:06:14.320 The King's Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.

00:06:20.180 i'm a little bit uh speechless here brian yeah that's horrible how do you even intro an episode

00:06:28.420 after a story like that i don't know when we so we talk about our cold opens these are

00:06:33.100 you know these stories or anecdotes or quotations that we begin these episodes with

00:06:37.940 and usually we've we've all read them and heard the story in in this instance just because of

00:06:43.740 our recording schedule, actually. We kind of knew the topic, but Dan had not shared the outline

00:06:51.340 with us from this cold open. So that's the first time Eric and I heard that story. And I'm pretty

00:06:58.540 speechless. That's horrifying. Yeah, that's literally jaw-dropping. You would be shocked

00:07:02.760 to hear or read what I read on the events around this. It's actually some of the most horrifying

00:07:09.900 things i've ever read yeah it's interesting too dan because like as obviously as you're reading

00:07:14.180 that i'm thinking of things like even the terminology like what was it the great leap

00:07:17.980 forward right you know build back better the whole like you'll own nothing and you'll be happy

00:07:22.720 yeah um but as we unpack statism today yeah we find that a lot of it just adds adds up to total

00:07:29.580 atrocity it does that's where it's going it does i mean if you guys are interested in learning more

00:07:34.800 about this there are actually documentaries that are free on youtube and there's video of these

00:07:39.340 camps really and you'll see like the cutest chinese babies that are all locked up in cages 0.96

00:07:44.720 singing about the glories of socialism evil yeah just pure evil it's interesting too because even 1.00

00:07:49.860 somebody like jordan peterson you know they i asked him you can read 12 rules for life whatever

00:07:55.080 but you ask him like why are you so anti-statism and communism he said just read the history read

00:08:00.600 the history read the history yeah it welcome back to the king's hall and i'm i would say i'm sorry

00:08:07.560 if we ruined your day with that cold open,

00:08:10.600 if you're haunted by that.

00:08:11.960 But that's kind of the point of an episode like this,

00:08:15.500 where we're taking up this entry in the confession,

00:08:19.560 the creed of the idolatrous high places of autonomous man.

00:08:24.580 And if you remember from a few episodes ago,

00:08:26.860 the culmination of this creed,

00:08:29.100 the confession of faith that marks

00:08:31.340 modern, secular, humanist man

00:08:34.660 is the confession that man is God, right? That when you talk about Nietzsche and the death of

00:08:42.320 God, killing God, and this modern aspiration and delusion that we've killed God, the problem is

00:08:49.580 that man doesn't just see the death of God as the death of God. Man sees the death of God, 0.66

00:08:53.600 like we've said, as a job opening, and it immediately applies for the position himself

00:08:59.080 and appoints himself God. And one of the things that we hope to convince you of through this

00:09:04.500 season is not just that we ought to be about the work of building the new Christendom because,

00:09:10.480 oh, you know, it's one great option in our political theology, but because the alternative,

00:09:17.140 the alternatives historically, not theoretically, but historically speaking, the alternatives to

00:09:23.600 Christ-like Christian rule among men. To rule in the name of God, with the law of God, by the people

00:09:31.040 of God, is always a death cult. It's always a death cult. And so that's what we're going to 0.60

00:09:37.260 be talking about in this episode today, the idolatry of state, statism, one of these great

00:09:43.120 green groves in the land of Canaan or on our job site where we'd like to see the new Christendom

00:09:48.960 go up that will need to go. This idol that we need to not handle gently, but that we need to

00:09:55.780 take up the axe in the spirit of Boniface and go bring down a rain of blows upon it. And stories

00:10:02.740 like the one that you heard from Dan in our cold opening are just a taste of the misery of the

00:10:09.440 demon gods when you worship them and these men as you worship them. So today in our episode,

00:10:14.860 we'll be taking on this issue of statism and the idol of state under three main headings.

00:10:21.740 And the first thing we'll aim to do is just simply discuss the defining characteristics

00:10:27.480 and origins of statism. As in, what do we mean when we say statism? And where does it come from?

00:10:34.600 What sinful urge of fallen man gives rise to this idea of the state as God,

00:10:40.620 or the state as the locus of the divine on earth.

00:10:45.920 Second, we'll talk about what happens when you get statism.

00:10:51.080 What happens when you say the state is God and you get what you want?

00:10:54.580 What happens when you do that?

00:10:55.800 What is the fruit?

00:10:56.600 And obviously, we've already hinted at some of the fruit.

00:10:59.200 It is horrific.

00:11:00.840 But here we'll see why statism is the antithesis of Christendom

00:11:05.560 and why it's such a key center of idolatry that must go for our cathedral to go up.

00:11:11.700 And then finally, in the third heading of this show, we'll talk about how the church

00:11:16.460 has been complicit in the rise of modern statism, as well as some of the key ways that we can fight

00:11:24.540 back against this demon god and this idol. So first, guys, what is statism? When we say that,

00:11:32.040 What are we talking about?

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00:12:14.980 Yeah, statism is, in modern iterations,

00:12:18.340 you've heard things like fascism or communism or socialism.

00:12:22.060 And essentially it's a totalitarian style of government,

00:12:25.060 which is, again, a modern iteration.

00:12:28.060 But you see this throughout human history.

00:12:29.880 You have like Artaxerxes or Xerxes who saw himself as God, as the head of the government.

00:12:36.520 It's a totalizing view of the king or the ruling officials as God over its people.

00:12:43.140 And we'll get into the details in the future of what this God demands from the worshipers, from its subjugants, what tithes and offerings and what it requires of sacrifice from the people.

00:12:56.160 But boil down, it's a government that is swelled beyond its God-ordered size.

00:13:05.180 Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

00:13:06.380 Yeah, I think fundamentally it is the God state. 0.60

00:13:09.940 Right.

00:13:10.120 It's an object of worship.

00:13:12.020 This is in the New Testament.

00:13:13.680 When we have language like Caesar is Lord, that's fundamentally what's happening.

00:13:17.180 Right.

00:13:17.720 And what I think it is, we've talked about sphere sovereignty, things like that.

00:13:20.780 You have the individual, you have the family, the church, and then the state.

00:13:25.920 Usually under statism, it's just the state is everything.

00:13:29.160 And I would say you can see that typically in America.

00:13:32.000 I remember Obama giving one of his State of the Unions, and he said, these are the things we're going to address in the new year.

00:13:37.180 And I was just cataloging them and thinking it was education, it was your children's sexuality, it was welfare, health care.

00:13:45.440 And so really what they're saying is the state lays claim to every square inch of existence in reality.

00:13:52.440 So interestingly enough, this is what Rush Duny actually goes back,

00:13:56.100 and he's pointing to Pharaoh and what's happening in Egypt in the Old Testament,

00:14:01.340 early chapters of Genesis included.

00:14:03.600 And he's actually saying, and all the way to Moses, but he's actually saying,

00:14:08.800 this is functionally statism, which is happening.

00:14:12.000 Right. Yeah, I mean, you even see this, again, we're talking about today,

00:14:16.620 since we're talking about building the new Christendom, we are,

00:14:19.060 especially at the end of the show going to get very practical about our current

00:14:22.960 context and the type of statism that you see today but statism is not a new thing i mean

00:14:28.880 you can go all the way back to 40 bc so 40 years or so before christ is born a coin is struck in

00:14:36.960 rome and on one side it has the two-headed god of janus with uh well i mean on one side has janus

00:14:43.800 of God, and then Julius Caesar is on the other side. And so, I mean, basically, I think if memory

00:14:52.080 serves, the inscription under this coin is something like, Divine Caesar, the Son of God.

00:15:00.200 And so, I mean, you see this all the way back in Rome. We could go back to Pharaoh and Pharaonic

00:15:05.440 Egypt, and you'll find that the head of state is collapsed into also their head of their religious 0.86

00:15:14.120 cult. So you see Pharaoh as the descendant of the sun god. And I like how Joe Boot puts it in his 0.88

00:15:21.440 great book, The Mission of God. I think it's called The Mission of God, A Manifesto of Hope

00:15:25.080 in Society, something like that. And he talks about, I don't have the quote in front of me,

00:15:30.180 But he talked about statism as this idea that the state is the manifestation of God on earth, or it is the locus, like it's the center of the expression of divine power on earth.

00:15:44.420 So the state is God.

00:15:46.360 The state, anytime you begin to see the state take onto itself power that rightfully belongs

00:15:53.680 either only to God himself or to some other sphere of authority as defined by God himself,

00:16:01.480 you're seeing statism.

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00:17:07.180 Yeah, the other interesting thing, you know, connecting to the last week, last episode with the sexual revolution, you can see this in the French Revolution, but, you know, there's always been this idea throughout world history.

00:17:17.600 These ideas always go together that the way that statism, political tyranny and things like that, the way that you get there is through sexual revolution.

00:17:26.640 Interesting.

00:17:27.040 Yeah. So the French, they're distributing Marquis de Sade. They're distributing pornography because they have to undermine the family to make the state all powerful. So you've got to undermine sexual mores, stuff like that. You can even look back at Moses. They're making the golden calf, but what are they doing too? It's basically an orgy down in the street that Moses has got to confront. So anytime you find statism, you're going to find sexual immorality as well. 0.80

00:17:52.660 I think you hit it on the head. Sexual immorality destabilizes families. Families can't exist. Men and women can't have unbroken covenants with sexual immorality. Those covenants are gone. And not only that, but sexual sin is actually a sin against the body. And so it's destabilizing in every way.

00:18:15.880 So I think that's really at the core of that. The sexual revolution, it destabilizes families, which is the family unit should be one of the most powerful things in any society, in any Christian society. The family unit should be the core that holds it together.

00:18:34.240 It's the basic covenantal unit. It's the basic unit with which God works families on earth. And I think something Doug Wilson says comes to mind here related to this idea of sexual immorality as a tool of the deified state is that sin is like grapes. Sin grows like grapes. They come in clusters.

00:18:57.600 So when you're in the New Testament, for example, you know, in Colossians, Paul says,

00:19:01.680 put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion,

00:19:06.680 evil desire, and covetousness. He talks about anger, wrath, slander, malice, and obscene talk. 0.99

00:19:12.100 Like when you see sins show up in the New Testament, they often are clustered together

00:19:16.700 in these lists. And one of the reasons isn't just rhetorical, it's because that's how sin

00:19:22.220 is in the world. When you see one sin, it's usually going to be a grape that is connected

00:19:28.040 to a whole cluster of sins. And something similar happens when you see perversions of the spheres

00:19:34.720 of government is that you won't just see, for example, a society where one of the governments

00:19:41.460 we're talking about, the self, the family, the church, the state, these governments God has

00:19:45.820 established in the world. It's not the case that you'll find a society where you have rampant

00:19:51.740 disorder in the sphere of the state and all the other spheres are operating well. No, the sin is

00:19:57.340 going to be clustered throughout. You're going to see individuals who are not ruled by the spirit

00:20:02.940 of God and so master of their own spirits. And so therefore you're going to see households built by

00:20:07.980 men and women who are not self-mastered and mastered by God. And so the households are

00:20:12.480 disordered. Children are ruling instead of parents. There's inversions of the hierarchy.

00:20:17.280 you'll find churches therefore where you won't have godly elders you'll have lady pastors and

00:20:22.620 you'll have disqualified men and no church discipline and inversions you'll have flocks

00:20:29.140 that are led by councils and committees of loud women instead of godly male elders and pastorates

00:20:37.200 and then of course you're going to find states that are where the same inversion of hierarchy

00:20:42.040 he's happening, where the men and women have declared themselves God. And so they are not

00:20:47.580 submitting to the rulership of the actual king of God himself, but they've seized that.

00:20:53.760 So there's another point actually from Joe Boot's book, The Mission of God, that I just found really

00:20:58.780 compelling. I read it a few years ago, and it was one of these points I had never thought of,

00:21:04.300 never connected. But once I saw it, it was like just a light bulb coming on, and it explained

00:21:10.560 everything. And his point was that anytime you have a culture that deviates from the doctrine

00:21:17.400 of Christ that you find confessed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, you will find statism

00:21:24.000 eventually develop, or that the urge behind statism is the same urge that arises when you

00:21:30.860 don't understand this key point that Chalcedon affirmed. Chalcedon affirmed against some heresies

00:21:36.820 and some controversy about the doctrine of Christ, that Christ is truly man and truly God,

00:21:44.040 right? That he's not a truly God who's pretending to be a man. He's not a man who became God or

00:21:52.120 added some kind of divine elements to himself. No, he's truly God and he's truly man. And his

00:21:57.420 point was that that doctrine and that doctrine alone gives you the one bridge between heaven

00:22:04.120 and earth. It gives you the one connection where man can ascend to heaven. And why? Not because

00:22:11.480 man builds a deified state like the Tower of Babel to reach the heavens, but because the heavens come

00:22:16.700 down in the person of Christ, take on true humanity, and then through his death, burial,

00:22:21.700 resurrection, ascension, reign, and our union with him by faith, man can truly be united to

00:22:28.020 the divine, not to become little gods ourselves, but we can be reconciled cosmically to the divine.

00:22:35.160 And so, because, I mean, man in his fallenness doesn't lose the urge or the desire to be at

00:22:39.680 peace with God or to be in union with God. What he does is he perverts it and he makes himself

00:22:45.020 into God, or he comes up with some false God to be unified to, or he tries to build his own,

00:22:50.920 you know, Jacob's ladder, his own tower to ascend to the heavens. And so the doctrine of Christ

00:22:56.500 affirmed at Chalcedon, absolutely undercuts and destroys any notion that humanity is going to

00:23:04.200 bridge heaven and earth through his own efforts. We need the God-man. Yeah, it's interesting. So

00:23:10.100 the opposite of that would obviously be what, Babel? Like the Babelic instinct? Exactly. So I 0.95

00:23:15.020 think, and that's something that we have to recognize is fundamental to the human nature,

00:23:19.260 especially the sinful human nature, is this, we're going to reject God, but it always results in we're

00:23:23.920 going to do something else. And it always is this man-centered, atheistic state-building project.

00:23:30.420 Exactly. This is the sinful urge that gives rise to the idea of the state as God.

00:23:36.100 It's that mankind has a longing to be united to the divine. I mean, this is inescapable.

00:23:43.660 He will either try to make himself a god or he'll invent a god to unite himself to the divine.

00:23:48.000 Yeah, getting to the heavens, you know, I was thinking about this, even Saturn V Rocket Center

00:23:52.720 warner von braun you know builds his rocket right and he says oh yeah now that we built the rocket

00:23:57.740 we've transcended god in the heavens oh so even in that you see that instinct yes occurring and

00:24:04.840 you can just i mean you can follow this trajectory it's so obvious once you see it and again joe

00:24:09.940 boot's book really just turned the lights on in this room of my mind for this concept that what

00:24:16.160 is the deified state except man writ large it's like as soon as you make man into a god you will

00:24:24.060 immediately end up with the state as the ultra god because the state is just the absolute expression

00:24:30.940 of human authority human ingenuity human power human uh you know building and he it's it's it's

00:24:37.560 the it is man writ large yeah it's sort of the final fruit i mean even we were talking about

00:24:41.520 Carl Truman, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he says, you know, first man must be

00:24:46.060 psychologized, then he must be sexualized, and then finally he must be politicized, or

00:24:52.220 the self must be.

00:24:53.160 Yes.

00:24:53.360 So it's kind of this, you're following that progression until you get to statism vis-a-vis

00:24:59.620 sort of what we see a lot of that happening today out in the open.

00:25:02.980 Yep.

00:25:03.360 You know what I find to be particularly interesting is one of the main ways that God reveals

00:25:07.900 who he is his character his morals is through his own law and so this is one of the ways that you

00:25:15.800 see states attempt to bridge that that gap from the from humane to the divine or humanity to the

00:25:24.220 divine is by declaring their own law and it's all-encompassing you know and it's it's world

00:25:30.640 swallowing and it communicates exactly their character and their desires and everything about

00:25:36.280 them. And this is, isn't this what God warned about in the Old Testament with the kings? Yes.

00:25:42.360 He said, hey, you want to, you want to be like the nations around you, which were, they were

00:25:46.020 statist. They had deified states. They had deified political centers where the state was all mixed up

00:25:54.840 with the priestly cult of the Canaanite or Molech religions. And so eventually Israel says, why can't 0.90

00:26:00.920 we be like those nations? We want a king. And God says, you know what the king's going to do?

00:26:04.740 He's going to do what their kings do.

00:26:06.380 He's going to take your children.

00:26:08.060 He's going to start demanding things, to paraphrase.

00:26:10.060 He will demand things that only God can properly demand.

00:26:14.580 It's interesting, too, because post-Enlightenment culture specifically was this rejection of a covenantal relationship with God, really for the whole earth, right, through creation, if not through a specific covenant with Christianity.

00:26:26.760 But it's interesting because you look at everything happening in our culture, particularly in June, and it's like everything that's happening to us is falling along the exact contours of the Deuteronomic curse.

00:26:41.060 Yes.

00:26:41.540 And at the same time, we're claiming, no, no, no, no, we're not under covenant with God.

00:26:46.080 And I think this is central to the statism question.

00:26:49.040 Really, people today want to say the state is not subservient to Christ.

00:26:53.120 And we're saying, yes, it is.

00:26:54.580 Oh, yes, it is.

00:26:55.480 It is.

00:26:55.900 Everything is.

00:26:56.760 In fact, we're going to do a whole episode on this. I mean, we're going to do a whole episode in a few episodes, Lord willing, on city fathers and Christian governance and not just this negative against statism. But yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We're talking about this inescapable reality of covenant blessings, covenant curses, covenant relationship between God and peoples. And so, of course, we want political rulers who are in covenant with God. Of course, we want that.

00:27:25.300 Like we always say – you hear people say, well, the kingdom is not of this world, and so we shouldn't want a Christian government. 0.99

00:27:34.300 That would be theocracy.

00:27:35.920 That would be theocracy.

00:27:37.680 And you're like, well, here's the problem, guys.

00:27:41.060 What's the alternative?

00:27:42.980 It's not no theocracy.

00:27:45.240 It's just theocracy with a different theo, with a different god, different theos.

00:27:49.180 You always end up with a different God at the top, but it is inescapable that because government is fundamentally an ethical institution, it's about, as Romans 13 says, the government, the civil magistrate is a minister of God to praise the good and punish the wrongdoer.

00:28:08.780 You're always going to have the government trying to do that, and the only question is, which God is going to be defining the good, which God is going to be defining the wrongdoer, defining the one the ministers to praise, who will define the guardrails around the exercise of his sword that he's given, and who that sword is going to be pointed at.

00:28:29.180 Well, that's the whole point, right? The episode we did with Yuri, Pastor Yuri Brito, was homo adorans. We are worshiping creatures. So the real question is, we're going to worship something, and whatever we worship is going to directly relate to what kind of government we institute. 1.00

00:28:45.840 Yes. And it will demand of us worship. Yes. If you make the state of God, it will demand like,

00:28:51.420 like again, back to that God warning Israel, he said, well, they're going to, they're going to 0.96

00:28:55.360 demand a tithe from you. They're going to tax you at as astronomical a rate as 10%. Like they're

00:28:59.920 going to steal your sons for war. Yeah. Can you believe that? Like not only did that, that covenant

00:29:05.820 curse come true that they would demand a tithe of our income, like a 10% tax bracket would be just

00:29:10.680 like chef's kiss. It is interesting where God says that the Kings are going to demand this.

00:29:15.180 They demand your sons. What does God demand of the firstborn? The firstborn to breach the womb is mine. Take your sons, your tithes, your offerings, everything. And I did want to say, just defining our terms, one of the things that the state does necessarily is it legislates morality. You said it defines what is good. That's another way of saying it legislates morality.

00:29:38.940 and so it's it's but dan i thought we weren't supposed to legislate morality i don't know how

00:29:43.780 to do that i don't know how that's even possible how do you legislate anything else well i mean

00:29:48.500 a good question it really is a good question because a lot of people make that claim i think

00:29:53.120 post-enlightenment claim that there's somehow a category that's amoral yeah and that's impossible

00:29:59.020 it's utter nonsense utter nonsense all legislation all juridical matters all like virtually every

00:30:06.340 matter of state is a matter of applied ethics it's saying what are the bad who gets to decide

00:30:11.800 what the boundaries of the authority of the state is what is good what is bad what is you know not

00:30:16.640 only what is good and bad but what is sin and what is crime because there's a difference between

00:30:21.320 those like when your kid lies to you about whether they snuck the cheetos from the cabinet which are

00:30:26.880 full of seed oils so you probably shouldn't have them but you know what i'm saying and so when they

00:30:34.620 lie to you, do you call the police? Well, no, because you understand there's a difference

00:30:38.360 between a sin and a crime. Well, who gets to decide where that line is? It's going to be the

00:30:44.540 God of that system. It's going to be the ultimate authority of that system. And so wrapping up this

00:30:49.920 first section here, the issue that you always have is that you will always either have a government

00:30:56.700 that is in submission to the true and living God, so understanding what the good, the true,

00:31:01.760 in the beautiful list, understanding its own authority and the edges of its own authority.

00:31:07.400 And so, you know, serving the people as a minister of God, restraining evil, punishing

00:31:12.100 the wrongdoer, executing murderers, doing all of that work that protects society and

00:31:16.600 restrains evil, or you will have a government, and this is the only other option, that in

00:31:21.420 some way ends up functioning as a God and enforcing its own morality, its own definition

00:31:28.160 of sin and crime, its own definition, it will start praising what it says is the good and putting

00:31:34.180 up rainbow flags everywhere and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, hypothetically, 0.84

00:31:40.640 to do all sorts of gay stuff, or it will worship God. So that's what statism is. It's basically 0.79

00:31:47.680 the worship of the state. It's a deified state, and it's a state that has swollen, like a river

00:31:53.860 that's swollen its banks and flooded into other areas where God did not give it authority.

00:32:00.540 And yet it has seized authority and said, I'm in charge of that too. So what happens when that

00:32:09.680 river swells its banks? That's the second topic here. And maybe first, why is this, like how big

00:32:15.640 of an issue? I think we can all agree that statism is an issue. How big of an issue is it?

00:32:20.700 Yeah, I think the grand revealing, the grand apocalypse has been the last couple of years.

00:32:25.340 Yeah.

00:32:25.780 I remember reading Doug Wilson for a long time and some other people, too, who were warning about statism.

00:32:31.560 In fact, I remember reading a quote from Francis Schaeffer.

00:32:34.440 It's R.C. Sproul saying, you know, near the end of his life, they shared a cab.

00:32:38.360 And he asked Francis Schaeffer, you know, you've seen a lot.

00:32:42.820 You've been monitoring culture for a long time.

00:32:44.700 And he said, what is the greatest problem facing America today?

00:32:49.040 And he said, without hesitation, Francis Schaefer said, statism.

00:32:53.020 Wow.

00:32:53.680 So that was, I think, in the 80s.

00:32:56.440 Well, fast forward to now, and everything's been warp speed.

00:32:59.580 So the things that these guys were predicting,

00:33:01.380 even I was kind of like, I don't know, Doug, maybe slow your roll.

00:33:04.300 Maybe it's not so bad.

00:33:05.980 But I think in the last couple years especially,

00:33:07.720 we've seen that actually it is that bad.

00:33:10.160 People's cards have been put on the table.

00:33:12.500 I think that, as I mentioned earlier,

00:33:14.240 we have things now where the great reset, it's all out in the open.

00:33:18.420 you know they're saying like you'll own nothing and you'll like it but i think the other thing

00:33:23.240 that we're tending to see is as the state grows larger and larger those other institutions family

00:33:29.280 the individual in the church grow weaker and weaker and so we've seen that as well in the

00:33:34.580 last couple years i think one of the most shocking things was even like reformed churches were not

00:33:38.900 pushing back against any tyranny whatsoever yeah so they were just letting it happen i knew of one

00:33:44.400 church that it was like three months ago where they were like okay we just started worshiping

00:33:47.820 again. Yeah, that would be some serious red flags, right? Oh my word. But I think all of that has,

00:33:55.740 you know, you can sort of see that, yeah, statism is ruling the day to such an effect that people

00:33:59.700 don't even recognize that it exists. Wow. Yeah, that is absolutely true. Absolutely true. And I

00:34:05.400 think Schaefer was prescient in that, that the, you know, one of the, one of, if not the biggest

00:34:10.180 issue of the day, and again, they come in clusters. So in some ways it's hard to say where the edge

00:34:16.660 of one issue stops and another issue begins. Like it's hard to say where the sex sins stop and the

00:34:23.360 statism sins begin. It's hard to say where the family issues stop because all these governments

00:34:28.900 are just, they're intermingled. They overlap. You can't, again, you cannot have a healthy state

00:34:34.000 without, you know, without healthy families and you can't have healthy families without healthy

00:34:38.940 church. You can't have healthy church without healthy families. So there's a tremendous amount

00:34:42.700 of overlap but but i do think that this issue of statism has to be one of the top three top five

00:34:50.040 issues facing christians today i also sorry dan i also think that we have to wise up because a lot

00:34:55.700 of people will say well nobody came out and said the word statism and and so like it's not no one

00:35:01.140 said pinch uh some send some caesar to joe biden it's not out in the open but a good book i would

00:35:05.220 recommend on this is the google archipelago the google archipelago and the fundamental thesis of

00:35:11.540 this book it was written released at the beginning of 2020 right before covid oh wow so one of the

00:35:16.740 things they said is mirroring communist capitalist china they're kind of a mix actually um what the

00:35:23.620 u.s has done is they've actually started to use corporations so imagine the guy's writing this

00:35:27.920 it releases like january 2020 and he's saying listen what's gonna happen is that the government

00:35:33.720 is now using corporations to enforce all of its mandates so it doesn't look like statism google

00:35:39.620 is the largest monopoly probably in the history of the world oh yeah they make john d rockefeller

00:35:45.080 look like child's play right they control so much they control the information that we get

00:35:49.600 and so anyway companies like that are the ones who are actually firing people for not getting the jab

00:35:54.380 right they're the ones who are enforcing we're finding this out all over the country they're

00:35:58.860 enforcing diversity equity and inclusion hour in a company meeting yep can you imagine if those

00:36:04.820 same companies had like a prayer time oh right it just shows you how far we've come so i think

00:36:11.100 that's that's one reason that people say oh there's not statism you know in those you know

00:36:15.120 well go start your own country you know go start your own your company and yeah you know when you

00:36:20.180 have good when you have big pharma big tech big government uh big big medicine yeah all these

00:36:26.700 things with big government again just like it's hard to tell where one problem starts and one

00:36:31.400 begins or one ends, it's really hard to tell where private starts and government ends.

00:36:38.880 Yeah. As it continues to swallow more and more and more. This is actually a harder question to

00:36:44.380 answer than I had first thought. How big of a problem is statism? Because Francis Schaeffer,

00:36:50.960 I think he's right. It is the problem. But is it really a problem or is it a symptom

00:36:56.120 of a problem yeah that's really the question isn't it because especially when you have a

00:37:02.040 representative democracy or representative republic like we have what you have in the

00:37:07.140 government is a representation of what the people want they've actually they they have representation

00:37:14.880 in the government for their desires they vote for what they want and you can listen to any

00:37:20.320 politicized speech from any politician and the different things that they're they're stumping

00:37:25.860 is how they're actually going to spend the money

00:37:28.480 that they're stealing from you.

00:37:30.180 Nobody's saying actually like,

00:37:31.760 I'm going to give it back to you

00:37:32.840 because the government is swallowing every aspect

00:37:36.200 of what it means to be human

00:37:38.040 and in civilization with one another.

00:37:41.220 Even like you said, privatized companies,

00:37:43.300 it becomes really difficult,

00:37:44.740 especially with 2020.

00:37:46.080 Now, all of a sudden you're like,

00:37:48.000 hey, I get grant money or free money

00:37:50.120 for the payroll relief program.

00:37:52.340 And so even churches can get government money

00:37:55.920 Is it government money, though?

00:37:57.060 Who's the government?

00:37:57.860 It's we the people.

00:37:58.920 Yeah.

00:37:59.160 Right.

00:37:59.960 And so it's really difficult to say, like, is stateism the problem?

00:38:03.660 And the answer is yes.

00:38:05.180 And it's because of the people who decided that's what they want.

00:38:10.460 They voted for the monsters that they now have that are now ruling over them.

00:38:15.220 And that's what false gods always do. 0.61

00:38:17.340 Exactly.

00:38:17.660 I think it's like a yes, that's true.

00:38:21.200 And I would also offer sort of like on the other side, Christopher Lash, his book, The Revolt of the Elites.

00:38:28.140 And you can look at any society.

00:38:29.800 Fundamentally, the elites tend to rule society.

00:38:32.700 That's not true post—I mean, that is still true post-Soviet Russia.

00:38:38.780 We didn't do away with that structure. 0.77

00:38:40.900 Right.

00:38:41.340 So I think one of the things you see in the U.S. is I would argue that certain things are being stolen, like when you go to booths and you cast your votes.

00:38:50.420 I think there's actually real evidence

00:38:52.800 trying to get around the sensors

00:38:54.740 so well here's the thing

00:38:57.020 as you start to look at these things

00:38:58.440 my point in all this is saying

00:39:00.000 there is a ruling class that is forcing things

00:39:02.940 down people's throats

00:39:04.520 like a year and a half ago

00:39:07.060 at the Chiefs game opening day

00:39:09.040 for the Kansas City Chiefs

00:39:10.980 they play the black national anthem 0.99

00:39:12.980 it's like a BLM thing

00:39:14.660 there's a black national anthem

00:39:16.380 is the normal national anthem

00:39:18.840 the white national anthem?

00:39:19.960 I guess.

00:39:20.640 I didn't even know that.

00:39:21.620 I thought the white national anthem

00:39:23.020 was Backstreet Boys' song.

00:39:25.720 But anyway, keep going.

00:39:26.920 Also.

00:39:27.900 All right.

00:39:29.060 Should I call you mister?

00:39:30.500 So they play this on Monday Night Football.

00:39:33.240 And it was an interesting spectacle to see

00:39:35.820 because you're in the heartland of America.

00:39:38.120 Right.

00:39:38.800 In Kansas City.

00:39:40.260 Right? 0.58

00:39:40.460 This is middle America. 0.83

00:39:41.560 Red state America at its core. 0.87

00:39:43.100 Yeah. 0.92

00:39:43.680 And they play this.

00:39:44.540 And what happens on Monday Night Football?

00:39:46.560 They boo.

00:39:47.280 all you hear is booze and michelle tofoya says well that was not received well so what struck

00:39:54.840 me about that event and this is what i'm getting at is there is stuff being rammed down people's

00:39:59.580 throats that they may not actually be voting for but to quote joseph stalin silly man it's not the

00:40:06.560 people who cast the votes that matter it's the people who count the votes count them so i think

00:40:10.900 there's more afoot that's my point hey i agree my definition was simplified because there are other

00:40:17.620 powers at play but here's the thing the people aren't universally uh insulated or protected or

00:40:24.920 defended against these ideas because imagine going to to um the middle ages europe and trying to push

00:40:32.800 some of the things i mean like people are just steeped in christianity and in biblical thought

00:40:38.520 and teaching there's no way that any of these ideas get any foothold at all in fact the people

00:40:45.900 would laugh at them or prosecute them and you know one of those one of those i actually like that but

00:40:51.180 i actually i think you're right and i think that what's happening to america is like doug wilson

00:40:55.920 says this right the punishment for sin is more sin right so i think that we got those elites

00:41:01.160 because we are being judged because we gave away yeah we said govern me harder daddy yeah exactly

00:41:06.720 And so God says, oh, you want Saul?

00:41:09.220 Yeah.

00:41:09.620 Okay, here's Saul.

00:41:10.620 You got Saul?

00:41:11.200 Yeah.

00:41:11.540 I mean, I know we're going to get into more of this later, so I don't want to get too far in front of us.

00:41:16.300 But the propaganda machine is actually really effective in communicating and liturgizing the people as to the proper worship.

00:41:23.740 So even in the cold open in Mao's China, you had the propaganda machine turn on, and it fired up the peasants against the landowners because they were rooted.

00:41:33.940 They actually had money.

00:41:34.860 They had generational wealth that they had built up.

00:41:37.740 They were providers for their communities and fed the nation.

00:41:42.160 And that was an issue of rebellion for Mao and his plan, the Great Leap Forward.

00:41:48.980 And so he essentially told the people that had a sin.

00:41:53.180 I mean, I don't know how they were actually treated, but they had a sin of envy.

00:41:57.580 And all he had to do is say, you're the victim and these are your oppressors.

00:42:03.260 These are your oppressors.

00:42:04.640 and so revolt and take what should be yours.

00:42:07.340 Yeah, he just inflames that sin.

00:42:09.060 That's exactly right.

00:42:10.440 That's exactly right.

00:42:11.700 And so they did.

00:42:12.760 Yeah.

00:42:13.040 And there was a peasant uprising.

00:42:14.660 Yep.

00:42:15.040 So I don't know if you could connect that to today's world,

00:42:17.800 but anyway, moving on.

00:42:19.400 The scriptures compare the deified state,

00:42:24.280 this statist world, to a beast.

00:42:27.700 I mean, you could just read the book of Revelation.

00:42:29.460 You see the scriptures compare the deified state to a beast.

00:42:33.060 And one of the reasons I think that this is, obviously it's inerrant, so it's an apt metaphor, but one of the reasons I think it is such an apt metaphor, the beast, is that like a beast, the state just, it gobbles up every, like the river that's swollen its banks, it's also a beast that gobbles up every realm, all authority, and in this claim to be a god.

00:42:55.760 And so, you know, I'll give you an example, and then I want your guys' take on this as well, because there are many areas where the state gobbles up things that do not belong properly to it.

00:43:06.260 One example, again, from China that you told me earlier, if you're okay with me retelling this story that you gave to me as you were researching, is that it gobbles up the family.

00:43:14.880 In the cold open, you heard about children being separated from their families, everything from sex to education being totally regulated by the state. 0.83

00:43:25.620 Well, there's an example that an older man goes and he's talking to his three-year-old niece or his three-year-old daughter, and she asks him, uncle, what is it, grandfather, uncle?

00:43:39.560 She called him baba, which I think is father or something like that.

00:43:42.720 What is the son?

00:43:44.880 And he says, well, the sun is a great ball of fire in the sky.

00:43:49.540 And she says, you know, and keep going, Dan.

00:43:52.760 Fill in the threads here.

00:43:53.960 It's a great story.

00:43:54.920 She says that the sun is Chairman Mao.

00:43:59.380 And he says, oh, it's just a metaphor.

00:44:02.280 And he thinks, how am I supposed to communicate a metaphor to a three-year-old?

00:44:07.440 And so he says, yeah, you're right.

00:44:08.860 It is Chairman Mao.

00:44:10.620 And she says, no, but you said.

00:44:13.820 you're a revolutionary you're a revolutionary that's what it was you're revolutionary

00:44:17.540 and he says yeah you're right you know never mind it is chairman mao and she says no no baba

00:44:24.160 it was a great ball of fire you said that the and and the point is the state so brilliantly

00:44:31.860 in this demonic cleverness uh in this demonic play gobbled up the family gobbled up education

00:44:42.720 Well, and if you know the fifth commandment, especially the Westminster on the fifth commandment, you know, it's actually rooted in obedience to parents. All government is rooted in obedience to parents. Right. Right. So if you get that wrong and then you get to statism, you can understand why the state is then saying, well, in order to get us to be the only authority and look across history.

00:45:06.740 Every time you have statism to the max, you always have like reporting on parent structures.

00:45:12.080 You find this in 1984, which is obviously fictional, but you see it in communism.

00:45:17.100 And I think you even see this today.

00:45:19.160 Some of the things that we've addressed across America, you know, it was critical race theory, but now they've switched language.

00:45:25.580 Now it's social emotional learning.

00:45:27.980 And so what they're asking is kids.

00:45:30.620 This is in American schools.

00:45:32.480 They're asking kids questions about their parents.

00:45:34.640 Well, have they ever said things that, you know, went against what you're being taught at school?

00:45:39.720 And they're basically asking parents to report or children to report on their parents.

00:45:45.060 Yes.

00:45:45.820 So I know I hate to talk about China again, but I mean, this is such a fascinating case study for me.

00:45:51.440 And this is kind of off topic because we're talking about education and the family and everything like that.

00:45:56.880 But I think this story illustrates just the delusions that the false god of the state thinks it has control over everything.

00:46:06.400 So there was one point early on in this great leap forward plan that Chairman Mao said that there were pests, four pests that needed to be eradicated.

00:46:16.880 They had millions of Chinese people trying to eradicate sparrows, frogs, rats, and I can't remember what the last one was.

00:46:28.440 Why have people always got to be picking on the frogs?

00:46:31.340 Poor frogs. 1.00

00:46:32.400 They're now gay. 1.00

00:46:33.560 Frogs are all gay now. 1.00

00:46:34.620 Yep. 1.00

00:46:34.940 They put enough estrogen in the water, they're turning everything gay. 0.99

00:46:37.380 So anyway, the sparrows, though, were really the thing that they focused on because they thought they were eating grain. 0.93

00:46:43.740 And so what they did is they deployed millions of Chinese people. 0.80

00:46:46.380 they would bang on pots and pans and not let the sparrows roost in any of the trees and they would 0.77

00:46:50.800 eventually fall out of the sky out of exhaustion i'm telling you you can go online and you can see

00:46:55.420 videos of this i'm not even making it up they would have strings with sparrows tied on them

00:47:00.700 like tons of dead sparrows tied on them they would eat them there are no sparrows left right

00:47:05.660 and what ended up happening is that there was a plague of locusts i'm not even joking yep the

00:47:11.400 insects were out of control and actually decimated their because there were no sparrows that's right

00:47:15.660 But that's the power that the state thinks that they can wield, is that they can even control nature.

00:47:21.640 Well, I mean, in our country, birds aren't even real anymore.

00:47:24.920 Well, no, they're not.

00:47:25.980 They never have been.

00:47:27.080 Well, I thought it was in the 60s they were all replaced with government drones.

00:47:30.760 Well, and actually, I was going to say, in the U.S., we actually had a very similar thing with the pigeons.

00:47:36.280 They annihilated all the pigeons because they thought that they were bad.

00:47:39.420 And then, you know, same issues.

00:47:40.840 Yeah.

00:47:41.600 You had problems with bugs and sort of like, okay, well, now the bugs are a problem.

00:47:45.300 Let's just use DDT.

00:47:47.260 Oh, right.

00:47:47.860 But I think it's this fundamental assumption, enlightenment assumption, that science will save us.

00:47:52.280 Yeah.

00:47:52.860 But just like in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, every time you trust in science to save you, you get a monster you didn't anticipate.

00:48:00.260 Ooh.

00:48:01.960 And this, I mean, even, what a good illustration of the beast that it can't gobble something up without consuming it and killing it.

00:48:11.620 It always turns to horror.

00:48:13.300 Yes.

00:48:13.580 I mean, that was the cold open is that you turn away from God, you build the God state.

00:48:19.240 It's always a horror show.

00:48:20.860 Yes.

00:48:21.580 Another way that you can think about this, you know, a river swelling its banks, beasts

00:48:25.520 gobbling up every aspect of authority to itself, saying, I'm now the father.

00:48:31.040 I'm now the mother.

00:48:32.680 I'm now the king.

00:48:34.280 I'm everything.

00:48:35.800 The state saying, I'm in charge of how you spend your money.

00:48:38.360 I'm in charge of what you eat.

00:48:39.540 I'm in charge of who can give a haircut, literally, in America at this point.

00:48:43.760 I'm in charge of everything.

00:48:45.320 Another way that you can think about statism and the fruit of statism is that statism always,

00:48:50.940 it's both built on and it establishes its own systematic theology where it tries to explain everything.

00:48:58.180 Hamartiology is the doctrine of sin.

00:48:59.900 Soteriology is the doctrine of salvation.

00:49:02.200 It has its own, like Marxism has its own hamartiology, doctrine of sin.

00:49:06.380 Sin is basically oppressors, power, disparities, economic disparities, and so salvation and soteriology is the state coming in, leveling out all economic disparities, destroying this, what is it called, the bourgeoisie elite, taking away the capital from them, the means of production, and they're going to usher in their eschatology, which is paradise through this godlike state.

00:49:35.880 that will save everybody from their sin. And so I think you see another aspect of statism is this

00:49:44.180 establishing, another delusion of deity is it establishes its own systematic theology.

00:49:50.000 Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. I remember years ago talking to some of the people

00:49:54.740 at Samaritan Ministries, and they were saying, look, part of the reason that we have such rampant

00:49:59.980 statist aggressive control of things like the welfare state yeah health care the reason they're

00:50:06.220 gobbling that up is because the church gave away a doctrine of charity and so you know and of course

00:50:12.080 the state's all too eager to grab onto that and and build from there look at education it's the

00:50:17.320 same thing yeah that the government is going to be the one in charge of educating your children

00:50:21.800 you can look at certain states like alabama they spend more than any other state on education they

00:50:26.420 ranked 52nd out of 50 states. How did they even do that? How do you even pull that one off?

00:50:30.840 Well, so question, let's tease that out a little bit because I think you're right.

00:50:35.380 How does the state produce economic slavery? How does the state corrupt true education?

00:50:42.380 How does statism do that? Yeah, I think it begins. It's really helpful,

00:50:47.500 actually, if you think about how a church is supposed to operate, how the church is supposed

00:50:51.140 to operate. What do you do? You catechize your kids, right? Yes. You're supposed to catechize

00:50:54.460 kids. So what is the chief end of man? And the state is asking that same question. They're asking

00:51:00.300 that same question. They come up with very different answers though. And like, like Brian

00:51:04.220 said, it's, you know, oppressor classes, inequality, whatever they're teaching right now at the third

00:51:09.700 grade class at the local public school down the street here in Ogden, Utah. And so you need to

00:51:15.320 train your worshipers. You need to train them. You need to liturgize them and catechize them

00:51:20.860 in the ways of the state as to offer proper worship, even to the point there's a gentleman

00:51:27.940 here who started a construction company. He's getting his general contractor's license,

00:51:35.520 right? And so he's required to take classes from the state. And you would think it would be like,

00:51:40.620 oh, here's a helpful class. Here's building codes. Here's accounting principles. Here's

00:51:45.380 some of the things to help you succeed. No, there's literally classes on how to pay taxes.

00:51:51.380 Wow.

00:51:52.000 That's what it is.

00:51:52.720 It's classes on how to pay taxes.

00:51:55.360 Unbelievable.

00:51:55.620 And so anyway, that's just for adults.

00:51:58.540 But with our children, there's a reason that you're seeing the radical sexualization from our kids.

00:52:04.800 There's a reason that you talk to almost any high schooler right now and you ask them about furries.

00:52:09.940 I don't know if we've talked about furries.

00:52:11.120 I think we have.

00:52:12.420 Ask them about furries.

00:52:13.760 Oh, it's a real thing.

00:52:14.640 There was a school in Georgia that was putting litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids.

00:52:21.500 Yes.

00:52:22.760 Anthropomorphic, dressed students.

00:52:24.180 I want to get off this earth.

00:52:25.640 I actually saw a furry the other day.

00:52:27.280 Get me to Mars, Elon.

00:52:28.400 I need to leave.

00:52:29.360 Get me to Mars. 1.00

00:52:29.420 We need to start a new Christian colony on Mars. 0.99

00:52:32.280 So what they're communicating is just what the church would communicate. 0.58

00:52:35.040 Who is God?

00:52:35.820 Yeah.

00:52:36.280 What is man?

00:52:37.260 How do you rightly worship God?

00:52:38.400 What is righteousness?

00:52:39.200 What is evil?

00:52:40.540 Yeah.

00:52:41.120 And to Brian's sermon on Sunday, the fundamental takeaway, I don't know if this is the point of your sermon, but it was what I took away.

00:52:48.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:49.880 When Christ is teaching, he's the son of the builder.

00:52:52.940 The teaching is building a people.

00:52:55.260 Yeah.

00:52:55.740 And that's what you're driving at.

00:52:57.380 Whatever you teach is what you're building culturally.

00:52:59.840 Yes.

00:53:00.440 So this is why teaching is so foundational.

00:53:02.140 The statists and the atheists and the secular humanists, they know that too.

00:53:07.120 Yeah. And so that's why they're like, OK, we got to get in there ahead of the parents and we got to teach these kids. We got to have things like Snapchat where we're infiltrating kids, teenage bedrooms away from their parents. It's a way to sneak in there and get information and teaching and really dan catechism about what is the good life.

00:53:27.220 Yeah. I know in Mao's China, in the cold open, I talked about how the state would take the babies into nurseries and then they would have their education for the kids. You didn't need to worry about that. So moms would be free to work. And so it was not that long ago that we had my eldest in speech therapy and they asked, he was two and a half, I think.

00:53:49.280 And they asked if he was going to go into a three-year-old preschool.

00:53:53.180 And I was like, what?

00:53:55.260 Three-year-old preschool?

00:53:56.900 So they're taking the kids younger and younger.

00:53:59.520 So you can go right from daycare into three-year-old state-sponsored preschool.

00:54:04.280 This is why a lot of the strategy of successful statism in the modern West today

00:54:11.800 has, I think, learned from some of the massive total failures of Russian and Chinese communism

00:54:21.420 and those kinds of things, and has adopted more of a Gramsian approach,

00:54:25.580 which is a slow, long march through the institutions.

00:54:28.700 Instead of saying, you know, like, I don't think Biden tomorrow is going to deploy the military

00:54:32.980 to try and take the children and put them in cages.

00:54:35.280 And instead, what they've done, they don't need to because they've done it slowly

00:54:39.480 by winning the institutions and turning the heat up slowly

00:54:42.660 so parents now actually think, like the old saying,

00:54:46.160 that if the government started teaching people how to tie their shoes

00:54:48.880 within 10 years, people would actually believe

00:54:51.160 that nobody could ever learn how to tie their shoes

00:54:53.220 unless the government taught them.

00:54:54.720 They just start, they give you bait on a hook.

00:54:58.460 They say, oh, do you want free preschool?

00:55:00.880 Oh, do you want free college?

00:55:03.280 Oh, do you want, and what they do is they enslave you

00:55:06.760 through your appetites. And then you don't realize that when you're giving your children to them,

00:55:11.140 thinking, oh, mommy's going to get more time during the day now. She can go get a job so we

00:55:15.120 can get a boat. You know what they're actually doing? They're saying, oh, we've just tricked 0.99

00:55:19.140 you into letting us disciple your children. And making the wife a slave to the corporate state.

00:55:25.380 All at once. And you think you're getting something. Well, and what's crazy about it,

00:55:29.420 you look at that whole matrix and most people today, like think about homeschooling. When we

00:55:34.740 were homeschooling before St. Brennan's, people would ask us, they'd say, wait, are you allowed

00:55:40.180 to do that? Am I allowed? Of course, I remember the Vadi Bakram. He was like, you know who asked

00:55:46.480 the question, am I allowed to educate my own children? He's like, sheep. That's right. That's

00:55:51.040 who says that. Yeah, that's why they have to take the guns before they can take the kids. 0.72

00:55:54.380 Yeah, that's right. I mean, don't let them take your guns, people. Don't let them take your guns.

00:55:59.500 Don't let them take your guns. Yeah, it's interesting too. And this is one of the ways

00:56:02.880 that statism so i worked for the nra for a number of years to a uh most of my career well we just

00:56:07.940 got canceled we just got canceled sorry guys if that was the worst we said then that was the last

00:56:12.880 you'll ever hear of eric con yeah that's right but i think one of the things that i've learned

00:56:16.880 from it look you can go back to david my condolences on your suicide eric i'm just sorry

00:56:24.700 keep going keep going but i mean you can go back to the days of david and saul and like

00:56:29.100 with the philistines what did the philistines do they banned the blacksmiths because if you didn't

00:56:33.560 have a blacksmith you couldn't beat your plow into a sword can't make a sword you can't have

00:56:38.140 weaponry yep so yeah i would say absolutely that becomes a vital part of this they know that

00:56:43.200 just this morning i read an article on fox news and it was like just the last month there have

00:56:49.060 been 248 mass shootings in america most of them in chicago no literally like yesterday this morning

00:56:56.760 there was a quote-unquote mass shooting and it was a gangbanger in Chicago and they got into a

00:57:02.200 gang brawl and he shot three people. Yeah. That's, you know, I mean, propaganda to the max. That's

00:57:06.820 actually a reason I need guns, not a reason to take them. Yeah. When you tell me that there are

00:57:11.320 criminals shooting people, that doesn't tell me disarm. No, no. Yeah. And you'll have to stay

00:57:17.880 tuned for our next episode on cuckold conservatives. Yeah. We're going to talk about

00:57:21.520 one of the wrong answers to this problem of statism is this kind of libertarian, cuckold,

00:57:29.400 conservative fever dream. That won't do it, you guys. Just a heads up. You need something much

00:57:34.140 more robust. You need something that much more rhymey with, like, Flistian rationalism.

00:57:41.180 Yes.

00:57:42.660 Anyway.

00:57:43.480 Flistian rationalism.

00:57:45.100 That's not a thing. What rhymes with Christian? 0.98

00:57:47.100 It does. 1.00

00:57:47.440 Mischief rationalism.

00:57:49.100 Yeah.

00:57:49.300 So one of the – I've heard people define the state in this way that's actually horrifying, and people don't even realize how much they're ceding to the state when they define it as an organization with a monopoly on force.

00:58:02.320 Yeah, I think Elon Musk has said that.

00:58:04.160 Oh, that's horrible.

00:58:05.380 You cannot let the state have a monopoly on force.

00:58:08.440 No.

00:58:08.820 Absolutely not.

00:58:09.660 So we're already getting into this, and I don't want us to run out of time here on this

00:58:15.520 last section, because this is really the meat and potatoes here, where we're talking about

00:58:20.540 how, we're talking about Christians here.

00:58:22.260 We're calling Christians to repentance and faith.

00:58:24.020 That's what we're trying to do in this podcast.

00:58:25.640 This is Dan's section.

00:58:27.000 Yeah.

00:58:27.340 By the way, you say meat and potatoes, Wisconsin, Dan, this is the cheddar and worst.

00:58:32.860 I have two T-bone steaks waiting for me at Home to Grill.

00:58:36.120 Praise the Lord.

00:58:36.580 They are cut to, I think, two inches thick.

00:58:39.140 oh wow i'm gonna be uh i salted him last night and put him in the fridge to dry you know what

00:58:45.280 you know what the state wants to take away from you beef your beefs they want to give you the

00:58:49.680 bugs in the pod okay here's the thing you guys we're talking to christians this is a clean segue

00:58:55.000 back from that interruption we're talking about christians here christians being christians

00:59:00.700 repentance faith building christendom and so judgment begins with the household of god

00:59:05.180 we need to start with this question of how the church has been complicit in the rise of modern

00:59:09.580 statism and some of the key ways that we can fight back as christians against this idol so

00:59:17.620 gentlemen what are some of the ways the church has been complicit in modern statism and how and

00:59:24.640 with each of these how can we do better yeah first of all i think that the church has neglected

00:59:30.260 in the right worship of the one true and living God.

00:59:34.500 Neglected in the regulative principle.

00:59:36.960 And that sounds really probably obscure.

00:59:39.540 And not having proper ordered worship

00:59:42.380 and being essentially people pleasers

00:59:44.880 and appeasing to the masses and to pagans,

00:59:49.420 they've abandoned right worship of the one true God.

00:59:52.640 And what that does,

00:59:53.460 what does the worship of the one true God do?

00:59:56.060 What it does is it strengthens the people

00:59:58.300 in their foundations, in their principles

01:00:00.840 to where they will not capitulate.

01:00:03.280 They will stand on the truths of God.

01:00:05.580 They have to go to church every Sunday

01:00:07.500 and they confess their sins to the one true living God

01:00:10.940 and are washed clean.

01:00:13.340 They are singing the battle hymns of the church

01:00:17.620 in the Psalms, in the hymns of the great saints

01:00:21.020 that have come before us.

01:00:22.140 They hear the covenant blessings and curses of God's law.

01:00:25.940 And then they go to the table

01:00:27.380 and they feast and are built up by the body and the blood of Christ.

01:00:30.920 And then they go out with their marching orders.

01:00:33.420 That is how our worship is to be formed every week, week in and week out.

01:00:38.740 And so because the church has neglected this,

01:00:42.660 we've neglected proper worship to the one true God.

01:00:45.980 Where are our principles?

01:00:47.440 Everything that we've been trained to do in our worship ends up being capitulated.

01:00:51.880 Yeah, that's right.

01:00:53.500 We're capitulating to other gods then.

01:00:56.960 And being willing to be catechized and to receive the liturgy of a false God.

01:01:03.980 And I think such a good outflow even of Uri's interview last week.

01:01:10.020 Another thing I think you'd bring up that's really related to this is the way that the church and its worship and its teaching has handled something like the law and the gospel,

01:01:18.620 where we've just adopted this dichotomized view of the law and the gospel, where they're like in their enemies.

01:01:26.180 They're not friends. The law and the gospel are complete enemies. They're oil and water.

01:01:33.580 And so we've adopted this preaching that is very hesitant to apply the word of God in

01:01:41.440 applicational ways to preach the law and obedience to the law for Christians. And that just gives

01:01:47.980 birth to this truncated ethical, cultural, and political witness that really doesn't know how

01:01:54.760 to be a human being so how do these people actually relate to the law do you think do you

01:01:59.560 think because it seems like anytime the law is mentioned they retreat quickly like like like

01:02:04.160 cockroaches when the light is turned on and immediately go to the gospel and saying like

01:02:08.260 well christ did that for you so don't worry about it is that shame of god's law what is it i honestly

01:02:14.740 where you would adopt then some sort of common kingdom law as this is the law of the land is

01:02:21.660 superior to God's law. There are so many issues wrapped up in that. One of them, I think,

01:02:26.820 is an embarrassment about the law of God. I think that there's an embarrassment there.

01:02:32.300 But I also, I just think Christians have recently been trained in this gospel centrality movement 0.96

01:02:38.120 to essentially treat the law with that one sermon all the time of, oh, hey, we just got to this 0.82

01:02:46.380 passage in Colossians, it says, put away all wrath, okay, and slander, and malice, and obscene

01:02:51.680 talk from your mouth. But you know what the good news is, guys? Jesus never sinned in wrath, anger,

01:02:57.360 slander, malice, and obscene talk. And by grace and through faith, his righteousness is credited

01:03:01.800 to you. So just trust in Jesus and be forgiven. Yeah. It never moves from that to, and your new

01:03:11.140 creations in Christ, created in Christ, the workmanship of God, created in Christ Jesus for

01:03:15.160 good words that you should walk in them you know what's really interesting then sorry eric is that

01:03:18.540 the state comes in and actually gives it fills the void applicational yeah theology they say here

01:03:24.460 here's slander you are not to say no gay or whatever it is you're not to say you're not to

01:03:30.000 say you know no no no sodomy you're not to say yeah don't say that you have to actually say 0.99

01:03:35.760 rainbow flag don't say the monkey pox comes from having sex with men don't well if you're a man i 1.00

01:03:40.980 I mean, if you're a woman, you can have sex with your husband. 1.00

01:03:43.080 But you won't get monkeypox. 1.00

01:03:45.800 You might get pregnant, which would be great. 1.00

01:03:47.580 Build a kingdom. 1.00

01:03:48.240 Amen.

01:03:48.540 Hoorah.

01:03:48.900 Okay, anyway, this is getting away from us.

01:03:50.920 You're absolutely right.

01:03:52.280 The government will see that.

01:03:54.680 Vacuums are filled instantly. 1.00

01:03:56.660 It's just perplexing to me that these Christians would reject the applicational theology of 0.96

01:04:02.380 the church, but then wholeheartedly accept the applicational theology of the state.

01:04:07.820 I think what we've seen, though, is that the gospel-centered movement, the gospel coalition, Tim Keller, John Piper, these people, this movement, really has been the seedbed for statism.

01:04:18.600 So that's like the hot take from me for today.

01:04:22.940 But honestly, you look at it, John Piper, pietism, and you see what they've done in the last couple of years, going hard at things like, well, basically, we shouldn't vote for Trump, shouldn't protect our wives against rape.

01:04:37.820 yeah these hyper pietistic positions that are you know they sound scriptural yep they sound godly

01:04:45.580 but fundamentally i think it's interesting like dan what dan was saying is that somebody is always

01:04:50.640 going to step in with applicational law in those situations it never just stays uh there and what's

01:04:58.940 interesting i think is what we've actually found if people haven't read it i would encourage you

01:05:03.100 to read it, Daily Wire, Megan Basham had an article on Francis Collins. It's actually showing

01:05:09.200 how pastors were pushing the state's narrative about the virus. So I think you can actually

01:05:16.500 prove without question that most of the prominent evangelical leaders in America have actually been

01:05:23.240 weaponized and partnering with the state to further that agenda. Yes. This is the play to

01:05:29.200 like some of what we've been talking about, the church failed to preach the totalizing nature of

01:05:36.060 the gospel of the kingdom of God. It reduced the good news of the kingdom of God from the good

01:05:41.360 news that Christ has come to forgive us our sin, to renovate us, to make a new humanity, to make

01:05:46.300 a new kingdom, to adopt us, to arm us, to send us out, to conquer and colonize and disciple the

01:05:51.920 nations. And instead we got this truncated, this is a lot of this whole season, this truncated

01:05:58.560 emotionalistic shallow message of grace and we've traded this redemption and renovation of humanity

01:06:05.300 through christ for cheap grace and spiritually impotent easy believism and what the state did

01:06:10.800 is it said oh great perfect easy pray for me to come in and disciple people in the totalizing

01:06:17.320 message of the god of the state and to say here's the catechism here's the good true and beautiful

01:06:21.800 here's what you're for i think the other thing here that's going on is what the church has done

01:06:26.720 regarding the family so the church seeing that families are deteriorating you know talk about

01:06:32.820 fatherlessness and black communities being one example seeing that the family is deteriorating

01:06:37.420 this the church could have stepped in and said we need to bolster families we need to be teaching

01:06:42.660 like the chris wiley stuff 30 years ago about building a strong household yeah we could have

01:06:48.320 used strong teaching on masculinity 20 years ago right we didn't get that yeah and what the church

01:06:53.900 did instead of trying to bolster the family the mission of man dominion fruitfulness all that his

01:06:58.500 marriage yep bolstering all of those things instead the church said we also will take those

01:07:04.240 roles from the individual the state gives you daycare well guess what we got child care and

01:07:08.940 children's worship yeah you don't need to be in the service oh preach anytime you have one sphere

01:07:15.720 stealing the god-ordained responsibility of another sphere yeah it ends poorly absolutely

01:07:21.320 And the church has been just as guilty, I think, in many ways as the state has.

01:07:24.480 Oh, yeah.

01:07:24.800 I mean, the church has given its children to the state for education and discipleship.

01:07:29.460 The church has taken the children out of the worship of God and given them some watered-down kids' ministry version.

01:07:37.100 Flannel graph.

01:07:37.680 Flannel graph.

01:07:38.300 And we've actually had the audacity to think that we can do both of those things and that will be enough to keep our kids.

01:07:45.680 that we can give our children to the state for 15,000 hours by the time they're 18

01:07:50.640 and give them 45 minutes of flannel graphs on a Sunday, and that's going to be enough.

01:07:54.640 Well, and the thing is, you've got to understand the state is, they've got a lot of power.

01:07:58.820 The public education system has a lot of power. 0.52

01:08:01.180 And so how do Christians respond?

01:08:03.060 Most pastors today won't preach on any of the difficult issues of the day.

01:08:06.840 They will not talk about public school.

01:08:09.440 Yeah.

01:08:09.760 They will not talk about it.

01:08:10.780 Oh, and if you do, get ready.

01:08:11.480 So if you're going to be impotent like that in the face of an all-powerful state

01:08:14.480 that's roaring like a lion a beast yeah i mean you're gonna lose let me give you another one

01:08:19.960 that's related here because i think this ties together and there they go hand hand in glove

01:08:23.600 the church has also allowed itself to become economically enslaved to wicked corporations

01:08:28.060 on two fronts the church has failed to preach a robust protestant work ethic and doctrine of

01:08:34.420 vocation to men to say men don't settle don't just allow yourselves to be uh sharecroppers on

01:08:43.160 a woke globalist government corporation or a government corporation explicitly.

01:08:48.720 Okay, so don't do that. 0.68

01:08:49.860 And on the other side, send your women, send your young women to colleges for years to 1.00

01:08:56.160 get into $100,000 of student debt so that we must have two income households, so that 0.90

01:09:01.920 mom can't be at home, so that the kids must be cared for by the government, educated by

01:09:06.800 the government.

01:09:07.920 The church has allowed us, and the reason I say it's allowed itself to be enslaved in

01:09:11.480 this way is because, guys, those two issues that I just mentioned have been the reason more people

01:09:17.080 have left this church, our church, Refuge Church, over the last five years than any other two issues

01:09:23.260 saying, wives, go home, go home, take Johnny Mac's advice to Beth Moore, go home, put yourself to the

01:09:32.480 hard work of being a productive homemaker, and don't let the state educate your children in 0.77

01:09:39.240 public schools, which is going to require men to work hard, be creative, take dominion in the

01:09:44.740 economic sphere. And the church has just allowed itself to be so thoroughly played on both of those

01:09:51.240 issues. Do you have any, either of you, any idea why? I know you guys have been counseling people

01:09:56.900 here for a long time. It's a tough issue. It's not actually that complicated, but it's just very

01:10:02.300 difficult. Why? Why is that such a hot button issue? Yeah, I think that so much of the feminist

01:10:09.340 movement has been really effective in telling women that your value is in being a man and 0.84

01:10:14.960 bringing home a paycheck. That's where your value is. You need to actually be more like a man. 0.94

01:10:21.160 And so that's been really effective in enslaving women. And you see this like talking to 0.99

01:10:27.220 younger couples that are dating in college. And all of a sudden you're going to be married to

01:10:32.780 a woman that has a lot of student loans. She comes with debt. And then maybe you become convinced 1.00

01:10:38.120 that you should actually follow Titus too. And she should stay home and build homes. And I don't 1.00

01:10:43.560 know, maybe grow eternal souls and nurture them. And then you're saddled with a whole bunch of

01:10:49.900 student loans. But this is a hotbed issue because the identity of women, they've been told through 0.99

01:10:56.160 their whole lives that your value is in your work, in what you're doing, and it has to look like a 1.00

01:11:02.080 man. Yeah, they've, again, Gramsian, not Zedong. They've aimed for the same ends as Mao Zedong

01:11:10.620 in The Great Leap Forward. Yeah, it's just a lot slower. They've done it slowly over institutions,

01:11:16.420 undermining the family, undermining the father, introducing sexual immorality,

01:11:19.900 in saddling people with debt doing i mean offering easy cheap cheap they're twenty thousand dollars

01:11:25.780 a year per kid but free to you alternatives so you can we'll take your kids we'll take all your

01:11:31.100 duties they are being a bad father yeah who would take instead of allowing his his son and daughter

01:11:36.860 to grow into a man or a woman to treat them like a perpetual adolescent and this is actually 0.91

01:11:42.800 something the chinese have figured out so the difference between mal and now and now right

01:11:47.140 is really a change from 1984 to Brave New World.

01:11:50.960 Exactly.

01:11:51.480 They realize, like, I don't actually have to, like, put somebody in prison 1.00

01:11:55.440 and kill them outside the Uyghurs. 1.00

01:11:57.660 We do that with them. 1.00

01:11:58.780 Yeah. 0.70

01:11:59.300 The Chinese do. 1.00

01:12:00.740 But what they realize is if we just give them a smartphone and Snapchat 1.00

01:12:04.660 and Netflix, we can control their mind and control everything about them.

01:12:09.240 And here's the deal.

01:12:10.540 People, you know, the other thing that we haven't really talked as much about,

01:12:14.980 but think about things like pornography.

01:12:16.540 Yeah.

01:12:16.720 When a culture is awash with pornography, which it's delivered in everywhere, smartphones, computers, you name it, TV, Disney, you have a culture of shame.

01:12:28.440 And so that culture is not going to be courageous and pushing back against anything.

01:12:31.960 It's saddled with guilt.

01:12:33.100 They have so many hooks in them.

01:12:35.420 Yeah.

01:12:35.620 Have we talked about that here, this hook of guilt?

01:12:38.540 I'm not sure Ben was talking about it in a recent episode.

01:12:41.140 Guilt puts a hook in your flesh.

01:12:44.680 Yes.

01:12:44.980 And hooks a big, heavy iron chain to it.

01:12:47.240 And whoever holds the other end of that guilt chain, they can manipulate the heck out of you. 0.87

01:12:52.580 Well, think about what is happening with Black Lives Matter. 0.92

01:12:55.980 So many Christians played in the CRT racial reconciliation game. 0.97

01:13:00.240 But it's fundamentally like you've committed the sin. 0.89

01:13:03.600 You can never atone for it.

01:13:05.500 No one can atone for it.

01:13:06.760 And you have to spend your whole life paying reparations.

01:13:09.860 Compared to the gospel, right, which is like you're forgiven.

01:13:13.240 It's over today.

01:13:14.260 Yeah, you're clean. You walk out clean day one with the gospel. The guilt is removed. You are bought with a price. Your whole self belongs to the king, but he is a true king. He's King Loon. He's a good king. He frees. He adopts. He gives life.

01:13:31.880 the head of the serpent he's he's destroyed defeated death he's not like that's the problem

01:13:36.500 is that any other god you replace the true and living god with is a god of death it's the it's

01:13:41.420 the god of the aztecs it's the god of the communists it's the god of the marxists it's the

01:13:45.780 fill in the blank they all kill only only christ freeze and and so in in the next couple episodes 0.77

01:13:54.360 we're going to be talking about first we're going to talk about one of the wrong answers like we

01:13:58.380 mentioned already, because there's an easy answer that a lot of people that we want to reach for,

01:14:03.140 because it looks good, it looks attractive, but it's a horse and a chariot that's rented from

01:14:07.220 Egypt and it will not save you. We're going to talk about that next episode. It's a kind of

01:14:12.280 conservatism that will not save you. And then in the episode after that, Lord willing, we'll take

01:14:18.260 up this issue of what does Christian governance look like? If the God is not the state, if the

01:14:23.280 state is not God, well, is the state bad? Should we have states at all? And the answer is yes,

01:14:28.840 we don't. We're not anarchists. We don't just go from statism to anarchy. No, there is such thing

01:14:35.020 as a Christian view of the state. So we're going to talk about that Christian city fathers in the

01:14:40.300 next episode, or in two episodes from now. And let me just give you a quick plug here to start.

01:14:47.600 We've still got some road ahead of us here in season one, but here at the King's Hall,

01:14:52.040 we're starting to think about the next season of the King's Hall podcast. And I just want you to

01:14:57.100 get fired up now because we're going to be talking in the next season about some of the foundational

01:15:02.200 issues that have led to a world where the state thinks it's God. And so we're very excited as we

01:15:09.220 prepare that next season for you guys to be praying for us as we get that content together.

01:15:13.860 We hope it's helpful to you. Make sure you check out our sponsor for this season of the King's

01:15:20.180 call Reformation Heritage Books, head over there. And again, you can't have a godly Christian view 1.00

01:15:27.040 of the state if the other spheres are in disarray. We need self-ruled men and women who are catechized 1.00

01:15:32.580 according to the true and living God. We need solid families who are worshiping together. We

01:15:37.540 need Christian churches who are properly holding the line against tyranny and understanding the

01:15:42.940 limits of obedience to civil authorities and understand the scriptures. And so we'd invite

01:15:48.280 you to check out Reformation Heritage Books. They've got a whole library of resources,

01:15:52.480 both modern and from our Christian forefathers, that will be helpful in developing a thick

01:15:59.480 Christian worldview. And with that said, thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us in this

01:16:04.500 episode of the King's Hall. Join us on Patreon if you'd like to gain access to our patrons-only

01:16:09.780 after-hours show, where we discuss all sorts of practical things and share a toast each week.

01:16:14.940 But God bless you and yours. May his face shine upon you. And remember,

01:16:19.480 fest in Alente, make haste slowly. We're not going to fix any of this in a day,

01:16:24.580 but guess what? The Lord is conquering. God be with you.

01:16:36.120 Well, in case you didn't know, we have another King's Hall show called The After Hours,

01:16:39.980 and it's available only to our patrons. We have a great time in The After Hours.

01:16:44.120 i play hype songs which brian loves sometimes we even talk about brian's cut we talk about recent

01:16:48.700 news on x and answer listener questions overall it's a great time so i'd encourage you to head

01:16:53.540 over to patreon.com slash the king's hall if you'd like to support the show and get some extra content

The King's Hall - June 17, 2022

The Deified State

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