Sermon: A Rewired Society (Part Two): A Post-Truth World

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Given 07-Sep-24; 81 minutes

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The Progressives (Neo-Maoists or Neo-Marxists) for over two decades have been targeting the youth of the offspring of Jacob, because they have not yet developed the critical thinking skills to see the demon behind all the angelic rhetoric, having the tendency to internalize experiences through an emotional rather than a rational filter. Consequently, the totalitarians have succeeded in brainwashing the youth with destructive propaganda, just as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China have been able to do in the past. Young people, in the grip of their cellphones, have gullibly accepted homosexuality and transgenderism. Critical race theory, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Wokeism). Because parents have neglected to rear their children, Satan has taken over the role of the parent and has educated them to accept his nature—the carnal way of self-exaltation and get, preparing them to fall under the influence of the man of sin. Previously, traditional Christianity, although it was bereft of God's standards, nevertheless defended some of them, providing a temporary blockage of the mystery of lawlessness, but today the secularists have ascended to the majority, claiming there are no absolute truths, making everyone "free" to establish their own morality. The post-Modernist, and post-Christian movements have discarded free "moral" agency for free will and license to do whatever feels right, just like the time of the Judges. Consequently, the new morality is lawlessness and rejection of all "restraints" which ironically makes them abject slaves of sin and candidates for the lake of fire. Only our Lord Jesus Christ, His holy and spiritual law, and His Word can build secure foundations for truth and freedom.


transcript:

There is a man that I follow on Substack. He writes under the pseudonym Unskool. He wrote the following in an article he recently published on the fourth of September. And that article is titled, "The Maoists Are Reeducating Public Employees." I wanted just to extract a paragraph out of here.

Progressives, whether they identify as NeoMaoist or NeoMarxist, target the youth because they haven't developed sufficient critical thinking skills to see the demon behind all the angelic rhetoric. Young people tend to internalize experiences through an emotional rather than a rational filter.

And this is a well known fact. This Unskool is not telling us anything that we have not heard before. But totalitarians propagandize young people in a society because they know that if they can influence a child's mind early and often, they can persuade them to agree with them and to kowtow to their regimes. And these young people, even after they grow up, will probably remain loyal to the regime, stalwart supporters of it despite atrocities even toward the nation's own people. We have seen this played out in various places around the world where totalitarian regimes have been dominant. It happened in Nazi Germany with the Nazi youth. It happened in the Soviet Union. It happened in Communist China. And it has happened in other places around the world, North Korea and other places where Socialist or Communist dictatorships employed this tactic.

Nevertheless, despite it happening, it keeps happening, and the people of the West have succumbed to it and have started using it themselves in its own progressive socialist endeavors.

Now, my sermon last week dealt with the findings of sociologist Jonathan Haidt in his recent book, The Anxious Generation. While he did not spend any significant time on propagandizing children through social media, what he did say was that our children are being rewired by endless hours on their cell phones. And they are not on their cell phones doing their book reports and other things for school. Mostly they are playing games. Boys are the ones that tend to play more games and the girls are on social media going through endless screens of stuff that the curators, the algorithm devised by people in these big companies like Meta and other companies have constructed.

And this endless scrolling on social media especially, makes young people susceptible to constant messaging of one sort or another. And most of the time it is not good. These companies like Meta and the one that is behind TikTok (I cannot think of it right now), are mostly liberal. They have progressive ideas and they are pushing these things to our young people. And proof of that they are being rewired and that their ideas are being molded, is that young people are on the forefront of most of today's progressive movements.

As I mentioned last time, they are in the forefront of the homosexual movement, of the transgender movement, of things like critical race theory and DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And of course, young people, that is, late teenagers and college age kids and those who are just out of college, are the ones doing the most pushing of wokeism of all sorts in the way that they live.

Why should they not? They have been brought up on it. They have had their screens showing them these things as the way to go for many years. Some of them got their cell phones when they were prepubescent and they have been watching these things for a decade or more, because these things, Jonathan Haidt tells us, started about 2010 in terms of these young people having access to cell phones, smartphones, from that point on.

I just thought of something Mr. Armstrong said years and years ago. Of course, it had to be years ago. He has been gone for a long time. But he would say fairly often to parents, "Teach your children early because if you don't teach them, someone else will." And that someone, he implied, was Satan the Devil. That he would take advantage of the empty space that the parents were leaving there and influence the children towards sin, toward rejecting God I should say.

Now, last time we went over II Thessalonians 2, verses 2 through 12. And I would like to read that again just to refresh us.

II Thessalonians 2:3-12 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Now, I went into this because of the late Charles Whitaker's article that he wrote. Actually, it was a commentary that we made into an article, "What Restrains the Man of Sin?" And he had come to the conclusion after studying this section, that what restrains is not a person but law. Law and standards, and particularly the law and standards that were restraining were God's law, God's standards that are found in His Word. We might even call them in their watered down form traditional Christian standards, the kind that this nation lived under for a few centuries. They have helped keep the society together, kept us somewhat on the right course.

But those are going away. Those are the restraining forces, if you will, on behavior and now with them weakening and going away, those restraints are being taken off and people do what people do when they have no restraint. We could go back to the proverb that says that when there is no revelation, the people run wild, but happy are those who follow the law of God.

So we see that Charles seems to have been on to something and that we need to understand that the restraining force is indeed the law and standards of God. And now that they are going away, the mystery of lawlessness can break out, the mystery of lawlessness can surge into prominence. And what II Thessalonians 2 tells us is that Satan with all power, signs, lying wonders, and unrighteous deception is going to push this, because he knows it is his time. He needs to bring about the conditions where the man of sin can rise and people will be attracted to him—to the man of sin—and opposed to the coming of Jesus Christ.

So as we slouch toward a post-Christian, post-truth world, we are going to be seeing more and more Satan-inspired efforts to cause an increase in lawlessness and to ultimately push the man of sin or the lawless one (as he is named here), into prominence so that he can hold sway over the whole world. And they will follow him to oppose the return of Jesus Christ.

As we saw last time, Paul said he already saw signs of the mystery of lawlessness in his time. But we also saw that with the rise of Christianity, because the apostles went out and preached the gospel and many people believed it. They were not all true Christians, but it spread over the whole world like Jesus said it would, and just because of the presence of Christianity, the mystery of lawlessness was held in check. Because even false Christianity taught many of the truths of the Bible; they just got a lot wrong that made it false. But it was enough to infuse the world and its governments with law, standards, and that has held it off.

But now we are beginning to see that it is all unraveling.

Our takeaway, then, is that lawlessness is the goal of Satan. And as we see at the end of that section, that God will help it along. He will send strong delusion upon the people of the world, not because He really wants to deceive them, but because He wants to bring about the conditions that will end in the return of Jesus Christ. He is using Satan, and He wants what comes after. He wants His Kingdom to be established, and Christ to rule, and His saints to help, and to bring about the conditions of the Millennium, where truth will actually be learned and applied. So He has to get over this hump, and so He, I guess you could say, abets this surge toward lawlessness for His own purposes. And He has been doing stuff like that for the course of His purpose and His plan in His sovereign way so that His will will be brought about.

So if lawlessness is the goal, and our children are being rewired and propagandized to buy into it wholesale, then we are coming upon a time of further lawlessness which is only going to grow as more and more young people are fed into this meat grinder of lawlessness through their cell phones and by other means in society. So while their minds are still plastic and forming their patterns of thought, these young people are being conditioned, being programmed, if you will, to find lawlessness attractive, and right and good in their eyes.

And the reason why they do this or why they find it right—I mean, who in in his right mind would think that lawlessness, anarchy, would be a good thing—but they are being conditioned to think of it as a good thing because the propaganda that they are hearing is framed as good things. It is framed as seeking your own truth. I mean, does that not sound so much better as "doing what is right in your own eyes?" No, you are seeking your own truth. Or like with the transgender crowd, "identifying as they feel they are in their hearts." And so not only do they go, let us say from male to female or female to male, they have all these other genders that they come up up with, or even things like cats or babies or whatever because they are being trained that they are what they feel they are—not what their biology tells them or what have you.

So they buy into this because they are too young to understand the consequences of it all. They are too young to foresee outcomes. They cannot imagine what they see in their heart as ending up as anything but good. So they think that it is all going to be, you know, unicorns and buckets of gold at the end of the rainbow. They do not see that their choices might actually turn out to be horrible and ending in death. Maybe to put it in the most simple terms that I can, they cannot work out cause and effect. They cannot see that what they are doing is going to turn out badly because they do not have the range of experience or the right mentality to think of it in those terms. They have not developed it yet.

Now we know from places like Judges 21:25 (which we turned to last time), that chaos results when there is no authority to enforce the truth. And thus everybody does what is right in his own eyes. That is what Judges 21:25 says. "There was no king in Israel; everybody did what was right in his own eyes." And if you look at what happened in the book of Judges: war, homosexuality that led to atrocities, and all kinds of terrible things happened in Israel. And that is what the writer's ultimate judgment was. There was no one in the whole land of Israel that would enforce standards and this is what happened. All this chaos is what happened.

Jesus supports this by talking about or prophesying about the end time. He said it would be like the pre-Flood world or the world of Sodom and Gomorrah, where despite appearing normal on the outside, people were marrying and giving in marriage and doing all this and that, yet on the inside evil, violence, sexual perversity were so great that God saw no solution but to destroy it, start over again. And I think most undeceived observers of this world would agree that civilization is quickly reaching that point again. Maybe we have not quite reached it, but we are on the verge. It is not pretty out there.

So we are going to continue on this theme, but we are going to look at it from a different perspective than last week.

What led up to all of this in our world, in Western civilization, is the ideology of postmodernism. And that has spawned many of these nefarious movements the kids are now embracing. Postmodernism is based on the evolutionary God-denying assumption that absolute truth and the laws and the standards that derive from absolute truth does not exist. They deny because we are just protoplasm that somehow became intelligent, there was no God, there was nothing outside of us to create us in our world, then there cannot be absolute truth. It is just what everybody thinks is right and wrong, and we just have to deal with it.

So we are going to see what Jesus says about this idea, whether there is or is not absolute truth. And also what happens to those who believe absolute truth and what happens to those who do not believe in absolute truth. He is very clear on these things. It is not something that we are going to have to really dig down deep to figure out. Now it is a bit of theology and so brace yourself for that, but it is very understandable when you have the right definitions of things.

We are going to go first to John 18 where Jesus is standing in front of Pontius Pilate. They are having a discussion. We will start in verse 33 and go down to verse 38.

John 18:33-36 Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to Him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered him, "Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this about Me?" [Do you really want to know? Or are you being a pawn for somebody?] Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered You to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. [He does not deny that He is a king. He just says, My kingdom is not of this world.] If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now [He is adding a temporal part here at this moment, at this time.] My kingdom is not from here."

It will eventually be from here. That is why He is coming back. But He says up until that point, it is not a kingdom of this world.

John 18:37 Pilate therefore said to Him, "Are you a king then?" [He is trying to pin Him down when He has already answered the question.] Jesus answered, "You say rightly that I am a king. [Yes, I am.] For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."

Now we have to understand "everybody who is of the truth hears My voice" is code for "listens to Me and obeys Me; follows Me."

John 18:38 Pilate said to Him, "What is truth?"

He avoids it. He avoids what Jesus is telling him. Jesus is actually putting him on the spot. "Are you one of these people, Pilate, that hears My voice?" And Pilate does not want to answer. He is pretty savvy politically. He followed the conversation pretty well and he knew that he could not answer this question in a way that would be good for him as he saw it. And so he asked him a question back rather than answering the question, "What is truth?"

John 18:38 And when he said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, "I find no fault in Him at all."

I think he was partially convinced. He certainly did not want to condemn Jesus at that point because Jesus had just shown him that this idea that he was rebelling against Caesar was ludicrous. That He was not claiming to be a king here and now. He said, yes, He was a king but His Kingdom was not for here, not for now. Caesar had nothing to be worried about.

But it is this question, "What is truth?" that kind of gets him off the hook because he turns it from a conversation about an actual king and an actual kingdom to a matter of philosophy. Okay, You said everybody who hears Your voice is of the truth. Well, how do you define what truth is? How am I to answer that question if I do not know exactly what truth is? So he weasels out of it like a good politician. He is cynical, he is political. So he does not give Jesus an answer, but instead turns it into a debate that Jesus says, "Nah, I'm not going to get into that right now."

Now, all Pilate had to do is go back and read John 14, which had not been written down yet. But the answer there that Jesus gave His disciples was, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." The truth was not a philosophical argument. The truth is a Person, the Word of God. And that Word is made into knowledge that we have in our Bibles in front of us. So we have it both in the person of Jesus and we also have it in the words that He spoke and the words that He inspired to be written throughout the Bible.

And so, in a way, we could say that Pilate asked this stupid question, "What is truth?" when truth was staring him in the face! He could not recognize it. He was blind to the truth even though the absolute truth was right there before him having a discussion with him. But you know, he may well have asked not necessarily what is truth but what is reality. Have not the sages and the philosophers been trying to figure out what that is for millennia? Pilate's almost saying to him, "Is not the truth ultimately unknowable? Is it not just a personal construct?" That is what they say today, do we not fashion our own truth to suit ourselves?

His question, "What is truth?" shows that he was speaking from spiritual ignorance. He had no idea what was going on there. He played it pretty well for a carnal man, but he did not know what was going on. He did not have the spiritual education to be able to recognize truth that was staring him in the face. So we can kind of forgive Pilate for being so ignorant, to being so full of human nature that he could not see. He was blinded like most men are.

I said that he could have asked the question, what is reality? Because even though we rarely encounter the word reality in the Bible, the idea is there. The Bible speaks a great deal about truth. And the word truth and the word reality are synonymous, because both the Hebrews and the Greeks considered reality to be what is true or what is genuine, what is actual, what is authentic.

In Greek truth is translated most of the time from the word aletheia. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, in theological circles this is called "Little Kittle" because it is a condensed version of the big multi-volume set. But on page 38, the author, who is Gerhard Kittel (that is why it is called Little Kittle), comments that in etymological terms, aletheia means

Non-concealment and so denotes what is seen, what is indicated, what is expressed, or disclosed. A thing as it really is. Aletheia is the real state of affairs, the truth in law, or real events in history, or true being in philosophy. In practice, it yields the sense of correct doctrine that indicates the truth. [Gerhard Kittel continues] In philosophy, aletheia comes to mean genuine reality in antithesis to appearance. What truly is can then be equated with what is divine or eternal.

And therefore what is divine and eternal is Christ. So it all comes back around to the fact that He said that He is the truth.

So, if I can put this all together for you, make a kind of a final analysis for us, reality is ultimately what is of God, what has constant eternal value. These things, the things that are of God and that are of constant eternal value, are absolute truths. They always work, they will always be there, they will never change. So these are the things that are always right, always good, always reliable. And they are exactly the ideas that are being rejected today.

And these days young people are exposed many hours each day to their opposites. Because this is the sort of thing that progressives are pushing on things like Instagram and TikTok and other social media sites. Our young people have little or no defense against them because they have not been taught how to think them through. Or maybe even worse, they have not been given the tools even to avoid listening to them, because social media holds them in a grip. They do not want to put their phones down. They do not want to go listen to anything else because they are so attractive, you know, all of these things, all the pictures, all the sights, all of the sounds.

And so their minds are being gripped by this propaganda, this conditioning, and they will spend hours scrolling through their feeds because they are being given little doses of "happy feeling" while they are doing this. And it is all happening in their brains because the hormones there, the little spurts of dopamine and those sorts of things, are rewarding them for keeping on scrolling and listening and watching and seeing all these things that are happening on the screen.

So they are too-early exposed to this onslaught of lawlessness. And because they have not been taught how to think they readily believe the lie. It is truly, the way I look at it, what I see in all of this, Satan is truly working with all unrighteous deception to push this so that we come to a point where the man of sin can rise.

Let us go back a few chapters in John to chapter 8. We will read verses 31 through 36 where we have another conversation of Jesus, this time with the Jews on the subject of truth, and not only truth but freedom. This is very important in terms of what is happening today, because the problem we are having in social media and all this, also revolves around the ideas of truth and freedom. So starting in verse 31. Actually, let us get verse 30 because there is a point here that we need to understand.

John 8:30-31 As He spoke these words, many believed in Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, . . .

Notice who He is speaking to now, people who are on the verge of conversion, let us say. They believe what Jesus is saying, they are attracted to Him. So these are not just anybody, these are people who are on the right track, at least did the first steps of being on the right track.

John 8:31 Jesus said to [them], "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed."

Now we have to think here. Jesus knew where they were along the path and so He is telling them, He is giving them help for their next steps. And He is saying, "If you really want to be My disciple, if you want to continue in belief, you have to continue in My word. So if you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed."

John 8:32-38 "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." They answered Him, "We are Abraham's descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, 'You will be made free?'" Jesus answered them, "Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed."

Sermons and sermons could be given on this six or seven verses here. I do not want to give sermons and sermons on this. I want to give you an idea of how this applies to this particular problem that we are having in American and other Western societies because of this brainwashing that is going on.

So in that vein, then, what Jesus is saying here in this short paragraph stands in direct opposition to the postmodern ideology of personal truth. He is saying here that there is a truth that is over and above all of that. It is reality, and it is found in His Word or in Himself, you could say.

The present surge of the mystery of lawlessness, which we are finding rising all about us, is cloaked in the language of personal freedom. You are free to identify as you like. You are free to act in your own way that you think is right. You are free to have certain sexual partners or many sexual partners or whatever. It all depends on what you decide in your heart you are going to do because you are the master of your own universe, essentially.

They are saying you can decide whatever, and if that is good for you, then that is wonderful for you. That is your truth. I always think of Oprah Winfrey when I say that because I think she even said that in the DNC that just happened. You know, live your own truth or whatever, something like that. That is kind of at the center of this postmodern progressive ideology. There is not an outside, absolute truth that should guide us into what is right. That does not exist to them. They throw that out and just say, whatever you decide to be your truth, that is the truth.

It is terribly deceptive. I mean, put that in front of a person who does not know how to think through outcomes and that sounds absolutely wonderful and freeing because you do not have to subscribe to any kind of ideology. You do not have to think things through. You do not have to do anything but what you feel. It is all inside you. There is nothing that is going to constrain you in any way. You just do what you want to do.

What it does, looking at it from our perspective, it posits the old satanic line that each person with eyes wide open should be like God, deciding for himself what is right and wrong. That is what the Devil, the Serpent put before Eve. "Hey, this little shiny piece of fruit, you take a bite out of it, even though God said you shouldn't, it's going to make you wise. You're going to be free to decide good and evil just like God. God doesn't want you to be like Him. You know, He's withholding all these good things from you. But you can overcome that to sin. You can be like God."

And so in this way, in our modern times, you follow this course and you can curate your own personal truth. "I'll take a little bit from here, a little bit from there. I like this. That's nice. I think I'll take that." And you make your own truth. There is no restraint.

Now Jesus here speaks positively about the link between truth and freedom. He does admit here, if we want to put it that way, that if you know the truth, you have true freedom. That is true. But it is far different from today's thinking. Jesus says, "If you know the truth, it will make you free." Today's ideology says, "If you make your own truth, you will be free." That is distinctly different. That is not the same at all. But this truth and this freedom that today's people talk about, because they are apart from God, they come from inside human nature, and from outside being the influence of Satan the Devil, they invariably lead to iniquity, sin, lawlessness. And down the road, near or far, it is hard to say, is death. It is inevitable.

And so Jesus hits the nail right on the head and He says, this idea of personal truth is enslaving. He says right in here that you are a slave of sin if you have this idea of personal truth. If your truth is not His truth, then you are a slave, you are a slave to sin. The only truth that is truly freeing is found in Christ, is found in God's Word.

But you know, the world looks at that—even though God says, "Look, here's the truth, here are pages and pages and pages of the truth. You need to read it, you need to believe it."—the world looks at it and sees laws and standards and rules. And Jesus talks about a narrow way and obligation and submission and faithfulness to a creed, to obedience and righteousness, and there is a binding covenant that you have to make. They look at it and see not, this will lead to salvation and eternal life and living the quality of life of God forever. They see you must conform, you must sacrifice, you must restrain yourself. They see it all in a negative light. Why?

Well, the Bible tells us that too. Romans 8:7, of course, says, "The carnal mind is enmity against God" and cannot or will "not subject itself to God's law." It is in total opposition. And so while the truth is out there and freedom—true freedom—is available, they reject it because they do not want to obey. They do not want to conform. It sees all of God's goodness and righteousness in negative terms.

It is a hard sell. I understand that; I have human nature too. My mind and my body always want to do something else and I have to wrench it back into the right way. Paul talks about this in Romans 7. It is something we all have to do, whether we are an apostle or whether we are just baptized. It is something that happens that we are confronted with temptation and we have to learn how to walk the narrow way in spite of our body and our carnal minds telling us we should go another way that is a whole lot easier.

Well, why does the world see these things in negative terms, beyond this understanding of human nature's enmity against God? I have come up with two reasons. The first is, they have a false definition of freedom. And the second one is, that they are only thinking about now. They are not thinking about the future, they are not thinking about eternity, they are thinking only about the present. And so if they are only thinking about now and they are only thinking about their personal freedoms to do whatever they want, well, God's way looks like a bad deal. But if they were thinking of freedom as the Bible presents it and they were thinking about things like their salvation and eternal life, then God's way seems a lot better. It is a viable way to have a good future and to live forever.

Go into your typical dictionary and look for the definition of freedom. I got mine out of the New Oxford American Dictionary and it says there freedom, "The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint." That is typical.

If you go into a dictionary and look at their definition of freedom, you will get something like this. I am not saying it will be word for word, but it will be something like this. And the important part, as you probably figured out, is that last part, "without hindrance or restraint." Everyone wants to be free to do what they want without anyone telling them or restricting them from doing it. They want total absolute freedom to say or do whatever comes to mind, whatever is there.

Now, as you probably figured out, this is not a biblical definition. We cannot understand this passage in John 8 by plugging that definition into what Jesus is saying, because it will not make any sense. It will sound like Jesus is contradicting Himself. So people misunderstand John 8 because they do plug that definition back into it, and that is what the Jews did in in verse 33. They said, "We have not been in bondage to any man, and how can You say the truth will make us free?" Because they were using a wrong definition of freedom.

I mean, the Jews' statement is false on its face. They had indeed been in bondage to many foreign nations all the way back to Egypt and they were currently under the heel of Rome. So if we do not ascribe madness or craziness to the Jews, what definition were they using? Well, they were using a false definition of freedom. Their definition that they were using seems to have been something like, the state of not being imprisoned. Like, you know, you are not in jail, basically is what they were thinking. That is, even though Judea was ruled by Rome, the people could still conduct their lives pretty much without interference from Rome or Roman troops or the Roman government in one form or another.

So they totally misunderstood Jesus because that sort of freedom is not what He was talking about. He was not talking about whether they could conduct their lives without Roman interference. He was talking about something much, much more important than that. So what was His definition of freedom? I think we need to nail that down.

Notice what He says. He gives us the definition right away. You shall know the truth from My word. "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." So the definition of truth that He is using is My word. The truth is found in His word. And it is this truth that colors His definition of freedom. His definition of freedom hinges on knowing and understanding truth, or reality as we saw earlier. That is, His definition of freedom hinges on what is actually going on, what is really happening in the universe, what is really happening in the world.

We could also put this another way. The truth or freedom hangs on who is guiding the course of history. Or we could put it another way. Freedom depends on where God's purpose is heading. All of this is found in His Word. It is all there.

We could kind of paraphrase Jesus' words here to something like this. "If you knew," telling the Jews, "what is really going on, what is happening behind the scenes, what God intends, you would be free to choose and then act in accordance with it." If you had knowledge of where the course of the world is going and how God is going to bring it to pass, you would have freedom to choose the right way.

So Jesus is speaking of a freedom to chart the best course to end up with the best outcome. That is all He wants for us. He wants us to live in abundance and have eternal life. That is all He is about; everything He does for us is to bring about our good and our eternal life. And so He is telling these people, if you really know what God has planned and how He is going about bringing it to pass, then you would have the freedom to choose to follow it and end up in the best place.

His definition, then, is something like the power of self-determination or we could also call it the power of free moral agency in its absolute terms. I think a lot of us have a misunderstanding of what free moral agency is. We just think it is the right to choose, the freedom to choose. But there is more to it than that. Because a free moral agent—listen to this definition—is a free willed person, somebody who has the freedom to make choices. A free willed person having the ability to choose between good and evil who willingly chooses and defends good.

That is really what free moral agency is. That you are free to choose what is moral and good, and you side with morality and goodness and you defend it. It is not just the freedom to choose. If you have the freedom to choose, you can kill your child in the womb. But if you are a free moral agent, you would never make that choice because it is immoral to kill another human being, in the womb or out.

It is very interesting, it seems to me that if you chart the words of free moral agency, they drop out a while back. Very few people use the word free moral agency anymore. They talk about free will or free choice. The morality of it drops out. And so we have to understand this good that a free moral agent chooses and defends as what is of God, what is divine, what is godly, what is eternal, what is absolute right and good.

Let us go back to John 8 here. Jesus is telling these believers that God's Word contains all a person needs to know about God's unalterable purpose and the means by which it will come to pass. That is, it is going to come to pass through God's unconquerable will and by the power of His Spirit. And if we read the Bible properly, we see that it also will come to pass through our belief and cooperation and transformation into His children. I mean, God could do all these wonderful things, but if we are not cooperating with Him in this purpose, it will not happen for us. And that is all there in Scripture, we can find ways to back it up all through there. We can see what God's plan is and all we have to do is cooperate with it.

So God's Word is the blueprint and with His Spirit which is given to us, we can read it and understand it, and once that happens, once we have knowledge and understanding and have His Spirit to guide us, we have actual freedom, freedom to choose a course in line with truth or what is actually going on, what is actually happening. And this is why Jesus here answers as He does in verses 34 to 36. He is saying, because the carnal mind is set against God, it will always veer into sin. What is evil, what is fleshly, what is ungodly.

Thus, carnal humanity without insight by the Holy Spirit into God's Word is no more than a slave people. Remember, He said, "Let the dead bury the dead." They are dead spiritually. They have no real understanding of God's Word. They have no idea of what truth is and so they are enslaved, enslaved to their own carnal mind and their own fleshly bodies. And this bondage to sin goes from generation to generation unless God intervenes at some point. And when God intervenes, He offers the opportunity for a person to become a child, a child of God. And this is done through the Son of God.

He says here, "If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed." We could go to John 6:44 where it says that the Father draws people to the Son. That is the only way that one can be called, if the Father draws us to the Son. And then in the very next verse, which we do not quote very often, Jesus says there, "and they shall be taught by God." So when the Father draws a person to the Son, God teaches them. Whether it is the Father or the Son, they are both God and They teach us. And what do They do? If we co-operate, if we accept it, we become free indeed. We could make right choices for ourselves based upon actual reality. That is, that God is going to send His Son and set up a Kingdom that will rule forever and ever. And we can be part of that and live forever and ever.

But if you do not have that knowledge, if you do not have God's Spirit and you have rejected the truth of God, you are a slave and you will remain a slave until God calls. So until then, until God calls the person he is stuck, he is bound. He is in bondage. He is unable to choose what is best for Him. He is enslaved to sin without a Savior to free him. That is the truth.

Let us move down to verse 37. Jesus says,

John 8:37-47 "I know that you are Abraham's descendants, but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father." They answered and said to Him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you are Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this. You do the deeds of your father." Then they said to Him, "We are not born of fornication. We have one Father—God." Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe Me. Which of you convicts me of sin? And if I tell you the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears God's words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God."

So the theme from verse 35 on is the Father/Son relationship. The Jews claimed Abraham as their father. But Jesus disputes this quite vigorously because a child should resemble his or her father. There should be some similarity there. Jesus implies that the behavior of the child reveals or identifies the father. And since they wanted to kill Him, well, then their father was a murderer. And since the Jews were lying through their teeth, their father was also a liar. If it were God, who is not a murderer and who is not a liar, then they would not be doing that to Jesus, who came from God. But because they were doing these things, it revealed that they were not of the same parentage. So, it is not difficult for Jesus to conclude your father is the Devil. You want to do the same things he does. You are following in his footsteps.

And then Jesus tells them that they have nothing in common with Him. There is no meeting of the minds. He says, I tell you the truth, but you do not believe Me because you are of the lie. He could have said I am of the truth and there is no handshake there, the truth and the lie are opposites. So if they were really God's children, they would believe Jesus because He spoke the truth. That is, what is good, what is godly, what is divine, what is eternal. But their inability to hear the truth from Him proved that they were part of the opposition. They were among those who practice lawlessness.

So, we get this, we see that this was happening in Jesus' time. We saw from II Thessalonians 2 that Paul saw it in his time, 30 to 40 years later. So let us circle back to what is happening today because we see it happening in our time. Ours is being called a post-Christian society because people can see that secularism is in the majority. We are no longer following Christian tenets, we are following secular ideas. It is also a post-truth world because it is equally clear that most people do not even agree about what truth is or even whether it exists. Or whether it exists but it is in 8 billion different forms, each person having his own truth.

So to most, they just assume that there is no absolute truth, just what each person decides to believe is the truth. Some believe in facts. You will see, "Science, I believe in science." What a fraud. Science changes every day. Many more believe what their hearts tell them is the truth. And then you go and look at Jeremiah 17:9 and you find out the heart is absolutely wicked. It is desperately wicked. So is the truth wicked?

I mean, look at people and what they are doing. Their truth is whatever; whatever it is that they are doing. You know, they believe that they are a cat in the morning and a baby in the evening, or something like that. Is that not wickedness? Because they are a person of a specific biological gender. That is the truth. But they have turned it into something shameful and wicked. So most people think the truth is subjective and what is the result of that? What are we seeing?

Let us go back to the book of Isaiah, chapter 59. God will tell us what the result of that is. Let us start in verse 1.

Isaiah 59:1 Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, nor His ear heavy that it cannot hear.

Look, God is the same. He has not changed. Mr. Tkach used to say when things are are bad, you know who moved. It was not God, it was human beings who moved.

Isaiah 59:2-5 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue has muttered perversity. No one calls for justice, nor does any plead for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies; they conceive evil and bring forth iniquity. They hatch vipers' eggs and weave the spider's web; he who eats of their eggs dies, and from that which is crushed, a viper breaks out.

This is just total lawlessness that he is describing here and it is a result of our iniquities, our going away from God.

Isaiah 59:9-15 Therefore justice is far from us, nor does righteousness overtake us. We look for light, but there is darkness! For brightness, but we walk in blackness! We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as at twilight; we are as dead men in desolate places. We all growl like bears, and moan sadly like doves. We look for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and as for our iniquities, we know them: In transgressing and lying against the Lord, and departing from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. So truth fails, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. Then the Lord saw it and it displeased Him that there was no justice.

The rest of the chapter informs us that once it gets to a certain point, there is no remedy, and God Himself must supply it. You cannot turn a civilization around that gets to this point where there is no truth and everybody is just being as wicked as they can. There is no justice, there is no equity, there is nothing good in society anymore, and so God has to do something.

And what does He do? Well, first, through Christ becoming the Savior, the Redeemer from sin, He provides a route out of it through repentance and belief in the truth. And secondly, and this is where we seem to be on the threshold of, ultimately He provides the solution of sending His Son back to earth to knock some heads together and start His own government.

Isaiah 59:21 "As for Me," says the Lord, "this is My covenant with them: My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants' descendants," says the Lord, "from this time forth and forevermore."

So He sends His Son back, His Son establishes His Kingdom, and He makes the New Covenant with everyone. And He says, "I'm going to put My law in your heart and I'm going to put My Spirit in you, and it's going to be in you and your sons and your grandsons and your great grandsons and all the way down the line." That is the only way civilization survives. But it is going to be based on the truth, not on the lie. Much of that is still future.

So what must God's people, His church, do in the meantime? Because we are stuck here, we have to have a solution. Let us go back to Psalms. Psalm 82, verse 5. You will see that down through history, God's people have lived through surges of lawlessness and to them, it felt like the very foundations of the earth were unstable, rocking uncertainly under their feet, and they wanted to know what they can do.

Psalm 82:5 They do not know, nor do they understand; they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are unstable.

This is everybody, this is what all the people of the earth are thinking. They may not form that as such in their heads, but they know that something is not right.

Let us go back to chapter 11, verse 3.

Psalm 11:3 If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

Now, we are getting more specific into what can we do as people who know the truth and have been made free to make the decisions that are necessary to conform to God's purpose.

Psalm 119:150-152 They draw near who follow after wickedness; they are far from Your law. You are near, O Lord, and all Your commandments are truth. Concerning Your testimonies, I have known of old that You have founded them forever.

These people in olden times, as we might say, who had no footing, were being tripped up at every turn, unable to move forward with certainty, like walking through a dark and alien world, had to ask themselves: What is certain? What is reliable? What is true? And the answer is God—His truth, His word, His law, His testimonies, that is, the proof and the evidence from God Himself of what is good and right, and what works. Those are eternal foundations. Those are things that can be relied on. Those will take us far, all the way into the Kingdom of God.

So the answer is simple. Again, not easy to put into practice, but the answer itself is simple. As Rudyard Kipling writes in his poem, "If," this is the first couple of lines: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, . . ."

And that may actually happen, that they will begin to turn on those who are of the truth and blame all their problems on us. If you can keep your head through all of that and keep your eyes focused on God and His law and His Word and His testimonies, you will prove to be God's Son, a real genuine child of God, and inherit the earth. And we do this by remaining committed to God and the truth of His Word. We cannot let ourselves begin to think of having a personal truth. We have got to stick close by the revealed truth of God.

It will be a struggle. Things are going to get bad. Deceptions are going to mount, troubles will come up and affect us personally. But diligent endurance, "He who endures to the end," diligent endurance in observing and preserving the things that you have been taught by God will keep your feet on the path to the Kingdom of God.

RTR/aws/drm





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