Welcome back to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling. Information regarding the resources referenced on today's program can be found at www.knowingthetruth.org. Now here to continue with today's program is Pastor Kevin Bowling. Well, are you looking for proof? Proof that the liberal social democratic society works. You saw maybe during the recent democratic debate that took place that the place to go to in order to point to to say that liberalism is really, really going to work. is to look at some of those Scandinavian countries. And if you look to those Scandinavian countries, then you will see that that is the place for utopia. That's the place where these policies are really going to bring about true happiness. The only problem is when you look a little bit deeper, you find out they're not very happy. That's the problem. That's a brand new article that has been printed not that long. Well, I guess it was a while back, but it was an article that said, sorry, liberals, Scandinavian countries aren't utopias. This one was in the New York Post, and in the article it goes on to talk about how everybody is pointing to them as being happy, but then it actually talks to a group of people that says that they're not that happy. And the group of people is? the people from Denmark themselves. And when they talk to them, they find out, oops, there's a problem here. They're not as happy as everybody's trying to make them out to be. I want to talk about that on the program today, about this unhappiness that is associated with these liberal policies. And in order to do that, we're going to talk with Dr. Grant Horner, once again, who's the Associate Professor of Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the Masters College Again, the Masters College, you should check out the information concerning Dr. Horner there, but also the college as well out on their website, and that's www.masters.edu. That's www.masters.edu. You can get all the information you need right there on their website. Dr. Horner, welcome back to the Knowing the Truth radio program. Hey, it's good to talk to you again, Kevin. How are you doing today? Excellent. Well, the Scandinavian... You're not living in Denmark, then. We're not. If I'm doing good, something must mean that I'm living somewhere else because there seems to be this, I don't want to say a charade, I guess. Maybe that's too strong, but a misnomer or something that Denmark is this happy place. It's really not, right? Well, it's interesting. You know, a lot of people really do romanticize the idea of Europe. I mean, I spend a lot of time in Europe. I go there a couple times a year. I teach in the museums and the cathedrals there with college students and high school students. And it's very, very interesting because it's incredibly beautiful. When I walk people around in these beautiful cities like Florence and places in Scotland like Edinburgh, these beautiful, beautiful ancient cities, when I walk them around for the first time, they're loving the art and the food and the culture and so on and so forth. And after a few days, I ask them, you know, what are you noticing? And they will usually say, you know, I'm really excited to be here. It's absolutely beautiful. But I'm starting to feel a little weird. There's something missing. It's kind of sad. And there are a lot of factors that play into that. One of them is that particularly in Italy, after about three days, you notice that you never see children because they're not having children there. You rarely, rarely see them in public. It's a very kind of a private life thing. You don't see them walking around the streets and so on and so forth. Because of where Europe has ended up spiritually, and I guess you could even say psychologically, there is a tremendous, tremendous degree of unhappiness. And you don't see that in the travel brochures at all, and you certainly don't see it in the articles where people on the American cultural left are trying to present Europe as the standard that we should be aiming for. Yeah, the left has been doing that for quite a while and I don't know if they do that so often because it's far away and it's hard then for people to find out the truth very easily unless they're in a position like yourself where they go there very often. But there are those that have been there like yourself that have talked about what it's really like. And in fact, this article that I was alluding to just a few moments ago, it says this, it says, let's look a little bit closer, suggests Michael Booth, a Brit who has lived in Denmark for many years, in his new book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, behind the myth of the Scandinavian utopia. So an entire book written about this myth that's being foisted upon the American people that there's this utopian world over there, and they're saying pretty much not so fast. Well, what's interesting is that a lot of people don't know where the word utopia comes from. It's actually a title of a book that was written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, who was a close friend and advisor of King Henry VIII. He was actually the Chancellor of England, kind of a reigning diplomat and counselor and advisor under Henry VIII to the monarchy in early 16th Century England, and Sir Thomas More wrote this book, Utopia, and he creates the very idea of a perfect society, and he presented it as a kind of a satire, and the word utopia is a coined word, he invented it, kind of an invented Latin word, topos in Latin means place or location, like topography on a map, and you is a negating prefix, and so utopos, or utopia, actually means no place, so the very idea of, oh, let's move to a utopia, Well, there is no such place. Human beings have desperately been trying to find utopia since the fall. We want a place that is perfect, a place that has all the needs met and all the desires are good, and there's nothing but love and kindness and charity, and there's no sadness, no sin, no sickness, no death. But there is no such place on earth. Whenever people use that word utopia, I just kind of smile, because not a lot of people know the origin of the word in Denmark. and and europe as a whole and even the united states which is which is a place that a lot of people look at that i wish i could have been a state We're not a utopia here either. We're not perfect at all. Well, what's interesting about Danish culture is because it's very, very socialistic, and it has a very, very long tradition, more than almost anywhere in Europe, of being very communitarian, where community is everything, the individual is minimized. In some ways, it's similar to Japanese or Chinese culture. The all is everything, and the individual is nothing. And so in Danish culture, to stand out, to be an exception, to be really, really good at something is almost looked down upon. CEOs don't ride an elevator. They don't get a nicer office. They walk up the stairs. They brown bag their lunches. They don't fail to mingle with all of their employees. And there are certain good aspects of that. But if your kid is a great athlete and wins a trophy, and you mention that at a party, people will actually look down at you. You're supposed to blend in. You're supposed to kind of be one flake in a bowl of oatmeal is one of the metaphors from a a famous Danish movie from a few years ago. We should all just be part of the oatmeal bowl. You don't want to stand out. You don't want to be unusual. And you really don't want to be excellent at anything. And another thing that's very important in Danish culture, you know, kind of Northern European culture in general, is that you cannot admit to being unhappy or dissatisfied. You don't want to excel at anything, but at the same time, you don't want to ever tell anyone that you're not satisfied with what you have. And so this polling data is kind of skewed. If you've got people who, one of their cultural values is to say that you're happy even if you're not. Then you're going to have some really skewed data. The actual reality is that Denmark, along with places like Scotland, Northern Europe, has one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world. Very, very high per capita consumption of alcohol. They have the highest use of antidepressants of any country in Europe. So these people tend to not be very happy. They're kind of self-anesthetizing to deal with what I think is probably a very deep unhappiness. In literary history, probably the most famous literary character of all time is William Shakespeare's character Hamlet. The play is set in Denmark, and he's known as the melancholic Dane. He's a Danish prince, and he's miserable, he's depressed, and he's dealing with a very difficult situation. So he's highly, highly intelligent, but he's a miserable person, and all the terrible things that are going on in Denmark in this play are the reason for the famous quote from the play, something is rotten, in denmark i've never been to denmark i've been in amsterdam But it's a very, very similar culture. It's very beautiful. Culturally, it's very interesting. But you can just see the unhappiness on their faces. You can just feel it. Yeah, that's remarkable. So they're not answering the question on the survey truthfully because of this cultural aspect. I think the one line in the article that caught my attention said this, moreover, there is a group of people that believes the Danes are lying when they say they are the happiest people on the planet. And this group is known as the Danes. They should know themselves. And lying might be a strong word. They probably, many of them probably desperately want to believe it. People don't naturally want to think of themselves as unhappy. People don't enjoy being unhappy. And you would like for people to think that you are happy. That's why Facebook is filled with so many, you know, happy pictures. No one puts on Facebook, oh, here I am frowning because I'm so depressed today. Everyone's, oh, I'm I'm out on a wonderful date in this restaurant, or I just went to Disneyland or something. But what is very interesting about the situation with Denmark is that they are one of the most highly socialized countries in Europe. They are taxed at an almost unbelievable rate, up to 73% of your income, and everything is taken care of, really kind of from cradle to grave, to borrow that phrase. And what happens is the average worker only has to work 28 hours a week. And that sounds like, well, it sounds like utopia. What are we have to work 20 hours a week? I work that sometimes in two, two and a half days. What happens is work is a virtuous thing. Working hard is good for the soul and then blending it with rest is good. So if you have too much leisure time, too much time on your hands, you're going to do things like sit around and drink and be bored and play video games and read. depressing novels. I mean, I don't know how much Danish literature or Danish film you're familiar with, but it is about the most depressing stuff out there. That's interesting, especially when they've got them here as the happiest place on earth. It's like Disneyland, but it's Denmark that they're talking about. The article says this, Danes are well aware of the worldwide reputation for being the happiest little logos in the box, or Legos in the box, I'm sorry. Answering no would be as unthinkable as honking in traffic in Copenhagen. When the author tried this once, he was scolded by a bewildered Danish passenger saying this to him, what if they know you, Booth was asked. And then he goes on to say this, that was a big clue. At a party, the author joked, it typically takes about eight minutes for people to discover someone they know in common. Denmark is a land of 53 point, 5.3 million homogenous people. Everyone talks the same. Everyone looks the same. Everyone thinks the same. You know, he's not very happy with this homogenous view over there, huh? Right. And they have set themselves up for a terrible problem. And this is going on from Sweden down into Bavaria because they're bringing in a large number of migrant workers. So many people are set up with jobs that are based on the government working hours. You can only work 30 hours a week and you get six weeks of paid vacation. You get a year of maternity leave and all these other kinds of things. And what happens is there are so many jobs uh... but not enough man-hours of came to a work it so they are importing people from the least they're importing muslims and the muggles are not mixing in with just culture at all and it's beginning to become increasingly increasingly dangerous I was going to ask you then, bringing this over here to the States, we say, OK, well, you know, these people aren't really as happy as they everybody thinks that they are. But what's the ramifications of that for the United States or even more particularly for evangelicals in general? Yeah, not that many Danes tend to emigrate to the United States, which is very interesting. The culture is so different. America is definitely a land of individualism, and that's not always necessarily a virtue. But it does tend to produce a productive society, and productive societies in general will produce happy people. Now, the problem with this whole issue, and the reason I wanted to talk to you about it today, is that most of us never actually stop and define what we mean by the word happiness. Happiness is a really interesting word in English. It's related to an old Anglo-Saxon word, hap, which means chance or random. For instance, you've heard the word, oh, well, it just happened. It was an accident. It just happened. When they say that something is related to Hap, Thomas Hardy has a famous poem called Hap, and it's about how the universe appears to be random. When something is referred to as Hap, or happenstance, or it just happened, that means no one willed it, it's not part of any kind of plan, it's really kind of chaos, as opposed to cosmos, or what we would call order. For instance, when they used to say in England five, six hundred years ago, oh, that's a happy person. It was not simply a remark on their emotional state of mind that was positive and joyful and gleeful. It was talking about how their circumstances had been random, but had so worked themselves out that the person ended up joyful and gleeful. Some people are happy because of circumstances and others aren't. So happy has a really, really interesting kind of etymological word history behind it. But nowadays, when you say happy, it's just referring to the emotional state. But here's the problem. What's the source of your happiness? The original set of articles that came out in the Huffington Post and New York Times and other articles that were producing all these academic studies that showed, oh, the danger to the happiest people on Earth. It's the happiest country by far. Those original articles define happiness by a sense of self-satisfaction. The problem with that is that in a sinful world populated by fallen, sinful human beings, is that the source of satisfaction is always, always going to be by nature. uh... going to be something that will not in the end leave you happy so you've got a high rate of alcoholism you've got very heavy drug use uh... most uh... drugs that are illegal in the united states heroin marijuana hashish speaking but that those are legal to varying extent in scandinavia from really really from the netherlands north up into denmark uh... they have very very high rates of heroin use like i said that they have the highest use of antidepressants prescription antidepressants anywhere in europe and that's really saying something uh... and uh... not going to go into detail but this article laid out that there is an incredibly awful uh... set of sexual perversions that are widely practiced and considered okay in places like denmark what happens is you simply have human beings who have uh... increasingly cast off all moral and ethical restraint they may look really good but they're actually depraved and they are they are basically giving free reign to uh... to sinful desires of all sorts And what happens is, in the initial practice, it'll make you feel good, it'll make you happy, and so on and so forth, but eventually it'll leave you miserable. And the root problem for Denmark and all of Scandinavia and all of Northern Europe is, they were very powerfully influenced by the Lutheran Reformation that we talked about last month. And Northern Germany became heavily Lutheran, Southern Germany is still very Catholic, but parts of Poland, all of the Netherlands, all of Denmark, and up into Scandinavia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, where it became heavily, heavily Lutheranized. I mean, you had very powerful Lutheran Reformation revivals up there. But by the time you get to the end of the 19th century, ahead of most of the rest of Europe, actually, they had completely ditched their Lutheran and Christian heritage, and Scandinavia is now more post-Christian absolutely secular and even anti-Christian than all the rest of Europe combined. Well, the Scripture says that happy are the people whose God is the Lord. And we do believe in happiness, of course, as evangelicals, as Christians. But our happiness, as you pointed out, the source of the happiness, it's objective, it's found in God himself. We find our pleasure in him. We find our happiness and our holiness as a result of him. And so it's objective first, and it has subjective realities to it as well. We are truly happy in and of ourselves because of our relationship with Christ and not because of the happenstance or the particular set of circumstances that we find ourselves And we're happy even in spite of those, or despite of those types of circumstances. So what happened that the Lutheran influence, apparently they either didn't tell that story, or people just hard-heartedly rejected that and went after their own self-induced happiness. This happens all the time. This is kind of the history of revival. Think about the greatest revival in recorded human history, the last place you would expect God to work. They were the wickedest people in the ancient world. God sent the absolute worst, most failed, you know, most failed prophet of them all, Jonah. I mean, he had to have Jonah swallowed by a fish and swimming into the sea. And yet when Jonah finally is obedient, the fish vomits him out at the end of chapter two and in chapter three of the book of Jonah, He shows up in Nineveh, and he walks through the city for three days, and he's preaching about the one true God. The Assyrians worshipped 2,400 different gods. They were violent, evil, kind of demonic beings. They were involved in human sacrifice. They were the most feared warriors in the ancient world. Their hobby was getting on their chariots and riding out into herds of lions that were running around there in Iraq at that time, because modern-day Iraq is where Nineveh is, the kingdom of Assyria was, and hunting wild lions with spears. Unbelievably dangerous kind of you know overly masculinized uh... bloodsport so these were just the nastiest people in the ancient world of the most feared uh... feared warriors in the great enemies of the jews and so when noah when jonah goes and preaches to them really against his will he still has an attitude he doesn't want the nastiest syrians to become believers in the one true god he wants got the burn them up the entire city is converted and in a million and a half people in the whole city repented in in dust and ashes in the king of uh... of Assyria, the king there at the palace in Nineveh, proclaims a fast, and he tells everyone to repent and to turn to the one true God of the Hebrews, and the entire city is converted! It's absolutely amazing! And Jonah, of course, has a really bad... he's a terrible prophet, and he has a really bad attitude about it. That's what chapter 3 and chapter 4 in Jonah are about. But what's interesting is that a hundred years later, we find in the book of Nahum, which is like the sequel to Jonah, In the Book of Nahum, we have the absolute destruction at Nineveh, and for 2,500 years, no one even knew where the largest city in the ancient world, Nineveh, no one even knew where it was. People began to say it was a myth, there was no such city, and then in the 18th and 19th century, some archaeologists started poking around in these weird-looking hills just north of the Tigris and Euphrates River, they find the gigantic walls of Nineveh, and they've been unearthing it for about two years now, and it's absolutely massive. It's just north of Mosul, where a lot of the fighting in Iraq has been over the last 10 or 15 years. And what that shows you is that the entire city is converted to faith through repentance in the one true God, and within a hundred years, God wipes them off the map. They completely turn around. It may have been one generation, it may have been two, but they completely reject the incredible revelation of God's grace that was brought to them by Jonah, and it's just wiped out. And that's what happened. If you look, you go to where Martin Luther lived, it is very hard to find a Bible-believing evangelical Lutheran there now. Lutheran churches everywhere, but most of them are dead. You're so right. I remember preaching through the Book of Jonah at one point, and I had a very simple outline that covered those four chapters. Chapter 1 with Jonah protesting, Jonah praying in chapter 2, Jonah preaching in chapter 3, and Jonah pouting in chapter 4, where he doesn't like what is taking place. But the central verse to all the Book of Jonah is, salvation is of the Lord. Yes, amen. The sovereignty of God, right? And as you rest, if you want to truly be happy, there's the key to real happiness, resting in the sovereignty of God, right? That's the only way. Everyone that I know of who is depressed, if people come to me for counsel, I'm miserable, I'm unhappy, I'm depressed. I simply start asking them, You know, tell me something that you did for somebody this week. And they look at me, and say, what are you talking about? I'm too busy being depressed to do things for people. Tell me something you did this month that cost you some time or effort or some money or some material value that you have. Well, no, I'm miserable. I'm depressed. It's all about me. Well, there's your problem. When you love God, when you've repented of your sin, You want to do things for other people, and that makes you happy. When you're focused on yourself, and you haven't repented, and you're not a believer, that will leave you miserable in every single case. And there are really no options. It's kind of an iron law of the universe, like gravity, or the relationship between the elements of the electromagnetic spectrum. You can't rearrange x-rays and the visible light spectrum and gamma rays. You can't do it. And you can't ignore the laws of gravity. It works everywhere. And you can't ignore the law of the universe that says salvation is of the Lord, and all happiness and joy is found in Him. at His right hand are pleasures evermore, all the pleasures that humans use to substitute for the pleasures of knowing God and a peaceful relationship founded on His salvation. All those pleasures only lead you to misery. And that's what happened in so many of these countries in Europe, and it's amazing when I take Christians over there, they're blown away by the art and the incredible Christian culture and the Reformed churches and the Catholic churches and even some of the Eastern Orthodox churches. But then they see that the people are miserable because these great buildings have turned into nothing but museums of their past. And they will tell you openly. They'll say, oh, you're Christians. Yeah, well, we used to be Christians, but we're past all that now. We're post-Christian. Oh, boy. Wow, what a terrible, terrible legacy over there now to abandon the real source of happiness, which is found in God Himself. If folks want to find out more about the subject of happiness, just the other day we had Randy Elkhorn on the program, and we talked about his book on happiness. Have you got a chance to read that yet, Dr. Horner? I have not read that. A number of years ago, I taught both of his daughters in one of my classes, and he actually visited the class. I did not recognize him because I'd not seen a photo of him, and he came up and talked to me afterwards, and it was such a, you know his story, such an honor to meet him. But his books on treasure, his books on heaven, all those things are just marvelous. So this is a book I could recommend without even having read it. Yeah, it was a very good interview, and we had a great discussion on the subject of happiness. And we were pointing out a couple of things. One, not only is it for our own self, enjoyment, you know, the Christian end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, and our own enjoyment, but also for drawing others to Christianity, you know, as people see that we are happy and that we, you know, we're thriving and really, truly, deeply satisfied, robustly happy in our wonderful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and all that He's done for us, in us, and through us. then that will serve as the best advertisement that we can do for Christianity. People will see that and be drawn to what it is that makes us happy, even during very difficult or trying times. But thank you very much, Dr. Horne, for talking through this. We won't find happiness there in Denmark, but we can find it in the sacred pages of God's Holy Word. So thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and talking through this today. We really appreciate the work that you do there at the Master's College, and we appreciate you taking time out to talk with us periodically here on the Knowing the Truth radio program. Great, it's great to talk to you again, and I'll probably talk to you in a couple of weeks. Okay, great, Lord willing. We'll see you then. You're listening to Knowing the Truth. To keep this ministry strong and coming your way, you can make a financial gift at knowingthetruth.org by clicking on the Donate button. You've been listening to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling. Knowing the Truth is the outreach ministry of the Mountain Bridge Bible Fellowship located on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest. For more information about the church and radio ministry, visit us on the web at knowingthetruth.org. 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