Alright, so the idea of ethics, when we talk about ethics, we're talking about what is right and what is wrong. you might have noticed that the culture in which we live is a culture that is almost completely devoid of ethics. There's no standard of right and wrong, it seems like. In our culture, it seems to be very similar to what we read about in the days before there was no king in Israel and every man did that which was right in their own eyes. And that seems to be the standard by which the culture in which we live lives by. But how did we get to this point? Because history shows us that there's a regular ebb and flow to ethics, and Christian ethics particularly, and the way that it has an impact on the society that it's in. So you have the upswing from the time when the children of Israel refused God as their king, and demanded a king, and so they got Saul. Saul was hard on them. And then as the kings followed God's decrees and God's law, you saw Israel increase rapidly until the time of Solomon. There was peace, there was prosperity. But in the peace and prosperity, both the king and the culture began denying God's law again. And Solomon began worshipping other gods and accumulating to himself horses and all the things that God had told the kings not to do. And what do we see in the very next generation? We see a decline in the culture. We see that the kingdom split and Israel went downhill from there. We can see a very similar thing in Western civilization, if I can still say that. I don't know if you all saw where an Ohio senator is under fire for defending the term Western Civilization. Civilization isn't only in the Western world. The Eastern world is civilized too. But you understand what I mean when I say Western Civilization. We're talking about the society that was built out of a Christian ethical mindset through the Reformation and the time of the Puritans and then you had the Enlightenment which began to erode a lot of that and it seems to be quickly going downhill ever since then. So how did we get into this position. Where did the decline of ethics in the political realm, first off, we'll look at, come from, and then we'll look at the decline of ethics in the religious realm. In the first century, we'll go all the way back, because to deal with Western civilization, to deal with the Western world, you have to go all the way back to the first century when Christianity, as The New Testament reveals it in its fullest form as it came into being. The early church began formulating creeds, what they believed. And that's what a creed means, is I believe. And so, they formed these creeds. And you had the Apostles' Creed, you had the Nicene Creed, you had the Athanasian Creed. And all of these were just very, very basic statements of faith. And one of the most basic statements of faith is that they believed that Jesus was Lord of all, that He was coming back one day to judge the quick and the dead. And by those two statements, that Jesus was Lord of all and that He was coming back to judge the quick and the dead, they were saying that they believed that Jesus and His Word was the final standard of right and wrong, and that Jesus therefore had the authority, when He came back, to judge what had been done right and what had been done wrong. Therefore, as the early church began to formulate its creeds, it simultaneously reformulated civil law. Because not only were the Christians having influence in the political realm. When I say that, I mean people who were in positions of political influence and authority were being converted. But also the very culture, the very fabric of society was being changed. The statement of the disciples of Jesus was that these are the men who've turned the world upside down. They've been changing the culture in all of its forms. And so, civil law began to change. Western liberty Constitutionalism and its ideas of morality all stem from the early creeds of Christendom. That's where it comes from. Now, when I say Constitutionalism, I don't mean that the United States Constitution is the final standard. Just the opposite. I mean that when a society sets itself up based on a rule of law, which is what constitutionalism is. You realize the U.S. Constitution isn't the only constitution. The state of Alabama has a constitution. All 50 states, I think, have constitutions. Churches have constitutions, organizations. The idea, though, is that the constitution gives us a basis to go back on as to what we believe the standard is for life and practice. Before Christianity began to have this impact on society, you didn't see this. You saw one of two or three things. You either saw a complete dictatorship, a monarchy. Right and wrong was what the king said it was. And depending on what mood he was in, it might be different from what it was yesterday. Or you had democracy. Democracy is not a particularly Christian ideal. The Greeks were very democratic. The Romans were very democratic. However, democracy, as has been often noted, is nothing more or less than mob rule. If the 51% decide they want to steal everything that the 49% have, they can do it. That's democracy. They vote themselves benefits, and that's what our country is becoming. Just mob rule. But constitutionalism, the idea that there is a final, unchanging standard by which we hold ourselves to, and it doesn't matter who the king is, and it doesn't matter who the representatives are, and it doesn't matter what the majority of the people want. The Constitution, this final standard, is the thing that we continue to go back to. was born out of the early creeds of Christianity. The idea that Jesus Christ is Lord of all and He will be the judge of the quick and the dead in the final day. So this question, it may not be the appropriate time to ask it, Somebody asked me one time if I believe the Constitution was a living document, and I said, no, I don't. I believe that it is a fixed document that isn't growing or evolving. And it was just because you start reinterpreting it. So even though there were new creeds that came out, they were addressing other topics. Would we say a creed is not a living document? Right, in the very liberal definition of the term. I heard somebody say, I don't remember who it was one time, someone was asked one time, do you believe the Constitution is a living document? He said, well, I don't believe it's a dead document. So, I mean, it depends on how you're interpreting that, I guess. But yeah, the very liberal definition that judges and representatives can change it to fit the culture, that just comes back to a democracy once again. If the 51% want to change the rule of law, they can change the rule of law. There's nothing objective, there's nothing final. And as I said, we see that in today's world. On both sides of the aisle, let's not fool ourselves, for 99% the Republicans aren't any better than the Democrats and the Democrats aren't any better than the Republicans. They both want to change the law to fit whatever their notions are in the current culture. So yeah, absolutely, we believe that the creeds and the constitutions are a fixed document. Now, as I said, that doesn't mean that those fixed documents are of divine origin. If they were written by men, then they're also held to that same final standard of God's Word. But the idea of constitutionalism really rests on the fact that it is the standard and you can't change the standard just because you want to. If you don't like how long an inch is, that doesn't mean you can change it to be something different. So we say that Western liberty, constitutionalism, and morality all stem, all were born from the early creeds of Christendom. And we say this as the alternative to the messianic claims of the secular state. Because this is where Rome was when Christianity came on the scene and began influencing the culture and changing the culture and the politics around the culture. Everybody viewed Rome in this state of Messiah. We want bread. Who do we ask for bread? Rome. Ask Caesar for bread. We want entertainment. Who do we ask for entertainment? Rome. Caesar. Ask him to provide us entertainment. Does that sound like any culture that you're familiar with? We want health care. Who do we ask? Ask the government. You need SNAP benefits. Who do you ask? Ask the government. They're the Savior. They're the Messiah. They're going to come in and rescue us. Christianity is diametrically opposed to those ideas. The Roman Senate had to approve the gods of Rome. So, Rome officially worshipped all kinds of gods, and any time a new god wanted to be added to the pantheon, the Senate had to confirm it. Now, is that irony or what? That the state said, okay, yes, you can have this new God. And, of course, that built up all kinds of lobbyists and things of that nature. We see in the Scriptures that the fervor over Diana wasn't really a religious fervor so much as it was the silversmiths' lobby fervor. They were afraid that they were going to lose their living if people stopped buying these little silver statues of Diana. And that's what it always leads to. It always leads back to making a god of ourselves. So, whereas the Roman Senate had to approve the gods, the Christian creeds affirmed God's authority over all creation, attributing all authority in heaven and on earth to Christ. So, the Senate doesn't get to tell us that we can worship Christ, or that Christ is good for us to worship, but Christ tells us that we all ought to worship Him. And therefore, the creeds The implication from this statement, none of the creeds, if you read the Nicene Creed or the Apostles' Creed or the Athanasian Creed, none of them address politics and the civil magistrate or anything. That's not what they were trying to do. But as you began to work those ideas out, well then what does that mean? If all authority in heaven and earth rests in Christ, then what does that mean for the civil magistrate? What does that mean for Caesar? What does that mean for the centurion? Well, it means that they all only have derived authority as a minister of justice under Christ and His Word. Christ has all authority. Therefore, the only authority that the civil magistrate has is what has been given to him by the one who has all authority. He doesn't get to be the final standard for anything, but he has to go back to the one who has all authority, which is Jesus Christ. The political source of law, then, in Western civilization traced back, not to Caesar, but ultimately to Christ and God's law. This was the working out of these early creeds. Who was it that famously had it on their desk, the buck stops here, one of the US presidents, you know? Well, no, it doesn't. It doesn't stop with the president. It doesn't stop with Caesar. It doesn't stop with the judiciary. It stops with God and His Word. They're the ones who finally have the say over all other authorities. During a time of increasing nominalism and dualism in the Church of Rome... You have Rome as the world power. You have Christianity exploding onto the scene. People who are in Caesar's household begin to be converted. We see people mentioned in Rome who we now know through extra-biblical documents were actually treasurers of some of these major cities and things of that nature. And then, of course, Constantine, For better or for worse, whatever you think of him, whether he's actually a Christian or not, he makes Christianity completely legal and accessible and actually the preferred religion of Rome in the 300s. And so then you have Christianity. Well, as we all know, that quickly devolved into Roman Catholicism, as we would call it or know it today. The papacy and authority began to be the main theme of the Church. Not righteousness, not justice, but power. And the Pope wielded power, and the bishops, and the cardinals, and everyone else in that framework, got some piece of the pie. And in about the 1300s, there was a couple of men in the Roman church, and I use that church very loosely, as Doug was talking to me about. Not Christ's true church, but they call themselves the church, right? There was a couple of men in that system, He began to heavily lean on this idea of nominalism. And what nominalism is, is it's one of those philosophies that you or I can sit here in the real world and say, this doesn't make any sense. But you sit up in a study long enough, and you just sit there thinking long enough, and don't actually interact with people in the real world, and you begin to come up with these crazy ideas, that's nominalism. Nominalism was the idea that there is nothing in the plural or the abstract, but only on the individual level. And I had to do a lot of research on this to really wrap my head around what they were trying to say. But basically what they were saying is, you can't say theft is a sin. Because both theft and sin are abstracts, they're plurals. You can only deal with the individual case-by-case basis. You can only say that this one act wasn't right for that situation. But you can't categorize everything largely. As I was beginning to look into nominalism and how it's played out today, you know what the most common form of nominalism is today? There's no such thing as male and female. There's only individuals. And we look at you and we say, well, all men have this body part and all women have this body part, and so we put them in these big categories, but really there's no such thing as categories. There's only the individual. And when you begin to break this down in philosophy, one of the most famous illustrations of it is, if you have a cat here, And the cat's named Leo. So we have a cat sitting on the table, and it's the cat's name, and we say, this is Leo. And then you chop Leo's foot off. Well, is he still Leo? Well, he can't be Leo, because Leo had all four feet. And this cat doesn't have a foot. And is that foot that's sitting apart from him Leo? Well, it has to be. You said it was Leo five minutes ago. You see what I mean? In the real world, it really doesn't make any sense. But you get these philosophers who begin theorizing about these things and saying you have to break it down to the most basic level. You can't even say this is a cat. You have to say, all these parts, all these atoms, all these molecules, and we categorize them when they're together as a cat. It's silliness, but when you apply it to ethics and morals, you see how it appeals to men. That guy, Pierre Bourret, one of the philosophers in the 1500s, he was arguing about these philosophers who were, at the time, saying, if you've got a rope tied to a goat, Or is the rope leading the goat or is the man holding the rope leading the goat? And philosophers would sit for hours in today and debate. who's really leading the GOAT. And he said, I don't know, just get the GOAT out of my garden. They don't care who's leading, because they won't deal in real world application. He didn't call it real world application, but that's exactly what it is. And that is amazing. I can't help but hear Josh, and I'll say something nice, because he's been here, but I can't help but hear when Josh says that, to me it goes back to the old, who's in authority? It's only about the authority. That's right. In the beginning, and God said, and the devil come on and say, did he say? Right. And nowadays they say, God said I'm a man. No, I'm not. Right. It doesn't matter how much evidence you got against you, you know. And it's like he was talking about the gods. You think about the gods are wrong. That's what we got when you got authority saying I can kill a baby. Because I'm overruling that oath of authority. That's right. And when I got that, in the same manner, when you got a woman who said, I'm just going to preach, my husband give me authority to. Well, the only problem with that, the husband don't have that much authority. That's right. And yet, that's never brought into the scene. Yeah. That's what it all boils down to. There's a lot of terms and all this, just like you do with football stadiums. Yep. And what are they doing? worshiping their God. And that's what we're going to be talking about all semester long, is how do we boil this down to the final standard, the final authority, so that it's not this nominalism. You can't say I'm wrong. If it's right for me, you can only judge it on a situation by situation. You can't say murder is always wrong. You can't say homosexuality is always wrong. That was nominalism. So that was creeping into the Roman Catholic system. And on the other hand you had dualism. Now today we call dualism, you may have heard of it, you may not have, two kingdom theology. It's the idea that there's the spiritual kingdom and there's the secular kingdom. And the two shall never meet. And so what the pope said and what the church did should have no saying, no impact on what the king did in the civic realm. And so you had these clashes between popes and kings as the king would want to get a divorce and the pope would say, no, you can't get a divorce. And there were these battles that were raging. And so dualism came on the scene. What's done in religion stays in religion. What's done in politics stays in politics. And the two should never meet. And there's theologians, it's a very popular idea in today's realm, that says just that. You may have heard it called the separation of church and state, and that's not what we're talking about because there is a separation of church and state that's proper. But what they're saying is a separation of God and state. God doesn't get to have a say in what the state does. And so you had those two philosophies, nominalism and dualism, that began to have an impact systematized Church of Rome, and therefore politics began to be assigned to a realm independent of God's laws and God's norms. Because you can't say something's wrong across the board. It has to be taken situation by situation. Plus, the church shouldn't have any say. And therefore, God shouldn't have any say in what the state does. And so that began all happening in the 13, 14, 15. That's really when it began to really manifest itself. That's not when it began. It began a lot earlier than that. So that's what began affecting politics and the culture until it got to the point around the Reformation that authority was so tied up in Rome and these secular monarchies and they were two sides of the same coin. It was godless, lawless power grab. Every man can do what's right in his own eyes. The Reformation took a decided stand against this trend. So, during the Reformation, it amazes me today how many people say, oh, I believe the Reformed faith. And all they mean is they believe in election. But the Reformation was about so much more than that. It affected every part of life. And one of the parts of life that it affected was challenging this two-headed monster of antinomianism, those who are against law, and that was the nominalism. There shouldn't be any laws, nothing can be said in abstract or in plural, it all has to come down to the individual. And on the other side, Statism. Totalitarianism. The idea that one man can wield absolute, complete control. And however his mood and whims change, the law changes. And the Reformation said both of those are wrong. The French Enlightenment that says everybody needs to have an equal amount of power is wrong. And the totalitarian state of Rome and England with their monarchies and one person deciding what's right and wrong, they're wrong. All authority belongs to Jesus Christ. They went back to the Word of God. They went back to those early creeds of Christianity. They said there is a standard, and that standard is God and His Law. Here's one of the confessions of faith, one of the earliest ones from the Reformation. It's the Geneva Confession of Faith, written in 1536. So this was almost 150 years before the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith came out. This was really early on in the train of confessions. And this is one of the things that was in that Confession of Faith. Because there is only one Lord and Master, who has dominion over our consciences, And because His will is the only principle of all justice, we confess all our life ought to be ruled in accordance with the commandments of His holy law, in which is contained all perfection of justice, and that we ought to have no other rule of good and just living, nor invent other good works to supplement it, than those which are there contained, as follows, in Exodus 20, I am the Lord, by God, which brought thee, and so on." That's the only thing, we confess, that's the only thing that can lead to good and holy and just living, and no other invention outside of that can supplement it, can add to it, or come alongside it. John Calvin in his commentary on Psalm 72 said this, By the terms righteousness and judgment, the psalmist means a due and well-regulated administration of government. So when you read the Psalms and David talks about righteousness and judgment, he's talking about a correct administration of government, which he opposes to the tyrannical and unbridled license of the heathen kings. who, despising God, rule according to the dictates of their own will." So Calvin says, even back in the psalmist days, David understood that the heathen kings just thought they could do whatever they wanted. From the words we learn, by the way, that no government in the world can be rightly managed but under the conduct of God and by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But in requesting that the righteousness and judgment of God may be given to kings, he reminds them that none are fit for occupying that exalted station except so far as they are formed for it by the hand of God." David teaches us that people would enjoy prosperity and happiness when the affairs of the nations were administered according to the principles of righteousness. I just read my personal devotions Think yesterday, that proverb about righteousness exalteth a nation, but iniquity and wickedness is a shame to any people. That's basically what he's saying. But it is a truth which ought to be borne in mind that kings can keep themselves within the bounds of justice and equity only by the grace of God. For when they are not governed by the spirit of righteousness proceeding from heaven, their government is converted into a system of tyranny and robbery. That was Calvin, commenting on Psalm 72. That's what I'm saying, with all the kings that we've had, that it is the perfect system. But we lack one king. We ain't got the perfect king. That's right. And that's what man is trying to feed himself into, God's place. What's the point of having riches if you can't have that? Then you turn it in the black and you say, humble yourself. If you realize somebody else is looking over you, the more you have, the more you'll be responsible for it. That's right. So what's the point? That's right. I love the belief that there are many forms of government that can work as long as they're all governed by the principles of Scripture. You can have a monarchy. You can have a constitutional republic. You can, I guess for a while, even have a democracy, or maybe even some kind of socialism, as long as it all follows the dictates of God's Word. I guess that would rule out socialism. Because from the beginning we see so many different forms of government in the law. The judges, the kings. I mean, even at the time when there were no judges. The sin of man's heart. I want a king. Pride of his heart. And you don't take into consideration, is this the way the Lord wants it done? You don't become a king for long, you bet! Even the kings were blessed by God, though. Your point is well taken. It's just, we know the sinfulness of man will take any system and totally pervert it if God's not. And that's why I think there was a lot of wisdom in the way that our government was set up initially with the checks and the balances that it was supposed to have, but we've pretty much eroded all of that by now with the tyranny of the judiciary and the overstep of the... It started out the same way. That's right. Just like you said, they had many gods. We have the same thing in our system now when you've got people, our politicians appealing to Roe versus Wade and stuff. And they'll tax us for it, give them the money and they'll turn around and buy their influence. That's right. So you've got a double whammy there. William Penn, one of the early founders in America said, men must choose to be governed by God or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants. And that's where we're at. Absolutely. We've chosen to be ruled by tyrants because we refuse to be governed by God. And in some countries, such as France during the French Revolution, which was one of the ugliest and bloodiest times in Europe's history, or Russia, where you had the overthrow of the government there, you've seen revolution and civil war and complete breakdown of society being the final result of Enlightenment thinking. In other cultures, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, it's been a slow decline into social pragmatism and messianic ideals. So we've slowly, over time, began to take on this idea that the state is viewed as the sole originator of law. And it's legislation. So how many times is that the appeal of someone like Roe v. Wade? Well, that's the law. And so you ask Brett Kavanaugh, he's being interviewed to go... That's the precedent that's been set. That's just the way that it is. Well, that's humanistic thinking. That's Enlightenment thinking. The state gets to decide what's right and wrong. If it's legal, then it's legal. That makes it right. But that's not the case. But that's the system that we've come to. That's the point that we've come to. And therefore the legislation of the state aims to create a perfect social order. That's what they sell to us. That's the bill of goods they're constantly telling us. We want to rehabilitate the criminal We want to redistribute the wealth through pervasive welfare. We need to be the guardians of the world. We need to be giving foreign aid to all of these different countries. And all of this is done irrespective of justice and questions of moral obligation, in order to realize the higher principle of love. Wow. It doesn't really matter that the money that we're giving to this country, they're killing Christians, they're a totalitarian state, they're persecuting their own people. We need to love them enough to give food to them when they're starving. We do it here in our own country. We need to love the sluggard enough to make sure that even if he won't work, he can still eat. Because we need to love him like that. We need to love the criminal such that he never learns that there's really any ramifications to his crimes. We just need to rehabilitate him to be a good citizen. I was watching a documentary the other day on chain gangs. They used to take prisoners and chain them together and they'd walk them down the side of the road to clean up the streets or they'd have them dig ditches or whatever the case may be. I remember when I first moved to Alabama in 1999-2000, that was still a thing. You'd still see it from time to time. That's the thing. The argument was, I was watching this documentary, that work should never be used as a punishment. that these people were already being punished by having to go to prison and therefore to make them work on top of it was like double jeopardy. You were giving them a double sentence. We need to love these people enough that we won't make them work. to pay back their debt. Isn't that the same thing we've got going on when we elect two Senators? It's for surreal law and they cover up their heads coming in saying they're not going to be submitted to a man while they're being submitted to a man that won't let them walk ahead of them if they're in their country. Yeah, that's right. It's so mixed up and that's... And we're not going to be, you know, just like the argument down on the wall, I mean down on the border, that we're going to have the United States that everybody's coming to. It won't be like it is if all those people come from down there. And there's people who know better than I do about that. Well, I think we've put ourselves in enough of a problem that we don't need anybody else's help to make it any worse. Israel was took over and different countries took over by people just easing in and taking them over. And sometimes the Lord sent Philip to slaughter all of them and sometimes he let them be taken in by men filtering in under the law. So that's the decline of ethics in the political realm. That's the point that we've come to. And so alongside the messianic state thinking, so right alongside this idea that the state can create this perfect social order by rehabilitating criminals, redistributing the wealth, giving foreign aid to all these other countries, right alongside that, you have the other group of people, and sometimes the same group of people, who is putting this incredible emphasis on personal freedom. If two consenting adults want to get married, who are we to tell them they can't? Shouldn't they have the personal freedom? If two men want to say they're married, if two women want to say... Why is that any of our business? Shouldn't they have the personal liberty to do what they want to do without us telling them how to live their lives Hollywood, the media, the state itself is pushing this message that the highest virtue is being true to yourself. Ever heard that phrase? Just be true to yourself. Just be who you are. Follow your heart. All the other clichés that they use. Individualism and liberty become the only absolutes which govern interpersonal relationships. If me and the fella down the street decide we want to swap wives, who are you to tell us we can't do that? We'll do whatever we want to do. Thus responsibilities and standards of justice come to be seen as shackles. You're inhibiting me from being true to myself, from expressing who I really am inside. We had for the longest time, which was just a sham and a cover up to start with, but the don't ask, don't tell, you know, in the military, if you were a sodomite. They couldn't ask you if you were a sodomite and you weren't supposed to tell if you were a sodomite and you could just stay in the military. But if you ever decided to speak up and that was on you and you got kicked out. And now we've gotten rid of that. Because we believe the most important thing is being true to yourself. Just whoever you are inside The age of enlightened reason, this is the enlightenment thinking, has played itself out into a degenerated ethical state, where violence, slothfulness, and sexual deviance are at an all-time high in Western civilization. Alleged moral neutrality, isn't that what they sell us on? We're morally neutral as a state in politics. We don't want to push any religion. Well, you're pushing the religion of humanism then. You're pushing the religion of individualism. Alleged moral neutrality and lawless assumptions have brought us to the brink of a physical clash between statism and anarchy. And this was written, I forget when, back in the 60s, I think, or something like that. And I thought that was very prophetic, because now you're beginning to actually see that play out in these riots and things of that nature, where we're having literal physical clashes between statism, this totalitarianism, the police state, and the overreach of the government, and anarchy. These people say, I should be allowed to do whatever I want, and if I can't, burn buildings and flip over cars and whatever else I'm going to do. So that's the decline of ethics in the political realm. I'll just keep going straight through. If you all need to get up and use the bathroom or something. So to explain then, when we see the state say y'all have to stop rioting because this policeman was shot or whatever it is. The state's trying to stop that. A riot or something like that. That's not statism. Right. But it would be more like if they're marching for gay rights and the state says, ah, y'all can't do that. And they go, no, we can do anything we want. And the state says, no, you can't. So when they ask the state why not, what's the state's answer? Because we say so. That's the final authority is our wish. Stateism is just that. They're the final authority. And sometimes stateism gets it right. And most of the time, and I could probably say all of the time, that statism gets it right. It's because of the holdover that we still have the last traces, the last remnants of this true biblical Christian thinking of law and final morality. I don't know if you've ever heard any of these debates with atheists and things of this nature, when you ask them, what's your final statement? Everybody knows that murdering is wrong. You don't have to be a Christian to believe that. Well, you have to borrow from Christian ethics to believe that. Because there's been lots of pagans who didn't believe that, who believed that it was a dog-eat-dog world. There's no reason in the evolutionary atheistic mindset that murder should be wrong. And so when people make the claim, well, you don't have to be a Christian to be a good person, to be ethically... Well, they're just borrowing Christian ethics. They're just borrowing Christian standards and saying, I don't have to be a Christian to hold to your standards. Well, no you don't, but you have to admit that they're my standards. They're the law of God that tells you that that's right or that's wrong. So when statism cracks down, on gay marriage, on violence against authority, and they say, no, you can't do that. The cracking down against violence is right. That's what the Scriptures tell us that the state is for, to bear the sword against the evildoers. What makes it statism is just that, when you ask them, well, why not? Because we're God. because we say you can't, not because there's a final moral standard that all of us are submitted to, and that is God's Word, God's Law. And so statism is the mentality behind the actions. And ultimately, it always leads to a completely humanistic totalitarian reign. Okay, that answers my question. I can't rattle that down, but that answers my question. there's also been a decline in the religious realm, not just in the political realm. And I think we can fairly say that the decline of ethics in the political realm, more than anything, stems from the decline of ethics in the religious realm. That because, within the religious realm, we haven't held to a final standard, why would we expect there to be anyone in politics who holds to a final standard if those who claim to be Christians don't hold to a final standard? Jesus said that we were the salt of the earth. Now, what is He saying there? He's talking about a preservative. He's talking about something that gives not just flavor, but literally preserves that which it's been salted. If the salt has lost its saltiness, then what good is it except to be trampled underfoot? That's what Jesus said. So if Christianity isn't having a preserving influence on society, He said we were the light we were to be a light, like a city set on a hill, if we're not illuminating the culture with truth, Then, according to Jesus, we're not doing what we've been called to do. We're not good for anything, actually, if we're not willing to instill in the earth, in the world, this preserving, illuminating effect that we're called to have. And because the early church and the Reformers understood this concept, they maintained that Romans chapter 13 was true. that the civil magistrate is a minister of God. And that phrase, minister of God, we call pastors ministers. Even deacons are said to minister. Why? Because the word minister means a servant. It means someone who serves, and therefore the civil magistrate is a servant of God. He's a minister of God. He carries out that which God has ordained. and is therefore responsible to God's authority and God's law. Romans chapter 13 assumes a biblical idea when it says, "...do not be afraid of him, for he does not bear the sword in vain, but is to be the avenger against evildoers." That begs the question to someone outside of biblical ethics, what is evil? If he bears the sword against evildoers, what is evil? Is it whatever the magistrate says is evil, or is he the minister of God to execute judgment against those who do what God calls evil? That's the idea in Romans chapter 13. That's the light and the salt that the early church and the reformers were having on society. They were telling those civil authorities who were converted, now it's your duty to obey God in the realm that you're in, as it would be in any other vocation. However, in modern day, so-called theologians have tried to find any and every reason to deny the duty of the civil magistrate to exercise justice by God's standard. This fellow, Greg Bonson, he lists several semi-modern theologians. I didn't necessarily recognize any of their names, but apparently they were fairly prominent theologians in his day. One's named Reinhold Niebuhr. He taught that Jesus and the apostles thought that the world was about to end, so they didn't speak to a world like ours because they couldn't foresee the world lasting this long. That was his explanation. They thought that the world was about to end. So what they were saying dealt with the Roman system and the way that they interlaced with the Jews and things of that nature. But it doesn't apply to us today because they didn't mean for it to apply to us today. That was their idea. His idea. Paul Ramsey says that Jesus only dealt with the simplest moral solution in person-to-person contexts. And he wasn't trying to say anything about the overarching themes of government and civil authority and magistrates and things of this nature. He was just talking about how you act with your next-door neighbor. Roger Meele says that Jesus' teachings are ahistorical, entirely spiritual, and existential. So we're not supposed to look at them literally, it's just teaching us these broad, good ideas that you're supposed to love your neighbor, and that's a popular one today. That Jesus' teachings are just supposed to be taken in some general, spiritual, mystical sense, completely arbitrary, real rationale. Those three were liberal theologians. And when I say liberal, I don't mean it like liberal and conservative. In the early 1900s, there was the label of liberalism within theology, and that's how those three men would have labeled themselves. Then, kind of opposed to that, you had fundamentalism. And C.I. Schofield is one of, if not the most prominent member of that group. And of course, he taught that God had divided time into seven different dispensations, and in each dispensation, God's dealing with man in regard to his sin and man's responsibility were different in each dispensation. And therefore, We can't be held accountable to the same law that God gave ancient Israel. And really, we can't even be held to the same accountable that Jesus taught while He was here, because that was before Calvary. And we're in the dispensation of grace now, which started after Jesus died. In fact, another famous quote-unquote fundamentalist Charles Ryrie said that the Sermon on the Mount doesn't have any primary application to today, because that was in the other dispensation. That was before the dispensation of grace. So you have supposedly these two opposed ideas, liberalism and fundamentalism, but they're both ultimately doing the same thing. They're saying God's Word really doesn't apply to us today. For whatever reason you want to give it, We can't be held accountable to God's law or God's word because that was for a different dispensation. They couldn't foresee the world lasting this long. It was only meant to be taken in an existential way. Jesus didn't ever deal with that. He only was talking about the way we dealt with our neighbor. Explain away, explain away, explain away. I'm not accountable, I'm not accountable, I'm not accountable. That's what it keeps boiling down to. Lutheranism, the Lutherans, Old Lutheranism held to the three uses of the law, which is what I hold to, is what I'm going to be teaching from here, that the law serves to lead us to Christ, it serves to withhold evil from evildoers, and it serves as a guide to the Christian's conscience. And Old Lutheranism held to that, but modern-day Lutheranism doesn't anymore, as in so many other areas of theology, they've strayed away from that. In fact, he quoted one Lutheran theologian who said that God's law and the gospel are at enmity to one another. And a Christian can never live under both. Let me read to you what he says about that. Paul Altheus is this guy's name, recognizing that the Bible clearly purports to direct Christian living. So he said he's a Lutheran and he recognizes the Bible says it directs us how we live. I mean, he can't really get away from that. attempts to remain true to the Lutheran dichotomy of law and gospel by distinguishing command, God's will for us, from law, a special form of that will. So this one Lutheran theologian said, well, the law is at enmity with the gospel, but there are commands that aren't the law. The commands of God are actually the summons to life and love. That's what the commands are. They're summoning us to life and love. The commands are God's offer to be man's God. God's offering, I'll be your God. And that's His command. I don't know how an offer is a command. A challenge to accept freedom and permission to live in God's love. That's what the commands of God are. Law, by contrast, is what became of God's command through the fall. That's what this Lutheran was teaching. He said, when you have the law, that's the twisted version of God's command. That's the result of sin in the fall. It distorts the command, always accuses man, demands greater purity than the command really does, and applies always and only to the sinner before acceptance of the Gospel. The only time that law applies is before he accepts the Gospel. The Gospel puts an end to the law, and through the Gospel, the law again becomes command. Now, if you're confused, you're in the same boat with me, because you're like, where is he getting the distinction between law and command? Well, listen to what he says next. The arbitrariness of this scheme should be obvious, and indeed it was obvious to Altheus himself. For he admits that the distinction between law and command cannot be derived from the terms themselves as used in Scripture. So he says, you can't read Scripture and find the difference between law and command. I just came up with these two different definitions, but I realize if you read the Bible, you don't see the difference. The law is interchangeable with command and applied to the Christian life at points in Scripture. He said, I realize that that's the way the Bible says it, the actual contents of law and command are identical. The law cannot be distinguished from command by the law's negative form, since gospel commands take negative form also. Don't be like the world, that's a gospel command, so you can't say that the law is the only one that's negative. And the command with life and love is still heard in the law. So, you can try to draw these distinctions, but in the end, you end up sounding like a fool, because that's not what the Bible teaches at all. Alpheus also declared, the same Lutheran theologian, And I realize I'm reading you all this to show you how far man will go, even in the religious realm, to disassociate himself from God's law. So I'm reading you this as something not to believe. This is a foolish rendering of it. This is what he said, though. The Christian ethic is an ethic of the Spirit. This guidance by the Holy Spirit implies that God's concrete commanding cannot be read off from a written document. You can't read God's commands by a written document. You just have to be led by the Spirit. I must learn afresh, every day, what God wants of me. For God's commanding has a special character for each individual. Well, that's useful. Nobody can hold me accountable if it's just what is for me. It doesn't apply to anybody else. It is always contemporary, always new. How about that one? God commands me and each person in a particular way, in a different way than He commands others. And His command is spoken afresh in each situation. Does that sound like nominalism we were talking about before? Every situation is different. Nobody can be held to the same law, the same standard. The living and spiritual character of the knowledge of what God requires of me in the present moment must not be destroyed by rules and regulations." So if I just feel like God's leading me in the present moment, to commit adultery, then you can't give me a written document that says, thou shalt not commit adultery and destroy that present knowledge that I have from God by those rules and regulations. That's where he's going with this. And this is the decline of ethics in the religious realm. This is so-called theologians. People who are so-called are studying God and His Word. That's right. Absolutely. I heard one man say, the Spirit of God never leads you to disobey the Word of God. And basically, what that Lutheran theologian was saying was just the opposite of that. God can lead me to whatever He wants me to, and there's no rules or regulations or written Word that can go against that. Man don't need God. And I find that's the opposite. Because we weren't here. I can be rebellious, I can do all I want to do, and it won't change his stance. It won't change his being. I don't understand that. Man do. So in summary, now that we've looked at the decline of ethics in the political realm, the decline of ethics in the religious realm, man wrote about the urgent necessity for a biblical social ethic. So all of this history, everything I've been talking about tonight is the introduction. I'm telling you, in a sense, why we need to return to a final standard, a final biblical ethic. And it's as this one Dr. Hooft said, It is strange that after these many centuries of church history, we have to admit that in this respect, particularly here where applying God's Word and God's Law to every area of life, in this respect, the Bible is still very largely a closed book. And what he means by closed there is not been studied or applied. There haven't been a lot of expository works written or preached on this Topic. We have only the vaguest ideas about its message concerning the abiding realities of social and political life. We operate with a few obvious texts or a few general principles, but we know next to nothing about the biblical witness with regard to such basic elements of our common life as property, justice, work, soil, money." And how true that is. We've completely given all of those areas over to secular philosophy. If someone asked you to defend the principle of personal property and personal ownership from the Bible, could you do that? Do you go to the Bible and say, well, this is why I believe that it's important for there to be personal property and ownership that isn't overruled by the state like we have in our current society? If someone asked you to defend from the Bible, what's the biblical concept of money? What's the biblical concept of true justice? You hear that word thrown a lot around in our society. But what does the Bible say about justice? What really defines justice? What's the biblical doctrine of work, of the soil? When it comes to these getting our hands dirty, regular, everyday topics, many times we've completely given that over to the secular world and we act as though the Bible really doesn't speak to everything necessary for life and godliness. when the Scripture witnesses of itself that it does. It gives us everything necessary for that. Throughout these lectures, I'm going to be using that term I mentioned at the beginning of theonomy. Don't be scared by that. There's a lot of people in today's culture who are adamantly opposed to that term, as we've just been discussing. What we mean literally is theonomos, God's law. That's what those two words mean, theonomy. It means the law of God. And by theonomy, we will mean that verbalized law of God which is imposed from outside man and revealed authoritatively in the words of Scripture. That's all we mean when we say theonomy. We mean the final standard imposed not from within man, not from within any magistrate, but revealed authoritatively in the words of Scripture. And therefore, while we will be dealing with moral and political aspects or implications of scriptural passages, we forthright reject any reduction of the sacred message to moralism or politics. So we're going to be talking about ethics in this class over the next several weeks. We're going to be talking about morality and how it is involved in politics. But don't take that to mean that we're saying that's all the Bible is. The Bible is not just a book of rules, a book of laws, a book of how politics ought to run. It's a book for all of life. And politics are included in that. Ethics are included in that. But we're not reducing it down to just that. Although the moral and political effects and teachings of the Scripture can not be excised or ignored, we can't just push them out and ignore them. The central thrust of the Bible is recognized to be the accomplishment and application of salvation to God's people. So we're not denying that. We're not saying that the main theme isn't Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, and the revelation of that. We recognize that to be the central and final thrust of the Bible. However, we're saying included in that is this final standard of faith and practice. The commandments, many of which are found most explicitly in the Old Testament, are not mere artifacts in a religious museum, nor are they ideals suspended over an age of parentheses and appropriate only for the coming day of consummation. They are the living and powerful Word of God directing our lives here and now. So we read that Geneva Confession that says, we believe that we're ruled by particularly those words written in Exodus chapter 20. And I told you, Schofield and Ryrie would say, well that's just for some past day. Many of those who want to make it existential say, that's just for a coming day. That's just to be realized in heaven in its full form. But we say, It's for every day. It's for every age. It's for us here. So, in two weeks, when we come back, we'll be going to Matthew. So we're going to be talking about God's Law. Maybe you'd think we'd go to Exodus, but we're not going to. We're going to go to Matthew, and we're going to talk about the abiding validity of the Law. Ryrie would say, Matthew chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount, doesn't apply to us either. But hopefully you're with me that we absolutely deny and denounce that and say that Exodus and Matthew and Revelation and Genesis are all equally for our admonition. Before you pray, Donna that came to church with her last Wednesday night, she just got back from the hospital. Oh no. Absolutely, sure will. And then Eden and Debbie weren't with us tonight because they're not feeling well, so we'll pray for them too.