In just a moment, Generations with Kevin Swanson. But first, this, The Worldview in 5 Minutes. It's Wednesday, April 22nd, in the year of our Lord, 2015. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes. I'm Adam McManus. Franklin Graham is calling for a ban on immigration of Muslims to the U.S. from terror nations and said Obama should be held responsible for ISIS. The Christian Post reported Graham, leader of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, spoke out the day after Islamic State militants released the new mass murder video of Libyan Christians. Graham posted on Facebook Monday, Can it be that the world is no longer as shocked by Christians having their heads cut off and then ISIS proudly proclaiming this on video? Such news should leave us horrified and nauseated. The government needs to recognize Islam for the danger it is." Franklin Graham said he held the president responsible for ISIS for creating a power vacuum in Iraq by withdrawing troops too early. urging immediate action. He added, quote, declare a war on ISIS, use special forces, take air action, put boots on the ground, unquote. Egypt's ousted president is getting much more than blame. He's getting 20 years in prison. Mohamed Morsi was sentenced to prison in Egyptian criminal court Tuesday on charges linked to the killing of protesters in 2012. Morsi, the country's first freely elected leader since Mubarak was ousted in 2011, escaped receiving a death sentence in the case, which Islamists derided as a, quote, farce, unquote. MiddleEastEye.net reports 1,500 acts of political violence in Egypt during the first quarter of 2015. There's an upside to this, however. According to Victor Atala from Middle East Reformed Fellowship, increasing numbers of Muslims are disenfranchised with the violence and are drawn to the true Christian faith. And we are living in very special days when we see scores of Muslims attracted to the gospel of God's grace in Christ. It is a fact that growing numbers are disenchanted with Islam. The reality is that the numbers are growing and they are unprecedented for the last 1400 years. The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, is steaming toward the waters of Yemen. This is part of a mission to beef up security and join other American ships that are prepared to intercept any Iranian vessels carrying weapons to the Houthi rebels. According to the Associated Press, Navy officials said the carrier Roosevelt was moving through the Arabian Sea to intercept a convoy of about eight Iranian ships headed toward Yemen and possibly carrying arms. There are about nine U.S. warships in the region, including cruisers and destroyers, carrying board and search teams. Members of the March for Marriage are on a mission of their own this week The Christian Examiner reported event organizers feel this year could be their most significant to date. This Saturday's march is scheduled just three days before the Supreme Court hears vital arguments about marriage. They will decide the constitutionality of state marriage amendments, defining the family institution as between one man and one woman. The Family Research Council sent a press release saying, quote, Jesus said, From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh. What therefore God has put together, let no man put asunder. The March for Marriage is scheduled to start at 12 noon this Saturday, April 25th in front of the U.S. Capitol. Learn more at marriagemarch.org. USA Today reported Christian football star turned sports analyst Tim Tebow is returning to the NFL. Tebow, who signed a contract with the Philadelphia Eagles Monday, said only God knows what he'll do. Speaking to KSAZ-TV in June of 2014, he expressed a desire to make a comeback by faith in God. I don't know what my future holds, he said, but I know who holds my future. God holds the future of Catholic Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City St. Joseph as he voluntarily resigns his office. CNN reported Tuesday Finn, who has remained on the job for three years after becoming the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official convicted in the church's long-running sex abuse scandal, submitted his resignation to Pope Francis. Finn was convicted of failing to report child sexual abuse by a priest under his authority. He served two years probation but received no jail time or fines. Two churches in North Carolina were tagged with pro-homosexual messages and sustained thousands of dollars worth of damage over the weekend. Bales Memorial Wesleyan Church in Jamestown and Grace Baptist of Greensboro had their windows smashed, flowers pulled out of the ground, and parking signs taken out. Spray-painted slogans covered the outside of the churches, which were also hit with eggs, silly string, and toilet paper. May the vandals be rewarded according to their deeds. And that's The World View in five minutes on this Wednesday, April 22, 2015 AD. I'm Adam McManus. Seize the day for Jesus Christ. Welcome to another edition of Generations Radio. I'm Adam McManus, in for Kevin Swanson on GenerationsWithVision.com. A unique guest today, his name is Lou Palakis, author of Faith on Earth? He's not the typical Christian author, a retired electrical engineer, retired back in 2002, a serious student of God's Word since his conversion back in 1974, ordained as an elder in the Christian Reformed Church, and very influenced by R.J. Rushduni, the late R.J. Rushduni at the Chalcedon Foundation, where he discovered post-millennialism and Christian reconstruction, doctrines he believed reflect a truly biblical Christian faith. Now, he's been married to his wife, Joan, since 1955. They live in Florida. He has two children, seven grandchildren, and five, count them, five great-grandchildren, He's 83 years of age, feeling good, feeling strong. Let's get right to this verse, Luke 18, eight. Nevertheless, when the son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? Lou, the $64,000 question of your book is, will he? The answer is yes. He will find faith. Man bears responsibility, you write, for the maintenance of the faith, and second, the presence or absence of faith on earth when he returns depends on man. How do we walk that theological tightrope between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? Too many people fail to walk the tightrope, and they lean in one direction or the other. We know that God ordains all events that occur. God is sovereign, and everything that happens is part of God's purpose for history. But within that purpose, we, as members of the body of Christ, as His servants on earth, we have responsibility to act. This is what we have failed to do. In many respects, we are a shell of what Christians ought to be, because we have dropped the ball. Christ has, in the Great Commission, told us that we need to teach the nations to obey His commandments, which implies that we need to teach His law to the nations, because His commandments are His law. But it also includes the gospel. What we have done as Christians is we have pursued the gospel message but neglected the law message. And so we have fallen short in that regard. If I gave you the chance to ask 100 Generations Radio listeners, when and where did Christianity originate? I think 99 out of 100 would say 2,000 years ago in the city of Bethlehem with the star overhead with the birth of Jesus Christ. And frankly, to be honest, before having read your book, Faith on Earth, available at faithonearth.net through Amazon, I would have said the same thing. It never occurred to me, practically speaking, that Christianity really began many years before with Adam and Eve. Yes, it began with Adam and Eve. That's true, because Adam and Eve obeyed God. We could say it began again with Moses, because Moses gave us the law. And Moses, you could say, was a Christian, because he believed in Christ. He wrote about Christ. At that time, the Messiah that was looked for, he was not going to come for another 2,000 years, but he was still the Lord of the faithful of Israel at that point in history. You write, The Israelites of Moses' day look forward to the coming of the Messiah, the anointed one, to whom all the sacrifices offered by the Israelites pointed. And you cite a number of verses which indicate that many of the patriarchs from Moses to Abraham were themselves believers, not just in, quote-unquote, a Jewish God, but in the one true God who was the triune God from the beginning. He didn't become the triune God at the point of the Incarnation. He didn't become the triune God at the point of Pentecost. He was the triune God from the beginning of time, as we can understand time. Of course, God is outside of time, but he was always the triune God, is the point. Yes, from eternity. God has always been Triune, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The coming of Christ in the Incarnation was a decision that the Triune God made actually before the Earth was formed. God knew that Adam and Eve would sin, and He knew that a Savior would be necessary, and that Savior could only be God. God the Son was the one chosen to be the Christ of the New Testament. In the book of Genesis itself, at the very beginning, the reference that God makes to himself is not me or myself, but us and we. Yes, it's a form of the Hebrew which indicates plurality, and it's a plurality greater than two. When we read in the New Testament, primarily in the book of Acts, of many coming to faith in Christ, most of whom were Jews, 3,000 souls in Acts 2.41, 5,000 in Acts 4.4, a great company of the priests, obedient to the faith, Acts 6.7, you write, these were not converts in the true sense of the word. They merely returned to the faith of their fathers. and acknowledge Christ as their Messiah. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul said when he gave his witness to the Emperor that he had always obeyed the faith, the original law of the Old Testament. You're right, the idea that the Christian faith was alive and well more than a thousand years before Jesus was born may sound strange to modern ears. But what is Christianity other than faith in the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and wasn't ancient Israel founded on just that faith? Paul is defending, in Acts 24, 14, the Christian faith, which the Jewish leaders were calling heresy, as being the logical continuity of the ancient faith found in the Law and the Prophets. And he said, But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the Law and in the Prophets. You know, I think in many ways too many of us self-identified evangelical Protestant Christians, Lou Pamakis, have blinders on of sorts, even when we read the New Testament with all these references to both the ancient Jewish history itself and specific texts from the Old Testament. Yes, that's true. We've had a change in theology. If you go back a couple hundred years, you'll find that these theologies that are prevalent today, and I'm talking about premillennialism and amillennialism, they were there, but they were not reflective of the bulk of Christianity. The main thrust was what we call postmillennialism. Much the way Europe is no longer known as Christendom, America has renounced its convictions in terms of the Bible many years ago, in large measure. J.C. Ryle, who was a British Christian writer, spoke last century of the Christianity in England. It was like a very broad lake, but it was only inches deep. Today, that lake has just about evaporated. What we see in America today is very similar. We have a great deal of Christianity. There are many Christians in America, 60%, 80%, some very high percentage. But the depth of understanding and the depth of that faith is only inches deep. It's evaporating and it's ineffective. I love how you describe the Founding Fathers You write in chapter 2 of your book, Faith on Earth, available at faithonearth.net, the founding fathers that drew up the Constitution, along with the population at large, generally saw the Bible as the basic law book, the Constitution being merely a procedural document that ordered such things as the scope and structure of civil government. well into the 19th century, and I was fascinated by this. Judges in courtrooms, when ready to sentence offenders found guilty by a jury, typically would read a passage of scripture, one pertinent to the case, before passing judgment. This action demonstrated their reliance on the Bible and its relevance to judicial decisions the Christian faith and the Bible dominated the culture and the laws of early America. And now, Leupomachus, it seems to be that Christianity is put on the table next to Islam and atheism and a rabbit's foot, it's all morally equal. In fact, the bumper sticker that probably gets my blood boiling more than most is the one, maybe you've seen it, using the symbols of the various religions, coexist as if they're all equal and they all have the same claim on truth. Well, they're all, in many regards, aside from Judaism and Christianity, they are claiming antithetical premises and theses one to another, so they can't all be true at the same time. This is one evidence of the pluralism in today's society, the idea that there can be all these different religions within one law system. And it's just a fallacious idea. What has to happen is some religion is going to be dominant over time. What you have is humanism, which has basically almost taken over this country. So the pluralism idea is how they get the foot in the door. We have to be tolerant of all these other religions. Then the idea is to eventually eliminate all but their religion, which is humanism or atheism. In chapter nine, entitled pluralism of your book, Faith on Earth, available at faithonearth.net for just seven bucks on Amazon, you write, faith and culture are irrevocably interdependent. Faith informs the culture, and the culture informs faith. And this is what I starred, and I put a big wow next to. Religious pluralism is never permanent, but is characteristic of a culture in transition from one faith to another. This is the condition in America and most of the Western world today. Sadly, writes Lou Pamakis, Christians in this nation and around the world do not appreciate this fact. They have bought into the idea that their faith is something solely between themselves and God. It's a private matter, they say, and hence there's no problem with other people having whatever faith they desire. They reason their faith does not affect me or mine, but this is both wrong and foolish. I was just blown away by this notion that religious pluralism is an indication of transition, because ultimately it's the seesaw tipping away from the predominance of the Christian religion to the predominance of either atheism or humanism. And yet many Christians in the pews of churches across America would celebrate what they think is a positive of pluralism, not realizing it's the next step toward humanism or atheism being supreme. What you had in America, oh, at the time of the writing of the Constitution and the Declaration, you had, I think the figure is 98 point something percent Protestant Christian population. There's been a tremendous change. Today, it is almost reversed. Government, the law, the legal profession, the universities, Christians are almost excluded. This is something unheard of a century earlier. You cite some interesting examples of countries where Christians are being persecuted and raise the question, well, how come these Christians are able to survive and thrive and grow despite the fact that they are truly in the minority? China, for example, southern Sudan, where the Christians are undergoing significant persecution. You write, one major contributing factor to this growth is the uniformity of the faith throughout the families who are isolated and united by the persecution. Others of like faith surround each individual and the youth essentially are not confused with differing religious views. The problem in America, so many of these kids who are raised in loving, supportive, affirming Christian homes go off to college, get corrupted by their liberal professors and their new boyfriend or girlfriend. They walk away from the Christian faith if it was ever real to begin with. But how do you compare and contrast that to these examples in China and southern Sudan where the Christians are being persecuted and yet they're thriving nonetheless? It's a total environment in those countries. The opposition is a hateful enemy that is persecuting them. Everything they come in contact with, other than this enemy, is supportive of the faith. It becomes ingrained in the youth, and they don't lose it. My guest is Lou Pamakis, author of Faith on Earth? You can get the book. It's about 150 pages in length at his website, faithonearth.net, through Amazon for just seven bucks. It's a paperback book and certainly well worth the read. I'm Adam McManus, in for Kevin Swanson on this edition of Generations Radio, found as Generations with Vision. A lot more to talk about is related to the book by Luke Pomacus, Faith on Earth. The mark of a good father, according to Jesus in Matthew 7-11, is that he knows how to give good gifts to his children. He would not give his child a stone or a serpent. He would give him that which is nutritious and helpful. Now Christian parents, if you're like me, you are constantly on the search for good gifts for your children. You're probably tired of cheap China junk and expensive toys that break within a month or two. That's why the Generation staff has spent the last six months scouring magazines, checking out samples, interviewing Christian parents, and identifying the very best books for our children. We look for creative presentations, substantive messages, biblical integrity, identifiable characters, and riveting stories. We have sponsored a child picture book contest called Nurturing Little Hearts, and we begin to publish the very best of children's books over the next year or two. But find good gifts for your children. That's a really good thing. We have an entire new section of children's book selections at our website for good gifts that you can get for your kids. Find it at generationswithvision.com. That's generationswithvision.com. Welcome back to the second half of Generations Radio. I'm Adam McManus, and for Kevin Swanson, my guest, Luke Pamakis, author of Faith on Earth. He is citing the Luke 18 8th passage, When the Son of Man comes, shall he find faith on the earth? And you can get the book for seven bucks through Amazon at faithonearth.net. 150-page paperback. I read it earlier today and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, you note in Chapter 4, entitled, God in Control, that another common failing of modern-day American Christianity is to view the Bible as a book of instructions related primarily to eternal salvation as opposed to life in this world. Where did we go wrong? Well, the absence of law, Christianity is looked at as basically the gospel. Believe in Jesus Christ, you have eternal life, and that's all you need to do. But there are many instructions for Christians from Scripture, where to be the salt of the earth, where to be the light of the world, and in the Great Commission, we have Christ's marching orders for his people. We are to be champions of the truth, and we are to work to bring God's law, as well as the gospel, the law, into the nations. What Jesus said there was, all power is given unto me, and therefore you, my followers, go into these nations of mine and teach them to obey me. So we've got work to do as Christians. That's the missing element. Chapter five, God's plan. You explain something to me that I have always wondered about in my 48 years of life, or at least ever since I was a Christian at the age of seven. I've never quite understood this verse in Genesis, which says when Satan tempted Eve and said, you could be like God knowing good and evil. I thought, well, isn't that good to know good and evil. You basically explain that this is about whether a man or a woman will decide for themselves what is right or wrong, not just knowing good from evil. For example, a drunk might justify his excessive drinking, or an adulterer might attempt to justify his extramarital sex, or a homosexual might attempt to justify subverting God's design somehow. And in so doing, they are making themselves like God, not just knowing good from evil, but determining right from wrong in their own very subjective, morally relativistic way. And that was the very sin of Lucifer himself, wasn't it? Yes, it was. What they were doing was they were saying we can, in ourselves, without God, know good and evil. There's really nothing wrong with knowing good and evil, but it is knowing it in independence of God and dispensing with the need for God. This was where the problem was. Because you write, the ultimate standard of morality is God's eternal character itself, for He is absolutely perfect in His very being. Therefore, all of His actions are good because they flow from His holy character. For example, when we read the Ten Commandments, and we read, Thou shalt not murder, that's because God is life. He's the one who created us, and He created us to be like Himself in as many ways as that's possible. We cannot be infinite and eternal, we cannot have the attributes that are unique to God, but we can be like Him in many ways. How do we do that? We're creatures. We need to recognize that. We can't, for ourselves, decide what's right and what's wrong. We've got to go to our Creator. He sent his son to die for us so that we might be saved, that we might have the kind of life that he designed us to have originally. Fascinating division that you describe between the seat of the woman and the seat of the serpent, setting up a foreshadowing of Christ's victory over Satan. You refer to this in this book, Faith on Earth, in chapter six on the Great Commission. You believe that for too long, Christians in America in particular have watered down what truly the Great Commission even means to simply handing out a tract or saying the sinner's prayer or raising your hand at a Billy Graham crusade. focusing almost exclusively on this vertical relationship between God and man and not recognizing that The Great Commission articulated in Matthew 28 in which Jesus talks about teaching them to do all that I've commanded you. The gospel is broader and greater than just the fire insurance of going to heaven. Yes, the Christian message has been reduced to what is called today the gospel. It is a truncated gospel that is being preached. Become a Christian, you can be saved, you can have eternal life. What's missing is what's foreshadowed in going back to Genesis 3 and verse 15, where God says, we have two seeds. We've got the seed of the serpent, and we've got the seed of the woman. Well, the seed of the woman is Christ, and all those that are in Christ are all Christians. And the seed of the serpent is all unbelievers. And then God says, I will place enmity between these two seeds. They must not intermingle. They must be separate and in opposition to each other. Why would a loving God do this? For a very good reason. The one represents good and the other represents evil. When good and evil try to come together, we end up with something in between good and evil, which is still evil. Good and evil must be separate so that the good can remain pure. And yet Rodney King asks, can't we all just get along? This is, oddly enough, the mantra of Christians today. Why can't we just be nice? And why can't we just be, quote unquote, loving? And then that will entice the seeker into the church. But we seemingly have watered down what the gospel message even is to the point that we're just trying to get another warm body in the church. and we've thrown the importance of accurate theology out the window in the process. Yes, that's certainly true. We have the humanists basically running the culture. We can see that in Hollywood, we can see it in the media, we can see it in the schools. The humanists are calling the shots and shaping the discussion. What they've done is convince Christians through wrong thinking, through wrong theologies, that all we have to do is be nice guys. Well, in the process, we're compromising what God calls us to be, and that is the salt of the earth in Matthew 5, 13. But if the salt has lost its savor, it's good for nothing except to be cast out and to be trodden under the foot of men. There clearly is the direct command by Christ himself in that Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew 5 to retain our saltiness, to retain our perseverance, to retain our willingness to be set apart, to be different, to act differently, and try to reform every available institution for Christ possible. And if we don't do that, which he implies we have the possibility of losing our saltiness, we're now relatively ineffectual, we're theologically unworthy, and not acting like Christians, to be blunt. When you just go along and get along, you've lost your savor. You're not as salty as you need to be. My guest is Luke Pamakis, author of Faith on Earth? About whether the Son of Man, when he comes, whether he will find faith on the earth, from Luke 18.8. You can get the book for just seven bucks, paperback, about 150 pages in length, through his website, faithonearth.net, through the Amazon button. That's faithonearth.net. You write in this Great Commission chapter, today's church has to a great extent trivialized the sense of Christ's words by reducing them to a directive to merely preach the gospel to all nations. But this is not what the words say. We are instructed to teach the nations and bring them into obedience to Christ's commandments. This involves much more than just preaching. Major cultural changes requiring a long-term commitment to education, Leadership, training in godly living, and much more are in view here. Tell us about what General Douglas MacArthur did at the end of World War II, for example. It was in Japan, of course. We had just won the war. What he said was, send me 10,000 missionaries. They don't teach that in the public schools these days, by the way. Public schools are run by humanists. To the point of MacArthur, he recognized that there was a genuine need, spiritually speaking, for Japan to be transformed from within by Jesus Christ and by missionaries that understood it wasn't just about saying the sinner's prayer and having a New Testament tucked under their arm. It was about transforming the entire Japanese culture from the inside out, where they had once worshipped the emperor. Yes, and that worship was compromised by their loss of the war. And so they were at that point very open, would have been very open to a Christian culture. You write, the loss of focus on the Great Commission as a comprehensive task for all Christians and its degeneration into only a call to preach has robbed God's people of the primary purpose God gave them. I mean, you're not pulling any punches, Lou Pamakis. I didn't intend to. I just really want to tell it as it is. Christians have really withdrawn from the world in large measure because of the preaching they've been getting over these years from dispensationalists, for example, who contend that The world is just going to get worse and worse and worse. Victory for Christendom isn't even in the theological deck of cards. And you might as well resign yourself to the world going to hell in a handbasket, because the sooner that happens, the faster Jesus will rapture us out of here, be zapped out like Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye say from the Left Behind series. That's a sad story, but that is the case. Christians do not understand that they have to be salt and light, that they have to do work to change the culture, to change the laws of the nations. They're just waiting for Jesus to come. They're saying, Jesus is going to fix everything when he comes. He's not going to fix everything when he comes, because he's commanded us to do it. And he's not going to do for us what he has commanded us to do. C.I. Scofield popularized dispensationalism in notes within the Scofield Reference Bible. Ultimately, he contributed to the founding of the Dallas Theological Seminary and a host of Bible schools and seminaries that teach dispensationalism. What, in a nutshell, in a sentence, is dispensationalism? Well, it basically says that when Christ came, He offered the Kingdom to the Jewish nation. They rejected Him, and so He went from Plan A to Plan B. And Plan B was Christianity. But Christianity is only an interim thing. It's been an interim for 2,000 years now, and it will be an interim. until he returns. But then he will go back and treat the Jewish people that existed at that time as his nation. Basically says that Jesus will rule the whole world for a thousand years after he returns. The millennial reign. That's the millennial reign. Until the millennial reign, the world is just going to get worse and worse. And there's nothing you can do about it. And Christians that go to their churches and they hear this theology, well, they say, there's nothing I can do for the world. Let's just get out of it. Let's put our children in the Christian schools. I said, let's go to our churches. Let's have fellowship with each other and sort of build a wall around Christianity. We're abandoning the culture. It's a doctrine of eschatology, you write, is extremely pessimistic. That is the dispensational doctrine of eschatology. It declares that the world is so dominated by the devil that no matter what Christians do or how hard they try, the world will grow more and more evil as the last days approach. And what I think is perhaps surprising to some generations radio listeners, Lou Pamakis, is that this notion, which is very popular and probably the majority theological end times worldview today among Protestant Christians, was in the minority just 200 years ago. It didn't exist 200 years ago. Premillennialism did, but not dispensationalism. That's an invention of, you mentioned C.I. Schofield, but his teacher was J.N. Darby, an English man. Dispensationalism, you write, teaches that Satan holds legal title to the world and he will rule until Christ returns. This is a 180 degree reversal from the attitude that was prevalent for virtually the entire church age. This unscriptural doctrine has rendered the modern church impotent with regard to its ability to effectively combat the current trend away from a Christian and toward a humanist worldview. You describe in your author bio that you were exposed to and discovered post-millennialism and Christian Reconstruction. So what is post-millennialism? Post meaning after, pre meaning before. Does the millennium occur and take place in this present age, or is it in the next age? Because when Christ returns, that is the end of the age. I believe that the millennium, which is a golden age where virtually we have a Christian world, the Great Commission has been fulfilled, the nations have been taught to obey God's word, God's laws, and we have a thousand years of peace. So the millennium occurs first, and then post-millennium, Christ returns. That's the second coming. Jesus doesn't come and then come again. He comes once and that's it. It's not a second coming and then a third coming. Yes, I certainly agree with that. The rapture teaching says that the Christians, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins view, are taken out right before the bad stuff happens. Yeah, seven years or so. Yeah. And then non-Christians are given kind of a second chance, and then Jesus comes back again for what the official second coming. And so there's like two comings of Christ, according to the most... Two second comings. You could say a second and a third coming. Right. Which the Bible does not speak of. So you don't believe in a rapture then, do you? In the sense that Jesus is going to take Christians out of the world as it gets worse and worse and worse, so they don't have to go through the tough times. And then Jesus, after that what appears to be a second coming, comes back for a third coming for the millennial reign. What's your sense of all this? There's only one Second Coming, the Second Coming. There's no rapture that dispensationalists speak of that occurs seven years before. At the time of Christ's Second Coming, he'll be coming into what is basically a Christian world. This whole idea of tribulation is misplaced in time. The tribulation that is spoken of was what occurred in A.D. 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman soldiers. The book of Revelation itself, the final book of the Bible, all of those horrific series of judgments happened in 70 AD. It's not something in the future in your view. It was written for the Christians of that day. In fact, the Christians got out of Jerusalem before the serious assault of the Romans came and all the tribulation. The last couple of chapters of Revelation do refer to the future, but most of the book refers to historical events that occurred during the first century. One of your longer chapters, Luke Marcus, in your book Faith on Earth, Chapter 7, is entitled God's Law. What was your essential point? Well, the essential point was that God's law is just. and his right. We need to remember that God is our creator, and God is a loving God, and he gave us a law that we need to live by. Remember, we are still sinners. Even the most devout Christian is still not perfect, because none of us are perfect. And so we need a law that guides us, that teaches us how to live. You go through the list of blessings and curses from Deuteronomy 1 through 14 for the blessings, 15 through 68 for the curses. You write, he has had patience with America, but is judging us even now for the many ways we have provoked him through our continued disobedience. God's word is very clear. obey and be blessed, disobey and suffer the consequences. Do you believe that because of our fist in the face of God as a country, as a people, in all of these areas of influence from the media to medicine and government and higher education in particular, that God has cursed America with the natural disasters, with the terrorism attacks, with an economy that's as fragile as ours is. When you use the word cursed, that God cursed us, it sounds like a punishment, that we did something wrong and that's our punishment. But that's really not the right way to look at Deuteronomy 28. What you have there is God spelling out for us through the writings of Moses what happens to a nation that obeys God and follows His commandments, and what happens to that same nation when they disobey. The events that we find uncomfortable, punishing, are really the consequence of our disobedience. Because we haven't lived by God's law, we incur not His displeasure and punishment, but the natural consequences of that failure. We caused these things to happen. My guest is Lou Pamakis, author of Faith on Earth?, as we invite you to take a look at the book and get a copy for yourself, 150 pages in length of paperback for about seven bucks, through his website, faithonearth.net. You can click on the store and get it for seven bucks through Amazon. That's faithonearth.net. Chapter eight, entitled Theological Drift, one of my two favorite chapters. You write, of all the possible causes of the decline in Christian influence, the lack of a good understanding of God's word is foremost. Too many Christians today reject doctrine as too dry and too dismal a subject. Give me Christ, they say, and keep your doctrine. And you say, without the Bible, each individual invents a Christ of his own making and becomes an idolater. Oh my, you're stepping on some toes with that line. I don't know how to put it more plainly and I guess more bluntly. When we decide for ourselves what to do and decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, we're doing exactly what Adam and Eve did. They said we don't need God to direct us, to teach us what is right and wrong. We can decide for ourselves. That's just original sin. One of the theological figures you point to by way of warning is Pelagius, a fifth century figure who denied the doctrine of original sin, claiming that man was basically good, morally unaffected by the fall. You wrote that not long after that, even though his teaching was fought by Augustine and rejected by the church, Not long after that, sadly, the Church adopted a variant of that original teaching called semi-Pelagianism, where salvation became the cooperative effort of God and man. Explain semi-Pelagianism a little more. What it says is that the individual must first choose God, or choose Christ, and then he can be helped by Christ. We don't save ourselves, as Pelagius said, and do all the work. God does the work of salvation, but it is a man who must choose God. This is semi-Pelagianism. I'm reminded of the story of Lazarus, dead in the tomb for several days, and his sisters grieving, and the town grieving over his death. Wrapped up in his tomb clothes, Jesus raises him from the dead, and he walks out. Lazarus was not able to raise himself from the dead, much like we are not able to save ourselves. God has to do the work. We are wretched, we are sinful, we're incapable. If we could save ourselves, then the work of Christ on the cross is irrelevant and unnecessary. We read in Ephesians 2 that we are dead in trespasses and sins, and it is God who comes to us. He sends the Spirit. When the Spirit comes, we are made alive spiritually, and then we're able to see who Christ is and who God is and who we are. It's fascinating to see the roller coaster that is the church. They rejected Pelagius and then they adopted a variant of his teaching that somehow man has to be in cooperation with God and God doesn't just save man by his own accord, the elect referenced throughout scripture. The Armenian doctrine was rejected, that it's pretty much up to man's sovereignty, and that was back in 1618 in the Synod of Dort. But then it was revived since then, and now, sadly, the Armenian doctrine is the prevalent teaching in many evangelical churches, you note. It effectively places God at man's mercy. He is pictured seated in heaven, having sent his son to die for sinful man, wringing his hands, hoping his beloved creatures will accept his salvation. God makes salvation available, but it's man who decides to accept the offer or not. In this scenario, Luke and Marcus, you note the final determiner of who is saved and who is lost is sovereign man. And that's a major problem, isn't it? It is certainly a major problem. Not seeing God as he is, we're not seeing ourselves as we really are, as his creatures, as his sinful creatures, and in need of his salvation. The Bible is very clear on this. Most of the churches today still teach Arminianism, which teaches this doctrine of, I choose God rather than God chooses me. We have this almost schizophrenic notion, theologically, about the Old and New Testament, as if it's two different gods. The Old Testament is about the law, New Testament is about the grace. And yet, both Christ and the Apostle Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament, emphatically reaffirmed God's entire law word, as you note. Explain that, if you would. Christ himself upheld God's law very early in his ministry at the Sermon on the Mount. There was this new miracle worker speaking to the people, and they were wondering, well, what is he going to do? What's he going to say about the law? Because the law for the Jews of that time was a very important thing. Is he going to change the law? And so what he said was, I didn't come to revoke or to change the law. I came to fulfill it. And by fulfill it means put it into effect. And he goes on there to say that those who promote this law will be called great in the kingdom of heaven, and those who speak contrary to it will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. So we see there very clearly that Christ took the Old Testament law and applied it to Christians today. Paul did the same thing. The definition of sin itself is the transgression of the law. And so, therefore, if the law was annulled or done away with in New Testament days post the incarnation of Christ, then why would sin be described as the transgression of the law? And what is the law referring to? Clearly, the Old Testament law These were Jewish men, predominantly, who were the disciples. Of course, we have the Apostle Luke, but the majority of the followers of Jesus were themselves Jewish, and they understood very clearly that the law was the Old Testament law, not just the Ten Commandments, but outside of the sacrificial system, which was fulfilled in Christ, it was this judicial code given to us from God on high. We have to obey God's law and we can't just make our own laws. Paul seems at places and times to be speaking against the law. But when he's saying we cannot be saved by law, we're saved by grace, the law he was referring to there was mainly the extortion of the law by the Pharisees of that day. What they were saying was you need to obey the law to be saved. And Paul was saying, no, you're saved by grace. because no one can obey the law, and God's requirement is 100% obedience. Paul, as God's apostle, knew that that was impossible. No one can be 100% obedient to the law. The exception was Jesus Christ himself, because he never sinned, but we all sin. And so our salvation is through grace and through faith. Faith is the gift of God. So it's God that gives us this gift of faith, we believe, and that's how we are justified. Because salvation has two components. Justification, that means we're made righteous in God's eyes, and then that's followed by sanctification. which means we begin to live in accordance with God's commandments. No Christian ever gets there before he dies. But as we go through the Christian life, we learn more and more what are God's requirements for us, and we gradually approach a better and better adherence to those laws. So we start out as sinners. Sinners means we disobeyed the law. God gives us faith. We believe in him, and he justifies us, makes us righteous, but then he sends us back to the law, and he says, this is how you live, because the law never changes, because God never changes. You note, the law for early Americans was assumed to be the Bible, and the courts were expected to apply the principles found in God's word in their decisions. Their judgment was not based so much on statutes or precedents as on God's word. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. What little I know about modern day law, I've gleaned, perhaps improperly, from television shows like Law and Order, and it's always about the precedents. But in the 19th century, America, wow, they didn't rely on precedents as much as they did the law of God itself. The president was the law of God. Exactly. Well put. And you know that the salvation of the individual lies in Christ, who said you must be born again, but the salvation of the nation lies in the application of God's law to the culture. So there are many generations radio listeners, Lou Pamakis, who are hopeful that the right presidential candidate will run, that he'll win the primaries, that he'll win the general election, and we certainly hope that to be the case. But, as Cal Thomas once said, a well-known syndicated columnist who happens to be a Christian, the kingdom of God isn't going to come on Air Force One either. And I think that you speak to this in that one line, the salvation of the nation lies in the application of God's law to the culture. What does that look like then? For example, we've got these x-rated bookstores that sell obscene materials and the police officers, the judicial system kind of wink at the law being broken, or we have a problem with fatherlessness in this country or rampant increase in crime, whether it be murder or theft or burglary. The answer is, as you've described it, applying God's law to the culture. But what does that mean? What do you want people listening to this show to do? What is needed is for the population at large to be Christian and to believe in God and to be obedient to God's law. Now, when the people obey the law, when you get a pawn shop that opens up, the first thing is there's no business. It would be shunned by the people. The laws of the nation, largely God's law that operated in the courts. Now, what about the statute laws, the laws that are on the books? We need laws to govern businesses, corporations, and many such things that maybe didn't even exist in ancient times. But those laws must come into conformance with God's law. There mustn't be a contradiction, and they must be basically derived from God's law. You summarize Chapter 8, entitled Theological Drift, of your book Faith on Earth, Lou, by saying, But of all the problems found within Christianity, these theological deficiencies, the loss of God's law and the loss of a victorious view of the future, have done a great amount of damage to the Christian cause. Both were consequences that arose not from the work of the enemy, but from within the church by church-recognized pastors, teachers, and theologians. It makes me think of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Screwtape instructed Wormwood on how to use the Christians to basically become the Trojan horse within the church. That certainly is the case. Let's talk about politics. My guest is Lou Pamakis, author of Faith on Earth? A paperback available at his website, 150 pages in length, the website faithonearth.net for just seven bucks. Page 108 of your book, in chapter 11 on considerations, you devote a section to politics. noting that this country transitioned from a republic into a democracy as a consequence of events surrounding the Civil War culminating in the Wilson administration with the income tax, the Federal Reserve, direct election of senators. But because democracies can be inherently unstable, it has now for all practical purposes degenerated into an oligarchy ruled by the few. No doubt there are those who are listening to the sound of this conversation who are wondering, have you gone off to the conspiracy edge? And you say what? I don't think I've gone off the edge. If you recognize the power of the media, particularly today, television to control elections, that is to favor a set of candidates over other candidates. I see America as very much an oligarchy. You say this oligarchy, largely comprised of atheist humanists, ostensibly irreligious, but in fact are very religiously intent on aggrandizing greater and greater power to themselves and to the total elimination of the Christian faith. One of my favorite lines of the book, Faith on Earth, Lou, is page 112. Christians need to stop selling Jesus merely as a way to peace in this life and bliss in the next. They also need to focus on the dire need for God in everyday life and in every institution of man, including civil government. When they do so in sufficient numbers, the world will begin to sit up and take notice. What's it going to take for that to happen? I think what it's going to take is for more people to realize that it's not just the pastors and the missionaries and the people in the seminaries, but it's the everyday Christian that God is holding responsible for what's going on in this world. Until we get that into our heads and realize that Christianity isn't just a free ride into heaven. It involves a responsibility that we have. We need to study God's Word. We need to learn for ourselves what this responsibility is. And then what we need to do is we need to put some pressure on the churches to make them start teaching properly. The very publisher of your book, Gerald Norskog, wrote, In Faith on Earth, Lou Pamakis presents a biblical worldview designed to bring us out of selfish Christianity into the kingdom-oriented faith of the Scriptures. He does an excellent job of stimulating our thinking of the world on Christ's terms. The church and the yet-to-be-evangelized world needs this message. When he returns in glory, may Christ indeed declare, yes, the Son of Man found faith on the earth. This has been another edition of Generations Radio. I'm Adam McManus, in for Kevin Swanson. Found at generationswithvision.com. You can get the book, Faith on Earth, question mark, at the website faithonearth.net through the Amazon link for just seven bucks. It's a 150-page paperback book. I read it in its entirety today and would recommend it highly. If you'd like to email me any reaction to this particular broadcast, send that to talkradioadams at gmail.com. Talkradioadams at gmail.com.