Okay, so we are finally in Romans 12 as we started last week. And I indicated then I wanted to belabor a particular topic at least a couple of weeks and just force us to think about it on a deeper level. And you may have already done that before. I had shared that at least in my background, I've heard a lot of good sermons on different parts of Romans and Romans 12, but I've not heard a sermon where, or even been a part of a Bible study where we really tried to think about how we'd apply this matter of a renewed mind. It's clearly the key in many ways to the whole book. I mean, beyond having faith, one receives justification by faith. The sanctification process we know is based on faith, although it's not a completely passive activity. And Paul said a lot of things, especially as you get into Romans 8, about where your mind is set on. The focus or the orientation of your mind can result in you experiencing life and peace or experiencing death. And then when he gets to Romans 12 and says, therefore, and looks back on all this stuff, he talks about the outward person, in a sense, and then the inward man, the renewing the mind. And what I wanted to do is press on that a little about how that actually works because, and this is what we covered last week, when you think back on what a lost person looks like through the lens of scripture, you look at Romans 1, you look at all the things Paul says are different. It is both their behavior, the things they do, but more than that, it's the inward person where he describes them as suppressing the truth, You can suppress the truth external to yourself the way we have a lot of people suppressing free speech in our country, so we understand that. But you can suppress the truth within your heart and mind. And he talks in Romans 1 about a darkened understanding, senseless thinking, a corrupt or base mind, all those things. And what I suggested is really a simple idea that those things in Romans 1 affect the entire person. Outward and inward, they affect every area that we think about in some way. We may not always be cognizant of all the things they affect, but it's a pervasive problem. This salvation that Paul wanted to talk about, to use the word he had introduced in chapter one, verse 16 and 17, this salvation should undo that. It's not just your ticket to heaven, but it's also going to provide a process that we sometimes call sanctification. where the effect on our heart and mind that you talked about in Romans 1 can begin to be reversed. And that's the renewing the mind. And so the question becomes, well, how would we do that? Because I think that a lot of Christians are struggling with this. I've had some tell me that, that they've come to realize, you know, I've got all these viewpoints and I've kind of assumed they're Christian viewpoints. except that it didn't really get them from digging through scripture. And so they're questioning, are they Christian viewpoints or do I need to look at them again? And it's kind of easy if the question is, is it okay to steal? But when you talk about a question like, is capitalism really supportable biblically or is it some other economic theory? Well, that's a lot harder because I couldn't find the word capitalism in the Bible. So what am I going to do? So we wanna think about that a little bit. Any, based on just what I've said now or kind of where we were last week, any comment or question before we maybe try to dig into a couple of ideas and think about how we would bring a Christian perspective to bear? I'm gonna share the screen. Now, I showed these slides before, although we didn't get through them all, which is why we're still talking about it. But I want to repeat one of them just to ground us, and if people listen to the recording, understand where we're going with this. You know, our goal as we grow in spiritual maturity is to have a uniquely Christian perspective not only on some of the specific moral precepts in the scripture, like that we should love one another, we know that, but also on all aspects of reality. And that's where I think some of the struggle comes in. Like, how do you do that? How do you have a uniquely Christian perspective on art, math, philosophy, science, political theory, and other things, anthropology, psychology? The arts is interesting because it's not an area that I would in any way hold myself out as having expertise. Art for me is, when I see it, I know if I like it or not. But Francis Schaeffer is one that if you're interested in pursuing that specific question about a Christian perspective on art, some of Francis Schaeffer's books, several of them, he spends a lot of time with art. I mean, a lot of time and it can make a couple of his longer books harder to read. But what he does do effectively is show that as our cultural viewpoints change, the art changes. When you had a culture that at least had more people with the Judeo-Christian background, even if they weren't believers, but just sort of that was part of the culture, the art was different. And then you can follow that up from hundreds of years ago to today, and it changes. And we tend to maybe think, well, things are just changing. The music just changed. It didn't just change. The people changed. And when the people change their art, whether it's painting, sculptures, or music, poetry, those things, literature, those things change with it. And so there is this sense that if we have a uniquely Christian perspective, even the arts will change. And I mentioned before, I've read an entire book, I won't try to outline that, but there have been a few people who've written books about this issue as it affects to, as it relates to mathematics. And one in particular was quite good, it's math. Mathematics Through the Eyes of Faith, I think is the name of the book. Now, I don't mean by this that there's a Bible verse for every discrete question. That's the whole point I'm trying to step away from. On the one hand, the renewed mind is going to understand things that the scripture says explicitly. And as you mature in the Lord, I think one of the things that happens is you have a truth that you've known for a long time, but you see further implications of that truth in your life. So it's not so much that you found a new truth as you better understand the implications. It's easy to say love one another, but what that looks like in a variety of circumstances is something that comes with growth. And then there's issues about which the Bible does not speak directly, but I would argue it gives us principles. And that's where I wanted to do a little bit of a focus today to think about how that works. And there are obstacles to a renewed mind, as I had mentioned before, and there's a number of them. Of course, the biggest one is if we just don't have our head in the book ever. I list some examples of questions that would be good if we had a Christian perspective on. It's easy to have strong opinions about social issues. We're told not to discuss religion and social issues with other people and the public and all that because it's divisive. when in reality, mature Christians ought to have the ability to speak on these things with some measure of clarity and without getting angry about it. I listed a bunch of these as just examples of those things. Not that we could go through all of these, but they're hard issues. We're in America. We're, for the moment, still primarily a capitalist economy. Most people in this country used to think that was the correct way to do it. Now, a lot are pushing Marxism, which is a different economic theory. But from the scripture, which one? Or maybe it's neither. I'm not going to get into that right now, other than just to say, as a Christian, that's a question we ought to ask. Are there Christian biblical principles that would come to bear on these issues? And having said that, and I'll have this on another slide, in order to entertain that analysis, I've got to know what these things are. I've got to know what Marxism is. You can read, there's so many books out there about it. What Marxism became in the 1900s, not quite the same as exactly what Karl Marx and Engels were writing in the 1800s. But that's a place you kind of have to start is getting your hands around what it is, then you can, you know, and how it's been applied. And then you can, I would say you can bring biblical principles to bear a good modern book. It's not written by a Christian, but one that just does a pretty good idea of showing modern Marxism, what it stands for today, especially through the lens of critical race theory, which is just It's just a cover for Marxism because it's easier to sell something if you change the label sometimes, right? I mean if you want to sell poison, you don't call it poison, right? You you can call it something else. So There's a book by Mark Levin called American Marxism. That's actually a pretty good Fairly scholarly work on on what Marxism looks like today if you want to know what it looked like in the 1800s when it was actually being written by Karl Marx and want to know something about his life, which it'll be surprising to you. That man never had to do any work, and he was never a poor person, so it was really easy for him as an elitist to talk about it. But there's a book called Marxism, and it's by an economist named Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L. It's not an easy read, but he's a top-notch scholar. That's a place to start on some of these ideas, is my point. It's kind of a simple one. Make sure we know what we're talking about. Make sure we have an idea of what it is that we're trying to evaluate and critique. And I would say the same thing about the transgender movement. I've recommended before the book by Abigail Schreier called Irreversible Damage, I think is the name. Not a long book. very well written, not written by a Christian, but it's a good book. That would be a good introduction to understanding what's really going on. And then you've got something to talk about from a Christian perspective. 1619 Project, that's an attempt at historical revisionism by a journalist. Critical Race Theory, there's a lot of different quote critical theories. It's a term of art for a way that things get analyzed But when it comes to certain areas, there can be critical race theory and some others. This is a big thing because the Southern Baptists are welcoming this into their politic, if you will, in vitro fertilization. This came up just the other day. Somebody was asking about this, not in this group, but the death penalty, the just war. Anybody know what I mean by the just war? Have you heard that phrase before? I've heard the phrase, I don't know if I necessarily know how to define it. It's like, do you have the right, is there a way to wage a war that's like morally acceptable, I guess? Yeah, no, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. And I mentioned it. Go ahead. I think it's where you can almost clearly define good and evil. Like in World War II, that was a just war. Yeah, yeah. Vietnam was not a just war, not fought that way anyway. Right, right. It's interesting, you know, debates come and go among Christian circles, and this one for the most part has gone. That is, most Christians aren't that familiar with the debate at all, and I'm not saying so much you need to be, But it's interesting and I think can be helpful to read up on it a little bit just to see how Christians devoted a lot of time to this issue to try to establish criterion that they believe were biblical criteria to determine when a war is biblically acceptable, a just war or not. And of course, not everybody agrees because there have been for a long time among Christians, certainly in the early church and in a more recent history among groups like the Quakers, more of a passivist understanding. But everybody seems to get the idea and should get the idea that just because the United States government decides to go to war and just because we have passages like Romans 13, that we've not gotten to yet, but they talk about submitting to the laws of the land and stuff. That really doesn't mean that a Christian has no choice and in fact is morally obligated by the Bible to participate in a war just because the U.S. government wants to. The Christian has a law that supersedes the laws of men and it's the law of God. And I'm not talking about the Mosaic law, but I'm talking about God's moral principles. And so the Just War, just to study it a little bit, to pick up a book on it, would help understand how Christians have struggled with one of these many issues that the Bible doesn't just have a sentence somewhere that gives you the answer, and they've had to try to apply general principles. And they've done that by creating criterion by which to measure whether a war is just. And we could do something with that another time. I'm not an expert on it, but I've read up some and it was covered actually at length in my ethics class. I took it from Fred Che at a seminary and he presented a lot of fairly detailed material on it. But it's a good example. Criminal sentencing, parole, prison issues, I'm gonna come back and talk about that. hopefully on the back end today or next time as we put this behind us. But democracy, immigration reform, that's kind of a hot button right now about immigration. I ain't hearing much on TV or news that's biblical one way or the other on that. Environmental legislation. We have lots of environmental laws in this country They started maybe in the late 1800s, but in modern times, primarily beginning with the Nixon administration, we started getting fairly comprehensive environmental legislation, big acts, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, these kinds of things. the Oil Pollution Act that I think the first George Bush signed. So anyway, a lot of that, and we have environmental advocacy groups, at least they claim to be, that are extremely powerful in this nation. And they have names that make them sound pretty benign, so it's something to look at. Climate change is another one. Again, just to say, these are issues everybody's talking about. They're political issues. Are there Bible principles that would help guide us in what we think about these things? I'd suggest there are. In this, I showed last time, but just to say, and there's no real secret sauce to anything I'm going to say, but hopefully it'll make some sense. You're not going to have a renewed mind without the word of God. and we need to dig deeper, it needs to be a routine life practice, but you can know a lot of Bible and not have a renewed mind. It has to move from what you understand about the Bible, and this is the faith part, that you actually believe it, that's faith. It's the believing that it is in fact true, that is sort of a first step for a renewed mind. The other thing for these big difficult issues and all those issues I listed, I'm not suggesting any of those are easy or that we wouldn't have legitimate disagreements, but we do need to, I mean, Jesus said it, no one's going to build a tower without counting the cost first, without doing their research. We need to dig into some of these issues and make sure that we know enough about them to deal with them in an honest and reliable way, right? If we just have just enough knowledge about some topic to be dangerous, we're going to come out with some bad answers. And a lot of people, sincere people, who are allowing and promoting, for example, critical race theory within church circles and within the Southern Baptist Convention and stuff, they're either being deceptive or they're just fools from a biblical standpoint. I have found in a lot of those conversations that they know virtually nothing about it. If you don't know what you're supporting, that's a problem. I want to start with a negative thing here. Susan, go ahead. I just wanted to say that unfortunately, a lot of people today, Um, are ignorant and they, they don't know history and their hearts are in the right place, but their brains are not. So I think that is what we're seeing outworking is everybody wants to be nice and love their brother. And so they're buying into all kinds of unbiblical ideas. like let's take away everybody's wealth and give it to people that don't have any. Nice idea, nice Robin Hood idea, doesn't work. So just wanted to say that. No, you're absolutely right. And at the same time, though, people want to, they want to have the dialogue in the public arena about these ideas and look and sound smart, like they really know something. And there's really a pride element to it. I'll offer a strong opinion about something I've thought a lot about, like the death penalty. I could be wrong, but it's not for lack of knowledge or research. On the other hand, I know at a high level about the 1619 project. I've not deep dived it yet. And so I have some cautions, but have largely reserved my opinions. What I think we hear a lot of are very strong opinions. And as soon as you ask somebody, what personal study have you done to understand, you know, whatever this issue is? Like, you know, and you quickly find out there's nothing, it's like saucer deep. And so it's this combination of what Susan said with just a sort of anti-intellectual approach. And then taking the lead of Marxism and critical race theory, they don't argue by, facts and evidence, they argue by narrative. You can find this in the writings. What we hear a lot of, and we hear it on both sides of the political aisle, are narratives. Narratives aren't arguments. But you tell a narrative, maybe one that changes history a bit. So let's think about this negative side first, because this is something I'm just suggesting. And again, not so much a secret sauce. This is just how my mind thinks. When I analyze some ideas that are out there, one of the first things I ask you know, after trying to learn enough about it that I'm not just being ignorant, that I have some idea of, for example, what Marxism or critical race theory is teaching, I asked myself, is there some way in which just on the face of it, these doctrines, these ideas are contrary to scripture? Contrary, and the way my mind thinks about it, It's usually not something subtle, so much as it is that I think the Bible establishes certain truths that I call foundations. The Bible is full of truths, and some of them are fairly narrow truths. You read about it in a limited amount of scripture that may refer to that issue, and it doesn't mean it's not important. It doesn't mean it's not true. But you have some more what I call foundations that are issues that tend to saturate the whole Bible. You find it repeatedly. I might have called it themes or something. There's a lot of things you might call it. That's just a word I chose. I chose foundations because I think they are critical to propping up a biblical or Christian perspective. And I'll give you an example of a couple of them. You could probably come up with a lot. A lot of them come out of the opening book of the Bible, Genesis. The foundations are things like God establishing the family unit in marriage. The foundations are the holiness of God, the fall and its implications. Things like that that then carry forward throughout the Bible. There's a number of others. I think Satan, according to 1 John 5, the world lies in the sway or influence of Satan. We're told in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God so that we could stand and withstand the fury darts of the devil. Peter says in 1 Peter 5 that he's like a lion prowling about to see whom he can devour. He's trying to devour Christians. John chapter eight, Jesus says he's a liar and the father of all lies. He was the one that was first to murder. I mean, we have a lot of things about how Satan works. We're told that in these last days, things are gonna get worse in terms of the level of deception. Jesus warned about deception and all of that discourse. And so I think about it and I say, well, we're told that our weapons are not carnal, but the second Corinthians 10, I think is the passage, they're weapons that can be used to take down strongholds, to withstand the ideas, the philosophies, these ideas that really come and are sourced in Satan. Colossians says not to be sort of taken by worldly philosophies. So how would Satan do it though? How would he do that? If we are in the middle of a war of ideas, and I think history shows we are, current history, what we're living today shows we are, what do I look for? And it's these foundations that are at least a starting point for me. big picture items in the scripture that are just foundational to the worldview as we know it through the lens of scripture. Susan? What I've noticed stronger and stronger over the past, say, 30 years is that a lot of people, most people, just your average Joes, don't believe that the Bible has any basis of reality. So consequently, arguing from the Bible is not going to convince them of anything because it doesn't mean anything to them. So we're at that point where we can hold those views, but if you want to reason with somebody, you can use history maybe, but try to reason from the Bible by saying, well, the Lord doesn't approve of that, or this is wrong. God says it's wrong. Yeah, that doesn't work anymore. Well, then that's a good point, and I want to be clear on this. My concern is most Christians on these deeper issues, they have an opinion, but they have no clue from a biblical perspective, whether that opinion aligns with scripture. And so this isn't how I'm going to convince somebody else. It needs to be how I understand and make sure I don't get deceived by Satan in the first instance. But your comment goes to a second issue, which is super important too. How do I then bring a Christian voice into the public arena. And you're right, if I try to argue solely by citing the Bible to a world in darkness, I'm not gonna convince a lot of people, but I still think this can be done. When you understand reality through God's eyes, and that is the goal, you will also find some clarity in how you can argue this to somebody without quoting chapter and verse, but you will argue for the principle. The principle that's there in the scripture is what you'll argue. But the first step is we actually have to know to reason through what are those core principles that come to bear on Marxism or whatever issue we're gonna deal with. So foundations are these core beliefs, and I'm not going to try to list them all out, but you could think of a lot of them. But like I said, things like the holiness of God, the repercussions of the fall, he made them male and female, these things. Another big one that's important in our day is that God made us a unified being. We are both spiritual and physical at the same time. We're not one or the other. The real us is neither the body nor the spirit. It's the real us is both in this perfect union that we don't necessarily even discern there if there's two. When Satan attacks, when he puts an idea into the public discussion through the news networks, and rest assured, I mean, don't kid yourself, he's working through Fox, CNN, all the others, the social media. I mean, he really is. But what's he going to do? Satan will always attack the foundations. He may dress it up, He may give it a label that sounds not only benign, but maybe in fact peaceful and positive, but he'll attack the foundation. So I always ask myself if I'm looking at a view, for example, Marxism, right? Is it attacking a foundation? Well, it does in a lot of ways, but just to mention one, Marxism is always against what we've proverbially called the nuclear family, a husband or wife and some children, right? And it attacks the nuclear family as part of its doctrine in its modern incarnation. And the reason is because the family unit passes down from parent to child ethics, beliefs that may be contrary to what Marxism requires, which is that you worship the state, right? Not in the sense necessarily of bowing the knee and praying to the state, but the state becomes your God in every sense, really. And so we can't have parents telling their children what's right and wrong. The state's going to tell you what's right and wrong. This attacks the foundation. It also attacks the structure. And this is what we're seeing happening in the United States. We let a bunch of people, some of whom are students, most of whom are just paid to be there and be disruptors, take over public properties, empire private properties with no consequences, no real consequences whatsoever. Had I broken the speed limit and the cop pulled me over, I would have had a more severe consequence. These things are designed to bring chaos in one way or another, to undermine the rule of law on multiple fronts, and we see this happening. We see not only attacks on foundational ideas, we're actually having a debate about whether men should be able to sit in the women's dressing room in the high schools, but we're attacking the structure. There is an attempt to do that. And then there's attack on a particular people or people groups. Hitler did this and he wasn't the first. You need a group of people to hate. If you think about critical race theory, white people are considered racist by definition. Has nothing to do with what they've done or how they think, they simply are. And so you need yourself a hate group, a group that we can blame and marginalize and that sort of thing. And it's interesting in our culture to see how quick media is to marginalize Christians and churches and pastors, but they won't do the same to Muslims. It's an interesting thing. There's a reason for these things, but we see attacks on the people. When you start seeing a war against freedom of speech. That's what's happening. That's what this is. It's why it's so dangerous. Even someone like Elon Musk can see that, and I'm not suggesting he's a Christian or looking at it through the Bible, but anyone who's a student of history, and that's the reason the 1619 Project is around, it's part of a greater movement to replace factual history with narratives. If you're a student of history, you start to realize, wait a second, this isn't novel stuff coming up. This is an old playbook being played again. And so there was this marginalization of people Certainly, when Hitler rose to power, when Mao Tse-tung in China rose to power, there always is. And then, of course, finally, they're seeking power, targeting, weaponizing institutions. A lot of our universities have been, that's happened. That's why that you have the largest concentration of Marxists among college university faculty. According to different statistics, it's as high as like 80%. So, you use ideas, revisionism, indoctrination, and you ultimately try to force to power the leaders of the movement. So, this doesn't help me with how to dig out the scripture, but I'm just telling you a lens I looked through with some of the big picture ideas that were being pushed on us. And I applied this, for example, to climate change. We're not going to dig deep into that. There's a lot I could say about it. Actually, this is an area I have studied in great detail. But on the surface, how it's being advertised and what it's really about really aren't the same thing. And what it actually does, and is a matter of public policy, was largely not even known by the public at large. if Satan is behind some of this stuff, and I don't mean by that that he's dictating every person that's involved or agrees with it, but we should expect it to be laced with deception. Dart? Hi there. I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I might look at it a little differently though. I think Romans 12 too is speaking to our personal lives, how we live our life. I don't think it's said. I mean, it says we should not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but it also doesn't say to try to transform the world because the world is dying. In our personal life, we need to be true to God's word. We need to walk the faith so we can make the right decisions, both politically and otherwise, and maybe try to bring people to Christ. We don't want to withdraw totally from the world, but the world is dying. and we should not adopt its truth. Second Timothy 2.4 says, no one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs. And essentially, we are in a war, but it's a spiritual war more than anything else. You and I are probably pretty close together, and it is a spiritual war. And I'm suggesting that a lot of Christians are losing it and don't know it. because of this. Just frankly, it's a surface-level knowledge of the Bible, and a failure to apply it to a lot of these issues, so that the issues that, using this little grid I have here, I can see Satan behind it, they embrace it is a concern. But you did touch on a good point that we should think about. It is a serious issue. It is itself a Bible issue. The renewing the mind is my mind. I can't renew yours. I might can be a help in some way through teaching the Word or something, but I can't renew your mind. So where does the line get drawn? I renew my mind, but am I trying to change the world or is there, am I just gonna be an island or is it something in between? And I think it's a question we need to wrestle with, kind of what's the role. What I would like to hear, I don't expect Christians to necessarily have a Christian political party But the fact is a in-depth knowledge of the Bible and a biblical perspective on these issues will in fact impact every area of our thinking, and it's going to affect how we think at the ballot box, but it's going to affect how we think if we have a conversation with anybody about these issues. That's what we want to see. We want to see a real Christian perspective coming out of Christian mouths, that a lot of times I hear Christians, you know, especially ones that they have a national public platform. They just don't have something clever to say. And obviously, I hope you understand that. Susan? One of my favorite things in the Bible is in when Moses gets the law, And there is this 50, I think it's 50 years, there's a Jubilee and everything that was bought and sold and the people who screwed up and the people who were great winners and got everybody else's land, you know, it's like playing Monopoly. And then on the 50th year, it all goes back to zero. And I think what, you know, funny how that isn't, you could see Satan's behind most of these ideas because I have never read a book where that was proposed as a solution to all of the angst and poverty and difficulties that people have in their lives. I just, you know, it's just kind of interesting. Well, it is. I want to suggest that as we dig into, we're going to do a little bit of it today, as we dig into some of that Old Testament stuff, including setting up the Law of Moses and all that, we're not under the law, but there are principles when God established that government that can help us. They can help us think through some issues now. Jud, Yeah, to Sue's, related to Sue's point. I think, and most Christians don't have this viewpoint. I think the Bible teaches very clearly that as believers, we should not be in debt, right? Leviticus chapter 26, the blessing and the curse. The blessing is that you will lend and you will not borrow. The curse is you will borrow and you will not lend. Romans actually says, owe nothing to anyone. except to love one another. What we've done in our country is we've normalized debt. We've made it so that if you need a house, you get a mortgage. If you need a car, you get a car loan. If you need an education, you get an education loan. Whatever you want to get, put it on your credit card without any thought as to whether you can pay that back and then just run up that debt on your credit card. I actually listened to a lot of YouTube videos in other languages, and what they all mentioned, especially the German ones, people who have moved to the US from these countries, and they're asked the question, what are the big differences between the US and Germany? You know, what are the positive ones and one of the negative ones? One of the negative ones is always the debt culture. These Americans are in huge amounts of debt. It's absolutely crazy. They get a degree and they owe $100,000 plus in money. So if you've ever listened to Dave Ramsey, the financial counselor, he's got all kinds of stories where he said, you know, one couple took my teaching and he teaches, you know, the radical concept is that you shouldn't be in debt. Right. One of the stories that he tells is that a couple was listening to him and they needed a house. They were a young couple and they said, you know what, we're not going to take a mortgage. We're going to save up that money and buy the house for cash. And they said, and people always say this when they you know, really decide to trust these biblical principles. They couldn't believe how fast they saved up that money. It almost seemed impossible how fast they saved up that money and they bought that house without debt. And Winnie and I have been debt-free for many, many years. And It's just a totally different lifestyle. Your sense of well-being when you don't have any debt is just way higher. I think that's one application is that really, I think the Bible teaches we shouldn't be in debt. If you make the decision that that's what the Bible teaches and that's what I'm going to do, you would be shocked at how fast the Lord can get you out of debt and keep you out of debt. And you have to kind of take it even one step further and ask yourself, could this be a snare that Satan uses over Americans? And I'm not going to say that every time somebody's taken a loan that the devil did it, but the fact is we wouldn't borrow money for things if we didn't desire those things. I wonder sometimes what my observation has been about, say, the housing thing. There was a time when you could get these things called adjustable rate mortgages that the rates were very low at the time people got them, but anyone that just knew how to add two and two and get four would know that they'll eventually go up. Now, what most people didn't know, and they should have, but didn't, is it going up a point or two in the interest rates, a big honking deal. And so I'm watching, and here I am in my $130,000 house as an attorney, and people I know that, I just know, and I hate to say it this way, but I know they don't make as good of money as I am, but they're in a $400,000 house. The problem wasn't so much that they borrowed money for a house, is that the system was set up to allow them to buy a house that there's no way they could actually afford. But then there also had to be a heart issue in deciding on that, and it trapped people and it caused a lot of pain. I mean, I just knew tons of people that lost their homes. and they should have known better than what they bought, but in any event, it can become a trap. The debt trap prevents a lot of people from doing the Christian ministry they otherwise would have done. I mean, there's a motive behind it. Let me cover a few more things real quick, and just to get into where I've been trying to kind of aim us, just again, not to tell you so much what to think, but to think about the process, like how do I move from reading scripture to coming to an understanding of issues that the Bible doesn't just directly tell me in a verse or two what to think. I have a word that's totally a fictional word, deceptionism, and I just mention it because I think the more you look at current issues and what's happening, the more deception you should see abounding. And from scriptural standpoint, we shouldn't be surprised if the world really is in the sway of the evil one, we should expect to see that deception. But sometimes, you know, you could overplay it and just become, you know, you think you find a conspiracy behind every person you meet. But on the other hand, you could be a bit naive, you know. And so this deceptionism is deceit, often coupled with false promises designed to cast doubt on the truth, or advocate the exact opposite of the truth. In 1 John, he deals with some deceivers in the background. He never calls out exactly who they are, nor does he list out everything they believe. He does call them anti-Christ. And more than anything, and it's the reason 1 John opens with a couple of verses about the incarnation of Jesus, they attack the incarnation and all that it stands for. They attack the baptism. They attack the cross, the whole earthly ministry of Christ. They deny it happened. And you're gonna have those kinds of people in all ages that are attacking the truth. It's no just coincidence or whatever that we have these attacks on the truth of the Bible and even the truth in general in favor of more of a false reality, okay? And so I just, I call that, and this is one of the things I think about with some of these ideas, am I seeing deceptionism? You start studying a lot of the issues, you start deep diving into the, you know, the science, the mathematics behind climate change, and you start finding a lot of things are in fact 100% the opposite of what we're being told. But anyway, we should sort of expect that given how Satan worked in the fall. Now, Let's talk a little, I just call this freedom principles, but let's just talk a little about the book of Exodus and how God set up a government there. And it's an interesting thing. I say a government, there wasn't a big political body, but it was a system of laws and God would administer those laws and Moses and some others that he would delegate to would administer these laws. And of course, primarily you had the priesthood to do it. There are some principles there. We're not under the law, but there are some principles, and I'm not going to suggest that our task is to set up a government or a society that looks like what God set up for Israel. It's really not that. It's just that there are some principles inherent in what God did there that any successful functioning government has to have. This book, Magna Carta of Humanity by Os Guinness, it's an excellent book. I mean, he's up in his 80s now, but he's still writing. He was a student of Francis Schaeffer. And you see what he wrote there. Exodus, the book of Exodus, is history's supreme precedent and pattern for revolutionary change and therefore for hope and the very notion of possibility. After the Exodus, as Rabbi Sachs notes, the world's never been the same. Rabbi Sachs has passed away, but he was a, like the lead rabbi, like in the UK, and wrote some books and stuff. The contagion of freedom has been released. But Exodus not only models freedom, it has also launched a successful and sustained critique of the abuse of power that continues to this day. Contrary to the dictators of history and the apostles of post-modernism, powers no longer self-evident, self-justifying, might no longer means right. When you think about how Egypt had reached a fever pitch in its wickedness with its totalitarian pharaoh in charge, then God set something up through these Israelites that's profoundly different in a lot of ways. And we can pull out some of those principles, and then they can become sort of, okay, here's some of these foundations I was talking about for whatever my political or governmental theory ends up being. I'm going to try to show you a couple of them. I hope this will just make some sense. Again, I'm thinking about the process because you could read through Exodus and just think of it as a history book. But does it have something to say for us today? I think the answer is yes. I think it's a lot of things. I'm taking a lot of this from this guy's Magna Carta of Humanity. I thought he did such a good job with it. Os Guinness in general, his books are deep thinking and they're doing what I'm kind of trying to talk about, about taking the scripture and applying principles and thinking about the world around you. Os Guinness was a young man in China when World War II was happening and then when Mao Tse Tung took over and they were, you know, communism that A lot of people died, and he was watching it happen as a young person, so he's got some perspective on tyranny, you know, firsthand. So, you know, freedom has to be won. What did you think about that? Now, God did most of the winning here. The people, by faith, had to walk through the Dead Sea. But you have these big conflicts in Exodus out of which some principles come, a conflict between Moses and Pharaoh, the God of the Jewish people, the little gods of Egypt that are behind the 10 plagues. Each of the plagues relates to one of those Egyptian gods. But ultimately, it's a big conflict between freedom and tyranny. They started off in Egypt as free people, but then they became slaves and they were in bondage and the conditions weren't good. So you have this thing going on, and God, of course, sets them free. We know that. But that freedom didn't, like, Pharaoh didn't just say, oh, well, heck, you want to be free, you're free. It took the 10 plagues and ultimately the destruction of his army to free those people. And there's something to be said for that. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but in a world that's under the sway of Satan, who fancies himself, according to Job chapter one and two, he fancies himself the sovereign over this world. He doesn't think that we have a right to be free, and he's gonna implement governments the best way he can to keep us not free, or to let us believe we're free when we're in fact not, which is illustrated by what Judd was saying about the you know, the borrowing money and being deep in debt. So freedom has to be won. And you know, in our country's history, in the American Revolution, freedom was won. But now you've got a lot of generations who didn't have to win it. And so they're very willing to give it back to a larger and larger government. But this idea of freedom being won is sort of in there. Even our freedom from sin, we received it by faith. Somebody had to pay the price for that, and that was Jesus. Freedom is always like that, and liberation and freedom aren't really quite the same thing, it seems. I'd ask some questions here. Does God ever intervene to change human nature? I think it is a general pattern. We don't see that. What he'll do sometimes, is he'll intervene to stop somebody from doing something. He didn't let Pharaoh take his army through the Red Sea at first. He waited until, he held them off until the Israelites had gotten through. But he also didn't just do magic on Pharaoh's mind and change his mind so that he just wanted to turn back. So we're always gonna have these people who would want to take our freedom if they could. And they can do it through different ways, maybe by controlling social media, different kinds of things. Freedom has to be won, and when you lose that sense that it had to be won, it becomes a lot easier to give it back. The thing about freedom, because we have sin natures, is that there has to be order. And the law of Moses did that, as does some of our laws today try to bring order. You know, we have laws against driving the wrong way and laws against driving too fast, things like that. We have laws against murder. We all realize those laws don't keep us safe. And you have to think about that because there are a lot of people that seem to think if something's against the law that that protects them. Nevertheless, the laws are needed because your freedom can't be without any limits at all. When we talk about freedom as a principle here, and you see this in Exodus, he didn't free them from Pharaoh and then give them open-ended freedom to do anything. God set strict limits on that freedom. They were free, but there were limits. For example, they couldn't take their neighbor's stuff, their neighbor's land, or their neighbor's wife. There were limits, and so there are people who will argue that we need anarchy. We don't need government at all. We can just police ourselves. Biblically, that's not supportable. And the reason is because of the fall. You give an opportunity without consequences, and people will fall to the lowest common denominator very quickly. And so this idea of freedom, it has to be both ordered, but also cultivated. And you sort of see that in the book of Exodus, what we are trying to do is build a humanistic society, and it's not working. The freedom is less and less ordered. We take areas where there should have been some limits, and we keep removing the limits. That's not going to hurt anybody. That's legal. Freedom has to be ordered. A third principle, and this is where we'll stop. Actually, well, it's a second slide on this. This is an important point about this freedom being ordered, and we'll end here. But freedom is not so much a matter of the form of government. I can't argue from the Bible that the only proper form of government is a democracy, because when God set up a government, he set up a king named David, first a king named Saul. I'm not saying democracy is wrong either. What I'm saying is we tend to maybe make some assumptions that it's a more fundamental principle about government is that the freedom has to have order to it that includes responsibilities of the people, as well as limits on the power given to that government. And that's the thing that starts coming out of that. The Egyptian government had no limits, but even when God pulls the people to freedom, they have responsibility. And in Exodus 24, Moses tells them, here's all your obligations, and they say, we'll do it. It's that agreement to be part of the community That's the critical thing to see coming out of how God sets up this government. It's a willing participation and a willingness by agreement to accept the limits on the freedom that are a part of this community, because those limits, you know, if I don't have any limits, then there's always going to be a bunch of people who aren't free because one person is going to take from another. Anyway, that's an important part of this, this idea of a commitment to the community. When we talk about immigration, this comes to play as a biblical principle to understand immigration. There are only immigrants in the United States. We don't truly have indigenous people, according to history, because apparently everybody even the Native Americans came here at some point and maybe traveled through Alaska or whatever. We come here, but we come here for different reasons. And there was an idea a long time ago that if you came here to the United States, it wasn't just for a job or even the American dream. People often were leaving behind something where tyranny was a problem or crime was a problem. And they were hoping to come to something different, something where there was a community commitment to something better. For example, this bizarre and essentially unheard of notion of freedom of speech, freedom of association. Nobody did that before, just generally speaking. You just don't do that. And we did. And what's been lost in the debate is about And people talk about how hard it is to become a US citizen. It is hard. But the theory behind that was that you were making a decision not just to come seek a job, but to become part of the community and to have at least that commitment to some of the ideals the community was founded on. And that is important. And I'm not commenting any further about the immigration issue. That's for another time. But just to show you where there's a principle here that does matter. if I wanted to immigrate to China, it should be because I have some commitment to what their government and their country, their people stand for. And if I can't do that, I probably shouldn't go, right? Let me stop there at a time. We'll spend one more week of this and I'll leave it behind. I don't wanna beat a dead horse, but think about even the part now, cause I know you haven't got to ask questions or maybe comment on that last part, Think about a little further, just in your own mind, what you know just of Exodus and how God took the people to freedom and set up a government. What are the principles that I might take forward and say, you know, when God set up a government, here were some core principles designed to make it function in a healthy way. What are those? Because maybe that's what, as I look at, you know, our government or the government of another country, Maybe those can come to bear on how I think about all of this. Let me.