Well, let's take a moment and seek the Lord's blessing and then we'll get to work here. Father in heaven, we thank you again for this day. Each Lord's Day we come together as a people and we thank you that you set aside a day to be an enormous blessing to your people. And we're thankful that we can have this time of Sunday school to even begin to shape our minds and our thinking, and in some way to even prepare us to enter into your presence for worship. So teach us this morning, and teach us to think wisely about the world around us. I ask all this in Jesus' name, amen. I have a couple passages I'm gonna read. You can pass this back to Mike if you want. Oh, okay. I'm going to read from Acts 20, verses 28 through 31, and then 2 Timothy 1.15. This is the Apostle Paul writing here to the Ephesian elders. He's just about to leave them. They're having sort of a tearful farewell. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure Fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away disciples after them. Therefore, be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease, night or day, to admonish everyone with tears. In 2 Timothy 1, verse 15, You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me, among whom are Phagellus and Hermogenes." Acts 20 reminds us how concerned the Apostle Paul was about the inevitability of false teachers emerging from within the body of Christ, emerging from within the body of Christ. From outward appearances these men would look like sheep who've been called to serve as under shepherds of Christ's flock, but in reality they're fierce wolves who'll destroy the flock. They're predators and their prey is Christians. Why do they do this? Why do they speak the twisted things? to draw away disciples after them. In other words, they want people to follow them, to be on the same path they're on. Here's what we need to know about nine years after Paul warned the Ephesian elders. He would write to Timothy in 2 Timothy 1.15 and say that virtually all of those in Ephesus had fallen away. That warning wasn't without meat, or without teeth, I should say. What I've always found astonishing is that every generation seems to think, it can't happen to us. And my concern, and the reason for this particular study, is that issues like critical theory are being smuggled into the church as though these ideas can somehow occupy the same space as the gospel. They can't, they're irreconcilable. I put that particular tweet on your reference sheet, again to reinforce why this issue is so important and especially why we have to know the language that's being used. I doubt most of you know the author of that article. I don't think he's a believer, although both of his parents are ordained Methodist ministers. He's very famous for a book he wrote in 2019, How to Be an Antiracist. Something of an aside, he believes that we need a new government department, the Department of anti-racism, and virtually all government oversight should be turned over to this Department of Anti-Racism. It is remarkably 1984ish, but it's being promoted as legitimate social science. But I shared the tweet specifically because it helps us bridge the language gap that I touched on last week. Being anti-racist, and he makes this crystal clear, doesn't he? It isn't about opposing racism. It isn't about seeing racism as wrong and sinful and evil. That's not what it's about. Anti-racist is about destroying the white cultural hegemony. I'm not gonna reiterate that. I've covered that for two weeks, the definition of that, but if you turn back to the banner I gave you in an earlier set of notes that was from the National Museum of African-American History, look at all the things it describes that whiteness is. And all that whiteness is needs to be torn down. That's the work of an antiracist. It's not opposing racism. It's tearing down white culture. We need to make sure we're not fooled by the language. John Stone Street, he's a fellow at the Colson Center, provides a very helpful quote. It's no good having the same vocabulary if we're using different dictionaries. And what we're dealing with are people who are using different dictionaries, you see? Part of what I want to do is start really interacting with some of these things. The song that's printed there on your sheet. This was written by a group of men who have strong connections to both the PCA and the Gospel Coalition, right? That's a remarkable piece of hymnody, if we can even call it hymnody. I suspect the PCUSA, RCA, and Liberal Episcopals will be the first to use it. But I would be surprised if it's not very quickly adopted into more conservative liturgies. And make no mistake, the group that produced this didn't produce this to be a Christian song to be sung at homes or in groups. They're producing worship music. Now what I want to do is something of an exercise and I really want your input here because I want us to begin to think about these things specifically from a biblical perspective. So let's think about this psalm and I want to reiterate something that I've said a couple times in a couple different ways as we've looked at this. It's not my goal to become a perpetual fault finder, right? We're simply kind of wagging our fingers at other Christians who don't like or that we don't think do things right because the way they do things isn't exactly the way we do them. That's a kind of haughtiness that we need to pray God keeps us from. But we have to look at bad ideas and sinful ideas and blasphemies and be able to evaluate them through the lens of scripture. And to be quite candid, my contention is this, the song's not harmless, it's not neutral, it's blasphemous. And here's where I want to pause. I'm going to give you a minute to read through this and tell me why you think this song is problematic. And although it might take an immense amount of courage to do this based on what I've said, if you think the song is okay, tell me why you think it's okay. Who is this hymn about ultimately? Let's start with that. Huh? I don't think they're even disguising it. I mean, I mean it's, yeah, yeah, yeah. well he caught ya there's the real issue we might miss this if there's a whole everything you said is right and you're getting at it but here's the big problem they are conflating a sinful man with this sinless son of god because that's what this hymn is about and so you can't miss that implication that's blasphemy Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. George Floyd. You know who George Floyd is? Pardon me? Do you know who George Floyd is? he would he would he was an african-american who was killed about three months ago in minnesota the polio the police officer apparently had his knee on the person's neck for quite a long period of time you know what i'm not when i criticize the song i don't know anything about the facts of that case do you know this guy was no choir boy how do we know yeah because look at you because the whole the big thing was Yeah, well, that there's the problem, right? There's the problem. Oh, sacred neck now wounded. See, that's the whole that was the whole media line that his knee was on this man's neck. That was the big part of the news story that went viral that we saw 100 pictures off. And you can see some other things like, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, by blows and knees. Well, here's the thing. Interestingly enough, I probably am entrenched in the media a little bit, but it's almost impossible not to know something of George Floyd. And what was his cry? And he speaks to this somewhere in here about his mother or something. I can't find it. Yeah. because apparently he was crying for his mother or something just before he died. I don't know. It's a tragic story, irrespective of his background, irrespective of the fact that cops may have been legitimate. I don't know. I'm not making a judgment. It's a tragedy that somebody lost their life. It's a blasphemy to sing about it as though we can put it in the place of Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that may be true, but this is one of the few that a lot of churches do still use, right? Because if nothing else, they use it on Good Friday. If they only use it that once a year, they use it. So it's a pretty darn popular hymn. Yeah, here's the line, O sacred head discounted, lies crowned in locks and sweats, see thorns and curls now found in your weeping mother's hands. Again, this is the language of the story. You're good if you're not immersed in the media, but this was such a big story. If you even watch the news half a dozen times a week, this was probably going to be portrayed 25 times in half a dozen segments because they're destroying the country because of this. It is news. Again, my goal is not to say, look how bad these people are. It's just simply to say, this is the kind of stuff being brought into conservative circles, right? And offered as something that would be a legitimate expression to God. Probably not. Yeah, because I can't think of the name of the group. but it's a para-church organization. Two of the ministers are, two of the writers, two of the people in the group are RUF ministers, and one's an RUF intern. That's a Reformed University Fellowship. It's like the university mission to college students. So here's the problem. They didn't do this in the church, and unless it's being sung in a church, For example, if you went home and sung this, I couldn't come into your house to do church discipline because you sang it in your house, right? You see, it's one of those... Yes, yes. Probably not. No, I'm just being very honest because this was posted on a Facebook page and about 150 people responded on the page that's mostly teaching elders in the PCA. Probably a third of them were saying, I don't really see a problem with this. I'm not kidding you. Why are we affiliated with the PCA? That's a good question. I asked myself that, but no, all kidding aside, here's something I said two weeks ago, and I've said over and over. I think the PCA's got a much bigger problem with this than the OPC and the URC, but make no mistake. I'm just not pointing to other people's houses, but I could show you where this is existing in the OPC and the URC. it's not it's not again I think the PCA's got a bigger problem with it yeah so well and and and the PCA you gotta understand when the PCA left the mainline denomination in 73 they didn't initially leave the mainline denomination to be a reformed denomination they left to basically be conservative evangelicals And so they became, in some sense, more reformed over the years. But that evangelical root is basically followed just what you see happening in the broader evangelical world, which is pretty dangerous. So anyway, it's a valid question. One of the things I would say is we're in a presbytery that's really pretty good, and we're not all monolithic. We don't all hold to exactly the same things, but none of the guys in our presbytery would approve of this. Pardon me? A lack of training and discernment. Yeah, and that's part of it and it's an, I mean, it gets difficult to make too many evaluations because I honestly don't want to ascribe motives but my gut feel is, and I think there's some evidence to this, that they very much want to follow the world, right? And want some popularity with the world, some kind of approval in the world, and this is the only way they can get it. And again, I think I shared this two weeks ago, if you look at the young, restless, reformed movement, It really exploded in the late 90s and early 2000s. A lot of those guys have gone down this route. And of course, that's the origin of the Gospel Coalition. And the degree to which the PCA has been in that, they've followed with them. And the degree to which the ABC has been part of that and the ORC. There's some following with it. It's just, the Gospel Coalition is a big evangelical conservative group that was initially formed to coalesce around the gospel? The PCUS, yeah, I don't want to get in too many initials, but yeah, they're... Yeah, in fact, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you something Chris shared with me. The presbytery he belongs to is PCUSA Presbytery. And after the George Floyd murder, they wrote a paper. And you know what the paper said? Basically, it was this kind of poetry. And after each refrain, it said, we can do better. Oh, no, we must do better. And then they would say something else about oppression, and we must do better. And da-da-da-da-da-da, and we must do better. And I was talking to Chris, and I said, well, basically, they just created their own law. and offer no gospel. They're telling you what to do and no way to relieve your guilt. Just, we've got to do better. Yeah, so they're off that train. You know what? I don't want to be that guy, right? You don't want to be those people who are always angry. And I think sometimes reformed people get that reputation because they deserve it. But you can't pretend this isn't blasphemy when it's blasphemy. This is not singing Shine Jesus Shine. I think that's a vacuous song. But it's not blasphemy. That's the difference, right? OK, you're ignorant. You've not been taught. You have no discernment. The problem is most of these guys are graduates of seminary. It's not that they don't know. They don't care. Anyway, go ahead. That's all right. Yeah. Spurgeon made a really helpful quote in regard to discernment. He said, discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. Discernment is knowing the difference between right and almost right. That's what you've got to be able to do, right? And that's kind of why we're doing this, right? Because you look at this, and as you said, you didn't even know much about this. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the problem is, again, it's not about Jesus. So this is a hymn ultimately about a sinful man. And by the way, this could be clearly a song about Chip Byrd. It would still be a sinful man. It can't be. Yeah, yeah. Well, here was the argument on the site. You know, Jesus came to die for the oppressed and Yeah, you really can't get around that, right? I mean, they clearly are going back and forth. This is part of the problem. Yeah. Yeah. What's that? Has God really said? It's never right at the get-go, God's wrong. It's first, let's tweak it a little. Yeah, that's, again, that's part of the problem, right? I mean, we can pick up O Sacred Head Now Wounded that was written a few hundred years ago, And we know exactly what it's about, even though it was written in a different culture. Why? Because we know who Jesus is. Admittedly, you didn't know the details of this because you didn't know the details of the news. So that just makes people who might not know the details of the news, especially those who are more poorly discipled, they're vulnerable to this. And it is a blasphemy. And here's the thing. Let's say a person didn't know better. And you sing this a few times. Well then, this becomes a part of you. Some of you may remember, some of you weren't here, but some of you'll know Pete Van Campen. Brother, I didn't think you guys were here when he was here, but he and his wife were married for 70 years, yeah. They had a 70 year, anyway, after every sermon, he always quoted a psalm together. a hymn or a song. Whatever I said in a sermon, it inevitably reminded him of a hymn, right? Because hymns have that impact on us. I mean, how many people teach young people to memorize with music, with songs, right? Because it's such a powerful way. You get this in them, you're indoctrinating them into a worldview that's hostile to the gospel. Yeah, that's another song that I find vacuous, but it's not blasphemous, really, right? Because God did walk in the garden. My problem with the song is the implication that what God's doing, He does only for me, and I'm so unique and so special, and my experience is all in all. So I have a problem with that, but it's not a blasphemy, right? I mean, that's, again, that's why I don't mind saying, I'll never pick that song, right? For those reasons. But if a person sings that song, my thought is, I wish somebody would disciple them. Maybe I'll get an opportunity. But that doesn't mean they're not believers or they're doing anything dangerous. They're just foolish. This is dangerous. So that's kind of how I make that decision. uh... it again i i i i i don't want to go too far down the in the garden road you know you don't get hot Yeah, well and also, it's one of those songs that, it's like me when I'm out on my bike, I listen to Southern Gospel. And I gotta tell you, sometimes if people saw me on my bike, I'm singing out loud and stuff, you'd think I was a charismatic or something. At least a Southern Baptist, you know? Because I'm riding along sweating and panting and singing, you know? But it's not music that's appropriate for the corporate worship of the Holy God. It's alright, what you do in your home, you can do in your home, you know, And I'm not opposed to even having truth-governed feelings. It's just, in worship, you have a responsibility to, this isn't truth, you know? What's that? So like, no Black Sabbath? You know, in fairness, you're right. Years ago, I backed way off of rock for that same reason, but that's kind of a different issue. Let's move forward. I want to kind of pick up where I left off last week. You recall I mentioned there's a connection between postmodernism and critical theory. Postmodernism dismisses the idea that there's universal truth that we can all agree upon. Truth isn't something that's outside of us. Truth is something that's relative. It's self-determined, and postmodern thought Each person constructs their own private reality, and that's their truth. That's the truth that matters. And so my truth might be quite different than your truth. That's sort of the stream that flows out of postmodernism. Now, critical theory, they've taken that idea, and they tweaked it for their purposes. And they said the only truth that matters is the truth of an aggrieved identity. You know, your identity class of person to whom you belong. And the truth that matters is how your aggrieved group relates to the white cultural hegemony. So let's say you're a brown or black man. The only truth that matters is the truth that you've been oppressed by the white hegemony. doesn't have to be based in what we would call reality. That's what they see as truth. If you're a Mexican lesbian, the only truth that matters is you've been oppressed by the white cultural hegemony. That's the truth. It's not relative to the individual any longer. That was postmodernism. In critical theory, it's relative to the identity group a person belongs to. Everybody sort of tracking with me here mostly? If you get this, you'll be able to make sense of the world around you, in part. You'll sometimes hear conservative news commentators say, if you really believe black lives matter, you'd be concerned about black-on-black homicides. But you see, those commentators are relying on old perceptions of truth that's absolute and grounded in things like numbers. I mean, we laugh at that, right? But that's what it is. Not critical theory. That's not the truth that matters. Which is why 500 black people, because shoot, 500 black people in almost all black neighborhoods, and it's irrelevant in our cultural conversation, and will very rarely be reported on. That doesn't pass the truth test for critical theory. The truth test means it's got to fit the narrative of white power oppressing some oppressed group. It has to. Conversely, that's why, again, if a police officer tragically kills a person of color, there's no need to wait to get any information, because the truth is already known. The white power structure's done it again to a person of color. That's the truth. What happens beyond that is irrelevant, and we've got to get that in our heads. And I know it's like, but that doesn't really make sense. Yeah, you're right. It doesn't make sense, but that's where they live. Take the case of Breonna Taylor just this past week when the Attorney General of Kentucky said they weren't going to charge those police officers. Riots broke out, pandemonium, right? And what you or I think of as what could be the truth in that case is irrelevant. The fact that her boyfriend shot at and actually shot a cop, irrelevant. That's not truth that matters. The fact that the cop had a warrant, irrelevant. The fact that the apartment was used for drug trafficking, irrelevant. I know it doesn't make sense to us, but the only truth that matters is that a woman of color was killed by the oppressive white cultural hegemony. And this is where we have to understand, and I mean we have to understand this. When we hear people speak of social justice, The last thing they have in mind is biblical justice. Stick with me here. Biblical justice, you see, is necessarily related to truth. Not truth as they define it, real truth. The New Testament word for truth is the word aletheia. You know what that word means? It means essentially, in the Greek language, reality as it is. That's truth. And you see, biblical justice simply cannot exist where that truth doesn't exist. So anyone who says, well, we just pull social justice into the church and make it biblical justice, No, you can't, because they define categories that we see as necessary to administer justice, right? That's why, how many witnesses does it take in the Old Testament to verify a case? Two to three, right? Why? Because they want to make sure it's true. Because justice can't happen unless we have true processes of law. Somebody was going to say something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is where we're gonna pick up next week and next week will be the last week of this, by the way. But one of the things you need to know is what we're looking at here It's not a bunch of random thoughts that are silly and weird. We're looking at a structured worldview that's decidedly religious and necessarily contrary to the true religion. So, again, that'll be next week. Well, I'm thankful for the civil rights movement, but that's part of the problem. The people who are protesting are acting as though the civil rights movement never happened, right? I mean, even when I'm talking, I'm talking to ministers and they're saying, I can't believe you quote that. He was a Presbyterian. He was actually General Lee's chief of staff, and he became a great theologian in the Southern Presbyterian Church. And I've had Presbyterian ministers. I can't believe you quoted him, because he supported slavery. Like, well, yeah, I know that, and I disagree with that. He was really, he not only supported slavery, he actually did promote it, even more, over and against Lee, actually. But be that as it may, it's like, you do understand we're talking about 170 years ago. What he did or didn't do to people is irrelevant to what people are experiencing today. Again, we'll talk about some of this kind of stuff next week. Anyway, I really want us to get this. Again, if somebody says, do you want to just society? Well, yeah. Duh. Of course we want a just society. But social justice is a justice that's grounded on post-modernism, ideas of truth. Again, which is relative to an identity group. Biblical justice is going to be grounded in truth. I put a few verses here. You can follow along. Isaiah 59, 14 and 15. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away, for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself prey. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice." So this passage begins and ends with justice, right? By the way, in the Hebrew, this is what's known as a chiasm. I won't work this out, but it begins with justice, it ends with justice, and what's in the middle? Truth, right? You can't have justice without real, legitimate, objective truth. Zechariah 7, 8 verses 16 and 17. These are the things you shall do. Speak each man the truth to his neighbor. Give judgment or make judgments in your gates for truth, justice, and peace. Let none of you think evil in your heart against your neighbor, and do not love a false oath, for all these things are things that I hate, says the Lord." Psalm 89, 14. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Mercy and truth go before your face. You see, there is no concept biblically for a kind of justice that's devoid to a commitment to truth. And by the way, this is something that the secular world agreed with until about 1980. That's when this started to transition. The ideas really began to develop in the mid-60s. But we begin to see the implications of it in the 80s. But prior to that, everybody understood you need truth for there to be justice, right? And those were maiden virtues. That's how Socrates spoke of them, is maiden virtues, right? I put in a wonderful, and this is helpful because Kevin DeYoung writes so easily and just so fluidly. This is a wonderful definition of biblical justice over against social justice. DeYoung writes, I have my concerns with the term social justice and with all that it connotes. But what if we press for a less culturally controlled and more biblically defined understanding? Several years ago I worked my way through major justice passages in the Bible. Leviticus 19, Leviticus 25, Isaiah 1, Isaiah 58, Jeremiah 22, Amos 5, Micah 6, Matthew 25, Luke 4. My less than exciting conclusion was that we should not oversell or undersell what the Bible says about justice. On the one hand, there's a lot in the Bible about God's care for the poor, the oppressed, and the vulnerable. There are also plenty of warnings against treating the helpless with cruelty and disrespect. On the other hand, justice as a biblical category is not synonymous with anything and everything we feel would be good for the world. That is a powerful statement, by the way. Doing justice means following the rule of law, showing impartiality, paying what you promised, not stealing, not swindling, not taking bribes, not taking advantage of the weak because they're too uninformed or unconnected to stop you. By the way, he said he worked out those verses. I read his book in which he did it, and this little definition he gave here in an article was a summary of his exegesis on all those justice passages. It's really, really helpful. Oh, yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah, there's the problem. See, this is the little subtlety of Satan. I do think, as Western Christians, we are way too material, and our prosperity has become a kind of idol for us. No doubt about that, right? But having said that, this movement of critical theory necessarily makes certain categories of people bad. White, man, prosperous. Those are just inherently wicked in these worldviews. That's a different kind of partiality! But that's exactly what it is. It's a partiality. I want to very briefly close with this tweet here from Andrew King. He's a professor at Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary. Again, you guys wouldn't be very familiar with that seminary. It's not as conservative as the one where Moeller is the president, but this is considered to be a conservative evangelical seminary. And he wrote this after the Attorney General of Kentucky came out and said they weren't going to press charges against his office. It seems that Breonna Taylor was 26 years too old for some Christians to mourn. God help us now. Abortion. In other words, what he's saying, and that's a good question, and this is what he's saying, if we were dealing with abortion, Christians would be all pro-life, but they don't care about this life. By the way, this is a biblical studies professor, right? So it's not ignorance. But, here's the problem. on any host of levels, it's a false equivalency, right? Right? Because, I mean, I know she's being promoted now as this incredible EMT who just, you know, was about to save the world. If she would have just lived another year, she would have undoubtedly cured cancer. I mean, that's the, you see, that doesn't matter. The fact that she was with a guy It's the fact that she was immersed in a drug culture. You know what? This evening, I'll be quoting this. Yeah. Yes, you do. The embarrassing thing is I can't remember it off the top of my head. Proverbs 13, 17. No, that's not it. Well. Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. Because the world has a certain perspective of truth doesn't mean that God's words of wisdom no longer apply. If you're a companion of fools, it's hard. That's what I said last week. It's not an unkindness. I say this so you see, it's one thing to say, don't ever be surprised when the world acts like the world. Right? When the world acts like the world, we should say, I'm glad I belong to Christ. But when you start to see the church embracing ideas, that is dangerous. And let me just make one other quick comment. If you're dealing with people who are going down this road, they need to be taught how these things are incompatible with the Bible. Things like how biblical justice is not the same thing as what's called social justice. I've got a sheet that I'll be passing out next week. I've been accumulating these as I put this together that'll have like a bunch of resources on it. But I'll close with this. One of the greatest resources I found was written by an atheist group, interestingly enough. It's three scholars. One's a mathematician. And his name's James Lindsay. I forget the other two guys' name. But he and his two other partners, about four years ago, became somewhat infamous for producing grievance studies. What they did was they wrote fake academic studies and sent them to major academic boards and academic journals to see if they could get them published. And they got four of them published. And one of them was a translation of Mein Kampf. And they didn't even care because they concluded the paper by saying basically white people are bad. One of the papers, this is really amazing, was showing how, and this caught my attention, this is how I first got drawn to it. how if you go to a dog park you can see misogyny and male supremacy. And here's how they wrote, again it's a total ruse, and this paper got published by one of the premier gender journals in the country. They said if you go to a dog park, and they said, we evaluated, listen, they evaluated, we evaluated the genitals of thousands of dogs at the dog park. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke. And what they wrote was, but if you watch and you watch like dogs mount other dogs and male dogs mounting other female dogs, when male dogs mount female dogs, we don't care. But if female dogs mount male dogs, then we care. That's a sign of misogyny. And they actually went on in the article and said, you know, there's other things we can learn from the dog park. We probably should put men on a leash. They published this. Why? because that's their truth. What we call reality is irrelevant. And see, believers need to know that we're dealing with a different language, a different understanding of reality. We can't just take those things and say, I'm going to import them. Yeah. Anyway. Well, only if they identify as gender studies professors. I mean, that's some of the nonsense, right? Anyway, let's close with prayer. Father, we thank you for this day, for this time together, and even what is an uncomfortable subject, but a necessary one. Make us wise to evaluate the world around us, and wise to, even as we heard, to discern. your ways, your truth, your purposes, and not to be taken in by twisted language, by men who would seek us to follow after them. Bless us and keep us, O God, for Jesus' sake. Amen.