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June 9, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:15
The Religious Decline of the West | John MacArthur
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It just so happens that the politicians have basically co-opted sin and turned it into their platform, which forces people who understand a biblical definition of sin to be the enemy.
It's not that we're trying to take over the world.
It's not we're trying to take over the United States.
It's we're just trying to uphold righteousness.
John MacArthur is an American pastor, prolific author, and the host of the national Christian radio and television program, Grace to You.
He's been the pastor of Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Sun Valley, California, since 1969, and serves as the Chancellor Emeritus of the Masters University and Seminary in Santa Clarita.
Since completing his first best-selling book, The Gospel According to Jesus, in 1988, John has written nearly 400 books of biblical commentary on themes such as finding truth in our modern world, the shaping of the Twelve Apostles, and extraordinary women of the Bible.
His expositional preaching and deep theological insights have made him one of the most respected and influential evangelical leaders of our time.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he made headlines for his defiance of lockdown orders arguing the government had overstepped its bounds in restricting religious gatherings.
Los Angeles County sued MacArthur's church for refusing to close down according to local mandates.
MacArthur and his congregation held their ground, countersuing and winning, by utilizing precedents set by a Supreme Court decision ruling that certain public health restrictions could not be applied to houses of worship.
Los Angeles County ultimately settled the suit, paying $800,000 in legal fees to Grace Community Church.
In today's episode, we discuss the decline of religious life in the West and the degradation of biblical teachings in American churches.
John also addresses the challenges of convincing the upcoming generation to live a life of faith, the importance of cultivating a sense of community membership, and the Christian understanding of the Jewish people.
This is a conversation you don't want to miss.
Welcome to another episode of the Sunday special.
Pastor MacArthur, thanks so much for joining the show.
I really appreciate it.
It's my pleasure.
Good to be with you again.
So, let's start with sort of the status of religion and Christianity in particular in modern America.
Obviously, those of us who believe in the Bible, whether we agree on the New Testament, we'll get to, I'm sure, in a little bit.
But those who believe at least partially in Bible and biblical morality, let's say, we've been lamenting the downfall of church attendance in the United States, the lack of biblical adherence in the United States over the course of the last several decades.
And we're seeing all of that come to a head.
Do you think that's a trend that is going to continue?
And if so, how exactly do we reverse the decline?
Well, it's obviously a trend, and there may be a number of things contributing to it.
I don't want to get too technical, but first of all, many, many churches have lost their sense of transcendence.
It's like going to a rock concert.
It's like going to a TED Talk.
It's like going to hear somebody tell you you're really a wonderful person and you can speak your own world into existence.
It's psychological, sociological games.
But it lacks the transcendence.
It lacks the sense of connecting with God, with finding reality in an invisible means of support beyond yourself.
So many churches are, I mean, they're pumping the prosperity gospel, you get what you want, or they're just talking about being a better human being.
That just doesn't lift you up.
That doesn't elevate you.
That doesn't take away the fear of death.
That does not give you some kind of existential reality that you can cling to that transcends life.
And I think another reason people don't go to church is because it's so confusing.
So what is the form of Christianity that represents accurately the scripture and the word of God.
I think another thing that contributes to indifference toward church is the crushing disintegration of the family.
And people are finding their community online.
They create their own fantasy community, they create their own You know, virtual world of relationships.
So they don't need real community.
They're not dependent on the intimacy of, and many of them don't even understand what that intimacy is because of the breakdown of the family.
So, and there's also an effort to destroy anything traditional, anything historic, anything ancient, anything even 10 years ago.
In favor of whatever the new zeitgeist is.
So there's so many things that assault the church.
Those are some of the things that come to mind.
So, the biggest decline that we've been seeing in terms of religious adherence in the United States, and the most important, has been in Protestant denominations.
And obviously, Jews represent a very small fraction of the population.
Catholics represent still a fairly small minority of the population religiously in the United States.
It's been the secular decline in Protestant adherence over the course of the last 50 years that really has been devastating for the nation.
So, for people who are looking at Protestantism.
You asked the question before and I'll ask you.
How does somebody who's interested in going to church determine what is a Bible-believing church that's worth their time versus a church that maybe has a Pride Progress flag hanging off the door and claims to be speaking in the name of the Gospels?
So let's go to the real issue here.
A church that is faithful to Scripture, a synagogue that is faithful to Scripture, bears moral authority.
I mean, it exists to say, this is what the Lord has said.
This is what God requires.
This is divine mandate.
This is the morality that leads to blessing and disobedience and disregard for this morality leads To cursing, you could say.
So, the bottom line is, if you're living in the culture that we're living in, where you want absolute freedom to do anything you choose to do, to establish your own set of rules, your own truth, your own standards of morality, the last thing you want Is to step into some place that's going to call into question everything you're choosing to do in your life.
And it's going to exercise authority over you.
The church to be the church, and I think this is true in Judaism with a synagogue.
If you're going to be a faithful Old Testament synagogue, then you have to lay down the law of God.
If you're going to be a faithful church, you have to lay down the standard.
And it is not to crush people, it is to bring them into divine blessing.
I mean, that goes back to Deuteronomy, right?
Do this and you'll be blessed.
Don't do this and you'll be cursed.
So I think because the natural fallen heart is bent towards sin, The church is not an inviting place to go if it's faithful to proclaim the Scripture, because then that brings people under guilt.
And why would they go to be basically held up before God and threatened with judgment?
But that's the message of the church, and that's what leads to the good news of the gospel, that Christ died to pay the penalty for your sin, and through Him you can have complete forgiveness of sin, so that the church becomes the family of the forgiven, and all the blessings of God are dispensed there.
So, how much of this is going to be self-correcting, and what needs to happen in terms of church in the United States in order to fix it actively?
Because, you know, one of the problems that is faced by, I think, Protestantism in certain senses, Judaism, not as much by Catholicism, which has a centralized authority, obviously.
Catholicism, theoretically, can enforce from the top, although increasingly they're not doing so.
Protestantism, by nature, is much more diffused in terms of sources of authority.
There are a variety of pastors who are interpreting in a variety of ways.
Judaism has something similar.
There's no hierarchical structure.
So, given the lack of hierarchy, how exactly can you ensure that more churches are spreading the gospel?
And by the same token, is it just a matter of waiting until people become disillusioned with secularism and kind of wander their way back to the proper church?
Well, there's certainly some truth in that.
But Hosea said it in a simple statement.
He said, like people, like priests.
I mean, the people can't rise higher than whoever the spiritual authorities are in their life.
I mean, when you've got a guy, like the case that's going on with that Miller guy down in the South, where his wife committed suicide and all these horrible things going on around that, and that guy is a pastor?
What would we expect to come out of that except the chaos that manifests itself eventually?
And time and truth go hand in hand.
You can't hide forever.
So I think that the primary issue is leadership.
I mean, it's the same thing in any field.
You never rise higher than the leadership.
I mean, we know that politically.
We know that in every aspect of life, business, education, and everything.
So I think the church suffers from really, really chaotic Inconsistent leadership.
The church, you know, if you're dealing with people with deep needs, hurts, pains, illnesses, this is a perfect place to become rich at the expense of those people that you abuse.
And so people counterfeit religion.
And they make themselves rich.
So you're trying to sort out not only the false leaders, but the weak leaders, the unfaithful leaders, the untrained leaders.
So that is really the issue in Christianity.
I had a reporter ask me one time, who is in charge of the Christian movement?
And I said, Well, unfortunately, nobody is in charge of that movement.
And it's that, that is, on the one hand, good, because you don't have the hierarchy dictating everything.
But on the other hand, you have to live with what you get.
So I think it's a leadership problem and the call for Genuine, honest, godly, virtuous, kind, compassionate, loving, truthful leadership in the church is more necessary now than ever in my lifetime.
So, as somebody who's spent your life teaching faith and spreading faith, what is the best way to teach faith?
It seems almost a self-contradiction in terms, because obviously faith is something that you have to believe or something you have to feel.
How can you teach belief or feeling as opposed to what you would do in, say, a science class would be to teach the scientific process, teach falsification, teach evidence.
How do you teach somebody faith?
What's the best way to approach somebody with the faith?
That's really a good question, Ben.
And the answer is this.
The only faith that makes any sense is faith that has an object that can deliver what you expect.
I mean, if you say, I'm a person of faith, what do you believe in?
Who do you believe in?
I mean, that could be the ultimate folly if you believe in the wrong thing.
I mean, you can get on a five-story building and say, I have faith that I can fly.
We had that happen in our church.
Just a few weeks ago, we had a guy who had come off some drugs and climbed up on the highest point of our church, and I guess he thought he was Peter Pan or something.
and flew and killed himself.
Tragic!
This is not a person from our church, but somebody in the community.
I don't know what he believed, but if you're going to believe, you better believe in the right thing, because it's the object of your faith.
It's the object of your faith.
Who do you believe in?
What do you believe in?
What are the truths and the standards that you can anchor your life to because they're valid, because they're validated, because they're proved by actual evidence?
Otherwise, it's folly.
Faith without the right object is foolishness.
So, let's say you have a skeptic who comes to you and says, listen, I don't believe in the Gospels.
I don't believe in the veracity of the Bible.
Prove it to me.
How exactly are you going to convince me that this is something that I should spend my time on?
Do you start with the values of the Gospels or do you start with the story of the Gospels?
What's sort of the way that you lead people into faith from your perspective as a pastor?
Well, there are a number of categories.
You could start with the idea of fulfilled prophecy.
You can go back to the Old Testament, and many, many times God said something was going to happen, and it happened.
I mean, it happened in the Old Testament just the way God said it was going to happen.
So you have those kinds of historical things.
You also have the miraculous element validated by eyewitnesses throughout all of redemptive history, throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
You have thousands of people who saw the risen Christ, for example.
You have the apostles who who were scattered and fearful when Jesus was arrested and crucified.
Three days later, He's risen from the dead.
And if you question that, then you have to ask, how is it that the disciples from being fearful turned into these bold proclaimers of the risen Christ and literally gave their lives in martyrdom for a message they knew was true.
So, historically, you can go back and you can look at the history of Scripture.
You can see fulfilled prophecy.
You can compare the Old Testament with history.
That's one of the things that I studied under a guy named Charles Feinberg.
A Jewish guy who was really basically trained to be a rabbi, went to Johns Hopkins, got a PhD in archaeology, studied under William Foxwell Albright, the leading archaeologist of that era.
And he spent his whole career as a former guy being trained for a rabbi, studying biblical archaeology and showed how it paralleled the actual accounts of the Old Testament.
But I think the most compelling thing that Christianity has to offer is the person of Jesus Christ, the historical Christ, and the fact that Christ does not come across as somebody created by a committee or a bunch of deceivers.
The moral character of Christ, the wisdom of Christ is so transcendent.
So I think there are a lot of ways you go at it, but I would just say this in a general sense.
Read the Bible.
Just read the Bible.
It has the ring of truth.
It defends itself.
It's like a lion.
You don't defend it.
You don't defend a lion.
You open the cage and let it out.
It'll be okay.
And the Scripture is like that.
It's like that even morally.
There's something in the heart of people that resonates with biblical morality.
Obviously, their sinfulness fights it.
But the law of God is written in every human heart.
That's part of being created in the image of God.
And you can fight that law, you can resist that law, you can violate that law, but that law is there.
That is part of being created in God's image.
And I think if your heart is open to To the truth.
You go to the Word of God, and I've seen this now for all these years I've been in ministry.
The ring of biblical truth is so powerful to a person who honestly reads the Scripture.
I just tell people all the time, go to the Scripture, read the Bible, and let it defend itself.
You know, one of the things that you mentioned there, and obviously as somebody who's spoken his entire career as a Jew about why Christians need to go back to church and re-engage with the Jesus of the New Testament, the perversion of Jesus into a sort of namby-pamby, bizarrely androgynous Creation from from Haidt Ashbery is one of the stranger things that's happened over the course of the last 50 or 60 years in American life.
The attempt to turn him into a sort of bizarre pacifist with nothing of morality to say.
People who are out there, major politicians, will say that Jesus was out there to teach non-judgmentalism and tolerance, which is like, I don't know if they lost the ability to read a book or if they never just understood the book they were reading, but I don't see that at all when I read the New Testament.
Well, no.
Look, they didn't kill Jesus because He was so kind and generous and compassionate.
They killed Jesus because He exposed the hypocrisy of the religion of the Jews.
And that was nothing new, and you know that from Jewish history.
In the Old Testament, I mean, God had a hard time getting them to conform to His law, even after Deuteronomy, where He said, Command you to do, you'll be blessed.
If you don't, you'll be cursed.
I mean, we all know the history.
They wind up worshiping Baal.
They wind up offering their kids to Molech.
Trying to keep them on the straight and narrow was a very difficult thing to do.
So, when Jesus arrives, there are true believers in Israel, for sure.
You know, Joseph and Mary, his parents, Elizabeth and Zacharias, the priest, and Simeon and Anna at the temple when they brought Jesus in to be Introduced to Judaism.
And you have true believers.
But Jesus confronted false religion in no uncertain terms.
And He confronted irreligion in no uncertain terms.
And much of His ministry was pronouncing judgment.
You either come to God for forgiveness and salvation, or you're going to come under divine judgment.
That's the real Jesus.
I wrote a book called The Jesus You Can't Ignore.
And that is the Jesus that at the beginning of His ministry went into the temple and made a whip and cleaned out the buyers and sellers.
And then He did it again in the Passion Week three years later at the end of His ministry.
And then He stood outside the temple and said, not one stone is going to stand upon another in this temple.
I'm going to bring it all down because it's corrupt.
And one of the illustrations of that corruption was the widow who gave her last mite.
And Jesus says, this widow gives her last mite.
She has nothing left.
What kind of religion takes the last coin from the hand of a widow?
And he pronounced judgment on that temple.
And it wasn't long after that that the Romans came.
In 70 A.D.
and everybody knows what happened to Jerusalem, which is exactly what Jesus said would happen.
In the meantime, of course, obviously there were true Jews.
The New Testament says not all Jews are true Jews in the spiritual sense, in the sense that they love God and love His law and want to honor Him.
So, I think this is the big issue with religion.
Jesus said this.
He said, you hate me because I told you your deeds were evil.
So, that is the big issue.
Look, this is what Biblical Judaism does.
It confronts evil and sin.
And this is what Christianity does.
It confronts evil and sin.
So, if you're happy with your sin and you love the darkness rather than the light, why are you going to go hear that?
There has to be something going on in your heart where you've reached a point of deep conviction, a deep dissatisfaction, where you begin to hate the sin and the effects of the sin, and you're looking for deliverance from sin.
At that point, you find a place where the gospel is being proclaimed, the gospel of forgiveness.
And sometimes it's tough to find.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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So do you think that, you know, obviously there are many distinctions between Judaism and Christianity.
One of the distinctions that may have been pressed too hard upon, but I'd like to get your take on it, is the distinction between sort of faith and acts.
the sort of way that Judaism perceives itself, and Maimonides certainly describes it this way,
is that the acts precede the faith. That basically the way that you bring people
to faith is through acting in the way that the Bible suggests. That you set up a track record
of success by acting in moral ways, and because you're now living in the realm of godly morality,
you're living what God wants you to live. That the belief is sort of a natural
manifestation of that, whereas Christianity, conversion in Christianity
seems to be faith first and then works later, meaning accept the primacy of
Christ and then the acts will naturally follow because you've accepted the
authority and primacy of Christ in your life. Is that distinction too hard a
distinction? What do you make of that? Well I think both of those things are
true. I think how can I convince somebody to be a Christian if they can't see the
transformation. I mean what am I trying to do?
I can't say to somebody, you need to be obedient to the law of God, you need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you need to be obedient to God's law and God will bless you, if my life isn't a demonstration of that.
So, yes, my behavior Greg gives grounds for somebody else's faith.
Oh, look, you're like... I mean, there was a philosopher in Europe who said, show me your redeemed life, and I might be interested in believing in your Redeemer.
I mean, that's so foundational.
So basically, if you're ill and you go to a doctor and the doctor finds a way to cure you, and you go to all the people who have your same illness and say, hey, this guy can cure me, and I'm a living illustration of that, that's the proof.
So I think, in a sense, both of those are true.
Somebody has to have the behavior that validates the faith.
And then the faith comes and the behavior follows in another person.
That make sense?
Yeah.
No, that does make perfect sense.
I mean, this is some of the stuff that you talk about also in the war on children is because when you're raising kids, it really is coincident you teach faith and act at the same exact time.
I mean, the reason that you teach a kid that something is good or bad when the kid is three, four or five years old is because God says that it is good or bad when they are three or four or five years old.
And so they're simultaneously learning to believe in the veracity and truth of the moral system you're teaching and the veracity of the God who gave them that moral system and makes them successful in life through that moral system.
And that's something that you talk about in your book is deeply lacking.
We now live in a world where people seem to have taken up this sort of Rousseauian view of how you should raise children.
They just expose the children to the elements and you don't make any choices for them at all.
The best form of parenting is non-judgmental parenting.
But that is, in and of itself, a form of judgmental parenting.
You've judged against a moral system, in favor of an amoral system, and then you expect children to be able to navigate that.
Yeah, I mean, the worst thing you can do with children is let them decide what they're going to believe and what kind of morality they're going to follow.
I mean, you'll have a disaster in your home at three years of age.
I mean, they have to be conformed.
That's why Proverbs says, spare the rod and spoil the child.
You know, you have to discipline.
There has to be, literally, there has to be some pain connected to dishonest or lying behavior or unkindness or whatever, and attitudes as much as actions.
I mean, I've been thinking about that, watching the university conflagrations going all over the place in this country, and I'm thinking to myself, who raised these kids?
Where is all this massive kind of uncontrollable hatred, anger, ignorance, rebellion, destructiveness come from?
This is the product.
This is the product of the parents of those young people, clearly, this integration of the family.
So much of it is screaming women.
And weak men, and abysmal ignorance, and hatred even.
And then you give them the bullhorn?
You know, you give the bullhorn to the kindergartners?
This makes no sense at all.
But if you think that children have been the target of the last 20 years, just look at the universities.
And they can't, with an undisciplined life and a life of almost hedonistic freedom, they arrive in a university and come under the influence of some ideological activist who can basically lead them to do anything he wants them to do.
And if it's rebellion, all the better, because that suits the immature heart.
So this is the proof of what's been going on in the parenting process over the last 25 years.
I think that so many of these protesters are representatives of a fundamentally anti-religious belief system, because the religious belief system has a few key predicates, a few key principles.
Some of those are, you do have the willpower and ability to change your own life.
That you're responsible for your own actions before God.
The idea that there is an unchanging moral system, a moral right and a moral wrong, that has nothing to do with your self-proclaimed status as victim.
And I think there's a reason that so many of these protesters are burning the American flag.
They don't believe any of this stuff.
They've decided that the system itself is fundamentally corrupt,
controlled from above by powerful people, and they're all going to link arms
and march upon the system, which is why you see this bizarre spectacle
of people flying gay pride flags in solidarity with terrorist groups that kill gay people.
Like, it's not about their common shared interests between one another,
it's about their common shared interests against the societal superstructure
that has provided for their prosperity and success.
Well, you're absolutely right.
I mean, that's absolutely right.
But it wouldn't matter.
It wouldn't matter what it was.
I was talking to a guy yesterday from Brazil, and he said they're fighting the same battle with wokeness.
And I said, well, wait a minute.
Do you have a sort of an oppressed Category of people?
Is it like natives of Brazil?
Is it like some ethnic group?
And he said, no, it's LGBTQ.
The wokeness issue is that they are the oppressed people in the society.
And it just strikes me that when people want to rebel, they'll find any reason to rebel.
And that's what I see in the hearts of these kids.
They were raised in families where they didn't know how to face the challenges of this world.
A family is where you learn by observing.
You watch how your parents love each other, how your parents resolve problems and issues.
You figure out how to live life by looking at the model and example of your parents and grandparents.
These kids, it's as if they were raised in the jungle without anybody to show them what to do.
And somebody opened the cage and turned them all loose on the world.
And it could be anything that could sort of activate that rebellion.
I remember some years ago, an interview with a student who said, I want to protest.
I'm looking for a good cause.
It's that kind of mentality.
They want to rebel, and that rebellion finds its origin in the fact that I'm God.
There is no transcendent authority outside of me.
This is how I feel, and I'm going to demand that what I feel be considered as the most important issue, and I'm going to scream until people get the message.
You know, as I've mentioned before and as you've been talking about, I think the curative to this is, in fact, not just going to church, but being involved in a church community.
So, you know, in my community, obviously, I think that the Jews have this right, and Jesus had it right originally because he's pro-Sabbath, the basic idea that On at least one day a week.
You are supposed to remove yourself from the world around you and you are supposed to be in the community with compatriots who believe in the living God is the way to do it.
So, you know, we don't use electronics.
We all live within walking distance of the synagogue.
Every seventh day we are spending 25 hours with one another engaging in everything from prayer to Bible study groups, having lunch with one another.
The problem is this.
religion and faith practice, they're in the water, they're in the air that's around you.
And when we separate that off from regular life, it's like, these are faith principles that I believe,
they're apart from me and I believe in them.
That's not how most people historically have lived their faith.
It really is not about what you think, it's about what you do and what you are in the world.
The way that I engage with my community and the way my kids engage with my communities,
they're engaged in the community from literally the day they're born.
In Judaism, obviously, we have circumcision on day eight, and the thing that we say during the circumcision ceremony
is that the child should be dedicated, l'chuppah, l'torah, l'maisem, t'oviyah,
meaning to the wedding canopy, to the Torah.
Well, that is all exactly right.
And that's why I wrote the book, The War on Children.
the eighth day, like from when they're born, they're born into a system of obligations
and social networks and social fabric.
And when you rob children of this, they become free radicals and they don't know where to go.
And then they do end up creating identities around terrible things.
Well, that is all exactly right.
And that's why I wrote the book, The War on Children.
The War on Children starts, well, it really starts in not wanting to have children.
I mean, you don't wanna have children, You know, buy a dog.
And then it moves to, if you do get pregnant, kill the child in your womb.
And if the child survives, you know, let the culture raise him.
It's easier for people.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's easier for people to take a kid and put him on a drug than it is to turn off the cell phone.
It makes no sense.
I mean, it's just one thing after another after another leads to the irresponsibility.
But you're absolutely right.
God's complete plan based on the family.
Father and the mother loving each other and raising the children according to the law of God so that their lives could be blessed and so they could have well-ordered societies.
And God has built in some things, like even in an individual sense, the human conscience.
You know, it screams at you, accusing you or excusing you based on your conduct.
That's the law of God in the heart.
And the next barrier is the family, where the father's authority and the mother's authority, as we find out in Proverbs, even to the point of corporal punishment if need be, is part of channeling that child down the right pathway.
And if it gets past that, then the society steps in, and God even gave the society the sword.
They don't bear the sword for nothing.
They have a certain amount of authority to coerce people to obedience and conformity that allows for well-ordered societies to function.
So God has done just built into the common grace of the world, things, mechanisms that help correct people
and put them in the path of blessing.
And when all of that disintegrates, when you reject the police, when you reject the authority,
when you reject any authority at all authority, when you have no parental consistency,
no moral leadership in your home, where there is no morality at all.
I mean, you can believe whatever you want about morality and think that the consequences are going to be good.
In spite of the fact that you violated the law of God, who is the Creator, who knows how His creation functions best?
When all of that is disintegrated, and really, you're right, at the bottom of all of it is a rejection of God.
They don't want a divine, transcendent, sovereign judge ruling on their lives.
Yeah, and in rejection of God lies rejection of man.
This is the part that I think the post-Enlightenment thinkers got totally wrong.
I mean, the basic idea is that God created man in a particular way, in his own image, which means that you do have a nature, and that nature is in fact fixed.
As a human being in certain particular ways and that God has created roles and jobs for you across your life.
I mean, if you go back to the book of Genesis, God puts Adam in the garden and he's actually got a job in the garden, right?
He's meant to cultivate the garden, which is a beautiful place.
Everything's fine.
It proceeds man.
Man gets there and it's his job to actually maintain and cultivate the garden.
He fails in that job because he violates God's commandment and he gets thrown out.
And so what does God do?
God gives him more work.
God says you're gonna have to till the ground.
God says that you're going to have to die at some point.
You're gonna have to be a father now, right?
He doesn't have kids until he leaves the garden, right?
This idea that human beings, they find their identity in the things and roles that they play across the course of a lifetime, not in how they feel.
That is the fundamental distinction in terms of identity that our society, I think, is breaking down upon.
It's foundering.
Because it used to be that a human being, the way that I've talked about this, I say, you want to know what human beings are and what we aspire to be?
Go to a graveyard, go to a cemetery, and look at what's on the headstone.
What's on the headstone is always loving father, loving husband.
It's the thing that you did for the members of your family, for your community, and for the world that actually define you.
But the way that we define ourselves online is, how do I feel today?
It never says on your headstone, felt terrible, right?
It never said, there's no emoji on the headstone, right?
Your feelings are irrelevant to what your life actually is supposed to mean in front of God and in front of your family.
Yeah, I don't know if you've seen Jonathan Haidt's book on The Anxious Generation, but he looks at that whole issue of the cell phone and the internet from 2010 to 2015 as this mega shift in dealing with teenagers and young children, where they shifted away from building relationships, real relationships with real people, to building bizarre kinds of Relationships with people on the internet, falsified, fanciful, you know, fabricated kinds of things that took over their lives.
And you can see it from that time on.
What you have as a result of that is all these teenagers who have anxiety and bipolar and ADD and whatever it is, and ultimately, you know, the escalating Figures in suicide and self-harm and all that, because they're disconnected from what makes life life, what makes life fulfilling, and that's real relationships with people that you love and love you.
You know, one of the things that you've been hit with that's been fascinating to watch is what I think is an enormous amount of projection on the part of certain people in politics, and that is this accusation that religious leaders are getting too political.
And that seems a bizarre sort of projection, because again, The thing that I've seen over the course of my lifetime is stuff that was considered radically uncontroversial when I was growing up is now considered radically controversial if you maintain exactly the same position in 2024 that you maintained in, say, the year 1995.
So if you maintained in 1995 as any religious Christian would have, going all the way back to the time of Jesus, and for a thousand years before that, under Judaism, that, for example, marriage is between a man and a woman, That was considered apolitical in 1995.
Today, if you're a pastor and you say that, now you're politicizing matters.
Or if you say that politics of abortion, that this matters because abortion matters to Christians, now you're considered political.
What do you make of the projection that you saying the same thing that you've always said is now political as opposed to people on the left who are just, you know, they're just saying political stuff but that's what they do because they're political and really you should bow down.
So, I grew up in a world where Democrats had a sociological view.
They had an economic view.
Republicans had a sociological and economic view.
It was never a moral issue.
It was the workforce and the ownership.
Those were the two parties.
The Republicans were the ones that created the jobs and the Democrats are the ones that worked the jobs and finding out a balance there, you know, was what the political leaders were supposed to achieve.
That all went away early in this century when Politicians began to make their platforms moral or immoral, from my standpoint.
When you start saying it's pro-LGBTQ, it's pro-homosexual, it's pro-abortion, it's pro-transgender, you know, we got your back, we got your back.
Everything has shifted from the economic You know, definitions of the past into these moral issues.
So, as a Christian, I'm still talking on a moral level.
It just so happens that politicians have stepped into the moral world and created chaos.
So, for me, I have to vote for what is righteous.
I mean, I don't always have a clear-cut option, but you take the best of the options that are put before you.
So we all want to uphold righteousness in this society because we want to represent God rightly and accurately.
And if Christians and the people of the faith in Judaism hold to the law of God, then that should show up in how they vote.
It should show up in their willingness to say, I'm going to stand against this trend because it violates the Word of God.
That's not Christian nationalism.
It just so happens that the politicians have basically co-opted sin and turned it into their platform, which forces people who understand a biblical definition of sin to be the enemy.
It's not that we're trying to take over the world.
It's not that we're trying to take over the United States.
It's we're just trying to uphold righteousness.
That attempt to treat everyone who is Christian and voting as a Christian nationalist is total insanity.
I mean, the reality is that this country's liberties were rooted in Christian virtue.
I mean, that is just a reality.
All of the founders, including the founders who consider themselves more deistic,
believed in the virtues of the Bible.
I mean, even Thomas Jefferson, who is maybe the most deistic of the founders, his great attempt was to strip the Bible of miracles, but to maintain the morality of the Bible, which, of course, I don't think is quite possible, but he attempted to do it because he understood the inherent value of Christian morality.
The attempt to say that Christian morality itself, which is the basis of all of American development, that that is somehow, if you want to maintain that, An aspect of Christian nationalism is though you're a theocrat forcing everyone in the United States to convert or die, which is the attempt by the media to recast this term Christian nationalism into something that it really is not.
It's such an Orwellian exercise, the attempt to say that if you believe in Jesus or you go to synagogue or you go to church and you believe that the biblical morality upon which our entire civilization is based is good and ought to be effectuated in our culture and ought to be supported by the government on a broad level without In sectarian ways.
Forcing people to adhere to particular religious beliefs.
That if you believe those things, that you are somehow a 13th century Catholic theocrat or something.
Like that's such a bizarre take.
And obviously meant to dissuade religious people from even engaging in politics at all.
Yeah, and that's the point.
They like to keep us out.
They want to keep us out of the public discourse.
That's for sure.
That is the legacy of secularism.
I mean, that's where secularism takes you.
Religion is an affront.
Religion is an attack on secularism.
And you have this secular society unwilling to bend to the law of God.
I mean, you have the president saying, if you're transgender, we've got your back.
And when I heard him say that, my reaction was, what are you going to do?
Push him over the cliff from the backside?
I mean, what you're doing for somebody who's in that kind of transgression, and then that kind of pattern.
You ought to have their front, and you ought to stop them from what they're doing, rather than have their back and shove them down that path any further.
But secularism hates the truth, and it will do anything it can to label it and vilify it, and, you know, that's what we have going on.
You know, one other thing, Ben, I wanted to mention to you.
There's a story in the Old Testament that is pretty compelling.
When Israel came out of Egypt after the captivity and they were headed toward the Promised Land, the first group of terrorists that attacked the Jewish, attacked the stragglers, it says you remember, were the Amalekites.
Amalek.
Amalek was a grandson of Esau.
Esau had an axe to grind, obviously, because Jacob got the covenant right, and Esau sold his birthright for a meal.
So there was some hostility there, but you go a couple of generations later, and you've got Amalek.
He's the first terrorist, and he leads a group that raids them.
And God says, They have to be destroyed.
They have to be destroyed.
And in Deuteronomy 25, verses 17 to 19, as Israel stands on the edge of going into the promised land after wandering in the wilderness, God says to them, I want you to destroy the Amalekites.
I want you to destroy all of them.
All of them.
I want you to destroy their animals.
And he goes through the whole litany of things.
Because they are a deadly, deadly force in this world, and I need you to be my instrument of judgment.
Well, I don't know if you remember the story.
They battled the Amalekites, 1 Samuel 15, and Saul was the king, and Saul was told to wipe them out, and he didn't do that.
He allowed some of them to survive, and he allowed Agag, the Amalekite king, to live, and he didn't kill him.
He didn't cut the head off.
Fast forward to the end of the 15th chapter.
Samuel comes up and Samuel says, Saul, you didn't kill Agag.
And then Samuel does this amazing thing.
He hacks Agag to pieces, which is an amazing act.
And he did it because God told him to do it.
That group of people were so dangerous, they were so destructive and so deadly and so threatening to the plans of God for Israel that He wanted them wiped out.
They didn't do that.
Fast forward to the book of Esther a few hundred years later, and what have you got in Esther?
You've got Haman.
who is an Agagite, who is from the line of Agag and the Amalekites.
And he plans genocide for the entire Jewish race.
Right?
In the book of Esther.
And Mordecai and Esther come to the rescue.
It wasn't until the Persians completely wiped out the Amalekites that the God's will was fulfilled in that judgment.
Now, you might not like the fact that God is a judge, but when God determines that I'm going to protect my people Israel, And you're going to attack my people, Israel.
I have a plan for my people, Israel.
As the New Testament says, so all Israel will be saved.
There's coming a kingdom He will fulfill.
Every promise He ever gave to David, every promise He ever gave to Abraham, every promise ever coming through the prophets will be fulfilled when Messiah establishes His kingdom.
God is going to preserve that people.
And if you are a threat to that people, Historically speaking, God says you need to be removed.
And I think about that story so often when I think about This is like the modern version of Amalek.
And until they're wiped out, this is just going to go on and on and on and on.
And I know, I don't want to be callous about things, but God has, in His sovereignty, made a decision for the preservation of Israel into the future, into the kingdom of Messiah.
That's His plan.
That's His promise.
You can be a part of that by coming to the Messiah and being a part of His kingdom, but if you attempt to destroy the very people that are the heart and soul of God's plan, then you come under the judgment of God.
And I think Israel is acting, even though they're a secular nation in the large sense, because salvation is individual, not national.
I think their desire to protect and preserve them And to fight in a really a terminal way against those who would destroy them follows the divine pattern of God for the preservation of that people until He fulfills His plan for them.
Your point with regard to Hamas is particularly true, and I just want to clarify here.
When you have a force that is dedicated to the extermination of every Jew on the planet, which is what Hamas openly says, if you are a member of that terror group, the moral position for anyone would be to end that terror group and destroy them wholesale.
And Israel has done, actually, an extraordinary job in attempting to distinguish civilians, even civilians who are sympathetic to Hamas.
The fact that there are so many people in the West who seem to lack moral clarity in what is easily the most morally clear conflict of our time is a source of astonishment to me, but I think really can only be explained by, again, an anti-biblical perspective that substitutes a narrative of victimology in favor of a narrative of right and wrong.
No, that's exactly right.
But you also know in the Old Testament, God said to the children of Israel, when you go into the land, destroy the Amalekites.
Destroy them.
Because I'm bringing judgment down on their heads for their sins.
I mean, they're like a cancer in the world.
And we all understand everybody's going to die, right?
We're all going to die.
The wages of sin is death.
Ezekiel said, the soul that sins, it shall die.
And in the conflicts of life in this world, death is a reality.
And it can happen.
The good news is Death doesn't have to lead to eternal hell.
It can lead to eternal heaven.
And that's where Christianity comes in and says, in Christ, there is the promise of forgiveness of sin, everlasting life in heaven.
And when you die, that's where you're going to go.
So, and I think about that with We worry about what collateral damage is going to be done.
The message is, look, you don't know when you're going to die, and you need to make sure your life is right with God.
You need to make sure your sins are forgiven and you have received the gift of salvation so that when that comes, You can enter into his presence.
So, preaching the gospel is, you know, what the church's role in the world is to be.
But I think at the same time, we have to warn the world that death is coming to everybody.
You may die in a raid.
There's collateral damage.
You may die in an accident, a disease.
It's inevitable.
It's inevitable.
God, there's going to be wages for sin.
We just need to make sure that we're prepared to enter into God's heaven.
So, let's talk for a second about Jews and Christians.
We referenced it at the top.
Last time we spoke, we had some extensive conversations on the differentiation between Jews and Christians.
Obviously, I'm not offended at all by the fact that Christians want me saved.
I'm quite flattered by it, that people care enough for my soul that they want me saved.
after death. And so I've never found, you know, anybody attempting to convert me to be offensive
or dangerous in any way. Again, I think that that's quite a good thing. There's been an attempt,
I think, to divide Jews from Christians by some nefarious actors out there who
can't hold two thoughts in their head at one time.
The thoughts being that yes, Christians would love Jews to convert, and the second thought being that also Jews and Christians have an awful lot in common.
You can hold both those thoughts in your head at the same exact time.
What do you think that Christians' relations with Jews should be like?
How should Christianity approach Jews?
Well, first of all, Ben, I have to say thank you for letting me come back again.
I was pretty direct last time we talked.
And I know that's what you're referring to.
I didn't hold back.
You asked me then, what's the difference between the Jews and the Christians?
And I said, it's your view of Christ.
And that is still the issue.
The Apostle Paul said, I could wish myself a curse for the salvation of my people Israel.
So, you know, that's what I carry in my heart.
Do I want you to be saved through faith in Christ?
Yes.
Do I want the Jewish people to be saved?
Do I want them to come to the truth that Jesus is actually their Messiah?
He has to be because He fulfills Isaiah 53.
He fulfills so many other Old Testament promises.
Because He was a miracle worker who rose from the dead, He validated all of that.
Do I want the Jews to believe?
Yes.
Paul, he actually said, I could wish myself a curse for the salvation of my people, Israel.
So yes, we want the Jews to come to the knowledge of Christ as their Messiah.
That is basically driven by love.
When people ask me about what I feel about the Jews, my response is, you know, unfortunately I was born a Gentile, but I'm trying to overcome that.
Everybody I love the most in history is Jewish.
You can start with Abraham and run the gamut all the way to the New Testament and Jesus and the Apostles.
And I think true Christians have a profound love for the Jewish people because they understand that God loves them in a unique way.
You know, God said, I didn't choose you because you were greater than any other people.
He said, I chose you because I set my love upon you.
Richard Wolff years ago said, how odd of God to choose the Jews.
Which was, you know, in a sense, I suppose, an easy-to-understand statement.
Why that?
Well, the answer is, God says, because I chose to love them.
I chose Abraham, and I chose his descendants.
Because I'm God and I can do what I want, and they're the ones I chose.
But the fulfillment of that choice, as far as Christianity is concerned, comes in the salvation that comes through the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.
So the prayer of Christians is always that the Jewish people would see Christ as their Messiah.
And all I can ask of Jewish people is, Read the four Gospels.
Just keep reading it and see if you don't find the awakening in your own heart that He is, in fact, the Messiah that He claimed to be.
I don't think there's any gimmick.
I don't think there's any strategy.
I don't think we need to get you into an auditorium and play some mood music to convince you I think.
Read the New Testament, that's all I can say.
That is the revelation of the Messiah.
And you read it and open your heart to the Lord and see if He doesn't convince you that Jesus is your Messiah.
That's the joy that I would have for Israel, for you.
The response the Jews usually give to that poem, how odd of God to choose the Jews, is, it's not that odd, the Jews chose God.
Which is also accurate to Mount Sinai and the Jews opting in by saying, we will do and we will hear at Mount Sinai.
And I think that in the end, for America, You know, that's what I'd love to see is a more Christian America in which more people choose God.
That's going to require more leadership like yours.
It's going to require more powerful Christian leadership.
It's going to require people who are willing to engage in community-minded ways.
It's going to require actually putting obligations on people, and this is something that I discover with my own children every single day.
I have four kids under the age of 10, and if you don't give them anything to do, they fritz out.
And I think that we're a society that has given our kids nothing to do.
We give them no duties.
We give them no obligations.
We give them no tasks.
What kids want more than anything is a series of responsibilities.
There's nothing kids want more than responsibility.
And giving them responsibility, giving adults responsibility, is the thing that's missing in a society that's completely now about lack of responsibility.
Yeah, just to validate that, Grace Community Church, where I've been pastor for over 50 years here, when COVID came, we had to shut everything down for a few weeks.
But then we decided this isn't right.
You know, the government is not the head of the church, Christ is.
So we opened the church, and I remember the day we opened the church on that Sunday, we had over a thousand children.
We had balloons everywhere, right in the middle of COVID.
As you remember, we defied the state of California.
We got into a lawsuit.
We won the lawsuit.
The church just began to explode at that point.
We've probably had 3,000 new people come to our church since that point.
And the draw turns out to be families with children.
So that in the last two years, We have created two homeschool programs where we work with parents in two different groups for homeschool.
We have started two hybrid school, which means half the week it's homeschool, half the week it's classroom.
We actually now have a full-blown K-12 Full Christian school.
So we have five different options to train children.
Because parents are saying, you got to help us.
We have to escape the threat of public education.
And if you want to build a church, you know, go after the children.
Be a protector of the children.
It's amazing how families will gather.
Well, Pastor MacArthur, it's, as always, an honor to see you.
It's wonderful to spend the time with you.
I really appreciate the time and the insight.
My pleasure.
We miss you in Southern California.
Well, I miss you, but not Southern California.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.
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