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April 2, 2019 - Jim Bakker Show
21:24
Jim and Lori Bakker Interview Brad Cummings
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Inevitable Clash Within Culture 00:08:23
Welcome to Heritage USA International.
Yes.
And Lori and I are here for the roundtable with Rick Joyner.
And we're having an amazing week meeting people.
Yes.
Revolution is going on in that roundtable.
Stuff could change the world, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
This is Brad Cummings, by the way, producer, publisher, changer of the world.
Tri-T.
In the whole creative space of Hollywood.
Yes.
Exciting.
You saw a movie he helped write.
I sure did, the movie The Shack.
And I remember reading the book first many, many years ago.
And then I just met you, Brad, the other day.
Yeah.
And you were like, I helped produce.
That was a controversial movie, but it's such a big seller.
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
The book was a big seller.
22 million copies.
It's over in 40 different languages.
I mean, we publish it out of my garage on $200 of marketing.
You're kidding.
So that's a pretty fun story.
We're turned down by 26 different publishers.
Not because they didn't like it.
They didn't know what to do with it.
It's too edgy for the Christian publishers.
It's too Jesus-y for the secular ones.
We said, that's fine.
And it just, it was a word-of-mouth phenomenon that you just, you can't ever plan for.
You know, we didn't try to write a bestseller.
You know, there were three of us that just got each hit by a truck and we just sort of fell somehow.
God met us in the midst of pain, and so we decided to tell the truth about, you know, you're never as alone as you think.
So good.
Why are you here?
Why are you at the round table?
How did you get here?
Rick and I have been friends for a while and I have been so captured by what he's been, the dream encounter he had, you know, kind of warning of a second American Revolution, another civil war.
The cool thing about his dream is we win.
Explain that.
He's saying that, right?
What I understand him to mean is I think he was sort of startled that he saw in sort of like the timeline of history, he saw that we were, you know, headed for an inevitable another clash within our culture, our civilization.
Just as the Revolutionary War, because it left some things undone, it made the Civil War inevitable.
And I don't think we really understand that because they compromised with slavery and this nation was birthed for the purpose of freedom and that all men are created equal.
Not some, not just certain colors, but all men.
Yes.
When they compromised in it, and I think the founders put in a poison pill on purpose because they wanted slavery to be abolished.
And so I think we've got our history of our nation wrong and it's being contended for.
But the shocking is that he's saying this.
I know.
And I've never wanted to happen.
And yet, so I ask him, clarify this.
He says it will be a war of fire.
Cities will burn, rioting in cities, maybe not the whole nation at once.
But he said there is coming this almost civil war.
We can see it in our culture right now.
I mean, the total breakdown of civility.
Our government was meant to have rigorous debate, but not the kind of just awful incivil, just we make the other side the enemy, which I think is one of the tragic mistakes.
It's like this nation, it needs to have freedom for everybody, so the solutions need to be workable for everyone.
Not just for the side.
I believe it.
That's right.
And that's the beauty about freedom is like, we were supposed to contend in the marketplace for the truth of ideas and let the truth win.
It was a free market.
It's a non-coercive society.
America is so unique.
It doesn't exist anywhere else like this little experiment.
It has been the most stable, most prosperous, most amazing country for 250-some years.
And you're just going like, okay, it's being contended for again.
And so we have a whole bunch of people who are trying to just kind of rewrite our history.
That's right.
And the warfare going on right now.
When I was here at this place, God let me bring people together.
Millions came here together.
But I would have a Democrat on my show and I'd have a Republican on the show.
I flew on Air Force One with a Democrat president.
I flew with Ronald Reagan.
I mean, I was with him in his homes.
I couldn't do that today.
I mean, I would do it, but I don't think there's a Democrat that would sit with me.
No, we don't have, we don't have to do that building bridges between the isles.
I mean, what do you see?
Where do you live?
Do you live in California?
I live just in the world.
Oh, so you're the Malibu?
You're out there.
I am on the left coast contending for the security of our nation.
Trying to hold on to it.
Keep it from sliding into the ocean, right?
But what is your feelings about this?
I think in our culture, we really are at a place where it's like, blessed are the peacemakers if there are people that can come in and actually bring truth and listen to the other side.
We can find solutions.
And so when I look at the Civil War and I look at the potential, I'm not looking for a bunch of bombs and bullets, but we are at a clash where we have a secular culture that is intolerant of anything with God.
But we have a Christian foundation that was totally tolerant of those that didn't believe in God.
So there is a foundation upon which freedom can work for everyone, but you cannot come from the tyrannical side of intolerance.
It's like you can't look at our nation and realize that God did not have a hand in building he did.
And it's all over the place.
It's in all of our monuments.
The Capitol building.
I think you guys found this one rather fascinating.
I did.
During 1860 to 65, when the nation was at war, the Capitol building was being reconstructed.
And for Lincoln, it became a living symbol of the state of our union.
And it was finally completed at his second inauguration just after it was clear that the war had turned, victory was in sight, and the dome was completed before his second inauguration.
And it's profound.
On the top of it, they have a statue that was constructed that would take a while to tell you the whole story, but its name is triumphant in war and in peace.
And it's a picture of freedom.
And you're going like, wow.
And then the Capitol building went under more reconstruction during 1959, 1960, right around the civil rights.
And you're going like, so another point in our history where big, huge changes are being made, necessary ones, because things were not finished in the Civil War.
It made inevitable the civil rights movement stuff.
And now, in just the last couple of years, the Capitol building has been undergoing reconstruction and repairing a thousand cracks within the dome to keep it so that it's watertight, which I think is a prophetic symbol of the problem we're in right now.
We have a lot of cracking structures in the integrity of what our nation is.
And if we don't attend to them, it's going to go into disrepair.
But that work is being done, and I think that's a prophetic symbol of that work is also needing and being done in this nation right now.
Yeah, these cracks are, you know, the removal of the cross on every building possible and things like that.
We ought to have the cross.
And I don't fight if somebody puts a statue of Buddha, that's their business.
Right.
It's freedom for all.
It's a free market.
The Founder's Bible 00:04:34
We're at the free market of religion.
But we're at the point where everything that we believe in is illegal.
I know.
They're trying to push God completely out of our public square, and they're trying to remove him from history.
One of the projects I did was the Founder's Bible with David Barton.
And we'll have a chance to do that book.
Yeah.
That takes all of the best history of the founding of this nation.
And it really puts it in its spiritual context where you go like, these ideas were not the product of the Enlightenment.
They were inspired out of scripture.
And it shows the exact verse that these ideas come from.
I want one.
You can have one.
I'll send one to you shortly.
For sure.
And just going on record here.
And I think what's so amazing is, you know, my son helped me in the project, and he's a high school kid at the time that we began this.
It so fired him up because it's like everything that he was not being told in public school.
Right.
He's learning.
He's seeing the original documents.
He's going like this.
What do you call it?
It's called the Founders Bible.
Is it like the American Bible?
It is the Bible.
And we called it the Founder's Bible because it basically takes all of the founders' writings and it kind of goes over all the issues of today.
What's so amazing is they addressed them back then.
Okay, what did you come out with a conclusion of it then?
As far as the issues of today?
No.
Is America founded on godly principles?
Absolutely, undeniably so.
And you look at it, but they really did believe in a non-profit society.
We've been talking about it this week.
I know.
And it hasn't been delivered yet.
I promised you yesterday, I have not gotten home to send you.
But you know, I'm a fanatic about Bibles.
My wardrobe, I like Billy, you know, Billy Graham, his wife, sent me Bibles from his library in prison.
I have, like Billy, I have a library, many libraries, but full of Bibles.
You can't get enough.
And this is something different, something new.
This is so absolutely exquisite, yes.
It has been designed with a lot of the art and stuff from the founding era.
And then we had an actual artist do a whole bunch of renderings for us that just kind of bring it alive.
This is the now Bible.
We need it now.
We do.
Really?
Yeah, no, we do.
And you call it the Founders Bible.
It's called the Founders Bible.
So it's a Foundation of American.
David Barton.
Yep.
David Barton is the signature historian.
I think a lot of people for years had gone after him and said, oh, would you do something with this?
I was there meeting with him on some other deal.
And just in my hotel room, the Lord says, I want you to do the Founder's Bible.
I'm like, what?
It's like the world doesn't need another Bible.
It just needs to be the one it has.
But it needs a Bible like that.
That's unusual.
But I was so taken by the stories that David told me, his staff told me, because, you know, I'm seminary trained at 16 units of American church history at a master's level.
I should know this.
They were telling me stories I'd never been exposed to.
And I was getting just fired up going like, wait a minute, how do I not know this?
I, of all people, should know this.
I'm educated.
Wow.
And you're going like, how do we not know this?
And so I just tossed the idea out to David, and he was game for it.
And with his busy schedule, my schedule, neither of us sleep, but it's like for seven months, we probably worked about 20 hours a day.
My goodness.
Put this whole thing together.
I had 88 questions that I said, David, we have to answer these.
These are all the things I got to know.
And so it's like out of the treasure trove of his life, and he's got a vault of 100,000 original source documents.
So you're looking at actual letters that Jefferson wrote, that Washington wrote.
You're just going like, you're not trafficking in opinions.
You're looking at original source things.
These men, we've called them secular.
If they're secular, I would like an army of secular men like them.
Right.
Because they're so fired up about God.
And it's like they were intentional, but they believed in the dignity of men.
And they wanted people to have a free choice, not a coercive response.
So it was not heavy-handed, you must follow this.
The Wisdom of Self-Government 00:08:45
And you just go like, the wisdom that God gave them to build a free society where we could all be free is extraordinary.
It had never been tried before.
This experiment of self-government.
Everyone always had a king or some kind of dictator or military ruling it.
And here it's like, do we believe men can live together peaceably and rule themselves?
And they wanted to have a court of appeal as to where we disagree, where do we go to?
We don't want to empower just another man.
They looked at the Bible as being the ultimate court of appeal.
Think about it.
What is it that we respond to, where it doesn't speak, we have liberty.
And you just go like, if we just reapplied some of that, it would solve so many of the cultural issues that are like, we're a culture at war again.
We are.
We absolutely do not need to be.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Where are those people?
And it's not enough for me to get what I want.
I've got to work for a solution that works for the other side as well.
Otherwise, I'm going to be the tyranny of my opinion.
That's not freedom for them.
And it's like, so when we're diametrically opposed, what do we do?
We've got to somehow win, I think, through the way in which we live and love, not being afraid to confront.
See, I want to contend for the truth.
There are things that they're saying that are just absolutely wrong.
And I'm like, no, that's absolutely wrong.
Right, that's right.
Okay, but you have the freedom to think that way.
I just, you don't have the freedom to make me follow that.
So how do we then solve this?
We don't have that going on in our government.
So when Rick Joyner said, what did he call it?
Not a civil war.
He said it was like the Second American Revolution.
The Revolutionary War.
And it's like, I looked at that and went, I totally get what you said.
You get it because of what you've been studying.
You've been in history.
And the history of America.
We're doing work on two screenplays, one on the Revolutionary War and then one on the life of Frederick Douglass, who we can thank him for abolishing slavery.
There would be no Lincoln without a Frederick Douglass.
You know, Rick Joyner does not prophesy idly.
No.
No.
And for him to say what he said at this meeting, it was overwhelming to me because I'd heard it once before, but he just recently is saying this.
He kept warning us.
He's in December.
And everything that he's been doing for 50 years, all the study that he's done, he feels as if it was all for now.
Wow.
What did you get from this roundtable that you could share?
You know what I'm saying?
Just to highlight, I'm asking you to come on my show and we'll spend a couple hours discussing.
What I took away and what was so fun to take away is the heartbeat of our needing to simply be with God.
Here you have national leaders from all over.
It's like they all have a treasure trove.
I mean, they could all have spoken for two days each.
The fact that they would speak for maybe two, three minutes, and that's it.
That's the greater works, you know.
But you look at that, and every one of them came away with this just absolute dependent need, knowing we need to hear from God.
Yes, it's like we're done with the day of good ideas.
Right.
I need to hear from God.
Yes.
And all of this has to flow out of relationship and intimacy.
Yes.
And for national leaders to sort of be in that place of humility, not posturing, not attributing all these great works that we've done, for all of them to be in a place of humility.
And that gave me, because I think I'm one of the youngest guys there.
Yes.
I looked at that and I went, this is awesome.
Here are fathers that have been raising up sons and multiplying ministry.
And what's coming out of them is this passion to say, we desperately need more of God.
Wow.
You know, Brad, it reinforced me.
I mentioned we were building Prayer Mountain.
The chapel's almost finished on top of the mountain.
I mean, literally, at my age, I'm almost 80 right now.
Nice.
I climbed.
But a few months ago, I climbed this mountain at our place.
And, you know, I put my flag on the top.
And the chapel is being built up there.
The roads are not all in.
They're just roughed in.
And the chapel's almost finished.
And I know it's God's will.
And when I come from this conference, I know I'm in the will of God.
This was good to come here.
Yeah, it was.
Because we need to hear from God.
Yeah.
And that prayer place, we're building prayer cottages where people can literally move up there if they want to and be in the prayer place.
But we're building prayer caves like they have in Korea.
That's awesome.
We talk about prayer.
Yep.
But we got to do it.
That's right.
We got to do it.
And I sort of feel like that.
I actually love that the times are becoming that challenging.
Right.
Where it's like, you know what?
Yeah.
Your ideas don't work.
If we don't hear from God, fresh bread.
That's right.
We're in deep trouble.
That's right.
But it's the perfect place because guess what?
The world knows that too.
Yeah, they do.
So people that actually come with fresh bread will be the problem solvers that the world will listen to.
Because the world knows the stuff that we're facing together.
Yes.
We won't survive unless we find a solution through.
And I don't know of anybody, even those that are vehemently opposed to whatever I believe.
I've had some wonderful meetings with what could be enemies.
And you find some common grounds of compassion and a desire to solve things.
Changes the whole discussion.
Yes.
And they're hungry for something.
If you actually have wisdom from heaven.
I don't need to say, thus says the Lord.
I just need to give them the wisdom.
And the proof will be in the pudding.
Amen.
That's so good.
Brad, this is such a great conversation.
And it's reinforced me so much to be here.
And you were one of the main contributors in this thing, I feel.
I got excited.
You kind of were stitching things in together.
And it was really good.
And I'm so anxious to see this Bible, the Founder's Bible.
Yes.
And I'm serious.
I wouldn't say that because I have been pitched.
I had Bibles pitched to me this week.
I shouldn't say pitched, but I have them.
Even my ministry name on it.
It was amazing.
But I'm telling you, I am so interested in this Bible.
Do you know what the Geneva Bible is?
Because it's a now moment.
Do you know what the Geneva Bible was?
The Geneva Bible.
The Bible that the Reformers wrote.
Right.
And what they did is they took all of their thoughts and they put it in the margin.
When King James, I'm related to that guy.
You're a King James.
Okay.
It's not that wonderful.
You know a whole lot about him.
His Bible's wonderful.
But as a human being, he was less than wonderful.
He was interesting.
Character.
Wow.
When he published the King James Bible, he was totally at odds with the Geneva Bible.
And so he widened the margins and took out all of the Reformers' notes and made a phenomenal translation.
But he hated the ideas of the Reformers because they were questioning the divine right of kings.
America was founded not with the King James Bible, but with the pilgrims came over, they had copies of the Geneva Bible.
And so they're thinking, how then shall we live?
How do we set up a society?
And they're wrestling through the scriptures with the Geneva Bible, thinking about, okay, how do we set this up where it's not coercing people to have to believe something, but it is setting up something that allows us to be free.
I told David Barton, I think it was like three in the morning one night, when I just realized we had nearly finished this Bible, I said, David, I think we have a Geneva Bible for our generation.
It's dealing with all the same cultural issues of the day that we're fighting over.
The founders had wisdom back then on these same issues.
That is just absolutely stunning in terms of their wisdom and privilege.
But it's coming out of the eternal word of God.
That shouldn't surprise us.
It shouldn't.
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