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Nov. 5, 2020 - Jim Bakker Show
09:04
Is There Hope For America - Tim & David Barton
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Time Text
Going Backwards? 00:04:23
Is there hope?
I want to, David, I really want to ask you something.
Is there hope to turn America around or have we gone too far?
There's absolutely hope.
You cannot find a place in the Bible where God is not capable of turning his nation around.
So as you look in the Bible, even though they made mistakes a bunch of times, he brought them back when they wanted to be brought back.
Now, if they don't want to be brought back, that's a different story.
But when they say, hey, God, our bad, please forgive us.
He would bring them back.
So a lot of it is up to us.
He is quite capable of doing that.
I am extremely optimistic in many ways.
And let me jump on something that you and Mondo mentioned.
You can't change a nation's history until you first have people ignorant of its history.
And so back in the 1960s and 70s, we were still teaching American history.
In the 1980s, we had a guy called Howard Zen who came in and introduced a view of history that America has done everything bad in the world.
If it was bad, America did it.
And so it's a change, but he didn't catch on back then.
What had to happen was we had to stop talking about what actually happened.
Let me give this example.
I do a lot of reviewing for states and state boards of education governors of their history standards.
Tim and I both go through history standards for various states.
And what we look for most is not what they get wrong, but what they don't say at all.
It's when you go silent on something that's more important.
For example, if I were to have a history book that said Abraham Lincoln dropped a nuclear weapon on Thailand to end World War VII, I would be laughed out of the room because we know that's not true.
But if we stopped teaching about Abraham Lincoln at all and didn't do anything, then I could say something like that because nobody knows.
And so what happens with George Washington is we can say ridiculous things today because if you recall back, some of you may recall, but in the 1980s, the big outcry was, oh my gosh, they have more in the American history textbooks about Marilyn Monroe than they do about George Washington.
So we haven't been teaching about George Washington for 40 years.
Now we can make up lies about Washington and get him to believe it.
Same with Columbus, same with anything else.
You have to go silent before you can change it.
And in some regards, it's not even that they're telling lies all the time.
Now, some of them are blatant lies, but sometimes they're highlighting a sinful, a weak, or a fleshly moment and saying, well, they did this, therefore they're evil.
One of the biggest arguments today is George Washington is he was somebody who had slaves.
Now, I'm not defending him owning slaves, but they say he should not have a monument or statue because he owns slaves.
But if the only thing you know about George Washington was the fact he owned slaves, you don't know your history and you don't know anything about George Washington.
The reason he has a monument and statue wasn't because he owned slaves.
It was in spite of the fact he owned slaves.
If you go back to the American Revolution, he was the commander of the American military during the American Revolution.
Without his leadership, America probably doesn't win the revolution.
At the end of the revolution, his military commanders came to him and they said, okay, Congress seems kind of corrupt.
They seem kind of dumb.
We don't really trust them.
Washington, why don't you be the new king of America, the ruler of America?
And Washington says, guys, settle down.
We just fought a war to escape a king.
We don't need a new king.
Washington turns down that request from his military commanders.
He submits his resignation.
He goes back to live in Mount Vernon.
So he could have been the king of America, turned it down.
Then, when the founding fathers realize the Articles of Confederation don't work, we need to do something new.
The Constitutional Convention happens.
Washington is chosen the leader of the Constitutional Convention where we actually write the U.S. Constitution.
Without his leadership, we never would have been able to write the Constitution.
And this is not historically disputed.
Without his leadership, there would be no Constitution.
There would not be the United States of America, arguably speaking, going forward.
And then he was chosen the first president of the United States.
He was elected unanimously, the only president in American history to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College.
He was elected unanimously.
Why We Honor Imperfect Leaders 00:04:56
And then at the end of serving two terms in the era of monarchs, he stepped down to show what a peaceful transfer of power could look like in a constitutional republic.
He literally is the reason that America exists as a nation.
The reason he had statues and monuments was because of his leadership role in helping America become America.
But what happens today is people say, well, we can't honor him because he did bad things.
And this is where you just know not only are we biblically illiterate, we are historically stupid.
Because if we knew the Bible, the Bible, the Apostle Paul tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
What that means is that everybody is a sinner who needs a savior.
And so there never should be a moment when we look at anybody in world history or even biblical history and think, well, this person, they sinned.
I can't believe they were a sinner.
Our starting place ought to be, that person's a sinner who needs a savior, right?
We would say that person is jacked up and they need Jesus.
Yes.
So I'm never going to be surprised by a weak, a fleshly, or a sinful moment in somebody's life.
That is the expectation.
And yet, what we also know to be true from the Bible is that a perfect God uses imperfect people and does great things through them.
And in spite of our brokenness, God can use us.
If you go to Hebrews chapter 11, which is known as our faith hall of fame, because we know without faith, it's impossible to please God.
So we need faith.
And then the author of Hebrews says, here are examples of great heroes of the faith.
And it lists people like Noah and Abraham and Moses and Samson and Rahab and King David.
And if you go down the list of people it lists and you examine their life, Noah, after the ark lands on Mount Ararat, he comes out, he plants a vineyard, he gets drunk and passes out naked.
Well, that's not the most righteous or honorable thing to do.
Abraham was a liar.
Wouldn't be honest about who his wife was.
Moses was a murderer.
Samson was a womanizer.
Rahab was a prostitute, right?
King David was an adulterer and a murderer.
If you look at the people that the author of Hebrews holds up in chapter 11 as the heroes of the faith, these are very imperfect people who had some weak, fleshly, sinful moments.
And some of them did very bad things at moments in their life.
And yet, what is also true is God used these weak, imperfect people and did great things through them in their life.
And this is the story that we forget in America is we say, well, Christopher Columbus wasn't perfect.
George Washington wasn't perfect.
And therefore, they shouldn't be honored or celebrated.
That is a really bad take of history.
And that's a really bad view as a Christian understanding the reality of the world from the Bible is that nobody's perfect.
And yet we can point to people like Columbus and like Washington, like Abraham Lincoln, and we can acknowledge even though they were not perfect.
What is also true is a perfect God used those imperfect people and did great things through them.
And that was the reason they had statues.
That was the reason they had monuments, not because they were perfect, but because a perfect God used them and did really great things through them.
But the point you were making, Dad, is today because we don't learn the history of these people.
The only thing we learn are one of their weak, sinful, or fleshly moments.
And sometimes even the accusations against them are not even historically true.
So we're even lying about things they did sometimes.
And that's why we look at them and think they were terrible people when the reality is most of them were very honorable people who were not perfect, but God used them and did great things through them.
It's just today we don't have a biblical perspective or a biblical worldview and we don't know history.
So we don't recognize the lies and attacks being said against many of these very honorable American heroes.
History really does serve as a compass.
If you know history, if you know the good and the bad and the ugly, I can learn as much from the bad and ugly stuff that David did as I can learn from the good stuff that he did.
So you don't hide any of it.
You use all of it and you let God direct and learn lessons out of that.
And that's why so often God told his nation Israel to remember the former days, to recall the former time, know your history.
When you know your history, you don't get sidetracked.
Even if you know the bad parts, all right, let's not do what they did in the wilderness, as we're told in 1 Corinthians 10.
Let's not lust as they lust in the wilderness, and let's not sit down to drink and rise up to play.
We have all these bad examples, and we still learn from them.
So when you don't know history at all is when you can shift a nation.
And we've cut America off from any knowledge of its true history.
And we've even misportrayed the bad.
I mean, George Washington, yes, he owned slaves.
But you know what?
Interestingly enough, Washington was anti-slavery.
He lived in a state that would not let him free his own slaves.
They finally gave a loophole in the law that says on your death you can free them, which is when he freed his slaves.
But in the meantime, he signed the first two federal laws to anti-slavery laws in America.
Washington did a lot of stuff to help move the ball down the court.
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