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Jan. 18, 2026 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:36:40
Psalm 73: Stephen White

James is joined by preacher Stephen White to unpack the beauty and depth of Psalm 73. ↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

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Time Text
Snow Let Festival 00:15:30
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole.
And today we're going to be doing Psalm 73.
And I'm using the Miles Coverdale translation for the Book of Common Prayer.
Truly God is loving unto Israel, even unto such as are of a clean heart.
Nevertheless, my feet were almost gone.
My treadings had well nigh slipped.
And why?
I was grieved at the wicked.
I do also see the ungodly in such prosperity.
For they are in no peril of death, but are lusty and strong.
They come in no misfortune like other folk, neither are they plagued like other men.
And this is the cause that they are so holden with pride and overwhelmed with cruelty.
Their eyes swell with fatness, and they do even what they lust.
They corrupt other, and speak of wicked blasphemy.
Their talking is against the Most High.
For they stretch forth their mouth unto the heaven, and their tongue goeth through the world.
Therefore fall the people unto them, and thereout suck they no small advantage.
Tush, say they, how should God perceive it?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?
Lo, these are the ungodly.
These prosper in the world, and these have riches in possession.
And I said, Then have I cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.
All the day long have I been punished, and chastened every morning, yea, and I had almost said, even as they, but lo, then I should have condemned the generation of thy children.
Then thought I to understand this, but it was too hard for me.
Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I the end of these men.
Namely, how thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth them down, and destroyest them.
Oh, how suddenly do they consume, perish, and come to a fearful end.
Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.
Thus my heart was grieved, and it went even through my veins.
So foolish was I, and ignorant, even as it were a beast before thee.
Nevertheless, I am always by thee, for thou hast holden me by my right hand.
Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and after that receive me with glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of thee.
My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.
For lo, they that forsake thee shall perish.
Thou hast destroyed all them that commit fornication against thee.
But it is good for me to hold me fast by God, to put my trust in the Lord God, and to speak of all thy works in the gates of the daughter of Zion.
Well, thank you to my special podcast Psalms guest, Stephen White.
Thanks for spotting this psalm.
You've got very good taste in psalms because the previous one we did together was similarly excellent Psalm 34, wasn't it?
That's right.
Yeah.
And basically, I pick the Psalms that mean a lot to me.
So if there's something here that's blessing you, it's because it's blessed me first.
And I think I mentioned to you when I was picking this psalm, I think of this as the conspiracy theorists needed psalm because it contains here thoughts that I think almost everyone who sees the state of the world feels at some point.
And then it has the remedy for it.
And so many people are just stuck in that first half.
So yeah, that's why it appeals to me because I need it.
Yes, I was grieved at the wicked.
I do also see the ungodly in such prosperity.
It's we're all feeling it.
Before we go into analysing the psalm, because not everyone will have seen our previous episode, tell us about yourself.
Sure.
I consider myself just a regular guy, to be honest.
I'm a second-hand book dealer.
As you can see, I'm in my office.
See all the random junk behind me.
I live in Bradford in West Yorkshire.
I'm married to my wife, and I've got six children.
So my eldest is 15, my youngest is one.
So we have a very busy household.
And my life is sort of split between home, church, and work.
And then other stuff that I do as well.
I've got fingers in quite a few pies.
I guess I came to be in touch with you because over the course of the lockdowns from about April 2020 till Easter 2022, we ran a little sort of rebel fellowship starting in our garden, then in the woods, and then various buildings that we could get ourselves into because we wanted to actually, and it's actually quite pertinent to later in this psalm.
Worshiping God is not just like a duty that you have to sort of grit your teeth and go through.
It is a duty.
We're supposed to do it.
But actually, it really orientates us in the world and it helps us.
And we were denied the opportunity to do that in person, which I think I don't think you can do it remotely.
And so a little ragtag bunch of us sort of ended up together.
And it's funny, I was talking to a lady who was there and she said to me, still the best church days ever.
Yeah.
So it was a wonderful time.
Well, of course, the church thrives under oppression, doesn't it?
It does.
By the way, I don't know where you can do anything about it.
Your thing is going flash-flash.
I'm getting green flashes relative to connection or something.
I'll try some of these wires.
The devil.
Yeah, it probably is the devil.
It's still flashes, isn't it?
It's going to give people epileptic fits.
Yeah.
Right.
Is that any better?
Give that a go.
Yeah.
See if that goes any better.
Yeah.
So I totally agree with you.
I'm sorry that you missed my latest Dick and James Christmas special party.
Is the discussion recorded?
I have recorded it.
I'm not sure whether I'm going to put it out or not.
No, that's fair enough.
Just because if I'm not being filmed or recorded, I feel sort of completely unguarded as opposed to pretty much unguarded.
And I wonder whether I said anything.
Maybe I'll put it out for, or maybe I'll just send it out to select, select people.
But the extra treat this year was that we, on the Sunday morning, after the Saturday evening, we repaired to the local church service.
And it was in a particularly beautiful, well, actually, All the churches around me are particularly beautiful.
They're all about 13th century in lovely settings.
And this one had a particularly lovely setting.
And it was Advent, which meant that we got to sing some of my favourite hymns that you don't get to sing, like Hills of the North Rejoice.
Do you know that one?
I do, yeah.
It's a banger of a tune, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
And you can overdo the carols this time of year.
And actually, personally, I don't actually celebrate Christmas as a Christian festival.
I think it's basically pagan.
But you've got to take the good stuff that's on offer when it's there.
And some of these songs that only get wheeled out once or twice a year are too good, to be honest, to be kept under wraps for the rest of the year.
Stephen, maybe three or four years ago, I would have had you down as a kind of crazed religious zealot for that remark about Christmas.
I'm afraid now I'm totally in agreement with you.
There was a carol service at my church, actually in the afternoon after a different church.
And it was nice, except when they started introducing into the medley, because there was a group of singers who were just getting into the spirit of Christmas with their Satan claws hats.
That's right.
And they were singing, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.
Let It Snow, Let It Snow was not written by a Christian.
It was not written by somebody who had any interest at all in Christ's birth.
Only an interest probably, in all likelihood, in poisoning the poisoning the season or capturing it for the forces of commercialism and greed and disappointment and alcohol and all the other things that kind of make Christmas a bit of a sort of crazy event.
But I was thinking about this through the service and I was thinking, yes, Christmas really is a rebadged pagan festival, but nevertheless, we do have in the repertoire, certainly going back to at least bird, so at least to the 16th century, there are Christmas songs which predate the sort of satanification of Christmas.
And you've got the Coventry Carol, which is often sung at Christmas, presumably.
So presumably within the church, before Charles Dickens and co-invented Christmas, there was at least a sort of vestige of a Christian feast.
Yeah, and no, a bit.
So what I don't want to do is throw out anything good that has been done by genuine Christians.
So like those carols you mentioned, time thinking about the incarnation is always well spent.
Like we have no salvation without it.
So I don't want to knock that kind of thing, but I really see it as a syncretistic thing going way back to the early days of Christianity in the third, fourth century.
It's really Saturnalia, the worship of the rebirth of the Son.
And it was easier to take a festival like that and sort of morph it into a Christian meaning than it was to try and wipe the existing culture out and enforce an official Christian calendar on it.
So I think a lot of those things like the burning of the Yule Log, like the fact that it's just a few days after the shortest day of the year isn't a coincidence.
It's all linked with the old pagan way of doing it.
But genuine Christians have come along and thought, the birth of Jesus, this is an awesome thing.
And written, like, I say William Bird's written great stuff.
The Coventry Carols, the mystery plays that would have been performed before people, a lot of people could read.
So they're acting out the stories of the gospel at this time of year so people can understand them.
So there's lots of good that's been done.
But as a as a festival, I've really got no time for it.
Yes.
I imagine the early Christians would perhaps not have celebrated Christmas.
Yeah, and it's like I'm a Bible guy rather than a tradition guy.
Traditions are built by men.
God wrote the Bible.
And so I'd celebrate Christmas with the best of them if my Bible told me to.
I just don't see it.
I don't think you're sinning necessarily if you do hold the festival because the Bible doesn't forbid it either.
But it doesn't command it.
And if it was that important, it'd tell us what to do.
It does get some attention in Luke, though.
But the birth of Jesus definitely gets attention in Matthew.
And I'm all for that.
Like I say, the incarnation is one of the most pivotal events in human history.
But I dislike limiting it to one time of the year.
The advantage of that is it doesn't get missed.
Every year, you will think about the incarnation.
And I see the value in that.
But I don't, you know, I remember I was preaching at church years ago in Birmingham and I was preaching on something that touched on the incarnation.
And so I said, oh, can we sing Hark the Herald Angels Sing?
And you look like I'd requested to sing ABBA because it was June.
And he's like, but we can't do that now.
I was like, well, why not?
It's about Jesus is the Bible.
And it's that limiting of it to this time of year that annoys me a bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're quite hardcore, Stephen.
But it's quite unusual.
Well, it's quite difficult to find people to talk about these Psalms who are both scripturally literate, but also aware of the sort of the wider context.
For example, fallen angels, demons, all the things that I think at least Christians who are most Christians who are down the rabbit hole or aware of, I'm not sure how many.
I was lamenting this with my brother yesterday that so many, so much of the supernatural element has been written out of Christianity for a lot of the churches.
I mean, the Church of England, if you talk about demons, they think you're a nutcase.
Yeah.
And I think it's like a cognitive dissonance with a lot of people.
It's like, if you said, like, especially to people, I'm an evangelical, so we take the Bible pretty seriously.
And so, you know, if you go to lots of evangelicals and say, do you believe that Jesus literally cast the devils out of that guy who had a legion devils in and going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you believe a devil made that guy's child thrown into the fire and into the water?
Oh, yeah, we believe that.
And you say, do you believe that devils are around now?
And they're like, well, I guess technically.
They've got this category in their head of it happened in the Bible.
It is a real, I have to give a cent to it because it's in my Bible.
But the idea that there might still be something going on in the world today, they're so captured by the modern mindset, which doesn't fit.
Like there is no space for that kind of thinking in the scientific Enlightenment sort of world.
Comparing Christian Practices 00:15:53
And it's, but I mean, I'm not trying to do a disservice.
You'll find the Pentecostals are very good on this sort of thing.
There are sort of branches of Christianity that really do wage sort of spiritual.
Are you the same as a Pentecostal or is that different?
We'd have a lot in common, but some things slightly different, mostly to do with emphasis.
So, yeah, so a lot in common.
But I'm not a big sort of miracles upfront person.
I do believe in them.
But I think preaching is primary over sort of tongues and prophecy.
But I personally do believe in those gifts still today.
It's been one of the real joys for me of doing this podcast, talking to, I never know what the correct term is, different branches of Christianity or different denominations, but then you just, if when you use the word denomination with Catholics, they say we're not a denomination, we are just the church, yeah.
But so I had an Orthodox priest from Texas on my previous psalm.
Yeah, I love the range and the different takes on Christianity.
And I find them all interesting and useful.
I don't find myself going, well, he's a nutcase, he's an evangelical, and they're just completely obsessed with the, you know, the Bible and solar scripture.
Or, or equally, I don't find myself listening to the Catholics.
They worship a rebadged, what is it, Asherah?
Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So I should explain to viewers and listeners that Stephen very kindly supplied me with some interesting books.
Two absolute classics.
Just tell us their names.
So there's Earth's Earliest Ages by a guy called Pemba and a book called The Two Babylons by Hislop.
And they're both, they're both, they have some overlap.
So Hislop is really tracing the old Babylonian worship and showing you how it's still around and it changes and morphs.
And you'll find it in a lot of the traditions of the Catholic Church have adopted.
It's like we were talking earlier about the syncretism of Christmas.
Rather than sort of keep Christianity pure, it's merged with the old Babylonian religion.
And what Pemba does, Pemba goes right back to the early days of Genesis, which is why it's called Earth's earliest ages, and looks at the nature of what happened just before the flood.
And I'm in full agreement that what happened there was fallen angels mating with the daughters of men and giants were born to them.
And this kind of abomination is what brought the flood and primarily on the earth.
But it didn't stop there because, as you remember, it says, for the giants, and also after that.
So this demonic interaction with people, physically often, but also sort of spiritually, has carried on.
And then he sort of shows how the modern theosophical movement is the same mindset.
Ascended masters, all that sort of stuff is basically the old devils still trying to get their own way with people today.
So yeah, they're fascinating books, well worth a read.
Pemba's a bit more dense, but Hislop has got more pictures.
So it depends, depends what you like.
Yeah, they're both really good.
And they confirm, in my view, what I always say is that Christianity is the biggest and deepest and widest of all the rabbit holes.
There is so much going on.
There is so much disputation about different points.
And of course, it would be the biggest rabbit hole because ultimately we are living through the great clash between good and evil.
And probably have done since the beginning, since God created us.
Yes, since Genesis chapter 3, since Satan came to tempt Adam and Eve.
And God says it there: the enmity between the woman's seed and the serpent's seed.
And that hasn't been resolved yet.
Christ on the cross, obviously, dealt the decisive blow in the war, and he now has all authority and power, but he hasn't put down all his enemies under his feet yet.
Certainly doesn't look like it to me.
I've not seen that.
I see them in great in such prosperity at the moment.
And that's exactly what I think is an interesting wording that.
I wonder, I wonder where you got it from.
So, yeah, it's still being played out.
And the fact that God could just send the Lord Jesus, he could obliterate everything right now.
There's a reason he hasn't.
He's doing something else.
And often we're like this.
We want to tell God how to do it.
It's like you should do this now and do it in this way.
And actually, this whole psalm is about reframing your perspective so you see things God's way, even if you don't quite understand the timings and the nature of it.
Okay.
Is it one of David's psalms?
I don't think so.
So the title says a psalm of Asaph.
So there are Psalm 73 to Psalm 83.
So 11 Psalms are all named Psalms of Asaph.
There's one other one, I think, earlier, around the 50s, that's a Psalm of Asaph.
Asaph was one of the chief sort of musicians at the time of David.
So some people think David wrote it and like gave it to Asaph.
So it's a Psalm for Asaph, but that's not what it says.
It says a Psalm of Asaph.
When it says a Psalm of David, I tend to assume David wrote it.
So I assume Asaph wrote that because he's also called a prophet in 1 Chronicles, I think, in one of the old books.
So he's a guy in his own right, but he's an important guy in the worship of God.
And he's no mean psalmist.
I mean, I'm not going to hold it against him that he's not David.
He's done a good job here.
He has.
And actually, his position as like a guy in the temple really said this isn't just me, you know, a Joe Blogg's nobody who gets frustrated with how the wicked are doing.
This is one of the chief worshipers orchestrating the music, writing stuff the time.
And he feels like this.
And so it's like, you know, when you read David, David has bad days.
That's quite encouraging because I have bad days as well.
So he's a pretty somebody.
Who are they talking about when they're talking about the ungodly?
Are they talking about Israelites or are they talking about the Canaanites who are surrounding them or what?
Who's giving them grief?
It's both.
So obviously, David at times is on the run.
So he sees a lot.
When he's talking about the ungodly, he could easily be talking about his enemies in his own people.
But Asaph is writing at times, it seems to me, when the kingdom is stable, at least David's monarchy.
I say the kingdom is stable.
David gets kicked out by his own son and has to go on the run again when Absalom takes and Absalom takes David's wives publicly.
So even in David's reign, there are very troublous times.
And Asaph will have seen those.
But yeah, there are still people in Israel.
And we find this all the time.
Even under a godly king like David, in Israel, there are still people worshiping false gods and raising their statues to other gods.
And then all the nations around them are doing the same.
And some of those are mighty and powerful nations.
We know this because obviously Gath is nearby, and that's where Goliath came from.
And for years, they were able to subdue the Israelites.
And there are still these prosperous nations all around Israel who all worship other gods.
And it's like, yikes, like they're worshiping their gods and they're doing fine.
So, but there was also a contingent in Israel.
I suspect it's probably the outside group that's the main focus.
But, you know, at a time of rebellion, they really show their colours in Israel as well.
Yeah.
Well, so how dangerous was it being one of the children of Israel in David's time?
It depends which side you were on.
So there's a lot of palace intrigue.
So like when Absalom sort of spends like decades, it seems like seducing the people to himself.
And at that point, he's able to kick, kick.
David can't return.
He goes out on a journey, can't return.
The priests are separated in whose side they are.
And there are pitched battles at times within Israel between different factions of Israelites.
So that's if you're in Israel.
But if you live on the outskirts, we tend to think of hard borders now, don't you?
Like a fence running up and down.
That's not what it's like over there.
You might be technically in Israel, but not far away from you can be a walled city of the Philistines and the Canaanites, which you can see from your farm.
And you're not always very safe.
They don't always respect the technical land borders, as you might expect.
So yeah, it was more precarious than we can sometimes think living in that kind of world.
Yes.
I've noticed in the Psalms, okay, there are moments like where in Psalm 27, they came upon me to eat up my flesh.
But yeah, when the wicked, even my enemies in my first, came upon me to eat up my flesh, which is quite graphic.
I mean, that's the zombie apocalypse moment in the Psalms.
But I've noticed generally that the threat is much less less graphic.
they spend the whole time being bad mouthed by the wicked.
The wicked are just kind of, they're almost like they're like Latter-day He-Man, sorry, Latter-day Skeletor in, in He-Man and the Master of the Universe, you know.
Skeletor, he sort of makes these noises, but he's not really that threatening.
Why is that?
Why are the enemies in the Psalms sort of slightly cartoonish?
That's a good question.
I guess it's sometimes because they are actually having a cartoonish effect on us.
They act in this kind of way, but we receive it that way as well and take it seriously.
And actually, sort of these kind of sketches help show us what we're like.
And this happens a lot in the Bible, especially like you read the stories of the children of Israel walking through the desert.
And they've just been rescued from Egypt, walk through the Red Sea on dry land.
There's a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire leading them.
And they look and say, I can't see any water.
And they start complaining and grumbling.
And it's like, oh, come on, guys.
It's a joke.
It's a cartoonish.
Now, I believe it really happened, but it's a cartoonish kind of story.
And you're supposed to go, oh, what a bunch of idiots.
Why can't they be grateful?
Why can't they trust God?
And then God then just flips it on you and says, you know, you're just like that.
You know, this, like, how much have I been good to you all the years of your life?
Not just have I sent you Christ and redeemed your soul from hell, but I've blessed you and I've kept you.
And then this one little thing happens and you're like, where's God?
What is he doing?
What is he playing at?
We're just like them.
So actually, we're more cartoonish sometimes in our responses and then we realize.
So I guess that maybe that's why it's painted in these ways, because we receive it that way and we sort of act it out a bit more than we should.
They are a bunch of whiny ingrates, aren't they?
The children of Israel.
Very often.
You kind of wonder why God has chosen to favor them.
Yeah, and it's interesting that he explicitly says, I think some point in Deuteronomy, I didn't pick you because you were better than everyone else.
Have you ever wondered about that?
What was on God's mind?
Why did he pick this lot rather than because he could have gone, oh, yeah, and the Egyptians, they're my favorite as well.
I love their Pharaoh's hats and their pyramids are really cool, but he didn't.
Yeah, I think he's setting up for us the example of how everyone actually gets saved or gets right with God.
It's not because of who you are, what you've done, it's all because of what God will do for you.
And this is where, sort of, as evangelicals, this is our big thing, that we are all sinful and none of us have anything good to go before God.
So, how do we ever get right with God?
Well, actually, God wraps the whole thing up in a gift and gives it to rubbish people like us.
And we see that in the Israelites.
You're like, oh, they're rubbish people.
They complain, they whine.
They keep going after at the end, it says, I will destroy all them that go whoring from thee.
That's that's like God's like, you're my people, and you're basically like treating me like the cooked guy at home while you go off and pimp yourself out to all these other nations.
Like that, they're not good people.
And yet, I'm not a good person either.
And so, I need a salvation.
I need a God who can have mercy on people like the children of Israel for myself, because I need that kind of mercy.
My thoughts, my deeds, the things that I've done, I need that kind of level of grace from God.
So, it's like he picked them as an example of rubbish people that he can be good to.
Although, to be fair, Stephen, I think anyone looking at you objectively would be going, actually, Stephen's pretty all right with God.
He's probably not on the scale of naught being kind of, I don't know, one of the Illuminati, sacrificing children to Satan, and 10 being Jesus, you're not going to be at the lower end.
Because you're, I mean, you read the Bible every day, I imagine, a lot.
Yeah, meditate on it and that sort of thing.
But if we could replace the other end with anyone but Jesus, I'd be happy with the analogy.
But the problem is that as soon as you compare yourself to him, really.
No, I'm not saying that no one is ever going to score a 10 because that's the end Jesus gets that.
What I'm saying is he's the guy we emulate.
Yeah, no one's going to get out of the zero point anythings when compared to Jesus because every thought is pure, every deed is pure, that's true, every action is pure, and like we can present reasonably well.
You know, I can live a life where most people think, oh, he's a good neighbor.
He's like, What goes on in here is pretty dark at times.
And that's a problem because God is the standard.
You know, when the Bible says all have sinned, it says, and come short of the glory of God.
If he's the perfect standard, it's like flip.
Like, it's, I can't, I'll be doing fine if I compare myself to like rapists who are like in my neighbor, like in the prisons near me.
But if I compare myself to God, I'm screwed.
And actually, that's what Jesus offers is a salvation for everyone.
Like, like Paul, you know, he's like, I'm the chief of sinners.
And God says, yeah, I can save you.
And so that's the kind of salvation I need.
Now, once we are saved, like God sends his Holy Spirit and then he says, right, now you do need to live like a Christian.
And there are consequences if you don't.
But that's not my ticket to heaven thing.
I've got the ticket.
Jesus paid for it.
What You Sow 00:08:44
But I do have a responsibility and I love him.
So I want to do what he asks me to do.
If you love me, you'll keep my commandments.
Can I just check with you on that one?
Because my previous podcast guest disagreed with you on this.
So in your view, because Christ died for our sins, you're basically on the way to heaven, but it is incumbent upon you to lead a good life because of that.
Yes, that's right.
And there are consequences too.
So the principle of like, whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, applies in this life.
So if I, as a Christian, do some do some awful things, I might well reap some awful things as a consequence.
I might not.
God is gracious, but often that's how it works.
But also there is a reward system.
So I think it's 1 Corinthians 3 talks about how no foundation can any man lay than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus.
So that's the, Jesus, we call ourselves Christians.
He is the foundation of all our faith.
We're told there we can build on that foundation with different things.
You can build with wood, hay or stubble, or you can build with gold, silver or precious jewels.
And at the end of time, or at some point, we will stand before God and he will test all of our life by fire.
Now, the foundation will still be there.
But the wood, the hay, the stubble, all of that will be burnt up.
The gold, the silver, the precious jewels, they will remain.
And that's where the phrase, so as by fire, is in the Bible.
Like, so some of us will just about get into heaven on the work of Jesus, but we'll have nothing left to show for the lives we lived down here.
Now, that's a pretty big incentive to do something right for God.
Now, but the foundation is unchanged because the foundation is Christ.
But what we build on it after that does matter.
But do you mean that when you on the day of judgment, you're going to get given a much harder time and have to go through what some sort of penance is?
Or does it mean that there are earthly consequences for your bad behavior, which you'll feel kind of more immediately?
So the earthly consequences would be things like, if I'm just, we're commanded to be loving and generous, for example.
And if I'm not generous, I'm unlikely to be the recipient of generosity and good things.
If I bite at people with my words all the time, people are probably going to bite at me with their words.
And if I, if I rob someone, I'll probably either get arrested, I probably won't go arrested to police it.
But that's not exclusive to Christianity, that one.
I mean, you get a lot of non-Christians saying the same thing.
It's like it's karma.
What goes around comes around.
Yeah.
And so I would say there is something to that idea, but that's God set that up in the world.
It's called sowing and reaping.
So it's not exclusive to Christians.
But those eternal things.
So the I don't want to get too lost in the eschatology here.
Just keep the big picture.
The eternal state is all good.
We all worship God and there's no sin and there's no tears and there's no crying.
That's all great.
But since Jesus has given me so far a couple of decades of life here after he saved me, I would love to have, and he's given me opportunity to do something with it.
I would love to have something to offer back to him in eternity and say, you did all this for me and you gave me a chance to give you something back.
And I know it's small, but this is what I did for you because I loved you.
Now, there will be Christians who are there on that day, have nothing to give back to Jesus.
Now they'll still be saved and they'll still be happy in the eternal state.
But I'd much rather have something to offer to my Lord on that day.
And it's all by his grace.
If it's something like they say, say through our podcast, someone hears and says, do you know what?
Actually, yeah, I'm going to become a Christian.
Well, I didn't do that.
God did that through us.
But he gives us the blessing of being involved in his work.
And so on that last day, he'll bless me, reward me and you for something he did through us.
It's the kind of God he is.
But we'll have something to offer.
I must say, it would be very sad seeing the look of kind of mild disappointment on Jesus' face.
If one had nothing to do with, I love you, but what did you do?
I gave you all these years.
I gave you all these abilities.
What did you do?
And that's a real motivator.
It's not because I'm going to lose heaven.
It's because I love Jesus who loved me first.
That's my motivation.
And so we're often accused of having like a cheap grace sort of thing.
Well, you've got your tickets sorted, so you can basically do what you like.
Well, that forgets the fact that when you become a Christian, something actually changes.
This isn't like an intellectual thing.
I can now sign a confession of faith that says I believe.
God actually changes you.
We believe that you're born again.
You're made alive to God.
And so your desires change, your wants change, not perfectly.
It will do one day, but a real change has happened.
So Paul addresses this in Romans.
Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound?
God forbid.
How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?
And you'll notice the things that used to really appeal to you before you were a Christian don't appeal as much when you after you're a Christian because something has changed.
It's not because, oh, I know it's, I know that's bad for me technically.
It's like, no, I hate it.
I don't like violent films anymore.
Yeah.
I used to think they were fantastic.
And well, I mean, I used to be, I used to be, but put it this way, I used to be into them a lot more than I am now.
I pretty much can't bear to watch them.
So you're right.
Desires change.
Yeah.
But you know what, Stephen?
I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know here.
I've met loads of evangelicals who are clearly filled with the Holy Spirit, and yet they haven't a clue about a lot of stuff.
I mean, they're seriously, seriously, embarrassingly wrong on stuff that you and I would know to be true.
Yeah, and that's the case.
And sort of in the big picture, I would rather be an ignorant Christian who will definitely go to heaven than a conspiracy theorist who knows all of the details and doesn't actually trust Jesus because they'll be in the same position as these wicked.
But I'd rather, if I have the choice, I'd rather be clued up and be going to heaven.
Oh, that's possible.
I agree.
I agree.
And I'm glad you're both.
But it's kind of annoying.
I mean, I don't.
One thing I've realized, and I quite enjoy not doing, is not judging too much because that's God's prerogative, not mine.
It doesn't mean one can't form opinions about people's behavior, let's say, and or people's thinking.
I don't really get Christians are supposed to have this thing called discernment.
And you hear a lot of Christians going talking about, talking quite pridefully, actually, with a pride worthy of Satan himself about how discerning they are.
And they clearly wouldn't know what discernment was if it bit them on the bum.
I mean, it's not that it's when they get holier than now with me.
And I'm thinking, what?
Hey, you're judging me when I know that you don't know what you're talking about.
And I get it.
Like, there can be a level of sort of not self-protection, just like ordering your priorities.
So, for example, if you know all about chemtrails and you know what, or at least you can see what's going on in the sky, well, if you can't do anything about it and all it's going to do is make you miserable and complaining and whining, you're probably better off not thinking about it too much.
Yeah, yeah.
But Christians do actually have weapons at our disposal.
We have prayer.
We have the word of God.
And actually, being aware of Satan and his devices should lead us to take action.
And that's why I care about some of these things.
Not because I just love the fun of looking into it.
It is fun.
But if it's just fun, well, what's the point?
If we're in a real pitched battle with the enemy, which I think we are, and what the enemy wants is souls dragged to hell, then actually we've got something to work with here.
The Heavenly Host's Role 00:06:40
We've got stuff to do with our knowledge.
And so if it's just knowledge on its own, it'll just puff you up.
But actually, learning, Christians should be switched on to this stuff so they know the battle that they're in.
Like we talked about earlier, like if you don't really acknowledge the presence of the devil and his devils active in this world, you're going to be unguarded.
Like we pray differently in my house now than we did a decade ago.
We pray for God's angels.
Yeah, we pray for God's angels to protect us because there are devils out there trying to get to us and there are angels who are on our side.
So there are.
Do you know how many archangels there are?
Well, there's only one named in the Bible, Michael.
Yeah, but I think there's 12.
Oh, there.
Well, that's a good number.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you're talking about Michael.
I mean, he's definitely.
And he's the leader of the heavenly host, isn't he?
I mean, they have it seems to be.
I think it's Michael that when the angel comes to Daniel, I think Gabriel comes to Daniel in one of the chapters.
And this is my paraphrase.
When he gets to Daniel, he's like, sorry, I'm late.
I was having a fight and I couldn't win.
And I had to call Michael for reinforcements.
So, like, Michael's the guy.
If you know you're going to have a fight after the schoolgates, Michael's the friend you want there on your side.
Yeah.
It is fascinating because I think it's sometimes tempting to think that, well, God's got this.
He's God.
It is written.
And he's got the heavenly host.
But it's much more touch and go than we realize.
Yeah.
Well, it's the same with us.
Like, so again, we all believe like all the verses in the Bible, like God is omnipotent.
He's all powerful.
He knows everything.
He's got everything under control.
But he's using people all the time.
The whole story of the Bible is him using people to do stuff.
And sometimes they'll fail and sometimes they'll do it.
So why would it be any different in the spiritual realm?
Why would we assume that in the spiritual realm, God just clicks his fingers and everything and everything happened?
No, the spiritual realm is just as worked out between, if you like, entities, spiritual entities, as the physical world is worked out between your local pastor, your friend that you read the Bible with, your neighbors.
Like, that's the physical world works out like that.
Why wouldn't the spiritual world be the same?
And then you start to read the Bible like that and you're like, oh, yeah, it's obvious.
Don't you reckon that tells us something interesting about the nature of God?
Is which is that he likes it?
He likes things to be interesting.
I mean, he could have made it so much simpler had he wanted to, but he doesn't.
He quite enjoys the game, the excitement.
Yeah, and he's not a tyrant.
And this is this people struggle with this because I believe in an all-powerful God.
Everything is in his control.
Everything is in his power.
But like, if I'm worrying if it wasn't the case, exactly.
I mean, if I were, that would be.
I don't know why people get up in the morning if that isn't the case, but I'm sure they have some way of rationalizing it to themselves.
But I don't.
So that's my ultimate confidence.
But when I, if I sin, like, say, I'm unjustifiably angry with my children, God doesn't kick my door down and shout at me.
Like, you know, he's not like that.
He doesn't micromanage every area of our lives.
He's surprisingly okay with us making mistakes and learning the hard way.
Even though he's written a book which tells us, like, here's all the mistakes you could make.
Don't do that.
And then, but sometimes he lets us go.
So he's got all the power, but he's not tyrannical in that sense with it.
He will, and actually, that writes a better story.
And that leads us to be able to love him.
Because, you know, if I didn't have any kind of choice, like we talk about with what we do with our lives, well, how can I show him that I love him other than he's given me a way to serve him or to not serve him?
And I can show him.
And that actually makes for a great story in this world.
And we'll look back in heaven and see God's masterpiece of storytelling.
And we'll be like, okay, that's the best story that's ever been written.
I suppose how are we going to do that?
How are we going to tackle the good guys?
So it's in quite noticeable chunks.
So we could probably sort of summarize the sections.
So the first bit, so the first verse, he's sort of, I'm not going to say it's perfunctory, but he's setting the scenes.
He's like, truly God is good to Israel, even to such as of a clean heart.
And we think, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, God's good, good people, great.
But then the whole next bit is about how he wasn't there.
It's like him saying, yeah, but as for me, it's like God's good to the people with a clean heart.
But as for me, my feet were almost gone.
My steps had well nigh slipped.
So he's going to be showing that he doesn't live up to the ideal Christian or the ideal believer.
And he's going to explain why.
And the whole of that first section, it runs down to verse 12.
He's saying, am I right?
He's saying, I see all these bad guys having a good life.
And well, not good as in good, but having a prosperousness, a fun life, a rich life.
And they're getting away with it.
And I have to say, I look at these people and I'm thinking, well, if you can't beat him, maybe I should join him.
Is that he's basically saying, what is the point in being righteous?
I'm righteous and I'm struggling and it's hard.
And they are, they're not just like quietly wicked.
They're openly wicked.
They boast against God.
They celebrate wicked things.
They do wicked things.
And they've got money and they've got power and they've got influence and they mock me and they mock God and they're fine.
And this is why this is the conspiracy theory song because that is what we see.
We look at the world, you look at media, you look at news, you look at rulers, and on the whole, you're like, they mock God, they hate him, they practice sexual wickedness, they speak lies, and yet they're rich, they live in nice houses, they've got good health.
Nancy Pelosi's Stupendous Wealth 00:02:25
Like, what's the point?
And especially when you're, and they're actually some of them actively in league with the devil, and yet God hasn't dropped a fireball on them and they haven't got cancer.
They're just basically fine.
Like, why do they die?
I think Americans, for example, must look at Nancy Pelosi and the millions that that woman has accumulated through what can only be honestly categorized as insider trading.
I mean, that's how everyone in Congress makes their money, isn't it?
They have access to information which enables them to take positions in the markets from which they benefit hugely.
And they never get called out.
They don't have to take any risk.
They just get stupendously rich.
And where was Nancy Pelosi's punishment?
Or when is George Soros going to get punished?
He's a really good example.
Like, just the embodiment of, seems to be like the embodiment of selfish evil.
He does whatever he wants and it works out well for him.
He betrays his own people in Hungary.
It works out well for him.
He sells people out, creates wars, diseases, and it all works out well for him.
And it's like, what is the point?
And like, like a slightly lower level one for us, Brits would be someone like David Attenborough, who spends his life sort of shown the glories of God's world.
Like, and he has privilege upon privilege to spend all his life.
I mean, how great would that be to just research God's world?
But you don't even have to be like a detailed scientist.
You just get to enjoy it.
You just get to look at all the cool things, travel all around the world.
Best gig in the world.
Yeah.
And all he does is trash God.
And he doesn't do it explicitly, but it's always evolution.
There's no cause to this.
There's no acknowledgement to the God who made all these things.
And he's in his 90s in great health.
Yes, he's almost 100.
He's still going strong.
Sins And Devils 00:14:40
You're right.
I'm glad that you share my discomfiture towards.
And I do like the photography.
Yeah, I'd enjoy watching, but it makes me happy.
No, no, he's just.
That's for the grunts who spend hours.
Weeks before Attenborough rolls up, they're living in bivouacs and being eaten alive by bugs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like that everywhere.
You know, the wicked just seem to get away with it and it can get you down.
It can, can't it?
Or it could.
Yeah.
Well, I think it does as well.
Like, it shouldn't.
And that's what the psalm's going on.
But I think we just have to be honest with ourselves.
There are days when you wake up and think, just what is the point in doing the right thing?
Like, it'd be much easier if I just cheated financially.
I'd know I'd be better off.
No one would find out.
I wouldn't get caught.
And that's what they do all the time.
So it is real.
And he sort of fleshes that out.
He talks about pride compassing them as a chain.
It talks about fatness in one of the verses.
Their eyes swell with fatness.
I wonder what that means.
How do your eyes swell with fatness?
This is obviously kind of a complicated metaphor.
So again, I'm sure you're on the same page with me on this.
Our modern sort of food system is also being corrupted.
Fat is a good thing.
And you see historically in the Bible, fat means prosperity.
So their eyes are standing out with fatness.
They're bulging with the love of the good things and good things.
So they have lots and their eyes are just like bulging with worldly prosperity.
Oh, okay.
And they do even what they lust.
Yeah.
They're having a good time.
Because they can, because they've got all the money and they can do what they like.
And there was another thing, actually, which is really key to where Asaph is going wrong is verse 3 is that he's envious.
But I was envious at the foolish.
Oh, Harry.
What line is that?
I'm on the 20th.
Oh, I see.
This is interesting.
So in my version, it's and why I was grieved at the wicked.
So that doesn't quite carry the same.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, I would go with envy.
Obviously, that's what I think.
But I think even if, without based on this passage, that is the sin that eats us up.
Envy of bad things is natural, but it's really destructive.
Because it eats away at our satisfaction.
Because there's always someone you can envy.
So no matter how rich you are, you can envy someone else.
No matter how beautiful you are, you can envy someone else's looks.
Envy will kill all satisfaction.
And I remember, I was thinking about this today, actually.
How much of my before I became a proper Christian, particularly when I was a young man, how much I did envy the men who were the sort of the sort of cold sharking predators of women.
They would always get the girls because they were the bad boys that the girls liked and they were just good at it.
They didn't care about breaking hearts.
The main thing was they got their sex and lots of it.
Or the ones who could party all night and or take loads of drugs and just had no control mechanism and they get away with it.
And I looked at these people and I thought, I wish I could be one of them.
Or at least I envied them.
I envied them these things.
And now I realize that all the things that I envied, the qualities I envied were actually not desirable qualities.
And I know that some of these people have actually, as we're going to find later on in this podcast, sorry, later on in this psalm, they have come to a fearful end.
They have been, they haven't benefited from it.
But it's funny, isn't it?
That the things that we envy are often often sinful things.
Yeah, they often are, but they can be good things as well.
You know, like the 10th commandment, do not envy their neighbor's wife.
So that wife is a good, a good thing to your neighbor, but she's not yours.
So you envy that, that'll be bad for both of you.
Don't envy your neighbor's donkeys or asses or those sorts of things.
So it can be a good thing, but you're right.
Often the things that we really want, well, often they are good things out of context.
It's like sex is a great thing, but it's right in its context.
And so what the devil does is he twists it and says, this is what you really need.
And we lust after that rather than seeking how God has given us a really good gift in the first place.
And so sex in marriage is the most satisfying way of having sex, but that no one's going to tell you that in mainstream media because they want you to pursue the devil's way of trying to twist these things.
They really want you to have affairs.
Oh, yeah, huge.
Yeah.
I think I remember you saying on a podcast recently, like, you felt like a loser because you weren't having an affair, because that's what you do.
And yeah, like, I'm a bookseller, like, the amount of novels that the hook is based on on a fair.
And even like a helpful book like 1984, you know, before my son read it for the first time, I was explaining to him, like, it's a useful tool here, but like, the affair is a critical element in the plot because that's what they use to break him in the end.
But you know, it's everywhere.
Like, it's pushed and pushed and pushed.
And you're right, like, people, people think the only reason to not do it is risk of getting caught.
But that's the like the real reason not to do it is because it's destructive for you and the other person involved and everyone else.
It's stupid and it's foolish.
That's the real reason, but you don't get, you don't get, um, you don't get the wise counsel from the world.
They just because the devil loves that destruction.
He would like nothing more than for you to envy and lust over someone who isn't your wife and then go ahead with it and just destroy everything good in your life.
He would love that.
Yes.
He doesn't tell you that up front.
Especially given that all women are basically the same.
And actually all you're doing, if you play the devil's game, all you're doing is exchanging one set of problems for another very similar set of problems.
So it wasn't really worth it anyway.
But that's by the by.
And yeah, and like you'll find it's cheap as well.
Like the investment you make with your wife is like decades, hopefully, long.
And like you'll throw that all away.
Yeah, well, exactly.
I mean, yeah, throw it away for nothing.
So yeah, I think we're agreed on that one.
I do, I love this section where it goes, for they stretch forth their mouth unto the heaven.
It's such a wonderful image.
And their tongue goeth through the world.
Therefore, another way that this is automatically the inevitable consequence is therefore fall the people unto them and thereout suck they no small advantage.
I think it's beautifully expressed.
Yeah.
And it comes to this explicit nature of it.
This isn't just private hatred against God.
These people will stand openly and they'll be like, oh, is there a God?
Why doesn't he strike me down then?
Come on, God.
They will rail against God openly.
They'll set their tongue to the heavens.
And then people will be like, their people will then come and receive the overflow of their wickedness from them.
It's brazen rebellion against God.
Do you think that's what?
I mean, the people that we understand are the baddies in the world, the people who run the world, the kind of elites, the predator class, the Illuminati, whatever.
Do you think they do spend a lot of time slagging off God?
Yeah, I think it's important to them.
Yeah, because I think that's where their heart is.
They become more and more like their master.
And the devil hates God.
He was envious of God's position.
He wanted to ascend up the sides of the north.
He wanted to be like the most high.
And the fact that God won't let him do it is a source of unending hatred to him.
And I assume his followers become more and more like him.
They hate God more and more.
I suppose one example of that would be: I've noticed this a lot: the amount of blaspheming that takes place routinely on TV and in the movies.
I mean, I wouldn't mind if they use the F word all the time because that seems fine, but it's never that.
It's always taking the Lord's name in vain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that is deliberate.
The whole concept of the watershed, I don't watch TV anymore, so I don't really know whether it's still in effect.
But there was this idea, like certain things, only certain words can be said after certain times.
But that didn't apply to blasphemy.
So you can get children used to hearing blasphemy all the time.
Whereas, like, I'd rather my kids didn't use coarse swear words.
But to be honest, if they stub their toe, I'd much rather they say a swear word than they say, use God's name in vain.
Yeah.
Because God made their tongue.
How dare you blaspheme the one who gave you this because you've hurt yourself a little bit.
But forgive them, Father, for then know that what they do.
I mean, okay, your children obviously do know because they've got you as their dad.
But I think so many people have been trained to think that actually blaspheming is less, is more acceptable, less offensive than using the F-word.
That's how the media and the entertainment industry can corrupt people.
Yep.
And they've stolen a massive play over us by doing that because there is power in names and in words.
And they don't realize that they're not just offending God by using his name in vain.
They're actually having an effect on themselves and the world around them.
And I think a spiritual one as well.
So I think sins attract devils.
And the sin of blasphemy being commonplace, I think, goes hand in hand with your society being riggled with demonic attention.
And I was thinking also, giving examples of how the kind of the evil people in this world like insulting God.
They do it through art.
So the entire career of Maria Abramovich with her spirit cooking and her friendship with the Rothschild, and they're clearly into all that Cannibalism and satanic imagery.
Yeah, they'll use all of the arts.
They'll use poetry, they'll use fiction, they'll use drama, like film, and they'll use music and corrupt all of those to rail against God.
Either explicitly.
Do you remember that avant-garde work of art by Andres Serrano called Piss Christ?
I was actually going to use that as the example.
Yes.
Yeah.
Because it's an epitome of art deliberately done to be as offensive as possible to Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's interesting, like, anyway, no, that will take us way too far off track.
And also, well, I tell you, I'll tell you who else talks a lot who really doesn't like the mention of Jesus and gets really, he's really insulting towards Christians.
Our friend David Icke.
Yeah, that's a good tell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it was always.
It's not like, yeah, well, some Christians, you know, we can take or leave it.
It's like he really, really doesn't like it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that for me is the biggest tell for people like that.
There are some people who are like, oh, yeah, I don't know what to make of Jesus.
It's like, okay, you're probably closer to the kingdom than you might realise.
But those who are actively put off by.
And I do get that you can be sold a mischaracterization of Jesus.
So I think you had an interview with a guy, I can't remember, Nathan, someone maybe, but he'd been in the satanic sort of bloodline sort of world.
And they use the name of Jesus to traumatize you.
They have words.
They have people dressed up as Jesus.
That's right.
Abusing, sexually abusing children so that they're not tempted to run to Jesus because he's their abuser.
Yeah.
So he calls him Yeshua just because in his head the name Jesus has been tainted.
So again, I'm not going to try to be wooden about it, but in general, Jesus, the name of Jesus is powerful for a reason, because Jesus is powerful.
And any kind of blaspheming of it, sort of minimizing of it, and railing against it.
And you see like these cute little kids sort of singing along to songs and they're blaspheming God.
Like from a young age, they're just being inculcated in railing against God.
And it's not a surprise when they grow up, that's just how they live.
They say, we forgive Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
And that's why this stuff is so serious, because they don't know what they're doing and yet still having an effect.
This is one of the things in the who wrote Earth's earliest ages?
Pemba.
Pemba.
So Pember, he's obviously a smart cookie.
He's very well read, but it's quite.
It's quite an imaginative work.
I mean, there's a lot of scholarship in there, but he's thought it through and he's painted a very convincing portrait of the fall and the events leading up to the fall and so on.
Worship's Role in End Times 00:07:21
But then towards the end of the book, he starts talking about the signs that we're approaching end times.
Yeah.
And he was writing what in the 1880s when spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky were just sort of starting to get traction and the East was starting to have its allure to people in the West.
But he thought he was living pretty close to it.
He did.
But blind me, if he were to come back now and see him.
He thought it was bad then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's and I'm not one of those people who says, I know we're deaf, it's around the corner.
But there is enough to me to look at the world to say, there's enough here.
Could well return this afternoon.
Like, it's bad enough.
But as we've seen between Pember's time and ours, it got a lot worse.
It could get even worse still.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Christ turned up tomorrow.
I just think it's just going to get a lot worse.
Well, it could well do.
Yeah.
But let's.
Well, how are the horses supposed to be wading up to their bridles in blood?
Yeah.
So again, this depends on your eschatology.
You probably won't be very happy to know that I do believe in the pre-tribulational rapture.
Yeah.
But I don't think that saves me from going through anything any Christian has gone through in church history.
So I could still be beheaded.
I could still be torn apart by horses.
I could have my family killed in front of me.
I could go through any kind of and like my whole nation could be could be taken into bondage and sold to Islam, which is what happened in North Africa, to Christians, to whole Christian sort of countries.
So any of that could still happen.
So it's not like a get out of jail free card for any kind of suffering, which I think for some people, some people portray it as that, which I don't.
It doesn't excuse me from all kinds of tribulation.
It just excuses me from one particular period of time.
I think I'm going with beheading in preference to torn apart by horses.
Yeah, or cut in half with wooden saws and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah.
Who was the prophet who got?
I think it might be Isaiah.
Isaiah.
Is it?
I don't quote me on that.
It might have been.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So some pretty rough stuff.
And like you, have you read Fox's Book of Martyrs?
No, I haven't.
I probably should.
I'll send you a copy.
It's moving and inspiring, but you read what some of the Christians have gone through.
I just barbaric.
Well, like Christ, the crucifixion was designed to humiliate and excruciate people in the worst possible way.
And the Christians are crucified upside down.
Various things are done to them before they finally expire.
Yo, it's awful stuff.
And yet they considered it worthy for the name of Jesus.
It's inspiring and frightening at the same time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It ain't easy.
It ain't easy being a Christian.
No.
And we do have it easy.
You know, there are brothers and sisters in parts of the world.
Like what's happening in North Nigeria now is just heartbreaking.
It's something like 20 or 30 Christians a day are killed in North Nigeria by mostly Fulani sort of militants, Islamic sort of people.
It's just like, and these are people who will refuse just to just, you know, all they need to do is just say, oh, I don't believe in Jesus anymore.
And they won't do it.
So, yeah, it's pretty rough stuff.
But the psalmist thinks his work is a waste of time.
So in verse 12, he's like, I've cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in it.
Everything I've done, like, it feels like a complete waste of time.
But something then changes him.
And it's verse 17, until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end.
Yeah.
So this, we need, and this is what I was talking about in the intro when we need the worship of God.
It orientates us, it pivots us to see what is real in this world and what isn't.
And that's why I think worship is so key, because it's so easy to get lost in your own thoughts and your own actions.
Whereas actually, when you worship God, it takes you out of yourself and focuses you on him.
And then God shows you actually what's really going on.
You're like, oh, yeah, I get it now.
I get it now.
And I've been in various different types of churches in my Christian life.
But I was for quite a while in a Brethren church in Dudley, and we would have what we call the Lord's Supper or communion every week.
And that was so helpful.
Because I've been in other churches where you have it like once a month or every now and then.
And knowing it was coming every week, even if you messed up and you got to a dark place or whatever, when you got there, you're like, I needed this reminder.
I needed to be reminded of what Jesus has done for me.
And it's like that with all worship.
We need to be reminded who God is, what the world is like.
And that's why I've got no time for like gay, limp worship that doesn't really say anything could do anything.
It's like, I need to know who God is.
I need his word to be preached to me.
I need prayers to be genuinely offered to him because, yeah, God is worthy of it.
But also, I need it.
If I want to understand the end of the wicked and the world, God's going to meet me in worship in a way that's particular and helpful.
So when you say the Lord's Supper, is that like Holy Communion?
Yeah, yeah, communion.
Yeah, we sometimes call it the Lord's Supper.
Sometimes call it communion.
Right.
Bread and wine.
Yeah, I think one does feel better for having had communion.
I don't like being away from it for too long.
No, me.
I'm in a church where we do it once a month and I'm like, I'm gasping by the time we get there because I need it.
So yeah, his worship changes him.
He worships, goes into the sanctuary, the holy place.
He worships God and then he understands their end.
And this is where my sort of non-conformity would come in.
The sanctuary here does not mean, for the New Testament Christian, a special building built in a certain way.
The sanctuary is the temple of God, which in the New Testament are Christians, living people, lively stones, Peter calls them, build the temple of God.
So when we were meeting together in the woods, we were the sanctuary of God because we were the holy people of God worshiping it.
When we were in my garden, we were the sanctuary.
George Soros: The Warlock Without Christ 00:03:19
And now you can be in the sanctuary in a cathedral as well, but it's not the building that makes it holy.
It's the people where God then comes to be with them.
So entering the sanctuary changes everything.
And then suddenly he's like, get it now.
Like, I know where they're going to end up.
When you see the holy God and you see these people, it's like, oh, yeah, of course I know what's going to happen to them.
When those two things collide, when the purity of God, who we worship in our services, meets the wickedness of George Soros without Christ.
The end is obvious.
But we need that because it's too easy to focus on his prosperity.
We do need to be reminded that George Soros will come to a fearful end.
Without Christ.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, he's got the option.
I'm just thinking.
I can't see him.
No.
On past form, I can't see him really.
No.
You know the story on George Soros, don't you?
I've heard brief bits.
Is he Hungarian?
Is he Jewish?
And he sold out his own.
Yeah, well, I meant the more.
So according to Jesse Zabota, the world is divided up by the Satanists into five regions.
And the North American block, it's got a mother of darkness, but it's also got a sort of chief warlock.
And the previous warlock in charge of that division was George Soros.
Right.
And he got replaced by, do you know?
I don't.
Barack Obama.
See, it doesn't surprise me at all.
It's very interesting.
When you look at Soros' career and behavior, that his think tank, his Open Society Foundation, so much of the really bad stuff that is happening in the world, the sort of the uncontrolled migration, which is just kind of ripping up cultures right, left, and center.
But also the war machine.
Soros's think tanks fund all the, sorry, his Open Founder Society Foundation funds all the think tanks, which are constantly pushing for war.
And they can outspend governments, these people like Soros can.
So he really is wicked.
He is really doing Satan's work.
He's not just a kind of a bit player.
He's very significant.
And yeah.
And we know their end, because for all his power, for all his influence, he is a human being, and God could end his life in a split second, and one day will.
The Endless Account 00:13:42
So all that he's built, all that he's done, will one day be suddenly taken away from him.
And he will stand naked before his God to answer for all the things he's done.
It's a frightful place to be.
And you think, oh, why would I envy someone like that?
Why would I want all of that money and all of that power and all of that influence if that's the end of that route is having to answer for that wicked?
And that's the perspective we need.
It's not worth a penny of it.
Yes, the psalmist leaves it to the imagination what the end might be, what the fearful end might be.
Yeah, I can't remember what yours said in 19, but it's something similar.
Mine says they are utterly consumed with terrors.
Yeah.
And then you get this rather lovely image.
Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.
So they're just going to be gone.
A bit like in Psalm 37, when again, yet a little while.
Yeah, that's right.
It's interesting that this Psalm and so 73 and 37 are very much parallel.
And the numbers are reversed as well.
Is that deliberate?
I don't put too much weight on it, but I can't help noticing it either.
Yeah, they are very similar because you did that with Buyon Mashabi, I think.
Yes, I did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.
And again, it's that it's that thing about, don't worry, they're going to be gone.
That's right.
Yeah.
Just chill out about it, basically.
Yet a little while and the ungodly shall be clean gone.
Thou shalt look after his place and he shall be away.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that.
Clean gone.
Yeah.
And one day, and sometimes we see this in time.
So like the like the Ozzy Mandius type figure.
Yeah.
Who remembers the great wicked rulers from the past?
Well, unless they're recorded in the Bible or somewhere else.
We don't know most of them.
No.
They've gone.
Their place has been swept and gone.
But ultimately, God will do that with all the wicked on the final day.
All of their place will go.
And the earth, when he remakes it, won't have any wickedness in it whatsoever.
It'll be all, it'll be like Eden, but restored.
It'll be all good.
And if we believe Psalm 37, we get to see this.
When the ungodly perish, thou shalt see it.
Yeah, I think Christians are there as witnesses and judges on the final day.
Because the great white throne is set up.
It says, and I said, so a great white throne and thrones.
So there's more than one throne.
And we're told that we will be kings and priests unto God.
So Jesus is the king.
In his grace, we get to be kings with him.
Well, that's good.
Yes, it's pretty awesome.
And this is what that package that God wrapped up as a gift to give to all who repent and believe in Christ is the best package you can ever have.
The things contained in it are just unspeakably good.
And yet we there's not many of us relative to the no, there aren't.
And that's because the things of this world do really have a hold on people.
And you see it all the time.
It's really hard to endure hardness now for something good later when you can just step sideways and ignore the hardness now and the benefit later.
It's easier to just opt for the easy path.
And broad is the road that leadeth to destruction.
And many there be that find it.
It's easy to just go along with the world, just sort of not objecting to the blasphemy and not objecting to the false idols and all that sort of stuff.
And just go along with it and find yourself sort of swept into hell.
And it's easy because the relativeness we talked about earlier, it's easy because you think, well, I'm not as bad as that guy.
So maybe I'm all right.
But actually, yeah, it is sad.
And I think, and so I do think the road is narrow and the gate is straight.
But I also think there are people out there who are ready to hear the message of Christianity and the gospel if we'll only just help them.
And so there is something on us to share this message and say, look, guys, this is where you're heading.
Look what happens to the wicked.
Don't go there.
This is what we're doing now, Stephen, in this podcast.
I think it's important watching this may have their heart softened.
I hope so.
Yeah, by God's grace.
Yeah.
And it's happened in stranger circumstances than this.
Oh, I think it happens all the time.
It's great.
I mean, I feel really blessed that God seems to have given me this gift of, you know, bring people around in a kind of, in a not annoying way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sure I'm guilty in a quite annoying way at times.
So we then get, so he feels bad.
Thus my heart was grieved and it went even through my reins.
So foolish was I and ignorant, even as it were a beast before thee.
So he's feeling, at this point, he's feeling very humble in the presence of God, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
And he should, because he's like, I was an idiot.
I shouldn't have been thinking like that, and I was.
But this is the wonderful thing for the Christian is that God is gracious and he's ready to forgive.
So the very next verse after that is, nevertheless, I am continually with thee.
Thou hast holding me by my right hand.
Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel and afterwards receive me to glory.
The guy who was with the chairs.
With the throne.
That was the guy who was earlier in the psalm envying the wicked.
Because he belongs to God.
God's got him by the right hand.
God will hold him.
God will receive him to glory.
That's the kind of God he is.
He keeps hold of his own.
He won't let them go.
And then verse 25, I love.
It says, whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is none on earth that I desire beside thee.
I like the accurate grammar there.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is mine's quite similar.
And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of thee.
Yeah.
And, you know, I love anyone who genuinely trusts in Jesus.
So I'm not after denominational lines, but if you think Mary's going to God for you in heaven, this verse is a bit of a problem.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
Oh, interesting.
There's one.
There's one on whom our hopes can be trusted, and that's God.
And this was the ancient dilemma.
It was like, well, yeah, I know it's God, but how can but also how can I how can how can I get to know that God?
He's too remote.
He's too removed.
That's the incarnation.
God himself comes down in the person of Jesus Christ and he is a man, a true man, and he is true God.
And so the mystery is resolved that the one in heaven is God, but also he's the one who walked on earth and died on the cross.
And so the verse, I see Jesus here.
Whom have I in heaven, but he's the only one because he's God.
There's none upon earth.
It's extraordinary how prophetic the Psalms are in that respect, that they address God in a very...
I mean, we're talking, they were written pre-Jesus, and yet clearly Jesus is somehow present in their minds because it's a very intimate relationship they have with God.
It's the the and the thou that they use, which is one you use for your friend, your loved one, your intimate, it's not sort of formal and respectful.
No, and it's singular and personal.
So the T pronouns are singular pronouns.
So it's not talking in a general sense.
He's talking about the God that he knows.
Yeah.
It's very personal.
And it's just beautiful how God will do all this for people like us who don't deserve it.
So then we have a sort of rounding up and he's sort of realizing the error of his ways and he's realizing that God is what matters and God is there for him.
So my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
What does my portion forever mean?
Just the good inheritance, like a portion of land that was given to you.
So my translation says, for lo, they that forsake thee shall perish.
Thou hast destroyed all them that commit fornication against thee.
What does it mean by it doesn't mean that people are having sex in the streets, does it?
What does it mean?
No, so mine is ever so slightly different to the second half is thou hast destroyed all them that go ahoring from thee.
So this is a constant framing refrain in the Old Testament is that God calls Israel his bride.
And he says, and you go ahoring after other gods.
Yes, which they do all the time throughout the Old Testament.
Yeah.
And interestingly, it is a metaphor, but it's surprising how often actual sexual depravity accompanies the worship of false gods.
So it is a metaphor.
They've gone ahoring after other gods.
But it's surprising how much temple prostitution and those sorts of things were part of that going to other gods.
Yes, I touched on temple prostitution with, I think, the previous Psalms podcast.
So They had prostitutes in the temple, not just as a kind of handy office, but somehow the sexual act was united with the worship of the gods of these.
It was considered a part of a part of the worship.
And it's hard to get your head around this stuff.
It's so distasteful to the Christian mind.
But the Canaanites, and I don't think this stopped.
Part of their worship was also the sacrifice of children.
And these sorts of, like, it's the inversion of everything good.
That which is good and holy, sex and bringing forth of children, is then perverted in the worship of these false gods.
The Canaanites are definitely still with us.
They're heirs.
Yeah.
Yeah, they are.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's.
Oh, I think maybe you were talking with the podcast guest recently.
I heard someone talking about, and they described the awful practices that the Canaanites had.
And you think, oh, the Canaanite.
Yes, it definitely was you.
Yeah, the Canaanites sometimes in hyperbolic language said to be gotten rid of.
But then a few chapters later, a Canaanitish woman is there in the narrative.
So they weren't fully ethnically exterminated.
No, they weren't.
And even if they had been, it doesn't mean their gods disappeared.
It doesn't mean that the devils that they were sacrificing to have disappeared and just given up the game.
They're very much still around.
So it's a serious thing to go after.
You can only, yeah, you only go ahoring from God if he was your God.
And that's why God had particular judgment for the nation of Israel when they went after these other gods.
It wasn't like a Canaanite swapping their God for a God of a Moabite.
That would be bad, but it's changing from one bad to another bad.
Whereas the children of Israel, they had the true God.
And they still went after the other gods.
And then we have it sort of wrapping it up as the psalms do in the conclusion.
But it is good for me to hold me fast by God and to put my trust in the Lord God and to speak of all thy works in the gates of the daughter of Zion.
Presumably the gates of the daughter of Zion is Jerusalem, is it?
Yes, that's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's what we need to do.
It's actually part of our, I think we're commanded to do, it's actually part of our helping ourselves understand the world is actually just actively say how good God is.
Tell other people, like, God is gracious beyond all means.
Like, you would not believe how kind he has been to me and to my family and to my children.
And how the situation where you think, I don't know where the next, where the money is going to come from to pay that bill.
And then something comes out of nowhere.
You pray for people who are sick.
And it doesn't always happen.
People get sometimes God miraculously heals.
And you think he didn't need to do that.
But he did.
He does these good things.
And we help ourselves by reminding other Christians and the world, like God is good and he's good all the time.
Bought Books in 2015 00:03:06
What's the most miraculous book sale that God has given to you?
What was the book find?
Well, a book sale, it was a while ago.
Probably I was here in Bradford, maybe 2015.
And self-employment is, I'm not very good at business.
So I just sort of do whatever seems right.
But it goes up and down.
And then there's this, I was never making much money, but there's this thing called payment on account, where if you go over a certain threshold, they want an extra 50% in January towards next year's bill.
And then the same again.
And so I didn't know anything about this.
And I hadn't been very good at saving up the tax for this year.
And I must have gone over some sort of threshold.
And they were like, and we need an extra.
I only submitted my accounts at the end of December because I didn't have an accountant there.
So I did it myself, submitted them at the end of December, and they're like, This is your bill for the end of January.
I was like, I literally don't have it.
I don't know what to do.
And then sort of five days later, a guy bought a set of books for like three and a half grand that completely covered.
And I had never sold anything like remotely that expensive before.
He was chuffed a bit.
I drove the books down to Leicester to give them to him.
We had a chat.
He was chuffed a bit.
But it's just came.
It was called The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester.
So there were these Victorian, sort of early Victorian county histories that were published.
And they're really incredible works of architecture and history.
A lot of the stuff has been lost.
So there's good records in there.
But interestingly, the books had once belonged to a guy called Henry Drummond, who was like an aristocratic sort of guy.
I can't remember the name of where he lived.
Albury Park was where his country residence was.
And the plate was still in the frontier, belonging to Henry Drummond.
And in that room in the library at Albury Park, Henry Drummond convened some of the early prophetic conferences of the age.
He became an evangelical Christian, and Edward Irving and people like that came and had prophetic conferences in the room.
Now, the guy who bought the books wasn't a Christian, but he loved that history.
Like these books were on the wall when this sort of stuff was happening, this pivotal sort of stuff was happening.
And that's what tipped him over the edge to buying them was the story behind the books.
And it's like, I can't orchestrate any of that.
I was just pure God being good.
And like little things like, I said little things.
When we were meeting during the lockdown, we had one of the young ladies who was meeting with us wants to get baptized.
And we didn't have a building.
And it was, I think it was February, so it was freezing cold.
So I bought one of these portable baptistries and put it in our front garden, which is sort of on the main, on the sort of the main road of our council estate.
Baptism and Divine Intervention 00:02:26
It's sort of raised up.
So it's like a platform.
So we put it on, filled it with warm water.
Everyone else was stood on the streets.
They weren't technically in our garden.
So the only people who could get into trouble were me and the two people getting baptized.
We baptized them, her and her brother, in the front garden.
And the police came up the road and stopped at the T junction just by, there's no way, like humanly speaking, they could have not seen us.
And they just turned right and went the other way.
Like, so either God said, like, maybe God made it so they couldn't see us.
Or maybe God just said, not today, mate, just go and do something else.
And what, for whatever reason, we had no trouble, even though the police drove past us actually more than once.
And it's like, God's just been so good.
We were all prepared to get into trouble for it.
And God was like, no, it's okay.
Don't worry about it.
I've got this.
You think what it's like being God?
He's making decisions like that.
How many people are there?
If we believe the figures, it's like 8 billion.
Yeah.
Maybe we don't.
But even if it's a lot of people.
And he's in everything.
And you think you've got to.
The slightest shift you make in somebody's arrangements, then that has knock-on effects everywhere else.
The butterfly and the beating its wings.
And he can do it.
Yeah, he's got it all.
Yeah.
It's quite, it does give you an idea of just how omnipotent he is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you think that's the tiniest thing.
And it blows you away when you're the experience, the recipient of it.
You think, whoa, how could God do that?
That was incredible.
And you're like, he's like, you say, he's doing this all the time, all over the world.
Weaving my story in with your story and the story of our listeners.
He's doing all of these things all the time.
You can't get that.
There'll probably be somebody listening to this, and somebody will have picked up something that we didn't even notice.
Why More People Should Listen 00:05:33
That's right.
And it will make a massive difference to their life and change them.
Yeah.
I'll bet you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the kind of God he is.
And we're not perfect people.
We've said this, like, our thoughts are wrong sometimes.
And yet, God still chooses to work through people like us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I wouldn't want to back any of his rivals because they're not going to be in the same league.
Yeah.
And that's that's the point of the psalm.
If you get to the end of the psalm and you think, I'm staying on God's team.
It would be dumb for me to do anything else.
Then the psalm has the psalm has achieved its objective, at least in that sense, because that's what you're supposed to get from it.
Good.
Well, Stephen, thank you for introducing me to the psalm.
Thank you for having me.
It's one of my new favorites.
It's got some really good lines in it and it's got a great message.
And as you say, it is every awake person should know this psalm because it would be a great solace.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think if there are people out there, I know there are people who listen who aren't Christians.
Just read this a few times.
Just find a few minutes.
Just read it through and think, is this accurate about how it portrays the wicked?
And they'll have to be like, yeah, it is.
It's like, well, maybe it's right about, maybe it's right about the rest of it.
Yeah.
Good point.
You don't have to be a Christian to read the Psalms and appreciate them.
It's poetry, it's moral precepts, it's explanation of the world.
They're good.
But all the emotions that you can possibly have, they're all explored.
Yeah.
So non-Christians, don't be frightened of.
Just read the Psalms.
If you've made it this far, I mean, you've done pretty well anyway.
But yeah.
Yeah, I wonder.
Actually, Stephen, I wonder how many non-Christians have.
That would be heroic.
It would be.
Yeah.
But they're the ones that God's working on.
They are.
I'm slightly worried that this has been one hour and 33 minutes.
And I kind of wanted to get to 34 because I don't like that 33 number.
Tell us where we can find your bookshop and stuff like that.
Yeah, self-promotion time.
I'm not very good at this, but I'll give it a go.
So I'm very inventive with my naming.
So my business is called Stephen White Books.
And we have our own website, but we sell through the big evil corporations as well, Amazon and eBay and things like that.
So you can find our stuff on there.
We've also started doing these big pop-up book sales across the country, which I'm hoping to take on tour.
We've started doing them in Bradford.
I'm looking at doing one in Manchester.
So I'll be taking them on tour.
So you can, that's called UK Book Fest.
So people can follow that on social media or just follow Stephen White Books on anything and you'll find you'll find everything that I'm involved in that way.
But I do have a few other things.
I've started a podcast with my friend Mike just talking about Christian stuff.
So that's called Strangers and Pilgrims.
The little reference to Hebrews there.
So if people are because there's loads of great podcasts out there, so much of it's American.
And it's just nice to hear English voices talking about stuff.
So we just talk about general Christian stuff on strangers and pilgrims.
And then if you're in the Bradford area, you can always pop down to my warehouse and meet me or come along to our Thursday once a month hymn singing and things called the Bradford Wesley and Hymn Singing Society.
That's pretty much my main stuff I do.
I think that those bits at the end will make up for the mammon element of your plugins.
I'm hoping so.
I can't imagine God's going to begrudge it, particularly not since you're probably very good for tracking down Christian books as well.
Yeah, and like God wants us to work hard.
He wants to bless people.
So I'm not against business.
It does feel slightly uncomfortable.
It's just not very British, is it, to promote oneself?
But yeah.
I'm quite used.
I have to force myself.
And I don't do it on the Psalms podcast, but I think it's, yeah.
Anyway, I'm glad we finally got around to, well, thank you for introducing me to the Psalm.
And thanks to you, I've now learned the Psalm.
I mean, actually, I've just, the final, the last two verses I haven't quite mastered yet, but I've got most of it.
And it's a great, great psalm.
So thank you.
Thanks for having me, James.
It's been a privilege.
And everyone else, if you like this podcast, spread the word.
I think more people should listen to Psalms.
They're very, very, they're very beneficial to have them in your life.
Thank you, Stephen.
Like James, James, He
is wonderful.
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