NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - The True History Of Thanksgiving & The Gay GOP Senators Who Dishonor It
Aired: 2022-11-22
Duration: 42:59


=== Selling Out the Conference (02:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
[00:00:03]  If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five star review?
[00:00:09]  This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content gets out to as many people as possible.
[00:00:17]  Thanks.
[00:00:18]  Hi, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:00:20]  I am your host, Pastor Joel Webb with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:24]  In this episode, I'm very privileged to have Steve Dace from the Steve Dace Show on the Blaze Network.
[00:00:30]  He's joining us now for the second time.
[00:00:32]  We're talking about his Thanksgiving children's book that's coming out.
[00:00:35]  And then we also talk about midterm elections.
[00:00:37]  We talk about the revival that's desperately needed in America.
[00:00:41]  We talk about a little bit about Trump, all the whole nine yards.
[00:00:44]  So you guys are going to really be in for a treat.
[00:00:46]  Tune in now.
[00:00:47]  Houston, we have a problem.
[00:00:49]  I repeat, we have a problem.
[00:00:50]  Our conference is about to sell out.
[00:00:52]  I mean, about to sell out.
[00:00:54]  We probably have about 75 to 100 seats left.
[00:00:58]  Our venue holds about 525 to 550 seats, and we currently have 450 people who are registered for this conference.
[00:01:06]  The excitement is tangible.
[00:01:09]  A lot of people registered because they wanted to hit the early bird rate.
[00:01:12]  We're now at our normal rate $130 for an adult, $50 for a kid who's 11 to 17 years old, and kids 10 and under get in free.
[00:01:20]  You can bring the whole family.
[00:01:22]  But the problem is not that we're going to raise the rate again, the problem is we're going to run out of tickets and we're going to run out pretty fast.
[00:01:29]  Again, we've got about 100 seats or less, 450 people, six months out.
[00:01:34]  Are already registered for this conference, we don't want you to miss it.
[00:01:38]  So, to ensure that you get to make it to this conference, you need to register not a month from now, not a week from now, not tomorrow, but today.
[00:01:47]  You want to be there for the Theonomy and Post Millennialism Conference, May 5th, 6th, and 7th, with James White, Joe Boot, Gary DeMar, Dale Partridge, and yours truly, Joel Webbin.
[00:01:58]  Go to RightResponseConference.com.
[00:02:01]  Again, that's RightResponseConference.com.
[00:02:04]  It will sell out very soon.
[00:02:08]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:02:11]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:02:17]  All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:02:20]  I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and I'm privileged to be joined once more by Steve Dace from the Steve Dace Show on the Blaze Network.
[00:02:29]  Steve, thanks for joining me on the show.
[00:02:31]  You bet, man.
[00:02:32]  Good to see you.
[00:02:32]  How are you?
[00:02:33]  I'm doing well.
[00:02:34]  How are you?
[00:02:35]  I could be a little better and a lot worse.
[00:02:37]  I know this in the Midwest, it decided to be January 16th, and Not ready for it.
[00:02:43]  Winter at least needs to take me out on a date before it gets this crispy weather.
[00:02:46]  You know what I'm saying?

=== Defining a Christian Nation (15:57) ===

[00:02:47]  Yeah.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:48]  So I'm in Texas and it's 50 something, and that's usually about as cold as it gets.
[00:02:53]  If it gets any colder, then Ted Cruz goes to the Bahamas or where was it?
[00:03:00]  I'm fogging up here.
[00:03:02]  Right.
[00:03:02]  Yeah.
[00:03:03]  So, anyways, hopefully we don't have a big snow apocalypse again.
[00:03:06]  But yeah, I wanted to have you on the show.
[00:03:08]  I wanted to talk about your children's book.
[00:03:09]  Can you tell our listeners the name of the children's book and why you wrote it?
[00:03:14]  Sure.
[00:03:15]  I wrote it for money.
[00:03:16]  Just kidding.
[00:03:18]  But it's called Why Thanksgiving?
[00:03:21]  The Pilgrims started Thanksgiving for the same reason they came to America because they love God.
[00:03:27]  And two weeks ago, Publishers Weekly said the first week that we were out, we were the number one best selling nonfiction children's book in the country.
[00:03:35]  Wow.
[00:03:35]  So that was pretty cool.
[00:03:37]  And the idea for it came from my publisher, Post Hill Press, came to me about a year, well over a year ago, and asked me about the idea.
[00:03:47]  And I'm like, hasn't this been done like a million times?
[00:03:52]  Like Rush had his Rush Revere books that were so successful.
[00:03:54]  And I'm like, I mean, this seems like a market that's kind of been tread, right?
[00:03:59]  That, you know, sort of conservative or, you know, Judeo Christian views of history for children.
[00:04:08]  And so I said, I'll tell you what, I'll think about it if we can do America's Christian Heritage instead.
[00:04:15]  Yeah.
[00:04:16]  And I was surprised that they instantly said yes.
[00:04:19]  So now they called my bluff and I got to come up with, you know, okay, then what will the book be about?
[00:04:22]  And, you know, to me, I guess I just decided that.
[00:04:26]  It's sort of like when people ask you when his life begins, when everything else begins, at the beginning.
[00:04:30]  Things can only begin at the beginning.
[00:04:32]  That's when everything begins, is at the beginning, right?
[00:04:34]  So, what's the beginning of America's Christian heritage?
[00:04:37]  It's the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and that story.
[00:04:41]  And of course, we connect the gospel into this because that was the driving force of their story.
[00:04:46]  And a lot of this is history that if you're, you know, I'm 49 now, if you're my age or older, you remember growing up and watching the Snoopy, the Peanuts Thanksgiving special.
[00:04:56]  And they still play that today.
[00:04:58]  But when we were growing up, it was an hour long.
[00:05:00]  And the second half hour was Charles Schultz telling the history of the Pilgrims, which is the Puritans.
[00:05:08]  And we don't tell that history anymore on network TV.
[00:05:10]  And so I wanted to bring that history back.
[00:05:15]  The providential nature of their journey.
[00:05:17]  I mean, they travel thousands of miles across the channel.
[00:05:22]  They make one stop that they don't think is inhabitable, they go to another place.
[00:05:27]  So, what are the odds that you stopped one time?
[00:05:30]  And would run into an indigenous person who knows your language and knows about Christianity and the Bible because Christians freed him from slavery, and his name was Scoanto.
[00:05:41]  Those odds are astronomical, let alone that you would run into that person after you went to a place you never even intended to go to originally.
[00:05:49]  That was the second stop you made.
[00:05:50]  I mean, you can just see the divine hand of providence on this journey.
[00:05:56]  We're talking barely 100 people made this journey, almost half of them died the first couple of years that they were here.
[00:06:02]  One of them because of the harshness of winter and they experimented with socialism.
[00:06:05]  I left that part out of the book for five year olds.
[00:06:08]  Okay.
[00:06:09]  But I'm really pleased with how it turned out.
[00:06:12]  It's one of the hardest things I've ever written.
[00:06:14]  You know, when I normally write a book, we have like a round maybe of edits, two at the most.
[00:06:19]  We did about eight rounds of edits on this for a book that might be 3,000 words total.
[00:06:24]  It was just so hard for me to wrap my mind around distilling it down, you know, to four and five year olds.
[00:06:29]  But I'm very, very pleased with how it turned out.
[00:06:32]  I've gotten a ton of great reaction and People have sent me pictures of their kids reading it, them reading it to their kids.
[00:06:39]  And then I didn't know this was going to happen, but there's been a subversive nature to this.
[00:06:43]  People are telling me about their kids are reading it and taking it to school because the kids haven't been worked over yet.
[00:06:48]  They don't know.
[00:06:50]  They earnestly just think, hey, it's a great book about American history and it's really, the artwork is pretty and the story is good.
[00:06:56]  So let me take it to my government school and show my classmates.
[00:06:59]  And so I had no idea that I was going to create contraband for America's government school system, but very.
[00:07:07]  Very pleased and honored with how the project has turned out.
[00:07:10]  And now my publisher's like, well, when are we doing the next one?
[00:07:12]  So I got to come up with what that is.
[00:07:14]  We have a successful pilot.
[00:07:16]  This might now be a series.
[00:07:17]  So again, it's called Why Thanksgiving?
[00:07:20]  The Pilgrims started Thanksgiving for the same reason they came to America because they loved God.
[00:07:25]  That's cool.
[00:07:26]  So that's actually the full title.
[00:07:27]  That's the full title, yes.
[00:07:28]  That's cool.
[00:07:29]  That's a very Puritan title, by the way.
[00:07:31]  When the title is almost like a whole chapter, you know, then you know that you're in that Puritan stream.
[00:07:37]  Very puritanical.
[00:07:38]  I left no debates.
[00:07:40]  I preemptively answered all follow up questions as Calvin would in his sermons.
[00:07:43]  There you go.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:45]  No one left with any dangling participles.
[00:07:47]  If you were wondering if it was about you, it's about you.
[00:07:50]  Yeah.
[00:07:51]  That's great.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, I think that's so important.
[00:07:53]  I think about it, you know, it seems like there's been such, and this isn't new, but for decades, there's been such an organized effort to rewrite America's history.
[00:08:05]  Because it's, I mean, I get discouraged as a Christian.
[00:08:08]  I know you get discouraged.
[00:08:09]  We just had the midterms and, you know, the wave didn't materialize.
[00:08:13]  It wasn't as bad as it could have been.
[00:08:14]  There's still some things to be hopeful about.
[00:08:16]  But, you know, there was a bit of a trickle, and there's a million reasons why.
[00:08:20]  Maybe it's, you know, for one, we've made voting too easy.
[00:08:22]  Maybe, you know, rigging or something in Arizona, I don't know.
[00:08:25]  But, But part of it is because people, I keep thinking about John chapter three, right?
[00:08:29]  That Jesus, he's the light of the world.
[00:08:31]  He came into the world, but men love the darkness.
[00:08:34]  And that's not to say the Republican Party is rainbows and, you know, just Christ exalting.
[00:08:39]  Oh, it's rainbows.
[00:08:40]  Biblical.
[00:08:40]  Well, yeah, yeah, you're right.
[00:08:41]  You're right.
[00:08:42]  Rainbows, brother.
[00:08:43]  Yeah.
[00:08:44]  You're right.
[00:08:44]  It's rainbows.
[00:08:44]  It is rainbows today.
[00:08:46]  I mean, we had a slew of Republican senators essentially do the full Sodom, shake their fist at God, and help the Democrats use the federal government to declare open lawfare upon.
[00:08:59]  The church.
[00:08:59]  So, right.
[00:09:00]  It is rainbows, my friend.
[00:09:04]  You were describing.
[00:09:05]  You're right.
[00:09:05]  Yeah, that's not what I meant, but you're absolutely right.
[00:09:09]  But my point is to say that the Republican Party is by no means, and what you just pointed out just proves the point even more.
[00:09:13]  It's by no means synonymous with the scripture.
[00:09:16]  But as you and I have talked before, I think it's important for people to see that our two parties are wicked, but they're not equally wicked.
[00:09:23]  And when you have one party that their platform essentially is you can have your sin.
[00:09:29]  And the other party is you can have some of your sin.
[00:09:33]  But you can have your sin.
[00:09:34]  So Jesus came into the world as light, but men love the darkness, right?
[00:09:37]  Like cockroaches, you turn on the light, they scatter under.
[00:09:40]  And I feel like there's just so much of what we've seen and been just disappointed by in this last week with the midterm election, all these kinds of things.
[00:09:48]  Sometimes it feels impossible that our nation would actually exalt Christ again.
[00:09:52]  But the key word is that last word that I said, knowing our history, to know that what we're striving towards is something that actually has occurred.
[00:10:01]  In this land before, that it wasn't just a bunch of deists, that there were actually, George Washington, I believe, by looking at first sources that he was, would qualify as an evangelical Christian and knowing that these things have happened before gives you a sense of hope that they can happen again.
[00:10:17]  Any thoughts on that?
[00:10:19]  I agree.
[00:10:20]  But we also have to remember that sometimes when they happen again, they don't happen the way that we think.
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:26]  And when you tie this into the story of the pilgrims, and Joel, just to show you, just.
[00:10:31]  How Romans one of a nation we are.
[00:10:34]  How much of we're not even rebellious now.
[00:10:36]  We're ingrates.
[00:10:38]  Okay.
[00:10:39]  We're deniers of our heritage, deniers of our legacy.
[00:10:42]  We reject it.
[00:10:43]  We're not like rebelling against it.
[00:10:45]  Let's test the boundaries here and go through an extended, you know, pubescence and, you know, and have the season of sowing our wild oats before we have a family and come back to reality.
[00:10:56]  You know, you're dealing with a country right now where the average 25 year old male is more likely to be living at home with a parent than in another home with a woman and a child.
[00:11:04]  We have the lowest marriage rates and birth rates since we started keeping these stats in the 19th century.
[00:11:09]  We are a nation of ingrates to the point that we have taken the term puritanical and it is a pejorative.
[00:11:17]  We use this to slam things now.
[00:11:19]  And this, even forget the left.
[00:11:20]  I hear this constantly on the right.
[00:11:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:23]  We take the people, our forefathers, without which this thing called America would never have existed.
[00:11:30]  We take their lineage and legacy and we essentially use it as a put down.
[00:11:36]  We are ingrates.
[00:11:37]  And if you look at the history of the Puritans, remember what they were rebelling against.
[00:11:42]  They weren't fleeing Islamic hordes in Asia Minor, future modern-day Turkey, invading the seven churches of that area.
[00:11:55]  They weren't evading the Islamic hordes in Lebanon, one of the original Christian colonies in the first couple of centuries.
[00:12:05]  This wasn't, let's get it, the Druids have come over the wall.
[00:12:09]  The Visigoths have come over the wall.
[00:12:10]  The barbarians are at the gate.
[00:12:12]  They were fleeing their own countrymen.
[00:12:16]  They were fleeing their own church who said, No, you could not teach and preach the Bible.
[00:12:20]  You could not teach it without a license.
[00:12:21]  You could not teach and preach it.
[00:12:23]  That's what put John Bunyan in prison when he wrote Pilgrim's Progress.
[00:12:26]  They refused to abide by the laws that said you needed state permission on what you could and could not preach.
[00:12:33]  These were people who spoke their language, they shared customs, they shared communities, right?
[00:12:39]  I mean, that's what they had to flee.
[00:12:42]  And I think that maybe what we have been blessed to be able to forget in America.
[00:12:47]  When Jesus said, I do not think I came to bring peace, but a sword, mother against daughter, father against son, brother against brother, the truth of who I am and what I represent and the kingdom that I'm establishing will divide humanity to a molecular, granular level.
[00:13:06]  We are the first kingdom in Christendom that's not really had to truly understand or experience that.
[00:13:14]  Okay.
[00:13:14]  And we are a kingdom that was founded or at least inspired.
[00:13:21]  By Christian teaching, Christian orthodoxy.
[00:13:26]  And so we can all debate the, like you mentioned, George Washington, you know, and Thomas Jefferson famously cut all the miracles out of his Bible.
[00:13:36]  Now, why did he do that?
[00:13:37]  Did he do that as a statement of heterodoxy?
[00:13:40]  Did he do that to make, I mean, there's, we can debate the individual links and extent of each one of these men's faith and adherence to it.
[00:13:49]  What you cannot debate is that the founding of this country was at least marinated.
[00:13:55]  in the scriptures, at least marinated in it.
[00:13:58]  And so we are the first people in the history of Christianity.
[00:14:03]  From the time the religion was founded, originally this was a uniquely Jewish argument.
[00:14:08]  Jewish families divided.
[00:14:10]  Is this Yeshua of Nazareth?
[00:14:12]  Is he Messiah or not?
[00:14:14]  Right?
[00:14:16]  Go into the pagan, the Gentile, uncircumcised countries.
[00:14:21]  You're in the outskirts of a civilization in all of those places.
[00:14:25]  You're the outsider.
[00:14:27]  This is the first time.
[00:14:29]  That we're the epicenter.
[00:14:31]  This is the first time that culture emanates from the inside out of our belief system on a mass scale.
[00:14:39]  And so this is going to be very new to us.
[00:14:43]  And I go to Hebrews when the writer talks about the large cloud of witnesses that are cheering us on, rooting us on for us to finish our race.
[00:14:51]  For the saints that have come before us, this is nothing new.
[00:14:56]  They're probably wondering how did you guys get away with this for so long?
[00:15:01]  Because they constantly lived on the defensive, constantly.
[00:15:06]  And so, you know, we're going to be the first generation of Christians in 2,000 years that have seen a cultural birthright hijacked and taken away from them.
[00:15:16]  No previous era of Christianity prior to the founding of this republic knew what a Christian heritage or birthright was.
[00:15:25]  Right.
[00:15:25]  Not from the very beginning.
[00:15:27]  Yeah.
[00:15:27]  Such a thing was just foreign to their thinking.
[00:15:31]  And so, It's not new for Christianity, what's going down in a post Christian America, but it's going to be new for us.
[00:15:37]  Right.
[00:15:38]  I completely agree.
[00:15:39]  For this generation, not new for you know the full gamut of church history, and you're absolutely right.
[00:15:43]  I mean, whether it be King Alfred, you know, in England's legacy that the Lord used in extraordinary ways, um, it still wasn't the origin, it wasn't from the beginning.
[00:15:52]  This is one of the only places where, from the beginning, there was a covenant between the nation and God, and uh, right, you know, people always have such a problem, right?
[00:16:00]  So, people are okay with saying Christian individuals, and and then some guys will go a little further and say, Okay, we could call this a Christian church, but you can't have a Christian family unless all your kids are regenerate and baptized, you can't have.
[00:16:13]  A Christian nation, right?
[00:16:14]  You can't have a Christian this.
[00:16:15]  You can't.
[00:16:16]  And it's like, okay, when we say a Christian nation or we say a Christian this or that, we're not saying each and every individual person in it is born again.
[00:16:24]  I can't even say that about my church as a pastor, you know?
[00:16:27]  And that's not just that's not because I'm a Pado Baptist, which I'm most of my friends are.
[00:16:31]  I do, you know, I'm I'm Credo Baptist, 1689, you know, particular Baptist, Reformed Baptist.
[00:16:36]  So I believe in regenerate church membership.
[00:16:39]  I do the best of my ability, but I have no doubt I've baptized plenty of people that weren't actually saved.
[00:16:45]  You know, that are, you know, are going to wind up in hell.
[00:16:47]  And so I can't even, you know, if that's the standard, each person who belongs to this organization must be regenerate in order for it to be a Christian thing.
[00:16:54]  And people are having problems with this.
[00:16:55]  But the bottom line is that, like, God is a covenantal God.
[00:16:58]  He works in the framework, in the context of covenants.
[00:17:02]  And I do believe, like, of course, there's nothing else like the covenant, the old covenant that God established with Israel.
[00:17:09]  And for me, I'm a covenant theologian guy, not a dispensationalist.
[00:17:12]  So I would say that, you know, that the only equivalent of that and even greater, Eschaton than that is the church.
[00:17:18]  So the church is the new Israel, not America.
[00:17:21]  But I do believe that other nations outside of ethnic Israel, even under this new covenant dispensation, to use that word, can be Christian and make covenants with God.
[00:17:31]  I believe that the founders made a covenant with the triune God, and that's why this nation was blessed.
[00:17:37]  And that doesn't mean that everyone was a Christian, but it was a Christian nation.
[00:17:42]  And I would say that covenant still stands, that we're actually still in covenant with God, but we're currently an apostatizing Christian nation.
[00:17:50]  Under God's judgment.
[00:17:50]  What do you think about that?
[00:17:52]  The language that is used in the Declaration of Independence, for example, where they openly ask and invoke for God to judge the rectitude of their actions.
[00:18:05]  In other words, judge our motivations.
[00:18:08]  If we have not rightly divided the teaching of your word, that if this is in violation of Romans 13, if it is wrong in all circumstances to revolt against a government, Regardless of how godless, oppressive, and tyrannical it is, don't let us be successful.
[00:18:27]  Don't judge the rectitude of our actions.
[00:18:29]  Judge our motivations.
[00:18:30]  That's what that word means.
[00:18:31]  Don't let it be, don't let us set a terrible precedent.
[00:18:34]  And even if we are right, even if we are right, Joel, they said, we couldn't possibly succeed against the most powerful empire in the world without a firm reliance on divine providence.

=== Separation and Divine Duty (11:58) ===

[00:18:45]  So there is, at the very least, indirect invoking of covenantal language there.
[00:18:52]  At the very least, they were attempting in a civic sense to emulate what they had seen exist between the Mosaic covenant and God in the past.
[00:19:03]  Right.
[00:19:03]  Follow my laws and decrees, and you can live in the land.
[00:19:06]  If you don't, then you cannot.
[00:19:07]  In other words, we curry God's favor and protection as a people through collective obedience, not in perfect individual autonomous salvation, but they were at least trying to emulate that in some civic way.
[00:19:24]  We can debate whether it went to the extent of covenant explicitly, but at the very least, they were implicitly invoking that language on purpose.
[00:19:35]  They were at least trying to emulate that sort of conversation or paradigm in a civic sense.
[00:19:41]  Right.
[00:19:42]  Yep.
[00:19:42]  No, I completely agree.
[00:19:44]  And if you don't keep all these laws, which they absolutely invoke, they use that kind of covenantal language and say, we will do it, it reminds me of Deuteronomy.
[00:19:51]  We'll do all the things that the Lord has told us to do.
[00:19:53]  More citations quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus than John Locke and some of these early documents.
[00:20:01]  And so that explicit Christian language.
[00:20:03]  But one of the things the scripture says is that if God's people did not live properly in obedience and holiness in the land.
[00:20:10]  The land itself, it wasn't just that God would turn against them, but the land itself would swallow them and spew them out.
[00:20:18]  You know, that they're actually, the land would be cursed.
[00:20:21]  This land that was meant to be a land of milk and honey and prosperity and all these different, because there's so many reasons for the success of America.
[00:20:27]  And what I want to advocate is saying that this is not the only reason, but I think the chief reason is a covenant with God.
[00:20:32]  I think that God has blessed America.
[00:20:34]  No question.
[00:20:35]  But I do also think, like, America has more navigable.
[00:20:39]  The reason we cracked the code on self government is we came up with our founders initiated the concept of rights that come from God and not from government.
[00:20:48]  That's the difference between a constitution and the Magna Carta.
[00:20:51]  There's not liberty by law, there is liberty by the laws of nature and nature's God.
[00:20:56]  It is the intention of God for man to live this way.
[00:21:01]  And so, therefore, government is every bit as accountable to God as the individual is.
[00:21:07]  God is not a respecter of persons.
[00:21:09]  Your station, your socioeconomic status, There are kings and queens in hell.
[00:21:13]  There are rich people in hell.
[00:21:15]  There are philanthropists and vagrants in hell alike.
[00:21:20]  He does not judge and separate the way that we do as human beings.
[00:21:25]  That language is what sustained us as the longest running concurrent experiment in self government in all of human history, which you're talking about.
[00:21:34]  Yep, absolutely.
[00:21:34]  Lex Rex, like the law is king.
[00:21:36]  There's something about the state.
[00:21:37]  And that something is not just an idea, it's not just some ethereal, mystical, it's a person.
[00:21:43]  His name is the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:21:45]  And so, what, you know, I remember when MacArthur came out with his article, which I really appreciated his stance and those things that he did.
[00:21:50]  But one difference, one, you know, for me theologically from MacArthur and being more covenantal and those kinds of things is, you know, MacArthur said, Christ, not Caesar, is head of the church.
[00:21:59]  And I want to say a thousand times yes and amen.
[00:22:01]  And then I want to also say, and Christ, not Caesar, is also head of the state.
[00:22:04]  Caesar, so render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but to God, what is God's.
[00:22:08]  The question, though, that Christians should ask is, okay, and who gets to decide what is Caesar's?
[00:22:12]  Does Caesar get to say what is Caesar's?
[00:22:14]  Because what if Caesar says everything is Caesar's?
[00:22:16]  Because that's what Caesars do.
[00:22:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:22:18]  And so it's just like, so rendered under Caesar.
[00:22:20]  But the question is, of course, Christ is head of the church.
[00:22:23]  And what I want Christians to get is, Christ is not exclusively head of the church, he's uniquely head of the church.
[00:22:28]  So the church is the only institution that Christ, in his headship, he actually laid himself down and died for the church.
[00:22:35]  It's the only thing that is described not only as his body, but as his bride that he gave himself up for the church.
[00:22:41]  But Ephesians 1 22 says that God has set him as head of all.
[00:22:46]  All things, all things.
[00:22:47]  So Christ must be head of the state as well.
[00:22:50]  So, my point is, Christians have to recognize separation of church and state.
[00:22:54]  I'm for it 100%.
[00:22:55]  I think that's one of the beauties of America and the American experiment, the government that we've had.
[00:23:00]  So, I don't want an ecclesiocracy, a church run state.
[00:23:03]  And I don't sure as heck don't want what we've had the last little while of a state run church.
[00:23:08]  I don't want the three self church in China, which we're getting dangerously close to.
[00:23:11]  So, I don't want a state run church, church run state.
[00:23:13]  But I do want Christ as the head of the church and Christ as the head of the state.
[00:23:17]  So, separation of church and state, yes, separation of Christ and state.
[00:23:20]  No, which means the state has a duty, I believe, a moral obligation before God to kiss the Son, Psalm chapter 2, lest he be angry, and to recognize that Jesus is Lord and that we're not just this polytheism, public atheism kind of thing.
[00:23:35]  No, we believe in the triune God.
[00:23:36]  That doesn't mean that people of other religions can't live here, be equal citizens with equal rights under the law, equal provisions.
[00:23:42]  But there is something to be said for, like, England, you know, everybody's upset about Christian nationalism.
[00:23:47]  And then Queen Elizabeth dies and they're doing the whole pomp and circumstance.
[00:23:51]  You're the defender of the faith.
[00:23:54]  That's, and you know what I mean?
[00:23:56]  And I think that that's our founding, that's our heritage.
[00:23:59]  We did that better than them.
[00:24:00]  We did it better than them.
[00:24:01]  Let's keep doing it.
[00:24:03]  Any thoughts on that idea of separation of church and state?
[00:24:05]  Yes.
[00:24:06]  Separation of Christ and state?
[00:24:07]  No.
[00:24:08]  What do you think?
[00:24:10]  I could not have said it better than myself, frankly.
[00:24:13]  I'll simply add this.
[00:24:15]  All throughout human history, the spirit of the age, which is one of the references that the Bible uses to the demonic manifestation of influence within a culture, all throughout human history, there has never been a period of time that the spirit of the age did not attempt to manifest itself politically.
[00:24:34]  Whether we're talking about kings that call themselves Baal, Peor in the Old Testament, I am the Lord, I'm a Lord of the cult of Baal.
[00:24:42]  I rule in Baal's place, I rule by Baal's stead, or I am God as king, as Nero declared and other Caesars did.
[00:24:51]  There has never been a time that the spirit of the age has not attempted to manifest itself politically.
[00:24:57]  And you're seeing that in our day and age as well.
[00:25:00]  The other thing I would add is every government in the history of humanity has been a theocracy.
[00:25:05]  It is just a matter of who the Theo is.
[00:25:07]  That's right.
[00:25:08]  And ours is Demos, right now.
[00:25:10]  I would say the people.
[00:25:12]  And behind that, Right, because here's the thing people say, uh, you know, our battle's not against flesh and blood.
[00:25:17]  Right, how if we had a dollar every time a Christian quoted that to in some kind of pietistic motive, right?
[00:25:23]  That's politically used as an excuse not to actually confront anybody, exactly.
[00:25:27]  So it's pietism, you know, wrapped in scripture.
[00:25:29]  But here's the thing, you it's so easy scripturally.
[00:25:32]  So, uh, our battle's not against flesh and blood.
[00:25:34]  But first Timothy, I believe it's chapter one or two, says, um, it says, uh, rebuke your opponents gently, not knowing if God might grant them repentance.
[00:25:45]  And that they might come to their senses after having been taken captive by Satan to do his will, which means our battle is not against flesh and blood, it is against Satan.
[00:25:54]  But who does Satan enlist in his army?
[00:25:57]  Flesh and blood.
[00:25:59]  Flesh and blood.
[00:26:00]  And so that doesn't mean that we pick up a literal sword, but we certainly have to engage with arguments, we have to be involved, all these kinds of things.
[00:26:07]  And so I would say that the God of it's not whether but which.
[00:26:10]  And so you're absolutely right.
[00:26:11]  Everything's a theocracy, just which God.
[00:26:14]  And I would say our God is.
[00:26:15]  Sadly, it is becoming more and more Satan, but wrapped in, in terms of the veneer, it would be Demos, the people, this raw democracy of mob rule, you know, that's just mob tyranny.
[00:26:28]  And that's why, like, we voted on it.
[00:26:29]  They had mob rule outside Lot's house, too, brother.
[00:26:31]  Go ahead.
[00:26:32]  Go ahead.
[00:26:32]  Say that again.
[00:26:34]  They had mob rule outside Lot's house, too.
[00:26:38]  They had a democracy outside Lot's house, too.
[00:26:39]  They took a vote and said, yeah, we're going to rape the angels first, then we'll rape your daughters and your family.
[00:26:45]  That's a great way to put it, Steve.
[00:26:48]  And that's the will of the people.
[00:26:49]  So, what do we got to do?
[00:26:50]  I know you only have so much time.
[00:26:51]  What do we got to do?
[00:26:53]  This is what I told my church because I preach on politics in the church because the statement, Jesus is Lord, is the most political statement ever made.
[00:26:59]  And so I preach the scripture.
[00:27:02]  So, I think faithful preaching is revelation, interpretation, application.
[00:27:05]  Revelation being there's only one revelation, the Word of God.
[00:27:07]  So, you don't stand before the people of God behind the pulpit and say, I have a dream, I have an idea, I have a strategy, then sit down if that's what you have.
[00:27:14]  You say, I have a text of the Word of God.
[00:27:16]  Then you interpret revelation, interpretation of faithful exegesis of the text, but then it's application.
[00:27:21]  And guess what?
[00:27:22]  The Bible doesn't just apply.
[00:27:24]  To an hour on Sunday morning into marriage and parenting.
[00:27:27]  The Bible applies to economics and to vocation and to arts and to government and all these different things.
[00:27:33]  And so I talked about the election, and people were feeling the disappointment.
[00:27:36]  Texas did fairly well, you know, but feeling the disappointment, those kinds of things.
[00:27:41]  And I told them three things we need we need preaching, teaching, and training.
[00:27:44]  Preaching, teaching, and training.
[00:27:45]  I said, preaching, one of the things, one of the biggest problems, this is the core problem, is we just don't have enough Christians and are not truly born again, regenerate Christians.
[00:27:54]  So we need preaching because the gospel is the only power of God for salvation.
[00:27:58]  So we just need some good old, and I'm talking old timey preaching where people claw into the pews in front of them, sinners in the hands of an angry God, Jonathan Edwards preaching.
[00:28:06]  They claw into the pews out of terror of God's judgment that he's a thrice holy God and that he will not by any means pardon the wicked except lest they believe, repent of their sin, and believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:28:17]  Because the people who claw into the pews are the ones when they're offered the free grace that's found in Christ alone, they claw into Christ and they never let them go.
[00:28:23]  And so we need preaching and regeneration.
[00:28:25]  We need teaching.
[00:28:27]  The Christians that we do have, we don't have enough, but the ones that we do have are reading the Gospel Coalition and this third wayism where it's like, well, over here we have the sanctity of life, but over here we have.
[00:28:37]  Caring for the poor.
[00:28:38]  And it's this false dichotomy, right?
[00:28:41]  And then what's said is, well, both are bad.
[00:28:43]  And it's implicitly said they're equally bad, aka you can either not vote at all, just not be involved, or you could really go either way.
[00:28:50]  And really, if you want to be a good person, you should vote Democrat.
[00:28:53]  So we need some teaching.
[00:28:54]  And then last, training we need Christian schools.
[00:28:57]  We used to have them.
[00:28:58]  They were called the public schools.
[00:28:59]  There were Bible classes in the schools, Christian flags in the schools.
[00:29:02]  That's why Catholics started their schools because the American public schools, once upon a time, were Protestant schools for the most part.
[00:29:08]  But that's just not the case anymore.
[00:29:10]  We need to start good.
[00:29:12]  Strong, robust Christian schools.
[00:29:13]  And so that's what I've been telling people.
[00:29:14]  This is the way forward.
[00:29:15]  This is what we got to do.
[00:29:18]  But you've got some great stuff.
[00:29:19]  I saw you on Twitter.
[00:29:20]  You said, you know what?
[00:29:21]  I'm probably going to do a little less politics and a little bit more theology because you were feeling some of the same things that I've been feeling.
[00:29:26]  We just, we need some Christians in here.
[00:29:29]  Do you have any more takeaways from this last election, Trump's announcement, everything that's going on in the political world?
[00:29:35]  What can Christians do?
[00:29:36]  What do we need?
[00:29:38]  I think we have to remember that for almost 1700 years, Between Christ's ascension and when the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Christendom endured and survived countless martyrdoms, countless persecutions, countless tyrannies.
[00:29:58]  It didn't have a U.S. Constitution.
[00:30:00]  It didn't have a Republican Party.
[00:30:02]  It didn't have hacktastic politicians.
[00:30:05]  It didn't have the right to vote.
[00:30:07]  How did it endure?
[00:30:09]  And it endured in my, to me, when I look at church history, well, first of all, it endured.
[00:30:15]  Because upon this rock I will build my church and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it, because it is the bride of the ruler of God's, of all creation.
[00:30:24]  So that's the meta theological answer.
[00:30:27]  Okay.
[00:30:27]  But then, but then how did, did, did, did, how did Christ work out his royalty within that statement?
[00:30:35]  What did it look like to us in an earthly realm?
[00:30:38]  Two things.
[00:30:39]  One, everything that you just said, everything you just said.

=== Enduring Through Retribution (04:09) ===

[00:30:44]  And, but, but two, Christians learn the art of the word no.
[00:30:51]  Whether it's the monk who came out of the stands in the Colosseum and pleaded in the name of Christ, stop, and then got murdered on the floor of the Colosseum that day, but his murder so shocked the people that that was the end of the gladiator games.
[00:31:13]  Whether it's Polycarp saying, all These 80 years of my life, my Lord has been faithful to me.
[00:31:20]  How do I deny him now at the end?
[00:31:22]  Whether it's a black Baptist seamstress who just used the word no on a bus one day and sparked the civil rights movement, on and on and goes.
[00:31:32]  The use of the word no, we will not comply.
[00:31:37]  We will give Caesar the tribute he deserves for the paving of the roads and the civil defense.
[00:31:44]  When Caesar asks for my worship, when Caesar asks for my ethics, those don't belong to you.
[00:31:51]  That is not the jurisdiction of the state that Christ gave to you.
[00:31:55]  I serve God and not man.
[00:31:57]  I fear God and not man.
[00:31:58]  Yes, you can put me in the stockade.
[00:32:00]  You can put me on the gallows.
[00:32:01]  You can draw and quarter me.
[00:32:03]  You can drop me in a vat of acid.
[00:32:04]  He can cast my soul into hell.
[00:32:07]  So, no.
[00:32:09]  My answer is no.
[00:32:11]  And I think now that we're no longer in an era that we can trust these institutions, largely founded in our belief system, to defend us as the default, as the benefit of the doubt, on a very individual, granular, molecular level.
[00:32:26]  We're going to have to learn how to say, no.
[00:32:30]  Right.
[00:32:31]  No, I won't wear your mask anymore.
[00:32:33]  No, I won't take your Mark of the Beast jab.
[00:32:35]  No, I'm not going to do that.
[00:32:38]  No.
[00:32:38]  My answer is no.
[00:32:39]  I will not comply with this.
[00:32:42]  And I'm not afraid of your retribution.
[00:32:45]  And for most Americans, retribution is a negative comment by an ant they can't stand already on a Facebook page.
[00:32:51]  Okay.
[00:32:52]  We're not talking about the stuff that the martyrs have old faced.
[00:32:54]  All right.
[00:32:55]  We're talking about, oh, no, I can't get on Instagram anymore.
[00:32:59]  Whatever will I do?
[00:33:00]  Okay.
[00:33:01]  I mean, it's, you know, I got so ticked off the other day.
[00:33:05]  Nothing says 21st century Christian more like jumping on Twitter to Kvetch all day about your vote don't count.
[00:33:12]  Okay.
[00:33:12]  Right.
[00:33:13]  And you're heated home.
[00:33:14]  All right.
[00:33:15]  You know, while following the lower third on Fox News on your satellite dish, all to get out of here, man.
[00:33:21]  Okay.
[00:33:21]  I don't want to hear any more talk.
[00:33:23]  Civil war is coming, dude.
[00:33:25]  You wouldn't take your princess to Costco without a mask for a year.
[00:33:29]  Yeah.
[00:33:30]  Right.
[00:33:30]  You ain't fighting a civil war.
[00:33:32]  Don't urinate on me and tell me it's raining.
[00:33:34]  Get out of here.
[00:33:35]  Okay.
[00:33:36]  Come on.
[00:33:37]  So let's start with a simple word.
[00:33:40]  No.
[00:33:41]  Right.
[00:33:41]  When a relationship, when a job, when the government, any entity, any person, when they ask me to do something that God says I should do for them, I will do it with all of my might.
[00:33:54]  When they ask me to do something that God largely doesn't prioritize or is silent on, as long as that doesn't violate my conscience, I'll happily take part in the community ritual.
[00:34:06]  When they ask me to do something that God says, don't do that, my answer is no.
[00:34:11]  Yeah.
[00:34:12]  Amen.
[00:34:13]  Yeah.
[00:34:13]  Somebody, I can't remember who it was, but he basically said that all of life's yeses are ultimately decided by your higher no.
[00:34:22]  That a lot of people, they're saying yes to everything because they've said no to nothing.
[00:34:26]  Right.
[00:34:27]  And so that's where compromise happens.
[00:34:29]  So being able to have a God in heaven who judges the living and the dead, who actually, he wrote a book.
[00:34:35]  You know, he speaks through nature.
[00:34:36]  He has two books, but he also wrote a book that you can pick it up and you can read and seeing what God forbids and seeing what God's no for my life and being able to sketch that out and get that squared away and then being able to say, okay, so then these are the bounds, right?

=== The Power of Storytelling (07:26) ===

[00:34:54]  The fish, you know, I need to be liberated from this prison and oppression of water, you know, and one day it swims as fast as it can and it, you know, jumps out of the water onto the land and dies, right?
[00:35:04]  The thing that it thought was imprisoning it was that that was the proper context that God.
[00:35:07]  God determined and created.
[00:35:09]  That's where the fish was free, actually, was the water.
[00:35:13]  And so being able to say this is the no, I think that's fantastic.
[00:35:17]  The one thing I want to add to that is just, I think that primarily men say no.
[00:35:23]  I think that's part of how God's designed us to be defenders, to be protectors, to be providers.
[00:35:30]  My wife, so we've been married now, coming up on eight years, and she was horrible at saying no.
[00:35:37]  She would, she, you know, she admits that she would be, you know, she'd be like, yep, Joel's right.
[00:35:41]  And I had to really disciple her in the art of knowing, you know, telling people no, what to say no to.
[00:35:48]  And I mean, it, it, It was horrible for her at first because I'm saying, I'm like, I'm sorry, sweetheart, we're saying no to this.
[00:35:54]  No, we're not going to go to 15 birthday parties this week.
[00:35:56]  No, we're not going to, you know, like, we're saying no, we're saying no, we're saying no.
[00:36:01]  And that was really hard for her, but it freed her.
[00:36:04]  And here's the thing she got better at saying no, but she also doesn't have to be a master at saying no because she's got me.
[00:36:09]  And I just think that one of the things that progressives do, that liberals do, is they've beaten conservatives at stealing the hearts of women because they've gotten really good at storytelling.
[00:36:20]  I thought, why are they so much better at storytelling?
[00:36:22]  And I think it's The facts over feelings, which I get the sentiment, that's true.
[00:36:26]  But I think the facts over feeling mantra is like we've got the pie charts, we've got the graphs, we've got like we actually have the truth on our side.
[00:36:34]  So we don't have to be elaborate and good storytellers.
[00:36:37]  But good storytelling appeals to people, period.
[00:36:40]  But especially women, the way that I think God has wired them and designed them.
[00:36:44]  And we just saw, you know, all the single ladies, all the single ladies really came out, you know, as a voting block, not an ethnic voting block, not poor or rich, not an economic stat, but.
[00:36:55]  But gender, single women came out in full force for Democrats.
[00:37:00]  And I just feel like one of the things that we need in saying no and holding the line and these kinds of things is men have to win the hearts of their wives.
[00:37:07]  We have to win, fathers have to win the hearts of their daughters.
[00:37:10]  And we need to do it by teaching them the facts over feelings, those, but we also need to do it by showing them glorious stories once more.
[00:37:17]  Showing them, like, you hear a story of this person, this poor person coming up in a caravan that just wants, you know, freedom in America.
[00:37:23]  And, you know, and there's only 13,000 of them that want to cross over.
[00:37:26]  But there's another part of the story, but we just give the pie chart.
[00:37:29]  But we need to, like, how do we tell that story that shows that this actually leads towards destruction and this actually preserves life?
[00:37:36]  And I don't know.
[00:37:37]  Any thoughts on storytelling?
[00:37:39]  Do you think I'm off there, or is there a better way that you would say that?
[00:37:44]  No.
[00:37:45]  I mean, I think this is the third question in a row that you've asked me that I thought you probably gave a better answer than I was going to give you.
[00:37:50]  Okay.
[00:37:51]  All right.
[00:37:51]  Well, then I know you're running out of time.
[00:37:53]  So any final thoughts?
[00:37:55]  It's very well, first of all, you're talking to a guy that has a movie coming out next year about a book he wrote.
[00:38:01]  Oh, good.
[00:38:02]  Well, there you go.
[00:38:03]  That's what we need.
[00:38:04]  Yeah, with the intent of trying to retell good storytelling again.
[00:38:10]  Amen.
[00:38:10]  We can do this as Christians without being cheesy.
[00:38:13]  We can honestly depict the world as it is without making it look like we're glorifying it at the exact same time.
[00:38:19]  At least that's the needle we're going to try to thread.
[00:38:22]  But I completely agree with you about storytelling, Joel.
[00:38:25]  And I think it's the last place left in our culture where persuasion can take place.
[00:38:31]  When it comes to whether it's emotion or logic, Those sectors are as balkanized as they could possibly be at this point.
[00:38:42]  They're bulwarks against each other, and there's no cartilage in that ligament in that knee any longer.
[00:38:47]  The place where the gap between emotion and logic can be bridged so persuasion can take place is with storytelling.
[00:38:56]  And I do think for our side, that is just as it was 80, 70, 80 years ago when a Catholic evangelized an atheist.
[00:39:08]  In a college town pub.
[00:39:10]  And out of that friendship came the stories that became known as Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth, and the Chronicles of Narnia.
[00:39:18]  That is where we have an opportunity to persuade still in the West, and is with the art of storytelling.
[00:39:26]  Christ spends much of the word, the time that he is physically on earth, telling what we call parables, but that's storytelling.
[00:39:33]  Storytelling is, I think, the last outpost of persuasion left in our culture, and I would encourage our side to learn.
[00:39:40]  And master it.
[00:39:41]  Amen.
[00:39:42]  Yeah, I love that Tolkien, you know, he took Lewis up on a hill and he showed, you know, the wind was blowing, it was evening, the breeze, the moon's coming out, you know, as the legend goes.
[00:39:51]  And he said, you know, and he's talking to him about Christ and God creating all things and that the Christian faith is real.
[00:39:57]  And Lewis, you know, once again, for the thousandth time, it's a myth.
[00:40:00]  And Tolkien, you know, famously said, it's a myth, but it's true.
[00:40:04]  This is the one true myth.
[00:40:06]  The best myth, the best legend of all, the best story ever made is the one that's true.
[00:40:11]  We like that.
[00:40:12]  That is such powerful artillery that we have in, you know, on our side.
[00:40:17]  And we need to use it.
[00:40:19]  And one other thing that I thought was just Tolkien.
[00:40:21]  You know how people used to tell stories back in the day?
[00:40:24]  You knew who the bad guys were because they were orcs.
[00:40:27]  You know what I mean?
[00:40:27]  Like they looked like bad guys.
[00:40:30]  I think that's part of the problem right now is the bad guys just look, they use the storytelling, all those kinds of things to look altruistic, to look like, oh, look at how empathetic this person is.
[00:40:41]  And they've really done a good job at taking the Few good guys that we have and making them look like monsters and racist and this kind of.
[00:40:48]  And I think that good storytelling, one of the reasons we need it is because, again, the pie chart's just not going to do it.
[00:40:54]  We need to be able to cut through and rip off that mask and say, This dude's an orc.
[00:41:01]  He's an orc wearing elf skin.
[00:41:02]  You know what I mean?
[00:41:03]  Like, look at him.
[00:41:03]  He's literally, he's got blood coming out of his mouth, you know, like from the last person's head that he ate, you know, and this person is not, you know, this person is beautiful.
[00:41:12]  And so to be able to take truth, it's not just truth and falsehoods, it's beauty and ugliness.
[00:41:18]  I think we need to make falsehoods ugly again and truth beautiful again.
[00:41:22]  So, how can people follow you, Steve, and keep up with you?
[00:41:26]  And what should they be looking for?
[00:41:27]  What's on the horizon?
[00:41:28]  What's your next big thing?
[00:41:31]  In the next winter or this winter, we have a book coming out called Rise of the Fourth Reich Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial.
[00:41:40]  So, this never happens again.
[00:41:41]  And that's 400 pages of Rock Your World when that comes out.
[00:41:46]  So, look forward to that.
[00:41:47]  We just finished the movie version.
[00:41:51]  Of my 2016 book, A Nefarious Plot About a Demonic Takeover of America, that is my homage to the screw tape letters.
[00:41:58]  Cool.
[00:41:58]  In fact, my movie makers are bringing me the film, the finished version, to screen for me and my investors this weekend.
[00:42:04]  Awesome.
[00:42:05]  Awesome.
[00:42:05]  We are looking forward to that.
[00:42:07]  Then we will start having distribution conversations after Thanksgiving and it'll be released next year.
[00:42:12]  I don't know much more than that, but I've seen the rough cut of the film.
[00:42:16]  I'm very, very pleased with how it turned out and I can't wait for people to see it.

=== New Film and Daily Show (00:39) ===

[00:42:20]  So, Those are two projects.
[00:42:22]  Then you can get our daily show.
[00:42:23]  Just go on iTunes and look for me, D E A C E, Steve Day, Steve Day's show.
[00:42:28]  Subscribe to that for free on iTunes and you can tune in every single day.
[00:42:32]  Great.
[00:42:33]  It's a great show.
[00:42:33]  I try to listen.
[00:42:34]  I can't listen daily.
[00:42:35]  There's so many great podcasts, but I listen to you probably at least once a week and it's fantastic.
[00:42:39]  So thanks for coming on the show.
[00:42:40]  I really do.
[00:42:41]  Thank you very much.
[00:42:42]  Thank you.
[00:42:43]  Thanks so much for listening.
[00:42:44]  But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor take a moment and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
[00:42:51]  This is undoubtedly.
[00:42:53]  The best way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible.
[00:42:59]  Thanks so much.