Religion & Politics
Vern Peterman · Nov 28, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 22
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262315595584

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

And that's something to keep in mind if you're talking to people, is try to figure out at the outset, what do they think? How are they thinking? About half of those people who call themselves Christians, actually it's a little bit more than that now, over half of those who call themselves Christians don't believe in absolute truth. And some statistics are even farther that way. So that they don't believe that something is absolutely true. Furthermore, they don't believe it can be knowable. So that uncertainty.

And we're talking Christians now. People at least claim to be Christians. So you'll be talking with them and you'll say, well, this is true because, see, it says this here and here and here. Their whole assumption is it can't possibly be true with a capital T. It can't possibly be true truth. And so you're talking to them with an assumption that they'll never square up with. or at least they're not starting from that standpoint. So it's real interesting when you're talking about the subject religion and politics. There's a lot that can be done, I think, to head off the heat, but most people don't start at the foundation. Most people start talking about the stuff you see up top, and it's the foundation that makes the difference. Grab a hand out here and I've got something for you.

Yes, thank you. By the way, we got the John in Exile video. Does somebody want to borrow that that hadn't seen it yet? St. John in Exile? Oh, yeah, it's outstanding. Yeah, it's four hours and cut down to an hour and a half. So it's edited down, but it is just phenomenal. There may be a few points that you might pick at doctrinally, but if you can overlook those, it's really quite good. One guy. It's one guy. You know the guy that did the Herbie movies? That's the fella. Anyway, just enjoy that and pass it along. Next step. Here's an interesting thing.

Americans polled recently. They expect deeply religious elected officials to compromise on things that are near and dear to their heart. Isn't that interesting? So they expect somebody to hold a view strongly and yet vote or veto or whatever to the contrary. And it turns out something like two to one. Americans think that an elected official who holds a particular moral view should compromise on that when it comes to the way they operate. Yeah, we just saw that. A significant number of people feel like a president, a senator, a congressman ought to compromise their views if that's what's called for. Now, what the Bible says.

We've got the Church History series, History of the Relationship between Church and Government, and Christian Foundations in the American Colonies. Those are a couple of things. The Church History class has been going through that. You're welcome to get the material if you haven't seen it, or hopefully you can take it up later. But those are some classes we've put together in the past that touch on the subject.

The Bible record statements are history and fact about politics and government, but provide spiritual insights about those aspects of earthly life. Otherwise, we wouldn't know it. And that's the key thing that should always be remembered. The Bible is not just an inspiring book. A lot of people have just come to that, oh, I'll read it because it's inspiring. No. It is inspired. It is God's revelation.

That's pivotal. That's key. Because the truth is, spiritual things are something that human beings are not, of themselves, able to discern and determine. Can't do it. Alright. The Bible presents that spiritual truth as absolute. based on the character of God, and will ultimately allow no other views in either thought or life.

That is, the Bible speaks in absolute, exclusive terms. And that's one thing that, say, Hinduism, Buddhism, those are religions that tend to just accommodate. I will slip in Jesus, or we'll slip in, you know, the Bible, and they'll just kind of put things alongside. The Bible says this is the revealed Word of God. exclusively. Jesus comes and says, I, and the Greek is, I in contradistinction to all others in the singular way, the singular truth, the singular life. I mean, that's exclusive.

And so the world doesn't jive with that. The world doesn't understand that, and that's not the way most worldlings think. Now, if you look at the Bible, politics and government aren't seen as the ultimate solution. What happens as we look towards the millennium, all the world's kingdoms and kings and rulers are basically set aside. As a matter of fact, they oppose Christ at the end. And he comes in, puts them aside and says, no, for a thousand years this is the way it's going to be on planet earth. Politics in the form of government is supported as a temporary instrument. It isn't that the Christian is to rebel against it, but it's a temporary instrument of the Lord, ultimately being set aside by government that is God himself.

And that's one reason you get people really heated up about politics. Their hope is in the political system. This election we had just ending a few weeks ago, I mean, there are people that poured themselves into it and, you know, took time off of work and, you know, stayed up all night and just poured themselves into it. And I'm not saying a person shouldn't do that, but you wonder, and some of them, their motivations may be that that's my hope. That's where my hope is. And so they're going to tie everything to it. Okay. Here's some generalizations that we can work with, okay?

Every native culture and scripture was non-biblical in its spiritual perspective. That is, if you look at every native culture, you go to the Egyptians, you go to the Canaanites, you go to the Babylonians, every single one of them had a non-biblical perspective. So as you're reading scripture, I think that's one of the things you'll see is constantly dealing with an un-biblical culture. When the Jews went into Canaan, they were supposed to not adopt anything. from the Native culture, God told them, drive it out. Drive it out. Do not take on the practices and the gods of the Canaanites. Push it out.

Why would that be? Why would all the cultures be unbiblical? Just the Native cultures in Scripture? Why do you think that would be? Why would all the Native cultures be unbiblical. Why would that happen? Why wouldn't you have a culture that, boy, these people are just naturally right on, and, you know, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, Canaanites?

Yeah. The bottom line is the world is going to come up with its answer, right? Yeah. It's the world, the flesh, and the devil, and they're just going to cook up various things, and it's man's cooked-up solution. Yeah, that's right. They turned away. That is the trend of man. It is the tendency of man. It's a magnetic pull, a gravity that man cannot resist, to simply pull away from God.

All the primary native religions of both the Old and New Testament were basically polytheistic. Now, historians might argue with me on one point. They might say, ah, but what about Persia? Persia basically had a good god and an evil god, so it was still polytheistic. They just said, well, what you should do is side with the good god. There was Aura Mazda and the devil. That was the Persian belief. Anyway, they might argue that, but the bottom line is those are both seen as equal gods, one good, one bad.

The Bible presents theistic agnosticism. Now what do I mean by theistic agnosticism? This is where Paul talks to the philosophers in Athens. He says, I see that you're very religious. You have an altar to the unknown God. So, theistic agnosticism says there's a God out there, I just don't know anything about Him. Skepticism about truth. 1838, what does Pilate say to Jesus? What is truth? Yeah. Apparently he's not sure. Personal atheism. These are several references in Psalms where it says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. Personal atheism.

It comes from here. And finally, human philosophy. This is, again, in Acts 17, where you find the philosophers of Epicurean and Stoic persuasion, and there's all kinds. So it's interesting. You see a real perspective of philosophical and spiritual belief among people.

Now, think about this. Here's the impact of personal belief. Suppose you say, I believe da, da, da, da, but it doesn't really have any impact on my life. That's one position. Let's go to the next step outside. I believe this, and it impacts my personal life, but that's all. I don't let it go beyond that. Now let's take it to the next step. Impacts others' lives voluntarily. That is, I will talk to somebody else, but it's really up to them to respond, and if I persuade them, fine. If not, then they'll do whatever they want to do. Or the last one. impacts others' lives involuntarily.

And my reason for putting this up here is, what did most of the rulers of the empires do when it came to spiritual things? They said, in some degree, this is the way we're going to do it, and you're going to have a God. And of course, I put the dot, dot, dot thing because you have the Persians were probably some of the least pressured in terms of, you know, this is what you've got to believe. They were even willing to say, you know, if you want to go back to Jerusalem and practice your religion, go ahead and we'll even support you.

So theirs was impacts others' lives voluntarily. They didn't force their Zoroastrianism. Now, impacts others' lives involuntarily, what do the Babylonians do? But yeah, they say, hey, you know, we want to keep you or we're going to keep an eye on you. You know, we don't trust you. So you're going to come right here and sit under our noses and we're going to train you to be a Babylonian. You're going to give you a Babylonian names. You're going to eat Babylonian food.

Okay. Involuntary. Okay. Believe me, all those Jews didn't want to move hundreds of miles away. It's a lot of work. So, so what you see is, is mostly the fourth option. is most of what is in operation during the biblical times. Some degree, the third one there, impacts others' lives voluntarily. What did Rome do, for example? What was their attitude towards religion? Believe what you want, just give us the money. Yeah, believe what you want, just give us the money.

If you were a Jew, you got an exception. You don't have to worship, you know, do sort of nominal worship of the emperor. But if you're not a Jew, then you've got to do your emperor worship. What happened over time is that they said to the Christians, hey, you're not Jewish. You don't get an exemption. You've got to bow to the emperor. We don't care who else you bow to, but you've got to do it to the emperor.

The Christians' response varied. A great many of them said, I'm sorry, we can't do that. I will be a model citizen, but I will not do that. And so many of them paid the price. That was the mixed response of Rome. We don't care what else you do, but you just got to bow to the emperor once in a while. And the Christians said, no, we can't do that. That's an area we can't sacrifice. Okay, generalizations, more of them. Every culture and scripture had some level of alignment between religion and the chief political leader. The pharaoh was, what, an everyday guy? They considered him what?

A god, yes. This is Ra incarnate. The sun god incarnate. If you went to the kings and emperors of Assyria and Babylon, always some kind of conformity. Remember in Babylon there was the big idol? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were among the large crowd that said, okay, when you hear all the music going, then bow down. So, forced. Babylonians were very much into that forced religion. There was always some alignment.

Even in Rome, they said the emperor was deity. So the Romans actually paid, of course they taxed everybody to get the money, but they paid to have temples to the emperors built in the main cities. So you'd go into Ephesus and you'd worship Domitian and you'd worship different ones. they would have temples for you to worship in, to come worship the emperor. Yeah?

Did that emperor worship begin with Caesar Augustus? It had really begun with Caesar Augustus. It was something that they were growing into it. Augustus was typically recognized as the first Caesar, true Caesar. And you do find temples to Augustus. part of what had taken place there.

It was really bizarre as they would require you to do that and then later on they'd rescind his deity, you know, some strange thing. I don't know how you do that. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, they would have instances where Caesar's own household would murder the Caesar, you know, so it kind of de-deifies somebody, you know.

The extent to which the political and religious alignment impacted others varied in degree and character from one empire to the next. The difference here is the Mosaic Law made Israel into a theocracy. There was always a religious impact on each empire that the Jews faced, but the Mosaic Law specifically made them into a theocracy. There wasn't designated under the Mosaic Law, here's our big kahuna, and he's a deity. That wasn't under the Mosaic Law, no. So, there were political impacts to that, a part of which is, during the time of the judges, they just kind of floundered because they neither acknowledged the Lord, nor did they have political leadership, so they just kind of got beat all over the place. There was little human political structure. They would have no real political structure, and the Lord would raise up a judge to kind of get the you know, made trouble off of them, and then they'd slide back in the soup again.

All right, here you have a chart, and that should be on your handout as well. And this chart is similar to the one you've seen before. And what we see is there's a philosophy of empire regarding religion, okay? We look at it for Egypt, religion was for Egyptian people.

Basically, the slaves, they didn't care about them, because religion in the Egyptian system was much more selfish. It wasn't a, hey, you know, we got a religion and you really got to be a part of it. You know, hey, you're building the pyramids for us so we can have a great afterlife and that's mostly for the pharaoh and the other people in his court. And if you want to have some other religion, who gives a hoot? Because religion was considered very, very selfish.

It was very self-centered. And as a matter of fact, if you really wanted to insult somebody and to do something nasty, you do something to make it impossible for them to be resurrected in the afterlife, if you could conceive of doing that. So here was the Egyptian system, very self-centered, very earthly, and you had to work like crazy to support the Pharaoh's religion, but he didn't care what you did. Assyria. Religion was for the Assyrians, all others, we just loved to ill-treat them. Abuse them, scatter them all over the place, strip their skin off while they're alive, horrible stuff.

But we don't care what you do religiously, we just got our own. Again, it's very self-centered. The Babylonians came along and they said, our religion is great, you're going to love it, or else. And so they pressed it upon people and said, you will follow our religion.

It was much like the Assyrian religion, they said Marduk was the chief deity, otherwise polytheistic, similar deities. And then when we move into Persia, that's where we have the switch with Zoroastrianism. We would think of Christianity, you've got some main things that a Christian believes, right? One of the key beliefs of a Zoroastrian is you don't relocate people and you don't impose a religion on people.

And that's one of the reasons why they thought the Babylonians were so awful, that they had to fight them. Because they would come in there and here's the Babylonians doing what? Exactly the opposite. Imposing their religion, relocating people to the Zoroastrian trained Persians. That was just absolutely incomprehensible. Why would you do such an awful thing? So the Lord used that change of the mindset of the Persians to put the Jews back into Israel.

Now, the Greeks said, oh, Greek language is great, the culture is great, you're going to love it, and we're just going to tell you all about it. And so they infused Greek language and culture into the people. It wasn't a forced brainwashing, but it was enthusiastically conveyed. Lots of enthusiasm.

Under Rome, allow the existing religions, but require worship of the emperor, except for the Jews. And once they recognized that these Christians weren't really Jews, then the Christians started getting in trouble. Okay, so that's kind of the philosophy of empire as we step through each of those.

Now, how was Israel to address other religions? Remember, the Bible doesn't back off from talking about religion and politics at all. Now, you're Jew. and you're looking at the law, how do I handle other religions? What does the law say to do when you encounter other people from other backgrounds? Don't mix with them? Don't intermarry with them? Do you kill them all? You're supposed to drive off the Canaanites, but there's actually provision in the law for dealing with foreigners and strangers. What's interesting, it doesn't give instructions on how to accommodate other religions. Can't find it. I've looked through 613 laws, no instructions for how to accommodate other religions. Here's what they do. See all those references?

Those are all the instructions to tell you how to deal with foreigners and strangers. So there's your list. You read those and then you know how to deal with foreigners and strangers according to the Jewish law. Basically what they would do is the law said For example, you're going to have Passover. Foreigner and stranger, he's got to do all the same stuff you do. So what it amounted to is that applied everywhere.

Boy, whether it was dealing with this or that personal matter or this practice or that festival, this whole list is all how to deal with foreigners and strangers and one of two things is going to happen. One is the Jew is going to insist that that foreigner and stranger come under the law and operate.

And it isn't a matter of belief. There's no talk about belief. This is what you do. This is what you don't do. It's behavior, not belief. But this is how the foreigner and stranger will be among you. Period. No application in triplicate and we'll consider it. This is the way it is.

So either the foreigner is going to conform, or the Jews are going to back off. So you see what happens? Either it gets real tough for the foreigner to stick around, because everything that goes on, these guys are pressuring me to do this and do that, and not do this and not do that, or the Jews sort of retreat. They back off from what the law says to do.

And guess which one they did most of the time? Yeah, most of the time they backed off. especially as they became a minority in other areas and they began accommodating other religions. Centuries went by without them recognizing how they're supposed to let their fields lie fallow and forgive the debts and all that stuff. Centuries went by without them doing that. They backed off of their law and they backed off of dealing with it. So anyway, you ask the question, how were they supposed to accommodate it? Not at all. No room for it. The law made no accommodation for somebody believing something different. There's no place for it. All right.

The Law of Moses doesn't deal with converting foreigners to Judaism on the basis of believing, but rather on outward behavior. When it comes time for the Passover, do this. When it comes time for this feast, do this. If a foreigner or stranger is in your land, do this with them. It's behavior. That's what the law focuses on.

It is also written assuming that Israel is in the promised land and free of domination. Boy, now what do we do when we're in Babylon? What do we do when Rome's in charge? See, the law didn't really have any answers for that because it was written assuming that they would be in their land and free of domination.

How's that going to happen? When is that going to happen? When are they going to be in their land and free of domination? in the millennium, right? The bottom line is the Lord told them through Moses, Deuteronomy 28, if you obey me, I will bless you. If you disobey me, everything the opposite.

So once you're not in the mode of obeying, there's nothing in the law to help. So what the Jews ended up having to do, and they've gone 1900 years without a temple, so what they would do is they would say, given that you can't do sacrifices, we'll say that fasting is as good as a sacrifice. So they come up with alternate laws to fulfill what the law just simply doesn't address because they're not in the land and they're not obedient. Alternate laws. Lots of them. Because the whole thing in Leviticus, here's all you do, right? Do this, do that, do this other thing. Everything having to do with the temple. Here's the priests. All those things. No way to deal with it. No temple. Not in the land.

Remember, even in New Testament times, at least twice as many Jews lived outside Israel as lived inside. In Judges, the Judges freed Israel and they often destroyed pagan images and temples and altars. 1 Kings 18, Elijah was merciless to the prophets of Baal. So here's how the Jews were to deal with other religions.

Get rid of it. Now, let's ask this question. Does that mean then that since we've got a Jehovah's Witness hall down the street, what are we supposed to do? Burn it? Tear it down? What's that? We're not a theocracy under the law, are we? The Jews had one way of operating. We're very much in a different mode. You notice that Paul didn't say, OK, Timothy, Luke, see that temple to Artemis? Burn that thing. Tear that thing down, right? He didn't do that, did he? No. We're not under law. Under the law, that's what you've got to do. We're not under law.

Therefore, you see, when the apostles went into these places, according to law, which said stone people, kill the temple prostitutes, burn the temple down, tear the stones apart. No. They came in and they told them about the Lord, even using the culture that the people understood. Very different. Very different.

In the records of the kings of Israel and Judah, their approval or disapproval was in great part dependent upon their intolerance of the pagan gods. All the kings of the Northern Kingdom, the Ten Tribes, were considered evil. Not one of them was good. Some of the kings, a minority, of the Southern Kingdom, like Josiah, Hezekiah, were good kings in that they would tear down the altars of the pagan deities. But many of them did not. But whether they were good or bad was in great part determined upon what did you tolerate.

The prophets who were sent to Israel frequently would cry loudly about the acceptance of the pagan deities. Here's one example. In Jeremiah 7 and 44, there was the worship of the Queen of Heaven. And they had the mothers and the fathers and the children all involved in this worship of the Queen of Heaven. Ishtar, Astarte, some of the different names. Our modern name Esther comes out of that. Do you have the prophets dealing with the other religions? How?

Not by accommodation, but by calling out, this is evil. You've accommodated these religions. You were told not to. The last Old Testament prophet Malachi denounced the inroads of pagan religion and culture among the Jews. He talked about the practices that says the priests are foul, they do everything wrong, they violate the law, violence, divorce left and right, families breaking apart, real sad case.

Now, how did Jesus address other religions? I want to start to perhaps turn a corner here. What's one of the difficulties when you try to talk about how did Jesus address other religions? What's the problem we run into? What did Jesus make as his earthly focus and mission? Focus on the Jews. So was he out there to encounter the other religions?

No. No. So that's one of the things that when you ask that very question, it took time to even come up with material in one respect. He dealt with a lot of Jewish groups, and he talked about what the problems were with the Jewish groups, but didn't go out of his way to try to hunt down pagan groups. He did go to this Samaritan woman and present himself as the Messiah.

They had a religion similar to Israel's, but it was based in Samaria, not Jerusalem. They didn't have Levites as the priests, right? And they operated off a copy of the first five books of the Bible that was similar to what the Jews had, except they had the worship in in Samaria and not down in Jerusalem. So that's why Jesus was with the woman at the well, sitting at the well, and she says, we worship on this mountain. It's the one they see up on the hill. Right there. We worship on this mountain that you worship in Jerusalem.

Jesus says there'll be a time, will come when, when? Location won't be the issue, right? So it's interesting. as he deals with a Samaritan woman who is under a distorted Jewish system. He says, yeah, you worship here and we worship there. Time is going to come when neither one is going to be what matters. Neither one is going to matter. How did the apostles address other religions? Now we are stepping into the time of the church.

What is happening there? The first religion they ran into was Judaism and its various strains and varieties, right? They met right in the temple porticos, right at the perimeter of the temple area. They had these porches that were covered, and you know, weather's a little inclement, you can meet underneath there, and that's where they'd gather together. They refused to be silenced by the Sanhedrin.

Acts 2-5 focuses the church meeting in those porticos. starting to move into the houses by that time. Paul was the apostle sent to the Gentiles, so he was the one that really spearheaded encountering the other religions. In general, the apostles used the features of the culture, including the philosophical and religious aspects.

Some of the terminology, we've run into that as we're studying Ephesians and Colossians, like even the word mystery. The word mystery. It was a word that they kind of redefined from the pagan cultures. Or how about the word grace? Charis. They redefined it. Because God was more graceful than anything that the Greek culture knew anything of. So they had to redefine it in order to use it.

But they used the communication points of the culture but vigorously fought against encroachments into the churches. They didn't say, oh yeah, you got that worship of that goddess, that's fine, just do this thing too and we'll be happy. No. Vigorously opposing anything that would taint and tamper with the gospel at every turn.

At one seminary, there was a professor asked the class, what is the number one theme of the New Testament epistles? And so what he did is he broke the class up into groups. He said, okay, you go through the New Testament. Tell me, what's the number one theme of the New Testament epistles? They all went off and did their study, came back, every single group dealing with false teaching. Number one theme. So this Is there an accommodation to the other religions?

Uh-uh. We'll go ahead and use some of their words and symbols if that's helpful to communicate things, even redefine things if we have to. But that's not in a sense of accommodating the truth. We're not going to adjust the truth to fit this other religion or philosophy. Okay.

Paul spoke to the philosophers in Athens and began by taking note of the existence of an altar to an unknown God and saying that the God he was introducing was the God that was unknown. He was the one you didn't know. Here's one in Rome. By the way, in Athens they haven't found that specific one, but all around that was a fairly frequent thing. So this was one in Rome, the altar to the unknown God. Yeah, it's like, you know, we don't want to offend anybody, so in case we haven't got one, here's one to the one we don't know. Yeah, isn't that amazing?

Paul taught doctrine to Christians at times who would use words from the pagan religions, but would use them differently. Mystery, that we've seen in Ephesians and Colossians, is one of those. A mystery was something that remained secret to our special elite group, and it continues to be clouded in the unknown. Mystery in the New Testament, the way Paul uses it, is a truth previously unrevealed, but now revealed by God and proclaimed to everybody.

Turned upside down. Same word, but used completely upside down. He would talk about grace, because grace was something in the culture you would do for a friend or a relative and expect nothing in return. He said, no, we've got to redefine grace. Grace is what God does for those who are enemies. That's grace. Grace without bounds. We looked at this word mystery here when we were going through Colossians. So here they would draw from the pagan religions, but clearly redefine it.

And that's one of the things we'll see as we go through, is Paul defines the term so that they don't mix it up. How did the other apostles address other religions? When the apostle John wrote to believers in 1 John, he gave them criteria by which to smoke out the false teaching of Gnosticism. He says, not only, you know, here's what's true, but here's how you can tell what's false.

So he goes into 1 John 4, 2-3, By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist of whom you have heard that he is coming and is now already in the world. Gnosticism would deny that Jesus actually came in the flesh. No, he can't possibly have come in the flesh because the flesh is bad. You can't have a body because the body is bad. So, it couldn't be.

And so what you find is that there are cults even now, Christian science would probably be one of those, we'd say as an example, Gnostic. Now, come back to this. Think about this diagram. We looked at this before as how did empires rule. Now think of it in terms of Christians. You see these different things here.

Which of those four positions do you think scripture calls for believers to work by? Pardon? Impact others' lives voluntarily? Voluntarily, yeah. What we do as we present the gospel, it is up to them to respond based on the Lord's work in them. Yeah. It's interesting. There are Christians who will opt for the last one. Tend to be kind of a hard-line Calvinist bent, you know, kind of some of the Amel and post-millennial folks. We've got to get control of the government and make people be Christians, say. But that's not the picture you see presented in Scripture. And getting a hold of the government is not going to fix it. Remember, that's something we looked at earlier. That's not our call.

There will come a time when the Lord will say, okay, all these earthly rulers, they're done. But that's the Lord's timing. Our call is no. We certainly are not to have no impact on personal life. Certainly, it's to impact our personal life. That's what all the apostles are continuing to write about. But, Debbie is right. It impacts others' lives voluntarily.

We present the gospel as the Lord speaks through us, and we look to the Lord to work in their hearts. They have a responsibility before the Lord to make that choice and decision. It's not our job. It's not our job to convert them. It is our place to be the mouthpiece of the Lord, to speak the truth to them, and for they to respond to it.

So it's interesting, as you look at this, this chart is not only a question of how do you run an empire, but it's how do I run my life? How do we as a church, how do we as the body of Christ deal with people? Is it our job to go out and get control of the government and force everybody to be Christians? Pass Christian laws? instead to lay the gospel out and look to the Lord to work in their hearts.

Yes, because think about this, if you don't understand that we're not Israel, in other words, if you think we replaced Israel, and Israel is an earthly body, then our job is to be an earthly body and take charge of things. That's God's kingdom on earth, see?

That would be their perception of things. So they want to take option number four, grab hold of things and get this place fixed. We'll make it so good Jesus has to come back. See? That's the mindset that they're approaching this with. We're looking at it instead, no, God is calling to all people. He wants them to respond to the message of the gospel. But ultimately, he's calling people to be a heavenly people, seated with him.

And trying to fix this mess here on planet Earth, ain't going to happen. Not going to happen by us deciding we're going to do it. And Jesus isn't coming back because we forced his hand, because we made things so good. So it's a real different perspective, isn't it? And it's important for Christians to get the right concept in mind. Because those have consequences, don't they? If we say, it impacts my personal life, but that's it. I don't talk about it to anybody else. That's not quite what the Lord has in mind. But if we go to the other extreme of, boy, we're going to make everybody Christians whether they like it or not. That's not the biblical picture either.

Debbie has pointed out the right thing. Impacting others' lives voluntarily, and I include in that assumption that it's impacting our personal lives as well. So there's not just a philosophy of empire, there's also a philosophy of, you know, what's the Christian life consist of? That's a part of that picture. Okay.

Next time we talk about slaves, slavery. We'll look at slavery in the Old and the New Testament. Have you ever had anybody tell you that, you know, the Bible, it approved slavery? or support slavery. Interestingly enough though, Christians were often at the forefront of getting rid of it. One of the fellows who was instrumental over in Britain was a guy by the name of Granville Sharp.

He was the head of material supply for the British military. And he, well, when the Declaration of Independence hit the shores of Britain, he got the order, okay, order up supplies here. And he says, I won't. I'm not going to order supplies against the Americans. And he had to resign. Because that wasn't something they were going to put up with. So he resigned. Anyway, he, he was instrumental. in the following decades. And not only he made some kind of observations that he published about the Greek New Testament, but he also was instrumental in spearheading the abolition of slavery in Britain. Boy, I'm trying to... Search of the W? Is that right? Wilberforce? Yeah, I think so. Okay.

But it's interesting, you have Christians involved in getting rid of slavery. Anyway, we're going to take a look at what the Bible says about it. Again, what's interesting is, similar to what the apostles did with other religions, they would use terminology from it. It didn't mean they approved of it. But they'd use terminology from it. We'll find a similar thing when it comes to slavery. And people look at the use of the terminology if that meant approval. But in truth, the gospel was not brought to just bring about social change. The gospel was brought about to change individual lives of those who believe. And radical different. Radical different approach.

Anyway, we'll take a look at that next week. And we're getting down to the last several weeks here. What we'll do when we get done here is make sure everybody has copies of everything and also in the end get a CD out so you can. What we'll do is include all the slides, all the handouts, and some additional references as well so you have that. And I'm also trying to compile a listing. I think I gave you a preliminary copy of resources, you know, books websites, different newsletters that you can get, things of that sort that are helpful. So you'll be able to use this and continue to work with it. Questions?

The Granville Sharp rule, yeah. The Granville Sharp rule, this guy cooked up this rule, basically says if I have a definite article before two personal singular nouns connected by and, chi, that those two are the same identity. So, for example, Paul writes to Titus and talks about our great God and Savior. It meets the Granville Sharpe rule.

It's one of about 80 places in the New Testament that does. So, great God and Savior Jesus Christ, He is both Savior and God. So it's a claim to deity. And that's one of the things you find, as he was observing that in the New Testament, he found a number of places that did exactly that, that they clearly demonstrate the deity of Christ. And of course, those who don't believe in the deity of Christ will argue vigorously to the contrary. But what they end up doing is they have to argue from outside the New Testament, not in it.

All right, other questions? All right, I've either been very complete or completely baffling. But we'll propel on next time. All right, let's pray. Lord, as we look at this, indeed the world has got all sorts of belief, and the world puts its hope in those man-made, self-made beliefs. Beliefs about politics. Beliefs about spiritual things. And we thank you that you have uniquely and specially and lovingly revealed the truth for us that we might know you. Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.