in American history. People forget we were breaking away from the most powerful king on the planet, the King of England. He was a globalist. He was a one-world government guy. And the British controlled India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, British Guiana, Canada, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica. He was a globalist. He was the George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Larry Fink of the day was the king of England. And America's founders decided they didn't like globalist kings telling us what to do, so they broke away and flipped it and made the people the king. They got their idea from the New England pastors who had congregational forms of church government where everybody was involved in church and everybody was involved in the civil government. It was the churches that were founding cities. So you had Pastor Roger Williams and his church founded a city, Providence, Rhode Island, and the first Baptist church in America. There were like no non-believers to be lazy and let them run stuff. Everybody was involved in church, everybody was involved in the civil government. And so when the revolution starts, the British send over a military governor, Thomas Gage, and he outlaws meeting houses. We don't need the people meeting in church and giving their consent to what's going on in government. You just obey government mandates. And we're like, no, nothing happens in America unless we give our consent. And he's like, no, you obey government mandates. And we're like, no, nothing happens in America unless we give our consent. He's like, no, you're a robot, you're a zombie. When the government blows the trumpet, you bow to the statue. And we're like, no, nothing happens in America unless we give our consent. Turns into a revolutionary war and we win. And we set up a government where it's we, the people, government from the consent of the governed. And the word federal is Latin for covenant. So we have a covenant form of government that came from these New England pastors, that came from the Bible, what part of the Bible that first 400 years out of Egypt before King Saul, the Hebrew Republic, a 400 year period where there's millions of people and no king. Now that period I go through in this book, who is the king in America? So Israel was the first nation with private land ownership. You see, wherever there's a king, you never really own the land. It's always conditional of you staying on the nice side of the king. You cross the king, he'll take away the land and kill you. But in ancient Israel, the land was permanently titled to each family. And if you got in a pinch and sold it, every 50 years it reverts back to the family. If you own land, you can accumulate stuff. The Bible called that being blessed. And you can give away some of your stuff. The Bible called that charity. Sort of interesting, Karl Marx says communism can be summed up in one sentence, abolition of private property. It's like, if you don't own property, how can you be charitable? How can you give away what you don't have? What, are you gonna steal from somebody, break the law, now you're a thief? No, God entrusts you with stuff and then gives you opportunities to show on the outside the love of God that's on the inside. And then ancient Israel was the first nation with no standing army. You have a king, he has an army. But in ancient Israel, every man was in the militia and armed with a sword upon their thigh and ready at a moment's notice to defend their wife and kids and community. Right? Ancient Israel was the first nation that could read. I thought this was fascinating. So Egypt had 3,000 hieroglyphs, and only 1% of Egypt could read. Reading and writing was the scribes' secret knowledge. They actually kept the hieroglyphs complicated on purpose as job security. They were needed as a class of scribes to interpret these complicated things. Sumeria had 1,500 cuneiform characters, but it was only for the kings and scribes. China had 10,000 pictogram characters, only for court records. When Moses comes down the mountain, he has the law in a 22-character alphabet. First letter's Aleph, second letter Beth. Sound familiar? It's so easy to learn, kids could learn it. Ancient Israel was the first literate population on planet earth. Not only were they given the law, they could read it for themselves. They were an educated populace. We don't really see this again until after the Reformation and the invention of the printing press where everybody was taught to read and have their own copies of the Bible. Ancient Israel had a bureaucracy-free welfare system. What's that? Well, in Egypt, if you need food, the government comes along and says, we'll give you food, but it's an exchange for your cattle, your lands, your life, right? Your votes. We'll give you money, but it's an exchange for something. In ancient Israel, when there's poor people, when you harvest your field, you leave the corners, the gleanings for the poor people to pick through. Like Ruth, And so this way the poor were taken care of in a decentralized manner without a big bureaucratic government collecting everything and doling it back out to their supporters. By the way, Pastor has an excellent message on Ruth that I wanna hear, so when you do that, I'm gonna, let me know and I wanna watch it on the internet. And I think he might even give that next week. But it's a powerful message you don't wanna miss. So ancient Israel had a bureaucracy welfare system, bureaucracy free welfare system. Everybody was armed. Everybody owned private property. Everybody could read. And it's interesting that they had no police in ancient Israel. Everybody was taught the law. Everybody helped enforce the law. There was no king with his soldiers that would come in and enforce stuff. No, everybody was taught the law. If you heard somebody take God's name in vain, it was your job to go and tell the elders of the city. Leviticus 5 says, a person sins because he did not speak up, even though he was an eyewitness to a case or knew what happened. Anyone who failed to testify is guilty. So if you saw somebody do something wrong, you had to speak up. Do you know the verse everybody knows, Leviticus 19.18, love your neighbor as yourself? Do you know the verse right before it? Confront your neighbor directly so you will not be held guilty for their sin. They're loving each other and they're confronting each other. One translation says rebuke your neighbor so you'll not incur their guilt upon you. Right? So you don't just, oh, I just love him. You know, I saw this one video and it says, oh, if your child's going through transition, right, the way the world's teaching it, just love him, just love him. It's like, no, you love your child and you correct your child. If you left the kids up to doing what they feel, they would eat candy all day long and their teeth would run out of their head. You're the adult, you tell them what to do, right? You love them and you correct them. In ancient Israel, everybody was loving each other and correcting each other. It was a self-pleasing system. So there's like a dozen different things that Israel was unique in world history, but it was empowering the individuals. So everybody was taught the law. Everybody helped enforce the law. You had private ownership of land. Everybody was armed. Everybody could read. And so it worked until the priests stopped teaching the law. And you said, really? Yeah, well, that's what happened. Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the tent of meeting another Levite with a silver graven image right in the house of a guy named Micah, another Levite with a concubine where the law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe. And so the priest stopped teaching the law. Every man did what was right in their own eyes, turns into chaos. And they all go to the prophet Samuel and they say, this self-government system is not working. We want to be like the other countries. We want a king. And Samuel cries, and the Lord tells him, they did not reject you, they rejected me. God's original plan was to have everybody have all these freedoms, all this knowledge, and the power to defend your wife and family. And, you know, a little way to sort of why it's important to preach the law. And I love the Ten Commandments here. You have to preach the law before people see their need for the Lamb. You have to preach the law before people see their need for the lamb. In the book of James, it says the law is like a mirror. You behold your face in the law, and then you walk away and you forget what you look like. So it talks about the law being a mirror. And so it's like, people say, oh, I'm a pretty good person, right? It's like, you know, it's like, you think you're pretty good, try to keep the law for a while. And so this idea that imagine a bathroom, you have a mirror, and then you have soap and water. The mirror shows you how dirty your face is, but it has no power to cleanse your face. You can look at it all day long, it's not gonna get that smear off your face by looking in the mirror. But it does do something. It creates the desire in you to take advantage of the soap and the water. If there was no mirror, you'd say, oh, nobody's told me I'm dirty. I'm certainly not as dirty as that person. You wouldn't see your need for the soap and the water. But then you look in the mirror, it's like, whoa. And Jesus comes along and ups it and says, all you have to do is think a lustful thought and you're guilty. All you have to think or call your friend a fool and you're guilty of murder. It's like, whoa. Oh, and then one more thing. It's one strike and you're out. All you have to do is sin one time in your entire life and you cannot go to heaven by being good enough. Right? I mean, you don't have to break every law. Like the policeman pulls you over and you say, well, I didn't steal, I didn't rape, I didn't kill. Yeah, but you did this one thing wrong. And you go to jail because of this one. You don't have to break. All you have to do is break one law, one time, and you can never go to heaven by being good enough. It's like, whoa, if this is what it takes, I need help. Great, I got your attention now. Here's help, the soap and the water. The blood of Jesus to cleanse you of your sins. Thank God for the blood of Jesus. But if you didn't preach the law, you think, I'm a pretty good person. But when you preach the law, and then Jesus ups it one, and then it's one strike and you're out. It's like, oh, now I need this blood of Jesus to cleanse. Thank God for the blood of Jesus. So ancient Israel, they functioned without a king. And it worked until the priests stopped teaching the law, and then they get a king, and then the rubber band snaps back, and King Saul rules as a tyrant. And he's killing these priests, and he's taking land from people and giving it to others. And so America's founders look back to this, what's called the Hebrew Republic, as the model for America. So, in New England, instead of separation of church and state, it was the pastors and churches that created the state. How could you say, pastor, don't preach on politics, when it's the pastor's sermon that's our constitution. Thomas Hooker founded Hartford, Connecticut. He was a pastor. And they took his sermon in 1638, which is titled, The Foundation of Authority is Laid in the Free Consent of the People, and they turned his sermon into the Constitution of Connecticut. It's called the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. And they used it as their constitution from 1639 up until 1818. For nearly two centuries, Connecticut used the pastor's sermon as its constitution. Even when we broke from Britain and many states got rid of their colonial charters and wrote constitutions, not Connecticut, they go, our constitution's been working fine, we're going to continue to use it up until 1818. And so they had an understanding of separation of church and state, it was to keep the government out of the church. So, Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island, he wrote a pamphlet in 1644 called the Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Conscience's Sake. In other words, this bloody practice of persecuting people for their conscience. And he says the Jews in the Old Testament and the Christians in the New Testament are both set apart by God and that when they sin, God allows the wall of the garden to be broken down and the government comes in and tramples the church, telling them what to believe and arresting pastors. But if the church repents, God will rebuild the wall of separation between church and state. And he's referring to Isaiah 5 that says, My well-beloved had planted a vineyard and set a wall around it and planted it with a choicest vine. And then he came to check on it and instead of grapes, it had wild grapes. And he says, what shall I do between, how to judge betwixt me and my vineyard? I says, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll tear down the wall and I'll let it get trampled. And I'll remove the candlestick. And he says, but God went to Jerusalem and looked for justice, but found oppression. And so the analogy is really clear. It's the garden is the church. The wall keeps the government from coming in, telling you when you can have church, when you cannot have church, how far you have to be spaced from other people in the church, whether you can sing songs in the church, whether you can have communion in the church. And it's like, we don't want the government telling us what to do. And so that was the understanding all the way up until like 1947 with a Supreme Court case called the Everson case. And in some states, Catholics were getting bus rides to their Catholic school and the state brought a lawsuit to say, no, they shouldn't. And it worked its way up to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. And he said, that the bus rides get to continue, but from now on, the federal government's in charge of religion. And Hugo Black had never been a judge before in his life, except for one year as a police court judge. And he was a Democrat senator from Alabama, and FDR put him on the Supreme Court. Now, just a little side note. So one of the things I did is I read through every charter of every colony and found out that Virginia was an Anglican colony. And New York was a Dutch Reformed colony. And Massachusetts was a Puritan colony. And Rhode Island was a Baptist colony. And Connecticut and New Hampshire were Congregationalist colonies. Maryland was a Catholic colony. Delaware and New Jersey were Swedish Lutheran colonies. And then they got taken over by the Dutch and taken over by the British. New York was a Dutch Reformed colony. And then Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony. And they did not get along. And they would tar and feather each other. But then the revolution starts and they all have to work together against the king. After the revolution, their attitude was, we may not agree on religion, but you were willing to fight and die for my freedom. I need to let you practice your faith. And so that's when the states began to become a little more tolerant. And then I read through every state constitution and every amendment and every revision to every state constitution. And in 1776, nine states required office holders to be Protestant Christians to hold state office. I mean, South Carolina. Every officeholder must be a Protestant. The Christian Protestant religion is hereby established, the established religion of the state. North Carolina, every officeholder had to be a Protestant Christian. And three states said all you had to do was be a plain Christian. Like Delaware's constitution in 1776 said every officeholder had to believe in God, the Father, Jesus Christ, His only Son, the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forevermore. That's all you had to do to hold office. And people said, well, that's pretty narrow-minded. You had to believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost to hold office? No, that was liberal. Because these other states, you had to be a Protestant Christian or a Puritan Christian or a Dutch Reformed Christian to hold office. And we're saying, look, all you got to do is believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, right? That was pretty liberal. You could even be a Catholic and believe that. And then Ben Franklin signed Pennsylvania's Constitution in 1776 that said all you had to do to hold public office was to believe in God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good, the punisher of the wicked, and acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration. So in other words, you not only had to lay your hand on a Bible to swear an office, you had to swear you believed in the Bible, right? Which makes sense. I mean, what good would it do to lay your hand on a book you didn't believe in? The idea of an oath was to call the higher power to hold you accountable to perform what you said you were going to do. And there was one state that had zero religious requirements to hold public office, Rhode Island, founded by Baptists. They said if you required someone to be a Christian, they could say they were even if they weren't, that would be hypocritical. So just vote for the best Christian person you know. And then in the early 1800s, there was an Irish potato famine and millions of Irish Catholics coming to America. Originally, 98% of the country was Protestant, 1% Catholic, three million people, 30,000 Catholics. Catholics were only allowed in three states, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. And one-tenth of a percent of the country was Jewish. Seven synagogues in the entire country of three million people. So about 3,000 Jews and three million people. But then in the early 1800s, there's an Irish potato famine. Millions of Irish Catholics come to America, and the Catholic percentage goes from 1% to 20% in a decade. and there's Protestant-Catholic clashes, but finally settles down, and then states change their constitutions from requiring you to be a Protestant to just being a Christian. Like North Carolina in 1835, they changed one word. Every officeholder had to be a Protestant, they changed it to every officeholder had to be a Christian. And then in the middle 1800s, there's a persecution of Jews in Bavaria, Germany, and a quarter of a million Jews come to America, and they go from a tenth of a percent to one percent. And now they've gone up to close to two or three percent. But as the years go on, the states would expand religious freedom at their own speed. So like a racetrack with 13 lanes, some states would be way out in front. right, like Pennsylvania. And some states would be dragging in the back like Massachusetts. But it was up to the states to decide how fast they wanted to expand it. And so then you had that Everson case in 1947 where the federal government took religion out of the state's jurisdiction and put it under the federal. And that's when they really began to morph it. So 10 years after the Everson cases, 1957, and the Washington Ethical Society wants tax exemption as a religious organization. And the IRS says, you're an ethical society, you're not religious. Well, guess what? This new Supreme Court with Hugo Black says ethical culture is a religion, they get tax exemption. And then in 1960, a guy named Joe Torcaso in Maryland wanted to be a notary, but he didn't want to say, so help me God at the end of his oath. Right? So help me God. Well, I don't believe in God. And so he was not allowed to be a notary. He sues, goes up to the Supreme Court and this new Supreme Court with Hugo Black says, um, there are new religions in America which do not acknowledge a supreme being. And among them are secular humanism. So now secular humanism is a religion. And then you have draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, Elliot Welsh, and they wanted to be religious conscientious objectors as atheists. The army says, no, you're going, but the Supreme Court says, atheism is a religion. It's a belief system. When someone holds beliefs with the same conviction as those who believe in a traditional deity to that person, those beliefs constitute their religion. So now atheism is a religion. And so now to not prefer one religion over the other, they kick God out. But by kicking God out, they're establishing the religion of atheism. They're violating the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. Well, they're kicking God out, they're establishing the religion, so they're violating the First Amendment, right? And because we don't know our history, we're letting them get away with it. The irony, there was this case, I think it was Kurtzmiller, but the judge would not allow the teaching of creationism in school because it violated the separation of church and state. Yet Jefferson, who wrote to the Danbury Baptists and used that phrase, Jefferson himself believed in a creator, right? The Declaration of Independence, all men are endowed by their creator. So here they're taking Jefferson's words out of context to prohibit the teaching of a creator that Jefferson himself believed in. I mean, these lawyers are so brilliant. They can twist it around to mean the exact opposite of what it was intended to mean. But our country was found, so I wrote a book on socialism, and every other belief system, you get your rights from the government. Our founders went above the government's head, and we said we had rights from a creator. So in Europe, they had the divine right of kings. The Creator gives all the right to this king. He's God's lieutenant and he dispenses all the rights to all these lowly people below. Well, we get rid of the king and we say the Creator gives the rights directly to each one of us. And we're all equal and we choose from amongst equal who's going to be in office. And so there's a great quote from Eisenhower. He said our founding fathers had to refer to the creator in order to make the revolutionary experiment make sense. We had to say that our rights came from a power higher than the king. and the king was infringing on our creator-given rights. But if there was no creator, our rights come right from the government. And so our country was founded on this idea that we get rights from a creator, the government's job is to guarantee to us our creator-given rights. Now, what's the last thing? The most important thing is the freedom to preach the gospel. So one of my favorite ways of presenting the gospel is Adam and Eve sinned and hid from God. Have you ever sinned against anybody? You sort of don't want to be around the person you've sinned against. Let's say you're talking about somebody behind their back, you're joking about them, you're making fun of them, and then you look up and that very person is walking towards you. Question, are you drawn to want to go over to that person? Or like, I'm really embarrassed, I was just making fun of them and there they are. I want to slip out the back. Your own conscience does not want you to be around the person you've sinned against. So when Adam and Eve sinned from God, sinned against God, they wanted to hide. It's like two magnets that are stuck together and one of them turns. The first one wants to touch, but the second one wants to get away. God wanted to walk with them in the garden, but they were hiding. So it's not so much that God sends people to hell, it's once people sin against God, it's their own conscience that makes them wanna avoid God for a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. And so Adam and Eve said, we blew it, we have to do something to make ourselves acceptable to God again. They put on fig leaves. That was the beginning of false religions. Man coming up with man's idea how to make man acceptable to God. Did the fig leaves make Adam and Eve acceptable to God? No. And then we read this little line, God made Adam and Eve coats of skins. Question, how do you make a coat of skin? Kill an animal, something has to die. You think God went to the other side of the garden, killed an animal, and brought Adam and Eve some nice tailored outfits? Or do you think maybe He killed the animal right in front of them? And they witnessed the first death ever. Right? Creation just happened. This would have been the first thing ever to die. And Adam and Eve are watching this innocent animal go through the pangs of dying, and they've never witnessed this before, and they're thinking to themselves, we're the ones that sinned, but this innocent animal is the one that's dying. And God wanted to make it really clear the animal was dying in their place. that right in front of them, he strips the skin off the animal and he puts it on their naked bodies. Maybe it still had a little blood on it, right? They were covered in the blood. And so for the rest of their lives, Adam and Eve are walking around wearing the skin of the animal that they watched die in their place. And whenever God sees Adam and Eve, He sees them clothed with the skin of the animal, the lamb slain from the foundations of the world. So Adam and Eve tell Cain and Abel. Cain wants to worship God, but he does an offshoot of the church of the fig leaf, and he starts the church of the fruits and the nuts. Cain's was a religion of works just like the fig leaf. How do we know it's works? Because God told Adam, the ground is cursed for your sake and you'll bring forth fruit by the sweat of your brow. Sweat is work. Cain is bringing forth fruit out of the ground, thorns and thistles. He's working. He's trying to work his way to heaven. He piles all of his works on the altar. Did Cain's works make him acceptable to God? No. If you do works, you can be proud of your works, and God resists the proud and He gives grace to the humble. If you're trusting in, able-trusted in the Lamb, if you're trusting in the Lamb, you're implicitly acknowledging you're insufficient in yourself, and you need this third person, right? So the Lamb is, God is on one side, we are on the other side, our sins separate us from God, and the Lamb pays for the sin. The lamb takes the judgment instead of us taking the judgment. The lamb gives its life instead of us giving our life. So, Noah offered lambs when he got off the ark. He brought two of every animal, but seven pair of every clean animal, so he had lambs, and he sacrificed the lambs in the rainbow piers. Abraham sacrificed lambs. Moses had every family in Israel kill a lamb, right? It was with them for three days and then they kill the lamb and then they put the blood of the lamb over the doorposts of their house. What's that all about? Well, the angel of death is bringing judgment and the blood is there saying, We've already been judged. The Lamb took the judgment in our place. Here's the proof of it. Here's the blood of the Lamb. This house has already been judged so the angel of judgment, the angel of death can pass over. So it's called the Passover. And then the tabernacle in the wilderness. And so you have the tent of meeting, and in front's the brazen altar, and inside the holy place, and then there's the holy of holies with the Ark of the Covenant. It's a box covered with gold. Inside are the Ten Commandments, the golden lid, and then there's two golden angels, and the presence of the Lord appears between the angels. And so you have this picture of God In the cloud, looking down at the Ten Commandments, and then the high priest comes in, representing the people. And he sprinkles the blood on the mercy seat. So the blood is between the presence of the Lord above and the law below. And so he says, we've broken the law, but this Lamb took the judgment in our place. Accept the blood of the Lamb. If the high priest would have approached without the blood, he would have been approaching the judgment seat. but the blood changed it from a judgment seat into a mercy seat. And then Solomon had a thousand lambs sacrificed when he dedicated the temple. Finally, John the Baptist points at Jesus and he says, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. So God is on one side, we're on the other side, our sin separates from God, and the lamb pays for the sin. So I ask people, are you approaching God as Cain or as Abel? If you're still hoping you're good enough to go to heaven, you are approaching God as Cain. I hope I piled enough good works on the altar, maybe a couple more handfuls of barley, that'll do it. Or are you approaching God as able? It's not me being good enough, it's this lamb that was good enough to take all the judgment on itself that I deserve in my place. Now why did the lamb have to die? God is just. And he can't help it, he's just. Which means he has to judge every sin. He's a God of laws. Everything he creates is laws. Laws of planetary motion, laws of gravity, laws of physics, laws of optics, right? Now they have quantum field theory and it's all these laws and quantum and everything's organized and everything. God is a God of laws. In mathematical equations, there's constants and variables. In the equation of redemption, the constant is God is just. Was, is, and forever will be just. The variable is who takes the judgment, you or a substitute. God is just, he can't help it, he has to judge every sin. Because if he does not judge a sin, by default, his silence would be giving consent to the sin. It's called the rule of tacit admission, T-A-C-I-T, and it's in a wedding ceremony. Pastor says, if anyone present knows of any reason why this couple shall not be joined together in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace. If you're holding your peace and you're silent, your silence is actually giving consent to the wedding. If there are sins and God is silent and not judging the sin, His silence would be giving consent to the sin. And if God gives consent to one sin, one time. He denies his just nature. He denies himself. He un-gods himself. He's kicked out of heaven. And he is not gonna get kicked out of heaven, and he is not gonna deny himself, and he is gonna judge every sin. So he could never be loved back, right? I went through the whole Bible, and I looked up the word love. So everything God creates follows rules. Galaxies follow rules. They can't love. Animals follow instinct. I looked at the word angel in the King James Bible. It appears 289 times. Not one time is the word love used to describe an angel's relationship with God. They praise God. They glorify God. The word angel means messenger. They deliver God's messages. They deliver God's judgments like in Egypt. They sang when the stars were created. They rejoiced when a sinner converts. Jesus says, I'll confess you before the angels or heavenly witnesses, but they're not made in God's image. And Jesus did not die on the cross for angels. Angels cannot forgive. When they're going into the promised land, he says, my angel will go with you and you better obey him because he will not forgive. They are mighty beings, they are powerful beings, but they were made for a purpose. What purpose were you made for? We're not mighty, we're not very smart. A king can have a castle with really powerful soldiers and really smart staff, and then he can have children. Guess what? The word love is used all throughout the Bible to describe men and women's relationship with God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Psalms 91, because he said his love upon me, therefore I will deliver him. Jesus rose from the dead and said, Peter, do you love me? We are beings uniquely created with the ability to love God back. But for love, do we love? It must be voluntary. He has to create this space-time bubble, right? He's outside of time so we make our little free will decisions, but he's outside of time so he can readjust every electron before time moves forward to the next nano frame, right? So he creates us and he allows us to have the free will because you can't, without free will you can't love. I mean, if God were to force you to love him in any way, he himself would know he's forcing you to love him, and he would know your response is not a love response, so he'll never force you. And then there's another thing, he has to hide himself. You say, what? Yeah, God, the universe is 93 trillion light years across, 93 billion light years across, and still expanding at the speed of light. If God were to appear to you in all of his universe creating omnipotent power, your response would be involuntary. All power in the universe, you'd be like the Apostle John in the book of Revelation, I fell at his feet, he's dead. And God's like, I can do involuntary responses all eternity long. I can do that. I'm interested in this voluntary response. So he has to hide himself. People say, God's real, why doesn't he show himself? Because the moment he shows himself, your free will's gone. In the presence of all the power in the universe, boy, it'd be involuntary. And the same hiding of himself that allows us to have free will necessitates that we have faith. Oh, it's so hard having faith. I wish God would just show up and say, well, yeah, if he shows himself, you won't need faith anymore, but you won't have a free will anymore. I was trying to think of a way of explaining why God has to hide himself for our response to be a love response. Imagine a billionaire has a son who goes to college, and he flies in on his private jet, drives up in his Lamborghini. He's got Rolex watch, gold rings, fancy clothes. He's gonna have every girl on campus wanting to meet him. But if he lays that aside and drives up in a clunker, and he's got holes in his jeans, all the uppity girls are gonna ignore him. But then there's a girl that likes to study with them in the library. And they eat together in the cafeteria. And they become friends. And she takes heat from the click for hanging around this nobody guy. But she believes in him. They fall in love. They get engaged. And then one day he says, hey, I want to take you back to meet my dad. And they're like driving up to this castle mansion estate. And the girl's like, whoa, you didn't tell me about all this. He knows that she loves Him for Him, not because of all of His stuff. If Jesus would have come in His glory, every political ladder climber would say, I'm your friend. No, He's born in a manger. It says in Isaiah 53 of the Messiah, there was nothing in His countenance that would make us want to desire Him. He only wants those that love Him for Him. Right, so God creates us as free will beings. He hides himself so that we can use our free will. But he's just, which means he has to judge every sin, which means he could never be loved back. Because even if he created us and gave us the free will, if he stepped out of line and we sinned against him, he would have to judge us. So he could never be loved back until he came up with a plan. He actually had the plan before he created the first electron. And the plan was his own son would become a man, and only as a man could God die on a cross to pay for our sins in judgment. Charles Wesley wrote the hymn, Amazing Love, How Could It Be That Thou, My God, Shouldst Die For Me? So God is just in that he judges every sin, but he's loving that he provides the lamb to take the judgment for the sin. And then, well God's just, so how can one person's death pay for billions of people who sinned? Jesus is divine. And he experienced judgment in a dimension we will never comprehend. It says a day with the Lord is as 1,000 years. Jesus experienced that day on the cross as if it was 1,000 years. You know, I've read the book of Revelation dozens of times, thousands of times. I got it on my little app here. I got this Alexander Scorby King James Bible app. And I listen. So this is what I usually go to sleep to every night when I'm on the road. And so God, In the book of Revelation, it's God that's pouring out the judgment. You read the book of Revelation, the lamb breaks the seal, the angel throws the censer, the angel blow the trumpet, the angel pours the, it's like why is it? God's a just God, he has to judge every sin he missed along the way and so this is the final judgment. So you can't get 10,000 years into eternity and say, God, there was a sin way back when, and you were silent, you didn't judge it. Were you giving consent to the sin? Is there a party that's unjust we didn't know about? He says, uh-uh. It says, the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever, and the angels cry out, righteous and true are your judgments, O Lord. Nobody's gonna question for the rest of eternity that God judged sin. But that's the final judgment. He will not do any more judging for the rest of eternity. But in that sense, Jesus had the equivalent of the book of Revelation judgment poured out on his head. Jesus took the judgment for every sin that everybody would ever do upon himself on the cross, experienced it as if it was a thousand years. You know, I have a degree in accounting, so I like things that balance. You take an eternal being, Jesus, who is innocent, suffering for a finite, limited period of time, it's equal to all of us finite, limited beings who are guilty, suffering for an eternal period of time. Let me say that again. An eternal being that is innocent, suffering for a finite period of time, is equal to all of us finite beings who are guilty, suffering for an eternal period of time. Infinity times finite equals finite times infinity. An unlimited being, suffering for a limited period of time, is equal to all of us limited beings suffering for an unlimited period of time. Jesus experienced the equivalent of eternal damnation in all of our places. Experienced it as if it was a thousand years. And he's the only one who could have done it. And out of love for the Father, and out of love for you and me, he became a man, he became the Lamb of God, and he took the wrath of a just God upon himself on the cross. in our place. And then He rose from the dead to prove He was who He said He was. The Lamb is God's way to love you without having to judge you. It's His plan. He came up with it before the foundation of the world, that He can love you for the rest of eternity. You can love Him back for the rest of eternity and not be afraid of being judged by Him because all the judgment you deserve went on Christ and you are approaching Him through Christ. You have His blood covering you. You've got Jesus' name on your forehead. You are in Christ. The Lamb is God's way to love you without having to judge you. And then He fills you with the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. And then the Holy Spirit reaches out through you to share the love of God with a lost and dying world. is to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, rescue those unjustly sentenced to death. Be a street preacher, going out there and the love of God compels you to share the God and the Holy Spirit gives you the insight and the wisdom to say the things that they exactly need to hear at that moment to unlock their heart. There's nothing more exciting than letting the God of the universe love people through you. and then have the promise of eternal life with Him in heaven. I'm going to turn it back over to Pastor. God bless you. That's gospel preaching. And that's what's needed in a world full of bad news. As he writes these books about what's going on in the world, we need the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he did mention one line from a Charles Wesley song in our hymn book 134. And Wesley obviously must have read his Bible a lot. because as you read through the lyrics of his songs, they are rich with scripture. So let's turn to 134 and we'll close with that hymn.