OK, just a reminder a week from Saturday we have our men's prayer breakfast and then after that the deacons meeting. Then we'll get some information out on the Israel tour that we will begin from Ben Gurion Airport on May 7th and go through the 19th and that would be a departure date to come home. We'll get all that information out there eventually. And just pray about that. We may be going somewhere else. I don't know. I've read several articles that suggest that there'll be a major assault into Lebanon against Hezbollah by the end of the month. And there's always those threats. So who knows what's going to happen, you know? We may never have another tour till the Lord takes us there. So those are the announcements. Be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication With thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever." So before we get started on this Independence Day of 2024, Let's bow our heads together and go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we're thankful that we have the freedom to come together to teach the truth, proclaim the truth of your word, teach the gospel without any fear of government intervention. Father, we know that we're in terrible shape in this nation, that there are many forces at work to try to destroy the freedom, the liberty that we have, and that many incursions have already taken place over the last 100, 150 years to minimize the kind of freedom that was foreseen by the founding fathers. And Father, we pray that we might see a change, but we know that the only change that will count is a change in their trust toward you and in trusting Christ as Savior and then focusing on the Word. Without a change of heart there will be no lasting change in the political situation in this nation. So we pray for us that as believers that whichever way your plan goes that we might be faithful, stand firm, and that we might focus upon you and not on the noise of the culture and the noise of the circumstances around us, but we may be focused upon your plan and purpose for us. And we pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. All right. Tonight we are going to focus on Independence Day. This is Independence Day, July the 4th of 2024, which is the 248th anniversary of the initial signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was not actually signed officially by everyone in the convention until almost the beginning of August, but this is the day that we celebrate our nation's birthday. And within 25 years of the founding of our nation, the trajectory of the nation started moving away from the foundations of the nation. The psalmist said, if the foundations falter, what will the righteous do? And that's a question we need to pay close attention to. As I begin this tonight, I want to remind you of what Paul said to the leaders of the churches in Ephesus in Acts chapter 20. Acts 20 28 to 31 Paul said therefore Take heed to yourselves or watch yourselves pay attention to yourselves talking to the leaders and to all the flock Among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers To shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood For I know this that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you not sparing the flocks Also from among yourselves men will rise up speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore watch and remember that for three years I did not cease to warn everyone night and day with tears. Part of the responsibility of every pastor is to give people not only the good news of the gospel and do the work of an evangelist but also at times to give people the bad news related to what is going on in the world around us and to warn people and to warn the sheep of the dangers and also to help the sheep and help all of us focus our attention where it should be which is on the Lord. We all know that we're living in an interesting time. that every day things happen. And more and more I hear people comment about how many things are going on in the world today. And the only point that I can compare it to perhaps is that time period in the 1930s when there was so much happening with Germany and with Japan and then with the beginning of World War II on September 1st, 1939. Of course, it had already been going on since the early 30s with Japan attacking Manchuria and into China. And so every day people just had to see what the news was, what had happened, what the battles were, who had won the battles. And many times there were battles that were lost. And like every war, there were dark times when it did not look like the allies would win, where everything was still in a state of suspense and there were terrible defeats that occurred on the battlefield. But God in His sovereignty and His providential care provided, guided, and directed the forces of the allies. So we know that we're involved in something today that is at least as bad, if probably much worse. Some people have called these the culture wars. And if you trace that back, these culture wars actually begin historically as far back as almost 200 years ago as there were various thinkers and atheists and others who were set against the kind of freedoms that we had in this country. They were small groups. They were unnoticed by many, many people. But some of the intellectuals that influenced those groups had their own disciples. And it went from generation to generation until by the turn of the century, a hundred years ago, they began to be more, their influence began to be felt more and more. And you had the first progressive president in Woodrow Wilson. You had the Federal Reserve Bank start. You had things that happened as a result of World War I that changed the culture. Most people go back to seeing changes that occurred in World War II, but actually a number of the social changes that changed, moving from the farm to the city, various women going to work in the workplace, all of that began not during World War II, but it began back in the period of World War I. Huge societal and cultural shifts took place And in the midst of those changes there were a lot of people who began to drift away from the roots of biblical Christianity in America. The fruit of 19th century Protestant liberalism that had basically rejected the inerrancy and fallibility and historicity of the Bible had really began to bear fruit in various seminaries denominations were splitting over these important issues. The liberals, the theological liberals usually won the battles in the denominations and they kept the seminaries and the colleges and the buildings and the money. And so fundamentalists, as they were called, had to start all over again. And so a lot of people are of the opinion that, well, they weren't heard from again until you have the moral majority with Jerry Falwell. But that's not true. They were very, very active in the 30s and in the 40s. In fact, many of the independent Bible churches that were developing at that time, some of the conservative denominations that started during that time, were warning the administration and warning others of the rise of anti-semitism in Europe and especially in Germany, the evils of what was happening in Germany from the late 20s on, and were already taking a stand to support the Jewish people and to try to get the immigration laws changed. But that's usually ignored by most historians and most history books. So by the time you come out of World War II, and you get into the 50s, that was a period of post-war prosperity. And then all of a sudden we hit all of the changes, cultural changes that happened in the 60s because really triggered by the Vietnam War. But actually, a lot of things that had transpired in the early 20th century that were in the classrooms, in the universities, in the seminaries, really began to bear fruit in the rebellion of the hippie generation in the 1960s. And so that has led to what people are calling now the culture wars. Some have called it the clash of civilizations. And so we all know very well that there are humans, human powers, that are very much against the Constitution, constitutional law. You have a vast number who have incredible financial resources, billions and billions of dollars of personal wealth that they are using to try to influence elections and influence judges and influence elected politicians. And they're very successful in many of those endeavors, along with individuals. You have their influence through multinational corporations. They have incredible power, which they are using to change the very foundations of Western civilization. Some of those enemies are outside of the church and outside of this country. Others are within this country. those that are outside of the church that seek to destroy Western civilization are pretty obvious to most of us. We can think of Russia and Turkey, Iran, China, and a number of lesser bad actors, but we know that there's a lot going on that we suspect, but we are not fully aware of. We know that we've been infiltrated by all manner of terrorists and bad actors through the open border policies of the last 20, 25 years. And so we are aware of certain physical enemies. But the most insidious enemy is a spiritual enemy. The problem that we have in terms of facing the spiritual shift that has occurred in this nation. Ephesians 6.12 tells us that we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age. Those three terms all relate to demonic powers. That we are living in the midst of the angelic revolt. That the affairs of human history have always been influenced to one degree or another by Satan and the fallen angels. And so we have these wars, Paul says, against principalities, powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. And so this is a major issue. The choice before us as a nation and as Western civilization is really a choice between one of quite a few competing pagan worldviews. We have the ecological worldviews, the religion of climate change, and ecology, and those roots, if you don't understand that they have deep religious roots in the pagan philosophies of Hegel and Marx and others coming out of the 19th century. Mark Musser has written extensively on this. And by the way, I would be in prayer for the Musser family as they live in Belarus and are ministering there. And right now there's a new law going into effect in Belarus that is written so generally that it opens the door to excessive abuse by the totalitarian government of Lukashenko there in Belarus. So the choices between these competing pagan worldviews which are really just different manifestations and facades of the same thing. It's either the worship of the Creator, Redeemer God of the Old Testament, of the Bible, or these pagan worldviews which all basically boils down to the same thing. As the Bible says, we're either worshiping the Creator or we're worshiping the creature. Today we want to worship nature, the environment, Gaia, Mother Earth. And we have political figures and we have many powerful, influential university leaders and technology leaders who are all promoting these things. And so this puts our culture in a position where you have to make hard choices that will really affect the rest of your life. Are you going to follow the way of the world or are you going to follow biblical thinking and stick to a worship of the creator God of the universe? Talking about paganism to define it, By paganism, we mean not simply the ancient worshippers of Baal, Thor, or Zeus, or the sky gods of the American Indians, but we believe to the entire set of beliefs that were part of these ancient systems. They all had the same basic beliefs. They just changed the names from one culture to another. But fundamentally, they denied the creator-creature distinction And once you do that, you are going to worship in one form or another the creation. They call it nature or the environment. But this is what's going on. And so there has to be a decision. And we have many political, powerful political figures who desire to basically function as a god. They want to rule over the culture just as the ancient pharaohs and Caesars did. In 1939, as World War II was beginning, and in the context of interacting with the pagan views of the National Socialist Workers' Party in Germany, known as the Nazis, T.S. Eliot, who later in life had become a Christian, and he wrote a book called The Idea of a Christian Society, in which he said that the choice before us is the creation of a new Christian culture and the acceptance of a pagan one. For him, he said, National Socialist Germany or Communist Russia is an abusive terms. We mean only that we have a society in which no one is penalized for the formal profession of Christianity. But he astutely recognized that we conceal from ourselves the unpleasant knowledge of the real values by which we live. He recognized that the West had a form of Christianity, a facade of Christianity. They used the language of Christianity, but they had already shifted to various forms of paganism. And for him, paganism imposes a moral relativism. So at the core of paganism is the idea that there's no absolutes, because if you remove the creator, you have no higher authority than the individual. And the individual makes up his own rules. And this is what he recognized. And when the individual is the one who determines right and wrong, the individual becomes his own god. And each one is determining what his vision for reality is. And so in sharp contrast, we have the foundational ideology which undergirds both the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And in those documents, they assert a creator-lawgiver who is the ultimate reference point for law and for all reality. In contrast today, our culture doesn't have an ultimate reference point. Our reference point is either whatever the majority wants, and the majority can often and is often wrong, or we just have our own authority. And so we have 360 some odd million people living in the United States, and so we have 360 million people competing with each other as to who is God. Sooner or later, that leads to anarchy. And the only solution to anarchy is the establishment of an absolute authority over the culture. That's what happened in the ancient world. That's what you had in Egypt. That's what you had in Mesopotamia. That's what you ultimately came to in Greece and in Rome as well. So we are left with this reality. We either choose the creator Redeemer God of the Bible, or the tyranny of creature dominion, creatures claiming divine prerogatives. In a recent book called Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, a Roman Catholic author who is one of the editors for the Federalist is John Daniel Davidson. If you want to read more and learn more, I recommend what he has said. I think it's his second chapter. For someone who is not out of an evangelical dispensationalist background, he has the best succinct chapter and explanation and understanding of the role of Satan and demons in the history of the world that I have read. it is biblically sound. And he traces it, and that's at the core, we know, of all paganism. John Idesmo, who is one of the adjunct faculty for Chafer Seminary and is a lawyer, and has spoken at Chafer Conference several years ago, wrote a book, I don't know, I've had this book, I think, since I graduated from seminary, called Christianity and the Constitution, The Faith of Our Founding Fathers. And he writes that the revolutionary principles of Republican liberty and self-government, taught and embodied in the system of Calvin, were brought to America. The vital relation of Calvin and Calvinism to the founding of the free institution of America, however strange that may sound in some ears, is recognized and affirmed by the historians of all lands and creeds. the vast majority of the early colonists, and by early colonists I mean those who came up through the end of the 1700s, had their background in various forms influenced by Calvinistic theology because of what had happened in England during the Reformation and in the 16th century when there would be persecution of the Puritans, persecution of various Protestants that weren't either not Roman Catholic in some of England's periods, or they weren't going to go along with the established religion of the Anglican church. And so when this persecution would arise their pastors, if they were able, left and went to seminary basically in Calvin's Geneva. And they brought back these very good ideas about the roles of the rulers of this world. And federalism was very much a product of that. And so it deeply influenced not only Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, who was reared as a Puritan, but it also influenced the Founding Fathers to a large degree. In the early 80s, There was a 10-year study done, actually it started in the 70s, by Donald Lutz, who at the time was a professor of political science at the University of Houston. And so they did a study where they took a large number of documents, I think it was around 15,000 different documents, including diaries, political speeches, letters, that were written by the leading founding fathers from about, covering a period from 1765 or 70 up through about 1810. And so they analyzed these looking for places where they actually cited a source for their ideas. And what they determined was that 34% of the citations were from the Bible. Most of them were from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. And 1 Samuel, eight passages that deal with the political makeup of the Jewish theocratic republic. So you had 34% came from the Bible, 22% from the Enlightenment, primarily from John Locke. But most of the quotes that they cited were basically paraphrases of Biblical verses. So you can say that probably 70% of those 22% were basically restatements of Biblical teaching. The Whigs, who were Scottish Presbyterians, were quoted 18%. And their ideas were biblical. English common law, since the time of Alfred the Great, had developed these ideas. And that came from the Bible. A lot of people don't know much about English history, but Alfred the Great, who was around the 10th century, translated the Psalms from Hebrew into English. He translated Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy into English. Middle English at that time, or Anglo-Saxon, and so 11% came out of English common law. 9% were classical authors, ancient classical authors, 4% quotes from peers, and 2% from others. So the primary influence on the founding fathers, whether they were personally saved or regenerated or not, They had a belief that the Bible was God's Word to some degree, most of them to a great degree. They respected the Bible. They got their ideas from the Bible. They held to a Judeo-Christian worldview. Some of them may or may not have actually been regenerate, but that doesn't matter. Their ideas came out of the Bible. And so this is why we say that America was founded, and I have many quotes that I've used in past presentations, that even John Jay, who was one of the first Supreme Court justices, said that America was a Christian nation. He didn't mean that America as a nation was regenerated. He didn't mean that everybody in America was born again. or that everybody in America had orthodox theology. He meant that the framework, the worldview of the founding fathers was a Judeo-Christian worldview. It was rooted in the Bible. And we see this in the ideas that are present in both the Declaration and in the Constitution. There's the sanctity and significance of human life. There's the sanctity and significance of the individual. the importance of individual liberty, especially in relationship to God. But from this, they develop the thinking of individual rights that everybody has. So when you hear people today talk about their individual rights, they talk about justice, they talk about what's right and what's wrong, They're stealing all those terms from Christianity and giving them new definitions. Social justice. Where do they get the ideas of justice if everybody does what's right in their own eyes? There's no external absolute. It's all relativism. And so this is all related to their understanding that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God and therefore has value whether they are a slave or whether they are a free man, whether they are a common laborer, or whether they are an aristocrat. They are all equal before the law and equal before God. And this became the foundation for freedoms that we have enshrined in the Bill of Rights, freedoms of speech, assembly, worship, which was in stark contrast to the history of civilizations among pagan cultures. In pagan cultures, might made right, even in many so-called Christian cultures of the Middle Ages that did not have a a firm biblical foundation thought that, I mean, that was the big issue with the steward kings in England, the divine right of the monarchy. James VI of Scotland became James I of England and his son was Charles I and he absolutely said he had authority over everything because he was the king appointed by God and that led to the revolution from Cromwell and the Puritans And Charles lost his head over the whole thing. And that led to a period called the Protectorate in England. But it was during that time that you had tremendous, tremendous thoughts develop on the nature of government biblically and the nature of freedom and the limitation of the authority of the king. And one of the greatest Puritan thinkers of that time was a man named Samuel Rutherford, who wrote a tome called Lex Rex, which means it's Latin for the law is king. Up to that point, the king is the law. But they recognize the importance, and this lays a foundation in our history that law, we live by the rule of law and not by the rule of men. So we have, because of this, Christian verbiage in the Declaration of Independence. the terms laws of nature and nature's God. And so people who are anti-christian and don't know anything about theology or Christianity and are teaching your children and your grandchildren and probably taught you in college and in high school said, oh, these were enlightenment terms. These are impersonal terms. And it just shows that they were deists. You know, I have several words to describe that, none of which should be used in polite company. because that's not true. The eras that we're talking about, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, were very formal times. Men and women who were married referred to each other as Mr. Washington and Mrs. Washington, even in private. They were very formal. The way they addressed and talked about God was very formal. We live in a culture since the 50s where we've become more and more informal. Many people don't even understand the role of different titles that people have. They don't know what they mean, and they forget to use them, and they're too informal. So this is a real problem that we have. But if you trace the usage of these phrases, laws of nature, nature's God, they have their roots back in the Middle Ages even before the Protestant Reformation. The laws of nature are the laws that God the Creator built into His creation. And He's the Creator God, that's what nature's God meant. These are not impersonal non-Christian terms. They said that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. They believed in creation. They were not yet influenced by evolutionary ideas. They believed God created everything in the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them. And so our rights came because we were created in the image and likeness of God. They said that governments are instituted among men. Well, who institutes them? That comes from God. They understood divine institution number four, human government. It says, organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. That's using the same ideas that are present in 1 Timothy 2 that we're to pray for kings and all who are in authority that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life. That's the role of government. So that we can live a quiet and peaceable life And in paganism, life was horrific. You couldn't depend on it. You never knew what the various chieftains' power lust would bring about. It was horrific. Go back and watch some of these miniseries that they have on Netflix and on other channels about the Vikings. They're pretty accurate in their history. This was a horrific time to live. They were brutal. They had no authority other than the authority of brute force. And that was typical of all paganism. But going back for centuries, back before Christ, but what changed everything, what changed everything was a recognition of the Creator, Redeemer, God, first from the Old Testament and then from Christianity. So also the declaration says they are appealing to the supreme judge of the world. That there is a personal judge who will hold us all accountable. And that is God. So these are all solid ideas coming out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. Now an important passage to understand is found in Jeremiah chapter 17. This is very important for today because we have We have people who look to human beings and our institutions as the ultimate solution to our political problems. But we have political problems because we have spiritual problems. They look to the Supreme Court for solutions. Many conservatives were so thankful because President Trump was able to appoint conservatives. But how many of those conservatives have voted in ways that disappointed you in the last four, five, or six years? We cannot look to the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter and solution to the problems in America. In an article that came out not too long ago, John Davidson, who is, I mentioned him a minute ago, he wrote this in The Federalist, He said one example of this is in the 6-3 ruling in Murphy v. Missouri last week, I think it was June 26, just last week, which ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing and because the Biden White House allegedly backed off of its censorship campaign, what he's referring to is that during the 2020 election and 22 election, The Democrats were intimidating or working in collusion with those who ran all of the social media apps that were out there and preventing anyone from posting any accurate news about COVID or about politics or anything else. And so you had this collusion going on between the media and technology and the White House that was preventing free speech. And so they, in Murphy v. Missouri, they said that the plaintiffs lack standing and so nothing has been done about this. So when we enter into this election cycle in 2024, We're not going to see any change take place in terms of the collusion of the Democrat Party with the social media platforms. Trump is something else. There's much that he can do. Some things he did very well. Some things he promises to do. But there are some serious problems with Donald Trump's political philosophy. and some of his views. For one thing, he is very sympathetic to the LGBTQ movement. So he violates the Second Divine Institution, which means you also necessarily have problems being consistent with the Third Divine Institution. There are other problems. A lot of people have forgotten this, but when COVID hit, which was in, really began, it hit in January of 2020, Who was the president? It was Donald Trump. He was the one who initially put lockdowns and also gave every family, every individual in America $2,000. You want to know where our modern inflation started? I mean, President Biden just exacerbated it with a lot more spending. But what causes inflation is just printing more and more money and throwing it at people. there's more money in circulation, then the prices are going to go up because more money, it has less value. And so Trump gave away a lot of money. There were things that he did that were definitely wrong and that took power away from individual liberties. And so what we see is that due to the impact of progressivism and relativism in the 19th century and the development of a postmodern worldview, every facet of government, all the minions of the bureaucracy, are simply foot soldiers for the promotion of progressivism, which is anti-constitutional. It is against the worldview that undergirds our concept of the rule of law and civilization. But sometimes we have to choose to vote for people because they're going to be less bad and less destructive than the other side. And that maybe they have a brain cell or two that actually recognizes each other. In Jeremiah 17, five and following, the Lord says this to Jeremiah. Now remember, this is a time that Jeremiah is writing Josiah's been the king. He's been a good king, but his father was Manasseh, who was the worst king, the most evil king. We'll talk about him in a minute. And so by God, because of Manasseh had already determined that Israel was so corrupt and had given themselves over so much to paganism and pagan thought, and they were worse than the Canaanites, that he had to bring harsh judgment upon them, as he had promised in the Mosaic Covenant. So this is what God says to Jeremiah, thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord. And we have to be very careful as we look upon political leaders that they're all corrupt sinners. Some of them are corrupt in many other ways, some not so much. But we cannot seek the solution in politics because the problem is a spiritual problem in this country. It is not a political problem. The vast majority of people in this country do not think in terms of a Judeo-Christian worldview anymore. They do not think in terms of spiritual absolutes or moral absolutes or legal absolutes. God goes on to say, describing the one who trusts in man, For he shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when good comes, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land which is not inhabited. Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh, and whose hope is the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, Now God is saying this to people who are worshippers of Yahweh. They're the minority in the pagan culture of Judea at this time. And God is saying that they're blessed even though they're about to be judged and even though they're surrounded by a pagan culture. And that's part of why we have hope. Our joy in the Lord, our sense of stability, our peace is not dependent on which party is in power or which individual is in the White House. And there are too many believers. I am good friends with a couple of guys that I've known since we were kids. And one of them is, I would say, a more knowledgeable, mature believer. The other one, not so much, but he's a strong believer and strong conservative. And just last night he said, I've got to quit watching all this stuff on the news. It's just driving me crazy. I want to be put to sleep for six months so that I can wake up after this election is over with. And I immediately texted to him 1 Peter 5, 7, and Philippians 4, 5, and 6, and three or four passages from Daniel. Four times Daniel says that the Most High God rules in the affairs of men and He raises up kings and He brings down kings so that when we end up with a president like the one that we have, this is God's will. He worked through the system and He has brought this evil to us as judgment. That's Romans 1, God completely turning the culture over because that's what they deserve. But God says for the believers, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord even when everything looks bad. And remember, these are the people that are going to be there when Nebuchadnezzar comes in 586 and levels Jerusalem, destroys the city, destroys the temple, and drags most of the Jews back as prisoners to Babylon. And many fled and they went to Egypt, so there weren't that many that were left. And we'll come back to that scenario. But God says they're blessed if they trust in the Lord. Because sometimes trusting in the Lord means you're going to go through some difficult times because of various reasons that aren't related to you. for he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, even when there's a desert around you, which spreads out its root by the river and will not fear when heat comes, but its leaf will be green and will not be anxious in the year of drought. Nor will he cease from yielding fruit. And then Jeremiah says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Now you've heard me quote that verse many times. You need to see the next verse. I, the Lord, search the heart. See, who knows the heart among the creatures? No one. But the Lord searches the heart. I test the mind even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings. So God is saying here that I understand what everybody did. I know the thoughts in their heart. And there will be accountability and there will be a judgment. And as R.G. Lee famously said in a sermon a hundred years ago, there'll be payday someday. So we need to understand the biblical philosophy of history. And we need to learn to look at what is going on within this biblical framework. So in the biblical philosophy of history, we need to understand that human history It's the outworking of the plan of the Creator God, the Creator Redeemer God of the universe, that He's in charge. That doesn't mean He micromanages every decision that every person makes, but He works things together for good, and He is leading human history to His ultimate goal of glorification and the establishment of the messianic kingdom and then on into heaven. But there's been a problem. Point two, in eternity past, there was a rebellion of the angels led by Hillel Ben-Shahar, who is usually known as Lucifer, now as Satan. And he seeks to subvert the allegiance of the human race to the Creator God, Creator Redeemer God of the universe. And what we see through the dispensations is continuous demonic attacks. I want you to just think your way through the Bible with me for a minute. Think about what happens between the fall of Adam and the Noahic flood. There's no institution of government, you just have the authority within the family, the patriarchal authority. There are a few that are mentioned in the genealogy of Genesis chapter 5 that are very positive towards God. You have Enoch who is so close to God that he walks with Him. I think this is not metaphorical, this is literal because God is still on the planet. And he walks with God and one day he just walks with God right into heaven. He was a godly man according to Hebrews. He was a prophet. So you have men like that. But the vast majority of human beings became so evil And then you have the intrusion of these sons of God, these demons, these fallen angels who Jude says left their first estate, which basically means they gave up their angelic bodies to take on a human body so that they could have sexual relations with the daughters of men. And they had a hybrid race. And it became even more evil, so evil that if you can imagine All of the horrors under the Ayatollahs in Iran. All of the horrors under Stalin in Russia. All of the horrors under Mao Zedong in China. Those would have been good situations compared to what was going on before the flood. It was horrific. It was so bad that God had to destroy everyone except for the eight that were on the ark. It was horrific. That's what paganism produces. It produces chaos, destruction, and it creates wars and violence and all manner of horrific atrocities. And so we go through these demonic attacks in history of the sons of God in Genesis 6. We see their involvement with the Canaanites. And all of these religious gods that they worshiped, Deuteronomy 32, 17 says basically they're worshiping demons. It was all demonically inspired. And so God brought judgment on them and God wanted to completely eradicate their culture to protect Israel. And then you have the judgments that God brought on Israel and Judah because they compromised, abandoned God and went along with the Canaanites, got sucked into their religious thinking. They were moral relativists. Judges describes it. It's a horrible time. Everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes. And so we go from those judgments to the cross, where the Son of God is rejected by his people and he is nailed to the cross. But it fulfills God's plan. They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. and Christ died and paid the penalty for sin. And on through the church age and into the future tribulation and then the great white throne judgment. It's all part, it's all influenced. All of human history must be understood to be influenced by these demonic powers. You can think of the brutal cannibalism and brutal atrocities of the Aztecs and the Inca down in Peru. You can think about the horrific atrocities of the Comanches and the Apaches and the Iroquois and the Shoshone and other American tribes. And over in Europe you have the Vikings and before them you had the various barbaric Germanic tribes. And all of this is the result of the worship of the same gods and goddesses that are just the front camouflage for these demonic forces. Deuteronomy 32, 17, God indicts the Canaanites and he says, they sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they did not know. to new gods, new arrivals that your fathers did not fear. And then Moses is talking, this is his parting words, then he indicts ancient Israel. He says, and it's an indictment for us, he says, but of the rock who begot you, speaking of Yahweh, of the rock who begot you, you are unmindful. You've forgotten God. You don't think about him. He is not a factor in your decision-making process as you go through the day. You've separated your work life like any other secular person and you don't ever think about God in the work that you're doing. Of the rock who begot you, you are unmindful and you've forgotten the God who fathered you. In Ancient Paganism, this is a great article. It's written by Andrew Doran who is an Israeli scholar. published this in a periodical called The European Conservative. The article is entitled, Civilization is from the Jews. And I just had to quote several paragraphs from it. He said, All early people sacrificed human beings. Human sacrifice was normative in almost every culture outside of Israel. He says, one has only to remember Agamemnon's sacrifice to angry Artemis of the most beautiful thing he possessed, his daughter Epigenia. But this was a story of the Greek Iron Age, no more present to the Romanized world into which Patrick, St. Patrick of Ireland, was born than public executions are to ours. For us, it is a strain to find any surviving elements of sacrifice. We have cut flowers, Christmas trees, vigil lights, and the mass may be the last vestiges, but in the Roman world animal sacrifices were still offered. He goes on to say most will agree that civilized behavior at a minimum consists of abstaining from ritualistic torture, rape, sexual mutilation, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and related conduct. All of which describes what Hamas did. and worse. We're circling the drain. Yet for most of human history such conduct was normative and often sacralized. It became part of their religious worship. Habits of ritual violence and scapegoating to satisfy bloodlust and communal anxiety were ubiquitous. The myth of the noble savage, that goes back to Rousseau, the French Revolution. And many people idolize those who go back to nature and live simply. But as Doron says, this was the myth of the noble savage. It somehow survives despite the mounting evidence. In truth, there is nothing noble in our origins, only savagery. And the primary reason few of us have encountered such savagery is the spread of the Abrahamic religions. And I would restrict that just to Christianity and Jews, not to Islam. They are just as savage and brutal. He says human sacrifice was a near universal practice in primitive pagan societies, even among sophisticated pagans. Greeks had elaborate religious rituals for killing their pharmakoi, the scapegoats. Romans buried sacrificial victims alive in religious rituals to spare Rome from enemies like the Carthaginians. And though human sacrifice was later banned, Crucifixion, mass executions, and murderous entertainment continued until banished in the Christian era. The Carthaginians, like their Phoenician and Canaanite ancestors, sacrificed their own children as did many Mediterranean peoples. Aztec, Maya, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian civilizations all had rituals for human sacrifice. Ritualistic violence among low pagans was less well documented but often more horrific. Christians from the medieval to modern eras, travelers like Ahmad ibn Thadlin and Samuel de Champlain, and missionaries all personally witnessed the ritualized torture, murder, and cannibalism from North America to Northern Europe and Asia, Celtic and Baltic, Germanic and Anglo, Comanche and Guanche. More peoples partook than can be numbered because most have gone extinct. Ritualistic barbarity, was universal. You weren't taught that in world history, were you? So what changed the world? First of all, in the ancient world you had the values of the Mosaic Law. Israel was supposed to be a light to the nations. And they had laws that preserved individual dignity. Laws that even though they they had slaves, the slaves were protected in ways that they weren't in any other culture in the ancient world. And then you had Christianity come along and Christianity had a tremendous impact and it transformed the cultures of ancient Gaul, of the Visigoths in Spain and the Germanic tribes and the Slavic tribes, and there's tribes in the Scandinavian countries, and you had missionaries that took the gospel to those nations, and it transformed them, because that's what Christianity does. Paganism doesn't do that. If we continue our path, that's where we're headed. In the ancient world, when Israel succumbed to paganism, worse than the Canaanites, God punished them, as he had the Canaanites. Here is just a passage from 2 Kings 21-2 talking about Manasseh, the worst, most evil king Judah had. He did evil in the sight of the Lord according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. Who were they? Those are the Canaanite nations. God had to judge them, and his judgment was they needed to be annihilated, every man, woman, and child, so that the Israelites could survive and bring a biblical culture, a qualitatively different culture, into the world. If they had not done that, they would have disappeared and been totally assimilated. He rebuilt the high places. He had all the sacrifices, all the ritual, fertility religions. Verse 5 says he built altars for all the hosts of heaven. So that's for all the fallen angels. They're worshiping all the demons. He made his son pass through the fire. Child sacrifice in order to placate Baal or Chemosh or Molech. and he did evil in the sight of the Lord. Notice when you read through the Old Testament, whenever the Old Testament says that they did evil in the sight of the Lord, it's not talking about, well, they told lies and they were a fraud. It's talking about idolatry. Almost every single time it's a reference to violating the Mosaic Law and the covenant with God and worshiping idols. But, verse 9, they paid no attention, and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel. So God spoke by his servants the prophet, because Manasseh, king of Judah, has done all these things, all these abominations. Therefore, thus said the Lord, behold, I am bringing such a calamity upon Jerusalem and Judah that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle, and I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab the king in the north." Ahab and Jezebel were destroyed. Jerusalem is one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. And that's what happened. God will punish nations that turn against him and go into this raw demonism of paganism and earth worship religion, climate religion. In Jeremiah 18.1, God's going to give Jeremiah an important lesson. We often hear people, Christians, quote from 2 Corinthians, I mean, excuse me, 2 Chronicles 7.14. 2 Chronicles 7.14 is a specific answer to the prayer of Solomon's dedication of the temple. It has no application to anybody else. But this is the passage that does. This states the principle. So he's going to give Jeremiah an object lesson. He sends him down to the potter's house and so he goes down, in verse 3, he goes down to the potter's house and the potter's making something. Verse 4, the vessel that he made of clay was marred and the hand of the potter. So he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. So God's going to build an analogy off of this. It's not Calvinistic determinism, because he's not talking about individuals. He's talking about how God is going to use nations in history. And so God says, O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter? You know, the potter said, well, this didn't turn out real well. I need to remake it. Look, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. He's not talking about individual salvation or damnation. The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if I say I'm going to judge this nation and that nation against whom I've spoken turns from their evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. That's the hope of America. is that if we turn back to God, God will relent and we will not experience the judgment that we're rushing toward. Verse 9, and the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to build and to plant it, if it does evil, in other words, if I'm going to bless it and then it turns and does evil in my sight so that it does not obey my voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I would benefit it. Now, therefore, he says to Jeremiah, Speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, Thus says the Lord, Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now every one from his own evil way." God's constantly extending grace to this rebellious nation, idol worshipers. We're in the same battle for the soul of our nation. So what can we do about it? How do we handle this? Well, first of all, we need to focus on the spiritual priorities that God has given us. We have to go to Ephesians 6, 13 and following. Therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day. We have no idea. We've had some evil days. Everybody here has had some evil days. But there may be worse evil days coming. How do you stand? And remember, it's to stand. We're fighting ultimately not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. And we are to stand. We are to stand firm on the Bible. It's not our job to go punch the devil in the nose. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying always with all prayer and supplication by means of the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance, hanging in there, enduring tough times, and supplication for all the saints. So we're in this battle for the soul of the nation. The first thing we're to do is to pray. We have to pray. We have to build that relationship with God to pray not only for others, but to pray that God would strengthen us to do the right thing. And the only way we're going to know the right thing is to get into the Word and to internalize the Word. We have to internalize the word, memorize the word, apply scripture, and we need to teach our children and our grandchildren. Proverbs 22.6, train up a child in the way they should go, and when they grow up, they will not depart. What we learn from this passage is only the full armor of God can protect us. It's not going to be education. It's not going to be your 401k plan. It's not going to be your job. It's not going to be your friends. It's going to be the Word of God, the full armor of God. Second, only the full armor of God is sufficient. It can handle any problem. There's no problem that's going to come up that God hasn't prepared us for. This armor includes truth in two forms. The Living Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who said, I am the truth. Second, the written Word of God. Jesus prayed to the Father, Thy Word is truth. And here it is called the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. We put on the breastplate of righteousness. The moment we trust Christ, we are given the righteousness of Christ. That's our imputed righteousness. We have the gospel of peace, thus we stand on, the gospel of peace is what's on our feet. We stand on the good news of Christ's death for us and this provides us with confidence and certainty in the midst of persecution and oppression. This provides us with the salvation that is also identified as the Christian soldier's helmet. The shield of faith, faith in God's promises, we have to memorize scripture, memorize the promises of God and claim them. And the helmet of salvation, with all things we are to then pray toward the end of endurance, being strengthened to stand firm against all that the devil throws at us. That is what we do. A practical thing, get involved in your community. This is really just get to know people around. some of the things that you can do and I've talked about this in the past you know my wife and I joined APAC many years ago just when I think we're still in Connecticut and we did that just so we could find out information about what's going on in the Middle East and through that we have met all kinds of unbelievers and we've given the gospel to all kinds of unbelievers along the way as they've asked us or it's come up in conversation And we have learned a lot of information that is not necessarily available in any of the media that most people hear. Another thing that we've done is just in local politics. Four or five years ago, we had the opportunity because nobody goes to your precinct meetings, so your precinct may be entitled to send Send maybe 25 or 30 people to the next level meeting to the meeting of the Senate districts and five people show up so they all get to go and Anybody else that wants to go so we got to go and we went up there But I had to go to I was going to Israel that year. So I couldn't go to the state convention But through that I've gotten to know our precinct chairman. Do you know who your precinct chairman is? Have you ever talked to them? Have you ever asked them, what can I do? It's an election year. I've taken a couple of men in the church and one of them brought their son and we went knocking on doors. Now you go, what are the people going to say? Everybody on the list has voted Republican at some point in the past. You're knocking on the, you just want to get, encourage them to get out and vote. Don't stay home. Don't miss the election. And that's important. It's a numbers game. The more people that we can get out to vote, the better it's going to be. So get to know your precinct chairman. And we've been invited to all kinds of meetings over at her house where we've met all the different people running for office. And we've had conversations with them. I've invited some of them to come and speak to the men's prayer group. It's just opened up a lot of doors. But you have to be involved. You can't just sit back and take care of your hobbies and come to Bible class and watch the world go to hell in a handbasket. We have a responsibility given to us by the fact that we are a citizen of this nation. And part of that is to help preserve this nation as the founders intended it. So there's a lot of things. And look at some of the successes we've had recently. For example, just in the last month, we had the election to replace two members of the Harris County Appraisal District. And they won by almost a two-to-one margin. And many of the churches, I know that First Baptist, Second Baptist, many other churches really got the vote out. And it was overwhelming. And so we elected two good conservative Christians to the Harris County Appraisal District. And in the last five or six years, I think we've elected about four good conservative Christians to the Spring Branch School District Board. These things are important. And if Christians aren't involved, then whose fault is it? People who know the truth need to exercise the truth and be involved. And there's a lot more. You never know what kind of doors are going to open if you don't get out of your house meet some of these people and get involved. We have two possibilities in the future. Possibility number one is that God will hear our plans and begin to transform our nation. But faith only comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Nothing else will do. Without a spiritual transformation everything else is just putting a band-aid on a wound that is bleeding profusely. So we need to be involved and the word has to get out there and people need to understand the truth. We have to be involved in evangelism and we have to be involved in just encouraging people we know to go to a Bible teaching church. The second option is that the trajectory continues as it has for the last 225 years and the nation will destroy itself from within. We lose our freedoms, our families, our wealth, our security, our homes, and our dreams. Those are the options. Now we go to Lamentations chapter 3. You've got to get the setting here. Jeremiah for the last 20 years has been warning the people of exactly what has happened. That they're going to be destroyed by Babylon and that the temple will be destroyed and they're going to be taken to a foreign land. where they won't know anything or know anybody or know the language. And he's having a pity party. He's up on the Mount of Olives. He's overlooking the smoldering ruins of Jerusalem. And he says, I'm the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light. He's blaming God. Surely he has turned my hand against me time and again throughout the day. He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones. He's besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe. He set me in dark places like the dead of long ago. He's hedged me in so that I cannot get out. He's made my chain heavy. Even when I cry and shout, he shuts out my prayer. He has blocked my ways with hewn stones. He's made my paths crooked. He has been to me a bear lying in wait like a lion in ambush. He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces. He's made me desolate. He's having a pity party. But what happens? His thinking shifts. He gets his eyes off the calamity and onto the God who prepared him for it. He said my soul still remembers and sinks within me. This I recall to mind." That's the change. This I recall to mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. See, we don't need to get our eyes on how things may fall apart because God's still in control and our hope needs to be in the Lord. The Lord is my portion, therefore I hope in Him. The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation, for the deliverance of the Lord. We need to have hope. A message like this, you can take it as a downer. It's not meant for that. We have to have a realistic view of where we are and where we're going unless things change. And it's not pretty. But our hope should be in the Lord. So I want us, everybody's kind of scattered, I want us to come down by the piano, everybody, and Hedy's going to get on the piano, Alan's going to lead us, and we're going to sing, My Hope is in the Lord, and then I'll close in prayer. Okay? So everybody get up and move down by the piano. What's the hymn number? 406, bring your handbook. 406. Amazing the Lord, who gave Himself for me. And lay the price of all my sin at Calvary. He died for me. And everlasting life and life free begins. Oh Mary of my own, is anger to suppress. My only hope is found in Jesus' righteousness. For me, he died. And now for me he stands, before the Father's throne. He chose his own defense and gives me as his own. For me, he does not fear. is he Father we thank you that you are our hope we have confident expectation of the future we have a mission we have been placed on the earth for to be a light in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation and that's not something passive that is something active as we our active witnesses to your grace, your goodness, to the truth of your word, and that we are to have an impact upon the culture around us. And so, Father, we pray that you would give us opportunities, give us openings, give us the courage, the strength, and the endurance to stand firm no matter what may come. Whether you turn things around or whether things continue to go down, We are to stand fast and have our hope in you and nothing else. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.