Transcript: Episode 0014

“The Enemy’s Playbook”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.

WEBVTT

00:00:00 – 00:00:25:	Take it easy guys!

00:00:25 – 00:00:44:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Moller and I'm well. Today we're going to be talking about

00:00:44 – 00:00:52:	Satan's playbook. We're going to discuss the strategies that are used in this world

00:00:52 – 00:00:58:	across the board and in all the various realms of life that seem to keep coming up over and over again.

00:00:58 – 00:01:04:	We see these patterns repeated so often that at some point you have to recognize the pattern

00:01:04 – 00:01:10:	and realize as Corey has said in past episodes there's clearly an animating intelligence behind what's going on.

00:01:10 – 00:01:16:	The consistency and the precision with which certain strategies are employed

00:01:16 – 00:01:23:	it's more than can be believed from just normal conscious people doing what they feel like doing in the moment.

00:01:23 – 00:01:32:	So today we're going to be talking about a few of the strategies that are used by evil, by Satan in the world,

00:01:32 – 00:01:37:	both in what we call the political realm, the left hand kingdom and in the church.

00:01:37 – 00:01:42:	And there are two initial points that I want to make before we get into it.

00:01:42 – 00:01:46:	One, again we're talking about Satan and we're going to be talking about demons.

00:01:46 – 00:01:53:	And that is strident to speak in such terms is inherently polarizing.

00:01:53 – 00:02:01:	It makes people uncomfortable. The fact that we would be talking about over evil as having an animating intelligence behind it.

00:02:01 – 00:02:03:	It's not something that people want to think about.

00:02:03 – 00:02:08:	So I want to make a clear up front that this is not something that we spend a lot of time thinking about.

00:02:08 – 00:02:12:	It's not what we think the Christian life is.

00:02:12 – 00:02:19:	But Scripture warns that Satan prowls as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

00:02:19 – 00:02:27:	And if there's a lion in the woods or in the jungle or the Paul grass, wherever your local floor is like,

00:02:27 – 00:02:30:	you want to know he's there and you want to know where he is.

00:02:30 – 00:02:32:	And so that requires consciousness.

00:02:32 – 00:02:38:	You must be aware of the enemy and of the manner in which it's seeking to devour you.

00:02:38 – 00:02:40:	So that's why we're talking about it.

00:02:40 – 00:02:44:	It's not to be dramatic and it's not to name call.

00:02:44 – 00:02:52:	We're going to talk some in this about demons and about the voice of demons animating certain conversations in the church,

00:02:52 – 00:02:55:	which again seems very confrontational.

00:02:55 – 00:02:58:	We're not doing it to be dramatic or to be name calling.

00:02:58 – 00:03:03:	That's the chief thing that we hope will be believed when we're discussing this.

00:03:03 – 00:03:08:	When Cory and I say this is demonic, it is in light of 1 Timothy 4,

00:03:08 – 00:03:14:	which as we've said before, sets the bar for teachings of demons as incredibly low.

00:03:14 – 00:03:23:	It's not that only the very most central tenets of theology can possibly be attacked by Satan.

00:03:23 – 00:03:28:	He who is the father of lies will use any lie he can get to you with.

00:03:28 – 00:03:35:	And so when we talk about these things in terms of evil and in terms of the demonic,

00:03:35 – 00:03:36:	it's deliberate.

00:03:36 – 00:03:44:	We're deliberately shining a bright light on areas where frankly evil has been permitted to maneuver in the dark.

00:03:44 – 00:03:50:	And so this episode today is to help people learn how can you identify when evil is maneuvering?

00:03:50 – 00:03:53:	Because as we said, there's a playbook.

00:03:53 – 00:03:56:	There are patterns of play out over and over.

00:03:56 – 00:04:03:	And the intelligent honest Christian at some point must acknowledge what's going on here is not a coincidence.

00:04:03 – 00:04:10:	The fact that the same thing that happened to what became public schools in the 19th century

00:04:10 – 00:04:19:	is today culminating in the absolute destruction of human bodies and minds and souls in the 21st is not a coincidence.

00:04:19 – 00:04:24:	And the fact that Christian schools even are the same thing except in slow motion.

00:04:24 – 00:04:28:	They're 20 years behind, but they're following the same path.

00:04:28 – 00:04:30:	That's not a coincidence.

00:04:30 – 00:04:37:	So we're going to give an overview of kind of three main categories of attack that Satan uses.

00:04:37 – 00:04:42:	And then we're going to give some specific examples from the Missouri Synod recently

00:04:42 – 00:04:50:	where the newly annotated and released large cataclysm, which almost refer to as the large cataclysm,

00:04:50 – 00:04:52:	because that's really what it is.

00:04:52 – 00:04:59:	How the strategies that we're going to describe up front were played out in particular in that scenario.

00:04:59 – 00:05:06:	Not to say that it is special, but just to give a recent current example of how these overall strategies play out.

00:05:06 – 00:05:13:	So the three tools that we're going to focus on principally are the long march through the institutions.

00:05:13 – 00:05:17:	This is something that originated obviously in the political realm.

00:05:17 – 00:05:21:	China today has an ICBM called Long March.

00:05:21 – 00:05:26:	Someday ICBM's name Long March may well land in North America.

00:05:26 – 00:05:32:	So it's very important in communism that that is a tool that they love and that they celebrate.

00:05:32 – 00:05:38:	And it's something that's been successfully employed on our shores again for nearly two centuries now.

00:05:38 – 00:05:43:	And it's being employed in the past century very effectively in our own churches.

00:05:43 – 00:05:49:	So the march through the institutions co-opting them, turning the things that were trained to trust,

00:05:49 – 00:05:52:	into things that are used against us.

00:05:52 – 00:05:57:	Then the second phase, we're going to be talking about once those people are in those positions of power,

00:05:57 – 00:06:00:	what do they say when someone objects to something they're doing?

00:06:00 – 00:06:02:	We're just being reasonable.

00:06:02 – 00:06:05:	Why are you guys so mad? You don't understand.

00:06:05 – 00:06:07:	You're confused by the words that we're using.

00:06:07 – 00:06:10:	But what we're doing is just like what we've always done.

00:06:10 – 00:06:13:	Sure, it sounds a little bit different because it's modern.

00:06:13 – 00:06:17:	We're dealing with the modern world, so we have to use these modern ideas.

00:06:17 – 00:06:21:	Again, that is the second key element of Satan's playbook.

00:06:21 – 00:06:24:	Once he gets the institution, he changes how it talks.

00:06:24 – 00:06:28:	And it says, look, what we're doing is what we've always done.

00:06:28 – 00:06:29:	And we're being reasonable.

00:06:29 – 00:06:34:	And if you get mad at what we're doing, if you don't like it, you're unreasonable.

00:06:34 – 00:06:36:	We'll talk about how that plays out.

00:06:36 – 00:06:43:	And third, we'll talk about when they get past the point of accusing those who object of unreasonableness,

00:06:43 – 00:06:48:	they employ Alinsky's 13 rules, the rules for radicals from Saul Alinsky,

00:06:48 – 00:06:52:	who dedicated his book by that name to Satan,

00:06:52 – 00:06:56:	to me called the first rebel, the great rebel, which is true.

00:06:56 – 00:06:58:	And that was his hero.

00:06:58 – 00:07:02:	And so we're not making a stretch by saying this is Satan's playbook

00:07:02 – 00:07:06:	when one of the men involved in writing it gave him credit.

00:07:06 – 00:07:12:	So the reason that the rules for radicals are important is that

00:07:12 – 00:07:16:	that is when institutional power, which is a Marxist term,

00:07:16 – 00:07:18:	but you can't avoid using some of them,

00:07:18 – 00:07:27:	when the power that exists over structures that we believe are for our own benefit,

00:07:27 – 00:07:33:	when it is used against those underneath, it's used to single out, to pick off, to isolate,

00:07:33 – 00:07:39:	and to delegitimize so that it's not a question of what someone is saying

00:07:39 – 00:07:43:	in opposition to the now co-opted power structure.

00:07:43 – 00:07:47:	But it's a question of, well, you can't like or trust that person at all

00:07:47 – 00:07:53:	because they possess X, Y, and Z, unacceptable characteristics.

00:07:53 – 00:07:56:	You know, it's their mean, they're hateful, the racist, whatever.

00:07:56 – 00:08:01:	You know all the words that are used, they're killing words to eliminate people from conversation.

00:08:01 – 00:08:04:	So that's going to be the basic structure of this episode.

00:08:04 – 00:08:09:	So to begin, let's talk about the long march through the institutions.

00:08:09 – 00:08:12:	So the long march through the institutions.

00:08:12 – 00:08:16:	Essentially, the name really tells you exactly what they're doing.

00:08:16 – 00:08:21:	The goal is to capture existing institutions and then wear them as a skin suit.

00:08:21 – 00:08:26:	And the reason you wear them as a skin suit is then you can take the legitimacy

00:08:26 – 00:08:31:	and the influence that institution had from what it used to be

00:08:31 – 00:08:33:	and wield that for yourself.

00:08:33 – 00:08:35:	And that's how you can change what the institution says.

00:08:35 – 00:08:40:	And the gravitas, the influence of that institution remains

00:08:40 – 00:08:43:	because people don't update their mental frame quickly enough.

00:08:43 – 00:08:45:	They don't realize this has been co-opted.

00:08:45 – 00:08:47:	And so I shouldn't listen to it anymore.

00:08:47 – 00:08:54:	They look at it and say, this is an institution that has been trusted for 100, 200, 300.

00:08:54 – 00:08:56:	However many years it's been trusted.

00:08:56 – 00:08:59:	And so what it's saying must carry some weight.

00:08:59 – 00:09:03:	But what they don't realize that the institution has been co-opted.

00:09:03 – 00:09:09:	And how this is typically done is through the building of small networks that become larger networks.

00:09:09 – 00:09:13:	So one Marxist gets hired somewhere.

00:09:13 – 00:09:18:	Of course, the best place to get hired is HR or the hiring department,

00:09:18 – 00:09:21:	whatever it used to be, today it would be HR.

00:09:21 – 00:09:24:	Because then you can hire all your friends.

00:09:24 – 00:09:30:	And you have significantly more power with each additional individual you hire.

00:09:31 – 00:09:35:	Because now it's not just me, it's this panel made the decision

00:09:35 – 00:09:39:	or this board made the decision or this person signed off on it.

00:09:39 – 00:09:43:	And so you slowly hollow out the institution and fill it with your own people

00:09:43 – 00:09:48:	until it is 100% in opposition to what it used to be.

00:09:48 – 00:09:53:	And that is what the Marxist did with many institutions.

00:09:53 – 00:09:56:	One of the best examples would be academia.

00:09:56 – 00:09:59:	The Marxist hollowed out our universities.

00:09:59 – 00:10:02:	And this is the entirety of the West. This is not just in the US.

00:10:02 – 00:10:07:	They hollowed out the universities by getting their own people into positions of power

00:10:07 – 00:10:12:	and then filling all of the roles in the university with nothing but their own people.

00:10:12 – 00:10:18:	And so if you hold a contrary view, if you speak in a contrary way,

00:10:18 – 00:10:20:	you will simply be silenced.

00:10:20 – 00:10:23:	You'll be shouted down. You'll probably be terminated.

00:10:23 – 00:10:25:	And you may be thinking, well, what about tenure?

00:10:25 – 00:10:28:	Tenure doesn't actually mean as much as you may think.

00:10:28 – 00:10:32:	You can still be fired. And good luck suing.

00:10:32 – 00:10:35:	So that's what happened with our universities.

00:10:35 – 00:10:37:	But this also happened with our media.

00:10:37 – 00:10:41:	And it happened with the media in a number of different ways.

00:10:41 – 00:10:47:	There's of course the common way I just spoke of when it comes to academia, hiring your own people.

00:10:47 – 00:10:52:	But you can do the same thing if you happen to have money at your disposal.

00:10:52 – 00:10:57:	Because what you do is you concentrate the various voices,

00:10:57 – 00:11:03:	the power structures, and how you do that is you buy up all the small newspapers

00:11:03 – 00:11:08:	or you buy up all these small producers of television media, you buy up the studios.

00:11:08 – 00:11:13:	If you own all of these things, then you can control the narrative.

00:11:13 – 00:11:17:	You can make them all say the same things often in the exact same words.

00:11:17 – 00:11:24:	There are some particularly damning clips of media personalities across the country

00:11:24 – 00:11:28:	and even in other countries using the exact same words.

00:11:28 – 00:11:33:	You can layer them over each other and it just sounds like there's a slight echo.

00:11:33 – 00:11:39:	That's how you take over something like the media and then you can control the narrative in society

00:11:39 – 00:11:43:	because ultimately of course your goal is to take over the government.

00:11:43 – 00:11:48:	And if you can take over the academy and you can take over the media, you can take the government.

00:11:48 – 00:11:52:	Because with the media you control the narrative, you control what people think.

00:11:52 – 00:11:54:	You control the demands people make.

00:11:54 – 00:12:00:	And with academia, with that side of things, you are producing the next generation

00:12:00 – 00:12:04:	of bureaucrats and politicians and doctors and lawyers

00:12:04 – 00:12:08:	and all of these people who will be running your managerial society.

00:12:08 – 00:12:13:	So that is how the Marxists manage their long march through the institutions.

00:12:13 – 00:12:16:	And today they basically own all of the things I mentioned.

00:12:16 – 00:12:19:	The control of the government is not complete.

00:12:19 – 00:12:25:	In the US they are largely doing the long march through the various executive agencies.

00:12:25 – 00:12:31:	So I mean, yes, there's the FBI and the CIA where there's a competition between Mormons and Marxists.

00:12:31 – 00:12:33:	That's a topic for another day.

00:12:33 – 00:12:42:	But they are attempting to take over all of these institutions because those have very real power in our government, the way our government works.

00:12:43 – 00:12:51:	Because you have a very high churn rate, obviously, for congressmen, even senators are six years.

00:12:51 – 00:12:55:	A president is a maximum of eight.

00:12:55 – 00:12:56:	So where is the real power?

00:12:56 – 00:13:08:	The real power lies with those who don't have to give up their offices, don't have to give up their control, their power, and simply gain more as they gain tenure in longevity.

00:13:08 – 00:13:15:	That would be the executive institutions, the executive agencies, and of course the courts.

00:13:15 – 00:13:22:	And as you said, the reason that this strategy is so effective is that people are trusting.

00:13:22 – 00:13:37:	People get locked into a moment in time from at some point in their lives when they are being brought up, where they will perceive things like a school and newspapers and government as serving one end or another.

00:13:37 – 00:13:41:	And maybe you have a cynical view, maybe you have a welcoming view.

00:13:41 – 00:13:49:	It's largely going to be based on early in your life when you first formed an opinion about what was going on in those places.

00:13:49 – 00:14:01:	But the term institution, I think, is important because it intimates the question by whom was this instituted and for what purpose?

00:14:02 – 00:14:05:	And it's precisely why institutions are targeted.

00:14:05 – 00:14:22:	Because for example, academia, universities and lesser schools are instituted historically by local communities to educate their young, to inculcate sound knowledge and the ability to reason.

00:14:22 – 00:14:25:	And that's still the skin suit that they wear to this day.

00:14:25 – 00:14:31:	You want to learn how to think, you want to learn more about subjects, you go to school, that's where you learn those things.

00:14:31 – 00:14:42:	And so by targeting the place where people think the learning is occurring, all they have to do is hollow that out and cause it to inculcate a different sort of thing.

00:14:42 – 00:14:48:	And if you say, well, that's indoctrination, that's brainwashing, that doesn't have anything to do with learning.

00:14:48 – 00:14:51:	In fact, that's the opposite of learning now.

00:14:51 – 00:14:54:	They will just shy you down and say, well, that's ridiculous. It's a school.

00:14:54 – 00:14:57:	How can a university possibly not teach people?

00:14:57 – 00:15:00:	I mean, look how much it costs. It must be valuable.

00:15:00 – 00:15:07:	And it's usually enough to confuse most people that they'll just sort of wander away because you don't want to think about it in the first place.

00:15:07 – 00:15:11:	And the other examples you gave were spot on. Media works the same way.

00:15:11 – 00:15:19:	If someone is old enough that they grew up with Walter Cronkite, you probably have a pretty high trust in media even to this day.

00:15:19 – 00:15:26:	Certainly relative to someone who's a zoomer who has only ever seen just a complete parody of nonsense.

00:15:26 – 00:15:32:	Like the media in the 21st century has been such a joke on its face.

00:15:32 – 00:15:40:	And yet people still keep gobbling it up because it still has the same name and some of the same logos and some of the same historical trends.

00:15:40 – 00:15:48:	Historical trappings that came along from an era when one might think that it was more trustworthy.

00:15:48 – 00:15:52:	I would say that I would argue it was probably never trustworthy in the slightest.

00:15:52 – 00:15:56:	But even if that were the case, it's far worse today.

00:15:56 – 00:16:03:	So when you lock in an idea of what one of these things is for, you stick to it even in the face of evidence.

00:16:03 – 00:16:12:	And so like many of our episodes, the reason that we're talking about this and highlighting these is that I don't want to say you must become suspicious.

00:16:12 – 00:16:15:	But I don't know how else to say it.

00:16:15 – 00:16:19:	You have to look out for your own soul in your own mind.

00:16:19 – 00:16:25:	A lot of this really goes back to the genealogy of ideas episode where we talked about checking your inputs.

00:16:25 – 00:16:31:	When someone comes to you with new words and new concepts you've never heard before, where did they get them?

00:16:31 – 00:16:35:	Why are they talking in some weird way that you've never heard before?

00:16:35 – 00:16:37:	What is their upstream source?

00:16:37 – 00:16:41:	Because they may be coming to you from an institution that you trust.

00:16:41 – 00:16:47:	It may be your own church's publishing house and you should implicitly be able to trust that.

00:16:47 – 00:16:58:	And yet, if they're talking in a way that you have reason to believe could possibly do harm, you need to dial the trust back and you need to start verifying.

00:16:58 – 00:17:02:	You need to verify where did this stuff come from.

00:17:02 – 00:17:14:	And so a lot of this is going to be about that because when the institutions are co-opted and they're hollowed out and they're turned into something else, people continue to believe that they're doing what they originally were sold as.

00:17:14 – 00:17:16:	And that's simply not the case.

00:17:16 – 00:17:22:	And that's one of the really difficult hurdles for people, especially older people to get over.

00:17:22 – 00:17:27:	Because you don't want to admit that you've been lied to and that you fell for it.

00:17:27 – 00:17:31:	Like, it's one thing if someone tries to lie to you, especially systematically.

00:17:31 – 00:17:39:	It's a second more difficult thing for you to suddenly realize I've been lied to for 50 years.

00:17:39 – 00:17:43:	And I didn't realize at the whole time, I didn't see through it.

00:17:43 – 00:17:48:	It makes you feel stupid. It makes you feel like a dupe and you look back over the things that you've said and done.

00:17:48 – 00:17:55:	That maybe were informed by sources that you now realize didn't have the intent in mind.

00:17:55 – 00:18:00:	That you thought they did when you regurgitated the things that they're saying.

00:18:00 – 00:18:10:	And so it's a big ask to suggest to someone look at something that you trust and see if you can still trust it.

00:18:10 – 00:18:14:	It's a scary thing and it's not something one of people want to hear about.

00:18:14 – 00:18:20:	And then for us to additionally connect it to, well, this isn't just a political strategy.

00:18:20 – 00:18:28:	This isn't just Marx or Popper giving a playbook to say, oh, well, let's do this and see because we think it's going to be better for the world.

00:18:28 – 00:18:36:	When the fundamental point that must be recognized as you're looking at these things is that there's an animating intelligence behind it.

00:18:36 – 00:18:42:	It's more evil than any of the people involved and has ultimate evil ends in mind.

00:18:42 – 00:18:48:	That's it's something that most people I think are probably not equipped even handle mentally.

00:18:48 – 00:18:59:	We're not given the tools to recognize that there there is evil and there is a there's temptation in the world beyond just my own personal sins.

00:18:59 – 00:19:11:	When we talk about Satan coming to us in these ways, it's different than Satan coming to you and tempting you with whatever you're vulnerable to.

00:19:11 – 00:19:15:	Maybe it's sex, maybe it's gluttony, maybe it's laziness.

00:19:15 – 00:19:19:	You can go down the list of things that are different hooks for different people.

00:19:19 – 00:19:29:	Some people are largely impervious to some sins and very easily fell to by others and so you tend to have your guard up when it's your own personal sins.

00:19:29 – 00:19:33:	And you don't really have to worry about the others because that's not your weakness.

00:19:33 – 00:19:40:	And so I think when we think about Satan acting in the world especially in our lives, we want to think about it in those narrow terms.

00:19:40 – 00:19:44:	Is he coming to me and trying to tempt me?

00:19:44 – 00:19:56:	The reason we're doing these episodes is to point out that there are other ways that Satan comes to you and chief among them is as deceiver because if he can get you to believe something different.

00:19:56 – 00:20:01:	Now that's different than tempting you with something seductive, something you already want.

00:20:01 – 00:20:10:	When Satan deceives you, he's tricking you into loving and buying and adoring and seeking out something new, something you didn't know you needed.

00:20:10 – 00:20:16:	And then it gets packaged up and marketed in such a way that you're like, oh wow, I need that. That's really important.

00:20:16 – 00:20:33:	And Christians are so vulnerable to it because when it's our own institutions that are co-opted, when it's our churches and our seminaries and the group of men who are going to be going into them, when they're the ones who are seduced by these worldly ideas,

00:20:33 – 00:20:40:	the problem moves far upstream sufficiently that you as the person sitting in the pew can't see where it's coming from.

00:20:40 – 00:20:47:	All you see is your pastor who's trying to preach faithfully up in the pulpit and he's saying some things that are a little bit strange.

00:20:47 – 00:20:50:	You know, maybe it's stuff that you've actually heard of work before.

00:20:50 – 00:20:57:	You're hearing terms in the pulpit that you've also heard in your diversity, equity and inclusion training at work.

00:20:57 – 00:21:09:	And that kind of makes you uncomfortable because how is it that Scripture is saying the same thing as my pagan boss who's trying to brainwash me into something that no one believed 20 years ago.

00:21:09 – 00:21:14:	And that's the right question. It's not fundamentally a question of is my pastor evil.

00:21:14 – 00:21:23:	It's a question of are these words deceptive because it's the origin of the words that matter, not the man who's speaking them.

00:21:23 – 00:21:33:	If something has an inherent nature that is contrary to Scripture, that's the end of the discussion as far as evaluating what to do with it.

00:21:33 – 00:21:43:	The second order effect is what do we do with this pastor, what do we do with this seminary, what do we do with the fact that we're letting these men in who are subject to these deceptions.

00:21:43 – 00:21:48:	And that's a much bigger problem in terms of retaking the institutions.

00:21:48 – 00:22:01:	But the first thing that we have to deal with today on the ground is identifying when our own institutions have been damaged to the point that suddenly some of the things that they're saying are not true anymore.

00:22:01 – 00:22:07:	And their lies that are being imported from a world that seeks our destruction.

00:22:07 – 00:22:13:	And the reason that co-opting the institution is so important is that you trust it.

00:22:13 – 00:22:23:	You trust that when your church's publishing house puts out a book that's gone through doctrinal review that it's going to be sound doctrine, that's the cell.

00:22:23 – 00:22:26:	That's what they're giving you. It's not just a book that they're selling.

00:22:26 – 00:22:35:	They're giving you, you're there in promoter on the book to say, this is sound doctrine, you can trust, trust us.

00:22:35 – 00:22:43:	If that's the extent of your analysis and your skepticism, you're going to be devouring things that did not come from God.

00:22:43 – 00:22:50:	And again, this is a scary challenging subject because it undermines faith.

00:22:50 – 00:22:57:	It does undermine faith when you suddenly realize maybe not every pastor can be trusted to speak faithfully.

00:22:57 – 00:23:03:	Maybe about some things they get it right, but if there are other things that are getting wrong, that's what you need to worry about.

00:23:03 – 00:23:05:	And it's a very scary thing.

00:23:05 – 00:23:16:	And co-opting the institutions is how Satan anesthetizes us against feeling the pinch when this is inserted into our lives.

00:23:16 – 00:23:21:	Because even if the words coming from the past or either you're reading in the book sound little weird,

00:23:21 – 00:23:29:	if you know that you can trust where they came from, you ignore where the words came from because you trust the messenger.

00:23:29 – 00:23:37:	And so if the institution has corrupted, the messenger can be corrupted by giving the messenger's false words.

00:23:37 – 00:23:41:	That again, they're not temptation to sin in the way we typically think of sin.

00:23:41 – 00:23:46:	They're not temptation to look at pornography or to steal or to lie.

00:23:46 – 00:23:52:	They're temptation to believe something that doesn't immediately seem to have any negative effect.

00:23:52 – 00:23:58:	And that's the hardest thing of all about this is that on the surface, it seems okay.

00:23:58 – 00:24:05:	Even if it's a different way of talking about something, if it seems okay and if it's juiced up so it sounds really Christian,

00:24:05 – 00:24:08:	then who are you to judge?

00:24:08 – 00:24:13:	Who are you to say that these things in these Christian sounding words aren't Christian?

00:24:13 – 00:24:17:	Well, that's what we did the episode on the perspicuity of Scripture.

00:24:17 – 00:24:20:	Can you believe, whoa, Scripture says, and is it clear?

00:24:20 – 00:24:22:	Satan wants you to believe that's not true.

00:24:22 – 00:24:28:	So that when these other things, they come down from the institutions that have been co-opted, you're disarmed.

00:24:28 – 00:24:34:	You think, well, maybe I was wrong about the Bible, but I got to trust my pastor and I got to trust my church

00:24:34 – 00:24:36:	as publishing house.

00:24:36 – 00:24:39:	When that happens, you're already sunk.

00:24:39 – 00:24:43:	Because it's not going to stop with the one little lie and the one little deception.

00:24:43 – 00:24:49:	They will continue to pile up and pile up until ultimately there's a danger that your soul will be separated from God.

00:24:49 – 00:24:52:	Even though you didn't say, oh yeah, I'm going to go do some sin.

00:24:52 – 00:24:56:	You just believed some things that were deceptions that came from the father of lies.

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	And that is something that is worth guarding diligently against.

00:25:02 – 00:25:08:	Looking at the messenger is actually a very good frame for this because that is exactly what we're telling people to do.

00:25:08 – 00:25:13:	We are telling you to look at the ultimate messenger because again, genealogy of ideas.

00:25:13 – 00:25:20:	You can trace any of these ideas back to an ultimate root.

00:25:20 – 00:25:27:	We are telling you don't just look at the man who is in front of you speaking the words.

00:25:27 – 00:25:32:	Where did he get them? Who told him those words and who told him?

00:25:32 – 00:25:38:	We are pointing out that many of these things you are hearing, in fact from pastors and others today,

00:25:38 – 00:25:41:	ultimately are from Satan.

00:25:41 – 00:25:48:	And as has been mentioned, that is not something the average person wants to realize, even wants to think about that.

00:25:48 – 00:25:55:	Because that could be your pastor speaking the words of Satan to you and telling you the words of God.

00:25:55 – 00:26:00:	He may not be doing that maliciously. He probably is not doing it maliciously.

00:26:00 – 00:26:02:	But it doesn't matter.

00:26:02 – 00:26:07:	Yes, it is worse if he is doing it maliciously, but that is a second problem.

00:26:07 – 00:26:14:	We are talking about the prime problem of whether or not you are hearing the words of God or the words of Satan.

00:26:14 – 00:26:22:	And so again, this is one of those times where it is worth looking at the meaning of actual terms.

00:26:23 – 00:26:30:	Indoctrination was mentioned and most people today, when they hear indoctrination, they think, oh, that's bad.

00:26:30 – 00:26:34:	Indoctrination is someone telling me how to think.

00:26:34 – 00:26:42:	Well, that's a deep well, but indoctrination is not actually bad. It is a neutral term.

00:26:42 – 00:26:47:	Because indoctrination simply means to bring into the doctrine of.

00:26:48 – 00:26:54:	Doctrine is simply teaching because it comes from the Latin word for teacher, del cate, to teach.

00:26:54 – 00:27:02:	And so indoctrination can be good or bad. It depends on the thing into which you are being indoctrinated.

00:27:02 – 00:27:09:	And so for instance, when we teach the catechisms in the Lutheran Church, that is indoctrination.

00:27:09 – 00:27:13:	When you teach your children's scripture at home, that is indoctrination.

00:27:14 – 00:27:19:	That is good indoctrination. You are bringing them into the doctrine of the church. That's good.

00:27:19 – 00:27:27:	What is bad is when they are being indoctrinated into the doctrines of Satan, which happens at most universities today.

00:27:27 – 00:27:38:	And that's the universities are particularly heinous example because many of our universities and basically all of our great universities were started essentially as seminaries.

00:27:38 – 00:27:46:	They were started with the specific intent of training men to take on roles of leadership, teaching, and preaching in the church.

00:27:46 – 00:27:54:	And Satan has co-opted them and is now teaching his doctrine to many of the men who will wind up in pulpits.

00:27:54 – 00:27:58:	That was the case with Harvard. It was a divinity school.

00:27:58 – 00:28:06:	Yeah. Harvard divinity school was founded in 1636. And you can find online the original admission exam.

00:28:06 – 00:28:17:	You had to be fluent in Greek and Hebrew and Latin. And it wasn't simply because that was the general level of knowledge at that day, although it was much closer than what we have today.

00:28:17 – 00:28:23:	But it was specifically because they were there to train pastors. Harvard was founded because this was the new world.

00:28:23 – 00:28:29:	It was to get a pastor from thousands of miles away. It wasn't going to scale.

00:28:29 – 00:28:31:	Yeah. It didn't work.

00:28:31 – 00:28:35:	Yeah. And I think William and Mary was the same.

00:28:35 – 00:28:47:	All the earliest institutions that are today the most depraved and evil ones leading the charge in all these areas were themselves instituted in the name of God in four good purposes.

00:28:47 – 00:28:51:	Obviously, as Lutherans, we have some disagreements about some of the doctrines that they taught.

00:28:51 – 00:28:56:	But I don't question that for the most part, they were Christians. And that their intention was pure.

00:28:56 – 00:29:01:	They wanted to stick to the word of God as they understood it even when they were in error.

00:29:01 – 00:29:11:	But those institutions, like to tell someone that Harvard was a Christian school, I mean, it would be illegal to say that today.

00:29:11 – 00:29:19:	And yet nearly 400 years ago, when it was founded, that was it's not its sole purpose, but overwhelmingly its principle purpose.

00:29:19 – 00:29:23:	And it served that purpose vitally for a great many years.

00:29:23 – 00:29:30:	And breaking down institutions is what Satan does to kill things.

00:29:30 – 00:29:36:	He doesn't just make frontal assaults. He'll find any vulnerability.

00:29:36 – 00:29:45:	And if that means sneaking in the back door or changing the locks or any metaphors fall apart, but the destruction is the ultimate goal.

00:29:45 – 00:29:48:	And he doesn't care how he does it.

00:29:48 – 00:29:55:	And Christians have long understood the value of institutions.

00:29:55 – 00:30:12:	In fact, Lutherans, Lutheran Malanthin were among the first to push greater education for children, for the late children of Labeman, specifically to increase their knowledge and wisdom in godly things.

00:30:12 – 00:30:21:	When Luther realized how ignorant the masses were, it wasn't simply a failing of teaching in the church.

00:30:21 – 00:30:28:	But it was also just generally a failing of the Christian society to value the teaching of its own.

00:30:28 – 00:30:38:	And so Christian churches, Lutheran schools had been an inextricable part of Lutheran churches throughout the entire period of the Reformation.

00:30:38 – 00:30:40:	And it's for this very reason.

00:30:40 – 00:30:49:	It was required by our Synod initially. That was part of if you were a Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, if you remember you had to have a school.

00:30:50 – 00:31:14:	In fact, there were times where it was more important to set up the school before you set up the church building, because they recognized that it was absolutely vital to train the next generation, because at a bare minimum they have to have the education necessary to read scripture, to understand scripture to actually listen to a sermon and understand what is being said.

00:31:14 – 00:31:17:	Unfortunately, it's fallen by the wayside today.

00:31:18 – 00:31:25:	So when Satan targets the institutions, it's particularly because they're so effective at doing God's work.

00:31:25 – 00:31:35:	And rather than making a frontal assault on them, rather than saying, I'm going to attack this directly, as Corey said, he hollows it out, and he wears it as a skin suit.

00:31:35 – 00:31:38:	And then it's doing his job in God's name.

00:31:39 – 00:31:54:	And the Christian today who has not been engaged, who's not been paying careful attention, the Christian who remembers the good old days when things weren't so bad and wants to trust that they're not really as bad as they seem or that they'll get better.

00:31:55 – 00:32:08:	That man is fundamentally disarmed by his own naivete to look and think, well, I still want to trust this thing, because I have my Letterman jacket or whatever.

00:32:08 – 00:32:16:	You have some fondness for the past, which is really, it's nostalgia. It's remembering a thing that no longer exists.

00:32:16 – 00:32:43:	And I think that as Christians, we are going to begin to need to take a long hard look at which part of any existing is that the institutions today should remain, whether they should be allowed to continue to exist as they do with the craft that has built up, whether it's in our bylaws, or as Corey mentioned with the FBI and the CIA, this happens in our churches too.

00:32:43 – 00:32:55:	When you have employees who stay there for decades and lifetimes in these unelected invisible positions, they continue to shape the future.

00:32:55 – 00:33:04:	If they're being faithful, that's a blessing. If they cease to be faithful, that's like having a radioactive substance inside your body.

00:33:04 – 00:33:11:	It's going to continue to produce cancer cells, no matter how hard your body fights to try to repair the damage.

00:33:11 – 00:33:16:	As long as there's that radioactive substance inside you, you're going to keep slowly dying.

00:33:16 – 00:33:33:	And the institutional rot caused by this institutional corruption is such that when we start looking at what do we have to deal with here, there are going to be some hard questions that every church is going to have to face about its own beloved trust.

00:33:33 – 00:33:42:	Some beloved trusted institutions, you know, the LCMS just celebrated 175th anniversary or about to, I can't remember which I think it just did.

00:33:42 – 00:33:51:	And so we like to say that we stand on the shoulders of Walther in 175 years of Missouri Senate Lutherans.

00:33:51 – 00:34:02:	Well, Corey made a tweet a couple days ago that opposition to polygony, opposition to slavery, opposition to patriarchy.

00:34:02 – 00:34:07:	In the name of God, as moral matters, is a novelty.

00:34:07 – 00:34:24:	And amazingly, there was one of the pastors who's generally doesn't like us very much, who defended the position, named so far as he confirmed to someone that said that Corey should be excommunicated from the church and declared to the whole world to be damned for eternity.

00:34:24 – 00:34:29:	This pastor said, well, you know, the LCMS actually did believe those things once upon a time.

00:34:29 – 00:34:39:	Now, I don't believe this pastor was doing it because he agrees with scripture. He was simply making the point that, yeah, we used to believe one thing and then we got better.

00:34:39 – 00:34:51:	The point that I made based on that interaction was that we claim to have 175 year legacy of Missouri Senate Lutheranism and a 500 year legacy of Lutheranism.

00:34:52 – 00:34:58:	By borrowing names from men who would not agree with many of the theological points that we teach today.

00:34:58 – 00:35:03:	And that is also a symptom of institutions being co-opted.

00:35:03 – 00:35:16:	If you have a church body that taught one thing historically, and then today it teaches a new doctrine that is not consistent with the historic doctrine.

00:35:16 – 00:35:27:	One of those is heresy. One of those is lying in God's name, which is the second worst sin that you can commit after saying that God is not your God.

00:35:27 – 00:35:38:	And one falls right after the other. And so the identification of these errors is not simply a matter of winning fights on the internet.

00:35:38 – 00:35:56:	It's about making sure that the subversion and the damage that's being done in all of our churches in these modern terms by sources and words and ideas that are imported from atheism into the church sprinkled with Jesus dust.

00:35:56 – 00:36:06:	So it goes down easy when Christians hear it. That's how Satan is getting us. He's making his words sound Christian.

00:36:06 – 00:36:15:	And so for the second part of this strategy, once the institutions are co-opted, what did these guys say again when anyone objects?

00:36:15 – 00:36:22:	We're just being reasonable. This is a normal, reasonable way to talk about these things today.

00:36:22 – 00:36:44:	And the reason that they do that is framing. It's very powerful framing. And it's the reason we did the framing episode. I hope you start to see that the more we go into this series, the more we refer back to specific episodes, we're doing that, not for our statistic reasons, but because this is a framework for understanding everything that's going on.

00:36:44 – 00:36:54:	If you ignore the genealogy of the ideas that are coming to you, and if you accept the framing of those who are trying to feed those false ideas to you, you're fundamentally disarmed.

00:36:54 – 00:37:04:	Even if you might have the theological chops to push back, you're not going to have the willingness to because you're not going to be confident that what is confronting you is actually something that needs to be confronted.

00:37:04 – 00:37:14:	So when these guys insert this stuff, and you know, when when Cory and I use terms like sprinkle with Jesus dust or slather with Jesus butter.

00:37:14 – 00:37:21:	I hope that people don't think that we're being blasphemous against God because it's precisely the opposite purpose we have in mind.

00:37:21 – 00:37:30:	What we are saying is that these foreign radioactive substances that are coming from Satan's realm, that are teachings of demons.

00:37:30 – 00:37:37:	When these men bring these things into our churches, they don't bring them in their original clothing.

00:37:37 – 00:37:42:	They put a new costume on them. They put Lutheran words on them in our church.

00:37:42 – 00:37:57:	In other churches, it's going to be whatever Christian vernacular you use so that the shibbolus that you are programmed and indoctrinated to respond to will cause you to accept what they're saying, even though it doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard.

00:37:57 – 00:38:04:	And even though it might be contrary to things that you've been taught in the past, correctly, because you've been taught scripture.

00:38:04 – 00:38:22:	When they sprinkle Jesus dust on it, you as a Christian who trusts the institution and who loves Jesus and wants to obey his commands, when a pastor says to you, I command you in the name of God to believe this because I'm a pastor and this is from God.

00:38:22 – 00:38:28:	That's an impossible situation for the average layman when what they're teaching is false.

00:38:28 – 00:38:38:	And unfortunately, we feel that we must arm people today to understand when that's happening because they're always going to say they're just being reasonable.

00:38:38 – 00:38:41:	They're always going to say, this is what Christians have always taught.

00:38:41 – 00:38:51:	And it's really interesting when when they make that play, they will maybe they'll point back to some document that was written in 1994 or maybe as late as the 60s.

00:38:51 – 00:38:55:	But then, you know, the next document that they look at, it's going to be scripture.

00:38:55 – 00:38:59:	Now, we talked about that in several in several episodes.

00:38:59 – 00:39:03:	What happened to the other 1900 years of Christian history?

00:39:03 – 00:39:15:	If you say that you found something in the Bible and then you found it in the 60s and in the 90s and you're telling us today that we have to believe it, where's the rest of Christian history believing the same thing?

00:39:15 – 00:39:27:	Because if you can't make that case, then you must either accuse all Christians before us of being heretics, of lying in God's name and believing falsely and risking damnation.

00:39:27 – 00:39:38:	Or you have to admit that you're teaching a new doctrine and these guys will say, oh, we're being reasonable while they're teaching things that are fundamentally new to the church and that's incredibly dangerous.

00:39:38 – 00:39:51:	And this, of course, ties right into the issue of politics because many Christians have been trained and they should probably investigate the source of that training.

00:39:51 – 00:39:58:	But they have been trained to believe that, oh, well, there's politics and then the church is something else.

00:39:58 – 00:40:07:	That there's this division between a political realm where apparently Christ is not king and the church where Christ is, of course, king.

00:40:07 – 00:40:09:	And that's just false.

00:40:09 – 00:40:17:	Yes, as Lutherans, we do have a sort of two kingdoms doctrine but so many misunderstand what that means.

00:40:17 – 00:40:34:	Because it's always rendered in a shorthand instead of the fullness of what the terms actually are because it is the kingdom of the right hand of Christ is the church and the kingdom of the left hand of Christ is the state.

00:40:34 – 00:40:44:	And our confessions are very clear that those who rule in the state also have a duty to ensure that the scriptures are rightly taught in their realms.

00:40:45 – 00:40:52:	The head of state will have to answer what he did with the sheep God gave him the same as a pastor will have to answer.

00:40:52 – 00:41:06:	Yes, they have different duties but the duty of the prince or the king is not exclusively secular to use a term that is not a very good term but people will understand what is meant.

00:41:06 – 00:41:19:	The prince still has a duty with regard to the things of God because he has been given his position of authority and power by God and that comes with certain duties.

00:41:19 – 00:41:30:	But there's also the issue of hierarchy just to quickly talk about institutions and what happens when they're co-opted again when an institution is co-opted.

00:41:30 – 00:41:33:	Satan achieves two victories.

00:41:34 – 00:41:46:	For a period of time he gets to use that institution to teach his doctrines with the authority the institution has because of its history what it used to be.

00:41:46 – 00:41:58:	And then additionally he has destroyed an institution that probably took generations to build and any replacement will also take generations to build so that's a twofold victory.

00:41:58 – 00:42:18:	And then of course the problem that flows from that is how does a layman or a parish pastor deal with that problem because if things get corrupted at the highest level and that filters down by the time it gets into the parish and is taught to layman the corruption has probably existed for generations.

00:42:18 – 00:42:26:	Because Satan doesn't tend to move very quickly with these things he's not patient but at the same time he is because he has a lot of time on his hands.

00:42:26 – 00:42:35:	He doesn't live for 80 or 85 years and then have to pass things off to the next generation humans do we have to do things generationally.

00:42:35 – 00:42:38:	He doesn't have that limitation.

00:42:39 – 00:42:54:	And so by the time it gets down into the parish you have generations of rot you have to deal with you may very well have to rebuild your institutions from the ground up because they may have been so thoroughly corrupted that you cannot salvage them.

00:42:54 – 00:43:00:	I'm not saying that our institutions are necessarily that far gone at this point.

00:43:00 – 00:43:08:	But they are certainly far gone in some regards even in the Lutheran church Missouri Synod.

00:43:08 – 00:43:25:	And so speaking of how these things are sold it's really a difference between the soft sell and the hard sell anyone who is familiar with marketing and advertising and related things will understand the difference between a soft sell and a hard sell.

00:43:25 – 00:43:40:	And basically it's just the type of approach the soft sell is the easier approach should sort of subtly influence someone to come around to your position to sell them on something the hard sell is very much more upfront blunt forceful.

00:43:40 – 00:43:48:	Christianity is more of the hard sell because you start with the law and the law is a hard sell.

00:43:48 – 00:44:03:	Satan is the exact opposite Satan is the soft sell because Satan is going to tell you what you're doing is fine but and if you're currently sinning and ignoring God he's just going to tell you what you're doing is fine keep doing it have fun.

00:44:03 – 00:44:16:	But if you're a Christian or you're trying to follow God he'll tell you what you're doing is good but it could be a little better so maybe do this and it'll be a small change

00:44:16 – 00:44:29:	and it seems like a small innocuous change it doesn't seem like something that is big it doesn't seem like you've set your foot down on the wrong path but then there'll be another one and another one and another one.

00:44:29 – 00:44:41:	And if you're on the wrong path well it actually only takes that one first step to be on the wrong path and every additional step down that path is worse because you are still heading down the wrong path.

00:44:41 – 00:45:04:	That's the way that Satan works it's small it's incrementalism it's ratcheting and that's where the reasonableness comes in because as soon as you've accepted step one and step two and step three then there comes the argument will step four is just reasonable as an extension of these others and obviously you can't go backward there's your ratchet because if you go backward

00:45:04 – 00:45:31:	well that would be unreasonable because we've made progress with these steps so we have to keep going in the same direction and that's how this reasonableness works it makes it so that it's unthinkable to turn around and look at the path and look at where you actually major error where you actually went to stray because it would be unreasonable to do that no we have to forge forward and keep going and take these additional steps.

00:45:31 – 00:45:43:	That's what Satan wants to do Satan does not want you to look at the source of these things because if you look at the source you'll see him eventually standing behind one of the men in that line.

00:45:43 – 00:45:57:	And that's the greatest trick that these men play in the church when they sprinkle the Jesus dust because again they have a brand new idea it's brand new doctrine in some cases in the 21st century.

00:45:57 – 00:46:09:	Some examples we're going to get into when we talk about the large cataclysm are cutting edge evil we're not even in the we're not 20 years behind like we typically are the things that are happening in our church today are cutting edge.

00:46:09 – 00:46:24:	And so when these guys try to say oh well I found it in scripture again how did you find it in scripture when it was missed for 2000 years how did you find it today in 2023 why was it missed all of that time.

00:46:24 – 00:46:45:	And the it is Corey said there's there's the ratcheting effect where the one small thing the first little thing that they want to change where they're using wording that if you're familiar with the the left hand kingdom activity that is well ahead of the right hand for most of this stuff.

00:46:45 – 00:47:03:	The world has been going to hell in Marxist terms for 150 years the church is now rapidly catching up and the same words are being used by the same people to the same ends with the same malevolent animating force.

00:47:03 – 00:47:23:	And the way the reason that the reasonableness argument is so effective in the church is it again you're not supposed to hate you're not supposed to even disagree you're not supposed to dislike you must have peace in church were told that peace is a sign of God's presence that's not what scripture says.

00:47:23 – 00:47:50:	Jesus says I came to divide two against three the households will be divided scripture says that false doctrine will be taught among you so the true doctrine may be known conflict is inherent in the word of God because Satan opposes it that's the inherent conflict God speaks truth Satan speaks lies and men will choose one or the other.

00:47:50 – 00:48:19:	And so when the very first little debauchery is introduced inside the church the man who can smell it when no one else can is going to do what everyone else thinks is overreacting it's going to look unreasonable how can you possibly say that this one small wording change is a big deal it's just a few words and if you would just read it in context it would seem just fine you're overreacting you're not being reasonable.

00:48:19 – 00:48:39:	The reason that God needs men to appear unreasonable and to be slandered with those words is because God and man who is faithful to him knows that the next step is the same next step that we see in the world and that when you legitimize even in the name of Jesus some sin and say we'll hate the sin but love the center.

00:48:40 – 00:49:06:	There's an and then it's hidden in the periphery of that sense it's unspoken but it's there and Satan knows what is next move because he's already done it everywhere else and so if a man has been paying attention to the world and then he sees the world encroaching on his church he's going to look extremely unreasonable when he says not on my watch you're not going to start any of that here we're not having any of it.

00:49:07 – 00:49:20:	When the institutions are captured and the men and those in those institutions speak and soothing tones and they tell you let's just be reasonable about this maybe we should reward it a little bit differently but it's still okay our intentions were good.

00:49:21 – 00:49:35:	That's the second problem it's not simply that it was a lie whether it was a lie that was accepted at an institutional level because when you know the source and the genesis and the genealogy of the lie you know they cannot possibly have come from scripture.

00:49:36 – 00:50:04:	And so either we as a church have men who can no longer read scripture in here God's voice or we have men who simply don't care to either way we have a problem needs to be solved and that's not just no CMS problem it's a problem for every church we're not as far down this path as many but there are a lot of men in this in this synod who are trying really hard to catch us up and there are also a lot of men in this synod who are trying really hard to fight it.

00:50:04 – 00:50:21:	Unfortunately the men who are trying to fight it are by and large not equipped for this particular battle over and over we see guys who they're not going to fall for the reason the boldness thing they're willing to fight but they want to fight the same fight that they fought 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago.

00:50:21 – 00:50:40:	So you see framing that's done by the good guys who want to oppose the evil but it's not framing in the terms that of battle that Satan is giving us today they're trying to pick a bat to pick a fight to win a battle that they know how to win.

00:50:40 – 00:50:56:	You can't do that Satan gets a vote the bad guy who's choosing the battleground has already decided what the issue you're going to fight on next you don't get to try to I keto that in reverse that momentum so that you can fight some other battle.

00:50:56 – 00:51:09:	If you do that you're just you're going to fall on your own face because the real battle is in the other room and if you try to change the terms of the fight without engaging it where it is you're still setting yourself up for fail.

00:51:09 – 00:51:24:	Even if you have the will to fight so we're talking about these things to equip such men to see clearly what is going on what is the force behind it what is it sound and smell like and what do we do about it.

00:51:24 – 00:51:33:	We're not going to talk so much about solutions because again these are church institutions we have our opinions but that's all they are.

00:51:33 – 00:51:51:	Whether or not we even share them whether not anyone listens it would still ultimately be the function of the machinery itself to auto correct personally I don't think that's possible I don't think that there's anything there that can be saved time will tell if I'm wrong thank God and if I'm right.

00:51:51 – 00:51:59:	I pray to God that something will replace it that will be faithful where we have failed but between here and there.

00:51:59 – 00:52:05:	There are men in this church who are not going to respond to the let's just be reasonable argument.

00:52:05 – 00:52:19:	There's a quote that I want to read from Mark or sorry from Walther this again from the Mark or paper that we've referred to a few times that God esteemed supposed regarding on the question of theological controversies.

00:52:20 – 00:52:33:	Walther writes never has been so much talk about love is an our day love has become the slogan and watch word of those who claim to be Christians as well as those who do not care to be called Christians.

00:52:33 – 00:52:46:	Now what do such Christians mean when they speak about love they mean above all as they express it that in measured matters of faith one must exhibit tolerance that is endurance indulgence and the spirit of compromise.

00:52:46 – 00:52:56:	That one must not be so exact in regard to purity of doctrine nor criticize the departure from the word of God as strenuously as was done in old and times.

00:52:56 – 00:53:08:	And that we ought therefore also recognize those as a brethren who are not willing to obey the word of God in some points as long as they will accept a few especially important articles of faith.

00:53:08 – 00:53:21:	But how should that really be a true description of Christian love does not the word of God say the very opposite charity rejoices if not in the iniquity but rejoices in the truth.

00:53:21 – 00:53:28:	Such Christians who out of love tolerate false doctrine are like the man who is very liberal and charitable towards the poor.

00:53:28 – 00:53:36:	What he gave them however he did not take from his own goods from what he had secretly stolen from others that he openly gave to the poor.

00:53:36 – 00:53:48:	For what are those Christians doing but robbing God of his word his truth his glory and thereby giving the impression that they have more love than others who adhere strictly to God's word.

00:53:48 – 00:53:58:	Just how little love such people really possess may be seen by their attitude towards those who take them to task for the indifference to the truth.

00:53:58 – 00:54:06:	Again such true disciples they are mostly filled with rancor venom and bitter amnesty.

00:54:06 – 00:54:14:	Now that was Luther writing or Walthard White writing in 1935 but it pretty well describes the fight that we're having today.

00:54:14 – 00:54:33:	And back to the you know the main thesis of this episode there's a playbook the reason Walthard is describing similar situations it's not just the human nature is consistent is that the strategy being employed within the church to destroy it has consistency because there's a playbook.

00:54:33 – 00:54:46:	Satan knows what works he knows that if you take a lukewarm Christian and give him a lukewarm quasi Christian argument that doesn't actually pass the smell test but as a few of the correct words attached.

00:54:46 – 00:54:54:	The lukewarm Christian will not hear that it's not as master's voice will think oh yeah love that's really important I need to do that.

00:54:55 – 00:55:03:	That's true in some context but the love of God sometimes requires the hatred of evil fact it always requires the hatred of evil.

00:55:03 – 00:55:13:	The sometimes is that sometimes evil is not present and so we don't want to be hyper reactive or over reactive but to be precisely reactive when evil is in our midst.

00:55:14 – 00:55:38:	And when evil is detected you cannot have a reasonable response not in the worldly sense the only reasonable response to evil is the response that Christ had when he overthrew the money lenders tables and he drove them out with a whip sometimes when evil is in your midst you do not talk about it.

00:55:38 – 00:56:01:	You don't try to argue it you don't discuss it in their terms you don't try to be reasonable you drive the evil from your midst that's not necessarily step one and it's not necessarily the only strategy certainly there are other things that can be done but there are absolutely times where making a whip and flipping tables and driving men out of the church is necessary.

00:56:01 – 00:56:24:	And the men who oppose these words don't want you to believe that's true they don't want you to believe that Jesus actually did that or the fact that he did it twice well maybe was sin or you know Jesus offices can't sin so but he's God so whatever he does can't be sin and so God's just capricious and when he does these things we just have to live with it but we can't ever do that.

00:56:24 – 00:56:37:	I'm not saying flip tables a church it's not something I would never do I hope I hope it never gets that bad but I only say never because I hope it never gets that bad if the day comes when tables need to be flipped.

00:56:37 – 00:56:51:	Okay I guess that's how it's going to be that's not my choice but if it's the choice of those who are just saying just be reasonable while they continue to push evil then the fight will continue on other by other means.

00:56:51 – 00:57:09:	I mentioned a few examples of the tools that are used for this fight by the other side and I just like to run through really the five main ones there are many others but we're not going to cover all of them that's not the goal here.

00:57:09 – 00:57:24:	First is and these are in no particular order but first is best construction and best construction has been turned into a cudgel that is used against anyone who actually wants to be faithful to scripture.

00:57:24 – 00:57:37:	Anyone who wants to oppose false teaching false doctrine false teachers and best construction is first and foremost and primarily something that applies to your neighbor.

00:57:37 – 00:57:51:	Not to everyone in the world you can't apply it to everyone in the world that's insane that is not the standard that is not the teaching a scripture of the church so if your neighbor for instance.

00:57:51 – 00:58:00:	Keeps your weed whacker for an extra week that's where best construction applies you assume that he forgot you don't assume he's trying to steal it.

00:58:00 – 00:58:13:	If a politician is doing something wicked you don't assume that he has the best intentions that is a totally different category that is a totally different interaction you have to respond differently.

00:58:13 – 00:58:28:	Second would be the hiding of divisions or the holding forth of a false peace that should bring to mind a verse from Jeremiah of course they have healed the wound of my people lightly saying peace peace where there is no peace.

00:58:29 – 00:58:42:	We are not to simply cover shove under the rug these divisions that crop up in the church because if there are legitimate divisions over doctrinal points we have to hammer those out.

00:58:42 – 00:58:55:	There have been times in the history of our synod where there were divisions at a conference at a synodical meeting where they stopped all business and worked through it then and there.

00:58:55 – 00:59:02:	And either had the person who was teaching falsely repent or expelled him that is how it is actually supposed to be done.

00:59:02 – 00:59:13:	Third would be winsomeness which will drop a graph of the use of that term into the show notes because it demonstrates something that will be very obvious.

00:59:13 – 00:59:16:	This is made up nonsense.

00:59:17 – 00:59:23:	Winsomeness applies to a smile or some sort of habit someone has.

00:59:23 – 00:59:26:	Winsomeness does not apply to an argument.

00:59:26 – 00:59:33:	An argument is true, an argument is convincing, an argument is effective, an argument is not winsome.

00:59:33 – 00:59:37:	This is Satan's soft sell imported into the church.

00:59:38 – 00:59:46:	Four, as was brought up and discussed is anti-hatred. The idea that as a Christian you cannot and should not hate anything.

00:59:46 – 00:59:52:	And of course that's absolutely false. We've spoken to that issue in a previous episode.

00:59:52 – 00:59:58:	Appropriately titled easy to find, Christians are called to hate certain things.

59:58 – 01:00:04
Do I not hate those who hate you? I hate them with a perfect hatred. I count them my enemies.

01:00:05 – 01:00:10:	Scripture uses the word hatred in many places throughout Scripture.

01:00:10 – 01:00:14:	It is the duty of the Christian to hate that which is wicked.

01:00:14 – 01:00:18:	And you cannot love that which is good unless you hate that which is wicked.

01:00:18 – 01:00:20:	And then fifth is tolerance.

01:00:20 – 01:00:29:	And this leads into unless there's something more to say on this point or three main points it leads into our third main point.

01:00:29 – 01:00:39:	Tolerance in the modern world is a satanic conception that came to us through a man called Karl Popper.

01:00:39 – 01:00:44:	Karl Popper was a Jewish philosopher from the Frankfurt School.

01:00:44 – 01:00:52:	And his conception of tolerance is what the modern world has inherited with what it has been infected.

01:00:53 – 01:01:00:	I'm going to read a quote from him on tolerance and some I would hope most will see the problem here.

01:01:00 – 01:01:04:	Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.

01:01:04 – 01:01:18:	If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.

01:01:18 – 01:01:25:	We should therefore claim in the name of tolerance the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

01:01:25 – 01:01:32:	Now one would hope that you could see the problem with this because of course tolerance isn't a thing.

01:01:32 – 01:01:39:	It means absolutely nothing and you can see in this definition it is self-defeating is self-contradicting.

01:01:39 – 01:01:48:	All that tolerance means in the Marxist frame is that you must have tolerance and that's you the enemies of the Marxists.

01:01:48 – 01:01:54:	Or just the average person who's being manipulated, you must have tolerance for the things the Marxists are doing.

01:01:54 – 01:02:00:	But anything that is done against them is intolerant and therefore you don't have to tolerate that.

01:02:00 – 01:02:03:	Of course it's incoherent but that's because it is a mercenary approach.

01:02:03 – 01:02:10:	It is ends seeking. It has no actual foundation other than of course the wickedness of Satan.

01:02:10 – 01:02:29:	And I mentioned popper, if you want the two men who are probably most responsible for the current philosophical state of Marxism and therefore the state of things are culture or civilization in the west, it would be popper and adorno, both Jewish philosophers from the Frankfurt School.

01:02:29 – 01:02:36:	I do not actually recommend reading them. Simply owning the book is kind of like having a portal to hell on your shelf.

01:02:36 – 01:02:44:	But Alinsky is probably the better read if someone is looking for more information because Alinsky gives the rule book.

01:02:44 – 01:02:50:	Alinsky is the practical one. He takes the evil ideas of these other men and he applies them.

01:02:50 – 01:03:01:	And so you have popper and the others writing in the 40s and the 50s adorno is right around that time. His biggest work is the authoritarian personality came out 1950.

01:03:01 – 01:03:12:	Popper is the open society in 1945. Rules for radicals is 1971 right around the 90 right around 1970 at any rate.

01:03:12 – 01:03:21:	He gives the real rule book that our adversaries still follow to this day even if they don't realize they're following it.

01:03:21 – 01:03:29:	And I actually want to make a point there. I want to highlight something that is vitally important to recognize.

01:03:29 – 01:03:36:	There are divisions within those who are advancing these ideas using these rules.

01:03:36 – 01:03:43:	There are some who do it wittingly and some who do it unwittingly. There are three groups.

01:03:43 – 01:03:56:	We have the adversaries which would include the pastors who oppose us who are unwittingly using these ideas they have imbibed from the world they have just absorbed osmodically from the world uncritically.

01:03:56 – 01:04:01:	They are using them against us but they are doing it unwittingly.

01:04:01 – 01:04:08:	So I would call them adversaries if I am being specific with my terms because they are not in fact necessarily enemies.

01:04:08 – 01:04:22:	Now, if their usage becomes witting or malicious, they are then enemies and within the category of enemies you have the witting and the unwitting, the vast bulk will always be unwitting.

01:04:22 – 01:04:28:	They hate you for various reasons that have been programmed into them but they don't really understand why.

01:04:28 – 01:04:35:	They just respond. It's the NPC meme. Someone took the chip out and put in a new one and so they hate you because the new chip says to hate you.

01:04:35 – 01:04:49:	The most dangerous are the witting enemies. Those who understand these things, those who know the goals they are attempting to achieve and are employing the philosophy, the ideology and the rules to achieve those ends.

01:04:50 – 01:05:09:	They are the smallest group but they are the most dangerous and so it's just important to distinguish various groups from each other and to recognize that the pastors again to repeat myself by and large those within the church who are using these things are doing so unwittingly.

01:05:09 – 01:05:19:	They are adversaries because of what they are advocating. They are speaking with the voice of Satan but they are not necessarily doing so maliciously or with ill intent.

01:05:19 – 01:05:28:	They need to be educated and trained. They need to be shown what they are doing is wicked. Not necessarily assumed to be enemies.

01:05:28 – 01:05:40:	They need to be brought to repentance which is a turning away from that which is evil. To reject these things publicly explicitly and to say that is no longer what I believe.

01:05:41 – 01:05:54:	In the case we are going to talk about in just a minute until such time as bad occurs, there is no repentance to say, oh I'm sorry I got caught or I'm sorry for whatever you think I did, that's not repentance.

01:05:54 – 01:05:59:	That is not even contrition and it is not self-efficient.

01:06:00 – 01:06:05:	You had mentioned the two Jews, I'm not sure if you mentioned the Saul Linsky is also a Jew.

01:06:05 – 01:06:17:	Since we're talking about Satan's playbook, I think it's important to acknowledge that in the introduction two rules for radicals we're going to get into a few of the specific details in a minute, Saul Linsky writes this.

01:06:17 – 01:06:29:	Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical from all our legends mythology and history and who is to know or mythology leaves off in history begins or which is which.

01:06:29 – 01:06:39:	The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom, his own kingdom, Lucifer.

01:06:39 – 01:06:50:	So when we say that this is Satan's playbook, now it should be obvious to anyone simply by looking at what is being done, but these guys aren't even hiding it anymore.

01:06:50 – 01:06:58:	They make it clear and I actually got that text from the snopes because this came up with Hillary and Obama.

01:06:58 – 01:07:11:	Are we talking about politics here? Are we talking about religion? Well, I don't know a guy who's claiming to be political is using a satanic strategy to satanic ends and he says is introduced to introduction.

01:07:11 – 01:07:14:	Let's give credit to Lucifer for at least some of this.

01:07:14 – 01:07:21:	At some point it is okay to take your enemy at his words because even liars don't lie all the time. They also like to brag.

01:07:21 – 01:07:33:	They'll tell you what they're doing and the fact that more and more of these things go mask off is we mentioned I think last week that today there are satanic unbaptism booths.

01:07:33 – 01:07:40:	That's out in the open and it's done for political purposes like they don't think they're being religious when they do that.

01:07:40 – 01:07:53:	The call that we're giving to every Christian who years us is to understand the fundamentally all of these issues are Christianity versus Satan, God versus Satan and God's people versus Satan's people.

01:07:53 – 01:08:07:	And so when we see these words and these strategies employed in the world is Corey just said there are many cases where pastors have been misled the fact that they've been misled calls into question or seminary training in our seminary selection.

01:08:07 – 01:08:17:	How is it that we are employing men to be to be shepherds who cannot faithfully shepherd who cannot tell good from evil.

01:08:17 – 01:08:24:	That's another question to be dealt with at the institutional level. It's the reason we brought that up first.

01:08:24 – 01:08:34:	To round this out we want to give an example from a recent issue in the Missouri Senate that went so widely that it actually showed up on revolver news.

01:08:34 – 01:08:38:	I think it's widely known certainly throughout the Christian community.

01:08:38 – 01:08:45:	And as what we refer to at the beginning as the large cataclysm Matt Harrison before we get into the large cataclysm.

01:08:45 – 01:08:53:	I just want to read that Chrysostom quote because I think it actually leads into it well because this is an instance where flipping tables is warranted.

01:08:53 – 01:09:04:	But this is Chrysostom speaking on first Timothy in writing to Timothy Paul bids him take refuge in the healing virtue of wine drinking.

01:09:04 – 01:09:09:	Not that to drink wine is shameful God forbid for such precepts belong to heretics.

01:09:09 – 01:09:26:	But since our discourse has now turned to the subject of blasphemy I desire to ask one favor of you all in return for this my address and speaking with you which is that you will correct on my behalf the blasphemers of this city that is to say those who are saying that wine is evil.

01:09:26 – 01:09:33:	And should you hear anyone in the public thoroughfare or in the midst of the forum blaspheming God go up to him and rebuke him.

01:09:33 – 01:09:41:	And should it be necessary to inflict blows spare not to do so smite him on the face strike his mouth sanctify your hands with the blow.

01:09:41 – 01:09:46:	And if any should accuse you and drag you to the place of justice follow them thither.

01:09:46 – 01:09:52:	And when the judge on the bench calls you to account say boldly that the man blasphemed the king of angels.

01:09:52 – 01:09:59:	Or if it be necessary to punish those who blaspheme an earthly king much more so those who insult God.

01:09:59 – 01:10:14:	Act that he highlighted wine and drinking and consuming food is goes back to the common I made the beginning about teachings of demons which is a quote from first Timothy four.

01:10:14 – 01:10:24:	That specifically is referring to men forbidding the consuming of certain foods which is again what chrism was referring to and what that he called that blasphemy.

01:10:24 – 01:10:35:	He didn't call it heterodoxy he didn't call it a misunderstanding he said that it was a direct insult to the throne of God to speak in such a manner so.

01:10:35 – 01:10:58:	Corey and I speak clearly not because we feel we have a permission slip from Chris system but because we rightly understand that these matters cut to the heart of the Christian faith they cut to the heart of whether the blood shut on the cross is going to be faithfully received by those who rejected by rejecting God.

01:10:58 – 01:11:08:	You cannot reject God's word and adopt Satan's word and expect that the blood of Christ will cover your sins on the last day.

01:11:08 – 01:11:22:	That's not a question of works righteousness it's a question of rejecting God's perfect gift by calling him a liar by saying that God is not God that he didn't do those things he didn't do this he didn't do that I have a better idea.

01:11:22 – 01:11:29:	God you said some things that kind of sound like sin I'm not going to go there I have a better morality than you.

01:11:29 – 01:11:44:	That's where a lot of the church is today and so when Corey and I bring up matters like Plegony which I'm not remotely interested or slavery which I'm not remotely interested in I've said before and for private I would rather be a slave than own slaves.

01:11:44 – 01:11:52:	I don't think it would be that bad if I had a Christian master it would take it to take a load off you would have to worry about what you do.

01:11:52 – 01:12:08:	I think that a slave such as myself would be valued and probably be exploited very successfully whatever I don't have any intrinsic desire to be a so called free man in this world because I understand what true Christian freedom is.

01:12:08 – 01:12:25:	And so when we discuss these matters that cause such frothing hatred among men who should be fellow believers and brothers in Christ they're not angry because we're disagreeing with God they're angry because we're disagreeing with their God.

01:12:25 – 01:12:36:	We're saying things that are contrary to the prince of this world who has convinced much of the church that there's a parallel religion that has the same name as Christianity

01:12:36 – 01:12:47:	and has some of the same trappings but it doesn't have the same doctrine it has some new and improved doctrines that are even more loving than what Christianity had before.

01:12:47 – 01:12:59:	And so the last part of this discussion is the large cataclysm where some of those new doctrines were introduced by the Missouri Synod into a 500 year old confession of the faith.

01:12:59 – 01:13:25:	Now as far as we know they didn't actually change any of the text itself of the large cataclysm they added dozens of essays with explanatory power to frame these issues in the large cataclysm which involves the chief articles it's the apostles creed the large prayer 10 commandments etc to explain to Christians how to really understand those things today.

01:13:25 – 01:13:48:	And so when this blew up online one of our friends Ryan turn up seed and that is his real Christian name the name Ryan turn up seed was written before the beginning of the world in the book of life he wrote a threat on Twitter the highlighted about a dozen of the false teachings in the large cataclysm.

01:13:48 – 01:14:02:	He highlighted specific excerpts that were plainly on their face Marxist language that has no business on a Christian's lips never mind in a teaching tool of our own church.

01:14:02 – 01:14:09:	And what played out next was a perfect microcosm of everything that we're trying to get to in this episode.

01:14:09 – 01:14:19:	The first thing that happened within our own church body was the members of the committee on theology and church relations.

01:14:19 – 01:14:36:	CTCR has 20 members 15 of whom are active most of the time who basically decide theological questions for the church there are several layman on there and there's a woman on there which is new recently.

01:14:36 – 01:14:46:	Absolutely should not exist on its face the fact that there's a woman present deal agitimizes the fact that they would rule doctorly on any matter.

01:14:46 – 01:15:01:	When I say rule it's important to distinguish the CTCR can issue statements but unless they are adopted at convention by the synod they're not considered binding.

01:15:01 – 01:15:19:	Those are always a words CTCR is the official body within the LCMS to decide doctrinal matters it's a commission on theology okay there's no question about that so you don't need convention to ratify rather whether it's true or false doctrine.

01:15:19 – 01:15:30:	It should be implicit that anything that these men and now woman generate will be true doctrine and they're speaking on behalf of the entire Missouri Senate Lutheran church.

01:15:30 – 01:15:43:	Speaking on behalf of Corey and I when they say these things they're saying that this is what God says this is what Luther says this is what the LCMS says and this is what you should believe we bind your conscience with these words.

01:15:43 – 01:15:57:	Here's some of the words and there we're not going to cover all of them we will link in the show notes a video stream that Ryan Corey Ryan and another man did on this subject we went into each of them in some detail.

01:15:57 – 01:16:10:	We're going to highlight a couple of the egregious examples so if you're not familiar you can have a sense of what's actually going on so that when we tell you what happened next you'll have an understanding of why we're doing this episode.

01:16:10 – 01:16:18:	There's a quote from one of the current professors at Concordia St. Louis that's one of our seminaries named Dr. Joel Bierman.

01:16:18 – 01:16:39:	I'm going to a lie to the stub the his quote for the sake of brevity all I'm doing is a meeting specific words that do not in any way alter the content of this because it's a little bit rambling I want to hone in on the specific issue you can see the screenshot for yourself and see that I'm not altering the meaning and the slightest.

01:16:39 – 01:16:54:	Lethal force is never exercised for the sake of self you say that again lethal force is never exercised for the sake of self.

01:16:54 – 01:17:23:	This is a man who's an ordained pastor in the Missouri Synod who is explicitly empirically and for all time forbidding self defense he is saying you may not defend yourself now his argument in the broader context of the discussion in his essay is that applying the Lutheran doctrine of vocation to the question in other words a man has a vocation as a husband as a father is.

01:17:23 – 01:17:39:	To those under his care and that if he's ever allowed to kill someone he's only allowed to do it in defense of another he's never allowed to do it solely for his own sake.

01:17:39 – 01:18:08:	This is shocking for so many reasons that we can do an episode just on how bad that one take is I just want to highlight who it excludes if you're an unmarried man maybe all of your relatives are dead maybe you live out in the country you don't have any immediate neighbors what this man is saying is that if home invaders to come to your home trying to kill you you must let it happen you cannot resist or you sin against God and then your last act in your life.

01:18:09 – 01:18:38:	Trying to kill them before they kill you will have been sin against God that is so profoundly evil that there's there are no words for it creation itself testifies to how false this is any animal will struggle for its life if it's endangered and the universal law of war recognizes that the reason that a man is permitted to use lethal force on the battlefield is not for the sake of well he's there bearing arms and

01:18:39 – 01:19:00:	defense of the state it's that a man has an inherent right to defend his own body and on the battlefield if another legal combatant is trying to kill him he has the right to try try to kill him back setting everything else aside that's a secular argument but it's also consistent with Christian doctrine.

01:19:00 – 01:19:29:	You have an inherent right because God made you and gave you your life to defend your life and so right out of the gate in this book in the in the discussion of the fifth commandment beerman destroys Christian doctrine not even Christian I mean Christianity began in the garden it's a point we made before he destroys 6,000 years of what believers have always believed that your ability to defend yourself is not a function of whether you're doing it.

01:19:30 – 01:19:40:	For somebody else it's whether you're doing it because God has given you your life and he determines when you die not the man who broke into your home trying to hurt or kill you.

01:19:40 – 01:19:55:	So we're going to give a couple of other examples but I just want to highlight how profoundly evil that is and what the response was when we call this even if we were to take his argument at face value.

01:19:56 – 01:20:10:	It's still in coherent nonsense because you always have the moral duty to defend yourself because you are God's property and you have a duty to defend the property of your rightful sovereign.

01:20:10 – 01:20:34:	So in addition to being wrong scripturally he is utterly insane philosophically he has he is utterly unfit to write ever again for the church and this should just be burned that's only one of the arguments that I would run through that just makes it incredibly obvious how wrong an argument against self defenses.

01:20:34 – 01:20:44:	Because of course he tries to couch it in saying that well you you have a duty to defend others but not yourself how are you going to defend others if you're dead.

01:20:45 – 01:21:03:	But it's it's just such a heinous immoral irrational argument that it's just the fact that this made it into the large cataclysm proves that the systems in place to vet this stuff are not simply insufficient but corrupted.

01:21:03 – 01:21:09:	I'll give two more brief examples and then we'll fill you in on what happened when we brought these things to light.

01:21:10 – 01:21:23:	A second example is from one regarding sexuality this is an essay I believe by a woman there are a number of female authors who wrote doctrinal doctrinal treatises on behalf of the church for the church.

01:21:24 – 01:21:39:	She writes however some of us are burdened with homosexual lust, pornographic addiction, transgenderism, pedophilia and polyamory more often they're the spec in our neighbors eye rather than the log of in our own.

01:21:41 – 01:21:47:	Now I want you to look at the screenshots you can read that for yourself.

01:21:48 – 01:21:59:	This person says on behalf of our church some people are burdened with pedophilia in a list of other sexualities.

01:22:00 – 01:22:11:	Now this is the LGBTQIA plus plus thing if you keep going with acronym P is added that publicly P for pedophile is added to the list of sexualities.

01:22:12 – 01:22:23:	So when I said that the LCMS is on the cutting edge here this is what I was referring to the idea that pedophilia is a sexuality and sure it's a bad sexuality but it's a sexuality never less.

01:22:24 – 01:22:38:	The fact that the church would have published this to acknowledge the 2023 framing that only in the very most last couple years has even the most radical left been willing to say publicly the fact that our church would join in that chorus.

01:22:39 – 01:22:56:	I'm generally pretty good with superlatives but I have none there's no way to characterize this and she goes on to say that your neighbor's pedophilia is really a spec in their eye you need to deal with your own sins first.

01:22:57 – 01:23:16:	Implying that if a man likes how girls now women look and he looks at a woman who's not his wife with sexual desire that that is a log and he has no business being worried about the pedophile next door until he deals with that is that the voice of God or is that the voice of Satan.

01:23:17 – 01:23:38:	I hope that anyone listening us doesn't need to think about that very long that is utterly satanic just is the first thing what beer man said is utterly satanic because in the broader context of all these comments what are these do these men and now women doing in our church they are supporting what Satan is doing in the world.

01:23:38 – 01:24:07:	Throughout this episode we've used lots of terms that have political connotations when we use them it's not political there's no such thing anymore there is God versus Satan and there's God's children versus Satan's children these voices are the voices of demons that were published by the Missouri Senate's own publishing arm to say you can't defend yourself in the same tone that attacks on the basis of race the ownership of private property by those who have been privileged.

01:24:08 – 01:24:21:	If you know anything about what's going on in the world you know that those are part and parcel it doesn't matter if they're in two separate essays they're the same fabric and they have the same author and he lives in hell.

01:24:21 – 01:24:28:	The last brief example I want to give before we talk about the reaction also has to do a sexuality.

01:24:28 – 01:24:39:	Some Christians sense themselves as the gender or sex opposite to their physical sex other Christians are sexually attracted to individuals of the same sex.

01:24:39 – 01:24:57:	Now this isn't the most egregious example in terms of subversion but just listen to the fact that a church is using terminology that even 20 years ago our own church would have imploded if we had talked this way no Christian was talking this way no normal human being five years ago was talking this way.

01:24:57 – 01:25:17:	And yet in 2023 Matt Harrison oversaw publishing this the CTCR blessed it they wrote much of it they approved all of it and they said this is church teaching this is for the benefit of all future generations go forth and study this and enjoy the blessings of God's word.

01:25:18 – 01:25:39:	The reason we ban with co-opting institutions is that's precisely what we're dealing with here CTCR has been co-opted the Missouri Senate has been co-opted there's no possible way that this evil book could have been produced by a Christian body this was produced by a body that has demonic voices in its midst.

01:25:39 – 01:25:55:	And as Corey said that doesn't mean that the individual is involved or demon possessed it goes to the end of the first Timothy quote teachings of demons are these teachings of God or these teachings of demons there can be no question that there's a single answer to that.

01:25:56 – 01:26:20:	So when this shipped and when Ryan publishes thread which will link three things happened first the synodocrats circled the wagons and those who are our huge fans of institutional love they said how dare you question the institution this went through doctrinal review that means it must be trustworthy.

01:26:21 – 01:26:36:	So the implicit assumption was the reason we brought up co-opting institutions they say well there's no possibility that a institution could be co-opted or even that it can make a mistake the only possibility is that you're wrong.

01:26:37 – 01:27:04:	And the fact that there are some people who could see through that but not nearly as many as I had hoped and far more people than I had hoped bought a hookline and sinker they think the idea the layman could comment on theology as a as a shocking affront to the state of our church and for us individually so this to the state of our souls that we must be deeply troubled men who are obviously very unreasonable.

01:27:04 – 01:27:33:	And so what step three it's a lensky's rules for radicals which immediately went into effect beginning before we even had the live streamer we discussed it but in the days in the media aftermath of us bringing to light this profound evil in our church there were attempts to dox us which are ongoing there attempts to see us punished punished and ex communicated from our churches for speaking about this theological.

01:27:35 – 01:27:43:	And that's interesting because the response that Matt Harrison had when he got a black eye for this disaster which is hung around his neck.

01:27:44 – 01:27:49:	He said we're withdrawing it so that it can go under review for these concerns now.

01:27:50 – 01:28:01:	I hope that there will be a good outcome from that we'll see but I bring that up to characterize the response of those who seek the destruction of the layman who spoke against it.

01:28:01 – 01:28:24:	If we spoke against something on the on the basis that it was not sound doctrine and the president of the Senate says I need to look at these concerns how is it not acting as judge jury and executioner for every pastor and layman who seeks to destroy the men involved in bringing this to light for saying that we are implicitly wrong because we're opposing an institution.

01:28:25 – 01:28:31:	I'm not whining about hypocrisy I'm pointing out that these men are liars and they are damned by their own actions.

01:28:32 – 01:28:38:	If the Senate is defensible because it published it then you must necessarily defend their decision to withdraw it.

01:28:39 – 01:28:53:	And instead they have characterized us as a mob, as angry anons as every all the slander that we've talked about in previous episodes particularly the one a man who has no name, a man whose name no man knows.

01:28:55 – 01:29:01:	These slanders are employed consistently with a Linsky's rules for radicals.

01:29:02 – 01:29:14:	So before I read a Linsky's rules there's one really interesting quote that we used in the episode on the suitability of scripture for determining such disputes.

01:29:15 – 01:29:20:	John Wickliffe's opponents stated the jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the lady.

01:29:21 – 01:29:32:	Now just a few weeks ago when I wrote that we were laughing at the Romanists for having done that that the Pope would have people murdered for trying to read the Bible themselves.

01:29:32 – 01:29:36:	And the idea that the toy of the lady was a threat to the jewel of the clergy.

01:29:37 – 01:29:43:	What we saw two weeks ago when this blew up was that that very same spirit lives within our own churches today.

01:29:44 – 01:29:48:	And I think that everyone needs to think long and hard about what that implies about us.

01:29:52 – 01:29:57:	So Saul Linsky wrote rules for radicals and he distilled it down to 13 bill points.

01:29:58 – 01:30:03:	These bullet points are predominantly focused around the personal destruction of the enemies of the institutions.

01:30:04 – 01:30:14:	Now if you know about the world in which that's being applied that sounds a bit ironic and maybe 50, 75 years ago that was not true.

01:30:14 – 01:30:21:	But today in a world where all of the institutions have been co-opted it's absolutely true that these rules work equally well.

01:30:21 – 01:30:30:	Not for the radicals against the institutions but for the radicals who employ and weaponize the institutions against their opponents.

01:30:34 – 01:30:42:	So I'm going to read the nine that were used in this very scenario against try and turn obscene against myself and Cory and others.

01:30:43 – 01:30:48:	Number one, power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

01:30:49 – 01:30:57:	So as I apply here, well, they're pastors who are trying to get us x communicated for speaking in defensive scripture.

01:30:57 – 01:31:09:	Now even in the case where we were wrong, the fact that they would presume to call us to repentance again before Senate has ruled on whether or not this is in fact false doctrine.

01:31:09 – 01:31:12:	I think that they're probably going to capitulate on a number of the points we raised.

01:31:12 – 01:31:20:	Frankly, we didn't raise all the points. There's a lot more trash in there that we didn't raise because the point was that the book itself was corrupt.

01:31:20 – 01:31:28:	We were not editors. We weren't trying to find every air. The point was to demonstrate that on its face, the existence of the book is in a front to God.

01:31:29 – 01:31:46:	So the use of institutional power to threaten laymen who would speak up against it is absolutely deploying church discipline as a weapon to silence laymen who are like we're not trying to burn down the Missouri Senate.

01:31:46 – 01:31:53:	We're not trying to destroy CPH. I think that both have serious problems. I'm very open about that.

01:31:53 – 01:32:01:	We're seeking the immediate redress of this specific problem and then we'll go upstream from there to figure out how do these problems occur.

01:32:01 – 01:32:12:	We have our own theories and our own understanding but the point of bringing the large cataclysm to the view of the world was not to pick a fight with the institution.

01:32:12 – 01:32:22:	It was to end the book because if this book had shipped to all the people who wanted it and was normalized as a part of church teaching, that's the ratchet.

01:32:22 – 01:32:27:	That's the reasonable wording being made reasonable and moving one step further down.

01:32:27 – 01:32:35:	And so a year from now, all the men who are advancing Marxism in the church would be quoting this against us and saying this is established church teaching.

01:32:35 – 01:32:40:	We had one tiny window of opportunity to prevent that from happening.

01:32:40 – 01:32:44:	And when we did, we threw a monkey wrench in the gears of that ratchet.

01:32:44 – 01:32:47:	We kept it from moving forward for the first time in a long time.

01:32:47 – 01:32:50:	It didn't move to the left like it has been.

01:32:50 – 01:32:52:	And so they're trying to threaten us.

01:32:52 – 01:32:55:	Fine. Good luck with that.

01:32:55 – 01:32:59:	Second rule is never go outside the expertise of your people.

01:32:59 – 01:33:08:	Well, that's clearly in play here because those who are most practice and slander in the destruction of reputations have done it quite effectively.

01:33:08 – 01:33:11:	It's been an ongoing thing we've seen ever since the beginning.

01:33:11 – 01:33:17:	And the expertise that they have is demonstrated by the alacrity with which they've employed those tools.

01:33:17 – 01:33:21:	Which of course ties right into rule 13 but we'll get to that.

01:33:21 – 01:33:22:	Yep.

01:33:22 – 01:33:24:	The third one is particularly relevant.

01:33:24 – 01:33:27:	Ridicule is man's most powerful weapon.

01:33:27 – 01:33:29:	And that's what they went to.

01:33:29 – 01:33:37:	It was interesting that when a number of laymen raised a serious theological critique against a church publication.

01:33:37 – 01:33:38:	The response.

01:33:38 – 01:33:40:	We'll give you what the responses were.

01:33:40 – 01:33:41:	They were first.

01:33:41 – 01:33:43:	How dare you question the church?

01:33:43 – 01:33:44:	It went through doctoral review.

01:33:44 – 01:33:46:	You guys can't possibly be right.

01:33:46 – 01:33:49:	And then they said, oh, you took it out of context.

01:33:49 – 01:33:53:	If you'd read the whole thing, you'd know that what we what we quoted was actually okay.

01:33:53 – 01:33:56:	The pedophilia is actually a sexuality.

01:33:56 – 01:34:00:	And if you read the whole essay, which is only like three pages, that's going to be explained.

01:34:00 – 01:34:05:	No, we read the full essays in order to find those excerpts.

01:34:05 – 01:34:06:	All right.

01:34:06 – 01:34:07:	We didn't cherry pick.

01:34:07 – 01:34:08:	We distilled.

01:34:08 – 01:34:10:	There's a fundamental difference.

01:34:10 – 01:34:14:	Cherry picking is isolating one thing out of context to mislead.

01:34:14 – 01:34:19:	Distillation is saying, here's three par- here's here's three pages.

01:34:19 – 01:34:23:	This paragraph gives away their true intentions.

01:34:23 – 01:34:24:	That was distillation.

01:34:24 – 01:34:27:	That is fundamentally truthful.

01:34:27 – 01:34:31:	And yet they would say, well, you took it out of context.

01:34:31 – 01:34:32:	You're liars.

01:34:32 – 01:34:33:	You're deceiving.

01:34:33 – 01:34:35:	Once we read the whole thing, we'll understand it.

01:34:35 – 01:34:37:	We got to pass the bill to know what's in the bill.

01:34:37 – 01:34:44:	I mean, that was basically amounted to most of the argument for shipping this book and not recalling it.

01:34:45 – 01:34:52:	And the last thing they did too was to go to ad hominem, to ridicule Orion for being anonymous,

01:34:52 – 01:34:54:	for being anonymous coward, which is layers.

01:34:54 – 01:34:56:	Because again, that's his name.

01:34:56 – 01:35:02:	And yet numerous pastors on multiple forums in public and in private attacked him for being anonymous.

01:35:02 – 01:35:06:	As though that somehow discredited him, I'm pseudonymous.

01:35:06 – 01:35:08:	Am I discredited by that?

01:35:08 – 01:35:09:	Some men believe absolutely.

01:35:09 – 01:35:13:	There are men like Larry Bean and Lyman Stone who will routinely say,

01:35:13 – 01:35:20:	if you do not put your name, your Christian name to your Christian words, you are not a Christian,

01:35:20 – 01:35:25:	you are a false Christian, you are cowardly, you deny the faith by concealing your name.

01:35:25 – 01:35:32:	Well, isn't it interesting that in this very moment where pseudonymity is on one hand seen as evil,

01:35:32 – 01:35:36:	and on the other hand, the men who are not pseudonymous, who use their Christian names,

01:35:36 – 01:35:40:	are being attacked in their own churches for the sake of their destruction.

01:35:40 – 01:35:42:	And again, for the sake of declaring that they're damned.

01:35:42 – 01:35:46:	When you excommunicate a man, that is applying the binding key.

01:35:46 – 01:35:49:	It is saying, we have called you to repentance repeatedly.

01:35:49 – 01:35:52:	You refuse to repent of what we are calling a sin.

01:35:52 – 01:35:56:	We now declare to the whole world, and in the name of God,

01:35:56 – 01:36:01:	that you will spend eternity in hell if you do not repent in the future.

01:36:01 – 01:36:04:	That's what excommunication means in the Lutheran Church.

01:36:04 – 01:36:06:	It's not a small deal.

01:36:06 – 01:36:10:	And so for all these pastors to say that we should be brought under church discipline,

01:36:10 – 01:36:14:	because we're anonymous, and because we slandered the church,

01:36:14 – 01:36:20:	and because we doubted doctrinal review, it's fundamentally evil.

01:36:20 – 01:36:24:	And it's a profound evil that I've never personally witnessed in my own church.

01:36:24 – 01:36:28:	I wish it were for the last time, but I think it's only going to ramp up.

01:36:28 – 01:36:32:	They're also doing the exact same thing that happens in the left hand kingdom.

01:36:32 – 01:36:38:	If you speak up on many of these same related issues or nearly identical issues,

01:36:38 – 01:36:44:	closely related issues, people will call and harass your employer,

01:36:44 – 01:36:48:	your family members, anyone they can find to try to get you fired and ruin your life.

01:36:48 – 01:36:50:	That is their entire goal.

01:36:50 – 01:36:56:	And we're seeing the same thing being done by supposed Christians in the right hand kingdom.

01:36:56 – 01:36:59:	Because it's the same playbook.

01:36:59 – 01:37:02:	We have a friend who that to him that happened.

01:37:02 – 01:37:07:	He spoke out against this stuff a number of years ago in his local town.

01:37:07 – 01:37:13:	He had to leave town, along with his family, because the death threats and the destruction of his personal character

01:37:13 – 01:37:18:	were so great that he felt the fleeing was his only chance for a fresh start.

01:37:18 – 01:37:21:	That is what these men seek against us.

01:37:21 – 01:37:25:	Now, is that what God wants or is that what Satan wants?

01:37:25 – 01:37:27:	You make up your own mind.

01:37:27 – 01:37:31:	And fairness, one of the reasons that I no longer live in California.

01:37:31 – 01:37:35:	I mean, there are plenty of reasons to leave California, but that is certainly one of the considerations.

01:37:35 – 01:37:36:	Indeed.

01:37:36 – 01:37:41:	It is certainly safer to be honest about these issues while living in Tennessee.

01:37:41 – 01:37:44:	Yeah, very much so.

01:37:44 – 01:37:48:	The next tactic that was employed is a good tactic is one your people enjoy.

01:37:48 – 01:37:53:	Well, we've seen from Facebook and the forums and Twitter and elsewhere.

01:37:53 – 01:37:58:	These people love calling us names and ridiculing us.

01:37:58 – 01:38:01:	None of them addressed the substance of our arguments.

01:38:01 – 01:38:02:	They called us racist.

01:38:02 – 01:38:03:	They called us Nazis.

01:38:03 – 01:38:07:	I don't know if they called us homophobes, but it's all the same package.

01:38:07 – 01:38:12:	That cluster of slanderous terms all go together.

01:38:12 – 01:38:17:	And the reason they were hearing it in the church, we're told it's because, well, that's Christian morality.

01:38:17 – 01:38:20:	Obviously, you can't be any of those things or you're not a Christian.

01:38:20 – 01:38:23:	How is it that no one ever talked like that a hundred years ago?

01:38:23 – 01:38:24:	I'll tell you how.

01:38:24 – 01:38:28:	It's because Satan began using those things in the world.

01:38:28 – 01:38:35:	And these men who are participants in co-opted institutions have brought these things into Christ's bride.

01:38:35 – 01:38:38:	They're using them against Christians in the name of Satan.

01:38:38 – 01:38:42:	They're speaking the teachings of demons among us.

01:38:42 – 01:38:45:	And discernment of that is vital.

01:38:45 – 01:38:47:	We're not saying this in self-defense.

01:38:47 – 01:38:52:	I don't care if man judges me harshly, whatever.

01:38:52 – 01:38:55:	The question is, are we being faithful to God?

01:38:55 – 01:39:00:	And the fact that this destruction is falling on us, it's simply because we happen to be the first to know and the first to speak up.

01:39:00 – 01:39:04:	Which is, you know what, it's why we're doing this podcast is why we began it.

01:39:04 – 01:39:07:	And it's why we will continue to double down and double down again.

01:39:07 – 01:39:13:	Because the harder these men push and the more they scream, the greater incentive there is for us

01:39:13 – 01:39:18:	to be faithful voices in an environment where most men are afraid to.

01:39:18 – 01:39:21:	Even if they know the truth, they're afraid to speak.

01:39:21 – 01:39:23:	Ridiculing me is not going to do any good.

01:39:23 – 01:39:26:	Ridiculing Corey is not going to do any good.

01:39:26 – 01:39:29:	There's nothing you could possibly say that we haven't heard before.

01:39:29 – 01:39:32:	We don't care. We just laugh.

01:39:32 – 01:39:35:	It makes you look silly. It doesn't make us look bad.

01:39:35 – 01:39:39:	But it's clear that you're following Alinsky's rules and enjoying it.

01:39:39 – 01:39:41:	So keep on enjoying it.

01:39:42 – 01:39:46:	Flowing right along the next one, keep the pressure on never let up.

01:39:46 – 01:39:48:	That's been consistent since day one.

01:39:48 – 01:39:54:	They immediately began to attacking the messenger rather than even considering the substance of the message

01:39:54 – 01:40:02:	because they had a preordained decision that whatever synod did has to be good or synod wouldn't have done it.

01:40:02 – 01:40:04:	Think about the circularity of that.

01:40:04 – 01:40:07:	How is that not Roman Catholicism?

01:40:07 – 01:40:10:	If the Magisterium says it, it must be true.

01:40:10 – 01:40:16:	Okay. If that's where Lutheranism is going to be, why shouldn't I just be Roman Catholic?

01:40:16 – 01:40:19:	They dress better. They have a cooler claim on history.

01:40:19 – 01:40:20:	It's mostly nonsense.

01:40:20 – 01:40:23:	But if we're lying, why not tell the best lie we can?

01:40:23 – 01:40:25:	We have a crappy lie as Lutherans.

01:40:25 – 01:40:28:	If it were a lie, except it's the truth.

01:40:28 – 01:40:31:	Until lately.

01:40:31 – 01:40:36:	The next Alinsky rule, the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

01:40:37 – 01:40:38:	And they know that.

01:40:38 – 01:40:44:	These guys know the threatening to doxus, threatening to bring us on, well, you can't bring a layman up on false doctrine charges.

01:40:44 – 01:40:54:	But you can have his pastor and his elders determine whether or not the congregation should choose to expel him or to place him under the lesser ban

01:40:54 – 01:40:56:	where we would be denied communion.

01:40:56 – 01:41:02:	We would be denied the body and blood of Christ to tell us that our sins are unforgiven.

01:41:02 – 01:41:03:	So what sin would that be?

01:41:03 – 01:41:09:	The sin of saying the same thing that God says about, the ten commandments and these other teachings.

01:41:09 – 01:41:18:	When a man comes to you and demands that you confess a false sin, he is commanding you to confess a false God.

01:41:18 – 01:41:20:	I want to be explicit about that.

01:41:20 – 01:41:24:	There's no such thing as confessing a false sin to God.

01:41:24 – 01:41:29:	If we were to confess the things that they demand we confess, we would be blaspheming.

01:41:29 – 01:41:34:	We would be violating all the commandments, particularly the first one by denying our own creator.

01:41:34 – 01:41:42:	If you think that we're going to repent for doing that, which we are compelled by conscience to do, watch what happens next.

01:41:42 – 01:41:44:	And so they're trying to threaten.

01:41:44 – 01:41:49:	They're using Alinsky's rules to threaten because they hope they don't care if we repent.

01:41:49 – 01:41:51:	They're not interested in our souls.

01:41:51 – 01:41:54:	They're interested in silencing their enemies.

01:41:54 – 01:42:05:	They're interested in silencing the small handful of laymen who will go head to head with evil, even when the evil is institutional.

01:42:05 – 01:42:07:	Beyond that, what do they have?

01:42:07 – 01:42:11:	The very worst case for me personally is that I'm doxed.

01:42:11 – 01:42:13:	I've faced death threats.

01:42:13 – 01:42:17:	I've faced threats in my community, maybe, whatever.

01:42:17 – 01:42:28:	In the church, the worst threat would be that if my congregation were to willingly command me to repent of a false sin, and I refused, I would be excommunicated.

01:42:28 – 01:42:34:	Do you think I'm going to stop coming to church just because my church made a false confession and kicked me out?

01:42:34 – 01:42:45:	No, I'm not going to go up to communion, obviously, because not only would it be a violation of the congregation sanctity, but it would be a false confession.

01:42:45 – 01:42:52:	Because any congregation that would excommunicate me from my words and actions is a congregation with whom I do not have fellowship.

01:42:52 – 01:42:58:	Nevertheless, if it's my only opportunity to hear the word of God preached well, that's where I'm going to go.

01:42:58 – 01:43:09:	So the worst that you can possibly do to me apart from letting people know that I'm evil and should be murdered is to deny me communion for the rest of my life.

01:43:09 – 01:43:11:	I hope that doesn't happen.

01:43:11 – 01:43:13:	If it happens, I'm prepared for it.

01:43:13 – 01:43:17:	The Siberian Lutheran church, the were entire generations that went without communion.

01:43:17 – 01:43:25:	As a Christian, I understand that the body and blood of Christ is too to be desired for the forgiveness that it provides and the comfort that it provides.

01:43:25 – 01:43:30:	I am equally forgiven in baptism. I am equally forgiven in hearing the word.

01:43:30 – 01:43:36:	There is nothing that they can deprive me of except for a name which is an attack on God's name.

01:43:36 – 01:43:43:	So the reason we're framing this in terms of Alinsky's rules is that it goes right down the list.

01:43:43 – 01:43:50:	These attacks, again, they won't talk doctrine. They want to talk about the men and they only want to talk about the men.

01:43:50 – 01:43:55:	They want a point to us and say to everyone else, get them. They're bad. They're bad guys. Get them.

01:43:55 – 01:44:03:	Not only are they going down the rules, if you actually read the book and it's not that long of a book, it's 200 pages or something.

01:44:03 – 01:44:09:	All of the examples and the details and things that are in the book, they're using them as well.

01:44:09 – 01:44:11:	There's just a quick quote I want to read here.

01:44:11 – 01:44:15:	And I guess this is our, there's one naughty word in here.

01:44:15 – 01:44:19:	So language warning if someone is listening to this with their children as I know some are.

01:44:19 – 01:44:29:	Can you imagine in the arena of conflict, charging that so and so is a racist bastard, and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as,

01:44:29 – 01:44:34:	he is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity and a good husband. This becomes political idiocy.

01:44:34 – 01:44:41:	And we see that happening with anyone who opposes these adversary pastors.

01:44:41 – 01:44:47:	All of a sudden you are an archfiend. There is nothing good about you. It doesn't matter what else you do.

01:44:47 – 01:44:52:	You can be someone who attends every service at your church, constantly volunteers.

01:44:52 – 01:44:58:	Does all of these good works and they are in fact good works.

01:44:58 – 01:45:05:	But the only thing that matters is that you've opposed them on this one thing and so you are the most evil man ever to exist.

01:45:05 – 01:45:12:	And we want to be very clear, we are not saying that sort of thing about the adversaries.

01:45:12 – 01:45:22:	Many of them do many good things, particularly the unwitting pastors who are using this playbook without knowing they're using the playbook.

01:45:22 – 01:45:29:	Most of what they're doing in their congregations and their daily lives, probably good, probably in line with what God wants.

01:45:29 – 01:45:37:	We are seeking to correct the error they are making because they are speaking with the voice of Satan when they make that error.

01:45:37 – 01:45:50:	And that is in contrast with what is being done to those of us on this side who are apparently 100% evil because we disagree on something because we're defending the word of God.

01:45:50 – 01:45:54:	And that flows into the next Alinsky rule that's being employed here.

01:45:54 – 01:46:02:	The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

01:46:02 – 01:46:18:	Now as we've just described to you accurately what has happened in the last couple of weeks, imagine what a signal that sends to other laymen or pastors in the Missouri Synod or related synods who would also be concerned.

01:46:18 – 01:46:34:	If they succeed in getting us excommunicated, if they succeed in getting the Missouri Synod to attack a layman speaking against false doctrine in the church, think about the chilling effect that that will have on the church as a whole.

01:46:34 – 01:46:47:	What will happen the next time the ratchet moves and someone notices if we're not in play, which will only happen if God calls us home because as long as we draw breath, we're going to do this harder and harder.

01:46:47 – 01:46:51:	So you guys should have tried to co-opt us a year ago and been nicer.

01:46:51 – 01:46:59:	The fact that you picked us out as enemies has animated the very energy that you now are threatened with.

01:47:00 – 01:47:10:	The constant pressure that Alinsky is talking about is this constant pressure. It's not simply the activities of doxing and threatening dex communicate.

01:47:10 – 01:47:21:	It's the knowledge, the persistent knowledge that will remain in our church body for the foreseeable future that this is what the immune system in the Missouri Synod does when laymen speak up.

01:47:21 – 01:47:33:	Even if we were wrong about the things there, if the opposition to someone who speaks about doctrine and gets something wrong, is it their destroyed? On contact?

01:47:33 – 01:47:49:	If that's the response of this church, who else is going to speak up? Not many men. I can tell you that most men can't afford to and most men don't have the constitution to withstand the degree of slander and hatred that is directed against us.

01:47:50 – 01:48:03:	God has equipped us so that we find it kind of funny most of the time. It's sad that these men are nailing Christ to the cross with every tweet that they give and every word that they say in the secret directing men to destroy us.

01:48:03 – 01:48:18:	That's tragic, but for our own sakes, it's just funny because the lies are so far from the truth that it's not even a parody. There's no comparison of the true man and the false slandered version that the world is given.

01:48:19 – 01:48:30:	And the last rule is really the sum of all of them. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. That's precisely what's been happening.

01:48:30 – 01:48:40:	It's interesting. They've gone after Ryan turnip seed, even harder than the rest of us, principally because his name was attached to it, but I think also because he's a young man and I think they can bully him.

01:48:40 – 01:48:53:	They're in for a rude awakening because he's younger than either of us, but he is incredibly brilliant. He has incredible fortitude and he's not going anywhere.

01:48:53 – 01:49:04:	Now, I don't know what's going to happen in the future of our church, but in terms of him being a voice within Christianity and fighting for the truth and fighting for the faith, he's going to be around longer than us.

01:49:04 – 01:49:15:	And if you think that galvanizing him with slander is going to chase him off, you're going to regret the next 70 years or so because it's not us who's suffering, it's going to be you.

01:49:15 – 01:49:31:	And the difference is that while you seek our suffering for the sake of the gospel, we simply seek for your evil to cease, to abate, for the teachings of demons to cease to be present in our churches.

01:49:31 – 01:49:41:	So the closest out I want to read from the Beatitudes, it's interesting when you look at the structure of them, there are nine blessed are statements.

01:49:41 – 01:49:57:	The first seven have to do with the qualities of the people about whom Christ is speaking. So the meek, those, you know, he's speaking about what is inherent to the person, what they're doing in their lives and in their communities, how they handle themselves.

01:49:57 – 01:50:09:	The last two Beatitudes are different in this particular way. The last two blessed ours have to do with how other men treat those whom God says are blessed.

01:50:09 – 01:50:13:	So I'll read them now and then just briefly put them in context.

01:50:14 – 01:50:20:	Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

01:50:20 – 01:50:28:	Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

01:50:28 – 01:50:36:	Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted the prophets who are before you.

01:50:36 – 01:50:47:	The reason we're closing out with that is not simply to make an appeal that we're the persecuted, although I think that if you believe the context we've provided here, there's no other conclusion.

01:50:47 – 01:51:00:	This is an example. Jesus is giving of Satan's playbook. The fact that we're viling and uttering all kinds of evil falsely against someone for the sake of Christ.

01:51:00 – 01:51:07:	Jesus didn't mention that flippantly. It wasn't something random. It wasn't just like, oh, I guess number nine, I need to round it up.

01:51:07 – 01:51:20:	And he even mentioned the prophets received the same treatment. Why did they receive that treatment? Because of prophets spoke the word of God among the people, both believers and unbelievers, and they were hated.

01:51:20 – 01:51:27:	Not because they weren't nice, not because they weren't good looking, not because they weren't popular. They were hated because they spoke the word of God.

01:51:27 – 01:51:37:	It is an eternal truth. There were ever Satan's animating forces in the hearts of men. Those who speak the word of God will be hated.

01:51:37 – 01:51:45:	They will be hated to the point that they were reviled and slandered ceaselessly in public. Jesus promised that.

01:51:45 – 01:51:56:	This is a blessing tied to a prophecy, which is what makes it different from the others. The others weren't prophetic. They were saying, you're blessed because of these gifts that I have given you inherently.

01:51:56 – 01:52:12:	These are blessings for what is going to come to those who obey God. Jesus prophesied and also spoken in history whenever a man speaks faithfully, all kinds of evil will be uttered against him for the sake of God.

01:52:12 – 01:52:21:	None of these ad-refersary pastors who hate us with a fire of a thousand sons do so because they think that they don't like us personally.

01:52:21 – 01:52:30:	They hate that there are men in the church today who will unflinchingly speak the word of God in their presence and against their words.

01:52:30 – 01:52:36:	And we didn't even target them this time. And when I say target, I mean speak against their lies.

01:52:36 – 01:52:48:	We are speaking against the lies that the Missouri Synod published. And yet they relized rise to its defense, and they do it with the same slander that Jesus would come to his faithful.

01:52:48 – 01:53:05:	All we can do is rejoice and thank God. But for the context of what can be done to save the church, not only the Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, but all of our churches because, again, every denomination is undergoing these same attacks using the same tricks in the same playbook.

01:53:05 – 01:53:13:	And it's going to have the same results. There will be a faithful remit who will speak up in some cases, be destroyed and driven out.

01:53:13 – 01:53:34:	And there will be those who seek to their destruction because they ultimately served Satan. And regardless of what's in their hearts as they're doing the driving out of the faithful men for the sake of God, in the end when you've driven out the faithful men, all you have left are those who cannot tell the difference between the teachings of demons and the voice of God.

01:53:34 – 01:53:48:	And those who hear the voice of their master will respond to his words with thanksgiving and faithfulness and repentance. And those who don't hear his voice and recognize it will naturally respond with howls of rage.

01:53:48 – 01:54:01:	And as we see these things play out in our church, pay attention to those two sides who was speaking as God speaks and what is the response are those who respond faithfully are those who hate.

01:54:01 – 01:54:13:	If they hate, do they hate in the same way that the world hates? Do they hate with Satan's playbook? Do you see the same thing playing out again for the 50th time? If that's happening, why is it happening?

01:54:13 – 01:54:24:	This is an eternal playbook. Well, not eternal. It's created in Satan's mind as a creature, a twisted creature who seeks for all of creation to join him and rebellion against God.

01:54:24 – 01:54:37:	By God's grace, none of us are going to rebel against God. And if that means faithfulness in the face of persecution within our own church bodies, then we will rejoice for that blessing too.

01:54:37 – 01:54:46:	And it just brings to mind one additional scripture verse, I think, we'll close with Joshua, chapter 24.

01:54:46 – 01:54:58:	And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of the academy that has been co-opted or the gods of the wicked state that now rules over you.

01:54:58 – 01:55:04:	But as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord.

01:55:04 – 01:55:06:	Amen.