Transcript: Episode 0078

“On Violence”

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

00:00:37 – 00:00:39:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

00:00:39 – 00:00:40:	I am Corey J.

00:00:40 – 00:00:41:	Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:43:	And I'm still Woe.

00:00:44 – 00:01:02:	On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing something that has been going on in the world, something that's been accused against us repeatedly, including very recently as the subject of violence and the advocacy of violence versus the incitement of violence and various other forms.

00:01:03 – 00:01:07:	So today, we're going to be talking for a couple hours entirely about violence.

00:01:08 – 00:01:18:	And we're going to have a somewhat lengthy preamble here to be very pedantic about what it is that we are and are not saying because people are sloppy with words.

00:01:18 – 00:01:27:	And so there are times when we will get into things definitionally where some people think that we're being autistic, which is a stupid criticism.

00:01:27 – 00:01:29:	We're being precise because the words matter.

00:01:30 – 00:01:40:	And so I didn't even realize that this was going on until this past week, until the controversy that arose that precipitates initially the thought.

00:01:40 – 00:01:42:	And we'll get into a little bit of details, but not too much.

00:01:43 – 00:02:11:	But I realized that in the past couple years when lying pastors and other false Christians have slandered and accused Corey and me of advocating slavery or advocating genocide or advocating this or that, it never occurred to me that in one very, very narrow sense, they were not lying, but what they were doing was lying by connotation.

00:02:11 – 00:02:13:	And so here's what I mean by this.

00:02:13 – 00:02:15:	That's not an admission of anything evil, by the way.

00:02:16 – 00:02:24:	And so this is going to be an episode where you could very easily clip probably any 60 seconds and turn us into the bad guys, because we're talking about something very difficult.

00:02:25 – 00:02:29:	But when you take the whole argument, it's like, well, yeah, that's clearly what's actually going on.

00:02:31 – 00:02:37:	Advocacy is different than incitement, is different than encouragement.

00:02:38 – 00:02:45:	So one of the things that we do on Stone Choir very frequently, we encourage people to go to church and to read the Bible.

00:02:46 – 00:02:48:	We exhort people to do the same.

00:02:49 – 00:02:51:	You might even say that we incite people to do the same.

00:02:52 – 00:02:59:	And those three words all have slightly different connotations, but at the same time, they're synonyms.

00:03:00 – 00:03:04:	They are overlapping in some portions and they're separate in others.

00:03:05 – 00:03:11:	And so when you only use one word, you get all the baggage of the connotation, even if you just want to mean the one thing.

00:03:11 – 00:03:19:	So I wouldn't typically say that I'm inciting you to read the Bible, but I would say absolutely that I exhort you to read the Bible, even though it's basically synonymous.

00:03:20 – 00:03:30:	And I realized as I was thinking about the remarks I would give here today, that my prose and my speech is very often what is called in literature turgid.

00:03:30 – 00:03:32:	It's I go over the top with my synonyms.

00:03:33 – 00:03:34:	I'll just kind of layer them on.

00:03:34 – 00:03:38:	I'll say like two or three things that seem like they mean almost exactly the same thing.

00:03:38 – 00:03:40:	And I realized that this is precisely why.

00:03:41 – 00:03:44:	It's because when I layer on, I start with the first word, like insight.

00:03:44 – 00:03:48:	Say I incite, I exhort, and I encourage you to read the Bible.

00:03:50 – 00:03:51:	It's over the top.

00:03:51 – 00:03:54:	And I know that some people think I'm a buffoon, I don't understand the English language, and I do that stuff.

00:03:54 – 00:03:56:	And I'm fine with that.

00:03:56 – 00:04:08:	The specific reason that I have that very particular weird kind of annoying habit is that by layering different words over each other, you know, you lay down insight, I'm inciting you to read the Bible.

00:04:08 – 00:04:10:	You have the complete definition of that word.

00:04:11 – 00:04:15:	And then when I add exhort, well, exhort's off by like 15 degrees.

00:04:15 – 00:04:22:	So it lays on top of insight and the junction of those is really what's left.

00:04:22 – 00:04:25:	If you imagine there are different shapes layered on top of each other.

00:04:26 – 00:04:35:	Once I have insight, exhort and encourage, all layered stacked up on top of each other, there can be bits and pieces of those definitions hanging off the edges.

00:04:35 – 00:04:38:	And the junction in the center is what I'm actually talking about.

00:04:39 – 00:04:46:	So that annoying verbal tick seemingly is just me trying to really narrow down what it is that I'm communicating.

00:04:46 – 00:04:50:	And the reason for that is that words mean things.

00:04:50 – 00:04:54:	The precision with which we use language is vital to communication.

00:04:54 – 00:05:02:	And one of the very common things we do on Stone Choir is complain about and try to illustrate how lazy and sloppy people are with words.

00:05:02 – 00:05:07:	Because if you only say one of those, it leaves peripheral questions.

00:05:07 – 00:05:10:	If I say, I encourage you to read the Bible, well, how strong is that encouragement?

00:05:11 – 00:05:12:	It's kind of a take it or leave it thing.

00:05:13 – 00:05:16:	If I say that I exhort you to read the Bible, that's much more emphatic.

00:05:17 – 00:05:22:	I'm basically kind of burdening your conscience to some extent, again, depending on context.

00:05:22 – 00:05:27:	If I say if I exhort you to read the Bible, it's kind of like I'm somewhere between begging and grabbing you by the lapels.

00:05:28 – 00:05:31:	And if I say that I'm inciting you to read the Bible, well, that's even a slightly different thing.

00:05:31 – 00:05:35:	But all of them mean that if you listen, you're going to go read the Bible, right?

00:05:36 – 00:05:42:	So, the different terms that we use are an important part of a conversation.

00:05:42 – 00:05:45:	And one of the reasons I do it, like I love the English language.

00:05:45 – 00:05:47:	I love how incredibly rich and deep it is.

00:05:47 – 00:05:51:	There's a video from an old interview with William F.

00:05:51 – 00:05:56:	Buckley and a Spanish author named Borges where he says something absolutely wonderful.

00:05:56 – 00:06:03:	He's a Spanish speaker natively, but he says he prefers writing and speaking in English because it's a much richer language.

00:06:03 – 00:06:08:	It's funny because Buckley is trying to argue with him and trying to talk about how rich his native language, Spanish, is.

00:06:08 – 00:06:09:	He's like, no, it's better.

00:06:09 – 00:06:24:	And a specific point that he makes is that the English language is simultaneously synthesized and derived from Anglo-Saxon language, from Latin via, in some parts, French, and there are dribs and drabs in Greek kind of at the periphery.

00:06:25 – 00:06:28:	There are multiple ways for a native English speaker to say anything.

00:06:29 – 00:06:38:	And in some cases, because they're coming from completely different languages, and one of the examples that he gives is the Holy Spirit, which is a Latinate word, it's a very light word, you know, spirits.

00:06:39 – 00:06:40:	It's light.

00:06:40 – 00:06:44:	You just kind of instinctively know that there's an ephemerality and a gentility to a spirit.

00:06:45 – 00:06:49:	Ghost, on the other hand, he describes as a good dark Saxon word.

00:06:49 – 00:06:54:	When you say the Holy Ghost, it gives a very different impression than the Holy Spirit, even though it's the same thing.

00:06:54 – 00:07:00:	And so both of those are used in the English language, but you can choose which one you use for emphasis.

00:07:00 – 00:07:08:	And for me as a native English speaker, one, I'm eternally grateful to God that I know this language natively, because I would never want to learn this mess.

00:07:08 – 00:07:09:	It's confusing.

00:07:09 – 00:07:16:	I have tremendous respect for those of you who are English second language speakers who become fluent because this is a mess.

00:07:17 – 00:07:19:	But it's an incredibly rich mess once you master it.

00:07:19 – 00:07:22:	So I just kind of got that for free by being born here.

00:07:23 – 00:07:30:	When we're using various words, it's very easy to mislead by using one and being sloppy about what it means.

00:07:30 – 00:07:38:	When we are falsely accused of advocating slavery or advocating violence, what they actually mean is incitement.

00:07:38 – 00:07:43:	And you can always tell that whenever the accusation is leveled that they mean incitement to violence.

00:07:44 – 00:07:53:	When I say that we are advocating things like slavery, we're talking about it in the sense that the Holy Ghost, one of his names, is advocate.

00:07:53 – 00:07:55:	The Holy Ghost is our advocate to God.

00:07:56 – 00:07:59:	If you have an attorney, he is your advocate in the courtroom.

00:07:59 – 00:08:00:	Well, what does advocate mean?

00:08:01 – 00:08:03:	To speak for, you know, vocal, advocate.

00:08:03 – 00:08:06:	It basically means one who speaks for another.

00:08:07 – 00:08:19:	And so to advocate for a position is not to say, you know, in a specific example of slavery, and we said this in that episode, it was a two-hour Bible study about the subject of slavery.

00:08:20 – 00:08:21:	And we advocated for it.

00:08:21 – 00:08:29:	We said, look, slavery has been accused of being a per se sin, of being the greatest evil in the history of the universe until the Nazis.

00:08:30 – 00:08:33:	And anytime you see slavery, you see absolute wickedness.

00:08:34 – 00:08:38:	And we advocated for the scriptural position that that is completely false.

00:08:39 – 00:08:42:	And yet simultaneously, we said that we are not inciting slavery.

00:08:43 – 00:08:45:	We're not saying that we want anyone to be enslaved.

00:08:45 – 00:08:52:	It's simply to advocate for a position is to say, the thing that's being said about this is false.

00:08:52 – 00:08:55:	And so we had advocated for things that are controversial.

00:08:56 – 00:09:10:	And it's not to be controversial because as we talked about in the recent target selection episode, when Satan's global religion is coming after things and saying this is the great threat, that peaks our attention, that peaks our curiosity.

00:09:10 – 00:09:13:	What is it that Satan is threatened by in this subject area?

00:09:14 – 00:09:21:	And so one of the things that Stone Choir exists for is to advocate on behalf of those things when there's a scriptural basis.

00:09:21 – 00:09:26:	Now, it's not simply rote, defiance of whatever, like I'll always look, you know.

00:09:27 – 00:09:28:	If slavery were evil, we would say it was evil.

00:09:29 – 00:09:29:	I don't care.

00:09:29 – 00:09:33:	I don't have a vested opinion because I'm not trying to incite anything.

00:09:34 – 00:09:38:	I benefit not whatsoever, not one whit to say these things.

00:09:38 – 00:09:42:	It's only been to our detriment to advocate for controversial positions.

00:09:42 – 00:09:44:	And we don't do it to be controversial.

00:09:44 – 00:09:46:	We do because that's where the fire is.

00:09:46 – 00:09:47:	That's where the smoke is.

00:09:48 – 00:09:56:	So today when we're talking about violence, in one very narrow sense, we are going to be advocating for violence in that very specific sense.

00:09:57 – 00:10:05:	Violence is not, per se, that is in and of itself at all times and in all places evil in this world.

00:10:05 – 00:10:17:	And we're going to get into the times and places where and in the moral sense that whether violence should exist at all in the universe and what God's nature is and how it relates to that because it's a very complicated question.

00:10:18 – 00:10:24:	But part of the reason we're doing this lengthy preamble is that we are not inciting any form of violence.

00:10:24 – 00:10:29:	We would never do that because A, it is, per se, illegal to incite violence.

00:10:30 – 00:10:32:	It is retarded to incite violence.

00:10:32 – 00:10:33:	And it's ineffectual.

00:10:34 – 00:10:38:	To go do something violent and illegal is dumb.

00:10:38 – 00:10:39:	It's not going to work.

00:10:39 – 00:10:40:	It's going to backfire.

00:10:41 – 00:10:42:	And then you're going to go to hell for it.

00:10:43 – 00:10:48:	You won't find Cordy or me in any situation where any of those things are in play.

00:10:48 – 00:10:48:	We're not going to be evil.

00:10:48 – 00:10:49:	We're not going to be stupid.

00:10:49 – 00:10:51:	And we're not going to be impotent.

00:10:51 – 00:10:58:	So the notion that we would ever incite violence or incite slavery or anything else, it's just, it's a lie.

00:10:58 – 00:11:06:	It's a slanderous lie that is a necessary type of defamation to ensure that no one will ever consider any of these subjects.

00:11:07 – 00:11:14:	In the case of the slavery episode, we made the case that you cannot have the Christian religion without a proper understanding and respect for slavery.

00:11:15 – 00:11:16:	If you don't remember that, go back and listen.

00:11:16 – 00:11:18:	I'm not saying something wild.

00:11:18 – 00:11:21:	We make the case that you cannot have Christianity without slavery.

00:11:22 – 00:11:29:	And the attack in the world, in the new global religion against these things, is for precisely that reason.

00:11:29 – 00:11:35:	As soon as they take something off the table that seems very peripheral, it's not even a going issue anymore, so why would we talk about it?

00:11:36 – 00:11:38:	Well, why does Satan care?

00:11:38 – 00:11:40:	If it's a dead issue, why does it matter?

00:11:40 – 00:11:52:	It matters because if you take that off the table, if no one is any longer advocating for that subject in a manner consistent with the Christian religion, Satan can kill Christianity.

00:11:53 – 00:12:01:	And almost all the polemics, all the apologetics that exist for the last five centuries, don't look at these things because these are new attacks.

00:12:01 – 00:12:11:	You say very often, a lot of the stuff that's happening today has never happened in the history of the Church, so we don't have good theology sitting on the shelf to say, this is exactly how to deal with this.

00:12:12 – 00:12:13:	I have some historical example.

00:12:14 – 00:12:18:	In many cases, you're going to have brand new attacks doing brand new damage to the Christian faith.

00:12:19 – 00:12:36:	And we're going to give you a few examples here today where if you neglect the thing that seems like a minor peripheral matter, you have undermined the faith months, years, centuries, millennia down the road because you gave up something that was scriptural and godly and Satan doesn't care about any given generation.

00:12:36 – 00:12:41:	He might just let that lie sit there for a thousand years before he exploits it.

00:12:41 – 00:12:44:	And sometimes some of his most effective work has been doing that.

00:12:44 – 00:12:49:	He makes a lie, he puts it in the timeline, he gets everyone to repeat it, and it doesn't seem to do any harm.

00:12:49 – 00:13:00:	It just sits there quietly, and a thousand years later it's activated because someone else comes along and they derive some new conclusion on top of that lie, on top of that foundation of quicksand.

00:13:00 – 00:13:05:	And very quickly it's layered up and layered up and layered up, and soon you have a full blown attack on Christianity.

00:13:06 – 00:13:08:	And it was made possible by that one lie a long time ago.

00:13:09 – 00:13:18:	So the necessity of advocating for things which are scriptural and godly, and very often go directly to the nature of God himself, are for these reasons.

00:13:18 – 00:13:24:	Neither coin nor I want to see any violence anywhere, at any time, in any place for any reason.

00:13:24 – 00:13:26:	That's never a desirable outcome.

00:13:26 – 00:13:30:	However, we live in a fallen world and violence exists.

00:13:31 – 00:13:44:	And so in that fallen world where violence exists, where evil exists, all by itself, if Christians, as many are today, concede that all violence is always per se evil, Satan is going to win.

00:13:45 – 00:13:48:	Because we'll get into this, pacifism is anti-Christian.

00:13:49 – 00:13:51:	Pacifist Christian is an oxymoron.

00:13:51 – 00:13:52:	There is no such thing.

00:13:53 – 00:13:59:	You cannot refuse at all times and all places to ever exert any form of violence against another man.

00:13:59 – 00:14:00:	That's not Christian.

00:14:01 – 00:14:03:	And the law always recognizes that.

00:14:03 – 00:14:04:	That's not a scandalous position.

00:14:04 – 00:14:06:	We'll get into some of those details as well.

00:14:06 – 00:14:11:	Because we have to be very precise about what we're saying so that everyone understands.

00:14:11 – 00:14:13:	Corey and I are not inciting violence.

00:14:14 – 00:14:18:	And we're not even advocating violence in the sense that, well, now here's a license.

00:14:18 – 00:14:19:	That's another crucial part of this.

00:14:20 – 00:14:31:	You know, if we talk about polygyny or slavery or violence, it's not a license for someone to say, oh, I really wanted to do that anyway, and now somebody gave me license to do it, so I'm going to go do something.

00:14:32 – 00:14:32:	That's BS.

00:14:33 – 00:14:34:	That's not what you should do with the Bible.

00:14:34 – 00:14:36:	It's not what you do with anything that you hear.

00:14:36 – 00:14:38:	It's the exact opposite of our intent.

00:14:39 – 00:14:46:	The advocacy is very, very narrowly scoped specifically to the case where this is actually scriptural.

00:14:46 – 00:14:52:	And anyone who is attacking the subject itself per se is evil is actually attacking God.

00:14:52 – 00:14:54:	And that's our concern.

00:14:54 – 00:14:56:	That's our principal spiritual concern.

00:14:57 – 00:15:06:	Additionally, and downstream from that, there are also very real political concerns from men saying, no, there can never possibly be any violence under any circumstances.

00:15:06 – 00:15:13:	Because as we see in the world, the very same men saying that are simultaneously enacting violence against us.

00:15:14 – 00:15:17:	They cry piece piece as the bullets whiz past your head.

00:15:17 – 00:15:20:	And then when you stand back up bloody, they say, calm down.

00:15:20 – 00:15:22:	We need to have a conversation about this.

00:15:22 – 00:15:23:	Don't get angry.

00:15:23 – 00:15:24:	There's no violence.

00:15:25 – 00:15:33:	That is a ratchet effect like we see everywhere else, where it's a fundamentally dishonest argument coming from people who want to kill us.

00:15:33 – 00:15:36:	And we have to acknowledge that.

00:15:36 – 00:15:38:	We can't just pretend that everything's fine.

00:15:39 – 00:15:41:	No one wants to do any physical harm in the physical world.

00:15:42 – 00:15:43:	We are physical creatures.

00:15:43 – 00:15:45:	God has given us our bodies.

00:15:45 – 00:15:47:	Our lives are not our own.

00:15:47 – 00:15:48:	They are bought with a price.

00:15:49 – 00:15:55:	And we have a duty to God, to self and to neighbor, for God's sake, to preserve that which God has given us.

00:15:55 – 00:16:00:	And there are certain narrow circumstances where violence is necessary.

00:16:01 – 00:16:03:	And Corey's going to give his legal disclaimers.

00:16:03 – 00:16:04:	He's an attorney.

00:16:04 – 00:16:06:	He's a very competent attorney.

00:16:06 – 00:16:06:	He's a brilliant attorney.

00:16:07 – 00:16:07:	I'm a layman.

00:16:08 – 00:16:10:	Neither one is going to give you legal advice.

00:16:10 – 00:16:14:	But just know that every state, every country, has different ways of treating these things.

00:16:15 – 00:16:17:	Nothing that we're saying here is legal advice.

00:16:18 – 00:16:18:	That's obvious.

00:16:19 – 00:16:22:	You need to talk to an attorney if you want to know what the law is in your area.

00:16:23 – 00:16:26:	But there are principles that are also involved.

00:16:26 – 00:16:29:	And the principles are generally held everywhere.

00:16:29 – 00:16:36:	So we're going to talk about the principles, how they intersect with faith, with scripture, with history, and with reality.

00:16:36 – 00:16:44:	Because right now, in this moment, this current year, this week, all those things are coming together in one place from all different directions.

00:16:44 – 00:16:51:	And so this subject was kind of both handed to us and forced upon us by events in the world.

00:16:51 – 00:16:55:	And it's critical for someone to be speaking about it faithfully.

00:16:56 – 00:17:03:	At the same time, part of our exhortation to you as listeners is you shouldn't go around talking about violence.

00:17:03 – 00:17:08:	We're not trying to put this on the table and say, okay, we're going to have a lot of people talking about violence now.

00:17:09 – 00:17:25:	The premise of Stone Choir episodes is to lay down a library that tries to treat an individual topic in a somewhat complete fashion where we lay out the argument and someone can go back and listen and say, okay, I have a better understanding now of what the moving parts are for this subject.

00:17:25 – 00:17:28:	That is not trying to make anything a live issue.

00:17:28 – 00:17:41:	It's just saying that if someone later comes along and tries to say, you know, Bonhoeffer was a really great saint, he was a wonderful Christian, you can point to the episode on Bonhoeffer and say, well, actually, he was a murderous assassin who hated God.

00:17:42 – 00:17:46:	And the things that he did were motivated by the very same sort of hate that we've seen this week.

00:17:47 – 00:17:51:	So they're interlocking pieces here, but this isn't the core of the Christian faith.

00:17:52 – 00:17:54:	It's not the core of what should be discussion or discourse.

00:17:55 – 00:18:06:	We don't think that, like, this is not, we don't want mentioning this or discussing it to be any sort of paradigm shift, but it's absolutely crucial and vital that there actually be Christians talking about it somewhere.

00:18:07 – 00:18:15:	And we hope that we can lay this down and offer it to our listeners and to others, say, okay, I now understand the basis for some of these things.

00:18:15 – 00:18:23:	And what people do with that in their own lives, in other places and other times, should be informed by what God wants above all else.

00:18:24 – 00:18:29:	And the law, the written law, in the world, will dictate what the consequences will be.

00:18:29 – 00:18:37:	So, everyone should be obeying the law after they're obeying God and never wishing violence in any circumstance.

00:18:37 – 00:18:40:	Yet, when it comes, we can't say, no, there's no such thing.

00:18:42 – 00:18:58:	So, before we turn to violence as a general subject and as a scriptural subject, and as a moral subject, of course, I want to go over it briefly as a legal subject, because, of course, the law is tied up in all of this.

00:18:59 – 00:19:01:	I am going to go over it from a US perspective.

00:19:01 – 00:19:15:	Obviously, if you are listening somewhere else in the world, your laws will differ to some degree, perhaps radically in some places, but in the Western world, this is sort of generally how the law works for this.

00:19:15 – 00:19:30:	There are definitely some nuances, some differences in most European systems, but this is still a general overview of how these moving parts work with regard to violence, with regard to incitement.

00:19:31 – 00:19:38:	And so the general law in this area, the most important case, and of course, as Woe said, this is not legal advice.

00:19:39 – 00:19:42:	If you need legal advice in this area, you should speak to an attorney.

00:19:43 – 00:19:46:	But the most relevant case is Brandenburg v.

00:19:46 – 00:19:53:	Ohio, which deals with what qualifies as incitement to violence.

00:19:55 – 00:20:02:	And so in order to qualify some statement, in order for it to qualify as incitement, there are two elements.

00:20:04 – 00:20:13:	I am going to, of course, simplify this area of the law to some degree because there are other cases that come in and nuance some of this or explain it.

00:20:13 – 00:20:14:	But this is the general law.

00:20:14 – 00:20:16:	This is the overview.

00:20:17 – 00:20:17:	The two elements.

00:20:18 – 00:20:28:	It must be directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and it must be, as the second element, likely to incite or produce such action.

00:20:30 – 00:20:35:	There are a number of requirements in those two elements, of course.

00:20:35 – 00:20:40:	And so you should think of it as intent plus likelihood.

00:20:40 – 00:20:50:	You have to have the intent to produce the lawless action, and it must be likely that what you did will produce such lawless action, imminently, incidentally.

00:20:50 – 00:20:52:	It can't be 500 years in the future.

00:20:52 – 00:20:55:	That would not fulfill the imminent requirement.

00:20:57 – 00:21:01:	So that is the general law with regard to incitement.

00:21:03 – 00:21:18:	I want to also go over the issue of fighting words, because fighting words are very much related to this area of the law, and obviously they act as a sort of defense if you do something violent in response to them.

00:21:18 – 00:21:20:	That's essentially how fighting words work in the law.

00:21:21 – 00:21:30:	But fighting words are words that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.

00:21:30 – 00:21:33:	Again, that aspect of imminence or immediacy.

00:21:33 – 00:21:35:	It can't be in some distant future.

00:21:35 – 00:21:41:	And so someone looks up something you said in the past and comes and beats you up, that doesn't qualify.

00:21:41 – 00:21:43:	That's not immediate breach of the peace.

00:21:45 – 00:22:01:	Now, some of you may be thinking, I can think of some naughty words, some inappropriate or words that are unacceptable socially, currently, that would qualify under that general definition, but they don't generally.

00:22:01 – 00:22:02:	And there's a reason for that.

00:22:04 – 00:22:12:	A law that prohibits the utterance of certain words would be a prior restraint.

00:22:12 – 00:22:16:	And prior restraint requires the highest level of scrutiny in our laws.

00:22:16 – 00:22:17:	That's strict scrutiny.

00:22:17 – 00:22:20:	I'll go over how that works in a minute just briefly.

00:22:21 – 00:22:28:	But the reason you cannot do that typically in the law is because it's prior restraint and it is content based.

00:22:28 – 00:22:41:	And so, for instance, racist statements would typically not qualify as fighting words because to prohibit them would be a content based prior restraint of speech.

00:22:42 – 00:22:43:	And again, that's strict scrutiny.

00:22:43 – 00:22:49:	You have to have a very high level for that because it violates the First Amendment in the US context.

00:22:49 – 00:22:59:	Obviously, in other parts of the world that do not have a First Amendment, you may very well have these sorts of restrictions, this sort of prior restraint of certain kinds of speech.

00:23:00 – 00:23:07:	For instance, certain European countries still have laws on the books that prohibit insulting foreign heads of state.

00:23:08 – 00:23:12:	Basically, a carryover from when you had nobility and royalty.

00:23:12 – 00:23:16:	Some European states obviously still do, but it's a carryover from that.

00:23:17 – 00:23:19:	And so, we don't have that in the US.

00:23:20 – 00:23:22:	You don't get arrested for insulting the president.

00:23:23 – 00:23:26:	That's not a thing in our system, at least it's not supposed to be a thing.

00:23:26 – 00:23:28:	Legally, it is not a thing in our system.

00:23:29 – 00:23:34:	But the elements for fighting words are that they must be aimed at a specific individual.

00:23:34 – 00:23:36:	So, for instance, not just a class of individuals.

00:23:37 – 00:23:40:	They must be likely to provoke an immediate violent response.

00:23:40 – 00:23:43:	Again, that element of imminence or immediacy.

00:23:44 – 00:23:48:	And of course, for the analysis, context and circumstances are vital.

00:23:49 – 00:23:54:	That is going to be a very big part of the analysis of any court with regard to fighting words.

00:23:56 – 00:24:00:	But I said I would go over strict scrutiny, and so I will go over strict scrutiny briefly.

00:24:00 – 00:24:15:	The standard for strict scrutiny, as any attorney will be able to tell you, because all attorneys are familiar with these levels of scrutiny, assuming they remember their constitutional law courses at all, the law must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest.

00:24:16 – 00:24:24:	And so narrowly tailored basically just means it has to be the least restrictive means to achieve the compelling interest.

00:24:25 – 00:24:35:	And there must be a strong connection between the law as written and that interest without overreach, which is to say the law must be not over broad.

00:24:36 – 00:24:47:	It must not encompass behavior that is outside of this compelling interest of the government that is not part of this least restrictive means to achieve the interest.

00:24:48 – 00:24:57:	The reason that's relevant again is because when dealing with fighting words, when dealing with these matters, you have the issue of prior restraint, of the government saying you cannot say.

00:24:57 – 00:24:58:	That's all prior restraint means.

00:25:00 – 00:25:10:	If you are punished after the fact for saying something, and it's not according to a law that said you couldn't say it in the first place, that's not prior restraint.

00:25:10 – 00:25:14:	What prior restraint is, is a law that is in place that says you may not say.

00:25:15 – 00:25:18:	And so before you said it, you have been told you are not allowed to do so.

00:25:19 – 00:25:20:	That's prior restraint.

00:25:20 – 00:25:24:	That's subject to strict scrutiny, again, because of the First Amendment.

00:25:25 – 00:25:28:	So that's the general law in this area.

00:25:30 – 00:25:34:	This is not, again, as Woe said, this is not license.

00:25:34 – 00:25:48:	This does not mean that you go in and yell some inappropriate word, whichever one happens to have crossed your mind while I was going over fighting words, and go in and yell it in a building full of the people who would be targeted by that word.

00:25:49 – 00:25:51:	Would that necessarily constitute fighting words?

00:25:51 – 00:25:52:	Perhaps not.

00:25:53 – 00:26:02:	But it would certainly constitute immense stupidity, which again, as we always say in these sorts of episodes, some of this is a matter of wisdom.

00:26:02 – 00:26:04:	Much of this is a matter of wisdom.

00:26:05 – 00:26:12:	Just because you legally may say something without suffering legal consequences does not mean it is wise.

00:26:13 – 00:26:19:	Just because what you said doesn't rise to the level of fighting words doesn't mean the other man won't punch you in the face.

00:26:21 – 00:26:25:	Is he legally in the wrong if what you said did not constitute fighting words?

00:26:25 – 00:26:25:	Of course.

00:26:26 – 00:26:28:	But you still got punched in the face.

00:26:29 – 00:26:33:	And so some of this is again a matter of wisdom.

00:26:33 – 00:26:39:	Whether or not you say these things is not simply a matter of whether or not you're legally entitled to say them.

00:26:41 – 00:26:44:	This is a general moral statement.

00:26:44 – 00:26:46:	Not just in this area.

00:26:46 – 00:26:51:	Just because you are legally entitled to do something does not mean that you should do it.

00:26:52 – 00:26:55:	There are many things under our legal system to which you are entitled.

00:26:56 – 00:26:57:	You may do them.

00:26:57 – 00:26:58:	It is entirely legal.

00:26:59 – 00:27:00:	That does not mean that you should.

00:27:01 – 00:27:05:	As a Christian, you certainly should not do some of those things.

00:27:06 – 00:27:09:	Legally in our system, you may view pornography.

00:27:10 – 00:27:11:	You may go to a strip club.

00:27:12 – 00:27:16:	In certain parts of the United States, you may hire the services of a prostitute.

00:27:17 – 00:27:19:	These things are legal under our system.

00:27:19 – 00:27:22:	It does not mean that you should do them.

00:27:23 – 00:27:25:	And it does not mean that it would be moral to do them.

00:27:26 – 00:27:44:	So just because something doesn't rise to the level of fighting words and is therefore illegal under the current state of our law, and historically as well, because this all comes from Anglo-Saxon common law when it comes to fighting words and things like that, just because it is legal does not necessarily mean that you should do it.

00:27:46 – 00:27:53:	That in essence covers the overview, the 30,000 foot view of the law in this area.

00:27:54 – 00:28:01:	The law is not our focus for this episode, of course, but it's necessary to address it because we all live in the real world.

00:28:02 – 00:28:10:	And there are very real legal consequences if you get these things wrong, at least if you get them wrong in public.

00:28:11 – 00:28:19:	And so it is necessary to know at least the outlines of the law, how the law works, what is illegal and what is not.

00:28:19 – 00:28:25:	So again, I will go over the test in Brandenburg just to drill it into your head as it were.

00:28:27 – 00:28:29:	It's intent plus likelihood.

00:28:30 – 00:28:37:	So directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and likely to incite or produce such action.

00:28:39 – 00:28:40:	Again, exercise wisdom.

00:28:41 – 00:28:44:	Just because that's the standard doesn't mean that you should come as close as possible.

00:28:45 – 00:28:47:	This is similar to what we've mentioned before.

00:28:48 – 00:28:49:	Think of certain things as a cliff.

00:28:49 – 00:28:52:	You do not walk as close to the cliff as possible.

00:28:53 – 00:28:54:	That is the legal standard.

00:28:54 – 00:28:55:	That is the bleeding edge, as it were.

00:28:56 – 00:29:01:	That is the absolute furthest bound of what is permissible under the First Amendment.

00:29:02 – 00:29:07:	That doesn't mean that you have to go all the way up to that line and try to stick your toe just barely not over it.

00:29:07 – 00:29:08:	Don't do that.

00:29:08 – 00:29:09:	That is unwise.

00:29:11 – 00:29:19:	The reason I've gone over the law is so that you are aware of the law, not so that you can try to do as much as possible without violating it.

00:29:21 – 00:29:24:	And just to be explicit, this is a legal defense.

00:29:25 – 00:29:27:	This does not keep you from being prosecuted.

00:29:27 – 00:29:36:	If you run your mouth and you say things that get anywhere near these lines, you are very likely in the current environment to be prosecuted for it.

00:29:36 – 00:29:43:	And you may well be convicted for it, even though there's a First Amendment and even though there's the Brandenburg ruling on the books.

00:29:44 – 00:29:46:	It may be a banner of appeal, and you may still lose.

00:29:46 – 00:29:52:	You get the wrong prosecutor, the wrong jury, the wrong town, the wrong appellate division.

00:29:53 – 00:29:56:	You could spend the rest of your life in prison for some of these things.

00:29:56 – 00:30:06:	So talking about the legal aspects is very narrowly to explain that here is how not remotely close to anything like this we are going.

00:30:07 – 00:30:09:	We would never say anything remotely like this.

00:30:10 – 00:30:22:	As far as we're concerned, to the extent that we can forbid anything, we would forbid you as a matter of binding your conscious not to go anywhere near that for the sake of your soul, for the sake of your butt, and for the sake of your reputation.

00:30:22 – 00:30:26:	It's not remotely what Christians are doing.

00:30:28 – 00:30:37:	So this whole preamble is because people are going to try to misconstrue as they have routinely defamed us in the past, say, oh, those guys are advocating violence.

00:30:37 – 00:30:39:	We will never incite violence.

00:30:40 – 00:30:44:	We will advocate scripturally for any position that has a moral basis.

00:30:45 – 00:30:46:	That's a crucial difference.

00:30:48 – 00:30:49:	Absolutely true.

00:30:50 – 00:31:06:	You may very well win on appeal if you are charged and convicted for something that the prosecutor says violates the law, but does not violate the actual law, which is to say Brandenburg and related cases.

00:31:07 – 00:31:17:	And you may very well eventually wind up before the Supreme Court and win, because these are the sorts of cases that will get taken by various legal aid societies and similar.

00:31:18 – 00:31:24:	However, that will absorb years of your life in the process, and it will not be a pleasant process.

00:31:24 – 00:31:32:	You do not want to drag your family, your loved ones or yourself through this process, so do not come close to the line.

00:31:33 – 00:31:35:	It is not worth the risk.

00:31:37 – 00:31:43:	And just as a frank matter, most men are likely to overstep if they're trying to come close to the line.

00:31:45 – 00:31:47:	This is a technical area of the law.

00:31:47 – 00:31:49:	It is complicated.

00:31:49 – 00:31:52:	There is more nuance, obviously, than I have gone over in this introduction.

00:31:53 – 00:32:02:	Do not come close to the line because you will probably step over, and even if you don't, your life can be made miserable by those who are currently in power.

00:32:03 – 00:32:08:	Again, the only reason for going over the law is because it's relevant and because it is the law.

00:32:08 – 00:32:14:	So the law of the land does matter because we are indeed living in the land under these laws.

00:32:15 – 00:32:17:	Don't come close to the line.

00:32:17 – 00:32:19:	That's the bottom line recommendation here.

00:32:21 – 00:32:34:	But to return to the issue, or really to turn to the issue of violence and related matters on a grander scale, on the moral scale, the scriptural scale, how are Christians supposed to view these things?

00:32:35 – 00:32:44:	I would like to start with just defining what violence is because if we don't have a definition of the term, well, we could be talking about different things.

00:32:44 – 00:32:46:	You may not know what exactly we mean.

00:32:46 – 00:32:52:	And so it's important to define our terms when we are dealing with these technical sorts of matters.

00:32:53 – 00:33:08:	And so for the sake of this episode, and just generally for the sake of when we are discussing these and related matters, violence is the application of physical force to achieve some end via infliction of harm or injury.

00:33:09 – 00:33:11:	That specifically is what we mean.

00:33:13 – 00:33:21:	Now, the second, not really element, because elements are necessary parts, just another quick legal thing.

00:33:21 – 00:33:30:	Elements with regard to a law are necessary things that you must fulfill to have a violation or a finding with regard to that law.

00:33:30 – 00:33:32:	Factors are more of a balancing test.

00:33:32 – 00:33:37:	And so technically the second part of this isn't an element because it could be absent.

00:33:37 – 00:33:45:	There are men out there who pursue violence for the sake of violence, or just pursue violence just because.

00:33:46 – 00:33:52:	One could quibble and say that that is itself an end, but that's just to set that issue aside.

00:33:53 – 00:33:56:	This specifically is the definition with which we are working.

00:33:56 – 00:34:01:	And a related matter is intimidation, which is the threat of violence.

00:34:02 – 00:34:04:	Distinct issues, not the same.

00:34:04 – 00:34:07:	Kind of how assault and battery are different in the civil law.

00:34:08 – 00:34:10:	Related matters, but not identical.

00:34:13 – 00:34:26:	The central claim really that we are making in this episode is a refutation of those who would say that violence is always impermissible, is always immoral.

00:34:27 – 00:34:34:	And the reason we are doing that, the reason we are advancing that claim, is the same reason that we did the slavery episode.

00:34:35 – 00:34:39:	It's the same reason we've addressed polygyny and other related issues.

00:34:39 – 00:34:46:	These are things that are in scripture that God says are morally permissible, or things that God himself did.

00:34:47 – 00:34:58:	And so if we say that they are per se sin, if we say that violence is per se sin, we are accusing God of sin, and we cannot do that as Christians.

00:34:59 – 00:35:04:	What God has done, or what God has commanded, cannot be sin.

00:35:04 – 00:35:18:	And I would like to highlight, with regard to the issue of violence, something that is glossed over in scripture, something we just read and pass by it, ignoring it totally.

00:35:20 – 00:35:25:	The first act of violence in scripture is committed by God himself.

00:35:26 – 00:35:40:	Because the first act of violence in scripture, we will set aside, as it were, the issue of the rebellion of the angels and Satan's fall, because scripture only gives us very little information about that, really.

00:35:40 – 00:35:53:	But with regard to creation, the first act of violence in creation is by God after the fall, because God kills animals to create clothing for Adam and Eve.

00:35:54 – 00:35:56:	Could be one animal, could be a number, we don't know.

00:35:56 – 00:35:58:	That is not mentioned in scripture.

00:35:58 – 00:36:02:	But God creates clothing out of animal skins.

00:36:03 – 00:36:04:	That required an act of violence.

00:36:05 – 00:36:14:	Now, of course, we usually think of violence, and when we speak about violence, we usually mean interpersonal, violence committed by one man upon another.

00:36:15 – 00:36:19:	But violence encompasses more than that, and so killing an animal is an act of violence.

00:36:21 – 00:36:23:	It is the application of physical force.

00:36:23 – 00:36:25:	You are doing it to achieve some end.

00:36:25 – 00:36:29:	In the case of the clothing, God did it to make clothing for Adam and Eve.

00:36:29 – 00:36:39:	If you are a hunter, it is perhaps for the purpose of providing food for your family, or the leather for various goods, or any of a number of other uses of the carcass of the animal.

00:36:40 – 00:36:47:	And that physical force is applied to inflict harm or injury, because you are killing the animal.

00:36:47 – 00:36:49:	That is certainly harm and injury.

00:36:50 – 00:36:51:	And so that is violence.

00:36:52 – 00:36:53:	We gloss over that in Scripture.

00:36:53 – 00:36:55:	We just read that and keep moving.

00:36:55 – 00:37:00:	The first act of violence in creation was committed by God himself.

00:37:01 – 00:37:10:	And so if we say that violence itself is per se sinful, we have accused God right here in the beginning of being a sinner.

00:37:11 – 00:37:14:	And as Christians, we absolutely cannot do that.

00:37:14 – 00:37:16:	We must not do that.

00:37:16 – 00:37:19:	Because to accuse God of sin is sin itself.

00:37:19 – 00:37:21:	In fact, it is blasphemy.

00:37:21 – 00:37:23:	It is high-handed sin.

00:37:24 – 00:37:25:	It's something the modern world tells us.

00:37:25 – 00:37:28:	Because the modern world tells you, oh, you can't be violent.

00:37:28 – 00:37:30:	Violence is always wicked.

00:37:30 – 00:37:31:	Violence is always wrong.

00:37:31 – 00:37:32:	It's always a sin.

00:37:34 – 00:37:36:	Usually, that is two things.

00:37:37 – 00:37:41:	One, it's a novel morality, somewhat novel.

00:37:41 – 00:37:42:	It's straight from the pit of hell.

00:37:43 – 00:37:44:	But it's also because of sloppiness.

00:37:45 – 00:37:50:	You have many men who use these words in a very sloppy way.

00:37:50 – 00:37:56:	They are not careful with how they use the various terms in this area, or really anywhere else when they're speaking.

00:37:57 – 00:38:02:	But if you are sloppy with these terms, you are going to wind up saying things that are not Christian.

00:38:03 – 00:38:06:	You'll also wind up saying things that are not wise and may very well be illegal.

00:38:08 – 00:38:11:	But it is that highest concern that we are focusing on in this episode.

00:38:12 – 00:38:14:	Is what you are saying Christian?

00:38:14 – 00:38:16:	Is what you are advocating Christian?

00:38:16 – 00:38:18:	Or is it against God?

00:38:18 – 00:38:20:	Is it against Scripture?

00:38:21 – 00:38:24:	And so you cannot say that violence is per se sin.

00:38:24 – 00:38:29:	We're not saying that violence is always moral, because of course it's not.

00:38:29 – 00:38:32:	The end toward which it is aimed is relevant.

00:38:33 – 00:38:39:	And so killing an animal to provide food for your family is morally permissible.

00:38:39 – 00:38:42:	That is morally permissible violence.

00:38:43 – 00:38:48:	Rising up in anger and striking down your neighbor is murder.

00:38:49 – 00:38:51:	That is morally impermissible violence.

00:38:52 – 00:38:53:	The end matters.

00:38:55 – 00:39:03:	And the very next thing that happens in the end, the Genesis 3, is two more acts of violence, although on a slightly different time scale.

00:39:04 – 00:39:08:	Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, a knowing good and evil.

00:39:08 – 00:39:13:	Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also the tree of life and eat and live forever.

00:39:14 – 00:39:18:	Therefore, the Lord God sent them out of the Garden of Eden to work on the ground from which he was taken.

00:39:19 – 00:39:27:	He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

00:39:28 – 00:39:34:	So as part of the curse, God sends Adam and Eve to death, sends us to death.

00:39:35 – 00:39:38:	That is delayed violence, but it is violence nonetheless.

00:39:39 – 00:39:40:	And then he put a cherubim with a sword there.

00:39:41 – 00:39:44:	If Adam had tried to go back into the Garden, what would have happened?

00:39:44 – 00:39:45:	The sword wasn't there for show.

00:39:46 – 00:39:48:	That was a sign that you will be killed if you try to get back in.

00:39:49 – 00:39:56:	So, from the very moment of the fall, God is unleashing both short and long-term violence against man.

00:39:57 – 00:40:05:	As Corey said, it's one of the crucial parts of this seemingly small matter of Christians especially, but everyone in the world.

00:40:05 – 00:40:11:	And it's notable that everyone in the world is unified with most Christians and saying, there's never any place for violence.

00:40:11 – 00:40:13:	Violence is always and everywhere evil.

00:40:13 – 00:40:18:	The global religion says that, and most of the Christians say that.

00:40:18 – 00:40:22:	As in every other case where that happens, you're dealing with enemy action.

00:40:22 – 00:40:24:	You're dealing with Satan.

00:40:24 – 00:40:26:	What was the first thing that Satan said to Eve?

00:40:26 – 00:40:28:	You will not surely die.

00:40:29 – 00:40:30:	Well, that's what the world is saying.

00:40:30 – 00:40:31:	Hey, peace, peace.

00:40:32 – 00:40:33:	Don't worry about it.

00:40:33 – 00:40:34:	There's going to be no violence.

00:40:34 – 00:40:36:	Tikkun Olam, we're going to take care of this thing.

00:40:36 – 00:40:38:	We're going to perfect this world now.

00:40:38 – 00:40:39:	No one will ever die.

00:40:39 – 00:40:40:	There will be no more violence.

00:40:41 – 00:40:43:	That would be desirable if it were true.

00:40:43 – 00:40:44:	That's certainly my wish.

00:40:45 – 00:40:49:	But scripture makes clear that that is not only not possible, but is not going to happen.

00:40:50 – 00:40:57:	Because until Judgment Day, evil will persist, men will persist in evil, and there will be death and violence.

00:40:58 – 00:41:01:	Wars and rumors of wars are one of the signs of end times.

00:41:02 – 00:41:04:	And they're one of the echoing ones that's always there.

00:41:04 – 00:41:07:	It's like when you read a headline that says, oh, there's a war.

00:41:07 – 00:41:09:	Oh, well, check my watch.

00:41:09 – 00:41:10:	It must be the end of days.

00:41:11 – 00:41:12:	No, it's a call to repentance.

00:41:13 – 00:41:19:	But it's also separately God saying, there's always going to be violence, especially in the end.

00:41:20 – 00:41:26:	When we look at the nature of God, I think a part of this discussion needs to be from the Perfect Hatred episode that we did last year.

00:41:27 – 00:41:34:	We talked for the entire episode, the fact that hatred, which is another one of these things that is completely condemned, no hate here.

00:41:35 – 00:41:40:	That is something that most so-called Christians and the entire new global religion are in complete agreement.

00:41:41 – 00:41:44:	There can be no hate anytime, anywhere.

00:41:44 – 00:41:46:	It's exactly the same argument.

00:41:46 – 00:41:48:	We advocated for hate.

00:41:49 – 00:41:50:	Now, we didn't incite hate.

00:41:51 – 00:41:58:	We simply said there is a time and a place where not only is hatred morally illicit, but it is required of the Christian.

00:41:58 – 00:42:03:	It's required of every good man in certain circumstances to hate.

00:42:04 – 00:42:05:	That's not incitement.

00:42:05 – 00:42:12:	That is saying this thing is from God and when we obey God, there are times when we're going to do God's things.

00:42:14 – 00:42:28:	When we look at the specific subject of violence, we find that God is not only the author of violence, He is the first one that committed violence, He's repeatedly committed violence on a global genocidal scale.

00:42:28 – 00:42:33:	And Judgment Day is nothing less than the complete obliteration of creation.

00:42:33 – 00:42:36:	It is a scale of violence that defies description.

00:42:37 – 00:42:39:	It is effectively infinite violence.

00:42:39 – 00:42:44:	And typologically, we have the flood, where God killed everyone.

00:42:44 – 00:42:50:	It is the greatest act of violence in the history of the universe, and God did it.

00:42:50 – 00:43:00:	He did it not at the drop of a hat, He did it when He realized that He regretted having made man because they were turned ever against Him and towards wickedness.

00:43:01 – 00:43:04:	And so God enacted global violence.

00:43:04 – 00:43:08:	He literally reshaped this planet with a flood that killed everything.

00:43:09 – 00:43:17:	But I think this is one of the crucial aspects of the intersection of violence in God's nature.

00:43:18 – 00:43:25:	When God was disgusted with what man had done in creation, God did not unmake.

00:43:26 – 00:43:29:	Unmake is something that is kind of a science fiction thing.

00:43:29 – 00:43:31:	It doesn't exist.

00:43:31 – 00:43:37:	We have the concept of something being unmade in the sense that it simply vanishes as though it never existed.

00:43:37 – 00:43:39:	And God could certainly have done that.

00:43:39 – 00:43:41:	That could have been God's judgment.

00:43:41 – 00:43:43:	To say, I made these people, they're evil.

00:43:43 – 00:43:45:	I'm going to unmake them.

00:43:45 – 00:43:52:	God, in His infinite wisdom, chose instead to enact global, unmitigated violence against them.

00:43:53 – 00:43:54:	He didn't unmake them.

00:43:54 – 00:43:55:	He didn't make them vanish.

00:43:55 – 00:43:56:	He killed them where they were.

00:43:57 – 00:43:58:	And not quickly.

00:43:58 – 00:43:59:	He killed them slowly.

00:43:59 – 00:44:05:	They drowned in sheer terror, begging for their lives, and He did not hear their cries.

00:44:05 – 00:44:06:	That is our God.

00:44:07 – 00:44:18:	And so when the world, the global religion, and the so-called Christians who share that religion cry out against all violence, they are crying out against God.

00:44:18 – 00:44:25:	Just as those unbelievers, those wicked men who were destroyed in the waters of the flood, they're saying God is evil.

00:44:26 – 00:44:27:	And they're also saying have mercy.

00:44:27 – 00:44:28:	No, no, no violence.

00:44:28 – 00:44:29:	We don't need violence here.

00:44:30 – 00:44:30:	God's like, no.

00:44:31 – 00:44:33:	Unlimited, unmitigated violence against evil.

00:44:33 – 00:44:35:	Is it because God is hateful?

00:44:35 – 00:44:35:	No.

00:44:36 – 00:44:38:	It's because they were contrary to God's will.

00:44:38 – 00:44:57:	And so when illicit violence exists, and there's a clear distinction between illicit violence and illicit violence, as Corrie said a minute ago, much of this is a matter of us understanding there's a time and a place for violence, and there's a time and a place for not violence.

00:44:58 – 00:45:01:	And violence is always and everywhere destructive.

00:45:02 – 00:45:09:	And economically and personally, because things can't be unmade, they can't simply vanish.

00:45:10 – 00:45:18:	When there's violence, when there's destruction of life, of property, of whatever, there is one sense in which that's evil.

00:45:19 – 00:45:25:	We've talked in the past about there are places in the Bible where God talks about authoring evil actions.

00:45:26 – 00:45:35:	Not that the thing itself was evil, that the impetus was evil, but that the fact that such things would exist is itself evil.

00:45:35 – 00:45:38:	The fact that violence exists is evil in a narrow sense.

00:45:39 – 00:45:49:	Not in the sense that God sinned in the garden or in the flood or on judgment day, but in the sense that the fact that there is violence anywhere is because of evil in the world.

00:45:49 – 00:45:54:	And so it is God's violence redeeming and fixing those things.

00:45:55 – 00:45:59:	Now, the redemption at the cross is eternal, but it is not temporal.

00:46:00 – 00:46:13:	That's one of the big challenges that we have with the faithful remnant inside the church is trying to differentiate between God's redemptive action on the cross, which redeemed the whole world in eternity.

00:46:13 – 00:46:20:	But only those who have faith, who are elect to receive it, are going to actually benefit from that redemption.

00:46:20 – 00:46:25:	And at the same time, that redemptive work does nothing to fix the world.

00:46:26 – 00:46:27:	People didn't stop dying.

00:46:27 – 00:46:28:	Jesus died on the cross.

00:46:28 – 00:46:32:	The other two men hanging beside Him died, justly so.

00:46:33 – 00:46:34:	And one of them confessed that.

00:46:34 – 00:46:42:	It's a very interesting example, when you talk about crying out against violence, against men saying that the death penalty is wicked.

00:46:42 – 00:46:47:	The thief on the cross who confessed Christ confessed that the death penalty was entirely illicit.

00:46:48 – 00:46:49:	He basically said, we deserve to be up here.

00:46:50 – 00:46:54:	And he chastised the murderer on the other side of Jesus, saying, how can you run your mouth at God?

00:46:55 – 00:46:56:	He's done nothing to be up here.

00:46:56 – 00:46:57:	We deserve to die.

00:46:57 – 00:47:01:	And then he turned to Jesus and said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

00:47:02 – 00:47:04:	That was an expression of faith.

00:47:04 – 00:47:09:	And it was simultaneously expression, an entirely Christian one, that He deserved to die.

00:47:11 – 00:47:15:	And Jesus' death on the cross right beside Him did not save Him from that.

00:47:15 – 00:47:18:	It didn't save Him from the temporal consequences.

00:47:19 – 00:47:20:	It saved His eternal soul.

00:47:21 – 00:47:25:	And that thief will be restored in the New Lutworth.

00:47:25 – 00:47:29:	He will be raised from the dead, along with all the rest of us.

00:47:29 – 00:47:31:	And He will go with the sheep and not with the ghosts.

00:47:32 – 00:47:35:	We're all going to be raised bodily after we're all killed.

00:47:35 – 00:47:36:	God kills everybody.

00:47:37 – 00:47:40:	And on Judgment Day, He's going to wipe away everything.

00:47:41 – 00:47:52:	And leading up to Judgment Day, incidentally, not that we want to get eschatological all the time on this podcast, but when you look at the signs of the end times, God's very clear that it's going to get so bad.

00:47:53 – 00:47:58:	He says He's going to cut those days short only for the sake of the elect, because it's going to be so bad.

00:47:58 – 00:48:07:	There's going to be so much violence and so much evil that if God did not cut the last days prior to Judgment short, the elect, too, would apostatize.

00:48:07 – 00:48:12:	Everyone would fall away, because it's going to get so evil, so violent, so wicked.

00:48:16 – 00:48:25:	The fact that God tolerates and permits these things is one of the greatest challenges in the Christian faith, because we have these things that are evil that God is clearly opposed to, and yet He permits them.

00:48:25 – 00:48:27:	And in some cases, He uses them.

00:48:28 – 00:48:32:	The things that man intends for evil, God intends for good.

00:48:32 – 00:48:35:	And so God absolutely uses man's evil in the world.

00:48:35 – 00:48:36:	He doesn't prevent it.

00:48:37 – 00:48:40:	He doesn't cause the evil man to wink out of existence before he can commit a sin.

00:48:41 – 00:48:41:	He lets it play out.

00:48:42 – 00:48:44:	And then God uses it to His purposes.

00:48:45 – 00:49:06:	The flood is a crucial example of what we're talking about here in particular, because not only is the flood the most catastrophic example of absolute violence in history until Judgment Day, which was exacted by God, but it's another one of these examples where it's a small detail in the Scripture.

00:49:06 – 00:49:08:	There's not a lot of talk about the flood.

00:49:08 – 00:49:11:	It's just sort of sitting there, and it pops up occasionally.

00:49:11 – 00:49:12:	Noah pops up.

00:49:12 – 00:49:14:	The flood pops up once in a while.

00:49:15 – 00:49:17:	But the whole Christian faith doesn't hinge on it.

00:49:18 – 00:49:29:	Satan uses that fact, the fact that there's not a lot of ink spilled in Scripture about the flood after it happens, to permit men today to say, well, that was in the olden times.

00:49:29 – 00:49:31:	No one knows what really happened.

00:49:31 – 00:49:32:	Maybe it wasn't a global flood.

00:49:33 – 00:49:34:	Maybe it really didn't happen like that.

00:49:34 – 00:49:36:	You know, there's no one there to witness it.

00:49:36 – 00:49:38:	So we just have this account.

00:49:38 – 00:49:45:	And all these other pagan religions, these pagan places have their own accounts of a global flood or local flood.

00:49:45 – 00:49:47:	You know, there's a lot of water and a lot of people died.

00:49:47 – 00:49:49:	Yeah, maybe something happened, but it's a story.

00:49:49 – 00:49:50:	It's a myth.

00:49:51 – 00:49:59:	The problem with that sort of dismissal of a detail in Scripture, just as violence is a detail in Scripture, there's a lot more violence than there is the flood.

00:49:59 – 00:50:01:	You know, the flood is one example of violence.

00:50:02 – 00:50:06:	If you were able to just paper that over and say, well, I'm just focused on the Gospel.

00:50:07 – 00:50:08:	I'm Gospel-centered.

00:50:08 – 00:50:10:	I don't think about these mean things.

00:50:11 – 00:50:12:	Here's what happens.

00:50:12 – 00:50:27:	In 1 Peter 3, it's recorded, when God's long-suffering in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight souls, were brought safely through the water, baptism, which is the antitype to this, now saves you.

00:50:28 – 00:50:40:	Not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with the angels, authorities and powers, having been subjected to him.

00:50:41 – 00:51:03:	So, the New Testament makes very clear, not everywhere, but it makes clear in 1 Peter, the flood, which is a real historical event, is typological of our salvation, and that baptism, the sacrament, is the delivery of that salvation for all men, just as eight men were saved through the waters in the ark.

00:51:04 – 00:51:06:	God explicitly says it's typological.

00:51:06 – 00:51:08:	The word there is anti-type.

00:51:08 – 00:51:09:	That's where we get it.

00:51:09 – 00:51:17:	The Greek word there is literally anti-type, so that's why I used that word, instead of saying according to or anything else, to make it clear.

00:51:17 – 00:51:22:	God says the flood is the anti-type to baptism, which is the means of salvation.

00:51:22 – 00:51:25:	I know the Baptists in the audience totally disagree with that.

00:51:26 – 00:51:28:	Go back and listen to the baptism episode again.

00:51:28 – 00:51:29:	That's why it's so crucial.

00:51:30 – 00:51:36:	So if you go in to scripture and you say, well, I don't know about, you know, it was a long time ago and nobody was there.

00:51:36 – 00:51:39:	I don't know if the flood really happened or didn't happen like that.

00:51:39 – 00:51:42:	When you crack that door open, what do you do?

00:51:42 – 00:51:47:	You undermine the baptism sacrament and you undermine salvation itself.

00:51:48 – 00:51:54:	God calls it an appeal to himself for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

00:51:55 – 00:51:56:	That is salvation.

00:51:57 – 00:52:01:	That is the beating heart of salvation and the flood points to it.

00:52:01 – 00:52:09:	So in the very act of unmitigated violence, well, it wasn't completely unmitigated because the ark actually mitigated it.

00:52:09 – 00:52:11:	That was the only exception of the violence.

00:52:11 – 00:52:14:	Within that ark, all the men were safe from the waters.

00:52:14 – 00:52:25:	And the difference is that although baptism washes away our sin and is not a violent act, the water that occurred in the flood washed away everything.

00:52:25 – 00:52:29:	I guess in the sense it did wash away the sins by washing away the sinners, didn't it?

00:52:29 – 00:52:31:	So it really is kind of more direct.

00:52:32 – 00:52:34:	But what was violent then is very peaceful now.

00:52:34 – 00:52:36:	And so we look at it and we don't really think it's anything.

00:52:37 – 00:52:42:	If Satan can take the flood off the table for Christians and say that was, we don't really know what happened.

00:52:42 – 00:52:43:	It doesn't really matter.

00:52:43 – 00:52:48:	It doesn't have anything to do anything anyway because I like the spirit of it, but I don't care about the facts.

00:52:49 – 00:52:51:	This is how these attacks work.

00:52:52 – 00:53:00:	Satan will take a long time to pluck some seemingly small thing off the table because it can be used later to attack the beating heart of the Christian faith.

00:53:01 – 00:53:05:	And obviously violence is not the beating heart of the Christian faith in the gospel sense.

00:53:06 – 00:53:10:	But how do you have the Christian faith without Judgment Day?

00:53:11 – 00:53:14:	Judgment Day is unlimited, infinite violence.

00:53:15 – 00:53:16:	That's God's violence.

00:53:17 – 00:53:18:	How do you have the Christian faith without it?

00:53:18 – 00:53:23:	You lose the creeds, you lose Scripture, where it's described.

00:53:23 – 00:53:26:	How do you still have God if you don't have violence?

00:53:26 – 00:53:36:	To this point, the scriptural portion is talking about God in the beginning and the end and these big miraculous and that they're supernatural events, even though they're occurring in the material world.

00:53:38 – 00:53:44:	If these are sin, if violence is sin, as we're told, no hate, no violence, well, God hates and God's violent.

00:53:44 – 00:53:49:	As we said many times, we're going to say repeatedly here, this is not license.

00:53:49 – 00:53:55:	If in your heart you want to be violent and you want to be filled with hate, we're not exhorting you to either of those things.

00:53:55 – 00:54:00:	This is a condemnation of your sinful desire to do those things because that's not in accord with God's nature.

00:54:01 – 00:54:06:	The very fact that there would ever be violence in the world as a result of the fall and it's always sorrowful.

00:54:06 – 00:54:15:	Even men who have the duty and the vocation to go and commit violence because it is proper and godly for them to do so.

00:54:15 – 00:54:25:	And in our current system, that involves, you know, men like policemen, military, in your own home, in the case of an intruder, given local laws.

00:54:25 – 00:54:38:	There are various circumstances where an individual man, either according to an organization or according to his legal and moral rights, is able to commit violence.

00:54:38 – 00:54:40:	There's never a desire for such thing.

00:54:40 – 00:54:45:	There's a recognition that there are some men who will not be stopped by anything else.

00:54:46 – 00:54:56:	If someone is charging a cop with a firearm, they're making it very clear they're going to kill the cop, and then the cop kills them so that they don't.

00:54:57 – 00:54:59:	Somehow this has today become a controversial thing.

00:54:59 – 00:55:02:	That should be the least controversial thing in the world.

00:55:02 – 00:55:10:	If someone is attempting to commit violence against an agent of the state, the presumption is always absent any other facts.

00:55:10 – 00:55:13:	The presumption is that that was per se evil.

00:55:13 – 00:55:14:	You just don't do that.

00:55:14 – 00:55:19:	Even if you argue, you disagree with what the cop is doing, that is a matter to be settled in court.

00:55:19 – 00:55:20:	You figure it out later.

00:55:20 – 00:55:22:	You don't figure it out violently.

00:55:23 – 00:55:25:	And yet there are some men that don't care about that.

00:55:25 – 00:55:26:	They don't care about the reason.

00:55:26 – 00:55:27:	They don't care about the future.

00:55:27 – 00:55:28:	They don't care about morality.

00:55:29 – 00:55:30:	They're just going to be violent.

00:55:31 – 00:55:40:	And the circumstances, the world today, has been very carefully crafted to make sure that there's an entire segment of our population, a huge segment, that thinks that's okay.

00:55:41 – 00:55:44:	When they see people going after cops violently, they cheer it on.

00:55:44 – 00:55:48:	They think, yeah, the cop did something, get the system, get the pigs.

00:55:48 – 00:55:52:	That's stuff that's so common that people say it and no one thinks anything.

00:55:53 – 00:55:54:	It's crazy.

00:55:55 – 00:55:55:	It's evil.

00:55:55 – 00:55:56:	I shouldn't say it's crazy.

00:55:57 – 00:56:04:	It's a figure of speech that's become so common now because we can't even cope with the degree of wickedness embodied in this sort of view.

00:56:06 – 00:56:11:	It's always, in a sense, wicked that there's violence because nothing like that should ever happen.

00:56:11 – 00:56:16:	But at the same time, you're a fool if you think that that means, well, I'm just going to opt out of violence.

00:56:16 – 00:56:17:	There's no such thing.

00:56:18 – 00:56:21:	Evil exists and evil men are going to do violent things.

00:56:21 – 00:56:28:	And there are times and places just as God must enact violence at various times in the historical timeline.

00:56:29 – 00:56:37:	Men have a vocation under certain legal circumstances to enact violence because it's literally the only thing that's going to stop another man from doing evil.

00:56:38 – 00:56:44:	And when a man who's obeying God and who's following the law enacts violence, it is not evil.

00:56:45 – 00:56:52:	Genesis 9,6 specifically says that if a man sheds blood, by man's hand shall his blood be shed.

00:56:53 – 00:56:59:	God says, before the liturgical law has nothing to do with the people of Israel who came much later.

00:57:00 – 00:57:02:	God says, if you kill a man, you must die.

00:57:03 – 00:57:06:	Not you can, there's no rules of engagement there.

00:57:06 – 00:57:11:	God says, if someone kills a man, that man must be put to death by other men.

00:57:11 – 00:57:15:	That is God expressly directing men to commit violence.

00:57:16 – 00:57:25:	And the same people who say today, there's no place for violence in politics, there's absolutely no place certainly for anyone in religion to ever talk about violence.

00:57:26 – 00:57:28:	They hate the God of Genesis 9,6.

00:57:29 – 00:57:32:	They hate God because they hate the God of Judgment Day.

00:57:33 – 00:57:40:	On Judgment Day, they're going to be standing there, screaming at God that he can't be violent, just as those who were dying in the flood said the same thing.

00:57:41 – 00:57:42:	Those are the two sides.

00:57:42 – 00:57:47:	And the one who has violence is not necessarily the one that's evil.

00:57:49 – 00:58:01:	A key point in all of this when discussing violence is that violence itself is not an unqualified or unmitigated or inherent good.

00:58:01 – 00:58:03:	It is a qualified good.

00:58:05 – 00:58:13:	And what I mean by that is essentially that it's a fact-specific analysis to return to the legal speak again for a moment.

00:58:15 – 00:58:16:	The circumstances matter.

00:58:17 – 00:58:19:	The intent matters certainly.

00:58:19 – 00:58:20:	The end matters.

00:58:21 – 00:58:31:	For instance, if you shoot a man for no reason or because you felt like it, that is morally impermissible violence.

00:58:32 – 00:58:34:	That is not a good.

00:58:34 – 00:58:35:	That is wicked.

00:58:35 – 00:58:36:	That is evil.

00:58:36 – 00:58:36:	It is a sin.

00:58:37 – 00:58:37:	It's murder.

00:58:40 – 00:58:49:	If, however, you were to shoot an intruder who broke into your house to assault your wife and children, that's still violent.

00:58:50 – 00:58:55:	But now it is a good, because it is sufficiently qualified.

00:58:56 – 00:58:57:	It is warranted.

00:58:58 – 00:59:04:	If you have adequate moral warrant for your violent act, the act itself is good.

00:59:05 – 00:59:14:	Which is to say that violence itself, violence qua violence, is really morally neutral in our fallen world.

00:59:14 – 00:59:24:	As Woe mentioned, in sort of an absolute or higher level moral sense, violence itself is an evil.

00:59:25 – 00:59:27:	It's not always evil in our fallen world.

00:59:28 – 00:59:35:	Because why you are committing the act, what you are seeking to do with the act matters.

00:59:36 – 00:59:39:	Because there are times when violence is required of men.

00:59:39 – 00:59:44:	The best example, and it's the reason that we've used it, is when a man is defending his own family.

00:59:45 – 00:59:58:	But the same thing applies for the police officer who is maintaining order, who is dealing with the various men in society who cause problems, typically those who are engaged in impermissible violence.

00:59:59 – 01:00:02:	And so violence must be used against them to stop them.

01:00:04 – 01:00:08:	But also, of course, of the soldier who is defending his nation with violence.

01:00:10 – 01:00:13:	It depends why the violence is being used.

01:00:13 – 01:00:25:	It's not that violence itself is good, or that violence itself is, in our fallen world, evil, even if it may be in that higher order sense, an evil thing, because it should not exist.

01:00:26 – 01:00:27:	It should not be part of creation.

01:00:28 – 01:00:31:	It was not part of God's design for creation.

01:00:31 – 01:00:35:	It was introduced into creation by the fall.

01:00:36 – 01:00:40:	So the necessity of violence in the fallen world is a function of the fall.

01:00:41 – 01:00:48:	But just because something is a function of the fall in that way does not mean that it is always wicked.

01:00:49 – 01:01:02:	So there is no evil on the part of the soldier who kills another man in defense of his nation, assuming, of course, the cause is righteous, that gets to be a little complicated, but as a general matter, holding all else equal.

01:01:03 – 01:01:05:	He is defending his nation.

01:01:05 – 01:01:06:	What he is doing is not wicked.

01:01:07 – 01:01:15:	The man who kills in defense of his family against a violent intruder, what he is doing is violence, but it is not wicked.

01:01:16 – 01:01:30:	Again, these are things that should not be part of creation, but they are necessary because of the reality of life in a fallen world, because we are mortal, we are sinful, we are fallen.

01:01:30 – 01:01:37:	We live in a world full of wicked men who would do any amount of evil if not stopped.

01:01:38 – 01:01:52:	It is one of the reasons that God entrusts the sword to the prince, should be a Christian prince, but it is the reason, one reason that God entrusts the sword to such men, because the evil must be restrained.

01:01:53 – 01:01:56:	That is, the curb use of the law.

01:01:58 – 01:02:02:	It's not showing you your wickedness so that you can recognize you're a sinner.

01:02:03 – 01:02:05:	It's not guiding your life.

01:02:05 – 01:02:07:	It is curbing the wicked.

01:02:08 – 01:02:10:	That is one of the uses of the sword.

01:02:10 – 01:02:12:	It is one of the uses of God's law.

01:02:13 – 01:02:17:	And the Christian prince who does not do that is no Christian prince.

01:02:18 – 01:02:32:	Because the rightful ruler, the good authority, keeps order, maintains society, enacts God's laws and God's vengeance on the wicked.

01:02:32 – 01:02:34:	That is the rightful role of the sword.

01:02:35 – 01:02:47:	You have a minor version of that, as it were, with regard to the house father, with regard to the man who is head of his household, because he has the duty to maintain order in his home.

01:02:47 – 01:02:49:	No, you don't kill your children when they act up.

01:02:50 – 01:02:55:	We'll leave aside some of the Old Testament cases of when and where that is appropriate.

01:02:55 – 01:02:57:	It's not the focus of this episode.

01:02:58 – 01:03:03:	But you do use the sword in a smaller sense to defend your family.

01:03:04 – 01:03:06:	Because in a very real way, your home is your castle.

01:03:07 – 01:03:10:	You are king of your home, if you are the house father.

01:03:11 – 01:03:18:	And so if someone comes into your domain to cause harm to your subjects, it is incumbent on you to defend them.

01:03:19 – 01:03:26:	And we would rightly call the father who is unwilling to use violence in defense of his wife and children an evil man.

01:03:27 – 01:03:29:	The pacifist is wicked.

01:03:30 – 01:03:33:	There is no pacifist who is a morally good and upright man.

01:03:34 – 01:03:35:	They are all evil.

01:03:36 – 01:03:39:	They are all high-handed, impenitent sinners.

01:03:40 – 01:03:45:	Because what they are saying, effectively, is I am more moral than God.

01:03:45 – 01:03:47:	I am unwilling to engage in violence.

01:03:47 – 01:03:52:	I am unwilling to defend the things God has entrusted to my care, not least of all your own life.

01:03:52 – 01:03:54:	You don't have to have a wife and children.

01:03:54 – 01:03:57:	Because again, you do have a duty to preserve your own life.

01:03:58 – 01:03:59:	You are a slave of God.

01:03:59 – 01:04:00:	You are his property.

01:04:01 – 01:04:03:	And so you have a duty to defend yourself as well.

01:04:04 – 01:04:07:	Self-defense is moral and a moral duty.

01:04:08 – 01:04:20:	But if you say I am a pacifist, you are saying that I will not use this means that God himself uses and that God himself has commanded us to use because I am better than God.

01:04:21 – 01:04:22:	I know better than God.

01:04:22 – 01:04:25:	I will not engage in violence because it is always wrong.

01:04:25 – 01:04:28:	God was wrong when he wrote this and did that.

01:04:29 – 01:04:34:	No Christian can say those things and mean them because it isn't Christian.

01:04:34 – 01:04:36:	You cannot accuse God of sin.

01:04:36 – 01:04:39:	You cannot say the things God did are sin.

01:04:42 – 01:04:56:	And to highlight something that Woe said, God's authority does rest on violence because God's authority rests on his power, his infinite power.

01:04:56 – 01:04:57:	God is omnipotent, of course.

01:04:58 – 01:05:10:	But as I said before in last week's episode, God's authority in a very real way rests upon his infinite ability to bring infinite violence upon his enemies.

01:05:12 – 01:05:14:	If he could not do that, he would not be God.

01:05:15 – 01:05:19:	If he did not visit that upon them, he would not be God.

01:05:19 – 01:05:28:	Because to fail to oppose such evil, to oppose such wickedness, and in God's case certainly to destroy it, would be to be immoral.

01:05:30 – 01:05:33:	Everything God does is always perfectly moral, of course.

01:05:33 – 01:05:35:	God is the source of morality.

01:05:35 – 01:05:36:	He is morality itself.

01:05:37 – 01:05:39:	And so what God does is moral.

01:05:41 – 01:05:46:	It's not in the divine command sense of it's moral because God said it.

01:05:47 – 01:05:52:	No, it's moral because God did it, because it flows from his nature, and so all that he does is moral.

01:05:53 – 01:05:57:	It's important to get that direction of causation, as it were, correct in this.

01:05:58 – 01:06:07:	But the central point of that is that God has used violence throughout history.

01:06:07 – 01:06:20:	God will use violence in the end times, at the last judgment, and God's authority rests on that violence because he has the power to do any and all things.

01:06:22 – 01:06:24:	If he didn't have that, he wouldn't be God.

01:06:25 – 01:06:31:	And so when we say, as fallen men, well, you can't use violence because it's immoral.

01:06:31 – 01:06:33:	You're accusing God of sin.

01:06:34 – 01:06:45:	You're trying to be more moral than God, which is so often the case when we go over these issues where modern morality, so called, butts up against what Scripture says.

01:06:46 – 01:06:53:	Modern men are trying to be more moral than God, or at least they're trying to convince you that you can be more moral than God.

01:06:53 – 01:07:07:	Because, as Will mentioned, often the very men who tell you, well, you can't be violent, will use every single aspect of state power to enact violence against you, all while telling you that you can't be violent.

01:07:07 – 01:07:12:	Because, of course, the goal is to destroy you because they're children of Satan.

01:07:13 – 01:07:17:	They are liars like their father, who was a murderer from the beginning.

01:07:18 – 01:07:20:	They just seek to act in the same way that he acts.

01:07:21 – 01:07:22:	That is their nature.

01:07:23 – 01:07:24:	That is what they have become.

01:07:24 – 01:07:26:	It is what they are making themselves into.

01:07:26 – 01:07:29:	It is what they are reinforcing day by day with their actions.

01:07:32 – 01:07:34:	Some will be tempted to say, well, that's just hypocrisy.

01:07:34 – 01:07:36:	Hypocrisy is neither here nor there in this, really.

01:07:37 – 01:07:38:	Is it immoral?

01:07:38 – 01:07:39:	Of course.

01:07:39 – 01:07:41:	Does hypocrisy matter in that sense?

01:07:41 – 01:07:41:	Yes.

01:07:42 – 01:07:55:	But when you're dealing with those who are using the levers of power in order to enact violence against you, all while telling you, well, you can't use violence as a Christian because that would be wrongful, this is politics.

01:07:56 – 01:08:03:	Hypocrisy and politics, you could almost say they're one and the same, but it's really the one is irrelevant to the other.

01:08:04 – 01:08:05:	Different consideration.

01:08:05 – 01:08:07:	Morally, it matters politically.

01:08:08 – 01:08:12:	Anyone who tells you hypocrisy matters politically is trying to deceive you or harm you.

01:08:13 – 01:08:16:	Just a practical matter with regard to politics.

01:08:17 – 01:08:21:	And sometimes it's difficult for the Christian to make some of these calls.

01:08:22 – 01:08:26:	Again, this is a matter of wisdom, as we will continue to repeat.

01:08:28 – 01:08:35:	Just because something is political does not mean that Christians are absolved of all moral demands, of course.

01:08:36 – 01:08:37:	Not all means are moral.

01:08:39 – 01:08:49:	But there are different considerations in the political sphere versus the purely private sphere, say, or the right-hand kingdom versus the left-hand kingdom.

01:08:50 – 01:08:56:	It is a matter of wisdom, and we're not going to give you any hard-line rules for some of these things, because there aren't.

01:08:57 – 01:09:08:	These are going to be fact-specific analyses, which we continue to say with regard to these matters, just as whether or not something is a fighting word in a particular circumstance.

01:09:09 – 01:09:12:	Well, the circumstances matter, the facts matter.

01:09:13 – 01:09:14:	You have to analyze those things.

01:09:14 – 01:09:16:	You have to look at the context.

01:09:19 – 01:09:36:	But to return to that issue of the nature of violence in the fallen world, I want to say again and emphasize that violence itself is not an inherent good, but it is also not an inherent evil.

01:09:37 – 01:09:41:	We're going to set aside that sort of higher level analysis because we live in the fallen world.

01:09:42 – 01:09:48:	We're not making an assessment of this or that with regard to a perfect world.

01:09:48 – 01:09:50:	We do not live in a perfect world.

01:09:51 – 01:09:55:	We can have that discussion when we get to paradise where there will be no violence.

01:09:57 – 01:10:11:	But in a fallen world, if you say, I will never engage in violence, there are no circumstances under which I would be willing to be violent or to support the use of violence.

01:10:12 – 01:10:17:	I say that there should be no military, we should all be pacifists, etc., etc.

01:10:18 – 01:10:19:	Ad nauseam in this case.

01:10:21 – 01:10:29:	What you are saying is, of course, as I have repeated a number of times, God sinned because you're saying that Genesis 9,6 is sin.

01:10:30 – 01:10:33:	You're saying that many places in the Old Testament are sin.

01:10:34 – 01:10:37:	You're saying that what God will do at the final judgment is sin.

01:10:38 – 01:10:41:	But you're also saying that nothing actually matters to you.

01:10:44 – 01:10:55:	You're saying, I don't care about my wife, I don't care about my children, I don't care about my city, I don't care about my church, I don't care about my nation, I don't care about my country.

01:10:55 – 01:11:00:	None of these things matter to me because I am willing to stand by idly and watch them all be destroyed.

01:11:03 – 01:11:11:	It's not that violence is the first weapon, it's not the first tool in your bag, but it has to be there.

01:11:12 – 01:11:17:	And the reason it has to be there is because it is the ultimate tool.

01:11:18 – 01:11:24:	Everything else before that is based on that threat of violence.

01:11:25 – 01:11:32:	Everything else before that has force only because at the very bottom there is the threat of violence.

01:11:33 – 01:11:44:	This is the same in interpersonal relationships, and I'll come back to that to explain exactly what I mean there, but it's the same from there all the way up to nations.

01:11:45 – 01:12:07:	If you have two nations dealing with each other at an international level, if one makes a threat against another, whatever it happens to be, economic, sanctions, whatever, that's backed by the threat of violence, because if there is no threat of violence, the sanction doesn't mean anything, because it can be safely ignored.

01:12:08 – 01:12:18:	So, for instance, if a pacifist tells you, if you don't do X, what, where is the actual backing to what he is saying?

01:12:21 – 01:12:24:	To some degree, women are not going to understand this as much as the men in the audience.

01:12:26 – 01:12:28:	And this is returning to the interpersonal comment.

01:12:29 – 01:12:35:	Because everything for men, every single interaction, has a background threat of violence.

01:12:36 – 01:12:46:	It's not that men are necessarily always violent, or they were always two steps away from a fist fight, or whatever negative construction or connotation some could take from this.

01:12:47 – 01:12:48:	That isn't the issue.

01:12:49 – 01:13:01:	The issue is that men know in every interaction there is some line that could be crossed, and it's going to differ from one man to another, from one context to another, particularly one culture to another.

01:13:02 – 01:13:09:	Because, for instance, fighting words are going to be very different for Scots-Irish versus Germans or Norwegians.

01:13:10 – 01:13:12:	Some cultures you can get away with saying more than others.

01:13:12 – 01:13:14:	Some you can get away with far less.

01:13:14 – 01:13:15:	It depends.

01:13:15 – 01:13:19:	These things differ from one context to another.

01:13:20 – 01:13:31:	But at base, foundationally, fundamentally, between men, there is always that background threat that this could devolve into a physical altercation.

01:13:33 – 01:13:38:	It's one of the reasons that it has often been said that an armed society is a polite society.

01:13:39 – 01:13:49:	Because when you have that threat of violence, there's a necessity of a certain code of behavior to which you must adhere to avoid that violence.

01:13:50 – 01:14:06:	Because ultimately, all order, all of our stability, all of these things in society upon which we rely and which make our lives as pleasant as they are and would be more pleasant if things were better enforced, they rely on violence.

01:14:08 – 01:14:12:	The state is a construct of violence.

01:14:12 – 01:14:16:	When the state tells you, you may not steal.

01:14:16 – 01:14:19:	If you steal, we will do X, Y and Z.

01:14:19 – 01:14:23:	X, Y and Z depend upon violence.

01:14:24 – 01:14:32:	Well, if they send the police after you, that's the use of physical force up to and including killing you if necessary in order to arrest you.

01:14:32 – 01:14:33:	They have to kill you, they don't have to arrest you anymore.

01:14:34 – 01:14:36:	But that's physical force to arrest you.

01:14:37 – 01:14:41:	If you're convicted, it's physical force to imprison or otherwise punish you.

01:14:42 – 01:14:43:	All of these things rely on that.

01:14:44 – 01:14:49:	And for men, it starts with that interpersonal relationship of one man to another.

01:14:50 – 01:14:53:	Now, most of the time, it is a very distant matter.

01:14:54 – 01:15:00:	If I were just talking to Woe, there's no real threat that it's going to devolve into a fist fight there.

01:15:01 – 01:15:04:	It is very distant and practically a non-issue.

01:15:05 – 01:15:11:	But if you're dealing with a stranger, or you're dealing with someone who is truly adversarial, it is a different matter.

01:15:12 – 01:15:21:	And so that scales all the way up from that one man with regard to another man, all the way up to nations, all the way up to nation states.

01:15:23 – 01:15:26:	That is the reality of living in a fallen world.

01:15:26 – 01:15:27:	It is inescapable.

01:15:28 – 01:15:38:	And so someone who says that he would never resort to violence or that he would never support the use of violence is saying that he rejects all of this.

01:15:39 – 01:15:44:	That is a level of apathy and indifference that might even make Satan blush.

01:15:46 – 01:16:04:	That is wickedness on a scale that is practically incomprehensible and to a depth you cannot plumb, which is something that is alien to most modern thought, to most modern men when they think about it, and particularly, again, to modern women, because men and women are very different with regard to this matter.

01:16:05 – 01:16:15:	And the reason for that is that most have been programmed to think that violence is some sort of pinnacle of wickedness or nadir of wickedness, however you want to think about that one.

01:16:17 – 01:16:34:	The worst thing you can do is support or advocate or engage in violence, because that's Satan trying to sneak his morality into the world, because what he wants to do is he wants you to accept this new morality, because then what have you done?

01:16:35 – 01:16:39:	You've abandoned all of your duties, and you've accused God of sin.

01:16:41 – 01:16:50:	And so part of this is just fundamentally restructuring the way we think about these issues, because again, violence is not per se wicked, and it is not per se good.

01:16:51 – 01:16:52:	The context matters.

01:16:53 – 01:16:55:	Who is committing the violence matters.

01:16:55 – 01:16:56:	Why he is doing it matters.

01:16:56 – 01:16:58:	Toward what end matters.

01:17:00 – 01:17:01:	You have to apply wisdom.

01:17:01 – 01:17:04:	You have to look at the context and the circumstances.

01:17:04 – 01:17:18:	But you cannot accept from Satan his proffered morality, which is that violence is always immoral, that it's always wrong, because one, he doesn't believe it, and two, he's trying to make you a blasphemer by hoping that you will believe it.

01:17:20 – 01:17:28:	There were two back-to-back issues in quick succession last week that forced us to tackle this issue, even though we hadn't really thought about doing one before.

01:17:29 – 01:17:44:	And again, despite the fact that we've been routinely for several years called the authors and insiders of violence by slanders, defamers and blasphemers, it's one of the most important charges against Stone Choir is that we're violent.

01:17:44 – 01:17:48:	And so there's inherent risk to us talking about this because like, look, they got us.

01:17:49 – 01:17:52:	They said we're violent, and here we are saying the violence isn't evil.

01:17:53 – 01:17:54:	Obviously, they were right.

01:17:54 – 01:17:56:	The complete opposite is true.

01:17:56 – 01:17:59:	What brought this to a head initially last week?

01:18:00 – 01:18:05:	Sure, all of you listened to the last week's episode that was a different one where we were playing someone else's show.

01:18:06 – 01:18:07:	We were on Will's show.

01:18:07 – 01:18:08:	He invited us on.

01:18:08 – 01:18:10:	We talked to him for over seven hours.

01:18:10 – 01:18:12:	It was a six and a half hour recording.

01:18:12 – 01:18:13:	It was a fantastic interview.

01:18:14 – 01:18:16:	And he gave us permission to have the first two hours.

01:18:16 – 01:18:18:	I think he's going to give us the second two hours.

01:18:19 – 01:18:26:	He, on Wednesday, when we normally publish Stone Choir, we put the first two hours up at 3 p.m.

01:18:26 – 01:18:31:	He put it up on his sub stack about noon, even though he normally typically would publish on a Friday.

01:18:32 – 01:18:51:	And as was said in the intro to that episode, for him to be interviewing us was him going into kind of riskier waters because he wanted to tackle more controversial subjects and authors and sort of get down to the nitty gritty and spread his wings in terms of his interviewing style.

01:18:52 – 01:19:03:	And he wanted to put the episode behind the paint wall because we were so controversial that obviously only the very most hardcore people would be willing to even engage with a couple of, quote, neo-Nazi podcasters like us.

01:19:03 – 01:19:09:	That's not what he called us, but if you Google our names, that's what comes up, neo-Nazi podcasters.

01:19:10 – 01:19:11:	Because those are killing words.

01:19:11 – 01:19:16:	To say that someone is a Nazi or a neo-Nazi is quite literally incitement to violence.

01:19:17 – 01:19:18:	We'll get to that in a bit.

01:19:20 – 01:19:27:	So he posted at noon, we posted at 3, at about 6 or 7 he DM'd me a number of screenshots.

01:19:28 – 01:19:29:	Now tell me if this sounds familiar.

01:19:30 – 01:19:37:	Screenshots of things that Corey had posted on Telegram specifically related to violence in varying ways.

01:19:38 – 01:19:48:	And he said, someone sent me these, an anonymous accuser as far as we're concerned, sent him screenshots of something that one of us said somewhere on the internet.

01:19:49 – 01:19:53:	And he said, if I had known about these things, I never would have talked to you guys.

01:19:54 – 01:19:56:	And, okay.

01:19:56 – 01:20:01:	So he deleted the tweet that he had that pointed to the episode that I had retweeted.

01:20:01 – 01:20:03:	So I posted a screenshot of the deleted tweet.

01:20:03 – 01:20:09:	And I said, no comment at the time, because if he wants to pull it down, it's his interview on his site.

01:20:09 – 01:20:10:	He can do whatever he wants.

01:20:10 – 01:20:13:	We're not taking it down, because we had the rights to publish the first two hours.

01:20:14 – 01:20:16:	The rest you'll never hear, because he doesn't want you to hear it.

01:20:17 – 01:20:31:	What happened in the subsequent hours after that was he put up a new tweet where he reiterated those screenshots and basically said that if I had known these things, I never would have talked to those guys in public.

01:20:31 – 01:20:39:	He functionally disavowed both Cory and me and Stone Choir, and very effectively accused us of advocating violence.

01:20:39 – 01:20:42:	And that was the whole problem, that we're advocates of violence.

01:20:43 – 01:20:45:	And he threw us under the bus.

01:20:45 – 01:20:46:	He defamed us.

01:20:46 – 01:20:56:	And he said that he was guilty by association of things that we said that we didn't say on his show, which again, tell me if you've heard this one before.

01:20:57 – 01:21:02:	This exact pattern has happened seven or eight times to multiple men associated with Stone Choir.

01:21:02 – 01:21:05:	Myself, Corey, and anyone who's publicly interact with us.

01:21:05 – 01:21:07:	This exact thing happens.

01:21:07 – 01:21:17:	Someone interacts in public, and then there's a secret accuser behind the scenes that goes to somebody's pastor with screenshots and says, look how violent and evil these men are.

01:21:17 – 01:21:18:	You must disavow.

01:21:18 – 01:21:20:	And every time, that's what happens.

01:21:20 – 01:21:21:	Not every time, almost every time.

01:21:21 – 01:21:22:	It's what happened this time.

01:21:23 – 01:21:26:	So you'll never hear the rest of that interview, which is unfortunate because it was great.

01:21:27 – 01:21:35:	The hilarious part is that in the intro, which you can go back and listen to, when he introduces us, he makes very clear that he's not endorsing everything that we say.

01:21:35 – 01:21:36:	He just wants to have a conversation.

01:21:37 – 01:21:46:	And he said that when he talked to us and when he listened to us, it was very clear that we were faithful Christian men who had good hearts when we were addressing these subjects.

01:21:46 – 01:21:51:	And then somebody emailed him screenshots that were nothing that was secret.

01:21:51 – 01:21:52:	It was from Telegram.

01:21:52 – 01:21:53:	It's the same stuff Corey tweets.

01:21:53 – 01:21:55:	It's the same stuff that we talk about.

01:21:56 – 01:22:00:	And yes, somehow it was so scandalous because somebody said the word violence.

01:22:00 – 01:22:01:	And so that was the end of it.

01:22:01 – 01:22:02:	So I got pulled.

01:22:03 – 01:22:13:	And the thread was a disaster for him because he got dogpiled, not because we instigated anything, but because it was such a shameful and cowardly thing to do, particularly in the face of the very context involved.

01:22:14 – 01:22:22:	And so I went in and we got a clip of the exact, like seven minute clip in the first two hours where we addressed violence explicitly.

01:22:22 – 01:22:28:	The very things that were in the screenshots that he clutched his pearls about, pretending he had no idea.

01:22:28 – 01:22:30:	And this is just so far beyond the pale.

01:22:30 – 01:22:33:	We literally addressed it in the first two hours of the episode.

01:22:33 – 01:22:36:	So you can go back and listen, starting about the 38 minute mark.

01:22:36 – 01:22:38:	There's a bit of back and forth between Corey and Will.

01:22:39 – 01:22:44:	And Corey gives a several minute explanation for what we mean when we're talking about violence.

01:22:45 – 01:22:53:	And it was clear that there's both the aspect that involves God directly and then there's the aspect that involves the world, the state does not bear the sword for nothing.

01:22:54 – 01:22:56:	That's not just metaphorical.

01:22:56 – 01:22:58:	It means exactly what it means everywhere else.

01:23:00 – 01:23:05:	There are men who are empowered by God to exact violence against other men in this life.

01:23:05 – 01:23:07:	And that is political violence.

01:23:07 – 01:23:12:	And not only does God allow it, God commands it in certain cases.

01:23:12 – 01:23:16:	And so the only discussion for Christians is when is it moral?

01:23:17 – 01:23:18:	Not all violence is moral.

01:23:18 – 01:23:19:	Some violence is absolutely wicked.

01:23:20 – 01:23:22:	And all violence is, yes, undesirable.

01:23:22 – 01:23:25:	I'm thankful to live in a world where violence is not the norm.

01:23:26 – 01:23:29:	The life that I have led, I would not fare well had that been the case.

01:23:30 – 01:23:34:	Now, if it were a violent world, I would have led a different life when I was better equipped for that.

01:23:34 – 01:23:38:	But the fact remains that we benefit from having a peaceful world.

01:23:39 – 01:23:49:	That's part of the reason that Corey and I tackle subjects like race and the series we did on the Jews and all these other things is specifically to try to preserve life.

01:23:50 – 01:24:05:	Because all of the things that are happening politically in the world, where these population groups are being moved around like chess pieces, knowing that there are inherent properties to those groups that are going to naturally manifest when they go to places, those are acts of political malevolence.

01:24:06 – 01:24:14:	And it's very clear to everyone who's looking, and it's very clear to anyone who's listening to the people responsible, that they know that those outcomes will be the case.

01:24:15 – 01:24:20:	It's only the people who are like, oh no, there's no such thing as violence in every person as an individual and you can't judge groups.

01:24:20 – 01:24:24:	Those are the people who are crying, peace, peace, when there is no peace.

01:24:25 – 01:24:33:	So Corey, very calmly and adroitly dealt with the very thing that the next day turned into some stink.

01:24:34 – 01:24:35:	It wasn't a stink as far as I'm concerned.

01:24:36 – 01:24:37:	We stand by every word that we said.

01:24:37 – 01:24:40:	It made us look better because we were effectively blameless.

01:24:41 – 01:24:53:	So this episode is not some sort of response or a defense, but the very next thing that happened on Saturday was that a leftist murderer killed a man, shot another, and he shot the president.

01:24:53 – 01:25:03:	Donald Trump was shot, and if he had not turned his head, he would be dead right now because someone who listened to the cries Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, kill him, get him.

01:25:03 – 01:25:08:	Anytime someone says this man is a Nazi, they are inciting violence.

01:25:08 – 01:25:12:	It is defamatory, and it is an incitement to violence against that man.

01:25:12 – 01:25:23:	It is attempted murder to call someone a Nazi because everyone knows, beginning with Saint Bonhoeffer, to kill a man who is a Nazi is no crime at all.

01:25:25 – 01:25:28:	Those are the terms of the late 20th century.

01:25:28 – 01:25:31:	It wasn't the case in 1945.

01:25:31 – 01:25:33:	That's not what anyone in the United States thought.

01:25:33 – 01:25:35:	That was invented later on.

01:25:35 – 01:25:42:	And yet today, it is the new morality, the new global religion has Nazis as the most evil, wicked thing on the planet.

01:25:42 – 01:25:45:	And so if you call someone a Nazi, you can do anything you want to him.

01:25:45 – 01:25:47:	That's exactly what happened to Donald Trump.

01:25:48 – 01:26:00:	And one of the examples in that moment when the shots rang out from that man who killed someone, the man that was killed, his name was Corey Comparatore.

01:26:00 – 01:26:03:	He was a firefighter from Western Pennsylvania.

01:26:03 – 01:26:08:	And incidentally, in the Butler farm ground where this occurred, I've been there.

01:26:09 – 01:26:12:	I used to live the next county over in Mercer County for four years, and I was a kid.

01:26:13 – 01:26:20:	We went to ice cream socials every year on the very grounds where the murder and the attempted assassination took place.

01:26:21 – 01:26:26:	As a very semi-rural state, semi-rural part of the state, it's extremely red.

01:26:27 – 01:26:28:	Everybody is a gun owner.

01:26:28 – 01:26:32:	Everybody is conservative in the sort of old school sense.

01:26:32 – 01:26:38:	There's a lot of union people there, but at this point, union is almost more conservative than the left wing.

01:26:38 – 01:26:40:	Because they're just like, this was the Rust Belt.

01:26:40 – 01:26:40:	It used to be.

01:26:40 – 01:26:42:	It was just north of Pittsburgh.

01:26:42 – 01:26:49:	It was hit hard 50 years ago by the destruction of the economy that has since played out in all these other ways for the rest of us.

01:26:50 – 01:26:54:	But the Rust Belt was one of the first places to be destroyed, including this area.

01:26:54 – 01:27:11:	So, the reason that Corey Comparatore right now is dead is that when the very first shot rang out, his instinct, the thing that he did without hesitation, without even thinking, was to throw his body in front of his wife and his daughter.

01:27:11 – 01:27:12:	They were right next to him.

01:27:12 – 01:27:17:	He didn't know where the shots were coming from, but he knew where Donald Trump was and he knew where his family was.

01:27:18 – 01:27:20:	He put himself between Trump and his family.

01:27:21 – 01:27:29:	And in the time that it took him to put his body between what turned out to be the sniper and his family, a 2-2-3 run passed through his head and he was killed.

01:27:31 – 01:27:33:	This was an act of sacrifice.

01:27:34 – 01:27:38:	This was the greatest act of love that a man can commit for another.

01:27:39 – 01:27:41:	And he had a duty to his wife and daughter to do that.

01:27:42 – 01:27:46:	He might not have had a duty to other people around him to die, but for them he did.

01:27:46 – 01:27:49:	And so without hesitation, he put his body in front of him.

01:27:49 – 01:27:54:	He provided cover so that if a bullet were to come, it was going to hit him and not them.

01:27:55 – 01:27:56:	And that's exactly what happened.

01:27:57 – 01:28:00:	And so he's dead today because of that act of love.

01:28:01 – 01:28:16:	Now, I think this is a vital example in the discussion of violence because there are some who will look at what Corey Comparatore did as an act of pacifism, as an act of love and of non-aggression.

01:28:16 – 01:28:19:	He was passively shielding his family.

01:28:20 – 01:28:23:	I think that that is a malevolent misreading of what happened.

01:28:23 – 01:28:27:	What he did was in a sense, it was an act of violence.

01:28:28 – 01:28:29:	That was warfare.

01:28:29 – 01:28:31:	He did the only thing that he could do.

01:28:31 – 01:28:32:	He was unarmed.

01:28:32 – 01:28:34:	He didn't know where the attacker was coming from.

01:28:34 – 01:28:39:	The only option that he had was to use his body as cover for his family.

01:28:40 – 01:28:49:	The reason that I say that that was an act of violence was that Corey was a violent man, not in the sense that he was a criminal of any sort, but he was a firefighter.

01:28:49 – 01:28:50:	He was a solid guy.

01:28:51 – 01:28:52:	He was very conservative.

01:28:52 – 01:28:53:	He was on Twitter.

01:28:53 – 01:28:54:	He was pretty funny.

01:28:54 – 01:28:58:	He was a good poster, certainly for a guy who isn't in the dissident right.

01:28:59 – 01:29:00:	He mostly had his head on straight.

01:29:00 – 01:29:05:	He was a brave and honorable man in slightly different circumstances.

01:29:06 – 01:29:15:	If the geometry of that attack had been slightly different and he had been armed and his family had been safe, he would have been running towards the gunman with his own gun.

01:29:15 – 01:29:20:	He would have been going towards the danger because as a firefighter, that's what he did professionally.

01:29:20 – 01:29:25:	He put his body in danger to save others, not only their lives but their property.

01:29:26 – 01:29:35:	And so the act that he performed for his wife and his daughter that saved their lives undoubtedly by sacrificing his own, it wasn't a passive act.

01:29:35 – 01:29:37:	It was an act of act of defiance.

01:29:37 – 01:29:50:	And he's the sort of man who would have acted violently against the sniper, not out of rage, not out of malice, not out of hatred, out of a desire to end evil and to preserve life.

01:29:51 – 01:29:57:	So in that moment, situationally, the only thing that he could do to preserve life was to potentially lose his own.

01:29:57 – 01:29:58:	That's exactly what happened.

01:29:59 – 01:30:08:	And Coy Comparatore's name should always be remembered because what he did was heroic, what he did was honorable, and what he did was what every man should do.

01:30:09 – 01:30:13:	We are ultimately in a sense disposable in that realm.

01:30:13 – 01:30:15:	He had raised a good daughter.

01:30:15 – 01:30:17:	He had loved his wife.

01:30:17 – 01:30:24:	At any age, when given those circumstances, it was his job to put himself between them and danger.

01:30:24 – 01:30:27:	But on a very slightly different circumstances, he wouldn't have been faced away.

01:30:28 – 01:30:36:	He would have been faced towards danger and himself armed to kill whatever man was trying to inflict that grievous bodily injury against the crowd.

01:30:37 – 01:30:38:	The guy was spraying bullets.

01:30:39 – 01:30:42:	I shouldn't say that's the sort of thing that CNN says.

01:30:43 – 01:30:44:	The guy was an incompetent shooter.

01:30:44 – 01:30:49:	And incidentally, the fact that an AR-15 was used is complete BS.

01:30:50 – 01:30:53:	That part of Pennsylvania, everybody has a bolt gun.

01:30:54 – 01:31:01:	A bolt action in a higher caliber is in every truck, every house in that part of Pennsylvania.

01:31:01 – 01:31:05:	And incidentally, AR-15s are illegal, semi-autos are illegal for hunting.

01:31:06 – 01:31:09:	So anyone who is a hunter, which is almost everybody there.

01:31:09 – 01:31:14:	Like when I was a kid, and I think to this day, on the first day of deer season, the schools close.

01:31:15 – 01:31:16:	The middle school closes, not only high school.

01:31:17 – 01:31:20:	That's how much of the red rural area it is.

01:31:21 – 01:31:27:	The fact that he used an AR-15 in part saved the president's life because another heavier bullet would have done what he intended to do.

01:31:29 – 01:31:31:	The whole thing is a setup, the whole thing is a stink.

01:31:31 – 01:31:32:	We're not here to analyze that.

01:31:33 – 01:31:49:	But the one-two punch of us being accused of exhorting political violence when it's BS and actual political violence playing out in the most evil, horrific manner possible pretty much made this the obvious thing to discuss.

01:31:49 – 01:31:54:	And so, last couple days, I've been visiting with someone and driving around the car more than usual.

01:31:54 – 01:32:03:	And so, I was listening to NPR to hear their coverage of this thing because I knew that the worst possible takes in the world were going to be coming from NPR.

01:32:03 – 01:32:05:	And they did not fail to deliver.

01:32:06 – 01:32:14:	They were extremely concerned about political violence, about toning down the rhetoric, about reducing the temperature.

01:32:14 – 01:32:25:	They weren't concerned about that the week prior when they were calling all of us Nazis, when they were telling the whole world in dog whistle terms, in coded terms, these are the people who need to be killed.

01:32:26 – 01:32:37:	One of the very interesting things, one of the guests that they had on, I can't remember his name, he's a professor at the University of Chicago, has been analyzing data for survey data for the US for a number of years.

01:32:38 – 01:32:49:	And his focus is basically on what these people call radicalization, on the desire to use violence to achieve political ends, which is incidentally one of the definitions of terrorism.

01:32:50 – 01:32:50:	No argument here.

01:32:51 – 01:32:55:	We're not neither inciting, nor endorsing or advocating that.

01:32:55 – 01:32:58:	I don't want to see violence to address political problems.

01:32:59 – 01:33:00:	It's bad.

01:33:00 – 01:33:01:	It's bad for everyone.

01:33:01 – 01:33:01:	It's evil.

01:33:03 – 01:33:25:	One of the fascinating things that he mentioned was that in the most recent survey data, which was from just a couple of months ago, when interviewing the left, 26 million Americans, about 10% of the voting populace, say that they consider it to be acceptable to murder, to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again.

01:33:26 – 01:33:27:	26 million people.

01:33:27 – 01:33:43:	And so that is the result of NPR and CNN and all the churches calling us Nazis, calling anyone with a red hat a Nazi, saying that it is a threat to democracy in the end of the world if these people are not stopped by any means necessary.

01:33:44 – 01:33:45:	Those are fighting words.

01:33:45 – 01:33:46:	That's incitement to violence.

01:33:46 – 01:33:48:	It's saying, here's a target class.

01:33:48 – 01:33:51:	Here's what they're going to do if we do not stop them by killing them.

01:33:52 – 01:33:57:	They've been doing that for years with complete impunity because the discourse is like, oh, that's fine.

01:33:57 – 01:33:59:	Obviously, Nazis need to be killed.

01:33:59 – 01:34:01:	And obviously, these guys are Nazis.

01:34:01 – 01:34:09:	And if some 20-year-old with a gun puts two and two together and takes care of business, well, then we can say tone down the rhetoric.

01:34:09 – 01:34:10:	That's precisely what played out.

01:34:12 – 01:34:13:	All this is wicked.

01:34:13 – 01:34:14:	None of this should exist.

01:34:15 – 01:34:23:	But the fact that 26 million people say, yeah, it's fine to kill people to make sure that that man doesn't return to the White House, is the state of politics.

01:34:23 – 01:34:24:	And it shouldn't be.

01:34:24 – 01:34:26:	I don't want that to be the case.

01:34:26 – 01:34:34:	And that's part of the reason why Corey and I talk about these things, is to make sure that there are Christian voices who are faithful to Scripture talking about them.

01:34:35 – 01:34:45:	Because almost everyone in the Church is joining with NPR and CNN and MSNBC and the World Economic Forum and everybody else, saying, peace, peace, where there is no peace.

01:34:45 – 01:34:48:	They say that political violence is never appropriate.

01:34:48 – 01:34:55:	And in a sense, that is true and is desirable, but it's also specious.

01:34:57 – 01:34:58:	You've all heard of the name Aaron Burr.

01:34:58 – 01:35:02:	You know him because he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton.

01:35:02 – 01:35:04:	They had a duel in 1804.

01:35:05 – 01:35:11:	And it was illegal for them to duel, both in New York where they were and in New Jersey where they stepped across the line.

01:35:11 – 01:35:19:	They had a duel there because they had been going back and forth, accusing each other of things, slandering each other, at least those are the traded accusations.

01:35:20 – 01:35:23:	The men were depriving each other of their perceived reputations.

01:35:23 – 01:35:28:	And it went on for so long, they decided to mutual combat to the death.

01:35:28 – 01:35:30:	And one killed the other.

01:35:30 – 01:35:31:	That's a very famous story.

01:35:31 – 01:35:32:	It's why you know the name Aaron Burr now.

01:35:35 – 01:35:38:	The fact that it was illegal didn't make it weird that they had done it.

01:35:39 – 01:35:43:	Because for a very long time in the West and in other cultures, dueling has been normal.

01:35:44 – 01:35:47:	Now, I'm happy to live in a world where dueling has gone away.

01:35:47 – 01:35:58:	But to say that political violence is always unacceptable is simply to lie about the fact that for most of human history, that sort of thing happened.

01:35:58 – 01:36:03:	Now, it's not political in the sense that it was, you know, red versus blue.

01:36:04 – 01:36:06:	But it also kind of was because they were political opponents.

01:36:07 – 01:36:09:	They didn't incite each other's followers.

01:36:09 – 01:36:11:	They did it like men face to face.

01:36:12 – 01:36:13:	And that was, it was traditional.

01:36:14 – 01:36:15:	It's been traditional in many countries.

01:36:16 – 01:36:20:	And that is normal male violence.

01:36:20 – 01:36:24:	Now, I say normal, I'm not saying that I approve of it as desirable.

01:36:24 – 01:36:26:	This is not incitement to returning to dueling.

01:36:27 – 01:36:30:	Once again, there's a difference between incitement and advocacy.

01:36:32 – 01:36:39:	To advocate for the historical norm in most places and most times is simply to deal with reality as it is.

01:36:40 – 01:36:45:	And a simple fact is that in most places, men have violently settled their disputes when words fail.

01:36:46 – 01:36:55:	And as more and more women entered into the political sphere, all that vanished, at least on the surface.

01:36:55 – 01:36:58:	But the underlying impetus didn't go away.

01:36:58 – 01:37:00:	And that's part of what has created a powder keg today.

01:37:01 – 01:37:05:	Is that there are some times where men naturally will settle things by squaring off.

01:37:06 – 01:37:08:	And it doesn't need to be a fight to the death.

01:37:08 – 01:37:10:	I don't want to see that because it's wasteful.

01:37:10 – 01:37:13:	They were like, I despise Hamilton.

01:37:13 – 01:37:15:	I don't know much about Burr, but they were intelligent men.

01:37:15 – 01:37:19:	You know, they could have been doing good things instead of killing each other, trying to.

01:37:20 – 01:37:26:	It's never desirable for someone who's lived a life and has potential to have that snuffed out over an argument.

01:37:27 – 01:37:28:	That's stupid.

01:37:28 – 01:37:31:	I would put that in the category of retarded, whether or not it's legal.

01:37:32 – 01:37:34:	And I think it's only fairly recently been made illegal there.

01:37:36 – 01:37:41:	As Corey was saying, there's always an inherent violence underneath any interaction between two men.

01:37:42 – 01:37:44:	And I've said this before on Stone Choir, and I mentioned it.

01:37:44 – 01:37:53:	I did another interview last week with MetaPrime on tax, where I specifically talked about, you know, this whole scenario playing out, and talked about violence and Christianity.

01:37:54 – 01:38:24:	And I mentioned that when I'm interacting with other men on the Internet, when I'm hiding behind a keyboard, as, you know, I'm always accused, as we're all accused, especially if we're synonymous, when I'm interacting with a man that I know is bigger and stronger than me, that's more martially competent than me, I am less likely to say something aggressive to him, something, you know, something that could potentially rise the level of fighting words, than I would if I didn't know that about, if I knew that he was, you know, my size or whatever.

01:38:25 – 01:38:32:	And that is, I realized just as Corey was saying his comments a few months ago, that was specifically out of respect.

01:38:33 – 01:38:35:	It's not cowardice being afraid of them.

01:38:36 – 01:38:41:	It's that I will not say something online that I won't say face to face.

01:38:41 – 01:38:44:	I'm not hiding behind a keyboard or behind a microphone.

01:38:44 – 01:38:47:	I'm not hiding behind an avatar instead of using my face and my name.

01:38:48 – 01:38:51:	The things that I say here are the things that I would tell you directly.

01:38:51 – 01:39:00:	And so when I know that a guy might beat me, if, you know, nice guys like I don't really typically talk to people who are both mean and, you know, whatever.

01:39:00 – 01:39:08:	But like, if I know that a guy could kick my butt for saying something, I'm not going to say out of respect because I wouldn't do it to his face.

01:39:08 – 01:39:13:	That's an inherent recognition that's just in the background in my mental thought process.

01:39:13 – 01:39:13:	I'm sure I fail.

01:39:13 – 01:39:18:	Like, I'm sure I've mouthed off the guys who would absolutely beat my ass if I stepped out of the line.

01:39:20 – 01:39:22:	But my principle is not to do that.

01:39:22 – 01:39:25:	I don't want to be a punk.

01:39:25 – 01:39:26:	I am not a coward.

01:39:27 – 01:39:31:	I might occasionally be stupid, but it's not an act of hypocrisy.

01:39:33 – 01:39:43:	It is entirely reasonable and in fact natural for men to interact with each other in such a fashion that violence is always an option.

01:39:43 – 01:39:47:	I have said before, I am a big fan of the UFC and of MMA in general.

01:39:48 – 01:39:59:	I think the existence and the presentation of mixed martial arts and the combat sports is really the last bastion of masculinity in our society today.

01:39:59 – 01:40:02:	I know there are a lot of guys who are listening.

01:40:02 – 01:40:04:	Corey disagrees with me to some extent about this.

01:40:05 – 01:40:07:	Most guys who don't like it see it as blood sports.

01:40:09 – 01:40:09:	I don't.

01:40:09 – 01:40:13:	I see it as two men who are entering mutual combat.

01:40:13 – 01:40:15:	They're locked in an octagon together.

01:40:15 – 01:40:17:	They're locked in a cage together.

01:40:17 – 01:40:26:	And the fight is over when one man is either incapable of continuing to prosecute the fight, time is up, or he submits.

01:40:27 – 01:40:30:	And submission doesn't necessarily need to be a choke hold or an arm bar or something.

01:40:31 – 01:40:33:	The man could simply say, you know what, I've had enough.

01:40:33 – 01:40:34:	You're the better man than me.

01:40:34 – 01:40:37:	I don't want to get punched in the face anymore.

01:40:37 – 01:40:37:	I quit.

01:40:38 – 01:40:48:	So, when they enter into the ring, it is with a mutual understanding that they're going to do their very best to best the other man, marshally, physically, with violence.

01:40:49 – 01:40:50:	And whoever wins, wins.

01:40:50 – 01:40:57:	And one of the reasons that I appreciate the sport so much is the tremendous sportsmanship between the men.

01:40:57 – 01:41:04:	Even men who have mouthed off for weeks and months leading up to some of the big fights, sometimes it's extremely acrimonious.

01:41:05 – 01:41:09:	Sometimes the men really, really hate each other as they say some really nasty stuff.

01:41:10 – 01:41:11:	And they're fighters from all over the world.

01:41:11 – 01:41:13:	So we talk about fighting words.

01:41:13 – 01:41:27:	There have been some Risa cases where a man from one culture said something particularly vile about the mother of a man from another culture, not recognizing that, even though that's something that, you know, it's not really acceptable in our country, but you don't die for it.

01:41:28 – 01:41:30:	There are countries where you'll die for that pretty much on the spot.

01:41:30 – 01:41:32:	You don't insult a man's mother.

01:41:32 – 01:41:33:	You should expect to die.

01:41:34 – 01:41:39:	So the guy that he was saying that to, he was just talking trash, and he was being mean, he was being insulting.

01:41:39 – 01:41:42:	He didn't realize the level to which those words rose.

01:41:42 – 01:41:44:	So there was a lot of buildup to that fight.

01:41:44 – 01:41:47:	I can't remember which one it was, but like, it's always a risk.

01:41:47 – 01:41:59:	You run your mouth, but the beautiful thing, the reason I appreciate MMA, UFC in particular, is that when they meet in the ring, however pissed off they were when they face off with each other, usually there's not anger.

01:41:59 – 01:42:00:	Usually it's just two professionals.

01:42:01 – 01:42:04:	There's usually a lot of respect from the opening bell.

01:42:05 – 01:42:15:	But even in the cases where they hate each other going in, in almost every case, they end up respecting each other at the end of the fight, especially if they go all three or five rounds.

01:42:15 – 01:42:23:	When you hate a man so much that not only are you fighting him for money, but because you genuinely want to hurt him, which isn't really a good motivation.

01:42:23 – 01:42:25:	Sometimes it's a detriment in the ring.

01:42:25 – 01:42:38:	But even in that worst case, when those two men meet and they beat the crap out of each other, and then the final bell rings, it doesn't matter who won, they respect each other as men in a way that will last the rest of their lives.

01:42:40 – 01:42:41:	That's how men work.

01:42:41 – 01:42:48:	It doesn't matter who wins, as long as you can go toe to toe with another man and demonstrate that you also are a man.

01:42:49 – 01:42:50:	This is inherent to us.

01:42:50 – 01:42:52:	It's inherent to a man's nature.

01:42:52 – 01:42:53:	Even a man who can't deliver.

01:42:53 – 01:42:55:	Most men can't do what those guys can do.

01:42:56 – 01:42:57:	I certainly can't do it.

01:42:57 – 01:43:01:	And I respect the fact that they're so good at something that's incredibly difficult.

01:43:02 – 01:43:09:	The masculinity is that they face off against each other knowing that they're going to be hurt and that they're going to try to stop the other guy.

01:43:10 – 01:43:15:	And the respect that comes out of that is something that women frankly can't understand.

01:43:15 – 01:43:18:	There are a lot of women who are fans now for various reasons, I'm sure.

01:43:20 – 01:43:30:	The only way to actually fully understand and to respect what goes on in the MMA ring is to be a man and to be a man who can put himself in that sort of martial mindset.

01:43:30 – 01:43:34:	To understand that in a sense, violence can be neutral.

01:43:34 – 01:43:38:	There are times and places where men say, well, you know, let's settle this like men.

01:43:38 – 01:43:44:	The notion of dueling, pugilism, doesn't need to be with guns, it doesn't need to be to the death.

01:43:45 – 01:43:54:	The notion that one man would square off against another man is interpersonal, as Corey was saying earlier, and it's also the essence of the political.

01:43:54 – 01:44:02:	When two neighboring states are quarreling, they always know that it may well get to the point that one of them, you know, it's called saber rattling.

01:44:03 – 01:44:08:	And although that's a metaphor, it's not much of one, because it used to be those actual sabers that were going to come out.

01:44:08 – 01:44:11:	Today, it's guns and bombs and artillery and the whole nine yards.

01:44:12 – 01:44:15:	It's lethal force, but the communication is the same.

01:44:16 – 01:44:19:	We can talk about this or we can settle it by other means.

01:44:20 – 01:44:24:	And as Corey said, violence is always a political option, not for us as individuals.

01:44:25 – 01:44:36:	So to once again beat the dead horse to belabor the point, to advocate this narrow sense in which political violence is sometimes permissible is not incitement.

01:44:36 – 01:44:40:	I don't want to see it because it's destructive and because it's often evil.

01:44:41 – 01:44:44:	It's almost always evil, but that doesn't mean that it's per se evil.

01:44:45 – 01:44:48:	There's a time and a place where sometimes that's the only option.

01:44:48 – 01:44:53:	And we see it play out in criminal episodes where somebody's running around committing crimes.

01:44:54 – 01:44:59:	You know, almost no one is crying about the fact that the sniper on Saturday was killed by a counter sniper.

01:44:59 – 01:45:01:	That was an act of violence.

01:45:01 – 01:45:05:	You had an evil act of violence, and you had a good act of violence a couple seconds later.

01:45:06 – 01:45:13:	It is entirely rational and coherent and not hypocritical to condemn one and to applaud the other.

01:45:13 – 01:45:22:	The sniper that actually managed to do his job from 488 yards away, whatever else went on, like the fact that that roof was open, beyond a conspiracy.

01:45:22 – 01:45:24:	That was a deliberate act of malice.

01:45:24 – 01:45:25:	That was a setup.

01:45:26 – 01:45:34:	But for the very narrow three seconds that the gunfire was going on, you had an evil shooter and you had a good shooter.

01:45:34 – 01:45:38:	They were both doing functionally the same thing with entirely different intents.

01:45:38 – 01:45:48:	One wanted to commit political violence to commit murder and mayhem, and the other wanted to end political violence and commit murder and mayhem, wanted to end the threat.

01:45:49 – 01:45:54:	To say that violence is always impermissible is to condemn the counter sniper.

01:45:54 – 01:45:56:	And that's an essential part of this.

01:45:56 – 01:45:59:	The same people who say that necessarily have to be pacifists.

01:46:00 – 01:46:07:	If you believe that the police should be armed, that the military should be armed, you believe that violence is sometimes politically necessary.

01:46:07 – 01:46:08:	Full stop.

01:46:09 – 01:46:12:	The presence of a gun is always the threat of violence.

01:46:13 – 01:46:13:	That's true.

01:46:14 – 01:46:18:	Now, there are degrees, but there's the potentiality for violence.

01:46:18 – 01:46:30:	And so one of the other things that exists in the law is the notion of brandishing or of assault, where if someone is open carrying a firearm, there's no immediate threat to anyone.

01:46:30 – 01:46:31:	That's perfectly legally elicit.

01:46:32 – 01:46:51:	If you square off with someone and you are armed, or their arm doesn't matter, if one party has a gun and there's a back and forth that's acrimonious and the man who has a gun, or perhaps both of them are armed, if a man touches or even reaches for his weapon, that's called brandishing.

01:46:51 – 01:47:06:	It's an escalation because it's gone past the point where a man's armed, but there's no immediate threat to brandishing your weapon, the assault of the threat or the perception that you are going to potentially use that weapon is itself in some cases a criminal act.

01:47:07 – 01:47:16:	Again, it's something guys get into trouble with when they're carrying firearms legally, but they don't understand their local laws because every law is different in every state.

01:47:17 – 01:47:28:	It's really vital if for anyone who's a gun owner, a legal gun owner, you must know the law backwards and forwards, the typical responsible gun owner honestly knows these laws better than a lot of the police.

01:47:28 – 01:47:31:	The police don't have any consequences if they get that stuff wrong.

01:47:31 – 01:47:35:	The man who is charged with a crime, whether guilty or not, has to sort it out in court.

01:47:36 – 01:47:49:	And so the simple act of reaching for a gun or of touching a gun is itself in some circumstances seen as a criminal act because there's an escalation of the potential for violence, which can be reciprocated.

01:47:49 – 01:47:56:	And so part of the reason for a lot of the laws around fighting words and brandishing and these other things is that we don't want to see violence.

01:47:56 – 01:47:58:	We don't want to see intentional or accidental violence.

01:47:58 – 01:48:02:	And so you draw concentric circles around the subject, so you don't go there.

01:48:03 – 01:48:21:	But at the same time, there's a recognition by the fact that it's legal now in most states for men to carry firearms, either open or concealed, that it is not only the state that has the right and the duty to enact violence, but their circumstances, legal circumstances and moral ones where individuals may have the same duty.

01:48:21 – 01:48:24:	So none of this discussion is about legal advice.

01:48:24 – 01:48:26:	You need to look up your local laws.

01:48:26 – 01:48:34:	But it's also important to acknowledge that if you say there's no place for violence, you must absolutely be for the abolition of firearms.

01:48:34 – 01:48:40:	You must be for the abolition of firearms, not only for civilian populations, but for militaries and everyone else.

01:48:40 – 01:48:45:	You must be for the abolition of all weapons if you say that there's no place for violence.

01:48:46 – 01:48:49:	I'm saying this specifically because it's an incoherent, retarded statement.

01:48:49 – 01:48:51:	There's always a potential place for violence.

01:48:52 – 01:48:53:	It's not an incitement to violence.

01:48:53 – 01:48:55:	It's saying that it exists because men are evil.

01:48:56 – 01:48:58:	And so good men must respond to evil men.

01:48:58 – 01:49:01:	And they must, in some cases, respond in kind.

01:49:01 – 01:49:04:	And that in kind is what we call the rules of engagement.

01:49:05 – 01:49:23:	In the case of the sniper-counter-sniper incident in Pennsylvania with President Trump, allegedly, and this blows my mind, but allegedly the latest information as this recording was that the rules of engagement for the Secret Service was that they saw a man with a gun, they couldn't do anything until he shot.

01:49:24 – 01:49:25:	That's completely insane.

01:49:26 – 01:49:28:	Even the normal police don't have those rules of engagement.

01:49:28 – 01:49:32:	If a man's brandishing a gun and approaching you, a cop is able to shoot them.

01:49:32 – 01:49:35:	In most states, it's typically the case that an individual can as well.

01:49:36 – 01:49:36:	Why?

01:49:37 – 01:49:39:	There's an eminent threat to bodily harm.

01:49:39 – 01:49:44:	And so violence is on the table illicitly because violence is already on the table illicitly.

01:49:45 – 01:49:49:	And that's the reason why prohibition of guns is evil on its face.

01:49:50 – 01:49:53:	Prohibition of the existence of self-defense is evil on its face.

01:49:54 – 01:49:56:	That sort of view can only ever serve evil.

01:49:57 – 01:50:00:	It cannot serve good, because men are always going to be evil.

01:50:00 – 01:50:04:	Even in total absence of weapons, men can still kill each other.

01:50:04 – 01:50:10:	Things like karate were developed specifically because the certain classes of people were disarmed.

01:50:10 – 01:50:13:	Only certain classes were allowed to carry weapons.

01:50:13 – 01:50:17:	And so what they do, they develop martial arts, the open hand, that's what karate means.

01:50:18 – 01:50:23:	You're not carrying a weapon, you're unarmed, but you can still be lethal with your body.

01:50:24 – 01:50:25:	A man's body is itself a weapon.

01:50:26 – 01:50:38:	And this is something that plays out, particularly for guys who've trained MMA or boxing or any other, you know, if you've trained any sort of combat sport, you can be prosecuted differently than someone who hasn't, simply for using your hands.

01:50:38 – 01:50:44:	Because under the law in many jurisdictions, your body is treated as a lethal weapon because you've been trained.

01:50:44 – 01:50:49:	So the fists of a boxer are treated the same way as a gun or a knife.

01:50:49 – 01:50:58:	That's an acknowledgement under law that the violence that a man carries around by virtue of being a man is something, it's a tool.

01:50:58 – 01:51:03:	It's a weapon that has to be held in reserve for only when it's necessary to use.

01:51:03 – 01:51:11:	And there are a lot of guys who've trained golden gloves and other things who later on punch and kill someone in a bar fight or something, and they end up in prison because of this.

01:51:12 – 01:51:20:	Even if the fight itself was justified, they get hung up because of their training, because their body itself is treated on their laws of weapon.

01:51:21 – 01:51:25:	The fact that violence exists is undesirable.

01:51:26 – 01:51:27:	None of us want a world with violence.

01:51:28 – 01:51:29:	We want a peaceful world.

01:51:29 – 01:51:39:	But when we look at the world in a fallen state, we have to acknowledge that there are men who are going to be violent no matter what, and they're going to prosecute their violent acts until someone stops them.

01:51:40 – 01:51:44:	And fundamentally, that's why it's crucial for this subject to not be taboo.

01:51:45 – 01:51:56:	It is necessary for Christian men, for every man, to realize that when there are violent acts occurring in the world, there are times and places where violence is the only possible response to them.

01:51:57 – 01:52:00:	And so we're never going to discuss the rules of engagement or what to do.

01:52:00 – 01:52:01:	That's not our place.

01:52:01 – 01:52:03:	It's not our expertise or purview.

01:52:03 – 01:52:09:	But as a moral matter, to say that violence is never acceptable is feminine screeching.

01:52:09 – 01:52:10:	It is literal hysteria.

01:52:11 – 01:52:13:	It has no place in political discourse.

01:52:14 – 01:52:19:	And any man who says that is a liar and a hypocrite, unless he's also a pacifist.

01:52:19 – 01:52:22:	And if he's a pacifist, he's already damned, so he's off the table.

01:52:22 – 01:52:23:	Those are the stakes here.

01:52:23 – 01:52:28:	This is not something that's desirable, but it exists, and so we have to deal with it as it is.

01:52:30 – 01:52:36:	So we're going to end this in Scripture, because obviously that's the most crucial thing for Christians to deal with.

01:52:36 – 01:52:42:	And this is also going to be a teaser for a couple upcoming episodes, who hear pretty soon, I hope.

01:52:44 – 01:52:51:	One of the verses that comes up when you look for violence in the Bible, if you're just like looking for proof texts, I want some verses either.

01:52:51 – 01:52:53:	I already know what I think about violence.

01:52:54 – 01:52:59:	Where can I find a Bible verse that's going to tell me how I can justify what God says to hold my position?

01:53:00 – 01:53:02:	And so Psalm 11 is going to come up.

01:53:03 – 01:53:12:	There's a particular line in Psalm 11 that says, The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.

01:53:13 – 01:53:16:	And so if you're a proof texter and you just want one line, there you go.

01:53:16 – 01:53:17:	The Lord hates violence.

01:53:18 – 01:53:22:	Obviously, those Stone Choir guys are liars, evil, wicked blasphemers.

01:53:22 – 01:53:24:	We're twisting scripture to do evil things.

01:53:24 – 01:53:29:	So everybody says, because it's necessary for you to believe that, to ignore what God says.

01:53:30 – 01:53:30:	We're not God.

01:53:30 – 01:53:31:	God is God.

01:53:32 – 01:53:38:	The beautiful thing about looking at Psalm 2 is it proves two simultaneous points that I didn't even see coming.

01:53:39 – 01:53:58:	Since discovering what's going on or what has gone on for the last 2000 years with the Septuagint, whenever I look at the Old Testament, I'll look at whatever Bible I have at hand, but I always look at what the Septuagint says, because in many, many cases, there are subtle or profound differences in the way it represents the subject.

01:53:59 – 01:54:06:	In some cases, entire things are missing or are added in the Septuagint that were censored or changed in the Masoretic text.

01:54:08 – 01:54:12:	So Psalm 11 is great for two reasons.

01:54:12 – 01:54:23:	One, it's a microcosm of what BS proof texting is, because as I just said, the text says, God hates the one who loves violence, paraphrasing.

01:54:24 – 01:54:25:	Obviously, game over.

01:54:25 – 01:54:26:	This is a wicked episode.

01:54:26 – 01:54:27:	Delete it.

01:54:27 – 01:54:28:	We're bad going to hell.

01:54:29 – 01:54:30:	Unless you read it in context.

01:54:30 – 01:54:32:	It's a very short Psalm.

01:54:32 – 01:54:33:	Psalm 11 is like seven verses.

01:54:34 – 01:54:39:	The very next verse says, Of God, let him rain coals on the wicked.

01:54:39 – 01:54:43:	Fire and sulfur in a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.

01:54:44 – 01:54:50:	So see what just happened to someone who wanted to use this verse in Psalm 11 to say that violence is always bad.

01:54:51 – 01:54:56:	Literally, the next line says, May God pour out violence upon those who oppose him.

01:54:57 – 01:55:02:	So again, there's no Christian desire for violence never to happen.

01:55:02 – 01:55:10:	Christians cry out for violence against God's enemies, which as we've said in numerous other episodes is distinct from our enemies.

01:55:11 – 01:55:13:	I have personal enemies who've done horrible wicked things to me.

01:55:14 – 01:55:16:	I don't pray for violence against them.

01:55:16 – 01:55:17:	I don't plot violence against them.

01:55:17 – 01:55:18:	I don't discuss it.

01:55:18 – 01:55:19:	I don't want it.

01:55:21 – 01:55:31:	And in some ways, that's almost more hateful than if I did, because I know that those men who have done those wicked things that they're unrepentant for are going to answer to God in eternity.

01:55:32 – 01:55:34:	They're going to be cast bodily into hell unless they repent.

01:55:35 – 01:55:50:	And God is going to torture them violently for eternity in their bodies, for what they did to me and all the other things I've done to everyone else, because for all the things I've done to whomever my entire life, all the sins I've ever committed, I deserve exactly the same kind of punishment.

01:55:51 – 01:55:56:	I deserve to be cast bodily into hell and to be tortured violently by God for eternity.

01:55:57 – 01:55:59:	That is the price for sinning against God.

01:56:00 – 01:56:01:	God doesn't annihilate us.

01:56:01 – 01:56:03:	There is no annihilationism.

01:56:03 – 01:56:04:	That is blasphemous.

01:56:04 – 01:56:05:	It is anti-Christian.

01:56:06 – 01:56:07:	God could do that.

01:56:07 – 01:56:09:	He could have chosen to do that.

01:56:09 – 01:56:10:	He does not.

01:56:10 – 01:56:11:	He does not annihilate.

01:56:11 – 01:56:15:	He preserves bodily and he tortures violently for eternity.

01:56:15 – 01:56:17:	That is God's righteous judgment.

01:56:18 – 01:56:39:	So, when I say that I don't want men to reserve, to receive in this life, the just punishment for their sins, I am saying let God take care of it, but I try to be Christian about it, but I know it is far better for them if they were to suffer harm in this life than to suffer harm in eternity.

01:56:39 – 01:56:44:	Because at least the harm that they would suffer in this life justly for the things that they have done would end.

01:56:45 – 01:56:47:	The suffering they are going to face in eternity will never end.

01:56:47 – 01:56:52:	So my heart is not as Christian as it should be in my treatment of them.

01:56:53 – 01:56:57:	To be explicit, the things that have been done to me, I have said in the past, for my sake, I forgive them.

01:56:58 – 01:56:59:	I truly do.

01:56:59 – 01:57:14:	And so Christian doctrine says that just as when Job interceded for his friends and God blotted out their sins for the sake of Job, I believe that they will not be punished for what they did to me, for my sake.

01:57:14 – 01:57:18:	That doesn't change the punishment for what they did against God.

01:57:18 – 01:57:20:	And God was ultimately their target.

01:57:20 – 01:57:27:	So again, how do you have total prohibition of violence without dealing with who God is?

01:57:27 – 01:57:36:	When we look at this verse, when we look at Psalm 11, we see that yes, God hates violence, but it's in a specific case.

01:57:37 – 01:57:39:	It's in the case of those who are violent.

01:57:39 – 01:57:42:	Because the very next thing that it says is may God pour violence against those men.

01:57:43 – 01:57:46:	It's just like the sniper-counter-sniper situation.

01:57:46 – 01:57:48:	Only it's an infinite and eternal one.

01:57:49 – 01:57:55:	God is the eternal counter-sniper against the wickedness of man, and he doesn't miss, and it lasts forever.

01:57:56 – 01:58:05:	So it's a great microcosm of proof texting because it's such nonsense for a man to try to cherry pick one line when literally the next line calls him a liar.

01:58:06 – 01:58:08:	But that's typical when you deal with that sort of proof texting.

01:58:08 – 01:58:09:	And you can look at all the other passages.

01:58:09 – 01:58:16:	There are so many places in Scripture where violence is prayed for by the godly against God's enemies.

01:58:17 – 01:58:18:	That is a righteous prayer.

01:58:18 – 01:58:20:	Those are called the imprecatory Psalms.

01:58:20 – 01:58:21:	There are dozens of them.

01:58:22 – 01:58:28:	And it's not only eternal violence, but it's violence in this life, where men are to cry out for God to destroy the wicked.

01:58:29 – 01:58:31:	That is how God teaches us to pray.

01:58:33 – 01:58:34:	It's not Christian not to believe that.

01:58:35 – 01:58:38:	The second parallel point, it's translated to the first.

01:58:38 – 01:58:44:	And it's entirely fine for you to look at that version of Scripture and to say, well, here's why violence is XYZ.

01:58:45 – 01:58:54:	As I said, I always look at the Septuagint now, because I know that it differs materially in ways that change doctrine, that change Christian doctrine, often in small ways.

01:58:54 – 01:59:00:	And this is a case where it's a small way, but it's a way that can have profound knock-on effects downstream.

01:59:01 – 01:59:04:	So here's what that same verse says in Greek, transliterated.

01:59:05 – 01:59:12:	The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord's throne is in heaven, his eyes look upon the poor, his eyelids examine the sons of men.

01:59:12 – 01:59:18:	The Lord examines the righteous and the ungodly, and he who loves unrighteousness hates his own soul.

01:59:19 – 01:59:21:	So note what was missing there, the word violence.

01:59:22 – 01:59:31:	The word that's used in Masoretic text in the Hebrew, so called, for violence, does not even appear in the inspired Greek.

01:59:31 – 01:59:35:	What it says is, he who loves unrighteousness hates his own soul.

01:59:36 – 01:59:50:	So again, Psalm 11 in the Masoretic text and all your Bibles doesn't even make the point that someone would like to make because Psalm 11 refutes the notion that God hates violence in the sense that they're trying to pretend.

01:59:51 – 01:59:59:	And yet, when you look at the original Greek scripture of the Church from the very first days of the Church, it doesn't say anything about violence.

01:59:59 – 02:00:12:	This is one of many examples where very small changes have occurred that the way it's written in the Masoretic, it's fine, it's defensible, it's not inspired, but it is not wicked.

02:00:13 – 02:00:17:	But the true version in the Greek cannot even make the point that they're trying to make.

02:00:18 – 02:00:29:	Now, what's interesting about the word that it uses there, the word for unrighteousness, is that that word is a word that comes up in numerous places in the New Testament and it's usually translated as unrighteousness as well.

02:00:30 – 02:00:32:	One example would be Romans 1.

02:00:32 – 02:00:36:	The wrath of God is revealed from heaven, against all ungodly.

02:01:05 – 02:01:13:	The word that is used in Greek doesn't even come close to contravening the next verse, because it says something entirely different.

02:01:14 – 02:01:17:	So we're going to do a few episodes coming up here, hopefully pretty soon.

02:01:17 – 02:01:19:	There's something that's beyond our control, we're waiting on.

02:01:20 – 02:01:22:	When we're able, we're going to deliver a multi-part episode.

02:01:22 – 02:01:24:	We haven't decided yet if it's going to be two or three.

02:01:25 – 02:01:41:	It's going to be the most important thing we've ever done, because the scope, the volume, and the import of the changes in the history behind them of the Christian Bible when a thousand years ago, the Jews replaced it with something that they called Hebrew has left us all in a worse shape.

02:01:43 – 02:01:45:	This is a small example of the fact that this stuff is going on.

02:01:45 – 02:01:49:	Like I said, like you can look at both and like, okay, they're both Christian, it's a minor point.

02:01:50 – 02:01:56:	The fact that you would try to make an argument against violence impermissibly isn't even possible if you use the Christian Greek.

02:01:57 – 02:02:00:	So that's just a sneak preview of what's coming in the future.

02:02:01 – 02:02:06:	The changes you've heard about in the Septuagint, they're not small and they're not just about a few prophecies.

02:02:07 – 02:02:08:	They're all over the place.

02:02:08 – 02:02:10:	And there's a lot more to say about that later.

02:02:11 – 02:02:22:	So just as we're looking at Scripture, when you look at the history, when you look at what God does, what He promises to do in Scripture and in the creeds, He's coming on the last day to judge both the quick and the dead.

02:02:22 – 02:02:34:	And that judgment is the beginning of either eternal reward or eternal punishment, eternal violence against the bodies of the wicked, which is most men who have ever been born.

02:02:35 – 02:02:36:	God is not going to annihilate them.

02:02:36 – 02:02:37:	They're not going to vanish.

02:02:38 – 02:02:41:	They're going to be resurrected in the dead too, and they're going to be violently tortured for eternity.

02:02:42 – 02:02:43:	That sounds really nasty.

02:02:43 – 02:02:48:	Doesn't sound like the loving God that we're told about, but it is the loving God that we're told about.

02:02:48 – 02:03:00:	We've been lied about God's true nature and the only possible way to come up with a God that has no violence and that forbids violence is to come up with a satanic God, one who's not in Scripture at all.

02:03:01 – 02:03:03:	That's why it says the Stone Choir episode fundamentally.

02:03:03 – 02:03:06:	It is absolutely not incitement to violence.

02:03:07 – 02:03:18:	It's only barely advocacy of violence, except narrowly in the sense that, yes, it's permissible, yes, it's sometimes necessary, and by the way, violence is in fact a property of God Almighty.

02:03:18 – 02:03:21:	When you condemn violence per se, you're damning God.

02:03:22 – 02:03:23:	How often does that come up?

02:03:23 – 02:03:28:	Every time we look at this crap, we find that the world religion is damning God.

02:03:28 – 02:03:39:	At some point, the Christian listener who's capable of discerning patterns will think, huh, maybe all these morals that I'm getting from the world and I'm hearing in most pulpits are not remotely Christian.

02:03:39 – 02:03:40:	Maybe they have another source.

02:03:40 – 02:03:46:	Maybe they're teachings of demons, and maybe believing them is going to separate my soul from God in eternity.

02:03:47 – 02:03:52:	And judgment day, when it comes, will be bliss for us, and will be eternal violence for them.

02:03:53 – 02:03:57:	I wish that for no man, but it is promised that that's going to happen if they don't repent.

02:03:59 – 02:04:10:	Before I turn to the three sections of Scripture with which we are going to close out this episode, I want to make a brief philosophical comment.

02:04:11 – 02:04:20:	For those who are paying attention, Woe mentioned twice the possibility of someone or something more pertinently someone being unmade.

02:04:22 – 02:04:27:	The alternative view to that would be that God cannot unmake something for various reasons.

02:04:27 – 02:04:29:	We won't get into in this episode.

02:04:29 – 02:04:33:	You are not bound to believe one way or the other on that.

02:04:34 – 02:04:41:	Christians can disagree on whether or not God could have unmade people instead of damning them to hell for eternity.

02:04:42 – 02:04:47:	Scripture does not necessarily speak precisely and explicitly to the point.

02:04:48 – 02:04:50:	So again, you are free to believe one way or the other.

02:04:50 – 02:04:53:	We are not saying you are bound to believe one or the other.

02:04:53 – 02:04:59:	And I am not going to lay out the argument for the other side in this episode, because that is not the topic we are covering.

02:05:01 – 02:05:11:	But to turn to the conclusion, as it were, of this episode and the three sections of Scripture I would like to cover, I will be starting with a section of Joshua.

02:05:14 – 02:05:21:	And it happened as Joshua was at Jericho, and looking up with his eyes, he saw a person standing before him, and a drawn sword was in his hand.

02:05:22 – 02:05:26:	And approaching, Joshua said to him, Are you an ally or from the enemy?

02:05:27 – 02:05:31:	He said to him, I, the commander of the army of the Lord, now am here.

02:05:32 – 02:05:38:	And Joshua fell on his face upon the earth, and said to him, Master, what do you command your servant?

02:05:39 – 02:05:46:	And the Lord's commander said to Joshua, Untie your sandals from your feet, for the place upon which you are now standing is holy.

02:05:46 – 02:05:53:	A few things about this particular section of scripture.

02:05:56 – 02:05:58:	One, this is Christ here.

02:06:00 – 02:06:01:	This is a Christophany.

02:06:01 – 02:06:04:	Christ is the commander of the army of the Lord.

02:06:04 – 02:06:06:	This is the angel of the Lord, upper case A.

02:06:07 – 02:06:10:	Sometimes in the Old Testament the angel of the Lord is Christ.

02:06:11 – 02:06:14:	Sometimes the angel of the Lord seems to just be an angel.

02:06:14 – 02:06:21:	You have to pay attention to what is being done and what is not being done in the passage to know which is which.

02:06:22 – 02:06:25:	Here, Joshua falls down and worships.

02:06:25 – 02:06:26:	That's what he's doing.

02:06:26 – 02:06:30:	Some versions of some translations in English say worship.

02:06:32 – 02:06:41:	If he were instead of dealing with the angel of the Lord, uppercase A, simply dealing with an angel, he would have been rebuked for doing that.

02:06:42 – 02:06:50:	You can think of Revelation where John is told, do not do that because we are not permitted to worship angels.

02:06:50 – 02:06:52:	We are not permitted to worship saints.

02:06:52 – 02:06:55:	We are not permitted to worship anyone but the Lord God.

02:06:56 – 02:06:57:	So this is Christ.

02:06:58 – 02:07:00:	And what does Christ have when he appears?

02:07:01 – 02:07:04:	He has a drawn sword, not just a sword.

02:07:04 – 02:07:06:	He has a drawn sword.

02:07:07 – 02:07:10:	And of course, I would point to the fact the ground is holy.

02:07:10 – 02:07:13:	That adds into the fact that you can conclude this is the angel of the Lord.

02:07:13 – 02:07:15:	He's appearing in the context of war.

02:07:16 – 02:07:23:	But to go back and focus on that drawn sword, culturally many today are going to miss what that means.

02:07:23 – 02:07:31:	And the reason they're going to miss what that means is because we are so disconnected from cultures in which this was more of part of the culture.

02:07:32 – 02:07:34:	And we could debate whether that's good or bad.

02:07:34 – 02:07:36:	In some ways it's good, in some ways it's bad.

02:07:38 – 02:07:59:	But in cultures where everyone or at least the upper classes are carrying a sword, so for instance, in Japanese culture in the medieval era, it would have been the upper class carrying the sword because the lower classes were prohibited from owning them as Woe referenced earlier, if you draw your sword, it is at the absolute minimum a threat.

02:08:00 – 02:08:04:	In the Japanese context, it was expected that if you drew the sword, you would also draw blood.

02:08:05 – 02:08:12:	That was the case in certain times at certain places in Europe and in the Middle East, but not always in the latter two cases.

02:08:13 – 02:08:16:	Sometimes it was simply a threat, but a very real one.

02:08:17 – 02:08:21:	A drawn sword means I am ready and willing to draw blood.

02:08:22 – 02:08:26:	Christ appears here with a drawn sword.

02:08:26 – 02:08:27:	He is going to war.

02:08:27 – 02:08:31:	He is leading his people, his army to war.

02:08:32 – 02:08:35:	He is called the Lord of Hosts and not without warrant.

02:08:36 – 02:08:42:	And so to reject violence is to find this image of God here utterly incoherent.

02:08:42 – 02:08:46:	It's to deny this is God at all, to deny that God could do this.

02:08:47 – 02:08:57:	And so again, you cannot possibly conclude that violence is per se wicked or per se sinful and have the God of Scripture.

02:08:59 – 02:09:01:	Another passage from the Old Testament, this time from Psalms.

02:09:03 – 02:09:04:	Sing to the Lord a new song.

02:09:04 – 02:09:07:	His praise is in the assembly of the holy ones.

02:09:07 – 02:09:13:	Let Israel be cheerful in the one who made him and let the children of Zion rejoice exceedingly in their king.

02:09:14 – 02:09:17:	Let them praise his name and dance with tambourine and harp.

02:09:17 – 02:09:24:	Let them sing Psalms to him, because the Lord is well pleased with his people and he will raise up the humble in salvation.

02:09:24 – 02:09:34:	Holy ones will boast in glory and they will rejoice exceedingly in their beds, the heights of God in their throats and double-edged swords in their hands.

02:09:34 – 02:09:49:	To enact vengeance among the nations, reproof among the peoples, to bind their kings in fetters, and those held in esteem among them in iron handcuffs, to enact among them written judgment, this is glory to all his holy ones.

02:09:52 – 02:09:58:	Very often, when dealing with issues like this, you will have those who will argue, well, are you King David?

02:09:59 – 02:10:00:	Well, are you Joshua?

02:10:00 – 02:10:04:	Well, are you X, Y or Z man from Scripture?

02:10:07 – 02:10:21:	In a fundamental way, what they are arguing is that Scripture is not applicable to anyone except for those in Scripture, which is a denial that it is the Word of God, of course, and it's denial of what Scripture says about Scripture, that it is fit for reproof and for training, for teaching.

02:10:23 – 02:10:25:	However, it's also obviously mercenary.

02:10:27 – 02:10:38:	But here we have, in the previous passage that I read from Joshua, Christ dealing with Joshua leading the Israelites in the conquest, the genocidal conquest of Canaan.

02:10:39 – 02:10:43:	Well, here we just have a reference to the Holy Ones.

02:10:43 – 02:10:44:	That means Christians.

02:10:44 – 02:10:46:	That means those with faith.

02:10:47 – 02:10:50:	And they have double-edged swords to enact vengeance among the nations.

02:10:51 – 02:10:54:	And that is the glory to all his Holy Ones.

02:10:56 – 02:11:09:	Scripture is saying that the use of violence against the unbelievers, against the wicked, is part of God's plan for the holy, for the righteous, for Christians.

02:11:10 – 02:11:23:	Not just for Joshua, not just for David, not just for Solomon, not just for these great men, these warriors, in some of those cases more so than others, but not just for these warriors in the Old Testament.

02:11:23 – 02:11:25:	But also for Christians more generally.

02:11:27 – 02:11:32:	Violence is part of God's plan, and this is another thing we tend to gloss over, we tend to miss in Scripture.

02:11:34 – 02:11:38:	The conquest of Canaan could have been accomplished by God with a snap of his fingers.

02:11:40 – 02:11:46:	In some ways, he did use specific miracles that did not involve the Israelites directly.

02:11:46 – 02:11:53:	He sent, for instance, hornets before them to drive some people out of their cities so that the Israelites could simply occupy them.

02:11:55 – 02:12:04:	But God, by and large, used Israelite men with swords and bows and slings to slaughter the Canaanites.

02:12:05 – 02:12:10:	God used men to enact his violence against his enemies.

02:12:10 – 02:12:12:	He didn't need to do that.

02:12:12 – 02:12:17:	He could have done any of a number of other things, but that is the means that he chose.

02:12:18 – 02:12:29:	And so if we want to say today that God cannot use violence or Christians cannot use violence, we are denying Scripture in many places.

02:12:29 – 02:12:34:	I am using just a few examples here to close this out, but this is all throughout Scripture.

02:12:34 – 02:12:37:	I recommend you go and read Joshua and Judges.

02:12:37 – 02:12:38:	You could listen to them.

02:12:38 – 02:12:39:	I did that this morning.

02:12:39 – 02:12:43:	It took an hour and 45 minutes to listen to the book of Joshua.

02:12:43 – 02:12:44:	It's quite quick.

02:12:46 – 02:12:57:	But if you say that God cannot use violence, or that Christians cannot use violence, you are denying the Word of God, you are calling God a sinner, and quite frankly, what you are doing is apostatizing.

02:12:59 – 02:13:01:	But there are those, of course, who will say, well, that's the Old Testament.

02:13:01 – 02:13:02:	This is the New Testament.

02:13:02 – 02:13:03:	It's the New Covenant.

02:13:03 – 02:13:03:	It's different.

02:13:04 – 02:13:15:	Of course, ignoring the fact that that's Marcionism, we can point out, no, this is in the New Testament as well, because that was Christ standing with a drawn sword before Joshua.

02:13:16 – 02:13:28:	The same Christ who in the Book of Luke speaks, but as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.

02:13:30 – 02:13:38:	That is a command from Christ to his followers, to Christians, to slaughter his enemies before him.

02:13:40 – 02:13:46:	And just to be clear about that word, I would think that the English is sufficiently clear slaughter.

02:13:47 – 02:13:52:	Perhaps for those who are removed from any sort of rural area or farm life, it's a little more distant.

02:13:54 – 02:13:58:	But that verb in Greek is katasfazo.

02:13:59 – 02:14:12:	Yes, sp is a thing that the Greeks think go well together, but that aside, that word, the core verb there, means to kill by violence, specifically, to kill by violence.

02:14:13 – 02:14:19:	And that is what Christ says to Christians, what he commands to Christians of his enemies.

02:14:20 – 02:14:23:	That is what Christ will do on the last day when he stands on the earth.

02:14:24 – 02:14:28:	He will destroy those who opposed him, and he will destroy them by violence.

02:14:31 – 02:14:33:	God is not a pacifist.

02:14:33 – 02:14:37:	God does not eschew violence.

02:14:38 – 02:14:40:	He may abhor violence to a certain degree.

02:14:41 – 02:14:46:	Because as we mentioned a number of times in the episode, there are really two levels to this.

02:14:46 – 02:14:52:	And perhaps the best way, the most constructive way to think about them would be the abstract and the concrete.

02:14:53 – 02:15:02:	In an abstract way, removed from all considerations, all reality, untethered from the world, violence is bad.

02:15:03 – 02:15:04:	Violence is an evil.

02:15:05 – 02:15:07:	Because it should not be part of the world.

02:15:07 – 02:15:09:	It was not part of God's design.

02:15:10 – 02:15:15:	If Satan had not fallen, if man had not fallen, there would be no violence.

02:15:16 – 02:15:17:	That is a better world.

02:15:17 – 02:15:20:	That is the world he will restore on the last day.

02:15:21 – 02:15:22:	That is the new creation.

02:15:22 – 02:15:22:	That is paradise.

02:15:24 – 02:15:45:	But the second level, and quite frankly for us the most important level, because it is the level that is relevant to us today in this life, we could discuss the next life, and so that first level is relevant, but there is nothing to discuss, because violence will simply be gone with regard to the elect, with regard to those who are in paradise, who ran the race successfully.

02:15:47 – 02:15:50:	But that second level is this world.

02:15:51 – 02:15:58:	It is our life in a fallen world, in a sinful world, in a world in which violence is a reality, a constant reality.

02:15:59 – 02:16:02:	Perhaps go back and listen to the episode on normalcy bias.

02:16:02 – 02:16:17:	Everyone walks around in this world and thinks, well, violence is some distant thing, it's something that happens over there or back then, or despite the fact that we still have a decent amount, to abuse the term perhaps, but a decent amount of violent crime in certain parts of the country and increasing.

02:16:19 – 02:16:21:	By historical norms, we have almost no violence today.

02:16:23 – 02:16:28:	But that's normalcy bias to think that that will persist, to think that that will continue.

02:16:28 – 02:16:31:	That is not the reality of life on this earth.

02:16:32 – 02:16:39:	The reality of life on this earth historically, throughout the entire history of man, has been almost constant warfare.

02:16:39 – 02:16:42:	There are wars happening right now in certain parts of the world.

02:16:42 – 02:16:45:	Just because they aren't happening here doesn't mean they aren't happening.

02:16:46 – 02:17:00:	But that second level is this life in the fallen world, and violence is a reality, it is a part of it, and it is necessary with regard to the righteous, with regard to the good, with regard to the Christian prince who wields the sword.

02:17:02 – 02:17:09:	Because the wicked will always engage in violence, just as they will always engage in all sorts of destructive sins.

02:17:10 – 02:17:15:	It is necessary to oppose that, and sometimes that requires violence.

02:17:16 – 02:17:27:	The example that we have given a number of times and I will give it again, if a man breaks into your house and intends to harm your wife and children, it is incumbent on you as a man to oppose that with violence.

02:17:27 – 02:17:29:	That is your moral duty.

02:17:30 – 02:17:43:	Yes, there are some legal niceties and some specifics as to how you are permitted to do that or not do that with regard to the positive law in the state in which you live, but your moral duty remains regardless of what that positive law says.

02:17:44 – 02:17:50:	Because your moral duty as a man is to put yourself between the shooter and your wife and child.

02:17:50 – 02:17:53:	Your moral duty as a man is to die if necessary.

02:17:54 – 02:18:00:	It is to enact violence, the violence that is necessary to defend the things God has entrusted to your care.

02:18:03 – 02:18:05:	That is the reality of living in a fallen world.

02:18:06 – 02:18:08:	That is the reality of what scripture says.

02:18:09 – 02:18:24:	If you have a pacifist god, if you have a god who simply says that violence qua violence is wicked, is evil, is always wrongful, you may very well have a god, but you have a different god from the one found in scripture.

02:18:25 – 02:18:33:	Because you do not have the god who stood before Jericho sword in hand and told Joshua to destroy that city.

02:18:34 – 02:18:44:	You do not have the god who speaks in the psalm and says that it is the glory of his holy ones to execute vengeance on the nations with double edged swords in their hands.

02:18:45 – 02:18:55:	You do not have the god who says in Luke, but as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.

02:18:56 – 02:18:59:	Because the god of scripture is not a pacifist.

02:19:00 – 02:19:06:	The god of scripture uses violence when and where it is warranted.

02:19:07 – 02:19:09:	Because violence is a part of the fallen world.

02:19:10 – 02:19:11:	It is something we cannot avoid.

02:19:12 – 02:19:14:	It may be something that we oppose and hate.

02:19:15 – 02:19:19:	We wish that it were not part of this world, because of course we wish that the fall had not happened.

02:19:20 – 02:19:24:	But just wishing that something were the case does not make it so.

02:19:24 – 02:19:27:	Because we live in this world.

02:19:27 – 02:19:30:	And this world is fallen and sinful.

02:19:30 – 02:19:34:	And the reality of that necessitates certain responses.

02:19:35 – 02:19:38:	God wants no one to spend eternity in hell.

02:19:40 – 02:19:47:	But all of the sinners, who do not repent, who are not covered by Christ's blood, will spend eternity in hell.

02:19:47 – 02:19:50:	He will torture them for eternity in hell.

02:19:51 – 02:19:55:	He will enact violence against those men his enemies for eternity.

02:19:56 – 02:19:57:	Unceasing torment.

02:19:59 – 02:20:00:	That is the Lord God.

02:20:00 – 02:20:02:	That is what He does.

02:20:02 – 02:20:09:	If you have a different God, then I don't know why you're listening to this podcast, and I don't know why you'd pretend to be Christian.

02:20:11 – 02:20:20:	Because the Lord God is a God of peace, but it is a God of peace, and it is a peace that is backed by infinite violence.

02:20:20 – 02:20:20:	Thanks for watching.