Transcript: Episode 0081

“The End Times”

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.

00:00:45 – 00:00:48:	On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be talking about peace.

00:00:49 – 00:01:02:	Last week, we discussed violence at some length, talked about the implications within politics and within our lives and the context in which violence is sometimes necessary when it's forbidden.

00:01:02 – 00:01:13:	And basically addressing the fact that part of the new global religion says that all violence is always and everywhere per se evil, which is plainly false scripturally.

00:01:13 – 00:01:15:	So we made the case that that's not always true.

00:01:16 – 00:01:24:	And yet at the same time, we also made very clear that saying that something is moral is not inciting it.

00:01:24 – 00:01:28:	You know, when we talked about slavery, we're not saying you should go out and get slaves.

00:01:28 – 00:01:33:	It's never license that is the reason behind discussing some of these subjects.

00:01:33 – 00:01:38:	And so after discussing violence last week is something that is in some places and times permissible.

00:01:39 – 00:01:41:	We want to talk this week specifically about peace.

00:01:42 – 00:01:50:	If we get into the main subject, just a brief note that Corey has another big batch of the challenge coins ready to go shortly.

00:01:50 – 00:01:54:	And he's hoping that by the end of next week, he'll be able to get the rest of them out.

00:01:54 – 00:01:57:	So thank you to everyone for your patience and for your support.

00:01:57 – 00:01:59:	We'll let you know after they've all gone out.

00:01:59 – 00:02:06:	So for some reason, after we give the all shipped signal, if you still haven't gotten one, you can reach out to us and we can get it sorted out.

00:02:06 – 00:02:08:	But he's very good at record keeping.

00:02:08 – 00:02:10:	So that's probably unlikely.

00:02:10 – 00:02:13:	But we just want to acknowledge that when everything's out, you can let us know.

00:02:13 – 00:02:16:	And we of course ordered plenty.

00:02:16 – 00:02:18:	We'll have probably a couple of years supply.

00:02:18 – 00:02:25:	So if you're waiting for the backlog to get cleared, you're welcome to place an order and we'd be happy to ship one out to you.

00:02:25 – 00:02:27:	And thank you again to everyone for your support.

00:02:27 – 00:02:29:	It's cool seeing them online.

00:02:29 – 00:02:31:	That's exciting that people are excited about it.

00:02:31 – 00:02:32:	I mean, they're really cool.

00:02:32 – 00:02:33:	It's a fun thing to have.

00:02:35 – 00:02:37:	Today's we're talking about peace.

00:02:37 – 00:02:44:	I want to frame it first in terms of the contrast, you know, violence and peace.

00:02:44 – 00:02:59:	You know, I think when we we think about these things, we often think in terms of like yin and yang, we have equal opposing forces, or, you know, there's the meme where the guy's standing in front of the big board with two red buttons and which one does he push.

00:03:01 – 00:03:19:	The framing that I want to present for this topic, as with many of the others we've talked about in the past that are particularly controversial, is that violence and peace are related, they're correlated and they're opposites in some senses, but they're not equal and opposing forces.

00:03:20 – 00:03:30:	So to give you just a couple other imperfect examples to kind of give you a sense of what we're going to be talking about today, heat and cold are obviously contrasting.

00:03:31 – 00:03:32:	One is the opposite of the other.

00:03:33 – 00:03:38:	And yet at the same time, the definition of heat and the definition of cold are circular.

00:03:38 – 00:03:44:	So cold is the absence of heat, but you wouldn't really say that heat is the absence of cold.

00:03:44 – 00:03:47:	Heat itself is the motion of particles.

00:03:48 – 00:03:51:	And so whenever particles are moving, that's what we call heat.

00:03:52 – 00:03:53:	And of course, all matter moves.

00:03:53 – 00:03:55:	There's no such thing as a motionless particle.

00:03:55 – 00:03:57:	It's theoretically possible.

00:03:57 – 00:03:59:	That's what's called absolute zero.

00:03:59 – 00:04:02:	It's the theoretical coldest possible thing.

00:04:02 – 00:04:07:	And yet our understanding of physics completely breaks down because the idea of matter not moving at all.

00:04:08 – 00:04:12:	We can conceive of it as a hypothetical, but it doesn't exist in nature.

00:04:12 – 00:04:17:	And so it's technically possible, but at the same time, it's an impossibility.

00:04:17 – 00:04:22:	Everything has some heat, no matter how cold it is, because all matter is in motion.

00:04:23 – 00:04:36:	And at the other end of the extreme scale of heat, you have things like the inside of stars or other stellar objects where there's so much heat, there's so much energy, the boundaries between molecules are just completely dissolved.

00:04:37 – 00:04:46:	You just have a soup where everything is tightly packed due to gravity, and everything is moving so quickly that it, you know, again, it's almost inconceivable.

00:04:47 – 00:04:55:	In fact, the time that takes a photon to get from the interior of a star to the exterior can be years and years because it bounces around.

00:04:55 – 00:04:56:	It's a random walk.

00:04:57 – 00:05:03:	Really weird things happen when things get super hot and yet cold is just nothingness.

00:05:04 – 00:05:06:	Something similarly true with light.

00:05:07 – 00:05:11:	You can have a flashlight that projects light, you know, somewhere that you want to be.

00:05:11 – 00:05:12:	And it's a very valuable thing.

00:05:12 – 00:05:13:	It can keep you safe.

00:05:13 – 00:05:14:	It keeps you from feeling alarmed in the dark.

00:05:15 – 00:05:16:	You don't step over things.

00:05:16 – 00:05:17:	You don't hurt yourself.

00:05:18 – 00:05:20:	Yet there's no such thing as a dark ray.

00:05:20 – 00:05:22:	You can't shine darkness onto something.

00:05:22 – 00:05:27:	You cannot project dark because dark is simply the absence of light.

00:05:27 – 00:05:31:	The darker something is, the more absent light is.

00:05:31 – 00:05:39:	And complete blackness is simply no light whatsoever, zero photons, which is something that can be achieved in the physical world.

00:05:40 – 00:05:45:	So although light and dark are contrasting, one is definitionally the absence of the other.

00:05:45 – 00:05:46:	And that's what's really going on.

00:05:46 – 00:05:48:	It's not the equal and opposing forces.

00:05:49 – 00:05:53:	It's just that when you have one, the other is necessarily absent.

00:05:54 – 00:05:55:	Same is true of color.

00:05:55 – 00:05:59:	White is the reflection of every single color simultaneously.

00:05:59 – 00:06:02:	Black is, in a sense, not even a color.

00:06:02 – 00:06:04:	Black is the absence of any reflected light.

00:06:05 – 00:06:09:	If you have something that's completely black, there's nothing there.

00:06:09 – 00:06:10:	There's nothing being reflected.

00:06:11 – 00:06:15:	And when you have all the colors being reflected simultaneously, you have white light.

00:06:15 – 00:06:21:	And so black and white are, I think, the most common examples of complete polar opposites.

00:06:21 – 00:06:25:	And even then, one is fundamentally the absence of the other.

00:06:26 – 00:06:31:	And so as we're thinking about violence and about peace, they're not equal in opposing forces.

00:06:31 – 00:06:43:	Peace, I think, a reasonable definition would be the complete absence of violence or strife or, you know, really kind of anything actively negative, anything that's doing some harm to the environment around you.

00:06:44 – 00:06:47:	You know, the primordial example of peace would be the Garden of Eden itself.

00:06:48 – 00:06:52:	And to this day, gardens are actually some of the most peaceful places you can be.

00:06:53 – 00:06:56:	It's very common for people who get into gardening, in part because how peaceful it is.

00:06:57 – 00:07:01:	And so a garden and peace, they're very closely connected in our minds.

00:07:02 – 00:07:10:	And yet, unlike the Garden of Eden, where there was no violence, there was no enmity of any kind, it also had no weeds.

00:07:10 – 00:07:13:	And then after the fall, the weeds became part of the curse.

00:07:14 – 00:07:23:	And so even in the modern garden today, if you're a gardener, gardening necessarily one of the actions you have to engage in is weeding.

00:07:23 – 00:07:29:	You're basically doing a very small amount of violence in your garden to keep it idyllic, to keep it peaceful.

00:07:29 – 00:07:35:	That means uprooting weeds, killing these living plants so that the plants that are desirable are present.

00:07:37 – 00:07:40:	So, peace is when there is no violence.

00:07:41 – 00:07:48:	And so, back to the last week's episode and the general theme of these two episodes is that obviously peace is desirable.

00:07:48 – 00:07:49:	We all want peace.

00:07:50 – 00:07:51:	We want peaceful lives.

00:07:51 – 00:07:53:	We want peaceful communities, peaceful homes.

00:07:53 – 00:07:56:	It is the desirable ground state for everything.

00:07:56 – 00:07:59:	The absence of violence is one of the most desirable things possible.

00:08:00 – 00:08:08:	And yet at the same time, as we made the case last week, it may arise that the only way for you to have peace is for violence to take place.

00:08:09 – 00:08:12:	Whether or not you're a personal participant, someone may have to do violence.

00:08:13 – 00:08:17:	In fact, that's the reason that we have a country today in the United States and any country in the world.

00:08:18 – 00:08:22:	There was violence that established the borders, that established whatever government you have, good or bad.

00:08:23 – 00:08:27:	It was established through some process of violence, either active or the threat.

00:08:28 – 00:08:31:	Sometimes it's just enough for a strong man to show up and say, I'm in charge now.

00:08:32 – 00:08:35:	Historically, sometimes that's how things play out.

00:08:36 – 00:08:42:	And then you have peace, either through violence, the threat of violence, or the act of the violence itself.

00:08:43 – 00:08:44:	And then you have peace.

00:08:44 – 00:08:57:	And so as we're talking about peace today, we're gonna be talking about in scriptural terms, and we're gonna talk about the home, about your community, about geopolitical, national political level, and then about the church.

00:08:58 – 00:09:01:	Because in each of those contexts, we have different forms of peace.

00:09:02 – 00:09:11:	And then at the end, we're gonna talk a little bit, just kind of briefly about the peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, which of course is the most desirable of all pieces.

00:09:12 – 00:09:18:	And it's one that as Christians, God imparts to us, he imparts through faith and through knowledge of scripture.

00:09:20 – 00:09:27:	And when we have that blessing of God's peace, it helps us to deal with all the other moments in life when things aren't peaceful.

00:09:27 – 00:09:39:	As part of the blessing that God speaks up in scripture, when you have God's peace, it's not that it doesn't matter how bad things are, it's that you can deal with it, because you know that at some level, this is not your home.

00:09:40 – 00:09:54:	And that's one of those phrases that gets used to, it's an emulsifier for civilization in the mouths of wicked false Christians, because they will look at the violence and the evil that's happening in the world and say, don't worry about it, not our problem, our home is in heaven.

00:09:54 – 00:09:55:	Not at all what we're saying.

00:09:56 – 00:10:01:	We're saying that in the worst event where we lose in some temporal fashion, that's okay.

00:10:02 – 00:10:07:	We can be at peace with losing here because our reward is in heaven, and that's up to God.

00:10:08 – 00:10:12:	And so there's a very clear distinction of things that are up to God and things that are up to us.

00:10:13 – 00:10:16:	But one of the things that's up to us is to make peace.

00:10:17 – 00:10:26:	And so as we talk today about the subject of peace and the absence of violence, just want to acknowledge at the outset, it's not that I want peace and therefore I will never be violent.

00:10:27 – 00:10:33:	It's that I want peace and therefore I acknowledge that sometimes violence is necessary to achieve peace, which is what God says.

00:10:34 – 00:10:36:	It's the only rational explanation.

00:10:36 – 00:10:39:	You don't need the Bible to explain that to you.

00:10:39 – 00:10:48:	If someone is losing his mind being violent, running around your neighborhood with a sword or a gun or something, it's very clear that there's only one thing that's going to stop that violence.

00:10:49 – 00:11:02:	The desire for peace, the prayer for peace that we should all have every day is always in the acknowledgement that sometimes the way we get to peace is by momentarily not having peace.

00:11:03 – 00:11:04:	And that's not contradictory.

00:11:04 – 00:11:06:	That's a crucial thing for me drawing this distinction here.

00:11:06 – 00:11:09:	It's not that I can either have violence or I can have peace.

00:11:10 – 00:11:11:	I desire peace.

00:11:11 – 00:11:12:	We should all desire peace.

00:11:13 – 00:11:18:	And we must acknowledge that there are certain times and places when the only way to get that is through violence.

00:11:19 – 00:11:23:	So as we go through all this today, just keep in mind that it's not one or the other.

00:11:24 – 00:11:25:	That's a false dichotomy.

00:11:25 – 00:11:27:	The desire for peace is absolute.

00:11:27 – 00:11:30:	It's abnormal to desire violence.

00:11:30 – 00:11:32:	We should desire peace and we should pursue peace.

00:11:33 – 00:11:38:	And to the best of our ability, and so far as it depends on us, we should try to achieve peace.

00:11:39 – 00:11:43:	And then the alternative when the other side gets a vote is that there may not be peace for a time.

00:11:44 – 00:11:46:	And that's not the first choice.

00:11:47 – 00:11:55:	But if that's what we have to deal with, then in order to get the peace that God desires for us, sometimes there's an intermediary step that is itself not peaceful.

00:11:56 – 00:11:59:	And these things are simply not contradictory.

00:11:59 – 00:12:07:	They're entirely coherent, because the ground state, the peaceful garden state of peace sometimes requires defense that is less peaceful.

00:12:08 – 00:12:21:	So as Woe highlighted, peace is essentially a negative in the neutral sense of that term word, which is to say it denotes a state of the absence of certain things.

00:12:22 – 00:12:31:	Woe mentioned violence, of course, but I want to give you two terms to think of when thinking of what is absent when you have peace, a state of peace.

00:12:32 – 00:12:36:	And that would be that peace is the absence of suffering and strife.

00:12:37 – 00:12:38:	And of course, suffering, we all know what that is.

00:12:39 – 00:12:41:	That's just pain or distress or hardship.

00:12:42 – 00:12:50:	But strife is usually angry or bitter disagreement over something or some things fundamental.

00:12:51 – 00:12:54:	And so peace is the absence of those things.

00:12:56 – 00:13:00:	Naturally, it means that we are not always going to have peace in this life.

00:13:00 – 00:13:07:	In fact, we are never going to have perfect peace in this life with regard to temporal or earthly things.

00:13:08 – 00:13:12:	There's a difference there with eschatological peace versus earthly peace.

00:13:12 – 00:13:13:	I'll get into that in a minute here.

00:13:14 – 00:13:20:	But with regard to this life, we will always have suffering and to some degree strife.

00:13:20 – 00:13:37:	Now, strife can vary depending on whether we're dealing with, as we'll mention, the home, society, politics, the church, and the times in which we live, because of course there's going to be more or less suffering and more or less strife.

00:13:38 – 00:13:42:	There will always be some degree of suffering.

00:13:43 – 00:13:50:	The reason for that of course is that we live in a fallen world, and so that will never be entirely absent from human life.

00:13:51 – 00:13:57:	And so we will always have some disruption with regard to peace.

00:13:57 – 00:13:59:	It doesn't mean you can't have peace.

00:13:59 – 00:14:03:	It just means the peace in this life will not be perfect.

00:14:04 – 00:14:14:	And so to distinguish these different kinds of peace, as it were, there is earthly peace and there is eschatological peace.

00:14:15 – 00:14:17:	Earthly peace is relative.

00:14:17 – 00:14:20:	Eschatological peace is absolute.

00:14:20 – 00:14:34:	And so to give an example, to make that more concrete, earthly peace would be what you are experiencing when you're out in your garden, assuming you don't have too many weeds and insects and other things causing you strife and suffering.

00:14:35 – 00:14:36:	That's earthly peace.

00:14:37 – 00:14:46:	Eschatological peace is what you are going to have with regard to the certainty of your salvation because of God's promises.

00:14:47 – 00:14:48:	That's an absolute peace.

00:14:48 – 00:14:56:	That is a different sort of peace from the relative peace that we have here in this life with regard to earthly things.

00:14:57 – 00:15:02:	And so there's also in this life temporal and eternal peace.

00:15:02 – 00:15:04:	Again, temporal peace is relative.

00:15:05 – 00:15:07:	Eternal peace is absolute.

00:15:09 – 00:15:29:	It's important to understand the difference between and among these kinds of peace because this is where we start to see some sophistry and other things arise with regard to those as we'll mention to tell us simply to not care about the things of this life.

00:15:29 – 00:15:31:	Well, we have the eschatological peace.

00:15:31 – 00:15:36:	We have the promises of God with regard to these things in the next life.

00:15:36 – 00:15:37:	So it doesn't matter what happens in this life.

00:15:38 – 00:15:49:	And that's just absolutely not true because scripture speaks in many places throughout scripture to the things of this life, to life on this earth.

00:15:49 – 00:15:59:	Yes, a fallen world that does have suffering and does have strife, but nonetheless we can work toward peace and we should do so.

00:16:01 – 00:16:03:	Scripture says, blessed are the peacemakers.

00:16:04 – 00:16:08:	That doesn't just mean with regard to the things of the next life.

00:16:08 – 00:16:10:	It means with regard to the things of this life.

00:16:11 – 00:16:13:	And so Christians should be peacemakers.

00:16:13 – 00:16:16:	We should seek peace, as Will mentioned already.

00:16:17 – 00:16:22:	That does mean that sometimes violence will be necessary as we went over in last week's episode.

00:16:24 – 00:16:26:	But it's not violence for the sake of violence.

00:16:26 – 00:16:31:	It is violence for the sake of maintaining or establishing peace.

00:16:32 – 00:16:33:	And that is not a contradiction.

00:16:34 – 00:16:36:	Certainly not a contradiction in terms.

00:16:38 – 00:16:44:	Because we all know that in order to maintain order, it has to be enforced.

00:16:45 – 00:16:47:	For instance, borders have to be protected.

00:16:47 – 00:16:59:	And that is the case, whether we are speaking of the border that is the front door to your home, or the border that is the border of your nation, of your country, of whatever territory your country controls.

00:17:01 – 00:17:06:	Those things must be maintained with at least the threat of violence.

00:17:07 – 00:17:20:	And in fact, if you do not have that threat of violence to back up that border, to defend that border, then what you're actually doing is harming the odds of maintaining peace.

00:17:21 – 00:17:31:	Because if the threat is there, you are less likely to encounter those who would violate that peace, because they are going to recognize there is a cost to doing that.

00:17:32 – 00:17:36:	And so pacifism actually invites greater harm.

00:17:36 – 00:17:40:	It invites greater disturbances of earthly peace.

00:17:41 – 00:17:50:	Contrary to what some of those who advocate for pacifism and related things would claim, they will try to claim that they are simply against violence.

00:17:50 – 00:17:52:	They are against strife and suffering.

00:17:52 – 00:17:54:	They are against all these negative things.

00:17:54 – 00:17:55:	They are for peace.

00:17:55 – 00:17:56:	They are not for peace.

00:17:57 – 00:17:57:	They are liars.

00:17:57 – 00:17:58:	They are hypocrites.

00:17:59 – 00:18:03:	Because in order to have peace, it must be maintained in this life.

00:18:03 – 00:18:07:	Again, this is the difference between this life and the next.

00:18:07 – 00:18:10:	In the next life, we don't have to work to maintain peace.

00:18:11 – 00:18:15:	God will have established perfect permanent peace.

00:18:16 – 00:18:20:	There's no work for us in the next life with regard to peace.

00:18:20 – 00:18:24:	There's still work in the next life, because of course man was made for work.

00:18:24 – 00:18:25:	It's not labor.

00:18:25 – 00:18:29:	That's the distinction there, but that's a discussion for another time.

00:18:30 – 00:18:33:	The peace in this life must be maintained.

00:18:33 – 00:18:35:	It is something toward which we work.

00:18:36 – 00:18:40:	It is something for which we labor, because it is something worth having.

00:18:41 – 00:18:42:	Because again, what is peace?

00:18:43 – 00:18:46:	It is the absence of these various negative things.

00:18:47 – 00:18:53:	And so when you work to eliminate suffering, you are working to establish peace.

00:18:53 – 00:19:00:	When you work to eliminate strife, you are working to establish peace, or to maintain peace as the case may be.

00:19:03 – 00:19:10:	This is something that a Christian should most certainly do, because again, Christians are supposed to be peacemakers.

00:19:11 – 00:19:13:	That does not mean pacifists.

00:19:13 – 00:19:16:	That does not mean you are supposed to be a doormat or a rug.

00:19:17 – 00:19:22:	It means that you are supposed to have peace as one of your goals for your work in this life.

00:19:23 – 00:19:29:	And again, you establish that by removing these things that are against peace.

00:19:30 – 00:19:40:	That doesn't mean that you simply yield, and we will get into that more later in this episode with regard particularly to the state and the church, but to some degree society as well.

00:19:41 – 00:19:58:	How you approach different issues of suffering or strife and trying to eliminate them in order to live in a peaceful world, in a peaceful environment, is going to vary depending on where and what.

00:19:59 – 00:20:11:	Which is to say that you are going to approach matters of peace with regard to the home differently from how you would approach matters of peace with regard to the church or the state.

00:20:12 – 00:20:15:	Politics is a different beast from the home.

00:20:16 – 00:20:20:	You do not run your home as you would run a political party.

00:20:20 – 00:20:25:	You do not engage with those in your home as you would engage politically.

00:20:26 – 00:20:30:	That would be a horrible thing to do, and you will most certainly not have peace in your home if you pursue that.

00:20:32 – 00:20:39:	And so again, this is a matter of wisdom, as we keep having to say in episode after episode, but that is unavoidable.

00:20:41 – 00:20:43:	These matters are going to call for wisdom.

00:20:43 – 00:20:51:	You have to know how to pursue peace, what is appropriate, given the time and the place.

00:20:52 – 00:20:53:	Is it your home?

00:20:53 – 00:20:54:	Is it society?

00:20:54 – 00:20:55:	Is it a political issue?

00:20:56 – 00:20:57:	Is it an issue in the church?

00:20:57 – 00:20:58:	Is it a matter of God's truth?

00:20:59 – 00:21:05:	Is it a minor matter that isn't a matter of a doctrine or some core part of the faith?

00:21:06 – 00:21:14:	You're going to have a different way of approaching things if you're fighting over the color of the pyramids versus justification.

00:21:16 – 00:21:20:	You don't fight to the death over green versus purple.

00:21:21 – 00:21:34:	You may very well have to fight to the death over justification, and that has happened in the history of the church, because God's truth is worth defending in a much different way from something that is adiaphorum.

00:21:35 – 00:21:40:	It ultimately doesn't matter what color the candles are, or the pyramids, or the carpet, or anything like that.

00:21:42 – 00:21:44:	That's a matter of good order in the church.

00:21:44 – 00:21:48:	It's important, but it is not something that rises to the same level.

00:21:48 – 00:22:01:	And so disturbing the peace, as it were, not in the criminal sense or in the civil sense, but in the sense that you may very well have as a duty a breach of the peace.

00:22:02 – 00:22:05:	You will be accused of that, of course, if you bring these things up.

00:22:06 – 00:22:22:	But if it is a matter of God's truth, or if it's in the political realm, and you're a man and have the duty to enact something or to say something, you may have to stand up and do something that will end a false peace.

00:22:22 – 00:22:23:	And that's a key here.

00:22:25 – 00:22:39:	If you are simply ignoring issues, if you are neglecting to address them, if you are just shoving them under the corner, shoving them under the rug, in order to maintain a certain peace, that peace is false.

00:22:41 – 00:22:43:	Because a peace that is built on a lie is no peace at all.

00:22:45 – 00:22:48:	Because peace must be built on the truth.

00:22:49 – 00:22:51:	The strife is still there.

00:22:51 – 00:22:53:	You are just ignoring it.

00:22:53 – 00:22:59:	In fact, you are only making it worse, because eventually it will come to a head at some point in the future.

00:22:59 – 00:23:02:	This happened in the history of the Church, with the Reformation.

00:23:03 – 00:23:09:	The things that were permitted to fester did so for centuries before the Reformation began.

00:23:11 – 00:23:16:	If they had been addressed earlier in the Church, they would have been more easily resolved.

00:23:17 – 00:23:18:	It would not have been so acrimonious.

00:23:19 – 00:23:22:	It would probably have not caused a split as it did.

00:23:23 – 00:23:41:	And yet because a false peace was maintained, sometimes with murder, of course, in the history of the Church, unfortunately, but because that false peace was maintained, because no one wanted to stand up and be the man who broke the peace, who breached the peace, the man who unsettled the Church.

00:23:42 – 00:23:44:	Because that is what was pursued.

00:23:44 – 00:23:46:	That is the path that was taken.

00:23:47 – 00:23:56:	We wound up with actual wars spanning virtually the entire continent of Europe instead of what could have probably been resolved in a council.

00:23:57 – 00:24:00:	And so a false peace is no peace whatsoever.

00:24:00 – 00:24:07:	In fact, often what it is, is simply putting off the worst of the strife and the suffering to future generations.

00:24:09 – 00:24:18:	This is a quote that I believe I mentioned before in a fairly recent episode, but I want to reiterate it here, because it's so important for discussing the subject of peace within the Church.

00:24:18 – 00:24:21:	And we don't have a lot to say about that today.

00:24:21 – 00:24:28:	We've talked about it in other episodes, but it is crucial, as Corrie was laying out, to distinguish between false peace and true peace.

00:24:29 – 00:24:45:	In the hypothetical perfect Church denomination, where there was literally zero false doctrine, where no one ever committed any public sins, where they never committed any private sins against each other within the Church, within their homes.

00:24:45 – 00:24:48:	Well, I mean, I've already described Heaven, haven't I?

00:24:48 – 00:25:00:	But in that perfect case, there would be peace within the Church, because everyone would be on God's page, not only on the same page, but on the page of the author of peace, who is God Almighty.

00:25:00 – 00:25:04:	And yet, in this life, that is an impossibility.

00:25:04 – 00:25:11:	And so God makes it very plain, the heresies must arise among you, so that the true may be known among everyone.

00:25:12 – 00:25:20:	When there are divisions, you can look at the two sides and say, this person is according with scripture, and this person is set against God.

00:25:20 – 00:25:22:	And that will be clear, and it's always clear.

00:25:23 – 00:25:28:	Sometimes it takes work, sometimes it takes a lot of work to figure out who has made a mess.

00:25:28 – 00:25:53:	And when God blesses certain times and places with men who can clearly speak, men who are actual theologians, who can address the complex and make them simple, and narrowly define, here's what's going on and here's why this is an error, then the division itself, the heresy, will become something that forms greater understanding of the truth, which was already always present in scripture.

00:25:53 – 00:25:57:	It's not that men who tackle these things are creating things that are new.

00:25:57 – 00:26:03:	As Protestants, we would never say that new doctrines were created during the Reformation.

00:26:03 – 00:26:08:	We would say the things that were scriptural truths had to be clarified due to centuries of error.

00:26:09 – 00:26:10:	That's always a possibility.

00:26:10 – 00:26:13:	It's something that we see in the New Testament itself.

00:26:13 – 00:26:14:	What is the New Testament?

00:26:14 – 00:26:28:	If not the direct repudiation of the accretion of errors caused by the Sadducees and the Pharisees and others, the wickedness of the Jews corrupting the Christian faith prior to Christ's birth had to be corrected by the Apostles.

00:26:28 – 00:26:32:	And they stood up and said, look, their arguments were from scripture.

00:26:32 – 00:26:34:	Their arguments were all from the Septuagint.

00:26:34 – 00:26:35:	They're saying, look, this is what God wrote.

00:26:36 – 00:26:37:	This is what God said.

00:26:37 – 00:26:40:	These men, these vipers are lying to you.

00:26:40 – 00:26:42:	They're saying things that are false.

00:26:42 – 00:26:43:	Here's what's true.

00:26:43 – 00:26:44:	And then they reasoned from scripture.

00:26:45 – 00:26:53:	And in some cases, they also gave prophetic inspired arguments and things that were new as God used them for.

00:26:53 – 00:27:02:	But in many cases, although what they said was inspired and it was infallible because God was speaking through them, it was also entirely simply an argument from scripture.

00:27:03 – 00:27:12:	Many of the apostles in their writings and their arguments, they weren't saying anything that if you had a perfect faithful understanding of the Old Testament, you wouldn't have arrived at the same conclusion.

00:27:12 – 00:27:17:	And so God blessed us with these men who laid bare and laid beyond any shadow of a doubt.

00:27:17 – 00:27:18:	Here's what God says.

00:27:19 – 00:27:23:	But they didn't have to have God speaking through them directly.

00:27:23 – 00:27:25:	It wasn't direct revelation.

00:27:25 – 00:27:29:	It was God ensuring that that which had previously been revealed was held faithfully.

00:27:30 – 00:27:37:	And so this quote from Luther that I used recently that I want to reiterate here, he said, Faith and love are two different things.

00:27:38 – 00:27:39:	Faith tolerates nothing.

00:27:39 – 00:27:41:	Love tolerates everything.

00:27:41 – 00:27:42:	Faith curses.

00:27:42 – 00:27:43:	Love blesses.

00:27:44 – 00:27:46:	Faith seeks revenge and punishment.

00:27:46 – 00:27:48:	Love seeks to spare and to forgive.

00:27:48 – 00:27:56:	Therefore, when faith and God's word are involved, there can be no more loving or being patient, but only anger, zeal and scolding.

00:27:56 – 00:28:01:	All prophets also acted in this way that in matters of faith, they showed no patience or mercy.

00:28:03 – 00:28:06:	When I used that quote before, it sounds kind of heartless.

00:28:06 – 00:28:13:	It sounds like Luther wants to come in just storming and raving and hating people and bringing an end to peace.

00:28:14 – 00:28:23:	But when you understand that the context is the defense of the faith, the disturbance of the peace, as Corey was laying out, is not that someone has said, hey, there's a liar in our midst.

00:28:24 – 00:28:27:	The disturbance of the peace is when the false doctrine is introduced.

00:28:28 – 00:28:35:	So the church is a narrow specific case where obviously within the church, violence should not be used.

00:28:35 – 00:28:40:	Actual physical violence doesn't have a place in theological discussions.

00:28:40 – 00:28:41:	I don't think anyone disagrees with that.

00:28:41 – 00:28:55:	And what Corey was saying before was basically amounted to between nation states, where there were diametrically opposed true and false representations of Christianity, there were cases where princes went to war.

00:28:56 – 00:29:04:	But that was not within the church, that was warring church factions, which is sort of the worst case of the past, is talking about divisions among you.

00:29:05 – 00:29:08:	And again, it's not desirable that those things should happen.

00:29:08 – 00:29:13:	We shouldn't say that those are the license for us to have more Protestant versus Catholic wars.

00:29:13 – 00:29:15:	How foolish, that's destructive.

00:29:16 – 00:29:18:	It's evil to think, hey, that's a great idea.

00:29:20 – 00:29:26:	But it's not necessarily good to say, well, everything that they did must have necessarily been bad because violence is involved.

00:29:26 – 00:29:31:	And we don't get much into history because I find it tedious and I think it usually misinforms people.

00:29:31 – 00:29:43:	But it's important not to just go back and blank condemn the entire centuries of Christians, of men that we sort of say, well, yeah, they're in heaven, but look at all these sins that they didn't repent of.

00:29:43 – 00:29:50:	We really get ourselves into a pickle when we start condemning men of sins that they didn't see as sins when we weren't on the ground.

00:29:50 – 00:29:51:	We didn't know what they knew.

00:29:51 – 00:29:58:	And when we're importing modern sensibilities, we are every bit at risk of being in error as they were.

00:30:00 – 00:30:10:	Within the church, it's crucial that the defense of the faith be loving and to pursue peace, but the pursuit of peace sometimes involves disturbing it.

00:30:10 – 00:30:26:	As I was looking at some of the words involved here, as I've said a couple of times, I've started using Claude AI to kind of grope through some of the historical documents, because it's basically an incredibly powerful search engine that will spit out a whole bunch of correlations.

00:30:26 – 00:30:27:	It would take me a long time to dig up.

00:30:28 – 00:30:37:	And so I asked it a couple of questions about peace, and when it started talking about the Old Testament, it wanted to tell me about Shalom, which is the Hebrew for peace.

00:30:37 – 00:30:40:	You hear Shalom, Shalom, Shalom everywhere.

00:30:40 – 00:30:50:	And the AI bot, which was just spitting out, which what thousands of men have written, basically it was like Shalom is so rich and bountiful, and it's got such a broad lexical scope.

00:30:50 – 00:31:00:	It's a much more useful word than some of these other Greek words, which is really kind of begging the question that Hebrew is not just an incredibly primitive language.

00:31:00 – 00:31:03:	They had one word for like 38 different concepts.

00:31:03 – 00:31:10:	And so I had to tell it to shut up about Hebrew and tell me what the original Septuagint said.

00:31:10 – 00:31:16:	And what I found was the word that I actually knew, but I didn't realize I knew, I'll probably butcher the pronunciation.

00:31:17 – 00:31:17:	I apologize.

00:31:17 – 00:31:18:	I'm not a Greek guy.

00:31:19 – 00:31:19:	Never gonna be.

00:31:19 – 00:31:23:	So if you're fluent in Greek, please don't let this cause your ears to bleed.

00:31:24 – 00:31:29:	Irenae, the root word for ironic, which I think we most of us probably know that word.

00:31:29 – 00:31:35:	There are certain scholars or theologians who are described as ironic, which is in contrast to polemic.

00:31:36 – 00:31:45:	And so, for example, in the Lutheran sphere, Melanchthon is often described as the more ironic of the early church fathers in the Lutheran tradition.

00:31:46 – 00:31:49:	And then Luther is seen as more polemical.

00:31:49 – 00:31:51:	He was more combative.

00:31:51 – 00:31:57:	He was the one who would swing the war maw and not try to be as gentle and peaceful as Melanchthon.

00:31:58 – 00:32:13:	And this got Melanchthon to a lot of trouble after Luther died because the ironic nature of Melanchthon caused him to continue to try to make peace with Calvinists and even Rome to the point that he compromised Lutheran positions on doctrine to try to have peace.

00:32:13 – 00:32:25:	He basically took the things that Lutherans had settled on and continued to permute them, to dilute them, so that others could agree with the words, even though the actual statements themselves became false.

00:32:25 – 00:32:27:	Because it was a false peace.

00:32:27 – 00:32:34:	It was creating a peace where suddenly Calvinists and Lutherans and Pope all agreed on justification or various aspects.

00:32:35 – 00:32:35:	It was nonsense.

00:32:35 – 00:32:37:	There was no possible agreement.

00:32:37 – 00:32:38:	There were word games were played.

00:32:40 – 00:32:56:	There's always a danger when someone is only capable of being ironic, of being peaceful, of being a peacemaker by concession, by being conciliatory, that you end up compromising on the faith, which is what many argued Melanchthon did.

00:32:57 – 00:32:57:	I agree with that.

00:32:57 – 00:32:59:	There are some who claim that he was actually compromising.

00:33:00 – 00:33:01:	That's an inner Lutheran fight.

00:33:01 – 00:33:02:	You guys don't care about that.

00:33:03 – 00:33:10:	I think that it's important to distinguish between those approaches because both are valuable approaches.

00:33:10 – 00:33:25:	I don't know that Corey and I are certainly not ironic by nature, and yet at the same time, I will absolutely try to be ironic with someone when I'm meeting them, finding out where there's mutual agreement, figuring out, okay, where are the differences between us?

00:33:25 – 00:33:35:	I'm not going to just go after somebody, because if I actually want to be persuasive, as we talked about some in the persuasion episode, in order to persuade someone, you can't just attack them.

00:33:35 – 00:33:39:	That's not going to be persuasive to the object of your wrath.

00:33:39 – 00:33:43:	If you're bringing wrath to the discussion, you're probably not going to win hearts and minds.

00:33:44 – 00:33:53:	Now, maybe observers will respond to that, and sometimes when you become polemical against someone who is spreading false doctrine, the purpose is not even the object of that wrath.

00:33:53 – 00:34:03:	They serve as a warning to others by saying, this man, this liar, just as Jesus said and Paul said and others in the New Testament said, these men are vipers.

00:34:03 – 00:34:04:	Look what they're saying.

00:34:04 – 00:34:05:	They're lying.

00:34:05 – 00:34:20:	You know, as Corey and I were discussing this before we began recording, I realized that when Jesus called the Pharisees and Sadducees are brutal liars and called them sons of Satan and murderers, he wasn't simply calling them names.

00:34:20 – 00:34:22:	He wasn't simply being polemical.

00:34:22 – 00:34:33:	He was also undermining them in front of their congregations because these Pharisees and Sadducees, these teachers of the law, the rabbis who are following Jesus around along with everyone else, they were envious.

00:34:33 – 00:34:35:	They were envious of the authority with which he taught.

00:34:36 – 00:34:43:	And they despised the fact that the crowds were listening to this man instead of to their lies.

00:34:43 – 00:34:46:	And so Jesus undermined their authority.

00:34:46 – 00:34:58:	Their authority which, for the sake of argument, we could say had been granted to them by God as rabbis of their congregations, they were defying the authority God had given them by lying to their people.

00:34:59 – 00:35:03:	And so when Jesus attacked them facially, he wasn't just calling them out.

00:35:04 – 00:35:08:	He was destroying them in front of their own congregations saying, look at this wicked viper.

00:35:08 – 00:35:09:	These men are liars.

00:35:09 – 00:35:11:	They're going to try to destroy your soul.

00:35:11 – 00:35:19:	That was exactly the function that it had, which is why Christianity we perceive as having emerged as a new religion in that moment.

00:35:19 – 00:35:20:	That wasn't true.

00:35:20 – 00:35:22:	Christianity always existed.

00:35:22 – 00:35:28:	The problem was the Jews, the rabbis, had corrupted it and turned it into a false religion.

00:35:28 – 00:35:41:	And so the people who were hearing the scripture, they're hearing it preach daily, weekly, they were hearing the rabbis teach some things that were true, some things that were subtly twisted, and some things were blatantly false.

00:35:41 – 00:35:48:	When Jesus came along and clearly taught from scripture, the scripture that they already believed was the basis for them saying, yes, this is what I believe.

00:35:48 – 00:35:49:	I'm a Christian.

00:35:50 – 00:35:51:	They were already Christians.

00:35:51 – 00:35:53:	They already had faith even before Jesus arrived.

00:35:54 – 00:35:55:	That was how they received that truth.

00:35:56 – 00:35:59:	And so Jesus was not ironic.

00:35:59 – 00:36:03:	I mean, there are times when he certainly was, but Jesus is very often polemical.

00:36:03 – 00:36:05:	He went hard at people.

00:36:06 – 00:36:10:	And to point this out, he's not licensed for being a jerk on the internet.

00:36:11 – 00:36:16:	I think the approach that Corey and I typically take, certainly on Stone Choir, is didactic.

00:36:16 – 00:36:17:	It's kind of splitting the difference.

00:36:18 – 00:36:21:	We're not being soft, but we're not being hyper aggressive.

00:36:22 – 00:36:23:	We generally try not to be.

00:36:23 – 00:36:24:	It's didactics.

00:36:24 – 00:36:25:	It's teaching.

00:36:25 – 00:36:28:	It's like, look, this is a true version of something.

00:36:28 – 00:36:29:	This is a false version.

00:36:29 – 00:36:31:	Here's why the false version doesn't work.

00:36:31 – 00:36:31:	It doesn't hold up.

00:36:32 – 00:36:35:	Here's why the true version does work, and here's why it's important.

00:36:35 – 00:36:41:	And so to draw those clear distinctions, you can do that polemically, but you can also do it didactically.

00:36:41 – 00:36:43:	You can just be like, look, here it is.

00:36:43 – 00:36:45:	And personally, that's the approach I prefer.

00:36:45 – 00:36:46:	I don't want to fight and scream.

00:36:46 – 00:36:54:	I can do it if I have to, but at some point, you're losing ground that maybe you can make up if you take a slightly less aggressive approach.

00:36:56 – 00:37:04:	So in the context of peacemaking in the church, it's just important to acknowledge that there's not a blanket prohibition against any of these things.

00:37:04 – 00:37:06:	Being ironic is desirable.

00:37:06 – 00:37:09:	You know, one of the early church fathers, his name was Irenaeus.

00:37:09 – 00:37:10:	That's the same root word.

00:37:10 – 00:37:13:	His name was basically the peaceful one.

00:37:14 – 00:37:15:	That's certainly a desirable thing.

00:37:15 – 00:37:20:	Whereas joking, if one of us had been named Irenaeus, it would have been ironic.

00:37:20 – 00:37:27:	We would not have lived up to that because we are not men who seek peace, certainly at the expense of truth.

00:37:28 – 00:37:34:	I will sacrifice for truth even if it makes anyone angry because there are times and places when someone's got to do that.

00:37:34 – 00:37:45:	And when enough men start doing that, suddenly you can have peace because when you root out the false teachings, you get back to an idyllic garden-like state, where okay, we're on the same page.

00:37:46 – 00:37:56:	And that's one of the blessings of having things like church denominations, assuming that one of them would get their doctrine right, is that within the four walls of that denomination, you don't have these fights.

00:37:57 – 00:38:06:	And at the same time, it's important to acknowledge that as human beings, as fallen sinful creatures, we're always kind of looking for a fight.

00:38:06 – 00:38:08:	We're always looking for that next thing.

00:38:08 – 00:38:14:	And there are some denominations, I think, that are certainly more vulnerable to this than others, just by their nature.

00:38:15 – 00:38:19:	There's the notion in some of the reforms of Semper Reformanda, always reforming.

00:38:20 – 00:38:27:	And in general, I think that's a really bad idea, because it basically kind of invites corrosion to the party.

00:38:28 – 00:38:35:	It's saying we're never going to stop fighting amongst ourselves, which is crucially different than we're never going to stop fighting for the faith.

00:38:35 – 00:38:36:	We're called to fight for the faith.

00:38:37 – 00:38:38:	We're called to fight for God's things.

00:38:39 – 00:38:46:	But when God's things aren't under attack, we don't need to be an overactive immune system that goes looking for fights when there aren't none.

00:38:46 – 00:38:51:	You know, it's entirely possible for you to get Christian doctrine to the point that they're small things.

00:38:51 – 00:38:54:	You know, Corey gave the examples of things like the color of candles and carpeting.

00:38:55 – 00:38:56:	Don't ever fight over that stuff.

00:38:57 – 00:38:57:	Don't pick the fight.

00:38:58 – 00:39:02:	And if possible, be the peacemaker who's like, we're going to let this slide.

00:39:03 – 00:39:09:	But there's a distinction between things that are core to the faith and things that are ancillary.

00:39:10 – 00:39:12:	And those are not simply matters of wisdom.

00:39:12 – 00:39:15:	Those are matters of discernment, which are related, but different things.

00:39:16 – 00:39:22:	You must correctly discern those things that are vital to the faith and those things that you can do without.

00:39:23 – 00:39:25:	And plainly, there are things like carpeting and candles.

00:39:26 – 00:39:36:	To say that the form of a thing is necessarily salvific becomes idolatrous, which is when those things cease to be adiaphora, when someone says, you must do it like this.

00:39:37 – 00:39:38:	Well, then they pick the fight.

00:39:38 – 00:39:41:	And that very thing, the color of the candles, that didn't matter.

00:39:41 – 00:39:47:	If someone says you have to use pink versus purple or whatever, you have to do the opposite.

00:39:47 – 00:39:48:	You have to say no.

00:39:49 – 00:39:56:	As a matter of Christian freedom, I'm going to do the exact opposite what you're trying to bind my conscience with, because that is a false teaching.

00:39:57 – 00:40:06:	And so the piece that we will pursue within the church is not in distinction to violence, but it is in distinction to strife.

00:40:07 – 00:40:15:	There are times when there is strife within the church, and it's undesirable, but again, the measure must always be not who's pulling the fire alarm, who is calling BS.

00:40:16 – 00:40:19:	The measure must be who is being faithful to scripture.

00:40:19 – 00:40:27:	And when one man points to scripture and another man refuses to acknowledge it, that's generally a pretty good indication of what the two sides are.

00:40:27 – 00:40:29:	Sometimes that's how it plays out, sometimes it isn't.

00:40:30 – 00:40:40:	Sometimes both men are pointing to scripture, and then it gets harder for someone who is judging as a jurist, as a finder of fact, like, well, I need you to make a clear case for me from scripture.

00:40:41 – 00:40:51:	But in the end, certainly as Protestants, and this is something, sorry, papers who are listening, scripture is not only the tiebreaker, scripture is the source, is the root of all of this.

00:40:51 – 00:40:55:	And so wherever scripture is being adhered to, there should be peace.

00:40:55 – 00:41:00:	And where scripture comes under attack, there will not be peace as long as scripture is under attack.

00:41:00 – 00:41:04:	Again, not a question of violence, but it is a question of strife.

00:41:05 – 00:41:12:	Spiritual, auditory, polemical, barbs going back and forth in letters and on the internet or whatever.

00:41:13 – 00:41:22:	There is a time and a place where it's necessary to defend the faith out loud and where people's feelings are going to get hurt because they hitched their wagon to false teaching.

00:41:22 – 00:41:27:	So you can't let someone being upset act as an indication that something has gone wrong.

00:41:28 – 00:41:32:	You need to understand, is it coming from scripture or is it just coming from a misunderstanding?

00:41:32 – 00:41:35:	And if it's just a misunderstanding, then absolutely be ironic.

00:41:35 – 00:41:41:	Try to dial things back as quickly as possible so the accumulation of sins doesn't make a situation even worse.

00:41:42 – 00:41:44:	That's always part of what being a peacemaker is.

00:41:45 – 00:41:51:	That word peacemaker, as far as I can tell, is the first time in the Bible was the first time that that word was conjoined.

00:41:51 – 00:41:55:	And it's important not only to focus on the peace but on the maker.

00:41:56 – 00:41:59:	To make peace is an active thing.

00:41:59 – 00:42:00:	It's not being passive.

00:42:01 – 00:42:03:	It's not God commanding us to be whitewashed tombs.

00:42:03 – 00:42:09:	You know, a whitewashed tomb is very peaceful, but making peace is a fundamentally different thing.

00:42:10 – 00:42:11:	Sometimes when you make peace, it's loud.

00:42:13 – 00:42:26:	At least with regard to Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, their names were appropriate because of course, Martin comes from Mars, the god of war, and Philip has philos in it, friendship or loving.

00:42:27 – 00:42:33:	Although I guess there's some historical irony in that Philippic is also in there, but that's just historical irony.

00:42:34 – 00:42:47:	But to return to the different locations, as it were, the places where peace is relevant, of course, peace is relevant everywhere, but it's relevant in different ways, in different places.

00:42:49 – 00:42:59:	The four on which we really want to focus are, again, the home, society or the culture, politics or the state, and the church.

00:43:00 – 00:43:14:	And just to give sort of a very brief outline of the different way in which peace is pursued and when there should be peace in these different places.

00:43:15 – 00:43:20:	With regard to the home, the goal should be to always have peace.

00:43:21 – 00:43:24:	Now, of course, that isn't going to be possible in this life.

00:43:24 – 00:43:32:	There will always be some strife to some degree, some disagreements, but the goal should be to always have peace in the home.

00:43:32 – 00:43:39:	With regard to society or the culture, it should be a matter of generally or usually having peace.

00:43:41 – 00:43:54:	The reason it is important to highlight these is partly just because it's important to note when there should be peace, but secondarily to contrast them with the state and the church.

00:43:56 – 00:44:09:	As we've gone over before in other episodes and linked to particularly the Marquardt essay, with regard to politics or the state and the church, you should have peace when possible.

00:44:10 – 00:44:12:	It's not that there should always be peace.

00:44:12 – 00:44:14:	It's not that there should generally be peace.

00:44:15 – 00:44:19:	It's that you should have peace when it is possible to have peace.

00:44:19 – 00:44:28:	And that's because, of course, with regard to politics, politics is just one of those areas where there is always going to be strife.

00:44:28 – 00:44:30:	That is the nature of politics.

00:44:30 – 00:44:35:	And so you should not pursue peace at the expense of truth.

00:44:36 – 00:44:39:	You should not pursue peace at the expense of security.

00:44:39 – 00:44:46:	There are other considerations that are higher, that are greater considerations when it comes to the political sphere.

00:44:47 – 00:44:48:	The same is true in the church.

00:44:49 – 00:44:53:	There are slightly different considerations, but of course truth is overlapping.

00:44:54 – 00:45:02:	With regard to truth, you should not yield in order to preserve or to create peace, because again, that would be a false peace.

00:45:03 – 00:45:05:	And so it is peace when possible.

00:45:08 – 00:45:35:	With regard to the things of God, if someone is teaching falsely, and there seems to be perfect peace, there's a chord, no one is causing a disturbance, that is a false peace, that is not real peace, because that peace, supposed peace, that false peace should be disturbed, because it is not a real thing, because it is the truth that matters, it is the things of God that matter.

00:45:36 – 00:45:51:	And so those should be defended, even if you will be accused of breaching the peace, or being someone who disturbs others, or quarrel some, or whatever it happens to be, lovelessness is another accusation that gets thrown at those who bring up these issues.

00:45:54 – 00:46:10:	But fundamentally speaking, with regard to both the state and the church, peace should be pursued only when possible, which is to say when it does not come at the expense of higher or of greater considerations.

00:46:11 – 00:46:15:	And of course, the primary one with regard to the church is truth.

00:46:16 – 00:46:29:	The primary one with regard to the state is probably security, because that is one of the highest duties of the state, the maintenance of the territory entrusted to its care, security, defense, those things.

00:46:29 – 00:46:32:	That is a higher concern than peace.

00:46:33 – 00:46:54:	If, for instance, you have a neighboring country that is preparing for war, and you decide to pursue peace, you're just going to disband your military, you're not going to build fortifications on your border, you're going to pursue peace, and ignore all these other considerations, are you likely to end up with peace?

00:46:55 – 00:46:57:	The answer, of course, is no.

00:46:57 – 00:47:07:	The same thing is true in the church, if you abandon the truth, because again, you are just seeding chaos and suffering and misery for future generations.

00:47:07 – 00:47:12:	It will be far worse than if you had just dealt with the problem when it first arose.

00:47:14 – 00:47:19:	But to return to the home, the home is supposed to be a sanctuary.

00:47:20 – 00:47:24:	That is the nature of the home.

00:47:24 – 00:47:31:	It is supposed to be somewhere that you can be safe from the strife, some of the suffering, some of the problems of the world.

00:47:32 – 00:47:35:	You can get away from those when you are at home.

00:47:36 – 00:47:41:	When you go home, you can leave some of those things out in the world and not have to deal with them anymore.

00:47:42 – 00:47:48:	Incidentally, that does mean that you should try not to bring them home with you, leave them at the door.

00:47:48 – 00:47:54:	That is a recommendation that some perhaps need to hear, particularly with regard to politics and things like that.

00:47:55 – 00:47:59:	Don't cause strife in your home over those things if you can possibly avoid it.

00:48:01 – 00:48:04:	This is again one of those differences between men and women.

00:48:05 – 00:48:16:	And so for many of these things we are discussing, they are going to pertain primarily or even exclusively to men, because of course one of the major considerations of the state is war.

00:48:17 – 00:48:24:	And women should not be involved in war, not actively at least, not on the front lines, not as soldiers, not as decision makers.

00:48:24 – 00:48:26:	That is an enterprise for men.

00:48:27 – 00:48:32:	But with regard to the home, that is primarily an enterprise for the woman.

00:48:33 – 00:48:36:	And God has constituted men and women differently.

00:48:37 – 00:49:02:	Women are more inclined to seek consensus and to be peacemakers in this particular way than are men, because men are designed, are constituted, such that they can engage in the political sphere, which is acrimonious, which is just going to involve strife from the beginning of human history to the very end, when God establishes permanent peace on the earth, the new earth.

00:49:04 – 00:49:11:	Men are constituted for those sorts of conflicts, and so that is always going to be part of the nature of men.

00:49:12 – 00:49:14:	That is not part of the nature of woman.

00:49:15 – 00:49:21:	God made woman to be a helper, to be a keeper of the home, to be a peacemaker.

00:49:22 – 00:49:28:	And so women seek consensus, whereas men are more constituted to seek truth.

00:49:29 – 00:49:33:	Truth is what matters if you're having a fight in the church.

00:49:33 – 00:49:39:	Truth matters if you're having a fight in the realm of the political, in the state.

00:49:40 – 00:49:51:	Now, truth matters in the home as well, of course, if you're dealing with, say, the things of the church, because obviously the husband is supposed to teach the faith to his wife and his children.

00:49:51 – 00:49:52:	And so the truth matters there.

00:49:55 – 00:50:01:	But you can let more things slide that aren't related to the matters of the church, aren't related to the things of God.

00:50:02 – 00:50:07:	You can let things slide in the home in order to maintain peace.

00:50:07 – 00:50:15:	You can let things slide that you would not let slide elsewhere, that you could not let slide in the church, that you would not let slide in politics.

00:50:16 – 00:50:18:	You can cover over them.

00:50:19 – 00:50:21:	Love covers a multitude of offenses.

00:50:21 – 00:50:26:	You can cover over some of these things in the home in order to maintain peace.

00:50:26 – 00:50:28:	Because again, when should there be peace in the home?

00:50:29 – 00:50:29:	Always.

00:50:30 – 00:50:32:	That is what is preferable in the home.

00:50:32 – 00:50:33:	That is the goal for the home.

00:50:34 – 00:50:36:	It's not really the goal for the state or the church.

00:50:37 – 00:50:43:	Because there are going to be times where you will have to have fights in the state or in the church.

00:50:43 – 00:50:46:	You don't necessarily have to have these fights in the home.

00:50:47 – 00:50:50:	And so the goal should be to maintain that peace.

00:50:51 – 00:50:53:	In the home, these are your family members.

00:50:53 – 00:51:07:	You are supposed to deal with them differently from how you deal with others out in the world, with how you deal with strangers, particularly if you're dealing at the level of politics, international politics, things like that.

00:51:08 – 00:51:14:	In the home, you seek peace, and you let more things slide than you would otherwise.

00:51:15 – 00:51:20:	And so again, this is the woman's realm in a very concrete and real way.

00:51:21 – 00:51:32:	And so for the men in the audience, don't bring home that same mindset where you're going to have a knock-down, drag-out fight for the truth in the public sphere.

00:51:33 – 00:51:34:	Don't bring that into the home.

00:51:35 – 00:51:48:	It is a different thing in the home that's going to be difficult for some to hear, perhaps even difficult for some who are hosting the podcast, because we may have the inclination to argue in a certain fashion.

00:51:49 – 00:52:03:	And you have to mitigate that or alter that when dealing with different places, because what is appropriate when you are arguing in the political sphere is not necessarily going to be appropriate when you are arguing in the home.

00:52:04 – 00:52:10:	And the same is true for the church versus the state or just in the culture generally versus in politics.

00:52:11 – 00:52:23:	Where you are does change how you should behave to a certain degree, and with whom you are interacting, with whom you are engaging, should change how you engage.

00:52:24 – 00:52:29:	You are not going to argue with your wife the same way you would argue with a political opponent.

00:52:29 – 00:52:32:	Hopefully, if you do that, you probably will not remain married.

00:52:33 – 00:52:34:	So don't do that.

00:52:36 – 00:52:40:	The goal with your wife is not just to win an argument.

00:52:40 – 00:52:42:	There are different considerations there.

00:52:43 – 00:52:44:	That's a marriage.

00:52:44 – 00:52:45:	That's a relationship.

00:52:45 – 00:52:48:	That's something on which you have to work, something you have to maintain.

00:52:50 – 00:52:54:	If you are dealing in the political sphere, the goal is to win.

00:52:55 – 00:52:58:	The goal isn't to maintain a relationship with your political opponent.

00:52:59 – 00:53:01:	So there are very different considerations.

00:53:02 – 00:53:03:	These are matters of wisdom.

00:53:04 – 00:53:09:	You have to know how to behave in certain places with certain people.

00:53:09 – 00:53:19:	And so in the home, that is where you should try above and beyond everywhere else to be a peacemaker, to maintain peace.

00:53:19 – 00:53:26:	And that does mean engaging differently and letting more things slide than you would anywhere else.

00:53:28 – 00:53:33:	Much of the reason that the home is so important is that it is in contrast to the other realms.

00:53:34 – 00:53:39:	You know, the home is, it's the smallest of all concentric circles in your life.

00:53:39 – 00:53:42:	And so as Corey is saying, it must be a refuge.

00:53:43 – 00:53:50:	And there are some in the audience, I'm certain, and there are certainly many in the world who grew up in homes that were not refuges.

00:53:51 – 00:53:55:	They grew up in homes where there was actual violence or the threat of violence.

00:53:56 – 00:54:17:	And that sort of perpetual threat of harm that shouldn't exist inside the home, when the home should be a safe place, that leaves a permanent mark on someone, especially if they're young, that it changes someone who's grown up in that environment in a way that they come out a different type of adult than someone who didn't.

00:54:17 – 00:54:18:	I didn't experience that.

00:54:19 – 00:54:20:	I had a good, peaceful home.

00:54:20 – 00:54:22:	I was never subject to that.

00:54:22 – 00:54:23:	I was never familiar with it.

00:54:23 – 00:54:31:	And yet, as an adult, I've talked to those who were subjected to, you know, violent alcoholism or whatever, horrible situations.

00:54:31 – 00:54:45:	Some of the worst things that could happen, and part of why they're bad is not simply that adults were derelict in their duty towards their own children, but that the home itself, that one place where everyone should have been safe, they weren't.

00:54:46 – 00:55:02:	And I think as much as the duty of care that is failed by the adults in those situations, there's a mark that's left on a child who's raised in those situations that they're never quite able to feel safe in the same way as they would have, as I do.

00:55:03 – 00:55:12:	Like, I don't have any sort of reaction to situations or to ideas, and to even bring it up, I'm sure probably bothers some people a little bit.

00:55:12 – 00:55:14:	I apologize for that, but it's reality.

00:55:15 – 00:55:18:	And it's important for those of you who are looking at forming homes.

00:55:19 – 00:55:40:	I don't think there's a lot of violent alcoholism probably in our audience, but anything like that, like just the very notion that those things could exist in the home, that what should be a safe refuge, anything contrary to that is destructive in a way that even if your home is peaceful and your society is in trouble, you can be okay.

00:55:41 – 00:55:48:	Maybe not long term, maybe eventually you're going to face reality when, you know, the things that are happening at your borders come to your home.

00:55:49 – 00:56:10:	But the reason that the home is a crucial example here is that if you were to say in the hypothetical scenario have a completely peaceful society where the nation was just totally idyllic and then the home itself were a nightmare of violence and threats of violence and abuse and terror, all is lost.

00:56:11 – 00:56:12:	That's no society at all.

00:56:12 – 00:56:19:	If you have the appearance of peace outside and then every home is filled with terrors, that's hell.

00:56:20 – 00:56:27:	It's a veneer of falsehood that's far worse than if the home is peaceful and it's a nightmare outside the walls of the home.

00:56:28 – 00:56:40:	And so this is one of those cases where not only politically is it challenging for us because as Corey was saying, and I want to reiterate very starkly, the home is in a sense very much the domain of the woman.

00:56:40 – 00:56:42:	I'm not talking about being a long house.

00:56:42 – 00:56:46:	I'm not talking about husbands abdicating their responsibility.

00:56:46 – 00:56:48:	But for example, you know, lady of the house.

00:56:49 – 00:56:52:	Lady is a title that is the feminine version of Lord.

00:56:52 – 00:56:55:	To call her a lady is to say that she's in charge.

00:56:56 – 00:57:01:	She's second in charge, but she is the steward of that household where the husband is, you know, the king.

00:57:02 – 00:57:07:	He rules the realm, but while he is gone, the lady has the stewardship of that place.

00:57:07 – 00:57:09:	And that is very much her domain.

00:57:09 – 00:57:12:	You know, the same is true with master of the house and mistress.

00:57:12 – 00:57:19:	You know, today we think of mistress as being, you know, something that has to do with inappropriate behavior, but properly understood.

00:57:19 – 00:57:21:	Mistress is the feminine version of master.

00:57:21 – 00:57:25:	The master of the house is the man, dominoes and domina.

00:57:25 – 00:57:27:	The male and female form of the same thing.

00:57:27 – 00:57:29:	Lord is Latin for lord, lord and lady.

00:57:31 – 00:57:37:	Within the home, the woman, the wife, the mother does act as the steward.

00:57:37 – 00:57:47:	And so in a very, very concrete sense, in this narrow domain, I think that wives and mothers are perhaps the most perfect peacemakers that we have in the world.

00:57:48 – 00:57:55:	If you're a mother and you've had more than one child at a time, you have certainly dealt with situations where there's strife.

00:57:55 – 00:58:04:	You have little kids, somebody picks a fight, somebody steals something, pokes, they're screaming from the other room, you go in there and you have to be a peacemaker.

00:58:04 – 00:58:17:	You have to settle whatever differences occurred in a way that gets everything not only back to an even keel, but straightens everyone out so that they're properly aligned with the rules of the household, which the husband sets and you enforce.

00:58:18 – 00:58:23:	And when everything works properly, you know, in an ideal situation, kids wouldn't be fighting, but they're kids.

00:58:23 – 00:58:23:	They got to be taught.

00:58:24 – 00:58:25:	Adults have to be taught too.

00:58:25 – 00:58:30:	But outside the home, the way adults are taught is very different in some ways than how kids are taught.

00:58:30 – 00:58:36:	And so the wife and the mother can be the perfect peacemaker in a way that doesn't exist anywhere else.

00:58:37 – 00:58:50:	Because the things that a mother, as a steward of a home, as the lady or the mistress of the household, has a right and responsibility to do things and to manage the household in particular ways that just don't apply in other domains.

00:58:50 – 00:59:00:	And that thing, which is a tremendous blessing within the home, becomes the single greatest liability that we have politically as soon as that mentality leaves the four walls of the home.

00:59:01 – 00:59:25:	And this is why girls voting, girls participating in politics, have been so disastrous in the last century, everywhere in Christendom, is that that thing which women are perfectly designed by God to do, they're imbued with the grace and the patience and the love and the wisdom to deal with that sort of bickering and fighting and sorting things out in a way that sometimes they do it better than men.

00:59:25 – 00:59:30:	There are things that women are better at in the home sometimes than men, because God has given them that special gift.

00:59:31 – 00:59:38:	And the beauty of having a strong husband and a strong father is that, you know, this is how I grew up.

00:59:38 – 00:59:41:	If I stepped out of line, my mom would say, you know, wait till your dad gets home.

00:59:41 – 00:59:43:	That was the worst thing I could possibly hear.

00:59:43 – 00:59:46:	Not that he was mean or he was a tyrant, but he had a belt.

00:59:46 – 00:59:54:	And the understanding was, if I didn't settle things with my mom, if I didn't submit to her, when dad got home, it was going to be a much simpler conversation.

00:59:55 – 00:59:58:	He didn't need to get up to speed and hear a bunch of arguments.

00:59:58 – 00:59:59:	I might catch the belt.

00:59:59 – 01:00:00:	It very rarely happened.

01:00:00 – 01:00:02:	He was mostly a good kid.

01:00:02 – 01:00:04:	But that reinforcement was there.

01:00:05 – 01:00:07:	And that's, I think, probably pretty much gone away today.

01:00:07 – 01:00:10:	And I think we see the results of that in society.

01:00:10 – 01:00:17:	But the manner in which husbands and fathers deal with things is in some ways the way it works outside politically.

01:00:18 – 01:00:24:	And the way the mothers can deal with things, while it's ideally suited for the home, it's suicidal everywhere else.

01:00:24 – 01:00:32:	It's suicidal to bring a mother's understanding of how to resolve political situations anywhere outside of the home.

01:00:32 – 01:00:36:	Because society is not your kids.

01:00:36 – 01:00:42:	You cannot extrapolate the principles that work perfectly under your roof anywhere else.

01:00:43 – 01:00:55:	And so the reason that we're sort of sequestering the household here is it is the one unique place where women have not only the right, but they have an absolute responsibility to be acting in these ways.

01:00:55 – 01:00:59:	If a woman fails, if a mother fails to do those things, her house is going to be chaos.

01:00:59 – 01:01:01:	It's going to be complete disaster.

01:01:01 – 01:01:04:	We've all seen examples of mothers who are checked out and let their kids do whatever.

01:01:05 – 01:01:06:	Those kids are monsters.

01:01:06 – 01:01:08:	They're sociopaths.

01:01:08 – 01:01:18:	They're absolute nightmare human beings because their mother didn't show up to be a steward, to be responsible for the home and instead of her husband, who often didn't exist anyway.

01:01:19 – 01:01:23:	All these things that are breaking down civilizationally, they do begin in the home.

01:01:23 – 01:01:28:	That's why part of the discussion about political things also has to include the home.

01:01:28 – 01:01:30:	We have to fix all these problems at once.

01:01:30 – 01:01:36:	This is one of those many situations where we got to get about 30 things right all at the same time or we don't have a fix.

01:01:37 – 01:01:48:	I can't fix society and leave a home in shambles because it's going to be producing broken, terrified children or monstrous children with no sense of right and wrong, and they're going to go out and burn down society.

01:01:48 – 01:01:50:	You got to get all the stuff right at the same time.

01:01:50 – 01:01:51:	So it's a huge challenge.

01:01:51 – 01:02:00:	But the reason for highlighting it within the context of peace is that when a mother and a wife is a peacemaker, it's a blessing for the children.

01:02:00 – 01:02:02:	It's also a blessing, incidentally, for the husband.

01:02:03 – 01:02:16:	When your husband is out all day, working, slaving, laboring under God's curse, that his labor is going to be hard, and it's going to beat him up, and it's going to kill him earlier than it kills women.

01:02:17 – 01:02:20:	Women live longer than men because of the curse from the garden.

01:02:21 – 01:02:29:	Men's bodies are used up, our minds are used up, our sanity, our hearts were chewed up by life in a way that shouldn't be happening to women.

01:02:29 – 01:02:31:	So yeah, women live longer, and that's why.

01:02:31 – 01:02:36:	There's a sense in which men are physically consumed by the hardship in the world.

01:02:37 – 01:02:42:	And so the peace in the home is crucial, because it should be our refuge as well.

01:02:42 – 01:02:47:	When a husband comes home, when a father comes home, he should come home to a peaceful household.

01:02:47 – 01:02:52:	He shouldn't have 500 more problems to deal with on top of everything in the world.

01:02:52 – 01:03:12:	You know, for guys who are tied up worrying about geopolitics and national borders and local strife and whatever's going on in their business, whatever's going on with their employer, whatever's going on with the neighbors, when they then come inside, if they have that many more problems that they can't escape, that's corrosive to husbands and fathers too.

01:03:12 – 01:03:17:	That is the one place where a man should feel like he's going to catch a break.

01:03:18 – 01:03:24:	If every time he walks in the door, it's even worse than outside, that's also civilizationally corrosive.

01:03:24 – 01:03:34:	So one of the duties of wives and mothers is to preserve the home so that her husband, the father of her children, has a place where he is safe.

01:03:34 – 01:03:36:	She's keeping a safe space for him.

01:03:36 – 01:03:39:	Yeah, it's turned into a joke, but it's a very real thing.

01:03:39 – 01:03:47:	When someone feels like they have no place to rest, they had no place where they're ever going to have a moment of peace, you can't live like that for long.

01:03:48 – 01:03:52:	We see in warfare, you see examples of men who used to be called shell shocked.

01:03:53 – 01:03:58:	You can see a guy who goes into warfare at 18, young and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

01:03:58 – 01:04:03:	One year later, after a year in the trenches, assuming he's lived, he's a changed man.

01:04:04 – 01:04:23:	One year after all that combat with the continuous explosion and the constant fear of death, not fear in the sense of, oh, no, I'm afraid I'm going to die, but just you could die at any moment in combat, that absence of peace, even the both theoretical and in actual practical absence of peace, it destroys men.

01:04:24 – 01:04:25:	It absolutely destroys men.

01:04:25 – 01:04:28:	And most men are not equipped to deal with that.

01:04:28 – 01:04:32:	And usually the men who come out okay, they certainly all come out different.

01:04:32 – 01:04:35:	They come out hardened in a way that they didn't go in.

01:04:36 – 01:04:44:	And you can cope and you can be fine, you can be perfectly functional, but you've gone through something that, in an ideal world, you wouldn't have gone through.

01:04:44 – 01:04:46:	You wouldn't have been in a situation that wasn't peaceful.

01:04:47 – 01:05:03:	It's a blessing to have men who are willing to do that, to willing to sacrifice strife and danger and death and hardship, sacrificing the sort of peace that most of us enjoy every day, because the lack of that does tremendous harm.

01:05:04 – 01:05:15:	And so just keep in mind that the very things that are a benefit in the home become destructive civilizationally when the female, the wifely, motherly attitude is brought anywhere else.

01:05:16 – 01:05:31:	And yet, after generations of having women's suffrage and this political interference from a population group that never incidentally wanted it in the first place, I've mentioned this before, you can look at the stats.

01:05:31 – 01:05:35:	If women had been able to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified, they would have voted against it.

01:05:36 – 01:05:37:	Women did not want to be able to vote.

01:05:38 – 01:05:41:	The majority would have preferred to be kept out of it, because they knew better.

01:05:42 – 01:05:42:	They were correct.

01:05:42 – 01:05:49:	The majority of women were correct that they did not want to be involved in this crap, because it was beyond their expertise.

01:05:50 – 01:05:52:	It was beyond their domain of responsibilities.

01:05:53 – 01:05:54:	And it's nasty and brutish business.

01:05:55 – 01:05:59:	It's something that a lady shouldn't want to be involved in.

01:05:59 – 01:06:05:	And so I don't say these things to condemn anyone who's listening, who's a girl who has political opinion or is politically active.

01:06:06 – 01:06:23:	It's not my place to tell you to stop, but it is my place to say that I want to see a world where you don't have that problem anymore, where you can go home and maintain a home in a way that you're perfectly suited for, where all of your sensibilities are dialed in exactly the way God wants things.

01:06:25 – 01:06:30:	But the purpose for doing the episode last week on violence, where violence doesn't belong in the home.

01:06:31 – 01:06:32:	I was hit with a belt a few times.

01:06:33 – 01:06:34:	I don't consider that violence.

01:06:35 – 01:06:35:	It's percussive.

01:06:36 – 01:06:37:	It's percussive correction.

01:06:38 – 01:06:42:	But I would never in a million years feel like I was abused in the slightest.

01:06:43 – 01:06:43:	That's not cope.

01:06:44 – 01:06:47:	That's understanding that when you fool around, you find out.

01:06:48 – 01:06:50:	And that's one of the best lessons that anyone can ever learn.

01:06:51 – 01:06:56:	Even if someone's never been in a fight or anything else, if you understand, if you keep going, it's going to hurt.

01:06:57 – 01:07:00:	That draws a line that will stick with a man for his entire life.

01:07:01 – 01:07:03:	That's something that men deliver.

01:07:03 – 01:07:06:	It's something that women shouldn't have to be involved in at all.

01:07:07 – 01:07:12:	As we go to these further domains outside of the home, there's an exclusion zone there.

01:07:12 – 01:07:16:	I don't want to see girls going beyond the boundaries of their dwelling place.

01:07:17 – 01:07:26:	The place where you are a domina, a mistress, a lady, where you have all of the abilities to do these things well, you lose the ability to do them well as soon as you go outside your home.

01:07:26 – 01:07:27:	Because you have one tool.

01:07:28 – 01:07:32:	Men have multiple tools, and some of them include violence or the threat of violence.

01:07:32 – 01:07:48:	And so a lot of what dictates our understanding of politics today, we moved to talking about neighborhood and society, and then national politics and beyond, violence and the threat of violence should be exclusively a masculine domain.

01:07:49 – 01:07:58:	And therefore, whenever feminine voices and feminine minds and ideas show up, they're going to try to do the thing that's exactly the right thing to do in the home, but it's the wrong thing to do everywhere else.

01:07:58 – 01:08:06:	And the reason that we had to tackle that for two hours last week is that the feminized world that we live in now doesn't make any distinction.

01:08:07 – 01:08:16:	When it says that men and women are completely interchangeable, and your political views as a woman are just as good as mine as a man, and it's just opinions, man, you can think whatever you want and you can be right.

01:08:16 – 01:08:17:	That's nonsense.

01:08:18 – 01:08:21:	Men are equipped to do things that women aren't, just as women are equipped to do things that men aren't.

01:08:22 – 01:08:27:	And to respect how God has created us, to respect that order, is to preserve it wherever possible.

01:08:28 – 01:08:40:	So, moving on to society and beyond, we have to draw a line that women should not be going beyond the boundaries of their household, because they'll cease to be good at the very thing that they're so good at inside the home.

01:08:41 – 01:08:57:	For the purposes of this episode, society is the next concentric circle, and essentially, it goes all the way from the home up to the level of the state, which of course is implied by the fact that there are essentially three levels here.

01:08:57 – 01:09:01:	The church is not a fourth level, the church is something separate.

01:09:03 – 01:09:13:	Really, we're dealing with three different things, because the home is its own sphere, society and the political are another sphere, and then the church is a sphere.

01:09:14 – 01:09:22:	But there is sort of a hierarchy, as Will was saying, from the home up to the state, and then the church is the right-hand kingdom.

01:09:22 – 01:09:23:	It's a separate matter.

01:09:24 – 01:09:29:	But for society, of course, that starts off with you and your neighbor.

01:09:30 – 01:09:47:	From there, it scales up to the state, but you are going to interact differently with your immediate neighbor, your actual neighbor, perhaps literally in some cases, for some of you listening, because it means literally the farmer next door, the next farmer over.

01:09:49 – 01:10:18:	You are going to interact differently with that man and with his family than someone on the other end of the country or someone in another country, because there are different considerations with regard to proximity, with regard to how closely related you are, you're going to, if things are organized correctly, if they are ordered properly, you are going to be more closely related to those who are near you, and so that is a consideration.

01:10:18 – 01:10:24:	You will treat your cousins differently from how you would treat a complete stranger or an alien.

01:10:24 – 01:10:34:	It's not to say that you abuse the stranger or the alien, but you have different duties, different considerations with regard to your own blood, because they are family.

01:10:34 – 01:10:36:	They are extended family, but they are still family.

01:10:38 – 01:10:56:	But again, you are going to let more slide with regard to your immediate neighbor than someone who is more distant, just as you are going to let the most slide with regard to the home and the least with regard to the state.

01:10:57 – 01:11:24:	So for instance, with regard to the state in matters of truth, and this of course is for men, because this is politics, this is not a sphere for women, but with regard to matters of the truth, there are times where you cannot let anything slide, because if you engage in falsity, if you ignore the truth, it can have disastrous consequences.

01:11:25 – 01:11:46:	And so for instance, if you neglect the fact that the United States is currently being invaded and has been for many years, and we are quite frankly, largely, we, I mean as a body politic, ignoring that fact, the country and the nation will cease to exist.

01:11:46 – 01:11:48:	That is the ultimate consequence of that.

01:11:49 – 01:11:52:	And so you cannot let that slide.

01:11:52 – 01:11:54:	You cannot ignore that for the sake of peace.

01:11:56 – 01:12:02:	At the other end, with regard to your immediate neighbor, if your neighbor is a little weird, you can ignore that.

01:12:04 – 01:12:09:	Maybe he mows the lawn wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts and working boots.

01:12:10 – 01:12:10:	Fine.

01:12:11 – 01:12:13:	You can ignore your neighbor being a little bit weird.

01:12:14 – 01:12:17:	You can ignore some of the quirks of your neighbor.

01:12:17 – 01:12:22:	These are things that you let slide, that you ignore for the sake of peace.

01:12:22 – 01:12:26:	Because ultimately these aren't things that should disturb peace.

01:12:27 – 01:12:30:	They aren't things that you should let disturb the peace.

01:12:30 – 01:12:37:	Because peace is more important than your neighbor's choice of a tire while mowing his lawn or whatever it happens to be.

01:12:39 – 01:12:42:	You have quirks, your neighbor has quirks.

01:12:42 – 01:12:49:	Everyone is going to have some behavior that someone else is going to find a little grating or a little obnoxious or a little weird.

01:12:50 – 01:12:55:	We let these things slide in order to maintain the peace in society.

01:12:55 – 01:13:02:	And that is why there should generally or usually be peace with regard to this level or this circle, as it were.

01:13:03 – 01:13:06:	Because there are things that you just ignore for the sake of peace here.

01:13:07 – 01:13:11:	You don't have a knock down, drag out fight over everything.

01:13:11 – 01:13:16:	Your neighbor mows his lawn one way, you mow a different way, you don't like how he does it because you think it's wrong.

01:13:16 – 01:13:18:	You don't have to fight over that.

01:13:19 – 01:13:23:	You can have a friendly discussion over it if you're so inclined, but you don't fight over it.

01:13:23 – 01:13:33:	It's not something over which it is worth breaching the peace, worth disturbing the peace, because this is sort of a sliding scale.

01:13:34 – 01:13:36:	You are going to let more slide.

01:13:36 – 01:13:48:	You are going to let more just pass you by and ignore it for the sake of the peace with regard to your immediate neighbor, and then less and less as you get farther away.

01:13:49 – 01:13:54:	Of course, farther away, it's going to concern you less, so it may be that it's just entirely irrelevant.

01:13:55 – 01:14:03:	To stick with the example of mowing the lawn, perhaps it's on my mind, because this time of year the grass grows very quickly, at least here in the south.

01:14:05 – 01:14:19:	But someone, say, 2,000 miles away, for those of you in Europe, another country, but for those of us in the United States, still the United States, perhaps Canada, you don't really care how that man takes care of his lawn.

01:14:20 – 01:14:22:	That's going to be completely irrelevant to you.

01:14:22 – 01:14:29:	And so some of these things are going to matter only because of proximity, and you ignore them for the sake of peace.

01:14:30 – 01:14:41:	But there are things that will still be relevant from that immediate level of your next door neighbor, your literal neighbor, all the way up to any other member of your society.

01:14:41 – 01:14:48:	And you're going to tolerate more from the neighbor because you have a higher duty to maintain that peace locally.

01:14:50 – 01:15:10:	This is actually still a level at which the intuition and the abilities of women can be relevant, because of course, maintaining peace between neighbors and households in the immediate vicinity is going to be something in which women are actively engaged, because one woman is going to interact with the woman next door.

01:15:11 – 01:15:34:	And if you happen to have children who are the same age, or children are going to get along, and you'll have to mediate disputes and things like that, this is still a level on this end of the scale at which women can be involved, at which women should be involved, because God has created women for this sort of thing, this maintenance of this network that forms the bedrock of society.

01:15:35 – 01:15:41:	This is vitally important to having a peaceful and functional society, and women are of course involved in this.

01:15:43 – 01:15:58:	The stark line, the black and white line, is politics, because once things transition over into concerns of the state, running the state, that is no longer the domain for women.

01:15:58 – 01:15:59:	That is the domain for men.

01:16:00 – 01:16:13:	And there is sort of a gray area here between the immediate neighbor or your neighborhood, the small scale, and the other end where we're dealing with, say, local government.

01:16:13 – 01:16:17:	That's starting to edge into politics or the state.

01:16:17 – 01:16:23:	But you have things that are lower than that, that aren't necessarily quite politics proper yet.

01:16:24 – 01:16:27:	So you may have a neighborhood council, something like that.

01:16:28 – 01:16:31:	That's still going to be a domain for men.

01:16:32 – 01:16:38:	That is going to be something that is sort of a small sort of politics.

01:16:38 – 01:16:46:	But you are going to have a different way of engaging with that than you would have, say, just you to your neighbor.

01:16:47 – 01:16:50:	Because you to your neighbor, the goal should just be the maintenance of peace.

01:16:50 – 01:16:51:	Again, that is the goal.

01:16:51 – 01:16:53:	You want to maintain that peace.

01:16:53 – 01:16:55:	You want to get along with your neighbor.

01:16:55 – 01:16:59:	You don't want to have needless fights with those who live right next door.

01:17:01 – 01:17:18:	But if you're getting up to the level where it's starting to deal with regulations or dictating what others may or may not do, now you have a very real possibility, not just a possibility, but a likelihood or even inevitability of strife.

01:17:18 – 01:17:22:	You are going to have conflict as soon as that is on the table.

01:17:22 – 01:17:31:	Because as soon as one man has power over another, you have the very real risk, the very real possibility of conflict.

01:17:32 – 01:17:35:	That is simply how things work in this world.

01:17:36 – 01:17:38:	It doesn't mean that will always devolve into conflict.

01:17:39 – 01:17:40:	Thankfully, it does not.

01:17:40 – 01:17:42:	But it does mean that it is there.

01:17:42 – 01:17:45:	And that does mean that it is a domain for men.

01:17:46 – 01:17:52:	Because men have been equipped with the necessary abilities, the disposition, etc.

01:17:52 – 01:18:00:	to deal with that sort of thing, to deal with those potential conflicts, and to deal with them when they become actual conflicts.

01:18:01 – 01:18:08:	And again, as Woe was saying, women are going to have the wrong intuition, the wrong approach with regard to those things.

01:18:09 – 01:18:19:	Because the peacemaking that works in the home, and even works, perhaps, in your immediate local neighborhood, is not going to work at the level of society.

01:18:19 – 01:18:27:	It's not going to work at the level of your city, of your state, certainly not the level of your nation, and most certainly not at the international level.

01:18:29 – 01:18:36:	Once we get up into politics, into politics proper, even most men are not suited for politics.

01:18:36 – 01:19:04:	It takes a particular kind of man, with a particular mindset and set of abilities, to be good at politics, to even be suited to politics whatsoever, which is one of the unfortunate things about the current system that we have, because it really involves everyone in politics, which on the one hand makes everyone guilty of what is done politically, what is done by the state, but on the other hand, it places a burden on those who should not have that burden.

01:19:06 – 01:19:11:	A properly ordered society will not place burdens on those who cannot bear those burdens.

01:19:12 – 01:19:14:	That's obviously disordered.

01:19:15 – 01:19:22:	You don't tell your five-year-old to go to the store to pick something up for you, driving your vehicle, obviously.

01:19:23 – 01:19:24:	You don't do that.

01:19:24 – 01:19:25:	That's disordered.

01:19:25 – 01:19:28:	That's not how you are supposed to run things.

01:19:28 – 01:19:34:	That is an improper delegation of not just authority, but duty in that case, I guess.

01:19:36 – 01:19:43:	If you do that, it is an abuse of, if you are the husband, the father, that's an abuse of your authority.

01:19:44 – 01:19:46:	You are not maintaining right order.

01:19:46 – 01:19:51:	The same thing is true with regard to society.

01:19:51 – 01:20:12:	If you have the wrong people who have been given a duty to know what is going on at a certain level and to know what should be done, and you've given that to people who don't have the capacity to do it, or just simply should not be burdened with it, you have a fundamentally disordered society and you are going to have worse outcomes because of it.

01:20:14 – 01:20:36:	That is what we currently have, because currently we have a universal franchise, which essentially what that says is that every single person over a certain age is equally skilled, equally capable of making decisions up to and including when and where to go to war.

01:20:39 – 01:20:52:	When you phrase it that way, when you point out the reality of what our system contends, when you point out the foundational claims of our system, no man can think that is rational.

01:20:53 – 01:20:55:	It is obviously insane.

01:20:55 – 01:20:58:	It is wicked as well, but it is insane.

01:20:59 – 01:21:11:	One of the examples I like to give is that you would never go into a random restaurant or a truck stop or just some place with a crowd and take a poll of whether or not you should have heart surgery.

01:21:13 – 01:21:17:	No one would do that because that is a fundamentally insane thing to do.

01:21:18 – 01:21:22:	And yet that is exactly what we do with our politics, with our society.

01:21:23 – 01:21:24:	That's how we run things.

01:21:25 – 01:21:26:	That's evil.

01:21:26 – 01:21:27:	That is a wicked way of doing things.

01:21:28 – 01:21:39:	It is ignoring the fact that God has given different men different abilities to do different things, and it is a rebellion against hierarchy and order.

01:21:39 – 01:21:42:	And again, God is a God of order.

01:21:42 – 01:21:50:	When you have a system that creates disorder as a natural consequence, you have a very real problem that needs to be addressed.

01:21:53 – 01:21:58:	But the fundamental point here is that we have this hierarchy of home, society and the state.

01:22:00 – 01:22:13:	And when it comes to peace, maintaining peace, and preventing to keep the peace, you are going to let more slide at the home end of this spectrum, as it were, and less slide at the state end.

01:22:13 – 01:22:16:	Because that is the necessity of the thing.

01:22:16 – 01:22:19:	Because the harms are sort of inverted.

01:22:20 – 01:22:28:	Maintaining peace in the home runs minimal risk of harm because you're letting things slide to maintain that peace.

01:22:28 – 01:22:32:	Breaching the peace causes immense harm in the home.

01:22:32 – 01:22:43:	At the other end, in politics, maintaining the peace by letting things slide is how you lose your nation, it's how you lose your state, it's how you wind up being destroyed as a people.

01:22:45 – 01:23:04:	If on the other hand, you breach the peace, as it were, in order to defend, say, the truth, or to state an unpleasant reality, to say that no, we actually need a military, we actually need to defend our border, then what you've done is actually gained something greater than the peace that you lost.

01:23:04 – 01:23:13:	Because there is a higher concern there, there is a greater concern with regard to things of the state or things of society than peace.

01:23:14 – 01:23:17:	Peace is going to be one of the highest concerns in the home.

01:23:17 – 01:23:21:	It is not the highest concern for society or the state.

01:23:22 – 01:23:34:	One of the passages in Scripture that often comes up in this context is from Roman 12, where Paul writes, If possible, so far as it depends on you, live at peace with all people.

01:23:36 – 01:23:38:	I love this passage for a few reasons.

01:23:38 – 01:23:48:	One, when it addresses this to Christians and says live at peace with all people, it's a universal dicta.

01:23:48 – 01:23:52:	It's not saying just Christians, it's not just within the church.

01:23:52 – 01:23:54:	We are to live at peace with everyone.

01:23:56 – 01:23:58:	That's important because that means that it's also political.

01:23:58 – 01:24:07:	We're not talking about, this is covering the whole spectrum from home, church, neighborhood, state, planet, all human beings everywhere.

01:24:07 – 01:24:10:	So far as it depends on you, live at peace with them.

01:24:11 – 01:24:14:	And yet it also acknowledges that the enemy gets a vote.

01:24:14 – 01:24:21:	It may well be that the man with which you live to live in peace doesn't want to live in peace with you.

01:24:21 – 01:24:27:	If that's the case, then you proceed on to the next steps, and you proceed on to those next steps as a man.

01:24:28 – 01:24:38:	This is a place where there's no female voice at all, because what the woman is going to say is, no, let's stay in the car.

01:24:38 – 01:24:39:	Let's not get out.

01:24:39 – 01:24:40:	It's dangerous out there.

01:24:40 – 01:24:42:	Let's not get into trouble.

01:24:43 – 01:24:49:	The men know that sometimes it's go time and you have to go do something that you don't want to do, but the alternative is worse.

01:24:50 – 01:24:58:	And so God makes clear that we are to try to live at peace, but we are not bound to do so.

01:24:58 – 01:25:02:	So this is one of the many reasons why pacifism itself is apostate.

01:25:03 – 01:25:09:	You cannot be a pacifist Christian, because to the extent that you can live in peace, you should.

01:25:09 – 01:25:11:	To the extent that you cannot, you don't.

01:25:12 – 01:25:15:	And as we frequently say, this is not violence.

01:25:16 – 01:25:24:	It's not like everyone should be on a hair trigger, just waiting for that moment, where they can say, okay, we tried peace, now we're going to do a whole bunch of violence.

01:25:25 – 01:25:26:	That's not desirable.

01:25:27 – 01:25:29:	It's destructive, as we talked about last week.

01:25:29 – 01:25:32:	Violence destroys peace, which is desirable.

01:25:32 – 01:25:33:	It destroys property.

01:25:33 – 01:25:37:	It destroys human lives, which at least at some point had potential.

01:25:38 – 01:25:51:	And yet when it comes to the point that violence is the only way to resolve something, we have to acknowledge that the hypothetical potential that may have existed at some point is no longer what matters.

01:25:51 – 01:25:53:	What matters is now what's right in front of us.

01:25:54 – 01:26:05:	And so at a civilizational level, sometimes at a civic level, a man has to understand that what's right in front of him means that the enemy has gotten a vote, and he still has a duty to do.

01:26:06 – 01:26:16:	And so while it's always in the pursuit of peace, it's with the acknowledgement that we live in a fallen world where peace will not come until we die or until God comes back.

01:26:17 – 01:26:20:	That's the only way that we get perfect peace.

01:26:21 – 01:26:33:	And so we'll end in Scripture talking about God's peace, but just to briefly wrap up the political, we have to acknowledge that we live in both kingdoms simultaneously.

01:26:33 – 01:27:03:	It's one of the huge problems that we have, especially online with clerics who have no business interfering in politics, wading into these things where they are trying to take an approach that's suitable for the church for matters of church polity and trying to superimpose them on state matters, where the men are themselves unsuited, where their office forbids them from acting in such a fashion, and where the things that they say are plainly contrary to Scripture itself.

01:27:04 – 01:27:13:	And so this is destructive not only because they're liars, but because they're binding consciences by virtue of the collars that they're wearing or the offices that they hold, the titles they have.

01:27:14 – 01:27:29:	When such men come along and they say things that are contrary to what Scripture says, it puts everybody in a bind, because suddenly you have the man who's supposed to be the voice of God in your midst telling you to do something that's going to get you and your family killed.

01:27:30 – 01:27:32:	And you say, no, but don't worry, I got some Bible verses that make it okay.

01:27:33 – 01:27:34:	And then what do you do?

01:27:35 – 01:27:39:	This is the same problem that we've described in the Reformation episode.

01:27:39 – 01:27:54:	We said, I would rather that a man remain in Rome than leave Rome in most cases, because specifically within the Roman Catholic Church, when they leave, they have been taught that if I'm not Roman Catholic, I go to hell.

01:27:55 – 01:27:58:	And so their only choice then is basically I choose hell.

01:27:58 – 01:27:59:	And many do.

01:27:59 – 01:28:05:	When someone falls away from the Roman Church, they almost always cease to be Christian entirely.

01:28:05 – 01:28:13:	I would rather they stay with the bad theology, where at least they're hearing the Bible occasionally, than have them say, you know what, I would rather have hell.

01:28:14 – 01:28:15:	We have the same situation here.

01:28:16 – 01:28:31:	You can't set up these false dichotomies where someone's saying, I'm speaking in the name of the Lord, and I'm telling you that's a good thing, that your crops are being devoured and your communities are being destroyed by foreigners and your daughters are being harmed and everything is burning around you.

01:28:31 – 01:28:33:	Look at all the gospel opportunities.

01:28:33 – 01:28:35:	Pastors are saying that with a straight face.

01:28:36 – 01:28:38:	They're saying that because Satan is telling them to say that.

01:28:38 – 01:28:50:	And so, back to earlier when we were talking about confronting lies in the church, there's going to be a lot of noise when that stuff goes on because they have breached the peace by lying in God's name in a way that's going to get people killed.

01:28:50 – 01:28:54:	We've gone beyond the spiritual where they're going to damn souls with their lies.

01:28:55 – 01:28:58:	They're going to get actual human bodies killed with their lies.

01:28:59 – 01:29:00:	And that's the purpose that they serve.

01:29:01 – 01:29:15:	And so it's a tough position for all of us to be in because the very men who are responsible for telling these things truthfully are in many cases not only abdicating their responsibility, but they're going in the opposite direction.

01:29:15 – 01:29:32:	So familiarity with scripture, taking it seriously, understanding how all these pieces work together is vital for a Christian man because you may be faced with a situation just as they were in the days of the Reformation, where the men who are supposed to be teaching faithfully in God's name, it turns out they're not.

01:29:33 – 01:29:40:	And even if somebody was right about something five or ten years ago, if he starts telling new things that turn out to be lies, you have to turn your back on him.

01:29:41 – 01:29:48:	Because just as Jesus pointed to the Pharisees and said, you brood of vipers, we have to be ready to say that to someone who actually is.

01:29:48 – 01:29:53:	Now, again, this is not licensed to just be mean to people in the church.

01:29:54 – 01:29:59:	The first instinct and the first desire should be to hope that they're actually Christian and they're simply in error.

01:30:00 – 01:30:04:	And that's often the case, although less and less so as the days get shorter.

01:30:05 – 01:30:12:	And yet at the same time, we have to fully acknowledge out loud that what they are saying is evil, and it's harming people.

01:30:12 – 01:30:14:	It's harming souls, it's harming bodies, it's harming communities.

01:30:15 – 01:30:17:	It's a political matter, not only a church matter.

01:30:17 – 01:30:28:	And so when these clerics wade into those things, doing destruction in Satan's name, pretending to be in God's name, we have to deal with them as the type of enemy that they are.

01:30:29 – 01:30:39:	Cory was talking a little bit a minute ago about order, and that should bring to mind another passage from 1 Corinthians 14, where it says, For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace.

01:30:40 – 01:30:45:	And so Scripture plainly sets disorder and peace as two more antonyms.

01:30:46 – 01:30:51:	And so I took a look at where the word used for disorder, there was used throughout Scripture.

01:30:51 – 01:30:57:	It's the Greek word, akastasia, which literally means not standing down or not settling down.

01:30:57 – 01:31:02:	So you have disorder, not settling down, or you have peace.

01:31:02 – 01:31:06:	And the disorder, the way that's translated, it's used in various parts of the New Testament.

01:31:07 – 01:31:14:	In Luke 21, it's talked about wars and tumults, basically wars and rumors of wars, as disorder, war or peace.

01:31:15 – 01:31:16:	That's a pretty obvious one.

01:31:17 – 01:31:21:	2 Corinthians, in chapter 6 and chapter 12, it talks about tumult, and it talks about disorder.

01:31:22 – 01:31:26:	And then in James 3.16, it also talks about disorder in every evil practice.

01:31:27 – 01:31:38:	So these are all examples where evil things, things that are, you know, whether it's a war or it's some calamity, some disordered behavior, is in opposition to peace.

01:31:39 – 01:31:43:	But it's not simply loud noises versus quiet noises, or maybe no noises at all.

01:31:44 – 01:31:48:	It's the disorder is contrary to God's eternal will.

01:31:48 – 01:31:50:	Peace is God's eternal will.

01:31:50 – 01:32:01:	And yet God is coming with the sword on judgment day to kill everybody and to cast those who have defied him and who did not accept Christ's sacrifice on the cross into hell where they're tormented eternally.

01:32:02 – 01:32:06:	They will never get a break from the violence that's going to be poured out against them.

01:32:07 – 01:32:08:	And that's God's perfect will.

01:32:09 – 01:32:11:	And as creatures, we can't even reconcile that.

01:32:11 – 01:32:13:	It seems contradictory.

01:32:14 – 01:32:26:	It's one of the cases where when we're dealing with God's things, if you plainly have two statements that seem contradictory and there's no possible way to finesse them, you say, okay, they're both true and I don't understand.

01:32:27 – 01:32:28:	God is God.

01:32:28 – 01:32:32:	I trust him to do what he's going to do, and I trust it's going to be perfect.

01:32:32 – 01:32:33:	That's very much what we have here.

01:32:34 – 01:32:40:	We can't understand how eternal peace for us is going to be eternal torment for those who are opposed to God's peace.

01:32:40 – 01:32:43:	But we're told that's what's going to happen, and it's true.

01:32:44 – 01:32:45:	That is our God.

01:32:46 – 01:32:55:	And it's another part of reason for talking about peace and distinction to violence and the absence of violence, is that God wants and uses both.

01:32:55 – 01:33:03:	He does not want violence in the sense that it was ever supposed to exist, and yet it is the solution to God's problems.

01:33:04 – 01:33:08:	And there are cases in the human life when it's also the solution to man's problems.

01:33:09 – 01:33:10:	It's not a license.

01:33:10 – 01:33:12:	It's not something to be happy about.

01:33:12 – 01:33:20:	It's a sorrowful recognition that in this fallen world, sometimes more bad things have to happen to stop worse things from happening.

01:33:21 – 01:33:24:	And so that's the political sphere in a nutshell.

01:33:25 – 01:33:31:	As much as possible, we try to live peacefully, and certainly the closer you get to home, the more urgency there is for that.

01:33:31 – 01:33:40:	And yet at the same time, when you have things that are civilizational threats, that are physical threats, peace may end for a time.

01:33:40 – 01:33:48:	And we did the episode last year about normalcy bias in a sense to try to warn people about things that were coming.

01:33:49 – 01:33:56:	It's going to get to the point, I believe in our lifetimes, where things will get a whole lot worse than they are today, where they will get more violent.

01:33:56 – 01:34:06:	The time of peace that we have enjoyed, where you can sleep every night in your own bed without being shell shocked, I believe that that's going to come to an end for most of us.

01:34:07 – 01:34:08:	I'd like to be wrong.

01:34:09 – 01:34:10:	I don't want that.

01:34:10 – 01:34:11:	It's not something I desire.

01:34:12 – 01:34:16:	But looking at the trajectory of things, I don't see another possibility.

01:34:16 – 01:34:17:	That's my personal view.

01:34:17 – 01:34:18:	Maybe I'm wrong.

01:34:19 – 01:34:29:	You shouldn't take anything from that other than, hey, maybe I should fear and love God to make sure I have my spiritual ducks in order and have my physical duck in a row.

01:34:29 – 01:34:37:	I want to make sure that the things of God and the things that I have a duty to deal with are in alignment, and that's going to radiate outward.

01:34:38 – 01:34:43:	If you realize that there's things about your life that have been ungodly, you don't worry about geopolitics.

01:34:44 – 01:34:47:	You worry about what's under your own roof first, and you sort out the rest later.

01:34:48 – 01:34:58:	So when we're peacemakers, when we're setting things according to God's will, there's always a sense of urgency, and the immediate comes before the distant.

01:34:59 – 01:35:01:	That's why the neighbor distinction is so crucial.

01:35:01 – 01:35:03:	Most people on the planet are not your neighbor.

01:35:03 – 01:35:06:	In a very real sense, they are not your problem.

01:35:06 – 01:35:09:	What's happening 6,000 miles away is not your problem.

01:35:09 – 01:35:11:	It's not that your heart shouldn't go out to them.

01:35:11 – 01:35:19:	It's that to the extent that you care about someone 6,000 miles away, you should have exponentially greater care for the man who lives down the road.

01:35:19 – 01:35:26:	And what we find is that the way our society, the way our churches, the way our teaching is structured, that never happens.

01:35:26 – 01:35:37:	You will never have more sympathy for your neighbor, your actual neighbor, than for the distant person who's completely alien to you, that's put on the TV in order to say, hey, care about this guy.

01:35:38 – 01:35:40:	Don't care about the guy you can actually do some good for.

01:35:41 – 01:35:44:	If you want to be a peacemaker, you begin at home.

01:35:44 – 01:35:45:	You begin with what's nearby.

01:35:46 – 01:35:52:	And so it's a good thing that's, I'm very happy to see emerging throughout the right is, okay, what can I do now?

01:35:52 – 01:35:57:	What actual material changes can I make in my community, in my church, in my home?

01:35:58 – 01:36:01:	How can I do more good things where I actually have control?

01:36:02 – 01:36:05:	Frightening all the time about geopolitics doesn't help anybody.

01:36:05 – 01:36:06:	It really doesn't.

01:36:06 – 01:36:07:	As Corey said, he's absolutely right.

01:36:08 – 01:36:12:	Most men are not suited for that at all, not only temperamentally, but intellectually.

01:36:12 – 01:36:14:	You're not going to understand it, and you're not going to get it right.

01:36:14 – 01:36:16:	That applies to almost everyone listening.

01:36:17 – 01:36:21:	And yet, we're in a situation today where like, we're all on the hook.

01:36:21 – 01:36:23:	It doesn't matter if you know about it, it can hurt you.

01:36:24 – 01:36:29:	But the things that you can actually control, the things where you can try to preserve peace, that is where your immediate duty is.

01:36:30 – 01:36:37:	And so, as you're thinking about these concentric circles, don't let yourself get tunnel vision on the distant.

01:36:37 – 01:36:40:	But at the same time, don't exclude it entirely.

01:36:40 – 01:36:47:	Until we can get to the point where the men who should actually be worrying about the distant matters are, it is everybody's problem to some extent.

01:36:48 – 01:36:52:	But where we can make peace is going to be in a home, and it's going to radiate out from there.

01:36:53 – 01:36:59:	And what God says applies within the church and without in somewhat different context, but the principle is always the same.

01:36:59 – 01:37:00:	Let's try to get along.

01:37:01 – 01:37:04:	Reginald Denny said that in the wake of the OJ riots.

01:37:04 – 01:37:06:	Can't we all just get along?

01:37:06 – 01:37:14:	And he was mocked for it, and it was, you know, that was kind of the beginning of racial propaganda in the last generation.

01:37:16 – 01:37:20:	It's a good sentiment, but Romans 12 also applies.

01:37:20 – 01:37:21:	He got hit in the head with, I think, a brick.

01:37:22 – 01:37:30:	And so it was completely racially motivated, and the feds sent out their basically PR SWAT team.

01:37:30 – 01:37:43:	Anytime there's any racial violence against white people by blacks, the feds send a SWAT team out to contact those people, not an armored SWAT team, but a PR SWAT team, to make sure that they say exactly what Reginald Denny said.

01:37:43 – 01:37:51:	Because if people understood the threat to peace that is presented by these sorts of acts, there would not be peace.

01:37:52 – 01:37:58:	And while it's not desirable, I think the fact that the feds are performing those sorts of cover-ups, that's a subject for another day.

01:37:58 – 01:38:01:	But it's also a matter of us understanding the score.

01:38:03 – 01:38:05:	God is not a god of disorder.

01:38:05 – 01:38:08:	Wherever you see disorder, you are seeing Satan on the march.

01:38:09 – 01:38:11:	And that's most of what we see in the world today.

01:38:11 – 01:38:14:	Anywhere you look, near and far, we see disorder.

01:38:14 – 01:38:18:	You must always know that where you see disorder, it is anti-God.

01:38:18 – 01:38:20:	It is anti-Christ.

01:38:20 – 01:38:22:	You will never see disorder where God reigns.

01:38:24 – 01:38:32:	Back to the beginning point, that doesn't mean that the person pulling the fire alarm and saying, hey, this is bad, that's not the source of disorder.

01:38:33 – 01:38:35:	The source of disorder is who created it.

01:38:36 – 01:38:44:	It's not that there are Somalis 6,000 miles from where they belong, and then someone points and says, why are there Somalis 6,000 miles from where they belong?

01:38:44 – 01:38:45:	That's not the creation of disorder.

01:38:46 – 01:38:50:	It's the people who put them on a plane to ship them someplace they don't belong.

01:38:50 – 01:38:52:	That was the beginning of the creation of disorder.

01:38:52 – 01:38:54:	That's contrary to peace, that's contrary to God.

01:38:55 – 01:39:01:	And that thing which is a geopolitical issue then becomes a very local issue for many of us.

01:39:02 – 01:39:07:	There are people who are fleeing states, they've been destroyed by that sort of deliberate political subversion.

01:39:08 – 01:39:14:	It's deliberate destruction of communities, of the very nearest circle in our lives.

01:39:15 – 01:39:20:	And it's part of the reason why everyone is saying violence is never a solution and we must always have peace.

01:39:20 – 01:39:23:	Well, they're crying peace, peace where there is no peace.

01:39:24 – 01:39:32:	Things that are anti-God, things that are anti-order, that are disordered and violent, are being artificially placed in our midst.

01:39:32 – 01:39:36:	And then we're told to calm down and say, this is a wonderful gospel opportunity.

01:39:36 – 01:39:39:	No, it's a threat to your family, it's a threat to your community.

01:39:40 – 01:39:48:	And the duties that we have to try to act peacefully, to behave peacefully, to behave in accord with God, the enemy gets a vote.

01:39:49 – 01:39:51:	And we still have duties when that time comes.

01:39:53 – 01:39:59:	So to wrap up, we're just going to talk briefly about the direct spiritual connotations of God's peace.

01:40:00 – 01:40:09:	As Corey said at the beginning, there's an eschatological nature to the peace of God, which is different from what we experience in this life.

01:40:10 – 01:40:15:	The important distinction there is that we can experience the peace of God as Christians.

01:40:15 – 01:40:16:	It's not entirely alien to us.

01:40:17 – 01:40:21:	It's just that we don't fully and completely and exclusively enjoy it.

01:40:22 – 01:40:31:	So last year in the Fear of the Lord episode, I mentioned at the end that I described one of the times when I had a stroke, and I mentioned that it was fine.

01:40:31 – 01:40:32:	It was a severe stroke.

01:40:33 – 01:40:35:	It was a very serious medical emergency.

01:40:35 – 01:40:38:	It could have crippled me for life, and I wasn't worried about it.

01:40:38 – 01:40:46:	And the specific point of recounting that story was that it's an illustration of the peace of God that's given by faith.

01:40:46 – 01:41:14:	And the only reason I shared it is to share the peace of God with others, to point out that when you take these things seriously, when you believe the theoretical, when you believe the principles, the lofty goals, concretely in your mind and in your heart, but not when push comes to shove, then in those sorts of moments where you maybe are facing something that's like threatening or an immediate medical emergency, family crisis, something bad is going to happen to you at some point.

01:41:15 – 01:41:15:	Spoiler alert.

01:41:16 – 01:41:17:	People are going to be hurt.

01:41:17 – 01:41:18:	People are going to die.

01:41:18 – 01:41:19:	You're going to get sick.

01:41:19 – 01:41:20:	You're going to die.

01:41:20 – 01:41:22:	It's going to be a hardship.

01:41:22 – 01:41:28:	And when those moments come, God's peace needs to be with us, even when there's no other peace in this life.

01:41:28 – 01:41:32:	Maybe the only peace that we have left is God's peace.

01:41:32 – 01:41:46:	And so we went here in scripture specifically focusing on that because all the things that matter in politics and even in the home, all the things that we have under our control to some extent, we're still mortal creatures.

01:41:47 – 01:41:48:	We are not omnipotent.

01:41:48 – 01:41:50:	We can't fix anything.

01:41:50 – 01:41:52:	We can do the best that we can.

01:41:52 – 01:41:53:	We can obey God.

01:41:54 – 01:41:56:	And we trust the rest in His hands.

01:41:56 – 01:41:58:	And He'll take care of it as He sees fit.

01:41:59 – 01:42:06:	And so when your day comes, when my day comes, we should have the peace of God which passes all understanding.

01:42:07 – 01:42:14:	So a couple of passages I want to just read briefly just to reiterate what Scripture says so we don't neglect God's word.

01:42:15 – 01:42:20:	In John 14, Jesus says, These things I have spoken to you while I'm with you.

01:42:20 – 01:42:27:	But the helper, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring you to remembrance all that I have said to you.

01:42:27 – 01:42:29:	Peace I leave with you.

01:42:29 – 01:42:30:	My peace I give to you.

01:42:31 – 01:42:33:	Not as the world gives do I give to you.

01:42:33 – 01:42:36:	Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

01:42:37 – 01:42:41:	And two chapters later, Jesus also says, Do you now believe?

01:42:42 – 01:42:43:	Behold, the hour is coming.

01:42:43 – 01:42:44:	Indeed, it has come.

01:42:44 – 01:42:48:	When you will be scattered, each to his own home and will leave me alone.

01:42:48 – 01:42:50:	Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.

01:42:51 – 01:42:54:	I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.

01:42:54 – 01:42:58:	In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart, I have overcome the world.

01:43:00 – 01:43:04:	So this is important for Christians to understand where we're anchoring our peace.

01:43:05 – 01:43:17:	If you anchor it in your personal philosophy, or you anchor it in your physical fitness, or your diet, or your great political opinions, all those things are going to come up short.

01:43:17 – 01:43:19:	They will absolutely come up short.

01:43:20 – 01:43:33:	When you anchor your belief and your confidence in God in receiving His peace through the gift of the Holy Spirit that God promises, through faith you will have eternal peace, and you'll also have a measure of it in this life.

01:43:34 – 01:43:40:	You know, when we did the episode on normalcy bias, talked to some length about Admiral Stockdale.

01:43:41 – 01:43:45:	James Stockdale, when he was a POW, he was at peace because he was a Christian.

01:43:45 – 01:43:52:	He was able to be an anchor for the men around him by having unwavering faith in God no matter what.

01:43:53 – 01:43:57:	He knew that no matter how bad things got, God was still with them.

01:43:58 – 01:44:04:	And he didn't know how it was going to end, but he knew his duties were to his men and to his wife at home and to his country.

01:44:04 – 01:44:07:	And he never wavered from that because of his faith in God.

01:44:09 – 01:44:12:	That sort of resolute faith can only come externally.

01:44:13 – 01:44:14:	That's not simply a matter of character.

01:44:15 – 01:44:16:	It's not simply a matter of training.

01:44:17 – 01:44:19:	It has to be a gift that we receive and then we cultivate.

01:44:20 – 01:44:25:	And you cultivate it by thinking about it, by meditating on it, by studying God's word, by praying for it.

01:44:25 – 01:44:27:	If you lack in that, pray for more.

01:44:27 – 01:44:29:	God will give it to you.

01:44:30 – 01:44:33:	Don't waste your time thinking about things that aren't doing you any good.

01:44:33 – 01:44:36:	Think about the things that God has promised to bless you.

01:44:37 – 01:44:38:	And these are chief among them.

01:44:39 – 01:44:40:	There are a lot of young guys listening.

01:44:41 – 01:44:45:	There are those among you who may never get wives, as screwed up as this world is.

01:44:46 – 01:44:48:	Everyone is facing some manner of hardship.

01:44:49 – 01:44:50:	I don't say that to be black billing.

01:44:50 – 01:44:54:	I pray for every one of you to get what you want in his life.

01:44:56 – 01:45:00:	And yet at the same time, our confidence and our peace has to come from God.

01:45:00 – 01:45:04:	It can be, well, if I get the thing that makes me happy, then I'm going to be okay.

01:45:04 – 01:45:09:	You will never get enough things to make you as happy as God's peace will make you.

01:45:10 – 01:45:16:	That external sense of peace, a very real one, it's not just some woo-woo spiritual thing.

01:45:17 – 01:45:22:	The absolute confidence in God as God transcends everything else.

01:45:22 – 01:45:32:	And it makes dealing with things like the family and the community and the nation and geopolitics a whole lot easier, because what you have in front of you then is simply duty.

01:45:33 – 01:45:37:	I know God, I know what he wants from me, I'm going to do my best and he's going to take care of the rest.

01:45:38 – 01:45:39:	It's very simple to say.

01:45:40 – 01:45:42:	It's a lot harder to get there spiritually and intellectually.

01:45:43 – 01:45:58:	And so, you know, the discussion of violence and the context for all these things, it is ultimately an encouragement and an exhortation to seek and to desire God's peace in this life and most importantly in eternity.

01:45:58 – 01:46:04:	I'll leave you with one last passage from 1 Peter 3 where he quotes Psalm 34.

01:46:04 – 01:46:12:	Peter writes, Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart and a humble mind.

01:46:12 – 01:46:20:	Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless for it is you who are called that you may obtain a blessing.

01:46:21 – 01:46:28:	For whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit.

01:46:28 – 01:46:30:	Let him turn away from evil and do good.

01:46:30 – 01:46:32:	Let him seek peace and pursue it.

01:46:33 – 01:46:40:	For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.

01:46:43 – 01:46:59:	To the scripture that Woe just read, I will add four brief selections from Proverbs, and they essentially go in reverse order, as it were, of the locations or spheres that we covered in this episode, starting then with the church.

01:47:00 – 01:47:10:	My son, do not forget my teachings, but keep my commands in your heart, for they will prolong your life many years and bring you peace and prosperity.

01:47:12 – 01:47:18:	Deceit is in the hearts of those who plot evil, but those who promote peace have joy.

01:47:20 – 01:47:25:	When the Lord takes pleasure in anyone's way, he causes their enemies to make peace with them.

01:47:26 – 01:47:31:	Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting with strife.

01:47:34 – 01:47:46:	And so I want to return to where we started this episode really, distinguishing between the temporal and the eternal, between the relative and the absolute.

01:47:48 – 01:48:07:	With regard to the things of this life, and they are important, so do not listen to the false teachers who say that we can simply ignore the problems in the world, ignore the things that go wrong in life, because we have a better future, we have a celestial city, we have paradise to which to look forward.

01:48:09 – 01:48:26:	While that is true, it does not negate the fact that we live in this world, we live here and now, and we have certain duties in this life, given us by God, made abundantly clear in His Word, and also in His creation, in some cases.

01:48:29 – 01:48:35:	But temporal peace, earthly peace, is always going to be relative, because it will not be perfect.

01:48:35 – 01:48:38:	It cannot be perfect in a fallen world.

01:48:38 – 01:48:50:	And so you can have a peaceful home, you can have a peaceful society, you can even have a peaceful state, or even peaceful international relations at some points in history.

01:48:51 – 01:48:52:	But it will never be perfect.

01:48:52 – 01:48:59:	There will always be some strife, and there will always be suffering, because we live in a fallen world.

01:49:00 – 01:49:10:	Every man listening to this podcast will one day die, and yes, every woman as well, because we are all mortal, because we are fallen.

01:49:12 – 01:49:19:	And so the peace of this life, in this life, with regard to earthly things, is relative.

01:49:20 – 01:49:26:	But the peace with regard to eschatological things, with regard to the things of God, is absolute.

01:49:27 – 01:49:42:	That peace is eternal, because that peace deals with the promises of God with regard not just to the life to come, but with regard to what he will do for us in this life, because he promises to be with us.

01:49:43 – 01:49:46:	He promises that his peace will be with us in this life.

01:49:47 – 01:49:53:	These are promises on which we can count, because they come from God and God cannot and does not lie.

01:49:54 – 01:49:59:	We can believe every single word that God has spoken, that God has relayed to us.

01:50:00 – 01:50:03:	All of his promises inevitably come true.

01:50:04 – 01:50:11:	And so that sort of peace is absolute, because the promises of God are absolute.

01:50:12 – 01:50:15:	Because God is perfect, God does not lie.

01:50:15 – 01:50:28:	These are the things on which we can rely, regardless of what may come in this life, regardless of what strife or suffering we may experience, regardless of what may happen to our nation, our society, even our homes.

01:50:29 – 01:50:32:	We can always rely on these promises of God.

01:50:32 – 01:50:34:	And so that is the right way to frame this.

01:50:35 – 01:50:41:	Rely on those promises of God, with regard not just to the next life, but also this life.

01:50:43 – 01:51:05:	Even when there is still suffering and strife, even when earthly peace is disrupted, you can have peace, a sort of eternal peace, that absolute peace that is founded upon, that rests on the things of God, even when there is no peace, with regard to this temporal life.

01:51:07 – 01:51:10:	That is what it means to have trust in God.

01:51:11 – 01:51:14:	That is what it means to have a Christian faith.

01:51:15 – 01:51:20:	You trust in God, you believe the things that God has said, and so come what may.

01:51:21 – 01:51:23:	To the Christian, does it matter?

01:51:23 – 01:51:36:	Yes, because you still live in this world, but in another sense, no, because you know that God will see you through it, because God has promised that everything will work together for the good, for those who love him.

01:51:36 – 01:51:41:	And of course, you can only love God if he has given you that free gift of faith.

01:51:41 – 01:51:43:	And so it's not a work.

01:51:43 – 01:51:47:	It's not that if you love God enough, God will do these things for you.

01:51:48 – 01:52:03:	No, what that verse is saying is that God has given you faith, and because he has given you faith, and because he first loved you, you can love him, and therefore he has promised that he will see you through whatever comes in this life.

01:52:04 – 01:52:16:	That is an absolute sense of peace that we can have, regardless of what may come, regardless if the days continue to get worse, or perhaps God will turn them around and we will see better days.

01:52:17 – 01:52:24:	As that verse in Proverbs said, when the Lord takes pleasure in anyone's way, he causes their enemies to make peace with them.

01:52:25 – 01:52:30:	There is still the possibility that God can turn things around, that there could be better days ahead.

01:52:31 – 01:52:37:	That doesn't mean that we're Pollyanna, we're paying loss, that we think that, well, everything will just turn out well.

01:52:38 – 01:52:46:	No, as Christians, and particularly as Christian men, we have duties in this life to work toward God's peace in this world.

01:52:47 – 01:52:53:	That is the temporal peace, that is the relative peace, because again, we live in a fallen world.

01:52:53 – 01:53:04:	But at the same time, we have, we already have, we have possession of that absolute peace because God has promised it to us as His adopted children.

01:53:05 – 01:53:13:	And we can rely on that in life and death, in strife and suffering, regardless of whether the days are good or evil.

01:53:14 – 01:53:19:	We can rely on the promises of God because God does not lie and He has never failed.

01:53:22 – 01:53:34:	And so we will leave you in this episode with perhaps the most famous blessing, the most well-known blessing, certainly to those who attend liturgical services, but the most well-known blessing in Scripture.

01:53:36 – 01:53:38:	The Lord bless you and keep you.

01:53:38 – 01:53:42:	The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

01:53:42 – 01:53:46:	The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.

01:53:47 – 01:53:48:	Amen.