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The Politics of Jesus

2025/4/19
logo of podcast David Gornoski

David Gornoski

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I appreciate you guys having me. And I came from Florida, so it's great to be with you all again. This is my third time being here. And we've had some wins since I last spoke to you. Remember, I told you guys to write down seed oils. And now we have an HHS secretary who's very much against seed oils. You see how things can change very quickly, right? So, you know, now Steak and Shake. Have you seen their news? What'd they say they're going to do? Did you hear about Steak and Shake? Do you guys have Steak and Shake around here?

What do you guys have? It's like one? That's what we have. Well, they've announced that they're doing, getting rid of all their seed oils, toxic, and they're going to move them to beef tallow, right? Beef fat.

So things can move fast, right? You know, but there's some other wins we've had. We've had Trump come in there and he's talked about the golden age, which is what I was going to talk to you guys about. But I appreciate you having me here. So I'm going to try to talk briefly about the politics of Jesus. Have you ever wondered what Jesus would do? Would Jesus wonder what the Alabama legislature is going to do to save their lives? Is that what he would do? Would Jesus sit around asking what committee is going to help save us? Come on, what are we doing?

We don't want these smart cities. These cities are going to go to hell, right? But the Bible wants us to build a city.

The Bible begins in a garden and it ends in a city. The Genesis starts us in the garden and then Revelation, we have the city within a garden. So we're supposed to be building something, right? And that's what's important is that you understand what your calling is as a Christian. And that means that we're not waiting around for politicians to save us. If you're doing that, you're not doing Jesus.

I'm going to say that again. If you are waiting around for politicians to save your life, you are not following Jesus Christ. You're not. They can't do it. Donald Trump can't do it. He can only do so much. He's going to do what he's going to do. But to rest your laurels, and I have to applaud you.

I was expecting a smaller turnout because Trump won. Your guys are supposed to be asleep right now. So thank you for coming out. That means you really care about your people. And that's a testament to the work that she's done here, that she's cultivated a group that wants to get to work even when maybe their guy gets in, right? So hats off to you, but there's work to be done. We can't just sit around here and wait for the legislatures to get their head out of their sand. They're not going to do that.

They're not going to do that. This is a human nature problem. It's a structural problem. Democracy was not what the founders wanted. The founding fathers understood the dangers of democracy. It'll swallow up everything. We've destroyed our republic, what you were talking about.

They wanted to limit democracy as much as possible because a democracy out of control creates a mob that doesn't have any sense about it, just swims in the whims. It moves this way, it moves that way, and all it has to have is tickled ears to go off into wicked wars, spending trillions of dollars. That's what we've been doing.

We've destroyed our liberty. Why are we expecting the government to tell us how to build our homes? What kind of material we can use? What kind of energy we can use? How to measure it? We've given them so much control. And then we've said, you've been given God idolatrous levels of power. Please do something good with that. Why would they do that? Think about what we're asking. You give them God level powers, then they're mine. It's not.

And he said, do something righteous with all this power we idolatrously gave you, please.

My guy's good. Look, every politician, you get them off. It's like Bugs Bunny. You know how they get in a fight in cartoons, Looney Tunes, and they get into a little storm cloud, you know? Then Bugs Bunny will come out and he'll look at the camera like, what those guys doing, right? Well, he was in that. That's kind of like politicians. You pluck them out of that little mess of the legislature where they can hide and they'll say, yeah, those guys are a bunch of scoundrels, aren't they?

Why can't we just start following the Constitution? They always say that. Then they go back in that little cloud and I can't get these guys to think straight. I'm going to go try it again. And he goes in that little cloud and you're like, whatever's going on in there is not working, right? And no matter what you do, it doesn't get really much better. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't give up. There's always something that you can happen, as I just mentioned.

I mean, right before the election, I had Dr. Ron Paul. I mean, everything that's been the best about Trump's campaign was stuff he took from Ron Paul. Ron Paul said no tax on tips back in 2008, before it was cool. Fox News would let him on the polls. He would put them all the way at the far end of the stage. They would laugh at him when he said not one more dollar to any country, including Israel.

You know, he didn't want to subsidize what they were doing with Jeffrey Epstein. You know, why would he? You know, that's wicked. We've lost our way, but we're coming awake. We're starting to wake up. We have to channel that right into the right action, right? So let's go and look into Scripture. You know how they say in Wednesday night Bible service, if you have your Bibles with you.

He didn't bring it this time, did he? But that's always, always say that. They always say, if you have your Bible's turn, it's like, did you bring it? You know, that's not shown if you're, but of course, you know, you don't have to have it today. And I don't, I don't want to make this too much of a in-depth Bible study, but I do want to give us some scripture to give us some guidance about what Jesus would do. So yeah, I just to kind of wrap up some of the headlines, I wanted to say some praise reports.

So right before the election, I had Ron Paul on my show. It was Halloween. And I said, God, why you broke, you know, I wanted him on a Tuesday. And his staff said he can do Thursday. This is right before November 2nd or whatever the third, whatever the election day was. Fifth, right? November 5th.

And I said, why did you put them to Thursday? They said, he can't do Tuesday. He can do Thursday. That's Halloween. And so I said, well, the Halloween traditionally in the church tradition was the day in which people mocked evil, right? They mocked. They said that Jesus had defeated all the powers, all the wicked spirits, and they're mocking like a show to show that all the spirits have been conquered.

I thought, okay, so what's that mean? So I said, the one thing I want to ask Ron Paul, he's been in Congress since the 70s, he's now retired, he's 89 years old, still smarter than any of the politicians half his age. I said, you know, Elon says that he wants to cut a trillion dollars if he gets in charge, if Trump wins, you know, the Doge, Department of Government Efficiency. I said, would you be willing to help him? And Ron's very humble.

because he understands the biblical principle that we don't need a king to run our lives. Like 1 Samuel talks about, God says, you don't need a king. He's going to tax you 10%. That was a lot back then. You're lucky if they leave you 10% after all the inflation and everything today, right? But back then, you can tell God was limited government at least. He said, come on, watch out. They're going to take 10% of everything you got.

But Ron understood that principle. So he would run and he would tell the crowd, I don't want to run your life. I don't know how to. I don't want to run the world. I don't know how to. That's a Christian way of talking about power. Recognizing the humility of a servant leader who says, I'm going to use this power to steward and judge and discern righteously. We didn't want that.

We prefer the showmanship. That's where Donald Trump comes along. But God uses showmen to do good things. And it's a grace that God, but it's a message to us of where we need to get that it takes someone with braggadocio and showmanship and alpha swagger to get us to listen to the great principles that Trump is advocating that echoes some of the things that Ron Paul was foreshadowing with his campaign.

Like I said, no tax on tips, Ron Paul. No tax on Social Security benefits, that was Ron Paul.

get rid of the income tax, have massive cuts, and then replace the difference with tariffs. That was something Ron Paul said in his presidential campaign. All the best things about no war, be skeptical of the FBI, the CIA. Ron was saying that. He was getting booed and hissed by the team, even parts of the Tea Party, even the Republican Party. They wanted John McCain. They wanted Mitt Romney. And then Trump came along, and he knew how to give that sizzle

Because the crowd wants an alpha male. And Ron was humble. When people would interrupt him on the stage, Christians would say, he's not strong. But what is it that means strength in the Christian mind, right? What were our values really all about? If he wouldn't interrupt somebody else, if somebody interrupted him, he'd sit quiet. He was a person that was not attractive to the crowd.

The crowd wants that earthly power. But God can take that and he can still do righteous things as Trump seems to be doing. Let's hope that he stays away from those who are whispering in his ear to start a war with Iran. That can quickly get out of control. If you look at that scene that the Houthis are supposedly, we got to go get our boys involved with that.

You know, China and other countries are getting more out of that little area than we are. But why do we have to always do their dirty work? Why is it that our children have to be used as sacrificial fodder anytime the globalists need some cleanup on aisle seven? That's disgusting. We ought to stop it. But all this has to go back to who are we really trusting in? Do we trust in the kings and princes and the principalities of this world? Or do we trust in the way of Christ? So let's look into this.

some Bible passages. Let's start with, I'm going to look at Luke 19, 37 and following. When he came near, this is Jesus coming into Jerusalem. When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen. Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord. They're quoting prophets.

They're quoting their great prophets that they've been waiting for the chosen one to arrive. And they think that Jesus is the one. He's the hero. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, teacher, rebuke your disciples. And he says in 40, I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out. Now, this is interesting.

Because when I heard that passage growing up, I typically thought of it was kind of like he was saying, well, look, if the people don't like me, I can make the earth sing my name, right? That's not what's going on here, actually. If you look at this passage, it's referencing another prophet, Habakkuk. We're going to get to that for a second.

Jesus is making a prophecy here. He's actually making a prophecy. It's an allusion to an earlier prophet who is dealing with corrupt kings of his time, and that's Habakkuk. And I want to continue on just to give a little more context. As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, if you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes.

The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground and you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. Now, what's interesting here about this is

is that when you look at this word talking about children within your walls, the Bible and the Gospels are very filled with lots of double entendres. There's deeper, you know, there's layers and layers of meaning because it's supernaturally inspired. So it's the greatest work of literature you could ever, it's going to have so much literary merit, even though these are real events, it's written with literary meaning that's impacting multiple layers of truth.

Children within your walls can mean children living within the walls of Jerusalem. But it also is a reference to a practice that Habakkuk, who he quotes in that passage, was dealing with in his time, which is the practice that's a technical term we call immurement. It's a weird word, immurement. Sounds like something the IRS wants you to report. This is an immurement policy.

Immurement was the ribbon cutting ceremony of cities. We talked about smart cities. This is a continuation, a futuristic continuation of what immurement was. So when you would do, now this is gonna get a little bit graphic, but in the ancient societies around the world, when you would have inauguration of a new city or a new walls or a new river, a bridge or a temple, they would lay a living sacrifice, oftentimes a child,

at the foundation, and they would put the stone, the first stone, on top of that person. Sometimes it could be a 15-year-old girl. They did this in Japan in the 1800s. They were still doing it because that's how pagan and isolated they were from the gospel. But this practice was being practiced all over the world.

And in Jesus' time, the Jews of his time were always wrestling with this contradiction between what God chose them to do, and yet they're flirting with paganism and the sacrificial rituals that were going on. And so they had been having this problem all along.

Whoring after other gods meant laying down sacrifices in different ways, including immurement. Now, the process of immurement is important because there's all kinds of sacrificial rituals, but the immurement process is the way you start a new city or a new temple. It's the consecration. So when Jesus said, if they keep quiet, the crowd is chanting his name, the stones will cry out. This is tied to what he's saying when he says,

that if you had known, but what would bring you peace? What would bring you peace? We often look over that. He actually wanted them to choose the way of peace. And what was the way of peace? It was everything he said and did leading up to this moment. When the Romans go after you for a mile, go an extra mile. Don't fight them because you see, Jesus had zealots. Peter, by the way, was wrestling with zealots.

political ideology. A zealot was someone who wanted to go and get violence back at the government.

And so he had zealots on one side and he had people who were collaborators with the Romans, the sellouts. That would be the establishment politicians and Republicans and Democrats of today that just, you know, always told, oh yeah, we're going to cut your taxes and then they're selling us out left and right. He had to deal with both. And he did a whole new path that didn't get anybody what they wanted. We weren't going to do revolutionary violence and we weren't going to be selling out. We're going to follow Jesus' way. And that's what he's talking about, that Jerusalem could have been spared.

from what was coming. What was coming? We know what happened. Jesus staked his entire earthly ministry's credibility on what event. He kept saying it's going to happen. He said, you will know that I'm sent from God when this event happens. And that was the destruction of the temple, which happened historically in front of everybody's eyes. Nobody disputes that the temple was destroyed in 70 AD.

And it was destroyed because zealots, who he was trying to get them to see the way of Christ, which is nonviolence, which is the way of the cross, that that was the way of the heavenly way of redeeming the earth. That's the only way that would ever work. And that's what he said. If you had only known the ways of peace, because he knew what was coming, he was going to be executed.

And instead, they were gonna choose the zealot path, which would cause Rome to utterly destroy the temple. But Rome, when they destroyed the temple, that temple was never rebuilt because the new temple is Jesus Christ's body, which was resurrected three days after, or whatever people say about the days. It was a resurrection that was God's vindication of Jesus's temple, which is one not built by human hands and violence,

but one that is of living self-sacrifice, not sacrifice of the other. So this is the key to understanding the way of Jesus. You can do sacrifice of somebody else,

Or you can do self-sacrifice. Self-giving, that's what Jesus does on the cross. Or you can do, well, I'm going to sacrifice my kids, or I'm going to sacrifice them with these dangerous drugs, or I'm going to sacrifice and put the blame on these people, or we're going to send those people off to war. Sacrificing somebody else.

for the gods of the principalities of this world? Or are we going to self-sacrifice and say, I'm giving up on that false god. I'm going to follow Jesus. So let's go to what Habakkuk was saying. So he's quoting Habakkuk chapter 2, who says, Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain. Does that sound like what we're doing still today? Setting his nest on high to escape the clutches of ruin. You have plotted the ruin of many peoples.

People are displaced all over the world because we have idolatrously handed over power to human beings rather than following the way of peace that Christ inaugurated 2,000 years ago. Vietnam, wars all over the place. Look what happened to Dresden, even World War II. That's supposed to be the good war? 55,000 civilians murdered.

In Dresden, they were just innocent civilians, just had the wrong ethnicity. That's sacrificial violence. That's not Christ. And that's what our government was doing. So we have been being used with this false sense of patriotism. And I have issues even with the Pledge of Allegiance because the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. We can look it up.

And I know people's intentions are good so that God honors our intentions. But even that has its own corrosive effect when you swear allegiance to kings. Because when that flag flies over the latest abortion advancement in Africa, where our government says, you want our American money? You better abort your kids or trans their children.

That's a flag that doesn't need to be aligned with our hearts. We don't pledge allegiance to that when it does that. And Francis Bellamy was a socialist. That's why he created that. He wanted to get us to have more of a socialist mindset when we think of patriotism. But Habakkuk chapter two goes on to say just what Jesus said. The stones of the wall will cry out and the beams of the woodwork will echo it. Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice. That's what Jesus was quoting there.

Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people's labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? Now this is the good news. For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So the knowledge of the Lord will flourish when the stones cry out.

So that's actually what happened when Jesus predicted that. When he said that they will be silent, the stones will cry out, he's fulfilling Habakkuk right here, which means he fulfills everything you see with that statement. Woe to him who builds the city with bloodshed. The people that were persecuting Jesus were doing so in the name of Yahweh. And they thought they were wholly different from the pagan polluters of the Romans and everybody around them, Samaritans.

But what they didn't want to reveal was that they were excluding and scapegoating and sacrificing the leper, the main. That's what he was doing his whole ministry. He was showing that all of that same pagan impulse to sacrifice the weak, the misfit, the downtrodden, they were still doing it while still trying to go to the temple and say that they truly had the representation of God.

And so Jesus is saying here that when they're silent, which the next week that crowd that was praising his name is silent. They don't come to his aid, do they? They only speak when it's to crucify, crucify, right? It says the stones will cry out, meaning the hidden victims of their society will now start to be echoing throughout history and everywhere the gospel goes. And that's why today,

The wicked have to hide in the name of victims to keep their violence going. Satan's system, in other words, is on the run.

It's like a hermit crab. It always has to get to a new shell. And each shell that the little hermit crab Satan is running and hiding under is a shell that looks more and more like an innocent slain lamb. That's what Revelation is about. And at the end of that, when you see the slain lamb, right, hidden since the foundation of the world, and all the kings are going against it, they're going against Satan.

The fact that they cannot continue their game of might makes right and sacrifice without trying to hide it. We're doing this for the poor trans child or we're doing this for your grandma. That's why we have to lock down people and destroy all the businesses and give trillions to the corporations. It's for grandma.

Do you think they had to do that in Roman times when Jesus was around? Did they have to say, well, we're doing this because we want to help the little people. They didn't have to do that. That's because of how effective Christ has been at unmasking and showing the wickedness of governmental powers. They have to ever play this ever losing game of hiding under the image of a slain lamb. Look at the wars today. Look at what Gaza and Israel is all about.

Both of those sides have to show my side has more slain children. See my video? And then the other one says, no, mine has more victims. And the other one says, no, mine has more victims. Did they have to do that 2,000 years ago? No.

Because Jesus' kingdom has been advancing that much so that Satan cannot just do what he used to do. He has to try to pretend that there's old 1990s Batman movie where Michael Keaton's Batman has Jack Nicholson's Joker on the run. He's about to finish him off, and he's out of ideas. He's like, I've tried everything. He puts on glasses. You wouldn't hit a man with glasses, would you? He just hits him right there.

And that's a mirror, it's an image of what I'm talking about, that Satan has to come in the look of Greta Thunberg, right? A little Scandinavian girl, hello, how dare you? That's how desperate Satan is to keep the game going because he has to play within Christ's game, which is that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

You see, Jesus is winning. It doesn't work on our timescale because we are the slowest team in history for him to work with.

He's the greatest captain in the world, but he's got the sorriest team. Remember the 90s, all those movies, like Fighting the Giants and Mighty Ducks, all those movies about the misfit team that couldn't win, and they had the little plucky coach who was an underdog, and there was the heavy kid, there was the little kid, there was the nerd kid, but somehow, someway, he was able to get their team spirit to win. That's what the church is like, you know?

We don't want to do it. We still want to go chase after political power. If Donald Trump came in, we'd all get excited. Why? Why? Why? Because we still want that fleshly sense of power. And that's okay. It doesn't mean you should hate yourself for it. It's just we're humans.

But we should always look to see what Jesus says and how Jesus deals with his political situation. We have the Epstein Island thing. Are we ever going to know the truth about all the people there? That FBI and all them, they scrubbed that place clean. You know, it wasn't just that island and it wasn't just Jeffrey. Jeffrey was just a cut out one of a million. I mean, not a million, hopefully, but I mean, it was just a dime a dozen.

And, you know, the fact that, you know, you got people like Pam Bondi, our former attorney general, I don't think she knows to go. She's not going to go too far with, you know, active intelligence agencies and politicians. And why do they all vote the way they do? Why does Rick Scott have a foreign power flag behind him, not an American flag when he's doing his addresses? And then you wonder what will happen to those tapes?

You see, we, you know, and how does, how does, so what does, so what does that mean? That means that Satan's on the run, but while he is always cornered, because humans have free choice, it's not on autopilot. You're not watching a movie. We have to do something and we can do it better. And there's gradients of worse.

And we tend to choose the worst, but every now and then we do something really good. So if we would all just focus on what actually Jesus does, because you think that the Romans and folks who were running his town, do you think they were doing child trafficking and things worse? Okay. Now, did he start a violent revolution to stop it? Peter tempted him to do. When he heard that Jesus was going to go on the cross, he said, no.

Let it not be so that you die on a cross. We got a political revolution to go. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. You do not speak the things of God, but the things of man. What does the word Satan there mean? It means accuser. He's saying, why are you tempting me with earthly power? See, that all ties back into the ways of peace that he's lamenting and crying over Jerusalem that they would not follow. They're still going after the ways of the world.

Psalm 2.1, I'm gonna go through a few more just to show you this point. Psalm 2.1, why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed saying, let us break their bonds and pieces and cast away their cords from us. This is one of the first things that Peter talks about and acts when they've just now gotten the truth about what Jesus was all about.

Peter was missing it the whole time. In fact, he was doing something that the zealots, which was a violent revolution, was doing. You know, the story where Jesus is being arrested and, you know, Peter takes out a sword, right? And he slices the man's ear, Telemachus, who was the high priest's chief servant. So he was the high priest-in-waiting.

And the zealot movement back then, there was a law in their tradition that they all kept in the people that if you were missing a limb, you could never serve as a priest. And so when you see, you know, you wonder, why is he chopping the ear off? Well, the Bible wants you to think about that, right? You know, Peter is Jesus's right hand man, and Jesus is the true high priest.

Caiaphas is the false high priest, and he's got his little Peter double, his little Robin, you know, Batman and Robin. He's got his little sidekick, Telemachus, and Peter's his sidekick. And so, you know, Caiaphas wants the high priest that's real to be killed, like the sacrificial scapegoat in Leviticus. He's going to play that role out. And Peter's like, no, I still don't want to do this this way. We need to do a revolution. We've got the numbers. We did a poll. We think we can win this. So he grabs a sword and boom.

takes off the guy's ear. And what is that telling? Faith comes by what? Hearing. So when Peter's looking at his double, what's he seeing? A man that doesn't have an ear to hear. You're not listening.

Those who live by the sword die by the sword. That's why he says that. You're not hearing the faith that I'm trying to get you to see, but he does see it. And so that's why he says in one of his first addresses in Acts, you spoke, he's talking about God, by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David. Why do the nations rage and the people's plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one. They did that on the cross and Jesus defeated them.

That's what it means when we say Satan fell like lightning. Their way of having power, the accuser way, has fallen like lightning with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And we have work to do using the same principles that Jesus did. What did he do? He always pushed nonviolence. And I know that conservatives don't like that. A lot of conservatives don't like that because they want, I got my gun.

Jesus says, turn your other cheek, but you tie that with me. It's a funny thing, right? But the thing is, it's okay to laugh at our human frailty and so forth, but there's a little bit of idolatry there if you think about it. Jesus says, turn your other cheek, but I don't have to do it. Well, then you're not a Christian. Okay, I don't care which prayer you've said. If you don't want to imitate the entire purpose of his message, you're not following Jesus. That's hard.

That's hard because we want to hide behind our gun culture. I'm not saying the government should have nothing to touch our guns. I get it, right? But at the same time, we should idolize our guns. He just said, those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Did he mean, but if you have a gun, you can live by that. That's okay. No, come on. What Bible are we thinking? First Kings chapter 16, verse 34. I want to just show that this practice of sacrifice at the foundation was something that they were wrestling with in that community. Jericho, by the way, is very close to Jerusalem. In his day, and this is back thousands of years before the temple scene I just talked about.

In his days, Hiel of Bethel built Jericho. He laid its foundation with Abraham, his firstborn, and with his youngest son, Segub. Now, Segub had it worse than the first because he already knew what was going on. So he's next. Segub, he sets up at its gates according to the word of the Lord, which he had spoken through Joshua, the son of Nun. Does that mean God was on favor of that?

Why is God talking about that? And why is it that that practice is called to mind by Habakkuk and then Jesus calls it to mind? Were they laying child sacrifice? That's what I mean by children within your walls. It means not only children alive within the barrier of the wall, but children within the walls. And it says that their voices are crying out.

And we know that no matter where we go in history, the whole world, when the gospel spreads, they have to account for their sacrificial victims. The more China becomes Christian, the more they have to account for the sacrificial victims of their past and their present. The more we become, you know, that's why the West is so self-flagellating. We are so haunted by our victims, we can't see straight.

Because we're going, again, in a satanic way of becoming obsessed with victimism or political correctness. But we talk about all the caskets of our victims. The Native Americans, right? The civil rights movement. The whole museum. We are talking about, does Japan have a civil rights museum equivalent about their victims of their indigenous people? Not yet, but they will the more Christian they become.

And they are becoming more Christian because they continue to emulate the West because they want to be like the West. Just like Donald Trump makes us want to follow some of the anti-war stuff he says because he has the strong machismo. Japan looks at America and says, wow, they're the big guys. I want to aspire to be like them. And while they do that, God uses the gospel that's in our hearts, even though it's not practiced well, to still infect their culture by imitation. That's how God spreads his gospel today.

message, the vindication of the slain lamb is spreading all over the world. That's why Habakkuk says, when the stones cry out, the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth as the ocean is wet. That's exactly what we see going on right now. We are haunted by the voices of all the victims. USS Liberty, we weren't even allowed to talk about that. Now Tucker Carlson and so forth have made that okay to talk about. USS Liberty.

where Israel was bombing and terrorizing, killing all of our soldiers and then saying, oh, we did it on accident. We thought you're, they had an Israeli flag, they had an American flag, and they did that. They were trying to start a war. And that happens over and over again in other conflicts. We're going to be wrestling with 9-11. What was going on there?

What was that all about? How many players were involved with why that was happening? Why did Building 7 fall at freeze-free? I don't know. But those things will continue to be wrestled with because God is not going to let one stone be left on another.

That's what he says about the people of his own time, and that's what's going to continue to happen. The truth will set us free. If you hide the truth, you can't be set free. But if you speak the truth, that's the beginning of knowledge. That's the beginning of being able to own your sin and move away from it. And that's why 1 Peter, after Peter didn't get it right, finally Peter in his mature time says,

As you come to him, the living stone rejected by humans. Now, remember, Peter's name means the rock. And Jesus was a tekkon, which that's the word we translate as carpenter. It's more accurate in the area that he was at, that he was a stonemason. That's probably why the masons kept copy of that stonemason imagery. They're trying to build their own counterfeit Christ globally, by the way.

Just watch what your enemies do. Sometimes they'll help you find out a little more underneath the nose what's going on. But tecton is the word for an artisan craftsman. But they weren't, if you go back and look at the architecture of Jesus' time, there wasn't a lot of wood structures. It was mostly stone. There was a big quarry where he lived and grew up with his father. So he's a stone, he's a stone mason. So listen to what Peter's word. Peter means the rock. As you come to him, the living stone,

They would know what he's, they know the alliteration that's going on, the literature that's going on here, the literary of this letter. Rejected by human, but chosen by God and precious to him.

You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in scripture it says, See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone. Remember, we just talked about the cornerstone ritual. We just talked about that. We showed it in Jericho. We showed Habakkuk talking about it. And then Jesus invokes that.

Because he's the stonemason. He's going to build a spiritual temple of living stones. That means not stones of death where you're sacrificing and killing somebody else, but stones where you self-sacrifice your fear, your anger, your violence, your idolatry to be a living sacrifice. The stone, it goes on to say,

A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for. And Daniel, Daniel's dream talks about the stone at the end of all the different layers of the statue that Nebuchadnezzar has this dream about. And Daniel interprets what the dream's about. But you want to talk about a golden age, the first, this is Daniel chapter 2, 31, if you want to see this.

At first, the head of the statue was made of fine gold. Its chest and arms were made of silver. Its stomach and hips were made of bronze. Its legs were made of iron. Its feet were made partly of iron and partly of clay. While we were watching, a stone was cut out, but not by human hands. Here we go again. Remember?

This is something that humans don't want to do. Humans want might makes right. Humans want big machismo, hard to get gods, hard to get governments. Oh, please, Mr. Governor, please save me. Oh, please save us. We make God in that image, which is not the image that Christ reveals in scripture.

So it says that a stone was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue's iron and clay feet and smashed them. Then all at once, the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were smashed. They became like husks on a threshing floor in a summer. The wind carried them away and not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain, which filled the whole world. That was the dream.

That stone is Jesus, the cornerstone, a living stone. And you and I are living members of that worldwide temple being constructed through history. Not stones that kill others, but stones that are willing to lay down their life, even for those who hate them, like Jesus did. And that means, are we willing to give up our treasure? Are we willing to put it all on the field of life?

Are we willing to let it all go? Are we willing to, maybe you don't want to lay it down your life, but can you give up all your treasure at least by the time you're ready to go? Or if you're laying it all for somebody else, did you really give it all on the field? He told that rich young ruler, go and sell all your possessions. And that doesn't mean everybody has to formalize that into a do it today. But the purpose of that is that you should put all of your efforts into

into fulfilling the mission of Christ, even if it means going to your death with not much left financially, not much reputation. Are you willing to die with everybody not liking your reputation? Maybe you'll take a few generations before they realized you were doing something that was of God.

Are you willing to die as a scapegoat? Are you willing to die like Jesus, cast out of the cool place? He was cast out in the outcast, and he was numbered amongst revolutionaries. You know that passage that I was talking about, about where he meets, and he's in Luke,

When he's talking about these, he goes, he enters the temple courts. And this is how I know he's talking about the stones of the Jerusalem. Because right afterwards, he goes into the temple.

So that's, he's not referring to random pebbles are going to sing songs like Zippity-Doo-Dah. Remember the flowers? I think he's talking about the stones of Jerusalem. But he said, he says, when Jerusalem, when Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling and said, it is written, my house would be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.

That word robbers is actually, if you translate it, it's more accurate to call it revolutionaries or rebels. So these were people who wanted to do earthly political power rising up. They said, this isn't how we're going to do it. That's why they killed him. Because that is the way of peace that we all can follow in our time today. And we still are slow to realize that. We want a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of macho man politicians.

You know, and that's what we want. We want a little bit of both. We want to hedge our bets. I'm going to do a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of this. A little bit of MAGA, a little bit of Trump, a little bit of Jesus. Just feeling how my hormones feel today, right? You feel angry and besieged, you go, I want Trump. When you're feeling good, you say, thank you, Jesus, right? We want to have all Jesus, all times, because Jesus is king. Nobody else. There's nobody else. And Jesus wants us to do things differently.

Why would you bet on a man who, like, I like Trump. I'm not saying anything negative to Trump, but this is a man who prides himself. He's got his name on casinos. Jesus split time. Jesus created the concept of a hospital that'll see you, whether you're disformed or handicapped, whether you're a leper or you're missing an eye or you're a Samaritan, which was his equivalent of a Muslim during his time. Hospitals would see, and still to this day will see anybody.

Generally speaking. Now, what they give in that hospital, they need to work on that. They need to come to Jesus, and we're going to work on that with them. But the principle still stands, that in theory, you're supposed to get healed, no questions asked. Trump didn't do that. Jesus did. So why are we so bedazzled by four years of Trump, when we've had 2,000 years to study the kingship of Christ and how it's moving around world history?

When they showed the picture of Emmett Till, remember that? Of that young man who was a victim of lynching and you saw that face in the open casket? That was Jesus saying, the voices of the stones will cry out. The hidden victims will not be silent any longer.

And Satan has tried to co-opt that into what you see with the left of a guilt trip of you're not good enough, that you have to apologize for your skin tone or your gender. And that's not what Jesus has in mind. He wants restoration and reconciliation. He wants healing between the races. He wants healing between the gender. There's two. That's enough for a conflict. Takes two to tango, right? You don't need all those other genders to have something to heal.

So all of that is what God wants us to do. He wants to do it with nonviolence. He wants us to do it with signs and wonders, which I talked about last time I was here. So I want us to think about that as we close out today and just think about how we can be involved in the kingdom of Jesus Christ and letting that saturate our expectations from people who want to take the shot. Don't focus on that short term. It's very alluring.

But it's fleeting. That's what Solomon was talking about. It's all vanity. When you have to close your eyes one day, all of us have to, unless we are alive in the return of Christ. And that's going to be another whole deal, right? But we're all going to have to have that moment. Nobody can ride that ride with us.

We all got to go there together, right? And we shouldn't approach that with a feeling of fear in the sense of, I'm afraid of an abusive father who's going to smite me if I look at him wrong. That's the wrong way to look at it. But we do have to realize that we have been given a gift to live on this earth. We've been invited into the greatest story in human history.

by a God who became a human being in a food trough. He's trying to let us know what he thinks about our version of power, by the way, becoming as a food trough. Hello? Glory to God, right? We want Donald Trump with a golden toilet. He comes as a food trough guy.

Would Donald Trump want his baby born in a food truck? None of us would. But the point is, right, is that God is trying to upend our expectations of power. That's the entire point. The politics of Jesus is the point of the gospel. That's why when you say Jesus is Lord, that was a declaration of what was circulating around that time. They used the word gospel for their letters for Rome. Did you know that? Gospel was a common word in that time, evangelion. And you would pronounce the gospel of Caesar Augustus.

So when you have the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, they are challenging the false gods of their time who promised great things and couldn't deliver, just like the ones today. But they didn't have to hide under the image of Jesus to get their little schemes and wars and everything. Now the enemy's running. So let's keep it up. Let's keep that advance going.

And let's learn to find ways that we can perform signs and wonders. When they're trying to destroy our farming, we're going to double down on richer soil than ever before. We're going to feed people with less acreage. If that's all we've got left, we'll double up the yield until we get more.

Because we'll learn the principles because God has all kinds of scientific things for us. We're going to heal diabetes. We're going to heal cancer. We're going to heal psoriasis, arthritis, all these different afflictions that we have learned to take for granted as just how it has to be are not how it has to be. It's because we've listened to false liars far too long and we've kept Jesus as a mental idea in our Sunday service and we haven't let it manifest in everything we do.

We don't want to take everything in our life captive under Christ because it'll put us in an uncomfortable position, almost like we're being crucified sometimes. But that's what he did, and he expects us to take up the cross as well. I appreciate your time. I'm David Gronowski, and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys again sometime. Thank you, Linda. ♪♪♪

Bye.