Seven Threats of Our Time

Our topic [today] is one that should be of deep interest to all of us who live in this country and I would say anyone who actually is alive in the world today because the thing that is happening that we see here in America is not just isolated to America but it is happening around the world as well, especially in western cultures. One might even say it’s already happened in other western cultures, but the battle rages heavily here in our country.

It is dangerous to ignore the reality of Satan and his forces. I am NOT a person who sees a demon behind every bush, but to run to the other side of the continuum and act as if there is no spiritual warfare is folly and contrary to plain biblical teaching. We forget this to our peril:

So, I want to, first of all, acknowledge that the world around us has somewhat made it an "eye roll" to even mention, "demonic," the word demonic, or to mention the word "Marx," or to say the word "communism," the machines of the world and the culture around us have moved into a position where that will often evoke an eye roll from people. And if you have that sense as well when we say the word communism or marxism or a demonic worldview, I pray that you might allow the Lord to speak to us [today] without those kind of machinations (plots or schemes) that are in play. It is important for us to recognize and understand the times in which we live and the things that are going on.

[Dell says,] I have written about the history of this and the demonic influences upon Karl Marx before and we need not repeat it here, except to note that many had thought that Marxism had taken a death blow when it couldn’t get any traction in America and it had failed in so many places. But Marxism was reborn in our country through the Franklin School and Critical Theory. Instead of sowing discord between the workers and the owners, it now sought to sow division in the hearts and minds of those of a “minority” status, convincing them that they were the oppressed and the “must-be-hated-oppressor" was the white, straight, cisgender, Christian male hegemony, including every institution that he had built. These "minorities" were the new pawns in a demonic worldview that desires to overthrow all of God’s social institutions. When we speak of “overthrowing”, we do not necessarily mean their destruction by elimination. What we see today is the zealous drive to recreate them into a new image; to modify the language, the design, the purposes into something radically different than God’s original. There is a deep, visceral fervor associated with this. Marx’s “abolish the family” is driven not by some contrary philosophy, but by something deeply demonic. It is, of course, a scam. The pawns who overthrow the status quo will then find themselves, as every Marxist pawn in the past has found themselves, in a grey, barren world interrupted only by the lavish palaces of the Marxist elite.

This worldview has been germinating in America for over 50 years. Having taken deep root in academia, it has, almost miraculously, exploded upon us in the midst of the COVID scare. And we now awake to find ourselves in a nation that has a deep and severe worldview rift. For most of our nation’s history, we shared a common worldview. Yes, we disagreed about politics, and sometimes fiercely. Some of those disagreements were enough to bring us to a civil war, but we shared a common worldview. That is no longer the case. Now, our divide is no longer merely politics, but about the fundamentals of life and truth and liberty. That divide is [made worse] by the fact that this new worldview has embedded itself in academia, prime media, entertainment, technology giants and judicial, legislative and executive bodies. It flies under various flags as “social justice” and “woke” and “progressive” and under the guise of new[ly] defined terms such as “equality”, "equity" and “diversity”. Most critical is that it has made “compassion” the supreme ethic, though in reality, it is a malevolent compassion. This feigned compassion overrides freedom, it supplants truth and righteousness, it outweighs sane logic and common sense. It is the new litmus test for everything. But, in our new culture, it sells.

Its end, however, is the same: total dominance; total control; total acquiescence of the masses. Comply or die. Maybe not physically, but you will be isolated, shunned, forced out of the means of communication. Some have already had financial accounts closed, jobs terminated, reputations ruined. All of us, if we are honest, must admit that there is a new standard associated with what you can say and what you can’t. Free speech has been lost and we weren’t even aware it happened. If you are guilty of CrimeSpeak (1984) you will be cast out. This is not [the] future. This is now.

Survivors of the horrors of Marxism in the former Soviet Union, in China, and other places where it has terrorized millions and left mass graves and grey skeletal cultures, are screaming at us to wake up. They speak with alarm, pleading with us, for we now walk the same dangerous path they saw in their former lands.

This storm front is massive. When it is combined with the others, it may be fatal.

We have a lot to cover [today], so we’re going to move fairly quickly, but the first thing I want to do is to call your attention to Matthew 16, it says that the Pharisees and the Sadducees had come seeking a sign from Jesus and Jesus responded to them with a little bit of an admonition, if not a large admonition, that they were capable of discerning the signs of the physical world around them, they could discern the signs associated with the weather and the sun and those kinds of things, but Jesus then admonished them by saying they could not discern the signs of the times. And then when he got alone with the disciples, the disciples were caught up in a little bit of the same problem, because Jesus told the disciples, "watchout and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees." And the scripture tells us the disciples were saying, "well, it’s because we didn’t bring bread", they were thinking basically of the surface, physical things. And then Jesus opened their eyes [and] he told them what was true. And then scripture says [in Matthew 16:12 (ESV)] Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

The word [for] teaching there in the Greek is better understood not simply [as] a lecture, a small teaching here or there but, it is better understood as the larger teaching associated with, in this case, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Vines defines it in that way, in that larger sense as well associated with this Greek word.

So, those of us who are involved in worldview teaching and interested in worldviews, it would be appropriate for us to understand what Jesus was saying. He was warning them against the Pharisees' and the Sadducees' worldview. And we need to be careful of that worldview. In 2 Timothy we read this:

And that is what we are going to be doing today[, identify the worldview that we need to be careful of]. We’ve been talking about what we’ve called the perfect storm, the seven threats all converging on Western Culture in our particular time, in the time in which we live [in] western culture. We’re looking at it primarily today as how it is impacting our nation.

The first four threats that we looked at was:

The second threat,

The third [storm front], a critical one that we talked about,

That led us then to the fourth threat that is rising around us. This is:

So that now leads us then to this next threat. And I have labeled it…​

I do not shy away from that adjective because I believe that it is a demonic worldview. It is based upon what has been, academically, referred to as the Marxist worldview. And we will reiterate again that I am absolutely convinced that Carl Marx was under the deep influence of demonic forces. That worldview, many have written and documented hundreds of millions of people have been slaughtered at the throne of that worldview. It is demonic. And [the] rise of that demonic worldview in our country has now for the first time created a [National] Worldview Rift.

It is important for all of us to understand that the divide we see today is not a political divide. We had political divides in the past, we’ve had serious political divides in the past, but as a whole, our nation shared a common worldview. And I contend it was a biblical worldview. That doesn’t mean that everybody followed that worldview perfectly, and in some cases, some people didn’t at all. But it was a common worldview that brought about a common understanding of what was right and what was wrong. It was a worldview that produced almost a church on every corner. It was a common worldview, yet we had some very serious political differences that even brought us to the Civil War and other things, but there was still a basic foundational worldview that the nation rested upon. That is no longer true.

The rift that we see in our nation today is no longer simply a political rift, it’s a worldview rift.

Ok, so, as I have mentioned, as those of you who have been on any of my tours before, I have often said and I will continue to say, I hope for as long as I have breath, that whenever you come to any kind of an issue, anytime you come to a problem, the best thing you can do, and the first thing you need to do, is to go back and understand the nature of God! That provides the foundation for whatever issue we’re looking at. His nature and character, his attributes are the source of all truth, so we must go there before we begin to study whatever issue. We’re going to do that again [today/tonight] for this very, very, serious issue that we see before us.

When we go back and take a look at…​

in particular the attributes that are important for us [today/tonight], when we talk about the fact that God is…​

because we’re going to be talking about the influence of Satan [and] the demonic influence upon the world around us.

And so, when we talk about God, that He is a relational God based upon the fact that He is triune, He is unity, He is diversity, all bound up in the very nature of God, what we find is that Satan, of course, is the opposite.

Satan IS a monolithic being, of course, but Satan wants to…​

We’re going to break here and continue the rest of the lesson this evening.

Again, [we need to] remind ourselves that we are not a people that are without hope. Every time we talk about each of these threats it is easy to be overcome by the weight of what is happening around us. And yet we need to understand and realize that we are pilgrims in this world, but we are still here and we are placed here for a reason. We are placed here for a purpose. And God has given everything that we need, everything that we need to follow what He’s asking us to do.

And so, my [recommendation] to you is to be [of good courage], be of good hope, even in the midst of this perfect storm that is raging around us. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

The solution is the church. Jesus left and we remain, why? He has work for us to do. Not just making new christians, but teaching them to do all the He has commanded. We need to be transformed through the renewing of our mind and conform to the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. We need to study to identify the biblical Christian worldview and then live it. We can’t be part-time christians with one toe in the world and one toe in the church. Jesus told us we cannot serve two masters. We have to choose one and live for Him building relationships with others to be fruitful and in so doing, glorify God.