Today with Jeff Vines

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is not a political message. This is a biblical message.
There are public, social, and governmental policies. Let's stink of
systemic racism, and we Christians should be standing up and saying,
oh no, not.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
On our watch, Today, Today, Today, Today with Jeff Fines, pastor,
apologist and Bible teacher.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hello, my name is Bill, and welcome. This is Today
with Jeff Fines podcast broadcast and available online Today. Pastor
Jeff brings us a message in the Reset series. He
talks about racial unrest around the world. It's a message
about serving God completely and speaking out against evil aimed

(00:48):
at our neighbors, about seeing all people through God's eyes,
loving them as God does. Let's begin with Pastor Jeff
in Joshua chapter seven.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
As we come together this weekend, I'm reminded of the
fact that we are a family. The Bible mentions numerous
times that we are God's new community in the world,
that we are to love one another, care for one another.
I'm seated this weekend because there are times that I
feel is important to have more of a family discussion,

(01:30):
one that comes from the heart, deep within the recesses
of the heart. Sometimes pastors are motivated by great burdens,
and when they speak on topics like this, I got
to tell you from the get go that I need grace.
In fact, I need not just a little, I need
a lot. The reason is is because I've made it
a habit in my life not to talk about something
unless I had sufficient information, unless I had a great

(01:54):
amount of understanding. And if you think about it, that's
a pretty good policy. But at the same time, if
I don't speak about this now, I feel that my
silence will speak more than my words ever could. And
I would ask you to listen to the message that
I'm about to bring on the basis of what you
know about me in the past.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Would you be willing to interpret the words through the lens.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Of what you know to be true about my heart,
who I am, and my love for you and for
all people?

Speaker 4 (02:19):
Can you do that?

Speaker 1 (02:20):
The reason that's important is because our nation right now
is so divided. Everyone's shouting, no one's really truly listening.
We have witnessed violence against the black community, violence against
the police community, violence against communities and businesses that are
innocent bystanders, and to make matters worse, and the mainstream
media politicize everything for money, and for power. This has

(02:45):
been going on for decades. We have systemic corruption everywhere,
and we are not walking humbly with our God, nor
have we done so in a very long time.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
Folks.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
We have to come to the conclusion that our justice
system today is broken. But like all things that are broken,
it can be mended. It can be put back together restored.
But this will not happen without leadership and a great
amount of effort, in my opinion, not without the Church
speaking up against all evil. Now, can I ask you

(03:25):
again to stay with me, to not anticipate where you
think I'm going or what I'm going to say. This
is not a political message. This is a biblical message.
I'm interested in what the creator and sustainer of our
universe would do, what would Jesus do to help us
understand this. I feel incredibly privileged to have met President

(03:47):
Kagami in Rwanda and as I walk through those prisons
the first time after the genocide. Now some of you
may not be familiar with the topic of discussion, but
in nineteen ninety four we had all over a million
Tutsis slaughtered by the majority Hutus. It was a genocide

(04:07):
orchestrated from the very top. Kagami, as the incoming president,
had to find a solution to bring peace and reconciliation
to his people. When I set before Kagami, I asked
him the question, and I saw this on the looks
of the faces of the prisoners, who, even though they

(04:31):
participated in the genocide, were still quite confused after all
it happened, thinking how on earth did this happen in
our country? Even though I'm guilty, How did it happen?
And Kagami said there were four players. He says, for
any atrocity to occur, you always have four players. You
have the orchestrators, those who are at the very top,
who are making decisions, who are systematic in their policies.

(04:57):
They had but one objective, and that is to annihilate
the minority Tutsis from the population. But just underneath those
who orchestrated the policy are those in local positions of
authority and power, and they kind of knew that something
evil was about to occur, but they didn't do anything
about it because there's a part of them that agreed

(05:18):
with it. And then you had the third level, the
communities that surrounded that made up most of Rwanda. And
these communities suspected that something evil was happening, but because
they were in the majority, they thought to themselves, well,
this is bad, but what can I do. My life
is okay. In fact, my life is getting better, so

(05:38):
I'm not going to rock the boat. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it. And then Kagami says that the fourth
category are those who know that something's happening, that it's
pure evil, but they're just apathetic, so they do nothing
about it. Many Hutus knew exactly what was going on,
but they simply didn't do anything about it. Many saw
the corporate semic evil that was going on, the systemic

(06:03):
racism that was happening.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
They knew about the.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Orchestrated effort to destroy the Tutsi population population, They knew
about segregation by documentation. One of the first steps government
did was forced the Tutsi and the Hutu to carry
around a booklet identifying who they were to what tribe
they belonged. They were denied the best jobs, the best education,

(06:27):
and there was a national media manipulation to gather a
type of discrimination against the minority.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
You know, I never thought about that.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Meeting with Kagami the way I have in recent days,
I also remembered the same was true in the Holocaust.
At the very top you had Hitler and his sycophants
and hundreds and hundreds of leaders designed a systematic killing machine.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
But just underneath them you had guards, the.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Social workers and government workers, both local and national, who
were just following orders. In fact, at the Nuremberg trials,
the generals of the Third Reich and even those who
were working in local law enforcement and local social programs
denied their guilt by saying that they were just obeying
the laws of their land, So we can't be held responsible.

(07:18):
We were just doing We were just following the system
that we were a part of. Therefore we have no
legal or we do not need a legal defense. We
were just obeying the laws of our land. Until finally
the American lawyer who was leading the charge against the
Third Reich, through his hand up in the air and
frustration and said, wait a minute, gentlemen, isn't there a

(07:41):
law above our laws? Isn't there a law above our laws?
So there's the orchestrators of the Third Reich. There are
the local officials working under the orchestration, and then there
are the townspeople all of Germany who suspected something horrible
was gone going on, but just thought, well, it doesn't

(08:02):
really affect my day to day life. In fact, my
life is getting better. In fact, when Eisenhower and the
American troops came in to the concentration camps of Ravensburg
or Elswich in Germany, wherever they were, he forced the
local townspeople to come in and witness the atrocities that
had been committed, so that no one could deny these

(08:24):
atrocities in the future. So you have entire communities seeing
human ash flow out of the chimneys, who are somewhat
suspicious but refuse to believe what is actually happening. Eisenhower
forced them to come in when the war had ended
and actually bury many of the dead bodies left behind.
And we are told that people in the community were

(08:47):
frustrated so much to the point they were terrorized that
many committed suicide that somehow this could happen on their watch.
And then of course you had that first tier of
fourth tier, rather of just everyday German citizens that suspected evil,
hated evil, but just didn't have time to do anything
about it. They were apathetic, so in both cases there

(09:09):
were levels of responsibility. However, the only way the genocide
could have worked, the only way the atrocities of the
Third Reich could have occurred, is if every level, every
level works in full cooperation and in operation, either by
ignorance or by intention. No way could you create a

(09:31):
system that kills so many people if everyone in those
tiers were not cooperating to some degree. Although it has
been quoted and misquoted many times, it was actually John
Stuart Mill in eighteen sixty seven who said these words.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than

(09:52):
that good men should look on and do nothing. I'm
not suggesting for a moment or even comparing the Room
Wandon genocide and the Jewish Holocaust with what's happening in
our country today. I only bring them up to illustrate
a systemic corporate evil that exists in our nation, a

(10:13):
systemic racism.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
I love this nation and I love this people.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
I've lived in other places from the majority of my life,
and I can tell you that with all our false
America is still the greatest country, the greatest nation on earth.
But part of our greatness is that we have been
overcomers that no matter how bad things get. The Judaean
Christian worldview, the Judaeo Christian worldview, emerges from the dusty

(10:42):
dungeons and forces us to ask the question who are
we really? And the truth is that few nations on
the planet recognize this about us. Unfortunately, when it comes
to racism, a big part of our problem is this
Western society tends to think in individualistic terms. You know,

(11:09):
I heard this in the South growing up throughout my
entire life. The person who says I never owned slaves,
I'm not prejudiced. I cried when I saw the movie
in Mississippi burning. What my ancestors did was terrible. But
I'm not responsible for what my ancestors did in the past.
I'm not responsible for something someone else does. And the

(11:32):
reason you say that is because you're part of a
Western society where individualism is primary, and you did not
get that from the Bible. Can you drop your defensive
walls just for a moment, Can I show you something.
In Joshua seven, the children of Israel are coming into
the Promised Land, and they are clearly told as they

(11:52):
overcome these nations not to plunder their goods Aiken, a
member of a family takes does not belong to him,
but as a result, his entire family, parents, grandparents, brothers,
his entire family are punished.

Speaker 4 (12:10):
You and I look at that, and we think, why
he's the one who did it.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
That's why parts of the Bible are offensive to you
because of your cultural location. Not always, but if you
think the whole world thinks like you do, don't you
think you might have just the literal cultural narrowness somehow,
that there's a pride in you because the reality is,
in this case, this Bible story in Joshua seven, most

(12:36):
of the world understands that we are products of our family.
That it takes a village to raise a family, and
sometimes they don't do a very good job of it.
Families produce offspring good and sometimes bad. Your family actively
and passively participates in your guilt and in your goodness
by the culture it establishes within the family unit. So

(12:57):
Joshua seven reminds us that there is a corporate responsibility
inside every family, that what our members do reflects all
of us. Actually, there's a pretty powerful verse in Proverbs
chapter twenty nine, verse fifteen that says this a rod
and a reprimand in part wisdom. But a child left
undisciplined disgraces its mother. The idea basically is this, and

(13:21):
by the way, rod is not the rod of torture.
Rod is like the rod of a shepherd who guides
and leads the sheep back the into safety. So the
verse is basically said telling us that a parent who
does not continually.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Correct the path of a child.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
That child will be an embarrassment to the parents and
the family in public. There is responsibility. Then we come
to Daniel nine. When Daniel prais he assumes corporate guilt
for something that his ancestors did. His prayer is definitely
one that we should all read because he speaks of
families and grandparents and parents that he had absolutely nothing

(13:58):
to do with, and members of community that he never
even met. And yet in his prayer in Daniel nine
he repents on behalf of generations before him. Let me
read to you a section Daniel nine four through sixth, Lord,
the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of
love with those who love him and keep his commandments,
we have sinned and done wrong.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
We have been wicked, and every beelled. We have turned
away from your commands and laws.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
We have not listened to your servants, the prophets who
spoke in your name, to our kings, our princes, and
our ancestors, and to all the people of the land.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
This is crucial.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
There's a common saying in the South again, I never
owned slaves. I'm not a racist. I am nice to
those people. So why do I have any responsibility to
that community? Daniel praise and repents for the things that
his ancestors did, and the reason is he knows that
he's part of a culture, a system that produced the

(14:55):
sins of the past, and he's still part of that culture.
He senses the connection and a type of shared responsibility.
And then we come to that classic passage in Romans
chapter five where we witness classic federal theology. Paul went

(15:16):
way beyond faith and family, way beyond culture, and into the.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
Very core of the human.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
Race to teach us that by virtue of the human race,
all of us are condemned. Remember the verse in Romans
five twelve. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through
one man, that's Adam, and death through sin. When Adam, sin,
death came into the world, and in this way, death
came to all of us because all sin. So there

(15:43):
is a connection that we have to Adam. Somehow we
inherited his physical DNA. Even though we're not guilty of
sin until we commit sin, all of us have a
propensity towards sin.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
There is a system in which we live, in which
we are reared.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
The good news is that Paul says, however, because we
have a connection to Jesus Christ, we are saved, not
because of anything we did, but because of a new system.
Now we have a connection to Christ, and in that
system we relate to God on the basis of grace,
not law, and are therefore saved. So when I speak

(16:21):
of systemic evil and systemic racism, please let me define it.

Speaker 4 (16:26):
I mean this a system that.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Excludes and marginalizes people on the basis of race, even
though most people in the system are not intentionally trying
to do it.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
You hear me on that. I gotta say that again.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
We're talking about a system that excludes and marginalizes people
on the basis of race, even though most people those
last two tiers, sometimes the last three, are not intentionally
trying to do it. So the individuals are not for
the systemic evil or racism, but they're by nature of involvement,

(17:01):
part of a system that's doing it. So there is
some guilt by association. And the question I have for
all of us who are Christ followers, do we have
eyes to see places in this country where systemic racism.

Speaker 4 (17:21):
Exists? Please listen to the end.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Please, We who are in the white majority, we don't
like that phrase. And part of that is good news
in the sense that we don't like it because we
know racism is wrong. That's a good start. We celebrate
movies that actually conquer it. I was in the theater
when I saw Remember the Titans and Denzel Washington bridges
the gap between white and black, and we cheered. I

(17:49):
remember seeing Mississippi burning, same thing. You had all of
these people, most middle aged white people watching this movie,
and they cheered. When racism was overcome, of those who
were responsible before it were brought to justice, they cheered.

Speaker 4 (18:06):
Recently, there's a movie called justin Mercy.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
It's an incredible movie about a Harvard Lograd who's African American,
goes back down to his home in the South and
begins to defend African Americans who are on death row
with a lack of sufficient evidence against them, They had
no voice.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
They are executed without fair representation.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
We love our country so much that we feel when
somebody uses the term systemic racism that it means that
every ounce of every corner of every part of our
country is racist. And quite frankly, as a white male,
I don't even know that. I can't even know that
because I'm white. But what I am saying is this,

(18:49):
there is public There are public social and governmental policies,
both local and national, that stink of systemic racism, and
we Christians should be standing up and saying, oh.

Speaker 4 (19:03):
No, not on our watch, and we're all guilty.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
My hometown, if I were to go back there today,
I could take you to the part of my hometown
where all of the black community live. It is a
community that has received the less assistance, the least assistance
in social programs, in education, in any social service.

Speaker 4 (19:32):
And part of the reason is.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
That the way it's set up is that the taxes
collected from a certain part of the community go back
into that community.

Speaker 4 (19:42):
For schools and social services. So there is a vicious cycle.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Because the lowest wages are earned in that community, which
means there are less taxes, which means there are less
social services, which means there is least education. And that
is repeated again and again and again. How systemic I
don't know. You know, when I was playing basketball in
high school, between my junior and senior year, my coach

(20:11):
set me down in the locker room and said, look,
I know you've been the captain of the basketball team,
and you got to know, when you're in a small town,
if you're the center, you're if you're the pivot man.
I mean, you're like a god with a small g,
free haircutts, cheeseburgers, it's the works, because that's all some
of these small towns have. It's their athletic programs, their pride,

(20:32):
and their basketball team. My coach set me down, he said, Jeff,
we've got a student coming to our school for the
next year, and I just want to give you a
little heads up.

Speaker 4 (20:44):
His name is James Henry. He's African American.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
He's from the Virgin Islands, and he's six' nine and
about two hundred and fifty.

Speaker 4 (20:52):
Pounds and it was coach's.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Way of saying to, me, basically your days of playing
the pivot man are over. NOW i was fine with the,
Meeting but THEN i go out into the community AND
i had so many people come to me and, say,
hey this is not. Fair you've earned the, privilege it's your.
Right you're entitled to have that position because you're from this. Community,
now what was amazing about this entire scenario was When

(21:18):
James henry. ARRIVED i quickly noticed That James henry was
one of those. Men he was impossible not to, like
And james AND i became best. FRIENDS i remember Visiting
james in his home the first time and his parents
looked at, me, like are you lost to show you the? Division,

(21:41):
now the problem is THAT i learned so much about
The African american community in my hometown through my relationship With,
JAMES i did nothing about, it AND i had a
voice you, say, well you were. Young, yeah but even
at a very young, AGE i had a keen interest
in social, studies eat keen interest in civil programs and.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
Justice BUT i did.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
NOTHING i look back at that now AND i wonder why,
Why AND i think it's because my life was going.
Fine and NOW i realized that even, then at a
very young, AGE i was part of a, system system
designed somehow intentionally by some unintentionally by others to keep

(22:27):
my friend's family. Down BUT i was saying. NOTHING i
know we've come a long way in The United. STATES
i get, that but we've not come far. Enough how
can we say we've come far enough until there is absolute.

Speaker 4 (22:41):
Equality the only thing worse than ignorance is.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
Apathy and there's no WAY i can pretend to know
the ins and outs of this.

Speaker 4 (22:49):
Issue how CAN. I i'm part of the.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
MAJORITY i can tell you this, though BECAUSE i lived
on foreign soil for ten, YEARS i have experienced. Racism
WHEN i lived in some, BOY i was the. Minority
when my wife AND i would cross borders Between South
africa And, zimbabwe they would often hold me in a
room for two and three hours in a hot room
with no air, condition just BECAUSE i was.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
WHITE i got used to.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
IT i remember one TIME i bought the very best
tickets to go to a soccer game Between zimbabwe and The.
Congo AND i came AND i stood in, line and
BECAUSE i was, white everyone shoved me to the back and,
yes it was BECAUSE i was. White and somebody looked
at me AND i, said BUT i bought a ticket
and the response was, yeah welcome To. Zimbabwe my white
friend basically said these, words what are you doing?

Speaker 4 (23:33):
Here why are you?

Speaker 1 (23:34):
HERE i can't even begin to compare with the experiences
of Our African american brothers and sisters here in our.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Country you've been listening To today With Jeff. Vines thanks
for joining. Us next time we'll bring you the rest
of this message from past To.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Jeff we're all clothed With, christ no matter what, color
we're clothed with G. Jesus romans five tells us That
god sees us through the lens of, community how we
treat one.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
Another that we Are god's new community in the.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
World so the question is what is this community going
to do to defeat systemic racism and corporate evil in our.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
World you can listen to more messages like this just
search For today With Jeff fines wherever you get your.
Podcasts you make me a.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
Bond say with every single, Friend.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
We'll bring this up, Today, Today, Today today With Jeff.

Speaker 4 (24:47):
Fines