Today with Jeff Vines

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Second King's chapter twenty one, there's a narrative. In that narrative,
we experience the darkest times in the nation of Israel,
disintegration and ruin, come to a culture that seems intent
on evicting the sacred, and that is the lesson of
the past. But we have ceased looking at the law
of God and the precepts of God through the lens

(00:20):
of the love of God.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Today, Today, Today, Today, with Jeff Fines, pastor, apologist and
Bible teaching.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Hello, my name is Bill, and welcome. This is Today
with Jeff Fines. Today we're thinking about where we're headed.
In this message from the Reset series, we'll hear why
we should be changing our trajectory to make sure we're
focused on living in God's direction. Let's begin with Pastor
Jeff from Second Kings chapter twenty one.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
We'll hear the story of Nasa.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Okay, for those of you who know me, you know
that I've been very clear that I don't like country music,
and I don't know why it is. I grew up
in the eastern part of Tennessee. Nashville is considered to
be the home of country music. But what is it
about it that I don't like. And I remember hearing
someone say that if you play country music backwards, then

(01:34):
your wife comes back, and your dog comes home, and
your pickup truck is repaired, and your beer tab is forgiven.
And I started thinking, maybe this is the problem. There's
enough bad news in our world without having to listen
to music who glorifies it somehow, who talks about all
the bad things.

Speaker 5 (01:52):
So maybe that's the issue.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
And as a pastor, I don't talk about these things
that often because I know that when we do, we
tend to get political. But there are times in a
pastor's life that he feels like that he has to
address some of these issues. I mean, if you look
at our nation right now, can we not agree that
this great social experiment that we've been on over the
last fifty years is not working. At what point does

(02:17):
honesty kick in? Suicide rates are forever on the rise
in the United States, becoming the number one cause, very
close to becoming the number one cause of death for
ages fifteen to twenty four.

Speaker 5 (02:31):
Fifteen to twenty four, Our youth are not even making
it into adulthood.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
There's been a fifty six percent increase in the last
two decades in teenage suicide, school shootings increased, the racism increased,
teenage pregnancy and abortions. Financial corruption on all levels. There's
Ponzi schemes, there's madeoff schemes, markets crashing, And then you

(02:58):
think about how things like character and integrity and responsibility
and sacrifice and loyalty, the essential things upon which a productive,
stable society is built, those things have become relics of
the past. Let me read to you a quote, and
then I'm going to tell you where it's from. I

(03:19):
think it'll shock you. Here's the quote.

Speaker 5 (03:22):
It is not.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
True that honesty and integrity always make for good business.
In certain situations, doing the honest thing would be financially ruinous,
and therefore, according to strict cost benefit analysis, the risk
of getting caught in a lie is clearly worth taking.
Now that was written twenty years ago in the Harvard

(03:45):
School of Business.

Speaker 5 (03:47):
You think about that. So the graduates of.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
A school like this, and this could be said about
most of our major universities, are now CEO's president directors
of our financial institutions. So is it any wonder, then,
that the financial crash of two thousand and eight had
more to do with character and integrity and ill advised,
irresponsible loans where CEOs gained millions and millions of dollars

(04:17):
in their pockets while the rest of us went bankrupt.
But this is merely symptomatic of a greater disease. Stay
with me for a moment. I'll set the stage here.
Last week I went over to the offices to film
our weekly podcast and I ran into an older lady
that was seated over in the corner, and I recognized her.

Speaker 5 (04:39):
She didn't look very happy.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
She almost looked scared, as we taught, she is afraid
that perhaps we'll never find our way home. What happened
to us? How did we get here where we are?
And then there's this whole thing of social media. It
ain't social and it's not media. I've said this before.
It's a platform for people to spew vitriolic language, to

(05:01):
say things they would never say in the presence of
the individual who has become their target. You know, someone
has said that if you put YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook together,
that would be a good description. It would be called
you twit face. And that is the kind of people
sometimes we feel, who are victriolic on social media.

Speaker 5 (05:21):
How do we get here? Though?

Speaker 1 (05:23):
The only thing worse than apathy is amnesia. And you
and I, as Christ followers, have this incredible, sacred privilege
of being able to go back in biblical narratives, recognize
the mistakes that were made, and then recognize what happened
to restore the nation of God, the people of God, restoration, reconciliation.

(05:44):
This is a time for perhaps the most important reset
of all. So in the Bible and Second Kings, Chapter
twenty one, there's a narrative. In that narrative we experience
the darkest times in the nation of Israel.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
It was under the reign of.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
A king named Manassa, and Manasa was able to undo
in a few short years, decades and decades of good
that happened before him. This should be a reminder to
us that no matter how much good exists in a culture,
no matter how solid the foundation upon which it has
been founded, you're only one generation away from turning the

(06:23):
tide toward evil. Unfortunately, Manassa's reign lasted longer than any
king before him and any king that would come after him. Now,
as we look at the nayrav and I'll read a
major part of the text, he did three things that
destroyed his nation, his people, his society. Number One, he
broke away from the ultimate point of reference. He broke

(06:44):
away from God. There is no God, and God's law
is not love. So he crossed lines of morality, a
line that could not be crossed with impunity. Second, while
he's denouncing God and evicting the sacred, the second thing
he does he encourages a type of heathenism, that's a
type of spirituality without God. And third, he sought to

(07:07):
silence the voice of the prophets, the voices of moral absolutes.
Let me read just the section of the narrative in
Second Kings twenty one. I mean verse two through six.
Manassa did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following
the detestable practices, the detestable practices of the nations of
the Lord, or the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.

(07:28):
He built or rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah
had destroyed. He also erected altars to bell and made
an asheripole, as they have King of Israel had done.
He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them.
He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of
which the Lord had said in Jerusalem, I will put

(07:48):
my name in the two courts of the Temple of
the Lord. He built altars to all the starry hosts.
He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced divination,
sought omens and consultant mediums and spiritists.

Speaker 5 (08:03):
He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord,
arousing his anger.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Now, just quickly, at first glance, do you see any
parallels with our day? The worship of everything under the sun,
including the sun, the sacrifice of our children, and subjective morality,
where everybody does what he's right in his or her
own eyes, even if those moral precepts conflict and contradict.
This past week, I read a story of a student

(08:29):
in one of our major universities who was asked to
do a paper on marriage. Now, what's important to point
out this student is a straight A student, so we're
talking about a pretty good intellect here major university. In
writing his paper on marriage, he decided that he would
present the Biblical.

Speaker 5 (08:47):
View of marriage.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
And this straight A student received a felling grade an
F and at the top of the paper that he
had written, his professor wrote these words, it is in
a appropriate to quote C. S. Lewis because he is
a pastor. Now, first of all, the question is why
would pastors be excluded. I mean, had the student quoted

(09:10):
Stalin or Marx or Nietzsche or Oprah or doctor Field,
that everything would have probably been okay. But the professor
went on to reveal his true motivation because at the
bottom of the page he wrote, I don't agree with
your dogmatism, so what's his problem? In America day, there
is an overt rejection of truth claims because truth claims

(09:34):
bring responsibility and accountability. You can give your opinion as
though you don't pretend.

Speaker 5 (09:39):
That it is the right way to go.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Opinions are okay, but truth claims are not, because they
demand conformity. And the highest value in the Western culture
today is autonomy, not freedom, not freedom, but autonomy. I
do what I want to do, where I want to
do it, and when I want to do.

Speaker 5 (09:57):
It, and no one can say otherwise.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
The irony is that this position of the professor that
he doesn't agree with this dogmatism, is based on the
false assumption that only Christian claims are exclusive, which is ridiculous.
Truth by nature, A statement by nature is exclusive because
it excludes what doesn't agree with it, or what is false.

(10:22):
Every time you make a statement, you're assuming that it
excludes everything that disagrees with it. Every world view is
exclusive at some point. The other thing to point out
is the professor not being dogmatic in his refusal and
rejection of pastors. To say that pastors have nothing of
value to offer to any topic. Is that not an

(10:43):
opinion of dogmatism. The second thing is this that I
find interesting is that C. S. Lewis was not actually
a pastor. He was an English professor at Cambridge University,
where Sir Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin taught
as well. So I had to ask the question, what's
really going on here? Well, the professor in this major

(11:06):
university actually wants the same thing that Manassa wanted in
the Old Testament when he destroyed society. Freedom from the
shackles of the past, get rid of God, the ultimate
point of reference for all.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Morality and goodness.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Now, the sadness of this comes when we realize that
the secular world refuses to understand the motivation for the
precepts and the revelation of God in the Bible. There's
no creative impulse or end result in life that provided
for limitless possibilities without some parameters. In other words, everybody
draws the line somewhere in the fragile path of living

(11:42):
where relationships and passions collide. God, in his wisdom has
provided fences, walls, boundaries for our well being that we
might not stray into rain or into terrain that destroys
the very essence for which we were made. And it
is these fences and walls that are coming down today

(12:03):
with thundering force. God is a god of love and
establish his fences and parameters because he knows how we
are designed, and he knows if we go outside those
fences and parameters, it will bring disintegration upon us and
on society. God's law is not arbitrarily given. It's given
out of love, and in the words of GK. Chesterson,

(12:23):
before you remove a fence, perhaps the best question to
ask is why the fence was put there in the
first place.

Speaker 5 (12:30):
And everyday example of this.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
You know, when I was growing up in the high school,
I had a very early curfew. My father required me
to be home by ten thirty, and quite frankly, this
was embarrassing because the girl that I was dating didn't
have to be home until eleven, and so I had
to be home thirty minutes before my girlfriend. You know,
I can't remember how many excuses I made. I was

(12:54):
struggling with this, and then one day my dad came
into my bedroom, sat on the bed beside me. He said, son,
I want to talk to you just a moment. I
know you're kind of rebelling here, but I know what
you want in your life. I know that you want
a basketball scholarship so that you can go to university,
and I know that you know we can't afford that,
so I'm trying to help you. You need to be
at bed early to do well at your studies, to

(13:16):
keep your GPA up where it ought to be. And
I know you're on the basketball court until nine o'clock
at night, so you can't live that kind of life
without getting enough sleep, or it's going to impact your
health and your vitality and ultimately your ultimate goal. And
you know, I didn't agree with everything Dad said, because
I'm a high schooler and I don't think my brain
was fully developed yet.

Speaker 5 (13:35):
But I do know that Dad loved.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Me and he wanted to make sure that I was
able to achieve the greater goal. You know, when a
father says to his son, don't do drugs, don't smoke,
don't gamble, or even when a mother says to a
two year old, you can't have candy for dinner, it's
not motivated out of hate or even apathy, but out
of love. And this is what a secular generation just

(13:58):
cannot fathom, cannot understand. Please listen carefully as we watch
week leaders around our nation stand by and allow the
destruction of our nation. Please remember this that a rebellious
heart will never feel like it has enough autonomy. A
rebellious heart will never feel like it has enough autonomy,

(14:21):
And the more autonomy you give it, the more it
will demand. For the founders of our nation and today's
christ followers. For us, evicting the law of God from
culture is to ignore the question of design that God
made us, that gave us limits that will nourish us.

(14:41):
And we have to ask the question of what worldview
will cause flourishing and what will destroy society because disintegration
and ruin come to a culture that seems intent on
evicting the sacred, and that is the lesson of the
past but we have ceased looking at the the law
of God and the precepts of God through the lens

(15:03):
of the love of God. We're like little children whose
father tells us don't play in the middle of the
street because you might get hit by a car. We disobey,
We play in the middle of the street, We get
hit by a car, and then we blame our parents.
When you break away from the gold standard, you no
longer know what your money's worth.

Speaker 5 (15:20):
When you break away from God, the.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
Ultimate standard, you no longer know the difference between good
and evil. And evicting the sacred undermines everything, not just
the good, but eventually all good. So we have no
God in the public arena, no prayer in our schools,
and no ultimate point of reference to nourish and prosper

(15:44):
Here's the worst part about that, though, And then I'm
going to move on those of us who believe in
these foundations, and we believe that these foundations built our
country and they should not be destroyed. We're not only
being asked by society, actually we're being demanded. They are
demanding that we not only celebrate the demise of the foundations,

(16:08):
that we not only remain silent on the demise of
these foundations, but we actually rejoice in the midst of
it in a book called Deliver Us from Evil. The
most terrifying aspect of the foundational shifts in our time
is not just the line between right and wrong has
all of a sudden been made unclear. Not just that

(16:28):
morality has somehow had its boundaries altered. What has dramatically
happened in your time and mind is that those of
us from a religious perspective, or theistic worldview, or Christian worldview,
we are not only being asked to erase those lines
and move the fences. It is now being demanded of
us that we join the celebratory cry, a triumphalous cry

(16:51):
of those who have somehow shaken off these restrictions that
religion had imposed upon them for centuries. So we're not
actually merely being told to accept the breaking down of
moral lines, but to celebrate the fact that it's happening.

Speaker 5 (17:06):
And so we have.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Redefined our terms, and we have given names to something
that is not good in appearance to make it appear good.
So abortion now is called women's rights, and we're to
celebrate women's rights and same sex relationships or marriage that
referred to as alternative lifestyles, and we should celebrate alternative lifestyles.
And we're even told today that we must applaud delusions.

(17:33):
Do you remember, not too long ago there was a
forty five year old man that chose to identify as
a five year old girl, so he dressed up in
little girl's dresses with little girl makeup, and we were
told that we should embrace this. Is this not sad though?
I mean, if we really love someone, is this really love?
Is this really merciful to become an accomplice to a

(17:57):
delusion and to insanity?

Speaker 5 (17:59):
Is this really love and mercy?

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Is this really good for society, good for the one
who's experiencing it. When you evict the sacred, there is
a heavy price to pray. And the reason is because
nature abhores a vacuum. If you evict God, rest assure
that something will come in and take his place, whether
it's secularism or pluralism, or hedonism or atheism or relativism

(18:24):
and all these other isms than in the words of
ev Hill that should have beensms. There's no such thing
now as a neutral worldview. The question is what worldview
truly promotes love and justice for all. Which world view
is going to hold society together? Which worldview is good
for the individual and good for the corporate the whole?

(18:47):
And which world views will cause ultimate disintegration. Is it
not fair to look around at America today and many
other parts of the world. Is it not fair to
look around and to say we are descended? Grading culture
is disintegrating. We ignore the fact to expel the moral
law may seem very cavalier, liberating at the time, but

(19:09):
the ramifications are catastrophic, and they were meant to be so.
Manasa does exactly this. He encourages Sadi away from the
ultimate point of reference, away from God.

Speaker 5 (19:20):
But he does the second thing.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
Manassa encouraged and accelerated, in fact, heathenism. And when I
use the word heathenism, I am referring to godlessness. Now
do you know what Manasa did in his day? Let
me see if I can illustrate it somehow. A couple
of years ago we went on a trip to Israel.
We took about forty members of a one in all church,

(19:45):
and Steve Mahag, one of the teaching pastors here, went
with us. And Steve and I kind of took turns
as unofficial tour guides. Now we had a fantastic Israeli
tour guide.

Speaker 5 (19:55):
His name was.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Danny, and he was really good. He knew his history.
I was impressed, but he did.

Speaker 5 (20:00):
Didn't know his story.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
He didn't know how it was God's story, and he
didn't relate the places we were visiting to the redemption,
the overall plan of God in history. So Steve and
I would jump in and fill in the gaps. At
one point during the journey, we arrived over the valley
of Hinmhem, and I was so tempted at that point

(20:22):
to relate to the tourists who were with us a
description of what actually took place in the valley of
Hinnim during Manassa's reign Molech. Before Manassa, Molech, the god
of the Ammonites, demanded the sacrifice of children on a
moltenholt on a molten hot altar. It was gruesome, it
was grotesque. The belief was this that somehow, if you

(20:44):
could burn your little baby alive, that the skin would
be melted off, and then the child would join the Godhead,
free from earthly impurities. So Manassa becomes king and reinstitutes
this practice. Now imagine, imagine you're a young woman with
your child, and you're following your king Manassa into the valley,

(21:09):
believing that the king is going to participate and lead
some kind of ritual whereby the soul of your little
one would be cleansed and his infirmities would be released,
and then he would be able to join ecstasy and
eternity with some kind of godhead. But then, as the mother,
you arrive and you hear the screams of the other

(21:30):
children being sacrificed on the heathen altar. You try to
turn back, but it's too late. One historian wrote, this
night time seems to have been the special time for
these awful immolations. The yells of the children bound to
the altars or rolling into the fire from the brazen
arms of the idol, the shouts and hymns of the
frantic crowd, the wild tumult of drums and shrill instruments

(21:55):
by which the cries of the victims were sought to
be drowned, rose in discord ordinance over the city, forming
with the whole scene visible from the walls by the
glow of the furnaces and flames such an ideal of
transcendent horror that the name of the valley became and
still continues in the form of Gahanna, the usual word

(22:16):
for hell, the valley of Hinnam. Removing the good in
a society never stops with just one step. Defiance of
this kind of magnitude where you're sacrificing your children does
not result from a momentary outburst of one single issue.

Speaker 5 (22:35):
It happens over a period of.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Time when you've evicted the sacred or the ultimate point
of reference, when man is left up to himself to
be God and determine right and wrong, and rebellion that
sees no sanctity of life will never be satisfied. Okay,
Pastor Jeff, I can see your point, but we're far
too educated in America, far too advanced to sacrifice our

(22:59):
children on the multiple alter Really.

Speaker 3 (23:06):
You've been listening to today with Jeff Fines, Thanks for
joining us. Next time we'll bring you the rest of
this message from Pastor Jeff.

Speaker 5 (23:15):
Manassa.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
When he realizes what he had done, the society falls
on his face and repents, but it's too late, and
a whole generation emerged that was lost self aggrandizing, self centered,
entitled and self law evictor sacred, evict God, evict prayer
and evil will one ramp it.

Speaker 5 (23:33):
That's what's happening today.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
You can listen to more messages like this just search
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Speaker 4 (23:41):
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Speaker 5 (23:50):
Single We'll bring this

Speaker 2 (23:59):
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