Ali Stuckey (0:00)

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. So if you are watching this, you can see that the setting has changed. I'm in my home. Maybe you're listening, you can tell it sounds a little bit different. I am recording this Monday morning, a little addendum to today's episode, the rest of which was actually recorded at the end of last week. So I've got a couple things to say in light of the happenings of the past few days. Number one, we will be talking about Iran, everything going on there, all the considerations we should have as Christians, especially, especially in light of our eschatology or belief about the end times. Also the tragic events in Austin, Texas, how those two things are possibly connected. So we'll be discussing all of that on Wednesday. I also just wanted to add some clarity to the subject that we're about to discuss, John Piper's post with the immigration related Bible verse. So from all of the information that's come out over the past few days, it does look like this was not an intentional commentary on the news cycle or a reaction to Trump's State of the Union address. In fact, John Piper seems to post this verse every year in accordance with his Bible reading plan. Now, you could say that there should have been more consideration about the timing in light of recent events and all of that, but this was not an intentional insertion of his opinion about immigration. However, the rest of the commentary that we give, the response that we give to those who do try to wield this verse to make some kind of liberal immigration point is very relevant, very necessary, will be helpful to you as you're navigating these conversations. And the rest of the episode is also extremely prescient. Last week, of course, we didn't know everything that would be going on in Iran yet. This episode is about the position that America is in and how we should be thinking about that and how Christianity plays such a key role in who we are and how we should think about our national identity and our place in the world. So I just wanted to add that, give you as much information, as much clarity as possible and without further ado ado, let's get into the rest of today's episode. CNN is releasing a new documentary about so called Christian nationalism where a journalist fear mongers about classical Christian education and biblical marriage. But Christianity in America is not the ideology you need to be afraid of. In fact, I will paint a picture for you of exactly what it looks like when Christians refuse to engage in politics. We've got all of this and more on today's episode of Relatable. Make sure you get your tickets to the Arrows @share the arrows.com Christian Women's Conference October 10th in Dallas, Texas. And make sure you subscribe on YouTube and you like this show and you also leave a five star review wherever you listen. All right, let's get into today's episode. Hey guys. Welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Good news. God's eternal plan of redemption is still as ever, going off without a hitch. Yay. Woohoo. I'm so glad about that because there's so much craziness going on in the world. There's evil. It seems everywhere we look there's so much darkness. And sometimes it seems like the darkness is winning. But nothing surprises God. Nothing takes him aback. He's never wondering, gosh, how did you make this mess? He's sovereign over all of it, and every second of every day his anger is kindling against evildoers. Psalm 37 reminds us that one day he is going to take vengeance for his people and he is going to fight on our behalf. And all of the blood that has been ever, that has ever been shed by the innocent by his chosen people will be avenged. And we have that to look forward to. It's really easy to think, why would God allow all of this suffering? Why would he allow all this pain? That's something that you heard Shannon Bream and I talk about on Friday, and yet we know that he's not actually doing nothing, that he has a plan. He has determined the day and the hour that he is returning and he will make all things right. That's a really good reason to be courageous. Two reasons. One, the day of your death is determined by God. Missionary John Batten. He spent years of his life being a missionary to this island of Aniwa where these pagan tribes lived. After 15 years of his work and the work of other missionaries, the entire island turned to Christ. And he realized in the midst of the hardship that he had to endure there, the hatred that he originally felt from these islanders, that he was immortal until God called him home, that there was no weapon that could be formed against him that would prosper without God's will. So until the day and the moment of your death, you are absolutely invincible. You are absolutely immortal. Psalm 139 reminds us that all of our days were written out for us before any of them came to be. And so there's not anything happening in your life that God's like, oh, gosh, didn't see that coming. Not sure how I'm going to avoid that. So you can be completely brave. And then the second reason is that the day of victory has already been determined by God, that everything will be made new, everything will be made right, and perfect justice will be enacted. That's another reason why we can be courageous. So just remember your responsibility as a Christian, as a mom, as a grandmother, as a single woman, as a father, whatever station of life you're in, is to simply do the next right thing in faith, with excellence, and for the glory of God. And remember, the kingdom of God is mostly advanced through the seemingly mundane acts of obedience, the unseen and unsung acts of faithfulness by believers every single day, through our boldness, through our kindness, through our commitment to excellence, through the love that we have for our neighbors, through sharing the gospel, God's kingdom is advanced. And what a privilege it is that we get to be a part of that. God doesn't need us, but he chooses to use us so we can be as bold as lions, because we serve the God who has a victory and who has already planned all of our lives. And I'm just so thankful for that, especially as I look to the headlines around the world and some of them that we're going to talk about at the beginning. And the point that I want to drive home, really in this entire episode, but especially in some of these things that we're going to talk about at the top, is how thankful we should be for one the Lord, just that he gives us such a perfect roadmap in his word, of the life of godliness and how we can find satisfaction, where we can seek true justice, what truth and clarity and all of these things look like, but also just in an earthly sense. So thankful to live in the west. So thankful to live in a country that at least foundationally believes in the imago dei, believes that we were all created by a God who has given us inalienable rights. It's so easy to take that for granted and to think that this is just common sense everywhere. It's not. I saw this horrific headline and it was originally tweeted out by someone named Liza Rosen on X. And it's a Daily Mail headline. It says hundreds. This is very, very disturbing. Hundreds of dead newborn girls have been found dumped in garbage piles in Pakistan over the last year as cultural preference for boys drives more parents to murder babies. Unfortunately, this is something that occurs in all kinds of non western countries and actually it occurs in America today. We Just don't do it after birth. It doesn't typically happen in this way. It happens via abortion, it happens via eugenics. Some people use the IVF process to decide which gender they want to give birth to first. So this is a very prevalent practice that happens all over the world. Now when we read something like this, our first instinct is that is barbarism. Sounds a lot like the one child policy that happened in the 20th century in China. The boys were preferred over girls. But if you had more than one child, you had to kill your child, even if it was 8th, 9th month of pregnancy, even if it was after birth, commit infanticide. And if you've heard me talk at all about this book by a historian named Owen Bakke, then you know what I'm talking about when I say Exposure Hills. Exposure Hills were these places in ancient pagan Rome where newborn unwanted babies were placed outside of the city limits to die by exposure to the elements to wild animals. This was a very prevalent, well documented practice in the ancient world because children weren't seen as full humans. They didn't possess what the ancient Greek scholars at the time called the logos, and that is the ability to reason or to rationalize. Only the adult free male did. Kids didn't. So they were basically seen as on the level of animals and barbarians. And so mistreatment of them, whether it's the sexualization of them, they were very often sold into prostitution. Using them for child labor or killing them outright in or outside of the womb was done without moral qualm whatsoever. In fact, there is like a scholarly, philosophical justification for doing that. But Owen Back, he chronicles the change in culture and the change in the perspective on children 2,000 years ago, and he attributes this change of perspective to Christians. Now, this concept of the imago Dei already existed with the Hebrews, with the Israelites. Genesis 1 says that God made us in his image. But Christians popularized this idea. And it was a radical concept at the time that none of the scholars and even the religious pagans of the time believed or I even had the words to conceptualize that all people have equal worth because they are people. Not based on their status, not based on whether they're a slave or free, not based on their income, not based on their gender, not based on their age, not based on their intellect, not based on their political position, but just because they are people. No one aside from the Hebrews believed that at the time. No one aside from the Hebrews that we know of had any issue whatsoever with child sacrifice. It was God and his People that were distinct. And then when Christians came along about 2,000 years ago, who were evangelistic in their faith, who weren't just Jews, but also Gentiles, who were converts, who were going into the pagan world and saying, actually, this child sacrifice that you're doing is not okay. Actually, all people have equal worth because of the imago dei, because we're created by God, the one God. Actually, all of us are equally dead in sin apart from Christ, but all of us can be made alive in Christ by grace through faith. This radically equalizing message that Christians preached wherever they went eventually changed how the world saw people. Because these Christians, they worshiped a God that was so unlike the Roman and Greek gods at the time. When this person that they called God, this Jesus of Nazareth, Nazareth, came to earth, he came to earth as an embryo. He was heralded by the kicks of an unborn John the Baptist, he was worshiped as a newborn by the angels and by the wise men and against the protestation of his disciples, said, let the little children come to me. Such as these belong the kingdom of heaven. That was a completely unlike, unheard of in the pagan world and even among the Jewish religious scholars at the time, an unheard of perspective on children and certainly an unheard of perspective on the divine. And these persistent and very strange Christians, over time, everywhere they went, as they preached the gospel, they said, the child sacrifice will end now, the child sexualization will end now. The oppression of the poor and the sick and of women will now. And so they built the hospitals, they created the orphanages, they built the churches that had these foundling wheels where parents of an unwanted child or a child that they couldn't care for, they'd be placed in these wheels and there would be Christians on the other side of the wall to turn the wheel and to catch the baby and to care for the baby and to make sure the baby was adopted by loving parents. And eventually these exposure hills and the pagan ancient world were stigmatized, and eventually they were criminalized. This took decades and then centuries. But over time, Christians changed the game for children, changed how the world saw people. And we so take this for granted in the west today, we think that everyone kind of believes this. Like everyone has more compassion for children. Everyone has this view of the poor or the view of the sick, this instinct that even, even liberals have. Those who are pro abortion, there's a cognitive dissonance there. But even they would say they have extra compassion for vulnerable kids. They have extra compassion for the elderly or the sick. That's Kind of our instinct in the west, but it's not based on human nature. It's based on the Western conscience that was forged specifically by Christians. Christians changed the game. And when you don't have Christianity as your foundation, all kinds of moral atrocities, especially against the powerless, are justified. So what we see in Pakistan, what we've seen in China, what we see in the Middle east today that we know is disgusting and is depraved and is demonic, is not seen that way in most of the world today, because most of the world does not measure the worth of a person by the fact that they're a human, but by all different kinds of arbitrary criteria. And when your worth as a human being is judged by this arbitrary, superficial criteria, then you get a holocaust. You get widespread abortion, you get killing babies just because they're unwanted. So I just want us to realize that what we still have, as fragile as it might be in America, we still have the vestiges of a Christian conscience in the West. And I do believe it is up to Christians to preserve that as much as possible. It's not about Christo fascism. It's not about building a theocracy in which people are forced to be Christians. It's literally just about loving our neighbor. And if God's ways are better, like if God is the creator and he's the authority over all of it, and he is the boss when it comes to what's right and what's wrong, what's justice and what's not, then of course we want our policies to conform to that, because we love people. And if God is love, 1 John 4:8, the most loving thing we can do, and even our laws can do, is agree with him and agree what he thinks about life and people and worth. And the Imago DEI Christians, yes, throughout the. Throughout history, of course, they were sharing the gospel. They were doing all of these things, but they were necessarily and by definition, by nature, I should say, culture warriors. Maybe not on purpose, but they were infusing the culture with this countercultural, radical belief about human beings. And we in America here today have the same responsibility. We'll get more into this in just a second. Let me pause and tell you about our first sponsor for the day. First, that is Seven Weeks Coffee. Gosh, what a fitting sponsor for what we're talking about. This is a company that is standing up for the voiceless, the most vulnerable group of people in our culture, and that's the unborn child. They donate 10% of every sale of seven weeks coffee to pregnancy centers. Across the country they have, they have garnered more than a million dollars in donations. They've donated these to pregnancy centers. This gives these pregnancy centers the tool, the resources that they need to serve mothers in crisis. So moms feel equipped and supported to make that life saving decision for their child. So this is translated into saving thousands of lives. And if you have bought your coffee from Seven Weeks Coffee, God has used you and your purchase to serve this incredible life saving, generationally changing kind of purpose. And so thank you so much for being a part of that. And make sure you subscribe to Seven Weeks Coffee because every subscription every month contributes to those pregnanc centers. Plus you save Money, you save 15 when you do this. Seven weeks is super high quality, pesticide free, mold free. Really, really good. When you use my code Ali, you save an extra 10%. The seven weeks coffee.com code ali. Okay, I also saw this other post, very disturbing what I'm about to show you. It's a video and it's showing what's happening in Bangladesh, which is a large Islamic community there. And that's the same thing with Pakistan, by the way. This is not only a problem, what I'm about to show you and what we were just talking about in Islamic countries, it's a problem in lots of countries, Hindu countries, Buddhist countries, pagan countries. But it, it's especially prevalent in Islam because Islam has such a diametrically opposed view of human worth and women and children and other responsibility to righteousness and things like that, that. But in Bangladesh. This is a report of something that's going on here and I'll just play you. I don't have to play the sound, but I'll describe it for you. It's basically like a dummy of a woman and she's hanging by a noose in what looks like the town square. And she's wearing this dummy is like wearing female garb. And over the head of this dummy is like a, a black, a black hood. And then men are taking turns violently beating this dummy that is supposed to be like a woman. And apparently they're practicing like they have flip flops and shoes in their hand. They're hitting her, kicking her. Again, not a real person, as much as violently as they possibly can. They're filming it and they're laughing about it. And this is apparently supposed to, supposed to be protesting women being given additional rights in the country, which of course in these Islamic countries women don't really have rights because they're not seen as full people. What is interesting about this and this Is the comment that I made on X is that not a single. I don't think you can correct me if I'm wrong, but not a single liberal feminist in America would say no to welcoming any of these men into our country. If these men were transported into our country today and they were under threat of being deported by ice, every single liberal feminist that you know would be protesting their deportation. We would have Billie Eilish saying, no one is illegal on stolen land. Oh, no human being is illegal. We'd be hearing that from celebrities. Until you grapple with the darkness of many of these cultures that we are importing into the United States today, it's really easy to be in your gated community, to be in your nice neighborhood, and to say, oh, no, human being is illegal. We should just have open borders. F ice. Get ICE out. We shouldn't be deporting these people. It's really easy to say from your couch. But when you think about the vulnerable people who are actually affected by this kind of culture, by this kind of behavior, maybe, I don't know. Just stop and think for a second if borderlessness is the way to go. There was a horrible study that I saw. I think Elon Musk reposted it on X and it was just talking about the increase of the sexual assault in Britain. This is a huge problem. And actually we had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the show several years ago. She is a former Muslim. She has said now that she's converted to Christianity, which is amazing, but she wrote a book on this. The Pervasive Problem of Sexual Assault in European Countries because of Mass Migration of Muslims. Am I saying every single Muslim is going to commit sexual assault? No. But in these communities, the rates of sexual assault are much higher. And it's not because these guys are just rebels. It's because they don't see it as rebellion. Because their worldview is different than ours. Their view of human beings and what their responsibility is as men is not the same as ours. This idea of chivalry in the west, in the United States, which I know is dwindling, but again, the vestiges are still there. There's something in our American instinct that likes to see a strong man caring for women and caring for children. This idea of self sacrifice as leadership, of using your strength to protect others and to guard the dignity of others, that is a Christian idea, okay? That's not just common sense, liberal, classical democracy. That is Christianity that gave you that. You take Christianity away, you don't get that anymore. I don't care. I'm not even talking about right and left. I'm just talking about what is true about Christianity and what it has given us. Now, a lot of people were mad speaking of immigration at John Piper recently, just the other day, he said, you shall treat this is Leviticus 19:34. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God, he said. Christians know the miserable bondage we are all in. Well, John Piper got ratioed by a lot of people on X. Not I thought. I thought most of them were not rude. You have people like my friend Megan Basham, respectively pushing back against him. Katie Faust as well. A lot of people I follow who were reading this as an indictment on Trump or an indictment on Trump's celebration of defending our border and deporting illegal aliens. Now, I do not know if that is what John Piper was talking about in the moment. If he just had this scheduled tweet put out. I will defend John Piper more than I think many conservative evangelicals will. I think he's gotten it wrong several times when he wades into the political discussion. I've been very clear about that over the years. He's not a progressive, though. He's just. He's not a progressive. I'm not saying he's a Trump supporter, but he's definitely not theologically progressive. And the man knows the Bible. Now, I think living in Minneapolis and allowing his perspective to be skewed by liberal sources like people like Russell Moore, unfortunately has led him to saying some things that are undiscerning. I don't know his motivation behind posting this, but I will take the opportunity to respond to this mentality, because a lot of people do use this verse in Leviticus to justify open borders. To say that deporting people is wrong, to justify illegal immigration, and to say that deporting illegal immigrants, including pedophiles, is somehow oppressing the sojourner. You see this used just like carte blanche as a justification for condemning ICE or all border control. And so here was my response. I said, maybe we are all reading too much into Piper's post. But for those who do use this passage to justify illegal immigration or to argue against deportations, you should keep this verse in mind. This is a verse that we've talked about, and it's Exodus 12:49 there shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you. Okay, one law. So if, as liberals do, and again, I'm not calling John Piper liberal, but people who use that verse to justify legal immigration, if we are going to use Old Testament law as our basis for immigration law in America today, which seemingly only progressives want to do, which is interesting, their own little fun form of Christian nationalism, then we need to look at the whole thing. Because there was no tolerance of illegal immigration in ancient Israel. None. If you were a migrant. I mean, there was lots of different definitions of sojourners and foreigners and merchants just passing through and all of that. But if you were to live among the Israelites, you were required to be circumcised. You were. That would be a good deterrent, actually. Like if we just told people, hey, if you're going to illegally immigrate into the United States at the border, you're going going to be circumcised. So if we want to apply Old Testament law to current American immigration policy, that's a conversation to have. But they also had to follow the laws about food and marriage and sexuality, every single one of them. We can also see throughout the Old Testament this principle, and I just thought of this today, I wish I would have written this in my book. But something that we see over and over again in the Old Testament is that walllessness equals lawlessness. So without a border, without a wall, without a barrier of protection, you get chaos. We can see this in the Book of Nehemiah, how a strong border was a signal to the enemies, hey, don't mess with us, don't mess with our women, don't mess with our children. Because this is a symbol of God's provision for us. In fact, we read in Proverbs that a city or a man without self control is like a city without walls. Because you're chaotic, you're a danger to those around you and to yourself. Jeremiah 29:7, as we've talked about before, urges the Israelite exiles in Babylon to seek the welfare of the nation in which God has providentially placed them. And we Christians are exiles on this earth, and we are to seek the welfare of the plot of earth in which God has providentially placed us. Us. And one of the ways that we can do that is to protect our borders. Because remember, nations and governments and laws were God's idea. They were all God's idea, not our idea. Because God is a God of order. And he created these modes of order, these spheres of order and law and law enforcement for our good, because we actually don't thrive in chaos. You know that if you have kids, your kids don't thrive in chaos. They thrive when they have parameters, when they have boundaries, when they have a home with walls. And they say you can only go this far. Yeah, they might be a wild child and want to run, you know, 20 miles down the road, but you know that your fence, that your boundaries of your property are for their protection. And so it is with us. Remember that God placed us not in a jungle, but in a garden. What is the difference between a jungle and a garden? Order. There are walls and parameters and rows in a garden. And we were called, Adam and Eve were called to work it, or Adam was to work it and to keep it. And I think that is still true today, that we are to make orderly the world around us. And one way to do that is to protect our border. You cannot protect your border if you're not deporting illegal immigrants because you are incentivizing lawlessness. And John Piper is a very smart person and he knows his word very well. And I think he loves the Lord, his God with all of it, his heart, mind, soul and strength. So I don't assume to know more than him or to be wiser than him. There is a disconnect, I think, if this is the message he's trying to convey in this post when it comes to connecting the word of God to the political implications. My humble opinion, because as we have just talked about, like immigration and the people we allow in our country, it really affects our neighbor, especially the babies and the women and the vulnerable people in our country. In light of this, all of this conversation, CNN is warning us about Christian nationalism. And I want to respond to some of the things that they're saying because we hear all the time the danger is Christian nationalism. But the definition of Christian nationalism is so, is so fluid. We've been talking about it on this show for years. And Vodi Baucom, the late Vodi Bakam, whom I respected so much, he came on the show and talked about it and we just kind of like broke it down. What really not according to the liberal media, that is Christian nationalism. Like, I, I'm not even sure how I would personally define it, but if you break down the words, nationalism just means that you want to put the interests of your country first. It's not automatically synonymous with Nazism or fascism, but I do believe that we actually have the Christian responsibility to put the needs and the well being of our citizens first. Again, God created nations. Nations are like families. You don't hate your family just because. Or you don't hate your neighbors just because you lock your doors and you live inside a house. You just love your family. And God has created these, these circles of affection and circles of priority for us, for our good, especially for the good of children again. But I think that's true of Zimbabwe as well of China. Everyone should put their country first. So that's how I would define nationalism of like, in comparison to globalism, which is what we're going to have, a global government and we are trying to prioritize the needs of everyone equally. Absolutely impossible. Chaos. I'm anti chaos. I'm an anti chaos person. That can basically describe my politics. And then Christian, of course, we know what Christian is. A belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And so you believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You believe in putting your country first. You believe as Christians that your Christian worldview should impact all you think about policy and politics. And so you could describe it that way. But some would describe it as theocracy, as trying to force people through law to believe what you do, to practice what you do. People somehow, inexplicably would call me a Christian nationalist for literally no reason at all. But that is because people haven't actually tried to define it. So that's what cnn, I think, is trying to do. But of course they're warning against it. So they've got a documentary that is called the Rise of Christian Nationalism and it's apparently going to air in just a couple weeks. The CNN anchor behind the project, her name is Pamela Brown. She interviewed Douglas Wilson. Doug Wilson is an Idaho pastor in Moscow, Idaho. He identifies as a Christian nationalist. And she said, quote, through response to that report was overwhelming and highlighted the need to better understand this movement working to redefine America as a Christian nation. So you can already kind of see the bias in their language there, as if America doesn't have a Christian foundation, which of course it does. But she goes on to say, in the home, in a marriage, in schools and in government. This journalist Brown, defines Christian nationalism as an ideology rooted in the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should reflect Christian values. Well, again, like I, I would be hard pressed to understand how a Christian could argue against that. I mean, there's no such thing as neutrality. So it's either going to be Christianity, Islam, secular progressivism. Now, I do think that we should have religious liberty. I don't think we should force people to worship a certain way, to Pray a certain way or to be Christian. But. But if a worldview always has to inform law, because it does, every law speaks to a moral truth. People say, you can't legislate morality. Of course you do. Every piece of legislation is a form of morality. And our worldview is going to be reflected like Jesus's king can't be compartmentalized. Just like the Muslim doesn't believe that their belief should be compartmentalized. Certainly the secular progressive doesn't believe that their belief about gender or abortion should be compartmentalized. They're bringing the fullness of their belief system into the voting booth, into their PTA meetings, into the city council, into their classrooms, into every public sphere that they occupy in. Christian conservatives and Christian conservatives alone are told, you can't do that. Everyone else can, but you can't do that when you do that. That's a form of fascism. Well, this journalist pointed to the Charlie Kirk memorial service as a time of, quote, unprecedented alignment between Christian nationalists and the Trump administration. And so here she is saying that