The Gospel Scope & Culture (Contra Pagan Culture)

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The Gospel Scope & Culture (Contra Pagan Culture)

May 15, 2022

Truth is exclusive. Culture is not created in a vacuum. All cultures reach for a transcendent reality to anchor themselves in, hence the root word Colere or Cultura, denoting growth and cultivation (a bacteria culture) or when applied to human society meaning "the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group" (taken from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture). Cultures are either objectively bad or objectively good (Christian culture being the only good).

Read this blog for a more concise thought on the topics discussed in this episode:

https://lennoxkalifungwa.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-cultural-neutrality/comments Key Text: Revelation 2:14-15 Website: forthekingpodcast.com Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/For-The-King-105492691873696/ Gab page: https://gab.com/ForTheKingPod Contact: forthekingpodcast@gmail.com Donate Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/f63fd7db-919e-44f6-9c58-8ec2891f3eb5 Kingly Clothing: https://www.bonfire.com/store/for-the-king/

Transcript

Solomon talks about in Proverbs, he tells his son to bind up his teachings on his heart that he may be careful to obey them. So there's a culture that comes with the commands of God based upon the scriptures. And that's what Israel lived by.

And when they came by other pagan cultures, what did God command them? Do not intermarry. Why? Why were they not to intermarry? Was it from an ethnocentric standpoint? Or as some might call it racism? No. It had everything to do with culture, and that still applies today.

Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow in tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[Music] Blessed are those who wash their robes so that they might have the right to the tree of life, and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. What is that? Revelation 22 verses 14 through 15.

Welcome to the For The King podcast. I'm your host Rocky Ramsey. I'm joined by my co-host and brother both in Christ and in the flesh.

Bryce, my co-host here. And on this podcast we seek to proclaim the edicts of the king, namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns. That's what we're here to declare to all of you listening.

So we're happy that you guys are with us today and this week we're talking about the gospel and culture. We're going to break this up into a bunch of different little series, a bunch of different things to talk about. But the main gist, the main topic of these next few episodes are going to be the gospel and culture and how the gospel and culture interact with each other.

So I started with that text in Revelation 22 and we're going to talk about this a little bit more as we go on this episode. But culture comes from the root word cultus, which is where we get the word cult from. So it has religious undertones to it.

Every culture, you know, culture doesn't happen in a vacuum. Every culture, when you say culture, people think every culture is their customs, their way they dress, their music, their food, the art, you know, the kind of books they read. That's what people think of when culture, so they think all those things are neutral, right? But none of those things happen in a vacuum.

Culture, all the way, all the ways that you do those things, books, literature, art, things like that, those happen from a worldview or some kind of religion, some metaphysical presuppositions that drive the culture a certain way. So culture isn't, culture isn't this neutral category that we should all rejoice in and we should all be happy when we look at the culture of the the pagan and whatever they're doing and rejoice with them as a Christian and say, "Wow, that's, we gotta, you know, if we're gonna preach the gospel then we need to make sure to maintain their culture." The fact of the matter is, for a majority of the part, we're not talking about changing their food or, you know, their food or maybe the instruments they use in a certain culture, but there is an element that we want to destroy their culture and replace it with godly Christian culture. Yeah.

That's exactly what Christians want to do. And this has an assumption tied to it that there is such a thing as a good culture and a bad culture. Yep.

The chief culture of this world is the culture of Christ. That is the only culture that is truly good. Every other culture is evil and wicked.

Yeah. So we want to displace the cultures of this world with the culture of Christ. So yes, that means that we want every single nation, every single tribe, all of it to be gospelized, which means that the gospels preach to these nations, people are baptized, and then they are taught to obey all that Christ commanded of us.

Now this doesn't mean, like Rocky says, that all of a sudden they're all gonna start dressing like Amish. It's not to speak English. We're not talking about speaking English and eating our food and using the guitar and the drums in your music and dressing in jeans and a white tee.

Yeah. That's not what we're talking about. That's not really what culture is.

That's a very shallow view of culture. Right. There's much, much more to culture than just those things.

So we're not talking about adopting the white western culture. We're talking about the gospel. We're talking about the way you do things and the ethics associated with the way you do art.

Although it in its entirety though, it will look very similar to western culture because western, in westernization it was largely synonymous with the Christian worldview and religion. So it will look very similar to the west. Yeah.

And ultimately it'll be the fundamental deconstruction of the east. But even with our culture that we have, even in America specifically, it's largely been reverting back to paganism. So ultimately that will be displaced as well.

But yeah. So we are talking very similar to the westernization, but it won't look exactly like how it has. So.

Yeah. And when you talk about west versus east, it's, we're not talking about, again, customs and the meaningless kind of, like the non-metaphysical parts of culture. We're talking about the clash between the paganism of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, atheistic materialism.

We're not talking, we're talking about those, the battle. And the west is largely Christian. It's all about the worldview specifically.

Yeah. What you believe and how it bleeds into what you practice. So it's Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy.

Yep. Yeah. Exactly.

So that's why I started off reading Revelation, because that's life in the kingdom. That's talking about the new Jerusalem, the new heavens and the new earth, the new Jerusalem. What's a life going to be like there? Yeah.

Well, outside will be people that have a wicked culture where they practice wicked things. So for instance, in Hinduism, there are temple prostitutes. I don't know why.

I don't know all the intricacies of the Hindu religion, but there is, that's permissible in their religion and that's needed for their religious experience. That culture is outside of the kingdom of God. It's Contra.

It's against the kingdom of God. So outside will be people that are sexually immoral, like the temple prostitutes. That's going to be opposing the new Jerusalem, the new heavens and the new earth.

So that's why I read that inside are those who dip and wash their robes that they might be fit for the kingdom of God, which is where righteousness reigns. So another parable I want to read you guys that talks about this, this Christian gospel centered culture, gospel centered. Did you hear that gospel coalition right there? But I mean that in a totally different way than they mean that.

Are you good? Yeah. Okay. So Luke 20, and he began to tell this parable, this is Christ.

A man planted a vineyard and let it out to tenants and went into another country for a long while. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants so that they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty handed and he sent another servant, but they also beat him and treated him shamefully and sent him away empty handed and he sent yet a third.

This one they also wounded and cast out. Then the owner of the vineyard said, "What shall I do? I will send my beloved son. Perhaps they will respect him." But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, "This is the heir.

Let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours." And they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others. So when they all hear that, they say, "Surely not.

This would never happen." This is what happens when you have a bad culture. You have wicked men developing a culture, customs, ways they think they can bend the world to their will. That's what culture is.

It's bending the world and the human society to a certain will. That's what cults do. That's why the root word of culture is cultus because when you have a cult develop, they develop this own little micro culture.

So let's think about Mormonism. There's a little micro culture there of customs and trades and things you do, things you say, things you read. And within that, that little micro culture of a cult is bending that society to the will of that worldview.

That's what's happening there. So let's think about the Greeks. They would make sculptures.

Their art reflected their worldview. They would always be making sculptures of the perfect male physique, the perfect form, the physique. Why were they so obsessed with that? Because their metaphysical worldview, their presuppositions that when they went into do art, what's the most beautiful thing we could make? Well, they were very in love with the male aesthetic because they also ended up being super effeminate and gay.

They were very enamored by the physique of the human. So they would make all these nude naked sculptures that resembled their worldview. So this is what we mean.

Would a Christian ever make a sculpture like that? Probably not. Glorifying nudity. Well, it depicted their humanism.

They ultimately in Greece after the conquering of Alexander the Great, I mean, they were pretty much the height of civilization. No one compared to Greek culture. So when they were depicting their gods, they were their own gods.

That's why when you have in Greek mythology, Zeus is depicted as a man, Thor. Sorry, that's Norse mythology. Poseidon is depicted as a man, Aphrodite, all these things.

So it's really just a, it's reciprocal. Their gods reflects themselves. The gods is the mirror of their own lives, essentially.

And that's why when you have in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, that when they're retelling the history of Greco culture, it's pretty much the conquering and the predominance of man over all things. It's him as God, which is why demigods are depicted in the stories themselves. They are the sons of God.

They are gods themselves. So that's why their art is a reflection of that. And they depict the heavenly beings, which is really just themselves.

Yep. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's why nobody, nobody would buy the argument.

That's just my culture. If you go, if you go to some place and they're doing something wicked, like for instance, let's think about an atheist viewing the Christian worldview. Let's think about patriarchy.

Men are leading in an authority over women. An atheist looks at that and says, I don't like your culture. I don't like the way things play out in your relationships and the way you do things.

I don't like that. So the Christian can't say, oh, that's just my culture. You're not allowed to expose evils of my culture.

Right. That's what so many people will do of other places in the world. They'll say, oh, that's just their culture.

So we have to accept it. It's just their culture. Yeah.

That's not how the world works. There's objective morals. There's things that are right and wrong.

So the atheist constantly critiquing the Christian worldview, because they see that all the time. First of all, they don't have any leg to stand on. They have no presuppositions to back up to, to derive where they're getting their morals from.

They can't even do that in the first place. But I've just heard that a lot that we need to be very, be very respectful of the cultures and the customs of the people. And it's like, well, if they're wicked, we ought to be intolerant of them and to expose the darkness.

That's exactly what Paul does to an act 17. He's exposing the darkness and the wickedness of their thoughts of God when he's talking to them and he's entering into their culture, into Greek culture, into Hellenistic culture. And that's the essential reason too, why you have a warfare that goes on.

It's one nation saying another nation's culture is wicked. Yeah. That's essentially what it is.

Or their culture is inferior to mine and they are only deserving to be displaced. Yeah. Which isn't necessarily a bad thought unless your culture is wrong.

Yeah. And that's what me and Rocky are trying to talk about here is that the gospel does bring the culture with it. When you look at the Old Covenant, Israel had its culture and customs of how they were supposed to live their lives according to the revealed will of God.

Deuteronomy 29, 29, the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever. Right. That we may do all the words of the law.

Deuteronomy 28 talks about the blessing that comes upon Israel and the doing and the accomplishment of the law. Solomon talks about in Proverbs, he tells his son to bind up his teachings on his heart that he may be careful to obey them. Right.

So there's a culture that comes with the commands of God based upon the scriptures. Yep. And that's what Israel lived by.

And when they came by other pagan cultures, what did God command them? Do not enter Mary. Why? Why were they not to enter Mary? Was it from an ethnocentric standpoint or as some might call it racism? No, it had everything to do with culture and that still applies today. That's why Christians are commanded to marry in the Lord.

Why? Because as it says, Solomon was led astray by his wives to worship false gods and idols. Yep. Right.

So marriage is a, that is such an important thing. There are so many good men like Solomon who married an unstable woman and that unstable woman then caused them to turn their eyes to false and foreign gods. Yep.

So that's the principle that the Christian is supposed to live by. Right. We do not yoke ourselves with this, with the cultures of this world.

That's why John says, do not love this world of the things in this world for all that is in the world, the less of the eyes, the less of the flesh and the part of life. Right. Don't love them.

He says, Paul says, don't be conformed to the pattern of this world. They'll be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Yep.

Right. So there's a culture that comes with Christianity and Christianity's culture is completely in contradiction against every single culture of this world. When it means when Jesus says that he has all authority in heaven and on earth and we are commanded to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the follows and Holy Spirit and teaching them, what that is doing is it is gospelizing the nations.

It's enculturating the nations with the Christian ethic and worldview. A culture is only goes so far as their worldview goes. And that's what we're trying to do.

We want to poke the idols of the false pagan worldviews and we want them to be supplanted with the Christian worldview. It's essentially just grafting. You're cutting off wicked branches and putting on the good ones.

And yeah, again, remember this does mean that Christian culture is objectively better than every single other culture of this world. That's something that we constantly have to remember unless it's a Christian culture, it will be shaken so that that which remains will stand short. That's what Paul says in Hebrews 12, right? He will shake the world.

So he says, "Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken." So we're supposed to be grateful for the culture of God's giving us. We live in a kingdom. Jesus said to repent for the kingdom of God as a hand.

So because we live in a kingdom, there are kingdom rules. There's a kingdom ethic. There's a kingdom culture.

So we are commanded to live by that so that we might be the salt and light of this world. But when we do not live by that culture, when we do not poke down the idols of the day, when we do not take our acts and cut down the wicked forces of this world like Elijah did, Elijah the prophet was brought before many false prophets in his day. And he challenged all of them against Baal, against their God Baal, saying, "Let's see whose God is stronger." And I'm sure you guys know the story.

There's essentially a worldview conflict between Yahweh and the gods of this world. The prophets of Baal, they were supposed to perform the sacrifice and light this fire, and it didn't end up working. Their God didn't answer.

And Elijah essentially makes fun of them and mocks Baal, saying, "Oh, I'm sure he's asleep. Keep calling for him." And then ultimately he calls upon Yahweh, and Yahweh demonstrates his preeminence over all gods. And that's what we do as Christians.

We put the world views of this world, and we put them in conflict with Yahweh, and we will find that only one of them will remain. And that's why Christianity has been predominant for the past 2,000 years. It continues to conquer, it continues to rise.

So that means that we will see atheism as it already has been. We will see that fall down. We will see Muhammadianism fall down, Mormonism, Catholicism, all of these things.

Judaism, we'll see all these, Hinduism, Buddhism, all these things, all of them will tumble down, and the only thing that will remain is Christian culture. So that assumes two things. One, we take our acts against false culture, and two, we establish and build up new culture.

We don't want to just sweep the house clean, we also want to fill the house. And that's what Rocky and I are really talking about here. Yeah, let me read that text real quick.

Luke 11, 24, "When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and finding out it says, 'I will return to the house from which I came.' And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order, then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last day that person is worse than the first." Yeah. That's what happens when Christianity comes to a culture. The goal is to cast out the unclean spirits, the unclean customs, the unclean and evil things, the profane things, and to fill the house lest unclean, more unclean spirits come and recapture the home.

So that's very important when you think of yourself as a Christian. What are you doing? You're not just proclaiming a gospel that for individual salvation, you're proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, which includes an entire culture and way of doing things. The way you talk, the way you act, the way you cook, the way you work out, the way you play music, the music you sing about, the things you listen to, the things you intake, the things you do and don't do, the movies you watch, the books you read, everything you do, everything you talk about should be uniquely Christian.

So when people say that, "Oh, that's a Christian thing," or "That's Christianese," that's things Christians say. So many people say, "Oh, we need to stop speaking Christianese. We need to dumb things down for people." And we do.

You don't have to use massive theological terms when you could articulate the same concept to somebody in an easier way. But it's good for people to recognize that Christians talk a certain way. Christians have certain words that they use.

That's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. This is the major problem when Rocky and I talk about, he had mentioned this at the beginning, when he talks about the gospel-centeredness that we have versus the gospel-centeredness of the gospel coalition is this fundamental distinction.

They don't tear down or build up. They just preach the gospel. And they think that they're doing something beneficial, which actually, in reality, they're actually doing a wicked thing.

The gospel is contextualized. And hear me clearly. When I say the gospel is contextualized, I mean it no more than when the rich young man asked Jesus, "How may I enter eternal life?" And Jesus says, "You know the commandments?" And he says, "I've kept all of these from my youth." And Jesus says, "Yeah, but you lack one thing.

Go and sell all that you have and come follow me." Jesus contextualized the gospel because this young man had one sin hanging in the balance that was causing him to withdraw as he was hardening his heart against God. And it was, he had too many possessions and he wouldn't give any of them up for Christ. Yeah.

So Jesus contextualized the gospel. He taught him true, taught him truly how to come to Christ. And it was that he had to give up everything.

When you share the gospel with a feminist, what you ought to do is highlight her sin of feminism to her and call her to repent of that. If you meet someone who's a homosexual, don't hush up about homosexuality and talk about lying when he doesn't struggle with lying. Obviously everyone lies, but you need to contextualize it and talk about the sins of the day.

Yeah. If you do not talk about the sins of the day, you fail miserably to preach the gospel. Yeah.

If you meet somebody that is overweight and fat, you can see right on their body what they struggle with, what sin they're given to. This is not a bad thing to say, "Hey, I can tell you overindulge and you're a gluttonous person." "Oh, but I have a metabolic problem. My hormones are out of whack.

I can't help it." Okay. You can help it. You can eat properly.

Humans aren't designed to be fat. You need to poke the idols in the eyes. Right.

And that's what you would say against somebody who believes that Allah is the one true God and Muhammad is his prophet. You tell them you need to repent of your Muhammadianism and you need to come to Christ because Muhammad is a false prophet. He's a murderous individual and he rapes many people.

He raped many people and he pillaged many lands. Right. And his God Yahweh is a God who is far lesser than the gods.

God Allah. Yahweh. Yahweh.

What? You said his God Yahweh. That Allah. Did I say Yahweh? You said Yahweh.

I meant Allah. Yeah. That's funny.

Bet you tell him to repent of that and turn to Christ, turn to the true God. Yeah. And ultimately there's many apologetics for that, but obviously, I mean, their book even points to reading the Gospels, which is odd because it's a contradiction because it says that Jesus didn't rise from the dead and that he actually didn't even die.

But Allah made it look like that, essentially. And they say, go read the Gospels and it's like, well, if you go read that, you'll see something else. Yeah.

So, and it's very interesting. But anyways, yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. You're poking the idols of the day.

So if you're giving a sermon for two people who are about to get married, you're about to marry them, and you lack saying the word submission, which is the biblical word, there's a very big issue there. No matter how perfectly you might have preached the Gospel, you missed the mark entirely because that's the son of the day. Right.

Feminism is rampant. Feminism is rampant. Pornography, adultery is rampant.

We need to poke the idols where they're at. We don't want to try to fell a tree that's already down. Yep.

Amen. So we're going to continue talking about this. This is just the first one.

What we mainly labored to do today, guys, is why the Gospel is inherently against pagan culture and by default is establishing Christ's own culture, God's culture that he's revealed to us. And just to recap, all we're claiming is that culture comes from a worldview, metaphysical principles and presuppositions that bleed out into customs, actions, languages, art, literature, everything that you would think of as culture doesn't happen in a vacuum. And neither does God's culture happen in a vacuum.

He made it. He commands it. So we're going to keep talking about this and we're going to do a couple case studies and look at some things more specifically in the next couple episodes, but that's what we wanted to establish today.

So thanks for listening, guys. I got a website, forthekingpodcast.com and you can reach me at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com if you have anything that you just hated that Bryce and I said and you want to engage with us in it, we'd be happy to talk to you about it. And I always end with the doxology from 1st Timothy 117 to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God be honoring glory forever and ever.

Amen. Solely, deo, mortal.

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