Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my twenty seventh episode. Tonight, I bring you my first lecture as part of the new ministry I described in the previous episode. I’ll be doing this with all of my lessons so I that can keep you up to speed with my live classes. Please sit back and enjoy.
Okay so, in the previous episode I gave a brief promotion of what I hope to accomplish with these lectures. I presented the idea that we have a serpent to contend with in the West. I told you that he hides behind three masks. First is equality of outcome. Second is group identity. Third is censorship. My long term goal for these meetings is to combat these three issues, as well as others. So tonight I want to go into detail about what it is we are facing. These are concerns that I share with many other speakers, and I want to make the case for you that this serpent is real. This is not alarmist material – this is not doomsday preparation.
Not only is it true but it matters to each of you. If we are right about this, all of us will be directly impacted by major transformations within a generation. But that’s only if we do nothing. Meetings just like this are happening all across the country and I’m predicting that we (the church) are going to correct the course of this ship. I don’t know what that means for eschatology – or end times prophecy. I don’t know the timing of God’s return. But I do know what I see, and there are still enough people who are seeking the truth for us to pull off another revival in the West. You only need a strong minority of your population (think 30 – 40%) to be individuals who refuse to compromise their integrity. That’s generally enough to preserve the civilization – all the way down to your own neighborhoods.
It’s a curious time that we live in. It’s never been easier to access information than it is for us today. Yet in some ways, we’ve never been further from the truth. Both inside of the church and outside of the church. Four years ago I had my heart set on destruction. I wanted it. God stood in that path the same way He did for Balaam and his donkey when Balaam sought to curse Israel in the book of Numbers. God put up His hand to stop me. Then, everything I thought I knew came crashing down. I’ve been on this journey ever since. I’ve worked tirelessly to get at the truth. And after all this time, after many hours of mulling over philosophy, after listening to hundreds of attacks on God’s very existence – the truth remains standing. And that truth is Jesus. He is both the foundation and the summit of every discipline. He is there waiting for us at the limits of every domain of discovery. As Christians, we can charge forward and take heart because He is everywhere.
Why am I telling you this? Because things around us are changing. You all know about the toxicity that characterizes our politics in the West. You all know about the political and societal issues that hit you in your own home. Are you going to be able to make ends meet? Are your children safe when they go to school? You will have your opportunities to effect change for these issues when you vote. I’m here to talk about a problem that cannot be solved by the politicians. I’m here to address a need that blossoms into the worst tragedies the world has ever witnessed. My problem is a serpent that sneaks into our communities and into our homes. My problem is not political – it is theological. It is an attack on God Himself and on the divinity that is inside of you that makes you a child of God.
In order to properly understand this problem, we need to look at where we’ve seen it before. The 20th century was scarred by wars which killed more people than the previous 19 centuries combined. I can speak for my generation. We were educated every year on the terrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. But we learned nearly nothing about the Soviet Union and the death toll of Marxist ideology. The best way of thinking about an ideology is this: an ideology is an incomplete story that claims to solve a problem completely. Marxism was an incomplete story that presented itself as a utopia – or a perfect world. In the perfect world of Marxism, poverty would be gone and there would be no such thing as social status. Everyone would have enough. 293 million people fell for that lie.
Remember, I said an ideology is an incomplete story. In Marxism, the missing part of the story was the gulag. The gulag was a state sponsored forced labor camp.
The USSR (the Soviet government) planned the gulag. Mass incarceration and political repression were features of this utopia. They were designed and built-in to the economic system. And murder was designed and built-in to Marxist ideology.
I need to tell you about the kulaks. A kulak was a farmer who was able to raise more crops and have more livestock than his neighbors. The Soviet government labeled these farmers as oppressors and demanded that they be slaughtered by their own fellow countryman. And the countryman did it. The Jewish Russian journalist Vassily Grossman made this report:
The activists who helped the State Political Directorate (the secret police) with arrests and deportations “were all people who know one another well, and knew their victims, but in carrying out this task they became dazed, stupefied […] They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children ‘kulak bastards,’ screaming ‘bloodsuckers!’ […] They had sold themselves on the idea that so-called ‘kulaks’ were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a ‘parasite’s’ table; the ‘kulak’ child was loathsome, the young ‘kulak’ girl was lower than a louse.”
These were common people raiding their neighbors’ houses, raping their wives and murdering their children. In rural areas just like our own. All of this happened because when individuals were offered the choice between power and principle – they chose power. Each one of them.
We are reminded of Satan offering Jesus this same choice in Matthew 4:8-10:
Next the devil took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. “I will give it all to you,” he said, “if you will kneel down and worship me.”
“Get out of here, Satan,” Jesus told him. “For the Scriptures say, ‘You must worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
6 million people died as a consequence of these kulak farmers being murdered. And that’s not to confuse this 6 million with the 6 million who were killed during the Holocaust. This happened because individuals – commoners just like us – wanted power more than they wanted God.
And today, this march towards the Marxist utopia has already begun in the West. The Universities have set up activist disciplines that train young people to go out into the world and shape it to their liking. These students are being told that they have the tools and the knowledge to create a more perfect world. Young people everywhere are being sold on the idea that they are fine just the way they are. They’re being told that the world should submit to their judgment if it doesn’t treat them accordingly. They’re being encouraged to rewrite the mistakes of the past and forget that it ever happened. Who is doing this? What singular being could orchestrate such a thing? Perhaps the same one who was behind the dazed faces of the people who murdered the kulak farmers. Perhaps the same one who tempts all of us with power and pride over wisdom and integrity.
Some activist professors and politicians will tell you that this civil unrest is from too many people struggling to get by. But that narrative does not fit with the facts. Almost all markers of prosperity are showing positive increases. Luxury is up. Theaters of war are relatively stable. Pollution and crime are down. Diseases are being controlled and eradicated. Technological advancement has never been better.
But, the markers of human mental wellness have gone in the opposite direction: polarized and poisonous politics; an opiate crisis; increased diagnosis of depression and anxiety; widening participation in mob mentality. Did you see the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert last month? 70,000 people gathered in the desert to light a giant wooden man on fire and have an orgy. If that doesn’t sound like the pagan religions from the Old Testament, I don’t know what does. This was not just a big gathering of crazies. These were 70,000 upper middle class people. Executives from Google attended this event. Burning Man was the largest spiritual gathering in the United States this year. These things are not happening because of economic struggle – these things are spiritual and they are being driven by a crisis of meaning.
But this young generation is smart. These are good kids who are starving for a sense of purpose. I know this because I was one. They can be saved just as I was saved – by coming into contact with individuals who love God with all of their heart. The story of the West is not a foregone conclusion. We don’t have to travel the same path that our predecessors did in the 20th century. We can turn this thing around and the Bible tells us how to do it. Matthew 28:18-20:
Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
As many of you know, this is the Great Commission. This is the biggest job for all who call themselves Christians. Unfortunately, sharing the Gospel is not as straightforward as it used to be. If you try to talk about Jesus in a public setting you get accused of proselytizing or ramming religion down someone’s throat. What is the most common reason why people react defensively when being told about Jesus? I believe it’s because they follow a different religion.
We are all taught that secularism means to be without religion. The dictionary defines secular as: denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. I present to you that secularism itself has become a religion. Advancement is the god of secularism. Let me explain this:
In the years following the enlightenment, science emerged at the hands of Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, and Francis Bacon. All three of these men were Christians. Over time, people began to see the reliability of the scientific method. Albert Einstein said: the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Einstein knew that a universe born of blind chance should not be rationally intelligible. This means that if there was no mind behind the creation of the universe, we should not be able to describe the universe using science.
The best way of thinking about this is to imagine that you are walking on the beach. You walk up to your name written in the sand. In this case, everyone would automatically assume that someone with a mind was behind your written name. It didn’t just appear by the chance bombardment of the waves and the surf. In the same way, the laws of nature are God’s writing on the universe. Science is simply the process we use to read this writing. Einstein’s thought was, how could you have written information if there was no mind to write it?
Fast forward to today. The world has enjoyed more advancement in the last 50 years than ever before in recorded history. All at the hands of science. So what did humanity do? What we always do – we erected a religion around science and we worshiped it. You can see this happen in ancient history too. It was common practice for the ancient empires to round up conquered people and homogenize them – or mix them up – with other cultures. This prevented people from uniting in rebellion against the empire. During the height of its power, the Babylonian empire would bring captives into the city of Babylon.
These captives would be awestruck by the marvels of the city. They witnessed engineering that was well beyond their understanding. Luxuries once thought impossible were commonplace in Babylon. Diseases that would ravage normal populations were nowhere to be found in this city. How did the captives react to this amazement? They bowed down and worshiped Marduk – the state sponsored god of Babylon. After all, he must be the real god. Why else would Babylon be so successful?
Many people in the West treat advancement the same way. If science can give me an iPhone or tell me how many stars are in the galaxy – surely it must be able to answer my questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. That is the attitude that gives birth to idolatry. Sharing the Gospel is difficult today because many people have become followers of the religion of secularism.
So how do we witness to them? We embrace the same advancement that spawned their religion. The disciplines like science, history, psychology, etc. – these are worldview independent. For example, if I light a piece of wood on fire, it will burn the same way whether I’m Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or secular. The facts of the world are independent of your values. But this independence goes both ways. Since facts are independent of values, I cannot derive values from facts. That’s why a moral system without God is not logical.
Okay, so if I know that facts do not belong to any religion – then I can also know that the disciplines which describe these facts do not belong to any religion. This means that the disciplines are fair game for us Christians. We should embrace science, history, psychology and the like. I’ll tell you why. The single greatest reason atheism is spreading so rapidly in the West is because prominent members of these disciplines are saying that they don’t believe in God. A molecular biologist can stand at a lectern in front of 300 students and say that God does not exist. And the students believe the speaker because a molecular biologist must know a lot about reality. Right? But that’s the problem – these disciplines have become so specialized that you can spend your whole life studying one field and not learn all there is to know about it.
So, if a speaker has spent their whole life studying one area, that means they know almost nothing about the other areas. But because they sound so smart at the lectern, the listeners assume that he or she must know more about God than they do. Christians, if we can reach these experts and show them that the God we follow is true and alive – then the Gospel will cut right through the false religion of secularism. The same way the Israelites cut through the Asherah Poles in the Old Testament.
There are two ways that we can do this: the second way depends on the first. The first is found in Matthew 5:13-16:
You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless.
You are the light of the world – like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father.
Your character is the most important part of who you are as a Christian. Being a good person is something everyone can do regardless of talent or intellect. Remaining a good person when everything around you has turned bad is how you become the salt and the light of the world. The people you witness to may never learn the 5 philosophical proofs for the existence of God. But they will never forget a Christian whose character preserved what was good and whose light guided the world. And you can do that without ever saying a word to anyone.
But let’s say that somebody sees your sense of joy and peace and wants to know who you get it from. This is where step two comes in. 1 Peter 3:13-15:
Now, who will want to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you suffer for doing what is right, God will reward you for it. So don’t worry or be afraid of their threats. Instead, you must worship Christ as Lord of your life. And if someone asks about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it.
This is where effective conversation comes in. As Christians, we must master the art of having discussions with people whom we disagree with. When a believer approaches a nonbeliever, by definition they are starting from a place of disagreement. What a witness for Christ when the Christian is the one who can reach across the aisle and promote freedom of thought. There are tools that we can develop to do this. There are also very strong reasons for believing what we believe. Classic thinkers like Aristotle, Ignatius, Thomas Aquinas, and Leibniz have all mapped out reasons for God’s existence. There is a wealth of knowledge running through history that points straight to Jesus Christ.
I believe in the West. I believe in this generation and I believe in the body of Christ. I’ve given these talks in other places where listeners have felt as if they could not connect with these big issues. I want to warn you against that mode of thinking. That’s called tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons was most recently made popular during discussions about climate change. Scientists found that individuals were not motivated to recycle because they didn’t think anyone else would recycle. So what difference could they make on their own? Tragedy of the commons is when you feel as if you are just one person and you can’t make a large scale difference since no one else is changing. But the tragedy occurs when everyone else is thinking that too.
So what should we do about it? I believe when we gather together to sharpen each other and to explore the space between us and God, Jesus is right here with us. Let’s have the courage to confront all types of discussion, and the good faith that the truth will stand. I want us to examine the issues from the highest levels of society to the smallest difficulties here at home. All of this is connected. What you do in your daily life is going to change the world, and what happens in the world is going to change your daily life.
Status quo is an illusion. That means that there is no staying in place. When we do nothing, we become locked in a constant and gradual backslide. This rule applies to your personal life as well as to the community. The broken parts inside of each one of us desire to hide from God. Our only chance is to have faith, and to pick up our crosses (or pick up our suffering) and follow Him. I want us to leave each of these meetings with new and improved tools to spread the Gospel and to be salt and light to the world. Jesus said:
I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!
The Way to protecting the future runs through the individual. The Truth is that the individual is the only one who can prevent evil from rising again. The Life is the joy and the peace that you will have when you know that you stood on principle in the moment that you were offered power.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 