Latest / The Living Waters Podcast / Communism’s Rejection of God. True Equality and Justice in Scripture. - Highlight: Episode 344

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Communism’s Rejection of God. True Equality and Justice in Scripture. - Highlight: Episode 344 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  Speaker 1: But, ray, as far as communism goes, it goes beyond economics Just slightly.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: First of all and I'd like us to discuss this communism's rejection of God.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: That's huge, you know, in its Marxist-Leninist form it's basically built on an atheistic, if you can even call it a worldview.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: There's debate on that.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: But basically it's built on atheism and Karl Marx is credited with that famous saying that religion is the opium of the people, or the masses.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Opiate, opiate, opium, opiate.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, communism seeks to imitate Christianity in that sense, because you look at the book of Acts, where they had all things in common, but it was given willingly, motivated by love, and what communism does is we're going to share everything.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: You're rich, so you're going to die so we can get you goods, and that's what happens.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Atheistic communism has been responsible for more than 100 million deaths down through the years, so it doesn't work because it's tainted by sin as Oscar was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, and Mark this desire to be liberated from God.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: That's okay.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: Let's start right there.
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: Right, because I would make the contention and the argument that communism didn't begin with Karl Marx.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: It began in the garden.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: Right, where we see Adam and Eve attempting to go away from God, and it says the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: Right, so man tried to seize that which belonged to God.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: I know better than God.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: I want what belongs to God, right?
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: And to Ray's point, as Ray's talking about really a capitalistic society as well, and you think about it in Acts 5-4, while it remained unsold, did it not remain your own?
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: Right, so Scripture would affirm to private property that God does not desire a forced redistribution of goods.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Right, we're saying it's the government's responsibility to take care of the homeless.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: It's the government's responsibility to take care of my health.
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: It's the government's—no, no, no.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: This is where really nonprofit organizations come in by and large, which were a big piece of the pie, coming from religious organizations, from hospitals being founded to anything else.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: Or you think of American Red Cross, you think of the Salvation Army, having these Christian foundations saying we are overflowing with good works, and that's what the Christian does when somebody has this paradigm shift and moves from darkness into light.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: They want to be rich in good works.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: They can't just pass somebody by.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: The essence of communism is that it rejects God's authority, and I love that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: The way the Ten Commandments begin I am the Lord, your God.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: That phrase, I am the Lord, your God is used over 400 times in Scripture and it's really good to understand what it means.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: It means I am the Lord, the sovereign authority, the one you're going to answer to your God.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your creator.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: So Richard Dawkins has a God.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: God is his God, his creator.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: Every atheist has a creator, but he's not their lord, and you see it consistently through scripture you shall love the lord your god with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and we see this the gospel, appearing in the words of thomas when he knelt before jesus and said my lord, and my god, and that's the essence of what a Christian is.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: They take on the Lordship of Christ, and one day the whole of humanity will bow to the Lordship of Jesus.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Every knee will bow.
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: So the gospel makes some generous people.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: And when you remove the gospel which is typically what a communistic society is going to do, you're going to remove Christ from the picture, you're going to remove the only hope for a society.
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: And the only hope for a society to Oscar's point is the gospel.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: So the answer is not necessarily a socialistic society, it's not a capitalistic, it's not a communistic society.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: The only hope is the gospel.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: And this is so important because we get sidetracked, thinking that our battle is in Washington.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: DC.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: Our battle is in local authorities who are going to set up laws, and I'm not saying don't vote.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: Obviously, for those that are listening, I'm not swinging to the other side of the pendulum and you don't either.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: I'm simply saying that everything we do and everything we interpret and everything we watch has to go through a gospel-centric lens.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: Why am I doing what I am doing?
• 5:50
  Speaker 4: I love what you said, mark, and you're absolutely right the answer to socialism, communism, is not capitalism.
• 5:57
  Speaker 4: You see the cracks, you see the imperfections, and I think where socialism slash capitalism starts is a longing for something good, a longing for justice, a longing for equality, a longing for a world where there's none in poverty, where there's none being oppressed.
• 6:15
  Speaker 4: But ultimately, your ultimate hope is in politics and not in the Prince of Peace, and my plea to anybody who's buying into any of these ideologies is that you cannot have heaven on earth without the cross.
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: We've tried it before.
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: We've tried it in Babel.
• 6:35
  Speaker 4: We tried bringing down utopia.
• 6:37
  Speaker 4: It started in the Old Testament.
• 6:38
  Speaker 4: We've tried it in Russia, we've tried it in the United States, we've tried it all over the Middle East.
• 6:43
  Speaker 4: You cannot have heaven without a cross, and the more we try to do that, the more we fail.
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: So while communism aims for justice, it aims for justice without a redeemer, and the gospel calls for justice through a redeemer.
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: No political vision can save us.
• 7:02
  Speaker 4: Only Christ can save us.
• 7:04
  Speaker 4: And we can get into the details about you know like.
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: Again, as I said earlier, the scriptures give us a rubric to critique all man-made structures, including capitalism, socialism, communism, libertarianism.
• 7:19
  Speaker 4: God's economy is like this it's provision over profit that's capitalism.
• 7:25
  Speaker 4: But it's also provision over power that's communism.
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: In other words, in God's economy we have justice and mercy and beauty and goodness.
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: But what you long for will not happen through policies and politicians.
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: It will only happen when Jesus comes back and brings heaven with him.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: Just while you guys were talking, I was thinking what I would say if I had the privilege to go to some of these angry universities that just spend nothing but day in, day out protesting their anger against, basically, america and capitalism.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: What would I say if I went there?
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: And I thought it would be interesting, because all I want to do is preach the gospel, and that because of their background atheistic and evolution, et cetera.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: However, when we talk about the gospel, what we're saying is Jesus came to save us from the wrath, to come, and as fruit of the gospel there is love, and it's so simplistic sounding, but love is the answer to every dilemma of humanity.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: You shall love the lord, your god, with your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: If humanity could do that, there'd be no rape, no murder, adultery, no fornication, no theft, no lawyers, no judges, no prisons.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Everything that we live for would just be cast aside because we'd have utopia.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: But humanity cannot do that because it doesn't have the love that we need.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's a rock group called the Beatles from years ago that sung All we Need Is Love.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: And that was just before their bitter breakup.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: And then the hippies that just said Love, love is all you need, same thing.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: And then you get the Charles Manson come in and you just see the whole thing tainted and that resulted in the Jesus revolution where people come to know the Lord.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: But love is the answer.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: And that's the fruit of the gospel and that's why we need to preach the gospel to get people saved by God's grace from the wrath to come and to bring a society that's tolerable until the coming of Christ.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I was recently in a communist country.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: You guys know I went to Cuba and I saw firsthand the ravages of communism in terms of its systematic, I think, deterioration of a society, of its systematic, I think, deterioration of a society, and the believers there.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like I went and I just kind of observed, but the believers there told us I think the average income is like $7 a month right now there.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: So I got to see firsthand just the destruction, I think, of communism and again, not just because of its economic policy, but all these other things we're talking about.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: We didn't even get into the destruction of the family structure because the state takes over that.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: We didn't get into the creation of envy and class warfare and the danger of centralized power and things like that, of centralized power and things like that.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: But, man, you know, what was the most beautiful thing Was watching these believers thrive in the midst of that, because they treasured Christ.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: You guys remember I talked about how I got up and I said the church in Cuba is alive, the church in Cuba is powerful, the church in Cuba loves Jesus.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: And then they exploded amen.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: And they're not letting it stop them.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there are repercussions, but they keep pushing and pushing to where the government is even stepping back and going.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Wow, these people are actually having good impact in our society.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: So I know that there are brethren right now living in communist countries who are listening to our voice, and we just want to encourage you to know that you are loved by your brethren here in the United States of America, that we care for you, that we're standing with you, that we're praying for you and, in keeping with what Mark said, they cannot take Christ from you.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: And so treasure him, cling to him and love them with the gospel, make the gospel known, because the true hope for every nation is the gospel.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Friends, we value your time, so we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped, without the jokes and fellowship.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic Until.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic Until.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Then you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaterstv.