Paul: Hi Pastor John my name is Paul.
John: Hi Paul
Paul: I was back and forth with this question and I received some slight peer pressure through
text message so—
John: So you succumbed to the pressure.
Paul: Yes I did, I did.
So with that being said, what is a biblical and Christ-proclaiming view of Charlottesville
Virginia and all that's happened recently?
John: Sure – I'll give you a biblical view of it.
The human heart is desperately wicked.
And the human heart is hostile toward God and self-centered and proud and selfish and
angry.
What Charlottesville simply demonstrates is that fallen humanity is corrupt.
All I see in that is the justification of anger.
Look, that's not about slavery.
That's not about something that happened two hundred years ago.
That's an opportunity for angry, hostile, self-willed, selfish people to explode and
feel good about it.
Because they can get away with it when there's enough of them, too many of them to stop.
No one tolerates white supremacists.
When I was down in Mississippi years ago I was arrested by those kinds of people for
preaching the gospel in black high schools and I was put in jail and they took all my
money away.
I know that.
I was with the black leaders in Jackson, Mississippi when Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’ brother,
Charles was the first black mayor in the south.
His brother Medgar was the first martyr of the civil rights movement.
He was killed.
I was in the room—when Martin Luther King was assassinated—with those black leaders
and we went to Memphis and I stood on the blood spots on that motel with those men.
And I stood in the little bathroom on top of the toilet where James Earl Ray shot him
out the window.
Those men were my friends; that was my community.
I couldn't buy groceries in that town when I got back in Mendenhall, Mississippi.
I couldn't eat in a restaurant.
I've seen all that.
That's not what's going on there in Charlottesville or any of these other demonstrations.
This is the wretched fallen human heart feeling like it can rise to any level that is not
completely controlled.
And let me tell you what gets you there.
Number one, the human heart is evil, war is in the heart, men will kill—that’s how
they function.
But God has built three restraints into society.
Restraint number one is in the individual and it's the conscience.
But the conscience reacts to a moral law.
So if you have a whole generation of young people that have been taught a twisted perverted
inverted upside down and backwards moral law, then their conscience can't function.
The conscience is simply a recognition mechanism that says that's wrong, that's right—that
excuses and accuses.
But it only can function where there's a sound moral law written in the heart.
So you have a whole generation of these people, of this generation, who have had a totally
perverted sense of what morality is.
And the dominant part of this new morality is, “I'm the most important person in the
world, it's all about me.”
It's the selfie culture.
So conscience is now crippled.
Secondly, God put fathers and mothers in a family to bring a rod to discipline people
in order to subdue their evil.
If the family is destroyed and the family breaks down then you have no control over
those people.
So conscience can't function because the moral law has been literally destroyed.
Families don’t function, so there is no discipline learned, there's no sense of what
is right, what is acceptable behavior.
And the only institution left that God ordained was the police.
Police were given a sword to subdue those who do evil.
When you assault the police long enough that you diminish their authority and the sense
of fear and the sense of reverence that a society has to have for those who police them,
then all hell will break loose.
Conscience isn't functioning, family is not functioning, and the police have been stripped
of their powers in the social consciousness.
You literally have unleashed the human heart at its worst level.
This is not about race, and this is not about what happened in America in the past.
No one can tolerate white supremacists; no one can tolerate the Ku Klux Klan.
One of my dear friends, John Perkins, his brother was killed in front of him by the
Ku Klux Klan in the street.
No one can tolerate that.
That is just one manifestation of the evil of the human heart.
And we have only begun to see it once it's unleashed.
And it's going to start coming in all kinds of forms because of the breakdown of moral
law, the breakdown of the conscience, the breakdown of the family, and because of the
incessant assaults on governing authorities.
So get ready.
I don't think it's going to go away.
Okay?
Paul: Thank you, pastor.
John: You're welcome, thank you Paul.