- 2 days ago
John and Bob discuss the historical and theological roots of dominionism, tracing its lineage from ancient tribalism through Christian Identity and Latter Rain theology, to its modern manifestation in the New Apostolic Reformation. They examine how belief systems have always included some form of power struggle, with dominionism merely being the latest iteration of an age-old human tendency. Drawing from ancient history, biblical narratives, and personal experiences, the conversation challenges the modern evangelical lens that sanitizes scripture and overlooks the broader, often troubling context in which it was written. They critique how the Bible is often misused to support narrow political or religious agendas, instead of being viewed as a complex historical and spiritual text.
The discussion also explores how religious leaders have shaped—and sometimes distorted—the nature of God to reflect their own brokenness, using dogma to enforce conformity rather than fostering genuine transformation. Through comparisons with Islamic eschatology, ancient conquests, the Catholic Church, and even the dynamics of the early Israelite tribes, the conversation makes a case for humility, nuance, and a multi-perspective view of theology and history. Mental health, elitism, and the dangerous allure of theocratic control also come into play, particularly in reference to recent controversies and leaders in the NAR. The episode closes with a call to reconsider how we view both scripture and leadership, especially when distorted theology can perpetuate abuse or drive people away from real healing.
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Dominionism and Christian Identity Roots
03:02 C. Peter Wagner and Early American Influences
05:01 Eugenics, Elitism, and Religious Control
08:45 The Spread of Dominion Ideology Globally
12:14 Historical Patterns of Control and Empire
14:46 Ancient Examples of Dominionism
17:15 Latter Rain and Zion City as Theocratic Models
19:15 Old Testament Dominion and Its Fragile Legacy
22:57 Power Dynamics in Ancient Israel
25:17 Offense, Division, and the Fall of Unified Israel
27:07 Sanitized Preaching and Whitewashed History
30:06 Rebuilding Culture After Destruction
34:36 God’s Role in Cultural Development
36:57 The Bird’s Eye View and Bible Complexity
40:10 Denominational Division and Lack of Context
43:41 Dominionism’s View of God vs. the Bigger Picture
46:03 Prophets in Power and Lessons from History
47:53 The Samaritan Perspective and Jesus’ Approach
51:13 Common Origin and God’s Global Work
53:10 Reducing God to Human Flaws
54:40 Good People, Bad Choices, and Mental Health
58:43 Control vs. Transformation
59:13 Religious Leadership and Coercion vs. Invitation
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.you
The discussion also explores how religious leaders have shaped—and sometimes distorted—the nature of God to reflect their own brokenness, using dogma to enforce conformity rather than fostering genuine transformation. Through comparisons with Islamic eschatology, ancient conquests, the Catholic Church, and even the dynamics of the early Israelite tribes, the conversation makes a case for humility, nuance, and a multi-perspective view of theology and history. Mental health, elitism, and the dangerous allure of theocratic control also come into play, particularly in reference to recent controversies and leaders in the NAR. The episode closes with a call to reconsider how we view both scripture and leadership, especially when distorted theology can perpetuate abuse or drive people away from real healing.
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Dominionism and Christian Identity Roots
03:02 C. Peter Wagner and Early American Influences
05:01 Eugenics, Elitism, and Religious Control
08:45 The Spread of Dominion Ideology Globally
12:14 Historical Patterns of Control and Empire
14:46 Ancient Examples of Dominionism
17:15 Latter Rain and Zion City as Theocratic Models
19:15 Old Testament Dominion and Its Fragile Legacy
22:57 Power Dynamics in Ancient Israel
25:17 Offense, Division, and the Fall of Unified Israel
27:07 Sanitized Preaching and Whitewashed History
30:06 Rebuilding Culture After Destruction
34:36 God’s Role in Cultural Development
36:57 The Bird’s Eye View and Bible Complexity
40:10 Denominational Division and Lack of Context
43:41 Dominionism’s View of God vs. the Bigger Picture
46:03 Prophets in Power and Lessons from History
47:53 The Samaritan Perspective and Jesus’ Approach
51:13 Common Origin and God’s Global Work
53:10 Reducing God to Human Flaws
54:40 Good People, Bad Choices, and Mental Health
58:43 Control vs. Transformation
59:13 Religious Leadership and Coercion vs. Invitation
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.you
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:36I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research
00:00:40at william-branham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder
00:00:47of the Kansas City Fellowship and the author of three books, the latest of which is Some
00:00:52Say They Blundered, Breaking My Decades of Silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Prophets,
00:00:57and the International House of Prayer.
00:01:00Bob, it's good to be back and to talk about all things mess in the Christian world today.
00:01:08We've gone through the series talking about how things got to where they are, and you
00:01:13mentioned you wanted a break from that to talk about dominionism and Seven Mountain Mandate
00:01:18type of stuff, which is interesting because I like to take things from multiple different
00:01:24perspectives.
00:01:24And as you know, I've talked about this with multiple people at this point.
00:01:29The last one was Jed Hartley, but talking about just the differences between it and Christianity.
00:01:35And there's some history there with which, you know, this history goes back millennia.
00:01:41You can go back as far back as you want to go, which you and I will talk about.
00:01:44But in the near history, if you go back to where my research on the latest book goes back to
00:01:54Christian identity.
00:01:55And really, that's the root of what became the Latter Rain Movement.
00:02:00Largely, it was embedded in Pentecostalism.
00:02:03But there was this notion that the United States was being infiltrated.
00:02:08But through Christian identity, they taught that there was basically subhumans and the
00:02:14children of God.
00:02:15And it developed from British Israelism.
00:02:19They thought that the United States and Canada and the British Isles were the descendants of
00:02:24the lost ten tribes of Israel.
00:02:26But the opposing thought to that, once it became Christian identity, was there is this lesser
00:02:32class of humans.
00:02:34They used different terms, but basically false Jews that had taken over.
00:02:39They've taken over our entertainment industry.
00:02:41They're embedded in our politics.
00:02:43They're basically every aspect of life.
00:02:46And we need to fight back.
00:02:47We need to take this back.
00:02:48Isn't it the Elders of Zion or something?
00:02:49Isn't there a publication?
00:02:52Oh, it's a crazy interesting history.
00:02:54And it's more closely related to the New Apostolic Reformation than people realize.
00:02:59So C. Peter Wagner, who is the one who named it, the New Apostolic Reformation, was at a
00:03:05Fuller Seminary.
00:03:07Charles Fuller, who founded the seminary, was a leading ranking member of the
00:03:13They were called the Defenders of the Christian Faith, which was led by Gerald Burton Wynrod.
00:03:18Gerald Burton Wynrod was a no-name preacher from Kansas, just humble guy, no money, allegedly
00:03:25humble.
00:03:26He goes to Germany and has counsel before the war.
00:03:31He has counsel with Hitler.
00:03:32He suddenly comes back with massive amounts of money, massive, and launches this huge campaign.
00:03:41The campaign included Christian fundamentalism, but also with that, he carried with him the
00:03:47copy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and he starts distributing it.
00:03:52So he's distributing it, and Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company.
00:03:57Yeah, I remember that.
00:03:59Yeah, Dearborn Independent.
00:03:59Reading it, I should say.
00:04:00I wasn't alive, but I remember reading about this.
00:04:03Yeah.
00:04:03So they're spreading it, too, through the Dearborn Independent.
00:04:06But what happened essentially was it was coming into the nation at a time whenever the politicized
00:04:15propaganda was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was working with the false Jews, and they were
00:04:21trying to shift the country into a direction that essentially was leading towards Armageddon.
00:04:27And we'll get into it more as we go, but essentially what they wanted to do was they wanted to retake
00:04:33the mountains, they wanted to take over the entertainment industry and block the false Jews,
00:04:38the government, block the false Jews, and it became deeply rooted into the latter rain theology.
00:04:46If you understand the history of what I'm talking about, you'll understand that it's connected to
00:04:50latter rain.
00:04:51Well, then from latter rain came the NAR.
00:04:54So what we have today, it's not new like people think.
00:04:57This is history repeating itself then, but as you and I will talk, it goes back for millennia.
00:05:03Well, parallel to what you're talking about, and you're going to have to forgive me or you're
00:05:08going to have to help me because I'm having a brain glitch right now, but there was also a movement
00:05:15where Winston Churchill, Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt were all talking about the fact that
00:05:26there were a superior race.
00:05:29What's the word I'm talking about?
00:05:30I keep saying euthanasia, but it wasn't euthanasia, but it was like an E word.
00:05:36It was eugenics.
00:05:37Eugenics, that's the word I'm looking for.
00:05:39And you know, people don't realize that that was taught in American schools as though it was a science.
00:05:44People were breeding, basically, we can breed ourselves a certain way and outbreed all of the bad quality genes.
00:05:52Well, I'll give you an example of somebody, Charles Lindbergh.
00:05:55Our modern world doesn't really fully grasp that Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s was the rock star.
00:06:04Like, he was the man, right, because of the fact that he had flown to Paris nonstop over the ocean.
00:06:11But Lindbergh bought into the whole eugenics thing.
00:06:15And, of course, later it was discovered that he, like, you know, this is the other scandal.
00:06:22If you go to the English crown, there was a reason why Edward abdicated, because Edward and Mrs. Simpson were tied.
00:06:29They loved Hitler.
00:06:30Like, there was a whole bunch of people in the British aristocracy that loved the German efficiency.
00:06:38They loved all of that.
00:06:39They thought it was a better way of life.
00:06:41And they thought they were a superior race, right?
00:06:43Well, it was discovered years later, years, years later, after Lindbergh had died, there was two groups of kids in Germany that claimed that he was their father.
00:06:55And everybody used to laugh at him, right?
00:06:58And sure enough, once DNA testing became a thing, they tested him.
00:07:03And, you know, he had not only a family in the United States, he had two families in Germany.
00:07:08And his whole idea was, I have superior genes.
00:07:11I need to populate.
00:07:15Like, I need to get as many women pregnant.
00:07:17I mean, it's really twisted now, you know, in 2025.
00:07:21But 100 years ago, that was a thing.
00:07:24Like, I mean, we're talking about Winston Churchill.
00:07:27Helen Keller, who's blind and deaf, is into it.
00:07:30Like, there's all these really famous, high-profile people that all accepted this.
00:07:36And, of course, as most people know, so did, what was it, Margaret Mead or whoever, that started Planned Parenthood.
00:07:45It was all driven by this need of trying to, you know, control the birth of black people.
00:07:51So, in my latest book, The Christian Identity to the NAR, I go back through some of that history.
00:07:57I actually got most of it from Michael Barkun's book, Religion and the Racist Right.
00:08:01He talks about how all of this developed, but he only started at a point.
00:08:05So, I went back.
00:08:06I traced it as best I could back before him.
00:08:09And King James, whenever he was translating the King James Bible, I catch all kinds of flack when I mention this.
00:08:15But this is fact.
00:08:17King James thought that he was descended directly from King David because he bought into this thing.
00:08:22And so, he's translating the Bible because we are the new, we're the lost tribes of Israel.
00:08:28We're the King James who loved little boys.
00:08:30Yeah, it's a mess, man, when you think about it.
00:08:32It really is.
00:08:34Humanity is so broken.
00:08:35I think, you know, to basically give all of this, you know, an oversimplified generalization word, it's about elitism.
00:08:45You know what I mean?
00:08:46And it's plagued humanity since the beginning of time.
00:08:50That's why I kind of wanted to touch on this Dominion thing because, interestingly, because of this Vance Bolter thing, I've been contacted by these newspaper reporters, right?
00:09:02Who are starting out from a paradigm.
00:09:07And their paradigm is religious right bad, right?
00:09:12Religious right wants to take over the world.
00:09:16And so, they're all armed with Dominionism, right?
00:09:19And so, they're all trying to tie the knot between, try the link between Vance and Dominionism and whatever because, in their view, that's the problem, right?
00:09:33So, here I am.
00:09:35Well, just sidebar here, what maybe most people don't realize is the vast majority of the press is under 40 years old.
00:09:45That is the generation who has never really taught history.
00:09:51I mean, and world history, like hardly at all, right?
00:09:54So, I'm having these conversations with these reporters and I'm trying to explain to them that Dominionism as a concept is not uniquely Christian.
00:10:11And they're, I mean, it sounds weird, but they're like, what do you mean?
00:10:14Like, they think that the concept of Dominionism is something that Christians came up with.
00:10:21And I said, I said, stop a second.
00:10:24Do you understand what's going on in the world of the Muslim world and the religion of Islam?
00:10:30I'm like, well, what do you mean?
00:10:32I said, do you know what their goal is?
00:10:35They want to build a caliphate.
00:10:36I go, everything you're seeing right now that's happening in the world with the Muslim community, the reason why they're here in the United States, the reason why they're into Europe,
00:10:51the reason why they gave Nelson Mandela $200 million to open up the border so Muslims could immigrate into South Africa is because they're building a caliphate.
00:11:04They believe, just like, you know, many in the religious right believe that Jesus is coming back and he's going to set up the kingdom of God on earth.
00:11:12They believe the same thing in Islam.
00:11:15It's the same exact concept.
00:11:18And I said, and yet, you don't talk about that.
00:11:21I said, have you seen what's going on down in Texas?
00:11:25Like, you wake up one day and suddenly they're building this massive community down there.
00:11:29Do you not understand what's going on in New York right now?
00:11:33Do you not understand what's going on?
00:11:34And I said, and here's the crazy thing about it, is Christians, they're trying to do this by having crusades and converting people.
00:11:44And the Muslims are doing it, and their plan is rock solid because they're going to outpopulate us.
00:11:53You know, where Christian women are having 1.7 children, Muslim women are having 5, 6, and 7 children.
00:12:01You know, and part of the problem, even that, even that problem kind of goes back to Christian identity.
00:12:06They were so focused against the Catholic Church and the Jews that heavily influenced people's thinking against, this is the Catholic Church, this is the people who did the Spanish Inquisition.
00:12:20And when people think about religious warfare, they kind of stop there.
00:12:24They don't go back in time and realize that religious wars have – I read the Old Testament – religious wars have been since the dawn of time.
00:12:32People want to take control of other humans.
00:12:35That's the way it works.
00:12:36And it's usually the bad guys that are wanting to take control of the other humans.
00:12:41And, you know, God is saying, we want peace.
00:12:44We want to live and help our brother.
00:12:46I love your neighbor as yourself kind of religion.
00:12:48Well, that's not what's being created here.
00:12:51And the sad part is that's embedded into what is called Christianity today.
00:12:55We want this dominionism because that's our pride, our heritage.
00:12:59Well, we can be in control.
00:13:00It's all about control, isn't it, really?
00:13:01And that's one of the things I was trying to point out to these reporters.
00:13:05I said, so you think dominion is a uniquely Christian thing that's sort of happening in the last few years,
00:13:16like in the last couple decades or the last couple generations.
00:13:20I said, do you understand human history?
00:13:23You know, as you just said earlier, I said, from the beginning of time,
00:13:28when the first humans were on this earth until now,
00:13:34there's always been a consistent dynamic in play.
00:13:38And that's that humans want to control other humans, whether it's in your family, right?
00:13:45Whether it's at work, whether it's in your city, whether it's in your nation, whether it's the globe,
00:13:51humans want to control other humans.
00:13:54The ones like you were talking about that are driven by selfish ambition and greed,
00:13:59they want to control the masses, right?
00:14:01Because they want to control the wealth.
00:14:03They want the stature.
00:14:04So what's driving them is this overwhelming passion for status and stuff, right?
00:14:14So as I said to him, I go, what do you think Nebuchadnezzar was doing in Babylon?
00:14:21Do you think he was happy just having a little city?
00:14:25No.
00:14:26He was trying to conquer everyone else.
00:14:27I said, what do you think Cyrus was doing in Persia?
00:14:31And I said, how did Alexander get his name?
00:14:36Like, sorry, how did Alexander get the name Great?
00:14:39He goes, what do you mean?
00:14:41And I go, why is he great?
00:14:43He's great because he conquered everyone else.
00:14:48Right?
00:14:48I go, it's like, I go, we have a guy called Alexander the Great doing the thing that everybody thinks is bad.
00:14:55I go, you guys, this is the very thing you guys are all complaining about, and yet he's still Alexander the Great.
00:15:03I go, what was Julius Caesar doing?
00:15:06Why was he over there in what's now modern Europe conquering tribes?
00:15:12I go, dominion, this need to control other people.
00:15:18It's always been there.
00:15:20Stop it.
00:15:20It's like you're trying to make this thing a uniquely, you know, Christian right-wing thing.
00:15:27And I go, this has been human nature.
00:15:29I go, what do you think the Third Reich is?
00:15:34I don't know.
00:15:35It's the third thousand-year reign.
00:15:38I have a buddy who introduced me to Colonel Eugene Burt.
00:15:43Colonel Burt was one of the first guys over the Remagen Bridge, which was the first entry into Germany in Second World War.
00:15:50Colonel Byrd went on to be the commandant at Spandau Prison.
00:15:55So I enjoyed some evenings with him in Berlin.
00:16:01And guess who he had?
00:16:03It's Spandau.
00:16:04Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer.
00:16:08Wow.
00:16:08So I got sort of an inside view of what Albert Speer was doing because Albert Speer was the architect, right?
00:16:19You can go to Germany today and there are still buildings that he designed that are there that they can't get rid of.
00:16:30Like, they've tried to blow every piece of memorabilia from the Nazi, you know, decade, they will call it, up.
00:16:40Like, they don't want anything to remain, right?
00:16:44And yet they can't even blow this stuff up.
00:16:47He built it so well.
00:16:48And when you ask him why, what was his mandate?
00:16:54It needs to last a thousand years.
00:16:58Right?
00:16:59So Hitler's dominionism, right?
00:17:02Him there had dominionism.
00:17:03What do you think Joseph Stalin was doing?
00:17:06Right?
00:17:07So that's what I mean.
00:17:08I just, I have a problem when I hear, you know, this single, very narrow perspective on dominionism as though somehow it's this uniquely right-wing Christian thing.
00:17:22And I'm like, wait a minute.
00:17:23This has been human history for, you know, as far back as you can go.
00:17:28It's funny, too.
00:17:29I watch the comment feeds whenever we put stuff out.
00:17:33And you can talk about dominionism, and you'll find Pentecostal people who haven't really adopted the New Apostolic Reformation ways, they will just blast it and condemn it and say, that's why we stuck with Pentecostalism.
00:17:46We're not like this.
00:17:47And I don't comment back, but I'm like, do you not know your history?
00:17:52If you go back, John Alexander Dowie, what did he do?
00:17:55He created the Theocratic Party.
00:17:57Look at the NAR today.
00:17:59What they've done is they basically created a Theocratic Party.
00:18:01Dowie wanted to take control of the nation.
00:18:05First, he took over Chicago and basically owned Chicago.
00:18:09When he left Chicago, his void is what allowed the Chicago Mafia to come and take control.
00:18:15Because of Dowie, we had the mob.
00:18:18Then he moves to Zion City, and he basically wants to create the city of Zion, built in the United States, built on British Israelism.
00:18:25Heaven on Earth, right?
00:18:25Heaven on Earth, and they were – like you mentioned the Third Reich, they were selling thousand-year leases to their properties because of this.
00:18:34Well, he goes and they tried to take over – forcibly take over New York City.
00:18:39So he goes in these – you can see these caravans of people going to New York door-to-door, banging on their door.
00:18:44You will be converted, and how's that not dominionism?
00:18:48That's what he's trying to do, take dominion of New York City.
00:18:52And his intent was really to take over the nation with his Theocratic Party, but then he went crazy and it died out.
00:18:58And when it died out, Charles Fox Parham and John G. Lake, all these other people, came into Zion trying to take over his empire
00:19:06because they wanted the dominion that Dowie was establishing and creating, and they wanted his financial empire.
00:19:13You want to get in trouble?
00:19:15I always want to get in trouble.
00:19:17Okay, so I'm going to go there on something that's bothered me.
00:19:22And again, when I share some of this stuff, I don't always have conclusions.
00:19:28I have ponderings, meaning that this is in process.
00:19:32So, so much of the dominion idea, right, is rooted in the Old Testament.
00:19:40And it's rooted in a worldview that the Israelites had, right, about their destiny, right?
00:19:51And that one day this Messiah was going to come, and they were going to rule the world, right?
00:19:58So it's rooted in that.
00:20:00But here's the paradox of this, which has always been fascinating to me.
00:20:05What people don't seem to grasp is the unified nation of Israel, i.e. the 12 tribes together as a unified nation.
00:20:17Modern Israel has lasted longer than that little unified kingdom existed, right?
00:20:26So it's sort of weird to me, because there's like, you read all the, in fact, what it reminds me of is the Irish, right?
00:20:36The luck of the Irish, right?
00:20:39All this stuff.
00:20:40When have the Irish ever been lucky?
00:20:43Like, they're one of the most oppressed people groups in Europe, right?
00:20:47It's like in their oppression, they created this hope, right?
00:20:56This, you know, that one day this is all going to change, you know, we're going to be lucky, you know?
00:21:01But they were never lucky.
00:21:03And yet there's this whole thing about shamrocks and luck and all this kind of stuff.
00:21:08Well, you think about the Israelites, right?
00:21:10So you got these 12 tribes, you know, these people that, you know, supposedly come out of Egypt, who are being led by a half-breed guy.
00:21:21And what I mean by a half-breed is that Joshua comes from the tribe of Ephraim.
00:21:27And Ephraim's mother was Egyptian, and his father was Jewish, or Hebrew, we'll say, right?
00:21:34So in other words, you've got a biracial, if you want to use that word, even though it technically isn't biracial.
00:21:40But I'm just saying two completely different cultures who's leading this group of people in, right?
00:21:47And they get across the Jordan, and of course, they're in what later becomes the tribe of Ephraim's land.
00:21:54But, like, they're proportioning out all this land and chasing out the native, right?
00:21:59So they did the same thing the colonialists did when they came to America, right?
00:22:05And we pushed all the indigenous people out.
00:22:07Well, they did the same thing.
00:22:08They came in there.
00:22:09But, again, everybody goes, well, that's wrong.
00:22:12You know, what they did was wrong.
00:22:14No, that's what you did.
00:22:16There was no rule.
00:22:18You know what I mean?
00:22:18It's like I get really frustrated with people trying to put modern, you know, worldviews on ancient history.
00:22:26Everybody was doing it to everyone else.
00:22:28You know, the only rule in the ancient world was power, right?
00:22:34If I got more power than you, so what's the fact?
00:22:37Might is right.
00:22:39In the ancient world, might is right, right?
00:22:41So they come in there and they put all their stuff in a big tent, right, in Shiloh, in Ephraim.
00:22:51And then they all go out, right?
00:22:52But for years, they're like, you know, 12 little independent kind of tribal things until Saul comes along and he puts them all together.
00:23:01And then David takes over.
00:23:04And, of course, here's the problem.
00:23:05You've got this 12 ragtag groups of tribes, 12 ragtag tribes that decide to come together because they need to become a nation.
00:23:16Why do they need to become a nation?
00:23:18Why don't they stay independent?
00:23:19The reason is, is south of them is an ancient empire with massive armies and great wealth who can pulverize them at any moment, right?
00:23:32What's north of them?
00:23:33Another ancient kingdom called Assyria, right?
00:23:36Who's got massive armies and great wealth.
00:23:40What's to the east of them?
00:23:42Babylon.
00:23:44What's also great, right?
00:23:45They're this little puny.
00:23:47And this is what I don't think people understand because you read the Old Testament and it's glorious Israel, right?
00:23:54Everything's glorious Israel.
00:23:56I listen to Sunday morning preachers and then it's all the glory of Israel, you know, all this kind of stuff.
00:24:01And I'm like, you guys, this is a minority group, right?
00:24:07This is a little bitty group.
00:24:09The fact, the stories, once you understand who they are and the limitations they had, the victories they won are even more miraculous, right?
00:24:18Because they're way outgunned, right?
00:24:20It's one of these, you know, like, you know, the Dirty Dozen movies, right?
00:24:24It's like, they're like this little group of, you know, that basically holds their own.
00:24:31Well, they try to anyways.
00:24:32But that's because they're between three great forces, right?
00:24:35But here's what gets interesting is David takes over, right?
00:24:38He becomes king.
00:24:41And he ends up in trying to unify and make them a nation, creating the offense that later would cause the whole thing to fall apart, right?
00:24:56And you know what it was?
00:24:57He moved the tabernacle from the time of Ephraim, where it had been between, you know, where they had made their covenant with God, to Jerusalem, to his tribe.
00:25:09And he created an offense, right?
00:25:13Because we're the keeper of the tent up here, right?
00:25:16But, you know, for the sake of holding everyone together.
00:25:18So he dies, and then it gets even weirder because the firstborn son of David doesn't even become king.
00:25:26How does Solomon become the king?
00:25:28He's like the bastard son, right?
00:25:32He's the, you know, what do they call it?
00:25:35He's the affair son, right?
00:25:37It's like, oh my gosh, this gets so weird, right?
00:25:40So, and I'm only trying to say this because I believe that the Bible is the most scrub piece of literature on Sunday morning in the world.
00:25:53It's like it all of a sudden gets reduced down to little, you know, primary school, Noah and his little archie, and we all sing songs.
00:26:02We have this idealized view of this whole story, right?
00:26:05So what ends up happening is that Solomon's son takes over at Rehoboam, and the whole thing splits, right?
00:26:15And then when Jesus, by the time you get to the time of Jesus, it's like all divided into three areas, and they hate each other.
00:26:22Say, there is no glorious, united Israel that lasted for a thousand years.
00:26:30It lasted less than 70 years.
00:26:32I think modern Israel, we're in 72 years now.
00:26:37So it's so interesting to me because the modern Israel is far more sustainable than ancient Israel was, and yet we have all this sort of idyllic viewpoint of this thing.
00:26:52I'm glad that you brought that up because for me, a person who grew up in this weird, isolated cult, I read my Bible.
00:27:01I read it when I was in the cult, and then after I left it, I read it over and over.
00:27:05I've mentioned this several times.
00:27:07I just actually just had this conversation earlier, I guess it was yesterday, with a person.
00:27:12Once I started entering into mainstream churches, I struggled to fit in because I knew what the Bible said, and I would hear them preaching, and I was like, wait a minute.
00:27:21Do you guys not know what it is, the book that you're preaching from?
00:27:25Because, like you said, they're glazing over and they're telling the happy points.
00:27:30And anybody who knows about history knows that if you only talk about the good stuff, you're going to eventually repeat the bad stuff.
00:27:38But here's the bigger problem.
00:27:41What they have done, they have changed the nature of the Bible itself.
00:27:46And let me explain this, because I know we'll get pushback for this one.
00:27:50I just want to put this out.
00:27:51That's what I said.
00:27:52Do you want to go down this road?
00:27:53Because we're going to get some pushback on this.
00:27:56Yeah.
00:27:57But honestly, if you read the Bible and you know what's in it, if you know what the intents of the authors, when they're writing the books, they're very clear what their intention is.
00:28:08If you read it as a book, not as a piece together, like these, I don't know if you've seen the guys who are doing the serial killings and they take these little snippets out of magazines.
00:28:20That's the kind of preaching that they're doing.
00:28:22They're taking these little snippets.
00:28:23Yeah, Thomas Jefferson did that.
00:28:25That's how he made his Bible.
00:28:26He took all the stuff he didn't like out of it.
00:28:28Well, so that's what they're doing.
00:28:30But it changes the nature of the book because the book is very clear.
00:28:36The authors are very clear in what they describe as learning from their mistakes.
00:28:42So God actually commissions some of these things to happen.
00:28:46He commissions the war, go down to this country, you'll take over this country, et cetera.
00:28:52And Paul calls the whole thing as basically a lesson.
00:28:55They're learning a lesson.
00:28:57So God sends them out.
00:28:58The kingdom rise.
00:28:59They fall into sin.
00:29:00The kingdom falls.
00:29:01They're learning a lesson from it.
00:29:03And each time they try to claim dominion over some other nation, that's what happens.
00:29:09They try to claim dominion.
00:29:10Some guy gets the big head and they start to think that he's something.
00:29:15And then he falls to idolatry and the whole thing falls down over and over and over and over again.
00:29:21You can read the book of Kings.
00:29:22It's talking about kingdom rises, kingdom falls.
00:29:25Kingdom rises, kingdom falls.
00:29:26Well, and that's why, to your point, I don't think a lot of people understand, is the Old Testament as we know it was actually pulled together while they were in Babylon in captivity.
00:29:40The second most holy book in Judaism is the Talmud, but it's called the Babylonian Talmud.
00:29:47And the reason was is they were people in a foreign country trying to hang on to their culture, right?
00:29:55And so the scribes, the priests and the scribes and the scholars in Babylon were trying to like, hey, we got to write all this stuff down.
00:30:02Like we, you know, we need to preserve our culture, right?
00:30:06And I get it.
00:30:07And it's not any different than when the African slaves came to America, right?
00:30:13Trying to preserve their African culture.
00:30:15So much of black churches, they don't, if they have never been to Africa, they don't understand that this goes there.
00:30:22This ties into that.
00:30:23Your ancestors came over here and a lot of this ties into their tribal backgrounds.
00:30:28You know, the songs, right?
00:30:31The songs they all, the biblical songs, they so identified with the Israelites, right?
00:30:37Who were basically getting the crap beat out of them constantly, right?
00:30:42But, you know, and people get upset with me, but I'll give you just one little thing.
00:30:47If you'll notice, it says in Genesis, it says Abraham from Chaldea.
00:30:54Well, the problem is, is that Chaldea didn't exist at the time of Abraham, but Chaldea does while they're all in Babylon.
00:31:08So somebody who's pulling all of this, these stories together, right, and translating this uses a modern, this is one of the big clues, right?
00:31:18That they give you, it's, they're using a present example that people would understand, like, oh, Abraham's from Chaldea now, you know, right?
00:31:28In 700 BC, you know what I mean?
00:31:31So, yeah, this gets really interesting for me, you know, because it's like, okay.
00:31:36But here's, here's what I do, just if you want to know where I get my perspective from.
00:31:46It's my point of view that if you just read the Bible by itself, well, you may find yourself getting inspired, and it's, you know, and there's great wisdom and knowledge and understanding.
00:32:00There's so much in there.
00:32:01It's rich.
00:32:31There's so much in there.
00:33:01I'm very careful who I have the conversation with, so I don't know that I've really talked about this much in the public, but you're right.
00:33:08If you have the context of what happened in history and you have the context of the Bible, you get to, you get a better understanding of what the people were talking about.
00:33:18And the equivalent for people who don't understand this, think back to the Civil War and think about some person who's writing about the details that are happening at one specific battle in one of the battle states of the Civil War.
00:33:33And he's describing what it was like, what the city was like, how they used to go to the market.
00:33:39And suddenly the market is demolished because, well, you get a better understanding of that battle because you've got another perspective looking in.
00:33:47The more perspectives, the better you get.
00:33:49Well, what has happened is, in my opinion, people have preached the Bible delicately and avoided anything that people might find offensive.
00:33:59But that's not the way history works.
00:34:02You want to read the good and the bad so that you don't repeat the bad.
00:34:06And there came a time after kingdoms rose and kingdoms fall when Babylon invades and they take all – they basically destroy the temple, the libraries, everything that the children of Israel had as far as their heritage.
00:34:21They were creating cultural genocide to the children of Israel, and they took the wise people from Israel.
00:34:29What does this mean?
00:34:30The people who could read and write were going like the Hebrew boys were going because they could read and write.
00:34:36Well, after cultural genocide, what do you do?
00:34:40You start to piece back together your history because you just lost your culture.
00:34:44And they're in one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world, in the Babylonian library.
00:34:49How do you do this?
00:34:50How do you piece together something that has been obliterated?
00:34:53And I think that's the thing that people miss.
00:34:56You find these – you'll find atheists who say, well, I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I see suddenly, wait a minute, the Bible copied the Epic of Gilgamesh.
00:35:07And you find the fundamentalist, hardcore evangelicals that say, no, this can't be copied.
00:35:13And they don't understand their own history.
00:35:15They don't understand that it was obliterated.
00:35:17They had to piece back together so that I can picture the people going through the libraries and trying to find, well, what matches what I remember reading in our holy books?
00:35:28And that word holy books, I think that has became obscured over time because whenever people say the Bible is the word of God, it takes a different meaning than what they actually meant by a holy book.
00:35:43This was a holy book of our culture, of our laws, our statutes, of our history, and it included both the good and the bad history.
00:35:52It included everything.
00:35:53This was – that was their holy book.
00:35:55That was their culture.
00:35:56So, like you said, Babylon invaded, wiped out their culture.
00:36:00They had no culture.
00:36:02They start piecing together as best they can and then start to continue to build what became the holy books.
00:36:10And that – I'm not making anything up here.
00:36:12You can read that directly in the Bible.
00:36:15You can read that this is happening.
00:36:16And you can read from some of the other ancient cultures that this is happening.
00:36:19So, this is nothing that Bob and I are making up, but if you remove that element of history, what you end up with is you end up with a different Bible than they were even reading.
00:36:31Yeah.
00:36:32Well, maybe it's my personality or maybe it's life lessons.
00:36:38I'm not really sure.
00:36:39But one of my struggles within the religious – Christian religious world is this diametric mindset of you're either right or wrong.
00:36:54You know, that's where fundamentalism kind of – it bothers me a bit because it's like this mentality.
00:37:01If I'm right, that makes you wrong.
00:37:04So, therefore, I am right and you are wrong.
00:37:07And what does it do?
00:37:08It – it's like it reduces everything down to this simple little thing and then we end up having conflict.
00:37:15And then, as we know from history, we start killing each other over our conflict, right?
00:37:20Because, you know, I'm right and I'm God's man, so I have the right to kill you.
00:37:25And that's always bothered me.
00:37:28And part of it is growing up and getting married, right?
00:37:32What happens when you get married?
00:37:34You get to live with a woman.
00:37:35And as we all know, when a man lives with a woman, you can look at the same situation and come up with two completely different conclusions of what is happening in this moment, right?
00:37:49The difference is her understanding is right and yours is wrong, buddy.
00:37:53Right.
00:37:53But what I'm saying is, is there's two perspectives, right?
00:37:58In other words – and there can be different, right?
00:38:01So, then when I got into the whole racial reconciliation world, right?
00:38:06And you're in there with people that are just been beating the crap out of each other and killing each other, right?
00:38:13And you start listening and you begin to realize that they're both right.
00:38:19So, what do you do with that, right?
00:38:22And so, that's where I began to realize, and I was just telling a friend this week, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible is when Paul's writing to the Ephesians
00:38:34and he talks about the manifest, the manifold wisdom of God, the many-faceted wisdom of God, right?
00:38:44And you begin to realize that, wait a minute, God's diverse.
00:38:50God's got many facets to him, right?
00:38:53But the thing that makes him so amazing is somehow he's able to hold all these facets together, right, and handle it.
00:39:03Where we can't.
00:39:04We seem to like it's my facet versus your facet, right?
00:39:07It's like we get into these kinds – so, that's where I struggle a lot of times.
00:39:11And I don't even like getting into some of these religious conversations because suddenly you just see people go into this defensive posture, right?
00:39:19And it's like they're threatened by a different perspective.
00:39:23The way I look at it is – see, people – and I've struggled with this my whole life – is that people immediately, if you say something different, they get on the defense and it's us versus you, right?
00:39:36It's this kind of thing.
00:39:37My brain goes, how does this fit with that?
00:39:41See, I look at it like a puzzle, right?
00:39:43It's like, okay, you got a piece and I got a piece.
00:39:46And why are we assuming that these things are confrontational and conflicting?
00:39:51What if they're part of the same thing, right?
00:39:55And so, that's been my struggle.
00:39:58So, that's what happens with me even when I'm reading my Bible.
00:40:02I realize that, wait a minute here, this is a single perspective, right?
00:40:08And again, so much of the Old Testament, just so people understand, is history.
00:40:13It's a giant history book.
00:40:15It's a people telling a story.
00:40:18But what's interesting is they have found ancient writings in Assyria talking about the same battles that the Bible writes about.
00:40:27And there's an Assyrian perspective that's very different than this, right?
00:40:31And people are like, well, they're wrong.
00:40:33Well, it's kind of like what just happened in Iran, right?
00:40:37There's an American, there's a Western version of what happened, and then there's the Iranian version of what happened, right?
00:40:46I mean, you know, it's like you're sitting there and they're going, we won.
00:40:50And we're going, no, we won, right?
00:40:53And it's like, wait a minute, this is happening at the same time, right?
00:40:56And this has been going on for thousands of years.
00:40:59So that's why, you know, like I said, I try to look at this, you know, it's like, I know this sounds funny, but I like to get up at the bird's eye view like a helicopter and circle around the whole thing.
00:41:12You know what I'm talking about?
00:41:13I think you understand because you're a little bit like I am.
00:41:16It's like, I want to look at this from all the angles.
00:41:18So I go look at history books.
00:41:20I go look at all the other stuff that's out there that adds more facets, more color, more dimension to this story, right?
00:41:29And that's where you begin to discover that so much of what's preached from pulpits is actually completely uncontextualized.
00:41:40And the reason why we get into such bizarre thinking about stuff is because we don't do our homework and we don't really look at the bigger picture here, right?
00:41:52And so we suddenly take a little thing like this, you know, I mean, there's a reason why there's 40,000 denominations out there, right?
00:42:01Well, he sprinkled, that's wrong.
00:42:04He's going to hell because he didn't get dunked, right?
00:42:07Oh, no, the elder so-and-so can't baptize him.
00:42:11It's got to be a pastor.
00:42:11Oh, we got to start another church now.
00:42:14And I mean, the whole of Christianity is littered by people fighting over the most stupid rudimentary things.
00:42:24And it's just like, God, are we children here?
00:42:26Like, can we grow up?
00:42:28It's like, oh, I don't, you know, it's that, what's the whole thing?
00:42:30I'm taking my ball and going home.
00:42:31Go start my own church.
00:42:33I'm going to go start my own denomination.
00:42:35This is another problem that I have.
00:42:37This whole world is confusing to me.
00:42:39After leaving this isolationist group, I just don't understand it.
00:42:43Like you, I like the bird's eye view.
00:42:45I like to know everything that I can about something.
00:42:48And here's where it gets really scary for me.
00:42:51There are really, really, really smart people that are my peers in this Christian world.
00:42:56They understand the necessity for a bird's eye view.
00:43:00But the moment in which you mentioned the Bible with the bird's eye view, no, you can't do that.
00:43:06I know.
00:43:07It's got to be Bible only.
00:43:08And the way that I try to explain it is picture the military.
00:43:13And picture you're a private in the military.
00:43:16And the general tells you, go and fight this battle over here.
00:43:20And the general knows that you're going to lose that battle.
00:43:23And you go into it, your only perspective is that you're going to fight.
00:43:27You have no idea that the general knows you're going to lose that battle.
00:43:30And you may lose men.
00:43:31But because you lose that battle, and because so many enemy forces are focused over here,
00:43:37he can go invade this other territory and win the war.
00:43:41So your battle is just as important, but in the grand scheme of things, you're going to lose.
00:43:46Your perspective is somebody who's got this little, little, tiny perspective.
00:43:51Well, the way they preach the Bible, where they cut out all of the things that are very important history
00:43:58and just glaze over it and give you these little perspectives,
00:44:02what they're doing is they're taking God and they're putting him down at the private level.
00:44:06God doesn't have control over this enemy nation.
00:44:09God doesn't have control enough to let the people see that they can learn by their mistakes.
00:44:14They've taken God and they've diminished him.
00:44:16And then take that to a broader scale.
00:44:19If you love history like I do, and you also love religious history like I do,
00:44:25ancient mythologies, etc., look at the shift in the world.
00:44:29From the perspective of the way that Christianity is taught by these people who ignore histories,
00:44:36they have a God that's not in control.
00:44:39But what if God and all of these other nations and religions and cultures,
00:44:46what if God is shifting them slightly towards truth in the same way,
00:44:50knowing that they're in error,
00:44:51in the same way that the children of Israel were in error?
00:44:55Because this is happening on a global scale.
00:44:57And God said, for God loved the whole world.
00:45:00It doesn't say, for God loved just this little tiny people.
00:45:04God loved the world.
00:45:05And so you have to believe that if there is a God that is that powerful,
00:45:09that is that all-knowing, that can shift entire cultures,
00:45:13we'll look at how those cultures shifted.
00:45:15You know, there are instances of child sacrifice in the world today,
00:45:19but on the global scale that we have, it's minuscule compared to what it was in the ancient world.
00:45:25All of these things have shifted gradually towards getting better.
00:45:29Now, can I say that, you know, some ancient culture or some other religion is,
00:45:34that's where you're going to go to find God?
00:45:35I can't say that.
00:45:36But can you say that God is in control of it all?
00:45:39Yes.
00:45:40And that's really the problem that I have with dominionism.
00:45:43Because what they've done is they've taken God from the general level down to,
00:45:47well, he's a private, and he needs us to be in control of these other nations,
00:45:52and we're going to dictate to them the way that they should be.
00:45:56That is taking God out of control into this little tiny scale.
00:46:00God, my head is exploding right now, so I had like 10 things popping in my head.
00:46:04But just to your point here, Mike and I got a big fight over this in the 80s
00:46:14because he kept telling everyone there's going to be this end-time revival.
00:46:21This was his mentality.
00:46:22There's going to be an end-time revival.
00:46:24You know, Bob Jones was feeding this.
00:46:25There's going to be a billion souls saved.
00:46:27And Christians are going to take over the world.
00:46:33I mean, I'm simplifying this, but that's basically the whole mentality, right?
00:46:37Which isn't new, but again, that's what was driving him.
00:46:41And I said to him one day, I said,
00:46:43so who's going to be like running these nations?
00:46:48Do you know what he said?
00:46:49He goes, oh, the apostles and prophets.
00:46:53And I just went, oh, my God.
00:46:55I remember just inside of me going, oh, my God.
00:46:58And I went, hey, Mike, we already did that.
00:47:01It was called the Catholic Church.
00:47:02It was a disaster.
00:47:05And he just looked at me and he was like, you know, he was like all confused.
00:47:09And I go, we already had the church ruling government.
00:47:12It doesn't work.
00:47:13I go, I don't know anywhere in human history where church leaders running civic government
00:47:20has ever worked.
00:47:23They're not qualified.
00:47:25They don't have the skill sets.
00:47:26They're, you know, I go, I mean, I just could not get my head around the thinking, right?
00:47:32It's just like, what do you mean?
00:47:34Like, you think that's a good thing?
00:47:37But again, it's the theocracy, right?
00:47:40It's this whole theocracy, which Islam has, right?
00:47:45So it's anyway, so that's one thing.
00:47:47The second thing to our point here about diversity and different perspectives, I don't know how
00:47:56many people that's listening may be aware of this, but during the time of Jesus, there's
00:48:01a reason why there's a conflict between, you know, southern Israel, you know, which is
00:48:09Judea, right?
00:48:10And Samaria.
00:48:12And you know what the conflict was?
00:48:15The conflict was the same conflict that David created thousand years earlier.
00:48:20Yeah.
00:48:21Right?
00:48:22Who were the Samaritans?
00:48:24The Samaritans had their own temple.
00:48:26Oh, they had their own scriptures.
00:48:29They thought the Judeans and David screwed it up because when Joshua brought the tabernacle
00:48:36in and set it up in Ephraim in Samaria, what was then now Samaria, that was what God wanted.
00:48:43And David missed God, right?
00:48:45So this is so funny because you're like, you know, again, because the Judeans controlled the
00:48:50narrative, right, our viewpoint is, is David, you know, did the right thing.
00:48:56Samaritans didn't think like that.
00:48:58Samaritans thought that David did the wrong thing, that he disobeyed God, right?
00:49:04And that David was full of pride because David wanted to be all about, I'm going to build my,
00:49:09you know, what David looked around and what all the other nations had, which made them
00:49:13a unique nation, was they all had a palace for their king and a temple for their God, right?
00:49:18That's what you do.
00:49:19You build a national temple for your God and you build a national palace for your king.
00:49:24And now you're legit.
00:49:26And that's exactly, David follows the same pattern that everybody else has got.
00:49:30And that's what he does.
00:49:31Well, he makes the Samaritans or the Ephraim, they're mad.
00:49:36Like, so what do they do?
00:49:37They recreate it.
00:49:38They go, you screwed up.
00:49:40So what does Jesus do?
00:49:44He goes and befriends Samaritans, right?
00:49:48He does the very opposite of what we do today theologically, right?
00:49:53We get in, you know, we do what the Judeans do, right?
00:49:57We hate these people so much.
00:49:59They're apostate.
00:50:00In fact, we hate them so much, we're not even going to walk on their soil to get to Galilee.
00:50:05We're going across the Jordan and up the other side and back across.
00:50:09And we're going to take the long way because these people are apostate, right?
00:50:15Jesus doesn't think like that, right?
00:50:19And so this has always intrigued me.
00:50:21It's like, wait a minute.
00:50:23He's crossing the boundary, like the religious boundary.
00:50:27He's over there with the heretics, right?
00:50:31That fascinates me.
00:50:33I mean, it just challenges me to my core, right?
00:50:36It's like, wait a minute.
00:50:37You know, we're over here killing each other because I'm right and you're wrong.
00:50:40And Jesus is going over there and healing the people that are the heretics.
00:50:45And I just think there's something there that the modern church world, you know, needs to, you know, rally back around.
00:50:54Because I think that's a transformational way of living.
00:50:58And we've lost all that, you know?
00:51:00That's why we got 40,000 denominations.
00:51:03Because I'm right and you're wrong, Don.
00:51:05Did you know that?
00:51:06We have lost it and, you know, so take that a step further.
00:51:10I'm one of these people that I think architecturally, if you're talking to a Christian and you describe what you just described,
00:51:18because their mindset is that the way the Bible was written, it was written as an all-perfect entity describing only the good things.
00:51:30That's literally how it's taught in these Christian churches.
00:51:33It's scrubbed.
00:51:34It's scrubbed.
00:51:35But because they've been taught and you mentioned the word King David, what happens is it sets off the programming that's in their head.
00:51:41And they think, oh, I can relate to this.
00:51:44So I see that there are two descendants of King David and God loves both of them.
00:51:49So what Bob said makes sense.
00:51:52Take it back further, all the way back to Adam and Eve.
00:51:55Every culture, every civilization that has risen in time, if you believe the Bible and you believe the book of Genesis, it all came from Adam and Eve.
00:52:05And it's God's creation.
00:52:07Does not God love the people of the other parts of his creation?
00:52:11Is he not leading them in directions?
00:52:14They don't have the same equivalent of a holy book that lasted through time like we have.
00:52:18But can we not say that God is going to lead them hopefully into all truth in the way that the Bible is written?
00:52:25If you read it cover to cover only for what it says, ignore what everybody else says, just read it for what it says, you can come to that conclusion.
00:52:35For God loved the whole world.
00:52:36But if you read it from the perspective of these Christian minister, quote unquote Christian ministers that whitewash the whole thing, no, that was a warring nation.
00:52:45God said to invade them.
00:52:46God said to kill them.
00:52:47So therefore, they're the bad guys.
00:52:49That's how they look at it.
00:52:51And that's not the way – if you read the Bible, that's not what God says.
00:52:54That's not what it's supposed to be.
00:52:56But it limits God and it makes God a narcissist.
00:53:00We had the conversation about narcissists before.
00:53:03They like to do this.
00:53:05They like to change the personality of God to match their own flaws.
00:53:09And I think if you take anything away from this conversation, which this is going to get me in all kinds of trouble.
00:53:14Thank you, Bob.
00:53:15I'm sorry.
00:53:16But if you follow out to its logical conclusion –
00:53:20We're just thinking out loud here, John.
00:53:22Thinking out loud.
00:53:23These people, because they don't understand God, the only way they can understand them is to put their own flaws into the nature of God and decrease his power so that they can understand it.
00:53:34And when you do that, what kind of a box are you putting God in?
00:53:37Well, I've maintained to all of the people in my circle that death is going to be the greatest revelation of our lives.
00:53:46Because I think once we transition out of these human limitations in our bodies and we actually see God, we're going to realize, oh, my God, I got so much stuff wrong.
00:54:01Right?
00:54:02It's like – think about this.
00:54:03Because all of our descriptions of God are human.
00:54:10Right?
00:54:10In other words, we've taken this – I mean, you're talking about – this guy created universes.
00:54:17Yeah.
00:54:17Right?
00:54:18I mean, do you understand who this is?
00:54:21And somehow we've reduced him down to human sexuality and human emotions and human thinking, right?
00:54:29Because we're so puny in what we know, right, that we can't think outside of it.
00:54:35We just can't get outside the box.
00:54:37And I'm just – that's why even in these discussions, I'm always saying – I'm thinking out loud here.
00:54:41But I don't hold anything, like, dogmatic because I know I'm going to get my mouth shut when I die because I'm going to be going, oh, my gosh, I so did not get this.
00:54:54And the funny part about everything that you just said, you said, this guy created universes.
00:54:59Oh, there you go.
00:55:00Oops.
00:55:01This being.
00:55:02Yeah, exactly.
00:55:03You know, so one other thing, and I know we've got to wind this up, but this all ties back into what I've been dealing with with my book in Leaders.
00:55:13People do not seem to have the capacity to understand that good people do bad things and bad people do good things.
00:55:20This isn't a simple black and white yes or no, good or evil.
00:55:25Meaning that I have a younger generation in particular who's hurt by Mike Watt did.
00:55:31They think he's the son of Satan, right?
00:55:35I mean, they just think he's evil personified.
00:55:40And the reason is because they don't know him like I do.
00:55:42I've known him.
00:55:43I knew him since we were 18 and 19 years old.
00:55:46I know his heart.
00:55:48I know what's in there.
00:55:50But like so many other guys that have come through my counseling or consulting thing,
00:55:56they're good guys who are very broken and do bad things and hate themselves because they do bad things.
00:56:03And they're like Paul who goes, I don't want to do bad things, but I do bad things.
00:56:09And it's not that simple.
00:56:11I just wish people would not be so absolute and dogmatic in their thinking and realize this is manifold.
00:56:18It's many faceted that we live in the world of dynamic tensions.
00:56:24Good, evil, up, down, in, out, right?
00:56:27There's all these words over here.
00:56:30But we live, we're like the little slide thing on a balance thing on your stereo in the old days where you used to slide it.
00:56:36It's like in some situations it's this and then it slides over.
00:56:40It's not static.
00:56:41So, you know, I just think, and the key to all of this is I think what's in your heart, or at least what I was hearing from you, is humility.
00:56:53It's like, God, let's have some humility here and not assume we know everything.
00:56:59You know what I mean?
00:57:00Absolutely.
00:57:00And it comes down to the point where you have to understand that there are extremes on both sides.
00:57:07Because whenever people demonize Mike, what they're eliminating, in my opinion, which I don't know Mike, I don't know his medical history or anything like this, but I do know and understand the mental health issues of the nation.
00:57:22And I know that there are some very good people who got executed for very bad things.
00:57:27But something happened in their head, and they literally could not stop what they were doing.
00:57:33And should they have died, you know, I don't know if I'm for the death penalty, but they definitely should have been taken away from the public that could be harmed.
00:57:41Should people, if you're on the NAR, will you restore these apostles?
00:57:45Because they're apostles, that's wrong.
00:57:48You're putting them in a position where they can hurt people again.
00:57:50But on the flip side of this, if you demonize them, what you're doing – and this is a conversation for another podcast.
00:57:57I won't go too far.
00:57:58We never got to the third piece here.
00:58:00We're going to have to do that.
00:58:01Let's do that next.
00:58:02I know.
00:58:02We just keep going down these money drills.
00:58:04Yeah.
00:58:05But it's mental health.
00:58:06Whenever you demonize people who do bad things and you turn them into the devil's got them, this guy was bad from the beginning, all of this stuff, you make the people lose perspective of mental health issues.
00:58:20And then what happens is, say one of their children has a mental health issue, or they themselves get into a mental health issue.
00:58:28Well, now they're afraid to go get help because I've been demonized.
00:58:31I'm doing this thing that I can't control.
00:58:33Or you got a demon.
00:58:34Or you got a demon.
00:58:35And I won't go too far with that.
00:58:37I have a huge problem with it.
00:58:38We'll talk about it in another podcast.
00:58:40Yeah, another time.
00:58:40But, yeah.
00:58:41Thank you for doing this.
00:58:42Hey, by the way, just P.S. here, did you see that one of the leaders of the N.A.R. is running for governor of California?
00:58:50I did.
00:58:51It's unbelievable.
00:58:53But what's driving that?
00:58:55Dominionism, right.
00:58:57Well, it's just, you know, that's God's mandate to us.
00:58:59We're supposed to take over and control everyone.
00:59:02See, and again, again, God, we could keep talking about, but this was another seminal worldview shift for me.
00:59:15And what I began to realize was, is that religion, and this was years ago, religion, religious leaders drive people to conform to the will of God.
00:59:26But Jesus drew people, and it's completely different, right?
00:59:33Christian institutional religion wants to control everyone and force their behavior.
00:59:41Jesus transformed people from the inside out.
00:59:44Transformation of the soul is the soul of transformation.
00:59:48He worked that way, and he used water and bread analogies and said, you're thirsty.
00:59:53You're hungry.
00:59:54Come to me, right?
00:59:55He drew people.
00:59:57And those are two completely different mindsets.
01:00:01Right now, the Dominion guys are trying to drive people.
01:00:03You know, we're going to get in control, and you're all going to be forced to conform to our will.
01:00:10It's a totally different religion.
01:00:13But anyway, we could talk for two hours.
01:00:15We'll let it go.
01:00:16If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.
01:00:20You can find us at william-branham.org.
01:00:23For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion,
01:00:28From Christian Identity to the NAR.
01:00:30And if you want to read more about Mike Bickle and IHOPKC, you can read Some Say They Blundered,
01:00:36Breaking My Decades of Silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.
01:00:41We'll see you next time.
01:01:11We'll see you next time.
01:01:41We'll see you next time.
01:01:48We'll see you next time.
01:02:00We'll see you next time.
Recommended
2:19:26
2:33:51