NSR: A Biblical Understanding of Woke Culture, White Privilege, & BLM
This episode wraps up our 3-part series on critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality. Brody, Zach Carter, and Zach Mabry sat down and took time to discuss and define the topics of “woke” and “white privilege”. What is happening in the culture today is wrong.
Believers, we need to remind ourselves that the Lord will bring justice to every wrong that has been done. God is the one who vindicates wrong and we can trust that. Our job is to tell people the Truth and work to ensure just laws come into place. Christians should be alleviating the material sufferings of those around us. Let’s weep with them, mourn with them, acknowledge that this is sin, and tell the truth about it.
It is dangerous for the Christian to be pressing into this ideology of CRT and intersectionality. We already have a mission and a command to take part in the work of building the Kingdom. The things of this world are vapor. The world doesn’t need more people setting low bars. We need something that transcends this world. One day God will make everything right again. The culture is asking the questions, so we need to answer them. The world doesn’t know why these things are happening but they can acknowledge that the current order is not right. The Gospel is the answer.
If you believe in Heaven then you can wait for God’s good justice to come. It is not our job to pick up the sword and think that we can make it right on this earth. While you wait, meet the material needs that you can and be faithful to proclaim the hope that you have.
Bible passages
- Ephesians 2:6
- Psalm 24
Resources & further study
- Christ and Culture Revisited by D. A. Carson
- Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes A Feminist Theory Successful by Kathy Davis, Feminist Theory 9, no. 1 (2008)
- Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics by Kimberlé Crenshaw, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
- The Complexity of Intersectionality by Leslie McCall, Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1771–1800. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800.
- Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge
- Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
- Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives by Sandra Harding
P.S. If you liked this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify and help us get the content out to help others grow in their faith and mission to equip the Church.
Read Transcript
Brody Holloway: Hey. Zach Mabry, worship pastor Snowbird Outfitters, and I recently sat down with Zach Carter, another Zach, who is a PhD candidate at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And he’s sort of, I wont use the word expert, but he’s definitely authoritative when it comes to the topics and issues of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Those may be some words that you’re not familiar with. Most of our listeners may not be familiar with those, but I think it’s very important that we talk about ’em. They are issues that are prevalent right now in politics, and in media, and in the church. In fact, in 2019, it was a real big topic of conversation in the Southern Baptist Convention, and that’s a major denomination, I think 17 million people. So all of our listeners are not Southern Baptist, but just sayin’. It’s in evangelical circles. It’s also very political. You hear about it coming out of Washington, lot of talk about it. So we wanna talk about Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality. If you’ve never heard of those two things, I hope this is insightful. If you’ve never heard of ’em, do some follow-up research, but there’s three episodes here that we’re devoting to that conversation.
BH: We sat down with Zach Carter, spent a few hours with him, and edited that down to three manageable episodes. Hope it’s helpful. If you got any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask, and we’ll do our best to maybe answer those in a follow-up episode. And as always, thanks for tuning in to No Sanity Required.
BH: Okay. So this will be our last episode, and I hope you guys have enjoyed this. Hope you’ve gotten something out of it, I certainly have. I know at times it’s gotten a little bit heavy, but for the subject matter we’re dealing with, it has not gotten heavy. It’s been super practical and attainable, and I’m really grateful for that. So it’s helped me a bunch, and I hope you guys have enjoyed it. This last episode, I wanna talk with Zach Carter and Zach Mabry, about getting into a little bit more contemporary cultural terminology like privilege and White privilege, and woke or wokeism. And talk about these things that people here, probably don’t know what they mean, but they hear ’em. I’d like to touch a little bit on Black Lives Matter.
Zach Carter: Sure.
BH: And I wanna start, before I turn y’all loose on this, by saying, I wanna go back real quick to two things that have happened in 2020 that stand out in my mind. One, is right after the George Floyd incident and murder, when George Floyd was killed, we didn’t speak out as a ministry. We didn’t get on social media, and it seemed like everybody was doing it, large scale. People were going crazy and we didn’t say anything, we didn’t address it. But I think finally one day, I shot a little on my phone video that went on the Snowbird Facebook page for that day. And it was super simple, just like, “Hey, Jesus is the hope.” “Laws aren’t gonna change the hearts of man,” something like that. And so we took a lot of heat, a lot of heat. And a lot of it was targeted at me personally. And it’s interesting because I was accused of so many things like racism and stuff like that. Racism was the main thing. And I was accused of being insensitive, silence is violence. Then there was the blackout day on social media, we didn’t do that.
ZC: Yeah.
BH: Blackout day rolls around, we just keep cranking stuff out from our media team. But what stood out to me was the biggest rants that we heard were from past White females, who worked a summer or two or three at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, who went on and got their degree, some of them got postgraduate degrees. And these are White females that grew up in affluent suburban communities around Atlanta. And they went off on me. And I thought it’s so interesting, why are they so vehemently, so passionate about this? And then something else that jumped out at me was, there was a march in the county seat here where I live, which is the town of Murphy. And there’s very few African-Americans, very few Black or Brown people in this county. It takes an hour and 10 minutes to drive across this county, and there’s less than 30,000 people in the county. And it’s just a big, broad, rural county. So downtown, in front of the courthouse, there was a march and a “Protest” And it was super peaceful and I went and met with the Sheriff to see if we could… What concerns or, might be, is there any ministry opportunities. Met with the Sheriff, met with the county commissioners. Get to that march. There’s about 200 people marching, about 150 of them are 18 to 25-year-old White girls.
BH: And so, those two things stand out in my mind, ’cause I think it’s so bizarre that that seems to be who’s sort of driving the narrative. And so I think maybe there’s this guilty conscience over White privilege, but I’m not even sure I know what White privilege is. And I heard one of those girls sayin’ she was reading the book, White Fragility, and it was “Wrecking her.” Which is terminology we use when you read the word of God and you’re overwhelmed with conviction, or God shapes a new thought in your mind that you’ve been blinded to because of the hardness of your heart, and God expose the sin and breaks you down, and you say, “Man, that really wrecked me.” And she’s wrecked. This is a girl who confesses and professes faith in Jesus. One of these gals served on the mission field in an East African country, and was very gospel-centered, part of one of our teams that lives over there. So I wanna talk about White privilege or privilege, and in my mind, I think of White privilege. And then I wanna talk about what it is to be woke or wokeism. And then we might throw in there, in this conversation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, where does… Because someone will say, “Do you not think that Black Lives Matter?” And then our response is, “Yes, we think that Black Lives Matter.
BH: We do not support, or agree with, or commune with. We’re not in solidarity or unity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. And so it’s kind of all these little phrases are like… There’s like catch-22 to all of it, because if you say, “I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” then you’re racist because you don’t think that black lives matter, and that’s not at all what you’re saying. You’re saying, “As an organization, here’s what you believe. I know what you think, and then I know where you’re coming from. And it is Marxist, and it is rooted in these Marxist ideologies.” Yeah, what do we do with that? In a contemporary way, how do we live and function and keep our Christian witness? I heard that one guy say, one podcaster who is an African-American man, and he said “We need to vote for Biden so that we can keep face with our neighbors. And then if what comes out of that is persecution and a loss of religious freedom, then we’ll survive and we’ll have a chance for the gospel to get big in our lives.” And I’m like, “Man, I think you’re working backwards, like you’re working upstream with that.” So what do we do with that? So I guess maybe starting off, what do people mean when they talk about privilege?
ZC: Yeah, great question. So I’m gonna assume at this point people have listened to the first two of these episodes, so I’m gonna return back to our window room analogy. Right? So privilege, back to a curtain, person in the room, person in the other room. Privilege would be proximity to that curtain, right? Or really to that window. So if your worldview is material, and if your worldview affirms that you occupy a point, an intersection on a spectrum of identity, and some of those comprise of oppressor characteristics, or oppressee, those who receive oppression, characteristics to the degree that your oppressor identities outnumber your oppressee or the oppressed, you are privileged to that degree. So someone who is cisgender, someone who’s born a gender… They feel that they’re born in the right body, that person is more privileged than a trans person because the current structure of the world values a cisgender person more than a trans person in that theory, in that worldview.
ZC: So then your prime oppressor would be an affluent white male, who is born in an upper middle class family, and who is probably a Christian and probably highly educated. So someone like the President’s son, Baron Trump, is an example of a prime oppressor. He is set up. Jared Kushner. These individuals are set up in the halls of power, and they’re gonna make decisions which affect all people, but they can’t possibly think on behalf of all people because they’re not, right? They can’t even see because they have so much privilege. They can’t know what it’s like. They could never enter the shoes of someone who might be, for example, a transgender African-American female who lives in Santa Fe, Albuquerque. Or Santa Fe, New Mexico. So that’s what privilege means. And then if you’re… Oh, go ahead.
Zach Mabry: Can I clarify? And if you are part of the privileged, then that is synonymous with being part of the oppression, is that right?
ZC: Yeah, you might not recognize you are oppressing someone, but by not yielding or giving up some of your privilege and allowing… So in a world of have-and-have-not, material have-and-have-not, if you’re not willing to give some of what you have to someone who has not, then at that point, you are the oppressor ’cause you’re maintaining the system versus giving the little that you can, or the little you might be able to give to someone who might not enter the room. And that is also what means to be woke, ’cause these two are interrelated, when you see behind the curtain, and you see how much privilege you have, then you’re obligated to take the person who’s in the other room, who doesn’t even know that there might be a window behind the curtain, and you’re obligated to step out of the way and tell them where are the curtains and maybe even hold the curtain back from them so that they can see that you might not even be able to see. And that’s how material it is. And I’m trying to use that very visceral image for people because there’s no supernatural thought of providence of anything like that.
ZC: In the first episode, I talked about Job, let’s go back to Job’s story for a little bit. If you look at what happened to Job and you insisted on material explanations for what happened, but you would say that Job… And I’m potentially, you know, treading on dangerous waters here, ’cause… What I’m not about to insinuate is that natural disasters are necessarily a consequence of God’s sovereignty in punishing someone, okay? So God is in the world when I do this. But let’s just look at materially what happens when he loses his things, right? You might say, “Well, climate change caused this disaster to come upon him, and that is the material explanation for how that happens,” a contemporary example, obviously. And then to you and look at the person who caused that change in the climate, even though you can’t possibly know that, and then you would punish that person by either extorting a tax, removing position, something, and then you would try to make it right for Job by restoring his fortune back to him. But the biblical narrative doesn’t do that for Job, God in his providence is testing Job, and He’s wrestling with what it means, and something cosmic is actually happening that Job is feeling acutely, but it’s really a… God is establishing and showing his justice to the accuser, to Satan, right?
ZC: Who is accusing God of favoring Job, so God is descending his justice using Job. And who knows what the Lord is doing in any circumstance, why some people are born in Bengali and don’t have enough food and the monsoon destroys their house every other year. Who knows what the Lord is doing? We ought to, as often as we can, help love and support people. And then we could even look at the famine in Jerusalem. Why did God do that? I think we can make exegetical arguments first, scoring up the generosity of the churches, got some scattering. But anyway, in the promise of that, doing something for Job and then to the church in Jerusalem and then to that fictional person in the valley that we can’t know. And we ought to, in my opinion, adopt the posture of Job and shut our mouths and not suppose, but minister to, in the midst of. Try to alleviate the suffering. And then Job, by the way, the reparations, so to speak, that he received, they’re not just equal to what he lost. And the main reparation he received is not really his material goods which he got back and more, it’s the fact that God is vindicated and Job’s faith is proven. That’s the real reward.
ZC: ‘Cause eventually Job is gonna die, he knows this, ashes to ash. He’s not gonna keep that stuff. It’s God’s justice is upheld, it’s vindicated and Job’s faith is vindicated against the accuser. And that’s the real reward. It has nothing to do with the material circumstances, and that’s the conversation that the friends are having. The friends are not really talking about the material circumstances, they’re really talking about what is God doing in your heart Job? So when we’re talking about privilege, wokeness, those sorts of things, it’s dangerous because while we want to address the material sufferings of people, we wanna give them cool water to drink, we want to feed, then we want to give them clothing, ’cause Jesus commands us to do those things, ’cause what we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. That’s true. But when you are insisting on wokeness and you’re insisting on those things, then you are treading on, in my mind, the very ground that belongs only to God. You’re searching the unsearchable providences of God. And you might be right, it might be human sin, and it could be. But even still, God is the one who’s vindicates. This is the message of the Bible, that God vindicates everything and that God… That those who are oppressors will reap the whirlwind.
ZC: And it will not just be material punishment, it will not just be a redistribution, it will be eternity in hell. And it’s not just separation from God, it’s torment. It’s clear in Scripture, it is the absolute justice of God upheld. And who knows his purposes? We could go any number of ways with this direction, I don’t wanna take up all the time on this, but wokeness, privilege, those sorts of things, they’re trying to look behind the curtain and then they’re trying to do these things and search the unsearchable providences of God, and it’s really dangerous. But if we’re telling the truth, and we’re working to see just laws come into place, we’re working to alleviate material sufferings of each other, that is sufficient, and we can trust God to justify and vindicate himself in the end, and he will do that.
ZM: I think that’s really helpful. Can I, on a follow-up with that also, when we’re talking about… And I say we. When the culture is talking about this idea of privilege, and so you’re recognizing, maybe I’m on the spectrum where I have more privilege than others, and I become woke, I am now obligated.
ZC: Obligated. 100%.
ZM: I’m obligated to give of my privilege to other people, to those who are oppressed, to those who are under-privileged, correct?
ZC: Yeah, and so that’s why, Brody, I think people are marching and saying Black Lives Matter. It’s all strife though, because none of them are actually giving…
ZM: They’re doing nothing, right?
ZC: They’re not dropping out of college so that people can… And that’s more thinking of that it’s all kind of fake anyway, it’s just bending to cultural pressure. And you did ask about Black Lives Matter. The church has something qualitatively better than Black Lives Matter. It’s that Black lives are created in the image of God. And why at this particular moment might we not say all lives? That’s a good debate to have anyway, but you can say Black Lives Matter at this moment, because it’s what the culture’s asking, so the church can answer, “Yes, we affirm that Black lives do in fact matter to God, but even better than just saying matter, they’re created in the image of God. And they experience the effect of the fall, they experience the effect of sin around them, and the sinful creation of people, but Jesus will also restore that to them. He will restore their dignity, and then he will judge the people that did that.” It’s far better than just… It’s just qualitatively better. And so when Christians say Black lives matter, it’s like, depending on how and what the word means, it’s what you said, the organization itself is so un-Christian, it can’t possibly be a firm, and they want to destroy the nuclear family.
ZC: It’s not just about advancing LGBT rights, it’s about deconstructing the family unit. But when churches say Black lives matter, that you’re selling yourself short. You have a message better than that which is that…
ZM: Right, right. That’s the lowest bar you can have.
ZC: Yeah, yeah. And the world doesn’t need more people giving a lower bar. We need something that transcends this present world.
ZM: That’s good.
ZC: We need heaven to break through, and we do that by saying that Black lives are created in the image of God. And I do think it’s appropriate to say Black lives, not all lives at this moment, ’cause the culture’s asking the question. So answer the culture and say yes, Black lives are created in the image of God.
BH: Man, that’s so insightful. That’s so good.
ZM: And let me come back just a little bit, because you said, as Christians, yes, we need to be voting in this direction, we need to get rid of laws that are oppressive. And this is where I need you to help clarify something. We seek equality, but can you give a minute to help us understand that when some people are saying, like when I say equality, I’m talking about equality of opportunity, whereas when other people are saying equality, they’re talking about equality of outcome. Can you help us understand that a little bit better?
ZC: Yeah, that’s acute right now because that video of Kamala Harris, the potential Vice President of the United States released a video talking about that. That’s a good question. So there’s a meme. I joke with my people in my church and beyond that memes are actually more insightful than people give them credit for. And there’s a meme that has a fence, right? And you have three boys all the same height and they are all different heights. One is able to peer out just out of her natural ability, and then the other needs a little bit of help, and then the other can’t see at all, and so they redistribute the boxes so that all of them can see kind of together, so… And [0:21:07.2] ____ equity and equality. Christians should care about equality because God is not a respecter of person, and so it’s not just theoretical for the Lord. The Lord is so concerned about equal justice that He has laws about scales and balances, and the person who’s dishonest with scales is guilty of Hell. Can you imagine that? If you are saying that your loaf of bread is 12 ounces, but it’s 11.5 ounces, that is worthy of Hell in the Lord’s eyes because He is no respecter of person, and He cares about equal justice for all.
ZM: Justice, right. Yeah, that’s good. Equality.
ZC: Yeah, Christians. Yeah, that’s right, so what all of that means is, is really just telling the truth, which also means that… Who knows the providential purposes of the Lord, of why Brody, you were born in North Carolina in the family you were born in, and why I was born in the family I was born in, and why my parents got divorced. When they got divorced, my mother struggled. She worked valiant, my mother’s a hero. She worked two jobs. One of them, she had to drive two hours one way, and she did this on Saturdays, so she would have enough to keep food on the table. Why did she have to do that? I don’t know, and the Bible doesn’t tell us that, but it does tell us that He’s working a purpose and preparing something that none of us can search. But the other promise is, that in Ephesians 2:6, which is one of my favorites in the Bible, which is in the coming ages, He’s gonna seat us within a Heavenly places so that He might display the unimaginable riches of His time and grace towards us in Christ Jesus.
ZC: Heaven is going to be God telling us, “This is how good I was to you. And this is why I did these providential things,” and so I don’t know Zach, why there are differences in outcome other than that. That’s one of the unsearchable things of God, but I do know that God is very concerned with equal justice before the law in both the Old and New Testaments. ‘Cause in the New Testament, the very end of James, those who withhold wages from their laborers are also guilty of Hell. God cares about paychecks. He cares about people getting paid on time, so God cares about these things. He’s a God who sees. There’s no one theoretically erased from the law with God. He sees the hagars of our current legal system, and He will one day rectify the injustices that people face as a result of humans sining against one another. And if you believe in a Heaven, then you can wait. And I’m not saying people have to wait for justice, but what I’m saying is for those that are like Christians, you’re like, “Well, what do I do now?” Well, you go, you pray, you meet the material needs that you can, and then you wait for God’s good justice.
ZM: That’s good. As we start wrapping this up, so what do you say to believers who… There are some popular preachers out there who will say, racial reconciliation has already happened at the cross, and now we need to live in light of that. Is that a helpful way of thinking through some of these racial issues?
ZC: Yeah, so there’s a book called “One New Man” by Jarvis Williams, and he makes the argument in there that in Ephesians 2, the cross has killed the former identities of all people and created one new man, and so that takes place in the context of the local church, and so when… Let’s just say for example, that I was a Libertarian and Brody, that you were a liberal. Both probably things that we are not.
ZM: Probably.
ZC: And in a church… Yeah, exactly. In a church context, those identities are crucified, and what we are named then is sons of the most high God. And that’s the primary identity then around which we’re organized. So that’s the short of it. Probably back, I could say more, which is good.
ZM: Yeah. I think the two things that you’ve really highlighted that are the most helpful for Christians to think through this are those dual identities. That we are all human beings created in the image of God as a good creation. And then the subsequent fall, redemption, restoration, consummation, but we’re human beings created in the image of God. And then especially as believers, all of those identity markers have been crucified. They’ve been torn down to make one new man, and that is how… I don’t wanna sound too Sunday schooly.
ZC: Nah dude, that’s the truth.
ZM: Right? ‘Cause the gospel is the answer.
ZC: Do the Sunday school thing. Yeah, it is.
ZM: That’s it.
ZC: ‘Cause you know what it does? And you’re so right, ’cause what it does, we’re acknowledging the fact that the current order is not right. So the Gospel creates the third way. It creates the way that offers up the cheek when it’s slapped. It creates the place where people who formerly hated each other because of their ethnic identities, now gives all of their possessions over to one another because one has material needs. And the people, our listeners, what I want you to pour your life into is to the life of your church. I want you to pour all of your vital political energy into your church, because the church is a kingdom, it is a political organization, and it is the place that God is doing His work of restoration in the world. And I wanna say just one cultural observation point, Brody and Zach. I think the reason that we’re seeing such vitriol and visceral reactions in the public square is, because people want to pour all of those energies into volunteer organizations like a church, like a synagogue, like a mosque, those sorts of energy that they would have, but in a secularizing world and a growingly materialistic world, those places are invalid because nobody believes in God anymore.
ZC: It just seems foolish to pour your life into that, but I would offer that… And I think that’s why we’re seeing public worship on display, and we see people cry or not cry based on whether their messianic figure has taken over the kingdom.
ZM: Yeah. Oh, man.
ZC: And as Christians, we have to avoid that on both sides, you have to pour your life into the local church and die for it, ’cause Christ died for it, and that is when we will really see actually real justice ring out. And the black church in America has modeled that perfectly. The National Baptist Convention, from which Martin Luther King originally came, there was a split, but his vision of creating a beloved community, that’s really compelling, ’cause what he’s saying is that America is not toast, but it’s not the place where we need to pour all of our vital energies, even to the context of creating a beloved community, just isn’t our place, and I don’t agree with him on every point, I disagree with him on what he’s talking about when he’s defining a beloved community, but the idea of pouring your life into Christ’s Church is really compelling for me.
ZM: Yeah. What I’m hearing you say is, that we’re seeing this happen right now because people are wanting to be a part of something bigger than themselves, that’s meaningful.
ZC: 100%.
ZM: Right.
ZC: Yeah.
ZM: And especially in light of social media, because in social media, everything that you think, and say or do is on display for everyone else, and so shouldn’t you be involved in something worthwhile, something meaningful? But you’re right, even when you’re talking about the marches, that they’re impotent because you’re not giving jobs to people who are oppressed, you’re not taking money from yourself and giving it to feed others, you’re just walking, you know?
ZC: Yeah, yeah.
ZM: I think that is really helpful. Brody, do you guys each one wanna have like a closing, “This is my final say.”
BH: Yeah, well, I think this last portion of this third episode is… I think is the… If I was gonna say to somebody, “Hey, we just did a couple of hours worth of discussion on this topic.” And I was gonna say, “Go listen to this 10 minutes.” I think that nails it. That whole idea that the white 24-year-old girl, that grew up in a six-figure home, both parents were six figures, dad’s a major airline pilot and mom’s a small business owner, and it’s a family of two kids, and they both go to really prestigious universities, and then now she feels really empty, the bottom line is, everything is wood, hay and stubble in the end. And she feels very empty, and it’s not just that there’s a God-size void in a person’s heart, there’s a need for mission, there’s a need for something, Zach you said, bigger than yourself. We have that in the Gospel, we have that in the mission of the church, we’ve been commissioned by our Creator, not just endowed with inalienable rights, we’ve been commissioned by our Creator to pursue, to be on mission in the building of a kingdom. Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, over 50 times, Jesus speaks of the kingdom and we’ve been brought into the work of building the kingdom.
BH: Well, if you don’t have that mission, then you’ve gotta create the mission. I think that that for me, puts everything in a good context and it helps me, and I’m really glad you said that. And then also you said, and I think it’s back in the second episode we did, you said, “It gets dangerous for the Christian if you go down this path.” And I think what you’re driving at, man… And then I’m gonna leave the final remarks here with you, Zach Carter, it gets dangerous for the Christian to press into this ideology or this ideology, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, because we have a mission, we’ve got a mission, we’ve got a command, and we’ve got a goal in sight, and we do. I remember speaking to a group of veterans where PTSD from combat service is rampant, and then saying to these guys, “I don’t know why you had to see what you saw, I don’t know why war exists in that part of the world, but I know this, the writer of Ecclesiastes at the very end of the book says, Vanity, it’s Havel, it’s mist, it’s vapor, it’s worthless, it’s meaningless, it’s empty.” But I know this, one day, God’s gonna make everything new, He’s gonna put things in order, He’s gonna make things right, He’s gonna assign eternal value to temporal things, and it’s all gonna come into focus. And that’s part of what living by faith looks like for us.
BH: And so, the idea that it gets dangerous for the Christian, and then when you said, you said this three times in this episode, they’re searching for what is unsearchable. We’re ascribing to God, not the glory to His name, as David says, I think it’s Psalm 24, we’re not just describing him the glory. We’re trying to ascribe to him human reasoning that is driven from unregenerate minds. So it’s a secular ideology, and now we’re trying to fit God into that and say, well, let me help the church here from the secular world here, let me see how we can merge these two ideas, and they don’t merge. You can’t search what is unsearchable. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who’s been His counselor? And so those two things kinda come out of this last summing up, I think is really helpful for people, and so I’ll leave that with you Zach Carter and Final thoughts, closing thoughts.
ZC: No, I appreciate it. I hope it’s been helpful. I know it’s been encouraging me to think through and the listeners. I think it was just one last thought to sum up what you guys said. What would it look like to be like Jesus to people that have these questions, that are experiencing injustice, those sorts of things. I think at first would be to lament with them, to mourn injustice, and to say, it is wrong, that there was red line. It is wrong that these sorts of things happen. It is wrong that in the 1920s, Jim Crow laws disenfranchised tons of people. That’s wrong. Let’s weep about it, let’s acknowledge that it’s sin, let’s tell the truth about it, but let’s look forward to the vindication of God. And then I think the second thing that we can do to be like Jesus is to feed and clothe and to meet the material needs of people who are suffering from injustice. But then the third and final thing is to not pick up the sword and think that we can make it right on this earth. It’s remarkable to me, ’cause Jesus did not do that. He could have, but He did not. He died Himself and allowed God to vindicate Him, and we can be like Jesus by pouring our life into His kingdom, and so I really want people just to be really great church members, who love the Word of God.
ZC: If I get to do one thing in my life, that the Lord will allow me to do it, it’s just to hammer for everyone who listens that your best political energies will be poured into being a good church member and that’s it. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. It’s been edifying and encouraging, and I love you guys and the ministry you’re doing. Love that you care about equipping these students, pastors, parents, to think about this stuff. We are in an ideological war for the soul of the world, though it’s been that way from the beginning. It’s not new, and we’re just in a new battlefield.
ZM: Right. Just different questions.
ZC: I’m glad you guys do talk… Different questions for the Bible sufficient. So thanks for it, thanks for having me on.
BH: Yeah, man. Thanks for being on. We’ll get you back in the future. There’s other things I’d love to pick your brain about. So thanks for being here, thanks for partnering with us in a lot of different ways, and I hope this has been super helpful for folks. So thank you guys for tuning in. And we’ll see you next time.