Participants:
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI200494A
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00:26 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:28 This is a program designed to introduce religious liberty 00:33 and religious liberty developments 00:35 around the world, 00:36 into your thinking to make you very aware 00:39 of how dynamic that is today. 00:41 My name is Lincoln Steed, editor of Liberty magazine. 00:44 And my guest on the program is trouble. 00:47 No, it's my good friend, Cliff Goldstein, 00:50 once editor of Liberty Magazine 00:52 and now causing no, not troubled, 00:54 you're doing a very good job with the Sabbath school lessons 00:57 that go out globally 00:58 for the seventh Adventist church. 01:01 But let's get into some real heavy stuff. 01:02 Let's talk about the philosophy of religious liberty, 01:05 which of necessity. 01:07 We'll talk about, you know, 01:08 the philosophy of human behavior 01:10 and where we are and who's God. 01:12 And how do we relate to them? 01:14 Well, I guess the whole question comes in is 01:17 did God originally give us religious liberty? 01:20 Did God... 01:21 And I think, well, you take the Adam and Eve story. 01:24 God says, 01:26 "Don't eat of the tree." 01:28 Or you'll die. Yeah, or you'll die. 01:29 Okay. Now... 01:31 Why did He give them a tree? Yeah, why did... 01:33 Well, see, this comes down to, 01:34 you know what it all comes down to? 01:36 I believe it comes down to one word, 01:39 the word is love. 01:41 If God... 01:43 The God who created the cosmos, 01:46 He can force every creature in the cosmos 01:50 to bow down to Him. 01:52 He could force every creature in the cosmos to obey Him, 01:57 but He cannot force any creature to love Him. 02:03 If God wanted beings who could love, 02:06 He had no choice. 02:08 He had to make them free. Okay? 02:10 You see what I'm saying? 02:11 He could not force us to love Him. 02:13 Now you could say, okay... 02:16 Let's say you accept that. 02:18 I think you're onto something. 02:19 The love aspect makes perfect sense. 02:21 We have to be free. 02:23 But the free will argument, I think is more difficult. 02:28 Well, no, no, no 02:29 because let's take this a little step further. 02:30 Okay. 02:32 So let me just follow my train of thought here 02:33 for few minutes and see if... 02:35 And somewhere my logic falls apart, stop me. 02:39 Okay. So you say, God has no choice. 02:44 He wants beings 02:45 who can love Him and love others. 02:47 So we have to create them free. 02:49 But you say, okay, God is all-knowing. 02:53 And so God knew that we were going to fall. 02:55 There was going to be pain, suffering, 02:58 all whole wretched thing we got to deal with. 03:02 And then you think, okay, He did it anyway. 03:04 Well, if He did it anyway, but God is all good, 03:08 then we ultimately have to believe 03:11 that God is ultimately going to bring good at. 03:13 Well, an implicit in what you're saying is that 03:15 there was no other way that God all-knowing, 03:18 all-powerful could produce the desired effect. 03:21 Well... 03:22 That's perilously close to the fortunate fall. 03:25 Well, no, He's... No, no, no, no... 03:27 I don't believe that at all. 03:29 Evil never needed to happen. It never should have happened. 03:33 But when you create, when God makes us free, 03:36 it's really free. 03:38 He knew the moment of creation. 03:40 He knew what was going to happen. 03:42 That a naive couple 03:44 from an unknowing arch... 03:50 And that because the same principle 03:52 occurred in heaven. 03:53 The most amazing text, I think in all the Bible, 03:56 listen to this. 03:57 In Ezekiel, it says, 03:58 "You were perfect in your ways 04:01 from the day that you were created." 04:03 And the Hebrew word Bara is a verb 04:07 that is only God as its subject. 04:09 So you've got a perfect viewer. 04:11 You were created, you were perfect in your ways 04:14 from the day that you were created 04:16 until iniquity was found in you. 04:18 So let me ask you. 04:20 What you getting at and I know you don't know the answer. 04:22 Paul says, there's the mystery of godliness 04:24 and the mystery of iniquity. 04:25 I don't believe without knowing 04:28 the full compass of God's origin and power, 04:31 we can understand 04:32 how co-existent with that could be evil. 04:34 Well... 04:36 Because the simple thing is God, 04:37 if He created everything He created evil. 04:38 But free choice, freedom, 04:41 but the question is 04:42 how could you have a perfect being Lucifer. 04:45 Bible says he was perfect, 04:47 created by a perfect God in a perfect heaven. 04:50 The answer is that 04:52 perfection included the potential to do wrong, 04:57 and that had to be there for love. 04:59 Okay? But anyway, follow me anyway. 05:01 God creates his free beings. 05:04 He knows they're going to fall and yet he's all-loving. 05:07 He's going to bring all good out of it. 05:09 But that leaves the final question. 05:12 Well, how fair is this? 05:15 God is up in heaven. 05:17 The angels are adoring Him and worshiping Him. 05:20 And He's up there, fine in heaven. 05:23 And us poor schnucks 05:24 are down here in the blood, sweat, and tears, 05:29 and God's going to work it all out. 05:31 That's not fair... 05:32 I'm not a moviegoer per se, but I like Clint Eastwood. 05:35 And there's a movie called Unforgiven 05:38 where the sheriff, who was a bad guy here, 05:40 the sheriff who had opposed him 05:42 and done some bad things is lying, 05:43 dying on the floor 05:45 in losing the gunfight with Clint Eastwood's, 05:47 tough character. 05:49 And he says, 05:50 "I don't deserve this. 05:52 You know, I was just building a house," 05:54 and all the rest. 05:55 And Clint Eastwood says, 05:57 "Deserves got nothing to do with it." 05:58 Well, that's... 06:00 Now at the end of the day, if God is a sovereign God, 06:02 we don't deserve to be saved. 06:04 We don't deserve... We think we do. 06:07 The Bible says, 06:08 you know, man thinks he wasn't made to die. 06:10 We were made to die. No, we weren't... 06:12 In the sense that 06:13 we're fallible creatures remembered... 06:14 We were originally created to live forever. 06:16 But why... Evil came in. 06:17 Evil came in. Evil came in. 06:19 In Genesis, it gives the reason, 06:20 God says we will throw Him out of the garden 06:22 and let's eat of the tree and live forever. 06:24 We will not in ourselves... 06:26 But we didn't have inherited immortality. 06:28 No. Exactly. That's what I mean. 06:29 But anyway... 06:31 We are created creatures 06:32 that we don't have life in us... 06:34 No, no, no... 06:35 We only ever had it through God, 06:37 and we'll have it again in an eternity. 06:39 But anyway, come back, 06:41 God had no choice created us free 06:44 because He wanted us to love Him. 06:46 Knew what was going to happen, but He's all-loving. 06:49 He's going to bring good out of it. 06:51 So we're back to this question. 06:54 How fair is it that God is up in heaven 06:58 and we get it all worked out here. 07:00 That's a good question. 07:01 Except I only know one answer, Jesus on the cross. 07:05 Yeah, you're right. I think love is... 07:07 Jesus on the cross. 07:08 God said, in other words, 07:10 "I know what these people are going to do. 07:12 I know what's going to happen, 07:14 but love and the freedom, 07:16 inherent was religious freedom 07:19 is so sacred so fundamental 07:21 to how I'm going to run my government. 07:24 That even though I know that 4,000 years after this, 07:28 I am going to come down. 07:30 I am going to take on humanity. 07:32 I am going to live a perfect life, 07:35 and I will bear in myself, the sins of the world. 07:41 That's how I think it's answered. 07:43 And the other thing too... 07:45 One of my... 07:46 It's funny, I have a... 07:49 It's funny we can learn from philosophy. 07:52 Well, the philosophers, 07:54 some of them were religiously inclined. 07:56 They were all using human logic 07:58 to explain the condition 08:00 and the best of them come very close 08:03 to what you just outlined about God's way. 08:06 But the philosopher 08:08 was probably the most anti-Christian philosopher 08:11 in the past 200 years 08:13 that I learned the most from... 08:15 From who? Nietzsche. 08:17 Nietzsche... Look, listen. 08:19 Nietzsche had a line in that says Zarathustra, 08:25 which goes, 08:26 "In the end one experiences only oneself." 08:31 Now think about this. 08:32 We talk about the sum total of human suffering 08:37 but there's no such thing 08:38 as the sum total of human suffering, 08:41 no human being in the world 08:44 has ever suffered more 08:46 than a single individual has ever suffered. 08:49 Remember when Bill Clinton said, 08:51 "I feel your pain." It's a lie. 08:52 He didn't feel our pain. 08:54 Only pain we know is our own pain... 08:57 Well, we can have empathy. 08:58 We can have empathy but it's still only... 09:00 we cry our own tears. 09:02 We sweat our own sweat. 09:05 You see what I'm saying? 09:06 I know of just one exception. 09:10 You read Isaiah 53. 09:13 You know, the King James has an awful translation here. 09:17 I happen to like the King James version. 09:19 But when he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. 09:23 First of all, whose? 09:25 We say griefs and sorrows are pathetic words. 09:28 King Jimmy was too busy, molesting his little children. 09:30 He should have been paying attention 09:33 to those who translated his Bible. 09:34 But... 09:36 One of them was supposedly Shakespeare, 09:37 Yeah, yeah. 09:39 Well, whatever, whatever, King James was known pedophile. 09:41 But don't tell that to the... But anyway, the point is... 09:44 And partly Scott so be careful. 09:45 The point... 09:47 But the point is he carried our griefs... 09:50 But the bottom line is 09:51 somehow corporately at the cross 09:56 God in the person... 09:58 In Adams or in Christ. 09:59 Yeah, felt something, felt corporately. 10:04 In other words, what I'm going to say in the end is 10:06 freedom, religious liberty. 10:09 The freedom, inherent love 10:11 was so sacred so fundamental to God... 10:14 That God would risk His entire creation. 10:16 Christ got on the cross knew 10:18 He was going to suffer worse from the sin than anyone. 10:22 And yet, rather than not give us the freedom, 10:26 he went to the cross in order to do that. 10:29 And to me that's very heavy. 10:31 Ellen White writing for Seventh-day Adventists 10:33 I think gets to an interesting aspect of this, 10:37 Lucifer, who knew heaven 10:40 and made a big mistake 10:41 would have liked to have been reinstated, 10:44 and the trick of the plan of salvation 10:46 has how did God saved man, 10:49 the simpleton who transgressed 10:52 in a way that he wouldn't have to save Lucifer. 10:54 I think the argument is very simple 10:56 and I don't know 10:57 how much we want to get into this. 10:59 He sinned in the full brightness of... 11:01 Exactly. 11:02 That's what we do want to get into. 11:04 Yeah, He's sending 11:05 the full brightness of the knowledge of God, 11:07 Adam and Eve were relatively new. 11:09 They didn't know what Lucifer knew. 11:11 And so... 11:12 There's a book by Ellen White the Seventh-day Adventist have 11:15 but most of them don't know about it 11:17 called Confrontation. 11:18 Yeah, of course. 11:20 And to me, that's one of the best explanations 11:22 into what was going on with Adam and the new Adam 11:25 and the model that he provided. 11:27 But from the point of literature, 11:30 I am very enamored 11:32 with John Milton's Paradise Lost 11:33 and paradise... 11:35 Where most of this stuff comes from. 11:36 You know, the joke was, 11:38 they say He gave Satan all the best lines. 11:40 And the other joke was. 11:42 Not wished it longer, I think it was... 11:44 Yeah, Johnson, Samuel Johnson... 11:48 Great book, but it was a long... 11:50 But it's a seminal book 11:51 for really the English language 11:54 and a lot of theology. 11:55 People don't realize that, 11:56 that's in the US so influenced by Puritan origins. 12:01 Milton is the overshadowing presence. 12:05 So, you know, there's some wonderful truths 12:07 right in the Bible 12:09 and they undergird religious liberty. 12:10 There's no question because, you know, 12:14 religious liberty is all to do with conscience, 12:17 free will, lack of coercion. 12:20 And somehow God used those same restraints 12:24 to deal with man. 12:26 Love is the foundation 12:27 and love the moment you coerced love, 12:31 it's no longer love. 12:32 It's like a particle in an antiparticle, boom. 12:35 They meet and they destroy each other. 12:38 If He wanted beings to love Him, 12:41 He had to create them free. 12:42 You know, I use an analogy when Tom, I love my dog, 12:45 but sometimes my dog can drive me crazy. 12:48 Well, you know, you ca n get a robot dog from Sony. 12:52 And people fall in love robots. 12:54 You could get a robot dog. 12:55 But let me ask you... 12:57 But it's hard to an inanimate or... 12:59 I would if you're were not satisfied... 13:02 If you wouldn't be satisfied trading rover in 13:06 with fleas and bites and ticks 13:08 and pooping on the carpet and all that. 13:10 Well, I would guess. If you would be... 13:12 If you had moments, 13:13 but if you wouldn't be content 13:16 to do that and trade it for a robot dog, 13:18 you understand a little bit more 13:21 why God was willing to risk 13:25 knowing it would take him to the cross 13:27 rather than create robot dogs. 13:29 He wanted free moral beings. 13:33 Yeah, no, it's a powerful subject. 13:36 And does lie behind 13:37 the religious liberty principle. 13:39 We'll take a short break here and be back to continue 13:42 this serious discussion 13:43 because it is what ultimately lies behind 13:46 everything we say on religious liberty. |
Revised 2021-03-04