Return of the caveman

The ethic driving the culture isn’t the old two-bucket culture of biblical thinking and paganism; it’s the one-bucket culture of paganism, explained Jordan in his recent sermon on “the course of this world.”

“In Europe, historically, this thing disintegrated very slowly like taking a balloon and letting the air out of it slowly. In America, it just popped. One generation and it’s gone and a whole change has taken place in just one quick generation.

“What you hear people talk about as the decline in traditional values is a myth. It’s not a decline; it’s a funeral, folks!

“They’ve already been replaced with a new cultural norm, and people watching Fox News mourn about it, decry it, wish they could go back, just as people watching MSNBC rejoice in the new freedom and liberty and say, ‘Let’s get on with it!’

“When you go to Romans 1, there’s the bucket of truth and there’s the bucket of lie. When you have two buckets you have the thinking of the Bible. When you have only one bucket, you have paganism. What we have substituted Western values for is paganism.

“You no longer have God and Satan; truth and the lie. The Creator and the creation. Light and darkness. Man, animals, heaven, hell, male, female. You just have one bucket and everything’s in that one bucket.

“And you have no right to distinguish or discriminate between these things because they’re all in the same bucket and there’s no difference between male and female.

“If you know a male that wants to marry another man or a woman wants to marry another woman, you’ve got no right to distinguish between it and call it marriage. When you look at the animals, they’re just as valuable as a human. That’s where that thinking comes from, and philosophically and religiously it’s paganism.

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"When you have paganism, the symbol of it is the circle. The band Travis had a hit song some time ago that said, ‘There’s no wrong, there’s no right. The circle only has one side.’ That’s it; it’s a circle. In the Lion King, there was that circle of light and everything’s in it.

“Now, understand the new culture is very spiritual. It’s very into the supernatural. It’s very into the superstitious. That’s why everywhere you look you see vampires and zombies and avatars. The Barnes & Noble by the Woodfield Mall has a ‘Teenage Paranormal’ section as long as that wall to the door.

“I was raised in the Phil Donohue age where everything was naturalistic and there was no supernatural, miraculous intervention by God at all. Einstein said, ‘Well, I believe in a God but not one that intervenes into history.’ All the philosophy then was about God being an ‘absentee landlord,’ as Al Pacino called him. That was the idea. 'If there’s a God, that’s okay; He just doesn’t get involved.’

“Naturalism says the world just works on the laws of nature like a washing machine. It just works because it works. That’s the way it is. Before you had to spend your time defending there’s a resurrection or a virgin birth or that there could be miracles.

“Now you don’t have to convince young people there’s a resurrection. What you have to convince them of is there’s only one! Because they believe in all kind of resurrections, all kind of life after death. UFOs, zombies. What is a zombie? It’s life after death! What are vampires? That’s animal and man put together in one creation.

“There’s no distinction; it’s gone. There’s a thinking and a social impact of that. Oprah made it chic to be spiritual. She said over and over, ‘It’s okay to get in touch with your spiritual side; just don’t use the Bible.’ Why? Because the Bible says there are two buckets and paganism says there’s just one. It's, ‘Can’t we all just get along.’

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“Paganism requires the philosophy of tolerance in order to be able to function. The only sin is believing that there is a sin. To say that any action is wrong, or any condition needs to be changed, is abhorrent. That’s why Bible-believing Christianity is presented as intolerant. It’s presented as unloving. It’s intolerant because it’s got two buckets.

“The old culture said that truth is what corresponds with reality. The correspondence idea of truth: ‘If it’s real, it’s true.’ That’s the fundamental thinking of the Bible. How do you know there’s a Creator? There’s a creation. Duh! The first-cause demands that.

“In the old Judeo-Christian thinking paradigm we all recognize truth is out there somewhere. We might not know what it is, but if we just keep searching and dialoguing, it will be there.

“You know the story of the three blind men that tried to describe the elephant? One felt his trunk and said it’s like a rope, another felt his leg and said it’s like a stump and the other felt his belly and said it's like a wall. That’s their perceptions, but the old thinking would say, ‘It’s STILL an elephant!’  It’s the still the whole, not your part.

“The new thinking is, 'Whatever you experience it to be, it’s truth.' For you the elephant is a stump or it’s like a big old wall because the elephant is whatever you think it is. Because we’ve only got one bucket and any thinking process that you have, everyone’s experience and participation is right. It’s truth. And it’s not right to say there’s only one way. Truth is really just by experience, so it’s not right to say, ‘You’re wrong!’

“We have terms for the moral ethic that holds paganism together; egalitarianism is one. Multi-culturalism--that’s where the so-called feminist movement came from. That’s where the environmental stuff comes from. That’s where the homosexual stuff comes from. All of that comes from a complete different paradigm of thinking where there’s just one bucket and everybody’s in it. And that’s what paganism is all about.

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“The course of this world, when you see how it begins, is just a description of man exploiting the resources of the world without God for his own use and purposes. Romans 1:20.

“If you exploit the things of creation and harness what’s there, who should you be seeing and what should you be learning? You should be seeing the wisdom, the knowledge and the power of God. You should be seeing the provisions God has put there and His creative genius to provide for you, and you should be expanding that.

*****

“When you are given up, there’s a sense of loneliness in that. There’s a sense of the purpose that makes your heart go that is gone. You’re another Cain.

“God put a mark on Cain to protect him. It wasn’t a good thing; it was the mark of the curse. But Cain turned that into a ‘good’ thing. You see how he did that? He twisted that bad thing into a good thing and he extends that mark of Cain to other people, so it had become a symbol of protection and blessing from god. But what god is it? It’s not the right God. Now, that’s the way 'the course of the world' is going to work.

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“The men of Cain’s day were not a bunch of long-haired, club-carrying, half-dressed cavemen.

“There’s an issue of leisure and affluence, and what happens is in the wake of city life comes this looseness, this permissiveness, this sophistication and chicness where we don’t have to go by those old mores. There’s this constant undermining of what God established, redefining it into something different.

“With the depletion of the labor force from the country to the city (Gen. 4:20), they needed more and more efficient means of production of food and clothing and so forth, so they began to develop systems of agriculture and animal husbandry and so forth.

“Genesis 4: 21 says, 'And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.'

"Cain’s developing a whole culture of people who do this. To have an artist community, the first thing you have to have is leisure. You go all through the history of man, when there are artists, somebody has to buy their clothes, their groceries, pay their living expenses, all so they have the leisure time to go . . .

“What are the people doing? They’re using their affluence to buy all of this artistic stuff. Verse 22 says, ‘And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.’

“An artificer is an artisan; it’s somebody who’s a craftsman. There are craftsmen in iron and brass. We’re talking about metallurgy. Brass doesn’t exist until you take copper and tin and put them together.

“They set down and figured out the chemistry of metallurgy. These people had developed technology. What they’d done is gone out into creation and begun to harness it and subdue it.

“They began to take the resources of creation and exploit them, but they’re doing it without God. They’re using creation for their own interests; not the interest and purpose God put there.

“The course of this world is a course that begins to develop all kinds of activities of man, man using his creative genius God gave him to go out and subdue the earth but not for God’s plan and purpose.

“The next two verses in the chapter, people scratch their head about it: ‘And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
[24] If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.’

“What Lamech said unto his wives; that is the first piece of poetry in human literature!

“What’s the poem about? Violence and murder. That’s the fruit of the course of this world directed by 'the prince the power of the air.' And look how he perverted it is in verse 24.

“There’s the development of the first weapons of mass destruction: ‘If he’s going to get seven, put a zero on it for me!’ ”