When reprobate minds take over

Talking about the growing number of public people who mock Christians, Jordan says, “They’ve always felt that way; they just haven’t been free to say it. A guy like Bill Maher didn’t just get the attitude he has. He’s always felt that way, he just always hasn’t had an (accepting) audience.

“The influence of Christianity in our culture has diminished to the point now where all these people are free to come out of the closet. They’re not in the gutter anymore; they’re out running wild.

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“God didn’t establish America. After our country got to going gangbusters, there was a doctrine called ‘manifest destiny’; that it was the manifest, divinely-ordained destiny of the American colonists to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

"Out of that has come an idea that is called ‘American exceptionalism.’ You get the idea that everything that America’s ever done was God-ordained and God-blessed but it ain’t so.

“When you have a founding doctrine that says we hold these truths to be self-evident and eliminate any divine authority for saying these things, you shouldn’t be so quick to say that everything our nation’s done has been God-blessed when the nation’s founder said it was human-blessed.

“I think we live in the greatest country that’s ever existed among Gentile nations but that’s had nothing to do with us being Israel. It was the direct result of the social impact of the Protestant Reformation in recovering Pauline truth about justification, and taking God’s Word and having it have a social impact on the culture, that brought a small group of people out of that.

“When they came to this country, they came with all kinds of different religious heresy. That’s why you had to have a First Amendment that said the federal government would make no laws establishing religion. The colonies did. You remember that? But the federal government wouldn’t make one. Why? Because there was such religious heresy among the colonies that there would have been a war!

“As the verse says, ‘Righteousness exalts a nation; sin is a reproach to any people.’ The one great thing about our nation has been that the Word of God has had the freedom and liberty to be preached and it’s been preached.

“The course of a nation is set by the amount of sound doctrine resident in the populous. That’s what you learn from Israel. You learn that even the nation God established and put in the earth, if it didn’t contain and have in its populous sound doctrine, living in the identity God gave them, that even that nation would lose its glory. Now that nation is an example to every nation.

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“When they overthrew the Ukrainian government and sent the Russian puppet that was there packing, the guy they selected to be the new head of their government was a Baptist preacher. Now the country’s not Baptist; it’s Eastern Orthodox.

“You couldn’t have done in that in America. I say you couldn’t, but you wouldn’t do that in America today. I’m just saying.

“Israel forsook the Word of God and what happened? They got treated just like any other nation. Our nation, or any other nation does that, if you want an explanation about what’s happening to our culture, it’s because God’s Word has been kicked out, unbelieved, corrupted and disregarded. That reprobate mind that comes that doesn’t want to retain God in its knowledge takes over.

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“In I Kings 12, Solomon’s died and his two boys are going to take over the kingdom, but two of them can’t sit on the throne so one of them goes up into the northern ten tribes and says, ‘We’ll have a kingdom up here,’ and that’s why you have the northern tribes of Israel called the nation Israel and the southern two tribes called Judah.

“Verses 25-27 says, ‘Then Jeroboam built Shechem in mount Ephraim, and dwelt therein; and went out from thence, and built Penuel.
[26] And Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David:
[27] If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah.’

“You see he knows where the king ought to be. Jerusalem is the city of the great king, as Jesus Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:35. God had a rule in Israel that three times a year every Israeli male had to go to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles and worship (Deut. 16:16).

“Israel had three tithes, not one. The first tithe supported the government and the second tithe you kept for yourself. Read Deuteronomy 14. The second tithe was called the ‘festival tithe.’ It was a tithe you used to finance your trip three times a year to Jerusalem to worship.

“I mean, if you lived a long way away, what are you going to do? Take a bunch of sheep with you? No, you’re going to take your money down there and buy some sheep, buy the lambs, buy whatever it is that you’re going to sacrifice.

“He doesn’t just say go sacrifice; God says, ‘Go, party hearty. Have a good time. It’s a celebration.’ You know where the word holiday comes from? It’s taken from the term ‘holy day.’ It’s a time where they were to go celebrate the things of the Lord.

“Jeroboam understands that if all the men go down to Jerusalem three times a year, where’s their heart going to be? They’re going to value Jerusalem. So what does he do?

"Verse 28 says, ‘Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.’

“Uh-oh. What’s the commandment say? Don’t do that. Where would he have gotten that idea? Didn’t you read that in Exodus 32 where Aaron makes them a golden calf?

“He’s quoting Aaron from Exodus 32. He’s going to try and counterfeit what God did in Israel and he’s going to try to counterfeit the lie that the religious system introduced in Israel. He set one (house of worship) up in Bethel and the other in Dan. The top of his kingdom and the bottom of his kingdom.

“Verses 32-33 say, And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made.
[33] So he offered upon the altar which he had made in Bethel the fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month which he had devised of his own heart; and ordained a feast unto the children of Israel: and he offered upon the altar, and burnt incense.

“You see what he does? He says, ‘I’ll go set up my own religious system and I’ll make it look just like what’s in Jerusalem. I’m going to have priests like they have; sacrifices like they have. I’m going to have houses of worship; in fact, I’ll have more than they have. I’ll outdo them two-to-one.’

“Israel was to have one temple, not temples plural. What they did up in the northern kingdom is they just built more and more and more places to go worship God. That was apostasy, leaving what God told them to do to go after a religion of their own making.

"But notice they made it LOOK like the real thing! Corruption of truth is always designed to look like the real thing. So Israel is corrupted into apostasy and the result is they’re taken into captivity.”