Reasoning Through the Bible
Taking a cue from Paul, Reasoning Through the Bible is an expository style walk through the Scriptures that tells you what the Bible says. Reviewing both Old and New Testament books, as well as topical subjects, we methodically teach verse by verse, even phrase by phrase.
We have completed many books of the Bible and offer free lesson plans for teachers. If you want to browse our entire library by book or topic, see our website www.ReasoningThroughTheBible.com.
We primarily do expository teaching but also include a good bit of theology and apologetics. Just like Paul on Mars Hill, Christianity must address both the ancient truths and the questions of the people today. Join Glenn and Steve every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as they reason with you through the Bible.
Reasoning Through the Bible
Faith in the Public Square: Lessons from Charlie Kirk's Assassination || An RTTB Perspective
The assassination of Charlie Kirk has exposed a dangerous reality for Christians speaking in the public square. In this sobering episode, we explore what this tragedy reveals about the deteriorating state of dialogue in Western society and what it means for believers going forward.
What happens when disagreement becomes a death sentence? Charlie Kirk was known for respectfully engaging with those who opposed his views, allowing them to speak without interruption before responding to their arguments. His murder represents a chilling message to Christians everywhere: "Shut up or we'll kill you." Having spent 16 years in campus ministry doing similar work, Glenn never imagined someone would be killed simply for expressing biblical views in public spaces.
We trace how "maximal rhetoric" from all sides of the political spectrum has created an environment where opponents are portrayed not just as wrong, but as existential threats deserving elimination. When political disagreements are framed in apocalyptic terms, violence becomes the logical conclusion for unstable individuals.
The biblical prophets identified three primary reasons for God's judgment on nations: bloodshed, sexual immorality, and idol worship. A sober assessment of our current cultural landscape reveals these exact sins dominating Western societies. While God's kingdom will ultimately prevail, there's no guarantee that any particular nation will continue to enjoy His blessing after abandoning its moral foundations.
For Christians, this moment calls for greater engagement, not retreat. We must model respectful dialogue while boldly proclaiming truth, disciple the next generation to defend their faith, and work with renewed urgency in kingdom service. The window for freely sharing the gospel may be narrowing—are you prepared to use whatever time remains?
Listen now to understand the spiritual implications of this pivotal moment and how you can respond faithfully in increasingly hostile times. Let's make Heaven crowded.
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May God Bless you!! - Glenn and Steve
We're going to do a special topic today on reasoning through the Bible, something that I don't think we've ever done, which is a current events topic, and there's a reason for it. If you've been with us very long, you'll notice that we never have I don't believe we've touched at all on anyone in the world that's alive today. Very few ever dealt with critiquing people that are alive today, simply because our main thrust of our ministry is explaining the Word of God and we've always wanted it to still be valid 500 years from now. And if we go and critique people or speak about current events, then those are only good now and those things are not valid very far down the road. But today I want to make an exception, and we're going to work here pretty much unscripted and talk about something that's happened that I think is important enough to talk about.
Speaker 1:As we record this, it's been about a week since the death of a man named Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 1:About a week since the death of a man named Charlie Kirk, and Charlie Kirk was a Christian that started an organization and he was really a force in the sense that he was very involved at a very young age and he accomplished a great deal A Christian that was involved in many things and he was assassinated about a week ago again.
Speaker 1:As we're recording this, and today we wanted to talk not so much about his death but about the implications and applications around that and how our culture led up to that and the way it possibly could be falling out in our nation and around the world after that. So I think this will have implications for not just our country but in really the entire Western world and the globe. I know we have a lot of listeners in the United States, but we also have listeners all around the world and I think this will play out simply because of the state of the church in our day. So, steve, before I just jump in, any thoughts on this, before we just jump in, I had some thoughts that I'm just very concerned about the state of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we can tell that the impact that this has made on not only our nation but also on across the world, as there's been several different services worldwide in remembrance of Charlie, and one of the things as we get into this is just to know that there are many of the issues that are couched today as being political, but really they're moral issues and they're moral issues that are couched today as being political, but really they're moral issues and they're moral issues that Scripture talks about. And so, as we go through verse by verse, through the Bible, whenever we come across these topics, we talk about it and we discuss them as we go across them, and people today want to say, oh, that's political, don't talk about politics, you can't mix politics and religion. Well, when you let that narrative come out and frame moral issues as being political, then what do you do? You then want to have the people that are discussing scriptures do what? Slink back into the darkness and don't say anything because you can't discuss politics and morality.
Speaker 2:And I think that one of the things that Charlie did from at least the things that I have seen him do personally on his videos and followed many of the videos and debates that he had with people was that he did a variety of topics Some of them were political, some of them were moral, and on the moral ones, he spoke about them in that way and in that vein, that it's a moral issue.
Speaker 2:Now, people might not like that In fact, some people don't like that but, as we're going to talk about here, we have to have the dialogue in order to continue being able to get along as a society. That was one of the things that Charlie talked about was being able to continue to have a dialogue. So that's one of the things I think as we go through here, glenn is just to emphasize we've got to be able to continue to talk with each other in order to let each other know what their positions are. It doesn't necessarily mean we walk away in agreement, but at least we have communicated with each other walk away in agreement, but at least we have communicated with each other.
Speaker 1:As far as what Charlie Kirk was teaching in the public square, I didn't agree with everything Charlie Kirk said. I agreed with a lot of it because he was a Christian and he approached things from the biblical worldview, and so most of what he said I would agree with. He got into endorsing political candidates. That was one of his purposes and I know here on our ministry you're never going to hear us endorse or not endorse a political candidate. That's just not what we're about, and I personally thought that the cultural, moral things that Charlie Kirk was teaching was much more important. But let me tell you why at least the first reason why it affected me so much when he was killed, what Charlie Kirk would do and one of the things he would do he would go out to college campuses and have these large outdoor gatherings and he would take on anybody that wanted to question him and anybody that disagreed with him. He'd move him to the front of the line and what he would do is talk with people with a degree of respect. He wasn't just arguing, but he would. If you get a chance, watch his videos where he's interacting with students on university campuses. He would take a question and then Charlie would set down the microphone and listen and he would let them speak and if he needed a clarifying question, he would pick up the mic and ask a clarifying question and then set down the microphone and he would listen and then he would respond. He was opinionated and he had strong opinions and if people came up they weren't prepared, he'd make them look a little foolish. But he was treating people with a degree of respect by listening to them and dialoguing with them, and because someone disagreed with his ideas and opinions, he was killed, and why that affected me personally. So much is.
Speaker 1:I spent 16 years of my life doing a very similar thing. I worked with a ministry called Ratio Christi. Matter of fact, just two, three months ago was when I retired from Ratio Christi to spend full time doing reasoning through the Bible, but I spent 16 years of my life doing what Charlie did. Now I didn't draw as big a crowd because he was better at it than I, but nevertheless we were doing that. We would go outside on a college campus and set up a table and talk to whoever walked by about biblical issues and moral issues, and we dealt with people who were angry atheists screaming at us and crazy sexually oriented people and people that didn't believe reality exists and all kinds of people, but I never thought that my life was in danger. There was all kinds of people that disagreed with the biblical things we were putting out and we had people lying about us. And we had people lying about us and the lies never did really bother me so much, because you kind of consider the source and you go on about your business. But what shook me so much when Charlie got killed. He was doing the same things that we were doing and they killed him because of the community out there on the Internet were telling lies about him and somebody believed the lies and they killed him to shut him up. And I never thought while I was doing that that somebody was going to walk up with a gun and shoot me. And as of right now, I still have a fair amount of friends that are out there on college campuses still doing it this very day and because of Charlie's death it's actually drawn a lot of people to those kind of ministries.
Speaker 1:The second part is that our discussions in the public marketplace have gotten to the point where people believe that if you disagree with me, then you're an evil person and need to be removed from society. That's the way a lot of our societies are thinking. It's not just you're wrong because you disagree. They believe you disagree, therefore you're evil and you need to be silenced. That's why Charlie was shot and I was out there doing it.
Speaker 1:I still have friends out there doing it, and so I just want to say we need to tone down things to where we can have discussions, like Charlie Kirk was doing, without fear of bloodshed. So that's the first thing and, steve, I have more. I don't know if you have any other comments on that, but that was my first fear. It was a very acute fear of my own life because I was out there doing it and the lives of my friends, and I really don't want to see anybody killed simply for going out there speaking about the gospel of Jesus Christ with people that would disagree and think that we need to be silenced.
Speaker 2:Right, whenever you say that we need to tone it down, you're talking about both sides. You're talking about the rhetoric, and what we mean by that is that we need to be rational and if we're talking with somebody, even on our own particular views, if they start to get really animated about it and irritated about the topic, step up and say calm down. We don't need to really get all excited about this and calm it down and bring it back to dialogue and discussion. And in our particular country, we vote every four years for a national president. Every two years we have congressional candidates and senators are mixed in there. Go to the ballot box, like we have always thought, and turn your vote in there.
Speaker 2:Go out and campaign for other people to vote for your candidate, and the worst thing that's going to happen on a presidential basis is you'll get somebody that doesn't agree with your views for a maximum of eight years, but, as you've seen in our society here in the United States, that can go for as short as four years. So that's what we're talking about. As far as toning down the rhetoric, it starts with us and rather than us standing by and letting people get whipped up, we need to stand in and calm them down, or, rather than us just walking away from it, step up to the plate. If you're a Christian on either side, just calm down the rhetoric and start a dialogue on both sides whatever side you're on and with somebody else and let's just listen to each other, and you talked about the rhetoric.
Speaker 1:I think that's part of the contributing problem. I think it's a major contributing problem. I think it's a major contributing problem. But what has happened in recent years, at least in our part of the world, is that all of the major political parties have increasingly ramped up their rhetoric to where, when there's major elections, they describe their opponents as what I call maximal rhetoric. The opponents it's no longer my political opponent is just wrong and he's going to take the country in a bad direction. That's not what they're saying.
Speaker 1:The rhetoric is that the nation's in danger. Society as we know it is in danger of completely disintegrating. They describe their opponent as Hitler, a threat to democracy. Society as we know it is going to fall apart. And if we believe those things and somebody out there listening to you will believe that you're speaking literally and if you say it long enough our existence is in danger. If we think back to World War II, there were people that tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and today we look at them and hold them up as heroes, because Adolf Hitler was an epitome of evil. And so if you call your opponent Hitler, call him a threat to democracy, an existential threat. That's another firmly used existential threat. If you believe those things, then you're morally obligated to go destroy their life and I think the maximal rhetoric is contributing to the problem. Maximal rhetoric is contributing to the problem and the reason why I'm so concerned is none of the political parties have an incentive to back down the rhetoric. None of the political parties have an incentive to back down the rhetoric simply because they want to win and they believe that's the only way they can win. And the amount of death that most of our countries have now really is a significant issue nowadays. So we have around all these elections this maximal rhetoric going on demonizing the opponents, and the population is sitting there listening to that, thinking whoever this candidate is is worse than the devil and worse than Hitler and somebody needs to take him out. And we've seen that around Charlie. We've seen it around political candidates that people were saying this person is so evil that somebody needed to take their life. And even after Charlie Kirk was dead, my goodness, there's these horrible videos of people singing and dancing and laughing. Charlie Kirk's been dead. They make this little rhyme and it's just. The degree of depravity in society is just way, way, way, way bad. So that's my concern is that the United States and Western world is in a very dark place right now, in the sense that I really don't see a way out apart from the Lord.
Speaker 1:You know I'm a student of church history. I've read the last chapter of the book and I know we win as Christians and I always have hope in Christ. And if you look through church history, there's been times like John Wesley that saved England from disintegration and civil war. There's been revivals under men like George Whitefield that these men went out and the Lord raised them up and they caused great revivals. And that can happen and I pray that it does. We should have faith in evangelism and the Lord's work.
Speaker 1:But at the same time as we're recording this, we've just been recently going through the book of Ezekiel and in these Old Testament prophets, especially in this last study of Ezekiel that I've done, it really drove home to me. You know, in these Old Testament prophets God raises up countries and he takes them down again. He is in control of raising up and tearing down nations and, yes, god will win in the end. But he doesn't have to do it with the United States and he doesn't have to do it with my country or your country and he can raise up our countries or take them down again. He doesn't have to do it with the values that have come out of Western Christianity for many, many centuries. He can win without us.
Speaker 1:And you look at the reasons why in Ezekiel and Isaiah and different places, why God gives for taking down and pouring out his wrath on nations. He gives two or three key reasons that keep getting mentioned over and over. One of them is bloodshed and another one is sexual immorality, and we add idol worship in there too. But a lot of times the idol worship were centered around the first two. They had sex cults that were having sexual prostitutes around idols and they had child sacrifice around idols. But bloodshed was one of the reasons why God tore down nations. He said you've had bloodshed, you've been violent for too long.
Speaker 1:Well, what do we have in the Western world? Well, what do we have in the Western world? Violence. What do we have around the death of Charlie Kirk? We have a Christian that goes out there and respectfully listens and dialogues with other people and no more nor less than his beliefs. He's killed for it and we have no indication that the rhetoric's going to back down.
Speaker 1:So I really feel that, if you look at the direction that our countries are going, my goodness, in England today, they arrest people for criticizing Islam. For no more, no less than going to an online social media post that criticizes Islam, they break into your house in the middle of the night and haul you off to prison. Now, that is a very difficult environment to share the gospel in if you can't criticize places and different ideas. So I guess, in summary for what I talked about so far, we have an increase in violence, not a decrease. The violence is helped along by the rhetoric that's involved in all the political parties, and we have society getting further away from a moral compass. Because they've abandoned God, they're believing the political rhetoric to the point. Now they're assassinating people for doing no more nor less than going out on university campuses. And there's large segments of the population that believe that if you disagree with me, then you're evil and need to be taken out.
Speaker 1:And I'll add one last one to this. And I'll add one last one to this, just from a practical human standpoint, just from practical wisdom the only way a country can stay together is when most of the people in the country have a common value or a common belief or some kind of common experience, to where they feel like we need to keep this country together. Think of a sports team. The only way a sports team's going to win in the game or the match is when they all believe and they're working together and they have a goal in mind. Well, if everybody in this team believed something different, then the team's going to just disintegrate. Same thing in a country. The only way a country can stay together is if most of the people either have a common history or some kind of common value system or common things, a common language, common something or other, the common experience that's holding them together.
Speaker 1:And what's happening in really around the world, and especially in the Western countries, is I can't point to anything any idea that 90 to 95% of the people in our country agree on. And so why would our country, why would God keep our country in place when most of the people don't agree on anything? There's no one thing I guess is the way to phrase it that most of the people agree on. We have a huge degree of violence and a huge degree of sexual immorality, the exact same things that God tore down nations for in the Old Testament. And now we have people shooting people, people that were doing the same kind of ministry I was doing, for no more and no less than going out there talking about biblical morality in the public marketplace, and it just has me just very worried.
Speaker 2:You mentioned on the UK that the person being arrested for criticizing Islam the complaint was that it was offended somebody else that was the complaint that generally comes in this person's post has offended me, which then signals for the police to go out and arrest the person. So it's not just Islam, you know one, it could be anything that some people find offensive, even to the point that you're praying for somebody silently across the street from a abortion clinic and the police come up and say what are you doing? And if you say I'm praying, if you're within so much of a feat, they will arrest you. And I've seen the videos where that happens. They even have a statute that's either in place or being thought about in place in Scotland, my understanding that if you live within that framework of a certain circle of a abortion clinic, that you can't even pray in your own house, so because somebody else finds it offensive. So that's the thing.
Speaker 2:When we get into these kind of obscure areas of well, how do you define what's offensive? And that's the type of thing? But the other areas that you mentioned bloodshed, sexual immorality and idol worship Well, one of the areas of bloodshed across, not just our nation here, but across the world is abortion. I know people don't want to talk about that, so when we talk about rhetoric and we talk about agreeing on things, we need to at least come to an agreement that abortion is bloodshed. Now the exceptions to it, that is a separate discussion, but in order to start the conversation, we at least have to agree that it's bloodshed and it's something that shouldn't be done. It's taking the life, and until we come to that point, if we can't even agree that it's taking a life, then we get to this point where people get really ramped up on it for whatever reason that they might have, and as Christians we need to discuss it. We need to talk about it, not so much for our past of maybe the decisions that we had made in our past and what happened, but for the future generations, to let them know this is something that's not supposed to happen, one of the things that the idol worship that were done with the people that worship the God of Molech. They would heat up this iron god that they had made with outstretched arms. They would heat it up and then they would place the babies alive on the arms outstretched arms of the idol. That was a horrific child sacrifice and whenever we're talking about abortion. It's a horrific thing and it's something that people don't want to look at and deal with, but we need to deal with it and we need to tell the other people about it.
Speaker 2:We need to, at least from a Christian standpoint, talk about bloodshed. As Glenn mentioned before, that was one of the items that God judged nations on. It's the same as in the past. It's the same as it is today and it'll be the same in the future. In the past is the same as it is today and it'll be the same in the future.
Speaker 2:So those are areas, as Christians, that we need to speak up on as to our society, to get them back to an area where they at least know from a moral standpoint not a political standpoint, but from a moral standpoint that something like that is immoral and it needs to not happen again. So that's just one of the areas and this is the impact of this assassination of Charlie Kirk has made where they are in their life, whether or not they have mentioned things to other people in the past, or whether they've just sat by and let our society progress to the point where it is today. And because Christians have sat back and let society progress without their influence on society. This is where we've gotten to, and it's gotten so bad that we have to have graphic things like graphic pictures in order to get people back to reality, and we most certainly need to have dialogue with other people to let them know this is not the right thing to do.
Speaker 1:You talked about there at the end, steve, about Christians sitting back and allowing things to happen. I was short story about me. I was saved for 40 something years ago and the church I was in when I first got saved was very socially active. They had a social issues committee that would bring in people from the congregation and talk about things that were going on in society and the town we lived in and how we could help and turn it in a biblical way. They would educate the congregation about social issues. They had one of the elders of the church that was responsible for that committee. That church also had a letter writing committee that would get together once a month or so and write letters to our elected officials and let them know biblical positions on things that might be coming up in the government. And that was the first church I'd ever seen.
Speaker 1:I thought all churches do those kinds of things and it wasn't until years later I figured out that was the exception, that really most of Western Christianity as far as influencing the culture is asleep, and we've been asleep for a very long time and the enemy has been at work, and so now we are at a point where we really don't know how much longer we'll be able to talk about Jesus Christ in the public square. And this is really kind of the motivation for why I wanted to do this in the first place, really kind of the motivation for why I wanted to do this in the first place. We could, in the years that I've been active, we could talk about Jesus Christ in the public square. We could talk about the biblical morality in the public square and people would disagree. And people would disagree, sometimes vehemently and passionately. I've been called names and screamed at and things like that. But I mean it kind of comes with the territory. It doesn't really bother you that people, that non-believers, don't believe right, that's just kind of you know you expect that it doesn't surprise you when you have very non-Christian people giving very non-Christian responses. They do the same things that happened in the New Testament.
Speaker 1:What's bothering me now is I think we've taken a step further. It's not just that people are disagreeing with us, it's they think we are now evil and need to be silenced. We are now evil and need to be silenced. And to me, in my mind anyway, charlie Kirk's assassination was the first symbol of that, simply because I did that university ministry for so long. The message is pretty clear from our enemies Shut up or we'll kill you. That's the message, because they killed Charlie because of his ideas. And if the pattern of societal, societal degeneration continues, then they're going to be more and more Christians that are just not going to be allowed to go out into the public square and talk about Christ. If you're either going to make a law against it, like has happened in many countries, or they're going to be very violent against it, like has happened in many countries, or they're going to be very violent.
Speaker 1:And I'm not a prophet. I've been accused of being negative before. But again, as a Bible student, I know there are some times when there's been revivals and there's been changes, and I pray that would happen. I pray that God would lift up a George Whitefield or a John Wesley and there would be revival. That could have been Charlie Also. I'm a Bible teacher and I know we're going to win.
Speaker 1:I read the last chapter. But God judges nations for violence and sexual immorality and idol worship, and our societies are rampant with all of those. So I guess if I were to leave you with an idea, the believers in the crowd, the idea that I would leave you with is we don't know how much longer we have Could be a long time, I could be wrong and society could turn around after this assassination and it all get better and people come back to church and there's a big revival and our society turns around. It also could be that God's going to take our lamp off of the shelf and our countries will be judged in God's wrath and we will degenerate into violence and bloodshed and I pray that doesn't happen, but I have no confidence that it won't.
Speaker 2:So I just have a couple of last parting things to say. Is that one a argument with people? They say don't legislate your morality on me or don't push your morality on me. Murder and manslaughter are not political things, those are moral things, and we have laws against murder and manslaughter. So we have many other laws that have to deal with morality that don't have anything to do with politics. So just keep that in mind. A second area that people will say is that I don't want to push my religion off on my children and so therefore I'm going to let them make up their own mind. Therefore, I'm going to let them make up their own mind We've mentioned this in many of our sessions as we go through the scripture is that, as Christians, we have the duty to pass down our Christianity to our children, to tell them why it's true, why we are Christians, why we are believers in Jesus Christ, and to go through the scriptures with them and pass that down to our next generation, because you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as they leave your house and they go to a school of higher education or go out in the world itself, there are going to be other people who are not Christians, that are very most certainly going to be pushing their ideology off on them.
Speaker 2:And if we haven't done anything in our homes to prepare our children to go out into the world and to go out of those schools of higher education to let them know why they're a Christian, if they are, if they become a believer, and to be able to strengthen their faith so that when they encounter these different ideas, they know how to think about them and know how to counter them, then we're not doing service to our children. So keep that in mind. And then the last thing that I want to mention is that we mentioned here go watch the debates and the talks and the speeches that Charlie Kirk had. You can go to his social sites, charlie Kirk. You can go to the TPUSA sites. Watch them all within their context. Some of them are two hours long or so.
Speaker 2:Be aware that when somebody passes you a three-minute or less clip from a two-hour debate, this goes for anybody or any situation, not just Charlie Kirk, and it goes for both sides.
Speaker 2:They are framing an idea that they want to get across to you and it's incumbent upon you to go check out that clip to see if it's in the right context and if it's the true and accurate as to what the person sending it out or forwarding it is trying to convey. And that's for both sides. Critical thinking isn't being taught in our schools today. Teach it to your kids, get them to know how they can take these three minute and less videos that are being set out and think about them critically and go find the truth and go find the context again from both sides. So it's not just opening the debate, it's not just opening both sides to dialogue, but it's also teaching both sides to go to the full context, just like what we do with the Word of God by by going verse by verse through Scripture and we take the whole context of Scripture itself as we go through and we teach it.
Speaker 1:So what I think we'll leave you with is a charge, and the charge is this If you're not a Christian, then you really don't have any hope and you need to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ, and you can hear more about him on our program or pick up a Bible and read it. If you are a Christian and you haven't been to church lately, then go to church, because that's the place where you're going to get some comfort and the ability to do something about it. If you're a Christian, you're plugged into a good church and you really haven't been as active. You're really the ones that we're speaking to today.
Speaker 1:We don't know how much longer we will have. Could be a long time, could be a very short time, we don't know. We need to work while it is day. The Bible says so. If you're not active, doing kingdom work of some sort, there's a place for everybody doing work to help the local church and to further the cause of Jesus Christ. Go to your pastor and tell them hey, I need some place to plug in. I'm feeling a pull to be more active in the church. I need a ministry. I guarantee you your pastor will have some place for you to plug in, and there's other ministries as well. But get into the Word of God and get active, because we don't know how much time we have left.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to us and, as always, when we sign off, may the Lord bless you.
