WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO RANDOLPH SCOTT?

 Confession: I borrowed the title of this blog from a song but that's beside the point. The point is all about heroes. A nation needs its heroes, those who model courage, patriotism, virtue, and sacrife for the generations to come. 

High school Latin students used to cut their liquistic teeth on the works of Livy, an acient author who wanted to instill in the Romans what was courageous, patriotic, and sacrifical that made Rome what it was. A case in point is his story about Cincinnatus who was a farmer who became a dictator over Rome, but then gave up his absolute power to go back to farming his small plot of land. This is why George Washington is called "the American Cincinnatus." 

Livy also included the story of the brave Horatius who, all by himself, defended a bridge against the invading Etruscans and thereby gave Rome time to get prepared for the enemy. That sounds like  Travis, Crockett, and Bowie at the Alamo. 

England had Henry V who needed to make a rousing speech to his men. (It's from Shakepear's play that includes the speech from which we get the phrase, "band of brothers.") The English army is significantly outnumbered by the enemy forces. The real, historical Battle of Agincourt bears this out:  Henry’s army numbered around 5,000 men, while the French army numbered at least around 30,000, although some estimates are as high as 100,000 men. Henry’s speech captures the sense of comradeship and patriotism which binds the men together on the field of battle.

Not to be outdone, there was the man voted to be the greatest Englishman of  all time, Winston Churchill and his immortal speech which included these words during WW II,

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

The hairs stand at attention on the back of the necks of those who heard or read those words.

Then we turn to Hebrews 11 which contains a register of the faith of men and women in the history of Israel whom God used in great ways. Paul uses Abraham's faith, his trust in God, to "go to a land that [God] would show him." James cites Abraham's trust in God in the sacrifice of Isaac. Israel had its models of faith for as the Scripture commands us, "whose faith follow." 

We have Paul who tells the reader "follow me as I follow Christ." The chuch is not left without its models of what God does through the faithful. But each of those models had their flaws--Abraham, instead of being truthful about his wife, lies and puts her in danger. David's breaking of many of the The Commandments is repeated in Sunday school lesson after Sunday school lesson. And Samson? Thereby hangs a tale. And what about Solomon at the end of his life? And Noah? We could go on and on. But suffice it to say, if you're searching for a perfect person as a model other than Christ, you're on a fool's errand. 

We're living in a day of the destruction of our models. They've removed many of Jefferson's statues. They've renamed schools and streets, deleting the name of George Washington from our national landscape, but mentioning that "he owned slaves." As of July 17, 113 statues had been defaced or torn down. A mob in Minneapolis cheered as it pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus. 

Who do these people think they are? They aren't morally or intellectually fit to lace the shoes of such great men of our past. And make no mistake, they will not stop until there is nothing left. Nothing. No history. No past from which to learn. Only an ongoing present.

This brings us to that question, "Whatever happened to Randoph Scott whom the songwriter used as a model for whatever happened to our American heroes?

 

TWO WORDS PRESIDENT BIDEN NEVER SAID

"“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed…History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

~ George Orwell, 1984

"It is astonishing that those in the West are living through the near extinction of their civilization. For students in the academy today, the Western civilization history course, virtually a standard curriculum offering 30 years ago, has disappeared. . . 

"Only 2 percent of colleges offer western civilization as a course requirement. Remarkably, western civilization is rarely even required for history majors. . . 

"In 1987, Jesse Jackson led Stanford protestors in a chant of 'hey-hey, ho-ho, Western civ has  got to go.' The purpose of this demonstration was to eliminate a course on Western Civilization, and,  Jackson and his ilk were successful. . . 

"The course that stood as the foundation stone in the curriculum was shattered like pie crust by an ideological bandwagon." (Herbert  L. London, Dec. 13, 2011)

What had to go? What had to go were the knowlege of the achievements both in deed, in thought,  the literature, and of course, the bedrock of western civilization, Christianity. The question is, "Why?" Why the attack on and the desctruction of the study of the history of western civilization which would include the study of  American history? 

We are tasting the sour fruit of history's demise. For at least two generations our eduational system has produced loonatics devoid of the facts and principles of the past. Instead of learning from the past, their educators have indoctrinated them to judge of the past. This is so vital that we must ask for the "why." Why destroy the history of a nation? 

George Orwell in his classic, "1984,"a book that ought to be required reading by students in every school everywhere and by adults yearly, answered that question.

He wrote that if a tyranny is to exist and sustain itself, the history of a country must be erased, even streets must be renamed, and fear and confusion must abound. The destruction of history didn't just happen, it came about by deliberate design in order to pave the way to tyranny. 

Once they erase the history of a nation, the dominoes begin to fall. Once their hisotry is gone, the people have no past reference points. In Israel God ordained that Israel retain its memory of its history. The classic example of such retention is the Passover which was to be observed and explained once a year, every year, to their children by means of a special meal. The Passover was their reference point just as the Declation of Independence is America's reference point because it is America's birth certificate. The Lord's Supper functions for the same purpose in the church, it is a reference point that explains the death of the Savior. 

Every tyrannt knows that when his regime erases the history of a nation, the people have no way to answer the question, "Was life better in the past before the revolution came?" Those born in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 didn't know of any other way of life other than that undert he hobnailed boots of Lenin and Stalin. All those living in America today don't know of a time when there was no graduated income tax in AmericaKarl Marx made a graduatted income tax an emphasixed feature of "The Communist Manifesto" of 1848. When the people think that the graduated income tax always existed, they have no way to ask, "Was life better when there was no income tax? The tyrannt wins.

When history goes, an anchor goes, an anchor by which a person can find stability, somethhing to hold on to. These anchors function as historical information by which the individual can question the ideology of the reigning tyrannical ideology. Without a knowlege of history he can't battle against the powers that be because he has no weapons with which to do so. History is that weapon. To go further, he has no ability to even question the elite because he has no knowledge of history. To erase the  historical memory of the how and the way of the Declation of Independence and the Constituition, the two basic ways to say that an action of the government is wrong disappears. The anchor is now in the boat and is no longer the stability of the  vessel. 

When a people's history is destroyed, the people become putty in the hands of the rulers, able to be molded into whatever the prevailing ideology is, because without a knowlege of their nation's history, they lose their national identity. Hence, the people have no way to know they're being molded, i. e. indoctrinated. Israel had a national identity going back to 2000 BC with the call of Abraham, an identity forged in the fires of slavery and deliverance therefrom at the Red Sea, and a national identity sent down from Mt. Sinai. 

This brings us to the two words President Biden never said and why those two unsaid words are important. It goes back to an event in which the President was speaking by reading from a teleprompter. It was then that what was a joke in a movie happened; he read something he wasn't supposed to read, but was on the prompter as an instruction to him alone, "Repeat the line," meaning, "You say again what you just said." But he read it as part of the speech. He read the line then kept reading, saying the instruction on the telepromter that wss only for him, "Repeat the line" and he dutifully repeated it. 

People have gotten a laugh at such a mind-numbing thing to do. But beneath the surface, it is not funny. This is where the scary part enters--something right out of "1984." The powers that be changed the official transcript of the speech for the "historical" record to say that he uttered two words before that, the words, "Let me" and that changes everything to sound logical as in, "Let me repeat the line." But, as clear as noontime sunshine, he didn't say, "Let me." The offical, government ordained transcript says that he did.

Our government rewrote history to the point that we're to believe that what we heard, we didn't hear. Orwell would say, "That's a protent of things to come. It's not funny."

It's not only statements that must be rewritten, the history of a the nation has to be changed and, lo and behold, the nation loses its national identity. If America's national identity is, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America," history must be changed as it is in the 1619 Project. 

That project is a massive upheaval of American history that abolishes July 4, 1776, as America's birth and replaces it with August 20, 1619, thus changing an anchor and a reference point as well as our national identity, all in one fell swoop. One author has said that the 1619 Project is an upheaval of history, "Do not let your children read it."

And that's where you and I enter the picture. We provide history for our children and their children. We read and provide them with the books of historians such as Carl J. Richard (on ancient Greece on Rome and the birth of  America), Walter Lord, and the late David McCollough ("John Adams"). We ask them what they're studying in their history classes (if there are any). We relate the stories of history directly, telling them of Bunker Hill, the Alamo, the manly  courage on the Titanic of "women and children first," and the sacrifices at Valley Forge, events that have forged the soul of our country.

DOES THIS PASTOR GRIEVE YOU?

 It's grieved me ever since I read what he said. Who's he? Well, he's a popular and highly influential pastor in the U. S. of A. Multitudes pack the pews to hear him. After all, he is an excellent speaker.

 Droves of pastors hang on to his every word and salivate after his success. He's not shy when it comes to telling his ministerial audience how to pack bodies into the pews, lots and lots of bodies, multiplied thousands of bodies, as he does. 

Our focus will be on his telling the ecclesiastics how the pews will not be packed, and this is grievous. He says, and very dogmatically so, that church pews will never be filled if the pastor teaches the Bible verse-by-verse. He doesn't stop there, he goes on to say that anyone reading the Bible can't find a single instance of verse-by-verse preaching in the Bible. 

But, he doesn't stop there--he says verse-by-verse preaching is "cheating" and "easy."

Let him speak for himself: "[P]reaching verse-by-verse through books of the Bible-- that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There's not one example of that." 

Is it true that no one modeled that? If you turn to the book of Acts, yes, it is true that neither Paul nor Peter preached verse-by-verse, but that's in Acts which contains the historical record of summaries of the evangelistic sermons of Paul and Peter, some directed to Gentiles and some to Jews. 

That doesn't count as a point against verse-by-verse teaching to believers meeting in their churches. Paul couldn't tell the pagan elites assembled on Mars Hill to take out their Bibles and turn to Psalm 22 while he instructed them verse-by-verse on the prediction of the death of the Savior. 

When we turn to the epistles which are addressed to the churches, what do we find? Listen to what Paul wrote as he closed out I Thessalonians: "I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter [I Thessalonians] read to all the brethren." 

When the reader read what we call I Thessalonians to the believers in their house churches, he would have read it verse-by-verse and they would have been instructed that way as it was read. Would we think that the reader just read I Thessalonians in 15 minutes and said, "Well, it was good to hear from brother Paul. Brother Publius, lead us in prayer after which we're dismissed"? No, they would pay close attention to each sentence, word by word, sentence by sentence.

When Paul concludes Colossians, he writes, "When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea." The reader in those two churches read it aloud from start to finish, verse by verse to the assembled.

There's a misconstrued verse in the book of Revelation 1:3. The misconstruing of the text is based on our egocentric tendency. The verse says, "Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near." This sentence is addressed to each of the seven churches that will receive the book. 

The verse is, first and foremost, a statement of blessing to the one who reads the book to the church ("those who hear"). The reader read it sentence by sentence one right after the other. (Don't worry, however, the promise stands today, there is a special blessing for reading the last book in the Bible.) And the church was instructed thereby.

Now let's look at the pastor's statement, "That's not how you grow Christians." I was in a church for 22 years in which the pastor never ever, not one time, taught a book in the Bible to us, going verse by verse. What were the results of that? Not good.

One of the terrible things about topical preaching, that is preaching on this text in this book and next Sunday  text in another book and another text in some book in the Old Testament and still another text in another place, and all you get are just texts that are floating around
in the breeze, a  few from Mark, a bit from Deuteronomy the next Sunday, and we were in Matthew at the next gathering. 

The audience that listens to that kind of preaching never really has anything solid and substantial. I never got anything definite. Nothing was nailed down; nothing fit with anything else. 

Was what my pastor was saying true to the context? I had no idea because I was never told what the context was. But when I was taught the Bible books verse-by-verse, the Bible began to make sense. Things fit together into a cohesive whole. I saw that the Bible was God's complete and connected thought toward man. 

And what about the popular pastor's saying that verse-by-verse teaching is "easy." Really? Those who teach verse-by-verse study and learn how each word, sentence, and paragraph of the book fit into the context or "argument" and flow of the book. Without such teaching, what the people say and what they do in the Bible appears  disjointed and out of left field. 

My pastor and my Sunday school teachers never answered the question of, "What is the purpose of this book in Bible?" They never showed me how this paragraph jives with the Holy Spirit's purpose of the book, so that each verse makes sense.

The "verse-by-verser" must teach the book so as to demonstrate the authorial intent for the book and how each verse verse fits into his purpose. 

Then there's the necessity of the study of the culture of the 1st century and how the first readers/hearers of the book would have understood what Paul, Luke, Peter, et al. wrote. For example, what was slavery like during the Roman Empire. If the teacher doesn't know what the master/slave relationship was like, he will import the slavery of the Confederacy back into the New Testament and present a very distorted and false picture. 

Another example would be that of a first century wife who has become a Christian and her husband remains a pagan. What would her life be like? What would dinner in her home be like? From a study of the culture, we know that every dinner would be a battleground between light and darkness. 

It would be important to study what the prison conditions were back then and that those conditions would cause us to understand why Paul would lavish compliments on Onesimus and his family for what looks like a simple visit to an inmate, but it was far from that.

As a scholar of church history wrote, "One of the saddest things in the history of the church of Jesus Christ has been the fact that so many churches have gone down the drain having been the recipient of the preaching of outstanding preachers. 

"For example, Joseph Parker was one of the great English preachers. He was the pastor of the great City Temple. But unfortunately, Joseph Parker was a textual and topical preacher. He was known all over the country as a great preacher. He has written some interesting books, but when he left because the people were not grounded in the truths of Holy Scripture, systematically that congregation fell prey to a man who was the leader in what was called New Theology in his day, R. J. Campbell. 

[Campbell introduced Biblical criticism into his preaching, questioning the traditional authorship of books, and the origins of the text. The theology held by Campbell and a number of his friends came to be known as 'The New Theology.]

"DeWitt Talmadge had a tremendous ministry in Brooklyn, but his ministry was not expository. As a result when he left, his church fell into the hands of the Russellites. Imagine that -- a man who was an outstanding evangelist but he preached topical sermons. He did not instruct the congregation in the truths of theology, the truths of Bible doctrine. So when he left, the Jehovah's Witnesses moved in and took over."

Verse-by-verse teaching is easy? Verse-by-verse teaching is cheating? Verse by verse teaching doesn't grow Christians? It hurts down deep to hear a pastor say that. 

It is a grief indeed.