Chag sameach Rosh Chodesh kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah and welcome to the third and last of this series of Shavu'ot talks. Our task this afternoon is to bring together all we've been talking about these last two days and set it in the context of these tumultous days.

So let's 'get down to brass tacks', as we say in English, the nitty-gritty of today's message. I want to begin by addressing the way our perceptions of reality and truth can get distorted by our failure to distinguish between modern culture and the culture of the ancients on whose record we rely so heavily for our spiritual information. As should be obvious as we look around at the 35,000-plus denominations in Christendom that we talked a bit about yesterday, something isn't right. This isn't the road Yah'shua (Jesus) intended His people to go down and is one of the many blemishes on His Bride He wants sorting out, because He isn't just going to ignore it or wink at willful ignorance indefinitely. From the beginning we were supposed to be united in all things, and especially in emet (truth) and ahavah (love) (Jn.17:21). And toward the end of yesterday's assembly I shared with you the very basics that constitute true emunah (faith): belief on the physical resurrection of Messiah, belief in His atonement for sin, a gentle disposition, firmness in truth, a determination to obey the mitzvot (commandments), and a resolution to cling onto Him no matter what to the very end.

Let me begin today by shaking up the Messianics just a little bit. So hear this: We none of us can assume that by saying the word 'Jesus', Yah'shua, Yeshua, Yehoshua, or whatever you believe the correct pronunciation to be (and still less the word 'Christ', 'Messiah' or 'Mashiach') that we are automatically in touch with the real Son of Elohim (God), the real Saviour of the World who walked and talked in first century Roman Palestine - in Judæa, Samaria, Galillee or the other historical provinces of Israel. Neither the warble of our larynx nor the shape of our lips and tongue ensure that we are in right relationship with Him, any more than a legalist assuming he's in a state of grace simply because he's joined the one-and-only true church. There are many Messianics who are very proud and cocky because they believe they have the correct pronunciation of the Son (or even the Father, for that matter), who then arrogantly condemn those who do not have the correct articulaion or intonation, as they suppose.

I am, as I always do, going to call the Saviour 'Yah'shua' or 'Jesus' and if you're a Messianic and don't think either of those is correct or good enough, you are just going to have to mentally substitute in your own pronunciation if you're unhappy my form. The Yah'shua (Jesus) of whom I speak, so that we are in no doubt who the Referant is, is the One who is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb.13:8), the Person described in the Apostles' Creed. Messianics in particular make a big ado about correct pronunciation, as if what really matters is boiling spirituality down to laryngeal vibration, tongue-curling and mouth-contorting to have the 'right religion'. This is very little different from the attitudes of the Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Calvinists and others whom we talked about last time.

What really matters is not the exact pronunciation but this: we are not at liberty to manufacture a different Yah'shua (Jesus) to the one detailed in the Scriptures. But neither is it enough to suggest that just because we have the four Gospels in our English New Testaments of whatever translation we happen to prefer, that we know all we need to know about this Man, because, as Alister McGrath has pointed out, "every reading of the Bible is embedded in a cultural context". You have to understand the cultural matrix of the Gospels or the New Testament book writers in general in order to accurately understand the message.

When I was evangelising in Bulgaria years ago I misunderstood the culture and nodded when I meant 'yes' and shook my head when I meant 'no', just like we do everywhere, or so I thought. But in Bulgaria, as in Greece (and nowhere else as far as I know), it's the other way round: nodding means 'no', and shaking your head means 'yes'. So misunderstandings and confusion sometimes resulted. Maybe this is a relic of Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire which was eventually defeated and crushed by the Ottomans, I don't know. Someone might like to research that and tell me. I'm sure, if you've travelled extensively, you'd be able to tell me stories of cultural differences that have led to misunderstandings, like Tibetans and Maoris sticking out their tongues in greeting or as a threat, respectively.

The first independent Israelites under Moses made the mistake of thinking that culture didn't matter when they rationalised that it was perfectly fine to build a golden calf. After all, they claimed, it was just a representation of the true Elohim (God), Yahweh, and they were doing it to His glory, not to any Egyptian deity. And we all know how that went. Firstly, the building of that idol did not glorify Yahweh because the Creator of the Cosmos cannot be reduced to the mere likeness of a creature or physical object, be it animal, human or some heavenly body. We are not to 'represent' Elohim (God) and then worship it at all, and that includes Catholic statues and Orthodox icons, because Yahweh simply is what He is, beyond space and time. Besides, it wasn't so 'innocent' as they tried to make out.

The golden calf was an already extant pagan god from Egypt called Apis that had a disk between its horns representing the sun-god whose day in the week in the Roman system is still called 'Sunday'. That pagan idol is still being worshipped today by Christians who worship on the day of the sun-god, 'Sunday', and by Jews, Messianics and so-called 'sabbatarians' like the Seventh-Day Adventists who worship on the day of the heathen god Saturn, on Saturday, Saturn-day or Satyr-day, and then blasphemously call it the 'Sabbath'. That is just one of hundreds of pagan elements in Christendom and the Messianic realm that dishonour Elohim. There are many, many other controversies, arguably equally, if not more, serious in nature though of a broader nature.

All that we do as believers must be rooted in Yah'shua (Jesus) Himself if we are not to become idolatrous and self-serving, and end up reinventing the Saviour in our own image, to then wonder why our personal spirituality has become less than exciting and life-changing. As N.T.Wright says, "it is not enough to say one's prayers in private, maintain high personal morality and then go to work to rebuild the tower of Babel" [1].

Moreover, it isn't enough to be so committed to Scripture that we come to say that nothing outside of its pages matters. Rather, we need to be so committed to what the Bible says that we become determined to discover both everything inside it, and everything about it from historical and linguistic sources, even if what we learn means upsetting our cherished Christian or Messianic traditions which have supposed were biblical but turn out demonstrably not to be. If we don't, we will learn not only how to become blind but in time become so accustomed to blindness to the point of no longer being able to admit we were ever blinded, even after a brilliant light has been shone on it showing that we were.

We have to be prepared to ask ourselves threatening questions like, for example, whether some of the things we have believed as literal, are in fact, metaphorical, or even the reverse. This is something that keeps flat-earthers in bondage to illusion and groups like the Eastern Orthodox false believing that the physical waters of baptism literally wash sins away by means of some sort of mystical infusion into the material. The Bible is jam-packed with symbols which can deceive the literally-minded into making many false assumptions. At the other extreem, we must not deceived by liberals who, because they don't believe in miracles, insist that very physical things like the resurrection actually happened and are not mere symbols of inner realities. We must not be afraid of the truth but rather embrace it, even if it hurts. And that often means asking difficult questions.

One of the positive things about the Enlightenment was that it insisted on asking historical questions about the Bible. The Reformers rightly insisted that we had to get to the literal historical meaning of the texts by asking such questions as: what did Yah'shua (Jesus) or Paul mean when they said so-and-so as opposed to what the church, centuries later, said they meant. Yesterday I was listening to Orthdox Minister Josiah Trenham again (whose brilliance I praised yesterday morning) attempt to explain away what the plain biblical teaching about the New Birth was. He tried to explain it in terms of baptism, claiming that it was sanctified water-immersion that was actually responsible for an Eastern Orthodox convert being born-again. In other words, for them, physical baptism equals new birth. It is simply assumed that some sort of transformation takes place inside. He was at least honest enough to admit that so many Orthodox believers continue to look like the same unregenerated souls they were before baptism, and then went on to try and explain that way, reminding me of what Mormon apostle Heber C. Kimball once said, commenting that many of the people he baptised were the same devils as they were before baptism (Mormons view baptism as a literal washing too). Trenham was not doing proper history. That's trying to make Scripture fit in with what some third or fourth century Council said. And that's not honest. I don't buy it for those reasons.

The timeless truths recorded in the Gospels, for example, are inescapably grounded in the space and time of first century Palestine and nowhere else. Yes, the atonement was, and is, timeless but it was reported in terms familiar to a time and place far removed from our own. Unfortunately - and let's take the Reformers as examples because most of us are ex-Protestants - "post-Reformation theology grasped the insights of the reformers as a new set of timeless truths and used them to set up new systems of dogma, ethics and church order in which, once again, vested interests were served and fresh thought waas stifled" [2]. They ended up doping precisely what the Catholics and Orthodox did.

Protestantism was a protest against Catholic abuses such as the very things Protestants themselves later became guilty of. Now the Enlightenment was itself a protest against a system that, since it was itself based on a protest, could no longer see that it was itself in need of further reform. That was a noble thing. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment was itself a secularied version of the Protestant Reformation since elements of it wanted to challenge non-negociable things like the validity of prophecy, miracles, and so on. In other words, it included within its ranks agnostics and atheists. And so, in the same way Protestants protested against Catholic dogma, the secular wing of the Enlightenment wished to challenge the notion that Christ was divine and to accuse Christianity as a whole of being oppression. These secular movers of the Enlightenment were simply the first wave of what would become Modernism and now Postmodernism. They wished to prove using reason that Christianity, as the Bible knows it, was an invention of the first talmidim (disciples).

Now we may not like that very much but what have we got to be afraid of? Scripture nowhere tells us to be afraid of reason. Indeed, it says:

"'Come now, let us reason together,' says Yahweh" (Isa.1:18, NIV).

To be fair, atheists and sceptics, whilst often giving unreasonable answers to difficult questions, do often ask the right questions - they're better at spotting rotten eggs than laying new ones. And when Christians/Messianics refuse to engage with such people, idolatry is typically lurking in the shadows. It doesn't mean we always have the answers, because we don't, but we can continue searching for them.

One of the great weaknesses of the Enlightenment was its reductionist approach to everything, splitting apart history and faith, facts and values, religion and politics, nature and supernature. You can't do that because they are connected. Secular scientists, though they will rarely admit it, exercise faith just like their Christian neighbours. His faith is in an exclusively material origin of the universe and he can get very passionate and emotional about it even though science is supposed to be a dispassionate discipline. The truth is, scientists have their biases like everyone else.

The great disservice done by the Enlightenment is to put in the mind of the public that categories like 'history' and 'faith', and 'nature' and 'supernature', are diametric opposites, with one being right and the other wrong. They have created a fault-line that never existed in the world before the rationalists appeared. Are nature and supernature two opposite things? Not at all. Many things the ancients viewed as miracles we regard today as natural because we understand the processes now. Now some things we may never understand, because we are not Elohim (God), but others that we presently regard as 'supernatural' will one day appear as 'natural' to us, like teleportation (as the apostle Phillip did once) or walking through solid objects as the resurrected Yah'shua (Jesus) did on at least one known occasion.

The Enlightenment took us one step forwards and two steps backwards. Mordernism has taken us one step forwards and three steps backwards. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has taken us one step forwards and enough steps backwards to plunge humanity into the very abyss that Christianity lifted pagan man out of. The Enlightenment taught us how to think rationally and to consider history in acquiring an understanding of more Biblical knowledge, though Postmodernism doesn't care about any of that. A Postmodernist can believe whatever he wants to.

What the Enlightenment wanted to do was uproot everything from Jerusalem and replant it in the emerging Metropolisis of Europe and America like London, Paris and New York. It wanted to redefine history from the persepctive of Western materialism by displacing Middle Eastern spirituality. What you see on the streets of the West today with anarchists burning and looting is the final outcome of that enterprise. Bible scholars trying to view the Bible out of a non-historical Western lens, encouraged by the Enlightement instead of by an historial Middle Eastern one, virtually guaranteed that christology (for example) would collapse into the warring camps of naturalism and supernaturalism, liberal and conservative, counterfeit and authentic.

Now I don't want to focus too much on the Englightenment as our main goal is to examine Postmodernism, but we obviously need some background to see where everything came from. Everything is so confused in 2020 because we live at the overlap of several huge cultural waves. A mere 300 years ago we were an agrarian or agricultural society, and then everything changed when we industrialised. But even the industrial economy which I knew when I was growing up, is now receeding into the backgrounmd as we move into both an exciting and frightening microchip technology. The culture has shifted with both these major changes. Patterns of work, economic growth, social and cultural values are being turned upside down and inside out, at least in the cities, where men and women are getting progressively more and more dehumanised. That is why so many are attracted to an agricultural way of life hearkening back to Bible times. The truth is, we can never entirely go back there unless we become Amish...which we may be forced to for a while.

Let's try to understand the post-Enlightenment Modernity and the Postmodernity we are now plunging headlong into like an express train hurtling into oblivion. There's a certain amount of overlap between these three, obviously. I'd like to break Modernity and Postmodernity down into three areas and then compare the two philosophies. These are Knowledge & Truth, The Self, and The Story. I'll explain what I mean by 'the story' in a minute. I think you'll find this interesting as well as helpful in explaining why it is hard to relate people raised to think anarchically as opposed to rationally or spiritually, and why the generation gap is getting larger, faster.

Where Modernity thought it could know things objectively about the world, Postmodernity has reminded us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. Everybody has a point-of-view, and that point-of-view distorts because everybody describes things the way that suits them. For Postmodernists, there is no such thing as objective truth. Likewise, there are no such things as objective values, only preferences. The cultural symbols that encapsulated this revolution at its start were the personal stereo and the virtual-reality system which have evolved into the Smartphone and computer plugged into the Internet: now everyone creates his own private world.

Modernists vaunted the 'great lonely individual, the all-powerful 'I' or 'Me', what Descartes called cogito ergo sum and the proud 'I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul'. But Postmodernity has up-ended that egocentric view of self. In Postmodernism the 'I is just a floating signifier, a temporary, accidental collocation or placing together of conflicting (as well as mutually exclusive) forces and impulses. Just as reality collapses inward upon the knower, the knower him- or herself self-deconstructs.

Modernity (like the Enlightnment and Christianity before that) told an implicit narrative or story about the way the world was, as it perceived it. It was essentially, like the God-centred pre-Modern Christian Story, an eternally progressing I/Me-centred eschatological story. World history had been steadily moving toward, or at least eagerly awaiting, the point where the industrial revolution and the philosophical Enlightenment would burst upon the world, bringing a new era of blessing for all. This huge overarching story, what today we call a 'Meta-narrative', has now been conclusively shown to be an oppressive, imperialist and self-selving story, which is of course what you would expect of a story centered on the 'I' or 'Me'. It has brought untold misery to millions in the industrialised West and to billions in the rest of the world, where cheap labour and raw materials have been ruthlessly exploited. It is a story that serves the interests of the Western world, and especially the globalist élite core. Modernity stands condemned of building a new Tower of Babel. Postmodernity has claimed, primarily with this great meta-narrative as the example, that all meta-narratives are suspect; they are all power games. Therefore there is no Story for them. And when stories die, so does the human soul, because we all need a Story to give us purpose and hope.

So what is the consequence of the unfolding Postmodernist society we suddenly and brutally find ourselves in? Collapsing reality; deconstructing selfhood; the death of the Story or Metanarrative, so now there is no purpose whatsoever. We are seeing atheism, shorn of its early dependency on the fruits of Christianity, play itself out for what it really is. Postmodernity is atheism in the raw, in its true state, shorn of its illusiory clothing. Postmodernity is a ruthless application of the hermeneutic of suspicion to everything that the post-Enlightenment Western world has held dear since the 1960's when it really got going, whose children have been our leaders until now.

Postmodernity fits perfectly with the microchip revolution, which has generated and suspained a world in which creating new apparent realities, living in one's own private world and telling one's own story even though it does not cohere with anyone else's, is easier and easier. This is what the Internet is partly all about. We live in a cultural, economic, moral and even religious hypermarket. Scoop up what you like and mix it all together. I promise you, this does not end well, and we're already seeing the first signs of that as culture implodes into anarchy and chaos. It is already being exploited to the full by Marxists and Socialists as a means by which they can run roughshod over a very confused and disunited people and install a totalitarian régime in the very heart of the free world: America.

What, then, are Christians and Messianics to do? Well, we can never go back to preaching it as though we were still living in a modernist and industrialised world because that's gone. True, some groups of believers have managed to hold on to a premodern way of thinking and even of living, holding the modern world, let alone the premodern world, at arm's length. I mentioned the Amish as an example. But most of us who have been practing believers for half a century or so have tradionally articulated the Besorah (Gospel) to people who thought and felt as modern people, particularly as 'progress people' - people who thought that if they worked a little harder and pulled their weight a little more strongly, everything would pan out.

And here's the problem that Christians raised in a modernist society face - again, I'm speaking of those who knew nothing about life before the Hippie Revolution of the 1960's which is roughly when Modernism began in earnest. The problem is that they never knew what the Enlightenment was or the Christrian world-view that came before that. When you are born into a culture, that culture shapes your thinking, feeling and behaviour unless you are Amish, Mennonite or someone like that isolated - in whole or in part - from the prevailing culture. The modernist dream into which the Christian generation - the one immediately after mine - was born, when translated into theology, sustains a sort of Pelagianism. What is Pelagianism? It is an old heresy (i.e. not biblical) that says: pull youself up by your moral bootstraps, save yourself by your own efforts. And since that is what Martin Luther attacked with his doctrine of justification by faith - of getting right with Elohim (God) by trusting - we were preaching - if we were Protestants - a message of grace and faith to a world of eager Pelagians.

If you read Christian books and missionary tracts from the second half of the 20th century, that's pretty much what we were doing. We essentially presented to the Modernist world an Augustinian, Calvinistic or Lutheran version of the Besorah (Gospel). And the problem with that was, as I have been trying to teach you over the past few years, that isn't exactly what Paul meant by 'Justification by Faith' which, though I'd love to, I don't have time to go into today. Now, with the subsequent move into storyless Postmodernism, most of our contemporaries will very soon no longer be Pelagians any longer.

We face an entirely different audience. Those who have denied all objective knowledge in favour of a world of feelings and impulses, those who have abandoned the arrogant Enlightenment 'I' or 'Me' for the deconstructed mass of signifiers, whose who have torn town the great Metanarrative and now play with different interchangeable stories as they come long so that you never know what 'the story' is from one day to another - those who live in this world, which is increasingly our world, are not trying to pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps any longer. Where would they pull themselves up to? Why would they bother? Who are 'they', anyway? Motive, goal, identity - all of these have been undermined by the shifting sands of postmodernit. This rootless, purposeless last generation has opened itself wide open to a false 'Big Brother' saviour in the form an aggressive, ruthless, murderous left-wing, psychopathic and sociopathic totalitarianism, with a track record of failure yet possessing an ability to cement together through terror and blood-letting those willing execise a blind, slavish faith in it.

People sometimes wonder why I study communism so much. I'll tell you why. Because the communist world is a perfect illustration of where we're headed. In Stalinist Russia you never knew exactly what you were supposed to believe in. This is perfectly illustrated by a communist era joke which I know all of you here have heard, but for the benefit of those listening to us abroad, I'll repeat it. It was one of Ronald Reagan's favourite jokes.

Three men are imprisoned in a Soviet Gulag or concentration camp (and you all know how brutal they were - if you don't, read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulagt Archipellago because the Gulags are returning and have alrerady been built here in the West. Most of you know what I mean). One of the prisoners asked, 'What are you in here for, comrade?' He answered: 'I opposed Comrade Popov'. Then he asked the next prisoner, 'What are you here for, comrade?' He answered, 'I supported Comrade Popov'. Finally, the first two asked the third, 'What are you here for, comrade?' to which he answered, 'I am Comrade Popov'.

It's funny and it's not so funny. You see, in communist countries you have no security in anything you say, do, or believe even if what you say, do, or believe accords 100 per cent with communist teaching, or the particular version of socialism that is the preferred one of the present rulers. None of that matters. I have been reading lots about Stalin and the mindset of communists which is very Postmodernist indeed! Indeed, as I have maintained again and again over the years, Postmodernism leads to a kind of Communism which is the final satanic order of things. Postmodernists, Communists and Satanists alike are "cynical advocates of evil, the lofty advocates of force, [and] think their mouth is in heaven and [that] their tongue can dictate on earth". In case you didn't know, that's a quotation from the Bible - Psalm 73:8-9, to be precise - in the brilliantly translated Jerusalem Bible, one of Catholicism's great gifts to us. You cannot reason with these people because they employ no reason other than to rattle off disconnected slogans. You can only restrain them.

What we are seeing on our TVs and computer screens are inexplicable acts of barbarity and apparent meaningless. We are witnessing a world being swept up by the emotional effervescence of hatred, fear and blood lust, just as the communist world was in the days of Stalin's great purges and in the days of Mao's cultural revolution in Red China. What you are seeing is nothing new. Communism is not, in the final analysis, a system of rational thought, even though Marx's and Lenin's writings might lead you to suppose otherwise. Quite apart from the fact that their ideas don't work, have never worked, and never will work in bringing about a Modernist Utopia, the demonic forces that steered these writings merely used them to ride the back of human gullibility by exploiting people who reject Elohim (God) and want to pull themselves up by their own socialist bootstraps, charging towards the real agenda of those who steer them which is utter anarchy and chaos. Why? Because Satan hates Yahwen and wants to see all his children, in whose image they were originally made, destroy that image, engage in total deconstuction and by this means totally destroy themselves. 'Out of chaos, order', is the Masonic and Deep State philosophy. The communists and other like them are a sea bed of contradiction. They simultaneously encourage eulogy as well as despise it. They simultaneously encourge one segment of society to promise life for itself while encouraging them to destroy all other life. What we are experiencing today is a replay of the destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990's but on a much larder scale.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I have learned from studying communism for the last 40 or so years, and in particular Maoism and Stalinism. How were the Popov's and their supporters and detractors of the communist world supposed to survive when it didn't matter who or what you believed in? The impulse - the power, the force - that drives communism and satanism alike - which comes out of the very womb of hell, wants only one thing, the same thing Mao wanted, the same thing Stalin wanted. Understand this and you will know exacly what you are dealing with in totalitarian, communistic, fascistic, satanic systems. Understand this and you will know why so many people will willingly accept the Mark of the Beast, whatever it may be (and that is something we have discussed at length before). Here it is, then, the Article of Faith, the Rule of Thumb, of what Postmodernism is ultimately headiong towards:

That's it. That's what happened in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. It didn't matter what you believed, all that mattered was that you gave blind obedience to the State, usually represented by a single dictator. And one last thing:

I recommend you read these two books (there are many others too) if you do not believe me

• 1. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Phoenix, London: 2006, 6th impression)
• 2. Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Vintage, London: 2007)

You see, motive, goal and identity are all totally meaningless in a communist world, and Postmodernity is rapidly undermining all of these. They have no Metanarrative or Story, no purpose, as Christians do, so they have no goal. They are driven by a manic, demonic lust to destroy everything in the vain belief they can start again. They have no motive to build anything because they don't trust anything, so all they can do is destroy the old order, both the bad and the good because they cannot discriminate between them. They don't even care to. There's is a collective, ant's nest or beehive mentality, but worse, because they aren't constructing as ants and bees do, but deconstructing in a fit of madness [3]. We know there are people steering Antifa and BLM from behind the scenes, the 'evil genius', and they know exactly what they want to achieve. For them, the ground troops of Postmodernity are what Lenin cynically called 'useful idiots', to be disposed of when they are no longer useful, once enough millions of people people have been culled so the globalists can build their feudalistic, slave-state 'pardise' for themselves. They have made no secret of what they intend to do - you can go and read them on the Georgie Guidestones in America.

What will that slave state look like? Just think of Mr.Epstein's estate in the Virgin Islands - that's what they believe in: limitless money, absolute power, luxury and debauchery. Every wicked thing in this world traces back to one or more of these. That's why Satan got the children of Israel to do what they did at the first Shavu'ot (Weeks, 'Pentecost') in the Sinai desert and what He got impatient Christians to do, spiritually-speaking, at the 'Azusa Street Revival' of 9 April 1906 in their eagerness for spiritual gifts without the discipline of Torah-obedience and the character development and discernment that necessarily follows such. That is why Pentecostalism, so-called, born in the state of California, has so degenerated in our day into the lawless, chaotic and wild charismania of the Christian 'Wild West'.

One thing we cannot do as believers is deny the presence of Postmdoernity. It's here to stay. It has a way to go yet but it is here to stay. An entire generation of academics has been raised on, and indoctrinated by, it. That's how they have been trained to think. You can't go to a Western university these days and not be trained to think that way. That is how the Enemy has successfully used the education system. And it starts earlier than College now, beginning at Kindergarten or Preschool and working its way throughout primary and secondary education. Post-modernist thinking is everywhere and that is why, if you want your children to have a chance, you have to homeschool them in their formative years so that they are equipped with the intellectual tools to think for themselves. Otherwise you will lose them to the Beast system. The globalists fear that more than anything else which is why they are so desperate to shut down free speech online so that everyone thinks and behaves like a Postmodernist. And it has heavily infiltrated the Messianic Community or Church which as a result is worse than liberal now - it has become anarchic.

The sorts of things we mostly talk about in our sermons and discipling classes mostly won't work in the 21st century mission field. We cannot turn the clock back culturally and theologically. It's impossible. And what is happening now had to happen both to judge the arrogance of the anti-Gospel philosophy of the preceeding Modernist and Enlightenment which sought to separate man from Elohim (God) so that he could become his own god...yet again. To do evangelism amongst Postmodernists we have to first understand how we were deceived by the man-centred gospel of the Modernist and Enlightenment thinkers, how we compromised with it and incorporated it into our Christianity and Messianism.

The Postmodernists are right to point out the failures of these two systems, and they have failed, leading to massive inequalities and injustices. The corporate élites have exploited them to get filthy rich, which they have used to buy their political power base. Paul warned those who lust after more than the basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, something the false Prosperity teachers are in denial over, consumed with lust as they are:

"But they who desire to become rich fall into temptations and snares and into many lusts which are foolish and hurtful and which drown men in judgment and destruction: for the love of money is the root of all these evils" (1 Tim.6:9-10, AENT)

The élites have loved money above all else. Many have multiplied their millions in the current Corona visus crisis and aim to milk it even more with useless (if not actually harmful) but very expensive vaccines. They cynically use evey disaster, both natural and man-made, to ever increase their wealth. They don't need more for themselves, they need it to finance their globalist project of total world dictatorship. The revolutionary movements of the past, from nazism to communism, were all financed by them, just as they are financing the thugs of Antifa and BLM creating mayhem everywhere. Then they'll finance others to kill them off when they have served their purpose, just as Stalin killed of all the original Bolsheviks and as Hitler killed most of the original Nazi brownshirt leaders in the 'Night of Long Knives' in 1934. The pattern is consistent.

History is its own witness if we will bother to study it before they go and completely rewrite it, as George Orwell, himself an ex-communist, predicted they would in his novel, 1984, so that no one will be able to remember what it was really like before. That is why we must study and preserve history. It should be one of our major subjects at school and taught objectively. Why do you think the revolutionary Antifa and BLM Marxist thugs out there are destroying all our non-Marxist monuments? Was it because all these people represented by these monuments were evil? Well, no, they weren't. Did they have a dark side? Undoubedly, because every man and woman has. Yet they do not destroy statues of Marx and Lenin, who were evil through and through. Indeed, they recently erected a statue of Lenin in Gelsenkirchen, in western Germany. Again, it is not because they love the good. It is because communism demands slavish obedience and they will do anything to achieve their Bolshevik 'paradise'/hell-hole.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy to witness to Postmodernists. We have to learn a completely new way whilst sharing the same old truths. And we don't have the centuries that it took for Christian apologists to start responding to pagans in Roman Imperial times, beginning with Origen of Alexandria (184-253). We have to learn fast. So in the days ahead I am going to be focussing on this question but first of all we have to persuade fellow believers - evangelists and missionaries - that the tools we used for those of the Enlightenment and Modernism won't be satisfactory enough for the Postmodernists. Can it be done? Absolutely. There is no darkness the Besorah (Gospel) cannot penetrate. For as it is written, "The light continues to shine in the darkness, and the darkness has never extinguished it" (Jn.1:5, Barclay).

I do believe that the Gospel and Letters of John specifically will play a major rôle in the new evangelism. We first of all have to own up to the failures of the men whose statues the revolutionaries are tearing down but we must also force them to face the truth about the men whose statues they refuse to tear down. We must expose communism, nazism, fascism, atheism, and satanism wihout apology. We are commanded to expose it and also told why:

"Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:

"Wake up, O sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."

(Eph 5:11-14, NIV).

It can't be avoided. If you're going to be a witness of Christ, His light will be shining through you exposing any darkness in the vicinity of your influence. That's what we're commanded to do. The light of truth is our business, and He is the Truth. However, the traditional ways of doing that may well have to be altered a bit, meaning, you will have to make your appeal to Messiah and the Besorah (Gospel) a little differently - the old Augustinian-cum-Calvinist approach will not succeed because these people do not think in the same way as Pre-modernists. Much of Augustine's theology was a disgust with his former Manicheism, a disgust which has shaped Catholicism and Protestantism. Remember, Postmodernists are fundamentally in denial of reality. These people do not think in the same way as we do because they are not into reason or evidence-based reality at all. For them a tobacco pipe is not necessarily a tobacco pipe but what you personally believe it is. And what that is is your own personal, subjective truth, they will say. For them it could just easily be an ear-trumpet or a mouth organ. Sounds ridiculous? Well, given what they are saying about gender and biology, not really. You can't reason with them as a rationalist just as one cannot reason with a flat-earther because they have chosen to believe in an alternative reality and refuse to do science. Yes, flat-earthism has a strong element of Postmodernism in it. So what are you going to do? How will you present the Besorah (Gospel) to them? This is what we are going to have to talk about in the weeks ahead.

In the meantime, we ourselves have to shape up and seek for new revelation. Paul says:

"Be very careful, then, how you live - not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Master's will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Ruach (Spirit). Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Master, always giving thanks to Elohim (God) the Father for everything, in the name of our Master Yah'shua the Messiah (the Lord Jesus Christ)" (Eph.5:15-20, NIV).

Then he goes on to explain marriage and family relationships and how they should be condited. Continuing:

"Finally, be strong in Yahweh and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of Elohim (God) so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of Elohim (God), so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of emet (truth) buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the besorah (gospel) of shalom (peace). In addition to all this, take up the shield of emunah (faith), with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Ruach (Spirit), which is the Davar Elohim (Word of God). And pray in the Ruach (Spirit) on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones)" (Eph.6:10-18, ).NIV

I would like to suggest that Psalms 42 & 43 contains some important keys in yoiur quest to witness to the very lost souls of Postmodernism so I am going to leave those with you as 'homework' for next time. May Yahweh bless you and keep you safe in Yah'shua (Jesus). Amen.

Endnotes

[1] N.T.Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP Academic, Downer's Grove, Illinois: 1999), p.11
[2] Ibid., p.20
[3] See Douglas Murray's excellent book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, London: 2019). Murray, who is also the author of The Strange Death of Europe, is a secular Modernist

Further Reading

[1] The Post-Modernists: Seven Things They Need to Know

Comments from Readers

[1] "What a powerful, profound, much needed, but scary ... and boy what a challenge for me. Sincere prayer for all of us that we may succeeed in our striving for perfection through power of the Holy Spirit (I sure can'y do it on my own!!!) Thanks Christopher for being on the point. I pray for many blessings to go your way" (MW, USA, 29 July 2020)