“What about war?”

Steve Brown:
What about war? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s nobody’s guru, but he does have honest answers to hard questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, and worship. Now, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hello Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man.

Steve Brown:
How you doing?

Pete Alwinson:
I’m doing good.

Steve Brown:
You’re getting better and better in every way, every day, at least with your shoulder.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it’s healing. It’s the long heal, you know.

Steve Brown:
Oh, man, I didn’t, you know, I hope, I don’t want a long thing. I want you to give me an aspirin, a glass of water and leave me alone,

Pete Alwinson:
and get over. You had some.

Steve Brown:
come back in an hour.

Pete Alwinson:
You’re going to have some surgery too.

Steve Brown:
I am, but that’s going to be a tooth, dental.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s still surgery. You know what minor surgery is? Minor surgery is surgery on somebody else.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson, if you haven’t read Like Father Like Son, you ought to get it. And as soon as Pete will sit in the chair and finish with it, he’s got, you’ve got a new book that’s going to be coming out.

Pete Alwinson:
Going to come out. Going to come out. It’s going to get there.

Steve Brown:
Give me the title.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s Forged for Greatness. It’s plays off the name of our title, but it’s really kind of the five marks of manhood.

Steve Brown:
Okay. I’ll let you know. Probably 10, 15 years from now, unless he starts moving. By the way, Pete comes in and we answer questions together. And we’ve done that for a long time. We love your questions. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, follow instructions and record your question. And sometimes we put your voice on the air, or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
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if you live in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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or you can email it to [email protected] or go to keylife.org and check some places along there, and you can ask your questions there. And those are places where, should the spirit move, you could help us financially. I promise that when you do that, we’ll be faithful with your gift. And we’ll use it for others who can’t, most of the people who benefit by this ministry are not able to help us financially. So, when you do, you help them too. And I promise we’ll be faithful, we’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. Pete, lead us in prayer, and then we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Father, we do come into your presence today, and we honor you. We thank you that we’re yours, that we belong to you forever, and all because of what you did, Lord Jesus, by the, by your life, death, burial, and resurrection on our behalf. We honor you. You are our Lord Jesus and Holy Spirit. You are the one that has taken the very work of Christ and applied it into our hearts and sealed us until the day of redemption. So, we have so much to be thankful for, but it’s been a long week and we come to you and we ask for your grace on behalf of your people right now, Lord. You know us, you know our challenges, our fears, the areas where we want to control everything. Lord, you know us. And so, we come to you, we surrender to you, but we ask for your grace and power in the very practical areas of our life. Lord, you know that we need to worship and how easy it is for us to be self focused and not God focused. And so, we really do pray you’d prepare us for a Sunday, a week-end of worship, and of thinking about the God who made us and protects us and redeems us. And we pray for our pastors, our leaders, our worship directors, all those that have been preparing to make Sunday morning, this week-end at some point, a wonderful time of worship. And we ask that you would lead us to the end of ourselves and to the beginning of you. Be honored and glorified, we pray these things, in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Alright, let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
I have a question for you about restoration and finding hope in the church in times like these. Thinking about what the enemies show from us, you know, supporters of war. I was hoping you would answer how we can expedite the rapture of the church and find new hope in these hard times.

Steve Brown:
It’s hard, isn’t it? That’s a good question. Hope is hard to find when you’re in the middle of worldwide situations like we’re facing right now. A lot of Christians, and he may be one of those, who think that war is something you should never do. And they become pacifist, and they have theological reasons for that. And I think this young man, or I assume he’s young, he sounds kind of young, is wondering how we can find hope when we’re doing stuff like war. Well, sometimes war is necessary. And the church has, over the years, developed pretty clear standards on what is a just war. Aquinas and a lot of others have talked about things like a just war. And so, sometimes, a good place to talk about that is to look under the Third Reich and the II World War. I hated it, and a lot of people died in it, but it was necessary. And there are wars today that are necessary too.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, reading Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas and reading his follow up book, on Letter to the Church. It’s so important to see that some of the errors that have been committed in the past are being recommitted. And that’s when we see.

There’ll be wars and rumors of wars, Jesus said.

So, in a broken world, these things happen a lot. And I think we, the Christian impulse is to minimize war, right?

Steve Brown:
I know.

Pete Alwinson:
To seek peace. And we should pursue that, but evil does have to be confronted.

Steve Brown:
It really does.

Pete Alwinson:
And in appropriate ways.

Steve Brown:
And that’s what Bonhoeffer struggled with.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right.

Steve Brown:
You know, he was close to being a pacifist. And by the way, if you’re listening and you’re a pacifist. I respect that. I really do. I can’t go there, but I want to, but Bonhoeffer was close to that, and he struggled and ended up being, dying for his efforts to be an assassin of Hitler. And his reasons for doing that were cogent and Biblical and Christian. So, it’s a real, now finding hope in all of that is like asking, where do you find hope in a fallen world?

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. And we find it in our Lord Jesus Christ, our risen Savior. And that’s why I think it’d be a good thing to re-read the Book of Revelation because it shows that even though there are beasts out there and there are wars and there are final wars, our Lord Jesus is sovereign and in control and we still need to advance his kingdom proactively. That’s one way we find hope is by advancing the gospel of grace now to everybody that we could talk to.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And all of us wince sometimes it’s a hard world.

Pete Alwinson:
It is. It is.

Steve Brown:
All right, let’s go back a few generations. What were the Puritans like? That’s an e-mail.

Pete Alwinson:
Isn’t that something? We haven’t heard anything like that.

Steve Brown:
No, we haven’t.

Pete Alwinson:
The Puritans have been roundly criticized by so many people, and particularly in the moral area. What are you, Puritanical?

Steve Brown:
It’s become a description of real legalist judgment of others.

Pete Alwinson:
I think one thing I would say, first of all, is that the Puritans were deeply committed to Jesus Christ. Generally speaking, right?

Steve Brown:
Oh, they really were.

Pete Alwinson:
Our Puritan forefathers.

Steve Brown:
And deeply and profoundly touched by God’s grace.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
If you want to read a book, and you and I both read it occasionally, The Valley of Vision, it’s a book of mainly Puritan prayer.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And you would think they would be praying for the death of the pagans and that the bad people would go away. It’s mostly confession.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And some of it is so profound and so deep, they got it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
They knew they were sinners.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And they knew they deserved nothing from God. And so, they praised him for his grace.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. So, at one level, they were the real deal Christians.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And so, they took seriously the fact that they had been redeemed from a bad lifestyle.

Steve Brown:
That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
To live a new lifestyle, to be set free.

Steve Brown:
And they spoke truth.

Pete Alwinson:
And they spoke the truth. So, some of the negativity that they get is that they were moralistically seeking to become pure people. Well, that’s what all Christians really should.

Steve Brown:
That’s the deal.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s the goal. But, so the negative, why do they get such a negative rap?

Steve Brown:
Well, I think there’s some supernatural evil involved in that. But I think from a historical standpoint, I don’t know if you did, you may not be old enough, but when I was in high school and we had those English anthologies, there was always Jonathan Edwards sermon Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right, right.

Steve Brown:
And so, a lot of, millions of people across America, that’s all they knew of the Puritans was that sermon. And that wasn’t even representative of Jonathan Edwards.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
He was a scholar, he became the first president at Princeton, he didn’t preach that sermon every Sunday, just once. And it was a pretty scary sermon. And the truth is about the Puritans, is they knew how to party.

Pete Alwinson:
What do you mean?

Steve Brown:
Well, they, you know, they weren’t teetotalers.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah?

Steve Brown:
They didn’t celebrate Christmas, but I’m good with that. Well, they didn’t, but not because they didn’t want to have a good time, they did it for theological reasons.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And so, bottom line is they’ve been given a bum rap.

Pete Alwinson:
They have been given a bum rap. I would say one other thing from a Christian standpoint, they’re also very deep and analytical people. They were thinkers of Scripture. They went deep. They’re not Christian light. And so, that’s why they got, perhaps one reason why they got a bad name, but why we still read them today. It’s because they have so much good stuff to say.

Steve Brown:
And by the way, we need to say this, that if you’re a Christian and you’re going to stand up and be counted in our culture, people are going to feel that way about you.

Pete Alwinson:
Yep, that’s right.

Steve Brown:
You’re going to be criticized, you’re going to be put down because people don’t like to hear the truth. And if we’re right, and we are, by the way. And they’re wrong, and they are, by the way, about these things, not everything, but about the gospel, and they’re wrong, then they’re in trouble, and they know it, and they don’t like it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right, right.

Steve Brown:
So, expect it.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, you and I are going to dress as Puritans.

Steve Brown:
I may do that myself.

Pete Alwinson:
I know.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. And know that people laugh at us and get some points with Jesus. That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
I can see you. I can see you with a blunderbuss and a pilgrim hat.

Steve Brown:
Oh, I love it. But you first. Guys, we’ve got to go. We love the fact that you spend this time with us. One other thing before we go, and you should remember, that Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.