"Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints."
Ephesians 6:11-18
King James Version
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Ephesians 6:11-18
King James Version
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Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00All right, so good morning everybody. Happy to be doing Masterfan, Malini from Freedomain.
00:03So, if you're finding these talks helpful or useful or deep or meaningful or any or all of
00:11the above, if you could please help out the show, freedomain.com slash donate.
00:15All right, so this is Ephesians 6 and we're going to go to our trusty King James
00:22version. This is a very famous passage and has within it some of the best poetry
00:28that is around. So, children and parents, this is 6. Children, obey your parents in the Lord,
00:38for this is right. Now, this is very interesting. Obey your parents in the Lord,
00:45which means with regards to virtue, with regards to good. Obey your parents in the Lord,
00:53for this is right. So, you obey the moral law as manifested in your parents. Your parents teach
01:00you the moral law. You can't invent it all yourself out of whole cloth. And so,
01:05obey your parents in the Lord. Not just obey your parents, but obey your parents in the Lord.
01:10Obey the moral law transmitted through your parents, which is really to say,
01:13obey the moral law and your parents are responsible for teaching that to you.
01:18Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise,
01:23that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. And you,
01:27fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition
01:32of the Lord. So, do not be a nag, do not be a scold, do not be a bully, do not abuse,
01:38do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition
01:45of the Lord. And the Lord here, for the more secularly inclined, would be morality, objective
01:52philosophy, virtue, objectivity, empiricism, right? Bring them up in the training and admonition of
02:01the Lord. So, training, of course, is to train children to be moral. Admonition, admonition
02:08is to remind, right? Not to nag, not to bully, right? But to admonish is a very different thing.
02:22A counsel or a warning, this kind of stuff. Let's look at Merriam-Webster, right?
02:28Gentle or friendly reproof, counsel or warning against fault or oversight. This is really
02:36important. Gentle or friendly reproof, counsel or warning against fault or oversight. These
02:42are not accidental terms. Bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.
02:47This next one is not so good at all. Bond servants and masters. Now, bond servants
02:54are people who are legally bound to be under the direct economic and political and coercive
03:02control of a master. So, in some of the versions of the Bible, translate this directly as slaves.
03:10The King James gives bond servants, but slaves in many ways would be equal. Now, of course,
03:19equal terms. One of the big problems, of course, with the Bible is it does not talk against
03:25slavery in any foundational way. I mean, it gives some responsibility to the masters
03:29to not be abusive, but it does not talk against slavery. This is one of the things that when I
03:34first read through the Bible, it was hard to miss. And, frankly, this is one of the things that puts
03:39the Bible and its ethics in its own time. Now, of course, we all fully, completely, and deeply
03:47accept that slavery is one of the greatest moral and, in fact, practical evils of the world because
03:54the practice of slavery obviously removes the free will and moral independence of another
03:59sovereign soul, but also the practice of slavery delays and destroys economic progress.
04:08It has been one of the worst toxins in human life, the fact of slavery, because of slavery
04:18the Industrial Revolution could not happen because the Industrial Revolution could not happen.
04:22Hundreds of millions or perhaps billions, I mean, the birth rate and population was,
04:27well, sorry, the population was much lower back in the day, so there was a massive amount of
04:32death and suffering because of slavery, and nowhere in the Bible is slavery called a great evil. Now,
04:41to be fair, it could be that the people who were transcribing, as you would say, from your
04:50religious or writing the Bible if you're secular, the people who were writing the Bible could not
04:54speak out against slavery because that would get you ostracized or killed. Slavery was the
05:00foundation of the wealth of the elites, and if you spoke out against slavery then you would probably
05:05come to quite a bad end indeed. However, of course, Christianity was in many ways founded
05:10or at least validated by those willing to come to a very bad end because they loved Jesus and
05:17recognized him as the Son of God. So, it seems a little hard to process, and this is what puts
05:24the Bible in its time, and this is an argument against the Bible being a product of an all-knowing,
05:30all-good, all-powerful God because slavery being one of the greatest evils in human history and
05:38arguably the greatest evil in human history in its sort of moral and practical implications and
05:45results. So, an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God would first set his sights on
05:54slavery, and the fact that the Bible is not anti-slavery and mentions it with respect,
06:03right, that slaves you have to obey your masters, you must obey your masters, that is not good,
06:10and I don't know any way around this without deploying interstellar levels of sophistry.
06:18This tells you that the morals are of the time because in Ephesians, actually, no, let's switch
06:28just so we can look at the other ways of looking at it, because bond servants to me is a minor
06:36term of sophistry because I think it should read slaves. So, in the New International version,
06:42it says slaves, and the other ones are pretty much the same, it says slaves obey your earthly
06:49masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart just as you would obey Christ. Obey them
06:56not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ doing the will of
07:00God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because
07:07you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave
07:12or free. Ouch! I'm telling you this is a solar plexus blow to the ethics and whether Christian
07:22or not, whether religious or not, this needs to be grappled with. Let's read this again. Slaves
07:28obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart just as you would obey
07:33Christ. I mean, what does this mean? That slavery is not immoral and that slaves have a deep moral
07:44duty to obey their earthly masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart. This is
07:53a blanket approval and endorsement of slavery. Obey them not only to win their favor when their
08:03eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ doing the will of God from your heart. The will of God is
08:09that you as a slave must enthusiastically, happily and with respect and fear obey those who
08:17coercively rule over you. And then Ephesians goes on to say, serve wholeheartedly as if you were
08:24serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever
08:28good they do, whether they are slave or free. This is brutal. This is brutal. And this is a passage
08:35that had me kind of jolt out of my seat. I read the Bible, of course, when I was working up north,
08:42so I was 18 or 19. And I don't know how to get around it. I mean, I don't know. It's almost 40
08:53years later. I don't know how to get around it. And there is, of course, an urge to get around it
08:59because we wish to view the moral commandments of the Bible as outside the time of the age,
09:07to have eternal virtue. And if we were to say this as a moralist, if a moralist were to say
09:16this about, say, the antebellum South or the slaves currently controlled, bullied and subjugated in
09:23the world as a whole, if we were to say this about them, we would be considered entirely corrupt and
09:28immoral. And this is not an evil character. These are good moral admonishments. So saying that
09:37slaves obey with respect, with sincerity, wholeheartedly, and the will of God is that you
09:47enthusiastically obey those who own you like livestock. I mean, this is a lot further than
09:55render under God what is God, render under Caesar what is Caesar's. There's some ambiguity there.
10:01But this is a full-throated, wholehearted moral commandment, praise and endorsement of slavery.
10:10And it goes on to say, and masters treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them,
10:13since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no
10:18favoritism with him. So what does it mean to say to a master, do not threaten your slaves?
10:27What does this mean? I don't know what it means, because the whole way that a master enforces
10:35being a master and having a slave is to threaten the slave. If you try to run away, I will
10:41cripple you or kill you. And if you disobey me, I have the right to assault you. I mean,
10:48slavery is enforced through threats. So saying to a master, don't threaten them with regards
10:53to his slaves, it is a misreading of the entire relationship. And again, I know that the urge,
11:02the impulse is to dodge this, to wriggle away, but the Bible is, of course, in its ideal form.
11:11It's an ideal concept. The Bible is transcribed from the will of God. This isn't people talking
11:15about what they think God means or thinks. This is transcribed according to the will and
11:21inspiration of God. And honestly, this is a very tough one. This is a very tough one.
11:29We know and fully accept now that slavery is a monstrous and grave evil, and yet it is endorsed
11:39not just in obey the master since he has power over you, but obey the master according to the
11:47holy will of God as if your master were God or Jesus himself. Obey them as slaves of Christ
11:55doing the will of God from your heart. So it's not just saying, you know, hey man, this is a
12:00tough situation, but you'll be rewarded in heaven. This is the way the world is set up. There are
12:04masters and slaves, but even the slaves shall be saved. No, no, it's not doing that. This is not
12:10what Ephesians is saying. What Ephesians is saying is you must enthusiastically, wholeheartedly,
12:18with optimism and respect and fear, obey masters. And nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, a thousand
12:27times nope. And what can I tell you? I don't know any way around this. I don't know any way to
12:32minimize this. I don't know any way to bypass this. This is a glaring, staring, central
12:40black eye in the moral authority of the text. If anyone said this to you
12:48about slavery in the present or slavery, say, in the past in America or other places,
12:54that if somebody made this argument that it was the responsibility, crazy as it is,
13:00for the slaves to enthusiastically obey their masters, that would be an endorsement of slavery.
13:06And that would be to say that the slavery must exist not just in the physical realm,
13:12but that slavery must exist in the mind. You must not just obey. You must enthusiastically
13:22obey. And that is what it is. There's no way around it. But the passage that I find very
13:30powerful, and you've heard of this one, I'm sure, the armor of God. Again, we're going to go back
13:34to King James, because to me that might in fact have the hand of Shakespeare. Probably not, but
13:42there's some rumors and I like to imagine it from time to time. So if we go back to King James,
13:51then we can get this next. The whole armor of God. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord
13:58and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against
14:06the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
14:15against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts
14:22of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be
14:28able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand. A principality, of course,
14:40is a state ruled by a prince and also in traditional Christian hierarchy of angels,
14:47the fifth highest order of the ninefold celestial hierarchy. So he's saying here,
14:53be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God
14:58that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. The wiles. It's very powerful,
15:06because he's not saying stand against the physical might,
15:10but the wiles. The wiles is the sophistry of the lies, the misdirections, the appeals to empathy
15:18from those who have no empathy themselves. The wiles, the running in mazes, the creation of
15:27a labyrinth of language that confuses, baffles, bewilders and ensnares and enslaves you.
15:33The wiles of the devil. So stand against the wiles of the devil.
15:37So one example that I would give from a philosophical standpoint, this is analogous,
15:44but not direct. So you've heard this, of course, in call-in shows when people say,
15:52if they confront abusive parents or parents who were abusive in the past and they confront them
15:57and their parents say, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
16:02So that's a wile, that is a way of saying you can't expect me to be omniscient, I did the best
16:09I could with the knowledge I had and it is cruel for you to have a standard for me that was
16:16impossible for me at the time. It would be like calling a two-year-old incompetent because they
16:22can't play basketball. Well then you're doing the best you can with the physicality you have
16:26at the time and there's an injustice in having higher standards than that which is physically
16:30possible at the time. That's bad. Now the answer to that, of course, is if the standard is do the
16:41best you can with the knowledge you had then those selfsame parents who claim this as a justification
16:47for parenting should never have criticized the child for any poor showing in school.
16:56If you fail a test, you say, well I did the best I could with the knowledge I had. Oh well that's
17:00fine, right? But that's not what they said. So when you as a child did not, well you did the
17:06best you could with the knowledge you had, your parents would say, well it was your responsibility
17:11to study for the test, right? If you fail a test, your parents get mad at you, the teacher calls
17:15them in and you say, hey man I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, they would say,
17:20but you were supposed to study. You are responsible for gaining the knowledge you
17:25need to pass a test, right? So the while, the sophistry, the manipulation is, hey man I did
17:33the best I could with the knowledge I had, which as a grown-ass adult who's in charge of children
17:38is a pretty sad excuse, particularly if you then say to your children when they're young,
17:47that's no excuse. I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, that's no excuse. Or if
17:55your parents say, if they were abusive or mean or did things that were wrong or bad, and then when
18:01you get older you confront them and then they say, well you need to let go of the past, you need to
18:06stop being bothered by the past, you need to move on, right? Just move on. You're stuck in the past
18:12and you need to move on and I'm giving you good advice and so on, right? Okay. Fortunately my
18:18mother never tried this one with me because my answer to my mother, if she had ever said you're
18:25stuck in the past, you need to move on and stop being bothered by the past, is I would say,
18:28you're still complaining about the divorce from 30 years ago, right? How dare you tell me to move on
18:36when, you know, I was in my mid-teens and we were going to restaurants and drawing up fantasy lists
18:40of everything you were going to force my father to pay for, and that you were, when you first
18:44met him again at a family gathering, at a wedding, when you first met him again in many many many
18:50years, you complained about him again and were upset with him again. So that's not good. And the
18:58other thing too, of course, is that if you complain to your parents and then they say, why are you so
19:04stuck in the past? You've got to let things go, you've got to move on. Well, did your parents ever,
19:10when you were growing up, did your parents ever bring up things that you had done in the past
19:16in a negative fashion, right? Or if they found out that you had done something negative,
19:24but they found out days or weeks or even months later, were they unbothered by it?
19:31If they found out, say, that you had, I don't know, lost a flashlight or lost your braces, right?
19:40Or lost your glasses, but they didn't find out for a week or so, or maybe longer. If they were upset
19:46about it and you were to say to them, man, me losing this stuff, that's in the past, you've got to let
19:51it go, you've got to move on, don't let the past control you, don't let, just move on, man. Would
19:56they have said, yeah, you know, it's really good advice, I shouldn't be bothered by stuff.
20:00That happened in the past. Well, that's a problem. So that's, this is that the Wiles is this kind of
20:09sophistry, where a moral is advanced, it's better to X, right? It's better to not judge people by
20:18impossible standards. Sure, that's reasonable, right? But if the impossible standard is, well,
20:24I lacked knowledge, well, you can always gain knowledge, right? I failed my math test because
20:30I didn't know the math. Well, it was your responsibility to know the math. You can't
20:34just say, well, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, right? So that is a false standard
20:40that is put forward to evade moral responsibility, and the reason we know it's a false standard
20:46is that parents, neglectful or abusive parents, when confronted, will pull out all these moral
20:51standards that they did not follow when they were parents. They will claim excuses as adults
21:00that they never would have granted their children when their children were 4 or 6 or 8 or 10 or 15
21:05or whatever, right? Or parents, when confronted with bad behavior, will say, well, I had a bad
21:13childhood. To which, of course, the response is, well, if you knew that you had a bad childhood,
21:17then you'd be responsible for fixing the effects. Well, I had it worse than you. Well, first of all,
21:24that's unverifiable, and secondly, if you know that you had a bad childhood, then you are responsible
21:30for fixing it, right? I mean, if as a kid you put your hand in a fire and it burns,
21:38then you are responsible for keeping your children's hands out of fire because you know
21:41how much it burns, and you certainly should not be grabbing their hands and putting them into a fire.
21:46And, of course, there is a rank contradiction between I did the best I could with the knowledge
21:52I had, and I may have acted poorly, but my excuse is that I had a bad childhood, so it wasn't really
21:57my fault. I mean, if you know you had a bad childhood, then you had the knowledge necessary
22:04to improve things, right? It would be like me as a kid saying, yes, I failed the math test,
22:12and I knew that I didn't have the knowledge to pass it. Well, that would make my responsibility
22:18for failing the math test go up, not down. So, when parents say, well, I acted badly because
22:23I had a bad childhood, they're then saying, well, I know what bad parenting is, therefore,
22:28I had no capacity to improve my bad parenting. If your father had a father who yelled at him,
22:34and then he yelled at you, then he knows exactly how bad it is, and he has full access to that
22:39because he claims it as an excuse. But if you claim something as an excuse, then you know the
22:44causality. I acted badly because I had a bad childhood, in which case you're responsible
22:47for fixing it. If someone were to genuinely say, however we could measure that, genuinely,
22:53I have no idea why I acted badly, that's a whole different situation. That's a whole different
22:58situation. So, the wiles are in the false morals that are invoked in the moment in order to gain
23:09some material advantage, control, or dominance. They're in the moment, in the moment. I mean,
23:15the sort of typical example is the mainstream media being very, very sad that government workers
23:22are losing their jobs, while previously having zero empathy for Republicans who were losing
23:29their jobs, like the gym manufacturing people, people who tended to vote for the right.
23:36So, if the principle is we should have sympathy for those who lose their jobs,
23:41then they should have had sympathy for the Republicans who lost their job, but they didn't.
23:44I learned a code. You'll get a job in the green economy. It doesn't matter. Who cares? Things
23:49got to change. Things got to move on. You'll deal with it, right? So, if there's this coldness to
23:53people losing their jobs, but suddenly when those on the left are losing their jobs, there's this
23:57massive tearful, well, these are people too, and sympathy, that's a wile. It's repulsive. It's just
24:03skin-crawlingly, spine-vomiting repulsive. These are the wiles. Fortunately, of course, we have the
24:12internet to point out hypocrisy, and the understanding of hypocrisy is the liberation
24:16from false morality. You know, when I finally physically fought back against my violent
24:23mother, and she was just horrified and appalled, and how dare you, and it's like, okay, that's like
24:28the criminal who's only into gun control when somebody else has the gun, right? When you
24:36get the gun from the criminal, suddenly he feels that violence is just a terrible way to solve
24:40things. I mean, it's just rank hypocrisy, and self-serving moral contradictions are everywhere
24:48in the world. I mean, you can't live and breathe without seeing them everywhere, at all times,
24:53under almost all circumstances. I mean, questioning the validity of elections is something,
25:00of course, that when the left does it, it's protecting democracy. When the right does it,
25:04it's an insurrection. It's terrible. It's just appalling. It's destroying democracy. Just,
25:09you know, it's sort of boring, boring stuff. So, it's interesting, the full armor of God. Well,
25:15the full armor of God is universal morals, and this is why empiricism is so valuable. It's
25:24essential. It's essential when it comes to evaluating people's moral propositions. So,
25:29all the people who said healthcare is a human right, were they complaining when healthcare
25:35was effectively shut down for months, or in cases, years, over COVID? No, no, no, we have to find a
25:41way to healthcare, right? So, they don't care. They don't care. So, universality and empiricism
25:51is the way that you defend against these devilish sophistries and manipulations. So,
25:57the universalism is extract the principle and see if the person has betrayed that principle in the
26:04past, right? So, your mother, you complain about your mother to your mother, and your mother says,
26:10well, you've got to let go of the past, you've got to forgive the past, you've got to move on,
26:14and then you say, well, hang on, but you were constantly complaining about dad
26:18during and after the divorce for years and years and years, right? So, you make it a universal
26:24principle, right? You make it a universal principle, and then you see if the person has
26:30followed that universal principle. Well, we've got to have sympathy to people who were losing
26:34their jobs. Okay, well, when your political opponents lost their jobs, did you feel
26:38a sympathy, right? I mean, if people say violent protests by the right are unacceptable,
26:45okay, well, by the right is not a moral category, right? So, violent protests are unacceptable,
26:51and did you ever say the same thing and condemn violent protests by the left?
26:58So, universalism is, okay, so this is your moral principle. Let's find out if you have followed
27:04that moral principle in the past in a consistent fashion. Well, that's how you, the full armor of
27:11God is universalism plus empiricism, and universalism plus empiricism is how you dismiss
27:17people's moral arguments, right? If your parents say, well, we did the best we could with the
27:23knowledge we had, but they punished you or got mad at you or whatever for failing a test in which
27:28you did the best you could with the knowledge that you had, then clearly they don't believe
27:32in the defense called do the best you can with the knowledge you had or have, right? They don't
27:37believe in that, and so you can dismiss this as a manipulative, pathetic defense, as a sophistry,
27:45as a devilish while in this context, right? You extract the principle and you see if the person
27:52has followed the principle in any reasonably, I mean, who's perfect, right? Reasonably consistent
27:57fashion, and of course you see this all over Twitter, right? People on the left condemning
28:02what people on the right do, and then you say, well, did you condemn it? When people on the left
28:07did it, and of course they didn't, so you just dismiss them. You just dismiss them. Are you
28:12willing to live your values? If you're not willing to live your values, then I won't listen to your
28:17argument, because they're not morals, they're manipulations, and it's really repulsive to use
28:23people's moral sense in an attempt to gain dominance and control over them, in other words,
28:27using their desire for virtue and consistency to dominate and control them. To deploy morals
28:33to excuse your own child abuse is repulsive in the extreme, and it is of course a continuation
28:41of the abuse. Does the person grab morals in a way like they're running from a bear, grabbing
28:48rocks, turning and throwing the rocks? They're just desperate to avoid a negative experience,
28:53so they just grab and throw whatever they think might stick. You see this, of course, all the time.
28:58And, right, so the full armor of God is somebody comes at you with a moral argument,
29:04you extract the principle, and then you find out, and you can do this very easily,
29:10this is a great thing about the internet, is people's moral stances and statements are recorded
29:14and easily searchable for all time. It's beautiful. So you can very easily go back,
29:21you don't have to go to library, look up books, find some way to publish it and get it out.
29:25Somebody tweets something, you extract the moral principle, you find out that they've completely
29:28violated that moral principle in the past for their own team or their own benefit, and then
29:32you point that out and you say, okay, well, you don't believe this is just a move, right?
29:37I mean, this is amazing, right? The full armor of God is the internet never forgets, right?
29:43It's amazing. So the full armor of God is universality and then empiricism. Now, of
29:50course, people will say, well, just because I've been hypocritical doesn't mean that my argument
29:53is invalid. Well, I mean, that's true. Hypocrisy is not a proof that an argument is invalid,
30:02but it is proof that you cannot trust the hypocrite, especially if the hypocrite is
30:09hiding his hypocrisy, like you cannot trust the hypocrite. So while it certainly is true
30:14that a hypocrite being hypocritical does not disprove a moral argument, being a hypocrite
30:20absolutely destroys the value of engaging in a moral debate with a hypocrite, if that makes sense.
30:28So if someone says you should be all natural in bodybuilding competitions and then it turns out
30:34that they've been juicing with steroids, that does not destroy the validity of the argument
30:39that you should be all natural in bodybuilding competitions, but it will get you disqualified
30:43from the bodybuilding competition, right? So it doesn't destroy the argument, but it destroys
30:50the validity of the interaction. And I feel like I need to make this point again,
30:55but it's probably redundant. I don't know that I've made it forcefully enough. Somebody who's
31:00a moral hypocrite, it doesn't prove or disprove their moral arguments, but it disqualifies them
31:07from credibility in moral conversations. So if somebody's a hypocrite, it doesn't mean
31:15that their argument is proven or disproven, but it does mean I'm not going to debate with them,
31:20because they will only ever be true or accurate accidentally, right? I mean, you wouldn't hire
31:27a blind batter for your softball team or your hardball team or whatever, right? Like you wouldn't,
31:33let's say you're at the top levels of baseball, you're in the show, right? Well, you wouldn't
31:38hire a blind batter, even though the blind batter could, every once in a blue moon, hit a home run,
31:45because he would not be a good batter. Say, yes, but you know, once every 10 years he can hit a
31:49home run, it's like, but he's not a good batter because he's only hitting a home run accidentally,
31:54can't even see the ball. So you don't hire him, because he cannot consistently produce value.
32:02And so somebody who's a moral hypocrite, don't engage with them, because while it's technically
32:07true that their moral hypocrisy does not destroy their arguments, you can never trust them to act
32:13with good faith and integrity, because they're hypocrites. If someone is a con man, it doesn't
32:19mean that they will never pay their bills on time, but you don't do business with them.
32:23If someone's a con man who argues for the value of property rights, you understand that arguing
32:28for the value of property rights is just a way of camouflaging his con, right? A cheating man
32:37or a con man who runs a bank, who constantly tells everyone your funds are secure and blah, blah,
32:40blah, blah, blah. Well, if he turns out to be a cheat, that doesn't invalidate the importance
32:46of having your funds be secure in a bank, but it does mean that you wouldn't do any business with
32:51him ever again. I mean, if Bankman Freed ever gets out of jail and opens up another crypto
32:56exchange, if he's ever allowed to, would you put your crypto in his hands? Well, of course not,
33:02because they're only making arguments to camouflage their corruption.
33:06So putting on the full armor of God to defend against the wiles of the devil,
33:11right, that's what it means. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against
33:16principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual
33:21hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. That's powerful, right? Against spiritual hosts
33:29of wickedness in the heavenly places. So it means that the angels are actually devils, right? The
33:36devils are pretending to be angels in order to fool you into thinking that you're subjugated to
33:41morality when you're only controlled by sophistry, manipulated by sophistry, right? In the heavenly
33:48places, in the appearance of virtue, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,
33:56right? The best camouflage for the devil is as an angel, and the best way for you to be enslaved
34:02is for someone to convince you of a moral good that requires your subjugation. Well, you care
34:08about the sick and the poor, therefore I have to take half your income to take care of them,
34:16right? So they're pretending to be, you know, you care about the future of the planet and you don't
34:21want your children to be underwater, you don't want cities to be underwater, you don't want the
34:28entire economy and environment and planet to be destroyed, do you? You care about the future.
34:34I mean, I'd believe the global warming stuff if people were tackling the national debt, right?
34:40And if they're not tackling the national debt, then they don't care about the future and they
34:44don't care about a good environment for their children. They just don't. It's just foundational,
34:48right? I mean, tackling the national debt would not prove that global warming is true, but it
34:53would prove that people cared about the future of the world. But they don't. They don't. So
35:01the appearance of virtue, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,
35:08smuggling coercive control in under the guise of empathy, compassion, and morality,
35:15is how the devil does his work. How the devil does his work. Therefore take up the whole armor
35:23of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.
35:30And of course it's all in preparation for great moral temptations, right? All of this is in
35:36preparation because there will come a time, and probably more than one, it happens more and more
35:42the more virtuous you are, but there will come a time when the devil will slide up to you under
35:51the guise of an angel and will say to you, this is the path to goodness. This is the path to goodness.
36:00And a lot of life is preparation for that moment. And depending on how you respond to that moment,
36:08the devil either comes back stronger or stays away and tries to silence you from the world.
36:14Because the devil does not want you as an example of resisting the devil because that will embolden
36:19and strengthen others. I would imagine that most of the people who we deplatformed were
36:24first tempted with money and power and status, but they resisted and the deplatforming is to
36:32hide their integrity from view so the people are not strengthened in this battle that Ephesians
36:38is talking about. All right, I hope that makes sense. I really do appreciate your time, care,
36:43thoughts, and attention. Your support is most gratefully and humbly accepted at freedomain.com
36:47slash donate. Lots of love from up here my friends. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.