Culture of the Kingdom

Today I wanted to talk to you about culture. Our culture, the culture of the land that we live in, the culture that we have become accustomed to, and the culture that we deal with every day. Draw some comparisons for you and draw your attention to some of the things that our culture leads us into and some of the things that it should not or we need to be aware of. When I say culture, I know that you all know what I'm talking about. We all know the American culture. We are all aware of what America stands for. For some of us who have been around a while, what America stands for today and her culture is much different than it was back 30, 40, 50 years ago. You know what I'm talking about. When I talk about the culture of the kingdom of God today, I hope you understand what that is because the culture of the kingdom of God will be far, far different than the culture of America today. Every country and every group has its own culture. We work in different places and I know even among companies you can have different cultures. Some places that I worked, I very much enjoyed the culture. It was a little more serious and down to business. Other places were, I don't know, just more loose and more whatever. Different to my personality, but you've zoomed workplaces. Groups, companies, people have cultures. Cultures tell us a lot about each other and tell us a lot about what's going on in that land. We think about China, we think about their culture, we think about Japan, we think about their culture, we think about the Middle East, we think about their culture. They're not all cultures that we would be very comfortable in. We're very comfortable in America. We should be becoming more comfortable as we develop the culture of God in our home, in our churches, and as the kingdom of God approaches. But, you know, we can identify culture and it has several components in it and identifying characteristics of the people. I just wanted to kind of run a few of those with you here as I begin. One of the ways that we can look at the culture of people is by the values, by the values that a people have or have. You know, we can, you know, what do they stand for? When you look at a country, what are they made of? What are their morals? What do they consider right and wrong? Do they abide by the law of the land? What is it that they do? And we can look at our culture in America and we can look at it and say it's a changing culture. It used to be more of an abode-abiding land. It used to have been closer to some of the moral principles in the Bible, but when we look at it today, we see a changing culture and we see one that is leading more toward lawlessness and going away from the law of the land and discounting what the norms have been.

We can look at those values and we can be assessed, you know, is there integrity in the land? Is there someone we want to deal with? I think America has long been seen as a good ally in the world. It has had values of sharing its wealth, of being able to watch out for the world and become the world watchdog and have others' interests at heart and not just our own interest. Those are good values to have. On the other hand, we can look at the values of a country and say that today, today, the moral values and the moral fabric of the country is denigrating and almost non-existent anymore as we live in a anything-goes type mentality. So the values of a country say about it and as we look at the values in America today and contrast those to the values that will be in the kingdom of God, we see this deep gulf and this widening gulf between the two.

We can look at the standards of a people. What standard do they adhere to? Is it a culture that expects excellence? Is it a standard that promotes hard work? A culture that promotes quality and that expects the best out of people and rewards the best for people? Or is it a culture that, you know, that was good enough, that's good enough, just enough to get by, that's all we care about?

Some countries, some nations have that part of their culture, that standard that they adhere to. America has always had a standard of excellence, a standard of quality, a standard of improvement, not standing on the status quo, always looking to improve. And that goes along with what the Bible has. When God looks at the culture that we should be or we look at the Bible and see the culture we should be living in, God expects us not to be sitting on the status quo. Shouldn't be people are saying, I'm good enough, I've changed enough, I've transformed enough, God has gotten enough out of me, the way I am now is the way I want to be and I am pleased with it. No, God is always working with us. God is always purifying us. He is always promoting in us change and purification and adhering to a standard of excellence that He expects, just like His Son Jesus Christ. We turn back to Ephesians 4. Ephesians 4 and verse 13, we see the standard that He would have us adhere to written back here in the chapter that talks about His church and how He has it established.

Back in Ephesians 4, we can pick it up.

In verse 12, and He talks about the structure of the church, the body that He has put us all into, body where He develops us and molds us into what He wants us to be. In verse 12, He says He does this for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the work of service, because we are all called to serve and be servants to Him and servants to each other, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying or the building up of the body of Christ, ever building up, ever improving, ever getting closer to the standard He set, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the wholeness of Christ. Well, that's part of our culture. It should be part of our culture at home, part of our culture here. Part of our culture will be part of the culture of the Kingdom of God when it is on earth and Jesus Christ is reigning on earth, and you and I are working with Him to teach and to help people attain what He wants us to attain to. Back in Psalm 78-72, kind of a summary of the first two points, you know, God looked at a man in the Bible, David, and said, this is a man after my own heart. In Psalm 78, verse 72, the verse that has always warmed my heart in thinking about David and also one that's always been a challenge that we could adhere to, because David was one who adhered and who lived the culture of God.

You know, he prayed sometimes, and he had to correct himself and change course and go on the way. But here's what God said to him in a nice verse that I would hope that all of us would want him to say about us one day. You know, God took him and trained him through the various many things that he went through, and there were so many things in David's life that he endured.

Some he may have thought along the way, like, you know, it's not fair to us, but he did it all. And in verse 72, it says, So he, speaking of David, so he shepherded them, Israel as their king, he shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart.

He had the values of God. He developed them over time, and he exhibited them, and when people saw David, they knew what he stood for. Maybe not always in the early days, but they, as he became older and as he was king and established, they knew when David says this, David means it.

David is going to stand by God. David is going to do what God wants him to do. He shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart, and he guided them by the skillfulness of his hands. He worked hard. He developed. He developed the physical skills that he needed. He became a person that God could look at, the person that he would want you and I to become. Developing our physical abilities, working hard, always improving ourselves, but also doing it with integrity.

We have both sides of the equation there as he looks at us. People in a culture, as he looks at us individually, looks at our homes, looks at our church, looks at what he's building here, and this pill building the temple that he's building among us.

Is he building it, and are we allowing him and are we conscious that we are to be building it with integrity and with values? Another thing we can look at when we look at cultures is, what are the priorities of a culture? You know, in America, we can look at what are our priorities? You know, other lands, when they look at America, and they look at us and they see our entertainment, they see our media, they see our newscasts.

In a world that's become shrunk in size and we can see each other's things, they look into America and they see priorities that they don't agree with. You know, they may have different priorities, and judging in the way humans do, they look at us and say, their priorities are all askew.

And they look at us and say, their values are all askew. And their standards are changing, and not what they used to be. People can see us by what do we spend most of our time in? What is the thing that drives us? What entertainment do we watch? What media are we watching? What are the things that when we have free time, what do we do with it?

Where's our priorities? When we look at America, our priorities have far changed. Is it God? No, it's not God in America. God is far, far, far down the list if he's even on the list. Entertainment, leisure, stock markets, you can name the things that are priorities for America far different than what the culture of the kingdom would be, because the priorities in the kingdom are going to be God. Number one, not even a question about it. Matthew 6, 33 tells us, our culture, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Seek Him first. He's the priority. He's the one we look to for deliverance, for salvation, for protection, for guidance, for instruction, for helping us through the problems and trials in life. And if we look anywhere else besides Him first, we're probably going to experience or not have that great of an experience. Our culture have God as a priority, far different than what America has today.

And we all live in this culture, so we're kind of all used to God as not being part of the culture around us. Our friends don't talk about it. We don't talk about it in workplaces. We certainly don't hear about it on TV. We certainly don't see any of the values that are associated with the Bible, promoted anywhere on TV anymore, and the things that are going on. And another one that I want to spend some time on today. You can tell a culture a little bit about them by the things that they celebrate.

The things that they celebrate. You know, some cultures, well, every culture has holidays in it. And you can learn a lot about a country by looking at what the type of holidays and how they celebrate it is. I'm not familiar much with China, but I know they've got a Chinese New Year's, and I know they've prayed around with these dragons and whatever the animal of the year is, and it seems kind of silly to me. And I look at that, and I think, that's a funny thing. But to them, it's just part of everyday life.

Of course, it's a land that doesn't know God the Father, doesn't know the true God. It's been steeped in pagan religion for a long time, and so it kind of makes sense that they would do things that just would seem strange to us. You know, here in America, we have holidays. We have holidays all sorts of holidays. And when we look at our holidays, we can break them down into three different categories, if you want. All of us kind of enjoy having the days off of holidays, and I hope that on some of these holidays that have some national significance, we might actually spend some time thinking about what went on. But in America, we have, we have secular holidays, not tied to any religion, but tied to American history, if you will, and notable people in our history or notable events in our history. We have things like President's Day. Now, we might think of people like Washington and Lincoln. We have Martin Luther King Day. We might think about what he did and how he helped change the fabric of America and the things that he had said. We have Veterans Day, and we realize the sacrifice that veterans have made as they have gone and fought the various wars that we have. We have Memorial Day, another day where I hope maybe we stop and think about the land we've lived in, because, you know, God has been very instrumental in this land. He has protected it. He has guided it. You read through some of the things and the things and the occasions of war, and you can see God's hand as he has blessed this country enormously, and you and I are the benefactors of that. And we could be very appreciative of that. We have a Fourth of July in the Independence Day, and all of us live and enjoy the benefits of freedom and what those men back then saw in a world that didn't have any freedoms at all the way that we enjoy them today. But we have others as well. We have Labor Day. We have, what did I miss here? Columbus Day. We have Thanksgiving. All of these rooted in American history, significant events that when we have that day off, then we celebrate that day, however we celebrate it, and however we observe it, whatever we think about those things. And we might draw our attention to us. You know, God recognizes that nations have their own holidays. He said, he said, His holy days in order, and back in Leviticus 23, he said the days that His culture, in His kingdom, will be celebrated. But there are nations today, and nations and examples we can see in the Bible, where these secular holidays are not a problem for us to enjoy. Let's go back to the book of Esther. The book of Esther. And you remember, as I turned there, and as you turned there, the story of Esther, she found herself queen. She had hidden her true identity from the king, but there came a time in her life when that was going to be revealed. And there had been a plot by Haman to exterminate all the Jews in the land.

Esther was a Jew by background, and she found herself in a tough situation. Would she approach the king, which alone could mean death to her? Would she reveal her identity, her heritage, which could mean death to her? Or would she say secret and allow the people to be exterminated? Well, you know what she chose. She chose rightly. After fasting, she chose to reveal herself and go to the king. And he looked on her, and the plot was foiled. And the Jews were delivered. Of course, God looked on Esther and looked on her uncle Mordecai and blessed their decisions in what they had done. And to remember this tremendous occasion where God delivered the Jews, a national day of remembrance was put in place. Esther 9 and in verse 26, the preceding verses kind of recount the story of Esther there. But it's setting the stage for a national day for Judea and the Jews to remember this event, this notable event of God intervening in their history. Verse 26 says, So they called these days Purim, after the name Pur. Therefore, because of all the words of this letter that Mordecai sent out that said, Let's keep this day, let's keep this as a national day of remembrance, a national day to celebrate for the rest of time. Let's remember this day. Let's remember what God had done. Therefore, because of all the words of this letter, what they had seen concerning this matter, what had happened to them, the Jews established and imposed it upon themselves and their descendants, and all who would join them, that without fail they would celebrate these two days every year according to the written instructions, according to the prescribed time, that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every family, every province, and every city, that these days of Purim should not fail to be observed among the Jews, and that the memory of them should not perish among their descendants.

God was okay with that. Even in the days of Jesus Christ, even today, the Jews still celebrate Purim. It's a significant event in their history. Not a problem with it. Just like it's not a problem remembering some of the notable things that have happened in America through the years, and thinking about those things, and as the nation gives us that day off to enjoy whatever we enjoy on those days, to think about those things, there's nothing wrong with it. From time to time, someone will say, that's adding to the Bible. It's not adding to the Bible. It's adding to the national heritage. The Jews did it here, and God didn't condemn it. In fact, in Jesus Christ's day, not only this day, but another day that He was alive through, He didn't condemn. It's okay to have those days when they're founded in something good, in something uplifting, in something noble, in something high, in something mighty, in something that references and makes us realize God is involved. God is involved, and He has intervened on our behalf, and He has had a hand in the things that we do.

Let's go back to Zachariah, or forward, forward to the book of Zachariah. Zachariah chapter 8.

Speaking of the future, we read in verse 19. God is referencing some of the things that the Jews do, because they had other days. I mean, they kept the Sabbath, they kept God's holy days, they kept Purim, and they had other days that they routinely kept. Verse 19 says, Thus says the eternal of hosts, the fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth. Now, the Jews had a way of maybe celebrating or observing something a little different than we would. To them, a fast was a way of observing, and these fasts, if you look back in the commentaries and some of the history of the Jews, you see, these were fasts that they did that commemorated something in their history.

You can go back and look those up, but they were routinely keeping these things. And God says, the fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, the fast of tenth, these things that you're keeping.

It was a hard time for them then. The fast day is never really pleasant, unless we're remembering what the purpose of the fast is and asking God to help us get the yoke off of ourselves and clear our own minds so that we can be who He wants us to be. But He says, these fasts shall be joy and gladness and cheerful feasts. I'm going to turn these fasts into something that you will be joyous in, that you will rejoice in, that you will enjoy celebrating in.

He doesn't say He's going to do away with them. He doesn't condemn it and say, you should never have been keeping these things. The only thing you needed to keep were my holy days. Well, we do need to keep His holy days. That's all we keep. That's fine. But He was not condemning the Jews here. He said, I'm going to turn those fasts that you do, that you routinely do, that have some momentum to you and your country.

They're going to be turned into joy, joy and gladness and cheerful feasts for the house of Judah. Therefore, love, truth, and peace. Look forward to those days. Jesus Christ Himself, we learned back in John 10, was alive when another Jewish holiday was being celebrated during His time in John 10 in verse 22. Jesus Christ, if you have the red letter Bible, you can see where He was speaking before and after that.

And in the narrative here, it says, it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem and it was winter. There He was. Feast of Dedication. Today we know it is Hanukkah. From time to time, people ask me, should we be celebrating Hanukkah? No. No. We don't need to keep Hanukkah. We're not the Jewish nation.

We're not Israel. We're not them. That was theirs. No more than the nation of Israel would keep Memorial Day or Presidents' Day or anything like today. That was their national holiday. But Jesus Christ was wrong at that time. And you remember what Hanukkah pictured, right? Hanukkah pictured the time when Judas Maccabeus came in and he restored the temple to his grace after Antiochus and Ephesus had come in and absolutely decimated the Jewish religion and way of life.

He wanted to completely obliterate it. He came into that temple. He sacrificed pigs. He smeared it all over the place. He was trying to eradicate Judaism from there. And Judas Maccabeus came in and restored it. And they knew that God's hand was in it. And so they still keep Hanukkah today. This is what they were observing back here in chapter 10 and verse 22 as Jesus Christ walked among them. He never condemned it. He never condemned it.

It was a holiday that was rooted in something high and noble and looking to God and knowing that God had intervened in those things. Nothing wrong with having those remembrances. God is involved in our lives. God is involved in the things that we do. And for them, for them, Hanukkah was a day. Now, Hanukkah was celebrated much differently back in the Jewish days of these days than it is today.

Today has become very much Romanized and Christmas presents have had an effect on that holiday. So it becomes more of a quasi-Christmas than it is Hanukkah. And I think more of the Jews just look at it as their Christmas anymore than they do what it really was supposed to mean. So, no, I'm not advocating any of us should keep it. We absolutely shouldn't.

It is not kept in America the way it was kept back in the time of Jesus Christ. But my point is, these days are okay. It's part of how a nation celebrates. So when we look at the Jews and the examples that God gave us, their holidays were rooted in something that is good to remember. They kind of inspire. They kind of make us recall. When we look at our holidays in America, the Memorial Day, the Veterans Day, the Columbus Day, they do the same thing for us.

They help us see things that are high and good. Well, there's some of those days, you know, another set of the holidays we have. We could classify as family holidays. We have Mothers and Fathers Day. Not established by any church. Not done by no background other than it was to be a mother, honor your mother, and honor your father. And so, today, we have Mothers and Fathers Day.

And we have a commandment that we all adhere to, honor your father and mother. It goes along with that. So if you keep Mothers and Fathers Day, not saying you have to, you keep it in the right way, and it doesn't get out of hand. Not a problem with it. But then we have this other set of holidays, and this other set of holidays that are federal holidays that we have days off for, and that the nation goes crazy over. When you look at the dollars spent on holidays in America and how we celebrate, the vast majority of our dollars are set in this other set of holidays that are nationally recognized. And those would be religiously-based holidays. Days like New Year's, days like Valentine's Day, days like Easter, days like…trying to go through the calendar here…days like Halloween, days like Christmas. But they're not secular at all.

They've all been promoted by one church, and the whole world follows those holidays, and they celebrate those days. And that's what we do in America. Billions and billions of dollars spent in celebrating those holidays, and when you ask someone what the highlight of their year is, rarely are you going to hear. Oh, it's Memorial Day. Oh, it's Presidents' Day. No, no, no. They're going to tell you one of those days they spend, because that's part of the culture of America, not rooted in anything of God. Part of the culture of America that is so different than the culture of the kingdom of God, it is absolutely mind-boggling. You couldn't be more opposite if you tried.

And America's culture is defined largely by those days. By those days. Before I get into this a little more, let's go back and look at a few scriptures that I just kind of want you to recall and think about as we go through this. Let's look back at Deuteronomy 12.

Deuteronomy 12. These are probably memory verses to many of you. Deuteronomy 12 and verses 20 and 8. I don't think that's verse 29. Now, I have to remember, when God speaks to His people, Israel in Old Testament, He's speaking to His people then. He's speaking to us now. The same things that apply to these, to them in these days, the same principles apply to us.

Chapter 12, verse 29, It shall be when the Lord your God has brought you into the land, which you go to possess, that you shall put the blood ... I'm in the wrong chapter. That's it. So, it probably is verse 28. Let me see.

Yes, verse 29. 12-29. When the eternal your God cuts off from before you, the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land. When you kind of look around and take you into the promised land and you see how these other people live, He goes, take ye to yourself, that you are not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed from before you, and that you don't inquire after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods?

I'll do the same. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way. For every abomination to the Lord which He hates they have done to their gods. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. God says, Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it. You shall not add to it or not take away from it. When you worship Me, you worship Me exactly the way that I said. Don't add to, don't take away. Don't look at the gods of other nations and say, Well, that's kind of clever. That's kind of cute. That looks kind of funny. Why can't we just apply that in to the way that we do the things as well? And with the reasoning of today, as long as we have God's name on it, as long as we have Christ's name on it, isn't He pleased that we're just thinking about Him?

The answer is absolutely not. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Let's go to Jeremiah 10.

Jeremiah 10, verse 2.

Jeremiah, this is on the other side of Israel's history and Judah's history. Jeremiah has been prophesied to Judah for 40 years that if they don't turn back to God, if they don't do the things that He says to do, that they will be taken captive, they will lose the land that He had given them. And in verse 2, chapter 10, Jeremiah warns, he says, Thus says the Eternal, Do not learn the way of the Gentiles. Don't learn the way of the heathen. Don't look at the people that worship different gods. Don't learn their ways. And then the ensuing verses, he talks about things that are very familiar to us when we see the customs of the people are the trees that they cut down, the trees they decorate, the trees that they bow down to, the trees that they worship. It doesn't take any kind of real leap here to realize we have the same thing going on with us today as being described in Jeremiah 10. But God said, Don't learn. Don't learn their ways. In Matthew 15, verse 9, to read the whole sentence beginning here in verse 8, Jesus Christ, upgrading the Pharisees, He calls them hypocrites. They say that they are following God. They say they are following the Bible, but they were practicing a religion that was far different than what God had intended. Jesus Christ practiced the true religion. They hated Him for it. In verse 8, He says this, These people draw near to Me with their mouth. They say the right things. They call on God. They give these prayers to Him and whatever. They have people drawn near to Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. They are not really doing what I asked them to do. They are not really following Me with their heart. They are just giving Me lip service.

In vain, they worship Me teaching His doctrines the commandments of men.

It is futile what they are doing. It is empty what they are doing. They think they are worshiping Me by doing these things. They are not. They are following the things of men. They are not following the things of God. Their culture has become that way. Just like our culture has become that way. Many, many, many will put God's name on holidays, will put Christ's name on holidays and say, God, aren't we honoring You by doing that? Not at all. Finally, back in 2 Corinthians 6. 2 Corinthians 6 and verse 17. Paul, Paul who had to work with a group of Gentile churches, heathen churches, people who lived in a culture that was anything but God-oriented, God of the Bible-oriented, they came out of a pagan culture. They came out of a society that was given to all sorts of different things that they grew up with and just thinking it was okay. Just imagine the education that those people had to do that were a part of all those feasts, all those pagan origins, all those pagan rites that they went through. Paul told them, in a very difficult thing for them, to think and choose and distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, to leave a culture that they had grown up in and have to come to the culture of the kingdom of God. He says in verse 17, to them, come out from among them and be separate. The same thing he would tell you and me. We come out from a culture in America that's different than the culture of the kingdom of God. It may sound similar in some ways, but it's different. And he says, come out from among them and be separate. Don't touch what is unclean, unclean, and I will receive you. Don't even touch it.

Don't get close to it. Don't warm up to it. Don't think it's okay to cuddle up next to it, and as long as you don't do this and draw a line here, don't touch it. Leave it behind. Leave it behind, and don't follow those ways. So today, in America, we've all grown up with, and even if we've been in the church 30, 40, 50, 60 years, we live in a culture that every year we hear about religious holidays that are the antithesis of what God stood for. Back in the fall, we talked about Halloween. Halloween. Billions of dollars spent each year on Halloween. Little kids look forward to it. In schools, I know our young people have to face that all the time. Halloween parties and this and that. What are you going dressed up as? It's a tough time of the year. And we talked about Halloween, and what does Halloween represent? Because when we celebrate these days, we need to look and see, what is it that it's referring us back to? What are the things that we do? Remember, we talked about Halloween. It's the ancient festival of Samwan, and it talked about evil spirits.

It talked about the dead coming back to haunt the people that are alive. People lived in fear so much that they would leave out treats for the evil spirits to ward them off.

Does that sound like something uplifting? Does that sound like something that we would want to celebrate each year? Is that something we would want in our homes to be close to? Or that we would when we understand, this is what we're celebrating? This is what our culture is. We're celebrating evil spirits. We're celebrating the dead coming back to life and haunting people.

And we learn that in the Wiccan religion, that today Halloween is one of their eight Holy Days.

Not one of God's Holy Days, but a religious Holy Day that has its beginnings and its origins in another religion, a false religion. We're here in the month of February, and in just, what, a little over a week? We'll be looking at Valentine's Day. I'm sure if I was out in stores, I'd be seeing all the Valentine cards and all the Valentine's candy that I could buy. And I'm sure all of you have been exposed to that. And I know our kids at school are exposed to that all the time. Some people would say, a harmless day. All it is is, you know what, we just want to make a friend, give me a Valentine, whatever. But what are we doing? These holidays have a basis in them. It's been a while. Just like with Halloween, it's been a while since I looked at some of these things about how these days were originated and what they mean. So, I want to just spend a couple minutes here going through some of the things about Valentine's Day, because it has a basis here that we should all understand. And when God looks at these holidays, He sees what they mean, what we're really celebrating, what when children give one Valentine's card to another, or they paint a little picture of Cupid, what they're really harkening back to. And as we face those things as parents, and as we face those things at the workplace and whatever, to remember what it is, to remember what it is that God sees that we're celebrating and that we may be coming close to touching. Well, there were two major festivals, if you remember, back in Roman pagan times. Saturnalia was one. We've talked about Christmas, and you know all about Christmas and its pagan origins. Here's what Britannica and History.com say about another Roman festival that was wildly, and I do mean wildly popular back in the Roman days and even before dating back to the sixth century BC. So, celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15th, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus. To begin the festival, members of the Lupercae, which was an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf called a Luper. The name came from. Already kind of weird, right? So, the priests would sacrifice the goat for fertility and the dog for purification. They would then strip the goats' hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood of the dog, and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Now, can you imagine if that festival was doing the same thing today? I mean, the media would have a heyday, right? I mean, rightly, some of the things have come out about how abused. So, here they were, running around the streets, whipping women with this thing. So, it's just when you think about it, it's almost laughable. Far from being fearful, it says, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women of the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name, and they would become paired for the year with this chosen woman. Not just to date, innocently, they became structural partners. Pick the name out of the urn, and they became sexual partners for the next year. And it says to soften it. Some of them got married later on.

But, now, there's the origin, later in the Britannic era, here in a minute. That's Feast of Lupercalia. That's the predecessor of Valentine's Day. And there's more to Valentine's Day as well. We'll talk about Cupid here in a minute, because there's an interesting little thing about him and these whips or these hides that they were doing. You look at that day, is that something to celebrate? Is that something that we would want to have part of our heritage and culture? Yeah, we want to remember those days, back in the pagan rites, when they believed that the fact that blood of goats and the blood of dogs could provide fertility, that it was right to go ahead and do these things. Is that something we would want to do, or would you more hang your head in shame that that was ever part of your culture, when you realize what it is? Can't justify anything that went on. Nothing in that festival in the Bible. All of it is wrong. Let me talk a little bit about Cupid here. It says, "...essential in the face of you, Lupercalia, was a god known as Cupid. He appears as an innocent little character, but he has his past in pagan gods. In Roman mythology, Cupid's mother was Venus. Now, Venus was a god of love. She was the patron, I guess, patron god or whatever, of Corinth. Corinth was a debauched city. I mean, it was promiscuous, it was licentious, it was kind of Las Vegas of its day. And when you went there, and everything went, but they did it in honor of Venus, because that's what she stood for. Cupid was the son, in mythology, of Venus. Venus and Cupid were associated with Lupercalia, the pagan mid-February festival of purification and fertility that foreshadowed the modern Valentine's Day. As part of the festivities, Lupercai, nearly naked young boys, smeared with the blood of sacrificed dogs and goats, ran through the streets, flailing women with whip-like thongs. You've heard this. You know what those whip-like thongs were called? February. F-E-B-R-U-A.

Wonder where ever wondered whether month February got its name? F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y. I never knew that, but I don't think I'll ever forget it now. Every time I write February, indelibly etched. Just so shows how far paganism and the origins are even in our society.

I heard what Dave talked about, that Satan has his devices and he intertwines his things and he was a belief into our life. It's always there. We always have to be aware of what he is up to. Okay. That's bad enough. What the Catholic Church did, and I will call them out, what the Catholic Church did with these two festivals, Lupercalia and Saturnalia, goes right against what we read in Deuteronomy 12. When they Christianized Rome, they decided, rather than tell the people, you can't do that anymore, something that the Apostle Paul clearly told the Gentiles, you can't do that anymore. You can't have your old thesis anymore. You can't do things the way you did anymore. You have to do it God's way. They instead said, you know what, let's just let the people do what they want to do and put a different name on it and that'll make it okay. Is it biblical?

No. So we have the process of what is going on in those days, what they actually mean, but we also have what the Church had done and how they became holidays that we look at today and are part of our culture, the antithesis of what the Bible would say. That Church, that Church defied the Bible, that Church has brought upon us days that we cannot justify in any way, shape, or form.

Let me read this from the fall, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. He says, after the conversion of the Imperial City, Rome, the Christians still continued in the month of February, the annual celebration of the Lupercalia, to which they ascribed a secret and mysterious influence on the genial powers of the animal and vegetable world. They just continued in that way. There was something about it that kind of mystified them that intrigued them. They liked that festival and they weren't about to go to get away from it. So when we look at Valentine's Day and we look at the name February anymore, is that something God would say that's going to be part of the culture? No, nothing. And in our homes and in our workplaces and whatever we do, God says, be aware of what these things mean. What do you celebrate? What do you touch?

Now, I didn't intend to get into this next one, but as I was researching this, I found out this Lupercalia has kind of like tentacles. It has its feet and other days that we're going to hear about. One of them is Mardi Gras. Everyone's heard of Mardi Gras, right? Now, Mardi Gras is kind of like more modern-day Corinth, I think. I've never been to Mardi Gras. I never wanted to go to Mardi Gras. I've always had a negative feeling about it, but the pictures I've seen, the stories I've heard, I thought, that is what place you would want to stay as far away from as physically possible. It is modern-day Corinth in action. Mardi Gras has its roots in Lupercalia. Listen to this from either Britannic or History.com. According to historians, Mardi Gras dates back thousands of years to pagan celebrations of spring and fertility, including the raucous Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Lupercalia. When Christianity arrived in Rome, the dignitaries of the early church decided it would be more prudent to incorporate certain aspects of such rituals into the new faith rather than attempt to abolish them altogether. This granted a Christian interpretation to the ancient custom and the carnival, as they call that time, became a time of abandon and merriment, which preceded the Lenten period. Of course, Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter. During this time, there would be feasting, which lasted several days, and participants would indulge in voluntary madness by donning masks, clothing themselves into likeness of specters, and generally giving themselves up to the Bacchus and Venus. Ah, those gods. Doing the things that those gods would have them do. All aspects of pleasure were considered to be allowable during the carnival celebration, and today's modern festivities are thought by some to be more reminiscent of the Roman Saturnalia than even Lupercalia, or be linked to even earlier pagan festivals. And then it talks about Fat Tuesday. I guess I never realized that Fat Tuesday is actually the translation of Mardi Gras. It is believed to have come from the ancient pagan custom of parading a fat ox through the town streets. Such pagan holidays were filled with excessive eating, drinking, and general baudiness prior to a period of fasting. Wow! Do I need to go through any scriptures to show that's not biblical?

Everything about that festival, that people... and it's actually a legal holiday in the state of Louisiana. A legal holiday. And yet, that's what when we celebrate, and it's celebrated, and people go to it, they may not realize and understand it, but God looks at it as, that's what you're celebrating. That's debauchery, that's depravity, that's paganism. That's what those days represent.

Paul was faced with all those things. Those people were really participating in those things that came out of the church in Corinth, and out of the church in Galatia, and out of the churches of those Gentile churches. They had to go and leave those things behind. But when the Catholic church came along and they labeled it Christian, they said, you don't have to give it up. Even though the Bible said, you must give it up. So we have a double whammy on these things that we look at. It's wrong in every sense of the word, not anything that any culture that's thinking would ever celebrate. Certainly not anyone who has the culture of God, or the kingdom of God, that they're working on in their homes and in their lives, and that we're developing here as a body of Christ. You know, if you take Lupercalia a bit further, it mentions Mardi Gras and Lent, that leads up to the period of Lent. And if you look through the encyclopedias, you will find that there's a God named Tamuz, a God named Tamuz that's associated with Lent. And there's a story about him. He was married to the goddess Ishtar. Everyone's heard of Ishtar, right? She appears in the Bible. Actually, Tamuz appears in the Bible. And the story goes between Tamuz and Ishtar. He was killed, and when he was buried, the world became just... it just became unproductive. People were no longer appropriating. All the vegetation ceased to produce. And so Ishtar was so brokenhearted, and she saw what had happened when Tamuz was never there. She said, for six months of the year, I'll trade places with you. I'll go down where you are. You need to rise up so that the world can come back to life again. And, of course, that was around springtime, around the spring equinox.

And so, leading up to Lent are the forty days that some say are associated with the days in the Bible that we talk about here back in Ezekiel 8. The talk about weeping for Tamuz. So let's go back to Ezekiel 8 and see that even back in the Jewish times, even back in the time that Judah was there, they let some of these customs into their life. Just like modern-day Israel has embraced them in so many ways. Ezekiel 8... I'm not going to read all of Ezekiel 8. Let's pick it up in verse...

verse 5. Ezekiel 8, verse 5. Ezekiel here is in a vision. God picks them up and says, And he said to me, Son of man, lift your eyes now toward the north. So Ezekiel says, I lifted my eyes toward the north, and there, north of the altar gate, was this image of jealousy and the entrance. And he said to me, Son of man, do you see what they're doing? The great abominations that the house of Israel commits here... The great abominations that the house of Israel commits here... the house of Israel, you remember, had already been taken into captivity at this point. Do you see what they're doing to make me go far away from my sanctuary? When God sees these things happening, He leaves. He's not going to be part of any of these things that go on that have their basis in paganism and in the basis of denying His word and going against it. So he brought me to the door of the court, verse 7, and when I looked, there was a hole in the wall, and He said to me, Son of man, dig into the wall. And when I dug into the wall, there was a door. And He said to me, Go in, see the wicked abominations which they're doing there. So I went in and saw in there every sort of creeping thing, abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed all around on the walls. And there stood before them seven of the men of the elders of the house of Israel, and in their midst stood Jez and I, the son of Chapin.

Each man had a sensor in his hand, and a thick cloud of incense went up.

I remember when I was growing up. My family on my dad's side was all Catholic. And so we would go to funerals, and always through the funeral procession, the priest would be there leading the incense, and you would just watch the smoke going up around it.

I don't know exactly what it means, but this reminds me every time I read the verse of what I saw back then that is still going on today. God says to Ezekiel, Look what they are doing!

And He says to me, Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark?

Every man in the room of His idols. For they say, The Lord doesn't see us. He's not watching.

No one can see us. We're kind of doing it in secret. We're getting really close to these things out there. But that's okay. He doesn't see us. Verse 13, he said to me, turn again, and you'll see greater abominations that they are doing. So He brought me to the door of the north gate of the eternal house. And to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for temus.

They were there observing this ritual of the pagans, weeping for temus, waiting for him to be resurrected in the spring so things could come back to life. And that's what they were weeping for.

And the Lenten period and Easter, and I could go into so much more, and I'm not going to take the time to do it. You can go online and learn all this stuff yourself through separate secular sources, and not just what the church literature is, but you see that all these things, and some of them trace back to Nimrod of all people. And it's part of the land, and when these things happen and they're all around us, it's a continuation. Now we know the culture of the kingdom of God is not going to be rooted in weeping for the son of temus. The culture of the kingdom of God is in the forty days of weeping and fasting for Jesus Christ. The culture of the kingdom of God is keeping the Passover, preparing for the Passover, getting ourselves ready, looking at ourselves through the standards that the Bible says, looking at ourselves through the eyes of God's Word, and getting ourselves ready so that when He returns, we can be there, and doing things the way that He said. Not just weeping for some pagan idol following through on some kind of ritual that has existed from time to kind of counterfeit what God is working in this time, in the life that we live in and that we see the world around us in this culture, just borrowing from and living for totally.

Did I mention that Paul was in an environment when he went to these Gentile churches that those people lived it. They knew what Lupercalia was, they knew what Saturnalia was, Jesus Christ knew what it was as He walked the earth. Paul had to work with those people, and he was pretty clear with them. He was pretty clear with them, you can't do that. The way they celebrate, you don't celebrate. You celebrate the way God celebrates. Let's look back at a few of Paul's words and the light of some of this what we know about these holidays today, that the world embraces, that our culture embraces. But back in 1 Corinthians 5, we find Paul faced with something in the culture of Corinth that maybe the people didn't really take too much stock in. It was an immoral society by everyone's count. You can look at everything on the earth. This is a pretty immoral culture. They had temple prostitutes. It was kind of seen as okay to do whatever you wanted to do was okay.

And those people came, they were just kind of schooled in that. So much like us, who today our culture says, premarital sex is okay, same sex is okay, whatever you do with anyone is okay.

And so we could find ourselves kind of in the same situation that the Corinthians found here, because they had someone in their midst who was living in a way that was far different than what the standards and the culture of the Church of God would be. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul, he hears about this. He writes to him and he says, you know, there's reported that there's someone living among you in such a manner that even the Gentiles don't do. This is that bad, but you're tolerating it. They were just kind of used to it. They just kind of left it. But he has to let him know, this doesn't happen in the culture of the Church. This doesn't happen in the culture of the kingdom. This doesn't happen. It may happen all around you. It may be something you're used to, but it doesn't happen in the Church of God. It can't be tolerated in the Church of God. That's not the standards we adhere to. It's not the priorities we set. It's not the values we hold. It's not the way we celebrate. And down in verse 9 of chapter 5, he draws some distinctions to them because they live in a difficult time, just like you and I live in a difficult time, where our culture is widening the gap between what we believe and what the world's values and culture is. In verse 9, he says, I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Well, it's something that he had written even before, apparently, this letter that we have in 1 Corinthians. I wrote to that, but apparently it was misunderstood. And he clears it up. He says, yet I certainly didn't mean with the sexually immoral people of this world or with the covenants or extortioners or idolaters, so that you would need to go out of the world. Well, I didn't mean that because that's their culture. You live in it, Jesus Christ said. It's not my will that you take them out of the world, Father. They need to be in the world but not of the world. And that's what the Corinthian church does. And he's saying, no, no, no, but in the culture you've been called into, in the culture you're developing in your homes, he says, I was talking about that. We can't dictate the culture outside. We have to be aware of it. We have to draw a distinction between it. We have to work with people. We have to go to school with people. We have to be neighbors with people. We can't condemn them. We can't judge them. When God opens their minds, they'll understand what you and I do. He goes, but now I've written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother who is sexually immoral or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or an extortioner, not even to eat with such a person. Now, you look at those things. All the things that he lists there, that was happening in those feasts. Lupercalia and Sapranalia were all about eating and being drunk and revelry and immoral behavior. You can't do any of that. That's not us anymore. That's not the culture of the kingdom of God anymore. Over in chapter 6, he draws the comparison.

Morey says, don't you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don't be deceived. Neither fornicators, look at the feasts that they were accustomed to, look at their society, neither fornicators nor idolaters, look at what they were worshiping, look at what we worship, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.

That won't be part of that culture. And it shouldn't be part of our culture today.

And we read down in verse 18 here in the same chapter. He says, flee fornication. Chapter 10, verse 14, he reminds him, flee idolatry, get away from it!

And I'll remind you in 2 Corinthians 6, he says, come out of her. Don't be with him anymore. Don't even touch it. Don't get close to it. Don't coddle up to it. You don't know when it's going to raise up and bite you. And he would say the same words to us today, back in 1 Peter.

4, he was dealing with the same thing. He says to words that we can all identify with, words the Corinthians could identify with, words the Galatians could identify with, words the people down through history could identify with who are called by God and who follow Him and leave the culture of the world behind to adopt the culture of the kingdom. In 1 Peter 4 and verse 3, he says, we've spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles. We've spent enough of our past lifetime doing the will of the heathens. We've all done those things, he says. We've all participated in those things when we walked in lewdness, in lusts, in drunkenness, in revelries, in drinking parties, and in abominable idolatries. That was part of our past. He didn't say, well, let's just put a Christian name on it.

He says in regard to these, they think it's strange that you don't run with them in the same flood of dissipation and they speak evil of you. How come he doesn't do that anymore?

He used to love Lupercalia, and now he doesn't do it. He used to love Saturnalia, and now he doesn't do that anymore. He used to love Christmas, doesn't do that anymore. He used to think it was okay to be around Valentine's Day and Halloween and St. Patrick's Day and all these holidays of a different religion, that is, the antithesis of the religion of God and the religion of the Bible. What's wrong with him? What's changed? What's changed? Well, what's changed is we know truth. We know the future. We aspire to higher things. We have a different culture than the world around us. Let's go back to Philippians. Philippians 4.

This is what the culture, or part of the culture, the kingdom of God is. Part of the culture that we would celebrate. Part of the culture that we should inculcate into our lives, into our homes, and the things that we do. None of us are perfect at it, but we have to work on it, because it will be part of the culture of the kingdom of God. Finally, verse 8, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there's any virtue, and if there is anything praiseworthy, he says, meditate on these things.

Look to those things. Don't look to these things that speak nothing of values, that speak nothing of truth, that speak nothing of purity, that speak nothing of God, that are so far away from it that it's not even in the same, shouldn't even be used in the same sentence. It's not even on the same register. But God said for His people, don't keep the religious days of this false church.

Leave it behind. These pagan holidays, these pagan rituals that have now adopted a name, leave them behind. They're not of Me. But He did tell us that part of His culture is a series of religious holy days that we should celebrate. Things that He orchestrated and put in place before the foundation of the world. And in just a couple months, in less than a couple months, we'll be...

Here's how I found it. Why don't I look at that? Okay. Don't know that. Didn't know that was on. So, I heard me talking. I heard me say, hey, so, um, phones. Um, lost my train of thought now.

Well, Siri, you know, she never talks back to me when I talk to her, but this time she does. So, okay.

Yeah, God put into our culture a series of holy days. Those holy days don't speak of depravity. They don't speak of evil. They don't speak of glorifying that. They speak of the plan of God. They speak of Jesus Christ. They refer us to Him who is the one who our lives are even possible because of the sacrifice that He gave. We'll be keeping Passover. We'll be keeping the days of unleavened bread. Those things have real meaning. Meditate on those things. Celebrate those things. Let those elevate in our homes and in our hearts. Let's look forward to those things. That's what the future is made of. That's what the kingdom is made of. That's part of that culture. That should be part of our culture, these other things of the world that we have to deal with.

Part of what we can examine ourselves is the many things that we've talked about recently.

How are our relationships? What are we thinking of? Why are we getting too close to holidays and pagan rituals? How do we relate to one another? Another one that I think that I gave somewhere else before but I haven't given here yet. We'll talk about that in a few weeks. When we examine ourselves, where are we? Are we in the culture of God? Are we living that? Are we growing closer to those standards that God has set for us? The Holy Days will be upon us. One of the things that we can all look at and think about, and I include myself in it, and I'll conclude here in Revelation 18. As Paul said it, the Apostle John repeats it as well as he is here at the end of time.

And a system that has yet to come upon the earth, rightly named Babylon, that is going to encompass all of these things that we've spoken about. He says to this at the time of that time when that society will be judged and it will be gone, God will take care of it. Revelation 18.4, he gives us an admonition and he gives us a warning when he says, and it says, I heard another voice from heaven saying, come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins and lest you receive of her plagues.