Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - Where Are the Epstein Files?

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

In this episode, Pastor Allen confronts the silence surrounding one of the most chilling scandals of our time. The Epstein case wasn’t just about one man—it was a doorway into a network of wealth, power, and corruption that reaches into the highest levels of government, media, and global influence. He explores unsettling questions such as: Is there a connection between Epstein's client list and the State of Israel? What is Israel’s true significance—not just politically, but biblically, prophetically, and culturally? Why does this one nation remain at the center of so many global conflicts, conspiracies, and spiritual battles? Someone is working hard to keep the truth buried, but God's Word says, “There is nothing secret that will not be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17).__ "Simple Man" by Charlie Daniels - UMPG License #262673It’s up to us to bring God’s truth back into our culture. It may feel like an impossible assignment, but there’s much we can do. Join Pastor Allen Jackson as he discusses today’s issues from a biblical perspective. Find thought-provoking insight from Pastor Allen and his guests, equipping you to lead with your faith in your home, your school, your community, and wherever God takes you. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JsyO6ysUVGOIV70xAjtcm?si=6805fe488cf64a6d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-christianity-the-allen-jackson-podcast/id1729435597

Welcome to culture and Christianity. Our goal with this, as you know, is to take our faith outside the church and try to roll it into the world we live in so that our faith isn't separate or siloed or isolated. It's not theoretical. It's got to be worked out in the real world. So a lot of times I'm told I'm being political, although now the IRS has given me some freedom. Apparently churches can endorse political candidates. Gee, that's not going to create any confusion. But it's really a victory for free speech. I'll probably come back and do another podcast on that. I think we have the right to say what we want in the church is just like we should have the right in the public square to say whatever. And for the people who would chirp and say we get tax advantages, so to schools, so to universities, so to NGOs that get hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to do political business and their 501C3s. So the IRS ruling was a real victory, I think, for free speech in the church and the Christian community.

it's going to force us out of hiding a little bit. We've been sitting in our churches acting like we didn't notice Rome was burning. And now we don't really have that excuse. We'll have to use our voices. We don't have to. But that's not really the topic today. I really changed the schedule for the podcast and what they had planned. The news just seems a bit upside down.

If you can be more upside down than we've been. And I wanted to talk about some things. While we're doing this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about the Epstein fiasco and what's going on. with that and the roiling that it's done and the FBI and the Attorney General's office. And I really think that's kind of parallel with the whole Diddy trial and his freakoffs and what we don't know about those things. I want to talk a bit about all of that. We just had the one-year anniversary for the assassination attempt with President Trump or

then candidate Trump and Butler, PA. What we don't know about Thomas Crook. You know, there's some big gaps, folks, in the information that we're given, and there's just enough happening in a world, and we're busy enough at summertime. We're going to go to the lake or get our last vacation in before the kids go back to school that we don't pay attention. But I think we have to pay attention. But I want to start the session. I promise I'll come back to that before we go. But I want to start the session because somehow Israel and the Jewish people keep getting drug into this whole thing. It's rather bizarre to me how that happens.

but I've taken multiple phone calls this week from influential voices and people across the country asking me about the Jewish people and Israel and so I just want to take a minute I'm going to do just a bit of a Bible said the authority which I'm going to come, I'm a pastor at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day as a matter of fact

is why I think Israel matters. I think it's important that you know it and understand it. It's not simple. You know, not every answer that we would like is as simple as we want it to be, so we'll have to think a little bit. I'm going to give you some scripture passages. The good news about a format like this is you can stop it and write them down and do what you need to. But I think if you understand it from a biblical perspective, then you're better equipped to

interpret or unpack what's happening in the world. One of the unique aspects of our Bible is that it's a significant portion of it is prophetic literature. God tells us what we can anticipate in some ways about our futures. He doesn't give us every detail, but he gives us enough that we're not completely caught off guard. And I think on this topic, it's a very helpful matter, and we're too ignorant of Scripture, and it leaves us at a deficit. So here we go, why Israel matters. And spoiler alert, this really isn't political. It's not about petroleum.

I'm going to approach it from a biblical perspective. Israel and the Jewish people are not just another country or another group of people. And if you think of them that way, you're really avoiding, I think, big chunk of the scripture and what it has to say to us. So I want to walk you back into that, and I've got a bunch of pages of notes. I might have to flip through them here if I can't keep them straight because my prep time was a little abbreviated today, but maybe we start with just some simple scriptures. John chapter 4 in verse 22, Jesus is speaking, and he said, the Samaritans worship what you don't know, but we worship what we do know for salvation is from

the Jews. Mike drop. No Jewish people. no salvation. That's for everybody on planet Earth. Every spiritual blessing that I have, my entire spiritual inheritance, I owe to one people the Jewish people. That doesn't mean they're always right. That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. That doesn't mean they can't do evil. That simply means I owe them an enormous gratitude. My Lord and King, the one that I have chosen to worship, that I have sworn allegiance of my life to, that I'm trusting for my eternity, in case you don't know is an observant Jewish rabbi. So that forces me to deal with the Jewish people and the nation of Israel in something of a different way.

It's not just an Old Testament. It's not just a Hebrew Bible concept. Ephesians 3-6 says this mystery is that through the gospel, the good news about Jesus, that's the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, shares together, in the promise of Christ Jesus. There's not a separation. We do this bizarre thing of cutting the Bible into chunks and acting like the Old Testament isn't relevant. It's impossible to understand the New Testament without the Old Testament.

They aren't separate. They're presented to us as a document. It's not like one is anointed more heavily or one makes the other defunct. Galatians 329 said if you belong to Christ, which is the definition of being a Christ follower, a Christian, born again, saved, then you're Abraham's seed. It's a fascinating concept

that the promises and the blessings God gave to Abram come to you and me as Christ followers, that we're not separate. There's no some special covenant apart from that. In Romans chapter 9, there's this remarkable statement that the apostle Paul makes. There's an argument going on in the church in Rome, and I'll look at that in more detail in a moment that is suggesting that the Jewish people have been rejected.

And Paul is addressing that, and he says this, the people of Israel, theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs is the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. There's are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God overall forever praised. really plain language, the Jewish people present to all of us, all humanity, the divine glory, the manifest supernatural presence of God, was with Israel as long as they walked in obedience. The covenants, all the biblical covenants are with Israel, except for those that were made before Israel was a nation. There's a covenant with Noah, but all those major biblical covenants come to us through the Jewish people.

The receiving of the law, how we know the character of God, comes to us through Israel. the temple worship, this whole notion of a priestly service that human beings would represent human beings to God. You know, we have a great high priest today. The only reason you and I can approach God without a physical intermediary on the earth is we have a great high priest who has already passed into the heavens. Do you know who he is? This is New Testament. This is an Old Testament. His name is Jesus.

Again, an observant Jewish man. So the whole priesthood we understand through the temple worship, the human ancestry of Christ, through the Jewish people, through Israel, that Jesus came as our Messiah into the world. His arrival was not through any other people than the Jews. So for the Christians to take the Jewish people and set them aside or to vilify them or to point some unique hatred at them really forces us into a place either to reject scripture or exposes a profound. ignorance of Scripture. Now that doesn't mean that we do everything that the Israeli government wants us to do. The Israeli government can be as perverse as the American government. But we shouldn't be confused about the role of the Jewish people and the purposes of God. There's an idea that is flourished in the American

evangelicalism and beyond. But in the last hundred years or so, it's really taken pretty deep root and it's called replacement theology. It's the idea that God replaced the Jewish people with the Christian church that because the Jewish people rejected Jesus as Messiah, they were rejected. And it's not a new thing, it's present in the New Testament. In fact, I'm going to read you two or three passages from Romans chapter 11. In Acts chapter, in the book of the emperor Claudius, who was elected in the middle part of the first century,

is emperor of Rome, expelled the Jews from Rome. By that time, the church was established, the leadership in the church in Rome, Rome was as it was in most of the Roman world, most of the cities that Paul visited, the church started in the synagogues. So the leaders and the most influential voices were people of Jewish descent. They came from the Jewish community, from the worshiping in the synagogue. They recognized Jesus' Messiah, and as the Jesus' story began to expand, most of those early

significant voices, as they were in Jerusalem, they were around the Roman world. They came from the Jewish community. Well, when Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, they lost the leadership of the church in Rome. So non-Jews stepped into those roles. Well, Rome's economy collapsed. They changed emperors. And the Jews were invited back. And when the Jews came back into Rome, guess what?

The non-Jews, the Gentiles, didn't want them back in the church. So they came up with a theology, a theological reason. You know, when we're not willing to explain our poor behavior in terms of our selfishness, we'll explain it in terms of God. We haven't changed much in 2,000 years. And they came up with the theology that said God had rejected the Jewish people. Well, Paul addresses that in the book of Romans. There's some snippets of it in New Testament.

In Acts chapter 18, you can read where Paul, it tells us that the Jews have been expelled from Rome. But in Romans chapter 11, starting in verse 1, Paul asked the question, did God reject his people? And in English, the next phrase is translated by no means, but it's the most, it's the strongest negative imperative available in the Greek language. It's God forbid. It's almost as if Paul is shouting. Absolutely not. He said, I'm an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin.

God did not reject his people whom he foreknew. So in the plainest of language, he's confronting that. idea. And yet 2,000 years later, in spite of the Council of the New Testament, it's a very prominent idea in the midst of the Christian community that God rejected the Jews. Same chapter, Romans 11 in verse 11, he said, I ask again, did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the non-Jews to make Israel envious. Same chapter, chapter 11 of Romans, verse 17, if some of the branches have been broken, off. Paul's using an analogy of an olive tree, saying that the Jewish people are an olive tree,

and that because of their unbelief, some of the branches were broken off. You know that from what you know of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. The Exodus generation, that didn't want to go into the promised land. They died in the wilderness. They didn't obtain their inheritance. Says God was angry with them and said, you'll never have your inheritance. If some of the branches have been broken off and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been gathered in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, don't boast over those branches. If you do, consider this.

You don't support the root, but the root supports you. Again, it's all in this same chapter. Paul is repeatedly making the same point. He said, don't have the arrogance to say you don't need your Jewish brothers and sisters. The nourishment that comes to you comes through that Jewish heritage. We're not something new. We're the fulfillment of the promises that we're. were made in the Hebrew Bible, and our Lord and King is a Jewish rabbi.

So we are indebted to the Jewish people. Now, here's the awkward part, and I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't earned a degree in history, I suppose. But for 2,000 years, the Jewish people have been hated predominantly by the Christian community. They've been hunted, they've been hated, they've been unwanted. And yet God's kept his promise to them. After 2,000 years of having no homeland, the Jewish people were expelled from Jerusalem and their land. by the Romans. In 70 AD, and then in 130 AD, they rebelled again and they were driven out.

They renamed Jerusalem. They wanted to eliminate any connection between Jerusalem and the Jewish people. That's how the whole word Palestine made its way into the vocabulary. I'll come back to that. But for the intervening 2,000 years, the Jewish people were scattered to the far corners of the earth. In 1948, at the end of World War II, with the awareness of the Holocaust, the United Nations recognized the formation. of the modern state of Israel. And for more than 100 nations, the Jews began to immigrate back. And we've watched that.

But the story in the enthrum is unmistakably that the Christians have promulgated, they have incubated and given expression to a hatred of the Jewish people. It's in Romans 9, 10, and 11. I just gave you a sampling of that.

Some of you may have seen the movie or perhaps the play fiddler on the roof. It's a snapshot of Russia. There's a word we, use. In Russia, it was common for a lengthy period of time, if there was a drought, if there was a plague, if there was a natural disaster, that if there was a nearby Jewish community, they would be blamed for that. They would say that they drank the blood of the children. And the messenger for that was typically the leaders in the Orthodox Church. And when that

would happen, the troops would ride through the Jewish communities and either destroy their homes or kill the people. If you've seen Fiddler on the roof, it's a Jewish community forced to move again, living in poverty because they're not given equal access before the law, the Russian pogromes, the Spanish inquisition in Spain in the 15th century, the Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity, and if they refused to convert, they were tortured or expelled from the country and their properties confiscated. The Roman Catholic Church, and I'm not anti-Catholic, The Roman Catholic Church accused the Jewish people of deicide, of being Christ killers. And that was in place as an official part of the doctrine of the church until the 1970s.

So it's not ancient history. In World War II, the Holocaust, most of us know that the Nazis built the death camps and they incinerated millions of Jews and gypsies unwanted people, six million Jews. What we don't typically focus on is that it was cruxies. Christian Europe that gave up the Jews. It wasn't just German Jews that died in those camps. It was the Jewish community from all of Europe. And the European nations gave up the Jewish people. There were a handful of exceptions, notable exceptions. You may have seen Schindler's list. Oscar Schindler used his manufacturing enterprise to protect some of the Jewish community.

Some of you may know Corey Tin Boom, a Dutch watchman. and his family who hid Jews in a secret room in their home. They were betrayed by a Christian neighbor and went into the camps where Corey's sister died. Her father died after their arrest. But it was Christian Europe, Christian Europe that surrendered the Jews to the Holocaust. So the hatred of the Jewish people has been fostered by the Christian community. The average Israeli on the street today is more. comfortable with a Muslim than a Christian. Because the Israelis are aware of that history.

Most of us in the Christian West are not aware of that history. But the history to the Jewish people goes beyond that. If we go back in the Bible to Moses' generation, when the Hebrew baby boys were being murdered by the orders of Pharaoh, you pull it forward to the Gospels in the New Testament, where Herod murdered all the baby boys born in Bethlehem when the report was that the Messiah had been born. in the Holocaust, there were one and a half million, one and a half million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. The story doesn't end there after World War II. After the Nazis are defeated, after the Axis powers are defeated, and Europe is being restabilized,

the Jews were not welcomed back. Those that survived the Holocaust truthfully weren't welcomed back into their homes or into their communities or their neighborhoods. It was too embarrassing. It was too shameful. Their property had been confiscated. In many cases, their wealth had been confiscated. Their artwork had been confiscated. Their neighbors hadn't stood up for them.

They hadn't defended them. So it was too shameful to try to, for them to reenter the society where they had been a part of. And many of them had had prominent positions in the communities, presidents of banks, presidents of universities, influential people. But their wealth had been looted. Their resources have been confiscated. They're still hated, hunted. and unwanted. It's a chapter of history that we don't know a lot about. There was a book, Leon Euris wrote it, the Exodus. Some of the Jews, thousands of Jews, got on boats and tried

to go to what's modern day Israel, and they weren't allowed to land by the British. And some died. One boat that was particularly celebrated, that's the one I mentioned in the book, goes back, finally docks at France, they're not allowed off the boat. And ultimately, the Jews that survived the camps, made a boat ride to modern day Israel, weren't allowed to unload, go back to France, they're put in concentration camps when they're taken off the boat. It's a horrific story. Having survived a war, arrest, incarceration, and death camps, the Jewish people still weren't welcomed in their historic homeland. Everything that we're seeing right now was well planned and well prepared for. No, we don't want to talk about them. We don't want to talk about morals. We don't

We want to talk about the nuclear family. You know, we don't do politics. We just preach the gospel. What does that mean? We're to contend in culture. If we continue to stay quiet, there is blood on our hands, and I firmly believe that. Jesus said, I'll build my church and the gates of hell will not be able to keep it out. This is our time.

God has given us the truth. And we have an assignment to take that truth into our culture. It starts here in our churches. Jesus is Lord. God's word is infallible. When we look at the news, we see the same story repeated on all the channels. each presented with a different slant, an obvious agenda. We need a fresh perspective, a biblical worldview on what's happening around us.

How can we equip ourselves spiritually for all the changes at hand? We'll explore all of this and more this fall at the Culture and Christianity Conference. You'll leave equipped and prepared, ready to stand in your faith and make a difference wherever God takes you. Go to culture and Christianity.org to register. The Bible says that what happens to the Jewish people is a preview of what's going to happen to the Gentiles. It's in Romans. It's given to us repeatedly. It says to the Jew first and then to the Gentile. And I think we need an awareness. Matthew 24 is Jesus' most lengthy prophetic discourse. Jesus is the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets, greater than Isaiah, greater than Jeremiah, greater than Ezekiel.

and his most lengthy prophetic discourse is in Matthew 24. It's in Luke 21, it's parallel passages in Mark as well. But in Luke 24, 19, 9, he says this about the Christians, Christ followers. He says, you'll be handed over to be persecuted and put to death. And you'll be hated by all nations because of me. So anytime I see a rise in the temperature or the intensity of the hatred of the Jewish people, I'm very conscious that it's simply the other side. of the coin of a hatred that will be directed towards all the people of the book.

And so when you and I witness a rise in anti-Semitism, which is a fancy word for hating the Jews, I think we should listen to what Jesus said, and we should understand there's a day coming where we'll be hated. Now the Bible tells us that clearly, before the end of the age, that all nations will turn on the Jewish people. I've read that passage, I suppose, since childhood. But I've come to understand it in a different way. I believe all the nations will turn on the Jewish people because they think they have a reason. They won't all get together and say, this is spiritual and we're going to be demonically influenced and hate the Jews. There will be some piece of logic that is used, some report that is distributed,

something, some activity that's engaged in that will cause all the nations of the world to feel good about themselves and uniting in a hatred of the Jewish people. And I believe the same thing about what Jesus said in Matthew 24. There will be report given about Christ followers, people of faith, that will be so demonic, so evil. But it will be reported so widely that we'll be hated by all the nations because of our affiliation with Jesus. You know, I sat in a lecture some years ago. It's been a while now. The man doing the presentation had been the chief rabbi of in Denny.

Mark. And he said in his presentation that the Jewish community, the Christian community, the Muslim community could all get along. We could have complete peace if we could just get people to stop saying Jesus was the Lord. And the days ahead of us when there will be some line, some logic, some report, some bit of information, some accusation that will cause us to be hated by everybody because of our affiliation with Jesus. So when you hear the hatred of the Jews being ratcheted up, and you feel the intensity of that. Understand it's a precursor. It's a foreshadowing.

It's like a storm cloud you see on the horizon and you can hear the thunder and you see the lightning. You know there's rain coming. But when you hear the thunder and the lightning of the hatred of the Jews, know that the rain's coming. And use your voice to be their advocate. Let me give you a little bit of a history lesson. I studied at Hebrew University.

I've lived full disclosure, so I lived in Jerusalem. for a while. But there's a lot of confusion about land and territory. Israel owns that they occupy less than 2% of the territory of the Middle East. Less than 2%. If you roll in North Africa, which is predominantly Muslim as well, the percentage grows even smaller. And the most common talking point globally for the last four decades has been there can be

no peace in the Middle East until Israel gives up some of their territory. If you go look at a map and you look at how tiny Israel is, and you look at the nations of the Middle East, go from Turkey all the way around to the Saudi Peninsula, then across North Africa to other Muslim states. And when you look at that map and you say the talking point globally, from the UN to the nations of Europe, there can be no peace until Israel gives up some territory. It is truly an absurd proposition. But a part of the discussion is always about the Palestinian people and the great angst that has been incubated for decades in the world about the Palestinian people.

Well, the question is, who are the Palestinian people? And that's not a simple answer. Palestine was not an Arab nation in 1948 when Israel was recognized. It was not. The Jewish people didn't take over someone else's territory. Great Britain had the authority over the Middle East until they became tired of governing that volatile region and they asked the UN to help them resolve the problem. Before Great Britain was tasked with administering the region, after World War I, the Turks had controlled the area since the 1500s, and the Turks aren't Arabs. Palestine has never been the name of any country.

The name Palestine came from the Romans. I mentioned that earlier. It was 1.30 AD when the Barcockeba rebellion took place, and the Romans were so frustrated with the Jews. They forbid the Jews to live in Jerusalem any longer. They renamed it. They wanted to eliminate any association between the Jewish people and the land. So they borrowed it from the Philistines. Palestine is really a corruption of Philistia or the Philistines.

And they had disappeared years earlier under the destruction of the Babylonians. 600 BC. So the Romans really borrowed from the ancient history of the Middle East to disassociate the Jews from Jerusalem and the word Palestine got attached to a region. It was never a nation. There was never a president of the state of Palestine or a government of Palestine. Much in the same way we talk about the Midwest in the United States. You know, there are component states, there are different people groups, there are different ethnicities, but the Midwest and the United States is a region or the southeastern United States or the northeastern United States. Well, the region of Palestine didn't have any connection

to the Arab ethnicity. Muhammad wasn't even born until the 6th century. The Romans labeled the area Palestine in the second century. So there's no immediate connection between Palestine and the followers of Muhammad or Islam. All of that emerged much more. much later, David was king in Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish nation, a thousand BC. So more than 1,500 years before Muhammad was even born, David, a Jewish king, ruled on a throne in Jerusalem over a Jewish nation. It was in November of 1947 when the UN voted to partition the region of Palestine into two nations, an Arab nation on the west side of the Jordan River. And the Arabs rejected the partition. A Jewish nation, Israel accepted the offer in May

in 1948 and the modern state of Israel was born. The Arab nations surrounding them declared war on Israel the day after the UN vote. Five Arab nations and the local population declared war on the new Jewish state of Israel. Nobody in the world thought the new Jewish state could survive. they had no standing army, they had no central government, they had no resources for weapons, and yet miraculously, tiny Israel survived. When the ceasefire was declared Israel had defended the territory they'd been given. Jordan controlled the West Bank, the territory on the West Bank of the Jordan,

and Egypt controlled Gaza. The Arabs on the West Bank became part of Jordan. They had Jordanian passport. The Arabs in Gaza became a part of Egypt. When the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was created, Jordan controlled the West Bank. The Palestine they wanted to liberate was Israel. They intended to drive Israel off the territory that the Jews occupied. They weren't concerned about the Arab people that were living on the West Bank.

They should have been fighting Jordan and Egypt, but that wasn't the target. before Israel was birthed in 1948, everybody that lived in the region was considered a Palestinian, Arabs and Jews. There was a Jewish-owned newspaper, and it was the Palestinian Post. Jerusalem has only been the capital of one country, Israel. As I said, King David established Jerusalem as that capital, about 1,000 BC, 1500 years before Muhammad was born. Some people say, well, you know, Israel was created.

It's a created nation in the Middle East. So were the other nations in the Middle East. Jordan was created in 1922 by Great Britain. They took 80% of the ancient region known as Palestine, and they created Transjordan. 78% of the land. It's all the land on the east side of the Jordan River that had been a part of the region of Palestine was made into an Arab state. Transjordan, modern-day Jordan. The Syrians were under French control until 1946.

Lebanon received independence from France in 1943. Iraq became an independent nation in 1958. Those were all the nations created from the Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I. They hadn't existed prior to 1920 in the way they're drawn on the map today. And I mentioned this earlier, but it's worth renoting that the total landmass of Arab states, not including the non-Arab states in the Middle East, which is Iran and Turkey, two big countries. If we don't include them, the landmass of the Arab states, is 98.4%. Israel occupies 1.6% of the land mass. And yet they say no peace unless Israel gives up some land.

The word Jerusalem or Zion appears nearly a thousand times in the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. It never occurs in the Quran. I mean, I could go on and on with this. Biblically, it's just really clear. You know, so what's the best point? prayer. How do we pray for the Jewish people? How do we pray for Israel? I'll give you one verse from the New Testament. Romans 10, verse 1. It says, brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. The Bible introduces this idea. There's two categories. You're either saved or you're not. There's no third option, no third rail, no dual covenant. If a person isn't saved, they're lost. You know, some people have an excitement for Israel and the Jewish

people that is concerning to me, candidly. I love the Jewish people. I feel indebted to them. But some people take this to such an extreme. They act as if the only factor is the Jewish heritage in the land God promised. Every human being has to deal with the reality of Jesus. So my prayer for my friends in Israel and for the Jewish community is that they may be saved, that they'll have a revelation of Jesus, not to embrace the Christian faith, but to recognize Jesus as Messiah.

That is transformational for time and eternity. It's my prayer for my friends in Israel. It's my prayer for my Jewish friends in this nation, not to diminish their Jewishness, not to turn their back on their heritage. So how does all that roll into the news of the day? Well, we're watching things in this nation that I never thought I would see.

After the October of 7th attacks in 2023, I could scarcely believe it when some of our most celebrated universities became the incubators for the hatred of the Jewish people. And our intellectual elites and the faculties, administrators that are leading those propaganda-infused institutions that are destitute of truth, I don't think of them as elite universities any longer. They're very well-funded propaganda centers. I heard students chanting from the river to the sea.

I mean, they were advocating for a genocide of the Jewish people, and it was unconstitutional. unchecked. It was unimaginable to me. Then a few weeks ago, in the midst of the conflict with Iran, I heard a whole host of voices on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum saying that there was no way that the United States should be involved in a war with Iran. Well, I wasn't anxious for us to put boots on the ground. I don't always agree with Israeli policy. I don't think we should support them 100% blindly. But Iran has been for decades. the global sponsor of terrorism. They have funded it.

They have trained them. They have protected them. They have bullied the international community because of their great oil wealth and their influence because of that. They have openly said they intended to destroy the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and to annihilate America. Whenever they had the capacity,

thousands of our troops have died or been maimed or harmed because of Iranian hatred and the sponsorship of terrorism. So when the opportunity presented itself to remove Iran's nuclear capabilities, which they repeatedly said they intended to use immediately upon securing them, it felt like not only a prudent idea, but a necessary one. And I heard these powerful voices. People who are acquaintances of mine, if not friends, we don't all hang out together, but I know many of them.

And they were using their voices saying, Absolutely not. We shouldn't be involved. It was stunning to me. And now we find ourselves a few weeks later in the midst of this Epstein fiasco, some pervert of the first order that spent his life praying on underage children and organizing an island and apparently recruiting his influential friends from around the world to do so. I mean, we've listened to the Jeffrey Epstein story ad nauseum. I don't think I have to rehearse that. What changed in recent days was a change from the Trump administration when they said that there was no client list. There was no there there. There was nothing left to be seen. And there was an enormous, I think, roiling within the conservative community.

It felt like another Fauci moment. It felt like another FISA court ruling where they were going to spy on Americans or another steel dossier. I mean, it didn't pass the smell test. Maybe there's not a list written in Jeffrey Epstein's handwriting of a list of people who flew on the Lolito Express to his island to engage in all sorts of perverse activities abusing young people. But we've seen the photographs and the videos of the stacks of videotapes of people engaged in the apparently listed behavior. it seems pretty obvious that if somebody wanted to compile a list, they could do so. What I wasn't prepared for was the messaging that began to come

that Epstein was simply a tool of the Jewish state, some sort of an Israeli activist, that they were blackmailing the global community. And yet there wasn't any evidence produced to say. They were just making the statement rather brazenly and boldly. And it began to incite hatred and anger and resenting. and protest all over in a whole new way towards the Jewish people. You know, the people saying it weren't presenting any evidence along with it. We've heard something similar in recent months since the war in Gaza in the October 7th attack,

that the Israelis were committing genocide on a massive scale, that there were enormous mass graves in Gaza where the Jews were annihilating thousands and tens of thousands of Gaza and citizens recklessly. Well, the people saying, and weren't producing any evidence. They were just lobbying their accusations. And it was somehow drowning out the reality of the attack from Hamas and the citizens of Gaza on the innocent people at a music festival in Israel

and those little communities along the Gaza border. It was illogical and irrational. And now we find ourselves in this Epstein mess and powerful voices, people acquaintances of mine, friends of mine, saying that the Jews are doing it. I don't have a logical explanation. for that. It seems to me it has to be understood in spiritual terms. If there's evidence, bring it forward. You know, I think the administration, and I'm praying that the Attorney

General and the FBI that they regroup and come up with a more honest presentation, you know, I think we're all ready to put Epstein in the sordid mess behind us. We want to put Diddy behind us, too. We're tired of hearing about the freakoffs and spending the time in court. Why don't you just tell us who's involved in that egregious behavior? Maybe we could agree nationally that it's not a good idea. We shouldn't behave that way. And we could move forward. But we haven't yet, we don't have that kind of integrity in our government yet.

I pray it is returned. We don't have that kind of integrity in our churches. We don't want to talk about current events. You see, we can't expect the government to be truthful and forthright and clean if we sit in our churches and we only want to talk about first century culture. If we're avoiding our culture and the impact of our biblical worldview and biblical truth the world in which we live, if we're not allowed, if we don't imagine that the church should have a voice in defining the sanctity of human life, what's moral and immoral, what kind of leadership

we should have. We prefer to talk about the first century and who the Pharisees were and who the scribes were and who the Aesans were. We're hiding from our responsibilities. So I don't think it should surprise us then that we see the same kind of cowardice at the national level. We've had some amazing expressions of courage. we've had, I've been calling them God events.

I think when the President of the United States says that marriage is between a man and a woman, that's a God event. When the President of the United States said that there's only two biological sexes, I'm going to call that a God event. And he ends the foolishness and the nonsense about transgenderism and men competing with women in athletics and robbing opportunities from our young girls. It took the President of the United States to say that. Where were the pulpits?

Where were the good people sitting in the pews? Why weren't we demanding that kind of truss? and the communities where we live. I'm grateful for the president. It took the Supreme Court to walk back Roe v. Wade. Folks, if the law of the land is wicked, it doesn't mean you should behave in a wicked way. We've been killing our babies, 60 million of them.

And the Supreme Court walked it back, and the churches were deafening in their silence. So what we're watching with the anti-Semitism now being drug into the Epstein discussion, it's as bizarre to me as killing the babies in Egypt or the babies in Bethlehem. or the 60 million children we lost while the church was quiet. If there's evidence that the Israelis were running Epstein as a black male scam,

I'm happy for that to come to light. And let the truth be told. It doesn't excuse the perversion and the depravity of the people that were participating. The list still needs to be made known. God is moving in the earth. The truth is being told in the public square. I think it's a time to live more fully the truth we know from Scripture. I don't believe it will always be applauded.

I think ultimately we'll be hated by all nations. And they'll have a reason for hating us. It won't be abstract. They'll have some concrete expression. They think we're trying to create a state church or control people's behavior. And that's not really the case at all. I don't want a state church. but I don't want to state that interferes with the church.

The First Amendment says the government shouldn't make any law inhibiting and croaching upon the free exercise of religion. And so I'm grateful for the ruling of the IRS. I'm grateful for a president who's taken moral positions that have brought freedom to the church. I'm grateful for a church that's finding the courage to tell the truth. I believe the truth about Epstein and his behaviors will come out.

And I think it will bring some of, greater freedoms to us. And I want to invite you to join me in that prayer from Romans 10-1, that our heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. I pray that for the people in our nation. I pray that for the people in the nations of the world. And I pray that for the people of Israel. I hope you'll join me in that. That's a little window into culture and Christianity. We'll see what next week brings. We'll open another window and look through. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me. Hey, thanks for joining me today.

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