COMMITTED to train men and women
to have minds for the Lord Jesus,
hearts for the truth, and
hands that are skilled to the task.

10.05.2022 – Lesson 4 | WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE

Deuteronomy 6:4-21
2 Peter 1:20-21
Erwin Lutzer in “We Will Not Be Silenced”

“Revising history lies at the heart of all social and political revolutions. Perhaps the best example is the bloody cultural revolution in China (1966-1976). Mao Zedong decreed that China was to rid itself of all traces of capitalistic Western influence. The Red Guards took to the streets and monuments were destroyed. Western literature was burned, and buildings renamed along with new designations given for cities and streets to reflect contemporary heroes. Churches were either destroyed or repurposed. Either you sided with the new Marxist standard of justice and equality or you did not. Those who didn’t get on board were jailed or killed.
Thankfully, we are not there yet in America. But the point to be made is that when revolutionaries want to remake a country, they vivify the past to give legitimacy to their vision of the future. It is obvious that the “Ministry of Truth” is busily at work transforming America by rewriting the past. They say their purpose is ‘to root out racism’. But a look at what they’re doing reveals a much more sinister goal. They are using racism to attack America at its core. It’s not about making America better; it’s about destroying the past to build America on an entirely different foundation.
Arthur Schlesinger, a historian and former confidant to President John F. Kennedy, observed, ‘History is to the nation much as memory is to the individual. The individual who loses his memory doesn’t know where he came from or where he’s going and he becomes dislocated and disoriented.’ I might add that an individual who has lost his memory can be manipulated into believing he is whoever someone else says he is.”
David Fiorazo in “Canceling Christianity” writes:
“Like a spiritual warfare over the souls of men, there are battles in heavenly realms over nations because of what they stand for as well as over the people in those nations. The enemy hates America because of the God we were once united under and the believers who represent Him.
Part of the epic battle manifests as hatred directed at Christians. There are cultural conflicts about worldview; heaven and hell, righteousness and unrighteousness, freedom and bondage, truth and lies, but it all comes down to three words: God or man. A person’s assumptions about God and man directly influence their philosophy of land and government.”
Erwin Lutzer “No Reason To Hide”
“Marx did not disbelieve in God; rather he HATED GOD; Other philosophers had already reversed the roles of men and God. Marx’s unique contribution was to shift the notion of the deity of man from the individual to the state. In 1848, he co-wrote THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO with Friedrich Engels. Discounting people’s individual differences, they grouped everyone into hardened categories; they believed that throughout history, conflict had raged between the ruling class, who controlled the means of production, over against the working class, who worked on farms and in factories.
Marx believed that history can best be explained by this ongoing class struggle. This conflict is between the oppressors and the oppressed, and everyone belongs to one group or the other. He was right that exploitation and oppression exist; exploitation has dogged the history of mankind ever since Cain killed Abel. But what he proposed as a solution became the dread and enslavement of the world. Substituting man for God has always brought negative consequences.
Marx’s goal was the abolition of private property; he envisioned a world in which no one owned anything – everything was the property of the state. He promised this revolution would eventually establish a classless society. He knew the ruling class (the landowners) would never give up their power and wealth voluntarily; it would have to be taken from them by force. He proclaimed the need for a revolution so that the working class could gain control of political power.
Witness how this played out in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Any ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – that is, those who impeded the development of this transformation of ownership – had to be suppressed. The resulting Russian Civil War saw the death and suffering of millions. Many were executed because of their alignment with various political factions. Figuratively speaking, the past had to be burned down before a new future could be constructed.
But those in power believed this was worth the cost to bring about a promised new utopian future.
Standing in the way of this utopia, Marx taught, was religion, which – like a drug – exploits the masses and keeps them enslaved to illusions, to the benefit of their oppressors. For Marx, the greatest oppressor was, of course, Christianity, along with the nuclear family. Men oppressed their wives, parents oppressed their children by taking them to church, and God was the ultimate oppressor. In his words, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’
It follows that freedom, certainly freedom from religion, had to be abolished, according to Marx, for the simple reason that citizens can have no higher loyalty than the state. If there is to be worship, it must be the state that is worshipped. If love exists, it has to be love of the state. The state can tolerate no rivals.
And what about the family? Carl Trueman records how Marx’s associate, Friedrich Engels, taught that ‘the family turned women into chattels, virtual pieces of property, and their emancipation would come about only when they were allowed to take their place as workers in the public means of production.’
Mothers were viewed as slaves at home raising their children, salves who had to be liberated into the workforce so they could make direct contributions to the prosperity of the state, for service to the state was the highest honor. And children would, in turn, transfer the trust for their livelihood from their families to the state, which would distribute its wealth with equality and fairness. The nuclear family was an impediment to the state and needed to be weakened, if not destroyed, in order for the state to usurp the authority of the family.
Let’s pause and consider some other ideas at the core of this philosophy.
Marx taught that human beings are essentially good; they commit crimes only because they are oppressed. Remove their oppression (the capitalists), and all will live in harmony and peace without the need for laws.
Once private property is abolished in the communist utopian state, the need for laws will wither away, and everyone will be content.
Another tenet is that history is moving toward globalism; eventually, the entire world will adopt the Marxist view of history. “Workers of the world unite!” was the battle cry. Marx never lost sight of a world run according to Marxist/socialistic principles.”
How did Marxist ideas come to the United States?
“Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by Mussolini in Italy for his opposition to fascism, and he used his time to write how Marxism could be advanced in a peaceful way, without the bloody revolutions seen in Russia. Gramsci believed that Marxism could best be advanced by attacking the culture. The radical activist Rudi Dutschke described this transformation as ‘the long march through the institutions.’
He taught that Marxism could gain power by capturing the institutions of education, law, media, economics, entertainment, and the like. Thus, Marxism could be advance INCREMENTALLY, step by step, institution by institution, and law by law. As it advanced, people would see its benefits. It could arrive at tiptoe.”
So, present-day Marxists believe that the revolution they seek can gradually be brought about by cultural upheaval. In this way, Marxism can flourish from within, hopefully without a bloody revolution. This requires these cultural revolutionaries to gain positions of power within the existing institutions. And to get there, they must undermine the present order and then rebuild on an entirely different foundation.
Some today seek to dismiss the idea of cultural Marxism as a conspiracy theory. But it’s clear that Marxist ideas continue to gain influence and momentum within America. It seeks to vilify our past and rebuild our nation on a Marxist foundation.
The first step, of course, is to attack culture. In Germany, a group of Marxists known as the Frankfurt School developed what has become known as Critical Theory. This is also called DECONSTRUCTION, where culture itself is seen as the enemy and must be dismantled. That word DECONSTRUCTION means just what it appears to mean: the tearing down of any institution or barrier that stands in the way of the Marxist utopia.

The purpose of deconstruction or Critical Theory is to ‘liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslaves them.’ Among other things, this theory teaches that history has to be deconstructed to show that texts do not mean what they appear to mean. For example, the framers of the US Constitution did not mean what they wrote; Critical Theory says that those who composed America’s founding documents were all white males who hard sinister motives, and therefore, their writings are, at best, suspect. We’re told that the Bible, Western laws, and philosophies or the Enlightenment should not be taken at face value because they were written so certain people could hold on to their power – specifically WHITE POWER.

Of course, Critical Theory has also been applied to gender; the traditional binary of male-female has been deconstructed and then destroyed to make room for new ways to talk about the created order. This has brought about gender theory and queer theory. And now race is being deconstructed; thus, we have Critical Race Theory, which is greatly debated today. The goal is to attack and deconstruct traditional culture – especially Christian culture.
Cultural Marxism has sought institutional power to undermine the existing order and replace it with a new future. But there was still a piece missing from the puzzle. That missing piece was individual liberation from tradition, from sexual norms and restrictions. And because our sexual identity was viewed as the core of who we are as persons, that had to be exploited. Sexual deviancy needed to be normalized, which, in turn, would deconstruct and destroy the nuclear family. Only then would full liberation be achieved. In other words, Marxism had to merge with the teachings of Freud.”