Countdown 2 Eternity

Announcer: Welcome to Countdown 2 Eternity with Pastors James Kaddis and Andy Woods. It’s a weekly radio ministry from Calvary Chapel Signal Hill. James and Andy examine current events and connect what’s going on in our world to Bible prophecy. Let’s lean in and listen.

James Kaddis: Well, hello, my dear brothers and sisters. I want to welcome you to another episode of Countdown to Eternity. We’ve got a loaded one for you today. I am with the great Andy Woods. Andy, bro, can I just ask you a question? What in the world is going on over there in the very great state of Texas?

We’ve got Yasir Qadhi running around trying to take over the world for Islam. There’s a bunch of other crazy things happening. I’m very happy to hear the news about Ken Paxton; that’s good stuff. But I think America is heading for some judgment, bro, especially when we talk about the story we’re going to talk about today. Let’s start off with this. How are you doing, brother?

Andy Woods: James, I’m doing great. Yeah, good to be here.

James Kaddis: Bro, how about we start off with this one story that you sent me? I think it’s consequential for a lot of reasons. Do you want to talk about this story for a minute?

Andy Woods: Yeah, you’re talking about the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of America story. Trump had a group there in the White House, and they had a big conference. Basically, it was a lot of pastors. Now, some of them, I’ve got to be honest with you, James, I’m not theologically on board with every little nook and cranny of what they’re saying. I don’t think you are either.

James Kaddis: A lot of them are kooks, bro. New Apostolic Reformation, some of these are part of some nasty cover-up culture. They’re people I would never align with, but I do understand what you’re saying. I know where you’re going with this one.

Andy Woods: But the general thrust of it was they were trying to demonstrate something that is being denied by the left, which is the fact that America was based on a Christian, Judeo-Christian foundation. In fact, there’s a Supreme Court case that goes back to 1892. It’s called the Church of the Holy Trinity versus the United States. You could Google it and find it online and read it. It’s fairly short and to the point.

A unanimous decision, but it dealt with a pastor who was coming across the pond, so to speak, and he was going to be a pastor at this church in New York in 1892 called the Church of the Holy Trinity. Apparently, that arrangement ran afoul of an immigration law. This is in the good old days when we used to actually enforce immigration laws.

The Supreme Court steps in, and this is a unanimous decision. This is not like a narrow decision at all. They said you can’t interpret that law the way you’re interpreting it against a Christian pastor because America is a Christian nation. This is not me saying it or you saying it; it’s the United States Supreme Court. The majority opinion was written by David Josiah Brewer. He cited 87 historical precedents in the actual Supreme Court case, starting with Christopher Columbus and why Columbus came to this country.

Columbus wrote a book called his Book of Prophecies. Columbus tells you why he came to America. Everybody just trashes Columbus today for various reasons, but very few people read his book on prophecies. He believed that he was fulfilling prophecies in the book of Isaiah to take the gospel to distant lands, and he believed that’s why he came to America. Brewer starts there and goes from there to 87 historical pieces of information.

He deals with the state of Maryland, for example, that had on its books, "We’re going to levy taxes to support the Christian religion," going back to about 1775. Just countless historical precedents that are, as Brewer says at the end of this decision, beyond dispute. This is all part of the factual historical record. His conclusion is this country was founded as a Christian nation.

A Christian nation doesn’t mean we are like an Islamic nation where we persecute people that have a different set of ideas, but it’s the idea that we have freedom because we’re a Christian nation. Now, use your freedom wisely. That isn’t me talking, or the late Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, or any of those other guys. It’s the United States Supreme Court.

The left just gets unhinged over these kinds of things. They don’t want that history to come out. They’re using this wall of separation between church and state words, which as we all know don’t appear in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, to argue that these people are doing something unconstitutional.

James Kaddis: It’s just insane. Take a moment to read the letter that was written to the Danbury Baptist Association by our former president. He basically wrote that letter when he spoke about the wall of separation between church and state being indicative of a very specific mechanic designed to keep the government from interfering with the church.

The whole idea was that the Danbury Baptist Association was fearful of the fact that the newly found position of the current President of the United States would provide a mechanism by which he would discriminate against them as an organization because of the rift that was going on between the Baptist Association and the other religious organization that was happening at the time.

When he wrote that letter, he said no, that wall that he spoke about was one that was designed to keep the government from interfering with their rights, and that he assured the Danbury Baptist Association that there would be no advantage that would be created by his current position as President of the United States.

How about we just talk about the Declaration of Independence for just one moment? Four times it mentions God. How about we take it a step further and we bring about the fact that all but one of the original signers were actually Christians who had formal theological education? How much more obscene does it get to actually try to deny that or to throw that away? It’s ridiculous.

Andy: When the concept came up in Jefferson’s letter—and by the way, Thomas Jefferson was not even at the Constitutional Convention. He was in France as America’s ambassador to France. They’re grabbing this guy’s words, taking them out of context, and acting like what he said there represents everybody at the Constitutional Convention. Beyond that, they’re completely abusing Jefferson’s words.

When Jefferson used that expression, he was applying it to the Free Exercise side of the First Amendment, not the Establishment Clause side. People need to understand this, that there’s two aspects to this religious discussion related to the First Amendment. There’s the government shall not establish a religion.

By the way, look up "religion" in an 18th-century dictionary and you’ll see what they meant. What they meant is denominationalism. They didn’t want this to be a Presbyterian country or a Methodist country or a Baptist country, but they had no problems with the trans-denominational principles of Christianity permeating public life. Anyway, that’s the Establishment side, and then there’s the Free Exercise side that the government can’t interfere with religion.

Jefferson was applying it to the Free Exercise side. The next time that that expression shows up in American jurisprudence is in 1878, where they applied it to the Free Exercise side. It wasn’t until the year 1947 that the court just took that expression and applied it to the Establishment side. Subsequent courts came along in the 60s and used that ticking time bomb to move America away from its Judeo-Christian heritage onto a humanistic foundation.

The devil’s been really good at constructing this narrative, and I really appreciate the Trump administration trying to reclaim the truth. The left doesn’t want the threads in their intricately developed narrative to be pulled too far because the American people might actually see the truth to this.

James Kaddis: The 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and dare I even say the 1970s were filled in the legal world with what I would call the most extreme conflations that ever existed. Perhaps one of the most abhorrent legal conflations that ever existed was the one that dealt with the Establishment Clause versus the idea that we start talking about here, and it becomes completely ridiculous.

That very conflation is the one that has allowed judges over the years to create a mechanism of dicta that is nothing but garbage. At the expense of sounding like a twin to Clarence Thomas, it’s absolutely insane. It makes no sense, the conflation that they carry with the Establishment Clause.

If you even read some of the Founding Fathers and their discussion concerning the Second Amendment, believe it or not, there’s where you’ll actually find a lot of these very cautious analyses being written concerning the First Amendment, specifically speaking about freedom of speech, specifically speaking about the Establishment Clause. It’s just remarkable.

You can see very clearly, even the Federalist Papers, that there was a very strict delineation that was being created to make sure that this denominationalism was not going to be something that would affect the way that the mechanics of government actually worked, because it was also something that the Founding Fathers recognized as being very lucrative. They recognized that very clearly.

I think that when you see this happening, there’s a much bigger picture involved here. The bigger picture is you have a group of people who have to be clearly lying in their illegal analysis—I will call it their illegal analysis instead of their legal analysis—to be able to come to these conclusions because they’re not simply conflations that are taking place anymore. They are absolute derogatory nefarious action that’s being designed to cause people to capitulate to a series of lies that drive them to a rewriting of history that completely denies what the Founding Fathers ever intended.

I think there’s a complete Bible prophecy issue related here. I think there’s even a bigger issue that comes into play when it speaks concerning what God promised Israel versus what God promised the United States of America. I think the promises given to the United States of America were purely indicative of examples that were given to us by what God did with Israel.

The difference between us and Israel is that God told Israel, "Look at the sun, the moon, and the stars. If you see those ordinances that still exist, then I’m not denying you, Israel." He didn’t give that promise to the United States of America. The promise given to the United States of America was simply tied to the most important aspect of our founding, and that is the walk with God that we chose to give ourselves to in doing what we did.

In the thirteen original colonies, you couldn’t even be a leader by any stretch of the imagination unless you actually signed a confession of faith. What in the world is going on here? That’s the problem. To me, it’s just hilarious. We both have legal backgrounds, so the analysis of this is not very difficult, especially when you understand what’s going on. But the reality of it is we’re seeing this happening more and more, where people are denying the very constructs of what was actually intended by the Founding Fathers.

In the name of some sort of constitutional legitimization, we’re coming to these conclusions that are absolutely faulty. The narratives are completely broken. Did you see the Raskin interview with that high school kid?

Andy Woods: I don’t think I saw that.

James Kaddis: Raskin decided to completely bully this sixteen-year-old high school kid, basically saying that the separation of church and state is a part of a constitutional amendment. This kid had the boldness of saying, "No such thing exists, Congressman, with all due respect. No such thing exists. Your legal analysis is broken."

It was just absolutely horrendous to think about how bad things have gotten that people are denying God. We entitled this show, "Here Comes the Judge." I’m saying it for a reason, because if the United States of America doesn’t turn away from just the blatant lies that they’re giving themselves to, we’re headed towards judgment.

I thought we were seeing it with Joe Biden, and I thought that God said, "Listen, you want this nonsense? Here, you get it. Here it is. Here’s the beginning of my judgment." I think we were given a remarkable reprieve by the President of the United States being in office right now, and I think it’s amazing.

The messaging behind it, forget the legal authority that we stand on—of course we stand on a legal authority. I think the Constitution as well as the Declaration were both inspired documents by the Holy Spirit, undoubtedly. That’s reality. But the problem is you cannot use that as the primary justification for what you want when you want to see the country better.

If you want the country to get better, then you love the things that God loves and you hate the things that God hates. That’s why we support Israel. That’s why we understand the need to be able to bring our children into a more steady place of education, especially as it relates to what the word of God says.

Andy Woods: The scripture is very clear. It says righteousness exalts a nation. It doesn’t say tax credits, interest rates, gas prices, independent oil drilling—although I’m in favor of that—it says righteousness exalts a nation. When you deny our Judeo-Christian heritage, you’re denying the very thing that exalted the United States to begin with. The Founding Fathers, I agree with you, many of them, most of them, were Christian. Now, there’s a few we’re not sure about.

But even the ones that we’re not sure about, this much I know, those guys like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example—of all the Founding Fathers that we could recognize, we’re always trained to focus on those two, probably because they’re the ones whose Christian background is most suspect, so we’ve all been brainwashed very severely.

But even those guys, let’s say they weren’t Christians—because Thomas Jefferson said some weird stuff about the Trinity at different times in his life and so forth—even he though and Benjamin Franklin, even though they may not have been born-again saved the way we would describe the terminology, they had a huge respect for Christianity. Thomas Jefferson said, "I’ve made a study of all of the philosophers of the world. I’ve looked at all of them, and Jesus of Nazareth is different because he put his principles into the hearts of people."

I hope people go see the movie "The Awakening" because it documents the relationship between Benjamin Franklin and one of the great evangelists of the first Great Awakening in America going back to around 1740, George Whitefield. They had a great relationship and mutual respect for each other.

The reason our founders loved Christianity, even the ones that may not have been Christian, is because they were giving us limited government. The only way for limited government to succeed is people need to have the ability to govern themselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. The only religion that allows people to do that, our Founding Fathers clearly saw, was Christianity. So they were in favor of Christianity.

They were in favor of our Judeo-Christian heritage. What’s interesting is the Bible says to whom much is given, much is expected. Here we’ve had this wonderful foundation and this wonderful base, and we’re walking away from it. I’m of the persuasion that that is not going to bode well for our country because God certainly holds all nations accountable for rebellion against him, but particularly the United States given its unique Judeo-Christian heritage.

James Kaddis: I think this is critically important, and I’m going to put up a graphic for everybody so that they can see it. It happens to be one of my favorite quotes from Samuel Adams, one of our Founding Fathers. I love what he says. It says, "While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader."

Reflect on that. Think about that for just a moment. Talk about prophetic. We’re talking about the prophetic implications of this. This does have prophetic implications because Satan, in order to bring in his New World Order, which is maximum government—Daniel 7:23, Revelation 13:16-18, countless other scriptures—the government nanny states micromanage people’s lives from cradle to grave.

Andy Woods: In order to bring that in on a global scale, you’ve got to get rid of America and you’ve got to get rid of what made America great. If you read through our Constitution, it only would take you 11 pages, including the Bill of Rights, to read through that whole document. Compare that to Obamacare, which is about 3,000 pages to read through all of that.

When you look at the enumerated powers given to our Congress, there’s only 18 things they can do. Today they’re involved in anything and everything; it’s become what I call Fedzilla. But the truth of the matter is the founding of America stood for limited government. Now if you’re the devil, what are you going to do? You want to bring in maximum government, so we’ve got to trash repeatedly America, the American experiment in self-liberty, limited government.

You have to take away the very thing that gave America her origin, her Judeo-Christian foundation. If your listeners are wondering what this discussion has to do with Bible prophecy, the answer is everything.

James Kaddis: Absolutely everything. The mechanism of totalitarianism is something that we see very clearly given to us. As a matter of fact, one of the major cases that I make for this is in Revelation chapter 6. Revelation 6 happens when we’re raptured, but that’s my point. Second Thessalonians chapter 2, verse 3 tells us that we as a church will not see even the Antichrist being revealed to the world until the church is raptured.

The reason for that is because we, the church filled with the Holy Spirit, act as the restrainers. This is something interesting because if you put that in light of Revelation chapter 6 and you start looking at the first four seals. The first four seals are really important to understand. The first one, of course, the rider of the white horse, we know that’s the Antichrist. He has the bow, he doesn’t have the arrow. He utilizes the promise of revolution without any kind of war to be able to bring people in, and that’s what totalitarian rulers do.

The second horse that comes, which is the second seal, is the rider of the red horse, which is war. Of course, that’s how totalitarian rulers work. They bring you in on a promise, then they bring in the mechanism of war to be able to lock you in as they seize your means of production in order to actually create the condition that they need in order to have victory in the war.

Once the brainwashing is gone on, you get to the third seal because the third seal is a rider of the black horse, which in essence takes away any economic advantage you would ever have, while by the way preserving a ruling class, the Hillary Clintons of the world and the George Soros of the world. Touch not the oil and the wine.

Then it gets us to that very last horse, which of course is the pale horse, oftentimes referred to as the green horse, which in essence is death. Literally 25 percent of the world’s population dies as a result. If you look at the effects of totalitarianism in the last hundred years in our world, we may see a total of 250 million deaths. I’m not including abortions; I’m just talking about other deaths related to it.

Imagine three billion dying. Why? Because the restrainer is gone. What we’re talking about here is this ultimate mechanism of totalitarianism that’s designed to take people away from the Lord. The thing is you have to get rid of the church in order to seize the means of production. You can’t seize the means of production without the church being in the middle because the church speaks of the freedom that’s necessary to be able to do it.

There are biblical principles that teach the church to be wealthy. The wealth that the church teaches us, that the Bible teaches us to obtain, is not for us, it’s not for our children, it’s for our children’s children. That’s the problem. Because we don’t understand that and we label it all as health and wealth like the Kenneth Copeland liars that are all going to hell, it’s just an amazing thing to see. We don’t understand it.

Because we don’t understand it, the church gets weaker. Look at what happened, bro. Look at the rise of totalitarianism when COVID happened and they shut down the churches. 80 percent of the churches that shut down during COVID aren’t back up anymore. It’s unbelievable to me. But that’s what’s happening. You get the church out of the picture, then you literally bring poverty into the picture.

That poverty drives desperation into people. They no longer have any independence, and then as a result, what do they do? They give themselves to the mechanism of totalitarianism because of the mass psychosis formation that’s happening. That’s exactly what we’re actually watching right now. These powers of darkness are doing everything they can to take advantage of that, and that is literally the meaning of the end times. We’re seeing it happening right now. Jesus even told us to expect this.

Granted, the very first sign of the generation that’s going to see the second coming of Christ is the one that sees what happens in Daniel 9:27, when the treaty is made strong and then of course he enters into the temple and demands to be worshipped. But nonetheless, we still are told what to expect as we go into that point, and we’re seeing it. It’s crazy. Every time I see a story like this, I just think how much longer is it going to be until we just completely start alienating anything that relates to the gospel.

All while you have a guy named Mamdani in New York who stands under a tunnel in solidarity with Hamas, puts his hand on a Quran. We know the story of all the extant manuscripts that exist with the Quran, right? We don’t even have to get into how completely non-valid they are. But he puts his hand on the Quran, which even if the Quran was real and true and from Allah, how would you like to swear on a document that says "wamakaru wamakara Allahu wallahu khayru al-makireena," which basically means that Allah is the chief of deceivers? That’s their Quran that says that.

Are we out of our minds? We’re giving ourselves to this. I hate the fact that a Muslim school was shot up. I hate it. I think the violence I just cannot stand it. But you wait and see. They are going to treat that as literally one of the worst things that’s happened in American society, all while hundreds if not thousands of Christians have been killed "bismi" Allah, in the name of Allah, and nobody’s doing anything about it.

I would never minimize this. I want every single person who had anything to do with supporting this, liking it, anything, they all ought to be locked up. I get that. Did you see the video of those poor kids running? That should not be the case. But how about we be consistent and we start talking about these kids that are being targeted because of their love for Jesus who are being killed? Or how about more importantly, the Jews?

Andy Woods: The other thing is related to Mamdani and also Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar and all of these people, Muslims being sworn in on a Quran. To kind of bring this full circle, what happened to the doctrine of separation between church and state? It sure disappeared quick.

Here’s something that’s really important to understand. This is a famous communist saying. I learned this by listening to Curtis Bowers, and he’s got a communist that he quotes saying the issue is never the issue, but the revolution. In other words, you use an issue in a very selective way to accomplish some sort of political end that moves the country closer to a Marxist approach, a Marxist paradigm.

If these people that are screaming and have been screaming so long about a strict wall of separation between church and state, if they really cared about that issue, they would be upset about Mamdani being sworn in on a Quran, but the silence is deafening. They would be very loud about the situation in Minnesota where they’re building these foot-washing type things at taxpayers’ expense to accommodate Muslims in the public schools, but the silence is deafening.

That kind of shows me that they never really cared about the strict wall of separation between church and state. What they cared about is separating Christianity from America. Once they accomplished that and Islam came in and humanism came in, suddenly they don’t really care about the issue at all because the issue was never really about the issue; the issue was about the revolution.

It’s like all of these feminists all upset back in the 90s about allegedly Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill. By the way, the evidence for that is exceptionally lacking, but let’s just pretend it’s true. Then a guy named Bill Clinton comes along and we get names like Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones.

James Kaddis: You’ve got cigars in the White House. You’ve got dresses being stained. Goodness gracious. I told Ken Starr face to face, I walked up to him one day and I told him, "You know what, bro? I think I was the only high schooler that read your whole report from cover to cover, and was that vulgar?" He says, "You should have seen what I saw. That report was really nice to the president."

Andy Woods: My point is what happened to all these feminists that were upset about Clarence Thomas? They just disappeared. So it shows me that they’re not about protecting women; they’re about using the issue selectively to attack people that they see as a threat to the revolution, like Clarence Thomas. I think that’s the best way to understand this whole separation of church and state thing.

James Kaddis: Ilhan Omar is probably besides the fact that she’s too busy fighting World War XI, let me just tell you she is by far one of the dumbest females to ever walk through the doors of our congressional halls. The worst part about it is she’s standing up for Somalia, she’s standing up for Islam. Does she realize that she’s black? Strike one if you’re a Muslim, she’s black. Strike two, she’s a female. Strike three, she’s strong-willed.

If she spent five minutes trying to do in Somalia what she did in the United States of America, they would smoke her. Not that I would ever wish that upon her. Of course not. I don’t want her burning in hell like she’s about to if she doesn’t repent. It’s just completely crazy. It’s like the whole Queers for Palestine. Let’s see how well that works for you.

Go to downtown Gaza for five minutes and hang out with Hamas and talk about your rights as a queer. Let’s see how that works. You go to Tel Aviv, you won’t have that problem. No big deal. Join in the party; they’ll even do a little pride march, whatever. You go to Gaza, they’ll throw you off the literal building. They’ll do it in five minutes. That’s if your survival rate is long. But this is the problem. These are the things that we’re talking about.

Then you have one of Islam’s greatest scholars who happens to live in your neck of the woods, who lives in Texas, Yasir Qadhi, who’s actually leading this massive group of Muslims to take over these city halls, yet at the same time admitting to the whole world that the Hadith has no real extancy, has no real value as it relates to any of the manuscript issues that any scholar would take a look at, who actually admits to the whole world that Muhammad isn’t even a real character. How crazy does it get?

Let’s not talk about the Quran, which every extant manuscript that we have of the Quran dates back to the Ottoman Empire, which is hundreds of years after the existence of Muhammad. The Quran only mentions the name of Muhammad four times, and it’s really not even his name. It’s the word Muhammad, which means the blessed one, which is probably talking about Christ.

But yet people wake up in the morning and they do it. It blows my mind. I cannot even get it. By the way, speaking of separation of church and state, these same people are the ones that are pushing for the early morning prayers at the Culver City mosque, or in Texas. There are parts of this country where you wake up in the morning to hearing the call to prayer. You go to parts of these countries and you hear these Muslims say the same things that the 9/11 terrorists were saying when they were crashing planes into buildings.

You think we’re not going to be judged? Sorry, you think I’m a little emotional about this, Andy?

Andy Woods: What’s troubling about the whole thing is we just sat back and let it happen. We have people in our prophecy circles, James, that are running around encouraging Christians not to vote.

James Kaddis: Idiot. That's the only thing I can say.

Andy Woods: I’m thinking to myself, do you think the Muslims sit around and have internal debates about whether they should vote or not? Do you think the hardened feminists and the left, do you think they sit around and have internal debates about whether they vote or not? They’re marching in lockstep all of the time, and our camp, we can’t even figure out should we get out there and restrain evil or not.

James Kaddis: They shouldn’t only be encouraging people to be voting. How about we just take it a step further? How about all of you should be talking to church members? You should be holding people’s hands, you should be driving them to the polling place, you should be knocking on doors and saying let’s go. You should be telling people how they can register to vote and advising them.

I do it on a regular basis at church right from the pulpit. "Hey, these are the people we need to be voting for. This is what’s going on." You have to do that. Come after me over the Johnson Amendment. Let’s see how long you last in court over that one.

Andy Woods: I don’t think anybody’s even been dealt with under the Johnson Amendment. No legal precedent. The whole thing is just a giant canard. It’s smoke and mirrors.

I’m a Texas pastor. I got a letter from the Reverend Barry Lynn. Barry Lynn is head of this organization. It’s kind of like the ACLU; it’s called Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Number one, the guy’s a total fraud because those words, as we just talked about, don’t even appear in the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. It comes from something Jefferson said after the fact, as we’ve already covered.

Number two, the guy’s not a real Reverend. I watched him on a cable show where a conservative host was saying, "Hey, Barry, I’d love to see you preach this Sunday. Where do I find your church?" This whole title "Reverend" is fake. Anyway, I got this letter from him, and it was like a form letter sent out to Texas pastors during one of the election cycles in the past, telling us, "Hey, you better be careful about saying anything about politics or we’re going to come and under the Johnson Amendment take away your tax-exempt status."

I was thinking to myself, I’ll bet the big social justice churches that get up and talk about global warming and universal healthcare and critical race theory, I’ll bet they sure didn’t get a letter like this. No way. It’s only aimed at one group of people: conservatives.

Because, James, they’re really not about separation between church and state; they’re about separation of salt from culture, exactly what Jesus told us to be involved in. As going back to what I said earlier, the issue is never the issue, but the revolution. That’s why we do what we do. We’re fighting. It’s a literal fight, and there’s a massive spiritual war, and the war is ugly.

It’s getting uglier. If we don’t stand up and if we don’t talk about this—I’m telling you, more than any other time, I think we have to yell at the top of our lungs: "Here comes the judge." What side of that judgment do you want to be on? We want to be on the right side of history. I think people listen to us, you’re watching this at the beginning of early voting for a lot of states. You have to vote, and you have to vote conservatively.

James Kaddis: You’re going to run into people who are leaders, who are running for office, that might not even be Christians, but at least they’re going to align with our values. Vote for them. Please. Because if we don’t have the freedom to worship God, we’re doomed. Forget MAGA, forget any of that. We’re done if we don’t have that freedom.

I think that’s why the president is so brilliant. I think the president recognizes that the whole America First philosophy is fundamentally predicated upon our freedom to worship the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There’s no other way around it.

Andy Woods: Kelly Shackelford, I forgot his organization’s name, First Liberty, an amazing attorney. Probably has some of the greatest victories in the Supreme Court, probably more than any other civil rights attorney that I’ve ever seen. But he came to our church and he did a talk, and he made the point that around the world when someone wants to take away freedom of political expression, private property, they want to take away what we would call Second Amendment rights, gun rights, they don’t start there. They start with religion.

That is always the first domino to fall. Once that falls, the others fall quite easily. So what we’re doing with freedom of religion in America and how we’re going to react to it is really setting the stage for the rest of the freedoms that are guaranteed to us in our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, etc. I couldn't agree with you more, brother.

James Kaddis: Okay, well, as usual, I’m going to give you the final word because we’re out of time.

Andy Woods: Well, I would just say to whom much is given, much is required. America’s in a precarious place because God is going to deal with our country. Any country that turns its back on the heritage that it’s been given, God is not going to look the other way.

I would just encourage people, even as early voting is taking place this week and next week there’s primaries, and we’re coming up on our 250th year celebration of our independence, I would encourage the Christians out there to be more outspoken and more vocal than ever before and to permeate all levels of society just like salt as a preservative does. I would encourage the preachers out there to encourage their flocks to do just that and don’t go into this mindset where we’re going to withdraw, we’re going to put the salt back in the salt shaker, because that’s going to do nothing more than expedite God’s judgment.

James Kaddis: Amen to that, bro. Amen to that. I got to tell you, I think more than ever, we have to be focused on that, we have to concentrate on that. There are so many beautiful things that God has given us in this nation, and as Ben Franklin said, if we can keep this republic, it’s going to serve us well, but it’s only if we can keep it.

I think that the way we do that is by recognizing the responsibility of stewardship that God has given us. May God have mercy on us. May he keep this nation from being judged because the Christians decided to speak up and to get very real about this whole thing. Anyway, with that said, I do sincerely hope that you guys enjoyed watching this as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. We love you guys so much.

Remember this, understand this: Christ could come at any moment, and this is why we do what we do. This is why we contend in the political arena, this is why we choose to fight the way that we do because Christ could come at any moment. So with that said, we love you guys. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Countdown to Eternity. On the behalf of the great Andy Woods, keep looking to the Lord. We love you guys. God bless you.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Countdown 2 Eternity with Pastors James Kaddis and Andy Woods. If you joined us late or would just like to hear this again, stop by countdowntoeternity.com. Countdown, the number 2, eternity.com.

Have you heard Pastor James has a new book? It’s entitled "The Last Book." Revelation isn’t a book of fear; it’s a book of hope. "The Last Book" will give you what you need to know about Revelation, the Rapture, and the end times. Learn what the Bible says about the days we’re in and what God’s promise is for believers in "The Last Book," available right now at countdowntoeternity.com. That’s also the place to go to give to this ministry. Thank you very much for your financial support and prayers.

Again, we’re at countdowntoeternity.com. I should also mention Andy Woods is online at andywoodsministries.org. Browse through his latest media, check out some of his recent interviews, and available resources at andywoodsministries.org. Then join us next week as the Countdown 2 Eternity continues, right here. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.