God Doesn’t Grade on a Curve

0:00Yeah, it's gone. God don't ever do. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 443. 443. All right. So what's in the news right now? What can we talk about? What can we kick around? What can we discuss? Well, of course, I think it has to be Sydney Swini making another splash with an ad campaign with sort of sort of nudy ads promoting a gambling operation. And this whole issue is festive to the nth degree. Sydney Swini is a photogenic sex pot. It kind of has become iconic sort of on the secular right as being sort of blonde, white,

1:06conservative, pretty, not, you know, sort of the anti woke old school cheesecake model as opposed to imperpled lesbians and wokeies and other people plus size models that we have been afflicted with. And so she does this ad campaign with these nudy provocative poses, et cetera, and the internet went nuts. And it went nuts for all the wrong reasons. The lefties, the progressives came out and said that she was degrading women and women should be admired for their accomplishments in the sporting world and not to be objectified in, et cetera. And of course, it took about 10 minutes for the conservative supporters of Swini to produce any number of photo shoots of leftists and progressives in various stages of undress.

2:12And of course, it's so it appears to the objective observer is that nudity is a bad thing if you're right wing. And so you look at this inconsistency and the progressives were criticizing her because they were saying, well, she's degrading sports. Well, the thing that really is degrading sports is the thing that she was advertising, which was the gambling network on sporting events. If there's anything that degrades the integrity of sports, it would be introducing money and gambling. And let's see, how can we create incentives for someone to throw a game or to, and then people can not only bet on the game, but they can bet on, in the old days, you just bet on the outcome. But now you can, you can place a bet on anything. You can bet on the margins like the Super Bowl winner will win by how many points.

3:16And then if there are a number of bets on the margins, then people can decide not to throw the game, but they can decide to throw a set of downs or they can adjust the margins for the sake of the gambling. And so you've got this appalling degradation of athletic standards in the encouragement of a betting culture surrounding athletics. And Sydney Swini was advertising that. She was, in fact, advertising something that really is bad for sports, advertising something that really is, really is a no bueno. And the conservative right-wing defenders of Swini are correct in pointing out that the left-wing progressives who are hot and indignant over what she's doing are basically shills for a particular ideology, coupled with envy because generally Swini is better looking

4:17than the general lot of them. But none of that is an objective transcendent standard. None of that is a standard that you can find by means of exegesis. And it's sort of a shame to see Christians wanting to defend something which in another era, their great-grandmother would have called horish behavior, just because the person who is doing it is generally sympathetic to conservative causes. You see the same thing with Sophie Cunningham in the WNBA. So Sophie Cunningham is a strikingly good-looking woman and she's not ashamed to sexualize it. Sydney Swini is certainly not ashamed of doing that, flaunts it. And yet I stand for traditional values. Okay. Yeah, that's more, some respects just like Lotton Sodom.

5:21Lott shouldn't have been there. He chose the wrong path when Abraham gave him the choice and certainly wasn't good for his wife. Nevertheless, Peter calls him a righteous man who was vexed by the behavior of the people around him. Ultimately, God doesn't grade on a curve. At the same time, God distinguishes between things that are near the end of the road and things that are not near the end of the road. And this is just another testimony to how confused we have gotten. So continuing with the podcast, 443, we continue on with our in-depth researches into what we are calling haemartiology, the study of sin. Particularly, we are looking at all the Greek words in the New Testament that have something to do with some sin or other. Our sin of the week this time is nofidzamy, nofidzamy, N-O-S-P-H-I-D-Z-O-M-A-I, nofidzamy.

6:25And it means to keep back or to perloin, to keep back or to perloin. There are two uses of this in the New Testament. The first use is found in the story of Ananias and Sapphira when they sold some property and held back part of the price. The sin was in the attempt to buy a reputation for generosity on the cheap. In other words, what they wanted to do was have the reputation in the community for having sold some property and donated all the proceeds to this common fund. They wanted to have a reputation for sold out generosity, all in generosity. When what they did is they skimmed the amount and kept it for themselves, which they had every right to do. They had the right to keep the property. They had the right to sell the property and keep all the money. They had the right to sell the property and keep half the money. What they didn't have the right to do is sell the property, keep half the money or a fraction

7:26of the money, and say to Peter and the others, this amount is everything we earned off the sale. That's what they didn't have. Their sin was the sin of lying, not the sin of not giving enough. Peter said that the property was theirs to keep in the first place. He also said that the money was theirs. Once they had sold the property, they could do whatever they wanted with the money, which is also, incidentally, an answer to those people who describe the early behavior of the Christians in acts as communism. Well, it wasn't communism and it wasn't socialism. It was all entirely voluntary. It was a donation-driven thing. They were free to give or not give. They were free to give part or all. What they weren't free to do is lie. What they were not free to do was to give a portion while claiming that they were giving it all. Acts 5, 2 says, and kept back part of the price.

8:28That kept back is our word. No feet, Samai. And kept back part of the price. His wife also being privy to it and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles' feet. So this is called perloining or stealing. And it's stealing because it was a species of fraud. They were trying to buy a reputation that they had not actually earned. And so no feet, Samai is the word that's translated, keep back or kept back. And then it's used again in the next verse. But Peter said, and anise, why had Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost? There's the center of the problem. The center of the problem was the lying and to keep back part of the price of the land. Okay? The second instance of this word being used refers to the more active type of stealing, sort of the porch climber, the burglar. The kind that a dishonest slave might engage in, for example, the perloining here would

9:33refer to objects around the house that he could just help himself to. This is Titus 2, 9 and 10. Exort servants, and here it means slaves. Exort slaves to be obedient under their own masters and to please them well in all things, not answering again, not perloining, but showing all good fidelity that they may adorn the doctrine of God, our savior in all things. So slaves, household slaves who worked around the house would have many opportunities to help themselves to things. Twenty dollars out of their master's wife's purse, silver spoon that somehow went missing, you know, things like that. Don't give yourself to perloining. So this active stealing on the part of the slave, on the part of a servant, is rejected by the New Testament. God don't ever change his God.

10:34All right. The book that I'd like to review this time around is Acadia, A-C-E-D-I-A, and it was written by a gent name of SNEL. Now Acadia is the word for one of the seven deadly sins, which is sloth. Acadia is sloth. And if you pick the book up, thinking you're going to read a book on lazy, straight up laziness, we've got proverbs. It could be raining porridge and he forgot his bowl or he was so lazy, he was like Ludlum's dog who had the lean his head against the wall to bark. So there's sort of straight up laziness right out of the book of proverbs. But SNEL has other, he's hunting bigger game. Acadia doesn't refer to, you know, teenage, well, it does refer in a certain extent. It does refer to a certain extent.

11:35But it doesn't primarily refer to a teenage boy who doesn't want to get out the couch because he just wants to eat more cheetos. But SNEL is attacking is what might be called a joyless, bored nihilism. So it's sort of like all the colors gone out of the world. There's no motivation for anything. There's no reason to keep on. It's like a rootlessness or a pointlessness. NEL is one of these authors who is vastly learned referring to people all over Tarnation. Different scholars, scholars you've heard of, scholars you've not heard of quoting people bringing it all together. It's a very, very interesting book. He's describing a world in which nothing tastes. There's no tang in it. There's no blood in it.

12:36There's no sap in it. And of course, this results in a listlessness or an apathy or an anewi and he dissects it very, very wonderfully, very, very good book. It's not a huge tone, a small book, Acadia, A-C-E-D-I-A, Acadia. Yeah, it's gone. God don't ever change, He's gone. Ashtown Announcement. After 15 years of blood, sweat and tears, the Ashtown burial series is finally reaching its conclusion and uniting and a gorgeous quartet issued this year.

13:39You can pre-review your copies now and you obviously should. It's been a long journey getting this far and I'm glad that I'm not one of those terrible fantasy writers who died before finishing the series, barely avoided, but I did avoid it. So the conclusion the Silent Bells will be shipping on Cyber Monday as will the full set if you go for the United set.