Join Dr. David Jeremiah in this captivating episode where he explores the controversial topic of socialism and its increasing presence in modern society. Through vivid historical examples, including the turbulent experiences in Venezuela, and insightful biblical references, Dr. Jeremiah connects the dots between today’s political shifts and ancient prophecies. This episode offers a deep dive into understanding the roots of socialism and the warnings laid out in the Bible, encouraging listeners to reflect on their views and beliefs in the context of scripture.
00:00:05 Introduction to Socialism and Cultural Prophecy
It’s the dangerous philosophy at the heart of many of the world’s problems, yet it’s gaining widespread support. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah examines socialism to begin his series, Where Do We Go From Here? Is the rise of socialism predicted in scripture? Should its popularity concern you? Listen as David introduces today’s compelling message, Socialism, a Cultural Prophecy.
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I am sure that along with me, you probably in the past have thought there would be no way socialism would ever find its way into the fabric of American culture. And yet here we are today with a socialist mayor in New York City and socialist mayors showing up all around the country. Socialism, certainly in Congress, in the governments of our states, it is a very frightening thing, if you know anything about socialism, to think that it could ever become a part of our American culture. Today we’re going to talk about it from a little different perspective, not just what we know about it from history, but what the Bible sets forth as warnings against this. And I hope you will stay with us. We’re going to talk about this for today and tomorrow. And it’s one of the chapters in the book, Where Do We Go From Here? And that is a very important little book for you to get if you don’t have it. It’s not the series resource for the month of March, but it is available from davidjeremiah.org, along with Turning Point’s study guide and CDs and DVDs that go along with this series. Ask about it when you write us or when you go to our website for inquiry. We are very excited to tell you that during this month, our resource is Understanding Biblical Prophecy, a 30-day Bible study on how to understand prophecy in the Bible. It answers critical questions about prophecy as God’s promises for the future. Questions at the end of each chapter for personal or group study, only available from Turning Point, only available this month as our resource of the month. Ask for it when you send your gift to Turning Point today. Here’s Socialism, Part 1. Under the cover of darkness, a middle-aged man inched out of the window of his seventh-story apartment and then silently rappelled 75 feet to the ground. A pair of bolt cutters snipped off his ankle monitor, and the man jumped into a waiting car. No, this is not a movie. After 15 years of imprisonment on bogus charges, Ivan Simonovas was escaping from Venezuela. In 2014, Ivan had been moved to house arrest to seek treatment for 19 chronic health conditions, most of which had been caused by his imprisonment. Knowing this was his only chance, he arranged his daring escape. And after speeding off in a car, he spent three weeks evading security in a cat and mouse pursuit. A 14-hour ride in a small fishing boat got him to a Caribbean island, and from there he flew to the United States. Ivan could recall when Venezuela was the wealthiest nation in South America. The per capita income of its citizens was greater than those of China and Japan, almost rivaling the income of U.S. citizens. The people of Ivan’s generation enjoyed religious liberty and political freedom and personal dignity and economic opportunity. But when the oil prices crashed in the 1980s and then again in the 90s, the Venezuelan economy experienced a dip, and then that dip became a dive in 1998, and the Venezuelan people elected Hugo Chavez as their president. Once in power, Chavez relentlessly implemented the socialist playbook formulated by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China, and other nations. His first task was to rewrite the Venezuelan Constitution, guaranteeing citizens the so-called free rights of government, provided health care, free college education, and social justice. When the Supreme Court ruled against Chavez on several important issues, he responded by stacking the court with 12 new justices, all of which were loyal to him. Socialism totally engulfed the country when Chavez was re-elected in 2006. Fully in control of the courts and the legislature, he moved quickly to nationalize the media, removing every voice of dissent. Then he authorized government agencies to seize privately owned wealth and property from Venezuela’s citizens, all in the name of fairness and equity. Chavez took control of the nation’s oil industry. He expelled all the foreign investors. He nationalized power companies and farms and mines and banks and grocery stores. And his final step was to eliminate term limits for elected officials, setting himself up to rule for the rest of his life in the style of Russia’s Stalin and Cuba’s Castro. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Not even Chavez could evade the last enemy. He died from cancer in 2013, but his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, continued to implement Chavez’s agenda, even going further in some areas to force a Marxist system on the Venezuelan people. Today, Venezuela is descending into anarchy. Record numbers of Venezuela migrants are fleeing northward trying to reach the border of the United States. Right now, you may be wondering what all of this has to do with you. I mean, if Venezuela has proven that socialism is a bad idea, why should anybody care? Well, you should care, you should really care, because socialist visions and policies are invading the United States. You’ll hear it discussed under four different names, socialism, communism, Marxism, and cultural Marxism. Consider this. Hugo Chavez had plenty of cheerleaders in the United States during his rise, including Hollywood stars like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Danny Glover. Socialism seems to hold some sort of hypnotic power over many thinkers, and it’s spilling into the common culture. A 2020 poll showed that 40% of Americans had a favorable view of socialism. This was up from 36% in 2019. And even more frightening, 47% of the millennials and 49% of Generation Z view socialism favorably. Indeed, one 2019 poll found in Axios that 61% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 have a positive reaction to socialism. And then there’s this. In 2020, Bernie Sanders nearly won the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. And this is the same senator from Vermont who publicly declared, I am a socialist and everybody knows it. When Jesus was describing what it would be like on earth just before he returned, here is what he said. But as the days of Noah were, so also will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in the days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” What were those days of Noah like? Genesis 6, 5 describes them this way. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The people of Noah’s day ignored and ridiculed his warnings. Noah built and preached for 120 years and not one single individual outside of his immediate family believed him. The people were so indifferent that they didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late. The heedlessness of the people of Noah’s day will be duplicated in the last days of our world’s history. It will be a day much like ours, a day when ideologies like socialism can sneak in without much attention. Will this be the political philosophy on the earth when the tribulation begins? I believe it will. Socialism is tailor-made for the Antichrist’s appearance. It creates global conditions that bring great stress and trouble, difficult days that will be hard to bear. And it demands a one-world system of government, which Scripture says will be established before the end of history. Revelation 13 describes the Antichrist as a beast having vast power and authority. Watch carefully the all-inclusive words. The whole world marveled and gave allegiance to the beast. And he was given authority to rule over every tribe and people and every language and nation and all the people who belong to the world. There’s coming a day when there will be a leader who will be in charge of the whole world. He will be the central authority for everybody in every place on planet Earth. And you think that’s not possible, but it is. So I’ve introduced all of this and I’ve talked about socialism a couple of times. What is socialism? How should we understand it today? Well, socialists believe that the world’s means of production, like infrastructure, farms, factories, energy, natural resources, medicines, and more, should be under the control of, quote, unquote, the people. In other words, society as a whole should own all the raw materials and the systems that produce wealth. In a free market system, these materials are controlled by companies. or individuals, but in socialist countries, they are owned by the people. Of course, there’s no way to make decisions based on such a loose concept as the people. So under socialism, the government becomes the sole authority and controller and the means of production. Unfortunately, governments are controlled by specific people. often the kinds of people who seek out power. And those people are entirely corruptible by greed and selfishness, lust and vindictiveness and violence and the overwhelming desire for power. As more power flows to the government, the handful at the top become dictatorial. To understand socialism as it is in our culture today, we must first understand the originator of socialism as we know it. He was a man by the name of Karl Marx. When you understand who he was and what he believed, you will be able to trace a lot that’s going on in our world today right back to him. If you study the life of Karl Marx, you’ll learn that he wasn’t just a hater of God. He was a cheerleader for the devil. His family thought him possessed by a demon. A biographer described him like this. He had the devil’s view of the world and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing the works of evil. On one occasion, Marx’s own son sent him a letter and addressed it to my dear devil. Marx’s partner, Frederick Engels, declared that 10,000 devils had Marx by the hair. In 2020, a man by the name of Paul Kenger wrote a book entitled The Devil and Karl Marx. Karl Marx hated Christianity, and his rise to power was an amazing thing to watch. What he did, who he was, what he said. Frankly, it was a difficult book for me to read. I read the whole book. Karl Marx and the Devil. And according to Kinger, Marx was a tyrant, a racist, and a misogynistic radical who hated God and wanted to see the world burn. In his 1837 poem, The Pale Maiden, he composed these words, “‘Thus, heaven, I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, has been chosen for hell.'” He knew in his own life that he was an evil man. In 1849, one year after publishing the Communist Manifesto, Marx was evicted by his landlord, who was fed up with his filthiness. Karl drank too much, he smoked too much, he never exercised, and he suffered from warts and boils due to the lack of washing. He stunk. As for the family apartment, everything was broken down, busted, spilled, smashed, falling apart, with toys and chairs and dishes and cups and tables everywhere. Karl Marx fathered an illegitimate child by his maid, Helene de Meuth. He blamed the child on his partner, Ingalls, who thought it was a great joke. Since Marx never had a job, he mooched off everyone, his parents, Ingalls, and anyone else he could find. His wife, Jenny, was so miserable in their marriage she wanted to die, a wish she pondered daily. His daughters, Jenny and Laura, fulfilled their mother’s wish. Jenny poisoned herself when she was 43, and in a death pact with her husband, Laura also committed suicide. Karl Marx died in despair on March 14th, 1883. Just before his death, he wrote to his friend Ingalls. How pointless and empty is life, he said, and yet how desirable. He was buried in the Highgate Cemetery, considered the center of Satanism in London. Now I’ve given you that little report on this man because I can’t help but wonder how many people who are championing socialism and Marxism are aware of the poisonous roots of their belief. Their founder was a hideous person and what he was, socialism became. Today Karl Marx is ruling the world from his grave. And here are some of the characteristics of his ideology. Number one, Marxism is anti-God. Karl Marx hated Christianity. which he saw as a source of oppression. To him, religion was the opium of the people. For communism to succeed, loyalty to the church had to be replaced by loyalty to the state. On one occasion, he described the church as medieval mildew that had to be scraped away. In spite of what many claim to believe or propose, Marxism is incompatible with the free expression of religion. I don’t think you can be a Christian socialist, a Christian Marxist. The things that are involved in these two understandings are totally opposite. They contradict each other. So Marxism is, first of all, anti-God. It’s not atheistic. They believe in God. They just hate him. and they try to push him out. One of their little sayings was, we’re going to rid the world of capitalists and rid heaven of God. That was their motives. It is also characterized by totalitarianism. That’s a long word, but it’s a word you’ll understand in a moment. This fact about Marxism is one we should grasp. it quickly becomes totalitarian. The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of dictator Benito Mussolini, who summed it up this way, everything within the state, nothing outside the state, and nothing against the state. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar on totalitarianism, a totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it to be. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. It’s anti-God, it’s totalitarian, and it’s divisive. Marxism thrives on division. In historic Marxism, the division was promoted between classes of people. The oppressors against the oppressed. The bosses against the workers. Men like Hugo Chavez went out of their way to ensure that the poor people of his country hated the wealthy people of his country. In today’s cultural Marxism in our country, the exploited divide is often racial. I believe that’s one of the reasons we’ve lost some of the progress we’ve made on race relationships. Whatever it is, or however far it might be removed from actual racism, whenever a socialist or Marxist can’t figure out how to respond to an issue, they always, and I mean every time, call it racist. And this is tragic for many reasons. It’s very hurtful to be branded a racist if one has done or said nothing that would lead a rational person to make such an accusation. And once racism has been pinned on a person, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it, no matter what you do. But there is another seldom discussed sadness with playing the race card. If everything is racist, nothing is racist. All of us know there are still issues that need to be addressed with race relationships in America, but the true issues get lost in the avalanche of unwarranted accusations, and there’s never any time to devote to the real issues that still face us. When everything is racist, then nothing is racist. And Marxism is using this divide in our country to make headway into our culture. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Marxism to me as I studied it is how deadly it has been. Christianity leads to life. Marxism leads to death. In 1999, the Black Book of Communism endeavored to attempt the impossible task of tabulating a Marxist-Leninist death toll for the 20th century. It revealed the most colossal case of political carnage in history. Latin America, 150,000 deaths. Eastern Europe, 1 million deaths. Vietnam, 1 million deaths. Africa, 1.7 million deaths. Cambodia, 2 million deaths. North Korea, 2 million deaths. USSR, 20 million deaths. China, 65 million deaths. The death count that resulted from Marxism between 1917 and 1979 would equate to a rate of multiple thousands of dead people over the course of 100 years. Even Adolf Hitler got nowhere close to that. In fact, neither did the two deadliest wars in history. Think of this, World War I and World War II would have to be combined and doubled to get near to communism’s butcher bill. More people have died as the result of communism than the First World War and the Second World War times two. Communism leads to death. Wherever you see it, across the globe, you will see the deadliness of it. That’s all from the heart of the evil Karl Marx. So that’s what it is. And obviously there’s much more to socialism than what I’ve said. Those are some of the main characteristics. And you say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, that’s a good study. So what does that have to do with us? What does that mean? Well, I am afraid this new political trajectory in our nation is more than just a trend. It is a seismic shift toward the socialist agenda. If you look closely, you can draw the connections. First of all, the destruction of our monuments. It’s become common in recent years to see news headlines or live video of protest groups surrounding, defacing, even eventually removing statues. and other historical monuments they considered to be offensive. We were surprised when they took down some of the early monuments. There might have been some reason for that, but then they didn’t stop there. They took down Washington and Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, everybody they could find that had anything to do with history. When we witness these events, we’re not simply seeing a bunch of rowdy young people tearing down statues for fun. No, instead, this is a part of a concerted effort to erase the past. The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory, destroy its books, its culture, its history, then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history, and before long, the nation will forget what it is and what it was. On the contrary, it is interesting to discover that the word remember is found 164 times in the Old Testament. Socialism wants you to forget. Christianity wants you to remember. Remember the former things of old. God said through the prophet Isaiah, I am God and there is none like me. Yes, remember all that God has done for us. On the basis of past mercies, we can build a future of grace. That’s a very important lesson to remember. Socialism wants to erase the past. And the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ is to remember the things that God has done for us. We have a song that we sing usually during Communion Sunday at Shadow Mountain, and it’s called We Will Remember, written by Tommy Walker. This great song tells us the importance of our memory as a part of our worship. Part 2 of Socialism tomorrow. I hope you’ll join us then as we get our feet going in the right direction here. Where do we go from here is the question, and the Bible will tell us if we study it together here during Turning Point’s Prophecy Series. Don’t forget that during this month, our resource for the month is Understanding the Bible. a beautiful biblical prophecy workbook that will help you understand the prophecies that are in the Bible. It’s a workbook, but it’s really filled with truth and instruction. I think it will be blessing to you, and you can do it in 30 days. It’s yours for the asking when you send your gift today, but be sure to ask for it. See you tomorrow.
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For more information on Dr. Jeremiah’s series, Where Do We Go From Here?, please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly Turning Points magazine and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org slash radio. That’s davidjeremiah.org slash radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David’s new book, Understanding Biblical Prophecy, a 30-day Bible study. It’s a powerful resource, and it’s yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, available in a variety of handsome cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org slash radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue, Where Do We Go From Here? on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
