Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, I want to challenge you to think, how are we to respond not only to the death of Charlie Kirk, but more importantly, to the entire ethos and worldview that made it possible and motivated that assassination? And I want to do this in a two-part series. So this is part number one.

Now, we are understandably shocked and grieved over the assassination of a peaceful, persuasive advocate for the Constitution and an advocate for Christian principle in life as well. As has been observed again and again since he was gunned down on the campus of Utah Valley University, as he was beginning one of his classic prove-me-wrong interactions. I love that. Kirk was a sharp, savvy conservative who had crafted one of the most effective persuasion and influence juggernauts in the world at Turning Point USA. Well, at this specific event, and he's held many of them, including a great annual conference, the Turning Point USA Conference.

Well, at this specific event, Kirk was fielding questions from young students about issues ranging from abortion to transsexual rights to the United States role with Israel in the Middle East. Nothing was off the table. In fact, Charlie Kirk's modus operandi proved especially effective with young college-age kids precisely because he encouraged open dialogue and opinions fueled by facts and reason rather than empty slogans and pre-programmed cliches fed by Marxist professors. And his modus operandi ran directly counter to campus practice, which labeled anything other than the progressive narrative as hate speech that needed to be canceled.

When Charlie Kirk's speech couldn't be canceled, however, by the progressive left, the only alternative remaining for them was to cancel his life, which they did with a bullet from an evil transsexual shooter. Evidence is pouring in that it was more than a lone wolf shooter, too. A network of supporters encouraged and enabled him. This is no surprise when you consider the nature of the evil that we face. Our enemy is more than the occasional deranged shooter who inscribes their bullets or their gunstocks with cryptic sayings.

And we must look past the single shooter to the entirety of that culture in which he was nourished. And what I want to stress now, that so many are, now that so many are paying attention, at least for the moment they are, to the evil that is at work in our world, I want to draw attention to that, is that evil and evil ones vie for power and sway over us, both in the physical realm and in the spiritual realm. And we readily see the evil that took Charlie Kirk. But so many miss the larger context in which it was framed.

Now, military planners have rightly observed since the days of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist from the 5th century BC, whose book, The Art of War, set the standard for military strategy. And he always said that knowing one's enemy is the first and necessary requirement for victory. Therefore, O Christian, since we are in a spiritual war, know your enemy. First of all, what evil is? What is evil?

Well, what counts is what God thinks evil is, not what we think evil is. And in the Bible, evil is always set in direct opposition to good. There's an adversarial relationship. Satan means adversary. Depart from me, you evildoers, the psalmist says, that I may keep the commandments of my God.

And St. Augustine defined evil as an absence of the good. Oh, I like that understanding of evil, the absence of the good. Disobedience to God's commands, thus is evil. It has connotations of injustice and deception and falsehood and emptiness. Well, there are three components, all of them personified in Satan, three components of evil, and all of them personified in Satan, the devil.

First of all, evil is adamant opposition to God. Evil is adamant opposition to God. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the Hebrew word for adversary is Satan, from which we get our word Satan. It means one who opposes God and all for which he stands with great vitriol and hatred and animosity. From 1 Chronicles chapter 21, for example, then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel, which issued in great sin and death by an avenging angel.

And then from Job, Job chapter 1, now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. Right? And of course, he tries Job. He asks for Job from God in order to try him, and thus kicks off the book of Job. And then from Zechariah chapter 3, then he showed me Joshua, the angel.

That is, showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. Oh, Satan, the accuser. Satan, adversary, has been viciously, tenaciously opposing God's plan to build his great garden city kingdom from the beginning in the Garden of Eden, and he will oppose to the end when he is finally defeated and thrown into the lake of fire before that great garden city kingdom descends from heaven in the closing chapters of Revelation. So make no mistake, dear listener, the murderers of Charlie Kirk are very much adversaries, satans of God and his work.

They oppose Christ and his church, and all for which it stands, and they seek to destroy it. And that brings me to the second aspect of evil. The second aspect of evil is that it is murderous and bloodthirsty. Evil seeks to kill and destroy the work of God, especially the apple of his eye, mankind. In upbraiding the Jews for their intent to kill him, Jesus said to them, you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires.

He was a murderer from the beginning, and the truth is not in him. Well, also, when speaking of himself as the true shepherd, Christ characterized the Jews and their father, the devil, as false shepherds and wolves and thieves. He said, the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly, unquote, from our Lord. So, from the beginning, when Cain murdered his brother Abel, the evil one has been seeking to kill and destroy.

And we have seen it in history and in our own day, whether in bloody wars where millions are killed or in an assassination where only one life is taken, like Charlie Kirk's. Ah, the third aspect of evil that I want to highlight here with you, the third component, is that evil is deceptive, a liar in the face of truth. As the serpent deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden, so he and his minions seek to deceive Adam and Eve's children. And once more, in the same speech to the Jews, where he calls the devil a murderer, Jesus also says of the devil that he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.

When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. And the children of lies exist in the progressive movement today. So, wherever you see lies and deception and untruth, there you will find evil. That lie can be a big lie, like the entire big picture COVID hoax, or the lie of a worldwide pandemic that was going to kill the world's population. That lie was perpetrated, wasn't it?

Or there's the single lie, like the MAGA movement was responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk, as AOC has tried to say. Oh, lies. Behold, dear listener, the three big characteristics of evil. Number one, evil is the sworn enemy of God and the good. It implacably opposes the good at every turn.

And number two, evil is a bloodthirsty murderer. It kills God's creatures wherever and whenever possible. And number three, evil is a liar. It seeks to pretend and deceive and mislead mankind. So, where these three elements exist in human behavior, there you will find evil.

And we see plenty of it around us, and yea, in the death of Charlie Kirk. But it is important to see evil in its larger context, if we are going to properly understand the evil in his death. Know your enemy, dear listener. Know your enemy. For example, the killer of Charlie Kirk, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is already being called the trans shooter because he and his lover were in a transsexual relationship where his roommate was in the process of transitioning, quote-unquote, to a woman, supposedly.

And Charlie was shot in part because he was such an effective defender of marriage and family and the traditional Christian home. So, already we come up against, in Charlie's death, not only the evil of murder per se, but also the evil of the transsexual movement and all for which it stands. It is evil. It has already developed a reputation for violence in advancing its goals, threatening to shoot and kill those who oppose them. There was the trans shooter Audrey Hale in Nashville, Tennessee, for example, the girl in transition to be a male who shot and killed six people at Covenant School in Nashville in 2023.

And of course, there was the recent Annunciation Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis, where 23-year-old Robin Westman killed two children and injured 21 others. He, too, was attempting to transition to a woman without much success. Well, the larger evil altogether is the attack upon God's plan for filling the earth and taking dominion of it. That is the biblical family. That's the real target of the transsexual and the LBGTQ plus movement.

Oh, under whatever rubric one chooses to categorize himself under the LBGTQ plus categories, whatever rubric you choose, it stands in opposition to the family. And thus, you are an adversary to God if you are one. In seeking to kill those who oppose them, trans shooters become murderers like their first father, the devil. In trying to normalize and regularize their movement, too, they lie and deceive us into thinking that it is okay and natural to accept them. Well, since Charlie Kirk was so effective in holding out for the biblical family, and he modeled it with his own wife and two children, he had to be killed.

Widening our lens even further, we see why the progressive left embraces the LBGTQ plus movement as its own, too. The progressive left is increasingly exposing its Marxist petticoat, so to speak, to the world. Ah, Mom Donnie's socialist credentials in the New York City mayoral race, for example, is only the most recent manifestation of those tendencies. Where Marxism and LBGTQ plus interests intersect is in the destruction of the biblical family structure. Yes, the progressive left, the socialist left, and LBGTQ plus have this in common, the destruction of the biblical family.

The communist manifesto, for example, declares as one of its planks, and I quote from it, abolition of the family. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and that complement was private property, and that the communist manifesto goes on to say, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. This is one reason we can characterize Marxist communism socialism as evil. Marxist communism socialism is evil. They are the implacable, violent, eternal enemy of God's plan for taking dominion of His creation, and that is the biblical family.

And any measure taken against the biblical family will help to destroy it. Political power and government resources, for example, that are used to advance elements destructive to the family will help achieve progressivism's purpose. Whether it is the LBGTQ plus causes, like gender transition care, as it's called, yes. Or abortion, which of course is a bloody measure in itself that murders life and also destroys the family. Or whether it's divorce or pornography, all of these things and more are adversaries to the biblical family, and thus they are evil.

The LBGTQ plus movement is evil. And no one understands this better than the progressive. It is why they continue to make excuses and create lies to cover for the shooter in the death of Charlie Kirk. Many, many more in this movement are evil than just Tyler Robinson. The progressive left is complicit in this crime, aiding and abetting him by lying to us about him and extenuating his reasons for reacting in violence over his choices in perversion.

But we are not finished in our pursuit of evil, dear listener. To use an airline analogy, we can take the 35,000 foot view. 35,000 feet is the optimum cruising altitude for an aircraft. And you can see a lot from 35,000 feet. So we're going to take that 35,000 foot view of evil in our world.

The grip of evil is far more comprehensive than the destruction of the human family, I submit to you. We must also understand that we struggle against an enemy that would take everything that we have, everything that we are, and would reduce us to mere husks of humanity. Perhaps even the walking golem type creatures that you see at progressive rallies these days, the actual demon controlled embodied spirits with empty eyes and screeching voices, having had their souls sucked out of them in their progressive degeneration. Know your enemy if you will defeat him, dear listener. Know your enemy.

Well, behind the street thugs of progressivism, the actual foot soldiers used to kill, burn, and bully the American public, the pawns in this 3D chess game, behind them lie the controllers who know exactly what they are doing. They're not fools. They're not being mistaken in what they do. They are the corporate and political heads that you hear about occasionally, who attend the summits at Davos, Switzerland, or can be seen with Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum, or who regularly enforce DEI policies from corporate boardrooms. All of these and more are ubiquitous and iniquitous.

They love evil, and they hate the good. I have detailed their names and activities in other broadcasts, so I urge you to check out our broadcast archive at our website, americastruths.org. That's all one word, americastruths.org. Know your enemy, dear listener, if you will defeat him. Know your enemy.

Well, even as their father, the devil, seeks to steal, kill, and destroy, so these elites seek to rob and steal all that we have and reduce us to the kind of serfdom and slavery not seen since the Middle Ages. And one of their major tools is the destruction of our free market economy with the implementation of socialism. Socialism is evil, dear listener. A core principle of socialism is, of course, the abolition of private property, one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto. And corporate America is only too glad to assist in this venture, gobbling up all wealth and assets it can lay its hands on in the meantime.

For example, Blackstone and other hedge funds now own over 25% of private homes in America. Think of it. They are striving to make it impossible for the average citizen to buy and own their own home, which is the classic American dream, of course. And we will soon be a nation of renters and already are mostly there with many young people. And then also billionaires like Bill Gates are buying up farmland and sequestering its use for growing crops in the name of climate change.

Well, in the last 10 years, for example, over 144,000 small farms have disappeared from the American countryside. Oh, let me remind you, dear listener, no farms, no food. Also, thirdly, then banks are desperately trying to get us to transition to digital currency and away from cash so that all of our activities can be tracked, canceled when necessary, and controlled all the time. With the advent of your CBDC, that is your central bank digital currency account, with it coming soon, your days as a free man already constricting will disappear altogether. Those of you thinking that this CBDC account is progress, a good thing.

Be careful what you ask for, what you wish for. Perhaps you also remember during COVID, the teaser that the World Economic Forum put out forecasting the future world post-COVID. COVID was really a naked power grab by corporations and government. And that teaser, that short, featured a grinning, unmarried, brain-dead millennial living in a futuristic 15-minute city who worked from home and lived in a rented 250-square-foot apartment. He owned no car, but he walked and used public transportation to get around.

And that teaser concluded with the ominous prediction, you will own nothing and be happy. Oh, I always shiver and feel like adding, or else. You will own nothing and be happy. That is the Marxist dream for all of us. Most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this phenomenon unfolding before our eyes, but it is happening.

There's a conspiracy, if you will, for government and corporations to garner all the wealth of the earth. It's breathtaking to consider, and then consequently virtually enslave the remainder of mankind. This is nothing but pure evil, dear listener. The current fascination, for example, the rock star status that mayoral candidate in New York City, Zoran Mamdani, has with progressives is indicative of the naive stupidity of the American people when it comes to socialism.

It's trendy for many to think that socialism is a good thing and that the reason it has never worked or it's been tried, places like the Soviet Union or Romania or Venezuela, is that it just hasn't been implemented correctly, which is what we socialists will do. Oh, dear listener, that is pure hubris. Charlie Kirk was very effective in explaining these things to college students. He argued persuasively for a free market capitalist economy, and he warned of the dangers of a shallow rock star politician like Mamdani. Kirk knew his history.

It's another reason they killed him. When evil cannot argue or reason or persuade, it kills. And then, the lust for blood. Satan is a murderer. He has been from the beginning.

And the lust for blood is nowhere more evident than in the pursuit of perpetual war. If the evil one seeks to frustrate the plan of God and eradicate his pet creature man, then war always has been and continues to be a favorite means to that end. And currently, that includes the ongoing bloodletting in Ukraine and that ethnic dogfight in Gaza. Recently, the president of the European Union outlined her plan for the next 10 years of the EU's economy, and that is war with Russia, the basis for an economy.

Major publications like the Macro Pulse have headlines like the coming European war economy, what it means for interest rates, inflation, and real estate. Oh, this is nothing but pure evil, dear listener. As I have documented in other broadcasts, the Biden administration, in full cooperation with NATO and the EU, excuse me, goaded Russia. Biden's administration goaded Russia into invading Ukraine in 2022 and has been perpetuating that war ever since, despite opportunities to negotiate peace. And the stated goal is to bleed Russia dry and divide her into four quadrants and rule Russia from Brussels.

And one must ask, in light of the millions of lives lost already in this conflict, how many more millions will die in the projected 10-year war, even if the EU achieves its objectives? The devil was a murderer from the beginning, and his minions continue in his footsteps. Can we adequately describe the evil bloodlust that is present among those who practice evil? The Luciferian cults that proliferate today, and that's a topic for another broadcast even. But it is another marker of the evil infesting our world when the Luciferian cults that proliferate today are famous for their occult blood rituals.

Oh, the devil loves blood. But we do not have to seek out the occult to see the devil's love for blood. His evil minions are already practicing blood ritual openly on the battlefields of Ukraine and Gaza. Charlie Kirk also argued effectively with college students for the ending of the tragic war in Ukraine, and he also argued for a more measured response by Israel in defense of her homeland. His reasoning was cogent and reasonable.

It is yet another reason they wanted him dead. The devil was a murderer from the beginning, and his lifeless minions follow in his footsteps, even in Utah. The larger takeaway for me from the assassination of Charlie Kirk is that we do face evil on a very broad front, dear listener. All of history, all of life, and in every aspect of the daily lives we live, we face evil, and it's increasing. Know your enemy, dear listener, if you will defeat him.

Know your enemy. We are at war, and that warfare is primarily a spiritual one. Charlie's Roman Catholic faith informed him of this, and Kirk kept reminding us of this fact. As Paul says in Ephesians, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Unquote.

Yes, dear listener, know your enemy, and your enemy is primarily spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. And unless we are prepared to do battle in this arena, then we will be defeated. We will be defeated, be defeated, excuse me, time and again, and we'll be confused and wonder all the time at, at incidents like the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah. But we do not have to be ignorant, dear listener. Know that it is Christ alone.

In him, we find the spiritual armor and the weapons needed to do battle with evil. Unless and until there is a revival in America and a reformation of our entire lifestyles, we will continue to be befuddled and be bedraggled, if you will, and be defeated by those spiritual forces of evil if we are not prepared to do spiritual warfare with them. And the first thing is a new birth in the Lord Jesus Christ, and then he prepares us to do spiritual battle. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We meet for holy worship Sunday at 10 a.m. And for the time being, we are meeting at the Senior Citizen Center in Idaho Falls, which is located on the corner of 21st and Rolandette in Idaho Falls, 10 a.m. And we encourage you to join us for worship, and you can call us for more information at area code 208-523-0196.