GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Keith Phillips and Paul Mikov ~ Fighting the War for Peace: Human Rights, Social Justice and the Military

Keith Phillips

Adventists and the Military, Part I

What I'd like to do is, before we begin, what I'd like to do is, I'm gonna go around the room.

I'd like you to give me your first name and where you're from, so I have a general idea.

Because if you sit through 2 sessions, I might wanna call on you or ask you a question.

Yeah, the second session I'll be having part 2.

The first presentation will be foundational.

The second 1 we make the practical application And Lord is really blessed with this presentation.

Father God, we're asking that you would bless each and every 1 of us with understanding.

Please make this presentation clear, Lord.

So Please bless each and every 1 of us in Jesus name.

Amen We have today recorded in the military 7 and a half thousand soldiers bearing arms Back in the early 1900s when the government asked each denomination to send chaplains, our church said no.

And you think, why would our church say no?

Can someone go in the military and preach our gospel message?

And so we have to ask ourselves the question, well, if our church said no to the chaplaincy, How did we get so far that now we have soldiers in the military bearing arms?

That means they're trained to kill somebody.

Anybody have a favorite sports team or anything?

You know, they win or they do something and you say, we?

Something happens and we're doing this, we're doing that.

I don't know about you, but my Bible says pray for your enemies and I'm still waiting for someone to show me the consistency of shooting someone and praying for them at the same time.

I have a story that I'll close in the second session with such a story as that.

Someone prays for somebody and someone shoots somebody.

The whole world except those who are at war with the United States.

Well, let's look over some things we're going to cover.

We're going to cover the draft versus volunteering, a theocracy, the sixth commandment.

We'll learn from the 1950s when the evangelicals wanted to be more patriotic.

They went into the Bible and they wanted to change the sixth commandment from thou shalt not kill to thou shalt not murder.

And is that a correct translation of the text?

Adventists and the Military, Part II

Father God we're asking that you continually be tender and merciful to us teach us by your word Lord Give us a greater and a better understanding of our mission in Jesus name Amen See how young people are being are growing up without mission They feel that they don't have no worth in life, they have no direction.

It's because the family's not mission-orientated, amen?

Our colleges are too expensive, And I'm saying this on tape and I hope they hear it.

And our kids are leaving our colleges with 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars in debt.

The army comes along and says, you join for 2, 3 years and we'll pay that off for you.

And they're thinking and they're fretting, How am I going to pay off this big debt?

But if I just go in the military, they're caught.

And so young people think they have no other option.

Brothers and sisters, you do have an option.

I remember I was at a camp meeting and a dear sister came up to me with her kid, he was like 12, and he's been gung-ho ever since he's been walking that he wanted to join the military.

So I gave him my book and I talked to him, I said, listen, God has a job for you.

You can't do it when you put on the uniform.

I don't know what part of the ministry, but everyone has been called to the ministry.

I said, I want to pray with you and I want you to go back.

That kid came in the next day, he read that whole book, reading machine.

Came back, says, Pastor, He said, you know what I think?

I think I'm just going to go ahead and be a pastor.

Of course, that didn't hurt my feelings any.

Whatever ministry you decide you're going to go into, but you can't do that, and you cannot fulfill that role in the military.

And we're going to prove that right here.

When the chaplains came into the middle, when the government asked our church for chaplaincy, this was our church's response.

Because government employment and remuneration from public funds for the teaching of religion is a violation of biblical principles regarding church and state.

You put on the uniform, You can't preach our message.

You got to preach the way the army wants it, amen?

2, the church's position is to have complete separation of church and state, and states as stated by the General Conference Committee of January 29, 1908, clergy employed by the government could not preach the full gospel message for this prophetic hour.

Can they still go on and say, hey, you've got to keep the Sabbath not to work, not to bear arms, not to shoot somebody.

Then how come we got people joining the military left and right?

Well, what they said, they changed it after Vietnam.

So, we leave it up to the individual conscience.

Is truth subjected to your conscience and how you feel No, our feelings should be subjected to the Word of God.

Amen Embarrassment would arise from the chaplains who would have to defend the church's non-combatant position and at the same time fulfill their function as morale builders and you're gonna see that in the video clip here in a second.

The purpose of ministering to Seventh-day Adventists in the military can be best carried for by the camp pastor plan.

The possibility of Seventh-day Adventist chaplains being placed where other Seventh-day Adventists are placed is very remote.

You know that was bold last night what he did.

Because no 1 else is willing to preach that.

If we were hearing that all the time, that would seem fluff.

It would seem, it would seem, you know what, powerful, but it wouldn't be so, seem so direct and and so, you know, so.

And God bless them young people who came up front after that appeal.

I thought about that all night long, that appeal.

It was 1 of the greatest appeals I ever heard because I deal with this all the time in unequally yoked marriages and stuff like this.

You don't have right to do that which you feel is right.

You have to do what God tells you to do, amen?

And when I seen them, I didn't think anyone would go up to tell you the truth, personally.

But when I seen people getting out of their pews, tears almost came to my eyes.

That's a person who wants to serve Jesus Christ.

And then when he said, you got to make a phone call and don't discuss anything.

And our young people are leaving the church left and right because of these type of relationships.

I deal with it all the time as a pastor and it breaks my heart.

Paul Mikov

Human Rights & Social Justice, Part I

My name is Paul Mikov and we'll be jointly discussing today the subject of human rights, social justice and contemporary Christian.

I apologize if this whole setup will appear to you as if I am pontificating, but also considering the fact that I was a pastor for a number of years and now I am working at the UN quite often, the ultimate place for pontification and speech giving and reading actually manuscripts, you'll understand.

Thanks for joining us today to address this, I think, important subject, and I presume a subject that will be of great interest to you, especially these days, considering what is going on in this country as well as around the world.

Well, the backdrop to our conversation today and this subject about human rights and social justice is, on the 1 hand, the fact that 8 days ago, exactly on December 10, the world celebrated a huge historic milestone, namely the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted on December 10, 1948 at the United Nations in New York.

I suspect you may recall, or some of you may recall from your history that it was a monumental development in the affairs of the world in international relations, a monumental event for ordinary people actually around the world even though most of them were unaware of what was going on.

And it was an event that actually was in many ways a response to the horrors of the Second World War.

We'll say a little more about the declaration as we go into our presentation here.

But the other part of the backdrop to our conversation today is the very condition of our world.

Let me share with you a number of global statistics that I suspect you will not find terribly surprising.

Each year, more than 8 million people around the world die because they are too poor to stay alive.

Over 1 billion people, which is 1 in 6 approximately around the world, live in extreme poverty, defined as having to live on less than 1 dollar a day.

Some 3000000000 people, which is half of the whole humanity, is considered to be poor, not extremely poor, poor and that means that they have to live on only $2 a day.

Now you can imagine how many more of the 6 billion people on this planet would qualify in this category of poor if we raised this figure from say $2 to $5, $10.

The point being that the vast, vast majority of the population of this planet lives very meagerly and very poorly.

Close to 1 billion people tonight, by the end of this day, will go to bed hungry.

And over 100 million primary school-age children cannot go to school at all, will never step actually through the doors of a school ever.

And today, which is perhaps for me, I suspect, 1 of the most devastating statistics, some 30, 000 children will have died from preventable diseases.

So by the end of this hour of our conversation today, about 1, 200 children will have died from malnutrition, hunger, malaria, or some other very, very preventable diseases.

And this last 1 actually translates or is equivalent to 1 child dying every 3 seconds, 18 children every minute.

You will recall in 2004, there was this massive disaster called the Asia tsunami, which killed somewhere around 260, 000 people in 1 day.

So the 30, 000 children dying every year would amount to a tsunami occurring every week, or an Iraq-style death toll, which is in the hundreds of thousands of people, every 15 to 36 days.

And almost 10 million children dying every year, if we go by the 30, 000 children per day, that is, and some 60 million children having died between 2000 and 2006.

And of course, poverty is not simply about numbers.

It has to do with men, women, and children in particular enduring unimaginable obstacles, for us, certainly unimaginable, who live in this society of plenty.

And the sad thing is that in a very real sense, poverty is a denial of human rights.

In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, the signatories at the time proclaimed with a lot of hope that all people, irrespective of their differences, had the right to education, to work, to health and to well-being.

But today we realize that this was a massive ideal because millions around the world are too crippled by poverty to fulfill these basic rights.

Millions continue to go hungry, scores of children will never step into a classroom, and families in the millions actually watch on a daily basis their loved ones die because of the various causes that we already mentioned.

Poverty, please remember, is a denial of basic human rights.

But we have to ask the question, what are human rights?

Because it is not necessarily a notion that is universally accepted, even though it is claimed to be a universally valid notion.

And in order to help ourselves, and I did not want to assume that people would have the helpful background, let's say a few things about human rights.

And the first being that there are so-called 3 generations of human rights or 3 sets of human rights that have historically been developing.

And this notion was actually proposed in the late 70s by a Czech judicial expert who based his idea of 3 generations of human rights along the lines of the 3 watchwords of the French Revolution.

And the 3 watchwords were liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So the first generation of human rights goes along, is essentially about liberty, about that first watchword of the French Revolution.

It's about liberty, and in particular, participation in political life.

They're fundamentally civil and political in nature.

And they serve actually to protect individuals such as ourselves from the excesses of power and authority of the state.

And these rights typically include things such as freedom of speech, freedom of fair trial, freedom of religion, voting rights, etc.

The second generation of human rights is related to the second watchword, as we mentioned, and that's equality.

And it was recognized especially after the bloody First World War.

They're fundamentally social, economic, and cultural in nature.

And they ensure that different members within societies have the necessary conditions for life with dignity and the necessary treatment that is worthy of their dignity.

And here we're talking about things such as the right to be employed, the right to have housing or to to be able to rent housing, the right to health care, social security, and even unemployment benefits.

And the third generation of human rights goes beyond these first 2, that they're much more fundamental in nature.

But because of the notion of sovereignty of states, and in particular because of the fact that the vast majority of states and nations would actually be massive offenders of this generation of human rights, is being almost impossible actually to embed them within the international law structure and framework.

It's been even more difficult to actually enforce them legally.

And these have to do mostly with the spectrum of rights that have to do with groups.

So the right to self-determination, the right to economic and social development, the right to a healthy environment, the right to natural resources.

And as the world is actually encountering the massive consequences of some of the damage that we humans have done, such as the consequences of climate change that are slowly coming upon us and will come with a vengeance upon this world soon.

These human rights are likely to actually gain insignificance.

As a matter of fact, there are already island states that are working on obtaining territories elsewhere to take their populations to move them out of danger because it is expected that perhaps even in a matter of years, some of those island states will basically be gone, will be underwater.

Now, what is important here to mention is the fact that these 3 generations of human rights have developed mostly because of historical and contextual circumstances.

And that states, certain groups of states, have emphasized 1 generation of or 1 set of human rights much more than another.

For example, the Northern Western countries of Western Europe and that includes America as well, mostly because of or in response to the fascist sort of states and historical developments in their context have emphasized much more individual rights in order to curtail and curb the power of a state.

Other groups of states, such as the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere on other continents, as a way of struggling against capitalism and class rule, they have much more emphasized the social, the economic, and the cultural human rights.

Countries that have in their histories a background of being colonized, most countries in Africa, many in Asia, some in South America as well, they have been typically emphasizing the third set of human rights, the third generation human rights, which calls for self-determination, independence, and the rights of collective groups.

Where do you think this country, the United States, is on this continuum now, at the moment, even though in its law, the second set of human rights are also embedded and enforced.

Where is the preference of this country, do you think?

Even though the US has embraced the other, the second actually set, has never recognized the third 1, the heart of this nation is actually within the first set of human rights, which are much more political and civil in nature and vis-a-vis individuals rather than groups of people.

And that has huge implications for many things, social justice, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, before we venture into the all-important question of whether there is actually a biblical basis for human rights.

We must place our discussion today in the context of the underlying fundamental reality of human sin, of human fallenness, and the human predicament.

And we have to say that because of sin and the human predicament, Christians have rightly been attentive to both individual wrongs and structural evil in the area of human rights.

And it is very important to note the fact that human sinfulness, when it comes to human rights and violations of human rights, does not manifest itself only in terms of human rights violations perpetrated by individuals, by John, by Stephen, by whoever, but rather are often, and I would say perhaps in the vast majority of cases, a result of structural evil embodied in human institutions, human systems, human structures, human norms, etc.

How can an institution, a human institution, a human organization, structure or system embody evil or generate evil?

Well, it is possible because human structures, systems, and organizations and institutions are actually entities that are made up of people, made up of ideologies, made up of norms and laws.

And so in a very real sense, structures actually can have a life of their own, which is why they're very consequential.

They're actors, perhaps much bigger actors than we as individuals are in a society.

And so this is tremendously significant when we talk about human rights.

Let's use a number of, or refer to a number of examples.

You've heard of trade barriers and tariffs.

Millions of people continue to live in poverty of the sort that we mentioned earlier because of multiple trade barriers and tariffs that are imposed by the wealthy nations on them.

A very good example along this line, even though the issue is of its kind and category, are the so-called food subsidies in the European Union and the United States especially.

And I'm sure that Most of you have an idea as to what we're talking about here.

But just briefly, in order to protect the very significant economic sectors of agriculture that both the European Union and the US have in their economies, and we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars here of services and products, produce, they impose actually, they introduce subsidies for their producers, for their farmers, be they individuals or large corporations.

And on top of that, they complement them by various barriers and tariffs.

So African farmers, individuals, or those incorporated may produce actually, produce agricultural products that are of equal if not superior quality to what the Europeans may be producing, but they're unable to export those because the European Union has imposed barriers to trade in agricultural products.

And that keeps the African farmer in poverty, in dire poverty.

Hundreds of millions of tons of food is actually thrown away.

It's wasted every year as a way of balancing supply and demand within the large economies of the European Union and the United States.

So these are structural issues that actually contribute to violations of human rights and contribute to the state in which this planet finds itself.

The apartheid in South Africa, not to mention, It's a very obvious example of evil by structures.

Slavery, the slavery issue in the US, communism as a system in Europe.

Corruption, something that is not necessarily so tangible and so obvious, corruption and poor governance.

What actually has been happening in this country over the last 2 to 3 months is actually evidence of structural evil.

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Series

Keith Phillips and Paul Mikov ~ Fighting the War for Peace: Human Rights, Social Justice and the Military

Adventists and the Military, Part I

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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