Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Guest (Male): Yesterday connecting past, today with an outer view, tomorrow to understand future. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow is the program that covers the current contemporary social issues in the light of our history. To understand our yesterday, to live fully today and tomorrow. Yesterday, today, tomorrow with Inseong Kim.

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday Today and Tomorrow. This program will air Resurrection Sunday and also Saturday, the day before. We are excited to share the good news of Resurrection Sunday. If the resurrection is not relevant individually, then we probably celebrate Easter as just a tradition. I want to share a very important message on Easter today about why and how it's relevant to all of us, especially in the culture we live in.

The question that I want to ask is, why can a butterfly not fly, even though she's a butterfly? Why is she still in a cocoon? That's the question we have to ask. Sometimes when we think about medicine, some specific dosage or some specific kind of medicine works for each patient differently. In the spiritual matter, it is the same. We share the gospel and the good news of Resurrection Sunday. Every pastor shares different messages, but sometimes it hits someone and sometimes it just kind of flies by.

We think, "Okay, we're here, our family's together. This is our tradition," but we feel it has nothing to do with us. This program is especially geared to connect the relationship between the real God and Jesus, who really rose from the death. This message can help us understand why we believe what we believe. I want to start our program with a word study that a lot of us might struggle with.

I want to share how many times the word "sinner" is used in the Bible. We hear a lot of this word "sinner," especially in the Christian environment. I wanted to find out how many times it was used. In the Greek word, it is used 47 times. In the total Bible, it is 67 times, but only seven to eight times did Jesus use it.

This was a revelation to me because growing up in a Christian family and being born in a Christian family, at every revival meeting I went to and every meeting I went to, I heard a lot of the word "sinner." I thought probably "sinner" was a very important word in the Bible. I was more surprised Jesus used it only seven to eight times. *Hamartolos* in the Greek word for sinner is used in the New Testament 47 times.

That's a very important, eye-opening discovery for me. When Jesus used the word, it was very interesting. Pharisees criticized him for eating with the sinners. So in the New Testament, it wasn't particularly Jesus telling or labeling somebody as a sinner. There's a reference I can post on our website. The Pharisees were grumbling that he received the sinners, so it's not from Jesus.

The Pharisees labeled the tax collector a sinner, and then Jesus said the tax collector is justified. There's a different angle. In Gethsemane, he said "betray into the hands of sinners." When he talks about that, "sinners" refers particularly to religious leaders. All those times, Jesus was quoting back the Pharisees' contempt, not originally using it as a label. Isn't that interesting?

God's love in the Bible was used 106 times in the New Testament. *Agape* is used 230 times, including God's love and how we love each other. This word, like a covenantal loving-kindness, the love was 176 times. God's love for humanity is referenced five to six times more than the label of sinner. This is very important as we're going through this time of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.

Why are we celebrating this beautiful day that Jesus died on the cross? When someone asks us what the cross means to us, does sin or sinner come to your mind first, or the love of God first? "Children of God" in the New Testament used *huios* in Greek, and in the terms of legal heir and a position, 377 times. *Teknon* is "child," used 99 times. Adoption is used five times.

Even apostles, in particular, did not label "sinner" as a sinner. What about us? How do we view ourselves and view others in the culture that we're in today, bombarded with this social destruction that we're experiencing? Yet, how we view each other is so important. The redeemed identity is a child of God. That is extremely important for us to resonate with when we get together with a family.

This label of sinners came from a lot of the ancient settings, especially in the culture with a class system. There is an "in" and "out" or "outcast." There is a social structure that we have to protect, so whoever violates it, we call a sinner. But when Jesus was with those who were outcasts, he did not label those people as sinners.

We have to re-examine right now how we understand the cultural view, and especially as we're entering this society with a social score and an honor and shame culture rather than an image of God culture and children of God culture. One of the things that I was fascinated by was the word "Abba Father." It's not in a disrespectful way, like how sometimes a grandson calls a grandpa by his first name.

It's not with disrespect, but in a very loving way and it shows that intimate relationship where we can call the Heavenly Father in a very close way. That was really fascinating to me because in Asian culture, you cannot do that. You cannot call someone by their first name because there's a very high hierarchy. So there is a belief system and landscape of culture depending on how we believe and how we practice in our culture.

We have a cultural clash here, a huge collision where we're facing a different era in humanity we call post-modern or post-Christian. Whatever we're calling the end times, the particular culture that is coming in and that we're embracing is not new; it's old. I grew up in both cultures. In Eastern culture, it has that honor and shame culture that brings into the embedded "insider" and "outsider," and the "outcast," "low," and "high" class.

In God, and when we become children of God, we don't have that. We have respect and more respect for the elderly, but there is a fundamental belief that we are children of God, whether man or woman. The Bible says Jews or Gentiles, sinner or not sinner in the label by other culture, not Jesus. We're all children of God. That matters to us, but that's what we have to preach seriously in our culture to the young generations.

We can be really shocked by this new culture that is coming in and shaping our younger generation, which we call transhumanism. When it happens, a lot of children will be subject to deforming this humanhood in the image of God. Destruction is coming. When we see that, our immediate response is that they are sinners. They become outcasts, so we kick them out of our family or isolate them.

One of the big issues that happened years ago was when people were divorced or when they had an abortion. Now we have gender problems. We keep putting those people in as outcasts and it never works. When we outcast people who were divorced, we realize how many people in the church experience that. When we outcast those people who had abortions, we found out how many people in the church had abortions.

With the gender issues that we're dealing with, all those have to be based on being children of God. We all are made in the image of God. We fall, and sin is labeled itself, but Jesus never labeled a person particularly who is an outcast, weak, vulnerable, or a victim as a sinner. It was labeled by Pharisees or the religious leaders and all the social systems they had. They labeled those people.

The woman who is caught in adultery was called a sinner, and Jesus never called her that. The woman at the well in Samaria lived in separate locations, and those were the sinners. Jesus never approached her as a sinner. When we have a preconception of the layered culture and when we bring the gospel to the culture, it transforms. There's a fundamental change in the transformation, and that's what we need.

But we're going the opposite way in America. We had that beautiful culture. It was so beautiful that when I see it, it's why America is beautiful. The culture shows the value of the individual human as God sees it. I'm guilty of it too, perfectly, and we all are. On Resurrection Sunday, like I shared, why can the butterfly not fly? What about the cultural guilt that we placed on our culture that the butterfly is not supposed to fly?

If she flies, then perpetrators or especially in our time, corporate pharmaceutical companies that are damaging a lot of people with a lot of medicines, those people can be exposed. Therefore, the butterfly should not fly. Even though she became a butterfly, she still has to be in the cocoon unless we let them fly. That's the social conversation that we have to create.

That is the true Resurrection Sunday that we actually imply to our society. That is the cultural transformation. We see all the different cultures coming into America trying to take over, like woke culture and critical race theory. We want to oppose it. When we're trying to oppose, fight, debate, and combat all of that, what wins the message is that we are created in the image of God.

All the people are suffering from the cultural transformations. We have to give them a hope message that Jesus never used the word to the outcast to label them as a sinner and emphasized it. God sees us as the children of God. When a missionary goes out to other countries, that is the most beautiful form of Emmanuel.

Actually, the Christian goes to the dark culture where they can see a lot of ugly things. I shared a long time ago before that in India, if a husband died, the young wife had to be burned together. That's a really extreme culture, but a similar culture was everywhere and is still everywhere. A missionary goes there and tells them that you are made in the image of God.

Who are we preaching to? We're preaching to those outcasts who are victimized and we tell them that they are valuable and they're precious. But do we do that in America? That's the question we have to ask ourselves because we can create this Christian culture that might isolate us. If we don't share the gospel, the true gospel, with those people who feel outcast, then we don't do our job of sharing the good news.

In the Bible, there is no post-Christian culture. Every culture is the mission field. Whether it's pre or before or post, it does not matter. Everybody needs to hear this message of resurrection. What does that mean to every individual and how do we practice it at home and also in our society? That's a challenge we have when we are entering into this shame and honor society with the credit score.

Once you're damaged, you don't have hope. There's no chance. That is the honor and shame culture. But the culture of grace with the belief that we are created in the image of God means we value each other and we give them a second chance. That's what the church does. We give people a second chance, a third chance, and a fourth chance until they die because Jesus and God will never condemn them until they have their last breath.

That's our job. It's a huge task that we have. Even though we have so many megachurches and so many Christians, we still have a mission field that is wide open. This means every single believer has to be matured and step up to be a leader to harvest all of those people who are lost in America, not just outside of this country.

We cannot just content ourselves and say, "Our church is full; we have so many people." We have to be busy raising disciples and leaders to send them out and bring people to the truth so they know who they are in Christ. That's the mission field that we have. As the transhumanism world is coming in with technocracy and communism, it will cover our culture like a cloud.

Our job is not over yet until Jesus actually comes. Don't think of it as the end times where we don't have hope. We still share the hope until the last breath we take and until the end is coming and God says there's no hope. Until then, we still have freedom here. Whether we exercise it or not is our job. I've been sharing with the hope message, sharing the encouragement, especially to those who experienced abortion.

I feel like I'm on a very lonely journey talking about this, but there are more than 70 to 80 million people who are silenced. We only talk about it politically, but we don't talk about it on a personal level for those who actually experienced that they lost children. We don't validate their experience. We cannot just shun them. Let the butterfly fly.

We have to go through this process of healing in our culture and knowing how many of the population are affected. But the most strong message that we have to share is not so much of a debate about who is right and who is wrong. At the end of the day, once you have a child, you know in your heart that life starts at conception. You cannot deny that.

You cannot bury your head under the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. We cannot deny that. So that truth is out there. The matter of the truth is how we bring these people back to the Lord. That is our homework. That is the message that we have to share. Everyone is created in the image of God, not just of the fetus, but the people who experience abortion.

There are many people walking out there alone who never shared with anyone, not even knowing what happened or being able to connect the dots. But as leaders, we have to recognize the social symptoms that we're in and what is really the battle of this culture. It's not a human that we're fighting against politically.

Our real battle is saving the souls that were lost and bringing them back to tell them they are made and created in the image of God. Restoring their identity back to God is the power of the resurrection. That's what we're sharing today. It shouldn't be proclaimed only in the pulpit, but it should be proclaimed by every people, everyone who experienced the power of the resurrection.

We have to share with the people who are next to us. That's everyone. Thank you for listening to Yesterday Today and Tomorrow. We go out and share the good news that we are all made in the image of God. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Thank you.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Yesterday Today and Tomorrow with Inseong Kim. You can also find more from Inseong Kim at inseongkim.org. That's I-N-S-E-O-N-G-K-I-M dot O-R-G. Thank you for listening to the show.