That be Friday, everyone. If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know, we don't

delve into social and legal and political issues on the podcast very often for a variety

of reasons that we've explained over the years. And that means attempts by APJ listeners

to get us into that conversation and whether or not the church should legislate sin must

get pretty creative. And they take it creative, even resorting to hypotheticals as in the case

of today's question, the most recent creative attempt. And it comes to us from an anonymous

man, a regular listener who writes of this, Pastor John, hello, I often wrestle with the

question over what role our government should play in outlawing sin. Specifically, I would

like to ask you a hypothetical question here. If you were an influential pastor at the

ologian back in 1913, America, would you have supported Christian temperance organizations

and lent your voice to prohibition? Pastor John, what would you say? I will try to answer this

question honestly, but I confess at the very beginning that this question leads into

complex issues of church state relations where I do not have as many answers as I would like to have.

But I will take you as far as I can and then you can go further. The question whether I would

have supported prohibition in 1913 might mean would you have supported it with all the cultural

assumptions I may have shared as a child of my times in that day and without any of the hindsight

that I now have, it might mean that, or the question might mean given everything I know now,

would I have supported prohibition if I could get in a time machine and go back?

Now, the answer to the first question is, I don't know. I mean, nobody knows. You don't know who

you are. What would you be like? It would have been relatively easy to see that a world without

drunkenness would be a vastly better world than the one we live in or the one they lived in

in 1913. And I can imagine myself being persuaded that the benefits of sobriety and families and

...