40. How do the 10 Commandments fit in the Modern World? Who is the new Catholic Pope?

Ed Van Buskirk shares his journey from IT business owner to founder of If You Love Me Ministry after a men's retreat challenged his knowledge of the Ten Commandments, leading him to see them as God's recipe for a wonderful life rather than restrictive rules.

• Discovering the Ten Commandments as relationship-builders that foster harmony with God and others
• How confusion serves as Satan's weapon to divide and create chaos in society
• Understanding truth not just as a concept but as a person—Jesus Christ
• The Garden of Eden story revealing how broken commandments lead to broken relationships
• The ministry's "God's Recipe for School and Family" program implemented in 56 Catholic schools
• Using family kits with puzzles and resources to make the commandments accessible and engaging
• Applying the commandments to navigate modern challenges like social media, pornography, and artificial intelligence
• Seeing the commandments as a spiritual compass that helps cut through confusion with clarity
• Learning from Mary's example of saying "yes" to God by putting the first commandment first
• How even small deviations from truth (being "2% off target") can lead us dramatically astray over time

For more information about If You Love Me Ministry and resources on the Ten Commandments, visit https://ifuloveme.org

https://veilandarmour.com

Our sincere apologies for not being able to fix the technical difficulties. Thank you very much for your patience and understanding!

Happy Mother's Day!

VIva Il Papa!

Chapters

• 0:00 Truth as a Person
• 7:30 Planting Seeds of Faith
• 14:39 If You Love Me Ministry Beginnings
• 21:44 God's Recipe for School and Family
• 27:56 Mary's Yes and the First Commandment
• 33:38 Broken Relationships and Restoration
• 38:14 Navigating Confusion Through Truth

Transcript

Ed Van Buskirk: 0:00

When I started looking into The Commandments, and specifically the eighth commandment, it's really the first time that I started looking at truth not as just an idea or yeah, something's either true or it's false. It's just kind of the light switches on or off. But I started seeing truth as a person and that person being Jesus, and he tells us very clearly.

Ed Van Buskirk: 0:29

He says, "I am the way, the truth and the life.

Sheila Nonato: 0:31

Habemus Papam! We have a new Pope, Pope Leo XIV, the first from the United States. A monumental day yesterday, on May 8th. Pope Leo spoke of the peace and the love of Jesus Christ. He prayed a Hail Mary and he spoke of the hope for the missionary church to bring the body of Christ as united and one under God. This is what the successor of Saint Peter is tasked to do to sow the seeds of faith inside and outside the church, to reach the far corners of the world, speaking the truth of the good news. On this Mother's Day, in our own way, as mothers, we also sow the seeds of faith, faith, hope and love in our own domestic church, in our homes, in our own domestic church, in our homes.

Sheila Nonato: 1:24

I share this seed that I received from a beautiful, faithful lady, Mrs. Pereira. This is a monstrance seed with an interesting story, and let me show you. It is a seed, a white seed, that has a picture, almost a painting, hand-drawn, of the monstrance on a white seed, and it has an interesting story. This is a real seed that actually grows into a green bean, as Mrs Pereira had told me, and I am looking forward to going and seeing her garden to see it, and I am looking forward to going and seeing her garden to see it the way that it has blossomed into a green bean plant. And let me tell you about the story.

Sheila Nonato: 2:13

There are a couple of stories of this monstrance climbing French bean, the first story being according to a website called Growing Food Saving Seeds in the UK. There are two stories connected with this being. First, there's a story of a thief who supposedly stole a monstrance, which is a Roman Catholic church vessel where a consecrated host, the body of Christ, is exposed for adoration inside a church, meaning people pray in front of the monstrance where the blessed sacrament is inside. And it was buried in a field. And when the field's owner wanted to plow the field, the horse did not want to go over the spot where the monstrance had been buried, and so the farmer dug up that spot and he found a monstrance had been buried. And so the farmer dug up that spot and he found a monstrance, returned it to the church and then the farmer sowed white beans and to his astonishment, according to the website, it grew and there was an image of the monstrance inside on the bean when he had harvested it, when he had found it. According to the second legend, a monk had planted white beans in a monastery garden as there were troops advancing. There were hostile troops, and then the nuns all buried the church artifacts, which included the monstrance, in this garden. And they had reported a miracle that the white beans which were beside the monstrance had this image of the monstrance imprinted upon them.

Sheila Nonato: 3:57

And so, Dear Sisters in Christ, as the Holy Father is tasked with sowing the seeds of faith, we are also tasked with this great, humble and significant role as mothers in our own families, to plant those seeds of faith, to help our children to grow in the love and hope of the Resurrected Lord and to be the beacons of light in a world of darkness, to be the leaders that we want to see in our societies, that will help the disenfranchised, that will help the marginalized and that will also be that source of strength of faith for everyone around us, for all of our neighbors, for our family. And in this vein, how do we plant the seeds of faith? We refer to the Bible, sacred scripture, and the most famous, of course, aside from Jesus' teachings, aside from the Beatitudes, are the Ten Commandments, and this is one of the most famous rules that God had given us. And if we read in the Ten Commandments, we read how God himself had written the commandments, had taken his hand, his finger, to write out each of The Commandments on the tablets that Moses was asked by God to bring up to the mountain. If you love me, keep my commandments. In a world that says morals change over time and prefers relative truth, your truth or my truth, to absolute truth, do the Ten Commandments still matter? Ed Van Buskirk says absolutely. He believes in it so much that he left his IT business to start If you Love Me ministry, which spreads the good news of the Ten Commandments to students, teachers and parents.

Sheila Nonato: 6:08

Ten Commandments to students, teachers and parents. In the Bible we read of how God wrote the commandments with his own hands. We discuss why the Ten Commandments form part of the story of God's love for his people in sacred scripture and why they remain relevant today. While we recorded this interview on the Feast of the Annunciation of Mother Mary, we are now in the month of May and celebrating Mother Mary, and it is most appropriate to present to you this interview that remains relevant, that will help us in our journey of motherhood, in our role as mothers to helping to raise the next generation of leaders and saints and helping to sowing those seeds of faith, hope and love. Thank you, and God bless and happy Mother's Day, and let us pray for our new Holy Father, pope Leo XIV. May God bless him. May God bless the Holy Catholic Church, amen, and the inspiration of Our Lady. I strive to tell stories that inspire, illuminate and enrich the lives of Catholic women to help them in living out our vocation of raising the next generation of leaders and saints.

Co-Host: 7:34

Please join us every week on the Veil and Armour podcast, where stories come alive through a journalist's lens and mother's heart.

Sheila Nonato: 7:41

So welcome to the podcast, Mr Ed Van Buskirk, from Kansas City, Missouri. You're the founder of If you Love Me Ministry. And Happy Feast of the Annunciation, by the way.

Ed Van Buskirk: 7:52

Well, thank you very much. It's a delight to be here with you and I'm excited for our conversation.

Sheila Nonato: 7:59

Thank you, as am I and your organization, If you Love Me. Ministry is seeking to transform society by restoring the truth and the wisdom of God's Ten Commandments in a world of confusion. Can we please start with a prayer?

Ed Van Buskirk: 8:14

Oh, that would be great. Let's begin in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen, the handmaid of the Lord.

Sheila Nonato: 8:48

Be it done unto me, according to your Word.

Ed Van Buskirk: 8:50

Hail Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Sheila Nonato: 8:58

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Ed Van Buskirk: 9:03

And the Word was made flesh.

Sheila Nonato: 9:06

And dwelt among us.

Ed Van Buskirk: 9:07

Hail Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Sheila Nonato: 9:15

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Ed Van Buskirk: 9:19

Pray for us,

Sheila Nonato: 9:22

That worthy of the promises of Christ.

Ed Van Buskirk: 9:25

Let us pray Pour forth. We beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may, by his passion and cross, be brought to the glory of his Resurrections. Through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen. In the name of the Father, Holy Spirit.

Sheila Nonato: 9:50

Amen, Thank you for that. And so I wanted to start. You had a radical call to this ministry, so please tell us from the beginning what were you doing before this and what happened. How did this all start?

Ed Van Buskirk: 10:07

doing before this? And what happened? How did this all start? Yeah, well, just a quick background on my upbringing. I'm the youngest of seven in a Catholic family wonderful parents, wonderful family raised through the Catholic teachings in the Catholic schools and went through Catholic education all through my academic years and then raised my children Catholic. And then it was when I was approaching my 50s.

Ed Van Buskirk: 10:33

I attended a men's program called that man Is you and the presenter was telling a story and the story was basically challenging us as men as to whether we were good guys. And I sat there amongst the other men, a fairly large group, and I was thinking to myself well, I think I would qualify as a good guy. Not too many people call me a jerk, so I think I'm a good guy overall. And the next question was well, if you're a good guy, are you a good guy according to the Ten Commandments? And once again I thought, well, yeah, I think I would qualify for that.

Ed Van Buskirk: 11:15

The story continued and it became evident that he was saying well, if you're a good guy according to the Ten Commandments, that must mean that you know the Ten Commandments. And I sat there, I put my hands under the table and started counting on my fingers the Ten Commandments. And I got up to like five or six and I'm starting to struggle and I'm thinking why don't I know the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments. And I went home that day and I was really bothered because, first off, if I didn't know The Commandments, I probably wasn't living them very well, so I probably am not the good guy I thought I was. But then, secondly, it was just like why, with my background, do I not know something so basic, foundational and important as the Ten Commandments? And so I started writing them out longhand and then rehearsing them at stoplights, and so that's kind of how the story got started.

Sheila Nonato: 12:18

Awesome, and you were in the tech industry. Is that correct?

Ed Van Buskirk: 12:23

Yeah, my business IT services company. I started when I was 36 and ran that for 21 years and over time, as this realization I didn't know the Ten Commandments kind of came into play and I started rehearsing them. Something interesting kind of started to happen. I started noticing the Ten Commandments all over the place. The Ten Commandments are sprinkled throughout and very integral to the scripture passages and you think of Jesus' teachings as parables and everything that is really in the gospel. It's him teaching us how to live the Ten Commandments and as Catholics we focus on that a lot, but we don't focus on the specific Ten Commandments, we don't have them top of mind. And what I realized that day was that if I don't have them top of mind, I'm not living them in my heart, I'm not putting them into play intentionally in my day and at the end of the day, if I do an examination and I go back and go, oh, I didn't do that right, I didn't do that right.

Ed Van Buskirk: 13:34

Well, we shouldn't be trying to figure out what we didn't do right, we should be preparing ourselves to do what is right. Right, and it was several years after realizing this that I just felt God's calling to say okay, what are you going to do with what I've been revealing to you? And over time I realized that God was calling me to do more than just have that for myself. And so it was okay. Well, I'm the men's leader at the church, let me go find a good Catholic program on the Ten Commandments, and I'll do that for the men. And year after year I kept looking for a program on the Ten Commandments and I could not find a good Catholic program on the Ten Commandments. And I could find some that had the Ten Commandments as maybe one session or two sessions in a program. But I wanted something that focused specifically on the Ten Commandments and I couldn't find one Interesting. It's very surprising because you see the Catholic Catechism. It's a good, thick book, about 900 pages book, and there's four sections in the Catechism. One entire section is dedicated to the Ten Commandments. And so you got to think if we got one quarter of our Catechism dedicated to the Ten Commandments, why are we not speaking about them more? Why aren't we bringing them into the forefront much more prevalently, much more intentionally? And so our ministry.

Ed Van Buskirk: 15:13

We got started in the scripture passage where Jesus says if you love me, you will keep my commandments John 14, 15. I really like that scripture passage. There's a lot packed into it, but two key words I want to point out real quickly. It starts with the word if. The verse sounds like a statement, but it's a challenge. Do I love God enough to trust him, to trust in his wisdom of them, the love of them, enough to set aside what I think is earthly, the right thing to do, or maybe, in the business world, the right thing to do and trust him and then keep his commandments? And a lot of people say well, yeah, I keep the commandments, I've got them on the wall. See, they're right over there on the wall. Well, that doesn't mean that we're keeping them. We have to keep them, which means we need to know them, we need to understand them, how they operate and when to apply them. And so keeping them is a lot more than just memorizing them for a test when we're in the fourth grade.

Sheila Nonato: 16:21

And is that when you realized this? Is that when you wrote to President Obama?

Ed Van Buskirk: 16:27

Yeah, that really is. I was trying to think what do I do with this? How do I make these more than just for me? And so at the time you know they're just there still is a lot of, uh, of confusion, there's a lot of heartache, there's a lot of hardship, um, and division. And so I started writing uh letters how the commandments can be the solution and the antidote to the struggles that we have, everything from poverty to unwed pregnancies, to the divorce rate, to problems with economics. The Commandments, they're God's recipe for a wonderful life, but they're the antidote for solving these problems. And it's amazing. And so I started writing him these letters and, of course, I just got form letters back from him each time and they didn't really go very far from that perspective.

Ed Van Buskirk: 17:31

But it was interesting, as I wrote these letters, how much I started to truly realize how, you know, we have to live them individually, we have to embrace them.

Ed Van Buskirk: 17:40

That's really the only thing that we can control. But as we as a parish community, within our civic communities, and then it grows out from there as we embrace these commandments, bring them to the forefront and really hold ourselves together in love, accountable for them, it starts to change a community and as multiple communities really start to embrace these, it starts to change the state, let's say. And then it grows out from the country. And then you think of the wars that are going on right now. The Commandments are being the root cause of somebody saying you have something that I want and I'm just going to steal it. If we can embrace how we shouldn't, as individuals, be looking to what we can take but what we can give, how much better off will countries be in terms of being neighbors to one another? They truly are the antidote to the challenges that we face individually, societally-wise, and in the country and in the world. They're amazing.

Sheila Nonato: 18:55

Are they being taught in your state? What's sort of the status?

Ed Van Buskirk: 19:01

In the public schools, are you saying?

Sheila Nonato: 19:03

Yeah, like in the public schools, yeah.

Ed Van Buskirk: 19:07

Yeah, there's a lot of states. Last count there are 13 states that have introduced legislation in the past couple years to bring the Ten Commandments in, just to display them on the walls along with other historical documents. Actually, louisiana actually had their legislation passed and it was signed by the governor, and it's been since this happened last summer sometime. It's since been put on hold by you know lawsuits that came and a judge put some kind of an injunction on it. So in the public schools, you know there may be some that are, you know, and maybe in small communities, but in general in the public they have been taken down since they were taken out of the schools and so they're not being taught in the public schools.

Sheila Nonato: 20:10

And so can you tell me about your ministry, and how does it teach the commandments to? Is it in schools in parishes?

Ed Van Buskirk: 20:19

Both. It's both Our bishop here in the Kansas City St Joseph Diocese on the Missouri side of the line he has been just supportive of our ministry. We have a program called God's Recipe for School and Family, and really a big challenge with the commandments is to get people's perspective of the commandments as not just being a list of rules imposed on us by a demanding God, but how they're God's gift to us, a God's recipe for the life that he wants for us. Gift to us, a God's recipe for the life that he wants for us and the life that we yearn for. And so all of our programs are called God's Recipe for a Wonderful Life, something that really shows how the commandments are not a list of Debbie Downers, but how they lift us up and they help us to have the wonderful life we want. And so the bishop asked us to put our school and family program into every school in the diocese for the fourth graders and their parents. It's really a parent-led program, getting people to be involved in their faith. And so he asked us to put this in to all the schools and the school of religion for those parishes that don't have schools. And so that's 56 that we are in the process of running through that program for the first year. We started last September and it really goes throughout the school year.

Ed Van Buskirk: 21:51

It starts off with a Ten Commandments family kit. Throughout the school year it starts off with a Ten Commandments family kit. So the kids take this family kit home with them. I don't know if you can get a good look at that there. It's got a letter to mom and dad in there and the kids open it up and they're real excited about it and they pull out a jigsaw puzzle. So we got a jigsaw puzzle. It's an image of the Ten Commandments for the family to put together. And once they put it together they don't want it to just get shoved in a drawer or in the trash. So we put a picture frame in the package. So mom and dad picture frame and put the puzzle in there and the family can decide a good place to present it. And then we've got a book for mom and dad that we put in there. Dad can use this.

Ed Van Buskirk: 22:42

It's just got a few pages for each commandment but it gives them enough insight that they can conduct some nice conversations for the children. And then there's a family activity for them to go and usually there's something involving food, something involving the outdoors to really discover what that commandment really means. And then every month, throughout the school year, we feature one commandment a month and we send to the families just a short email with an aspect of that commandment that maybe they haven't thought of, such as don't steal. It does mean don't steal, but that really calls us to generosity, and you think of stealing, how that harms our relationship. Stealing causes, whether the other person knows that we stole it or not, there's a division there. It divides us, it separates us. But that commandment is really calling us into generosity and with generosity it unites people, it brings a relationship. And so we send these emails to give them a little more insight on the commandments and then some questions to ask around the dinner table just to get some conversation going. So that goes throughout the school year.

Ed Van Buskirk: 24:01

So the school and family program is one thing. We then have an 11-session video study for parishes and individuals at the adult level to really understand how these commandments operate, at the adult level, to really understand how these commandments operate, and so that is. We have that in about 20 parishes that are mostly here in the Kansas City area, but some outside of the area as well. And then I go and I get the opportunity to share what these commandments can do in front of groups, at a conference or in a parish setting at retreats, and they apply to everything. I'm going next month down to Wichita to speak to a business group. This last weekend I was up at Benedictine College giving a talk at their Changing the Culture Symposium, and when I get a chance to do that it is a great opportunity to help people see these commandments not just as a list of rules on the wall but something to take and to live every day.

Sheila Nonato: 25:02

Is it also for homeschooling families?

Ed Van Buskirk: 25:05

Yeah, absolutely, homeschool families homeschooling families to use this family kit. That would be a perfect thing for homeschooling families to put into play and to use that as their could be for their curriculum. But we really are trying to look at how to live the commandments, not just look at it from a let's memorize what these are.

Ed Van Buskirk: 25:48

And in terms of, I guess, living the commandments so today is a Marian feast and in terms of decisions to make and we learn to the first commandment first. The first commandment is the foundation for all of the other commandments. I am the Lord, your God. You shall not have any strange gods before me. When we put that, when we get that commandment right, then we're going to not use God's name in vain. We're going to only use God's name in reverence and in awe and in prayer.

Ed Van Buskirk: 26:31

We're going to make sure that we don't fill up our Sundays with getting the laundry done, cutting the grass and all the chores we're going to make sure that we truly set that day aside as a holy day. And when we get those first three commandments to where we're really, those are about our relationship with God. And as we pursue those three commandments and really pursue God through those commandments, then it becomes very for us to make the choice. I, to people, I'm not going to steal from them, I'm not going to commit adultery, I'm not going to covet what other people have in a disordered way. It starts to become very natural. And so when we have those forks in the road and we're thinking well, in worldly ways, I should go this direction. But if I follow God's wisdom and trust in him, I'm going to go this direction. I may not want to go this direction, but I'm going to because I love and I trust God. So, getting back to Mary, here we are on the Feast of the Annunciation. So this is a great question. The angel Gabriel came and said well, God wants you to trust him. He has this for you, to do this in the face of everything that would be so counter-cultural for you. People are going to be making remarks, they may spit on you, they may do worse to you what you have done. The law said you should be stoned. That's the worldly way.

Ed Van Buskirk: 28:20

But Mary, because she put those first three commandments first, the only way she could have said yes is because she had no strange gods including herself, and she was able to say yes, gods including herself and she was able to say yes. And by having God first first in my life and order everything else in my life in terms of how they lead me and how they lead others to God. And as we put that first commandment first, it becomes so much easier to say yes when we're tempted to lie. When you say yes when we're in front of our computer and something teases us to go one direction, we're able to say no. That's going to lead me away from God. And it applies in our driving when we drive on the roads to drive with generosity for one another, so that everybody can enjoy the roads and get to their destination safely and not full of rage and being upset.

Ed Van Buskirk: 29:48

Mary is the example of being able to say yes, I'm going to accept God's plan and set aside my plans. My guess is she woke up that day and she wasn't thinking. You know, if I get asked if I'm going to be the mother of God and to bear God's son. I think I'll say yes. That day it probably wasn't what she woke up, day it probably wasn't what you woke up. So we don't know when that challenge, when that real demand or that real demands, not that when that calling for us to be ready to say yes and as we live these commandments in the small ways, it prepares us to say yes to that calling from God.

Sheila Nonato: 30:36

On the bigger things, when you mentioned the relationship of Mother Mary with God, I'm sort of thinking about the book you wrote and also the Garden of Eden, our first parents, adam and Eve, who disobeyed God's commandment, and how that relationship between God and man humanity was broken at that instant and how Jesus came to repair that and to redeem us. Can you talk about what is the connection with the commandments and having right relationships with God and with each other?

Ed Van Buskirk: 31:15

Yeah, it is all about those right relationships. And the Garden of Eden is where it begins. You got Adam and Eve and they're living a life of harmony One another, harmony with God, with all the blessings that God has given them on earth. And they had one commandment, not 10. They had one commandment you shall not eat from the tree with the knowledge of good and evil. Now, I don't, you know, it's easy to put ourselves, you know, and look back on it. But if you've got the entire garden full of all this wonderful, beautiful fruit and God says this tree over here, don't just leave it alone.

Ed Van Buskirk: 32:01

But Satan, in his trickery, he starts to. He puts a wedge between God and Eve by saying did God really say that you would die? And he puts a little doubt in there and gets her to start to think, hmm, hmm, he got it. First she said well, he didn't say that we would die. And the conversation continues. And she first, he sows doubt. And then he tells a flat out lie Surely you will not die. And then he says God knows that if you eat of it you will become like him. And so Eve is putting a wedge between that relationship and making God out to be the bad guy and as we see the story unfold, they disobey the one commandment and instantly their relationship changes, their relationship with God changes. They go and they hide, they start blaming each other. Ah God, the woman who you put here. She tricked me into eating. So you start to see conflict, the harmony is gone, the division has started and Satan, same thing today. He sows doubt, he tempts us and he sows doubt and then he says, "h, God just doesn't want you to do whatever it is that you want to do, because he's trying to restrain you, he's trying to restrict you. And we need to go back to that first sin and go. How is that first sin relevant in our life today and the relationship?

Ed Van Buskirk: 33:57

So if I'm tempted in business world, if I'm tempted to, let's say, bend the truth to a client on what this new wonderful product is going to do for them and how much money it's going to save them, if I get it, well, what's the difference going to make? He's still going to do fine with it. That lie, that sin client may never find out about it, they may never realize it. But now I become a slave to that sin and now I've got to keep that sin a secret and in order to do that, I'm employed talking to that client because I don't want to have my sin disclosed, and that separation begins. And so let's say the client does find out about it and they go well, I can't trust you anymore. And let's say our employees pick up that I'm not trustworthy as a business owner and the employees go, I'm going to move on to someone else. So you got your clients and then vendors start to wonder what's going on there and what good is a business, or how effective is a business, if it's not going to have any relationships with their clients, their employees and their vendors? Right there you can see how it just in a business world it shrivels up In the family, the family relationships.

Ed Van Buskirk: 35:24

They can be blessed by showing generosity and trust and treating one another with honor. That the fourth commandment calls us to build, those relationships within the family. But how often do we look and hear stories of relationships within families being shredded, somebody disobeying one of the commandments or more? But in all of these situations, for all of us, we always know that while the damage of those relationships can be damaged easily, christ is always there to take us back, to restore us, to put us on the right path, to give us the forgiveness and show us the mercy that we can begin to restore our relationship with God and with one another. And it takes time. But over time, as we live these commandments and people see, oh, he's changed his way. I'm starting to hear that he's become a person of integrity. He is not the person he used to be. Then those relationships can be mended and restored. It takes time. In our relationship with God, God's always ready to restore us back to him.

Sheila Nonato: 36:49

But we've got to do our part. And when you mentioned about confusion in your book, you also mentioned that confusion is a favourite weapon of Satan to divide, to create chaos. And one of the, I guess, golden calves of our day is the phone, social media, the internet, you know, spreading gossip, and we don't even have to put our real name on if you go to on X, or formerly known as Twitter you can just spread gossip and not have to have your real identity there.

Sheila Nonato: 37:20

Nobody's going to know who you are. There's also, unfortunately, addiction to pornography, even amongst children, which is very heartbreaking for me to hear, and there's also AI. You know, we don't know what is truth. What is the truth and what is wise advice if we just ask Chad GPT to help us make our decisions? What is happening in our world today and how can we bring it back to truth, wisdom and order?

Ed Van Buskirk: 37:52

Yeah truth.

Ed Van Buskirk: 37:53

When I started looking into the commandment, and specifically the eighth commandment, it's really the first time that I started looking at truth not as just an idea or yeah, something's either true or it's false. It's just kind of the light switch is on or off. But I started seeing truth as a person and that person being Jesus. And he tells us very clearly. He says I am the way, the truth and the life, and that really struck me as I was studying the Ten Commandments and thinking, wow, truth, god is truth, and truth exists in the of us as male and female, the creation of the sun and the stars and the planets, and then you have the truth of what the particle was and how they interact together, how you pick up an object and you let go of it, and the truth of gravity is that it's going to always pull it to the ground. And so we have truth everywhere. Some people deny the existence of truth. There's never any absolute truth. Well, I strongly disagree with that, and the only thing that happens is people get confused about the truth, and confusion causes us to. When we're confused, it's hard to find truth, truth being Jesus, and so in our culture right now, they've had to come up with new terms for truth or lying. Actually, they've had to come up with new terms for lying because they don't want people to know what it really is. There's misinformation and disinformation that has suddenly become a part of vocabulary in years. Instead of people saying that was a lie, let's call it for what it is. Let's not use a euphemism to cover it up. The confusion that's going on in the world makes it very difficult for us to see what is true. It makes it very difficult to see God in the confusion, and that's right where Satan wants us to be confused and not able to find what is true is true. And you know, there's a lot of things that we hear where we think you know that sounds like, yeah, that sounds pretty truthful, that sounds like a good, a good theology. But sometimes there's a little sprinkle of a little bit of a lie in the midst of the truth. And so when we think about that and think, well, it's mostly true. Well, let's say it's 2% not true, it's 2% lie, and so we use that as our philosophy, we decide that that's something we're going to really put into our character and really esteem to follow, and we're 2% off target and over the course of 10, 15 years. How far off target can we be? Think of a plane flying from San Francisco to New York and they're 2% off their trajectory of to get there. They end up in a totally different state.

Ed Van Buskirk: 41:23

We want to make sure we get the full truth and the chaos and the confusion and the chaos and the confusion that we have in our world, especially with the young men and women, the young folks who are listening to this social media, to the newscast it's impossible to really know what is truth on all of that and the confusion that it's causing them. And that's where The Commandments can really come in, so important for equipping all of us, especially our young children, as the targets of all this confusion, to bring them back into what and navigate all of the confusion and to see, okay, if I put God first in that first commandment and I start to understand how these commandments really work and operate in our daily lives, whether we're a junior high student in the school, or we're a business person in the workforce, or a retired person, or a woman or a man who's taking care of things at home, if I can put God first in my life, all the confusion that comes up in my world and day I can say wait a minute time out. Let me just go to this wonderful recipe that God has given to us in the Ten Commandments and go, let's just see how this really stacks up. Oh, wait a minute, this isn't going to lead us to God. This is going to take us away from God. It's a direct violation of the commandment you shall not kill. We're not going there. And then trust to accept that.

Ed Van Buskirk: 43:12

This is an interesting thing because it involves so much of life, investments, and when we look at the investments, the companies that we invest in, and really look to see how their, what their business is about and what other industries they support and what products they produce, how closely do they align with the Ten Commandments? And if they don't, then why am I investing in them? Let's make a better choice. These commandments apply everywhere and they help us to cut through the confusion and to make the choices that are going to be good for others and good for us and good for our relationship with God.

Sheila Nonato: 44:13

Thank you for listening to the Veil and Armour podcast.

Co-Host: 44:16

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