Columbus, Critics, and a Compass that Points to Jesus

We challenge how we spend time and what our choices prove, read Hebrews 13 and Psalm 115 on trust and idols, and revisit Columbus through primary sources and Las Casas to test easy narratives and seek honest history with a Christian lens. We add a Medal of Honor snapshot to ground virtue in action and close with prayer and practical calls to trust God in daily life.

• examining whether our last 24 hours reflect faith
• Hebrews 13 on love, marriage, generosity, and obedience
• Psalm 115 contrasting living trust with lifeless idols
• Proverbs on how praise tests character and folly clings
• trusting God as helper and shield without fear
• Medal of Honor: Horatio L. Birdsall, courage and service
• Queen Isabella’s commission and shipboard devotions
• Columbus’s journal entries on peaceful contact and conversion by love
• Las Casas’s role, sources, and complexity over slogans
• personal challenge to prioritize God, spouse, and neighbor

If you're looking for a family-friendly middle-grade fantasy kids, grandkids, or to read as a family, I would humbly request that you check out Countryside. And if you feel like you can spare$3 or$5 each month to support the podcast, I would appreciate that too.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Gratitude, and Opening Prayer
• 2:38 Examining How We Spend Our Time
• 4:11 Reading Hebrews 13: Following Christ
• 8:00 Psalm 115 and Trust versus Idols
• 9:38 Proverbs on Praise and Foolishness
• 10:45 Trusting God as Our Helper
• 11:55 Medal of Honor: Horatio L. Birdsall
• 13:10 Reframing Columbus’s Motives with Sources
• 15:28 Queen Isabella’s Commission and Shipboard Devotions
• 17:35 Columbus’s Journal: Encounters and Intent

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well. Wherever y'all are. Whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate y'all giving me some of your day. I will try and use that time wisely. For those of y'all who continue to share the podcast with others and tell others about it, thank you so much. Very, very grateful for that. For those of y'all who continue to pray. For me and for the podcast, thank you. Very much need your prayers and appreciate them. Father, thank you for today. Thank you for you, Father, and your son Jesus Christ and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love and your mercy, your grace and your forgiveness of sin. Through the mercy of or merit of your son, Jesus Christ. Thank you for the people listening to the podcast, Father. Believes be with them, be with their families. Guide them, bless them, surround them with your angels. Help us all to do your will, Father. Help us to love your son Jesus Christ, to follow his commands, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Guide our steps, be with our leaders here in America and around the world and nations where people are listening. Help them to rule in fear of you. Be with our pastors and our priests in the pulpit. Be with their wives and their children. Comfort them. Help us to truly appreciate to take advantage, Father, of the ability to read your word freely each day. Help us to focus on you, to trust you. To know that you have everything well in hand, even when we can't see it or don't understand what's going on. Be with those who are hurting, Father, those who are injured, those who are ill, those who are in the present. Comfort them. Help them to feel your presence. Ease any discomfort they're having. Thank you, Father, for all the blessings that you bestow upon us. And please guide my words here. Your son's name we pray. Amen. Have you made time for God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit? And have you made time for your spouse? How have you spent the last 24 hours of your life? What have you done? Are you pleased with it when you look back on it? Are you pleased with how you spent your time? Are you pleased with what you're giving your energy and effort and affection to? Or do you feel like you need to make some changes? And if you're pleased, why are you pleased? Are you pleased because it feels good? Because it's what God tells you to do, both? Neither something else. At the end of each day, I hope, I know it's not always true, folks, but at the end of each day, I hope that if somebody looked at my life from the outside in, there would be enough evidence to convict me of being a true Christian follower of Christ. Because there's no there is no greater goal in my life than hearing God one day say, Well done, good and faithful servant. Bible verses for today. I'm gonna start with Hebrews chapter 13, verses 1 through 25. Keep on loving each other's brothers and sisters. Don't forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it. Remember those in prison, as if you were there with them yourself. Remember also those being mistreated, as if you felt their pain in your own bodies. Give honor to marriage, and remain faithful to one another in marriage. God will surely judge people who are immoral and those who commit adultery. Don't love money, be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, I will never fail you, I will never abandon you. So we can say with confidence, the Lord is my helper, so I will have no fear. What can mere people do to me? Remember your leaders who taught you the Word of God, think of all the good that has come from their lives, and follow the example of their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So do not be attracted by strange new ideas. Your strength comes from God's grace, not from rules about food, which don't help those who follow them. We have an altar from which the priests in the tabernacle have no right to eat. Under the old system, the high priest brought the blood of animals into the holy place as a sacrifice for sin, and the bodies of the animals were burned outside the camp. So also Jesus suffered and died outside the city gates to make his people holy by means of his own blood. So let us go out to him outside the camp and bear the disgrace he bore. For this world is not our permanent home. We are looking forward to a home yet to come. Therefore, let us offer through Jesus a continual sacrifice of praise to God, proclaiming our allegiance to his name. And don't forget to do good and share with those in need. These are the sacrifices that please God. Obey your spiritual leaders and do whatever they say. Their work is to watch over your souls, and they are accountable to God. Give them reason to do this with joy and not with sorrow. That would certainly not be for your benefit. Pray for us, for our conscience is clear, and we want to live honorably in everything we do. And especially pray that I will be able to come back to you soon. Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, and ratified an eternal covenant with his blood, may he equip you with all you need for doing his will. May he produce in you through the power of Jesus Christ every good thing that is pleasing to him. All glory to him forever and ever. Amen. I urge you, dear brothers and sisters, to pay attention to what I have written in this brief exhortation. I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released from jail. If he comes here soon, I will bring him with me to see you. Greet all your leaders and all the believers there. The believers from Italy send you their greetings. May God's grace be with you all. Psalm one fifteen, one through eighteen. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness. Why let the nations say where is their God? Our God is in the heavens, and he does as he wishes. Their idols are merely things of silver and gold shaped by human hands. They have mouths but cannot speak, and eyes but cannot hear. They have ears but cannot hear, and noses but cannot smell. They have hands but cannot feel, and feet but cannot walk, and throats but cannot make a sound. And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them. O Israel, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. O priests, descendants of Aaron, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. All you who fear the Lord, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. The Lord remembers us and will bless us. He will bless the people of Israel and bless the priests and descendants of Aaron. He will bless those who fear the Lord, both great and lowly. May the Lord richly bless both you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord who made heaven and earth. The heavens belong to the Lord, but he has given the earth to all humanity. The dead cannot sing praises to the Lord, for they have gone into the silence of the grave. But we can praise the Lord both now and forever. Praise the Lord. Proverbs twenty-seven, verses twenty-one and twenty-two. Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but a person is tested by being praised. You cannot separate fools from their foolishness, even though you grind them like grain with mortar and a pestle. How much do we cling to our foolishness, folks? How unwilling to be separated from it are we for the things that we do that are foolish? God has said, I will never fail you, I will never abandon you. So we can say with confidence, the Lord is my helper, so I will have no fear. What can mere people do to me? O Israel, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. O priest, descendants of Aaron, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. All you who fear the Lord, trust the Lord. He is your helper and your shield. Father, help us to trust you more each and every day and everything. In your son's name we pray. Amen. Medal of Honor for today. Horatio L. Birdzall. Sergeant, U.S. Civil War, Bravo Company, 3rd Iowa Cavalry, U.S. Army, April 16th, 1865, near Columbus, Georgia. Capture of Flag and Bearer. Accredited to Keok, Lee County, Iowa, not awarded posthumously, presented june seventeenth, eighteen sixty five. Born eighteen thirty three in Monroe County, New York, died november twenty ninth, eighteen ninety one, buried Arlington National Cemetery, MH thirteen Tac sixty nine thirty five, Arlington, Virginia, United States. Horatio L. Birdsall. So we're going to go back into today Columbus, spend the rest of the week with him, and just keep reading through some actual history as opposed to what the common narrative so often is today that Columbus came over here just to rape and pillage and plunder and had nothing to do with his desire to follow Christ, to spread the gospel. And we will, don't fear, we will talk about indigenous people, but it probably won't fit the narrative that most of the left and the academics claim very well today. But it will be real history. This is Queen Isabella's commission to Columbus. It is hoped that by God's assistance, some of the continents and the islands and the ocean will be discovered for the glory of God. And you can look at all this stuff, folks, if you really want to and say that it's all cynical, or you can be cynical and say that it was all fake. But at least you've heard it. The sailors on board at the beginning of each day would sing out this Blessed be the light of the day and the Holy Cross, we say, and the Lord of Verity and the Holy Trinity. Blessed be the immortal soul and the Lord who keeps it whole. Blessed be the light of day and he who sends the night away. 1492 Columbus, the beginning of his journey, the first voyage across the Atlantic, writing to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, because most Christian and very exalted, excellent, mighty princes, king and queen of the Spains and of the islands of the sea, our Lord and Lady, in this present year 1492, after your Highnesses had made an end to the war with the Moors who ruled in Europe, and had concluded the war in the very great city of Granada, where in the present year, on the second day of the month of January, I saw the royal standards of your highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra, which is the citadel of the said city, and I saw the Moorish king come forth to the gates of the city and kiss the royal hands of your highnesses and the prince of my lord. And soon after, in that same month, through information that I had given to your highnesses concerning the lands of India, and of a prince who is called Grand Khan, Grand Khan, which is to say, in our vernacular King of Kings. How many times he and his predecessors had sent to Rome to seek doctors in our holy faith to instruct him therein, and that never had the Holy Father provided them, and thus so many people were lost through lapsing into idolatries and receiving doctrines of perdition. And your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes devoted to the Holy Christian faith, and the propagators thereof and enemies of the sect of Muhammad, and of all idolatries and heresies, resolve to send me Christopher Columbus to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands, and the dispositions of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our holy faith, and ordained that I should not go by land the usual way to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone. Bartolome de la Casas, also called the apostle of the Indies. He was one of the first Christian missionaries to America and was very devoted to the oppressed and enslaved natives. He knew Columbus personally, and his father and uncle were shipmates of Columbus's. He copied the original journal of the first voyage, which I won't try and say in Spanish, into an abstract, and here are some of the dates. October eighth, fourteen ninety two. Thanks be to God, says the Admiral. He added that it was useless to complain. He had come to go to the Indies, and so had to continue until he found them with the help of our Lord. October twelfth, fourteen ninety two. At two hours after midnight appeared the land at a distance of two leagues. They handed all sails and set the trio, which was the main sail without bonnets, and lay too waiting for daylight Friday, when they arrived at an island of the Bahamas that was called in the Indian's tongue Guanahani, San Salvador, so that they might be well disposed toward us, for I knew that they were a people to be delivered and converted to our holy faith rather by love than by force. I gave some red caps to some and to others glass beads which they hung around their necks and many other things of slight value. At this they were greatly pleased and became so entirely our friends that it was a wonder to see. I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own. Our Lord willing, when I depart I shall bring back six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn to talk our language. October sixteenth, fourteen ninety two. I don't recognize in them any religion, and I believe that they are very promptly, that they very promptly would turn Christians, for they are of a very good understanding. Trees all along the river beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruit, each according to their kind, many birds, and little birds which sing very sweetly. And so I hope in our Lord that your Highnesses will do something about it with much care, in order to turn to the church so numerous a folk, and to convert them, as you have destroyed those who would not seek to confess the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And after your days, for we are all mortal, you will leave your realms in a very tranquil state and free from heresy and wickedness, and will be well received before the eternal Creator, to whom I pray to grant you long life and great increase of many realms and lordships, and both will and disposition to increase the holy Christian religion, as hitherto you have done. You have to see that Columbus's main intent or one of his main priorities, folks, was spreading the gospel and doing God's will. Can we say the same about our own lives? If you're looking for a family-friendly middle-grade fantasy kids, grandkids, or to read as a family, I would humbly request that you check out Countryside. And if you enjoy it, if you would leave a review somewhere, I would be grateful for that. And if you feel like you can spare$3 or$5 each month to support the podcast, I would appreciate that too. God bless y'all. God bless your families. God bless your marriages. God bless America. God bless your nation, wherever you are around the world. Listening, folks, we'll talk to y'all again real soon. Oh, yes. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.