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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:04:55 GMT -5
The Futility of Thanksgiving
There’s a running gag in our family that occurs every time we dine together as an extended family. My father, a creature of habit, always blesses the meal and thanks God “for the hands that prepared it”—covering all the bases, as it were. After the “amen,” my wife and mother frequently chime in that it was just one of them who prepped the meal, poking fun at him for giving other “hands” credit. But, hey, it’s always good to cover all the bases.
For many, Thanksgiving is a day to cover the bases. We rejoice in generic blessings from the hands of a generic deity. We are much like the people of Athens, who added to all their altars to all their gods one altar to the “unknown god,” just in case they left someone out of their pantheon (see Acts 17:23)
What’s wrong with this?
To illustrate the problem another way, my kids borrowed a cheap, easy-reader Thanksgiving book from the library, in which Barney the dinosaur and his gang frolick around outdoors, thanking the animals themselves for all their contributions to society—songbirds for their songs, deer for their peaceful attitudes, and so forth. By thanking no one in particular for all our common graces, we thank everyone and everything. In the process of our covering all the religious bases, as it were, we become as pagan as those Athenians. Like ancient idolaters, we lustfully spread ourselves under every green laurel (Isaiah 57:5).
But being grateful to nobody in particular is equal to being ungrateful. Lauding the “hands” that made the meal is no different than extolling the spoon that delivers the cranberry sauce to one’s palate. Thanksgiving misplaced is thanksgiving denied.
When the Apostle Paul recognized the futility of the Athenians’ general worship, he called them to recognize the true source of all blessing: the Triune God, Yahweh. Specifically, he called them to recognize the supremacy of the crucified and risen Son of God:
“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.… The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:24-25, 30-31)
Yes, this violates our inclusive, multicultural sensibilities. Yes, this makes Thanksgiving a religious holy day. But worship is an inescapable concept. We will either feast in honor of the songbirds and deer or we will feast before the God of heaven.
I am no marriage expert, but I can imagine my bride taking offense if I were to say today, “Honey, thank you for toiling over this phenomenal turkey… now, what was your name?” This would be so even if I covered my bases by bowing my head and thanking an invisible sky being for all the women in the world who make turkeys on this day. This type of thanksgiving is futile.
True thanksgiving requires that we name him who provides for and sustains us. And the God of heaven and earth, who showers us with the graces of turkey, football, and freedom, requires that we know him through his Son:
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” (John 14:6)
“Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” (1 John 5:12)
Because all our blessings are cruciform blessings, we may not have a holiday of generic, grateful warm-fuzzies. We must actually name the One to whom we owe our very life and breath. All these blessings come to us through Jesus Christ, the Lord of the universe. The Pilgrims and their heirs left the Old World to escape tyranny, yet our real freedom is found in a life of gratitude to this benevolent dictator of the universe for his free grace. “Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for his steadfast love endures forever” (Psalm 136:3).
Today is a day to give thanks to Jesus, and if you repent from your sin and trust him for forgiveness, he is able to save you from his judgment and give you a seat at his feast—a feast spread by nail-pierced hands graven with your name.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:06:05 GMT -5
Against Concupiscence
Issues of same-sex attraction, the Christian identity, and sexual orientation have once more made it to the fore, and a growing contingent of believers are wondering if the whole thing is a matter of semantics.
Terms like “gay” and “orientation” used in the context of professing Christians have drawn much ire from various discernment voices. Is this a mere squabble over words to no avail—the sort of thing condemned in 2 Timothy 2:14 (“[C]harge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers”)?
This question has been stirred by the continued ripple effects of the Revoice conference. Regarding Revoice itself, Albert Mohler and Kevin DeYoung have written convincingly concerning its dangers. Christian author, pastor’s wife, and former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield, in a conversation addressing similar issues, said, “Souls are at stake. And I think that’s where we have to recognize that the gay Christian movement, including the celibate gay Christian movement, is a different religion. … I’m not standing in the same forest with Greg Johnson and Wes Hill and Nate Collins looking at different angles of the trees. I’m in a different forest altogether.”
But one needn’t compose an entire blog post to simply cite to the thought leaders and add, “All that goes for me double.” So rather than flesh out all the arguments others have already made, I would simply like to make a point that has somehow gone unnoticed in much of the current discourse.
Concupiscence is still a sin.
Now, on first glance, it may seem as though the sin of concupiscence is the sin of using such a pretentious word in the first place. Concupiscence is, after all, a bit of a holdover from the king’s English. (True story: to this day, my parents castigate me for having asked in seventh grade if forsooth was too archaic to use in my composition assignment. And no, I didn’t know what it meant.) But its meaning appears as we see it used throughout the New Testament:
“But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.” (Romans 7:8 KJV)
“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” (Colossians 3:5)
“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God[.]” (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5)
Modern translations render this word along the lines of lusts, passionate urges, and inordinate longings. What we are dealing with is the Greek word epithumia. Henry Jacobs (1844-1932) defined it in this way:
The Greek noun, like the verb from which it comes, meaning ‘to yearn,” “to long,” “to have the heart set upon a thing,” is determined in its moral quality by the source whence it springs or the object toward which it is directed.… As a rule, when the object is not expressed, it refers to longing for that which God has forbidden, namely, lust. It is not limited to sexual desire, but includes all going forth of heart and will toward what God would not have us to have or be, as its use in the Septuagint of the Ten Commandments clearly shows, for “Thou shalt not covet” (Exodus 20:17).
The fact is that, biblically, desiring to sin is sin. Now, that is not to say that to merely be tempted is morally equivalent to succumbing to said temptation; Jesus was tempted but never sinned (Matthew 4:1ff, Hebrews 4:15). But for us fallen beings, to the degree that these desires arise from within us, they reflect our depravity and are thus culpable before we even act upon them. “Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).
Separating Ethics From Orientation
There is a strange history in the church of claiming that such lusts are actually not culpable. I would submit that there is a reason that at the Council of Trent, the same Roman Catholic body which anathematized those who hold the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone (see Session 6), also excused concupiscence (5.1.5). The reason is simple: a man-centered, works-based gospel cannot truly contend with the reality of indwelling sin. A Roman Catholic system of self-salvation involving meritorious works simply must pronounce some sinful desire okay, or else the system falls apart. Only the one-way grace of God—demonstrated in Christ doing for us what we could decidedly never do for ourselves—can redeem us out of the sin that “clings so closely” (Hebrews 12:1). It takes the unilateral intervention of a sovereign God to bring to life dead, sin-inclined hearts (Ezekiel 36:26), and this intervention is exactly what Christ procured with his blood.
On the issue of so-called sexual orientation, it seems as though many Christians want to hedge their bets, buying into Freudian categories of sexuality while superimposing a biblical ethic of sexual behavior. This is understandable. Every day we inhale gulps of cultural air convincing us that being gay is a fundamental fact of personhood comparable to eye color or left-handedness. And we should be grateful that many believers within the orbit of Revoice still hold that homosexual activity is contrary to the law of God. But the effort to separate so-called orientation from ethics, while driven out of compassion for those who experience same-sex attraction, is fundamentally misguided. And we can see this through a simple thought experiment, replacing sexual immorality with any other sin.
Imagine explaining to your wife or husband: “Sweetheart, I want to obey the Lord Jesus, and he commands me not to run you through with this steak knife. But I confess that as long as I live in this fallen frame, I will face the constant temptation to run you through anyway. But I won’t, because I am committed to pro-life ethic in our marriage.” In this case, a healthy marriage cannot coexist with an orientation towards violence. We cannot separate Christian ethics from the life of the mind and the internal drives of the professing Christ-follower. It is for this reason that Jesus runs his own reductio ad absurdum in the Sermon on the Mount, equating lust with adultery and hatred with murder (Matthew 5:21ff). To put it plainly: wanting to sin but refraining from the external act is no triumph of the will.
Resisting But Wishing We Weren’t
As I recount my own youth and my battles with sexual lust, I am grateful for the truly miraculous way in which the Lord graciously delivered me from the snares of pornography. But I also recall a period of heavy conviction marking the period after I was “clean” from such external sources of temptation. Though I was externally steering clear of vile and sexually explicit media, my internal monologue droned, Ah, Lord, but if only pornography weren’t sinful. I still longed for it. I was “obeying” externally but not hating the sin simply because it grieved my Savior. I was, at that point, still waging war in the power of the flesh. Only when the Lord persuaded me that my daydreaming and desires themselves were damnable was I more fully enabled to by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13). And here the real renewal began.
The Apostle Paul writes: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do to be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). As a fallen follower of Christ, I can joyfully join in the “such were some of you” chorus. The beauty of the gospel is that Jesus died for bad people. Christ suffered for both sins and the guilty desires that beget them. In his power we are now transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:1).
And this is what gives the gospel its power to redeem the same-sex attracted believer too. Before Christ, every single one of us was “oriented” wholly towards sin. Jesus died not merely for sinful acts but also for our desires to sin. But in Christ, we are made new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). Though we may wrestle with our fallenness for a lifetime, our natural selves are crucified with Christ and raised to newness of life. And having been thus regenerated, believers “repent” (metanoéō)—they turn from sin. One might even say they reorient from sin.
If any of this sounds to you like a condemnation of believers who sincerely struggle to resist same-sex lust, I encourage you to reread everything above. Believers who faithfully mortify and resist same-sex lust are doing what all believers are called to do: mortify and resist sin in any and all of its insidious manifestations. To walk with Christ is to constantly battle to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Rather, you should see in this post a sober warning to those who stop fighting—who reclassify their temptations as a part of their identity on par their ethnicity, nationality, or gender. (An example of this can be found in Revoice’s “Statement of Sexual Ethics and Christian Obedience” under the section “Christian Obedience and Sanctification.”) To follow Christ is to fight. To stop fighting is to stop following.
To posit sexual orientation as an immutable identity category is to say that there’s a part of our human nature Jesus didn’t truly die to redeem. As Butterfield also noted: “There is simply no way, biblically speaking, that you can bypass repentance to get to grace. And if you believe that your homosexual orientation is not an indwelling sin, then what you are telling me is that you are righteous, and there is no gospel for the righteous.”
This isn’t a matter of semantics. Concupiscence always leads to death—ours or Christ’s. Let us pray, plead, and preach the gospel of grace and the biblical doctrine of sexuality as matters of life and death, because they are.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:09:38 GMT -5
Have Yourself a Merry, Apocalyptic Christmas
If someone were to pinch me ten years ago and tell me that, by the end of 2019, Kanye West would be producing gospel music, the host of The Apprentice would be president, and Joe Biden would be the most conservative name in the Democratic primary pool, I might have asked said person if whatever they’re smoking is legal in 2019 too.
We live in strange days, but not unpredictably strange days. A wise man once said that while those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it, those who do are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it. Yet it doesn’t take an historian to gather that actions have consequences, and cultural actions have cultural consequences. We can only abort so many children, legalize so many fruitless unions, and print so much currency until we find ourselves barren, battered and bankrupt. These days are no qualitatively stranger than those of the Roman Empire’s last gasps—though our bread and circuses come by way of Doordash and Disney.
Societal breakdowns like this always fuel messianic fervor, whether one’s messiah is the Child in Bethlehem, the child on the cover of Time, or any one of the overgrown children who occupy public office. When covenant curses fall, each man cries out to his god (cf. Jonah 1:5). We Christians even have our own odd relief valve for our cultural pessimism: a whole industry of Rapture fiction that rises and falls in inverse proportion to the Dow.
In this respect, perhaps we can now better relate to the first-century Jews living under the Roman boot.
Eschatological Spidey Senses
Around 4 B.C. or so, the Pax Romana was just beginning to show signs of decay. Soon there would be “wars and rumors of wars” (Matthew 24:6). Since the math of Daniel’s seventy weeks prophecy (Daniel 9:24-27) pinned the coming of an anointed one to that generation, claimants to the messianic title came and went (Acts 5:36-37), often leading bloody insurrections along the way. Israel’s ruling class had made themselves little more than vassals of the pagan empire, including the religious elite, who made it their goal to squelch the “Make Palestine Great Again” Zealot party. Predictably, all these goings-on were enough to get everyone’s eschatological Spidey senses tingling, and if Twitter had been a thing in the Ancient Near East it would have been at least as heartburn-inducing as it is today.
The known world was coming unglued, and the eyes of the people were fixed heavenward, squinting to see any sign of their deliverance—or portent of their demise. Isaiah’s plea hung in the air: “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence!” (Isaiah 64:1-2).
Placing yourself in this setting perhaps not too remote from our own, you would have expected, as did the Jews, the age to come to come with a convulsive bang all at once. The final judgment, the advent of Messiah, the regathering of the Jewish diaspora, and the establishment of the global rule of Yahweh were all prophetic events expected to march into history like a Roman victory parade. As someone else has put it, the collective sense would have been, “Behold, the kingdom the God cometh like the 82nd Airborne.”
This makes what happened next so subversive.
Peace Child
In the 1960s, Canadian couple Don and Carol Richardson were sent as missionaries to the headhunting, cannibal Sawi tribe of Papua New Guinea. The Richardsons’ eventual claim to fame was their use of the “peace child” metaphor to make sense of the gospel message among the tribesmen. In Sawi culture, if one warring tribe sent a single, helpless child into an enemy settlement, the enemy was required to care for the child and receive him as an envoy of peace—an inviolable token of reconciliation. So Jesus, the missionaries explained, was the ultimate Peace Child sent from heaven. The Sawi understood and believed the message, and the rest is, as they say, history.
This analogy helps us to adjust our own perspective. At a moment in time when God should have come in all-out war against a hostile human race, the Messiah entered the world in stealth—such that he went almost entirely unnoticed. Just as Joshua’s spies infiltrated Jericho first to save unworthy Rahab before bearing the sword of divine judgment against the city, the better Joshua slipped into our realm on a silent night, into the formless void of a virgin’s womb, to accomplish salvation before judgment. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). The kingdom came more like a Navy SEAL on a rescue mission than a heavy-duty bomber carrying a full payload.
That no one expected the two-stage coming of Christ and his kingdom is evident from the Jews’ reactions to his messianic claims and the content of his teaching in response. This is the timbre of all the parables: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field… The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened” (Matthew 13:31, 33). The kingdom was coming, but not in the way anticipated. This barren world was to first become pregnant with the new creation before the rule of God would be fully consummated in history.
The Real Apocalypse
When the world teeters on its foundations, as it seems to be at the moment, we would do well to realize that Christmas is truly in this sense apocalyptic.
The book of Revelation is named such because it is introduced as the “revelation (apokalupsis) of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place” (1:1). G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, “And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.” But Jesus’ apocalypse is meant not as the sort of apocalypse that spins off literature of the “Late, Great” sort. An apocalypse, or revelation, is an unveiling—a pulling back of the curtain. A revealing. Revelation is not meant to obfuscate but to clarify, despite our abuse of its prophetic imagery. And this revealing is not only what happens at the end of days, but what did happen in the advent of the Son.
There are an odd handful of places in Scripture when the visible world peels back and reveals the real nature of things underneath. In one crucial moment of impending doom at the hands of the Syrians, God opened the eyes of the prophet Elisha’s servant to see that “those who are with us are more than those who are with them” (2 Kings 6:16). “When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city.… Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (vv. 15, 17).
Christmas night is one such night, complete with the angelic announcements befitting such a cosmic event. Imagine expecting the upheaval of the world and the coming of Christ in your own generation (as many evangelicals do). Now, imagine being told that Christ had already come—but half a world away in a stable, and no one’s eyeballs had melted in their sockets when they beheld him. If we can put ourselves in this situation, we are close to hearing the gospel story the way the first-century audience did.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It
As I finish penning this short post—well, tapping it onto a screen—it’s Christmas Eve, my children are in bed, and expectation fills the air along with the white noise from our daughter’s sound machine, safe from the more sinister clamoring of a hostile world outside our window.
But Christmas marks the beginning of the end of the world, at least as we know it. The kingdom of God is not yet fully here, yet it is already here—and growing. Rather than smite us rebel earthlings, our God Yahweh donned flesh and bone to bear our curse and reconcile us to live under his righteous reign. An “apocalypse” is simply a revealing, an unveiling—and that is exactly what took place 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem against the backdrop of a world in cultural and political upheaval. The curtains have already been rolled back on the final judgment of God—yet it was a judgment who fell on heaven’s Spy on his redemptive recon mission.
This is a weighty glory.
So have yourself a merry, little, apocalyptic Christmas.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:10:37 GMT -5
Fruit Salad Diversity
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Human beings are obstinately visual creatures.
By this statement, I am referring not to all the typical examples of our visual nature—our propensity for art, the male species’ hard-wired infatuation with the optics of the female form, the fact that Baptist churches split over the color of the drapes, or. I am speaking, rather, of our being aesthetic worshipers. When it comes to how we adore the invisible, oddly enough, looks are everything.
So, what do I mean by aesthetic worshipers? Calvin wrote that the heart is a perpetual forgery of idols, and it’s because of what Scripture calls the lust of the eyes (1 John 2:16; cf. Gen. 3:6). We tend to be dissatisfied with the narrow waveband of God’s glory we’re allowed to perceive, so we exchange it for visible images (Rom. 1:20-23). Israel, discontent with the unseen God who had delivered her, returned the favor by recasting him as a brazen bull (Ex. 32:1ff). In Isaiah, we’re given a picture of the foolish idol craftsman who would fell a great tree, burn half to heat his house, and prostrate himself before the leftover lumber (Isa. 44:9-20). Each of these case studies serves to illustrate our visual nature gone haywire. We want desperately to see in a carnal way what we worship rather than worshiping in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24).
We tend to be dissatisfied with the narrow waveband of God’s glory we’re allowed to perceive, so we exchange it for visible images.
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But it isn’t just the pagans’ problem. Our visual idolatry breeds all sorts of disease in the church too. We may reject idolatry of the graven image variety, but we counterfeit the shekinah glory with our fog machines and pyrotechnics. We could multiply the examples. But given the web of race-related tensions still permeating our popular discourse, it seems fitting to narrow our focus to issues of ethnicity.
My thesis is that American church experts are increasingly succumbing to the temptation to replace the glorious, invisible, divine ideal of Christian love and unity with the culture’s graven substitute of stock-photo diversity, and that if we don’t return to the substance, we’ll become deaf, dumb, and mute like the idols we worship.
Looking Like Heaven
The richness and beauty of all the human cultures, languages, and ethnicities God has seen fit to create in his providence (Acts 17:26) are worthy of awe and gratitude. The problem is that what our culture actually celebrates under the banners of “diversity” or “multiculturalism” are often matters of aesthetics more than principle or conviction.
As it goes, we in the church have our own fixation on token diversity as well. Rather than setting our sights on things unseen, which are eternal, we fix our gaze on things seen, which are not only temporal (2 Cor. 4:18) but skin-deep. As evidence, my first exhibit is the increasingly popular sentiment that goes something like this: “the church on earth should resemble the church in heaven”—drawing from texts like Revelation 7:9, white robes notwithstanding.
This sentiment is not only noble, but biblical. Christ has ransomed people of all nations to himself (Rev. 5:9), and from the beginning of God’s plan of redemption, his intent has been to bless all the nations through Christ’s people (Gen. 12:3). We confess one church holy and catholic. The same trans-national body of Christ that meets for worship in the Democratic Republic of Congo is also the same church that gathers in Dhaka, Dublin, or Duluth.
Where the sentiment drifts off-course is not in its inspiration but in its execution. People from every tribe and tongue will certainly inhabit the new heaven and new earth together, and should hence be the object of our missionary endeavors. But it does not follow that local bodies in places like the DRC or Duluth can begin to reflect those cosmic demographics. Who decides what constitutes a heavenly diversity quota? Who does the demography? Who sets the standard?
No one local church will represent a perfect cross-section of the elect from every nation. And, so long as believers of various ethnicities and classes are not excluded from any particular body on the bases of partiality or prejudice, this fact, far from being something for which we should apologize, is part of the very mystery of the church. The profundity of that divine mystery is that the underground church in China, the jubilant congregation worshiping outdoors in the plains of Tanzania, and the white country chapel in the chimney of Idaho are all somehow of the same body. This deep unity is what is manifests the manifold wisdom of God before a stunned audience of angels (Eph. 3:10).
But when human tradition and philosophy impose laws to bind the consciences of each of those worshiping bodies, requiring them to maintain certain ethnic ratios, we’ve forgotten that what binds together Jew, Greek, and barbarian in Christ is not an external pressure roping us all together but the magnetism of Christ himself at the center. In short, we neglect the root and manufacture the fruit.
Back to the Root
Here is the problem. We crave the visual spectacle of multiethnic worship so badly that we socially engineer it. Instead of growing real Christian diversity in Calvary’s level soil, we settle for the petri dish diversity cooked up by the latest program or fad.
The fruit of freedom in Christ is freedom from the bonds of partiality, vainglory, evil suspicion, and a host of sins that have historically fueled humanity’s race problems through the ages. “The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere” (James 3:17). And blessed are those who walk according to that rule. So long as we press into Christ as our Savior and Lord, he’ll squeeze out of us the sort of Christian love that causes white, brown, male, female, Jew, and Greek to embrace each other in the Lord.
The diversity around heaven’s throne exists only because all nations, kindreds, and tongues are entranced by the Lamb.
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C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” We talk a big game about reflecting heaven, but when we finally take aim, we set our optics on earthly outcomes, quotas, and quick fixes. And in so doing, we forfeit heaven and earth. Watched pots never boil, and closely monitored church demographics prove equally tepid. The diversity around heaven’s throne exists only because all nations, kindreds, and tongues are entranced by the Lamb; remove Christ from the center, and the fruit of true unity becomes impossible. When we idolize the fruit, we revile the root.
Let us labor with missionary zeal towards the day when truly every ethnos will gather to adore the Lamb. But this fruit cannot be picked off the vine, diced, arranged to photogenic perfection, and deposited inside local congregations without starting to rot. Severed from the root of Christ, our fruit salad diversity is worth little.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:12:24 GMT -5
The Blessing of Pestilence
As I begin writing, it’s day six of the national “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative (catchy, no?)—or at least, I think it is, but I’ll admit, the days are starting to blend together a bit.
I’ll spare you the full list of activities our family has undertaken in these historic days, since our experiences are common to many. Suffice to say that we’ve enjoyed a bit more time together as I have worked from home, my lovely wife has tried a few new recipes, and the dumbbells in the basement are finally getting used—and yes, we’re doing fine on toilet paper.
I will confess that, like many of you, I’ve tiptoed that knife’s-edge balance between healthy precaution and sinful worry. By God’s grace, I can’t say that we’ve quite given much into the sort of worry Jesus forbids (Matt. 6:34)—the kind rooted in unbelief—but that could be owing more to the sheer surreality of it all. In a few months I’m sure it will begin to sink in: Wait, the president really told everyone to stay home for weeks? Entire industries really shut down? This wasn’t some draft script to the never-filmed 10th season of 24?
Yet for as many rebukes as there have been from our Creator amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, there have been generous helpings of grace mixed in—pressed down, shaken together, running over. It seems funny to label the current situation a “judgment” when, at least in my neck of the woods, that judgment means taking more walks outside, meeting more of our normally-reclusive suburban neighbors, and joining my wife and kids for lunch—things we’d otherwise call blessings.
So is all this COVID-19 stuff a judgment or mercy—a blessed curse or a cursed blessing?
Consulting Moses
I may lose some of my readers at this point, but when it comes to questions about judgments and nations and whatnot, I am one of those pesky Christians who turns to his Old Testament and believes what it says.
I believe we are saved by faith in Christ, not works (Eph. 2:8-9), and as a confessing Protestant following the Second London Baptist Confession, I believe that the civil laws of Israel perished along with that unbelieving nation in A.D. 70, leaving behind only their moral use or general equity. So, if after reading the previous paragraph you pigeonholed me as that kind of Old Testament guy, I encourage you to suspend judgment for just a moment.
Qualifications aside, it’s also true that once and only once in history did God infallibly inspire a set of laws governing a nation, so while we aren’t co-identical with that nation, and we are under a new and better covenant of grace (of which the Law of Moses was but a shadowy foretaste, cf. Heb. 10:1), we would also be sorely mistaken if we assumed Moses had nothing to say to us too. All things are ours in Christ and can be used for our edification (1 Cor. 3:21), and this certainly includes the Law.
Hence, two passages from Deuteronomy have been bouncing around my head this past week (a welcome interruption to the usual rattling up there). The context: God’s people have sojourned about forty years in the wilderness following their miraculous deliverance from Egypt and refusal to enter the promised land in faith. The old generation now having died off in the desert as judgment for their rebellion, Moses restates the terms of the covenant to the new congregation on their way into Canaan—the second giving (deutero) of the law (nomos). And like the original covenant of works cut with Adam in Eden, the reiterated Sinaitic covenant stipulates blessings for obedience and curses on disobedience.
The first text is this:“The LORD will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. The Lord will make the pestilence stick to you until he has consumed you off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. The LORD will strike you with wasting disease and with fever, inflammation and fiery heat, and with drought and with blight and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish.” (Deuteronomy 28:20-22 ESV)
If the children of Israel were disobedient and chased other gods, plagues and pestilence would follow. Does this mean that the current virus pandemic is also a judgment of this sort? We might answer with a qualified “yes.”
While we aren’t Israelites and this covenant applies to us by extension, we also have in the deuteronomic blessings and curses a striking reflection of the heart and holiness of God. Sin and rebellion are punished not just in Israel as a unique nation but in every nation, and this includes some of the same temporal curses promised to Israel (see Lev. 18:24-28, Isa. 24:1-13). So it isn’t enough to dismiss the matter with a shrug and a “Well, we’re under grace, not law.” The world outside of Christ is under nothing but law, so we shouldn’t be surprised when God chastises Gentile nations in ways that resemble his rebukes of his old covenant people too.
The other plague facing us, and arguably the more deadly one, is the plague of widespread panic. This too has its basis in Moses:
“The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them. And you shall be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.” (Deut. 28:25)
Note that this is the exact inverse of the blessing for obedience: “The LORD will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways.” Obedience to the covenant would yield the grace of courage among the people. One soldier would chase an entire troop (Josh. 23:10). Disobedience would result in the curse of cowardice, and a lone enemy fighter would route a whole band of Israelites.
There is no doubt that we are under a similar curse of fear. We’ve scattered in all directions and scurried into our basements, not fleeing a mammoth Philistine giant but a minuscule pathogen. There is, of course, wisdom in following precautions, flattening the curve, and even submitting to rigorous quarantines (as our family has)—but all these actions ought to be taken without giving way to nail-biting anxiety. If our fear of illness eclipses our fear of God, our affections have become disordered.
Not Like Karma
One might object “Wait. If you’re willing to count the COVID-19 outbreak with all its relative statistical insignificance as divine judgment, you’d better be prepared to count all sorts of other, graver phenomena as judgments—influenza, car accidents, and cancer.” I am willing to swallow that reductio so long as a category distinction is made between general judgments and special judgments.
General judgments—and I’m sure there are theologians who have determined better shorthand for this—are those judicial decrees of God (that is what judgments are) in response not necessarily to a particular sinful act here or there but to the presence of sin in creation as a whole, starting with its failed federal representative, Adam. In this category we would include influenza, car accidents, cancer, and COVID, along with hurricanes, hernias, and house cats. The sin of our first parents ushered blood, sweat, thistles, and thorns (Gen. 3:14-19) into the whole cosmos, such that it now groans in labor pangs awaiting the eschaton (Rom. 8:22). Death itself, common to all, is really and truly a judgment, whether one dies painfully in the throes of battle or passes peacefully between neatly-tucked sheets. The wages of sin is death. (See Romans 6:23 and Psalm 90.)
If our fear of illness eclipses our fear of God, our affections have become disordered.
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In other words, all general judgments are judgments on sin, but are not easily attributed with this or that sin apart from infallible revelation telling us otherwise. Under this curse, fallen Adam may step on a thistle in the course of his toil and feel a good bit of discomfort for a minute, and this trivial pain is judgment—not necessarily for any proud thoughts he’d been entertaining moments prior (“What a nag, that Eve. ‘Watch your weight, eat more fruit.’ A lot of good that advice did me last time…”) but for his original sin in Eden. We are not dharmists; we do not believe there is a one-to-one correspondence between every pain or inconvenience in life and personal guilt on our account. Life under this cursed world is unpredictable that way. Sometimes construction accidents happen and innocent civilians are killed, as in the Tower of Siloam incident, and God sovereignly superintends it as a warning to every average Joe that “unless you repent, you too will perish” (Luke 13:3). But in other instances, children are born blind owing to no one’s sin at all (John 9:2-3). The covenant of works does not work like karma.
Special judgments, for lack of a better term, are different. This category refers to specific sanctions on sinful individuals or groups imposed according to a particular historical covenant. An example would be the barbarous cannibalism that happened when Jerusalem was under siege in 586 B.C. (Jer. 19:9) and again in A.D. 70 (cf. Josephus, The War of the Jews Book 4, ch. 3.4). There is a reason Jewish history rhymes here; Yahweh had promised the Israelites in Deuteronomy 28:53 that, should they persist in rebellion and idolatry, they would fall to their enemies in such desperation that, starving to death, they would be driven even to eat their children. Judgments like these are unique, nontransferable covenant signs, though they are rife with application for any discerning Bible reader.
Charles Spurgeon, in a 1866 sermon on Amos 3:3-6 and addressing the cholera outbreak afflicting London at the time, wisely noted:
“We believe that God sends all pestilences, let them come how they may, and that he sends them with a purpose, let them be removed in whatever way they may; and we conceive that it is our business as ministers of God, to call the people’s attention to God in the disease, and teach them the lesson which God would have them learn. I am not among those, as you know, who believe that every affliction is a judgment upon the particular person to whom it occurs. We perceive that in this world the best of men often endure the most of suffering, and that the worst of men frequently escape; and therefore we do not believe in judgments to particular persons except in extraordinary cases; but we do nevertheless very firmly believe that there are national judgments, and that national sins provoke national chastisements.”
I count myself with Spurgeon. We simply do not have enough information to say for sure whether the current outbreak is a generalized judgment or a specialized one. But either way, it’s some kind of judgment—a real chastisement from a personal, holy Creator God, regardless of whether we can cite chapter and verse about which exact national sin was the tripwire. Sin always has consequences, and these consequences are always covenantal in nature; some are just further downstream from Eden than others.
Our Tripwires
But we ought not rule out the notion that this judgment is more direct and specialized. At any rate, in the case of the West, there is little mystery as to why God would take aim at us.
We have possessed more light than virtually any nation prior, having ubiquitous access to the truth of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ, yet we of all the peoples of the earth have shed the blood of more than 60 million unborn infants in the U.S. alone. (Today, in my city, Planned Parenthood remains open in spite of our governor’s orders to refrain from elective medical procedures.) We have profaned the covenant of marriage, blessing sodomy, adultery, and every perversion the human heart has dreamed. We’ve squandered our common graces and perverted God’s kindness. We pioneered the microchip only to spread smut through the cloud and beam it into anyone’s pocket. We have turned from the Triune God to the idols of mammon, sex, and the State. We have hoarded wealth in a day of slaughter (Jas. 5:5). We deserve a hundred pandemics to wake us up and drive us back towards God.
Given this, the question is not whether the panic and the pandemic are judgments of God (they both are), but why these rebukes are so gentle and mixed with the mercies of home offices, FaceTime, and family walks. But God’s judgments in history are always intermingled with mercies.
From Moses to Christ
God’s law is not just meant to expose our sin and its consequences but tutor us to Christ (Gal. 3:24). And from the first human sin, when God cursed creation but promised a victorious, snake-crushing Messiah (Gen. 3:15), God has peppered promises into punishments.
The pattern continues throughout biblical history. God flooded a depraved world but saved Noah; he consumed Sodom and Gommorah but left Lot; he judged Egypt but delivered his chosen people; he decimated Jericho but rescued righteous Rahab; he sent the Assyrians and Babylonians but preserved a remnant; he ordained the fall of Jerusalem but preserved the infant Christian church.
There is an eventual point of no return, at which point repentance is withheld, but we aren’t there yet.
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Whether the coronavirus pandemic is a cursed blessing or a blessed curse (only history and heaven know), what matters is that we respond rightly to both providences at once. To the curse, we must respond in total, desperate repentance, and to the blessing, we must respond in thanksgiving, worship, and, you guessed it, more repentance. There is an eventual point of no return, at which point repentance is withheld, but we aren’t there yet. As long as we are alive, it seems repentance is possible. We must look through the judgment to the offer of mercy buried within every chastisement. The Lord Jesus Christ died for sinners, rose, and reigns victorious over every people, plague, and providence, judging the wicked but freely forgiving all who come to him in empty-handed faith.
The blessing intermingled with our current circumstances is this offer of the gospel. Though the hour is clouded by a dark providence, let us be awake—even in the wee hours—and heed the call to repent. Nothing is more viral than the news and rule of Christ; “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:14:20 GMT -5
All Our Righteousness Is as Filthy Masks
Well, it feels a bit awkward to be writing again, given that I haven’t written anything in long form really addressing COVID-19 since the beginning of the shutdowns. It’s not for want of trying, but, as they say—the spirit is willing, but the flesh is wrapping up a major landscaping project, helping the wife with the kids, and working extra hours from home. It’s also tough to adequately craft a post when the warp-speed news cycle changes the conversation every few days.
I feel a bit like Elihu—hearing his elders bicker back and forth, biting his tongue and biding his time until, at last, he opines (Job 32:4-10). So, you’ll excuse if I’m a bit stream-of-consciousness here. And I do not mean to flatter myself with the comparison to Elihu; rather, I mean that, by God’s grace, I am endeavoring to break my relative silence in such a way that is worth the wait.
Some Preliminary Aphorisms
Before diving in, allow me to preface my remarks with a few theses outlining where I fall on the current COVID issues. (If you’re short on time, skip to the next section.) There is a time to play one’s cards close to the chest, and there is a time to lay them on the table, with any the necessary qualifications. I am not opposed to playing it close to the chest, but given the state of the current dialogue (“You hate old people!” “Wearing a mask makes you a slave!” “Orange man bad!”), I’d rather stave off any potential misunderstandings from now. So, here is my foundation:
The pathology of the virus is one thing; the psychology of the response is another. The pandemic and the panic are both covenantal curses.
As a result, one may argue for or against the level of threat posed by the virus without necessarily denying the threat to personal liberties. One may also hotly contend for personal liberties without becoming, of necessity, a flat-earther. It is possible, after all, to face threats to our civilization from multiple angles.
The virus is more transmissible than we thought it was, but less lethal. For a certain segment of the population, there can be dramatic and potentially lethal effects. Tragic deaths have occurred, and we ought to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).
At the same time, the virus is not an equal opportunity killer. Among those most at risk are the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those with comorbidities. More than 40 serology studies have begun to paint the picture that the vast majority of healthy individuals are able to fight the virus. In terms of case-fatality rates, adjusting for unique situations like those found in nursing homes or in New York City, the virus is simply not quite the threat to most ordinary, healthy individuals that we were told it was. The pandemonium was unwarranted.
A wide-scale suspension of common sense has infected the psyche of much of public policymaking. Natural herd-immunity was not pursued. “Flatten the curve” became, in effect, “Hide until Erskine’s super-soldier serum has cleared clinical trials.” In keeping with the spirit of the age, our egalitarian ethos dictated that Montana be treated the same as Manhattan. A rather bourgeois decision was made that pretty much everyone but physicians and Amazon delivery drivers should telecommute, resulting in massive harm to the country’s working class, poor and homeless, and immigrants and refugees.
The pandemic has shaken loose a complex matrix of related issues, from religious liberty to the ideal of the basic right of self-determination, and the resulting cloud of confusion is dark and ominous. The cabal of media and magistrates has unmasked itself (as fitting a term as ever). The truth simply does not matter to the principalities and powers of our age. Why should we be surprised that those who shut their eyes to the inherent differences between, say, male and female would be equally challenged in virology and or economic forecasting? (Here’s looking at you, Dr. Levine.)
That said, I’ve spent the last few weeks collecting metaphors—biblical metaphors capturing the state of our society, smooth stones to lop into the giant’s forehead at the right time. And there are enough of these to fill a small volume.
Like David, we were ripe for judgment and given a choice between natural disaster or human disaster, but, unlike David, we foolishly chose the latter (1 Chron. 21:8-17).
As our cultural moment has degenerated from dire to absurd, we see on the one hand the priests of scientism wailing and cutting themselves to be heard by their gods, unwilling to admit that the models are deaf and dumb (1 Kings 18:28-29). Conversely, we also have a shortage of prophets willing to break out the polemical potty jokes in the cause of righteousness (1 Kings 18:27).
That reliable information is so hard to find is not a separate problem but is a self-same part of God’s passive judgment on a people who no longer care for truth. Yet we should not mistake an apparent lack of prophetic voices for an actual lack thereof, because it’s also difficult to maintain a serrated prophetic edge in a culture that parodies itself. Like the Jewish leaders of Christ’s day, our intellectual elite constantly want it both ways. “‘But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn”’” (Matt. 11:16-17). Cloth masks are really just petri dishes, but we’re mandating them. Trust Dr. Fauci, but only when he’s speaking ex cathedra. The death toll is comparable to a flu season, except when it isn’t. Models are unreliable, except when they align with our political aspirations. Be a good Romans 13 Christian and obey Caesar, but looting is understandable. Our blue-checkmark philosopher-kings want to have their cake, eat it too, then take that special pill they have in Panem to do it all over again.
Given permission (?) by President Cyrus to return to church at last late in May, we are returning from exile to rebuild, as it were, our houses of worship—and as it was in the days of Ezra, so now we find that the glory of the latter house pales in comparison to the memory of the former, and the shouts of joy are all muddled together with the cacophony of weeping (Ezra 3:13).
The Bible is given to us as more than a manual on cultural color-commentary, of course; its whole purpose and end is the Person of Christ (Luke 24:44-47; John 5:39). But Christ is also our wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30), and wisdom fills its whole house with treasures (Prov. 24:4). And so there is no shortage of insight to gain by holding the photonegative of our inverted generation up to the light of holy writ.
Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, our prophets are beauticians and barbers, while too many pastors and politicians, our would-be watchmen on the wall, anxiously pace that wall nail-biting and hair-pulling.
Oh yes, I had forgotten, this is all by way of prologue.
Filthy Rags
Allow me to return to an earlier point made in passing regarding masks. Though I’ve been known to opine on the internets, I am not a virologist, and I am still waiting for my honorary M.D. from Twitter. But it doesn’t take a medical professional to realize that reusable cloth masks, hand-crocheted and oft-touched, are less than sterile. This is not to say they are altogether useless. Let me go on the record and say that there are both good and bad reasons to wear or not wear a mask. Good reasons to don a mask include protecting the vulnerable, patiently complying with employer regulations, or avoiding a spat with the grocery store bouncer. Then there are the bad reasons to wear one—blind, undiscerning panic, for instance.
But when I think of Scriptural admonitions about infected cloths, Isaiah 64:6 comes to mind: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
This rather opaque metaphor calls for us to engage in a bit of biblical theology. Throughout the story of Scripture, the abstracts of guilt, innocence, honor, and shame intersect in the image of clothing.
Man, in his sinless state, was naked and without shame (Gen. 2:25). When he ate the forbidden fruit and incurred guilt, his first impulse was to conceal his shame with fig leaves (3:7).
Man’s makeshift garments proving insufficient, God promised a Savior and provided skins in their stead (v. 21)—teaching the infant race that only shed blood covers the shame of sin (Heb. 9:22).
Noah, himself a type of Adam given a flood-washed world to subdue and populate, also sinned with fruit and found himself naked and ashamed (Gen. 9:21).
The people of Israel were proverbially naked, bloody, and abandoned until Yahweh found her, clothed her, and adorned her with beauty in the exodus and striking of the Siniatic covenant (Ez. 16:1-14).
The Levitical priests were given careful instructions on concealing themselves while performing their ministerial duties (20:26) and special garments signifying their consecration before a holy God (28:2ff).
When the nation broke the covenant, her wanton idolatry was like the nakedness of a prostitute, which God then in fitting discipline allowed to be paraded before the pagan nations (Ez. 16:35-39, 23:1ff).
After the nation broke the covenant, fell into exile, and returned to its homeland, Zechariah saw in prophetic vision the high priest Joshua standing before God clothed in filthy rags. But when Satan brings accusation against Joshua, the angel of the Lord orders that spotless garments be given to him instead—a picture of the divine forgiveness, cleansing, and restoration ultimately fulfilled in Christ (Zech. 3:1-5).
Yes, right—back to the masks. The idiom “virtue signaling” has caught on so quickly that to apply it here seems trite—a bit too on-the-nose, perhaps. After all, one may say, if one is virtuous, is it so wrong for that to be seen? Are we not to so shine our light before others that they would see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16)?
But one need look no further than the local grocery store to see that signaling virtue is really much of what is happening with the use of masks. One shopper believes fully in mask wearing and straps on his N95, above the nose and all. Another shopper really just wants to grab a gallon of milk and avoid judgment, so she dons her bandana. But in any crowd, there are those for whom the mask mostly symbolic of the statement: See, I value life. Dr. Fauci admitted as much last week. And among the more radical are those brave citizens who chase non-mask wearers out of grocery stores with expletive-laced tirades, then remove their mask to sneeze, and whatnot.
Selective scrupulosity is the inevitable byproduct of a seared collective conscience. Having swallowed whole the Roe decision and the bitter fruit of more than 60 million dead, we strap fig leaves over our mouths. Having shut our eyes to the poor, the orphan, the sex-trafficked, and the oppressed, we don the finest vestments, broaden our phylacteries, tithe mint and dill, and pluck specks from the eyes of our unmasked brothers. Having declared sodomy and fornication “clean,” we go out and about in broad daylight in full surgical garb.
“Selective scrupulosity is the inevitable byproduct of a seared collective conscience.” —@ajkocman
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For those to whom a mask is a mere symbol of virtue, such deeds are indeed filthy rags. The term Isaiah used (עִדִּ֖ים) properly refers to used menstrual rags. Equally foul are our attempts to whitewash our sin as a people. No soiled cloth can signal enough virtue to appease a holy God. No fig leaves can cover this nakedness.
I again feel it is necessary to remind my readers that none of this is a commentary on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of masks. That depends entirely on which experts you happen to read at any given moment. Masks work; masks don’t work; all hail masks. This confusion actually underscores my point: for far too many, this isn’t about health. For many, it is about adorning ourselves in self-righteous rags.
But If You Need a Covering…
Our disease is more than skin-deep; it infects the heart itself. What we need is a covering not only for the body but the soul. And for those in search of such a covering, the only answer is Christ.
“No soiled cloth can signal enough virtue to appease a holy God. No fig leaves can cover this nakedness.” —@ajkocman
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Christ, the great physician and all-wise king, inhaled a toxic gulp of his people’s sin, guilt, shame, and death on the cross. Stripped naked himself, he hung on hateful display while corrupt law enforcement gambled over his priestly undergarments. Yet in the process, he adorned us with his own robes of righteousness (Is. 61:10). “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). He decks out his people in white like a pure, virgin bride (Is. 51:2, Rev. 21:2). He purifies us down to the deepest, guilt-ridden part of the conscience—“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you” (Ez. 36:25). He beckons us wash in his healing, convalescent blood. “Blessed are those who wash their robes” (Rev. 22:14).
One last aside: all this talk of blood sacrifice, purity, and atonement tends to fall on secular ears as the troglodyte ramblings of a divine child abuser. But our nation’s tsunamic surge in tyrannical dictates, juxtaposed against the real injustices flooding our streets, reveals an inescapable principle at play. It is not a matter of whether we will have purity laws, but which purity laws we will enact. Either we will have the fear-ridden edicts of unelected bureaucrats, coupled with a good bit of hypocritical comedic irony, or we will seek to apply the law of Christ. The issue of biblical law is never far downstream from our present controversies.
And on this point, we must be bold in announcing that only God’s law has provision for atonement: faith in the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. Man’s law offers no such provision—only heavy burdens, hard to bear (Matt. 23:4).
By all means, believe credible scientific data and take whatever precautions you agree to be necessary between yourself, your family, and your God. But the perfect hindsight of eternity will show that only the imputed righteousness of Christ alone can suffice as a covering for a people as guilty as we. And his righteousness is the only virtue worth signaling.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:15:47 GMT -5
Is There a ‘Right Side’ of History?
This article is cross-posted on Founders Ministries.
The rate at which new language and orthodoxies are accepted into the public consciousness is dizzying. Our language has the power to redirect public discourse, channel new pathways of thought, and supply oxygen to movements otherwise unable to gain momentum. Just a few years ago, no one would have guessed our cultural lexicon would now include such terms as “social distancing” or “wokeness.”
But these are the obvious examples. A less noticeable turn of phrase becoming more common in public conversation concerns the need to be on “the right side of history.” Google Trends indeed appears to confirm a general uptick in the idiom’s prevalence over the last several years. Today, the expression “the right side of history,” innocuous enough on its face, belongs to a family of progressive talking points deployed in identity politicking. It is an a priori assertion of the moral uprightness of those causes alleged to help the oppressed.
Invoking the final analysis of history has the convenient effect of lumping together one’s opponent’s viewpoint in with a variety of heresies, literal and figurative, and taking the melodramatic moral high ground. To advocate against the sexual revolution, for instance, or to even be accused of racism in the face of manifest racial injustice all around us, is to join the ranks of Nazis and flat-earthers on the wrong side of history. By contrast, the one who falls on history’s good side can immediately enjoy being counted on the side of the angels.
If we were to conduct an autopsy on the so-called culture wars of the last several decades, it is clear that this tactic has much to do with why evangelicals lost on homosexual marriage and sexuality. The revolution could not have made its case without piggybacking on the moral capital of the civil rights movement originally pioneered by racial minorities suffering true marginalization. And by the time evangelicals realized they had been played, the proverbial horse had left the barn.
Presuppositional Jujitsu
We must not be taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit (Colossians 2:8) and must instead take every argument captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Rather than ignore the enemy’s stratagem, we ought to anticipate it, harness it, and redirect it—engaging in presuppositional jujitsu, if you will.
The next time someone challenges your biblical convictions on law, morality, society, or salvation as repressive or troglodytic, consider three presuppositions that underlie the colloquialism “the right side of history”:
1. Objective morality. If there is a “right” side of history, there is a wrong side as well. But who determines this standard? Who stands as a judge over history? Who defines what is good and evil?
2. Linear time. If history is cyclical, as Eastern religions assert, or if it is the result of random natural forces, as secularism holds, there is no sense in speaking of “sides.” To speak of history having right and wrong sides implies that history has an author, an arc, and an eschaton. History is progressive; it is going somewhere.
3. Final judgment. Whether one falls on “right” or “wrong” side of history must be knowable, or the statement in question would have no meaning. History, then, apparently culminates in a final determination in which its author somehow asserts his divine prerogative and separates the righteous from the wicked.
Any argument that contains a claim about history’s judgment cannot grow except in the soil of capital borrowed from a Christian worldview. If any of these abve presuppositions prove false, claims like, “You must affirm the legitimacy and goodness of LGBTQ lifestyles or you are on the wrong side of history” lose their force. (Think how empty such a statement would seem in the context of traditional Buddhism, for instance—where the universe is annihilated and recreates itself every several billion years!)
But it is not enough to internally critique the worldview of the unbeliever; we must interject the revealed truth of God, or else our apologetic task is incomplete.
How to Be on the Right Side of History
Scripture confirms the three presuppositions above. God stands ageless from everlasting to everlasting (Psalm 90:2), but he created the universe in what can only described as a fixed point in time: “In the beginning” (Genesis 1:1). In creation, he stamped his objective moral law upon the cosmos and its sentient inhabitants as the extension of his essential character of goodness and holiness (Romans 1:18-21). And the universe as we know it will not last forever in its current state; heaven and earth will “pass away” (Matthew 24:35), and there is an “end” (1 Corinthians 15:24). The upright and evil alike will each receive their due, consigned to either eternal punishment or reward; perfect justice will reign, a new creation will rise from out of the old, and God will be all in all.
Unlike the counterfeit eschatologies that fuel today’s social movements, drawing from Hegel and Marx, in the biblical framework, the perfect state does not appear at the apex of aeons of human striving and bloodshed for a synthetic social ideal. Rather, the perfect state, the kingdom of God, is introduced from entirely outside the natural order. Only God usher in his kingdom (Matthew 6:10), because the corruption of sin renders mankind incapable of attaining to it. Jesus sums it up in this way:
“Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.” (Matthew 13:40-43, ESV)
With this as our foundation, it is entirely reasonable to want to be on the right side of history. We ought to yearn to be on the side of God and of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to stand on the last day. This is at root what it means to fear the Lord.
But in Scripture’s story arc, God does not invade our fallen realm with his sin-conquering kingdom all at once. The perfect, future age does not plop down onto our fallen timeline as a single cataclysm as the Jews in Christ’s day falsely anticipated. As one pastor has put it, nowhere do we read, “Behold, the kingdom of heaven cometh like the 82nd Airborne.” The good news of Christianity is that the final ending has already slipped into history midway through to bring relief for those indeed seeking to be on its right side. This is the mystery of the kingdom to which the majority of Christ’s parables refer (cf. Matthew 13:1ff).
Like the Israelite spies sent into Jericho to save Rahab before the invasion was ever mounted, God chose to intervene on our planet by slipping in unnoticed before bringing his final wrath to bear. The kingdom of God began its graduated, two-stage arrival into history in the man Jesus Christ.
By obeying the law of God and offering himself as the final prophet, priest, and atoning sacrifice, Jesus brought the old spiritual order to a convulsive close.
By enduring crucifixion on behalf of sinners, Jesus brought the final judgment into the present and exhausted its power over his people.
By rising from the dead, Jesus rendered the down payment on the final resurrection.
By establishing his church as a gathering of believers from all nations and tongues, Jesus offers a foretaste of the final, eschatological ingathering of the righteous.
And by presently ruling and gradually putting every spiritual and physical opponent under his feet, Jesus ever hastens the last day, our blessed hope.
In Jesus, the “end” of the world has already begun. Godless ideologies, worldly social movements, and political fads will come and go. Oppressive governments, prejudiced peoples, and unjust laws will crumble under the judgment of God and the gospel-motivated action of his people. Nations and societies sprout and fade like leaves. But it is those who know Christ who are decisively on the right side of history.
History’s author and judge has written himself into the story midway through. We do not need to wait until the end to know where we stand; he has already given us his terms of peace. If we bow the knee to him and him alone, the blood of his Son is at the ready to purge us of all our guilt, personal and corporate, present and historic.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:17:56 GMT -5
The Cost of ‘Kingdom’ Talk
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Author’s note: this article is cross-posted on Founders.org.
Everybody wants the rights to the term “kingdom.”
The word, as an adjective in Christian parlance, roughly translates, “Any vaguely spiritual activity or notion.” Clocking a few hours at a soup kitchen isn’t just volunteerism, it’s “kingdom work.” My menial life can be transcended and replaced with the ideal of “kingdom living.” And, if my coffee beans are fair trade and the cup is manufactured from least 20% post-consumer material, I’m sipping a kingdom latte right now.
The meaningless expansion of the term to encompass anything remotely altruistic or religious betrays our ignorance of its true definition. First, there is a sense in which God’s sovereign governance of the cosmos is his kingdom. But the second sense of the word is the special realm of God’s salvation and rule—his eschatological kingdom. This kingdom dawned when Christ came and accomplished redemption for his people, and it will reach its consummation upon his triumphant return.
When Jesus first arrived on the scene, he proclaimed the imminent arrival of his kingship: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15, emphasis added). The old covenant edifice was about to be replaced with the dominion of the Messiah. The Son of Man was about to receive royal authority from the Father (Daniel 7:14, Psalm 110:1).
This kingdom realm isn’t geopolitical or institutional; it is the unseen (given that it dwells in human hearts) yet very concrete (given that it manifests in tangible, cultural fruit) sphere where King Jesus is recognized as Lord. It is where God rules. It centers on the King.
This sits well with many Christians. We’re rather fond of a theoretical Jesus being theoretically Lord. But the biblical Jesus is the benevolent dictator of the universe. And as soon as we rip the kingdom out of the hypothetical realm, as the kids would say, things get real. Jesus’ claim to total dominion right now—“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:19)—includes our secular safe spaces.
Many of us have come to like the language of kingdom. Kingdom rhetoric preaches good. It sells. The problem is in nailing down what exactly such a kingdom looks like, or which sub-brand of evangelicalism gets to decide.
Check Your Presuppositions at the Door
“The kingdom of God” is not a blank canvas on which to paint our personal political and social ideals. Since Jesus is really ruling from heaven by divine law (Isaiah 42:4), then employing any kind of kingdom language necessarily involves a trade-off at a worldview level.
We are guilty of trying to have it both ways. We leave shore in the name of “engaging culture” while allowing the prevailing winds of secular, postmodern, intersectional, progressive theory to guide the sails of our worldview. The same can be said for a secular, libertarian conservatism which idolizes the depraved individual and conserves nothing. We must recognize, then, that modern intersectional thinking isn’t a simple distillation of a biblical justice, nor does the biblical imperative to love the sojourner map directly onto a policy of borderless nations. Loose thematic overlap—such as a shared concern for the poor—doesn’t make worldly philosophies interchangeable with a robustly biblical kingdom theology. Choose you this day whom you will serve. Just because the kingdom of God is in the inaugural phase doesn’t mean you’ll ever see Jesus stumping for the re-election of Belial.
There are two reasons this choice between a Christian world-and-life view and worldly philosophy is so stark. The first reason is that all governments are theocracies. There is always a god of the system—be it the State or the People. The Bible settles this issue rather quickly. Either Caesar is Lord or Jesus is. Either a Hegelian dialectic governs humanity or a Van Tilian antithesis does. You cannot systematically deify capital, oppression, autonomy, or Big Brother and expect covenant blessings from Yahweh.
The second reason is that all social theories are eschatological. Neither hollowed-out secular conservatism, libertarianism, progressivism, anarchism, nor socialism offer a buffet of public policy ideas disembodied from a philosophy of history. They all have their own views of history and thus either see history from God’s perspective or don’t. Communism and democratic socialism are notoriously utopian. Communism is more apocalyptic, while democratic socialism is more progressive, but they both pinpoint the consummation of history at the triumph of the god of the state. Conservative, flag-waving civil religion is also utopian in its own way, in that its goal is to return to the good ol’ days when traditional valued supposedly reigned. The world’s philosophies may have varying degrees of self-awareness of their eschatological presuppositions, but never did a group of men preface their party platform, “Here are just a few practical tips for society, but we have no opinion on how this all turns out.”
The thing about views of history is that they are also falsifiable. It’s a lot easier, for instance, to be an out-and-proud communist in 1848 than in 2018, 100 million dead later. (Assuming your educational system hasn’t all but rewritten the past.) The world’s social theorists must hide their eschatological outlook because then they must deal with those nagging historical facts. And if we’re honest with ourselves, the historical record for the last two millennia is one of the miraculous progress and imperfect transformation wrought by the scandalous message of a crucified Christ. Relative to 2,000 years ago, the gospel has made astonishing progress, and that’s no accident; it’s the direct accomplishment of Christ who promised to be empower and indwell his church even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20) and who in his zeal has sworn to spread his dominion (Isaiah 9:7). The offensive message of a flayed-and-risen Christ is the pebble in the shoe of the pagan worldview.
We Christians, of course, have legitimate differences over our own eschatology. Interpretations vary, but the biblical headline over history is that every knee will bow. And if that is where history is going—fast or slow—then to adopt a kingdom-oriented world-and-life ethic means giving up the competing historical philosophies of pagan theory. Jesus wins.
Necessary Qualifications
I recently had coffee with a student at an ostensibly Christian college tell me that he had a professor discourage him from pursuing cross-cultural missions because missions is an oppressive vestige of European colonialism. Similar claims have erupted in the wake of evangelist John Chau’s death on the island of North Sentinel. This begs the question: is all this talk of Jesus’ kingdom just warmed-over neocolonialism?
To the contrary, the kingdom of Christ is not to be conflated with any set of national borders or geopolitical powers. In previous generations, God has been pleased to use the West as a sort of cradle for Christianity, but he is free to focus his blessings elsewhere, and in many ways, he already has—to the two-thirds world, perhaps in part as a judgement against us. The Great Commission has nothing to do with Western imperialism, and we should be rightly suspicious of a Constantinian coupling of church and state. But this is different from separation of the state from God. The Lord Jesus is far from indifferent about the goings-on down here.
Nor am I saying that all the common-grace blessings of Western society will somehow magically mature into saving-grace blessings like revival, conversion, and lasting spiritual fruit. The civilizing project doesn’t evolve into the New Jerusalem. In fact, prosperity and wealth tend to have an adverse effect on the church’s vitality. Without breath, dead bones are dead bones—even if all the ligaments and sinews are reattached. But the presence of saving grace in a people group—that is, a faithful, evangelizing church—does tend to promote the sort of common grace blessings we enjoy in the West and falsely attribute to the ingenious of the Renaissance. In Jesus’ kingdom, blessings generally tend to follow obedience.
Power, Not Talk
The sum of the matter is this: of the making of recycled paper goods there is no end, but when it comes to the rhetoric of the kingdom of God, our talk comes at a price. We cannot parrot the current political zeitgeist, slap on the “kingdom” label, and call it a day. We must be willing to pay the price of our old worldviews to use kingdom talk. If we’re playing for team Jesus, we have to use his playbook.
After all, the kingdom of God does not consist in talk, but in power (1 Corinthians 4:20).
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:19:43 GMT -5
Weeping Without Joining the Dirge
This article is cross-posted on Founders Ministries.
In a famed passage of Scripture, the author of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is “a time to keep silence” (Ecc. 3:7). As our nation reels from the effects of the pandemic, protests, riots, and unjust killings, many Christian leaders have recognized the importance of listening compassionately. We are to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). When Job’s friends visited him in his grief, they sat silent for a full week.
But in the same breath, Solomon also reminds us that there is a time to speak (v. 7, again). What of the present time in which we live? Should the church stay silent or speak? And what should we say?
Consider the example of our Lord. The same Jesus, who by his Spirit inspired the instruction in Romans 12 to weep with fellow believers who weep, also evoked such public ire from the elite of his day that he lamented: “But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn’” (Matt. 11:16-17, ESV).
If we imitate Christ’s example, neither will we always be able to march with the world’s tune. When we fast, they’ll say we have a demon like John the Baptist; when we feast, they’ll call us gluttons (vv. 18-19). Rather than matching the culture’s dirges in timbre and pitch, we are instead to tune our instruments to our Lord’s will. The result will be that we, like wisdom, will be justified by our fruits (v. 20).
In the present hour, sympathy is not enough. We cannot wait for permission to preach the gospel. We must exercise our Lord’s principled contrarianism. In the present hour, sympathy is not enough, because our nation needs a full dose of Jesus, pronto.
The Situation
These deep, tectonic society rumblings have formed a tsunami of moral capital in favor of godless ideologies, movements, and cultural forces suddenly now emboldened in their crusade against the church of Jesus Christ, their scapegoat for society’s sins. So, we find ourselves in an era in which it is expedient to condemn racial inequality, police brutality, and so forth—vitally important issues—while the high places of anarchic organizing, critical theory, and identity politics remain standing.
Because there is both a time to be silent and a time to speak, for the Christian, there is no tension between showing compassion and condemning sin in all its hideous manifestations.
Believers have the privilege of being painfully honest about our own warts. Our position as justified sinners before God allows us to be radically candid about tour failures on issues of ethnicity, economics, government, partiality, and justice. Christians are free to admit that we really are far worse than the pundits say. We are the ones, after all, with the doctrine of total depravity.
Yet we are embraced by a powerful Savior, and to him alone we bow. There is no condemnation in Christ (Rom. 8:1). “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (vv. 33-34). The gospel solves the problems of guilt and shame that keep society splintered. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword, viruses, racism, riots, autonomous zones—none of these can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (vv. 35-39).
In light of this, to selectively address certain societal concerns with biblical law while refusing to discuss other equally weighty matters of the law is to use unequal scales, which displeases the Lord (Prov. 20:23). We are not permitted to relax any piece of the moral law (Matt. 5:19). Hate is as the sin of murder (1 John 3:15), legal biases towards the upper class or lower class are equally unjust (Lev. 19:15), and those who live in lawlessness disinherit themselves from the kingdom of God (Gal. 5:19-20). What to do?
The Solution
If all we can offer to a hurting world is solemnity and sympathy, we are stopping short of our mission. As the effects of the culture’s sins come violently back down upon it, we act as though we have been commissioned to go and preach the silent gospel of the stiff upper lip. And if this is the sort of so-called compassion we show, and nothing else, we will be duped.
The time to go introspective and navel-gaze about our lack of evangelistic compassion for the men of Sodom is not when they’re beating down the door looking for men to “know” (cf. Gen. 19:5). The time to shut our windows and pray privately is not when Darius has banned prayer (cf. Dan. 6:10).
Principled, Christian contrarianism is dangerous to the principalities and powers. To be free from condemnation produces a band of merry warriors feasting when the world is self-flagellating, fasting when the world is gorging itself, singing psalms when the world is silent, and gathering when the world is scattered. It is this kind of church that swallowed the Roman religion three centuries after Christ, ministered at great cost amid the Black Death, and accomplished the end of the global slave trade. These victories were not achieved through a wordless gospel of empathy but through proclaiming the lordship of the crucified and risen Christ. That is how yeast leavens the lump.
Plunging the Needle
It has never been a more opportune time to preach Christ as the solution to the effects sin now pervading society. We have a golden opportunity to cut through the violent extremes and condemn racism and lawlessness simultaneously with biblical clarity.
But we will forfeit this opportunity if, in our necessary effort to be “kind to everyone” (2 Tim. 2:24), we allow ourselves to be played. “Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land nor for the dunghill, but men throw it out.” (Luke 14:34-35a, NKJV).
Up until now, we have not been wielding the two-edged sword of the Spirit, law and gospel, to contend against the powers facing us. Our action has looked the same as the secular activism around us as we seek conversations with dialogue partners rather than proclaiming the word of life. We are peddling all the same grievances as the pagans, baptizing their hashtags as our own, wooing them with our cloying sweetness of tongue.
About a month ago, Democrat legal expert Alan Dershowitz argued that if someone refused to receive a COVID vaccine, “the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.” Now, a new crisis is facing us. We cannot bury the “no condemnation” lead. But we must grab the nation kicking and screaming, strap it down, and sink a syringe teeming with live and active gospel cultures into its bulging veins. There is no other way.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:21:37 GMT -5
Why ‘No Matter Who Wins, Jesus is Lord’ Isn’t Just a Cliché
Earlier this week, I was on a walk in my neighborhood with my three children when I happened across our Roman Catholic friends. After briefly bantering about politics and the chaos of the election, I made a comment to this effect: “Whatever the outcome is, at least Jesus is still Lord.” The wife responded, “You know, I’ve been seeing my friends post that more on social media lately.”
I was grateful to be reminded that this seed of gospel truth is indeed spreading right now, even amid cultural upheaval in the US. Yet I couldn’t help but immediately think: Surely that statement must sound trite to an unbeliever or a casual, nominal Christian. To many of our neighbors, after all, doesn’t “Jesus is Lord” sound as clichéd as “God loves you” or “everything happens for a reason”—vestiges of a forgotten Christian vernacular?
It’s true that Christians often throw around such catchphrases in a hackneyed manner revealing our pie-in-the-sky pietism. Sometimes, tossing out a pithy, spiritual-sounding aphorism is a way for a professing Christian to justify disengagement. “Well, God is in control,” we might blithely sigh while neglecting our duty. The statement is true, but the person saying it is false.
Yet “Jesus is still Lord” is anything but trite. And we ought not to be afraid of repeating it for fear of appearing passé. There are three reasons why.
1. “Jesus is Lord” means that the Lord Jesus Christ governs the affairs of men in history.
If for us “Jesus is Lord” has become a stale mantra, perhaps it is because we take it to mean, that Jesus is Lord out there somewhere—in heaven, in the spiritual dimension of life, in the church, or in my heart. And Jesus certainly is master over all these places. But his dominion spans vastly beyond the realm of one’s interior religious life.
Jesus Christ is a real man, God in human flesh, who lived perfectly, died sacrificially for sinners, and rose physically from the dead. Upon completion of this redemptive work, Jesus physically ascended into heaven, where he sat down in a place of authority over the entire created cosmos. Because he is the eternal Son of God, Jesus always had divine authority, even before his incarnation. Yet a unique, kingly authority was also conferred upon him by God the Father in light of his work on earth in his death and resurrection.
This is why before Jesus ascended, he announced, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). And as the biblical story progresses, we see that this authority is not merely ethereal or religious. A few years later, when King Herod receives worship from his subjects and refuses to acknowledge God, the Lord Jesus Christ strikes him dead (Acts 12:20-23).
King Jesus directs the flow of history. “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). He has fixed the borders of nations and charted their rise and fall (Acts 17:26). The appellation “ruler of kings on earth” is applied to Jesus now (Revelation 1:5). Jesus’ authority is not exclusively future, hypothetical, or bound up within the walls of the church. It touches down into our daily reality and extends to every world event.
2. “Jesus is Lord” means that the Lord Jesus Christ is the judge of all nations and men.
We despair when injustice prevails in a society. Evil is called good and good is called evil (Isaiah 5:20). From the chaos of the streets to corruption in the upper echelons of a nation’s leadership, we long for true, final justice. Yet any human efforts to conjure up this sort of ultimate, cosmic accountability fall woefully short and inevitably spur further injustice.
To confess “Jesus is Lord” is to recognize that every nation, governing body, ruler, citizen, and subject will personally face the Judge of the universe, and only justice will be done. “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13).
The Apostle Paul proclaimed to the Greek pagans of his day that God “commands” all the non-Christian peoples of the world to repent “because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31). Every being in heaven, on earth, and in hell will recognize Jesus’ authority (Philippians 2:10-11). Every sin and misdeed will be judged justly—whether in the flame of eternal torment, or retroactively in the cross of Crist. No wrong will not be righted.
This should cause the unrepentant unbeliever great fear. Knowing what a fearsome thing it is to face the risen Lord Christ and to receive perfect justice, we must throw ourselves at his feet for mercy. Even kings must bend the knee to be saved (Psalm 2:10-12). Yet for those who know Christ and cling to his atoning death, we have peace with God. We are commanded to spread the good news of forgiveness with others (Luke 24:47). And yet, when the evil prevail, we may take comfort that they will stand before the bar of the Son of God as he holds his heavenly court.
3. “Jesus is Lord” means that the Lord Jesus Christ is subduing this fallen world and spreading a better kingdom.
Too often Christians have neglected their inheritance. Like Esau who forfeited his birthright, we relinquish the crown rights of Christ and long for heavenly escape, wrongly thinking Christ will cede this present world in its entirety to the powers of darkness replace it with an entirely new world after the church’s inevitable defeat. But this is not a biblical picture of history.
Although biblically-informed believers often disagree with regard to the precise nature and timing of Christ’s reign and return, the univocal teaching of Scripture is that Jesus wins. Christ will put all his enemies under his feet (Psalm 110:1; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:25). One day, the whole world—this world—will be saturated with the glory of God (Habakkuk 2:14). All the nations will be saved (Isaiah 2:2-4; cf. Revelation 5:9, 7:9). Whatever these optimistic prophecies mean, they at least mean the completion of the Great Commission. The gospel will continue to spread, save, and Christ will build his church (Matthew 16:18). The gospel will bear fruit in the world all the way leading up to the final resurrection and the consummation of the new creation described in the New Testament, in which we hope. This truth is to be heralded regardless of the precise eschatological scheme to which one subscribes.
What’s more, the final victory of Christ has implications for the present. All things are already ours in Christ (1 Corinthians 3:21)—including our very nation. We will judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3); surely we can also engage boldly, winsomely, and sometimes offensively in politics. There is indeed a future, “not yet” element of Jesus’ kingdom. But there is also a present, “already” element. Believers may suffer and even die, but the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The cross precedes the crown. Death precedes resurrection.
This blessed hope allows the Christian to live in spiritual warfare while enjoying unshakable peace. It is only in view of this inevitable victory of the kingdom of God that we can “live quietly… mind your own affairs, and… work with your hands… so that you may walk properly before outsiders, being dependent on no one” (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). Christians are called to engage culture and resist the works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11), yet because of the better kingdom to which we belong, we are still permitted to savor God’s blessings amid the temporal judgments befalling us—to feast even while fighting. We may plant, marry, eat, and seek our neighbors’ welfare even while in exile (Jeremiah 29:4-14). Belonging to Christ, we may fight spiritual chaos and still live a normal life free from condemnation (Romans 8:1). Rejoice!
Conclusion
Regardless of the final legal decisions in the US presidential race, Jesus is ruling our nation—whether in mercy or in judgment. Let us pray that it be the former. And if it be the latter, we must pray that the Lord’s chastisement of the US would result in widespread repentance. No amount of media interference, litigation, or recounting can disturb the reign of Christ.
So, the next time you find yourself in one of those conversations about the crazed state of our world, don’t be afraid to remind your neighbor that Jesus is Lord. No one can declare that Jesus is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit, after all (1 Corinthians 12:3). There is no King but Christ. Surely this confession is no cliché.
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2024 20:22:58 GMT -5
Giants in the Land, Yeah-Buts in the Camp
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Jesus is Lord. So, the collective vocation of the church for the last 2,000 years has been, essentially, victoriously waging a war against any idea that would attempt to usurp Christ’s throne (2 Cor. 10:5). We do this not with swords or AR-15s, but with the subversive leaven of a gospel that asserts Christ—not Caesar or self—as Lord.
Hence, one can draw a fairly straight line from the calling of the Israelites to take dominion of the promised land to our calling to disciple the nations (cf. Matt. 28:19). That’s not to say that the church is a geopolitical entity, nor our true home is anywhere other than the consummated new heavens and earth (Heb. 13:14). But we, like the old covenant people of God, are called to wander out into the midst of an unbelieving world, preaching and suffering to bring all those around us into a realization of their true King and ours. Through the church, Jesus is putting all his enemies—sinners like us—under his feet (1 Cor. 15:25; cf. Ps. 110:1).
In the midst of our mission, we can easily fall prey to a disease known in our household as the “yeah-buts.” (As in: “Hey son, can you…?” “Yeah, but….”) Israel contracted a case of the yeah-buts in Numbers 13, when, despite God’s promise to give them the land (Gen. 12:7), they excused themselves from the conquest, intimidated by the beefy, pagan Canaanites and Amorites. A 40-year timeout followed.
We look back and scoff at these stiff-necked former slaves. Surely, we reason, had we passed through the Red Sea, drank water from a rock, and eaten the bread of angels, we would have had faith to march on Canaan, spears a’ blazin’. But our yeah-buts manifest subtler symptoms than are seen in our spiritual forbearers.
“We can’t expect the government to outlaw abortion; after all, the kingdom hasn’t fully arrived yet.”
“Why would we expect the nation to acknowledge a biblical definition of marriage? We’re just one religious voice of many.”
“We shouldn’t expect our leaders to explicitly acknowledge the lordship of Jesus; after all, that would be a theocracy, and we don’t want those nasty things.”
Don’t misread this. Nominalism and formalism don’t advance the kingdom of God. Godly laws and cultures—which are little more than the application of love (Rom. 13:10)—only flow from gospel hearts. Mere laws don’t heal lands (2 Chron. 7:14).
I’m talking more about the popular attitude among evangelicals that is skeptical that the gospel can produce such fruits in society at any scale. Largely to blame are the faulty eschatologies which require a return of Christ wherein he is greeted by a hellhole earth and a discouraged band of Christians who botched the Great Commission. The problem is that you hit whatever you aim at. Aim low, achieve little for the kingdom.
We are in need, thus, to draw encouragement from Joshua and Caleb’s report:
The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them (Num. 14:7-9).
First, the land is a good land. The earth is the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1). The nations are a drop in the bucket (Isa. 40:15). Jesus is the ruler of the world’s kings (Rev. 1:5), and their hearts are streams of water in his hand (Prov. 21:13). We are called to disciple the unreached peoples of the world and the well-reached, wayward U.S. And since Jesus is present with us through it (Matt. 28:20), it’s not impossible.
Second, the Lord delights in us. Israel received the land in spite of themselves (cf. Deut. 9:4-6), and every blessing we have in Christ is an unconditional gift of grace, too. We ought not to measure the potential success of our mission by our merits. It is true the obstinate disobedience will cost us our cultural impact. The beauty of the gospel is that our sins, repented of and atoned for, don’t disqualify us from living in and spreading the kingdom.
Third, the Lord is with us. The implication is: with us, not them. Their protection is removed from them. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18). God commands all to repent (Acts 17:30-31) and kiss the Son (Ps. 2:12). There may be intimidating, hulking giants in the land—filling the cultural landscape with abortuaries dedicated to Molech—but since God is with his church and decidedly not with the unrighteous, we will win. Giants in the land? Please—we have Yahweh. We can bear our crosses gladly and preach boldly knowing the kingdom of God wins in history.
Will we achieve utopia this side of eternity? No. That awaits Christ’s return. But a pessimistic eschatology is no excuse for lazy mission. Let’s dispose of our yeah-but theologies of truncated cultural engagement and believe that here and now, until Christ comes again, “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2024 9:51:43 GMT -5
An article from founders ministry
3 Reasons Biblical Elder Qualifications Matter in Missions
Alex Kocman
3 Reasons Biblical Elder Qualifications Matter in Missions
One way to judge the vitality of a culture is by the state of its men.
Where its men are weak, sin-addicted, and passive, the society will decline. Why? Because as men lead households, households form communities, and communities shape cultures.
Likewise, the health of the church depends upon its leaders—the qualified men God has called to preach to and oversee it.
The Apostle Paul knew this. So, he instructed Timothy to appoint elders in the church who met high standards of character. After leaving Timothy in Macedonia to guard the church and its elders (1 Timothy 1:3), Paul explains who is qualified to shepherd the church:
Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap. (1 Timothy 3:1-7)
Paul gives substantially identical instructions to Titus:
This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you— if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. (Titus 1:5-9)
This isn’t just a lesson for local churches but for the missionary enterprise. Why?
QUALIFIED SENDERS
First, it tells us something about who sends. Is your church shepherded by godly, competent men who can teach sound doctrine and hold others accountable? Without such leaders, a church cannot send missionaries.
To modify a phrase used by others, a church’s sending capacity can’t exceed its shepherding capacity. The spiritual needs of the congregation—for God’s word, for loving guidance, for discipleship—must be met before pastors can aspire to send out others.
QUALIFIED GOERS
Second, our passage says something about who goes. Men and women are both critical to the task of missions. The New Testament is replete with examples of women who served sacrificially in the early church. But only men may pastor and lead God’s people (see 1 Timothy 2:12, 3:2-5). Since our aim is to plant churches, we cannot obey the Great Commission without sending out qualified, called men as pastor-elders.
Across the evangelical world, the number of women in missions far surpasses the number of men. Many of the workers we train and send are single women. Let’s praise God for the many mighty ways he uses these faithful saints. Because we value teamwork, we confess there is a place for men and women on the field, married and single, parent and childless. And yet, without discounting women’s important work, we can also ask: where are the men? Have our churches failed to proactively train and send the kind of men described by Paul?
In our zeal to reach the nations, we are prone to act as though the only qualification for missionary service is a willing heart. This is not what the New Testament teaches. If nothing else, Paul’s statements about who is qualified for ministry exhort us to raise the bar with regard to our standard for whom we send out to the world.
In our zeal to reach the nations, we are prone to act as though the only qualification for missionary service is a willing heart. This is not what the New Testament teaches.
THE BENEFICIARIES
Finally, our text speaks to who benefitsfrom gospel ministry. When men, as household heads, come to faith in Christ, so can the whole family. Studies show that when father go to church with the family, the children are far more likely to continue in the faith.
As families are transformed, so are communities—and cultures. When this happens, everyone in a nation benefits—especially women, children, and the marginalized in society. That is not to say that missions results in sinless utopias. But historically, where the Christian faith has prevailed, unjust laws have been repealed, hospitals erected, the uneducated taught, the poor lifted up.
So, where are the men?
Too many men compete for platforms and fame here at home while countless churches worldwide desperately have no pastors. Too few men are willing to count the cost of missionary life, leaving single women to shoulder the load alone.
Pray for godly elders in our churches to send qualified men to the field where few are willing to go. And pray for those men to lead other men to Christ, such that the landscapes of those mission fields change. Perhaps we have not because we ask not.
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