Richard Weaver first made a name for himself when he published his seminal work Ideas Have Consequences, a brief book whose ideas are still bringing forth consequences. He was to the secular academic world something of a Francis Schaeffer, introducing thousands to the concept of worldview, arguing that what we think about little things, more often than not, is determined by what we think about big things. Weaver demonstrated how a modernist worldview wasn’t something academia simply studied, but was instead something that shaped academia. Indeed, modernism is academia’s mother. You wouldn’t have the former did you not first have the latter. Schaeffer named many of the strongholds we are called to tear down, the sundry ism’s that we in the evangelical world carefully study, the same ones we once studiously ignored.
While I don’t deny the importance of the study of worldviews, indeed, I’ve written my own book, Tearing Down Strongholds, looking at ism’s, I’m afraid there just might be something modernist about our modern fascination with ism’s, whether we’re fighting or promoting them. The Bible does argue that we fight against every lofty thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, but on the other hand, it spends far more time worrying about sins on a grand scale. The children of Israel, for instance, are never sent a prophet who thunders against them because they have embraced behaviorism. He never destroys a city with fire and brimstone because the citizens there believed in utilitarianism. No, the problem, doesn’t have much academic allure. The problem was always idolatry. Nations rise and fall, cultures ebb and flow, based on this simple question- do they worship the true and living God? Worldviews may shape how we see the world, but theology shapes our worldviews.
Since the fall of Adam, wherever we were, there we would find the seed of our own destruction. But such doesn’t mean we can’t look for particular forces that toppled us in a particular direction. Some, for instance, see the practice of chattel slavery as the great moment of national apostasy. Others look to the Scopes Monkey trial as a watershed moment when we turned our backs on the God who had so blessed us. Still others think it all went wrong when prayer was removed from the state’s schools. A few might argue that it was January, 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.
I’d like to posit a different theory. The handwriting was already on the wall, we had already been tried in the balance and found wanting, when our New England forbears jettisoned not just the rugged Calvinism that had sustained them in times of hardship, but when they began to embrace Unitarianism. Here the problem isn’t simply the playing fast and loose with the Bible. The problem wasn’t merely the Pelagian revival, the notion that culturally speaking, we could create the New Man and usher in paradise on earth. The problem wasn’t the smug pride that drove the rejection not only of the Bible, but of the wisdom of our fathers in church history. The problem was this, we stopped worshipping the true and living God. The evil of Unitarianism is that it isn’t trinitarianism.
So now what do we do? We do not simply change our worldview. We do not simply elect better politicians. We do not merely refute Darwin, or B.F. Skinner, or Derrida. All of this is lopping the tops off of dandelions. No. There is but one way for us as individuals, as families, as churches, as a culture, to become once more pleasing in God’s sight. We must worship God in spirit and in truth, which means we worship Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We repent for our idolatry, and we turn away from it.
The historians will argue for centuries over what brought about the downfall of this once great land. Dissertations will be written, and tenures will be denied. Great schools of thought will do battle with competing schools. Arguments as elaborate and as rickety as the tower of Babel will rise and fall, like rising and falling empires. But there is but one thing that exalts a nation, one way for a nation to enjoy blessing from the true and living God, and that is that we should worship Him and Him alone. We will only enjoy His blessing when we pray, “And may the blessing of God Almighty- Father, Son and Holy Spirit, abide with you now and always.” So let it be done, for the sake of our fathers, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our nation, and for the glory of our Triune God.
Tonight we continue our look at the monumental, towering book of Romans. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
Yes, and no. It is a common enough analogy supporting a common enough fallacy, the idea that all religions are simply different paths that meet at the top, finding God. If it’s a fallacy, and it is, then in what sense is it true? It is true that everyone, in the end, meets the true and living God. There is no path that leads, ultimately, away from Him. The question isn’t whether all men will meet Him. The question is, when we meet Him, will we find His grace and love or His just wrath? All those who climb the mountain will find the former. All those who seem to think that their efforts can bring themselves to paradise are fruitless, futile and foolish. Every effort made by every man to secure salvation is simply something else we need to be saved from, to repent of.
When I hear this notion, “All religions are different paths to the same god” my mind immediately translates it into, “I know nothing about religion.” It is true enough that almost every religion is some variation of self-salvation, some different path up the mountain. The Christian faith, however, doesn’t meet that definition, doesn’t follow that path. The Christian faith is not about how men climb up their way to God but about how God descended His way down to men. It isn’t about how we sought Him out but how He sought us out. It isn’t about what we’ve accomplished for Him but what He has accomplished for us. It isn’t about the way up the mountain but the way down.
Every other religion begins with, “Here’s how.” The Christian faith begins with “Here’s Him.” They say, “You can do this.” He says, “I have done this.” The Christian faith may be old, widely believed, grounded in a holy book like Judaism and Islam. It is not, however, the same. For the message of old, rested in by all who believe and taught in the Holy Book is that we are dead in our sins; He suffered for us; and as we rest in Him we are welcomed into the loving arms of the very Father who sent Him for us.
The path to heaven comes down. He, having been brought down, lifted up, buried and raised, carries us up with Him. Hallelujah, hallelujah!
It is not a great mystery why we call this day “Good” Friday. This is the day each year that we remember the suffering and death on the cross of our Savior. Though they surely had little understanding of what it all meant, God’s people, from the exit from Eden, looked forward to the coming of the Seed of the Woman who would, in crushing the serpent’s head, have His heel bruised. Today we remember that bruising. Sunday we remember that crushing. Though the sky turned ebony, though the earth quaked, though His agony echoed through the place of the skull, it was a good day. It was the day He secured His bride.
While we call this day good, we do so because it is the answer to our being bad. Ours should be a somber joy, for we are they who crucified the Lord of Glory. Yet it is a true joy. For the Lord of Glory saw us as the glory that was set before Him. He despised not our shame but embraced it, bound it to Himself that we might be His.
In every tragedy a question reverberates- can this be redeemed for good? Today we have our answer. There has never been a deeper tragedy than the outpouring of the Father’s wrath on His Son. Only once in all of history has a man ever received from on high a punishment that went beyond what was due. He received the punishment that wasn’t due to Him at all, but was due to us. For this He volunteered, going like a lamb to the slaughter. One time an innocent man suffered, and it was a sacrifice sufficient to pay for every guilty act of every other man. Not only can great evils be redeemed for good, but evil men can be redeemed by the one Good Man.
Jesus died for me. He paid it all. It was a good day, the day the Lord made. Let us rejoice, and be glad in it.
What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? Much in every way. On the negative side, we would do well to remember that the citizens of God’s city, like those in the city of man, are still sinners. Though we are indwelt by God’s Holy Spirit, though we have been given hearts of flesh, we remain sinners on this side of the veil, not utterly unlike those around us. Thus Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, enjoins us not to do that which still comes all too naturally to us, to fret and worry about our food or our clothing. Such things, He tells us, the heathen worry about.
On a more positive note, Jerusalem and Athens have this in common: they are ruled by the same Man. That is, Jesus is Lord of both. There is no city over which Jesus does not reign. He is Lord over all of creation. We must be zealous to make this affirmation with boldness. We must, however, do so with care.
That Jesus is Lord of Athens does not mean that all is well with Athens. We cannot safely assume the city to be safe because our Lord rules over it. Instead, remembering the antithesis, the biblical truth that the seed of the woman and the seed of the Serpent will war against one another until the kingdom comes in its fullness, the reign of Jesus over Athens means Athens is in trouble. The city belongs to Jesus, and yet it rebels against Him. His lordship is less an imprimatur over the city and more a Sword of Damocles, a constant threat of judgment.
There is a third thing these cities have in common. Not only does Jesus rule both, not only are both cities populated by sinners, but both are populated by those who bear God’s image. Though the seed of the Serpent is at war with God and His people, they still bear His imprint. We see this theme repeated several times in the Bible. God calls His children to exercise dominion over the creation. The wicked line of Cain is not lazy with respect to exercising dominion. Bearing God’s image, it goes to work, turns mud into bricks, and builds a tower to make a name for itself. That this line does not labor for God’s glory but its own is a sign of sin. That it builds at all is a sign of God’s image. The same is true with respect to worship. In Romans 1, Paul belabors both that all men everywhere worship and that outside of Gods’ active grace in our lives, we all worship creatures rather than the Creator. Because we are God’s image bearers, we worship. Because we are in rebellion, we worship falsely.
This ought to inform our understanding of how these two cities relate. We do not send out envoys of peace against the enemies of God, beating our swords into plowshares. Neither, however, do we allow our sense of antithesis to cloud our common humanity, or better still, our common bearing of God’s image. Thus, we do not determine that piety demands that we who worship the risen Lord ought to walk on our hands, because the children of darkness walk on their feet. We do not assume that the right thing is for Christians to hate their children because unbelievers love their children. Instead, we thank the Lord of all for all that we still have in common. Instead, we encourage all that is good, true, and beautiful in Athens, knowing that, in the end, it all must belong to the Lord.
The Athenian Plato was not, contra those who would forget the antithesis, a sadly uninformed but brilliant man whose well-intentioned philosophical meanderings can be richly gleaned for wisdom. He was instead, as we all were prior to the work of the Spirit of God in us, an enemy of God. His philosophical thoughts had as their end goal the denying of God. Plato was, with respect to wisdom, deaf, dumb and blind. He could not, according to the Scripture, even see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). There is wisdom, however, in that nugget that suggests “even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.” Plato did not tell us anything we did not already know when he first suggested that the three high virtues are goodness, truth, and beauty. He did, however, speak well, truthfully, and beautifully in so saying. Plato, in drawing our attention to goodness, truth, and beauty, made manifest the image of God in his own life, and in turn taught us how to better recognize that image in others. When unbelieving firefighters act heroically — when they exhibit the good — we have no reason for shame. When unbelieving scientists speak truthfully, we have no reason for shame. When unbelieving musicians create moments of beauty, we have no reason for shame. For these things neither belong in the end to Jerusalem nor to Athens. Instead, they belong to the One who is Lord of both.
Plato recognized the goodness, truth, and beauty of goodness, truth, and beauty. Jesus is goodness, truth and beauty, and every other perfection infinitely. If we would pursue goodness, truth, and beauty, we must pursue Him. We must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto us.
It has long been my contention that the rampant skepticism about all things supernatural among the Reformed crowd is driven more by modernist assumptions than it is exegesis. We’re in a bit of a pickle, wanting to be true to God’s Word, and to be respectable in the eyes of the world. We affirm inerrancy but nuance our way out of the plain meaning of Genesis 1 and 2, so we don’t end up looking like those tacky fundamentalists. We agree that Jesus cast out demons, but deny demons have any dealings with humans in our day, so we don’t look like those nutty spiritual warriors. We affirm that God hears our prayers, but deny He ever actually does anything truly amazing for us, lest we look like those big haired televangelists.
I’m not a student of Kenneth Copeland. Everything I know about his theology I learned decades ago reading The Agony of Deceit, an expose on the heretical theology of most of our television preachers put together by my friend Dr. Michael Horton. An outstanding book, by the way. I confess as well to having my own doubts when a. Copeland seems to suggest he has the power to divert hurricanes and/or b. claims to have diverted a hurricane. Skepticism and its kissing cousin cynicism are my natural habitat after all.
Which is why God is working on me, and doing something even more astounding than diverting a hurricane- sanctifying me. He reminded me that there was a profound disconnect between my faith that He commands the wind and the waves and my disdain at the notion that a man’s prayers could stop a hurricane dead in its tracks. He showed me the ugliness of my sneering scorn and His call to godliness, to faith, to believing He delights not only to hear the prayers of His children, but to answer them. Too often I not only lack the faith to move mountains but worse, lack the faith to believe others have the faith to move mountains.
This world does not belong to the scientists, the weather experts, nor to the scornful. Rather it belongs to the One who speaks, and reality happens, who not only blows the winds of hurricanes, but throws the swirling tumult of galaxies. And He has promised that He will give it to the trusting, the humble, that the meek will inherit the earth.
We ought to pray with all the innocence of children, asking our Father to quell storms, to heal bodies ravaged by illness, to make it snow in August, to end every war and to fill every hungry belly. And let us do so with no shame, no blushing, no crossed fingers to prove to the cool kids we’re still with it. Let us rise up out of the seat of the scornful. Let us be planted by the rivers of water, our roots reaching so deep into the good soil that not even the greatest storm, should He determine such should come our way, can move us. Let us bring forth the fruit of faith. Let us ask that He will prosper whatsoever we do.
If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land (II Chron. 2: 14).
No. And yes. This well-known text is often quoted by those saddened by our nation’s cultural decline. Conservatives, both political and theological, find here comfort and hope. It doesn’t take long, however, before some more careful and precise exegete makes a salient point- this text is not a generic, proverbial truism, but a specific message to a specific people at a specific time. Said careful exegete will next point out that this nation is not this specific people and said time is not our time.
While the nation of Israel and our own nation have a great deal in common, they are not the same. Both nations were established that God’s people might be free to rightly worship Him. Both nations were founded by people motivated by a desire to please Him. Both nations, however, failed over the years to be faithful. Both nations experienced God’s judgment. That said, God actually commanded Israel to take the land. God actually made a covenant with Israel. God actually sent prophets to Israel. These United States can say none of these things. Therefore, this promise of God cannot rightly be lifted out of its context and its promises appropriated by just any nation.
That said, all of the above is just a bit too pedantic. No one, I suspect, who clings to this text, makes the mistake of equating Israel and these United States. Precious few would argue that God made a covenant with this nation as He did with Israel. Which doesn’t change the broad, proverbial, generic promise of the true and living God that those who repent will be blessed by Him. This is clearly true not just individually but corporately as well. Of course our nation, even if, in God’s economy it is of no more spiritual significance than Latvia, Indonesia or Nineveh, would receive blessing if there were widespread repentance here. If there were widespread repentance in Latvia, Indonesia or Nineveh there would be healing in those lands. Jesus is not just Lord of Israel, but of every tribe and tongue across the globe.
God promises blessings for all those who repent. To persons, to families, to churches, to communities, to states, to nations. Can institutions repent? Excellent question. I’m not sure. But the people in them certainly can, and such will always impact the institutions, for the good. Which means not only should we not be shy about owning this text and the promise therein, we ought to be eager to do so. Let us, as we see destruction all around us, repent to the living God. He will hear from heaven. He will forgive our sins and He will heal His land.
