In the last seventy years, the United States government has waged war in Korea, in Viet Nam, in Libya, in Panama, in Grenada, in the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq again. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of these wars involved, of course, a congressional declaration of war, but in each of these circumstances, military weapons have been fired against soldiers of other nations by military serving the United States. We do not have black-out curtains and rationing as they did in the last World War. We do not have an active civil defense, and young ladies wrapping bandages for the war effort as we did back then. To many of us it seems like a time of peace, but it is not.
Each of these wars, however, are fought in the context of the one, great war. No, it’s not the cold war between capitalism and communism. No, it isn’t militant Islam against American consumerism. The great war transcends these wars and finds its beginning in the garden. The serpent launched his surprise attack when he asked Eve: “Has God indeed said?” And there he secured a victory, as both Adam and Eve, and all who would be born of them, determined to embrace the serpent’s view of reality, rather than to embrace the truth. Praise to our Father He did not take this lying down. His solemn declaration of war followed, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). This war, declared by God, begins in the garden and ends only when the great garden city, the New Jerusalem, descends from on high. This great war is the context of each of our lives, and all our lives together. We all live in times of war.
The apostle Paul was acutely aware of this hard truth. It was he who told us, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete” (2 Cor. 10:4–6). The devil wins too many skirmishes here, as we are wont to believe that since our weapons are not carnal, that the war itself isn’t real. We are at war with principalities and powers, something Paul would never forget.
Recognizing the reality of this overarching war, however, won’t equip us to fight the war. We need also to recognize that the war is fought on at least two fronts, that our one war is fought in two theaters.
The first front is found within ourselves. That is, not only do we war against the world and the devil, which is to say the serpent and its seed, but we war against our own flesh. We who fight our outward enemies likewise fight our inward enemies. This is why Paul calls us to put to death that which is earthly in us. This is why Paul cries out, “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:22–25a).
The other front is much like the first. In the first, we have a battle within the seed of the woman. In the second, we have a battle within the seed of the serpent. Our old nature battles with our new, whereas among those outside the kingdom, their war is between the remnants of the image of God yet in them and their fallen nature. They, Paul tells us in Romans 1, worship the creature rather than the Creator. That they worship at all is because of their being fashioned in the image of God. That is, because man as man is made in the image of God, man as man is made to worship. But because man in his fallen nature hates God, he determines to worship a false god, a creature.
In the here and now, these three battles will continue. When we are better salt and light, even those outside the kingdom better reflect their Maker’s image. When we lose our savor, however, we become more and more like walking zombies. We fight the big central battle best by fighting the internal battle well. That is, we will succeed in better having His kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, as we become more like we will be in heaven, as we put to death the old man, and put on Christ.
In eternity there will be no more war. Not only will the seed of the serpent be utterly vanquished, but they will be given over to their sin. Not only will the seed of the woman be victorious, but all those who are in Him will be made new. With the death of death will come the death of our old man. And we will live on forever in peace, under the eternal reign of the Prince of Peace. Paul longed for it, and so ought we.
There are any number of common myths, lies we tell ourselves, to somehow make it all seem not so horrible. The first lie is that the clientele at the local mill is made up of sweet faced high school girls who got carried away with their boyfriends, and come in blissfully ignorant of what goes on inside. There are people at the mill that fit this description, but they are exceedingly rare.
The second lie is that they are women in hopelessly desperate straits that see no other way out. The boyfriend has threatened to beat her if she doesn’t abort his child. The step-father threatens to kill her if she doesn’t abort his child. The rent check is about to bounce, and she will lose her job if anyone finds out she is pregnant. Again there are people at the mill that fit this description, but they are exceedingly rare.
The third lie is that those who come are peculiarly wicked people, that they come equipped with bulging bellies and horns on their heads, their mouths spewing angry obscenities. There certainly are people who fit this description, minus the horns. But they are by no means the majority.
The first myth is useful to us because it persuades us that all we need to do is educate the world. Write a letter to the editor. Engage in a debate on facebook. Hand out pamphlets. The myth reinforces the notion that what is wrong in the world is a lack of information, and that what will cure us is more teaching. If we can just get this ad on television, this other message on billboards, if we can just persuade everyone that the unborn are babies, the nightmare will end. But the nightmare is that they already know. They are abundantly conscious that a baby is growing inside them. And they want to kill it.
The second myth is useful to us because it persuades us that all we need to do is write a check. If we support our local crisis pregnancy center we will put an end to abortion. It is a wonderful thing indeed to support your local crisis pregnancy center. It will not, however stop people from murdering their babies. Do we really think that anyone willing to murder her baby because of difficult circumstances would not murder her baby were circumstances less difficult? Changing circumstances isn’t changing hearts.
The third myth may be the most dangerous. When we think this way, that those who procure abortions hiss and spit and spew vile profanations we push this evil away from us, as if it were some alien beings doing such horrors. We excuse our inaction on the grounds that these people are not like us, but are sinners of a whole other order. We think that it may just be a good thing that these kinds of people not reproduce, because it will just bring more of their kind of evil into the world.
The truth is that the people who come to the mill are decidedly ordinary. They are the people behind you at the grocery store, or the person bagging your groceries. They are the person beside you in the pew, whose confidence that God forgives leads them to deadly presumption, or the elder’s daughter who spares the family name by murdering the heir. They are people like me, who know they are carrying babies in their bellies. They are people like me, who have problems and challenges in their lives, who prefer to put their problems behind them. They are people like me who will stoop to nearly any shame to hide the shame they already stooped to. Nothing will change until we come to understand that abortion is not a them issue but a we issue, that the sinful hearts that procure abortions are just like the sinful hearts that think we can pay them off, inform them or ignore them. Neither will anything change until we come to understand as well that the babies being brought there are also just like our babies. Ordinary people do extraordinarily wicked things every ordinary day.
The Bible is full of promises. Most of them boil down to something terribly simple. God says to us, “Obey Me and be blessed. Disobey Me and be cursed.” This is God’s one covenant with man. Of course, praise God He has added a crucial addendum- it is possible to receive the blessings for the obedience of Another, and for that same Other to receive the curse due to us for our sin. Given that reality, however, we still see, especially in the Psalms, an expectation of comparative blessing for sinners who trust in the coming Savior and the comparative cursing on those outside God’s grace. The wicked will not stand. They shall soon be cut off. But the righteous shall be like a tree planted by the waters. While we recognize that proverbial promises are not designed to be math- that is, when God says those who do x will receive y, He is expressing the pattern by which He works, still there is weight here. We should expect greater blessing the more we are able to submit to His Word.
Then we hear the promises of Jesus. We should not be surprised when we are persecuted. We are promised trouble in this life. We are told to expect hatred from the world. In the old covenant we are tempted to expect the believing family to move from blessing to blessing, to enjoy prosperity, health, friendship, even admiration. In the new covenant it looks like we should expect to pick up our cross daily, that we will move from trouble to trouble, from heartache to heartache. What gives?
Our confusion flows out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of blessing. Consider for a moment the children of Israel as they march toward the Promised Land. Certainly their lives began with hardship, as they suffered under Pharaoh’s yoke. But then they behold the miracles of God. He hears their prayers and delivers them in a spectacular display of both His power and His favor. But they grumbled. They complained. Our Father sent them water from a rock. He sent them first bread, and then meat. He, in a word, prospered them. But we are told in turn that because they grumbled He sent them “leanness in their souls.” Their bellies were full, but their joy was emaciated.
The blessings of God are not, typically, prosperity, health and honor. They are instead things like love, joy, peace, patience. Indeed these fruits find their most fertile soil in the context of hardship. The man who meditates on the law of God day and night may not grow a thriving business. He may not be much beloved in his community. But he will mourn his own sins. He will be poor in spirit. He will not enjoy great power, but will be mindful of God’s power, resting in his own meekness. He will hunger and thirst for righteousness. Meditating on the law of God, he will know his sin, his need for mercy, and so will show mercy, making peace even as he suffers under the sins of his enemies.
Such a man, of course, can look forward to pleasures at His right hand forevermore. But he need not wait for blessing. God will draw near. He is the reality of which all other blessings are but shadows. Such a man will walk through this world carrying his cross, and rejoicing in the very fatness of his soul. May He be pleased to make of us such men.
Dunamis Fellowship and Sovereign Grace Fellowship continue our weekly Bible study at 7 eastern. Meeting Jesus consider our Lord’s death. All are welcome to attend. Come early (6:15) and we’ll feed you. You can also watch on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you join us .
Because that is her nature. Evangelicalism as a social movement sought to find a compromise between the academically muscular theological liberalism of the twentieth century and the bold orthodoxy of the fundamentalism of the same era. This was not merely the strategy of the movement but the very nature of it. Such compromises, however, have trajectories that go in only one direction, downhill.
Consider God’s people in the Old Testament. Syncretism was their besetting sin. They would blend a little of the false worship of the locals with the true worship of God by setting up high places He did not command, to worship Him. Soon they added pagan “liturgy” to their worship of the living God. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump before they were sacrificing their own, or rather God’s own children to Molech.
Or, consider what Paul said as the compromise between Judaism and Christianity infected the church at Galatia, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Gal. 5:9). Many evangelicals, from the beginning, compromised on the creation account and Noah’s flood. Was it because of their passion for the Bible? No, it grew out of that hunger for respectability. Next up was the Bible’s teaching on the grounds for divorce. Many evangelicals cast that aside. Because of some new great insight into the Greek prooftexts? No, it grew out of a hunger to be deemed just as compassionate and understanding as the theological liberals and the broader culture.
By the time abortion became an issue evangelicals staked a claim to the middle ground between pro-choice and abolition, supporting candidates, legislation and the ideology that said babies conceived during a crime were fair game for butchers to hunt down and kill. Anyone surprised by the lemming rush to join, somewhere reasonably in the middle, the LGBTQ+ parade hasn’t been paying attention. One can only wonder where the middle ground will be when pedophiles finally get their cultural moment to shine.
Here is the devil’s simple trick. He tells us that in order to minister well to those outside the kingdom we must not become offensive to those outside the kingdom. It sounds like wisdom to us because we hate being hated. Jesus, however, the very One who loved us while we were yet sinners, says if we’re not hated like He was hated, we’re doing it wrong. He tells us that if we are not hated by them it is a strong sign that we are not loving them. If we are loving them enough to tell the truth, we will be hated and scorned.
And once again, Big Eva is just like them. Tell her the truth and she will hurl the same epithets that the world throws. Tell her her compromises have left her tainted and abused by her lover and she will blame you. The spectrum is not from the smart liberals to the ignorant fundamentalists with the evangelicals somewhere in between. No, the spectrum is from the cowardly lions of the mainline churches to the heroic courage of the fundamentalists with the evangelicals somewhere in between. Which means we don’t need better spokesmen, better scholarship, better strategies. What we need is courage.
