Thesis 76 We must believe that blessing comes to our children as they learn to honor their parents.
While there is surely no neutral ground in the ongoing battle between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, there are those places where the image of God remains comparatively strong even among those outside His saving grace. Mothers, like the rest of us, are sinners sure enough. But a mother’s love for her child is something that extends well beyond the confines of the church. Parents, as a general rule, believers and unbelievers alike agree, want to see their children live good lives.
Where the antithesis comes in is two-fold. First, what do we mean by good lives, and second, what is the path to getting there? Sadly, the church may be at its most worldly right here, agreeing with the world as to what the good life looks like and how to get there. The American Dream works something like this- work hard in school. That will enable you to attend a more competitive college. That will give you a leg up on the best grad schools, which will clear the path for the best jobs. Then you’ll be able to live in the best neighborhoods where your children can get a good education. Why? So they can attend a more competitive college, which gives them a leg up… ad nauseam. I call this hell’s hamster wheel. We need to get off.
According to the Word of God the good life is not measured by bank accounts or educational opportunities, but by walking with our Lord. It comes from following the path He has set out for us, in submission to His law. Which brings us to how we get there.
God’s Word, right out in the open, in a passage virtually everyone is familiar with, tells us where that path is. He says in Exodus 20:12, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” There it is, the secret to a good life. Understand that “that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you” isn’t a promise just for those first to enter into the Promised Land. The promise is for all of Abraham’s children, including us.
It’s kind of scary, isn’t it? Wouldn’t we feel just a bit more secure if we knew our children had secured a good job? Is it, after all, safe to trust in something as amorphous and ephemeral as God’s promises? Surely He wants our children to prosper. Surely He knows they’ll do that if we help them secure skills that are in great demand. All my friends are building their children’s homes right here on this lovely beach. Nice houses too.
The storm clouds are already on the way. The thunder is no longer distant. To reform the church we must build our homes upon the Rock. We must teach our children to honor their parents, and rest knowing this is the path to His blessing. Nothing else will do.
Tonight, 7 eastern, we continue our ABCs of Theology Study, looking at O is for Ontological Trinity. All are welcome in our home or on FB live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We pray you’ll join us.
Because we’re people. The problem isn’t in the money. Which means, by the way, that one does not become more greedy than someone else by having more than someone else. Greed afflicts the rich and the poor and everyone in between. Our fallen humanity encourages the folly of greed in at least two ways.
First, and most obvious, because we are sinners we see ourselves as more important than others. We believe we are due more simply by virtue of being who we are, our august and deserving selves. That others may be in need is a problem. That problem will have to be solved with the wherewithal of someone other than me. I can’t be expected to get by on less because, well, let’s be honest, because I’m me.
The second form is harder to see, but just as common. Because we are sinners we think we should hold on to all that we have. We also think, however, that everyone who doesn’t share our priorities is obviously stupid and selfish, and, ironically, greedy. The unrivaled Dr. Thomas Sowell put it well when he wrote, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” We accuse others of greed because they don’t want to spend their money on the things we want them to spend their money on.
We seem to think that someone else’s failure to put their money where my mouth is is proof positive of their greed. If they weren’t holding on so tightly to all that filthy lucre they could put it in my clean hands. Or they could put it in the clean hands of those for whom I shill. Here’s my corollary to Sowell’s insight, “I have never understood why wealth makes a person greedy and that’s why we need to spread it around.” If money causes greed, giving money to others is like kissing them after finishing off the buffet at Wuhan Wings and Things.
How would you respond if I gave you this counsel? First, I want you to work hard. Second, I want you to give away ten percent of what you earn. Third, I want you, every year, to take ten percent of what you earn, whether it’s a little or a lot, the whole ten percent, and I want you to buy whatever you want. If you made $50,000 this year and want $5000 worth of the world’s best cabernet, then do it. If you made $1,000,000 and the original ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz are $100,000 and that’s what you want, get those shoes.
This, by the way, is not actually my counsel. Instead it is God’s commands. Exodus 20:9 commands that we work hard. Malachi 3:10 commands that we pay our tithes. Deuteronomy 14:23-26 covers the third one, what some call “the party tithe.” If God tells you to buy, with ten percent of your income, what you want, and I tell you He wants you instead to give that ten percent to the poor, whom should you heed? Who is being greedy, you with your new stuff, or me with my sour posture toward your new stuff? Which of us is living in submission to God’s Word, and which of us is seeking to subvert God’s Word with our own? Which one of us needs to repent and believe the good news? That would be me.
Sophistication, more often than not, comes complete with toilet paper stuck to the heel of your shoe. We enter the world seeking to look au courant. We carry with us the latest news, the latest opinions, the latest tastes, all while wearing the latest clothes. We think we’ve reached the summit of human evolution, and then, right when everyone is looking, we start picking nits off our neighbors and eating them.
It was the Frenchman August Comte who first suggested that the history of any given culture could be divided into three epochs. The first was the religious age, wherein all of the great questions of live are answered through a religious approach. Everything from death to drought, from birth to prosperity would be understood as the workings of God or of the gods. As man matured he enters into the philosophical stage. Here all the great questions find their answers in the fertile field of philosophy. Man reached the highest maturity, however, when he entered into the scientific age, where science is the source of all our answers. Isn’t it just like us to create a worldview wherein in the end all that is good and right turns out to be ta-da, us.
Something has gone wrong on Comte’s road to paradise. Science hasn’t delivered the goods, and so we are back to the deity menagerie. Those ancient and backward cultures once had a god for everything. The Sun God out dueled the rain God, and that’s why there was a drought. The thunder God was routed in the same battle. Not so for we who are higher up the evolutionary chain. We don’t have a god for everything. Instead we have a god for everybody. The god we actually worship is the god of personal peace and affluence. The god we claim to submit to is God-to-me.
Of course it can, depending on how you look at it, either be terribly easy or terribly hard to submit to God-to-me. The difficulty is that scarcely have you wished for something, and getting it is suddenly God-to-me’s command. That is, it’s kind of hard to bow down to that which you have made with your own hands. On the other hand, the best attribute of God-to-me is that His will corresponds exactly with my own. That’s why I made him in the first place. This is our so called progress. Those fools in loin clothes that came before us fashioned statues of wood and silver. They made for themselves aids to worship, understanding perfectly well that the statues they bowed before were not gods, but merely symbols of gods. After all, can a man make a god?
It took millennia for the mind of man to sink low enough that he could speak of God-to-me without blushing for the insanity of it all. “Well, God-to-me is sort of like this amorphous life force, effused through with love. It makes no demands on me. It only wants me to be happy, and it trusts me to determine the path that will lead to my happiness.” If the gods of science could have constructed a time machine such that one of these ancient stone worshipping rubes could hear our modern sophisticate speak such words, what do you think he would say. “I’m sorry, are you talking about god or your statue? I understand how a man can make a statue of his Maker. What I can’t fathom is how a man can actually make his Maker. If you can actually construct your god, than how could He have ever constructed you? You, O modern one, must solve your rather primitive chicken and egg problem.”
This, however, is where we have come to. This is accepted wisdom, the very creed of our culture- everyone gets to make god in their own image. To argue with this folly is to offend, uh, what exactly? If we all make our own gods, here’s what I propose. I am going to construct a god who not only made me, but made everyone else. He has delivered law not only to me, but to everyone else. And everyone is obligated to obey and worship the god of my making.
Relativism of any sort, theological or ethical, is a workable solipsism, until our worlds collide. That is, we can indeed all get along with our own “God-to-me’s” as long as we never have our worlds intersect. What do we do, however, if God-to-me thinks you should give me your car, while God-to-you thinks I should take a long walk on a short pier? Whose god wins, and how do we decide?
This is why the peace promised by postmodernism will always and swiftly descend into the war of fascism soon enough. The gods we construct can only wrestle through us, and whomever builds the biggest army wins. Thus whether or not unborn children may be put to death comes down to how many votes this party or that can garner. When there is nothing above the sun, sooner or later everything below the sun devolves into perpetual war.
This is why we must pray for the peace of Babylon, because we are getting caught in the crossfire of competing false gods. When those outside the kingdom begin whimpering “Why can’t we all just get along?” soon enough those of us who affirm the living and true God find ourselves under the gun. We are the extremists, the fundamentalists, the enemies of tolerance that must be either re-educated, put on reservations, or removed from the planet. May we have the courage to tear down their foolish and silent gods, knowing with confidence that our God, the one who made us, not the one we have made, reigns.
In this space just a month or so ago I had the deep displeasure of having to chasten what used to be Bethany Christian Services. They were ditching their commitment to Christ in favor of a commitment to the world. Their board of directors had determined that moving forward they would facilitate adoptions by practicing perverts. I suggested that they saw the handwriting on the wall. With the Equality Act gaining steam they got out in front in order to stay on the federal tax support gravy train.
Not surprisingly this stunning decision has proven to not be the last stop on the train, the terminal on their slippery slope. Newsweek recently reported:
“In a startling new report, Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, announced that allowing white families to adopt Black children from the foster care system ‘can cause a lot of harm to children of color.’ As a result, the agency favors ‘overhauling’ the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which bars racial discrimination in placing a child into an adoptive family. As part of its ‘long journey toward becoming an anti-racist organization,’ Bethany’s leaders now believe a child’s race should be considered “as part of the best interest determination for child placement.”
Count me among those who are less than startled by this report. It makes perfect sense for an agency which calls itself Christian and that supports adoption by practicing perverts. Why wouldn’t they determine that their commitment to being an “anti-racist” organization means making race a part of a child’s placement plan? These two concepts share this in common- they are both utterly unbiblical, absolutely cultural and completely indefensible.
Earlier this month, in another piece, I affirmed, confident that there was nothing in the least bit provocative in it, this of our two youngest, “Our two dark skinned teenage boys know before they are dark skinned, teenaged or boys, that they are Sprouls.” Their identity is wrapped up in their forever family, not the melanin level. Our identity, all four of us, is wrapped up in Jesus. This happens through Christian adoption, something Bethany clearly knows nothing about.
There are times when I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard to remind Christians feeding on a steady diet of Fox News to put away their fears. Jesus still reigns, and the marginalization of the Christian faith is all part of His plan for our good and His glory. There are times my target audience is the Chicken Little Caucus. Other times, however, I write to let my brothers and sisters know the broader culture just boarded a hand basket scheduled to soon arrive in hell. This is one of those latter cases. The difference, more often than not, is not found in the severity of the error, but in the names of the ones falling for it. That is, this kind of nonsense is to be expected from the influential, the esteemed, the haughty. That’s nothing new. What is new is people naming the name of Christ taking up this anti-Christian cause. May God be pleased to send His Spirit to lead Bethany’s leaders away from Bethany and to Calvary.
Yes. The doctrine of total depravity asserts two key points. First, all that we are has been affected by the fall. It impacts our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our desires, everything about us. There is no untouched area. Second, the doctrine affirms that there is no island of righteousness out of which we can, on our own embrace the work of Christ for us. We are dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1) and before we can embrace His work for us we must be made alive by the Holy Spirit. Regeneration, or the rebirth, like our first birth, isn’t something we do, but something done to us. Thus regeneration precedes, logically speaking, faith. Regeneration is the cause of faith, not faith the cause of regeneration.
Total depravity also denies utter depravity. That is, we are not as bad as we could possibly be, because of the restraining hand of God’s grace. This is important, not because it preserves some small level of dignity, but because it helps us understand the limits of our depravity. The human mind, for instance, even without regeneration, is not totally useless. There are some who would suggest sin has so impacted our minds that we can know nothing. One challenge with this approach is it doesn’t match how sin impacts the rest of us. That is, if total depravity impacts the human mind such that it can know nothing, then it must also impact the human body such that we are utterly paralyzed. The fall’s impact on our bodies explains why we stumble, why our bodies sometimes fail us. In like manner the falls impact on our minds explains why we stumble with our minds, why we remember falsely, calculate poorly, deduct irrationally from time to time. Remember also that the demons know that God exists (James 2:19).
We know this, of course because our minds do work. You can’t know the mind has erred unless the mind shows you so. I know I err when saying 9×9=82 because I can know that 9×9=81. While errors of the mind are a burden, the real problem is that we use the genuine capacity to think, in our fallen nature, to justify our unbelief, and to justify our sins. We rationalize. Our minds become tools to aid and abet us in our sin. The demonic mind that knows God is is matched with a demonic heart that shudders rather than rejoices. The human mind, knowing there is a God, suppresses that truth in unrighteousness. The mind works rightly in seeing that God is, then works wickedly to suppress that truth.
One of the ways we suppress that truth is by constructing worldviews that seek to make sense of the world without God. Those attempts, of course, always fail. And in failing they often undercut the very foundations that make truth knowable. That is, if I assert, “There is no objective true and false” I seek to remove from my thinking the objective truth that there is a God. But in so doing I have denied (and ironically affirmed) that there is a truth to know. My system doesn’t allow for truth, while the mind that built the system does.
Which is why, when dealing with the unbeliever we have to both believe that they can know truths (remembering it takes the Holy Spirit to give life) while at the same time showing them that their worldview leaves no room for truth. Which is why we can proclaim Jesus with confidence. He changes hearts and minds, bodies and souls. He changes everything.
