Thesis 56- We must do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.
Extraordinary times call for ordinary measures. When things go as we expect them to go we generally know what we are called to do. When, however, the world outside our control gets out of control we often find ourselves in a panic, unsure of how to respond. The ordinary things we know how to do, but they not longer bring the results we desire.
For more than a year now I have been laying out a list of theses, affirmations open for debate on how to bring about another Reformation in the church. I have been arguing that things need to change, laying out what some of those things are, and the way they need to change. As I write the church is drowning in a sea of controversy, inanity, worldliness, fearfulness. The world, not surprisingly, is in the same condition. What do we do now? Now we remember that the most calamitous of times call for the most plain of responses. What we need to do is what we always need to do, the right thing.
The prophet Micah provides for us a concise summary of just what the right thing is:
,
“He has shown you O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). That we live in unjust times, in a land of unjust rulers does not change our duty to do justice, but intensifies it. That we live in merciless times, in a land of merciless rulers, does not change our duty to love mercy, but intensifies it. That we live in an age of arrogance, in a land of arrogant rulers does not change our duty to walk humbly with our God, but intensifies it.
We don’t have to figure out what is going to happen next. We don’t have to discern who is telling us the truth and who is lying to us. We don’t have to guess the results if we embrace this strategy or that. For He has already told us what He requires of us. When we fail to do so, when we fear that obedience to the Lord will lead to bad consequences for us we call God a liar. We demonstrate that we do not live in fear of Him, but in fear of the world. We demonstrate that we worship the same idols of the world around us.
To do justice we must study justice, which is revealed to us in His Word. The judge of all the world has given us His law. It, and it alone, defines what is just. To love mercy we must grasp the scope and horror of our own sin, to cherish the great cost that was paid that we might be redeemed. To walk humbly with God, all that takes is submitting to what He says. All three are built from one thing- faith. We believe God when He tells us what is right. We believe God when He tells us we have failed to measure up. We believe God when He shows us His mercy and invites us, as His adopted children, to walk with Him. We believe God, who is true.
What if I told you that on September 12, 2001 terrorists in the United States killed 3000 people, and the story didn’t even make the news? What if I told you that on January 7th terrorists killed 2500 people in the United States and it didn’t even make the news? What if I told you that every day in between terrorists killed between 3000 and 2500 people in the United States, all with the full knowledge and legal protection of the United States federal government, and it didn’t even make the news? What if I told you that every voter in the country, for both parties, knew this was going on?
When my wife and I watched the President’s first press conference on COVID I came away shocked. The sheer audacity of suspending travel, of ordering lockdowns was like nothing I’d seen before. Then, a few months later, protestors not only took to the streets across the nation, in a few jurisdictions they took the streets, establishing their own autonomous regions. That was something I’d never seen before. A few months later an election left us wondering not only who had won, but if we would ever know. That question culminated in citizens storming the Capitol building. Something I’d never seen before. All of which, added together and multiplied ten times is not worthy to be compared with the ordinary, banal truth that over the past 48 years more than 60,000,000 times parents hired trained assassins to murder their own child with the full legal protection of the federal government.
What we accept we have every reason to expect. A culture that hasn’t the moral capacity to end the greatest atrocity in its history is not a culture that can expect peace on its streets, an orderly transfer of power, the blessing of the God of heaven and earth. We got in this mess because we determined that the state had an obligation to protect our right to pursue our sexual appetites as we see fit, without a thought for our victims. We got in this mess because we refused to submit to His created order. We got in this mess because we think we know better than He does. We got into this mess because from top to bottom, in our streets, in our churches, in our homes we are in rebellion against God.
It was a great shock to me and to just about everyone else to see private citizens storm the Capitol Building, to see elected representatives seeking cover. It was not, however, a shock at all to the living God. First, He planned it from before all time, for His glory and the well-being of His children. Second, every one of His children, and every one not His child daily seeks to break into His most august chambers and wrestle Him from His throne. We all do this with every sin. January 6th, 2021 may be remembered for some time in this country, but for all the wrong reasons. The great evil, the true affront, the most wretched display of lawlessness was the legally protected murder of unborn children. Pearl clutching over the Capitol is just one more manifestation of our guilt.
Accuse me of “what about-ism” all you like. Until babies are safe in their wombs from the assaults of their parents, nothing else should shock us. Until this greatest evil ends we can expect nothing but judgment. How do we get out of this mess? We repent, and believe the gospel.
It is bad enough that we are such suckers for the bait and switch. The devil has been playing this gag on us for millennia. We should have learned by now. When the angel comes along and says, “You know, God is love. And what He wants you to do is to love one another,” the devil doesn’t show up on the other shoulder and say, “Love, ah, that’s for suckers. What you really need to do is some good hating.” He’s not that dumb. Instead he shows up on our shoulder and says, “Of course, I want nothing more than for you to love everyone. Love is my favorite thing as well. Why, just the other day I was composing a haiku about love. Let’s see here, how did that go? Love one another; If your lover is not there, love the one you’re with.” He fills God’s words with his meanings, and, because we miss the switch, we end up tied in knots.
What is worse, however, is that he sometimes comes along and actually gets us to substitute a whole different word for the good one. He switches not just the meaning, but the word itself. Nice, though some have called it the cardinal evangelical virtue, is not, I’m afraid, a command from the Bible. God never said, “Whatever else you do, be nice.” Instead it is a command from the culture. And like love, it is a command we have allowed the devil to define.
There is only one thing required to be nice, and only one sin against niceness in the culture. You certainly never have to go out of your way and be a neighbor to anyone. You never have to make personal sacrifices of any sort. All you have to do is repeat the mantra of the age, “If that’s the way you see it, that’s fine.” See how non-threatening that is? It allows both of us to keep our pride, to keep our convictions, to keep our sins. And it costs so little. In short, to be nice is always and only to embrace relativism. Once you’ve swallowed this one, nothing else will ever get caught in your throat.
Actually though, you’re only half the way home. You have to study the other half of the nice rulebook, the side they only talk about when they have to. You see, there is one thing that still must stick in your craw. That, of course, is when some blamed fool refuses to play nice, to abide by the rules. When someone says, “It doesn’t matter how I see it, or how you see it, or how a billion Chinese see it. What matters is how God sees it, because He is the one who determines reality. Our job is to get our own perceptions in line with His, which are of necessity true. And all perceptions which do not match His are of necessity false,” you are not nice if you respond with a polite, “If that’s the way you see it, that’s fine.” Here, according to the devil, and he ought to know, the correct, and only nice response is, “Crucify him.”
If you can accuse all those who don’t abide by the nice rules of relativism of being mullahs, and terrorists and Nazis and threats to our way of life and fanatics who must be hunted down like rabid dogs, then you earn that most coveted of sobriquets, “Nice.” It’s not enough to be relatively relativist. You must be absolutely relativist. It’s not enough to have some humility about your or my convictions. You must arrogantly assume that all convictions, by their very nature, must be false. As a nice relativist you must be absolutely certain that any and all absolutists must be stopped, no matter what the cost. Otherwise you may as well be a fellow-traveler with those who just aren’t nice.
It’s important for us to remember this the next time we feel the sting of the accusation that we somehow aren’t nice. The answer isn’t to protest, to get out our relativist credentials, and show how up to date they are. Our response the next time some syndicated columnist tries to connect the dots between us and Hamas is to say, “If the objection is that both of us affirm objective truth, objective right and wrong, we’re flat guilty.” If the reason Islam is hated is not because it is false, but because it simply claims to be true, we ought to be in a panic that we as Christians aren’t the most hated group on the planet. If the powers that be insist on hanging all those who reject relativism, then our calling is to charge the gallows, not to tear them down, but to place our own necks in the noose of the not nice.
We can’t play nice with those who define niceness this way. We cannot keep both their rules, and the rules of Him whom we say we serve. When Jesus said, “If you confess me before men…” He didn’t mean standing up at some flag pole and saying, “This is what Jesus means to me…” When Jesus said, “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake,” He didn’t mean that we should do everything we can do to change their word, nice, into one that we can affirm, and act upon. He didn’t mean that we should tone down His exclusive claims so that we can wear our nice pins to the nice meetings. He meant we will be blessed when they throw us out.
If we will serve Him our goal ought never to be that when we are gone they say of us, “You know, that so and so sure was nice.” The epitaph we should seek for our grave marker should be Faithful. Instead what needs to be buried is the virtue they call nice, that the name of Christ might live on in the west.
Nothing like a riot to take the nation’s mind off your own public goof. Just days ago we were all laughing over a man and his “a-woman.” He now claims he was only joking (Proverbs 26:19). But it’s not funny. The reason it’s not funny, however, is less the ridiculous feminist hoo-haw that birthed it, more the shocking ignorance it revealed. The 117th session of the US Congress was opened by a Congressman with a prayer. The Congressman, having begun his prayer invoking a whole host of deities, ended his prayer “Amen, and A-woman.”
I’m increasingly used to our culture’s ignorance of basic Christian truths. The underlying consensus that once privileged Christianity is long gone. So it doesn’t surprise me when movies portray Protestant churches with crucifixes on their walls, or when politicians speak of Two Corinthians. What surprised me then about Emanuel Cleaver’s prayer wasn’t that he is an ignorant Congressman, Congresswoman, but that he is a pastor in the United Methodist Church.
How does a man become a minister of the gospel without knowing that amen has nothing to do with men? Because as craven, heathen, ignorant, worldly, backward as Congress is as an institution, it runs a distant second in all those categories to mainline churches. In fact, we have the Congress that we have precisely because we have the mainline churches that we have. That, and we have evangelical churches that play Squiggy to mainline Lenny.
It’s an old but telling joke that an evangelical is a fundamentalist who says to a liberal, “I will call you brother if you will call me scholar.” It’s a relatively new and heartbreaking reality that Big Eva left chastity behind and is quickly losing her ability to blush. We lost the culture. We lost the mainline churches. We lost the institutions of higher learning. We lost the neo-evangelicals. And Big Eva is blocking our calls.
How is it that these losses seem to mean less to us than our “loss” of the election? Because even the most fundamentalist among us have bought into the lie that politics is what matters. Politics, of course, does matter. Fifty years ago I might have been writing a piece on the woeful indifference to politics that defined fundamentalism. That all changed, however, when fundamentalists, from Jerry Falwell to Michael Farris learned that nothing brought coins in the coffer more quickly than culture wars.
We have lost our first love, a-woman that Jesus loves and died for, the church. By all means let the church be militant, pressing the crown rights of King Jesus. But first her virtue must be guarded, protected, cherished and honored. Before we can go forth from Eden to gardenize the jungle we have to purge the garden of all enemies.
Pray for the church. Pray that she would be cleansed, that she would grow in love and loyalty toward the Groom. Pray that she, the last Eve, would be a help suitable to the Last Adam, that we would rejoice that He has already overcome the world, that His is the kingdom and the power and the glory, world without end, The Man.
Because of the church’s failure to teach the Bible. It’s no great mystery. Teaching the Bible has at least two strikes against it for the church looking to prosper. First, it is not easy. The Bible is a book of books, which books were written over the course of more than a thousand years, written by men who lived in cultures foreign to our own, written in a language few of us speak. Its subject matter touches on profoundly difficult matters, the intersection of the eternal and the temporal, the tri-une nature of the living God, the incarnation of the second person of the trinity. This is not “See Spot run. ‘Run Spot, run.’” Even Peter, who authored two of the books of the Bible, in one of them acknowledged that Paul’s writings in the Bible could be profoundly difficult to grasp. The church’s biblical illiteracy, in this instance, is not that distinct from the general illiteracy our culture suffers from. We’re watchers, not readers. And what we watch we watch for entertainment, not learning.
The second strike may be even more detrimental. Teaching the Bible works against the local church “prospering” because its message is abundantly clear- we are sinners, and under the judgment of God unless we rest in the work of Christ for us. When the church sees the unbeliever as their “market” and research shows the market is averse to your message, well then, you have to change the message. It is not, however, just the unbeliever who prefers not to be taught what the Bible teaches about our sin. None of us like it.
The trouble is, if you remove that truth from the Bible, that we are wretched sinners apart from God’s grace, you a. have removed a high percentage of the content of the Bible and b. removed the reason to know the rest of the content of the Bible. Why would someone want to learn about substitutionary atonement who has no idea he needs an atonement? Who would have an interest in imputation who doesn’t know he stands guilty before God?
In the end we have both teachers who won’t teach and disciples who won’t learn. We have ear-tickling hirelings scratching behind the ears of goats. Pastors sell what they sell because parishioners buy what they buy, and parishioners buying what they buy because pastors sell what they sell.
Romans 1 teaches that God speaks truth to all men everywhere. And all those to whom He does not give ears to hear, suppress that truth. They deny it, push it away, seek out a message more soothing. Romans 7 teaches, however, that when God is pleased to give ears to hear, when He gives life to we who denied Him, and we respond in faith and repentance, our sin patterns do not disappear. We too suppress the truth of God, now not just what He reveals through His world but what He reveals in His Word, in unrighteousness. May He give us then both ears to hear, and mouths that would hunger for every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
We begin a new study, The ABC’s of Theology, designed to push against our biblical illiteracy, Monday evening, 7 eastern. All are welcome in our home, and to tune in via Facebook Live, at RC-Lisa Sproul.
