Time was when the answer to that question would be grounded in a faulty eschatology. Dispensationalism for decades taught a diminished understanding of the great commission. They saw it strictly as evangelism, that our calling was to drag as many people on to the lifeboat as we could before everything sinks to the bottom of the sea. Strangely, over the past forty years we’ve seen great swaths of dispensational people and institutions taking an interest in matters of culture, of government. Suddenly my friends seemed to wake up to our calling to not just evangelize but to disciple the nations, teaching them to obey whatsoever Jesus commanded.
Dispensationalism has essentially discarded its fundamentalist roots and joined the broader ranks of evangelicalism. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is now, as noted above, they are interested in the here and now, as they should be. The bad news, however, is that they have lost the great strength of fundamentalism, a gaping yawn of indifference to our standing in the broader culture. Forty years ago they didn’t care about the world, which is bad, and didn’t care what the world thought of them, which is good. Now they care about the world, which is good, and care what the world thinks of them, which is bad.
This failure of indifference is critical because it gives the world the only thing they have to hang over our head. It leaves them with the one weapon we most fear- rejection, loss of reputation. When we enter into a discussion about the raging sexual confusion in the broader culture our opponents throw insults instead of arguments. And we, because we are so hurt by the insults, flee for our lives. Anything, including absolute cultural capitulation is better than being thought of as a rube, a hayseed, a knuckle dragging evolutionary dead-end. If we don’t roll over, they taunt us a second time.
Jesus, the Bible tells us, hungered and thirsted for righteousness. His meat and His drink was to do the will of His Father. He left behind every bit of His visible majesty, His manifest glory, that He might not just change, but utterly remake the world. His opponents hated Him. They spat on Him. They conspired against Him, lied about Him, had Him beaten and put to death, surrounded by thieves and mockery. None of this phased Him. It was the pouring out of the wrath of the Father that led Jesus to cry out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Now He is victorious. Now He reigns over heaven and earth. Every power and every dominion is under His absolute rule. Now He is worshipped and adored by billions. All because He was willing to be hated. He wins because He fears God and no man. We lose because we fear man and not God. We will not see victory until we see that He has already overcome the world. We will not spare our reputations until we recognize they’ve already been lost. We will not live in the new world until we grasp that we have already died. We will not storm the gates of hell until we learn their weapon against is powerless, for He has already told us we are His children.