The devil is resourceful, hard working. There is no temptation he will not use, no stratagem too tiny to try us with. He does, however, have a few areas he specializes in. He is called Satan because he is an expert at making accusations. He delights to accuse us when we are innocent, and when we are guilty. He is also a murderer and has been from the beginning. Those who hate Him, we are told, love death (Proverbs 8:36). He is also not just a liar, but the father of lies (John 8:44). When we hear a lie we ought to smell sulfur. Every lie has his hoof prints on it. Of late the broader culture has been rather frantic in telling and believing lies with respect to boys and girls, and we Christians too often face the temptation to believe them. Here are ten we must never give in to:
10. Boys can become girls. Girls can become boys. No. Chemicals, surgery or clothes do not change boys into girls or girls into boys.
9. Gender is a social construct that can be chosen at will. No. From the beginning He has made us man and woman.
8. If our feelings don’t match reality, reality will have to change. I don’t dispute that the gender dysphoric feel like what they are not. But what needs to change is the wish to be other, not the immutable reality the dysphoric find themselves in.
7. Having our desires “met” will make us happy. No, repenting and believing on the Lord Jesus Christ will make us joyful. The One who designed us gives us His law not to make us miserable, but to show us the way of life. His law is always and everywhere an invitation to joy, not a burden to be carried. If it feels like a burden to us, we must change, not it.
6. Failing to celebrate the mutilation of bodies, and failure to affirm the lie that boys can become girls and girls boys is mean-spirited, narrow and cruel. No, sin is never something to be celebrated, and to be against something is no more narrow-minded than to be for something.
5. Determining to live trans is no one’s business but his or her own. No, public decisions have public consequences. It’s true enough that we have plenty of our own sins to worry about. It’s true enough that Christians have no need to hunt down hidden sexual perversion to shout it down. I am honestly not interested in what people wear in the privacy of their own homes. But living trans is a decidedly public decision when we are expected to call he’s her and she’s he.
4. Non-Christians are bad people who do this kind of thing and Christians are good people. No, apart from the grace of God in our own lives we’d find ourselves in the same mess or worse as anyone else. Even with his grace we yet struggle against and fall into sin.
3. Homosexuality is the same as any other sin. No, not all sins are the same. All sins are rebellion against the living God and are due His eternal wrath. But that doesn’t make them all equally rebellious or equally evil.
2. Homosexuals just want to be left alone to do their own thing in private. No, homosexuals insist that the rest of the world approve of their sin. And many are more than willing to use the force of the state to make it happen, whether through indoctrination at the government’s schools, or intimidation through its courts.
1. God will be mocked. No, God will not be mocked. The unsurpassed swift embrace of sexual perversion in the broader culture isn’t a surprise to Jesus. Rather, even as He ordained the rise of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar for our good and His glory, so He has ordained even this. He will use it for His purposes.
We must guard our minds against the devil’s lies. And we must not lose heart. Jesus always wins.
Dunamis Fellowship and Sovereign Grace Fellowship continue our weekly Bible study at 7 eastern. Meeting Jesus consider our Lord’s Passion. 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 .
Of course. Who could say anything different? Many do. Just a few days ago I posted a piece arguing that the United States government had no jurisdiction over the horror taking place in Ukraine. I can already anticipate that while many will insist my take is wrong, a few will insist that I shouldn’t have a take at all, that I have veered away from my calling in even posting such a piece. Christians, some argue, should steer clear of political issues.
If that’s you, may I ask a few questions? Does the Bible speak to political issues? Does it speak to the proper role and limits of government? Finally, did Jesus command us to disciple the nations, teaching them to obey whatsoever He commanded? That, I trust, should settle the matter.
I understand that some who believe Christians should be involved in political issues may push the envelope on those matters we should consider to be things the Bible speaks of. While I may prefer the roughed grouse to the cardinal as the state bird, I can’t imagine trying to enlist the Bible on my side, thundering from the pulpit against the evil cardinal party. Push back against that kind of political activism all you like. I’d be right with you. To reject this, however, isn’t to reject Christians’ involvement in politics. It is to reject Christians’ involvement in petty squabbles.
The killing of the unborn is and is not a “political issue.” It is not in that whether it is legal or not, such a deed is perverse and evil. It is in that it is the biblical responsibility of the state to protect the innocent from those that would seek to harm them. It is in that the law impacts the behavior. The Christian should most assuredly be involved in this issue.
What about propagating the Christian faith in the state school systems? Outside of politics it is a wonderful thing to propagate the Christian faith, part and parcel of the same Great Commission we are considering. The state schools, however, are not outside of politics. They are run by the state, financed by taxes taken from Christians and non-Christians alike. The Christian’s involvement politically here would be to actually fight against propagating the Christian faith in government schools, in submission to the Bible’s command to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Of course, the same issue applies in reverse. Christians should oppose the propagation of Islam, eastern religion, atheism or any other religion in the state schools, for the same reason. Which means we should be calling for the separation of school and state.
It is a mistake to see everything as political. It is equally a mistake to see nothing as political. It likewise a mistake to see anything as outside the reign of Jesus Christ. Jesus changes everything, because He reigns over all things. As Abraham Kuyper wisely said, “There is not one square inch in all of reality over which Jesus does not cry out, ‘MINE!’” Our calling is to make visible His reign, to labor that He would fulfill the promise of Psalm 2, that every knee, of every President, Potentate, Plutocrat and Prime Minister would bow and all tongues confess that He is Lord.
When we list the various ways we sin, “thought, word and deed” we might make the mistake of seeing this as a list like this one, “grape, watermelon, apple.” They all fall under the category of fruit, but that is the extent of their relationship. Not so with thought, word and deed. Thought, word and deed is more like acorn, sapling, oak tree. No one would mistake an acorn for a tree, but leave it alone long enough, in ordinary circumstances trees happen.
We have become such a virtual culture that we think it possible to separate our thoughts and words from our deeds. We enter into cyberspace to debate ideologies and policy perspectives. Things might get heated but it’s not like anything ever comes of it. Everyone just shuts down their windows, turns out the light, and goes to bed. Except things do come of it. Terrible things.
One of strongest cases one could make for the influence of “Christian nationalism,” not that there is much of a case, is found in how conservative evangelicals tend to view foreign policy. We are hawks. We see those dove Democrats as the party of Neville Chamberlain. (Of course, the truth is that Democrats are at least as war hungry as their Republican counterparts.) When we embrace American exceptionalism it is one small step to embracing American empire. Sure, we’ll cast it as something humanitarian. But just as Democrats think that whenever there’s a hardship within our borders the feds need to come up with a new program to spend it away, so too many Christian conservatives think that whenever there’s a hardship outside our borders the feds need to send in the troops. In the former instance real people with real hardships are put deeper into hardship, and more people not in hardship are dragged there by the bloat of government. In the latter, our emotive, unbiblical, grabbing the ears of a passing dog response results in wives weeping over graves, mothers clutching folded flags, little girls growing up without their daddies.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. Putin is a bad and dangerous man. People are dying and global balances are teetering. As we debate what ought to be done can we please start with this question- does the US government have any jurisdiction there? Does NATO? Does, absent Security Council approval, the UN? Does real calamity grant the US government jurisdiction? The true, historical conservative position on this is the same as it is on vax mandates. No. The US government doesn’t have the authority to require anyone to get a vaccine, much less an experimental one, much less an experimental one that doesn’t work like vaccines once did. Nor does it have the authority to join Ukraine in removing Russia.
If you feel strongly about the vax, by all means, get one. If you feel strongly about freeing Ukraine, by all means go there and fight for it. No one is stopping you. Those beating the drums of war in this country, however, are not the ones who will go, fight and die. Governments run up debts in the tens of trillions because every spending opportunity looks important when you’re spending someone else’s money. Governments wage wars because opportunities look too inviting when you’re spilling someone else’s blood, including that of your own soldiers.
American empire isn’t so dangerous in the abstract, when it’s just an idea. It’s only slightly more dangerous when it’s something we talk about. These, however, are just the first two steps to flag draped coffins. Ukrainians fighting to the death against the invading Russians are heroes to be honored. American soldiers dying in the same war would be pawns, victims of the same overreach by their own leaders as the Russians dying in the war. Neither country has any reason to be there. May the Russians go home, and may the Americans stay home.
Richard Weaver first made a name for himself when he published his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences. It is a brief work with ideas that are still reaping 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 was not something academia simply studied, but it was instead something that shaped academia. Indeed, modernism is academia’s mother. You wouldn’t have the latter if you did not first have the former. Schaeffer named many of the strongholds we are called to tear down, the sundry “isms” 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, I’m afraid there just might be something modernist about our modern fascination with “isms,” 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.
We are a schizophrenic people. We have a love/hate relationship with our own nation/history/culture. We, at least within the church, prefer to define ourselves in light of the heroes of our past. We are the heirs of the Puritans and the Pilgrims, faithful men and women. We are the children of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Washington. We were, and there is the heartache, were, a great people. Today we are a nation of looters and rapists. We are child predators and baby killers. Today, third world nations, with pity in their hearts, send missionaries here, for the sake of our souls. And so we want to know where it all went wrong. When did our city on a hill become Sodom and Gomorrah?
Of course, 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 war between the States 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 worshiping 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 Skinner or Derrida. All of this is lopping the tops off of dandelions, bandaging cancer cells. 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 only one thing that exalts a nation, one way for a nation to enjoy blessing from the true and living God, and that is our worship of 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, and for the glory of our triune God.
