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.
Imagine, if you would, there was a small group of men caught up in a bizarre and hungry ideology. Imagine they were committed to doing whatever it takes to enjoy the blessings of power and influence. Their stratagems ranged from sophisticated propaganda to political machinations to raw violence to quell those who stood in their way. Imagine that they had infiltrated the schools of the nation, and were about the business of indoctrinating the children in their ideology. Finally, imagine that this fringe group was so consumed with hatred toward the religious people of their land who once had wielded influence that they wanted them silenced or destroyed. What should, in this context the church do?
Before we answer we have to confess that the ideology is not a direct assault on any of our most ancient creeds. Our Lord never spoke specifically against the peculiar sin that animated this small group. There may be a few obscure texts in the Bible that, indirectly it would seem, touch on the sin. But truth be told, one could preach through the whole Bible without ever having to actually name the twisted doctrine of this group.
Some would argue that if we don’t preach where the battle is, we are not preaching at all. The late Francis Schaeffer, in his book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, quotes Martin Luther as saying-
“If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.”
Others, however, insist that the church should never be held hostage by the issues of the day, that our message transcends petty political squabbles. We are, after all, called to preach the Word, to make disciples of the nations. When we take sides on political issues we lose our audience and damage our witness. Isn’t it better that we should seek to win the ideologically confused by our love for them? Wasn’t Jesus despised precisely because of His willingness to invest in the sinners of His day? Should we not do the same?
Would it make a difference, which perspective we ought to take, if we were talking not about homosexuality as that ideology, but were instead talking of the Nazis? My description above fits both movements well. When Hitler came to power in Germany the church there faced the same challenge we are just beginning to face. The vast majority of churches in Germany rolled over, determined to keep their mouths shut on the Nazis, that they might maintain their position and their influence. All they salvaged, of course was their shame. A very few, the Confessing Church, took the better position. Many of them, including the courageous Dietrich Bonhoeffer were rewarded for their fidelity with the honor of martyrdom. The church at large, however, when the cries of souls crammed into cattle cars on their way to death camps disturbed their worship, simply chose to sing louder, to drown out those cries.
Some would argue that the comparison is unfair. I might have so argued not long ago. When, however, private citizens can be jailed for the crime of not embracing gay “marriage,” for preaching marriage is one man and one woman, we ought to at least begin to see the handwriting on the wall. “Homo-fascism” isn’t incendiary rhetoric. “You will be forced to care” isn’t a humorous exaggeration. These are instead the beginning of a new world and a new challenge. The question is, will the church preach the gospel at the point of attack, or will we merely sing louder?
Listen in as we celebrate our redemption to the uttermost, the fullness of His promises, new and imperishable bodies inhabiting a new heavens and a new earth. GLORY!
Thesis 75- We Must Wash Our Wives in the Word
How easy it is to be shocked at the wrong thing. Ephesians chapter 5 brings us a frightening analogy. Paul tells us that the relationship between a husband and wife is akin to the relationship between Jesus and the church. I know it’s frightening that in this text wives are called to submit to their own husbands. What is more frightening, however, is the call on the husbands. We are commanded to love our wives just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her. (Ephesians 5:25)
We’re supposed to die for our wives, to lay down our lives for them as Christ did for us. That, however, as shocking as it may be, is still not the most shocking thing in this chapter. Paul goes on to describe something even more scary about this relationship-
that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; (26-28).
Jesus is about the business of washing His bride. We husbands are supposed to be doing the same. Our tool is the Word of God. We, like the prophets of old, bring God’s Word to bear. How do we do so? We start with ourselves. When we are unwashed our attempts to cleanse just make things worse. We need to bathe in God’s Word, to continuously scrub away, by His Spirit, every blot and blemish. We lead by example, acknowledging our dependence on His grace. There are precious things more powerful in leading anyone under our care into greater obedience than for us to grow into greater obedience and for us to repent for our failures.
Which makes it all the more scary. We ought to know just how far we have to go. We don’t feel qualified, equipped. We instead feel terrified and overwhelmed. We feel failure breathing down our neck, our conscience and the devil together reminding us of just how far we have to go. All of which is destined to wash from our selves the stain of self-reliance. The most important thing we can do in taking up this God-given call, is to pray for strength, wisdom, perseverance, insight, faith. We husbands are to go the church’s Husband and ask Him to wash from us our fear and our failure.
We are, in short, to repent and believe the gospel. We are to turn from our sin, affirm our dependence on His grace, and believe in the sufficiency of His provision. The solution to our failures as husbands is the success of the church’s Husband. Reformation comes as the bride of Christ submits to the ongoing work of her Husband. Part of that is husbands following in His path. More of that is husbands looking to His cross and leading our joint heirs of His grace there.
