We are all quick to take offense, and all rather blind to the offenses we cause. That’s because we think we are the center of the universe, and all others orbit around us. Consider Roy Costner IV, a young hero in South Carolina, the valedictorian of Liberty High, who, several years ago, when giving his speech at graduation, tore up his school-approved speech and proceeded to recite the Lord’s Prayer. I joined the thousands of others who commended the young man for his courage. Good on him for being willing to face an angry world who doesn’t want to hear about the true and living God. There is much to be commended in the young man’s earnest heart.
We Christians are, I suspect, all tired of getting kicked around by our increasingly militant secular culture. A baker in Colorado has, multiple times, faced the wrath of the state for his refusal to make a cake for two homosexual men who wanted to celebrate what they mistakenly call their marriage. As even the mainstream media now admits, conservatives have been targeted by the IRS. With each passing day the targets on our backs grow.
The Apostle Paul, as we know, was not averse to claiming his legal rights when the state abused him. He refused to be released quietly after a wrongful arrest and later insisted on a full trial, as was his right as a Roman citizen. He knew the law better than the state’s lawyers. We ought not to be ashamed to do the same, to insist on our God-given rights. What we ought not to do, however, is trample on the rights of others in the name of Jesus. Which is, however unintentionally, what this young man did.
To help us grasp this admittedly counter-intuitive truth, all we need do is imagine the shoe on the other foot. Suppose that the valedictorian of Liberty High had been a Muslim. Suppose he had had his speech approved by the authorities, went forward, tore that speech up, and recited a Muslim prayer. Suppose he simply chanted over and over for his allotted time, “Allah Akbar.” How would we feel then? I suspect some of you, already unhappy with me, are thinking now, “Had that happened the mainstream press would not have said a word.” You may be right. But I’m not writing for the mainstream media, but for Christians. The question is not what would they have done, but what would we have done? I suspect we would have been upset, and rightly so.
The problem in both instances is that the public schools are financed by taxes, money taken against the will of those from whom it is taken. We don’t like, indeed we find it morally reprehensible for the state to take our money and use it in any way that gives the impression of endorsing Islam. As we should. It was Thomas Jefferson who said, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” That our opinions are true, that is, that the Christian faith is true and Islam (or the militant secularism of the state’s schools) false does not change the principle. Indeed it makes our sins that much the worse. We of all people should know better. We are indwelt by the Spirit of the living God. We have a true Word that calls us to turn the other cheek and to do unto others. Yet we applaud doing to the Muslim what we would protest the Muslim doing to us. We are called to a boldness that will proclaim the Lordship of Christ over all things. We are called to a humility that would insist that we must treat others as we would like to be treated. And we are called not to celebrate when we fail, but to repent.
Thesis 52 We must believe God loves us.
Love is one of the good words. Just as no one particularly labors to have words like death, or cruelty associated with themselves or their ideas, so everyone wants to lay claim to love. The devil is quite content for all of us to love love, as long as he maintains the power to define the term. The mainline American church follows mainstream American culture and defines love principally in permissive terms. Love means never requiring others to say they are sorry. God’s love for us, in this scheme, makes our sins insignificant (as well as the atonement of Christ.) God winks us into heaven, because we’re so valuable and lovable, and He’s such a swell guy (or girl).
The devil’s goal in promoting this nonsense, is not, in the end, directed at either liberal professing Christians nor those who are not professing Christians. Instead, his enemy is always those who trust in Christ alone. In getting them to embrace this foolish idea of love, he tempts us to deny or at least diminish the sound idea of God’s love. Evangelicals, at least the fundamentalist and the Reformed wings, want to affirm the reality of God’s wrath. He is a just and holy God. His wrath, justice and holiness are more real than we will ever realize. But they ought never to be contrasted with His love. We should not diminish any attribute of God to emphasize any others. The Lord our God is one. The Bible tells us time and again that we are loved by God. Our duty is to believe Him.
This is, in the end, the very end of the work of Christ. God’s goal was not merely that we would end up forgiven for our sins. This was but a step in a longer process whereby we who are by nature children of wrath become His own children. Our justification is in the service of our adoption. Jesus, His beloved Son, suffered for our sins so that we might become by grace His beloved sons.
I spent over a decade of my public ministry seeking to make known this startling reality- that if we are in Christ, we are loved by our heavenly Father as much now as we will ever be. Even when we remember our evangelical theology, even when we sing with our lips that we are justified by faith alone, too many of us too often seem to think that God is angry with us when we sin, and that we keep His anger far from us by not sinning. We long for heaven in part because we know that there we will sin no more. Guilt will no longer stand between us and our Father. The truth is, however, that guilt does not stand between us. Our guilt was driven away as far as the east is from the west two thousand years ago. God’s anger at our sins was spent on Calvary.
Over the past few years I have repented of seeking preaching this message. I no longer believe that I ought to be seeking to persuade people that God loves them now as much as He ever will love them. My goal now is to persuade Christians of this truth, far more shocking still- if you are in Christ, God loves you now as much as He loves His own Son. This is the good news. Not only were our sins forever expunged at Calvary, but the very obedience of Jesus became ours. He is as pleased with us as He is with His first born Son. We are now joint heirs with Him. We are in union with Him.
Believing this precious truth changes everything. So much of our fear, our weakness is driven by a failure to rest in this truth. We long for the approval of men, because we do not believe we have the approval of God. And so we fail to be faithful. Faith, however, is believing God. He has told us that He loves us. He has told us that He has made us His Sons. By his grace may He bless us with hearts that believe Him.
There are any number of theological questions that manage, at one and the same time, to elicit arguments and yet create no division. These are issues over which both sides, while disagreeing on the issue at hand agree that the issue at hand is both not easy to solve, and not all that important. John Calvin once sagely said about speculative theology, “Where the Lord has determined to be silent I will refrain from inquiry.” While we affirm that the Bible is clear, we acknowledge that some things are more clear than others. The answer to this question scores pretty low on the clear scale.
There are, historically, two perspectives on the issue. The slightly less common view is called traducianism. It holds that the creation of a human soul is as natural as the creation of the human body, that conception itself is the immediate cause of both body and soul. This view has two advantages over its competitor, both of which take us back to the beginning. First, it honors the principle that God has rested from the work of creation. The first six days, Genesis tells us, were morning and evening. The seventh day has no such description, suggesting that in some sense we are still in the seventh day and that God, while ruling actively through His providence, is no longer creating. Second, it makes the doctrine of original sin just a tad easier to swallow. If souls come about naturally, just as Levi was in the loins of Abraham when he paid a tithe to Melchizedek, so were we all in the loins of Adam at the fall, and so his guilt becoming ours is that much more clear.
The more common view is the creationist view which holds that souls are immediately created by the hand of God. This view affirms a different form of continuity between Adam and the rest of humanity. Instead of future generations branching off Adam, creationism has each of us being made by an act of God just as Adam was. God breathed life into Adam. He does the same for us. In addition the creationist view better reflects the language of Psalm 139:13, “For You created my innermost parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.”
I suspect the debates on this question continue for two reasons. First, people interested in such things love to debate. Second, there are implications or tendencies for each view that could conceivably lead someone astray. The former view is stronger in affirming the unity of body and soul, the latter tending a bit more to the error of seeing men as souls in bodies. The latter view is stronger in seeing God active and at work, the former mildly veiling the glory of God’s work in making us.
If we are careful to affirm that God is at work, that all men begin their existence tainted by sin, that God is not guilty over the previous truth, that Jesus is fully God and fully man, like us in every way yet without sin, that all men are stamped with the image of God, then either position is safe and should be seen as such by those adopting the other position. The danger in this debate is less that we will end up embracing some kind of grievous error, more that we will swell up with foolish pride. The solution is to remember that the important truth is that He is our Maker, and for those in Christ, our redeemer and Father.
I have noticed in recent years a great upsurge in objections to the objective truth to what we are. Anytime I speak of the believer as a sinner, let alone a miserable sinner, I can always count on someone to come along behind and chasten me for forgetting how God sees us. They will, happily, often do so by reminding me of the great truths of the gospel. But one thing the gospel doesn’t do is make our sin disappear on this side of the veil. It doesn’t make us incapable of committing this sin or that (with the exception of blaspheming the Holy Spirit). If we define “sinner” simply as “one who sins” then it doesn’t cause us to cease being sinners. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we are removed from our calling to recognize and give thanks for His mercy.
When we get ahead of ourselves, when we start to think not that we are deemed fine fellows by our Maker due to the life and death of His Son for us, but think instead that we are fine fellows in ourselves, we lose sight of the marvel of mercy. We forget not only to give thanks for the redemption of our souls, but for the preservation of our bodies. We forget not only to give thanks for the goodness in our lives in all the things that give us pleasure, but for the goodness in our lives in all the things that give us pain. In short, when we miss the sin, we miss the mercy. When we forget what we are due, we forget all that we have been given.
We forget we are sinners, we forget to give thanks for His mercy, precisely because we are still sinners. We preach this truth not to beat us down, but that we would look up. Jesus told us that the man who beat his breast, crying, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner” went to his home justified (Luke 18:13). He went home then joyful, thankful. He did not, however, from that moment forward never again beat his breast. He did not, from that moment forward, never again cry out to God, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” But each time he returned to pray, he prayed the same prayer, and went home with the same joy. If we would remember the joy of our salvation, we must needs remember the sorrow of our damnation.
Our lives are faithful liturgies by which we remember the joy of our thanksgiving. We remember to remember our condition before we are redeemed. We remember to remember our condition after we are redeemed. We remember to enter into the graces He continues to show us, remembering that His mercies are new each day (Lamentations 3:22). We remember to hope in the promises of future grace, remembering that one day we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (I John 1:3). And all along the way we give thanks, that He did not destroy us, but died for us when we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), that He will never leave us not forsake us as we walk to the Celestial City (Deuteronomy 31:6), that He who began a good work in us will carry it through to the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6).
There is, purportedly, a movement out there, a movement out of the church. A bevy of young, feckless and deformed men and women have weighed the evangelical church in the balance and found us wanting. They self-identify as ex-vangelicals. And boy do they love to tell their stories. As they grew up inside the church they noticed that it was full of sinners, based on the church’s own standard, the Word of God. We evangelicals are forever doing what we’re not supposed to, sinning in both ordinary and grievous ways. Shocking, I know. Because evangelicals are always droning on and on about how good and perfect we are.
As they make their way in the world they discover yet another failure on our part- we fail to measure up to the world’s standard. We’re accused of being bigoted, narrow, lacking in compassion for others because we believe boys are boys and girls girls, because we believe the sexual union is for married couples, and that marriage is one man and one woman. We’re so embarrassing that they simply have to treat us like tax collectors, lest they be sullied by us. Our calling is to be ashamed and put away our judgments and join them in their world of love and compassion. If we don’t, they’ll continue to treat us as pariahs. Because we’re not broadminded and loving like they are. We deserve their hatred and opprobrium because we’re so hateful and opprobrious.
I believe it was Tim Keller who once explained that on more than one occasion he was talking with a young man who had been a part of the church, but grew up and wanted to walk away. He would ask this simple question, “What’s her name?” The motive, Keller understood, whatever intellectual ribbons and bows the young man might have adorned it with, was moral, specifically, sexual. The move out of the church was necessary to starve the conscience so the fun could continue unabated.
It’s not always that that leads them out. Sometimes it’s this- they can’t stay in the church because they can’t stand the thought of people’s sins being forgiven, especially anyone who has sinned against them. You know, just like the Pharisees. The idea of grace is repugnant to the lawless, for it means there is a law, and they don’t measure up.
My hope and prayer is that ex-vangelicals will all become evangelicals once again, that they will repent and believe the gospel, that saves sinners like evangelicals. I also pray, however, that those who haven’t left won’t be drawn away by the Siren call of the ex-vangelicals as they seek to drive us away from rather than to Jesus because of our all too real guilt. Are we a judgmental bunch? For certain. Do we have so many skeletons in our closets that they can’t follow social distancing guidelines? We do. Everyone of their accusations against the evangelical rings true, not because we’re evangelicals, but because we’re people. The accusations ring true about everyone. The difference between those inside and those outside the church, however, is that those inside acknowledge our sin, and cry out for God’s mercy in Christ, while those outside stand on the public corner and thank themselves that they are not like other men. Which is why, by His grace, we go home justified.
