Christian Discrimination and Guilt

Christians in the West look on with confusion as they ponder their apparently unforgivable guilt. They cannot imagine that their rejection by the world is anything except their own fault.

How different is it to learn of the posture which Jesus himself taught? Recognizing that the outsider to Israel’s covenant was not privileged in the same way that the insider was, Jesus emphasized that particularity. We could even say that Jesus discriminated.

When the Syrophoenician woman wanted Jesus to perform a deliverance miracle for the benefit of her daughter, Jesus discriminated.

He said, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). He clearly affirmed there were distinctions of privilege that discriminated between the metaphorical children and dogs.

We may call Jesus’ approach localism, nativism, sphere sovereignty, and even a sort of racial privilege. But truly his approach was to see the electing, particular choice of God in setting his special, discriminating covenant affection upon Israel. This special covenant discrimination was so special, that a Gentile or covenant outsider needed to join themselves to Israel in some manner in order to get the residual benefit of Israel’s blessings.

When Jesus was approached by the Syrophoenician woman, she was not joining herself to Israel but was coming to Jesus. So in Old Covenant terms, she was not doing what was required to get the discriminating blessing of God reserved for Israel. Jesus knew this, but Jesus received the woman’s appeal directly to himself.

We are told of how this outsider responded to Jesus, in verse 28, “But she answered him, ‘Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” The woman clearly understood that she had no right to the blessings and that they belonged to the privileged ones (the children). But she appealed to Jesus for mercy. Not only that, she was content to get a small portion of the privilege (the children’s crumbs). Humility and gratitude were revealed in her appeal.

Jesus granted her request. He extended the privilege to her. He didn’t have to. He chose to do so. This privilege was still discriminating (not all lepers in Israel were healed see Luke 4:27), but it was sovereignly extended to an undeserving person. So long before John Calvin or even before Augustine, Jesus exercised a sovereign extension of privilege to the undeserving. He did this out of his free grace, and according to his own fidelity to a new covenant which he ratified in his own blood.

Christians in the West can feel guilty that they must extend the privileges of gospel forgiveness to everyone else. Yet they fail to see that the extension of those privileges is conditional on the recipients’ repentance, humility, gratitude, and loyalty to Jesus. No one in the world has a right or entitlement to the discriminating privileges of the New Covenant. It is not for the church to convince the world that the gospel is good enough for them. Rather it is for the world to humble themselves and beg for the children’s crumbs. Only when the worldly dogs appeal to Christ for mercy can they have the children’s privileged breadcrumbs given to them.

The Respect of Men

When the apostle Paul writes to his apprentice Timothy about the qualities of an overseer (Gr. Episkopos), he adds an important quality for all men. He must gain respect. Paul says, “He must be well thought of by outsiders” (1 Timothy 3:7a).

Of course, the larger term “outsiders” can include men as well as women who are outside of the boundaries of the local church. Yet for a man, and in Paul’s teaching, it must be a man (v.2 ‘one woman man’), to be well-thought of by other men is to gain their respect.

To be well-thought of by other men may mean that they don’t agree with your viewpoints, your beliefs, or your confessions. But it does mean that you have lived your life with duty, dependability, integrity, resolve, and perseverance. There can be no respect from men without these things.

Respect from men renders a man qualified to be seen and heard among the company of all men in any given place. The fool will be mocked. The unreliable will be shunned. But the respected will be recognized and heard. In this sense, men who have gained the respect of men have earned the right to be heard.

The respect of men does not mean that a man has to be friends with the world, which is prohibited (James 4.4). A man can stand facing his own choices and actions without support from men, yet still be respected by them. He can even gain respect from his enemies when they see him prosecute his arguments and battles with high character.

 This kind of respect will be required if an outsider is to think well of an insider, such as the potential overseer in the church. That Christian man will have obeyed Matt 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” The men on the outside may not be glorifying God, but they will see the good works of a man who has the respect of men. The hope is that seeing those good works will result in a conversion among men, not just their respect. On the last day of judgment, even those outsiders will be made to recognize that those good works came from God to the glory of the Father.

Christians can forget about the necessity of respect among men. They can excuse their foolishness, fickleness, rudeness, inconsistency, and unreliability. Then they can assume that they don’t have the respect of men because of an enmity that men have toward Christians. But this misses the point. When a Christian man cannot gain the respect of men, he will not be well thought of by outsiders, and he will show that he doesn’t know how to relate to the wide company of men in the world. Lacking the respect of men comes from a failure of maturity and a lack of masculine character. Without these, a Christian man is disqualified from being an overseer.

Consider how different churches would be if their overseers were men who were respected among men, even outsiders. Such masculine character among the episcopate would bring greater integrity to the office of the pastoral role, as well as greater gravity to the church’s presence in the world.

Europe: Graffiti on the Walls of Eden

Walking past the elite Dutch military unit we heard the announcement that all public transport to Amsterdam from Belgium was shut down due to a storm. The storm referred to was full of rain, but more than likely the true storm was the threat of class warfare in the streets of major cities in France.

Despite the new reign of terror in neighborhoods from Marseille to outer Paris, the beauty of France outside those pockets were left untouched and uninterested.

You may have seen the images of cars burning, reports of a mayor’s family being injured, a fireman dying in another arson, and gangs of young Muslim children looting the luxury brands of Paris. But for those living with joie de vivre in St Tropez or St-Remy de-Provence, there was no evidence that anything was wrong in the world, except lineups for flavoured ice cream or a two-hour lunch that took closer to three to complete.

The new terrors and the old tastes illustrate a truth that is increasingly clear: there is both a beauty and a darkness to the Europe I have seen. Seeing Europe is like being shocked by graffiti on the walls of Eden.

The Bordered Beauty of Europe

Driving across France (we didn’t get hi speed train tickets in time) revealed the French countryside in all its productive beauty. France looks like a country where anything could grow if you drop it on the ground. Grapes, barley, olives, alfalfa, Charolais beef, wheat, lavender, and flowers of every kind. The productivity from the soil to the table is cherished everywhere in the country. As a result, there is a clear sense of order. Life is to be carried out decently and in order. Every field has a fence. Every orchard is set in rows. For all its variety there are borders. Every driveway, flowerbed and cereal crop has a border.

People don’t normally make the connection between beauty and borders. But God has established order and beauty together. The binaries of male and female possess beauty because they are distinguished. The kinds of animals and plants are beautiful because they are just that, “kinds”.

The beauty of Europe is a bordered beauty and it remains beautiful when distinctions are clear. As mentioned before, there are differences between men and women maintained. There are differences between work and rest. Lunch lasts from noon to 2pm after which no French restaurant is open until 7pm. In the Netherlands, no shop is open before 8:30am and everything is closed by 5pm. The Dutch get a lot down in those hours, but after hours, the country goes relatively silent.

Having learned for centuries how to create order from chaos, both the French and the Dutch make their appearances distinct. The French are much more concerned with fashion. But both countries care enough about themselves that they are a slimmer type of people than North Americans. Certainly, they have not given in to the idea currently in North America that obese people ought to be celebrated for their health and appearances. There is a border between what is healthy looking and what is unhealthy. This was refreshing to see and reflects God’s ordered, bordered world.

France is complex, especially Paris, when it comes to borders. The borders between arrondissements or neighborhoods are clear. But when it comes to driving, the lanes in traffic circles with 6 exits are merely suggestive. To drive in Paris is to accept one of the great automotive endurance challenges: high speed, narrow streets, presumptive pedestrians and aggressive drivers. Nevertheless, the apartment blocks designed by Haussmann for Napoleon III create an ordered, bordered context for all of the vivid sights and smells of Paris.

The Un-bordered Darkness of Europe.

The sinister element that shadows every beautiful arch, flower petal, or chardonnay resides in the godlessness of Europe. France has an embedded Roman Catholicism that is “universal” but nominally “Roman”. So the festivals and idols of Mary (call it “veneration” if you wish, she is clearly worshipped), and intentional distance from being too serious about religion, all contribute to a godlessness even among those with a culturally religious memory.

The other sinister element which is even darker is the calculated secularism of the consortium of upper classes. I spoke with a Christian teacher at a church in Aix-en-Provence who warned of the “elites” who were applying further controls upon life in order to exploit the populace. He called the Brussels base for the European Union as a “temple of idolatry”. He was not a radical man, but one who was informed about the threat that exists when, as Peter Jones describes it, “The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back”. Gnostic features (I know it’s not the same as first century Gnosticism), seem to rule the day. Tight inner circles are created with “inner rings” (CS Lewis’ term), making outsiders desperate to get in, while insiders wield gatekeeping power to filter people onto the ladder or to pull the ladder up after them as they play in the top of the treehouse.

Another layer of darkness is the blindness of Islam. Muslims have migrated to Europe in record numbers. Many Muslims have come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, God, the Son. Yet there are still the majority who remain in the futilities of Islam’s ladder-climbing approach to religion. A religion of futility leads to many expressions of desperation, as witnessed in France with the émeutes or riots. All restraint is thrown off regardless of the stated reasons for doing so. This is part of the argument of non-christian author Douglas Murray, in his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe.

The last darkness is the lack of evangelical churches, preachers and schools. Like the rest of the West, France has a hard time finding good preachers who can plant churches. Travelling through France you can see many impressive church buildings. But is there spiritual life within? Compared to the cathedrals of Catholicism, evangelical Protestants have the barest, merely functional buildings. But within their walls resides a spiritual life that differs immensely from the distant ritualism of Rome. Sadly, there are not enough of these new “churches in the desert”. John Calvin Seminary in Aix-en-Provence stands as a hub for reformed theological training but it is small compared to the need for preachers. France awaits more responses from those who will say, “Here am I. Send me”.

Of course the Netherlands appeared different. Multiplied Reformed denominations can give the impression that Christians are in the majority in the land of Kuyper and the Canons of Dordt. But they are not. Christians there are like all Western nations, a marginal group with little political or cultural power.

It is a great irony that the Netherlands has had such an influential Christian thinker as Kuyper, yet the Netherlands would be so thoroughly secularized. Even the plight of the Dutch farmers whose land is threatened to be appropriated, has been met with a lot of equivocation, the “on the one hand, on the other hand” kind of argument. The Netherlands especially exemplifies the technocratic future of bicycles, 15 minute cities, and more public transit. Few Dutch evangelicals appear to speak against the possibility of reduced private ownership.

On the subject of Kuyper, whose memory touches many of the denominations in the Netherlands, he was not universally praised among the Christians I spoke to. Although he was a part of the Afscheiding of 1834, separating from the state church, Kuyper’s theology lead to a collapse in evangelism and the necessity of seeing the need for children in Christian homes to be converted. The second generation liberalism that resulted from Kuyper’s tribe devastated the Afscheiding denominations and is painfully felt today.

Prospects For a New Eden

Though European beauty remains in nature, she is losing her soul. The vineyards, Haussmann apartments, and cuisine will not be able to deliver lost souls. Totalizing governments cannot deliver souls either. All that will be left is cynicism at the gates of Eden.

The message spoken into this desecration reveals a still small voice of hope. It is the voice of God, the true Word, God enfleshed as messiah, God and Man among men. Jesus Christ is heralded in small churches, prayed to with impassioned voices, praised with joie de vivre, and feared with liberated courage. Hope in Christ pierces the darkness in the small, marginalized gospel communities. And it is in those communities that the Spirit of holiness renews his beatific work.

Only a New Eden, with Christ as Lord will wash away the graffiti from the once beautiful walls of the old Garden.

Despising the Shame

Shame dominates our public and private spaces. It drives people to signal their virtue because they fear being publicly shamed if they don’t. Shame tortures our innermost thoughts as we repeatedly ask ourselves, “What will other people think of me?”

If our shame was personified and it thought about Good Friday or Easter, it would generally manifest itself as guilt that we don’t feel bad enough about our sin, or don’t feel good enough about God’s grace. The goodness of Good Friday feels detached and abstract. The triumph of Easter morning should be celebrated with a bang instead of our tired whimper.

But the shame of social guilt in our psychologized world is not the big issue. Instead, the shame of guilt before God is what we must deal with. Adam led the way in this when he and his wife hid in shame from God because of their sin. Instead of going to God and asking for help, they fled from God and tried to cover their exposure with whatever they could get their hands on.

So our social shame is merely a symptom of our shame before God. We are guilty. As Isaiah cried out, “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the LORD of hosts”.

Our anxieties and depression find their source in this objective foundational guilt before God. The shame is the advance pain of judgement. It is the dread of the doom to come. So, any attempt to banish shame without some kind of atonement is phony. Yet a society that wants to feel good about itself eradicates any mention of shame, while we all carry the load of guilt untouched and un-atoned for.

When the struggling Jewish Christians of the first century A.D. felt the social stigma of following Jesus as their Messiah, they needed to be reminded of what Christ had done on that first Good Friday. He went to the cross, according to Hebrews 12:2, “despising the shame”.

Whose shame was he despising?

In one sense it was his own, or at least how he was being externally perceived and portrayed. He was being treated as if he was the rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21:23, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”. He was mocked by the soldiers and derided by the crowds. They heaped all their social shame upon him.  In that sense, Jesus was “despising the shame”.

The taunts and lies and caricatures did not stop him. He refused to be swayed from his course. He refused to give in to the social shame heaped upon him. In this way Jesus Christ was a portrait of courage. He had no tolerance for the shame imposed upon him. He did not accept it as true, but he endured despite the shame and despising it.

Jesus despised the shame of others too. Jesus associated himself with the shame before God that sinners bore truly and rightly. Jesus was well within his rights to disassociate himself from guilty, shameful sinners. He didn’t need to mess with them and be dragged down into the gutter with them. But he chose guilt by association. He took the shame of others upon himself because he took their legal guilt upon himself objectively.

Only God could see that guilt laid on Jesus. Only Jesus could bear the shameful curse against sinners. In fact, Jesus was “not ashamed to call them brothers” because he had been “made perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus suffered in the place of the guilty and the ashamed.

Even the terror of the judgement of God against the guilt of sin did not make Jesus shrink back. Jesus knew the calculus. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). If He was to be associated with the shame and guilt of his people, he would need to pay the debt, the debt of death. But Jesus stepped up and he didn’t balk at paying the tab. He despised the shameful bill, pulled out his wallet and paid with the promissory note of his own life.

When Jesus rose from the dead on the first Easter morning, the news was good and those who believe in Jesus enjoy “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The security in Christ is so solid, and the Father’s love so enduring that shame is cast away and in its place is the powerful motive of the apostle Paul:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17)

Is your anxiety or depression or fear of social shame blinding you to what Jesus has done? He despised the shame for sinners like you. Then you will have the courage to keep “a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”

This Easter, see how Jesus has dealt with sin and shame. You don’t have to accept social shame as true. In Christ, you don’t need to believe the lie that you aren’t acceptable enough. Because of the Son, the Father smiles upon you. Find your security in Him, and you will look upon him with an unashamed, “unveiled face” (2 Cor 3:18).

This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition Canada

Three Questions to Ask About Revival

A few thoughts:
A revival is a deepening of personal communion with God according to the Scriptures.
It is not merely a reanimation of the church’s corporate life.

Do we have a correct view of God?

Do we have a correct understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Do we have criteria for evaluating whether we would be in a revival or not?

We want to pursue God further, even if we are mistaken about a revival or a claim to one. We want to seek God with deeper personal communion according to the Scriptures and trust God for the results.

For a helpful reflection, see JI Packer’s talk:

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-glory-of-god-and-the-reviving-of-religion

Luther and Politics

green and beige temple under the blue sky

Luther became willingly involved in politics if one of two circumstances were given. Sometimes he felt that the political issue could not really be understood without explaining its theological implications…The second situation which might involve Luther in politics arose when he believed that the respect which he enjoyed among some of the great of this world might enable him to influence for peace and justice men who would not listen to anyone else. Here he acted as an individual Christian citizen.

George Forell, Luther and Politics, 5.

Examples of Political Gnosticism

In Postliberal Order, Patrick Deneen summarizes Eric Voegelin on political gnosticism:

What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” – i.e., natural – family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life – the working class. The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse – the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death. All the while these various mandates followed the trajectory of a raft of other economic and social policies that had led to the empowerment of a disembodied “laptop class” – or what N.S. Lyons has dubbed “the Virtuals” – at the expense of the working class, or the “Physicals.” The decades following America’s victory in the Cold War was a perfectly scripted expression of Gnostic belief and power – ironically, the pyhrric lap of a “classical and Christian” civilization that was enjoying the fruits of victory over its Gnostic foe.

Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

On Choosing a Sermon Series

How do you decide which book of the bible to preach through?

1. Well balanced diet:

Have you only been preaching through Paul’s letters, or the Gospels or the Psalms? What about OT Narrative, or the Minor Prophets, or Wisdom Lit, or Apocalyptic? Switching between genres and testaments helps to teach “the whole counsel of God”(Acts 20:27)

2. Maturity

What are the most obvious areas your church needs to grow in? Are they fixated on the present, then OT prophets or Revelation could lift their eyes up. Is there a lack of understanding about how the church should operate, especially the pastor’s relationship to the congregation? The Pastoral Epistles is the goto. If general biblical illiteracy is a problem, try preaching through the large OT narratives of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. And of course, it is always good to preach about the life of our Lord Jesus in the Gospels.

3. Calendar:

Churches operate on an annual calendar, even if they don’t follow the historic Christian calendar with its mushroomed number of saints’ days. You need to decide if you are going to have an open-ended series that pauses for Christmas and Easter. You can have a series that runs for a season (spring, summer, winter). You may want to have a short series then a long one. Estimating how many sermons match the number of Sundays available can give you a rough idea of how the series fits into your church calendar. Or you can ditch the calendar and keep your congregation guessing if you like.

4. Ability:

Few young men have the ability to sustain a long series like D.M. Lloyd-Jones. By long I mean a series that goes through a large book of the Bible at a slow, lingering pace. What ends up happening is that each single verse sermon becomes a springboard to talk about other things. However, when this is repeated, usually a sense of the context of a book of the bible is lost. We have to remember that New Testament epistles were letters read aloud in a single sitting. So the ability of a young preacher (or older one) may not match the skill needed to sustain the attention of the congregation in a granular study. Or the young preacher may easily distort the message of a whole book of the bible by granular proof-texting. Of course, if a preacher can engage in such epic sermon series, the congregation may be richly blessed. But there are many pastors whose own hubris assumed that they could “do like MLJ” and not get off track.

5. Challenge:

It is good to challenge yourself to try to preach difficult books of the bible. You shouldn’t do this as self-indulgence out of intellectual curiosity. But thinking about the souls of your people, ask yourself if they would be fed and equipped by a more challenging study like the book of Hebrews or the book of Job. Often, congregants are excited to have a sermon series preached on books of the bible that they have struggled to understand. So challenging yourself as a preacher and the congregation as listeners can be very fruitful.

6. Desire:

At the heart of the matter, the preacher should recognize what their soul needs. Does your soul need confrontation, encouragement, examples, instruction or application? Knowing what you want and what you think you need goes a long way to determining what you will preach. In other words, it is the question, “What is God teaching you?” You will find that if God has been teaching you from his Word, what you preach from that Word learned in your study will become remarkably relevant to your hearers. In this way, the Word is “living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). This will be true for you and them too.

Worldviews and Kingdoms.

There is a debate in Christian circles particularly in reformed circles about approaches for thinking through the Christian’s relation to society. This can include the church as an institution and how it relates to the broader society as well as how individual Christians relate to the world in which they live. The two basic schools of thought are the transformationalist view, sometimes associated with Abraham Kuyper. The other school of thought is connected with Lutheran theology and it posits that there are two kingdoms the spiritual kingdom governed by the church and the temporal kingdom governed by the state.

For Baptist believers who recognize that the newness of the new covenant requires only covenant members who were born from above, they are in a difficult position. Since they can only rely on conversions, there is little in the way of Christian transformational work that they can do which has New Covenant value.

However, the transformed life of a redeemed sinner expresses itself in new ways of thinking, rejecting the noetic effects of sin, and offering their work as worship to God. This latter type of transformational ethics leads to Christian ways of thinking and acting.

The two kingdoms approach can seem to lead to quietistic Anabaptism which verges on gnostic dualism. Spiritual is good, physical is bad.

What is strange about the worldview position is that it gets employed by both the right and the left. On the one hand, you can have an aggressive type of right-wing Kuyperianism from Moscow Idaho, while you can also have an elitist, left-wing Kuyperian from the Neocalvinians of Calvin College or the Institute for Christian Studies.

Left-wing evangelicals have extolled the church as an agent of transformation, using Critical Race Theory and policies for social justice, while right-wing evangelicals can call for an end to the liberal democracy in seeking to transform the culture into a hybrid theonomic society.

Is the answer to merely eschew right and left, always being in the middle in our cultural transformation work? This seems to be the position of those who are called “elite evangelicals”, who position themselves as apolitical, all the while tacitly supporting powerful cultural movements because they will not commit to resisting them. Such neutrality might work if it wasn’t for “the world, the flesh and the devil” who assail the Christian in thought word and deed.

So the two kingdoms approach admits the raging tide of the world against the church, but recognizes the sovereignty of God over all, working through even the state powers (eg. Babylon and Rome), so that general order is maintained while the gospel is faithfully proclaimed and promoted, even by suffering witnesses. The constant temptation is for the church to shrink back (the argument of Hebrews), to assimilate to the position of their oppressors. This is where the two kingdoms approach can fail to bolster the antithesis between the church and the world. Two kingdoms may presume to have temporal kingdoms that are deeply flawed, yet still organized around the vestiges of Christian outlook.

What remains for us to discern is not the absolute rightness or wrongness of Philadelphia or Escondido. Rather, we must see in both positions the corrective for the other, not only to improve our understanding but to clarify our interpretation of a post-Christian world faced by those who wield weapons of warfare (2 Cor 10:1-4) that are metaphysically suited for the task.

Church Unity

The apostles are the plenipotentiary witnesses of Christ and the founders of the Church. Therefore the legitimacy and also the unity of the Church lie in its apostolicity. There is the true Church, and there is the true unity of the Church, where the Church is one with the apostles, for there the Church of the Kingdom reveals itself.”

Herman Ridderbos, When the Time Had Fully Come, 24