So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12
O Holy Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I praise you this morning that you are the Creator of all things, all of my life and all of my time. My time is in your hands, O Father in heaven. According to your wisdom and care you distribute to me the days that you have for me, as plates passed at a table or an inheritance passed to beloved children. Help me, Father to recognize the time which your incarnate Son Jesus Christ has, an eternal time of humanity glorified mysteriously yet unmixedly joined to the divine nature which is categorically beyond time and thus timeless. Grant me your Spirit, O Father, even the Spirit of your Son, so that I may have the Spirit’s wisdom to know what I ought to do and not do in the brevity of life. Thank you for giving me such heavenly math until my heart is made yours.
The trucker convoys that have arrived at Ottawa and at the US border crossings in Alberta and Manitoba cannot be ignored. They have brought a new level of political engagement not seen for many years.
Lack of Political Leadership
Why have the trucks rolled? Canadians, most of whom are working-class, have supported the truck protest because they see no representative leadership available. Of course, there are MP’s who have been elected. But the fact is that the Opposition does not provide much in the way of real critique towards the government. The government itself has operated in a realm that doesn’t seek parliamentary filtering but acts independently. This is the way that many Western governments have operated, moving away from consensus-building democracy to state-directed democracy.
The trucker convoys have been supported by people of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, but they do not see representative leadership voicing the concerns that they have. The convoy is not merely a ‘conservative’ movement but is more like a rap on the knuckles to the political class. The convoy calls down the old political curse, “A pox on both your houses”.
The dismay of Canadians is shown to be well-placed when the Prime Minister fails to exemplify the traits which he has always projected, namely, empathy and authenticity. When these traits are only selectively employed, they reveal a deeper and more damning character trait, hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of Prime Minister Trudeau is becoming so large that international attention is being drawn to it, which appears to be the audience he favours the most.
Riding the Tiger of Identity Politics
The trucker convoy has clarified a further problem in the Canadian political scene. The divisive identity politics of the Trudeau circle cannot be branded as “sunny ways,” in the manner of Wilfred Laurier, a slogan which the Liberals embraced after the defeat of Stephen Harper. The convoy, with all of its ethnic and geographic diversity, was not given an inch by Trudeau. Instead, he doubled down on slanderous accusations against the convoy. The evidence for the appearance of a nazi flag and a Confederate flag at the rally has been widely suspected of being planted. One news organization has a cash reward available to discover the identity of either of these flag holders. It has even been suspected that Justin Trudeau’s personal photographer was following the flag bearer around when both quickly disappeared.
Only the opprobrium of white supremacy could give Trudeau the moral authority to dismiss the convoy. Yet as many non-caucasian convoy supporters have attested, they are not white supremacists.
Unlike the Black Lives Matter protests, the trucker convoy is not promoting identity politics, but unifying politics. The Liberal government has been riding the tiger of these identity politics and there is nowhere for them to easily get off.
Even the Twitterati in India thought Trudeau was due for a comeuppance. Pundits thought it was highly ironic that Trudeau was condemning a protest in Canada when he had the presumption to support a protest in India.
Yet his too-quick quarantine looked cowardly, and his positive Covid test communicated the very point that the truckers were trying to make: vaccines might be okay, but mandatory vaccination does not limit the spread of Omicron. However, mandates have crushing consequences on lives and livelihoods.
The Creative Offence
In an internet age, you would expect the protests of working-class Canadians to take place in some kind of online boycott. But the brilliance of the truckers’ convoy lies in their physicality. Like a large winger parked in front of the goalie, a large Kenworth is nearly impossible to move. The convoy has shown a creative offence that politicians would never have dreamed up. But in this new power play, anything can happen as the truckers effectively “crash the net”. Working-class Canadians are taking a shift on the offence. In so doing they are creating a shift in the whole game.
If It Was Me
If it was me, and I was organizing the truck convoy in Ottawa, I would rapidly build out the organization of convoy so that there is a lasting political movement. I’ve heard they have provincial ‘captains’. They ought to work at identifying federal, provincial and municipal allies, media allies, and allies in the corporate world. They have made their voices heard, but the next step is to build some lasting foundations for their movement. Maybe they should institute a series of lawsuits at multiple levels (see Brian Peckford’s lawsuit). They could also hire some well-known new media people (youtube or podcasting) who could begin a direct content drip that can last after the convoy is over. Their greatest challenge is getting their message out to the insulated classes in the major cities. Currently the Rogers/CTV/CBC media consortium has been just as creative as the convoy in finding story angles to undermine the convoy’s legitimacy. However, the fact of government-subsidized media being unable to hide their bias creates further distrust among the populace. All of this costs money to pull off, but they appear to have raised more than the Liberal party did last year.
Those are some thoughts, but what do I know, I’m simply a shepherd.
Harold John Ockenga was the leader of the Neo-Evangelical movement after WWII. He gave a speech where he outlined the challenges for the future. David Wells quoted a section of it in his own message called, The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church.
Ockenga said:
“This nation in its maturity is passing through a crisis which is enmeshing western civilization. Confusion exists on every hand. We are living in a very difficult and bewildering time, but few people realize what tremendous change we are undergoing.”
“The hour has arrived when the people of this nation must think deeply or be damned. We must recognize that we are standing at the crossroads and that there are only two ways that lie open before us. One is the road of the rescue of Western civilization by a re-emphasis on the revival of evangelical Christianity. The other is a return to the dark ages of heathendom, which powerful force is emerging in every phase of our lives today.”
Wells lamented the way that consumer marketing and material success had deluded the church into thinking it was on the right path. But in the rapid changes of the last few years, we see that Ockenga’s fear of “a return to the dark ages of heathendom” has a fearful currency. Heathen views of sex and sexuality and human beings and life itself are permeating society. Governance is giving up rule of law in favour of rule by power over “others”. What Ockenga saw as a crossroads, is for us a path we have taken much further than we may wish to admit.
Still there remains possible “the rescue of Western civilization by a re-emphasis on the revival of evangelical Christianity”. A re-emphasis is needed. A revival is required. Evangelical Christianity is retrievable.
We must move from the easy passions of speaking from our ‘gut’, and move toward the steady discipline of steeled minds who build and sow and stand inexorably against the chaos which promises to consume us, our churches and all that we hold dear.
He is not righteous who does much, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ. Martin Luther.
Every day a person must ask themselves how is it that they can stand before a holy God. If they don’t ask this question they are kidding themselves. If they find wrong answers to this question then they are condemned to live a lie. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ provides a correct answer to this problem.
The gospel of Jesus Christ provides the necessary infrastructure the necessary preconditions the fundamental bases by which a person can stand before a holy God. Only through the blood of Jesus Christ atoning for sin and the rendering of his active obedience in fulfilling all righteousness-only through these can a person put their faith and trust in Christ and so be accepted in the beloved.
Each day we must go about the business of life with these first principles in our mind. These first principles are the principles of the gospel. We must ask ourselves how can we stand before a holy God? As we carry out our day we find that we transgress we injure we break laws we cross boundaries, we trample upon prohibitions, And above all we offend the integrity of the essence of God who is holy. Not only that each day we fail to do all that we ought to do. We omit all of the love all of the right doing all of the right-thinking all of the right being that we ought to do. These omissions are crippling. The omissions expose how sinful we really are. For all that is required of us all that would be in our power yet, we failed to do. And so Jesus has fulfilled the law fulfills all the things that we have omitted. His obedience is impeccable. Even as we failed to climb the mountain of each day, Jesus has climbed it and climbed it again and again and again. There is no aspect of the ascent that Jesus has not mounted he is obeyed all fulfilled all reached the pinnacle and remained. Jesus himself in his moral purity can stand in the presence of God.
So the real and legitimate question of how can we stand before a holy God must be asked in a new way every day. It is the question of justification. How can we be justified before God? Of course, this brings us back to the necessity of a saviour who can both atone for sin receive just punishment for those acts and yet also have fulfilled all the laws demands bringing us not merely to zero but bringing us even to God.
Although scholars may debate whether or not justification by faith alone is the centre of the apostle Paul’s theology, it cannot be debated that justification must be at the centre of ours. Without justification by faith alone, there is no way for sinners like us to stand before a holy God. We’re in trouble if we neglect the answer, or rely upon false answers. We cannot continue to live with any kind of honesty, transparency, authenticity, or reality without justification by faith alone. Only as we have this true answer, namely reliance upon the atonement and the imputation of the obedient righteousness of Jesus Christ, that we received simply by a pure reliance upon him-only as we do that can we have acceptance with God. Only then can we stand.
When Helmut Thielicke, the Lutheran pastor, ran afoul of the Nazi regime in the mid-1930’s he had to wrestle with how to submit to government, how to resist encroachment on the advance of the gospel, and how to discern which political groups to associate with.
In his later volume, titled simply, Politics, published in 1979, he employs much of Luther’s theology, which has come down to us popularly as a Two Kingdoms approach. Nevertheless, Theilicke has a category for understanding totalitarian governments in a way that differs from authoritarian ones. This difference demands a different approach.
Thielicke notes that a state can switch. The state can move from “its sphere of competence as an order of secular power, a kingdom on the left hand, and purports to be a dispenser of salvation.”
This move of totality, is a religious claim on all citizens, all souls.
What is the threshold in Western democracies for a move toward totality? Do the technological abilities of the surveillance state create a new totality even as the remnants of the old liberal democracy offer a familiar facade?
By this late date, evangelicals should be hungering for a genuine revival of the church, aching to see it once again become a place of seriousness where a vivid other-worldliness is cultivated because the world is understood in deeper and truer ways, where worship is stripped of everything extraneous, where God’s Word is heard afresh, where the desolate and broken find sanctuary.”
Sometimes we fight differently, and sometimes old fashioned, pre-internet, real-world, peaceful man behavior is what is called for when dealing with autogynephiles who get aroused by entering women’s spaces.
Men are needed in this fight.
Women are needed in this fight.
Sometimes we fight differently, and sometimes old fashioned, pre-internet, real-world, peaceful man behavior is what is called for when dealing with autogynephiles who get aroused by entering women’s spaces.
— 🅑🅘🅛🅛🅑🅞🅐🅡🅓 🅒🅗🅡🅘🅢 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) July 27, 2021
Extractive Political Leadership
Leaders who exploit or extract from the public good, rather than building, growing or stewarding it. “…helpful if you are trying to understand our current extractive political leadership and its seemingly bizarre indifference to the future.”
This is the first in a series of quotes from the old ‘new’ book, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, by David F. Wells.
Now the divine imperative — “your will be done”– has gone and all that remains is the cacophony of opinions, the coercion offashion, and the confusions of a broken world. The once grand, majestic purposes of God have slipped from our sight. Now what we see are only the blind workings of nature with their tragedies, the impersonal forces of the economy which often seem so callous, the malice of evil people, and the peculiar anxieties of those adrift in a sea of affluence.
My family made the pilgrimage to the Calgary Stampede and visited the Elbow River Camp. Here are a couple of thoughts: 1)Most of the tribal flags of the Treaty 7 nations incorporated a Union Jack. It was quite striking to see so many representations of Great Britain on Canadian soil. In the flags, there is a keen awareness of the relationship between these Treaty 7 signers and the Crown. Since these nations border the United States, it seems like these flags were clearly distinguishing who the nations had brokered their treaties with. 2)In one booth selling crafted beadwork, a necklace had this verse written on a medallion, John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I asked the owner if she was a Christian. She confirmed that she was a Christian and proceeded to tell me about all of the different Christian ministry among local Siksika (Blackfoot). We knew some people in common and encouraged each other in the Lord. Although there is a lot of publicity for indigenous peoples to reclaim religious practices, it can be overlooked that the history of Christianity among indigenous nations is older than Canada’s Confederation, and the gospel is still being embraced and promoted. 3)I was reminded that contrary to what the media reports, there are those among the Treaty 7 nations who embrace all of their history (including the painfully tragic parts), who are nevertheless supportive of longstanding relationships, as well as those who live for Jesus Christ without denying their history.
