My Testimony on the One80 Podcast

My Testimony on the One80 Podcast

Jun 30, 2023 | The Gospel

Francis Thomson wrote a poem in 1890 called The Hound of Heaven that perfectly captures the story of my Christian journey. We don’t read poetry much anymore, but if you read the poem you may find it describes your journey too. Being a Christian of the Reformed perspective, I believe that Jesus came to earth specifically to “save his people from their sins,” as the angel of the Lord told Joseph in his dream when he was commanded to give Jesus his name (Matt. 1:21). Having listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last several years, it is amazing to me the infinite variety of ways he is able to accomplish this. As I look back over these forty four and a half years(!), it’s clear I didn’t stand a chance, thanks be to God. He was going to have me whether I wanted Him or not! He is faithful, even when we are not because his covenant promise to his Son will never fail. It was an amazing honor to share my story after so many years. (I really need a new “publicity” photo. This one was six years and over 20 pounds ago!)

Ezekiel: “Then They Will Know That I Am the Lord”

Ezekiel: “Then They Will Know That I Am the Lord”

Jun 27, 2023 | Theology

As I was reading through Ezekiel I was struck by how many times the Lord used this phrase, approximately 65 times. It’s fascinating because there is nothing like it in any other book of the Old Testament, and it’s not even close. It seems the Lord was trying to get across a message that was unique to this specific period of redemptive history. First, a little context. Ezekiel was a prophet is a period of terrible upheaval for Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. The Lord had previously declared judgment on the wickedness of the 10 northern tribes who were destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC, and now was the time for judgment against the two southern tribes of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar and the armies of Babylon conquered Jerusalem in the late 500s BC, with the city falling officially in 587 when the temple was destroyed, and most of the population exiled to Babylon, including the prophet Ezekiel. There are plenty of prophecies against Judah and Jerusalem, but also against the nations who were contending with them. Throughout all Ezekiel’s writing about this in practically ever declaration we read, “Then they will know that I am the Lord.”

It is important to understand that God’s judgment is never an end in and of itself. We tend to think that because it often appears so final, but mostly because our timeline is so limited. God, as I never tire of saying, is never in a hurry, and his purposes extend over millennia. We also forget that God’s judgment against sin, his wrath displayed, is not merely to hand out penalty, but to bring about restoration. That’s why I look at this this phrase as revelatory; The Lord is revealing to His people who he is, and to the nations that He is. It’s also important to understand that God here is using Israel’s covenant name, Yahweh, and not the generic name for God. There is something in His judgement against His people by the kingdom of Babylon that reveals His covenantal character, that He is a God who fulfills his promises to His people. This is more than clear from the entire scope of redemptive history from Genesis to Revelation, but it’s especially powerful in condensed form in the Book of Ezekiel.

Reading through the prophets is not for the faint of heart. It is almost all unrelentingly negative, almost. For example, this morning I finished reading the book of Hosea, and I was feeling weighed down by that unrelenting negativity, and in the midst of all the judgment and anger of God against Israel’s sin I read this verse (chapter 13):

14 “I will ransom them from the power of the grave;
    I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
    Where, O grave, is your destruction?

The point of God dealing with sin, and sin must be dealt with, is to bring life out of death! This promise is communicated through Ezekiel with metaphorical power

Ezekiel’s ministry to the exiles in Babylon is to be a prophet of hope amid the despair while reminding them of the horrible wages of sin. Those wages are transacted on a societal level as we see throughout Israel’s history; sin is never merely personal. The wages and the restoration God promises through them were also not just for the nation of Israel as we see throughout the Old Testament. God’s covenant promises were always to be for the nations, something Israel seemed to miss. Many, dare I say, most Christians miss this as well because our basic understanding of the Christian faith is that it is primarily a religion that affects us personally here and our souls forever in a new heavens and earth. I’ve referred to this previously as pietism where our focus is almost solely on personal piety, a very good thing, mind you, but not the only thing.

When Jesus gave his Great Commission in Matthew 28 it was to make disciples of all nations (ethnos) not individuals (anthropos). You’ll remember his commission after baptizing them in the name of the Triune God, is “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them. The Greek word for disciple (mathéteuó- μαθητεύω) means to train and instruct. When I first became a Christian in college, I was involved with a campus ministry that was big time into discipleship, but it was always assumed that discipleship only applied to individuals. Applying it to nations would have been, literally, inconceivable to us. You baptize individuals, silly, not entire nations! Well, maybe their connected? Jesus obviously thought so. Which, believe it or not, brings me back to Ezekiel.

For the first 33 chapters we get unadulterated judgmental gloom and doom, to Israel and the surrounding nations. Then in chapter 34 we start to see a change that in redemptive-theological hindsight is a declaration of the good news, the gospel to come as the Lord compares the current failed shepherds of Israel to the “good shepherd,” God himself, to come. It’s stunning to read the entire chapter and realize that when Jesus said in John 10 he was that shepherd who would lay “down his life for the sheep,” that he was almost surely referring back to this chapter in Ezekiel 34 and proclaiming himself to be Yahweh, Israel’s covenant God come in human flesh. These words from Ezekiel capture the mind-bending mystery of God’s revelation of his Triune nature in the salvation of we His people:

 22 I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. 23 I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. 24 I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the Lord have spoken.

Throughout the chapter prior to this the Lord refers to himself as Israel’s shepherd repeatedly calling them “my sheep,” and “my flock,” and that He will “tend them in a good pasture,” and “they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel,” and He will tend his “sheep and they will lie down.” Yet here is “His servant David” who will be the “one shepherd” over them, and it is he who “will tend them.” Which is it, David or Yahweh? Or are they one and the same? Also in John 10 Jesus tells us the sheep listen to his voice, he knows them, and they follow him. He in fact gives them “eternal life, and they shall never perish,” and no one can snatch them out of his hand. All of this incomprehensibly amazing theological truth points directly back to Ezekiel 34 after 33 chapters of judgment.

This is even before we get to chapters 36 and 37 where the Lord gives us two more powerful metaphors for the supernatural work in the souls of His people to show us He is the God who brings life out of death. In chapter 36 we read of him turning hearts of stone to flesh, and in 37 He brings a valley of very dry bones to life. Keep in mind what I said above, this is after 30 plus chapters of unrelenting judgment. All of this needs to be seen in light of God’s covenantal nature in redemptive history, a God who legally binds his creatures through promises of curses and blessings, most specifically laid out in Deuteronomy 28. God’s creatures must act in accordance with God’s nature because it cannot be any other way. If it was we would have cosmic chaos, exactly the goal of the accuser of the saints, Satan.

Thankfully, Jesus, as our Good Shepherd, stood in our place, to take both the covenant curses of the law for us, and grant to us the covenant blessings of obedience. As I read and heard Tim Keller say many times, Jesus lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we should have died. In that alone is our hope, that Jesus is our righteousness, holiness and redemption, as Paul says in one of my favorite passages in Scripture, I Corinthians 1:30. In this is the fulfillment of what we read in the challenging book of Ezekiel. Praise the Living God!

 

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Jun 21, 2023 | Politics, Theology

These stark choices confront us like a brick in the face as they haven’t for a long time in Western history. They offer us a moral clarity that comes from the blessing of leftist, woke cultural Marxist overreach that began when Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009. That’s not exactly true because the seeds of our current discontents go back to the fall with Satan’s temptation that if we just disobey God we can ourselves become God being able to call the shots about the nature of reality (“knowing good and evil”). That is man, we, could be a law unto ourselves, autonomy, sovereign self-rulers who get to sit on our own little thrones in our own little kingdoms. How’s that working out for us? The more proximate origins of the radical leftism of Obama that began to infect government in America and dominant the culture goes back to the Enlightenment out of which inevitably was to come the current secular Utopia of the modern West. Ain’t it grand!

I say blessing because the constant overreach of the left (they can’t help themselves) is opening eyes to the truth (and I would argue the Truth as well) like no mere words ever could. Events have a persuasive power all their own. When America and the West was nominally Christian as it was since World War II, it was easy for people to live in the mushy middle where the above questions were invisible, as if they were not the ultimate choices that confront us every day. Every person and society must choose Christ or Caesar (the state), God’s law or self-law, and those choices will determine whether we get liberty or tyranny. Christ and God’s law (theonomy) is the only true source of liberty as developed in the West through English common law and the “rights of man” eventually brought to fruition in America. The state ruled by man’s law apart from God can only lead to slavery and tyranny as we see all around us.

Christian Western civilization and the liberty it brought should have never happened. Of course, I’m speaking from a merely human perspective, but it’s a compelling one. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it is possible to get. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. On a societal level we witness a specific moment in Jesus’ ministry with mustard seed significance (Matt. 13:31-32).

Jesus is confronted by his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22) with what they thought was a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was normal with Jesus. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like, but it started that day.

Jesus was saying the state (the ruler, the king, the Caesar) could no longer be the ultimate source of authority because the state is accountable to God and whose role is to dispense justice based on God’s law. Prior to that moment everything belonged to Caesar. The entire messy history of Western civilization is the story of the triumph of Christianity and God’s law over paganism and man’s law, and justice based on the rule of law or the will to power, might makes right. We’ve come full circle in the twenty first century where the modern form of paganism, secularism, makes the same claims as Caesar did: everything belongs to the state. There are some Christians who think the Christian faith is not or doesn’t have to be “political,” that somehow it can exist apart from the political, how we are governed and by what standard. That is impossible.

We see an example of why it is when Christians of the early church refused to say, “Caesar is Lord,” and many paid with their blood. To say, “Jesus is Lord” is ultimately political because he is the Lord over all of reality, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 1, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” All means kings and presidents and prime ministers and governors, you name it, all. This was accepted and not in the least controversial in all of Western Christendom until the twentieth century when the Pac Man of secularism gobbled everything up and declared, thou shalt have no other gods before me! I wrote about Joe Boot’s response to the CBC hit piece against the Ezra Institute in my last post, and so loved his conclusion I wanted to share it here. Few Christians, let alone non-Christians, understand what Christ’s Lordship looks like over all of life, including the state and its laws and how we are governed. Boot does a great of distilling this in two paragraphs, and it applies not just to Canada or America or the West, but to the nations, all of them, as the Bible consistently declares.

The West has long been in revolution against God’s law, repealing it from the statute books for about seventy years i.e., divorce law, family law, sabbath law, blasphemy law, marriage law, abortion law, laws about euthanasia, murder, rape, taxation etc. Faithful Christians prophetically propose, not impose, a return to the Ten Commandments and the guidance of God in all Scripture for civil governments, which takes us right back to the first codification of English law and beginnings of the English Common law tradition under Alfred the Great. We do not believe that biblical truth and law can be imposed on a secular non-Christian culture unwilling to hear or obey. We believe in the need to evangelize, teach, engage and reshape socio-cultural and political life in faithfulness to Christ so that, over time, civil law will return to its biblical foundations as a Christian people insist on righteous laws.

Theocracy simply means ‘God’s rule,’ and the living God has always dealt with humanity in terms of a true or false theocracy – the worship of God or idols – in terms of the standards of His Word. As the Scripture says, “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34). Today’s Canada is the theocracy of a false god where ‘man enlarged’ in the state is the ‘divine voice’ and pretended source of all law and authority, redefining life, marriage, family, identity and sexuality by political fiat. If to oppose that pagan religious ideal makes us dangerous fundamentalists, so be it. Take your stand with Christ or Caesar.

 

Fundamentalism, The Ezra Institute, and the CBC Smear

Fundamentalism, The Ezra Institute, and the CBC Smear

Jun 18, 2023 | Eschatology

The reason I wanted to bring this article to your attention, Inside the Fundamentalist Christian Movement: A Response Statement by Joe Boot, the founder of the Ezra Institute, is because of my last post about how much the secular culture despises Christians and brands us as bigots and haters. I’ll explain below, but you’ll see if you read the piece what faithful, orthodox Christians are up against, specifically those who are obedient to Christ and apply Scripture to every single area of life, including the public life of government and law. Secularists are fine with Christianity as long as those who practice it leave their faith in their private lives. They will tolerate us then, but if we claim that Jesus is Lord over all creation, including the state, including rulers and authorities, and that God’s law applies to how societies are run, then Caeser will have none of it. I make this argument extensively in my next book which I’m trying to finish, but all of reality on this earth from a biblical perspective comes down to paganism versus Christianity, and their respective followers. When the Christians in the early centuries of the church declared, “Jesus is Lord!” it was a political statement. Many paid with their lives because of it. The secular state is a jealous God and will have no other gods before it. Boot’s piece explains it well.

As for fundamentalism, when I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity. The term has a specific historical meaning going back to the early twentieth century, but it’s used today as a pejorative term to one degree or another. The secularists use it to brand us as no better than Muslim Jihadists bent on domination and willing to use violence to that end. All the political violence, however, every single bit of it, comes from the secular Marxist left. When I was introduced to Reformed theology at 24, I began to see how the fundamentalist type of faith I practiced was a truncated, narrow, and privatized faith. Coming across Francis Schaeffer early in those years helped me a lot, but Reformed theology was eye-opening on many levels except at the eschatological level for most of my adult life. It wasn’t until I embraced  post-millennialism last summer that I began to learn of the different eschatological positions in the Reformed camp. I knew absolutely nothing about the post-mill position but what I thought I knew about it, and rejected it as unworthy of my attention. Oh how wrong I was!

Joe Boot has been an invaluable learning resource in this almost year-long learning process. It is amazing how over 44 years into this Christian journey how little I know and how much I have to learn. It is thrilling! And we get to do this for eternity, literally. Most Christians, understandably, complain about everything in the current state of our decaying civilization, but when it comes to doing something about it feel helpless. Most default to a defeatist eschatology seeing things are inevitably going to get worse and worse, believing that’s what the Bible predicts, and are just waiting for Jesus to return and save the day. They have no theological category for victory because premillennialism, which influences their thinking knowingly or not, predicts losing in this fallen world. The few that embrace amillennialism like I used to have a similar view that pushes out victory to only when Christ returns.

I used to mock the idea that we could somehow “change the world.” This fallen world, I thought, was unchangeable from it’s sinful dysfunction no matter what we did. We could plug holes in the dyke here and there, but to mix metaphors, Titanic hit the iceberg long ago and it was going to sink no matter what we do. It saddens me to think I ever thought such a thing, and now believe it is profoundly unbiblical. I have become convinced of the exegetical case (i.e., taken “out of” Scripture) for Christ’s victory in history in this fallen world. I’m hoping my book makes the case adequately enough so Christians will at least consider it.

The reason for this post, though, is Boot’s description of fundamentalism, which is one of the best I’ve come across. When I was introduced to Reformed theology I learned there was a word for the type of Christianity I was practicing, Pietism. The word doesn’t mean piety or pious, but historically comes out of German Lutheranism of the seventeenth  century, and means a faith that is primarily personal and focused on so-called spiritual things, like prayer, Bible reading, church, evangelism, etc. Christianity, however, is not primarily personal at all! If it was, the Christians of the early church would have never paid for their profession of Christ’s lordship with their blood. As I said above, Caesar then, and the totalitarian secular state now, will have none of it. It’s bow down and worship it and its dictates, or you will be made to pay. Notice the “Great Reversal”:

Yet Fundamentalism as a movement in the USA quickly became associated with a rejection of the social implications of evangelical faith, an abandonment of efforts at cultural transformation, and a withdrawal from distinctly Christian political engagement in terms of biblical principles. In what missiologists call ‘The Great Reversal’, evangelical fundamentalists (with notable exceptions) largely rejected the historic reformed Protestant vision for national moral reformation found in men like William Wilberforce and the optimistic eschatology of late nineteenth-century Princetonians like Benjamin Warfield and Charles Hodge, and so evacuated the public space to focus on personal piety and winning ‘souls,’ with an increased fixation on end-times prophecy within Dispensational theology. In this respect, the vision and work of the Ezra Institute and those who share our theological outlook is at odds with the once-popular notions of American ‘fundamentalism.’

He says “once-popular,” I think, because few Evangelicals today refer to themselves as fundamentalists. When I became a Christian there seemed to be a well-defined Christian cultural divide between fundamentalist and Evangelicals. The latter term has historical meaning as well, going back to the Reformation, but in the twentieth century a group led by Billy Graham and other founders of Christianity Today decided to separate themselves from the anti-cultural engagement and anti-intellectual fundamentalists. George Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, is a great history of exactly how this split took place. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer somewhere around 20, I never referred to myself as a fundamentalist.

I want to further comment on Boot’s conclusion, but that will have to be for another post.

 

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Jun 16, 2023 | Culture, Eschatology

In case you weren’t aware of it, if you’re a conservative Christian, believe the Bible is God’s actual word of revelation to mankind and the truth about human sexuality, you’re a bigot filled with hatred for “sexual minorities.” Yes, no better than any garden variety racist. No better than the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses in your black neighbor’s yard. I’m sure this is not news to anybody. But among our cultural “elite” and the lunatic left (those currently running the United States government, all the organs of culture and corporate America) it is commonly accepted. The word Christian slips off their lips with a condescending smear, and to them we are second-class citizens in our supposedly enlightened queer nation. Leftists (what almost all liberals have become) started out playing the victims. Then they asked for tolerance, and got tolerance. Next they demanded acceptance, and got acceptance. Finally, they demanded celebration, and those who refuse to celebrate will be made to pay by the alphabet mafia. Welcome to 2023 America! And what a grand place it is.

I saw this clearly coming during the runup to some unelected judges in black robes on the highest court in the land re-defining marriage in 2015. A large section of the less diplomatic and careful left branded those who didn’t support gay “marriage” as bigots and haters. Those pushing this perversion of marriage at a legal and PR level on an ambivalent population we’re much more careful. They told blatant lies sweetened with honey that went down easily with the unsuspecting and ignorant. It’s all about tolerance, just letting homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals. How could anybody be against that? The more prescient knew it could never stop there, and once marriage was redefined and homosexuality completely normalized, the transgender insanity circa 2023 was inevitable.

I was reminded of this unpleasant reality not only because it’s so called “pride month” (which God says goes before destruction) and daily shoved in our faces, but also because I read this article about a women who was a big name in Hollywood, thus appropriately left wing most of her life, and who became a conservative and Christian and now “has her friends mystified.” That’s almost funny, and speaks to how insular the woke left is. They live in an echo chamber only ever encountering people exactly like them and dismiss as unworthy ideas they disagree with. Such people are also deeply self-righteous and judgmental. Anyone who doesn’t think like them is unclean and unworthy of respect. Conservative Christians are modern lepers to them, and it is such people who hold almost all positions of cultural and government power in America today.

All of this is stunning, but completely unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Enlightenment rationalism that in due course rid the world of God and His word. Once that started happening it led inexorably to the suffocating secularism of the modern world with the help of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, et al. The 20th century gave us progressivism, cultural Marxism a la the Frankfurt School, “the 60s” and the sexual revolution, so called, radical feminism, no fault divorce, and eventually it had to get to homosexuality and their “rights.” Marx’s two primary goals of perpetual revolution and his communist Utopia was to be realized by the destruction of the family and religion, i.e., Christianity. The woke left in our day, the cultural Marxists, are his progeny, and even though he would be surprised the economic version of Marxism he predicted failed, he would be pleased as punch at the cultural version that hasn’t. It’s creating all the chaos, confusion, suffering, pain, and misery he could have ever hoped for, the conditions for communism’s perpetual revolution.

The article I mentioned above is definitely worth reading because it’s instructive of just how deeply ingrained this pathology is on the secular left, and it is important to realize the threat they pose to everything that is godly, good, and right. The goal of their push for sexual perversion, and that includes any sex outside of a married man and woman, and erasing biological sex, is and always has been the destruction of the family. You can look at the writings of leftists since the 1930s and it’s all there. The difference today is that all vestiges of Christian leaven that once made Western civilization flourish and prosper and held back wickedness are gone. In addition, we have a generation of leftists in cultural and political power today who are effectively woke zombies who can’t help themselves. They are compelled by generations of very effective brainwashing to silence or destroy any who get in the way of cultural revolution, their greatest enemy being Bible believing conservative Christians. If you’re also white and male, you get to the top of the list.

This is the bad news which we all know. The good news that most fail to appreciate is that because zombies aren’t subtle, normal people, which is the vast majority of the population, are waking up to just how pathologically evil and abnormal all this is. For Christians, this reminds us of the fundamental irrationality of evil, and that it is built and sustained on the pretzel logic of lies. God’s created reality, as for God Himself, cannot be mocked, people reap what they sow. Sooner or later it will bring the consequences of God’s judgment which happens whenever His law is transgressed. But God’s judgment isn’t an end in an of itself—it is revelatory as well. In such an environment the ugliness of sin and man pretending he can be God contrasts powerfully with the beauty of God’s law and the gospel of His grace in Christ. We have the answer to all the chaos and misery! And it goes through the cross.

We have something to sell that’s attractive and it works! All of Christian history proves it. And it doesn’t just work in our private lives or in churches, but it works for entire civilizations. Many Christians, and all secular people, don’t realize that what turned the ancient pagan world where, in Thomas Hobbes words, life was nasty, brutish, and short, into the modern world where it generally is not, was Christianity. Without God’s word, and God’s law, the gospel and the Holy Spirit, there would be no rule of law, no hospitals, no human rights, no universal education, no science or technology, no capitalism and wealth, and all the blessings that can bring, and much more. Secular culture, however, paints Christianity and God’s law as constricting when it is the most liberating thing that’s ever existed, in fact the only thing!

I’m currently reading a wonderful book that makes this case by an Indian named Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. If you’re wondering what it is we’re trying to do in the so-called culture wars (and politics and everything else), you’ll find what that is in this book. We’re not just trying to save souls so people can go to heaven when they die. Rather, we’re part of Christ’s charge and mission to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Before Jesus ascended into heaven to the right hand of God, he said all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, not just people. And this means, he says, teaching them everything he had commanded them. We need to get busy!