Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Oct 29, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

For my entire Christians life, from the fall of 1978 to August of 2022, I believed the nature of the Christian life in this fallen world was a conflict between good and evil, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. I assumed, but didn’t think much about it, that the conflict was almost between two equal forces. I also believed God is almighty and sovereign, but for some reason allowed the devil the upper hand in our fallen world. I knew this cosmic war into which we were born would eventually be won by the forces of light over darkness, but in this world for the most part darkness wins. There was at least partial victory on a personal level in the process of sanctification, but on a larger societal level victory would have to wait for the Second Coming. Until then things would likely get worse until Jesus returned to set all things right. Most Evangelical Christians see the world pretty much the same way as I did.

Like most Christians, I also believed the gospel would be preached to the entire world, but more people would reject than accept it. In a term familiar to Bible readers of the Old Testament, only a “remnant” would be saved. Jesus seemed to indicate this in his teaching on the wide and narrow gate (Matt. 7):

13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

This confirmed my basic pessimism about the nature of the spiritual war in which we are engaged. If we’re using a spiritual metaphor of who gets the most points in this game wins, then the devil clearly wins. He gets the most points because he gets the most souls. I learned later to read this passage in its redemptive-historical context, not out of context as if Jesus was speaking about Gentiles and salvation for all of time. No, Jesus was speaking to Jews because he was sent only “to the lost sheep of the house Israel” (Matt. 15:24). Most Jews rejected Christ and judgment came upon them in AD70. The Great Commission would have a very different ending. The gate would now be open wide with the proclamation of the gospel, victory ensured by the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed from Christ with “all authority in heaven and on earth” reigning at the right hand of God.

What I call eschatological pessimism is specifically the fruit of dispensationalism, whether we hold to that eschatology or not, or even know what it is. A pessimistic take on the nature of things just seems obvious and the most realistic. All anyone has to do is open their eyes and they’ll see that righteousness and peace and justice are not exactly marching victoriously throughout the world. Suffering seems to be everywhere, and it appears we’re fighting an uphill battle akin to Mount Everest. I imagine Christians felt that way in the 20th century during the darkest days of World War I and II. Slaughter on that scale had never happened in the history of the world, and not even close. Over a hundred million people lost their lives because of man’s inhumanity to man, because evil is clearly dominant in this fallen world. The 20th century is in fact why the pessimistic perspective came to dominate conservative Protestant Christianity. This is an important part of the story which we’ll explore below.

In my journey I even got to the point of mocking my younger self who believed he could “change the world.” In fact, the entire point of our existence is to “change the world.” But I came to believe that’s a fool’s errand, and only God could do that. Real change would only happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and wiped out evil once and for all. This is true for almost the entire church, that is how deeply engrained eschatological pessimism is. When I embraced postmillennialism a few years back that all changed for me. I was exposed to a completely new way of looking at life. Prior I thought of this eschatology as something of a joke, unworthy of even considering. Now I was eager to learn more because I knew nothing about it.

The Death of Postmillennial Eschatological Optimism
The man who killed postmillennialism lived in the century before it officially died. His name was J.N. Darby (1800-1882), and his aversion to postmillennial eschatology was one driving factor in his development of a completely new eschatology, called at the time, the new premillennialism. Premillennialism, which has been around since the early church fathers, holds that Jesus’ second coming will occur before (pre-) a literal 1,000-year period of peace and righteousness on earth, which is the Millennium as described in Revelation 20:1–7. Darby took this theology of “end times” in an entirely new direction which eventually came to be known as dispensationalism in the late 1920s. I’ve written about that previously, so I won’t get into the details here, but what became dominant because of Darby was eschatological pessimism. No longer was the church marching triumphant through the world, and in fact the church was the problem. It was corrupt and beyond saving.

What drove him was an antipathy to the idea of the church ushering in a “golden age,” something he saw as a secularized perversion of the gospel. The church was a heavenly entity, and it was Israel that would bring heaven to earth in due course. That all would happen only after things got increasingly worse and the church raptured from earth in the great tribulation. Then Christ would return with his people and reign from Jerusalem for a thousand years of peace on earth. That’s skipping over a lot of details, but you get the point. Postmillennialism, therefore, was the enemy.

It so happens he picked the right century to begin to discredit the eschatology that had dominated the church for most of its history. As much as Christians experienced suffering over the centuries, they all believed in ultimate victory on this earth. If not, what did Christ come for? Pietism, which started developing in 17th century Lutheran Germany, would eventually lead to an answer: escape. In this view that eventually developed through first and second Great Awakenings, and eventually into dispensationalism and fundamentalism, the purpose of Christianity was to go to heaven when we die, and while we’re here, personal holiness. The effect of the gospel on society became increasingly less important until in the 20th century it became completely irrelevant.

The 19th century saw the full flowering of several forces that would in due course make Christianity, almost, the non-entity it became in the modern world. The Enlightenment had been growing in influence, and it seemed one of its primary goals was to discredit the Bible and Christianity. In that, it was doing a very good job. Along with this growing influence was the scientific revolution which almost seemed to make God unnecessary. Progress became an obsession for Western man, and he seemed to be doing a rather good job of it. Two other forces developed in the church. One was the Pietism I mentioned, which turned the eyes and priorities of Bible believing Christians to heaven and away from earth, and the other was a liberal version of Christianity that embraced the assumptions of the Enlightenment. Throughout the century these two grew increasingly apart, until the early 20th century when the fundamentalist-modernist controversies erupted. You can easily guess which side won.

Various versions of postmillennialism were dominant into the 20th century given the incredible march of science and technology. It seemed man could accomplish anything he set his mind to, and because the Western world was still culturally Christian, the biblical notion of progress was secularized but retained some Christian terminology. That was soon to come crashing down, and along with it the credibility of postmillennialism. I place the beginning of the end with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. That was a cultural blow akin to a 9/11, but the enemy was an ice berg. Even the name of the great ship implied indestructibility, but destructible it was. A crisis of cultural confidence was on the horizon, but nobody could imagine it would include a war the horror of which was beyond imagination. Then just a decade later a Great Depression, and a decade after that a war far worse than the supposed “war to end all wars.” Amid all this was the rise of communism which would kill tens of millions more, and that golden age postmillennialists were promising looked like a nightmare instead. By the middle of the 20th century postmillennialists were harder to find than a conservative professor in a college humanities department.

The problem with this assessment of postmillennialism as a failure is that it never addresses the biblical case for it. It is always assumed that what it teaches is a notion of the advance of God’s kingdom is only in one direction, forward. It doesn’t seem to occur to the critics that a hundred years in God’s plans proves nothing. It is clear from Scripture that our God is never in a hurry. He, for example, promises Abram that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and it takes 2,000 years for that offspring to arrive! When he finally arrives, accomplishes his mission, then leaves and promises to return, another 2,000 year has passed and he hasn’t returned yet. So presuming we can interpret God’s intentions from historical events is unwise, not to mention unbiblical. His intentions are perfectly clear from Scripture, and now to me about eschatology. I’d rejected postmillennialism without even knowing anything about it, and now I was going to rectify that. Which brings us to the other perspective.

The Biblical Idea of Conquest Over Sin
The first book I read about postmillennialism was The Millennium by Loraine Boettner. I had gotten it seminary but don’t ever remember reading it. After being born-again into the Late Great Planet Earth hysteria of the late 70s, I wasn’t much interested in eschatology at the time. He introduced to me to the idea that the biblical testimony is one of conquest over sin, not mere conflict with it. And most importantly, this conquest is not just for our personal lives but for the entire world of human beings living in societies. Jesus’s Great Commission was to disciple nations not merely individuals within nations; how had I missed that all these years? My eschatological assumptions and the influence of Pietism.

I previously understood Christianity primarily as a personal affair, and whatever effects it had on society was a spillover from Christians living Christianly. Thankfully, Boettner, began changing my perspective, and that when Jesus said nations, he actually meant nations. The point of the gospel isn’t just that individuals would be saved from their sin and go to heaven when they die, but that Christians within a nation would transform it by proclaiming King Jesus and his authority over every area of life within that nation. Scripture proclaims, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34), and, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance” (Ps. 33:12). And what people did He choose for his inheritance? When God chose Abram he specifically promised that through him all peoples, all nations, would be blessed through him. In Psalm 2 we learn the nations will belong to the Messiah:

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

What does verse 9 sound like to you? Conquest! Decisive, unequivocal conquest. That, brothers and sisters, is what makes the Great Commission great, not plucking a few souls out of the nations while good and evil duke it out. The Apostles affirm this when Peter preaches the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 and quotes from Psalm 110, a Messianic Psalm and the most quoted and referred to in the New Testament:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
35 until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

That Psalm too proclaims conquest over the nations:

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

This crushing and dashing is not for the end of time, as I used to think, butt began when Christ ascended to the right hand of God. A couple quotes from The Millennium explains this perspective well. Quoting my theological hero, B.B. Warfield, he writes:

As emphatically as Paul, John teaches that the earthly history of the Church is not a history merely of conflict with evil, but a conquest over evil: and even more richly than Paul, John teaches that the conquest will be decisive and complete.

And in his own words:

How long the conquest continues before it is crowned with victory—we purposefully use the word “conquest,” rather the “conflict,” for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it—we are not told. . . . This progress is to go on until on this earth we shall see a practical fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth.”

One of the great biblical metaphors is Israel’s entry into the promised land.

The Great Commission in the Conquest of Canaan
Most Christians are familiar with the story of the spies exploring Canaan prior to the Israelites entering the promised land. Coming out of Egypt, they had made a beeline to the border of the land God prepared them to inhabit. The Lord commanded twelve men, one leader from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan (Num. 13). It was a scouting mission. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

They all reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were significant obstacles to taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as insurmountable obstacles to taking the land. The other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel (Num. 14):

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day they explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. Joshua and Caleb trusted God and his promise, and the ten did not. They were the only two of that entire generation who entered the land of promise.

The obvious message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life when all I saw was giants, I now believe this perspective applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. The entire world is our Canaan, the land of promise the Lord Jesus calls us to conquer in his name, and victory is ours to expect because of God’s promises and commands. In fact, in the gospel the victory is already won. We fight from victory, not to it. It is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church.

 

 

Mass Shooters: It’s All About Parents

Mass Shooters: It’s All About Parents

Oct 22, 2025 | Parents and Family

I wrote this post before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, but the principles apply there as well.

It seems my title has sadly turned into a pun. Death has once again, as we all know by now, come in another shooting at a school by a mentally ill person targeting kids. Our cultural elites have come to call people like this transgendered, a man who pretends he’s a woman, or a woman who pretends she’s a man. This specifically mentally deranged individual who targeted children at a Catholic Mass was allowed to “transition” by his parents when he was a teenager. It seems his mother has hired a powerful lawyer. Where dad is, I have no idea. In addition to such parents lacking wisdom and being morally obtuse, they have been indoctrinated by the secular leftist cultural machine and ended up destroying their son, and now devastating two families of dead children.

In biblical religion, a person can be guilty of their own sin while at the same time the parents be guilty of enabling their child’s sin. We’re all accountable for the responsibilities God has given each one of us. But this isn’t just about parents who enable their kids to become monsters, but about all of us, all those God has given the privilege and responsibility of becoming parents. For Christian parents this is built into the entire history of our faith. From the very beginning, literally the first chapter of our book from God, the story starts with the command for man and woman to be “fruitful and multiply.” When the story is interrupted by the little hiccup we call the fall, God tells us our salvation will come through the woman’s seed or offspring. In other words, the plan of God’s rescuing his creatures will be inextricably bound up in children and families. All the promises of this salvation to come include children and descendants of generations to come. In fact the morning I write these words I read Isaiah’s words written over 700 years before Christ was born (Is. 59):

21 “As for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord. “My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you, and my words that I have put in your mouth will always be on your lips, on the lips of your children and on the lips of their descendants—from this time on and forever,” says the Lord.

Once the Lord has achieved salvation for us, it will be passed down to our descendants from generation to generation, even as we’re told in Deuteronomy 7:9, “to a thousand generations.”

Parenting is being part of God’s plan of bringing the blessings of generational salvation to the earth. We get to be intimately involved in living out what God promised to us and accomplished for us. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as Jesus taught us to pray, largely comes through raising our children in the Lord. This puts a bit of a new spin on it, doesn’t it. That means we expect our faith to be generational, that our kids will carry on the faith we impart to them, the way of life that seeks first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, knowing everything else will follow. Unfortunately, as we know, that doesn’t always happen.

The Rise of the Nones
In 2014 and 15 we began to see a lot of stories in the media about something called “Nones,” not to be mistaken for Catholic nuns. These are young people who grow up in Christian homes, go off to college or life and abandon the faith. The term came from the wording on surveys where people are asked for their religious preference, and a growing number were picking, “None of the above.” The secular media was positively giddy about it, as anyone might predict, but in Christian circles there was only lament. Prodigals were leaving and nobody was sure if they’d ever come back. It does so happen that long term surveys discover that, as these kids become adults with families, having children often brings them back to the church. That is small comfort, however, for parents whose prodigal children are in a distant country.

Providentially in May of 2015 one of these nones would change the direction of my life. I read a piece online (sadly, the website is no longer available) about a young lady who grew up in strong Christian home, went off to college and promptly abandoned her faith. Here’s how this newly minted “None” starts her story:

I’m Lyndsay, and I’m an agnostic. I say this as if I have stepped into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting because my transition from “believer” to “non‑believer” feels somewhat pathologic. The purpose of my story is not proselytism; I simply wish to articulate how difficult and consuming this transformation was for me, and in doing so, hopefully feel less alone.

At school, her doubts about Christianity mounted, but they had nothing to do with whether Christianity was true or not. Rather, she felt that everyone in high school had “put her in a box,” and she simply didn’t like being “stuffed in a box that could not contain” her. She felt liberated by the freedom she found at college:

Once I was given the opportunity to breathe a breath of fresh, secular air, I could more easily acknowledge that Christianity is a way of life, not the way of life. I desperately wanted a different way of life, but coming to terms with that flagrant fact was the hardest thing I have ever endured.

I do not mean to sound so dramatic, but the changes rousing inside of me truly shook me to my core. I was a Christian. This label was all‑encompassing—it felt completely impervious to change. If I abandoned God, I would be stuck starting from scratch, discarding my entire identity along with my Maker. More than just a loss of sense of self, I would be stripped of security, hope, and companionship. But I could not will myself to believe any longer

When I first read this it ticked me off. I thought to myself, how could this happen? I was convinced, and still am, that this would never happen to my children. They are now adults, 23, 30, and 33, and I’m blessed to report they are still followers of Jesus. I never once wondered if their faith would endure because that is exactly how we raised them, and me as their father most intentionally. Now I read this and it fascinates me. How could she miss the entire point of Christianity? That it is true! Not once in the article does it seem to occur to her that whether it is true or not is the issue, and that everything else is secondary.

Christianity is also not “a way of life,” as if all Christians fit into a mold and come out looking and acting the same way. There are no Stepford Christians, as in the movie when the wives of Stepford change from free-thinking, intelligent women into compliant wives dedicated solely to homemaking, basically robots. There is no such thing as robot Christianity, each of us being as unique as our fingerprints, and each of our children should feel free to be their own fingerprint. But for her Christianity was constricting, the exact opposite of what it in fact is. Sadly, it appears she didn’t feel like she could talk to her parents or any other Christian adult in her life. Did she feel like she couldn’t ask questions or express her doubts? Our teen years are complicated, so who knows, but all I will say is that this doesn’t have to happen. If we can’t sell our kids on Christianity being the truth, and nothing else is, something is wrong. My job was to persuade our children that the only explanation for reality giving our lives ultimate meaning, hope, and purpose is in Christ. It’s actually not difficult because secularism as an explanation for reality offers them nothing. It is bankrupt, poverty stricken, and the evidence is all around us. Ex-atheist C.S. Lewis, as usual, put it perfectly:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

The Persuasive Christian Parent
I mentioned how this young lady changed direction of my life. I was going to respond to her article with a blog post, but I decided I would write a book, something I’d never done before. God used her to turn me into an author! I’d always had a thought in the back of my mind that it would be cool to be an author, given I love reading books so much, but I never felt compelled to do so; now I did. I had no idea what I was doing, nor how hard it would be. I just started writing. I’ve always loved writing and words and ideas, and started my first official blog in 2004, but this was a whole different ballgame. It took me five years to get a publishable version, and it was a painful process, but a learning one. It’s a little rough, but not bad for a rookie effort. Now I’m in the process of finishing number five. So, thank you, Lindsay! I found my calling later in life because of her, and if I can bless and help a few people along the way, praise God. I pray she comes back to Christ.

When I started writing I decided I would title the first chapter, “It’s All About Truth,” because for whatever reason, Lindsay didn’t realize that’s really all that matters. Is Christianity true or not? If it’s true, then you don’t abandon it, and if it’s not, then you do. It’s very simple. C.S. Lewis, an ex-atheist, put it in his own brilliant way:

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

It’s a binary choice, one or the other, true or not. What I realized as I was writing the book is that as Christian parents we need to raise our kids differently in a secular age. Thinking we can just take them to church and read the Bible and pray with them isn’t enough. Secularism assaults them every day, from every screen, in every place, and in every way. What is secularism? It’s life lived with God as persona non grata, an unwelcome presence. Whether He’s there or not, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he’s not relevant to this life. Watch any movie or TV show and God is for the most part invisible, and Jesus mostly some kind of expletive. Our children pick up the alternative secular faith more from such entertainment than any agnostic or atheistic teacher at school. Life without God begins to seem like a plausible alternative to Christianity, as it did to Lindsay.

This desensitizing us to God, and disenchanting of life, as if matter really is all that exists, is the unseen cultural force against which we do battle. I say unseen because the enemies of God, the secularists, aren’t even thinking about God or what they are doing. A God-less universe is just how they see reality, and it is out of this worldview that they write and produce products that seduce our children away from their Christian faith.

One of the sections (two chapters per section) is called, “It’s All About Culture.” (I decided that each topic I covered was as important as the next, thus each as “All About.”). Christian parents tend to live in fear of the culture, as if it had some kind of power to drag their kids away from the faith like a demon in a horrible nightmare. On the contrary, I subtitled this section on culture, “Your Children’s Best Friend.” What do I mean by that?

The culture is a massive, ubiquitous, all present, messaging system. It works 24/7, never sleeps, never rests. The greatest dereliction of parental duty in our age is allowing the secular cultural messaging carte blanche, free rein into our children’s imagination and thinking. What happens is that slowly over time what is plausible to them, what makes sense, seems real, changes. I guarantee you this is what happened to Lindsay. She didn’t logically go through the evidence to see whether Christianity is true or not. After she got to college her “plausibility structure” was changed by the environment, and Christianity no longer seemed true to her, seemed like the way the world was supposed to be. Agnosticism became a better fit.

If we don’t want this to happen to our children, then we need to teach them to interrogate the culture, treat it as a prosecuting attorney treats a witness for the defense in a trial. No message gets by without a question, and as we do this with them consistently, they will develop the habit of doing it themselves. Thinking about the culture critically will become a habit.

In our house, TV shows and movies were a tool I used all the time with our kids. I still do it with my longsuffering wife. I am the master of the clicker in our house (i.e., remote control), and no show could run without me stopping it numerous times for questions or comments. Every one of them in some way highlighted the poverty of the secular worldview compared to the Christian worldview. This “strategy” of mine went far beyond critiquing the culture’s entertainment, the goal always being to argue for the truth of Christianity in contrast to the lies of secularism, or any kind of God-less or non-Christian view of reality.

“Daddy’s Always Teaching”
The Great Commission starts with children, if we have them, and only then to others. I’ve never been particularly “intentional” about discipling our kids as we traditionally think of it. I was never good about Bible reading and prayer with them, family devotionals and so on. I tried from time to time, but I let life get in the way. But what I was good at was teaching them that Christianity is true. That is the only reason I became a Christian, and the only reason I stay one. It was second nature to me that when we had children I would teach them the same thing. Not too many years ago I was telling my daughter how bummed out I was that I was a terrible “spiritual” leader in our home, and she said, “Well, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” Well, there is that, and if one has to choose, and of course one doesn’t, then truth is the more important in our age, by far. We can’t assume our children actually believe Christianity is true, and every other religion and worldview is a lie. We have to teach them that, all the time.

Which brings me back to my daughter, our oldest, and one of the great moments of my life. In saying that I do not exaggerate. One Sunday on our way home from church, I was doing my typical lecturing on various and sundry topics. Our youngest, a son, maybe seven or eight at the time, said something with not a little annoyance like, “Why do you always have to lecture us, Dad?” I was nonplussed, surprised, taken aback, when our daughter came to the rescue: “Because, Dominic, daddy is always teaching.” My heart melted—truly one of the great compliments of my life. After all, this is one of the primary reasons I exist: the profound responsibility to raise our children before God.

Remember, it is not enough to know what we believe, we must know why. I get the impression most Christian parents are better at teaching the what, while the why is too often assumed. Maybe they assume the truth, the realness of their Faith, is self‑evident to their children. Or they believe it, and take their children to church assuming they’ll believe it too. But we must understand that we live in a time where our Faith is called into question in countless ways, and therefore, it must be defended to and for our kids in the face of those questions.

Lastly, when I was looking to publish my book I got pushback from some people who thought I was claiming I could guarantee that our children would never abandon the faith. So as not to be misunderstood, we cannot guarantee anything, and are in control of nothing (which is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to trust the Lord and pray). However there is much we can do, which you can find out by reading the book. But it does not follow that just because we are not ultimately responsible for the results we can’t have confidence that we can build into our children a lifelong and enduring faith. Ultimately, thankfully, our confidence is not in our performance as parents, but in God’s provision. We learn an important principle in spiritual growth and sanctification from the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 3:

6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.

What happens with the seeds we plant in our children’s lives is up to God, but because of his covenant promises to us and our covenant children, our confidence is fully justified. However, He can’t do it without us. That’s the way farming works; no farmer, no farm, just weeds. But without God nothing grows.

Having said this, I understand the insecurity many Christian parents feel living in a dominant secular Western culture hostile to our Faith. But the conclusion I came to at the end of writing the book, is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my kids should never want to leave it, or even be tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways, and has provided us an over‑abundance of resources, that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Danger of Intentions and Love’s Answer

The Danger of Intentions and Love’s Answer

Oct 15, 2025 | The Gospel

Early in my Christian life, my fundamentalist phase as I call it, introspection was encouraged. Part of this examination was questioning my motives and intentions to make certain they were not sinful but pure. The problem was that I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a perfectly pure motive in my entire life. I know my sinful heart all too well, and it’s not given to purity of motive. I also realized I was given to morbid introspection where I would try to pick apart what I was thinking, and guilt was a constant companion because it was anything but pure. Instead of looking to the cross and trusting God the Holy Spirit to do the inner transformation I needed, I thought I could figure me out. Good luck with that! I may as well dive into the vortex of a black hole. God through the prophet Jeremiah tells us why:

9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?

Over time I realized that if I had a hard time understanding my own intentions, how much more impossible it would be to figure out the intentions of other people. Yet I realized how easy it was for me to presume that not only could I figure out what they were, but I was certain about it! Whatever they said or did, I could perfectly infer their intentions, what they meant by what they said or did. If they weren’t certain what their intentions were, I could help them out.

At some point along the way I learned some things, and God had been dealing with me and my own issues, so I decided I wouldn’t do this anymore. If I wanted to know what someone’s motives or intentions were, I would do something shocking to most people—I would ask them. Until then I had no right to assume I knew. As we learned when we were kids, or should have, what happens when you assume something? You make an ass out of u and me. Don’t do that! Yet we do it all the time, especially about other people. So, don’t do that either!

God had obviously been working on me along the way, or more likely working me over, and because of his great mercy, for some reason I even decided I would give other people the benefit of the doubt and not assume the worst about them and what they intended. I know, that’s crazy! Isn’t it a rule of life or something that we must assume the worst about people? In fact it isn’t, but our sinful human tendency is to do just that. Unfortunately, this mentality God has ingrained in me through the pain of sanctification, is not common among sinful human beings. If it were there would be much more peace and harmony. Sinful human beings will always incline to reading intentions and motives into people’s actions or words, and then determine those are in fact their actual intentions and motives without ever asking.

How Do We Escape Intentions?
Well, first of all, that’s impossible. We are intending beings. When we do or say something, we have a purpose or plan in saying it, our intention. The reason we do or say it is our motive, the thing that is compelling us to act. These two dynamics are integral to human psychology, which means my question to start this section is senseless; we can’t escape our intentions. What we can do, however, is better understand them, learn to read them, so we can better figure out why we do or say what we do, and maybe not do or say it. Or do or say it differently.

This process is called sanctification, and it’s not easy, to say the least. It’s like being the anvil, and life is the hammer. Often we think it’s God wielding it, and it hurts! He is, of course, but not quite the way we think. That’s why I used the phrase “pain of sanctification” previously. It’s like a forging process. As metal is not easily molded without extreme heat and force so we are not either, sadly. Diamonds are also created in the earth through extremes of heat and pressure, and because they are so rare they are of great value. The process of sanctification is difficult, but the fruit is sweet, for us and everyone else in our lives.

So, if we can’t escape intentions, ours or anyone else’s, what are we supposed to do? Simple, learn to understand them. Of course that’s easier said than done, but it’s not impossible. As in politics, all it really takes is the will to want to do it. In the Christian life that’s simple: we don’t have a choice. Let me ask a question which has flummoxed friends and relatives for years. Why does God put other people, especially difficult people, in our lives. The answer is really simple, if seemingly impossible at times: to teach us how to love them! Ugh! I told this to a nephew of mine once, and he happened to be lying on the ground. He started wiggling and screaming Noooooo!!!! Then he said the magic words we all naturally feel—I don’t want to! Of course you don’t! That’s why God didn’t give us the choice. And lest you think I learned this in a book or theoretically, I didn’t. I was young, probably around 30, and this co-worker was terribly annoying. One day I was praying, more like complaining, to God and asked him the question: Why did you put this person in my life? And I could swear I heard him tell me out loud, “To teach you how to love her, you moron!” Well, maybe not he moron part, but the message was clear, and I never asked that question again.

So, how are we to go about doing what we just don’t want to do? A miracle, of course. This is in a way to answer the question at the top of this section. It might be better stated; how do we escape the tyranny of intentions? By what Charles Hodge explained as Christianity: the work of God in the soul of man. In other words, it’s a supernatural work of the power of God’s Holy Spirit in us that will get us to do what is impossible for us to do on our own, and which we don’t want to do anyway. It’s not just a matter of the will, of deciding, by golly, I’m going to love that poor slob! I really despise the person, but since I’m so magnanimous, I’ll cut them some slack. Leave it to a sinner to turn loving someone else into something about themselves. We’re hilarious, we sinners.

Love is the Drug I’m Thinking Of
That phrase might sound familiar to you if you’re a boomer or gen X’er. It’s a catchy 1975 tune from the band Roxy Music, and has nothing to do with the love I’m thinking of. That love is only from above, the love that comes from He who is love. This is when it gets kind of tricky, so if you want to escape and not bother with dealing with other people in this way, it’s best to stop reading (or listening) now. Before I get to the nitty gritty, I want to share a story of my having to deal with the beast in me, and how I learned my need for such love.

When I was in college I was involved in a Christian campus ministry called the Navigators. One Saturday we went to a swap meet to try to sell stuff and share the gospel. When I was ready to go back to school at the end of the day, the head of the ministry, an older guy probably in his thirties at the time, said he wanted to go back with me. I didn’t realize he had an ulterior motive—my sanctification. Mike was a guy who could be blunt and had piercing eyes. He could be intimidating. Pulling no punches he comes right out and says, “You’re not a very nice person to be around. You always want people to think like you, and you make them feel bad if they don’t.” And words so related. I was devastated. I can be intense, but am I really that horrible? I didn’t ask. That night back in the dorm I experienced what is called a dark night of the soul. I told God not only can I not love people; I also don’t want to! At that moment this Christianity thing felt impossible, and I didn’t think I could do it. Thankfully, that was a Saturday, and the next morning I went to church. Whether it was in the sermon or a verse I read, God said something along the lines of, of course you can’t do it, but I can do it through you! I remember an instant change from despair to hope.

If you ask me if God can still do miracles, I say of course he can. I know he still heals people of various maladies, but what’s far more profound to me is enabling two self-absorbed sinners to truly love one another. Now that’s a miracle! Such a miracle can only be found in one place, the cross. One of the reasons Christianity is historically verifiable is because of the many crazy things Jesus said, and this is one of them:

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

As modern people who’ve never actually seen a crucifixion, or a bunch of them at once, something common in the Roman Empire, we’ll have no idea what a horror it was. For Jesus to try to build a following on a metaphor of the cross is beyond absurd. Nobody makes that up. It had to come from the real Jesus of Nazareth, the real Son of God and Savior of the world. That’s the deal, though. In order to love others you have to die to yourself, and as the metaphor implies, it’s likely not going to be pleasant. Get used to it. But as Jesus also says (John 12:4)

24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

That’s the deal, there can’t be spiritual life without death to self, but in death is fruit and abundance, life and flourishing. Everyone knows selfish kids are insufferable, but so are selfish adults. When it’s all about me it’s about nobody else but me.

Sin is ultimately relational, first with God, then ourselves, then others. In Romans 12:1 Paul tells us because of  God’s mercy, we are to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, which is holy and pleasing to God. Those two words don’t normally go together, living and sacrifice, but dying to self is the path to true life. Then Paul adds something amazing. Doing this, he says, is our reasonable, rational, logical service or worship of God. In other words, it makes total sense logically in light of everything He has done for us in Christ. We are then compelled to love others. And in verse 2 he tells us how we are to do it, even if much of the time we’re not quite sure. Paul tells us, though, that we can “test and approve” what that is, what is God’s “good, pleasing and perfect will.” And there is nothing more God wills than that we should love others.

Loving Others is Not a Choice
That’s the thing about Christianity, it’s a take it or leave it proposition, as can be seen from Jesus using the cross as a recruiting tool. I’ve already said it, but it’s necessary to repeat: we have to love others whether we want to or not, whether it’s easy or not. Most of the time it isn’t. But what makes me compelled to do what can be so distasteful to me, is that I am commanded to do it by the very words of Jesus. From the Sermon on the Mount he commands us:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he was practicing what he preaches. Paul tells us in Romans 5:

10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

We were God’s enemies, and Christ died for us! Paul also tells us in Colossians:

21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.

The Greek word for enemies implies a hateful, odious, hostility. That is how we thought of God in our rebellion, and he still literally loved us to death, his own, in the person of His Son. That’s why we don’t have a choice. In fact, the more sanctified we become and the better we get at it, we’ll ask ourselves, how am I to love this person. Better yet, we’ll pray for God to help us figure out how to love this person, and give us the willingness to do it. You’ll know you’re on the right track as you pray about it when you start giving thanks for this person, and actually mean it. Paul tells is in I Thessalonians 5:

18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

All, not some. That includes people. And the thanksgiving is specifically in Christ Jesus. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” or this variation over 70 times in his letters, so to him Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension have implications for every aspect and every moment of our lives. Everything we do is “in Christ,” thus we can’t see our relationships with others apart from Christ. The reason we can love others is because, as John says, God first love us, and that in Christ. That is I John 4:19, and John follows it up with the message of Jesus:

20 If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from Him: The one who loves God must also love his brother.

Lastly, since we’re talking about intentions and motives, we need to be careful that we’re not hoping this person will change just so they don’t annoy us so much. As shocking as it often is for us to hear, it’s not all about us. We’re supposed to love others for their good, which is why Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love our neighbors then adds, as we love ourselves. Only when we love others will we really be loving ourselves. When we do that, it will always be for our good in the end. And even if we’re not successful for whatever reason, God is glorified in our obedience. And what is the chief end of man, in the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. In that case, love is the drug I’m thinking of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

Oct 8, 2025 | Western Civilization

When I started thinking about writing my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the words awakening and Great Awakening were out there in the zeitgeist, which in German means the spirit of the age. It’s the cultural climate of the period in which we live, and in early 2022 because Biden had “won” the election, we were in the full flower of the Covid scam and Wokistan. It was a dark time, and it would have been easy to lose hope, but because of the excesses of the left in government and culture, people were waking up to the truth. The realization many people were coming to happened specifically because they were being exposed to lies on such a massive scale that it became glaringly obvious something was deeply wrong with America’s ruling class. Although only some of these people were waking up to Jesus, and it was more than a few, others were in a way waking up to Jesus without knowing it. There are metaphysical and spiritual implications to truth because of he who is The Truth. If a person is an atheist or agnostic, and their minds start opening to truth, they are getting dangerously close to the source of all truth. This dynamic is possible because we are at the end of the several hundred year experiment of the Enlightenment. All Enlightenment figures believed in truth, except in a version untethered from the source of truth. Now because secularism born of the Enlightenment failed, truth now point to Jesus rather than away from him.

I wrote a piece here in June ’22 arguing that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left, which took over the Democrat Party with Obama’s election, only believes in “the narrative,” or whatever it is that advances and sustains their ideological agenda. They will use the “will to power” to advance it by any means possible. The ends always justifies the means for them. On the other side are old fashioned liberals who believe there is such a thing as truth, and have rejected the leftist takeover of the party. Of course, this doesn’t mean all those who believe in truth will end up putting their trust in Christ, but it does mean they can be confronted with the claims of the ultimate source of truth, the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Those arguments today are more plausible, and have more persuasive power, at this end of the failed Enlightenment. The reason is that philosophically, you can’t get truth from dirt, from mere molecules. Without God truth can’t ultimately prevail because it is grounded in nothing, and so doesn’t even exist. But it does, and so it can.

Which brings us to the difference of this Great Awakening from the previous two: it comes in a secular culture where Christianity’s influence was minimal at best. The previous two Awakenings took place in thoroughly Christian cultures, so there really is no comparison to our current cultural moment. Rediscovering truth as a cultural touchstone is important because it is a rejection of the relativism and postmodernism that dominated the second half of the 20th century, and found its ultimate realization in the leftism of the 21st. Up until the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 it seemed the triumph of secularism, and the third class status of Christians, would go on for the foreseeable future. But things took a radical change that day, one for many of us that is still hard to believe. Unless it is really happening, and it is.

I’ve said this many times here, and argue it extensively in my book, that secularism is basically dead. It had a good, very long run, but has run its course and proved to be a colossal failure. I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It seemed as indestructible as the physical wall separating East from West Germany, and fell as ignominiously. The basic premise of secularism was that a society could function and flourish without God, and it is glaringly obvious that doesn’t work. I was born in 1960, and the remnant of Christendom was hanging by a thread, it’s foundations having been completely gutted by the nascent secularism driven by America’s cultural elites. When Kennedy was shot and the Beatles showed up on the Ed Sullivan show a little over two months later, everything changed. What we came to call “the 60s” ushered in a cultural revolution that is only now coming to its somber end in 2025.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Real
By this third decade of the 21st century the youngest among us were hungering for something real, something that works, that makes sense of reality, that brings real meaning, real fulfillment, real hope, real joy, real healing, real anything. Secularism brought only disappointment and dysfunction because it only deals with half of reality, the material half, and that half will never make a person whole. If the material is all there is, then goodness, beauty, and truth cannot exist. They are only concepts “in the eyes of the beholder.” What ends up happening as we’ve seen throughout history, is that without God rooted in Scripture, goodness turns bad, beauty turns ugly, and truth into lies. It is inevitable. But the fact of the matter is that goodness, beauty, and truth do exist, and these metaphysical realities are touching millions around the world today, especially young people in the West who’ve grown up on a consistent diet of lies.

What is so shocking to many, I dare say most of us, is the seeming rapidity of the change. We felt the same way with peak woke that grew during Trump’s first term, and then came to dominate culture and politics in Biden’s term. Then all of a sudden, Trump’s elected again, and Christians and Christianity went from being mocked and denigrated, to Christ being proclaimed from the rooftops, including by the highest government officials, and that boldly. In a way we have Charlie Kirk to thank for that, but his horrible death only popped the cork, and the spiritual bubbly sprayed over the entire culture, and indeed throughout the world. It was yet another massive red pill in this Great Awakening journey God is granting his creatures. We also have the Internet to thank as well. First, information can no longer be controlled by the secular, leftist gatekeepers who once determined what was important and was allowed to be disseminated. And now people, especially young people, are getting their news and information from social media and the Internet, unfiltered, and uncontrolled by the secular leftists.

What is also amazing about this Great Awakening, is that while we’re breaking out of secularism like those awaking from a nightmare, we also seem to be breaking out of the Pietism that has dominated Evangelical Christianity for almost two hundred years. The lived Christian experience became a primarily personal version of spirituality. Another piece I’ve written here tells the story of Pietism and secularism being two sides of the same coin, each enabling the other. Charlie Kirk has been instrumental in bringing Christianity back to its world changing, culture transforming roots. While not being driven theologically, he realized through his talent and organizational skills at making things happen that it was Christianity that allowed society to function and flourish as God intended. As I recently heard a new British Christian, Louise Perry on Twitter say of Christianity, “If it were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” That is brilliant! Christianity lived out in obedience to God and his law, blesses wherever it goes, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago. Kirk understood better than most, it was Christianity that allowed true human flourishing in every area of life, including in politics.

More Christians than ever in my lifetime, especially politically and culturally influential Christians, are proclaiming Christ as King, and that our nation must be a Christian nation, rightly understood. And keep in mind, God used the most unlikely vessel to spark this spiritual wildfire, Donald Trump, with the Holy Spirit lighting that spark. It isn’t that Trump is our Moses leading us to the promised land, or a paragon of Christian virtue, but God enabled him to start something in hindsight no other public figure could: he drove the left certifiably insane. This was also enabled by the NeverTrumper right who revealed their true colors as the controlled opposition, and the result of this has been a revelation of God beyond anything that’s happened since the triumph of secularism in the 20th century. Initially, the title of my book was, Trump the Great Revealer, but my publisher suggested changing it because the book isn’t about Trump, but the Great Awakening coming in his wake, a great revealing.

The left revealing its true evil nature is God’s judgment in giving these people exactly what they wanted, and it just wasn’t good enough. They wanted more because at heart they are totalitarians. It reminds me of the passage in Romans 1 where Paul is speaking of God’s wrath against sinful humanity:

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Sexual debauchery is only one of the consequences of man’s rebellion against God, of his giving them over to their desires, because its ugly manifestations infect everything. Human nature being what it is, things often have to get very bad for people to eventually repent and find their way back to the Author of life that is truly life. Which is a good introduction to a change in my prayer habits that happened several years ago coinciding with my own eschatological awakening.

The Four R’s: Revival, Renewal, Restoration, and Reformation
For several hundred years in the Evangelical Church prayer for revival has been common. We’ve seen wide revivals like the Great Awakenings, and pockets of revival throughout Western history. I realized several years ago that revival in a secular society is no longer enough. In previous revivals, all Christians believed their faith should have societal consequences. Then as Pietism and secularism, two sides of the same coin, came to dominate Western culture in the 20th century, revivals became solely “spiritual.” For some my two sides claim seems odd. After all, isn’t Pietism deeply religious, and secularism not religious at all? The point is that one enables the other. Pietism is primarily about a privatized, personal religious faith, and secularism demands a privatized, personalized faith. In a secular Republic, like America is now, but slowly breaking out of, faith is allowed, but not in the public square. As long as religion stays within the four walls of the house or church, the secularist thinks it’s great, but when it starts sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, like government or law or education, it must be silenced and forced back into the private and personal.

Because of this Pietistic-secular dynamic, several years ago I stopped praying for revival only, and began praying the four R’s, for revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The first R is for the spiritual rebirth of individuals by the power of the Holy Spirit. The next two Rs means those people bring that spiritual awakening into God’s creation to renew and restore it, and the fourth R into the church to transform it into the engine of renewal and restoration for God’s people so they go out into the world to extend Christ’s reign on earth.

What this means in practice is that I am now praying for the earthly reclamation project that is the gospel. For too long Christians have seen the gospel in narrow, truncated terms, as if it was only about our personal salvation from sin. The gospel means, in effect, saying the sinner’s prayer, the Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road. In fact, what makes the Great Commission great, is that going from spiritual death to life, from darkness to light, is only the beginning. We are then to take that life and light into all of life. What did Jesus say when he gave the disciples their commission? Teach “them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And then Jesus gave us the New Testament to let us know what everything meant, and then to take that everything into every area of life. All things are transformed by the gospel, which means God’s kingdom coming and his will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

The beauty of this Great Awakening is that in large measure because of Charlie Kirk and all the work he did for the last 13 years, and then his assassination, more Christians are starting to understand that we can’t stop at the first R. His memorial is a great example of how renewal and restoration happen. Almost the entire executive branch of the United States Government was present, as were many from Congress. The boldness of government officials proclaiming Christ unashamedly was something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime. Sure, Christians have served in government, and boldly proclaimed their faith, but not in this way, not on such a grand scale. In addition to the people attending in two venues in Arizona, it is estimated that over a hundred million people saw it worldwide, and how many more will see clips and snippets into the foreseeable future is unknowable, but surely massive. Charlie Kirk in death is reaching far more than in life.

I recently heard Vice President J.D. Vance say in an interview that prior to Kirk’s murder, he hadn’t read the Bible much, and was uncomfortable being outspoken about his faith, but since he’s reading the Bible every day, and boldly proclaiming Jesus. He’s not the only one either. This is now widespread in the halls of power in the United States of America. And whatever anyone thinks about President Trump, he has really led the way in Making Christianity Great Again in America. Christianity has been welcome in his White House unlike any president in modern times, and given free reign to speak and be itself. That is an answer to my prayer for renewal and restoration. We add reformation when Christians realize the all-encompassing nature of the mission of the church, of God’s people taking the authority of King Jesus and Christian worldview into every nook and cranny of life because we understand again the theological richness of the first Reformation. The scope and extent of the gospel’s influence will then be unleased on the secularism that has decimated Christian Western civilization. But that means we will have to address the big lie of secularism.

The Secular Myth of Neutrality
Unfortunately, most Christians have never heard this phrase, and would likely not know what I was talking about. As I mentioned above, in a secular society religion is primarily a private affair. There is a long history of why this came to exist in Western societies, but religion is never just a private thing. Every nation and people has a view of reality that includes ultimate things, answers to the great questions of life that give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, or at least attempt to. There has to be some ultimate source of authority in every society, and if it’s not God it will be the state. We saw this come to full fruition in the tyranny of Biben administration, and now on terrible display in the UK. The religion of secularism was on full display, man like God determining what is good and evil (Gen. 3). There has never been and will never be a neutral public space where ultimate questions don’t have to be answered, it’s a myth, one we’ve been mired in since at least the end of World War II.

Ever since we’ve lived in a secular republic informed by the liberal (read left-wing) post-World War II “consensus.” That word in quotes means, sadly, that conservatives (including Christians) have gone along with the “consensus.” Most conservatives still buy into this, thinking something like a “Christian nation” is an oxymoron, in the words of Larry Arnn which I wrote about last year. I hope he’s changed his mind on that contention. The reason he said it, and why conservatives believe it, is because they believe if a nation is Christian, the government will force all the people to believe Christian things. That’s ridiculous because Christianity doesn’t teach such a thing, in fact exactly the opposite. Just read the gospels and Acts. Jesus seemed to do everything he could to get people not to follow him. And the Apostles simply proclaimed a resurrected Jesus as the Messianic fulfillment of the Jewish religion. People were free to believe it, or not.

Somewhere along the way in Christian history, Christians forgot this, and started forcing Christian belief with the threat of persecution, and sometimes death. That was when church and state were truly mixed up in an unbiblical and unhealthy way. Even then, however, the church couldn’t execute those they deemed heretics. That was a job for the state, the institution wielding of the sword (Rom. 13) for justice. This brings up something like blasphemy laws. Certainly, such a thing has no place in a Christian nation, right? Wrong. As we’ve seen in our secular republic, blasphemy laws are alive and well. The only difference is the content considered blasphemous. We all know and lived through this in the Biden years. The lie of the myth of neutrality was on full display, which I now see is why God allowed him to “win” the 2020 election. We got leftism on steroids. Some liberals and conservatives (who are basically liberals as well), still contend that a neutral secular state is the ideal we should strive for, but such a thing can’t exist, and never will.

That means in this age of the four R’s, this Great Awakening, Christians need to think seriously what a Christian nation in the modern world looks like. That will take a lot of work and debate and discussion, but many are now undertaking that. Part of the subtitle of my book was the refounding of America. The founders got a lot of things right, but not everything. Much of the Christian foundation of the republic happened because America was formed in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture, which was assumed, not explicitly stated. That was because secularism was already a force even then. That needs to change, and it is, but none of this will be easy. God gave us, then took away from us much too soon, a Charlie Kirk to give us a good start. Let’s build on his legacy so we can bless the generations to come with what he gave his life for.

 

Marx, Nihilism, Charlie Kirk, and the Modern Left

Marx, Nihilism, Charlie Kirk, and the Modern Left

Oct 1, 2025 | America

Roger Daltrey at the end of The Who’s 1971 song, We Won’t Get Fooled Again, sings, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” This came to mind as I’ve been contemplating the brutal, cold blooded murder of Charlie Kirk, and the current iteration of “the left.” The “new revolution” Daltrey sang about was the glory of the baby boom generation in the full flower and arrogance of youth, but he wasn’t buying it. There is something deeply ironic and realistic about the song because he prays, “We don’t get fooled again,” and cynically ends the song with the affirmation that nothing is really going to change, same boss either way.

Applied to our current political and cultural enemies, the New Left of the 60s was the same as the Old Left of the 30s, is the same as the Woke Left of the 2020s. In the 60s and early 70s violence was the calling card of the New Left. Groups like the Weatherman and Black Panthers carried out their crimes as protests against racism and the Vietnam War. Bernardine Dohrn was the leader of a group called the Weather Underground, and they added bombing to their arsenal of violence. She married another Weatherman leader, Bill Ayers, and living in Chicago they became pals of the future president of the United States, Barack Obama, no surprise there. Obama’s election was the beginning of woke and this 21st century version of the left, “new boss, same as the old boss.”

This means Karl Marx’s influence is alive and well. Even though Marxism has morphed and shape shifted over time like the T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2, like T-1000 it remains the same essence: a malevolent God-hating philosophy bringing misery, havoc, and death wherever it goes. One significant difference in the Marxism of our age is rage. The New Left in the 60s was filled with hatred and anger, but not like today. And Communists have always been cool operators, cold blooded killers, and they still are, but the troops are now fueled by a deep hatred and rage because of woke. They’ve discovered reality refuses to cooperate with them, and like spoiled children they pull tantrums thinking that will get them their way. We have social media to thank for this.

Woke as we know by now was the product of one of those Marxist transformations, what came to be called cultural Marxism. Just a couple years ago it seemed indestructible, in a way the Berlin Wall once seemed indestructible. It seemed its “long march through the institutions” would continue for the foreseeable future, but for those with eyes to see it was just as fragile as the brick and mortar Communist wall. It looked indestructible on the surface, but like the concrete wall separating East from West Germany, it was built on lies, and an empire built on lies cannot endure. That’s why I knew from the “election” of Joe Biden and the full flowering of Woketopia, that it was just a matter of time before it all ignominiously fell, as it already has. As Christians we understand that lies are ultimately powerless because of he who is The Truth. They may be able to kill a Charlie Krik, but they can’t kill Truth. Reality as created by God can only be perverted so much before the rubber band strikes back with a vengeance. As Paul reminds us, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

The difference with the Marxism in our day as I argue extensively in my book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, is that it comes at the end of an almost 400 year failed experiment in Western culture to create a society without the God of Scripture. It came to be called, ironically, the Enlightenment. That intellectual movement gave us the illusions of secularism, that it was possible to create a just and harmonious society without God, one in which God was persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. It was fine to have him within four church walls, or in our homes and personal lives, but in the public square, God would not be mentioned. Secularism, however, is now a completely spent force; it has nothing left to offer, no promises left to make, its failure apparent to all but the most obstinately blind and their guides. There are still plenty of such guides, and they still hold cultural and some political sway, but their heyday has passed like an aging athlete who pathetically doesn’t know when to call it a day. The day of Marx is over too, but in its death throes it will not go quietly, as we saw in the cold blooded murders of the poor Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, and Charlie Kirk.

Invoking the name of Marx means the enemy we battle is part of an almost two hundred year development on a philosophical, sociological, and cultural level. It is important to know the nature of that against which we do battle, and what caused our implacable foe to exist in the first place. For that we turn to Karl Marx himself. Knowing what drives the putrid rot of wokeness is critical if we’re to defeat it, completely, totally, once and for all.

Marx’s Worldview and His Enemies
Frederich Engels in his preface to the Communist Manifesto, co-written with Marx, describes “the history of the modern working-class movement,” and declares just how radical communism needs to be because of the “insufficiency of mere political revolutions.” What is needed is “a total social change.” There can be no tinkering around the edges if there is going to be true societal transformation. And I will remind you what Barack Obama said at a rally just prior to the 2008 election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Obama like his woke progeny is basically a Marxist. We can see that from Marx’s own words:

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

These traditional ideas standing in the way of Marx’s Communist, and the current woke, revolution are the enemy, and they must be defeated. Marx’s enemies list stands or falls together:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

This means there can be no Christ-less conservatism. There is no secular way to keep private property or the family or the nation-state. It was Christianity as the Messianic fulfillment of Judaism that gave us those things, and without it they cannot endure or flourish. The worst nightmare of the Marxist woke radical is a Christian nation. Let’s take a look at the enemies:

Private Property – The idea of human beings owning property is foundational to a well-ordered society with maximal liberty. Those who are not allowed to own property, as in communism, are no better off than slaves who can’t own property but are in fact the property of others. There is no direct affirmation of “private property” in the Bible, but it is everywhere assumed. The word property is common, used 50 to 60 times in the Old Testament (depending on the translation). The Hebrew word means possession. What a person possesses they own; it is their property. This is codified in the Ten Commandments in what is called “the second table of the law,” or six through ten. Most directly it is in the command that we shall not steal, which assume others’ property or possessions belong to them. The Lord makes the point even more powerfully in the tenth commandment against coveting, meaning we are not even to desire anything anyone else calls their own.

Contrary to the entire biblical witness, Marx is unequivocal in his antipathy to private property:

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

To Marx real private property which is truly (spiritually, ontologically) owned by the person in “modern society” and “capitalist commodity production” can’t exist. So anything called private property in such a society, the only one that exists, must be “abolished” because it leads to “fresh exploitation.” The modern cultural form of Marxism doesn’t focus on private property, but make no mistake, private property is the enemy of Marx and woke.

The Family – As Christians, we don’t need to establish the biblical basis for the family, but we do need to argue that the family, once commonly referred to as the nuclear family, father, mother, children, is the natural order of things. Every society in world history developed with the family as the fundamental building block of its civilization. Even those cultures that practiced polygamy required the man’s commitment to his spouses and children. Through families a culture’s moral values and framework are passed on from generation to generation, and as such must be destroyed by communists. A society comprised primarily of families will never be ripe for revolution or develop the necessary revolutionary consciousness in the population. Thus, Marx is also unequivocal about this:

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.

Like with most of Marx’s assertions, he begs the question, assuming any family in “modern society” and “capitalist commodity production” is not in fact a “family.” Therefore, such “families” must be abolished. As with everything else in the Marxist philosophy, this is supposed to happen naturally as dialectical materialism works itself out in history: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its compliment vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.” As we witnessed in the twentieth century, nothing vanishes “as a matter of course,” which is why communist regimes are always tyrannical, totalitarian, and bloody. Woke, as we’ve painfully seen, is no different.

The Nation State – As with his critics’ take on private property and the family, Marx addresses those who bring up this criticism, “The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.” His reply? “The workingmen have no country.” So, just like property and family, which by Marxist definition can’t exist in a bourgeois society, neither can “countries and nationality.” This is yet another reason why Christianity was and is the implacable foe of Marxism because it stands in their way. This includes the modern nation-state which developed in Christian Western civilization in many ways because of its Jewish and Christian roots. The idea of nations or peoples is ubiquitous in the Bible, so it stands as a fundamental bulwark to the universalist pretensions of the Marxists as well as the modern globalists who are their offspring.

As we’ve seen in the last ten to fifteen years, this modern version of Marxism is driven by open boarders, a function of the fundamental Marxists hatred of the nation-state.

Religion, i.e., Christianity – Here we come to the crux of the matter. Marx knew it was either Christianity or communism; both could not coexist in the same world. Everything in Marx’s philosophy flowed from his anti-Christian animus. Even though the cultural Marxists believed Marx was in error about economics being the driver of revolution, they embraced this central aspect of Marx’s worldview, that hostility to Christianity would make perpetual revolution possible, so it must be abolished.

Christianity gets the same treatment as every other “traditional idea.” It is dismissed as historically conditioned oppression. His most famous take on religion, or infamous depending on one’s perspective, is that it is “the opium of the people.” His criticism of religion is tinged with a contrived concern for people who supposedly suffer from oppression and look to an illusion to dull the pain. These people may think they are happy, but that too is an illusion keeping them from real happiness. You have to hand it to the guy. Here was a miserable man selling happiness to people who by definition will always be miserable (it’s a requirement) until the revolution brings everything to the dialectical end of history. And people bought it! And still do. The most telling quote from Marx comes right out of the Garden of Eden:

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

The Satanic core at the heart of Marxism, and woke, is blatant: man must be his own God, he must “revolve around himself as his own true sun.”

Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Modern Left
The logical conclusion and inevitable result of Marxism is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Nihilism, which literally means nothing (from Latin nihil). Wikipedia defines it well: “Nihilism is a family of philosophical views arguing that life is meaningless, that moral values are baseless, or that knowledge is impossible.” While Nietzsche is most often associated with Nihilism, he did not embrace it. He thought the collapse of traditional, i.e. Christian, values, left Western man standing firmly in midair, and destruction would follow, as indeed it did. Walter Kaufmann in his biography of Nietzsche wrote of the realization he had come to about God’s demise:

Nietzsche prophetically envisages himself as a madman; to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche’s thinking like a thundercloud. We have destroyed our own faith in God. There remains only the void. We are falling. Our dignity is gone. Our values are lost. Who is to say what is up and what is down.

Mind you, Nietzsche was convinced we live in a God-less universe because he uncritically accepted all the materialist assumptions of the Enlightenment. It was rationalism he found distasteful, and the failure of modernists to accept the implications of what they believed. Because God was dead, and the “slave morality,” as he called it, of Christianity was no longer valid, a new moral system needed to be developed, and he was just the man to do it! Thus, his ideas of the “will to power” and the Übermensch, or overman, were critical to developing an alternative moral system. Most profoundly, Nietzsche predicted the horrors of the 20th century, death on a massive scale never before seen in the history of the world.

Western man thought he could be rid of Christian moral values without consequences, and Nietzsche knew that was delusional, as was he for thinking he could make up values out of thin air, or ironically, out of nothing except man’s own mind. He thought man could avoid nihilism if he would only realize he had to be “like God knowing good and evil.” I don’t know if he ever put it that way, but in effect he fully agreed with Marx, that man had to “move around himself as his own true Sun.” Reality, however, cannot be mocked because God is the Creator of all things. Deny him and nothingness is all you got. Of course, nobody can embrace the absurdity of true meaninglessness, true Nihilism, so what we are left with in Nietzsche’s phrase is, “the will to power.” Although Nietzsche believed in truth, you can’t get to truth from dirt. Mere atoms and molecules tell us nothing about right and wrong. Rejecting God, however, doesn’t keep people from believing in right and wrong, only now the standard is completely arbitrary. It is whatever we say it is. If anyone disagrees, they will be made to agree, or be silenced. That’s the strategy of the trans-terrorists and the left in general, New Left, Old Left, Modern Left, new boss same as the old boss.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is the logical conclusion of the death of God, of man being his own God, and the only rational endpoint is nihilism. The benefit we have in this third decade of the 21st century is that we are living at a turning point in history, the end of something and the beginning of something new. Turning Point turns out to be the prophetic name of the organization Charlie started and led. This is the Great Awakening I wrote about in my last book, a movement of God coming as we are living through the demise of secularism, the failed experiment I wrote of above. The younger generation is no longer satisfied with secular materialist answers that give them no meaning, no hope, no fulfillment, no ultimate purpose. That’s why Charlie the Christian evangelist and apologist was so effective, and was not only building an army of young political activists, but of young Christians who saw their faith as integral to everything they do, political or not. The sexual revolution has been officially replaced with the Christian revolution, with traditional values and a family revolution.

We can also now see the left, their nihilism, their “will to power,” for what it really is, and because of social media and the way kids get their news now, the lies no longer work. The left can no longer control “the narrative” as they once did. There are no more illusions of something substantive, some rationale that gives the left’s actions justification, and everyone knows it, even the liars themselves, which is why they have to lie. They are just raging against the machine because they can’t get their way anymore. They had to get rid of Charlie Kirk /because he was uniquely effective with the younger generation they are losing. The new boss is going into the dustbin of history, the same as the old boss.