The Material Implications of the Gospel

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored.  Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

10 “‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Mar 18, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

In January I was listening to Steve Deace opine on the woman in Minnesota who was trying to block ICE agents on a suburban street. At one point it looked like she was trying to run over one of the agents, and he shot her. She died giving her life for the leftist religious cause of all things anti-Trump. You can bet if Joe Biden had sent Ice to deport illegal aliens, she would not have been on that street blocking them that day, and ICE wouldn’t be in the news at all. In fact, when Democrats have deported illegal aliens, and they have, there wasn’t a peep from the left, but if Trump does it, the left loses its mind. They are also invested in immigration, illegal or otherwise, because their power depends on it. A guy who goes by the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist put it well:

Mass immigration is an existential issue for the modern left, perhaps more than any other. Without mass immigration, the leftist project collapses. Kaput.

The word existential is one most people aren’t familiar with, but it says perfectly what’s at stake: existence itself. The concept developed in the mid-20th century post-World War II, “where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.” The seeds of this intellectual movement go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, but it was the horrors of the 20th century capped by Nazi death camps and atomic bombs dropped on Japan that gave it momentum. Existence itself, and it’s meaning, seemed to be on the verge of extinction. The radical left realizes this, and unfortunately most of the Democrat Party is right with them. Trump is the ultimate threat to their power grab because he realizes their threat to the American way of life, the liberty and prosperity handed down to us from our forefathers. Too many on the right side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum don’t seem to get this, that this is a metaphorical war for a way of life we’ve come to take for granted.

Deace sees this, and was bewildered that more on our side, especially Christians, don’t get what’s at stake. He was also marveling at the religious commitment of this woman willing to become a martyr for the cause she believed in so deeply, and he was wondering how she became who she is. The media tried to portray her as an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was in fact an anti-ICE warrior, part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She was a lesbian who was “married” to a woman and who was previously married to a man. She likely immersed herself in the left’s religious echo chamber, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, etc. and was committed to applying her faith to all of life. She had a radical leftist atheistic secular worldview. She even sent her son to a woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and “involving kids in political and social activism.” She took her faith seriously.

What Deace was marveling at was this passionate commitment of leftists compared to most Christians who are committed to comfort and ease. For many Christians, their faith is irrelevant to this world, and thus this world is never influenced by their faith. As I’ve written about extensively here, I blame Pietism for this, the 17th century German Lutheran movement with good intentions, that over the next three hundred years changed Evangelical Christianity from a transforming force in society into a culturally irrelevant one. A curiosity to me is how many people complain about how terrible things are, but don’t seem to realize the faith they believe is a transformational faith, not just for individuals but for entire civilizations. Look what happened to the once mighty Roman Empire; it was defeated by Christianity and turned into Christendom.

The Left: No Longer Democratic Rivals, but Existential Enemies
The existential battle between left and right, between good and evil politically and culturally, goes back to the French Revolution. That conflict gave us left and right, specifically from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly (also known as the Estates-General convened at Versailles). Those who supported the king, monarchy, tradition, and the old order sat on the right. Today these are called conservatives. Those who supported radical change, the revolution, limiting or abolishing royal/aristocratic power, greater equality, and republican ideas sat on the left. These are the leftists, liberals, progressives; Democrats have become the party of the left. That first radical Revolution in France led to tens of thousands of executions, upwards of 17,000 having their heads lopped of via Madame de Guillotine. It turned out to be a revolution in innocent blood, unlike the revolution coming before it in America.

Many revolutions followed in its wake, the most consequential the October 1917 Russian Revolution, out of which came communism and what is called the “Old Left.” This left gave us Stalin and purges and war on an industrial scale, but accomplished none of the dreams of its grandfather, Karl Marx. Communism simply didn’t work. Those who yearned for a world informed by the French Revolution, taking down the old order and everything supposedly inimical to “progress,” would never give up. In the 1920s and 30s a group of leftists in Germany developed a form of cultural Marxism, moved to America before the war, and eventually developed into the New Left in the 1960s. The current batch of woke leftists are the children and grandchildren of the New Left. The old Left focused on economics, labor issues, and socialism, while the New Left’s obsessions were issues like civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism, environmentalism, and plain old countercultural rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when screens were limited to 3 main channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, or channels 2, 4, and 7 in Los Angeles. PBS was channel 11, and then there were a couple local stations. Shocking to you youngster, I know. Protests of leftist hysteria over one issue or another was a consistent theme, and I had a front seat to it all in our house when the screen was turned to the news every night. So the antics of the woke left in our day are nothing new, and not at all creative. They’re basically a broken record, same old story, a turgid Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals movie, over and over again. It’s exhausting, and banal, not to mention dangerous. Susan Sontag, one of the New Left radicals, is a good example. Some people today are shocked by the anti-white racism of the leftist-Democrat liberal establishment, but Sontag wrote in 1967 that, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” You can’t get more anti-white than that! The real cancer of anti-white racism, which is anti-Christian and anti-masculine, has been around a long time.

What makes them especially pernicious is their self-righteous smug moral superiority. They believe themselves to be moral and good and right, and everyone else is evil, a fascist, a Nazi. Hitler for them is the apotheosis of evil; Satan doesn’t compare. Branding everyone who disagrees with them a fascist allows them to justify violence as a political tool. That’s why they’ve branded Trump as Hitler from the moment they realized he wasn’t one of them, and was a threat to their vision to take over the world. Of course killing Hitler is justified, then there would have been no World War II and no Holocaust. Go back to the 60s and 70s and we’ll see this is nothing new either. Their only real moral value is might makes right; the will to power rules all. Truth is a luxury they can’t afford.

The Christian Response to the Evil of the Left
These people take their faith seriously, and it is an all-consuming religious worldview applying to every area of life. Like we postmillennialists, they are confident their kingdom will eventually win and take over the world. They are something that appears contradictory, optimistic in their rage and anger. This actually reflects the futility of their efforts, but they don’t know that. They’re convinced they are, in the words of radical leftist Barack Obama, on the “right side of history.” Jesus begs to differ. When Peter in Matthew 16 declared of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus told them that he was going to build his church upon this declaration, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. For most of my Christian life I missed that gates were defensive mechanisms in the ancient world. It is the church, Christians, who are on the offensive in this spiritual war, and the devil and his minions are on the defensive.

We give the devil entirely too much credit. After the resurrection Jesus had been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and at his ascension was coronated as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Paul affirms this in Ephesians 1 when he tells us that Jesus was seated at God’s right hand,

21 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.

Notice, and this is critical, Paul took it for granted that his audience understood Jesus had all this power and authority now, in “the present age.” He felt he had to remind them, it was also for the age to come. The devil has no authority on this earth, zero, zip, nada, none. He only does what God allows him to do. Scripture further tells us when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on this world at Pentecost, that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Cor. 15). Peter in the first sermon in Christian history in Acts 2 quotes Psalm 110 to affirm that this has been the plan all along:

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

All of this started, the ushering in of the kingdom of God on earth, at Christ’s first coming. The victory in this world is ours because we belong to Christ, we are “in him,” as Paul says many times in his letters.

We have a problem, though. Most Christians don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either until a few years ago. I was convinced sin and the devil were such powerful forces that things would get increasingly worse on earth until Jesus came back to save the day and finally usher in his kingdom. This is a relatively new eschatological perspective in the history of the church. Most Christians believed the kingdom of God on earth had come in Christ, and it was the church’s job to advance the kingdom on earth. In the 1830s this all changed with J.N. Darby and the rise of dispensationalism. Even those who are not familiar with that term or what it means, have heard of things like Antichrist, 666, the rapture, and the great tribulation. This mentality is fundamentally defeatist in the face of evil, like the evil presented to us by the political and cultural woke left in our day.

The other problem is non-theological. Most Evangelical Christians are conservatives. Unlike secular leftist radicals, and the Democrat big money donors that enable them, we just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our families, and be productive members of society. That’s why we’re called conservatives. We think there is value in traditions and the Christianity that gave birth to our civilization, and want to conserve them against those who fetishize progress. We are on the right side of the French Assembly squarely against the Revolution. Most normal people’s lives are not consumed by politics, yet therein lies the problem. The radical left, which is the entire Democrat industrial complex today, will never leave us alone until they’ve ushered in their woke Utopia. Basically what it’s come down to is us or them, as I said, it’s existential.

As I write this, we are witnessing an existential battle for the American way of life in the streets of Minneapolis. Either the radical left and their minions of protestors are crushed, or America is over. It’s our will against theirs. Either truth, righteousness, and justice prevails, or it’s lies, evil, and tyranny. As a culture, a society, a nation, we have a clear choice, made all the clearer by the woke radicals: it’s either Christ or chaos. The church, as Jesus said, needs to “discern the signs of the times.’” It is either them or us. I will end this with the immortal words of Thomas Paine written in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in late 1776. They apply to our present moment in history and we need to take them to heart. There is no place anymore for a personalized Pietistic faith. As with the Patriots of old, we must decide if America is worth fighting for:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

 

 

What Does It Mean to Baptize Nations?

What Does It Mean to Baptize Nations?

Mar 11, 2026 | The Gospel

That’s a good question! At first I didn’t think so. I recently put up a post about Sphere Sovereignty, and someone responded on Twitter asking how nations are baptized. I gave a bit of a snarky answer. Then thinking about it I realized it’s actually a great question, and I apologized to the commentor for my snark. What am I taking about? It’s a passage in Matthew 28 every Evangelical Christian is familiar with, what we’ve come to call the Great Commission:

18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

For most of my Christian life, and that’s not a few years, I assumed like most Christians that when Jesus said to disciple nations he meant to disciple individuals in those nations. It would have never occurred to me that a nation as a nation, or nation qua nation as the scholars would put it, could be discipled. We don’t disciple America, Germany, or Lithuania, we disciple Mary, Bob, and Joe. Then a few years back I had an eschatological awakening, a red pill regarding how I think about “end times,” and it affected how I see the entire scope of redemptive history, past, present, and future. Now I realize discipling entire nations is exactly what Jesus had in mind, in addition to individuals within those nations. According to Matthew, he used the word that in Greek means nations, not individuals. Christians out not to try to explain that away, but rather try to figure out what Jesus meant, and then how to do it.

One way to do this is to see nations as corporate entities. Jesus speaks of “his church” which means both the individuals in it, and his church “body” corporately. Nations are made up of individuals, of course, but they also have corporate identities. The Lord repeatedly declares judgments or blessings on nations, and even towns like Jesus does in the gospels, which would affect every person in those nations even if each individual is not personally guilty or worthy of blessing.  So merely equating nations with individuals doesn’t work. It took my awakening about the study of the end of things to make me realize when Jesus said nations and not individuals he really meant nations.

Speaking of eschatology, the word means the study of end things, and we think that’s what it’s about, what happens at the end of history, the end of time. It is about that, but it’s much more about bringing the end into the present, and how we see the end influencing how we read history. I love the phrase a uses for this: “inaugurated eschatology.” To inaugurate means “to make a formal beginning of; initiate; commence; begin.” What Jesus accomplished in his first mission to earth, redemption accomplished, was then after his ascension applied to his church and this world at Pentecost.

In other words, eschatology is a comprehensive worldview that affects how we see everything. Other than that, it’s not really important. That’s a bit of sarcasm for you who tend to the literal. It’s massively important, although most don’t realize it. I didn’t for most of my Christian life; I was an eschatological agnostic. I didn’t believe how we viewed the end mattered at all, one way or the other. Eschatology was something people argued and speculated about, and I had no interest in it. Then the red pill, postmillennialism, dropped out of the sky and crashed my eschatological indifference into a million little pieces, and down the rabbit hole I wen              t!

I learned eschatology isn’t really about “end times” at all. That phrase I always put in quotes comes out of dispensationalism, a broadly Pietistic perspective that sees this world as evil, and the goal of the Christian life as getting away from it as much as one can, and also becoming more “spiritual” and less worldly in the process. I’m all for the latter, but eschatology is about bringing Christ’s fulfilled mission, how eventually everything will be in God’s kingdom, to earth. That means, according to Jesus, teaching them, the nations, “to observe all that” he had commanded. That doesn’t just mean the Sermon on the Mount, or other teaching we find in the gospels, but the entire word of God, all of it. Which brings us back to the question about baptizing nations and what that means.

Teaching Nations All that Jesus Commanded
When we ask a question about what something means, it’s often good to start with what it doesn’t mean. Depending on your baptistic convictions, Jesus wasn’t telling us to either sprinkle water over an entire country, or cover the entire nation in water. I think we can look at this both from a Presbyterian and Baptist perspective. For the former, baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant, of God’s promise to His people to save them from their sins (Matt. 2:21). In other words, baptism is a sacrament primarily about God’s faithfulness to which we are responding. For Baptists, it’s primarily about our confession of faith, a sign proclaiming to the world our trust in Christ as our savior. Let’s see how we can apply these to nations.

Both kinds of baptism require a confession, although Presbyterians believe the covenant community includes infants and children whose parents act as covenantal representatives for their children. They primarily confess God’s covenant faithfulness, while Baptists confess their faith in God’s saving work in Christ. Nations cannot be sprinkled or immersed in water, but the people in those nations can be, and the primary ethos of those nations, both culturally and in their governance, can confess God’s covenant faithfulness, and Christ as Savior and Lord. Even in complete heresy now, Great Britian confessed exactly these things when King Charles was coronated in 2023. The British Isles have been confessedly Christian for over a thousand years until the god of secularism seduced them after World War II. Now it’s just words, traditions.

So nations are baptized when the nation, it’s worldview and value system, reflects Christianity as the aspirational guiding system of the country. America was seen by its people for most of its history as a baptized confessionally Christian nation, even if the founders did not expressly state that in our founding document, the Constitution; they should have. Unfortunately, the secular strain of the Enlightenment had infected the thinking of many of the founders, and we got almost as good as it could have been. Of course, a baptized Christian nation must have a lot of baptized Christians, although it does not have to be a majority. I’ll explain why in a moment, but this quote from a book I’m currently reading, The Cousin’s War by Kevin Phillips, tells us just how religious, i.e., Christian, the colonies were in the run-up to the Revolution:

More material was printed in mid-eighteenth-century America about religion than about political science, history, and law combined, and even as the Revolution approached, devotional books outnumbered any single group.

Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation says, “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” America was a Christian nation because it had many Christians who gook their faith seriously. And it wasn’t just laymen. I have a book called, Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, and it clocks in at 1596 pages! Pietism had yet to fully infect American Christianity as it would in the later 19th and 20th century, and Christians from every walk of life, including church leaders, believed their faith applied to every square inch of reality, including how they were governed. This affected not only Christians, but nominal Christians and those who didn’t embrace the Christian faith at all.

The Christian Plausibility Structure of a Nation
I used the word ethos above, that a society to be Christian, baptized as Christian, needs to have a Christian ethos. The technical definition of that word is, “the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period.” The ethos informs the basic plausibility framework or structure of a nation. For something to be plausible it must be believable, credible, and the plausibility structure of a nation is that ethos that makes things seem a certain way, or just the way things are. We currently live in a secular nation with a secular ethos and plausibility structure, so most people think a woman killing her offspring is something that should be her “choice.” Sex outside of marriage is normal. Homosexuality is as natural and good as heterosexuality, and I could go on.

To be a Christian nation, that society must have a solid Christian plausibility structure. Even the non-Christians need to buy into and fully accept a Christian view of reality. Even today, without knowing it, most Christians adopt the secular plausibility structure of our dominant secular culture. How can they not! It’s everywhere, all pervasive, in every screen, coming through every message in our education, news, law, government, advertisements, all of it is indoctrinating us into the secular worldview, the secular plausibility structure that this is just the way things are, the way their supposed to be. Watch pretty much any TV show and movie, and God isn’t the enemy, for the most part, he’s just irrelevant, persona non grata, doesn’t much matter at all. Making God invisible and irrelevant to life is some of the most powerful indoctrination of all. In most screen entertainment, God or Jesus only shows up in some kind of expletive. Or take government schools, what we call “public schools,” where over 50 million kids go five days a week. They are an anti-Constitutional establishment of religion, the secular religion. The indoctrination is the same, all the more powerful because God is a non-entity.

So, what’s the answer to the suffocating secularism that inundates us at every point of our lives? How could the culture ever change and become once again a culture that affirms God and Christianity as the driving force of the nation? First, that has to be a goal and determined project of every Christian, but must start first in the pulpits and among Christian leaders who need to teach cultural transformation as a biblical imperative. When we look at the bleak cultural landscape, it might appear like we’re trying to leap over the Grand Canyon; even with a running start we’re not getting very far. But Peter tells us we have everything we need to make it to other side:

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2 Peter 1:3, 4).

We immediately tend to read this as if it only applies to us personally, but it applies to nations as well because Jesus told us to teach them everything he commanded, and this comes directly from his word. Even as we plan and work and execute to the best of our abilities, the transformation of the culture as is the transformation of our lives, a supernatural work of God. That’s why we pray as we work. What might that work look like?

The Culture Project
That was the name of a non-profit I started in 2008 after I realized that almost 20 years of conservative and Christian futility was because we had ignored the importance of culture in the transformation of our nation. We were so focused on politics figuring the culture would take care of itself. It most certainly will not! In the early days of my conservative political journey, which happened with Reagan’s first election, I learned about conservative activist Mortan Blackwell who started an organization called The Leadership Institute. According to Wikipedia, its mission is to “increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists” and to “identify, train, recruit and place conservatives in politics, government, and media.” I believed we needed to do this for the culture because until we win back the culture, nothing is going to change. As the late great Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” I believe that is true, to a degree.

I’ve learned since my early realization about the importance of culture, that culture can also be downstream from politics. Law shapes culture as well as reflects it, so if Christians want a godly society, being involved in politics is not an option either. It is politicians who pass laws that we are compelled to live by, and righteous laws will only ultimately be passed by righteous people, by those who fear God and obey his word. I’ll just give one example. In the 1970s California passed the first no-fault divorce law, which communicated to Americans that getting out of a marriage is no big deal, just a choice among many other choices. Soon no-fault divorce was normal throughout America, which led to broken families, and the misery and suffering that comes along with those; lives ruined for convenience.

But without the culture long term political effectiveness, which means governance from a conservative and Christian perspective, is like trying to run on ice with tennis shoes; you won’t get very far, and the harder you run, the more futile the effort.

I had a vision of The Culture Project as a kind of recruiting and mentoring enterprise that would identify young Christians and conservatives, and help them make careers in what I called “the cultural influence professions.” These are obvious—Hollywood and entertainment, media and journalism, education, law, etc. It never went anywhere because I’m not Charlie Kirk, but it is in fact what has to happen if we’re to really push back against the relentless assault of secularism. We can’t create a Christian plausibility structure or ethos, a Christian culture, by complaining or wishing upon a star. It also won’t happen automatically if more people become Christians, as if that will somehow turn into Christian cultural influence. It requires intention, planning, and execution, or focus and a lot of work. Not to mention, determination, resilience, and grit. It won’t be easy because secularists won’t just roll over and embrace the Christian message. We’re also fighting Christian secularists and Pietists who think cultural transformation is a waste of time. To them, we just need to preach the gospel and wait for Jesus to return.

The biggest obstacle to cultural transformation is this Pietism of a personalized Christianity that doesn’t see cultural influence as a biblical imperative. Like I said, it has to start from the top, but unfortunately most church leaders are Pietists, and Christianity for them is primarily personal not societal. Over the decades I’ve heard many prayers for cultural and political change, but few calls for Christians to actually do something about that. If we’re to obey Christ’s Great Commission mandate we have to change it from being just about leading individuals to Christ and discipling them, to discipling entire nations, and teaching nations to obey everything he commanded.

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

Mar 4, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Recently at a church service the closing hymn was That Old Rugged Cross, for over a hundred years a beloved hymn to conservative Protestants. It had been a long while since I’d sung it, and I noticed the final stanza got the ultimate hope of our faith backwards, although most Christians wouldn’t think so. I myself wouldn’t have given it a second thought until not too many years ago. The final stanza reads:

To that old rugged cross I will ever be true, its shame and reproach gladly bear; then he’ll call me some day to my home far away, where his glory forever I’ll share.

In fact, our home is this very earth upon which we live which Jesus came to redeem and restore to its previous Edenic glory, and Jesus will complete the job when he returns. Sure, it doesn’t quite feel “homey” because sin still exists and we long to be freed from being afflicted by its doleful effects. That, however, is a process only to be fulfilled at Christ’s second coming when we receive our new bodies and live on this new redeemed, renewed, and restored earth. That’s when we will be fully home. Heaven could never be our home because we won’t have our bodies, and we were never meant to live a bodyless existence. The Christian hope in the final analysis is not heaven, but a physical, resurrected body, on a material earth Christ redeemed from sin. We’re merely living the down payment now as we await the glory to come. These words of the Apostle Paul say it a whole lot better than I can, and notice not a word of heaven:

18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.

Our hope is completely material in orientation. Why we tend to think it isn’t, I’ll address below.

We give the devil entirely too much credit, as if this earth belonged to him and our goal is to escape it. Our goal, in fact, is to transform it, as Jesus prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That wasn’t a prayer for thousands of years in the future when he returns, but a prayer fulfilled at his first coming. Like the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13), Jesus wants us to know his kingdom’s coming on this earth is inevitable and all pervasive. It’s why Paul says when we are in Christ we’re part of a “new creation, the old has passed away the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). One day nobody will be able to deny this new creation as the kingdom’s transformational power goes out from God’s people to all the earth.

Satan, the World, and our Home
If we’re to talk about this sinful fallen messed up world, it’s important to be clear about what world we’re talking about. The physical earth and material world while always belonging to God its creator, was ruled by Satan since Adam and Eve rebelled, and he remained in the driver’s seat until Christ ascended on high and sent his Holy Spirit 50 days later at Pentecost. At that moment, Satan like the strong man in Jesus’ parable (Matt 12, Mark 3), was bound up for a thousand years so he could no longer deceive the nations (Rev. 20:1-3) and the gospel could go forth and bear fruit across the entire earth as it has these last 2,000 years. Prior to the ascension and Pentecost, that couldn’t have happened.

The problem with thinking heaven is our home and that it is far away, is that it’s not true. Jesus tells us as much in Luke 17:

20 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

The kingdom of God, of Heaven, is right smack dab in the middle of where we live. In that sense we’re “home,” only it doesn’t feel like it sometimes because we still need to tidy up, clean out the junk in the garage and attic, and put on some additions and redecorate. We need to truly make it feel like home, and that is the process of the Christian life, thy kingdom come!

Whatever heaven is, we can say with assurance that our residence there is only temporary. Theologians have termed our time there as the intermediate state, as in, it’s a temporary state of our eternal existence. We won’t get too comfortable there because we’ll be longing for our actual eternal home on this renewed, restored, and redeemed earth, the one paid for by Jesus’ blood. While we are in this fallen world living in our fallen bodies surrounded by fallen people, our mission is to make it as homey, eternally speaking, as possible, a place where God’s law is honored, and Christ exalted as King of kings and Lord of lords. In other words, in obedience to Christ we are bringing heaven to earth and discipling the nations. That is the Great Commission, not merely saving people from the fires of hell. We are not only attempting to sanctify ourselves, but working to sanctify the world, and the peoples and nations in them. It’s a tough job, difficult in every way, against the grain, but look at the progress over the last 2,000 years; from only a handful of people to over 2 billion, and transformation beyond what Jesus’ followers could ever imagine.

Havin said that, there are numerous passages in the New Testament that give us the impression this earth, rather than the fallen world, is not our home. Just this morning as I write this, we had a missionary from Thailand give sermon in I Peter 2. Peter opens his letter telling us he’s writing “to those who are elect exiles” in several Roman provinces in Asia Minor (modern-day northern Turkey). There is some debate as to whether Peter is speaking to Jewish or Gentile Christians, but Christians tend to read this as applying to our spiritual estate in the world, and not the literal description of Christians Peter was writing to who had been scattered, or dispersed, throughout Asia Minor. The word exiles in Greek means pilgrim or sojourner, so we conclude that must be us on this earth. Then in chapter 2, Peter says:

11 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. 12 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Again, we tend to read this as if it’s directly to us and about our spiritual estate in this fallen world, we being the foreigners and strangers and aliens in a fallen world. In some ways that’s true, but Peter is in fact writing to Christians living in the thoroughly pagan cultures of the time. Yes, it is analogous to living in a fallen world among heathens in our own day, but we’re the ones doing the transforming. We are not helpless before the juggernaut of evil wrought by the devil in this world. He’s been defeated! And now we bring the victory earned by our Savior and God to bring Joy to the World. As Isaac Watts wrote and we sing on Christmas, “He comes to make his blessings flow, Far as the curse is found.”

There are other passages that we could explore that give us the same impression, but how we read these depend on our eschatological assumptions, which most Christians are unaware they even have. If we see the world as belonging to the devil, and that it will get increasingly worse until Jesus returns to save the day, we’ll think we’re the ones who are the exiles and strangers here. By contrast, it’s the lost sinners who feel that way in God’s world, and we have to help them see that. If we realize Jesus took the world back at his first coming, and enabled the possibility of his kingdom to invade what was enemy territory, then we’ll see our mission as taking back what is rightfully his. We’re the light that drives out the darkness, and light always wins. We’re the salt that preserves and enhances. And as Paul says in Romans 14:

17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.

In other words, people want what we have! That is how the kingdom is advanced, as God’s Spirit is apparent in our lives and he works in the souls of those we encounter.

Why Do We Seek to Escape This World?
Why do we think heaven is our home and not this earth? Why do we think in such escapist terms? Until a couple hundred years ago most Christians didn’t, in fact. While they realized life was extremely short and perilous, instead of escape they saw their mission in life as bringing heaven to earth, God’s kingdom come His will be done. All Christians thought this way to one degree or another regardless of their view of “end times,” or eschatology. In fact it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the “eschatology wars” started because of a new player on the eschatology stage, J.N. Darby.

I won’t go into the details of his thinking because I’ve done that here numerous times before (see here and here and here), but since the 1920s it’s been known as dispensationalism, and by the 1970s Antichrist, rapture, and tribulation had become pop culture mainstays. The entire point of this version of “end times” eschatology is escape. The term “end times” itself was popularized in this period and came to mean a dystopian hell from which all true Christians were supposed to be rescued. I was born-again into this milieu in which the zeitgeist, or the spirit of that Christian age, was all about escape. I even remember praying one time right before I graduated from college that the rapture would happen so I wouldn’t have endure real life after college. But all of this mentality is the result of a false, unbiblical spirituality that goes back to the influence of Platonism on the early church.

If you never did your study on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his influence in church history, you wouldn’t know that the distrust of this material world found at times in Christianity came from him. His unfortunate influence in this regard was most powerfully felt with the rise of the heresy of Gnosticism in the second century. Plato gave the Western world a dualistic view of reality, upper/lower, spiritual/material, good/bad, and it’s wormed its way through Christianity ever since.

The 16th century German Lutheran movement of Pietism was one worm that eventually allowed a kind of Gnostic dualism to fully dominate the church, which is the answer to my questions. Pietism is the bad guy. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about piety, or a dedicated pious life of a vibrant personal relationship with our God through Christ. That kind of piety and Pietism are two completely different things. This kind of Gnostic dualism is a way of seeing the world, a mindset that mistakes this world for something inherently bad that we’re to get away from to experience true eternal life, the life of God meant for us in Christ. Francis Schaeffer called it a two story view of reality.

The Alternative to Escape: Transformation
One of the most unfortunate effects of Pietism is how it causes Christians to over spiritualize everything. The tendency is to downplay the importance of this world of material things, and only give true value to that which is forever, the spiritual, the not “this worldly.” I’m not talking about the perverse desires of this world the Apostle John talks about in I John 2, but rather to the contrast he makes, doing the will of God on this earth. The mission of God in Christ, the Great Commission, is distinctly for this world. The charge Jesus gave to his disciples right before he left the earth was to “make disciples of all nations,” not just the people in those nations, and having baptized them, teaching them to observe all that he commanded them. And he promised he would be with us always on this earth “to the end of the age.” This wasn’t his only final message. In Acts 1 he expands on it:

6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

He wanted the disciples’ vision to be the entire earth so that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs would come upon all peoples and nations; true Israel would now touch the four corners of the earth. The Great Commission and being his witnesses to the ends of the earth could only happen after Pentecost. Once he sent his Spirit he himself would be with us in power, the power to transform lives which in due course would transform civilizations. That is the point of the Great Commission, what makes it Great, not only saving souls to go to heaven when we die. Jesus wants his earth back, and we’re the down payment!

This transforming power, contrary to the Pietistic mentality of most Christians, affects every nook and cranny of existence, everything Christians put their hearts and minds to. I don’t need to define everything because it means, literally, every single thing we do. What happens when the spirit comes? Read Galatians 5, and compare “the works of the flesh” to “the fruit of the spirit.” This is transformation! And it not only transforms us personally, or in our relationships, but it makes us productive citizens. When Paul tells us the kingdom of God is a matter “of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” imagine a town or city or county or state or country filled with kingdom people who exhibit these qualities. Can you? It’s something wholly different than John Lennon could Imagine. We’re so used to seeing dysfunction and strife and “works of the flesh” we think that’s what it will always be. Jesus said otherwise.