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.

 

 

 

 

Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Sep 23, 2025 | Eschatology

This was the title of a YouTube video. I was surprised because I thought the failure of dispensationalists predicting the rapture for almost 200 years had put an end to this prediction business. Apparently not. This specific video was of a guy shooting down the prediction, which is like shooting fish in a barrel, given the woeful track record of dispensationalist predictions, not to mention the theological errors inherent in it.

We live in a different eschatological world than I did when I first became a Christian in 1978. That was the decade of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book popular in a way inconceivable to us now. Published in 1970, it eventually sold over 35 million copies by the 1990s, and talk of the rapture and antichrist and Armageddon was everywhere. And world events at the time seemed to lend credibility to the wild speculation. It was all over Christian radio, and popular culture as well. Prophesy conferences were common, as were sermons about it in church. Rapture speculation was common. I’ll never forget one day right before I graduated from college in May 1982 standing out in front of my dorm at Arizona State University praying for the rapture to come so I wouldn’t have to go out into the real world and deal with real life. No such luck! On January 1, 1988, a former NASA rocket engineer named Edgar C. Whisenant self-published a book with the unfortunate title, 88 reasons Why The Rapture Will Be in 1988. We’re still here, by the way.

The frenzy continued into the 90s with the Left Behind series of books, a collection of 16 Christian fiction novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published from 1995 to 2007. These were turned into a film trilogy from 2000 to 2005, probably the pop cultural apex of “Rapture theology.” (One of the ironies of recent history is that the star of those films, Kirk Cameron, is now a bona fide postmillennialist!) There was even a Left Behind movie in 2014 with Nicolas Cage, although by that time dispensationalism had pretty much run its course. Saying that I do not mean this eschatological perspective on “end times” has gone away, only that it’s no longer a relevant topic of conversation for most Christians. But having said that, dispensationalism hasn’t gone away, only now it’s become the furniture of the Evangelical mind, the background to life that colors how conservative Protestant Christians see things. It’s the assumed eschatology, not much discussed or debated, except maybe on social media. If you asked most Christians if Jesus is coming back soon, or any moment, or if the world is going to get increasingly worse, they would likely say yes. They are familiar with antichrist, rapture, and 666, but don’t much think about it or come across it in church or Christian culture.

Most Christians also live a kind of dualistic pietistic Christianity which fits perfectly with their dispensational assumptions. Christianity is primarily about saving souls, going to heaven when we die, and personal holiness. All of this is predictable given how modern Evangelical Christianity developed over the last two hundred years as the offspring of the Second Great Awakening and the fundamentalism to which it gave birth. For those who are younger among us, they’ve likely never heard conservative Christians referred to as “fundamentalists,” only as Evangelicals. Here’s a brief history as to why.

The word fundamentalist or fundamentalism today is rarely if ever used to refer to conservative Protestant Christians because of 9/11. The words were regularly used to refer to Islam and Muslims, and the angry “New Atheists” tried to slap that label on us in their short stay in the pop cultural sun, but it didn’t stick. In due course conservative Christians were always referred to as Evangelicals. This was a fascinating development for me because when I became a Christian, fundamentalists were a subset of conservative Christianity because of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th century. Evangelicals were a separate subset. This break came after World War II when a small group of Christian leaders, including Billy Graham, wanted to break out of the cultural and intellectual insularity of fundamentalism. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary, and would only refer to themselves as Evangelicals. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer in college I was ever thereafter an Evangelical. Now we all are.

Why the Rapture?
As I said, most Christians assume dispensational eschatology, and that we are in the “end times,” but few know where it came from or why it exists. Sadly, Christians are as woefully ignorant of history as most Americans, and dispensationalism is one of the defining theological characteristics of modern Evangelicalism nobody knows about. If you want a solid history of its development and demise, I would suggest Daniel G. Hummel’s excellent book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. I was only vaguely aware of some aspects of this development, and Hummel filled in all the blanks. Before we get to the rapture, I’ll briefly give you my synopsis.

Hummel doesn’t do this, but I would place the start of dispensationalism with the rise of Pietism among German Lutherans in the 17th century. From there Pietism, a dualistic form of spirituality, spread throughout Europe, especially with Wesley in England and Whitfield in America, as well as the Puritans in the First Great Awakening. In the 1830s out of the dynamics of these religious movements, a group of British and Irish dissenters, the most prominent among them J.N. Darby, came up with a novel idea of biblical dispensations, eventually to be called dispensationalism in the 1920s. Until then they were called the “new premillennialists” because their version of eschatology was very different from what thereafter came to be called historic premillennialism. They were also known as the Plymouth Brethren, after the city in England where they had their biggest gatherings. Probably the first real eschatological pessimists, they believed the church was so corrupted that God’s judgment was coming on the world because of it, and likely soon. Their theology developed over time, but became dominant with C.I. Scofield (1843-1921) and his bestselling Reference Bible.

What really ramped up the growth of dispensationalism were Darby’s visits to America from 1862-1877, seven times in all, encompassing a total of seven years. The new premillennialism made its greatest impact through the great evangelist of the 19th century, D.L. Moody (1837-1899). He and American revivalism would never be pure enough for the pessimistic Darby, but his teachings through the Plymouth Brethren came to dominate American Evangelical Christianity. According to Hummel speaking of Moody:

His premillennialism helped to popularize some of the key points as taught by Brethren and early American converts, including the imminent rapture and heavenly nature of the church.

As a successful businessman, Moody was an organizer, and it was the network he built that moved the new premillennialism to the center of Northern Evangelical culture, which continued into the fundamentalism of the 20th century, north, south, east, and west.

The connection between revivalism and this new pessimistic eschatology can’t be overstated. Hummel states it well:

These two implications of Moody’s ministry—the popularization and fusion of new premillennialism with revivalism—could hardly be separated. They worked together to form a potent and wildly successful message. Moody’s ministry spearheaded an interdenominational evangelical ethos shot through with the influences of the new premillennialism.

The Civil War played no small part in that. Given the death and destruction and horror, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Jesus would be coming back soon to rescue his church. Moody’s version of the new premillennialism was a simple one: “Jesus could come at any moment, and you don’t want to be left behind.” For Moody the Pietist revivalist, the details of doctrine were not that important. And doctrine was divisive and only got in the way of what was most important—soul saving. What mattered in life and Christianity was whether you were going to heaven or hell when you died. Then once you were scared into eternal life with Jesus, what counted was living “the higher life” and personal holiness, and victorious Christian living. It was a potent message for me in 1978. In fact, an experience of what I call “drive by evangelism” was instrumental in bringing me to Christ. One evening at a party not long before I was leaving for college, a buddy of mine and I were outside of a party having a smoke, and a VW bug, the old school one in those days, parks across the street, and a guy gets out of the back seat and walks over to us. I think he’s going to shoot us or something, and he says, “If you died right now would you go to heaven?” I did not want to go to hell when I died, so soon thereafter when I went to college I was praying “the sinner’s prayer.”

The Rapture and Its Predictions
If we’re talking about the Rapture, it will help to know what dispensationalists actually believe about the primary doctrine that defines their eschatology. Hummel here is helpful.

The close of this dispensation will be heralded by the imminent rapture, a sudden taking up into heaven of all true Christians to meet Jesus in the air (based on I Thess. 4:13-17). With the church removed from the earth, God will unleash judgments for seven years as part of the plan for world redemption. God will allow evil to reign and will permit the rise to power of the antichrist, a perversion of Christ’s incarnation that sees Satan fuse with the human dictator of a one-world government. Plagues, geopolitical machinations, and wars will ensue—the earth will be utterly devastated. Israel, God’s chosen people and instrument for world redemption, will be seemingly on the verge of destruction, but a remnant will find supernational preservation. At the climax of the seven years, the battle of Armageddon will see the victorious raptured church, led by Jesus himself, vanquish the forces of the antichrist. Satan will be bound for a thousand years; this is the same span of time that the millennial kingdom will reign in Jerusalem, its realm the entire globe, its rule one of peace and justice. A final confrontation with Satan after the thousand years will dispatch the devil forever into the lake of fire and prompt the final judgment of humanity.

The doctrine of the Rapture, if we can call it that, developed from Darby’s theological assumptions, most importantly his view of the church. First, he saw the church of his day as a corrupted body, and its ruin would be the precursor to the second coming. This was in contrast to what he considered the perversion of postmillennialism that saw organized Christianity ushering in a millennium of peace. Most importantly, he separated ancient Israel from the church. The Hebrews or Jews in ancient Israel were in no way connected to the New Testament church. Christians were citizens of heaven, but the kingdom of heaven on earth, a reign of peace could only ultimately come through Israel.

The details of this theology were worked out throughout the 19th century, but especially with Scofield and his reference Bible. Old and new premillennialism intermixed in this development, but the rapture was an early feature. As it moved to America even prior to Darby’s visit, the Millerite movement led by Baptist minister William Miller got into the prophecy speculation business, and declared that Jesus would return (often associated with a rapture like event) on October 22, 1844. When it didn’t happen it came to be known as the Great Disappointment, but it would only be the first of many disappointments. Before this September 23 predication popped out of the dispensational rabbit hole, the last modern prediction was from Harold Camping who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011, followed by a revised date of October 21, 2011, after the initial failure.

It is impossible to know exactly how many of these predictions happened over the years, but once a rapture like event entered the Evangelical bloodstream seeing world events as indicating some kind of apocalyptic end was a common occurrence, even if most Christians didn’t get into the prediction business. This dispensationalism mentality, the pessimistic the “we lose down here” perspective of life on this fallen earth, in the words of John McArthur, is the worldview of almost all Evangelical Christians. To one degree or another, they all share it regardless of their eschatological convictions or knowledge. That was my perspective most of my Christian life until I embraced postmillennialism just over three years ago. Things were inevitably going to get worse until eventually they got so bad Jesus would have to come back and save the day.

The Rapture and Futurism
Fundamental to dispensationalism and the rapture mentality is futurism, or the idea that the prophetic texts in the Bible refer to events in the future, not to any historical proximity in which they were written. There are three basic eschatological assumptions regarding prophecy and timeline, futurism being one. The others are historicism, which correlates prophecy to historical events, so for example, to the Reformers the Pope was the antichrist, and preterism, which says the events of prophecy happened in the past. The most solid biblical case can be made for a mixture of preterism and futurism. Some Christians have decided that it’s either all preterism or all futurism, but those lead to all kinds of problems, as we can see from Darby and the dispensationalism his thought eventually gave birth to.

For most of my Christian life I was a futurist, but I didn’t even know the term, nor had I ever heard the word preterism, which just means past in Latin. I’ll never forget one morning walking into our bedroom as my wife was reading about the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 or Luke 21, and understandably confused, she asked me some questions. I remember being just as confused and replied, “Oh well, who knows. God does.” That was typical of my pan-millennialist tendencies, that it will all work out in the end, so why bother with it. Then the most repeated month in my writing happened, August 2022, and postmillennialism dropped out of the sky on my head. For some reason I read this title of a James White sermon on YouTube, “My Journey to Hope for the Future,” and downloaded it on my trusty little MP3 player. Steve Bannon had turned me into an optimist, but I had no substantive theological reason for it, until I heard this sermon.

I hadn’t realized until these last few years that my basic pessemism about the present and future was due to futurism and its assumptions. Kim Riddlebarger, a scholar and pastor for many years, is a perfect example of why. He is not at all a fan of an optimism/pessimism paradigm, as he argues in a piece he wrote some years ago, and part of the reason is his furutistic reading of Matthew 24:

Jesus himself speaks of world conditions at the time of his return as being similar to the way things were in the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37-38)—hardly a period in world history characterized by the Christianizing of the nations and the near-universal acceptance of the gospel associated with so-called optimistic forms of eschatology.

This is only true if Jesus is referring to his own second coming at the end of time, not the coming judgment on Israel in AD70 he is in fact talking about. In Matthew 24 Jesus has told the disciples while they were standing on the Mount of Olives looking at the magnificent temple, “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” That was shocking, so they ask: “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Every futurist, which is the vast majority of Christians, assume the coming Jesus is talking about is the second coming, the end of time and the consummation of all things, and the age is this fallen world system. But Jesus says clearly that is not what he’s talking about: 34 “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” It takes all kind of pretzel logic to claim “this” doesn’t mean “this,” but that hasn’t kept Christians from doing it because they come to the text with their futurist assumptions, like Kim, and have to say it doesn’t really mean “this.” When I was confused, I figured some of what Jesus said referred to the generation he was speaking to, and some didn’t, but that was pretty much arbitrary.

Even though plenty of Christians were futurists throughout Christian history, it wasn’t until Darby and his novel dualisms of the church being heavenly and not earthly, and the church and Israel, that his potent pessimism became a feature of Christianity. His theology informed by his futuristic assumptions enabled rapture theology to blossom into dispensationalism that would eventually envelop almost the entire Evangelical church. Thankfully, there will be no rapture on September 23 because Christ did not call his church to escape the world, but to overcome and transform it. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

 

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Sep 17, 2025 | Eschatology

I’ve written here and there about how woefully misunderstood postmillennialism is, but I’ve never given it the full blog post treatment. There are deep historical and theological reasons for the typical knee-jerk reaction that will be fascinating to explore given Christians live in profound eschatological tension, the already and the not yet. The question and the debate always has and always will come down to the scope and extent of what N.T. Wright calls inaugurated eschatology. In other words, what will be fully realized at the end broke into our world at Christ’s first coming, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. The moment the tongues of fire came down on the 120 disciples in that upper room in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit was unleashed in His redemptive power to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. What does that all mean? What are the practical results in this still fallen world from Christ’s accomplished work? Therein lies the debate.

John Murray, the great Scottish theologian who helped found and for decades taught at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote a book called Redemption Accomplished and Applied, the title of which captures the essence of this debate. He writes primarily about soteriology and the order of salvation, or how we are saved, but salvation is not limited only to our own personal saving from the guilt and penalty of sin. Salvation is much bigger than just us, as we learn from the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:

18 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 of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.

Our salvation is literally cosmic in scope. That means creation in all its manifestations will be redeemed and renewed, starting with the apex of God’s handiwork, man, who will become fully human through everything it means for him to be a human being. Paradise lost will become paradise restored, slowly but surely in this life, then completely at Christ’s return.

Aristotle in his Politics said man is a political animal, not exactly a biblical way to put it, but yes, human beings are intuitively driven to organize with others in developing societal structures, be it family, church, business, or government. Christ’s redemption is applied to all these spheres, specifically under his kingly rule from the right hand of God. This is why before he ascended to that ultimate position of power in the universe he told his disciples:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Notice Jesus says all authority to all the nations. One would think given the clarity of Christ’s command, along with the clarity of redemptive history in God’s revelation, the scope and extent of the church’s mission would not be a point of contention, but it is. Jesus even used a Greek word we translate in English as nations, and not a comparable Greek word for individual. His charge was to disciple people groups as corporate entities, not merely as isolated people in their personal lives. This was accepted by all Christians regardless of their eschatology until the Second Great Awakening in the mid-19th century when soul saving became evangelicalism’s raison d’etre, or reason for being. Conservative Protestant Christianity became about saving souls so we can go to heaven when we die and personal holiness. Cultural transformation now became, at best, the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth, not as Christ seems to be saying one of its primary purposes. It took a while in the form of fundamentalism in the 20th century for our version of Protestant Christianity to completely turn in on itself. But by the middle of the century Christianity in America had become culturally irrelevant and the Great Commission had changed. The charge had become to save as many as we can from a sinking ship while the world goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

How the Enlightenment and Dispensationalism Took Down Postmillennialism
It seems my favorite bogeyman has to make an appearance in all such discussions, and this one is no different. The Enlightenment, a period of Western history starting in the mid-17th century, gave birth to the philosophical concept of rationalism. Man, so it was thought, via his reason could discern all truth without any reference to revelation. This process slowly progressed through the 18th century, but by the late 19th as Friederich Nietzsche said, God was dead and Western intellectual man had killed him. This entire period coincided with the Scientific Revolution and a remarkable increase in knowledge that inspired sinful man’s Babel like tendencies that he could accomplish anything. Given the Western world at the time was known as Christendom, it was inevitable that Enlightenment rationalism would make its way into Christianity.

The first consequence we see develop among Christians in the late 18th century is the heresy of Arianism, a rejection of the Trinity. Ironically, what came to be called Unitarianism grew out of Puritan churches in New England that in due course would come to be known as the mainline churches in the 20th century. The abolition, feminist, and temperance movements were filled with such Unitarians, people who still embraced Christianity but rejected Christ as God. For them, and the liberal Christianity they birthed, Jesus was a great moral teacher and example, but not the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At the same time as this liberalizing tendency was taking over large parts of more intellectual and activist Christianity, the Second Great Awakening burst onto the cultural scene in response. This revivalist movement was anti-intellectual and anti-theological, and out of which would come dispensationalism. These two streams of Christianity would flow in opposite directions both of which would end up discrediting postmillennialism in the eyes of all Christians.

Into the 1800s Christ’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was something all Christians believed was the mission of the church. Even Monastic movements prior to the Reformation sought to transform this fallen world with the righteousness of Christ, as did the Pietistic movements inspired by them after the Reformation. What united all Christian visions of transformation prior to the 19th century was a dependence on the Spirit of God. These were not Babel building projects of man’s hubris, but God working through His people to crush Satan under their feet (Rom. 16:20). Once orthodox Christianity was thrown under the bus, the spirit of Babel merged with a growing secular confidence that nature itself could be conquered by human ingenuity and will. The “new premillennialism” developed by the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in Ireland in the 1830s was a response to this secularizing tendency in the church. They saw corruption everywhere, and the convoluted eschatology of dispensationalism was the result.

Largely because of the Enlightenment and the growing secularism it spawned, Christianity encountered a fork in the road in that fateful century. Down one road was a this-world, man-centered hubris, down the other was an other worldly over spiritualized piety of escape. Biblical postmillennialists who affirmed a rigorous orthodoxy would not take either road. They would, however, after World War I, be tarred with the Babel label. The collective insanity of the Western World known as The Great War, the war to end all wars, would cement pessimistic eschatology into the minds of Evangelicals for the rest of the century. Postmillennialism would be discredited as the perversion of unbiblical secular progress, man thinking he could usher in the kingdom of God based on his own efforts and ingenuity. That is exactly what I thought it was until August of 2022. I was actually shocked that a biblical case could be made for an optimistic eschatology.

Optimism or Pessimism: The Parable of the Wheat and The Tares
In addition to postmillennialism having the baggage of being secular progress, critics contend its optimism is biblically unwarranted. I thought so myself. When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I found over time that it turned me into a pessimist. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, or weeds, Jesus tells of the kingdom being like a man who sowed good seed in his field. An enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. Jesus says the weeds should not be pulled up before the harvest lest the wheat gets pulled up with them, so the weeds and the wheat will grow up together until the end.

Both pre- and A-mill see this as the metaphor for life in our fallen world. Sin and righteousness are in constant conflict and in due course the weeds win. Pastor and theologian Kim Riddlebarger, who convinced me initially to embrace amillennialism, puts it this way:

Aside from the fact that many contemporary notions of optimism have stronger ties to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament. . . the New Testament’s teaching regarding human depravity (i.e., Eph. 4:17-19) should give us pause not to be too optimistic about what sinful men and women can accomplish in terms of turning the City of Man into a temple of God.

You can see in his comment two of the straw men I discussed above. One is that postmillennialism is a product of the Enlightenment and not Scripture, and the other is that it teaches that we usher in the kingdom of God through human effort. Neither of which resembles the truth in the least.

The conflict of sin and righteousness, good and evil, is what informs the worldview of most Christians, as it used to do with me. If you think this way and simply look at the world in all its misery and suffering, it’s almost impossible not to be a pessimist. If we live by sight and not by faith, we will inevitably see the weeds as the ultimate winners in our fallen world. But, as I found out, if we live by faith it’s a completely different story. Instead of seeing conflict everywhere like two heavy weight fighters pummeling each other for 15 rounds, we can begin to see the struggle in terms of conquest. It is difficult to convey how transformational this shift in perspective was for me. I’ll never forget what I heard Doug Wilson say only a few weeks after I embraced postmillennialism:

Now you have the theological justification for your optimism.

Bingo! I’d already started becoming more optimistic for a variety of reasons, but it had nothing to do with theology. I was looking for a biblical justification for it, and the very last place I thought I’d find it was in postmillennialism.

In my pessimistic phase, when I thought we lose “down here,” I didn’t realize the field into which the weeds are sown is a wheat field. It is a field primarily of wheat, not weeds! In any wheat filed weeds are a nuisance, but when harvest time comes there is always more wheat. I always missed that. I also missed that the next parables Jesus tells are of the mustard seed and leaven (yeast). I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a coincidence, Jesus putting these parables together, and in this order. I believe he did it to give us the context for how to see the parable of the wheat and tares. I’ve written about this in depth, so I won’t do that here, but the parables teach us about the extension and scope of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of God and Christ’s righteousness will inevitably be like the largest tree in the garden, and the leaven will go through the entire batch of dough. Everything, every single thing, will be impacted, influenced, and transformed by the power of God, far as the curse is found.

The Greatness of the Great Commission
This is the title of a book I recently read by Ken Gentry which raises a question: What makes the Great Commission Great? Is the greatness limited to the salvation and transformation of individual lives and the personal relationships they have? I’ve listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last handful of years, and I hear supernatural greatness in every one of them. Transformed lives are one of the great evidences of the truth of Christianity, but so are transformed civilizations. In the foreword of the book, Gary North puts it well speaking of the grace and restoration made possible in the healing power of the gospel:

Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional Church. Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin; every type of wound from every type of sin.

One could expand his list to include art and architecture, law and entertainment, agriculture, science, and health. The scope of God’s transforming power in Christ is as expansive as God’s creation. This was man’s task, dominion, before the fall, and the gospel calls us to exercise that dominion through the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49). That is what I argue makes it great, the discipling of entire nations and everything contained therein. This has only become my perspective, and conviction, since August of 2022.

Prior to that date, to my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed salvation was primarily for saving the souls of individual people, and the real, substantive transformation of the world would have to wait until Christ returns and makes all things right. I believed we should apply a Christian worldview to all of these things, but the basic structure of it would be wheat and tares struggling it out on a level playing field until the end of time. That won’t change until Christ returns; weeds win, I guess.

I came across a perfect example of how I used to think about this from the magazine of my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. The issue is about global missions, and in one of the articles the author states what he sees as the mission of the church of Jesus Christ: “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” Prior to my “conversion” I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, but now my response was, “No, He’s calling us to disciple the nations! To see them transformed by the gospel!” If our mission is calling people “out of” every nation, then we’re not teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded his disciples.

If we look back through the corridor of time it becomes easier to see the greatness of the Great Commission. And I mean way back in time. Four thousand years ago, God called one heathen man out of all the people on earth, Abram, to create a people for Himself. He promised that all peoples on earth would be blessed through this man. All was darkness until God himself lit this small candle. The history of Israel, from a human perspective, can be described as Thy kingdom stalled on earth, fits and starts, seeming to go nowhere for 2,000(!) years. That’s a long period of futility. After all those years God’s kingdom had made its mark in one little plot of land in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. Then came Jesus of Nazareth, the most unexpected Messiah. The blessing God had promised Abram all those years before was about to break out, only it didn’t look like it, at all. The odds of this fledgling little religious movement within Judaism going anywhere was between slim and none, and the Roman government and Jewish leaders made sure slim had no chance at all. Not only did it go somewhere, but it also eventually came to dominate the civilization that was bent on destroying it.

Now looking back 2,000 years we can see the civilizational power in the Christian message, and it goes well beyond what most Christians consider “spiritual.” A non-Christian historian named Tom Holland wrote a book whose title says it all: Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World. An historian of the ancient world, Holland realized what he believed, how he lived, and how he saw the world, was nothing like the ancient pagans he’d studied for so long. What changed? Jesus of Nazareth! Christianity in what we’ve come to call Christendom changed everything. Specifically, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. The great 20th century English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it in his own inimitable way:

The Man on the Cross dying to ribald shouts and mockery is validated, and seen to have guided and inspired through the Christian centuries all that is most creative and wonderful in human life.

From my new postmillennial perspective, I now see these 2,000 years as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago, that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him. As I always say, God is never in a hurry, which is why I think we may have a while to go before the final enemy will be destroyed, death (I Cor. 15:26). Until then Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25). He will do that by the power of the Holy Spirit through his people, his body, the church. What makes the Great Commission great is that it brings God’s blessing in Christ to everything human beings do, not just their “spiritual” lives. And at the end of the day everything creatures made in God’s image do is spiritual. That is our mission field.