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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Power of the Gospel Revealed in Zechariah

The Power of the Gospel Revealed in Zechariah

Feb 25, 2026 | The Gospel

My last post was my perspective on the Catholic faith from my Protestant perspective, and how much over the years I’ve come to appreciate it and see the nature of my faith in some ways more in line with theirs. This post, however, will highlight the significant differences in our understanding of the gospel. I’m not going to compare and contrast, but this will come from my Reformed perspective, which Rome at the Council of Trent declared heretical and anathema. Catholics aren’t so hard core today, for the most part, and they believe we Protestants are Christians too. There are, however, fundamental differences between the Reformed and Protestant understanding of how God saves His people from their sins, and I believe Zechariah highlights these differences.

There are numerous passages in Zechariah that reveal the gospel in the Reformed tradition of salvation being a monergistic work of God in the soul of man. First we’ll define monergism:

The word monergism comes from a combination of the Greek terms for “one” and “energy.” Combined, they mean “a single force.” When applied to salvation, monergism implies that God is entirely, completely, and solely responsible for any person’s salvation. This view contrasts with synergism (“a combined force”). Synergism suggests salvation is accomplished through a cooperative act of God and man.

I learned the phrase above from reading Charle Hodge’s Systematic Theology back when I was 24 and 25 years old and brand new to Reformed theology. He explained this most profound truth in the simplest statement: “Salvation is the work of God in the soul of man.” God does the work, we respond. By His almighty power, he calls us out of the grave spiritually as Jesus called Lazarus out of his grave physically, and guides us through life in holiness, service, and love. We call the former justification, and the latter sanctification, although having lived almost five decades as a Christian, I now call it the pain of sanctification.

Both of these, justification and sanctification, are the work of God to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). He initiates and completes it all, and even our cooperation, our “working out our salvation with fear and trembling,” as Paul puts it, is the sovereign work of God. That eventually became apparent to me a bit later in this journey with Christ when the truth I Corinthians 1:30 hit me in a way I had previously not appreciated. Paul says:

It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

First we are only in Christ Jesus because of God, because He sovereignly put us there. He chose us and put us “in him,” one of Paul’s favorite salvation phrases, “in Christ.” Jesus tells us the nature of our salvation in John 6:

44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

Jesus is confirming here all of Paul’s descriptions of our salvation, from God choosing us in Christ, to our justification, declared righteous because of Christ’s sacrifice, God’s making us holy, sanctifying us, setting us apart increasingly to Him, and our redemption, the resurrection of our bodies. It’s a package deal! All of it includes us, every part of what makes us human, emotionally, psychologically, our choosing, our failures, our wills, but none of it is ultimately up to us. I didn’t quote what Paul says in verse 31 right after he affirms the monergistic nature of our salvation:

31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

Paul is quoting from a passage in Jeremiah 9 in which the Lord is talking about boasting of our wisdom, strength, and riches, and now Paul is adding to that our very salvation.

Related to our salvation is another area where Hodge is helpful. He said that we tend to equate God’s “control” with human control, which requires coercion and destroys our free will. God, however, can “control” human beings without destroying or in any way distorting their humanity or agency. He is sovereign and God, almighty in every way, and how he does it we have no idea; we simply trust him that once he chooses us He will never let us go. As Paul says in Philippians 1, that God who began a good work in us “will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Monergism in Zechariah 3 & 4
Zechariah is given visions that point forward to a day when this salvation Paul declares will be fulfilled in Christ. It’s an amazing testimony to the power of God to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). It is the most Messianic of the 12 minor prophets, and in that it is not unlike Isaiah. He lived not long after the Israelites had returned to Judah after their exile in Babylon in the early 500s BC into the early decades of the 400s prior to Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilding of the temple. It is a book of encouragement to give the Israelites strength to endure the troubles to come. Nothing they are planning to do will be easy, as is living a Christian life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people always will be. We are always working against the gravity of sin, trudging up a mountain with that heavy backpack of sin, and we get a picture of that in chapter 3 as the scene is set up.

Joshua is the high priest at the time, not a coincidence the same name the Lord would give our Savior five centuries into the future. In Zechariah’s vision he is standing before the angel of the Lord and Satan himself. The devil is living up to his name, accusing Joshua, of what we’re not told. Then we see the Lord defend his high priest as he will one day the final high priest:

2 The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire?”

As Jesus says in John 10:10, the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, and the accuser does it by accusing, by rubbing our sin in our faces as if God is incapable of saving us from our sins. To make the point, we’re told that Zechariah is dressed in “filthy clothes.” The word in Hebrew doesn’t just mean dirty, as if your toddler was out playing in the mud, but something much more disgusting. It means, “soiled (as if excrementitious).” To keep this family friendly, he is covered in crap, smelly, disgusting. That is what sin does to us. What does the Lord do with this “burning stick snatched from the fire”? Then we get a beautiful picture of the monergistic nature of our salvation from sin:

4 The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.”

Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.”

5 Then I said, “Put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him, while the angel of the Lord stood by.

Of ourselves, we can’t do anything about our filthy clothes. Only God Himself can have those taken off. And it’s not just that our sin is taken away like those clothes, but God Himself has us dressed in fine garments, the righteousness of Christ himself, enabled by the active and passive obedience of Christ in life, even unto death. As I heard Tim Keller say many times, Christ lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we should have died. Unlike Catholics, we believe that not only did Christ die for our sins, but his righteousness was given to us as well. We are as Luther put it in Latin, simul iustus et peccator, or simultaneously righteous and sinner. We are declared righteous before God, legally, yet we are still sinners. It is a forensic declaration because of the transaction, that actual ransom paid for us, on the cross. This is justification.

Then we see that this is only the start. The Lord charges Joshua to walk in obedience and keep his requirements. There is no room for antinomianism, or being lawless, in the Christian faith or life. We don’t continue to sin because we figure we’re forgiven. As Paul says in Romans 6, God forbid! We are saved from the slavery of sin, like the Hebrews were saved from slavery in Egypt, to live like them in obedience to the law, to righteousness. There are also material implications to a full orbed gospel, as we learn next:

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

The phrase, “that day,” is a critical part of Zechariah’s prophetic power, which I’ll get to below, but we see here, and throughout the Old Testament prophetic declarations of salvation, that the blessings coming as a result are not only “spiritual,” but material as well. This is something Evangelicals either ignore or think has nothing to do with the gospel. God in his revelation, however, says differently. The Old Testament is an incredibly earthy document, focused on blessings in this life more than on the life to come. With Christianity we get both!

The Importance of “That Day” in our Salvation
This phrase is used 20 times in Zechariah to indicate the time in which salvation will come to God’s people, and it will be in one day, as we know in hindsight. Let’s look at some of the hopeful declarations the prophet gives to us.

Chapter 2:  
10 “Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares the Lord. 11 “Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.

Chapter 9:
16 The Lord their God will save his people on that day
as a shepherd saves his flock.
They will sparkle in his land
like jewels in a crown.
17 How attractive and beautiful they will be!
Grain will make the young men thrive,
and new wine the young women.

Chapter 13:
“On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity. 2 “On that day, I will banish the names of the idols from the land, and they will be remembered no more,” declares the Lord Almighty. “I will remove both the prophets and the spirit of impurity from the land.

9 The Lord will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name the only name.

And it ends in chapter 14 with the final references:
20 On that day holy to the Lord will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the Lord’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. 21 Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the Lord Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord Almighty.

The Old Testament is a powerful testimony of the sovereignty of God in salvation. The plan of redemption, of God saving His people from their sins since the fall has always been the work of God. He says to Adam and Even in Genesis 3:15:

And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

In Hebrew crush and strike are the same word, but I like the NIV’s rendering because while Satan can do some damage, symbolically the heel, the seed of the woman, Christ, defeats and renders powerless the devil, symbolically the head. From that moment, history is a very slow beeline to the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, redemption accomplished, to Pentecost, redemption applied.

The Gospel Fulfilled in Zechariah
There are two passages in the book that are amazingly specific about how this salvation to come is to be accomplished. In chapter 3 where we read about the Lord taking off Joshua’s filthy clothes and putting on fine garments:

8 “‘Listen, High Priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch. 9 See, the stone I have set in front of Joshua! There are seven eyes on that one stone, and I will engrave an inscription on it,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.

Those reading Zechariah’s words for the next 400 years must have wondered how sin could be removed in only a single day. Mixing metaphors, the Lord tells us the servant will be a branch and a stone, and Jesus tells us (Matt.21 and Mark 12) quoting Psalm 118,

‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’

Who did this? The Lord. We also learn something about the identity of this branch in Isaiah 11, one of the most glorious salvation chapters in the Bible. It starts with the Branch:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
3 and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

This eventually leads to the suffering of the Lord’s servant in Isiah 52 and 53, where we read the gospel

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Several hundred years later Zechariah echoes Isaiah in chapter 12:

10 “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

In perfect biblical hindsight it becomes apparent just how true it was when Jesus said to his disciples after his resurrection: “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Or the two on the road to Emmaus, telling them, “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” The Bible has one author, Almighty God, and every bit of it points to Christ. In the immortal words of the Hallelujah Chorus which proclaim Christ sitting at the right hand of the Almighty:

The kingdom of this world is become
the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ,
and of His Christ;
And He shall reign for ever and ever,
King of kings, and Lord of lords.

Hallelujah!

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

Feb 18, 2026 | Theology

I’ve been a Christian north of 47(!) years now. That’s insane. There was a time I couldn’t conceive of ever being 47 years old; now 47 is receding in the rear view mirror. I was born-again in the heyday of the Jesus Revolution late 1970s, and as the Grateful Dead also in the 1970s sang, what a long strange trip it’s been. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that in many ways I’ve become more Catholic than Protestant in my basic understanding of the nature of things. Mind you, I could never embrace Catholic theology given I’m a convinced Reformed Christian in the Presbyterian tradition, but I think I’ve grown increasingly more Catholic than Protestant in my perspective on things, as I’m going to attempt to explain in this post. 

Coming from an Italian heritage I grew up Catholic, but firmly rejected it when I was introduced to the Evangelical faith my first semester in college. In fact, I became vehemently anti-Catholic for a period of time because they never told me I could be assured of salvation and have eternal life, not wonder if I did. For example, When I was introduced to Romans 10 the night I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, I was blown away:

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 

I will? I didn’t know this as a Catholic, and one of my big fears was going to hell when I die; maybe that’s a Catholic thing. I was also early on introduced to this passage in 1 John 5:

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 

I can know this? Really? When I realized the Catholic Church had never told me this, it ticked me off. Of course it horrified my mother and father. My mother is still convinced that I had gotten involved in a cult, but I keep telling her that no, I was just a young know-it-all teenager who had no idea what life was all about.

Eventually I lost my animus toward Catholicism as I got to know about the many solid Catholics I highly respected in the conservative movement. These people were not stupid or ignorant. Eventually I came to accept that they simply came to different conclusions with the information and facts presented to them. I also was able to learn more about Catholic theology, and I discovered it was far more nuanced than I realized in my know-it-all ignorance. There is much I disagree with, but they are not as far away from what I believe as I initially thought.

It’s far too complicated to explain, and I don’t know enough to really do that, but I’ve concluded that no, Catholics don’t believe their works will save them, that in effect obedience to the law will earn them God’s favor. Some Protestant Catholic haters will declare that, but it’s a caricature. They too believed we are saved by God’s grace alone, and Christ’s merits, only that it’s applied in and through our lives differently than we Protestants understand it. Most importantly, they are passionate about standing for the ancient creeds that declare the historic orthodox Christian faith. For me, as long as someone can proclaim the Apostles or Nicene Creed, we’re brothers or sisters in Christ regardless of their other theological convictions.

What exactly is it about my perspective on things that has become more Catholic? The nature of salvation is one, and the nature of reality is the other. I may be going out on some thin ice, but I’m confident it’s much thicker than it first appears.

The Difference Between a Proposition and Trust
Protestants are a people of the Book, of words, of propositions. Our Reformation, our break from the Roman Catholic Church, was declared by the five Solas, one being Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as our ultimate source of authority. Catholics, on the other hand, are people of the Church and the sacraments, of grace infused, not merely accepted rationally. Scripture is but one piece of the puzzle for them, whereas for us it is the puzzle. That said, the Roman Catholic Church stands strongly on the inerrant, authoritative word of God. In fact, growing up a Catholic gave me an inherent respect for the Bible, so that when I was presented clearly with what it said, I believed it was in fact authoritative truth about the nature of reality, including how we are saved.

Which brings me the first of what I think are my more Catholic perspectives, salvation. As Evangelical Protestants, we believe in the primacy of propositions. If you believe in X, Y, and Z, you shall be saved. If you only believe in X and Y, and are not quite sure about Z, or ignorant of it, it’s iffy. If you only understand X and don’t get the others, you’re out! I don’t buy this anymore. I know this will send my Protestant brothers and sisters into a tizzy, but it shouldn’t. I came to believe a long time ago that there will be no theology test to get into heaven, or to receive our new resurrected bodies when Christ returns and death, the final enemy, is destroyed. As I became less dogmatic in my certitude about things, realizing I’m finite and in the cosmic scheme of things know pretty much next to nothing, I even told a friend we might get there and find out, to his horror, that the Roman Catholics were right!

As I came to have a more capacious understanding of salvation I never changed my basic theological convictions. I was a Calvinist then and I’m a Calvinist now. Only now, I don’t think everyone who disagrees with me is going to hell. In fact, I now believe anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even if they don’t quite understand what they are calling on. The opposite holds true as well. Someone can believe all the right things, have every proposition down and intellectually assent to them all, and still be headed for hell. Mere intellectual assent is not the basis of salvation, trust in a person is.

Which brings me to John 3, and Jesus analogizing the process of salvation from sin on the cross to Moses and the snake in the desert:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

As modern, post-Enlightenment people, when we see the word believe we immediately think, one who intellectually assents to something. The Greek, however, doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t preclude it, but it only tells part of the story. The word means trust, to put your faith in something or someone. Of course one has to have some understanding of the object of our faith or trust, but we don’t have to fully understand it to believe, to trust, to entrust our self to it, him, or her. I can trust getting on an airplane without understanding anything about physics or aerodynamics. I simply believe, trust, that the plane will get me safely to my destination. We exercise faith, or trust, every single day of our lives in ways too many to count. It is the glue that hold families and societies together.

We read the story of the bronze snake in Numbers 21. As with much of what we read in our Bibles, it’s a bizarre story. The Israelites are in the desert on the way to the promised land and they are complaining. They figure, Moses brought them out into the desert to die. A rebellion ensues, and God sent venomous snakes into the camp as a judgment against them. They quickly realize the error of their ways, repent, and ask Moses to pray to the Lord for them. The Lord tells Moses to fashion a snake and put it on a poll, so that, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” I guess Moses melts some bronze, makes a snake, puts it up on a poll. “Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.” They were to look up to an image, a symbol, of the thing that is killing them? How strange is that! You can imagine the people saying to themselves, that’s it, just look up and we’ll be healed? Did they understand anything about how or why it worked? Nothing. They just trusted Moses’ words, and were desperate enough that instead of looking down at the injury, they would look up and be healed.

Now Jesus tells us the cross and the salvation it brings is analogous to this. How much do we really need to understand the nature of soteriology, or the how and why of it all, to be saved? Most Christians could agree nobody understands 100 percent, but is 80 percent good enough? How about 60 percent? Forty or 20? For all of Christian history until the 19th century, not only were most people illiterate, few people outside of the church owned Bibles. Even after Guttenberg, Bibles were hugely expensive until mass printing in the 20th century. The vast majority of Christians heard it read and preached on Sundays. Most of these could likely not explain the intricacies of salvation and the gospel, but trusting Jesus to forgive them and give them eternal life, that they could understand.

All of this is why I believe my mother, for example, will be with Jesus when she dies. She couldn’t explain the gospel very well, and as a Catholic of 92 years of age, a personal relationship to God is an abstraction she has a hard time grasping, but I keep giving her hope that she just needs to trust in Jesus for what is often difficult to believe and understand, and she does as best she can. As I said, I’m convinced there will be no theology test to get through those pearly gates, which I why I always just encourage people to look to Jesus, and get to know him and his word if they at all can. Hopefully, the understanding will come along in due course.

Lastly, do we intellectually assent to something before we believe or trust? Or can the assenting to something as true come after trusting? A wonderful movie with Mark Whalberg about the life and faith of Father Stuart Long opened my eyes to how powerful the Catholic approach to faith and trust can be, as well as the testimony of Shia Labeouf in his interview with Bishop Barron. Neither of these men would have become Christians with an Evangelical, intellectual first approach. Rather, as those who had yet to believe, they were invited to participate in the sacraments, which in turn created faith in them as their understanding was illuminated by what stood behind those sacraments. To we Protestants, that’s all but heretical. Nope, you have to understand and accept before we’ll let you do any of this Christian stuff.

Now, on to the minor topic of the nature of reality.

Reality is a Lot Messier and More Complex Than We Think
This one is a bit harder to explain, or maybe a lot harder. An allusion to a hit movie might help. We live in the Matrix, in a world, a universe, of information and data so infinite in magnitude and complexity that it makes all the AI data centers and computing power in the world look like a child’s sandbox. We can take our blue pills and pretend what we see is what we get, reality obvious, right in front of us, or take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. The Protestant mind tends to the more rational, logical, explainable, and I’ve found over the years the more I know, the more confounding reality becomes to me. Maybe it’s a more mystical take, a less buttoned down, I’ve got reality figured out take. Like I said, this isn’t easy to explain.

It seems to me Catholic thinkers, and the Catholic worldview in general, tend to see a more seamless connection between the eternal or heavenly non-material world, the Matrix, and our material world than Protestants do. This became especially true as conservative Protestant Christianity grew more Pietistic and tended toward a Gnostic dualism in their understanding of spiritual and material realities, upstairs and downstairs if you will. Catholics tend to see the world as more enchanted, more connected to that which is not of this world, which is why praying to saints is plausible to them and anathema to Protestants. They see the vail between the two worlds as more permeable, a water wall rather than a brick wall.

Regarding this, I heard Bishop Barron, I’m sure the Catholic thinker I respect most, explain praying to saints using Hebrews 12:1, that “we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” Building on chapter 11, the great Hall of Fame of faith, this cloud of those who have gone before us is not off on some other planet with an unbridgeable gap between us, but all around us, invisible to our five senses, but there all the same. I couldn’t buy his argument, but at least it was plausible given how Catholics perceive the world we live in. So no, I haven’t started praying to the saints, and after all, Scripture is clear, every Christian is a saint, a holy one set apart to God.

On an intellectual level, Catholics going back to Augustine through Aquinas and many others, have developed a much more robust and broad intellectual tradition trying to apply their Christian worldview to every nook and cranny of existence. I think they got much wrong, but they also God much right. Conservative Protestant Christianity, now called Evangelicalism, has been anti-intellectual for some two hundred years. Add to that anti-theological and ahistorical. In fact, historian Mark Noll, an Evangelical, wrote a best-selling book in 1995 called, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I began to understand this in my early Christian walk through Frances Schaeffer, and learned more as I embraced Reformed Theology in my 24th year. The Reformed tradition is much more intellectually robust, but we’re a small portion of the greater Evangelical church.

Art is another area where a Catholic and Protestant worldview diverge because of The Matrix. The Reformation gave us iconoclasm, taking the Second Commandment against making images and bowing down to them and worshipping them as a commandment against making any kind of images. Catholic Christendom gave us the most amazing art and architecture the world has ever seen, and Protestantism rejected all of it. That’s why if you go into Evangelical churches there is no art, and of course, no statues. By contrast, if you go into Catholic churches it’s usually a visual feast, something that inspires the worshipping soul to connect with a different world to which the art points.

Having said all this, I’m no less a Reformed Calvinist than I’ve ever been, only that after well over four decades following Christ I’ve come to appreciate the Catholic Christianity that gave us birth. I came to realize a while ago that I can disagree with my Christian brothers and sisters theologically, and still see them among the great cloud of witnesses to our glorious Lord and Savior. To put it crassly, we are on the same team, and together we are doing our best to obey the Lord Jesus when he taught us to pray, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.