Love and Reigning in Life Through Jesus Christ

Love and Reigning in Life Through Jesus Christ

Feb 21, 2024 | The Gospel

From April of 2014 to June of 2022 I slowly wrote my way through the entire Bible. It was one of the best things I ever did to show me the inexhaustible riches of God’s word found in our Bibles, what the Apostles and New Testament church called the Writings, or graphé- γραφή in Greek. The word is used over 50 times in the New Testament, always of holy Scripture, i.e., the inspired, inerrant writings of the Bible. These writings, or Scripture, are authoritative because while written by and through men, they are the very words of God. The Apostle Paul tells us how this works and the value contained in these writings:

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3)

The Scripture Paul is speaking about is the Old Testament because that was the New Testament church’s Bible. There was no New Testament yet. It is from this verse that we get the biblical doctrine of Inspiration. It is phrased that way because the King James version translated these words as, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God…” The Greek word Paul uses there, however, is breathed out, so the writings are literally God’s breath coming through men in the form of words. Thus we call it the word of God. As Jesus said in reply to the devil suffering his temptations in the wilderness, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Or, on every word breathed out by God. What happens to us without food? Eventually we die. As Christians we must ask ourselves, is the word of God as important to us as food? Jesus says it should be.

The Bible’s Power to Change People
Biblical inspiration is powerful and profound, but what is more powerful and profound to me, is the effect the Writings have on the lives of the people who encounter them. Over the last few years as I’ve listened to hundreds of Christians share their testimonies, one thing every person has in common is feeling compelled to read the Bible. Even if they were reluctant initially, soon they were taken in by its unique power, realizing, often quickly, there is something divine about this book. To Paul it is this divine nature of the Writings that gives them the capacity, the dynamic aliveness, to create righteousness in God’s people. It has the power to change the way we live, from lost sinners in rebellion to God and for ourselves, to saved sinners living in obedience to God. In theology this is called sanctification, God’s work in us and through us to make us holy, those set apart for his kingdom purposes. Of course, nobody could say this better than Paul:

 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. (2 Cor. 5:15)

In addition to witnessing this dynamic in my own life, and the lives of many loved ones and friends, hearing so many people testify to seeing this play out in their journey to faith in Christ is to me magnificent. Every time I hear or witness it again, I marvel that this Christianity thing I believe in and have staked my life on, is actually true; it’s real! Mere human words on a page cannot do that.

Paul’s point about the purpose of the word of God in our lives is that it is there to change us in fundamental ways, change our being, who we are, that we may be able (thoroughly equipped) to do good works. Here in Jesus’ words is why we want to do these works:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it (abundantly) to the full (John 10:10).

This abundant and full life comes directly from the blessings that flow into our lives from obedience to God. If the devil can convince us that what we want is more important than what God wants for us, the thief will steal from us the only life that is truly life. God by contrast wants us to reign in life through Christ. How is that done? It’s done through Christ! Romans 5:17 is one of Paul’s declarations of why we can live the abundant life:

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

How much more . . . . By being given the gift of righteousness by faith (i.e., not depending on our own) because of God’s grace, we can now reign in life by performing righteousness. We now are able to obey God, albeit very imperfectly, because our lives are no longer solely about us, our wants, our needs, our desires, but about Him! I heard a very simple phrase recently that packed a profound meaning in what at first blush seems so obvious:

There is a connection between what we believe and how we behave.

Well, duh! No kidding. But if we don’t behave like we say we believe, then we either don’t know what we believe, or don’t really believe it. I remember hearing a saying decades ago along these lines:

To know and not to do, is not to know.

Biblically, this is known as fruit. As Jesus says in the gospels, you will know the tree by its fruit. Good fruit good tree, rotten fruit rotten tree.

But is it really possible to change who we are, our fundamental being? Yes and no. God has no desire to make us Stepford Christians, little Christian robots who do and say all the same things. In fact, the complete opposite is the truth. God wants to make each one of us the most Jesus-like person we can be so we can become more fully who he uniquely meant us to be.

The Secret of Reigning in Life
Speaking of reigning in life through Christ, what exactly does that look like? How does that work? When I was reading through that passage in Romans recently, I wondered how many Christians feel like they are “reigning in life.” I would guess probably not many, and I think the reason is that we don’t know what it means, or we think we know what it means and our lives certainly don’t reflect that!

In my early years as a Christians I heard about something called the victorious higher life, or victorious Christian living. It seemed no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t very good at that victorious life. Defeat seemed a far more common companion than victory, and the guilt that accompanied it. Then when I was introduced to Reformed theology at twenty-four, I learned there was a theology called perfectionism. I came across a book by the great Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield called Studies in Perfectionism that was revelatory for me. I learned this theology or understanding of the Christian life went back to John Wesley in the 18th century. He believed Christians could achieve perfect holiness, and a popular movement grew out of his teaching in the 19thcentury. By the time I’d become a Christian in 1978, few Christians promoted the idea that we could have complete victory over sin, but the echoes of that Wesleyan theology still reverberated in the Evangelical church. It became apparent over time that Christians could not in fact achieve perfection, and those who thought they had achieved it were insufferably self-righteous. Which is ironically funny if you think about it.

So back to our question. If we can’t be perfectly holy, how can we reign in life through Christ? To say we will reign has the ring of perfection to it. And Paul not only says it, but he also grandly declares it! Yet very few of us feel like the kings or queens of our own Christian life; more like paupers than princes or princesses.

The problem with knowing we can’t be perfect in holiness can easily lead to us to thinking we have the license to sin, misusing grace to think we can do whatever we want (read Paul’s horror at such a notion in Romans 6). The other end of the distortion is the irony I referred to. Thinking we are capable of pulling off the Christian life to a degree that leads to pride and arrogance, and thinking we are better than others. Jesus warned us about that in a parable to those “who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else” (Luke 18:9-14). We need to be like the tax collector, not the Pharisee, knowing we are unworthy in ourselves to even look up to heaven, and daily beat our breast and say, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That, my friends, is the means to reigning in life through Christ! What? Debasing ourselves is a way to reign in life? Yes, through Christ! And it is not debasing, but an accurate assessment of who we as sinners before a holy God. As I often say, I should be a smoldering pile of ashes on the ground; everything else is gravy!

The secret to unlocking the reign in our lives is daily repentance. Naming our sins before God, accepting that we are utterly unworthy of the favor he bestows upon us in Christ. It’s called grace, or unmerited favor. We cannot earn it, and unlike Catholic theology, we cannot earn it by penance, by being really, really sorry, and remorseful for our sins. We are simply agreeing with God that we are wretched sinners worthy of his just judgment, condemnation and death, the wages of sin. But since Jesus the Messiah paid the price, we don’t have to! We get life eternal, and we get to start living that life in the here and now. A mystery of the Christian life is living eternal life, living in obedience to God, being completely up to us in the moment by moment choices we make, but only possible because of God’s work in us.

John gives us a promise of how we can make this work, that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9). The Greek word for confess means to agree. I like to say, pardon the slight vulgarity, embrace the suck. But the next step is even more important. It is God alone who can change us; we can’t do it by mere will power. As God says to Cain, sin is crouching at our door; it desires to have us. The promise is that if we agree with God about our sin, He will purify us, cleans us, and do a supernatural work in us to make us more like Christ. Transforming ourselves is not our job, it’s His!

It’s All About Love
The key to making this a reality in our lives, the reigning part, is love reflected in service to others. If we’re going to truly great, and God wants us to be great, Jesus tells us we must be servants. And that can only be done in love. To get a handle on what this means, it’s good to remember a definition of sin made famous by Augustine then Luther: homo incurvatus in se. In English, man curved in on himself. The very essence of sin is self-centeredness. If my life is all about me, even if I’m those must upstanding moral person on earth, I am a quintessential sinner. The Pharisees are great examples of such self-righteousness. Being moral is of course crucial for Christians, meaning doing right not wrong, obeying God’s law starting with the Ten Commandments.

Jesus amplified the profoundly transformational nature of God’s law when he said it can all be summed up in love, for God, us, and others. If we’re really good law-keepers but don’t love, Paul says we’re no better than clanging symbols, all noise; basically like a two-year-old, look at me, look at me, look at me! Love is relational because the Triune God is fundamentally love and so relational. I contend, when we really work on loving others, we can learn what it means to reign with Christ because our focus then must be off of ourselves to do it. In taking up our cross, Jesus tell us we are denying ourselves. And Jesus adds, the only way to find our life is to lose it. If we grasp on to our life like a greedy beggar, we will lose it. The great irony of Christianity is that if we give our lives away, we will find the life that is truly life and reign in life through Christ.

 

 

 

We Can Rejoice in Our Sufferings

We Can Rejoice in Our Sufferings

Feb 14, 2024 | The Gospel

Christianity is the strangest thing, and one of the reasons I believe it’s true. Everything about it seems to be counter to everything I am. For some of us it takes a while, and some of us a very long while, to admit that is sin, and that we are sinners by nature at war with God. Because of this Christianity is counter intuitive to us. Everything about it seems upside down. That makes sense, though, because in a fallen world everything is upside down from the way it was created and supposed to be. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, because to counter the distortion of reality coming from sin, of course it seems upside down to us. Take Paul’s exhortation to rejoice in our sufferings. Really?

When I recently read Romans 5 all this was bubbling around in my mind. The very last thing I want to do when I’m suffering is rejoice. My typical response is to whine, moan, and complain. I don’t like suffering, so how in the world am I going to rejoice in it? It doesn’t feel good, whatever that suffering might be as I perceive it. Here is what Paul says:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Whenever we see the word therefore, we must ask what it is there for. In chapter 4 Paul is explaining how Abraham’s trust in God’s promises was credited to him as righteousness. He compares Abraham’s trust in God to ours who trust in Christ “who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” That same trust that we are not right with God, that our sins, or trespasses, have been forgiven and guaranteed by Christ’s resurrection, means we can now have peace with God through Christ. It also means in that peace we no longer have to be controlled or defined by our circumstances, even if that includes suffering. Easier said than done, as we all know.

The Apostle Paul’s Life of Rejoicing
If we think our circumstances are the key to happiness, joy, fulfillment, or peace of mind, we are in for a miserable life. Having experienced seven decades of life, and counting, I can report that will never happen. And when our idea of perfect circumstances does show up once in a while, life plays a cruel joke on us, and we find getting everything we thought we wanted doesn’t fill the void after all. The reason is that only one thing can bring true satisfaction, and that is God Himself in Christ in our right relationship to our Creator. The Apostle Paul tell us what “the secret” of true contentment is:

11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength. (Phil. 4)

Because of secularism, the cultural air we breathe, people are obsessively focused on the here and now, but it offers cold comfort when the “stuff” hits the fan. Wait till you see all the “stuff” that hit Paul’s fan, and maybe we’ll think twice before complaining about pretty much anything. If we think we have it tough, let’s compare our lives with the Apostle Paul’s, this man who literally changed the world and brought untold blessings to now billions of people. Remember, if it wasn’t for the Apostle Paul nobody would likely have ever heard of Jesus. This is what God allows to happen to the most consequential man in human history:

 I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. 24 Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. 27 I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. 28 Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?

 

30 If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. (2 Cor. 11)

How did Paul endure all this and remain content “whatever the circumstances”? He tells us earlier in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, it is through the promise of the resurrection. Speaking of the treasure we have, “the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ,” he says it is in us as jars of clay. It’s a powerful passage and he concludes with this:

16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary afflictions are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

If all the physical and mental sufferings Paul endured are “light and momentary afflictions,” what in the world am I complaining about! Quite the contrary, Paul tells us suffering does something good in us, thus we can rejoice in it.

The Benefits of Suffering
As I typed those words I thought to myself, that sounds absurd; but it’s an absolutely Christian idea. There have also been plenty of non-Christians, and philosophies and religions, who agree, but they don’t have anything to anchor those benefits: the perspective of my being in a reconciled relationship as a sinner to my holy Creator God. Not to mention our Savior and Lord who was a suffering servant. In the post-Christian West, however, suffering is to be avoided at all costs. Because they have their feet firmly planted in mid-air, secular people enjoy their lives only to the degree they are devoid of suffering and struggles. One of our most popular greetings, “How’s it going?” reveals this. Have you ever regretted asking someone this as they complain about all the woes in their life? Me too.

This is why a long time ago I changed my answer to that question. First, as I taught our children, nobody really cares how we’re doing—people care about themselves not you! Back in the 1990s my wife and I were active in the Amway business. (You youngsters probably don’t know what that is). Part of the vibe of the business was positive thinking. We were exposed to an author and motivational speaker named Charlie “Tremendous” Jones who wrote a book called, Life is Tremendous! He took the name because when people would ask him how he’s doing, he would always say, “Tremendous!” Ever since I do the same, but I use the word terrific. It’s amazing when I do that how most people perk up in surprise, often saying how refreshing that is, or asking why. It’s a great opportunity to bring up Jesus! I also consider it an act of service and blessing so they encounter the blessings of God through me. I smile, look them in the eyes, affirm their existence, and thank them for their service. I love doing that! Unfortunately, it is a rare commodity nowadays. Why isn’t everyone like that? All Christians should be, but the answer is circumstances, in which secular people live and move and have their being, instead of God.

As we saw above, Paul tells us the benefits of suffering come from turning us into different people. This change in who we are is true for non-Christians as well, as it is for Christians who are not walking intimately in communion with their Savior. Suffering affects us and alters how we see everything, and most importantly God. As an example, I will tell you about young Luna, 22, who has cut my hair the last three times at Great Clips. It was a wonderful experience being able to share the hope of God in Christ because I knew from our previous interaction that she’s not a Christian. I asked her this time if she believed in God, and she hesitated. She said she believed more in the universe, that God is a force. I asked her why, and basically it came down to life is hard. How could there be a personal God, she seemed to be saying, when there’s so much suffering. I said, at least with a personal God you can complain to him, but to an impersonal universe, not so much. Not to mention, the world is full of persons, so it makes sense God would be personal. She’s going on the heathen prayer list.

Christian Suffering Transforms the World
The Christian approach to suffering doesn’t mean we’re stoics, and that suffering is to be endured as if it wasn’t suffering. No, it’s called suffering for a reason because in it we suffer, we feel pain and sorrow, and expressing those emotionally is part of the deal. In itself suffering is not good, but a reflection of living in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. It is okay to get frustrated and angry and wonder why. As we experience these unpleasant things, we then need to go to the throne of grace and give thanks for all of it. That can obviously be very difficult to do, but we must do so in obedience to God. In I Thessalonians 5 Paul tells us what that obedience looks like:

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Because we’re sinners and suffering is hard and unpleasant, we will not be able to do this consistently, but that’s what repentance is for. After we repent, then we pray for that endurance that produces character. That word in Greek means to be proved through testing and to remain true. In other words, we are not fair weather Christians when the going gets tough. We refuse, like Job, to curse God and die. When we remain true to our Lord and Savior, we will have hope, and as Paul says, hope does not put us to shame. That word in Greek is interesting. It literally means, to curse vehemently, a verb variously translated as shame, disgrace, bring to shame, put to utter confusion, frustrate. Once we’ve developed the character produced in us by suffering, the experience of suffering, no matter what kind of suffering it is, has no power any longer to do these things to us. We call that liberty! It won’t surprise us that this passage where Paul makes this declaration in 2 Corinthians 3 (verse 17) is about hope. We are no longer slaves to our circumstances! Even when they involve suffering.

Of the many things Christianity brought to the world, among the most powerfully transforming was this endurance in the face of suffering. Along with love and service, it changed the world from the ancient pagan world into the modern world. Caesars and all the tyrannical leaders of the world ever since fear Christians who refuse to submit to their tyranny. They have no power over Christians because death for us, as terrifying as it is, it not the end, but only the end of the beginning, for forever. Something that scares all tyrants are these words of Jesus:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Most of us are familiar with the horrible persecution Christians had to periodically endure for three centuries until Constantine converted to Christianity in 313. While we as Christians love and affirm life, it is not in any way ultimate to or for us. Our hope is in God alone, in the resurrection of our bodies because we have a resurrected Savior. That, brothers and sisters, is the only true and ultimate source of liberty, and it transforms wherever it goes.

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

The Guardians of “The Narrative” vs. Truth

Feb 7, 2024 | America, Culture

I take this title from a piece by the great and erudite Roger Kimball where he asks if these Guardians will win. Before I discuss the Guardians, let me preface my comments by a brief history of where this idea of narrative comes from. The concept goes back to the 16th century, and it means, “a tale, a story, a connected account of the particulars of an event or series of incidents.” As such it was applied primarily to fiction, like the plays of Shakespeare, but it can apply to the ark of any story line. It’s the big picture, if you will, that helps define the meaning of the details of the picture. It’s most powerfully, and deleteriously, used in our time to push political and cultural agendas. We have Friedrich Nietzsche to thank for the initial idea that was then developed by postmodernist scholars in the 1970s and 80s when postmodernism became “a thing.”

Very simply, modernism given to us by the Enlightenment believed finding truth was attainable solely by reason. The romantic movement started pushing back against this in the late 18th century, and by the late 19th century Nietzsche pushed it off a cliff. That’s where the postmodernists (after modernism) come into the picture. They took his ideas and argued truth per se doesn’t exist, contrary to Nietzsche who believed strongly in truth. All that does exist is the meta-narrative (a culture’s big picture) and we derive our meaning of what is “true” or not from that. Basically we’re all living a novel, and whoever the societal author is (or in a culture’s case, the authors are) determines how we interpret the story. There is obviously some truth to that, but postmodernists literally believe truth doesn’t exist or even if it does it is irrelevant. These ideas were catnip for leftists, who not only do not believe in truth, but believe narratives are to be used to establish their political power.

 

This is a short video by two black liberal scholars who today are likely viewed as right wing radicals by the left. It is an excellent overview of these two poles of the metanarrative idea (they just used the word narrative). John McWhorter (on the right) says because of the way it’s misused, he hates the word narrative. Then Glenn Loury counters, explaining how narratives work and can be used in positive ways to help people interpret their past and present as a people. He acknowledges they can also be misused in ways that harm people. The black victim narrative is one such way that has created untold misery and suffering. It’s well worth a six minute and thirty second listen.

Narratives and the Will to Power
Nietzsche argued that because God was dead and Christianity no longer offered a metanarrative (he never used the word) that could hold Western civilization together, man must develop his own moral framework to accomplish that. He believed that could only be accomplished by great men he called Übermensch, often translated as Superman or Overman. He never fully defined exactly what such a man was, but he developed a complimentary idea in the will to power. I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to know how he developed all this, but the idea certainly originated with him, and fit his worldview. The attempts to interpret Nietzsche are numerous, and there seem to be as many interpretations as scholars doing the interpreting. In essence his worldview was the result of his desire to fulfill Satan’s temptation to Eve, that he could be like God knowing good and evil. In a universe without God that is kind of the only choice. You have to be your own god, and he knew that. Therefore, if you are going to mold reality to your will, you must have the “will to power,” must impose that will on matter, including human beings. It was another idea he never fully worked out.

Fast forward to today, and the modern left epitomizes the “will to power” in the use of narrative. The left and the Guardians of the narrative (the media) have completely taken over Western culture, using their influence for political power, defined as legalized coercion. Governments have the monopoly on the use of force, which makes politics a very important business. The Democrat Party and legacy media shamelessly use the “will to power” in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Their hypocrisy is so in your face it’s almost impressive. Controlling or directing the narrative has always been important and a fact of existence in politics and government, but it is critically important in the information age. The left controls the narrative, however, specifically to mold and shape opinion regardless of truth. The only “truth” they care about is what serves their ideological interests and political power. This has become more egregious since Obama became president as we learn from “the paper of record,” the New York Times.

In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases had exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

The driving of “the narrative” took steroids when Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in June 2015. Speaking of the rebarbarization of civilization, Kimball gives an example we’re all too familiar with:

The 2020 election . . . took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

Now that the media are “Guardians of the (left-wing) Narrative,” Edward R. Morrow must be rolling over in his grave. In their latest futile effort to destroy Trump, the Guardians have pulled out all the stops on narrative building because of the danger Trump poses to our DemocracyTM if he gets elected again. Oh the horror!!! Peter Berkowitz highlights some of these efforts in a piece explaining how these people imperil the rule of law (they believe they are a law unto themselves). He writes:

[A]nti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle. This gives Democrats time to grasp the grave threat and take suitable precautions. But what precautions are suitable to thwart the authoritarian conquest of America.

For those who believe Trump is Hitler, there is nothing they won’t do to try to stop him.

God obviously has a terrific sense of humor. He not only picked Donald J. Trump, billionaire New York real estate developer and reality TV star to be the primary agent of change in this moment in history, He also apparently made him unstoppable. Everything the left and the Guardians have thrown at him for over eight years has only served to make him more popular and influential. Now that is funny!

Truth Wins
“Will the Guardians of The Narrative Win?” is the title of Kimball’s piece. I don’t believe he intended this to be a rhetorical question, but I do. Of course they won’t! If we live by sight, the odds of defeating them seem impossible, but God is in the habit of making the impossible possible. For example, the Lord tells Abraham and Sarah when she’s 90 and he’s 100 that they will have a son in a year. Sarah laughs at the absurdity of it. In reply, the Lord asks, rhetorically, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Although not meant to be answered, Paul speaking about Abraham gives it to us anyway:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were (Rom. 4:17).

For the God who created everything out of nothing, raising the dead and doing “the impossible” is what he does for breakfast.

Every time you’re tempted to live based on what you see rather than trust, which leads to fear, worry, and doubt, first repent. Then remember He makes things to exist that currently do not exist. I encourage you to think about this revealed truth for a while. Not only does the truth therein apply to you personally, your life and problems and dreams, but to entire societies, or Jesus would never have commanded the Apostles to “make disciples of all nations,” not individuals. It is, of course individual people who make up nations, but Jesus was giving us the big picture, the meta-narrative, the purpose for which he came to earth. When people repent and believe on the Lord Jesus, it isn’t only for their personal salvation and holiness, or to grow the church and populate heaven, but to bring his kingdom reign to the entire earth, his blessings transforming this fallen world “as far as the curse is found.”

However, sometimes, as in the depth of the Covid scam, it appears the Guardians will win, but it is impossible for lies to ever triumph in the long run. The Negative Nellies and Pessimistic Pauls always give power to lies they do not possess. In the Trump years I’ve come to call them doomers because for them it always seems to be doom and gloom, the worst just around the corner. They have an unhealthy level of skepticism we call cynicism. I love this definition of that unhelpful state of mind: a faultfinding captious critic, especially one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest. If you didn’t know the definition of captious either, it means, marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections. The word nature is important. Such people are inclined to be this way because that is who they are. Christians, by contrast, should never be cynics or captious because it’s sin and it’s not who we are in Christ. So if you’re a cynic or given to cynicism, stop it! If you’re given to doom and gloom, repent, and pray for God to give you a spirit of trust in his almighty power. If Romans 8:28 is true, then all things in our lives, both personally and societally, work for our good and his glory. If you believe that, I mean really buy into it, circumstances, including other people, will have no power to control you, specifically your emotions and peace of mind. As the prophet Isaiah says,

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you (Is. 26:3).

There is a reason truth will always win eventually: Jesus. He who is the Truth (John 14:6) will make sure of it. But it’s bigger than that. Our confidence, even optimism, is based on what happened when Christ ascended to the right hand of God after his resurrection. As he says in the Great Commission, all authority had been given to him, therefore go. We go and work and plan and make it happen not in our authority and power, but in the authority and power of Jesus Christ. He is now reigning over all things toward his glorious ends in a new heavens and earth until every last enemy is vanquished, the last being death. Knowing this, we understand that the Guardians are spitting into a gale force divine wind. They don’t have a chance.

 

Must Listen Interview of Tucker Carlson with Russell Brand

Must Listen Interview of Tucker Carlson with Russell Brand

Feb 1, 2024 | Western Civilization

I’ve recently decided to get active on Twitter/X to promote my work, and especially my new book when it’s published next month, God willing. So instead of posting twice a week, I now post once on Wednesdays, and focus the rest of my time on Twitter/X. So I normally wouldn’t post anything on a Thursday, but I saw this conversation between Brand and Carlson yesterday, and had to share it.

Brand is a quintessential example of what my book is about. In this discussion he makes the exact argument I do in the book for the Great Awakening that is happening all around us. I won’t share with you exactly where he says it, but I will give you a hint that it’s near the end. You’ll have to read the book to find out exactly what it is, and how I work it out in book length form.

Plus it looks like he may be coming to faith in Jesus from something else I saw him share recently, and there are hints in the discussion a personal almighty God is becoming more real to him. He’s been very much an Eastern religion guy until recently, and that seems to be changing, praise God. Pray for him. It’s definitely worth a listen.

I’m kind of surprised it’s actually allowed on YouTube, but just in case they think better in their little leftist hearts, here is a link to Twitter/X, which Elon Musk turned into a free speech platform:

https://twitter.com/search?q=Russell%20Brand%20and%20Tucker%20Carlson&src=typed_query

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

Jan 31, 2024 | Theology

My favorite metaphor for the Christian life is puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without the big picture into which all the pieces fit, the puzzle pieces are, well, puzzling. Without God in Christ, the ultimate big picture, the pieces never seem to fit. We look at one piece and wonder what in the world it means. Life becomes like a Woody Allen movie ending in frustration or resignation. Why do you think he always seems to have that look of sadness on his face? A God-less universe can do that to a person. This metaphor is why my favorite quotation from C.S. Lewis is on the cover of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent:

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

Even in the conundrum that is life, in Christ it can make sense because we can trust him in his Almighty power and goodness and wisdom to make sense of it for us. And in him the pieces really do fit, which is why I was so confident in raising our children in the Christian faith. I knew they could never find in any other worldview the comprehensive understanding of every single puzzle piece of life, even those that take some time to figure out, and those to which we’re just not given answers. Which brings me to the history of redemption, and its importance for our faith.

That history is found in our Bibles, and our Christian life has no meaning apart from the entire story we read there. The Bible is God’s breathed out revelation, his word, about what this puzzling thing called life means. Without it, we are stuck in our own minds with the pieces trying to figure it all out, an impossibility as the history of philosophy and religion apart from Christianity makes abundantly clear. Without revelation all we have is speculation after endless speculation, and more endless speculation. What makes one speculation right and another wrong? Who knows! Nobody. That’s the point. Without revelation we’re stuck in a box with no exit or window for light to shine in. Eventually, the only way to determine right and wrong is power, might making right, which is why life in a God-less universe is so dangerous. Inside the box we initially got paganism, and through the Hebrews and the Jewish religion’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ, paganism was eventually defeated in Christendom. In the 18th century, however, revelation was rejected and mankind decided it liked life in the box better by trying to figure it out through reason, and secularism became the new paganism. We’re right back to might makes right and the will to power.

Thus the necessity of God’s revelation in Scripture and Christ, not only for civilization to survive, but also to thrive. This starts with each individual Christian understanding the importance of redemptive history for their own faith, and then together we’ll be capable to obey Christ’s command to the Apostles to disciple the nations. Being familiar with the ultimate big picture is critical if we’re to successfully be part of advancing God’s kingdom on earth, also in the Lord’s Prayer in obedience to Christ’s command.

What Exactly is the History of Redemption?
That’s an easy question to answer. We find the entire story in Genesis 1-3. God created the world good, man rebelled, everything went to hell, and man’s Creator promised to make it all right. The story plays itself out from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, and we are right smack dab in the middle of it! Of course there are a few details, and they make all the difference. It is unfortunate so few Christians know those details because all those pieces make the frustrating pieces we have to deal with every day fit so much better.

I was prompted to write this because of a conversation I had recently with a family member. She asked me what a zealot was because someone told her Jesus was a zealot and not what the gospels proclaim him to be, Lord and Savior. It was gratifying that I knew enough through my years of study and learning to walk her through the history of Israel, and how the zealots came to exist as a response to Israel’s oppression by foreign powers.

Oppression in Israel’s history is a critical part of redemptive history. God called Abraham and the Patriarchs specifically to lead them into 430 years of slavery, which is a very odd thing for a god to do to his people in the ancient world. And four centuries is a very long time! In the history of His people, God often communicates in metaphor, and this was an extended metaphor for the slavery and bondage of sin. The Exodus continued the metaphor. The only possibility of escape and freedom from the bondage of sin is revealed to be the power of God. We get a strong hint of God’s power, not our choosing, being the operative principle in the redemption from sin in the life of Abraham. He’s called by God from his homeland to go to a land He will show him. God makes a covenant promise with Abram that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore, and be a blessing for all the peoples of the earth (Gen. 12). He then tells Abram he will fulfill both sides of the covenant promise, His side and man’s (Gen. 15).

The problem is that Abraham, his name since changed to mean, “farther of a multitude” (Gen. 17), and his wife Sarah are old, and not just old but really old, as in it is impossible for them to have children old. God made the initial promise when Sarah was already beyond child bearing age, but he then made them wait 25(!) years before Isaac would be born. That would put Abraham at 100 and Sarah at 90. Having a child at that age is obviously impossible. A year prior to the birth, God in the form of three men visited the childless couple and said He would return in a year and Sarah would have a son. She laughs because the idea is ridiculous, and He asks the rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Of course not! God wanted to get across the point that with man what is impossible with God is made possible, and God made this abundantly clear throughout redemptive history.

After the Hebrews are freed from their slavery, they celebrated their deliverance every year, and still do, at Passover. For the Hebrews and the Jewish people to this day, the Exodus is central to their image as a people: they were never to be the slaves of anyone. Unfortunately, Jews who rejected Jesus as their Messiah failed to realize the Exodus was a metaphor for sin, not God’s promise that they would never experience political oppression. They also thought the promise was for a physical plot of land in the Middle East and not the entire earth. That is a big miss! Having misread God’s message, the Hebrews thought God’s promise was fulfilled 400 years later with King David and the glorious reign of Solomon, but as soon as Solomon died, everything started going back to hell. Israel split into the northern ten tribes, called Israel, its capital was Samaria, and the southern two kingdoms were called Judah with Jerusalem being their capital.

The Rise of the Prophets and Israel’s Oppression
As you read through the Old Testament it is vital that you connect what is going on with and through Israel to you as part of God’s chosen people in Christ. Remember and commit to memory Matthew 1:21, a verse vital to understanding where you fit in this vast history. The Lord appeared to Josph in a dream and told him that Mary “will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means The Lord Saves. Jesus didn’t come to try to save his people, or to make it possible; he came to make it actual. That’s what God does; He makes the impossible possible. We begin to see this much more clearly when the prophets come on the scene.

Israel’s civil war was a period of geopolitical conflict. Isaiah was the first prophet coming approximately 730 BC, and his writing is probably the most pointedly eschatological of all the prophets. The northern kingdom was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians and the ten tribes scattered and lost to history. Judah lasts approximately another 150 years when Jerusalem is destroyed and the Babylonians take most of the people captive to Babylon. After 70 years, God brings the now called Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and their religious life, and it stands until 70AD when it is destroyed by the Romans. This entire period is also metaphorically rich for our personal journey of faith. The prophets warn and promise, the people do well, then rebel, and this happens over and over, not unlike our own struggle with sin. God consistently promises that He will be their Savior because they obviously can’t save themselves. The verses promising this are practically innumerable, but Jeremiah 23:5,6 are a powerful reminder that this salvation in which we trust is God’s work in us out of which we work out our salvation with fear and trembling:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.

This branch is Christ who is king now sitting at the right hand of the Almighty ruling over all powers and authorities to the end of ultimately fulling the redemption of His creation. Jews thought the references to Judah and Israel were literal references to land and the people who inhabit it instead of the salvation from sin. That is also a very big miss.

The Unexpected Messiah
Micah, the last prophet to speak God’s words, lived 430 years before John the Baptist arrived. He tells us about a messenger for the coming of the Lord which would be fulfilled in John. During those years of silence the concept of a Messianic Savior developed that had nothing to do with the actual Messiah who was born in Bethlehem, Jesus of Nazareth. Part of the reason had to do with what transpired for the people of Israel during those 400 years.

After the Babylonian exile (586-538BC), the Jews were ruled by the Persians until Alexander the Great defeated them in 333, who then conquered Judea shortly thereafter. When Alexander died, the Jews were ruled by a combination of Greco-Macedonian kings, until finally in 160s to 150s they gained some semblance of independence under the Maccabees. Less than 100 years later, however, the Romans gained control over Judea; and in 37, Herod the Great, a questionable Jew, was appointed “King of the Jews” by the Romans. There was a whole cross current of ideas among the Jews trying to deal with this centuries long upheaval, some through violence, some isolation, others religious observance.

As a people whose self-conception would not allow slavery and oppression, living under hundreds of years of it developed a burning desire for Yahweh to send his Messiah to finally deliver them. There were many conflicting conceptions of who this Messiah would be, but everyone agreed he would be a human ruler like David anointed by God (the meaning of Messiah) to wipe out Israel’s enemies and finally restore Israel to its former glory. The disciples were still thinking along these lines when just prior the ascension, they asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” The Zealots were among the most, well, zealous of those fighting against the oppression of the Romans, and they often used violence to do it. Needless to say a Messiah like Jesus was the last thing they would ever accept.

The History of Israel and Me
From a Christian perspective, we can see in this broad overview of redemptive history God’s plans through it all to save me personally. I wasn’t an afterthought who God would possibly be save if I just made the right choice. God choose me! And in Christ before the world was even created. Once God choose Abram to get the ball rolling, it only took 2000(!) years for the plan to unfold to fulfillment. We have much to learn from all of that time, and the more we learn about it the more profound will that fulfillment be in us. As Agustine famously said, “The New (Testament) is in the old concealed, the Old (Testament) is in the New revealed.” The more effort we put into unearthing what is concealed, the more what is revealed will absolutely blow us away, not to mention transform our lives and our world.