The Best Discussion of Postmillennialism I’ve Heard

The Best Discussion of Postmillennialism I’ve Heard

Jan 23, 2023 | Eschatology

As I’ve written here previously, the very last thing I expected in my red pill journey that started when Donald Trump came down the golden escalator in June of 2015 was to become a postmillennialist (PM). I’d rejected this eschatological position out of hand for many years, although I’d never once studied it. Funny how I could reject something so firmly I knew absolutely nothing about. It was obviously a discredited position, so why bother.

One of the guys mentioned a book by Lorraine Boettner about the topic and I said to myself, I have to get that. Then when I saw the cover it looked familiar, and there it was in my library! I remember getting it back when I was in seminary, which would be about 35 years ago. Had I ever even cracked it open? Nooooooo. Now I have!

As I continue to read and listen and learn, I am more convinced than ever that PM is the biblical eschatology. If you are at all open to this, I would encourage you to listen to this discussion of two other converts to PM, Joel Webbon and Dale Partridge. In this case, Dale is the one sharing his journey to PM, and he was a very reluctant convert. The amount of energy and time he spent in his own studying and learning and listening is impressive, and at least makes him worth listening to.

Briefly, what appeals to me about PM, other than being convinced it is the biblical position, is that it’s all about, in the title of an N.T. Wright book, Jesus and The Victory of God. On the other hand, the premillennial position is all about (as I learned from the guys John MacArthur once said), “Down here we lose, up there we win.” No wonder those who embrace the pre-mill position, and this is the vast majority of Evangelical Christians, are uniformly negative and defeatist. The essence of this view is things will get worse and worse and worse, yea, must get worse and worse and worse, then Jesus will return!

I can no longer look at Psalm 2 and 110, I Cor. 15:25, and Ephesians 1, among many others, and believe that. These are not mere “proof texts” as if they’re the only texts that affirm the doctrine. The entire scope of redemptive history is Jesus and the victory of God. Satan has been defeated on the cross and in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilling the prophetic declaration of God in the garden that he would crush the serpent’s head. It now distresses me to think I ever believed the story of the New Testament church and the coming of the kingdom of God (not the same thing) was about the victory of the devil on earth.

It excites me immensely to now have solid theological grounding for my optimism in knowing that Christ is ruling at this very moment in the midst of his enemies until he puts them under his feet. I encourage you to give the video a listen to see if PM might make as much sense to you as it does to us.

Psalm 127: Unless the Lord Builds The house . . . .

Psalm 127: Unless the Lord Builds The house . . . .

Jan 20, 2023 | Apologetics

When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, this short Psalm by Solomon was an inspiration, especially the first verse:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the guards stand watch in vain.

Some people who read the book, or didn’t, accused me of arguing that I could guarantee my children maintaining their faith throughout life. As I said in the book itself, we are in control of nothing and can’t guarantee anything, but what we can and must do is be the best builders we can be. Not to mention God holding us accountable for how we raise our children. It’s not a dice game, a shot in the dark, but as my subtitle says, it is God’s provision for building an enduring faith in us and our children. He has given us everything we need, as Peter says, for life and Godliness through our knowledge of Him.

We see in Solomon’s wisdom a profound biblical truth: God builds and we build. These are not mutually exclusive but complimentary truths. It is my responsibility to build the best house I can possibly build. If I build a crappy house and it collapses in the storm, that is not God’s fault. It is mine! Some Christians are under the impression if they pray big, mountain moving prayers to God, that gets them off the hook for working their tail off. It doesn’t!

A good example is my current occupation. When I started building my business from scratch (on 100% commission), I was told if I make 50 to 60 calls a day, every day, I could not fail. And that is exactly what I did. I also prayed fervently to God because I desperately needed him to bless my efforts and establish the work of my hands. Me and God did some serious wrestling the first couple years because it was scary. It caused me to build my trust muscle in ways I’d never experienced before in my life, and as miserable as it was at times, the blessings have been incredible. In fact, I can hear my wife and granddaughter in the other room now as I type these words, and she is able to watch Eleanor when it’s needed because she doesn’t need to have a job anymore. That is an answer to prayer, all God, even as I worked my ever-living guts out to get it. So it’s both all me and all God—I work as if it depends on me, and pray because it depends on God.

These words of David in I Chronicles 29 were incredibly important in this difficult journey. They were in the church bulletin in the first or second church service we attended when we moved to Florida in June of 2017. I kept the bulletin and decided I was going to commit them to memory. Little did I know how much I would come to depend on them in the next several years:

11 Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, Lord, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.
12 Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.
13 Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.

Wealth and honor come from Him even though we have to earn it, and knowing it is all him and all me makes it all the sweeter in fulfillment. It wasn’t God waving his magic wand, or me alone by the painful toil and the sweat of my brow. It has been real achievement in which I can take justifiable pride while at the same time giving God the glory because in a real way it all comes from him.

One of the practical applications for me is that I pray for things in the past I would just do without prayer in my business and daily life. So if I have a challenging situation I do everything within my power to do what I have to do. Then I commit the situation to the Lord and affirm whatever the results are, are up to him, and I trust him. It is this dynamic that has made Isaiah 26:3 one of my favorite verses:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose minds is steadfast, because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace is something I very much want and trusting in the sovereign Almighty God of the universe is the way to get it. Why is it that Jesus commands us not to worry? Because he wants us to experience perfect peace! Or why does Paul command us not to be anxious about anything? So that we can experience the peace of God “which transcends all understanding.” I want that! When I talk to friends and relatives who are worried and anxious about things I tell them: Repent!!! Worry and anxiety are sin. If we don’t have the peace Isaiah and Paul speak about, we are in sin. We are not trusting God, and we ought not to do that because God is worthy of our trust.

If it were only that simple, right? It actually is, but it takes practice like anything else. Deciding to trust God has to become the automatic reflex of our lives when “life happens.” And it happens all the time. We all know that “thorns and thistles” are a fact of existence, every single day, but every time they create challenges and adversities it’s an opportunity to trust God, or not. It doesn’t take long to realize the God David praises as the one who is “the ruler of all things,” is worthy of our trust in all things.

Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray

Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray

Jan 17, 2023 | Apologetics

If you’ve been around a while you’re no doubt familiar with the “New Atheists” who fleetingly crossed the cultural firmament for a decade early in this century. There was nothing “new” about these “New” atheists because their arguments, such as they were, were as old and stale as moldy bread. They were cliché driven anti-Christian fanatics who gained shooting star fame, and then were gone. It’s amazing to have witnessed how popular they were, then in very short order they weren’t. Non-Christian belief in the form of atheism and agnosticism still exists, obviously, but there is a breed of what we might call the New-New Atheists, and they are very important for the re-establishment of Christian Western civilization.

We’ve been programmed to think because of the onslaught of secularism over the last hundred plus years that secularism is ascendent never to retreat, and Christian civilization in the West is a spent force never to be seen again. For most people this is axiomatic, but I beg to differ. I use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor far too often, but it fits. In the ‘80s almost everyone thought Soviet communism was if not eternal, close to it. Then, like the New Atheists, it was gone. Secularism, alas, will not go so fast, and rebuilding Christian Western civilization will not be so easy, but I am convinced it will happen, as I am arguing in my next book. Our New-New Atheists are a big step in that direction.

In case you’re not familiar Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, he does interviews of interesting people on interesting topics, and he’s very good at it. Speak  ing of the Berlin Wall, he was a speech writer in the Reagan administration, and it was he who wrote Reagan’s tear down this wall speech, standing firm against all who said he should take that line out. Of the three gentlemen he’s interviewing about God’s existence, Stephen Myer is a Christian philosopher and author, and advocate for Intelligent Design. The other two are a couple of brilliant Brits. Douglas Murray is an author and political commentator, and Tom Holland is a scholar of the ancient world and the author of many books, his latest, Dominion argues that it is Christianity that gave us the modern world, and without it, a pagan world would be a very different and less hospitable place.

One of the things that stood out to me in the conversation was when Murray says, “I just don’t know.” And I think he repeats it several times. It’s a fascinating statement about the state of the man’s psychology. The issue, as it is for all atheists and agnostics, comes down to epistemology. In other words, how is it that we can “know” something. Is knowing even possible? He assumes he knows all kinds of things, but when it comes to God he just can’t “know.” This unnecessary dilemma so many face goes back to 17th century French Catholic philosopher Renes Descartes. He was trying to counter the growing skepticism of the age and attempted to prove that absolute certainty was possible. It is not! In fact, it is a fool’s errand, but his work put epistemology and the search for absolute certainty at the heart of intellectuals’ search for knowledge ever since.

Murray’s error, and Holland obviously suffers from it too, is that they believe they require some kind of knowing related to God that is different than all the other “knowing” of their lives. Any person who thinks clearly about these things (and given sin, that is not as easy as it sounds, Rom. 1:20) has to realize that all our knowledge requires faith, i.e., trust. I could prove this with one zillion examples, literally, but it isn’t necessary. Just think about it. Do we know anything with absolute certainty? Of course not. It isn’t even debatable. Which means faith, i.e., trust, is required for knowledge.

I use a phrase to make this point: there is no such thing as an unbeliever. You’ll notice throughout the conversation that Murray and Holland use faith as if it applies to other people but not them. The fact is every human being lives by faith, whether that is about metaphysical issues, like God’s existence, or should I trust the baby sitter with my child, or the doctor with my health, or the person selling me the car, and again, the examples are endless. Do I really know my wife loves me? I think I do, and there is plenty of evidence given she’s put up with me for 35 years, but I have to trust that she does. Or Do I even really know that I exist? Or do the solipsists have it right, that reality only exists in my brain? How do I know! Can I really be certain? Maybe my totally bizarre dreams I have every night are reality, and the daily mundane world I inhabit is the real dream. 

Knowing isn’t so obvious after all, but atheists and agnostics delude themselves in thinking it is. Thankfully, we don’t have to have absolute certainty to know God exists, and that Jesus of Nazareth lived, died, and rose from the dead that we might have life eternal. Stephen Meyer knows this, and he’s brilliant. He’s far more persuasive than his two agnostic interlocutors. 

 

Psalm 112 and the Man Who Will Never Be Shaken

Psalm 112 and the Man Who Will Never Be Shaken

Jan 14, 2023 | Theology

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Reading through the Psalms is a wonderful experience. You could park on one for days mining the depths for nuggets of truth into the greatness of our God. And God is the point of all 150 of them. One of the reasons the Psalms have been so beloved over the millennia is because sinful, fallen human beings can relate to the pathos we read there. The struggles of the writers are familiar to us as we go through the often painful experiences of living life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. But we mistake the power of the Psalms if we think they are about us. The words connect with us because they are profoundly about God which then puts our struggles into perspective.

When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I was introduced to a metaphor that became my favorite way of  explaining living in the messy world as I described it above: a puzzle. The fallen human tendency is to focus obsessively on the puzzle pieces. Until we grow older we imagine the pieces are all that exist; there is no puzzle into which each piece fits to make the picture of life make sense. Then depending on our level of maturity, or not, will we be able to keep the individual puzzle pieces of our lives in perspective with all the others we encounter.

Our secular Western culture, however, expects us to believe that in a universe filled with profound particulars (puzzle pieces), like sunsets, and birth, and music, and taste buds, and love, and sex, and DNA, that nothing transcends the pieces to give them ultimate meaning (the universal). We’re expected to believe the puzzle doesn’t even exist! We’re just stuck with the pieces. Christian Philosopher Douglas Groothuis in his wonderful book Truth Decay puts this exquisitely:

It is as if a stained‑glass window, which offered a pictorial message of a reality beyond itself when illuminated by the sun, were shattered into countless fragments, which a bemused onlooker is now rearranging into every pattern but it’s lost original.

Brilliant! Why do you think film maker Woody Allen always looks so miserable? He’s rid the universe of the only universal that can give particulars meaning—God! Every movie he makes is a different pattern, but nothing comes close to the original. Inevitably there is despair, dissatisfaction, or the blind leap—I’ll just pretend I found the original and ignore the vacuum in my soul.

It isn’t only atheists like Woody Allen who tend to see the world this way, that the particulars are where our true meaning and hope and purpose are found—we are too! Where do you think worry and doubt and fear and anxiety and frustration and anger come from? They come from thinking the pieces are sovereign and God is not! Shame on us, but it’s a constant temptation for every single one of us, and it requires constant vigilance to not fall into the clutches of this perniciously appealing temptation. Once we give in, it can turn into a sink hole growing bigger and bigger until it completely envelopes us. Which brings me to Psalm 112.

The answer to these ubiquitous temptations is found in the words of Jesus: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” That and prayer and praise and thanks to God can make us the person to whom this Psalm refers, the blessed man:

 Praise the Lord!
Blessed is the man who fears the Lord,
who greatly delights in his commandments!

The right God-honoring attitude in all things we encounter is, Praise the Lord! How about that being our knee-jerk reactions to the “stuff” happening in our lives instead of complaining and moaning and whining. I know, I’m convicted too. But the promise is that we’ll be blessed if we do it. The blessings, i.e., the happiness and contentment that comes with praising the Lord is outlined in the next several verses, and what stands out to me are the following words:

7 He is not afraid of bad news;
his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
8 His heart is steady; he will not be afraid,
until he looks in triumph on his adversaries.

Oh, to live this way! Instead of living in fear we are steady; the Hebrew literally means to be established and is interpreted as to lean, lay, rest, or support. This person, which can be you and me, is stable, unmovable, reliable. Notice in verse two the impact this kind of life has on his children:

2 His offspring will be mighty in the land;
the generation of the upright will be blessed.

Living a truly Godly life of the blessed has a generational influence; it can’t be helped!

If we consider the “adversaries,” it is all those things in our lives that cause the opposite of triumph in the puzzle pieces of life. It’s treating those things as if they somehow had a power beyond the reach of Almighty God, as if in Christ all things did not work for our good, according to the Apostle Paul which is the promise of God himself. And notice the kind of person it is who lives in this reality of God’s ever-present goodness and power. He is gracious, merciful, and righteous, he deals generously and, conducts his affairs with justice. Those who are righteous in Christ—they who trust him in all things—will never be shaken.

 

 

 

 

“Unbelievable” Podcast, Apologetics, and Christian Conversions

“Unbelievable” Podcast, Apologetics, and Christian Conversions

Jan 11, 2023 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

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I had my biggest show biz break earlier this week appearing on the Unbelievable Podcast with Justin Brierly. Promoting a book as a “nobody” author without a “platform” is a formidable challenge. Zillions of people write books and are trying to get noticed, so not having a “name” makes the game especially difficult. I’m convinced Uninvented is unique enough to justify the attention of a “somebody,” and I’ve prayed and worked to that end. One prayer has been to have someone with a big platform appreciate the book and give it some attention. Unbelievable is certainly a big platform given it’s maybe the longest running apologetics podcast in existence. I think Justin told me he started in 2004, and in the podcasting world that’s positively ancient! In apologetics circles everyone knows Justin and Unbelievable.

(In case you’re not familiar with the reference of the podcast title, it comes from a catchy 1990 pop tune of the same name.)

The reason I’m writing about it now (before the episode comes out) is because it got me thinking about apologetics and Christian conversions. If you’re not familiar with the podcast, Justin created a niche by often having two people with different perspectives on things having a respectful dialogue. He’s a very good facilitator, doesn’t act like a cheerleader for the side he may be on, and asks solid questions. He certainly demonstrated this in our conversation. I’ve never been a fan of apologetics debates, whether it’s the atheist against the Christian, or the Calvinist verses the Arminian, etc., but Unbelievable never felt like a debate platform to me. Rather it’s more like two people who may disagree just having a conversation with someone helping it along. No wonder it’s lasted so long.

Regarding the topic of apologetics and converting people, and as I state in Uninvented, I don’t see apologetics primarily as something to convert non-Christians, although it is of course used by Christians to help people see the veracity of Christianity. Rather I see it as a ministry for building up the faith, i.e., trust, of the saints in their God and Savior. The verse from which we get the English word apologetics is I Peter 3:15,

But in your hearts set apart (sanctify) Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect . . .

The word reason in Greek, ἀπολογία-apologia, means a verbal defense, specifically like what a lawyer does in a court of law. The words, “everyone who asks you” has always stood out to me. There are several ways to take this, but at the least it assumes our Christian life is so apparent to those we interact with that they’re prompted so ask us about the reason for our hope. It doesn’t apply to incognito Christians. Our faith should be so apparent to those we interact with that they might be motivated to ask us why we’re different. To them there is something about us that doesn’t seem “normal.” I like to think of it as being a little annoying for Christ as I try to throw out hints to people I interact with. It all depends on the relationship and the situation, but our relationship with Jesus has to be something that compels us to want to do this.

What I know, though, whether it’s on the Unbelievable podcast, or in any other interaction with a non-Christian or a Christian, is that nothing I say in and of itself will make any difference whatsoever. The transformation of the human heart is God’s business, not the power or persuasiveness of my words. I’ve learned this lesson six ways from Sunday; meaning it takes me a lot of failure to learn my lessons, but God is patient with clueless sinners like me. As with all sanctification, it’s painful but gratifying beyond description. It’s hard to describe, especially for one who for many years was deluded in thinking my words did have the power to change another person, how freeing it is to know I have literally zero power. That it’s all God. And being a convinced Calvinist, I mean literally all. I have a printout of these words from Zachariah 4:6 pinned to my bulletin board to remind me that it’s all him in all things:

“Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty.

I can hear the non-sequitur forming in some of your minds: then doesn’t this mean what we do and say doesn’t matter? If it’s all God, some think, then what we do doesn’t matter. Oh yes it does! God’s sovereignty, his rule over all things, never precludes human agency and responsibility. I’ve found in knowing and trusting God’s sovereign power is incredibly freeing. The results are not up to me, but the work and obedience, that is. Thy will be done should always be our final prayer.

Regarding apologetics, few Christians are good at it, and I was one of those for much of my Christian life. I’ve always been zealous to want to spread and defend the faith, I just didn’t work at it. But in 2009 I had a turning point. In an encounter with a co-worker, I did a terrible a terrible apologetics job and I was embarrassed, although my interlocutor wouldn’t have seen it that way. I was ashamed of myself, so I decided to dive in and learn how to defend the faith. I was delighted to discover a wealth of resources were now available that were not there in the over two decades since I had studied apologetics. Podcasts were a growing phenomenon and I listened to everything I could find, and there was a seemingly endless supply of books and website articles as well. I was amazed how little I knew and set about to rectify that.

As the Lord commands us to defend the reason for the hope that we have, he has graciously provided us with a faith that can be defended with integrity; we have the advantage of knowing Christianity is true! It only requires a commitment on our part to put in the effort to acquire that knowledge and develop the skills to use it. It doesn’t mean we have to know everything, and often the best strategy isn’t transmitting knowledge but just asking questions. Most people we will interact with have no idea what they believe or why they believe it. When we do, God may use us to bless others to advance his kingdom and build his church.