Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Dec 24, 2025 | Apologetics

I recently saw an article that attracted me because of the title, “The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed.” The author, Maarten Boudry, explains what the piece is about in the subtitle: “We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.” We have no idea just how much we take for granted. Unfortunately, the article is now behind a paywall on the Quilette.com site, but the first couple of paragraphs give us the basic idea of the author’s perspective. Here’s the first one:

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

This is primarily an affliction of the left which drinks deeply from the lies of Rousseau and Marx, but a lack of gratitude is a sinful human predilection, and not just for we modern people. My only disappointment with the piece was when Boudry said he’s an atheist. I really didn’t think they existed anymore, but apparently they do, and we’ll discuss that below related to gratitude. But I was inspired by what this atheist wrote to do some reflection on gratitude, and the importance of it for Christians.

Count Your Blessings One by One
This is the title of a hymn from the 19th century, and the chorus says:

Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;

I’ve often thought over the years if I actually did this it could take days. The blessings God has bestowed on us in the time in which we live are innumerable, not to mention all the non-material and spiritual blessings. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Paul also quotes a version of Isaiah 64:4 in I Corinthians 2, and I love it in the King James Version:

9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

The verse in Isaiah says our God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” This includes material as well as spiritual and familial blessings, but let’s focus on the material for a moment.

The reason we take for granted the blessings of living in the modern world is our ignorance of history, and how horribly difficult life was for people, from paupers to kings, prior to the 20th century. Recorded history goes back approximately 5,000 years, and for about 4,900 of those years, death, disease, and starvation were a common feature of life. Just staying alive was a challenge. Clean water and basic sanitation were something nobody took for granted because they were so rare—we think it’s our birthright. Cheap filtered water is available to us whenever we want it, and indoor plumbing is everywhere. For all of those 4,900 years people just couldn’t flush human waste away. Disease was often rampant because of it.

Child birth was perilous, both for the woman and the child, and children making into adulthood was something people hoped for, but didn’t count on. It always amazes me that people had children before the 20th century. God made the sex drive so powerful that despite all the risks, people kept having them. Diseases that are easily cured today with antibiotics and medical intervention, killed people. Plagues and famine were common. If someone had a toothache, they either got it pulled or died. One could go on, but we have no idea just how easy we have it. Are we grateful? Given our sinful nature, we have to teach ourselves not to complain and be grateful; that shouldn’t be difficult, but often it is.

Even in the 20th century the abundance to be found in America and the West was inconceivable to most people in the world. Boudry’s article has a picture of Boris Yeltsin visiting a grocery store in 1989 prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember that, and how the news was filled with stories about how blown away he was by the cornucopia of affordable goods available to all Americans. Grocery stores and modern food production, even as we complain about processed food, is a miracle. Like Yeltsin’s experience implies, people were amazed by it in the 20th century. I worked at a small college in Pennsylvania in the early 90s, and some students from Africa visited for a semester. Going to a grocery store for the first time was beyond their comprehension. They had a hard time believing it was real. We don’t have to grow our own fruits and vegetables, kill and prepare animals to eat, milk the cows, or bake the bread. We go to the store, put it in the cart, complain about inflation, go home and cook it on our gas or electric stove, and keep the rest in a refrigerator or freezer. We can now even have it all delivered to our door for a pittance. Thank you, God!

And it’s amazing what’s happened since I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Back then there was something called the Club for Rome, a think tank established in Rome in 1968. They published a report in 1972 called, “The Limits to Growth,” and it “warned of potential global collapse in the 21st century if growth trends continued unchecked.” This pessimistic assessment assumed a Malthusian perspective, (from 19th century British cleric Thomas Malthus), that we live in a world of finite resources, and the more of us there are, the less there will be for everybody. They and others predicted mass starvation as early as the 1980s. In fact, because we live in a world God created to sustain His creatures, the more the merrier! Poverty and starvation have declined dramatically since the 1980s exactly because of economic growth and increased population. Yet leftists still condemn both, while we give thanks. Now instead of overpopulation being a threat, the problem is not enough children being born!

If you want to cultivate more of an attitude of gratitude, a great practice is to teach yourself to be amazed at common, every day features of life (and if you have children, teach them to be too!). A few years ago, for example, I was visiting my sister and her husband and had taken a shower. I walked downstairs and exclaimed to them: You won’t believe this, but I turned these knobs, and hot water came out of the wall! Can you believe it! They rolled their eyes. Open a refrigerator or freezer, and be amazed. Flip on a light switch, marvel. Turn on your computer or phone, and the Library of Alexandria or of Congress can’t match it. I am surrounded by books in my office, and not only are they affordable and widely available, but I can read them! Most people prior to the 19th century were illiterate. And I have my very own Bible! Something unheard of until the late 19th and 20th centuries. Take a plane, train, or automobile and zip to the other side of town or the state or country, and be astounded. One could go on, but you get the idea.

Lastly, Hollywood. We watch movies or TV shows set in the past, and things don’t seem all that bad. Production designers do an incredible job, and we think we’re getting a real picture of how life was hundreds or thousands of years ago, but we’re not. As good a job as Hollywood does, nothing can capture just how perilous and fragile life was in the past. Remember, count your blessings, name them one by one . . .

The Theological Grounding for Gratitude
The basis of all true gratitude is in God, the theos in theology, the study of God. Without a personal, sovereign, Creator, and Savior God to whom to be grateful, gratitude can only be a fraction of what it was intended to be. The author of our piece as an atheist can only argue for gratitude on a pragmatic level. It’s better if you are grateful for the benefits of modern life, so be grateful. The atheist, and agnostic for that matter, can be grateful to other people for their role in providing those benefits, but being grateful to a divine benefactor who makes it all possible in the first place is what we were created for. Not to mention the truth that God and not random acts of chance are responsible for all of it. In a sly mocking of atheist pretensions while my kids were growing up, when we would see something amazing, like a beautiful sunset or full moon I would exclaim, praise chance! One has to be educated into atheism because even to a child the created world appears to be, well, created!

One of my family prayers as my kids were growing up was asking God to give us hearts of gratitude. I did this because I know how inclined we are to complain and see the negative. I know this had some traction with them when I’ve heard my daughter, who now has her own growing little family, pray for hearts of gratitude. I also taught them how being thankful, even for the tough things in life, keeps us from falling into self-pity and seeing ourselves as victims. Those two emotions are evil because they reflect a lack of trust in God. In fact, they turn our circumstances into God, as if they were sovereign and He is not. Paul addresses exactly this in I Thessalonians 5:

18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

This was Paul being even more direct than usual. Complaining in any manner, even if it’s just annoyance or frustration (a major challenge for me), is sin. So, I give thanks a lot because I’m so tempted to “trust” my circumstances. My morning prayers always start with repentance and giving thanks, and I try to practice thanksgiving throughout the day, especially when I don’t feel like it. Another verse from Paul is especially challenging in a fallen world living among fallen people in a fallen body, Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I would joke with our kids that Paul couldn’t possibly mean all. Maybe 98%? Nope, all. And notice how Paul prefaces it with, “And we know,” not speculate, hope, but know. We can be certain God will somehow, in some way, use it all, everything and every moment of our lives, for our ultimate good and His glory. It is on this foundation upon which we can obey Paul’s injunction to give thanks in all circumstances, knowing our sovereign Creator God who made us and died for us has our back, always.

Another way to theologically ground gratitude is looking at one of its synonyms, appreciation. To appreciate can connote, “to understand a situation or thing fully,” to appreciate it. When we are grateful in this sense, we understand that the ultimate rationale for a thankful disposition is agreeing with God’s definition of things, not ours. This can be difficult, but from Paul’s perspective gratitude becomes the assessment of reality as it actually is, not what we wish or hope it would be. This is something our atheist friend cannot hope to capture in his perspective of a lonely God-less universe that came from nothing for no reason at all. Not only are we dependent and limited creatures, but our view of things and our reason is clouded by sin. Without God’s revelation to us in Scripture and in Christ we’re in spiritual darkness. As Christians we submit our perspective to God’s omniscient characterization of things, and teach our kids to do the same. Gratitude is obedience.

The Self and Gratitude
The Bible is full of commands to be thankful. But what if I don’t feel thankful? What if the circumstances I’m encountering are really crappy? These reasonable questions assume gratitude is about us, about our feelings and our circumstances. A perfect recipe for misery is to make sure it’s all about us. Who are the most insufferable people to be around? Those who think everything is about them.

Augustine and Luther describe sin as, Incurvatus in se, or being turned or curved inward on oneself. If we are the center of our existence, and if our desires, our ideas, our accomplishments, our comfort, our glory are what counts, we will never be thankful. These things are rightfully important to us, and to God, but they must never be most important. If they are, everything in life will be out of proportion, and reality distorted. By contrast, Augustine defined virtue as “rightly ordered love”:

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.

Understanding the relative value of things is a big part of curing the sinful inward curve.

Some years ago I came across a wonderful example of someone who understands Augustine, a young Christian mother, 35, who learned she had stage four cancer (since recovered and doing well). Kate Bowler is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School and the author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” She didn’t see much prosperity in that moment. Her insights about how Christians ought to think about life, not only in the face of terminal cancer, but every day are worth contemplating:

When we overly‑instrumentalize prayer, we become convinced we’ve connected all the dots between us and God. To be totally honest, I cannot say things like “It would be better for my son not to have a mom, because surely God is working in all things for the good of those who love him.” That sounds like a lie to me, because I’m working from my desires forward toward God’s.

What I can say honestly is things that work backwards from God’s desires to mine ontologically: God is good, God is faithful, God’s desires for me are good. When I work from God to me I can say true and beautiful things. When I work from me to God, I end up lying.

This is brilliant! These are the two stark choices of existence. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:

Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.

Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:

Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.

Such a mindset leaves little room for living in an imperfect, fallen world. If you want to be miserable, make your life all about your happiness. We will never understand what seems to be a contradiction, how we can be grateful and not happy, grateful and unfilled, grateful and miserable, grateful and dissatisfied, grateful and grumpy, simultaneously. We can’t completely avoid these negative attitudes. The question for us, then, is do our internal responses or interpretation of circumstances actually make them what we interpret them to be?

Gratitude is inextricably tied to God’s definition of things. Rephrasing Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, who are you going to believe, God or your lying eyes? We are simply not capable of any kind of ultimate, eternal, accurate assessment of anything apart from God’s revelation. Unless we frame things in the biggest of big pictures, that which is eternal, all we are left with is distortion. Our perspective is not authoritative, or accurate, merely because it is ours. Thus we give thanks because we agree with God, we trust God, and that in the end is how we develop an attitude of gratitude.

 

 

The Answer to All Our Problems Lies in the Home

The Answer to All Our Problems Lies in the Home

Dec 17, 2025 | Parents and Family

My friend Brandon, who is the proprietor of the YouTube Channel I’m part of, Eschatology Matters, wrote a Facebook post on the centrality of the family for the maintenance of civilization. As soon as I read it I knew I had to write about it. Here is a portion of what he said:

Everyone sees how bad everything is. The chaos in Washington, the madness of the Left. There are a million books and podcasts on what’s wrong and how to fix it. What our society desperately needs is strong families. Strong homes. And that starts with strong men and women.

Twentieth century feminism taught women that their highest aim was to be like a man. It taught men to submit and be like women. It’s nearly destroyed us. Our daughters need to know change starts by valuing the home and family. It’s not getting in their way of self-fulfillment; it’s the very thing that humanity itself hinges upon.

The future belongs to those who know what’s truly valuable. By God’s grace, and His alone, the great 20th Century Lie ends now, in my home.

I responded to Brandon: “Amen! The cradle of civilization is the home; all the answers start there.” Most importantly, it starts in my home.

The spiritual war that rages on a cultural and societal level is not primarily “out there,” but in the home. If we build civilized homes that honor God and his law, we’ll build civilizations that do as well. The family is foundational to everything God has done, is doing, and will do in the advancing of his kingdom on earth. The foundational nature of the family was accepted for the entirety of Western history until the modern era when the individual became the focal point of existence. Along with that came the rise of feminism over the last two hundred years, among other societal and cultural forces, and the family became just another “lifestyle choice.” It is not.

The Family as Foundation for Civilization
The well-functioning family is required for a well-functioning society and civilization. If the family isn’t flourishing, neither will the society. Any place where familial breakdown is rampant, be it the inner city black ghetto, or white hillbilly Appalachia, societal breakdown follows as night follows day. In the 1960s and 70s, liberals basking in the faux freedom of the sexual revolution like the teenagers many of them were, thought the family was optional, and that divorce and familial breakdown wouldn’t have any negative societal consequences. Nobody believes that anymore because the evidence is overwhelming. Dysfunctional families create dysfunctional children who bring their dysfunction into their communities and the culture. Suffering follows.

In fact, healthy families are the fundamental requirement in a republican form of government like America for the exercise of liberty and self-government. A self-governing republic needs people who can actually self-govern! Which means it is the primary bulwark against all tyrannical forms of government. Our current societal collapse is what happens when this civilizational bulwark breaks down. This was a commonly accepted fact through most of American history, until the sexual revolution. I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early 20th century were common, this being a good example:

It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.

His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:

The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.

This was an inarguable statement of fact until the 20th century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise, for example, the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:

The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.

Even the great pagan philosopher, Aristotle, understood the primary importance of the family for the possibility of civilizational flourishing. In a book called, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, Robert R. Reilly writes of Aristotle:

For Aristotle, the irreducible core of a polity is the family. Thus, Aristotle begins his Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. He says: “First of all, there must necessarily be a union or pairing of those who cannot exist without one another.” Later, he states that “husband and wife are alike essential parts of the family.” The family is the nursery of virtue, which reaches its perfection in the polity.

With only revelation in creation, Aristotle innately understood what God reveals in Genesis, that a man and woman would become one flesh, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, having dominion over every living thing. The family is the first institution upon which every other institution is built.

The biblical basis for the family is assumed from Genesis on with the family as the central unit of Hebrew and then Jewish life and civilization. Three of the Ten Commandments address families directly.

#5: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

# 7: You shall not commit adultery.

#10: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.

I used the fifth commandment a lot with our kids as they were growing up. It’s helpful leverage appealing to their self-interest. You want a good life? You want the blessing of God on your life? Then do as I say! When God lays down the fundamentals of existence, of how we’re supposed to live in this world he created, the family is central. Get family life right, and everything else flows. Of course, the devil figured out if the family is so important, then that’s what he’d have to destroy.

The Rise of Feminism and the Modern Era
His attack starts with the fall. Man was created to be the leader, provider, and protector of his home (the garden), while the woman was there to help him. The Lord tells us why he created man, male and female:

18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

A man or woman alone is “not good,” meaning it’s not the ideal state for which we were created. For whatever reason, some people end up single, and they are not second class citizens, but in God’s economy the ideal is marriage. This tells us as Christian parents we are to raise our children to aspire to marriage, that it is a good, noble, and wonderful calling, but it’s not an easy one. It is as important to teach them the latter as it is the former, which I’ll address below. We also learn something about the roles in a marriage. The woman is to the be the helper for the man, not man the helper for the woman. This drives feminists and egalitarians nuts, but it wasn’t my idea. Their beef is with God.

As for the difficulties of marriage, God also tells us why that is in Genesis 3. Among the consequences of man’s rebellion was a tension in the marriage relationship. Because of the curse of sin, the Lord says to Eve:

Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.

What makes these sinful inclinations so difficult is Satan’s fundamental temptation to Eve: “You will be like God knowing good and evil.” You now get to call the shots! What you think and feel is the most important thing, not what God reveals. That is a recipe for marital disaster.

When the marriage relationship works well, as God intended it to work if we live in obedience to Him, it is glorious, when it doesn’t, we’re all familiar with the consequences. Because of sin exacerbated by sinful culture, our fallen tendencies have gotten us to the point in marriage history where divorce and broken families are common. For the first 1800 years of Christian history patriarchy, or male rule, was the normal state of affairs, and too many men abused that. One of the understandable results was feminism. As horrible as feminism has been, one of the benefits has been to remind us of the dignity and strength of women, and how men are to treat them with respect as “the weaker vessel” (I Peter 1:7). These dynamics didn’t happen in a vacuum, and understanding the history of their development is important if we’re to address the marital challenges in our day.

Making this even more difficult than it already is, is one of the downsides of living in the “information age,” historical ignorance. Add to that the rise of “progressive education” over the last hundred years that devalued history as it fetishized progress. Average Americans have no clue that what they think and believe, how they see the world, is largely determined by all the people and events that happened before they were even born. This ignorance can be blamed on the family because, as Machen implied, parents are responsible for the education of their children, not schools. If children do go to schools (i.e., are not home schooled), then the parents ought to determine which schools and what they are allowed to learn. I know, easier said than done, but the responsibility is still ours as parents.

Part of this historical ignorance is that most Christians have no idea that the modern world became modern largely as the result of rise of Christianity. Much bad, however, came out of the good. In the 17th and 18th centuries Western intellectuals decided that human reason without divine revelation in Scripture, called rationalism, was how we would find all the answers to the mysteries of life, and the long slide downhill into the disaster of modern secularism was on its way. The rise of feminism began not too long after this in the early 1800s as the industrial revolution was beginning to expand throughout the West. The historical dynamics in which feminism developed are complicated and complex, but in addition to the fall and the rise of secularism, another one worth addressing is economics.

The material reason for feminism’s rise was the industrial revolution. British journalist Mary Harrington in her book Feminism Against Progress, explains how the economic changes that transformed an agrarian society created the forces in which feminism rose. She grew up completely accepting every lie feminism told, and as she grew older slowly began to realize they were in fact lies. What ultimately opened her eyes was finally getting married and pregnant later in her 30s or into her 40s. She writes:

I concluded that what’s usually narrated as a story of progress towards feminist freedom and equality can be better understood as a story of economic transition: in particular, of the transition into industrial society, and the transformative effect that shifts had on every aspect of how men and women live—whether apart or together—including how we organize family life.

So, these three factors, the fall, the Enlightenment, and economic reality, make marriage and relationships between men and women, and family life, complicated. And statistics prove that as secularism came to dominant American culture, and the further away America moved from Christ and Christianity, the worse the results for marriage and family life. Since the sexual revolution and no fault divorce exploded in the 60s and 70s, the American home has suffered, and with it multitudes of people living lives of struggle and pain. The statistics of suicide, widespread depression and anxiety, and broken families are sobering, be we have the answer! No, it’s not an easy answer because none of these forces cease to exist just because we embrace Christ and commit to his word as the guide for our lives, but he makes flourishing families possible.

Familial Flourishing in Christ
Having been married for thirty-eight years and four months, I marvel that marriages can survive without Christ at their center. It so happened that my wife and I met at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and that our premarital counselor was Tim Keller. I’ll never forget the first thing he told us in our first session: “The only sinner bigger than the one you’re marrying is you.” I was nonplussed (surprised). I thought that was kind of blunt! But oh how true it is. Unless you are completely blind, deaf, and dumb, it becomes obvious not too long into a marriage what a horrible human being you are. None of us are mass murder horrible, but you begin to see what a self-centered often petty and juvenile creature you can be. You realize your three favorite pronouns are I, me, and mine. George Harrison wrote a song called exactly that!

These realizations of our natural sinful tendencies lead to another benefit of marriage, sanctification. Keller also told us after we’d done a personality test that we are so different we will either destroy one another or sanctify each other. Wow, Tim, you really know how to make a couple feel good about themselves. But knowing marriage is hard because it’s two sinners living intimately together is foundational for a successful marriage. And because we are sinful sinners who sin, having at the center of our marriage a Savior who died for us on a Roman cross for our sins is crucial. It’s so much easier to apologize and say I’m a jerk or a moron because, well, I am! And here’s the golden key. Because Jesus died for us, and forgave us, when we were his enemies (Rom. 5:8-10), we are obligated for forgive others, not least our spouse. Jesus made is possible for us to truly love others because we daily take up our cross and follow him. I grew up in a home of constant bickering and tension, and I despised it. I swore that would never be my house, and because of Jesus it isn’t.

All of this has a profound spillover effect on our children. When mom and dad truly love one another, even as imperfect as they are, the children see what real life is about from a Jesus perspective. They see how two sinners can offend and hurt one another, and still love and respect each other. The reason early Christianity grew among women the quickest is because Jesus and Christianity transformed the male and female relationship. Women instead of property with no rights and little respect, were now co-equal heirs of eternal life in Christ. It was literally world-transforming. When Paul wrote this in Galatians, pagans and Jews would have thought him certifiably insane:

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Because of Christ and the full testimony of Scripture, we know men as patriarchs are the leaders, providers, and protectors of their families, having their wives alongside to enable them to fulfill their roles successfully. Men won’t be tempted to “pull rank” because there is no need. Biblically, men lead, women submit. Men are the ultimate authority in the home, but with ultimate authority comes ultimate responsibility. Women have the responsibility of the home, and men to “bring home the bacon.” However, there are no ideal versions of a home; it’s messy, and has to be negotiated given modern realities. As Brandon said,

Twentieth century feminism taught women that their highest aim was to be like a man. It taught men to submit and be like women.

The thing I’ve seen destroy most marriages, and children if the marriages survive, is weak husbands and strong wives. This largely has to do with personalities, but the real problem is when men won’t lead, and women think they can. Or women who want their men to lead, but since the men won’t they have to. Again, this is messy and every relationship is different. No ideal exists. What does, is being obedient to God’s design for marriage and family. Biblically it is clear what that is. Though we fail and struggle, we go to the cross as men and women and daily repent. Then we get back up the next day and pray that God will use us to build a home to His glory for the good of our families, and the advance of his kingdom on earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

Dec 10, 2025 | Apologetics

Ever since the French philosopher Voltaire in the 18th century, the existence of God has been debated, especially among cultural elites. There have been atheists throughout all cultures and times because life can be so absurd, but with the Enlightenment and the modern world, atheism became intellectually respected and culturally dominant in the form of secularism. A soft agnosticism would be an accurate description of the masses in Western culture, God pretty much an irrelevance, his existence not all that important one way or the other. Many atheists and agnostics will argue that if God really did exist, why wouldn’t he make himself more obvious. Thus the idea of the hiddenness of God, or if God exists why doesn’t he make it more obvious. Does the God of the Bible delight in making himself obscure, in effect hiding himself from his creatures? Their premise is that if God is real and good and loving, then he will make his existence undeniable to people. That begs the question: They assume their conclusion in their question, and then declare, he must not exist!

I was thinking of the hiddenness of God recently as I was reading through the book of Jeremiah, which can be a brutal read. Jeremiah lived in Judah during the fall of Jerusalem in the 580s BC as the armies of the Babylonians destroyed the city, and he saw the people of Israel exiled to Babylon. It was a horrific time to be alive, and is one reason Jeremiah is given the title, “the weeping prophet.” It was fitting he should write a book called, Lamentations. If Jeremiah, or we, live by site, judging our lives by circumstances, and not by faith, or by trust in God, then the hiddenness of God can be a real problem. I’ll deal with this from an apologetics perspective below, or how we can defend God’s existence and the veracity of Christianity against it, but I want to establish that it can indeed be an issue for some people. I went through my own “plausibility insanity” phase in my Christian life where God just didn’t seem as real to me as he used to. I could actually feel some sympathy for the atheist and agnostic, although I could never have become one of them. Something brought back God into the realm of the plausible, which I’ll share below as well.

Jeremiah and the Occupation of Prophet
Being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough job. The life insurance was really expensive. Having finished Isaiah prior to reading Jeremiah, the contrast is stark. When you read through the book of Isaiah there are plenty of declarations of judgment on a wayward, rebellious people, but it is interspersed with promises of hope and salvation. In the first several chapters there are glimmers of hope among the judgment, then we’re told in chapter 7:

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Instead of destruction, God against us, Isaiah is telling Israel that there will come a time when something remarkable, something unprecedented will happen, and through this son God will somehow be with them, not against them. Hope! In Jeremiah it takes 29 chapters to get any hint of hope amidst the unrelenting gloom. Then we get the great New Covenant announcement in chapter 31, but the book is almost all gloom and doom. From chapter 13 speaking of the people he is trying to warn, Jeremiah says: 

17 If you do not listen,
    I will weep in secret
    because of your pride;
my eyes will weep bitterly,
    overflowing with tears,
    because the Lord’s flock will be taken captive.

And they will be taken captive. The suffering, misery, and death will be overwhelming.

As I was reading chapter 26, I couldn’t help thinking of how God communicates to His people, and this fallen world in general. Jeremiah is commanded by the Lord to go out into the courtyard of the temple and speak to all the people of Judah who come to worship the Lord. The people are continuing with their religious duties, going through the motions thinking that’s good enough, but not living it out in their lives. Generally, we sinful human beings don’t like being told we’re wrong, and the priests, prophets, and people were not happy with Jeremiah. They seized him and said, “You must die! 

As I was reading through the chapter I kept asking, why are the people responding that way? I suspect it’s because they don’t think it is actually a message coming from the Lord. If they really believed it was from God Himself, I suspect they’d repent immediately. Then I asked another question. Why doesn’t the Lord just make it obvious he’s the one behind the message, make it clear this is not just something Jeremiah made up? That’s when the phrase “the hiddenness of God” came to mind, a phrase I’ve never much liked. Those who struggle with belief in God use it to justify their lack of faith. If, they claim, God only made his existence clear, made it easier to believe in him, then I would believe. But if he is there, he sure makes it difficult to believe in him. Why is that? The implication is that it’s just not fair. I’m sure Jeremiah wondered the same thing.

Around 587 BC the Babylonians were laying siege to Jerusalem, and Jeremiah’s message of divine judgment and urging surrender to the Babylonians wasn’t going over well. So, a plot was hatched to kill him by lowering him into a well or cistern (chapter 38). There wasn’t any water in it, but it was filled with thick mud at the bottom, so he either sinks into the mire, facing a slow death by starvation or suffocation.

6 So they took Jeremiah and put him into the cistern of Malkijah, the king’s son, which was in the courtyard of the guard. They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern; it had no water in it, only mud, and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.

We can imagine Jeremiah thinking, okay, God, as if I haven’t suffered enough, now this? We could add another question: Why does God allow his servants, or us, to suffer? Who knows! He does, but even amidst the suffering God remains faithful to his eternal promises. The question before God’s people is always this: do we trust him, or not. For me, I always go back to the character of God revealed to us in Scripture, and most specifically Moses’ glorious declaration in Deuteronomy 32:

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

Either this is true, or not, either I believe it, or not, even in the darkness or amidst the flood, even when I don’t want to believe it! If our hope is eternal, then this mist of a life, blink and then it’s gone, is nothing in comparison, as the Apostle Paul declares in Romans 8:

18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 

And this from the man who endured unimaginable suffering for the name of Christ (2 Cor. 11), eventually to have his head lopped off as an enemy of Rome.

Is God Really Hidden?
He most definitely is not! This, of course, depends on your starting point, your premise, your most basic assumptions. Because we live in a dominant secular culture awash in scientism, or the idea that science can give us all the answers for life, we think questions regarding God can somehow be proved empirically, as if the world’s a laboratory with test tubes and measurements. It’s not.  No metaphysical (i.e., beyond the physical world) questions can be answered with absolute certainty, or what we know as proof. We must start from somewhere, and where you end up will be determined by where you start. We, of course, start with God’s revelation of himself in Scripture, which tells us that God has revealed himself in his creation, what some call nature. So Paul tells us in Romans 1:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

It can happen the other way round as well. Many people start with “nature,” and eventually come to “creation” because God’s hand in it all it is unmistakable, so they end with Paul’s declaration, that God is “clearly seen” from what he’s made.

For many, though, the obviousness is an inconvenience; being their own God is preferable. Paul is saying that whatever people may claim, they are without excuse. This applies both to acknowledging that God exists, but further that they don’t measure up. In general terms we call that conscience, the guilt that comes from breaking God’s law, basically the Ten Commandments. God’s wrath against sinful humanity as well as his existence are obvious, even though people deny both. As Paul explains:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

The word suppress means to hold firmly, restrain. Even though God has made himself plain to them, sinful human beings stuff this truth down in their hearts, but it’s futile. I envision it like trying to hold down a beach ball under water while the pressure up is unrelentingly up. It takes constant effort to keep it down, but one way or the other that ball is coming up. It does so in varying ways, hopefully by getting people to acknowledge their sin, repent, and trust in Christ. What does this wrath look like? Contrary to Hollywood, it’s not lightening and thunder and fearsome storms and raging fire. It’s more prosaic than that, every day, humdrum. It starts with their minds becoming perverted:

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 

Remember Satan’s temptation to Eve: “You will be like God, knowing Good and Evil.” You get to call the shots now, not that tyrant God who is keeping you from fulfilling your potential because he’s just jealous and insecure. How’s that working out for sinful humanity? Paul starts the litany of sinful consequences with sexual sin, especially homosexual sin, but that’s only one of the most obvious. Dysfunction of every variety is found among people who reject their Creator God.

Put simply, God created reality to work a certain way, and he’s revealed himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ to tell us how to live in it. The contrast between those who live in Christ and those who reject him is stark, and for our purpose evidentiary. In other words, it is evidence for the existence of God, and our obligation to worship and obey him. In apologetics terms, this is part of the moral argument, that living in a moral universe, one of good and evil, right and wrong, can only be accounted for by God.

Evidence for God’s Existence
When we speak of apologetics proper, or defending the veracity of the Christian faith, all of the above applies. Man’s moral nature is evidence. We are not merely lucky dirt, matter in motion. Everyone knows we are born with a bent toward doing wrong. Leave a toddler to his own devices, and you will get a monster. The bad must be disciplined out of children. Crooked sticks cannot make themselves straight. Why is this? Of all the world’s religions only one gives us a plausible explanation why this is the case. Guess which one. Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. Why are people the way they are? Why does evil exist? We know why because of Genesis 1-3. If right and wrong, good and evil exist in the universe, then where did they come from? Mere matter cannot provide an answer. If they exist, then God must exist. If evil exists, then the devil exists, and if the devil exists, God exists.

For me, the moral argument is probably the most compelling of the evidences for God, but a close second is the design argument. This was one I could use most easily on our children because the material world was clearly created. A la Romans 1, a person has to work really hard at suppressing this undeniable fact, and few people now proudly proclaim they are doing that. We’ve seen a lot of conversions to agnosticism from atheism in the last two decades, not to mention to Christianity. The reason for that is critical to understanding the power and persuasiveness of the design argument in our historical moment.

First, what is this argument? It is also known as the teleological argument, from the Greek telos meaning “end” or “purpose.” When atheism became an accepted intellectual position in the 19th century, ridding the universe of purpose was a priority. Purpose implies a designer, and at just the right time Charles Darwin provided the answer to the problem. His system of evolution implies that the universe is a product of chance because it has no designer or creator. The design argument, by contrast, says we can infer a designer from the material world because of the implicit design, and obvious order and complexity of everything. Anything that has such order and complexity must be designed, and therefore must have a designer. Not too long ago this was vigorously denied by the greatest minds in Western culture.

In the 19th century atheism became a respected intellectual position because the knowledge of the material world was limited. Science and technology were in their infancy, and a Darwinian explanation for the world we inhabit had some credibility. These intellectuals further assumed that as knowledge increased, the case for God’s existence would become even weaker and religion would eventually wither away. Karl Marx certainly thought it would. But something strange happened on the way to the funeral: God wouldn’t die! In fact, as knowledge has increased the existence of God has become even more undeniable.

If you were alive and culturally aware in the first decade of this century you will remember the “New Atheists.” There was nothing new about them at all, but they thought so. They were an arrogant, loud-mouthed band of God and religion haters who became famous seemingly overnight, but their success contributed to their downfall. They failed to take into account that for the vast majority, like 95 percent, of human beings, the existence of God is not at all problematic. Again, it’s too obvious. It wasn’t too many years after their rise that their arrogant certitude started turning people off, and the exploding knowledge of the material world was increasingly revealing a preposterous complexity that could only be explained by a creator God. Now those atheists once as loud and confident as roaring lions, are as meek and quite at little lambs. If I ever wonder about God’s existence, I just look outside.

There are other evidences for God’s existence, not least for me is the Bible. I wrote a book called Uninvented, How the Bible Could Not Be Made up, and the Evidence that Proves It. That says it all, but I’ll end this with the most powerful apologetics argument for me: the consideration of the alternative. Whenever we believe something, there is always an alternative. If one thing isn’t true, something else must be. There is no neutral space where we can safely reside without having to make a decision, especially when it comes to ultimate questions: Why do we exist? What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why is there evil? What is the meaning of life? As the band Rush sang, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that the choice should be easy—he is not hidden.

I said above I would share what got me out of my “plausibility insanity” phase. It was two things. One was a deep dive back into apologetics in 2009. Being reminded again of all the evidence for Christianity being the truth, and the logical, rational reasons for its veracity makes it easy for me to believe it’s real. The other was in 2012 making a commitment to read the Bible and pray every morning. Communing with the living God every morning is what really did it, and I can’t even recognize the guy who would relate to the atheist and agnostic. This shows us that the so called problem of the hiddenness of God is a heart and not an intellect issue. As Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:

7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

 

 

My Kingdom is Not of This World

My Kingdom is Not of This World

Dec 3, 2025 | Eschatology, The Gospel

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read and heard this statement of Jesus as a reason for Christians to not engage in “the culture wars.” Doing this is in the old saying, like polishing the brass on a sinking ship. The implication, sometimes stated, sometimes assumed, is that this world belongs to Satan. For them, apparently, Satan is the king of this world. I’ll state my conclusion plainly up front: No he is not! As we’ll see, Satan was handed a kingdom he did not earn by Adam, and Christ came to take it back. We call this the gospel. For too long as a Christian when I heard or used the word “gospel,” I equated it with the salvation of souls, full stop. Sure, it has peripheral influences on the culture, but that was only a spillover from people being saved from their sins, as the theologians call it, soteriology.

Now, I see the gospel as a proclamation of salvation for the entire created order, starting with those who’ve embraced Christ as Lord and Savior, and God starting his reclamation and restoration project at his first coming. By contrast, the typical Pietist, fundamentalist, dispensational, Evangelical understanding of the state of this fallen world is that Christ will only fully clean it up at his second coming. Until then, Satan is more or less in control of this world, and the primary purpose of the gospel is to save people out of this world so they can go to heaven when they die. The world will get increasingly worse until Jesus finally comes back to save the day and set all things right. I used to believe this, more or less, but my embrace of postmillennialism a few years ago changed that. Let’s see how.

Satan Handed an Earth and a Kingdom
As we read in Genesis, God created the earth and everything in it “very good,” but something happened to ruin it. We’re all familiar with the story of the fall. God told Adam everything on earth belonged to him, but there was one tree from which he must not eat because when he does, he will “surely die.” We all know what death is on this side of the fall, but I always wonder what Adam made of those words. He had not yet seen or experienced death in any way, so I imagine it was an abstraction to him. Yet, he knew it must not be good. Maybe not fully understanding the implications of death is why Adam failed to protect the woman from the serpent, and Satan deceived her. We read in Genesis 3:

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Notice what happens when the woman eats—nothing. Then she gives some of the fruit to Adam and when he eats what happens? Only then were the eyes of both opened, not before. Paul confirms it wasn’t what the woman did that caused the fall, but what the man did:

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. . . . 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. (Rom. 5)

22 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (I Cor. 15)

Paul also tells us in Timothy (2:14) that it was the woman who was deceived, but in Adam’s tending of the garden and protecting his wife, he was a colossal failure. Where was Adam when the serpent was allowed to deceive the woman? Why was he not there to protect and defend her? Why was the serpent there in the first place? We can’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know from Genesis 2 that prior to Eve being created, man was given the charge to work and care for the Garden:

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

He failed to “take care of it.”

Interestingly, the Lord says to Adam he would curse the ground, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded, ‘You must not eat from it’” He clearly had the option not to listen to her, and if he hadn’t there would have been no fall. The choice was his, and he blew it, big time. In the created order of things, God made it so that man has ultimate authority, and therefore ultimate accountability. It’s called federal headship, the basic idea being how one person represents and acts on behalf of a larger group, with the consequences of their actions being imputed (credited or charged) to those they represent. Our salvation from sin depends on this concept. Adam was the federal head for the human race through which sin came, and Christ was the federal head for his people he came to save from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Sin was imputed through Adam, and righteousness through Christ. Without the federal headship of Christ, we would die in our sins.

Thankfully, Christ was given a task from the Father, and he fulfilled it. We read in John 6:

37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” 

Another idea we get from the theologians captures what we read about here, the covenant of redemption. In the internal Triune purposes of God, the Father gave Jesus a task, “to save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus didn’t come to save everybody, or to make salvation possible for all people, he came to make salvation actual for all those the Father has given him. This salvation accomplished by Jesus during his life of obedience unto death, his crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension, started to be applied at Pentecost. His kingdom was now established on earth, his having been given “All authority in heaven and on earth,” (Matt. 28). The flag of the kingdom, like a warrior in battle, had been planted right in the midst of the enemy’s territory, and he would now commence through the power of the Holy Spirit among his people to establish the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

A Ruined Kingdom Restored in Christ
The NIV translation of the verse in 2 Corinthians is the most literal of the translations, and to me the most accurate. It says, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.” Other translations infer that the new creation Paul is referring to is the anyone, so it says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” That is true, but that gives people the impression this new creation is limited to saved, redeemed people. I used to think that. In fact, it is God’s eschatological kingdom (the final fulfillment happening at his second coming) breaking into this dark fallen world that previously belonged to Satan—it does so no longer. The Apostle Paul tells us that salvation is a package deal, us and the rest of creation together (Rom. 8):

18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Noticed how Paul connects “the glory that will be revealed in us” to the entire creation. Most Christians think we only got a very small down payment on this new creation at Christ’s first coming, and a wholesale change can only happen at his second coming. They believe this fallen ruined kingdom belongs to the devil and use the evidence of evil and suffering to claim it. So, when Christ tells Pilot his kingdom is not of this world it confirms what they believe. However, Christ did not say His kingdom is not in the world, but that it is not of the world—not that the kingdom is “not here,” but that it is not “from here.” The word “of” is a primary preposition denoting origin. This means the origin of Christ’s redeemed kingdom is not of this world because he came to redeem and transform it!  Once his mission was accomplished and fully realized in his ascension and Pentecost, his kingdom was officially in this fallen world, like a mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13) taking it back from the devil.

We always read the text based on our assumptions, so when we read, “Who hopes for what they already have?” we assume we’re not going to get it until Christ returns at the consummation of all things at the end of time. But Paul wrote these words in the 50s AD, so Christianity and its influence in the world had been limited to parts of the Middle East and some of Europe, that’s it. Even there on a societal and cultural level, Christianity’s impact was minimal, but since then the gospel has gone throughout the entire earth and been utterly transformed by it. I do not limit the gospel’s reach just to human interaction, but to the imprint our actions and ideas and effort put on creation. Remember the dominion and cultural mandate given to Adam in Genesis 1:

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. 

27 So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

As the second or last Adam, Christ came to fulfill this mandate, and at his Ascension and Pentecost he began to fulfill it through us, his church. Human interaction on a societal level has been transformed by the gospel, and this includes science and technology and knowledge of every sort that has had an impact on how we live. Trust me, none of us would want to live in the ancient world, and the kingdom Christ came to establish is the reason we no longer have to live in such a world.

The Practical Consequences of the Ascension
Lastly, because Jesus is now king with all authority in heaven and on earth dwelling with his people by the power of the Spirit of God, the gospel has gone forth to the nations and God’s kingdom is advancing. As a result, the devil is on the defensive. Until I embraced postmillennialism, I thought it was the church and Christians who were on the defensive, and I thought this because I effectively ignored the ascension for God’s redemptive plans on earth. We are living in the fulfillment of God’s promise to Adam and Eve to strike or crush the serpent’s head, his defeat fully realized at Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God. The world now belongs to Christ!

Many Christians living by sight and not faith see how horrible the world can be and conclude the devil is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Greek often translated world is not cosmos, but aión or age. So Paul’s reference isn’t to the earth or God’s created order, but to the fallen world, the age of the devil’s reign on earth. Now, the devil is only the god of lost sinners, and God’s kingdom and Christ’s reign have been slowly taking over territory for the last two thousand years. That’s what the ascension means, the extension of Christ’s reign on earth and the advance of God’s kingdom. Our job as his body is to heavenize earth! When Jesus prayed to the Father, and taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” I imagine the Father was inclined to answer Jesus’ prayer in the affirmative. The point of Jesus’s coming was to establish his kingdom on earth, not wait for thousands of years to establish it. The parables of the mustard seed and leaven tell us the advance and extent of the kingdom will slowly but surely extend to the entire earth and everything in it.

The problem most Christians have with that assertion is how seemingly inconsistent the advance is. But, as I always say, God is never in a hurry. When God promised Abram 4,000 years ago(!) that all the peoples on earth would be blessed through him, for 2,000 years(!) the promise seemed hollow. This is why a common refrain of Jews prior to Jesus’ coming was, “How long O Lord!” David seemed like the fulfillment, then it all fell apart. Then Israel ceased to exist, and when they came back to the land, they were oppressed for most of the next several hundred years. Then Jesus! This little band of men and women in an obscure outpost of the Roman Empire literally turned the world upside down! As the men in Thessalonica exclaimed, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also!” More like right side up, and I’m inclined to think we’re just getting started.

 

 

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Nov 26, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Preterism was back in the news recently. Doug Wilson and Gary DeMar had another powwow in Moscow on Monday, November 3, this time an official debate. So, the timing is good to bring attention to this little book with big intentions. 

The word preterism comes from the Latin word for past, and it describes certain biblical prophecies having been fulfilled in the past, specifically in the first century. Most Evangelical Christians are futurists, meaning they believe those same prophecies describe future events happening very far into the future, most not even having happened yet. I hadn’t heard the word preterism until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, probably because I didn’t put much stock in eschatology as a recovering dispensationalist. I was an eschatological agnostic.

In my zeal for my new postmillennial eschatology, I was learning everything I could find on the topic. One resource I found was Gary DeMar, whose knowledge of eschatology seemed encyclopedic. I started listening to his American Vision podcast and became a big fan. I didn’t know much about preterism, and nothing Gary said gave me the slightest indication he believed anything out of the ordinary about eschatology. I caught a few things here and there indicating he was supposedly controversial, but even when addressing the topic there were no red flags.

Then last year I went to the Fight Laugh Feast conference, and I mentioned something about DeMar. A number of people I respect seemed to agree he was in fact out of the ordinary eschatologically. Some even used the word heretical, which I found hard to believe at the time. Fast forward to DeMar some months back going to Moscow to meet with Doug Wilson and make an appearance on CrossPolitic. What I saw on the podcast certainly didn’t seem ordinary. Getting him to affirm something definitively is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, frustrating. Thus, I began my journey down the rabbit hole of full preterism (FP). This interview and DeMar’s trip to Moscow brought out the full preterists on Twitter en mass. It was bizarre. These guys, and it seems they’re all guys, have a certitude about them that makes James White look positively doubt ridden. Ken Gentry wrote a foreword to Frost’s book, and in it says of such preterist zeal, “I have seen immature Christians swallow the system whole, then become intoxicated with a cult-like arrogance.” Surely not all who embrace it are immature, but I experienced a bit of that arrogance as well.

I still had no clue how deep the hole went, but not long after this I came across a Sam Frost interview on YouTube. As soon as he mentioned the book, I had to get it. I’m glad I did because now I know why I’m most definitely not an FP. Frost mentioned something in the interview I found surprising given what I was learning about Gary DeMar. On the back of the book is an endorsement by Gary DeMar! He writes that Frost’s book “is a great starting point in understanding the inherent dangers of a full preterism position.” I wonder what he thinks about that now.

Sam Frost has some credibility in writing a book about leaving FP because he not only embraced it, but taught and championed it, and wrote a couple books about it. He was a mainstay at FP conferences for a number of years until he grew disillusioned and saw what Gentry describes as “methodological errors, positional inconsistencies, and internal fragmentation.” What started to give me that queasy this is just not right feeling was the apparent rejection of 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy.

In the first chapter Frost gives us a short history of FP, and lays out four points on which all eschatological positions agree:

  1. Christ will return bodily . . .
  2. at the end of time and history . . .
  3. and raise our bodies . . .
  4. and bring full judgment to all.

Christians in history have been unified on what Frost calls “these essential matters.” I was shocked when I began to understand they didn’t believe these “essentials.” And it isn’t that they just don’t believe them, but they seek to “undermine them entirely.” How they do this is by claiming that all prophecies, all eschatological events (Matthew 24, Revelation, Daniel, etc.) were fulfilled in the past, and specifically in AD70 and the destruction of Jerusalem. AD70 is the ultimate hermeneutic by which they interpret everything in Scripture. The pretzel logic I encountered on Twitter of people trying to defend this was hard to believe.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for average Christians to wrap their minds around such a concept. What do you mean Jesus isn’t coming back “to judge the living and the dead”? What do you mean we will not be raised physically, bodily, out of the dust of the earth in resurrected eternal bodies? When I started to grasp what FP is, I thought there is no way Gary DeMar believes such things. Then seeing him on CrossPolitic trying to talk about the resurrection and watching the incredulous faces of the guys encountering this, it seems he does. Like I said, it’s hard to nail Gary down.

The short history of FP Frost recounts goes back to the early 70s. Out of 2000 years a half century or so isn’t much. Yet we’re to believe Christians for all that time completely misunderstood what God was saying about the very nature of redemptive reality, of reality itself? Sure seems like it. One man is responsible for this, Max King, an ex-Church of Christ minister. He published his first book in 1971 called, The Spirit of Prophecy, and as the description at Amazon says, it “shook the foundations of modern Bible interpretation.” It must not have been very high on the Richter Scale since so few have ever heard of it or FP. He wrote another book in 1987 Frost calls his magnum opus, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ. And he adds, this is the first documentation of full preterism, even though preterist ideas are common in church history.

Another thing that is new in church history was the FP antipathy to creeds Frost recounts in a chapter on, “History, Creeds, and Sola Scriptura.” The latter is a Reformation affirmation, and is important in this context because the FPs claim they only reject the creeds at the points which they disagree with Scripture. But I always thought the creeds were based on Scripture. Apparently not. This explains DeMar’s fixation on “show me the verse,” which he repeats ad nauseam when discussing this topic, as if affirmative declarations in Scripture settle anything. Or that inferring something from Scripture that isn’t spelled out is illegitimate. Like, for example, the Trinity. The word doesn’t exist in our Bibles, so “show me the verse” isn’t going to work for something Christians have believed since Christ rose from the dead and Trinitarian orthodoxy agreed upon at the Council of Nicaea.

The problem with such extreme Biblicism is that it contradicts itself. Because God didn’t see fit to give us a textbook or operating manual, spelling out exactly what we’re to believe but rather a story; doctrine must be inferred or derived from the text. The authority of Scripture doesn’t come directly from the text but must be interpreted, and upon that interpretation we stand or fall. FPs are “stuck” with the rest of us interpreters, even though their absolute certitude indicates otherwise. The inevitability of interpretation means they criticize those who do exactly what they do, interpret the text! You would think this obvious reality might engender a little humility, but alas you would be wrong. Absolute certainty for finite creatures like us is an impossibility. Sadly, too many people haven’t realized that.

Another concept I hadn’t encountered before reading Frost is the idea of infinity, in the title of chapter 4. This is truly bizarre. According to FP the world as we know it will never end (remember everything was fulfilled, finished, in AD70), so there will be no end to baby making, or what they call “infinite procreation.” As Frost writes from the FP perspective, “’the Bible nowhere speaks about the end of time, but only of the time of the end,’ which of course was AD 70.’” And if the covenant is eternal, forever, then history must go on eternally. Like I said, bizarre. But what about the elect. There can’t be an infinite number of those because Scripture is clear on this, not much interpretation required. Frost quotes John 6:39:

39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 

Frost writes a chapter on John 6 because it was critical in moving him away from FP.

Also, the concept of the book of life is affirmed throughout Scripture, and the idea is that a certain number of people are in it, not an infinitely expanding number of people. Daniel 12:1, for example, states: “But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered.” Doesn’t sound like an ever expanding book to me.

Frost finishes with a chapter on the reasons he left FP, and some might surprise you. One is that FP and dispensationalism “share a lot in common.” I didn’t see that coming, although he does mention dispensationalism several times. The similarity is that they are both “all or nothing” approaches, and both have a “one time fulfillment” in mind, among other things.

I could write much more, but my objective in writing this is to give you some sense of the bizarreness of this very newfangled eschatology, and the inevitable unorthodox implications that result. It’s worth the read if you’re curious or have someone in your life who is thinking about or embracing FP.