He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

May 6, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

One thing many Christians seem to miss is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, that he came first exclusively to his own people. There is a tendency to see all of Jesus’ words as written to us and universally applicable, and ignoring the historical context in which the story takes place. We’ll notice as we read through the gospels Jesus uses the word generation a lot, specifically in the Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus uses the word twenty-six times. Each time he uses it he is referring to the generation currently living. Even in John where that specific word is not used, John starts his gospel saying that Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” That statement is a good synopsis of the entire story of the gospels and Jesus’ ministry, which is the foundation upon which is built the Apostle Paul’s ministry eventually taking the gospel to the Gentiles and the entire world.

First, Jesus has to deal with the Jews and what the Jewish religion had become by the time he started his ministry. We have to look at the gospels in the context of the flow of redemptive history, and what God’s ultimate purposes were in creating a people for Himself in the first place. This requires us to go back to the very beginning. Adam was given a charge in the garden to take the world God had given him, and in effect to civilize it. Once he created man, both male and female, he gave them this charge:

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.”

We call this the dominion mandate coming from the word the King James Version used for rule, dominion. Expanding on the meaning, it indicates prevailing against, to reign and rule over, to take. Adam was given a world of raw material with which to create a world of blessings for the people he would co-create with God. Needless to say, he blew it. When sin entered the world taking dominion would become a very mixed blessing, but the blessings were there to be had. Sin just complicated things. Eventually God chose Abram, one man out of all the people’s on earth to bring his blessings to every nation, to all peoples, through him and his seed or offspring, which is Christ (Gal. 3:16).

The Jews by the time of Jesus seemed to miss this message, that their religion wasn’t just for them, but for all peoples on earth. Judaism had gotten so insular, so exclusive, that Jews were not even allowed to eat with Gentiles, or to go into their houses and visit. Since God had stopped speaking through the prophets 400 years prior, the Jewish religious professionals had turned their religion into something completely foreign to what God had intended it to be. Jesus came to rectify that.

The Misunderstood Jesus
For those of us who’ve been Christians for a while and have read and heard the gospels preached many times, they don’t shock us, or even cause us to wonder what the heck is going on. Part of the reason is that we don’t realize the gospels were not written to us, but for us. In my early Christian years I thought the Bible was God speaking directly to me divorced from the historical context in which the stories took place. Needless to say that is not the most solid biblical hermeneutic, or interpretive framework. It’s impossible to understand what’s going on unless we see it as the culmination of Jewish history, as the turning point, the pivot in redemptive history.

Jesus was a corrective, and because of that completely misunderstood. His ministry, those three short years, might best be described in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men.” Despite all he said and did to prove he had come from God, he was continually rejected, even by his own family! In Mark 3 Jesus is making a ruckus, and Mark tells us his family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ In Mark 6 Jesus visited his hometown, and the response of those who knew him best isn’t exactly welcoming. They say,

3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

In chapter 5 Mark gives us two stories of how how widely Jesus was misunderstood. In the first story, a demon-possessed man everyone must have known about because of his prodigious strength came to Jesus. No wonder the demons who spoke through him gave the name Legion. They plead with Jesus not to send them out of the area, so he gives them permission to go into a very large heard of pigs, who then immediately rush down a bank into a river and drown themselves. The people’s response is to plead with Jesus to leave their region. He had cost them a lot of money and they wanted nothing to do with him. The fact that Jesus commanded demons and they obeyed him was irrelevant.

The other story of rejection in this chapter is about Jesus raising a young daughter of one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus. He pleads with Jesus to come and heal his daughter, which he promptly does. When they arrive at his house, they tell him he’s too late, she’s already dead. Jesus tells them she’s not dead but asleep. The response of the people?  “But they laughed at him.” This is what reminded me of John’s observation in the first chapter of his gospel:

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Jesus had already done amazing works of healing throughout the region, yet they still doubted. Moral of the stories? No matter what Jesus did, many, most Jews, would never believe. In fact, at the very end of his life he is completely alone, hung on a tree, a Roman cross, as a crucified criminal, enemy of the state. Only a handful of women are there in his final hours. He was truly despised and rejected by men. He came to bring good news to that generation, that man could be reconciled to God, that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs could be theirs, that the dominion mandate could finally be fulfilled in him, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

Jesus’ War with the Religious Professionals and the Covenant
The ministry of Jesus is the culmination of 2,000 of Jewish history starting with God calling Abram to go from his home to Canaan to the land of promise (Gen. 12):

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

The expansiveness of this promise is the point, and it goes back to the Dominion Mandate. God always intended to bless the entire earth, his creation and everyone in it, and that blessing would come through His people. The Jews forgot that, and turned this welcoming religion into an insular legalistic affair for only the few. Witness the early church’s struggle with Jewish Christians welcoming Gentiles into the church. When Peter had his vision of the clean and unclean animals and was sent to the centurion Cornelius, the Jewish Christians “were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles” (Acts 10). That wasn’t supposed to happen!

But if we’re going to understand the full redemptive-historical meaning of Jesus and his contentious interaction with the Jewish religious professionals, we have to see it in its legal-historical context in God’s dealing with His people. This requires some understanding of Ancient Near Easter religion, and for modern people that’s not easy to imagine. What we see in our Bibles isn’t some petulant God frustrated with His people and lashing out at them. The heretic Marcion even went so far as to see the Old Testament God as a different God. Far from it. Rather, God established a legal relationship with His people typical of an ancient Near Eastern Suzerain-Vassal relationship. A Suzerain was a superior ruler, a king, or great power who exercised dominance over a subordinate ruler or state, known as the vassal. The relationship was formalized through suzerain-vassal treaties (or a word we’re familiar with, covenants), which were common diplomatic and political instruments. These were not generally agreements between equals, although such did exist, but hierarchical relationships imposed by a stronger party on a weaker one, often after conquest, alliance, or submission.

This started with God’s unilateral covenant agreement with Abram in Genesis 15, a bizarre ritual to us, where God puts Abram into a deep sleep. He tells Abram the story of what will become his descendants’ slavery and deliverance that happens 400 years into the future, and then in the form of a firepot, a blazing torch passes between cutup animals as a ceremony to formalize the suzerain-vassal relationship between God and His people. This relationship was unique, though, because it was unilateral, only one party, the suzerain, God, declaring he would fulfill both parts of the covenant. These covenants or agreements, like our contracts today, were always established between two parties. Not with God and His people. Those who would become the Hebrews and then the Jews would never be able to keep their end of the bargain.

God rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt began to formalize this relationship as we can see from the intricate details required of the people to maintain it. God lays out the conditions and consequences most starkly in Deuteronomy 28. There are detailed blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience, more of the latter than the former. We must notice the number one stipulation, a warning at the end of the list of blessings:

14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

The turning aside, turning away from their God, was a function of their following other gods and serving them. That is the essence of the human struggle with sin. It isn’t primarily our behavior that is the issue, but which god or gods we will serve. Our behavior always flows out of that. The final result of the cursing, which would prove prophetic in Israel’s history, is destruction. It’s a sobering read knowing what happened three times in Israel’s history. First with the Assyrians destroying the northern kingdom in 722 BC, then the Babylonians destroying Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BC, and finally the Romans destroying Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD. All this was a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness, of their turning aside to follow other gods and serve them.

Israel’s Marriage Covenant with God
In the Old Testament the covenant, i.e., legal, relationship between God and His people is depicted as a marriage, and Israel is often portrayed as an unfaithful wife who had committed spiritual adultery by turning to idols, yet God remains faithful and promises restoration. God had warned Israel of the exact consequences of the agreement, and they responded to Moses three times that, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey” (Exodus 19 and 24). They willingly entered into this agreement, and would have to live with the consequences. This is the ultimate context of Jesus’ ministry and mission to the Jewish people.

If we go back through Jewish history in the Bible we see a double minded people who are not sure if they want to remain faithful to their God or follow the ways of the other heathen pagan nations. God called His people to be holy, set apart and not contaminated by those heathen pagan cultures, and by the time of Jesus the Jewish religious professionals, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Teachers of the Law, had perfected a narrowly exclusive version of Judaism that bore little resemblance to what God intended in his promise to Abram. God’s design was that the nations wouldn’t infect His people, but rather that His people would influence the rest of the world with His blessings. After 2,000 years it was clear that just wasn’t going to work, and Jesus is bringing his message of warning to his people who instead of heeding it, kill him. Yet the Apostle Peter says in Acts 2 this was all part of the plan:

23 This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

Israel’s history was one long object lesson in failure, that without God the Holy Spirit dwelling in His people, the kingdom of God could never advance on earth, or Satan’s dominion be destroyed. That would take the man who would come to be called the Messiah, who in himself would fulfill all three offices of mediator that sinful humanity required, prophet, priest, and king. As prophet, Jesus was truth teller, speaking messages the people often didn’t want to hear. It was as prophet that Jesus’ contentious relationship to the Jewish religious leaders is best understood. They chaffed at everything he said and did because it condemned them. As Jesus lamented (Matt. 23):

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

They were determined to do the same to him. As priest, Jesus would atone for the sins of the people he spent three years condemning. Sadly, they completely missed that Jesus was himself the Passover lamb, who willingly took the wrath they deserved. And finally as King, he would be their ruler, the one to whom they owed unquestioned loyalty and obedience. Instead, they proclaimed that they had no king but Caesar.

The Jews would not accept Jesus’ atonement for their sin and unfaithfulness, and him as their Messiah, so as Jesus warned them, their house would be left to them desolate. Jesus had warned the teachers of the law and Pharisees in Matthew 23 with seven woes that judgment was coming, and in Matthew 24, what is called the Olivet Discourse, he prophesies the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. God would send an unmistakable message to the Jews and the world that there was a new way to the Father, the only way, and it was Jesus, Savior of the entire world.

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Apr 29, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

The great comedian Tim Allen, Buzz Lightyear himself, sat down with fellow comedian Bill Maher for a long conversation about their careers, and at one point discussed the credibility of Christianity. Maher’s at best an agnostic, but Allen clearly believes in God, and has struggled for years to get to the truth about the nature of things. I didn’t realize what a deep thinker he is. He wrestles seriously with the ultimate questions of life, and won’t settle for facile answers. It’s a real battle for him, and at times not coming up with answers has made him depressed. He’s a genuine seeker.

At one point in their conversation he brings up the Apostle Paul’s journey to his belief about the story of Jesus being true, and Allen is trying to wrap his mind around it all. Part of what prompted his thoughts was a trip to Israel to where it all happened, and he’s blown away that the gospels are actual history, that those things really happened in space and time. While he’s clearly not fully embraced the Christian faith, he’s also clearly compelled by it. What his thinking reveals to me is someone who intuitively understands something that cannot be denied, that we have to believe something, and it happens to be one of my favorite apologetics perspectives about realizing Christianity is true, which we’ll explore below.

His almost testimony reminds me of the actual testimony of Vishal Mangalwadi he shared in a wonderful conversation he had a few years back with Jordan Peterson. He’s Indian, the land of the Hindus, but he became a Christian in high school, and then rejected it in college because the very smart professors he encountered said it was basically hogwash. After he’d gotten out of college as a skeptic, his sister talked him into reading the Bible. His entire experience of coming to Christ was through multiple readings of the Old Testament, especially the historical books about Israel. Every time he read it he came to a different conclusion about what the nature of the Bible is and what it could mean. Eventually he saw the genius in it, the story of Isreal and their God, that could only be explained by being true revelation from God. He realized one of two things about the Bible must be true. Either it’s what it claims to be, the revelation of God to man, or it is a product of man, primarily stories of human fiction.

If it’s the latter he concluded there is no such thing as truth, and Christianity is the same as all the philosophies and other religions he studied, just fruitless searches for meaning in a meaningless universe. He and Allen both realized that without God’s revelation the very possibility of truth and knowing anything about the nature of reality is impossible. That’s why Allen was depressed and despairing over ever really knowing what life’s about. As Leon Morris said in his book, I Believe in Revelation:

[T]he view that what matters ultimately is what appeals to the individual’s experience or reason is a profoundly pessimistic view. It means that we have nothing from which to correct our errors, no way of knowing what is true or false once we have accepted an idea. If man’s mind is the measure of things there is no way of getting back to the right way once that mind has gone off the wrong track.

Both Mangalwadi and Allen knew this in their bones, and that the revelation of God in the Bible is the only answer to man’s dilemma, which which leads us to one of my favorite apologetics tools.

The Consideration of the Alternative
Simply put, if we don’t believe one thing, we must believe another. There is no in between where we get out of having faith, of deciding if one thing is true then everything else is not. As Geddy Lee sings on Rush’s Free Will, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Exactly. If Vishal had decided the Bible was not God’s revelation, then he was saying it’s a product of man. It’s either/or, one or the other. There are many scholars in the history of biblical criticism who didn’t get this. They claimed God spoke through some of what we read in Scripture, not all of it, and lo and behold, they were the ones who decided which Scripture was which! Convenient, that, and completely arbitrary.

Being deep philosophical thinkers, both Allen and Mangalwadi realized something most people never do. They intuitively grasped that if there is no God there is no truth. This is an undeniable fact of existence that the entirety of atheistic Enlightenment rationalism missed. All these atheists just assumed truth exists while denying God who is the Truth exists, and thus the ground of all truth. You can’t get truth from dirt because if all we are is lucky dirt, then you can only get, well, dirt! Atheistic materialism posits all that exists is matter; there is nothing beyond matter, no transcendent or spiritual reality beyond the material. Logically that means any moral assessment of reality, like goodness, beauty, and truth can only be mere preference, what each person prefers, like flavors in ice cream, or taste in music or food. There is simply no way around that conundrum for the atheist. Over the years I’ve marveled reading atheistic thinkers like Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, and how it never seems to occur to them that their atheism is problematic when it comes to their assessment of things being true or not.

Which brings us to another issue in the consideration of the alternative, the burden of proof. Once we realize, or accept, that if one thing is not true something else must be, the burden of proof shifts from only one side of the equation to both. Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud never thought, even for a second, that they had to prove or justify their belief in a God-less universe. To them it was as axiomatic as water flows downhill, just the nature of things. For most atheists, reality needs no explanation; it’s just brute fact. There is no why or justification behind good or evil, truth or lies, beauty or ugliness; they just are. They, however, were wrong because without God there can be no transcendent standard for what is morally right or wrong, or for what is true or not, or if beauty or ugliness even exist. All things become inclined to the tyranny of personal preference, or tyrannical preference on a societal level. So, in Hitler’s Germany, or Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia, genocidal murder of tens of millions of people was for them legal and morally justified. And if there is no God who’s to say it wasn’t?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’s first section is on “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe.” People, he says, will quarrel about one thing or another, and each appeals to a standard that assumes something beyond their own preferences. As he says about people making claims of fairness:

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it.

In other words, people without being taught it know that some objective standard exists to which each person can appeal, regardless of what they personally believe. In fact, we can only know what a crooked line is because we know it is not straight, and that the straight line exists. This puts the atheist in the unenviable position of trying to argue for a standard he claims doesn’t even exist. All he can ultimate says is, I don’t like it!

This means we must never accept the burden of proof double standard placed upon us by the materialist atheist. As I often say, there is no such thing as an unbeliever—all people live by faith. This applies to any counter claim to Christianity’s truth claims. For example, when the skeptic says the Bible is myth or fairy tale, made up stories, he has to provide evidence that is the case. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. Since the beginning of biblical criticism going all the way back to Spinoza in the 17th century, critics have just blithely assumed the Bible could easily be made up, that obviously the default assumption should be that for the most part it’s merely human fiction. We must challenge that assumption and force them to provide evidence beyond their blatant anti-supernatural bias. For example, I made the argument in my book Uninvented that nobody could make up a Jewish Messiah like Jesus, and laid out extensive arguments why. Now let the skeptic make counter arguments. They can’t because there are none!

What Are the Alternatives to Christianity? If we go to the big picture when we look for an explanation of reality we might think there are many alternatives vying for our allegiance. The skeptic will tell us there are thousands of religions all claiming to be the one true path to God or whatever is ultimate, but that’s not true. All religions basically accept Jesus in some form, as I say, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. But only Jesus makes the completely exclusive truth claim that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that “no one comes to the Father except through” him. When you get down to it, there are only three ultimate options: theism, atheism, or pantheism. Two of these alternatives are impersonal. Atheism is material, therefore not personal. Pantheism is spiritual, but not personal. In a world filled with persons and personalities, these are not credible. Only theism is spiritual and personal. And of the great theistic religions, only Christianity because of the Trinity is truly personal. It is no coincidence that the world created by the Triune God is inhabited by persons.

Whenever I am tempted to doubt, for what psychologically healthy person doesn’t doubt at times, I consider the alternatives. There is no other plausible explanation, no other religion, or worldview, that has close to the explanatory power of Christianity, and we’ve only scratched the surface in this section.

The Power of Explanatory Power
If you haven’t heard this phrase before, it’s something you’ll want to become familiar with. The term comes from the Philosophy of science, and means what “provides a better explanation” for X, Y, or Z. For example, is a Creator or chance a better explanation for the bumble bee? In science it often comes down to probability, or what the likelihood is of one thing being the case versus another. 

Explanatory power is associated with something called abductive logic. “Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation, is a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations.” Douglas Groothuis in his book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, gives us some real‑world examples of the practical power of abductive reasoning:

This kind of argument is often used in . . . courts of law. In court cases, various kinds of evidence are arrayed in support of a judgment concerning the guilt or innocence of the party on trial. One accused of larceny must give a better explanation of his whereabouts during the crime in question than does the prosecutor. If this kind of reasoning is common, useful and acceptable in other contexts, its use in the philosophy of religion should not be excluded.

C.S. Lewis put this concept best as he normally does. In a talk given on, “Is Theology Poetry?” he said the following with poetic simplicity:

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

Light always does this. Lewis’s sun metaphor is illuminating, pun intended, because the Christian worldview sheds light on everything. Light is a common biblical metaphor. Unfortunately, light is so common and easily produced in the modern world that we take for granted what a powerful function it plays in our lives. Think about it: light lets us see what’s actually there, even though we all have different perceptions of things. For example, when you turn on the lights chances are you will not run into the couch. Instead of sitting on nothing and falling on your behind, you can just go sit in the chair. Notice when the lights are on, you also have depth perception; three‑D is so much more impressive in reality than on a movie screen. When the lights go on, you can see color. All of a sudden, everything is defined!

The Apostle John tells us about Jesus, that

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it. . . . . 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 

John’s claim is that Jesus is the one who allows us to see reality as it actually is! As we get to know Jesus and his word and his world, we will bump into fewer chairs. We’ll stop running into things we can’t see and stop trying to convince ourselves, and others, that there really was nothing there after all. Why do you think it is that psychotherapists do such bang‑up business, especially among the rich and famous, and increasingly among the young and not so famous? Their clients are confused! (There are over half a million “mental health professionals” practicing in the US.) If you lived in spiritual darkness you would be confused too, running into walls and couches, wondering if this thing you’re feeling is the door to the garage or the bathroom. It would be so much easier if someone would just turn on the damned lights! God has, in Christ!

That is explanatory power. Lewis gives us an example of how explanatory power works. He beautifully contrasts Christianity as an explanatory framework with what he calls the “scientific point of view,” or swallowing “the scientific cosmology as a whole.” This view assumes reality is solely material, and it provides zero explanatory power:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio‑chemistry, and bio‑chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test.

For former atheist Lewis, the question is which cosmology, or what account of why things exist, best explains what actually exists.

The West has been indoctrinated into a secular, basically materialist cosmology; it is assumed everywhere we go, in everything we see or hear. A perfectly innocuous example comes from a golf tournament I watched on TV. The first PGA tournament of the year is always in Hawaii, and they were broadcasting the beauty and grandeur of the islands. The commentators, watching a large gray whale frolicking in the sea, remarked how beautiful this magnificent creature is, how majestic and awesome a sight. However, what they couldn’t say was how incredible and awesome must be the God who created that whale—the God who thought up the concept of a whale in the first place, and water, and oceans, and gravity, and an earth and moon, and human beings who could be blown away by the experience of it! A professional announcer today wouldn’t think of injecting “religion” into such an environment. As my family will attest, at times like that I yell at the TV and say something like, “What about the God who created it!”

It is this God, the Creator of all things, the Triune God of Scripture, and of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that will finally put all the puzzle pieces into a big beautiful coherent picture for Tim Allen. Let’s pray for him that he makes it all the way to finding what he’s always been looking for.

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

Apr 15, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

One of the many evidences secularism is dying is a phrase you’ll hear in popular culture, most often in TV shows and movies: “The Universe.” As in, “The Universe” is telling me something, or telling me not to do this or that. It’s funny how an impersonal material force can somehow communicate meaningful messages to persons. The reason people attribute power and will and intelligence to mere matter is because atheistic materialism, and it’s offspring, secularism, for all intents and purposes is dead, especially among the youngest generation.

Having been a consumer of popular culture all my life, this is something new, but it doesn’t surprise me. Secularism as the dominant societal ethos in the West has proved itself vacuous and unable to speak to the deepest needs of the human heart. As it developed and became dominant in the 20th century, God increasingly became persona non grata, merely a personal option among an infinite variety of options to find meaning in life. It hasn’t quite worked out like it was planned.

Where we are in this dying age of secularism reminds me of the beginning of Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859 and set during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It could very well describe our own time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Until, that is, the blood flowed and heads came off at the behest of the merciful Madame la Guillotine. We’ll remember that period became known as “the Reign of Terror.” The secular reign of terror isn’t so bloody, but its promises are just as hollow as the revolutionaries who brought so much misery and suffering to France. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, yet its cheerleaders still believe it’s our only hope for societal flourishing. Looking at a little history will help us understand why.

Secularism and the Societal Myth of Neutrality
Secularism does its damage on a personal and societal level. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” space, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence. Unfortunately, most Christians still believe in this myth, thus the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”

Secular understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture. We saw this played out in America in the autopen presidency of Joe Biden, and are currently seeing it play out throughout secular Western Europe.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. And make no mistake, secularism on a societal level will always and everywhere lead to tyranny. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point; its true nature can no longer be hidden by empty promises. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (an apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

I could not agree more. The so called “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear, has been completely discredited. The world is arguably more religious than ever, even if the West is less so. The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more as well, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year. Only Christianity gives us the true basis of liberty, as America’s founders knew full well.

Secularism and the Personal Myth of Neutrality: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Secularism on a societal level assumes the myth of neutrality on a personal level as well; one feeds the other. It’s ubiquitous and easy to spot, but I’ll use one example to make the point, a piece from the 2011 print edition of The New Yorker Magazine called, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents.” Author James Wood, a committed secularist, admits secularism has its problems, but not enough for him to discard it.

As a secularist, Wood clearly considers himself not “religious,” and therefore believes he is neutral regarding ultimate issues. Since he believes he isn’t “religious,” he also believes he doesn’t need faith. The secularist’s definition of faith is, however, fallacious and biased, something along the lines of what Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, declared: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith in this view is basically wishful thinking, and not “scientific,” as if science could answer metaphysical questions of meaning; it can’t. That would be known as a category error. Science and philosophy do different things and address different issues, and most secularists are terrible philosophers. The bias is specifically anti-supernatural because secularists are naturalists or materialists, i.e., they believe the material is all there is. They are, however, every bit as “religious” as the religious.

In other words, the un-believer doesn’t exist. One of my pet peeves is referring to certain people as believers and others as unbelievers. The word believer is biblical, but it’s a word we need to retire in our secular age. Using it allows the “unbeliever,” the secularist, the false impression they don’t have faith just like every “believer.” All human beings by the nature of their finite created existence are believers and live by faith; the issue is what or who they believe in. In the apologetics task against secularism, Christians must learn to refer to people either as Christians or non-Christians, not believers and unbelievers.

Throughout the article Wood contrasts religious “believers” with atheists, and at one point refers to “Both atheists and believers . . .” Ergo, atheists don’t have to believe anything! It’s almost comical how ridiculous the contrast it. Without the slightest evidence atheists believe all material reality basically created itself, everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Talk about a leap of faith! Wood might even say he doesn’t need the “crutch” of faith like many atheists, but atheism and secularism are their own rickety crutch. You’ll see throughout his piece something else secularists are especially good at, begging the question, a logical fallacy meaning to assume the premise as the conclusion, a form of circular reasoning. A great example of this is early in the piece when he lays his cards on the table claiming, “God is dead, and cannot be reimposed on existence.” The bald assertion is never defended, just asserted, as if it need not be defended; but it is a statement of faith. We must question the unexamined assumptions of the secularist and secularism wherever they rear their ugly head.

C.S. Lewis said something that underlies the impossibility of neutrality in the Christian understanding of reality:

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.

In other words, there is a spiritual war being waged on the vast plane of reality, and only one side wins.

Making the Secular Plausible: Epic Fail
The reason “the universe” is showing up in popular culture as a character directing the lives of people in some way is because secularism is no longer as plausible as it once was. The sociological concept of plausibility structures is helpful for us to understand what is going on, to get the big picture.

All societies and cultures have a structure of the plausible, all those things in the culture, entertainment, law, media, education, family, religion, etc., that make reality seem real and natural and normal to us—just the way things are. The truth of the seeming is irrelevant. What is plausible is what makes the worldview of a people, how they understand who and why they are, and people in the West inhabit a secular plausibility structure. God for them is for the most part irrelevant.

Since we’re talking about popular culture, the indoctrination into secularism, both personally and societally is insidious. Watch almost any TV show or movie, and God is invisible, unless used as some kind of curse. Treating God as if he’s irrelevant is far more effective in secularizing people than your typical atheist talking points, and we’re all more susceptible to the lies and illusions of a secular view of reality because of it. An irrelevant God is the secular cultural air we breathe, and the dominant cultural messaging, which is why the personal and societal effects of secularism are ubiquitous and profound.

James K.A. Smith in his book summarizing the magisterial tome of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, entitled his book, How (Not) to be Secular. He has numerous helpful insights into the nature of secularism. In speaking of plausibility, he mentions Taylor’s “conditions of belief,” saying there was “a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.” It’s not so much what people believe, as what is believable. These are reflected in “the default assumptions” of a people, ideas unexamined and taken for granted by everyone, and thus most secular people don’t think they assume anything at all! Commenting on the “conditions of belief,” Smith gives us a helpful perspective on the implications for faith:

Taylor not only explains unbelief in a secular age; he also emphasizes that even belief is changed in our secular age. There are still believers who believe the same things as their forebearers 1,500 years ago; but how we believe has changed. Thus faith communities need to ask: How does this change in the “conditions” of belief impact the way we proclaim and teach the faith? How does this impact faith formation? How should this change the propagation of the faith for the next generation?

Even though Smith makes my previous point referring to believers when the whole paragraph is about belief, he does say later, “[I]t’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.” And in this sense, everyone is a believer.

In simplest terms, secularism means “no God.” It doesn’t necessitate atheistic materialism, although all atheists are secularists. The vast majority of people believe God exists, but He has no practical relevance to their lives because all that matters is flourishing in this world. The dominant secular faith is called moralistic therapeutic Deism (MTD), meaning God’s there, He wants us all to be nice, and the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. If we get in a pickle, then we’ll bring God into the picture, otherwise not so much. Finally, this MTD faith believes good people go to heaven when they die.

This God is no threat to secularism because it is a religion of secularism. What’s important is the here and now. Why worry about all that stuff we really can’t know and everyone disagrees about anyway. Thus God’s invisibility in popular culture. The problem with this shallow secular religion is that people know it doesn’t meet their deepest emotional and psychological needs for meaning, hope, and purpose in life. It’s based on nothing but wishful thinking, nothing solid, nothing real, like soap bubbles, as soon as you catch them, there’s nothing there. It’s just preference as worldview, which is why an increasing number of people in the West are turning back to faith in God, to Christianity, the only true, solid, and real thing in this world and the next. Is it another Great Awakening? We’ll see, but it is an epic fail for secularism.

The reason it is epic is that it started somewhere in the 17th century with rationalism, and then developed over the next 300 to 400 years, eventually displacing Christianity as the dominant faith in the West. All the cultural elites believed we could order a prosperous and flourishing society without any reference to God. It’s obvious by this point that isn’t true. The 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of the world by far, and the 21st isn’t starting out much better. We’re the most prosperous societies the word has ever seen, and people are miserable. The universe won’t save us; only God in Christ can, he who died for our sin, and rose again to conquer death that we might live with Him forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Material Implications of the Gospel

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored.  Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

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

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Mar 18, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

In January I was listening to Steve Deace opine on the woman in Minnesota who was trying to block ICE agents on a suburban street. At one point it looked like she was trying to run over one of the agents, and he shot her. She died giving her life for the leftist religious cause of all things anti-Trump. You can bet if Joe Biden had sent Ice to deport illegal aliens, she would not have been on that street blocking them that day, and ICE wouldn’t be in the news at all. In fact, when Democrats have deported illegal aliens, and they have, there wasn’t a peep from the left, but if Trump does it, the left loses its mind. They are also invested in immigration, illegal or otherwise, because their power depends on it. A guy who goes by the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist put it well:

Mass immigration is an existential issue for the modern left, perhaps more than any other. Without mass immigration, the leftist project collapses. Kaput.

The word existential is one most people aren’t familiar with, but it says perfectly what’s at stake: existence itself. The concept developed in the mid-20th century post-World War II, “where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.” The seeds of this intellectual movement go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, but it was the horrors of the 20th century capped by Nazi death camps and atomic bombs dropped on Japan that gave it momentum. Existence itself, and it’s meaning, seemed to be on the verge of extinction. The radical left realizes this, and unfortunately most of the Democrat Party is right with them. Trump is the ultimate threat to their power grab because he realizes their threat to the American way of life, the liberty and prosperity handed down to us from our forefathers. Too many on the right side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum don’t seem to get this, that this is a metaphorical war for a way of life we’ve come to take for granted.

Deace sees this, and was bewildered that more on our side, especially Christians, don’t get what’s at stake. He was also marveling at the religious commitment of this woman willing to become a martyr for the cause she believed in so deeply, and he was wondering how she became who she is. The media tried to portray her as an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was in fact an anti-ICE warrior, part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She was a lesbian who was “married” to a woman and who was previously married to a man. She likely immersed herself in the left’s religious echo chamber, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, etc. and was committed to applying her faith to all of life. She had a radical leftist atheistic secular worldview. She even sent her son to a woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and “involving kids in political and social activism.” She took her faith seriously.

What Deace was marveling at was this passionate commitment of leftists compared to most Christians who are committed to comfort and ease. For many Christians, their faith is irrelevant to this world, and thus this world is never influenced by their faith. As I’ve written about extensively here, I blame Pietism for this, the 17th century German Lutheran movement with good intentions, that over the next three hundred years changed Evangelical Christianity from a transforming force in society into a culturally irrelevant one. A curiosity to me is how many people complain about how terrible things are, but don’t seem to realize the faith they believe is a transformational faith, not just for individuals but for entire civilizations. Look what happened to the once mighty Roman Empire; it was defeated by Christianity and turned into Christendom.

The Left: No Longer Democratic Rivals, but Existential Enemies
The existential battle between left and right, between good and evil politically and culturally, goes back to the French Revolution. That conflict gave us left and right, specifically from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly (also known as the Estates-General convened at Versailles). Those who supported the king, monarchy, tradition, and the old order sat on the right. Today these are called conservatives. Those who supported radical change, the revolution, limiting or abolishing royal/aristocratic power, greater equality, and republican ideas sat on the left. These are the leftists, liberals, progressives; Democrats have become the party of the left. That first radical Revolution in France led to tens of thousands of executions, upwards of 17,000 having their heads lopped of via Madame de Guillotine. It turned out to be a revolution in innocent blood, unlike the revolution coming before it in America.

Many revolutions followed in its wake, the most consequential the October 1917 Russian Revolution, out of which came communism and what is called the “Old Left.” This left gave us Stalin and purges and war on an industrial scale, but accomplished none of the dreams of its grandfather, Karl Marx. Communism simply didn’t work. Those who yearned for a world informed by the French Revolution, taking down the old order and everything supposedly inimical to “progress,” would never give up. In the 1920s and 30s a group of leftists in Germany developed a form of cultural Marxism, moved to America before the war, and eventually developed into the New Left in the 1960s. The current batch of woke leftists are the children and grandchildren of the New Left. The old Left focused on economics, labor issues, and socialism, while the New Left’s obsessions were issues like civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism, environmentalism, and plain old countercultural rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when screens were limited to 3 main channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, or channels 2, 4, and 7 in Los Angeles. PBS was channel 11, and then there were a couple local stations. Shocking to you youngster, I know. Protests of leftist hysteria over one issue or another was a consistent theme, and I had a front seat to it all in our house when the screen was turned to the news every night. So the antics of the woke left in our day are nothing new, and not at all creative. They’re basically a broken record, same old story, a turgid Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals movie, over and over again. It’s exhausting, and banal, not to mention dangerous. Susan Sontag, one of the New Left radicals, is a good example. Some people today are shocked by the anti-white racism of the leftist-Democrat liberal establishment, but Sontag wrote in 1967 that, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” You can’t get more anti-white than that! The real cancer of anti-white racism, which is anti-Christian and anti-masculine, has been around a long time.

What makes them especially pernicious is their self-righteous smug moral superiority. They believe themselves to be moral and good and right, and everyone else is evil, a fascist, a Nazi. Hitler for them is the apotheosis of evil; Satan doesn’t compare. Branding everyone who disagrees with them a fascist allows them to justify violence as a political tool. That’s why they’ve branded Trump as Hitler from the moment they realized he wasn’t one of them, and was a threat to their vision to take over the world. Of course killing Hitler is justified, then there would have been no World War II and no Holocaust. Go back to the 60s and 70s and we’ll see this is nothing new either. Their only real moral value is might makes right; the will to power rules all. Truth is a luxury they can’t afford.

The Christian Response to the Evil of the Left
These people take their faith seriously, and it is an all-consuming religious worldview applying to every area of life. Like we postmillennialists, they are confident their kingdom will eventually win and take over the world. They are something that appears contradictory, optimistic in their rage and anger. This actually reflects the futility of their efforts, but they don’t know that. They’re convinced they are, in the words of radical leftist Barack Obama, on the “right side of history.” Jesus begs to differ. When Peter in Matthew 16 declared of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus told them that he was going to build his church upon this declaration, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. For most of my Christian life I missed that gates were defensive mechanisms in the ancient world. It is the church, Christians, who are on the offensive in this spiritual war, and the devil and his minions are on the defensive.

We give the devil entirely too much credit. After the resurrection Jesus had been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and at his ascension was coronated as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Paul affirms this in Ephesians 1 when he tells us that Jesus was seated at God’s right hand,

21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

Notice, and this is critical, Paul took it for granted that his audience understood Jesus had all this power and authority now, in “the present age.” He felt he had to remind them, it was also for the age to come. The devil has no authority on this earth, zero, zip, nada, none. He only does what God allows him to do. Scripture further tells us when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on this world at Pentecost, that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Cor. 15). Peter in the first sermon in Christian history in Acts 2 quotes Psalm 110 to affirm that this has been the plan all along:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
   until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

All of this started, the ushering in of the kingdom of God on earth, at Christ’s first coming. The victory in this world is ours because we belong to Christ, we are “in him,” as Paul says many times in his letters.

We have a problem, though. Most Christians don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either until a few years ago. I was convinced sin and the devil were such powerful forces that things would get increasingly worse on earth until Jesus came back to save the day and finally usher in his kingdom. This is a relatively new eschatological perspective in the history of the church. Most Christians believed the kingdom of God on earth had come in Christ, and it was the church’s job to advance the kingdom on earth. In the 1830s this all changed with J.N. Darby and the rise of dispensationalism. Even those who are not familiar with that term or what it means, have heard of things like Antichrist, 666, the rapture, and the great tribulation. This mentality is fundamentally defeatist in the face of evil, like the evil presented to us by the political and cultural woke left in our day.

The other problem is non-theological. Most Evangelical Christians are conservatives. Unlike secular leftist radicals, and the Democrat big money donors that enable them, we just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our families, and be productive members of society. That’s why we’re called conservatives. We think there is value in traditions and the Christianity that gave birth to our civilization, and want to conserve them against those who fetishize progress. We are on the right side of the French Assembly squarely against the Revolution. Most normal people’s lives are not consumed by politics, yet therein lies the problem. The radical left, which is the entire Democrat industrial complex today, will never leave us alone until they’ve ushered in their woke Utopia. Basically what it’s come down to is us or them, as I said, it’s existential.

As I write this, we are witnessing an existential battle for the American way of life in the streets of Minneapolis. Either the radical left and their minions of protestors are crushed, or America is over. It’s our will against theirs. Either truth, righteousness, and justice prevails, or it’s lies, evil, and tyranny. As a culture, a society, a nation, we have a clear choice, made all the clearer by the woke radicals: it’s either Christ or chaos. The church, as Jesus said, needs to “discern the signs of the times.’” It is either them or us. I will end this with the immortal words of Thomas Paine written in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in late 1776. They apply to our present moment in history and we need to take them to heart. There is no place anymore for a personalized Pietistic faith. As with the Patriots of old, we must decide if America is worth fighting for:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

 

 

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

Mar 4, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Recently at a church service the closing hymn was That Old Rugged Cross, for over a hundred years a beloved hymn to conservative Protestants. It had been a long while since I’d sung it, and I noticed the final stanza got the ultimate hope of our faith backwards, although most Christians wouldn’t think so. I myself wouldn’t have given it a second thought until not too many years ago. The final stanza reads:

To that old rugged cross I will ever be true, its shame and reproach gladly bear; then he’ll call me some day to my home far away, where his glory forever I’ll share.

In fact, our home is this very earth upon which we live which Jesus came to redeem and restore to its previous Edenic glory, and Jesus will complete the job when he returns. Sure, it doesn’t quite feel “homey” because sin still exists and we long to be freed from being afflicted by its doleful effects. That, however, is a process only to be fulfilled at Christ’s second coming when we receive our new bodies and live on this new redeemed, renewed, and restored earth. That’s when we will be fully home. Heaven could never be our home because we won’t have our bodies, and we were never meant to live a bodyless existence. The Christian hope in the final analysis is not heaven, but a physical, resurrected body, on a material earth Christ redeemed from sin. We’re merely living the down payment now as we await the glory to come. These words of the Apostle Paul say it a whole lot better than I can, and notice not a word of heaven:

18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.

Our hope is completely material in orientation. Why we tend to think it isn’t, I’ll address below.

We give the devil entirely too much credit, as if this earth belonged to him and our goal is to escape it. Our goal, in fact, is to transform it, as Jesus prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That wasn’t a prayer for thousands of years in the future when he returns, but a prayer fulfilled at his first coming. Like the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13), Jesus wants us to know his kingdom’s coming on this earth is inevitable and all pervasive. It’s why Paul says when we are in Christ we’re part of a “new creation, the old has passed away the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). One day nobody will be able to deny this new creation as the kingdom’s transformational power goes out from God’s people to all the earth.

Satan, the World, and our Home
If we’re to talk about this sinful fallen messed up world, it’s important to be clear about what world we’re talking about. The physical earth and material world while always belonging to God its creator, was ruled by Satan since Adam and Eve rebelled, and he remained in the driver’s seat until Christ ascended on high and sent his Holy Spirit 50 days later at Pentecost. At that moment, Satan like the strong man in Jesus’ parable (Matt 12, Mark 3), was bound up for a thousand years so he could no longer deceive the nations (Rev. 20:1-3) and the gospel could go forth and bear fruit across the entire earth as it has these last 2,000 years. Prior to the ascension and Pentecost, that couldn’t have happened.

The problem with thinking heaven is our home and that it is far away, is that it’s not true. Jesus tells us as much in Luke 17:

20 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

The kingdom of God, of Heaven, is right smack dab in the middle of where we live. In that sense we’re “home,” only it doesn’t feel like it sometimes because we still need to tidy up, clean out the junk in the garage and attic, and put on some additions and redecorate. We need to truly make it feel like home, and that is the process of the Christian life, thy kingdom come!

Whatever heaven is, we can say with assurance that our residence there is only temporary. Theologians have termed our time there as the intermediate state, as in, it’s a temporary state of our eternal existence. We won’t get too comfortable there because we’ll be longing for our actual eternal home on this renewed, restored, and redeemed earth, the one paid for by Jesus’ blood. While we are in this fallen world living in our fallen bodies surrounded by fallen people, our mission is to make it as homey, eternally speaking, as possible, a place where God’s law is honored, and Christ exalted as King of kings and Lord of lords. In other words, in obedience to Christ we are bringing heaven to earth and discipling the nations. That is the Great Commission, not merely saving people from the fires of hell. We are not only attempting to sanctify ourselves, but working to sanctify the world, and the peoples and nations in them. It’s a tough job, difficult in every way, against the grain, but look at the progress over the last 2,000 years; from only a handful of people to over 2 billion, and transformation beyond what Jesus’ followers could ever imagine.

Havin said that, there are numerous passages in the New Testament that give us the impression this earth, rather than the fallen world, is not our home. Just this morning as I write this, we had a missionary from Thailand give sermon in I Peter 2. Peter opens his letter telling us he’s writing “to those who are elect exiles” in several Roman provinces in Asia Minor (modern-day northern Turkey). There is some debate as to whether Peter is speaking to Jewish or Gentile Christians, but Christians tend to read this as applying to our spiritual estate in the world, and not the literal description of Christians Peter was writing to who had been scattered, or dispersed, throughout Asia Minor. The word exiles in Greek means pilgrim or sojourner, so we conclude that must be us on this earth. Then in chapter 2, Peter says:

11 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. 12 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Again, we tend to read this as if it’s directly to us and about our spiritual estate in this fallen world, we being the foreigners and strangers and aliens in a fallen world. In some ways that’s true, but Peter is in fact writing to Christians living in the thoroughly pagan cultures of the time. Yes, it is analogous to living in a fallen world among heathens in our own day, but we’re the ones doing the transforming. We are not helpless before the juggernaut of evil wrought by the devil in this world. He’s been defeated! And now we bring the victory earned by our Savior and God to bring Joy to the World. As Isaac Watts wrote and we sing on Christmas, “He comes to make his blessings flow, Far as the curse is found.”

There are other passages that we could explore that give us the same impression, but how we read these depend on our eschatological assumptions, which most Christians are unaware they even have. If we see the world as belonging to the devil, and that it will get increasingly worse until Jesus returns to save the day, we’ll think we’re the ones who are the exiles and strangers here. By contrast, it’s the lost sinners who feel that way in God’s world, and we have to help them see that. If we realize Jesus took the world back at his first coming, and enabled the possibility of his kingdom to invade what was enemy territory, then we’ll see our mission as taking back what is rightfully his. We’re the light that drives out the darkness, and light always wins. We’re the salt that preserves and enhances. And as Paul says in Romans 14:

17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.

In other words, people want what we have! That is how the kingdom is advanced, as God’s Spirit is apparent in our lives and he works in the souls of those we encounter.

Why Do We Seek to Escape This World?
Why do we think heaven is our home and not this earth? Why do we think in such escapist terms? Until a couple hundred years ago most Christians didn’t, in fact. While they realized life was extremely short and perilous, instead of escape they saw their mission in life as bringing heaven to earth, God’s kingdom come His will be done. All Christians thought this way to one degree or another regardless of their view of “end times,” or eschatology. In fact it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the “eschatology wars” started because of a new player on the eschatology stage, J.N. Darby.

I won’t go into the details of his thinking because I’ve done that here numerous times before (see here and here and here), but since the 1920s it’s been known as dispensationalism, and by the 1970s Antichrist, rapture, and tribulation had become pop culture mainstays. The entire point of this version of “end times” eschatology is escape. The term “end times” itself was popularized in this period and came to mean a dystopian hell from which all true Christians were supposed to be rescued. I was born-again into this milieu in which the zeitgeist, or the spirit of that Christian age, was all about escape. I even remember praying one time right before I graduated from college that the rapture would happen so I wouldn’t have endure real life after college. But all of this mentality is the result of a false, unbiblical spirituality that goes back to the influence of Platonism on the early church.

If you never did your study on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his influence in church history, you wouldn’t know that the distrust of this material world found at times in Christianity came from him. His unfortunate influence in this regard was most powerfully felt with the rise of the heresy of Gnosticism in the second century. Plato gave the Western world a dualistic view of reality, upper/lower, spiritual/material, good/bad, and it’s wormed its way through Christianity ever since.

The 16th century German Lutheran movement of Pietism was one worm that eventually allowed a kind of Gnostic dualism to fully dominate the church, which is the answer to my questions. Pietism is the bad guy. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about piety, or a dedicated pious life of a vibrant personal relationship with our God through Christ. That kind of piety and Pietism are two completely different things. This kind of Gnostic dualism is a way of seeing the world, a mindset that mistakes this world for something inherently bad that we’re to get away from to experience true eternal life, the life of God meant for us in Christ. Francis Schaeffer called it a two story view of reality.

The Alternative to Escape: Transformation
One of the most unfortunate effects of Pietism is how it causes Christians to over spiritualize everything. The tendency is to downplay the importance of this world of material things, and only give true value to that which is forever, the spiritual, the not “this worldly.” I’m not talking about the perverse desires of this world the Apostle John talks about in I John 2, but rather to the contrast he makes, doing the will of God on this earth. The mission of God in Christ, the Great Commission, is distinctly for this world. The charge Jesus gave to his disciples right before he left the earth was to “make disciples of all nations,” not just the people in those nations, and having baptized them, teaching them to observe all that he commanded them. And he promised he would be with us always on this earth “to the end of the age.” This wasn’t his only final message. In Acts 1 he expands on it:

6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

He wanted the disciples’ vision to be the entire earth so that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs would come upon all peoples and nations; true Israel would now touch the four corners of the earth. The Great Commission and being his witnesses to the ends of the earth could only happen after Pentecost. Once he sent his Spirit he himself would be with us in power, the power to transform lives which in due course would transform civilizations. That is the point of the Great Commission, what makes it Great, not only saving souls to go to heaven when we die. Jesus wants his earth back, and we’re the down payment!

This transforming power, contrary to the Pietistic mentality of most Christians, affects every nook and cranny of existence, everything Christians put their hearts and minds to. I don’t need to define everything because it means, literally, every single thing we do. What happens when the spirit comes? Read Galatians 5, and compare “the works of the flesh” to “the fruit of the spirit.” This is transformation! And it not only transforms us personally, or in our relationships, but it makes us productive citizens. When Paul tells us the kingdom of God is a matter “of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” imagine a town or city or county or state or country filled with kingdom people who exhibit these qualities. Can you? It’s something wholly different than John Lennon could Imagine. We’re so used to seeing dysfunction and strife and “works of the flesh” we think that’s what it will always be. Jesus said otherwise.