What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

Jul 2, 2025 | Theology

Back when we lived in the Chicago area my wife listened to Moody Radio, and she told me how they often spoke disparagingly of something called Replacement Theology. I’ll never forget one time hearing Janet Parshall sneeringly say those words as if she was spitting out some horrible tasting medicine. Knowing Moody, both evangelist DL in the 19th century and the empire he built in Chicago today, are committed to dispensationalism this didn’t surprise me. What did was the vitriol, as if the very idea was an insult to any right thinking Christian. Having gotten active on Twitter early last year, the eschatology wars are a common occurrence. A dispensationalist and I started a conversation, mostly respectful, and he suggested I read this book, Has the Church Replaced Israel? By Michael J. Vlach.

The question of the title is something I couldn’t really answer because I’d never studied the relationship of Israel and the church in any real depth. I’m reading slowly through John Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah, and he always calls Old Testament Israel the church. This isn’t common in Evangelicalism, but most Evangelical Christians who are not committed dispensationalists tend to believe the church is the fulfillment of Israel, even if they couldn’t articulate exactly what that means. Historically as Vlach acknowledges, so called “replacement theology” was the default position of the church. I’ll explain what exactly this means below because it’s a new theological category that only developed in the last two hundred years. It would not exist if not for the also new eschatology of dispensationalism.

When I first heard this phrase I intuitively didn’t like it. Ever since I embraced covenant theology as part of Reformed theology in my 20s, I never saw the church as “replacing” Israel, as if we were throwing them out like unwanted trash. In my mind, the church doesn’t “replace” Israel, but is the fulfillment of Israel, of God’s redeemed people. Those two concepts, replace and fulfill, have completely different meanings. To re-place means to “put in place of,” so Israel no longer exists because the church has been put in her place. It’s kind of like replacing a struggling pitcher. The starter is not getting the job done, and the coach replaces him with a pitcher from the bullpen, a reliever, who saves the day and the team wins the game. There are two different people, two different pitchers, and the only thing they have in common is throwing a baseball to batters. In the minds of dispensationalists, that is “replacement theology.” To fulfill, on the other hand means “to bring to completion.” God’s promise to Abram that through his seed all nations on earth would be blessed through him meant God’s covenant promises were starting with Abraham and Israel, and would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and his body, the church.

Eschatology and the Importance of Assumptions
A favorite theme of mine is the importance of assumptions, mainly because we tend to be unaware of how they affect our thinking. Everyone assumes (there I go again!) they’re objective and don’t assume anything at all! We all do, all the time, or we couldn’t think anything at all. It’s part of the deal of being a finite creature with limited knowledge. I was happy to see Professor Vlach admit that up front. On the very first page of the introduction he states an indisputable fact:

As will be shown, one’s hermeneutical assumptions will largely determine where one lands on the relationship between Israel and the church.

I would say totally determines. The assumptions we bring to the interpretation of Scripture, our hermeneutics, determine our interpretation. For example, in the 19th century as skeptical German higher criticism developed, biblical scholars came to the text with an anti-supernatural bias. They rejected the supernatural because they embraced Enlightenment naturalism. So, whenever the Bible mentions miracles, those miracles couldn’t have happened, so they searched for other “scientific” explanations. This is an obvious example of how assumptions affect our conclusions about Scripture, but everyone brings certain assumptions to their reading and study of the Bible, some more obvious than others. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we think of Israel and the church.

The first thing I noticed about Vlach is that he assumes the burden of proof is on those who, according to dispensationalists, believe the church replaced Israel. These are called supersessionists. It seems to me the newer position, dispensationalism, should have burden of proof, but he believes his position is so biblically obvious the bigger burden is on those he disagrees with.

Then of Israel he assumes they are an entity God will continue to deal with in the same way throughout history. He refers to “the nation Israel,” Israel as “the group,” and Israel as a “people.” Isarel as a nation, a distinct people with a distinct geographic boundary, is fundamental to the dispensational paradigm because they assume God’s promises in the Old Testament to Israel necessitate a literal one-to-one correspondence in the New Testament church age. Based on his assumptions, he states the fundamental issue clearly in this passage:

I have no trouble with the designation replacement theology because with the supersessionist view there is a taking away or transferring of what national Israel was promised to another group. One can use fulfillment terminology as some prefer, but in the end the result is the same—promises and covenants that were made with the nation Israel are no longer the possession of national Israel. Israel’s promises and covenants now allegedly belong to another group that is not national Israel. This other group may be called the “new” or “true” Israel, but this does not change the fact that what was promised to one people group—national Israel—is now the possession of another group to the exclusion of national Israel.

As you can see clearly here, his assumptions determine his position. For his position to be true, or truly biblical, God needs to have intended all his “promises and covenants” to be specifically, literally, for the entity of the nation-state of Israel and its people, which will always be a distinct, independent, and self-contained object of God’s plan. There is no way for him to prove God’s intentions, or at least in any persuasive way, which is why supersessionism has been the predominant position in the history of the church.

The History of Supersessionism
First let’s clarify that word. It originated from the Latin term supersedere, meaning “to sit above” or “to take the place of.” It is formed from super- (“above” or “over”) and sedere (“to sit”). It emerged in the theological scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries specifically to indicate “replacement theology” as a system of thought or doctrine. Once dispensationalism got its start with J.N. Darby in the 1830s, and Israel as a nation-state entity became theologically relevant again, there needed to be a descriptive way to refer to what had been until then the historical position of the church. Vlach quotes theologian Lorraine Boettner:

It may seem harsh to say that “God is done with the Jews.” But the fact of the matter is that He is through with them as a unified national group having anything more to do with the evangelization of the world. That mission has been taken from them and given to the Christian Church (Matt. 21:43). (Italics added.)

The phrase, “unified national group” is an apt description of the heart of the matter. For all of church history until Darby, the position of the church was that God was no longer dealing with Israel as a “unified national group.” God’s covenant and promises that came through Israel were now fulfilled in the church consisting of both Jews and Gentiles.

According to Vlach there are three variations of supersessionism in the history of the church.

  1. Punitive Supersessionism – In this perspective, because of Israel’s disobedience and God’s punishment, He is displacing Israel as the people of God with the church because they have forfeited that right. Vlach says this was common in the Patristic era, and Luther with his anti-Jewish views held it as well.
  2. Economic Supersessionism – This is where I and most non-dispensationalists fit. As Vlach explains, “it focuses on God’s plan in history for the people of God to transfer from an ethnic group (Israel) to a universal group not based on ethnicity (the church). In other words, economic supersessionism asserts that God planned from the beginning for Israel’s role as a people of God to expire with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church.” I have a saying I heard somewhere and have used over the years: God’s covenant promises are about more than a plot of land in the Middle East. Vlach argues that it is exactly what they are about.
  3. Structural Supersessionism – Simply, this is an interpretive approach to the Bible that discounts the Old Testament history of Israel, and skips right to the New Testament age and focuses upon the church. He is right in that most modern Evangelical Christians ignore the history of Old Testament Israel, and use it primarily for moral lessons. Even as well-read as I am, and a seminary graduate at that, I still didn’t have a solid and detailed grasp of Israel’s history until the last handful of years.

This doesn’t mean we supersessionists don’t hold that there is a future for Isreal and the Jews as a people. Vlach calls this moderate supersessionism, and most Christians have held this position in the history of the church. He distinguishes between salvation and restoration. Moderates do not believe the nation-state of Israel as a “unified national group” will be restored, but we do believe per Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 that God is not done with the Jews, and that many Jews will come to believe in their Messiah and be saved. We call those today Messianic Jews. The church is the new Israel made up of saved Jews and Gentiles, and supersessionists do not see “any special role for Israel apart from the church.”

Vlach then does a deep dive into the history of supersessionism in the church from the church fathers through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Enlightenment eras, into modern times. He rightly points out that it is no longer the dominant view, but doesn’t tell us why. He wants us to believe it’s because the biblical case for God restoring national Israel is so obvious, even though it’s not as church history indicates. Supersessionism is no longer dominant because of the rise of dispensationalism in the last two hundred years, and it having completely taken over the Evangelical church. That goes back not only to the Plymouth Brethren and Darby, but to the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of fundamentalism against the liberal modernism of the early 20th century. Once Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth hit the bookstores in 1970, it was all over but the shoutin’! Then to put the dispensational icing on the cake, the Left Behind novels (16 of them!) exploded in the 90s, and the movies only added to the dominance of Evangelicals seeing national Israel continuing as part of God’s plan. Not to mention the unlikely event of Israel becoming a nation in 1948.

Hermeneutical Assumptions Determine Our Perspective on Israel and the Church
Having started the book admitting the importance of our interpretive assumptions regarding the Bible, he spends several chapters explaining what those are. This is the heart of the matter, more than the theological justifications he explains later, which we will not have space or time to get into. There are three primary assumptions:

The doctrine of supersessionism is largely controlled by three interrelated beliefs: (1) belief in the interpretive priority of the NT of the OT. (2) belief in the nonliteral fulfillments of OT texts regarding Israel, and (3) belief that national Israel is a type of the NT church.

He then implies that there are two mutually exclusive approaches to interpreting the redemptive history we find in our Bibles. For him these are either/or:

Can one rightly use a grammatical-historical-literary approach to OT passages? Or should the student interpret the OT primarily through the lens of the NT?

The answer to these questions is yes. If you’re not familiar with what a grammatical-historical approach is, simply, it looks to interpret biblical texts by focusing on their original context, language, and literary features. The first thing it asks is what is the author’s intended meaning for the original audience, which can only be understood in the context of the historical and cultural setting.

I was born-again at 18 years old, and I would not learn of this approach to biblical interpretation for over five years. Prior to that it was either implied or expressly taught that the Bible was written to me not for me, that it was God speaking directly to me. When He wanted me to understand something, God would zap! a metaphorical little wire coming down out of heaven into my brain, and I would understand the text for me. That was the primary interpretive grid of the kind of Pietistic Christianity I encountered as a new Christian and a recipe for interpretive distortion. I’m not saying by the power of the Holy Spirit God doesn’t use specific texts to us in unique ways, only that the text has one objective meaning in its historical context, and our objective is to understand that meaning. The phrase I learned that helped me quickly understand all this was “authorial intent,” or what did the author intend as he was writing the text, and related to this is what his readers would have been expected to understand.

The other question he raises is how we use the lens of the NT to interpret the OT. For me the ultimate hermeneutical principle is found in Luke 24 after Jesus is risen from the dead. He makes it clear that he himself is that principle. To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

According to the risen Jesus, God himself in human flesh, all the OT Scriptures, from Genesis to Malachi, is about him. In the following quote we get to the heart of the issue for dispensationalists, literalism:

Closely related to the supersessionist view of NT priority over the OT is the belief that the NT indicates that there are nonliteral fulfillments of OT promises, prophecies, and covenants related to Israel.

For Vlach and all dispensationalists there are OT texts that “appear to predict a time when Israel will fully possess its land and have a special place of service among the nations.”

The crux of the issue between dispensationalists and supersessionists is literalism, a basic assumption of the former is that certain texts must be interpreted literally. The problem with literalism is that it is impossible to apply consistently. Even in the book giving examples, Vlach doesn’t apply it consistently himself. He agrees that some texts merit typological interpretation, which means there are patterns or “types” in the OT seen as foreshadowing or prefiguring events or themes fulfilled in the NT. So who determines which are literal and which are types? In fact, something can be literal in one context, and a type in the ultimate fulfillment in Christ in another context.

Because of this, his critiques of these three hermeneutical principles of supersessionism (NT priority over the OT, nonliteral fulfillment of texts, and typological understanding of the OT story), is not persuasive; it’s his dispensational assumptions verses supersessionist assumptions. Neither of these approaches can technically be proved, and he admits “the hermeneutical issue of how the NT uses the OT is a difficult and complex topic.” Ultimately, as I said above, your hermeneutical approach and understanding of Israel and the church will be determined by your eschatology. The new eschatological kid on the block, dispensationalism, has gotten a very lot wrong in its less than 200 years, so they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt regarding the status of national Israel in God’s redemptive plan. I’ll be sticking with supersessionism, the historically solid position in the history of the church.

 

 

Back to America’s Providential View of History, the Present, and the Future

Back to America’s Providential View of History, the Present, and the Future

Jun 25, 2025 | Theology

Since the Covid debacle what I call the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, known as the Internet, has proved as transformational as the first Gutenberg Press of the 15th century. The latter was instrumental in allowing the Reformation to sweep like wildfire throughout Europe in the 16th century even as the Catholic church was running around with pales of water trying to put it out. It didn’t work, and Western civilization was transformed. A similar dynamic is happening today and the Internet in large part is making this possible.

 

 

This short video of short video of Pete Hegseth got me thinking about history, God’s providence, and what He’s doing in our time. Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, and at the Pentagon recently he was proclaiming Christ as Lord and praying for our country. Before the Internet the secular media either ignores this or paints it as a threat to the mystical “separation of church and state.” Now, it can be seen by millions all over the world, unfiltered, and people see that Jesus is no longer persona non grata in American culture and government.

Because of things like this, multiplied many times over, I believe we are in the midst of a Great Awakening. This one, though, is wholly different than the previous two because it’s developing in response to a hostile yet dying secular culture, while the previous awakenings were products of a Christian culture. Sociologists not too long ago were proclaiming the triumph of secularism as inevitable. As science and knowledge advanced, so the thinking went, religion would “wither on the vine.” In fact, exactly the opposite is happening. As science and knowledge have advanced, religion, specifically Christianity, is flourishing because science and knowledge reveal the Creator God. Paul told us a long time ago God is too obvious to miss (Rom. 1:20):

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 they are without excuse.

The “they” refers to godless and wicked people, “who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (v. 18). If the universe is mere matter colliding and we’re just lucky dirt, then do whatever floats your boat, no guilt required. But science and knowledge are making God the Creator way too obvious to ignore.

It isn’t just the created things, the stuff of the material world that makes it obvious, but history. God reveals himself in history. My latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, is about seeing God’s work in history so we can understand the present to make a better future. The definition of history, after all, is right there in the word itself, His story. Theologically we call it redemptive history because after man fell from his glorious estate into ruin, God promised to redeem him, and the day Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, His story began. In the Bible we’re given a roadmap of the development of God redeeming a people for Himself, and eventually the entire created order. Once it was all redeemed on the cross, the rest is just details. Those details are what we normally think of as history, what we’ve come to call AD, Anno Domini (Latin for “in the year of our Lord”), or after the birth of Jesus Christ. All of history is defined by Jesus, even as he directs it all. Which brings us to . . . .

A Biblical View of History
Like most Christians influenced by secularism, I’ve tended to see history and events like hurricanes, just happening and who knows which way either will go. When hurricanes are tracking toward where we live in the Tampa area, I have to remind myself it is God alone who determines where they go, not mere “natural” forces. Regarding history, we often must remind ourselves God directs all events, past, present, and future.

A proper Christian providential theology of history is captured by Daniel when God revealed to him Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream. Grateful he and his buddies would not be killed, he proclaims the greatness of our God, the author and director not only of our faith (Heb. 12:2), but of all history:

Then Daniel praised the God of heaven 20 and said:

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons;
he deposes kings and raises up others.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.

The Apostles Creed declares our belief in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and then we affirm of the second person of the Trinity:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We Evangelicals do not pay enough attention to Christ’s ascension. We think it’s the resurrection that really counts, and of course it is. The church was built and grew on that claim, but Jesus went somewhere after he rose from the dead, ascending to heaven and the right hand of the Father. In the ancient world the one who sat at the right hand of the king shared his kingly authority and power. In this case, Jesus has the ultimate position of power and authority in the universe.

The crowning New Testament rationale for the confidence of God’s providence in history is found in Ephesians 1. We cannot overemphasize the theological and providential implications of Christ’s ascension. Speaking of the surpassing greatness of the power for those who trust the Lord Jesus, Paul says:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 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. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

This is not only the rule and authority of material creation, but over beings spiritual and mortal that exercise rule and authority and power and dominion—over all of them. Many Christians quote Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” But it is critical to quote this in the context of the passage in Ephesians 1. Nothing happens that Christ doesn’t permit or cause to happen; his rule is sovereign and absolute.

Like most Christians, however, I tended to see this passage eschatologically because as Christians we know how the story ends. It’s more difficult to grasp that Jesus has all this power now and is using it in this world, in space and time, for the advancement of his kingdom and ultimately for his church. This has implications beyond the church, though, which is why Paul tells us Jesus’ kingly rule is not just for the age to come, but for the present age as well.

Linear versus a Biblical Teleological View of History
Once we accept God’s providential control over history, we need to have some idea of what the implications are for actual history.

Prior to “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1), all ancient peoples viewed time cyclically, a perpetual wheel endlessly turning going nowhere. Because of this, the Jews were the first people on earth to escape the endless turning, and the possibility of true history began, an actual story being told with a beginning, middle, and end. Many Christians, however, tend to think the contrast to the cyclical view of history is linear, a line going straight in one direction from A to B. That, however, is not the biblical understanding of history.

If we’ve learned anything from thousands of years of recorded history, it’s anything but straight. It zigs and zags all over the place, backward, forward, and sideways. Biblically, the contrast to cyclical isn’t linear but teleological. This word comes from the Greek telos meaning purpose or end. In this understanding of history, every event is leading somewhere regardless of what it may look like on the surface. This means there are no throwaway events, things that just happen. Every event has teleological significance whether we think we can see it or not, including in our own lives. The most common question in all of history attests to our needing to understand all this: Why, God? It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . to us. If we look back through Scripture, we see how often biblical characters felt the same way.

After the resurrection, Jesus explained to his disciples (Luke 24) the ultimate biblical hermeneutical principal—that the entire Old Testament was about him. This is the same hermeneutical principle for all history: we interpret it all according to God’s revealed word who is the Word become flesh. Because of this, we no longer look at the past, present, and future, and all events contained therein, in any other way. They are all ultimately about Jesus in some way, unless we have some other interpretive non-biblical framework for history.

The Secular View of History
Those who don’t have a biblical and thus providential view of history will by default have a secular one. Even though there are variations on the secular view, a strictly God-less interpretation of history means there is no overarching narrative, no telos to history—things happen randomly. If there is no God ordaining and guiding history providentially, we’re forced to conclude history is but chance and agree with Macbeth at the death of his wife:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale|
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Typical of Shakespeare, it could not be said any better. However, given we cannot escape living in God’s created universe no matter how hard sinful humanity insists otherwise, chance has never proved a satisfying explanation, for anything. We also live with thousands of years of the influence of Judaism and Christianity, so the teleological view of history can’t be completely escaped.

The default secular option comes to us from German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who gave us the concept of historicism, a teleological view of history without God—well, without a God any of us might recognize. His God was history itself as the unfolding of a World-Spirit. I’ve always been fascinated by the history of ideas, and how ideas inscrutable to normal people, like most of what Hegel wrote, make their way into the culture and influence history. On that count, Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern world. Historicism is a bastardization of the Christian idea of God’s providence. In the Christian view, human beings have real agency, they can change things even though God ordains and is in control of all things. The most common way historicism is embraced is historical determinism, which downplays human agency and accountability. As the word determinism implies, human beings are just along for the ride, cogs in the wheel of history who ultimately have no say where any of it goes. Marx used Hegel to teach the inevitable rise of communism, and north of a 100 million people were butchered in the 20th century because of it.

America’s Providential View of History
The biblical providential view of history has been an important part of the American experience.  America’s peculiarity, what some have called American exceptionalism, appears to have divine footprints all over it, and most Americans believed that until the mid-20th century.

While not all of America’s Founders were Christians, all of them had a biblical worldview to one degree or another. None of the Founders, as is often claimed, were truly Deists, believing in a clock-making God who sets creation going and doesn’t intervene in its history. And none of them were secularists. A view of reality devoid of divine providence would have been as foreign to them as divine providence is to modern secularists. The Founding generation embraced Christianity as a positive good for society without which it couldn’t survive. The Christian God of the Bible was an integral part of the founding of the republic, and they believed His providence was instrumental in allowing it to happen. The final words of the Declaration of Independence make this clear:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This theology of the Declaration of America’s independence from Britain was written by one of the least orthodox Christians of the bunch, Thomas Jefferson, and supposedly one of the most Deist. Yet Jefferson’s God did not appear to be Deist at all but was intimately involved with his creation. He starts the document with a reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, phraseology that was not uncommon in the 18th century. He next declared those familiar words, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The God of the Bible was the God of America’s Founding. I could multiply quotes from America’s founding generation. It’s clear they all believed in the God of the Bible and that His providential ordering of events was required for the success of their experiment in Republican government. But it wasn’t just the founding generation who embraced God’s providence.

Given Christianity was the dominant worldview, God was an important consideration for all presidents and political and cultural leaders in the 19th into the mid-20th century. Lincoln believed in God’s providence prior to the Civil War, but also in the midst of it. After two-and-a-half years of a bloody war, he declared a national holiday of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863. The proclamation is an inspiring read because it is the opposite of gloom and doom, which so many are given to when all hell breaks loose. The blessings of the bounties America enjoyed, he said, came from the “ever watchful providence of Almighty God.” All the many gifts he outlines “are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

A simple Internet search will find how American presidents regardless of the depth of their own personal faith, believed God, the Bible, and Christianity are inseparable from America as founded and sustained. In 1911 Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president, in an address called, “The Bible and Progress” stated this in no uncertain terms:

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God, and spiritual nature and needs of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation. America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.

Franklin Roosevelt, who gave us the New Deal and took the progressive approach to governance to the next level, agreed with Wilson:

We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Where we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity.

Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman in a 1950 address stated:

The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State!

From 2025 these words appear prophetic. The next president, Dwight Eisenhower, said it even more forcefully:

Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God’s help, it will continue to be.

Jimmy Carter even became president declaring himself a born-again Christian, driven by the conservative Evangelical revival of the 1970s.

As ironic as it may be, it’s taken Donald J. Trump, brash billionaire New York real estate developer and reality TV star to bring America back to a providential view of history. Trump peppers his speeches with God and his providence. I’m confident some or all of his speechwriters are Christians, as are most of the people in the administration. The providential icing on an almost tragic cake happened on July 13th in Butler, Pennsylvania. Even the most skeptical had to admit something “spiritual” happened that day. It did. God didn’t want Donald Trump dead, and he wanted the world to know it. The rest is, as “they” say, providential history.

 

 

 

 

 

Why Christianity Isn’t Moralism

Why Christianity Isn’t Moralism

May 7, 2025 | Theology

I was born-again as an 18 year old college student into a kind of fundamentalist Christianity. In the late 70s there were two types of conservative Bible believing Christians, fundamentalists and Evangelicals. The former grew out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies in the early 20th century, and were seen as backward rubes after the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In the 1950s, a group of conservative Christians reacting against this anti-cultural, anti-intellectual type of Christianity decided to call themselves Evangelicals. They came out of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, and Billy Graham, growing in popularity, joined them with the founding of Christianity Today. They wanted a more culturally engaged and intellectually robust Christianity. Today, there is no distinction; all conservative Christians are referred to as Evangelicals, and the word fundamentalist in reference to Christians has disappeared.

This Christianity I was born-again into didn’t exist in an historical vacuum, although for the Christians I was around, the history of Christianity seemed irrelevant. I often say when referring to this version of Christianity that it was anti-intellectual, anti-theological (or anti-doctrinal), and ahistorical. It was just me and the Bible. We didn’t want any of that other stuff getting in the way of our relationship with Jesus. This wasn’t overtly taught, for the most part, but it was part of the spiritual dynamic of that kind of fundamentalist Christianity. I began to realize all this after I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, probably in my junior year. From him I realized how truncated this version of Christianity tended to be, as if entire parts of life were cut off from it, and narrowed down to just what was seen as the “spiritual.” It wasn’t long before I rejected the fundamentalist label and started calling myself an Evangelical. The fundamentalist label has completely disappeared over the last 40 years.

I distinctly remember the realization dawning on me that my early understanding of Christianity came from somewhere, and how thrilling that was. That was only the beginning, though, because I didn’t fully realize it had practical consequences until I was introduced to Reformed theology in February 1985 when I was only 24 years old. That’s when I learned about the anti-theological nature of fundamentalism, and the implications of that for my newly Reforming faith. But before I get to some history and theology, it would be helpful to explain what I mean by moralism.

Everyone knows what morals are or what morality means. A dictionary definition puts it this way: “of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical.” Moralism related to Christianity is simply the focus on right and wrong, be it in conduct, thought, or speech. This, it was implied, was what Christianity was all about, mediated through the Bible and my relationship with Jesus. The gentleman who introduced me to Reformed theology told me this turned Christianity into a jumping through hoops exercise. If you jumped through all the right hoops, doing good and right, you knew you were right with God, but when you failed, guilt was a constant companion. That struggle, striving to do right, failing all the time, trying again, an endless exhausting cycle, explained my experience quite well, and put me on a journey to a more full-orbed Christianity that I continue on to this day.

Pietism and Perfectionism
I remember him telling me this Christian experience came from Pietism, something I’d never heard of. I had no idea my experience of Christianity had been influenced by something that started developing over 300 years ago. In the 17th century a movement in German Lutheranism arose responding to Scholasticism, a dry doctrinal orientation of the Christian faith. The Pietists were looking for something more dynamic, more personal, more experiential that touched the whole person, not just the mind. Christianity had to be more than just propositional statements of doctrines about the Bible. A significant aspect of this experiential Christianity of the Pietists was a focus on holy living. In due course Pietism would grab hold of John Wesley, and his influence would come to dominate modern Christianity. Wesley was an intense character, to say the least. When he and his brother Charles were at Oxford in 1729 they started a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion, and John applied his intensity to a critical self-examination. Striving for holy living, and failing, became a theme of his life.

In due course as Wesley’s influence grew so did his twofold emphasis, a conversion experience and holy living. He eventually came to believe that Christians could completely overcome sin and live a perfectly holy life, that Christians could completely overcome sin. In the 19th century this made its way into a stream of Christian thought called perfectionism, developing and growing in influence in various holiness movements such as victorious Christian living and the higher life movement. Evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899) did as much as anyone to bring perfectionism into the American Christian bloodstream, even though he didn’t teach the doctrine itself. We can see in him the transition from perfectionism to moralism by promoting holiness with an ethical emphasis. A perfect example of such moralism was his focus on the will. “Whatever the sin is,” Moody exhorted in a typical statement, “make up your mind that you will gain victory over it /” (from George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture). This became much of my early Christian experience. I obviously wasn’t very good at making up my mind because I didn’t get much in the way of victory. I imbibed the idea that if you were a serious Christian and worked on it hard enough, you could overcome sin in your life, but given sin isn’t what we do but part of who we are, these movements were destined to fail in the face of human experience. I was a perfect example of this.

My mentor introduced me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called Studies in Perfectionism that helped me think through what up to that point was my lived Christian experience. This passage explains the problem perfectly.

Perfectionism is impossible in the presence of a deep sense or a profound conception of sin. This movement proclaimed, it is true, only an attenuated perfectionism—a perfectionism merely of conduct. But this involved a correspondingly attenuated view of sin. The guilt of sin, the corruption of sin, were not denied, but attention was distracted from them and fixed on the practice of sin. This is a fatally externalizing movement of thought and brings with it a ruinous underestimate of the baneful power of sin.

Warfield calls perfectionism and its attendant moralism a “fatal externalizing movement” because it trivializes sin by making it primarily about our actions, or lack thereof. Sin is a far more profound dilemma than just what we do; rather, it is who we are, our being, in philosophical terms, our ontology. We are sinners, saved sinners, but sinners, nonetheless. Alas, sin is not like the water you dry off your skin when you get out of the pool; it is your skin!

Paul uses the Greek word σάρξ- sarx translated in English as flesh. He doesn’t mean a la Plato and the Greeks that our bodies are what make us predisposed toward sin, but rather it is our immaterial sinful natures. Our self-centered sinful inclinations are who we are as embodied, fleshly creatures, and thus mere will power can’t overcome it. Moralism makes sin about our wills, thus fatally externalizing it. D.L. Moody was wrong; making up our minds is worthless in our battle to overcome sin. What we need is a new nature, biblically speaking, a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, to be born again (John 3). The most vivid Old Testament image is found in Ezekial 36. In striking typological imagery, we see the Lord restoring Israel to the land of Promise. He’s clearly speaking about more than a plot of land because what’s in view is a personal transformation of His people He came to save (Matt. 1:21). It’s worth quoting at length because it helps us understand this process is far more profound than our merely willing it. There area a lot of “will’s” in this passage, but they are all God’s.

24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. 29 I will save you from all your uncleanness. I will call for the grain and make it plentiful and will not bring famine upon you. 30 I will increase the fruit of the trees and the crops of the field, so that you will no longer suffer disgrace among the nations because of famine. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices. 32 I want you to know that I am not doing this for your sake, declares the Sovereign Lord. Be ashamed and disgraced for your conduct, people of Israel!

The more profound the nature of sin, the more profound our salvation is from it. Only a supernatural work of God can transform a human heart from dead inanimate spiritual stone to living, vibrant, beating flesh. Born His enemies, we are transformed into his children who cry Abba, Father.

Thankfully, perfectionism is forgotten, a relic of a bygone more naïve era when an obsession with progress dominated Western culture. When I became a Christian, though, the spirit of perfectionism was still in the air even if not overtly taught. I eventually came to call it moralism. As Wesley’s life reflected, it’s easy to fall into a kind of morbid introspection, which is one reason it took him until he was 35 to believe he was actually a saved Christian. Although I was nothing like Wesley, my early Christian experience was moralism, and it was exhausting.

Unfortunately, because of the thin theological foundation of much modern Evangelicalism, most Christians confuse Christianity with moralism. One of the reasons skeptics and non-Christians in general think Christianity is all about ethics, obsessing about right and wrong, guilt and shame, is because for many Christians it is exactly that. Because God is merciful in the power of the cross most Christians don’t live guilt ridden lives on a roller coaster of success and failure to overcome sin. Even the most theologically ignorant among us know Jesus paid for all our failures, past, present, and future. For me, though, having a solid theological foundation was invaluable in helping me overcome my own morbid introspection.

What Exactly is the Gospel?
Have you ever asked yourself that, or has someone else, and you’ve had to come up with an answer? What would you say? It’s so simple it’s difficult. As sinful human beings we want to have something to do, to work out, basically save ourselves, but that’s not possible. No matter how “good” we are, it will never be good enough because we can’t change who we are, born enemies of God. In Pauline terms, no one will be saved by obedience to the law. The first night I was introduced to Reformed theology, my mentor painted a picture for me of man in his lost state. He said it’s like we’re dead at the bottom of the pool. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to save ourselves because, well, we’re dead. Our only hope is to be brought back to life by Almighty God. That is our predicament in our lost sinful state apart from God. In the contrasting version, we’re now drowning in the pool calling out for someone to save us, to throw us a rope so we can grab it and in effect save ourselves.

The way I’d seen it previously, and the way I think most Evangelical Christians do, is that we’re drowning—not dead. As Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, “Your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” Many Christians mistakenly believe we’re “mostly dead” in our sins, as I did before I embraced Reformed theology, or Calvinism. It wasn’t difficult for my new friend to convince me of this because I seemed to know it intuitively. I can’t save myself. Plus, he told me something I already knew; the wages of sin is death, as God told Adam would happen if he ate of the tree he was commanded not to eat. He and all his progeny, us, are now alienated from God and by nature want to hide from Him because we know we are guilty. Plus he shared with me a bottom-of-the-pool verse in Colossians (2:13):

13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.

It seemed impossible to argue with that. And in Ephesians 2, Paul also says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,” and then he adds, God “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” Death to life seems pretty clear. Then he tells us how he did it:

6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.

This is all gospel 101, but it’s amazing how easily we forget it when it comes to living the Christian life. Prior to embracing Calvinism, I had even memorized verses 8 and 9, but since I didn’t have any theological grounding, I believed non-Christians were just drowning and needed to hear the gospel. It was up to them to receive it or not, and if they “made a decision for Jesus,” then they would be born-again. But after my introduction to the 16th century Reformer, I realized nobody chooses to be born! In that passage in John 3, Jesus tell us this means we are “born of the Spirit,” or in Ezekiel’s terms, our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit are transformed from stone to flesh!

In theological terms we call this justification, but the Christian life doesn’t stop there. God saves us to make us holy, what is called sanctification. While it’s relatively easy to buy into God doing the work to save us from our sins, justification, we then think making ourselves more holy is our work, up to us; it’s not. In fact, that’s impossible. The confusion comes in confusing our choosing and efforts with God’s supernatural transformational work. The former is our responsibility, the latter is God’s. The transforming of our being, of our becoming more holy, more set apart to him for service to others, is God’s job and He’s quite good at it, even as we fight it every step of the way. After decades of living the Christian life, there were two verses that brought this to life for me and took off all the pressure of performance. The first is 1 Corinthians 1:30:

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

When I finally grasped that transformation of who I am to become more like Christ was as much God’s job as saving me from my sin, it was life changing. The other passage is from John 3, the “born-again” chapter. What at first glance seems a bizarre analogy to salvation, makes total sense in I Corinthians 1:30 hindsight:

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

I wrote about this in detail in a previous post, but all we have to do is look up to Jesus, both for being saved from sin and being transformed to overcome it. The word believe means trust, so we don’t have to understand “how” it works, but only trust that he has to power to pull it off. Our tendency is to look down at the bite, the pain, the circumstances, the situation, at us. Don’t do that! Look up to Jesus because the reason he came to earth was to both save us and sanctify us from sin. In fact, that is why he was given his name, as the angel of the Lord told Joseph (Matt. 1:21):

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Not try to save us, but to actually do it! God doesn’t do try. Believe it, trust it, Him, and you’ll know exactly what the gospel is.

 

 

 

Judgement as God’s Mercy Unto Repentance

Judgement as God’s Mercy Unto Repentance

Apr 30, 2025 | Theology

A sentiment I came across on Twitter is common among some Christians:

God destroyed Sodom for the same sins the world now celebrates. Judgment is coming.

My reply:

Actually, brother, judgment is already here. We see it in the fallout of the sexual “revolution.” This is critically important. The judgment isn’t Sodom like because of Jesus. Rather, it’s consequences, a trail of miserable and wasted lives, suffering and death. It’s 50,000(!) suicides a year, and triple that number try(!). It’s broken families, fetal genocide, and one could go on and on and on.

Too often Christians think of judgment as an end game, but it’s not. God’s judgment is mercy to lead people to repentance. Secularism is dead, and people are seeing the misery that’s come in its wake.

The most direct affirmation of God’s judgment as consequences is found in Romans 1:

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

God doesn’t normally reign down sulfur and fire, but allows people to get the sinful desire of their hearts. It’s clear God’s judgment is all around us.

God’s Mercy in Judgment
I’ve been very slowly reading my way through Isaiah with John Calvin, and the juxtaposition of judgment and mercy is striking. I’ve read Isaiah numerous times over the decades, and it can be a terrifying read given judgment against Israel and the nations is a consistent theme, but interspersed between declarations of judgment are bright rays of hope like these. Isaiah 7:

 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 9

6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 11:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

9 They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah 25:

6 On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
7 And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.
8     He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.

As we read through redemptive history in the Bible, God never seems to declare judgment without also telling us that is not the end of the story. Judgment for the God of Scripture is never an end in and of itself, as if smoke is coming up from the rubble and then we’ll just move on. If all you look at is Sodom in Isolation you might think that, but that’s not the full story. In fact, God shows his mercy in rescuing Lot, his wife, and two daughters, but his wife looked back at the train wreck and partook of the judgment.

On this side of eternity, Judgment always has a purpose coming from God’s justice that is informed by his mercy. We’re still in the middle of the history of redemption, so of course it is. This is not wishful thinking, but profoundly biblical; we see it declared throughout Scripture. More importantly, it is also because of God’s covenant promises, the most important of which begins redemptive history even before history began or the world was created, the covenant of redemption in the council of the Triune God in eternity. Then it is revealed to man after he rebelled and fell into sin; God would not allow his creation to fail, not allow Satan to win. Right there in the Garden we see God’s judgment against Adam and Eve, then we read this (Gen 3):

21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

The first sacrifice, death for life, mercy in judgment. Even our deaths are God’s mercy because we obviously can’t handle living with the knowledge of good and evil, let alone living with it forever. When we are resurrected on a redeemed and renewed heavens and earth, that knowledge will not be problematic.

The Profound Mercy in Noah’s Flood
The next example is Cain and Able, but that’s on a small scale. Another is Noah and the flood, more horrific because of the scale, encompassing the entire earth and human race. It seems the knowledge of good and devil results in mostly evil:

5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

When we think about the flood we can’t imagine how awful it would be for however many people were on earth at the time drowning to death. In this inconceivable judgment God had mercy only on Noah and his family. Our thoughts about Noah and the flood either go to animals or rainbows, but something was recently brought to my attention in the story we mostly overlook. It highlights God’s abundant mercy in his terrible judgment.

The first thing Noah does when he comes out of the ark after the flood waters subside is to make a sacrifice:

20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. 22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

This is the first recorded example of a burnt offering in the Bible. We can read the specific instructions God gives to the Israelites for this kind of offering in Leviticus 1, and we’ll notice the intricate details the Lord gives so it is done exactly the way He wants. Being an atonement for sin, the offering was the most important of the offerings given by the Lord because it was sacrificial to the giver:

Three kinds of animals were offered as burnt offerings — bulls (vv. 1–5), sheep and goats (v. 10), or turtledoves and pigeons (v. 14). Only the rich could afford bulls, the “middle class” offered sheep or goats, as that was the most they could give, and the poor sacrificed turtledoves and pigeons. In all cases, the offering was a real sacrifice. Meat was a rare luxury back then, so it was costly to burn an entire animal on the altar without giving any part of it to anyone but the Lord. This is exactly what happened with the burnt offering (vv. 9b, 13b, 17b).

It was also most important because it was foundational to the other offerings. Without the forgiveness of sins by the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us. Each of the offerings is a beautiful process of sinners being reconciled to God, all finding their ultimate fulfillment in Christ. It starts with the ultimate sacrifice, the giving of everything, which is a picture of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice on the cross where he paid it all (Is. 53):

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

When Noah came out of the ark and made his sacrifice, this is what it was pointing to, a type of what was to come. God had judged sin in the most horrific way imaginable. That wasn’t the end of the story, but only the end of the beginning. Somehow Noah had learned throughout his life from those who came before that the Lord’s wrath must be appeased. In biblical terms that is called propitiation, which is “a sin offering, by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased.” We read of this about Christ in I John:

9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

When we think of Noah’s flood, it reminds us that God’s wrath against sin has already been paid.

There But for the Grace of God . . . .
Almost everybody over the age of probably 30 could finish that thought, which by the mid-20th century was a common proverbial saying. Biblically, it hardly needs justification, but Paul can give us one in I Corinthians 15:

9  For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.

The saying possibly goes back to a 16th century Protestant in Catholic Bloody Mary’s England:

The story that is widely circulated is that the phrase was first spoken by the English evangelical preacher and martyr, John Bradford (circa 1510–1555). He is said to have uttered the variant of the expression – “There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford”, when seeing criminals being led to the scaffold. He didn’t enjoy that grace for long, however. He was burned at the stake in 1555.

When I read declarations of God’s judgment against sinners like the Twitter comment example above, I often wonder if that person has any conception of the truth of this statement, that but for God’s grace he’d be right there in Sodom just like those other sinners. Do such people, I wonder, realize that the meaning of grace is unmerited favor? That mercy is not getting what we in fact deserve? We should weep for people under God’s judgment, living with the consequences of their sin, their rebellion not only creating their own suffering, but leading to the suffering of so many others. Regarding the sexual confusion of our age, there is no such thing as a personal sex life, homosexual or not. Sex has massive societal consequences, and if not confined in marriage to one man and one women, those consequences will be exactly what we’re living with now, and its consequent suffering and misery.

The saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” reminds me of my obligation to love others. I’m not totally sure what that means, but I believe it has something to do with sacrifice given Jesus loved us while we were yet his enemies (Rom. 5:10). The description of love Paul gives us in I Corinthians 13 is a hint of what loving our enemies might look like:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails.

Wow. That’s a tall order, but guess what? We have no choice but to love others. And we are able to love others by that same grace. John tells us, “We love because he first loved us” (I John 4:19). When he was asked what the greatest commandment was (Matt. 22):

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In saying the second is like the first, Jesus is saying that in loving our neighbor as ourselves, we are loving God. We can’t separate the two commands. If we are to obey the first, part of the way we obey it is by obeying the second. How do we do that? Especially when encountering those who are apparently so unlovable? When we’re struggling with unlovable people, or are tempted to call down Sodom on some sinners, instead of weep for them, it’s a good idea to meditate upon Jesus’ words in Luke 6:

32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

The most important thing I’ve learned to help me to do what at times seems too hard to do is to realize the depth of my own sin. The greater I understand my sin to be, the greater I understand the love of God to me in spite of my sin, and I am compelled to love others whether I want to or not.

Jesus told us when the Holy Spirit comes, which he did at Pentecost, he “will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” Instead of praying judgment down on people, we ought to pray for the Holy Spirit to convict them of their sin and guilt before God, and their need for a Savior, that God would show them mercy in his judgment unto repentance.

 

 

 

Mere Christianity: Moses and the Bronze Snake in the Desert

Mere Christianity: Moses and the Bronze Snake in the Desert

Apr 23, 2025 | Theology

This story we find in Numbers 21 is one the strangest in the Bible, and one the skeptics love. It’s absurd and clearly made up because looking at a bronze snake on a pole can’t heal anybody, obviously. You know, science and all that. But God isn’t limited to what science says can be done because, well, He created it, and everything else. While God healing His people miraculously is what this story is about, we learn from Jesus it’s about something much more profound, something so theologically significant it defined his mission on earth. Before we get to the significance and what it has to do with mere Christianity, let’s look at the story itself.

The Israelites have been wandering in the desert since they escaped from Egypt, and they are having a tough go of it. Deserts are inhospitable places and numerous times they’d just had enough. This was one of those times.

4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

6 Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

8 The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

We might think it a bit harsh for God to kill His people just because they’re complaining. After all, the circumstances are arguably horrible, and they don’t appear to be getting any better. God can be so unreasonable sometimes, we often think. The most common question in human history attests to our frustration; Why? And this question is always an implicit accusation against God. I’m getting a raw deal! Don’t you care! I don’t deserve this! A better question is why do we feel this way, and think we’re justified in our anger and frustration against God? Sin. The perfectly harmonious relationship between God and man was ruptured at the fall, and as a result we see him as against us instead of for us. Satan’s accusatory question to Eve captures it perfectly: Did God really say . . . ? We can fill in the blanks; no, he wants you to be miserable and keep you from all the good stuff in life, keep you from being happy and fulfilled. People reject God not because belief in him isn’t credible or plausible, but because they hate him, they’re disgusted and want nothing to do with that big meanie.

All of this, including the desert wonderings in our lives, everything, comes down to a question of trust, or confident expectation in something or someone. The Christian life boils down to another question: Do we trust God or not? The only other option is to trust our lyin’ eyes. Unfortunately, what our eyes see is often horribly unpleasant, and trusting God through the unpleasantness is extremely difficult. This was the Israelites’ dilemma. It’s similar to another dilemma the disciples experienced in the gospels.

As Jesus was traveling from town to town spreading the good news of the Kingdom of God around the Sea of Galilee, he wanted to go to the other side of the lake. So they commandeered a boat and headed out. While they were on their way a fierce storm arose and the disciples were terrified. In Luke, they exclaim, reasonably, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!” While in Mark there is kind of a funny twist: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” We can understand their terror in the dark in the middle of a large lake amidst a raging storm, but Jesus is as calm as cucumber, sleeping away as the storm rages. How could he do that? Well, we need to go back to what he told them prior to heading out on the boat:

22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.”

Notice what Jesus did not say: “Let’s go into the middle of the lake and drown.” I love this story because the contrast between trust and sight is so stark, so blatantly in our faces we’d have to be blind not to see it. Jesus epitomizes Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you,” while the disciples epitomize the total lack of trust and what comes with it, fear, and in their case sheer terror. Without the Son of God and the Creator of the universe in the boat, terror would be justified, but not with Jesus who said they were going to the other side.

We can see how this story on the lake relates to the Israelites in the desert. What did God say to them through Moses? That they were going to go out into the desert to die of thirst and starvation? Nope! They were going to the promised land, and the Lord Himself would guide them all the way there. For example, from Exodus 13:

11 “After the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites and gives it to you, as he promised on oath to you and your ancestors, 12 you are to give over to the Lord the first offspring of every womb.

This promise went back a very long way, but time after time the Israelites chose to focus on their circumstances instead of trusting in God and Moses His mediator. If they had trusted Him, they would not have spent 40 years in the wilderness, dying before they could enter the land the Lord Promised. Trust is what brings us to Jesus and our salvation from sin and death, where and with whom we will spend eternity.

Jesus, Snakes, and the Nature of Belief
We’re familiar with John 3 and the story of the influential Pharisee named Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night to find out from his own lips the nature of his mission. Jesus tells him if anyone is to see the kingdom of God they must be born again, and Nicodemus is confused, not at all understanding the spiritual meaning of this new birth. Jesus tells him it’s of the Spirit, and then rebukes him because he’s not getting it. Jesus then affirms his Messianic mission as the Son of Man, and explains it this way:

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

Whatever happened in the desert has a direct correlation to Jesus being “lifted up,” which we know was on a Roman cross, crucified like a common criminal. Then John tells us why:

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

The word “believe” is used five times in this passage, so it is clear our salvation from sin is somehow intimately tied up with belief. But what does belief mean? And why is it connected to the snake in the wilderness? Knowing these two things will help us better understand salvation itself, especially in the context of the Israelites’ desperate fear of death and the will to live, and why Jesus told us that is analogous to him being “lifted up”.

Our post-Enlightenment tendency because of rationalism (i.e., reason is the primary source of knowledge) is to see belief as intellectual assent, primarily a rational process. We understand certain propositions, grasp an idea or comprehend it, therefore we “believe” it. That is only one part of the belief, and not the most profound part. By contrast, belief in the Bible is not primarily cerebral. The word in Greek, pis-tyoo’-pisteuó, also translated as faith, is a synonym for trust, or having confidence in someone or something. It is a fuller expression of the human person than just our rational faculties because it requires throwing ourselves upon something or someone without full understanding. Belief requires trust. Get on an airplane and you’ll understand faith, and its necessity. You have no idea how any of it works, or why, or if you’ll get to your destination, but nonetheless you get on. Few planes drop out of the sky, so your faith is well grounded, or as I define it, trust based on adequate evidence.

Modern belief assumes we understand and know all about things when we clearly can’t, flying only one obvious example. Our entire lives are lived by faith. This dependence, this lack of truly knowing, of knowing exhaustively without doubt, is why the analogy of the snake to Jesus being lifted up on the cross is so powerful.

This will make more sense if I explain what I think verse 17 means as we consider salvation from sin and Mere Christianity. Many Christians ignore this verse and believe that’s exactly why Jesus came, to judge and condemn the world and those in it. For them, if someone doesn’t believe the “right” things, i.e., agree with them, off to hell they go! And they almost seem delighted to condemn these people to hell, announcing their judgment as if they were Christ himself and qualified to make judgments on the nature of other people’s souls. I’ve seen this throughout my Christian life, north of 46 years, and it has nothing to do with the content of one’s theology. Sinful human nature is by definition self-centered, in Latin we are all Incurvatus in se, or curved in ourselves. What we think, what we feel, what we believe, our perspective, our views, our opinions are all important. Those who have this disease in an advanced state find it incomprehensible that anyone could possibly see reality in any other way than they see it. We’re all this way to some degree, and we must work on developing humility and trying to see things through other people’s eyes.

Jesus, Snakes, and Salvation
Think about the Israelites circumstances, really try to get in their shoes. They were miserable because they were totally focused on their circumstances and not God’s promise. So as sinners are wont to do, they start complaining, and out of nowhere venomous snakes start showing up in their camp biting them and many are dying. They go to Moses, repent, and beg for him to pray to the Lord for them to get rid of the snakes. Moses prays, and instead of the Lord just doing magic and getting rid of the snakes, He tells Moses to make a snake and put it on a pole. How odd is that? I can imagine Moses thinking, come again? How in the world is putting up the image of a snake on a pole going to address the issue of people dying of snake bites? The absurdity of it makes it all the more historically believable. Who would make up such a thing? What does this require of Moses? Faith. Trust in God’s word and power, using the plane metaphor, flying blind. The Lord tells him, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” OK, God, whatever you say.

We notice belief, faith, trust, is not passive. God is requiring the Israelites to do something for their healing. They had a choice when they were bitten. They could either look down at the injury in terror and fear, or trust Moses that looking at a bronze snake on a pole would heal them, and look up. In the biblical sense they believed Moses when they decided to look up and not down. Did they have any idea how this worked, or why they would be healed? Or really even if they would be healed? No. Out of sheer terror they desperately wanted to live, and despite the pain they looked up. Our tendency is to always look down at the pain, but that’s why Jesus telling Nicodemus the nature of salvation from sin is analogous to the snake in the desert is so important. We have a choice, we can either look down and wallow in our pain, or look up. Do we understand everything that’s happening when we do? No, and if we think we do we’re in danger of our faith being in our understanding and not in Christ. I’m not saying the content of our belief isn’t important, even critical, but Jesus put the analogy in his word for a reason.

I believe that reason is that when we are confronted with our sin we have to realize like the Israelites we can’t save or heal ourselves. Is it required that we know how this works, or why, in order to be saved? No, we just have to look up and trust Jesus. A great example of this is my 91 year-old nominally Catholic mother. I call her most every night, and I often get to “lecture” her about the faith. She doesn’t get much of it, but she doesn’t have to. One evening she asked me, “What if I’m not good enough?” That was profound and moved me. Should I have laid out the Four Spiritual Laws? Go through the Roman’s Road with her? Tell her about the fall and the nature of sin (we’ve talked about that plenty), and the condemnation of the law? Maybe in due course, but Jesus and the snake in the desert came immediately to mind, and I shared that with her. I said, you just have to trust in Jesus? None of us is good enough. She probably knows as much about salvation as the Israelites looking up at the snake, but she still can trust Jesus and be saved.

Which is a good segway to the next verse. John tells us why the analogy is so important. Simply, it is because God so loved the world, and us in it. Do we trust in his love for us? Do we have to know why he would love us? No, we just have to look up and see what he did for us, that he died in our place. It requires belief, faith, trust, and as we learn from the story of the snakes, it is not passive; it’s a choice. What if my soteriology is a bit off? If we trust Jesus to save us from our sin, it doesn’t matter. I’m convinced there will be no theology test when we get to heaven, or I might be in trouble. Mind you, I believe my understanding of it is correct, is biblical, but I’m not trusting that, I’m trusting Jesus! At my daughter’s wedding in February 2019, I talked with a number of her Catholic friends. Did I critique their Catholic theology with them? No, I just told them to seek Jesus and read their Bibles.

Jesus, Snakes, and Mere Christianity
Which brings me to mere Christianity, and you can probably already see where I’m going with this. It’s strange, but I often find myself defending Catholics on Twitter, me a Protestant, postmillennial Calvinist. Because our Reformational faith is founded upon Sola Scriptura, our tendency as Protestants is to focus on the rational, propositional content of the faith. We are required to understand A so we can get to Z. The tendency then is for us to think that anyone who doesn’t understand A-M exactly like us is never going to get to Z. I reject that exactly because of the snakes in the desert, and specifically the snake on the pole. Every Sunday morning when I when I spend time in God’s word and prayer, I thank God that 2 billion or more people all over the world are calling on the name of Jesus. Most don’t agree with me exactly on A-M, but they have the most important thing, looking up to Jesus, trusting in him.

For a lot of people in my little Reformed world, the concept of a mere Christianity isn’t popular. Those of a Reformational faith are some of the most intellectually inclined, and some of the most dogmatic. I used to be that way. It annoyed me that people did not believe certain things the way I believed them. I was clearly right and they were clearly wrong, so what’s their problem? One of the reasons I love being active on Twitter is because I come across so many people who can’t fathom how anyone could possibly disagree with them or see things differently than they do. I have fun with them and slyly mock them for their pretensions of absolute knowledge. One of the reasons I’m a fan of mere Christianity is because of our finitude. The older I get the more finite I realize I am, and the more I know the more I realize I don’t know. It’s hard to be dogmatic when I realize of all the knowledge in the universe, I know about a thimble full, if that. But for what I do believe, I do believe it dogmatically, and can defend it modestly well.

Mere Christianity is, of course, the title of one of the most famous Christian books of all time. It was a series of talks Lewis gave on the BBC translated to book form. He says in the introduction it “was to explain and defend the belief that that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” For me, if someone affirms the Nicene Creede, we’re on the same team. If they want to and are open to discussing theological distinctions, I’m all in, but I’m not compelled to convert them to mine. Often, I’ll assume my theological perspectives and see if that opens the door to discussions. At our moment in redemptive history, fighting a rampant secular tyranny with other Christians of different theological stripes as allies is the priority, not what I consider theological purity. There will be plenty of time for that in forever.

 

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

Mar 19, 2025 | Theology

Since I was twenty years old when I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, I’ve been a worldview guy. I went from a fundamentalist type of Christianity focused on the personal, on my relationship with Jesus, the Bible and me, to seeing how Christianity applied not just to me but to all of life and everything in it. I went from wearing the default set of secular glasses to Christian glasses, and everything looked different. As a Christian, although it may seem counterintuitive, it is possible to see the world through secular lenses. This means we see our Christian lives in primarily personal spiritual terms, and everything else as part of this fallen world, and thus not spiritual. The implication is that spiritual, personal stuff is important, and the other stuff not so much. I never thought through any of this before my worldview epiphany, but I didn’t see Christianity applying to the fallen world outside of the church. Thankfully, I found Schaeffer only two years into my born-again Christian life, and in addition to being so young and busy with college, thinking through any of this wasn’t a priority. But finding Schaeffer, and that a Christian view of the world and everything in it was possible, was exciting, not to mention being introduced to apologetics, and knowing I could credibly defend the veracity of the Christian faith I had embraced.

I’ve realized only recently, however, that having a worldview is not enough to fully capture the profound world transforming power of the Christian faith. Worldview assumes the intellect and how we think about things is primary, and applying those thoughts to what we do is what is transformational about the Christian faith. It is that, but it’s so much more. A Christian worldview is necessary for this new creation transformation (2 Cor. 5:17), but not sufficient. What is, what takes a Christian worldview to the next level, so to speak, is something almost completely neglected in Evangelical Christianity: the ascension. In all the years I’ve been a Christian, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a sermon on it. I didn’t realize this until I heard a talk by someone back in 2018 or 19. He said Evangelicals pretty much completely ignore the ascension, stopping at the resurrection, and I immediately realized he was right.

The Book of Acts makes it clear the church was built and grew on the declaration of the resurrection, but Luke starts with the Ascension. After Jesus promises his disciples to send them the Holy spirit, and gives them a charge to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” Luke writes:

9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

Although the disciples were no doubt befuddled, this raises two important questions. Where did Jesus go, and what does it mean? We learn by the time of the Apostles Creed the ascension had become foundational to the Christian understanding of the faith. It addresses the second person of the Trinity thus:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We learn explicitly from several passages in Scripture not only where Jesus went, as the creed affirms, but why he went there.

What Exactly is a Worldview and Why It Matters
Before we get to the implications of the ascension we need to address what a worldview is because not everyone is familiar with it, and for some who are they don’t believe it’s a valid concept. What I said previously assumes familiarity and validity, but I need to make that case and not just assume it.

Discussing worldview requires us to address the meaning and significance of presuppositions, and how they determine our view of the world. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them. Most people know what assumptions are, but have no idea the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, and perceive reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But finite creatures like us have to assume all the time because what we can actually know with any certainty is limited in a multitude of ways. James Sire in The Universe Next Door was one of the first to address worldview from a Christian perspective, and he defines it this way:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

I used glasses above as a simple metaphor for worldview because everyone understands without having to explain it that glasses change how you see everything. If it’s sunglasses, it brings a certain hue, or if corrective, they turn blurry to clear. You can’t not see what the lenses determine you will see. That is how the set of presuppositions we hold, knowingly or not, become the framework by which we see, or interpret, all things. In Sire’s words, worldview is a “fundamental orientation of the heart” which is the “foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” How people view reality, how they see things, what has meaning to them, what they value, what seems true to them or not, their “fundamental orientation,” is bound up in their worldview. Hence, their existence, how they “live and move and have their being,” is determined by it. We are fundamentally interpretive beings.

Everyone has a view of the world, but few understand how worldview is the lens through which they interpret reality. As such, it colors everything they see, hear, read, and do. In other words, there are no ultimately objective, neutral observers. Yet, this doesn’t leave us without the ability to actually know things, which is epistemology, or the study of how and what we know. It only says everyone has some type of interpretive grid through which they make sense of reality. In his book Popologetics, Ted Turnau has an excellent explanation of how worldview and presuppositions interact:

Worldviews, then, are not simply rooted in “the facts,” as if we could gather the relevant facts to build a picture of the Truth with complete, presupposition‑free objectivity. Rather, the way in which we process the facts is always already involved in a specific set of presuppositions. We are, in a sense, always “captured” by our worldview, our presuppositions. Worldviews are ultimately based on fundamental faith commitments from which we understand evidence, truths, facts, and all of reality. Your set of presuppositions is the most basic place you know from. At this level, worldviews are fundamentally religious. That is, they are types of faith. Worldviews are religiously rooted in these basic, nonnegotiable beliefs called presuppositions.

Therefore, all human beings are fundamentally religious because all people live by faith which become the glasses through which they try to make sense of an uncertain, chaotic, and often confusing world. What we’ll be doing in the next section is discuss how we can in effect fortify our Christian worldview because of the ascension.

As I mentioned, not everybody is on board with the concept or value of a worldview understanding of human psychology. As best I can tell, the critics think what we’re saying is that worldview is some kind of static grid through which people become robots, or something. I haven’t engaged in any depth with the arguments against it, but they don’t seem well thought out or thought through. Worldview isn’t some infallible measure of human nature, but simply a tool to help us understand how and why, in the words of Sire, we “live and move and have our being.” If we look at people from various cultures as a group, say Muslims from the Middle East, or Asians from China or Japan, or secular Europeans or Americans, we can better understand them because of their basic presuppositions, their worldviews. For me it’s an invaluable tool to help me better understand people and cultures and how the gospel message and Great Commission can advance in Christ’s worldwide mission, to which we now turn.

King Jesus and the Great Commission
Before I began to better understand the ascension, I saw Christ’s reign limited to my personal life and battle for holiness, along with other Christians and thus only for the church. Christ’s authoritative power was not meant for those people or institutions outside of the church; the fallen world I assumed would always remain in its rebellious fallen state until he returned. So when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples I assume it primarily meant saving people so when they die they go to heaven, and being made more holy while they are on earth (Matt. 28):

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Making disciples of all nations meant the people within the nations, not the nations themselves. Jesus doesn’t say that, but that’s what I took him to mean because of my assumptions about Jesus’ ascension and its implications for the world. It didn’t, or so I thought, apply to the world, just Christians, just the church. Then what does Jesus say? He says to baptize all ethnos-ἔθνος in Greek which primarily refers to a group of people or a nation, not merely the individuals within a nation. It is all the people in a nation and whatever they do to develop a society, along with the institutions, mores, and customs to create a unique cultural identity. Christ is Lord and King with authoritative power over all of it, and what that society becomes flows out of the people in it. The gospel and what flows out of it in Christians’ lives affect all of it, every square inch. Jesus’ authority is not in any way limited just to us!

Thus, a broadly Christian people can make a Christian nation, just as a broadly secular people can make a secular nation. Does that mean every person in those nations is Christian or secular? Of course not. Even those who reject the notion that a nation can be Christian, have no problem calling our nation, for example, a secular nation. That’s because the idea is not that every person is secular, but rather that the general makeup of the nation as a whole is secular in outlook. God recognizes nations as a whole, as one entity, and it is nations and everything in it that Christ calls us to disciple. Who people are affects everything they do; it’s as simple as that. As we disciple an increasing number of people, the influence through them of Christ and his kingdom will spread to all aspects of that society. This is what happened in the Roman Empire. It took almost 300 years, but eventually a pagan empire became a Christian one, and that had profound implications for how that empire was run. However, a merely personal faith, something Christianity was never intended to be, won’t do that. It will stay merely personal.

The difference between purely personal King Jesus and King Jesus who has “all authority in heaven and on earth,” is that non-Christians and their worldviews, who they are and how they act, are under the same authority as Christians. Jesus is as much in control of their lives as he is ours, and for the same reasons, to disciple the nations. A personal King Jesus, by contrast, does not include his reign over this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. The fallen world in this telling will inevitably get worse until Jesus comes to rescue us out of it at the end of time. It is a pessimistic view of things, which is logical if Christ’s rule has little or nothing to do with anything outside of the church. When I believed in personal King Jesus I effectively equated the kingdom with the church.

As I began to understand the ascension more and its implications for all of life in this fallen world, I had a kind of cognitive dissonance, a discomfort from my contradictory understanding of the ascension. On the one hand Christ had all power over all thigs, on the other it really only applied to the church. This seemed to be what Paul was saying in Ephesians 1:

22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.

True enough, but the church lives in a fallen world, and Christ’s authority in that world is ultimately to benefit the church in this world, on this earth, to take back territory from the Devil so we can experience God’s blessings in all of life. While many Christians on earth suffer for their faith, as I read very month in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine, that isn’t the goal. Which is why I pray that God would raise up a multitude of Christians in those nations to disciple and turn them into Christian nations where the gospel is proclaimed, and peace and justice reign. That isn’t just for the next life, on this redeemed and renewed earth, but here and now in this fallen world, bringing heaven to earth as Jesus taught us to pray. If Jesus didn’t mean this, he wouldn’t have given the command to his disciples and to us, in just that way; all authority has been given to him, therefore go.

Postmillennialism and the Ascension
Everything about my understanding of the ascension changed when I embrace postmillennialism in August 2022. In addition to my broadened understanding of the Great Commission, I now looked at Daniel’s vision in chapter 7:13,14 differently as well. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” at his coronation being ushered into the presence of “the Ancient of Days” being given “authority, glory and sovereign power” which all “nations and peoples” acknowledge. Prior to postmillennialism I automatically assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming, not a reference to his first. But Jesus clearly tells us it does apply to his first coming. How could I have missed that, and for decades? Paul confirms this all-encompassing authority Jesus received at the ascension was indeed for his first coming in Ephesians 1:18-23. When Jesus was placed by the Father at His right hand, he was now in a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named.” He adds as if, oh by the way,  this rule of Jesus is “not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” In other words, it’s so obvious it’s for life on this fallen world, this the present age, that his readers needed to be reminded it’s also for the age to come. That never stood out to me until I embraced postmillennialism.

Without understanding the true all-encompassing implications of the ascension, a Christian worldview will not positively affirm Christ’s authority over everything, literally every single thing, every single person, including every institution, every government, and every spiritual being beyond earth. If it’s just a Christian worldview, seeing things and applying a Christian view to it all, Christianity will not have the kind of world conquering spirit Christians had for much of the church’s history. In the gospel we declare King Jesus to whom all earthly power must submit, which gives us confidence that bringing heaven to earth is not a product of merely our own efforts or power, but of the rule and reign of Christ over all things. This is why I now pray something I learned from Joe Boot, that Christ would extend his reign on earth, advance God’s kingdom, and build his church. I add this to my four R prayer, for revival, renewal, restoration, and Reformation. That about covers it all!

This brings me to the final point we must discuss: how does this all work? The critics of postmillennialism think our confidence in victory, and our optimism, is in our efforts, and they don’t like that one bit! This straw man is trotted out a lot, but it isn’t true. What is true is that God can’t bring heaven to earth without us, we wretched sinners who always seem to get so many things wrong and messing things up. He’s stuck with us! Read the Bible. Working with imperfect sinners to accomplish his purposes on earth didn’t change when Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Our confidence then as now is in Christ, in what he accomplished in his first coming, which was to destroy the works of the devil and push back the effects of the fall as far as the curse is found. Now, instead of hell on earth having the upper hand, heaven does.

This is a biblical fact, and if you have faith, and eyes to see, you can see it everywhere. Don’t take my word for it, but do take it from Jesus.  As he told his disciples, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It never occurred to me until I read it in a book about postmillennialism, that gates in the ancient world were a defensive mechanism. How could I have missed that! And why didn’t preachers at all the churches we attended not tell us this! It is we Christians, Christ’s church, who are on the offensive; the devil and his minions don’t stand a chance!

Add this to your Christians worldview, and you will be a world changer. As I often say, work like it depends on you, but pray because it depends on God. I finish with these world conquering words from Joab, the commander of David’s armies (I Chron. 19:13):

Be strong, and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight.