The degree to which we are divided in our nation, including our Evangelical and Reformed churches simply becomes clearer by the hour.
When it comes to Church and State, and God's sovereignty over all, and Christ's rule over all, and how in the realities of life we should administer justice, basically all of our Evangelical and Reformed voices have been thinking and acting with great ignorance in our lifetime to one degree or another.
This assertion, of course, will meet with fierce resistance by many/most Christians probably over 50, and especially those who have been in the ministry for some time. They have had an established, extended ministry that goes back to the "normal" times prior to what we've seen over the last decade or so.
My counsel to Christians is to reflect on where we are today. Clearly things have been wrong for a long time, despite what good doctrine and teaching we may have gotten from men like R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, or whatever popular name you want to put in. Sproul and others would tell us that "everyone is a Theologian", and we have thought that everything is "Theology" in a strict sense of the word.
Our brains are muddled, and we've been fed a particular angle and partial picture of our Reformed forefathers and their teaching, especially on nations and the civil magistrate bearing the sword against evildoers. It's because we haven't had the stomach for it, and therefore, have basically said Calvin, Knox, and all the rest were wrong, and we are now more enlightened.
Friends, we don't know what a man or woman is. We are trans-ing the children, and we don't have any backbone to even hardly speak or vote against it, let alone run for office to bear the sword (Rom. 13) to punish these evildoers as God has ordained the ministry of the magistrate to do.
We got here because we were soft and complacent, foolish and forgetting the old paths of God's Word, and the old paths, clarity, and bravery that our lions in the faith had before us.
This leads to us having to be inspired by an almost certainly unregenerate man like Donald Trump showing us how to find our courage. Yet, so many still poo-poo this and give us nerd theological takes and can't make distinctions between the intensity of the moment -- and what it calls for -- and the clarity of the classroom or pulpit where you're going to lay out these theological and other distinctions and make greater clarifications on doctrine, practice, etc.
The fact that so many think this is sheer pragmatism or compromise demonstrates our failure to be able to make distinctions or to think outside of the context of a theology class. I can recall an example where a lady was grieving the loss and memory of her husband, and referred to a passage I believe in the Psalms or Proverbs that I thought was sound, yet the minister instead of giving comfort and acknowledging the theologically true (at least relatively) thing she was taking comfort in from the mouth of God, went into an explanation of how that Bible verse actually means something else.
Is God sovereign over all? Yes. Did God sovereignly direct that bullet to narrowly miss killing Donald Trump? Yes. Does this mean that because he was shot at 6:11 or whatever, that God did that because Eph. 6:11 says to put on the full armor of God, to resist the wiles of the devil? I mean, do you know how St. Augustine was converted? I will not tell you. Look it up for yourself.
There is a time and season for everything. The reality is that we lack wisdom, myself included. Ordinarily, wisdom probably wouldn't dictate King Solomon calling for a sword to be brought to him, in order to cut a living baby in half in order to resolve a dispute between 2 women and which had the child that died, and which had the child that lived. Imagine if Trump, or any modern day politician, applying wisdom and discretion today, attempted something like that.
Now imagine if you, like Israel of old, grasped the wisdom of King Solomon in this drastic call to cut a living baby in half, seeing "that the wisdom of God was in him to administer justice," 1 Kings 3:28? Not only would a modern Solomon today be crushed by Bible believing, conservative Christians, so would you. You'd be regarded as a maniac, a danger and threat to society, a baby killer, and all the rest. After all, where is that elusive Bible verse/proof text that says when two women come to a ruler disputing over who had the baby that died, that you ought to bring the living baby in to cut the baby in half? There isn't one friends. It's a judgment call, belonging to those who have sound wisdom from God, whether naturally as man in God's image, or heightened from one regenerate/redeemed in Christ. But an unregenerate man can have sound wisdom to administer justice better than a regenerate Christian. An unregenerate like Trump can have more bravery than almost all of the "Conservative" Evangelical and Reformed churches and ministers today. He inspired me to courage, in God's providence, and I thank Trump, and the Lord, for that.
None of this is to say that any politician today has the wisdom of Solomon. They do not, none of us do. But you must grasp that there is a whole domain of "wisdom" that we (men in particular) need to apply in all of life -- and Solomonic wisdom is in our grasp, for after all, God inspired Solomon to give us something of that wisdom in the Scriptures itself, and to take it from there and go forth in wisdom to apply such to matters we face today). But if you do not learn to think and apply not only God's Word but all we discover in creation/natural revelation with wisdom and prudence... well, you're never going to have wisdom, no matter how strictly you hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, nor how well you passed your theology exams, or even how well you've read and memorized your Bible. You evidently have not read and understood it well enough. That's okay. I have had to grasp this, as we all must. But when we do, let's repent and grow, not lash out at those who help us along.
Some will tell you I have just denied the sufficiency of Scripture, despite many of our Reformers arguing for truth from pagan writers as much as and perhaps at times even more from strictly quoting Scripture itself. Our Reformers recognized the wisdom of even wise, somewhat moral, unregenerate men, and thanked them for that wisdom, skill, and insight, and capitalized on it, filtered through God's Word and their own wisdom given them from God.
There's a lot more to be said on this, but for those who must have a Bible verse quoted, I'll underscore the importance of getting true wisdom from Solomon in Proverbs 4:5-9,
"Get wisdom! Get understanding!
Do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth.
Do not forsake her, and she will preserve you;
Love her, and she will keep you.
Wisdom is the principal thing;
Therefore get wisdom.
And in all your getting, get understanding.
Exalt her, and she will promote you;
She will bring you honor, when you embrace her.
She will place on your head an ornament of grace;
A crown of glory she will deliver to you.”
Of course, true wisdom begins with fearing God. If one is dead in sin, the light God has given them naturally, and that they may do well with on some level, does no good for themselves. They have no true salvation, no salvific wisdom, and lacking the Spirit of God will not apply that wisdom for the glory of God. But it does not follow that unbelievers can never do any earthly good. A man skilled and trained with certain virtues, even as an unbeliever, can put out a blazing fire in someone's home, bravely burst into danger, and drag out people, fellow Christian's even, and even say God protected him and helped him do this. Yet his heart may still be dead in sin. But did he have skill, wisdom, discretion, bravery, greater than many Christians, sad to say? For the temporal good of fellow man, yes. For the glory of God, not at all, not from the heart and sincerely at least, though they may pay lip service to God.
So in a land leavened with the Bible, and people exposed to and born into a land that historically believed in and by their system of law upheld the 10 commandments, you could have unregenerate cops and military, but even magistrates, rulers, governors, and presidents, doing some temporal good for us as a society, in restraining evil, and like Darius in Daniel 6, even calling for worship, or at least reverence, of the true God in all his empire. Whether Darius was genuinely converted or not is not the main point, if we grant that an unbeliever/unregenerate could decree such as well, as a positive good for the people in his domain, even if he doesn't inwardly believe in God or his own decree from the heart.
Trump is an interesting example. I have heard him say sinful things for sure, sexually and otherwise, and I have heard him say he doesn't think he's ever needed to ask God for forgiveness, or something like that. I've also heard him say repeatedly that God, and even by name Jesus Christ, is far greater than he, Donald Trump, is. He receives prayer from Christian ministers and has attended worship. I do not think he is genuinely converted given his personal beliefs and life, but he has been given some natural wisdom or giftedness from God, as a man made in God's image, to see some of the evils in our nation and land today, and to boldly stand against it, and some skill in economics, foreign policy, and knowledge that many of us do not have, that makes him in our desperate times a candidate worth considering to vote for, when the alternative is far, far worse.
Politics is its own discipline, with its own "wisdom" we could say. Knowing theology really well does not alone make you someone fit to be a good magistrate or ruler, anymore than knowing doctrine and theology and having a godly and pious life would make you qualified to be a soldier, a military commander a brain surgeon, a farmer, a sociologist, a historian, a governor or president, or all the rest. Yes, Being a Christian and knowing God and His Word will have bearing on all these things, but you still need to be skilled and trained in these particular fields to serve in those capacities.
All wisdom is God's wisdom, all Truth is God's Truth, to be sure. But not all Truth is found in the Bible alone, special revelation, but also in natural revelation, or God's creation. Our scientists of old were often faithful Christians and understood this. Their being faithful Christians did not make them good scientists, or scientists at all for that matter. The realm of nature, of Creation, reveals God, not merely His existence, but His eternal power and Godhead, His glory, His goodness, and this speaks even to unbelievers, and from God's creation/nature we can learn much that God has not chosen to reveal in the Bible, like aerodynamics and how to fly an airplane, or combustible engines, or political theory in exhaustive detail.
The issue is we have ceded the realm of nature and nature's God to the pagans, bifurcating our brains and retreating to the Bible in the name of sola Scriptura, but Scripture Alone refers to God revealing Himself and the way of salvation in the Bible alone, not revealing Himself and how to develop the earth and have skill in this life in the Bible alone. Everyone intuitively knows this. If you are building something, you go to the manual for that, especially if you are unskilled like me. Or you get help from someone who is skilled in building things, and learn from them. You do not open your Bibles to learn how to build a deck, though you probably should open your Bible to remind yourself of patience and the value of hard work and gaining skills such as how to build a deck, operate heavy machinery, etc.
If I need detailed information of particular behavioral patterns of modern day Midwesterners, I can glean some things from the nature of man in general, fallen in Adam and all the rest, from Scripture. But I'd need someone who knows the people, place, culture, customs, habits, and patterns that are present their today, to really understand in detail what makes them tick the way that they do. To say such is not to deny the sufficiency of Scripture, but to recognize the greater totality God has given us to understand ourselves and the world we are living in, and how to do well in this life.
So let us pursue true wisdom -- the highest wisdom of all in Christ Jesus our Lord, and also the wisdom He has put in all of creation and the skill and insight of even all His human beings made in His image, and make sound distinctions and determinations at a time when we are so muddled in our thinking, believer and unbeliever alike.
Comments
Post a Comment