Of Contracts and Covenants (Part 5) - By What Other Standard?

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger.

We’ve been talking about covenants and contracts, civil government, natural revelation, and today we’re approaching the third point of a covenant, stipulations of a national covenant, which is why we spent last time talking about general revelation, because it’s to note it exists and we’re really bad at reading it.

Wow, you just summed up so many treatises on natural law philosophy in one sentence. I’m impressed.

That’s cool because that’s something I’d really like to study more. I’m very seriously considering auditing the class about the Christian philosophy of natural law because I’m kind of skeptical, but I don’t know much so I’m very interested to hear what you have to share today.

Well, let me jump in. By the way, we did not banish Bryan. He had a prior commitment. I would have been interested to hear his take on all of this.

One reason we spent time in the last episode talking about general revelation is because Christians can easily confuse general and natural revelation with natural law. We shouldn’t, but even some of our brightest and best from Thomas Aquinas on down have kind of tried to dovetail the one to the other.

We saw last time that God does absolutely clearly sufficiently reveal himself in what we call nature and creation, and that there is an ethical dimension to this. In other words, God has manifested in the very hearts of men, from Adam in the beginning and ever since, what Paul calls the work of the law. He doesn’t say the law, but the impress, the remnant, the effect. In other words, we have consciences.

Every man who comes into this world – and just saying those words, Jesus is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is not simply a theistic revelation, as it’s a Trinitarian and Christological revelation. Everyone is marked by the light that is Christ. The problem is we’re sinners and we hate God and we hate the revelation, anything that points back to God.

We saw this last time in some length. We talked all about how the natural man suppresses that revelation. The problem is not the revelation. The problem is not that God has left man ethically on his own. The revelation is, was, and should be there, and yet man in his sin and rebellion blurs it. Paul says the natural mind is enmity against God, for it’s not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Another qualification here before a little bit of history. What that means is – and I’m sure other people have said it more precisely than this, but I think this will do – we come into the world knowing that marriage should be respected and sexuality should be respected and property should be respected, especially mine, and that reputations should be respected, especially mine. Yet if you want to up my reputation a little bit with things that aren’t completely true, that might be okay too. And that family has some kind of value, usually.

Notice all the qualifications here, and it goes beyond that. Even the pagans knew that there was something beyond man, call it God or nature or Ultimate Spirit or something, that was bigger than man, and in which man’s very existence is somewhat rooted, and that deserved some sort of honor, some sort of respect, or at least some sort of fear.

The problem is, because we all bear the image of God differently, and our circumstances historically are different, that general awareness of right and wrong and even those broad categories get blurred real easily. As I said, I think you should not take my property from me. I won’t take yours unless I really need it or really want it or it’s really cool. You should not take my wife, but if your wife is pretty good-looking we might have a fling, and it goes on. Yes, I shouldn’t lie, unless I’m in a tough spot, at which point a lie is a very useful thing in time of trouble, and so it goes.

Some people will emphasize the harshness and the justice of the law. Some people will emphasize the charity and the kindness and the compassion of ethics, of God’s nature. But we are all inevitably self-centered, and the longer the self-centeredness percolates through a society and through a culture, the more distorted it will be.

The Lord, through Moses, tells Israel with regard to their own worship –

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

That’s the best of pagan society. We can look at the pagan world and we see polygamy, chattel slavery, pedophilia, infanticide, and abortion, not simply as something that exists within these cultures and that they may be ambivalent to or even may embrace. We see them giving them a key role in their cultures, even to the point of, “This is how you worship your god. I worship my god by throwing my firstborn child to the crocodile, or throwing him onto the searing arms of this idol.”

It becomes institutionalized.

Yes, but not just institutionalized – institutionalized as a form of worship to the gods, which is one step even worse. So we look at this and say, “Well, you know, they got it wrong but…” “But what?”

By what standard now are we going to look at a pagan world that existed for 4,000 years, and in some respects still percolates along today, and say, “You do that and you do it with a good conscience. You do it as a matter of religious service. You’ve institutionalized it, and you’re wrong. We, on the other hand, are better than you are, morally better, because we don’t do those things, because we follow the law of nature.”

What do you think they’re following? They’re following the impulses of their heart. They are being ethical. They’re being very religious. We talked about the Canaanites practicing child sacrifice, and there’s ritual prostitution, ritual castration. You can think of the Thuggee of India who strangled thousands of travelers in the name of Kali, but my favorite example is still the Sawi tribe of Netherlands New Guinea, if you’ve ever read Peace Child.

When the first white missionaries, Don Richardson and his wife, came amongst them, he found that they embraced treachery as the greatest virtue. To deceive your enemy and make him think you’re his friend, fatten him up with friendship and food, and then surprise him with, “Aha, I have you now!” and kill him and eat him – that was just the coolest thing ever.

So when Don Richardson first told them the story of Jesus they were kind of bored with it until something at the end caught their attention and they got very excited and very interested, and Don Richardson was shocked to find out that they missed the story. They focused on Judas. He was the hero. He hung out with this Jesus for three years, ate with him, went to worship with him, and then turned on him? How cool can you be?

It took some interesting events for Pastor Richardson to get around that and to find a way to communicate the gospel to them, because how do you trust somebody who thinks it’s a religious duty to lie to you?

Again, it will not do to say, “Well, this is a small fragment of society, of humanity.” What exactly do you need to be the correct percentage? And how exactly does nature communicate that percentage to us?

It’s significant that this was a tribe that had had no contact with the rest of the world. This is what the society came to in the absence of the preaching of the gospel in any measure. It’s untouched by the Word of God, the written Word.

Yes. They had natural revelation. They had echoes of a tradition that may have gone back to Babel.

Whereas if we’re looking at the ancient Greeks or something, you can see how the echoes of a prophecy are there in Stoicism and how Daniel in Babylon had the Word of God and that multiplied.

And about that same time. I need to give you a copy of my book on Greek philosophy and all that, because one thing I found out in writing it was that the presocratics who moved away from the Iliad and the Greek pantheon and all that started coming online just about the time Daniel was in Persia.

The Persians were all about air and spirit and water and elemental things like that. They were no longer polytheists as we think of it, but they worshiped the basic elements within nature, and beyond that saw behind it all Ahura Mazda, the good god who orchestrates everything. This was at a point when the Persians were about to beat up on the Greeks.

Then from the presocratics, who were extremely religious, to say that they were naturalists is to completely misunderstand Greek culture and Greek philosophy, but they were moving away from the gods of Olympus to more of what we would think of as Hinduism or God and nature bound up together.

Then in comes Socrates, who still claims to be demon-possessed, and then we have Plato, who sounds a lot like he read Moses. The point I was making in Bible study last night was that you think the pagans are going to tell us that they read the Word of God and cribbed it? No, they’re not.

They wouldn’t even tell us that the Persians were cooler than they were.

No. We look at the pagan cultures and expect them to tell us the truth about themselves and their enemies. How stupid are we? And yet secular textbooks have taken that as the point of departure. “The Greeks were champions of liberty, and the Persians were Oriental oppressors.” The Persians were sons of Japheth, just like the Greeks, and the Bible has a much higher opinion of them. It acknowledges the Greeks were out there someplace.

But here’s what happens, and this is now bringing us back to some of the history elements involved here. The Japhetic tribes – Greece, Rome and beyond – like the Canaanite tribes by and large, tended to build their religion around an ancestor, a dead ancestor obviously, maybe some great hero of their past who may or may not have actually been a real person, but often a dead king who did great things a long time ago.

They would build their city-states around the tomb of such a god, and they would have an altar burning to him, and the walls of that city were the magic barriers that bound you to that city, to that religion, to that people. The basic morality, the ethical standards, the laws of that city were bound in terms of that religion.

“We live here because our god is here. I have this property because grandpa is buried out in the back and he’s a demigod. And my father will be buried there one day, and you don’t give away the family plot.”

The father is the priest and has to maintain the pure line of succession, so adultery is right out, but the father can sleep with all the prostitutes he wants to because that’s irrelevant, as long as we maintain this line. Step-by-step they reconstructed a morality that was based on the needs of the city-state that were absolutely completely totally religious.

Then comes Alexander and he builds them all into one kingdom, one empire, that then encompasses Persia as well, and other nations beyond, as far as Egypt. And this is true of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle. They had been building their ethics around the city-state. “We just lost that by Alexander conquering the world. We were so successful we destroyed our religion, so what’s right and wrong now?”

It’s so funny that the advent of globalism comes with Alexander, who’s a globalist in that he wants to rule the world, which is just how globalism works today. We all want to be one happy family, right? As long as I get to decide what happens.

Because I’m the unity, to borrow a line from Star Trek. So what happens in the Hellenistic age, the age that follows the death of Alexander, is an attempt to sort out meaning. We get the various schools of philosophy – the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cynics, the Skeptics – and they all have takes on what happens to philosophy now that it’s no longer rooted in this one particular city-state called Athens or Sparta or Corinth or wherever you were – usually Athens. What do we do?

Basically, the skeptics said, “We don’t know. We don’t know the world is real. Let’s just do what works and call it a day.” The cynics said, “Yeah, we don’t know either, so go and act like a dog in the streets. That will be good enough.” The Epicureans said, “Well, there probably are gods someplace. They may be universal, but they’re so great and they’re so far off they don’t care about us, so just enjoy yourself mildly. Don’t draw divine attention to yourself. That’s about all there is, because there’s nothing. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

The one group that was the exception were the Stoics, who we encounter in Acts 17 at Mars Hill, along with the Epicureans. The Stoics said, “Wait, wait, wait, we got it, we got it. We’re the ones who have an answer here. We’ve been talking now…” – and here we’re going back to the presocratics – “The universe is divine.”

They’re not non-religious. They are extremely religious. They just turned God into the universe, and the universe into God. The universe is fire, being kindled and burning out. “The Force is an energy field generated by all living creatures,” so they invented the Jedi religion.

There is absolutely nothing original in Star Wars.

No, there’s not. So having invented this, they identified this sentient universe with the mind of man. Man is divine.

The book I wrote is tentatively titled To Be as God, because why not? My mind as a human is identical with God’s mind, the mind of the universe. This is half a step away from Hinduism really. It’s pantheism of a sort. The order, the divine Logos that structures the universe is something I participate in, so that Logos, that logic is mine is that of the universe, and therefore this is something accessible to all logical rational men everywhere, and that’s where morality comes from for the entire empire. You’ve just got to be logical and accept this religion we just invented out of nowhere.

That’s natural law and it percolated among Hellenistic society. Some of the Romans picked it up. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who delighted to kill Christians, picked it up and said many sweet wonderful things about keeping your emotions in check and being one with the universe and all that stuff. But then Christianity won, which no one saw coming.

The Christians were out trying to tell the world, “There’s another king – one Jesus,” who oddly enough as a king has said, “Teach them everything I’ve ever commanded you, and lo I am with you always to the end of the age.” So at some point we have this conflict. Are we going to listen to Jesus and what he has said, what he has told his church to teach, which is everything he said, his words, or are we going to fall back on this Greek pagan concept of continuity of being, continuity of mind and logic between the universe and the individual? So there’s the conflict for you.

Again, remember we’re not saying that God has not revealed himself, but that revelation we twist. Jesus did not say, “Go out and teach everybody to observe nature, to model their behavior on the black widow and the cancer cell, think about it logically and pragmatically. What would you want people to do?”

He told them, “Go, tell them what I said, and place them under a covenant bond, a baptism, a commission. Make disciples, baptizing them, then teach them everything that I’ve told you.” That’s the Great Commission.

When we start saying, “Well, we’re going to baptize them and put them in covenant…”

See, here’s the problem with contract theory. Contract does not say we are in covenant with God. We are not submitting to Jesus. We are not receiving his ordinance, his sacrament of baptism, and we are not learning everything that he has taught us. We’re doing our own thing and thinking we’re pretty good at it, because we have a capitalist society and are relatively more free than others.

That’s not what the Bible is about, and it’s one reason that so many liberals point at conservatism and Christianity and say, “You’re confusing something there.” You know what? They’re right, and not because liberalism is better.

Right. I’m having flashbacks to that very naïve article that I sent you recently. It’s like, “We want a Christian society, so we have to go back to the Founders, because they were clearly all Roman Catholics and devout.”

Yeah, so this is it, and honestly as we’ve had these discussions over the last few weeks this has become a lot clearer for me than it was before, and it keeps coming down to the Great Commission. We’re talking covenant or contract. What did Jesus say?

Once you understand that baptism is a covenant sign and that’s what Jesus commanded us to do, not as an afterthought, not as, “Oh, and you can do that if you want to,” but as a key element in his plan for discipleship and blessing all nations, which is the gospel, that all nations will be blessed, justified, sanctified through the work of Messiah, you’re not left with a lot of options here. Societies need to be brought under the covenant authority of Jesus Christ, and that means that they need to be taught what he said.

As I’ve said a couple times, we’re not debating here the fine points of theonomy or theocracy or the case laws or whatever. Those are discussions for other times and there’s still a lot to be settled there, to be sure, but from the time that the Empire surrendered to Christianity to the Reformation, Christendom knew that it was Christendom, that the nations belonged to the God of the Bible in Jesus Christ, that he was Lord of heaven and earth, and whether or not they always lived up to that standard, they professed that as their standard. They forsook their idols. They threw them to the bats and moles and they built churches, and kings claimed to receive their authority from Christ.

At least formally.

Yes. Now, we’re not talking about what was in their hearts. And here’s the thing – “But they may not really have been saved.”

“Is everyone in your church saved? Is it still a Christian church? How about your family? Do you have Christian families, everyone’s saved for sure, you know that?”

So let’s stop doing that. Let’s measure instead by the measurement that Jesus gave us. Have they claimed that they’re disciples? Have they received baptism? Are they being taught to observe all that he said? And are they progressively conforming to it? One would hope, more or less, the same standard you use with your covenant kids.

“Well, you know, my kids aren’t perfect. I’m afraid they’re going to hell.” Get over that one real fast. How about yourself – you perfect? Christianity is not about perfection in this life. It’s about salvation and it’s about grace, but that comes from learning what Jesus says, the gospel, and then what the gospel is supposed to bring forth.

For roughly 1500 years, Northern Europe Christendom and beyond – the Eastern Empire as well – believed that they were in submission to the God of the Bible. More to the point, they could not conceive of an empire or kingdom that worshiped no god in particular. Secularism did not exist. It didn’t exist in ancient Greece or Egypt or Canaan. It didn’t exist in Rome. It did not exist in the Hellenistic age. It did not exist in the Greek philosophers. They were not naturalists. They were pagan to the core. And it did not exist in early Christendom.

It's not until we get to the Enlightenment that people actually begin to say, “How about building a culture that has absolutely no reference to any god whatsoever?” and even that’s not completely accurate because the early Enlightenment thinkers still believed in a god. He was the divine geometer, the unmoved mover, the god who with one swipe of his compasses carved out the universe, that god, the source of all scientific natural law as well as ethical natural law.

It took a long time for them to actually get to the point where they said, “Oh, and we don’t need any god at all.” They rejected Christ. They rejected Christianity. But they didn’t kick out religion for a very long time. They moved toward pantheism on the one hand, and eventually a few moved to atheism. It really wasn’t until Darwin that they breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Huh, now we don’t need any god at all.”

So here we stand, looking back and saying, “But isn’t a secular society normal?” It hasn’t been normal in 4,000 years of human history, except for the last couple hundred years. Was Nazi culture actually secular? You can even make some interesting observations about Marxist culture, because its roots were solidly in occult theory and magic.

Man would like to think he’s all that and a bag of chips and can get away from God and the very concept of God, but he can’t. Society, as the Greeks knew so well, is inevitably religious. That means somebody speaks with authority, and we’ve got to decide sooner or later who’s it going to be? The line from Good Omens is, “Sooner or later everyone has to decide what gang they belong to.” Are you going to be part of Jesus’ church and listen to him and what he says in his Word? Or are you going to come up with some source of law from someplace else?

Now, if you’re not a Christian, we get it. You don’t want Jesus’ law. Big surprise there. Go be pagans. The hard thing is when Christians say, “Yes, but God’s law is so cruel and mean and impossible and no one likes it, so obviously we can’t use that.”

I would question what part of the law you’re reading. What law are you reading that sounds all mean?

That is just an absolutely wonderful and excellent question, and we don’t have to be talking about this whole issue of law and society. We need to talk about law in a Christian’s personal life. There are Christians who just recoil at the idea of using law in the new covenant, and how bad the Old Testament law was.

Some of you do have to say, “Wait, which commandment are you having trouble with? Is it the one about adultery?”

“Well, no, no, no.”

“Oh, I see. You want to steal from people?”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“You want to slander your neighbor. Got it.”

“No!”

“You want to worship other gods?”

”No!”

“Which commandment here is so oppressive and abusive?”

I think there’s often a low view of the impact of sin. “Yeah, adultery is wrong, but should we stone people because of it?”

“You mean the thing that just destroyed an entire family? Yeah, that’s a big deal, and maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we took it that seriously.”

Or simply, let’s forget adultery, but…murder. “He’s a serial murderer, but he’s in rehab,” or “Yeah, he’s a serial rapist but he only raped 10 young women and a couple little boys.” What is it that we find so abhorrent?

Theologically, one thing is the fear that when you saw law of God you’re introducing works righteousness. Now, that I get. By the way, for anyone listening, no we’re not. Be at rest, be at peace. When we talk about the law of God we’re not telling you how to earn your salvation. We’re not telling you how to be right with God. We’re telling you the kind of behavior that glorifies Jesus, that says to him, “Thank you,” that is loving to God and loving to our neighbor.

And yes, there is a civil dimension to it. It’s something courts have to enforce. It’s something the policemen have to grab people for and say, “You’re coming with me because you just took a shot at my partner and that’s not allowed.”

“You’re so mean! Police brutality! I’m being repressed!”

Again we have not criticized our own sins, our own sin nature, nearly harshly enough. We don’t see how dangerous and deadly and destructive sin is for the little child, for the single mom, for the old folks down the block who’ve got nobody, for people who have different-colored skin, for our law enforcement officers. Sin is out to destroy everybody and everything, all in the name of love and justice oftentimes, and we’re afraid to bring consequences.

We see this in all sorts of areas – classroom, church. The one place we generally won’t see it is when my economic fortunes are at stake. Then we want consequences pretty fast, because again Brady Bunch – “But this time it’s me!”

I would like to leave some questions for those who still think that there is this thing called natural law and that it somehow would fix everything. You can argue, “People don’t agree about the Bible.” That’s true. We don’t agree about a lot of things.

Why would we expect them to agree about something that’s not articulated in precise language?

Exactly. And you know what? It’s not the things in the Bible that we don’t understand that are causing the problem. It’s things like “Don’t commit adultery.” There’s a whole lot more going on there. Homosexuality is wrong, the Bible tells us. Abortion is wrong. The Bible is very clear on these things.

It’s not, “Is that 2-fold, 4-fold, or 7-fold restitution?” Nobody’s getting mad about that one. No one’s arguing over the case laws in most cases. It’s the very clear statements in scripture about basic right and wrong, things like men should marry women, and women should marry men. When you have a baby, you don’t kill it.

Here are some questions that I would put forward:

Natural law is supposed to be logical and rational and open to anybody who’s honest (there’s a problem), but if that’s so, it should be easy to write down its first principles. Oddly enough, no one ever has, not even your friend Jordan Peterson. He’s made some interesting attempts, but he hasn’t gotten very far. Mostly, as I say, he’s cribbed Christianity and God with it.

This natural law thing, is this law that you’ve discovered compatible with the Trinitarian-based law found in scripture, particularly the 10 commandments? Or is it a shorter and foggier version of the book of law, or is it another law code all together?

You’ve come up with this moral code. Let’s compare it with what’s in the Bible. If they’re the same thing, what are we arguing over? If the Bible is more or less alike, but a lot clearer, what are we arguing over? Let’s go with the clear version. If they are two different law codes, we have a problem. Does God speak with forked tongue? Can God not make up his mind about right and wrong? Or is there some other source for this natural law thing?

Does natural law allow for oath of office or the use of oaths in court? And if so, in whose name should they be sworn? And is that name a valid name for the Christian God and no other? Or is it the name of some yet to be named deity – the State perhaps? “I swear by my life. I swear by the State. I swear by my mother’s grave. I swear by who and what?”

Are oaths even a thing with natural law? Are we calling on God as the omniscient searcher of hearts, the sovereign God who will judge all men one day – that God? Or is that too religious and does it smack too much of scripture?

What next? What exactly is murder? “Well, you’re not supposed to kill.”

Yeah, right – who? Does it depend on how old a person is? How senile? How much they’re on life support? How about their gender? Does that matter? How about their ethnicity, the color of their skin, the medical fitness of the victim? What if it’s a baby in the womb? Who is it we are not to kill, and how does natural law communicate this to us?

Then what’s the just penalty for murder, because a lot of this is about – as you suggested earlier – the punishments, the sanctions. Execution? Imprisonment? Rehabilitation? Or borrowing from Babylon 5, how about mind-wipe? Let’s rewrite their personality. We may not need science-fiction techniques to do it. Let’s just hand them over to psychiatrists in a mental hospital for a few years and see what we can do to – or for them.

What exactly constitutes theft? Is it theft if a poor man takes the property of a rich man? What if the State does it for him and calls it taxation or nationalizing foreign holdings?

Is the civil government to regard any sexual act as a crime, if the act itself does not accompany violence? Although you can feed that in too, I guess, because some people can’t – unless there’s violence involved. If so, which ones and what are the corresponding penalties for each act? Should adultery be a crime? How about fornication? How about rape? How about sodomy? How about sodomy with a small child? How does natural law communicate this to us, and what age groupings does it give us, and how do we know?

Should having more than two children be a civil crime? It was in China. And if so, what’s the proper sanction for that crime? Forced sterilization? For the sake of the planet, of course. Isn’t nature screaming that we must protect her? Isn’t that natural law? To protect her from that cancer that is the human race, from over-population?

If no one else agrees with these answers, can we safely assume the answers are wrong? Or am I the prophet for the universe? How many people have to agree with those answers before we ought to take them seriously? Everyone? A significant majority?

How does natural law communicate the exact percentage? How do we know when we have enough people on our side to impose these laws on everyone else? Because no one seems to want to do that with scripture, and it claims to be from a sovereign God, so how many people have to vote in on this before we can impose natural law on people who don’t receive it?

If the answers to all these questions are at odds with scripture, can we assume the God of the Bible does not like these answers? Isaiah 8:20 says -

“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

So do we have all the answers for what a godly society should look like? No, but we really haven’t been trying for the last few hundred years. We still don’t have all the answers for what a godly church should look like or a godly family. We’ve got to start someplace. We’ve got to start thinking in terms of scripture, and you’re not going to find the answer by looking someplace else.

Jesus said, “Go make disciples.” Disciples are under discipline. They’re under the teaching of their master, and they conform their lives to his. “Everyone who is perfect shall be as his master,” Jesus says. So we should not hold back from teaching the nations whatever God has commanded, but we just need to work really hard at making sure it is in fact what God commanded and we’re not making it up.

That’s pretty key.

Yeah, and a big challenge.

Lots to think about there. I’m always surprised when I hear Christians who have been brought up in a classical sort of environment criticizing Constantine for institutionalizing Christendom. I think there’s a desire to reject the cultural Christianity that is not true Christianity.

That’s okay. You can do that. There’s a really good way to do that. It’s called sanctification. It’s called preach the gospel some more. Teach them to observe all things God has commanded, and get rid of the superficiality and hypocrisy.

When Constantine embraced Christianity, it was an incredible opportunity for the church, but it was also an incredible threat, because now it’s popular and chic to be a Christian.

Which is not necessarily the right way to think about Christianity, right? It’s probably a really bad thing to have in the air.

But on the other hand, here’s something that modern Christians can’t get a hold of. The Empire was killing Christians – persecution, violent, hurtful, bizarre, torturous. “Oh, but it’s so bad they had to stop that because it just ruined the church.”

Right. What is the alternative? Secularization was not a thought in anybody’s mind.

No one could conceive of that. So yes, we understand that when Christianity becomes popular culturally there is a danger, no kidding. That’s when the church has to get to work and start enforcing God’s law, Christ’s Word, among its members. Oh, that’s right, we don’t want to do that. That’s kind of what we’re talking about. We don’t want the State to do it, but we don’t want the church to do it. Basically, we don’t want to do it.

It’s awkward. It’s embarrassing. It’s impolite. People won’t like me when I stand up and say, “You know what? That sexual thing you’re doing, Jesus doesn’t like that. He says so right here. You should stop. I’ll pray for you about this. And if you’re not going to stop, I’m going to be talking to the elders.”

“How harsh! How condemning! How judgmental!”

It’s almost like it’s their job.

Our thought patterns, our very way of thinking and analyzing are corrupted far more than we understand, and it’s a difficult thing. There was a young lady in our house several months ago and there were three things she said. I don’t know that I remember them well, but she came originally from a different culture and she had questions about American Christianity.

She said, “I went to public schools and we learned to separate what the Bible says from what we’re being taught. We’re taught evolution in this context. We learn it for the test, but we reject it. We embrace what the Bible says. But I’m concerned that in America you politicize so much of your theology.”

I forget what the third thing was, but it fit in here someplace. Anyway, the hairs on my neck began to rise a little and I said, “Is there something specific you’re talking about?”

“Well, abortion.”

Abortion is wrong. She knew that. It’s killing a child. She knew that. “But why does it have to become such a big issue in the church? Why can’t you keep your politics and your religion separate?”

We had a good conversation and I think I was able to answer her questions. I said, “Wait a minute. Remember when we started and you said that you embrace what God says in his Word and you’re just learning your evolution and your secularism for the test? It sounds to me like you’re wrong about that. You’ve embraced a way of thinking that itself is not Christian. Either Jesus is Lord or someone else is Lord.”

In the end, I think that’s probably what registered with her. “I understand,” she said, “that someone has to have the final word, someone has to be in control.”

Yeah, for the church, for the individual, and for the State. We say Jesus is Lord. How does he communicate that to the State, or is the State, the civil society, are people free from him somehow? We’re not talking about shoving God’s law down their throats or a violent revolution. We’re just saying that when we have opportunity, and as we have opportunity, should we in this representative democracy or this used-to-be Republic, or whatever we call it – are we allowed to vote for things that are closer to God’s law than those that are not? Or are we going to get criticized for that?

Are we going to suggest that the government stealing from its citizens is wrong? That abortion is wrong? That marriage is between one man and one woman, or is that somehow oppressive because there are some people in our society who don’t believe that? Or are we going to appeal to some kind of neutral natural law thing because we think that’s going to help? Technically it might help for a short time, but in the long run it’s not a solution.

You want everyone to vote for this particular proposition? Fine, whatever you can appeal to if it’s a good thing, but don’t think that that’s the same thing as what Jesus is demanding. Jesus demands our submission to him as our Savior and as our Lord. And no, it’s not going to make us very popular, but then radical heart surgery isn’t exactly something everyone signs up for either.

Speaking of radical heart surgery not being fun or popular, I would like to recommend The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield, which I’m just finishing up this week. I visited the local library the other day while our kitchen countertops were being forcibly attached to our house. Gretchen and I made ourselves scarce, so we went to the library. First of all, the Dewey Decimal system totally threw me for a loop.

Aren’t you familiar with it?

I worked with the Library of Congress, so then I go and I’m like, “Why are all these books together? They don’t have anything to do with each other.” But I found Rosaria Champagne Butterfield’s book and it’s been a real blessing to me, a really edifying read. It’s not a fun read, but really refreshing. It’s the sort of thing that is what it says it is. She doesn’t seem to be trying to make a point. She’s just telling you her story, which is great.

After that rather deep and hot conversation I’m going to go for something completely trivial that your recommendation will make even more silly-looking, but nonetheless. I asked my family what I should recommend and they all said peanut butter.

That’s a good thing.

it’s a good thing, but you know what’s even better? You get Ritz crackers or whatever is available, and you put the peanut butter on, and then you put (if you have it) plum jelly, grape jelly, or strawberry jelly. Plum jelly is best. You make a whole bunch of these and you get some very cold milk, and this is one of the best nighttime snacks there is. If you’ve never had it, you do not know what you’re missing, go try it. It’s almost impossible to mess up and it is a wonderful way to close out a day. There you go.

Awesome way to close out a podcast, too. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you tuning in. We are on Substack, Rumble, YouTube, any podcast catcher. Let us know if you find one that we’re not on and we’ll fix it. We are pretty much not on Facebook, David informs me, so maybe don’t go there looking for anything to happen, but we’re all those other places.

Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.