Swords Into Ploughshares

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 and Bryan Broome. Bryan, it’s good to have you back. It’s been a while.

It has been.

We missed you.

Thank you. I missed you all as well.

We’re talking today about an oft-used poetic image, swords into ploughshares. This is from both Isaiah and Micah, and we’re going to follow the three rules of biblical interpretation, which are context, context, and context – specifically biblical context.

This pops up everywhere. It’s in the deleted scenes of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s in Les Miserables. It’s in the United Nations garden, which I didn’t know was a thing, and even Michael Jackson, so this is everywhere but it comes from the Bible. Greg, what’s the context?

The context, context, context thing is so important because notice all the varied people you just described as using it, and their very varied worldviews.

And different ends, different points they’re making.

The one in the United Nations garden is on a statue. It’s a statue of a man, oddly enough, beating a sword into a ploughshare.

So far, so good.

Yeah. It has the verse. The interesting thing is the statue was crafted by a Russian-born sculptor and presented to the United Nations by the Soviet Union, while it was still the Soviet Union.

Meaning it hated the Bible and everything it stands for.

Yeah, but it found something in the Bible it could twist to its own ends, because it sounds good.

Even from a secular standpoint – or I should say the secular misunderstanding of the verse – it still is very hypocritical of them to do so.

You mean they didn’t take all of their nuclear research and turn it into a garden?

No, they wanted us to do that.

Something for everybody else to do.

I think if you asked most humans on the planet if it were a good thing if humanity allocated all the energies and times and monies that it spends on war – together at the same time – and spent them instead on agriculture and on feeding the world, I think we would all say as long as we’re all doing it and no one is holding back their nuclear missiles in reserve that this sounds okay. It sounds promising. It implies no more wars, and we all want no more wars, right?

And more food.

And more food, so it seems win/win. So it’s not odd, I think, in the long run that so many people who either are not Christians or lay claim to some kind of odd Christianity would lay hold on this and say this is the goal. This is where history should go. Well, we’re glad they agree with God, but we need to talk about the biblical context, historical, theological, textual and all that.

Tonight will be something of an adventure in exegesis, and I ask my friends here to question anything I say that they’re not sure about and call me on the carpet if I seem to be going wild, but I will start here and then we’ll see how we go.

As Emily said, the passage appears in two places. It appears in Isaiah and in Micah. They were roughly contemporary. It’s hard to know which of the prophets did it first and which cut and pasted and plagiarized, by the work of the Holy Spirit.

It wasn’t called plagiarism in those days. They had very different ideas of intellectual property.

They did. It was fine to take what someone else had done and transform it and do something better with it, especially when the Holy Spirit is the original author of both, so that’s okay.

There’s a little more textual background in Micah. We can look at Isaiah perhaps in a bit, but in the Micah passage where we read about this it flows out of what he’s been talking about. What he’s been talking about is God’s wrath against Judah. I’m going to back up into chapter 3 of Micah and read the background, so that when we get to the swords and ploughshares thing it sort of makes a little more sense. The prophet Micah says this –

But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the LORD, and of judgment and of might to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin. Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.

The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money; yet will they lean upon the LORD and say, Is not the LORD among us? None evil can come upon us.

Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.

That’s the background that leads into chapter 4. Notice just a couple particular things, I suppose. Micah was convinced of man’s depravity. What follows is no utopian, “Well, you know, men are fundamentally good at heart, and given enough time and enough education we can reverse these trends and we can come up with…”

There’s none of that. In fact, it’s quite the deposit. “You guys are a bunch of wicked scoundrels. God is angry with you. You’re murderers. You build Zion with blood.” The leaders, judges, prophets, priests do so for money. They’re all in it for money, and yet they hypocritically claim the presence and blessing of the Lord. “Is not the Lord among us?” And the verdict sounds pretty definite. “Zion for your sake shall be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps.” It’s going to be laid waste.

Now, it’s going to take several generations before God does this, and in fact in Jeremiah’s day, Jeremiah prophesies similar things and some of the local princes and prophets want to kill him for this. Things have gone downhill a lot by then. But some of the princes say, “Wait, wait, wait. Micah said this in the days of Hezekiah and they didn’t kill him. They repented! Maybe we should do a little of that.” The princes who were out for Jeremiah said, “Mmm, maybe,” and grumbled a lot, but they didn’t kill Jeremiah.

It’s interesting that we have people within the biblical record, within the flow of history, looking back at this prophecy and understanding what Micah was saying. Yes, he’s talking about the destruction of that city, but they also are arguing that because there was this revival in Hezekiah’s day, however in some respects superficial, it was enough that God delayed judgement. “So this is coming, but it need not come in our generation if we repent.”

Well, they didn’t kill Jeremiah, but they didn’t repent either, and it did come within their generation within a very short time, so that part was fulfilled in a most literal way. Jerusalem was laid waste. It became a bunch of heaps and a place for wild plants to grow and such. But then we move chapter 4, and of course there are no chapter breaks in the original.

But in the last days…

“Last days” is a kind of vague-ish phrase. It can simply mean later on, hereafter, down the road, in days to come, but the further we go in the Old Testament, and particularly into the new, it begins to acquire a more decided connotation, if not definition.

For most of the minor prophets, and even beginning with Isaiah, the latter days are the days of Messiah. You can take it as the latter days of the old covenant, which would make sense because Messiah will come in the latter days of the old covenant, so that would be a simple way out. Or perhaps Messiah begins the last days, and the last days reach all the way to the last day, in which case it’s a synonym for the whole gospel era.

For our purposes, which one you pick does not matter a whole lot. What matters is he is talking about history. He’s talking about redemptive history, the time when God is still at work pushing the gospel toward the salvation of the nations. He’s not talking about heaven, in the sense that everybody in heaven is happy and no one fights and they all have plenty of whatever. No kidding. That’s hardly a secret, nor does it need two entire chapters to tell us that.

It is not talking about eternity, although we could easily assume that if it gets this good within time and history, eternity will outpace it by infinite amounts. And if this is the beginning, then what lays ahead in the new heaven and the new earth in its final form after the resurrection will be greater still.

But the point – and here some references to the New Testament. Peter on the Day of Pentecost quotes the prophet Joel. Joel in his prophecy doesn’t give a time element. He just says later, but Peter says, “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, that I’ll pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,” and Peter says rather bluntly, “This is that.” It’s not this is a forerunner of that, this is kind of like that, if you like this, wait till you see that. This is it. It’s begun. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost was something that took place in the last days.

The writer of Hebrews wrote –

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son…

It’s the last days again. It’s the day when Messiah comes and fully reveals the Father.

Paul speaks of the New Testament church as those upon who the ends of the ages have come. And John in 1, John is really blunt. “Even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour.” King James says “last time,” but the word is “last hour.” The clock’s ticking, which may be a stronger argument for saying it’s the end of the old covenant, but not necessarily a convincing one or clinching one. And there are other such passages. That’s just a token amount.

Paul warns about the evils that will come in the last day on a couple occasions in Timothy, and yet he immediately turns around and says, “Yeah, these evil people are coming. Timothy, beware of them.” He’s not talking about something that’s 1,000 years off or 2,000. He’s talking about something they were living in the midst of. “In the last days, perilous times will come.” Well, look back over the last 2,000 years. Have perilous times come? Yup. Paul knew what he was talking about. But does that mean that all times must be perilous?

Here's the counterbalance. Yes, some times certainly will be perilous and have been perilous, and ages of apostasy and times of unbelief and times of persecution, most certainly. Any eschatology that doesn’t take that into account is kind of dreaming. But this is the other side of things.

But in the last days it shall come to pass…

That means God has decreed it and providentially will make it happen.

…that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains…

Now, they did not necessarily know this when Micah wrote this, but these are images. God had not explained, “Look, the temple is going to be wasted, and you’re going to come back from Babylon after 70 years and you’re going to rebuild the temple and it’s not going to be that big a deal, except this pagan named Herod is going to come along and dress it up just in time for the Romans to come and destroy it, and then you’re not going to have it.”

That’s not there, because it wasn’t relevant to what they needed to hear. What they needed to hear was that the presence of God and the worship of God and the truth of God would not only endure, but would be exalted above all other powers and philosophies and competing religions. It shall be established in the top of the mountains.

Mountains are symbols throughout scripture of kingdoms (see Revelation 17, for example), so there’s going to come a time when the temple mountain, the place of worship, Zion, is going to be exalted, and as a result people shall flow unto it, Micah says. Isaiah words it a little differently, and this is how that’s going to look – verse 2.

And many nations shall come and say, Come and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths…

There’s a ‘for’ coming up as to why that’s going to happen, but the first word is describing the movement of these peoples that are flowing. It’s not trickling, it’s flowing. It’s a big movement of people. We’re not given percentages, but something that constitutes a flow, and it’s voluntary. They’re saying to one another, “Let’s go learn the word of God. Let’s go worship God.” And the next word is a ‘for’ –

…for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

Law – Torah. Scripture considers revelation as well as commandment, the truth of scripture, paralleled by the word of the Lord. There’s a starting place – Zion, Jerusalem. Zion was originally the place where David pitched the temple for the ark of the covenant before Solomon built the temple. Then when Solomon moved the ark into the temple, the temple mount was still called Zion although properly it was Mount Moriah. We’ve talked about that in the past.

The Psalms, many of which were written before David, before Solomon’s temple, often speak of the temple of the Lord and the house of the Lord as Zion, and the later psalmists don’t go back and correct it or start using a different word. “David said Zion. We of course now know it’s Moriah, so we’ll start using that word.”

This continues on into the New Testament. The writer of Hebrews says, “You are come unto Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” And in Revelation we see the Lamb standing on Mount Zion.

So there is a transformation going here. It’s not the temple as a building of stone, brick, gems, gold and all that. It is the place where God dwells, where God manifests himself, where God’s word comes from, and the hymns of the church have recognized that as well – the Church, the kingdom of God, which are not exactly the same thing, but they’re close enough. So this is what’s happening. Out of God’s people, out of the place of worship, out from those who have the word of God, that’s flowing out, and the result is that people are flowing in.

For those of us who have read the end of the story, the Great Commission on through Acts and the Epistles, we know that this historically is exactly what happened. It began in Jerusalem and Zion as the apostles preached, and then they went out from there and they continued to carry the gospel. Those who succeeded them carried it further, and other generations carried it further. The word kept going out, and people came. People of all sorts and all nations and sometimes whole nations, came to worship God. This is the background here.

Now, it’s not all peachy-keen.

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off…

Before we get to the swords into ploughshares thing, there’s one other side to this that’s kind of a permanent other shoe in the prophets. Yes, the outpouring of the word and the Spirit, but God judging among the nations.

There’s nothing here of seamless constant growth until everything is wonderful and perfect. There is this is happening. The word is going out, the gospel is going out, people are coming in, but in the midst of this there are judgements. God has nations to smash. He has enemies to bring down – wars and rumors of war and all that.

We can think of Psalm 2 where the Son takes that rod of iron and is smashing all that rides up against him, or Psalm 110, which is a wonderful psalm.

The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.

Then a little bit later…

The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the heathen. He shall fill the places with the dead bodies. He shall wound the heads over many countries.

So biblical eschatology has these two things going on here. There is the preaching of the word, which has great power and calls lots and lots of people in, but God is still out there smashing down resistance and bringing his judgements against those who will not kiss the Son. So biblical context, textual context, historical context.

As people in Micah’s day and Isaiah’s day are looking saying, “But the Babylonians are going to come and destroy us, so what’s it all worth?” well, if all you care about is yourself, then probably the answer is nothing. But if you are part of this story and part of this vision and part of this mission of God to save the nations, then there is great comfort in knowing that although I’m going to suffer, my children are going into captivity, my grandchildren may be some who come back, and it’s not going to be really hot for them, but somewhere at the end of this, this is all an elaborate set-up for God saving the nations – that’s a different kind of hope.

It's not, “Well, you know, within five years everything’s going to be great. We don’t have to worry anymore. God’s just going to send revival after revival, and the world will be transformed.” That’s not what this is saying.

I think we’ve talked before about labels and my own particular disdain for them, because after a while any good label gets misunderstood and abused, both by friend and foe. Am I post-millennial? Well, it depends on who defines it. I’ve mentioned before the phrase “preppy post-millennialism.” I take that to mean, “Hey, everything’s going to be great! And we can just lean back and watch and God’s going to save the world!” The history of the world says no, that’s not what’s happening and not how it’s going to happen.

And yet we can look back at the Day of Pentecost and see those who were saved, the 120 in the upper room, the 3,000, the 5,000 a few days later, and say, you know, there are a few more Christians today than then. The Bible is in a lot more languages. Our creeds have gone from “Jesus is Lord” to the Westminster Standards and the Three Forms of Unity. There are very few nations where the name of Jesus is not known, although there are still some.

So we can look and see, has God failed? Well, part of it kind of depends on your time frame, I think. Americans are really good at insisting that everything happen now, to us.

Yeah. It’s all about America. We are the fulfillment.

We’re it, and our generation particularly, and I’ve been there. When I was younger, very young, I was kind of there. “Before I get much older things are going to turn around.” The Bible doesn’t say anything like that. There may be 1,000 years of darkness ahead of us, for all we know, but that doesn’t mean God has lost.

We can look over history. I’ve told you before that one of my favorite songs, to the tune of a Russian hymn, ironically, is God the All-Terrible because of one particular line. “Through the thick darkness thy kingdom is hastening.” That’s something to meditate on.

It’s not that the kingdom is always visible, and nations are opening their doors to the gospel, and seminaries are being planted, and mission stations set up, and new governments are creating constitutions to recognize Jesus, and everyone is modeling their law after the Bible, and Christian schools are sprouting everywhere. We’re not seeing that.

We may someday. I don’t know. It depends on how God has things planned, but we are constantly running into some weird little country someplace – at least in my experience – saying, “Hey, we just became Reformed Christians about 10 years ago and we’ve heard about you guys.”

I belong to a very small denomination that no one has heard of. “Can you help us? If you can give us $1,000 we can pay our pastor for a year. If you can give us books that you people have written, we’ll translate them. We want you to help us change our country. We’re small, but will you help us?” The temptation is to say, “Who are you?”

In the ‘70s there was a gentleman, Aaron Kayayan, who did a broadcast for the Christian Reformed Church, the Back to God Hour, in French out of southern Africa. There are a lot of people who speak French in southern Africa, including particularly the Belgian Congo in those days, which was then called the Belgian Congo.

A lot of people came to Christ, and a lot of people came to the Reformed faith, and they wrote back to Aaron and said, “We want to form a Reformed Church.” He went to the CRC and they said, “That’s not part of our plan right now.” I don’t know what they were thinking or why they said that, but that’s at least the very simple version.

Aaron was visiting our church and said, “I’ve got this great opportunity, but there’s a problem. The government would like an up-front payment” – it was $3,000 or $5,000 or something, I forget – “to guarantee that this real local indigenous church is being backed by white westerners who have a lot of money, so we know it’s a real church.” What they were asking for was a bribe. “You bribe us and we’ll let these people form a church just like yours.”

“That’s it? That’s all you want?”

“Yeah.”

A small price to pay for evangelizing a country.

Yeah. “I think we can pay this bribe,” and we did. Again, we hadn’t planned this. We were not part of the process that sent these broadcasts into Africa. God just tagged us along the way and said, “Hey, you’ve got money. Use it.”

“Okay, thanks. Moving on.”

We haven’t been terribly active. We were for a while. We haven’t been very active lately, but the Confessing Reformed Church in the Congo was born.

This is the thick darkness. If this is happening to us, how many places is this happening? How many little churches out of the way is God tapping to change the world? And each of us contributes just a little bit here and there. To our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world it may seem huge, and to us it’s just, “Let’s not drink Starbucks for a year and put all our money together and we’ll have $20,000.”

You never find out what God did with the prophets who didn’t bow the knee to Baal. That’s not the story he told us, but he didn’t do nothing with them. We know that for sure.

They were still out there ministering.

One of the points of the gospel story has to be that God has all power in heaven and earth, and always has. He could have just thrown Satan into the abyss, knocked down all resistance, sent out the gospel, converted everybody, and it could be over real fast and very dramatically. He chose not to do that. What he chose to do was to use simple foolish fallen but converted Christians to change the world, a little here, a little there, over a very long time, 2,000 years.

I have students in my class at our Christian school, and these kids have grown up in churches that are evangelical, in families that are Bible-believing, and these kids are 13, 14, and 15, and still can’t define justification by faith.

It doesn’t come quickly. It doesn’t come easily. So if what I’m saying doesn’t fit in with someone’s post-millennialism, then I’m not post-millennial I guess in that sense. And if your amillennialism fits in with this, great. Welcome aboard. I’ve heard people call themselves optimistic amills. Okay. That’s fine.

We’ve been talking about the insufficiency of labels. Not taking a side on this I think is kind of a luxury. It’s one that I’m leaning into. As with so many things, a lot of people don’t have the chance on such-and-such an issue to just not have an opinion, and really I’m sitting back and listening to teachers whose main focus is the gospel, and now and then, because it’s all interrelated because this gospel is not this isolated thing, you get to eschatology. And when you listen to the substance of eschatology, people who are speaking biblically are all saying the same thing, whether the label fits or not. The reality is that it’s mixed. Is it optimistic or is it pessimistic?

I prefer those labels, but even those labels are insufficient because what do you mean by optimism?

Exactly. We have this mixed image.

Do you mean a social gospel that produces some kind of flawless utopia? That’s not biblical.

I’m very optimistic that the rapture is going to come and we’re going to be saved.

Yeah, see, there’s that kind of optimism, too.

What the Bible shows us is God is judging. There are nations that are afar off that need to be rebuked, and that’s happening at the same time that swords are being beaten into ploughshares. It’s not just one or the other.

No, it’s not. And with regard to Bryan’s remark, Hal Lindsey when he wrote The Late Great Planet Earth, toward the end he does say something like, “We should be very optimistic because we should be living like people who don’t expect to be around much longer.” That’s a form of optimism.

That’s one take on it, I guess.

That’s a direction.

Yeah. I think I’ve probably told you this too, but I’ll mention it again. Our elders were interviewing a pastor for possibly teaching at City Seminary. He was a great guy. We really loved the guy and everything he said was spot-on.

Then we came to eschatology, and I have gained enough wisdom to not say, “Which position do you take?” In fact I said, “I’m not going to ask you that. I’m just going to ask you one simple question. Will the Great Commission be fulfilled?” And he looked at me and he hesitated because he knew what I was asking. I don’t remember the hem or haw in his voice, but he said, “Yes, it will.”

“Okay, good for me. That’s all I want to know.” When we stop believing that, we start finding excuses not to do that.

Now, you could say, “We should be better than that. We should do it because God commands it.” Yeah, we should, but when we’re told up front, “And all of your missionary activities are ultimately going to fail, and all the converts you won are going to be martyred or lost,” it’s harder.

Yeah, you feel like the kid who says, “Why should I clean my room? It’s just going to get dirty again.” That’s my inner monologue every day.

Or worse, a car is going to come screaming through the lawn and run into it and we’re going to rebuild the whole thing, so what does it matter?

Why should I clean?

And you can say, “Well, you know what Martin Luther said about that. ‘If Jesus were coming back tomorrow, I’d plant a tree.’” Honestly, Martin, why? In the last 24 hours I think I would think of other things to do. They mostly involve going to everyone I know and saying, “Are you a Christian? Have you heard the gospel? Have you really heard it?”

Well, that could happen tomorrow, and that’s why God kind of gives us a few hints that we’re on a long game plan here. The Bridegroom tarries. You don’t know the day or the hour.

The wheat and the tares are growing up. It takes time.

The wheat and tares are still growing. The earth is supposed to be full of people, and it isn’t. The Church is supposed to become a body knit together in love, fit for Christ. That’s kind of hard to prove. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” It’s a prayer we pray. Did he mean for it to be sort of tentative?

Like a wish.

Yeah, it’s a wish. We ought to wish for it, but we don’t really expect God to do that.

So in the basic elements of the faith there is this encouragement that God is not playing a game with us. He’s not saying, “Look, I’ve scattered some of my elect out there someplace. There may be a few thousand scattered across the world. Go find them, and when the last one is saved then Jesus will come.”

I mean God could have done that, but I think the Bible story would be very different if that was his game plan. We’re never told to go hunt and pick for the elect. We’re told to preach to everybody. We’re to preach not tentatively. You’ve heard the thing, how Calvinists witness. “Hello. God may or may not have a wonderful plan for your life.”

We offer Jesus freely. He died for the world. Yes, we understand limited atonement and we understand that it’s effective for the elect and all of that, but that’s not the gospel as such. The gospel is Jesus died for sinners. Believe and be saved. That’s what we’re called to preach and not, “Well, I don’t think God would elect someone like that.” We don’t get to make those calls.

Anyway, let’s just assume for the moment that at some point in earth’s future – and it might be a very distant future, not within our lifetime or our grandchildren’s lifetime possibly, maybe a lot longer, God is faithful to a thousand generations – that most nations find themselves composed mostly of Christians who are on their way to sanctification but maybe aren’t the greatest Christians ever, but really love the Lord and want to learn the Bible and want to do his word. Most nations are like that.

You think that maybe those nations would decide not to wage war on one another? You think? I mean it’s true that Baptists and Presbyterians still do little snide remarks at each other, but…

Even Catholics and Protestants have pretty much chilled.

Yeah, we’ve got to the point where we don’t try to kill each other anymore, so thumbs up for us. God has sanctified his Church to that point. Can we take it to the next level, where there are enough Christians in most countries, at least the big ones who have nuclear weapons, so that we just decide we’re not going to do that anymore. In fact, we’re going to trim back our governments a bit in the first place.

If that were to happen, then of course it’s the preaching of the gospel and it’s also God smashing all opposition, all those people who have nuclear weapons and want to blow up other people for the fun of it. This is what happens.

And he shall judge among many people and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks. Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

That’s where Isaiah’s prophecy stops, but Micah adds just a little bit more.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

Vine and fig tree is an expression that was used back in the days of Solomon when the kingdom was at peace. It’s used a number of other times, sometimes a bit rhetorically or even facetiously, but the idea is clear enough. You have your own little garden back there, and when the day is over you can go take a nap out there and you’re safe.

It’s a beautiful image.

It’s a beautiful powerful image.

And it’s interesting that it’s not the community garden.

No, it’s his own garden, his own fig tree and vine, but the images are garden-y and agricultural. And then he adds this, and for years and years this confused me because after saying that these nations are basically going to become Christian, or at least most people in them are, he says this –

For all people will walk every one in the name of his god…

And I used to think, “Wait, that sounds like he’s going back on it, like the nations will continue to walk in the ways of their false gods.” Finally I figured out what he’s saying. He’s simply stating a truth. People walk in the way of their gods. If you worship Baal, you walk in the way of Baal. If you worship the sovereign state, you’re going to walk in the ways of the sovereign state. If you worship science, you’re going to walk in the way of science.

It’s a statement of a generality, like train up a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old that’s how he’s going to live.

Your religion, your worldview, your worship dictates your culture, and that’s an obvious thing to say here. What happens here is, “Wait, Micah, how is this possible? There are so many wicked people.”

“Yeah, people walk in the ways of their god. Maybe you need to change your gods.” If you change the god, you change the culture, you change the civilization.

And that’s not the goal, per se. Changing the civilization is not the goal. It’s the worship of God, and this is the outflow of it that’s a good thing.

This is the fruit of it, and it’s not something to despise either. Having a Christian home doesn’t mean that our foremost goal is to have nice well-behaved polite children who are safe and clean and eat well.

Because if you focus on that alone in isolation, you’ve lost the main thing, a Christian home, because you’ve got a moralistic home now.

Yeah, you have a moralistic home and you’re guilty of idolatry.

While we were saying that, my wife just handed me a note that I think tightens up the focus here. What we’re talking about is as you come to know your God, you do more and more walk after that God. You look back at America in the late to mid-1700s and people gave lip service to a God, the Creator, the God of nature, who may or may not have been the triune God of the Bible, but people weren’t precise. A lot of people just said, “Oh, he said God. That’s my God, obviously.”

And as late as the ‘50s, ‘60s, and even ‘70s people would say, “Oh, this candidate, he mentioned God and he quoted the Bible. Obviously, he’s a Christian and he shares my values.” No, that’s not necessarily so.

But today you say God and people know exactly what you mean, because the people who are saying God are Christians now, pretty much, or you’re talking Allah, but they’ll say Allah, they won’t say God mostly. They will be very precise. We’re getting more precise, and as we get more precise the battle lines are drawn and the judgements come, and our need to be relevantly preaching God’s word, in words that both our enemies and friends can understand, pushes on us all the more.

My wife’s note also mentions the parable of the wheat and tares. Part of eschatology has to be the reckoning that, as time passes, Christians will become more self-consciously Christian. The Church will become more self-consciously the Church.

I mentioned before we start with Jesus is Lord, and then we move to the Apostles’ Creed, then the Nicaean Creed, and then we come to the Reformation and we get the Formula of Concord and Calvin’s catechism, and before too long we have the Westminster Standards, which are rather voluminous as things go, and the Three Forms of Unity, which put together probably equal the Westminster Standards.

And the Westminster is considered a consensus document.

And it is, and that is an excellent point to bring in here. So is the Heidelberg Catechism. They’re very much consensus documents, because nobody thought that everybody was in agreement on everything, because they knew from experience they didn’t. So they tried to frame things of, “Okay, what can we say that most of us in this room are going to accept and sign on and not walk out in a huff?”

So you look at the Westminster Standards, and from our point of view, “Wow, that’s pretty radical. They’re taking some really hard positions.” Yeah, there were a lot of people in that group who were, “Yeah, we believe that, but also this thing over here.”

“Don’t mention that right now, please. Talk about that with your people back home.”

They were trying to find the common ground, but it was biblical common ground.

Our school has a confession of faith. It is Trinitarian. It is very, very mildly Calvinistic. We speak about faith being the gift of God. That’s it. Now, that’s enough because once you acknowledge that faith is God’s gift, not man’s creation, you’re Calvinist if you follow it out consistently, but most people don’t. So we’re using a very broad consensus document. It’s Trinitarian. It’s Chalcedonian. It’s 6-day creationist. And with that, there’s enough for us to teach our Bible classes and go from there.

One day perhaps we’ll have something even more definitive than our Reformed Standards, but probably not next year. We’re in a process of growth, and to canonize the Reformed Standards would be a huge mistake. I think they’re really accurate. They may be almost flawlessly accurate, except in one or two points where they kind of disagree. I’m not a Sabbatarian, I’m sorry. But aside from that, they’re these wonderful statements of the faith that we can agree with, and yet there’s more we could say, and maybe one day will say, if God gives us time and if he keeps growing the Church.

So that’s part of this whole vision. The Church becomes more the Church, with the result that the culture she influences becomes more self-consciously Christian. At the same time, the world becomes more self-consciously the world.

When I was a kid we hardly even knew what the word homosexual meant. When you talked about it, you said it in low whispers or you used what we considered cuss words to describe such people, because we didn’t know anybody like that. It was weird. It was mentioned in passing. With Casablanca there were a couple references to homosexuality, and most people don’t catch them.

They’re so oblique.

Yeah. The young guy who’s keeping company with Sydney Greenstreet, the fat man, I forget his character’s name, he’s called a gunsel, which is the word that’s taken out of the original novel. Everyone thought that gunsel meant a guy who carries a gun. That is not what it meant, but nobody knew what it meant until they left it in, figuring “No one’s going to catch that one.” No, they didn’t. It has a very particular connotation in that culture.

Yet now, if you don’t say positive things about homosexuals, you’re going to be berated, accused of being a hate monger, a Nazi, and all kinds of other things, so that’s within 50-60 years. The world has become more worldly, more self-consciously so.

Now, is that a good thing? As long as they have power and the trappings of power that Christians put in place for 200 years, that’s kind of bad, but can that lifestyle sustain a culture over centuries? The simple answer is no, they don’t produce children, how can they?

“Well, they have to get our children.”

“Yes. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, please.”

They’re working on that actively. That is their goal.

That is their goal. It has to be their goal, if they care, and most of them unfortunately apparently do.

There’s just a little bit more here.

For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.

Then skipping a little bit to verse 7 –

…and the LORD shall reign over them in Mount Zion from henceforth, even forever.

One thing that I haven’t said and we should say, just in passing before we leave, is that the second coming of Christ is not in view here. “In the last days once Jesus returns…” is not here. Now, I can give props to our premillennial friends in that they realize that this is a historical setting, but they miss what’s doing it. It’s not the return of Christ in glory. It’s not that Jesus comes and forces everybody to worship him. That’s a very different approach to sociology, to eschatology, and to the doctrine of salvation and the covenant.

If we say, “You know, the gospel pretty much fails to win people. Well, Jesus will come here and twist their arms and get their worship that way,” that’s not in harmony with what the Bible is saying. What it’s saying here is the word of the Lord is flowing forth from the Church while God judges the nations, and that’s what’s going to make the difference, however long it takes, in whatever form it takes, and however sneaky and however much darkness it moves through.

When Paul is speaking in Galatians 3, he says God preached the gospel to Abraham, saying “In thee shall all nations be blessed.” That’s this, God blessing all nations, and Paul calls it the gospel. It’s not just about me being saved, although that’s really important to me, but God’s vision is bigger. He wants to save nations, and that’s what Jesus said. “Go make disciples of all nations.”

Good stuff. We should switch to recommendations. I’m not supposed to go last, so I will go first. There’s an episode of a podcast called Cooper and Cary Have Words. I recommend the podcast broadly, but there’s a specific episode that’s available currently called “Why Build a Cathedral?” with Steve Jeffery. Their guest Steve Jeffery is a postmillennialist by his own labeling, speaking of labels. The joke is, “Wow, how did a British man become this optimistic about anything?”

I will tell you the library of this podcast that’s available does rotate. They only have so many of the archives available at a time, so it’s on Spotify now. It’s not behind the paywall. If you want to get behind the paywall you can give them money, which I don’t dis-recommend. I do that and get lots of benefit from it, but this one is available for free right now, so there’s a time limit. I don’t know how long that’s going to be the case.

Bryan, you got one?

I have two, because I just thought of a second one. Speaking of podcasts, I’ve recommended a podcast before called The Rest is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who I do not know as well from his writings. Tom Holland is fantastic. He’s my favorite agnostic. He’s the one who wrote that really fantastic book Dominion, which is about Christian history, which I’ve also recommended. I just love the guy.

Which I’m still reading.

I’m told he is a church attender.

He is, really? That is an update, given my last knowledge. That’s exciting, good for him.

I’m still working my way through their backlog of episodes. They recently had another podcaster, and your comment about paywalls reminded me because it’s Dan Carlin from Hardcore History, another podcast that I’ve recommended as well. He’s known for his 4-1/2- to as long as 6-hour episodes on given topics, and sometimes there are multiple 4-1/2- to 6-hour series on a particular topic. I think the last one was on the history of Imperial Japan from its beginnings as a world power before World War 1 to its fall in 1945, a really great episode.

Anyway, the episode of The Rest is History where they interviewed him was very fun. It was a two-parter because you can’t fit Dan into one episode, and it was really good, so I recommend that one.

The second recommendation is a TV show that I grew up watching, that my wife and I have started watching through together. It is Psych, which is excellent. I just watched it as it came out as a kid, because we had cable, and I’m watching it now and I missed like 80% of the jokes because of my youth, which isn’t to say that all the jokes I missed are inappropriate. It’s a cable show, it’s a modern show, so those are there too, but there’s just a lot of references that just went over my head. I thought that I didn’t live under a rock, but I did.

So I recommend Psych. The writing is clever and the character dynamics are amazing. The two main guys are just like best friends since childhood and it’s wholesome brotherly affection and love and making fun of each other, because that’s what you do.

When you have a wholesome relationship with another guy.

Exactly.

I’ll tell you, because you’ll appreciate this. One of my favorite gifts that I’ve ever given was a pineapple-shaped cutting board, where I did some lettering work and David did word-burning over my lettering work to make it permanent, and it says, “You know that’s right.” [laughing]

I’ve been waiting for someone to say, “I’ve heard it both ways.”

I love that. That’s so applicable in so many circumstances.

The number of times it’s come up, it’s so good.

My recommendation is a little more theological, and I feel sad about that for some reason because yours were more fun. St. Athanasius wrote a book called On the Incarnation of God the Word. It exists in translation. It’s on the internet, easy to find, but the translation is into an older English so you might have to work with it a little bit.

What he’s doing is arguing simply that Jesus is God, and among his arguments are the coming of Christ shut down all the magic, all the oracles, all the demons that inhabited and infested the ancient world, and they were many. He empowered young people to live sexually chaste lives, which was a complete revolution in the pagan world, but along the way he mentions the effects of the gospel in bringing peace, and he quotes the passage we’ve been talking about.

He looks to the barbarian nations on the borders of the empire and says, “They’re beating their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks. It’s happening, guys, and only the Messiah, only God could accomplish this.”

Of course, we can look back and say, well, it began and then it failed, and then it kind of picked up, and then it failed. It’s not all done, but he understood that peace on earth is the fruit of the gospel and that there is no other way to bring peace.

As a history book and as a theology book, Athanasius is the one who defended the deity of Christ at Nicaea, so there is much to profit and it’s not a terribly long book.

C.S. Lewis wrote a famous preface. And as we’ve been kind of talking tangentially about history, I think that brings up another relevant point to this discussion, which is that every time we look at history we have a limited view. We have to take a beginning and an end point; otherwise, we’re not doing history.

So when we look at the scope of things and say, “Well, it went up or it went down,” that’s because we’re only looking at one select point. We have a framework we have to impose on the things that are happening. God is the only one who doesn’t have to do that. He’s the one who can see what’s really going on, so we take him at his word when he says, “This is the way it is.”

You reminded me of something. It’s not a recommendation but it’s just a funny connection. Speaking of introductions that Lewis has written, he wrote an introduction or a favorable critical review when Tolkien’s book Lord of the Rings came out, and in it he compared Tolkien and his work to not Dante Alighieri but another major Italian poet and classical author of some kind. Tolkien later was like, “You know, I’m very grateful for Lewis for writing that, but I think he could have done without that.” He was very British.

Thank you guys 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 or visit our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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