Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Sacrificing for the Emperor: Cultural Orthodoxy and God's People

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." ~ George Orwell, "The Freedom of the Press" (emphasis added)

My friends, this is a post that I have wanted to write for several years now. It has been a part of many conversations that I have had with friends, congregants, family, and many, many others over the past few years. Last year, with the SCOTUS ruling on marriage, my desire to write it has been "amped up," but yet, I have continued to let other things get in the way. One of those things is my perfectionist idolatry: there have been parts of this that I felt I was not prepared to write well and I struggle with idolizing perfection. (My idolatrous perfectionism is actually one of the things that keeps me from writing more, which I know God is working on in me but my progress is slow.) Yet, lately, it has been coming back in full-force through many conversations with graduate students in my church. In fact, I lead a graduate student Bible study on Virginia Tech campus, and we are studying the Old Testament book Daniel, which has brought this back up over and over again. We are about to finish with Daniel 6, and again, I have been reminded of this subject and felt compelled to write, whether or not I am prepared to do it perfectly. So, this post will partially be a study in Daniel 6 and partially my musings on current cultural trends in light of God's Word and history, and then, next week, Lord willing, I will write another talking about how Daniel and other believes have been faithful under harsh times.

It is no secret that our current culture is pushing Christians to capitulate on its views of sexuality and sexual identity. Any Christian who upholds a biblical view of marriage and sexuality is labeled a "bigot" and "hateful," no matter how politely or lovingly they make their stand or even if they hold that view quietly, and any Christian who refuses to use their business to support any agenda of a sexual-progressive movement is sued and most are losing those suits (in this most recent case, even actor and vocal supporter of LGBT issues, Patrick Stuart, is against the ruling). In fact, even teaching the biblical view of sexuality in a Sunday school class might soon be labeled "extremist" and suppressed in the UK. And, some are coming right out and saying that anyone who descents from the culture's view of sexuality should be forced to comply with it. It seems our society is approaching a totalitarian state, where a particular worldview of sexuality is the only one allowed in the public square, which reminds us more of the Brave New World of Huxley or Orwell's 1984 than a democracy where individuals are supposedly given human rights. Now, I am not writing this to talk about the details of this cultural issue itself, transgender ideology, whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal, or anything like that. Others have written on the subject, and many have done a better job than I could. I want to look behind this and ask the question, "What is going on? Why is this happening? Is there anything behind this cultural push?" and hopefully provide some biblical and historical encouragement for Christians to follow Christ instead of culture.

That is why I started with a George Orwell quote. Many of you have probably read Animal Farm, and if you have not, I would be willing to bet you have at least heard of it. What you may not know is that Orwell wrote a preface to it that did not end up in the published work called "The Freedom of the Press," from which I quote above. In it, he talks about what we might call "cultural orthodoxy," which every culture has had, although it has taken many different forms. That cultural orthodoxy is, as Orwell writes, a body of ideas that all "right-thinking" people are assumed to hold, and anyone who descents from them in any way is never given a fair hearing, actively suppressed, and often persecuted. Sound familiar? It should. In Orwell's time, it was communist philosophy. In our time, in the West, it is sexual sovereignty: "I am sovereign over my own body and sexuality, and no one can tell me or believe otherwise." But, I think the real issue is not actually sexuality or really even cultural orthodoxy, per se: it is an issue of highest loyalty. To whom will we give our highest loyalty? The Kingdom of God or some kingdom of man?

Let me start with Daniel. Any Christian who grew up in the Church is familiar with Daniel 6: Daniel and the Lion's Den. It is a popular children's story, but, like almost all popular children's stories, it is often taught wrongly. It is often taught as "If you obey God and do what's right, everything will turn out fine for you." There is a grain of truth to that, but it depends on what we mean by "fine." Often by "fine" people mean that life will be generally comfortable and you will avoid most suffering. But, biblically-speaking, "fine" does not mean we will not suffer in this life; quite the contrary, actually. The biblical "fine" means God will use our suffering for our ultimate good, but we will still suffer. But, even that is not the point of the story. The point of the story comes out in the decree that the king is duped into making: "O King Darius, live forever! All the high officials of the kingdom, the prefects and the satraps, the counselors and the governors are agreed that the king should establish an ordinance and enforce an injunction, that whoever makes petition to any god or man for thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions." (vv. 6-7)

We look at that and on the surface are tempted to think it is about praying and worship. That is part of it, but ultimately it goes deeper. The ESV gets the translation right because it is about making a petition not just praying. Praying is certainly in that category, but asking a satrap for tax money to fix a road would be as well, which is why they qualify it with "any god or man." So, then what are these enemies of Daniel doing? They are appealing to the vanity of King Darius--to his desire to be the highest dependence and highest loyalty in Babylon. Whatever we depend upon most will be the thing to which we are most loyal--our highest loyalty. In essence, they are saying, "Make a law, King Darius, that for thirty days no one can have a higher loyalty than you; no one can be more dependent on anyone else than you." That would be a tempting prospect to anyone, and, indeed, it is the original temptation: "You will be like God." (Ge. 3:5) They know Darius will love the idea of being everyone's highest loyalty, and they know that Daniel will not give in to that command. That is why in v. 5 his enemies say to one another, "We shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God." Thus, they have set the trap: make the highest loyalty someone other than God and watch Daniel maintain his loyalty to God. It is a test of loyalty that they know Daniel will fail.

Such a situation is not unique in the history of God's people. This was also the main issue at stake when it came to the official Roman persecutions of Christians. (You can read my summary of early Church persecutions here.) The Romans were remarkably tolerant of religions, philosophies, worldviews, etc. so long as the Roman State was your highest loyalty. They deeply distrusted and hated anyone who had a higher loyalty than the State. If they ever found out that you had a higher loyalty than the State, you were persecuted, and that was exactly the issue that caused the first empire-wide persecutions of Christians from 250 AD onward. Before 250 AD, the persecutions of Christians were localized to various regions of the Empire, and they were not yet a matter of official Roman policy. Then, Emperior Decius came along. Decius issued a decree that commanded all people under Roman rule to offer a single sacrifice once a year to the Roman gods for the well-being of the emperor by burning incense before the local magistrate. When you did, you were given a libellus (the image above is a surviving libellus), which was your proof of sacrifice. If you could not present a libellus when ask for it, then you were sentenced to death. Do you see what he was doing? He was testing the loyalty of his people. If they were ultimately loyal to Rome, they would sacrifice, even if they also had other gods they served, but if they had a higher loyalty to their God, they would not sacrifice. The ones whose highest loyalty was not to the State could then be identified and erradicated. Rome was fine with your religious beliefs, so long as you were loyalty to it above all else. It was a test of loyalty that Decius knew many Christians would fail.

For Daniel and the early Christians, the test of cultural orthodoxy many have been different, but the underlying issue was the same: Who is your highest loyalty? Whom do you really serve above all else? And, what we are seeing today has the same underlying issue, even though the test of cultural orthodoxy is different. The real issue is not sexual autonomy. That is just a symptom of something deeper: a culture that deeply distrusts those who have a higher loyalty than the culture itself, e.g. Christians.

Our culture is fine with religious beliefs and "spirituality" and even encourages it, so long as those beliefs do not lead you to question the prevailing cultural dogma, so long as you pass the test of cultural orthodoxy. For, if you pass that test, it shows you are more loyal to the culture than you are your religious or spiritual beliefs. If you are willing to compromise on that one belief, it shows your highest loyalty is really to the culture; not the God of the Bible. Last year, Frank Bruni of the NY Times tipped this hand and revealed these cards in his article "Bigotry, the Bible and Lessons from Indiana." There he lays it on the line. He tells us that religious freedom is really "freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity." I added emphasis to show you his bottom line: all people, religious or not, must bow to the "enlightenments of modernity," i.e. all people should be more loyal to the culture than their god, religous text, or spiritual beliefs. It is a test of loyalty: Is our highest loyalty to the culture (the "enlightenments of modernity") or to our God?

You see, friends, what we are seeing in culture is what Christians have experienced in all cultures in all times. It is just that the specifics of the test are different for us. Why do I point this out? For two reasons:
  • First, we Christians need to be reminded of this so that we do not begin to think that we are going through something no other Christian community has. We are not. Our struggle is not unique. The true Church of God's people has never been on the "right side" of human history and has always been at odds with cultural orthodoxy. And, in those times where we seemed not to be at odds with the surrounding culture, I would argue that those are the times we have been least faithful to God and His Word. It was not because the test was not there but because we passed it (from the culture's perspective). I will talk more about this in the next post, but we need to remember that because then we can look back on history and see that God sustained His people during all those times and tests, no matter how bad the persecution became. He will do the same today. The gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church (Mt. 16:18). 
  • Second, I want us to realize that whatever the test of cultural orthodoxy is, the issue at the base is always spiritual. The fundamental issue is not sexuality, communism, or petitions. It is always a test of whether or not we will worship God and depend on Him above all else, even if it costs us everything we have in this world. In fact, these were really the issues at stake in devil's temptations of Jesus. And, if we are going to follow Christ through these tests, we need to see them for what they really are: spiritual battles. We need to look past the arguments over sexuality and see what lies behind it: Will we trust God, believe His Word, make use of His means of grace to sustain and train us, and make Him our highest loyalty? That is the question that really matters. It was what mattered for Daniel, the early Church, and all other Christians throughout space and time. 
For now, I leave you with that to ponder. Next week, Lord willing, we will learn from Daniel and a little from Church history how we live as faithful Christians in the midst of these tests of cultural orthodoxy.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Fight the Good Fight of the Faith: Sin in the Camp

First, this week, there is not a devotional that goes with this sermon. As I have mentioned in the past, the devotionals in this series come from emails sent to my church on the Fridays before the sermons. Generally, they have something to do with the passage or subject of the coming sermon. I like to use them to fill in gaps in the sermon series. Because my series are often for a summer, there are a limited number of sermons I can preach, so sometimes I have to skip parts to finish a book or section of a book (like with my Joseph series). This was certainly true with Joshua, for I had to fit 24 chapters into eleven sermons. But, this week, there was not anything major I had to skip to move on, so, instead in the Friday email to my congregation that preceded this sermon, I sent a link to an article about the PCA's racial reconciliation efforts. You can read that article here, if you want, but it is not really pertinent to this series, so I am not going to talk about it. Instead, we will move on to the sermon itself.

Today's sermon is on Joshua 7:1-13, 19-21, 25-26. With this text, we come to the hardest passage of Joshua, I think. Of all the episodes, this is the one to which I was least looking forward. I’d rather preach on the whole conquest of the land and the annihilation of the Canaanites than this, and, by the way, last week’s Friday post covered the tough question of how the holy war against the Canaanites fits in the biblical witness. If you have not read that, you might want to because I think it will help you with a very difficult part of the Bible. But, again, I personally think that’s easier than this passage. Here we come face-to-face with the consequences of sin not only on the individual but on the congregation of God’s people, and that’s not a subject on which I want to preach. But, this is the counsel of God, and really no series on the battle of the Christian life would be complete without addressing the issue of sin, which is probably why the author includes this difficult story in the first place.

If you want to hear more, you can listen to the sermon here or read the transcript here.

I pray that God will use it to magnify His glory in your heart and fortify you for the battles of this Christian life.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Fight the Good Fight of the Faith: God Fights for His People

In the previous post, I talked about the conquest of the land of Canaan because that is one of the difficult ethical issues that this book brings up, and in the chapter that this sermon will cover brings that to the forefront. However, I would not have had time to cover it in the sermon, so I did it in the devotional. So, if you have not read that, please read it first.

In this sermon, we'll see from this passage how God fights for His people in the battles of this life. We cannot hope to stand alone against sin, the devil, the world, and death itself. Our enemies are far more powerful than we are, but God does not leave us alone. He fights for us, just like He fought for Israel in the battle against Jericho.

If you want to hear more, you can listen to the sermon here or read the transcript here.

I pray that God will use it to magnify His glory in your heart and fortify you for the battles of this Christian life.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Friday, October 14, 2016

Fight the Good Fight of the Faith: Holy War and the Gospel

First, let me apologize for taking a couple of weeks to continue this series. I had meant to post these devotionals and sermons once a week, but the past couple of weeks have been really busy for my family and I. However, we are back in the swing of things now, and so here is the next devotional, with the next sermon coming on Sunday.

As I have alluded to a few times throughout this series so far, there are some difficult issues that come up in the book of Joshua that often get attention in from Christians and non-Christians alike. Well, the one that Joshua 6 brings up is probably the biggest: holy war. In the episode we will consider on Sunday, God commands that all living things be killed in Jericho, and v. 21 tells us, "Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword." This is simply a result of the commands God gave to them in the book of Deuteronomy, like 7:1-2:
When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
This should bother us or at the very least make us pause when we read that, and we need to know how to think about it within the whole context of Scripture and what it teaches us about God.

So, what about the "holy war"? How does "show no mercy to them" square with Jesus' teaching about loving our enemies? Well, I want to argue that most often our main hangup here is that we do not have a high enough view of God's holiness. As Christians, we have encountered the grace of God in Jesus, which allows us to enter into God’s holy presence with boldness (He. 10:19-25), because of the promise that we are being remade after the pattern of that same holiness. But, in that grace, we may sometimes forget what holiness looks like to someone who is not so covered by Christ. And, non-Christians, generally do not have a very high or realistic view of sin, thinking of God more as a "smiling grandfather" than a holy, upright, perfect, and just God. However, both those views of God are not true to His being.

God is supremely holy, which means He cannot abide sin without a response. God is a consuming fire (He. 12:29), a purifying power that cannot abide the unholy to remain in His presence without destroying it. God, however, is also a gracious God who does not desire the complete destruction of the works of His hands (cf. Eze. 18:32)--who holds back the consuming fire like a dam holds back a flood. (For more on this balance, see this excellent article by John Piper.) With that tension in mind, I think the conquest of Canaan is best understood as a profound and temporary in-breaking of God’s holiness into an unholy world for a specific redemptive purpose. Let me explain.

In creation, God created the world and humans holy--in perfect communion with Him. Yet, we fell from that holiness and therefore incurred the wrath of the holy God. God's holiness consumes unholiness just as light consumes darkness, and that is what we all deserve in our natural state. Only God can hold back the consumption for a time. And, at the fall of Adam and Eve, God, in His grace, temporarily suspended His full wrath until the day of Final Judgment (cf. Mt. 25:31ff), otherwise Adam and Eve would have been judged and sent to hell on the spot. So, common grace--God's forbearance of final judgment--became a part of the world in which we live.

This has bearing on the conquest of the Promised Land (henceforth referred to as "the Conquest"). The ethics of the Conquest are ultimately those of a completely holy and good God calling the rebellious people, the illegal aliens on His property into account for their sins. And, since the Fall affects all of us as equally as it affected the Canaanites, the implication is that we all deserve, always and everywhere, what they got then and there in Canaan from the Israelite armies. In light of this reality, we must admit that the sheer fact that the Conquest was confined to only one very geographically limited area at only one point in human history is a sign of God’s mercy.

What? A sign of mercy? Yes: one of the purposes of the Conquest is for us to see what must be the inevitable result of our natural standing with God as the sinful human race. Without Christ, we all deserve what they received. The ethics of the Conquest can be seen as a type of what is called "intrusion ethics" (a term coined by Meredith Kline)—a temporary intrusion into history of the ethics of the Final Judgment, i.e. that moment when God finally brings the created order to account so that He can judge all evil and create the new heavens and new earth. That is to say, the Conquest reveals in history, however briefly, what the end of history will look like when Jesus returns in glory to reclaim in total His land and create the true Promised Land.

As we talked about in the devotional a couple of weeks ago, this is an Old Testament type. A type is a real person, place, event, or object that God ordained to act as a visible pattern of Jesus' person (who He is) and/or work (what He does). Just as the OT Promised Land (a type) ultimately points to the true Promised Land--new heavens and the new earth; just as Joshua is a type of Jesus Himself, the Conquest (another type) points to the judgment where God ultimately judges and punishes evil through Jesus as the Judge (2 Pt. 3:10)--the punishment He stayed/delayed at the Fall--and creates the new heavens and the new earth (the true Promised Land). One purpose of seeing such a thing in history is, therefore, to bring mankind to repentance, so that we might be spared that fate when the Day arrives. Not only will God have given humanity the whole of their history of time to turn back to Him, He will have also made it abundantly clear by the Conquest what is to come. But, still many "stiffen their necks" against Him.

All of this has profound ramifications for how we square the goodness of God, as we have encountered it in Jesus, with the severity of God, as we see it in the Conquest. In many respects, they are two sides of the same coin. They both show the extreme lengths to which God must go in order to get humanity's attention. The sad history of Jesus' rejection by His own people only reinforces the point that humankind's fallen hearts are so hardened that we do not respond to God, even when He comes in meekness. Such a sorry state of affairs, such a clear example of our rebellion, makes the extreme ethics of the Conquest seem all the more justified. Further, it illustrates with vivid clarity how, in not getting always and everywhere what the Canaanites got then and there, humanity as a whole has seen merciful forbearance (common grace) on God’s part.

And, we also need to note that God's use of the Israelites of the instrument of His judgment was not because of their goodness. In fact, this is explicitly laid out in Dt. 9:4-5:
“Do not say in your heart, after the Lord your God has thrust them out before you, ‘It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess this land,’ whereas it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you. Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you, and that he may confirm the word that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
God chose the Israelites (and us) simply because of His unmerited, free grace. The Israelites were very wicked and just as deserving of judgment as the Canaanites, just like all mankind is without Jesus. One commentator explains:
Hence Israel must not assume a holier-than-you-all attitude, for Yahweh will not bring his people into the land because they are righteous and deserving; ‘it is because of the wickedness of these nations that Yahweh is driving them out before you’ (Deut. 9:4–5). The conquest is not a bunch of land-hungry marauders wiping out, at the behest of their vicious God, hundreds of innocent, God-fearing folks. In the biblical view, the God of the Bible uses none-too-righteous Israel as the instrument of his just judgment on a people who had persistently reveled in their iniquity.
God, in His sovereignty, chose to satisfy His holy wrath against the Canaanites by judgment and against the Israelites by redemption (cf. Ro. 9:14-21).

Perhaps a typological chart would be helpful when thinking about OT types and the true, spiritual reality in Christ to which they point:

Old Testament Type
True, Spiritual Reality in Christ
The Exodus
Christ’s redemption
The wilderness wandering
This present life
The Promised Land
The new heavens and the new earth
The conquest of the Land
The Final Judgment
King David
King Jesus
Solomon’s kingdom
Jesus’ rule in the new heavens and the new earth

Before I end this discussion, though, there is one more intrusion ethic that we need to mention: the cross of Christ. Just as the Conquest was a temporary in-breaking of God's final-judgment, holy wrath into history, so was the cross, but in this case, God's final-judgment, holy wrath fell not on the culpable human race that deserves His wrath but on His perfect, innocent Son. Christ did not deserve anything but full reward from God, and yet, on the cross, Jesus took the full wrath of God that He would have poured out on His elect in the Final Judgment. That means that all God's holy wrath against His people has been satisfied. Even though He is completely holy and we do not really even understand the depth of that holiness or our sinfulness in comparison, He has satisfied His holiness by pouring out His wrath on Christ for all His elect. This is how the faithful Israelites and all true Christians avoid what the Canaanites got. We deserve the Final Judgment, but since Christ came into space and time and lived as one of us, since He fulfilled the law perfectly, and since He withstood the intrusion of final judgment on the cross, we can have eternal life in the true Promised Land forever.

So, the Conquest is a sad, hard part of Scripture to read, but it is a perfectly just action of the holy God. Yet, we should not look at it mechanically as that but in two ways: 1) as a warning that causes us to pray for and seek the conversion of the lost so they do not get what the Canaanites did and 2) to praise God for sending Jesus Christ to take the holy wrath that we deserve so that we can live with God forever in the true Promised Land. That should lead us to praise as Paul praised God in Ro. 11:33-36 after he finished detailing out these gospel truths about God:
33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
35 “Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”
36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
By His Grace,
Taylor