Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 2

How to Grow in Christ (& Fight the Devil)

Practical Christianity 10
Luke 4:1-4 

Prayer: Father, we live in dark days when so many call evil good and good evil, and so many professing Christians just go along with it. But we know that you have called all of us to this moment, to this battle, so please equip us now for the fight. Do not let us grow weary. Strengthen our arms; strengthen our hearts with Your mighty word and Spirit, in Christ name, Amen. 

Introduction
We live in a culture careening toward disaster and destruction. We have been struck by madness that murders the unborn and castrates little boys and girls. The root cause of all of this has been our nation turning away from Christ. We bought the lie that secularism was possible, that our public square could be religiously neutral or agnostic. And having swept the house clean, seven demons have returned and filled our land. We are living in the ruins of that impossibility. Our once fruitful nation is become a barren wasteland full of demons. So as we face this reality, it must be said that our nation needs Christ, and those who know Christ must grow in Him. Growing in Christ is not an attempt to escape reality. Growing in Christ is the only way to actually live in reality. Christ is ultimate reality. Growing in Christ means fighting the devils in our land. 

When anyone confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and they believe that God raised Him from the dead, they are saved (Rom. 10:9). This offer is made to all freely and to their children: call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved (Acts 2:39, 16:31). And this is why all who believe and their households are offered baptism (Acts 16:33). This is what God calls becoming a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17) and the new birth (1 Pet. 1:23). This is all pure grace, received by faith, not by works, lest any man should boast, but it is the kind of work that God does in us that causes us to begin working and growing (Eph. 2:8-10). We are not saved by good works, but we are saved for good works. We are saved in order to grow up as trees that bear good fruit (Lk. 6:43). And the kind of good fruit we are talking about are flourishing families, businesses, cities, nations, economies, sciences, and arts. We are talking about fruitfulness in every area of human life because it all belongs to Christ. But this kind of fruitfulness comes into conflict with all unbelief.   

Therefore, after becoming a Christian, the task before us is growing up into Christ, growing into maturity, becoming fruitful in every way, and doing battle with the Devil. So this message is about that: growing in Christ and fighting the Devil and all His works. 

Summary of the Text
We might be tempted to think that being full of the Holy Spirit might mean everything going easy in our lives, but here we see that it was just when Jesus was most full of the Holy Spirit, right after His baptism in the Jordan River, that the Spirit led Him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Lk. 4:1). Being full of the Holy Spirit and having the blessing of God upon you means you are ready for battle. The same thing happened to Adam in the Garden: right after all that blessing, God allowed a dragon in the Garden. Having God’s blessing means you are ready to grow, but growing usually requires a struggle. Not only was Jesus being tempted by the devil, He ate nothing and was incredibly hungry (Lk. 4:2). This was a physical as well as a spiritual test and struggle. Now God had just proclaimed that Jesus was His beloved Son at His baptism (Lk. 3:22), but forty days in a desert and severe hunger can make anyone doubt or forget and the devil started there, tempting Jesus to doubt God’s Word and maybe just double check “if you’re really the son of God…”, suggesting Jesus turn a stone into bread (Lk. 4:3). But Jesus knew to doubt His Father would be sin, and He refused, quoting from Deuteronomy, that His life was upheld and strengthened, not merely by bread, but by the Word of God (Lk. 4:4, cf. Dt. 8:3). So we face the temptations of the devil in our finances, in our families, in politics, in our thoughts, in our friendships, on social media, and the only way to face these fights is by trusting our Father, trusting His word, and growing in Christ. Man does not live by bread alone.

And let me just add here: many of you are coming in for landing on the school year and looking forward to summer. And summertime can be a great blessing, different routines, vacations, etc., but let this message be a bit of a warning: don’t let your guard down. Don’t coast. Think of the summertime as an opportunity to be fruitful in somewhat different ways. More time as a family, more time for other activities, yay sunshine, but don’t be seduced by the devil into thinking that this is “me-time.” No, this time belongs to Christ. Your summer belongs to Christ. How will you redeem this time and turn a profit on this time for Christ? How will you do battle with the Devil this summer?

Six Steps for Growing in Christ
Growing in Christ is a lot like growing up. So how do you grow up? Eat well, get enough sleep, exercise, go to school, learn from your mistakes, work hard, etc. Then it just happens. Plants and trees grow this way also: sunshine, water, good soil, fertilizer, pruning, etc. So here are six steps for growing in Christ. This is not a mechanical check list; these are crucial ways you trust God and live by His Word. This is how you grow strong in Christ and fight the Devil. 

1. Read your Bible: Many folks in our community do the Bible Reading Challenge, and it’s a bit like cross-fit for Bible reading. If you want to get in Spiritual shape, it really is a great blessing, and I commend it to you. But if you’re not in great shape, and you don’t have regular Bible reading habits, just start reading a chapter a day. If you’ve never read the Bible before, read the New Testament first and then start over in Genesis and read the whole thing. The key thing is regularity not quantity, but as you grow, you’ll want more. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). 

2. Pray: God is real. He created the Heavens and the Earth, and He made us in His image for communion with Him. Pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father…” Pray the Psalms – they are 150 inspired prayers that God loves to hear and answer. To be a Christian is to receive the Holy Spirit of adoption that means you have been granted the same sonship as Jesus Christ, and you are invited to cry out to God as your Abba Father (Rom. 8:15). What do you tell your father? What do you ask from your dad? God is your perfect Father. 

3. Read the Bible, pray, and sing as a family: Men, you are called to be the spiritual leaders of your home. Husbands, wash your wife in the water of the word (Eph. 5:26). This is how you love your wife like Christ loves the church (Eph. 5:25). Fathers, you are specifically required to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). Dedicate a regular time to this and lead your family before the Lord. This can be very simple: read a little bit of Scripture, pray, and sing a song. When the kids are little, this can take less than 5 minutes; when the kids are older, it can grow. 

4. Repent of your sins: This is the invitation of the gospel that Jesus Himself preached: “the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mk. 1:15). To “repent” means to turn around, to stop going one way and go the other way. The Bible describes this as putting off the old man and putting on the new man (Eph. 5:22-24). Stop lying and tell the truth (Eph. 5:25, cf. 5:28). Stop looking at porn and lusting, pursuing a wife and be faithful to one woman and the children she bears you (Prov. 5). Do not be drunk with wine/pot/drugs, but be filled with the Spirit, singing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to the Lord (Eph. 5:18-19). Stop cursing and using filthy language, but let your mouth be full of thanksgiving, praise to God, and edification (Eph. 4:29, 5:3-4). Be anxious for nothing, but with thanksgiving, let your requests be made to God (Phil. 4:6).

5. Forgive those who have sinned against you: this is perhaps one of the central acts of repentance. The old, natural man is full of hatred, bitterness, and resentment (Tit. 3:3). And this part of the old man dies hard. This is why Jesus taught us to pray that God would “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The warning of Christ is clear: “But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses” (Mk. 11:26). Bitterness is a root that will cause much trouble, and it defiles many families, churches, and communities (Heb. 12:15). Bitterness is a hurt that isn’t healing, isn’t fading. We forgive for the sake of Christ (Eph. 4:32). Forgiveness is paid with the “currency” of the blood of Christ. 

6. Go to church, keep Sabbath, and tithe: “Going to church” means worshiping the Lord, and “worship” means complete surrender. When you become a Christian, you surrender in principle. This is what it means to confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” This means beginning to obey Him in everything. But two particular ways you demonstrate that complete surrender is by keeping Sabbath and tithing. From the beginning, God’s people have imitated God’s own rest, when He finished His work of Creation. Christians rest on the first day of the week because that is when Jesus finished His work of New Creation (Heb. 4:9). Sabbath includes fellowship, hospitality, and community. We do not live by bread alone, nor do we live in Christ all alone. We have been baptized into community, the body of Christ. So make a point to fellowship after church, and get together with folks. And lastly, we embody our full surrender with our tithes: we tithe, giving God ten percent of our first fruits, confessing that all that we have is from His hand, all that we have belongs to Him (Gen. 14:20, 28:22, Mal. 3:10). And if you haven’t been tithing and aren’t sure you can, start by simply dedicating a fixed percent: 3% or 5% and then see how God blesses you and work your way up to 10%. 

Conclusion
As we face a chaotic and confused world full of devils and devilish forces and temptations, we must live by the Word of God. We must fight in the strength of God. And this means growing in Christ: read the Word, pray to Your Father, worship together as families, repent of your sins, forgive one another, fully surrender and dedicate your time and resources to God. 

We do these things not as slaves but as sons who have been redeemed. We are not slaves; we have been set free to serve our king. By His grace, we are His armies. We have been baptized and given His Spirit, and you know what comes after that. When God is pleased with His sons, He sends them into battle. And these are your weapons. This is your armor. We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We live in Christ, and therefore, we must grow in Christ and fight the devil. 

Prayer: Father, please apply this message exactly where it needs to be applied. Encourage those who are already doing these things, and give them your peace and joy in the midst of the battle. Give strength and courage to those who know they need to address some of these things. Do not let us be fools who smile and nod and then walk out of here and do not change. And we ask for this in Jesus’ name…

Trent & Nora

“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). 

This gospel is essential for Christian marriage. It’s of course true that non-Christians can and do get married. Marriage is a natural institution, established by God at creation, and so atheists and Hindus can be married. But because of sin, marriage is naturally harder and more difficult. When Adam and Eve first sinned, God promised that there would now be enmity in the world, and to the woman He said, “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” What was intended by God to be a harmonious relationship between husband and wife, because of sin, became significantly more challenging, not to mention the greater difficulties in work, sickness, pain, and ultimately death itself. 

So while non-Christians can be married, there are certain inherent difficulties that they will face. And I want to underline one of them here, and that is the difficulty of forgiveness. I know that many non-Christians try to forgive and they would even say they believe in forgiveness, but apart from faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they cannot really forgive. I know that’s a pretty extreme claim. So let me explain. 

Sin is not just a mistake. Sin is not just accidentally bumping into someone. The Bible teaches that sin is brazen disobedience. Sin is inexcusable. Sin is doing evil to someone else. And if you think about it, you can’t really ever undo sin. You can’t really put it back. How do you calculate the hurt of lies? How do you calculate the pain of adultery? How do you calculate the damage done by certain biting and malicious words? Everyone has sinned. Everyone has said and done evil things to others. When you ask for forgiveness, what are you asking for? The best non-Christian answer is something like not holding it against them, letting it go. But on what basis? Maybe because you know you’ve done bad things too? You would want them to do the same thing for you? 

But the pain and damage of sin builds up, and eventually it will be too much to bear. The Bible says that sin is the kind of damage that requires death. The wages of sin is death. When His disciples asked Him how many times we should forgive, Jesus said seventy times seven, and His disciples about fell over. How is that possible? The answer is the gospel. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Christian forgiveness is not merely letting sin go. When a Christian asks for forgiveness, he is saying please forgive me for the sake of Christ. Christian forgiveness is not us absolving one another of sin. No, sin is inexcusable. None of us can make up for sin. The harm and damage is done.

So this is why Christ died. Christ died in our place so that we could be forgiven before God and so that we could forgive others. In a marriage or family, sin will happen, just like messes happen. I know it’s hard to imagine, but there will be dirty dishes, dirty laundry, and trash to take out in the Oland house. So the only question is whether you will deal with it or not, and the only way to deal with sin is by the blood of Christ. 

In 1 Jn. 1:7 it says, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” How do we have fellowship with one another? By walking in the light. The problem is that none us walk in the light naturally. Sin is darkness, and every one of us has a darkness problem. The next verse says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” If you say you’re full of light and you have not darkness, you’re a liar. 

So how can sinners walk in the light? The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. So how do we get that blood on our hearts and hands. How can we get clean and walk in the light? The next verse tells us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:9). None of us can cleanse ourselves or cleanse anyone else, but Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He died and paid the infinite cost for the infinite damage of our sins. What we could never pay for; Christ paid in full. 

So what we do is confess our sins: we acknowledge them to God and anyone we have sinned against, and God forgives us and cleanses us from all unrighteousness for the sake of Christ. So this is the basis of Christian fellowship: we walk in the light as we confess our sins and receive God’s forgiveness and ask one another to agree that Christ has paid for it. This is the basis of our asking forgiveness, and this the basis of our extending forgiveness. We forgive those who have sinned against us because Christ has paid the cost. So this is why I say apart from faith in Jesus Christ, you cannot really forgive. On what basis can you honestly say that the someone is cleansed of their sins? “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”  

So Trent, the charge to you is to lead your new household in this gospel of forgiveness. You must do this first of all by confessing all your sins to God regularly, so that you are walking in the light and have fellowship with God. Then you will be in a position to lead your wife in the same light and the same fellowship. You are required by God to love your wife like Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. Cleansing your wife with the water of the word means teaching, encouraging, and correcting your wife according to God’s word. But Jesus says, how can you remove the speck from your wife’s eye while there is a log in your own eye. This doesn’t mean you have a free pass. This means you must get the logs out of your own eyes regularly, so that you can see clearly to assist your wife. 

Nora, the charge to you is to submit to your own husband in the grace of this gospel of forgiveness. We live in a world that has coddled women for far too long, and really done a great disservice to women by not addressing their particular sins. So the charge is for you to walk in this light, by confessing your own sins to God and maintaining a clean heart before Him so that you will remain in fellowship with God and be in a position to bless your husband greatly as he leads you in this fellowship. The Scriptures say that you are to submit to your own husband as the Church submits to Christ. And of course the irony is that your husband is not perfect like Christ, and so the great temptation will be to point that out from time to time. But Scripture says your best bet is to simply adorn the gospel with your way of life. How can you do that when you are being asked to submit to a fallible man? By being tender-hearted and forgiving him just as God in Christ has forgiven you. 

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Noah & Libby

[Note: In a funny providence, I wasn’t able to give this homily, but Pastor Wilson kindly did in my absence.]

“Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun” (Eccl. 9:9).

Initially, this verse seems a bit cynical. Live joyfully all the days of your vain life. Live joyfully with your wife all the days of your meaningless existence. But the word often translated vain or vanity actually means something more akin to vapor or wind. The point isn’t that life is meaningless, but that it is fleeting and mysterious. 

As the rest of Ecclesiastes points out, there is nothing under the sun that is certain, nothing under the sun that is fixed. It is all wind and vapor. What the KJV translates “vexation of spirit” modern translations have improved with “striving after the wind.” Or even better, the word for striving is closely related to the word for shepherd. This world can often feel like we are trying to shepherd the wind. Try to get a handful of wind or vapor, much less herd it into a pen. Our attempts to plan our future, our attempts to understand world politics, even Solomon in all of his glory who could do virtually anything he wanted came to the conclusion that since everyone dies in the end, whatever you work for has no guarantee after you go. And many calamities happen in this life. Life under the sun is vapor and wind, shepherding the wind.

Nevertheless, the wise man concludes: “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd” (Eccl. 12:11).  Because there is a God in Heaven who will judge all things, and because He shepherds the wind and sovereignly rules over every detail under the sun, wisdom is still real, and we are set free to enjoy this life for the gift it still is. There’s nothing better, the wise man says, than to live joyfully, to enjoy your labors, your wife, bread and wine, and to fear God. Everything is in the hand of God. And wisdom acknowledges this and rests in this. 

So the charge is to live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vaporous life. And implicit is the inverse: live joyfully with the husband whom you love all the days of your wind-blown life. And it might be tempting to think that this lowers the bar: just survive, just make it. But the wise man says that the words of wisdom are like nails fastened, and are given by the One Shepherd. While this world is a windy and uncertain place under the sun, the Word of God found in the Bible is firm and sure. It gives us nails that secure things in this life that are otherwise impossible to secure. God is still sovereign, and we rest in His wisdom. But the instructions that God gives are nails from the Shepherd of the Wind, so that in small ways we can be faithful under-shepherds of the wind with Him. 

So what are some of those nails? 

Noah, the Scriptures clearly teach that you are called to take responsibility for your wife and family. When things go wrong, do not be like Adam who blamed his wife. Do not be like Aaron who blamed the people, or Saul who did the same. Be like the Good Shepherd Jesus who gave His life for His bride. Jesus Christ was the only man who had the right to say it wasn’t His fault, and He refused. He took responsibility. And by taking responsibility, He led us to the cross where all our sin and guilt was put to death. In all the wind and vapor of this life, the Cross has been planted in this world and it can never be moved, and when you lead your wife to the cross, there is a great calm, a great peace there that can be found nowhere else. Loving your wife like Christ has loved the church does not mean doing whatever she wants to do; if that was love, then we would not have let Christ die for us. No, love is doing what your wife needs in order to become more holy and pure. And from this day forward, it is your God-given responsibility to find out what that is. And as you dwell with your wife with this understanding, you do her great honor, and your lives take on great gravity, greater glory because they are fastened with nails from the Good Shepherd of the Wind. 

Libby, the Scriptures clearly teach that you are called to submit to your own husband and respect him in the Lord. When things go wrong, you will be tempted to panic, to try to seize control, to be fearful or insecure, but 1 Peter 3 says that your task is to help your husband not through panic or grasping, but through your chaste conduct coupled with fear. And I take this to be talking about the fear of God. If you fear God, you need not fear any man, much less any calamity. And if you fear God, you trust the nails He provides for securing everything good in this life. In Proverbs 31, it says that favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain (or vapor or wind), but the woman who fears the Lord, shall be praised. The fear of God allows you to continue at your station when it gets really windy. When the kids are challenging, when finances are tight, when your husband makes a decision you’re not sure is the right one, you can keep on submitting and respecting because You know that there is a God in heaven who sees all things and He is watching over you in the wind. 

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Photo by Jordan Arnold on Unsplash

James Lindsey and American Sneetches

Introduction
James Lindsey’s atheistic underwear is showing again. He cares about truth a great deal, but he won’t tell us what truth is grounded in. He has been very concerned with the “woke” Gnosticism of the left, mystical knowledge of power dynamics that confuse and divide people into classes in order to capture more power – we might call it the dialectic of Sylvester McMonkey McBean, weaponizing the discontent, envy, and ambition of American sneetches everywhere. And Lindsey has rightly pointed out that there is no reason why certain factions on the right can’t employ the same tactics – what Lindsey is calling the “woke right.” 

Now some on the right are suspicious of this name-calling, since it can sound like more woke-left cancel culture: call people bad names and get people to pull away their skirts in a pseudo-offended purity swoon. And both sides have a point. The people blaming the jooz for all societal ills and the Corey Mahler types arguing that blacks are inherently incapable of as much sanctification as white people really are a kind of “woke right,” or what some of us have been calling the “dank right.” Classifying people by superficial attributes like the amount of pigment in their skin or ethnic ancestry is as reckless as anything Kimberle Crenshaw has come up with. 

But part of what many on the right have come to see is that you can’t fight an all-encompassing worldview (various Marxisms) with the nerf sword of vague, universal “values.” Family values, American values, and the like have been weaponized and turned into cudgels to beat Americans and their families with far too many times. Liberty and justice (to name just a couple) are real values that exist in the Triune God and incarnate in particular cultures in real time in history (or not). 

What Auron & James Said
So my friend Megan Basham recently suggested on X that we need a “constitutional nationalism,” and Auron McIntire replied by saying, “While this is a good faith attempt to solve the problem it actually compounds it/ Nations are a people with a specific way of being that is captured by its constitution, written, or unwritten/ The nations defines the constitution, the constitution does not define the nation.” And James Lindsey replied: “Auron isn’t just holding out a ‘living constitution’ here. In fact, he plausibly thinks he isn’t. Fascists generally believe in the nation as an idealized extension of the people in their idealized (“specific way of being”) but unactualized state. Perfected nation as ideal magic.”

Now, James Lindsey is correct that fascists of all stripes thrive on vague aspirations of greatness. They abandon constitutions and the rule of law for an “idealized but unactualized state.” They justify lawlessness in the name of working for some utopian dream. And Lindsey is correct that it’s absolutely possible for “conservatives” and folks on the right to do the same thing in the name of some vague, unactualized American dream. But this is why I reposted Auron saying, “That way of being that Auron is talking about is their religion and culture. Good men craft constitutions like fences that help protect liberty and justice, but bad men always usurp and tear down those fences. There must be a standard behind our fences: God’s Word, Lex Rex.” Auron replied to me insisting that cultures shaped by God’s word will be different and therefore (presumably) their constitutions will look somewhat different – citing America, Ethiopia, Hungary as examples of very different cultures. Which I assured Auron I agree with, as long as we keep the Word of God as the foundation, and I said we need to do that in order to answer the James Lindseys and keep the dank right far away.

Auron said he agreed that the Word of God is central but wasn’t exactly sure what I meant. So here’s what I mean. God, in His kindness has raised up enemies that are slowly but surely cornering us into saying out loud what Scripture requires of us: where does civil liberty and justice come from? The woke left have weaponized all our vague American ideals: equality, liberty, justice, family values, etc. And if the right comes raging back simply demanding to define those ideals their way, then James Lindsey is right: if it’s just a power play, then it’s just a species of fascism. Lindsey is right: there must be a transcendent truth and order over us that we are submitting to. But “the Constitution” is not and cannot be that transcendent truth and order. At its most glorious, it is a dim reflection of certain transcendent principles of justice and liberty.

This is where James Lindsey doesn’t appear to have a category for an epistemologically self-conscious Christian civics. The Bible is not an “idealized” or “unactualized state.” The Bible is not magical or utopian. The Bible is the Word of God perfectly spoken from Heaven. While the secularists claim our religion is just another human opinion among many, the Christian religion refuses that category. This is why many Christians were martyred in the Roman Coliseums. The claim that Jesus Christ is Lord is not an idealized or unactualized reality. Our creed is that Jesus Christ is the incarnate God, and He was crucified, buried, rose from the dead on the third day, and bodily ascended into Heaven where He currently reigns as Lord of Heaven and Earth right now. That is current reality. That is actualized reality – as actualized as gravity, the laws of logic, and basic math. 

So Auron is right, merely human constitutions, even the very best are merely human, and they will ultimately be defined by the people who write them and guard them. They are only as good as the people who continue to swear allegiance to them. We can and should teach and press for originalism and not capitulate to the “living document” nonsense. But it simply is true that the culture of the people is ultimately what will preserve any constitution. A wicked culture with a good constitution will not be slowed down in the slightest by the actual meaning of the words, as we have witnessed repeatedly in recent decades. We must also recognize that merely human constitutions will never be perfect or exhaustively account for every need or problem that will arise. But this doesn’t mean that every nation is left to the whims of mobs or the machinations of evil men.

Conclusion
Christ really is in Heaven, and He really has spoken in His Word. That Word, as it permeates nations, will incarnate and enculturate in different ways. Every good constitution will be a cultural artifact, but God’s Word is over all and endures forever. Our constitution actually alludes to this in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, insisting that there are other rights not enumerated in the Constitution which are retained by the people and the states. Where do those rights come from? They come from the common law rooted in Scripture and nature. Our Constitution insists that there is a law above our Constitution.  

The American War for Independence was not fascist in the slightest. It was not a lawless rebellion in the name of vague humanistic ideals like the French Revolution. No, the American War for Independence was a thoroughly conservative revolution, a defensive war for liberty under law. And this principle is what many on the right are now striving to recover and articulate. It is what I believe Auron is arguing for: America is not merely universal ideas or ideals; it is not even a very fine Constitution; it is rather, a particular people in a particular place bound by loyalty to a particular God and a particular way of life. To the extent that the Constitution has been weaponized by the left, obliterated by judicial activists, and turned into the wax nose of cultural marxists, it is a functional dead letter. That doesn’t mean that we are therefore operating without law or lawlessly. Absolutely not. We are under Christ. We are under God’s law, found in Scripture and nature. This allows us both the freedom to preserve our common law heritage, as well as, as needed, revise our laws and constitutions to more faithfully reflect God’s law and apply it to our new circumstances. To do so is not to play the sneetches game at all, even if some on the right are doing that.    

Tariffs as Affirmative Action

Introduction
While the heyday of affirmative action hiring and admissions policies seems to be careening into the landfill of awful ideas where it most certainly belongs, the persistence of certain insane and unjust tendencies is remarkable. Just when the last fool’s gold is proven counterfeit, another shyster shows up and the sheep herd obediently toward his stall. 

We’ve just been through several decades of official state-sanctioned racism and sexism, reducing people, citizens of these United States no less, to their sex, skin color, or nation of origin, perhaps most infamously illustrated by former President Biden’s vow to appoint a “female person of color” to the Supreme Court. He did not vow to appoint the most qualified person for the job, the wisest, most constitutionally astute person. No, he vowed to use a perverse prejudice, limiting and reducing his choice first to their sex and skin color, which incidentally (and somewhat ironically) gave us Ms. Ketanji Brown Jackson, who among other omens, was notoriously unable to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearings, protesting that she is not a biologist. And the senate dutifully bowed at that DEI altar and confirmed her. 

Of course President Trump has done his own version of this on occasion celebrating the sheer number of female members of congress. But what, an astute observer might ask, has “femaleness” to do with it? To which many would find themselves in a similar position to Ms. Jackson. On the other hand, the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth seems to be on a Trump sanctioned rampage of the military, clearing out every vestige of wokeness, reestablishing a meritocracy based on actual, you know, fighting abilities. And while we might wish for an even more explicit repudiation of women in combat, his rhetoric and policies will surely go a long way toward that goal. 

Laying out Some of the Parallels
Nevertheless, the virus of affirmative action is not yet entirely eradicated, particularly in the economic realm. Economically speaking, tariffs and protectionism are a sort of affirmative action applied to markets. Tariffs are taxes on imports, meant to punish or threaten the country of origin of those imports, but it is American consumers or businesses that will be forced to pay. To the extent that we’re just talking about “leveling the playing field” or “trade deficits,” that’s discriminatory affirmative action. It’s treating the free exchange of goods and services among humans as quotas based on (at least) nation of origin. 

For example, if Trump slaps a tariff on coffee imports from Brazil and Columbia because he doesn’t like some of their economic policies toward the US, the immediate effect is that coffee shops in America that depend on coffee from Brazil and Columbia will pay more for their coffee beans, and you and me will end up paying even more for our afternoon caffeine hits. But that means that those coffee shops that don’t import from those countries now have a superficial advantage in the market. The tariffs discriminate like Affirmative Action in that sense, but they are also discriminating against Columbian and Brazilian coffee growers. Their governments may be corrupt or slimy, but the farmers are usually just trying to make a living. Tariffs treat individual businesses and business owners like they are part of some superficial “class” of enemy. And if you happen have to the good fortune to be living and growing coffee beans in Mexico, your beans are currently (according to GROK) blessed with tariff-free access to American markets. So while Biden’s Affirmative Action pick for the Supreme Court was admittedly a far greater travesty to justice, Trump is currently favoring Mexican coffee over Brazilian and Columbian. That is Affirmative Action in the marketplace: favoring and limiting products and services based on their country of origin.      

Let me be clear: civil magistrates have full biblical authority to protect their nations from actual enemies and limit, penalize, or even ban trade where there are true security threats, egregious moral atrocities, unjust wars, terrorism, etc., but Trump’s team has not laid out any clear explanation for why Mexican coffee beans are currently the favored flavor. 

I’m also willing to leave some room for the use of tariffs and protections as bargaining chips (with the ultimate goal of ending all tariffs), and I have perhaps a bit more patience than some of my free-trade friends to let Trump’s team throw some wild pitches before determining that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.  

However, when it comes to trade policy in general. Many conservatives are being sucked into the affirmative action narrative through the backdoor of previous horrific economic policies. And the parallels between affirmative action and tariffs on this point really are quite striking. 

We’ve Been Here Before
Progressives and fools of all stripes often create problems with their absurd policies and then pretend that the problem was not their previous policy but that they were not able to completely implement said absurd policy: we have just not given them enough money or power. Stupid political policies are known for their inability to work apart from vast amounts of theft and slavery. It’s like the ancient chieftain claiming he can walk through the air if only all of his subjects will let him walk on their backs.

Government schools and socialized medicine are among the chief illustrations of this tendency. We gave the government control (terrible idea), and then when they drove education into the ground, right on schedule, they asked for more money and more control – over and over again. “Now, we will make sure no child is left behind!” – after having driven decades of school buses off the cliffs of Darwinism and all its ugly fruit. And like Lucy with the football, certain Charlie Brown Republicans will be right at the front of the line championing giving more money to government education. Ditto letting government “fix” health care, health insurance, and provide for the poor and elderly. I always just think that’s like asking the DMV to take care of your grandmother. 

But affirmative action was the government trying to “fix” social and economic disparities after having created those very disparities through social welfare policies for decades, while steadfastly refusing to address the actual root causes of poverty: the breakdown of marriage and family and religious virtue. Why did we need government programs ever expanding? Because the government insisted on “welfare,” promoting divorce, adultery, out of wedlock pregnancies, and abortion. And having often targeted minority communities with their sick and twisted “benevolence,” more was needed, and hence affirmative action was required to make businesses and colleges take the ‘products of their misconceptions.’ As Thomas Sowell has famously said, “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do….And that is to destroy the black family.”

Protectionism & Stockholm Syndrome
But a wholesale embrace of protectionism is like running back into the arms of your abuser. It is absolutely true that America has lost numerous jobs overseas, that the rust belt has deteriorated into opioids and despair, but the answer is not more government intervention. The government was one of the central players that did this. The answer is government deregulation. How did we get to this place? It was minimum wage laws, building codes, health codes, labor laws, rising income taxes, rising corporate taxes, rising property taxes, rising employment taxes, and then a few dump truck loads of green energy and environmental insanity. The government has been harrying and harassing employers and business owners for decades, making business in America like doing business in an Italian ghetto. There were no doubt any number of problems with NAFTA, but the main one was the government mafia’s involvement to begin with. The enemy of rural white America (and urban black America for that matter) is the biggest thug on the block: government bureaucrats and regulations. Just look at your paystub. How much got taken from you? And how much did your employer have to pay off the government mob boss to keep you on his payroll?

So when the government comes in and says it will now protect American jobs and American workers, pardon me, if I burst out in a belly laugh. If the government wants to help, they need to stop mugging us with confiscatory taxes and all the assault and battery via rules and regulations. To the extent that working class Americans trust tariffs and protectionism, we have Stockholm Syndrome, returning to our abuser for protection. 

And just like affirmative action, tariffs pick and choose winners and losers, just economically. Instead of sex and color of skin, the focus is on country of origin. Where did you buy those clothes, that car, that computer? It’s so like an abuser to be this controlling. Having beaten you, they say they love you, and then in the very next breath tell you who your friends can be and where you can shop, or at least subtly manipulate you and threaten penalties if you don’t abide by their rules. 

Conclusion
Having robbed the American people for decades via social security taxes, income taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, inheritance taxes, property taxes, and labor laws and health and environmental codes, there is something incredibly insulting about telling American workers that the solution is just paying a little more for everything. Of course the promise is that after a bit more pain, manufacturing will return to America, but under what conditions? Under these same abusive conditions? That’s a bit like a slave master assuring the slaves that after a bit more pain, they won’t ever have to leave the plantation.  

No, the solution is to stop beating the American worker. Stop abusing American businesses. Let Americans be free. Let employers and employees operate freely. Let Americans actually compete. If Americans were actually free to compete with China or India or Mexico, there would be certain things that other nations could do better and cheater, and if there were good reasons for Americans to have access to some goods in case of supply chain ruptures, Americans would see that and prepare for it. But if we were actually, free I have no doubt that we would be very competitive, like we used to be. 

Of course with freedom comes responsibility, and if we were actually free, there would be all kinds of challenges and abuse of that freedom. But then the civil government could do what it is actually well-suited to do: punish criminals. At the same time, such a situation would demand the heavy involvement of the private sector: families and churches and private schools and Christian businessmen cultivating virtue and justice in communities and markets. Families and churches will no doubt fail at various points too, but haven’t we had enough of the solutions of big government? 

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

Parenting Basics

Practical Christianity 8

Prayer: Father, we know that one of the greatest tasks You have placed before us is being fruitful and raising faithful children. And we know the Enemy seeks to destroy your godly seed. So send Your Spirit now to bless this Word so that it may bear much fruit in the families here so that Your mercy may extend to a thousand generations. In Jesus’ name, Amen. 

Introduction
Think of the task of parenting like teaching a child how to ride a bike: When children are very young (0-5), you must do everything for them; in the middle years (6-11), they are beginning to make some choices with lots of guidance and correction; and in the later years (12-17), they are beginning to act independently, with the goal of sometime in late high school telling your child that they are free to do as they please in Christ.  

The Text: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6)

Summary of the Text
The central principle here is that training has a trajectory. We often say practice makes perfect, but it’s also true to say that practice tends to make permanent. What you practice with your children will become habitual. Literally, the text says to “narrow” a child or if we think of Psalm 127’s picture of children as arrows, we might say “make straight” or “sharpen.” We are to do this shaping and sharpening particularly at the “mouth of his path.” We speak of the “mouth of a river” as the beginning or source, so this is emphasizing the early years of childhood as being particularly significant. And the goal is not merely adulthood but even faithfulness in old age. An older minister once said that parents get their report card when their grandchildren are walking with the Lord and thriving. But this goes further, suggesting that we are aiming for when they are grandparents, which would be to see your great-grandkids walking with the Lord.

When They Are Young
When children are very young, faithful parenting means running a benevolent totalitarian dictatorship. You are teaching them initially simply what it means to be human. This will not crush their personalities; it will give them the raw material to develop their gifts and personalities. During these years, the fundamental instruction that God gives to children is to obey (Eph. 6:1). Obedience is right away, all the way, and cheerfully. Delayed obedience is disobedience. Incomplete obedience is disobedience. Fussing, stomping, eye-rolling, back-chatting obedience is disobedience. The reason for this is because God requires all of us to obey Him right away, all the way, and cheerfully. 

During these years, spanking is most prevalent. Despite all the claims that spanking only teaches children to hit, Scripture says that “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (Prov. 22:15). Sometimes parents wish there was some way to get to the soul of a child, and the Bible says, “If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol” (Prov. 23:14). Spanking should be calm, judicious, and include full restoration of fellowship. Remember too that spanking is really only effective as a tool of restoring joy and fellowship – which means that you must have a baseline of joy and fellowship.

The Elementary Years
During the elementary years, children are beginning to have thoughts and opinions, but they still need a lot of coaching. In fact, think about good parenting as good coaching. These people just arrived here a few years ago, and they don’t know hardly anything. Good coaches must explain and practice, explain and drill, over and over (and over). This means that parents must prepare their children for the challenges they will face, like getting ready for the game. Many parents, fathers in particular, provoke their children to wrath by not preparing them for what they will face (Eph. 6:4). What can your children expect at school? What about birthday parties? Shopping? Church? Many times the failures of children are actually report cards for parents. 

So practice obedience regularly. Talk through what it might look like to have guests over for dinner. Practice for church. Practice for birthday parties. Practice cheerful, immediate obedience. Play obedience games. Give opportunities for “do-overs.” Practice makes perfect and permanent. Jesus frequently promises rewards for obedience. There is no reason why parents cannot do the same. You shouldn’t be constantly bribing or threatening, but it’s fine to make obedience fun and rewarding. 

Like good coaches, remember that encouragement and praise is potent, especially when dads do it. When God showed up at the baptism of Jesus, the example He gave us was His beaming pleasure, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17). Say it out loud; say it often: “I love you.” “I’m proud of you.” “You are beautiful/handsome.” As well as many hugs. And in this context teach and praise the glories of masculinity and femininity. 

The High School Years
As children transition into high school years, they really are beginning to practice adulthood. They are away from home more often with sports or school or jobs or friends. They still need your guidance, but they also need your respect and honor. Many parents talk to their teenagers in ways that they would never speak to another adult, maybe not even how you would speak to a teenager from another family. While children must still be submissive to their parents, the goal of parenting during these years ought to be fellowship, friendship, and building deep loyalty and trust. 

While all media and entertainment and technology must be carefully limited and monitored when children are younger, during these years, there should be some careful practice with use of phones, social media, etc. They will be launching into the real world shortly and need to learn how to be wise with these tools. Use of monitoring software, time limits, filters, and so on can be very helpful for parents and older teens. 

The goal is to be able to tell your son or daughter in late high school that they are free to do as they please in Christ. You want to let go of the bike and let them take a few turns in your driveway before they head out into the world. 

Conclusion
The goal of Christian parenting is not merely that our children would survive. Our goal is that our children would thrive. We do not merely want to protect our children from bad influence; we want our children to be dangerous to unbelief and darkness. We want non-Christian neighbors concerned about the Christian influence of our kids on theirs.

No parents have ever done this perfectly, and all of this is only possible by the grace of God. That grace begins with repentance for sins. And there’s nothing quite so potent as parents who repent to and in front of their kids. When you repent, you prove that this is not fundamentally about you or your authority; rather, it is about Christ and His authority. 

Finally, remember that God’s grace always meets us where we are instead of where we should have been. That’s why it’s grace. And if you’re in a place with your kids where it’s been kind of bumpy or gnarly, start over now. Grace is God’s gift of starting over. His mercies are new every morning because Christ died and rose again to make all things new.  

Prayer: Lord, please meet each one of us exactly where we are and do not let us be distracted by where we should have been or where others around us seem to be. Meet us and encourage us and give us the wisdom to know exactly what we need to do now. And we ask for this in Jesus’ name, who taught us to pray…

Adam Smith, Capitalism, and Love

Here’s a charge I gave at a recent Business Makers Summit in Nashville.

Introduction
The most valuable resource in the universe is people. This is because people are made in the image of God. And this means in part that people are makers like God. God creates, and so those who bear His image create, invent, discover, build, design, and produce. But all such things presuppose minds and ideas. As George Gilder has insisted, in the beginning was the Word, and therefore words and ideas are at the heart of all creation, production, all business. 

Adam Smith got a lot right about division of labor and specialization and free trade, but where his work has needed development is in understanding what drives productivity. Adam Smith and capitalism are often accused of defending selfishness and greed. In Wealth of Nations, Smith is (in)famously quoted as saying, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Many critics of capitalism have latched on to this one quote out of context accusing capitalism of inherent greed and selfishness, and even some defenders of capitalism have embraced the charge. 

What Adam Smith Actually Meant
But this is to actually get Adam Smith very wrong, and it has attempted to put a very bad idea at the heart productivity. What Adam Smith was addressing was the inability of individual workers and businessmen to serve all the needs of the world. Later in the same book as Smith describes his famous “invisible hand,” he explains, “As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” While many critics seize upon this and say, “see! He says individuals only seek their own gain and then some magical invisible hand somehow makes it help the public good,” if you are reading carefully, he is primarily underlining the limits of creaturely knowledge. He is not saying, as critics and even some defenders claim, that capitalism works because God overwrites greed and selfishness for good. 

But if we read further we find that Adam Smith had a deeper and far more Christian understanding of “self-interest” and “personal gain” than you might initially think. For example, in his previous book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith opens by noting that however selfish humans may be they still care very much about what other people think and what they are going through. Human personal interest is often closely wrapped up with the interests of others; men are naturally sympathetic and this sympathy is part of their self-interest. Furthermore, he says that it is in every man’s self-interest to be moral and upright, not least because there is a God who will judge all men. It is in man’s self-interest to be moral and virtuous because he will stand before His Maker and give an account one day. Finally, in another place, Smith says that one element of justice is propriety and giving proper attention to objects which deserve our attention (like a beautiful painting or poem). It is in our self-interest to give proper justice to the objects and persons around us. He writes, “what is called justice means the same thing with exact and perfect propriety of conduct and behavior, and comprehends in it… every other virtue, of prudence, of fortitude, of temperance… the perfection of every sort of virtue.” 

While Adam Smith may not have always defined his terms as carefully as we might hope, it is at least arguable that what he meant by “self-interest” includes these considerations of virtue, justice, answering to God, and sympathy for others. At the same time, no finite human being can act beyond their immediate sphere of influence and knowledge. A mere man cannot possibly aim at helping everyone in the world or sympathize with everyone or give proper attention to everyone. All of our virtues must be practiced in our immediate vicinity. Self-interest and self-love certainly must not be self-centered or greedy or selfish, but if the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor “as yourself,” this actually requires some sort of self-awareness and self-interest. But the Bible goes further: A husband is to love his wife as he loves himself, as he loves his own body (Eph. 5). And Paul insists that it is in a man’s own self-interest to love his wife like this because a man who loves his wife like this loves himself. All of this imitates the love of God: in the same place, it says Christ has laid His life down for His bride the church in order to present her “to Himself” spotless. As paradoxical as it may seem, Christ died in an act of supremely selfless self-interest. It is simply a glorious grace that His self-interest included our salvation. 

Capitalism as Gift-Giving
So this is the fundamental idea of capitalism and creativity and all productivity: self-giving. It’s the exact opposite of the selfishness and greed that many accuse us of. Just as God created in the beginning, and all things were created as pure gifts, so too true human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and productivity imitates the Creator by creating in order to give gifts to others.

The free market is truly free because it is the free exchange of gifts. It truly is more blessed to give than to receive, but that doesn’t mean we must refuse all gifts. Wise businessmen know that in order to keep giving the gifts they most want to give, they have to receive gifts in return. This is what a payment is. It is the gift given by the consumer in exchange for the gift we have given them.

While incentives certainly matter, and there are certain laws of incentives that tend to come true over time, human beings are not fundamentally materialistic appetites. We are embodied souls, covenantal beings. And covenants are made and kept and renewed fundamentally through the exchange of gifts. 

But in order to be a good gift giver you must be a constant student. You must be constantly learning. A husband must dwell with his wife with understanding and knowledge to know how to love her well (1 Pet. 3:7). Likewise, you must be studying your resources, your abilities, your assets, and you must be studying God’s world, studying opportunities, needs, difficulties, challenges, and of course this includes studying the people you want to serve – what are their needs, challenges, difficulties. 

In the beginning was the Word, and that means that in the beginning was knowledge, wisdom, understanding. In the beginning was good ideas, creativity, imagination. It is of course true that demand invites some supply. But in God’s world supply has always been the driving force of demand. God created a world for which there was absolutely no demand. And so it is that the true entrepreneur invents, discovers, produces, designs what no one yet knows that they need. And he does it because he has come to understand something surprising, unexpected about the way God made the world and about what the people need he hopes to serve. And the entrepreneur lays his life down, sacrificing great time, energy, and resources for the good of others. In other words, love drives good business.

Love provides goods and services that meet real human needs. Love offers those gifts to others on the free market in exchange for free gifts in return. This kind of Christian love requires risk. Your love may be returned or it may not. If you receive enough gifts in return, you are enabled to continue giving those gifts.

Conclusion
I don’t mean for this to be overly philosophical or vague. It is in this context that I want to say to you business leaders, business makers: go hard. The world wants you to feel bad for working hard, for making money, and for growing your businesses. And too often Christians unfortunately add to that criticism. But understood rightly, business is nothing less than loving your neighbors well. Paul tells Titus that he must make sure that those who have believed in God must be careful to maintain good works – which are good and profitable unto men (Tit. 3:8). What are Christians supposed to be constantly giving themselves to? Maintaining good work that is good and beneficial to others. In order to “maintain” your good work, you have to have spread sheets, good record keeping, good products, quality services, good employees, good customer service, a good price point, and so on. 

And what is all of that? The Bible calls it love. When you work as to the Lord, when you work to truly bless others with quality products and services, you are loving your neighbors. So the charge is to love as many neighbors as you can. Give as many gifts as you can. And make as much money as you can in order to keep creating, producing, and blessing others. This is to imitate your Maker, and this pleases Him greatly. This is good and virtuous and just. And when you do, you are becoming the fullest version of what God created you to be. Or we might say, with Adam Smith, it is in your best self-interest. 

Photo by Jorge Vasconez on Unsplash

He Descended Into Hades

Easter 2025

Prayer: Father, we are gathered here before Your Word. And we are asking that You would make this Word a living word. We know it is a living word, but we so easily deflect it and make excuses. So we are asking that Your Spirit would drive this Word all the way into our souls. Do whatever it takes, so that we may have the fullness of the Risen Christ reigning in our lives, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Introduction
Every Lord’s Day, in the Apostles’ Creed, we confess that Christ “descended into Hades,” although some of you may come from churches where you said, “descended into hell.” In Old English “hell” referred to the “underworld” or the place of the dead, which is what the original Latin and Greek words in the Creed referred to. However, over time “hell” has come to refer in common parlance to the place of eternal punishment of the damned, what Revelation calls the “lake of fire” or Gehenna, where the Devil and “death and Hades” are cast at the end of history (Rev. 20:10, 14). 

This can create confusion: how could Jesus go to “hell?” The answer is that He didn’t. While it is true that He suffered the “hellish” torment due our sin on the Cross, when He cried “it is finished,” it really was, and as He told the dying thief next to Him, when He gave up the ghost, He went to “Paradise,” or what ancients would have understood as the place of the dead or Hades. 

So as we celebrate the resurrection, it is fitting to ask, what does it mean that He “descended into Hades”? And the answer is: having fully suffered for the sins of all His people, Christ went down to that lowest place to release His people there and so prove that nothing can stop Him from bringing all His people to God in the highest place: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Pet. 3:18). Christ is Lord. Nothing can stop Him. 

The Text: “…When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?…” (Eph. 4:7-10).

Summary of the Text
Paul is in the process of summarizing our great unifying inheritance in Christ, and in order to do that, explains that when Christ ascended into Heaven, He led captivity itself captive and gave gifts to men (Eph. 4:7-8, cf. Ps. 68). But Paul pauses here and points out that before Christ ascended, He also descended, not merely to earth but even into the “lower regions” of the earth – and that is the Greek word that appears in early versions of the Apostles’ Creed (Eph. 4:9). And Paul explains that Christ has descended that far and ascended above all heavens in order to fill all things (Eph. 4:10). He has done this because He is the Lord.

A Biblical Cosmology
In the Old Testament, the word for the grave and the place of the dead was “Sheol.” In Homer, the “underworld” was a literal place called “Hades” that Odysseus traveled to, but even in Scripture, God forbids necromancy (trying to communicate with the dead) and when the Witch of Endor summoned Samuel’s spirit, it came up out of the ground and Samuel foretold that Saul and his sons would be joining him shortly (1 Sam. 28:12-19). David prophesied, “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell [Sheol]; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10). When the Apostle Peter quoted that verse at Pentecost, he translated “Sheol” as “Hades,” using the traditional Greek name for the place of the dead, and said it was talking about the resurrection of Jesus (Acts 2:27). 

In the parable that Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus, He pictured Hades as a place of torment for the wicked but a place of rest for the righteous: “And in hell [Hades] he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom” (Lk. 16:23). The ancients also refer to this as “paradise,” which Jesus referred to on the Cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43).

A Protestant “Harrowing of Hell”
The traditional name for this teaching is called the “harrowing of hell.” Harrowing means “to raid, harass, cause distress, or lay waste.” The Church Fathers sometimes allowed their imaginations to run away on this point (and some of this is probably the origin of the Roman Catholic notions of purgatory and praying for the dead, which we reject), but putting all of this together: before the death and resurrection of Jesus, all people went in spirit at death to the same place called “Sheol” in Hebrew and “Hades” in Greek, which was divided between a place of torment and a place of restful waiting (Abraham’s bosom/Paradise). But the saints of old could not enjoy the fullness of the presence of God until their sins were actually paid for, which is suggested in Hebrews: “And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11:39-40). 

Therefore, when Christ cried out, “It is finished!” and breathed His last, His Spirit left His body and descended into Hades, the place where all spirits were waiting. But He went there in order to “lead captivity captive.” He went there to proclaim His victory over sin, death, and the Devil to the damned (1 Pet. 3:19) and to release the Old Covenant saints out of Abraham’s Bosom/Paradise in Hades and usher them into the presence of God in Heaven. This is why Jesus tells John in Revelation, “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell [Hades] and of death” (Rev. 1:18). When Jesus rose from the dead, it proved that His soul did not remain in Hades, and if it could not remain there it is because He has the keys. And this is why God’s people who die on this side of the resurrection are immediately with the Lord in Heaven.  

Applications
So this is the point: Christ is Lord. Christ is Lord of All. Christ went down to the lowest place to proclaim His victory (His Lordship) and bring all of His own directly to God in the highest place. He did this to prove that nothing can stop Him from bringing His people to God – He is Lord. If nothing could stop Him from bringing Adam and Abraham and David to God, there is nowhere you can wander where He cannot reach you. The Old Testament saints were heroes, but they were also deeply flawed heroes who had far less to go on. Think about the high-handed disobedience of Adam, and the adultery, murder, and rape that mark the families of God’s Old Testament saints, and Christ did not leave any of them in Sheol/Hades. And if He did not leave them, He will not leave you.

“He descended into Hades” means there is no sin so dark that Christ cannot save you. There is no prison cell of sin so secure that He cannot release you. Do you feel trapped in sin? Do you want to stop, but you don’t know how? Are you locked in some dark place? Hades was the one place (death) where you might have thought the God of Life could not go, but He is Lord of all. 

Think of Jonah rebelling against the Lord fleeing to Tarshish into a great storm and swallowed by a great fish for three days and three nights – that’s high-handed rebellion and disobedience and it doesn’t get more trapped and lost than that, but Jonah prayed: “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and He answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice” (Jon. 2:1-2 ESV). 

Have you run from God? Have you rebelled in your heart? In your mind? In your actions? Do you feel trapped? Are you lost? Are you locked up in sorrow, regret? Call out to the Lord in your distress. He will hear you from wherever you are. 

But there is a huge difference between actually calling on the Lord and “doing the religious thing.” There’s a story in the New York Times a couple days ago about how many people in America left Christianity in the last generation but report feeling like nothing they have tried has replaced what they had. One woman who left Christianity because of its teaching on women said, “I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now.” But that is simply a way of saying that she wants to remain her own lord, her own god, her own savior. She wants Jesus on the side, like a good diet, like a life hack. 

But God isn’t interested in being your “life hack.” He sent Jesus so that every knee would bow and confess Him Lord: in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. Calling on the Lord in your distress means honestly humbling yourself and acknowledging that He is your only hope for every area of life. Christ must save and Christ alone. Christ is Lord.

But even “Reformed” types can carve out areas where they functionally try to keep Christ out: entertainment, music, finances, politics, social media, etc. But wherever you have functionally excluded Christ, that is your personal Hades. But He is Lord, and He claims it all.

The Bible is clear that after death, there are no second chances: we will all stand before God’s judgment seat (Rev. 20:12, 14-15, Heb. 9:27). And Revelation 20 says that at the great judgment they will open the books of all our deeds. Everything you have thought, said, and done will be revealed – no lies, no spin, no excuses, no hiding. But there will be one other book at that judgment also open, and it is called the Book of Life. And Scripture says that if your name is written in the book of life, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done because it has been paid for by Jesus Christ. But anyone not found in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire. So, is your name written in the book of life? Have you called on the Lord? Have you placed all your hope in Him?

If you trust your own deeds, your own righteousness, you will only sink down further, but if you place all your trust in Christ, there is no pit so deep that Christ will not find you there and bring you to God: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt. 12:40). 

And so He was, and He is risen from the dead. 

Prayer: Father, we know that You are able to say the word and the dead rise, the sick are healed, the enslaved are set free. And that is what I am asking for – for everyone here – that no one would leave this place not knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection. And so we ask for it in His good name, and we pray the prayer that He taught us to pray…

Crucified Before Your Eyes

Good Friday 2025

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” (Gal. 3:1)

Paul told the Galatians that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ had been clearly set before their eyes – and this was crucial to their obedience to the truth. But how had they seen it? They lived far away from Palestine, years after the crucifixion. 

One of the striking things about the Reformed Protestant tradition is the lack of crucifixes in our worship. You will not find statues or paintings of Christ hanging on the Cross in our churches or religious art. Part of this is an historical point. Jesus Christ is not on the Cross anymore. He suffered once for sins, and He rose from the dead and is alive forever. 

But part of the reason for this is also a theological point, which is that the Second Commandment forbids making images of God. This is because our attempts to picture the living God will always end up falling so short of the reality that they end up being some kind of lie. Jesus Christ is God, the perfect revelation of the invisible God, but God did not give us a picture of Him. And therefore, to make our own pictures, even of Jesus, to imagine what He might have looked like is always a false image.  

The Heidelberg Catechism says that the Second Commandment means we must not make “any image of God,” and that “God cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way.” Then it asks, “But may not images, as books for the unlearned, be permitted in churches?” And the answer is, “No, we should not try to be wiser than God. He wants the Christian community instructed by the living preaching of his Word – not by idols that cannot even talk.”  

We sometimes think that we know better than God, but this is always foolish. We think that if we have pictures or images we will understand better. But God knows us. He knows what we need. And the thing about images and statutes is that they are lifeless: they cannot talk. They put something before our eyes, but when it comes to seeing God, pictures cause us to see less not more. This is because God is alive. God is the fullness and abundance of infinite life.

But does this mean that God does not intend for us to see Him in any way? Not at all. In Galatians Paul said that Jesus Christ was set before their eyes clearly as crucified. So how was Jesus Christ set before their eyes as crucified? By the living preaching of the Word, as the Catechism says. 

In the first instance, never forget that God has made His own authorized images of Himself in the human race, which at last count is around 8 billion people on the planet. God does not object to images of Himself at all. He simply objects to our clumsy attempts at making our own images of Him. But people are His authorized image of Himself. Male and female, they picture His creativity, His joy, His life.

And God became man like us, a perfect man. Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God. He was fully God and fully man from the moment of conception and throughout His life: the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. But from the moment of conception and throughout His life He was on a collision course with sin, death, and the Devil. He came as the Light of the World colliding with darkness and demons. But even then, the Revelation was still coming to a full boil. We see this sometimes when Jesus healed someone and told them not to tell anyone. And so often they went out telling everyone. But it was like He was an artist working on a canvas saying the full picture is not complete yet. It was like He was saying, ‘Wait, wait for the whole thing to come together.’

And so it was that the perfect Son of God, the perfect image of God came together as He was betrayed by a close friend and handed over to corrupt religious leaders. And they brought Him before a feckless magistrate and manipulated him into sentencing Christ to death. And soldiers stripped Him, beat Him, spit on Him, and mocked Him, and they hammered a crown of thorns on His head and they scourged Him with whips full of glass and stone and metal, ripping chunks of His flesh from His body. Then they made Him carry His cross through the streets of Jerusalem until He stumbled and fell and another man from the crowd was ordered to carry it for Him. And when they brought Him to the hillside outside of town, called Golgotha, which means place of the skull, they forced that lacerated back onto a wooden post and then stretched His arms out on a crossbeam and pounded spikes through His wrists and His feet – before lifting Him up naked, bloody, with searing hot pain ripping through His body, and dropped the bottom of the Cross into a hole in the ground. And He hung there gasping for breath, praying, with a thief and a murder on either side of Him.

Do you see Him? Do you see Him there before Your eyes? Do you see Him as the Sinless One mangled there in your place? Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But this is why God has determined to portray this picture before our eyes through the “living preaching of His word.” A picture, a painting, a statue cannot even begin to capture what is going on. 

One time someone asked George Whitefield if he would permit the printing of his sermons and he is said to have replied, “Well, I have no inherent objection, if you like, but you will never be able to put on the printed page the lightning and the thunder.” It’s the same with artistic renderings of the crucifixion. You can never capture that absolute glory. Even our best photography only grasps bits of glory, but there has never been another moment in all of history packed full of so much glory as those three hours when our Savior hung on Calvary. 

Paint it, sculpt it, draw it – you simply can’t. Why? It will always be missing something essential. It will be missing the essential meaning. You can’t paint that justice. You can’t draw the perfect justice of that scene: the infinite offense our sin being fully paid for. You can’t paint that love: pure, selfless love. You can’t draw the love of God for a loveless race of fools and rebels.

But you can see it. You can see it clearly through the living preaching of the Word. It has been portrayed today clearly before your eyes so that you may believe that Jesus Christ was crucified for sinners and all who trust in Him are completely forgiven and have everlasting life, that you may obey the truth.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Jesus the Giant Killer and Dragon Slayer

Palm Sunday 2025

Prayer: God our Father, we have all sinned in our father Adam, who failed to protect his wife from the dragon and disobeyed Your clear word. But You sent Your only Son into this dark world in order to kill that dragon and rescue us. Please pour out Your Spirit on this Word now so that no one in this room would leave without clearly understanding how this has been accomplished and having the peace of knowing they have been set free. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Introduction
You could summarize the story of the whole Bible as “Kill the Dragon; Get the Girl.” This is what Adam failed to do, and it is what our Jesus has done. In a garden long ago, Adam was commanded to guard the garden to not eat of one tree and to lead his wife in fruitful obedience, but a crafty serpent-dragon was allowed into the garden and Adam failed the test. He listened to the voice of his wife rather than listening to the voice of God. But God promised a seed of the woman, a descendant of Eve who would come as a new Adam, who would listen to the voice of God and crush the head of the serpent and take back his spoil, take back all his captives. We remember and celebrate Palm Sunday as the beginning of that great combat, when our hero, Jesus Christ, rode into Jerusalem to face down our mortal foe, strip his armor, set us free. 

The Text: “… When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils” (Lk. 11:14-22).

Summary of the Text
One of the highlights of Jesus’ earthly ministry was casting out demons – demons that deformed the image of God, as we see here with someone who could not speak (Lk. 11:14). But some accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of some greater demon, the “chief of the devils” Beelzebub and demanded a sign to prove otherwise (Lk. 11:15-16). But Jesus pointed out the folly of such an accusation, since that would mean that Satan was divided against himself and was fighting against himself (Lk. 11:17-19). But rather, if Jesus casts out demons, it proves that the Kingdom of God has come; if Jesus is casting out demons, an invasion as begun (Lk. 11:20). For when an armed strong man is secure in his palace, everything is calm, but when a Stronger Man comes and kills him, He strips his armor and divides the spoils – and that is what Jesus was doing (Lk. 11:21-22). And that’s why we need to talk about dragons and giants. 

Dragons & Giants
The Bible clearly teaches that there have been dragons in this world, and they are frequently associated with evil powers. In the beginning, God created great sea monsters (Gen. 1:21), and the same word is translated “dragon” in Isaiah: “In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Is. 27:1, cf. Job 41). In the wilderness, Israel was attacked by “fiery serpents,” literally “serpent-seraphs,” suggesting that Satan is a fallen “seraph,” which Revelation seems to confirm: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Rev. 12:9) – which also explains why he showed up as a dragon-serpent in the garden (Gen. 3:1). 

The Bible suggests a similar typology with giants: “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth…” (Gen. 6:4-5). The word for giants is “nephilim,” which is what the spies saw in Canaan, which was likewise full of wickedness (Num. 13:33, Gen. 15:16). Some believe that the “sons of God” were fallen angels that intermarried with human women, which might account for where giants came from and their great wickedness, and Jude suggests that something like that has happened, as also suggested by the perversions of the men in Sodom (Jude 6-7, Gen. 19:5). I think “sons of God” more naturally refers to the descendants of Seth in Genesis 6, but I also think weird demon-human relations likely happened at some point in history, given what Jude says and ancient mythology (e.g. Ovid’s Metamorphosis). 

Regardless, a great deal of the conquest of Canaan included giant-slaying, and these were vile, wicked men (Dt. 2:11, 20, 3:13). Chief among the wicked giants was Og king of Bashan, whose iron bedstead was 13.5-15 feet long and around 6 feet wide (Dt. 3:11), suggesting that he was perhaps 12-13 feet tall. If AI is to be trusted, Og might have weighed between 900-1000lbs. Of course the most famous giant was Goliath, probably descended from those same Canaanite giants, but who lived a few centuries later, the champion of the Philistines: he was over nine feet tall (1 Sam. 17:4). “And he had an helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of brass. And he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. And the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron: and one bearing a shield went before him” (1 Sam. 17:5-7). He was clearly a gigantic man, and the word for coat of “mail” is literally “scales,” like a dragon – He was a dragon of a man, part of the “seed of the serpent.” David and his “mighty men” were giant-dragon slayers (cf. 2 Sam. 23). And therefore it is no accident that when David struck him down, he cut off his head (1 Sam. 17:51). 

Binding the Strong Man  
There really were dragons and giants on the earth in those days, and they were often the instruments of the Devil, the dragon of old and his “giant” power in the earth. As with the men of Israel who cowered before the Philistine “strong man,” his greatest power was fear. The greatest power of dragons and giants has always been their ability to instill fear, which is the greatest power of Satan. And this is why Jesus came, to destroy that power: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15). 

The power of the Devil, and all his demonic seed, is fear of death, and men fear death because of their sin. For sinners, death is a judgment: “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Sinners know that they are guilty before God and deserve death, and it imprisons them. It is like chains. And you cannot stop sinning, no matter how hard you try. So this is why Jesus had to come and die: “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:13-15). So this is how Jesus bound Satan, stripped his armor, and divided his spoil. He took the death that we deserve, forgiving all our sins, blotting out all the laws we have broken, nailing it all to His Cross, and rose from the dead to set us free from the tyranny of the Devil. 

Applications
The name “Satan” literally means “accuser.” In Revelation 12, right after it says that the Dragon, the serpent of old, has been cast out of Heaven, it says, “And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Rev. 12:10). The Dragon as the Accuser (Satan). His power was in accusation. 

The Dragon says, you lied, you cheated, you stole, you lusted, you were bitter, you fornicated, you committed adultery, you hated, you betrayed, you cursed.  

So then, when was the accuser cast down? Jesus said: “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This He said, signifying what death He should die” (Jn. 12:31-33). Jesus said that when He died, He would cast the prince of this world out. How did the death of Jesus cast the Dragon out so that he cannot accuse us anymore?

What kind of death did Jesus die? Jesus said: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:14-15). Jesus cast the Accuser out by His death because He died the death of a poisonous serpent/dragon because that is what our sin is. The Dragon only has the power of fear and accusation. But when Jesus died in our place, for our sin, He paid the wages of our sin completely. 

“For He [God] hath made Him [Jesus Christ] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Your sin is a dragon. Your sin is a giant. But Jesus became the giant-dragon of your sin on the Cross, and so when Jesus died, your Giant-Dragon died. Your sin is a Giant of Accusation. Your guilt and shame is a Dragon of Accusation. But when Jesus died, your Giant-Dragon died. Your sin was nailed to His cross, and completely paid for. When He died, you died, and your sins died in Him, and when He rose, you rose, and the Giant-Dragon is still dead. He has no more power. 

This is what we celebrate on Palm Sunday: our Jesus riding into Jerusalem as our Great David, our New Adam, our Stronger Man come to strike down that dragon of old, our Goliath-Accuser and set us completely free. Are you still haunted by your sin? Are you still accused by the Great Accuser? Do you have trouble believing that you are really forgiven? That you are really clean? 

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Whoever believes in Him cannot perish but has eternal life. Jesus is Stronger. 

Prayer: Almighty God, do not let us get off this point. Assure us of Your great power over our sins. Assure us of the victory of Christ. And I pray that those words, “No Condemnation” would ring in our ears and in our hearts and fill us with great peace and joy. We ask for this in the name of our Stronger Man, Jesus Christ, the righteous…