Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 75

The Exploding Victim-Fleecing Industry

I wrote in the comments of a not-too-distant post that “…there’s an exploding victim-fleecing industry currently making its living off the backs of the afflicted,” and I wanted to follow up with a few thoughts on this.

God made the world such that sin and righteousness, guilt and forgiveness are necessarily at the center of everything. Another way of saying this is that God made the world with covenantal realities wound through the whole thing. Or, to say it in even simpler terms: the whole universe is personal. Everywhere you go, everything you do is related to God. You are either living under God’s personal blessing or else you are living under His personal wrath. There is nothing neutral, nowhere you can go to find escape from His presence.

But sinners gonna sin, and therefore, sinners gonna try to hide their sin. Like our first parents, Adam and Eve, we try to cover our nakedness, our shame. This is the instinct for atonement. Atonement means covering. They used fig leaves, and we use whatever we have at hand. When we sin, we are in some way taking something good and twisting it. And since we are surrounded by His goodness even when we’re trying to cover our sin, we’re still grabbing more of His goodness, twisting it and trying to use that to cover the previously twisted goodness, sin upon sin, guilt upon guilt.

So when we sin, we are plagued with guilt and shame, and God’s answer to that problem is the blood of Jesus. However, sinners enslaved to their sin refuse God’s answer and grab for their own answer, but the wages of sin is death and therefore, at some fundamental level what guilt craves is blood. But it’s not just any kind of blood. Sinners need innocent blood to cover them. Sinners need the blood of a victim.

Sinners rarely think clearly enough to put this all together in complete sentences, but this is true at a visceral level, an instinctive level. And so then, what are guilty sinners in search of? Victims. And since the blood of these victims, from Abel down to the present, only provides a momentary cathartic release and cannot actually take away our sins, guilty sinners need a steady stream of victims in order to get that momentary catharsis to feel more like a continuous covering for their sin, a sort of patched-together, shoe string faux-atonement.

And this is why rational, scientific arguments make so little headway in ending abortion. Guilt drives the whole bloody industry. While I am completely committed to doing everything I can to encourage and push for the complete abolition of abortion in America and throughout the world, I do not believe we will see significant change in our land apart from a massive evangelical revival. Millions of guilt-ridden Americans need to find their full and free atonement in the blood of Christ. This is why many so-called Christians, who claim to be pro-life, cannot find the courage to stand up to the holocaust. Even if abortion were outlawed tomorrow, the bloodlust would break out somewhere else immediately. If blood is not shed in the clinics, it will be shed in the streets. This is simply a fact about the way God made the world. You cannot banish the bloodletting in a land full of guilt and expect everyone to come to their senses.

And like most addictions, what was satisfying last week will not be enough next week. And so the lust for blood grows. And it begins breaking out in child abuse, sexual perversions, self-harm, including genital mutilation, body piercing, increasing suicide rates. But far from the chaos of zombie movies and Halloween specials, I’m inclined to agree with C.S. Lewis that the Devil is actually the supreme bureaucrat:

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the managerial age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see the final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven faces who do not need to raise their voice. (From the Preface of Screwtape Letters)

In other words, the Devil’s deep insecurity is revealed in his lust for organizations and systems and bureaucracy. God created the world with plenty of order, and there’s something truly glorious about the rhythms and cycles of nature. But the personality of God also breaks through in all the changeups and surprises and variations in the order. But if the Devil were in charge, he would obliterate the exceptions, the variations, and the surprises. And so what I mean by all this is that sinners, prompted by their Accuser, instinctively want systems of guilt relief, industries of atonement, programs of shame reduction, ministries of victim-sharing. The medievals introduced confessionals and indulgences, purgatory, penance, and pilgrimages, but the devilish instinct is still with us in creeping ceremonials and rituals in the church, with the white-coated administration of “medicine” to “terminate a pregnancy” or “gender reassignment surgery” — here, would you just fill out this paperwork, and now an explosion of organizations specializing in “helping” victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, PTSD, and the list goes on and on and on.

Now hear me carefully: I’m not saying there are no Christian counselors or Christian ministries that are doing good, faithful work to minister God’s grace to the hurting. But what I am saying is that there is a dark and ancient lust to cover guilt with the blood of victims. There are perverse incentives resident in this world and in the hearts of guilty sinners attracted to victims for all the wrong reasons. They are not consciously seeking to harm the victims, but there is a certain thrill and satisfaction in the high drama, the outrage over injustice, reliving and retelling the cruel and violent acts and words, a vicarious sharing in the suffering, such that there are multiple levels of incentive for perpetuating a victim status, not all of which are selfless. Guilty sinners, if they cannot find a way to make themselves victims, will draw a certain sense of peace and strength from the agony of victims around them. This is what I mean by “victim-fleecing.” This can and will be euphemistically spiritualized as sympathy, compassion, identifying with suffering, weeping with those who weep, and surely counselors will come to truly believe that this is why the work gives them such peace and feels so empowering. But the truth of the matter is that there is a deep victim-lust in the hearts of guilty sinners. And there is a devilish administrative impulse that loves an orderly flow of victims signing up, making appointments, and pouring out the agony of their hearts, and the vicarious sufferers share in the pain, share in the gruesome details like a junkie shooting up.

But you know it’s counterfeit when it doesn’t break the cycle. You know it’s counterfeit because slaves are not actually set free. I was at a memorial service recently where my Dad gave the sermon and he pointed out that if you read the gospels carefully you come to realize that Jesus never did funerals. He was often late to funerals, and when He did show up, He always interrupted them. He always raised the dead. Jesus doesn’t do funerals. He couldn’t even do His own.

And so it is that Christians should be highly suspicious of the explosion of the victim industries, the explosion of what we might call the mortuary arts. We are Christians. We don’t really do funerals. Yes, we bury our dead with dignity, planting their bodies in the ground in the hope of the Great Spring. But mostly we do resurrections. We preach for resurrections. We baptize for resurrections. We pray for resurrections. We eat and drink at a table that proclaims resurrection. And so we counsel and we minister for resurrections. Everything Jesus touches comes back to life. Everything Jesus touches is healed, forgiven, cleansed, and set free. In Christ, our identity is Conqueror — actually, More Than Conqueror — through Him who loved us.

We are not victims. We are not survivors. And we are not here to assuage someone else’s guilt, to make someone else feel a little better about their sin, as they vicariously share in our suffering.

We are victors because there is a perfect victim who has already suffered in our place:

Man of Sorrows! what a name

For the Son of God, who came

Ruined sinners to reclaim.

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,

In my place condemned He stood;

Sealed my pardon with His blood.

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Guilty, vile, and helpless we;

Spotless Lamb of God was He;

“Full atonement!” can it be?

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Lifted up was He to die;

“It is finished!” was His cry;

Now in Heav’n exalted high.

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

When He comes, our glorious King,

All His ransomed home to bring,

Then anew His song we’ll sing:

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

#MeToo & Our American Guilt Crack

So last week I tweeted: “The whole #metoo movement is an attempt at crowdsourcing justification. The reason Christians should hate it is not because the mistreatment of women is acceptable but because only biblical justice can confront sin sufficiently & bring healing through the blood of Jesus.”

And even though this seems to me like one of the more straightforward things I’ve tweeted over the years, it still turned up a few questions that I want to try to answer here, without backing down from what I wrote in the slightest. In fact, God helping me, I want to more than double down. In fact, I’d like to stand on my chair and swing a dead cat over my head while delivering my fiercest Indian war whoops to the general populous.

The #MeToo movement is a complete scam, a complete con-job, a full-throated cheat. #MeToo is a diseased pig wearing a dinner gown and a ludicrous smear of lipstick. #MeToo is a hag with hairy legs shuffling around in a pink tutu. #MeToo is an obese butch with a smoker’s voice trying to sing a lullaby. #MeToo is a parasitic farce that sucks the blood of a charade that picks the fleas from a travesty of a lie that was so lame they gave it a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a sham, a speckled corpse, a black tooth, a fraud.

How can I say such things? Aren’t there hurting women who have suffered unimaginable horrors at the hands of wicked men? Hasn’t our culture propped up a society that gags women from speaking out about their abuse? Shouldn’t Christians applaud the outing of creepy men and cheer the women who courageously come forward to confront their abusers?

Well, actually, yes. A hundred times, yes. And my hatred of #MeToo is precisely because the #MeToo movement isn’t doing any of that. It’s all lies. This is like Hitler wishing the Jews a Happy Hanukah. This is like the KKK running #BlackLivesMatter. This is like Planned Parenthood celebrating Mother’s Day. Oh wait. They did. And we are the sort of gullible, naïve fools who go along with this kind of insanity.

I do believe there are hurting women who have been mistreated horribly, and I hate #MeToo because it will do absolutely nothing to help them. Our culture has propped up a society that gags women from speaking out about their abuse, and #MeToo is more of the same. Yes, you heard me right: This #MeToo idiocy will end up silencing far more women than it liberates. Yes, Christians should applaud evil creeps getting justice and those women who testify against their abusers. But that isn’t what is happening in the slightest.

How can I speak with such assurance? How do I know that it’s all a bunch of rotting lies? Well I’m glad you asked. The reason I know is because the #MeToo movement has not raised one little finger of defiance against the massive, enslaving burdens that our culture has laid on the backs of women. You cannot banish transcendent standards of justice and truth and morality from the land, and then stand up and make anything like a moral pronouncement without at the same time proclaiming yourself a god or goddess. There is always a god, a goddess, a deity, and therefore, we will either have the God of Heaven and His Christ who was crucified and raised from the dead for the salvation of the world or else we will have whoever is insisting that it must not be Him. And mark this: everyone who rejects Jesus Christ is gaming for His job. And all the pretenders to Godhead are tyrants, slave-traders, abusers, Pharaohs, genocidal maniacs.

But this is all much too philosophical. Let us state it simply for the simpletons. The same people running this circus show called #MeToo insist on the right of women to murder their babies. Full stop. Do not tell me that these clowns have any interest in women. They are murdering them by the thousands, by the millions. I do not say that Planned Parenthood is doing some good, since butchering babies is only 3% of what they do. But there is more. The same folks pontificating from their thrones of moral godhead would also have us believe that it is good and right and beautiful for a woman to have her breasts removed because she hates that God created her as a woman. Any movement that claims to care about the abuse of women must speak up here or else they are liars.

Or how about the pornography that passes as artistic expression in film? How about all those “brave” women take a stand there – insisting that they will not sell their bodies like so many pieces of flesh, like objects to be ogled and used? But the fact of the matter is that if there ever was a strike and the women walked out of Hollywood and said they weren’t going to sell their flesh anymore, you better believe it would go down in flames. There is no deep virtue hiding in Hollywood. The whole damn thing is propped up by the lust of men. Right now we have a highly controlled release valve scapegoating some of the more annoying elements of the demonic monster we have created. Weinstein and Schneiderman are sacrifices to the goddess, and meanwhile, there is absolute silence on pornography, nudity on screen, abortion, not to mention all the LGBT perversions. I will believe #MeToo is something more than a pharisaical virtue signaling when Bruce Jenner is officially notified that he is a big part of the problem, when Cecile Richards is publicly condemned for her role in our nations’s holocaust, when Ellen Degeneres cannot show her face in public. Then I will believe that #MeToo may actually be about justice.

The question Christians must always be asking is by what standard? At the moment, the standard for #MeToo is clearly the sentiments of the mob and has nothing whatsoever to do with what the God of Heaven has to say about the treatment of women. Because that sort of thing would actually require repentance based on the Bible. But in it’s place, the high priests of our culture offer their dollar store knock offs, which cannot be anything other than faux-justice because they are making it up on the spot. Their “justice” allows for the murder of millions of babies; their “justice” allows for the exploitation of women on the screen. And then in croaking unctuous tones they announce that they don’t care about the plight of women and love deplore the systems of silence that have caused great money harm. And the Christians come running with their wide precious eyes, their naïveté pinwheels spinning on their gullibility caps, groveling at the skirts of their lubricious overlords begging for a few more crumbs of guilt crack.

These people cannot set you free. They do not know the way out of the dungeon of guilt and pain and shame. They are not here to help. How could they? They are here to lead you further into the dark, further into confusion, further into silence. They love the darkness. It’s where they hide, and it’s where they want to take you. They call their slavery freedom, and they call their silence speaking out. You cannot banish justice and then offer anything resembling a solution. Despite all her faults, the Christian Church has the advantage of at least still clinging to something resembling a standard — the Bible. But #MeToo cannot offer anything other than more confusion, more silence, more harm because it officially believes there is no such thing as justice, no such thing as a standard, other than the whims of their mob lust. And this being the case, all it can offer is more guilt, more shame, more pain, more confusion, and all in the name of helping.

And this is why I said the #MeToo movement is an attempt at crowdsourcing justification. But there is no amount of attention that will make your pain go away. There is no amount of sympathy from the masses that will make it right. You will not get justice, healing, or relief by the social media mob. They are drunk on their lusts. And yes, while they put on their compassionate, sympathetic face for you, they cannot justify you. They cannot put it right. In order to be justified, you have to have a standard of justice. And the standard is currently: we have no standard. We must be “free” to do whatever perversity comes into our minds. But mark it carefully: by that standard Harvey Weinstein is your hero; Weinstein is your god.

My point is that we are Christians. This doesn’t mean that we overlook sin or pretend it doesn’t exist. The center of our faith is a Roman cross and a perfect man beat to a bloody pulp for sin – a good man, the only good man, screaming and gasping for air – for our sin, for our healing. By His stripes we are healed. We are not healed by the number of people who know we were abused. We are not healed by the number of people who thank us for our courage or tell us how sorry they are for how we were treated. We are healed by the blood of Christ. We are healed as sin is actually named, confronted directly, and biblical justice is brought to bear. This means that no matter how horribly we have been treated, we must confess and be forgiven for our own sin. This means recognizing that every son or daughter of Adam has joined the rebel mob to some extent and therefore we all need justification, we all need to be forgiven and made right. And the God and Father of our Lord Jesus offers free mercy in His Son. He offers justification simply by faith alone, by trusting in His Son dying in our place and receiving His perfect, spotless righteousness in return. And if God justifies, no man can condemn, no mob can accuse. And from this place of perfect justice in Jesus Christ, the only Just One, true justice may be sought in this world. This may mean calling the cops, calling the elders, calling parents, calling a school superintendent, and if one of those doesn’t work, calling their superiors. But this isn’t an emotional blowup, vindication by outrage, which is a fire that never goes out and a sword that ultimately devours all those who try to wield it. This is biblical justice, fully submitting to the Word of God, worked out in the shadow of the cross where God takes away our burdens, truly sets us free, and heals every wound. In the shadow of this cross, God assures us that He is Lord, and that He is making all things new.

How Thabiti’s Repentance Got Hijacked

Doug Wilson has already done a great job of explaining some of what’s wrong with the recent apology fest with Beth Moore and Thabiti Anyabwile leading the charge. And I would like to add my two cents as well.

Let us begin by noting that the devil is no slouch. He loves to set up the optics both internally and externally to make questioning his attacks look utterly heartless and impious. How could anyone find fault with tearful, heartfelt apologies, heartbreaking letters of appeal? What kind of monster do you have to be to make fun of that?

My friend Tim Bayly likes to say that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is a monster. In the land of the blind, when we love our blindness, the ability to see seems like utter arrogance, hatred, and a monstrosity.

But here we are, and what shall we do? Ignore the truth?

So, brother Thabiti, with all due respect, you have been hijacked. After coming on to CrossPolitic, you wrote a gracious followup post responding to our episode on the MLK50 race conversation on Crosspolitic. You picked up on that phrase that our man Chocolate Knox used, a wonderful phrase, “Hijacking Repentance,” and I’m so thankful that you did. I have to think that it stuck out to you for good reason, and I think at the very least it was providential. But let me tell you straight: you just got hijacked. You are riding a train that is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go. Your car was heading to Florida but you just gave your keys to somebody driving to Canada. You may have an official ticket from an official ticket office, and it may have all the appropriate signatures and seals and bumpy embossment, but you are being played by thugs and gansters.

What do I mean?

Here’s the thing: Christians naturally have tender hearts when it comes to confession of sin. We know we are sinners, we know that Christ died for our sins, and we are (rightly) eager to confess sin, have clean hearts, and be reconciled to our brothers and sisters. But this is how the hijacking works: It’s a play actually being run from two different directions. In every sin there are at least two sides: the side of the one who sinned and the side of the one who was sinned against. The devil is currently running some of his most effective plays on Christians from both of these angles, milking both sides, mugging us coming and going.

What do I mean? Well, fundamentally, we have a standard problem. This is what we talked about on CrossPolitic in our short reply to your blog post on this topic. What Choc Knox was getting at and what we tried to explain was the often missing standard when it comes to Christian repentance. In order to repent of sin, Christians must define the sin biblically, and then having defined the sin biblically, we have to find out how the Bible prescribes repentance for that particular sin. These are the same two categories or angles where our repentance is getting hijacked. Christian repentance gets hijacked when the standard is unclear or ambiguous. Christian repentance is always for sin — which is to say, something that Jesus died for. And this really is why the act of repentance is such a sacred thing to Christians. Jesus died for our sin; His blood was shed for all of our sin. And this is important: His blood was not shed for a bland, ambiguous file cabinet of miscellaneous sins. He died for particular sins, for particular acts, thoughts, words that are unclean, shameful, evil, disobedient. This is why sin must be defined biblically. And this means it must be as specific as possible.

But the devil’s play is to get us to confess our sins ambiguously and vaguely. This has a number of pleasing results for the devil. This makes it harder to be sure that you have actually confessed everything needing confessing, it makes it more difficult to know if you are really forgiven, really clean, and the same goes for those who have been sinned against. How can they be sure you really confessed all of it? How can they be sure that the sin has really been fully dealt with? Has sufficient restitution been done?

This is where the devil hijacks our repentance — on both ends of this transaction. If he can get the perpetrators to confess vague sins, he can keep sinners shackled in the ambiguity of sorrow and regret without any real confidence of forgiveness and freedom. And if he can get the victims to traffic in the vague confessions, the devil can keep victims in the ambiguity of sorrow and shame without any real confidence of resolution and freedom. And tenderhearted Christians can get sucked into this black hole because it can feel very spiritual and brokenhearted. But there is a massive difference between the broken and contrite heart that God loves and leads to true freedom, and the emotional death camp of vague guilt and shame.

Now add to all of this the fact that we live in a culture that is in high rebellion against the God of heaven. We have thrown down the 10 Commandments symbolically and judicially. We have officially enshrined lies, theft, murder, and sexual immorality as the law of our land. And meanwhile, we are slowly but surely demanding that the backward knuckleheads who still want the Bible to be our standard of ethics and justice — that those morons be silenced. California is on the from lines of this fascist regime, but the same tyranny is in the DNA of every act of rebellion. You cannot demand that millions of babies be slaughtered and imagine that you will be allowed to carry on believing in Jesus in your heart. The judicial demand for baby blood is itself a defiant middle finger at the God of Heaven and all those who are loyal to Him. Now comes the Obergefell decision mandating homosexual “marriage” in all fifty states, and California is following the logic faithfully: all those who would teach or counsel transexuals or homosexuals to repent of their sin must be disciplined and punished. And parents may not remove their children from the sex-ed classrooms that seek to indoctrinate them in the ways of deviance and perversion.

And here is my point: we live in this pagan culture in which we have officially insisted that God’s Word is not over us. We will not have Christ as our King. And it is in this climate that the #MeToo moment has arisen. But what is this thing you speak of called morality? Where did you get it? What is this thing that you sing of called R-E-S-P-E-C-T? What is this thing you call human dignity? Why shouldn’t men think and speak and treat women as slabs of meat? Our nation has officially enshrined the sexual urges of man as the highest standard of law in the land. This is what the Supreme Court officially ruled in its Obergefell decision. For any Christian to don the pink hat, to seriously join that hashtag movement, or lend their support to its confusion in the slightest is to bow to the Baals of our day. In the name of what god is the mistreatment of women wrong? In our culture, it is in the name of the mob, in the name of the Supreme Court, in the name of the goddess of sexual deviance. And therefore, for Christians to join that pantheistic catechism class is to sell the farm, to give the keys to our car to thugs, to get hijacked.

The reason why men must treat women with honor and respect is only because of Jesus Christ. We must not take the name of any other god upon our lips. God created this world. God created man, male and female, in equal glory and dignity and honor. Jesus shed His precious blood for men and women, Africans and Chinese and Russians and Americans. This is the only foundation for Christian respect, honor, and repentance.

And so, let me say clearly that I have no doubt that Beth Moore has experienced real mistreatment by Christian men. And I hate that, I abhor that, and I condemn it as antithetical to the Christian gospel.

But you know what I hate even more? I hate the thought of allowing the devil to steal the ground upon which we are even capable of hating that sin. The devil is always making deals. He offered Jesus the kingdoms of the earth if He would only worship him, and when we use the #MeToo moment to address the real sins of Christian men against Christian women, we are taking his cookie. We are making a deal with the devil. Our repentance is getting hijacked.

Real Christian repentance establishes the standard that Jesus is Lord, that the Bible is our standard, as it clearly defines sin, clearly confesses it, clearly puts things right, and brings true reconciliation and freedom. But this is not what Beth Moore’s letter or your follow up apology have done. You have inadvertently created confusion and ambiguity by speaking into that microphone, by implicitly submitting to the false gods of our culture.

Another way to say all of this is that Christian repentance must be obedient to God’s Word, not merely an emotional dumpster dive. And this means that when the world around us is demanding submission to their false gods, Christian apologies must be even more careful, especially for those who would be leaders or teachers. We have an even greater responsibility.

Thabiti, I still hope we can do lunch before too long. You owe Choc Knox that Three Musketeers too! And if you can get Beth Moore to join us, I’d love an opportunity to talk this through even further with both of you.

 

Faces, Rocks, Books, and Screens

I’m continuing to work my way through Tony Reinke’s book 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, and it really does have a number of helpful things going for it. Chapter 2 is entitled “Ignoring Our Flesh and Blood,” and here Tony points out our proclivity to write things electronically that we would never dream of saying to someone’s face (often harsh or angry things), and our simultaneous tendency to pull away from flesh and blood community, prioritizing what Buzz456 is saying in the comments section over the fact that your wife has been asking you for help with your two year old progeny for the last hour.

There are good reminders here that really do need to be heard and applied. At the same time, in the interest of trying to encourage a broader discussion of all of these topics, I’d like to push in somewhat different directions than Tony has, not because I disagree with what he’s written, but because I think there is more to be said (not less, but more).

And my questions center on the notions of proximity, community, and face to face versus the community dynamics of various media. Centrally, I want to make sure that as we process these new and various technologies we do not back ourselves into biblical or theological corners. In other words, whenever we’re reasoning about words, communication, community, etc. out there in the world, we should always circle back around and run our hypotheses through Scripture to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up for some kind of snarl. This is Tony’s whole purpose in writing, and so we’re interested in the same project. He helpfully points out that the apostles at various points describe the great joy of being face to face with their churches. Writing was useful and important, but it really wasn’t as great as being there face to face (e.g. 2 Jn. 1:12). And we could multiply scriptural examples of this principle: the friendship of God and Moses is explicitly described this way: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:11). And of course, the greatest Christian hope is to stand before the throne of God and the Lamb and see His face (Rev. 22:4). In the meantime, Jesus has established local communities of saints who are marked with water in baptism (Mt. 28:19), who eat bread and drink wine together (1 Cor. 11), and where members are accountable to elders and elders accountable for their members (Heb. 13:17). All of this clearly prioritizes physical proximity, and the significance and goodness of physical community. You can’t do Christian discipleship virtually.

At the same time, as we look at Scripture, there are some curious additional dynamics to take into consideration. First, the centrality of the written word. Since at least the time of Moses, God has determined to reveal himself through written words, and the Bible is the standing testimony to this reality. Skimming forward, I see that Tony touches on this, and maybe he will answer all my questions when I get there, but I rarely see the supremacy of Scripture playing a significant roll in our theologizing about social media. Insert here all the jokes and memes about Moses downloading the first tweet from the cloud, but the point really is important. God wrote down the Ten Commandments with his own finger (Ex 31:18), and for all we know God could have used His thumbs. And from at least that point on, God insisted that His people honor His written word and (to our point) put all the most important things down in writing.

When the land of Canaan was surveyed, three men from every tribe went out and wrote down the exact dimensions of the inheritance of the tribes (Josh. 18). When a man wanted to divorce his wife, that legal act had to be written down (Dt. 24). And the law itself was to be written down on the doorposts of Israel’s houses and on their city gates (Dt. 6). While it is popular for cultural anthropologists to assume oral tradition as the backbone of ancient societies, this was most certainly not the case in ancient Jewish society — or at the very least, it is clear that the written word was supposed to be the backbone of their oral tradition and not the other way around. All of this is crucial for our doctrine of Sola Scriptura. I’m afraid that there is a certain kind of theorizing about oral/face to face communication that is a fine setup for succumbing to Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theories of inscripturation and the authority of the Church.

Related to this is the fact that while it is popular to point out that people will often write things online that they would never dream of saying to someone in person, I’m really not convinced that this is any more true than the fact that people will often say things to someone’s face that they would never dream of saying if they wrote it down. I think we are currently more aware of one side of this equation, but I am not at all convinced that people are less likely to sin with their words face to face. I think people sin in both contexts equally, and there are somewhat differing temptations in either situation and perhaps varying levels of temptation for different people. For example, the Bible requires that justice be dealt out without respect to faces (Dt. 1:17, 16:19). The Bible teaches that men are apt to say the wrong things when they give too much credence to the faces of the people they are speaking to (cf. Lev. 19:15). Jesus had become (in)famous for His refusal to be swayed by the faces of men (Mt. 22:16). He didn’t care about anyone’s opinion (Mt. 22:16). The fear of man is a terrible snare, and many a man knowing what he should say has melted for fear in the presence of the rich and powerful of the earth, including his mother-in-law.

In other words, I think we need to give a whole lot more thought to the biblical emphasis on the goodness, power, usefulness, and wisdom of written words. This isn’t to say that written words cannot be angry or sniping or deceitful — of course they can, but God tells us to write all the most important things down. Why? So we don’t forget. So we remember to tell the truth, the whole truth, to stand with conviction and courage, in order to give careful thought to our words. This is not opposed to face to face conversations and community, but there is a sort of accountability to written words that is sometimes lost in the purely verbal. Tony rightly points out the helpfulness of visual and verbal cues (e.g. facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, etc.), but I think we would be naive to think that those cues are silver bullets for communication. How many snarls have we gotten into by misunderstanding those social cues? How often have we misremembered what was said or how it was said? How many pastors have had to untangle marital squabbles that were entirely face to face and because of years of unconfessed sin and bitterness made all the worse? When he does that thing with his chin, that means he hates me! When she does that thing with her eyebrows, I know it means I’m in trouble! Sometimes, the only way to untangle things is to write out simple letters of confession and forgiveness, with nothing but words on a page. And just to run back around the other side of this: not a few pastors in recent years have experienced jaw-dropping moments of being introduced to a family quarrel wherein said participants have primarily launched insults and accusations from their phones from their respective bedrooms in the same house, and when the pastor raises the question of whether they have ever sat down to talk about any of it, all the faces glaze over like you were speaking in tongues. So yeah, I’m aware of that problem too.

Lastly (for now), I’ll just note briefly that we need to take into account the Ascension of Jesus into heaven and the gift of His Spirit in our discussions of social media. And in particular, without taking anything away from our great and final hope of seeing Jesus face to face at the resurrection, Jesus clearly tells His disciples that it is better for Him to go away and send the Spirit. The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, but that same enfleshed Word is now at the right hand of the Father and He has given us His Spirit. At one point, Tony says that electronic media is more like ghost-to-ghost communication than face-to-face, and I get what he’s saying. There really is a sinful sort of escapism that infects the sons of Adam. But I just want to point out that there is *some* sense in which Jesus has insisted that the Christian Church learn to commune with God and one another in the Spirit, in the Holy Ghost. And while that certainly includes physical congregations of people washed in water, sharing bread and wine, in geographical proximity to one another, building one another up in face to face community, there is also something better about Jesus not being here in the flesh, communicating with all of us face to face. There is a ghostly presence and communion that is better for now, and while I’m not at all saying that social media is the pinnacle of that, I am saying that our theorizing about social media needs to take these truths into account.

The Only Innocent Victim

Since the Garden of Eden and the first sin, man has been a blame-shifter and played the victim. God asked Adam what he had done, and Adam blamed his wife – “The woman you gave to me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate.” And the woman, following her husband’s example, passed the buck as well, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

And ever since, we have followed in the footsteps of our first parents, not only in sinning, but in our blaming and playing the victim. But remember that the explicit penalty for disobedience to God’s command was death. So, Adam, by blaming his wife, was implicitly condemning his wife to death. Since the wages of all sin is death, every time we blame someone else for our sin, we are condemning them to death. And, given the fact that God created all things, all blame-shifting is ultimately blaming God. The woman you gave me, the serpent you created, the parents you gave me, the children you gave me, the health you gave me, the job you gave me, the weather, the traffic, the internet. You’re blaming God for creating the circumstances in which you couldn’t help sinning. You’re accusing God of victimizing you. Thus, blame-shifting is always an act of hatred and violence against our neighbor and against our Maker. We are always implicitly saying that we wish they would die for our sin.

But trying to find safety in playing the victim is a dehumanizing black hole. Playing the victim is ultimately saying that your choices are worth nothing, that you are not free, and that your existence is meaningless. But God in His great mercy has come in His Son in order to restore to us the dignity of being His images in this world. And He does this beginning with insisting that all men embrace the dignity of guilt. People thrash about doing everything they can to avoid their guilt. But Jesus said He only came for the sick. He came for the blind, the lame; He came for the guilty. So do not pretend. You are not here because you are good. We are here because we are not good, but we have met the One who is Good. And He was the only innocent victim, and He bled and died for our sin.

 

Photo by xandtor on Unsplash

Alfie Evans & Our Gods

What we need to be praying for is that God would open our eyes now. We need to be praying that God would let us see ourselves and the world around us for what it really is. But this is a terrifying prospect.

I remember when I was young we lived in southern California, and one evening the electricity went out. My mom had been doing the dishes while preparing dinner, and we lit candles on the dinner table and sat down to eat in the dark. At some point during the meal the lights came back on and lo and behold someone went to take a drink and there was a dishrag in their drink glass. We all had a good laugh and someone got a new drink. But my point is that you can miss many things when you are in the dark. But when the light comes on, you have to deal with reality.

Sinful men in their rebellion love the darkness because it hides their evil deeds.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed (Jn. 3:19-20).

If God opens our eyes it will be far worse than finding a dishrag in our drink glass. If God opens our eyes we will find that our table has been set with the butchered bodies of millions of unborn children, our cups will be full of blood and excrement, and we will suddenly realize that the condiments we have been spreading on our revolting feast is a mixture of semen and maggots. This is what our sin is. It is putrid and foul and obscene and degrading and shameful. This is our rebellion. And in the dark we boast about it. In the dark we raise toasts to it. In the dark we parade it around with pride. In the dark, we speak in serious, dignified tones, and grant awards and degrees and scholarships for those who serve up feces on a platter and call it a delicacy. We praise those academics and politicians who serve up unborn infant ribs with an aged toilet bowl glaze. And far too many people who name the name of Christ insist that if any light is to be allowed it should be very faint and very dim. Too much light is too harsh, too bright, too offensive. It hurts their eyes. It hurts their feelings. It gives them the wrong idea about Christ, and they insist that they be left in the dark, slurping their fecal water soup.

But every once in a while, lightening flashes and for a brief moment the whole world is lit up. And at this moment, a brief flash has occurred in the horrific story of Alfie Evans, the little baby dying in a British hospital. The horror of this particular situation is not merely the mysterious disease apparently taking this little boy’s life, but the insistence of a British court that Alfie’s parents may not remove their son from the hospital in order to seek out other forms of treatment. In the name of doing what is in the “best interests” of the child, the British court has usurped it’s authority with breathtaking arrogance and determined that Alfie must be refused life support and nourishment until he dies in the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

Here in this moment, God is pulling back the curtain, lighting up our skies and shouting into our apathetic malaise. This is the end of autonomy. This is what you get when you insist that you will not have God rule over you, when you insist that you will not have Jesus be your King. The end of that path is always tyranny and death. There is no other option. There is no other way of freedom, life, or happiness except in Christ crucified, buried, and raised again and ascended as Lord and King of the world. The only options are Christ or death. Christ or tyranny. Christ or the cesspool.

But we need to ask God to open our eyes, not merely to see our vile mess, but we need Him to open our eyes to see how we got here, to see how the dots connect.

How does a British high court have anything to do with our current American bloodguilt and lusts? How does that kind of tyranny have anything to do with our billion dollar porn habit? Our greed? Our violence?

The connection is actually found in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The fundamental divide between all men comes down to this question: Are there fundamental, objective realities and truths, which are bedrock, immoveable, and immutable? Or is this world on a cosmic ride at the fair, spinning and lurching in a mindless cacophony of lights and carnies? If there are objective truths, then you can have such a thing as “unalienable rights” endowed by a Creator. If there are fundamental realities that are immutable, then it’s quite possible that all men are created equal. But if this universe is the sludge at the bottom of an intergalactic outhouse, “unalienable rights” is as meaningful as the sound your ketchup bottle makes when it’s almost empty.

So the question is: Are there really such things as unalienable rights or not? That is – are there rights given to individuals directly by their Creator which no individual, committee, congress, court, or mob may take away without just cause? This was an absolute claim, an objective, universal statement in our Declaration, but all sin is lawlessness (1 Jn. 3:4). Every sin is an act of rebellion not merely against our neighbor, not merely against our Maker, but also an act of rebellion against the very notion of law, against the very notion of immutable truths, foundational reality, what we used to call in the old days, facts. Lawlessness hates reality, hates truth; it rebels against all of those archaic, oppressive, and stifling notions such as gravity, logic, morality, and pesky definitions. Lawlessness demands the right to redefine anything and everything as needed.

The point is not that man can somehow be sinless. Every man, woman, and child has sinned; we have all broken the law. But repentance is the recognition of this. Repentance turns away from lawlessness and recognizes the truth, the facts, the reality, seeks forgiveness and puts things right. But the refusal to repent, the refusal to tell the truth about sin, that hardness of heart cannot be contained. You cannot harden your heart and justify pornography and lies over here, and pretend that you have any kind of moral high ground to stand on when someone wants to sleep with their secretary over there or embezzle a little money over here. By what standard will you make your demands? By what standard will you insist on heterosexual monogamy or fidelity or truth telling? Apart from repentance, you have no ground to stand on. You are being capricious in your application of the law. When men are in sin and they refuse to repent, they are insisting that it is OK to be selective in applying the law. They are not merely breaking the law; they are being lawless – anarchists. Because that is what they are doing, and they are demanding that everyone around them honor that. They are demanding that capricious and arbitrary application of the standards be the standard.

In other words, when injustice and evil go undisciplined and unpunished in families, churches, or nations, you are enshrining lawlessness. You are not merely letting one sin go, you are positively inviting all of the others. You are insisting that there is no absolute law, no absolute standard, and therefore, no fundamental reality, no unalienable rights. This is why James says, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (Js. 2:10-11). To break the law at one point is to break the whole law – not in the sense that you are thereby guilty of each and every individual sin/crime (though that will be true eventually) – but rather in the sense that you have broken the standard that upholds every single one of those individual laws. You cannot break one and stand there and insist that it is fine for you to break it and somehow that doesn’t effect anyone else, so mind your own business. No, that stubborn refusal to repent of evil is simultaneously a demand that there be no law at all because it all comes from the same Source, the same Law Giver.

In Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People, he writes this about the United States Constitution: “A prime object of the Constitution was to be conservative; it was to guard the principles and machinery of State from capricious and ill-considered alteration.” Whatever conservative has come to mean, in its most basic, rudimentary sense, conservative simply means guarding certain principles from alteration. It means that there are certain things that are true all the way down. This is what the entire culture war is over. One side insists that truth and reality and morality is imagined and invented to suit the moment and tastes. The other side insists that truth and reality and morality is received and guarded regardless of how we feel about it.

So we need to ask God to open our eyes and let us see how we have done this, how we are doing this to ourselves and to our children. While sin and rebellion is as old as dirt, I suspect that a strong case can be made that our cultural rebellion actually began financially. When did our nation first begin making up reality? When did we first begin telling lies as a matter of official policy? Well, how about when we started making up the value of money? You cannot fabricate money by fiat and make up value out of thin air and then say that this will not affect anything else. “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Tim. 6:9-10).

So let’s see: we started making up our own reality, pretending to be the god of value, insisting that we could be our own standard when it came to the value of money, and what has this led to? Complete lawlessness. Rather, that very act is the very definition of lawlessness. We will have no fixed standard, no absolute law to measure value. We will have no law governing our money. We were offered riches and houses and cars in exchange for lawlessness. And of course the insanity of it all is that the whole American economy is built on an elaborate pyramid scheme. The US Treasury Department is the original Amway. As long as everyone keeps playing along, we can keep passing the buck while everyone skims off the top, but the fact of the matter is that there isn’t enough real money in the bank to cover all the notes. We are playing musical chairs, and sooner or later the music will stop, and when it does, we will find not just one chair missing but trillions.

But this is the point: it’s not merely that conservatives recognize that there is a universal law that must be received and guarded and the progressives want to invent and refashion truth and law however they like. It’s far worse than that. To insist that reality can be refashioned and re-imagined is to insist that there is a job opening for God. This is what it means to create reality, to endow dignity, to affirm morality, to decree righteousness and justice and mercy – this is the job description for God Almighty. So make no mistake: this culture war is not merely between those who would receive the law of the Triune God and guard it and those who are more agnostic and free spirited. No, the war is between the Living God and millions of rebel men and women who want His throne.

It turns out that only the living and Triune God can actually command value to appear ex nihilo – all of the other gods are false gods, including the US Treasury Department, the Supreme Court of the United States, the US President, the United Nations, and whoever dares defy the God of heaven. They cannot actually create real value out of nothing. They cannot actually create their own morality by fiat. They cannot declare boys can become girls or that two men can be married or that a human being is just a clump of cells. They are just magicians and illusionists playing games and lying. They keep oppressing us, and when we complain, they blame our God and His Christ and His Church. Just let us run these chains around your legs one more time, my pet, the goddess demands eerily, and then you will really be free. And so it’s no surprise that they are the principle powers who want to keep us in the dark. They do not want us to see because then we would see how disgusting and vile the whole scam really is.

This claim to deity and godhead is insane and therefore it is utterly capricious and arbitrary. The law always matches the character of the god it proceeds from. The living God is immutable, good, gracious, kind, and just, and His law does not waver, does not change, and it gives life. But the whims of man are many and bloody, and therefore, how will you object to Alfie Evans being starved to death in a British hospital? The State is your god. He commands value to come into existence. And he who commands value to come into existence may also decree when life begins, what love and marriage are, what it means to be a boy or a girl or a parent, and when it is time for you to die. You cannot take his payouts and then say you will not submit to his decrees. You cannot serve God and mammon.

But if God will open our eyes, we will be heartbroken and disgusted. If God is merciful and shines the light of Christ on our land, it will be far worse than we ever imagined. But when the light of the gospel shines it will reveal our nakedness, our shame, and it will reveal the nakedness and shame of our gods. They will be revealed as corpses, as sore-infested, toothless hags and creeps, clutching sticks and babbling incoherently. If God is merciful He will also turn our eyes to Jesus Christ, to see a good Man, the only Good Man who ever lived, who gladly came for us, who came for us in our insanity, in our defiance, and in our filth and shame – who not only came for us, but came down into our cesspool and submitted to the croaking blasphemies of our chosen gods who condemned him to die for our crimes, who led Him to the cross for our iniquities, the greatest sham of justice there ever was. And there He was mocked and scorned, and He took it all – all our spite, all our rage, all our shame – He took it all with Him down into the grave and crushed it’s God Damn head. He broke the spell, and He turned on the lights. And He welcomes all of us filthy creatures home. For free. And there’s a warm bath and a table spread with good food and a seat for everyone who will come.

The death and resurrection of Jesus is for this moment we are living in right now. It is for fools and monsters who have done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the awful. It is for abusers and abused. It is for scoffers and schizophrenics, for politicians and pastors, for tribes and nations, for men and women, and yes, even for you.

O Lord, open our eyes, and let us see.

 

Photo by Tommy van Kessel on Unsplash

12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You

I’ve just started reading Tony Reinke’s book, and it’s definitely the sort of thing we need more of — trying to analyze new gifts of God through an explicitly biblical lens. And what is needed on this topic is a broad ranging discussion on the phenomena of the iPhone, social media, blogging, et cetera.

So in that spirit, I may write a bit more in the coming days and weeks on this topic, but in the interest of leading by example, let me throw one initial thought out interacting with Tony’s first chapter on distraction.

Tony is careful in this chapter not to assume that there weren’t distractions available to the sons of Adam before the advent of the iPhone. He quotes Blaise Pascal as a helpful (Christian) interlocutor to demonstrate that the problem of distraction is as old as dirt, as old as sin — but actually, to put it that way is to raise my question.

As old as dirt… Hmmm. Think about what God did when He created the world. He created the universe and filled it with (arguably) millions upon millions of, well, distractions. Imagine being Adam and Eve on that first day of human life in the universe. It’s hard not to imagine them running from one thing to the next, excitedly: Look! and Look! and, Over here! Look! And so on, until they were ready for lunch.

So my first thought is that we need to be careful not to construct a theology of distraction that would seem to say that God was in any way doing us any harm by creating a universe with billions of glorious and extraordinary things. From starfish to solar eclipses to centipedes to raindrops to electricity — God created and placed man into a world teeming with glorious distractions. In some ways, the glorious gift of the iPhone is that we now have reminders and notifications of this glory throughout the day. Ding! Somebody just shared a video of a hippopotamus. Ding! Look at this super nova. Ding! Watch a cute toddler dancing in his high chair.

My point is not that we can’t sin with those distractions — we can and we do. But as we grow in wisdom in this area, we want to be careful to frame the problems clearly and not accidentally back ourselves into a corner where we are implicitly rejecting or subtly resenting God’s good work of creation. I don’t think Tony wants to do that at all, but this is an area of emphasis that seems to me to need more development.

Related to this: why did God create a world with so many distractions? Apparently, the myriad of glories shouting His praises all day long, all night long is a very good thing. And what is that? There are no doubt many reasons, but at least one certain reason is because we need to be reminded to worship our Maker constantly. We need reminders, notifications: Ding! Look what your Father made! Ding! Look how creative and good and loving your Father is! Hey, I’m talking to you! Praise Him!

In other words, part of our theology of distraction needs to include our regular need to be distracted from our lethargy, our apathy, our ingratitude, our boring mental ruts. There’s an old demon that lurks in the hearts of the sons of Adam that often appears as an angel of light under the name asceticism — seeing this world as getting in the way of communion with God, getting in the way of spirituality, getting in the way of holiness. A common assumption is that holiness means stripping away this world and all of its distractions (glories?) and somehow finding God in a naked back alley of this universe. But of course no such back alley exists. Even in a dark cave, you cannot get away from His presence in the rocks, in the stalactites, in the earth worms, in the bats, in your body.

So our task is not to escape this world full of glorious distraction. Our task is, as Augustine would put it, to rightly order our loves. The problem with our distractions is not out there in the world or in the phone in your hand that connects you to the bursting world. The problem is in our hearts, where the vestiges of a conquered alien kingdom still rise up from time to time, raging against God and His Christ, seeking to subvert the glorious order of the panoply of creation. Since our first parents, our rebellion has been to want to be gods, to order our own realities, to create our own meaning, and therefore in our rebellion, we do not worship our Father, our Maker. We turn the created world into sophisticated mirrors, and we worship ourselves as graven images.

Of course we do not begin with full blown pagan temples; we begin with disordered loves, giving too much time, money, or attention to one thing when love of God and obedience to Him requires a different set of priorities, a different ordering of our time, resources, and attention. That is a problem, and it is a problem of sinful distractions.

But the answer to that is the gospel of Jesus proclaimed from the rooftops, written on the doorposts of our homes, and gossiped about like the greatest rumor in the world — Christ saves distracted sinners. In other words, the answer to our sinful distractions is not a distractionless existence, but rather it is turning away from one way of being sinfully distracted from the glory of God and all the disobedience that entails to a new life of holy distraction by the glory of God and a new obedience to His will. Having been interrupted by the gospel, everything in this world becomes a notification, a reminder of our Father’s love, of the goodness of our Father. It teaches us about His character, His law, His wisdom. It shouts from the street corners, invites us like highway billboards, like a google reminder: Your sins are forgiven, Christ has won, love your wife and kids, work hard with all your might, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. And He shall reign forever and ever.

And it seems to me that blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and yes, even Youtube, however much they have been abused by sinful man, have great potential and have already begun to join in this song of creation, this rambunctious and boisterous chatter, like millions of noisy birds in a million exotic rainforests, tweeting their Maker’s praise. What a helpful, welcome, and glorious distraction.

 

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

The Only Kind of Glory

A Christian heart makes over his will to God: now then if God’s will is satisfied, then I am satisfied… That is the excellence of grace… for he says, ‘If God has glory, I have glory; God’s glory is my glory, and therefore God’s will is mine; if God has riches, then I have riches; if God is magnified, then I am magnified; if God is satisfied, then I am satisfied: God’s wisdom and holiness is mine, and therefore his will must needs be mine and my will must needs be his.’ This is the art of a Christian’s contentment…

-Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

Just Stand There

One of the great sins of man is our tendency to think that sin is not as bad as it seems. Another one of our great sins is refusing to believe God when He declares our sins forgiven. And often these two sins work a sort of good cop – bad cop routine on peoples’ hearts.

It often happens like this. You sinned and you confessed it but you still feel bad. And so you keep turning the sin over in your mind. You keep going back to it. In fact, as you marinate in it you come to think that feeling bad about your sin is actually good for you. And in the process, you get grumpy, fearful, anxious, maybe even angry with your wife or husband or kids or roommate. And if they ask you about it, you’re offended because how could they suggest that you’re in sin when you’re wallowing in your confession of sin? I’m over here feeling bad about my sin – can you get much holier than that? And so in the name of confession of sin, you justify more sin.

But notice what’s going on: in the first instance, you didn’t really confess your sin because you didn’t receive God’s forgiveness. You didn’t believe that God washed you clean and removed your sin as far as the east is from the west. The whole point of confession of sin is to get rid of it. And if you’re still carrying it around like some kind of pet skunk, you’re doing it all wrong and you’re tracking that stench with you wherever you go. But ultimately, you didn’t confess your sin and receive God’s forgiveness because you didn’t really think your sin was that bad. Of course this is deeply offensive to our pride because after wallowing around in feeling bad about your sin for a week, the last thing you want to hear is that you didn’t feel bad enough. But it’s true. The only Christian way to deal with sin is to actually kill it. And it dies when you agree with God that it was so bad Jesus had to die for it. And He did.

So this is the point: when you confess your sins, do not commit the additional sin of arrogantly refusing God’s forgiveness. If Jesus died for it, then it’s dead and gone. You don’t help God to forgive you by wallowing around in it. Your job is to just stand there and praise His glorious grace.

The Paternal Instinct

We’ve all heard and seen the maternal instinct. A new mother walks into the room, and all the females lurch with delight. Little girls play with dolls and set up houses, grandmothers rejoice in grandchildren, a secretary instinctively starts tidying things up and making things look homey. This instinct is firing on all cylinders when there is any danger, possible sickness, or harm. A mother bear robbed of her cubs is a terrible threat to any in her path (Prov. 17:12).

But we live in a world that has systematically dishonored, undermined, and almost completely destroyed any notion of the paternal instinct — the natural, God-given instincts given to boys and men that sense injustice, oppression, and various threats to the wellbeing of those under their care. The vast feminization of American/western culture has almost entirely displaced masculine instincts with feminine ones.

In the biblical order, men and women are mutually dependent. We need the respective glories of one another. It was not good for Adam to be alone in the garden (Gen. 2:18), and Paul says, “in the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman” (1 Cor. 11:11-12). But this mutual dependence is ordered by the Lord: “woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Cor. 11:7-9). Woman is the glory of man; and man is not the glory of woman. Man was created first, and this is his creational headship. As I’ve written elsewhere, this leadership and headship means that he gets to die first. And so he did. The first man was put into a deep, death-like sleep in order that God might make the first woman from his side. In this sense, God has ordained that the masculine/paternal instinct is to come first, it goes out ahead, it is to be dominant. In fact, this is not really something we can argue with. Men lead everywhere at all times; the only question is whether they are leading well or not. Men will always dominate, the only question is whether their leadership will be gracious and life-giving or whether it will be tyrannical and destructive. Even a man’s chronic absence from his family is one of the most destructive crimes he can commit. A father’s absence leaves an aching hole in the lives of his children. But God’s grace is abundant, and where sin has abounded, God’s grace abounds still more.

But God’s grace doesn’t displace the natural order God has ordained. God’s grace does often fill up what was lacking. Where a father has been absent, God’s grace often fills the void with peace and comfort and often with other faithful, godly men who step into various roles to give counsel and advice and protection. But one of the sins of women is trying to replace failed men. A woman is often called by God to serve in situations where men have failed (or where men are providentially hindered from carrying out their responsibilities, e.g. sickness, disease, death), and these really are difficult situations, but that calling never includes a woman replacing a man. A dominant maternal instinct in a home, church, or culture creates as many problems as it seeks to solve. God has ordained that the paternal instinct is to be the dominant instinct, the leading instinct — it goes first. But it’s important to note for my selective readers: in the biblical order, that paternal instinct should not go alone. It is not good alone. It needs the help of woman. In fact, the paternal instinct understood biblically includes the instinct to take a wife and love her like Christ loves His church.

Now that we have all the feminists shrieking and spitting at their screens, let’s push this into the corners, shall we? What exactly is a paternal instinct? We’re so far from biblical norms that even saying this out loud seems extreme and hateful. In fact this blog post is probably illegal in several states and countries, but as they say here in Idaho, oh well.

There’s lots more to say, I’m sure, but for now I want to suggest that the God-given paternal instinct has at least three distinctive elements:

First, the paternal instinct cares about justice and equity more than you might think is reasonable — and sometimes you’d be right. Most little boys are little fairness traffic cops. If one boy gets a cookie, you can bet that every boy in the room naturally assumes that they deserve a cookie too. And this is where this instinct needs to be discipled. Biblical justice does not teach that all men deserve equal outcomes. Nothing in the Bible requires that the exact same gift must be given to everyone. In fact, this undermines the whole notion of gifts. If you have the right to demand the gift, it is no gift. This is why socialism is simply institutionalized hatred of Christmas. At the same time, biblical justice does teach that all men are to be held to the same unchanging, blind standard — equal weights and measures for everyone, every day of the week: for rich or poor, black or white, blind or deaf, male or female, etc. So this part of the paternal instinct is better served when a boy sees one student receive detention for an infraction when other students have not been punished for the same infraction, or when the same answer is considered right for one student but wrong for another student. This sort of instinct for equity and equal weights and measures creates cultures of freedom and hard work where the standards are clear and enforced. A man is wired to work hard and enjoy the fruit of his labors, but the surest way to get a man to stop working hard is to insist that there are absolutely no guarantees that his labor will be respected or honored. If his wages might change, if thugs are allowed to rob him, or if he will be penalized capriciously, everything in his soul will buck at the injustice. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that women don’t care about equity, but I do think all things being equal, women will generally bear with injustice for a whole lot longer than men will.

Second, and related to the first element, the paternal instinct spots injustice not only in the particulars but is also wired to see systemic injustice. It reasons from particulars to the general, and often is able to see areas where the general problem is beginning to crop up in a new or unexpected particular. This can seem like trouble making to some when they don’t see the danger, but the paternal instinct understands that the heart of man is selfish, deceitful, and lazy and begins to recognize distinct patterns in human communities. God has wired women to defend their children and families from one set of threats, which can include the occasional Sisera who shows up looking for a place to hide (Judg. 4:21). But God has wired men to go hunting for the threats. Where is this sickness coming from? Why do we keep running into these troubles? So when a male physician walks into a hospital room where a young man is recovering from being castrated in the name of the god we call “gender dysphoria” and he sees a brief interaction between the patient and his older male “lover,” the physician spots the abusive relationship in a trice in the facial expressions and tone of voice without any explicit proof. The paternal instinct recognizes that something is massively wrong, but the problem is not just in that young man’s head and heart. The paternal instinct begins tracing the problem out. It wants to hunt down that problem and kill it. And it is ultimately willing to die in the process if necessary.

Finally, and wound through both of these previous elements, the paternal instinct is more concerned with truth than unity. A godly man is not unconcerned with unity, but when any tension is presented between choices of unity or truth, the paternal instinct breaks toward truth over unity. In general, the maternal instinct breaks toward unity. This doesn’t mean that women are unconcerned with truth. But all things being equal, the protective instinct of a mother is bound up with the desire for unity, friendship, community. This is illustrated well by the fact that women tend to work harder at communicating their love and friendship and approval towards those they care about. If they haven’t heard from someone in a while, they might begin to wonder if everything is OK. A man on the other hand tends to assume everything is fine unless it obviously isn’t. The weakness is that men are classic under-communicators and wonder why they need to tell their wife they love them again, since they already told them last year, and on the flip side women can tend to fear silence and over-read non-verbal cues. At the same time, women are often far more attune to non-verbal cues and can spot certain troubles years in advance in certain glances, facial expressions, or tone of voice. And there is an important analogous masculine version of this instinct.

The point of all of this is that men and women need one another, but we need one another in the stations and callings that the Lord has assigned. We need the paternal instinct leading the charge in this world far more than it currently is. And we know we need this paternal instinct because it was this paternal instinct that saved us: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). It was God’s paternal instinct that sent His Son into the world to hunt down our sin and death and kill it, to hunt us down and bring us home. It was that paternal instinct that saved us, and it is that paternal instinct that will save the world. It is this instinct that drives men who sense that things are off to stand up and say so. It drives them to admit when they were wrong, confess their sins and repent of them. It drives them to risk being wrong for the sake of justice and truth, for the sake of protecting the weak and the vulnerable.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

-C.S. Lewis Abolition of Man

 

 

Photo by William Stitt on Unsplash