Randy Alcorn's Blog, page 63

Finding Peace and Rest in a World of Weariness and Division

Note from Randy: This is a great article from pastor and author Scott Sauls. Though he talks specifically about the weariness and burnout that many church leaders have faced over the last year and a half, much of what he says applies to all believers who find themselves tired and hurting over the division and angst in our culture. Scott’s words really resonanted with me.

May we remember that Jesus invites us to come to Him and sit at His feet, and even in this world full of suffering and pain, to find in Him the happiness, peace, and rest we all long for.

Ted Lasso, Mr. Rogers, and Christian Leaders in an Unhinged World

By Scott Sauls

In December of 2020, I saw a meme on the internet in which five portable restrooms were lined up at a construction site. All five of them were on fire. The meme read as follows:

“If 2020 were a scented candle…”

That sounds about right. The combination of a global pandemic, mass social isolation, emptied communities and classrooms and congregations, Zoom fatigue, and the most divisive political season of my 53 year-old lifetime, created a perfect storm that has left almost everyone, especially leaders, feeling agitated as well as tired, lonely, insecure, overwhelmed, under-encouraged, and immobilized by fear that they will say or do something that will get them called out, attacked, accused, taken down, or canceled.

In a recent text exchange with a fellow Christian leader, I asked how he was holding up. He replied, “I am ready for 2020 to end. But I might have to wait until 2030 for that to happen.”

As I write this, it is September 2021, and the year 2020 still shows no signs of retreat. If there were a competition for word of the year, top contenders might include “polarized,” “racialized,” “tribalized,” “politicized,” “divided,” and “outraged,” to name a few.

Sociologists and therapists alike are calling the climate we are in “The Great Resignation.” In an effort to escape regret and hurt and fear and other 2020-ish challenges, alarming numbers of people have “resigned” from their friendships, communities, schools, jobs, cities, and even family members in hopes of hitting the reset button on life.

Many Christian leaders feel heavy as they find themselves stuck in the crossfires. This is especially true of bridge-building types who work hard to keep themselves above the fray of partisan division and rancor. In the current climate, nonpartisan, bridge building leaders are especially vulnerable to being labeled as obsessive maskers and anti-vaxxers, woke antagonists and white supremacists, American nationalists and anti-American globalists, homophobic bigots and gay affirming sellouts, too liberal and too conservative politically, too rigid and too loose theologically, too direct to call themselves true priests and too cowardly to call themselves true prophets.

Amid such realities, it is easy to understand why Paul Tripp, himself a counselor and pastor, has labeled the assignment of pastor as a “dangerous calling.” This is not just true of pastors, but of all Christian leaders under pressure to be the rope in modern versions of the ancient Jew/Gentile cultural, ideological, and socio-political tug-of-war.

The fatigue that comes from trying to bring people together in a politically unhinged climate can take a toll. The weariness factor is so pronounced for some that, according to the latest surveys, over thirty percent of pastors and other church staff (for example) are actively looking to leave the ministry. Within my own pastor networks, the percentages seem much higher than this. Since the pandemic began, leadership complexity and demands have been unrelenting for an unprecedented number of Christian leaders. When I have myself felt wearied, I have been helped by this gentle, caring word from Pastor Joe Novenson:

“The feel of faith is not strength, but dependent weakness.”

Enters Jesus, who reminds us that in this world there will be trouble. No one should be alarmed by the presence of thorns in the flesh or even fiery trials, for it is in such trials that we receive opportunity to share in what Paul called the fellowship of sharing in Jesus’s sufferings. As the last two Beatitudes attest, even if people persecute us or say false or misleading or hurtful or behind-the-back or out-in-the-open things about us, rejoicing remains possible, for so they treated the prophets before us. Great is our reward in heaven, our Lord reassures us. The wearying things that happen to Christian leaders are things that happened to our Lord first. As we suffer similar things, we have opportunity, if we will accept it, to abide in even deeper, more intimate solidarity with Christ.

Likewise, if concerned friends point out true things about us, including our own glaring deficiencies, sins, blind spots, and the like, we have the ultimate resource in Christ himself to face our deficiencies in a spirit of humility and teachability and repentance, versus running from them. As the modern hymn reminds us, “Our sins, they are many. His mercy is more.”

I know. It’s much easier said than done.

It feels almost pie-in-the-sky difficult.

I once heard an anecdote about St. Teresa of Avila and a conversation she had with the Lord. It was a time of deep weariness and suffering for her. She asked the Lord why he allowed things to get so hard for his children, to which the Lord allegedly replied, “This is how I treat my friends.” To this, Teresa responded, “Well, then, it’s no wonder why you have so few friends!”

Amid seasons like an “extended 2020” that can sometimes feel like a long, unrelenting winter, the promises of the Gospel and the rest it provides remain. In the Gospel, there are resources not only for coping, but also for thriving in weary times. The Gospel gives us resources that help us nurture and lean into counter- and cross-cultural community and witness.

As Donald Carson has written, as “a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’s sake,” Christians possess resources in Christ to pursue harmony between individuals and groups who could not possibly come together, let alone love one another, outside of Christ. In Christ, dividing walls of hostility between male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free were torn down in early church communities. If Christ could accomplish this in ancient times, could he not also accomplish it right now?

This might be our best current opportunity for compelling, persuasive witness—to simply be kind to one another in Christ, especially across the lines of difference. To opt out of the modern culture of biting, devouring, blaming, shaming, and attacking in the name and for the sake of love.

There must be a reason why Mr. Rogers is popular again and Ted Lasso is such a celebrated TV series. Human hearts are bent, battle worn, and tired. We crave the sort of kindness, caring, empathy, and benefit-of-the-doubtism that Mr. Rogers and Ted Lasso exemplify. Both illustrate the Proverb which tells us that a gentle answer turns away wrath (Proverbs 15:1). Both also point us to Christ himself, whose eighth and most memorable “I AM” statement invites all who are weary to come to him for rest, “for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (see Matthew 11:25-30).

If you are a Christian leader, please recognize that Jesus’s invitation for you to come TO him comes a full seventeen chapters before Jesus asks you to go and do FOR him. His great invitation is extended to you long before his great commission.

Whatever your situation, one thing is for certain. In this or any other disorienting climate, you will only become a gentle rest-giver to the degree that you yourself can also enter the Sabbath rest of Christ. A weekly Sunday Sabbath, to be sure. But also a daily, even moment-by-moment one. The abiding kind.

If Christian leaders are going to embody his gentle and humble ways in the culture, they must first address the messy, restless, anxious culture that can so easily take up residence in their (our) own hearts. Abiding Sabbath is the only way to do this well.

It is good to remind ourselves and each other that there is no bypass road around Jesus’s great invitation in Matthew 11 to get to his great commission in Matthew 28.

To become like Christ in the world, Christian leaders must pull into the rest area to abide and linger with Christ. For the fruit of the Spirit—including the fruit of rest-giving gentleness—can only grow and be shared and sustained when we take the lead in resting in and relying on Christ.

What does this mean for Christian leaders? Chiefly, that they themselves are, first and foremost, sheep under the Shepherd’s care. It is beneath the shelter of this reality that Christ will keep, uphold, and strengthen them as they limp forward until 2020 ends…even if that doesn’t happen until 2030.

This article originally appeared on Scott’s blog and is used with permission.

Photo by Caleb Frith on Unsplash

The Chosen Reminds Us We Too Will One Day Walk with Jesus

Many of you have watched the first two seasons of The Chosen, but if you haven’t yet, I highly encourage you to start! The first year was consistently excellent, and season two was just as good. I actually think The Chosen is better than any portrayal of Jesus I’ve ever seen—the presentation of Christ’s love, wit, humor, and delight with His disciples is amazing!

In this clip from my message “No More Curse,” I talk about the show, and how we too will walk with Jesus as His disciples:

Here are some related thoughts:

Scripture portrays God as holy and transcendent. But even before Christ’s incarnation, God came to the garden to walk with Adam and Eve. And Christ’s incarnation and resurrection took it much further—one member of the transcendent triune God became permanently immanent. Jesus is in physical form, in a human resurrection body, for all eternity.

Jesus promised we’d eat with Him in His Kingdom. How truly magnificent! To eat a meal with Jesus will be to eat a meal with God. The fascinating God is by far the most interesting person we’ll ever meet in Heaven.

Imagine what it’d be like to walk with Jesus, as the disciples did. If you know Christ, you’ll have that opportunity on the New Earth.

I’m sometimes asked how untold millions of believers with Jesus in Heaven, or on the New Earth when Heaven descends to it (Revelation 21-22), will be able to talk to Him one-on-one. But if God took on human form several times, as recorded in Scripture, couldn’t Christ choose to take on any form to manifest Himself to us? Or might the one body of Jesus somehow be simultaneously present with His people in a million places? For sure He promised us He would be with us always (Matthew 28:20). We don’t have to wait until we die or are resurrected for that to be true, but how much more immediate and wonderful will His presence be with us in the world to come?

Could we walk with Jesus (not just spiritually, but also physically) while millions of others are also walking with Him? Might we be able to touch His hand or embrace Him or spend a long afternoon privately conversing with Him—not just with His spirit but His whole person? It may defy our logic, but God is capable of doing far more than we imagine!

I sometimes ponder what it’ll be like to see Jesus, to fall on my knees before Him, then talk with Him and eat with Him and walk with Him as a resurrected person living on a resurrected Earth. Like Job I’m struck with the realization that “I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:27).

For more on the eternal Heaven, the New Earth, see Randy’s book  Heaven . You can also browse our additional resources on Heaven.

C. S. Lewis, the Self-Described “Most Reluctant Convert”

This Wednesday, November 3, for one night only, the movie “The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis” will be in cinemas nationwide.

It’s based on the on-stage production done by Max McLean (who plays the adult Lewis in the movie), which is absolutely excellent. You can watch “C.S. Lewis On Stage—The Most Reluctant Convert” here. Max is a faithful believer and the familiar voice of several audio Bibles.

In late May 1988, when our daughters were seven and nine, Nanci and I and the girls spent ten days in England. We visited Oxford, where I used some photos from one of the six Lewis biographies that I’d read (showing the view from his window of some stationery objects) to trace down Lewis’s office and rooms behind Magdalen College. It was in this room where he came to a belief in theism, then on Addison’s Walk outside the building, by Deer Park (which he saw through his back window), Lewis came to Christ. In this same room in years to come he wrote most of his books, including The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis says in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.

He referred here to his conversion to theism. It was on Addison’s Walk where Lewis underwent his second conversion, this one not merely to theism but to Christ Himself. He had a long walk with two friends, one of whom was J. R. R. Tolkien (it was Lewis who beseeched the procrastinating perfectionist Tolkien to finish and publish Lord of the Rings and Tolkien once said that if not for Lewis he likely never would have).

Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy of a trip riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his brother Warren, on a trip to the Whipsnade Zoo:

When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

However, Lewis tied his conversion to Christ directly back to that talk with Dyson and Tolkien on Addison’s Walk.  A few days after his trip to the zoo with Warren, Lewis closed out a letter to Arthur Greeves with this news: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

Lewis’s mentorship and impact on my own life, and indirectly on my ministry has been profound, and I’m grateful to God for him. My Heaven book is full of him, and Heaven for Kids overflows with Narnia. Screwtape Letters inspired Lord Foulgrin’s Letters. It also inflenced The Ishbane Conspiracy, which I wrote with my daughters thirteen years after we lurked outside Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen. Mere Christianity plays a pivotal role in my novels Deadline and Deception. In Edge of Eternity, Nick Seagrave’s pilgrimage, into a world where the spiritual realm is visible, was Lewis-inspired. In my novel Dominion, Lewis serves as a guide to a character in Heaven. Another character, yet on earth, reads the The Chronicles of Narnia to his children. (In 2013, the year of the 50th anniversary of his death, I did a plenary session on Lewis and Heaven and Hell at a Desiring God conference.)

Nanci and I retraced Lewis’s steps beside his friends on Addison’s Walk. Negotiating the falling leaves, on a brisk wet afternoon, was haunting and unforgettable. What happened in Lewis’s life there was a stone thrown in a pond. Its ripples have extended deep into my life and millions of others. I’m forever grateful that our God of grace called that reluctant convert into His Kingdom.

Also coming out this month: “Sabina: Tortured for Christ, The Nazi Years” will be in theaters November 8-10. It’s the story of Richard Wurmbrand’s wife, and Richard as well. After many years in Romanian prisons, he went on to be the founder of Voice of the Martyrs. I will never forget reading his first book, Tortured for Christ , as a young believer. It marked me. It still does.

The Racial Stereotypes That Hurt the Most: A Discussion between Two Friends

In this excerpt from my novel Dominion¸ two characters discuss racial stereotypes about black people.

If you’d like to explore more about racial unity, I highly recommend the resources of Tony Evans,  many of which are available for free, including his booklet A Personal Challenge to Black and White Americans.

Jake’s face turned serious. “So, since we’ve been talking about race, can I bring up something you and I almost never talked about when it happened?”

Clarence studied him. “Now you’ve got me curious. What?”

“When O. J. Simpson was arrested for murder.”

“Oh, wow. We’re going there?”

“You remember the split between whites and blacks on whether he was guilty?”

“Wish I could forget. It was agony. You know, Jake, I remember the exact day of his acquittal, can you believe that? October 3, 1995.”

“I wasn’t sure how to even bring it up with you back then,” Jake said. “My friends and family all thought he was guilty. It seemed obvious. But I knew a lot of black people saw it differently. I wondered what you thought but I was afraid to ask. Maybe I was insecure about our friendship, I don’t know. But I’m asking now.”  

“The truth is, when O. J. was accused, I felt like I’d been accused.”

“But…why?”

“Because I’m a black man.”

“But that doesn’t—”

“I know, I know. It sounds irrational. One day I overheard two rednecks at a lunch counter, talking about O. J. One guy said to the other, ‘What’d you expect from his kind?’ I wanted to put his face in his mashed potatoes, but then he probably would have just said, ‘What’d you expect from his kind?’” Clarence laughed, but not convincingly.

“You know what I thought about, Jake? Something I never told a white guy before, but I sure brought it up to my black friends.”

“What?”

“I thought about how nearly all serial killers are white. Manson. Son of Sam. Bundy. Dahmer. Gacy. On and on.  But when Dahmer sexually abused and murdered men and cannibalized them, did anyone say, ‘What’d you expect from a white man?’ Did anyone even think of saying that? Of course not.

Or what about espionage? When Aldrich Ames betrayed CIA agents in the Soviet Union for a maroon Jaguar and a nice house, and twenty people were murdered as a result, did anyone say, ‘That’s a white man for you’?”

“Race has nothing to do with it,” Jake said.

“Yeah. Unless you’re a black man and it’s a black criminal, then all the rules change. See, when a white man does something wrong, he’s just another bad man. But if Dahmer had been black, the whole equation would’ve changed. He wouldn’t have been just another bad man; he’d have been another bad black man, a black murderer, a black cannibal. Every black man feels the weight of that—at least, I do.”

“It really affects you that way? The thought never occurred to me.”

“Yeah, it never occurred to me how women look at things until I married Geneva, and I got a crash course education!” Clarence laughed. “To survive in this culture, black people need to know how white people think, but whites don’t need to know how blacks think. Since they don’t have to, they don’t usually take the time to learn. I get that. If 80% of Americans were black we’d be the dominant culture, and I wouldn’t need to know white people, I’d probably just accept the stereotypes.”

“What are the stereotypes of blacks that bother you most?”

“It’s not just the stereotypes, it’s how one-sided they are. For instance, black men have illegitimate children and don’t raise them or care for them. That’s what people think. Well, how many centuries did white men rape their black slave women, get them pregnant, refuse to acknowledge the children as their own or raise or care for them? How many black men have been accused of ‘having a thing’ for white women? How many black men are automati­cally viewed as potential rapists of white women, when for hundreds of years it was routine for white men to rape black women? But have white men ever thought everybody’s viewing them as rapists? No. Black men do.”

“Well,” Jake said, “white men do have to live with the stereotype of being racist oppressors. Sometimes you feel like everybody’s loading guilt on you. It really gets old.”

“I hear you. But what about the ‘Blacks are violent’ stereotype? I heard people in the sixties point to marches and demonstrations and riots to defend that thesis. But look at organized labor in this country. White workers marching, rioting, and burning city blocks before the civil rights movement even existed. Look at history. For three hundred years whites buy and sell, steal, whip, torture, rape, brutalize, and murder their black slaves. The vast majority of those blacks never fought back, never returned violence for violence. You could make a great case for American blacks historically being the least violent people in the world, obviously a great deal less violent than the whites who abused them. After all that, now you’ve got some black criminals rioting and gang members shooting each other and everybody thinks, ‘Yeah, those black people are just violent by nature.’”

“I don’t think that way, Clarence.”

“Maybe you don’t. But haven’t you heard people talk about Africa? Idi Amin and what he did in Uganda. The civil war in Mozambique. The slaughter in Rwanda.

They think it’s because blacks are violent—I’ve heard it said, Jake. I’m sure you have too. And I say, look at the bloodshed in the Middle East. So that makes Arabs and Jews violent by nature? Look at the wars and murders in Central America. Hispanics are violent by nature? Look at the bloodshed in China—Mao killed what, five times the number Hitler did? And Pol Pot in Cambodia. Well, Asians must be violent by nature, right? Hitler was a Caucasian. So were all the soldiers who killed the six million. And how about Stalin’s Caucasian Russians murdering starving children in the Ukraine, mil­lions of them? And what about the Bosnian Serbs? More Caucasians. Look at Ireland. They’re white as they can be, religious church-goers, too. But does anybody say when the bombs kill people, ‘See that proves it—those whites, they’re just violent by nature’? Of course not.”

Jake felt Clarence’s frustration and didn’t know how to respond.

“Know what it all tells me, Jake?”

“What?”

“Not that blacks are violent. Or Hispanics are violent. Or Asians are violent. Or whites are violent. Just that all of them are people and it’s people who are violent. Color doesn’t matter. Like Pastor Clancy says, ‘It’s not a skin problem, it’s a sin problem.’”

“I’m with you there, brother,” Jake said. “And I’ve got another example for you. Think about the two best known college coaches in the 90’s, Bobby Knight and John Thompson. You were a sports writer then, so you know where I’m going, don’t you? Knight grabbed players by their jerseys and screamed and swore at referees and threw chairs. Thompson was a con­trolled disciplinarian who treated his players with respect. But nobody looked at Bobby Knight and said, ‘Just another out-of-control white man.’ And they didn’t look at John Thompson and say ‘There’s another cerebral, thoughtful, disciplined black man.’”

Clarence looked at Jake with surprise. He smiled thoughtfully. “Careful there, Jake. It’s like you’re starting to see through different eyes. That could get you in trouble.”

Photo by nappy from Pexels

If God Is Good, Why Is There Evil and Suffering?

Recently, I was interviewed on The Thinking Out Loud Podcast with Kevin and Kyle. In our conversation, which centered around my book If God Is Good, we discussed evil and suffering, faith, healing, and much more. The last year and a half have been tough on many people in many ways, (including for us as Nanci battles cancer), so the subject of suffering feels especially pertinent right now.

Here are the questions we covered. You can listen to the whole interview here, or you can listen to the questions that interest you:

If God Is Good, Why Is There Evil, and Where Did It Begin?

If Eden Was Perfect, Why Did God Allow Evil to Come into the World?

Why Is the Problem of Evil and Suffering So Important?

Does God Have Limited Goodness or Knowledge? And If  So, Would It Be a Source of Comfort or Despair?

What’s the Worst Thing about the Health and Wealth Gospel? 

How Do the Apostles’ Lives and Deaths Disprove Prosperity Theology?

What’s the Relationship between Sin and Suffering?

For more related to the subject of suffering, see Randy’s book  If God Is Good , as well as the devotional  90 Days of God’s Goodness  and book  The Goodness of God . Also, the booklet If God Is Good, Why Do We Hurt? deals with the question and shares the gospel so that both unbelievers and believers can benefit.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

Our Most Destructive Assumption About Heaven

Of all the misconceptions we have about Heaven, which is the most destructive? That’s a difficult and important question to tackle.

Once, while preaching about the New Earth, I cited passages about feasting together in our resurrection bodies. Afterward, a veteran Bible student asked if I really believed we would eat and drink in the afterlife. I told him yes, since Jesus said so. Visibly shaken, he replied, “Engaging in physical activities in heaven sounds terribly unspiritual.” Standing there with a body God promised to raise, he was repulsed by the thought of living forever as a physical being in a material world.

And he’s not alone. Many Bible-believing Christians would die before denying the doctrine of the resurrection—and yet they don’t fully believe it.

I’ve dialogued with lifelong evangelicals who don’t understand what resurrection means. They really believe they will spend eternity as disembodied spirits. God’s revelation concerning the resurrection and the New Earth—our forever home—eludes them. A Christian university professor wrote, “I was floored and dismayed to discover the vast majority of my students don’t believe in the bodily resurrection.” Some evangelicals even believe we become angels when we die.

If I could eliminate one belief about Heaven, it would be the heresy that the physical world is an enemy of God’s redemptive plan rather than a central part of it.

Dangers of Christoplatonism

I coined the term “Christoplatonism” to capture how Plato’s notion of a good spirit realm and an evil material world hijacked the church’s understanding of heaven. From a Christoplatonic perspective, our souls occupy our bodies like a hermit crab inhabits a seashell.

Plato’s statement Soma sema, “a body, a tomb,” reflected his belief that the spirit’s ideal state is freedom from the body. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo tried to integrate Plato’s view with Judaism. In the second and third centuries, some church fathers—including Clement and Origen—followed Philo and reinterpreted Scripture.

But the Bible contradicts Christoplatonism from beginning (Genesis 1, God created the heavens and earth) to end (Revelation 21, God will remake the heavens and earth). The gospel itself centers on the resurrected Jesus who, as part of His redemptive work, will resurrect His people and the world He made for them.

Genesis 2:7 says, “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Adam became alive when God joined his body and spirit together. Your body doesn’t merely house you; in concert with your spirit, it is you.

Jesus redeems our whole person. When believers die, our spirits go to the present Heaven while our bodies go to the grave, awaiting resurrection. We will never be all God intended until body and spirit are reunited in Heaven. And just as our new bodies won’t be non-bodies, but real bodies, so the New Earth will be a real earth, not a non-earth.

Disembodied Gospel

If we believe, even subconsciously, that the material world is inherently unspiritual, we will ignore or spiritualize the resurrection. Some speak of spiritual resurrection, but as the sunrise requires a sun, resurrection requires a physical body. That’s what resurrection means.

The risen Jesus reassured His disciples, “Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have” (Luke 24:39 CSB). Yet some evangelicals imagine an afterlife in which we become ghosts—the very thing Jesus reassured His followers He wasn’t.

Satan wants us to believe eternal life will be unearthly and boring. Then people focus on bucket lists, thinking here and now is their only chance at real human life. Who wants to be a ghost? Why invite others to spend eternity in a heaven we don’t look forward to ourselves? Our joy, hope, and motivation to evangelize diminish. Trying to develop an appetite for an eternity of disembodied existence is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel.

The only good news about this view of Heaven is that it’s absolutely false.

The Bible’s actual teaching should thrill us. Eternity in a redeemed body living in a Jesus-centered culture on a New Earth, capital planet of the new universe? That’s incredibly good news.

What About the Present Heaven?

God never changes, but Heaven will change. The Bible indicates that after our resurrection, God will relocate His central dwelling place to the New Earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. . . . I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . . I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:1–3)

We’re told “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it [the New Earth], and his servants will worship him” (Revelation 22:3). Heaven is where God’s throne is, where He dwells with His people. Hence, the New Earth will be Heaven on earth. When Christians die, we go to live with God in His place. That’s the present Heaven. But after the resurrection, God will come down to live with us in our place. The future Heaven, on the New Earth, will not be “us with God” but “God with us.”

We err when we confuse the present pre-resurrection Heaven with the future post-resurrection Heaven that God will bring down to the New Earth. The present Heaven is “far better” (Philippians 1:23) than our lives under the curse of sin and suffering. Upon death, we will be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). But my point is, wonderful though it will be, we shouldn’t think of the present Heaven as if it were our ultimate home. The best is yet to come—eternal and delightful life worshiping and serving the forever-incarnate Jesus on the New Earth.

World Worth Anticipating

Spirits without bodies fit Platonism and Eastern mysticism. They do not fit Christianity. Paul says if there’s no resurrection, we should “be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

New bodies and the New Earth aren’t our inventions; they’re God’s. He created us to live on and rule the earth, and Jesus became man to redeem His creation (Isaiah 65:17; 66:22). God’s people should look forward to living forever in a redeemed cosmos (2 Peter 3:13). That is a life-changing perspective.

The present earth, even under sin and curse, teems with clues about the New Earth: mountains, water, trees, people, and cities. Along with other passages, Revelation 21–22 depicts life on the New Earth in familiar ways. We will eat, drink, work, play, worship, discover, invent, and travel in a sinless world like —yet even better than—the one God made for Adam and Eve. The word nations suggests resurrected civilizations, cultures with distinctive ethnic traits (Revelation 21:24, 26). Multiple New Earth passages mention animals (Isaiah 11:6–9; 65:25). What can the rest of “the whole creation” in Romans 8:19–22 be but animals, which along with humans groan and await the resurrection when the earth that fell on our coattails will rise on them?

Settling for Less Than a Redeemed Earth

Jesus promised his disciples a “renewal of all things” (Matthew 19:28 NIV), which the ESV renders “the new world.” Peter preached that Christ won’t return “until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21). With the Lord we love, believers will embark on the ultimate adventure. A magnificent New Earth awaits our exploration and governance, to God’s glory. Jesus will be the cosmic center; joy will be the air we breathe.

Christians are vulnerable to attractive false teachings. Ironically, the true biblical teachings about the new body and New Earth are far more robust and appealing than the false Christoplatonic view of Heaven. Let’s teach our children and our churches what is absolutely true and profoundly attractive.

Does the thought of experiencing a resurrected world appeal to you? Does it ignite your imagination to realize we will live happily ever after on a planet without sin and suffering? Is this part of the good news you share with others? Let’s never settle for less than the full breadth of God’s promised salvation—eternal life with God’s people on a redeemed earth governed by the King of kings, whom we will joyfully worship and serve forever.

For more on the eternal life that awaits us, see Randy’s book  Heaven , and Randy's other books and resources on Heaven available from EPM.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How Abolitionists Worked Incrementally to End Slavery—and the Implications for Prolifers Today

In my last blog, I shared an article by Scott Klusendorf: “Saving Some, Standing for All: A Defense of Pro-Life Incrementalism (And the Problem with ‘Abortion Abolitionism’).”

As we expected, many who call themselves “abortion abolitionists” took issue with Scott’s article and my posting it. I have heard from many of these people in the past and have tried to look at their arguments objectively. That’s not easy to do, partly because they consistently and strongly portray “prolife” Christians—including many of us who have invested considerable time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice to save the lives of unborn children—as  “unchristian” and actually at fault for the fact that abortion is still legal in America.

Here’s a direct quote from one Facebook comment: “If they [prolifers] would abandon their anti-Christian, God-opposing ideology, and start holding their politicians accountable and supporting God’s Word, instead of prolife’s ideology, abortion could end in two years through the entire country. It is the prolife ideology that allows this atrocity to continue.”

There was a time when using the term “prolife” was taking the moral high ground. Now, the high ground is taken by using the term “abolitionists.” It’s an effective term because nearly all of us realize the original abolitionists were on the morally correct side of the slavery issue, and it also implies most Christians who are prolife do not want abortion to be abolished.

On the contrary, every prolifer I know would love for there to be no abortion! We just believe that given the prevailing mindset of our culture, it is simply impossible to achieve New Earth realities right now. Therefore, we think we should do our best to save however many unborn children we can through personal intervention in nonpolitical contexts (that’s what I focus on through my writing and speaking and conversations) as well as legislative efforts which can be very effective in certain parts of the country. However, in many places (such as where I live outside of Portland, Oregon) there is no hope of passing such bills when they advocate eliminating all abortions by criminalizing them.

No Room for Pragmatism?

In my experience, and it is considerable, “abortion abolitionists” have insisted there is no room for compromise or pragmatism, and that abortions should be treated as all other murders and criminalized with appropriate punishment—some believe capital punishment—under civil law. 

This has the advantage of moral consistency, as did the logic we used in the rescue movement that sent many of us to jail and to court in the late 80’s and early 90’s. We said, “If three-year-olds were legally being killed every day at a building in our city, what would Christians do?” Our point was, if we really believed the unborn are fully human, shouldn’t we intervene for them as we would for toddlers?

I was arrested seven times and sued by several abortion clinics, and by God’s grace we succeeded in the clinics having to be closed on the days we were present. Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups did studies showing that when women came for abortions and were turned away because of the presence of peaceful rescuers, 25% would never set up another appointment and would have their babies. To us, that was wonderful news! When a clinic had 40 abortions in a day, and it was shut down through our presence, that meant 10 children’s lives had been saved!

I tell this story because I keep hearing from abortion abolitionists that those who aren’t part of their movement are unwilling to take radical steps on behalf of the unborn. Because of my prolife efforts, I lost my job as a pastor, went to jail, and couldn’t make more than minimum wage for twenty years. That’s very small suffering in the larger scheme of things, but I think I can say I am not casual in my dedication to stopping abortions (which is saving children) nor am I inherently opposed to radical thinking and action.

Attempting to Apply the Golden Rule

I have been reading abortion abolitionist comments on my Facebook page and the articles they’ve linked to, and watching videos they sent me. I had hoped to write about those today, but it might be several weeks before I can put my thoughts together. We’ll see.

For now, I want to say that I believe many abortion abolitionists are sincere Christians who genuinely care about unborn children. They have listened to the arguments of intelligent and articulate leaders and have come to the uncompromising conclusion that their approach—and theirs alone—to saving unborn children is the right one. Several have made clear they believe all other “prolife” approaches don’t go far enough and therefore are sinful.  

Their “save all babies” approach sounds pure and undefiled, but in my opinion their utter opposition to incremental prolife efforts amounts to “Save all babies, and unless we can, let’s not save any.” (I realize they would never say it that way, but that’s what it sounds like. I’m sure some of them have a more balanced approach. I just haven’t heard it yet.)

So why am I looking over abortion abolitionist material? Because I want to be fair and open to the possibility that I’m wrong, whether entirely or partially. Obviously, I don’t think I’ve been wrong (do any of us?), but I’m asking God to give me insight in the knowledge that sometimes I certainly have been wrong. If I want others to be open to my viewpoints, I should be open to theirs.

In these last few years I have seen a jarring number of Christians despising each other about masks, social distancing, vaccinations, and political candidates. I don’t want to fall prey to the acidic, demeaning ways Christians have treated other brothers and sisters in Christ. I believe these violations of Christian love and unity blatantly violate the commands of Jesus and hinder the work of the Holy Spirit in drawing unbelievers to Christ. (I recently wrote an article for Desiring God that addresses this vitally important issue that is hurting churches and undermining our gospel witness.)

This is why in a future blog, I plan to link to podcasts and articles so people can hear for themselves what abortion abolitionists are saying. In my book hand in Hand I say we should not base our appraisal of Arminians by listening to what Calvinists say they believe, nor should we base our appraisal of Calvinists by listening to what Arminians say they believe. I am absolutely convinced to understand any position, you must listen to its proponents, not its opponents.  

I confess I have been treated in demeaning and dismissive ways by some (though not all) abortion abolitionists, and I do not want to reciprocate that. The golden rule is not, “Do to others what they do to you,” but “Do to others what you would want them to do to you.” That’s why I’m asking God for understanding, and the ability to set aside my preconceptions and believe the best of my brothers and sisters whether or not they do the same. I want to have civil dialogue and not misrepresent or slander fellow believers.

The Incremental Abolition of Slavery

Now to my focus in the remainder of this blog: I’d like to demonstrate that the abolition of slavery, which the term abolitionists is historically derived from, actually happened in increments over many decades, with the hard work of many who opposed slavery and used different means to attempt to end it.

Consider this article on ending slavery in the state of Virginia, which talks about incremental steps. Even the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 didn’t end slavery, since it applied only to the Confederate States. Over a year later Virginia finally outlawed slavery in the entire state, including parts which had been loyal to the Union.

Another year later came the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. Had that amendment not been ratified then, surely the efforts to abolish slavery would have continued, even if they’d taken decades. While the ideal would have been the immediate change of the law everywhere, in a world where those who understand what’s right and wrong aren’t always in control (have you noticed?), the ideal is not always immediately possible. Therefore, righteous people must labor to change all that can be changed, while working towards all that should be changed. 

One of my great heroes is William Wilberforce. He is credited as the primary human agent to bring about the end of slavery in England. In an article called “The Incremental Nature of Change,” Tim Challies summarizes some points from Talking About Good and Bad Without Getting Ugly, written by Paul Chamberlain, a professor at Trinity Western University: 

Wilberforce was a realistic man and knew (to borrow a cliché) that Rome was not built in a day. He knew that the kind of change he desired would take time, for it required the British people to adopt a whole new mindset. They had to be led to see that slavery was an afront to the God-given value of human beings, even those of a different skin-color. They had to see that the conditions of slavery were an abomination to a nation that claimed to be Christian. They had a lot to learn—a lot to understand. This would take time.

Wilberforce, then, was willing to accept incremental improvements. For example, at one point he supported a bill, passed on a trial basis, that would regulate the number of slaves that were permitted to be transported on a single ship. Previously slaves had been laid in rows on benches, chained on their sides with the front of one pressed against the back of the next. Following the legislation, improvements were made. However, the bill implicitly and explicitly supported the continuance of slavery. Wilberforce saw it as a step in the right direction and was willing to support it. Another time he voted for a bill that required plantation owners to register all of their slaves. While this bill also supported slavery, Wilberforce saw that a registry of slaves would keep plantation owners from adding to their number of slaves by buying them from illegal slave smugglers.

Wilberforce saw these incremental changes as accomplishing two goals. First, at the very least, they improved the living and working conditions of slaves. While slavery may continue, at least the slaves were afforded a greater amount of dignity, even if it continued to be minimal. Second, he believed that affording slaves greater rights set the Empire on a slippery slope. Having acknowledged the humanness of the slaves, people had to admit that slaves were something more than animals. The British Parliament had given approval to bills that Wilberforce knew would lead to nothing short of abolition. And of course his beliefs proved to be correct. The incremental changes for which he lobbied proved to be the starting point for the eventual abolition of slavery.

Year after year, while both unbelievers and Christians denied or ignored reality, Wilberforce suffered sleepless nights, plagued by dreams of suffering slaves. Finally, in 1807, against incredible odds, Wilberforce saw the slave trade outlawed. But even that was not the end to slavery; rather, it was a big step (otherwise known as an increment) toward ending it. Parliament still insisted that those who were already slaves should not be freed. Wilberforce and the other abolitionists labored over 25 more years for the emancipation of existing slaves. Wilberforce died in 1833—three days after the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery passed its second reading in the House of Commons, bringing legalized slavery in England to its final end.

Can you imagine any British opponent of slavery in 1807 saying that they would refuse to vote for ending the slave trade unless all slaves were immediately freed? Sure, ideally, you would want every slave freed. But any way to end some slavery was better than not eliminating any slavery. And even when slavery was ended, it fell far short of establishing full legal civil rights for the former slaves. That didn’t happen for more than a hundred years, and even then, the racism beneath the surface couldn’t be eliminated.  I also recommend this article that depicts the many anti-slavery tactics employed decade after decade, ultimately leading to the abolition of slavery. Imagine if one group stepped forward and said, “We will stand against all incremental efforts to end slavery in America. We will oppose all laws that free some slaves and not others, and we will fight all legislation that increases the rights of slaves but fails to give them absolutely equal rights.”

Though these idealists might have had pure motives, and perhaps would have slept better at night knowing they didn’t tolerate compromise, judge for yourself how effective they would or would not have been in actually ending slavery. Certainly their standard would have failed to help present slaves. I think it’s a worthy point that historically the true abolitionists in countries such as England and America normally favored, embraced, and frequently used innumerable incremental means to bring about their ultimate goal, the end of slavery.  

Where We’re at Today

The implications for the prolife movement today are obvious. As Scott Klusendorf pointed out in his article, we are all incrementalists, including abolitionists: “When abolitionists introduce a total ban on abortion in one state but not all of them, they are working incrementally. …We can’t help but function incrementally when confronting evil. It was right to end slavery in 1865 even though legally sanctioned segregation was not abolished for another 100 years. Even if we ban abortion, we still have the evil of discarded IVF embryos to contend with, not to mention other reproductive technologies that treat children as commodities.”

Suppose I’m on an ocean beach, and I see a sinking boat. I see people in the water and hear some crying out. I see people flailing their arms. I dive into the water and swim as fast as I can to get to them. By the time I get there, the entire ship is below water. Some are injured, and there are no life preservers. Among those struggling are five children. I grab hold of the closest child and hold her head above the water. I swim to another child and hold her up, but when I hold both up, my head is under water. I make my way to a third child, but I realize that if I attempt to swim them all to shore, we will all drown. Two is the most I can possibly save. Even when I sink under, hopefully I can hold my breath then come up for air often enough to swim them both to shore.

This is a terrible moral dilemma. Who am I to choose to save some and let others drown? If two children have the right to be saved, don’t all five? Of course. But what is the alternative to attempting to saving only two? To let them all drown? Two is an increment of five. Saving two is not as good as saving five. But since I can’t save five, shouldn’t I do what I can to save as many as I can?

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward” (Mark 9:41). Notice the value He places on doing small measures of grace to the extent that we can. He did not say, “Unless you can save a child from a life of abuse and poverty, you should not do anything for him.” He also did not say, “Unless you can give a cup of cold water to all thirsty children, you shouldn’t give one to any of them.” Giving a cup of cold water to a child is a small thing which may or may not lead to greater measures to help that child. Jesus does not take an “all or nothing at all” attitude toward helping the needy. A cup of cold water was an increment, but it was a very good increment.  

Every day, on average, there are over 2,000 abortions performed in the U.S. There’s much work to be done—and the good news is that every one of us can do something to help women and children in need. May we, in our hearts and actions, have mercy on the smallest and weakest of God’s precious children, and do what we can to rescue and help as many of them as possible. May we  reach out in love and compassion to their mothers. If we can’t reach them all right now, let’s reach as many as we can. And meanwhile let’s all work toward ending child-killing, just as the original abolitionists freed and aided what slaves they could, while working toward the goal of ending all slavery.

Browse more prolife articles and resources, as well as see Randy’s books  Pro-Choice or Pro-Life: Examining 15 Pro-Choice Claims ,  Why ProLife?  and  ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments .

William Wilberforce photo: Wikimedia Commons

Four Minutes of Beauty and Wonder

This amazing four-minute slow motion video, excerpted from a TED Talk, shows what happens in God’s world that we normally don’t get to see at all, and virtually never in this way. It includes bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and creatures that will remain anonymous until you see them. Watching this causes me to worship our Creator God, the maker of beauty. (The bigger the screen the better.)

“The earth is Yahweh’s, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it….Lift up your heads, O you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is he, this King of glory? Yahweh Almighty—he is the King of glory” (Psalm 24:1, 9-10).

Photo by Paul Bonnar on Unsplash

The Problem with Abortion Abolitionism, and an Appeal to Prolifers to Work Together

Note from Randy: Over the years, we’ve received numerous comments and feedback from those who consider themselves abortion abolitionists. I honestly appreciate their passion to see abortion ended. Any sincere prolifer would be ecstatic if abortion were made illegal. Unfortunately, their methods and philosophy, and their antagonistic stance to other prolifers, are often problematic.

Scott Klusendorf explains that the assumption behind these abolition groups is that “pro-lifers have the power to immediately end abortion but simply won’t. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pro-life advocates do not have the power to say which children live and which ones die. The federal courts have already said that no unborn children have a right to life. In that legal environment, the principled pro-lifer is an immediatist morally and an incrementalist strategically. That is, while pro-lifers remain committed to the principle that every unborn human should be legally protected, they work to save as many lives as possible given current political realities.”

Certainly we can and should pray for and work toward the day when abortion is illegal and ending an unborn child’s life is unthinkable. In the meantime, may prolifers work together, in a spirit of humility and grace. I like to put it this way: to win a war, it takes the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Special Forces, Navy Seals, etc. Anyone who thinks their group or branch of the Armed Services is the only way of fighting the war or accomplishing the mission is simply wrong. The same thing is true of those who believe their strategy to end or prevent abortions is the only one that is right or effective. 

My thanks to Scott for this article explaining the problems with abolitionism and giving a defense of prolife incrementalism.

Saving Some, Standing for All: A Defense of Pro-Life Incrementalism
(And the Problem with Abolitionism)

By Scott Klusendorf

Now that the Supreme Court has let stand (for now) a Texas pro-life law that prohibits abortions after fetal heartbeat, the knives are out for pro-lifers, and not just from pro-abortionists. Abolitionists are also in the hunt to gut pro-life legislative efforts.

Consider this year’s Southern Baptist Convention. Delegates affirmed an abolitionist resolution that calls the SBC to be a “prophetic voice to abolish abortion” immediately and without exceptions. Incremental strategies advanced by pro-life advocates—the abolitionist resolution declares—are nothing more than appalling “regulatory guidelines” for determining “when, where, why, and how” adults may intentionally kill innocent pre-born children. Put simply, pro-life gains to date—such as parental notification and consent laws, late-term abortion bans, or heartbeat bills—have done nothing but sanction evil. Any incremental strategy rather than immediate abolition is a shameful sin leaders must confess, lament, and repent of because it makes them complicit in abortion.

The delegates tried to soften the resolution by amending it to say that the SBC “will not embrace an incremental approach alone to ending abortion.” But the addition leaves untouched abolitionist language that unequivocally condemns incrementalism as an appalling sanction of murder that “challenges God’s Lordship over the heart and the conscience, and rejects His call to repent of sin completely and immediately.” The implications for Christian fellowship are troubling. William Ascol—the pastor who sponsored the resolution—used a 2020 sermon to say SBC churches should summarily disfellowship Christian politicians who don’t vote along abolitionist lines. Virgil Walker, co-host of the G3 podcast, called pro-life incrementalism “an idol that really needs to be brought down. It’s actually a golden calf.” In short, pro-life advocates are not only mistaken; they are willfully sinning. Denny Burk summarizes what follows if abolitionists are right about that: “It would obligate churches to shun pro-lifers through church discipline. . . . They have to remove the impenitent sinners from among them.”

Are Pro-Life Advocates That Bad?

Imagine a world in which wife-beating is legal. Three governors—Bob, Abraham, and Caleb—all claim to oppose it. Bob has the political power to protect all women, but when the state legislature sends him a bill banning spousal abuse outright, he vetoes it and demands exceptions for men 35 or younger. He appeals to pragmatism: “Come on, younger men have difficulty controlling their emotions and may snap if their wives burn supper, fail to discipline the children, or withhold sex. That’s reality. The solution is not punitive laws, but state-funded counseling for men.”

Abraham, meanwhile, wins election in a state notorious for wife-beating. Previous attempts to ban it outright failed miserably. Abraham is sickened by this lamentable state of affairs and vows to protect all women in law. However, he does not yet have the votes to do it. Nevertheless, he does what he can. He signs an executive order freeing state employees from abusive spouses. They may leave home and keep their jobs without fear of arrest. Two years later, his party—which more or less opposes wife-beating—picks up a slim majority in the legislature. True, the votes still aren’t there to ban the practice, but he keeps pushing. He signs legislation that forbids hitting your wife with blunt instruments. A month later, he secures two more bills, one protecting teenage girls from forced marriages to older, abusive men and another that forbids striking any woman older than 50. Those last two bills alone will protect an estimated 20,000 women. He signs all three incremental bills and vows to do more.

Caleb governs a state where attempts to ban wife-beating have similarly failed. The state legislature scrapes together just enough votes to send Caleb identical legislation to that signed by Abraham. Caleb swiftly vetoes it on grounds that incremental legislation that regulates when, where, and how men may beat their wives is sinfully motivated and consents to the abuse of those women left unprotected.

Which governor did the right thing?

According to abolitionists, only Caleb. But the abolitionist claims are flawed and unfairly represent pro-life efforts to limit the evil of abortion.

1. Pro-life advocates and abolitionists agree on principle—We should protect all unborn humans.

They disagree on practice when you cannot immediately do that. For the pro-life advocate, there are two ways to practice war. If you have superior forces, you quickly crush the opposition and enforce political victory. If you do not, you fight a war of attrition, wearing the enemy out by constantly chipping away at his strongholds. When one falls, you come back for more. You never quit. From 1974 to 1983, pro-lifers advanced several human life amendments and human life bills, hoping to gain a quick and decisive victory for all unborn humans. When those efforts failed, pro-lifers began practicing a second strategy aimed at limiting the evil of abortion insofar as possible given current political realities. While not abandoning our principle of total protection for all unborn humans, we practiced incrementalism to save as many lives as we could along the way. Abolitionists insist that pro-life advocates employ a sinful means (incremental legislation) to achieve a good end (saving children). But the abolitionist claim is question-begging since the debate over incrementalism is precisely about whether compromising legislatively equals compromising morally.

2. The abolitionist claim that incrementalism is wrong in principle raises troubling questions.

Abolitionists insist that incremental laws are a sinful rejection of God’s sovereignty and legitimize murder. However, if incremental pro-life laws are inherently sinful, which incremental laws currently in force do abolitionists wish to repeal right now? Incremental laws save lives. For example, the Charlotte Lozier Institute estimates that the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal and state matching Medicaid funds for most abortions, alone saves 60,000 lives a year (2,409,311 total since 1976). Should we let those children die in exchange for abolitionist purity? This is a problematic question for abolitionists and one they’ve dodged in public debates with pro-life advocates. Incremental laws make it tougher to operate abortion clinics, forcing some to close. That’s why Planned Parenthood fights these laws tooth and nail. If a bill was introduced banning all abortions but did not address lives lost to IVF procedures, would abolitionists support it?

3. Pragmatic doesn’t always mean evil.

True, it could be evil if I justify wrongdoing with an appeal to pragmatism, like Governor Bob. Bob is not opposing evil. Instead, he is formally cooperating with it. He wants exceptions and intends to enshrine them as permanent law. But “pragmatic” can also mean prudent. Consider Abraham. He lacks the votes to ban abuse outright (his true intention), but has them to protect teenage girls and women older than 50. If he doesn’t sign the bill, 20,000 women go to sleep that night unprotected. So, he signs the bill and pushes for more, as everyone around him—including his political enemies—knows he will do. Unlike Bob, Abraham’s overriding concern is not the justification of (or surrender to) an immoral principle, but the limiting of evil as far as possible given current political restraints. He’s still in the fight for good, doing all that can be done to save as many women as possible.

Put simply, if by pragmatist you mean Abraham, I guess you could say pro-lifers are pragmatists. They refuse to let children die who can be saved with incremental legislation. Abolitionists, meanwhile, trade lives for the alleged purity of their principles. They are willing to sacrifice children whose lives could be saved today in hopes of securing an ideal future in which all children are protected. Steve Hays sums it up well: “Abolition can only succeed on the backs of babies it relegates to the grave in the short term.”

4. Pro-life advocates are not consenting to the killing of unborn humans left unprotected by incremental legislation.

Suppose I’m a prisoner of war captured by a ruthless enemy. My captors take me and hundreds of my men on an 86-mile death march where those falling behind are promptly shot. As the ranking officer, I secure a concession from my captors that allows exhausted soldiers a 20-minute reprieve to recover and get moving before they are shot. My fellow officers join me running up and down the line saving as many men as we can. As a result, 400 men who fell behind resumed the march and after the war returned home to their families. Tragically, 500 others could not resume the march and were shot.

By saving some, did I consent to the killing of those left behind? Of course not! Nor was I consenting to the legitimacy of the death march. When I secured the concession from my captors, I did not say, “Give me 20 minutes, then you can kill the wounded soldier.” I gave no such consent! Rather, given the wicked hand I was dealt, I limited the evil done as far as possible given the realities confronting me. Unlike Governor Bob who had the power to stop evil but didn’t, I was forced to operate from a position of weakness. I didn’t choose the lesser of two evils. Rather, as Kevin James Bywater clarifies, I chose to lessen evil. True, the situation was evil, but not because I secured a concession from my captors. It was evil because my captors forced upon me a cruel reality: keep my men moving or watch them die. Given the situation, it is not evil to save those you can.

5. Abolitionists wrongly assume that pro-life advocates have the power to stop abortion but simply won’t.

This is fantasy. Like Governor Abraham, pro-lifers have no such power. The federal courts have declared that no unborn humans have a right to life. Given that judicial reality, pro-lifers can’t wave a magic wand and make abortion go away. Abolitionists reply that laws permitting abortion are null and void and that pro-lifers who work to limit their evil impact wrongly cede to Caesar the ultimate authority to dictate from on high who lives and who dies. But as Steve Hays points out, the objection confuses moral authority with legal authority. Biblically understood, God is indeed the ultimate moral authority who will righteously judge all humans. Genuine Christians recognize and acknowledge that truth. However, to abolish abortion in a constitutional republic like ours, pro-lifers need legal authority, which they do not yet have in sufficient measure to protect all children. In short, declaring that abortion-permitting laws are null and void does not make them null and void. Given pro-lifers lack legal authority to save all children, it’s not evil for them to protect as many as they can.

6. We are all incrementalists, including abolitionists.

When abolitionists introduce a total ban on abortion in one state but not all of them, they are working incrementally. They are practicing what one writer calls “local political incrementalism.” In doing so, they are not saying, “We consent to killing the baby in those other states where we did not introduce a bill.” As long as there remains a political union between states that protect life and those that don’t, pro-lifers have no choice but to function incrementally, in this case, state by state.

We can’t help but function incrementally when confronting evil. It was right to end slavery in 1865 even though legally sanctioned segregation was not abolished for another 100 years. Even if we ban abortion, we still have the evil of discarded IVF embryos to contend with, not to mention other reproductive technologies that treat children as commodities.

Then What?

How would an abolitionist strategy play out in the real world? Have abolitionists prudently considered the implications of their views?

Pro-lifers are hopeful the Supreme Court will strike a fatal blow against two cases that enshrined the abortion license, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Mississippi case it will hear on December 1 represents our best chance for that outcome. If Roe and Casey fall, abortion will no longer be a constitutional right at the federal level. Individual states can then set their own abortion policies. Without that incremental win, attempts to abolish abortion in any given state are dead on arrival.

Here’s why. Suppose that Roe and Casey survive challenge. Nevertheless, a state defies the federal courts and signs into law an abolitionist bill banning all abortions, without exceptions. What then? As more than one pro-life leader points out, a move like that is akin to secession. Don’t expect the federal government to look away. For millions of Americans, abortion is a sacrament that cannot be challenged. As happened with civil-rights integration in the 1950s and 1960s, troops will be sent in to enforce federal law. Abortion clinics will remain open. Then what?

Pro-lifers and abolitionists share two things in common. First, they agree in principle that every unborn human deserves the protection of law and we must not rest until that happens. Second, both are forced to function incrementally. Given that shared reality, there’s room for candid discussions about tactics and strategies. If abolitionists want to join that conversation in good faith, they are welcome.

This article originally appeared on The Gospel Coalition and is used with permission of the author.

Photo by Tessa Rampersad on Unsplash

How Do We Best Help the Poor and Needy in Our Communities?

I think the most important principle is you can’t effectively help needy people you don’t know. Now, there are exceptions. You might say, “I know the people who work with them, and I financially support their ministry.” But the principle still stands that someone has to actually know the people being ministered to.

We’ll never have a heart for people we don’t see and spend time with. If we don’t know anyone who’s poor—if we don’t go out in our communities to meet people, strike up conversations, and get to know them—we can’t see what we can do for them. We need to take the initiative of volunteering at a soup kitchen, doing downtown ministry, or participating in some other outreach to those in need.

We can also encourage our churches to support these ministries, and then start volunteering ourselves. Churches often get involved in a ministry when some members are invested in giving of their time and developing relationships.

Nanci and I have experience that in our home church, Good Shepherd Community Church. One of our members walked away from his very profitable medical practice and set up what’s called The Good News Clinic in one of the poorest areas of our community. Churches support them. People volunteer, including physicians and nurses, as well as trained therapists and people with counseling skills because the clinic’s patients need more than physical care—they need emotional and mental care too, and most importantly they need to hear the Good News of Christ.

But you’ve got to get out there and actually connect. Certainly, missions trips to poor parts of the world are important, though they don’t involve the poor in our own community. But there are truly poor people around us. We need to meet these people and see what’s being done for them, instead of writing them all off as drug addicts and people who are just trying to bleed the system. Many of these people have very complex stories that involve abuse, hurt, and pain, and some of them are veterans. You just don’t know until you get close enough to meet them and minister to them, as God’s Word calls us to do.

For some of us it’s a question of walking down the block and getting to know the poor. For others it’s driving twenty miles to find a homeless person. Perhaps I must take regular trips away from the cozy suburbs to the inner city. Whole churches have become involved in projects of helping the poor. Some youth groups take regular trips to Mexico. Others put on camps and evangelistic Bible clubs for inner-city children. Churches can go to the ghettos, the jails, the hospitals, and rest homes—wherever there is need.

God links our efforts for the poor directly to our relationship with Him. May he one day say of us what he said of King Josiah: “He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?” (Jeremiah 22:16).

For more, see my article Helping the Poor and Homeless and my book Money, Possessions, and Eternity .

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels