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This is because cultural damnation is denial of God, denial of the truth, denial of reason, denial of what is obvious, and it is denial of all these things, no matter what.
And that is why, when the Spirit moves, He does what He does by giving a new heart. And when He does that, nothing can stop Him.
We tend to assume that if the existing authorities tell us to do anything short of swearing an oath to worship Satan, then we have to do it.
Certain truths lie right on the surface of the Bible, and this is why true Christians generally do well in times of overt persecution. When they are commanded to bow down to an idol, they know that Daniel’s three friends refused to do so (Dan. 3:16). When they are commanded to stop spreading the gospel, they know that this was the point where the apostles refused to cooperate (Acts 5:29).
Christians do better when the trap has sprung than they do in refusing to take the bait.
The answer is that we are coin from God’s mint. We are created in the image of God, and are therefore forbidden to render ourselves to Caesar. We give one thing to Caesar and another to God. We may not render it all to Caesar. It is prohibited. And they marveled at Him.
If I am God’s coin, I don’t need to know my monetary value to Him to know whether or not this coin can be rendered to Caesar. I may be a penny and I may be a ten dollar bill, but in either case, I may not make any payments to Caesar from this account. I just need to know that God’s image is on me, and that God’s image is being restored in me through Christ.
If we were not created in the image of God, then this means that we have no jurisdictional appeal beyond Caesar. If there is no God above Caesar, then Caesar is God. If there is a God in Heaven, and He has placed His image on us, then this absolutely requires the biblical concept of limited government.
We need for God to give us seers, who see the world whole and entire.
Satan did not revolt against God because of the grim conditions of Hell. Hell is the result of him revolting against the delightful conditions of Heaven. Adam did not rebel against God because he was tired of living in a slum. No, his children live in slums because he grew tired of living in Paradise.
We live in world that contains both dark evil and staggering goodness. The cause of the evil is our revolt against the good, which we routinely justify by pointing at the evil.
This is the fundamental difference between radicals and reformers. Both recognize that good and evil exist, but the radical wants to blame the good as the root source of all evil. The reformer wants to fight evil, and so he does. The radical resents what is truly evil, but what he fights is the good. The reformer doesn’t resent evil—he is no sentimentalist—but he does hate it. St. George fights the dragon, and does so with a good will.
The ability to raise the poor from poverty by teaching them how to make money is a good thing, and so they blur it by condemning the ability to make money. Nowhere are the sentimentalist contradictions of radicalism so apparent as here. The fact that people are poor is an outrage, and the fact that the means exist for bringing them out of poverty is an even worse outrage. They say the disease is wicked, and the medicine worse.
In order to keep our bearings, and in order to keep our heads, we have to reject every attempt to get us to compromise our fundamental allegiance to Scripture as God’s infallible Word to us. It all comes back to this. Yea, hath God said is always a strategic move so that we may jump in there with here’s what I think.
So we should be in the market for young Christian men and women who are willing to be trained in genuine cultural engagement. They won’t be embarrassed by old-fashioned virtues, like hard work and discipline. They will respect authority and defy the authorities. They won’t get fired from jobs because of laziness, and they will get fired from them because of something they said about homosexuality. They won’t resent money and success, and they won’t be dazzled by money and success. They will laugh at the hipsters, and they will laugh at themselves laughing at the hipsters. They will loathe the
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First, since our principal problem is the idolatrous cancer of statism, we must first be interested in keeping that statism from getting any worse. Second, we have to roll back as much of that statism as we can. And third, those things which are healthy in themselves, and which may be allowed to remain, must be grounded in our desire to do the will of Jesus, as revealed in Scripture.
If I am debating someone who was maintaining that God didn’t know where South Dakota was, the difference between us would not be about geography. And if I am debating someone who thinks the government has the right to tell me what kind of light bulb to use, the difference between us is not about the best wattage for my living room. If I am debating someone who wants to ban magazines with more than ten rounds, they want it to be about the magazines—whereas if I still have my wits about me, I should know that the debate is over whether or not the ATF rose from the dead in order to ascend into
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The stated purpose of such laws is to keep devastating weapons out of the hands of criminals. The real purpose of the law is to grow the power of the idol-state, and to shrink the power of those capable of resisting it. This sleight of hand matters because what genuine Christian wants criminals to have devastating weapons? And what genuine Christian wants a bigger and more powerful idol-state? There are two different questions on the table, and so it matters which one is the real one.
All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable, and Scripture tells us to do things with murderers that we simply refuse to do, and it never tells us to do anything whatever with the murder weapons. “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecc. 8:11, ESV). It does not say, however much we might like it to, “Because the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil, therefore remove all the weapons from the general populace, and accumulate them in the arsenals of an arrogant and overweening
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In sum, the eternal power and Godhead is known from the things that are made, and the knowledge that arises from this is knowledge that brings moral culpability with it. For the knowledge was not just that God was there somewhere, but that He was worthy of worship and honor. Worship and honor were required by the knowledge that natural revelation brought. This they refused to do, in defiance of this light from natural revelation, and this light from natural revelation can certainly be called a natural law. It has all the ingredients–a lawgiver, a standard, a subject, and moral responsibility.
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You cannot find a rock or a pebble anywhere that does not command you to worship Him. This is natural law.
What do natural law, the covenant of works, theocracy, regeneration, and homosexual marriage have in common? They are all different aspects of the same subject, that’s what.
If the church is going to speak authoritatively in the public square—theocracy—then there needs to be a basis for speaking to the non-believers. The covenant of creation provides that basis.
the covenant of creation is the only possible basis for natural law, which he does recognize (perhaps in spite of himself). He cannot account for this natural law within the framework of his worldview, but it is there nonetheless. For example, the late Christopher Hitchens did not use the language of natural law, but he sure appealed to it all the time.
How do we declare the lordship of Christ over all things when a significant number of people are obviously outside the covenant of grace?
This is why 1689 Federalism is so key, and why those who believe in one covenant, multiple administrations will always end of paedo-baptists.
These people can refuse baptism on the basis of their unbelief, but their unbelief is not potent enough to remake the world they live in. The reason they appear to be having some success in the present (as measured by things like homo marriage) is not because of their unbelief. It is because of the Church’s unbelief.
Why don’t we believe in natural law? Because of cowardice.
Natural law is not impersonal, but is rather the will of the triune God.
Natural law is not inconsistent in any way with special revelation, and natural law rightly understood is not embarrassed in any way by the specific revelation found in Scripture. You shall not suffer a witch to live, objects falling down at 9.8 meters per second squared, and nature itself teaching us that long hair is a woman’s glory are all expressions of the same personal and divine will.
All of Christ for all the world.
This is why it is as silly to assume that someone is a postmodernist because he emphasizes story as it would be to assume that someone was a Union soldier because he was on the field at Gettysburg, and had a gun. Right, he did, but which way was it pointed?
Truth is resisted, obstructed, lied about, persecuted, and then when all that damage is done, the opponents of the truth glibly declare that the truth must not be all that true—look at all the damage!
I am not trying to save America, unless saving America is a proximate means to the larger end of glorifying God through the salvation of His people through the gospel.
Most of the really big problems in the world are caused by the smartest guys in the room.
The shrill left approach is effective, though, when it comes to people easily embarrassed or cool-shamed. I think a lot of hard conservative types aren’t willing to associate with things generally liked by mainstream red-staters who lack nuance. To them, liking Palin is similar to openly liking The Blind Side or Fireproof. Being seen to have unsophisticated tastes (even by one’s enemies) is just too much to bear . . . the last thing we need is a leader with nuance. We need the right principles, black and white vision, and an inability to feel fear (or poll pressure).
We don’t need sophisticated economics. We need people who understand the difference between bigger numbers and smaller numbers. We don’t need nuance in race relations. We need to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. We don’t need wise men who manage an endless series of nation-building wars. We need our wars to be purposive, rare, and short. We don’t need a candidate who wins the grudging respect of the professional left. We need a candidate who has an uncanny ability to set them all off as barking mad. In sum, this means we need a candidate who
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If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.
But some of us want to give those assumptions the raspberry.
First, it is stealing. Taxing money simply because it is there is offensive to God. The language of “fair share” notwithstanding, the top five percent already pay fifty-seven percent of the tax load. Here is a question without guile—when will the wealthy finally get around to paying their “fair share”? What is that fair share exactly?
If someone attempts to steal something from me, but fails, then I am none the worse. But for the aspiring thief, he gets all the guilt credits for having made such an attempt and none of the booty. He has the worst of both worlds. He tried to steal two stools and he then fell between them.
We have thieves in Congress and in the White House because we have thievery in our hearts.
Because we have larceny in our hearts, we call it greed when someone wants to keep the money he made, and we don’t call it greed when we want to take it away from him. But we are the ones with sticky fingers—and we have sticky fingers because of our sticky hearts.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances that permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of society, the people slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’
Robin Hood. He was not robbing the rich to give to the poor. He was robbing the tax collectors in order to get the money back to the people who had earned it in the first place. The Sherwood Forest hideout had a Gadsden flag flying over it.
Reform opposes the revolution, and the revolution is that “faction” (if we must call it that) that is in full-throated opposition to the way God made the world.
But the question before the house in our day is whether we are going to live in the world God created, or whether we shall do otherwise. A reformer takes the affirmative view, and the revolutionary insists that we must, we shall, do otherwise.
The Federal Reserve is now being run by non-Euclidians who have been a little too free with the bourbon. They want our philosophers to spin a new world for us that will provide full scope for all of our horny little lusts. And sexbots. Don’t forget the sexbots. They will be squaring the circle next.
The real reformer has a real advantage, but one which he rarely recognizes himself as having. Living in the world that actually exists is an enormous advantage. There are times when it almost seems to me like cheating or something. In the long run, we need not worry. In the long run, blind stupidity never works. The revolutionary alternates between throwing rocks at the moon and barking at it.
Reformers in the past have been martyrs for even crazier reasons, but everything that is happening in such a scenario is a test of courage, and not an intellectual test. And a courageous man defending the way reality actually is may of course be killed—but he is still invincible.
