Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. (Ps 116:15)
In a culture devoid of martyrdom, the ancient and medieval “cult of saints” can appear to be a strange and superstitious practice. We in the Christian (or post-Christian) West have not undergone the fires of persecution, and a “Christian death” is something normally undergone in relative peace. Even the case of fatal disease is a far cry from the dismemberment of the Coliseum.
Yet the idea of celebrating or commemorating the death of an important person is not as foreign as we might think.a Indeed, in our American “civil religion,” there are “saints days”: for Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr., and so forth. As someone has said (the reference of which escapes me), after the Civil War, Memorial Day became a sort of civic “All Saints’ Day.” Yet the commemoration of Christian saints has been largely lost among Protestants.
As John F. Baldovin points out, “celebration” is a “feast”—an “exuberant manifestation of life itself—while “commemoration is simple remembrance. Nonetheless, either “celebration” or “commemoration” may be used in discussions of remembrance. John F. Baldovin, “On Feasting the Saints,” Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 376. (back)
As John F. Baldovin points out, “celebration” is a “feast”—an “exuberant manifestation of life itself—while “commemoration is simple remembrance. Nonetheless, either “celebration” or “commemoration” may be used in discussions of remembrance. John F. Baldovin, “On Feasting the Saints,” Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 376.
We celebrate —together with a vast majority of Christian Churches in the world–the feast of All Saints. On this day, we honor and remember the saints gone before us. Traditionally, All Saints Day is the day after All Hallowed Eve on October 31st, and the Church celebrates it on the closest Sunday to the first of November.
All Saints Day is also known as the day when we celebrate the hallowed ones, those who have been honored by God because of their faithful lives. The Bible encourages frequently to give honor to whom honor is due (Prov. 3:27) and it lists the great heroes of the faith while praising them for their mighty actions in the face of grave danger (Heb. 11). All Saints’ Day is the benediction of God upon martyrs, the “well done” upon the faithful, and the clothing in white robes on all those who, from their labors rest.
By celebrating the life of the saints, ultimately, we are celebrating the death of death. We celebrate that in the death of the faithful ones, Satan has been mocked. In fact, All Saints testify to the humiliation of the devil and evil throughout history. The Christian Church rejoices over evil by mocking death. The third-century theologian Athanasius gives a good example of the early church’s attitude toward death:
“Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by jeer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Saviour on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing and saying, “O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15: 55).”
Only the Gospel gave people hope that death could be defeated and reversed. Only the Gospel promised people glory at death and even more glorious resurrection life at the end of history.
The reality is that paganism cannot compete with All Saints’ Day because paganism cannot offer hope after death. The Christian message can offer a definitive answer to death. Jesus is the answer to death’s grip because Jesus overcame the grip of death.
Many Christians have thought very little about baptism and its significance in their experience of salvation. If they think of baptism at all, it may be only as a personal decision they made to get baptized or in terms of what they think baptism does not mean or accomplish. The Westminster Confession of Faith says:
Baptism is a sacrament of the new testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church; but also, to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life.
WCF 28.1
Baptism makes a person a member of the church (1Cor. 12:13). It is a formal rite, conferring actual membership in the Body of Christ. The person baptized may choose to neglect that membership or abandon it later in life. He may become an unbeliever and apostate, but he can never be a non-Christian.
Baptism is a sign and seal that a person has been united to Christ (Gal. 3:27). It certifies that a person has been grafted into Christ, made part of the covenant of grace, and now partakes of the vine. The baptized person may neglect that union or decide to renounce it later in life. He may be cut off from Christ due to unfruitfulness or fall from grace. But he must be connected to Christ before he can be severed from him. He must be a partaker of grace before he can fall away from it. He is connected to Christ in his baptism.
Baptism is a sign and seal that a person has been regenerated (Tit. 3:5). We know that a person may be outwardly baptized and yet remain inwardly unregenerate. Simon the sorcerer was. But the person who is baptized is part of the regeneration (Matt. 19:28) and shares in the resurrected Israel (Ezek. 37:1-14). He may go on living according to the old man of sin. He may reject the resurrection life which we are offered in Christ. But his baptism will forever testify that the new creation has begun.
Baptism is a sign and seal that one’s sins are forgiven (Acts 2:38). It is a symbolic washing which cleanses our souls and saves us from the judgment to come (1Pet. 3:21-22). The person baptized may choose to walk in unbelief and unrepentance, just as Israel did after they were baptized in the Red Sea, and if he does so, then his sins will not be pardoned. But baptism is a visible sign of God’s promise that our sins are forgiven and that God will remember his promises and not our transgressions on the day of judgment.
Baptism is a sign and seal of a covenant obligation (Rom. 6:3-4). The baptized person no longer belongs to himself. He has died with Christ to sin and been raised with Christ to live in obedience for the glory of God. He may choose to forsake that covenant obligation—he may be unfaithful to it—but he cannot deny that he is so obligated. A person does not choose the nation of his birth, but he is subject to its laws as a citizen nonetheless. So too, the person baptized is forever obligated to life under God’s covenant grace and the law of Christ.
Let us not forget or neglect the significance of our own baptism but be deliberately mindful of what it says to us and about us. Improve your baptism, not by doing it over and over again, but by meditating upon its truth, goodness, and beauty, and endeavoring to live in light of it.
The victimization culture has become an overwhelming feature in our modern discourse. It offers a culture (henceforth, vc) that is almost always antagonistic toward the cause of the conservative Christian faith. VC looks around its environment for micro-aggressions, eager to act as the moral arbiter. Indeed, this culture attempts to form a new morality that despises a merit-based world–the kind that has defined Western Civilization–in favor of passive rewards.
The argument is quite simple: You are, therefore, you deserve. This new religious class lumps entire cultures into neat associations that help categorize them into antagonists or champions of human rights. If you support their cause, a Nobel Peace Prize is nearby.
What we have is a new generation of youth pre-cooked for victimization. Their entire demeanor is pre-disposed to being offended by the smallest acts or rituals. Ironically, these disgruntled/confused men and women want nothing more than dominion. They want to impose their morality on others, which for their cause means to legislate a no-tolerance agenda towards “fanatics” who believe in the authority of holy writ.
To provide a fruitful dialogue in the VC, you need to speak carefully with every nuance, avoid all the pitfalls of potential hurt, navigate carefully the waters of gender ideology, and speak from a position of deference to the greater good of such culture. In this worldview, everyone is fundamentally against you; if they don’t bow down to your needs, they are oppressors. Essentially, this VC has provided a space where the conversation is necessarily evil if you begin from a position of authority, especially the One from on High.
The entire proposal from “Victimization Culture” stems from a “guilty” before proven innocent philosophy. And this is coming down the pipe for “radicals” like us who treasure biblical inerrancy and have little tolerance for mind games played by the Left in this country. No matter how much you assert that the walls of partition are broken down in the name of Messiah Jesus, no matter how often you preach Jesus Christ crucified for sinners, you are still guilty of not performing the act of submission towards the cause of victimization.
I am led to the simple conclusion that we cannot allow our children to be trained under such infidels to the Triune Mission. Faithful worship and faithful cultivation of habits of grace in the church and household is the solution to the day’s confusion. One can be a genuine victim of evil whose life will require community care, love, and truth. We pray churches will embrace such people and lead them to green pastures of comfort and peace.
As an observer of this modern phenomenon, I stand humbled and grateful for a true Victim who suffered at the hands of murderers and unjust men for our cause. He suffered, t yet did not seek to force others to pay him homage but transformed others to love his suffering. True victims are beholden to the cause of a true Sufferer– stricken, smitten, and afflicted for our victory to the eternal praise of his glorious grace.
The recent attacks by Hamas on the State of Israel and the rapidly expanding war in the Middle East that has followed have prompted many Christian preachers and pew-warmers to try their hand at theo-political punditry. This, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. The last few years have rightly undermined confidence in the competence of credentialed experts in many fields. We should bear in mind, however, that the fact the experts are making it up as they go is not an argument for the superiority of uninformed and ill-thought out opinions.
Many dispensationalists, predictably, see the latest violence in Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and harbinger of the last days. The fact this is how they have interpreted every instance of violence involving Israel since their particular prophetic perspective appeared in the mid-1800s does not seem to dim their enthusiasm and confidence in reading the tea leaves of providence.
Christians who lean left politically (or long ago toppled over) can be heard making arguments about nuance, context, and the evils of colonization, as if any of those things had anything to do with deliberate war crimes against a civilian population, rape, kidnapping, multilation of the dead, and calls for systematic genocide against an ethnic group. If this argument is relevant, I suppose we might offer the same nuance and context for the Holocaust and Final Solution carried out by Nazi Germany. Maybe there was something to their claims about the Jews and their manipulation and control of financial markets after all.
Even among, more politically conservative, Reformed Christians there seems to be a perverse need to state the obvious. Ethnic Israel is no longer the covenant Israel of God and The political State of Israel is not God’s chosen people—believers in Jesus are. That is true, and there is a place for noting it. So many Christians in the west have been indoctrinated by dispensational theology that we must be prepared to offer such clarifications. But what does such a claim have to do with recent violence and the present war? Why would we make this clarification our emphasis at such a time? Is it helpful or appropriate?
How are we to think christianly about ethnic Israel? The Jews are not accepted by God simply on the basis of their heritage. Membership in the covenant is delineated by faith in Christ, not merely by biological lineage.
For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
(Galatians 3:26-29)
This does not, however, mean there is no longer any distinction to be found between ethnic Jews and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. The same apostle who wrote Galatians 3 also clearly affirmed:
What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God. For what if some did not believe? Will their unbelief make the faithfulness of God without effect? Certainly not!
(Romans 3:1-4a)
He goes on in the same epistle to the Roman saints:
I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen.
(Romans 9:3-5)
These historical, bibliographical, religious, and spiritual advantages do not mean that Jewish people are saved apart from faith in Christ.
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.
(Romans 10:1)
The Jews must embrace their Messiah, but Paul says they will.
For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written:“The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.”Concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all.
(Romans 11:25-32)
All Israel will be saved. All Israel, i.e. ethnically Jewish people, as Jews, will come to faith in Christ. This means that while the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles has been broken down in Christ, ethnic identities still exist. The fact that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people in the way they once were does not mean they have merely been absorbed into a mass of undifferentiated humanity. That is not what Scripture claims, quite the contrary.
Even under the Mosaic economy, the Jews were in proximity to covenant blessings that could only be fully and finally possessed by faith (John 8:31-58). Those who trusted in their ethnic heritage would not be accepted by God. They were sons of the Devil, not of Abraham. Abraham’s children have always been defined by their participation in Abraham’s faith. What has changed is not the recognition of Jewish ethnicity but the expansion of Abrahamic blessings to all nations through the resurrection and reign of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.
God does not have two people groups with separate identities and destinies, as dispensationalism claims. But the Bible does acknowledge the persistence of the Jewish people, their distinctiveness as an ethnic group, and their future conversion to faith in Christ. Their destiny is not distinct from the Church of God but is rather to ultimately be united with the Church of God.
How are we to think about the recent attacks against Israel and their war with violent Islamists who openly state their intention to exterminate the Jews? All of the theology explained above may be true, and it may be helpful to Christians who are ill-taught on these issues. But it is of little use or relevance in responding to the kind of godless slaughter we have lately seen. Christians are sometimes guilty of the kind of theology as comfort practiced by Job’s friends. Miserable comforters are you all (Job 16:2).
Would Christian pastors have chosen September 12, 2001 as an opportune time to remind us that many of those killed the day before were unbelievers and now in Hell? Would it be helpful to observe, what is undoubtedly true, that American believers have more in common with Arab Christians than unbelieving New Yorkers who worked in the World Trade Center? The death of a neighbor’s child is not the time to lecture them about the mysteries of election. The young woman may have been dressed inappropriately, but the hours after her rape are not the best moment to discuss the importance of modesty.
It is true that American believers have more in common with a Palestinian Christian than they do with a secular Jew. It is also true that a believer has more in common with an American Christian than with his unbelieving cousin. But it would be naive and inappropriate to imagine that because one person (or group) is unbelieving, there can be no special connection to them. I have family members who are not walking with Christ, and I have far more affection and compassion for them than for anonymous Christians I have never heard about or met.
The Jews are the Christian’s cousins, and one day the family will be reunited. Christianity is a Hebraic faith. There is no denying the impact of Hellenistic language, philosophy, and culture on various aspects of the Christian tradition, but insofar as the two streams of Hebraism and Hellenism stand in opposition to one another in interpretation of Scripture, typology, liturgy, and ethics, the Christian faith stands in line with the tradition of the Hebrews, not the Greeks. Christians worship a Jew as the Son of God. Our spiritual fathers, first teachers, and foundational Scriptures are all Jewish. This is not to diminish the way in which God used the Greek language and culture to advance the cause of Christ. It is not to deny that the Jewish people, by and large, rejected their Messiah, fell under God’s condemnation, and have been estranged from the covenant of promise. But we should affirm that the Christian Church has more in common with modern Jews than with the average Gentile unbeliever, and we have vastly more in common with the State of Israel than we do with militant, Islamic terrorists.
One does not have to be a Zionist, neo-con, or dispensationalist to support Israel in its war with Hamas. The State of Israel is largely secular, but the conduct and stated mission of Hamas is explicitly, indefensibly evil. There are no mitigating circumstances, no excuses, no room for context, nuance, or negotiation. The Arab-Israeli conflict may be complicated. The Israel-Hamas war is not. To think christianly means not only thinking theologically and covenantally; it requires us to think with ethical clarity.
Every time a rocket is launched from the Gaza strip, a dispensationalist gets his wings. And by wings, I mean like Red Bull, in that he will receive a rather large boost of courage, enough, in fact, to crawl up and out of the hole he has been hiding in from his last failed prediction and to flood the internet with a panoply of reasons why the end times are really here this time and happening right before our eyes. This confusion is entirely unhelpful and could be cleared up if any of my former 28 articles and podcast episodes on the topic of eschatology were seriously engaged with. Shameless plug intended.
Along with this, I have also seen a litany of social media posts proclaiming solidarity with Israel in their current war with Hamas, because they are God’s chosen people and we do not want to be on the wrong side with God. For this reason, before getting on to our topic today, I thought it might be wise to mention a few things to consider regarding the covenantal status of modern-day Israel.
STILL GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE?
Perhaps the best place to start would be with what the word Israel means. From the Scriptures, the first time the word is used is when God wrestles with Jacob and then renames Him Israel, which means “the one who wrestles with God.” Knowing this, it is obvious that “Israel” is not a genetic term that is passed through bloodlines down through families in the same way “Egyptian” would be. To be a member of Israel was a spiritual activity, of knowing God and wrestling with Him in intimate fellowship, not just merely inheriting the right DNA.
We know this is true, because God calls all kinds of ethnic peoples “Israel.” For instance, when the Israelites leave the land of Egypt, escaping from the slavery to be a free people serving their covenant God, the text tells us that a “mixed multitude” went out with them (Exodus 12:38). Apparently, there was a contingency of Egyptians who were so impressed by Yahweh, that they abandoned the empire of the Pharaohs and joined themselves with Israel, becoming followers of Jehovah. Just like the ethnic born sons of Abraham, they too were accounted as Israel.
Moses also reiterates that Israel was a spiritual distinction, when he admonishes the people to “circumcise their hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16). All of the men of Israel had performed the physical sign of circumcision on their genitals, but there were many of them who were not true Israel in the heart (Romans 9:6). This is because being a member of true Israel was never about biology or physicality, but of spiritual allegiance to Yahweh.
Thinking also of the lineage of Christ, from the genealogies recorded in the Gospels, we can ascertain that Ruth the Moabite was a part of His lineage and was grafted into Israel. Along with Ruth, Rahab the Canaanite prostitute was a part of His line as well as Bathsheeba, who was the wife of Uriah the Hittite and could have been a Hittite herself (the text is unclear). Regardless, the Servant of the Lord, whom Isaiah calls “true Israel” was the one who assimilated people who were far off, and foreigners to His covenant promises, and brought them into Him as one people. This is why Paul says that there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28) because all are one in Christ, made one through His finished work (Ephesians 2:14-16), to be children of Abraham by faith (Galatians 3:29), and have been made into a new nation, the “Israel of God” which includes slaves and free, male and female, Jews and Gentiles together as one unified people of God (Galatians 6:16).
What we are experiencing in our times is merely a replaying of classic higher criticism. In the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper argued that modernist scholarship was an attempt to regard themselves as holy. Their worldly wisdom would uphold their elite status because their ethical values were free from religious control.
Kuyper noted that they think they have found the truth, but they have attributed “reality to a mirage, a fairy tale.”a He further argued that the way out of this moral chaos is to make Christian education indispensable to the success of the Church. Since the state was not interested in the biblical concept of truth, “Christians would have to establish their own schools.”
He knew that modernism could only breathe if it kept the lower middle class distant from the political process. In those days, people experiencing poverty remained far from political engagement since most were not allowed to vote because they did not own land. Therefore, Kuyper entered the political scene eager to appeal to the lower middle class. He knew that the poor in the Netherlands wanted to preserve tradition and conserve Christendom in their communities. He called them to enter the political stage to exorcise the modernists from both Church and State.
Our scene today offers us an opportunity to abandon the antipathy towards politics by encouraging the Church to re-enter the stage of history and fight for society’s good; to see their Christian task as far more than merely a spiritual pursuit of heaven, but to see the Church as the fundamental means by which society is transformed.
The modernists today want nothing with truth but opine from the comfort of tenured status, and we must now seek to leave them to their own devices and begin anew with biblical institutions that presuppose the Triune life at every point of human endeavor.
James E. McGoldrick, Abraham Kuyper: God’s Renaissance Man, 56(back)
James E. McGoldrick, Abraham Kuyper: God’s Renaissance Man, 56
Our first president, George Washington, said in his Farewell Address,
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. . . . Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation [were to] desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?” a
How can we trust the word and life of our fellow citizens, if religion is gone? And what would that do to American prosperity? Washington’s answer was that if religion was gone, we could not expect morality to remain long without it. And thus, “political prosperity” would quickly follow them both out the door.
From the beginning of the United States, religious themes found their way into political discourse. In Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural address, he said:
“I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”b
Symbolically, Europe was Egypt, America the Promised Land, and the European settlers Israelites. America was to be a “city on a hill” and a “light to the nations,” in the language of the Founders. All of this meant that from its earliest days, America had a “religious dimension” that touched all of its institutions, including its politics, and led to what sociologist Robert Bellah has called a “civil religion.”c
Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022. I am indebted to Bellah’s article for many of the presidential quotes listed here. (back)
Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022. I am indebted to Bellah’s article for many of the presidential quotes listed here.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
