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On May 25, 2020 By In Politics

Memorial Day: The Virtue of Remembering

I grew up in a country whose last war was in 1828. It was nobly entitled, “The Cisplatine War, Mutiny of the Mercenaries.” When Hillary Clinton went to Brazil asking our then president to join American policies against Iran, Lula replied that America (then led by Obama) was too eager to get into war with Iran. I think he was right, but again, Lula was too eager to ally himself with dictators. They were both ultimately wrong in my estimation. Neo-conservative politics never did attract me from the left or the right and socialism never attracted me. Period.

When I came to the U.S. nearing three decades ago, I was exposed to a world comfortable with the language of war. There was honor and service and respect for those in the military. Police officers, many of them who had served in some capacity, were respected. It was quite a change of view for me, and I found it a delightful one.

I pastor in a community replete with men and women who serve or have served in the military. The military families and individuals who have come through our congregation were/are some of the finest I’ve ever met and when they left, they left a deep void in our body. Once in a while we are even overwhelmed with joy to see that they desire to come back and be among us.

I’ve also had the privilege of meeting widows whose husbands fought valiantly for their country. We honor those faithful laborers and we especially pray for those who mourn them today. Memorial Day should not be a day for intellectual patriotic affirmation. We should remember the dead who fought for our country and even those who fought for wars led by political ambition.

Patriotism is noble; the kind of patriotism that serves the country with eyes wide open. There is a blind patriotism that pervades everything, even church life; the form of patriotic fervor that is too eager to trust in horses and chariots. I despise that form of patriotism. The prophet Jonah was the wrong kind of patriot. He cherished his land above loyalty to God. Any patriotism that speaks of God generically is bound to error. The healthy patriot serves only the Triune God and cherishes his country but is lucid enough to point out its ethical flaws.

From the days of the Israelite wanderings to our own day, the great sin of history is the sin of forgetfulness. Remembering, then, becomes a biblical virtue. Remembering fallen heroes is a way of remembering the nature of sacrifice.

In this post-adamic world, death becomes the pre-requisite to life. We should remember the fallen. Remember the pain of death. Remember the life that comes from those who have died, and then rejoice in freedoms new and freedoms to come. 

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On May 24, 2020 By In Church, Politics, Wisdom, Worship

Who’s In Charge Of The Church’s Worship?

When Jesus reveals himself to John on the isle of Patmos, he is holding seven stars in his right hand. (Rev 1.16) These seven stars are the angels or messengers of the seven churches (Rev 1.20) to whom Jesus will speak in chapters 2 and 3. These angels are not spirit angels but pastors of the churches. They are the ones to whom Jesus speaks directly, who are then expected to deliver his message to the churches and deal with the issues he addresses.

Symbolizing the pastors as stars is not incidental. Describing pastors as stars isn’t an empty image. Stars have a long history of governing in Scripture; a history that begins in Genesis 1. Stars, along with the sun and moon, are the lights in the firmament-heaven for “signs and festival times.” They are set up to rule the earth. (Gen 1.14-19) When Abraham was promised that his children would be as the stars in heaven, (Gen 15.5) that promise included ruling the earth. Jacob, his wife, and their sons were sun, moon, and stars in Joseph’s dream in which Joseph rules them all (Gen 37.9-11). When Isaiah describes the fall of Babylon, the rulers that will fall are stars (Isa 13.10).

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On May 12, 2020 By In Politics

Spiritual Memory

The Church is in the midst of Eastertide. Having celebrated and commemorated the events of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, our minds go to that

In the gospel of John, one of the works of the Spirit that is highlighted repeatedly is that of remembrance. The Holy Spirit works in us to bring to our memory the person of Jesus, His life, words, and works. 

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On May 2, 2020 By In Politics

When Kansas City Comes After Church Membership

If ever there was a time to heed Francis Schaeffer’s warning against authoritarian government, the time is now. Schaeffer urged the Christian to speak and act on the absolute to combat the arbitrariness of the state. The federal and local governments must avoid at all costs the interference with the sphere of the church. The church functions independent from the state since they offer a different sacramental table than what the government offers. We offer bread and wine to weary sinners and the state offers the sword to wicked sinners.

If there is to be any joint enterprise it must be on the assumption of mutual agreement between the spheres in times of absolute necessity. Kuyper notes that all government authority “originates from the Sovereignty of God alone.” When the state assumes a self-serving authority beyond God’s boundaries, there can be no harmony between the spheres.

As churches all across the country re-open, Kansas City, Mo. is demanding that churchgoers turn over membership lists along with personal data as a way of tracking and isolating individuals exposed to COVID-19. This act is a clear violation of the fundamental nature of the church. Our loyalty is to a heavenly regime and not some local authoritarian eager for notoriety and power. We don’t need much blood to call the attention of a hungry lion, and the government (even at its local level) seeks only a sample of blood to jump at the opportunity to seize a table that belongs only to the church.

There is no virus that can take the authority of the church, and certainly there is no virus powerful enough for the church to hand over her keys to the civil magistrate. The keys of heaven and hell belong to the institution of the church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. Church membership is a distinct document used for the benefit of the local church and her members. It does not belong on the desk of a bureaucrat and it is certainly not to be used for surveillance no matter how well intentioned it may be. Let the church be the church. Leave the bread and the wine where it belongs.

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On April 20, 2020 By In Politics, Theology

Cheap grace and gratitude

Guest Post by Dr. Jordan Ballor

As we live in a time of crisis, isolation, and suffering, there’s perhaps no better time to consider anew all the goodness and grace in our lives that we so often take for granted. Amid the outbreak of plague, we should ponder the gifts we have been given and the gratitude we ought to have for them. As we deal with the loss of life and restrictions on our activities, we should also come to a greater recognition of the divine origin of all good gifts all the time.

Fallen (and perhaps particularly fallen and redeemed) human beings have a way of cheapening grace. The German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened his classic work on Christian discipleship with an incisive analysis of what he called “cheap grace,” the idea that God’s saving work could simply be assumed and that it required no substantive response from or transformation of human beings.

If Christ’s atoning work was infinitely sufficient to cover all of our sins, such thinking goes, why not go on sinning that grace may abound (Rom. 6:1)? Or at least, why worry so much about doing any good works, since they aren’t all that “good” in the first place, and aren’t the basis for our salvation in any case? As Bonhoeffer puts it, “Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacrament; grace as the church’s inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs.”

Bonhoeffer had in mind what is often called special or saving grace in his indictment of cheap grace, and he had in mind the costliness of Christ’s sacrifice and the call to follow Him. But there’s an analogous error when it comes to the gifts of common grace. If special grace involves the application of the atoning work of Jesus Christ for the salvation of sinners, common grace involves the recognition of the gifts that are given to everyone regardless of righteousness or piety. In Matthew 5:45 we read that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Natural goods like sun and rain are examples of common grace, but as the Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper describes the idea, common grace also involves social and cultural realities, like the love of familial relationships, the goods and services provided by businesses, and justice and order protected and preserved by governments.

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On April 14, 2020 By In Politics, Theology

Easter: The ABC of our Faith

We need to continually return to the root of our faith, to those first historical events that propel us to move forward as a people. The Church Calendar helps us to never outgrow the life of our Lord from his birth to his Ascension.

The Resurrection is the foundation of our faith. In modern evangelicalism, we tend to view the Resurrection of Jesus merely as validation or proof that the crucifixion accomplished what it was supposed to. In other words, the Resurrection is lovely because now the death of Jesus means something, and we get to spend eternity in heaven. But the Bible ascribes more significant value to the empty tomb.

The Four Gospels navigate us through the life of Jesus and give us a glimpse into the meaning of the Resurrection. But if we simply build our thinking around the Four Gospels, we will have an incomplete view of who we are and who Jesus is. The Four Gospels are not enough. We need the entirety of God’s Revelation. In other words, “If our gospel begins and ends on Good Friday, it is impoverished.”a 

Though we glory in the cross, though we preach the cross, though we love the old rugged cross, the cross is not enough! And I make that statement very carefully. As one scholar stated, “If the story of the prodigal son was only based on cross-theology, there would have been only forgiveness, but no joy and feast.” The message of the cross is incomplete without the Resurrection. The cross and the Resurrection can never be separated.

The Resurrection not only validates the cross, but it is a sure sign that we are shadows of our future selves. We are now partly what we shall be. This reality is apparent as we enter into the Acts of the Apostles: the early Church began to live out their Resurrection among the nations. In fact, “the preaching of Jesus’ Resurrection is arguably more pervasive than the cross in the book of Acts (Acts 2:31; 3:26; 4:2; 33; 10:41). The Psalms most quoted in the New Covenant are Psalms 2 and 110, which speak directly of Jesus’ Resurrection and exaltation. Cyprian once wrote: “I confess the Cross, because I know of the Resurrection…since the Resurrection has followed the Cross, I am not ashamed to declare it.” This is back to basics! We are a cruciform people, but if we overemphasize the cross, our identity is incomplete.

So, let us consider a few implications of the Resurrection, keeping in mind that the Resurrection is more than a confirmation of the cross, but it is the foundation of our faith. Paul makes this point when he says that without the Resurrection, we are of all people most to be pitied. He does not say this about any other event in the life of Jesus.

First, the Resurrection is the objective grounds of salvation. We often look at the cross as the grounds of our salvation, but God saves us by, in, and through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul makes this explicit when he says in Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” In I Corinthians 15:17, Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” But aren’t we justified and forgiven on account of Jesus’ death? Of course! Romans makes that clear! For the Apostle Paul, the Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus as the Faithful Son and as the righteous sin-bearer.

It is “the creative power of God that imparts life to soul and body.” This is who we are. We are nothing more, nothing less than saints united to the Resurrected Christ. This is the objective ground of our salvation.

Secondly, the Resurrection is not only the source of our justification, our right-standing before God, but the Resurrection is also the power that drives our sanctification; that is our growth in King Jesus. Some theologians have referred to this as anastasity, from the Greek anastasio, meaning Resurrection. Anastasity is the way the Resurrection flows into our lives. I confess this is in many ways is revolutionary to Christians who have never considered the Resurrection in this light. What the cross of Jesus does for us is to bankrupt our pride, it sobers our minds when we become full of ourselves, and it pulls the plug on any naïve triumphalism. When we are tempted to be proud of any accomplishment, we need to look no further than the cross of Jesus to give us an enlightened view of what Jesus had to suffer to take our sins.

But the Resurrection is the other necessary and prominent part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and part of God’s people. We cannot only have a theology of the cross because a spirituality that meditates only on the cross could potentially reduce us to self-loathing, spiritual insecurity. The impression, then, is that we remain, pathetic, lowly sinners, miserable wretches, unable to do one good thing for God even though we are justified by the event of the empty tomb.

I suggest this is a pietistic simplification of the Christian life? Anglican scholar Michael Bird summarizes best our status:

Some Christians might feel humble when they tell everyone how pathetic they are; a form of self-deprecation. Rightly so, we should be the first ones to share our struggles with others, but let us not think less of ourselves that how God thinks of us. “If God thinks well of his Son, He thinks well of you. If God loves His Son, He loves you, for you are partakes not just of his sufferings, but also of his glory.b

Finally, the Resurrection calls us to a new way of living. Paul says in Colossians: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things.” Some have interpreted this to mean that we are to be so heavenly minded, that we ought to abandon our earthly concerns. After all, this world is merely passing by. But I think this interpretation lacks a fundamental understanding of the role of the Resurrection in the mind of Paul. Who are we? We are resurrected saints. This is the most basic foundation of our humanity as Christians. And if we are resurrected saints, where does the resurrected Christ now abide? He abides at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Where Christ is we are. We are to act and live as if we are seated with Christ in heavenly places. We are to have a heavenly perspective on our earthly life. This reality is to have an impact on our present. Our status in Jesus Christ calls us toward the goal of faithfulness.

Easter is the most basic fact of our humanity. It is who we are. It is because of the bodily Resurrection that we live, breathe, and have our being in a Christ who shows mercy, rather than a Christ who condemns us. The Resurrection of Jesus vindicated Jesus as the bearer of the ugliness of sin, so when he looks at our Lord sees beautified saints. We can never take that for granted. Our standing before the Father causes us to love one another more fully, to serve one another more sincerely, to embrace a more robust view of hope, to feast more abundantly, and to worship the Risen Christ with greater passion. Easter is the abc of our faith. If it is anything less, we are most to be pitied, but thanks be to God, Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

  1. Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, 436.  (back)
  2. Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, pg. 445  (back)

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On April 10, 2020 By In Politics

When the Serpent Came Back to the Garden

There is a venomous snake in the garden. While the Messiah and his disciples enter the garden, a certain snake-like figure named Judas knows precisely where the faithful are. Judas enters the garden knowing that this was a place of constant fellowship and peace. But he is not a man of peace and his fellowship with the Messiah has been broken. He is now a man at war and his loyalty is with the darkness.

In the Garden of Eden, the Great Serpent entered the garden to bring about chaos; to tempt the first Adam. Indeed he was successful. The first Adam failed in his loyalty to Yahweh, being deceived by the serpent in the garden, and thus, thrusting all mankind into a state of sin and misery. Now in John 18, a new serpent re-enters the garden. He is possessed by the same devil that possessed the serpent in Genesis. It is this precise battle that is unfolding before us in this text.

Who Owns the Garden?

Does Judas with his newfound commitment to darkness and evil own the garden or does Jesus own the garden? As the text reveals, the son of perdition seems to have the upper hand in this sacred dispute. In verse 12 we read:

So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him.

Jesus is arrested and bound. They take him out of the garden bound like a defeated enemy. Now, in every conceivable scenario, this would be the historical determination that Jesus lost his rights to the Garden. After all, if the Messiah is to bring this unshakable kingdom, how does this apparent defeat in the garden fit into the messianic agenda? The answer is paradoxical because the coming of the kingdom is paradoxical. The kingdom does not come in the way and in the expression that many expected.

The kingdom of Jesus comes in an unexpected way to the first century. The binding of Jesus in the Garden confounds the reader. In this text, Jesus is not being bound because of defeat, he is being bound because of victory. Paradoxically, Jesus’ arrest is his release. His arrest is not his binding, it may appear to be, but it is ultimately the binding of the father of lies, Satan himself. This is why the gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus is the One who bound the strong man (Mat. 13) He is the One who arrested the Serpent and dragged him out of the garden. Jesus owns the garden, not Judas or His master, Satan.

This arrest and this binding of Jesus in the garden is not a plan gone awry, it is exactly what has been planned. In one sense, this arrest is the Trinitarian conspiracy against the kingdoms of this world. When evil leaders and governments think they have the Son of Man trapped, he fools them. As Psalm 2 says, “God laughs at their plans.” The conspiracy of the cross is that the cross is Christ’s sword to defeat evil. But the serpent does not know this. He is virtually blinded to the Messianic plan and nothing will stop Jesus from conquering evil and bringing in his new creation.

The garden belongs to Jesus because the garden is where his people gather and eat, and fellowship. The garden is the sacred space of peace for God’s people. In the garden, the King says, “The gates of hell shall not prevail.” Death dies once and for all and victory will come and we will celebrate it this Sunday. Today, though we fast, it is only a prelude to our coming feast. Jesus’ death marks the end of the serpent’s sting of death.

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On March 23, 2020 By In Culture, Politics, Theology

The Eschatology of Covid-19: End-Time Misinformation, Part 1

The end is near! Or at least it was when Jesus prophesied in the first-century. We, 21st-century citizens of heaven, live after the Great Tribulation. In fact, about 2,000 years after those events. These statements may seem a bit troubling to some, so let me make two caveats:

First, affirming the Great Tribulation was a past event does not mean we live in some utopian era. In fact, Covid-19 is a reminder that the repercussions of Genesis 3 will be with us until “he shall come to judge the living and the dead” at the end of history.

And second, affirming that the events in Matthew 24a is in the past does not negate our responsibility to understand the times in confusing days. In fact, we need more wisdom in these days.

We need a healthy dose of reverent fear in our day; not because we are at the end of history but because in such a time as this God calls us to be extra valiant and courageous to do his will.

Modern-Day Prophets

One of the things I don’t want to do is to give insanity more air-time than necessary. So, I am not going to link these folks and I won’t quote them. The evidence is abundant in any modern crisis. I refer to these prophetic isolationists as thrill-seekers because they remind me of storm chasers who travel around the country in caravans seeking the latest storm. They want to get close to the action. It’s not just twitterdom that offers you a buffet of such cases, but even in the published world, you will find such people.

Some took advantage of the year 1988, the year 2000 and now they left their hibernating stage to offer the world their new and clever view of the Bible. What’s more troubling is that many folks who “specialize” in prophecies reveal in a very brief time their incompetency to understand the most basic principles of biblical prophecy.

For instance, many asserting this is “the beginning of birth pains” (Mat. 24:8) have a history of cutting and pasting texts to whatever flavor of catastrophe consumes the news today. We want to avoid this attitude and embrace the language of the Bible vigorously, even when it may challenge our long-held beliefs. And I have found over the years, especially living in the South, that the belief that Jesus can come back at any moment is crucial to the identity of many evangelicals. In fact, one can have a faulty view of the Trinity, but as long as he espouses some variation of a futuristic end-time scenario, he’s considered safe and may even get a platform to opine about revelations.

Now, context matters. It matters in this Covid-19 era as information is disseminated. And it most certainly matters when we are reading giant portions of the Bible like the Olivet Discourse (Mat. 24). If I look at that passage and see that “famines” will happen in the end and conclude that due to our milk shortage at the local grocery we have ourselves a fulfillment of prophecy, I am hermeneutically blind. That is to say, you should return to your cave.

The Olivet Discourse

Matthew 24 is used for all sorts of events. In my 40 years of life, I have seen it use to support the supposed fulfillment of prophecy in the Gulf War, that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were the antichrists, that the Mayan prophecies were to be fulfilled at Y2K, and currently that Donald Trump is setting the stage for the new world order.

But what some fail to see is that Matthew 24 has a long-established tradition of interpretation; one that avoids such reckless distractions from the text. Now, the question of whether a position or an idea has a long-standing history doesn’t always solve the issue at hand. However, I think it’s important to say that the beliefs you hold grow more in legitimacy if other orthodox Christians have held them for the last two millennia. To be precise, the interpretation of Matthew 24 advocated here is held by most of the Puritans, both Anglicans and Presbyterians, well-known Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and the Reformed.

What is at stake in this conversation is the ability to either think carefully about this Coronavirus scenario or be bogged down by endless speculation when the next virus comes along carried by a vagabond vermin. We need to see that Matthew 24 opens our eyes to see the Bible clearly without dependence on newspaper exegesisb.

Interpretational Keys

I cannot dissect the entirety of Matthew 24c in these two articles. But others like Gary Demar have already done a real service to the church in his classic work, Last Days Madness. The book must be in its 20th edition. What I can do is offer a couple of interpretive keys to guide the reader through Jesus’ words in Matthew 24.

The first interpretive key is that Matthew 24 demands context. Again, the temptation is to cut a verse and paste it into our preferred panic situation. But the prophecy of Jesus has something very specific in mind. In chapter 23, Jesus has a full-scale indictment of the Pharisees. When Jesus finished his warnings to the Pharisees, he was going out of the temple and the disciples were pointing out the buildings of the temple. And that is where Jesus makes this remarkable prediction in chapter 24, verse 2:

Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

Early on, we begin to get some indications as to whether these prophecies were referring to the present first-century temple or some rebuilt temple in the distant future. The key is found in one little crucial word, and it is the word here. There will not be left one stone….where? Here. This is a crucial word that we should not overlook. The reason Matthew 24 is referring to that first-century temple and that temple only is because nowhere in the entire New Testament do the authors say one word about a rebuilt temple sometime in the future. Nowhere. The temple under discussion throughout the Olivet Discourse is the one that was standing during the time of Jesus’ ministry, the same temple that would be destroyed some 30 years later by the Roman Army.d

If the identity of the temple is clear, then any attempt to futurize the words of Jesus are in vain; any attempt to connect Covid-19 to Matthew 24 suffers a thousand deaths. What we are left with are words that apply to something very specific in the early church and ought to be understood only in that way.

Probably stunned from Jesus’ statement, the disciples ask Jesus a series of questions about the present temple and Jesus will take the rest of the Olivet Discourse to answer those questions.e But what is imperative to learn is that Jesus’ answers to those questions are guided by the principle of context which is very much dependent on the present structures of the first-century.

The second interpretive key is that Matthew 24 depends on its own language. In short, when we hear something strange in the Scriptures, we should compare it with other texts where similar language is used.

We must read the Bible as it is intended to be read. The Bible possesses its own language; its own interpretive guide. We should not allow our feeds to dictate how the Bible should be interpreted. We seek to understand the Bible in its own terms. As we read through Matthew 24 you will quickly discover that the language Jesus uses in his prophecies is not anything new, but it’s the way prophets have been speaking for hundreds of years. Jesus is continuing that prophetic tradition by using the language of the prophets. His words were not meant to be fodder for prophetic thrill-seekers but understood in its own context and its own language.

Closing Words

Matthew 24 is a difficult text. It requires us to look at the bigger picture of redemption to see why Matthew wrote Jesus’ words as he did. The end result is a beautiful picture of the righteous. God has not forsaken his people. His purposes shall prevail. His kingdom shall prevail, even if it means destroying the most sacred space of the Jewish people. God will make all things new.

Jesus was not predicting the end of times for the 21st-century world, but the end of times for the 1st-century religious system that prevailed in the day. Our Lord was not predicting the consequences of a virus coming into the world, but the destruction of the pervasive and venomous religiosity of a system that needed to end. Indeed, that generation suffered the Great Tribulation just as Jesus predicted.

  1. we could also add Mark 13 and Luke 21 and a few scattered texts  (back)
  2. I believe Greg Bahnsen was the first to use this expression  (back)
  3. though I have preached through it; leave a comment with your email if you would like a link to those sermons  (back)
  4. Demar, Gary. Last Days Madness, 68.   (back)
  5. Again, I deal with them in my sermon series, but an even more academic work is found in Gary Demar’s book  (back)

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On March 13, 2020 By In Culture, Politics, Theology, Wisdom

Social Distancing and the Real Danger in an Age of the Corona Virus

It was a typical morning for my tribe. When I returned from the gym, it was still early. But my boys are ready to take on the day with zeal. We went for a walk around our peaceful neighborhood. The young warriors carried their sticks as a precautionary measure against wild creatures. As we leisurely strolled, we began singing through the Lord’s Prayer. “Deliver us from evil…” we roared. It’s a piece we sing every Lord’s Day and often at the dinner table, but this morning it took on a special significance.

Which Evil?

In our day, the natural evil in our minds is the Covid-19 with its aggressive demeanor towards the elderly and sometimes its fatal blow towards unexpected recipients. It’s all over ESPN at the gym, and it’s the featured article in any major newspaper. Its ubiquitous nature is obnoxious but expected. We live in an interconnected state of the human era. We may debate the hype or the unorthodox enthusiasm of the media, but the reality is we do not know what next week will look like for any community.

But is that truly the only evil of our day we sang against this morning in our casual adventure? I believe there is something more subtle than what this pandemic brings. It may take different shapes, but its root is the oft obligatory “social distancing” experts are encouraging. That’s a significant threat in this Corona Virus age. In the 14th century, there was a plague outbreak in Florence, Italy. Renaissance author Giovanni Boccaccio noted:

Florentines “dropped dead in open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses.”a

We can safely say it was a deeper plague than anything we are currently experiencing and probably will experience. But the results of such destructive forces led to another epidemic, the one of isolation. Boccaccio goes on to argue for the importance of preserving social forces and traditions even when the higher forces wish to de-activate our social practices, or we might say, those things which make us human.

Social Distancing vs. Scriptural Sociology

At this moment, people of all evangelical persuasions are likely downplaying the self-quarantine incentive viewing it as a necessary step towards the eradication of this virus and self-preservation. There is a clear sense that in times of societal upheaval, we must do whatever it takes. But this shouldn’t close our eyes to the consequences of isolating ourselves from one another and our communities.

Should this pandemic force us into these isolated environments, we need to be thoughtful about this new sociological phase of history. The Scriptures are unwavering about the necessity of community and social gatherings. Social distancing is the antithesis of the Scriptural imperative. Even if necessary, we should grieve over it. Some appear to praise social distancing as a noble gesture in an enlightened culture. Church cancellations, colleges moving to on-line venues, sports events, and concerts are now entering into unchartered territory with indefinite postponements. Again, all good and necessary, but have we counted the cost of such actions?

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  1. https://www.newstatesman.com/2020/03/coronavirus-survive-italy-wellbeing-stories-decameron   (back)

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On January 27, 2020 By In Family and Children, Politics

Men on the Edge: The Inevitability of Male Leadership

Guest post by Aaron Siver

Our present circumstances under the cultural sway have brought a radically egalitarian influence to bear upon all sectors of society, including the church. Much of the efficacy of egalitarianism comes not so much from any conscious effort on the part of ideologically possessed individuals or interest groups—though there is that—but from systemically deforming tendencies inherent in our culture for a variety of reasons. These have a propensity to neutralize or obscure the significance of constitutive differences between males and females as demographic groups.

It would be grievous negligence, a failure to faithfully shepherd and oversee the flock if elders were to refrain from declaring the whole counsel of God. Particular attention should be given to this point. The watchmen ought to possess the competence to see the threat unambiguously and the courage to blow the trumpet resoundingly.

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