We must again champion what we believe in – and what we do not:
Yesterday I penned a piece on counterfeits. I had in mind spiritual and theological counterfeits. There are always fake gospels and fake spiritualities out there, so the biblical Christian must always be wise and discerning, able to separate truth from error.
This becomes all the more urgent because we live in an age that no longer believes in truth or absolutes, and runs with relativism and subjectivism instead. And this has infected the churches as well. The foundation of biblical truth is being undermined and destroyed, and far too many believers simply run with whatever secular narratives come along.
When the foundations are destroyed, as the psalmist asks in Psalm 11:3, what can the righteous do? No structure can last without a firm foundation, and Christians need to go back to basics here. We need to reaffirm what we believe. And the affirmation of truth means stating what we believe in as well as stating what we do not believe in.
To affirm certain things means of necessity rejecting other things. Truth is like that. It is exclusive. For example, to adhere to the Christian belief in the full deity and resurrection of Jesus Christ means we must reject the Islamic view that Jesus is not God’s son and did not rise from the dead.
So we will always need to speak of those things which we cannot affirm while we proclaim those things which we do. In light of all this a recent piece by American writer and pastor Douglas Wilson caught my eye. He also appeals to Psalm 11:3 as he lays out three main themes in his piece: Our Shared Beliefs; What We Reject; and What Is Distinctive.
It is that middle portion of his article that I want to share here. While one may not agree with every single point made in his article, nor even agree with every one of the items on his reject list, I like the idea of once again stating old verities and rebuffing modern illusions. Such conviction is becoming all too rare among believers today.
So the following is Wilson’s comments on ‘What We Reject’:
Actual belief in this gospel means that we reject certain debilitating compromises that some Christians have unfortunately made. We do not say that those Christians who have made these compromises are unsaved, but we do say that these compromises are why the church today has been so inept and powerless in the face of the secular jihad that we are currently facing. While there are many who want to say “you can be a Christian and also believe thus and such,” when it comes to consistent Christian witness, we believe the following doctrines must be rejected, root and branch.
We reject Darwin, and all his works. The world is here because God made it, and put it here. This goes for the ground beneath our feet, and the stars above our heads. God spoke, and it was done. Over the course of six days it was done, and we rejoice in the goodness of His exquisite creation. If you can look at the beauty and intricate craftsmanship that goes into a slug, and believe that it came about as the end result of mindless mutations over millennia, then our prayer for you is that God would take away the spiritual cataracts on the eyes of your heart.
We reject every form of woke, and any kind of accommodation that tries to rhyme with woke. The diseased definitions of justice that emanate from the envious today are definitions straight from the Pit, and that is why they smell like sulfur. Justice is a beautiful lady, blindfolded, with scales in one hand, and a sword in the other. She does not need that descriptive adjective social, which transforms the whole thing into a rancid grievance-fest. The source of so much bitterness and rancor in the church today is the result of trying to define justice apart from the Word of God.
We are dedicated to a rejection of every aspect of the sexual revolution. This obviously includes sexual behavior, including all the alphabet nonsense, along with whatever that + business is supposed to mean, but not forgetting to reject any old school heterosexual fornication. But an essential part of this means a return to a biblical view of sex roles. Men were created by God to do certain things for their wives and children—fundamentally, in order to protect them and provide for them. The woman’s role is to glorify what he gives to her. It is not possible for us to abandon our assigned sexual roles in marriage and at the same time to maintain God’s standards for our sexual behavior. If the fire is not kept in the fireplace, it will burn the house down, as we are seeing.
We are opposed to every form of dualism, by which we mean the sort of workarounds that enable Christians to affirm the lordship of Christ in theory while denying it in certain roped-off realms that are held in reserve for the devil. But Christ is Lord of both Heaven and earth. He is not the Lord of the upper story alone. Neither is He Lord in the church, while the world can go on its merry way. No. He is the Desire of Nations.
It naturally follows that we hold that secularism is a dishonest pretense. It is not possible for human societies to function apart from a transcendental grounding. Idols which pretend to transcendence can hold things together for a brief time, and the unique contribution of secularism was that it managed to hold things together, for a time, without any appeal to the transcendent. This was therefore thought to be a new era. This venture only succeeded for as long as it did because of the residual moral capital that still existed in the societies attempting it, a moral capital inherited from more faithful Christian times. But like the prodigal son, who eventually ran out of money, our secular societies in the West are now officially bankrupt. It is time we acknowledged this frankly, and call for our leaders to return to the Father, submitting to the lordship of Jesus Christ. We say this because we are servants of the one of whom it is said “of the increase of His government there will be no end.” https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-torrent-of-truth-or-what-we-actually-believe.html
I am sure this is not an exhaustive list for Wilson. There would be many other things he might have added. But it is refreshing to find Christians today who actually still run with certainties, with absolutes, and with conviction. This contrasts with all the wishy-washy, half-hearted, touchy-feely Christians we find in the West today who would never dare to affirm with any degree of certainty what they believe and what they do not believe.
The world keeps winning while the church keeps losing because we have abandoned the idea of standing on the solid rock. We have preferred to simply slide along the shifting sand. But as Jesus warned so long ago, that scenario will never end well (Matthew 7:24-27).
The foundations are crumbling and are in urgent need of repair. The real question is this: does anyone care, and are they willing to do something about it?
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