The LORD Knows—Psalm 1:6
Even if Christ does not return for another millennia, each of us will surely see His face, in either grace or judgment, within the next century. But we certainly do long for the day when the very path to destruction itself will be destroyed.
for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of wicked will perish.
Psalm 1:6 ESV
After all has been said in the first five verses of Psalm 1, this sixth and final verse gives us the fitting concluding contrast between the blessed and the wicked. The blessed, here synonymously called the righteous just as the wicked and sinners are used interchangeably, are known by the LORD, while the wicked are doomed to perish. Of course, when the psalmist states that the LORD knows the way of the righteous, he does not simply mean an intellectual knowledge, for we know that the LORD knows all things. He has numbered each hair, each heartbeat, each breath, of both the righteous and the sinner. No, an experiential knowledge is being described here; He has a personal knowledge of the righteous, whereas the wicked perish by being cast out of His sight.
Yet notice that the psalmist is not really speaking of the righteous nor the wicked directly. Instead, ‘the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.’ The path of the righteous is always in the LORD’s blessed sight, as David rightly said: “The steps of a man are established by the LORD, when he delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the LORD upholds his hand” (Psalm 37:23-24). That is the reality being conveyed here. Even when the righteous fall, they do not come to ruin, for the LORD continues to uphold them.
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The Deepest Part of You
We make choices and experience feelings, and our choices shape our feelings and our feelings shape our choices. This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).
This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).
Which is more revealing of the “real you”: your spontaneous and unguarded emotions, or your purposeful and intentional choices? Put another way, which is more fundamental to who you are: the feelings that spontaneously erupt from your heart, or the choices that you intentionally make?
At Bethlehem College & Seminary, I teach a class called “Foundations of Christian Hedonism.” Alongside the Bible, we read Piper, Edwards, Lewis, and more. We talk about the supremacy of God, the indispensable importance of the affections, the Christian life, and pastoral ministry. I love it.
One stimulating aspect of the class is identifying tensions and disagreements between our favorite Christian Hedonists and wrestling together with them. Last semester, we discovered a seeming dissonance between how Piper talks about feelings and how Lewis talks about the will.
Piper’s Grief
In chapter 3 of Desiring God, Piper explores “Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism.” In doing so, he accents the importance of feelings, emotions, and affections in worship.
Piper emphasizes that genuine feelings are spontaneous and not calculated. Feelings are not consciously willed and not performed as a means to anything else. He gives numerous examples of feelings — hope (that spontaneously arises in your heart when you are shipwrecked on a raft and catch sight of land), fear (that spontaneously arises when camping and you hear a bear outside your tent), awe (that overwhelms you as you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon), and gratitude (that spontaneously erupts from the heart of children when they get the present they most wanted on Christmas morning).
“Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality.”
The most poignant example of spontaneous feeling that Piper describes, however, is the grief that poured from his heart when he received the news that his mother was killed in a car wreck. In that moment, “The feeling [of grief] is there, bursting out of my heart” (91). No planning, no performance, no decision — just emotion and feeling. And here’s the crucial bit: “It comes from deep within, from a place beneath the conscious will” (91).
Lewis’s Prayers
At the same time, we were reading Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm. In Letter 21, Lewis discusses the frustrating irksomeness of prayer and the nature of duty. One day, when we are perfected, prayer and our other obligations will no longer be experienced as duties, but only as delights. Love will flow out from us “spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (154). For now, we contend with various obstacles and impediments.
Even still, we have rich moments in the present — “refreshments ‘unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming’” (156, quoting John Milton). But then Lewis makes this statement:
I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. (157)
In other words, our best prayers may be the ones we pray even when we don’t want to pray, when our prayers are not riding on positive feelings toward God, but are actively, deliberately trying to overcome resistance within us. The will, Lewis might say, rises from deep within, from a place beneath even our feelings, proving who we really are at bottom.
Clarifying the Tension
We can see the tension, can’t we? Are feelings deeper than the will (as Piper says)? Or is the will deeper than feelings (as Lewis claims)?
Before evaluating, we need further clarity. We can begin by noting key areas of agreement. First, both Piper and Lewis agree that we ought to distinguish feelings from the will.
Second, they seem to agree about some of the key differences between feelings and the will. Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality (like birds singing and flowers blooming). The will, on the other hand, involves intention, planning, choice, and execution.
Third, both Lewis and Piper agree that the will and the feelings ought to be viewed in some sort of hierarchical arrangement, with one being “deeper” than the other.
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Work as Christian Service
Our secular culture purportedly values neighborliness, even as it kills it. Therefore, a vertical understanding of Christian vocation—one which sees it as a priestly task, the daily self-offering in and through Christ, by the power of the Spirit, to the Father—exists only among those who constantly fight upstream. Which is to say, it is incredibly difficult. It can be sustained only through a life of prayer.
Our current economic situation is one of ceaseless disorientation. Workers are separated not only from the means of production but also from the immediate fruits of production. Whereas past generations received tactile wages, such as a farmer and his crop, we are now at the point where even the once-tangible paycheck has been absorbed into the ether of digital technology via direct deposit. Such a situation contributes to the loss of a telos in our vocations, but it does not remove the search thereof. Naturally, the accumulation of possessions follows. We hunger for the meaning of our labor to be concretized, and since our physical labor has been translated into the realm of invisibility, one can be forgiven for wanting to see an object so as to prove that their efforts produced something. Materialism, then, is materialization, or at least the quest for it. It is the exportation of the otherwise-useless green paper, or worse yet, imperceptible paycheck into the realm of reality.
Christian efforts to redirect the objects of spending are surely laudable. Don’t pour your money into selfish pleasure-pursuits, we are told, and rightly so; rather, give the fruits of your labor to the poor, or to efforts of Christian mission. Much that is positive can be said about this. It acknowledges the longing for the materialization of labor and, recognizing the inherent selfishness in the human heart, redirects it toward Jesus Christ. If followed, it will surely provide the Christian with a deeper sense of purpose in his or her vocation, as the fruit of one’s labor now resides, via translation, in the kingdom of God. This much is good and must be carried on. But, as a means of providing orientation within vocation directly, it falls short. For it does not do anything to fix the telos of labor above the transitory payment, a digitized set of numbers in an online bank. It does not attend to the concrete dimensions of the very tasks and services we perform but locates the telos a few steps away from our action. The result: After we have completed our labor, which in and of itself remains basically meaningless, we can draw meaning from the tangible effects of the money we obtain. While surely better than unreflective materialism, this will not suffice in our quest for the guiding purpose of our labor, one that transcends the mere economic output and resides in the action of work itself.
A notion of work as Christian service accomplishes just this. Rather than positing the wages as the ultimate goal of all labor, whether spent on selfish pleasures or selfless donations, defining vocational meaning as Christian service fixes our eyes upon a higher, steadier telos. In short, one’s vocation is the domain in which he or she obeys the two greatest commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 23:37-39). Vocation itself is a calling (from the Latin vōcare, “to call, summon”). A job or career is not a mere economic appendage to a pre-existing Christian identity, as if Christians interacted with God somewhere other than the real world which they inhabit. On the contrary, one’s vocation is the stage upon which he or she enacts God’s direction. If these two great commandments from Christ are the compass for Christian pilgrims, our career vocations are the terrain we must travel in order to get there. The practical, daily demands of our vocational tasks are the thicket of woods we must traverse in order to move Northward.
Firstly, therefore, our work is service to our neighbors. If, as we have suggested, the purpose of our labor is not determined by our salary, then it follows that value-measurements must be derived from elsewhere. Contrary to the mindset we instinctually absorb, the dollar amount does not determine the worth of our work. Dollar amounts are transient, and in an economy as large as ours, surely do not represent the palpable concerns of the people who immediately surround us. This means that we must first examine the nature of our action itself, that is, what it is we do. The simple answer to this is that we are serving our neighbors.
Each job provides a service for someone who otherwise would not obtain it. A plumber performs a task that someone else is unable or unwilling to do. A lawyer provides a service that would be impossible if no lawyer existed. A computer programmer does something that non-computer programmers cannot do, for whatever reason. So what? What does this have to do with neighbors? Put simply, neighbors need help, and help comes from other neighbors. If someone is unable to cut down the trees in his backyard, someone who can comes over and does it. If someone is sick and cannot diagnose herself, she goes to someone who can. Neighbors need their neighbors to serve them. Each one’s vocational task offers something to the wider community that is valuable precisely because it is needed by neighbors.
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We’re All Christian Nationalists Now
The world could care less about how you define terms in your Christian circles. Just don’t take your views into the public square. If they choose to define Christian Nationalism as a nation influenced by Christians that promote Christian morality because they believe in the God of the Bible, then we will have to live with their definition, and we will have to live with any consequences that come from that definition.
One of the interesting dynamics in the debate over Christian Nationalism is that there has been no acceptable definition of what it would look like if it were implemented in our nation. Various evangelical and reformed protagonists in this debate have framed various scenarios of Christian Nationalism from a time-capsule approach of merely returning to the Eisenhower era to the portrait approach of monarchial tyrants in high places of the civil government. How about a Chrisitan Prince?
The worst-case fear is that religious persecution would rise again as it did in Europe just a few hundred years ago. Some Baptists today are afraid they might be put in jail under a Presbyterian ruler; and the first amendment, the right to free speech, would cease to exist. Theonomists would be in charge, and some young children would be put to death by stoning. As a theonomist and a clergyman in the PCA who follows both sides of this debate, I am aghast at the ridiculous characterizations of proponents of Christian Nationalism, on both sides.
Listen up! It would appear now that we evangelicals do not need to define Christian Nationalism anymore. There is no need for any more books or articles on the topic. Our enemies in the world have done it for us. In speaking of Christian Nationalists, Heidi Przybyla, a journalist with the popular Politico has said “that they [Christian Nationalists] believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority.” She went on to say that Christian Nationalists believe that our “rights don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God.” Well, there you go—a definition of Christian Nationalism without all the minutia of what one would look like in detail. We Reformed guys are into the details too much anyway.
My first reaction to this new definition of Christian Nationalism is that maybe Ms. Przybyla forgot to read the Declaration of Independence where our forefathers declared that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our rights do come from God and not from man.
The Creator God of America in 1776 was the Trinitarian God of the Bible. At one time America was a Christian nation. Christian nationalism gave rise to both a robust freedom of religion and the freedom of the press—two fundamental bullworks of what has been called American exceptionalism. American Christian Nationalism even protected the right of free speech of men who were atheists.
So, to put it simply, Christian Nationalists believe in a nation where the rights and responsibilities of the people are derived from God himself, and not simply from a Congress that has become irrelevant, or a Supreme Court gone rogue, or even a neutral Constitution that can be interpreted according to the fleeting ideas of autonomous men.
What am I trying to say to evangelical and reformed Christians? We’re all Christian Nationalists now! If you believe that the laws of our nation-state should reflect, at a minimum, the last six of the ten commandments of the Bible, then you are a Christian Nationalist. If you vote for any candidate for public office who shares your views, then you are a Christian Nationalist.
For example, if you believe that abortion is the unlawful taking of human life because the Bible says so, then you are a Christian Nationalist. If you believe that homosexual marriage is sinful because the Bible says so, then you are a Christian Nationalist. If you believe that God created mankind as male and female, and the Bible forbids a multi-binary identity, then you are a Christian Nationalist. If you believe it is your right to say publicly that “Christ is King,” then you are a Christian Nationalist.
Now, maybe you disagree with this definition. Maybe you don’t like it. Maybe you think it is too simple. Well, it really does not matter what you believe, or what you like, or what you think. We evangelicals don’t make the rules anymore nor do we have the authority to create definitions in the public square. Write all the books you want and publish all the articles you want. You will add nothing to the public debate. In the mind of the world, you are no longer a contributor to the public dialogue. You are only a threat to them.
Just remember that the world controls the definitions and what is allowed to be spoken in the public conversation. You are safe within the walls of your church sanctuary. They could care less about how you define terms in your Christian circles. Just don’t take your views into the public square. If they choose to define Christian Nationalism as a nation influenced by Christians that promote Christian morality because they believe in the God of the Bible, then we will have to live with their definition, and we will have to live with any consequences that come from that definition.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.
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