And God Blessed Them
All Satan’s craft and all sin’s deceit fail to undo the goodness of the blessing that God spoke in the beginning. The signs of the blessing are all around us, whether in fields of wheat ripe for harvest, in school playgrounds packed with screaming kids, in seeing-eye dogs serving with loyal zeal – all these and more remind us that God’s favor is still at work among the people he created and loved from the beginning.
Like so many others, January finds me in the book of Genesis once again. The creation account can seem so familiar, and yet every visit to these two chapters feels like entering a massive temple charged with mystery and grandeur. The words that struck me particularly this time were those spoken by God over the newly created pair of human beings:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:28
What a weighty and marvelous thing it is to receive such favor from the eternal God. On the day that he made them, God looked at our first parents, and he blessed them. God loved them and delighted to shower his goodness upon them. This is God’s original disposition towards our family, and despite all that happened afterward, the blessing was never rescinded.
After the fall, when God comes to judge his creatures, we encounter the word curse for the first time. “Cursed are you above all livestock,” he says to the serpent, condemning it to crawl on its belly and to eat dust all the days of its life. Then he turns to the woman. She is sorely punished, stricken with pain and dysfunction in her most intimate relationships. She is not, however, cursed. The man too is bowed down with a heavy sentence, but he is not cursed either; the earth is.
The first person to be cursed is Cain (Gen 4:11), and after him many individuals and groups of people fall under God’s curse. But not once does he ever curse the entire human race the way that he blessed us in the beginning.
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Honoring God as a Nation?
There are many “mild and suitable means” to privilege right worship without coercing it, and to discourage false worship without trying to do away with all difference. The early statesmen of America, informed by guides such as Vattel, sought to pursue just such a prudent and Protestant middle way. Although changed circumstances may require different methods today, the same principles—and the same commitment to the ideal of national faithfulness—should continue to guide us.
Public Religion and Freedom of Conscience
“If all men are bound to honor God,” mused one of the greatest of Protestant political theorists, “the entire nation, in her national capacity, is doubtless obliged to serve and honour him.”
Thus expressed, the sentiment appears almost incontestable; and until a couple of centuries ago, it was. Today, it is liable to seem laughable. In its place another principle has taken pride of place: “liberty of conscience is a natural and inviolable right.” Both quotations, however, come from the same source: Emer de Vattel and his magisterial The Law of Nations (1757). By meditating on this paradox, with Vattel as our guide, perhaps we can recover anew a synthesis that used to be central to Protestant political thought: the shared commitment to public religion and private conscience.
Although little known today, Vattel was a giant of eighteenth-century thought. Often classed among Enlightenment thinkers, Vattel was in fact still deeply embedded in the long tradition of magisterial Protestantism, indulging in a delightful screed against papal supremacy in the midst of his great treatise. Born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, a stone’s throw from Geneva, Vattel was nurtured in the Swiss Reformed faith before training in law and working as a scholar and a diplomat on behalf of the elector of Saxony and the King of Prussia (technically the sovereign of Neuchatel). The Law of Nations would exert a remarkable influence on the thought-world of western Europe and the Atlantic world over the next few decades. George Washington studied it closely, and one of the greatest early debates of early American foreign policy—between Jefferson and Hamilton, of course—was waged by way of rival quotations from Vattel’s masterpiece.
Emer de Vattel’s Defense of Public Religion
The basic thesis of his book was straightforward. The natural law, of which classical and Christian thinkers had written for two millenia, applied in its moral demands not merely to individuals, but to nations as corporate entities. Each nation, like each individual, must chart its course in relation to three overarching sets of duties: duties to self, duties to God, and duties to others. Indeed, God had so arranged the moral universe that a nation, like an individual, flourished best (and thus fulfilled its duties to self) when it honored God and honored its obligations to others. Unlike an individual, however, a nation had no higher authority on earth to tell it how to balance its various obligations; it must in the final analysis make its own decisions and bear the consequences before God.
Within this framework, Vattel constructed his argument for public religion on firm and ancient foundations. The first was the Aristotelian idea that the telos or goal for all human beings is happiness, conceived in the fullest and richest possible terms; everything we do strives toward this end. The second was the idea that humans live in and through communities or collectives larger than themselves—above all, to Vattel’s mind, the nation. Therefore, it followed that the task of the good ruler was to promote national happiness. And just as individual happiness depended upon the cultivation of virtue, so national happiness depended upon national virtue: “in order to conduct it [the nation] to happiness, it is still more necessary to inspire the people with the love of virtue, and the abhorrence of vice” (§115). Finally, since “Nothing is so proper as piety to strengthen virtue, and give it its due extent,” it followed that to be happy, “a nation ought then to be pious” (§125).
Thus far, the argument seems impeccable. And yet it has reached an impasse: what are we to do about freedom of conscience?
As a Protestant, Vattel can hardly be oblivious to this concern. If true piety depends on faith, and faith is an act of understanding and will, you cannot simply compel people into piety; that would defeat the very purpose. And yet is not compulsion central to the practice of politics and the exercise of sovereignty?
At the same time, the ruler must worry not merely about the demands of public piety and private conscience, but also, above all, about civil peace. “To live well, it is necessary first to live,” Richard Hooker remarks in this context, so any public policy regarding religion has to consider the chances of provoking violence and disorder—whether from legislating too little or too much.
Vattel, equally attentive to all three concerns, seeks to balance them delicately over the course of his lengthy chapter “Of Piety and Religion.” A close look at this remarkable text affords us a window into the forgotten world of Protestant political prudence.
Distinguishing Internal and External Religion
Vattel begins by making a fundamental distinction, one which goes all the way back to Martin Luther and his “two kingdoms.” Religion has both an internal and an external dimension. “So far as it is seated in the heart, it is an affair of conscience, in which every one ought to be directed by his own understanding: but so far as it is external, and publicly established, it is an affair of state” (§127). We might balk at the last phrase, but if the nation has duties toward God—and if religion can generate conflict—how can religion not be an affair of state?
Internally, the conscience is free for two reasons: first as a simple matter of fact (no one can compel me to believe something, however much they try), and second because the honor God desires is that which proceeds from true love and conviction. And since the conscience feels bound to honor God through worship, “there can then be no worship proper for any man, which he does not believe suitable to that end” (§128). If you force me to sacrifice animals to honor God, and I am convinced he desires no such thing, you are compelling me to sin against my conscience.
But worship is an external action, and hasn’t Vattel just said that external religion is an affair of state? Ah, yes, but another distinction is in order. Vattel notes that there is a great difference between being forced to do something and being forcibly prevented from doing something: “In religious affairs a citizen has only a right to be free from compulsion, but can by no means claim that of openly doing what he pleases, without regard to the consequences it may produce on society” (§129).
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New Christmas Toyota Commercial with All the Feels
Before our eyes, Toyota reminds us of the joy of loving well, and loving creatively. Maybe our minds go back to our own sweet grandmas who demonstrated love to us. Possibly, it is an adopted grandma through your church, work, or friend’s parent. Possibly, the commercial reminds you of your own aging parent or special friend. Regardless of who you remember, take a moment to say a word of gratitude to God for sweet memories.
Chevrolet made the best Christmas commercial so far of the season, but a close second is this commercial by Toyota. When my twelve-year-old son saw the commercial with me, he immediately said, “Dad, another one! They just keep making great commercials with elders in them.” Let me encourage you to watch it below first, then I’ll respond to it.
Video: Toyota Present from the Past
Not quite the tear-jerker as the Chevrolet commercial, but sweet nevertheless.
“Present from the Past”
Toyota hits a homerun with this commercial that celebrates the relationship between a granddaughter and her grandmother. The granddaughter picks up a package on a snowy day from the post office. She gets in her Toyota pickup where she opens it. The package contains a very old camera with some pictures from her grandma. As the granddaughter looks through the package, in the grandma’s voice, you hear the letter the with the gift, “When I was your age, I was given this camera. May it capture your big, beautiful life the way it did mine. Love, Grandma.”
The daughter jumps in her new Toyota truck and sets out on a journey. As you watch, you realize the sweet journey is capturing some of the same places and people of grandma’s life. There is a beautiful mix of old and new photographs, along with some Toyota trucks.
At the end of the commercial, the granddaughter presents the grandma with a picture album. In it, the old pictures rests next to new pictures capturing both the grandma and granddaughter’s lives together. The special relationship and love of a grandma and granddaughter celebrated in random pictures of the grandma’s past. It ends with the granddaughter and grandma hugging, “Merry Christmas, grandma.”
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The Church’s Cosmic Mission
From the human perspective, however, God is doing all of these amazing things through the message of the gospel. The Church, motivated by God’s glory and empowered by God’s grace, reaches out and impacts the lives of those around them by heralding the good news of what Jesus has done. According to his grace, God saves sinners and is glorified. This is why we exist as the church. This is our eternal purpose. May we come to realize the divine mystery of the gospel, be driven by the divine motivation of our calling, and more consistently and effectively carry out our mission, by God’s grace, and for God’s glory.
Several years ago, I read a story that has stayed with me. The author described an event in his family’s life, writing the following:
A few years ago Lisa and I took our four children on a day trip to Cunningham Falls State Park in Western Maryland. As we were leaving, a kind, elderly gentleman urged us not to head back toward Baltimore until we got a good look at the sky on what promised to be a crystal clear evening. “You’ll never be able to see such a pretty sight back in the city with all that haze and light pollution blocking your view,” he warned us. We gladly took his advice, stopping at a Dairy Queen drive-through and finding the nearest overlook off Route 70. We sat there in the fading light, finishing our cones, talking and anticipating the natural beauty we were about to behold. As dusk settled in, however, so did our grip on reality: we realized we wouldn’t have been able to see a meteor shooting ten feet away because we were looking through the smudged windshield of a well-used minivan belonging to a family with four small children.
Fortunately, with a little glass cleaner from the glove compartment and the roll of paper towels no family minivan should ever be without, Lisa was able to remove years of nasty film formed by the mysterious substances of childhood. In minutes, the glass was so clean that it blended imperceptibly with the world just outside. As the darkness of a summer evening fell, our family was mesmerized by the stunning splendor of a full moon, vivid in the western Maryland sky and set among what seemed like twice as many stars as there ought to be. We sat in speechless awe as the heavens declared God’s glory. And not once did anyone say, “What a beautifully clear windshield!”1
That story is such a great illustration of God’s purpose for the Church. Although we, as sinful human beings, are prone to smudge up the proverbial windshield, causing our focus to be hindered by many distractions, the Word of God provides us with a glorious picture of the grand, redemptive purpose God has given the Church. If we can simply catch a glimpse of that purpose, then it will radically transform and motivate us to effectively carry out our God ordained mission. There is arguably no better place to see that mission more clearly than in the book of Ephesians.
The Mystery has been Revealed for the Church
Beginning in chapter 3 of Paul’s letter, the Apostle writes:
For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles— assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel (Eph 3:1-6).
For the sake of context, a great deal of enmity and hostility existed between the Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s day. The Jews saw themselves as God’s chosen people. They viewed their standing as righteous before God and directly in the center of all his plans and purposes. Their view of the Gentiles, however, was just the opposite. Although they knew the promises God made to bless the Gentiles (Is 49:6), their predominate attitude was one of arrogance. Many saw their Gentile neighbors as nothing more than second-class citizens, at best. Against that backdrop, Paul wanted the church to understand that God has revealed a great mystery.
So, what is the mystery? It is that through the gospel, God has provided a way of reconciliation to all humanity, not just for the Jews but also for the Gentiles. In other words, Jews and Gentiles who savingly trust in Jesus are on equal footing before God. Now, for many Jews, this was entirely inconceivable. They couldn’t imagine a scenario in which they would be spiritually equal with the Gentiles. Yet, just as God revealed to Abraham, this was his plan all along (Gen 17:5-7, Gal 3:8). So, throughout redemptive history, God was revealing more and more about this mystery until it was fully unveiled in Christ. As Paul quoted from the prophet Hosea in the ninth chapter of Romans:
Those who were not my people I will call “my people,” and her who was not beloved I will call “beloved.” And in the very place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” there they will be called “sons of the living God” (Rom 9:25-26).
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