America’s LGBTQ Establishment
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Pride Month is not about civil rights, it is about ownership of space and time. It is a demonstration of cultural and political power and an opportunity to erase from public view those who refuse to acknowledge that power.
How do you take over an empire? That is a question that I used as a title for a lecture I gave each year in my Ancient Christianity class. The answer is simple to state but somewhat more difficult to achieve in practice: You simply need to control time and space.
Christianity achieved this in the Roman empire during the fourth century, a century that opened with the last great imperial persecution of the church and ended with Christians firmly established as the dominant religion officially sanctioned by the state and privileged above all pagan rivals. By no coincidence, it was also the century that saw struggles where the deployment of martyr relics was used as a means of claiming ownership of land for sacred purposes and the development of liturgical calendars for marking the rhythm of the year in distinctly Christian terms.
In our modern days, the same principles are deployed by those who seek to control our world. And Pride Month is surely the most ostentatious, annoying, and egregious of them all. June has been taken over by the avant-garde of the sexual revolution. It is the high feast of the progressive liturgical calendar and almost as long as Lent—though committed of course to self-indulgence, not self-denial. Pride parades pass through the streets, flaunting ever more exotic forms of explicit sexuality, often cheered on by parents with small children.
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The Perils of a Passive Man
God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves. And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.
I had never thought of myself as passive. Throughout high school and college, and all throughout my twenties, I had been the driven dreamer and achiever. I thought of myself as the organized one, the proactive one, the disciplined one, the visionary. I was the one who initiated next steps, important meetings, needed changes, group plans, hard conversations.
And then I married, and marriage showed me sides of myself I had never had to see.
A man does not change much by making vows and putting on a ring, but an awful lot changes for a man that day. The apostle Paul tried to prepare us: “The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:32–34). Divided me was not as put-together and proactive as single me had been. And as the pressures rose and the cracks began to show, I suddenly saw just how tempted to self-pity and passivity I could be.
What God Expects of Husbands
Over the first year or two of marriage, the passivity of Christian husbands went from a foreign and somewhat perplexing problem to a profoundly familiar and personal and humbling one. Vision and initiative were easier, in some ways, when they were fenced into certain parts of my life. Now, as two became one, all of life required a leading love.
Will I give myself up for her good again today (Ephesians 5:25)? Will I keep pursuing her, studying her, wooing her? Will I develop and carry out a vision for our family? Will I consistently open the Bible and pray with them? Will I lead our family in loving and serving the church? Will I lean into conflict with patience and love, or will I withdraw? Will I anticipate our family’s needs and preserve space to rest? Will I discipline our children, even when I’m tired? Will I bring up difficult conversations and make tough decisions? Or, like Adam, when God comes calling, will I hide and point the finger somewhere else (Genesis 3:12)?
God expects much from husbands. As my senses have been heightened to my own tendencies to passivity, stories of husbands in Scripture — good and bad — have come alive with greater gravity and relevance for marriage.
Weak and Wicked Example
God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves.
And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.
When we first meet the man, Scripture tells us, “Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years. And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (1 Kings 16:29–30). The kings before him were a cauldron of evil — conspiring, deceiving, stealing, murdering, and in it all, insulting God by choosing idols over him. Ahab, we learn, was worse than them all.
And his marriage was at the center of his rebellion. “As if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him” (1 Kings 16:31). He first mocked God by marrying an idolator, and then — as God warned would happen — he caved and bowed in submission to her and her god.
The facets of Ahab’s wickedness are worthy of much reflection, but here I want to focus on a scene that exposes the allure and peril of his passivity.
Seduction of Self-Pity
When 1 Kings 21 opens, Ahab covets the vineyard of his neighbor, Naboth, and asks to buy it from him — disregarding God’s law that prevented the permanent sale of land (Leviticus 25:23). Naboth doesn’t merely refuse because he wants to keep his land; he refuses because to do otherwise would be to disregard God. Now watch how Ahab responds, crumbling into self-pity and passivity:
Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him, for he had said, “I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.” And he lay down on his bed and turned away his face and would eat no food. (1 Kings 21:4)
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A Much Better “Activism” for Christians in America
The great need of the hour is collective humility and repentance for our sins, for our selfishness, for our idolatries, and our attempts to make our home in this world in denial of our heavenly citizenship.
One of the most important things Christians should talk about right now is repentance. With the plethora of problems we are facing at the moment, the fact is that, almost universally, among Christians, there lacks a deep humbling of ourselves before the Lord in true repentance.
It really is the height of arrogance for us to avoid the question of why nothing is going well. We are plagued by wars and rumors of wars, economic fall-out, corrupt leadership, and a lingering pestilence that has brought mass confusion as we watch the systematic destruction of a nation before our eyes. And the people seem to expect the government to save us as de facto God. Yet, we angrily respond in outrage to the newest hypocrisy of the day, lobbing “gotcha articles” for our side and the corresponding pot shots toward our enemies. But maybe we’re missing the real issue, the most important of issues.
Fire From the Throne
The reason things are not going well and why it feels like everything is going to hell in a hand basket is because temporary judgments are being issued from the throne room of heaven. You cannot have this kind of chaos, disorder, abuse, sickness, and confusion part from what David called the heavy hand of the Lord. But Christians, by and large, seem afraid to talk about God’s temporary judgments. For clarity, I’m not talking about the Pat Robertson kind of stuff, namely, that God is judging because of some specific group of sinners. Jesus corrected that thinking in Luke 13. Let’s move on from that to a right understanding of dark providence.
We sing from the psalms that Christ “judges the nations” and executes justice on oppressors, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven in the present (Rom. 1:18ff). We are told from the book of Revelation (a book meant to encourage the church in times of great persecution and satanic assault by the corrupt, beastly governments of this world), that God, in answering our cries and prayers, throws fire back down on the earth. That this fire comes in the forms of the “earth burning up” or the “sea becoming blood” or the “water becoming bitter” is meant to be understood as God answering the cries of his elect (see. Rev. 8).
Why then are Christians falling apart in shock over the things that are happening on the earth? The governmental grabs for power, the ungodly responses, and the many oppressions in the earth by the wicked, are desperate attempts to “save Babylon” from heaven’s divine blows. Yet, we act like we can stop this and “save America.” We sit in front of our computers and yell angrily at the wicked for taking our “freedoms and rights” as if our purpose is to bring calm to the storm in America through activism, on social media. Does anyone stop and think for a minute that what we are facing are symptoms of the world’s panicked response due to divine judgments from the throne? God hears the cries of his people; when we pray, he repays, this is what deliverance from Egypt by plague should have taught us.
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Pastors Need to Stand Up
Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Lots of people have a sense that some things in our culture aren’t right, but they aren’t sure about how to best think about them….Their own Pastor, who knows their life, talking to them about this is more helpful than any voice they find online….Please consider talking about cultural issues more in your own church.We live in difficult days. My nation has fallen headlong into a sort of Protestant Paganism and is embracing all of sorts of beliefs and practices that are against the way of God.
This isn’t suddenly true, it has been growing steadily for some time, and it could all turn in any direction very suddenly. What is I think is universally accepted is that if you’re a Christian and you believe what the Bible says about personhood, marriage, sex and sexuality, gender, partiality, money—or honestly that the world is shot through with the glory of God—then saying those beliefs in a public forum is likely to earn you derision at best.
As a result, most people don’t speak up. That’s not a problem, as long as you aren’t being put into a compromising position in your workplace by not doing so. We do need to be careful of that, and Pastors need to speak more carefully and frequently about those decisions, I suspect, as congregants face them more than pastors do.
Most people not speaking up because of the potential backlash or consequences in their employment is reasonable. It does mean that we need the Pastors who are paid by their churches—and so granted a measure of freedom to speak as they will—to clearly speak to difficult and contentious issues.
Except, in British Evangelicalism at least, that tends to be not what happens. There are, of course, many wonderful exceptions who should be lauded. They tend to be in smaller churches all over the place, as the pressures to not do so increase with profile (though again, there are wonderful exceptions).
I think there are two primary reasons that (some) full-time Pastors don’t speak clearly on cultural issues here in the UK.
The first is that it doesn’t seem very British. It all seems terribly American (which, American readers, would not usually be seen as a positive thing in the UK). We have a cultural tendency to not speak to difficult or contentious issues. If they have a political angle, then British churches tend to veer away from that as well. As a result of this, often the only voices that can be heard are strident or crazy. This would tend to drive us the other way: people will interpret you as standing with the crazy person, or think you sound like the strident one, even if you are trying to be careful and reasonable in the way you communicate. It seems like causing a lot of bother we’d all rather avoid.
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