The religion of death is awake and active. If it could, it would even swallow up the Christian. But our God is more powerful and provides the remedy to such folly. Do not be ashamed of the Gospel of God concerning Jesus Christ. It is, was, and always will be the power of God unto salvation. It must be preached, proclaimed, and protected. God will give His Word success and bring those in the clutches of death and darkness to the glorious light of the Kingdom of His dear Son our Lord.

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live: that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days.
Deuteronomy 30:19-20
The world, the devil, and all the powers of the flesh and darkness are joined together for this reason – to shed the innocent blood of children.
The recent leaking of Supreme Court draft documents has again brought to light the abomination of the world’s religion of death.  Couched in the euphemisms of “a woman’s right to choose,” “human rights,” “healthcare,” and other similar terms, the demonic practice of child murder is being promoted like never before by the Roman Catholic president of the United States, his vice president, and governors, senators, and countless groups across the country. This again begs the question, why? Why are there riots in the streets to promote murder? Why are the highest officials of the land promoting murder?
The answer lies in the spiritual realm.
Two Spiritual Conditions
Throughout the Bible the Lord presents just two spiritual conditions into which all people fall: Each person is either saved or unsaved; walking in light or walking in darkness; on the highway to hell or the pathway to life; lovers of life or lovers of death; haters of God or servants of God. Myriad descriptors present only two options for man, life or death.
Life
In order to live, God tells us we must choose life (Deut. 30:19). These two words have  been used as a rallying cry for the so called “Pro-Life” movement. In its Scriptural context, it has little to do with abortion and everything to do with faith in Jesus Christ. The life we are called to choose is the life of blessing, the narrow way through the narrow gate, the truth, the solid foundation. Life is not an idea or an action; the life of Deut. 30:19 is a person. “Therefore choose life… that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life.”
This is just what Jesus says in John 14:6: “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.”
As the LORD calls us to choose life He calls us to believe, have faith, and trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation so that we might have everlasting life through Him. The Jesus Christ we are called to trust is the God Man in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. He shed His own blood and died, so that His children might have life and live. Choose life means simply this – repent of your sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ alone for salvation and you shall be saved.
The preacher of Proverbs sums it up this way, “For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the LORD” (8:35). This is one spiritual state of man – the man that has found Christ and eternal life in Him. In this state, as a servant of the living and true God, this man sets himself to serve and glorify his King. The result is that [both he and his] descendants may live.
Death
There is the second condition – it is the condition of those who hate life, light, and truth. They are those who love death, darkness, and lies.
The preacher said, “All they that hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:36).
Many have foolishly believed that through reason, science, speeches, and laws, they can persuade the followers of death that life is good. What they fail to grasp is that those outside of Christ are not just prone to sin and evil, they love it. Those that hate Christ love death.
The apostle puts it this way, they not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them (Romans 1:32). The wicked glory in your flesh (Galatians 6:13). They love the shedding of innocent blood. They delight in sending their children and, if they could, your children to the slaughter. As the Christian delights in serving the living and true Lord with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind, so the wicked delights to serve sin and death with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind.
Why are the wicked rioting, threatening, enraged by a draft ruling from the Supreme Court that does not prohibit abortion but turns it over to the states to regulate murder? Because they perceive their religion and way of life is being somehow attacked.
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Written by O. Palmer Robertson |
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
At stake is the accurate record of the early proclamation of the saving gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. In terms of the progress of redemption, this speech of Paul at Antioch, delivered at the heart of the trade routes of Asia, represents the fullest record of an early proclamation of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations of the world, which therefore embodies a significant step beyond the record of Peter’s summary of the gospel as preached at Pentecost. 

God’s glory in the Gospel connects directly to the display of his righteousness when he declares righteous a sinful human being, a depraved, wrath-deserving sinner who has repeatedly violated God’s law. That he might be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” God offered his Son “as a propitiatory sacrifice through his blood” (Rom. 3:26, 25). This justification by God of the guilty sinner through the substitutionary death of Jesus, received by faith alone, openly displays the righteousness of God.
Was Paul’s letter to the Romans the first time this “Gospel” was declared that so wondrously displays the righteousness of God in the justification of the sinner through the blood of Christ?
By no means! Before any written Gospel had been published, during the twenty years in which apostolic proclamation alone defined the Christian Gospel, Paul preached the doctrine of the “rising and falling church”—justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law.
When and where did he make this proclamation?
During his first missionary journey into Asia, as he preached in the synagogue of Antioch of Pisidia.
What exactly did he say?
Let it therefore be known to you, men and brothers, that through this man, the forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed to you. From all the things from which you are not able to be justified by the law of Moses, all who believe in this man are justified (Acts 13:38, 39).
Rather remarkable is the translation of the root δικαιόω as “freed” rather than “justified” twice in this passage, as it appears in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV).
It would be impossible to discover the thinking behind the Revised Standard Version of 1952 in its rendering of “freed” rather than “justified.” The RSV, it should be remembered, was the first major effort to provide a new translation of the Bible into English that would replace the King James Version of 1611, made almost 350 years earlier. The RSV is basically a good rendering of Scripture, representing a more “literal” rather than a “dynamic” translation. It is frequently used as a helpful tool by Bible translation societies. Yet one might re-imagine the climate of the 1950’s in which the RSV originated in cooperation with the National Council of Churches. Significant resistance to the translation arose when the classic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 read, “Behold, a ‘young woman’ (rather than a ‘virgin’) shall conceive and bear a son…” As a consequence, this version of the Bible was rejected outright by evangelicals of the day.
In the prevailing climate that produced the RSV, it can easily be imagined that its translators could have concluded that the phrasing in Luke’s report of Paul’s speech in Acts 13 was “too Pauline” to be “authentically Pauline” at this early stage in his life and ministry. To read “everyone who believes” is “justified from everything from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses” might have appeared to them as simply incorporating “too much Paul” into this early speech in the Israelite synagogue of Antioch. These statements agree so perfectly with Galatians and Romans, Paul’s later writings, that it might have been concluded that they represented a “reading back” into Paul’s earlier speech in Acts the more refined theology of his subsequent formulations of doctrine.
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Some might raise the objection that contextualization is unavoidable. They’d argue that everyone is a product of his or her own culture. They’d say that no one is unaffected by their own culture, and it is arrogant to think anyone can “transcend” his own culture. To a degree, I’ll concede this point. It is true that no one can transcend his own culture, everyone is shaped by his own culture, and every Christian message is contextualized to that culture. Nevertheless, pressing this point too far leads to cultural relativism.

The Trojan Horse of Leftist Propaganda
I have been in full-time ministry for over twenty years. I spent the first five in collegiate ministry with CRU, which seemed to be on the cutting edge of evangelistic innovation. This is where I first learned about “contextualization,” the art of adapting the gospel message to a specific audience. I spent the next fifteen years planting and pastoring a new church in Cincinnati, OH. During this time, I learned the concept of “incarnational ministry,” where you immerse yourself in your target culture to “become Jesus” to them, learning their stories and speaking their language to communicate the gospel more effectively to them.
I planted my church in 2010, right at the crest of the “missional church planting” movement. Being partnered with the Southern Baptist Convention and Acts 29, I can attest that a whole generation of church planters and pastors were trained this way. And now, twenty years in, enough time has passed to evaluate the movement. As I’ll demonstrate below, my assessment is this. Contextualization, as it is commonly practiced, is a trojan horse for worldly propaganda that threatens the future vitality of the church.
Contextualization has changed the way modern Christians talk. Modern Christians don’t sound like the Bible when they talk. Our worship gatherings resemble evangelistic crusades where unbelievers are the primary audience. We speak in code, like the underground church in China worried that the CCP is waiting in ambush when they hear Christians talking like Christians. When preachers soften the Bible’s words to appeal to non-Christians, their churches follow suit. We use spiritual baby talk. And when baby talk is all you hear, baby talk is all you speak. This is how you contextualize the word of God right out of the church.
The Importance of Words 
Words are important because God speaks to us in words. God created the universe with words. The 10 Commandments were revealed with words. Jesus Christ is himself called “The Word.” John’s gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word. And the word was with God, and the word was God” (John 1:1). Salvation is communicated with words. The Bible’s use of the word “word” isn’t incidental. God’s words have power to create reality. Humans think with words. Words are the building blocks of theology. Therefore, manipulating words to distort truth is a serious issue because it’s an attempt to tinker with reality.
Paul spoke about this in 2 Corinthians. It says, “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word. But by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” This verse has a negative statement and a positive statement. Negatively, Paul says he’s “renounced” any tactic of salesmanship, verbal manipulation, or deceit to try to win converts. He refused to “tamper with God’s word” in any way. Positively, Paul’s was simply committed to an “open statement of the truth.” Paul refused to employ spiritually manipulative salesmanship tactics because he was an ambassador for the truth, not a peddler of propaganda.
Propaganda in the Modern World 
Propagandists specialize in these underhanded techniques, and no one does it better than the ideologues of the modern left. Their chief weapon is the manipulation of language. Just as God created the universe with words and rules his people by his word, leftists manipulate words to rule people in the reality they create. In other words, they are playing God. Saul Alinsky, a hero of the left, famously said, “he who controls the language controls the masses.” What are they trying to control? Everything. They want to control how we think, what we value, the ethics we live by, and how we are governed. Through the manipulation of language, leftist ideologues are trying to re-create society in their image according to their moral vision.
Scripture says it is evil to redefine ethics by manipulating words. Isaiah 5:20 says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” God forbids the use of words to upend moral norms. Doug Wilson says the fight of our day is a battle for the dictionary. In the late 1960s, Jacques Ellul, a French Christian writer, called it “Propaganda.”
The Tactics of Propaganda 
In his book, Ellul did an intensive study of the use of propaganda in many countries, notably Germany, the USSR, and the USA during WWII. His insights are still relevant because these tactics are still effectively deployed to deceive people in our day. Here are some of the most common tactics.
Borrow Social Capital 
Propagandists attach their message to a positive, agreed-upon social narrative. Ellul wrote, “Propaganda cannot create something out of nothing… It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea, it must build on a foundation already present in the individual.” The Civil Rights movement provides such a narrative for modern propaganda. LGBTQ activists have seized upon Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heroic martyr status and cast themselves in his image as the oppressed “sexual minorities” who are “fighting for justice and equality.” They steal the legitimacy of the civil rights narrative and twist it to support their cause. People fall before it because it feels righteous to support things like “justice” and “equality.” People who no longer believe in a transcendent God to give life meaning will find some semblance of meaning in supporting what they believe to be a righteous cause.
Appeal to Emotions 
Rather than focusing on logic, reasoning, and rational thought, propaganda focuses on emotions that can be subtly embedded in one’s unconscious mind. Bible-believing Christians who are committed to objective truth can naively assume that others do too. While we make appeals to texts of scripture, texts of law, rational arguments, and truth claims, the propagandists are telling stories. Stories have the power to shape our values and desires through narrative, symbol, and imagery. Hollywood knows this. They tell our nation’s stories, which is why the moral decline of Hollywood has always been about 20 years ahead of middle America.
Last March, Audrey Hale murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville, TN. What are the facts of this incident? A woman who identified as a transgender man targeted Christian children for violence and murder. What is the narrative of this incident? When a talented and aspiring artist was victimized by the hatred of her conservative Christian parents who rejected her sexual identity, she became violent. Unfortunately, facts don’t win the day, emotions do. An emotionally moving story can provide a sympathetic “context” to justify any behavior.
About this point, Ellul wrote, “[A] distinction between propaganda and information is often made. Information is addressed to reason and experience. It furnishes facts. Propaganda is addressed to feelings and passions. It is irrational. To be effective, propaganda must constantly short circuit all thought and decision.” Ellul continued, “Propaganda… creates… compliance… thru imperceptible influences. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces. This is one of the conditions for the success of propaganda. But some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate action.” And that’s the ultimate goal. Action. Not truth.
Activism Above All 
There’s a reason why men like Jordan Peterson call them “Social Justice Warriors.” They really are warriors, fighting a holy war. Their battle is a cultural jihad, animated by religious zeal, waged through political activism. They believe in a Great Commission: “Go ye forth into the world and proclaim the gospel of diversity, equity and inclusion.” They have an eschatology: a humanist utopia governed by their perverted moral vision. They have a playbook: “Win at all costs.” They are not constrained by Western, Christian morality. Christian morality is not the code they live by, it’s the enemy they’re trying to defeat.
About this, Ellul wrote, “The skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudice and images, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies.” As far as public perception goes, consistency is overrated, because truth is not their goal. Leftists are not motivated by consistency, truth, or logical coherence. All that matters is achieving their pragmatic aims.
Through the words they say and the stories they tell, they’re trying to create a rival reality that removes the Christian God and replaces him with a deified state. This is the pool we’re all swimming in. This is the spirit of the age. Every day, we dine at the table of propaganda and we drink the wine of propaganda. Leftist propaganda is in our TV shows, movies, and music. It’s on the news, in our schools, and in our workplaces. It’s in our government, tech industries, big business, and social media. And, I’d argue, it’s in the church.
Gospel-Centered Contextualization 
Much propaganda has been smuggled into the church under the winsome guise of “reaching the lost.” If Christians are to become “all things to all men” to reach the modern world, it is assumed, then we must use their stories, symbols, and words to communicate with them effectively. Pastor Tim Keller is a well-known practitioner of contextualization, and we read about this in a 2001 article entitled, “The Missional Church.” This article has been massively influential for countless pastors and ministry leaders in the last 20 years.
Two parts of his contextualization strategy merit attention here. First, Keller says, we need to “speak in the vernacular” of the target audience, using their words and symbols to communicate the Christian message. Second, we need to “enter and retell the culture’s stories” to show how they are ultimately fulfilled in Christ.
For example, a common theme in our culture is the “American Dream.” To contextualize to Americans, therefore, an evangelist could “enter and retell” that story and point it towards Jesus. He could say, “Everyone wants the American Dream. Since we are created in God’s image, we are eternal beings, which means nothing in this world can truly satisfy us. We are only truly satisfied in a relationship with God.”
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