Christ is King
“Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him” (Ps 2:12). In the Lord Jesus everything is to be found which can bring about rest. He is all-sufficient, omnipotent, good, faithful, and true. To trust in Him is to magnify Jesus in all His perfections. For such there are glorious promises.
In the first volume of The Christian’s Reasonable Service, Wilhelmus à Brakel explains Christ’s office as King as the Mediator of the Covenant of Grace. Christ’s perfection and fulfillment of these roles has implications that the believer can never ignore:
“The kingly office is the third office of Christ. A king is a person in whom alone the supreme authority over a nation is vested. Thus, the Lord Jesus is King, and none but Him. . .
Since the Lord Jesus is King, one must confess Him as such and not be ashamed of Him. “Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven” (Matt 10:32-33). This must be practiced with discretion, and yet at the same time boldly, willingly, manifestly (and thus without disguise), and in dependency upon the Lord Jesus, persevering therein until death.
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The History of American Evangelicals’ Opposition to Abortion Is Long
Written by Joseph S. Laughon |
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
[The] account of Evangelicals being late to the pro-life cause isn’t meant to convince the serious pro-lifer but to poison the well against pro-life advocacy. If the public can be convinced that pro-lifers are disingenuous, and hiding racist motivations, then it can more easily disregard discomfort about the ethics of abortion.As the pro-life movement remains entrenched among American voters, a new pro-choice talking point has entered the media narrative.
In the new historiography of the abortion debate, the reason that pro-lifers are against abortion is not that they sincerely believe it to be murder. Rather they are operating from a false consciousness, hiding their real motive, racism. That narrative, which now gets repeated by the usual pro-choice advocates in media outlets such as the Guardian and the New York Times, is inaccurate and disingenuous. It is an obvious attempt to manufacture a politicized history.
The narrative is simple: American Evangelicals never were pro-life and were in fact quite pro-choice until, losing their apparent battle in favor of segregation, they decided (for reasons never fully explained) to turn against abortion in their presumed quest for political power. There are several problems with this. For starters, it doesn’t matter. No one’s convictions about abortion have their basis in what some Evangelicals allegedly believed half a century ago. Before someone decides whether abortion is wrong, he doesn’t ask himself, “Wait! What did W. A. Criswell believe?” Moreover, this point ignores both the influence of American Roman Catholics in the pro-life movement and the growing secular pro-life contingent.
The main problem with this account however is its inaccuracy bordering on total falsehood. It ignores the history of Christians opposing abortion for two millennia and assumes that the American Evangelical experience starts in the late 20th century. In his compelling work Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky, the noted Evangelical journalist, lays out the pre-Roe history of Evangelical Americans’ fight against abortion. From the Colonial era onward, American Protestants, both mainliners and their Evangelical counterparts, took inspiration from the Bible as well as from the ancient, medieval, and early modern church in their doctrine on abortion. Though limited in their scope at first, American Protestants sought to keep abortion criminalized, increasing the pressure as it became more common in the United States. While it is true that Evangelical Americans’ history with abortion is more nuanced than thought in some quarters, the whole story is not one that makes for good pro-choice agitprop.
It’s telling that this chronicle always starts in the early 1970s. A more complete history would start in the ancient Near East, where the early Christians uniformly interpreted their scriptures, replete with texts about the personhood of the unborn, as prohibiting abortion. As early as the first century, Christians taught:
The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child. [Didache 2:1–2 (a.d. 70)]
The medieval Church was no different, and the Protestant Reformers were similarly consistent in their stance. Early Americans would be most influenced by the latter, as most were some variety of British Protestant. Early American Protestants would have been informed as well by the British legal environment in which abortion was a serious crime. To take pro-choice revisionists at their word, one would have to believe that, with Roe, the Supreme Court struck down restrictive abortion laws that came from nowhere and were passed by nobody but merely existed.
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Context Matters: God’s Mercies Are New Every Morning
We should remember the steadfast love of the Lord every day, but we need reminders most when we feel it least. When we’re tempted to lose heart, when our souls are cast down, we need to remember what God is really like. Join the author of Lamentations. Recall the mercies of God throughout history and in your own life.
Perhaps you’ve heard that God’s mercies are new every morning. You’ve been told that his steadfast love never ceases, and you’ve sung “Great is Your Faithfulness.”
Perhaps your reminder about God’s mercies was splashed on an inspirational calendar above the perfect dew-brushed meadow. Or maybe you heard a perky Christian radio disc jockey quote this enthusiastically in an effort to motivate listeners to get out of bed.
I’ve heard this sentiment about God’s mercies on retreats, during good times, when the group I’m part of wants to extend its current momentum. We’re experiencing God’s blessings—both in ministry and life—and from this verse we’re told we should have confidence these blessings will continue. But does this use Lam 3:22–23 in the correct context?
When we learn to read the Bible as an actual book and not as a professionally-bound collection of pull-quotes, we’ll find that some of our favorite passages take on deeper and more sobering meanings.
The Book of Lamentations
The book of Lamentations is not cheerful. The author was not writing from a mountain top, riding the spiritual high of God’s favor.
In fact, picture the exact opposite of that setting. That’s the background for this book of laments.
(A quick note: Many people assume the prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations. There is wide disagreement about this, however, and I don’t think any interpretation changes if we drop this assumption.)
In 589 BC, Jerusalem was surrounded by the armies of Babylon and endured a long siege. The city fell in 587 BC and Babylon crashed in with fire and fury. The temple was desecrated and destroyed. The city was burned. Many Israelites died, and most of the rest were led away by the enemy forces. A scattered few people remained, and they were starving.
The author of Lamentations wrote in the midst of this terrible landscape. In five heart-wrenching prayers, he cried out to the Lord. He knew God’s hand was behind Babylon and that the Jewish people deserved this judgment for their idolatry. His laments were raw acknowledgments of their terrible, warranted state.
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What Does the Name Jesus Mean?
If you have been brought face-to-face with your sin and have come to believe that Jesus is your Savior, no name will be more precious to you than His. Though at one time you may have held Him at arm’s length, despised Him as nothing more than a profanity, or even thought that you could save yourself through good works, the name, the person, and the work of Jesus have now become dear, for you have drawn near to Him and experienced His compassion, kindness, and mercy.
When the angel visited Mary and Joseph to announce the birth of the Messiah, he gave clear instructions concerning the child’s name: “You shall call his name Jesus” (Matt. 1:21; Luke 1:31). Christ has many glorious names: King, Creator, Lord, Judge, Son of God, Son of David, Master, I Am, the First and the Last, etc. But the angel commanded that a very specific name be given Him at His birth—and we may wonder at the intention behind that choice. Why “Jesus”?
The name itself was not an unusual name. In fact, it is the Hellenized version of the Old Testament name Joshua. In Hebrew, it is Yeshua, and simply translated, it means “The Lord saves.” So of all the glorious names He might have been given, the name that would mark out the incarnate Son of God would be that which describes Him as Savior. Jesus’ name communicates His purpose: “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). As Peter would later proclaim, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
While Jesus’ name and ministry invite people into grace, many do not respond to Jesus Himself with warmth. His name is precious, yet so many treat it as peripheral, or even profane. During this Christmas season, then, we ought to ask ourselves, “What does the name Jesus mean to me?”
Profaned and Peripheral
Many people have no interest in the name Jesus, except perhaps as a curse word. They have no interest in Jesus as a Savior, they have not experienced Jesus’ power to change their lives, and they may even question whether Jesus really is who He says He is—but they still find the sound of His name to be a convenient interjection when they are surprised or angry. So they choose to profane the name of the incarnate God, who came to save us from our sins.
Yet it is not only the obvious offenders who profane Jesus’ name. Many people feel some respect for the name of Jesus, but their lives are busy, and so Jesus is ultimately sidelined. After all, there are places to go, people to meet, money to be earned, bills to be paid, and children to be raised. Jesus is just one of many obligations, and certainly not their chief desire. People thus have little awareness that they need to be saved at all, and they ignore the testimony of Jesus’ own name: that He has come to save them.
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