Annual Planning With the Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments, not often associated with annual project planning, actually are a reliable guide for what is real. God actually did segment the potential thematic elements of all we will face, and he did it on tablets of stone. So the Decalogue serves us as a way to put our feet on a firm foundation when other factors try to convince us that life is a chaotic mess.
December is for the next year’s planning, or so many of us think. No one plans the next year in November. And no one plans for the next year once it has begun (i.e., in January). But is that the best time to plan for such a large chunk of our lives, a whole twelve months? I suppose it is inconsequential since yearly planning seldom occurs outside of the time-honored month designated as the twelfth.
The lean and pull to planning in December relates to how we account for time in twelve months, somewhat related to the seasons. A full description of how all this works out is beyond the scope of what I’m trying to cover in this brief essay. But I’ll say in broad and sweeping (and potentially reckless terms) that the reason we plan in December is that we’re trying to make sense of reality—a reality segmented into batches, batches that end and begin and begin again. But that leads to some honest introspection as to whether December is the best time exactly to make sense of the reality of time.
When we’re honest with ourselves, December is really difficult. If you’re a pastor, this is obvious. Whatever you did for Thanksgiving is in the rear-view mirror faster than deacons resign before the mission conference. And now you have to prepare for a Christmas Eve service, Christmas morning service, and whatever else falls in between. Adding to this, the bulk of your crisis counseling will happen between December and February. There are reasons for this,1 but again, they are outside the scope of this brief essay. Scheduling and people’s problems are enough to prove the point that December is difficult.
And if you’re not a pastor, the same truth controls. December is hard. You’ve said goodbye to Thanksgiving. And now you’re staring down Christmas (and New Year) with all of their requisite family gatherings, and joys, and dramas, and memories, and uncle Jack staying longer than expected with his whittling kit setup in your living room—wood shavings on the carpet and all. You get the point. December has a bit of psychic trauma attached to it. So, I know what we’ll do; we’ll sit in the middle of it and plan for the next year. What could go wrong? Could I suggest that December isn’t the greatest time to plan for anything, and yet that is precisely what we need to do? There could be a better way.
Enter the Decalogue as Real
There is a better way. When God’s people left Egypt, God buried the greatest military might of that generation under a few metric tons of Red Sea water. You can imagine the elation and fear of the Israelites—this is awesome; how do we avoid a watery grave? The answer was clearly God’s grace because the Israelites hadn’t done anything to be saved except to be in slavery and be favored by God. But God, following that deliverance, provided a Decalogue—ten words that would forever shape the world’s understanding of reality.
And I mean that; the Ten Commandments shape reality. They summarize everything we could and should consider about God and the world he created for us to live in. They aren’t just ten suggestions. They aren’t just the most important ten things. They are the only important ten things. They are an outline of reality.
The Positive in the Negative
I always have to address this whenever I say things like I’ve said so far. The Ten Commandments, in their negatives, also include their positives. What I mean by that is that the Decalogue is mostly “thou shalt not.” But for each “thou shalt not,” there is a “thou shalt” included. And for the minority “thou shalt” among the Decalogue, there is included the negative “thou shalt not.” So, when God says, “don’t murder,” he also says, “protect life at all costs.” When God says to rest on the seventh day, he also says don’t rest on the other six.2
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On Plundering the Egyptians
Although we must use discernment when using pagan philosophies, there is no need to fear their usage in the Christian church. Being able to rightly appropriate these things in service to Christian doctrine is evidence of the Holy Spirit working in common grace and the obligation of Christian theologians. This is precisely what theologians in the Great Tradition in the church has sought to do.
The debates surrounding catholicity and theological retrieval do not seem to be slowing down any time soon. With all the back and forth about Thomas, Aristotle, and Van Til, one theological topic seems to be overlooked more often than others—namely, common grace.
Often, the discussion of common grace is relegated to subjects such as marriage, art, government, and science. We think about these as goods not only for Christians, but for all mankind, perhaps recalling that God causes rain to fall on the just and unjust alike (Matt. 5:45). Yet we find common grace at work not only in the actions of unbelievers, but also in their intellect and inner life.
Although clearly different than special grace for the elect, common grace remains a sovereign operation of the Holy Spirit. As John Murray has said, in common grace the Spirit
“…endows men with gifts, talents, and aptitudes; he stimulates them with interest and purpose to the practice of virtues, the pursuance of worthy tasks, and the cultivation of arts and sciences that occupy time, activity and energy of men and that make for the benefit and civilization of the human race.”[1]
Therefore, unbelievers can, by virtue of common grace, come to philosophical conclusions that are helpful and true and can be utilized by the Christian.
This in and of itself is not highly controversial. Though in recent days, when it comes to Aristotle (and Aquinas’s use of Aristotle), there are some who are quick to sound an alarm, typically seeking to eschew these men in favor of claiming “sola scriptura.” This is not, however, how the Reformed have traditionally handled these matters. Rather, Reformed theologians have sought to utilize the insights, metaphysics, and philosophical truths from pagans where it is appropriate, while rejecting that which is antithetical to divine truth. Simply put, the Reformed can affirm the maxim that all truth is indeed God’s truth.
This does not mean that we should uncritically swallow everything that pagan philosophy has to say. Rather, we can claim that which is true as a gift of God, since the Holy Spirit is the fountain of all truth who guides us into all truth (Jn. 16:13). Understanding this allows us to understand philosophy rightly—even that of Aristotle or Plato—and utilize it as the handmaiden of theology.
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Make Christianity Hard Again
The ironic part is that Christianity is difficult. The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. So don’t talk about it like we just need to be nice people.
I grew up in a very interesting strain of Christianity. Now, I don’t know if this was the explicit teaching of my church or just what I felt, but it seemed like the overall message of a Christian’s duty was, “don’t sin, attend church, read your Bible, and tell others about Jesus.”
Now, all of those are incredibly important things. But I think what tended to happen was telling people about Jesus was paralyzingly scary, mostly because most of us didn’t know where to begin. (Do you hand them a tract? ask them if they know where they will go when they die? Just be kind around them until they ask you about your faith?) Church became routine, the Bible became something to know, and the sins we were supposed to avoid ended up being relegated to avoiding “big sins” (a category in which I tended to move the goalposts a lot).
But when you treat Christianity like that, it is actually not very difficult. Just be a generally nice person. But the real problem with this type of Christianity is that it becomes eye-wateringly boring. You don’t actually have too much to do. Maybe you block out your Sunday mornings and your Wednesday nights. But the rest of your life you functionally live like a fairly moral non-christian.
So, my hunch is that most people with this vision of Christianity are not disengaged because it is really difficult. Rather, people disengage because this version of Christianity seems boring. Now it might seem like the solution to this is to try to make Christianity fun. But I think that is going in the wrong direction. I think that the right move is to make Christianity hard.Related Posts:
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“Groomer”: An Empty Slur for Pro-LGBT Teachers, or Based in Reality?
“Educator sexual abuse is a major problem that largely gets ignored because it’s so uncomfortable to talk about. While a very small fraction of educators and school employees prey on the children in their care, one bad actor can do damage to many students.”
(LifeSiteNews) – There has been quite a bit of debate on the Right over the past few months about the use of the term “groomer.” A “groomer” is defined as someone who develops a relationship with a child for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and the term has been used by those fighting against the sexualization of children and sexual indoctrination in schools.
In response to LGBT activists dubbing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill — which prohibits teaching kids in the third grade and younger about sexuality — the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, parental rights advocates coined the phrase: “Ok, groomer.”
During one of their Backstage events, Daily Wire hosts Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Jeremy Boering discussed the use of the term, with Walsh noting that he thinks the term applies literally to many of those pushing sexual ideologies in schools, while Shapiro stated that it is a rhetorically brilliant quip that should not be used literally.
Columnist (and gay rights activist) Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Murray also discussed the term during a conversation on Murray’s new book The War on the West, with Sullivan strongly objecting to its use.
Sullivan in particular has excoriated conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Twitter for mainstreaming the term, accusing him of smearing educators. Rufo has pushed back by posting a growing list of news stories exposing sexual abuse in public schools by teachers (although no specific evidence that these assaults are connected to the sexual indoctrination in question.)
Rufo recently told Fox News that the lack of research is appalling: “The public school system has a serious child sex abuse problem.” The last significant federal study on this topic, which was conducted by the Department of Education in 2004, suggested that millions of American schoolchildren are victims of teacher sexual misconduct in each generation of K-12 students—and there hasn’t been any significant research since then.Related Posts:
