“Postmodern witchcraft, then, is in one sense a kind of secular substitute for organized religion, and specifically for the Christian faith. With its focus on self-empowerment, self-care, and identity politics, you might even call it neopaganism for the “nones.” It is easy to see the appeal of all this to young people in a post-Christian society, to understand it not just as a coping mechanism for the vicissitudes and alienation of modern life but also as a substitute for the community, identity, and connection to something larger and transcendent— all of which Christianity once provided.”

Many Christian observers of the West have noted for quite some time now that we are seeing a real reversal. The paganism of two millennia ago was basically wiped out by the spread of Christianity. Sure, it took some centuries to happen, but it took place nonetheless. However, the West is now quickly reverting back to what was the norm twenty centuries ago.
There is no question that we have moved from being a Christian West, to a post-Christian West, and now an anti-Christian or pagan West. While Christianity is thriving and growing in much of the non-Western world, here in the West it seems to be on its last legs.
Plenty of books have appeared of late making this case. One of the most recent is Pagan America. Those who have been following these matters over the years will find much familiar material here. But when your country is going down the tubes, we need to keep speaking about it in the hopes of turning things around.
His first paragraph clearly lays out what the book is all about:
The argument of this book is straightforward. America was founded not just on certain ideals but on a certain kind of people, a predominantly Christian people, and it depends for its survival on their moral virtue, without which the entire experiment in self-government will unravel. As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire. (xiii)
Of course trying to live on borrowed spiritual capital can only last for so long. The more the Christian roots of America and the West are attacked and removed, the less the benefits of the faith will last. What we are seeing now is clear proof of this reality.
As such, the usual examples are presented here, be it the culture of death, the radical sexual revolution, the war on the family, and the rise of the transhumanist future. It all makes for scary reading, but we can no longer keep our heads buried in the sand. We either face this crisis head on, or we will lose it all real soon.
Trans madness is of course a major problem in America and the West, and is as good an indicator as any of the rapid decline and deterioration we see all around us. A few quotes from Davidson:
Every major medical institution in the United States now subscribes to the theory that children can meaningfully consent to irreversible medical treatments that involve castration, sterilization, and the removal of healthy organs and body parts—all in the name of “affirming” their identity as a member of the opposite sex. What’s more, these institutions and the doctors and administrators who run them have concluded that these kinds of treatments and procedures are not just beneficial but necessary for the well-being of the patient. Sometimes they do so over and against the wishes of parents. The so-called “affirmative model,” in which medical professionals accept the expressed “gender identity” of the patient and his or her desire to transition, has replaced the once-standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis. (p. 200)
And again:
Fifteen years ago, there were zero pediatric transgender care clinics in the United States. Today there are more than a hundred. An entire medical industry—and a lucrative one, since patients who undergo costly transitions will be patients for the rest of their lives—has sprung up over the last decade, doling out powerful prescription drug regimens and performing irreversible surgeries while raking in profits from insurance companies. And make no mistake, the profit motive is nothing to dismiss lightly. In 2016, the Obama administration prohibited health insurers and medical providers from denying care based on gender identity, prompting health insurers to begin covering more treatments that fall under the category of “gender-affirming care.” Today more than half the states cover gender transition as part of their Medicaid programs, which serve low-income families and are funded with taxpayer dollars. As private and public insurance coverage has expanded, more providers have begun offering their services. And no wonder: the profits on the table are considerable. A year-long regimen of puberty-blockers alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars. All of this has been endorsed and promoted by the medical establishment. (p. 201)
We are reminded how fully in bed the Democratic Party in the US is with all this. And with ‘Tampon Tim’ Walz parading around the stage at the Chicago Democratic National Convention as I type this, it all hits home so much more.
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Indeed, if we had all the answers, if we had all the solutions, we would be God. Or at the very least, we would have no need for faith, no need for trust, and so on. Thus having questions and concerns can be a good thing. It keeps us dependent on God. It makes us want to know him more. It helps build trust in our lives. It can improve our prayer life. The benefits are many.

As I have said so often now, getting the biblical balance right is crucial. And this applies in so many areas. Here I want to speak about the need for biblical balance in terms of the believer embracing both certainty as well as mystery. That is, there are many things that we can be quite sure about, but there are also many things that leave us wondering, that leave us with questions, that leave us with mystery.
Let me explain. We have an entire book (really, 66 books) which contains all that we need to know about God, why we are here, what our problem is, and how things can be sorted out. So who we are, why we exist, how to get right with God, is all spelled out clearly in Scripture.
But so many other things that we might wonder about are not always clearly disclosed to us. As Francis Schaeffer used to say, we have true truth, but not exhaustive truth. God has given us all the vital information that we need to have, but he has not told us everything.
So in many areas – especially in terms of our own personal lives – we are left with countless questions. We do not fully know why we did not get that job we so very much wanted, or why the person we liked so much never became our spouse, or why a loved one died early, or why a friend got cancer, or why our church let us down so greatly.
A million questions can arise, and we do not always get the answers we are looking for – at least in this life. Presumably in the next life we will either get more clarity on some of these matters, or the questions will then disappear and seem not so very important any longer.
Especially when it comes to suffering and hardships and trials and adversity, we can have so very many questions, and most of them seem never to be answered – or at least answered to our liking. So all we can do is keep walking with God, even with so many unresolved questions.
Indeed, if we had all the answers, if we had all the solutions, we would be God. Or at the very least, we would have no need for faith, no need for trust, and so on. Thus having questions and concerns can be a good thing. It keeps us dependent on God. It makes us want to know him more. It helps build trust in our lives. It can improve our prayer life. The benefits are many.
Let me tease this out a bit further, and with my own story as a part of it. Some time ago on the social media a person had a post about how they had a huge improvement in their cancer situation. It seems they really are now doing quite well. The person said something like this: ‘It is a real miracle. It is such an answer to all your prayers.’
To which any Christian would rightly shout ‘Amen!’. God is a miracle-working God, and God certainly does answer prayer. So this was terrific news indeed, and I believe I pressed the ‘like’ button on that post. Always great to hear such reports. But….
Of course at the very same time that I was reading this I had some other thoughts going through my head as well. The truth is, other people – indeed, millions of other people – including myself, had a somewhat different outcome to a similar situation. As some of you know, my wife had a quite rare and quite aggressive form of breast cancer.
I and so many others of course were praying for her. Were there many hundreds of Christians all up praying for her? Perhaps even thousands? Friends, family, church members, even those who had never met her were praying, and many of them were praying fervently.
Yet after a very tough 18-month battle, she lost out to that cancer. The cancer won. Of course, God always wins, and she is now in the arms of her loving Saviour and suffering no more. That is great news too.
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“If you and I find ourselves afflicted by this condition, there is only one thing to do, it is to go to Him….He is our joy and our happiness, even as He is our peace. He is life, He is everything. So avoid the incitements and the temptations of Satan to give feelings this great prominence at the centre. Put at the centre the only One who has a right to be there, the Lord of Glory.”

Reversing the order of my title, we all have feelings, most of us have known depression at one time or another, and many of us know about the great Welsh expository preacher of last century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981). In this piece I will discuss all three. And my audience here, like that of Lloyd-Jones, is the Christian.
Yes, Christians can and do experience depression, struggle with despair, and can be overcome by what they are going through. I am one of those. Lloyd-Jones knew much about this as a minister of the gospel, and sought to help his people by extensively dealing with it.
As with so many of the vital books that we have from him, the volume I am quoting from here began as a series of 21 sermons which he had delivered at Westminster Chapel in London over consecutive Sunday mornings in 1954. He had been concerned about the rather joyless condition of many English Christians, especially just after WWII.
These sermons were put together in book form in 1965 and titled Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. I have the 1998 Marshall Pickering edition, so my page numbers refer to that volume. In this book of 300 pages, he looks at a number of aspects of depression and how the believer should deal with it. The 21 chapter titles are these:

General Consideration (Psalm 42:5, Psalm 42:11)
The True Foundation (Romans 3:28)
Men as Trees, Walking (Mark 8:22, 26)
Mind, Heart and Will (Romans 6:17)
That One Sin (1 Timothy 1:16)
Vain Regrets (1 Corinthians 15:8-10)
Fear of the Future (2 Timothy 1:7)
Feelings (2 Timothy 1:6)
Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16)
Where is Your Faith? (Luke 8:22-25)
Looking at the Waves (Matthew 14:22-33)
The Spirit of Bondage (Romans 8:15-17)
False Teaching (Galatians 4:15)
Weary in Well Doing (Galatians 6:9)
Discipline (2 Peter 1:5-7)
Trials (1 Peter 1:6-7)
Chastening (Hebrews 12:5-11)
In God’s Gymnasium (Hebrews 12:5-11)
The Peace of God (Philippians 4:6-7)
Learning to be Content (Philippians 4:10-12)
The Final Cure (Philippians 4:13)

In this article I am drawing from just one chapter—Chap. 8 on “Feelings”. The 12-page chapter is loaded with helpful insights and spiritual truths, and here I simply want to offer a number of key quotes from it.
“There are those, I know, who will not recognise the condition at all but will brush it aside impatiently, and say that a Christian is one who sings all the day long, and that that, ever since they were converted, has been their story—never a ripple on the surface of the soul, and all has been well. Since they will not recognise the condition at all, they have grave doubts about those who are given to depression and even doubt whether such people are Christians at all. We have shown repeatedly that the Scriptures are much kinder to such friends, and do grant clearly by their teaching that it is possible for a Christian to be depressed. Not that they justify this, but they do recognise the fact, and it is the business of anyone who is concerned about the nurture and care of the soul to understand such cases and to apply to them the remedy that God has provided so freely in the words of Scripture.” p. 107
“Feelings are meant to be engaged, and when the gospel comes to us it does involve the whole man. It moves his mind as he sees its glorious truths, it moves his heart in the same way, and it moves his will.
“The second statement which I want to make is this—and these are very simple and elementary points, but we are often in trouble because we forget them. The second is, that we cannot create feelings, we cannot command them at will. Let me put this quite plainly. You cannot generate feelings within yourself. You can, perhaps, make yourself weep and bring tears to your own eyes, but that does not of necessity mean real feelings. There is a false sentimentality very different from true emotion. That is something beyond our control; we cannot create it. However much you try you will not succeed. Indeed, in a sense, the more you try to produce feelings within yourself, the more you are increasing your own misery. Looked at psychologically it is one of the most remarkable things about man that in this respect he is not master of himself. He cannot generate or produce feelings, he cannot bring them into being, and to attempt to do so directly is always to exacerbate the trouble.
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There are two primary forms of special revelation: Jesus and the Bible. With these two external sources of truth and morality, we can have a quite accurate understanding of where we are at and where we are going. Jesus shows us what real humanity is meant to look like, and the Bible offers us all the insight, instruction and guidance we need to live a life that is pleasing to God, helpful to others, and good for ourselves. It is these sources that we need to look to, not our fallen hearts and fallible minds.

The hit 1952 country song by Hank Williams – Your Cheatin’ Heart – may have been a love song about what went wrong, but it is relevant for my purposes. We all have cheatin’ hearts. That is, we all have deceptive, lying and twisted hearts. We have a busted internal moral compass in other words, and we need outside help if we want true and unerring guidance and direction.
Consider life just a few decades ago. If you were in a strange place – say a city you had never been in before, or out in the countryside on strange roads, you would likely have needed help from others, or risk being hopelessly lost. Like many of you, I would have pulled into a service station and asked a local for directions.
Or we might have depended on a street directory. In Melbourne for many years we relied on having a Melways in the car. If you do not know where you are going, you need outside help in getting there. And it is not just geographical locations.
We all need moral direction as well. Little kids do not need to be taught how to be selfish. One of their first words is “mine!”. They will readily grab a toy out of the hands of someone else. So they need to be taught about things like sharing and care for others. Usually, it is the parents who bring about such moral counsel and guidance.
All this is quite familiar territory of course. Both Scripture and human experience tell us that we do NOT have some perfect internal guidance system that will never let us down, never go astray, and never mess things up. The truth is, sin is universal, and the human heart is quite unreliable when it comes to knowing right from wrong, truth from error.
Scripture calls this Original Sin. We live in a fallen world, and we all are born with a predisposition away from God and others, and toward sin and self. This is one of the most easily noticeable truths about the human species. As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”
The Bible throughout makes this case about the universality of human sin and the unreliability of the human heart and mind to properly direct us. Just a few of many passages can be offered here. They make it clear that we are ALL led astray by sin and deception, and we are NOT to trust our own failed and corrupted internal guidance system:
Romans 3:10-12 “None is righteous, no, not one;     no one understands;no one seeks for God.All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;no one does good,not even one.”
Ecclesiastes 7:20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all thingsand beyond cure.Who can understand it?
Isaiah 64:6 We have all become like one who is unclean,and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.We all fade like a leaf,and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
Romans 3:10-12 (quoting from Psalm 14:1-3 and 53:1-3)“None is righteous, no, not one;     no one understands;no one seeks for God.All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;no one does good,not even one.”
But the world around us tells us the complete opposite. We are told to follow our hearts, to fully love and believe in ourselves, to only think the best of ourselves, to just go with the flow, to trust our feelings, to listen to self, and to make self the source of truth and goodness.
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It is hoped these 27 quotes will spur you on to read more of the man. “Most Christians are not joyful persons because they are not holy persons and they are not holy persons because they are not filled with the Holy Spirit, and they are not filled with the Holy Spirit because they are not separated persons. The Spirit cannot fill whom He cannot separate, and whom He cannot fill He cannot make holy, and whom He cannot make holy, He cannot make happy!”

In my irregular series of articles featuring key quotes from key Christians, I have done a number of them on the matter of holiness. No believer can deny that holiness is one of the most important and most often addressed themes in all of Scripture.
And I take it that most believers would know that one of the great Christians to speak and write on this biblical truth so often was the great American pastor A. W. Tozer. Those who want to know more about him can check out this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2009/10/02/notable-christians-a-w-tozer/
Most of Tozer’s sermons and writings in one way or another returned to this grand topic of holiness. Some of his books were totally given over to this topic. One of his most notable works is The Knowledge of the Holy. But any of his books and articles are also worth reading on this.
Here I provide, without references, just a few of many inspiring quotes, listed from shorter ones to longer ones. It is hoped these 27 quotes will spur you on to read more of the man.
“The true Christian ideal is not to be happy but to be holy.”
“Christians don’t tell lies they just go to church and sing them.”
“You knew one thing about a man who was carrying a cross out of the city… you knew he wasn’t coming back.”
“Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.”
“The holy man is not one who cannot sin. A holy man is one who will not sin.”
“It is because of the hasty and superficial conversation with God that the sense of sin is so weak and that no motives have power to help you to hate and flee from sin as you should.”
“No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.”
“The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.”
“I cannot think of even one lonely passage in the New Testament which speaks of Christ’s revelation, manifestation, appearing or coming that is not directly linked with moral conduct, faith and spiritual holiness.”
“Although God wants His people to be holy as He is holy, He does not deal with us according to the degree of our holiness but according to the abundance of His mercy. Honesty requires us to admit this.”
“You cannot study the Bible diligently and earnestly without being struck by an obvious fact – the whole matter of personal holiness is highly important to God!”
“The spiritual giants of old would not take their religion the easy way nor offer unto God that which cost them nothing. They sought not comfort but holiness, and the pages of history are still wet with their blood and their tears.”
“We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable.”
“To love is also to hate. The heart that is drawn to righteousness will be repulsed by iniquity in the same degree. The holiest man is the one who loves righteousness most and hates evil with the most perfect hatred.”
“God is holy; and because He is holy, He is actively hostile toward sin. He must be. God can only burn on and burn on and burn on against sin forever. Never let any spiritual experience or any interpretation of Scripture lessen your hatred for sin.”
“We Christians must stop apologizing for our moral position and start making our voices heard, exposing sin as the enemy of the human race and setting forth righteousness and true holiness as the only worthy pursuits for moral beings.”
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy he does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because he is holy, all his attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.”
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“It to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to offend nobody.”

Since one collection of essays by the late great Dorothy Sayers is titled The Whimsical Christian, let me begin with a whimsical personal story. A learned and well-read friend had shared a neat Sayers’ quote on a social media post of mine, but without further reference. Now to my way of thinking, not at least mentioning the book or article a quote comes from is an unforgivable sin.
I suspected where it might have come from, but I had to spend the next 10 minutes sniffing around, until I finally found it. So I pulled that volume off my shelves, and this article is a result of all that. But there was another good outcome: in the process I came upon another of my books that also quoted it, and in it was a ‘free coffee’ card!
Moral of the story: do not use ‘free coffee’ cards as bookmarks. But in this case I rebuked my friend for her grave sin of half-hearted referencing, and then I thanked her for the pleasant discovery en-route to finding out the source of the quote. (And to make it even more interesting, moments after I found this card another friend was quoting from the very book I had just found it in.)
So I pulled out the essay in question and reread it: Creed or Chaos? It was a talk she had delivered on May 4, 1940. Hodder & Stoughton released it as a booklet that year. It has appeared in various other forms since then. One of them that I also have is the aforementioned The Whimsical Christian (Macmillan, 1978), which first came out as Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Eerdmans, 1969). It contains 18 of her more important writings on theology and Christianity.
While she is quite well known for her Lord Peter Wimsey detection novels, her work as a lay theologian is top-notch and deserves widespread attention. I discuss her a bit more in this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2006/05/03/a-review-of-creed-without-chaos-exploring-theology-in-the-writings-of-dorothy-l-sayers-by-laura-simmons/
Here I want to simply offer a number of quotes from her brief essay. The 18-page piece opens with these words:
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.
-John 16:8-11
It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.
If you think I am exaggerating, ask the army chaplains. Apart from a possible one per cent of intelligent and instructed Christians, there are three kinds of people we have to deal with. There are the frank and open heathen, whose notions of Christianity are a dreadful jumble of rags and tags of Bible anecdote and clotted mythological nonsense. There are the ignorant Christians, who combine a mild gentle-Jesus sentimentality with vaguely humanistic ethics – most of these are Arian heretics. Finally, there are the more or less instructed church-goers, who know all the arguments about divorce and auricular confession and communion in two kinds, but are about as well equipped to do battle on fundamentals against as a boy with a pea-shooter facing a fan-fire of machine guns. Theologically, this country is at present in a state of utter chaos, established in the name of religious toleration, and rapidly degenerating into the flight from reason and the death of hope. We are not happy in this condition, and there are signs of a very great eagerness, especially among the younger people, to find a creed to which they can give wholehearted adherence.
This is the Church’s opportunity, if she chooses to take it. So far as the people’s readiness to listen goes, she has not been in so strong a position for at least two centuries. The rival philosophies of humanism, enlightened self-interest, and mechanical progress have broken down badly; the antagonism of science has proved to be far more apparent than real; and the happy-go-lucky doctrine of laissez-faire is completely discredited. But no good whatever will be done by a retreat into personal piety or by mere exhortation to a recall to prayer.
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Our days are numbered, and when God wants to take us home, he will. So if we believe these passages to be true, then we need to accept that it may have been time for Comperatore (who was a strong and devout Christian) to go to be with his Lord, while it was not yet Trump’s time. This of course does not answer every question, and likely will raise even more questions. But all we can do is try to carefully assess the biblical data as we try to make sense of events like this. 

The biblical Christian knows that when any big theological questions arise as to significant – and not so insignificant – events and occurrences in this world, there are at least three major players that must be taken into account. The three of course are God (and his sovereignty), man (with his moral accountability for his actions), and Satan (with his malicious interference).
So if a person loses his job, for example, we can speak of God’s movements in this, human choices, and satanic influences. How all three can be part of the overall equation is of course a bit of a mystery. And we would have to say that while all three elements must be kept in mind, at the end of the day God and his purposes will be the overriding consideration.
Just one clear example (of many) found in Scripture would be the fate of Joseph as found in the lengthy story about him in Genesis 37-50. His brothers treated him terribly, inspired as they were by satanic influences, and yet divine purposes were fully taking place. As Joseph told his brothers in Gen. 50:20: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
And the prime example of ugly satanic attacks, bad human choices, and overriding divine sovereignty, can be seen in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How all three managed to cohere in this one mega-event is beyond our full comprehension, but we know that all three were involved. And in the end, the purposes of God stood.
The Trump Assassination Attempt
Let me examine one very recent and very well-known example of all this. Here we again find three main players: Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who sought to murder Trump, Satan who certainly influenced him in this, and God, who as always is working out his divine purposes in all of life.
Sure, we could discuss other people involved, such as the Secret Service agents and others who were meant to protect Trump, but so miserably failed in their duties in so many ways. But you get my point: for believers to understand this event means to consider all three.
Having said all that by way of background, I want to look in particular at one aspect of this that has many people – both Christian and non-Christian – asking many questions. And that is this: Why was the life of Trump spared, but the life of Corey Comperatore not?
Again, we can look at the three parts of the equation: Crooks wanted to kill Trump, carried along as he was by satanic inspiration. Trump happened to turn his head at just the right time, while 50-year-old Comperatore, the former fire chief, chose to dive on his family to save them, and he lost his life doing so.
But the question is, why did God allow one to be killed and the other spared? As mentioned, there is always mystery in such matters. And we can ask these sorts of questions about millions of things: Why did that guy get the job I was after? Why did that girl I liked so much marry another? Why did he get healed of cancer while I did not? On and on it goes.
As I say, so many are asking about all this. Let me offer just one high profile example. Yesterday at the Republican National Convention evangelist Franklin Graham not only briefly shared the gospel message in his short talk, but he led the crowd in prayer as well.
And he mentioned, as did so many others, that it was a God thing that Trump survived the assassin’s bullet. But he went on to say this: “I cannot explain why God would save one life and allow another one to be taken. I don’t have the answer for that.”
That is a good and proper response. There is plenty of mystery here. We just do not always know why God does what he does. When I posted his statement on the social media, one gal responded with these words: “God protection and divine intervention around one but not the other. It’s a tough one.”
Yes it is. But what I said above is part of how we can try to make some sense of it all.
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We see all over the world, especially in the West, people being given over to their sin. The sacrilegious and blasphemous display in Paris is just one of millions of examples of this. But it will not go on for much longer. That is good news.

Several things that occurred this morning reminded me once again of the reality of the spiritual war that we are in. One of the biggest mistakes the Christian can make is to not be aware of this ubiquitous spiritual battle that we are all involved in. Living as if everything is just sweetness and light will just mean we keep losing to the other side.
The Paris Olympics
My first example of this was what took place at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics. When I opened my social media feed today I saw dozens of posts on this. Satan is alive and well in France it seems, and demonised hatred of Christianity seems to characterise those in charge of the Olympics. One news report describes it this way:
The 2024 Olympics opening ceremony in Paris has sparked international outrage with drag-queen themed imagery of religious and historical figures. In between listing all the countries participating in the Olympic Games, there have been several performances riffing on France’s history and culture, such as a headless Marie Antoinette, the last queen prior to being executed amid French Revolution, singing with her severed head in her hands sporting drag-style makeup. This was part of numerous drag queens that appeared to be a recurring theme throughout the ceremonies.
Three drag queens were among the 10,000 torchbearers who relayed the Olympic flame as it started in Greece, passed through French territories and made its way to Paris. One new display on Friday showed what appear to be numerous performers, including drag queens and a large woman in an aureole halo crown, parodying “The Last Supper,” a universally recognizable painting by renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci of Christ and his apostles. https://www.foxnews.com/media/olympics-opening-ceremony-sparks-outrage-drag-queens-parodying-last-supper-gone-completely-woke
Plenty of commentary has already been made on this sacrilegious and diabolical assault on Jesus Christ and the faith of so many. One friend of mine put it this way: “The French misfire in Opening Ceremony of the Olympics. There’s good art and there’s bad art. This was bad art. Good art inspires. Bad art mocks and disgusts. The Olympics are supposed to be a unifying event, not a place to insult the deepest beliefs of many.”
Another said this:
Drag queens mock Christianity during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Paris as they attempt to recreate da Vinci’s painting of Jesus’ Last Supper. Not only are Christians the only people that it is socially acceptable to mock… it’s actually celebrated and put front and center when it happens. Remember the words of Jesus: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you (John 15:18).” There will be a day that mocking turns into fear of the One true God. Hopefully, it happens before it’s too late.
I will speak to that coming day in a moment. And big names were also condemning this disgraceful assault on our faith. Elon Musk said this: “This was extremely disrespectful to Christians.” Sports people also weighed in on this. Riley Gaines put it this way: “Men in wigs front & center at the Olympic Games. No one ever tell me this group is ‘oppressed’ or ‘marginalized’ again.”
NFL footballer Harrison Butker said this: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting.’ Galatians 6:7-8.”
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“A study of Puritan sermons will show that the preachers’ constant concern, in all their detailed detecting of sins, was to lead their hearers into the life of faith and a good conscience; which, they said, is the most joyous life that man can know in this world. The Puritan concern for a good conscience lent great ethical strength to their teaching. Of all English evangelicals from the Reformation to the present day, the Puritans were undoubtedly the most conspicuous as preachers of righteousness. They were in truth the salt of society in their time, and on many points they created a national conscience which has only recently begun to be eroded.”

The late great J. I. Packer (1926-2020) was one of God’s great gifts to the body of Christ. The Anglican theologian, author and educator was one of evangelicalism’s leading lights of the past six decades, and his influence is still very much with us today. Those who want more background to the man should see this piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/07/18/notable-christians-j-i-packer/
Among other things, Packer was a great lover of the Puritans, as were other evangelical powerhouses, including Charles Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He constantly referred to, and quoted from, the Puritans in his dozens of important books.
Some of his books were totally devoted to the Puritans, including his 1990 volume, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Crossway). I have already discussed this book in various articles. Six years ago I penned a piece on his chapter on Puritan preaching: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2018/08/29/packer-preaching-and-the-puritans/
Here I want to quote from his seventh chapter which discusses “The Puritan Conscience.” In it he focusses on three major topics of interest to the Puritans and how they relate to conscience:
First, this teaching reflects the Puritan view of Holy Scripture. God, said the Puritans, must control our consciences absolutely….
The Puritans themselves sought clear certainty as to God’s truth in its practical bearing, and believed that they had been given it. Their very quest sharpened both their moral sensibilities and their insight into the Bible. They would not have been interested in vague moral uplift; what they wanted was to grasp God’s truth with the same preciseness of application with which they held that He had revealed it. Because of their concern for preciseness in following out God’s revealed will in matters moral and ecclesiastical, the first Puritans were dubbed ‘precisians.’ Though ill-meant and derisive, this was in fact a good name for them. Then as now, people explained their attitude as due to peevish cantankerousness and angularity or morbidity of temperament, but that was not how they themselves saw it….
 Second, the Puritans’ teaching on conscience reflected their view of personal religion. Godliness, to the Puritans, was essentially a matter of conscience, inasmuch as it consisted in a hearty, disciplined, ‘considerate’ (thoughtful) response to known evangelical truth, and centred upon the getting and keeping of a good conscience. As long as a man is unregenerate, his conscience oscillates between being bad and being asleep. The first work of grace is to quicken his conscience and make it thoroughly bad, by forcing him to face God’s demands upon him and so making him aware of his guilt, impotence, rebelliousness, defilement, and alienation, in God’s sight. But the knowledge of pardon and peace through Christ makes his bad conscience good. A good conscience is God’s gift to those whom, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, he enables to look with understanding at the cross. It is maintained through life by seeking to do God’s will in all things, and by constantly keeping the cross in view….
 A good conscience, said the Puritans, is the greatest blessing that there is. ‘Conscience,’ declared Sibbes, ‘is either the greatest friend or the greatest enemy in the world.’ There is no better friend than a conscience which knows peace with God. (pp. 112-115)
Packer continues:
A good conscience is a tender conscience. The consciences of the godless may be so calloused that they scarcely ever act at all; but the healthy Christian conscience (said the Puritans) is constantly in operation, listening for God’s voice in his word, seeking to discern his will in everything, active in self-watch and self-judgement. The healthy Christian knows his frailty and always suspects and distrusts himself, lest sin and Satan should be ensnaring him unawares; therefore he regularly grills himself before God, scrutinising his deeds and motives and ruthlessly condemning himself when he finds within himself moral deficiency and dishonesty. This was the kind of self-judging that Paul urged upon the Corinthians at Communion time (1 Cor 11:31). The degree of sharp-sightedness which our consciences show in detecting our own real sins (as distinct from the imaginary ones on which Satan encourages us to concentrate) is an index of how well we really know God and how close to him we really walk—an index, in other words, of the real quality of our spiritual life. The sluggish conscience of a ‘sleepy’, ‘drowsy’ saint is a sign of spiritual malaise. The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God’s presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God’s word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it. We can begin to assess our real state in God’s sight by asking ourselves how much exercise of conscience along these lines goes into our own daily living.
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Televangelists and mega-church pastors strut their stuff for all the world to see. Not all misuse and abuse their positions in this way of course, but far too many do. And how often does mere eloquence, wit, good looks or youth become some of the main qualifications?

In many ways things are not so very different today than what they were 2000 years ago. Problems we face in the church today were problems back then. We might have new names for some of these things, but the core issues continue. Anyone familiar with the two letters the apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth will get my drift.
Back then a major issue Paul had to deal with were the “super-apostles”. These were leaders and teachers (often false teachers) who tended to put their personalities, their prestige, and their power forward as their credentials. They thought they were superior and more authoritative than people like Paul.
In 2 Corinthians especially we find him spending a lot of time dealing with this. In 2 Cor. 11:5-7 he puts it this way: “I do not think I am in the least inferior to those ‘super-apostles.’ I may indeed be untrained as a speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way. Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge?”
He boasts not in great power or speaking ability or popularity, but in his weakness, so that Christ might be glorified: “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. I have made a fool of myself, but you drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in the least inferior to the ‘super-apostles,’ even though I am nothing” (2 Cor. 12:10-11).
He had made all this clear in his first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:26-31):
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”
Today things are no different. Indeed, with the new technologies and global media, it can be even more of a problem, with televangelists and mega-church pastors strutting their stuff for all the world to see. Not all misuse and abuse their positions in this way of course, but far too many do. And how often does mere eloquence, wit, good looks or youth become some of the main qualifications here?
I recall some 16 years ago writing about one of these super-pastors who would not go anywhere without first sending through a list of his demands. I had mentioned a terrific article in Charisma magazine by J. Lee Grady which spoke of the “deadly virus of celebrity Christianity.” This is how he described what one celeb leader required before coming to speak:

a five-figure honorarium
a $10,000 gasoline deposit for the private plane
a manicurist and hairstylist for the speaker
a suite in a five-star hotel
a luxury car from the airport to the hotel
room-temperature Perrier

Wow. Imagine Paul or Peter or John or Luther or Spurgeon or Lewis or Paul Washer sending out such a ludicrous list of demands. Indeed, I once was speaking with a pastor and he discussed having me speak at his church. He asked me what my speaking fee was. I laughed and said it was as much as Paul had charged. I have never had a fee, and I never will.
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