Like the Prodigal’s father, our Father felt great compassion on us, and with our True older Brother, welcomed us back into the home at His own expense (Luke 15:20). And that expense would cost our compassionate Father the ultimate expense, the life of His one and only Son in crucifixion (Romans 5:6-8) in order to make us alive together with Him in His resurrection (Ephesians 2:4-5) and to bring us back to the Father we had sinned against totally clean; wholly forgiven (1 Peter 3:18).

One of the questions I have often been asked as a pastor is why God allowed sin and misery into the world. If He is all-knowing and all-wise and even has the ability and power to do all He pleases, then why did it please Him to create a world that would nose-dive so fantastically into the turmoil and futility we experience because of sin? Couldn’t He have done it differently? Wasn’t there a better way? 
These are essential questions that require careful answers. Thankfully, many careful answers have been given throughout church history, which we should borrow from when answering this question. For instance, many have said that God created the world, knowing full well what would happen in it because the story of sin and redemption manifested His glory more excellently than a world without a fall. Think about it this way, in a world without sin, human beings and all of creation could never get to know God in all of His fullness. While sin would not be present on a sterilized earth, there would be aspects of God that we could never understand, such as His mercy, justice, grace, forgiveness, and compassion. Without sin, there is no reason for God to be merciful. Without rebellion, there is no need for grace. This means, at least in part, that God allowed the world to fall into sin and misery so that He could showcase the fullness of His being to lost and lonely sinners, which brings Him unimaginable glory. 
Understanding this, and while I am fully aware that there is more to say in matters of theodicy, we can be grateful to God for our sins. Because my sin put me in a position of need that only God could meet. My sin created a disease that only God could heal. And while we ought never to sin so that grace may abound, my sin introduced me to a savior who has offered me abounding grace that now causes me to hate my sin and pursue Him. Thus, even in the wretchedness of sin, even in our mortification of sin and hatred of sin, there are peculiar comforts and joys available to those who know the compassions of God. 
And that is what I would like to talk about today. If you are new, we are in a little series on the attributes of God, talking about who God is, what He is like, and how we may know Him. Today, we look at His compassion towards sinners. 
God Is Compassionate by Nature
God is compassionate by nature. He does not decide to become compassionate when a situation arises. He is compassionate as a fundamental quality of His being and person. For instance, Paul says that He is the “Father of compassion” and the “God of all comforts” (2 Corinthians 1:3). This requires that He doesn’t just possess these things as if they were commodities, but He is these things in all fullness and perfection. His compassions exist on a level of robust density and purity that they are beyond our ability to comprehend or even withstand without the aid of a mediator. For instance, when the God of perfect compassions passed in front of Moses, letting all His goodness be on display (Exodus 33:19; 34:6), he needed to be hidden in the face of a rock and covered with the Lord’s own hand in order to live and tell the tale. God is so unimaginably good that even His goodness threatens our unmediated flesh. He is merciful and gracious (Psalm 86:15), slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 103:8), but His holiness and justice require that we repent and return to Him because He is compassionate (Psalm 116:5; 119:156; Joel 2:13)
God Is Compassionate to All People
While God’s most extraordinary and intimate affections are reserved for His children, the Lord is kind and compassionate to all people (Psalm 145:8-9). Think about it this way, everyone on earth has sinned and is in rebellion against God (Romans 3:23). And since the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), God would be perfectly just and righteous to eliminate the entire human race without so much as batting an eyelash. So, the fact that billions of people loathe God every single day, either in heinous acts of rebellion or in failing to thank Him for every stolen breath of His mercy, has allowed them to live on in morbid ingratitude.
Read More
Related Posts:

Bambrick is an associate pastor of Hope Church Craigavon in Northern Ireland. His ad draws a strong contrast to the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ad campaign. It featured art of various people washing other people’s feet, a reference to what Jesus did for his disciples in John 13. I criticized the “He Gets Us” debut Super Bowl campaign last year for twisting the gospel to fit our culture’s standards and trashing faithful Christians who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life. The same can be said about this year’s “Foot Washing,” which was clearly designed to evoke an emotional response instead of communicating the truth about every human’s sin and need for God to forgive us. 

Pastor Jamie Bambrick released a new ad that seeks to redeem the “He Gets Us” campaign’s theologically ambiguous take on Jesus with a more biblically accurate depiction of what it means to follow Christ.
The controversial “He Gets Us” Super Bowl LVIII spot, Bambrick said, was “perhaps well intentioned” but “failed to convey anything of the gospel to the hundreds of millions who saw it.” Cue Bambrick’s take.
The slideshow posted to the pastor’s YouTube page begins with Kat Von D, a celebrity tattoo artist who left witchcraft to become a baptized Christian. It then cycles through several photos of people including John Bruchalski, an abortionist turned OB/GYN.
The titles atheist, jihadist, Ku Klux Klan member, drug addict, gang leader, drag queen, onscreen prostitute, LGBT activist, and more appear to convey hopeless sinners who should have no heavenly future. Yet the still black-and-white images show smiling, joy-filled people. The “former” text in classic “He Gets Us” yellow confirms the pictured people abandoned their old, evil ways of thinking and living to follow Christ and it’s completely changed them forever.
“Jesus doesn’t just get us,” the closing text reads. “He saves us. He transforms us. He cleanses us. He restores us. He forgives us. He heals us. He delivers us. He redeems us. He loves us.”
The video concludes with a reference to 1 Corinthians 6:11. That section of the Bible says, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by R.C. Sproul |
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
To be a Christian means that we follow Christ, and to be a Christian leader means that we lead in the name of Christ. We are not free as Christian leaders to teach our own gospel. We are not free to throw away the teachings of Jesus and replace them with our wisdom. The world has plenty of human wisdom—too much of it—and it doesn’t need ours. The world is dying of confusion from human opinion. We must not add to the chaos of our society. The world desperately needs the message of Christ.

As Christians, we have access to the very wisdom of God. We have the mind of Christ. Christians must be on guard to have their thinking and decision-making shaped not by the secular world but by the mind of Christ. This is often a weak point even for godly, devout, zealous, and committed Christians, earnest in their desire to be authentic servants of Christ. Every one of us, no matter how thoroughly trained we are in biblical Christianity or theology, is infected by thought patterns that come to us from the secular world. We are born and raised in a secular culture. We are exposed to secular values day in and day out. It’s difficult for us to grow in maturity to have the wisdom of God. But that’s precisely what’s at our disposal as Christians—to be able to make value judgments and decisions not in light of secular values but in light of the gospel of Christ.
This means that if we’re going to be responsible Christian leaders, we must be conversant with the Scriptures because the Scriptures are radically different in their perspective concerning the meaning and significance of mankind. The directives, admonitions, and teachings of the New Testament are practical. Not only do we gain knowledge about God, which is suitable for our devotion and our salvation, but the Bible gives us the finest, most accurate, most incredible insight into human behavior that we can find anywhere.
No psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist will ever improve on the Bible because there we find the wisdom of God Himself—the One who has made us and who understands our frame inside and out. He knows what is good for us; He knows what is bad for us. When God tells us to do something, He doesn’t do it just for abstract theological reasons. He’s practical. He loves us. As Christian leaders, we are called to communicate that wisdom of God.
The most solemn responsibility for those in a position of Christian leadership is to accurately speak the truth of God. That means leaders must know the Scriptures. They must read so that their minds are transformed. As we begin to embrace the value structures that come to us through Christ, our lives will change, albeit gradually.
I can remember working at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati and experiencing the frustrations of evangelism. And my frustration in evangelism was this: How could I get these people to understand the radical difference between Jesus’ value system and approach to mankind and his environment and that which they receive in the secular community? How could I do that in one sermon? How could I make them understand who Christ is? I was thinking primarily of evangelism inside the church, not outside the church—speaking to those who joined the congregation but had no real inner commitment to Christ. They’d never really understood the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but they were there out of habit or convention.
So, I started a Bible study for women. About eighty women met every Monday. I was absolutely amazed at what happened to those women after a year in this study. At the end of the year, somebody asked me, “Is there any way to heaven besides through Jesus?” In other words, is Jesus the only way to heaven? Does a person have to believe in Jesus to get to heaven? My answer to that question is the New Testament answer.
Read More
Related Posts:

It is not for us to know why we face what we face. The ‘why’ question often leads nowhere. Yes, there were times in 1 and 2 Kings when a famine or event happened directly due to God’s judgement. Most of the time we won’t know why our lives are how they are. Perhaps we have issues due to our own sinful decisions; maybe it is part of a bigger plan of God we have not been told about. Seeking to know why is not the main focus of what we should be thinking and doing.

In some circles, Christians are directly taught that if they are faithful to God, they will be blessed with an abundant, happy and healthy life. It is a compelling message. We’d love it to be true. A neat life where faithfulness directly leads to an easy life right now sounds fantastic!
And this is not only an issue for Christians who have been taught this kind of prosperity theology. All of us will, at times, think along these lines. We will wonder if the problems we are currently facing are some sort of judgement from God. We will be upset if our plans don’t come about, assuming that God should give us what we want.
Yet the ease of your life is a bad indicator of your faith in God. Even a cursory look at the Bible will demonstrate that. The men who wrote Psalms 37 and 73 both noted that those who care nothing for God often seem to have happy, successful lives while believers struggle. Evil kings like Ahab and Manasseh reigned for a long time. The prophets and apostles all had difficult lives facing all kinds of problems. Life is not as simple as the faithful getting blessed now and the wicked facing immediate judgement.
Looking through the many kings described in 1 and 2 Kings, both good and bad, is instructive for us here. The vast majority of them faced major problems in their lives. The difference between the good kings and the wicked kings was not the circumstances they lived through; it was how they reacted to those circumstances.
Read More
Related Posts:

Loving your neighbour means doing what is best for them. That requires some understanding and discernment. And note that the text says nothing about money. It simply says if you are asked to give something. There are all sorts of ways we should NOT do this. The principle here of freely giving is a good one. But like love itself, giving must be done in the context of what is wise and good. Indiscriminate giving is not biblical. 

As so often happens, a discussion, a debate, or even a knock-down, drag-out brawl on the social media can sometimes be the occasion for an article here. One recent discussion triggered this article about how we are to understand the words of Jesus. Let me start by offering this verse in its immediate context (Matthew 5:38-42):
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.”
The social media post that I had shared that started the debate going was this: “Hmm, so I get yet another friend request from some gal in the US – lots of religious and Bible posts, but the very latest was about ‘I am stuck in a hotel and I need money…’ or some such thing. Um, adios lady.”
Plenty of folks agreed that we must beware of scammers and con artists. But one fellow asked, “Bill, how do you interpret the meaning of this Scripture when people ask you for money? ‘Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you’.”
I made this quick reply: “There is nothing godly about lacking in discernment and being unable to discern what is of God and what is of Satan.” Then another fellow came along saying this: “Bill, Not sure I see the answer to his question in your comment.” So I answered him as follows:
We do not give indiscriminately and without knowledge and wisdom. If a jihadist wants me to give him money to kill Jews, I will not. If a drug addict on the streets wants me to give him money to support his lethal habit, I will not. It is called loving your neighbour as yourself. In the same Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine”. Comprende? And in this case, it was clearly a scam which no Christian is obligated to take part in. We are called to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves – not clueless wonders with zero discernment!
But let me tease all this out a bit further. How we understand Matt. 5:42 clearly does matter. And two major principles of biblical interpretation of course arise here. One, we must look carefully at the context. The verses here – and those that follow – are about personal retaliation and dealing with enemies.
The other principle is the need to compare Scripture with Scripture. So when we read about ‘not resisting evil’ and so on, we must see it in light of the rest of the biblical revelation. We certainly are at times called to resist evil. I have discussed these matters previously. As to ‘turning the other cheek,’ see this piece, here.
And as to the lex talionis, see here.
Concerning this passage, John Stott rightly said this about it:
Christ’s illustrations are not to be taken as the charter for any unscrupulous tyrant, ruffian, beggar or thug. His purpose was to forbid revenge, not to encourage injustice, dishonesty or vice. How can those who seek as their first priority the extension of God’s righteous rule at the same time contribute to the spread of unrighteousness? True love, caring for both the individual and society, takes action to deter evil and to promote good. And Christ’s command was ‘a precept of love, not folly.’ He teaches not the irresponsibility which encourages evil but the forbearance which renounces revenge. Authentic Christian non-resistance is non-retaliation.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Rachel M. Coleman |
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Because women are the only members of the human species that bear children—that is to say, because women bear in themselves the future of humanity—if there is an attempt to change, foundationally and fundamentally, what it means to be human, the attempt will manifest first and most visibly in women. Byrne writes that “what is a woman?” is “the main question” of TWG’s third chapter, and as anyone who pays attention to this discourse knows, that question may be the most volatile question to ask in our current moment. Why doesn’t it occur to Byrne to ask why the definition of “woman” is in contention rather than “man?” Kellie-Jay Keen knows why, as well as the radical feminist philosophers I mentioned above: because the very fabric of who and what we are is at stake.

It is not an overstatement to say that the question of sexual difference, and its counter-concept, gender, is among the most contentiously debated today. We should think about why the topic inspires such vitriol, but one possible reason is that everyone has skin in the game: to be human is to be either a man or a woman, and therefore, being human requires us to think about what it means to be a man or a woman. Every bit of ourselves is expressed either as male or female, and therefore, the questions surrounding sexual difference touch on—or perhaps coincide with—questions of our humanity.
One of the consequences of this, however, has been an absolute morass of once unquestioned terms. On the face of it, this seems silly: there are men and there are women, and we all bring something different to the table when it comes to being human. It shouldn’t be that complicated.
And yet those who pay even the least attention to this discourse (and even perhaps those who wish to pay no attention) know that it is complicated. Part of the reason is that sexual difference is more nuanced than we have previously thought it to be, but another part—probably the larger part—is that the terms of the discourse are intentionally confused and obfuscated by gender ideologues (those who contend that gender is different from sex). Gender ideologues want us to think that sex and gender are much more complicated than most of us can understand, and that the evidence we collect from the world with our own senses (as well as that of the billions of humans who preceded us in history) is not reliable.
Alex Byrne’s Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions (TWG) is a mostly successful attempt to cut through the intentional discomposition of the terms of discourse about sexual difference. In an extremely well-researched manner, Byrne addresses many of the “fictions” gender ideologues use to make their arguments. One example: many note that 1.7 percent of the population is intersex, which would mean one out of almost every fifty people have some combination of both male and female genitalia. As Byrne demonstrates in chapter three, that number was made up by Anne Fausto-Sterling in her article “How sexually dimorphic are we?” and that the number is probably 0.015 percent. Such research and clarification alone make the book worth reading.
As Byrne himself writes in both the Introduction and Coda, TWG is a book about sex—not sexual intercourse, but human beings as sexually differentiated creatures. Byrne’s thesis is that “using ‘gender’ to mean anything other than sex is to obscure important issues for no good reason.” In making his argument, Byrne provides a great deal of evidence from biology, history, sociology, and psychology. He carefully sifts through a great deal of nonsense that passes for research in the fairly new subject of “gender studies,” exposing the gender ideologues’ faulty logic. 
On this score, Judith Butler is Byrne’s main target: the title of the book is clearly aimed at Butler’s Gender Trouble, first published in 1990 and largely understood to be a foundational text for gender studies. There, Butler expands on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous proclamation from The Second Sex that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and concludes that sex and gender are both socially constructed. Byrne criticizes Butler mostly on grounds of how unclear her writing is rather than any full examination of her first principles. Lack of clarity and precision seem, for Byrne, to be the deepest sin a thinker can commit.
Byrne explores cases of individuals to whom gender ideologues often point to demonstrate that “sex is a vast, infinitely malleable continuum.” These are generally people who have some sort of chromosomal or hormonal abnormality that leads to their being not immediately identifiable as their natal sex, and are thus raised by their parents as the opposite sex (the author makes it clear early in the book that such abnormalities do not result in a “disordered person: indeed, he or she may be the most wonderful human being you could ever hope to meet”).
Read More
Related Posts:

In the cultural battles of our day, conservatives always seem to lose. Some say progressives win because of their superior funding, organizational prowess, and cultural dominance. Others say conservatives lose because we are disorganized, factious, and lack an activist spirit. Perhaps they’re right on both counts. But that’s not why we lose. We lose because we have a much more difficult position to defend. We cannot go on thinking the left is acting in good faith for a good purpose, when in reality, conservatives and progressives are completely different projects with different goals and definitions of victory.

Roger Scruton once observed, “Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” Take the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France, for example. It took 183 years to build but was almost completely destroyed by fire in a matter of hours in 2019. This is a fitting metaphor for the modern West, which was carefully built to sustain our civilization for generations, but is now crumbling after decades of relentless attack by a progressive ideology hell-bent on destroying it.
Progressivism is a demon-possessed ideology that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). The progressive disease has also infected evangelical Christianity, poisoning its bloodstream and spreading the contagion through trusted and once-conservative media outlets and educational institutions.
Conservative Christians, contending for “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), are being assaulted on multiple fronts by openly hostile secular progressives in government, business, news media, and Hollywood, not to mention apostate progressive pastors who claim to represent “the way of Jesus.” 
As Christian schools are overrun by tenured leftist professors and publishers sell cloaked leftist propaganda to unsuspecting conservatives, naive Christians convince themselves that “this too shall pass.” If they keep their heads down, silent and compliant, they’ll leave us alone.
Unfortunately, this is not possible. Sooner or later, conservatives must rediscover our fighting spirit and realize that we cannot play nice with progressives. They do not want to peacefully “coexist” with conservatives. They want to destroy us. Ordinary Christianity is the last major obstacle in their path.
Conservatism Operates Within Reality
Conservatism is only as good as the thing being conserved. In our day, what most needs conserving is nothing less than reality itself. Reality is conservative, and the more one accepts it as such the more conservative one will become. The progressive left is a reality-denying cope for those who would alter reality to match the idealized fictions of their minds.
This puts them at odds with God himself, for God is the ultimate reality. As Joe Rigney recently wrote, “The first imperative is to love the indicative.” We must accept reality as it is, as God made it. Daniel, describing God to Nebuchadnezzar, said, 
He changes times and seasons; 
he removes kings and sets up kings; 
he gives wisdom to the wise 
and knowledge to those who have understanding; 
he reveals deep and hidden things; 
he knows what is in the darkness, 
and the light dwells with him (Dan 2:21-22). 
This is reality. God made the world, set it on its foundations, made springs gush forth, and caused grass to grow. Finally, he entrusted it to the stewardship of man to subdue and exercise dominion (Gen 1:28-29). He orders the world such that it sustains life. God provides for all man’s needs through the ordinary means of discipline, skill, and work.
God also establishes limits, hierarchies and inequalities, and requires man to live within these constraints. These are not the result of the fall, but built-in manifestations of God’s wisdom in creation. Every restriction or inequality is an opportunity to trust God and work within the boundaries he put in place.
This is the world as it truly is, the world as God made it, that which is revealed in God’s word and observed in God’s world, a reality that must be respected for any society to thrive. Conservatism is a worldview of giving, receiving, and blessing. It dignifies work as a legitimate expression of Christian service, and dignifies man by beckoning him to discover the wonders hidden within creation. Such is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and such is the glory of kings to search it out (Prov 25:2).
Any kind of political or social conservatism that does not acknowledge God as the ultimate reality will inevitably fail. Christians are conservative not merely because we admire the constitution or love tradition, but rather for the sake of the transcendent, eternal reality upon which those things stand.
In other words, Christians aren’t merely conserving a nostalgic political worldview, but rather the application of Christian truth to all of life, including our society. Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18). Paul said, “God” commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). Christ is “highly exalted” and has been given the “name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:9-11).
This is the worldview that built Western society. To be sure, not all of our founding fathers were regenerate Christians, but they did draw upon centuries of Bible-saturated political theology and wisdom. In short, we’re not merely conserving something political, but convictional: we’re fighting to conserve and rebuild a once-respected Christian heritage that is now under siege by a demonic ideology of pagan progressivism. 
The progressive project is not a matter of alternate policy preferences in pursuit of a shared, common vision for society. Progressivism is a political and cultural attack directed squarely at Christianity itself. It is more than a political ideology, it is a rebellion against nature, nature’s God, and an attack on all who worship him.
The Sin of “Equalatry”
Contrary to what we’ve been told, human differences inevitably produce inequalities–divinely established natural hierarchies hard-wired into creation for his glory and our good. While some inequalities can be exploited for sinful gain, a virtuous society organizes them into a productive division of labor that benefits everyone. The most fundamental, inescapable human difference is sexual: God made us male and female from the beginning (Matt 19:4). The inequalities between men and women are a divinely designed gift for the harmonious joining of the sexes in mutual love and the creation of new life. Similarly, other human inequalities are positively presented in scripture as gifts for the edification of the church.
The left cannot accept this fact. Their sin is “equalatry,” which is making equality into an idol. The sin of equalatry is what Murray Rothbard once called a “revolt against nature,” rooted in envy and resentment towards those with superior skills, intelligence, beauty, or accomplishments. It regards all inequality as oppression and all hierarchy as tyranny. Since it bears a superficial resemblance to fairness, a biblical virtue, equalatry makes the left’s demands for “social justice” feel virtuous to Christians. But since the left defines justice as the elimination of all inequality, exceptionalism must not be tolerated.
The left subverts reality through media “narratives” that reward grievance. A man’s feelings of envy are merely a byproduct of his oppression. All inequalities are “privileges,” unjustly acquired. Their propaganda campaign that relentlessly categorizes the whole human experience as an epic struggle between oppressive villains and oppressed victims slowly brainwashes ordinary people into vicious cycles of self-righteous indignance or self-loathing guilt.
Deep down, people intuitively know that society cannot function without the basic virtues of hard work, competence, and honesty, yet they are gaslit into affirming the opposite.  They gradually find themselves nodding along with the guilt-inducing narrative that they are oppressors whose sins can only be absolved by yielding to the irrational demands of the state, BLM activists, and the rainbow mafia. Over time, the propaganda wears them down. One can only resist for so long.
The left regards our Christian heritage as a blight that spawned injustices that can only be remedied by tearing it all down and rebuilding anew. Captivated by the social Darwinist “myth of progress,” humanity must break free from the antiquated shackles of Christianity and march towards their vision of an eschatological, secular utopia.
As Thomas Sowell once said, we have “reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today.” Americans have now reached peak efficiency in our ability to manufacture victims at warp speed through a malicious parade of patriarchs, homophobes, and white supremacists. It doesn’t matter that their thinking is irrational, because they have already determined that rational thought is yet another tool of oppression.
Progressives arrogantly believe reality itself can be bent to their wishes. With enough funding and power, they can refashion the world any way they choose. With enough medical technology, they can overcome the dreaded gender binary. They act with high-handed moral certitude, believing they possess sufficient wisdom to save our planet, end hunger, correct injustice, house the homeless, eliminate suffering, maximize erotic pleasure, turn men into women—you name it. This is delusional, of course, but they can’t see it because their worldview is predicated upon a carefully curated denial of reality.
Read More
Related Posts: