Jonah cared deeply for his people, Israel–YHWH understands this. It is not sin for Jonah to be patriotic. But it borders on sin to do what Jonah is doing–to understand his own national/racial identity as an Israelite to be more fundamental to who he is than his calling as YHWH’s prophet. Burning with anger, Jonah cannot see God’s greater redemptive purposes. Yet, Jonah has no right to be angry with YHWH merely because YHWH’s greater purpose includes extending his saving grace beyond the boundaries of his covenant with Israel. Neither should we be angry when God extends his grace to those in different socio-economic groups, cultures, ethnicities, or political parties.

What pleased God (the repentance of Nineveh), only made Jonah mad[1] – a rather ironic sentiment from someone called to be YHWH’s prophet. Why was Jonah so upset that YHWH brought salvation to pagan Ninevites? Jonah, you’ll recall sought to flee YHWH’s call to preach in Nineveh, but YHWH took him on an unexpected detour–a great storm arises, Jonah is thrown overboard and then spends three days and nights in the belly of a great fish. But Jonah eventually fulfilled his prophetic calling, and preached repentance to the Ninevites. The result of his preaching? Many Ninevites believed Jonah’s message. Even their king believed Jonah’s warning. He ordered a time of mourning and fasting, even exhorting his people to call upon God and cease their violent behavior.
As we learn in chapter 4 of his prophecy, Jonah is angry with God. The prophet is perplexed by the fact that the Ninevites were spared from YHWH’s judgment even as his own beloved people, Israel, are about to come under God’s covenant curse. In the closing chapter of Jonah, we find the prophet right back where he was when first called to preach. His disdain for the Ninevites surfaces again. “Why was Nineveh spared when Israel will not be?” As his prophecy concludes, Jonah is given yet another lesson in God’s mercy.
As we consider the final chapter, once again we discover that in the Book of Jonah, irony seems to jump off every page. You would think that YHWH’s chosen prophet would be thrilled to witness huge numbers of people believe in YHWH and spared from judgment through his own preaching. Yes, pride is a sin, but there is a certain allowable sense of satisfaction about witnessing people come to faith, repent of their sin, and then amend their ways. Jonah should have been thrilled to witness what God has done in Nineveh–extend salvation to countless Gentiles beyond the confines of his covenant with Israel. But as we have come to expect in the Book of Jonah, the ironic becomes the norm.
The closing scene in Jonah chapter four takes place after Jonah has completed his mission of passing through the city of Nineveh and proclaiming YHWH’s call to repent with remarkable success. Instead of being thrilled to be YHWH’s agent in bringing the Ninevites to repentance, the opening verse of chapter 4 reveals that Jonah is angry. Why? What has happened? Why is he back where he started, angry that the people of Nineveh repented? Irony appears again–God relented in his anger toward Nineveh while Jonah renews his anger towards the Ninevites.
Why would the same evil that YHWH attributed to the Ninevites (the Hebrew text of Jonah 1:2) now be attributed to Jonah (4:1). The Hebrew text literally reads “it [the repentance of Ninveveh] was evil to Jonah with great evil.”[2] The ESV translates the passage as “but it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry,” trying to capture the raw emotion Jonah felt at what the prophet perceived as a divine injustice. Jonah hated what YHWH had done. It is hard to imagine a great evangelist preaching to a huge crowd, seeing many of them respond in faith, and then getting mad at God because people actually responded–but this is the scene in Jonah 4.
Why Did God Spare Nineveh, But Not Israel?
Why would Jonah react like this? There are several reasons for Jonah’s anger which we have already mentioned. The first is that Jonah is a loyal Israelite. He is a Jew, a prophet of YHWH, and loyal to the northern kingdom, long at war with both Syria and Assyria to the north. We know from the Books of the Kings that YHWH used Assyrian aggression to weaken Syria to the point that in the days of Jeroboam II, Israel actually defeated Syria and was enjoying a period of relative peace. But just to the north of Syria, Assyria was growing stronger by the day. The empire was but one generation away from the time when the armies of king Tiglath Pilesar III will sweep down from the north and virtually wipe Israel off the map. Nineveh was in the very heart of the Assyrian empire. The first reason why Jonah reacted as he did is racial and cultural. The Assyrians are not my people. They are my enemies. How could God call them to repentance? Doesn’t he know how bad they are? Doesn’t he know that they are outside the covenant?
As a loyal Israelite, Jonah also very likely worried that without YHWH’s help, Assyria’s technologically advanced army could easily defeat Israel. If that were the case it would mean–at least to Jonah’s way of thinking–that Assyria would be God’s agent of judgment upon the disobedient, idolatrous, and faithless Israelites. Why would YHWH save Assyrians in Nineveh, yet bring judgment upon Israel, Jonah’s people?
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Productivity is not what you think. When you think of productivity, you think of an upper-class CEO yelling at his employees for not getting more done, threatening consequences if the report isn’t completed by Wednesday. This is tyrannical leadership, not productivity. “Stewardship” and “productivity” are interchangeable. Or, as Tim Challies put it: “Productivity is effectively stewarding my gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.” Seen this way, every Christian should care about productivity since every Christian is called to steward what God has entrusted to him or her, and will one day give account for this stewardship.

In 2016, Zondervan released What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done by Matt Perman. The book is on the intersection of Christian faith and productivity and, as the subtitle suggests, Perman teaches how the gospel affects the way Christians think about personal productivity. Gospel-Driven Productivity, or GDP, as Perman calls it, is the distinguishing mark that separates a secular understanding of productivity from a Christian one. The book has sold well and was named on Zondervan’s “Best of the Decade” list. Perman is also the author of a second book on productivity.
Less than a year before the release of Perman’s book, Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity, hit the market by Cruciform Press. Written by Tim Challies, the book is about productivity from a Christian worldview. Whereas Perman’s book is on the theory of productivity, Challies’ book is on the practical side of productivity. The book is short and succinct. Five plus years after reading the book, I am still daily applying some of the material to my life.
Before Challies’ book, I’m not sure I had ever heard of a book on the subject, or if it was ethically permissible for Christians to talk about being productive. I’m not alone. When Christians hear the word “productivity,” they often think of secular business. But Challies debunks this mischaracterization. Challies, instead, teaches that productivity is about stewarding your life for the glory of God and the good of others. Apathy about productivity means negligence in stewardship which means disobedience. Do More Better recently inched over 700 Amazon reviews.
A book that has not garnered the same amount of attention as the titles mentioned above, but is still worthy of consideration, is Brandon Crowe’s Every Day Matters. “I know of no better book to place in the hands of aspiring Christian men and women who want their life’s trajectories to be productive for Christ and his kingdom,” says Kent Hughes in the foreword. The premise of the book is captured in the title: Every day matters or, as R.C. Sproul used to say, “Right now counts forever.” Crowe’s book is practical, well-written, and theologically sound.
But the CPM movement is more than books. It’s also courses, email newsletters, and online communities. Enter Reagan Rose, the founder of Redeeming Productivity, a web-based ministry that teaches “Personal productivity, from a Christian worldview, for the glory of God.” The ministry began as a hobby. But in early 2021, Rose took a leap of faith and went all-in with Redeeming Productivity as his full-time vocation, and by the end of the year, the ministry was financially sustaining. The fact that Rose was able to turn an internet ministry on Christian productivity into a full-time job in less than a year reveals Rose’s adept business savvy, but it also reveals the desire for Christian resources on productivity. Turns out, Christian productivity is not a viability. Rose has a book bearing the name of his ministry forthcoming with Moody this fall.
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Eternal life on our own merits is impossible for a people who by nature hate God and neighbor. Salvation is brought to us by a Good Samaritan who showed us mercy and promises to return for us to take us into eternal life. We demonstrate that we are right with God not in trying to justify ourselves but when we love God and neighbor with this kind of humility, recognizing with great awe that we were the ones beaten up and left for dead because of sin, and that it was Jesus himself who crossed the road from heaven to save us.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is generally understood to be an ethical teaching of Jesus that challenges us to love our neighbor better. Most teachings on the parable are moralistic, leaving the impression that the imperative to “go and do likewise” is the sole aim of what Jesus is attempting to accomplish in telling the story.
But have we missed the greater lesson of what Jesus is impressing upon the hearer in this well-known story? Is the parable simply intended to press upon us the responsibility to love better? To answer this question, there is required a careful reflection of the context into which this parable comes. The parable is a surprising response to someone who understood well the demand of the law to love, but had failed to see how far he missed the mark of love in his own life.
The lawyer, seeking to justify himself, bypassed the question of his own need for deliverance.
Luke 10:25-37 records for us that a certain lawyer approaches Jesus to test him about how one can obtain eternal life. The lawyer specifically asks Jesus what he must “do to inherit eternal life.” When Jesus answers specific questions posed to him in the synoptic gospels, it is important to reflect carefully on the question that is being asked of Jesus. If the question being posed is not understood, the exegesis that follows will be faulty.
In this case, the lawyer asks the very same question of the rich young ruler, “what must I do to inherit eternal life”—two verbs. This is an entirely different question than those who asked Jesus for mercy, as with blind Bartimaeus or others who, as in the book of Acts, asked what they must do to be saved. Humble approaches to Jesus by those who asked for mercy and deliverance from sin received compassionate responses. This lawyer, however, is asking Jesus how, through his own efforts, he could achieve eternal life, not salvation.
Any attempt to justify ourselves is immediately met with the full weight of the laws demands.
The lawyer bypasses the question of his own need for deliverance, a detail that is obviously so important to Luke that he adds, for proper interpretive purposes, that the lawyer was “attempting to justify (δικαιῶσαι) himself” (Luke 10:29). As he stands before the only one who supplies the righteousness that comes from God, the lawyer’s attempt to justify himself is immediately met with the full weight of the laws demands.
Upon asking for eternal life, Jesus poses as question of his own: “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The lawyer responds by citing Deuteronomy 6:5, the great Shema, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart will all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus responds from Leviticus 18:5 with a perennial blow that should have made any Israelite tremble: “Do this and you will live.”
Jesus’ use of Leviticus 18:5 in this context is a direct response to the lawyer attempting to justify himself in asking Jesus for eternal life based his own merits. This demonstrates that any attempt to self-justify oneself before God to achieve eternal life is always met with the divine standard of perfect and complete obedience. Jesus does not mince words. He answers the lawyer by saying “if you do this, you will have the eternal life that you are seeking.”
Jesus tells a story to explain what it means to fulfill the intent of the law.
The glaring omission in the dialogue, unlike that of the rich young ruler who openly said he obeyed the law, is the silence of the lawyer with regard to his own performance of love. The problem, as much of the rabbinic tradition evidences, is that a neighbor was only understood to be a fellow Jew. The question is whether Leviticus 19:8, in its command to love one’s neighbor, only intended love to be exercised for a fellow Israelite, as the Rabbinic writings indicate, or did it demand love for all peoples.
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We are always works in progress. And lest some believers take umbrage at those two things that I just said (that we are still sinners, and we must resist a theology of perfectionism), let me simply point out how the Apostle Paul looked at this matter. The longer he lived as a Christian, the more he saw himself as being worse of a sinner. 

Christians know what my title refers to – it comes from 2 Corinthians 4:5-7: “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”
The good that we do and the ministry wins that we have occur because of Christ in us, not because we are such great shakes. Here I want to look at this from two vantage points. One, I will look at one famous Christian leader, and two, I will look further at what Scripture says about sin and the believer.
One Notable Christian Leader
A little while ago I wrote about pastor’s kids and missionary kids, and I spoke about the sad reality that children of Christian leaders can and do go off the rails. I also said that at times the parents themselves may have been at fault to some extent.
I mentioned the daughter of Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, and how she suffered because she saw so little of her own father who was so very busy in Christian ministry the world over for over 25 years. He had done terrific things for Christ and the Kingdom, but his family was often neglected and hurt in the process. See the article here: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/21/on-rebellious-pks-and-related-concerns/
As I said in that piece: “Part of the problem is that back in those earlier days, the standard list of priorities for Christians went like this: God, ministry, family. In more recent times many have realised that a much more biblical list of priorities goes like this: God, family, ministry.”
I want to look a bit further at the book. It is Man of Vision by Marilee Pierce Dunker (Authentic media, 2005). It is a bittersweet volume, extolling all the great things he had done, and his tremendous commitment to Christ. But he also had his issues, including bouts with depression and a bad temper.
And on top of that, as mentioned, he was simply away from home for so much of the time – usually 10 months a year. Indeed, the constant travel and activity and ministry was just not sustainable – physically, emotionally, spiritually. Says Marilee: “Years of eighteen-hour days, sleep caught on planes, unsanitary food, and eternal jet lag had begun to take their toll on my father.”
So many people became Christians because of his hard work, and so many were nourished physically as well as spiritually, but that did not mean his own life was fully in order. This was so very tough on his family, and even resulted in estrangement from his family. At one point he even filed for divorce. In fact, it was so bad that one of his daughters took her own life at age 27.
But the idea was to put God before all else. Writes Marilee:
How many times I heard Daddy quote Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children … he cannot be my disciple.” Daddy understood that Scripture to mean that he was obliged to put his ministry and the needs of the world before his own family. He used to say, “I’ve made an agreement with God that I’ll take care of His helpless little lambs overseas if He’ll take care of mine at home.” It surely sounded sensible enough, and Daddy sincerely believed he was right. Unfortunately, future events would prove that this was Daddy’s agreement, not God’s.
And one more quote:
My father had an unusual ability to “weep with those who weep,” and he was driven relentlessly to do something about the intolerable pain and despair he saw….” 
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Susanna combined Cornelia’s twelve-page confession with nine of Cornelia’s poems in a collection entitled A Short Confession of Faith. She prefaced the book with her own seven-page biography of her sister and a short poem by Susanna’s son, statesman and author Adrian Hoffer, who heartily recommended the book – the first book in Dutch authored by a Reformed woman. The timing was right, because the Netherlands were going through another wave of attacks by Spain. But the book remained popular after the war for at least twenty more years.

Largely unknown today, Susanna and Cornelia Teelinck inspired two generations of Dutch Christians to trust God to deliver them from Spanish domination.
They were born in 1551 and 1553 respectively into a distinguished family from Zierikzee, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Their father Eewoud Teellinck (d. 1561) was a brewer who also served as an alderman and treasurer in the City Council. Judging by the statues of saints and the crucifix found among Eewoud’s belongings, the family was probably Roman Catholic. It was also a cultured family, who owned a small but rich library of French, Latin and German books. All four children, however, converted to the Reformed faith.
Eewoud died in 1561 and his wife Helena Willem Jansdr followed him four years later, leaving their oldest son Joos to act as a guardian to his siblings.
Around 1573, nineteen-year-old Cornelia, the youngest, requested admission to the Lord’s Supper from her local Reformed church. She marked the occasion by writing a confession of faith which she presented to her consistory. While not innovative (it was modeled after the approved confession of Guido de Brès), her confession was simple and to the point, inspiring many to copy it by hand and distribute it to others.
It was a heartfelt confession, which she concluded with a bold statement: “Here I have written the foundation of my belief based on the examination of Holy Scripture, and as a sign that I am not ashamed, I have also included my name.”[1]
It was a courageous stand because at that very moment Spanish troops were terrorizing Netherlandish cities in what contemporaries called the “Spanish Fury,” taking particular aim at Reformed Christians.
How to Face Violent Opposition
Although Cornelia didn’t witness the violent sack of her hometown (by then, she lived with her husband Anthonie Limmens in Antwerp), she was deeply affected by the news and became a victim of the unruly raids of unpaid and hungry Spanish mutineers who roamed the country in the aftermath.
She responded with four poems where she thundered against Spain and called God to action: “Stand up O Lord; show that you are a mighty, blessed God, who out of nothing shaped heaven, Earth, and all that lives. Will you also now complete your unfinished work by your very strong hand?”[2]
Seeing the Spanish as God’s tool to bring his people to repentance, Cornelia exhorted all believers to call on God and place their trust in him: “Stand up Jerusalem, God’s City…God will be your comfort and your help and he shall put an end to your destruction…You need not fear sword or enemy for the Lord shall take up your case himself and show all that he is a God of vengeance over those who have persecuted the pious.

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Our salvation is one which is secured for us by the Triune God. It is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit which brings about our redemption and thus it is the Trinity which we magnify in worship because of our redemption. To worship any other god that is not the Triune God of the Bible is to worship a false god.

“You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” – Romans 8:9
The Early Church Father, Basil of Caesarea, in a profound bit of theological reflection, says, “Whoever perceives the Father and perceives the Father by Himself has at the same time a mental perception of the Son. And whoever receives the Son does not mentally dismember him from the Spirit but, in due course…. forms within himself a faith that is a commingling of the three together. Whoever mentions the Spirit alone also embraces in this confession him of whom he is the Spirit. And since the Spirit is Christ’s and of God (Rom. 8:9; 1 Cor. 2:12), as Paul says, the one who ‘draws the Spirit’ draws both the Son and the Father too at the same time, just as someone who grabs a hold of a chain on one end pulls on the other end as well. And if anyone truly receives the Son, he draws in the Father on one hand and the Spirit on the other. For he who eternally exists in the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can he who works all things by the Spirit ever be disconnected from his own Spirit. In the same way, anyone who receives the Father virtually receives at the same time both the Son and the Spirit.”[1]
I love the way in which Basil’s heart and mind are incapable of mentioning one Person within the Triunity of God without at the same time having his mind conceive and think of the other two Persons. And this kind of Trinitarian thought is something fully emerging out of the Bible. Basil was a Biblically-steeped theologian. Indeed, this kind of thinking is what Paul himself does in Romans 8, verse 9. Considering as he has that those people who are in Christ Jesus are also those who have the Holy Spirit within them (Romans 8:1-8), here Paul explicitly states that the Holy Spirit is both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ. This verse is brimming with Trinitarian glory!
Think about how Romans 8 began in verse 1. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” And now notice how Paul talks about being in the Spirit, that is, if the Spirit is indeed in you! Paul assumes, doesn’t he, that to be in Christ and to be in the Spirit is one and the same thing. And of course it is, since there is only one God. But still, we must maintain that the Son of God is different from the Spirit of God who is different from God the Father. In other words, to use the classical language of Christian orthodoxy: there is one God who consists of three distinct Persons.
What does this mean for us as we continue to meditate upon Romans chapter 8? One application is this: that our salvation is one which is secured for us by the Triune God. It is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit which brings about our redemption and thus it is the Trinity which we magnify in worship because of our redemption. To worship any other god that is not the Triune God of the Bible is to worship a false god.
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The eugenics movement, as Chesterton predicted, became a wretched story of the negation of democratic ideals to serve a utopian vision. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.” Wittingly or not, the eugenic dream unleashed a cataract of deeply rooted fears and hatreds — sanctified this time by a secular priesthood, the scientific community.

In the 1920s, when he was still an agnostic, C. S. Lewis noted in his diary his latest reading: “Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.”
A controversial English Catholic writer, Chesterton published his book in 1922, when the popularity of eugenics was at flood tide. Respectable opinion on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the concept: a scientific approach to selective breeding to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the category of people considered mentally and morally deficient. From U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, eugenics policies — including involuntary sterilization — were hailed as a “progressive” and “compassionate” solution to mounting social problems.
A hundred years ago, Chesterton discerned something altogether different: “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.” For a time, he stood nearly alone in his prophetic assault on the eugenics movement and the pseudo-scientific theory by which it was defended.
“People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late,” Chesterton warned. “I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its dupes.”
Chesterton declared his aim openly, without qualification or compromise: The ideology of eugenics must be destroyed if human freedom is to be preserved. The eugenic idea, he wrote, “is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.” In the end, it would require the discoveries at the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau for most of the world to finally reject the horrific logic of eugenics. Yet Chesterton was one of the first to see it coming: when the machinery of the state would invoke the authority of science to deprive individuals — both the “unfit” and the unborn — of their fundamental human rights.
It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term — from the Greek for “good birth” — argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion.” Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws.
To many thinkers in the West, the catastrophe of the First World War, in addition to the problems of poverty, crime, and social breakdown, suggested a sickness in the racial stock. Book titles help tell the story: Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922 — the same year Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils — was supported by Nobel Prize–winning scientists whose stated objective was to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population.
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Written by Christopher F. Rufo |
Friday, August 5, 2022
Bureaucracies have an instinct for self-preservation, and DEI ideology has embedded itself in the country’s prestige institutions. But nothing is more important for the success of American innovation and self-governance than prevailing over a regime that seeks to supplant “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as the governing principle of the United States.

“The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge once said. One hundred years later, Americans’ chief business increasingly is managing racial and sexual politics through the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
I have surveyed the programming of every Fortune 100 company and have confirmed that all of them have now adopted so-called DEI programs. These initiatives are no longer limited to high-technology firms in the coastal enclaves; they have spread to traditionally conservative sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, insurance, and oil and gas. The result is clear: every major corporation in the United States has submitted to DEI ideology and begun to make it a permanent part of its legal and human resources bureaucracy.
No doubt some of these programs are benign. Many companies adopt DEI policies out of pressure to conform. Other companies, however, use diversity, equity, and inclusion to promote the most virulent strands of critical race theory and gender ideology. I have documented many examples: Bank of America teaching employees that the United States is a system of “white supremacy”; Walmart telling workers they are guilty of “internalized racial superiority”; Lockheed Martin forcing executives to deconstruct their “white male privilege”; and Disney promising to abolish the words “boys” and “girls” in its theme parks and inject “queerness” into its children’s programming.
Three factors drive corporate executives to adopt DEI programs. First, these initiatives serve as an insurance policy against frivolous race- and sex-discrimination lawsuits. The legal department can point to mandatory trainings and policies as evidence that the company is “doing something” to prevent discrimination. Second, executives create these programs to appease internal activist groups that want to use the corporation as a platform for left-wing race and gender activism. Third, splashy DEI initiatives, such as Wal-Mart’s $100 million “Center for Racial Equity,” form part of a reputation-laundering strategy, improving a company’s public image and preempting Black Lives Matter-style protests through fashionable philanthropy.
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French philosopher Michel Foucault drew upon Nietzsche and Marx to build an atheistic and anti-realist view of the world. From Nietzsche, he adopted the view that power is at the center of all political discourse, and further argued that knowledge is merely a means to manipulate and exercise power. Thus, words such as “insane,” “prisoner,” and “homosexual” are manipulative labels that Western society uses to ostracize certain persons. Foucault further believed that human beings do not have an essence but instead we are constructed by systems and networks of power. Foucault’s work is precursor to critical race theory, queer theory, and intersectionality.

It has been said, famously, that all Western philosophy is “footnotes to Plato.” And, while this statement rings true, the deeper and more salient observation is that much of Western philosophy is footnotes to Lucifer.
Indeed. At the Fall, the Evil One spoke a word against God’s word, calling into question the truth of God’s word, the goodness of his created order, and the righteousness of his character. Lucifer’s destructive word can be viewed as his “antithesis” for the world. In the modern world, the Evil One’s antithesis has been active—and nowhere more than Western philosophy departments.
Thus, in recognition of Lucifer’s antithetical word, this article “calls out” the seven most destructive philosophers in Western history.
Plato (4th century B.C.)
Plato is perhaps the greatest philosopher in Western history, yet a number of his conclusions are severely problematic. Especially troublesome is his denigration of the material world in general and the human body in particular. Plato believed that the visible world is inferior to the invisible, and that knowledge gained from the visible world is therefore deceptive. In other words, he was a philosopher of hyperrationality, of the otherworldly, who denigrated God’s good creation. Sadly, this Platonic impulse has a rich history of appropriation in subsequent philosophy, and even in Western cultural developments such as transgender ideology and humanism.
Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Niccolo Machiavelli was an early modern Italian politico-turned-philosopher. As his political career collapsed, he penned The Prince, arguing that Christian morality is detrimental to good government and that political leaders should therefore operate as secular pragmatists. He believed that a political leader should sometimes be cruel, although the cruelty should be administered quickly, so as to get it over with, where has the leader’s acts of kindness should be meted slowly over time so that he will always be seen as generous. He further advises leaders to lie and break their promises. Many later political leaders—including Cardinal Richelieu (France), Frederick the Great (Prussia), Bismarck (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Lenin and Stalin (Russia), and Hitler (Germany)—embraced his ideas and put them into action.
Hobbes (1588-1679)
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that physical matter is all there is, and that therefore human beings are merely particles in motion. He further believed that “society” is merely an aggregate of violent political animals who need to be kept in check via a powerful sovereign body. Thus emphasizing the importance of sovereign political bodies, Hobbes argued in effect that the nation-state should replace the church as society’s central instituion. In fact, the first edition of Leviathan had a cover image that portrayed Leviathan’s torso as being composed of hundreds of people facing him; the image is intended to mimic the view from a cathedral in which one would see people facing toward Christ.
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Dying Means Going to Our Long Home
As King Solomon puts it in Ecclesiastes 12:5, we are all going to “our long home,” or as the original is, to “the house of eternity,” meaning the state where the soul will be eternally, without any further change.
It is our wisdom therefore, before this time comes, to make sure that we are reconciled to God in Christ. That will provide some suitable consolation for our souls, while our bodies will be [laid in the dust].
Therefore, while we are fit and healthy, we should employ our strength well, to make sure we are at peace with Him who is most high, so that He will not be a terror to us in the evil day (Jer. 17:17). If we have faith, then things that may present themselves as terrifying to others, will be no cause of fear to us.
Some people think that the best they will ever get is in this present life, and they promise to themselves that they will enjoy things on earth perpetually. Yet they shall find themselves after a little while miserably disappointed. They shall find that this is not their home. It would be wiser for them instead to look on their mansions here as short-stay residences, and to think of themselves as strangers and pilgrims, that so they would give all diligence to ensure they will have everlasting habitations.
After death there is no change of the state of souls as to their misery or the blessedness. They must remain for ever either with Satan in his prison, or with Christ in His Father’s house.
Death Affects Both Soul and Body
Solomon summarises our future state after death, making reference to both body and soul, the two principal parts of which we are made up: “Then shall the dust return to the earth, as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccles. 12:7).
The body, Solomon calls “dust,” because it was formed out of the dust (Gen. 2:7). When the body is separated from the soul, it is the most vile and loathsome piece of dust of all. He says it “returns to the dust,” because it is ordinarily buried in the earth, to remain there till the resurrection, and because it is in effect the same substance as the dust of the earth.
The more noble part is the soul, here called the “spirit” because it is immaterial, and because of its resemblance to God, the Father of spirits. The soul “returns to him who gave it.” This does not mean only the souls of the godly, but rather it is the common state of the souls of all humans after death.
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