Although I am of the mind that it is normative for covenant children to be born again and brought forth as the fruit of the new creation by the intelligible Word that is accompanied by even minimal understanding, whenever the Word raises sinners unto life it is always accompanied by the operative work of the Spirit who is free to work apart from the comprehended Word in the experience of infants. (John 3:8; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23) Surely, it is plain vanilla Reformed doctrine that God can regenerate covenant children in the womb or even at the font (even if it is not normative), but those who have been united to Christ in this way shall surely come to receive and embrace the teachings of Scripture, in particular the person and work of Christ, all in God’s appointed time. We can expect this to occur early in the regenerate child’s experience.

In Chapter 14 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), saving faith is distinguished from believing. This distinction, which has implications with respect to infants and those who might suffer from cognitive impairment, is made plain when the standards teach it is by the grace of faith that the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls. (WCF 14.1) Moreover, in WCF 14 we read:
By this faith, a Christian believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word…
WCF 14.2
WCF 14.1 does not teach that by the grace of faith a Christian is enabled to have faith. Nor do the standards teach in WCF 14.2 that by this faith the Christian has faith. Rather, the Confession recognizes that the gift of faith is not the same thing as exercising faith in the act of believing. Similarly, the grace of repentance in the Westminster standards is distinguished from the acts of repentance.
Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace, the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the Gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ. By it [i.e., the gift of repentance], a sinner, out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins… hates his sins, as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with Him in all the ways of His commandments.
WCF 15.1.2
It is by the the gift of repentance that sinners are enabled to turn from their sin in specific acts of repentance. This is analogous to acts of believing flowing out of the one time gift of faith.
Given this unavoidable nuance, we can understand that when an adult Christian is sleeping, suffers from severe cognizant impairment, or becomes unconscious by slipping into a coma, the saint is not without the implanted gifts of faith and repentance even if he can no longer exercise those gifts in believing or turning in faith. However, unlike with infants who also can have dormant gifts of faith and repentance, such adults have volitionally received and rested in Christ alone. Infants have not.
By parsing (a) gifts of faith and repentance alongside of (b) the resultant acts of believing and repenting, we can now better consider justifying faith in elect infants. 
We just saw that it is by the grace of repentance and faith that sinners are enabled to repent and believe. Moreover, like the grace of repentance, the gift of faith is also a necessary and immediate result of regeneration. Which is to say, no regenerate person (even an infant) is without a new and irrevocable nature that possesses the newborn capacity (or propensity) to respond to the gospel in turning and trusting. Added to this, the standards correctly teach that “elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated, and saved by Christ, through the Spirit, who works when, and where and how he pleases…” In such cases, the outward call that effects the inward call unto regeneration is bypassed, which God is free to do.
Putting This Together:
We are safe to infer that if God can regenerate elect infants who die in infancy, he is free to regenerate elect infants who don’t. (Whether that is normative for elect covenant children is not my concern quite yet.) It is also safe to infer that all regenerate infants are granted the seed of repentance and faith (even without the cognitive ability to willfully turn and trust), lest there can be new creations in Christ, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, who do not have the grace of new life that is accompanied by the propensity to repent and believe the gospel. Notwithstanding and, also, per the Westminster standards, effectual calling (as a matter of definition) entails knowledge of Christ and his work, whereby sinners become effectually and cognizantly persuaded of the need to embrace the Savior.
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Written by Anthony N. S. Lane |
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
These chapters illustrate clearly that Calvin’s aim in all his theology was not just to inform the mind but to form the heart through the mind. “The gospel . . . is not a doctrine of the tongue but of life. It is not grasped merely by the intellect and memory like other disciplines, but it is taken in only when it possesses the entire soul and when it finds a seat and place of refuge in the most intimate affection of the heart. . . . The gospel should penetrate into the most intimate affection of the heart, take hold of the soul, and have an effect on the whole human being” (3.6.4).

A New Translation of an Influential Work
John Calvin’s concern to make the Institutes of the Christian Religion useful and practical is especially manifest in his teaching on the Christian life.1 He did not have a chapter on the Christian life in the first, short edition of the Institutes (published in 1536), but he added a concluding chapter on this topic in the second edition (published three years later in 1539). Calvin considered this material to be of such great importance that in 1550 he had it printed as a booklet on its own, both in Latin and in his native French.2
The final form of Calvin’s Institutes is comprised of eighty chapters spread across four “books.” Book 3, containing twenty-five of those chapters, expounds the manner in which Christians receive the grace of Christ, and this is where Calvin placed his material on the Christian life, now divided into five chapters (chaps. 6–10).
Chapters 6–7 discuss self-denial, and chapters 8–10 deal with bearing our cross, our view of the life to come, and the implications for our attitude toward this life. The new English translation is taken from the definitive 1559 edition of the Institutes,3 written in Latin, where Calvin added a small amount of extra material.4
Chapter Summaries
In the first of these five chapters (i.e., chap. 6), Calvin sets out general principles about the Christian life and the factors that should motivate us to pursue it. He aims to enable the godly to order their lives aright by setting out a universal rule to determine their duties (3.6.1). The Christian life is a journey, and we should look for daily progress, but without expecting perfection (3.6.5).
The next two chapters are based on Jesus’s statement that following him involves denying oneself and taking up one’s cross (Matt. 16:24). In chapter 7, Calvin focuses on the need for self-denial, saying no to ourselves and yes to submission to God. This is the key to progress in the Christian life, whereas “wherever self-denial does not predominate, there either the most loathsome vices predominate without shame, or virtue, if there is any appearance of it, is negated by a corrupt lust for glory” (3.7.2). Those who deny themselves resign themselves totally to God’s will and allow every part of their lives to be governed by it (3.7.10).
Calvin continues his exposition of Matthew 16:24 with chapter 8 on bearing the cross, which is an aspect of self-denial. Bearing the cross involves patiently suffering whatever tribulations God may send our way. These have many purposes: to show us our weakness, to build up our character, to test our patience, to train us in obedience, to subdue our sinful flesh, and to discipline us. Greatest of all is suffering for the sake of righteousness, such as for the gospel (3.8.7–8).
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Brothers, if God has come to your aid and given you a wife, then take the opportunity to thank Him for her and then thank her. She enables you to do more. She brings a peaceful space to a world in chaos. She loves your children, and she loves you. Godliness adorns her and there is no better adornment. No wonder God said in His word, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord” (Prov. 18:22). Or as Luther would say, the Lord has come to your aid! Your clothes are washed and your mug is ready.

Martin Luther’s Table Talk is arguably the most entertaining of his works. The Weimar Edition contains six volumes under this head alone! Thus, volume 54 in the American Edition represents about one-tenth of the total bulk of what we know as Table Talk. However, as the American Edition explains there are good reasons for editing the work. For example, there are less trustworthy sayings and there are sayings that have been elaborated on by his students. All of this is to say that the American Edition removes the dross.
I have been reading Table Talk lately. The paragraphs of reminiscences are perfect to give one a flavor for the man we know as Martin Luther. Some of the talks bring laughter, I mean belly rolling laughter, some of them cause a headshake, and still others a pause and reflection. January 22, 1532 is one of those that caused me to pause and reflect. It goes like this,
I am very busy. Four persons are dependent on me, and each of them demands my time for himself. Four times a week I preach in public, twice a week I lecture, and in addition I hear cases, write letters, and am working on a book for publication. It is a good thing that God came to my aid and gave me a wife. She takes care of domestic matters, so that I do not have to be responsible for these too.
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Berg and Wiseman deserve praise for unveiling the breakdown of the dialectic of motherhood and for attempting to salvage motherhood’s reputation. But their focus on de Beauvoir and the feminist tradition does not shed light on our emergency’s deepest roots. To do that, we must go further than Berg and Wiseman and look beyond the feminism question: If the dialectic of motherhood has collapsed, shouldn’t we also expect that there exists a “dialectic of fatherhood,” and that it too has imploded? And, consequently, that there is a keystone “dialectic of parenthood” between fathers and mothers that has been destroyed? 

Two beings are now only one, and it is when they are one that they become three.” So wrote Maurice Blondel on the topic of love and procreation. The formulation expresses a faith in and desire for fecundity that was once a given. Today, however, the response to this mysterious arithmetic among many Millennials is, essentially, That doesn’t add up. Hence, the much-discussed fertility crisis.
This crisis is well-documented. The American fertility rate in 2023 was the lowest it’s ever been, and our replacement rate, 1.6, is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Clearly, the kids are not all right—otherwise, they’d be having kids. Most of these Millennials are not averse to childbearing; they are ambivalent toward it. All trends indicate that the arguments conceived to shake them out of this ambivalence have been insufficient. 
Even more worryingly, as Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman point out in What Are Children For?, merely bringing up the topic “comes across at best as gauche” to these adults, who generally consider the issue to be right-wing coded and therefore noxious. Berg and Wiseman are certainly not right-wingers. But they are fellow-traveling natalists who have written a book intended to convince their progressive peers of the value of children. The unstated challenge they set for themselves is to do so while avoiding any language that could be construed as conservative or religiously inflected.
Instead, they seek an alternative language in feminist theory, literature, philosophy, and personal narrative to affirmatively answer the question, “Is human life still worth the trouble?” This effort designed to sway minds otherwise out of reach is a noble one enabled by the parameters the authors set themselves. But the limitations are apparent.
Childless Millennials typically put forward material-rational explanations for their decision, citing economic constraints and inadequate state support. Berg and Wiseman begin by exposing such responses as smoke screens. The problem is not chiefly economic: Millennials are, in fact, basically as well-positioned financially to start a family as any prior generation. And, if the Nordic countries are any proof, there’s little evidence that greater social-welfare infrastructure leads to increased birth rates. The root of the ambivalence must therefore be philosophical.
Berg and Wiseman spend most of their time diagnosing and responding to this philosophical woe. Declining birth rates, they argue, are merely a casualty of a larger “reconfiguration of values that touches on every part of our lives.”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
If queers mocking the Lord’s Supper and a decapitated singing head are the things that France—or at least her officer class—consider to represent her, then things have surely taken a most dark turn. “This is France,” tweeted President Emmanuel Macron. I hope he was exaggerating. As to the lack of intent to cause offense, it is impossible to read the minds of the organizers, but it is hard to believe this claim. Would they ever have contemplated mocking things considered sacred by Jews or Muslims, one wonders? That seems rather unlikely—unless they really are as insensitive and thick as they claim.

The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics will be remembered as an eloquent testimony to the tilt of contemporary Western culture. The drag queen parody of da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the appearance of the severed head of Marie Antoinette performing karaoke said it all: A culture that has given the world the plays of Racine and Molière, the novels of Stendhal and Hugo, the paintings of the Impressionists, and the music of Berlioz and Fauré served the world a dish of blasphemous kitsch and gaudy perversion.
Of course, those responsible denied any intention to offend Christians: “Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief,” organizers said in a statement to The Telegraph. “On the contrary, each of the tableaux in the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony were intended to celebrate community and tolerance.” Organizers further noted that pop culture, from The Simpsons to The Sopranos, has parodied The Last Supper for decades, if not centuries.
Certainly, such parodies are not new is true, confirming the organizers’ intellectual laziness and lack of imagination.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, August 5, 2024
It doesn’t really matter whether you think the day starts as your head hits the pillow or when you wake but recognising that we start with sleep and that joy comes in the morning can profoundly reshape the way you visualise your weeks and years. This is the view of life of the Bible: hope comes after and far more can be mended than you know. What does matter is that we start to see the world with open eyes. Everything teaches you the way of the Lord, or the way of death.

Have you ever noticed that in Genesis chapter one, the days are the wrong way around?
When I say the wrong way around, I mean backwards to what we expect, and before you rush off to compare the order of creation and question whether it means anything meaningful that the sun and moon come so late (it does, but that’s not our topic today), look at each day.
They’re backwards.
“And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” and each day thereafter. Evening, then morning. That’s backwards. We all know that days start in the morning, unless we’re pedantic enough to insist that they start in the middle of night. If we are that pedant, we are a prime example of what happens when you give a scientist a writer’s job, or when we let people learn the natural sciences before they’re thoroughly grounded in real subjects, like poetry.
But the destructive results of carving the day into twenty-four sections and thinking we’ve done something clever aside, the days in the Old Testament seem to be backwards.
Of course, I’m sure we can all grasp that they count time differently, so it’s not wrong but different. Except, I would like to contend that the Old Testament’s way of counting days is instructive to us. Honestly, it’s also better.
The day starts in the evening as the Sun sets and then continues into the daytime after the night, ending at sunset the subsequent evening. Think, perhaps, of the Jewish observation of the Sabbath to see this in practice: beginning on Friday evening and following through to Saturday evening.
Ok, they count days differently, so what?
Little things like this shape the way we see the world. They subconsciously tell us stories. Day, followed by night tells us a story: we have limited time to work, then our death will come. Make the most of your days in the sun while you can, for they are brief. The best comes at the beginning, the worst at the end: or in other words, youth is better than old age.
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What does the leadership of these nations consider to be their nations’ highest values? The goals to which they aspire? In France, as in so much of the West, the general answer is: inversion, which is what critical-theory academics mean when they speak of “queering” something. It means to turn the meaning of something inside-out, as our governing and cultural elites have done to our civilization’s values. We are told that we must be diverse, which means punishing those who hold non-progressive views.

The International Olympics Committee is in full-on damage control over its blasphemous Paris opening ceremony show. The IOC has apologized for the event, and deleted it from its YouTube channel. These elites would like everyone to forget what a global television audience saw last Friday: a filthy mockery of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, featuring drag queens as the disciples, and Barbara Butch, an obese lesbian DJ, as Our Lord. 
“Oh yes! Oh yes! The New Gay Testament!” Butch later messaged on Instagram. Underscoring the point, that tableau vivant was titled, in punning French, La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine – that is, The Last Supper Staged On The Seine.
The satanic parody feast featured as its blasphemous Eucharist a priapic Smurf meant to represent Dionysius—perhaps a sneering, obscene reference to St. Denis (a Gallicized version of “Dionysius”), the third-century martyr who is a patron saint of Paris. According to a tumescent Associated Press account of the event, the Greek god of wine pointed to his penis and sang, in French, “Where to hide a revolver when you’re completely naked?”
Thomas Jolly, the gay French theatrical director who conceived this vulgar abomination, said, “My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock. Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”
There are people stupid enough to believe that. But even the leader of France’s far left, the anti-clerical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is not one of them. In a blog post, Mélenchon condemned the revolting event as shaming the nation. 
“We were speaking to the world that evening,” Mélenchon wrote. “Among the billion Christians in the world, how many good and honest people are there for whom faith provides help in living and knowing how to participate in everyone’s life, without bothering anyone?” 
Jolly rogered the good faith of Christians the world over, and knew exactly what he was doing. So too did everyone at the IOC and in the French government who approved this thing. It is impossible to believe that this trashy LGBT mockery of Christianity didn’t get a sign-off at the highest level. This was Paris’s chance to present itself to the world, and they wouldn’t dare leave anything to chance. 
What the world saw was a transgressive homosexual romp and stomp across what Christians hold sacred. France’s elites signaled to the planet that it sacralizes homosexuality, transgenderism, sexual excess, and blasphemy. The Paris Olympics overture was a floor show for the Antichrist. 
As many commenters noted, these oh-so-courageous would never do this to Muslims. Nor should they, I hasten to say! It’s just that France is deep into a culture war between Islam and secularism that will determine the country’s future. For years now, many authorities have warned that the struggle could easily tip over into a civil war. And yet, these decadent French elites are determined to hasten the destruction of Western civilization. Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”
In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 
“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians. 
Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle.
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A Christian burial service offers you a chance to preach the gospel to your loved ones from beyond the grave. It will press eternal truths directly upon tender hearts. It will preach gospel hope directly into open ears. Why would any believer pass on such an opportunity? Scattering your ashes off the dock at the cottage says a lot about how precious your family is to you, and a fair bit about your appreciation for nature, but it says nothing about who you are, what you believe and where you are going. Those are things that your loved ones need to know.

We recently did a 16 week series on Biblical Anthropology in which we talked a lot about what it means to be a human being, what it means to have a body and what it means to be resurrected. The material covered in the series gave rise to a number of questions about cremation.
Prior to 1980 very few Canadians were cremated, but according to recent data, about 75% of Canadians are cremated today. Most choose cremation because it is slightly less expensive than burial. Some prefer it because they want their ashes scattered in a location that has been meaningful to them and to their family. With religion on the decline in Canada, many are choosing cremation because they do not wish to have a traditional funeral.
How should a Christian think about such things?
Cremation was the most common way of dealing with the bodies of the dead in most pagan and pre-Christian cultures. Greeks and Romans, for example, did not have a high view of the body. They saw the body as a sort of cage for the soul. Burning the body was thus a way of releasing the soul so that it could enter into a higher plane of existence. Jews and Christians, however, had a view of the human person informed by Genesis 1-2. Reflecting on this foundational text, Catholic theologian Abigail Favale writes:
“God forms the human (the adam) from the humus of the soil and breathes into his body, animating him with the divine breath of life. This imagery reveals an important truth about our nature: we are both earth and breath, matter and spirit. We are physical creatures; our bodies are integral to who we are. Yet we are not merely matter, because God’s breath enlivens each of us with an immaterial soul. This is one of the foundational principles of a Christian anthropology: every human being is a unity of body and soul.”[1]
A bible reading believer understands that he or she does not merely have a body, he or she is a body, and therefore that body matters, both in the immediate and eternal sense. As such, it was common in both the Jewish and Christian tradition to carefully wash the bodies of the diseased and to lay those bodies respectfully in either a tomb or a grave in hopes of resurrection.
Theologians debate as to how developed the doctrine of resurrection was within Judaism, but there is less debate as to how the doctrine developed as a result of the resurrection of Jesus and the teaching of the Paul. The physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a first order doctrine for the Apostle:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3-5 ESV)
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Whatever the motives, the strife of the Mizpah Mood is not a biblical approach to dealing with divisions within the evangelical church. We will now examine scriptural guidance for how believers in the church should deal with those who are also on the Lord’s side (Psalm 124) yet might still be doing harm to the church. Just as Mizpah served as the place where Laban and Jacob resolved their differences, so can we in the church today find God’s provision for reconciling our differences with fellow believers.

Kevin DeYoung’s infamous coinage of the term “Moscow Mood” has highlighted significant concerns about the evangelical church today.
DeYoung sought to warn Christians of the harmful “long-term spiritual effects of admiring and imitating” the “visceral” mood emanating from Christ Church, pastored by Douglas Wilson, in Moscow, Idaho. According to DeYoung, these harmful effects include developing a personality “incompatible with Christian virtue [and] inconsiderate of other Christians” and theological positions such as “Christian Nationalism or [Wilson’s] particular brand of postmillennialism.”
The critiques of DeYoung’s article are widespread, but I believe Joe Rigney’s piece in the American Reformer gets to the heart of the matter. He writes, “DeYoung fears that Moscow appeals to what is worldly in us. I have the same fear about the circles that DeYoung runs in. DeYoung worries that the world is burning and Moscow is lighting things on fire. I worry that DeYoung is bringing out a fire extinguisher in the middle of a flood.”
Rigney succinctly captures a major divide in the evangelical church today. Both sides are concerned about worldliness creeping into the church, but they have significant disagreements over the nature of the worldliness. From this perspective, DeYoung’s article and the responses to it have revealed valid concerns about the evangelical church, but they are not the concerns DeYoung seemed to have in mind. Instead, what has been brought into focus are the differences in how the two sides react to their concerns about worldliness, and especially in how they treat each other.
Wilson and company act on their concerns by reforming the church and debating the issues with all comers. While hoping to bring others along with them, they are willing to move forward on their own. One result of this was the formation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which has drawn members away from denominations such as DeYoung’s, the Presbyterian Church in America.
DeYoung and company react to their concerns very differently. They criticize the other side but largely avoid debate, often treating those who disagree with them as “troublers” in the church. They often describe their opponents’ views as sinful, even at times heretical. The attitudes and actions of many on this side of the divide are what I call the Mizpah Mood.
The name Mizpah means “watchtower” or “lookout.” There are two different places in the Bible named Mizpah where God watched over His people. The first Mizpah is where Jacob and Laban settled their differences by making a covenant with each other and setting up a heap of stones to serve as a witness to their agreement. The place received its name after Laban said, “The LORD watch between you and me.” The second Mizpah was where Samuel poured out water before the Lord, which probably indicated a cleansing from sin of the people who had just put away the foreign gods—the Baals and the Ashtaroth (1 Samuel 7).
Yet there was often great strife in these watchtowers of God. This usually occurred when the people of Israel refused to trust that God would watch over them, and instead took matters into their own hands. The second Mizpah was where the people of Israel gathered, after the rejection of God as their King, to receive Saul as king, one “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 10:17ff). It was also where the Israelites came together to address the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine by the people of Gibeah (Judges 20). In the first Mizpah, Jephthah returned home after his victory over the Ammonites to be met by his daughter. She became the fulfillment of Jephthah’s pledge to “sacrifice[] as a burnt offering” to the Lord “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites” (Judges 11:29-40).
The human-centered strife in today’s church, the watchtower of God over His people, reminds me of the strife that took place in Mizpah. While the Moscow Mood is often blamed for most of this, the response to DeYoung’s article has shown that more often than not the strife originates in the Mizpah Mood camp.
An early example of the Mizpah Mood occurred at the PCA’s 2019 General Assembly. In floor debate, teaching elder Steven Warhurst made biblical arguments and expressed pastoral concerns as he spoke in favor of an overture on sexuality that had been rejected by the Overture’s Committee. The next morning, one elder raised an objection to Warhurst’s statement on the account it was intemperate. The objection was supported by the General Assembly, despite the fact that it was out of order. Because he espoused the pastoral concern that the celibate gay community’s self-identification as sexual minorities is an attempt to deceive Christians about the sinfulness of homosexuality, Warhurst was–in effect–branded intemperate by the PCA.
More recently, in an interview this year, Ligon Duncan said, “There are some people in our culture today who are saying, ‘this is the model of faithfulness—lob grenades.’” While making such accusations, those affiliated with the Mizpah Mood often claim the high ground and do not engage with the other side. Wilson has explained that Duncan did this at least once. Kevin DeYoung also did this when he wrote almost 5,000 words about the Moscow Mood, but said, “I’m not looking to get into a long, drawn-out debate with Wilson or his followers.” An elder in my church took a similar approach. He sent to me an unsolicited (though welcome) email, sharing his thoughts with me about something I had written publicly. He said he was doing so in the interest of discipleship, while also saying he did not care to debate the matter with me. When I responded with some thoughts and one question, his main response was to repeat his previous points and discipleship rationale and tell me he would not argue with me about this.
These examples highlight another Mizpah Mood characteristic: not engaging with or mischaracterizing the words of what those in the Moscow camp write and speak. Not only does this allow them to stay above the fray, but it allows them to make bold, unsubstantiated claims about the Moscow Mood. Often in the name of maintaining the peace and purity of the church.
Here is Ligon Duncan again. “We have a culture in a part of evangelicalism right now that is desensitized to its own spirit of mocking and slander,” he said. “That kinda goes back to the Moscow Mood thing again. Mocking and slander is not a Christian way of dealing with anything. Many of those mockers and slanderers I have no reason to even think they are Christians.”
Duncan’s statement expresses the heart of the Mizpah Mood: there should be no engagement with those in the Moscow camp because they are unbelievers, heretics, liars, and/or spreaders of ideas and attitudes harmful to the church. Excoriation or church discipline, not intramural debate, is the better way to deal with the troublers and their ideas about paedo-communion, Christian nationalism, postmillennialism, the objectivity of the covenant, etc.
The Mizpah Mood was on full display on the February 5 episode of The Westminster Standard podcast. The topic was the Federal Vision, but the five participants (PCA pastors Ryan Biese, Steve Dowling, Nick Bullock, Todd Pruitt, and Matt Stanghelle) spent much of their time focusing on the Moscow Mood, “movement,” and “folks.” Including folks like Douglas Wilson.
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The imperative of Exodus 20:4-6 is not saying: “Make all of the images you like so long as you do not worship them.” Instead, the passage forbids us from even making unsanctioned images in the first place. Because God knows how quickly our hearts will leap into worship, He has not only forbidden the worship of idols, but the making of them. He not only has forbidden us from worshipping Jonathan Roumie and Jim Caviezel, He has forbidden these men and us from casting the most precious image of God in their human and finite likeness. 

Nore: In this series, I take our law homily from our church gathering each week (The law homily is where we read from the law of God and let His law examine our hearts so that we can be a tender-hearted and repenting people), and I post them here for your edification.
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. – Exodus 20:4-6
Introduction
In a world saturated with images and icons, where visual aids are touted as essential for enhancing our spiritual experience, we are confronted with a crucial question: What does God require of us in worship? Or to say it a different way, in our well-meaning attempts to relate to the Almighty, are we inadvertently defiling our worship?
The Westminster Larger Catechism speaks to this very question. It instructs us that one of the duties required in the second commandment is to “keep pure and entire all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath instituted in His Word.” What the catechism is saying, is that the only way to know whether our worship is proper and true, is to consult with the Word of God, since God has perfectly revealed how we are to worship Him within the pages of Holy Scripture. 
If you are familiar with the theological phrase, the Catechism draws from and builds upon a concept known as the “Regulative Principle of Worship,” which is a foundational concept in Reformed theology and worship. The Regulative Principle asserts that God instituted the acceptable way of worshipping Him in the Scriptures and that anything not commanded in the Scriptures concerning worship is strictly forbidden. We may only do what God has commanded when it comes to worship. And if God has not explicitly commanded something, we have no permission to do it in worship.
The Fury of God Toward’s Images
As previously mentioned, God explicitly dictates how we are to worship Him. We do not have the liberty to offer any ritualistic act we fancy and expect He will respond with joyful pleasure. He is not like the doting mother who puts every sub-par scribbling prominently positioned on her fridge. He has revealed what pleases Him, which is worship conducted in accordance with the Scripture. If we deviate from Scripture, and do things God has not sanctioned, we do not invite His pleasure, but instead His wrath.
Take Cain, for instance. He arrogantly assumed that he could present whatever withered vegetable he wanted, thinking God would have to accept it. The text tells us that He brought “some of the fruits” of the ground, whereas his brother brought the very best of the flock for his sacrifice. In this, God had great regard for Abel and his offering. But, for Cain, God did not have regard and eventually put him under a life and world-altering curse.
Remember also the Israelites, who in their foolishness, fashioned a golden calf and declared, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). They even had the audacity to call this idol Yahweh, thinking they could worship the true God through a graven image. Rather than God praising their effort, or awarding them a participation trophy for trying their best, God responded with swift and torrential fury. God commanded the Levites to go all throughout the cam slaughtering their kin, resulting in three thousand deaths. The people might have thought, “What’s the big deal? We’re still worshiping Yahweh, we are just doing so with a visual aid to help us connect with Him better.” But God did not grant any validity to their line of thinking.
Consider one more example: Nadab and Abihu. These men were of the priestly order; they were Aaron’s sons, and they were given specific instructions on how to bring holy fire into the sanctuary of God. Unfortunately, Nadab and Abihu presumed upon the grace of God. They downplayed His holy prescriptions, presented fire in an unregulated way, and God responded to them, by raining fire on top of their heads (Leviticus 10:1-2). And as the ashes of his dead sons still smoked, God told Aaron not to shed a tear about it, since there boys dared to provoke the fury of God (Leviticus 10:6).
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