For many, the God of the Bible is dead, as the title page of Time Magazine said way back in 1966: “God is Dead.” Ridgley’s conclusions also challenge the church in its attempt to interact through cultural apologetics. How do we address—with the gospel—a culture that has lost its view of classic morals? We are in the situation of early Christianity, surrounded by pagan Rome, where citizens do not know the God of the Bible. 

Many sociologists now speak about the arrival of the post-Christian era in both America and the West in general. Way back in 1976, Newsweek Magazine spoke of “the year of the evangelical.” But church attendance is down in America. Young people abandon any semblance of their childhood faith as soon as they set foot in a university. This is a great concern in our churches. The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis of national sentiment over the past 25 years on: 

      Religion: 62% in 1998 vs 39% today.
      Having kids: 59% in 1998 vs 30% today.
      Community involvement: 47% in 1998 vs 27% today.
      Patriotism: 70% in 1998 vs 38% today.[1]
      The number of weddings: 40% lower in 2000 than in 1970

Star Parker, a black Christian intellectual gives similar figures and sees the sign of a “nation committing suicide.”[2]
While 20th century unbelief was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere, as astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream culture.[3]  Such an abandon of personal biblical faith has some obvious causes. Many universities, for instance, have become centers of Marxist training and/or Critical Race Theory, both of which are based on a godless post-modernism, generally called Wokism. George Floyd’s death affected major institutions—from federal agencies to Fortune 100 companies. Encouraged by the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, such organizations hastily pledged themselves to the new flag of Wokism. They gave multi-millions to groups like Black Lives Matter and promoted a revised version of morality preached through DEI—“diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Wokism’s leaders insist that America is fundamentally racist and they demand “antiracist discrimination” (a technical term used to discriminate against people identified as racist) to produce “racial equity.” This semi-religious ideology abhors “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and “antiracism.” Racism in America today is, to a very significant degree, a manufactured problem, crafted by woke Leftists in order to overthrow the American way of life. Most major cities, many major companies, the educational system and the government’s policymaking apparatus all bow down together before the god of Wokism. 
Few Christian students seem trained or qualified to know how to answer such powerful ideological opposition. Indeed, as we will note below, students have been deliberately trained into a Wokist viewpoint. The average four-year university now has more DEI officials on its staff than history professors. DEI offices have broadened the meaning of terms like “harassment” and “discrimination” not to promote a welcoming campus environment but to enforce a progressive ideology often proposed as a Marxian counter-revolution, determined by an ideologically driven progressivism.
Those who have lost faith in God need a new moral structure, which Wokism provides by playing on the sensitive conscience of American citizens, especially young Americans. They are told that white supremacy is just like the Marxist description of oppressing owners and oppressed workers. Now it is White oppressors and oppressed minorities—Blacks, women, illegal aliens, gays and trans individuals. Unlike biblical morality, this system does not include forgiveness. Whites remain guilty forever and blacks are doomed to be forever victims. In addition, there is no notion of original sin, no divine justice, and no atoning work of Christ to wash us clean. Alas, this is a false pagan morality in which God is absent. Such thinking has entered many churches under the appeal of moralism—see for instance, Lucas Miles’ Woke Jesus[4] and A.D. Robles’ Social Justice Pharisees.[5] Soon, I hope to treat this more thoroughly, but here I am focusing on the attack against students.
Professor Stanley Ridgley in his book Brutal Minds: Brainwashing in Our Universities,[6] documents that university administrators in particular deliberately intend to undermine a student’s ability to engage in classical academic thinking and to inculcate in them a serious case of “religious” guilt. Ridgley seeks to show “how one of history’s great institutions—the American university—is undergoing an infiltration by an ‘army of mediocrities’ whose goal is to destroy the university as an institution of knowledge-creation and replace it as an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.”[7] Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go,” springs to mind, since Western Civilization courses have truly disappeared. 
The new ideology, now labeled as Wokism, is summed up in a vigorous and progressive political program, which has spread in recent years throughout the culture—in government administrations, businesses and educational facilities— via the prompting of “diversity officers” of DEI, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” In the wake of George Floyd’s death, companies scrambled to hire “chief diversity officers” who would apply DEI, which quickly imposed the new moral principles required by the progressive state. In 2018, fewer than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed a “chief diversity officer.” By 2022, under pressure from state regulations, three out four companies had created such a position.[8] This is also the case in university administrations.
As an example of how far this goes, consider the following incident. In February 2023, Dennis Prager, a Jewish intellectual who promotes conservative values, was invited, along with Christian leader, Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA) to speak at Arizona State University (ASU) for a conference organized by Barrett College, the honors college of ASU. The conference was innocently entitled “Health, Wealth and Happiness.”
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The power of God at work in his word is a power that God intended to be exercised by the faithful ministry of his word. Ministers are sinful people who need to be rebuked, corrected, and shaped by the word that they preach. But, in God’s economy, his plan was always to have sinful people preach it and minister it to others. We must never lose sight of the call to let the word do the work, but never assume that labouring in the word and with the word is a failure to let the word do the work. By God’s incredible grace and mercy, and by his unfathomable power, he wills to work in and through his word as we minister it. 

An Uneasy Relationship with the Scriptures
As we start to explore what it means to tremble at God’s word, I want to suggest that our relationship with the Scriptures as God’s word is more complex than most of us are willing to admit. On the one hand, we know that Scripture is powerful, it is the Word of God. The preacher’s job is to get out of the way so that God’s powerful word can work in the hearts of people. We quote Spurgeon’s famous, ‘Defend the Bible, I’d sooner defend a lion. Just let the truth free and it will defend itself.’ We exhort each other to ‘let the word do the work’ and we share those wonderful stories of people who were converted just by reading Scripture. On this view, we as preachers are in danger of muddying the power and beauty and wonder of Scripture by anything that we say and do. Applying the word of God can feel like an activity where we move beyond the Scriptures and are taking responsibility for people’s godliness into our hands rather than leaving it in the hands of the Holy Spirit. However, it is easy to parrot the ‘let the word for the work’ line and naively misunderstand the power and responsibility we have in ministry. After all, we choose the books of the Bible we teach and the chunks they are taught in. Additionally, years are invested in Bible college education developing exegetical skills. Why do we invest so much time and money if the preacher is doing nothing? A moment’s thoughtful reflection should reveal that there are complex ities in what we espouse and what we do. I think we have what I might call an ‘uneasy’ relationship with Scripture.
What does it mean to be faithful Bible teachers? How powerful is God’s word? And what part do we play in bringing that word to bear and ministering it in people’s lives?
God’s Powerful Word
What God’s Word does
A quick survey of the Scriptures reveals many ways that the power of God’s word is articulated. God’s word creates. God said let there be and there was. Ex Nihilo. Out of nothing. God did not fashion the world out of what already existed. He spoke, and things that were not, suddenly were. God is the creator, and we are the creatures. God is powerful enough, simply by a word, to create. The same word that creates also reveals. The God who spoke creation into being spoke to that creation. He made himself known. He explained himself to us, his world to us and he explained us to us (1 Cor 2:11; Rom 7:7). The word which creates and reveals must also be the word that judges. A holy and pure God cannot speak to fallen and sinful creatures without them experiencing the awfulness of sin and rebellion against God (Heb 4:12-13). It is with relief that the same word that creates, reveals, and judges, is also the word which raises the dead (John 11:43-44; 1 Pet 1:23). The Word which made something out of nothing is the same Word that brings life from the dead. God’s people are declared right, forgiven, cleansed, and made holy by the work of Christ brought to bear in our lives through the Word of God. And so, the word of God is powerful enough to relate us rightly to God and to each other, and to transform us to be like the one who was raised from the dead as our Lord and friend. We believe that the word of God is powerful, but how does it do all these things? How does it reveal, judge, relate us to God and transform us?
How God’s Word does What it does
God’s Relationship with His Word
When we talk about God and his word, we speak of a relationship that is utterly unique in our experience. God’s word is not like our word in at least two very significant ways. Firstly, his words always represent him truly. There is no gap between what he says and who he is. Secondly, God is always present when his word is spoken. This is a very big difference from us. When we speak, our words can be reported by others. They can come in a letter, an email or a text that can be read and interpreted apart from our presence. But whenever and wherever God’s word is read, God is there. He is there working for salvation or for judgement.
For both reasons, God’s word is full of his power and goodness. God’s word does what God does because it comes with all the power, authority and goodness of God who is at work in his world. We live in a world where goodness and authority are opposed. In fact, goodness is what is necessary to stand up to authority because, by and large, authority is viewed as evil. Authority restricts my autonomy, and my humanness. And so, what is good is what thwarts authority and allows autonomy to thrive. Of course, we know from the Scriptures, that God’s world works in exactly the opposite way. The acceptance of God’s authority is fundamental to goodness because God is fundamentally good. There is no alternate truth, no container of righteousness, no abstract definition of good that stands over and against God in order that we might judge God; no, biblically, good is what God is. He is the origin and definition of all that is good. We live in a world that wants to define goodness apart from God, and God will ultimately judge it. But this also means that when he speaks into our world, we ought to expect people to reject His goodness at every turn. This is always the way the world has been: Satan questioned God’s goodness and Adam and Eve rejected God’s authority.
The prophets spoke and were scorned. We live in the last days when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths (2 Tim 4:3-4). God’s goodness and authority are mutually entwined in his person. They are deeply related issues in all of Scripture, fundamental to our understanding of sin and the human condition. In our sin we have rejected God’s authority and in so doing rejected God’s goodness. Nevertheless, God’s word has the power to judge us, raise us, relate us to him and transform us because God is present with his word and his word never fails to reveal him perfectly – in all his goodness and power.
God Speaks Intelligible Words
They are not words that mean nothing until the Spirit changes their meaning in our hearing.
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Instead of reaching for ‘how much…’ questions, we are better asking, ‘what does Jesus deserve from me?’ We should take the focus off what we will do for Jesus, as though we are paying him back, and instead ask ourselves what Jesus deserves from us. Again, any answer that falls short of our whole selves is simply wrong.

If your wife tells you she loves you, if you value your features, I’d suggest you don’t respond to her declaration with, ‘how much do I need to love you in return?’ As far as love for your wife goes, most questions beginning with ‘how much do I need to…’ will not end well. And, let’s be honest, rightly so.
There are certain relationships where ‘how much’ is a perfectly valid question, of course. The relationship I have with every shopkeeper I try to engage in business pretty much starts and ends with that question. ‘How much does it cost?’ is about the only valid question in that scenario. But then, neither me nor any local shopkeepers are claiming to love one another. It is a mere business transaction and literally nothing more.
Which of these scenarios, do you think, more closely represents your relationship with Christ? Which, do you think, more closely mirrors your relationship to the local church? I am sure few of us would seriously argue for the latter. Jesus calls the church the apple of his eye and his bride. There is no doubt that Jesus is saying, ‘I love you’. If we wouldn’t ask our wife, ‘and exactly how much affection, and how much evidence of me loving you, will suffice, y’know, to have done my duty?’ I’m not sure what makes any of us think that is an appropriate thing to say to the Lord.
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