Lead Your Heart
The heart is deceitful and not worth following. Let’s replace a foolish heart-following with a bold and Biblical heart-leading. God gives us new hearts in Christ, and we are no longer bound to obey sin, so we can actually lead our hearts in a way that pleases God.
It is popular to say (and mock) the cliché, “Follow your heart.” And while I’d love to mock the idea with all of you, I thought it might be better to provide an alternative. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to give the alternative, because the Bible gives the alternative. But before I do that, the Bible makes it plain that the heart is not to be followed. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer 17:9). That deceitful heart is not to be trusted. So if we aren’t to follow our hearts, then what should we do?
Get a New Heart
The first thing that needs to happen is that you need to get a new heart. That old heart is deceitful and crooked. It doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be replaced. And by God’s grace, when someone turns to Christ for salvation, a spiritual heart transplant happens. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Eze 36:26). God has promised to remove that old, stony heart and replace it with a real, living heart. This new heart has new affections and new desires, and now has the capacity to respond to God in His word. If you don’t have this new heart, nothing else I say in this post will matter. So if you are not a Christian, stop here. The next bit of information is impossible without a new heart. Repent and believe the gospel. God always gives that new heart to those who turn from their sins and trust in the finished work of Christ.
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America’s Not-So-Great Awakening
American Awakening is packed with biblical wisdom for Christians of every color, both sexes, and almost all political persuasions. But if you’re a Christian who’s attracted to identity politics, Mitchell wants to convince you that what’s attracting you isn’t a legitimate political extension of Christianity but rather an idolatrous substitute. His chief claim is that “Christianity has not disappeared from America; rather, the Christian categories of transgression and innocence have moved into politics” (34). And unless they’re moved back where they belong, our society is doomed.
False Atonement: Scapegoating Straight White Men
Christianity teaches the doctrine of original sin—all mankind is fallen in Adam and inherits his guilt and stain at birth. The only way to have our stain removed is by having it transferred onto the divine Scapegoat, Jesus Christ, who bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Pet. 2:24; cf. Isa. 53:6; John 1:29). This is the heart of the Christian gospel: salvation by substitution. What can wash away our sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
But when this message is rejected, the need for cleansing doesn’t just disappear. Instead, we seek to cover our guilt by other means, either engaging in penance ourselves or else finding scapegoats to blame. This has been a driving force for false religions throughout history: the effort to achieve innocence by scapegoating something (or someone), thus appeasing the gods.
When scapegoating moves from religion into politics, we get identity politics. And according to Mitchell, “The scapegoat identity politics offers up for sacrifice is the white, heterosexual man. If he is purged, its adherents imagine, the world itself, along with the remaining groups in it, will be cleansed of stain” (xxi).
Straight white males make a natural scapegoat (I speak as one). In intersectional scorekeeping, we rank dead last. As males, we’re guilty of oppressing women. As whites, we’re guilty of oppressing racial minorities. As heterosexuals, we’re guilty of oppressing those who identify as LGBT+. And worse, according to identity politics, we’ve also “broken the world…economically by [our] invention of capitalism…and environmentally by the greed of [our] industrial capitalism unleashed” (72).
Some of these concerns are legitimate. All of them also require clarification. But, as a whole, this condemnation feels like an updated version of the old “white man’s burden,” only this time with white men cast as the villain instead of the hero.
Mitchell presses the religious nature of this scapegoating further. In embracing his role as scapegoat, the straight white male doesn’t literally have to die (though hopefully demographic destiny will diminish him in due time). But he’s required to forever engage in acts of “innocence signaling.” In a Passover-like ritual, he must display the acceptable “signs of innocence on his front door—or more likely, his office door—for all to see.” Examples include stickers declaring “This office is green,” announcements about upcoming “diversity training,” and New York Times articles excoriating Donald Trump (xxiv–xxv). When they see the blood, they’ll pass over you. Just remember, this is a daily ritual, not a yearly one—so gird up your loins.
Some might wonder if Mitchell is blind to the genuine racial injustices of the past (or present) or whether he may be unwittingly carrying water for true racists. I don’t think he is. He spends an entire section of the book condemning the alt-right as yet another perverse alternative to Christianity (104–20).
But given how broadly the definition of racism has been expanded (10), in addition to being lumped in with other dubious social justice issues (like LGBT+ rights), Christians of all colors will have to risk being falsely accused of this sin by certain hostile sectors of the American public. Our goal is to not actually be a glutton or a drunkard or a racist—rather than to avoid being called one at any cost (Matt. 11:19). God knows our hearts, and he’ll vindicate all who truly love him and his people on the Last Day, if not sooner. -
Simple Words of Faith
In this portion of 2 Kings there is a slave girl who upon hearing that the commander of the army suffered from leprosy told him of a prophet of the LORD in Israel, a man by the name of Elisha. Her simple faith and willingness to share the good news with a man of his stature cannot go unnoticed. The world would say that she should show spite to this man who had caused her repression, yet her first impulse is to gently help her captor with the problems he had.
It’s interesting how many times gentile military leaders are used to give an example to the grace and mercy of God, which brings me to one of my favorite stories in the Bible, the healing of Naaman the Syrian General. So many “oppressors” are granted a place in Jehovah’s providential care, which makes Naaman’s entrance into the story of salvation all the more amazing. In this portion of 2 Kings there is a slave girl who upon hearing that the commander of the army suffered from leprosy told him of a prophet of the LORD in Israel, a man by the name of Elisha. Her simple faith and willingness to share the good news with a man of his stature cannot go unnoticed. The world would say that she should show spite to this man who had caused her repression, yet her first impulse is to gently help her captor with the problems he had. This act of affection for a neighbor should be instructive to us, especially when we live in and time and place that thinks returning evil for evil is the name of the game in seeking “justice”.
In some ways she has a lot in common with the words of the woman at the well in John 4 when she goes and tells her friends about this man who told her everything she had ever done, the testimony of the women who report the resurrection to the disciples, and Rhoda’s work in Acts 12:13. Each in their own way are conduits to God’s grace by their willingness to speak in love. Much of the Lord’s purposes in His creation are accomplished through avenues we least expect.
There are so many elements to the girl’s testimony to Naaman that are worth looking at that it could fill a whole volume (indeed it has). There us, as noted, a seemingly random interaction (though we know there is no such thing in God’s providence) between a servant and a man of place. There is should be no sense where this lamentable action, the enslaving of those grabbed in war, could be a scene of God’s gracious love, yet it seems like it is especially in these types of situations where the LORD particularly enjoys expressing His goodness and mercy. Similarly with the gentile woman whom Christ speaks to in Matthew 15, the Centurion in Mark 15, and the other Roman soldier in Luke 7, and of course the care of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 there are many instances where the very folks that the people of God are found to be disliking shame them in their faith and trust in the promises of Jehovah, even if at the time they are not the focus of it.
But back to Naaman for a second. It’s not just the 1 Peter 3:15 work of the slave girl that is worth highlighting in the passage.
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The Great Need of the Hour for Christians
If judgment begins with the house of God, and we know the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God (1 Pet. 4:17), then the greatest need of the moment is for us to display before the world a broken and contrite heart in true humility and repentance.
One of the most important things Christians should talk about right now is repentance. With the plethora of problems we are facing at the moment, the fact is that, almost universally, among Christians, there lacks a deep humbling of ourselves before the Lord in true repentance.
It really is the height of arrogance for us to avoid the question of why nothing is going well. We are plagued by wars and rumors of wars, economic fall-out, corrupt leadership, and a lingering pestilence that has brought mass confusion as we watch the systematic destruction of a nation before our eyes. And the people seem to expect the government to save us as de facto God. Yet, we angrily respond in outrage to the newest hypocrisy of the day, lobbing “gotcha articles” for our side and the corresponding pot shots toward our enemies. But maybe we’re missing the real issue, the most important of issues.
Fire from the Throne
The reason things are not going well and why it feels like everything is going to hell in a hand basket is because temporary judgments are being issued from the throne room of heaven. You cannot have this kind of chaos, disorder, abuse, sickness, and confusion apart from what David called the heavy hand of the Lord. But Christians, by and large, seem afraid to talk about God’s temporary judgments. For clarity, I’m not talking about the Pat Robertson kind of stuff, namely, that God is judging because of some specific group of sinners. Jesus corrected that thinking in Luke 13. Let’s move on from that to a right understanding of dark providence.
We sing from the psalms that Christ “judges the nations” (Ps. 110:6) and executes justice on oppressors, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven in the present (Rom. 1:18ff). We are told from the book of Revelation (a book meant to encourage the church in times of great persecution and satanic assault by the corrupt, beastly governments of this world) that God, in answering our cries and prayers, throws fire back down on the earth. That this fire comes in the forms of the “earth burning up” or the “sea becoming blood” or the “water becoming bitter” is meant to be understood as God answering the cries of his elect (see Rev. 8).
Symptoms of the World’s Panicked Response
Why then are Christians falling apart in shock over the things that are happening on the earth? The governmental grabs for power, the ungodly responses, and the many oppressions in the earth by the wicked are desperate attempts to “save Babylon” from heaven’s divine blows. Yet, we act like we can stop this and “save America.” We sit in front of our computers and yell angrily at the wicked for taking our “freedoms and rights” as if our purpose is to bring calm to the storm in America through activism on social media. Does anyone stop and think for a minute that what we are facing are symptoms of the world’s panicked response due to divine judgments from the throne? God hears the cries of his people; when we pray, he repays—this is what deliverance from Egypt by plague should have taught us.
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