Much more of the time, imitation of God slides, ever so subtly, into replacement of God. We do that thing that we do. We take his place, and soon it is our honor that we are concerned about, our law that is being breached, and our own needs that are stirring us to passionate rage.

Justified Human Anger
There are a few examples in the Scriptures of human anger that would appear to be justified, but only a few. What follows is not a selection of examples; it is, so far as we can see, the entire list!
When Moses comes down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, he hears the sound of wild revelry. We read that “Moses’ anger burned hot” when he hears this (Ex. 32:19). The narrative makes clear that the anger of Moses is precisely in line with the anger of God. Moses is right to be angered by the people’s idolatry.
When the people of Jabesh-Gilead are threatened with atrocities by their Ammonite enemies, and Saul hears of it, we read that “the Spirit of God rushed upon Saul when he heard these words, and his anger was greatly kindled” (1 Sam. 11:6). The close link between the Spirit coming upon Saul and his anger strongly suggests that this was a righteous anger.

Christopher Ash and Steve Midgley explore the root and character of human anger, examine the righteous anger of God, and offer readers practical wisdom about the way the gospel can gradually transform a heart of anger into a heart filled with the love of God.

When John the Baptist comes face-to-face with religious hypocrisy, he burns with anger. “You brood of vipers!” he declares in the heat of his righteous indignation (Matt. 3:7). He is right to be angry.
When the apostle Paul visits Corinth and sees the ever-present idolatry and the insult to the honor of the one true God, “his spirit [is] provoked within him” (Acts 17:16). This indicates a hot anger in his spirit. The only other time this word, provoked, is used in the New Testament is in 1 Corinthians 13:5, where it also refers to getting angry. But whereas in 1 Corinthians 13 love contradicts a wrong anger, in Acts 17 it would seem that Paul experiences a right anger.
Is It Right?
So when God asks of us the question, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (cf. Jonah 4:4 NIV), the answer may sometimes, just sometimes, be a qualified yes. And yet even then, in most of our experiences, even our most righteous anger is tinged with ungodliness. A trivial example will suffice to make this point. I was crossing a side road not far from where it left a main road. As I stepped off the sidewalk, a car on the main road turned into the side road without signaling, and I had to dodge out of its way. I was angry. Had you asked me why I was angry, I might have said this: “I am angry because this behavior threatens the good, moral order of society.”
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Don’t mistake Butterfield’s confidence for pride. Her heart throughout the book proclaims this message (my paraphrase): “God the sovereign creator brilliantly and beautifully designed men and women. We should obey what he tells us. We should live according to his design. We shouldn’t believe lies.” That assertiveness may strike some people as arrogant since it goes against the grain of worldly thinking, but worldly thinking goes against the grain of reality. Christians should not be embarrassed of anything that is true, especially anything that God has revealed in Scripture: “This book is for Christians not embarrassed by the Bible and its teaching on women’s roles and callings. An unbreakable biblical logic connects God’s design for men and women, God’s standards for sexual behavior, and the Bible’s teaching on sex roles in the family, church, and world” (p. xx).

Rosaria Butterfield used to be a lesbian activist who lived with a woman partner while serving as a tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University in New York. Now she is a Christian who is married to a Presbyterian pastor and who invests her time as a homeschool mom and grandmother and as a hospitable neighbor in North Carolina. (When she wrote this book, her four adopted children spanned ages sixteen to thirty-four.) The title of her new book specifies what she is warning against: Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023).
Butterfield’s Thesis
Here is one way to summarize Butterfield’s thesis: Don’t believe our culture’s lies about God’s design for men and women. She presents five lies and explains, “What all these lies have in common is they don’t think that God had a plan and purpose when he created men and women” (p. 290). At the root of the lies is what she calls “our nation’s reigning idol, a formidable monolith represented by the letters LGBTQ and the symbol +” (p. xxi; cf. p. 91).
Lie #1: Homosexuality Is Normal
The lie: The way you feel defines who you are. For example, if you are a female who feels sexually attracted only to women, then you are a lesbian. You have a homosexual orientation that is immutable. That is your core truth. That is your identity. And it is an identity that is good and normal.
According to “gay Christians,” a person’s homosexual orientation is morally neutral—like being blind or deaf. It’s not a sin that you should repent of. The church should not just welcome but empathetically approve of “sexual minorities.” When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is equally fallen.
The truth: Our sinful feelings do not determine our core identity. Those with homosexual desires are responsible to mortify their sinful desires. “The normalization of homosexuality is the central controlling narrative of our anti-Christian age” (p. 33). “Sexual orientation, a secular concept, began in the nineteenth century. You will not find the concept of sexual orientation in the Bible” (p. 67). “It all comes down to this: Do you trust your feelings, or do you trust the word of God?” (p. 98). We should have sympathy for those enslaved to sexual sin, but we should not empathize with the sin itself.
The identity narrative makes sense in our culture because people have swallowed the lie of intersectionality—the idea that the world consists of power struggles between oppressors (e.g., white, male, heterosexual, Christian, fit, free) and the oppressed (e.g., person of color, female, LGBTQ+, non-Christian, overweight, incarcerated). “Today, failing to affirm LGBTQ+ rights is considered an act of harm. … Today, even in the church, it seems, accepting someone without approving her is to reject her” (p. 59). Harm is now psychological, not material. The way to accrue social status is to claim an intersection of victim statuses. This creates a community that is “fractured, victim-minded, angry, and inconsolable”; it is “identity politics on steroids” and devoid of “a biblical category of sin” (p. 61). “The victimized identities that emerge from intersectionality are perpetually immature and in constant need of therapy and affirmation” (p. 62).
When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is not equally fallen: “The heterosexual pattern is natural even if a particular practice is sinful, as in adultery. If a man and a woman are committing fornication but they come to Christ and repent of their sin, they could someday get married and live in God’s obedience and blessing. But if a man and a man in a homosexual relationship come to Christ, they would need to break up in order to live in obedience and blessing. … Homosexual sin is a violation against both God’s pattern of creation and the moral law of God, while heterosexual sin violates the moral law of God exclusively” (p. 304). The hermeneutic that justifies women pastors is the same hermeneutic that justifies LGBTQ+. “Egalitarianism is the highway to LGBTQ+ church leadership” (p. 75).
Lie #2: Being a Spiritual Person Is Kinder Than Being a Biblical Christian
The lie: A spiritual person finds true spirituality inside himself or herself. Everything shares in a single divine power. Distinctions and hierarchies are abusive and violent.
The truth: There are two realities—God and not-God (i.e., the Creator and creation). And there are two kinds of people—those who love the triune God and those who defy him. It is not kind to be a person who misleads others to defy the Creator by living contrary to reality.
Lie #3: Feminism Is Good for the World and the Church
The lie: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is wrong. Male headship is a result of the fall. The Bible does not require a wife to submit to her husband, nor does the Bible forbid women from serving as pastors or elders. The traditional view results in sexual abuse. Any male-female sexual relationship that rejects sameness (i.e., interchangeability) and calls a wife to submit to her husband is foundational to rape culture.
The truth: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is true, good, and beautiful.

“A godly woman who is the wife of a godly man is receptive, teachable, and life-giving, her beauty increasing with her age because her Christian character is being more and more sanctified. … At its most basic distinction, God created men for strength, women for nurturance, and both for the other, her submission yielding to his headship creating the harmony of mutual work and worship of God. The simplicity, beauty, and perfection of the creation ordinance may be marred by sin but not by the designer’s perfect plan” (p. 158).
“A helpmate is not a doormat. She is smart and strong and knows how to think and advise her husband when called upon. While she may also have a job or career that contributes to the household, being a helpmate means that the husband’s vocation comes first” (p. 172).
“A godly woman is not called to universal submission. She is called to submit to her husband, elders, and civil authorities” (p. 161).
“A Christian’s best defense against abuse of all authority is membership in a biblically faithful church” (p. 162).
“When feminism is the interpretative tool for reading Scripture, the powerful, supernatural word of God shrinks into an easily manipulated tool of sociology, revealing power plays and oppressors and offering no hope beyond its creation of new possibilities and new words to express one’s never-ending hurt” (p. 177).
“Feminism’s war against patriarchy isn’t its only problem. By denying the centrality of the creation ordinance in defining woman and her glory, feminism insults women. Worse still, feminism can’t offer the protections against violence that it promises. In fact, feminism has become a place of such confusion that it cannot define what a woman is without offending the LGBTQ+ movement—especially the T part (transgenderism)” (p. 189).

Lie #4: Transgenderism Is Normal
The lie: Your sex is gender-fluid. The biological sex you are born as does not necessarily correspond to your gender. It is normal for a person recognized as a male at birth to later realize that he is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body. How you feel is the real you. There are more than just two sexes (the traditional gender binary is wrong), and there are even more genders. If your child is transitioning, you must comply or else you will be guilty of that child’s suicide: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
The truth: God created mankind as either male or female. There are only two sexes—male and female. God designed males to be masculine, and God designed females to be feminine. It is sinful for a man to be effeminate or for a woman to be masculine.
Tragically, transgenderism has become “the cool and cutting-edge expression of individuality” (p. 198). The question “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” is manipulative. The solution to a sinful desire—in this case, the sin of envy—is to put that sinful desire to death. The solution is not to enable your child’s sinful desires by pumping the body with hormones that do irreparable damage and by mutilating healthy body parts (“to lance off breasts and purge ovaries in the name of emancipation” [p. 199]).​​ “Love holds people to the impartial, objective, and safe standard of God’s truth, not the malleability of sinful desires and the posturing of sinful people” (p. 204).
Lie #5: Modesty Is an Outdated Burden That Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back
The lie: It is oppressive to call women to dress and act differently than men. If a woman dresses provocatively and entices a man to sinfully lust after her, then that is not the concern of the woman at all; it is solely the man’s problem. If a woman wants to exhibit her body or to express herself loudly and freely in an “unladylike” way, then male oppression shouldn’t hold her back.
The truth: “A godly woman is a modest woman” (p. 267). Butterfield approvingly quotes how Martha Peace and Kent Keller define modesty and immodesty:

modesty: “an inner attitude of the heart motivated by a love for God that seeks His glory through purity and humility; it often reveals itself in words, actions, expressions, and clothes”
immodesty: “an attitude of the heart that expresses itself with inappropriate words, actions, expressions and/or clothes that are flirtatious, manipulative, revealing, or suggestive of sensuality or pride”

Butterfield asserts, “No Christian woman wants to be seen in the eyes of God as a ‘provoking object.’ Women, don’t minimize the seriousness to your own soul if Satan uses you as a tool for any reason” (p. 278).
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In 10 topical chapters, Chang considers various facets of Spurgeon’s ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, ranging from church leadership and congregationalism to the ordinances and membership. He invites us to study Spurgeon as one who thought deeply about the local church and who therefore “remains a valuable conversation partner for pastors today.”

Everyone is a theologian, R. C. Sproul rightly observed. Anyone with ideas or beliefs about God is doing theology. It may be poorly considered, but it’s theology nonetheless.
By the same token, it might be said that everyone has an ecclesiology, a doctrine of the church. We all have beliefs or assumptions about what the church is, why it exists, and how it ought to function. Rarely do we pause, though, to think deeply about these things. Even among pastors, the incessant demands of ministry often pull us toward fixing urgent problems while neglecting larger questions. What does healthy pastoral ministry look like? What matters most in the life of my church? Am I shepherding God’s flock in a way that pleases him?
In Spurgeon the Pastor: Recovering a Biblical and Theological Vision for Ministry, Geoffrey Chang shows why the 19th-century Baptist expositor should be regarded as more than “the Prince of Preachers”—he should be studied as an example of a faithful pastor. Chang—assistant professor of church history and historical theology and curator of the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary—contends there’s “no better model of faithful pastoral ministry and commitment to the local church” than Spurgeon (2).

In 10 topical chapters, Chang considers various facets of Spurgeon’s ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, ranging from church leadership and congregationalism to the ordinances and membership. He invites us to study Spurgeon as one who thought deeply about the local church and who therefore “remains a valuable conversation partner for pastors today” (5).
First Things First
We have a fascinating propensity to overcomplicate things. Just as Naaman couldn’t fathom that his leprosy would be healed by bathing in the appointed waters (2 Kings 5), we can have a lurking suspicion there must be more to church than a covenant community preaching the gospel and practicing the ordinances.
When we doubt the sufficiency of God’s appointed means for ordering his church, we begin to seek out every manner of man-made scheme to make up for what’s lacking. The result is churches who will try everything except the relatively few things most essential to a biblically healthy church. Is it possible that our never-ending church innovations and strategic ministry “breakthroughs” reveal a lack of faith in God’s own design for his church?
Spurgeon never tired of the simplest strategies, because he believed they were biblically warranted: corporate prayer, congregational singing, and the reading and preaching of God’s Word. He was convinced that people’s primary need is to hear the gospel—and that preaching is the primary means by which it happens.
Shepherding the Masses
None of this means a stripped-down, simplified approach is always best. Sunday-morning attendance at the Metropolitan Tabernacle numbered in the thousands, and weekly church life was remarkably busy. By his 50th birthday, Spurgeon’s congregation supported some 66 entities. The busyness wasn’t in spite of Spurgeon’s straightforward ecclesiology but a natural byproduct of it.
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