Tulip: Perseverance of the Saints
God is shaping the perfect figure of you into what will be your resurrected body and glorified soul. You’ve been sanctified positionally so the sanctification of your person is sure to continue until it’s completion.
Think of a cup being filled to the brim—or inflating a children’s play castle or a basketball to its entire design. The thing being pervaded is what it is, but it is in the process of functioning fully and living up to its potential and peak performance until completely full.
Such gets at the sense of the Hebrew for “perfect” in Psalm 138:a[1], which reads, The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me. David takes consolation in the idea that God will completely fulfill him and accomplish His purposes in him toward his chief end. The text teaches that our perfect God will perfectly perfect His people. So Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:24, Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.
God never discards His people as unfinished projects. First Corinthians 1:8 reads, Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
What is the basis of this profound assurance that Christians will undoubtedly have fought the good fight and finished their race? The second part of Psalm 138:8 tells us: … thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever. God’s mercy, ḥesed in the Hebrew, is a word pregnant with promise expressing His covenant loyalty to His people. It is used in Psalm 136 at the end of each of twenty-six verses as a corporate, antiphonal exclamation.[2] God’s faithful covenantal mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23). So Christian, you can never lose your salvation and you will grow in your sanctification into the perfect you in Christ. In answer to the last part of Psalm 138:8, Jesus says He will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5)![3]
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A Prophet of School Choice
Written by Matthew H. Lee |
Thursday, December 7, 2023For Machen, the great benefit of these school choice reforms was that they would empower parents to oversee their children’s education. As he stated to the Sentinels, the hope is that “we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience.” School choice policies enacted and expanded this year promote this noble end and serve as an unexpected tribute to Machen on the hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism.
This year is the centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s magnum opus, Christianity and Liberalism.
Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote the book in response to a rising tide of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States. Machen’s views ultimately led him out of his denomination and out of Princeton Seminary, both of which accepted more liberal and modernist tendencies, and led him to help found two enduring institutions—Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936).
While Machen’s achievements are chiefly theological, he wrote and spoke extensively about education, where he observed some of the deteriorating effects of liberalism. One hundred years of policy and research have proven Machen prescient in his views on education policy, which can largely be grouped into three themes: resistance against standardization, opposition to centralization, and insistence on parental choice.
Resistance Against Standardization
First, Machen resisted trends to standardize both the teaching profession and student learning. The Lusk Laws in New York, for example, required teachers to obtain certification from the commissioner of education and made them subject to state visitation. Though repealed in 1923, less than two years after they passed, the spirit of the Lusk Laws endures. Nearly every state requires teachers to obtain some certification, often in addition to holding a degree in the field of education, despite the fact that research fails to document evidence of a meaningful link between certification and teacher quality.
Machen believed the modernist trend of training teachers in the science of education, rather than with content in their disciplines, marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of what teaching is. He lamented that the primary preparation of modern teachers was not “to study the subject that he is going to teach. Instead of studying the subject that he is going to teach, he studies ‘education.’”
In Machen’s view, the great danger in standardization and in emphasizing methodology over content is that it would place the child “under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life, who proceed to prevent any such acquaintance being gained by those who come under their care.”
Treating education as a mechanistic process would result in “intellectual as well as moral decline” because in such a context, morality is based “upon experience, instead of upon an absolute distinction between right and wrong,” Machen said in a 1926 address to the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization dedicated to resisting federal overreach.
To compensate for the meagerness of character formation in modern education, psychological experts instead try to inject civic and moral values into a standardized, secularized curriculum. Machen wrote about such “morality codes” in a 1925 essay titled “Reforming the Government Schools.” He observed that these codes were “making the situation tenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root.” Today, morality codes have many faces, but the same empty core. Social and emotional learning (SEL), for example, provides analogs for cardinal virtues promoted by classical and Christian education, but absent the thick moral context of religion.
Opposition to Centralization
Machen was also opposed to the centralization of oversight of education in the federal government, a natural extension of his resistance to standardization. In February 1926, a month after his Sentinels address, Machen provided expert testimony on behalf of the Sentinels for a Congressional hearing dealing with several issues, including the formation of a federal Department of Education, which he predicted that if enacted, would be “the worst fate into which any country can fall.” While he helped defeat the proposal for a federal department, his victory was merely temporary, as a federal department of education would eventually be formed as a cabinet-level department in 1980.
Machen was not being hyperbolic in his assessment. Since the establishment of the first federal agency in 1867, which started with only a commissioner and a staff of three, the federal role in education has ballooned. For 2023–24, the Department of Education budgeted over $270 billion in spending—all the more alarming when one considers that the Department of Education accounts for only three-fifths of all federal spending on education. Again, Machen has been vindicated by research, which has failed to document a reliable link between spending and student outcomes.
A common argument for centralized control over education, both in Machen’s day and today, is easily addressed.
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Authoritarian Science and the Case of Hydroxychloroquine
Critical thinking about medicine or any topic requires weighing multiple sources against one another and distinguishing between degrees of certainty, not ruling out all sources of evidence but one and equating “unproven” with “false.” The approach to health information increasingly taken by public officials, reporters, and social media—under which any statement is “unproven” and must be assumed harmful, barring some definitive pronouncement by public health authorities to the contrary—is thus not only authoritarian but also damaging to public health and science as a whole.
Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.
Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.
According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.
Such opinions have influenced not just news coverage but also the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have imposed ever-stricter rules against “misinformation” (meaning, in practice, contradicting American public health authorities). After Fareed and Tyson spoke by invitation at a meeting of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times ran an article noting that the Imperial County Medical Society “had urged supervisors to ‘not contribute to the dissemination of false or misleading information by legitimizing unproven treatments.’” The paper also quoted an executive at an Imperial County hospital, saying, “We need to stick with what we know is approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatments. . . . Misinformation itself ought to be stopped.” In December, Twitter also suspended Tyson’s account for breaking its policies against Covid misinformation.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are “unproven,” and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them—an approach that threatens public health and science alike.
Interest in hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment stretches back at least to 2005, when an in vitro study showed that chloroquine, a very similar compound, might protect against SARS infection. Based on laboratory studies and small clinical trials, medical authorities in China and South Korea recommended chloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment in February 2020.
Some doctors outside East Asia followed. Vladimir Zelenko, a doctor in a Hasidic community in New York, advocated a combination of HCQ, azithromycin (an antibiotic to guard against secondary infections), and a zinc supplement: HCQ increases the uptake of zinc ions into cells, a property that Zelenko surmised might provide antiviral effects. In an open letter in April 2020, Zelenko claimed to have treated about 1,450 patients, including 405 that he judged “high risk,” with only two deaths. Luigi Cavanna, a doctor in Piacenza, Italy, also claimed about the same time that thanks to an HCQ treatment protocol, none of his patients had died and only 5 percent were hospitalized—one-sixth the contemporaneous Italian hospitalization rate of over 30 percent. Many more systematic “observational” studies of HCQ—comparing patients in a hospital or elsewhere who received a drug (because of their own or a doctor’s choice) with those who did not—returned good results both as a treatment of Covid-19 cases (including one large study from the Henry Ford Health System in metropolitan Detroit) and for prevention of Covid-19 in individuals at high exposure risk. One especially striking example of the latter is a set of 11 “case-control” studies from India, where medical authorities recommended but did not mandate a weekly prophylactic dose of HCQ for medical workers. Most of these studies found that workers who took HCQ had reduced odds of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, with especially marked reductions for those who took six or more doses of the protocol.
Medical researchers tend to discount doctors’ reports and observational studies—which, granted, have many potential biases that can’t always be spotted or corrected. For instance, observational studies can underestimate the efficacy of a treatment that’s given more often to sicker patients—or overestimate it, if health-conscious patients are more likely to demand experimental treatments, or if doctors who give ineffective experimental drugs are also more likely to give effective experimental drugs (this latter point was a common and valid criticism of the Henry Ford study). So doctors generally consider randomized trials, which avoid these classes of bias, to be more reliable—though they have drawbacks, too, such as considerably greater expense and, therefore, typically smaller sample sizes.
And most analyses of randomized trials of HCQ—on the basis of which mainstream medical opinion decided that it doesn’t work for Covid-19—do draw negative conclusions. For instance, a February 2021 review by Cochrane, an organization that produces comprehensive reviews of randomized trials, concludes, “HCQ for people infected with COVID‐19 has little or no effect on the risk of death and probably no effect on progression to mechanical ventilation.” Another meta-analysis in Nature by Cathrine Axfors et al. estimates an 11 percent increase in risk of death on the basis of 26 randomized trials.
The results of both meta-analyses were essentially determined by two large, similar trials: the Solidarity trial run by the World Health Organization and the Recovery trial at the University of Oxford. These trials accounted together for over 97 percent of the statistical weight in Cochrane’s main analysis, and both claimed to rule out more than a tiny benefit of HCQ for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
But neither trial disproves claims such as Fareed and Tyson’s. First and most importantly, both trials were on hospitalized patients and are not necessarily applicable to “outpatients” earlier in the disease course. Antiviral treatments work better earlier: for instance, oseltamivir (also known as Tamiflu), an antiviral influenza treatment, works well if started within two days of symptom onset, but not later. In Covid-19, viral load peaks soon after symptom onset, and viral replication has already ceased in most hospitalized patients, guaranteeing that antiviral treatments will have limited effect. One review in The Lancet found that dozens of studies consistently find that viral load in Covid-19 peaks in the first week of symptoms and that “No study detected live virus beyond day 9 of illness.”
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Remember the Father’s Love
With Christ, we are given the gift of eternal life because he paid the ultimate price on our behalf. Thus, in a deep sense, we have a tremendous debt before the Lord in light of our deserved death, the due penalty of the law of sin. We are set free from sin and able to persevere in this broken world because the Lord is with us. Through him, we can look at our brokenness and have hope. Remembering the truth of who we are in Christ—because of his perfect life, atoning death, and victorious resurrection—changes how we live every day and leads us in perseverance against sin.
Beloved, I wonder if you can relate. I remember praying, “Father, my transgressions are ever before me. I do the very thing I hate. Why do you call me ‘son’ despite this wretched body?” I felt hopeless, cursed, and unloved. I heard the gospel’s truth, but, as sexual sins poisoned me, my sinful heart persisted in lying about my identity.
Remember Truth: Our Identity in Christ
For me and for you, believer, the foremost remedy is remembering who we are in Christ. Please turn with me to Romans 8:12–17. I pray you may see the truth today.
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
The Apostle Paul begins verse 12 by drawing a conclusion (“so then”) from verses 9–11, which talk about union with Christ. In union with Christ, life is enabled by the Spirit even though our mortal bodies are bound to die in sin. This is why Paul says believers are “debtors” in verse 12—without Christ, death is the only thing at work in us. But with Christ, we are given the gift of eternal life because he paid the ultimate price on our behalf. Thus, in a deep sense, we have a tremendous debt before the Lord in light of our deserved death, the due penalty of the law of sin.
We are set free from sin and able to persevere in this broken world because the Lord is with us. Through him, we can look at our brokenness and have hope.
Remembering the truth of who we are in Christ—because of his perfect life, atoning death, and victorious resurrection—changes how we live every day and leads us in perseverance against sin.
Remember Faith: Our Adoption in Christ
Death means complete separation from God (v. 13). The only way to avoid death is to abandon the flesh. “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” But how can any of us accomplish this? Truly, we cannot! That is why Paul grounds our actions in this foundation: “by the Spirit.” In faith, we need to remember two things from this verse.First, believers can’t be only passive about their faith in Jesus. A movement needs to take place. Because of the cross, believers are enabled—or, perhaps, conditioned—to mortify sin. If you belong to Jesus, there will always be something in your heart telling you to fight against fleshly evil. You are simply no longer driven by sin but life in Christ. Coming to faith in Jesus is necessarily connected with actively fighting sin: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5).
Second, we don’t have the strength to fight the good fight on our own. We come short of being able to do anything about these deeds of the flesh—pornography, abusive traumas, torn families, and never-ending, painful days of suffering. We are utterly incapable of fixing it—it’s too much. This is why Paul exhorts us to put to death the deeds of the body “by the Spirit of God” (v. 14, my emphasis). We are set free from sin and able to persevere in this broken world because the Lord is with us. Through him, we can look at our brokenness and have hope. Though our sins are red like scarlet, we can proclaim “they shall be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:18).
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