God is holy.  All His actions and pronouncements are holy.  They must not and do not deserve to be compromised.  The above represent subtleties in that they do not appear to be active or aggressive evil attitudes or acts.  At least, that is how they might appear to us.  But how do they appear to a holy God?  Slighting or taking lightly His holy character, actions, perspective, or pronouncements dishonors and disrespects Him in every way.

Unholy darkness is so subtle that it may compromise relating to words or actions out of either ignorance or insensibility on the part of some Christians.  Due to the subtleties, a greater need for holy sensibility or awareness needs to be encouraged.  A first experience to this need for me came through another language—French.
My first two years of language studies for missionary service were spent in Montpellier, France: French in my first year and Arabic in my second year.  Members of the French church I attended would invite me to dinners in order to assist my proficiency in the French language through conversation.  One evening, I had dinner with two sisters.  After dinner (Where I had to learn to eat potato chips with a fork and knife!) they pulled out a word game named Diablo (Devil).  It was akin to Scrabble—composing words with lettered tiles.  Unlike Scrabble where an unlettered tile could be used for any letter foregoing a score, this game had the image of a devil on the tile to be used similarly.  One of the words needing another letter was “CHR__ST.”  It was one sister’s turn to add a letter where she could.  She placed the deviled tile in the blank space, spelling “CHRIST” with the devil’s image in the middle of it.  Looking on, I was shocked and thought to myself, “I could never spell such a holy name using a devil to score.  I would forego a turn and lose points rather than combine the unholy with the holy.”  To me—without judging her, I thought such a move lacked holy sensibility.  It was a compromise.
I was also confronted with a frequently-used French exclamation by even some believers.  Coming from the States, I was familiar with commonly uttered profane usage of God’s or Jesus Christ’s name in vain, which is prohibited to all.  It was a while before I recognized the French use of the word God in vain appearing at first innocuous because it didn’t damn anyone or wasn’t used against someone.  It was simply, “Mon Dieu”! (“My God”!).  Eventually, it came to me as virtually calling on God without really wanting Him.  In effect, it is simply an exclamation calling on God in vain.  It too represented a compromise.
Do these relate to holy sensibility vs. compromise today and here?  There are an infinite number of ways, but following are a few.
Perhaps the greatest compromise of all is misnaming murder as a woman’s right, health care, or abortion.  The term abortion originally related medically to natural miscarriage, not coerced miscarriage.  It comes from Latin, “abortionem (nominative abortio) ‘miscarriage.’” In French, avortement (abortion) was still used for natural miscarriages when I was there.  Not realizing this until later caused misunderstanding on my part.  Please note holy sensibility so rampantly missing in regard to this unholy act against the most vulnerable and innocent numbering in the millions.  Unfortunately, many claiming to be Christian fail to see it for what it is, i.e., killing a genuine human being in an early stage of life.  This is compromise.
Another prolific compromise relates to identifying an immoral propensity, temptation, or acts to one’s position and union in Christ.  The usage and acceptance of the term “Gay Christian” by so many is a compromise involving an unholy association with a holy union between a believer and Jesus Christ.  No other sexual propensity, temptation, or sexual acts ever become an identity factor of one’s position or union in Christ.  This, too, compromises the holy with the unholy.
One other compromise is accepting the rainbow colors in a flag or diverse objects—God’s holy promise and sign following severe judgment for evil on earth—for activism representing ungodly attitudes and actions. “I establish My covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be eliminated by the waters of a flood, nor shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth . . . I have set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall serve as a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. It shall come about, when I make a cloud appear over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud . . .” (Genesis 9: 11, 13-14. God’s holy covenant sign must not be compromised with unholiness or sin.
God is holy.  All His actions and pronouncements are holy.  They must not and do not deserve to be compromised.  The above represent subtleties in that they do not appear to be active or aggressive evil attitudes or acts.  At least, that is how they might appear to us.  But how do they appear to a holy God?  Slighting or taking lightly His holy character, actions, perspective, or pronouncements dishonors and disrespects Him in every way.
Let’s pray for and exercise “Holy Sensibility” by not compromising even in the subtlest of offenses against God. “But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1: 15-16).
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
Related Posts:

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, March 6, 2023
Since materialism wipes out the possibility of ingrained purpose, and we require purpose to live, what we call expressive individualism naturally arises. We kill God and we will become him. When purpose and therefore meaning are self-determined, we fall into crisis. In other words, one thread of our predicament in this strange malaise we call modernity, is the natural result of our changing understanding of what the world around us is.

We live in a world that tells a story about itself: we learn the story as children in school and we imbibe it in our cups as we go about the day. It’s whispered to us by automobiles and tarmac and concrete pillars and we receive it intravenously by the tap our smartphones have placed in our souls.
The story is simple, though its implications and endless poorly written sequels spin themselves out like the very worst of web serials. It goes like this:
This is it.
The world tells us a story that the stuff that we can see is all there is, and that the stuff we can touch is just stuff. If there were a temptation to believe that perhaps that tree was not just a tree, and maybe, possibly its branches might be raised towards… just stop there. There is nothing to be raised towards. How can there be? What you can see and touch is what there is.
If we were tempted to believe that beauty has a source, that somewhere outside of the stuffy cave we find ourselves in there might be a source of the shadows we watch on the wall, the story will swiftly correct us. Because the world has a ruler, a story-teller, who would really prefer we didn’t consider his existence, or that for most of Christian history we have referred to this Prince of the ‘Air’ who twists stories like smoke around our heads as our Adversary. In Hebrew, the Satan.
But this story—which when we’re feeling philosophical we might call materialism, or naturalism—has got its grip on our world. It’s still pretty new, historically speaking, but it has solidified and deepened. We no longer believe in a Cosmos of ordered light, but instead in a Universe that we describe in mechanistic terms. It sounds like a machine.
We are catechised by our machines, so we start to think in their stories. Even for those who know that there is more, those who know that the story of the world is not that there is stuff that decays to dust but that God became dust and all things will be reconciled to him. Even if we know that the beating heart of the Universe is after death, life we still struggle to believe that what we see and touch is more than it appears. We’re steeped in stories that tell us otherwise.
If I, for example, suggested that what we refer to as the ‘laws of physics,’ our observations about the regular nature of the Cosmos’ operations, are most likely overseen by angels, I sound like I need to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Read More
Related Posts:

Esolen highlights man’s undaunted agency — a spirit that seeks difficult action — an agency that acts to serve others at cost to self: “what a man wants and what a man must do are seldom the same” (16). Heavy is the crown for which feminism gropes. Much of man’s thankless labor “demands a constant self-denial, a self-effacement. It says to the men what the battle says to a soldier: ‘You are not the central thing. This work is. Do it’” (38). A man must not just be physically strong but strong of spirit to rise to the challenge and needs of family and society. “I mean here to reject every philosophy that would cut the sinews of man” (49). Wryly, Esolen observes, “The world cannot run on courses in sociology or on politically enlightened novels. They do not think, Who’s going to dig that well?” (41, emphasis original). Good men gladly grab the shovel.

Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Eikon.
Anthony Esolen. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2022.
As a university student, I remember stumbling upon an article in The Atlantic, “The End of Men.” Women now surpassed men in the workforce — to the betterment of society? Were women better adapted to a post-industrial workplace than men? Had we finally arrived at the end of men — ruling, leading, providing? That was over a decade ago.
Into a world further adrift in confusion, Anthony Esolen has written a book he himself wished need not be written. But write it, he did. And read it, we should. The title contains the tone — No Apologies — the subtitle, a thesis — Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. Esolen attempts to convince us of what was once obvious: that this world does not run by magic but is built and sustained by the might of men living happily as men. 
What if we have come to the end of men? “It would mean our end, our death; imagine a great city, rotting at the core, with no one strong enough to shore up the ruins” (2). Six chapters chisel and sculpt man as civilization has needed him — then and now. And this against that ideology whose desire is contrary to the man: Feminism and all her sickly offspring. 
Man as He Was Fashioned
What kind of man does Esolen place before us? 
First, Esolen chisels the muscles of this gritty warrior. He displays the forte, the force, the brawn of the taller, faster, thicker, action-craving man. God created the world, man builds it, which we can easily forget in a post-industrial, technically-advanced world. “Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men. You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men. . . . The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do — and that the physically weaker sex could not have done” (x). 
Feminism then, to Esolen, is an ungrateful fantasy, attempting to expel man from the city he built. She scribes her scathing treaties within a well-heated, warmly-lit world built (and sustained) by men. The oil in her pen, the paper upon her desk, the plastic in her Starbucks cup, the electricity in her computer all join voice together to refute her — but she cannot hear them. And neither, often, can we. So with his engineer’s mind, Esolen examines the civilization we take for granted and points repeatedly to the small font scribbled on the infrastructure: “Made by Men.” Not by angels or elves, not by women or children, but by men — forgettable, forgotten, and too often flattened. No apologies, then, for men holding the plough to war with the earth — no one else can.
But the strength of men is not the only trait vital to our civilization.
Read More
Related Posts: