Great post from C.J. Mahaney, talking about the contemporary obsession with relevance in the church, and how despite our obsession (or maybe because of it) the church has become irrelevant by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than they are faithful to Christ.  Swing by and give it a read!

Leviticus 20.1-5 is the final text I’ll ask you to consider:

“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘Anyone of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who give any of his children ot Molech shall surely be put to death.  The people of the land shall stone him with stones.  I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name.  And if they people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I myself will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.”

Lest there be any confusion, “giving” a child to Molech was not some form of indentured servitude.  Leviticus 18.21 makes it explicitly clear that God is talking about child sacrifice, the heathen ritual of offering live babies as burnt offerings to pagan gods.  After reading this passage does it seem like God has much patience for this barbaric practice?

Notice that God isn’t just commanding Israel not to sacrifice their own children; he also expects them to intervene for the children of strangers among them.  If God’s people “close their eyes” and fail to drive child sacrifice from their midst, God will set his face against them.  The domestication of abortion has mad it tragically commonplace, so much so that we seem to have lost our ability to be outraged by it.  How is it that even we who are opposed to abortion are not more overwhelmed by the fact that it is legal, in the United States of America, to tear apart the tiny bodies of helpless unborn children?

The Old Testament accounts of child sacrifice are the closest parallel to abortion that we’ll find in Scripture.  The names of the idols have changed in our day; we don’t sacrifice our children to Molech or Baal.  Instead we give them to our idols of comfort, wealth, freedom and autonomy.  These are the modern idols that drive most abortions.  It is unthinkable that God’s people would sacrifice their own children, but is also unthinkable that God’s people would do nothing while other children are sacrificed all around them!

So I had another conversation this morning at church before the service started surrounding the question of free will.  There is a dear, dear lady at the Well who walked up before church started and noticed that our pastor had a copy of Erasmus and Luther’s debate on Free Will.  She picked up the book and said she’d never read anything by Erasmus and thought she might be interested in the book.

Seeking to engage the conversation, I mentioned that Pastor Todd had loaned me the book several years ago, and that I thought Luther’s writing in Bondage of the Will was by far the best piece of writing he’d every produced.

When she heard the title of the Luther’s response to Erasmus, her immediate response was, “So Luther believed in predestination?  Well, I don’t want to read it then, because he’s wrong!”  I couldn’t just let that statement pass (although I probably should have), so I pointed out that “predestination” is a word that’s used in the Bible itself, and predestination was taught by Paul the Apostle.  Whether you agree with the Calvinist view of predestination or not, it’s pretty obvious that predestination of some sort is taught by the Bible.

This conversation just went downhill from here; this dear Christian sister proceeded to tell me that “this is the reason I stopped studying theology.  Everybody is so convinced that they are right!”  I took all of my self control to bite my tongue.  Of course they think they’re right - for that matter so do you!  Nobody intentionally says anything they think is wrong! Then came my absolute favorite statement:

“If you believe in predestination, then eventually you just wind up a Calvinist, and that means you don’t actually have to preach the gospel to anybody, since they’re elect and will get saved anyway.”

If you want to disagree with Calvinism, that is okay with me.  Honestly.  Nevertheless, if you are going to disagree, do at least two things.  First, be willing to actually discover what Calvinism teaches.  Don’t just say, “I disagree,” and never interact with the doctrines themselves.  Second, disagree with the system itself, not a misrepresentation of it. ¹  To assert that Calvinism teaches that you don’t have to preach to the gospel, since the elect will get saved regardless, is a terrible misrepresentation of what is taught by Calvinists.

Admittedly there are hyper-Calvinists that do teach that - and it’s not what Calvin himself taught from the Bible, and has been roundly condemned by even the most ardent defender of the Calvinist system.

My goal isn’t now, nor has it ever been to be a Calvinist - my goal is to be biblical.  I would hold to some form of the Calvinist system whether or not John Calvin or Martin Luther had ever lived and taught, purely because whether or not John Calvin taught it, the Bible itself speaks of predestination and election!  (See Romans 9.14-24 and Ephesians 1.3-6.)

For me it’s not a question of whether or not believing in predestination or believing in free will is heresy - it’s not!  This is a debate in the family; there are good biblical reasons to hold to both positions.  I don’t think for a second that Arminianism teaches anything the Bible doesn’t.  I just don’t believe it teaches everything the Bible does.

I would hope, if only for the sake of intellectual honesty, that anyone who is going to disagree with a position would have the common decency to at least not misrepresent the views of those they disagree with.  Is that too much to ask?

Unfortunately, this lady did go on to embrace heresy, when she said that she believed that God did not in fact have exhaustive foreknowledge of the future.  No matter what you believe about free will, denying God’s omniscience is a flat denial of the God revealed in the Bible!  When I pointed out to her that denying God’s exhaustive foreknowledge is ultimately heresy, she then proceeded to spout my second favorite quote:

Well, when we get to heaven, we’ll find out who’s right!!

I don’t want to wait until I get to heaven to find out!  I’d rather actually read the Bible, and believe it to be true when it says

Set forth your case, says the LORD;
bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob.
Let them bring them, and tell us
what is to happen.
Tell us the former things, what they are,
that we may consider them,
that we may know their outcome;
or declare to us the things to come.
Tell us what is to come hereafter,
that we may know that you are gods;
do good, or do harm,
that we may be dismayed and terrified.
Behold, you are nothing,
and your work is less than nothing;
an abomination is he who chooses you.

I stirred up one from the north, and he has come,
from the rising of the sun, and he shall call upon my name;
he shall trample on rulers as on mortar,
as the potter treads clay.
Who declared it from the beginning, that we might know,
and beforehand, that we might say, “He is right”?
There was none who declared it, none who proclaimed,
none who heard your words.
I was the first to say to Zion, “Behold, here they are!”
and I give to Jerusalem a herald of good news.
But when I look, there is no one;
among these there is no counselor
who, when I ask, gives an answer.
Behold, they are all a delusion;
their works are nothing;
their metal images are empty wind. - Isaiah 41.21-29, English Standard Version.

God, speaking in this passage in Isaiah, declares the test of true deity.  Verse 23 gives the purpose of the testing as, “that we may know that you are gods.”  Right out the gate, we are faced with the claim that God can announce meticulously what is coming.  God puts his Deity to stand or fall on this question - and this should be the point that should decide the controversy over whether He or the heathen idols were the true and only God.

Since God himself declares the criterion by which the question of deity is to be evaluated, and since that criterion is the possession of a knowledge of the future that can be declared and verified by the unfolding of these future events, it is completely heretical to deny God’s divine, exhaustive foreknowledge and by doing so deny the very basis on which God himself declares that his claim to deity shall be made known! God says that if you worship a god that does not know the future, you aren’t worship the true God!

1. For a good place to start with understanding biblical Calvinism, read Chosen But Free by Dr. Norman Geisler.  While there are places where I do think Dr. Geisler slightly misrepresents orthodox Calvinism, overall, he’s spot on in this book.

Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and destitute.  Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”

Through passages like these God is calling his people to intervene whenever the vulnerable are threatened, be it an individual or an entire group.  Masses of German Christians should have com to the active defense of their Jewish countrymen, and a much larger segment of the American church should have joined the fight against slavery and segregation.  Why didn’t this happen?  Why don’t more Christians today follow these passages into the active defense of unborn children?  I would suggest that most of us, myself included, have too narrow a definition of who our neighbor is and too narrow a view of what it means to love him.  Regarding widespread oppression and injustice, we tend to confuse opposition in principle, with opposition in practice.  We content ourselves with the idea that we’re not participating in injustice, failing to consider the fact that we’re often doing nothing to stop it either

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor imprisoned for his opposition to Hitler, made the following statement in 1946:

Christianity in German bears a greater responsibility before God [for the Holocaust] than the National Socialists, the SS, and the Gestapo.”¹

How could he say this?  Because he recognized that those who have been rescued unto salvation are far more accountable to God than those who remain mired in blindness and unbelief.  If we don’t get a better grasp of what it means to love our neighbor, history is going to again look at the church with the same indictment:  “Where were all of the Christians while innocent babies were being murdered en masse?”  We would do well to turn our attention to the Good Samaritan.

In Luke 10 a certain lawyer tests Jesus with the quintessential Gospel question - “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus points the man to the law.  Whoever loves God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind; and who ever loves their neighbor as themselves will have eternal life.  The lawyer, wanting to know who exactly he’s obligated to love, asks a follow-up question - “And who is my neighbor?”  Jesus respons to the second question with the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.30.37).

The Good Samaritan was a man who, at significant cost to himself, cared for a dying stranger who was being ignored by everyone else around him.  Making his service even more remarkable is the fact that Jews and Samaritans generally despised each other, yet the Good Samaritan rescued his Jewish neighbor anyway.  He is the hero of the story, the model of neighborly love.  His actions are commendable, but shouldn’t be seen as extraordinary.  This is the kind of love God expects from us all!

The villains in this story are the religious leaders who passed the stranger by.  It’s easy to heap scorn on such callous disregard, but we probably wouldn’t have fared any better.  These men probably felt badly for the victim.  They may have even prayed for him as they passed by.  Getting involved though, wasn’t their calling, wasn’t their responsibility, or wasn’t a wise use of their time.  Maybe they were late for an important religious engagement, or weren’t trained in CPR.  Whatever their reasons, Jesus condemns them, not for wrong thinking, but for wrong doing. To love their neighbor, at that moment, required rescuing and caring for him, and that is something they deemed either too costly, or too insignificant.  God, through the parable of the Good Samaritan, is calling his people to the real and practical and often painful ministry of meeting physical needs in a dying world.

Right thinking isn’t enough.  What good is it to say you’re opposed to abortion, but don’t actually do anything to help those who are dying?

1. Quoted in Hitler’s Cross: Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross, Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1995.  p. 191

But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive.  So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”  And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”  Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.  And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that he provided households for them.”

The implication of this passage is that those who fear God will do what they can to keep mothers from killing their babies.

Some might read the command in Proverbs 24 and argue that it doesn’t apply to babies in the womb.  Don’t count on it.  Exodus 1 explicitly demonstrates that those who fear God rescue babies from death, and the only differences between babies before and after birth are differences that don’t matter.  Babies in the womb are smaller, more dependent, and less developed than newborns, but these are quantative differences, not qualatative.  Newborns are smaller, more dependent, and less developed than five-year-olds, but that doesn’t make them less human or any less worthy of protection.  If we know that God is pleased with those who spare the lives of babies after they’re born, we can infer that God is also pleased with those who spare the lives of babies before they’re born.

While orphans, widows and abortion-vulnerable children are all “in distress” - and generally unwanted by society at large - the circumstances surrounding their distress are very different.  It is one thing to provide food and shelter for people in need, and another thing entirely to intervene on the behalf of people who are about to be killed.  Perhaps you wonder if the Bible actually mandates our involvement in the more extreme circumstances, whre the price of involvement is much higher, and the level of opposition is more, much more, significant.  Here enteres Proverbs 24.11-12:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.  If you say, “Behold we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay each man according to his work?”

Like almost all biblical proverbs, the text gives zero indication what kind of specific injustice, if any, the author has in mind.  It serves as a general guidline for what God’s people are called to do in the face of violent injustice.  If innocent human beings are in danger, God-fearing people are to come to their rescue.

The proverb becomes even more poignant in light of verse 12.  The author anticipates circumstances in which injustice will be cloaked to such an extent that people, with some plausability, will be able to deny knowledge of it.  We are warned against taking up such an excuse and reminded that God knows our every thought.  False claims of ignorance won’t do us a bit of good on the day of judgment.

Let us ask ourselves then, are there people among us, right here in America, who are stumbling towards the slaughter?  Are there injustices in our day that God would have us raise our voices against?  Yes, and yes.  Abortions occur thousands of times a day, affecting nearly every community in the nation, yet most Christians barely give it a thought.  We know it’s happening.  We know it’s bad; but we seem content to remain as uninformed as possible, as if a general ignorance on the subject will somehow clear us of moral responsibility.  According to Proverbs 24, this is a very, very dangerous line of reasoning to take.

God knows our hearts, and he will repay each of us according to the work we’re doing (or not doing) to rescue those who would otherwise be slaughtered.  And just in case you feel the word “slaughter” is too severe to apply to abortion, think again.  Slaughter is defined as “the brutal or violent killing of a person,” or “the killing of great numbers of people.”¹  Abortion fits both definitions.  It’s hard to imagine a death more brutal or violent than having your body literally torn to pieces.  And if the roughly 50 million children just in the United States who have already lost their lives to legal abortion doesn’t qualify as “great numbers of people,” then the term is meaningless.  Can anyone point to another injustice, happening in our world today, for which Proverbs 24 would be more applicable?

1. ”slaughter” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v1.1).  RandomHouse, Inc. Accessed 1 October 2008

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

This concise definition makes it clear that helping those in desperate circumstances is a primary component of pure and undefiled religion.  Orphans and widows are the examples given, but it’s pretty unlikely that these are the only two groups he has in mind.  In the very next chapter, he warns against neglecting the poor; so we must surmise, then, that the application of James’ admonition goes beyond just widows and orphans alone.  They are simply representative of those in severe distress.  And lest we wrongly assume that James’ emphasis on practical deeds of love is out of step with the rest of Scripture, consider the prophet Jeremiah’s command in Jeremiah 22.3:

Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed.  And  do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

In the patriarchal society in which James and Jeremiah wrote, where there was no safety net of state-funded social services, the prospects for widows and orphans were bleak in the extreme.  With their natural providers gone, orphans and widows would not likely survive apart from the active intervention of God’s people.   As daunting and desperate as their circumstances were, children facing abortion are even worse off.

I would argue that since God commands believers to care for children whose parents have been killed, He would also have us care for children whose parents want them killed.  By explicitly commanding us to care for those whose livelihood is in jeopardy (orphans and widows) God is implicitly commanding us to care for those whose lives are in jeopardy (abortion-vulnerable children).  Reaching out to those in distress is an essential component of pure and undefiled religion, and since abortion-vulnerable children are in distress, it is essential that we reach out to them as well.

If you read the Bible from beginning to end, you will encounter over 14,000 different words, and the word abortion doesn’t even make a single appearance.  To be completely straight forward, Scripture says precisely nothing on the subject, yet you are reading an article called “Fear God, Save Babies”.  Is that a little presumptuous?  Is it even possible to articulate a biblical position on a subject the Bible apparently never mentions?  I would argue that it is possible, and moreover, it’s necessary.  If Scripture did deal with abortion directly, we wouldn’t have to wrestle through what a biblical response would look like.  So we must take everything the Bible does tell us, and apply it to everything it doesn’t.

The most significant question about abortion for those of us dealing with the Bible isn’t whether it is right or wrong, but whether God expects us to do anything about it.  I say that because any honest query into the act of abortion reveals it to be nothing less than the deliberate execution of a living, growing, genetically-distinct human being.¹

Since the Bible expressly condemns the shedding of innocent blood², recognizing the injustice of abortion should be fairly easy.  Figuring out what to do about it is decidedly more difficult.  On the one hand, abortion kills almost 4,000 helpless human beings every single day, and that’s just here in the United States.  On the other hand, abortion is the natural fallout of an increasingly self-serving, self-centered society.  Abortion, in fact, is deserving of God’s wrath, and may well be a manifestation of Gods wrath.³

Some have argued that opposing abortion takes crucial resources away from the primary call of the church.  Others believe that opposing abortion is the primary call of the church.  What is a biblically-minded person supposed to do?!

At the outset of my Christian life, I was convinced that abortion was a relatively insignificant “side issue”, one that could easily divert the church from more important matters.  I have since come to a far different conclusion.  To demonstrate why I believe God’s people have a responsibility to actively defend those whose lives are threatened by abortion I will direct you to five biblical texts.  Though they don’t directly deal with abortion, they introduce a variety of scenarios which parallel abortion in striking ways, and provide valuable insights into the character and expectations of God…(continued tomorrow).

1. “[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th ed.
   Keith L. Moore, Ph.D. & T.V.N. Persaud, Md., (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998), 2-18.

   “Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed… “ Human Embryology & Teratology, Ronan R. O’Rahilly, Fabiola Muller, (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996), 5-55.

2. Exodus 20.13; Deuteronomy 19.13; 1 Kings 2.31; Proverbs 6.16-18; Isaiah 59.7; Jeremiah 19.3-5, 22.3; Joel 3.19
3. When Pharaoh refused to let God’s people go, the wrath of God manifested itself in 10 plagues, the most severe of which was the death of all of the first born sons in Egypt.  When David sinned with Bathsheeba, the wrath of God manifested itself in the death of their innocent child.  Children are the hope and future of every society.  When God’s wrath lands on them, for the sins of a parent or the sins of a nation, it is an incalculably severe blow.  When a society starts killing its own children, it engages in nothing less than self-destruction.  Romans1.18-32 makes clear the fact that God’s wrath can simply be the “giving over” of people to bear the natural consequences of their actions.  For a nation that allows its children to be executed in the womb, not only does such behavior deserve punishment, in many ways, it is punishment.

On a good day, at most I’m a four and a half point Calvinist.  Other days, I’m maybe a three-point or at most four-point Calvinist.   I still just can’t figure out where I fall on the Limited Atonement question, so I often oscillate back and forth.  I didn’t become a Calvinist by just jumping on a bandwagon; I arrived here after throwing myself against the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Romans for about 2 years.  For reasons of biblical faithfulness, I hold to a Reformed theology.

The gentleman I would have been working for on the coast is an all-out Arminian.  These two teams of Calvinist and Arminian have been holding different theological positions for several hundred years - the argument between them ain’t new by any stretch.

So as I sat and talked to this man, he was the most hostile person to Reformed theology that I’ve ever met.  I was actually taken aback at the amount of venom he spoke with; to be honest, I was shocked, since I’m not that angry about folks holding to Arminian theology.  I believe since I arrived at being a Calvinist by a lot of theological reflection, then obviously an Arminian must have as well.  I think that stands to reason.

At any rate, our conversation got me thinking down a particular vein: why can’t we get along?  I’m convinced that there are good, biblical reasons to be Arminian in your theology.  I don’t think that the Arminian position says anything the Bible doesn’t say, I just don’t think it says everything the Bible does.  Nevertheless, it’s not heresy; this is an in-family debate.  I can’t think of a single Calvinist I know personally that would berate or browbeat someone of a Wesleyan Arminian theology.  Why is it then that Calvinists have the reputation of being bullies, when it’s the Arminians I know that are hostile?  I just don’t understand it.

There are only three questions I have to have answered to be able to work with someone:

1. Do you love Jesus?
2. Do you love the Bible?
3. Do you desire to see people reached with the gospel?

As long as the answer to all three questions is yes, I can work with you, no matter what you believe about election and predestination.  As long as we both love the Bible, we can disagree, and still have a place to go back to to settle our disagreements, since we both hold Scripture to be the final authority.

Has anbody else experienced this?