Underground Exiles

The Henry Institute: Commentary.

I’ve been getting some hate mail thanks to the Obama abortion post.  I’ve been derided as a single-issue evangelical when it comes to my vote.

I found the above sermon manuscript online, and at least on this issue, I’m in good company.

Go give it a read.

Before more folks go out to vote, I thought I should post this link; I hope that you will read it and take it into consideration.

There are some things for Christians that should be absolute deal-breakers. For me, abortion and the stance that Sen. Barack Obama has taken on it was just too much.

Please, think about this before you cast your vote.

It is easy, especially for me, to become indignant over the sin of abortion.  I find it very difficult, however, to become indignant over our own sin. Several years ago while listening to the radio, I heard John MacArthur (not one of my favorite preachers) publicly identify the greatest sin in the world.  It wasn’t abortion.

The greatest sin in the world is nothing less than the violation of the greatest commandment in the world - which means that every second we fail to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves, we are guilty of the greatest sin in the world.  Not even one person among us has commited a good deed for which we didn’t owe repentance.  Every last thing we do is bogged down in imperfection.

I point this out because the defining characteristic of Christian zeal should not be arrogance (which I am often guilty of).  It should be love.  If we focus only on the sins around us, we’ll become angry and self-righteous.  If we only focus on the sins within us, we’ll become detached and unresponsive to the needs of those around us.  We have to keep an eye on both, which brings me back to James 1.27, where this started.

I hope you noticed that I only focused on the first half of James’ definition of “pure and undefiled religion”.  Now is a good time for me to tackle the second.

Read more…

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?

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Psalm 82.3-4 is a passage that parallels Proverbs 24.11-12 in many ways:

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.

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