I recently did a podcast with Josh Haymes on love/hatred for enemies:
This was a follow up to an earlier podcast we did on imprecatory psalms:
—
Why do we do an Ash Wednesday service at TPC? Because we are not Pharisees.
To put it another way, we want to kill all self-righteousness. We want to admit our sin and what our sin deserves – death and hell. We want to call out our own sins, not just the sins of others. We want to remind ourselves man was made from dust and will return to dust.
—
In Titus 2:3-5, Paul commands older women in the church to train younger women “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”
Does feminism train any young women in these things? Is it fair to say feminism teaches women the exact opposite of these things Paul lists?
The answers to these questions are obvious. God has a plan for young women, outlined in Titus 2. Satan has a plan for young women as well – it’s called feminism.
—
Judas was the CFO of the disciples. But he didn’t just handle the money; he loved money. In the end, he showed that he loved money more than he loved Jesus. For a couple hundred bucks, he betrayed Jesus to his death — and to his own damnation.
—
Egalitarianism makes everyone gay. Patriarchy is the only alternative to faggotry.
—
The Bible’s teaching on men and women differentiates role and value. While men and women have different roles in home, church, and society, men and women are equal in bearing God’s image and thus have the same value/worth before him.
—
On domestic violence:
“Most intimate partner violence is not simply male violence, or female violence, but what’s called ‘bilateral violence’, with both partners feeding into a cycle of violence, that often escalates…
Let’s look at the facts, unfiltered by ideology. Studies from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and various academic reviews paint a nuanced picture. In one-sided domestic violence incidents—where only one partner is abusive—women are actually more likely to be the perpetrators than men, according to some analyses of arrest data and victim surveys. This isn’t about blaming women, though. It’s about understanding patterns to prevent harm. Even more telling are the rates across relationship types.The highest incidences of intimate partner violence often occur in lesbian couples, where both partners are women, while the lowest rates are found in gay male couples. This challenges the notion that abuse is inherently tied to male aggression or patriarchal structures. Instead, it suggests that unaddressed issues like emotional volatility, power imbalances, or unresolved trauma can manifest in abuse regardless of gender. Could it be that our reluctance to discuss female abusers is fueling higher rates of violence overall? By not providing women with self-awareness tools, we’re allowing cycles to perpetuate.”
—
A note on the footwashing in John 13:
Initially Peter rejects Jesus’ service to him.
When Jesus overrides his objection, he insists on being served by Jesus but on his own terms: “not my feet but my whole body.”
This is all too often exactly how we deal with Jesus: we either refuse what he wants to do in our lives, or we demand it on our own terms and in our own way.
—
Freya India on the bad rap young conservative men and women get:
“But this has not been my experience. A few years ago, I somehow found myself around young Christians and conservatives, and for the first time in my life felt that I encountered gentlemen, chivalry. One anonymous woman in the article says that these men now see women as “objects you can use at will.” But I always felt this to be true of liberal, secular culture: We are all objects; there is no shared morality. Then I met conservative men who cared about something beyond themselves, who had a framework to follow, who argued so passionately against porn and hookup culture and things that I felt hurt women. Men who believed in commitment, who wanted constraints on themselves. Men who took family seriously, took themselves seriously. Men who were raised as atheists but started going to church and trying to do what’s right, with basically zero encouragement and all the temptation in the world pulling them the other way. I found this impressive, incredible. And I can’t square it with the article’s insistence that “male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized” on the right, when it’s so often the opposite.
Ultimately, I think the problem here is the internet. The confusion is between conservative people and conservative influencers, who are dispositionally very different. There are conservative influencers who say extreme things for clicks, who care only about conserving their subscriber count, whose view of men and women seems entirely formed by X. Some are hostile, absolutely. But the problem is not conservatism; it’s that some people are angry and bitter. They are hurt and unhappy themselves, and are rewarded and indulged online. There are angry men who blame women for everything, just as there are angry women who blame men for everything. I’m very interested in a conversation about how the internet warps the way we think, how online ideologies map badly onto reality, and the perverse incentives of political influencers. But I’m not interested in an argument implying that all conservative women have been misled, and all conservative men are misogynistic. I’m bored by it, and the irony is: If you malign every young woman drawn to conservatism, if you dismiss her as brainwashed or a “pick me” girl, you push her toward the extreme you are afraid of. If the mainstream media won’t take her seriously, if nobody will entertain her thoughts and questions, then she can’t talk openly anywhere but online—where the incentives are warped, where there is so little complexity and so much contempt for the opposite sex.
Cruel men exist, and they will use all kinds of words and ideologies to justify their cruelty. But decent and loving and dignified conservative men exist too—as do thoughtful and intelligent conservative women—and we can’t have worthwhile conversations about any of this unless we acknowledge that. No movement is beyond criticism, but we can’t be honest if we write off every conservative woman as naive and every conservative man as a misogynist. I feel for those women who had bad experiences, but that doesn’t mean what they were looking for wasn’t real, wasn’t worth wanting. If the New Right means a generation holding themselves to higher standards, pulling themselves out of a world of hedonism and nihilism and nothingness, my instinct tells me many more young women will want to join. And we’ll have to start asking why.”
—
I don’t question the current war with Iran so much as I question everything we’ve done in the Middle East since at least 1991. We went to war in the Middle East when I was a senior in high school. I’m now an old man and a grandfather. We have never really left, and it’s been one war after another, with no tangible benefit that I can see to the American people. No peace has been achieved. No “nation building” has happened. We have spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of lives, and we have nothing tangible to show for it. The justifications for these wars were often sketchy, sometimes even outright lies.
If a crazy family lives next door, you probably will have to deal with them. But if a crazy family lives across town, why seek out involvement with them? Why entangle yourself in their mess? Let their own neighbors deal with them.
The truth is, we don’t need Middle Eastern oil. We have our oil in America and in our hemisphere. All we have done, again and again, with our misguided policies, is enrich our enemies – Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. We support and equip one side in a war, only to fight against that side the next time around. Great use of tax dollars, right? The problems in the Middle East are real and tragic – but they are not “our” problems unless we chose to make them so. I say let the nations in the region, and surrounding regions, figure it out. America has too many problems of her own to play world policeman on the other side of the globe. Jordan Peterson criticized millennials for wanting to save the world when their own lives were still disordered. Why wouldn’t that principle apply here? We need to make our own bed before we tell other people how to clean up their rooms. If we cannot bring order to our own cities can we really reorder another country, another culture, on the other side of the world that most of our leaders do not even understand very well? And isn’t America over-functioning instead of letting other nations take responsibility that is more rightfully theirs, eg, peace and security in their own part of the world?
I am not an isolationist, I’m not even necessarily anti-empire or anti-colonization, but I do think American foreign policy has been a disaster for a long time now. We need a major overhaul in how we think about our place in the world.
I like many of the men who currently hold power in our civil government. I want them to succeed. I don’t want the right to lose power or see the good done quickly undone in the next year or two. Perhaps this current war will end quickly and we can get out of there. I hope so. Since we are in it, I hope we win it (whatever that looks like). But the whole thing seems like “more of the same” – and we know how that movie goes because we’ve already seen it too many times.
—
Just a reminder: there is no economic system that can make lazy idiots prosperous. Many critiques leveled at the system of “free market capitalism” have nothing to do with the system at all but with the lazy idiots using it.
The West has prospered because it had been free, for the most part – but it wasn’t freedom alone (including it free markets) that made us prosperous. It was the virtue and work ethic (specifically the Protestant work ethic), stemming from Christian faith, that made the system successful. The same system with a people lacking that faith, virtue, work ethic, social trust, etc. would not produce the same results.
The same thing can be said of America’s constitutional system. Many people want to say “the constitutional system failed us.” I grant the system our founders set up had its flaws. But the biggest problems reside in the people who are using the system today, not the system itself. It’s not so much that the system failed the American people, but the American people failed their system.
Misdiagnosing a problem results in a misprescribed solution. We need to get the problem right if we want to solve it.
Christian nationalism is a semi-promising attempt to correct some of our political and cultural problems. But for it to actually succeed it needs real Christians, thoughtful Christians, mature Christians, biblically grounded Christians. And we probably don’t have enough of them right now.
—
Young women need to understand that while physical beauty can be filtered and faked, true inner beauty (which is far more valuable) cannot be:
From the article by Jeff Minick:
“According to a 2024 survey,” writes Freya, “72 percent of Gen Z girls said ‘mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.’”
I’m confused. I know what mental health problems are, but what’s a mental health challenge? It sounds like a sport. Is anxiety a mental health challenge? If so, then welcome to the club, because that’s a normal part of the human condition. Whisk yourself back to the Civil War in Georgia when Uncle Billy and his boys had just fired your home and pilfered the livestock from your farm, or to World War II when millions of moms, wives, and girlfriends watched their men shipped overseas, possibly to die in battle. Now we’re talking anxiety.
So, here’s my suggestion: Dump the online counseling. Look out a window instead of into a mirror. Twist yourself inside out and engage the world around you. Talk to friends instead of screens. Help others. Practice kindness. Volunteer, even if it’s just helping Mom and Dad with the household chores.
Do these things, and you’ll shrink many of those “mental health challenges” simply by making yourself smaller and other people bigger. Oddly, too, by focusing on them rather than on your “identity,” you’ll find yourself growing greater in nobility of heart and soul.
You are meant to be flowers beginning to bloom, not wilted lilies, flesh-and-blood beauties made for this world and not for a screen.”
—
“By renouncing the Bible, philosophers swing from their moorings upon all moral Subjects. It is the only correct map of the human heart that ever has been published. It contains a faithful representation of all its follies, Vices & Crimes.”
— John Adams
—
“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
— Noah Webster
—
“Since the end of World War I, the Conservative Party in Germany had become less a political entity than a club for angry malcontents.”
— Marsh, “Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
—
When someone takes psychedelics, he might think he’s just having a sensory experience, but it’s actually a spiritual (demonic) experience.
The drug user might think he’s toying with demons, but they are toying with him.
—
“People tell me, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ I always tell them, ‘Twist not Scripture, lest ye be like satan.’”
–Paul Washer
—
“To say that somebody ‘is not responsible for his actions’ is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions. Then, when we also acknowledge our sin and guilt, we receive God’s forgiveness, enter into the joy of his salvation, and so become yet more completely human and healthy. What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.”
― John Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“Perhaps it is a deep-seated reluctance to face up to the gravity of sin which has led to its omission from the vocabulary of many of our contemporaries. One acute observer of the human condition, who has noticed the disappearance of the word, is the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. He has written about it in his book, Whatever Became of Sin? Describing the malaise of western society, its general mood of gloom and doom, he adds that ‘one misses any mention of “sin”’. ‘It was a word once in everyone’s mind, but is now rarely if ever heard. Does that mean’, he asks, ‘that no sin is involved in all our troubles…? Has no-one committed any sins? Where, indeed, did sin go? What became of it?.’ Enquiring into the causes of sin’s disappearance, Dr Menninger notes first that ‘many former sins have become crimes’, so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman, while others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least into symptoms of sickness, so that in their case punishment has been replaced by treatment. A third convenient device called ‘collective irresponsibility’ has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behaviour from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“If we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter’s sobering words: ‘Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives…in reverent fear.’ In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry ‘Hallelujah’ with authenticity only after we have first cried ‘Woe is me, for I am lost’. In Dale’s words, ‘it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’”
— John Stott
—
“Even the excruciating pain could not silence his repeated entreaties: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ The soldiers gambled for his clothes. Some women stood afar off. The crowd remained a while to watch. Jesus commended his mother to John’s care and John to hers. He spoke words of kingly assurance to the penitent criminal crucified at his side. Meanwhile, the rulers sneered at him, shouting: ‘He saved others, but he can’t save himself!’ Their words, spoken as an insult, were the literal truth. He could not save himself and others simultaneously. He chose to sacrifice himself in order to save the world.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“We may wish, indeed,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘that we were of so little account to God that he left us alone to follow our natural impulses – that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less….To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God….”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“Insistence on security is incompatible with the way of the cross. What daring adventures the incarnation and the atonement were! What a breach of convention and decorum that Almighty God should renounce his privileges in order to take human flesh and bear human sin! Jesus had no security except in his Father. So to follow Jesus is always to accept at least a measure of uncertainty, danger and rejection for his sake.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself.”
— John Stott
—
“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”
— John Stott
—
“The New Testament uses five main Greek words for sin, which together portray its various aspects, both passive and active. The commonest is hamartia, which depicts sin as a missing of the target, the failure to attain a goal. Adikia is ‘unrighteousness’ or ‘iniquity’, and ponēria is evil of a vicious or degenerate kind. Both these terms seem to speak of an inward corruption or perversion of character. The more active words are parabasis (with which we may associate the similar paraptōma), a ‘trespass’ or ‘transgression’, the stepping over a known boundary, and anomia, ‘lawlessness’, the disregard or violation of a known law. In each case an objective criterion is implied, either a standard we fail to reach or a line we deliberately cross.”
― John Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“All Christian preachers have to face this issue. Either we preach that human beings are rebels against God, under his just judgment and (if left to themselves) lost, and that Christ crucified who bore their sin and curse is the only available Saviour. Or we emphasize human potential and human ability, with Christ brought in only to boost them, and with no necessity for the cross except to exhibit God’s love and so inspire us to greater endeavour. The former is the way to be faithful, the latter the way to be popular. It is not possible to be faithful and popular simultaneously.”
― John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ
—
“Octavius Winslow summed it up in a neat statement: ‘Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy; – but the Father, for love!’”
— from John Stott’s The Cross of Christ
—
“I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Reformed Protestants do not believe that the Protestant Reformation was the start of the church. We trace our lineage back through the Protestant Reformation, through the Middle Ages, into the early church, into the Bible, and we own all of that. So Saint Patrick belongs to the Protestants, as does Augustine, John Chrysostom, and all the rest of the saints. The Protestant Reformation was not the start of a new church. It was an attempt to purify and reform the church and move it away from the abuses of the papacy and its money-hungry, power-hungry twisting of the faith that was delivered once for all to the saints.”
— Joseph Spurgeon
—
“St. Patrick was a Presbyterian and a Protestant. Neither popery nor prelacy are the religion of the Ancient Irish. Ireland is consecrated by the genius of a true, primitive, apostolical presbyterianism.”
–Thomas Smyth (1808-1873)
—
“The Confederate army must have been vastly superior to the Yankees man to man to have come so near winning as it did. If it had won, what a blessing that would have been to the world!”
— J. Gresham Machen, found in “Machen’s Hope,” Richard E. Burnett, p. 523
—
Instead of just thinking about the war we are involved in with Israel and Iran right now, we need to rethink our relationship with the whole Middle East.
—
Many evangelicals, particularly in the South, identify dispensationalism with Christianity. They are not aware of the novelty of their own view, nor are they are aware of theological alternatives (covenant theology, postmillennianialism, partial preterism, etc.) within historic orthodoxy. They often don’t even know they are “dispensationalists,” they just think the dispensational way of reading the Bible is the only option for “born again Christians.” Ignorance of church history feeds parochialism on this issue. Dispensationalism has been so popular and pervasive for 100+ years, it’s often just assumed and anything else readily dismissed as liberal. Because theologians in more covenantal traditions, including some conservative Presbyterian denominations, don’t have much to say about eschatology from the pulpit (especially amillennialists), dispensationalism largely goes unchallenged. I’ve known quite a few dispensational Baptists who joined conservative Presbyterian churches and yet held on to their dispensational eschatology for years without ever hearing anything from the pulpit that challenged it.
—
Teddy Roosevelt on Christendom, Islam, and Courage, from his book “Fear God and Take Your Part:”
“Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh-century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.
If the peoples of Europe had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.
Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.
The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization.”
—
For the faithful Christian, all doctrine is practical, and all practice is rooted in doctrine.
For the faithful pastor, all preaching will be doctrinal, and all preaching will be practical — it will be practical in its doctrine and doctrinal in its practicality.
—
The theme of Romans is the righteousness of God (Rom. 1:16-17). That is to say, Romans is something of a theodicy. Paul is defending God’s covenant faithfulness, particularly in light of Jewish unfaithfulness.
How does it work? Without getting into exegetical details, we can still sketch out the big picture. In Romans, Paul is working with a narrative grid. He’s more of a story theologian than a systematic theologian. He tells the story of Adam, of Israel, of Jesus, and now of the church — all as tributaries flowing into the larger story God himself is authoring.
The center of the story is God’s act of covenant faithfulness through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the cross and resurrection, God is setting the world to rights. In Jesus, God has kept his covenant promise to Israel. But behind God’s covenant fidelity to Israel stands his covenant fidelity to the whole creation. Israel represented the creation, so what God did for her, he ultimately did for the world. Thus, in Romans, Paul stretches back through Israel, through Abraham, to Adam. Paul takes in the whole sweep of God’s purposes from the first creation to the new creation.
God’s righteousness, then, is simply God making good on his covenant with Israel, and back of that his covenant with creation. The gospel reveals the righteousness of God because in the gospel, God’s claim to be righteous is vindicated.
To come at it from another angle, God’s righteousness means that he’s committed to giving the story of the world a happy ending. That is to say, God’s original purpose for the creation has not been permanently derailed by Adam’s sin. Through the Last Adam, the world is being steered back on course and will reach the destination God intended for it from the beginning. The world will mature from glory to glory — from the Garden of Eden to the City of the New Jerusalem.
Throughout Scripture, we find the “righteousness” word group set in poetic parallel with terms like “faithfulness” and “salvation.” “Righteousness” is a covenantal or relational category, not just a legal one. Thus, we find appeals to God’s righteousness are basically appeals for salvation (e.g., Ps. 143:11). When Paul says God is righteous, he doesn’t mean God conforms to some legal or moral standard (there’s no such standard outside of God himself anyway). Rather, he means God has stayed true to his relational obligations. He has performed the covenant pledges. He has acted in loyalty to his people. He has kept his promises.
The gospel, then, is a revelation of how God has done these things, which of course, brings us back to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that’s the centerpiece of Romans: what God has done in history through Christ to redeem the creation. The cross and resurrection form the ultimate theodicy, the final vindication of God and his chosen people.
—
“The grace of election runs and flows most kindly in the channel of the covenant….
Natural love like a river is descending: it runs downward. All our care next to our souls is for our children; for in them our life is multiplied and continued
in the world. Children are the parent multiplied; therefore one saith of
children, They are ‘a knotty eternity;’ when the thread of life is run out,
there is a knot knit, and it is continued in the child. Therefore what a
mercy is it that God hath not only provided from eternity for our souls,
but hath spoken a good word concerning our house for a great while yet
to come, that he will continue his grace in our line.”
— Thomas Manton on covenant succession
—
“But this is not all his righteousness unto children’s children! Learn to fear God; that is the best way of providing for your children. We all seek the welfare of our children. You may heap up riches and honour upon them, and leave a curse with it; you may entail them an estate, and wrath with it; but leave them a covenant interest, that is an excellent inheritance. Wicked parents do as it were stop the way of God’s mercy from descending upon their posterity; at least, they do not open a passage and channel, that grace
may run down freely and with an uninterrupted course. God often
threatens, that ‘The posterity of the wicked shall be cut off,’ Ps. 109:13.
You may not only injure your own souls, but your posterity. Oh, for your
poor babes’ sake, learn to fear God, that you may not leave them to the
wrath and displeasure of God!…God will require not only the neglect of your own souls at your hands, but visit you for neglecting your children; that you have not taken a course to open a passage, that grace may descend to them.”
— Thomas Manton, to parents
—
“Here is comfort to believing parents concerning their children dying in infancy. We should not doubt of their salvation, unless we should wrong the covenant of grace. To what end doth God say, I am your God, and the God of your seed? Consider, Jesus Christ himself was the advocate of children, and would plead their right against his own apostles, when they thought Christ would have nothing to do with children: Mat. 19:14, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven’—suffer them to come; I have provided heaven for them, as well as for others. And Christ that hath said, ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ certainly will find out a way how to settle the title upon them, and to enstate them into the kingdom of heaven. David, when his child died, comforted himself in this: 2 Sam. 12:23, ‘But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.’ It is not only meant of the state of the dead, that were a brutish argument, but ‘I shall go to him;’ the meaning is, to the glory of the everlasting state; nay, though they die without the seal of the covenant. The Hebrew children were murdered as soon as born, Exod. 1:22; and Mat. 2:16. The children of Bethlehem shed their blood by martyrdom, before they shed their blood by circumcision, and therefore leave them in Christ’s arms.”
— Thomas Manton, comforting the parents of covenant infants dying in infancy
—
“Here is encouragement to the neglected duty of education. Many times we neglect our little children, think we can do no good upon them. Oh, water the seed of grace, for aught you know they may be sanctified from the womb. It is said of John the Baptist, Luke 1:15, ‘He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost from his mother’s womb.’ Oh, this will make them exert and put forth those hidden operations of grace which God worketh upon their souls; therefore water the seed of grace with the dew of education. God will call you to account for the education of your children: Ezek. 16:20, ‘Moreover, thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast born unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured: is this of thy whoredoms a small matter, that thou hast slain my children?’ that is, dedicated to me by circumcision. Consider, they are God’s children, and you are only entrusted with them that you may bring them up. Let us, that have been instruments to convey an evil nature to them, assist them in the work of grace. Many have been converted by private education before they have been called by the ministry of the gospel. You cannot do your children worse hurt than to let them run wild. Consider they are the natural branches of the covenant, and you should bestow culture upon them. Dionysius, the tyrant, to be revenged of his adversary, brought up his child to riot and wantonness. You cannot do yourselves a worse injury, nor yourselves a greater revenge, than to let your children run wild.”
— Thomas Manton on faithful parenting
—
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
— Bob Hope in 1975
While California did not make sodomy compulsory, they pretty much have made *approval* of sodomy compulsory (cf. Romans 1:32).
—
Scott Yenor with another masterful take down of femininism:
“We all know the feminist story. In the beginning, life was patriarchy. Women had no opportunities, no voice, no education, and no respect. Our grandmas and great-grandmas—really, any woman coming of age before 1960—could not exercise or even talk in public. Their husbands regularly cheated on them, and people consciously looked the other way. Women were barefoot and pregnant, living dead-end lives as housewives.
Then feminism brought about today’s glorious vision of womanhood: birth control and cubicles! Today’s gals can post on Instagram. They can have high-powered jobs. They can choose not to marry. They can testify before Congress. They can cheat on their husbands (and divorce them!) to the supportive cries of “Go, girl!” from their sisters. They shout their abortions. They are happy and fulfilled. Or so they say.
Betty Friedan laid out how she escaped the feminine mystique in her bildungsroman autobiography Life So Far. Feminist lips parrot the same script today. Amazingly, more women (especially educated women) today find American society more hopelessly misogynistic than at any time in the past. The chief thing to fear is…male backlash.”
—
Bruce Gilley provides a lot of insight and helpful pushback against my own skepticism of Trump’s war against Iran here:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/how-trump-saved-the-liberal-international-order/
Gilley writes,
“In both his first and second terms, Trump has reacted to the procedural LIO’s failure by making moves to reconstruct a substantive LIO based on securing interests and taking action when warranted.
The Trump Administration started by calling out Western allies for their suicidal tendencies with mass migration, censorship, national loathing, over-protected and regulated markets, demilitarization, “green” energy, and degrowth. The bad cop, good cop versions of this critique, lodged by JD Vance and Marco Rubio respectively at the Munich Security Conference, shared the same pressing concern with upholding Western civilization—“centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, [and] ancestry,” as Rubio called it. After all, there would be no point in a substantive LIO if there were nothing of substance behind it. U.S. support for the besieged democracies in Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine is of a piece with this. So is Trump’s seething criticism of Canada, a country barreling toward irrelevance under the weepy grandmother who heads its military and the Davos technocrat who heads its government.
Another critical plank to restoring the substantive LIO is the Trump Administration’s curtailment of asylum claims and re-vetting of over 200,000 refugee resettlement cases. International systems for asylum and refugees were developed after World War II to protect individuals facing substantive life and death threats. They then became procedural loopholes for mass migration. That’s why so many countries in Asia and elsewhere simply reject them outright. If they bring sanity back, Trump’s actions will restore, not destroy, those once-noble policies.
Trump has taken a multitude of other actions in the foreign policy realm. Maduro is currently in a Brooklyn jail cell, and Venezuelan drug boats are on the run, if not at the bottom of the sea. Iran has been bombed multiple times and airstrikes will continue, “regardless of what so-called international institutions say,” noted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on March 2. Israel, a key forward base for global peace and security in the Middle East, is safe and getting safer through the Abraham Accords and the Board of Peace. And the U.S. has put NATO into storage until it can prove itself a worthy ally.”
While I like Gilley’s work, he does not convince me here. The question is whether or not America in the role of “global cop” really serves America’s best interests at this point. Are we really capable of policing the world when we cannot police our own cities very well? Jordan Peterson criticized millennials for wanting to save the world when their own lives are disordered. Does that principle apply here? And is America over-functioning instead of letting other nations take responsibility that is more rightfully theirs, eg, peace and security in their own regions?
I agree we need a more morally substantive (= Christian) global order to replace the procedural one. But I do not the war with Iran will recover that.
—
Empathy is not all it’s cracked up to be by its proponents. Highly empathetic people allow other people’s emotions to flow over into them because they do not have good personal differentiation and lack emotional self-discipline. This is why Friedman pointed out that good leaders are high in differentiation and low in empathy. When you are overly empathetic, you are handing over your emotional steering wheel to the person you have chosen to empathize with (and why did you chose that person rather than someone else, anyway?). People who brag about being empathetic are actually bragging about their own lack of maturity, lack of emotional self-control, and lack of healthy boundaries. Empathy is especially crippling for leaders because being overly empathetic makes decisiveness impossible. How can you make a decision that might hurt someone else’s feelings or offend someone else?
A strong and highly differentiated leader can still empathize with others – but his empathy will be tightly regulated so he never gets swept up into the emotional reactivity of others. His empathy will be guided by the law of love, not by emotional drama. He has a moral compass outside of and above the emotionalism of any given situation. He disciples his own emotions, which means he is not at the mercy of other people’s emotions.
—
Two of my biggest pet peeves as a pastor:
- Wedding ceremonies that use the exact same vows for the bride and bridegroom, instead of sexually differentiated vows. The Bible gives distinct commands to husbands and wives, and that should be reflected in the promises they make to one another. Androgynous wedding ceremonies are dumb.
- Pastors who give pre-baptismal speeches about what baptism does NOT do. Why bother with something that doesn’t do anything? When a pastor baptizes, he should teach on what’s happening, not on what’s not happening. He should use the Bible’s own language – and he should explain that language, not explain it away.
—
“The revealing Sprit speaks through chosen men as His organs, but through these organs in such a fashion that the most intimate processes of their souls become the instruments by means of which He speaks His mind.”
— B. B. Warfield on the inspiration of Scripture
—
Thoughts the current things, put forward for discussion:
- Given America’s military superiority, no other nation in the world poses an existential threat to us. Therefore, there is no need for us to be involved in foreign wars in other hemispheres. Keep our military strong, but avoid all entangling alliances in other parts of the world. We went to war in the Middle East the year I graduated high school (1991). We never really left. There has been no net benefit to fighting in that part of the world. Will Iran prove to be any different? Maybe, but a strong enough case has not been made.
- If we need to police our own hemisphere in a Monroe Doctrine kind of way, fine, but there is still no real threat to our national security in this part of the world, so it shouldn’t be too hard.
- There is no reason for us to be involved in Middle Eastern conflicts. It’s on the other side of the world. Literally the other side of the world. Let the crazy people over there sort it out for themselves. But what about oil? We don’t need their oil, we have our own. The US has plenty of oil so stop buying it from Muslim nations who hate us. And oil is almost certainly a renewable resource anyway. We are not going to run out. No one talks about “peak oil” anymore, and there’s no need to. America could easily achieve energy independence. So do it. That little piece of the world called the Middle East has occupied our attention for a whole generation now, but we could completely ignore it – and would, if we were smart. Instead we have foolishly allowed ourselves to be dragged into “forever wars,” spilling our treasure and blood with no real benefit to the American people.
- Insofar as there is a threat to America, it does not come from Russia or Iran, but from China. Why did we enrich China by inviting them into the world economy and becoming their biggest customer? Why enrich a communist nation opposed to everything America has historically stood for? We created the China problem. End it now. If we are going to trade internationally, it should not be with nations that hate us.
- The US military should declare that starting in 5 years, it will only buy American made products. Want to bring manufacturing back home? Want to simplify supply chains? This is the way to do it. The American military buys so much, if it only buys American made, corporations will have to respond. This not only solves a lot of security issues, it also solves a lot of economic ones. America first had to mean American made, especially for our military.
- If America wants God’s blessing, we should look at a map with all the places Christians are being persecuted and use whatever leverage we have to stop that persecution. We need a gospel centered foreign policy.
- Tariffs are useful as a short term tool to try to equalize markets and bring about fairness in international trade. But if we drastically and permanently lower taxes and regulations, a lot of manufacturing will flow back to America without tariffs. America has just about everything we need – we can be a largely self-sufficient nation. Think about what we’ve done – we offshored a bunch of industries, then we tariff those imports, which raises the prices back to where they would have been if they were made in America in the first place. Stop playing that game.
- We must focus on domestic problems: stop the flow of drugs into our nation, deport illegals, criminalize abortion, put a moratorium on nearly all new immigration, ban porn, crush welfare fraud, eliminate DEI, fix the voting system, ban all trans stuff, suppress sodomy, ban Sharia, insist on English only in public/government settings, reform family court and divorce laws to stop punishing men, change tax rules to incentivize marriage and birth rates as much as possible, do away with TSA and let airlines handle their own security, lower regulations on new construction to fix the home affordability crisis, increase school choice options, etc. While many of these things have to happen at the state level, they should absolutely happen in all red states, at the very least. If we had reasonably competent leadership, most of these would have happened in red states a long time ago.
- Lobbying Congress should be strictly regulated. No more bribing Congressmen with “campaign donations.”
- The goal should be for any American family to be able to live on one income in a decent house in a decent neighborhood. Eliminate hidden costs that function as a tax on families. We have way too many regulations – government bureaucracy needs to be radically scaled back.
- End the Fed. Stop printing money. Let the market set interest rates.
- Trump must fire Paula White as his “faith advisor” and put a real pastor (an ordained man representing historic Protestantism) in her place. Bringing Paula White into his administration is undoubtedly one of Trump’s dumbest moves. I don’t expect much from Trump spiritually, but he can and should do better than a fake pastorette. If Trump wants prayer and counsel, he should get it from a qualified theologian, not a quack.
—
That time a pagan king became a Calvinist:
“At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”” (Daniel 4:34-35)
—
“Someone once said that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him. The implications of that undermine most of the agenda of the political left.”
— Thomas Sowell
—
Scott Yenor on gendered piety/sexed virtue:
“The sexes are capable of the same virtues, but virtues and vices register differently for men and women. Caring is important in both sexes, as are courage and intelligence, but these virtues (and their associated vices) matter differently.
A man who runs from a fight or is scared of spiders is judged harshly, while such weakness is hardly unacceptable, and can even be charming in a woman. A young man who lacks ambition in the workplace is judged more harshly than many a woman who lacks similar ambition. An adulterous man is a cad and was despised by employers and the community at large in the past, but an adulterous woman is judged more harshly than the cad. Both men and women should care, but women who do not care for their children or who do not like children are judged more harshly than men, since they are ignoring manifest maternal duties.
Ultimately, a man who is not a provider or protector to his family is more of a failure than a woman who neither provides nor protects. A woman who cannot beautify or nurture life is more of a failure than a man who does neither.”
—
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
— Simone De Beauvoir
Feminism was never about giving women choices but taking choices away, including the one most women would naturally make.
—
A lot of kids today, especially boys, get medicated to make them compliant. But what most kids need is not a better pill, but better parenting.
—
Marxists are clueless about wealth creation. They’re all about seizing wealth that has already been created – and then they destroy that wealth along with all that went into creating it, which is why Marxism always ends in poverty. Marxism is antithetical to the creation mandate of Genesis 1. Marxism is parasitic. Karl Marx’s mother once told him, “I wish you’d start accumulating capital instead of just writing about it.”
—
What is my politics? The politics that built and can recover and build upon the best of Western civilization.
—
Crazy, half-formed thoughts springing from the war with Iran:
I have an idea. The US has plenty of oil so let’s stop buying it from Muslim nations who hate us. Why should we enrich our enemies?
Oil is almost certainly a renewable resource anyway. We are not going to run out. No one talks about “peak oil” anymore, and there’s no need to. America could easily achieve energy independence. So do it.
That little piece of the world called the Middle East has occupied our attention for a whole generation now, but we could completely ignore it – and would, if we were smart. Instead we have foolishly allowed ourselves to be dragged into “forever wars,” spilling our treasure and blood with no real benefit to the American people. We started fighting there when I was still in high school (1991) and have really never left.
Maybe the current conflict in Iran will prove to be an exception. But I don’t see evidence of it to this point. So why bother with what’s happening in that hemisphere? How does our conflict over there benefit life over here, especially when we are overrun with domestic problems?
The reality is that there is no existential military threat to America today anywhere in the world. Thus, there is no reason for us to be dragged into other people’s conflicts. Our biggest threats are at home, so why not focus the attention there?
I’m happy to be proven wrong on this. If there’s a good reason to be involved with Ukraine and Iran at this point, I’d like to hear it.
—
Love rejoices in the truth. Empathy rejoices in raw emotional drama and perceived victimhood.
—
A great deal of the Bible is taken up describing buildings – 15 chapters in Exodus, several more chapters in 1 Kings, 8 chapters in Ezekiel, etc.
In total, the Bible has about 25 chapters devoted to describing buildings. That’s longer than Romans and almost as many chapters as the longest gospels.
Why? Many reasons, but mainly this: God teaches ecclesiology through architecture. The buildings described are full of symbolism and typology that, properly understood, reveal the truth about the church, which is God’s ultimate building project.
For more see my sermon series on Revelation 21-22, starting here:
—
“Even the most perfect, so long as they live in this world, never have so good ground for congratulation as not to need prayers, that God may grant to them, not only to persevere till the end, but likewise to make progress from day to day.”
— John Calvin
—
“Businessmen disdained the clergy as “people halfway between men and women.” Ministers found the most congenial environment, not in businesses, political clubs, or saloons, but “in the Sunday school, the parlor, the library, among women and those who flattered and resembled them.” Moreover, they were typically recruited from the ranks of weak, sickly boys with indoor tastes who stayed at home with their mothers and came to identify with the feminine world of religion. The popular mind often joined “the idea of ill health with the clerical image.”
— Leon Podles, The Church Impotent, on the the rise of an effeminate ministry in the 19th century
—
Summarizing Proverbs on wealth:
Because wealth is good we should be grateful for it.
Because wealth is dangerous, we should be generous with it.
Because wealth is powerful, we should garner it.
—
If you want to help someone else, tell them the truth if you want to help yourself, tell them what they want to hear.
—
When Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” ironically, he is dying on the cross to answer his own prayer in that very moment.
—
Some say full time pastors who rely on their congregations for financial support are inevitably compromised because their risk their ions if they offend their congregations.
There is truth in pointing out this danger, even though congregational financial support for a pastor is certainly the biblical model. Being bi-vocational does not necessarily solve the problem because there is still financial vulnerability.
But this problem is not unique to the pastorate. It’s always “your money or your faith.” Christians in most every vocation can face situations where faithfulness puts their job at risk. A man who makes his living podcasting can easily be held hostage by his audience; he thinks he shapes his audience, but in reality his audience all too easily controls him. A lawyer will often have to sacrifice money to keep his integrity. Businessmen are pressured to cheat customers. Christian politicians often have to choose between getting re-elected and being obedient/honest. And so on.
—
Ironically, feminism is a form of chauvinism, in that it despises real femininity.
—
It’s interesting to see criticisms of women’s suffrage/the 19th amendment coming from so many different sources today:
*Pearcey points out most women at the time did not even want the right to vote and were happy to be represented by their husbands
*Others point out that women’s suffrage pitted men vs women in a contest of sexual identity politics, dividing the household and making the individual rather than the family the basic unit of society
*Others point out that women were given a privilege with no corresponding responsibility, like defense of the nation
*Dabney had some pretty trenchant criticisms of what would happen if women were given the vote and his predictions proved true – many are taking note of that today
*Interestingly a lot of contemporary women recognize the problem with the way women vote – Ann Coulter has been saying for 20+ years she’d gladly give up her right to vote as a woman because it’d be better for the country
*There were circumstantial reasons women’s suffrage picked up momentum along with prohibition. Sadly, to put it provocatively, woman got the right to vote largely because too many American men were too drunk too often to think clearly. Far too many men at that time were were abusing alcohol; women had legitimate moral complaints with the bahavior of men.
—
James Talarico says, “In Matthew 25 Jesus tells us exactly how we will be judged: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger … nothing about going to church, nothing about being straight…It’s all about how you treat other people. And I think American Christians have got to get back to those fundamentals.”
This is a demonic quote for two reasons. First, so-called conservative Christians, the kind of Christians Talarico is slandering here, do far more to help the poor than any other group in America. They do it with their own dime and on their own time. Studies show that conservative/evangelical believers do the most to help the needy. Talarico is only interested in helping the poor with other people’s money, through taxation and the welfare state. That’s not biblical charity.
Second, Talarico’s appeal to Scripture is really no different from Satan’s appeal to Scripture when he tempts Jesus. Scripture speaks to going to church elsewhere. It speaks to sexual issues elsewhere. Taslarico is twisting Scripture to suit his purposes. He is a false teacher.
Third, if we are going to be judged based on how we treat other people, those who lie to people (the way Talarico lies to tell sodomites and transgenders that they do not need to repent) as opposed to telling them the truth about their sin will be judged severely. Those who lie about people (the way Talkarco lies about evangelical Christians) by falsely accusing them will be judged severely. Those who advocate murdering the unborn (as Talarico does) as opposed to protecting the unborn (as evangelicals do) will be judged severely.
—
People who move from a liberal state, say, California or New York, to a conservative state, say, South Carolina or Alabama, but refuse to assimilate to the conservatism of their new home state, are just as bad as immigrants who move from one nation to another nation without intending to assimilate to their new nation.
If you move from a liberal state to a conservative one, please, please, please, leave your politics behind. Why bring the politics that ruined your old state into your newly chosen state?
Of course, if you are a conservative in a liberal state and you move to a more conservative state to escape increasing tyranny and craziness, that’s no problem – you are a political and/or religious refugee, seeking a better home. You are welcome to come join us! Just start saying “y’all” and you’ll fit right in.
—
This post got 122k views in August 2024:
The biggest trouble makers in the church are not alpha males but females married to beta males.
These women are insecure about their own husband’s leadership which makes them anxious. They project that insecurity on all males in positions of leadership. They become anxious about male rule in general.
How women in the church react to preaching on “wives submit to your husbands in everything” generally tells you a lot more about how that woman feels about her particular husband than it does how she views, say, the authority of Scripture. Women who know they married men of high competence and high character virtually never complain about teaching on wifely submission. These women are married to masculine men and so they naturally settle into their feminine.
Sadly, churches today are mostly beta male factories.
—
My question for Joe Rogan:
You haven’t lived the way Jesus tells us to live – you are a sinner like everyone else – so how do you get your sins forgiven?
Forgiveness of sins is unique to the Christian faith. It’s what makes Christian faith good news.
Believing Jesus taught a better way of life is true, but that is not enough. You must trust him to be your Savior by what he did on the cross. His teaching alone will not save; it is his sin-bearing, wrath-satisfying death that saves. The gospel is not, “Jesus taught us a better way to live.” The gospel is, “Jesus died and rose again to accomplish salvation for sinners who trust in him.” Those who trust him will be transformed, to be sure – faith produces fruit. But salvation is found in what Jesus did, outside of us, on the cross, 2000 years ago.
I pray Joe takes that next step.
—
The only person to ever keep Jesus’ teaching perfectly was Jesus himself. That’s why Jesus didn’t just teach – he also died on the cross for those who fail to keep his teaching. We need more than the teaching of Jesus; we need his blood shed on the cross to cover and forgive all the ways we have violated his teaching. If the teaching of Jesus is the goal, all of us have fallen short of that goal and missed the mark. This is why just focusing on the good and wise teachings of Jesus is never enough. We need more than his teaching; we need his blood shed on the cross as the God-man, offering a sacrifice of infinite worth and bearing the judgment we deserve.
—
Western civilization is largely the fruit of Christian faith and is now largely apostate. We climbed the ladder of Christian faith, only to kick it away once we got to the top. But we will not stay at the top without recovering the faith that got us here.
—
“I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.”
— Thomas Paine
I am not a fan of Paine but this is the right way to look at things. We have to make sacrifices and fight battles today for the good of coming generations. The good man leaves his children a valuable inheritance; a good culture leaves the next generation a good world to live in.
—
The mission of the church is to disciple the world. Nothing less than that.
The great task of the church is to make the world full of Christ’s disciples.
The work of the church is to make the world as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
—
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that diversity as measured by racial or gender representation has any bearing on creativity, productivity outcome.”
— Jordan Peterson
—
Nikola Tesla on rising feminism and misandry in 1924:
“I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship.
But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man – in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization.
Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again.
Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don’t know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it – and there is striking evidence at hand that they do – then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world’s history.
Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects – a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life.
The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me.”
This is his explanation as to why he never married. While I think men should resist swallowing the black pill, it’s interesting to see how prescient he was over 100 years ago regarding how feminism was changing intersexual dynamics.
—
“There is a duty that comes with inheritance. A duty to be a steward rather than just a consumer. To ask not only what the world can offer you, but what you owe the world that was handed to you. Our ancestors were not merely people who lived before us. They were people who worked and sacrificed specifically so that something, a nation, a faith, a culture, a family name, would survive them…
We owe our ancestors more than a well-traveled life. We owe them continuation. We owe our countries more than tax receipts and tourism spending. We owe them citizens who take seriously the long project of civilizational survival. And we owe future generations something that no photograph can capture: a world still worth inheriting.”
— Elizabeth Stone
—
Every Christian who believes in the inspiration of Scripture is in principle a Calvinist. Inspiration means God worked through human authors without negating their human will/freedom to produce exactly the text God wanted. Inspiration requires a compatibilist view of divine sovereignty and human agency, and Calvinism is just Christian compatibilism.
—
Progressives have no arguments. All they have is name calling. “Do what I say or you’re a racist” is about all they have now. And it’s not working.
—
“In 1933 and in 1941 your leaders and the whole western world, in an unprincipled way, made a deal with totalitarianism.’ We will have to pay for this, some day this deal will come back to haunt us.”
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
—
If you want to understand America, Travels with Charlie by Steinbeck is an underrated read.
—
A note on the Heidelberg Catechism on merit:
“Merits” is not the language I would choose, and it’s not biblical language. But I don’t object to it in the HC, any more than I do in some hymns.
If merit is just a way of saying Christ’s work is of infinite worth, fine. If it means Christ satisfied a meritorious covenant set up at creation, it’s problematic.
I think the HC is doing the former.
—
Ordo Amoris is just the recognition that it’s not a sin to be finite. Ordo Amoris reminds us we cannot flatten love out such that we seek to love all people in the same way. It is impossible to do so and destructive to try.
Christian love is both universal and particular. Yes, we are to view all people as our neighbor — that’s the universal aspect. We recognize all people bear the image of God. But that universalism does not negate the particularity of Christian love. It does not negate our varying relationships based on varying types of proximity, and the hierarchies that exist amongst those relationships. The particularity is manifested in different types of connections we have with other people, including spiritual, familial, and geographic.
Those who say we should help everyone end up helping no one. By contrast, those who recognize the particular duties that arise from particular relationships are in a position to actually do good to and for others. Ordo Amoris does not limit our love; it channels it in constructive ways. If we reject Ordo Amoris, we will end up spreading our love so thinly, it will do no one any good. Ordo Amoris trains us love deeply in precisely those relationships where we have the greatest obligation.
To say our loves ought to be ordered is to say they can be disordered. This is the basic debate between Christians and progressives. Christian faith teaches that our loves should be prioritized according to God’s Word; progressivism denies this. But actually it’s worse than that. In practice, progressives tend to reverse a proper Ordo Amoris – they still have ordered loves, but they have reversed their proper ordering, in an unnatural way. When the proper order of loves is reversed, people all too often end up hating those they should love the most. This is why, for example, progressives will defend illegal aliens whom do they not personally know while despising their own family members and their own nation. The progressive will profess love for an abstraction – a distant stranger for whom he can do no practical, real world good – while abhorring those closest to him and to whom he has the greatest duty.
—
Jesus’ miracles like calming the storm on the sea and his healings showed his power over nature. His exorcisms showed his power over Satan and his demons. His raising people from the dead, including his own resurrection, showed his power over life and death. Taken all together, we see Jesus is the absolute ruler over the whole creation.
—
Paul loved his nation and the nations. He loved his kinsman (Romans 9:1ff) and the Gentiles (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). Christian love is both particular and universal.
—
It’s important to understand there are no moderate Democrats left. Maybe some campaign moderately but they govern radically. All the old school Democrats are now Republicans.
—
A note on David French’s anti-Christian nationalism:
David French famously called transgender drag queen story hour at public libraries “one of the blessings of liberty.”
Since Christians “praise God from whom all blessings flow,” French must think this sexual perversion somehow comes from God. Obviously, this is blasphemous.
If French had said drag queen story hour is one of the liabilities of civil liberty or of the down sides of civil liberty, that would make more sense. At least he would have recognized the proper and improper, righteous and unrighteous, uses of liberty. If French had said civil liberties are a blessing but drag queen story hour is an abuse of those liberties, that would also be a bit more respectable. But that’s not what he said.
What’s odd is that French is not willing to say that things he doesn’t like about the current right/MAGA movement are also blessings of liberty. If drag queen story hour is one of the blessings of American liberty, why isn’t Trump and his sometimes acerbic rhetoric also one of the blessings of our liberty? Why isn’t Trump’s tweeting a blessing of liberty? Why shouldn’t French count online neo-Nazis and manosphere misogynists as among the blessings of liberty?
The fact is that French is the wrong kind of nationalist. He is not a Christian nationalist. He is an anti-Christian nationalist. He might be a good American by modern liberal standards; he is not a good Christian by biblical standards. He does not believe Jesus is King of kings. For him, the modern liberal order is more ultimate than Jesus’ lordship. Jesus isn’t really lord; pluralism is lord. French ends up absolutizing the American system (as it exists today) instead of Jesus’ authority. The modern liberal notion of free speech (which is used to underwrite drag queen story hour) is more ultimate than God’s law.
French’s moral compass is set not by Scripture but by the modern liberal order. This is why French can accommodate and pedestalize someone like James Talarico while bashing evangelicals and Christian nationalists who thought Trump was preferable to Clinton, Biden, and Harris. Talarico plays by the rules of the modern liberal order. Christian nationalists serve a higher Lord so they are ruled out of bounds. Talarico is “decent” because he argues for baby murder, gender mutilation, and sodomy in a winsome way. Talarico might say “the trans community needs abortion access” but he says it’s politely so French applauds him. Niceness counts with French; biblical faithfulness does not.
But where does the obligation to uphold free speech in this way come from? It doesn’t come from God or his Word. It comes from a modern liberal understanding of the American political order. It comes from pluralism. French is a nationalist of sorts; he wants to play be the rules of Americanism. But he’s the wrong kind of nationalist. He has made an idol of modern American liberalism.
—
Great lyrics from a hymn we sang recently – this is Christendom in a nutshell, with Christ’s blessing resting upon the nation, the city, and the families of a people:
“O blest the land, the city blest, Where Christ the ruler is confessed! O peaceful hearts and happy homes To whom this King in triumph comes!”
—
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
— Dale Carnegie
—
I was searching for something and came across this email I sent to someone several years ago. I don’t remember what sermon of mine was being discussed, but I must have said something about Satan’s action in the world today – how it has been curtailed after the the death and resurrection of Jesus, but not yet fully eradicated. This questioner was taking issue with that, arguing that Satan is no longer active in any way. My reply:
Don’t you know your rock’n’roll? Haven’t you heard the Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil”? Satan does all kinds of wicked stuff in the world. Keith Richards even claimed he met the devil a few times (and I’m inclined to believe him).
More seriously—I think talking about Satan’s power being limited is certainly true, but it’s also a relative thing. Limited compared to what? Certainly compared to what it was in the old creation. Rev. 20 says he is bound with regard to deceiving the nations (cf. Rev. 12:9). Thus, we know he cannot stop the mission of the church to disciple the nations. He cannot deceive the nations as he did en masse before Jesus came. But he certainly can make the church’s mission much more difficult in various ways. His two strategies are seen in Rev. 12 – persecution from without and heresy from within.
Certainly, Satan is defeated in principle, and Christ is subduing the principalities and powers to himself (that is, the false gods/demons, and the pieces of creation they are able to use to mislead human beings). But if Satan was essentially powerless today, I don’t think Paul would identify him as our main enemy in Eph. 6, or list him as one of the enemies trying to separate us from God’s love in Rom. 8, etc.
I’ll have a lot more to say about the principalities and powers in the future – perhaps when I start my 1 Corinthians series pretty soon. I think unpacking what Paul means when he speaks about the principalities and powers is the key to understanding Satan’s activity in the present age.
I don’t think we should go looking for a devil behind every bush, or blaming everything that goes wrong on demonic activity. That gives Satan too much credit, and people not enough blame. Satan has no power over Christians. He can tempt us (like he did Jesus), but if we resist him, he has to flee from us. He can only influence us to the degree that we yield to him.
However, Satan is quite active in the world at large, and I think Rev. 12 (as well as Eph. 6 and other texts) show us that. There are a lot of references to demonic activity in the NT epistles when you start to look closely, so whatever Rev. 20 means when it tells us Satan is bound, it cannot exclude our ongoing warfare with Satan and his ongoing interference with cultures and nations. I think Rayburn is right that we need to do justice to the superhuman evil we see at work around us in various ways, and then we need to respond accordingly (e.g., exorcise the world by singing God’s praises the way David did with Saul).
That being said, I don’t think we can give any good explanation of exactly how demonic forces work in our world today. Nor can we explain how demonic evil and humans’ innate desire for evil interact. Certainly, we do not have to choose between saying a sinful action was the fault of a person or a demon. Obviously, in the case of Herod’s attempt to kill Satan, it was both his sin, as well the work of the dragon. Same with Judas betraying Jesus. Same when Jesus was crucified – see 1 Cor. 2:8.
The lyrics of A Mighty Fortress are actually a great summary of the sermon – especially the third verse:
“A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing: For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe; His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate, On earth is not his equal.
Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing; Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing: Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He; Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same, And He must win the battle.
And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us: The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him; His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure, One little word shall fell him.
That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth; The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth: Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever.”
Also, Rayburn included this line from John Newton, describing where the atheist philosopher Voltaire got his inspiration and popularity:
“John Newton, in his day, once wrote, “Perhaps such a one as Voltaire would neither have written, nor have been read or admired so much, if he had not been the amanuensis of an abler hand…” Voltaire was the unwitting secretary of Satan and his books were dictated by a greater and more powerful mind: that is what Newton meant. In our day we might wonder the same thing of Richard Dawkins or the late Stephen Jay Gould. Is this not the reason so many blindly, religiously believe the absurd?”
—
A note on typology in the book of Job:
Yes, by all means, Job is a type of Christ. He is righteous, and suffers at the hands of Satan, like Jesus. He cries out to God in agony like Jesus. He is called the servant of the Lord, like Jesus. He intercedes for others, like Jesus. Etc. Most importantly, like Jesus, he remains faithful through his suffering and as a result, Satan is defeated (that is, he is silenced – Satan means “the accuser” and while Satan speaks accusations at the beginning of the book, he has no speaking part at the end of the book – and a silent accuser is a defeated accuser).
So, yes, Job is a type of Christ all the way down – the whole story is perhaps one of the best typologies we have in the entire OT. It’s a death and resurrection story, in which victory is won through faithful suffering.
—
“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
—
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
— E.L. Doctorow
—
There was always a strain of relatively restrained and sane dispensationalism. I’m thinking of men like John MacArthur. MacArthir’s expository preaching prevented him from falling into many of the grave errors of other dispensationalists. Any form of dispensationalism has its problems, but some dispensationalists have been generally orthodox evangelicals overall.
But on the whole, dispensationalism has been a total disaster for the church in every way. It pushed no-lordship salvation, a kind of antinomianism. It’s hermeneutic leads its adherents to completely misread the Old Testament. It’s wierd and novel eschatology produced all kinds of problems, including a withdrawal from cultural engagement and seriously foolish politics. Dispensationalism is a religious system that pledges unconditional political support to a secular nation based on ethnicity. There’s nothing Christian about that. And those dispensationalists who are looking for a third temple in Jerusalem probably are heretics because it contradicts the purpose of the cross and the whole book of Hebrews.
Bad theology can send people to hell. It can also get people killed in wars.
—
Cy Young pitched 749 complete games. This might be the most untouchable record in all of professional sports. No current major league pitcher even has 30.
—
The Old Testament is about Jesus. The Old Testament is just as Christian as the New Testament. The New Testament uses the language and categories of the Old Testament to explain who Jesus is and what he has accomplished. Jesus cannot be understood apart from the Old Testament. The Bible is one book, telling one story, and the whole of it bears witness to Jesus.
John 5:46:
[46] For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.
Luke 24:26-27:
[26] Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” [27] And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:44-45:
[44] Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” [45] Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,
Hebrews 10:1:
[1] For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.
Romans 15:8:
[8] For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.
—
The third temple is already here. It’s called the church.
Ephesians 2:11-22
1 Peter 2:5
—
Genesis 3:15 already hints at the virgin birth. The promised redeemer, the new Adam, who will crush the head of the satanic serpent, will be the “seed of the woman.” Not the seed of a man – a man will not be involved in his conception – but the seed of the woman, meaning he will be conceived through a miracle of divine grace and power.
—
The Bible is the story of creation, fall, and redemption. Genesis 3 is the most pivotal chapter in the Bible because it is the only chapter to contain all three – it begins with an unfallen creation, the fall happens, then God gives the promise of redemption.
—
“A woman simply is, but a man must become.”
— Camille Paglia
To put it another way, for women, nature is kind but time is cruel and for men, nature is cruel but time is kind. Women have what they need to attract a man naturally, but they lose it as they age; men do not have what they need to attract a woman naturally, but can gain it over time by hard work.
—
David could wage physical war with hands. He could wage spiritual war through his psalms (sung prayers).
All men should be skilled in both kinds of warfare. David knew what to do with a sword in his hand and a lyre in his hand. He could work with his hands and with his words. He knew how to use a sword and a sling; he knew how to play a lyre and write a hymn.
Men need David-like range.
—
Jesus chose 12 male apostles to be the leaders of his church as it launched into the new covenant. If you think Jesus endorses female pastors, you have to posit that Jesus only chose men because he was afraid of causing offense in his culture, which is obviously preposterous. Jesus was not a coward and had no hesitation in offending people. He didn’t choose a woman as an apostle in his church because, in the words of Paul, another of his male apostles, he does not “permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.”
[Note: If the question is asked, “Why didn’t Jesus chose any Gentiles?,” the answer is obvious: While he foreshadows the coming Gentile inclusion in his ministry, it cannot happen until after his death and resurrection.]
—
Sad to see Abigail Spanberger turn the Commonwealth of Virginia into the People’s Republic of Virginia. What happened to “death to tyrants”? It’s right there on the state flag!
—
“Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more , but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”
— Robert Putnam
—
Trump has many failings…but his own kids love him and are loyal to him. That’s more than can be said of many Christian leaders I know.
—
If Aristotle was right about the races then the biblical vision of heaven is impossible.
—
If you go woke, you can never go woke enough.
—
Children who grow up in homes where there is a lot of marital conflict, even low key marital conflict, almost always struggle with anxiety and relational bonding when they get older. Having a happy marriage will cover many parental shortcomings because the child has a secure foundation. God has established spousal roles, domains, and an authority structure in marriage precisely so that conflict can be minimized in the home. When love and respect flow back and forth between spouses, when there is joy and peace characterizing the marital relationship, the children are put in a position to thrive. Marital faithfulness and joy can cover many parental shortcomings.
—
Unsubmissive wives are masculinized women and essentially turn their husbands into faggots.
TPC Pastor's Page 