“Wise people treasure knowledge, but the babbling of a fool invites disaster.”
Proverbs 10:14 NLT
Sin weakens us. It has consequences due to the fact that the Lord Himself is the source of all good things – especially wisdom. This means that when we reject God we become, as a logical necessity, illogical and self-destructive (Proverbs 8:36). Because the American church is largely apostate in our day we fail to understand the fact that all of life is downstream of theology. It’s a simple equation. Due to this being God’s world, and we being His creation, to rightly live in it we must start with Him as preeminent in all of our reasoning (Proverbs 3:5-6). The fear of the Lord in this context is the obvious recognition that He is the Creator God. To start our line of reasoning in any endeavor or field upon the premise that we can be ethically and philosophically neutral is, in the main, akin to trying to teach a bird how to ride a bike.
Seriously.
Many of us are angry right now, even furious, at all the duplicity and, yes, stupidity that appears to be increasing at a fever pitch. But if His church fails to recognize that fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, how can we be surprised that a secular world is outdoing itself in showing irrationality? You see, unless God is gracious to us in our sin, our attempts to reason without Him are literally suicidal. God and His holy word-law are the first principles of living and all reasoning. An unbeliever may be very educated and knowledgable in a particular field. He may be full of information. But the thing to know is that this is itself a great mercy from God. True knowledge and life is simply not possible without Jesus Christ who is the Truth itself. Consider that all reasoning requires a philosophical system. It requires a set of basic presuppositions in order to function. It requires a coherent theory of ultimacy (metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology), and ethics. Literally every time we say anything at all we’re presuming these things.
The Bible, and natural law, teach us that only in Christ do we have internal consistency and external coherence. All other worldviews end up in gross contradiction. Our era is marked by a hodgepodge of humanism. To wit: the metaphysic of chance rules our thinking. There’s no creator God, only impersonal chance driving a process of evolution. Therefore, what’s ultimate isn’t personhood and meaning, but raw “forces.” This has massive consequences downstream and leads to an ethic that’s shot through full of inconsistencies.
A theory of knowledge that starts mid-stream rather than God’s word-law presents man’s mind as the final reference point. This means that truth isn’t ultimate. Our culture believes that facts exist, but transcendent truth doesn’t…and then it contradicts itself by consistently stating ethical absolutes. Consider always that unless there’s a Personal Absolute (Jesus Christ), there can be no smaller, or sub-absolutes. If what is ultimate isn’t a person, then life is ultimately impersonal and this eviscerates the reality of ethics because ethics only apply to persons. If there is no personal and creator God as Christianity teaches, then it must be explained why human life or anything else truly matters.
So, you see how lack of faithfulness to God is eminently foolish. Unbelief is tragic in every way because it divorces us from truth, meaning, and wisdom. A consequence of God’s wrath is in His “giving us over” to a depraved mind (Romans 1:28), which is to say that since He’s the source of truth and wisdom, our attempts to live without Him invariably lead to utter foolishness.
It’s to this that we see how we aren’t protected by our economy or military power. America and her churches are secular now, in principle and practice. We’ve rejected the Lord and are clearly being “given over” to the consequences of unbelief (though we call that unbelief, tolerance or neutrality). Yesterday’s assassination attempt comes as a warning, not of the Left, as many would have it, but of our refusal to repent. We saw our vaunted Secret Service allow a 20 year-old with no special training gain a sniper’s perch with a clear line of sight to the former President Trump. The greatest protective agency in the world left a rooftop that was merely 150 yards from Mr. Trump easily accessible to a young man who was hardly to be confused with John Wick or John Rambo. (We assume, in this blog, that it was incompetence at work because the alternative is too difficult to bear right now).
Afterwards, as the agents fumbled about to get the injured ex-president into the waiting SUV, a nervous agent looks shaken and clearly can’t figure out how to holster her drawn handgun. So, she keeps it out for another few seconds and then figures it out.
This is the sort of thing that happens to a prideful people. The Lord gives them over to silly ideas like DEI where the Secret Service becomes more interested in the mood of the day rather than finding and equipping for the job the best men and women they can. Watching what is supposed to be the cream of the crop, insofar as security goes, miss their holster hardly inspires confidence. One wonders what hostile actors and nations must be thinking as they view the tape. One wonders how the best of the best didn’t think to secure such an obvious rooftop that offered such a clear line to so obvious a target.
Sin.
Sin makes us stupid. It makes us self-destructive. It makes us foolish.
“Some nations boast of their chariots and horses, but we boast in the name of the Lord our God. Those nations will fall down and collapse, but we will rise up and stand firm.”
Psalms 20:7-8 NLT
Unless we stand in faith, we won’t stand firm at all (Isaiah 7:9). How many nations and peoples have stood in shock, staring at the burned out ruins of what was once their civilization, blinking through tears, choking on the smoke, because they thought that judgment would never happen? How many swallowed the hard gruel of wrath because they insisted that God think on their terms rather than the other way around?
America must repent. Many on the right are speaking about civil war and how evil is the left when they should be purging the evil in their own hearts first (1 Corinthians 5:13). God is not mocked and our churches are awash with men and women who are epistemically “neutral” – that is, syncretistic. We reason like the world – from the myth of neutrality. Other churches are openly woke. Yes, we should pray for the former president – for his health especially (and for the other attendee who was killed!) – but also we must know that it’s righteousness that exalts a nation. The gospel of Jesus Christ is what we need for it’s the only way to righteousness. We should be praying most fervently for revival and for a renewed love of His word. As Gordon Clark said so well: “when the auto mechanic and baker knows Scripture as well as, and in many cases today, better than the theologian, we’ll have already had our revival.”
Indeed! My prayer today is that we know the Lord and praise Him in our hearts, our homes, our businesses, and our churches. Then and only then will the church be salt and light to a fallen world. We got this far because the salt has lost its saltiness and yesterday was God’s wonderful grace because, yes, the assassin missed and we have yet another chance to repent (Romans 2:4).
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