“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”
Romans 1:24-25 ESV
America is falling. And fast. The evidence is all around us. But, and I know this is going to strike some as, if not contrary to modern conservative-evangelical thought, then downright blasphemous. Ready?
Praise the Lord.
First, I’m not, nor should any of us be, “conservative” or “libertarian” first. As Christians we follow Christ and Christ alone. It’s Christ and His word-law that makes one think – socially or politically, that is – as a conservative or libertarian in the first place. Christian principles, in particular, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, and worshipping God alone, logically prohibit the epistemically consistent Christian from being any variation of a socialist. That’s true, but hitching Christ to a political narrative is a specious bit of business and one that’s causing the church and her families a tremendous amount of grief. Living on the edge of our seats as though doomsday is ever threatening isn’t quite a path of peace and joy in the Spirit, is it? Sure, the godless left (and they sure are godless) are only hitting the gas as they careen down the hill toward a devastating moral mashup. Yeah, that’s true. But there’s a huge difference between calling them to repent of their sin and turn to the Lord so that they may be saved and merely trying to beat them at the ballot box. How do we know if we’ve gone “full Jonah” – i.e., not caring about the people, only the politics? Easy: do we spend our time arguing for politics or the cross?
My pastor, Rick Phillips, wrote in Turning Back the Darkness that what we save them with, we save them to. No politician or political ideology is our Savior nor the gospel. In short, it’s sin that leads to where we’re at and only grace that can fix the massive problems we face as judgment mounts. To try and stay the execution via the ballot box rather than through the gospel shows us, ironically, how we’ve gotten here in the first place.
A Christian seeks Christ. A Christian sees the world first and foremost through the lens of Scripture so as to interpret events and times according to His will. To that end, the Left’s acceleration into sin and tyranny are hardly what we’re inclined to think they are. Sad, indeed. Even tragic. But only if we’re biblically illiterate and taken by such surprise that we react with hatred of millions of people taken captive to the false religion of Leftism. And make no mistake, Leftism is a false god.
For example, it has a contradictory metaphysic of Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary Darwinism. Things just occurred, they believe. Just because. Life and everything else came from literally nothing and for nothing (creation ex nihilo) but survival is good (for some reason) and is guided by a weirdly godlike but impersonal process called evolution. At the bottom of it all is the hard truth that “out of nothing, nothing comes” (ex nihilo nihil fit) and that the godlike process of life (evolution) is impersonal, which would mean, tragically, that in the ultimate sense we don’t matter.
And you wonder why the young struggle with meaninglessness, despair, and aloneness. They’re trying to live a life that makes sense in a world of no sense. This is the great tragedy of our day. To rail against transgenderism and sexual immorality should mean that our hearts ache for those taken captive by the false ethics springing like poison flowers from the contaminated soil of Darwinism.
The Left has its seminaries (its education departments) where it produces disciples of humanism. It preaches an epistemology of science while trampling upon the very things – truth and causality – that are killed by the metaphysic of Darwinism. In a chance world not only do people not ultimately matter, but neither does truth, so why should science matter? It’s not for nothing that Scripture says that man is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness! The great conspiracy is that our education system is built so that no one ever seriously questions the glaring contradiction in the modern humanistic house of cards. If everything came from nothing (and nothing is a logical impossibility since something obviously exists now!) then why would it matter if we’re right or wrong about knowing about nothing? Follow that?
You see, America isn’t falling because of homosexual marriage or transgenderism, or because President Biden is unfit for office, but because way, way before that we’ve exchanged the truth for a lie. The church of Jesus Christ is just as worldly in its philosophical bearings as the world. Atop a foundation of humanist metaphysics and epistemology we add a Christian ethic. Darwin and science during the week and some hymns on Sunday. How many Christians send their kids to public schools? How many homeschool but are still “neutral” in regard to the philosophical foundations of humanism that dominates the culture? This is syncretism plain and simple. It’s spiritual adultery and exactly what Israel was guilty of in the era before Christ. Does the church now think she’s immune to the spiritual diseases that brought Jerusalem to her knees? Does she not recognize that it was Jews, God’s own people, who failed to recognize the Messiah and had Him murdered? They did so, amongst other reasons, but this is the primary one, because they rejected His mission of delivering them from sin rather than Rome. To want liberty without repentance is like scattering grass seed in the Pacific.
It would appear, then as now, that God’s people have a problem with cause and effect. If we are actually granted an executioners’ stay in November, if we’re spared more of the Left’s crazed version of identity-based socialism, but continue in our dry and arid legalism, we are the worst for it. America is falling exactly because Christ isn’t known. And He isn’t known because He isn’t truly worshipped and followed by His church. The false gospel of humanism is alive in our pulpits when they deny or diminish the radical sovereignty of the Creator God and His complete ownership of you and me. Do we gather to speak of the latest Biden abomination and not our own? Have we wept over our own sins…our porn and our quarreling and our shattered homes like we do the latest political outrage?
This is the key, my friends. The church has been duped by that great conman, the Devil, into thinking she’s okay and her problem is Rome. If we won’t mourn over our own sin, we’ll surely fulminate over someone else’s. And if we don’t mourn over our sin – personally, that is – we won’t know the unsurpassed love of God in Christ Jesus. To know His love through the cross, poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, creates the new man or new woman who longs to show others the blessed Savior and who mourns for those who are lost. America was not built and blessed because she was holy in works, but because she was humble in faith. Righteousness, indeed, exalts a nation but we have the righteousness of faith, for Christ is the end of the law for all who believe (Romans 10:4).
God is glorified in that we see the gathering idiocy of Leftism on full display. The foolishness is evidence of exactly what Romans 1 says! And to that we praise Him…that He isn’t mocked and that man’s pride and truth suppression are what He says they are. A country of true wealth doesn’t spend itself into trillions of dollars of new debt every quarter as we do now. The growing sexual immorality is because He’s “given us over” to the works of the flesh…but the problem isn’t in those acts so much as the philosophy that leads to those acts. On this day when we speak of independence we must ask, “from what?” It is Christ who makes us free because it’s sin that brings all forms of slavery. We see bad leaders all around us and blame them and wonder where men of courage and wisdom are, but forget that such vacillating leaders are a consequence of our sin. They’re a part of this process of judgment upon a nation that’s a covenant breaker.
To hear Christians say such vacuous and faithless things like, “Donald Trump is the last hope for America” is evidence of our syncretism…even our apostasy. How many “conservative” Christians know the headlines but not the power of God? How many cry out to be delivered from the Left but have no record of fighting sin through prayer, the word, and faithful worship in their personal life? What logic would there be for the Lord to deliver America from judgment when His church hardly thinks it needs to be faithful and that our open southern border is more dangerous than our muddle-headed pulpits and faithless homes? How many Christians decry the law-fare against Trump but slander and gossip about their neighbors?
No, President Trump isn’t our last hope. That can only ever be said about Christ and though we should certainly vote against the Left in November, we should pray for faithfulness in His church. The Founders’ generation was built upon sound doctrine and the faithful men and women it produced. The same thing can and will happen again if we turn to Him and cry out with a united voice.
In all, do we want to save America? Then make America repentant again. We should pray for forgiveness of sin. And then, in all that amazing grace, we will worship Him. The soul that’s refreshed through grace, that knows it deserves death but becomes a son or precious daughter…oh, how it adores Him. And then we’ll follow Him with all our heart. We’ll obey Him because He loves us and we’ll pray for our enemies and won’t live in all that fear and trembling over politics. Do that one person at a time, one home at a time, and one church at a time and then we’ll have a reformation. But to pray for God to save America without repentance is the stuff of high treason against Him and only shows how lost we’ve become in 2024.
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