“On the lips of the discerning, [skillful and godly] wisdom is found, But discipline and the rod are for the back of the one who is without common sense and understanding.”
Proverbs 10:13 AMP
Righteousness exalts a nation (Proverbs 14:34). America, be sure, is a sinful nation that is being debased daily by its unrepentant sin.
The world is full of confusing choices and we’re easily overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. Where should we work? In what field? Where to live? What to do for recreation? It’s all choices all the time. Such is the incredible liberty that God has given mankind. The thing to know is what our teacher’s probably taught us in first grade when we asked, “can I go to the bathroom?” Remember that? She replied, “of course you can…what you mean to ask is may you go.”
Indeed. We can do many things. The question is may we do them. Our point is that America needs to learn once again that Jesus Christ is Lord and Lordship isn’t a shared thing. He isn’t running for office. He doesn’t need our help. He doesn’t need our advice. He’s simply God and the categories of life are all decided by Him (Romans 11:33-36). America’s sin, for which it absolutely must repent lest she be utterly destroyed and thrown in that big ole stinking trash heap of history like all the other God-challenging nations, is pride.
We think of pride all wrong. We think it’s a dude or dude-ette who’s looking in the mirror all the time or taking too many selfies. That’s annoying, yes, but hardly the toxic reality of true pride which is, without further delay, the creature acting like the Creator. Pride is a man or nation presuming to think about life on their own terms. Pride is ignoring God’s word-law. Pride is anything other than full philosophical and intellectual submission to God’s word in every single area of life. In America today our leaders routinely and habitually presume that they can think about life without reference to the philosophical categories of God’s word.
The economy? The justice system? Education? Taxes? Property rights? When was the last time any leader – in education, media, or government – asked what the Scripture says about any of these? And we wonder why we have such chaos and conflict!
The thing to know is that when the Bible uses the word justice it means righteousness. In our time, we foolishly refer to justice as something divorced from moral righteousness. We ignore the impossibility of unrighteousness ever producing peace. Just as personal sin will destroy families, it will also, when left unchecked to run amok, devastate an entire nation. Thus, in order to perpetuate actual justice a people must be able to identify what it means. By what standard do we assess what is just?
Ours is a secular humanist society now. Yes, the church is still present but the primary means of authority in daily life are dominated by the premises of humanism. Does the media fear the Lord? Does the reigning political power, the Democrat majority, hold God’s word/law as supreme or something else? What are the philosophical convictions of public schools and universities? Riddle me this: if a child in a public school believes he is a different gender will he/she be given more or less support from the authorities than if they decided to start each class by taking a knee and saying a prayer in Jesus’ name? We know the answer to that.
Does Apple or Microsoft or Amazon fear the Lord? You see, in every single area of power in American life Christ is excluded. So, the question is, what is supreme? No person, group, or nation can exist without a premise of ultimacy. Everyone is, as R.C. Sproul brilliantly once said, a theologian. Everyone has a theory of what is ultimately real (metaphysics), a theory of knowledge (epistemology), and an ethical system to determine right and wrong.
The Christian version of this is that God is sovereign over all things (metaphysic). In the beginning God made the heavens and earth (Genesis 1:1). Epistemologically, He made man in His own image so man is a rational being guided by divine revelation (Scripture) and reason (Romans 12:1-2). In other words, God’s divine revelation – His word/law – defines the categories of life. Right thinking is, therefore, biblical thinking because man, as a creature, can’t reorder reality but identify and adapt to it. All facts get their “fact-ness” from their place in God’s created order and plan. There are no neutral facts. All knowledge is revelatory of God’s nature and redemptive plan.
Ethics are basically the study of right and wrong, good and evil. A person or nation who hasn’t defined their metaphysic and epistemology talking about ethics is like a blind couple in a car with no map trying to get to a destination. To determine right and wrong is not the place of mankind. We receive God’s revelation on this front. He alone is the standard, not us. The categories of good and evil are given to us from above and are, therefore, immutable. We understand life only in reference to God and His word/law and never outside of Him. To think about ethics and justice we must think analogically – that is, apply the principles of Scripture to the particulars of life. Because we aren’t the Creator, we have no power over the categories of existence. There’s great diversity and liberty to move from within the Godly fences of truth and goodness, but no freedom to rearrange those fences, much less to remove them altogether. Again, we can do many things…but what we may do is always the question.
The modern humanist philosophy gives our students a metaphysic of zero. Darwinism posits an existence of blind chance, ruled by impersonal mechanisms humming along without any personal thought whatsoever. This metaphysic obliterates personal meaning and worth and reduces human life to cosmic bags of stuff. Lucky stuff, sure, but ultimately meaningless stuff nevertheless. Who cares if a cosmic accident goes into accounting or art? Why does the materialistic universe, ruled only by an impersonal ultimate, care if you marry Betty or Sue?
The epistemology of modern schools is equally irrational. If everything is blind chance and mere survival, how do we account for the fact that man’s intellect needs so much training? Why do all other created things on the planet operate from instinct and yet man’s instincts destroy him? If what is ultimate are mere blind forces moving only for mere survival, not glory or meaning, how is it that man’s intellect of reason came to exist? How does man know if not from instinct? Why would one creature (man) be an animal of reason in a vast universe of instinct and operational mechanics? If we say that science is our epistemological guide we’re saying that truth matters because humans can’t escape the instinct-reason dichotomy. To say that truth matters – that it’s better than error – is to impose upon an impersonal material universe a philosophical category that doesn’t exist. There’s no way to reconcile this issue outside of Biblical philosophy.
And all this leads us to ethics. You’ve seen how the Christian philosophy makes sense of the integration of the ultimacy-knowledge-ethics equation. The thing is, these three are constantly “running in the background” no matter what we do. In fact, the proof that Christ is Lord is that you literally have to presume His categories in order to cross the street. In a meaningless universe there could never be logical predictability of material laws that apply to personal beings (men and women) that ultimately matter. If a humanist was logically consistent they’d never look both ways before they cross the street because they can’t account for the uniformity/predictability in nature. Looking both ways presumes a predictable nature of events. It assumes that traffic might be coming and that getting hit by a bus is a bad thing. Predictability (uniformity) and meaning are literally always presumed contrary to the philosophical premises of non-biblical worldviews.
The greatest proof the Jesus is truly Lord is that a man can’t rationally cross the street without presuming Him. In every single thing a person does he assumes that life is a network of laws (uniformity) and he has personal meaning within that network. But secular man’s premises provide of universe of chaos and meaninglessness. Yes, indeed, let God be true and everyone a liar (Romans 3:4).
All of this leads to the annihilation of ethics that we’re witnessing. The breakdown is accelerating exactly because it must. Like a ball rolling down a hill picking up steam is the nation that rejects God’s immutable moral law. We speak of justice without any philosophical basis in fact. Justice is fast becoming merely that which is legal, which is to say whatever the power allows. All false appeals to justice lead invariably to tribalism as an ethical justification for force and regulation. We note how the politicians are speaking of “democracy” at present. They use this device because they have no moral righteousness to cite. The “will” of the people is the velvet glove covering the fist of immoral sanctions on people God created to be free.
There is no justice without righteousness. There is no righteousness without God’s law and the grace poured into our hearts by the Lord Jesus Christ. Man is morally sick, made so by the lust for power to be his own god and the nihilistic attempt to rewire the categorical laws of nature (including, of course, morality). America’s mad dash attempt to eradicate sin, not by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, but by rejecting the category altogether, leaves her ravaged by the anarchy sin produces.
For all her talk about justice, America’s authority structures war against righteousness on every front. She encourages sexual sin everywhere. She calls homosexuality and fornication good but biblical sexuality hateful, ignoring the intense emotional pain that sexual sin always produces. Broken hearts litter a landscape broken by pride. Just as a war leaves shattered remains everywhere, shards of glass and broken remnants of once beautiful things, so has our sexual revolution destroyed the simple beauty of families.
God has sent His Son so that all who believe on Him might have peace but we call this hateful today. Instead we cling to the very things that steal our humanity and our joy. We’re like parched souls drinking up ocean water, trying desperately to save ourselves while we hastily and foolishly swallow death. God gives us freedom by His grace. We seek it in unrighteousness by regulation and law. Because sin is real and we can’t get away from it anymore than we can get away from the sun, it must be dealt with. The humanists promise freedom to sin by trying to outlaw its consequences. In doing so we become slaves to the state that pretends to be as God. The humanist state is always trying to build another Tower of Babel.
But we have freedom only in Christ. And only when we repent of our maniacal and insane insistence upon trying to be our own god. Turn to the true and living God and be free at last. Sin is an enslaver…always and forever. So, reject those evil voices promising freedom from God. Yes, reject this culture’s humanistic premises and come to Christ in faith. That way to death is broad, yes. It’s paved with blue-check Twitter approval, educational and professional accolades. Turn to Christ and they’ll turn on you. That road is narrow, yes…but it’s life and truth. And true freedom.
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