“Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:20 ESV
Elon Musk, you may have heard unless you’re Amish, or living under the proverbial rock, has bought Twitter. That was bad enough for the woke Left. That he’s had the temerity to reinstate long banned enemies of democracy such as the satirical news site, Babylon Bee, amongst others, has the Left wailing and gnashing teeth. We could go on and on with the issue and the fact that Big Tech, being left wing, has squelched, suppressed, intimidated, and downright banned speech they don’t agree with. Our point isn’t all that stuff so much as it is to say this: the woke Left must ban speech because it flows naturally from their presuppositions.
It’s also to point out that only Biblical Christianity and the gospel of Jesus Christ leads to political freedom for all: saved and unsaved. It alone provides the structural foundations for social and political life through the God-given separation of church-family-state. All rejections of Christ bring wild and tempestuous swings between anarchy and tyranny. All other worldviews lead invariably to some form of tyranny because man simply cannot be a moral law unto himself. Unless God’s law is supreme, some crazed form of man’s law is and that’s all the difference in the world. Our perception of God directs our actions and endeavors on earth. It’s for this reason that we know people by their fruit. And the political fruit of unbelief is tyranny. Always. All forms of unbelief in Christ yield abuses of authority.
The greatest lie we tell ourselves is that there’s no God. Then, to make this deceit palatable, like rubbing good barbecue sauce on rotten meat, we tell ourselves that we’re merely neutral observers in life. Our great lie is that we don’t have a bias. But all thinking must rest upon a network of presuppositions about life and reality. We are, therefore, biased in that we begin “leaning on our own understanding” in life. We assume from the get-go that our mind rather than God’s word/law is the final arbiter of right and wrong.
God says that we’re without excuse because what can be known about Him is clearly perceived through the things that have been made (Romans 1:20-22). This means what God says. We’re literally without excuse for unbelief. Judgment Day will be filled with the recurring comic-tragedy of sinners seeing reality at last (Romans 14:11).
Until that time, however, we have this preposterous “myth of neutrality” everywhere we turn. Sinful man insists that God hasn’t truly spoken and, even if He has, it’s a garbled message, lost in vagueness, a single fact floating upon a veritable sea of them. This myth of neutrality is the false thing we tell ourselves to provide cover for the most horrific thing we can possibly do: deny our God and Creator.
This sets off a catastrophic chain of sin, pain, and misery. We become thankless. We grumble and complain. We worship ourselves or other worldly things…money, fame, power, the tyrannical state…anything but the true God. Indeed, we exchange the truth about God for the lie of radical autonomy. But in doing so we encounter a world of wrath, don’t we? We encounter God’s warnings about the great wrath to come. Fear becomes the low hum in the background of every aspect of life. Insecurity is there at every turn. Parents know it for their children; this is a scary world that has countless evils. Young people know it as they look into the future and wonder how they can provide for themselves, get an education, and so on. Older people know it. Married couples, single people. We all know fear because separation from God means life in the wilderness of danger.
To answer this, to assuage our sense of doom (Romans 1:32), instead of repenting of our sin and turning to Christ, we try and build new Towers of Babel. Sinful man tries to find security and peace not in the New Jerusalem built by Christ, but in the new Babylon built by himself. In short, we reject God’s city of holiness for Biden’s city of man. Sinful man builds cities not to honor God with the work of his hands, but to serve his lusts – to feed his passions, to give himself glory, and to somehow, someway, gain security.
Want to test yourself and see who/what you truly worship? Easy. Who provides – ultimately – for your security and future? Whose responsibility is your ultimate safety? The woke Left looks to government at every turn, which explains why they react the way they do to any suggestion that government would be made weaker. Freedom is the outcome of the life of faith, thus, to the unsaved, real freedom is terrifying and unthinkable. The state is the Left’s daddy, so to speak. To escape the terror of living in a fallen world amidst God’s wrath upon sin is the entire goal of the Left’s political actions.
The catalyst of tyranny is the great exchange of Romans 1. To try and grasp at the fruit of the tree is to make one as god, which means that everyone is god, which means that everyone is their own arbiter of right and wrong.
And that’s frankly as terrifying as it is impossible. If everyone is their own standard of right and wrong, there can be peace only through raw power, not transcendent moral law. In our hearts we know and sense this despite our fervent efforts to suppress the obvious. Having rejected God’s rightful authority over the affairs of life, we have no choice but to run to one man-made city of sin or another. Culture, therefore, becomes inverted. It becomes an attempt to shut God and consequences out rather than to glorify Him.
“Thus culture is the concrete expression of a society’s religious and philosophical commitments; it flows out of the heart—as it were—of the society which produces it (Prov. 4:23).” (From Plowing In Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture by David Bruce Hegeman)
And this is precisely why all forms of Godless cultures must reject free speech. Do you see how the Left calls all ideas contrary to their own “hateful” and “dangerous”? Their cities – Marxist, fascist, socialist, monarchist – whatever they are, cannot be truly free because liberty flows only from the foundation of Christianity. Since all men are equal before God, he alone is qualified to define rights; He alone defines right and wrong. No man or group of men (no government) can rightly enslave other men, nor make them a means to an end. All abridgments of the God-given rights of others are, therefore, prohibited to men and their institutions. Sin, being rebellion against God, leads invariably to conflict with, and oppression of, our neighbor. Sin, being built on lies, rooted in the ultimate lie that there is no God, must war against the truth. Because of this it necessarily rejects free speech. This particular fruit of sin can always be seen in the attempt to control language, the meaning of words, and the manner in which people are “allowed” to express themselves.
Indeed, just as we’ll naturally see the breakout of sexual sin and all sorts of greed in a godless culture, our rebellion against God will result in the suppression of competing ideas too. Sin is the attempt to play God and that, at its core, is the attempt to control what is true. This is why over the last few years we’ve heard all this nonsense about “fact checkers” and “fake news” from the very people who claim there’s no such thing as absolute truth in the first place.
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