“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” 2 Timothy 4:1–5 ESV
The last thing we’ll say about Paul’s letters to Timothy is in answer to the world’s slanderous charge against Christ and His church nowadays. It’s at the bottom of every contention; it’s the root of all the left’s attacks. What is it? That Christians want to rule the world by force.
Unspoken in all the criticisms is that the unbelieving Left assumes to “protect” the innocent from Christianity.
You catch this from those who protest against Christianity’s “intolerance” against homosexuality. There’s the insinuation that if the church has its way that some form of violence or coercion will be used against those who disagree. In truth, the opposite is in play and this is seen all over the country today. But it’s the Left that’s intolerant, not the church. It’s the woke movement that censors speech, bullies, and threatens the livelihood of detractors or, worse, those who are in sufficiently supportive.
The reality is that only in Christ is there true tolerance. The world needs to hear this lesson…not to score political points but in love because without this knowledge, we’ll surely dash headlong over the cliff of moral insanity. Sin, you see, isn’t a vacuum of goodness, a lack of righteousness; it’s the hatred of God and His rule. This much should be known about sin. It’s not neutral. Sin puts its flag down upon the dung hill of self-worship. And because of the logical necessity of such a thing (radical autonomy), tyranny awaits. Tyranny is the social/political riptide of sin. We see the waves of sexual sin, corruption, and greed crashing along the shores but are oblivious to the current of tyranny pulling us further out.
The logic is this: claiming to be our own god, we reject His interpretation of life (the Bible) and insist on our own. This sets us invariably upon a bloody trail. A path of heartbreak, betrayal, strife, and murder. Millions of little gods can’t find order nor safety in anarchy so the logic of sin swings to the false security of regulation and law as a form of self-preservation. But all Towers of Babel have this in common: they’re built by the desire to be one’s own god and yet sustained by being slaves to those more powerful. The funny thing about the world of antinomianism is that all things have authoritative structures precisely because this is God’s world and we can’t escape the elemental facts of it. God has us in a world of fences. Sin hates them, tries to obliterate them but ends up, in the name of freedom, erecting a thousand oppressions.
Tozer said that no sin is private. It may be done in secret but it never is private because sin is three-dimensional. It has personal, social, and societal costs. Indeed, sin shatters peace and makes us slaves. The truth of life that’s hated in America is that none of us can ever be metaphysically free – that is, a god. We’re either slaves to Christ or to sin. There’s no middle ground. There are no alternatives.
“Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” Romans 6:16–18 ESV
But the truth of Christ is that He comes in humility and God gives sinners so much grace everyday. A sunset on the beach, good music, your child smiling at you, a wedding…they’re all meant to lead us to repentance through love (Romans 2:4). And yet, indeed, the wrath of God is seen in the many warning shots flashing across the sky like whistling artillery falling on a nearby battlefield. The earth is a war zone – a spiritual one that plays out in the physical dramas, the deaths, the poverty, the diseases, as well as the broken hearts, aloneness and despair (Romans 1:18).
To all of this we’re given the gospel by those who have been sent (Matthew 28:18-20; Romans 10:14-18). Paul “charges” Timothy to preach, not conquer in the world’s ways; indeed, we’re more than conquerors through Christ who loves us. The gospel stands everything upon its head. Jesus commands His disciples to go and bring the good news by preaching and reasoning, not by sword. The atheistic world is forever trying to bring peace and utopia to the world, a kingdom of man without God, and it does this by force…by regulation.
In the story of Moses we notice that God has Moses go to Pharaoh and reason with him. Pharaoh is offered chance after chance to see logic. He refuses at every step. The God who says, “Come, let’s reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) sent Moses and Aaron to appeal to Egypt’s king, but his pride hardened his heart. The mark of pride is that, yes, it comes before the fall…but this is because sin is so irrational. God’s consequential wrath falls upon those who illogically reject His sovereign rule and amazing goodness. Irrationality and pride are flip sides of sin’s coin.
In Exodus 35 the Lord asks for contributions for the Tabernacle from a generous heart. In John 4 the Lord speaks of the Father seeking those who will worship Him in spirit and truth. At the end His life He speaks not a word in His own defense as He’s brutally beaten, slandered and then murdered on a cross. In Romans 12:1-2 Paul beseeches us, that is to say, appeals to us on the strength of the gospel’s logic, to willingly present ourselves to God, body, mind and soul. In 2 Corinthians we learn that whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. This is the Kingdom’s law! It’s the law that says, since God is all and own all, and man is His agent, he who sows bountifully will reap likewise (2 Corinthians 9:6-7). Contrary to the world’s ways, the Kingdom’s law says “each person should make up their own mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion.”
In Romans 13:8 we learn that we aren’t to owe anyone anything. Why? Because the logic of sin – that is, the insanity of it – is the principle of self-worship. The rebel, the sinner, makes themselves god over others. They think incessantly of how others owe them. They’ll get it some way or another. In a gang through violence (Proverbs 1:10-19), through political corruption (1 Kings 21:1-16…Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard), through political dominance (1 Samuel 8:10-18), or outright slavery (Exodus). Non-belief in God isn’t, as we’ve said, a vacuum where theism ought to be. It’s not like an empty suitcase. Non-believers are covenant breakers guilty of, as R.C. Sproul said, cosmic treason. The inexorable logic of unbelief is warfare with neighbor because to be god is to have control. What kind of god has no control? What kind of god has fences and limits? Unbelief is war by every means available against one’s neighbor; it’s the struggle to be as god in any way possible. Gossip, slander, regulation, coercion, assault, rape, murder, political oppression, tyranny…all are the maggots crawling on the fetid heart of sin.
Rushdoony wrote that “Men are too prone to introduce coercion, or, at the least, pressure, where God simply uses none.”
Notice how when Paul tells Timothy that many won’t listen to sound doctrine and have itching ears he next says, basically, mind your own business. Let them go their way. Why? Because we are not their God. We must let God God and not try and do His job. The Pharisees, said Spurgeon, were hard on others and easy on themselves because they weren’t sorry for their sin. The cancer of rebellion and self-worship was still alive in them. The mark of sin is how, like with Cain, it can’t allow freedom in others. The principle of sin is the idea that we can be as god and to do that is to disallow others the freedom that the true God provides His world.
The true man of God knows not to fret himself because of evildoers (Psalm 37:1) because he knows the word of the Lord and how they’ll fade like grass someday (Psalm 37:2). The sinner tries to rule by whatever power he has. He has no faith so he tries to dominate through force, or law, or regulation, or pressure, or gossip…whatever he can. The righteous knows the Scripture.
“I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread. He is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing.” Psalm 37:25–26 ESV
So, to do the work of an evangelist and fulfill your ministry you must accept that the Lord is the Lord and that some people will simply not listen. We must resist any temptation to manipulate or coerce behavior, for whatever reason, because righteousness is only through faith and faith comes as a gift. Preaching the word is the power that God has given us in this age of both sunshine and shadow, winter and spring. Freedom and harmony of interests between neighbors is the mark of the Christian world; coercion, backbiting, win-lose relationships, and oppression are the mark of the self-worshipping world. True tolerance is found in Scripture’s spheres of sovereignty and the preaching of the gospel to the fallen world. No Christian will, obeying the Bible, seek to use any means but the word of the Lord to convert people because we know that works are dead unless inspired by a cheerful heart surrendered to Him in faith.
Recent Comments