The Preacher

I have said this before, and I will say it again. Eventually, all things come to blood. If a nation heads in the wrong direction for long enough, good men will die. Here’s the thing though: how can you expect a nation to turn around if you do not pursue that which is great, rather than that which is barely acceptable? How can you expect goodness to come forth by choosing between the lesser of two evils?

Let’s take it a step further: If you believe that America is heading in the wrong direction but you are not willing to fight for what is good nor willing to look the part of a fool for the sake of righteousness; if you continue to be complacent and hope that tomorrow will be no different than today, then let me congratulate you on the murder of your children¹.

For if you truly believe that all things come to blood, and you do not fight today, then you are leaving that fight to your children. You are leaving them to live in a world made worse by your inaction and to either become corrupted by that world, or to be killed by it.

You are leaving them to death.

And if you are that sort of man; if America is a nation composed of men who are willing to make that choice, then we will deserve the death that comes. We will deserve it, because day by day, in a million tiny ways, we will have chosen it.


¹Let me be clear here: if you are fighting for good as well as you know how, I cannot accuse you. But there are those of you who are and have been compromising. Who know it, and need to be confronted with it. You have made easy choices for the very reason that they are easy. I have been one of you. I say, let it end today.

Children die because of their father’s decisions.

Do you believe that? Lately that phrase keeps popping into my head, pushing out every other thought, until all I can do is stop whatever it is I’m doing and pray for my nation, for myself, for my wife, for my son and my daughter, and for the children that I hope they will have one day. If this seems strange to you, let me at least try to make a simple case for why I’ve been thinking about this.

I hope you won’t think I’m being melodramatic when I say that I believe America has been headed in the wrong direction for some time now. I hope you still won’t think it when I say that if a nation heads in the wrong direction for long enough, it means that at some point, there will come a day when good men will die as a consequence. If you aren’t shaking your head in disagreement yet, then humor me one moment longer. If both of those statements are true, then among the people who will die, will be my children.

Children die because of their father’s decisions.

Do you believe that? And if so, what are you doing?

In a relationship, we often think of the person who leaves or wants to leave as the unfaithful one. The one who has the affair, the one who rails and sows nothing but discontent. But what about the husband who refuses to lead, who brings things into his home that destroy the intimacy and the purity of the relationship with his bride, who damages his and his wife’s soul with what he lets his eyes gaze upon. What about the wife who refuses to follow her husband’s leading, who seeks her emotional fulfillment in movies and novels and online relationships, who continually chooses to believe that romance is love and duty is tedious?

Is this not just as unfaithful? Is it not just as fatal, but in tiny, tiny increments?

Well, the spam bots are still at it, beating away on the Askimet-flavored invisible shell that protects this site from a flood of vile and unwanted comments. If you’re not familiar with spam bots, the way they work is that someone writes a program that knows how to go out on the web and visit blogs. Once the program finds a blog, it clicks on the link for a particular post and then tries to leave a comment advertising whatever evil product it was designed to promote (pornography, drugs, Jessica Simpson, etc.) What’s interesting though is that the latest round of Viagra and Cialis bots that come to this site are exclusively attacking articles about John Calvin and Calvinism. Which is ironic, because hawking vitality enhancers using Calvin is like using Chewbacca to sell Rogaine, Dick Clark to sell anti-aging cream, or Joel Osteen to sell pseudo-Christian heresy. What I’m saying is, Calvin is potent and the bots know it!! But this has set me to thinking (a rare and lofty achievement), what will be the next Reformation figure tie-in? What will the bots try to advertise on articles about Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and so on?

If you have an idea, leave a comment. But be forewarned — somewhere in this wild and crazy world, bathed in the dim glow of a monitor, and with nothing but thoughts of personal gain, a programmer is already thinking about it. (Except, you know, not really…)

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Those summer months just fly by: Does this represent your summer reading plans vs reality? Courtesy of Challies.com.

Russian Church leaders kiss and make up… literally: You can read the article about it here, but don’t miss the picture of two guys with beards kissing each other, while some other guy in the background cheers them on… I know there’s nothing immoral going on here, it’s just weird.

Just another day at school: Joanie Flatt writes about another school that is taking the (non-existent) concept of separation of church and state to ridiculous commonplace extremes.

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Going to church for fun and profit: Courtesy of Sharper Iron, we have this article from The Blade that tells us about an increasing trend where churches host a day of reverse tithe. And why not? The church has pretty much managed to reverse everything else that God commanded. Tithing was due.

The Gospel according to Spider-Man: Sing the old camp-song with me, O you can’t get to heaven watching Spider-Man, instead go read this post by Dan. Oh, I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more. Well, don’t just stand there looking at me like that, go read the post… sheesh, you act like you’ve never heard a guy burst into song before…

How much do you know about Ron Paul?: Straight from C. S. Hayden’s blog, I give you this post, containing a link to this video of Ron Paul’s responses in the recent debate. I have to admit that I haven’t followed politics very much this time around (due mostly to my lack of interest in the candidates that are getting all the air time), but I have to say that every time I have heard Ron Paul speak or read what he has to say, I’ve been fairly impressed. Check him out.

Perhaps you’ve experienced the following:

You are watching television, a crime-drama or a thriller, something like CriminalMindsBonesNumbers or CSI:MiamiNewYorkIdaho. You know exactly the sort of show I’m speaking of. On the screen there is a woman. She is at home and she is alone. There is a very good chance that she is attractive or even beautiful. If so, there is an even better chance that she is dressing for bed. Slowly, the music assumes a suspenseful tone and the camera pans back letting you in on the secret that she is not as alone as she might think. If you have watched these types of shows more than once, then at this point you know that something horrible is going to happen to this woman. The question is, what will it be? You lean forward in your seat. The camera moves closer and perhaps you are allowed to see the attacker or perhaps the woman hears a sound from another room and goes to investigate. Either way, the suspense builds further and further until it is at a breaking point. It is at this moment that someone calls you from the other room. Your wife, your husband, your mother, your child, it does not matter who. “Can you come here for a minute?” they ask. “Just a second you reply”, and to yourself you think, I want to see what they do to her.

Do you understand the significance of that thought? Someone has imagined an evil, and you would like to see it executed. Someone has sat and contemplated the horror that they could inflict upon someone else, and while it is not real, in fact, because it is not real, it will delight you to see what they have devised. You may shudder at what you see, but it will not compel you to turn the television off or to not return to it again.

Don’t think that I’m just making this scenario up, or that I’m just guessing at human behavior, because I’ve done this very thing. I’ve thought those very thoughts. I’ve done it so many times that it makes me sick.

Perhaps there is some part of you that resonates with the above examples. Perhaps you too know what it means to see evil and to be intrigued by it. Perhaps is too soft a word.

You have come face to face with evil. And if you are honest with yourself, you know that it’s occurred every time that you’ve beheld your own face in a mirror.

The shocking thing though, is not that we are so depraved, but that we pretend to be surprised when someone acts on that depravity. We listen to the nightly news and we hear about the murders and the beatings, we hear about the woman who abandoned her children in a locked car in a parking lot, and we can scarce believe it happened. “How could they do such a thing?” we ask, and in our black and filthy hearts a sharp-toothed little monster shakes its head in mock surprise and grins, “How indeed?”

I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O LORD, will I sing. I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. A froward heart shall depart from me: I will not know a wicked person. Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I cut off: him that hath an high look and a proud heart will not I suffer. Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me. He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight. I will early destroy all the wicked of the land; that I may cut off all wicked doers from the city of the LORD.
(Psalms 101:1-8)

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
(Jeremiah 17:9)

I read about a Swedish band; they sing their songs in English because it insultates them from lyrics that would be too raw, too painful to sing otherwise.  It made me think of birthday cards, of poems written by machines, of leaving notes for loved ones instead of saying the words ourselves.

Is it just human to behave this way? To only say what we feel when there is a lesser chance that we will hear our own words?

Does this makes its way into our worship? Or is it rather, quite the other way around? Is our ability to show ourselves, and to even know ourselves, tied up in our love for God? Are we unable to speak truly of ourselves because we unwilling to speak truly of Him?

What do you say?

There is a lot of talk today about the difference between science and religion, about the gulf between the Christian and the scientist, the chasm that separates faith from fact. There is a tone to the rhetoric that suggests that these two areas are not only incompatible, but that the Christian’s ability to view the world is inherently limited, and is therefore operating at a distinct disadvantage.

The heart of the idea that is being sold is that the scientist deals with the real world, with atoms and energy, with metals and chemicals, with universal laws and cold hard facts, while the Christian is left in the fanciful world of magic and fairies, of gods and miracles, of spiritual and invisible things that are only knowable through that slippery thing called faith. This idea supposes that the theologian who is studying the nature of grace is doing something fundamentally different than the astronomer who is studying the nature of the heavens.

The problem with this is that it is a lie.

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If you listen to commercials or read print ads, you’ve probably run into the word “mundane” a few hundred times or more. You may have even used it from time to time in everyday conversations. And why shouldn’t you? It’s a perfectly good word for describing the ho-hum, humdrum, habitual lives that we hate to live. Or is it? I think that somewhere in the modern consumption of the word, we have also managed to swallow a lie. And not just any run of the mill, garden variety lie, but a lie big enough to turn the tables and swallow us as well. A lie that, were things seen as they truly are, would be properly described as mundane.

The word mundane comes from the Latin word mundis, and means of the world or earthly and by implication, it has come to mean boring, banal, and unexciting. And that’s significant, because mundane has another meaning as well, one that backtracks a bit and unwinds itself, a meaning that in some ways, diminishes the borders of the word, and in other ways, sets it up as a ruler over an incredibly populous kingdom. Intrigued? The word mundane means of the world, and before you say, “you just said that”, let me explain that it means of the world in the sense that it does not mean, of heaven.

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