Resisting the Politicizing of My Pulpit: Part 2

Alan Dunn

Resisting by Persisting While Insisting

Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you [2 Tim 1:13-14].

No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier [2 Tim 2:4].

But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene [2 Tim 2:16-17a].

I solemnly 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, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires [2 Tim 4:1-3].

Positively, I am to preach specific biblically prescribed content. Negatively, I am not to preach what has not been entrusted to me as a minister of a new covenant [2 Cor 3:6]. I’m to persist in insisting that the people of God keep their focus on Christ and His kingdom and in so doing, I resist the intrusion of competing messages and agendas.

You’ve heard the adage, “nature abhors a vacuum.” To the degree that I am neglecting the standard of sound words and not preaching the word, to that degree my pulpit is liable to be filled by rival words of worldly and empty chatter that press in from everyday life and threaten to displace sound doctrine with ear-scratching teachings. The dynamic of displacement is at work either for our health or our harm. If we fill the space of our lives with the positive pursuit of godliness, we will displace that which is not conducive to godliness. On the other hand, whatever space is not filled with the pursuit of godliness is liable to be filled with the gangrene of worldliness that will, in turn, threaten to displace godliness. The dynamic of displacement is Paul’s put-off and put-on principle; living by repenting and believing; dying to sin to live in Christ. By insisting that we keep our focus on Christ and His kingdom, I resist being distracted by matters which have genuine legitimacy in their own right, but are not part of the treasure entrusted to me as a preacher.

Categorical Clarity

What am I authorized to do and for what will I give an account? What is my place in any given setting? What is the nature of my relationship to that person, to that task, to that function? Is that something for which I am responsible? No small amount of confusion ensues when we fail to take our place and to function obediently in our respective God-appointed stations. Love does not act unbecomingly, that is, “against the moral scheme of things” [1 Cor 13:5a]. God is not a God of confusion but of peace… all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner [1 Cor 14:33, 40]. If we would avoid confused thinking and living, we must think clearly at the foundational level of the categories by which we define and perceive life. Those categories are revealed in Scripture.

There are three basic God-constituted institutional authorities: the family, the church, and the state. Each authority structure has its own prescribed obligations. The church is not to parent our children and the state is not to prescribe our worship. As a pastor-preacher, I am to inform and feed the faith of God’s people, to fortify their living union with Christ and assure them of His love and the enablement of His Spirit so that they can then obey Christ in their families, in the church, and in society.

Our present concern is with our duties in the politics of our day. Here we need clarity in four biblical categories: creation, sin, salvation and eschatology.

The Relevance of Creation

Scripture defines man as image of God. Every person we meet, regardless of their religion or politics, is image of God. All are men who have been made in the likeness of God [Jam 3:9b], regardless of their patterns of sanctified piety or sinful perversion. As image of God, all men are endowed with a conscience and are “religious.” They are creatures innately inclined to worship and serve some “deity.” Their service will consist of an ethic, a set of duties, obligations, often coupled with some rituals. Their ethic will prescribe certain behaviors and interpersonal, relational dynamics commonly valued in society. They comply with societal mores motivated by an eschatological hope, the prospect of results promised by some authoritative voice to those who worship and serve the de facto deity.

Creation itself is inherently moral. God repeatedly judged it to be good as He shone light into the darkness, gave shape to what was unformed, and filled the void. God is the God of order, not of chaos, and creational order constitutes and sustains creational life. Image of God was made to live a good life according to the innate morality of creation. The moral character of man’s very being is expressed in what is called “the creation ordinances:” sexuality, family, labor and rest. These four aspects of our created humanity define moral probity for all people at all times in all places. Regardless of culture or religion, a “good” person’s goodness is assessed according to these four creational points of reference.

The creation ordinances provide guidance for our politics. We are citizens of heaven [Phil 3:20] who presently live in the societies of men. God’s injunction to the Israelites exiled in Babylon instructs us. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare [Jer 29:7]. The “welfare” of the earthly city will be found in the promotion of the creation ordinances. We are to participate in those activities that facilitate the innate goodness of this created order of life. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us [Lk 6:27], what He meant by “good” is seen earlier in verse 9 when He healed the man with the withered hand. I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it? To do good is to save a life.

Whatever political philosophy we hold, we ought to promote the goodness of God’s created order and endeavor to see our fellow image-bearers experience the blessings of living life in God’s good creation. Political systems, as least on the surface, hold forth the prospect of giving their adherents a “good” life, of promoting life lived in this created order. We need to give our fellowmen the benefit of the doubt and assume that they embrace a particular political philosophy because they sincerely desire what they understand to be “good.” They hope their politics will promote life as it is lived in our sexuality, our families, our labor, and our rest. Their definition of “good” may, in certain ways, be skewed, but we should kindly assume that men embrace varied political convictions conscientiously, thinking to themselves that what they are pursuing is, in fact, “good.”

The Relevance of Sin

When Adam fell through sin, he brought the penalty of death upon himself and his created domain. Death causes creation to collapse back into chaos, that dark, formless void out of which God brought created life [Gen 1:2]. Death divides and severs God’s unified order of life. God’s judgment of death divided mankind. Men are thus divided into the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman [Gen 3:15]. The seed of the serpent listen to the serpent’s lies and are engulfed with death. The seed of the woman listen to God’s revealed truth and are delivered into life.

In Genesis 3, Adam brought creation under the curse of death and abdicated his domain to the usurper, Satan. Men are now subject to the murderous lies of the Evil One. Yet the Lord salvaged the original created order and retained the man and the woman in their original places and functions. Life in this world is now a mixture of common grace and common curse, of the goodness of life and the penalty of death. Both the wrath of God and the gospel of the righteousness of God are simultaneously revealed [Rom 1:17-18].

In wrath God remembers mercy [Hab 3:1], and judgment is now the context in which God accomplishes salvation. The seed of the woman were given provisions of redemption from death. At the outset, God’s grace has always worked to bring otherwise dead sinners into the life of the age to come, into resurrection life in which death is conquered and eternal Sabbath blessings are bestowed. In brief, the provisions of redemption for the seed of the woman were 1] the promise of the seed[1] who would crush the serpent’s head [Gen 3:15]; 2] the provision of blood sacrifice to vicariously bear the penalty of death [Gen 3:21]; 3] the prospect of obtaining land, of living in the garden-temple once again with God [Gen 3:23-24]; and 4] the privilege of Sabbath, of yet having time to worship in the presence of the living, speaking God [Gen 2:2-3; 4:3]. The distinguishing trait of the seed of the woman is their salvation which they experience and express in their worship. Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord [Gen 4:26b]. To “call upon the name of the Lord” is to worship in reliance on God’s gracious provisions of redemption. The antediluvian believer worshiped the Lord with faith in the promised One who would come to crush the serpent’s head; relying on God’s grace by which His wrath was propitiated and the sentence of death satisfied in the offering of blood sacrifice; and confident that the Lord would bring His saved worshipers to a place and time of Sabbath blessing when He would live with them in His glorious garden-temple. In creation, God made man to be like God and to live with God. That is now the eschatological goal of God’s program of redemption. God’s people will enter His eternal Sabbath Rest to live with God in that city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God… Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them [Heb 11:10,16b].

Which brings me to ask this question: Who built the first city? Cain [Gen 4:17], the seed of the serpent. Fallen men, living in a fallen world built the first “polis”, the first political community. In common grace, the seed of the serpent yet live in God’s good world in compliance with the creation ordinances. They get married and have families; they labor and form societies. The culture of Cain produced industry, commerce, agriculture and the arts. Void of the provisions of redemption however, that culture also produced perversion. Lamech, evidently a tribal chieftain, violated the created order of sexuality and family with his polygamy, and like Cain, was a murderer who abused his authority to justify unjust vengeance. By the time of Noah, Cain’s culture had filled the earth with sexual sin and violence. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence [Gen 6:11].

In this age, we are aliens, sojourning to the promised land of Sabbath Rest, to the city of God in that heavenly country. Nevertheless, we live in this age in the cities and cultures constructed by Cain. We are to seek the welfare of those cities. We are to do all we can to promote created life and the welfare of Cain’s city while being faithful to our first and foremost commitment: to uphold the worship of God as His redeemed community and, by living a life of obedient faith, to bear witness to our fellowmen of truths concerning the age to come.

Foundational to all our endeavors in this life is the reality that we are creatures created in the image of God. We are to live good lives and foster the goodness of life among our fellow image-bearers, the saved and the unsaved. As Christians, God has given us redeeming grace. We have received His promised Son whose sacrificial death has paid the penalty of our sin. In Him, our risen Lord, we have an eternal inheritance in God’s glorious Sabbath Rest. Meanwhile, we live in Cain’s city. We are entrusted with the worship of the Lord and sent among the nations to witness to His grace. As worshipful witnesses, we promote the moral order of God’s good creation to deter the propensity to immoral chaos inherent in fallen authorities and rebellious, deceived sinners.

There are other matters to consider which we will take up in the next article. At this point, let us prayerfully reflect upon what it means for us to be sojourning worshipers of the true and living God in this good but fallen world where we live as the seed of the woman in the city of Cain.

[1] The seed in Genesis 3:15 is both singular, pointing to Jesus, and plural, identifying the people of faith.

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