The above title is the same as a Newsweek Article that you can read in its entirety here.  The rest of this post is the reply offered to the article by Frank Turk over at Pyromaniacs. My sole contribution is to say that it would be worthwhile to read both, and that Frank Turk’s reply is a must read for anyone on either side of the issue, and even any fence straddlers out there. . .here is the reply:

Of Course, she says – Frank Turk

Before you start here today, Dan advised me to split this essay in half because it is exceeding long — even by the standard of, well, what Dan and I usually write. I did not take his advice, so pack a lunch before you get started here — and my apologies to your boss and your family as you dig in.

The blogosphere is absolutely a-twitter over that Newsweek essay reproaching the conservative view of marriage – and rightly so. I mean, we have all read at least this much of this piece of writing:

“Let’s try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. “It is better to marry than to burn with passion,” says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.”

And most folks responding have sort of lost it in various ways because let’s face it: if anyone read Hamlet or Harry Potter with the critical finesse exercised in this paragraph, well, one would think they were reading something from a blog with only 5 or 6 readers – not from a magazine which people would (and did) pay money for.

But the thing which I think is interesting is the underlined part: “of course not”.

Lisa Miller’s point here is clear: if this is what conservative readers of the Bible – the ones advocating against “gay marriage” – mean when they say a “Biblical definition of marriage”, of course no one would want that. There’s a certain irony in this, but if the “religious conservatives” would “define marriage as the Bible does” – and define it therefore as loose polygamy for the sensually and spiritually weak, a vehicle only for the satisfaction of urges one cannot control for the fulfillment of promises one doesn’t think God is willing or able to keep, of course nobody would want that.

The problem for Lisa Miller, and her editor Jon Meacham, and their publication Newsweek, is that this is not the definition of marriage religious conservatives are promoting.

I am about to pour out the 100-proof polemics here, so before I tell you what exactly “conservatives” are (or at least ought to be) demanding, let me make something transparently clear: what I am personally demanding is not some sort of crime of hate against people with whom we disagree. I could repost it here, but back last summer I posted this piece about apologetic encounters with people who have loved ones who are g-l-b-t-q, or are themselves g-l-b-t-q, and I stand by it emphatically. This is not about how to injure anyone.

Here’s where I’d start: there is no question that of course the Christian church does not define marriage the way Ms. Miller has in her opening salvo here. But the reason Ms. Miller can make her point as hap-hazardly as she does in her essay is that the church has done a lousy job of defining marriage in the last 100 years. Someone might want to make the case that the church has been doing a poor job longer than that – I leave that case to that person, whomever he or she may be.

But here’s the truth: nobody can frame Barack Obama as a supporter of the war in Iraq, right? Nobody can frame Bill O’Reilly as a supporter of Barack Obama, yes? Nobody can frame Sean Penn as a political conservative – or even as a moderate. In fact, nobody can frame the advocates against Prop 8 as advocates of marriage in spite of their repetition of the word.

But why? Why can these people not be carelessly framed with not just a caricature of their views but with an outright contradiction of their views? Let me say it plainly: it is because these other people and groups are clearly on the record regarding what they believe. Publicly, openly, often: they say exactly what they mean, they do not apologize for it, and they are categorically militant to say what they are in favor of and are not merely and glibly chanting slogans about what they are against.

“But Frank,” says the politically-conservative reader who has stumbled onto this blog post, “how can you say that? Aren’t the proponents of Prop 8 and like legislation clearly for the union of one man and one woman? Don’t they say that often enough?”

My answer, unequivocally, is:

NO.

There are very few problems in the church that make me this angry, but this one is in the top 3. See: this is why Ms. Miller can say exegetically- and theologically- ludicrous things about what “Christian” religious conservatives want. Religious conservatives don’t really know what they want, or how to get it. And frankly, they have effaced their own position so badly in this case, it is no wonder we can see the head of the hideous monster about to be born cresting behind what they say they want.

What the student of the Bible ought to want in this case is not a social agenda. What the student of Biblical principles here should want is not for the government to force people to one kind of, um, gender entanglement over another.

Here’s why I say that: if the primary need for marriage is a social contract, one which gives me rights over another person, and rights regarding another person’s property so that they do not cheat me or that I am not otherwise cheated, I say plainly: let everyone have that. If that is all, or even principally, what marriage is, then please let every person have that as often as possible and with as many people as possible. Let Government (great “G” intended) protect the rights of each person so that no one is cheated.

But here’s the thing: I think – and historically the church thinks — that marriage is not the social construction of a network of rights – especially the “right” to some emotive or financial state of being appeased. In fact, the church (since it has come up) reads the Bible to mean that marriage is a surrendering of rights first to God and then to another person for manifold theological purposes – that is, a wide variety of purposes which, when acted out, give glory to God.

Marriage is about God. That is, the God who created us out of the dust for a purpose and subordinated to Himself. Marriage is about the Creator of all things and the purpose He made in mankind.

Now, all the people who liked Lisa Miller’s essay are thinking, “he’s going to break into the procreation riff here, and I’m checking out.” But because that is actually going to be my last and most derivative point, you should not check out. You think it’s a crude and dangerous club. Let’s wait a second here and put that purpose in its right place, and see if you still believe that.

The purpose of God in creating mankind is first to show the power of God over all things. The story goes like this:

YHVH-God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

and then God says:

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.

Man’s purpose in God’s creation is to work and “subdue the Earth” as it says in another place, and God makes woman to help man. That word “helper” there in the Hebrew is later used in the OT almost exclusively to mean the kind of aid only God Himself can provide — as in Psa 115:11, or Psa 124:8.

So God put Adam over all creation, and puts Eve with him as a divinely-given help in order to subdue the Earth. And Jesus – since Jesus’ opinion came up in Ms. Miller’s essay – says this about these events:

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

That celibate, single Jesus said that – endorsing the story in Genesis not only by saying He believed that’s what happened but in fact by saying those words from Genesis 2 were actually spoken by God. So what we have is not just some human story but God’s very own story-telling, God’s very own words telling us that marriage was made for man and woman, that in marriage they would become one flesh, and that it should never be separated because God made it so.

Marriage is therefore a glorification of God in our obedience, to do a thing the way He said it should be done, and not to treat it – as we do today in our churches – as something which is often abandoned because the other person has become to us not our own flesh, but merely a room-mate or worse: merely a contractor who we can fire when we aren’t satisfied with their work.

And that’s not hardly all. This Paul fellow whom Ms. Miller seems to think held a very low view of marriage didn’t quite receive the husbands and wives in Ephesus as second-string, morally-weak jobbers for the faith. To the men he said this:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Which, sadly, is the most powerful theological statement about human relationships and God in the entire Bible – and our churches treat it like it is some kind of cryptic betrayal of what we ought to stand for.

Yet to the women, Paul said this:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

And of course, Ms. Miller and Mr. Meacham want none of that – even if they would concede that the man is called to die for the sake of lifting his wife up. How can they admit that submission to a savior is actually a work of right-minded obedience? It would be a fatal betrayal of the godless religion they have tried to advance in their essays.

And in that, let me say for all of them that of course they do not want this kind of marriage, either. A marriage which at its root is a union intended and created by God that glorifies Him by being for the good of mankind – man and woman both – which creates a permanent and unbreakable bond in which one submits to the other, and the other in turn commits even to die for the sake of the first in order to nurture her as his own body – and that this union (here it is now: watch it) is the union where God has ordained to bring more human life into this world — is simply not what the opportunists who chant “gay marriage” want for themselves.

Now, so what? Read the rest of this essay carefully, because it makes two points against both sides of this public argument which ought to give both sides a reason to pause.

“So what?” #1 is this: if the church was serious about this kind of love – which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God – it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order – kids and social appearances be damned. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world – that is, we do it just as often and for all the same reasons – I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.

But my final “so what” here is to Ms. Miller and her tribe of social liberation kin: don’t kid yourself about what you “of course” don’t want. I find it almost incredulously-ironic, as I said above, that when Ms. Miller lists the sins of the OT patriarchs, she overlooks how the Bible describes what these acts were: “every man did what was right in his own eyes,” and “they did what was evil in the sight of YHVH, and they provoked Him to jealousy with their sins that they committed, more than all that their fathers had done.” It is expecially vexing and darkly funny to see her editor Mr. Meacham appeal to the sacrament of marriage when what he wants isn’t what God has specifically called holy. To appeal to sacrament is to appeal to God’s view of a thing, and to call for a blessing on an invented standard which seems right to a man but ignores or contorts God’s specific prescription for things is exactly the opposite of “sacrament”.

You see: if what you want is the church to bless your social-contract view of marriage, and you admit that this view is about what you want and not about what God has prescribed for you – male, female, for His glory, to your obedience, that you will sacrifice and for the sake of bearing children – you are asking for what you abhor in others, what “of course” we should abhor in the patriarchs described by Moses and the Prophets. Demanding a higher standard from others when one will not abide it himself is called “hypocrisy”, as we all know well and enjoy saying to the poor, ill-advised conservatives who want to do through Government what they cannot do themselves.

The other side, however, is in the far more pitiable position of wanting the government merely to allow them to do what they see in others as rank stupidity and evil. I’m not sure there’s a word for that (the Bible has one — you can find it in Prov 12:1) but if they come up with one that means what I mean, let’s by all means use that word instead. They should own up to what they are asking for, but please do not call it “marriage”.

Stop asking for “marriage”. You don’t want marriage but a way to make other people put their blessing on your life and choices; you want them to call your values “holy” when you can’t even say where they came from. I say you should have what you want here – because frankly you deserve what you are asking for, and that is not a compliment.

We are at fault here: we have taught you that marriage is a cheap thing which is easily made and easily unmade, and that it is about the pursuit of happiness. Shame on us for teaching you such a thing — may God have mercy on us for it; let us repent for making marriage about human urges and rights. But if we are willing to stand corrected — because of course nobody should want such a thing as you have asked for, a thing like the sinners of the Old Testament have done — you yourselves should change your minds. May God grant mercy that you, too, will stand corrected and you will repent of your offense against Him.

______________________________________________

“Life Coach” Joel Osteen and his wife speak out on Larry King Live, providing mostly that same sound advice you could get from any good motivational speaker with an occasional “Christian” cliche about using YOUR faith or how “God will see you through”. Even when Larry King served up opportunities for the Osteens to inject sound doctrine or take a solid stand on Scripture, they smilingly dodged the challenges. You can see a clip here. 

With the size of the ‘congregation’ at their ‘church’, one might wonder the impact for the Gospel Osteen could have if his ‘sermons’ actually contained the substance of the Gospel and sound Biblical doctrine!

“No signs can be more alarming than the growing infidelity and worldliness which I see among those who call themselves Christians. Does this nation really intend to cast off the fear of God and the doctrines of Holy Scripture to follow the vain imaginings of the sophists and the fashionable follies of the great? Are we to see again unbelief and luxurious sin walking hand in hand? If so, there be some of us who mean to take up our sorrowful parable, and speak as plainly as we can for truth and holiness, whether we offend or please. Be it ours still to thunder out the law of God, and proclaim with trumpet clearness the gospel of Jesus, not batting one jot of firm belief in the revelation of God, nor winking at sin, nor toning down truth, even though we fear that the only result will be to make this people’s hearts gross, and their ears heavy, and their eyes blind.” – Charles Spurgeon, 1885

The Christmas season, and especially the big day itself, evokes all sorts of thoughts and feelings ranging from the purely secular to the intensely religious. Regardless of the actual date of Christ’s birth, or how we ended up having a holiday to celebrate that birth, it IS the reason for the season.

Our thoughts of Christ’s birth are filled with nativity scenes, angels making announcements, wise men following a star, peace on earth and good will toward men. During the Christmas season, most of us become kinder toward family members, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and complete strangers. We might send a larger donation to our favorite charity, or volunteer to serve at a local soup kitchen or homeless shelter. After all, God gave us His Son so we should give more to others and do our little bit to make our world a more peaceful place.

In the midst of all these wonderful thoughts, I wonder how often we think about the ‘rest of the story’, as Paul Harvey would say. While we might speak of Christ coming to earth to die for sin, how often do we consider that He came for that very purpose, that he came to die. The Father sent His own Son to earth on a mission to die – for OUR sin.

Php 2:6-8 tells us this about Jesus:

“. . .who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

That Christ would die for our sins was in the mind of God before creation. At some point in His human life Jesus also realized His mission and ‘set His face toward Jerusalem’ and the very cross upon which He would die. During His life, Jesus spoke often about His destiny, along with his resolute obedience to the Father’s will. Many to who He spoke would not really understand until later, after the Holy Spirit came and brought clarity and understanding.

I am not saying that to focus primarily on the birth of the Christ Child is somehow wrong. I am merely drawing attention to ‘rest of the story’ that is at times forgotten or set aside, and encouraging anyone reading this to take advantage of the many opportunities to not only share the real meaning of Christmas being Christ’s birth, but to also include ‘the rest of the story’ in that sharing.

May you all celebrate a wonderful and meaningful Christmas as you share the precious Gospel!

Dr.Michael Youssef, Leading he Way Ministries uncovered the following 13 heresies in the popular novel The Shack.

1. God the Father was crucified with Jesus.

Because God’s eyes are pure and cannot look upon sin, the Bible says that God would not look upon His own beloved Son as He hung on the Cross, carrying our sins (Habakkuk 1:13; Matthew 27:45).

2. God is limited by His love and cannot practice justice.

The Bible declares that God’s love and His justice are two sides of the same coin — equally a part of the personality and the character of God (Isaiah 61:8; Hosea 2:19).

3. On the Cross, God forgave all of humanity, whether they repent or not. Some choose a relationship with Him, but He forgives them all regardless.

Jesus explained that only those who come to Him will be saved (John 14:6).

4. Hierarchical structures, whether they are in the Church or in the government, are evil.

Our God is a God of order (Job 25:2).

5. God will never judge people for their sins.

The Word of God repeatedly invites people to escape from the judgment of God by believing in Jesus Christ, His Son (Romans 2:16; 2 Timothy 4:1-3).

6. There is not a hierarchical structure in the Godhead, just a circle of unity.

The Bible says that Jesus submitted to the will of the Father. This doesn’t mean that one Person is higher or better than the other; just unique. Jesus said, “I came to do the will of Him who sent me. I am here to obey my Father.” Jesus also said, “I will send you the Holy Spirit” (John 4:34, 6:44, 14:26, 15:26).

7. God submits to human wishes and choices.

Far from God submitting to us, Jesus said, “Narrow is the way that leads to eternal life.” We are to submit to Him in all things, for His glory and because of what He has accomplished for us (Matthew 7:13-15).

8. Justice will never take place because of love.

The Bible teaches that when God’s love is rejected, and when the offer of salvation and forgiveness is rejected, justice must take place or God has sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for nothing (Matthew 12:20; Romans 3:25-26).

9. There is no such a thing as eternal judgment or torment in hell.

Jesus’ own description of hell is vivid … it cannot be denied (Luke 12:5, 16:23).

10. Jesus is walking with all people in their different journeys to God, and it doesn’t matter which way you get to Him.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one will come to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).

11. Jesus is constantly being transformed along with us.

Jesus, who dwells in the splendor of heaven, sits at the right hand of God, reigning and ruling the universe. The Bible says, “In Him there is no change, for He is yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 11:12, 13:8; James 1:17).

12. There is no need for faith or reconciliation with God because everyone will make it to heaven.

Jesus said, “Only those who believe in me will have eternal life” (John 3:15, 3:36, 5:24, 6:40).

13. The Bible is not true because it reduces God to paper.

The Bible is God-breathed. Sure, there were many men through 1,800 years who put pen to paper (so to speak), each from different professions and different backgrounds, but the Holy Spirit infused their work with God’s words. These men were writing the same message from Genesis to Revelation. If you want to read more about the place of Christ in the Scripture, read “We Preach Christ” (2 Timothy 3:16).

In the forward to Michael Horton’s recently published book “Christless Christianity”, William Willimon, Bishop of the United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama writes:

“Here we are in the North American Church – conservative or liberal, evangelical or mainline, Protestant or Catholic, emergent or otherwise – crranking along just fine, thank you. So we’re busy downsizing, becoming culturally relevant, reaching out, drawing in, making disciples, managing the machinery, utilizing biblical principles, celebrating recovery, user-friendly, techno-savvy, finding the purposeful life, practicing peace with justice, utilizing spiritual disciplines, growing in self-esteem, reinventing ourselves as effective ecclesiastical entrepreneurs, and, in general, feeling ever so much better about our achievements.

Notice anything missing in this pretty picture? Jesus Christ!”

“This is a tough book, but well written, fast paced, and wonderfully grounded in classical Reformation Christianity. Our poor old, compromised, accommodating church is here subjected to withering theological critique. Here the roots of our current theological malaise are exposed and we see the wrong turns we took when we began taking ourselves more seriously than God. The boredom and conventionality of the contemporary church are assaulted. Michael Horton diagnosis our trouble in stunning unavoidable candor. Therapeutic, utilitarian deism is named, nailed and defeated with the best weapon God has given us – the gospel of Jesus Christ. Presumptively evangelical Christianity is exposed as the latest recruit to the cause of insipid, culturally compromised liberalism.”

“In the process of reading this Jesus-induced polemic, you will be recalled to the power of the gospel. God forgive us for selling out our great intellectual treasure – the gospel of God with us – for a mess of psychobabble and pragmatic, utilitarian, self-help triviality.”

This is an important book. I’ve been listening to the broadcast series from the White Horse Inn since it began in January of this year. More about the book can be found here, including access to the book’s first chapter.

The following excerpt is from the sermon “The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God,” preached Sunday morning, 30 June 1867, at Camden Road Chapel, London. In that sermon, Spurgeon carried on an imaginary dialogue with the “epistemological humility” of his day. (Read Postmodernism today). It was posted by Phil Johnson over at Pyromaniniacs.com.

“Someone demands, “How am I to know which is the gospel?”

You may know it by searching the Scriptures.

“But one sect says this, and another sect says the reverse.”

What have you to do with the sects? Read the Book of God for yourself.

“But some men do read it and arrive at one opinion, and some maintain the opposite, and thus they contradict themselves, and yet are equally right.”

Who told you that? That is impossible. Men cannot be equally right when they contradict each other. There is a truth and there is a falsehood; if yes be true, no is false. It may be true that good men have held different opinions, but are you responsible for what they may have held, or are you to gather that because they were good personally, therefore everything they believed was true? No, but this Book is plain enough; it is no nose of wax that everybody may shape to what form he likes. There is something taught here plainly and positively, and if a man will but give his mind to it, by God’s grace he may find it out.

I do not believe that this Book is so dark and mysterious as some suppose, or, if it were, the Holy Spirit who wrote it still lives, and the Author always knows his own meaning: you have only to go to him in prayer, and he will tell you what it means. You will not become infallible, I trust you will not think yourself to be so, but you will learn doctrines which are infallibly true, and upon which you may put down your foot and say, “Now, I know this, and am not to be duped out of it.”

It is a grand thing to have the truth burnt into you, as with a hot iron, so that there is no getting it out of you. The priest, when he took away the Testament from the boy, thought he had done the work; “But,” said the boy, “sir, what will you do with the six-and twenty chapters which I learned by heart? You cannot take them away.” Yet memory might fail, and, as the lad grew into an old man, he might forget the six-and-twenty chapters; but suppose they changed his heart and made him a new creature in Christ, there would be no getting that away, even though Satan himself should attempt the task.

Seek to carry out the sacred trust committed to you by believing it, and believing it all. Search the word to find out what the gospel is, and endeavor to receive it into your inmost heart, that it may be in your heart’s core forever.

Next, as good stewards we must maintain the cause of truth against all comers.

“Never get into religious controversies,” says one; that is to say, being interpreted, be a Christian soldier, but let your sword rust in its scabbard, and sneak into heaven like a coward.

Such advice I cannot endorse. If God has called you by the truth, maintain the truth, which has been the means of your salvation. We are not to be pugnacious, always contending for every crotchet of our own; but wherein we have learned the truth of the Holy Spirit, we are not tamely to see that standard torn down which our fathers upheld at peril of their blood.

This is an age in which truth must be maintained zealously, vehemently, continually. Playing fast and loose as many do, believing this to-day and that to-morrow, is the sure mark of children of wrath; but having received the truth, to hold fast the very form of it, as Paul bids Timothy to do, is one of the duties of heirs of heaven. Stand fast for truth, and may God give the victory to the faithful.

We must believe the gospel and maintain it, for it is committed to our trust.” – C. H. Spurgeon

This blogger heartily agrees……..

Dr. Gill’s first words at the Carter Lane Meeting House.

The Meeting House at Carter Lane, Southwark, was opened on Oct. 9 1757. The Carter Lane Declaration of the faith and practice (based on the 1729 Goat Yard Declaration) had been drawn up. At the opening meeting John Gill, preached from Exodus 20;24. In the course of his message he made the following comments.

“As we have now opened a new place of worship, we enter upon it recording the Name of the Lord by preaching the doctrines of the grace of God, and free and full salvation alone by Jesus Christ; and by the administration of gospel ordinances, as they have been delivered to us. What doctrines may be taught in the place after I am gone is not for me to know; but as for my own part, I am at a point; I am determined, and have been long ago, what to make the subject of my ministry. It is upwards of forty years since I entered into the arduous work; and first sermon I ever preached was from these words of the apostle, ‘For I am determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified:’ and through the grace of God I have been enabled, in some good measure, to abide by the same resolution hitherto, as many of you here are my witness; and, I hope, through divine assistance, I ever shall, as long as I am in this tabernacle, and engaged in such a work. I am not afraid of the reproaches of man; I have been inured to these from my youth upwards; none of these things move me.”

For those interested, there is an online collection of John Gill’s works at the Reformed Reader.

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to staunch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common. -David Wells, God in the Wasteland

This is the last of three posts concerning “meekness”, used with the permission of the author (Dr. Paul Brownback, Evangelical Reformation).

The Results of Deformed Meekness

Dr. Paul Brownback

Have you ever thought of what it is like to be in combat? Perhaps you have had that experience. However, most have not. Imagine what it is like to live in an area inhabited by enemy soldiers possessing the weapons, training, and intent to destroy you.

Living in that environment would alter our demeanor. We would act with greater seriousness and intensity.

This sobriety and intensity is found especially in a leader, who has responsibility for the welfare of those under him. He must maintain an attitude that gets their attention, make them aware of danger, and that motivates them to carry out orders.

“Would you mind bringing some ammunition with you, that is, if its not too much of a burden,” is going to get people killed. Running out of ammo in the middle of the battle because in was inconvenient to carry would spell disaster.

Jesus lived in a combat environment. Scripture tells us that His enemies were looking for a way to kill Him, and they would succeed. More sobering yet was the fact that Jesus had to die to win.

The battle He was fighting was not with the Jewish leaders or the Roman soldiers, both of which would participate in His death. Rather, He was engaged in a cosmic struggle with Satan and the forces of darkness for the souls of human beings.

He asserted that He was meek (Matthew 11:29), but, as previously noted, meekness is not gentleness or mildness, nor was that His demeanor. Rather, He conveyed the intensity and directness of a leader in combat.

As such, He was no Mr. Rogers. His interaction with His disciples resembled that of a Marine Corps drill sergeant. He knew that the welfare of His disciples depended on their attentiveness and obedience.

Scripture often reminds us that we are also involved in warfare. Scripture refers to us as soldiers and calls us to fight. We, too, are also dealing with matters of eternal life and death.

This being the case, living in a combat zone as we do, it would be dangerous to think that gentleness and mildness should be our normal operating mode, as many evangelicals do. Mr. Rogers cannot be our model. This demeanor does not convey the seriousness of the situation. It does not get people to stop deadly behavior. They does not motivate people to life-saving action.

For example, gentleness does not get done the job of discipleship. “I know that for the last three weeks have talked about the need for you to be in Scripture, and you have not made it yet. Don’t let that discourage you. Maybe you will get to it this week.”

How about, “Friend, do you know that the Devil is out to destroy you. You have failed to get to your Bible for two weeks, now. You had better get to it this week or you could be in real trouble. You are wondering around the battlefield without your steel helmet and your weapon. You are going to get yourself killed. Tell me what is so much more important.”

Sure, there are occasions for gentleness, and we see Jesus convey that quality at times. But most of the time He was tough, and we need to be as well if we are going to develop a mature, effective army of Christian soldiers.

Gentleness and mildness are producing spiritual wimps that are losing the battle with the world, the flesh, and the Devil. We could use an evangelical reformation that will replace gentleness with gumption.