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Cultural Revolution and the Sons of Issachar
Christ Church on April 16, 2023
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Sabbath Blessings & Curses

Christ Church on

INTRODUCTION

Christians frequently fail to recognize how all of life relates to God. While we rightly reject the “prosperity gospel” that treats God like a vending machine, we must also reject various forms of Deism that assume that God is not active in the world, personally blessing and cursing. While God’s wisdom is far beyond our understanding, and the secret things belong to Him, those things that He has revealed, belong to us and to our children forever, namely the covenant, God’s personal promise of blessing for faithfulness and cursing for unfaithfulness (Dt. 29:29).

THE TEXT

“Ye shall make no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it; for I am the Lord your God…” (Lev. 26).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

Having organized the Israelite economy and culture around cycles of Sabbaths, God explicitly links that way of life with the prohibition against all idolatry (Lev. 26:1-2). Idols always destroy and crush life; the Living God gives life and health and rest: you become what you worship (Ps. 115:3-9). The blessings of keeping covenant are not just “spiritual,” but they flow out into the land in real time from God personally: food, peace, safety, prosperity, fellowship (Lev. 26:3-13).

By the same token, breaking covenant with God brings His personal opposition, beginning with sickness, sorrow, and tyranny (Lev. 26:14-17). If that doesn’t get their attention, God promises to break their pride with successive rounds of judgment and chastisement that come in “sevens” like inverted “sabbaths”: first, droughts and famines (Lev. 26:18-20), then wild animals to ravage the land (Lev. 26:21-25), then enemies, violence, and starvation (Lev. 26:26-27), then the desperate cannibalism of a military siege followed by utter destruction (Lev. 26:28-32). Ultimately, the people will end up in exile heartbroken, but this will finally give the land her sabbaths (Lev. 26:33-39).

But if God’s people confess their sins and humbly accept God’s punishments, He promises to remember His covenant and not cast them away, even in the midst of judgment (Lev. 26:40-46).

BLESSINGS & CURSES IN THE NEW COVENANT

The first and most common objection to a text like this is that it only applied to Israel, their special covenant with God, and the Promised Land. The problem is that the New Testament repeatedly contradicts that. For example, Paul tells Gentile kids in Ephesus (Asia Minor) that the Fifth Commandment is the first commandment with a promise for them, “that it may go well with you, and you may live long on the earth” (Eph. 6:2-3). Related, the apostle tells the Christians in Galatia that men reap what they sow because God is not mocked (Gal. 6:7-9).

Even Jesus said that those who have given up families and houses and lands for His sake will receive a hundredfold back in this life (with persecutions) and eternal life (Mk. 10:29-30). Likewise, Jesus proclaimed blessings and curses in His own ministry related to loyalty to Him (Mt. 5:1-11, ch. 23, Lk. 6:20-26, ch. 11), and He warned of blessings and curses in Revelation, with specific warnings to churches (Rev. 1:3, ch. 2-3, 22:14ff). The New Testament also says that judgment begins with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). This covenant loyalty is faith, a living faith that works by love, and that faith is a gift of God, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8-9).

THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S

Christians must never forget that God made this world, and therefore it matters to Him, and therefore it must matter to us. The earth is full of God’s glory, full of good things for us to find and cultivate and discover and use. In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve and commanded them to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and rule it with wisdom (Gen. 1:27-28). That task has been significantly hindered by the curse of sin, but God’s covenant was His personal promise to take away that curse and bless with fruitfulness in the earth, and this promise has always been received by faith (e.g. Lev. 26:9, cf. Gen. 15:6). Christ is the mediator of the New and Better Covenant because He has become the curse for us, so that we may get back to work under God’s potent blessing (Gal. 3:13ff). If God is for us, who can stand against us (Lev. 26:8, Rom. 8:31)? But if God is against us, who can possibly succeed (Lev. 26:17)?

But what we sometimes miss is that this includes creation itself. Creation itself is in bondage or liberty depending on the state of man, and therefore, creation itself either eagerly submits to our rule or stands against us and fights us (Rom. 8:19-22). Sometimes Christians falsely believe that “Christian work” is only doing evangelism or worship, but Christian work is all good work done under the blessing of Christ, including care for animals, forests, industry, science, water, and soils. While “climate science” is full superstition, distortions, and lies, we don’t need them to know that our culture’s covenant treachery has certainly called for famines and plagues and destruction.

CONCLUSION

We should not miss the highly personal nature of the covenant God made with Israel. Not only is God the one blessing or cursing, but the goal is for Israel to “walk” with God and for God to walk with them (Lev. 26:11-12). But if Israel walks “contrary” to God, God is promising to walk “contrary” to them. In fact, the text uses that word translated “contrary” seven times, implying a sort of anti-Sabbatarian collision (Lev. 26:21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 40, 41). There will be no rest.

Our sin is not merely “bad,” it also puts us on a collision course with the God of this world. It is a personal attack on God, and an assault on His goodness and grace. You cannot cling to your sin and have things go well for you in the land. It is certainly true that sometimes God takes righteous people through horrific trials, but it also true that He judges and chastens sinners, beginning with His own covenant people. Sometimes God is walking contrary to His people because they are walking contrary to Him. And the only way out is through the Cross of Jesus.

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Death Penalties & the Cross

Christ Church on

INTRODUCTION

Modern man prides himself in not being violent and savage, and yet we have butchered 60 million babies and counting. We have high rates of drug and alcohol and porn addiction, suicide, incarceration, and so on. We sacrifice babies to our Molech, and we sacrifice millions more in the slow cooker of government programs and prisons. We have rejected Jesus and His easy yoke, calling it harsh, and we have demanded the demented yoke of humanistic hubris and tyrannical government. And the only way out of this mess is through the Cross of Jesus.

THE TEXT

“And the Lord spake unto Moses saying, Again thou shalt say to the children of Israel, whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death…” (Lev. 20:1-27).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

The text opens with a prohibition against offering children to Molech and against turning a blind eye to it, as well as all idolatry, since the people are to be holy and keep God’s statutes (Lev. 20:1-8). Seven crimes are listed with death penalties (20:9-16), and five additional sins are listed, with the community sanctions of being “cut off from among their people” and “bearing their sin” (Lev. 20:17-21). “Dying childless” could imply the possibility of a civil penalty, but it is probably a direct sanction from God since it identifies one of those instances as being “unclean,” which is a ceremonial status (20:21). God reminds His people that He is giving them life and blessing in a good land through His law, which is why they must remain separate from the other nations (20:22-24). The daily sign of the distinction was their diet (20:25-26), and that was to remind them to remove all idolatry out of their midst (20:27).

COMPARED TO WHAT?

“Molech” is related to the Hebrew word “melech” which means “king.” The fires of Molech are most likely a generic reference to the various cults of the nations. Dedication of children to Molech seems to have included both child sacrifice as well as temple prostitution. And right on schedule our nation is actually debating the appropriateness of Drag Queen story, so-called gender “transition,” and the furies are out in full force demanding abortion as “health care.”  This is nothing short of the new dedication of children to Molech.

You can always tell the god or gods of a culture by where coercion and violence are accepted and obedience and submission are required. Even in relatively conservative churches, if a woman says she must obey her husband, she will sometimes get concerned looks and questions about whether everything is OK (same with obeying a pastor or elder). But if you mention a court order or taxes (with threat of violence/prison), the assumption is that you better just submit. The fact that many modern Christians are embarrassed that God would require death penalties for certain crimes but just shrug when our civil government sends thieves to prison for decades, tells you who our god is, who we see as holy.

In these laws we see God’s requirement that we hallow Him particularly in our families and sexuality. Over the centuries, acts of treason and desertion from an army in time of war have been punished with death, subtly insisting that civil loyalties are the most sacred. Instead of accusing God of harshness, we ought to assume that He is warning us and the world about the potency and sacredness of marriage and family (Heb. 13:4). Jesus also makes it clear what cursing father or mother looks like: “For Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: But ye say, if a man shall say to his father or mother, it is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightiest be profited by me; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother” (Mk. 7:10-12). Jesus is clearly implying that certain forms a high-handed neglect of elderly parents are the kind of cursing of parents that might be tried as form of murder.

CRIMES & SINS & JUSTICE

This text distinguishes between crimes that require a civil penalty (20:9-16), and sins that require a ceremonial or familial penalty (20:17-21). The distinction between crimes and sins designates different jurisdictions: the state, the family, and the church. Sins are to be adjudicated and addressed by individuals, families, and churches as appropriate, while crimes have civil penalties and are the proper jurisdiction of the state. God has given the civil magistrate the sword of vengeance, which means that the state is only good at violence and coercion (Rom. 13). This is why the Bible requires a fiercely limited civil government. In a Christian land, all crimes would also be sins, but not all sins are crimes. In a pagan land, it’s more of a Venn diagram, and not all crimes are really sins.

It’s worth noting that only murder required a mandatory death penalty; all of these death penalties are maximum sentences (Gen. 9:6-9, Dt. 19:11-13). We can see this in another law regarding Sabbath breaking which also called for a death penalty (Lev. 24:11-22, cf. Num. 15:32-36), however in the days of Nehemiah, he suppressed Sabbath commerce but didn’t institute a death penalty (Neh. 13:19-21). We see something similar with the death penalty for homosexuality in our text (Lev. 20:13), but the good kings Asa and Jehoshaphat exiled the sodomites from the land (1 Kgs. 15:12, 22:46), and Josiah tore down their houses of prostitution (2 Kgs. 23:7).

CONCLUSION

In the New Testament, we do not see the apostles lobbying for death penalties. What do we make of that? Paul does say after listing a number of crimes and sins, “that they which commit such things are worthy of death” (Rom. 1:32), and elsewhere he says the law is good, so long as it is used lawfully, to prevent lawlessness and everything that is “contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel” (1 Tim. 1:8-11).

Therefore, we conclude that the law (with its death penalties) remains the perfect standard of justice and reveals God’s wrath against our sins and crimes. We affirm the goodness of the law for public policy and all morality, but we affirm it first and foremost as that which drives the world to Christ and His glorious gospel. There is no life outside of Christ, and all who hate His wisdom love death. The world says believe in yourself, re-invent yourself, find yourself, and the end of that road is nothing but sadness and death: rage and shame, sickness and scars, mutilation and murder. And the law drives sinners to despair.

The law drives sinners to the cross, to the place of execution and there the gospel proclaims: Christ died for guilty sinners. Christ died for lawbreakers. Christ died for the unclean, the profane, the obscene, the sodomites, the pedophiles, the prostitutes, the liars, the idolaters, the proud, and all who have dishonored their parents. The law cannot save, but what the law is powerless to do, God has done by sending His Son. Christ has received the death penalty for us. And this is why it is only those who know their guilt who are the ones who are in.

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Blood, Marriage, and Worship (King’s Cross)

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INTRODUCTION

These two chapters are the hinge of the book of Leviticus, the first half broadly sketching our duties to God (1-17) and the second half our duties to our neighbor (18-27). In this, we see the great indicative/imperative distinction that echoes through the rest of Scripture and Christian theology. We do because of what God has done. We do because of what God has made us to be. So the center of life is the blood of Christ, and everything else flows from there.

THE TEXT

“… What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, and bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle…” (Lev. 17–18).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

God prohibits His people from offering sacrifices to other gods (Lev. 17:1-7), as well as offering sacrifices in any other place than He designates (17:8-9). God also forbids eating or drinking the blood of animals whether sacrificial animals or animals taken for food, since the life is in the blood (17:10-16). Those who disobey these commands are to be cut off or excommunicated from the covenant people (17:4, 9, 10, 14). Paganism and idolatry are always trying to trick life out of lifeless and dead things, and next to blood, sexual rites are the other common talisman of the nations. So God forbids His people from imitating the sexual confusions of the Egyptians and Canaanites (18:1-17), particularly through tribalistic marriages (18:18), or any other vile perversions (18:19-25). By these, the earth is defiled and vomits out its inhabitants (18:26-30).

THE COUNCIL OF JERUSALEM

The council of Jerusalem clearly affirmed the ongoing relevance of these chapters: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication…” (Acts 15:28-29). While fornication often refers to sex outside of marriage, it also refers to any kind of sexual immorality, which would include all the incestuous prohibitions in our text. While it may have been tempting to dismiss these prohibitions against blood and incest as a lot of archaic oddities in previous decades, these have actually been the marks of paganism throughout history, and they are currently in the process of being mainstreamed again as we speak. The council was not prohibiting eating rare steak, but clearly we may not dismiss these prohibitions as mere ceremonial law. God’s people must always abstain from idolatry, including the bloodlust and sexual deviance that accompanies it.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

We should never forget is that it is not whether there will be blood, but which blood, whose blood. The life is in the blood (Lev. 17:11, 14), and in this fallen world man wants to trick life out of blood apart from the God who gives and upholds all life. The fires of Molech (Lev. 18:21) and all abortion is the attempt to trick life out of blood and death. Cultures of sexual deviance are also always cultures of death and dying, and the diseases and ailments and shorter life spans that accompany them are no accident (Lev. 18:22-24). As Romans 1:27 says, they receive the consequences in their own bodies by their actions. It is simply a fact that the widespread culture of piercing and tattooing has also grown out of this bloodshed. Despite great progress in medical science, pseudo-scientific witchcraft is also on the rise. We reject the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ complete ban on blood transfusions, but we absolutely agree that the perennial scientific hubris of man must be rejected: trying to be lord of life and death, especially attempts to conjure up life from the bodies of murdered babies. But we have all this bloodshed because we have rejected the blood of Jesus. We have been embarrassed and ashamed of the blood of Jesus, and so now we have blood running in our streets. It is not whether but which.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

When one extreme rears its ugly head, you can bet that others are preparing their pitch. We live under a regime of statism (worshiping the power of the state), but right on schedule, we have some beginning to preach the power of familialism or tribalism. While statists worship the blood of the sword, another ancient demonic impulse worships the blood of kin, and incest has historically been central to that quest for power. While there are sexual deviants who pursue perversion for mere kicks, we should not be naïve to the power plays at work in the current sexual cesspool. The statists and globalists are currently using sexual deviance to grasp for power, but one reaction to that tyranny collapses into an idolatry of tribe with its own attendant sexual maladies (e.g. polygamy, incest). But we are not tribalists, we are covenantal Christians.

Human society is built on flourishing families, but families cannot flourish apart from the blessing of God, apart from the blood of Christ (and neither can nations). The blood of Christ does not obliterate natural affections for family and culture or nation, but natural affection certainly must die and rise again. Jesus said that unless we hate our father and mother, we cannot be His disciples (Lk. 14:26). The Kingdom of God is an international, global, and pentecostal mission. We believe that the nations (as nations) will bring their glories into the New Jerusalem, but those Christian nations will be united by the Spirit of God indwelling them, joint missionary work, tons of neighborly commerce, and boatloads of cousins.

CONCLUSION

Never forget that God made the world such that you become what you worship. Psalm 115 says that those who make idols and serve them become like them, and when you reject the Living God, you can only go down. You can only change the glory of the incorruptible God into images of corruptible man, birds, beasts, or creeping things (Rom. 1:23). But when you worship man divorced from His Maker, you are worshipping a man descending into beastlike vulgarity. When you worship animals you become like them.

So we are here to worship the Living God who made us, who knows what we are for, and who has come and dwelt among us, so that we might become like Him. Creation itself groans for the redemption of the sons of God because when we worship and act like animals we only harm and misuse creation and so it vomits us out. But the blood of Jesus cleanses every stain, and by His blood we have eternal life. And under that blessing, we work and marry and exercise dominion until the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

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One Little Word Shall Fell Him (Biblical Sexuality Sunday)

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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. !e same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” ( John 1:1–3).

Before turning to an exposition of the text, allow me to remind you of the arena where this text needs to be applied. This is what might be called an occasional sermon. The Canadian Parliament recently passed a law, a law called C4, that in effect outlawed any presentation of the saving gospel of Christ to those in the grip of certain sexual perversions. This legislation was plainly aimed at Christians, but whether it was or not, it just as plainly includes Christians.

In response to this move, a number of Canadian pastors have chosen this Sunday to preach on the forbidden topic, in violation of their new law, and in simple obedience to the law of God. For those who need the reminder, the law of God always outranks the legal whims of men.

Although the law does not affect us here in the States, the spirit of it most certainly does, and so a number of American pastors are also preaching on this same topic, on the same day, in solidarity with our Canadian brothers. This is not an instance of meddling in someone else’s business, like taking a passing dog by the ears (Prov. 26:17)—twenty states in the U.S. have already banned conversion therapy, about which more in a moment.

For reasons that will be made evident shortly, this is an issue that concerns absolutely everyone here. It is even more relevant to your children and grandchildren.

With that said, let us turn to a summary of our text.

In the first chapter of Genesis, we are told that God said something. We there read, “God said, ‘let there be light, and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). And of course, what God said was the Word. This Word of God was with God, and the Word of God was God (v. 1). He did not come after God temporally in any sense; He was in the beginning with God (v. 2). Everything that is created came into existence through this Word (v. 3). Apart from Him, nothing created has any possible existence apart from Him (v. 3). God the Father was the architect of all things, and we are told that God the Father in His speaking was the creator and maker of all things, through the executive of His Word, and so it was that the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep.

This world is therefore a spoken world. This world came into existence through that Word that was spoken. He is the Word, and we are all His words. Whatever belongs to the created order, this Word created it (Col. 1:16-17). Through this Word God made all the worlds (Heb. 1:2). And this spoken world only remains in existence because God continues to speak it; we are sustained by the Word of His power (Heb. 1:3).

The Word of His power. All created things are sustained by the Word of His power. Remember that. And what is that power? He is the Almighty. He is omnipotent. He is the everlasting God. The Word is therefore the Word of the Father’s infinite and almighty power. Christ, the Word of His power.

Now what is our circumstance? What is our situation? What is the location of the particular corner we have painted ourselves into?

This new Canadian law outlaws what they are calling “conversion therapy.” And the way they defined this objectionable behavior outlaws any attempt whatever to persuade a person with perverted sexual desires to repent of those desires. Now it has come to pass that anyone guilty of violating this law is subject to imprisonment for “a term of not more than five years.”

According to this law, conversion therapy refers to any “practice, treatment or service” that is designed to “change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual,” or to “repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour”—not to mention seeking to change any number of other things that very likely need changing.

But to no one’s surprise, the law does not prohibit conversion efforts running in the opposite direction. It does not prohibit . . . “a practice, treatment or service that relates to a person’s gender transition.” It is therefore illegal now to help someone climb the slope of sexual virtue in Canada, but it is by no means illegal to help them tumble down it, and into the crevices of vice.

Now the preamble of this wretched and misbegotten law declares, ex cathedra, that conversion therapy causes “harm” to those subjected to it, that conversion therapy causes “harm” to society because it is “based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression,” including the idea that “heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.”

That’s a mouthful. That’s a word salad, right there, and it is about as wrong-headed as a cathedral filled with unregenerate bishops could possibly be.

In effect, they are telling us that for us to repeat the holy standards established by Almighty God causes harm because it perpetuates myths and stereotypes that run contrary to what these dogmatists think should be applauded by all. And if you refuse to go along with this nonsense, it is five years in the big house for you. Someone saw that you weren’t applauding, and started to ask pointed questions.

This law is important, so their argument goes, in order to “protect the human dignity and equality of all Canadians.”

How are we to respond? What are we to think of all this?

Before we turn to examine it in detail, let us get the defiance part out of the way. We do not believe in some kind of hetero-normativity, grounded in human tradition, but rather in theo-normativity, grounded in the absolute law of God. And on the basis of that law, we here declare in the name of Jehovah that the image of God was established by the Creator Himself, imprinted on our race in a fundamental binary. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). This was His image, established by Him at the very beginning, marred by us in the rebellion and Fall, and which is now being restored in us through the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Consequently, we consider this Canadian law to be just one more antichrist in a long line of them, and we reject it as just one more antichrist.

We reject the spirit of this law, and with high confidence in God, we issue the strongest possible defiance to this law. Together with that defiance, we believe it is our duty to issue the strongest possible warnings to those politicians and bureaucrats who are fomenting this nonsense. “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?” (Psalm 94:20).

All of our current cultural conflicts—most certainly including this one—boil down to this. This is a battle for editorial control of the dictionary. And by “dictionary,” I mean the sum total of all our dictionaries. Our aspiring tyrannical mandatorians want to be granted the authority to be allowed to define all words, and they want their definitions to stand uncontested. They want to seize the authority to jail any who use language in forbidden ways. Other definitions, regardless of their source, are backhanded as “myths”—and not only myths, but forbidden myths.

They have determined that it is high time for them to rise up, and challenge the Editor-in-chief, the one who gave us the ability to speak in the first place, and consequently the one who is the Lord over all our old dictionaries. As the giver of speech, He is the giver of dictionaries. He is Lord of all the pronouns. He is the Lord of coherent speech, and we see in this, their incoherent speech, that He is the Lord of wrath also.

We need to understand this effort of theirs as a new Babel; this is a linguistic ziggurat. They intend to defend themselves against what Jehovah did to them the last time—that is, confusing their tongues—by seizing control of all language beforehand. If they are the editors of all the dictionaries, and if they can thereby control our speech, then plainly they have seized what they have lusted after for centuries. They were building a great tower of stones the last time, and God interrupted them by confusing their languages. So this time, as they vainly imagine, they have seized that weapon for themselves, and they will outwit Him, and they will build their new great tower out of definitional elasticity.

But who is it that they have decided to challenge in His position as the Editor of all dictionaries? Who are they taking on? His very name is the Word.

They have decided that they are going to challenge the God of all dictionaries, the God of all language, the one who fashioned Adam as a speaking creature. God gave the gift of speech, the gift of words, to the dust of the ground. They are going to wrestle—for all or nothing—for exhaustive authority over words, and they are going to throw out this challenge to the Word. They are doing this on the lip of the Abyss, on the edge of ultimate madness, on the threshold of the Void, and they are demonstrating to us how the madness is already starting to set in.

They have challenged the Almighty to a battle of words. They have challenged the Font of Speech itself to a duel of words. So if there is one thing that Christians should not be in the light of all this, it is anything like “worried.”

This is like a five-year-old attacking Neptune with a water pistol. It is like trying to set the sun on fire with a box of wooden matches. It is like throwing a snowball at all the glaciers of Greenland. This is the supreme folly. It is demented. It is the latter half of the banquet at Belbury. There is no reason for anxiety, Christian, because our adversaries have staked out their position plainly. They have said blotcher bulldoo, and they have warned us sternly that it is the law.

Now the Lord of all is sovereign over all things, obviously, but it has been His good pleasure to mediate His authority in the world through His church. He has made us kings and priests on the earth (Rev. 1:6; Rev. 5:10). “And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Eph. 1:22–23).

This means that the answer to this particular frenzy on the part of our ruling elites is an answer that is going to proceed from the church. And when the church speaks, she does so from her pulpits with an open Bible laid out on those pulpits. And what do we say? The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him; His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure; One little word shall fell him. That word above all earthly powers No thanks to them abideth; The Spirit and the gifts are ours Through Him who with us sideth. —Luther, A Mighty Fortress Mark that. “No thanks to them abideth.” But that Word abides nonetheless. It abides despite their scorn and pretended sophistication. It abides despite their threats of five-year sentences. It abides despite their abandonment of common law, common grace, and common sense. It abides despite their inversion of all fixed categories (Is. 5:20). The Word abides.

In 1943, when Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt were discussing the shape of the post-war world, the story is told that someone suggested that the pope might have something to contribute to their discussion. And Stalin is reputed to have said, “The Pope, how many divisions has he?”

In this confrontation of ours—and it is a confrontation—the worldings turn to us and they ask us what resources we might have? They have armies and navies, parliaments and conferences, international corporations and nuclear weapons, control of the monetary system, a hammerlock on the media, and many thousands of kept and fully-house trained scientists. So they turn to us with a sneer. How many divisions do we have?

And our answer is simple. We have words, and water, and bread, and wine. And underneath all of it we have the Spirit of Jehovah.

Now the reason that all of this is happening is because our ruling class is unregenerate. They do not know God, and that is why their decisions and determinations and law are shrouded in this peculiar kind of darkness. They dwell in darkness, and they hate the light, and why?—because their deeds are evil (John 3:19).

But what kind of power does darkness have when light is spoken to it? What happens whenever God says “let there be light”? And what happens when God says—as He will say—“let there be light” again?

When God said “let there be light” to the darkness of nullity and non-existence, there was immediately light. But He has the same kind of authority when He speaks to a different sort of darkness—the darkness of this sin and rebellion. And when He speaks light to that kind of darkness, the same thing will happen. Light happens, and the light does not come to be by coincidence. No, the light appears because it is obedient.

They will of course want to stop any word that has this kind of power, any word that has this kind of authority. And they will try to stop it by locking up preachers. Let them. Binding preachers is a whole lot easier than tying up their message.

It does not matter whether our ruling elites have scheduled a great reformation and revival. It does not matter that they have not written down anything like that on their calendars. What matters is whether it is on God’s calendar—and all the prophets, from Samuel on, declare that it is in fact on God’s calendar.

So it does not matter to us that the darkness has not planned for an eruption of light. They have nothing to do with what is going to happen. They have no authority, and less sense. They thought the little dwarf star of the church was about to flicker and go out, little realizing that it was actually God’s appointed place for the next supernova.

And so here is the outlawed light. This is the message that they don’t want you to hear.

Jesus is Lord. Caesar is not Lord. Jesus is the Creator of all things, and it is His will that all little girls grow up to be women. It is His will that all little boys grow up to be men. His is His purpose, intention, and design that the love between Christ and the Church be embodied and modeled by a man and a woman coming together in a fruitful union.

This is His will, and we are commanded to listen to His will because He is the one who rose from the dead. The cabal of crooked politicians in His day conspired to have Him railroaded in a joke trial in the middle of the night, condemned to death, and hanged on a gibbet. While He was hanging there, the diseased politicians of His day came to the foot of the cross in order to taunt Him. Come down, they said, and then we will believe.

But it was not His purpose to come down. He was going to go down, down to the grave, and from that place He was going to come up. We do not follow the one who came down from the cross. We follow the one who came up from the grave. Do you not see?

And as the one who came up from the dead, He is now established on His throne as the Lord of all things. In the first place, He is now the Lord of crooked politicians, and He will dispense with them as He pleases. God has established Him in His great office, as the Son of God, by His resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:4). Christ is established as the judge of the whole earth, which includes all these pitiful lordlings, and God established Him in that role by raising Him from the dead (Acts 17:31). The Word tells us that the Lord Jesus will judge the world in righteousness. He will judge the world in righteousness, and not in demented folly.

He is the Lord of the crooked and the Lord of the straight, and He knows how to make the crooked straight. He is the Lord of kings and congresses. He is the Lord of princes and parliaments. He is the Lord of boys and girls, men and women. He is the Lord of marriage. He is the Lord of darkness and the Lord of light. He is the Lord of the secular carnival fun house of mirrors. He is the Lord of love and the Lord of hate. He is the light, and He is love. He is the Lord of oceans and Lord of the dry land. He is the Lord of holiness, and the day is coming when holiness to the Lord is inscribed on the smallest things, down to the bells of the horses (Zech. 14:20).

You may be a member of parliament who supported and voted for this monstrosity. You may be a faceless functionary in some bureaucracy gearing up to enforce it. You may be an intelligence analyst who thinks that your grasp of data rivals the omniscience of God. You may be a Canadian pastor who is trying to figure out how to compromise on this without looking like you are compromising. You may be a soft evangelical think-leader who is trying to figure out how to configure all of this as somehow “not a gospel issue,” and as yet another lamentable exercise in conspiracy thinking by conservative Christians. It actually doesn’t really matter who you are.

It doesn’t really matter who you are because if Christ summons you with His inexorable and efficacious word, then you will come. You can come to Christ from anywhere. If He turns to you, looks straight at you, and summons you with the Spirit of God, the very finger of God, with which He points at you, what will you say? And if He then says, “Come, follow me,” then that is what you will in fact do. He is the Word, and He has spoken. He has said, “Follow me.”

And I, as a minister of His Word, am speaking in His name and on His behalf. Not only am I authorized to do so, I am under obligation to do so. You are now summoned. Christ was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead, and so you are now summoned. “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17)

And when you come to the light, you will leave the darkness behind.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.

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