God gave Adam a world full of good things to enjoy.  He withheld one good thing from him, one tree, and called that tree the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  By withholding that one tree from Adam and making Adam’s very life contingent on not eating that tree, God taught Adam the heart of good and evil, which is that all good things come to us from God, for He is benevolent, but that all the things that God has given us must be enjoyed as God’s gifts to us and according to God’s command for their rightful use, for God is also sovereign.

When Adam ate of the tree, Adam denied that all things really did come from God.  He believed the lie that the tree just existed of itself and could be used however Adam saw best.  This is the lie that mankind is cursed to believe ever since, that God’s good creation simply exists of itself and that it is up to man to determine what it means and how it should be used.

Last night we finished watching the BBC miniseries “Brideshead Revisited”, based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel. At one point, a very wealthy lord, who had run out on his family and abandoned the church many years before expressed dislike of his son’s choice in marriage.  The woman that he marries is a commoner, and the old man does not appreciate her outlook on life.  The old man’s son at one point says that she doesn’t fit in very well with his family because she has “middle class values”.  That got Andrea and I to thinking.  The characters in Brideshead Revisited are mostly a train wreck- broken families, alcoholism, indigence and the like.  But they are very wealthy, so they can avoid the more obvious consequences.

The underclass in Britain at the time also had many of those same character traits- this was early this century.  The very poor in our own nation do as well; anyone who has done charity and outreach work in this country, as I have, knows that a large proportion of the people in this country who are truly needy, especially who are truly needy for any great length of time, are needy because of their own character.  Before anyone gets excited, I am certainly aware of a great many exceptions to this rule.  Nonetheless, in a country with rule of law such as Britain or America, if one is hardworking, disciplined and has the ability to defer gratification, then absent some terrible medical condition, one will not be destitute.  That doesn’t guarantee wealth by any means, but it should be enough to keep one off the street with food on the table.

“The values of the middle class” is a common expression, and what is meant by it generally is hard work, reliability, dependability, discipline and the ability to defer gratification.  To attain the middle class it is necessary to have the ability to work toward a long-term goal, to save money, to put up with a lot of unpleasantness for the sake of some greater benefit in the future.  Going to college used to be a difficult and strenuous task for most people, requiring significant sacrifice usually on the part of both parent and child, if one was middle class.  It cost a lot of money, you had to defer income for several years, you had to study and work hard and avoid a lot of the things young people often do in order to get an education.  University academic standards have declined tremendously in the last several decades.  While there was always a certain amount of carousing associated with going to college, it was necessary to show some discipline and some self-control to complete one’s college education.

Home ownership likewise was a major accomplishment, not something everyone could attain.  Even after the advent of the 30-year mortgage, one had to save up a significant downpayment and convince a bank that one was creditworthy.  That required discipline, hard work and deferment of gratification.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit had a great insight a while back, something that has come to be known as “Reynold’s Law”–

The government decides to try to increase the middle class
by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go
to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own
homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college
aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds
of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that
let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t
produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. 

Getting people out of poverty and into the middle class is a major policy goal of most governments.  People in the middle class provide stability to a society, and they provide tax revenue.  They don’t consume many government services and they don’t get into legal trouble nearly as much.  So the federal government decided quite a while ago that they would subsidize home ownership and college education, because doing so would get more people into the middle class.  But those are just markers of the middle class, not the traits that actually make someone middle class.  The traits themselves, as Reynolds says, are hard work, discipline, and the ability to defer gratification, the ability to stick with something even if it’s hard, to gain a greater benefit down the road.  When government just gives people things that in the past they had to work for, then that actually undermines the very traits that produce the middle class.

In this last election, many people remarked on the gender gap, the greater propensity of women to vote for the Democratic candidate than the Republican candidate.  But an even greater gap, and one much less remarked upon, is the marriage gap.  Married females were almost 25% more likely to vote for Romney than Obama.  Married males were 19% more likely to vote Republican.  Marriage is another endeavor that, especially in our own day of easy divorce, requires “middle class values” to attain and keep.  Marriage is often hard; it requires the ability to compromise, to work with others, to defer gratitude and to control one’s desires.

One really easy way to become poor or to stay poor is to get divorced.  Another way is to have a child out of wedlock.  The wealthy can afford to pay for the fallout of broken families and single parenthood, at least in a financial sense.  The poor cannot afford it, and it’s one of the major reasons they stay poor.

In our time of media saturation and popular culture, people study and emulate the lifestyles of the very wealthy.  On TV we see lots of images of single happy people sleeping around and raising children by themselves without much trouble, people who never seem to work much and never seem to suffer very much from their choices.  Poor people see the lives of wealthy people and think they will be happy if they emulate those lifestyles, of promiscuity and substance abuse, but the rich are only able to live that way, insofar as they do at all, because they are rich and able to buy their way out of some kinds of trouble.  Less obvious is the tremendous emotional and spiritual damage they do to themselves.  But the poor, all too many of whom get their ideas of the happy life from Jersey Shore and Jay-Z, suffer immediately and obviously from a lifestyle of substance abuse, promiscuity and sloth.  Subsidizing college educations and home ownership for people without discipline and without self-control will not change anything, other than to temporarily mask the true deleterious effects of a lack of character.

The values that are necessary to the middle class are also the values necessary to success in the Christian life.  Christianity is hard.  It takes discipline and self-control.  It takes the ability to defer gratification.  The parables of Jesus point constantly to this truth, calling us to look to the long term for the benefit; if we are not able to stick through the hard times to get to the good times, then we will fail.  We will fail when our own sins tempt us, when the hostility of the world beats against us.  Paul tells us to set our eyes on things above, not on things on this earth.  All too many people become Christians looking for the fast benefit; most of those fall away.  Perseverance is necessary.

It is no secret and no surprise that the rise of the middle class in history corresponds to the increasing influence of Christianity.  Before Christianity’s influence, and absent that influence, society tends to divide itself naturally into categories of oppressor and oppressed; the rich elites born into the right families and willing to inflict violence and exploitation for the sake of the stability of the society (and their own benefit), and the oppressed who are viewed as too undisciplined and lazy to be trusted to rule their own lives, who must be made to work for the benefit of the ruling class, and cared for by the ruling class, for their own good.  This is how the kingdoms of men are always organized.  The kingdom of God, when it was revealed by Jesus Christ, was shown to be not the rule of some better earthly king, but the internal spiritual rule of Jesus Christ, mediated by the Spirit of God, in the hearts and minds of those who put their trust in Him.  When enough people in a society start to be governed by this kingdom, they realize that they don’t need earthly kings any more.  A man who is ruled by God has no need to be ruled by other men.  He is free.  The free societies of the west were all the product of this knowledge, first in the rise of Christianity in Northern Europe and England, and later especially as a result of the Protestant Reformation that recaptured many of these principles from the earthly tyranny of the Roman church.

As the state seeks to increasingly dominate every area of our life, they attack everything that stands as a rival.  So marriage is undermined, treated as inessential and unimportant.  They do this by disconnecting childbearing from marriage, making it easier to have children out of wedlock.  They undermine the need for hard work and deferment of gratification through welfare policies, social security and medicare, all of which become “entitlements”, not simply safety nets for hard cases but the normal expectation that the government will take care of us.  Education, medical care, housing, food- everything is increasingly dependent on state direction and state subsidy, all through funds taken from the smaller and smaller pool of productive people, or simply invented through the fiction of fiat currency and deficit spending.  Friedrich Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom looks more prophetic by the day- we are becoming serfs, workers dependent on the direction of the state for our every move.

I have no policy prescriptions here.  I am not telling you to vote Republican, or call your congressmen for anything.  But if people in this country want to remain free, we must start with ourselves.  We must free ourselves from slavery to our own lusts and desires, and that happens only through faith in Jesus Christ and new birth through the Spirit.  There are spillover effects, common grace effects of a Christian society, so that even those who are not regenerate can experience some of the related benefits.  But only through the gospel can we as individuals or communities really enjoy true liberty.  Christ came to bring the truth, and the truth sets us free.  Once we are free in our hearts, free men willingly serving Christ our king, we will forever be free of the slavery of men, whatever our earthly condition.  When we give up that freedom, as individuals or as societies, we will again fall into bondage, the natural slavery of the human race, which we sadly see happening all around us in America today.

Most of you under 30, you don’t understand.  You don’t get that the life you live didn’t just happen- it was the product of sacrifice and discipline that others made on your behalf.  What we had in America was rare in the world, very rare, and it still is.  People left Europe and Asia in droves because in Europe, in Asia, everywhere in the world, everytime you turned around you had to ask someone for permission to live.  They came here because in America they were free- free to worship, free to work, free to enjoy the fruits of their own labor without having to pay off some fat duke or bishop or petty warlord for the privilege of breathing their air.

The problem is, that those people are here too.  They are constantly tempting you- free birth control, cheap student loans, cheap housing, universal health care- tempting you to give up your freedom for false promises.  They don’t actually want to give you anything.  They don’t care about you.  They just want to trick you into giving them the reins, so just like in the old days they can dictate where you live, what you do, who you worship.

Isaiah’s idea of heaven was a place where they got to enjoy the fruits of their own labor without petty tyrants seizing it from them all the time- “They shall build houses and inhabit them.  They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.  They shall not build and another inhabit, They shall not plant and another eat.”  (Isaiah 65:21-22)  His idea of heaven was the free market, where people lived and worked and enjoyed and voluntarily shared what they earned themselves, without some petty tyrant dictating to them what they could and could not do.  There is more to heaven than this, of course, much more.  Yet the absence of tyrants in heaven is a major part of what makes it heaven, to Isaiah.

The great problem has never been the tyrants, the bureaucrats, the slave drivers.  The great problem has always been that people did not have the moral courage to take responsibility for their own lives, to refuse to trade their own accountability before God in exchange for a mess of porridge, to give up the liberty that is the true state of mankind in exchange for the lie of the world.  All through history people have clamored to go back to Egypt, to embrace slavery with security rather than freedom with risk, trusting God to see them through the wilderness.  And so the liberty which America has enjoyed these many years was hard-fought, by men and women who took responsibility for themselves, ultimately accountable to nobody but God, and resisted the false promises of the enslavers of men.

God made man to be a king, to rule himself and to rule creation, and to be answerable to nobody but to God.  Man threw away that inheritance in exchange for the false promise that if he submitted to the devil he would get what he wanted.  In America, more than anywhere else that has ever existed, the Christian truth of freedom had reasserted itself, that man could be self-disciplined, self-ruled, a king over his own life and accountable to nobody but God.

The problem is not Barack Obama.  The problem is a nation that would rather indulge their every lust in exchange for a tyrannical government that will promise to cover the cost of our self-indulgence, at the expense of our hard-fought liberty.  The problem is a nation that thinks that promiscuity, drunkenness, laziness, addiction to entertainment, pleasure and luxury can be had with no cost.  There is always a cost.

Jesus said, “He that sins is the slave of sin.”  Only by embracing our accountability before God can we truly be free, and once we have that freedom, nobody can take it from us.  We are free from the tyrants of this age.  This is the truth that our founding fathers realized.  This is the truth that they saw when they said, this people will be ruled by God, or by God, they’ll be ruled.  And with this last election, I fear the reversion to the mean is complete, that we have once again given up our birthright for a mess of pottage, once again traded our divinely appointed kingship under God for the false promises of pleasure and joy without responsibility.  The one who is promising to cover the cost of your self-indulgent life is the one who is making you their slave.

The days will come that you, under-30-year-old, will see that the costs of laziness, self-indulgence and irresponsibility will always be paid- if not now, then tomorrow.  When that time comes remember that Jesus Christ has promised to set you free, and America was once the closest thing this world has ever seen to that freedom, worked out in civil society.  Embrace the truth that anyone promising you security, safety and immunity from the consequences of bad choices simply wants to make you their slave.  Jesus has bought you out of the slavery that is the natural state of mankind, bought you with the price of His own blood, and He has promised you freedom from the lies of Satan and the tyranny of men, so that you too can one day enjoy the fruits of your own labor, that you too can sit under your own vine and fig tree.  If you are very lucky, very blessed by providence, you may get to experience a small taste of that liberty in this life, as our forefathers did.  But trust in Him, and one day you will certainly have it, in this life or that which is to come.  And when you come to trust in Christ and the liberty which He promises, you will never again believe the false promise of security and self-indulgence which the tyrants of this world use to trap those they would make their slaves.

Atheistic morality is a contradiction in terms.  Morality addresses what ought to be, and atheism allows the existence only of what is.  Atheists have come up with various formulations to defend the notion of atheistic morality, most based on what will benefit the survival of the species.  This leaves the atheist in a difficult position, however, for the atheist believes in materialism- that there are no such things as spiritual realities, and only the material is real.  If that is the case, then the atheist can only define morality in terms of what is natural, and can only determine what is natural by observation.  Nobody talks about how a bird ought to build a nest.  They only talk about how it does build the nest.  Therefore, the atheist must determine morality simply by observing what people actually do, and defining morality in those terms.

In the atheist view, morality can only be natural, since there isn’t anything other than nature.  If atheists believe that morality is natural, then people’s actual, observed behavior defines morality.  There can be no standard to judge people’s behavior except what one actually sees, at least in the majority.  Are the majority of people racist?  Then racism must be moral.  Are the majority dishonest?  Then dishonesty is moral.  Is self-sacrifice, honesty, humility and altruism a minority position?  Then those positions must be unnatural, on the order of a bird that doesn’t know how to build a nest, and therefore immoral.

No atheist therefore has any ground to speak of how anyone ought to be.  They can only, at best, observe how someone is.  All disagreements about morality are therefore disagreements about what renders the species more fit for survival, and such disagreements, as has always been the case, can only be settled by bloodshed.  In that case the Nazis were correct- believing themselves to be the superior race with the superior morality, they set out to prove it, to subjugate or destroy all other races.  In the atheist worldview, the only thing that rendered the Nazis immoral was the fact that they failed.  If they had succeeded, then genocide would be proven good and right.

A repost from seven years ago.  It still matters.  A lot of the links are broken now, I’m afraid, but the content is still there.

I missed this week’s Vox Apologia, although the topic is one that interests me a great deal. I just ran out of time. It was on the subject of evolution vs. creation, and whether it matters. There are a number of excellent posts up. Here’s RazorKiss’ entry, for example:

We dare not, we must not, and we cannot look an enemy in the face – and turn away as if it is irrelevant. We made that crucial mistake when this enemy first appeared – and we dare not continue. We cannot look at naturalism – at evolution – and spit in our Creator’s face by saying “so what if they deny you?” Romans warns us what excuses exist, for those who deny their Creator. None. His Creation, regardless of attempts to deny it’s Creator, stands as a testament to His power, His majesty, and His creativity – as do we. Despite the philosophical dexterity accompanying the devaluation of man, while simultaneously exalting his attributes – we should take it as a warning. If we exalt the natural – we dethrone the supernatural – we dethrone God – and take His place as the pinnacle. When we take over the pinnacle – we set ourselves up as God.

I’m going to argue that the evolution vs. creation debate does matter, which of course comes as a surprise to no one. But while many who defend the Christian perspective on the matter are content to argue for some theistic hand involved in the existence of the world, while not really disagreeing with a great deal of the popularly believed science on the matter, I intend to argue that any account of the origin of the universe that doesn’t conform to the Genesis account creates the exact same philosophical and theological problem as a completely atheist account of our origins.

I have argued before that people hold to their view of the origin of the universe for entirely other than scientific reasons, and that this is just as true of the so-called defenders of science as it is of anyone else. I make this claim because I have a high level of confidence that nobody, literally nobody, has seen enough data to actually have observed enough to take their position purely on the basis of science. Certainly nobody I’ve ever argued with has. What they have done is that they have heard other people talk about what they’ve seen, and what their interpretation is, and they’ve read books and seen pictures, all of little bits and pieces of work that other people have done, and they are told a certain story about what all of it means, and they accept that story. Certainly many individual scientists have done a great deal of hands-on work on certain fields. But one guy knows a lot about biochemistry, and accepts the story on astrophysics, zoology, botany, and the rest. Another guy might be a great astronomer, but know nothing about living things. Check out this post by PZ Myers, for example, a die-hard defender of evolution:

Don’t ask me about the subject of the title; I know little about it. I’ve confessed before to my zoological bias, which means plants and bacteria don’t get the attention they deserve here. Fortunately, I can tell everyone to go read the summary of angiosperm phylogeny at Niches. While I don’t know as much about flowering plants as I should, I can at least appreciate their importance and recognize an interesting evolutionary story when I see it.

He doesn’t know much about the subject, but he likes the story. That’s what ties them all together- the story. There is a certain story about how everything happened that they all like, and so all of their data is interpreted in terms of that same story. Details might be adjusted from time to time; question marks left where the data and the story don’t match; but fundamentally the story stays the same.

It reminds me of the debate about systematic theology sometimes. Some theologians say systematic theology is bad, because you force Biblical data into an interpretive grid instead of letting the data speak for itself. My answer to that has always been that that’s what everyone does; it’s just how humans think. The difference is, if you own up to a system, then at least you have the opportunity to check your system against the data, and adjust the system if necessary. If you are unconscious of your system, you will distort all of the data to fit, while never being aware that you’re doing it.

I want to start my system with one simple premise: “Thus says the Lord”.

This will of course render me ignorant, insane, and dangerous in the eyes of many. That’s OK. But we all have a choice between building our thinking on the word of God, or on my own mind. These are the only two options, and I choose the first.

After I’ve chosen the first, and then I read Genesis 1-2, there’s only one choice- the world was created in six days by the supernatural power of God. And if I read more of the Bible, I discover that this all happened probably less than ten thousand years ago. As I argued here, I believe Genesis because I love Jesus, because He saved me from my sins, and Jesus always assumes the absolute truth of the Jewish Old Testament, everywhere He speaks. This is why I am a creationist, because I choose to accept a particular authority.

But this is the dirty secret- that’s what everyone does. PZ Myers accepts the authority of the article he quoted above, because it tells a story that he likes. All people, including all scientists, do this all the time, because no scientist has access to all, or even more than a tiny fraction, of all of the relevant data. Even a biologist doesn’t dig up all the fossils himself. And he never even sees many of them. He sees pictures in books, and takes someone’s word for it that they look like what the book says they look like, and mean what the book or the journal says they mean.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this. Again, it’s what we all do, all the time. I believe that there are some interesting political events going on in Lebanon right now, but I have no first-hand information of that at all. I have chosen to accept the authority of the news reports I have read. And where I suspect a bias, that is, where the reporting of facts and interpretations does not fit the story I have chosen to believe, I adjust accordingly.

Now to the self-appointed priests of rationalism and empiricism, this is an extremely foolish and blinkered way to think. But all that means is that they are ignorant of their own thought process, and therefore unable to adjust the story they have chosen to believe.

Every attempt I have ever read or heard to interpret Genesis 1-2 in any way other than a young-earth, six-day interpretation has been an attempt to accommodate the biblical account to the “facts” of modern science. The interpretation of the text are always discussed, but when you dig into it, you discover that interpretation is always a secondary concern, and the primary concern is making the text “fit” the science. But accommodations of that nature never work, because what is being attempted is to accommodate two stories, two philosophies that fundamentally contradict each other. One philosophy is the one that says that we think God’s thoughts after him, and that all truth is learned by first submitting myself to God’s proclamation of truth. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. The other philosophy says that man is the measure of truth, that I decide the facts and the meaning of things; that I decide what is right and wrong. You have to make a choice. You have to pick one of these stories; you cannot have both. This is the choice to worship the creature rather than the creator. If the Bible is true, then the atheists and unbelievers who claim to be scientists have no ability to tell me anything relevant about the origins of the universe. They have no wisdom; their minds are given over to darkness as punishment for their rebellion; they are fools. And why should I attempt to modify the holy Word of God to acoommodate the ravings of fools? They may be very good at describing things that they can see. They may be good at building things. But they have nothing to say about any issue to which the Bible speaks.

Of course, the other implication of this train of thought is that while it is immensely important whether I believe evolution or creation, it is not all that productive to argue about it, except when there is already a broad agreement on the philosophical underpinnings of the debate. But if someone does not believe the Bible, then I do not expect to convince them of creation, any more than I could convince them that Jesus actually walked on water. Both he and I believe what we believe because of issues that have nothing to do with science.

Doubt me? Go read some of those blogs that are written by supposed defenders of science. They spend almost their whole time raving about philosophy, and they attack people like me not in scientific terms but in philosophical terms. They hold a level of hatred toward people like me that cannot be explained by simple differences in scientific opinion. They claim that defenders of creation are liars and evil people. But if science is their concern- the simple aggregation of knowledge- why would they care about a disagreement over a fact, or even about a liar? If a man is a liar, then real scientists will have nothing to do with him, as they constantly claim. Then the development of knowledge will not be affected at all by that liar. He might fool some rubes; he might get some government money or get some stickers put on some textbooks, but so what? No, their hatred can only be explained by the fact that their philosophy is being attacked; their religion; their God.

The first thing that the devil ever said to man was, “Has God really said?” Satan’s attack has always been an attempt to twist the word of God to mean something other than what it means. We must not accommodate that attack at all. So, creation vs. evolution is important primarily because the word of God is important. We must understand that the real point of attack is not on science, but on the credibility of the word of God. The devil’s always been good at arguing, and the defenders of evolution are too. But if we remember what the attack is really about, and what we stand to lose, then we will not be fooled.

UPDATE: Thanks to Ed “What the” Heckman for posting my late entry to Vox Apologia VII. Go check it out- lots of good red meat there.

ANOTHER UPDATE: One more quick related thought, here.

While preaching through 2 Samuel, I’m becoming convinced that maybe we Christians shouldn’t be advocating for traditional marriage.  Maybe we should be advocating Christian marriage instead.  Traditional marriage hasn’t usually been all that Christian.

The effects of the curse on the woman listed in Genesis 3:16 in part affect the marriage relationship.  We read, “Your desire will be to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”  This is not an example of what should be, but what is.  Women historically and traditionally have been viewed as existing for the benefit of the man, and have not been treated with respect as “fellow-heirs” in the image of God.  Although the Christian teachings of the Old and New Testaments address this in a way that no other religion even began to, the Christian community has been slow in implementing this truth.

We have made a lot of progress in the last couple of centuries in particular, recognizing different roles for women within the church and home, but advancing equality in legal treatment and rights, and equality in human worth and dignity.  But then along comes modern feminism, which teaches that there should be no distinction between men and women at all.  This is a lie of the devil, but like many of his lies, it is an extremely clever one.  Like modern radical environmentalism, like socialism- it is a lie that is based on Christian truth, that would have been impossible had it not been for the Christian truth which it distorts.  I think we ought to regard feminism as a Christian heresy- a distortion of Christian truth.  The reason I think it is important to think of it this way is that this lie, like many of the devil’s lies, has a two-sided danger to it- it gets you coming and going.  On the one hand we are tempted to accept that lie and reject the distinctions that the Scriptures maintain between men and women.  But on the other hand, if we reject that temptation, we are tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to reject the sound Christian truths which modern feminism distorts.

Modern feminists, for example, often assert that marriage is essentially an institution designed for the suppression of women, for the institutionalization of violence against women.  We Christians often rebel against such sentiments.  But while you’re thinking about that, read 2 Samuel 3.  In that chapter, we see David with multiple wives in order to advance his political and military career, Abner seizing someone else’s concubine to advance his career, and David demanding that Michal, his first wife, be returned to him, again to advance his career.  Every one of these decisions is made entirely absent concern for the women involved.  And all of them lead to disaster down the road.

We Christians need to realize that when we advocate for traditional marriage, 2 Samuel 3 is what a lot of people, especially feminists, hear.  The fact is that modern feminists are more right than we would probably care to admit.  And the reason for this is the curse.  When we say, “We need to defend the institution that has been at the very foundation of every society for thousands of years”, we are making a huge mistake- tactically and theologically.  The institution of marriage for thousands of years has been defined not by Ephesians 5 (“husbands love your wives”) but by Genesis 3:16 (“he shall rule over you”).

Genesis 3:16 is not advocating what ought to be.  It is advocating what is, under the curse.  No aspect of the curse pronounced to the devil, to the woman, or to the man, is a positive or good thing (true, the Messiah is promised in Genesis 3:15, but remember, God is talking to Satan there, and the coming of the Messiah would be nothing but a huge headache for him).  The relationship defined by the curse is one of warfare- the wife continually trying to undermine the legitimate authority of the husband, and the husband ruling over his wife as he would a slave, as property.  For thousands of years, all around the world, this is what marriage has been.  This is what we see in 2 Samuel 3.  Outside of the Christian worldview’s perspective on marriage, which is all too rarely practiced even in Christian circles, the feminists are more right than I think we conservative Christians would care to admit- marriage is an institution that institutionalizes oppression and violence against women.

Now there are common-grace benefits to marriage, even outside of the Christian worldview.  Marriage provides for a certain amount of societal stability and order.  Women are usually more protected within the confines of marriage than outside of it, especially in societies without much rule of law.  But the common practice of marriage in history, which we see well demonstrated in 2 Samuel 3, where women exist solely for the good of the men, absolutely cannot be defended Scripturally.  Jesus, attacking the exploitative views of the Jews of His day on divorce, said, “From the beginning, it was not so”- that the husband and wife were to live as one flesh, acting as loving and equal partners, companions.  Leadership exists within marriage, of course.  But according to Ephesians 5, that leadership exists in order for the husband to serve the wife, not the other way around.  Christ is our model of Christian leadership, and Christian leadership always exists for the purpose of service, as Jesus so beautifully modeled by washing His disciples’ feet.

So I think that when we’re dealing with the current assault on Biblical sexual ethics, we need to be really careful not to defend the indefensible.  Let’s stop advocating for traditional marriage, an institution dominated by the curse.  Let’s recognize that our critics may have more to teach us than we may have been prepared to admit.  Let’s advocate instead for Biblical marriage, and the wonderful picture of love and companionship we see presented to us there, a model of mutual service and mutual respect.

Psalm 34:19-20
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.  He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken.

In times of primitive medical technology, a broken bone was a very serious problem.  It usually meant permanent damage.  Consider Mephibosheth- his nursemaid fell with him and he was injured in both feet, with the result that he was crippled for the rest of his life.  Some ancient cultures would set bones so that they would heal after fractures, but the practice was very limited.

I think this gives us the key to this passage in Psalm 34, when looking at it from a modern perspective.  The Psalm has as one of its themes the truth that God protects and cares for His people.  Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.  We certainly go through many trials and sufferings.  The Psalmist himself says so- “Many are the afflictions of the righteous.”  But even though we suffer, we do not suffer permanently.  We come out of our trials stronger than before, by God’s gracious deliverance.  None of our trials do permanent damage.

I have had various accidents in my life, as most of us have.  Falls from trees, accidents on bikes, roughhousing with my brother, things like that.  When the hit comes there’s that moment of shock, and then you start evaluating- what is the degree of my injury?  Am I bleeding?  Am I bleeding a lot?  Is anything broken?  Can I just walk this off or do I need some additional help (a band-aid, mom, an ambulance)?  The Christian life feels like that a lot to me- some new blow comes and after the initial shock, you take stock of the situation- can I walk away from this?  Is this going to do permanent damage?

Certainly the Christian experiences traumas like divorces, deaths of loved ones, falls into sin and so forth that will have permanent consequences.  I have made mistakes that have permanently cost me friends.  I have wasted time in sin that I will never get back.  But by God’s grace I know that every loss I have experienced will be more than made up in God’s time.  Some of those losses may not be recovered until eternity, but they will be.

This is a great example of a prophecy that has multiple levels of interpretation.  We have to be careful not to allegorize and read hidden spiritual meanings behind everything, but sometimes we know that we should, since the Bible shows us the way.  In John 19:36 this Psalm is quoted as a prophecy of the Messiah.  When He was on the cross, the Roman soldiers broke the legs of the other prisoners to speed up their deaths, at the request of the Jews (since the next day was the Sabbath).  But when they got to Jesus, He was already dead.  So John says that this fulfills the prophecy in Psalm 34.

Unless you see the bigger picture, this can feel like a pretty trivial way of interpreting Scripture.  For one thing, the original Psalm doesn’t appear to be about the Messiah at all.  It’s clearly about God’s people in general.  Further, Jesus’ bones were not broken because he was already dead.  That certainly doesn’t seem like avoiding permanent damage.

But of course, we know the whole story- by the power of God, Jesus was delivered even from the bonds of death.  Even His death was not permanent.  The fact that His legs were not broken was not in any way necessary to this whole process- the God who raised Jesus from the dead certainly could have healed broken bones.  But the larger point is that Jesus escaped unharmed and stronger than ever even from this most calamitous trial.

And He is the head of His people.  We share in His life.  It is precisely because Jesus rose from the dead, that He conquered death itself, that we can have the confidence that the Scriptures calls us to in Psalm 34.  We can know that not one of our bones will be broken. We share in Jesus’ life, and therefore we can have complete confidence that we can walk away from anything life throws at us, even if it knocks us down for a while.  When we walk by faith, not by sight, we can have that confidence.  When we believe the promises of God and put our trust in Christ, nothing that life can throw at us can do permanent damage. We will stumble, but not fall.  We will bend but not break.  We will walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but the Lord will lift us up, for He lifted up Jesus Christ from death, and all Jesus’ people are lifted up with Him.

One of the issues that I know some Christians have in voting for Mitt Romney is that Romney is a Mormon.  If I vote for Romney, am I giving my approval to his religion, the thumbs-up to the man in general?

As I said in the last post, I intend to vote for Mitt Romney and I would like to convince others to do so as well.  A couple of things I am not going to do in this post- I am not going to pretend that Mormonism is the same as orthodox Christianity, or that his religion should be viewed positively.  Mormonism is a false gospel, and must be rejected by Christians.  Mormonism denies the sacrifice of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity.  It teaches a fundamentally different view of human nature and its relationship to God than Biblical Christianity does.  To speak of it as a sect of Christianity does it far too much justice; it is in reality a complete distortion, a totally different religion, than Christianity, though it bears some superficial resemblances.

I’m also not going to argue that a politician’s religion is irrelevant, or out of bounds for discussion.  A man’s religion is fundamental to who he is.  If a man’s religion was Wahhabi Islam, that would be highly relevant to whether that man should be the president of the United States.

That being said, it’s very important not just to identify the religion a man holds to, but also to recognize how that man understands that religion himself, and how it functions in his life.  Nancy Pelosi is a Roman Catholic, and so is Paul Ryan.  Yet it’s hard to imagine two more different political approaches than Pelosi and Ryan.  Does that mean their Catholicism is irrelevant?  Not at all.  But it does mean that their understanding of their Catholicism, and how their faith informs their political views, are very different.  Both of them come from recognized traditions within the Roman Catholic faith which emphasize different things.  Some people hold their religion very strongly and some don’t.  Some Christians emphasize the moral teachings of the Bible on sexual ethics while some focus more on the Bible’s teachings about charity toward the poor.  Some who agree that care for the poor is extremely important believe that this is the responsibility of the state, while others believe that private charity should be the emphasis here. So if we want to talk about a man’s religion and how it informs his politics, it’s not sufficient to simply identify the religion and then talk about some aspects of that religion and why that’s problematic for a religious candidate.  I know I would find it deeply unfair if someone said that a Christian should not be the president of a religiously pluralistic society since the Bible commands the death penalty for followers of other religions.  I would say that such a criticism is not being fair to how I understand Christianity myself.  Some other person’s opinion about what Christianity _should_ teach, or what is the most consistent understanding of my faith, is not relevant.  What is relevant is how the person himself practices and understands his faith.

I do not believe that Mitt Romney knows the true God.  He does not have faith in Jesus Christ.  He does not understand the revelation of the gospel.  I hope some day that he does.  But I also believe in natural revelation, that there is a natural light that all people have, to understand right from wrong and truth from lies. I do not believe one has to be a true Christian to have true knowledge about many things, including how governments and economies work.  People have different levels of understanding of this natural light, and different amounts of that natural light are present in different religions and philosophies.  A religion such as Mormonism, especially in its modern manifestation, has a good deal more of this natural light than other religions, as is seen by the way that Mormons in general live their lives.

The civil state in the New Testament is said by Paul to have the job of punishing evildoers and protecting the innocent, of praising those who do good.  In the Old Testament, in the infancy of the church, the church was annexed to a particular civil government, whose form was given by God Himself.  God had particular redemptive-historical purposes for establishing the state of Israel, which are beyond the scope of this discussion.  But to use those civil laws given to Israel to make specific statements about what a ruler today ought to look like is to fail to appreciate this redemptive-historical purpose.  That civil government expired when the form of the church changed after the coming of Christ.  God’s people then were not located within one particular entity, but spread out through all the nations.  With that change, a change in the purpose of government came as well.  The New Testament does not anticipate a government that promotes the true faith.  More often, the opposite will be the case.  What Christians ought to expect from the government is seen in Romans 13 and 2 Peter 2:14, that they punish evildoers and encourage good.  How this is defined is a matter of great debate, but is not spelled out clearly.  The Westminster Confession of Faith states that the Old Testament civil laws are applicable to New Testament government not in the particulars, but only in the sense of “general equity”- meaning the principles governing equity and justice between people that are illustrated by the Old Testament civil law continue to be applicable, but not the particulars of those laws, which were given only to Israel and expire with Israel as a civil state.

The civil state is not the kingdom of God.  The civil state is nowhere in the Scriptures given the job of advancing that kingdom.  Some of the early Reformers, still operating under largely medieval expectations, still thought that the state should enforce the Christian religion, leading to tremendous misery and suffering everywhere it was tried.  The Reformed and Protestant world as a whole moved away from this view, starting especially with the American revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1789, which largely removed the role of government in the affairs of the church.  I believe this to have been a wise revision, and the relative health of the Protestant churches in America compared to the state of the Christian church throughout Europe shows the wisdom of this move.

Different unbelieving men can understand the purpose of civil government according to the natural light to better or worse degrees.  Thomas Jefferson was a better civil magistrate than Adolf Hitler, despite the fact that neither of them were Biblical Christians.  The Pharaoh who made Joseph his right-hand man was a better ruler than the Pharaoh that came later, who enslaved the Israelites and called for the murder of their male children.  King Agrippa was a fairer man than Herod the Great.

All of this means that a Mormon, operating under the natural light, is perfectly capable of being a good civil magistrate.  Mitt Romney understands and practices his religion, as far as anyone knows, in a way congruent with the “general equity” of the civil laws given in the Old Testament.  He believes in charity, in honesty, in freedom.  He does so according to the natural light given to all men, and I believe he has a greater clarity and grasp of the natural light with regard to the purpose of civil government and the general equity of civil law than many other politicians, even ones that identify with Christian churches closer to orthodoxy than the Mormons.  Therefore I believe that a Christian with a Biblical understanding of civil government can in good conscience vote for a man, such as Mitt Romney, whose faith we would view as a perverted fakery of the real gospel, but whose understanding of the role and duty of civil government is nonetheless Biblical.  We are not electing him to church office.  We are electing him to punish evildoers, to protect the innocent, to provide order and justice and “general equity”.  I believe Mitt Romney will do a passably good job of fulfilling these tasks.

One final note- to say that a Christian cannot vote for a Mormon for president is really, I believe, to say that the entire American form of government is unbiblical.  I do not know how a Christian could consistently say that it is a sin to vote for a Mormon, but that it is not a sin to vote for the many nominal, liberal Christians that we have elected, or indeed to even support the existence of a government which forbids religious tests and counted as its founders Deists and Unitarians and which has from its beginnings had non-Christian officeholders.  I can respect an argument from Scripture, such as the Covenanters make, that the United States is in its entirety an unbiblical form of government and cannot be supported, since it does not explicitly recognize Jesus Christ as king and enforce the Christian religion (though I disagree strenuously with such an argument.)  But an argument which singles out Mormons specifically as unworthy of our vote, but still supports the pluralistic American project otherwise, begins to look more like personal animosity than a principled stand for the Biblical faith.