INTRODUCTION: A THEOLOGICAL PUZZLE
When I was growing up, my family enjoyed putting together puzzles during the Christmas season. They did pretty big ones - at least 1,000 pieces. Personally I never enjoyed puzzles and so I watched and did other things while they all huddled over the board examining tiny scraps of color, organizing the pieces into piles, and comparing the squiggly cutouts to the picture on the front of the box. My favorite thing to do was to steal one piece of the puzzle and hold on to it until everyone else had worked to assemble the other 999 pieces. At the end I would waltz in and place the last piece. Everyone (except me) put a lot of work into the puzzles and my dad even glued one of them to a board and framed it after it was finished.
Occasionally we had to move the puzzle while it was still being assembled. At that point we would try to slide the assembled parts of the puzzle onto a piece of plywood and move the whole thing into another room temporarily. Inevitably, much of the work that they had done would come apart and the assembled portions would break up into smaller chunks. Thankfully, we never had a situation where we dropped the board and lost the entire puzzle. Even I would have been sad about that because they would have had to redo all of the work that had been done up to that point.
In many ways, society is like a puzzle. The border is critical to define the boundary of the puzzle. The shape of each piece must line up properly, and the color and pattern on the shape must match the larger picture in order to know that the piece is in the right place. You can make some decent progress following the natural way that pieces fit together based on their shape and color. But of course, the most sure way to make sure that your pieces are going in the right places is to compare them to the shape on the front of the box. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if you have it right until you have connected several pieces together. To apply this to life, the Bible, like the picture on the box, tells us how to sort the pieces and what the final picture should look like. In short, it tells the assemblers what each individual piece is for and where it goes. I love what the psalmist says in Psalm 119:96-98.
96 I have seen a limit to all perfection,
but your commandment is exceedingly broad.
97 Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.
98 Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,
for it is ever with me.
In this passage the psalmist recognizes out that we will never achieve anything perfect here on earth. But rather than despair, he takes hope in the fact that God’s commandments are broad enough to encompass all areas of life. He says, “Sure, we won’t ever create a perfect system, family, business, kingdom… but God’s law stretches without imperfection and so we are going to bring it to bear on all areas of life. We are going to meditate on it and on how we can submit all parts of life to it. We will make this our task all day, every day. And in that way, God’s people will be wiser and more equipped than our enemies are.” I imagine him, carefully examining all areas of his life and kingdom to make sure each piece was in the right place, just like my family huddled over the pieces of each puzzle for hours on end.
MY THESIS: COMPREHENSIVE, HISTORICAL, AND BIBLICAL APPLICATION
Recently a good friend of mine asked me what I mean when I say that churches need to preach all of Christ for all of life. Aren’t most Bible-believing churches already doing that? I took a little while to think carefully about my response and I hope to explain what I mean in this and the next few essays. But in order to not burry the lead, here is my thesis that I will unpack over the next few weeks: The church needs to rediscover what the reformers and puritans taught about the comprehensive reach of God’s word. As it does this the church needs to reclaim the belief that part of its mission is to teach all people, starting with Christians, but extending to the rest of society, what God’s standards are for all areas of life and society. This teaching must rely exclusively on the Bible and not on worldly theories or definitions (sola scriptura), and it must rely compressively on all of the Bible and not only on doctrines of theology proper (tota scriptura). As we do this, we ought to use the idea of sphere sovereignty and the Great Commission to properly order and arrange how we understand God’s commands. When the church teaches in this way it opens the door to repentance for the unbeliever, and it opens the way to obedience for the Christian.
This thesis departs from what I would have said even several years ago, so I want to be clear at the outset, that as someone with nine years of pastoral/missionary ministry experience, many of my criticisms in this essay are directed towards myself and towards the way that I have long understood the idea of applying the Bible to all of life. But some of this criticism will necessarily spill over to the way I was trained to think about these things. For those brothers with whom I have done ministry, my comments are both appreciative and designed to stir thought and welcome feedback. I consider these men as co-laborers in Christ who love the Bible, the church, and the world with a sincere love. I hope to persuade some of them to consider a broader understanding of the great commission.
But there is another group of churches that I want to critique sharply. This is the group of so called Christian churches who deny Christ and the gospel by teaching their congregations that the proper way for Christians to live is exactly in lock-step with the demonic spirit of the age. Many churches in America deny the authority of the Bible and hold to the authority of sociology. They teach members to embrace godless and wordless ideologies rather than the Word of God alone. They embrace pagan philosophies and practices in an attempt to appeal to the world. They conform the Bible to ungodly patterns and lead many astray. These are the churches who dull the razor edge of God’s word by assuring sinners that the Bible does not condemn them, nor their practices, nor the larger philosophies and empty speculations that our culture has developed. These are the churches who rush to the Bible to find twisted interpretations that sound exactly like the current new thing. They are in-vogue, get published in and recommended by the most liberal press, and parade their heresies on talk shows, all to the applause of scripted audience prompts. In this way, these so-called churches not only present false truths to the world, but they seek to prevent the actual truth of the law and the gospel from landing on the hearts of lost sinners. To borrow from the parable of the soils, these churches go out to sow, but they sow salt that prevents the soil from receiving the seed at all. I have personally seen many Christians over the last five years who, because of the way these churches simply regurgitate the lies of the pagan world, are sure that the Bible requires them to, among other things, accept homosexual practice as good, to be allies for the ‘racially oppressed’ by erasing whiteness, and who want to destroy the patriarchy and the ‘western’ family. These churches have no place with Christ, but they they have achieved a position of prominence in society, such that many non-Christians assume that what these churches teach is in fact the message of God.
THE MIDDLE PICTURE
As I think about these liberal, godless churches, I want to make one important point very clear. These churches believe that the Bible speaks to social, political, and economic issues, and that they must preach and teach about these things. These liberal pastors claim to have the moral high ground because they are following the Bible and even the very words of Jesus. The thing is, they are not wrong about the claim that the Bible has something to say about social, economic, and political issues. They simply happen to interpret the majority of what Scripture says about these topics the wrong way. But they are convinced, and they convince others, that what they are saying about climate change, social justice, gun violence, etc, is actually what God says about it. Just look at writers such as Eric Mason or Matthew Vines. They are sure that they are right to push unbiblical narratives and teachings into the church.
As Christians we are used to talking about the big picture. That is, how we understand the overall arch of history as a story of redemption with Jesus at the center. We cling to God’s promises that Christ will return, triumph over death, judge the world, and make all things new. While this is certainly the biggest of pictures, I want us to consider something a little smaller - something that I call the middle picture. That is, issues and ideas that are larger than individual obedience and lifespans, but smaller than the promise of God’s final victory. By ‘the medium picture’ I mean the way that God carries out His will over generations, through the rise and fall of nations, and on a scale by which we would talk about how a culture builds itself up and degrades. I mean God’s will for how a country, corporation, or university ought to conduct itself over multiple generations.
To return to my puzzle analogy, societies are like puzzles that take generations and centuries to assemble. American society, for example, is a group of pieces that have been fitted in place slowly over millennia. While America has only existed for 250 years, it was formed on a set of ideas that had been simmering since the first generation of Christians defied Caesar and told him that Christ, not Caesar, is Lord. This essay will not trace that progression, but Dr. Joseph Boot has an excellent chapter on the history of Christian political thought in “The Mission of God”, and Glenn Sunshine spends the majority of his book, “Slaying Leviathan” following the path from one generation of Christians to the next as they considered political theory. I highly recommend these resources in order to understand how Christians have navigated the particular questions about what the role of the state ought to be. While America is in no way a perfect society, we have managed to put a lot of the pieces in the right place. Examples include the fact that we have, until recently, understood that morality comes from God’s character and law; the puritan work ethic; a limited and accountable government; the primacy and sovereignty of the family; a justice system that seeks to be impartial, swift, and fair; and most importantly, a recognition that everything that we have comes from God.
Over the last 80 years, however, these major sections and borders of the puzzle have been broken apart as forces have tried to disassemble the puzzle of our society. Postmodernism and secular statism have denied that absolute truth exists, which has lead to a buffet-style morality. Postmodern philosophers and evolutionists have popularized atheism, taught us to ignore the law that a man reaps what he sows, and destroyed the primacy of the family. While these border pieces have been removed, the table under the puzzle has shaken and shifted. World-wide wars, rapid technological changes, and the rise of the internet and social media have rattled the puzzle of society so much that many of the pieces are no longer in place, and some have fallen off the table altogether. Marxism has assaulted the idea of Biblical justice and God’s design for hierarchy and the family. What is worse, though, is that western civilization has also thrown away the picture on the front of the box. In America we have jettisoned God from our school, justice system, economics, sociology, and entertainment. This leaves everyone, Christians included, in a state of confusion with little knowledge of what the puzzle pieces are for, or where they go.
While many in the evangelical church recognize these trends, it seems that many are also reluctant to speak directly to these issues. How many parents are instructing their children to think Biblically about the transgender child in their class? How many pastors are helping their members think biblically about the so called social justice messaging that blasts them every time they turn on the TV or read the news? It is not the same thing to identify the false beliefs that have lead our society and our churches to this point as it is to teach what the truth that counters these evil philosophies is.
We can, perhaps, excuse the evangelical church a little bit. This is because that the same time as this global upheaval began in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the church faced its own onslaught of liberal ideologies that many seminaries and pastors fell for. Liberal churches embraced critical scholarship that denied the inspiration of the Bible. They embraced the social gospel and other heresies, and eagerly drank Darwin’s kool-aid. To counter this, the faithful churches responded with a call to return to first principles - to a fundamentalism that would not dilute the gospel with worldly ideologies. That battle was necessary and good. Indeed, there is nothing more important than defending the purity of the gospel, for without that, all else is lost. In fact, this is one of the Holy Spirit’s main missions, and He equips the church of each generation to preserve the gospel in the face of false teachers, worldly theories, and demonic attacks. But as the church focussed its efforts narrowly to defend the purity of the gospel, we embraced a sort of gospel myopia. That is, in an effort to preserve the truth about the Bible, man’s sinfulness, and Christ’s atoning work, the evangelical church stopped preaching about other things besides the gospel. To be clear, I never want the church to stop preaching the gospel, or to preach less than the gospel. It is the only hope for salvation. And yet, as earthquakes tossed American society like a rock tumbler, the church spoke less and less about societal issues. It spoke less about what God expects nations and kings and businesses and schools to do. This opened the way for sinful ideas to invade society such as no-fault divorce, the free love movement, abortion, the rise of feminism, the homosexual/transgender revolution, social programs based in theft and covetousness, and marxist critical theories. At the same time, the church stopped teaching its members and society about essential biblical ideas such as the importance of accountability to God for our own actions, patriarchy, the good use of force to defend the weak, proper understandings of charity, the very limited scope of what God has called government to do, and a posture of truly fearing the Lord. Our message became either one of private Christian practice, or of conformity what society accepted. Neither of these threatened the ‘arguments of lofty opinions’ that sought to unseat Christ from his rightful place as King. In short, the church focussed on the gospel and then allowed the gospel to be turned into a self-love, man-centered therapy session that plays well on Oprah.
I think many will agree with me up to this point. But perhaps this next statement is where I will lose some of you. After men like B.B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen helped re-establish biblical orthodoxy, the evangelical church remained silent on many of the prevalent sin issues in our society because it became accustomed to a ‘gospel-onlyism’. It was too easy to not speak out against the ways that culture twisted the definitions of good and evil. It was easier to say that we are to focus on the gospel and ‘gospel issues’. But what we forgot, and I think now don’t consider, is that there are many things that are not ‘gospel issues’ that the church should teach about and even fight for. This is because we love our neighbor and our nation. The same love that compels us to preach Christ is the same love that wants to alleviate suffering in the proper ways that God has prescribed. In other words, we want to follow God’s plan to address even temporal ills and failings in society. God has given His law to sinners not only to show them his holiness BUT ALSO in order to restrain evil in individuals and in broader society. He has given his law so that believers will know how to obey him AND as a common grace to allow many families and nations to flourish. Of course, just because a society or a family flourishes does not mean that the people within that society and family are saved from their sins. But when God’s principles bear fruit throughout a society this testifies to the fact that God is, in fact, truthful and that He offers eternal blessing to those who trust in Him for salvation. In fact, if Christians limit themselves to studying, preaching, and living only within the framework of ‘gospel issues’, we will miss many opportunities to obey Christ and testify to his rule over all things. In doing so, we actually engage in much disobedience, all while thinking we are obeying God with our full hearts.
IMMATURE OBEDIENCE
To make this point, let’s look at the example of Israel before and after God brought out of Egypt. Before being freed from Egypt the Israelites were slaves. They followed Egypt’s rules and they worked for Egypt’s good. It is certainly true that, as Joseph did, the Israelites could honor God by working hard for their masters. There is a sense in which they could harvest a crop of obedience through patient suffering. But they actually were not able to obey God fully. Their obedience and worship were like a dying fig plant in a pot with very little soil and almost no water. The plant squeezed out the occasional little fig, but it was nothing compared to a well fed fig tree that produced many figs year after year. That is why, in Exodus 7:16 we read that God instructed Moses to say this to Pharaoh:
‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” But so far, you have not obeyed.”
The implication here, and if we follow the story to the point where God gives the Israelites the law and settles them in the land of Canaan, is that, while they were slaves in Egypt they could not worship/serve God the way that God intended them to do so. There was obedience and worship that they simply could not perform for God while they were not free. They could not follow the Sabbath, they could not give their children an inheritance. Notice, though, that once God freed them from Pharaoh almost the first thing that He did was give them the law, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system. That is, he gave them freedom SO THAT they could worship Him fully, and then he linked their worship of him to proper service to him. The law regulated worship, commerce, government, marriage, labor, health, business, trials, and every other area of society. When Israel lived under Egypt they were unable to serve God in the ways revealed in the law. They did not experience the refining power that the law brought as it convicted them of their sin. But when God gave them the the law, he made a way for the godly to obey him in true worship, and for the wicked to clearly see their sin and due punishment when they did not obey God. The law was gloriously good because it helped them understand how all of life could be lived in worship to God and it severely corrected them when they did not live that way. While it is true that none kept the law perfectly, and thus needed faith in the Messiah for salvation, those who did have that faith delighted to keep God’s law for that was their true worship: submission to His commands in all areas of life. It must have been a marvel for them to come out of slavery and then to experience a truly good and just system that told them how to love one another and how to love God.
It seems to me that we are now in a similar situation as the Israelites were before God rescued them. One important thing to note is that God desired that they would live according to His law before He even gave it to them, and before He freed them from Egypt. That’s why He freed them. This means that God had expectations that Israel was not able to live-out while they lived under Egypt’s pagan rule. In the same way, many Christians now have allowed themselves to be content to follow a narrow category of God’s expectations by submitting to pagan and secular philosophies of economics, love, and family, to name a few. Instead of seeking God’s will in these areas we focus on our personal holiness. This is, of course good and proper according to Hebrews 12:14 “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”
But as we focus narrowly on our personal holiness, we tend to sin by neglecting what God has commanded us to do and think about in our businesses, in the kind of governments we support, in the way we understand healthcare, in who we make responsible to pay for and care for the needs of our children, in who we ask to tend to the poor, in how we think about proper land use, in how we understand national sovereignty, and even how to think about things such as immigration. To put this succinctly, many Christians think that they have fulfilled God’s expectation of them by being patient with their children and faithful to their spouse, but have never considered that they may have participated in theft by accepting someone else’s money from the government to put solar panels on their own house. So I fear that Bible-believing churches can actually promote a culture where Christians unwittingly commit many sins because the do not know that God expects more from them than simply demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit, like the description of love in I Corinthians 13 is to supposed be HOW Christians obey God in their businesses, elected offices, interactions with their bosses, etc. But that does not mean that bearing the fruit of the Spirit is the same thing as living according to God’s standards in the all areas of life.
To put it another way, II Corinthians 10 tells us that we are to take every thought captive to Christ. The context of this verse is not that we are to keep angry little words from slipping into our minds when someone cuts us off in traffic. Rather Paul is talking about the battle that we have against evil. It is a battle that is waged as the enemy advances evil ideologies that keep people from the knowledge of God. These ideas sometimes manifest themselves in purely religious terms, but most often, they sneak in through philosophical, sociological, economic, political, and even ecological ideas. At their core they follow the pattern that Satan used when he tempted Eve and when he tempted Jesus: find fulfillment and salvation in something that God has commanded you not to do. Resort to pragmatism and to the easy path to spiritual enlightenment rather than passing through the door of Christ. Christ DEMANDS everything, our political revolution will GIVE you everything.
But, “No!” Paul says. Christians are commanded to take every economic philosophy, every scientific theory, every sociological proposition captive. We are to drag it back to our camp and scrutinize it to see if it comes from Christ. This is because all ideas, if we do not bring them into submission to Christ, will lead us astray and into disobedience. To put a very fine point on it, if Christians do not take the current secular idea of ‘justice’ captive and force it to submit to Christ, it will pollute our very understanding of the gospel and lead us into heinous sin. If Christians do not take captive the claims that gender is fluid and that the loving thing is to indulge your co-worker in his or her pronoun delusion, we will call God a liar when Genesis clearly says that He created Adam and Eve male and female. If we do not take captive the idea that it is the government’s proper role to define what health is and to pursue whatever means necessary to achieve that definition, we will abdicate our responsibility as parents and churches. I will state it again for emphasis: Christians must inspect every idea that society lifts up as good and must then evaluate if that idea is, in fact, what God has said, or whether it is false and therefore designed to destroy us. This is why Christian thought has inevitably lead to the idea of a free society - because it is good and necessary for freedom to exist in order for Christians to be able to obey God in all areas. Obviously, God is sovereign, and throughout history He places Christians in situations where they cannot carry out full and free obedience. But the goal for Christians is that their physical liberty would mimic their spiritual liberty (James 1:25) so that they both desire to please God, and are permitted to please God in all things.
HOW DO WE KNOW?
And so we come to the question of how Christians are to understand what God’s will is for all of these areas of life. I will state clearly that we make a mistake when we try to answer these questions apart from the foundation and precepts found in the Old Testament, and specifically in God’s law. Of course I do not think that we are to take a one-to-one correlation from the old testament law and apply it to our context in exactly the same way as Israel did. What we need to understand, though, is that the law was given as a way to flesh out God’s moral decree that God expressed in the Ten Commandments. These, in turn, expressed God’s eternal character and will that had existed from before the beginning of the world. Therefore, one thing that we must remove from our thinking is the false idea that, if the New Testament did not specifically re-state a principle, then the original principle no longer applies to us. It is true that there are parts of the Law that Jesus taught about in order to show that there was a deeper meaning. An example of this is his ‘you have heard it said’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount. And yet, in these examples, He simply restored a proper understanding of God’s law. What we actually find is that Jesus and the apostles assumed that that law was still in effect, and that if God intended the church to set aside part of the law, He made that extremely clear. Examples of this include the vision that Peter had before visiting Cornelius and also Paul’s explanation in Colossians 2 and Hebrews 8 that Christians are no longer to keep the festivals because their purpose had been fulfilled in Christ. The same goes for the sacrificial system in Hebrews 10.
And yet Jesus affirms that the law and the Torah continue to show us how to live. He builds his case for marriage, righteousness, piety, and justice from the Old Testament. He cites Deuteronomy, the book of the law, more than any other book. Like him Paul, all over the Epistles, leans on the law to make his case. For instance, he uses the Old Testament law about not muzzling the ox to require churches to pay the elders who labor well in the work of ministry in I Timothy 5:18. He brings the law to bear on the the man in the Corinthian church who had taken his father’s wife. Paul also freely quotes the commands of the Old Testament when he evangelizes and when he rebukes churches. In spite of this pattern, I think a lot of my own lack of depth on issues outside of the epistles and Christian holiness have stemmed from the fact that I really neglected this fact: God laid an enduring foundation for topics such as economics, government, beauty, art, justice, and many other issues that define what a society is in the law and the Torah. I never thought to look there when I wanted to know what God’s will was for my life. When I read in the Psalms that David extolled the beauty and worth of the law over and over again, I always changed that word in my mind to ‘the Bible’, and by that I mainly meant ‘the gospel’. Thus I read “Oh how I love thy law Bible (especially the gospel). It is my meditation all the day.” While it is certainly true that we could meditate all day on the atonement, we would miss the great, liberating blessing of meditating on what the law says about how we are to understand our role within society. How should we pay our workers or how should a families should treat their pets. God has spoken about all of these things. And since He has spoken, he expects all people, especially his children, to obey.
Previous generations of Christians did not diminish the law the way that I have done. The Westminster Confession in chapter XIX.IV says, “To them also, as a body politick, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require.” In other words the Reformers and Puritans understood that the principles in the Law applied to all societies at all times. The greater the spread of the gospel through a society the greater that society will desire to carry out God’s precepts, and the more the individuals within that society will seek to understand how to build their marriages, education, government, and businesses in ways that honor God and align with His laws. Stephen C. Perks wrote a brilliant essay on the general equity principle of God’s law at kuyper.org. I highly recommend that you take the time to read all of it. As I have reflected on that, and on the writings of the Calvin about God’s law, I conclude now that Christians and churches have stunted their spiritual growth because they have not considered how God’s law applies comprehensively to our time. We have shrugged off many of the principles in the Old Testament as simply part of those things that pointed prophetically to Christ, or were fulfilled in Christ. After all, on the road to Emmaus, Christ himself taught that the Old Testament points entirely to him. But this does not remove the teachings of the Old Testament, it rather reinforces them. All of it was pointing to Christ, but he did not abdicate the law or the prophets. In fact, precisely because He fulfilled the law, we are now free to live according to God’s law without the fear of judgment every time we fail to keep it. As Jesus said, “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) His commandments are not burdensome, but they are comprehensive.
Instead of trying to understand how to weave God’s commandments through the fabric of our lives and society we have assumed that issues such as art, politics, and economics are a-biblical - outside of the Bible. That is, that man can use reason and come up with whatever views on those issues that seem good to him. Even worse, Christians decide that that is the way those things ought to be viewed. So it is that we see Christians who place a higher value on 33 unarmed black men who were killed by the police than the over 800,000 babies murdered in the womb every year. So it is that we do not hold politicians accountable for destroying thousands of small businesses, causing a massive mental health crisis, prolonging the pandemic, lying about and breaking their own health protocols and safety regulations, and creating levels of fear and distrust towards one another that have never been seen as a society - all in the name of ‘public safety’ and the public good. Few of us, myself included, considered that God has actually told us how to handle outbreaks of disease. Somehow we thought that our science was more sophisticated than God’s wisdom. This is what happens when we neglect a comprehensive view of what God has said to us.
I want to bring up one last example that truly saddens and angers me. There are many Christian hospitals and Christians healthcare workers would have said two years ago that they definitely affirm the doctrine of imago dei. They would have claimed that they believed that each person is made in the image of God and is therefore worthy of being treated and viewed with dignity and respect. And yet many of those same Christian healthcare workers and Christian hospitals could not figure out that when the government told hospitals to leave Covid patients unattended for hours, that nurses should not check on them, turn them, or feed them for entire shifts, and that they must be left alone to die, away from their families, and away from spiritual counsel, that this was a disgusting violation of the doctrine of imago dei. Something has gone wrong when Christians can assent to a foundational doctrine, but cannot identify or combat abuses of it. My wife is nurse and traveled to multiple hospitals during the pandemic. She saw Christian hospital after Christian hospital, and Christian employee after Christian employee sin against Covid patients simply because the government told them to do so.
WHAT’S FREEDOM FOR?
These and other seismic changes in our society have caused me to research and read like I never have before. I have not questioned my faith in the gospel or in Christ in any way. I am not deconstructing. My convictions in these areas are stronger than they have ever been. But I have asked what place the Christian faith has in the world. Solid food and good doctrine is good, but if we cannot discern between good and evil, and take appropriate action, we are actually immature, according to Hebrews 5:14.
Like the Israelites, God saves us and gives us new life so that can worship God through our obedience. We cannot have biblical understanding only; we must work to have a biblical practice. So we study to understand what God has said about every part of life. We do not leave any part to secular philosophy. And as we do, we exert effort to obey God in many new and wonderful ways. For most of my life, I have sought to obey God by focussing on only one piece of the puzzle - that is the piece of Christian devotion. But I have realized that this piece that many call piety is only that - one piece. A great many pieces of the puzzle still lie on the table waiting for me to understand where they go, and then to put them in the proper place.
And that returns me to the analogy of the puzzle. I want to challenge Christians to think about where all the pieces fit. It is true that we might have greater confidence about some of the pieces than others. For instance, I’m more confident in the doctrine of election than I am in biblical principles of taxation or economics. But that does not mean that we should not spend time or effort thinking about where all of the pieces fit. I have been reading what authors like Gary North say about Biblical economics and I have been trying to understand God’s will in this area. And as a father, I am trying introduce these ideas to my children. Recently we memorized Exodus 20 and had several very good discussions about the commands not to bear false witness and the command not to covet. Is advertising false witness? Do we build a welfare system that incentives covetousness? We need this kind of teaching along with the doctrines of theology. In fact, I believe that as we understand more and more areas of life from a biblical perspective, they will all flow to together with a beautiful unity and cohesion so that we will not feel that biblical economic principles are at odds with the deity of Christ. Rather, properly understood, economics will show the glory of the risen Christ. Therefore, Christians need elders and pastors to teach them about all of these pieces and to help them build a cohesive a vision for a life that seeks to submit itself to God in all areas. When this happens Christians will walk in great confidence and contentment, not because the task is easy, but because they know what the task is. In Hosea 4:6 God indicts his people for refusing to walk according to his law:
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.
Many liberal churches, I think, now fall under a similar judgment from God. Many have called what is good evil, and what is evil good. Many have embraced the spirit of the age and have said that we should live according to our own morality (relativism) and our own law (autonomy). Many have said that we can put the puzzle of life and of society together however we see fit. But let us not be like those false churches. Let us understand how God wants us to live and how we ought to encourage our society to live. And when the pagan world rejects these standards, as it will likely do under the influence of indwelling sin, this very law is also what will convict them and show them their need for the gospel. I am convinced of better things than this concerning those Christians who love God’s word, but have not thought to consider how to apply it to areas that our culture claims are neutral and outside the purview of scripture. Let us discover together the wonder of God’s wisdom over all fields of study and all areas of human activity.
I hope to do this until the day I die because, as it turns out, my childish habit of holding on to only one puzzle piece translated over into my Christian practice. In a sense, I have held on to only a few of the puzzle pieces in life - those of theology proper and of personal devotion to God. To be sure, these are important pieces, maybe even corner pieces that hold the rest of the puzzle in shape. But I’m challenging myself, and I’m challenging other Christians, to think about the rest of the puzzle - to have a middle view. Every piece matters to God. It’s true that the final puzzle will only be assembled perfectly in heaven, but that doesn’t mean that we should not try to put together what we can now. After all, though we understand that there is a limit to all perfection, we also understand that God’s law is limitless. Therefore we will meditate on it all day. We will love it and keep it and try to understand what it says about all of society and all of life. And as we do that we will be wiser than our enemy, and ready to tear down the foolish speculations that he throws at us and at the lost. In this way we will open the door for unbelievers and for ourselves to repent of more and more sin, and we will discern more and more the way to joyfully obey God. To that end, I have resolved that when we spend time making puzzles this next Christmas, I will huddle down over the table and help fit some pieces into their proper place. After all, object lessons are powerful ways to learn lessons. And I don’t want to forget this one.
