A Reformed Baptist Response to the Manhattan Declaration

Acts 24 and Paul Before Felix

In the 24th chapter of Acts, if you remember your history of the New Testament, you know that the Apostle Paul has been arrested in Jerusalem. He has appealed to Caesar. He is, of course, continuing to deal with the opposition of the Jewish people who are seeking to have him killed.

And while he is in that situation, he has opportunity of giving witness to the governmental authorities, specifically one named Felix. If we look at Acts 24, verse 22, we read, but Felix, having a more exact knowledge about the way, put them off saying, when Lysias the commander comes down, I will decide your case.

Then he gave orders to the centurion for him to be kept in custody and yet have some freedom and not to prevent any of his friends from ministering to him. And then notice what happens. But some days later, Felix arrived with Drusilla, his wife, who was a Jewess and sent for Paul and heard him speak about faith in Christ Jesus.

But as he was discussing righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix became frightened and said, go away for the present. And when I find time, I will summon you. The same time too, he was hoping that money would be given him by Paul.

Therefore, he also used to send for him quite often and converse with him. But after two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus and wishing to do the Jews a favor, Felix left Paul imprisoned.

And so you have later on after this, actually the appeal to Caesar, once Paul recognizes he's not going to get justice. But here you have a situation where the apostle Paul has an opportunity to speak to one of the leading political figures in his area.

And what does Paul talk to him about? What would you talk to leading political figures about if you had the opportunity today to address them? Well, he spoke to him about faith in Christ Jesus and he was discussing with him, notice the things, righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come.

And as he speaks about these things, Felix became frightened, why? Well, one reason might be right there in the text, he was hoping Paul might bribe him. But Paul starts talking to him about righteousness and about self-control and about what?

The judgment to come, the judgment to come. Now, if we think about the day in which Paul lived, the Roman Empire was not a place of righteousness. We know from history that the decline of the Roman Empire took quite some time.

The decline went more slowly than we might be seeing it in our own situation. Things didn't happen quite as quickly when you don't have an internet and you don't have CNN to help promulgate your ideas.

Things happen more slowly. Sometimes we feel like everything's out of control because things happen so fast today. But still in Rome at this time, you have a tremendous amount of sexual debauchery. You have temple prostitution.

You have graft and greed and corruption in the government. You have homosexuality, especially in particular areas and major cities. And though you did not have the same kind of drug culture, because obviously just didn't have quite the same technology that we have, they did have certain drugs.

You certainly had a great amount of drunkenness and the abuse of alcohol. And you didn't have the same kind of medical technologies. And so instead of having abortion, you would have exposure where you would take the newly born child and simply leave it outside at night to die or to be eaten by the dogs.

Christians became known in the first few hundred years of the Christian church as the people who would go out at night and find the exposed children and bring them in and raise them as their own. There had always been that concern for life.

But there is all sorts of political and moral things that the Apostle Paul could be discussing with Felix. Notice it says he used to send for him quite often and converse with him. And I would imagine that the Apostle Paul was rather consistent.

That's one of the things that people don't like about this fellow Paul. He was very consistent. That is he continued to bring up the same issues, faith in Christ Jesus, righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come.

Why the Manhattan Declaration Matters

Why do I direct our attention to this text this morning? Well, I want to do something unusual this morning. Normally, as you know, we've been going through Hebrews. When I've been preaching, we will continue that in Hebrews chapter four this evening, Lord willing.

But it is also good, I believe, at times to talk about what's going on in our society, especially when it directly touches upon our faith and how we live out our life. I think it is important that Christians today, in light of the challenges to our faith and our freedom from the forces of secularism in Western society, that we take time to think about how we are to respond biblically to challenges that we are facing.

And only a little over a week ago, many of you would already be aware of the fact that a declaration was promulgated, primarily through the internet and through the media services, called the Manhattan Declaration.

It was promulgated on November 20th, first drafted on October 20th of this year, the Manhattan Declaration, a call of Christian conscience. Now, I raise the issue of this declaration to explain why it is that the eldership of this church has not signed this declaration.

Over 150 ,000 people have signed it. Only since November 20th, that's only nine days. And there have been people who have signed this declaration that I personally have great respect for. For example, Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Seminary, a man from whom I have learned much, has signed the Manhattan Declaration.

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan, a theologian that many of you would be familiar with, a leading voice in the Presbyterian Church in America, a reformed theologian, has signed the Manhattan Declaration. And so, some might say, well, if you don't sign this declaration, which is just simply an assertion of, well, a biblical view of marriage and sexuality, a biblical view of life, and a biblical view of religious freedom, then you're just being one of those sticks in the mud.

You reformed Baptists, you just, you can't get along with anybody. You think anybody that looks differently than you and acts differently than you just isn't even worth the time of day. You're trying to isolate yourself, and you can't isolate yourself because this is coming after everybody.

That's what people would say. Well, I don't think we're isolating ourselves. We've taken the time to look at this and to consider it. Some of you know that I've written on this subject shortly after it was released, but we do need to think about these issues.

And I think there are good things said in the declaration, but there's a fundamental issue that I want to lay before you and hopefully help you to think through these issues as we seek to live as Christians in a evidently ever more secular society.

The Declaration’s Ecumenical Framing and Christian Identity

Well, what's the declaration about? We can't really discuss it if you don't know what some of it says. Well, I'm gonna read some sections to you, and then I want to consider this in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But first of all, the thing you need to understand is that leading ecumenists were the drafters of this document, specifically Charles Colson and Timothy George, along with others. And in drafting this document, they did not ask others to sign the document who are not Trinitarians.

That is, they did not ask the Mormons to sign the document. They did not ask atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, or anyone else. They specifically asked only Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Orthodox Protestants, that is, Trinitarian Protestants, to sign this declaration.

I listened to Charles Colson explaining his reasoning for this, so I'm not just going on the basis of the document. I have listened to some of the discussion that has gone on about it. So it is meant to bring together the three great traditions of Christianity, as it says, to, in essence, lay out a case for life over against abortion, euthanasia, and things like that, Christian marriage versus the homosexual perversion of that or any other kinds of alteration of Christian marriage that is being promoted out there, and religious freedom, and to, in essence, say that if any government, Europe or the United States, were to seek to limit the free exercise of the Christian faith, that we would stand against that and, in fact, would encourage civil disobedience against any laws that would be passed that would restrict how we can worship and what we say in worship.

Now, many of you know that I have been very concerned for a long time about the trends in our society toward the loss of our rights to preach the whole counsel of God. I have often made reference to the fact that we see trends in our society where there are those who would like to identify, especially as hate speech, and hence the beginning of a hate crime, the identification of certain behaviors and activities as evil, and especially that would bring, what did Paul say? The judgment to come.

We have seen this in many nations, and we know that right now an administration is in power that is very clearly promoting the restriction of what can be done in that area under the guise of hate crimes and hate crimes legislation, some of which has already passed.

And so the declaration says, we as Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians, notice the first statement, have gathered beginning in New York on September 28th, 2009 to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities.

We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives, and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image.

We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason, which is itself in our view, the gift of a beneficent God. And in the very nature of the human person, we call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we with St. Paul commend this appeal to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.

There is the opening statement, which identifies Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants all together as Christians. Now, we know that in our society today that the term Christian is used of anyone who basically uses the name of Jesus.

We don't expect our society to use a biblical definition of someone who has truly been regenerated by the Spirit of God. And as such, in academia, if you go out to ASU or any place else, you're going to see all sorts of things called Christian that you and I would go, that's not Christian.

We hear all the time, the Gnostic Christians, talking about people in the ancient world who didn't even believe the God of the Old Testament was a good God, and yet they're called Gnostic Christians. And this grates on our nerves as it should, but we seek that opportunity to try to correct those types of things.

I continue, we are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right, and more importantly, to embrace our obligation to speak and act in defense of these truths, specifically in regards to the dignity of human life, marriage, and religious liberty.

We pledge to each other and to our fellow believers that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season.

May God help us not to fail in that duty. Now, there's nothing there that's objectionable to me, except it raises one huge question. It's the 800-pound gorilla obviously sitting in this section of pews, which is why no one else is sitting in that section of pews.

There'd be enough room for a number of 800-pound gorillas right down front here. I'm not really sure what's going on. You're all crammed in the back of the room, again. But it raises the question, what is the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness that we are to be preaching?

I agree with the statement that we are to be preaching the gospel in its fullness. The problem is the three groups that signed this would have fundamental contradictions as to what that gospel is. What is it saying to the world?

Well, when we promulgate a document that says, we must preach the entire gospel, and the world says, and what is that? Well, we'll come back to that. The first of the three points addressed is life. Life, and they raise many vitally important issues.

Life, Abortion, and the Sanctity of Human Dignity

The promotion of a culture of death, the abortion industry, the frightening expansion of embryo research and cloning that is taking place right now in our world. We see films about it, about terrible, horrible things happening as if that's science fiction.

It's happening now all around us, and Western cultures have shown themselves for some reason utterly incapable of restraining themselves from tinkering with the very foundations of life itself. And so while on the one end, we are unable to restrain our technology from tinkering with life at the cost of human embryos that are unique in their genetic makeup and will never be repeated again, while on the other end, we have assisted suicide, euthanasia, the idea of rationing health care for the elderly, and strangely enough, the resurrection, shall we say, of the eugenics notions that we thought had been buried in the rubble of Europe in 1945, but that if you know your history had been very popular on these shores in the 1920s, and they gave rise to such organizations as Planned Parenthood.

Eugenics, super races, altering the DNA structure. These things are happening because there is no respect for life. I would suggest that so much of this is due to the fact that in Western culture, we have embraced a view of life that is Darwinian to its core.

There's nothing special about it, it's not created. The document says, we will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion.

We will work as we have always worked to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women in need, and those who've been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can be somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn children.

Our message is and ever shall be that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike. A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government, to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination.

The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak, and so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear.

We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and in every condition. Again, true words, but only partially true in the sense that there's something missing.

That we will get to as we finish up. The second point is marriage. Genesis 2, 23 through 24 is quoted. The same text of Jesus quoted in Matthew chapter 19. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh. And then Ephesians 5, 32 through 33, likewise is cited in regards to Christ.

And the church. We read in scripture, the creation of man and woman in their one flesh union as husband and wife is the crowning achievement of God's creation and the transmission of life and the nurturing of children.

Men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God himself. Marriage then is the first institution of human society. Indeed, it is the institution in which all other human institutions have their foundation.

In the Christian tradition, refer to marriage as holy matrimony to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Canaan of Galilee.

In the Bible, God himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem. It goes on to say, to strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery and holiness of faithful marital love.

We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is and what it requires and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

And then it addresses the issue of homosexual marriage, an oxymoron, there is no such thing. And here, this is interesting. We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed toward other forms of immoral conduct.

We have compassion for those so disposed, respect them as human beings, possessing profound, inherent and equal dignity. And we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward.

We stand with them even when they falter. We know less than they are sinners who have fallen short of God's intention for our lives. We know less than they are in constant need of God's patience. Love and forgiveness.

We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality. At the same time, refrain from disdainful condemnation to those who yield to it. Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners.

For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction, but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to a more excellent way.

As his disciples, we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it. Now, it spends a great deal of time, then, discussing the arguments that are used by people to attempt to say that marriage is an issue of equal rights.

And concludes by saying, and so it is out of love, not animus, and prudent concern for the common good, not prejudice, that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture.

How could we as Christians do otherwise? The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God's creation covenant. Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and his church.

And so, just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifice is required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is marriage.

Religious Liberty, Civil Disobedience, and the Limits of Law

Third and last point, religious liberty, the shortest of the three. I don't think there's any particular reason for that, just it ended up being the shortest of the three. Christians confess that God alone is Lord of conscience.

Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unrestrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.

What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well. It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled, and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law, such persons claiming these rights are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

You can't argue that one. All you have to do is look at what happened in California after Proposition 8, and look at the people whose businesses have been damaged or destroyed, closed down, because people got hold of the fact that they supported Proposition 8, they gave money to Proposition 8, and therefore there was retribution to be paid.

If that happened the other direction, I think people would have been talking about hate crimes. But evidently, hate crimes only go one direction. And so, finally it says, as Christians we take seriously the biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority.

We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust and otherwise immoral.

The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good, yet laws that are unjust, and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust, undermine the common good rather than serve it.

Then there is a discussion of Peter in Acts chapter four. And then yours truly demonstrated that I am without a doubt the most politically incorrect person on the planet, in that I am the only one who then pointed out something in the middle of this paragraph that I have seen, maybe someone else did, but I haven't seen it.

We read, there is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from a Birmingham jail, writing from an explicitly Christian perspective.

And citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God himself. That's quite true.

And Martin Luther King Jr. said true things. But all you have to do is read Martin Luther King Jr.'s own writings. And the man denied the deity of Christ. He was a heretic. Just as heretical as any other liberal theologian today that denies the deity of Christ or the Jehovah's Witnesses who knock at your door.

But you can't say that in our society anymore. Well, I did. And gave the references. Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act.

Nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth as we know it about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's, but under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's. Now you may feel in your heart, as I do, a desire to say amen to that.

Why the Declaration Falls Short of the Full Gospel

And so what's the problem? And it is just here that we encounter the need for Christian maturity. There are many people who in their zeal for the truth become so zealous that anything that they see as violating that truth, it all must be wrong.

It all must be bad. There are things that are said in this document that we can all agree to. And there is absolutely no question that these are major issues that we as Christians have to be thinking about in our society.

And they're gonna very often be the gateway issues to our being able to proclaim the gospel. They're the things people are talking about. And people are gonna wanna know, why do you believe what you believe about that?

Why are you against these things? Why are you for those things? Why should it matter to you if somebody gets married to his dog? Ain't gonna hurt you, really, doesn't it? We have to think about these things.

And there are many things, that's why men, like I said, that I respect, have signed this because it says many true things. Have we not often prayed, oh Lord, when it comes time to count the cost, may we be found faithful?

I've used the illustration many, many times. If there was some pencil-necked bureaucrat standing outside that door out there, checking off our names as we come in, and that was gonna mean we get a different tax form than other people do, and our taxes are gonna be higher, what would that do to many churches in the land today?

What would Sunday morning attendance be like? What would our attendance be like? That's a question each one of us has to consider because that kind of thing has happened in the history of this world, I assure you.

That is, in fact, the very mechanism that Islam used to destroy the thriving Christian church that existed in North Africa, starting in 632. So are we not just being recalcitrant, backwards isolationists to not add our names to the 150 ,000 that have already in nine days signed this and have basically said to the world, we're not giving in to your demands.

Are we giving in to the world's demands by not signing it? I don't think so. What then is the problem? Well, you probably heard the problem a couple times over. First, we as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, I can't get past that.

I can't get past that because I try to use the term Christian in a consistent way, and there's certain things that define the Christian faith. Evidently, what's being said is, well, as long as you're Trinitarian, that's good.

I mean, I can see, I heard Charles Colson saying, oh, we are so thankful for the Mormons. They stood firm in Proposition 8, and they've taken a lot of heat about Proposition 8, and they did, though I have to admit, it was somewhat ironic to see the Mormons standing firm for a definition of marriage that's actually contradictory to their own scriptures, because it says one man and one woman, and that's not what the Doctrine and Covenant says.

You can go read Section 132 for yourself, but the reality was the Mormons were staying against what they know to be immoral, and that is homosexuality, and there's nothing wrong with Mormons being right about a moral issue.

Aren't you glad they are? If they were wrong about every moral issue, you couldn't walk out the front door of your house. There's something called common grace, and we can be thankful for that. That doesn't make them Christians, and when the document talks about the gospel, it can't define what it is, and that's the fundamental issue that I've raised.

There is everything right about talking about all of these things. There is everything right in talking about and defending life, and we get tired because the other side will never give up. We get tired of hearing the same arguments, trying to repeat the same thing, but we can't get tired because the document's right.

God's the author of life, and we live in a society that is so hate-filled toward God that it's become hate-filled toward life itself, and when we look at homosexuality, how destructive it is to life, how it is used by the apostle Paul as such a clear example of the twistedness that sin brings into the human experience, twisting the creator-creation relationship so that even the intrinsic sexual desire is turned away from its natural object, we have to have the freedom to identify that for what it is.

It destroys life. The media won't cover it. And I could never behind this pulpit get very explicit about it, but what I had to study in writing on that subject, it is amazing the destructiveness of that behavior destroys life.

And yes, my marriage and my family is impacted by giving to others when they are not married, the institution of marriage. Yes, I am impacted by that. We all are. Our laws are, our children are, our experience in this society is all impacted by that.

It's not a matter of equal rights. And it is indeed an insult to those who seek equal rights against those who would be prejudiced to identify it as an equal rights issue. It's an insult. And yes, we should be very concerned about an ever-growing governmental power that seems to think that they can judge what is good and proper speech and what is not.

All those things are true. But my friends, what is the only power that has been given to this church to have any impact on any of it? Is it numbers? Is it numbers? We stand united together. Is that gonna change something?

Well, I suppose you might say in a representative democracy, it might help. But for Christians, what is the only power given to the church that can change hearts and minds? That's why I started in Acts 24.

Paul's talking to a political leader. What's he talking about? The gospel. Oh, he doesn't avoid the moral element of God's law. Righteousness, self-control. But did you notice? And I don't know if any of the rest of you, I would imagine some of you had already read all of this.

It's made big news. But the one thing over and over and over again that the document was unwilling to address, and that's because its framers are unwilling to address, something Paul talked about, the judgment to come.

There's no wrath of God. Oh, we think marriage should be this way because that's how we've always done it. Not God instituted this institution. God has the right to define it. And to violate that is to violate God's law and bring his wrath and judgment upon you.

It's not in the document. It's not there. It's all through the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea. It's all there, isn't it? Here on Sunday night, you've been hearing all about it. You break God's law and God has something called wrath against sin.

And that brings judgment and there is only one way of salvation from that just wrath of God against sin and that's in the gospel. But we already started off by in essence saying the gospel doesn't define the Christian faith.

You can have contradictory gospels and we're all just still Christians. Now, let me tell you immediately. I've read Dr. Albert Moeller's defense of his signing the Manhattan Declaration. And Dr. Moeller says this is not another Evangelicals and Catholics together from 1994.

Same people wrote it, but it's not another Evangelicals and Catholics together. It is not a theological document that overthrows the particulars of the gospel. Yes, there are people who signed it. One of the original signers, a fellow by the name of Father Peter Stravinskis.

Some of you know that name because I debated him in 2001. Rather classic debate actually if you have not had a chance to see it. It was very interesting, really brought out the differences in the gospels.

They're being proclaimed by the two sides. Dr. Moeller says it's not a theological document. I'm not saying that Rome's gospel is a saving gospel by signing this. Okay, I acknowledge that. But I say, I don't see how it works.

I recognize that that's why you signed it. Fine, great, wonderful. I'm not kicking the man out of the kingdom for that. But I simply look at this and I say the only answer to all of these issues is to change the hearts and minds of men and women.

And you don't change the hearts and minds of men and women with part of a gospel. You don't change hearts and minds of men and women with only a portion of the gospel or a boiled down gospel that's just down to just this core idea.

And we can't talk about wrath and we can't talk about judgment because we offer different ways of how you can escape that wrath and judgment. That's the problem. There's the issue. Our society not only needs to hear us say, we will stand for religious liberty.

Our society needs to hear. And Jesus said, if you offend even one of the least of these it'd be better if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were drowned in the depths of the sea. God will not bless a nation that persecutes his people.

Brings God's wrath. You violate his law of marriage. You violate his law of life and God's wrath will come upon your nation. And I know what some people are thinking. You can't talk like that in our society anymore.

That's the whole point. You see, I respect the fact that Dr. Muller said, when people look back on the cultural wars of our day, I want to be counted as having been there. Well, I don't think there's any question about where Dr. Muller is on that.

He's been a warrior along those lines. That's not the issue. Here's the question. When people look back upon our day, who will they see stood firm and faithful for the purity of the gospel and were willing to proclaim those elements of the gospel that this society found to be the most egregiously wrong and distasteful?

Who will be there? Who will preach the whole of the gospel, including the wrath of God against sin and the inevitable fact that his justice must be done? God will not be mocked. Is that not the consistent message of all of the prophets?

And is that not the very first bit of Jesus' preaching? What was the first word? Repent. Repent. Where's repentance? Where's wrath? Where's judgment? Oh, our society doesn't want to hear about those things.

That's where the document fails. Talks about have to preach the gospel in its fullness. But once you bring together contradictory gospels and boil it down to least common denominator, you can't preach the gospel in its fullness anymore.

And so we need to think about these things. We are often styled by people outside of our circle of fellowship as sort of being isolated, head in the sand type people. I don't think that's true. I think we do think about these things, but we have parameters and limitations in which we must respond and they're provided by God's word, not by the trends of today, not by what is cutting edge, but by what God has revealed in his word.

We desire to honor and glorify him by consistently applying a worldview that comes from the scriptures, not that's forced on the scriptures, but comes from the scriptures. And that's not easily done. Our society is throwing all sorts of things at us.

And yes, we have to take time to think them through, but fundamentally at the bottom, we always have to remember. The apostolic example was not that Paul started organizations to protest various moral ills of the Roman empire, because he knew the only power given to the church is a power that nothing in this world can resist.

And that is the power of the word of God and the spirit of God, bringing the gospel to life in the hearts of men and women. May we rejoice that we continue to have that very same power with us today. And may we be consistent in the proclamation of that gospel to the glory of God.