Highlight: Two Options

This has been a subject that's been, I feel like I've just been regurgitating a lot of this stuff a lot lately, but it's been heavy on my heart, really, since the beginning of this year, and a lot of it stems from the chaos that was last year.

But there's a quote here from, there's a Presbyterian pastor, Peter Marshall, he lived from 1902 to 1949, so this is where Christ or chaos comes from.

He said the choice before us is plain, Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration.

I am rather tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as Americans. The time is now, it is now, when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship.

America's future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God's government. This was 80 years ago.

Oh wow. That he said that, and I mean, it couldn't be more valid now than ever.

And so, yeah, like I was saying, I mean, last year was just complete chaos, right? And so, just really been, it's been on my heart that really everything we face, whether it be culture, whether it be problems in the church, it's, we have to either choose

Christ or chaos, and to go deeper, order versus disorder. So that's kind of how

I like to explain it is that in Christ is order, in chaos is disorder. And, and so actually

I, I, this, I, this was the subject or the title of my, my talk I gave with the OSA thing about a month ago, and I wanted to bring

Andrew on because he sent me some, some of his material that helped me prepare this message.

And so I was super thankful for that. But I mean, looking at culturally speaking, whether it be gay mirage, abortion, pedophilia, transgender, transgenderism, the, you know, disintegration of the family, you name it, masks, vaccines, you name it, you go down the list, statism, communism, like all of it.

Like it's, it's chaos. And it's, you know, because they're not, they're not choosing

Christ. So it's, it's disorderly, it's chaos. So before I go any further, Andrew, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Oh, you're right. I think a key here to understand is there must be some law, some, and if that law is not a transcendent law, that is

God's law coming from outside history into history. And in our case, as Christians, we know that his law in the

Bible, and the Bible tells us there's also the law of creation, not natural law, but his law woven into creation, his creational norms.

And of course, Christ himself, the law of Christ, all of these, not three laws, but one law with three facets.

If you don't have that, then what happens eventually is people start making up their own individualized laws.

And that's what's happened really increasingly in the 20th century. So basically people have become a law to themselves.

We use that term sometime, autonomy, autonomous, that means self -law. People become a law to themselves.

And so in the things I mentioned, transgenderism to homosexuality and pedophilia and abortion and cultural

Marxism, essentially people have said, we're going to abandon God's transcendent law, and we're going to be our own law.

What's ironic and what of course we see increasingly happening is when individuals start creating their own law, then those individual laws start conflicting with other individual laws.

And because that's why today we see often a group of feminist lesbians fighting transgender people, scratching each other's eyes out.

Why? Because their own private internalized laws are conflicting with other laws.

Society before that, when we recognize God's law wasn't perfect, since we're all sinners, but at least people recognize

God's eternal law. So when you remove that law, you get what we have today, chaos.

And I must say, until we return to the law of God, this transcendent standard, we will have more and more chaos, not only culturally, but Luke, as you wisely said, the church.

One thing when I was preparing this talk a couple months ago, something hit me pretty profoundly,

I thought about, and we all were post -millennial, right? So we understand that all things, Christ is ruling

Iran until all things are put under his feet, the last being death. And so for the culture, what are they promulgating the most?

All these things we talked about, homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, all that leads to death. Communism, statism, it all leads to death.

And it dawned on me when I was preparing this, like, oh my goodness, that makes so much sense that everything that they're promoting as good revolves around death, because that's the last thing that the enemy has to hold on to.

Yeah, those who hate me love death. Exactly. There's another irony here, guys, and it's really sad.

It really shows the state that these rebels are in. I think many of them even know intuitively it's going to lead to death and be destructive, but they're willing to pay that price as long as they can hang on to their autonomy.

Yes, it will destroy me. Yes, it will destroy the family. Yes, it will destroy my culture. Yes, it will send me to hell.

But I would rather suffer all of that as long as I can protect my little right to tell myself what to do.

It's a really sad case of rebellion against the sovereign God. Amen to that.

And I have my notes up here. I want to just go through a couple things real quick, and then I want to hear what you think,

Andrew. And I will say from the beginning, I did steal a lot of this from Doug Wilson. So here's a couple things

I want to say. For the believer, worship starts with God, and it's ruled by order. We've established that. But for the unbeliever, worship starts with chaos and is ruled by apparent order.

And we all know, believer and unbeliever alike, that the world is broken and needs to be repaired. So this problem then for the

Christian is that it's ethical. The world is broken because of sin and rebellion. Civilization is fragile because of the sinful heart of man.

The only solution, as we all know, is the gospel. And like I've been saying, right orderly worship.

The problem for the unbeliever is that civilization is also fragile, but because of chaos and structural defect, the world is built upon a foundation of chaos.

So the unbeliever has no ultimate standard of order. His only hope is to drive things back further into chaos, hoping to get lucky for better order on the next go around.

So if you think about it from that angle, the more chaotic it becomes, the more hope they have that they can start a new civilization according to their subjective standard of what they think apparent order looks like.

Yeah, he's right. Chaos always serves the the the rebellious unbeliever very well.

I think it's important point I was going to make a minute ago. I think it was Connor or somebody. Maybe Zach. I'm not sure who exactly is there, but a great point.

The uniqueness of Christianity is that it sees the equal ultimacy of the one and the many, as Van Til pointed out.

And that's why, on the one hand, we could have a unity, a basic unity that doesn't turn into tyranny, because we also believe in the many, the one and the three.

There is one God, and yet there are three persons, and yet only one God, not three gods.

And so there's an equal ultimacy here. You say, well, is God ultimately more one or ultimately more three?

And we say, neither. He is equally one and three. And therefore, when you apply this in society, it's just so beautiful.

Not perfect, because we're still sinful people, but so beautiful and correct. We can have a great deal of diversity and a great deal of individual uniqueness under God's authority, because everything is bound to this one unity of the triune

God, and yet who permits and encourages diversity within that unity. But you don't have that in any other society.

In Islam, for example, it's a very strong unified society. You know, you have just sort of the top -down crushing everything that seems diverse in a legitimate sense.

Then, of course, in other societies, but radically Western societies, everything is just the opposite. As you were quoting there, everybody's his own little

God, and there's no single unifying factor at all, except the unifying factor that there's no unifying factor.