Grow A Spine with Pastor Douglas Wilson

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Okay. All right, Doug, we're here again. So, um, all right.

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I wanted to talk about the issue of, of justice, just justice in the world. And it's interesting because you asked that question today, you have to be careful in certain circles, how you ask it.

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Because there's a popular movement today that talks a lot about social justice and it's not a good thing.

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It's not healthy. It's not balanced. It's not biblical. It's, it's social justice. It's very emotional, you know, we've got to care about justice.

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We've got to care about this. And, but there doesn't seem to be anything that it's anchored on. And then when it is anchored on something, it's generally on things like Marxism, neo -Marxist ideology, those sorts of things.

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So when you talk about the issue of justice, as you look through church history, I think you can see that Christians have always had a concern for justice in society.

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And it's interesting because we've gone from a place, I feel that we had that vision when

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America is forming and Christians are coming over there. The colonies are pointing directly to the

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God of the Bible, the triune God of the Bible. They're pointing specifically to God's laws. And so even in our own

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American experiment, not long ago you could see that Christians had a concern for justice in society. And this would be justice, justice, not social justice.

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The adjectives tell you that something's wrong. Yeah. And even if you have a good adjective, like biblical justice that tells you that you're answering somebody else's adjective.

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No, not social justice, biblical justice. We're Bible believing Christians.

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Well, is there another kind? Right. But you have to, you have to do that.

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Like people, yes. So, but justice is, you referred to the

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American founding, it has to do with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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And originally that was life, liberty, and property, you know? And it was,

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I think that that's informs what they had in mind. But it's, it's interesting to me that the abortion carnage erases all three.

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Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, it's, uh, life taken. Well taken away, right.

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Uh, liberty taken away and pursuit of happiness. Every, everything is taken away.

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Right. We, and so, and this is being done from the other side in the name of justice, their idea of justice.

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Yeah. Right. Right. Well, we have to ask for whom? Okay. Justice for whom?

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Yeah. And it says there, there are two great, um, questions that philosophers should be asking all the time.

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And those two questions are asked on every playground in America and they are why and who says.

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Yeah. Right. So we should do X, Y, Z. Why? Who says, right?

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Why, why should we do that? And who says we should do that? Um, if you take God out of the picture, you take

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God and his law word out of the picture. Um, there is no who says, and there is no why.

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It's meaningless. Right. Right. Or there, now someone will always rush to fill the vacuum of the who says

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Supreme court starts to think that the Supreme being and, you know, and Demos becomes the

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God of the people. Well, we, we, we will say, yeah. But then you say, well, hasn't the, hasn't this been done before?

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Did the, did the German people have the right to, um, do what they do to the, do what they did to the

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Jews? Um, did the Aztecs have the right to do what they did to their victims to just because you've got people saying this, well, having, having this, um, your, the law or your definition of justice grounded in the

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God, if you all systems of justice ground are grounded in the God of the system.

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That's right. There's an ultimate, there's an ultimate God of the God of the system. It's unavoidable. And the God of the Bible is holy and immutable.

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That means his law is going to be holy and immutable, meaning unchanging, unchanging.

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Yes. Right. Um, the Demos as the God of the system, as our current, uh, the

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God of our current postmodern secular decaying system, Demos, the people not holy, unholy, manifestly unholy and manifestly changeable, mutable, always, always changing.

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Yes. Changing is a, is a feature, not a bug as far as they're concerned, they're to take an unborn child's life is unholy.

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It's an unholy act and it will was has always been an unholy act and always will be an unholy act.

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It doesn't change. God's holy and God's unchanging and therefore abortion is prohibited always and everywhere.

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Right. Right. Uh, but when the God of the system is unholy, then the law that that God generates is going to reflect the character of the

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God. Yes. The, the, the law will be unholy. Right. Um, and the law will change all the time.

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Right. Um, that's right. You know, uh, and, and we see this oscillation back and forth, um, in the secular, in secular ethics, which is an oxymoron.

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Um, how can you have a, well, everybody is the, we had the sexual revolution in the sixties and then you have the me too movement.

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And so wait, are we supposed to be puritanical or are we supposed to not be puritanical? What, what is it?

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Well, it's all over the, you know, yeah, all over the road. That's right. So when we consider the question of justice, you mentioned

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God is holy. He's unchanging. His law is unchanging. Um, that gets to a question.

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Should Christians be concerned with God's character emulated in society and his unchanging law being a standard that the people look to?

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Right. Because as of now, the answer is no. Right. I mean, there's popular answer is hell no.

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Um, and so what's our role because there's, there's, there's a popular thing, a popular mindset.

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It's the prevalent mindset that, you know, that's not our place. This is not something we have to actually truly be concerned with.

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And typically when you have people who are say red state conservatives and they say, we know we should be concerned about these things.

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They're not always arguing from a position of, because God says, right, right. It's more or less because these are the conservative red state values and those are always changing too.

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They're moving more and more slowly. Moving more and more left red state and conservative values in 2020 are very different than they were in 1965.

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Right. So, right. I was, uh, tell you a quick story.

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Um, in a, I was talking one time at my daughter's, uh, at her wedding reception for my daughter.

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Uh, this was 20 years or so ago. I was talking to someone who was a little, a few years older than I was, who was a student here at the university of Idaho in 19,

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I think it was 1965. And it was Christmas break and then we were just chatting and about how everything has changed.

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It was Christmas break. She thought she'd go up to the admin building and pick up her grades. And she was busted on the way up to the admin building by the

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Dean of women for not wearing a dress. She was, she was wearing slacks.

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So she was, she was wearing slacks or jeans on the university of Idaho, a secular campus, 1965, 1965, and got written up by the

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Dean and women. And you know, fundamentalist, uh, conservative

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Bible, believing private schools don't have standards like that anymore. Wow. Now I'm not saying that particular standard is the epitome of wisdom, but it shows you that it's a different world.

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You're a woman. You should, you should dress like a woman, a woman. Yeah. On the, on at least on the campus of the university of Idaho.

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Yeah. Right. So, um, everything's, everything's gone all to pieces and, and Christians who want to appeal to traditional values are, are basically saying we are good with the revolution as long as it goes slowly enough to keep us comfortable.

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Kind of like Hezekiah saying you're probably, you know, Babylon, Isaiah says Babylon's going to take over this whole place.

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And Hezekiah's reaction is that's a good prophecy because there'll be peace and safety in my day. Right. Right.

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Yeah. Um, so, oh wow. Uh, and, and you don't, but red state conservatism is not thinking of their grandkids that they're just, they're just wanting their way of life to stay put for the time being so that things don't change too radically before they're, before they're gone.

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Peace and safety in my day. Right. So when you can, when you consider the question of ought we to actually be concerned with these things, should we, should we actually care about God's standards of justice and rightness in society as Christians?

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Because we've largely checked out largely, not everybody, but we've largely checked out.

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And, um, I guess the, the, the ultimate question to ask is when you said, um, why and who says related to the issue of justice, if, should we care, is that something that Jesus intends to do in the world?

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Establish justice. And, um, well, yeah, let me answer that really quickly in the great commission, all authority, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Jesus said, therefore go disciple the nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey everything

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I've commanded. It's part of the commission. That's part of the commission. You cannot be an evangelical Christian and not want to teach the nation's obedience in accordance with everything

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Jesus taught. I thought we just want to get into heaven. Yeah, we want to get them to, we want to get, well, first we want to get them to get, get them into heaven.

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But the first order of business is to get heaven into them. Right. And that, and there's no way to do it apart from straight up gospel preaching, you know, high and inside, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's got it because, because you can't take, take an unholy people who are standing in their unholiness, go make common ground with them in that unholiness and then appeal to them to,

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Hey, let's clean it up a little bit because you've got no, um, in the

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Psalms, he lifted me out of the miry clay and set me on a rock. You know, we need a rock.

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We need something. Sure. We need a sure word and a dark place. We don't need, it seems to me, preaching.

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We need, thus saith the Lord. Um, yeah. Preaching. Right. And the, and people say, well, that's going to turn people, um, um, that's going to turn people away or turn people off.

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The thing that, the thing that strikes me about this is how many times in the book of Acts does the, does the word tell us, does

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Luke tell us that the Holy spirit came on them and they spoke the word with boldness.

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Now, if you take the average message that the average PR manager or, um, wordsmith wants us to articulate to the unbelieving world that the way you should say it is this, the, all the, all the, everything's sanded smooth and all the edges rounded off and nothing there to cut yours.

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Uh, I don't need boldness to say that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

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Right. Um, I don't, I don't need boldness to be whimsical and a little winsome.

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I need boldness. If I'm going to say something, it's going to get everybody in the room mad at me.

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Right. That's right. Um, also in the book of Acts, when Paul ministered in Ephesus for long enough to damage the idol trade, which wasn't his main purpose there, he wasn't circulate running, circulating petitions to ban idols, but he was having an impact on the idol trade.

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And the amphitheater at Ephesus was filled up with yelling Ephesians, greatest Diana of Ephesians.

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And Paul looked at that and saw a speaking opportunity. Right. He said, look, a congregate, a congregation, a ready -made congregation.

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Just for me. There's a famous anecdote about an Anglican clergyman who said everywhere they served tea, the

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Apostle Paul went, there was a revival or a riot. He said, everywhere

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I go, they serve tea. That's good. That's excellent.

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Right. All right. So final question. Okay. Main focus, proclamation of the gospel, call people to repentance and faith, point them to Jesus, get heaven into them, get heaven into earth, right?

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Kingdom of heaven into the earth, into the world, expanding, moving. And that comes through the proclamation of what Christ has accomplished, calling people to come to be joined to him by faith and faith alone, to be redeemed and reconciled and receive the gift of eternal life.

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But then you mentioned, of course, the latter part of the great commission is and teach them to obey.

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So ought we to, as we come into the nations, as Christians did historically, to be focused on that aspect of pointing people to God's law in every corner of life, his standards in every corner of life?

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Is that something that we ought to be doing as a church? Yes. It's either it's it's one of those inescapable concepts.

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It's not whether we will be governed by law, but rather whose, whose laws, not whether, but which it's not whether we need a law.

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It's which law we will have. Well, I'm a Christian. Why wouldn't I want Christian law? Right.

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That's right. Right. Why would I as a Christian want secular law? Why would I want a form of law that presupposes that Jesus did not rise from the dead?

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You know, right. That makes no sense. Yeah. Jesus did rise from the dead.

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The world will never be the same. His word is authoritative. And part of the reason we're having trouble getting the world to accept the authoritative word over them is because we're not accepting that authoritative word over us.

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Right. Jesus told us what to do. That's right. He told us to, to disciple the nations.

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He told us to baptize the nations and he told us to teach the nation's obedience.

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That means teach communist China, obedience, teach Islamic Iran, obedience, teach a an apostate

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United States obedience. Yeah. No, no. You can't, you can't chop babies up into pieces and call it constitutional.

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That's right. No, you can't do that. You may not. There was something interesting just related to everything you're talking about in terms of the authority of Jesus and what we're trying to get into the world and how the world will never be the same.

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I found it so interesting when the pastor, Chinese pastor just got nine years,

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Wang Yi. I found it interesting as I was reading what the government had said about him, that he was essentially subverting the power of the state or the authority of the state.

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And I thought to myself, that's how you know he's preaching the right gospel. When the state recognizes that your

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Jesus is a threat to their authority and their power, you're preaching the right Jesus. You're preaching the

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Jesus of the apostles because Rome also recognized what you're saying. There's a different Lord.

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Why won't you say Kaiser Curios? Why would you say Caesar is Lord? What's the big deal? It's just a little pinch of incidents.

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Come on, just a little bit. So they recognize the authority of Jesus then and the kingship of Jesus then was a threat to Rome.

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And ultimately it was. And there was major transformation because of that authoritative threat down the line.

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And China recognizes that now and is throwing a very faithful man of God into prison because of it. And I'm worried that most of us maybe wouldn't be thrown into any prisons because our

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Jesus and our message isn't very threatening. Right. And we need to grow a spine.

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Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to end it. Grow a spine. We'll put that as the title of the video.

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Grow a spine with Pastor Doug. Sounds good. All right. Thank you, Doug. Thank you. Thank you, brother. All right.