Biblical Authority and the Demonic Rebellion of Contrary Applications

The Lord Jesus once gave a parable about a father who asked each of his two sons to go out and work in the field. The one said that he would but did not go. The other said that he would not but then felt bad and went. He then asked which one did the will of his father and the answer of course was the latter. Merely giving the right answer on a bibical principle wasn't good enough. The son surely knew his father wanted to hear him say "Yes" and so he did so, but God is not appeased with mere affirmations of the right answer. Empty words and promises are for the devil's children. God condemns the first son (which are the Jewish religious leaders in the context). This is because God is not pleased by our confessions alone. We act as though He is appeased if we merely believe biblical principles and repeat them to one another and so we have no need of actually being concerned about showing our submission to Him in our applications of these principles.

The Bible is against racism. The Bible commands us to be sexually pure. The Bible tells us to worship God alone. The Bible tells us to follow Jesus. The Bible tells us to be just. The Bible tells us to be loving. Sin is wrong. 

These are all generic biblical principles upon which most professed Christians would agree. In fact, most would find comfort in calling themselves Christians because they view their belief in biblical principles is the fruit of their conversion. But it isn't. 

You see, we are quite tricksy little hobbitses. We like to have our cake and eat it too when it comes to living worldly but also seeing ourselves as righteous and obedient at the same time. We do this in many ways but the main way we do it is by seeing our righteousness and obedience in terms of the principles we believe as the fruit of our salvation. In other words, if we believe biblical principles it is because we are now God's good and holy people.

Of course, we have been brainwashed by ourselves and others to believe that the application of those principles is subjective and we are not therefore bound to apply them in any particular direction and in any specific way. There is only one interpretation, we say, but a thousand different applications. This is a true statement but it is meant to say that applications of the principle should reach into every part of life and are therefore multiplied in various ways. It is not meant to say that application is subjective or somehow governed by the individual's own experience and not governed by biblical authority.

We can all agree that the Christian should not be a racist and that racism is evil but if the application of that biblical principle is governed by external philosophies of the wicked world and its false understanding of love and justice then it does not matter that I have affirmed the principle if, in practice, I have rejected the biblical authority that should govern its applications by ignoring what the Bible means by justice and love. In other words, the Bible does not just have authority over the principles we believe. It has authority over the applications of those principles.

If I end up, therefore, being unjust by applying a biblical principle like "racism is evil" by utilizing a worldly philosophy like Critical Race Theory, then I have actually undertaken a demonic task and have lived out an evil that undermines a biblical principle and sometimes even the very principle I often seek to apply.

Likewise, if I strive to apply the principle of sexual purity but apply the principle in a way that is governed by the teleology of the sexual revolution, although I see myself as a righteous man for doing so, I will end up practicing a satanic form of sexuality that denies the authority of the Bible that is no better, and often times worse, than those who deny Christ explicitly and reject the principle. 

We can all agree that Christians should be loving but if love means acceptance of what the Bible says is sin then we have misapplied the principle because we have not subjected our applications to biblical authority. 

It is of no use to say we accept biblical authority in the principle only to deny it by treating our applications as free-for-alls governed by our traditions, experience, current cultural practices and trends, etc. This is what it means to praise God with our lips but to have our actual thinking far from Him. Our Christianity merely becomes theoretical in nature and in practice ends up functioning as a license to do what is right in our own eyes. 

This the antinomianism that Jude warns us against. The antinomians were not denying that Christ was Lord with their confessions. They were denying His lordship over their lives in their applications. It was through what they ended up doing, not what they ended up believing that caused Jude to say that they were not saved and instead reserved for eternal darkness (Jude 4). As Paul said, these antinomians profess to know God but by their deeds they deny Him (Titus 1:16).

This is the greatest danger for all of us who have come to know the truth and profess it. We tend to think that we are done at this point. We tend to fall back on this as though it is all the fruit we need to show that we follow the Lord. It becomes a sort of ID card that we flash to ourselves and others to verify our faithfulness. Yet, the judgment scenes given to us in Scripture seem to focus on our applications of what is commanded rather than what we believe about what is commanded. 

Surely, submission to the principle is needed first. One must submit himself to the authority of the Scripture in all of its principles before he is able to apply anything. But the concern is that our relativistic tendencies within evangelicalism cause us to default to an unbiblical freedom of application that allows us to reject logical applications of the principles of Scripture that are governed, not by our personal desires, but by the whole counsel of God. 

It is our submission to biblical authority in our applications of biblical principles that displays the lordship of God in our lives and guards us from the false righteousness of the Pharisees. All else is made up of empty words and promises.

Halloween Interview at Bone of Bones

 The gals over at Bone of Bones posted a Q&A I gave on occultic phenomenon. You can read Part 1 of it here.

The Real Issue

The Biggest Issue Facing the Church 

Where Women Are Kings

 I don't know about you but when I was a boy, I would go up to the top of my patio roof and jump off, believing I would maybe get the powers of Superman and fly. Surprisingly, I never broke a bone. Not so surprisingly, I never flew either. That's because when you are a child, you have a hard time distinguishing reality from imagination. It's largely because your view of reality is not matured in a comprehensive manner. You actually think it might be possible to step off the roof and fly. You actually think it might be possible to call an object with the force like Luke calls for his lightsaber in Star Wars. That's because you're a child and have not learned enough yet to know that these things are a fiction created for the purpose of entertainment and escape from reality, but they are not reality themselves.

You see, in our stories, people can actually fly, they can lift buses with one hand, they can be shot with five arrows through their chests and continue on like nothing happened, and women can beat up men. That's because you make up anything for a story. You can even twist details so that incredibly evil people are heroes, but why would you?

In the new movie The Woman King, we are told that the Dahomey tribe had a female warrior unit called the Agojie. They were brave, valiant, noble people who would fight the white man who was trying to enslave black people. It's so inspiring and makes you want to hate those evil white people even more than you already do. The problem, as many of you know already, is that this is a complete fiction. In fact, not only is it a lie, it is the opposite of the truth. 

You see, the Dahomey tribe was one of the most violent and disgusting tribes on the planet. They went into other African tribes, brutally murdered or sacrificed (yes, the practiced human sacrifice) anyone they couldn't sell as a slave, and then sold everyone else into slavery. In other words, they were the bad guys. The white people that they fought were the French who had gone into Africa to end the slave trade. Yes, the bad white people were sacrificing, not other black people like the Dahomey, but themselves in order to end the evil slave-trade that the Dahomey were trying to perpetuate. 

So why was this history taken and twisted to tell us, and especially everyone who isn't going to bother to pick up a history book, that "white men bad, intersectional people good/"? Well, I think you already know that answer to that, as it's pretty much in the question. 

You see, reality doesn't support the fictional narrative that has been constructed by modern Neo-Marxists (e.g.., people who see through the lens of oppressed and oppressor) because all sorts of people are evil and all sorts of people are moved to do good. That means that all sorts of white people are evil and moved to do good and all sorts of black people are evil and moved to do good. No one is bad because they are a particular color and no one is moved to good because they are a particular color. That's obvious to those of us who have acquired a mature and comprehensive view of reality but the children apparently are still jumping off of the building even when told that flying humans are not a thing. Nor are women who should be warriors. The French wiped them out in a couple hours of fighting where most warfare takes days, months and years to come to a resolution.

Imagine what good it would have done to show the actual history here. It would have demonstrated the point to a young generation that has been brainwashed to believe that they should hate people because of the color of their skin that people cannot be put into categories of good and evil based upon external features. It's hard to hate people that gave their lives to save you and love people who brutally murdered, raped, sacrificed, and enslaved you but in the movies all things are possible. And all things are, but why do it?

The simple answer should bring a chill down our spines. Because this movie is all the evidence we need to make the case that there are a large amount of influential people in our culture who are actively working toward genocide. When you cannot even acknowledge that the people who did evil to you are evil but must present them as heroes and you cannot even see the people who did good to you as worthy of your honorable remembrance, you have set your mind to destroy them. 

I wish the fiction here was merely telling us of superhumans and 120 pound women who can beat up 300 pound men but it isn't. This is genocidal propaganda. To be sure, like all genocidal propaganda, it does not always have an immediate effect. Instead, it works off of already existing fears and animosity that exists in the culture. It functions off of the idea that there are oppressors and there is no redeemable characteristic in them. They are just people who need to be resisted and destroyed. The oppressed, of course, are always in the right. They are always the good guys even when they are the bad guys because the oppressors are always the bad guys even when they are the good guys.

That doesn't mean that there weren't white bad guys and black good guys within the battles over the Transatlantic slave trade. There were and that is the point. It had nothing to do with the color of one's skin. There are bad guys and good guys on both sides because that is the way reality works. Only the stories of children make a fiction of that reality.