Christianity Was Never Supposed to Be This Weak [Eschatology Matters]

0:00We must ask, seek, and knock, but it is God Himself who roots and builds us up in Christ, who establishes us in the faith. He is the builder of this new temple by the power of the Holy Spirit. In my mind, I shouted, and in the world, the entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. Men have forgotten God. Take heart with Gory Weng, the world view with Alex Cochman, the magistrate with James Baird and Josh Howard, the based boomer podcast with Mike D. Virgilio, the millennial medic with Jacob Glass, down to earth theology with Matt Plett, shadows to substance with George Seor, five new episodes every week. We are the E-M Network. Welcome to the based boomer podcast on the E-M Network, part of the Fight Left Feast Network.

1:20God is doing a glorious work in you and in the world. Some weeks back, our pastor preached on these verses in Colossians 2. Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, so walk in Him, rooted, and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught abounding in Thanksgiving. The sermon was tremendous, especially because it was framed from a reformed perspective that puts our hope in this walk with Jesus firmly in God's sovereign power, not in our own striving. I wrote recently on my blog, we'll put a link in the notes. We must ask, seek, and knock, but it is God Himself who roots and builds us up in Christ, who establishes us in the faith. This is a super natural work of God beyond our abilities. And as the pastor rightly said, Christ is building something glorious in you. He is the builder of this new temple by the power of the Holy Spirit. But for me,

2:24something in the sermon was lacking, which brings me to a consistent bogeyman of mine, pietyism. I always have to remind people I'm not talking about piety, but about a movement started in Lutheran Germany in the 17th century that developed as a response to a cold and overly intellectual Christian faith. The intentions were good, but in teaching a more passionate faith, it turned into a completely personalized one, which ended up turning Christianity into an irrelevant cultural force in the West. What was once a Christian Western civilization, out of which float innumerable blessings, became a secular West where those blessings disappeared. So, given my perspective, when the pastor said, Christ is building something glorious in us, in my mind, I shouted, and in the world. Unfortunately, for the pietyistic mindset, Christian influence in the world, in culture and society in general is, if not irrelevant, because every Christian would love a better, more peaceful,

3:30God-honoring world, but beside the point. And for many, working for Christian cultural influence is a distraction from the only thing that really counts our relationship with God in Christ. Pietyism makes the focus our faith almost totally on the individual and our personal salvation, justification, and sanctification. It completely innovates Christianity's cultural influence, because lay people have no vision whatsoever of cultural transformation, that their faith is supposed to transform the world, thy kingdom come. Innovate is the perfect word for the pietyistic effect on the church, because it means to deprive a force or strength to destroy the vigor of, to weaken. Over the last several hundred years, the church and Christianity have become completely, culturally, irrelevant in the West, and there has been much suffering because of it. With Christianity comes blessing, as God promised Abram four thousand years ago, that through

4:31his offspring, that is Christ, all peoples on the earth would be blessed, when Christianity, Christianity's influence wanes, suffering follows. Russian, dissident, novelist historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, knew firsthand the consequences of the waning Christian cultural influence in his country. In an address, accepting the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, he identified what happens when God disappears from a society and culture. Speaking to the death and destruction brought by communism in Russia in the 20th century, quote, that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, he said, quote, he could not put it more accurately than to repeat, men have forgotten God, that's why all this happened. He used phrases like, quote, deprived of divine dimensions and lacking all divine dimensions, and our godless age, and the entire 20th century is being sucked into

5:32the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. A better description of secularism and its implications and lack of Christian cultural influence could not be found. Men have forgotten God. Speaking of Russian history, he said, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism, its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles and amongst the uneducated its health was threatened. Later in the talk, he talked about the destructive spirit of secularism, destructive indeed, which brings us to a phrase that came to my mind as I was leaving church that day, where there is no vision, the people perish. If you've been a Christian any length of time, this verse will sound familiar. It comes from Proverbs 29-18. The entire chapter is filled with warnings and reminders of two directions a person

6:37and a people can go, one filled with peace and righteousness and justice and blessing or the opposite. What I quoted is from the King James version and is the first half of the verse. Here is the entire verse and also in several different versions. KJV, where there is no vision, the people perish, but he that keep with the law happy is he, and ASB, where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is the one who keeps the law. ESV, where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. In IV, where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint, but blessed is the one who heed's wisdom's instruction. Those four English translations capture well the nuance of the meaning in Hebrew. The word vision comes from a word meaning mental sight, seeing with the mind. One of the frustrating things I learned very early in my Christian life

7:40is how most of the evangelical church sees the Christian faith solely in personal terms. What counts, what is important is that the gospel is all about my personal relationship with Jesus and my personal holiness. Of course, it is very much about that, but it is not only about that. The point of the gospel of Jesus coming to earth, God becoming man to die for the sins of the world, wasn't just to transform individual people, but to transform the entire world. Yes, I know that will only happen fully at the second coming of Christ and his returning for the consummation of all things, the final enemy to be defeated being death. And prior to that, Paul tells us what Christ will be doing, is doing, since he ascended to the right hand of God, 1 Corinthians 15. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. Paul is confirming what the Lord revealed through the psalmist in Psalm 110. The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a

8:47footstool for your feet. Peter further confirms this started happening at Christ first, coming by quoting this verse in the very first Christian sermon in history in Acts 2. Christ isn't just reigning in our hearts or in the church, but in the world. The world the Father gave him all authority over in heaven and on earth. Victory is the vision, not frugal battle against evil, and the justification for victory is God's covenant promises to his people. I am convinced of the centrality of the covenant in God's dealing with humanity. The triune God made a promise to himself in eternity that when the fall happened, he himself would redeem his creation and turn it from the devil's playground to the means of his blessing, the nations. Paradise restored. Because I see the Christian faith through this lens, I always go back to the promises God made upon which we are to stand,

9:48to live and to proclaim. Our confidence isn't in us or our abilities, but in God who blesses those who bear fruit for his glory and our good. These verses should constantly come to our mind as we contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Jude 3. Genesis 3. God said to Satan, and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers, he will crush your head and you will strike his heel. Genesis 12. God said to Abram, I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Genesis 15. God said to Abram, and he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and number the stars. If you are able to number them, then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. Genesis 18, then the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful

10:51nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. Genesis 22. The Lord said to Abraham after he sacrificed Isaac, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me. Genesis 26. God to Isaac, I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed. The word blessed or its variations is used some 65 times in the first book of scripture. The foundational work upon which our faith is based, and as these verses indicate, it's not merely blessing to God's people to the church in New Testament terms, but to nations. Never was our faith meant to be solely for us. Even Jesus in giving His disciples a charge before He ascended to

11:54the right hand of God indicated what He had accomplished was not merely for individuals or the church, but for the nations were all familiar with it. Then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. And no, this does not mean to just disciple individuals within nations, but to baptize the nations themselves, to see Christianity permeate every nook and cranny of the society and culture. A vision of victory. We can look at this in any variety of ways. If we want our nation to be truly blessed, then evil must be defeated, and I will qualify this yet again, all evil will not be defeated on this side of the second coming, but Christ is even now putting

12:59all His enemies under His feet. As Christians, we don't look at the suffering, dysfunction, and sin in our world as if it's inevitable. And there is nothing we can do about it. That's called defeatism. God's covenant promise is blessing, not the proliferation of evil and its horrible effects. Over the last several hundred years because of the rise of pietism, Christianity has become insular and culturally irrelevant, and our societies have suffered for it. The sexual revolution of the sixties happened because while Christians were primarily attending to their souls, secularism became the dominant worldview of the West. And our societies went to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. Proverbs 29-18 tells us why. Let me ask you a question. Do Christians want societies with crime and poverty and broken families, suffering, misery, and premature death? Of course they don't. What is the answer to this? So societies are not in disarray.

14:04The gospel. Christ, God's law, a Christian worldview, Christians loving and serving others, men leading their families, and building things, all men and women fighting for goodness, beauty, and truth. Because where these exist, Christ is. Whether the people in every instance acknowledge Him as their author, we must have a vision of all these blessings as fruit of the gospel. We have to learn, as I said above, how to develop the mental site, seeing these blessings with our minds as the inevitable fruit of the gospel. We're not here to lose, to give the devil the default victory because things look a bit challenging at the moment. It's like your team is down a bunch of runs, and since you're a time traveler, you know the outcome of the game already. And your team wins. Are you going to pout and cop on the attitude when everything is going wrong and everyone is thinking, Devit, defeat is inevitable? No. You know without a shadow of a doubt, it's not. Even if

15:07at the moment things look bad. So you fight on, work, play, proclaim, create, and be a source of blessing to those in your circle of influence. Let's not settle for half a gospel that applies only to the narrow sphere of our personal lives. I read a wonderful book by Ken Gentry called the Greatness of the Great Commission. He explains how the discipling work of the Great Commission goes beyond just us. It aims at the comprehensive application of Christ's authority over men through conversion. As the number of converts increase, this providentially leads to the subsuming under the authority of Christ, whole institutions, cultures, societies, and governments. The authority of Christ isn't just for the church. The proclamation that Jesus' king in the New Testament church had political and cultural ramifications. Because our commission is great, we know God isn't just doing a glorious work in us, but in the world. The fallen world was never

16:08meant to remain the same after Jesus came. Rose from the dead ascended to heaven and sent his Holy Spirit to earth in his people. And it isn't. The reason is that Christians throughout history never saw their mission as merely personal. And their lives reflected that. In writing his book about the Greatness of the Great Commission, Gentry asks some questions, hoping his answers would be hope-inducing vision-expanding and labor-encouraging. Let me repeat that. Be hope-inducing vision-expanding and labor-encouraging. As Christians, we should have a theology of great expectations. For me, that includes post-millennial eschatology. But regardless of our eschatology, we must see ourselves as part of something as big as it gets, even if our part in the process is tiny. As for most of us, it is. The Puritans were world-changers because they believed as Ian

17:10Murray writes in The Puritan Hope that the church, despite all the odds, said against her, was as yet to be an instrument of blessing on a scale far surpassing all that has been previously seen in history. The expectation of success drove their missionary efforts as Murray writes. With this belief in the church's future, the Puritans gained energy and resolution. Had they adopted the short-term view, the problems of the church in their day might justifiably have seemed hopeless, but they faced them with an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity. That says it splendidly and unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity. That is our call as Christians because God is indeed doing a glorious work in us and in the world.

18:14Grace and Truth Records