How to be a 'True Christian'--When There's No Such Thing as Truth

By Lee Duigon
MichNews.com
http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_9209.shtml

Over the past several months, angry leftist e-mailers have been instructing me in how to be a Christian. Not that the Christian faith is true, mind you. After all, no one's set of beliefs is objectively "true." Except theirs.

I don't understand why atheists and moral relativists should want to set me straight about Christianity. But I'm beginning to grasp their theology, and I can now identify some highlights of the version of Christianity they want me to believe in.

1. Make no moral judgments whatsoever--unless they're directed against George Bush, the United States, capitalism, heterosexual white males, evangelical Christians, Republicans, the Boy Scouts, and anyone or anything else targeted by the Left. Everyone's morality is "right for him," unless it's wrong.

2. The essence of Christianity is the use of coercion to redistribute wealth. If you can't find Bible verses to support this, fall back on the other Sacred Writings of the Left: the New York Times, the Nation, Marx and Engels, etc.

3. There is no such thing as sexual morality or immorality, and to say otherwise is immoral. If you have any trouble with the logic of this statement, you're not alone.

4. It's self-righteous and evil to believe that the Bible is the only authoritative source of truth, when everybody knows that Michael Moore, Joan Baez, Cindy Sheehan, and Jimmy Carter have that honor. In fact, every single Senate Democrat is an oracle.

5. A real Christian believes that all religions are equally true. For that matter, so does an atheist.

6. Defending the United States is always wrong, unless a Democrat is in the White House. You "support the troops" by insisting that they are engaged in a corrupt and immoral enterprise, dying for nothing, massacring civilians and torturing prisoners on a scale not seen since the Third Reich--and, of course, identifying the "Iraqi insurgents" (especially the ones from Syria and Saudi Arabia) as the good guys and rooting for them to defeat the U.S. Army. That's how a true Christian supports the troops, according to my advisers.

Moral relativists identify conservative Christians as immoral. The fact that logical consistency would forbid them to brand even the Spanish Inquisition as immoral is a fact they consistently ignore.

Yes, there are rational and even Biblical grounds for dissenting from America's current policy of trying to "democratize" the Arab world. There has always been a Christian calling to relieve the poor--and we might well ask what effort along those lines the secular Left has ever mounted to compare with the steadfast labors of the Salvation Army.

But when it comes to taking religious instruction from the Grey Ponytail Brigade--thanks, but no thanks.

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Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu.

The Validity of Biblical Law

By R.J. Rushdoony
Reprinted with Permission

A central characteristic of the churches and of modern preaching and Biblical teaching is antinomianism, an anti-law position. The antinomian believes that faith frees the Christian from the law, so that he is not outside the law but is rather dead to the law. There is no warrant whatsoever in Scripture for antinomianism. The expression, “dead to the law,” is indeed in Scripture (Gal. 2:9; Rom. 7:4), but it has reference to the believer in relationship to the atoning work of Christ as the believer's representative and substitute; the believer is dead to the law as an indictment, a legal sentence of death against him, Christ having died for him, but the believer is alive to the law as the righteousness of God. The purpose of Christ's atoning work was to restore man to a position of covenant-keeping instead of covenant-­breaking, to enable man to keep the law by freeing man “from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2), “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us” (Rom. 8:4). Man is restored to a position of law-­keeping. The law thus has a position of centrality in man's indictment (as a sentence of death against man the sinner), in man's redemption (in that Christ died, Who although the perfect law-keeper as the new Adam, died as man's substitute), and in man's sanctification (in that man grows in grace as he grows in law-keeping, for the law is the way of sanctification).

Man as covenant-breaker is in “enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7) and is subject to “the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8: 2), whereas the believer is under “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ” (Rom. 8: 2). The law is one law, the law of God. To the man on death row in a prison, the law is death; to the godly man, the same law which places another on death row is life, in that it protects him and his property from criminals. Without law, society would collapse into anarchy and fall into the hands of hoodlums. The faithful and full execution of the law is death to the murderer but life to the godly. Similarly, the law in its judgment upon God's enemies is death; the law in its sustaining care and blessings is for the law-abiding a principle of life.

God, in creating man, ordered him to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over the earth (Gen. 1: 28). Man, in attempting to establish separate dominion and autonomous jurisdiction over the earth (Gen. 3: 5), fell into sin and death. God, in order to re-establish the Kingdom of God, called Abraham, and then Israel, to be His people, to subdue the earth, and to exercise dominion under God. The law, as given through Moses, established the laws of godly society, of true develop­ment for man under God, and the prophets repeatedly recalled Israel to this purpose.

The purpose of Christ's coming was in terms of this same creation mandate. Christ as the new Adam (I Cor. 15:45) kept the law per­fectly. As the sin-bearer of the elect, Christ died to make atonement for their sins, to restore them to their position of righteousness under God. The redeemed are recalled to the original purpose of man, to exercise dominion under God, to be covenant-keepers, and to fulfill “the righteousness of the law” (Rom. 8:4). The law remains central to God's purpose. Man has been re-established into God's original purpose and calling. Man's justification is by the grace of God in Jesus Christ; man's sanctification is by means of the law of God.

As the new chosen people of God, the Christians are commanded to do that which Adam in Eden, and Israel in Canaan, failed to do. One and the same covenant, under differing administrations, still prevails. Man is summoned to create the society God requires. The determination of man and of history is from God, but the reference of God's law is to this world. “To be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Rom. 8: 6) , and to be spiritually minded does not mean to be other-worldly but to apply the mandates of the written word under the guidance of the Spirit to this world.

Lawless Christianity is a contradiction in terms: it is anti-Christian. The purpose of grace is not to set aside the law but to fulfill the law and to enable man to keep the law. If the law was so serious in the sight of God that it would require the death of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, to make atonement for man's sin, it seems strange for God then to proceed to abandon the law! The goal of the law is not law­lessness, nor the purpose of grace a lawless contempt of the giver of grace.

The increasing breakdown of law and order must first of all be attributed to the churches and their persistent antinomianism. If the churches are lax with respect to the law, will not the people follow suit? And civil law cannot be separated from Biblical law, for the Biblical doctrine of law includes all law, civil, ecclesiastical, societal, familial, and all other forms of law. The social order which despises God's law places itself on death row: it is marked for judgment.[1]

[1] Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law Phillipsburg, NJ: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co, 1973, p 2-4

Why We Must Preach Jesus As Lord

By David Alan Black

The dawn of the third millennium has seen discernment fly out of the Christian window. This is especially true, it seems to me, in the area of evangelism. Health and wealth preachers have gained a wide audience at home and abroad, but they do not obey the Scriptures. Then there are those who preach Jesus as Savior and leave it there. What about the lordship of Christ?

The consistent theme of New Testament preaching is the lordship of Jesus Christ. Note the following examples:

• “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).
• “God has made this same Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).
• “For we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord” (2 Cor. 4:5).
• “As you have therefore received Christ Jesus as Lord, so walk in Him” (Col. 2:6).

Therefore, when the biblical gospel is preached, there will always be an emphasis on the lordship of Christ, not as a second act of consecration, but as the hinge upon which all else rests. Referring to the entire New Testament, Matthew Henry put it this way: “All the grace contained in this book is owing to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior; and, unless we consent to Him as our Lord, we cannot expect any benefit from Him as our Savior.” Similarly, the Willowbank Report of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism stressed the importance of the lordship of Christ (p. 19):

We are clear that the fundamental meaning of conversion is a change of allegiance. Other gods and lords – idolatries every one – previously ruled over us. But now Jesus Christ is Lord. The governing principle of the converted life is that it is lived under the lordship of Christ or (for it comes to the same thing) in the Kingdom of God. His authority over us is total. So this new and liberating allegiance leads inevitably to a reappraisal of every aspect of our lives and in particular of our world-view, our behavior, and our relationships.

It is tragic in our day to witness the loss of this understanding. It is not an idle question to ask, Do our present-day altar calls, with their emphasis on “accepting Jesus as your personal Savior,” conform to the teaching of the Word of God? We are badly deceived if we think our man-centered and needs-based evangelism will issue in lasting fruit. Evangelism is more than saving people from their sins; the scriptural call is to yield one’s entire life, without reserve, to Jesus Christ as Lord.

Those who look in the New Testament for the formula, “Accept Jesus as your personal Savior,” will look in vain. Rather, the biblical gospel calls for “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:21). Let me emphasize again, the New Testament knows nothing of receiving Christ as one’s Savior and then later making Him Lord. Why, then, do we put asunder what God has joined together? Why do we emphasize the blessings of forgiveness but fail to mention what it costs to follow Jesus? Such thinking reflects Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous dictum that a god without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment and to a Christ without a cross!

There are only two categories of people in this world: those who acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and those who do not (1 Cor. 12:3). This is not something about which non-believers should have any doubts!

August 4, 2005

David Alan Black is the editor of http://www.daveblackonline.com/. If you would like to know more about becoming a follower of King Jesus, please feel free to write Dave.

The Last Word's of Godly Men

In the last words of dying men, their true character is often revealed. The facades are torn down; the defenses that we have worked so hard our entire lives to build up are stripped away and our true nature is left bare and exposed to the world. At the same time, when a man dies well and in a manor consistent with his life, we can take it to heart that he really was the man we thought we knew.

Although I never met either R.J. Rushdoony, or Greg Bahnsen, I have the witness of their voluminous works and their last words, both of which attest to the quality of their life and their deep devotion to God and His Son, Jesus Christ.

This morning, I had the honor of reading for the first time R.J. Rushdoony's last "sermon," his last words. Tears came to my eyes as I witnessed, through the his words, a godly man dying the same way he lived. Lying in his bed, surrounded by his family, he died proclaiming the Word of God with strength and passion.

I have also recently had the great privilege of listening to the final sermon given by Dr. Greg Bahnsen in 1995. It is titled "For Me to Live" and is an exposition on Philippians 1:12-27. He delivered this sermon with a full understanding that his life would finally end in only two day's. In this sermon he says:

"Death helps to focus the mind. Death helps to focus the mind, even among believers who have lived their lives for themselves, lived their lives perhaps in quiet or even open defiance of God. When the time of death comes around, all of a sudden, the flippancy, the irreverence, the lack of serious and sober reflection on the meaning of life is gone. And the most defiant of people will be shown to be humbled in the presence of what the Bible has called the last enemy. The one which no one can avoid until the Lord returns."

R.J. Rushdoony and Dr. Bahnsen were two truly great and godly men. As a witness to the influence they had on shaping the lives of so many Christians, festschrifts were written in their honor:

• A Comprehensive Faith: An International Festschrift For Rousas John Rushdoony
• The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen

I pray, that when God calls me home to Heaven, I will die with the same honor and dignity, giving glory to God.

"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
Philippians 1:21 (NASB)