So What's This All About?

In case you didn't know, I'm in the multi-year-long process of posting a Christian devotional at the TAWG Blog. The TAWG Blog is, and always will be, mostly apolitical. For the most part, Bible-believing Christians will find little to disagree with there. But I also firmly believe that God's word can--and should--inform everything in life, and this should include politics and popular culture. How should we vote? How should we respond to hot topics such as abortion, capital punishment, taxes, and other issues? Which party, if either, is closer to the Biblical ideal? Tony Campolo and Ron Sider, Evangelicals whose political leanings are on the Left, have made the case in several of their writings that God wants his followers to vote politically on the Left more than on the Right. At times, some of them have gone so far as to equate voting on the Left with obedience to Christ, either subtly or not-so-subtly contending that the converse is true as well: If you vote Republican, you're sinning against the Savior.
I don't agree. I think that to the degree they actually resort to the Bible, they're misinterpreting it. With a whole bunch of caveats, I think politically conservative positions are a lot more compatible with the Scriptures than the Leftist positions.
Just to clarify, I would never accuse people who disagree with me--especially siblings in Christ--of what they accuse me of. I don't judge my own heart, much less anyone else's, and I don't equate political disagreement with theological fidelity to God. I have no reason to doubt their love for the Lord and "for the least of these," but I believe that they're sincerely wrong.
So there are two main purposes for this blog. One is to make a case for my political beliefs based on Scripture. The other is a bit more vague, basically to work out my political beliefs and figure out what's based on Scripture and what's based on my own biases. I certainly don't have all the answers. Some of this stuff I'm still figuring out. And I'm certainly open to correction. As long as you make your case civilly and based on Scripture, feel free to make a comment, and I promise I'll post it and consider your arguments thoughtfully and prayerfully. Who knows? Maybe we'll learn a little something from each other.
May God bless our common striving together towards both the "little t" truth and "Big T" Truth. Our watchword here is a line from C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle: "Further up and further in!"

P.S. -- Below on the left is "Topics I've Covered" which lists everything I've posted topically. It's come to my attention that some people would like to see everything just listed for them. If that's you, you can get it here. Thanks to my friend Stephen Young for the tip!

Monday, April 21, 2014

The Fork In The Road: Part Four: What does the O.T. say about this?

            I try to make this a blog not just about politics. The name of this blog is Intersections, and its raison d'être is to work out where politics, pop culture and the Bible meet. In other words, I’m trying to approach my political views, pop culture intake, and cultural trends from a biblical perspective. Am I reading stuff into Scripture that isn’t there? That’s for you to decide. I can honestly say that I’m making the effort, though.
            So does the Bible have anything to say about what we’ve been discussing, this fork in the road between conservatives (“cons”) and liberals ("libs")? Is the Bible more pro-distinctions or against them? For the next few paragraphs I need to credit Dennis Prager, a Jewish talk-show who spent 18 years going through the Torah verse-by-verse in a weekly Bible study. He knows the original Hebrew backwards and forwards, and he’s the one who pointed these things out to me on the radio.
            The first couple of chapters of Genesis are all about separations and distinctions. God starts out by creating the heavens and the earth. The picture Moses presents, however, in vs. 2 is that of chaos, and the Lord quickly begins to sort things out, and that requires separating things one from another. Think of an orderly house and its likely slogan: “A place for everything and everything in its place,” and you get the idea. He separates light from dark, the sky from the waters, the land from water, day from night (by means of the sun and the moon), etc. But a couple of points to consider on this line:

·         The first separation is something you might have missed, a very important starting point to understand our Creator in the very first verse: God and his creation are separate. God and nature are not to be confused with each other. Yes, the Lord inhabits and fills the universe, being omnipresent. But he’s not contained inside nature, and nature is not to be worshipped, nor anything within nature. This was a huge distinction between the Israelites and every other people in history. Everyone else worshipped something in nature: Sky gods, thunder and lightning gods, fertility gods, mountain gods, animal gods, etc. The Bible is utterly unique in that it presents a Creator who is A) alone to be worshiped, and B) moral and just, and who thus expects us to be moral and just in imitation of himself. Nature is not moral or just. Nature abides by one law: The law of the jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and it’s eat or be eaten. There’s no concept of grace or mercy or compassion or justice in nature. We have to get those things from the God who’s described to us in his word. For more on this, see here.

·        We need to focus on another major separation that really deserves its own essay: God creates humanity in his own image/likeness, and as such mankind is unique in all creation. I love my dogs dearly. My wife loves our dogs and cats (I tolerate the cats). But in no way are they created in God’s image, and as such every human being is of infinitely more value than my dog. But the further left you go, the more blurry this distinction gets. You don’t have to go very far into the environmental movement’s fringe before this vital distinction is erased. One of the main godfathers of the modern environmental movement, Peter Singer, famously put it thus: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For more on the Imago Dei, see here. Cons, for the most part, understand this distinction, even if they can’t articulate exactly why from a biblical perspective.

·         And of course in chapter two we see more attention put on the creation of man and woman, and the Lord definitely creates them as distinct from each other. Men and women are to be mutually complementary, and any attempt to blur this distinctive doesn’t come from the Lord’s way of thinking. The cultural normalization of homosexuality, the notion that any perceived differences between male and female are enculturated instead of biological, and pretty much every effort to deny intrinsic differences between the sexes certainly don’t come from an understanding of God’s word.

·         A pattern we see in the rest of the Old Testament Law is that of separation: It regularly separated one thing or time or person from another. There were holy vs. common days, seasons, places, food, and people. Of course everyone is created in God’s image, but that doesn’t mean that the Law didn’t make a distinction between (ritually) clean and unclean people.  Most everyone would be (at least temporarily) unclean at some part of his/her life. Women were ritually unclean for a few days of every month. If you were diagnosed with leprosy, you were unclean and quarantined from the rest of the population. If you touched a dead body, you were unclean for a time. Naturally we as modern-day believers understand these regulations to be time-bound and symbolic of spiritual realities (e.g., leprosy represents the spiritual disease of sin). But that doesn’t erase the underlying principle: Spiritual understanding begins with making proper distinctions.

·         And even the above principle falls into this paradigm of making distinctions. We need to be careful to make proper distinctions. Seeing the difference between obedience and sin? Good distinction. Seeing some difference in value between one skin pigmentation and another, or some intrinsic difference assigned to someone because of their national origin? Illegitimate distinction, to say the least. We’re supposed to even make distinctions between good ones and bad ones.


Well, this is all well and good, Keith, but we’re not under the Old Covenant any more. That’s absolutely correct, but since I’m running long I’ll save that for the next posting. 

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