False Peace
One of the greatest impediments to the work of God's people is professing Christians who deny the disturbing realities about the state of the world.
False peace
From time to time, certain detractors and critics of the EICC, our books, lectures and resources, suggest that we are scare-mongers and conspiracy theorists, paranoid ranters lacking in common sense, and various other charitable and glowing endorsements of like nature. Rarely do we actually hear a coherent argument or receive offer of debate and discussion, be we do hear assaults on our character and lack of intelligence. It is not surprising in the current church climate that this hostility is rarely from non-believers, but consistently from professing Christians. The ‘Christian’ critics’ premise seems to be that things are really not that bad at all. Western culture is basically fine and in fact things are better than in previous Christian eras, like the Puritan age in England or America. We are told the utopian pretensions of the modern state and global politics are overstated, as are all our concerns about economics, the collapse of the family, abortion, criminality, social decadence, the growing persecution of Christians, sexual libertinism and the capture of education by cultural Marxists. In short, there is no real problem, or at least, nothing that needs God’s law-word applied to it – that will have to wait for the second coming. Apparently the humanistic evolutionists and new atheists, the contemporary pagans and Paris radicals (the egalitarian Marxists), have not really impacted culture or the church after all and we are not faced with a new liberalism rife throughout the church that comes in the name of ‘social justice’ and the ‘kingdom of God.’ Rather, we have lots of wonderful ‘freedom’ in our culture and the biblical view of these socio-cultural matters that the EICC is arguing for is repressive and intolerant. “Peace, peace,” they say, but in fact there is no peace (Jer. 6:14). Like dumb dogs that can’t bark a warning, such people are willfully blind to the lawlessness and covenant breaking all around them, thus unable to see the wood for the trees, often stuck in self-made ivory towers, they are irrelevant to the crisis and opportunity of our age (Is. 6:10). One is forced to ask what it will take before Christians take the increasing decline of the church and deepening fall of our civilization seriously.
I recently returned from speaking in Cambridge, U.K at an academy for young Christians going into vocations in the public sphere. These included law, medicine, politics, education and so forth. As I listened to and chatted with the other speakers, including some leading lawyers (who had been before the British supreme court and European Court with various cases), about what is happening in Britain and Europe with regard to social decay, declining freedom for believers, euthanasia, abortion, same sex ‘marriage’ and judicial corruption and incompetence, it would have been easy to despair for our children in the West. Now we can never give in to such a temptation of course, for the victory that overcomes the world is our faith (1 Jn. 5:4) and the very presence of all these students committed to applying Christ’s lordship to all of life was profoundly heartening. Nonetheless, the examples of our present decay are weekly available for all to read.
For example, just recently the British Telegraph ran a story concerning the growing openness to incest in Europe and its decriminalization. According to the article, anti-incest laws in Germany could be scrapped after a government-backed group said relationships between brothers and sisters should be legal. In fact the German Ethics Council has called incest a "fundamental right.” Essentially, laws banning incest between brothers and sisters in Germany could potentially be scrapped after a government ethics committee said that they were an “unacceptable intrusion into the right to sexual self-determination.” Again according to the article, “Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.” We see here that cultural elites believe the protection of the family by law is merely an “abstract idea” and sexual libertinism more important. Once the creational, Christian norm of heterosexual marriage is abandoned in favor of pagan concepts of human sexuality, anything becomes permissible.
Or take Toronto. A recent Toronto PFLAG’s inclusive poster campaign went viral according to Justin Skinner of the City Centre Mirror on August 26th, 2014. He tells us that what began as a campaign designed to open the minds of Toronto students to their LGBTQ peers has begun to make waves all over the world:
Toronto Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) started a poster campaign in the fall of 2012, with local middle schools and high schools receiving copies of the posters. The campaign features two posters, one with a group of teen boys with the caption “He’s gay and we’re cool with that” and another with a group of teen girls reading “She’s gay and we’re cool with that.”… “We sent the posters out through the TDSB and said ‘if you want additional posters or you want us to come and speak at your school, give us a call,’” said Toronto PFLAG president Anne Creighton. “We started getting a lot of calls and the campaign was so successful, we decided to run the program the following year.” While it was no surprise the posters caught on in the Toronto area, Toronto PFLAG was pleasantly surprised when they began getting requests for the posters from further and further away… Larger orders have come in from Vancouver, Washington, D.C. and other locales… While the posters were originally targeted at middle school and high school students, Creighton noted requests have come in for younger students, as well, with some elementary schools requesting the materials. Naturally, Toronto PFLAG was happy to help spread the message of inclusiveness to younger kids.
This is now typical of Toronto, other large cities in Canada and throughout the West. These accounts and many like them proliferate almost daily. It is the mopping up campaign of a pagan cultural revolution. Those who resist are now at risk of prison terms or losing their job. I spoke with a woman in Cambridge, an occupational therapist, fired for praying with a colleague who requested it. From a lawyer, I heard about others facing the possibility of a prison sentence for reading a New Testament passage in the street.
The false peace that comes from burying one’s head in the sand, or quiet complicity with lawlessness, is no peace at all and only invites God’s judgment. Contemporary Christian pedantry wears the garb of righteousness, humility and love for people, whilst throwing around its wild condemnation of Christians upholding the material authority of the Word of God for church, family, law, politics, education, and business – in short for culture. Let them bluster all they will – by their fruits you will know them. Our task is faithfulness to God in a faithless age and he will judge every man, Christians included, with righteousness according to their deeds (1 Pt. 1:17). And let us never forget the words of our Lord as we bring His word to bear in faith, boldness and humility in our time: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:17-20).