The Black Eyed Peas - Where is the love.
I want to speak pastorally (Galatians 6:2) today, so let me begin with this.
Just yesterday, author Laura Dodsworth spoke on a UK national radio channel about an NHS nurse (who wished to remain anonymous at present) - a lady who has dedicated her entire working life of many decades to the care of others. Laura comments on just how wise this lady is in respect to the issues involved (and how others who have read her full story quickly wanted to step in and help).
After almost two years of service amidst the present crisis, this nurse faces a point of true trial. She has very sincere reservations about being jabbed, because of very clear convictions. She has already had the virus, and has confirmed anti-bodies against it. She understands that the current vaccination treatments cannot provide immunity, or even prevent transmission to others.
Clearly, a moment is approaching when, like UK care workers this week, she is going to have to take her leave… and that raises another major issue.
How can we allow a situation to develop where we, in effect, create a two-tier society?
Interestingly, Laura notes how one of the very first people to contact her in response to this story was a minister, asking if he could meet with the nurse to offer support.
So, my question to each of us is how do we, as church, step into this gap?
How do we seek to aid the weak, those now being made powerless by others?And how should such an intervention be shaped by our fundamental thinking about what we are - what role we are meant to be taking right now?
It’s as we keep these key things in mind that I want to set down these following, painful yet essential truths about what has ‘overtaken’ us - not simply to rebuke, but, as is so often the case in the history of God’s people, to bruise and break in order to bind and to heal, so please accept this admonition in that intent.
"In almost every place where the reformation flourished there was not only religious noncompliance; there was civil disobedience as well".
Francis Schaeffer - A Christian Manifesto.
"Professing Christians who set aside the Lordship of Christ", notes Dr Joe Boot, "instead following tempered pietistic patterns of thinking are, unsurprisingly, "sheep-like" in their behaviour and, most telling, in their response toward the state". And there is, sadly, no limit to the foolishnes of those who follow men rather than Christ the Lord when this ensues, because there no reigning-in of such abuse of power – they are indeed, like sheep before a butcher, noted William Tyndale,to be sheared and torn by others.
The issues may have become coloured by the contemporary, but the focus has not actually changed at all.
As Dr Boot continues - "False piety and virtue signalling manifest in a pharisaic insistence and compliance with mask mandates, social distancing, self-imprisonment and a quasi-religious hope in experimental vaccines, lockdowns, and various other restrictions".
To be seen openly complying with and strongly supporting all these self-denying and self-sacrificing measures is regarded as a form of social righteousness.
If particular action(s) were simply to aid and assist in a tried and trusted fashion - like safety belts in cars - employing them would indeed be useful, even imperative in particular circumstances, but when we are dealing with materials where the reality is far from sure and certain, it is clearly dangerous for us to simply condone what is being stated to be ‘good’ (how many “teachers" have worked evil inside the faith on that premise!)
Dr Boot continues - "In short, there is an atmosphere of societal ‘atonement’ about the whole enterprise. A culture in the grip of guilt and shame that rejects the atonement of Jesus Christ will be quick to leap at various forms of self-atonement in the hope of expiating their burdens by such individual sacrifice". The church, tied to such ends, effectively becomes an extension of the secular will, which, by various means, incubates a belief in self vindication through external actions, deemed ‘righteous’ and crossed in the mainstream at great peril.
All of this is possible because Christians loose sight of the fact that the source and authority for all key activity in life is not the various institutions devised to assist and enhance the well-being of daily life, but the manifold gifts and blessings given to us exclusively by God Himself (Ephesians 4:8), which society, in reality, has no right to take away.
Adhering to some required social or medical advice for a specified period of time and may indeed be prudent, but this should in no manner open a means whereby our lives then become solely and entirely directed by such.
Good medicine has to be about so much more than ‘influencing’ or even curing a disease - the genuine well-being of the patient should be paramount.
Whilst the public focus of the secular in this crisis has been almost entirely upon keeping some “alive”, the church has, in effect, mis-placed the vital truth that The Lord, is indeed, “Lord over all” -“God has made Him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2 2:36). This, as Schaeffer and others has noted, has blighted mainstream evangelical thinking for decades, allowing for either a ‘hyper-spirituality’ or a social pietism to become the mainstream forms of religious expression in the Western church, both consequences of a lack of trust in the Biblical faith to be pivotally relevant to the entire sphere of existence.
The consequences of this have become truly evident in this crisis, where a ‘sanitised secularism’ has dominated the ‘spiritual’ response to the troubles, and where any kind of deeper examination of this naive approach, as required, indeed commanded, by scripture, (1 Peter 4:7), has been almost entirely judged as unnecessary, and out of place. This has allowed an immersion into an ideology of what can only be defined as cultural eugenics, via a “informed” media cycle which has fed comprehensive devastation.
The justification by church ministers for such an approach is their employment of their own modified version of the official policy’s “precautionary principle” - that it is wise to assume the very best will result from your ‘careful’ actions - and that the very worse would arise if you sought to stray from such a golden rule. The ‘soul’, indeed, along with the body, is only made well when the ‘care' of the faith is vitally married to the insatiable requirements of the NHS!
This would, perhaps, be at least credible in some measure if numerous impositions burdened upon the people at large had not proved so callous and wicked in their consequences. Christ’s Lordship, therefore, is practically defined as subservient (and thereby irrelevant) before the authority of such controls.
The “leaven” (Luke 12:1) has indeed, left so many 'attending church' poor, blind, wretched and naked. Bared by the state.
So, nearly two years on, what has come about from this woeful murdering?
Douglas Wilson summarised it neatly in a current podcast:
"It’s the case that ‘big-box’ evangelicalism, inculcating that “niceness” vibe, has been refusing to teach its people anything that might remotely equip them for what they are now facing. The (church’s)‘immune system’has not been working at all. Some have recalled that they are meant to be fighting off something, so, (and here’s where ‘the few’ come in), it has often rounded on those it was supposed to be protecting
There are those who have sought to stand up to all this madness, to fight off this leviathan with entirely inadequate means…
So, we (the church), had our trained ‘elite units’, well-stocked armouries, state of the art weapons, monetary backing and more, and, after this stalwart company just up’ed and quit the field, a rag-tag assemblage showed up instead with wooden swords and trash cans for shields, having no choice - somebody had to stand and face the great dragon, and as soon as they took to the field, they found themselves being attacked - by the church’s elite units!"
The way back from here is not an easy one. The uneasy alliance with the ‘Philistines’may be breakable for some, at cost, but only if the Prophetic voice and direction of the David-like motley crew rejects the call to be encased in Saul’s over-sized armour (1 Samuel 17:38-40….‘Weapons’that have proved so ineffective so far)! and takes to the field, naked, beside the armour of God.
These denounced warriors will not flinch to call it like it is -‘who is this uncircumcised pagan, that he should defy the army of the living God?’. Evil will be called out and cast down.
Such an hour is most certainly close.
Thomas Cranmer, the architect of so much of English Protestantism, found a recovery of his faith and courage, and so clothed, was taken to the flames.
William Tyndale, the furnisher of the English scriptures, prayed with his last breath for an opening of blind eyes.
Martin Luther, after a fretful night before the crucible, stood firm before princes and powers on the immovable truth of Christ and His unchanging, eternal authority over all.
Such is the validity of the faith.
So, dear ones, for whom Christ has given all, I would beseech you to see, to know, and to do, as the Apostle charges us, so that we might indeed be presented on that day as pure and chaste, that we unmask the beguiling of the hour, and lead one another back into the sincere and good union with Christ, escaping that ‘other’ Jesus garbed in the medical coat of state, insidiously seeding a very different spirit amongst us that leads us to hope and trust in an escape the gospel does not offer. Let us remind ourselves how readily we can entertain such violence because of the religiousness of our own souls (2 Corinthians 11: 3 and 4).
In the surety of that truth, let us earnestly stand in this most trying hour.
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