“Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors.” —Psalm 119:24

An earthquake rattled the San Francisco Bay Area yesterday. The strongest quake the region has seen in eight years happened on the Calaveras Fault, one of eight major faults in the Bay Area and a branch of the San Andreas fault line. The event is thus a reminder that earthquakes do not create faults in the earth—they reveal them.

This fact applies to more than geology.

The nineteen-year-old gunman who killed two people and wounded several others at his former St. Louis high school left a handwritten note saying, “I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life.” According to St. Louis Police Commissioner Michael Sack, “This was the perfect storm for a mass shooter.”

In other news, 2022 has set a record for border crossings and migrant deaths. A man who drove an SUV into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin last November has been found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide. Authorities are investigating a woman’s claim in Iowa that her late father was a prolific serial killer who murdered dozens of people over several decades.

And the body of a little boy who was found stuffed inside a suitcase in Indiana has been identified. Local police have announced an arrest, with another suspect still at large.

“A republic, if you can keep it”

The moral challenges we face reveal the foundational fissures created by our postmodern, post-Christian rejection of biblical truth and morality. This crisis was predictable and was, in fact, predicted.

Adam Smith is considered to be the “father of capitalism.” In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he advocated for a society in which “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men” (my emphasis).

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he added: “Upon the tolerable observance of these duties [such as justice, truth, chastity, and fidelity] depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.” George Mason University economist Erik W. Matson comments: “It is liberty, in Smith’s view, that is at the heart of capitalism, and at the heart of liberty lies commitment to the good of humankind.”

In his magisterial work, Democracy in America, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville explained that this focus on personal morality is “how the Americans combat individualism by the principle of self-interest rightly understood.” He noted that this principle “suggests daily small acts of self-denial” and disciplines us “in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, [and] self-command,” drawing us toward “virtue by the will.”

I often state that America’s founders believed consensual morality to be essential to self-governance. Our constitutional checks and balances can only go so far in preserving and advancing our democracy. Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” requires a people capable of self-governance. As Benjamin Franklin famously stated when asked what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 created, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

And so, once again we see that advancing biblical morality is vital to our secular culture.

“Your servant will meditate on your statutes”

Therapists remind us that we cannot change the minds of others merely through the explanation of facts. If people do not want to change, they are unlikely to change.

However, we can demonstrate the transforming personal relevance of biblical truth so fully and powerfully that others may want what we have. As we have noted this week, living boldly and courageously for our Lord is vital to our souls and to our culture.

As an example and a model, consider Psalm 119:23–24: “Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors.” “Princes” in this context refers to rulers or commanders of the Jewish people. They “sit plotting” against the psalmist—the phrase means that they have gathered together, perhaps behind closed doors, to plan harm against the writer.

Nonetheless, he calls himself God’s “servant”—the word refers to a bondservant or slave, one who must do what his master requests whether he wants to or not. As God’s servant he will “meditate on your statutes”—the Hebrew means that he will focus his attention fully on God’s decrees.

Despite the opposition he faces from his nation’s leaders, the writer makes this commitment happily: “Your testimonies are my delight” (v. 24a), truth in which he finds great joy and pleasure. Furthermore, he will do what these “testimonies” teach: “They are my counselors” (v. 24b).

“Make an effort to be noble”

Such fidelity to biblical truth is no guarantee that we will not be persecuted by those who reject such truth. Nevertheless, the psalmist refused to be deterred from meditating on God’s statutes and enacting them in his life each day.

Dead fish float with the current; live fish swim upstream. God sees every act of unpopular obedience and will reward it forever. Just as he honored “the sons of Zadok, who kept my charge, who did not go astray when the people of Israel went astray, as the Levites did” (Ezekiel 48:11), so he will reward our faithfulness to his word and will.

Oswald Chambers noted, “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to live the noble life of a disciple of Jesus in actual things. It is always necessary to make an effort to be noble.”

How noble will you be today?

Denison Forum

The Christmas shopping season is already going strong. Christmas decorations are up in stores and on some houses as well. In that context, I have good news and bad news regarding Santa Claus.

The good news: we now have archaeological evidence that he is real. The bad news: this evidence comes in the form of a tomb that has just been discovered. In other words, he’s real but he’s dead.

The historic Santa Claus was Saint Nicholas of Myra, a bishop who lived from AD 270 to 343. The Santa Claus story was based on his reputed ministry of distributing gifts to the poor and the needy. Now archaeologists say they have discovered his tomb beneath St. Nicholas Church in Demre, a town in the Turkish province of Antalya.

The church is named for him, of course, but it had been thought that his bones were moved to Italy during the First Crusade in the eleventh century. However, during a routine survey this month, his tomb was found beneath the church’s floor mosaic. You can visit the church, though you will not see St. Nicholas’s actual sarcophagus since it has not yet been excavated.

Demre is 3,730 miles from the North Pole. Few of us can visit Santa up there, but every year pilgrims from around the world flock to his church in Turkey, where they pack the sanctuary for a December service. Father Amvrosios Chorozidis, who leads the liturgy, explains: “In the West, we seem to have everything, but in fact we have a lack of love in our hearts, so we need someone to visit us even once a year, to give us that love.”

“Starve to death or freeze to death”

Father Chorozidis could have been reading the morning news.

A health teacher killed in the south St. Louis school shooting “loved her students,” as her daughter told reporters. The number of school shootings in the US has already passed the record set in 2021, with more than two months left. In related news, after a series of school shootings, the state of Texas is sending public school students home with DNA kits designed to help parents identify their children “in case of an emergency.”

As Rishi Sunak takes over as prime minister, millions of elderly Brits are facing an escalating cost-of-living crisis with no apparent end in sight. “Starve to death or freeze to death” is the way one person described her dilemma. And a man who has been arrested three times for murder and was released on parole in 2020 is now accused of killing a fourth individual in California.

According to a recent poll, only 9 percent of Americans think our democracy is working “extremely” or “very well.” Americans’ trust in the media remains near a record low as well.

In such struggling times, you and I have a strangely paradoxical role to play in God’s providence.

Why God has blessed America

Years ago, a Cuban pastor friend shared with me his belief that God has blessed America so America’s Christians could bless the world. He cited our church’s ministry in his country as an example of Christian generosity to those in need. His logic makes sense: God would entrust resources to those who would use them as he intends.

However, there is another dimension to this calculus: I also believe that God has blessed America because America has blessed God’s people.

We enjoy constitutionally enshrined religious freedoms that are virtually unprecedented across history. Christians have been welcome and active in our governance on federal, state, and local levels since our nation’s founding. For most of America’s history, being a public Christian was a good thing in our culture.

Tragically, as I have written often in recent years, this is changing. Christians are increasingly being castigated as intolerant, oppressive, and even dangerous to society. Our religious freedoms are under unprecedented attack. Each day’s news brings another story of a Christian who loses their job or is otherwise “canceled” because of their faith.

Does this mean that our country may face God’s judgment if it persists in judging and oppressing his people?

“What you do makes a difference”

In Revelation 18 we read, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (v. 2). Most scholars consider this to be an allusion to Rome, “the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18). Among the reasons for his judgment we read this indictment: “In her was found the blood of prophets and of saints” (Revelation 18:24).

Jesus grieved over Jerusalem as “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it” (Matthew 23:37). As a result, he warned, “your house is left to you desolate” (v. 38). Luke similarly tells us that Jesus “wept” over the city, lamenting, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:41–42).

Consequently, the courageous public faith we have been discussing this week is vital not only for the people we influence but for the larger trajectory of our nation.

God’s mandate to his exiled people in Babylon speaks to our exiled position in our secularized culture: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lᴏʀᴅ on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). As we help people know and love our Lord, our influence benefits them in this life and the next. Their transformed lives benefit us as well. And together, we reverse our cultural trajectory before it is too late.

Dr. Jane Goodall observed: “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Choose wisely today.

Denison Forum

 “There is no doubt we face profound economic challenges. We now need stability and unity, and I will make it my utmost priority to bring my party and country together.” This was the promise made Monday by Rishi Sunak, who today will become Britain’s third prime minister in seven weeks. As the New York Times reports, Sunak will also be the youngest prime minister in two centuries and the first person of Hindu faith to achieve the UK’s highest elected office.

However, the new prime minister faces a personal challenge that his predecessors did not: his personal wealth is more than double that of King Charles III, constituting what may be the first time in history that the residents of Downing Street are richer than those of Buckingham Palace.

Here’s why this is a problem: Sunak has ascended to his nation’s highest office at a time when the UK has more food banks than McDonald’s and many are being forced to choose between eating and heating their homes. Critics fear that Sunak cannot identify with the people he will lead and the rising challenges they face.

The new prime minister wants to lead Britain to “stability and unity,” but as Cornel West noted, “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.” I would amend his wise observation: You cannot lead the people if they don’t believe you love them. No matter your claims to care about their challenges and empathize with their pain, if they consider you to be out of touch with their world, they’ll conclude that you cannot understand their problems.

And if you cannot understand a problem, you cannot solve it.

Is America “irredeemably woke”?

This fact helps explain America’s growing political animosity.

According to a new poll reported by NBC News, “80 percent of Democrats and Republicans believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” In his latest Dispatch article, David French explains the two “sides” of this conflict in ways that underscore the deep cultural chasm bisecting our national soul.

He reports that the far left believes “America was a racist, colonial power. It began as a slave empire, expanded through conquest and genocide, and then—even as it cast itself as a liberator in the world wars and Cold War—propped up vicious tyrants in the name of liberty.

“In this telling, all of the bad aspects of American history were highlighted, amplified, sometimes exaggerated or even fabricated, and then repeated endlessly to create a picture of a nation in whose DNA racism and conquest were inescapably imprinted. The solution to the crisis of America’s past and present was nothing less than revolution—a dismantling of America’s classic liberal founding and its replacement with illiberal structures that used the force of law and government to uproot entrenched power structures and re-order society from the top down.”

By contrast, the far right “sees America as irredeemably woke. All of the institutions of American life are ‘captured’ by the left—from the academy, to corporate America, to the military, to pop culture. Even our churches and religious schools are infected by wokeism.”

Neither side understands the other or wants to resolve this conflict through compassion and compromise. To the contrary, French writes, “The radical left seethes with fury at the America that was and believes that the America that is cannot escape its horrific past, at least not without revolutionary change. The radical right longs for the America that was, loathes the America that is, and believes the America that will be is doomed, at least not without revolutionary change.”

Three quintessential Roman qualities

What both sides are missing is the theological fact that humans cannot change human nature. If either side of our political divide got everything they wanted, our deepest problems would remain. This is because we are at our most primal level fallen sinners (Romans 3:23) who desperately need redemption and transformation we cannot effect (cf. Jeremiah 17:9).

A drowning man cannot save other drowning victims, much less himself.

The ancient Romans tried. In his remarkable biography of Julius Caesar I referenced yesterday, historian Adrian Goldsworthy reports that “what it meant to be Roman” included “such quintessentially Roman qualities as dignitas, pietas, and virtus.” Dignitas was “the sober bearing that displayed openly the importance and responsibility of a man and so commanded respect.” Pietas “embraced not merely respect for the gods, but for family and parents and the law and traditions of the Republic.” Virtus embraced “not simply physical bravery, but confidence, moral courage, and the skills required by both soldier and commander.”

Dignity, piety, and virtue are admirable foundation stones on which to build a flourishing society. But as Roman history proves, humans are incapable of exercising these values consistently. The Republic gave way to an Empire that eventually collapsed when its external enemies proved stronger than its internal character.

Will America suffer the same fate?

“We are ambassadors for Christ”

Today’s conversation underscores the urgent need for our secularized culture to turn to the God who alone can transform our sinful hearts and heal our divided nation. Remember his promise: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17, my emphasis).

Our role in such transformation is clear: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (vv. 18–19).

As a result, “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (v. 20).

An ambassador “lives in a foreign country and represents his or her own country’s interests there.”

By this definition, will you be an ambassador for Christ today?

Denison Forum