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Daily Broadside | Calling Evil “Evil” in a World Where Truth is Relative

Daily Verse | 1 Kings 18:21
“How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

Monday’s Reading: 1 Kings 20-22

Monday and the start of a new week. But, it’s not just any week—it’s Holy Week. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the start of Jesus’ final week as his meeting with the cross narrowed from three years to seven days. It was out of obedience to his Father’s will that he moved inexorably toward his death.

“I will not speak with you much longer, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me, but the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me.”

John 14:30-31

I was inspired by something my pastor said yesterday prior to the message. Without getting detailed at all, he simply drew attention to the world in which our children are growing up, and said something along the lines of, “Our children are under attack. It is evil, and it is exactly what the enemy would do.”

What he was likely referring to is what I wrote about here last week. The gatekeepers at our public schools have allowed an infestation of disturbed, biologically-confused men and women to influence our children at the very youngest and innocent of ages right through college. Our children are facing an onslaught of intentional corruption that they cannot protect themselves from.

It is, in a word, indoctrination.

It is, in another word, evil.

That word, “evil,” was what caught my attention when my pastor said it. I read a lot of news, blogs and other types of reporting. I can say, without exaggeration, that in my reading about the educational and entertainment institutions that groom children towards sexual confusion, only one of them has included the word “evil.”

I’m not saying that no one else has used it but, in my reading, I’ve only come across it once. And that particular source isn’t primarily religious but does respect the Christian faith.

We don’t use or see the word “evil” in news, blogs or in-depth reports. Nor do you hear it in everyday conversation unless you’re among like-minded people or in a church, like I was yesterday. And even there it can sometimes feel extreme.

The reason, at least from my perspective, is because our culture is no longer “Christian” in nature, but secular. The trappings of our Christian heritage still linger—for instance, you can find a bas relief portrait of Moses above the door directly opposite the speaker’s rostrum in the House Chamber—but they only function as artifacts emptied of their meaning, curious historical tokens rather than the sober reminders of a greater Law and Lawgiver that transcend the humanistic drivel that passes for law today.

We also live in a time when calling something “evil” is to make a moral judgment, and that is the one thing that you cannot do in a secular society—especially when that society is based on individual truth and the virtue of tolerance is paramount, as long as you tolerate the right things.

It is here that the Church must object. Because the church is not a building but people, it is individual believers who must object. Not only must they object to the lie that truth is relative, but they must call evil what it is when they see it.

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter.

—Isaiah 5:20

Aren’t those who teach children to question their sexuality calling evil good? Aren’t those who claim to be protecting children from their parents calling good evil? Aren’t they putting darkness for light and light for darkness? Aren’t they putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter?

And where is the Church in all this? The Church, I’m afraid, is timid. It is afraid to call this monstrosity what it is: vile, heinous, wicked, foul, cruel and yes, evil. The Church needs to reclaim its prophetic voice that proclaims, “This is what the Lord says.”

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.”

—Ezekiel 33:7-9

Unfortunately, the Church as a whole, with notable exceptions, is failing in its mission to call people to repentance here in the United States. We stand on the wall, similar to Ezekiel, watching the wicked, but not warning them that they will die for their sin because we are afraid: afraid of being different, afraid of being ridiculed, afraid of being rejected, afraid of being hated.

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own.” (Jesus, quoted in John 15:18-19)

I also think the Church has absorbed a lot more of the secular culture than the other way around.

I don’t often connect the Daily Verse at the top of the Broadside to what I write about each day, although there have been some opportunities that I’ve let go by. Today is different. The prophet Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (a mountain I’ve stood on) and says to the people of Israel, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

Elijah then proves that the Lord is God in a contest with the prophets of Baal (see 1 Kings 18:16-40).

I think something similar has to be said to the Church. If the Lord is God, follow him; but if the secular culture is God, follow it. Otherwise, God will expel you from himself like he threatened to do with the church in Laodicea:

“Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:16)

This is not a dainty little spritz into the sink. The word translated “spit” means “to vomit forth.” It’s a forceful ejection. In the biblical context, it figuratively means to reject with extreme disgust.

Be one or the other. If the Lord is God, follow him—and that means to be unafraid of standing for the truth, even when it means calling evil something that is evil.

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Daily Broadside | A Powerful Church is at the Core of the American Experience

Daily Verse | 2 Samuel 7:25-26
“And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever.”

Tuesday’s Reading: 2 Samuel 8-10

Since this blog is concerned with faith, culture and politics, I look for the intersection of the three but spend a lot of time on the political state of our country. Today I want to take a brief look at how the cultural ethos of our country, supported by the political regime we live under, is affecting the church—specifically what we’d consider the “evangelical” church in the U.S.

The threat to the Church is the same threat that is grinding down our culture—that of cultural Marxism.

This danger is the subject of a new film, Enemies Within the Church, produced by Cary Gordon, Trevor Loudon, and Judd Saul.  It chronicles the destructive infiltration of the churches and the injection of “wokeism” – Marxism, social justice, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity – into church doctrine.  The choir of radical Left ideology, having targeted and gradually co-opted the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, the unions, and the political parties, set its sights on penetrating and controlling the churches, a difficult, long-term endeavor.  And, as the film explains, the communists eventually succeeded in penetrating the Bible colleges, seminaries, and pulpits of many denominations to push Christianity in the direction they want.

In the article, the author reviews the film and reports on its themes, concluding,

The subversion of the Church has meant that religious terms have been redefined and recontextualized.  The film shows how seminaries have now become places to deconstruct Christian truth, thereby leading people away from G-d and Christ.  One heretical doctrine that’s gaining ground – antinomianism – claims that Christians are exempt from the obligations of the Ten Commandments and that feelings are more significant than facts.  Churches are now embracing LGBTQ in contravention of Christian doctrine and pastors are even repenting for past Biblical positions that rejected homosexuality.  Traditional clerics maintain that without the law of G-d to lean on, situationalism fills the void: right and wrong are decided not by ethics but by the cynical evaluation of the potential consequences of a decision.

But why attack the Church? Because the Church is at the core of the American experience. In Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he refers to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences twenty-year study of western society in which an official said:

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’

You would think that if the Chinese have figured this out, then maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to destroy our Christian heritage. It’s what gives us our strength.

But American Marxists also know this, which is why they are trying to subvert the Church. It’s the one truly significant obstacle to completing a Marxist takeover of the country.

And the Church is being subverted, especially by LGBTQ+XYZ activists.

Calvin University finds itself facing an awkward news headline. A lesbian staff member at the university, Nicole Sweda, married her live-in partner. That’s not all. An assistant professor of sociology at the college, Joseph Kuilema, presided over their ceremony. The problem? Calvin University claims an evangelical identity and is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which holds confessionally to Biblical definitions of sexual morality. This entails defining marriage as between a man and a woman, as well as prohibiting all sexual activity outside the bonds of matrimony.

You can read about it in the link above and find more here and here.

The point is that as secular morality has shifted away from a Judeo-Christian ethic, the Church has been pressured to conform to the new morality. In turn, that means that some churches have abandoned or explained away biblical standards for, in this case, sexual behavior.

I’ve seen it firsthand.

The move to normalize gay and lesbian men and women and to enfold them in the church I had attended for 30+ years was one of the factors that led to my leaving that fellowship. Church leadership had been imperceptibly moving us in a more progressive direction and I began to hear (or not hear) things that increased my concern. For instance, when SCOTUS decided in Obergefell v. Hodges “that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional,” effectively granting same-sex marriages the same force and elevation as biblical marriage, our senior pastor said exactly zero about it.

And that said something to me.

A little over a year later the same pastor gave a sermon in which he effectively blamed the Church for “oppressing” the LGBTQ+ community. It was during that sermon that I stood up and walked out, never to go back. The church had gradually allowed a progressive thinking to infiltrate and corrupt its allegiance to Jesus Christ and to biblical ethics, especially as it concerned sexual immorality, and I could no longer be a part of it.

All this to say that if you’re a follower of Jesus, stay alert and hold strong to your convictions. It is what gives our country the remaining strength it has, as expressed through the body of Christ, the Church. And our neighbors need to hear it.