This past Sunday (July 2, 2023), Dr. Mark Rutland delivered a necessary and powerful message to the congregation at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas. It was an Independence Day message, but it was also a warning to America and the American church. We need to hear more of this from our pulpits!
Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
trevorgrantthomas@gmail.com
In one of my favorite songs—Worlds Apart by Jars of Clay—singing of the death of Jesus, the lyrics ask (at about the 2:29 mark in the linked video) “Did you really have to die for me?” The answer, of course, is a resounding “YES!”
One of the most important questions in the history of the universe is “Why did Jesus have to die?” This is especially the case as we are in the throes of what some are referring to as the “Negative World” era, where “Everybody Wants to Rule Their World.”
Aaron Renn describes the “Negative World” (2014-the present) as a period when a culture adopts a negative view of Christianity, “particularly in the elite domains of society.” Mr. Renn adds that, in the Negative World “Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.”
Of course, this is exactly what we see in America today, especially where the “woke” rule. Much of the disdain for Christianity that we see today—and throughout time—is due to what God has had to say and do about sin. Far too many Americans today have refused to close their minds on matters that have been settled for all time, and instead have decided to adopt their own moral code (especially on matters in the sexual realm).
We are a nation littered with those who are deciding for themselves what is good, what is truth, and what is sin. We have largely abandoned the notion that we are sinners in need of a Savior. Thus, unsurprisingly, few Americans truly understand the reasons behind the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
The late-great Oswald Chambers provides one of the best
descriptions of why
Jesus went to the cross:
The Cross of Christ is the revealed truth of God’s judgment on sin…There is nothing in time or eternity more absolutely certain and irrefutable than what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross— He made it possible for the entire human race to be brought back into a right-standing relationship with God. He made redemption the foundation of human life; that is, He made a way for every person to have fellowship with God.
The Cross was not something that happened to Jesus— He came to die; the Cross was His purpose in coming. He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). The incarnation of Christ would have no meaning without the Cross. Beware of separating “God was manifested in the flesh…” from “…He made Him…to be sin for us…” (1 Timothy 3:16 ; 2 Corinthians 5:21). The purpose of the incarnation was redemption. God came in the flesh to take sin away, not to accomplish something for Himself. The Cross is the central event in time and eternity, and the answer to all the problems of both.
One of my favorite Scriptures that explains the death of
Jesus is near the end of the first chapter of the book of Colossians.
Colossians 1:19-20 reads:
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
In other words, Jesus was, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “The Perfect Penitent.”
As Lewis puts it,
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.
Christ dying for our sins is an amazing—and necessary—act of love and sacrifice, but it is not the end of the matter. Just as important as Christ dying for our sins is His resurrection. The physical resurrection of Jesus is the cornerstone of Christianity. British theologian Michael Green said it well when he noted, “Without faith in the resurrection there would be no Christianity at all.”
The facts of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection all are, of course, central to Christianity. For millennia, each of these events has been celebrated, studied, taught, and preached on. Most everyone—from the fervently faithful to the lukewarm to the “near Christian” to those outside Christianity—at least admires the loving life, work, and words of Jesus. However, for a complete understanding of the events of Jesus’ life—especially His death and resurrection—one must seek to understand sin and its sorrowful, destructive, and deadly effect upon humanity.
Unless you have a proper understanding of sin—especially the sin in your own life—you don’t really understand why Jesus came into this world, why He said the things He said, why He did the things He did, and why He died and was raised to life again. The first act of Jesus’ public ministry was His baptism by John. As Jesus came to the Jordan River, John declared (John 1:29), “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
Since the first humans decided that they wanted to “be like God,” the world has been plagued—literally cursed—by sin. More so than any other human who has walked this planet, Jesus knew—and knows—what we need most. He understood perfectly the sin-sickness of humanity and that He alone had—and still has—the cure.
People don’t like hearing that things in their life need to change; that they are on the wrong path; that the things they are currently enjoying are really quite evil and deadly. In other words, people don’t like being told that they need to “repent.”
As I noted several years ago, the greatest lie ever told is that there is no God. The second greatest lie ever told is that the devil does not exist. The third greatest lie ever told is that your (and my) sin is not really sin. One of the greatest debates within the church today surrounds the question of what is sin. If we can’t answer that question well and accurately, then we will fall short of understanding and appreciating all that Jesus did for us.
As Oswald Chambers reveals above, Jesus came for no other reason than to redeem us, to save us. Save us from what? From the sin that leads to death, hell, and eternal separation from God. We don’t get to come to God and accept Jesus on our own terms. It must be unconditional surrender. We must be willing to lay down everything that is an affront to God. He created us, He sustains us, and He alone can save us.
The ministry of God—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick—should never be separated from the message of God—to repent of our sin and believe that Jesus was who He claimed to be: the Son of God and the savior of the world. The ministry of God and the message of God—both together complete the mission of God. In other words, God became man not simply to improve us, or to help us out of a jam, or to give us what we ask for, or to make us feel better, but to make us into new creatures.
Happy Resurrection Day!
(See this column at American Thinker.)
Copyright 2023, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of
America
trevorgrantthomas@gmail.com
There is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is [remember, “now” was the mid-twentieth century], has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.Of course, Lewis was—and is—right. Note that our sexual instinct has gone so wrong that Lewis’s clear declaration of Christian sexual morality—published in one of the greatest works of modern apologetics, Mere Christianity—is now, in the early twenty-first century, somewhat insufficient. This is because the God-haters, and those otherwise devoted to a “theology of self,” have now perverted the oldest institution in the history of humanity—marriage.
The Bible is very clear in its teaching about two of the most controversial issues we face today—homosexuality and abortion. According to researcher George Barna, 90 percent of pastors recognize that the Bible speaks to these issues. But fewer than 10 percent are actually teaching what the Bible says about them!Given the rampant sexual sin in our culture—much of it leading to death (abortion, disease, and the like)—and the significance of marriage—the lifetime union of one man and one woman—one would think that pastors, Sunday school teachers, church youth leaders, evangelists, Christian media, Christian politicians, Christian celebrities, Christian parents, and the like, would give great time and effort to telling the truth on what are undoubtedly some of the most important moral issues of our time. Sadly, I believe this has not been the case, and it’s time for this to change.
As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago [before he became a Christian]. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.After all, Screwtape concludes,
It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing…Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.Fewer and fewer Americans these days seem willing “to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized, sin.” Of course, to a great extent, this is because fewer and fewer Americans are able to recognize what is sin—or, many Americans are simply becoming comfortable with their sin and are eagerly strolling along the “gentle slope” to hell.
There’s widespread and institutionalized racism inside America’s law enforcement agencies, and black Americans are especially targeted. This racism has led to the deaths of a disproportionate number of innocent black Americans. In order to stop this heinous activity, we need more gun control legislation, more wealth redistribution, more job and education programs, [and the like] and thus Americans need to elect more Democrats.The unpopular fact is that black Americans are much safer in the presence of law enforcement than they are in black communities, especially when such communities—because of things like the “Ferguson Effect”—have little or no police presence. The statistics makes this clear.
Less than one percent of men (more than half of whom were black) in total died while in prison, and there was no difference between black and white inmates in that regard.As Yahoo also points out,
If prisoners are better off in prison, then what does that say about the conditions plaguing low-income communities and the services being offered to people of color?What it says—and what many have long been saying, including some wise members of the NFL— is that, when it comes to violence and crime in our communities we don’t have a skin problem—as in the case with our schools—we have a sin problem.
The Cross of Christ is the revealed truth of God’s judgment on sin…There is nothing in time or eternity more absolutely certain and irrefutable than what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross— He made it possible for the entire human race to be brought back into a right-standing relationship with God. He made redemption the foundation of human life; that is, He made a way for every person to have fellowship with God.
The Cross was not something that happened to Jesus— He came to die; the Cross was His purpose in coming. He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). The incarnation of Christ would have no meaning without the Cross. Beware of separating “God was manifested in the flesh…” from “…He made Him…to be sin for us…” (1 Timothy 3:16 ; 2 Corinthians 5:21). The purpose of the incarnation was redemption. God came in the flesh to take sin away, not to accomplish something for Himself. The Cross is the central event in time and eternity, and the answer to all the problems of both.
The Cross is not the cross of a man, but the Cross of God, and it can never be fully comprehended through human experience. The Cross is God exhibiting His nature. It is the gate through which any and every individual can enter into oneness with God. But it is not a gate we pass right through; it is one where we abide in the life that is found there.
The heart of salvation is the Cross of Christ. The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened.One of my favorite Scriptures that explains the death of Jesus is near the end of the first chapter of the book of Colossians. (Colossians 1:15-20 is one of my favorite pieces of Scripture. It is a great answer to the question “Who is Jesus?”) Colossians 1:19-20 reads:
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.In other words, Jesus was, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “The Perfect Penitent.” As Lewis puts it,
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.Christ dying for our sins is an amazing (and necessary) act of love and sacrifice, but it is not the end of the matter. Just as important as Christ dying for our sins is His resurrection. As I have noted for many years,
The physical resurrection of Jesus is the cornerstone of Christianity. British theologian Michael Green said it well when he noted, “Without faith in the resurrection there would be no Christianity at all.” Noted biblical scholar, professor, and author Wilbur M. Smith said that, “The resurrection of Christ is the very citadel of the Christian faith. This is the doctrine that turned the world upside down…”…
C.S. Lewis notes that, “In the earliest days of Christianity an ‘apostle’ was first and foremost a man who claimed to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection,” or more accurately, a witness of the resurrected Christ. He adds that, “to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection.”The facts of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection all are, of course, central to Christianity. For millennia, each of these events has been celebrated, studied, and sermonized. Most everyone—from the fervently faithful to the lukewarm to the “near Christian” to those outside Christianity—at least admires the loving life, work, and words of Jesus. However, for a complete understanding of the events of Jesus’ life—especially His death and resurrection—one must seek to understand sin and its sorrowful, destructive, and deadly effect upon humanity.
As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago [before he became a Christian]. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.After all, Screwtape concludes,
It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing…Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.Fewer and fewer Americans these days seem willing “to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized, sin.” Of course, to a great extent, this is because fewer and fewer Americans are able to recognize what is sin—or, many Americans are simply becoming comfortable with their sin, and are eagerly strolling along the “gentle slope” to hell.
A person who is willing to kill another person for the sake of preserving their own prosperity or emotional health is declaring that their life is supreme — their existence is at the center of all things. This is the core of Satanist theology. So when Satanists declare their creeds, they strike uncomfortably close to the rotten core of the abortion-rights regime.Writing for Patheos, author and philosopher Michael Novak makes note of this “theology of self” when he writes of a two decades-old study on abortion that he only recently encountered. “Two main findings of the study startled me,” Novak writes,
but they are also fairly obvious once one sees them from the point of view of the young women in the study…To such women, having an unplanned child represents a threat so great to modern women that it is perceived as the equivalent to a ‘death of self.’Such a theology is not exclusive to Satanists. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has embraced this theology. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, ruling in favor of the “right” to kill children in the womb (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” (Thus, no one should have been surprised at his infamous conclusion on marriage.)
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good.’ We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way – centered on money or pleasure or ambition – and hoping, in spite of this to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.There is only one way to “free oneself from guilt and sin.” We cannot find this freedom in the redefining of sin, in the election of one politician over another, in the ruling of a judge, or in uninhibited acts of hedonism. The only way to such freedom is the Way of the Cross.
