Luther Quote: flight and disgrace
(an appeal to my home church after 8/2/15 sermon)
If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
(Luther's Works Briefwechsel [Correspondence], vol. 3 pp. 81f.) See http://creation.com/battle-quote-not-luther
Though this cannot actually be traced except to slightly similar passages in Luther's writing, thankfully, this is the kind of quote that has such a self-evident truth, that it doesn't matter who said it.
Pastor Tuuri's use of this quote has been embedded in the theonomic tradition of RCC thinking since at least 1988, listen to the attachment from the Anti-Abortion Day of the Lord Sermon @ :27
I have thought of this often, and was sad, today, to see that it has been substantially forgotten. It would be less apt to be forgotten by someone who has had continually put in front of him, the areas where the church is silent about the most crucial areas of defeat, that is doing the most toward retarding the advance of the kingdom of Christ. Can we not see the whole culture disintegrating into a loss of life, liberty, and property due to the cowardice of the Church to bear witness to the Crown Rights of our Lord(owner) Jesus the Messiah?
These are areas I would submit that have hardly been talked about since an RCC man was excommunicated for trying to clarify the Biblical applications to the crimes involved in money, banking, and other unlawful tax-supported "benefits" our civil government offers us. Right or wrong, he was fully convinced that these root areas were the wide-open flank where the World and the Devil were accomplishing the most unhindered damage. Pub Ed (pre- & post- High School) is the greatest national factor to influence thinking that the civil government is more good and more strong than the Triune God of the Bible. Dishonest Trade provides the unjust concentration of confiscated wealth required to put up the facade that civil government is strong enough to be the better provider and protector than the Redeemer who freely offers you His very own flesh and blood to sustain you, and His own Arm and Sword to protect you (notice how "He by death has spoiled His foes").
On the homosexual issue, the huge, invisible Elephant-In-The-Living room factor seems to be the criminal nature of the behavior. Find me a man who admits to seeing the corporate responsibility to execute criminals guilty of what God calls capital crimes. I can't help thinking people would walk out of churches with a clarified view of the application of the principles if the pastor clearly stated, "This is a capital crime like murder. The whole society will suffer punishment from God if they refuse to execute them like any of the other types of capital crime."
Last Sunday we heard that Pastor Tuuri would not argue for the responsibility of putting men who lie with men to death.....today.
@35:20 It's a death-penalty offense in God's law. Now I'm not arguing for that today.
We might have hoped that this just meant he would forcefully argue for that Next Sunday. And, in a way, he did. He affirmed the wisdom, understanding, and justice of Leviticus 20 and the totality of God's law. He affirmed that the church's Confession and Covenant would back up these statues. If we reason it out, we could assume he was calling for the execution of those convicted of homosexual acts, as well as those responsible for the murder of feticide. However, it could also mean he would argue against applying this in our generation, that there has been some change between Moses and Cotton Mather, versus this current generation. I would encourage the Congregation to trust, but verify. I think you will be turned over to the consequences of whichever answer you want to hear, and whichever answer you strengthen him in. Bear in mind, he, personally, has received death threats over this issue, many years past when it was not nearly such a hot issue, politically. If he does not have the "backing" of the men of the Congregation who are willing to go to jail (or worse) over this, do you expect him to be more super-human than you and I have been -- and take a stand out in front of every other church in Oregon, Portland, and among his own congregation?
This invisibility reminds me of the story of the invisible wheelbarrow. Again, doesn't matter if this is true to illustrate the point.
Legend has it that a Nazi prison guard was very suspicious of a prisoner who would return back to the camp from his work in the field every day, pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He could not fathom why he would go to the extra work to lug around the heavy dirt, which could not have any value in itself. He would either poke his bayonet it it, to make sure he wasn't hiding something he had stolen, or transporting something forbidden in the dirt. Sometimes he would make him dump it out and scatter it to insure it contained nothing else. This went on for many days. One day the prisoner did not appear in the line of familiar faces and the guard inquired. He found out that the man had finally been caught and punished for stealing wheelbarrows.
In this issue of homosexual sin, the "wheelbarrow", the most invisible thing about it, appears to be that this sin is a crime that God holds society collectively responsible to punish. Think about it, and see how ridiculous all the discussions (that don't acknowledge this) appear, if you do the thought-experiment of substituting a publicly acknowledged crime like theft or murder -- in for homosexual acts. Yet is seems like very few people are willing to see or acknowledge this. Like feticide, folks are willing to consider anything as a possible answer except what God requires us to do that would fix and solve the problem as completely as is possible in a fallen, sinful world.
Society commits a capital sin by embracing homosexual acts as non-criminal and as non-sinful. I say capital sin (not crime) because it is not the kind of thing Man can punish, only God can punish a whole Society and not punish the righteous with the wicked. At a certain 'critical mass', the whole society is 'executed' when they 'commit' this acceptance of homosexual practice.
In this case, the requirement to give a public testimony kicks in. If there is a crime-in-progress, the witnessing bystander is responsible to give hue and cry, or a rebuke.
Lev 5 ‘Now if a person sins after he hears a public adjuration to testify when he is a witness, whether he has seen or otherwise known, if he does not tell it, then he will bear his guilt..
And also the Church, institutionally has Her watchman responsibility as shown in Ezekiel. The wicked are going to suffer death-type consequences whether you warn them or not. But are you going to deliver your soul?
Ezekiel 3 ".... the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 17 “Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman to the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from My mouth, warn them from Me. 18 When I say to the wicked, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn him or speak out to warn the wicked from his wicked way that he may live, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. 19 Yet if you have warned the wicked and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered yourself."
God's judgment will come, but He is glorified when the earners of His curses are given adequate warning. If He is good, His character demands it. We are the privileged watchmen, however inadequate we might be ourselves.
Our job is not to be saviors in our own wisdom, as if to eliminate abortion, homosexual attractions or practice, or various other types of human evil. No matter how we knock ourselves out trying to prevent these things, nothing will suppress them as successfully as obeying God's requirements in the matter. He requires punishments for crime. He requires us to witness to His standards. His standards are part of the Gospel that Jesus is king and judge (see I Timothy 1). We like to think we can accomplish what needs to be done a better way. We can be more compassionate than God. We can love the criminal and victim better than that obsolete, vengeful God of that Old Testament. We know much better what can bring about human flourishing.
However, God has said the most wise, loving, righteous, compassionate thing for both victim and criminal in these human short-comings-of-the-grace-of-God is to punish the criminal according to the definitions of God's word. If there is murder and conspiracy to murder by shedding man's blood, God requires us to shed the blood of the murderer. It does not matter if the murderer and co-conspirators are father, mother, doctor, or nurse, or legislator. We cannot stray from God's perfect justice without assaulting the innocent and defending the guilty. These two sides of the ditch are inescapable by any definition of a just standard. If there is an ideal, there is no way to deviate from the ideal except in these two ways.
Remember, the most important victim in these crimes is the Creator, Redeemer, Inheritor, and Overcomer - Messiah, who is the Judge of the living and the dead. We must remember He will judge, not only the Sinner and The Criminal, but also the man responsible to punish the criminal as God said to. As creator and owner, He is fully within His rights to specify when life, liberty, and property stewardship are removed from those under his jurisdiction. He is also has authority to command participate in this removal.
Thanks to the heritage of 20 years of instruction at RCC and abundant opportunity to look through the lenses of excellent Reformed Bible teaching at huge volumes of American, Reformation, and world history -- these links below are the best attempts I have been able to make to offer a Biblical answer to the challenges of near-universal public enthusiasm for dishonest measures in trade, and feticide. Homosexual acts, as a capital crime, would be substantially covered by the same principles in the article, "How to Stop Feticide Before Next January".
For the sake of the glory of God, and the advance of the Church Militant and Triumphant, I would appeal to you to use anything usable in this material to leverage your own, better testimony of God's answers to these social ills.
Take it and Run to the Roar.
As Pastor Doug Wilson said, "This is not a post-Christian World. It is a Post-Resurrection world".
We could only improve on that by characterizing it as a post-ascension world.
http://www.keepandshare.com/discuss/20648/how-to-stop-feticide-before-next-january
http://www.keepandshare.com/discuss/21920/how-to-restore-honest-money
I would offer that it is no help to the World for the Church to just say a crime is a sin. In the American Civil religion of secular plurality, no one is supposed to care, just because one religion thinks something is wrong by their sectarian morality. The whole point of America is freedom of religion, thus no one need feel condemned by the condemnation of rival religions. The only requirement is that everyone must agree on the self-evident, universally understood essentials of civil laws and civil rights (save your guffaws for the end of the paragraph, please) which all religions have in common. Judeo-Christian ethics for all who do not follow Marxist/Leftist/Liberal ideas. This is the glory of Democracy.
So say the Freemasons who have successfully taught the Church to condemn any but "secular" objective, neutral civil government. Let me recommend
some discoveries about the wrong interpretation of "natural law".
If you are going to poke the dragon, if you are going to lay axe to the root of the idolatry, you have to challenge the ethical authority of the imaginary Majority to define crime and punishment. As soon as you stand up, against the Current, and say "this is a crime" -- you will teeter the world-view of all those who didn't realize that they didn't actually have a definite concept of ethical authority in civil law -- that can be coherently expressed and logically defended.
"By Whose Authority?" they will indignantly ask....and that will be the opportunity to finally communicate
the Other Half of the Gospel, that there is no other lawgiver, judge, and executive sovereign in civil law, that men can agree on, except our Lord Jesus Christ as revealed in the totality of His Word, including the Mosaic legislation.
If you only say it is sin, and not crime -- they are taught to think it need not apply to them. And since most Christians hold this same Dual-Kingdom view, they will
not be able to retain their grasp on it, as sin, either. They correctly intuit that something which is only a sin and not criminal - the State has no authority to punish. "You don't want us to punish people for every kind of sin, do you? Where would you stop?" Thus the whole culture around them gets the message that it is not crime, and, since sin is only a sectarian, optional notion that is not universal, they need pay no attention. Then, the predominant world-spirit around the Christians, begins to influence the Church to drop even the stigma of being a sin.
Plus you slander the Character of God. A Righteous Judge will declare His standards before the judgment. If the Church is silent, how is the world to know that the Judge of all the earth held them accountable to punish crime, and how they were to punish crime? If He had no program for communicating it - how would it be fair to judge. Have you heard, "We cannot condemn too harshly the young, aborting teenage. They have never heard this is a capital-crime murder society must punish or be 'spanked' by God."
OK. If so, why haven't they? Who is responsible to be the Watchman On the Wall? Ezek 3,33
