Both Cain and Abel were religious people.  We can read in Genesis 4 that they both even worshiped the same God.  Cain was a monotheist.  I think I can safely speculate in saying that Adam and Eve talked and talked and talked ad infinitum, ad nauseum, about sin and the fall, warning after warning after warning, so that they would be given thorough, sufficient knowledge of God, Who He was and His expectations for them.

Cain could and probably would put on his instagram feed, “God follower.”  Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:21-23, the now familiar words:

21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? 23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

“I never knew you:  depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”  1 John 3 says that the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest by whether they do the righteousness of God, and in 1 John 3, Cain did not love his brother.  He killed him, why?  Verse 12, “Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”  It’s not him that saith, Lord, Lord.  Cain could say, Lord, Lord, as well as almost anyone, but he did not do the will of Jesus’ Father.  Someone, who isn’t following Christ, isn’t a “Christ follower,” when He doesn’t do the will of the Father.  Jesus did the will of the Father in every single instance, so if someone is following Christ, He is also following the Father.

Cain and Abel both brought offerings for God.  However, God judged both of them and their offerings and He rejected one and received the other.  God doesn’t accept all worship or every worshiper.  Hebrews 11:4 comments:  “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts.”

Abel’s sacrifice was more excellent than Cain’s.  Righteous people give God as a lifestyle what He wants.  The “gifts” of Abel were these sacrifices that He gave God, according to what God said.

What was wrong with Cain’s?  Many would say that Cain’s was the religion of human achievement, a salvation by works.  No passage specifically says that, even though I wouldn’t argue with it.  It makes sense.  However, we have enough by just saying what the text says.

Abel brought the firstlings of his flock, and or even the fat, meaning that it was the first and the best of what he had.  That’s what it says.   Cain also brought God the fruits of the ground “in process of time” (Gen 4:3).  Easily one could contrast “firstlings” with “process of time.”  It took time before Cain came with his offering for the crops to be finished with the process.  God waited on Cain rather than Cain waiting on God.  Verse 4 says “the LORD had respect unto Abel and his offering.”  The LORD respected both the worshiper and his offering.  Then in verse 5, “unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.”

There is no doubt that God was for both Cain and Abel.  The problem was that Cain was not for God.  God wasn’t a hostage for Cain, but bear with me, because like with many apostates, and Cain represents  all apostates, he attempted to hold God hostage.  I’m not saying anyone can hold God hostage, but they try to, like children do so with their parents.  Cain was going to believe and act like he wanted, and God was expected to accept his belief and behavior.  When God did not, Cain was angry with Him, not with himself, and then pouting over it (verse 5).  People are self-deceived into thinking that if they behave down in the dumps or crest-fallen, they can get what they want.

The modern counterfeit alternative to the truth of God’s disrespecting an offering is that God, contradicting Genesis 4, instead accepts offerings as a matter of His grace.  He “redeems” the offering. He takes the offering the false worshiper wants to bring and He turns it by His grace into an acceptable offering.  There is no biblical basis for this view of redemption.  It is a lie.  It is deception in the category of Satan telling Eve, “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen 3:4).  What God does when He really redeems is turn a repentant false worshiper into a true one, who then brings God what God wants, not what he wants anymore.

God doesn’t receive worship with this above corrupted view of redemption.  People may be saying God is being worshiped, but He isn’t getting what He wants.  With this perverted notion, it doesn’t even matter if He gets what He wants, because anything He doesn’t want will be said to be accepted, because He redeemed it.  The point of worship is lost, just so the unredeemed Cain figure can be respected like he wants, even though that’s not even true either.

In Genesis 4:6-7, “the LORD” asked Cain:

Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?  If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?

Three questions.  All three are rhetorical.

The first two questions would require a longer answer, but they are rhetorical, because the answer is obvious.  The last question has the answer of a simple, “Yes.”

God uses questions a lot in the Bible.  Jesus used them much, as recorded in the gospels.  They are powerful, but to the wrong person, they can also be infuriating.  In the next verse (v. 8), Cain murders his brother, Abel.

Cain was angry.  Then God asked those three questions and Cain was even more angry.

Cain wasn’t being respected by God.  He wanted acceptance from God and he wasn’t getting that.  God was willing to respect Cain.  He was willing to accept him.  If he had only done well.  He didn’t.

God did right in not respecting or accepting Cain.  It wasn’t God’s fault that Cain was angry or his countenance was fallen.  When someone doesn’t do well, or how we would say it today, when he hasn’t done good or he has done something bad, he shouldn’t be respected or accepted for that.  These are basics in life still.

If behavior is rewarded it will recur.  Bad behavior if respected or accepted will recur.  Cain should have answered in his head, “I’m wroth because I’m not being accepted or respected for doing something bad or not doing something good.”  Then, “My countenance is fallen (I’m moping) because I’m not being accepted or respected for doing something bad or not doing something good.”  And then last, “Yes, I would have been accepted if I had done well or not done bad, by bringing an acceptable or respectable offering.”

Much of the anger in the streets is over a lack of respect or acceptance.  In between the anger is discouragement or depression accompanied by alcohol and other “self-medication.”  Young people are seeking for respect and acceptance and they’re not getting what they want, what they think they deserve, so in various ways they damage, afflict, hurt, strike, and destroy.

What young people need to know is that they have the respect and acceptance of God if they do well.  That starts by believing like Abel did.  Abel got respect by faith.  He was accepted by faith.  Cain wanted to do what he wanted and also be respected and accepted, but it really doesn’t work that way, at least not with God.  It really shouldn’t work that way either, because it is bad for an individual and for all of society when it does.

God’s Son, Jesus Christ, got acceptance from the Father.  He gave Him a name which was above every name.  He said, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.

Someone can get angry and down and depressed until he gets the respect and acceptance he thinks he deserves.  Maybe he or she will get it.  It won’t be good if he or she does.  It will just result in more bad behavior.  God wants to accept you.  He wants to receive you.  He wants to respect you.  God is good.

What Cain deserved for killing his brother was death.  God was merciful to Cain, but still, Cain said (verse 13):  “My punishment is greater than I can bear.”  Still thinking about himself.  Cain’s focus was on himself.  His respect.  His acceptance.  It should have been, am I doing what God wants me to do?  That’s the way to true acceptance and true respect. 

God’s three questions continue to be three really good questions to ask.

 Part One     Part Two

One could call the throne room of God the operations center for all the universe.  It is also a model or paradigm for man for beauty, truth, and goodness.  Hebrews calls it the “true tabernacle” (Hebrews 8:2), an example for the earthly one (Hebrews 8:2).   Just like man was made in the image of God or in His likeness, the earthly tabernacle mimicked the heavenly tabernacle as seen in Hebrews 8-9.

The throne room of God is visited or mentioned several times in the Bible and it is where the special presence of God is.  Since beauty is the glory of God or the beauty of His holiness, then the throne room of God is a template for an understanding of beauty.

The beauty is the coherent wholeness of the throne room, the composition or symphony of all of the parts, but also the individual aspects making up that whole.  God is beautiful, which is to say that His holiness, majesty, and glory are beautiful.  However, as beauty relates to the aesthetic of God’s holiness, it is the order, symmetry, proportion, brilliance, harmony, arrangement, splendor, accuracy, and completeness of it.  These qualities are beautiful and then beauty is found in the imitation of these qualities.

Objective beauty is that the object is beautiful in itself.  It isn’t based upon the perspective of the subject either seeing, hearing, or experiencing the qualities of it.  It doesn’t matter what you feel.  It is beautiful if you never existed.  God’s throne room existed before man existed.  Beauty existed before man could have a perspective, a like or a dislike.

When the taste of the subject determines beauty, it elevates the subject.  Value comes down to what someone thinks or feels.  The subject becomes the measurement.  The true beauty starts with God.  All beauty is judged based upon God.  Taste should conform to God.  If not, then the subject becomes the basis of value and in the way the creature is worshiped, not the Creator.

To rebel against God is to rebel against the nature of God, which is beautiful.  Ugliness is both rebellion and a symptom of a rebellious heart.  It violates the nature of God.  It is a characteristic of this world.

Someone whose taste clashes with the beauty of God wants something different than God, therefore, a different god.  He may conform his god to what he likes or wants, but it isn’t God.  He’s not worshiping God.  His rebellion against the nature of God manifests itself in his taste.  He doesn’t like what God likes.  This will not be hidden.  It will be seen.

If your taste doesn’t fit into the throne room of God, it’s not going to be there in the future either.  You don’t live a life congruent with the ugliness of this earth and have any kind of yearning for the actual throne room of God.  You won’t bring anything you like there.  If you don’t like the taste of heaven, then you should consider whether you are going to be there.  Why would you want to be there?

In scripture Jesus Christ is in the throne room of God in many instances.   He’s the one on the throne for Isaiah in Isaiah 6.  He’s in the throne room at the Father’s right hand in Psalm 110.   He’s in the throne room, of course, in Revelation 4-5.  Jesus is in that throne room right now as you read this.  You can say that you follow Him, but when your life wouldn’t and so doesn’t like Who He is, His beauty, because you choose the ugliness of this sin-cursed world, then you aren’t following Him.  You can attack me about that, as the messenger, but that won’t change it either.  Even though Jesus isn’t in His heavenly throne room in Revelation 1, John describes what He would be like there.

12 And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; 13 And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. 14 His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 15 And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. 16 And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp twoedged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. 17 And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: 18 I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

Beauty is to be beheld, but what makes it beautiful is not based upon the response of the one seeing or hearing it.  What is beautiful is beautiful no matter what the acknowledgement, but the response is informative.  In verse 17 John says that when he saw Jesus, He fell at His feet as dead.   John fell prostrate before the Lord in great fear.  Jesus’ “countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength” (v. 16).  He looks into the eyes of the Judge of the entire earth, which were like “a flame of fire” (v. 14).  Awe and reverence are the appropriate responses to the beauty of Jesus Christ.  He was in the presence of the glory of Jesus, and his penetrating judgment, the beauty of his purity, justice, and truth.

I included back to verse 12 in this description because Jesus is in the midst of His assemblies, His churches, which are the seven golden candlesticks.  A Christ follower doesn’t arbitrarily follow Jesus on the earth, but in one of His churches.  You aren’t following Jesus outside of a true church, which today is His earthly temple (1 Cor 3:16-17), symbolized by a golden candlestick, one of the pieces of the temple in the Old Testament to imitate the shining light of God in the heavenly temple.  A true church shines with the doctrinal and moral light of Christ.

At no time does He or would He ever appear like anyone either attending or performing at a popular music concert, and at no time would any true believer treat Him like that.  It is not appropriate.  Jesus can and does condescend to us, but our responsibility to Him is reverence as God.  The coarsening of the imagination of beauty has been a major cause for the profaning of Jesus Christ, treating Him in a common or casual fashion, which is not how John treats Him and partly because of how Jesus appears in His glory.  In Isaiah 6, totally holy angels cover their faces and feet in reverence of His holiness.  Jesus Himself is dressed in a garment down to His feet, much like ones God fashioned for Adam and Eve, and immodesty of any kind is not compatible with His holiness.

I understand that the throne room of God is unlike any place on earth.  It is the most beautiful place anywhere, more beautiful than anything or anyone, but one we can only attempt to imagine by reading what scripture says about it.  Still, however, it is a model for imitation for the earthly temple, something that Solomon understood when he built his temple in Jerusalem, but also what God designed into the tabernacle in the wilderness.  Much was put into the beauty of the entire structure and its parts.

One can also read the beauty of the text of the songs sung to God the Father and the Son throughout scripture, but including in the throne room of God in Revelation 4-5.  George Frederick Handel used that text for the lyrics of his oratorio, the Messiah.  It too is a model to imitate for beauty, since beauty is imitative.

The effervescent light at the throne of God is the red jasper stone, the translucent white sardine stone, and an emerald light rainbow round about it.  Men in pure white robes and crowns of gold sit at every one of twenty four of their own thrones encircling the throne.  There are seven lamps burning before the throne and lightnings and thunder proceeding from it.  Before the throne is a sea of crystal like glass from which would bounce reflections of all the other colors and hues.  Four awesome beasts are too before and behind the throne in the likeness of four different creatures with six wings apiece, flying and chanting or singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

In this description of God’s throne room are many varied aspects of the beauty of God at their most resplendent in a symphony of color, light, creatures, and sound, all of which speak of the majesty of a holy God.  Many chapters are given to the building of the tabernacle and then the temple of the Old Testament to imitate this scene.  This is the nature of beauty.  A departure from that is the on ramp to the broad road to destruction and the fastest lane from any way back to the narrow road that leads to life eternal.  Anyone reading this should be warned about the fascination and allurement of this world’s ugliness, drawing them forever astray from the presence of God.

The ugliness of a sin-cursed world and cooperative false religion stands in stark contrast to the overall beauty and the beautiful aspects of the throne room of God and then its imitation on earth by those truly God’s people.   In my second post, I compared true beauty on earth, mimesis, imitation, with poiesis, the expression of self, but also with diegesis, in which so-called beauty is revealed through the perspective of the narrator or storyteller.  Men love themselves.  What else occurs though is men who love themselves conflating their desires or taste into what God wants.  What makes something beautiful to them in their own imaginations is their taste, what they like.

The center of the universe isn’t in the belly of a man (read here and here), but in the throne room of God.  Beauty doesn’t start with a perspective ruined by sin or even from the experience of a professing believer.  Man’s heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).  At best, he sees through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12).  He should doubt his own perspective.  Imitation is a matter of faith, which pleases God (Hebrews 11:6). 

Millennial, who ghosts his parents, because your own taste supersedes all other, consider that you perhaps will continue to ghost them right into eternity.  The boundaries you set up to protect your own lifestyle will still be a boundary, much like the one between the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.  You want a great gulf and a great gulf you will get.  Hell is the ultimate in ugly, but it will be for everyone who prefers his taste above God’s.

The world is not intended by God to mirror the imaginations of men’s hearts.  It should look like the throne room of God and then a Paradise regained.  With that in mind, the church turns the world upside down, not the world turning the church upside down.  Churches have capitulated to the world, using its allures to conform to the belly of man, bringing the uglification of the church.  It not only is not acceptable to God, but it is the further downfall of man.

Part One

I see ugliness all over today, and it’s not just something generational, that is, what happens every generation with older people not liking the latest with the younger ones.  We live in a culture that glories in ugliness.  In most cases, the uglier the better.  This occurs when God stops being the standard.

Objective beauty is the holiness of God.  This means that the perfections of God’s attributes, those characteristics, as revealed in general through creation and the law written in man’s heart and then in the Word of God, define beauty.  What contradicts those is ugly.  Anything that clashes with God and His nature is ugliness.

One might think that men wouldn’t be attracted to ugliness, that it would die on its own for the comparison to beauty.  The allurement is what entices the flesh.  It isn’t credible.  It is attractive to fallen humanness. It doesn’t have to make sense, because it goes along with depravity, the consequence of a reprobate mind.  However, just because men like it and want it doesn’t mean that it is beautiful.  It is ugly.  You are right to think that is ugly.  Don’t doubt that.

Because beauty proceeds from God, it is necessarily mimetic, that is, it is an imitation or a copy of what God creates or does.  It reflects on God.  Mimesis contrasts with poiesis, which finds authenticity through the expression of self on its own terms.  The Corinthians justified it by saying it’s only natural, it’s “meat for the body and the body for meats.”  Babylonian mysticism connected these impressions, proceeding from self, to some spiritual inspiration, identifying foul sensual assertions as divine.  The contemporary church is now rife with this, conceiving many of twice the children of Hell they once were.

Now someone who endorses and promotes poiesis and then fellowships with its makers, adherents, and advocates, the ugliness that contradicts the nature of God, might claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ. This person turns the grace of God into lasciviousness (Jude 1:4).

In contrast, the Lord Jesus submitted in every way to the will of God the Father, pleasing Him.  The Apostle Paul was then an imitator of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), calling on others also to be imitators.  The plan of God is imitation.  Man is is made in the image of God and in His likeness, so man himself is an imitation, a divine endorsement of imitation.  God would have imitation the model or paradigm.  Then Jesus gave the example of doing exactly what the Father and wanted and what the Father did.  In John 5:17, Jesus said, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”  They were doing the same work.

With his upward gaze, man is to see, contemplate, and meditate upon the work of God, the glory of God, and imitate what He did and does.  That work is beautiful.  Man is not to look into himself to find beauty, producing something new and different.

In so many ways, the expressions of men’s selves run in direct contradiction to what God said to do and in violation of what He said not to do.  Men fashion themselves after women and women after men.  Men resemble femininity and women masculinity.  In their “authentic” ways, they turn exactly away to what God commanded against.  God prohibited marking one’s skin in the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:28), because it was pagan and these kinds of associations with the world God teaches against (Romans 12:2, 1 Timothy 2:9, Zephaniah 1:8, Leviticus 19:28).   The extreme piercings of varied body parts, butch hair and combat boots on women, long hair on men, and unnatural hair colors all fall in the same category.  They express degradation.

There is so much trashiness in the culture, it is hard to describe it all.  Today you hear, dumpster fire.  The culture is a dumpster fire.  So many things are wrong and embraced fully for their sheer ugliness.  One could hope that someone could be permitted with freedom of speech to call this ugliness what it is, to give it a true characterization.  The culture has gone further to disallow an accurate label.  The beautiful can be assailed and aspersed, the most reprehensible things said against what is aligned with God.  Criticism of the ugly is said to trigger, cause a lack of wellness, and violate personal boundaries in a criminal way.

The ugliness very commonly spawns from disobedience to parents.  Offspring rebelliously separate themselves from their parents without explanation or cause.  These are the teenagers with their earbuds, fettered to sensual rhythms pumping into their brains and bodies, hiding this, but the ugliness feeding into an external attitude that challenges authority.  They just want their own way, as Solomon describes in the first few chapters of Proverbs.  Women now wear in public something that was once only in the bedroom, and this is fashion.  Women wear the stretchy leggings, which leave nothing to men’s imaginations. Men wear earrings, not long ago a solely feminine adornment.  Contemporary entertainers tap into rebellion manifested in extreme hairstyles and bizarre fashion.

There are reasons why scriptural Christianity through history stayed free of markings, tattoos, and piercings.  They are characteristic pagan phenomena emerging from minds not submissive to the Word of God or the characteristics of general revelation of God.  They are intended to defy theological norms.  They do not imitate Divine design.

The decorations of ugliness do not mirror the attributes of God, but glory in the manifestations of the sin nature in man.  It is distorted.  It is deteriorated.  You’ve seen the dilapidated, decaying structures.  If it’s not that, it is a demented modernism, portraying the excesses of covetousness, often related to alcohol, entertainment, and sensuality.  This is embraced as authentic and art.

Various terms masque the determined uglification of music today, one being alternative.  Alternative according to the dictionary definition is “one or two or more things available as another possibility.”  You were going to walk, but you had alternative transportation.  That was the normal usage.  Then a certain faction called homosexuality an alternative lifestyle, the terminology justifying the behavior.  Now that term is used to justify other ugliness, obviously springing out of that same rationalization.

What is alternative?  There is popular music, conforming to the world and the present age.  Alternative is a further degradation, a digression to further perversion.  For music, it first applied to punk rock and its grotesque nonconformity to what is good and right, and even more extreme form of abasement.  These are forms not ordinarily accepted, pushing the envelope in a world already way off the narrow road.

The Apostle Paul in Philippians 1:10 prayed for the church at Philippi, that they would “approve things that are excellent.”  A true believer will test and then accept only that which is of absolute or objective beauty.  The word “excellent” is part of a verb that means “to be worth more or superior to.”  Later in Philippians 4:8, Paul commands, think on these things, among which are “things that are lovely.”  Characteristic of a culture and life departing from God is the embrace of the ugly.  Not only do these things that pertain to the world and the flesh lure to the broad road of destruction, but speed the pace of someone further down that road to a place where he can never return.  He’s eternally lost.

I’ve been writing on this subject a lot and for a long time, but among the few things that motivated me to write this one was a new book written by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of Modern Self.  This is not an endorsement.  I haven’t read the book.  I just thought that people might have thought I had read the book because of the content of this post.  Hearing about the book and reading some reviews of the book were one motivation, but not the main one.

God made man in His image.  One definition of the image of God, found right in Genesis 1, is God’s likeness in man.  One noted characteristic that distinguishes man among many is his upright walk and upward gaze.  Watch yourself when you walk outside, how you look upward.  The glory of man is the glory of God, man finding His navigation by looking toward His Creator as his North Star.

True believers in God through history looked upward to find their identity and the true meaning of themselves.  They received that from God.  He defines reality.  Some now call that viewpoint “premodern.”  Premodernism measured and measures according to God.

Transcending man, beyond and separate from him, comes from God truth, goodness, and beauty; hence, those three are called the transcendentals.  Before man gets to specifics such as truth and goodness, he arrives at beauty in the immensity, order, and proportionality of the revelation of God.  These are the “invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world [that] are clearly seen” (Romans 1:20).  These are the “heavens declaring the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

As we work our way through scripture, God’s Word reveals the glory of God, declared by the heavens  that He created and sustains, to be the perfections of His attributes.  God manifests Himself to mankind first through creation, and that revelation, which everyone knows is the glory of God.  But mankind as a race does not glorify God.  He does not worship God in His transcendence.  What happens or what has happened, and what is the result of that?

When man receives beauty from God’s revelation of Himself, this is objective or absolute.  God is the standard for beauty, so for something to be beautiful, it is judged according to God.  This was premodern thinking about beauty.  It is the truth about beauty.

Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder to premoderns, because it isn’t in the eye of the beholder.  Beauty isn’t subjective.  It was according to the revelation of God, the plain qualities revealed therein. Those are objective.  Beauty starts with God, so it is immutable.  It cannot progress.  It is transcendent, so invariable.

The truly or actual authentic is the original, like leather to naugahyde.  The latter is inauthentic.  Related to beauty, authenticity patterns after the revelation of God.  In scripture, this is termed the beauty of holiness.  Holiness is this transcendence, separation, or majesty.  Only that is acceptable to God.  If the opposite of beauty is ugliness, then subjective “beauty,” which isn’t beauty at all, is both ugly and inauthentic.

Modern and then especially postmodern thinking looks at man and then inward for beauty.   Man first is the measure and then self. This turns from the upward gaze to the inward.  Self becomes the standard, and this is subject, that is, from the perspective of self. Authentic with postmodernism means be true to you.  Jesus, however, said if any man would come after Him, let him deny his self (Luke 9:23).  The beauty of God’s holiness is the glory of God, which is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, not in the face of man or in himself.  Man’s heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

Attributes according to the nature of man are sensual and distorted by depravity.  It moves beyond lasciviousness to all out sexual perversion.  This turn inward for authority also rejects any critique.  The idea here, even though it is never applied consistently, is that the acceptable judge is self.  Criticism, on the other hand, assumes objective criteria.  There is nothing to criticize or reject if any and everything can be good, because it’s all according to the eye or ear of the beholder.

Postmodern authenticity is sheer self approval.  This is letting you be you, which can be an anthem for postmodernism.  Oddly, narcissism in postmodern psychology says you should be other than you. Applying an objective standard, one from God, and denying self is hate speech worthy of a restraining order or worse. The narcissist apparently presents objective beauty in contradiction of self identity. This is considered harm on the level of physical violence. These concepts undergird future rejection of freedom of speech and further down the road, reeducation camps.

Opposite of God as standard, self as standard is ugly. You reader might like it, but your like of it is not what deems it beautiful.  Popular art is ugly, and all the iterations of it, and this in music, drawing, painting, architecture, and fashion.  Truth and goodness cannot be separated from God, so with the ugly will follow evil and lies.

I have contended that the corruption of truth, let’s say in the form of an unscriptural doctrinal statement, is not the on ramp to the broad road.  Instead, it is ugliness, what is this subjective aesthetic.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not called ugliness.  It is called beauty, but it really is ugliness.  It proceeds from the imaginations of men, which is a denial of God.  It is an alluring and easy access to the broad road and then a speedy fast lane down that road away from the nearest on ramp.  This is the road to perdition.

God is worshiped through self denial.  If any man comes to Him, he starts with denying himself. An unwillingness to deny self is worshiping the creature. This is apostasy   Perversion and distortion follow.  Good is evil and evil is good, but first ugly is beautiful and beauty is ugliness.  It is the music hall and the art museum of Sodom and Gomorrah.  It is blasphemy to the name of God that ends in eternal destruction.  It will not enter the kingdom of God.  His eyes are so pure that He cannot look upon it.

It is an easy transition from beauty as personal taste, to a self scripted truth and goodness.  The god of man’s own imagination is very compliant.  He is sovereign and to them a benevolent master, much better than the One and True God, who is judging them and will judge them according to His holy and immutable standard. 

Contemporary evangelicalism has for the most part inculcated postmodern culture, rejecting the beauty of God’s holiness for the faux authenticity of self-fulfillment and advocating another Jesus made in the image of self.  Each person chooses his own identity.  Love is not defined by God and fruit of the Holy Spirit, but is a strong feeling of attraction to what pleases self.  Everyone finds his own meaning by expressing himself according to his own feelings and desires.

The institutions of divine authority, including parents, who curb or constrain self-expression, which is the total freedom to be themselves, what they call authenticity, is on the order of a hate crime.  This will cause their selves to be “unwell.”  It requires them to be someone other than who they see themselves to be, which is their definition of themselves.  Violating these boundaries is the new immorality, a narcissistic personality disorder.  From their perspective, the only hope of a future relationship is found in not just the absence of criticism or judgment, but the acceptance of what they themselves see as their true identity. 

The high octane of personal pleasure fuels faster speed down the broad road.  Without the restrictions God has designed to impede, provided through His ordained institutions, including true churches and a father and mother, the adherents to self fulfillment will continue their hurtle toward the catastrophic end.  They police themselves from the bromides of their own self help manuals.  God, however, will still judge them according to His Book.

As Romans 1:25 says, they have turned the truth of God into a lie.  They have turned the beauty of God into ugliness.  It is the ultimate form of suicide, spiritual suicide, ending in eternal separation from God in the lake of fire.

This could be a part two to the first post this week.

Thirty-three years ago, my wife and I, married two weeks, moved with nothing to California, the San Francisco Bay Area, to start a church.  We stayed until July of this year, 2020, when we moved to Southern Oregon, Jackson County, to begin again.  The church in California is solid with good leaders trained in our church.  Now we’re missionaries, but we’re doing the same thing that we did when we came to California, except with a lot more knowledge and experience.  Lord-willing we’ll do it a few more times, if the Lord tarries and we live.

I can say that I’ve now been at two places to start two churches, but I’ve also seen enough in other places to know what I’m about to tell you.  I should say that it corresponds to what you will read in the Bible too.  The latter should precede the former, but that’s not always how it occurs in real time.  Sometimes life experience seeks out the teaching and application of the Bible.  The two feed off of each other, but the Bible reveals the truth.  It is the final authority.

My experience is that the most difficult issues for a church are the ones where a desire of the flesh clashes with what the church teaches.  It looks like someone won’t consider scriptural teaching because he knows it means giving up something that he doesn’t want to lose.  If the church would go ahead and allow for his desire, it seems, he might listen and come along.  He won’t change on it.  He can find a church that won’t challenge this desire of the flesh.  Will the church confront and disallow this continued disobedience to scripture with the threat of his leaving?

The less ways that a church might clash with people’s desires of the flesh, the more people a church might keep.   Today these desires are totally accepted by society and most churches.  The church that won’t accept them is now an outlier.  Will the church require compliance to scripture in those areas that conflict with people’s desires of their flesh?  When one person is allowed freedom to disobey, that resistance will spread.  What one person gets away with will transmit to others.  Soon, that’s not the belief and practice of the church anymore.  The church has not kept that teaching.  Then it easily affects other churches, that also give up on that truth.

Church leaders don’t want to lose people, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t lose anything, when they don’t lose the people they have because they have relented to their people’s desires of the flesh.  They will give up teachings and practices that clash with those desires.  Leaders imagine their church will lose a majority of its younger people, because they want the music, dress, entertainment, social media, and friends of the world.  With the internet, they can find a version of Christianity that will allow for anything.  Leaders know that, some competition is occurring here, pressuring them to compete against potential departure, like keeping a customer.

The item coveted by the flesh is an idol.  Covetousness is idolatry (Col 3:5).  Jeroboam wanted to keep his people in the Northern Kingdom, so he built altars with golden calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12).  They might have an instinct against the convenience of the fleshly desire to obey by traveling down to Jerusalem to worship.  Jerusalem offered an invisible God.  Jeroboam provided a visible alternative, which could compete with the convention, tradition, or norm, the old way, of Jerusalem.  The visible calf was the comfort Aaron offered in Exodus 32 when fear struck the people at the base of Mt. Sinai.

Early in California I ran to the grocery store to pick something up there and a church member was two people ahead in the express lane.  He sat down one bottle of hard liquor on the counter.  I didn’t know about this.  So what do I do?   I wanted to say nothing.  I wanted to stare at candy bar selection to my right, play like I didn’t see him.  These are the most difficult issues in a church.

I look at the giving records of the church, and certain members with very high paying jobs are giving little to nothing in the offering plate.  They just drove their new expensive car into the church parking lot, so they can afford that.  Do you think they want that conversation about giving?

Someone with no time for evangelism has plenty of time to hang out with friends.  He or she has regular recreation and party time.  Ask for a fun trip and he’s ready to go.  He “can’t” come to a work day.  Entertainment references and pop knowledge come from his lips, but rarely to never a scripture verse or biblical expression.  Is he or she going to like your confrontation over this deluge of popular culture?

Is it appropriate that one of the women of your church shows cleavage?  A partial view of her breasts is readily available?  This isn’t the Trinity.  This isn’t the doctrine of justification.  This is whether God allow for women revealing this body part in public.  If you talk to her or have one of your ladies talk to her in a kind way, how’s that going to go?

I could give many more examples, but these are the most difficult issues in a church.  A church leader might think that any one of these issues might send someone away from the church.  A person who leaves might not even say that’s the reason.  He can find something else to leave about, that will sound legitimate to him.

Instead of dealing with an issue of the desires of the flesh, one might chalk that up to an issue of growth.  Here is a weak person, who just needs to be given time to grow.  One year later, he still needs time to grow.  Ten years later, when he’s worse or at least no better than ten years before, he still needs time to grow.  The issues remain.

How a person responds to scripture on any issue is one of the chief indicators of true conversion (James 1:19-27).  The major reasons for church gathering according to Hebrews 10:24-25 are provocation to love and good works and exhortation.  Scripture is profitable for reproof and correction.  In preaching the Word, the preacher reproves and rebukes.  Paul commanded Timothy in Titus 2:15 to rebuke with all authority.  I know that’s not all of what the Bible teaches about relationships in the church, but the most difficult issues in a church are when someone considering membership or a church member functions according to desires of the flesh and that practice must be be addressed in the ways the passages say:  correct, reprove, rebuke, etc.

Consider these two statements.  “We had thirty show up.”  “We had fifteen show up.”  Which of these is better?  Let’s say that thirty were showing up until a desire of the flesh was confronted, and now fifteen are showing up.  When you report that you had thirty, that sounds better than fifteen.  Thirty sounds like you might be doing a better job.  I understand.  Many church philosophy books or church growth manuals today explain the plan for getting thirty by allowing for desires of the flesh.

Keeping allowing for desires of the flesh long enough and in order to keep people, and then these desires become part of the doctrine and practice of a church.  Much longer and this characterizes almost all the churches of the entire country.  Churches that have kept reproving desires of the flesh, they are far away and few between and are now so far out of the mainstream that Christians think they’re some kind of a cult.  They’re bad.  They are in fact perverting the grace of God that allows for desires of the flesh.

So few people are denied desires of the flesh that they must be permitted.  Grace justifies their permission.  The church becomes like the world.  The church that isn’t like the world is now wrong.  This all started with the most difficult issues for a church.

If the Bible is the authority for faith and practice, the faith and practice will correspond to or reflect the Bible.  God keeps people saved (1 Peter 1:5).  Saved people won’t eject from the church (1 John 2:19).  If that is the faith and practice of the Bible, then God keeps people in a church.  The truth of scripture is not the enemy of someone staying in a church.  The truth attracts believers.  They’re going to want it.  They’re staying because the truth is what God uses to keep them in the church.

The truth isn’t what will cause a saved person to leave a church.  The corruption of or absence of the truth will cause a person to leave a church.  So how is it that a scriptural leader keeps someone in a church?  He does it by building that person up in the truth, strengthening him in the truth, so that he will not be led astray by error.

Is the following how a church leader thinks?  “I better preach the truth, because I want these people to stay.”  It should.  However, it isn’t unusual instead to think, if I preach this truth, that person might not like it and will leave.  So how is it that you “keep people”?  You don’t preach or enforce that truth.  You do the opposite to keep people.

Have you ever visited a church or been around another church and noticed weakness?  I mean, regular unscriptural practice among the members.  When I say that, I don’t mean the process of Christian growth, where change occurs over time, more doing of right with some doing wrong.  A leader can’t teach everything in weeks, months, or even years, and especially today.  We can’t assume that people grew up with the teaching of the Word of God.  They have to be trained.  What I’m describing is church wide weakness, that doesn’t seem like it’s even being dealt with.  Sometimes, however, the growth factor is used as an excuse for weakness, constant explaining away of disobedience, that isn’t confronted for fear of losing people, not keeping them.

The unwillingness to deal with sin of various types — commission, omission, worldliness, etc. — because confronting it would result in not keeping someone or many people, takes a church the trajectory of apostasy.  Very often the explanation is, “You’re not going to keep people.”  Leadership pictures the shrinking of the congregation.  That imagination informs policy, staving off potential leaving.  It also looks around and the increased numbers of churches that take the easier positions or ones conducive to keeping more people, and therefore adding them, are doing that, keeping and adding.  And their leaders explain these as reasons for church growth:  they’ve closed the back door.  So “God is using these decisions.”  It’s not explained as, “we’re disobeying God and God isn’t being pleased, but we’re going to do what we’re doing anyway, because we want to keep these people.”

When one reads evangelical’s materials on the church and then watches what they do, one can see that not losing people becomes preeminent.  They do what it takes to keep people and then they adapt their belief and practice to that to various degrees.   No doctrine is really adaptable, but in an arbitrary way, grace seems to have been the easiest.  Grace is a wide river, overflowing its banks, pulling in people who won’t repent, won’t obey, and live in continuous sin.  God’s grace keeps taking care of them.  This false grace doctrine leaks into numbers of other doctrines to allow for all sorts of doctrine and practice friendly to keeping the most people.

Someone might rightfully explain that churches haven’t kept carnal people.  Those people are already lost.  Also, by keeping them, they’ve hurt their church.  The goal of the church is to please God.  People that want to please God will stay.  They are better off losing people who don’t want to believe and obey scripture, even if it means being smaller.

Another thought on keeping people is the following.   What is the size of a church?  Is the size of the church the number of people a church has when it allows false doctrine and practice?  Or is the size of a church the number of people it has when it obeys the Bible?  Who decides how big a church is?  What is gained by having a big church that does it by not pleasing God?  Or arrives at the greater size through greater disobedience to or displeasure of God?

I’ve asked the question, should churches try to keep people?  It’s right to try to keep people, but not according to conventional thinking.  You try to keep people by explaining what the Bible says about leaving.  You try to keep people by helping them deal with trials and tests.  You try to keep people by building them up in the faith.  That’s really trying to keep people.  The church becomes stronger and it pleases God more.  It will even grow, but the growth will be the addition of true Christians.

Someone may want to leave because he’s tempted by the world.  The way to keep that person is not by making the church more worldly so that person will feel more at home.  That’s a person, who might not even be saved.  He loves the world.  He can’t find out that he isn’t saved if the church tolerates it and accommodates it like most churches in evangelicalism are doing today.

No, the person who seems to be headed out because he loves this present world, he should be confronted for his worldliness with the thought of biblical restoration.  Give him scripture that will confront the destructiveness and faithlessness of this thinking and behavior.  Woo him to stay by providing scripture.  This is spiritual warfare.  It will preserve a soul, save a soul from death, but it will also exalt God and His Word, the purpose of the church.  It will preserve the truth by passing down the purity of the Word to the next generation.  This is truly keeping people.