Part One   Part Two   Part Three   Part Four

To review, people want to be happy more than anything and they think relationship is the top reason for that.  Taking this further though, when they say relationship, they don’t mean what God intended for relationship.  I heard a commercial the other day, that I discovered was using an audio clip from the British rock band, Queen, a movie about which was nominated for the Academy Awards this year.  Perhaps the Oscars and the usage in the commercial fed off each other. I looked up the lyrics and the refrain or chorus were the operative words, except with two preceding lines:

It ain’t much I’m asking, if you want the truth
Here’s to the future for the dreams of youth
I want it all (give it all I want it all)
I want it all (yeah)
I want it all and I want it now.

I wondered if those lyrics were intended to express irony, as if Queen were mocking millennials or the present generation, rather than admiring their point of view.  “I Want It All,” I recognize as a perfect millennial anthem.  Apparently band member Brian May wrote the words at the time he had left his first wife for a second, the words serving as a defense of the relationship.  Lead singer, Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara), perhaps got what he wanted, but he also contracted the HIV virus, then full blown AIDS, something nobody would want, and died age 45 in 1991, two years after “I Want It All” was released.

What people want in relationship and what God designed or what scripture teaches conflict with one another.  You can’t actually “have it all,” even if you want it, unless you mean that you are committed to wait for it and then inherit all things in and through Jesus Christ.  That is usually not what people mean when they say, I want it all.  Maybe the key is, they want it, now.  They want the relationship that they want, even the one they have with God — they want that to be like they want it.  Nobody gets a relationship with God by subjugating God to his desires, what he wants, but by submitting his wants to God’s wants, just like Jesus did with His Father.

Horizontal Relationship

In part four, I alluded to the identification of the “horizontal relationship.”  Scripture evinces equality.  In Galatians 3:28 Paul writes:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.

Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.

Relationship of God with man hasn’t changed.  God sets the terms for the relationship.  Someone can conform God in His imagination to a God that accepts what he wants in a relationship with God, but that doesn’t mean it is a relationship with God.  This trickles down to the relationship of people with one another too.

More to Come

Part One   Part Two   Part Three

Relationship.  You can’t live without it.  You can’t live with it.  Bad relationship can be torture.  I don’t have to explain.  Everyone reading knows.  It can be great, fantastic, and enjoyable.  It can be infuriating, frustrating, or sad.  It can influence toward either righteousness or evil.  It mainly does the latter.  We need to know about relationship.  We need to know what God says about it.  We will be judged by God for and about relationship.

Relationship with God is priority and the basis of all human relationship.  Relationship starts with God, and that relationship is also the source and model for all successful and fulfilling relationship.  The desire for relationship that is inherent in every human being also turns every person into prey, using relationship as bait.  People want relationship to the degree that they will pursue inordinate relationship, instead of pleasing God in it.  Organizations, including churches, use relationship to pander to an audience.

To understand right relationship, everything fundamental to it can be found in the relationship between the Father and the Son in the Trinity, the Godhead.  Both the Father and the Son reveal in scripture various components of their relationship with each other in a way sufficient to explain the right kind.  Those characteristics of their relationship are teased out further in revelation in scripture about relationship between people.  What scripture says should be the guide by which we inform and the grid by which we judge our relationship with God and with people.

The relationship with God has been called, and in an accurate and helpful way, a vertical relationship.  The relationship with people has been titled, also accurate and helpful, a horizontal relationship.  It is also true and edifying to consider the horizontal relationship depends on the vertical relationship.  It is good then to see the association between the vertical and the horizontal.

Horizontal as a description of human relationship is a bit of a misnomer.  Almost all relationship divine and human is what could be called hierarchical, so much so that one should say that relationship is hierarchical.  This is also likely the most repulsive aspects of relationship to depraved humanity, and especially today.  People resist authority, starting with God.  Problem with most relationship is a problem with God, because relationship is hierarchical, as seen in several ways in scripture, not necessarily in this order.

One, in 1 Corinthians 11:3, the Apostle Paul writes:

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

This represents the most important relationships in existence:  Father to Christ to man to woman.  If hierarchy is in the Godhead, then it shouldn’t surprise someone that it is also crucial for humanity.

Two, the first words in God’s relationship to man are a command.  When God started talking to men, He commanded man (Genesis 2:16-17):

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

The relationship of God to man is “God commanded the man.”

Jesus, the God-man, did not treat His relationship with the Father differently than what God expects of all men.  Three, more than any other gospel, John presents the relationship of Jesus with His Father, and all through the gospel of John, Jesus says He’s doing exactly what the Father wants Him to do.  The purpose of Jesus was to do the will of His Father, that is what sanctified the Son, and what the Son said sanctified people as well.

John 5:19, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.”
John 5:20, “For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth.”
John 5:30, “I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.”
John 5:36, “for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do.”
John 8:28, “I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.”
John 8:29, “And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him.”
John 8:49, ” I honour my Father.”
John 10:18, “This commandment have I received of my Father.”

There is much more.  I often asked and still ask my own son, “Is there anything that I’m telling you to do as a son that either is not in the Word of God, or is against the Word of God?”  I’ve never heard, no, to that question.  Sons still often think that what the father says is optional or even harmful to them, albeit scriptural.  Relationship between the Father and the Son in the Trinity is hierarchical, and that is the model relationship.  Someone may say, “Well, the Father loves the Son, so it is easy for the Son.”  Here’s what the Son says (John 10:15-17):

As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. . . . Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.

I know many people who want “good relationships” and by that, they mean people treating them well.  The same people often have a problem with authority.  They don’t like hierarchy and don’t do well with it.  The problem, again and again, “are the people in charge” (their assessment).  This parallels the big issue for unbelievers.  2 Peter 2-3 speaks of the typical apostate “speaking evil of dignities.”  They don’t like having a boss and classically they nit-pick those above them.  They “walk after their own lust” and scoff at what clashes with their will.  They don’t deny themselves, aren’t thankful, and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.  All of this will sabotage relationship.

More to Come

I want to keep up my series on Relationship, having finished part one, and I will, but when I saw this article and then read it, I knew I had to write this instead.  I will be coming back to finish the Relationship series, Lord-willing, however.  I don’t know how many parts it will be, but it could be many.

Apostasy is a real and ongoing threat to Christianity.  It has never stopped since sin entered the Garden of Eden.  When true believers dwindled to eight out of about eight billion before the Genesis flood, that process took over a thousand years.  Churches don’t jump straight to apostasy either.  However, it can happen quickly.  When Jesus wrote to the church at Laodicia in Revelation 3, it had run its entire course in the space of about 40 years, start to finish.

What often occurs did in Corinth with church members’ denial of the bodily resurrection.  Corinthian culture declared all flesh evil and bodily resurrection didn’t conform.  Due to pressure of various sorts, the church at Corinth straddled mythology with the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Churches see their own beliefs and practices as a threat to their existence.  The world opposes and they negotiate a truce by conceding some of what they believe, convinced that it isn’t important enough to preserve.  They relegate biblical teaching that clashes with the world to a secondary matter.

How is apostasy stopped?  Someone like Paul mediates, as he did in 1 Corinthians 15, confronting the problem.  He also revealed the cause of deceit, which were relationships that exposed them to wrong thinking (cf. 1 Cor 15:33).  Likewise, in the six earlier letters to the other churches in Revelation 2-3, Jesus admonished and warned them to repent or face negative consequences.

In the slide toward apostasy, the beliefs and practices that clash most with the world depart first, which of necessity requires a dismissal of biblical authority.  God is One.  His truth is one.  The surrender of any part at least anticipates a total abandonment.  A path of deviation reaches a tipping point, one that seems like a place of no return, where Christianity might not be Christianity anymore.

On February 5, Greg Morse published an article for Desiring God, the organization of leading evangelical John Piper, entitled, “Play the Man You Are:  Will Effeminacy Keep Anyone from Heaven?”  If someone believes the Bible, knows 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and so cares about the eternal soul of a professing Christian man who exhibits effeminate traits or characteristics, he can’t let this one go.  What Morse has written, represented by the following tweet on the Desiring God twitter address, follows very close to scripture on a cultural issue.

If we are faithful to the word of God, we will call men away from the sin of brutality. We will also call them away from the sin of effeminacy. https://t.co/F7h33PBRuv

— Desiring God (@desiringGod) February 5, 2019

Men should rejoice in what he’s done, his explanation and application of scripture.  I want more of this in evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

What Morse wrote, I don’t know of any fundamentalists right now who would write it.  I haven’t read it anywhere, except here on my blog in a two part series December of 2017 (part one, part two).  Please reread those two posts and compare them with what Morse writes. Very few joined in my concern.  Churches are full of effeminate men and they are doing next to nothing about it.  Leaders are afraid, which will result in more and more effeminate men in churches.

acting cowardly or “womanish” in battle 

inordinate love for luxury 

acting like a woman in one’s demeanor, speech, and gesture 

lispy sentences, light gestures, soft mannerisms, and flamboyant jokes 

American culture associates pink with women, as it does dresses 

to walk down the street holding hands with another man 

a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him 

peak flamboyantly, gesture lightly, or wear lipstick

The Gay Vibe

 Morse writes:

On a recent family vacation to Orlando, I witnessed men blatantly, boldly, proudly play the woman in public. What did I observe? They did not commit any sexual acts before me. What I observed was not homosexuality but effeminacy. They were effeminate, sending out what Doug Wilson calls “the gay vibe.” They were living out of step with their nature, and out of step with our cultural expressions of maleness, and denying in their behavior their God-assigned manhood.

A part of the problem here, as I’ve witnessed it, is that Christians make playing the woman no issue today, as if it can’t really be done anymore, when men know it is done.  We should not be giving this behavior a pass — those who exhibit effeminate qualities.

Sex Governs ‘Gender Expression’

In the midst of this section, Morse comes back to Deuteronomy 22:5, something we just don’t hear today from either evangelicals or fundamentalists, but it is true:

From the beginning, God clearly wed sex and sex-expression. Under Moses, Deuteronomy 22:5 expresses a timeless prohibition that stood true long before the old covenant and long after the coming of the new covenant: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” God means, in the strongest terms, for men to dress as men, and represent themselves as men, because he desires no observable confusion between the sex he gave and our expression of it.

For women to put on a male garment there has to be one designated and for men to put on a female garment, there must be one.  Earlier, Morse said men don’t wear dresses.  It is true.  Of course, all readers here know that women don’t wear pants either.

“Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” which describes futile activity in the face of impending catastrophe, first appeared in print in 1969 in Time Magazine and with reference to reforms in Roman Catholicism.  Its origination is appropriate for the parallel with the present sinking of evangelicalism.  An equivalent metaphor might be a spy keeping a handy cyanide capsule.  I was reminded of this condition of evangelicalism when reading the latest 9Marks Journal, Feburary 2019 edition, titled, Ecclesiology for Calvinists (pdf edition).

I like the nine marks of 9Marks.  In 2008 I wrote the article, Missing the Mark: 9 Marks Aren’t Enough, at the Jackhammer Blog.  I extol the original nine that Mark Dever listed.  All things considered, I would have enjoyed the Nearer My God to Thee played by the string ensemble in the face of approaching doom.  I wish the most recent edition of the 9Marks Journal signaled repentance and change, a return to biblical belief and practice.

Jonathan Leeman, the editorial director for 9Marks, gives introduction with two big concerns I also share with him:  revivalism and pragmatism.  I’m right with him in his explanation, so much so that my jaw was dropping.  Momentarily my hopes were buoyed, but as I continued to read, I could hear the sickening creaking of the ship and the chill in the air.

With few exceptions, the first article was an excellent one by Michael Lawrence, entitled, “Hey Calvinist, Enough of Your Revivalism,” and it started with the question, “How do you grow your church?”  So much was good.  He even names names throughout, which could have an effect of separating himself from those he identifies. The following quotes are a good sampling:

In other words, it’s the fruit of the Spirit, not enthusiasm or momentum, that demonstrates God is at work. 

The tools of modernity produce the culture of modernity, not the kingdom of God. As survey after survey revealed, our growing churches were not filled with the results of Spirit-wrought revival, genuine converts characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, but were filled instead with the results of modern revivalism, religious consumers characterized by the spirit of the age.

Contemporary Christian music emerged from the culture of modernity.  Of what was wrong, displaying a contradictory lack of understanding to what was just written, he wrote in the last paragraph:  “There’s nothing wrong with having culturally appropriate music,” conflicting with this line earlier in his piece.

From the camp meetings, altar calls, and anxious bench of the Second Great Awakening, to the marriage of emotionally powerful preaching and singing in the ministry of Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, to the stirring rallies of Billy Graham, the style of revivalism has shifted to match the changing culture.

“Culturally appropriate music” is ‘worship’ that “has shifted to match the changing culture.”  It wasn’t appropriate for godly, premodern reasons, and not now.  Finney pandered using music.  Worship should conform to God, just like everything else in the church.  The disconnect baffles me about as much as how good the rest of the article is.

Despite the inconsistencies and a desire for underlying exegesis, Michael Lawrence was refreshing for someone in the Conservative Baptist denomination on the West Coast.  I don’t read this much from evangelicals.  I’m not sure the 9Marks crowd sees the ship sinking.  When they should be manning the life rafts, their eschatology, what they consider a second or third tier doctrine, gives them false hope.

Evangelicals fail to see the pragmatism of managed or negotiated evacuation.  Collin Hansen, who in 2018 authored the landmark book, Young Restless and Reformed, wrote in “Still Young, Restless, and Reformed?  The New Calvinists at 10”:

Mohler’s [Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary] teaching on theological triage helped YRR pastors avoid some mistakes of previous generations. Men like Graham and Henry were not primarily known as local church figures. There are some uses for mere Christianity, or lowest-common-denominator evangelicalism. But it led to confusion and the neglect of the local church and denominations that had succumbed to liberalism. 

Mohler’s triage distinguishes between first-, second-, and third-order issues so that we will learn how seriously we should regard disagreement. By contrast, lowest-common-denominator evangelicalism offered meager resistance to assaults on the character of God such as open theism and universalism. This triage helped sound the alarm bells of such first-order threats as Rob Bell’s Love Wins, published in 2011. 

At the same time, triage also helped the YRR avoid the belligerency and isolation of fundamentalism. Second-order doctrines such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, charismatic gifts, and polity are still vitally important, even if we don’t agree on every conclusion.  Triage helped us identify serious flaws in each other without condemning our friends and historical heroes to hell. Otherwise, the YRR would be cut off from much of Christian history and the global church in a kind of untenable Donatist purity. Finally, theological triage sidelined in the YRR certain issues that had formerly divided churches, such as questions surrounding the rapture and millennium. That’s where being connected to history helped. Not everything that seemed so important in late-19th and early 20th centuries is a hill to die on today or going forward. 

But triage doesn’t solve all our problems. And now, we’re seeing major disagreements in and among YRR, even within the same churches. Evangelicalism may not survive this transition.

Theological triage itself is pragmatism.  Scripture doesn’t teach it.  It is rearranging the deck chairs, which Hansen himself concludes in the end, saying, “Evangelicalism may not survive this transition.”  If scripture teaches separation from false doctrine, it’s pragmatic not to separate to avoid either condemning historical heroes to hell or Donatist purity.  Donatist purity was the cure for what Hansen would see as first order heresies.

Both evangelicalism and fundamentalism are belligerent.  I don’t seen any difference between the two.  Isolation is a caricature of the doctrine of separation.  It’s a term neo-conservatives use to smear nationalist foreign diplomacy.  Biblical separation isn’t isolation.  It is true unity.  It fellowships based on the truth, not by cutting the living child in two, something Solomon never planned to happen.

I can be happy that evangelicals know something is wrong.  That is evident in this 9Marks edition of their journal.  Some of the teaching in it is very good.  To save the ship, much more is needed.  Even to save what they call first order doctrines, they will need to separate, what Hansen calls “isolation” as a preventative for plugging the gaping hole.

Hansen’s book was of such impact that several articles and other books proceeded from it (here and here, among others).  He coined  both “young, restless, and reformed” and “new Calvinist.”  In 2009 Peter Masters, pastor of Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, wrote a scathing criticism of the new movement, entitled, “New Calvinism – The Merger of Calvinism with Worldliness.”  New Calvinism is another iceberg that will sink evangelicalism even faster.

To preserve organizations like 9Marks, doctrinal and practical triage is necessary.  To preserve the truth and the church, separation is necessary.  You won’t save them by just rearranging the deck chairs.

Dever and Leeman discuss this edition of their journal here.  You can listen to a podcast on it.  Take out Calvinism in this instance and think instead “the Bible” or God-centered thinking and it is very good.  They are not being totally honest in my opinion, but they are so deluded in many ways, they might not be able to hear.  I wish they could.  It’s interesting that Dever mentions Spurgeon’s church as an example of what they’re talking about.  You wonder if they might consider where Peter Masters is right now in that actual place.