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Isn't this fellowship great? It's like that perfume that was
poured upon Aaron's head, isn't it? That's just so sweet and
lovely. If we're not ready to go to heaven
after this weekend, I'll tell you. Thank you so much for having
me and for being so kind to let me address you. It's always a
great privilege to speak to the people of God. It's also a privilege
to speak to those who aren't the people of God when the Lord
has given you a message for them. But it's a real privilege and
a joy to be with those who are the people of God and are of
like mind with me. I want to give my congratulations
to the Caledon Presbyterian Church. You're celebrating your 20th
anniversary. I praise God for you and commend
you. I also want to thank you. I think
many of us who have gone through, well, ups and downs over the
last 20 years have found it an encouragement that God has raised
up a witness here in Atlanta, this congregation. He has blessed
you. Look at this wonderful building
you have, the people you have, the talent that's here, the preaching
from this pulpit. And I just pray that God will
give you many more years to lead the way and set an example for
us. Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party. I'm glad
that I can be here, and I'd like to take the opportunity, because
I think it's appropriate, that if we think about the 20 years
of this congregation, we can think about 20 years in what
is sometimes called the Christian Reconstruction movement. Now,
I'm not going to mince words today. Those of you who have
read No Other Standard know that I think technically there is
no Reconstructionist movement, if you speak in sociological
terms. but there's certainly a Reconstructionist school of
thought. And though it did not begin with the Chalcedon Presbyterian
Church, the public recognition of that school of thought is
not that far off from the beginning of this congregation in time.
So this is an appropriate opportunity to not only be grateful to God
for the 20 years you've had as a congregation, but also to stop
and reflect upon the Reconstructionist school of thought movement, whatever
you want to call it. The great theme in all of Protestant
theology is law and grace. What is the relationship of law
and grace? Many theologians have said if
you can get right on this subject, you've got your theology right.
And if you depart from that topic of law and grace, to that degree
you will depart from orthodoxy as well. Well, I don't need to
come and speak three times to you on theonomy to tell you the
theonomic view of law and grace. That would be carrying, you know,
coal to Newcastle, wouldn't it? I'm sure you're familiar with
the many books that have been put out, not simply by myself,
but by others that God has raised up. You know what the thesis
is, and you know how it is to be defended. I will say in passing,
even though I'm not going to go into the defense of it in
an exegetical way, that the last 20, 25 years in my own career,
God has given me increasing confidence that this thesis is correct. Most of you who know me publicly
are from my writings or tapes and so forth, don't know Greg
Bonson when he was in seminary and is working out these views
and throwing them up against his professors at Westminster
Seminary and wondering, rightly so. I mean, I think students
should be students and have the due humility of those who are
in a being taught position. But you always wonder, what is
it, because I'm not studied enough, that I have not seen, that I
have not considered, what's behind the veil of ignorance in my life
that may come out and say, now this is what destroys this idea,
and so forth. Well, see, 20 years of being
out on the road and defending this and taking the lumps and
hearing what supposedly the scholars of our Reformed and evangelical
worlds have to say has done at least this for me. I am absolutely
convinced this morning that if there are mistakes in the Reconstructionist
or theonomic outlook, they are not huge, gargantuan mistakes
that any child should be able to see. This is what our opponents
will tell us, that we have missed it by a mile, not just some fine-tuned
detail. Well, I'm now convinced that
if the finest that can be found outside of our school of thought
cannot do any better than they have over the years, we should
have a great deal of confidence. Not in ourselves, but I thank
God. This is a thesis, I think, that is going to stand the test
of time, and I thank him for that. I don't want to get into
the details of how I might answer my critics today, and I don't
want to bore you with going through just the vanilla thesis of theonomy
over the next three opportunities I have to speak for you, but
I do want to address the theonomic thesis in a way that I hope will
advance what we believe is the God's point of view with respect
to morality and politics in this world. and I'd like to help us
as theonomists and reconstructionists to come closer to walking with
God in the way that He wants us to. And so I'd like to focus
on the law with an interest on looking outside our movement,
that's what I'm going to do in this lecture, and then tomorrow
morning looking inside this movement or school of thought, and then
tomorrow evening looking together whether you're a theonomist or
not, looking together at the question of the grace of law. This morning I want to look outside.
I want to look, in a sense, at the law of God with respect to
our opponents and what we might want to say to them, apart from
just writing books and reputation of their arguments. And the title
of this morning's message is Law and Disgrace. And then tomorrow
morning, please pray for me, I have been in meditation and
reflection on this for some time, what I might share, looking back
at 20 years in the Reconstructionist movement, what might I be able
to say in the short time that is there to ourselves, looking
inside? And basically, if you can't be
here, what I want to share with you is that it is not enough
to have the law of God. I praise God for the law of God,
but the law of God in the hands of fools will not help us. You
will notice that when Solomon had the opportunity to ask one
thing of God, Solomon did not ask for more law. Of course,
he had everything he needed in the law that Moses had given.
Solomon asked for wisdom. And I want to pray that God will
use that message to help us become wise in the use of God's law.
And then together, whether we're theonomist or not, tomorrow evening,
I'd like for us to understand from a detailed exegetical study
of the Old Testament that we have misconstrued the relationship
of law and grace. Well, we go back 20 years, that's
what I told you. Let me go back a decade beyond
20 years and remind you that song that Bob Dylan made famous,
popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary, sung by Joan Baez, Blowing
in the Wind. You know, how many roads must
a man walk down before you call him a man? How many seas must
the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? The last
stanza has this line in it that I think is arresting. How many
times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn't see? And I'm going to be using that
as a unifying theme for what I want to say to those outside
the Reconstructionist school of thought and to those who are
inside as well. As I look outside, it seems to
me that the anti-theonomists are turning their heads from
the ugly truth about the world. And though we may get into institutional
politics and personal flaps and have difficulty living with one
another, we may disagree over how we argue the case, how we
exegete particular texts and so forth. What I want to know
from our opponents to the degree that they are brothers and sisters
in Christ. I want to know how many times can a man turn his
head and pretend he just doesn't see what's going on? I will address
the same question to us tomorrow morning as we examine our own
hearts and look in our own difficulties in living together. In our own
midst, how many times have we been turning our heads and pretending
we don't see what everyone else can see about us? and we are
not addressing it. And if I do that in a way that
brings conviction, you may not like me anymore, but I hope God
will like what I have to say for you. And all of us, brothers
and sisters in Christ, whether we call ourselves theonomist
or not, all of us need a better view of what the law of God really
means vis-a-vis His grace. Because apart from inner party
rivalries, if we lose that, we've just lost what being a Christian
is all about. So that's what I want to share
with you this weekend. Time is short. I have learned over the
years to talk more slowly. A few years in the South helped
that. And now I'm going to fight against
all that I've learned and have to fill your time with a lot
of material because we don't get opportunities like this very
often and I want to share some things with you. What are the
two major reasons why people tell me they oppose theonomy
and Christian ethics? There are plenty. I've written
a whole book, so it's much more than two. But if I were to boil
it down to the two recurring major reasons why people cannot
be theonomists, the first would be because we're not under law
but under grace, Romans 6.14. over and over and over again,
and variations on it, but that's the central theme. We're not
under law, we're under grace. And then as an application of
that, I think, and more particularly, we're certainly not under those
harsh, terrible laws about how society is to be governed, and
the civil magistrate is to punish criminal offenders. And so theonomy,
if it has it wrong, if you listen to the popular mentality and
the major reason why people will not go along with us, we have
it wrong because we think we're under law rather than under grace,
and we're so harsh as to think that our society should be governed
by these penal sanctions of the Old Testament. And so what can we say? If we
had two different schools of thought proposing how to build
a neighborhood, and they had completely different views of
how to engage in the building of the homes and the construction
of the streets and all the other things that goes into building
a neighborhood, you might, if you were in one school of thought
over against the other, and you're both trying to build your respective
neighborhoods, you might from time to time go over and see
one another and say, well, how's it going? Give me a progress
report. So rather than doing exegesis
and argument this morning, I'd just like to go over to the non-theonomous
neighborhood and say, how's it going? Give us an update on the
world under your influence. How are things going in your
churches? If we look back, way back, beyond the 20th century,
down through the years to the earliest days of the Christian
church, you'll see that the Christian church, in its very first heretical
encounter, had to deal with the law and grace issue. Marcion,
who died in 160 AD, was the leader of a heretical sect in the early
church. He had come to Rome about 140
AD. Four years after that, the church
excommunicated him. According to Marcion, he maintained
that the gospel of Jesus Christ was entirely a gospel of love
that excludes the Mosaic law. His version of love was not subjective,
it was not licentious. You need to understand that.
Marcion, in fact, was an ascetic. He believed in a very rigorous,
narrow approach to life. But he believed that that approach
to life was to be directed by New Testament text only. And that led him into a severe
ascetic lifestyle, very much like the Gnostics, that despised
the world and the flesh. Marcion felt that the original
gospel had been corrupted by his day. We're talking about
less than a hundred years, and now already people are preaching
sermons we have to get back to New Testament Christianity. Have
you heard that before? Marcion was saying that as well.
He felt that the Judaizing tendencies in the early church had corrupted
the disciples. They should have realized, he
said, that the Old Testament has absolutely no validity for
Christians. And it's only Paul, according
to Marcion, who understood that correctly, and by the way, even
Paul didn't get it right all the time. And so Marcion declared
that the New Covenant Scripture is ten of the epistles of Paul
and the gospel of Luke, but only the gospel with the Old Testament
expurgated from it. And the church had to respond
to Marcion. This is the first major heresy that the church
addresses past the apostolic generation. And it's out of that
confrontation that the church made declaration for the first
time of what it recognized to be the canon of Scripture. I
think it's fascinating that if you understand church history,
it was a theonomic motivation that led to the formation and
public declaration of the New Testament canon. That's fascinating. The New Testament church The
early patristic church was not antagonistic to the Old Testament,
and those who were antagonistic were deemed heretics. Boy, have
we come a long way, baby. Now those of us who are saying,
let's not throw away the Old Testament, let's respect what
God has said there, we now are called heretics. But back in
the days of the early church, the fathers of the church spoke
glowingly of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic law, and of its
civil application. I only have time for two quick
illustrations. Clement of Alexandria spoke explicitly
of, and now I'm quoting him, the harmony of the law and the
gospel. He went on to extensively and
in detail commend the virtue and the benefit of the case laws
that were revealed by Moses. He claimed that the Mosaic Law
was the fountain of all sound ethics. He said it's far superior
to the products of the best legislators of Greece. And now I'll quote
him again. Now Moses furnished a good polity,
which is the right discipline of men in social life. He also
handled the administration of justice. coordinate with it the
faculty of dealing with punishments. In a word, the whole system of
Moses is suited for the training of such as are capable of becoming
good and noble men. But those who disbelieve and
have shown a repugnance to engage in the works of the law, whoever
else may certainly confess their ignorance of the truth." Those
are pretty strong words. Here we have one of the fathers
of the church saying, of course, a civil polity should be fashioned
after Moses. The Greek legislators couldn't
possibly do any better than an inspired writer who speaks directly
to the subject about how men should get along in society and
deal with their problems. Well, that was long ago, right?
Doesn't sound like the day in which we live. This is what sounds
like the day in which we live. I'm going to quote Reinhold Niebuhr. in an interpretation of Christian
ethics. Orthodox Christianity cannot come to the aid of modern
man because its morality is expressed in dogmatic and authoritarian
moral codes. You see, that's the problem.
We can't help modern men because we're all tied down to these
dogmatic authoritarian codes. Rebellion is rooted in the heart
of man. Man would be a law unto himself. It does not come to sinful fallen
men naturally to submit to the dictates of their Creator, certainly
not the dictates in an old-fashioned discredited book. And so modern
theologians, rather than fighting against the spirit of autonomy,
have actually taken the spirit of autonomy to be the Christian
outlook over against the oppressive attitudes that can be found in
the world in various schools of philosophy. Graham de Graaf puts it this
way, There is no room in morality for commands, whether they are
the fathers, the schoolmasters, or the priest. There's still
no room for them when they are God's commands. Wolfhard Pannenberg,
the proclamation of imperatives backed by divine authority is
not very persuasive today. Well, thanks, Wolfhard. I wouldn't
have ever guessed that. Modern theologians promote autonomy,
not theonomy, autonomy in the name of Christian morality. Now
there are some people in Reformed circles that have argued against
an autonomous spirit. I think here of Doja Verde and
his disciples, the cosmonomic school of thought. So you have
autonomy, cosmonomic thinking, theonomy, Well, the cosmonomic
thinkers have felt that the autonomous spirit is not at all appropriate
to being a Christian, but on the other hand, they are not
at all willing to go to the text of the Bible to find those laws
by which we should live. They tell us we need an all-embracing
world and life view. They say that we should look
to the relevance of God's word. Be careful now, word is not being
used in the way you think. We should look to the relevance
of God's word in all areas of life. But in the end, we're disturbed
to find that according to this school of thought, the specific
textual teachings of Scripture—that's what you would have thought Word
meant—the specific textual teachings of Scripture are locked out of
social, economic, judicial, political theorizing. that in fact, believe
it or not, that's called a form of idolatry, because the Word
of God belongs in the box of ecclesiology. It belongs over
here in the category of the modality of faith, but it doesn't pertain
to other things. And Delivered himself specifically
called the attitude that wants to go to the text of the Bible
for civil polity, Biblicism. And I now wear that with honor. I am a Biblicist, because if
that's what you call it, so be it. A rose by any other name
smells as sweet." Nevertheless, there are those in Reformed circles
who want to fight autonomy, but they don't want to fight it with
the specific text of Scripture. As you know, theonomic ethics
recognizes the authority of God's Word, God's written Word, that
it cannot be restricted to any narrow domain. But rather, as
Paul says in 2 Timothy 3, it is profitable for instruction
in righteousness that equips a man for every good work. And now your choices logically
are these. Politics is not a good work,
in which case the Bible doesn't equip you for it, because it's
not a good work. Or it is a good work, and therefore, as Paul
says, all of Scripture is profitable for it. There are no other options. It's theonomy or autonomy, plain
and simple. Hendrick Hart, who was one of
these cosmonomic thinkers, wrote in The Challenge of Our Age,
biblical living can never be summed up in rules for faith
and conduct or faith and morals. Can never be summed up. Well
then, there can never be a biblical faith that challenges our age.
That's what I would say to Dr. Hart in response. Well, there
are those who are closer to home, people who do have a respect
for the text of God's Word who nevertheless don't find what
we are offering in theonomy or reconstructionism wholesome or
good, people who would continue to call us the heretics rather
than the Marcians of our age. And I think here are various
forms of antinomianism. F.F. Bruce has written to the
effect that Christian ethics is not characterized by external
rules. Let me quote him. Not by external
conformity to a written code, but by the impulsion of an inward
power, God's people would do his will from the heart. Talk
about false antitheses. You know, it's like you either
got an external code or you got the inner work of the Spirit,
you know, in your heart. Well, but his point is, if you
really believe in Spirit-born living, if you're really going
to be infused with the Spirit, then external codes of behavior
have no place in Christian morality. Charles Ryrie, in a well-known
dispensational work, The End of the Law, writes that Christians
are in-lawed to Christ. They have law, but it is not
the law of the old dispensation. that indeed unless something
is repeated in the New Testament, it is not the law of the Christian
man. I debated a leading dispensationalist
a number of years ago, many of you I think maybe have heard
the debate, and so I asked a simple question, is bestiality then
acceptable in the New Testament since it's not repeated in the
New Testament? Now you would think that is enough of a simple
reductio ad absurdum to tell people, go back to the drawing
boards, we obviously haven't got this worked out right. Dispensationalism,
however, has simply maintained its opposition, in fact, has
turned up the heat. I don't want to whine and complain,
but I can tell you stories, I know Gary could, all of us could,
about the things that are said and written about us by the people
who can't even show that bestiality is immoral. Isn't that incredible? Likewise, Walter Martin opposes
the Reformation endorsement of the Mosaic Law when he wrote,
the great imperative of love suspends the whole law. He says
we have to be careful to observe, though, that Christians do observe
law, and so then he asks, which law? And he tells us that the
Reformers, who suggested the Mosaic law along with the rest
of the Bible, we're guilty of, and I'm quoting, an unchristian
and unbiblical concept which we repudiate with abject horror. Well, so when we get over to
the other neighborhood, what I hear is people saying, you
are a heretic, Dr. Bonson. We reject what you're
saying with abject horror that is unchristian, that is unbiblical. And so we have in the evangelical
world and we have in the Reformed world today the ascendancy of
Marcion and the rejection of the earliest church, and I believe
of the Bible itself, with respect to the validity of God's law. John Murray wrote once, it's
symptomatic of a pattern of thought current in many evangelical circles,
that the idea of keeping the commandments of God is not consonant
with the liberty and spontaneity of the Christian man. that keeping
the law has its affinities with legalism and with the principle
of works rather than with the principle of grace. And then
he adds in one hammer blow of a sentence, it is strange indeed
that this kind of antipathy to the notion of keeping commandments
should be entertained by any believer who is a serious student
of the New Testament. Well, you know I agree with that.
How's it going? Well, how's it going? We're being
told that we have no idea what we're doing, we're going to destroy
the church, we're going to destroy true Christianity in the individual's
heart, that we are going to ruin society, that these are dangerous
notions, that we are new ayatollahs, and on and on it goes. Okay,
well I told you I wouldn't sit here and just, you know, argue
point by point in exegesis. I just want to visit the other
neighborhood and say, well, then how's it going? Give us a progress
report on what it is to uphold the grace of God as you understand
the grace of God. After a generation of allegedly
protecting the grace of God and the freedom of the Christian
man from the law of God, how's it going outside our circles?
What kind of influence is the Church? Up to 35% of people in
the United States claim to be not just Christians, evangelical
Christians. It's 70 to 80% who will tell
you they are Christians. But let's say, okay, we know
better than that. But those who know to call themselves fundamentalist
evangelical reform, over a third of our nation will profess that.
So how's it going out there where the grace of God is being protected
against us ayatollahs in this world? That's all I want to share
with you this morning, a little progress report. How about in
psychology? Listen to this. Broderick Chisholm, director
of the World Health Organization, and I quote, the belated objectives
of practically all effective psychotherapy are the reinterpretation
and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong. If
the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good
and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.
an outright declaration that we cannot solve man's personal,
psychological problems of the soul. We cannot solve those problems
unless we eradicate the notion of right and wrong. So how are
our brothers and sisters in Christ in the other neighborhood doing
in holding the world back from running completely into the autonomy
that now there is no right and wrong? How's it going in education?
I quote Irving Kristol from the Wall Street Journal, 1987. He
says, one might think that knowing right from wrong is not so remarkable
as to merit comment. But in fact, there are two major
institutions in our society where such knowledge is regarded with
suspicion and distrust. The first consists of the media.
The other is our universities, which cheerfully allow that they
are much too sophisticated to know right from wrong, and regard
any claim to such knowledge with disdain. Might I say in passing,
you might hope that he's speaking tongue-in-cheek. He is not. This
is the literal, observational, descriptive truth. You will be
sneered at at the modern university if you so much as presume that
there is a right and wrong about which you could speak. It's not
that you're mistaken in your view of right and wrong, it's
that you think that there is such a thing. What a child! Once upon a time, Crystal says,
practically all colleges and universities insisted on their
right to dismiss a faculty member for moral turpitude. That phrase
and the concept itself are now dismissed as archaic remnants
of an unenlightened age. Our universities don't know what
moral turpitude is. They teach that an educated person
should find it presumptuous to claim to know what moral turpitude
is. So how's it going out there where
the grace of God is being protected against the law? How's it going
in psychology and in education? James Patterson and Peter Kim,
in the 1992 book, The Day America Told the Truth, write, the overwhelming
majority of people, 93%, said that they and nobody else determine
what is and what is not moral in their lives. They base their
decisions on their own experience, even on their daily whims. Ninety-three
percent of the people with whom we live think that right and
wrong is based on what they feel and experience. And so how is
it going with respect to freedom in our society today where the
grace of God has been stripped free of this terrible theonomic
notion of the law of God? Well, what we see is a hypocritical
demand in our society. Freedom for minorities, freedom
for women, freedom for homosexuals, freedom for political dissidents,
but not freedom for Christian schools. No, there we have the
right to step in and tell you, don't you dare have the idea
of right and wrong. Freedom in our day and age? What
about the utter invasion of property and freedom that is practiced
weekly, practiced daily by the IRS? where are the men in the
other neighborhood who are standing up for the freedom of their people
against that kind of tyranny? Freedom in our day and age without
the law of God when we have so many market restrictions, rent
controls, so much so that I had to go up to Chico a few years
ago, the only Presbyterian they could find who would speak in
behalf of Evelyn Smith because she wouldn't rent her duplex
to an unmarried couple because she thought they were living
in sin. And so the state stepped in and brought charges against
her to force her to do that. That's what freedom means when
the law of God has been dismissed. How about the church and state?
How are we doing in that area? Well, we see in our country freedom
for all religions, don't we? People are just going out of
their way to make sure the Muslims have their freedom. Freedom for all religions, but
of course that means in the public schools freedom from all religion. In the courts, How's it going
where the grace of God has been protected and we don't want to
look at that archaic law of God? Do you remember the shameless
fiasco of the Clarence Thomas hearings when he was to be appointed
to the Supreme Court? I don't particularly care whether
he was guilty or not guilty of the charges brought against him
by His opponent, that is not the issue. What is shameless
to me is that even in a setting where we have legislators and
the issue is the Supreme Court, we have no idea what the law
of God says at the mouth of two or three witnesses, every charge
will be established. Don't we ever have the feeling,
you know, when everything else fails, go back to the instructions. Our society, in the freedom of
the grace that is promoted in our churches, has become characteristically
litigious in its outlook. All of us have become victims,
not free people, victims Look at the disrespect for property
and honesty all about you. The Josephson Institute survey
of 9,000 young people published two years ago informs us that
33% of high school students admitted to shoplifting in the past year.
One in three. Nearly two-thirds of high school
students had cheated on an exam in the past year. 20% of college
students openly said they would falsify a report to help keep
their job. But boy, we're making sure the
grace of God and the freedom of the Christian man is being
protected, aren't we? Patterson and Kim in The Day America Told
the Truth, 1992. Seventy-four percent said they
would steal from those who wouldn't really miss it. That's a huge
number. Three in four people would say
stealing is fine as long as I perceive it wouldn't hurt the other person.
Sixty-four percent said they would lie when it suited them
if it wouldn't cause real harm. 53% said they would cheat on
their spouse. 53%. And the reason given? Because
they figured their spouse was cheating on them anyway. 50% admitted it was standard
operating procedure to procrastinate on the job so that they figured
they really do about four days work for every five they're paid.
How's it going over in the other neighborhood? What about disrespect
for life? We could talk about abortion.
You know the sickening statistics. Has the Christian church done
a good job of being a city set on a hill? Is it now the light
that scatters the darkness when it preaches a grace that's devoid
of the law of God, devoid of any notion of sanctification?
Our genocide of the unborn has made Hitler's campaign against
the Jews pale into a minor crime by comparison. Within 48 hours
of taking the oath of office, President Clinton moved to ease
and lift restrictions on abortion in this country. He openly supports
the Freedom of Choice Act. Think about the euthanasia that's
being promoted and practiced in our country. Look at the widespread
violence all about us. Note the hatred and the bigotry
that's openly promoted in rap music. killing of police, beating
your bitch, getting niggers out of the way, openly, explicitly. Those are the sorts of things
that used to be said in whispers behind people's backs, and now
we sing it. So how's it going over in the
other neighborhood, where the grace of God has been stripped
free of the Mosaic law? Secular culture gladly stood
by when promiscuity and profanity were openly endorsed, and piety
was sneered at, since those sorts of things were conservative values.
And now liberals in our culture are standing aghast at the values
of civilized society being eaten away. Love for neighbor is not
there anymore. Equal treatment for all is not
there. Respect for truth and learning is not there. Concern
for life and property is not there. All of them eaten away
by the acids of modernity and relativism. What's the problem? William Kirkpatrick, education
professor at Boston College, notes that nearly three million
crimes are committed on or near school property. About 135,000 students carry guns to school
every day. And 21% of all secondary students
avoid using school restrooms, as they will put down in private.
because they fear intimidation or harm. Now, what is happening
to our world, friends, while we've been beating up on these
heretic theonomists? Disrespect for sexual purity.
Think about homosexuality alone. One of my students at the study
center has written me a term paper in response to the pressure
being exerted by the federal government to ban any kind of
discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace. The Office
of Personnel Management has ordered that sexual orientation is protected
under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The Department of
Transportation officially sponsors Gay Pride Day. Pro-homosexual
literature is distributed at exhibitions sponsored by the
Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Education
lists in its newsletter section on marriages homosexual commitment
services. The Department of Housing and
Urban Development requires management-level staff to participate in outside
organizations which promote cultural diversity, including homosexual
organizations. What is happening while we in
our churches are promoting the grace of God devoid of law? Are you aware of all these things? Well, in kind of an uneasy, nauseating
way you know that out there things are not good. I'm trying to give
you some detailed focus on this so you might understand why it
is we take the heat to defend theonomy in our day. For the
first time in history, A U.S. president has spoken openly in
favor of tolerance for sexual perversity and has campaigned
for easier treatment of homosexuals in the military. Time would escape
me if I were to speak to you about widespread divorce in our
culture, in our churches. The lifestyle of adultery and
fornication, which is taken for granted on the TV. You see, I've
lived through this generation. I remember when the TV just started
gently suggesting these sorts of things, and now it is taken
for granted that young people who go out on a date need some
kind of sexual protection. Ha, ha, ha, in all of our sitcoms. Well, of course, I'm offended
by the specific, but what really takes me back is that this is
just part of our lifestyle now. So gracious and free has it become. Pornography? Can you send your
children to the market to have them even buy some bread and
milk because of what they're going to see displayed at the
front counter? Rape? A UCLA psychologist interviewed
288 freshman males asking if they would commit a rape if they
knew for sure they could get away with it. One in four said
that he would. If he knew that he could get
away with it, he would not hesitate to rape his date. And how about this area of crime
and punishment, the real offense of theonomy, you know? I've had
people tell me from time to time, I really am glad, Dr. Bonson,
that you brought attention to the authority of the Old Testament.
We need to pay more attention to it. And you know, we need
to pay more attention to how God directs our lives, but I
really don't think you're right to think that we can apply those
laws for our society. We wouldn't want crime to be
punished in the way that the Bible says. Well, okay, let's
visit the other neighborhood. How's it going out there with
respect to crime and punishment? Do the police usually get their
man today? You might think so if you watch
the TV. Well over 30 shows having to do with police, drama, or
private investigators. But if you believe that the police
get their man, you'd be living in the fantasy world of TV. John
Perry reports in Pillars for 1994 that 14 million crimes were
reported in 1992. 14 million, of which 2 million were for violent felonies. Of that total, only 742,000 arrests
were made, of which 410,000 served prison time for their crimes.
You think the police get their man? Why even bother to call
the cops? In 1981, in New York City, the
chief of detectives, James Sullivan, announced that the police would
not be able to investigate burglaries unless the property was worth
more than $5,000, that which was taken. Is it any surprise
then that after he made that announcement, burglary complaints
for the year jumped 12% and there was only one arrest, not conviction,
only one arrest for every 11 burglary reports. See, the police
told the criminals, we can't keep up with you, and they said,
thank you, and they began to eat away all the more. Don't
make the mistake of presuming that violent crime rates just
automatically and always go up from year to year, by the way.
You see, most of our lifetime, we've seen that happen, and so
we just take it for granted. Well, of course, crime's gonna
keep going up. That's plainly wrong, if you study. In 1961,
the murder rate was half of what it had been in 1933. From 1933 to 1961, the murder
rate went down 50%. About that time, peniological
theories were embraced, having to do with the rehabilitation
of criminals. Social theorists and psychologists
turned our attention to the alleged root cause of crime, like poverty,
environment, and so forth. And guess what? Ideas have consequences.
Murder had gone down 50% in 30 years, and from 1960 to 1976, a person's statistical chances
of becoming a victim of violent crime tripled. We cut it in half
in 30 years and tripled it in 15. Ideas have consequences. The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit
group in Washington, D.C., released a report in this year with comparative
figures on incarceration. The U.S. now has the highest
rate in its history for imprisonment. Only Russia, out of the countries
of the world, has a slightly higher percentage of its population
in prison. Since 1980, the inmate population
in the United States has doubled. And you'll note the, you'll be
astounded at what the prisons are costing our society. We really
don't have time to go into all of these details. Do you get
my point? To all of these disgraceful indicators
of the immorality of our culture, I add with alarm the statistical
report that 35% of the people in our country claim to be evangelical
Christians. They have so protected the grace
of God that our world has turned into disgrace. This world, published by the
American Enterprise Institute, reports in its issue for summer
of 1982 on a poll taken by the Roper Organization on the political
and economic opinions of over 1,100 seminary professors in
America, 64% of which claim that the Bible is infallible. To the
question, do you think the Bible offers a blueprint for the ideal
social system or not? Seventy-seven percent of them
said no. Is that an accident? Is it an
accident that the statistical study of crime and immorality
in our country is going sky-high at the same time that the theologians
of our country say, of course, there's nothing in the Bible
about how our society should be governed. George Gallup reported
that among evangelical Christians, less than half of them could
list five of the Ten Commandments. Hey, but that's good news. Surely
the grace of God's not being weighed down with the Mosaic
Law. They don't even know five of
the Ten Commandments. Back in 1988, I read that Jimmy
Swaggart was planning to publish a periodical entitled Sound Doctrine. Boy, is that an ironic name. Sound Doctrine, in order to counteract
Dominion theology. And before he could get around
to publishing how terrible our theology was, his own personal
antinomianism scuttled the project. less likely to be openly noticed
are the numerous cases of dishonesty, abortion, adultery, and even
homosexuality, which are festering in our evangelical, fundamentalist,
and Reformed churches. Mel White recently declared his
homosexuality. He had been a ghostwriter for
Jerry Falwell. James Davidson, a sociologist, has compiled depressing
statistics on the lifestyles of young adults associated with
their evangelical colleges and institutions, only to find that
there is no significant statistical difference between fornication,
abortion, homosexuality between the evangelical colleges and
their secular counterparts. In any number of surveys, we
find that Christians and non-Christians respond and essentially the same
way and in the same numbers in answering questions about greed,
about hedonism, about racism. At Calvin College, the faculty
has widely decried and condemned a student group for bringing
a speaker to campus who spoke against the immorality of homosexual,
while a professed homosexual minister was quite welcome to
speak in the college chapel. Norman Geisler, one of the leading
critics of the heresy of poor Dr. Bonson, has this question
asked, shall we get back to our Christian heritage? His answer
is, God forbid. You see, friends, our culture
is morally going to hell in a handbasket. And the church is following right
along with it. If you sincerely try to stand
against the slide into the cesspool of wickedness in our state, in
our culture, by looking for a consistent biblical position from which
you might witness against the disgrace all around us, as many
of us have found, you'll lose your job within the seminary
community. You'll lose your standing in the church establishment.
You'll virtually become unemployable. Even if you're orthodox, you'll
become ostracized, you'll be called dangerous. What's wrong
with us? That theonomists are dangerous
when we have to lock our windows at night? It's crazy, isn't it? How many times can a man turn
his head and pretend he just doesn't see? of all the wicked
heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day,
when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write
something in unison. They gave their determined political
efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not
abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism
in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not
licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection
from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out
there and they could give their legitimate efforts to. Boy, the
thing they had to write about was theonomy. How many times
can a man turn his head and pretend he doesn't see? We are living
in the cesspool of relativism and the church doesn't have an
answer. I praise God, not for my work, I think it's the grace
of God that allows me to have this ministry, but I praise God
that the truth that the early church knew and that is found
in the Bible is available to us and there are people like
you who are willing to say, we'll pay the price, it's worth it.
Gordon Reed, posting an article from Reform Seminary in Jackson,
Mississippi, begins by noting the Los Angeles riots as a, quote,
grim reminder that our nation and our whole way of life is
seriously threatened by a growing tide of lawlessness. I begin
to read that, and I say, praise God. Forget my background with
the Reform Seminary. I am so glad. So I begin to read
this article. You look at the LA riots, and
you say, lawlessness is all around us. What can we do about it?
And the purpose of the article when you get to the end is to
make sure we know that we're not under the judicial law of
Moses. How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that
he just doesn't see? I submit to you that by opposing
the law of God in the late 20th century, the church continues
to be salt which has lost its savor in a decaying world. We deserve to be cast out and
trodden under the feet of men. In the name of protecting the
grace of God against those who promote the moral validity of
anybody else's opinion rather than what God has said in His
holy commandments, the church has turned the grace of God into
disgrace. It's become guilty of complicity
with the lawlessness of our world. And for a generation, Reconstructionism
has forcibly challenged the world and the drifting church to recognize
the necessity of God's revealed law if we would somehow avert
a plunge into the moral, licensed, and social chaos which is right
in front of us unless we turn our heads and pretend we don't
see. Jude verses 3 and 4 says, Beloved,
while I was giving all diligence to write unto you of our common
salvation, I was constrained to write unto you exhorting you
to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all
delivered to the saints. For there are certain men crept
in privately, those who were of old, of beforehand, unto this
condemnation written, ungodly men, turning the grace of our
God into lasciviousness." How's it going in the other neighborhood?
My word for those who oppose what I have written and my brothers
have written, for what you believe when they call us heretics, my
word to them is you have turned the grace of God into disgrace. May God save us all.
2 - Law and Disgrace (2 of 3)
Series Law and Grace
2 of 3
GB1490
| Sermon ID | 1821550353433 |
| Duration | 52:05 |
| Date | |
| Category | Teaching |
| Bible Text | Matthew 5:17 |
| Language | English |
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