God has ordained the Sacraments to divide men...
(Tim) From The Huffington Post, here's some commentary on the congregational applause that greeted Senator McCain's statement at the Rick Warren pow-wow, that life begins at conception:
These are church people. What they say and
what they do often doesn't match....
As loudly as they may have applauded McCain's straight talk about
abortion, a lot of women in that audience have had abortions. A lot of
their mothers, their sisters and their daughters have too.
How do I know?
I know because evangelicals who've studied each other have shown
again and again that evangelical behavior differs very little from that
of the rest of the country.
The writer is correct to say the church is filled with women who have murdered their babies. Even if you don't believe the pollsters, do the simple math and you'll see that the over two-thirds of Americans who claim to be Christians have to account for the murder of millions of the babies murdered since 1973's Roe v. Wade. And although the writer doesn't mention it, the church is also filled with the men who fathered those children and demanded or acceded to their murder.
Acknowledging this, we need to keep some things in mind.
First, regardless of how they identify themselves spiritually or
theologically here on earth (membership in the PCA, for instance), like
unrepentant adulterers and thieves, murderers who refuse to confess
their blood-guilt and ask for God's mercy will not be in heaven. As the
Apostle Paul puts it so bluntly:
Or do you not
know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not
be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor
effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor
drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of
God. (1Corinthians 6:9,10)
Second, as a minister
of the Word and Sacrament, the essence of Pastor Warren's calling is to
be as constant and explicit in making this dogmatic pronouncement as
the Apostle Paul in the Word of God. He cannot fail to discipline those
who, while murdering their unborn children, attend his church and take
the Lord's Supper there.
God has ordained the Sacraments to divide men
physically, distinguishing between those who do and those who do not
belong to Him--and in a way that all will see. Preaching also has been
ordained by God to make this radical distinction between life and death
and to warn those on the highway to Hell that God is not mocked, that
whatever a man sowed is the very thing he shall reap.
Our gay culture despises distinctions, but they're the heart of
biblical faith and the ministry of the Church. Two ways, two roads,
death and life, Heaven and Hell, broad and narrow, unbelief and faith,
washed and unwashed, communing and not communing.
The deception at the heart of American civic religion is the abuse
of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ as a cover for those who deny
every form of distinction that dares to expose that amorphous globule
of sentimentality known as "getting along with one another" which has
become our only surviving civil compact.
When Pastor Warren hosted a new kind of forum aimed at restoring
"civility" to our national discourse, he did so as a minister of the
Gospel, a pastor, a shepherd of God's flock, a watchman appointed to
guard the souls under his care. And the heart of his duty is to testify
to life and death, to Heaven and Hell.
The streets are running with the blood of over fifty million--that's
50,000,000 babies. In such a time as this, should a Minister of the
Gospel be able to gain a good reputation for measured words, a calm
demeanor, an avuncular manner, a pleasing equanimity, a bipartisan
posture as he hosts a national forum through which two candidates vie
for his nation's presidency, one of whom opposes and the other defends
that bloodshed?
Every one of us who is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ will have
an infinite weight of guilt to answer for when we stand before the
Judgment Seat. Blood-guilt for the murder of our own precious children
will be common among us on That Day. Augustine is not the only one who
needs to make his confessions.
Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were
sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ
and in the Spirit of our God. (1Corinthians 6:11)
So what are we doing to prepare ourselves and those God has placed
under our charge? Are we trying to lower the decibels of our national
political debate to a more civilized level? Or are we proclaiming the
hatred of Almighty God for bloodshed and calling all men and women to
repent of this great wickedness, warning those who refuse to hear and
continue advocating this bloodshed that unless they repent, they shall
perish?
If we want to know what this would look like, we have only to think
back to John the Baptist and all the prophets who went before Him. Or
Jesus. Then it all becomes clear.
Pastor Warren had the ear of our nation and its future president
that night. The river of blood dividing our land was front and center.
But the goals chosen by the Minister of the Word and Sacrament
presiding over the evening intentionally precluded him from following
in the footsteps of the prophets of old. Not surprisingly, then, he did
not share in their end.
John the Baptist is dead. He was killed by the ruler and his wife
who despised him for publicly humiliating them by calling them to
repent of their sexual immorality. His prophetic word could not have
been more specific.
This is precisely the path Pastor Warren studiously avoided. And he
had the audacity of proclaiming that his betrayal of his calling was
actually a matter of principle--you know, a "civilized" forum and all
that.
Thus Pastor Warren's forum is likely to be remembered as his finest
moment among evangelicals across this perverse nation. And this while
we lay garlands on the tombs of Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus,
Athanasius, Peter Waldo, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, William Lloyd
Garrison, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
