Blue Ruin, Black Redemption, Golden Glory

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Introduction

Everything is in a bad way, by which we mean in a horrendous way, and everybody knows it. But the reason everything is in such a bad way is not a matter of misfortune or bad luck. Neither is it the result of one or two mistakes by some key people, and all we need to do is find those few mistakes and correct them. We cannot fix it by holding someone accountable. We cannot fix it by identifying some sap of a scapegoat, and pretending to hold someone accountable. Nothing will be accomplished if someone forms a task force to look into it, printing their recommendations in a glossy-stock book with a dark blue cover. It is not within our grasp to fix anything. We are helpless, hopeless, distracted, and utterly lost.

The reason everything is in this wretched way is because we have sinned grievously against the God of Heaven and, as a consequence, we have lost our minds.

We are like a drunk with the staggers who thinks that another drink will calm his nerves and steady his hand. We have abandoned God and so God has abandoned us, and so we have decided to secularize even harder.

Our Sins Are Themselves Judgments

There are two very common mistakes that Christians make with regard to their understanding of sin. The first is that they think that people are always just people and that they remain essentially themselves even if they are guilty of this sin or that one. The idea is that a person under judgment is just standing there, and the recording angel tallies up the sins in the register, and then God determines where that person, remaining as that person, must go. But the register where our sins have their cumulative recorded impact is our person, and so damnation is the process of becoming a horror. Damnation is the ultimate gollumization of someone. In this sense, salvation and damnation share this one aspect—they are the moment where we become what we have been becoming. We arrive, in other words.

The second mistake is that they believe that particular sins incur judgments, but that there the matter stops. But it is also the case that certain sins are themselves severe judgments. It is true that God will judge our nation for abortion, and for sodomy, and for adulterous unfaithfulness. Yes, He will, most certainly. But the Bible also teaches that such sins are themselves a judgment from the hand of God. What collective madness would cause a people to start slaughtering their own kids? Yes, a people will be judged for committing such things, but it is also true that a people should be considered already under judgment when God gives them over to such things. The judgment is on us now.

So salvation begins at the point where by His grace alone we say to God, “thy will be done.” Damnation begins at the point where God says to insolent man, “thy will be done.”

Notice that phrase—God gave them up, God gave them up. All sin incurs the judgment of God, but certain sins are themselves judgments from God. Some sins happen when God stops restraining. They happen when God lets go. So it is manifest and plain that God is currently judging America, one of the most fruitful nations ever to exist, and He is judging us by turning us over to the fruitless deeds of darkness. He is letting us run headlong into the void where no fruit grows, where no harvest has ever been gathered. Fruitless. Pay attention to that italicized adjective. Fruitless.

What is anal intercourse? Among other things, fruitless. What do puberty blockers bring about? Fruitlessness. What is abortion? Violent and bloody fruitlessness. What is the DINK (double income, no kids) lifestyle? Fruitless. America has enslaved herself to the terrible bondage of orgasms without consequences. Under the weight of this severe judgment, we have demanded as our constitutional prerogative, the right to become as fruitless as a dried out stick. It is our constitutional right, or so we have argued, to be struck in the forehead with the hammer of God.

Ingrate Nation

I don’t know of any nation in history that has been as greatly blessed as ours has been. First, just on the material level, what were we given? Abundant rivers, fertile soils, spacious harbors, precious minerals, endless forests, teeming game, magnificent mountains, clear lakes. And on top of all that, this nation was settled and founded by evangelical and Reformed Christians, overwhelmingly. They gave us the straight lines of our constitutional order and the sturdy bones of structured liberty, under which we prospered and became great. And so naturally Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked (Dt. 32:15).

And so what did we do with this torrent of blessing? What this means—because we have turned away and wandered off from the one who bestowed them—is that there has never been a nation of ingrates like ours. Grubby and ungrateful, we came to assume that a high standard of living was somehow our birthright, bestowed on us by impersonal evolutionary forces, the kind of forces that never ask for a thank you. It all works out because we didn’t feel like saying thank you.

But we did not begin that way. We began as a grateful people, and as a people who acknowledged the greatness of God. And what does Romans 1 describe as the motive force of all national and cultural disintegration?

Our fathers glorified God as God, and our fathers rendered Him all appropriate thanks. We have refused to acknowledge Him, we have refused to name Him, and have refused to give Him thanks. And the fastidious Christians who go along with this secular charade are then mysteriously shocked to see a couple of guys humping on a Main Street parade float at 11 am. They argue, as David French has, that putting up with stuff like that is the price we pay for our liberty. So the source of our liberty is civic antinomianism? Not the risen Christ?

They somehow thought—maybe because of American exceptionalism or something—that it could be possible to misbehave in Rom. 1: 21 without winding up in v. 27 through the end of the chapter. “Let’s come up with a convoluted argument that will let the homos do what they want in v. 21, and because of our magical convoluted argument, we will never ever wind up on the receiving end of brimstone from the sky. You see, Sodom and its allies didn’t have the foresight to adopt a First Amendment strong enough to keep Jehovah at bay. Like we have.”

Blue Ruin

And so we are trying to sleep in this bed we have made, and for some reason we stuffed the mattress and pillows with these cannon balls. We are having to eat our own cooking, and those little oyster crackers do nothing to obscure the fact that dumpster scraping soup was not a good idea.

As a result of our high insolence, our mainstream denominations have become a haunt for owls and jackals. Our evangelical side show churches have become a well-financed network of clown academies. You are likely to be able to see more bearded ladies teaching in our government school system than P.T. Barnum ever thought of recruiting. Our institutions of higher learning insist upon and inculcate the most asinine ideas ever devised by the wit of man. The really bad ones require at least two years of graduate study to grasp fully. And some of our venture capitalists, provided the pitch man is brimful of hustle and shine, would be willing to fund Swift’s idea for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Jonathan, not Taylor.

Everybody is still driving on the right side of the road, but that seems largely like a matter of sheer inertia and is not likely to last much longer. After that point, mayhem.

Our prophets are jabbering, and our seers all appear to have put bags over their heads. The center is not holding, and the best lack all conviction. The gods of the copybook headings have walked off in disgust over the worst, who are full of passionate intensity.

People act like they think human trafficking is a big deal—you see signs in all the airports about it—but what is the government school system but a vast network of human trafficking? Not only are they trafficking bodies, at least if that groomer of a bearded lady gets what he wants, but they are also trafficking the minds and souls of children, treating them all as so much plasticine clay to be molded into the pre-fab shapes put out by the Department of Education.

In short, our culture has become a debris field of blue ruin. We are no longer warning, as I have done in years past, about what will happen. We are explaining what has happened.

Black Redemption

So it is as plain and obvious that America staggering under the curse of God. We are under His chastisement, pure and simple. The reason we have lost our minds is because God assigned that madness to us. Our prayer should be that it is a temporary warning, as it was for Nebuchadnezzar, and that we will be granted the grace of recovering our senses. We do not deserve such a recovery because if we did, it wouldn’t be grace. But we most certainly need such a recovery—one that flows from the mercy of Heaven.

If that happens, it will only happen if preachers of the gospel recall the fact that they are supposed to be preaching the gospel. That gospel is the wisdom of God, not the wisdom of man, which is why it must be a message of a Curse swallowing up our curse.

Any true redemption needs to be as black as the sin is, because that was the wisdom of the Father before all worlds. The only possible redemption was accomplished and applied by a Christ having His Father take all the sins that were to be forgiven, in order to lay them across His Son’s shoulders, which had already been flogged, and which had no skin left on them. That is the only place where they can be forgiven. Not possible anywhere else.

When this happened, when the propitiation fell, the blackest hour of our Lord’s life arrived, and the sky itself could not bear to look upon it. The heavens went dark (Matt. 27:45), and the God who initially commanded the light to shine out of darkness at the creation did the same thing again (2 Cor. 4:6-7). Stricken, smitten, and afflicted, that object of holy wrath writhed in agony. If the Father was no longer looking on His incarnate Son with favor, then how would it be possible for any created being to look on Him at all? He had, in that moment, no form or comeliness that we should look on Him, and so it was not possible to look on Him. Had we seen His face we would have seen the wracked face of the sum total all the vessels of wrath that God was intending to save, twisted under the fury of God’s holy wrath. I cannot see how we could have borne seeing it. But He bore it.

So anyone who claims to have “seen the light” without first encountering the black darkness over Skull Hill is advocating for some form of moralistic treacle instead of biblical salvation—true salvation is the kind that can only be bought with blood. The moralist acknowledges that there are some areas of his life needing some mild improvements, some touch-ups, as it were. The forgiven sinner, by way of contrast, rejoices in the stern kindness of the Master, whose voice of command sent all the demons into the pigs.

If we refuse to look at the blackness of propitiation, if we are too prim to look on the one that we all have pierced, then we are left to deal with our own darkness in our own way. As you can see by looking around, we don’t know how. So those who cannot deal with it are left to deal with it anyhow, meaning that they have been abandoned to their own makeshift schemes of salvation, which are, of course, not able to save at all.

As they walk haltingly toward the Abyss, the way all such are groping around and yelling while they argue, illustrates well the limits of their wisdom, and the limitlessness of their folly.

But It Need Not Matter

Our sins are varied, all over the map. They are great, and grievous, and awful sins, and they lie scattered in every direction.

Some sins are just dumb and stupid. You may have been a furry, dressing up like a racoon for the last couple of years. It doesn’t matter. Come to Christ and have all that stupidity cleansed.

Some sins are toxic and malevolent. You may have been lurking behind various anon accounts for years, spewing out hatred toward Jews, or boomers, or women, or your father. That need not matter. Before Christ, hating and being hated are entirely normal (Tit. 3:3). But it really doesn’t matter. Come to Christ, and have all that rancid bile washed right out of you.

Some sins are grubby, pedestrian and predictable—like some boomer Chamber-of-Commerce type, carrying on an adulterous affair with the secretary of his country club. Some are not high rebels in the tradition of the sexual revolution, but rather are just successful businessmen who trickled into the wrong beds. They not just just sinful, but also dull. Christ will take all of that as well.

Have you killed any of your babies? Come to Christ. Have you cut off your breasts? Come to Christ. Have you built a medical practice cutting off breasts? Come to Christ. Have you run numerous anon accounts attacking faithful servants of God? Come to Christ. Have you written op-ed pieces urging Christians to surrender the central point of the culture war? Come to Christ. Are you a loser? Come to Christ. You won’t be the first, and you certainly won’t be the last.

The Glory to Come

So if God in His mercy turns us, we will be turned (Lam. 5:21).

There have been generations every bit as stupid as ours that have been delivered from it. There have been people, just like us, simultaneously sentimental and inhumane, who have been liberated from that peculiar form of spiritual schizophrenia. There have been countless self-righteous strivers and climbers who have had their noses rubbed in their own filth, who have then been able to receive the mercy. There have been egalitarian levelers who have learned to glory in the hierarchical order that God assigned to us, and who surrendered the pride of hating the grace given to others. There have been many women who have repented of being feminists, and many men who have repented of being brutes.

When God determines to bestow the needed reformation and revival, there will be no possible countermeasures. The glory will happen, the glory will come, and it will happen at precisely the moment God determined for it to happen. He is not waiting on anything from us. This will happen in full accordance with His perfect counsel and will. We will be taken up by it, but we will not carry it—rather, it will carry us. Moreover, it will carry us through.

When God raises His arm to do this glorious thing, no one will be able to grab His wrist to stop Him and say, “What are you doing?” All the leftist money in Hollywood can’t stop it, and all the crapitalist money in the globobanks can’t even slow it down. It will come when the Lord just nods His head, indicating that it is time.

Nebuchadnezzar learned this lesson centuries ago (Dan. 4:34-35), and he learned it the same way it appears that we will learn it . . . after the fit of madness has passed.

Our Book Giveaways

The good folks at Canon Press are beginning their extravaganza of largess by giving away Leon Podles’ fine book The Church Impotent. This book is free from Nov. 1-5. Check it out here. One more day for that one. The next free book from Canon is Mere Christendom. Can you believe it? Here is the link. This will be available from Nov. 4-8.

And here in my quaint little Mablog shoppe, I am giving away, for the entire month, 21 Prayers for Pastors on the Lord’s Day. Get ’em while the getting is good. And as I mentioned before, every time there is a new NQN post, there will be an additional book made available. The next free book in this category is Letters of Marital Counsel, found here.