Infighting and Those Reservoirs of Guilt

Introduction

There are two ways to approach this kind of thing. One is to lay out your premises, and slowly work up to your conclusion, showing your work as you go. People can then struggle with your conclusion if they want to. The other is to state your conclusion, start the struggle off with a bang, and then to show your reasoning after the fact. If it is a subject that is controversial enough, this second approach starts by touching the bruise first—and then explains after the fact why you thought it was necessary to do it that way.

Today, for reasons that I hope will become obvious, I want to take this second approach.

So here it is: the conflicts that are currently tearing America apart are a judgment of God upon us. It is not simply that the conflicts are made up of sins that will be judged by God later on down the road. No, the conflicts themselves are a judgment being visited upon us by God Himself. As long as such is the case, it will do no good to visit the insane asylum every weekend in order to argue political theory with the inmates.

Now here is where the bruise might be sensitive to us. I am including in this the conflicts that have arisen inside what we call the “conservative movement.” The frenzy that has our culture by the throat has not left the conservatives alone. The reality is this—outside the movement or inside it, the mere fact that we are seriously debating whether Johnny should be allowed to attend school dressed as a racoon, whether Hitler was a Christian prince, whether sodomite dads can be conservative spokesmen, or whether a simple application of eyeliner can turn a boy into a girl means that our excuse-making deflections have gotten to #11 on the absurdity dial. Those issues are all in the same league.

But these are not primarily the sins that God will judge us for. The problem is a host of other sins under our feet—we refuse to repent of those, and so these absurdities are a judgment from Heaven on our hard-heartedness. God has ensured that our deflections and excuses and explanations for those sins are the hardening agent in these judgments He has now poured out. The longer it goes, the worse it gets. The harder it gets.

The Presenting Problem is Not Actually the Problem

What does the apostle Paul expect to encounter when he finally comes to Corinth? He expects to see “debates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, whisperings, swellings, and tumults” (2 Cor. 12:20). In short, he thinks he is going to walk into a Twitter comment thread, with a bunch of ostensible conservatives yelling at each other, and hurling vitriolic names in a way that merely reveals to the wise their internal spiritual condition. But notice that he doesn’t intend to waste any time walking around trying to knock any of those nasty crab apples off the tree. No, rather, he sets the chain saw at the root of the tree. What he is going to confront when he gets there is the “uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness” (v. 21).

I have underlined, first, what meets him at the front door, and secondly, what he knows he will discover and deal with down in the basement.

When someone out there is lauding Hitler, and is in a knock down fight with somebody else because they found that praise to be problematic, that is not the problem. That is God’s judgment on the actual problem, which is to be found in somebody’s browser history.

The reason there is so much in-fighting in the conservative world currently is because the conservative world has been sexually unholy. The quarrels are the smoke; the porn, the adultery, the lust for multiple women, the abortions, the sodomy . . . these are the fire.

And no, the apostle Paul is not part of the tumults, the debates, the strife, or the whispering, despite what some troll at Corinth might say. Paul is in the conflict, to be sure, but his involvement is righteous.

Judgment for Sin, Sins as Judgment

When a lot of people are being stupid all at the same time, it is easy for those who are trying to hang onto the old sensible ways to describe the problem as “people being stupid.” And the solution is thought to be something like “we should just tell the people to stop being stupid.”

But the Scriptures teach us that when Jehovah comes down in judgment on a people, He has many tools in His toolbox. He might, for example, bring a devastating hailstorm (Ex. 9:18-26; Josh. 10:11). Or perhaps it could be a drought (1 Kings 17:1; Amos 4:7). Or an invading army (Joel 2:1-11). Or locusts (Ex. 10:4-6). Or a plague (2 Sam. 24:1-25).

But there are also times—and we are in one now—when He strikes a people with a judicial blindness, with a spiritual stupor (Is. 28:7-8). And there should therefore come a time when the sensible observers, the few remaining, should stop attributing it to a faulty educational system, and say rather, “This is the finger of God” (Ex. 8:19).

I have made this general point a number of times before, but it really does bear repeating (Phil. 3:1). Faithful Christians really need to get their minds around this. Because we have tended to push the judgments of God out to the end of the world, out to the Eschaton, we look at various disorders around us, recognize the sin involved, and then we say that there will come a time in the future when God will judge that sin. He will deal with it then. And, of course, there is truth in that. But there is much more to it.

What we fail to recognize is that God does not simply judge at the end of history. He also executes His judgments in history, in real time. Moreover, it is often the case that He judges us with our sins. So He does not judge us for our sins at the end of the world. He judges us with our sins, in the middle of our story. He judges us for sin with our sin.

Notice the order. He is not abhorred of the Lord because he committed adultery. Rather, he committed adultery because he was abhorred of the Lord.

A prime example I have used before is the sin of our pride parades. Certainly these are activities that will be judged at the Last Day. But they are also a judgment in themselves. They bring judgment, certainly, but they also are a judgment. How can we say this? The wrath of God is visited from Heaven, Paul says (Rom. 1:18). God’s wrath (His judgment) is manifested. How is it manifested? Well, God gives them up to their perverse desires (Rom. 1:24), and when He does this, they run headlong into the judgment. Mercy is given to us by God when we say to Him, “Thy will be done.” Judgment is poured out over our heads when God says to man, “Thy will be done.” He gives us up, He gives us over. He lets go of the reins of restraint, and we rush—like the Gadarene swine—to our own destruction. God lets go in His wrath, and unruly man, thinking he is now free, organizes a pride parade.

Now . . . Splintered Coalitions as Judgment

I mentioned earlier that God has various tools of judgment at His disposal. One of them is that He causes coalitions to break up and to start fighting with one another instead of fighting the enemy they came out to confront.

He did this to the Midianites when Gideon came after them.

And this was the form of deliverance that God used when Jehoshaphat sent the choir out in the vanguard of his army.

And when Jonathan and his armor-bearer attacked a Philistine outpost, the result was a very great panic, with the same results—Philistines fighting Philistines.

Conclusion

Doubling down under such judgment, persevering in this mindset, is only prolonging the judgment, and it will only get worse. It will only get more and more demented, and with less and less ability to see how demented it has gotten.

And the only way out is simple repentance. Name the sin by its proper biblical name—not the symptom sin, the root sin. Name that sin in the presence of God, and offer it up to Him in the name of Jesus Christ. Ask Him to deal with it, and with all the root issues. All of them. Make every form of restitution necessary.

It was not enough for the Narnians to be “against Miraz.” It was not enough for them to see him as the “real threat.” The proposed coalition against Miraz had three components—Caspian and those with him, Nikabrik and those with him, and then the hags, werewolves, and ogres that Nikabrik wanted to recruit. Caspian could fight alongside Nikabrik with a clean conscience, and would love to, but not alongside those that Nikabrik wanted to bring along. Let the reader understand.

In short, a red-pilled resurgence is not going to get us out of here . . . as we can now plainly see. We need reformation and revival. We always did, and we still do.