Unholy Wars: Slavery, Jews, and Your Mouth

Here are the notes to my remarks at the Fight Laugh Feast conference in Nashville.

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Introduction

In some ways, speaking at a Fight Laugh Feast conference is like playing a word game with family friends in the living room after dinner. You reach into a stack of cards in order to draw out three cards that will frame the boundaries of an ex temp talk that you will then have to give. I have drawn, for some reason, slavery, the Jews, and your mouth. This concatenation of words was assigned to me for some reason, and I have reasons for suspecting that it could have been a good reason, so . . .

Watch me go.

All three have to fit under the umbrella labeled Unholy Wars.  

Defining War

War means conflict, a collision of forces, not to mention the antipathy that provides the motivation for the conflict in the first place. Let us begin by considering what Scripture has to say about each of these.

First is slavery.

Slavery was ubiquitous in the Roman Empire, about as ordinary to them as gas stations and mortgages are to us. 

Second would be the Jews.

And . . .

And third would be the tongue, or the mouth.

One of the more remarkable talents that people have lies in our ability to look at the plain teaching of Scripture and figure out ways of getting around it. And if the passage is particularly challenging, we can always resort to that old reliable, the Greek word study! When that fails to buffer us in our sin, we can always fall back on an alternative hermeneutic.

But massive problems are caused when sinners decide that it is a good idea to give their mouths free rein.

The Irony of Gospel Preaching

But God does not declare that the human tongue is a great problem, one that makes other great problems worse, and then announce that His remedy is to cut out all our tongues. No, His gospel is a gospel that tames the tongue, converting it, and turning it into a tree of life.

I am fond of telling our people that there is no situation so bad but that you can’t make it worse. And usually whenever it is made worse, it is made worse by verbal means—by the tongue and pen.

A few months ago there was an online controversy over the phrase “Christ is king,” which He most certainly is, but there were those out there who were using it as a way of taunting Jews. And . . . follow me closely here . . . there is a difference between taunting Jews and presenting the gospel to them. And in that skirmish I wrote something that may possibly have landed me this talk title. “Do not dare to confess that ‘Christ is king’ with your mouth when pretty much everyone knows that Christ is not king of your mouth.”

We are called believers throughout the New Testament. But this involves more than just believing enough of the content of the gospel to get our sorry little hinder parts into Heaven. We are sons and daughters of Abraham, which means that we are called to imitate him in his faith. And what did Abraham believe? We are not content to know that he believed. What did he believe?  

Abraham believed that he was going to inherit the world (Rom. 4:13). All the families of the earth were going to be blessed through him (Gen. 12:3), and he believed that. He was told that his descendants would be like the stars of the heaven in number (Gen. 15:5). Abraham believed that also, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness (v. 6). His name was changed from Abram to Abraham because he was going to be the father of many nations (Gen. 17:5), America included. The sign of this promise to Him was to be circumcision, and Abraham showed his faith in the promise by immediately circumcising all the males in his household (Gen. 17:23).

The apostle Paul is explicit when he teaches us that those who share the faith of Abraham are therefore children of Abraham. If you have been baptized into Christ, this means you have put on Christ (Gal. 3:27). And if you have put on Christ, you have therefore also put on Abraham (Gal. 3:29). That makes you heirs according to the promise. The upshot of this is that the Church is Israel now.

We are the new commonwealth. The middle wall of partition has been broken down. We in the Church are the heir of all of God’s covenant promises throughout the Old Testament. The Church is Israel now. The Israel of promise cannot be located anywhere but in the Messiah of promise, the Christ of promise. But where does this leave Israel according to Ancestry.com? 

No one understood the new identity of the Church more clearly—or taught on it more plainly—than did the apostle Paul. In fact, he saw it so clearly that he began immediately warning Christians, these new children of Israel, to guard themselves against the very same sin that had tripped up their older brothers. We are in fact so much to be identified with Israel that we would be susceptible to the same temptations that threw down the old Israel.

Now the thing that quite frankly baffles me is that we are dealing with professing Christians who have decided to strut at precisely the place where the apostle of these truths told them to tremble. Should we strut or should we tremble? I don’t know . . . time for a Greek word study!

Jewish branches were cut out of the olive tree so that we Gentiles could be made partakers of the new Israel. Well said, Paul replies. But the way these men strut with their tongues make me think they are being high-minded instead of fearful, which is exactly what tripped up the Jewish elites in the first century. I have not forgotten who crucified Jesus. Nor have I forgotten what kind of men they were, and how the apostle to the Gentiles warned us expressly against becoming that way ourselves.

Be careful that your arrogant antisemitism not have the effect of turning you into an arrogant Jew.

On Becoming a Bible Guy

One of the central life lessons that I gleaned from my father was this one: once the exegesis is done, once you have clarity on what the text is actually saying and what faithful application requires, a faithful Christian must have absolutely no hesitation. If the Scriptures say to jump, we should be asking “how high?” on the way up.

This is the way of true counterculture discipleship because words written two and three thousand years ago have the admirable characteristic of not being the slightest bit concerned about the zeitgeistian sensibilities of the early twenty-first century.

Do you want to hear my estimate of how much mental energy I think the apostle Paul put into questions of climate change, micro-aggressions, or the gender pay gap? In short, there are a number of hot topics that we have today that do not have any direct biblical teaching pointed at them. But as Cornelius Van Til noted, the Scriptures are authoritative on everything they address, and they address everything. That is, they address everything in principle. It is necessary for an applicatory preacher to discern the central principle in ancient teaching, and make it apply today, and doing so without twisting the Scriptures out of all recognition.

But there are some other topics that the Bible does address. I mean, page after page after page. “Like what?,” you might ask. And perhaps you saw this coming, but I would simply mention . . . slavery, the Jews, and your mouth. We are instructed, time and again, on how to deal with slavery, what to think of the Jews, and how best to watch your mouth.

So Then . . .

So let me take my three assigned topics and tie them into a tight little knot. While James does not use slavery images explicitly, he is very clear that unless the tongue is under the disciplined control of righteousness, the bit and bridle of God, the end result will be destructive mayhem. Those who reject the discipline of godly self-mastery will be turned over to a destructive fire within (Jas. 3:1-12), a fire that defiles the whole body. And any absence of verbal self-mastery is slavery indeed.

Such slaves refuse to recognize their own slavery and take it as a point of pride that they are slaves to no man. Just like the Jews in controversy with Jesus, they refuse to look straight at the truth.

We were never slaves to anyone, they said, doing so when there were Roman soldiers standing around on all the street corners. Men who are slaves to their own sins cannot be free men (John 8:34), however much they protest. Despite the name, libertarianism is not freedom. Form and freedom must go together for the sake of ordered liberty, and form and freedom only go together in Christ.

And we are only liberated when we come to the Word of God, the Word that frees us from our chains. But we do not just profess sola Scriptura. Our faith is tota et sola Scriptura, and this means all of Scripture and only Scripture. But when we look at the totality of Scripture, Genesis to Revelation, it tells everything we need to know for life and godliness, as the apostle Peter says (2 Pet. 1:3-4). The Bible tells you what true spiritual slavery is, it tells you how to fight evils like institutional slavery, it tells you what attitudes you must adopt toward unbelieving Jews, and it gives you explicit teaching on how not to run your mouth.

What Shall It Profit?

Jesus once asked a pointed question that we would do well to consider.

Having considered it, I would like to take the liberty of making it even more pointed. What shall it profit a man if he loses his own soul in his pursuit of gaining the whole world, and the fruitlessness of that exchange was revealed in the fact that he lost the whole world in the bargain?

What shall it profit a man if he makes America great again, but loses his own soul in the process?

What shall it profit a man if he wins the most based groyper in show, but loses his own soul?

And whether or not this is going on is determined by . . . how we speak. We will be judged by every idle word that we speak (Matt. 12:36). We will evaluated in accordance with the truth that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Matt. 12:34). This being the case, we are all of lost unless . . . unless God has provided us with gospel.