Tearing Up the Pea Patch

Introduction

When Ben-hadad came against Israel, this is how the Scriptures describe the set up.

“And the children of Israel were numbered, and were all present, and went against them: and the children of Israel pitched before them like two little flocks of kids; but the Syrians filled the country” (1 Kings 20:27).

Appearances can be deceiving, which means that they often deceive. Ad this is why tens of millions of Christians are preparing to quietly move into their pre-assigned post-Christian era, quietly bleating as they go.

But in this instance, clean contrary to the appearances, the Israelites won a great victory. This was God’s chastisement on the Syrians for trying to maintain that the God of Israel was the “god of the hills” only. Such is the end of any who seek to limit what the God of battles can do, and at any time He chooses to do it.

The True Higher Critic

What is the heart of the conflict? Why does the Bible attract such hostility from the world? Why do the people of God attract such enmity? The answer to that question explains the driver of all our cultural conflicts, and that issue is authority. The standing antithesis is between those who want to be under the authority of our Father in Heaven, an authority that originates outside the world in the recesses of eternity, and an authority that is grounded in our whims and passions.

“The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil” (John 7:7).

God has so fashioned the history of the world that it is impossible to eradicate the bad blood that necessarily exists between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).

The enmity is fixed by God. But from the perspective of the other side, the thing they find intolerable is an outworking of this idea of authority. The secular heart of man cannot abide the idea of an external audit. So those who maintain, however obliquely, that there will come a time when the skies and earth shall flee away, and when every judge, every legislator, every prime minister, every president, every dictator, and every thought leader will stand before the Ancient of Days in order to give an accounting for every tawdry decision, every corrupt bill, every mendacious executive order, it scares the bejeebers out of them. But it is not just simple fear; it is a fear that hates.

And there is more than this. The idea of the Last Assizes is repellant in its own right, but it is also abhorrent because it reminds autonomous man of every battle in history—and there have been many of them—when God reminded the lords of the earth that He is the God of both the hills and the plains. He doesn’t become God at the last Day. He is the God of history, the God of the judgment, the God of battles, and the God of both hills and plains. What this means is that God only has to give the word, He only has to nod His head, and the believers of our nation can make like the Jews of Susa, and tear up the pea patch.

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

The word translated discerner here (kritikos) is the word we get critic from. For several centuries, unbelieving man has wanted to be the critic, sitting in judgment on Scripture. And so it is that we have lower criticism and higher criticism, and at the end of this particular dead end we find critical theory.

But God is the critic, the only critic, the final critic. It is our work that will be reviewed, not His. And—let us be frank—our work is pretty shabby. We don’t want to read any of the reviews, but a day is coming when they will come in. And for everyone and everything that is found outside of Christ, the reviews will be scathing. Not only will they be scathing, but they will be entirely fair, accurate, indisputable, just, and meticulous.

The Baby Goat Ploy:
So however it looks to us as believers right now—and it does look grim—we must remember that all of this is God’s doing. This dog’s breakfast of an election cycle we are having is a gigantic testimony to what hubris and folly look like when you mound it deep. It also should have us glancing at the heavens with a quizzical expectancy. What is He going to do with this?

In the meantime, what I don’t get is why our Christian leaders have been so accommodating. I don’t mind having faithful leaders in exile, but I really don’t think they should be the same ones who led us to exile. Why should we be taking direction from those who think we are down here in Egypt because we hadn’t worshiped the Queen of Heaven enough (Jer. 44:18)?

Certainly, God sometimes has His people suffer defeat. God sometimes has His people go into exile. But how did we manage to go into exile when there was no siege? Why are we defeated when there has been no battle?

Some will tell me to be realistic. There has been no battle because—look at the facts here—all our assembled might looks like two little flocks of baby goats. But God looks down from Heaven and sees the baby goats. “Ah, just the thing,” He says. The old baby goat ploy.

Like I said. Quizzical expectancy. As Shakespeare put in Henry V—“O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts; Possess them not with fear.”