Letters That Come Up With the Sun

Good overview, but I think two key things are missing.
One claimed cause was that students were upset that the schools they go to, but other people pay for, are underfunded. The idea that other people should pay for your goods and services is a corruption “Christianity,” with Liberation Theology and the Social Gospel, helped to unleash.
Also, what is needed is not undoing the revolution but the Edict of Fontainebleau and Henry IV’s decision that Paris was worth a mass. A Catholic nation, with institutionalized blasphemy of the king of kings and outright demands for false worship, and its epistemological basis of tradition above both reason and revelation, and its hatred of the gospel, hardly seems a great alternative.
Worship is the ultimate goal, not some positive social values. Making false (not just imperfect) worship and blasphemy less important than horizontal ethics is unacceptable. For all its restrictions, secular Europe is not in the business of mass-promoting literal bowing down to idols. (not the “Tim Keller” idolatry where everything is an idol except actual idols.) Northern Israel was not mostly condemned for Baal worship, but for their false, albeit likely sincere, worship of the Lord.
If it is “Christ or Chaos”, that Christ must be the real one, not the product of a person’s or a “Tradition’s” imagination.

Luke

But would the Revolution have even happened if the Huguenot culture had been allowed to spread? The French need to repudiate the Edict of Fontainebleau.

DCH

Thank you for your post “Women’s Ministries as Pestilence.” I found the distinction between women ministering and women’s ministries helpful, and I’d be grateful if you could say more about where that line falls in practice.
Suppose a few women in a congregation are chosen to lead a book study, say through 1 John, and a woman teaches it verse by verse with little real oversight from the pastor or elders. Would that fall under the problem you describe, or is the trouble mainly the lack of oversight rather than the study itself?
More broadly, should women’s ministry be limited to the Titus 2 pattern of older women teaching younger women to love their husbands and children and manage their homes well, or is there room for women to lead verse-by-verse Bible studies as well?
Finally, how does Christ Church handle this?

SJ

My sister is not a believer. She has done low budget horror films (which are basically low grade porn films)—continues to be an advocate of homosexuality and same sex mirage as well as abortion and hates our country. She was baptized years ago (which was really an attempt to appease my father who she lived with while she was recovering from drug addiction) and therefore my father (who professes Christ) holds that she is a believer. He recent social media posts have her claiming she is an atheist.
My relationship with my father has been strained because I don’t want her anywhere near my family and directly oppose the idea that she is a believer. I have even told him that he should repent of enabling her and falsely categorizing her as a believer. As a result my father and I no longer speak, haven’t for years. I cut off relations with him and my kids because of his views. Am I biblically aligned by withholding them from him? I feel I am. Am I in the clear to decide to withhold him from them as long as he continues to have a deranged view of what a believer is? His focus has been on wanting to have a relationship with them only and not me. I have explained that I am the head of my family and all paths lead through me.

Rob

Do you have any practical methods, advice or counsel for someone on teaching him on how not to care what people think or comment about him, especially while trying to deal with a besetting sin, and that that sin might already be known by many people? Personally, I’ve found it hard to deal with. Some days I don’t care, but many other days I can’t help but care. It’s gone to a point where I can’t go out in public without my actions being interpreted in light of that besetting sin.

Kakashi

Concerning your post, “Our Memorial on Nations: Comments and Observations,” I had just done a sermon on the Tower of Babel in which I opined that the current move toward globalism is exactly a project to reverse God’s scattering of the nations. Consider a few characteristics of that project. English is spoken all over the world. Machine translators on the internet allow one to access content from anywhere. Mass migration is being used to homogenize cultures, especially in traditionally Christian nations. Algorithms are tuned on social media and search engines to enforce ‘approved’ thought and suppress ‘wrong think.’ Stories in the legacy media which mention Christianity disapprove of churches and individuals such as yourself who espouse traditional orthodoxy, but they are just fine with the tame churches who go along with the globalist project.
Babel shows that God will not tolerate human unification that excludes Him. As you say in your article, unification under the reign of His Son is the ultimate goal. Anything less will be chaos.

Jon

In response to your post “Our Memorial on Nations: Comments and Observations”, do you believe that Noah Webster was one of the gentlemen influenced by the rise of evolutionary thinking in the nineteenth century when he wrote this definition in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language:
RACE, noun [Latin radix and radius having the same original. This word coincides in origin with rod, ray, radiate, etc.]
The lineage of a family, or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is the series of descendants indefinitely. Thus all mankind are called the race of Adam; the Israelites are of the race of Abraham and Jacob. Thus we speak of a race of kings, the race of Clovis or Charlemagne; a race of nobles, etc.
Notice, Webster affirms the reality that all of mankind are descended from our father Adam, rather than ascended from one amoeba, and at the same time that all of mankind can be classified by different races, with no self-contradiction. He does this because he is defining the word race very broadly, to mean “series of descendants indefinitely”, which conception derives from its relation to the Latin word radix. (The word root is translated in French as racine, and root beer as racinette, as anyone would know who has bought A&W Root Beer in Canada). How does this in any way reflect evolutionary theory, when Webster clearly makes reference to a historical Adam?
Given that he calls the Israelites a “race” as well, he is very clearly asserting that it is synonymous with the word nation. Why can we not do the same? Why can I not assert that two nations (which word is related to native, natal, nature, and other words denoting birth), having two different fathers (who themselves would be cousins at some point, as we all are), are therefore also called two different races?
Is the English Standard Version of the Bible influenced by evolutionary thinking when it records the words of Stephen in Acts 7:19, saying, “He dealt shrewdly with our race”? Or in Romans 9:5 when it describes Israel in this way, “To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”? Or the New American Standard Bible, when it similarly records Acts 7:19 as, “It was he who took shrewd advantage of our race”?
I could go on with other examples, but my primary question is this. I believe that I have sufficient warrant and room for nuance (shout-out to Sean) both to reject the evolutionary conception of race (thank God for Ken Ham for pioneering this work for us), and at the same time to use the word race broadly, and according to its own etymology, in the same context as nation, ethnicity, tribe, and clan. Do you believe that I have that warrant? If not, why not?
I am keenly interested in your answer! Thank you very much.

Chris

Thank you so much for your great ministry Pastor Wilson.
Recently you were asked the question, “What should be considered ‘hills to die on’ for unmarried Christians when it comes to theological differences, and which differences should we as women be willing to accept . . .?” Your answers were very helpful, and I was hoping you could shed some light on a similar issue, but concerning physical differences. I know that physical attraction is important in a relationship, but at what point do you draw the line? I know a good looking Christian guy who really likes me, and who I get on with extremely well, but is very light weight and not very tall. I’m quite small myself, but I feel sure I could lift him, and when I wear heels I feel like I tower over him. And if I put on weight in my middle aged years we will not look like a very well matched couple! I know it’s probably vain to think this way, but I’m wondering, how important is the issue of size and strength between husband and wife? Do you think if I just stop putting such an emphasis on appearances and simply marry the man all these doubts will disappear as I grow old and wise? Is this feeling just the silliness of youth that wants to have cute wedding photos, or is this a game breaker, a sign that I will not be satisfied with him, which he certainly doesn’t deserve?
Thank you for your time.
God bless!

Lana

Hello! Wendell Berry’s passing a few months ago prompted me to read some of his books after coming across various articles about his life and work. I’m curious what you think of him as an author and as a man, especially given the topics you address in your book “Ploductivity”, and your comment that
“The technophobe just memorizes the poetry of Wendell Berry, and yearns for the days of yesterday when all our food was eked out under a hot sun by a slow mule and a picturesque peasant staggering behind it.”
I’m very curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.

ECH

I recently listened to your blog titled Full Preterism and the Death Problem. I have recently come to wonder if there were “imperfect” things in the garden. When reading Romans 1 it struck me that what everyone knows in their heart of hearts is that we can’t be made righteous by the law. When God gives them over, it’s to their desire to be self-righteous. It made me wonder if the agony that came after the fall was not the imperfection itself but the fact that we couldn’t make ourselves perfect with our works. Adam and Eve didn’t see their imperfections and they were “blissfully ignorant”. Once they ate of the fruit of good and evil they saw their “evil” (or perhaps mean in the sense of crude, unrefined) flesh and were ashamed of it. All flesh groans because the law constantly points out how inadequate it is. Peace is a covenant between law and the flesh and can only be instrumented through love (Christ). The flesh must learn to love the rigidity of the law and the law must learn to love the imperfectness of the flesh. Every rose still had it’s thorn in the garden but no one grumbled about it. Is this at all on the right track? Or is this some wrong headed track that has already been more deeply discussed at some past council of which I am unawares?
Hopefully this makes sense to you. Thanks so very much for all that you do!
Sincerely,

Jessica

You wrote today on the importance of loving Christ above all—of not letting our love for kin or nation rise above our love for Christ. Is this love primarily a love of loyalty: we must remain loyal to Christ even when our wife doesn’t want us to? Or is it primarily a love of affection: for every one unit of affection for the wife, there must be two units of affection for Christ? Frankly, this second option does not seem doable, even though there is a long pietistic tradition of trying to do it.

Andrew

What do you think about “Celebration” services—for a genuine believer—when they die… when the Lord calls them home?
It seems to me that it is inappropriate to be too joyful—almost giddy—about the death of a Believer . . . at least without a corresponding ballast of deep grief at the horrible curse of sin and death—an enemy—even though a defeated enemy for the Christian.
I’m suspicious that somehow the church has become infected with some sort of Eastern and/or worldly sort of mindset instead of a true Biblical view of death.
What do you think?
Thank you,
P.S. Maybe the problem is with me and exposes my own fear of death and sinful lack of trust in Jesus and the Bible and the Gospel?

Robert

Your four examples in the Hassan article don’t serve as justification for US public executions. Clearly God was at directly work in the cases of Achan as well as A and S in the NT so they aren’t examples to begin with. Execution needs to be seen done by “the people,” as in We, the people, not a group of hateful folk set on vengeance. That is what the other examples you mentioned speak to. The presence of families of those killed by Hassan approximates the biblical spirit of the death penalty. But crowds will do what crowds will do as they did outside the Ted Bundy execution location. Hoots and hollers and signs.
I think you said that Pike in TN should not be subject to execution and you quoted some saying about the hangman’s noose. What biblical justification do you have for that idea?

Elizabeth

I’m replying to your post on the execution of David Hassan.
I grant your point that if a society is going to execute a person, this should be done with eyes open. The gravity of premature death must be experienced; it should do something to a person. I suspect in the days of men being stoned, crucified, and the rest, it did do something to someone. These were also the days of nearby burial plots where dad’s first wife and first child were buried as the good news of new life coming into the world quickly turned into a day of bad news leaving a widowed man childless. I suspect we thought of death differently then. When we walked past the graves of our loved ones into the sanctuary to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, I reckon we were more sober-minded about these things.
The loss of the seriousness of death is precisely why I would argue against livestreaming the execution of Hassan or anyone else. In the days of public executions, there was not a 2:1 ratio of cameras to people in the crowd. There were no internet trolls, only town fools. As Postman predicted, technology has changed us—we are not the same people we were, extra camera and high speed internet added. For every person who tunes into a livestream and comes away with a new respect for what he has seen, I suspect there will be many more who describe it as “awesome,” the same way they refer to a pizza with extra pepperoni. There will be others who find it underwhelming compared to the evil they regularly view in places like 4chan (I think that’s still a thing; I will not be checking to find out).
We’ve given away so much of ourselves in the so-called information age, I think it is a mistake to start shipping it priority mail.
Cordially,

Andrew

Dear whom this concerns,
Topic: Christian Parent/Christian Adult Child relationship
My father doesn’t want me to question his authority or treat him as an equal, which I actually don’t because I honor his position as my father and also as a pastor. He doesn’t like the idea of me holding him morally responsible.
Two recent examples include a miscommunication about whether he consulted my mom before letting his daughter-in-law stay the night and rebuking him for lying to his employer by taking a sick day to do home improvement.
Should I treat him as a brother in Christ or not?
Blessings,

Mrs. SH

Long-winded is still my middle name, but this letter is my best yet, if I may be so bold. Not expecting a post on Mablog, but I hope you can find the minutes required to endure it, and I’ll watch for other ways you may tip your hat to the principles I’m driving at.
I have long reflected on the would-be Jewish Question, what you refer to as the Joo Floo. I have concluded that under the hood, you were right about everything – the over the hood exception being your messaging. That left much to be desired. I write now not to play armchair quarterback, even though truthfully that is about all I could play, compared to all that I am learning from the saints in Moscow, especially you. On that note of self deprecation, I write in humility in hopes that a light will go on for you, where I’m far less convinced it is going to come on over the heads of your opponents on this issue. I really do think significant reconciliation is possible, if not for the opposition leaders on Team Joo Floo, then for their listener base, who could be won back by beating the only drum you ever needed to beat. Reason.
I haven’t found all the blog articles I’ll paraphrase in my statement here, but you wrote them, so I’m sure you’ll recall by approximation. At one point, you reasoned with the rising tide of Reformed Anti Jewish sentiment that a grand Jewish Conspiracy as the man behind the curtain of US politics and this century of decline wouldn’t actually prove what frothing Jew Noticers claim it would prove. You wrote that man is fallen, and we are complicit in the decline in our own sinfulness, and discovering some rotters who pulled some strings behind the veil of the public eye doesn’t exonerate all of us rotters doing rot stuff in broad daylight. In this point, you were dead over target. And my argument is that all you had to do was expand this point to its logical conclusions, in every direction. Something that Moscow is already doing in real life based on the vision and faithfulness of you and your peers. You just needed to keep banging the drum, sort of like you fine gentlemen keep opening up schools.
I’ll get to what I mean by “expand the point in every logical direction” in a moment. First, I note your many divergences from the only point that matters. The very moniker Joo Floo is a kinder, softer version of the taunts of your interlocutors, whereas theirs would make the Lord start intoning about guilt enough to go to fiery hell. So good job on keeping it civil. But that wasn’t your only taunt. You had a number of others, rhetorically effective, but profoundly missing the same point the AntiJew folks were missing—to everyone’s detriment. You pointed out they were Young, Restless and Retarded, and they are. That they were sinfully stupid, and they are. That they were open bigots, and they are. And in so doing, in so chasing their foolish sin, you lost those of us in the middle who were just looking for a leader to emerge with a coherent, undistracted message. It is a sin to hate Jews and it is a sin to falsely accuse anyone, let alone an ethnic group of whom some are represented in every tribe and tongue in Revelation. Let alone a people God has chosen in the revelation of His Word. And dare I repeat myself, and I do, let alone anyone. The trouble is, that sin is what a handful of clickbait provocateur leaders are committing. Not the vast majority of their listeners, who remain to this day without a champion for their views, of which you could easily become that for the vast majority of us. Instead—and I say this with as much respect as I think is possible, because I respect you more than any other man alive—you opted to go full OCR: Old, and Contentedly Retarded. You opted to jibe with the jibers, and we are all poorer for the entire imbroglio until someone sticks on message and starts resisting the silliness. It is sin, and it should be addressed. But as a side point, because it is friendly fire, and the way to get friendlies to stop firing at other friendlies is to point all the guns in one direction, at the enemy they have a chance to hit.
Earlier I appealed to reason as the only point required in the beginning, middle and end of this dust up. These are the facts you and your opponents can agree on. One, there is a man behind the curtain: some shadow group, that acts in concert, is pulling a lot of strings internationally. Two, America’s elected leaders are in some likely majority or supermajority controlled by this group. Three, this shadow group is our common enemy, regardless of who we point fingers at to identify as the perp in this grand global game of Clue. Four, this hidden enemy requires a public apparatus or arm to wield its hidden power: they cannot operate without the complicity of public leaders in each of the host nations it has latched its parasitic hive mind control onto.
The last point is the only real argument worth exploring, because it is objectively correct. Whether we face a nefarious lot of tiny hats with spectacles, or nomadic turkic bespectacled tribesmen, or nomadic turkic time traveling aliens, or just the modern day version of That Hideous Strength, any of these groups would be forced to rely upon a common asset to do all the bad things they have done and are doing to us. They require complicit elected leaders acting as traitors against their own nations in broad daylight as the spin doctors of their treacherous plans.
Which begs a question you sort of are the modern progenitor of asking: how does one produce leaders that will not succumb to the pressures and lures of our shadow enemy after they are elected? To ask the reverse question: where do all the false leaders come from? Here I want to Homer disappear into some bushes as I marvel at the good work God has enabled the lot of you there in Moscow to do. The answer is in what you have engineered with your own hands. We build happy families. We re-establish a loving, sacrificial patriarchy. We build schools and take these happy, well loved kids from happy, well loved moms and joyful, sober minded dads and we equip them with elite training only classical education can provide. We fight a two-front war, where we ruthlessly destroy sin that has crippled the American family, and we ruthlessly reclaim the innate God-given capacity for greatness in children. We do so with the only fighting chance and power we have ever had: in the worship of and submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. And we praise Him for accomplishing what we could not.
And lo and behold, out of that come faithful and loyal and capable American leaders. I am preaching to the preacher who also happens to be the choir. A Puritan’s son is worth his weight in gold—because he was nurtured and reared as a Puritan’s son. The actual fight to be that family and resist the world and labor for this outcome is very hard, but the way God has historically blessed the obedience of parents and churches and schools is darn near mathematical. One might even argue God prefers above every other good work that we seek to raise up Men With Chests. Men with cussedness, who do and say the things the real, biblical Jesus would do, even when the modern Deepak Buddy Jesus greatly disapproves. Even when it costs them far more than they receive in return for their obedience.
An analogy to bring light to our predicament: Reformed Christian America is an old naval ship of the line. Her crew has been beset by an insurmountable deluge of stowaways. And the stowaways have gained power. They have bribed all the lieutenants and commissioned officers. The actual crew is beset by a staggering array of abuses. And so the crew starts pointing fingers at one another. After all, they come from different groups of settlers, some Irish, some English, some Chinese and some North European. And groups of them theorize the true identity of the stowaways and spin up grand conspiracies. And some of the last honest officers discipline the rabble-rousers for their dark mutterings. And pretty soon, the whole ship breaks out in general disarray, a biting and devouring we were warned about.
And no one asks why we still recognize the Captain, who stays in his quarters, only to emerge at meal time to make virtuous sounding speeches about how the crew is all one big family and we must be welcoming to every crew member and never question their actions, for that is the real treason in his ship. And no one can raise a hand against the stowaways. Because without the Captain throwing his weight behind the growing bevy of criminals, well, they all would have been thrown off the ship long ago, and every traitor amongst the original crew hanged.
Congress, the judiciary, and much of the executive are the Captain today. They are the lever of public power being wielded to abdicate all this federal power to a group of mysterious traitors. If we want to no longer be weak against parasitic organizations behind the scenes, regardless of their origin, we must produce better captains. It doesn’t matter who the shadow government is because their origin does not explain their rise to power, rather our failure to live as a godly nation does. It doesn’t matter to what degree the Jews are or are not a part of that conspiracy. This is all friendly fire, all foolishness and clickbait. We can all trust God that our shadow enemy will one day be revealed. I, for one, would not want to be pointing big fingers at the Jew haters if their conspiracies all turn out to be right, anymore than I can contest your theory that it’s probably all just sociopaths from the CIA doing their best impression of That Hideous Strength. That isn’t the side I want to take—because I don’t have to.
I’m not saying we should not investigate. In fact, let’s. We ought do more of that. But the truth is, until the investigations turn up the real perpetrators, we all should hold our tongues. All of us. From the dankest, most retarded among us to the most loving of pastors, none of us have a real clue the exhaustive list of names that belong on the Deep State Membership roll, nor what hats they wear on Saturdays. We might someday, and many a vindicated conspirator will point at the TV with his beer like Leonardo DeCaprio. But until then, we are collectively spinning our wheels.
I am saying, let’s rally around a simple argument together, which is both righteous and reasonable. Let’s stop with any presumption of guilt or innocence for any of the proposed shadow groups amongst the tin foil hat crowd. Except for maybe the turkic aliens, we should hold a vote on ruling them out. Let’s instead grow painfully and creed-ally aware that we have precious few caliber of Puritan’s son-grade leaders to offer in service of our nation. Even though those men once multiplied in the hundreds of thousands and built the great nation upon which we stand. And let’s keep banging this drum no matter how often the crazy church leader next door slavers on about the Jews. Moscow came to prominence because out of everyone, you guys were among the extreme minority to publish any kind of words that made sense out of anything in Modern America. All I’m proposing is you do that with the Deep State conspiracy: stay on message. In so doing, you will offer the barest of olive branches to the young retards in that you stop letting them sidetrack you away from the overwhelming lesson we are learning at great cost from recent history. Rather, the effect of this message, I believe, will orchestrate a swan song for their listeners to come put their thinking caps on. And in so doing, you do not violate any Scriptures that they be ashamed of their youth. But you do enforce something a good Systematic Theology would teach or at least ought to teach: young ones, let us no longer be retarded, but let us lay aside foolish controversies of the game of Clue. Older men likewise must remain in the middle of the autism spectrum. And let us raise less hollowed-out virtue signalling scum bags out of our children, and in so doing no longer be ruled over by traitors. Amen.

Patrick