We rejoice in the power of the Holy Spirit of God, who was poured out upon us so that we could be the true Israel of God in a pagan and dark world. As the true Israel of God, we are summoned and equipped to confront and overcome the paganism of the unbelieving world.
In times of decline, the Church has adopted two different approaches to take toward paganism, both of which are unfaithful to the assigned mission of the Church. The first amounts to capitulation. If you can’t beat them, join them. God words and Jesus words are retained, but the Church embraces the current worldliness, whatever it is—modern, postmodern, whatever. This is always done initially for the sake of relevance, and of course, the first thing that arrives is thundering irrelevance. King Ahab adopted the worship of fertility green, and his nation immediately turned brown.
The second approach reacts to this by moving into an evangelical ghetto. Separatism is the order of the day. We retain belief in certain doctrinal fundamentals, which is good, but we do so simply to get us into heaven when we die. These doctrines are little more than a helicopter to get us all out here. “It’s all going to burn, man.” Thus a man can get saved, join the evangelical subculture, go to work faithfully every day for forty years, and to use N.T. Wright’s illustration, he never notices that his job is to help build the Tower of Babel.
We are called to a third approach. The task of the Church in the world is, always and everywhere, to confront idolatrous paganism. We are required to be the new Israel to the world, a light for the nations, and this is why faithfulness will always result in conflict. If we surrender, there is no conflict. If we retreat into our evangelical cloister, there is no conflict. But if we declare in faith that Jesus is Lord—Lord of heaven, Lord of earth, Lord of kings, King of lords, Lord of every blade of grass, Lord of mayors, Lord of nations, Lord of false religions, and Lord of cities and towns just like ours—we will have conflict. How could we not?
This is why we have had turmoil here in our town. This is why some Christians are distressed with us—we have broken that unsigned peace treaty they had worked out with the reigning paganism. But let us never forget that it is what we do here, in worship, that accomplishes everything that God has purposed. So let us sing around Jericho.