The Time Of Preparation Is At Hand (Introduction to Preparing for the Underground Church, Part VI)

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Pastor Foley

(Part VI of VII of Pastor Foley’s introductory essay to Rev. Richard Wurmbrand’s Preparing for the Underground Church. To order a print or electronic copy of the bilingual Korean/English edition of Preparing for the Underground Church, including Pastor Foley’s introductory essay and a foreword by Voice of the Martyrs historian Merv Knight, visit Amazon or click here to visit the bookstore page on our website. For Part I of Pastor Foley’s introductory essay , click here.) 

Why must Christians today prepare to go underground?

Because we are the impediment to the sexual revolution—those who, in the words of Ephesians 4:24 “put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness,” rather than throwing that self off as so much repression. The sexual revolution is not the issue on which we choose to make our stand but rather the issue on which the governments and the people of the free world have chosen to make their stand against us.

As children of both the church and the free world, we are not accustomed to having to choose between the two. And we are certainly not accustomed to being portrayed as repressors of freedom. But Jesus does not give as the world gives, and when the world—even the free world—moves to buttress the freedom to sin by restricting the freedom not to sin, then the free world reveals itself to be simply one more guise of “the world,” which has always been hostile to the things of God.

Ultimately, traditional Christianity has become no more popular in South Korea than North Korea, because traditional Christianity challenges the foundational premises on which any society is built, including this one. The question is not where it is more pleasant for us to live (in a communist or capitalist society) but where it is more pleasant for God to live, where he finds himself welcomed. And it turns out that he is finding no more welcome in South Korea than in North Korea but is in both places equally reviled because he is no more the God of the sexual revolution than he is the God of the communist revolution. These revolutions are revealed to be two sides of the same coin, both minted by “the race of men inclined to will their absolute autonomy” in their conflict with a monotheistic God.[1] The two revolutions share an identical root. When the two sides peer at each other across the DMZ, those long deceived by the one revolution are peering over at those newly deceived by the other revolution.

The South Korean government is not only party to the sexual revolution; it is among its most ardent promoters. In 2011—long before “Gangnam Style”—the annual revenue from its so-called “cultural content exports” KPOP and Korean drama was already estimated at $4 billion USD annually. It claims an asset value for these cultural properties of $83.2 billion USD. It earmarks 1% of the national budget “to nurture popular culture” and maintains a fund in excess of $1 billion USD to further this “nurture.” This means it spends taxpayer money to translate KPOP music videos into foreign languages and to ask the television networks of other countries to air their programs.[2] It knows that when its stars get plastic surgery, or a new cell phone, or a new hairstyle, or use a particular makeup or handbag, that the Korean economy prospers from consumer emulation. Thus, the South Korean government is hardly value neutral. Compare a Korean drama or KPOP song today to ones from ten years ago. Note the growing edginess and embrace of more daring forms of sexuality. The South Korean government is acutely aware of global cultural developments. It regards reflecting these “changing values” in its cultural content as “the strongest tool to expand K-culture’s global distribution channels and the diversification of its consumers.”[3]

The South Korean government not only nurtures its cultural properties for economic purposes, it also leverages them for ideological warfare as well, especially in its engagement with North Korea. It’s not political speeches it’s blasting across the border anymore. It’s KPOP. It’s not speeches on capitalism it flies in via MP3s and balloons and drones in an effort to open up its adversary. It’s Korean dramas.

Thus, we should not expect the South Korean government to be our ally in withstanding the sexual revolution. In fact, given Korean churches’ historically strong relationship with the Korean government, we can fully anticipate that the Korean government will expect us to be its ally in this matter, supporting what it believes will best advance Korea’s national interests.

Just such a situation exists in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg is Professor of Law at Uppsala University in Sweden. She writes not from the Christian perspective but rather from the perspective of Scandanavian law in society about what Scandanavian governments expect from the church with regard to the sexual revolution. She writes very clearly, “The state may expect the churches—or at least its national Folks’ Church—to adjust to the new developments, even if it cannot rule on this.”[4] She notes that the church has not disappointed the state on this issue:

What explains the Folks’ Churches’ adjustment to the legal formalization of same sex relationships, considering that all of them were initially opposed to registered partnerships, and later, to same sex marriage? A general explanation would appear to be these Churches’ historical role and position as national Folks’ Churches to which the great majority of each state’s population belongs. In order to be part of society at large, a national Folks’ Church cannot cherish values that deviate too much from the prevailing mainstream values in society, irrespective of weakened ties with the state. For instance, when a bishop of the Church of Finland made critical statements about same sex relationships in a published interview a few years ago, it drove thousands of members to leave the Church and made nationwide headlines in the Finnish media.[5]

She expresses the meeting point at which the church and the state have made their peace over the sexual revolution:

From the perspective of biblical theology, the love commandment is superior to all other commandments and prohibitions in the Bible. The decisive factor where forms of cohabitation are concerned is therefore not the individual Bible passages but what is to the benefit or harm of people. This means that when the Church is to form an opinion on marriage for same sex couples, the relevant question to ask is whether this harms or benefits people.[6]

This definition of “love” completely negates the one that stands at the heart of the Christian tradition: Love as God’s gracious right ordering (and, by his grace, re-ordering) of the world, freeing us from sin through the crucifixion of our flesh. Christians who refuse to take the chisel to re-sculpt our tradition’s two millennia-old definition of love are thus increasingly cast as bigots, potentially dangerous, and in need of being watched, controlled, restrained, monitored, and, of course, mocked.

As Peter Leithart notes, this was predicted more than a generation ago by Augusto del Noce. Del Noce was a Christian philosopher roughly contemporary with Rev. Wurmbrand who lived through fascism and communism in Italy. Del Noce sensed that the church in the free world would soon face far greater challenges from the sexual revolution than it ever faced under communism. Leithart summarizes what Del Noce thought would happen to Christians who refuse to compromise their faith in the face of the sexual revolution :

The remaining believers in a transcendent authority of values will be marginalized and reduced to second-class citizens. They will be imprisoned, ultimately, in “moral” concentration camps. But nobody can seriously think that moral punishments will be less severe than physical punishments. At the end of the process lies the spiritual version of genocide.[7]

It is not difficult to see why, given the events currently unfolding in the Nordic countries. As Leithart notes, “All theological opinions will be judged by whether they advance liberalism’s particular vision of freedom and fairness.”[8] The only theological opinions that will be allowed to extend beyond the church’s doorstep are those that advance, not repress, the sexual revolution.

In this way, freedom of religion becomes reduced to freedom of worship for those who dissent from the state’s sexual orthodoxy. Freedom of worship means that we may say what we wish inside of our buildings provided that it does not impact anything we do outside of our buildings. That, sadly, is a bargain that many churches have historically been willing to accept.

Perhaps that is why the underground church is more often found in homes than in church buildings: the costs of maintaining the public church are just too high, and only a few of these costs are financial. The gospel of God is too great to be confined to moral ghettos. Thus, as the governments of the free world embrace the conviction that they must set boundaries for the church based on what those governments consider the preservation of liberty for all, we embrace our own conviction that Christian liberty requires our preparation for the underground church.

 

[1] John M. Rist, 2014. Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin, and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 10.

[2] Melissa Leong, 2014. “How Korea became the world’s coolest brand.” Financial Post. http://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/how-korea-became-the-worlds-coolest-brand.

[3] Chung Joo-won and Lee Eun-jung, 2016. “(News Focus) K-pop, K-dramas to embrace universal values to increase appeal.” Yonhap News Agency. http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/focus/2016/10/31/88/1700000000AEN20161031007600315F.html.

[4] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016. “A Scandanavian Perspective on Homosexuality, Equal Rights, and Freedom of Religion.” In Jack Friedman, Timothy Shaw, and Thomas Farr. Religious Freedom and Gay Rights: Emerging Conflicts in the United States and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loc. 5595.

[5] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016, Loc. 5631.

[6] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016, Loc. 5667.

[7] Peter Leithart, 2016. “Referees, Players, and Religious Liberty.” First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/09/referees-players-and-religious-liberty

[8] Ibid.

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What is the Purpose of the Law for Christians?

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Editor

To watch other Voice of the Martyrs videos, visit the Voice of the Martyrs Video Page!

Matthew 5:13-20

This scripture occurs immediately after Jesus’ discussion of the tragedy of unsalty salt and obstructed light which we discussed last week. As we learned, Christ does not use the image of salt to say that Christians are to be a kind of divine seasoning to give taste to a bland world. Instead, Christ uses the image of salt to describe how the law acts as a preservative to keep the world from the decay of sin. He talks about unsalty salt to convey the grievous absurdity of the law being used in ways that do not preserve the world from decay but instead bolster our own sense of righteousness while the world continues to rot. Similarly, lighting a lamp and quickly hiding it under a basket conveys the absurdity that human beings, who were created to mirror’s God’s image into the world, hide themselves–and thus God’s image–“because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). In other words, sin has reduced human beings and the law to the point of uselessness.

Does Christ propose to remedy the situation by doing away with the Law? No, he answers in Matthew 5:17. Does he propose to remedy the situation with either a new law or new insights into the old law? “Absolutely not!” the Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:21. “For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.”

Christ does not do away with the Law or create a new Law. Instead, he fulfills the only one God ever created. He enables us to experience the Law as blessing, not curse.

To understand what this means, we must travel back in time. We must think about God before time. But how can we know what happened before time? We know because when scripture tells us (cf. John 1:1). Before all time, the Son submits to the Father (John 6:38; John 1:8) and the Father glorifies the Son (Matthew 3:17, John 13:32). This is the way it was, the way it is, and the way it always will be.

When we read scriptures like this, we might (wrongly) conclude that the Father must be greater than the Son. In our world, the weaker submits to the stronger and the lesser yields to the greater. But we think this way because our thinking has been warped by original sin. Scripture tells us that the Son is the power of the Father (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:24) and that submission in the Trinity is not based on weakness but on love.

Like Satan, fallen human beings think that the purpose of power is to control others. We think that the more power we have, the more we can get our own way and accomplish the things we want to accomplish. We think about power as something we have—or want to have. When Satan tempts Jesus in this wilderness, he does so according to this understanding of power.

“Transform these stones into loaves of bread,” he tells Christ. “Throw yourself down from this height.”

Satan even brings Christ to a great height where he can see all the kingdoms of the world. He gestures to them and tells Christ, “if you bow down and worship me, I will give you all of this.” Satan sees power—and the prizes of power—as something he has and can give. That is why Satan thinks himself to be powerful.

But Christ knows that all power comes from God. God’s power always ultimately accomplishes God’s purpose. God delegates power. He does not hoard power, nor does he use power to control others. Power radiates from him. Because this world is fallen, this power is often badly twisted by those to whom it radiates. Through Christ, we see the power of God as it is intended to be used: in submission to God, reflecting it back to him with humility. In this way, we show God that we know who he is and who we are.

Christ rejects Satan’s requests not by overpowering Satan but by submitting to the authority of his Father. He refuses to transform the stones or throw himself down because his Father has not told him to do so. Christ understands that “the Son can do nothing by himself” and so he “does only what he sees the Father doing.” Instead of using power according to his own understanding or in order to achieve his own ends, Christ uses it only as the Father directs.

With this understanding of power, we can see that Matthew 5:21-37 is not about the creation of the Law, or the destruction of the Law, or about the Law bringing us to despair. It is about freeing the Law from the control of fallen humans who use the Law for their own purpose, namely, to create a standard of righteousness that is reasonable to human beings and achievable by them.

But that is not the purpose of the Law. The purpose of the Law is to preserve the fallen world from further decay. But the fallen world cannot be preserved by lowering the standard of the Law through interpretations that make it easier to keep. That only makes us feel self-righteous while the world slips into further decay—and us, blindly, along with it.

For the Law to act as a preservative, it is necessary to submit to the Law fully. That means submitting not only to the actions prescribed by the Law (e.g., do not kill, do not commit adultery) but also to the attitudes required to keep the Law—not only in body, but in soul and spirit as well.

When we submit to the Law in body, soul, and spirit, we come to see that our thinking (which is how early church fathers understood Jesus’ reference to our “right eye”) and our will (which is how early church fathers understood Jesus’ reference to our “right hand”) do wrong even when they seem to control our body to do right. That is because we interpret the Law in a way that suits our thinking and our will. As a result, the Law cannot stop the decay of human sin. We may not kill, but our anger masters us. We may not commit adultery in a way that others can see, but we become enslaved to lust. We may feel we are righteous when we provide certificates of divorce, but we can’t escape plunging ourselves and our former spouse into adultery. Our oaths sound holy, but through them we become captive to our own lies.

So in reality, we are not submitting to the Law at all. We are seeking to control it. Just as Satan believes the kingdoms of this world are his to give, we act as if righteousness is ours to bestow: anyone who fulfills our interpretation of the Law is righteous. But our interpretations lead both the body and the soul to hell, because the decay of sin is not halted in us, nor in the world.

God designed our bodies to submit to our souls and our souls to submit to God. But we fell into sin. Sin deceives us into thinking that we are submitting to the Law, that our bodies are being reined in by our souls, and our souls are being reined in by God. But because we control the Law through our interpretations, our souls aren’t submitted to the Law, and as a result, our bodies aren’t being reined in at all.

This is why our bodies feel so much more powerful to us than our souls. They are, in our fallenness. Our bodies are inflamed with sin, which carries with it the peculiar power of death. Because our souls no longer submit to God, they are left weak and helpless—dead in sin, in fact—and they cannot rein in our bodies.

Think about the movie Ben-Hur.

At one point in the movie, Ben-Hur has escaped from slavery and is in the desert. He is taken in by a desert nomad whose camp races chariots for a living. One day in the desert when the camp is preparing for a future race, horses attached to a chariot become startled and run through the camp. The horses are out of control, and the empty chariot is being dragged behind them. The camp is destroyed by the rampaging horses and their chariot. Eventually, Ben-Hur leaps onto the chariot and subdues the horses.

Does Ben-Hur subdue the horses because he is stronger than them? By no means. Even a single horse is much stronger than him. But the horses submit to Ben-Hur because that is what chariot horses do: they submit to their driver, when the driver commands.

Our body is the horses, our soul is the chariot, and both are running wild. Christ enters into our soul at baptism, and the chariot is no longer just an empty, useless cart. Once he takes the reins and issues the command, our body knows to submit to him. Our soul does not control our body by effort; it is not strong enough. Christ does not need strength; the body knows its true master, even though it has been stirred up by sin. It submits to his command. Everything does. And he commands only and exactly what his Father gives him to command.

We are not saved by our submission to the Law. Our body is not able to keep it. Our thoughts and will can only distort it. We can only rampage around it. But neither is the Law given to drive us to despair, nor is a new Law given that can bring life.

Instead, we are saved because Christ enters us at baptism. He brings us, chariot and horses, into submission, just as he submits to the father. Our submission to him is his gracious gift to us. He fulfills the Law—not instead of us, but in us, by his very presence.

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What is the Kingdom of Heaven? Doing Matthew 5:1-12

Posted on March 2, 2017 by tdillmuth

Before reading this post on doing Matthew 5:1-12, please make sure to read our post on hearing Matthew 5:1-12. You can also see a quick overview of our DOTW Bible study method.

What action does God take in Matthew 5:1-12 toward others?

Although Matthew doesn’t specifically use the words, “God gives,” we can clearly see that God is giving rewards to people with specific godly character traits. Throughout almost all of the verses, God gives blessings to his people.

Vs. 3 – God gives the kingdom of heaven to those who are poor in spirit.

Vs. 4 – God gives comfort to those who mourn.

Vs. 5 – God gives the earth to those who are meek.

Vs. 6 – God satisfies those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Vs. 7 – God gives mercy to those who are merciful.

Vs. 8 – God gives the opportunity to see him to those who are pure in heart.

Vs. 9 – God gives the name “sons of God” to those who are peacemakers.

Vs. 10 – God gives the kingdom of heaven to those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.

What action does God call me to take toward God? Toward others?

There is only one command in this passage of Scripture and it’s found in verse 12.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

This command to rejoice and be glad isn’t a general call for joy though; it is a unique command in light of persecution and suffering on Christ’s account.  While this seems strange to many Christians, the Bible emphasizes that every Christian will experience persecution for following Christ.  Paul said, “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12).”

Rather than being an unfortunate by-product, the Scripture indicates that persecution may be a gift from the Lord.

Philippians 1:29 says,

For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.

To suffer for the sake of Christ has been granted to us as a favor . . . or a gift of grace. The Bible says that suffering is a gift of grace from God himself! Our joy doesn’t come in spite of suffering, it comes as a part of the unique gift Christ gives his followers.

Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, the founder of Voice of the Martyrs, said,

The prison years did not seem too long for me, for I discovered, alone in my cell, that beyond belief and love there is a delight in God; a deep and extraordinary ecstasy of happiness that is like nothing in this world. And when I came out of jail, I was like someone who comes down from a mountaintop where he has seen for miles around the peace and beauty of the countryside and now returns to the plain. (Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ).

What actions did I take? Or, what actions will I take?

The command is clear, but how do we do it? A great way to start is to learn from the examples of other Christians who have been in situations described in Matthew 5:10-12. In the book of Acts, those who suffered “rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name (Acts 5:41).”Read the book of Acts and notice how Peter, John and the believers reacted to persecution.

Read Rev. Richard Wurmbrand’s books  to see  what he did in the midst of prison isolation and throughout his fourteen years of imprisonment. Make it a point to read the testimonies of Christians (both past and present) and their experiences with suffering for the sake of Christ. Take time to learn from Polycarp and Perpetua and countless others throughout the history of the church.

Pray that God would make this a reality in your life.

It’s important to obey God’s command even if you don’t fully understand it or feel it. Joseph Hovsepian, son of the martyred Haik Hovsepian, shared how he was able to forgive his father’s murderer. He said that forgiveness came only after repeatedly obeying Christ’s command, even though he didn’t have the feeling to forgive for quite some time.

The command to “rejoice and be glad” isn’t something that we should wait for . . . in each and every situation, we should practice this command now.

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