The one who rules over all

God's people in our day have no revealed mandate to swing the actual word sword of God's justice at contemporary pagans. But the principle remains - we must retain a distinct separation from our culture while mounting an active opposition to it, else we will blend with it. We are still called to this separation from and combat with our own godless culture.

Time was when we used to smile a bit at the fundies who denounced television and the cinema (I mention these because they are very 'Canaanite' in their sexual preoccupation), but the more recent pornographic explosion has sobered us. Celluloid is a powerful cultural medium, fully as dangerous to the Christian mind for what it suggests as for what it preaches, as perilous in what it finds laughable as in what it seriously propounds. But that is simply one aspect of our secularized culture. [The explosion of pornography on the Internet since these lines were written only confirms what he says.]

The church needs not only saints who live godly lives but also saints who develop godly minds and thereby critique and expose the whole gamut of the godless culture in which we live, minds that can not only recognized false doctrine (whether it comes via advertising, education, or government pronouncements) but also unmask the assumptions behind Antichrist's propaganda. Is this not our mandate? 'Instead of being moulded to this world, have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature, able to make out what the will of God is, namely, what is good and acceptable to him and perfect." (Romans 12:2 Moffatt)

One word more. If the church is going to do this we must cease thinking that God calls only missionaries and pastors. We must ask God to call believers to be artists, journalists, politicians and historians. That is, if we are to produce an effective counterculture we must begin by holding that all of life belongs to Yahweh (Baal has no royal rights at all in any compartment of Yahweh's universe). Our congregation has produced a brochure which we give to people we visit, part of which summarizes our beliefs. Among our essential convictions we include that 'God rules over all of life: nothing is outside his dominion - whether business and politics, economics and education, science and sex, history and harvests, art and affliction, music and marriage. All of life is holy and must be submitted to his reign.' That will not solve our cultural problem. But if we make any progress it must begin with that conviction. If we assume Baal has a corner of farming and sex, then we have already given the crown rights of Jesus to Antichrist.

From Such a Great Salvation - Expositions of the Book of Judges, by Dale Ralph Davis. pages 34/5

At this point in the book, Davis is discussing how Baal was worshipped for his supposed control over harvests (hence the reference to farming), and within the worship was temple prostitution, which the Israelites got themselves involved in, to their peril. 

Our union with Christ

Ultimately it all comes to this, that the real cause of [our spiritual depression] is failure to realize our union with Christ. Many seem to think that Christianity just means that we are delivered in the sense that our sins are forgiven. But that is only the beginning, but one aspect of it. Essentially salvation means union with Christ, being one with Christ. As we were one with Adam [in our sinfulness] we are now one with Christ. We have been crucified with Christ - 'I am crucified with Christ,' says Paul. 'All that has happened to Him has happened to me. I am one with Him.' Read the fifth and sixth chapters of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The teaching is that we have died with Christ, have been buried with Christ, have risen with Christ, are seated in the heavenly places in Christ and with Christ. That is the teaching of the Scriptures. 'You are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God,' (Colossians 3:3). The old man has been crucified and all that belonged to him. His sins have all been dealt with. You are buried with Christ, you are risen with Christ. 'Reckon yourselves then to be dead unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord,' (Romans 6:11).
Let me sum it up in this way, therefore. You and I - and to me this is one of the great discoveries of the Christian life; I shall never forget the release which realizing this for the first time brought to me - you and I must never look at our past lives; we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus. I challenge you to do that. If you look at your past and are depressed by it, if as a result you are feeling miserable as a Christian, you must do what Paul did. 'I was a blasphemer,' he said, but he did not stop at that. Does he then say: 'I am unworthy to be a preacher of the gospel?' In fact he says the exact opposite: 'I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who enabled me, for that He counted me faithful, putting me into ministry, etc.' When Paul looks at the past and sees his sin he does not stay in a corner and say: 'I am not fit to be a Christian, I have done such terrible things.' Not at all. What it does to him, its effect upon him, is to make him praise God. He glories in grace and says: 'And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.'

From Martin Lloyd Jones' Spiritual Depression, pages 74-5

Looking in the mirror

Paul's method was to provide evidence from Scripture. This is an effective strategy.  

It had been a long day for the assistant at the cosmetic counter. Having been on her feet all day, she was looking forward to going home. Just before the doors closed, a man came running up to her frantically and said, “Tomorrow’s my wife’s birthday and I don’t have anything for her. What do you recommend?” The shop assistant brought out a nice bottle of perfume worth about £100. He gasped and said, “That’s way too expensive!” So she held up a bottle that cost £50. He said, “That’s still too expensive. What do you have that’s less expensive?” She searched some more and found something for £25. The husband replied, “That’s still too expensive! What else do you have?” She then brought out the cheapest thing she had at the counter, a tiny £10 bottle of perfume. He was now exasperated and said, “You don’t understand. I want you to show me something really, really, cheap!” She quickly reached under the counter, pulled out a mirror, told him to look into it and said, “Try this!”

The Word of God is like a mirror - we can see ourselves in it. James wrote: Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. James1v23to24.

When it comes to paying attention to the Bible we can be like the man who took his portrait photos back to the photographer and said, "I want my money back, these pictures don't do me justice." The photographer looked at the pictures and said, "You don't need justice, you need mercy."

From John Reed's commentary on Romans 3:9-20

Supporting the Call

I believe it is very important for the church to confirm a man's calling. Unfortunately many are deluded as to their calling. It is by no means unknown for a man or woman to feel called to tasks that they are not suited to or equipped for. The prayerful judgement of the church is a safeguard against vainglorious feelings and egotistical desires.
The church needs to take its responsibility in this regard very seriously. Care needs to be taken and prayer made for sound judgement. Christians should beware of having a plank in the eye. Jesus wasn't thought highly of in his home town and uttered those sad and dispiriting words: "A prophet is not without honour save in his own country."
Much is always made of the response of J.R. Ryland when William Carey raised the question of whether it was the duty of all Christians to spread the Gospel throughout the world at a minister's meeting of Particular Baptists. He is said to have retorted: "Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine." The impression is sometimes given that Carey ignored the put down and was on the next boat to India.
This is far from the truth. Instead he worked to overcome opposition to missionary enterprise and eventually the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen (subsequently known as the Baptist Missionary Society and since 2000 as BMS World Mission) was founded in October 1792, including Carey, Andrew Fuller, John Ryland, and John Sutcliff as charter members. They then concerned themselves with practical matters such as raising funds, as well as deciding where they would direct their efforts. A medical missionary, Dr. John Thomas, had been in Calcutta and was currently in England raising funds; they agreed to support him and that Carey would accompany him to India.
Carey only went to India after his call was confirmed by the association of churches to which he belonged.

J. Reed in his online commentary on Romans. 

Reconciliation

The following is a very long extract from pages 89-93 of P T Forsyth's The Work of Christ. Because it's all of a piece, it's difficult to extract anything shorter. I've re-paragraphed it (not necessarily in places Forsyth would have chosen) otherwise it appear even longer in a blog post. 

Reconciliation, then, has no meaning apart from a sense of guilt, that guilt which is involved in our justification....I want to note here that it means not so much that God is reconciled, but that God is the reconciler.  It is the neglect of that truth which has produced so much scepticism in the matter of the atonement. So much of our orthodox religion has come to talk as though God were reconciled by a third part. We lose sight of this great central verse, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.’  As we are both living persons, that means that there was reconciliation on God’s side as well as ours; but wherever it was, it was effected by God himself in himself. 

In what sense was God reconciled within himself?  We come to that surely as we see that the first charge upon reconciling grace is to put away guilt, reconciling by not imputing trespasses. Return to our cardinal verse, II Corinthians 5 v 19, [God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them]. In reconciliation the ground for God’s wrath or God’s judgement was put away. Guilt rest on God’s charging up sin; reconciliation rests upon God’s non-imputation of sin; God’s non-imputation of sin rests upon Christ being made sin for us. 

You have thus three stages in this magnificent verse. God’s reconciliation rests upon this, that on his eternal son, who knew no sin in his ex  Christ was made sin for us, as he could never have been if he had been made a sinner. It was sin that had to be judged, more even than the sinner, in a world-salvation; and God made Christ sin in this sense, that God as it were took him in the place of sin, rather than of the sinner, and judged the sin upon him; and in putting him there he really put himself there in our place (Christ being what he was); so that the divine judgement of sin was real and effectual.  That is, it fell where it was perfectly understood, owned, and praised , and had the sanctifying effect of judgement, the effect of giving holiness at last its own.

perience (although he knew more about sin that any man who has ever lived), sin’s judgement fell. Him who knew no sin by experience, God made sin. That is to say, God by Christ’s own consent identified him with sin in treatment though not in feeling. God did not judge him, but judged sin upon his head. He never once counted him sinful; he was always well please with him; it was part, indeed, of his own holy self-complacency.

God made him to be sin in treatment though not in feeling, so that holiness might be perfected in judgement, and we might become the righteousness of God in him; so that we might have in God’s sight righteousness by our living union with Christ, righteousness which did not belong to us actually, naturally, and finally.  Our righteousness is as little ours individually as the sin of Christ was his. The thief on the cross, for instance – I do not suppose he would have turned what we call a saint if he had survived; though saved, he would not have become sinless all at once. And the great saint, Paul, had sin working in him long after his conversion. Yet by union with Christ they were made God’s righteousness, they were integrated into the new goodness; God made them partakers of his eternal love to the ever-holy Christ.  That is a most wonderful thing. Men like Paul, and far worse men than Paul, by the grace of God, and by a living faith, became partakers of that same eternal love which God from everlasting and to everlasting bestowed upon his only-begotten Son.  It is beyond words.

It was not a case of wiping a slate. Sin is graven in. You cannot wipe off sin. It goes into the tissue of the spiritual being. And it alters things for both parties. Guilt affected both God and man. It was not a case of destroying an unfortunate prejudice we had against God. it was not a case of putting right a misunderstanding we had of God. ‘You are afraid of God,’ you hear easy people say; ‘it is a great mistake to be afraid of God. there is nothing to be afraid of. God is love.’ But there is everything in the love of God to be afraid of.  Love is not holy without judgement. It is the love of holy God that is consuming fire. It was not simply a case of changing our method, or thought, our prejudices, or moral direction of our soul. It was not a case of giving us courage when we were cast down, showing us how groundless our depression was. It was not that. If that were all it would be a comparatively light matter.

If that were all, Paul could only have spoke about the reconciliation of single souls, not about reconciliation of the whole world as a unity. He could not have spoken about a finished reconciliation to which every age of the future was to look back as its glorious and fontal [pertaining to the source] past. In the words of that verse which I am constantly pressing, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.’

Observe first, ‘the world’ is the unity which corresponds to the reconciled unity of ‘himself’; and second, that he was not trying, not taking steps to provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not labouring toward reconciliation, not (according to the unhappy phrase) waiting to be gracious, but ‘God was in Christ reconciling’ actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair (Romans xi 15 [for if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?]). Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work. He did not preach a gradual reconciliation which was to become the reconciliation of the world only piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or were affected by the gospel. He preached something done once for all – a reconciliation which is the base of every soul’s reconciliation, not an invitation only. What the church has to do is to appropriate the thing that has been finally and universally done.

We have to enter upon the reconciled position, on the new creation. Individual men have to enter upon that reconciled position, that new covenant, that new relation, which already, in virtue of Christ’s Cross, belonged to the race as a whole. I will even use for convenience’ sake the word totality. (People turn up their noses at a word like that, and they say it smells of philosophy. Well, philosophy has not a bad smell! You cannot have a proper theology unless you have a philosophy. You cannot accurately express the things that theology handles most deeply. The misfortune of our ministry is that it comes to theology without the proper preliminary culture – with a pious or literary culture only. ) I am going to use this word totality, and say that the first bearing of Christ’s work was upon the race as a totality. The first thing reconciliation does is to change man’s corporate relation to God. Then when it is taken home individually it changes our present attitude. Christ, as it were, put us into the eternal Church; the Holy Spirit teaches us how to behave properly in the Church.

The question and the answer

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, Psalm 119, verse 9.  [Of course, all of this applies to young women, as well!]

Cleanse his way. The expression does not absolutely convey the impression that the given young man is in a corrupt and discreditable way which requires cleansing, though this be true of all men originally: Isaiah 53:6. That which follows makes known that such could not be the case with this young man. The very inquiry shows that his heart is not in a corrupt state. Desire is present, direction is required. The inquiry is— How shall a young man make a clean way — a pure line of conduct— through this defiling world? It is a question, I doubt not, of great anxiety to every convert whose mind is awakened to a sense of sin— how he shall keep clear of the sin, avoid the loose company, and rid himself of the wicked pleasures and practices of this enslaving world. And as he moves on in the line of integrity— many temptations coming in his way, and much inward corruption rising up to control him— how often will the same anxious inquiry arise: Romans 7:24. It is only in a false estimate of one's own strength that any can think otherwise, and the spirit of such false estimate will be brought low. How felt you, my young friends, who have been brought to Christ, in the day of your resolving to be his? But for all such anxiety there seems to be an answer in the text.

By taking heed thereto according to thy word. It is not that young men in our day require information: they require the inclination. In the gracious young man there are both, and the word that began feeds the proper motives. The awful threatenings and the sweet encouragements both move him in the right direction. The answer furnished to this anxious inquiry is sufficiently plain and practical. He is directed to the word of God for all direction, and we might say, for all promised assistance. Still the matter presented in this light does not appear to me to bring out the full import of the passage. The inquiry to me would seem to extend over the whole verse [that is, all eight verses in this section]. There is required the cleansing that his way be according to the Divine Word. The enquiry is of the most enlarged comprehension, and will be made only by one who can say that he has been honestly putting himself in the way, as the young man in Psalms 119:10-11; and it can be answered only by the heart that takes in all the strength provided by the blessed God, as is expressed here in Psalms 119:12. The Psalmist makes the inquiry, he shows how earnestly he had sought to be in the right way, and immediately he finds all his strength in God. Thus he declares how he has been enabled to do rightly, and how he will do rightly in the future. John Stephen.

I assume this John Stephen was the Presbyterian minister (1800-1881) whose publications included Expositions on the Epistle to the Romans and The Utterances of the CXIX Psalm expounded in a series of lectures.