When cultures reject God, they cut themselves off from the ultimate ground of reality, and in the end they do indeed become weightless, insubstantial, light as air, ephemeral or, in the terms used by the prophets, “weighed in the balances, and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27 KJV). They give birth “only to wind” (Is 26:18), and like tumbleweed before the hurricanes of history, they are eventually “gone with the wind” (Is 57:13). The judgment over their end is the verdict “Ichabod” – the glory, the reality, the weightiness has gone (1 Sam 4:21).
Os Guiness in Impossible People
Sin is Social
You don’t have to travel far either in the real world or the internet realm to hear a modern man or woman assert that they are OK with an adult choosing to do with their body whatever they want to do. Thus if an adult man wants to sleep with another adult man, that’s OK. If he wants to have his genitalia removed, take hormones and have bits added to him, that’s fine too. If he wants to be involved in polygamy, that’s not a problem. The individual reigns supreme, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone else. Unfortunately, comments like these can even be heard from Christians – which shows how thoroughly secular pluralism has infected our thinking.
A Christian response should be, “What do the Scriptures teach?” They teach that we are not just free-floating individuals. We are social beings. Yes the individual matters, but we are all interconnected. This is seen in the truth that we are literally all connected. We are all descendants of Noah and through him of Adam. We are further connected by the design of the world. God has so made the world, that we cannot live without each other. I cannot build, or do electrical work, or conduct surgery. I need others. This pattern is also seen in the moral design of the world.
So what ethical implications does this connectedness have? It means that all sin is social. Sin is never just individual. No matter how small, it has ramifications for society through the web of relationships that it impacts. The classic case of course is in our representative head Adam, whose sin caused all of his descendants to be caught up in its effects. Another case in Scripture is the story of Achan whose disobedience to God caused his own death, the death of his family, and the deaths of 36 other Israelite men. David’s sin with Bathsheba led to the slow trainwreck of his family. Solomon’s sin of marrying foreign women and going after their gods had geopolitical implications that caused suffering and misery for centuries to come.
Sin is social. This truth is denied in the statement, “He can do what he wants as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone.” Sin always hurts society. Fatherless homes have an impact. Homosexual unions have an impact. This is why Mosaic law dealt with things in a way that seems more than harsh to us. Adultery was punishable by death. Why? Because the impact on society of this sin is horrific. It doesn’t just hurt the rejected spouse and their children. The effects of sin ripple out through our social connections. So as moderns, we think we are over the barbarity of such responses to adultery. Yet our ‘mercy’ is truly cruel. In our ‘kindness’ we allow and promote behaviour that leads to more crime, more teenage promiscuity, a mental health epidemic among teens, and a high rate of suicide. We all have to live with the effects of that kind of society.
Conversion Practices Prohibition Submission
Dear Prime Minister Ardern and Minister Faafoi,
I greet you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am writing this submission to implore you by the authority of the God of Nations, to abandon this bill and turn from the unjust and wicked spirit that would compel you to write it in the first place.
Both of you bear the honourable title “Minister” and occupy an office worthy of respect and submission. The very title “Minister” as it pertains to civil rulers, comes from the Bible. Romans 13:1-4 teaches that governing authorities are God’s servants (literally ministers) who are obliged to punish evil and praise good. Therefore, Christians are commanded to be in subjection to your God-ordained authority.
Be that as it may, you have betrayed the solemn responsibility of your office. Your authority to govern comes from God. Yet you have betrayed that authority and trust by supporting and promoting this bill. Rather than obediently honouring God in your office, you have sought to usurp authority that was never given to you. You have attempted to take the rights and responsibilities that belong to God alone.
You will give an account before God for the following:
1. The deceptive nature of this bill
From the outset, this bill has been an exercise in manipulation through the control of language. When we hear the phrase “conversion practices” most ordinary people think of electric shock therapy and other abusive practices that do not currently exist in New Zealand. This is clearly intentional. You have intentionally lumped these abusive practices in with ordinary Christian teaching as a bait and switch to coax along ignorant chumps.
You clearly don’t think too much of ordinary New Zealanders, but we see through this. When a teacher, like myself, offers Christian counsel to a student confused about their sexuality, we should not be lumped together with torturers and abusers.
From the beginning, this bill has been championed by radical anti-Christian activists like Shaneel Lall. It is clear that this bill has been designed to target Christians. That much is plain. What is more subtle is the deceptive way you have gone about it. The bill purports to target “conversion practices”, when in reality, it targets those who are trying to affirm boys, girls, men and women in their gender.
2. The unjust treatment of Christian pastors, parents, and teachers
As Christians, we recognise that this world was made by, and is governed by God. He has made mankind as male and female and heterosexual marriages are the natural expression of sexual desire. All attempts to overthrow this creation reality are highhanded rebellion against the king of the universe. We recognise that since Jesus died to pay the penalty for sinners like us, we should gladly submit to his righteous standards for ethical behaviour and moral living.
We teach others to turn to Jesus, recognise him as Lord, and obey all his teachings. This is foundational to our obligations before God. This means that we will indeed teach that God has made boys to grow up into men who love and marry women. This means we will encourage our children, students, and congregations to live in accordance with all that God made them to be. We will teach people to be transformed by the powerful word of God and supress lewd and sinful sexual desires. We will teach people not to rebel against God by seeking to be a member of the opposite sex. We will explain the destructive and perverse results of lifestyles that fail to recognise God’s created order. And we will teach against the radical LGBTQ ideology that is being promoted by our government and many other institutions.
As a teacher in a Christian school, I cannot abide by the proposals of this bill. By definition, I would be castigated as a criminal because all the students I teach are 18 years or younger. Criminalising people like myself for teaching the Christian message and worldview is reprehensible. By doing so you are inviting the judgment of God and placing yourselves under his curse.
Additionally, these laws absolutely exceed the sphere of authority that has been assigned to you. You have no right to tell parents that they can’t encourage their children to live out a Biblical sexual ethic. They are not your children!
All those who set themselves against the Lord and against his people will be held in derision and will come under the wrath of God. Stop seeking to punish the good and righteous teaching of God and his people.
3. The promotion of child abusing LGBTQ ideologies
The real danger to our children and to society is the radical and destructive ethic of the LGBTQ movement. The real and dangerous conversion therapy is practiced by those who seek to chemically and surgically overturn the created order of God. Promoting rank and open rebellion is what should be outlawed, yet this government has demonstrated time and time again that they have no interest in truth and justice.
In order to know how to live and flourish in this world, we must be directed by the life changing message of the gospel. The law of God teaches us how we can best love God and love our neighbours. All other worldviews are ultimately doomed to failure. At the top of the list of destructive worldviews would be the God-denying, self-promoting worldview of radical individualism.
We do not have the right to define what it means to be human. We are creatures. Only the creator has ultimate say about what and who we are, and he has spoken, both in his word and in creation. All attempts to silence his voice can only lead to disaster.
Conclusion
Jesus Christ is Lord. By virtue of his death and resurrection, he has assumed the place of highest authority. He has all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, your authority is a derivative authority. This means that your authority is limited. You do not have the right to legislate immorality. Jesus will judge ministers harshly who have abandoned their duties and who have engaged in open rebellion and warfare against him.
Be that as it may, Jesus is a kind and compassionate ruler who loves to show mercy. In fact, he died to take the penalty for wicked and rebellious servants. He died for homosexual rebels, transgender rebels, and tyrannical rebels. He died to save them from the penalties of their lifestyles, and he now lives to transform them to be made new in Christ.
Recommendations
By the authority of Christ, you are commanded to repent. Abandon this bill. Assign it to the trash heap. Repent for your self-aggrandising lust for power and autonomy. Recognise that Jesus is Lord. Recognise that the only way to govern justly is to do so in light of his Lordship!
If you turn to Christ, you will find him to be a perfect saviour. You will find that his stipulated standards for righteousness and justice are the measure by which you should rule.
I will be praying that you do this.
In Christ,
Ethan Apollo Aloiai
A Short History of Slavery
The Biblical Role of Government
For too long now, Christians in the West have not really had to think too hard about the biblical role of government. We have lived in the afterglow of a civilization raised up by Christian presence in the past. Thus tyranny, where the gospel shone its light was eventually destroyed. It is unfortunate for us that we have forgotten the lessons learned through centuries of persecution and tyrannical governments. If we are not careful, we are set to learn them again; the hard way.
The all too common response of pastors and Christian leaders in the evangelical church at least in my experience in New Zealand is to assume since state government is ordained by God there are really very few biblical limits on what it can do. Christians are told to submit unless we are told to do something that is a sin. This seems a little too simplistic to me.
In the evangelical church, this naivety is regrettably combined with a dualistic worldview. The gospel is seen as about personal salvation rather than the universal kingship of Christ. Faith is expressed in the private sphere through prayer and Bible reading. The standard held up of faithful Christianity often involves giving up ‘the things of this world’ like a difficult job in order to spend more time helping out in ‘Christian’ (church) activities. Living out the Christian faith at work is equated with sharing the gospel of personal salvation, or perhaps ensuring personal integrity and honesty in one’s business dealings, or perhaps starting a work Bible study meeting. None of this is bad per se, but it is an unfortunately truncated view that neglects the application of the lordship of Christ to 90% of the average Christian’s life.
Consequently, many Christians have not thought through a Christian view of (among other earthy subjects) politics. So it is, that we have Christians who view politics as dirty and unworthy of Christian interest, and simultaneously take for granted the default socialist statist approach to governance. Thus, the role of state has continued to grow and grow unchecked with little or no Christian opposition. This should not have been.
Education is a case in point. In New Zealand the 1877 education act was passed into law. It established ‘free’, compulsory and secular education for all Pakeha New Zealand children. Well-grounded and Biblical Christians should never have supported this legislation, but around the world acts like this were supported with very little outcry from Christian leaders. R.L. Dabney’s prescient opposition being one prominent exception. Little by little the state’s appetite for control has grown and expanded. As each successive generation passes away, a new generation grows up assuming the current approach to government is normal.
So it is, that we have a state that believes it is responsible for our children’s education, our health, our economic well-being, our housing, our media and the information we receive, our charity and so on, right down to managing our interpersonal actions to ensure we don’t offend each other. We are slowly but surely being enslaved. What we need is a Biblical worldview of government. And given the pandemic and government actions as a response to this, we had better figure out what we think and how we must act toward government quickly.
In posts that follow, we will explore some Biblical passages that will help us develop our thinking on government and its role.
Human Rights
What is the source of human rights? For the Christian, this answer is easy. Our rights come from our Creator. We are made in his image and thus imbued with the dignity that flows from this. Thus, we have the right not to be killed. Since we are made in the Creator’s image, and we have been made for dominion, we are able to work God’s earth and as analogies of the Creator, we can create value and worth from our mind and the materials of earth. Thus we have the right not to be stolen from. For the Christian, human rights stem from the imago Dei, and God’s law.
However, many no longer live with the truth as their worldview. They reject the living God and embrace a materialist worldview. They believe that man is the result of a long evolutionary process, and God is a creation of man. However, these individuals quite like the Christian concept of human rights. So they want to steal them from our worldview. Of course they can’t get them from their own, for where could rights come from in a chance evolutionary system – a system that by its very nature requires bloodshed and might as right for evolutionary progress to occur.
So how do they back up their rights? With their own ‘god’ of course. And who is that God? The state! I recently heard some womble on the radio talking about the right to adequate housing. So I looked into this concept and found the Human Rights Commission espouses the right to ‘adequate’ housing. In a brochure on this, they write:
The human right to adequate housing is binding legal obligation of the State of New Zealand. This means the State of New Zealand has agreed to ensure that the right to adequate housing is progressively realised in New Zealand. It is an “international obligation” that must be performed in New Zealand.
The State has a duty to protect the right of people in New Zealand to enjoy adequate housing and a responsibility to provide remedies.
While this sounds nice, and of course we want everyone to have nice housing, God has not given us a ‘right’ to adequate housing. Nor has he given the State the role of ensuring we have it. He has given us hands and feet, a mind and ingenuity. And he has called us to exercise dominion over the earth he made. Work is how we get houses. The State does not have the right to make rights. Only God has that right, because he alone is the sovereign Creator. The State can only recognise the rights he has given people in his Word. When they attempt to make new rights, they are usurping the throne of God.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where the people have turned from the God whose yoke is easy and burden light to Leviathan who we think will look after us and care for us. And so our god State has benificently given us a right to adequate housing.
But for every right, there must be a corresponding duty. For example, I have the right not to be killed or stolen from. That means you have the duty not to club me over the head with a blunt instrument to steal my wallet. What does it mean that we all have a right to adequate housing? It means others have a duty to ensure this human right is not thwarted. According to the UN, it is the State that has this duty. Yet the State does not create wealth. Unlike the one true God, it cannot make something out of nothing, so it must plunder its people. Which ultimately means we have a duty to pay for the adequate housing of others who do not have it.
Ultimately this means that we do not have a right to our own resources, because somebody who needs them has more of a right to them than us. So this ‘human right’ is the right of the hungry Leviathan to take money from unwilling people to provide for others who do not have ‘adequate‘ (and that term is defined very generously by the UN) housing. His yoke is hard and his burden is heavy. Turn from the idol of State and come to Christ the true king of the universe.
Jabba the State
It is not that everything has been politicized. Everything has been stolen from the polis and given over to Jabba the State – bloated, disgusting, corrupt, without conscience, accountable to no one, and voiding the results of his meals into the land and the drinking water and the air that everyone has to breathe.
We want our authority returned to us – or we intend to take it up again – because it is ours by right. We want not to be reduced to idiots and barbarians with a nominal and trivial vote. Our opponents here talk a great deal about diversity, which seems only to refer to the variously mottled patches of flesh over Jabba the State’s tumid paunch. We want a diversity that strikes terror into their hearts: the natural diversity you get when the school board of East Springfield hires and fires and orders books with a different plan in mind from that of the school board of West Springfield; or when the Christian baker conducts business by his best lights, and the Jewish baker by his; or when men congregate to do something more conducive to the common weal than watching a ball game and getting drunk; or when women organize a father-daughter dance and do not thereby mean a mother-daughter dance or anything else besides what the words obviously denote; or when the citizens of North Springfield begin their meetings with a prayer; or anything else, Jabba, that is not your business, or yours, Jabba’s creatures otherwise known as lawyers, college professors, social workers, and judges.
Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes
Prickly Like a Porcupine
Any reader who pays even the slightest bit of notice to the world around them will be aware of how easily offended modern man is. Some will even be offended by the penultimate word of the previous sentence. Outrage is a national staple. Particularly outrage about perceived racist slights. But in all of this, it is wonderful to catch these turkeys in their own traps. Cue the outrage of touchy Seini Taufa, a lead researcher in Moana Research and Senior Pacific Advisor for the Growing up in New Zealand Longitudinal Study.
Seini objects to the terms Pacific Islander or Polynesian, because they are apparently degrading and insensitive. She said, ‘We did not name ourselves Pacific Islanders, we did not name ourselves Polynesian. These are terms that were constructed by palagi within a colonial context.” Oh the delicious irony. I could slightly arrange her sentence. “We did not name ourselves palagi. This is a term that was constructed by Pacific Islanders within a colonial context.” You know, because since the 1970s, Pacific Islanders have been colonising New Zealand.
I don’t write that because I’m offended by the word palagi. Honestly. I don’t care. I don’t expect someone to look at me and go, “That guys’ ethnic origins are 50% English, 25% Irish, with a little bit of French and German thrown in. I don’t expect a Samoan chap to figure out (or care!) what my ethnic origins are. If I look white, palagi will do. Not something I call myself – I tend to think of myself as Kiwi, but whatever. My identity is not based on what someone else refers to me as. I am a son of the king, and that is my ultimate foundation of identity and significance. Perhaps that’s what’s missing for many of these prickly porcupines.
Why the Left hates Babies
Check out this recent article on The Federalist which has a fantastic monologue by Ben Domenech on the importance of children and families.
A Culture of Life vs A Culture of Death
One of the fascinating but predictable things about rebellion against the true and living God is the way it always devolves into lies and death. Since Satan is the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning, this should not surprise us. We see the rebellion of our father Adam was founded on Satan’s lies and ultimately caused the slow murder of Adam and all his progeny. Those in Satan’s kingdom employ his methods. Thus very early on we have Cain murdering his brother in envy and Lamech murdering a young man for insulting him. Yet Satan’s influence is not limited to individuals. Cultures that embrace rebellion against the living God grow more and more like their father the devil. They too embrace lies and death. The Pharaoh of Moses’ day embraced the lie of his own divinity and murdered countless young Hebrew boys. The Canaanites embraced Molech and sacrificed their own children to their ultimate ruin.
Our secular culture in its haste towards the abyss more and more manifests its diabolical nature. Its language is full of lies. We have transwomen, marriage equality, antiracism, gender affirmation, social justice and economic equality. A transwoman is a man. Marriage equality? A homosexual union can never be a true marriage. Anti-racism is actual racism. Gender affirmation is the attempted destruction of the image of God in an individual as male or female. Social justice is injustice. Economic equality is stealing. You get the idea. Our secular culture only lies when it speaks.
Then we have secular culture’s embrace of death. Abortion is our euphemistic term for child sacrifice. In New Zealand, 18% of known pregnancies in 2019 ended in an abortion. We’ve also introduced euthanasia. And our suicide rate amongst youth is horrendous, but surely given the culture of death celebrated, and our nihilistic outlook, unsurprising. Secular culture is killing itself off. They see children as a threat to the environment. Recently Meghan and Harry won an award for their decision to have only two children. Environment worshipping secularists even promise to have no children for the sake of the planet. In this, the secularists plant the seeds of their own destruction.
The secularist trumpets their rebellion with slogans such as ‘a woman’s right to choose’, and ‘I was born in the wrong body’, but their embrace of this culture of lies and death is actually evidence of God handing them over to wrath and judgment. They will not be fruitful. Their culture will dwindle and decline. In contrast, this world will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. Fruitfulness and blessing come to those who love the Lord their God. They will inherit the earth. Those who love God, for whom Christ is king produce a culture of life. Having children for us is part of the calling to dominion under Christ. That is why faithful Christians tend to have more children than nihilistic secularists. We are hopeful. This world belongs to our Lord. It will be restored and we will reign with him over his creation.