Merely Inconsistent Or Spiritually Dead?

 David Alan Black

It is a truism to say that healthy national politics depends on healthy spiritual foundations.

I have often hinted that the cause of our human miseries is a radical moral and biblical dislocation, a loss of balance in our relation to God and to our fellow man. As Christians we have forsaken the Scriptures; and as citizens we have forsaken the law of the land (the Constitution) and, as a result, we are no longer ruled by republican principles of civil government.

Whatever else the so-called Civil War was, it was most certainly a sharp change in the nation’s relation both to the Bible and to the federal Constitution. Essentially, salvation has now become the domain of government action and coercion, and the federal government has become a sort of fixed center against which everything else is measured. No longer can we even say “is” and expect to be understood. This is because when we speak of God we no longer acknowledge Him as the great “I am,” from whom everything and everyone else measures.

The moment we make up our minds that we are going to follow God’s ways we fall into the condemnation of the world. We find ourselves increasingly out of adjustment, as it were, to the ways of society and increasingly estranged from even our closest friends and relatives. We have broken with the cosmos, and the break is the direct result of our changed relation to God. We now proclaim “No King But Jesus!” with humble and grateful hearts. That place of lordship and dominion is His by every right in earth or heaven.

Set over against this are the claims of worldly potentates. If I understand aright what they are saying, it makes no difference to them whether one supports the slaughter of millions of unborn babies or condones “consensual” homosexual acts. The desire for honor and popularity among men has made truth irrelevant. What can all this mean except that we have as our nation forsaken our spiritual faculties given us by God for the purpose of knowing truth and exposing falsehoods?

That a saving work of grace must first be done in the hearts of our national leaders is presupposed here. Man may think he is spiritually alive and yet have never been quickened to active life by the operation of the Holy Spirit – “Holy” because a genuine Christian can never tolerate sins such as abortion and homosexuality. The relativists among us are not merely inconsistent. They are spiritually dead.

I hope it is clear that the only sell-out that can please God is when we sell out to Him. If we truly want to follow God we must become other-worldly fools for His sake.

August 27, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book is Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

Back to daveblackonline