Post-Christian tribal living

The world is dissolving, crumbling, divided in every way imaginable.

“America is sort of a mirror to much of what the world is; the idea that our country would somehow be immune to the disintegration is nonsense,” says Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). “Look at the stuff happening on our southern borders, for example.

“A nation without a border--a clearly defined and defendable border--is no longer a nation. They’ll get some of that stuff solved eventually, but when they do it’s going to be so different than what you’re expecting it to be.

“You have to understand something, folks, after the Cold War was over, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, what happened to them? They dissolved and broke up into warring tribal groups.

“Culturally, socially, the thing that was always the cohesive thing in America, the 'melting pot' it was always called . . . by the way, did you know that in American history, from 1924 to 1960, immigration was largely outlawed?

“People have not always just been able to come here. It was strictly regulated, and the kind of thing you see today where just anybody comes; there were only two periods back in the 1800s when that was really the case.

“And the reason for that is we had a culture that understood you needed to be a melting pot where people would come and assimilate into the culture that’s here. Now they don’t do that. They do what they do in the Middle East. It’s the tribal culture. In fact, that’s now the big sociological term; the ‘tribalism.’

*****

“America’s turned into groups of tribes. People like you and me, Bible-believing Christians, we have little tribal culture areas where we live and we’re totally unaware of what’s going on in the other guy’s tribe. Sociologically, that’s a recent phenomenon in the last couple of decades.

“Years ago, when the fundamentalist Christians abandoned the cities . . . what happens is people solve the problems where they are, but now they’re going to try to solve them without truth, and you see that tribal warfare going on all over the planet and it happens here.

“The only place on the planet that CAN be different is in the Body of Christ. In a local assembly, manifesting what the Body of Christ is, you’re not oblivious to it all when you’re out in the world, but among us you’re reconciled in one body, because who I am and who you are in our own resources isn’t the issue. Who we are in Christ is the issue.

“If there’s ever going to be a testimony to that, and you know the heart of the world longs for that, they strive for it, but it’s that Genesis 1 thing. In the beginning, who created? Are you going to create your own world or is God going to create it?

"Most of us want to create our own, and the world you create is going to be one of division and strife because you carry that seed in your heart. But when it’s one God created, then you live in His resources; He reconciled us to God in one body.

*****

“When a culture rejects God’s Word and turns away from it, it winds up with things in its culture that are the antithesis of the way God created it; the opposite of the natural. There was a day when our culture understood that.

“How many of you know what a McGuffey Reader is? It was the standard textbook of the one-room schoolhouse in the 1800s. In 1854, the first McGuffey reader published, had as a text in it—this is what was taught to children:

“ ‘If you can induce a community to doubt the genuineness and authenticity of the Scripture, to hesitate undecided whether there be any such thing as virtue or vice, whether there be an external state of retribution beyond the grave; or whether there exists any such being as God, you have broken down the barriers of moral virtue, and hoisted the flood gates of immorality and crime.’

“That didn’t say you needed to be a Christian, that just said you don’t need to be a part of Romans 1. Isaiah 5:20 says, ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’

“You know what that is; it’s foolishness. You can’t even identify reality. Paul writes in Romans 1:28, ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.’

“There’s the problem. They didn’t want God: ‘I don’t want to think about Him, I don’t want Him around. Don’t talk about Him. We’re going to do it ourselves. Just remove any thought about Him from the culture.’

“They’ve done that in our day. If you’re under 40 years old, you were educated in a system that taught you fundamentally different than the system your parents were educated in.

“That which I read to you a minute ago was a fundamental understanding, and has been one of the fundamental principles of what we call western civilization, but about the time you younger people got into school, the prevailing wisdom of the education system was ‘multiculturalism, egalitarianism, every culture is equal; there’s no right, there’s no wrong.’

“People say, ‘Well, that’s the post-Christian.' You know what that is? That’s ancient paganism! That’s Romans 1. That ain’t nothing new. Everybody talks about modernity and post-modernity and I say, ‘Agh, phft! That’s Romans 1, man. Go back and look at it.’

“You see, to understand what’s going on in the world where we are, there’s the Body of Christ and not Israel’s (time past) program, but the world’s still the world. And when you deal with the world, you’re dealing with Romans 1.

“The result of that, as the end of the chapter reads, ‘Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
[30] Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
[31] Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
[32] Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’

“That’s a neighborhood I’d like to live in?! The coarseness, and the cruelty, and the corruption and the violence, and the abominable sinfulness of that culture didn’t just happen. It came as the direct result of, ‘I don’t want to retain God in my knowledge and I’m going to substitute the lie program, and I’m going to sit down and figure out a way to make my thinking the common thinking.’

“So when you come to the end of Romans 1, you’re at the depths of sin. You don’t only do the things, but you have pleasure in them that do them too. You’re not only a sadist, torturing others; you’re a masochist, torturing yourself, and you’ve reached the depths of sin. Revelation 2 calls it ‘the depths of Satan.’ ”

*****

“If the moment you got saved God gave you your resurrection body, where would you have to be?” Jordan reasons. “You’d have to be in heaven! Because II Corinthians 5 says you’re going to get a body eternal in the heavens. So when you get that body, you’re going to be up there.

“So if the moment you got saved He gave you that and you’re up there, what would happen to the ministry the Body of Christ down here? Well, you wouldn’t have gotten saved because the guy who gave you the gospel wouldn’t have been there to give you the gospel because he’d be in heaven!

“That’s why we suffer and travaileth in pain together with all of creation. Not because God doesn’t love us.

“You are His purchased possession, but He just hasn’t finished the work on you, so you’re in that little limbo period in there. That's why He says ‘as those alive from the dead.’ If you are a LIVING sacrifice, wouldn’t you be the walking dead?

“It’s an understanding of this identity God has given you and you ‘present your body’; you take the life that’s in you and say, ‘Lord, I’m going to use my body in the reality of who I really am. I’m a living sacrifice.’

*****

When Jesus was 12 years old and had just returned with His parents to Nazareth following His visit to the temple, Luke 2:52 says He “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”

Jordan observes, “If He increased in wisdom there must have been some wisdom He didn’t have before then. That’s kind of shocking. The answer is in Hebrews 5:8-9: ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.’

“How was He perfected? Well, He learned in His experience what obedience was. You see that contrast? ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience.’ He’s God but He’s also man and it’s His humanity that had to be educated, not His deity.”

*****

In Philippians 2, Paul tells us that while Christ “thought it not robbery to be equal with God,” He “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”

“There’s no question about the deity of Christ, but there’s something in this passage that allows you and me to come in contact with deity in a way we couldn’t otherwise do.

“It says, ‘But he made himself of no reputation.’ I love that. The first way you think like God thinks is you don’t make yourself of any reputation.

“Jesus was right; He was never wrong. He never did anything to offend anyone but when people were offensive to Him He could have stood and said, ‘You got no right!’ but He never did that. He never defended Himself against evil accusations. It says, ‘As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’

“He didn’t take His reputation and say, ‘I’ve got to be proven right.’ He said, ‘I didn’t come for that.’ He made himself of no reputation but took upon Him the form of a servant.

“Notice the verbs. He MADE himself and TOOK upon Him. Nobody forced Him to do this. Jesus Christ—now get this terminology in your mind—voluntarily of His own free will laid aside the free and independent exercise of all of His attributes as God.

“He purposely chose to live as ‘the man Christ Jesus’ in absolutely complete total dependence on what His Father told Him.

“He doesn’t know everything. Here’s God the Son, who has all the infinite knowledge of God—knows everything God the Father knows, everything God the Holy Spirit knows, everything they planned—but in order to be your Savior, in order for that Word . . . that expression of God to become flesh, He made a choice. He made himself of no reputation. He said, ‘I’ll not use my personal attributes.’

“He willingly chose to be a servant and one of the characteristics of a servant is He does not know everything there is to know about the master’s plan. He’s going to live in total dependence on what the master tells Him.”

(new article tomorrow)