Making the World Sweat

“When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city.”

Progressives want to tear apart society, ostensibly in order to build a better one, though they can’t tell us how they plan to do that. But they are convinced the existing system is unreformably corrupt, and that oppressed humanity will prosper under a different and better one.

Postmillennialists believe much the same thing, really.

The Right to Costly Speech

Douglas Wilson is hard at work making the case for the right to free speech from a Christian foundation, and I give him full credit for grappling with the abstract with all the enthusiasm of Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

But in explaining his position, Doug is making an undefended assumption — or at very least one he does not attempt to defend in this particular post — which may sound perfectly reasonable to many Christians: that biblical law ought to serve as a foundation or framework for modern society.

The Commentariat Speaks (19)

Moscow, Idaho is home to Christ Church, a conservative reformed evangelical gathering of about 900 people that has produced an unusual number of what Wikipedia calls “institutional projects”, including New Saint Andrews College, the Logos School, a Christian book publisher, a scripture translation group, a three-year ministerial training program and four spin-off churches in Montana, California and Myanmar.

Christ Church congregants form an active community of homeschoolers and Christian businesspeople within Moscow.

Anonymous Asks (21)

“How do you know if you’re being called to go to the mission field?”

Anyone interested in the answer to this question may find it useful to first read two previous posts in this series (numbers 18 and 20), which concern finding the will of God with respect to marriage, college and careers. Much of what the New Testament teaches about the “call” of God remains the same regardless of what it is we may think we are being called to, so for the sake of those who have read them already, I won’t recycle what I said there ad nauseum.

That said, scripture says a little more about the calling of God with respect to missions than to other areas of life.

What Is Job One?

An atheist who calls himself “Pointman” is infuriated that Christians do not make it our first order of business to take a public stand against the devastating effects of climate change activism in third world countries.

He provides considerable evidence that the efforts of environmental extremists, far from helping, are actually hurting the poorest of the poor. Western nations threaten to withhold foreign aid from countries that permit the use of DDT, so millions in those countries die of malaria. Changes in North American laws under pressure from environmental lobbyists incent farmers in developing nations to grow profitable biofuel crops rather than food staples, leading to price increases of up to 75% in basic foods, and resulting in food riots, starvation, malnutrition and death.

Notwithstanding his penchant for hyperbole, Pointman may well be right.