Doug Wilson's Letter From America

The Current Unholy Trinity of Unbelief

The Deep Things of Satan

Douglas Wilson
Sunday, January 10, 2010

This secular age has an unholy trinity, an attempt to counterfeit the place that the triune God holds in the world as it actually is. This, to be distinguished from the world that these bunglers are trying to fashion right in front of us.

Their father wants power, their son wants to be the incarnation of lust, and their spirit wants to muddle everything. And thus we have the collectivist state, the demands of sodomy, and the confusions of postmodernism. These three things conspire together to make, for you, a brave new world. If you want to understand the focus of my writing, there it is. They have their unholy trinity; I have three targets.

It seems hard to believe that such overt examples of rebellion could get a foothold in the Church, but they can, and have. Why did Paul have to tell the Corinthians (a Christian church) that cursing Jesus was not to be done? "Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost" (1 Cor. 12:3). Why did the Lord Jesus have to tell the saints of Thyatira that knowing the deeps of Satan was not a good thing? "But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden" (Rev. 2:24). I'll tell you why. It was because a number there had knowledge without wisdom. It was because of a lust for respectability, a desire to shine in the eyes of the world. It was because some of their pastors had gone to grad school before seminary, and had not kept their guard up in either place.

"But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God" (1 Cor. 2:10). So we answer all this with the words of Scripture, taken straight up. I want to see people getting saved -- we have to be saved from the world before we can save the world -- and I want them to get saved as the result of the kind of preaching that would come from a street preacher in a Flannery O'Connor short story. No subtlety whatever -- my sin and His blood.