Meditation on the Text of the Week

Is Integrity Too Much to Ask?

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold , a virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call His name Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14

Every year, at this time, the Christian faith and the Living God are held up to ridicule by Unbelievers. We expect that, really. Nothing much has changed from the days of Rome when Christians were ridiculed as cannibals and orgiastic, amongst other slurs. Unbelief will always be true to itself in the end. Anything at all may be true in its random world of brute chance, apart from the Christian God. He cannot possibly exist.

Therefore, it is entirely predictable, expected, and oh-so-mundane to be subjected to all kinds of Unbelieving innuendo, slurs, and misrepresentations at the very time when Christians honour and recall the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of all the earth. Unlike Ali-G, Christians do not demand respect from Unbelief, nor do they expect it. When it occurs, it surprises on the upside, and we are thankful. Meanwhile, regardless of the antipathy and prejudice of Unbelief we continue to seek to do good to all men, as the Lord has instructed, and according to His definition of what is good.

What is not acceptable, however, is when professing Christians demonstrate that they have gone over to serve the Dark Lord, even while remaining within the bosom of the Church. It is not acceptable to have them mouth the very taunts and ridicules of Unbelief against our Lord, His Church, and His people. We completely reject the arrogant and vain attempts by these pseudo Christians to "rescue" us from the historical Christian faith, to drag us into the fatuous modern world. We utterly repudiate their specious plans to make the faith of our fathers "more relevant"--by which they mean, to eviscerate the God of the Scriptures, replacing the true faith with an entirely different religion.

In recent days, we have seen just such hubris by a leader in the Anglican church, St Matthews in the City in Auckland, New Zealand. A billboard was put up by that congregation ridiculing the doctrine of the virgin birth of our Lord. The apologia for this blasphemy was that it served to make the christian faith "more relevant" to our world. Now, we candidly admit that there is little new here. Routinely at this time of the year we are dubiously festooned with so-called church leaders being quoted by eager newspapers striving valiantly to make the Christian faith "acceptable" to Unbelief. In all their striving they have a common message: "the Christian faith is your faith. We think and believe as you do. We, too, you see, are servants of the Dark Lord. "

But it is tiresome, is it not, to have these wolves in sheep's clothing continuing to parrot their calumnies and lies, as if they represented and spoke for the faith which has been once for all delivered to the saints. We expect such slanders and slurs from Unbelief. But it is completely intolerable to have the servants of Unbelief arrogantly trying to help us poor Believers, freeing us from our superstitions and ignorance even while being dressed in the garb of the very Church they are seeking to discredit and undermine.

In wartime, traitors are always treated to summary justice. In spiritual warfare against the Prince of the powers of the air, traitors are due similar, quick justice. "Reject a factious man after a first and second warning, knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned." Titus 3: 10,11. (The word "factious" is from a root meaning heretical--the action of trying to break apart the faith by teaching heretical doctrines.)

As the traitors reveal their true identity and loyalties, the Church must identify them, warn them, then reject them. If they persist in their lies, they prove beyond doubt that they have never been part of the Church to begin with. It is time to take note and take action.