Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
The central problem with the white supremacists in Charlottesville is not so much that they hate blacks and Jews. Their central problem is that they hate God, and hate Jesus Christ. And the same thing goes for the anitfa agitators on the other side of the street. Scripture tells us what the emotional weather is always like outside of Jesus Christ.
“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3).
There is no way out of this apart from real repentance. God sent His Son into this world, in part, in order to solve the most intractable of problems—that of ethnic animosity. Christ was sent in order to overcome the division between Jew and Gentile, to create one new man out of two (Eph. 2:15), and the chasm between those two groups was a true chasm. But—liberal bromides notwithstanding—we cannot have the Jesus fruit apart from the Jesus tree. “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). We are commanded to repent, and we are commanded to repent by Jesus. We cannot do anything resembling this if we persist in our refusal to name His name. We must come to hate our sin, which means naming it, and we must come to love Jesus, which means naming Him.But—liberal bromides notwithstanding—we cannot have the Jesus fruit apart from the Jesus tree.
Refuse to do that and the only thing you have to look forward to is an ever-increasing cycle of hatreds, spilling out of hearts and into the streets. These racial animosities are not a sin against America, or democracy, or our social fabric. They are a sin against God.
So every form of race-hustling, independent of which race might be receiving the benefits of that hustle, is detestable to God.
Every form of race baiting is detestable to God. Every form of racial biting is detestable to God. And this includes, incidentally, the lite forms of race-hustling, race-baiting, and racial biting that have somehow become acceptable within the church. But Christless alt-right thinking defiles the sanctuary. Christless grievance politics defile the sanctuary. There are those who hustle outside the church, and there are those who shamble and shuffle inside it, playing the same game at a slow enough speed to be palatable to evangelicals. But do not ask how fast it is going. Ask rather what direction it is going. There are only two directions—the New Jerusalem or the Abyss.
Ask yourself—where did these white supremacists come from? Were they educated in white supremacist academies? Not a bit of it—I will lay you even money that they were educated under the government school program of identity politics, and they then went and looked in the mirror to find out what side they were on. And outside of Christ, that is the way it always has to go. Outside of Christ, attempts at racial reconciliation are always going to be a matter of reaching around Lady Justice in order to get your thumb on the other scale now. You keep saying you are going to fix everything, and you keep knocking everything over.
It might be said that I am saying these things as a white male in his sixties, and therefore my point is suspect and invalid. No, I am saying these things as a minister of Jesus Christ, and when He makes His appointments, it has nothing to do with racial quotas, and everything to do with the authority of His Word. And so here is a message from God—a hammer that breaks the rock of racial animosities into pieces (Jer. 23:29). And it is the only hammer that can break this rock.
So here is the message for those who hate image bearers of God because they don’t like the color God used to paint that particular image. So then, you have taken it upon yourself to hate God in this way? Very well. Have it your way. Scripture teaches that—for those insist upon living in their own little cesspool of animosity—God hates them also.
Someone might object that they have been taught that God loves sinners, including those who sin racially, unconditionally. No, God loves sinners in Christ. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The only place where a sinner can possibly be a recipient of God’s love is in Christ. God’s love for sinners was bestowed and manifested in one place only, and that place was the cross of Christ. And so what happens to those who hate Christ, who despise His cross, who insist on turning their face away from Him? What happens to those who stand aloof from God’s solitary provision for sinners? They remain outside in the twilight—a twilight that is rapidly becoming the outer darkness. Where they stand, they hate God and God hates them.
You heard that right. God hates evil men. “The Lord trieth the righteous: But the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth” (Ps. 11:5). Those who love violence do so for various reasons, and they have all their rationalizations in place. But they rationalize under the wrath of God. They are by nature objects of wrath (Rom. 9:22). The white man who loves violence is detested by God. The black man who loves violence is detested by God. The fact that they detest each other does not keep them from going to Hell together.
Tim Challies sums it up nicely:
God “hates wicked people from his soul, from the very depth of his being. God hates their ways (Proverbs 15:9), their thoughts (Proverbs 15:26), their worship (Proverbs 15:8), their actions (Proverbs 6:18), and their evil deeds (Psalm 5:5).”There is only one righteous side for Christians to take in a situation like this, and that is the side of the gospel of reconciliation. The only way that racial animosity can ever die is if it is nailed to the cross where Jesus died. And again, for that to happen, the sin must have a name and the Savior must have a name.
Anything else is trying to pick up the turd by the clean end.
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