Us and Them? Biblical Unity, Division and the Confusion of Human Categories.
Along with what we’ve seen thus far, and sometimes from the same people, there is today a relentless cacophony of voices calling for “unity” in Christ’s church. Some far more legitimate than others.
Of course every true Christian knows that unity is indeed a scriptural mandate and is everywhere in both testaments. Passages are too numerous to cite here, but we’ll go with a couple examples
Psalm 133:1-3
1-Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brothers to dwell together in unity!
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2-It is like the precious oil upon the head,
Coming down upon the beard,
Even Aaron’s beard,
Coming down upon the edge of his robes.
3-It is like the dew of Hermon,
Coming down upon the mountains of Zion;
For there the LORD commanded the blessing—life forever.
…and 1 Corinthians 12:12-13
12-For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.
13-For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
…just to quickly point out a couple of well known ones.
As we have seen, the trouble today is that biblical definitions of pretty much everything have been replaced with artificial ones drawn from the world and human emotion.
1 John 3:10
By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.
1 John 5:12
He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.
There are two and only two kinds of people on this earth. Those of every nation, kindred, tribe and tongue who have been born dead in Adam, and those of every nation, kindred, tribe and tongue who have been supernaturally born again into new and everlasting life in Christ.
Those are the only two categories that Christians should be primarily concerned about, because those are the only two categories that God is primarily concerned about according to His Word.
We live in an era and a society that is positively obsessed with “identity.” Identity according to the wicked leftist worldly philosophy of critical theory which categorizes people along an ever expanding list of racial, sexual, ethnic, gender, deluded tans-gender, and socio-economic people groups topped off with their declared level of environmental preoccupation.
Almost literally ANYthing that is not white, heterosexual, Christian and terrified of climate change is good. What makes them good is not any particular quality or achievement. What makes them good is their state of being “oppressed.” Their mere existence as an oppressed identity group gives them preeminent consideration and influence in this warped and destructive way of thinking.
White, heterosexual Christians who are not terrified of climate change, are by definition bad. Or even anybody who so much as remotely sympathizes with them is bad. Not because they have personally done or even said anything that is oppressive or even derogatory toward anybody, but simply because they exist as the oppressors. Whether they actually know it or not.
These people have been very clever about this. They at the same time create out of thin air, a long list of identifies that play to the various sinful, worldly carnal propensities of postmodern man, and then subsumes them all under a single unified identity of… “the oppressed.” It’s a little like an NHL hockey team that drafts players from all over the world, some of whom don’t even speak the same language, and puts them all in the same jersey, united in the common purpose of winning hockey games and eventually the Stanley Cup.
While the sexual attacks upon gender, family and children are surely an abomination in the sight of God and His Christ, as they are attacks upon His very created order, the more insidious and deceptive component of all this for the church, is the equating of ethnicity with sexual deviancy.
Galatians 3:
27-For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28-There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Colossians 3:
9-Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, 10-and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him 11—a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.
According to God’s revealed Word, what part of the world somebody descends from and what color they are, carries with it no moral content or significance. A person is not more or less dead in Adam, or more or less alive in Christ according to their race or ethnicity. It is God Himself who made us different on the outside, but the same on the inside. No anthropological strain is innately better or worse than another.
This is clearly and certainly not true of the sexually immoral, indeed sexually deranged identities, being militantly promoted by this demonic leftist revolution. These perversions are fiercely and roundly condemned by God everywhere in His scriptures. As we saw yesterday, this has been universally recognized by professing Christians throughout the whole of church history.
As everyone knows, or should know, while this campaign of cultural subversion began much earlier, it really shifted gears in the 1960s. Black America married the state in the wake of new and massive federal legislation that wedged government bureaucracies into the place of provider and protector in black families. This has degenerated to the point where today in most urban black centers 80 plus percent of children are born to single mothers.
The sexual revolution began at the same time with the antiestablishmentarian hippie movement (make love, not war), the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion and the proliferation of pornography. The stigma of homosexuality began to wane during this time as well.
The racial component was much easier to sell back then though, due in no small part to the legitimate history of slavery and racism in the United States. The short version is that “racial reconciliation/social justice” became the vehicle used to smuggle into normalization the heinous sexual perversions we’ve seen accelerate at an exponential rate in recent years.
What we have now is the morally indifferent God designed and God ordained reality of ethnicity, over which no person ever born has had any control whatsoever, fully absorbed and assimilated into just about the rankest, most bizarre and debased sexual psychosis in world history, and that by the claim of common oppression.
Oh how it must grieve and anger the Lord our God that those calling themselves by His holy name are willing to ally themselves with this wickedness, in the name of what amounts to their own place in this world that we are commanded not to love. Who seem to have more affinity with goats who look like them than they do with sheep who don’t.
The God of the Bible commands unity among His true worshipers, centered in His revealed truth, and for those true worshipers to maintain a wise social and a total spiritual separation from those who are not His.
Christ’s church bride is a family, joined to Him and one another by the bonds of common adoption through the electing grace of a merciful God. Our primary identity, which defines and governs all others, is that.
Far from holding our identity through “philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ,” (Colossians 2:8 ), which critical theory most assuredly is, we are commanded to maintain a spiritually healthy separation.
(Isaiah 52:11, 2 Corinthians 6:17, Revelation 18:4}
For the ambassador of Christ in this world, we are living in, bar none, the greatest opportunity in church history on this continent to show these desperate sinners the love and justice in Christ that only unity in Him can ever provide.
Regrettably, that is not what they’re seeing. Professing American Christians are just as divided as they are and for the same carnal worldly reasons they are. These people honor Him with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him. They’re not concerned for HIS honor and HIS glory. They are concerned about THEMSELVES. What they think will make THIS life better for THEM.
Jesus Christ is not the end of their life and ministry. They see him at best as the means to their own ends. When they pray: “Oh Lord have your way in my life”, what they really mean is: “Can I borrow your power in the service of my own self interest?” They might even say “Please.”
Once again, we have what God commands in the clearest terms possible, this time as relates to unity and personal identity, and what the serpent demands as he succeeds in tempting and deceiving those who walk in the flesh.
And once again it is those inside Christendom who are the most abominable of all because unlike rank unbelievers who don’t pretend to love Jesus, those inside Christendom defile His name with the stain of this unleashed depravity.
Wow, that about sums it up. Brilliant analysis, once again. Helping us to see in a biblical context the world we live in. I think I’ve about divorced this world. It has been a tough divorce . I’ve always been a patriotic man. I loved America. I served her at the peril of my life, on the streets and with an Army expeditionary force. But, at the end of my life, I know it’s just a government of men. Imperfect. Flawed. My hope in America has been broken. But there has always been Christ. Always. He’s a worthy King. America is a worn out , rainbow haired, pierced face, fat gay whore. Without my wifey and fellow remnant, I’d go nuts.Yup, my divorce from America is just about final...
Sadly, every word of this post is true. Utterly, horribly true. Yet it is well to remember that the Church of Jesus survived, and even prospered under the oppressive yoke of Roman rule. It does so today in places like China, North Korea and Iran. There is a reason why believers throughout history have been described as a remnant. The unity toward which believers strive is centered in and premised on The Bible and the truths revealed therein. Any other unity is false and cannot survive because it is based on a lie. Yes, even the unity that once was based on a common belief in the American dream has been shown to be without substance and therefore incapable of surviving. When that dream was itself based on Biblical principles it had staying power, but once deprived of that Biblical basis, as it has been over the past eighty years, it shows itself for what it is--a chimera, a wooden god, a lie. Nowhere has this been illustrated more clearly than in the braying demands for "unity" emanating from The White House. Yes, our rulers want unity alright, the unity that comes from kowtowing to their depraved demands. Nebuchadnezzar demanded the same type of unity when he demanded all bow before his golden statue. Most did, but not all. The three who resisted were singled out for persecution, yet they prevailed because they were unified around the truth of God's revealed Word. And so it is with us today. In the face of demands for "unity", whether from The White House or the pulpit, we must first ask whether it is God's will that we unite with those who demand it, or whether they are seeking unanimity around a false premise. If they demand unity requiring rejection of Biblical tenets, values and principles, such demands are to be resisted. Our unity comes only from a united belief in and acceptance of God's Word and His salvific work through Jesus. Our motto should be, as with the patriots of old, "We have no king but Jesus!"