Do Not Love the World

"You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

James 4:4

I was recently reading about the preaching ministry of George Wishart in Scotland in the bloody days of the Scottish reformation. After preaching one day in Dundee an assassin came at him with a knife. Wishart fought and disarmed his assailant and then protected the would-be assassin from the mob that wanted immediate reprisal. Soon afterward he asked a young John Knox to accompany him in his itinerant ministry and to carry a two handed sword. Knox was known as “a man well hated” by Robert Louis Stevenson as he was faithfully contentious in his own day even while being perhaps Scotland’s greatest historic gift to the world (outside of whisky). There was an open conflict in those days that was very often physical as well as theological and political. A conflict that should instruct us as we’ve grown conflict-averse.

You do not love God nor your unbelieving neighbor by minimizing the distinctiveness of belief in Jesus and obedience to his law. Many of us, over the past couple decades, in church planting, preaching and general mission to secular places have put a fair amount of effort into translating Christianity into terms and emotional frameworks that are understandable and even appealing to secular people. We softened the hard, craggy edges of Scripture - both theologically and ethically. We, in many cases, succumbed to the modern redefinition of "love" to mean empathy or insuring people were kept from unpleasant feelings rather than the more objective standards for love set forth in the law and explained throughout Scripture. Along the way, I think a fear of God - of unfaithfulness to his word -was subtly replaced with a fear of being perceived as stupid, quaint, bigoted or unloving by the people we hoped to win to the gospel. This is a legitimate conflict of interest. We want our neighbors (which in Denver mean typically young, progressive, and functionally secularist) to believe the gospel and worship Jesus. But there are all sorts of things in the bible and in the way the bible says things that are hard. And these things aren't just hard in content, they are said in ways hard ways. Many have compromised the content and tone of God's words in order to appeal emotionally and intellectually to pagan people. We've called it graciousness, winsomeness, or being missional. But these compromises are a reduction of faithful witness - witness that always requires conflict.

The grace that is extended in the gospel is a grace that names sin, pointedly, sometimes mockingly. At the very heart of the invitation of the gospel is forgiveness for sins, but it is a forgiveness that accompanies repentance. The grace set forth in the gospel is a grace that saves sinners from deserved wrath and hell, in other words it is a grace that speaks in the harshest imagery and with the most devastating threats imaginable when confronting unbelief and its moral fruit. The grace declared in the gospel is a grace that forgives and justifies and then demands (as well as empowering for) obedience to all the laws of our King. The grace of the gospel demands an absolute allegiance to the rule of Jesus and everything he commands in Scripture - and these aren't just the "red letters." It is everything the whole of Scripture commands. These are hard truths, but if allegiance to Jesus means anything it must mean allegiance to Jesus when he says things that would get you kicked out of the party, the governor's office, or your neighbor's house.

But it isn't simply the content of what the Bible says that we must stand by, it is also the way in which God says what he says in the bible. If we haven't grappled with how Paul can exhort God's people to gentleness while also hoping his opponents cut off their genitalia, then we haven't let the bible itself tell us how to be "gentle." If we haven't considered that the same God who instructs us in how to pray and sing the imprecatory Psalms also commands us to love our enemies, we haven't allowed the complexity of the biblical world to shape our engagement wit the world. Paul set his life's mission to see those who don't know God to be won by the gospel and he also says, "If anyone does not love Christ, let him be damned." Biting satire is used to confront unbelief and immorality throughout the Scriptures by everyone from the prophets to Jesus himself. In other words, if you approach the bible with the idea that love requires an empathetic approach to sin and unbelief, you'll wind up condemning most of the people in the bible, including Jesus. Allegiance to Jesus means learning to not flinch or get embarrassed when he starts pining on or telling his rough jokes at the dinner party.

God establishes a paradigmatic division in Genesis 3 that runs throughout the entirety of the bible. Jesus says this division will divide families. Paul says it changes how you hear God's law - either with a hostile ear or a submissive one. Revelation portrays this division as open warfare until the end. There is no peace in this division. I think our world feels this division and tries desperately to explain it in other, secular terms - be it racialist, socio-economic, political or educational constructs. The division you feel in the world is actually real. It hasn't gotten more significant because there is an election or because of differing opinions on how to deal with COVID-19. It is a division that goes all the way down and has existed from Genesis 3 onward. But get the division right - it is a divide between belief and her children and unbelief and her children. This divide marks out the world's enemies. And if you don't rightly identify your enemies you can never obey Jesus' command to love them. And if you don't learn from Jesus how that divide manifests itself morally and ethically and theologically, you won't know whose side your on. And if you don't learn from the bible how to love your enemies, how to speak to your enemies - you'll think its about being nice and find yourself inadvertently claiming to know more than Jesus about how to be Christ-like or more than Nehemiah about how to speak to an unbelieving culture.

Faithful witness in this age requires conflict. But the conflict our Lord requires has fallen into disfavor among many Christians in our day. This conflict gets called all sorts of names: Pride, Unloving, and Obnoxious. And while there are many proud men (and women) whose fighting does fail to aim at the repentance and redemption of our enemies, and there is something to be said for a reasonable "winsomeness" in our tartness - I do not see an overabundance of courageous fighting in the corridors of Denver's evangelicalism or in the reformed "resurgence" that has grown up around us. I see a insidious love of self and cowardice masquerading as love for neighbor and a concern for mission. Pride is not conviction concerning what is true, it is a refusal to submit to God and his word. There is nothing more unloving than to pretend like everything is mostly fine as unbelief spins into chaos and madness. Winsomeness must aim to win people to an actual Lord who has declared actual things to be sin, and their consequences to be hell. Faithful witness in word and life should expect opposition from unbelief, and not assume we’re doing something wrong. We do not serve the cause of Jesus by reducing the claims and demands of Jesus. We do not love our neighbors by pretending the justice of God isn't really coming.

We have lusted after friendship with the world, covering over whatever might offend or be misunderstood and we are dangerously close to becoming enemies of God. May we repent, turn again to the Scriptures and learn again how to prophesy, how to live and how to read our world.