The great theologian and reformer, John Calvin, studied law before his conversion and service to the Lord as a pastor and teacher. He later wrote and taught on the use and purpose of God’s law:

1] It shows the way of perfect righteousness and also reveals to us how great is our sin.

2] It helps to restrain evil and maintain order in society.

3] It continues to guide believers in terms of our duty.

This is a very helpful summary that guides us in terms of our duty both to share God’s law and the gospel. God’s law is perfect, but it cannot provide salvation because no man save the Lord Jesus Christ can keep it perfectly.

Many Christians rightfully are concerned about sharing the gospel. We know that the gospel alone is what changes sinners from rebels to servants of the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:16-17). However, too many Christians ignore the proper purpose of the law. Although all men have been created in God’s image and know that there is a God and are aware of His power (Rom. 1:20), God did not just tell people to rely on their inner sense of right and wrong. God created our conscience, but He still determined to reveal His law to Israel, which, when properly understood, is applicable today.

This means that we cannot just sit back and hope that people will trust in Jesus. The reality of man’s sinfulness must be proclaimed along with the horror of God’s judgment. The hope and promises of the gospel must also be shared.

When we see wicked laws instituted at the state and federal level, laws that go against God’s law, we must speak out. The shedding of innocent blood through abortion cannot be tolerated. We cannot simply hide behind the fact that we ultimately want people to be converted and remain silent on the key issues of the day.

We live in a diverse nation, but morality cannot simply be determined by public consensus. The source of law is the God of all societies. We have witnessed a very long but demonstrable legal, moral, and religious revolution as, increasingly, the basis for the law has less to do with God and everything to do with public sentiment. This is not acceptable for those who know the truth.

Francis Shaeffer was once asked the question, “What would you do if you met a really modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel?” Shaeffer replied:

I’ve said over and over, I would spend 45-50 minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma – that he is morally dead – then I’d take 10-15 minutes to preach the gospel. I believe that much of our evangelistic work and personal work today is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realize the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt (and not just psychological feelings) in the presence of God. (Will Metzger, Tell the Truth)

In an earlier article, I mentioned the 2022 State of Theology conducted by Ligonier and LifeWay Research. That survey showed that on some matters, evangelical Christians overall have a correct view:

94% of evangelicals think sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin and 91% think that abortion is a sin. However, other questions continue to indicate confusion on important matters.

For instance, 37% of evangelicals believe that gender identity is a matter of choice, and 28% believe that the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today.

On these two key issues, our world is going crazy, and over a quarter of evangelicals have little problem with the direction. We very much need the correction and guidance found in God’s Law on all these issues.

We must not be ashamed of God’s truth; rather, we must boldly and lovingly declare what God’s law states concerning sin and seek to share with sinners their only hope of salvation in the message of the gospel. In this way, we stand against the false message of tolerance, and we guard against hypocrisy.

Let’s commit to being faithful in sharing God’s law and gospel.

~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

• “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
• “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
• “I believe in reason and logic!”
• “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
• “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
• “I put my faith in science.”
• And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

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