We are currently reaping the deadly fruit of the folly we have sown; it is high time the church cease hiding its light under a basket and let the glorious wisdom of God’s law and gospel shine in the nation.
“Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:8-10).
“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts…Through your precepts I gain understanding; therefore I hate every false way” (Psalm 119:97-100, 104).
A Historical Inflection Point
Though every generation tends to believe that it is the most consequential age that will determine the broad course of history for the foreseeable future, it seems clear that, at least since 2016, we are living through a historical inflection point.
With increasing rapidity, political and social norms are changing, institutions are losing credibility, and the conventional wisdom passed down by our immediate predecessors is failing and being discarded. Certainly, all of this is exacerbated by the 24/7 consumption of news as it breaks in real time, demanding real-time reactions to unfolding events; it is not only the medium of receiving news, but the news itself, which is increasingly significant, shocking, and paradigm-shifting.
Signs of a Shifting World
Examples of these revelations are manifold: the election and re-election of Donald Trump, the Russia collusion hoax designed to undermine his presidency, the utter delegitimization of medical authority during the Covid-19 debacle, the well-funded and well-supported BLM riots of 2020 and the not so above board election of the same year, the mainstreaming of transgenderism and mass illegal immigration, the attempted assassination of Trump, and recently the successful and tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk.
All these elements and more have contributed to the creative destruction of the world we currently find ourselves in, one in which political polarization, violence, and virality seem to have left many searching for something different than what the present establishment has to offer. Some of the alternative ideas being floated are radical and even revolutionary, and the possibility of the greater and more widespread use of unlawful violence appears to be likely.
Historical turning points and the unravelings of regimes tend to be messy. They also tend to be confusing. With the societal masses increasingly disillusioned with the status quo and seeking something that will provide true stability, it is essential in this moment for the church to be the bold, prophetic voice of truth in our culture.
The Call for Evangelism
Of course, Christians being outspoken about their personal faith is nothing particularly new. There has always been an evangelistic undercurrent in our nation, from tent revivals to soul-winning crusades to open-air preaching.
This sort of public evangelism must be ongoing and continually increasing in these radical times. Christians ought to take a page out of Charlie Kirk’s book and see the radicalized young people that populate so many college campuses as lost and confused souls who can be reached by faithful and patient contention for the truth. They are fields white for harvest, sheep without a shepherd, and Christians must be busy about the work of seeking those lost and winning them to personal faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
A Unified Voice of Wisdom
However, the church must also, at this time, be a unified voice in our political order at large, and specifically a courageous voice of wisdom amid increasingly loud foolishness.
This wisdom will obviously be centered around the gospel—true wisdom, after all, begins with the fear of the Lord, and to fear God we must know Him, and knowing Him means knowing Christ, and to know Christ truly means to repent of our sin and trust in Him. Therefore, none of what this article goes on to say is to be understood outside of this foundational gospel reality.
Yet in our age of radical individualism and a hyperfocus on personal feelings, the church seems to have lost a vital message it has for communities: the message of the law and justice.
Love and Justice According to God’s Law
The Christian call is to love one’s neighbor; this we ought to proclaim to individuals, families, churches, communities, and nations. The way in which we love our neighbors is by obeying God’s law with respect to them (Rom. 13:8-10).
In other words, to love someone is to give that person what is rightfully his under the law, to give him justice. Thus, for a municipality, state, or nation—a civil polity entrusted with God’s sword of justice (Rom. 13:1-4)—to love its neighbor is for it to do justice to those under its jurisdiction, according to God’s law.
This is a legitimate use of the law which has largely been ignored by the church in our age, in part due to the modern notion of “restorative justice,” which has dominated political thinking in the West for several decades. This is the idea that true justice ought not to be about giving a person his due but rather must be aimed at the restoration and rehabilitation of the criminal.
Thus, rather than simply punishing his behavior proportionately, the state seeks to address the “root causes” of crime as it sees them: social and economic injustice, lack of opportunity, mental illness, poor education, and so on. As these are addressed, the belief is that crime will naturally wane and eventually cease; this is why the current slogan on the left is “we can’t arrest our way out of crime.” Their idea is that the state can actually transform criminals into law-abiding citizens; therefore, rather than the state simply enforcing God’s just standards as His servant, the state seeks to be God, changing hearts by its own power.
The Rotten Fruit of Restorative Justice
As this historically novel concept has worked itself out into greater consistency, the fruit of what sounded to many like humane compassion has proved rotten and deadly. From the decriminalization of many drugs to the opening of “safe-injection sites,” from reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors to no cash bail, this modern makeover of criminal justice has resulted in more violence, more danger, and more chaos in our civil order.
Many have noticed this and are now calling for law and order. The church must be bold in insisting that this must mean God’s law and His creation order.
The Headlines That Demand Answers
For the week leading up to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the story that dominated the news was the cold-blooded murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarotska by a career criminal on a public train in Charlotte, NC, which the mayor of the city and the mass media responded to by calling for compassion for the murderer. Before that, it was the mass shooting at a Catholic church in Minnesota by a transgender identifying killer. Not long before that, the news provided non-stop coverage of the deployment of the National Guard to control violent crime in Washington, DC and riots in LA.
With every new story, there have been those who have essentially sought to obfuscate or even defend the criminals in the name of restorative justice, and those who have clamored for a crackdown against all this violent crime. This latter group seems to be in the ascendance as common sense appears to be gaining ground. Yet the fundamental question still remains: crime according to whom? A crackdown of what nature? Justice by what standard? To answer these, the church must prophetically and unapologetically proclaim God’s infallible revelation.
If God’s law provides wisdom, as the Scriptures testify that it does, then the church must be unashamed in its proclamation of the law as prescriptive for all people and all nations. Israel under the Old Covenant was to be a beacon of wisdom and justice to its pagan neighbors because it adhered to God’s law:
Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today? (Deut. 4:6-8).
This same light is needed in our current context, and it is up to the church to shine that light through its faithful proclamation of the whole counsel of God, including His law.
Recent Crimes and the Cry for Justice
Consider those recent crimes mentioned above, which have snatched headlines. Many in this nation sense the need for a different sort of justice than what we have become accustomed to, yet they lack a solid foundation or a consistent explanation for what they seek.
It was major news when the state of Utah announced it would be seeking the death penalty for Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, yet this only exposes how unjust our justice system has become. Capital punishment is the clearly prescribed penalty for murder according to God’s law (Ex. 21:12-14, Num. 35:16-21); this is restitution, true retributive justice. The fact that so few murders actually result in the death penalty—and those that do are not carried out for decades after sentencing—is a clear example of our lack of wisdom and our need to return to biblical standards. God’s word clearly warns, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil” (Eccl. 8:11); how much more when the sentence is rarely ever executed at all?
Habitual Criminals and Public Safety
It can also be argued that God’s law calls for capital punishment against habitual criminals who refuse to publicly conform to the law (Deut. 21:18-21). In a law order based on real restitution, rather than a prison aimed at rehabilitation, there is no place for the consistent, violent lawbreaker.
Consider how the application of this principle would transform our cities by providing a strong deterrent to a life of crime while permanently removing those who insist on pursuing their wicked desires at the expense of the public, thereby making communities much safer. Consider Iryna Zarotska as just one of the countless examples of a life lost to a person who had no biblical right to be in public life at all.
The Collapse of Moral Obligation
While we are on the subject, one of the most ghastly elements of the video of Zaratska’s murder was that for a minute and a half, not one person on the packed public transit vehicle responded to a woman bleeding to death before their eyes. According to God’s law, there is culpability for those witnesses who failed to intervene in any way on behalf of the victim (Deut. 22:1-4, Prov. 24:10-12).
Many watched that video and wondered how our society got to the point that a crowded train could sit stoically while a young woman was brutally murdered in front of them; when there is no fear of God and no reverence for His law, there will eventually be no valuing of human life or any sense of an absolute obligation to protect it. Our decades of silently bearing witness to the mass murder of the preborn have trained us well for this—nobody should be surprised that this culture produced that non-reaction on the train.
Sexual Deviance and Public Order
As one final example, consider the professed sexual identities and proclivities of both the alleged Kirk assassin (in a homosexual relationship with a transgender-identifying, male animal fetishist) and the Minneapolis shooter (transgender-identifying), along with numerous other LGBTQ-identifying killers from Pulse Night Club in Orlando to Covenant Christian School in Nashville.
One of the areas of God’s law which many modern Christians chafe at is what it says about what we in our day have come to call the LGBTQ movement: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them…If a man lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death, and you shall kill the animal” (Lev. 20:13, 15); “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God” (Deut. 22:5).
Our modern sensibilities recoil at the thought of any sort of modern application of these laws, or of any of the other numerous laws in Scripture prohibiting public sexual deviance. These are declared to be matters of personal choice and privacy (never mind that we are told they must be publicly normalized and celebrated). However, even if we do not wish to argue for full-fledged Theonomy, including the requirement that the state execute biblical penalties as they are given to us (which is not the purpose of this article), we still must conclude that a just society will discourage and penalize public sexual perversion in some way or other.
The Church’s Prophetic Role
This is not to imply that all who identify as LGBTQ are potential mass murderers. However, suppose we allow the Bible to define both criminal behavior and the generally equitable punishment that is its due. In that case, we must acknowledge that sexual deviance is detrimental to public order and ought to be proportionately punished.
If a person has so little respect for God’s created order and for His fundamental building block of society—the family—so as to proudly engage in LGBTQ perversion, how can it be expected that this person will respect the other self-evident elements of God’s world, including even the value of human life? There is a reason why the apostle Paul uses homosexual behavior as the pinnacle example of man’s idolatry (Rom. 1:26-27). If our civil law and social mores treated all sexual misconduct even remotely as seriously as God’s law of love does, we would do much to curtail broken homes, ruined lives, and even violent crime.
It is emphatically not the role of the church to pass civil legislation or execute civil punishment. However, when the church calls for repentance and faith, as it is commanded to, there must actually be content and direction to this call. The object of faith is Christ; our repentance must be in terms of His law. Therefore, when the covenant body that is the nation is called to repentance, a vague suggestion that perhaps we have slid off course and must now return to our “Judeo-Christian” values will not suffice.
True repentance is a concrete turning from the evil we have done and a repudiation of it made evident by taking actual steps to correct our sin. It means ceasing to do evil and doing good; it requires us to stop disobeying God’s law and to start obeying it as a nation.
The Church Must Speak Boldly
Do not become confused or mix up God’s ordained spheres of authority; the church is not to campaign to win elections nor to itself pass legislation to establish God’s law in our civil order. Yet this does not mean that the church has no place in what we call politics, or what may be more accurately called “public life.” We are not off the hook for bringing Scripture to bear in the political sphere.
Because the church is not a superpac or a political party, it can boldly and prophetically call for civil magistrates to obey God’s law and to hold them accountable if they refuse without fretting over the latest public opinion poll. Ours is a message with authority from Christ the King, and the church must repent of its timidity and proclaim this whole message with the full strength of our resurrected Lord.
We must be united in our authoritative announcement of all God’s truth, repentance and faith, the full gospel, with all of its ramifications—which, after all, are to “bring about the obedience of faith…in all the nations” (Rom. 1:5, 16:26). We are currently reaping the deadly fruit of the folly we have sown; it is high time the church cease hiding its light under a basket and let the glorious wisdom of God’s law and gospel shine in the nation.
Luke Griffo is an elder and member of leadership at Redeemer Church of South Hills in Bethel Park, PA. Click here for more RCSH Blog posts.
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