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“Faith obeys Jesus. The parallelism in John 3:36

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

is most interesting, for disobeying (apeitheo) is contrasted with ‘believing.’ in Him, indicating that disobedience is an expression of unbelief. John cannot conceive of those who believe in Jesus but fail to obey Him. Those who trust in Jesus keep (tereo) His word and commandments (8:51-52; 14:15, 23-24; 15:10), for those who refuse to keep Jesus commands do not truly love Him. Jesus defines His disciples as ‘those who keep His Word’ (17:6). Similarly, Jesus’ disciples ‘follow’ (akoloutheo) him (1:37-38, 40, 43; 8:12; 12:26; 21:19, 22), just as sheep follow only their shepherd (10:4-5, 27). Those who refuse to follow Jesus do not truly believe in Him and are not truly His disciples. We see the same theme in I John. Those who truly know Jesus keep His commands (2:3-6; cf. 3:22; 5:3). There are not sinless (1:7-2:2) but they do not persist in a life of sin (3:4-10; 5:18) Sin does not dominate their lives, and they do not give themselves over to evil.

“Thomas Schreiner
The King in His Beauty – p. 532

So, if all the above is true and if we were to add only that Jesus was and is the incarnation of God’s Character, noting that God’s character is His Law-Word then we have to ask why does the contemporary Church so hate theonomists who above all Christians are teaching people that to believe and follow Jesus means that they have a responsibility of obeying God’s Law Word?

But the modern Church has gone all Marcion on this score insisting that the individual Christian has no responsibility to God’s law outside a nod to God’s ten words and then maybe even some of those are truncated. The contemporary Church, outside of the theonomists want nothing to do with God’s case law insisting that God’s case law has all been abolished completely ignoring the whole idea of general equity.

For theonomists this looks all the world like God is schizophrenic. God has one Law-Word for the Old covenant but a different Law-Word for the new Covenant. This is not insignificant because if God’s Law-Word has changed then God’s character has changed since God’s Law-Word is the very definition of God’s character.

To be sure theonomists believe that those aspects of the Law that were related to the proclamation of Jesus Christ in the ceremonies have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ but Law being fulfilled, and so no longer required of us, is not the same thing as Law being abolished apart from fulfillment.

Those who say that the case law is completely abolished should be consistent and advocate, from the pulpit, the elimination of all laws forbidding incest and bestiality. After all, though we do have “Thou Shalt not commit Adultery,” we do not have the case laws of consanguinity or the case laws forbidding human and animal sex in the New Testament. If the case laws are all abolished then they are all abolished and this squeamishness about R2K chaps marrying their sisters or bedding their favorite farm animal has to go. (I mention R2K because they are the most famous for declaring that all the case laws are abolished and that general equity does not obtain.)

Shreiner, rightly notes that the New Testament teaches that believing in Jesus means obeying Jesus but from where I sit, looking upon the modern Reformed world, Jesus has been created as a new God unrelated to the God of the Old Covenant and so obeying Jesus has precious little to do with obeying the God who gave all those nasty case laws. For Dispensationalism and R2K (how much difference is there between the two) as with Marcionism the Jesus of the New Testament presents us with a different God, with a different law that allows us to engage in behavior in the New Testament era which would have had us tossed out of the community of faith in the Old Testament era. For these antinomians Jesus saves us from sin while allowing believers to jettison the case law so that the law and so consequently sin is dumbed down.

Indeed, so dumbed down has the law become in this antinomian world that one R2K minister has insisted that he has no interest in the State passing anti-bestiality laws. Why? Because that belongs to the case laws and the case laws are abolished.

A blurb from an article at the Sovereign Nations website.

https://sovereignnations.com/2019/06/06/black-identity-theories-secular-or-sacred/?utm_campaign=meetedgar&utm_medium=social&utm_source=meetedgar.com&fbclid=IwAR2G3I59mG8UJvJudfS9FjSe_IihdbeIGT6XhSZvcuyB74I_Br9ODu8m1Sw

As you read this keep in mind that “Sovereign Nations” is supposed to be the good guys opposing the slide of the Southern Baptist Convention into Critical Race theory and Intersectionality. With friends like this we might as well just let the enemies have their way.

The article is insightful in terms of its analysis of the origins of Critical Race theory but once she (Ariel Gonzalez Bovat) moves away from analysis to solutions she goes completely off the tracks. In point of fact I agreed with what I was reading until this statement,

“Cross’s model of black identity was an attempt to merge black culture with the unbiblical label of being black as a “race”.”

Black as a race is unbiblical? I’d love to see her prove that.

The fact that race exists is seen in,

1.) Pharmaceuticals that are developed as designed particularly for people of particular races.

2.) The reality of matters like this,

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/30/family-3-year-old-leukemia-plead-bone-marrow-transplant-donor/1293400001/?fbclid=IwAR2l7g2lMSpMekovIaqEGm0pY9E9-RXPgRD5Et9dXaHGIYQG_V951GSZEoU

3.) Forensic Science routinely can identify people from bones found. If Race was merely a social construct forensic science could not identify the races of the deceased by merely looking at bones long in the ground.

4.) The fact that some races are uniquely given to certain diseases while other races are not. For example the black race is given to sickle cell anemia. If race were only a social construct why would this be the case?

Ariel Gonzalez Bovat goes on to write,

“We can reject secular reasoning that asserts our skin color or culture should be our primary identity marker. Skin color is not tied to culture, race does not exist. Prayerfully, this article has proven that Cross and other secular theorists have succeeded in merging race, skin color and culture, creating that firmly held “social construct” that continues to reinforce the necessity of keeping the word “race” in our language, which ultimately informs how we view each other. We are not the totality of our skin color or ethnic culture.Our skin color does not define us, nor does it inform our identity.”

Bret responds,

“Fine we are Christians first, but the fact that we are Christians first does not mean that our skin color or race doesn’t contribute to the informing of our identity.

Second, this assertion is nothing but Gnosticism. Who God has created us to be in terms of race, culture and ethnicity, maleness or femaleness, all contribute mightily to our identity.

Third, she has embraced the postmodern idea that creaturely realities assigned by God are only social constructs that are malleable. This is the opposition to CRT in the Southern Baptists.

Fourth, this smack of hyper individualism… atomistic individualism which treats the corporate categories we are created with nominalistically. Our race, ethnicity, tribe, and family, are assigned to us by God. This view quoted above would make man a single integer which provides for himself his own creaturely identity.

Ariel Gonzalez Bovat is drinking from the well of postmodernism when she starts insisting that race / ethnicity is a social construct. This idea of social construct was barely heard of until the last 20 years or so and now it has been pushed into our social consciousness as an article of faith and those who advocate this are providing either a prime example of gas-lighting or else are themselves suffering from unspeakable insanity.

Race, ethnicity, sex, nationality, citizenship, etc. are all good and creational, God-ordanied categories.When people like James White and some of the authors at Sovereign Nations ignore these realities they are the enemy and we need to fight them perhaps even more then those who they are opposing since the James White crowd are putatively our friends. The statement on social justice that MacArthur spearheaded also said explicitly that race is a social construct, thus demonstrating that MacArthur has his head up his southern most orifice on this subject. All of this is, quite frankly, not merely unwise but completely dishonest. Dear reader, if you haven’t listened to Al Mohler’s exposition of the Table of Nations that he did in chapel you need to do so to learn just how bad it is because slippery Al also reduces ethnicity to language and “worldview” (i.e., religion).

IS THERE ANYBODY WEARING A WHITE HAT OUT THERE OR IS IT THE CASE THAT NOT ONLY THE BAD GUYS ARE WEARING BLACK HATS BUT THE OPPOSITION WHO IS TRYING TO STOP THE BAD GUYS ARE ALSO WEARING BLACK HATS?

“Zephaniah disputes the idea that Yahweh is ‘as irrelevant to life as the other gods, as though Yahweh were not a serious player in the life of the world.'”

Walter Brueggeman
Theology of the OT — p. 137

“Israel was called upon to ‘acknowledge God’s sovereignty in economic as well as the religious sphere.'”

Christopher Wright
OT Ethics — p. 97

On Wright’s quote I wouldn’t only tighten it up by acknowledging that the “economic sphere” he refers to is also a “religious sphere.” In point of fact there is not sphere that is not driven by religion and so a “religious sphere.”

When we consider these two quotes we remember that R2K is a ‘theology’ in violation of these very principles. R2K does insist that God is irrelevant to life by insisting that there cannot be uniquely Christian Culture, Law, Education, family, etc. Further R2K does not acknowledge God’s sovereignty in the economic Sphere. I dare you … try to get an R2K preacher boy to preach on the sins of Marxism, Unjust weights and measures as applied to fiat money, or the necessity for hard currency. R2K refuses that the God of Christianity has a “thus saith the Lord” in relation to the economic sphere.This is why R2K is anti-Christ.

So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. Luke 16:8

Riddle me this.

Why is it that President Trump realizes the dangers of Critical Race theory prompting him to ban all the teaching of it in Federal agencies, but the Southern Baptist convention has embraced Critical Race theory as a legitimate tool by which to interpret culture.

So, who is more sanctified; Donald Trump or Al Mohler?

Who would you be more likely to entrust your child to be trained; Donald Trump or someone taught by SBC hack professors Jarvis Williams or Matt Hall?

It is a ruddy outrage that the worldview of the Southern Baptist Convention is so twisted that it would embrace Critical Race Theory.

Everyone understands that Marxism (in whatever particular social order incarnation it comes in) is a leveling work that pursues the equality found in the least common denominator among those being leveled. Since that is true, what is so hard to accept the observation that Marxism likewise desires to level all races, ethnic groups, and families to a least common denominator racial blend?

If we understand that Economic Marxism desires to level the classes so that there is only one impoverished class among all men, then why is it hard to embrace that we are living in a time where the cultural Marxists are trying to do the same thing only in terms of race and ethnicity? The Cultural Marxists desires mankind to be one undifferentiated homogeneous coffee latte race of men just as the Economic Marxists desire us to be one undifferentiated homogeneous economic class of men. Why is it controversial in the Church to observe that the plan of Satan and his Marxist minions is destroy our various distinct racial and ethnic heritages in favor of the New Marxist Man where everything is undistinguished and indistinguishable? If it is right and Christ honoring to fight Economic Marxism why is it not right and proper to fight Racial Marxism? Is the work of leveling wrong as it pertains to class but perfectly fine as it pertains to race and ethnicity? If it is proper to say that the result of economic Marxism is a leveling that hurts everybody why is it not proper to say that the result of Racial Marxism where miscegenation is glorified is a leveling that hurts everybody? Why is one Marxism sin but the other Marxism is holiness?

The Marxists themselves have told us expressly that they intended to destroy Christian civilization by pursuing racial leveling.

“The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them….”

Vladimir Lenin
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination — pg. 76

1.) ”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

4.) “… Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the dictatorship of the proletariat, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all oppressed nations, i.e., their right to secede. “

Vladimir Lenin 
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination 

5.) “Even the natural differences within species, like racial differences…, can and must be done away with historically.”

 K. Marx’s Collected Works V:103,As cited in S.F. Bloom’s The World of Nations: AStudy of the National Implications in the Work of Karl Marx, Columbia University Press, New York, 1941, pp. 11 & 15-19:

Christians who are advocating the goodness of racial leveling are sharing ideological fluids with the Marxist agenda. Doesn’t that give any of these “Christians” a reason to pause? Can they be so stubborn in their insistence that Kinists are hell bound sinners that they are willing to have ideological intercourse with the Marxists?

This is not a insignificant issue. Paul rhetorically asks us in II Corinthians
¹⁴ Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? ¹⁵ What harmony is there between Christ and Belial^?  Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? ¹⁶ What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?

Christians who continue to embrace this Marxist racial leveling agenda are in fellowship with the most foul anti-Christs walking the planet. They have found harmony with Belial. They have found common ground with wickedness.

The warnings they have been given from people like me will be something they remember on judgment day. Repent before it is too late.