They Are A Judgement On Us

I just finished hear John McArthur's talk about "When God Abandons a Nation". Very good. What rung a bell is that recently I was reading an old Credenda Agenda magazine from years ago called "Recovering the Masculine Mind" by Douglas Wilson. The article goes back and forth on saying we don't recognize we are a nation already under judgement. He lays the responsiblity on the men for not being what God has created us to be. For being conformed to the Ideas and definitions that the world prescribes. The good news is, though so much of the nation looks hopeless we can begin the restoration process by repenting as men and bearing true witness to what God has ordained. To his definitions of the Family, the Church, and the State.

Recovering the Masculine MindDouglas Wilson

The problem can be called by many names. The men of our generation have had a failure of nerve. They have abdicated their responsibilities, and we are consequently in the midst of a crisis of leadership. Men have fallen, to use the biblical term, into the sin of unbelief . God has always promised tremendous blessings for those who keep His covenant faithfully, but, to be blunt, men no longer believe Him...

...The covenants in this category are those of marriage (Mal. 3:14-15), the institution of the Church (Luke 22:20), and the civil order (Rom. 13:1-7).

These three covenant institutions have been established among us directly by the hand of God We have no authority to alter or abolish them to suit our tastes or liking. But it is not enough for Christians to acknowledge their existence; we must also correctly understand their relationship to one another. It would be a serious mistake to line them up in a row of three, and then simply assign respective biblical duties to each. Each covenant institution certainly does have its respective duties, but we must first understand that the covenanted institutions of church and civil society are made up of covenanted family units...

Because of the crisis of masculinity in the home, that representation is not being offered by our households, and if it were offered, it would be received by our civil order only with laughter, and by an ignorant theological indignation in our churches. In short, we all, from top to bottom, are in high rebellion against God's design for family and culture. We in the church like to disguise that rebellion by talking about family values which amounts, as far as I can tell, to a vibrant desire for more G-rated movies but we never talk about familial representation in the Church, or familial authority in the civil realm.

...Modern Christian men can be divided into two categories those who have acquiesced to the current dictates requiring epistemological effeminacy, and those who think they have not because they are still allowed to beat their chests at home. Those in the latter category must come to realize their broader cultural impotence. What does your leadership in the household mean? That you get to hold the remote when the family watches television? That you get to park the car when the family goes to church? What it really means is that you have the responsibility before God to wake up .

For example, when our Supreme Court made its infamous decision to allow the slaughter of infants, the Christians of our nation were so covenantally blind that we did not see it for what it was the abortion of the legitimate family. This is not to minimize in any way the horrific nature of the abortion carnage...

The fact that a man has taken a solemn vow assuming covenantal responsibility for his offspring was judged by our highest court to be a matter of no legal consequence .
It is difficult to understand what is more tragic, the decision of the Court to slaughter the children, or the inability of modern Christians to even notice that the Court had declared every child in the nation to be, as far as they were concerned, a bastard.
With the abortion decision, this rejection of the legal reality of family covenants finally came to the shedding of blood. But this lawlessness had been at work in our civil order for well over a century. We did not notice that our children had been declared illegitimate because we had already believed the lie of individualism. For example, when women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals . And so the matter was framed this way men as individuals can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same? We were so muddled we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.

When a nation no longer receives the ambassadors of another nation, it is in effect refusing to recognize that nation...

We must mark it well; abdication does not remove the covenant responsibilities as far as God is concerned. What it does is bring down tumbling cultural curses like an earthslide. And here we are, with rulers who do not see any liberty in the law of God. "Why do they not see?" we wonder. But we are the covenant idiots; we still do not know that they are God's judgment on us . We do not see either....
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