In a world sinking in a malaise of consumerism, mass-production, digital fatigue and naturalistic materialism, there is a unique appeal to the ‘enchanted world’ that some people see so clearly, and have tried to share with the rest of us.

Admittedly, Sara Crewe and Anne Shirley did so thanks to the human authors who imagined them, but Crewe and Shirley are in good company with a very real human, G.K. Chesterton. These three share a light-footed, open-hearted and starry-eyed embrace of the unbelievable world that God created, and this author is persuaded that embracing it and loving it will bless your soul.

Let’s keep this brief, and hopefully sparkly! Sara Crewe is a young girl with outstanding manners who was raised carefree in India with her father Ralph Crewe. He sends her to England to boarding school, and her vivid imagination creates waves amongst the brow-beaten boarding school girls. It gets interesting when her father is alleged MIA, and she is treated not as a star pupil but as a poor beggar girl. It is at this point, when she has an absolute lack of physical wealth, that the quality of her character is tested, and the reliability of her imaginations and fancies are put to the test. Admittedly, it isn’t healthy to ignore or suppress the reality of something and comfort yourself with lies, but what makes Sara laudable and compelling is that she is not satisfied in mere things, or mere duties, or bare facts. She can’t be bought with money, she can’t be flattered with praise and she can’t be discouraged by scorn because her heart belongs to ‘another world’ (the name of one of the best songs from the musical adaptation of the book). This blesses the shy and teased girls around her with a good friend, and it frustrates the haughty students and cruel spinster headmistress because she can’t be moved with the conventional levers.

This kind of virtue does not ultimately belong to fiction, but ultimately it belongs to every single human being who has been given the immeasurable security of knowing that they are held in God’s hand. If you, dear reader, have peace with God through faith in Christ Jesus for your salvation, then you have every reason to be as self-assured, as joyful, as patient and as gracious as Sara.

Anne Shirley is an endearing mess. She is an orphaned young girl whose vigour and thirst for adventure and initiative often lands her in various scrapes and foils. At first, she’s a pain in the neck to her new carers, but not from any malice on her part. She can’t just go to school, she has to name each gravel track and each hedgeway and give it a fantastical name and think about magical characters that might live there. A lake can’t just be a lake, it has to be the ‘Lake of Shining Waters’. She can’t simply refer to the housekeeper as Rebecca or Becky, she would only use her full name (‘Rebecca Dew’) because it just sounds so delightful and quaint. It is just so fitting to her that it would be a crying shame not to use it. This author loved Shirley (and therefore the Anne of Green Gables book series from which she appears) from the first moment he encountered her, and it wasn’t until he finished the second or third book in the series that the similarity to Sara Crewe became obvious.

Some readers may say, ‘It is all well and good for you to enjoy the nostalgia of fanciful little fictional characters whose lives are entertaining to read about, but it isn’t appropriate for adults with responsibilities to get carried away in fairy-tales’. Well, O grinch, we beg to differ! After all, is it true or false that we live in a world in which water sometimes streaks down from the sky and everyone pretends that’s normal? Is it fact or fiction that we see green shoots spring out of the ground, and then without request or support or brush or paint produce multicoloured flowers, and then have those glorious flowers give off a delightful fragrance, and then see those flowers produce edible fruit? Yet you will tell us that the world we live in is not magical and gobsmacking?

Well, if you think that babies and infants are odd for having a permanent expression of wonder on for years, and you O adult are the normal one for being jaded at the chrysalis that produces a butterfly, then you are the fool, and the baby is the one responding correctly.

Finally, this author was greatly pleased to finally meet G.K. Chesterton in his own words when listening to Orthodoxy at work recently. There is this one paragraph from his book, and whilst you may have heard it before, since it is very widely quoted, we will not withhold it from that lucky reader who may not yet have heard it. So, here is Chesterton:

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

We’ll try to wrap this up. This author enjoys enjoying. There is such a richness to be found in simply recognising the unlikeliness and the fulness of the world that God made around you, friend. The sovereign God waves the tree branches as you walk past them, and he fluffs up the clouds like couch cushions when guests are coming over, and you can and should enjoy that and thank him for it. He loves your gratitude—but wait, he also loves your joy. So, hear it this way. All beauty in Heaven and on Earth belongs to Jesus. Therefore, go and make merriment in all places, seeing them and naming them with obstreperous adjectives, turning each one of them back to God in praise, and his Spirit of Joy will be with you, even to your old age. Amen.

The most important day in the Christian calendar is this day, Easter Sunday. Though Christmas displayed the miracle of the glorious son of the transcendent God emptying himself by taking on the nature of a human and veiling his glory, Christianity would be utterly worthless if there was no Easter Sunday. Indeed, the only reason that Good Friday is Good is because it is followed by Resurrection Sunday.

This day is like the rays of spring sunshine creeping through a permafrost forest in the soft hours of the morning. This day is a messenger on the horizon, running to a starved and besieged encampment of warriors to tell them that their King has won, the enemy has surrendered, and all the known world is theirs for the taking. It is a hot shower, clean clothes and a warm bowl of soup in the winter. Easter is the final and glorious cadence of an unpredictable symphony, one that had just spent three movements in a mysterious Fugue.

Easter is the counter-cultural elevation of the role of women in first-century society, and the dangerous news that a troupe of Roman guards would be sentenced to execution for not keeping a certain tomb shut. However, one couldn’t blame the guards who were ordered to guard Jesus’ tomb. The very Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Prince of Peace himself, the one who wrought all of creation with his majestic power, cannot be stopped by a heavy rock, or a wooden cross.

Brothers and sisters, let our faces light up at the mention of Easter. Let our first reaction be “He is Risen!”, “Risen indeed!”, and not “Well actually, some aspects of the Western tradition of Easter celebration allegedly have their roots in certain pagan deities and practices…”

Let us encourage you to love Easter, and to be proud to be messengers of the greatest news. The news presenters who proclaimed the end of World War 2 brought a weighty and glorious news bulletin that day, but in comparison to Easter, it is utterly insignificant! We proclaim that all the spiritual powers, all the earthly tyrants, all the sting of the curse and sin, all the wiles of the Adversary and all the temptations of the flesh have been decisively conquered, and now all that remains for human history is our clean up mission of rounding up God’s lost sheep and our conquering of his embittered enemies.

This author proclaims this news to the non-Christian as to the Christian: there is a new King, and his throne will never be usurped. You will bow to him one day. He offers for you to come to him now in faith, and to be received as a precious Son or Daughter. We know this is true, because there is an empty tomb in Jerusalem. He is risen. Risen, indeed.

The first thing to say is that love is not good, and hate is not bad. Love can be a wicked thing, and hatred can be the perfect expression of righteousness. It is always worthwhile to keep in mind that love and hate are either good or bad depending on their subject and object.

For example, Christians are commanded to not love the world, nor the things in it, because if anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in them (1 John 2:15). On the other hand Christians are commanded to love their neighbours (Lev 19:18). This is so very important to remember when phrases like “love wins” are thrown around. Not only is homosexual practice not truly love, because it is intrinsically narcissistic, but even if it were, the slogan is compelling because we assume that love is good, and where that campaign is concerned, it most certainly isn’t.

In a similar way, we must keep all of the strength of the word ‘hate’ and not dilute it, but nevertheless acknowledge that the Bible explicitly speaks of faithful worshippers of God appropriately hating evil, arrogant pride, evil conduct and perverse speech (Prov 8:13) and the practises that go along with false teaching (Rev 2:6). That may not surprise you, but what about this? We also see the Bible positively presenting the hatred of those who hate God and rise up against him (Ps 139:21-22) and those who cling to and worship worthless idols (Psalm 31:6). This author is ready to take on correction if he is missing something obvious here, but it seems that there must be a category for righteous anger in Christians, since it is Paul (citing Psalm 4:4) who commands us to be angry and not sin (Eph 4:26). However, this author does realise that whilst there may be a category and precedent for this, it is a wildly hard thing to execute, and we imagine that this is what the Lord’s brother had in mind when he wrote that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20).

Finally, a word on blasphemy laws, and the inescapable reality of ‘whether, not which’. The foundation we must start with is the ‘myth of neutrality’, which you could also call the ‘lie of secularism’. That is that there is no fact, no community, no text, no medium, no person, no idea and no practice that stands before the true and living God on neutral ground. All things, absolutely all things, are for him or against him. Secularism is the political name or manifestation of polytheism. Secularism is the idea that a society can exist with all of its various cultures, gods, customs and laws existing side by side, and respecting each other group’s right to do the same. It might also be posited as the idea that anyone can believe whatever they like, but they should keep it to their home/faith community, whereas in the public square everyone is expected to forego their beliefs and speak and act like neutral western materialists. It is a fantasy, a myth and a joke, but it is also the air we breathe, and the waters in which we swim.

We have this idea, thanks to the myth of neutrality, that blasphemy laws are a wicked thing, and that you should not be penalised for insulting someone’s god. However, all that statement reveals is that ‘someone’s god’ is not the god of the secular system. If you had insulted the god of the secular worldview, then you would be punished for it. It is not whether there will be blasphemy laws, only which god. If you find this idea hard to swallow, consider some of the most supreme gods of our increasingly neo-pagan society. At the time this is written, it is blasphemy to make any of the following statements:

1. Marriage only exists between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others for life.
2. Homosexual practice is an abomination.
3. Men cannot become women, and women cannot become men.
4. The COVID vaccines were utterly ineffective.
5. The COVID lockdowns were both wicked and counter-productive.
6. The environmentalist movement is dominated by the idolatry of Gaia.
7. Truth is absolute, and does not vary between people or cultures.
8. It is right and just that some people have more wealth than others, and that some people make more money than others.

Dear reader, we imagine that you now see the point. Did not one of those statements make you bristle? Were you not nearly tempted to silence and defame this author with a term equivalent to ‘blasphemer!’, whether it be ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ or ‘climate denier’ or ‘science denier’ or ‘capitalist pig’?

Dear reader, if you want to find the god of the system, here is your diagnostic question: What is the court of appeals past which no appeal can be made? When you find the answer, you have found the god of the system. That is why the statement attributed to Francis Schaeffer is true and should be well remembered that if there is no god above the state, the state is god.
The good news about freedom in Christ is that this author doesn’t care about the false gods, because at the cross, Jesus made a public spectacle of them, and he will continue to triumph over them all until the world is won over by the gospel, and then he will return. Because Christ is Lord of the Dictionary, this author simply must speak truth and not lie, because to lie and play the secular game is unfaithfulness to God. We will not fear, though the earth give way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea. God will be exalted among the nations. Be still, know that he is God, and love him.

Over 2022, a new podcast came onto our radar called ‘New Heart Theology’. This author knew of the men who ran it, and started weighing their claims. This reflection is a summary and an endorsement of what they had to say. To hear their claims from their own platforms, click here.

This is the question they answer: does a Christian’s disobedience flow from their heart, or from somewhere else? Can a Christian truthfully say that their heart is wicked, or is it actually good?

Before we go any further, it is worth acknowledging that different Christians will appeal to slightly different categories to constitute the human person. Some will suggest a human person consists of mind, body and soul. Some will say mind, body, soul, spirit. Others might say only body and spirit, or replace those terms with material and immaterial. For this article, ‘material and immaterial’ should be seen as terms used for distinguishing between all of the physical and material aspects of a human person on one hand, and all of the spiritual and immaterial aspects of a human person on the other. This way we can encompass all the other sets of terms without making these statements meaningless to those systems. Additionally, where we use ‘flesh’, ‘heart’, and ‘spirit’, they should be seen in terms of the context of how they are used in Scripture: there is clear dichotomy in the Pauline corpus between the intentions and actions that are ‘according to the flesh’ and those that are ‘according to the spirit’ (Rom 8:5-11). In this sense, decisions made ‘according to the flesh’ are not merely those made with reference to the physical body, but to the sinful inclinations of man in his natural state. Conversely, decisions made according to the spirit refer to those new desires God-honouring impulses which are wrought in regenerate believers by the Spirit of God.

To those of you whose attention has not yet been torn away to something more instantly gratifying, we are much indebted. We will start by considering the effects of regeneration upon the heart and the flesh (again, when formulated in their biblical contexts, not anatomically).

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Jeremiah 31:33-34

Jeremiah 31 is probably the most significant OT text for this subject, because it points forward with amazing clarity to the purpose and nature of the New Covenant that we experience today. There are a few primary observations to make here. The New Covenant is not like the Old Covenant in the respect that all the members of the New Covenant are true believers that have been forgiven by God, and who have had their hard and stony heart removed and replaced with a believing heart that is capable of knowing and loving God. The reason that neighbour would not need to teach neighbour, saying, ‘know the Lord’, is because they would all already have a true and saving knowledge of Him in their hearts, as opposed to one imposed on them from outside, such as was the law of Moses (which could govern their actions, but did not change their hearts).

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Ezekiel 36:26-27

Here the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the future day (which is in our past) in which God would not only deliver his people into material comfort and prosperity, but cause the change to happen inside them, so that obedience to God would become natural to them in their hearts. A new heart, and a new spirit. The stony heart, that could not honour God (Rom 8:7), is then removed from them, and a pure heart that seeks to honour God is given to them. Take note of the language: ‘I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes’. It is God’s unilateral action to change the desires and will of the human such that they would now desire and ‘be careful to obey’ his law. The change that takes a person from rebellion to repentance is something that God does, which the penitent person then responds to with contrition and faith.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Romans 8:18-23

Here, Paul shows that the regeneration which is the common possession of all Christians has not yet come to the creation as a whole, and nor has it come to our physical bodies. The creation still groans under its subjection to sin, just as our bodies still decay and corrupt. His argument indicates that in a future time, both the physical creation as well as our physical bodies will be renewed and freed from the subjection to sin and corruption. So, what conclusions can be drawn from all of this?

1. All Christian believers have had their hard, stony, unbelieving and wicked heart removed and replaced with a soft, fleshy (not meaning sinful, but simply a contrast to hard and stony), repentant, God-honouring heart.
2. The physical bodies of all people, believing and otherwise, are currently still experiencing the decay and subjection that results from sin in the world.
3. Christians will one day experience the full redemption of their physical bodies, at which point, everything about their person will be pure, regenerated, and sinless.
4. Creation itself will also be set free from bondage to sin and fully redeemed.

Here this author will seek to address the most common ‘but what about x’ questions that the Christian will likely ask.

Q: “Don’t the Scriptures say that our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately sick?

A: This author is willing to be corrected if he answers here in ignorance, but we are persuaded that this language (Jeremiah 17:9) in its context (especially v5-8) speaks with reference to the stony and unregenerate heart, not the heart given to a Christian. In this perspective, a Christian would be mistaken to apply that verse to the pure heart that God gave them in regeneration.

Q: “How do you explain the presence of sin in my life, that I still choose, even when I am a Christian?”

A: This is why we have been so careful to outline the teaching that the flesh is still corrupted, because it is our understanding that our flesh is what motivates us to sin, and not our heart, nor our spirit. You can truly say that you have chosen to sin, as Paul here does in Romans 7:17-20:

So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Paul does not shirk responsibility for his actions, pretending that is was someone else twisting his arm to cause him to sin. However, he does identify his true will (“I have the desire to do what is right”) with the righteousness that his regenerate heart produces, whereas he identifies the origin of his sin as not being him, but sin that dwells within him. We advocate for speaking in the same way as Paul. It is not this author’s desire to sin. Christ has taken this author’s evil heart away and given him a heart that honours him and seeks obedience. Whenever this author sins, it is due to the remaining influence of the sinful fleshly will.

Finally, we will end this reflection with some pastoral implications. To be honest, although this author is certainly not a pastor, we found this aspect to be one of the most compelling reasons to share NHT and not merely consider it an academic exercise in precise language.

If a fellow Christian comes to you, confessing a sin they have been succumbing to, which is weighing heavily upon their conscience, then it matters hugely whether or not you will tell them that their heart is desperately wicked, inclined to sin, etc. If a Christian knows that God has given them a new heart which is designed for and capable of obedience, it bolsters their efforts and faithfulness with the truth of knowing that holiness is possible with God’s help. They are not destined to always have sin triumph over their sanctification, but can expect Spirit-led victory over sin.

Additionally, consider what it is that you are saying to God if you blame your wicked heart for your sin. Christ died to ensure that your wickedness would be done away with and paid for. When the Spirit worked regeneration in you, he didn’t make any mistakes, or leave any black spots. His work was total and perfect. It is perhaps disrespectful to the perfection of God’s work in regeneration to say that he has left you with a half-evil heart.

In summary, this author advocates for recognising the biblical distinction between the heart and the flesh where the origin of sin is considered (in a regenerate Christian). It is faithful to the Scriptures, useful in sanctification, and honours the perfect work of God in regeneration. If you would like to learn more, please check out the resources we linked at the beginning of the article.

Recently, this author was in a conversation with a fellow Christian who accidentally misquoted Ephesians 2:8 as saying ‘you have been saved by faith, through grace’. It was merely a slip of the tongue, and he knew that it was by grace through faith, but it got this author thinking about an important distinction.

The old hymn is timeless that says ‘this is all my hope and plea / nothing but the blood of Jesus’. After all, what do you trust in for your salvation? The answer ought not be ‘my faith in Christ’, but rather ‘that on the cross, Jesus bore the debt and punishment of my sin, and that as sure as he rose again, likewise I will have eternal life.’

In other words, you don’t trust in your faith, you trust in the cross.

This begins to make sense when you think of the Christian who loves God, but sometimes falls into pits of despair and feels themself faithless and distant from God. If their trust is in their faith, then when they appear faithless, or doubt the sincerity of their expression of faith in the past, their very assurance of salvation slips away before them like sand in the wind. However, if they trust in the steadfast love of their God, and trust that on the cross Jesus paid for their sins, then even in their pits of despair when they see their inadequacy, they can remember that God is faithful and will not abandon them. Even when you are faithless, he remains faithful.

So, faith is not the grounds of salvation, merely the instrument (some may say the instrumental cause). Faith is that gift that God gives, whereby the believer appropriates unto themselves the salvation that God has wrought for the believer. God saved you by himself, from himself and for himself.

This misunderstanding of faith can be seen in that tradition in some churches where new Christians are encouraged to write the day and hour that they trusted Christ into their Bibles, so that if they ever feel doubtful, they can look back to when they first trusted Christ. See the problem? They are being encouraged to trust their decision to trust Christ, not Christ’s work of saving them.

So, what is the grounds of your salvation? All of God, and none of you. It is that God planned in eternity past to set you apart and save you. It is that his Son went to the cross with you in mind, clearing your record and saving you. It is that the Spirit found you in your rebellion, dead and blind and dumb to the gospel truths, and caused you to be born again to a living hope to an unfading inheritance.

So when you confess sola gratia, sola fide, remember Christ. Trust the cross, not the faith.

There has been in recent years the popularisation of the term ‘micro-aggression’ as a shorthand for the subtle communication of aggression from one person to another. This sounds rather reasonable, and not at all something that needs to engender any controversy or discussion. Have we not all seen the rolling of eyes, or the turning of a shoulder, to indicate someone’s displeasure? So, aren’t these communications simply greatly softened acts of aggression? Perhaps, but it depends on what you mean by aggression.

In the day in which we live, there has been a wife-swap between the terms ‘speech’ and ‘violence’. The word ‘speech’ was once married to the act of opening one’s mouth and breathing out coherent words. Likewise, the word ‘violence’ was once married to the concept of physical acts of destruction; whether burglary, assault, vandalism, domestic abuse, etc. We won’t go into great detail about the terrifying consequences of this foolishness, except to say that if speech is violence, then physical violence can be used to counter speech, and that is also known as fascism, coercion, and in some cases, terrorism. Oh, and let this author not neglect to mention: this viewpoint is being taught at the Universities. He should know, he sat through it himself.

So, the concept of a ‘micro-aggression’, though carrying with it ideas which are bordering on treasonous, reveals something true that our society would in other places deny. That truth, which we shall henceforth consider, is that communication is not limited to the words that come out of one’s mouth.

In a way, we all know this. Does a picture not represent a thousand words? Likewise, do actions not speak louder than words? What is a hypocrite, but someone who speaks one thing with their mouth, and then speaks the antithesis with their actions?

Having established that human communication encompasses more than just words, and that sometimes our words contradict other things that we communicate, let us address the issue at hand.

Simply put, clothing is communication. There are lots of directions you can go with this observation. For one, this author finds value in reflection on the internal monologue (or self-communication) that is affected by one’s wardrobe. Let the following scenario serve as an elucidation.

A young man rises in the morning, and prepares to dress himself for the day. Lying on his floor is a pair of tracksuit pants that he has been wearing for at least the last week. They are not terribly smelly or dirty, but a wash would be in order. He certainly wouldn’t wear them on a date. He picks them up and puts them on, not because they are particularly suitable to any of the plans he might have for the day, nor necessarily suited to the weather, but simply because they are directly within his line of sight, and do not require further thought.

Opening his wardrobe, he takes a printed tee-shirt and puts it on. He puts no thought into the combination of those two pieces of clothing, whether they complement each other, or his day’s tasks, or the weather, or anything else.

If this young man were to go to a cafe, or to stand in line at a library, or to be sitting on the platform at the train station, as he sees himself in reflections and with his own eyes, the decisions he made in the morning might convey the following statements, from morning-self to afternoon-self:

“I am not prepared to make a good impression on a stranger today. I am not looking to interact with other people. I have not made a plan for my day, and I am unprepared for the conditions that the day might present. The level of thriving or productivity that I expect to come forth from today is equivalent to what might be achieved by sitting on autopilot. I am not someone that you will feel compelled to take a second look at, and I am not interesting.”

Granted, this review may be overly scathing. Dear reader, if you happen to be dressed as the young man in this illustration, do not hear our words as a personal attack directed at you. However, we do not know your life, and it may be that the shoe fits.

However, this illustration is only tangential to the main point we are slowly angling on. Having established that clothing can (and does) achieve internal communication, we will now grapple with the elephant in the room: what you wear tells the people around you a number of things, and just as you are responsible for the intention and presentation of your words, you are also responsible for the presentation of your body.

Firstly, your clothing communicates how you want others to formulate your identity. If you are always wearing merchandise from your favourite film/TV/game franchise, you are successfully communicating that you want others to interact with you as a fan of that franchise. If you are often wearing your sporting apparel, whether from the AFL team you follow, or the local sporting club you’re a part of, or some such other thing, you are telling people that you are sporty, that your club is important to you, and that you are potentially ready for some activity or exercise.

If you have disfigured your body with subdermally implanted horns, and such other grotesque things, you are communicating that you reject the vision for manhood or womanhood that God has prescribed for you, and that you would rather be created in the image of some beast than of the one true and living God.

Further, if you are a young lady who routinely comes to social events wearing inappropriately revealing clothes, you are communicating that you want others (particularly the young men) to see you as sexually available, at the very least, if not something more forthright than that.

That statement will stir up in the bosom of many in our generation accusations of victim-blaming, slut-shaming, pharisaical judgement and a host of other things. Well, the fact is that we could go further in our assessment. You might want to sit down for this one. This author doesn’t think that his generation is anywhere near ready for this discussion: since when did it become acceptable for Christian men and women to walk around in form-fitting clothing that leaves basically nothing to the imagination? Even Christian women of godly character will take umbrage at our raising this subject. They will say that they are not to be blamed for the lack of self-control shown by their Christian brothers. As with many murky subjects of discussion, they are partially correct. A man cannot blame anyone else for his sin. Adam tried it, not a good idea. Men are required by God to be themselves disciplined in their practise of holiness. Christian civilisation does not reach the conclusion adopted in some Islamic cultures, which is that the women must be covered up in sacks, lest a man see a curve and be forced by his instincts to take her to bed.

Be that as it may, if it were not for our unbelievably individualistic culture, we might see more clearly that we are all members of one body, we are all stones in one temple. There is blame on both sides, so we will put it plainly: men have a long way to go with not committing adultery in their hearts as they look at their Christian sisters. This author himself is guilty of that. Likewise, women ought to refrain from advertising, by their clothing, something that it would be sinful for their brothers in the faith to take them up on.

It would take pages of disclaimers and caveats to cover all the exceptions that are running through the minds of some readers right now, so we will make no effort to cover all of them. We make no apology for putting it to you straight.

This is a problem in the church, but it is also more broadly a problem in our societies. As a result, we have to negotiate the proper standards for clothing with people who do not honour God, and who care nothing for saving a fellow Christian from stumbling.

Additionally, we have to deal with the most revolting and disgusting sin of rape, which is related to this issue. If a young woman is raped after a night out in the city, which has happened enough times that this author trusts you will grant the scenario without need of reference, it is inappropriate to senselessly jump in with a quip like ‘she probably was asking for it’ or ‘that’s what you get for clubbing’. These statements are deeply judgemental in a way that is totally inappropriate, and cares nothing for proper standards of justice.

Deuteronomy 19:15 establishes that “A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offence that he has committed.” Rather, a charge must be established on the basis of two or three independent witnesses. This same legal principle is seen all throughout the Scriptures (Matthew 18:16, John 8:17, 2 Corinthians 13:1, Deuteronomy 17:6, 1 Timothy 5:19, Numbers 35:30, Hebrews 10:28, and more).

As a result, it is totally inappropriate for Christians to jump on an accusation they have just heard and reach a conclusion before multiple witnesses have been cross-examined (Prov 18:17). If you hear an accusation levelled against someone, especially for a crime that will bring a serious punishment, you mustn’t be quick to assume the guilt of the person accused. Rather, the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ must prevail. There is much that can be said about how media in our day subverts this process by creating an association of guilt with a person even before their hearing, but that is the subject for another time.

Let’s apply this for a second. If a minister is accused of adultery, you mustn’t say or entertain a thought that says ‘that sounds about right, that’s just what I thought he was like’. If a girl is accused of fornication (in the common term, ‘sleeping around’), we likewise shouldn’t let that accusation impugn her good name until it is proven. If you hear that a young man called Kyle Rittenhouse shoots and kills another man on the streets of Kenosha, it is sinful for you to go too far in either direction, assuming (a) that it is impossible that he has committed a crime or a sin, or that (b) it is a foregone conclusion that he is guilty of a crime or a sin. We must treat the accused as innocent until proven guilty, but we must not determine beforehand which outcome we will require of the examination.

This does mean that evil women and men will get away with murder. This does mean that criminals and traffickers and drug cartels will get away with their schemes. Why is that? It is because they don’t truly get away with anything. A man dies, then comes before God for judgement (Heb 9:27). No crime or sin, no matter how big or small, can escape the gavel of the Omniscient Judge, who is also the Omnipotent Executioner. It is for that reason that some crimes must go unpunished in this life.

The alternative would see twenty innocent women incarcerated or killed falsely on the basis of one false witness, just to ensure that the real criminal can also be caught on the basis of one true witness.

It is a greater evil for an innocent person to stand condemned than for a wicked person to go free, because no one really goes free.

So, let’s bring this back to clothing and communication. The sin and crime of rape is the stickiest and most heated element to the discussion of ‘appropriate’ clothing and where guilt should be assigned when some such evil occurs. This author is convinced that a biblical standard of justice would see a rapist who is condemned on the basis of three independent witnesses justly executed by the state. We will by no means make light or trivia of this gross perversion.

Hopefully the wise reader will have the honesty to at least acknowledge that a society in which sexual misconduct occured less would also be a society in which women and men communicated clearly by their words and their clothes that they are not willing or hoping to have casual sex with someone they have just met, and that intimacy only ever comes after commitment, and not before it.

For a final note, we will address the subject of Christian bodies. If God created you as a woman, he gave you the physical, mental and spiritual attributes of femininity. If God created you as a man, you were likewise given the physical, mental and spiritual attributes of masculinity. Not only are you to verbally communicate truthfully, and with language that submits to and honours the truth, you are to communicate your masculinity or femininity (for they are the only options) with your clothing according to the standards of God’s law and the standards of the culture around you. To take a classic example, the Scottish man would be honouring his Scottish masculinity before God when he wears his kilt, but if a Lebanese or Korean  Christian went into the town square to preach the good news in a kilt, that would be entirely inappropriate. God’s law doesn’t state that all men must wear a suit and tie, and that all women must wear a summer dress with a blouse over the top. The duty is given to the Christian man to see the clothing that says ‘I am a man’ in his culture, and to dress in that fashion (provided that this doesn’t contradict God’s law in another place). The same goes for women.

For both men and women, you honour God when your clothes communicate that you embrace the sexual identity God gave you at conception. It is ungrateful and rebellious (not to mention directly prohibited by Scripture) to dress according to the clothing of the opposite sex. If you are now wondering whether that means dress-ups in theatre are sinful, leave a comment, and we may consider a follow up article.

To summarise what has been a winding journey, we have work to do. Men: we need to make leaps and bounds in self-control, regardless of the fact that our society is presenting us with porn and easy women (whether real or digital) at every turn. Women: if you are able to rise above individualistic thinking and see yourself as a member of Christ’s body, you will realise that you have a part to play in dressing with modesty that communicates the same purity you profess and love in the other parts of your lives.

Brothers and sisters, let our voices not be found among the number that foolishly cry “she had it coming!” or “can’t she dress however she wants?”. Both things are folly, and belong only to the darkened hearts of the enslaved world around us, and not to our liberated hearts that have been set free to serve and honour Christ.

For those Christians who had the great privilege of being raised by parents who love the Lord, such as this author, it is something of a rite of passage to not be allowed to watch Harry Potter. The justification for it is understandable: ‘we don’t want them getting ideas in their heads about witchcraft, it’s not a good thing for them to become invested in, especially at such a young age and before they can exercise proper discernment’.

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that this is actually a wise ruling. What is in, and what is out? If the standard is that witchcraft is not permissible, is Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also out? What about Tolkien? Are the great tales of Middle Earth and the shire unprofitable for young children because of the mere presence of scary monsters and magic spells?

One aspect of this comes down to connotations in terminology. Until about three years ago, this author had never heard the idea that monsters were essentially demonic. Growing up with such games as ‘Moshi Monsters’, in which you choose a silly, fun, goofy little monster to be your persona, this author always thought ‘monster’ more or less meant ‘a fictional creature that looks odd and usually scary’. To be perfectly honest, this author would probably include a good few real life creatures into that category. Come on, tell me that Diavlo from Moshi Monsters is more terrifying than bird-eating spiders or the frilled shark.

On a strictly technical level, one can understand how you could categorically call monsters demonic. If monsters are all fictional and grotesque creatures, or real creatures that have become deformed past recognition, then that kind of desecration of God’s good creation can easily be identified with the plans of the Adversary. He comes to kill, steal and destroy, amongst other things, and it’s no small leap to see how grotesque creatures would be his passion project. If you want further evidence of this, see the transgender movement. Now there’s something monstrous.

Ok, so where are we going with this? This author argues that the presence of magic and divination alone, though these are wicked and prohibited practices, is not enough to categorically ban a certain book title or movie. Narnia and Lord of the Rings are probably two of the finest pieces of Christian art in our era. Yes, Narnia is a Christian story. Narnia, like real life, happens to feature wicked characters who use evil means to pursue their grotesque ends. Scripture also contains wicked characters and gives detail of wicked actions committed in rebellion against God. The Bible is certainly not a PG book. In fact, you could not put the Bible to TV or movies faithfully without it incurring the most stringent R18 rating available.

We also argue, and set forth for consideration, that it should not be the mere presence of wickedness that invalidates a show or book, but that it should be the function and frequency of those things to the story. Let’s try some examples.

Game of Thrones: Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Martin is not writing Christ-figures in this story. It is not a great allegory like those other works. Furthermore, the TV adaption contains frequent and graphic sex scenes. One might try to argue that this is essential to the plot, and indeed it is present in the books, but only a fool wouldn’t realise that many viewers have chosen to watch GoT because it contains sex and nudity.

Star Wars: We can consider ‘the force’ to be a soft-magic system built within an Eastern worldview. George Lucas was explicitly influenced by Joseph Campbell, so the ‘hero with a thousand faces / hero’s journey’ tropes are abundant and clear. Across all six of the original films, the force is used, and viewers see how being motivated by hate can be powerful, but ultimately leads to corruption, loss of what is truly important, and bondage to powers of darkness.

Avatar (The Last Airbender): In terms of teaching children lessons about cooperation, friendship, love and forgiveness, it has a lot going for it. However, the presence of Eastern Religion is even clearer in Avatar than in Star Wars. Certain episodes function as more or less an instructional series on how to use Hindu/Buddhist techniques to access Chi power. This leaves the realm of mere fiction, and (in our opinion) crosses the line into tempting an impressionable young person towards ‘unlocking their chakras’ and so on. Thankfully, the conscientious parent could easily skip this with little impact on the greater story.

These are only a small handful of examples, and many more could easily be produced. This author hasn’t made any sweeping conclusions for you, the reader, about which of those you should or shouldn’t watch. However, consider our rubric of function and frequency.

Function: what does the magic/monster/immorality/false religion/sexual references do for the story? In Les Misérables, the character Fantine turns in desperation to prostitution, and in the recent musical film adaption we see her singing I Dreamed a Dream while some man is on top of her. That shot lasts for maybe a couple of seconds, and doesn’t contain any nudity, and doesn’t in any way present the scene as something erotic, arousing or laudable. This scene functions to show the depths of despair that Fantine is driven to, thanks to the wicked extortion of the Thénardiers, and the tough economic conditions of France at the time. Even still, that is pushing it.

In most shows and movies today, sex scenes are altogether unecessary, and primarily exist to increase the clicks that the show will get. That’s just the reality of it. In decades past, sex scenes would be merely implied, or only the scenes before or after would be shown. There are ways of explaining to an audience that two people had sex without showing it.

Asking the question of function can easily disqualify many shows, and it probably should. It doesn’t necessarily follow that just because one of these things functions in an artistic or important way in the plot that it can, however, be excused.

Frequency is another important one. The reality is that there are some great movies that just have one scene in them that you wouldn’t want a young person (or perhaps any person) seeing. In matters like this, one can often google a content review for a program beforehand, identify when in the story the objectionable content will come (whether sex scene, Séance, idol worship, gratuitous violence etc) and simply click past it. However, since this brings the viewer closer to the chance of accidentally seeing something, it is a decision that requires wisdom.

Let’s bring this back to myths, monsters and magic. This author is not trying to rag on conscientious Christian parents who want their children to come to love stories of righteousness triumphing over evil, and not become obsessed with dark and occult characters. That is a good and laudable desire. However, wisdom is needed when deciding what’s in and what’s out. If you throw out any trace of a monster, then do not be surprised when many babies fall out of the window along with the bathwater. What’s more, if you want to avoid all stories of witchcraft, you’ll have to tear chapters out of your Bible also.

As a wise woman once said, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Let the reader understand.

Since naturalistic materialism became all the rage, Christians have been shamed out of the supernatural elements of the faith. We’ve been conditioned to be embarrassed by them, to hedge them with ‘there’s a story in Scripture that goes’ or however many other ways we have of saying ‘you aren’t supposed to take this as fact, since it is supernatural, but the point is’.

However, God is not mocked, and reality can only be denied for so long. A society full of people that were created in contact with a supernatural world are not going to live like naturalistic materialists for long. So, the seeds that were planted before this author was born have now started to bear fruit, largely in the face of New Age spirituality. Our society has gone from a categorical denial of all things supernatural to a no holds barred buffet banquet of every spiritual practice one could think of (so long as it isn’t the one instructed by Jesus). Today we have everything from the people obsessed with crystals and tarot readings and other forms of divination to those people normalising and repackaging Eastern religion into a more modern suit, whether they know it or not, and whether they mean to or not.

So the Christians, who had just gotten used to the rule that ‘to sit at the table with public intellectuals, you can only deal with empirical data’, are now gobsmacked as the atheists and agnostics are the ones bringing spiritual categories to bear in common parlance. If you have ever heard the term ‘spiritual but not religious’, that phrase is the product of what we are talking about. ‘Religious’ is the formalised, empty, old-fashioned and dead counterpart to ‘spiritual’, by which images of freedom, exploration, openness, liberty, authenticity and reality are implied.

Let’s take a second and realise where we stand. We stand between the blind man and the witch; between an ignoramus in denial of the supernatural world God made and a fool embracing all of the impure spirits in the unseen realm.

It also just so happens that we stand on a solid rock, and that all other worldviews are built on sinking sand. The world we know, which is the world God tells us about, is far more splendid and fantastic than any of these other worlds we are sold.

Dear reader, please see this! The world the atheists want to sell you is boring! Dawkins is right, the world he believes in is an unbelievably vast void of blind and pitiless chance, merely a great string of accidents occurring deterministically as entropy runs its course. At the same time, the world we are now being sold is a dangerous misunderstanding. Our society finds astral projection, but does not see the chains and fetters tied to it. Our cultural icons see DMT and Ayahuasca as new and exciting tools for self-actualisation and addiction relief, but they do not hear Moses shouting his warning, telling them of the perils and spiritual bondage they are inviting themselves into.

This author has seen more and more films and T.V. shows popping up that feature multiverse theories, astral projection, the pineal gland (most commonly referred to as the ‘third eye’), mindfulness, yoga, spirit guides, etc. This author is neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but he fully expects new age spirituality to come fully and earnestly into the mainstream and enslave a generation before people start realising that even Satan presents himself as an angel of light. If you, dear reader, have fully managed to not see this cultural shift, you should watch the trailers for two films: Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Eastern religion / New Age spirituality are the bread and butter of these stories.

They are not benign, they are not simply unwise like a bunch of teenagers sneaking off with cigarettes and small amounts of marijuana to go and experiment. Stephen Bancarz, and so many others that were deep into the New Age who have now come to Christ can tell you with the proper terminology just what depths of slavery and bondage our neighbours are selling themselves into when they learn remote viewing or eastern meditation or any of those other practices. We fear that in 10 years, exorcisms may become common (or at least widely needed) in the west, from the sheer volume of demonic activity that so many people are inviting into their lives.

Ok ok, we’ll pull back on the doom and gloom for a second. The thing that this author finds so wonderful is that we have a better story. Sure, the herbalist/dryad aesthetic has its attractive elements. Granted, the suave scientist with his data and rock solid facts has his prestige. However, we belong to the one True and Living God, before whom all spiritual beings will one day kneel. In the ultimate Endgame, we have the confidence of knowing that we will be clothed in the righteousness of a saviour who took on innumerable lifetimes worth of sin and atoned for them all on the cross. The Almighty God who dreamed up the stars and invented physics also created great beasts of the deep and so many birds of the sky and tiny little bacteria and insects and—most amazing of them all—human beings, this is the God who you are invited to have peace with, and to call on as your Father.

God is not to be trifled with, or treated like a magic dispenser, but it is true to recognise that in history, God has used his infinite power to show the rulers of the world who he is. Imagine being Moses before Pharaoh, or Peter on the mount of transfiguration, or an Israelite behind the cloud of smoke and pillar of fire. That was our God. That was in this world, not in some fictional multiverse. There is a patch of desert somewhere in the Sinai region where that all happened.We would do well to remember that the most amazing universe is the real one, and the only all-powerful God worthy of any worship is the God Yahweh who revealed himself to us in 66 books that we call the Bible. The greatest salvation story ever is the one that has already been decided, and we have only just begun telling the world about it. What are we waiting for?

Though it may be well stated that the title of this reflection sounds like the start of a one-liner, we assure you that that is not the case. Though perhaps, it may be more entertaining to say that the only difference between an alcoholic and a drunkard is that one is on the way to the liquor cabinet, and the other is already passed out on the couch.

However, that is not at all the kind of difference we have in mind. For this subject, we must start with the disease model of addiction. Now, being untrained in the fields of psychology, biology and such other disciplines, this author will try to step lightly, as to not make a fool of himself. A straightforward definition of the disease model of addiction would be this: addiction is best described as a kind of illness, and one with biological, neurological, genetic or environmental sources of origin. To put it even more simply, you could say addiction is a disease that has happened to you, and is now part of who you are.

The last phrase there is very important. Popular approaches to overcoming addictions in today’s culture, such as that of Alcoholics Anonymous, treat the addiction as essential. It is not something that you did, it is not something that merely happened to you, it is who you are. You are not a person struggling with the vices of wine and weed, you are an alcoholic, you are an addict.

This author has firsthand experience with the disaster that occurs when someone essentialises a flaw or fault of their own. A young man in Christian circles became enamoured with the ‘Five Love Languages’, and upon discovering that Physical Touch was his primary love language, insisted that there was nothing he could (or should) do to dial back his displays of physical affection (though those of us witnessing would not have described this as affection, but perhaps lust or insecurity) to his girlfriend at the time.

It is the same as having a friend who is ‘the late friend’. If that is who they are, and if you reinforce that by telling them that that is who they are, why would you expect them to behave otherwise? Now, to the reader who has been scarred by the excesses and imbalances of ‘Word of Faith’ or ‘name it and claim it’ theology, please understand that we are not making the assertions that wolves like Osteen, Hinn or Copeland have made. However, it is common sense that if you only ever tell yourself that you never take opportunities or that you just can’t organise yourself, that you are already lowering the bar in your own mind for what outcomes you expect you can achieve.

Phew. Did we get through that without raising the hackles of the first year Psych students, the love-languages devotees and the AA acolytes? We will have to wait and see.

So, perhaps the language and conceptual background of the term ‘alcoholic’ leaves much to be desired, but what’s the big deal? Aren’t these two words basically the same? Isn’t this like arguing between Thy and Your? Well, no. It’s actually much more like the difference between ‘ethnic vainglory’ and ‘racism’, but we will save that for another day. Dearest reader, the main point that we have been angling on now for seven paragraphs, like a Great White Shark circling an unsuspecting beach-goer in the Aussie summer, is that the difference between the terms ‘drunkard’ and ‘alcoholic’ is that one of them is biblical, and the other one is ‘alcoholic’.

If there are pearls that need clutching, or accusations of pharisaism and legalism that are on standby, this is their cue. Take a breath. If you conduct a simple word search in the Scriptures for the term ‘drunkard’, you will see more than enough data to know (a) what behaviours the term is describing, (b) whether or not these are acceptable behaviours and (c) what the likely outcomes are for a person who meets this description. Calling someone a drunkard is a rebuke and an accusation, and so should it be. It is a word that ascribes fault on the part of the one drinking in excess, and shames them in due course. This is how it ought to be. Shame is not only an appropriate feature of any society, it is an inescapable feature of any society. It is not whether, but which. If you don’t believe this claim, try being a proponent of Young Earth cosmology without apology or qualification in an academic or education setting and see the response. Try speaking about how motherhood is perhaps the most glorious and ineffable calling of women to a group of professionals of both sexes, and see their response. Shame is one of the tools that every society and community uses to police its ranks. In fact, it is being used on you, and that is why you will of necessity find yourself policing your own thoughts or actions from time to time: “It’s not that I really agree with them, but we’ll never manage to be friends if I don’t follow the current rules about preferred names, so I go along with it for the sake of remaining friends. After all, someone needs to witness to them.” Alas, such an attitude witnesses first and foremost to one reality: evangelicals today care far too much for the world’s approval, and are prepared to assume on the charity and longsuffering of their Lord as if it were a light thing. In an effort to stay ‘relevant’ for the sake of the gospel, such approaches only present a gospel that loosely reflects a water balloon. It fits into any other cultural crevice it needs to, and if you coax it just right, and disappears into a shrivelled and damp puddle if approached with so much as a jagged fingernail.

So back to shaming drunkards. The reality that all the writers of Scripture showed us so consistently is that a person may be born into bondage to sin, but their hearty attempts to add more padlocks and chains to their sad state shows that the bondage is one they love, and one they will pursue forever unless Someone does something. But more on that at the end…

All sins committed by women are choices, all the iniquity of men is voluntary. (That is the same statement twice, though in our culture, accusing the women first and the men second is a grave infraction of the social laws).

So, let’s see how far we’ve come. If indeed these tangents are burning to the ground, it may be past time to get to the point.

The reality is that we ought to use biblical language, because we do not get to define the words with which we build our sentences. They are bricks, some made less scrupulously than others, some of made of unseemly mixtures of sand and pebbles, yet some others of good clay, fired thoroughly, and exhibiting that wonderful red hue that says ‘this brick would make the kind of house that a Big Bad Wolf could not huff and puff and blow down’. We ought to use biblical language because the Bible has done an excellent job of defining for us a very broad palette of words that should cover us for many and sundry purposes, whilst our society has also embarked on the mission of creating its own words, and they’re currently stuck with figuring out what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ refer to, so it is fair to say that they don’t have a great track record.

Why would you choose words from the same people who define racism as prejudice + power, or who put that immaterial and all-corruption qualifier ‘your’ before ‘truth’, rendering the latter utterly meaningless? You would not try to redeem ‘hate crimes’ into being some kind of culturally engaging way to talk about evangelism, and so esteemed reader, especially if you are trusting in Christ, we exhort you to cast aside the worthless double-speak forged by the enemies of the cross. Are we to believe that you would run into battle with rusted weapons and cardboard armour? Are we to take your word that you would write an important job application or resume in Comic Sans, with vocabulary sourced primary from the sexually explicit corners of the Urban Dictionary?

We are well aware that it may seem we labour this point. However, it is crucial. You will not see why it is crucial until you have lost, or until having watched another lose, you choose to take heed. You cannot imagine how important language is. You are letting other people reformat your thoughts.A person who has become fluent in the categories  of ‘privilege’ and ‘power-politics’ and ‘racial justice’ is a person who has torn semi-trailer sized holes in the fences between their paddocks and then scowled with naive dismay as their livestock abscond for a frolic through the other fields, trampling a harvest’s worth of thus and such. Oh my, haven’t these analogies gotten out of hand?

So, be it resolved that words have meanings, and that those meanings do not change fast, and certainly do not change just because you say they do. You will find some more novel examples of this if you have the distinct pleasure (as this author has had now for a number of years) of sustaining cross-cultural discussion where you use the same words as your interlocutor, but when those same words come from her mouth they mysteriously mean something else altogether. Something about the scandal of wearing asserts thongs to a BBQ…

So it is the case, as we have mentioned now several times over, that Christ is the Lord of the Dictionary. As such, if you are trusting in Christ, you do not get to exercise autonomy over your choice of words. No, that is yet another domain encapsulated by the ‘all things’ that are being put into submission under the Son, that he might be over all. It is Christ’s lordship over our tongues that prevents us from calling ‘adultery’ an ‘open relationship’, regardless of how winsome our adulterous friends might find it, and regardless of how many nuance-points we might win with those Christians who are Christian in name only, and are only a few years away from ‘contextualising’ or ‘decolonising’ or ‘deconstructing’ their faith.

So, the reality is drunkard, not alcoholic. It is effeminate, not ‘LGBT allies’. It is apostasy, not deconstruction, and it is eunuch, not transwoman.

This, this is what all of these words have been leading up to. This author will not mince his words for the sake of pulling punches or making it go down easier. True deconstruction is apostasy. If someone’s deconstruction leads them to a more biblical, historical, presentation of the Gospel, what they are describing is not deconstruction, but sanctification. Words like ‘exvangelical’ make for useful shorthand, and quickly refer to a particular movement and socio-historical context, but at the end of the day, a spade is a spade, and those who have departed from among us have done so to show that they were never of us. If you bristle at that, at least have the temerity to learn that those words are Scripture.

So, let me wrap this section up with an alternative. Far be it from us to cut off a word that seems to be building a head of steam and not offer a positive and truthful alternative. If you, dear Christian, are in the process of carefully inspecting the beliefs you were raised in, and doing the hard work of reading the Bible to see if those beliefs have any substance, because you want to honour God and his word, then you are growing, reforming (not in the sense of identifying necessarily with Calvin, but in the plain sense of going back to the roots), refining, reassessing, or even being a Berean about your faith. These are positive terms, and not ones filled with the slimy excesses of Derrida and Foucault.

It is a shame that culture has gone so deep that the ordinary task of comparing what you believe against God’s authoritative revelation is so unforseen that it has caused cultural upheaval. Let’s support Christians who want to refine their doctrine for the sake of fidelity and orthodoxy, but let’s call a spade a spade, and not give apostasy a new name.

The good news, though it may indeed be an odd place to start for this topic, is that at a point in the future, Roe vs Wade will be overturned. That is a fact, as surely as Christ is risen. Why do we say that, and why start there?

Scripture tells us that Christ’s resurrection is proof of the general resurrection to come, and that at that general resurrection Christ will present his fully-ripened kingdom to his father. However, this general resurrection and kingdom presentation happens only after he has put all of his enemies under his feet, and Molech is certainly one of his enemies.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. (1 Cor 15:20-26)

So, amidst all this turmoil, know that the outcome is already decided, and it is just a matter of time. We start there, because as Christians we can always start from a place of advantage. The one who rejects Christ and the word of God has no coherent and consistent way to make any value judgement or truth claim, so we needn’t be afraid of anything else they have to say. Even the worst they can do; whether harm, mockery or other diabolical devices are merely accolades of ours that God will glorify tenfold in the renewed creation.

This is not a debate where there are two nuanced and valid positions. One such example would be a debate over the proper place of weapons, including guns, in a society. Should they be legal at all? If so, is a licence required, and who decides on the eligibility criteria?

No, the only question in this debate is whether or not the entity inside a pregnant woman is a human being or not. If it is not, abortion is a trivial thing, like an apendectomy, and should be available to all. If it is human, then abortion is murder, and should therefore be illegal.

The first mistake a Christian can make in this debate is letting her interlocutor define the categories. This goes back to one of our earliest reflections. If they broach the topic, framing it as a ‘woman’s choice to decide whether she wants to become a mother or not’, do not play their game. The position you are being encouraged to take is one with implicit coercion. You are being encouraged to say ‘no, a woman should not have a choice in whether or not she becomes a mother, the fact is that she has become a mother!’ At the core, you have the facts properly considered, but both rhetorically and strategically speaking, you have already lost.

Take another example. A defence against abortion that says ‘it is immoral because the baby can feel pain’ is a defence that cedes control of the castle for control of the tool shed. Yes, there are things in there you can use as weapons, but no boiling oil, no cannon emplacements, and certainly nothing that a shrill band of university-educated children can’t mock. Often we get derailed into a conversation about permitting this murder at 8 weeks or 12 weeks or until there is a heartbeat or until the brain is fully formed or until late term, or until the baby is delivered, or (as it is today in many places) even after the baby has been delivered alive.

So, remember to stay on the high ground, where you belong. These are children, they became children and full of value and dignity and made in the image of God at the moment that their life was started (conception), and this is not a debatable point. Any credible biologist can confirm that at conception is when the new biological information is written, and already from that moment many factors about that boy or girl have been decided.

Keep in mind one or two other things. Most people out there aren’t unaware that what grows in the womb is a baby, and that abortion is murder. They just don’t care. They want the right to murder their children, and many of them will say so. Some are still fooling themselves about the facts of biology, but that should be no surprise, because Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what a woman is. After all, she isn’t a biologist.

So, what’s next? Well how about this chestnut: ‘if you make abortion illegal, that will only make it more dangerous, and it will still happen’. To see why this argument has less integrity than a house of cards in a tsunami, try it with slavery. ‘If you make slavery illegal, that will only make it more dangerous for the people who want to practise it, and it will still happen’. Watch as everyone loudly and rightly yells, ‘that doesn’t matter, it should be illegal because it is wrong!’ Though it is true that illegal abortion does not equal no abortion, less murder is still better than more murder.

Let’s go through just a few more slogans and some brief engagements with them, flat-packed and microwave ready.

“My body, my choice.”

A: “Thankyou for that pro-life argument. I also believe that every person should be able to choose what happens to their body, including that little boy or girl in your womb.”

“No uterus, no opinion.”

A: “I didn’t realise that having a uterus made murder legal.” (For bonus points, you could thank them for acknowledging that women have uteruses. In this day and age, this is not a given in many circles.)

“I can’t afford a baby / my family would kick me out / the baby has a debilitating disease.”

A: “You can’t kill a living person that has been born just because they are poor, or disabled or homeless. Why should a living person that hasn’t been born be any different?”

“This baby came about as the result of rape. Why should I be forced to be reminded every day of this egregious violation of my rights?”

A: “Rape is a serious sin and crime. God’s word teaches that the wicked man should be executed, but you are arguing that the innocent child should be executed. What’s more, the solution you propose to this unimaginable sin against your bodily autonomy is an even more heinous crime against a little person that utterly depends on you.

So, having discussed some of the foundational and strategic matters, let us turn our attention to what is happening in that interesting place they call America. Though this author makes no effort to stay fully on top of all the news, it appears that the Supreme Court in the U.S.A. may soon overturn a controversial court opinion that came from the Roe vs Wade case, which made it far easier to procure an abortion. We speak here in generalities, because law is not this author’s strong suit. The idea of Roe (as we shall henceforth abbreviate it) being overturned is hard to imagine, but not for the reason you think.

It is the sheer wickedness, the sheer volume of bloodguilt, the utter and complete rejection of God and his word and his world over the last however many decades, that has this author surprised. Not the wickedness itself, but the concept that instead of finally charging our national sin-debt to us, and exacting a punishment more severe than that of Sodom, that the gracious Lord God might instead bless these nations, and potentially remove Roe. But again, why should we be surprised? It is grace, grace upon grace, that we are shown in Christ. God shows grace, because he is who he is. So, whether or not this does come to pass, let us thank God with deep sincerity that he has given us another day to pursue peace and justice in the land, because we are living on borrowed time, and God would be committing no breach of fair conduct to end it all now.

This author considered making a Facebook post simply celebrating this development, but refrained because he couldn’t be bothered interacting with the backlash. It is to his shame that he says that, because that is self-censorship, and that’s just what they want. We have reached the place where we care what they think of us, and we want a seat at their table. So, please pray for boldness. Not only for yourself and this author, but for all people who find murder revolting. It is not ok that babies are being murdered. History is watching us, and everytime we ask how the Auschwitz guards could have stood by and watched as the Poles, Jews and gypsies were murdered in the millions, remember that we pay doctors to murder 10x more babies than Jews that were killed in the Holocaust, and this is supposedly ‘peace time’.

One of the saddest things that we are now seeing (aside from the unrelenting slaughter of the pre-born) is men and women who call themselves Christian coming out in support of Roe / abortion. It is sad, but they are doing us a great service, because they are making it much clearer who belongs in the kingdom and who is seeing themself out. There is no acceptable way to be pro-choice. This is not a field for Ecumenical bridge building. This is a mission field. Those who have submitted to the Lordship of Christ have submitted to championing the creational and biological categories of Male and Female, and to opposing and stamping out the murderous and idolatrous practise of abortion.

Many have wisely identified abortion as the worship service of Molech, a false god in the culture of death. It has seen many faces over the centuries, but the baby-murder has always been there. God help us. After all, we know he will, because we know how the story ends. Let us pray that we will be on the right side when the sorting happens. Let us pray that we would be the William Wilberforce of our day. So, let us celebrate Mother’s Day properly, encouraging and honouring the calling of motherhood, and defending the precious image-bearers that those women are called to bring into the world.