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I highly recommend that you read this! You might not love it but you probably will, so let me know if you did or not.

“Patrick could put himself—imaginatively—in the position of the Irish. To him, no less than to them, the world is full of magic. One can invoke the elements—the lights of heaven, the waves of the sea, the birds and the animals—and these will come to one’s aid, as in the incantation of the “Breastplate.” The difference between Patrick’s magic and the magic of the druids is that in Patrick’s world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success. And though that success is of an ultimate kind—and, therefore, does not preclude suffering—all nature, indeed the whole of the created universe, conspires to mankind’s good, teaching, succoring, and saving.

Patrick could speak convincingly of these things. He could assure you that all suffering, however dull and desperate, would come to its conclusion and would show itself to have been worthwhile. He could insist that, in the end, you too would hear the words “Your hungers are rewarded:  you are going home. Look, your ship is ready.”  He could speak believably of the superabundance of a God who in response to humble prayer feeds his lost and wandering people with heavenly manna—and a crew of lost and starving sailors with the herd of very earthly pigs.” (How the Irish Saved Civilization p. 131)

“The key to Patrick’s confidence—and it is the sort of ringing, rock-solid confidence on which a civilization may be built, an unmuffled confidence not heard since the Golden Ages of Greece and Rome—is in his reliance on “the Creator of Creation,” the phrase with which the “Breastplate” opens and closes.  Our Father in heaven, having created all things, even things that have since become bent or gone bad, will deliver us, his children, from all evil.  But our Father is not only in faraway heaven, but lives among us.  For he created everything by his Word, which was with him in the beginning, which became flesh in the human Jesus, and flames out in all his creatures:

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

His body gleams amid eternal snows,

His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

His  crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,

His cross is every tree.

This magical world, though full of adventure and surprise, is no longer full of dread. Rather, Christ has trodden all pathways before us, and at every crossroads and by every tree the Word of God speaks out. We have only to be quiet and listen, as Patrick learned to do during the silence of his “novitiate” as a shepherd on the slopes of Sliabh Mis.” (How the Irish Saved Civilization p. 132-133)

21 Principles a Christian Citizen Must Know (In the Age of Obama)

Sermons – Romans
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, March 15, 2010 6:09 am

INTRODUCTION:
Because the teaching of the apostle Paul on civil authority is widely misunderstood and misrepresented, we are going to take our time going through this section. And because the instructions here are to Christian citizens and subjects, we are going to begin with a scriptural introduction to this entire subject. And because of who is addressed here, it is important to remember something that Abraham Kuyper once said: “In any successful attack on freedom the state can only be an accomplice. The chief culprit is the citizen who forgets his duty, wastes away his strength in the sleep of sin and sensual pleasure, and so loses the power of his own initiative.”

We are going to therefore consider 21 principles on civil government that the Christian must understand.

THE TEXT:
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1).

21 PRINCIPLES:
1: Civil government and rule is a blessing from God, and not a necessary evil. “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain” (2 Sam. 23:3-4). We are not anarchists.

2: God establishes a righteous throne with majesty. “It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: for the throne is established by righteousness” (Prov. 16:12). “And the LORD magnified Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all Israel, and bestowed upon him such royal majesty as had not been on any king before him in Israel” (1 Chron. 25:29; Dan. 4:36).

3: The law of God is the soul of a good ruler. “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Ex. 18:21). Rulers who don’t fear God will try to be God.

4: God requires true humility of His rulers. “That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel” (Dt. 17:20).

5: Our basic demeanor toward civil rulers should be one of honor. “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:17). What the kings of the earth bring into the New Jerusalem is not a sham or a pretence (Rev. 21:24).

6: Tyrants love moral corruption, and hate virtuous men. As Chesterton once put it, free love is the first and most obvious bribe to offer a slave. Tyrants therefore love public entertainments and private vices because they love an enervated people. “But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication” (Rev. 2:14). Porn is therefore politics, and reveals your true political allegiances.

7: Absolute perfection in our rulers is not the point. “Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me” (Ps. 51:11). David had forfeited his throne, as Saul had, and he knew it. When Saul’s dynasty fell, it was because the Spirit had departed from him. But God in His mercy allowed David to remain as the king, despite this gross imperfection. And it is said of a number of kings that they were good, like Asa, but that they did not remove the high places (1 Kings 15:14). In Scripture, a king can get a B minus and still be a good and godly king.

8: Tyranny is a judgment from God for the sins of the people. “And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take . . .” (1 Sam. 8:11). But remember that the God who sends tyrants to chastise us may also send a deliverer to save us.

9: Every manner of civil government is under the authority of God. God rules in His own name, and princes rule by derivation. Civil rulers are the lieutenants of God. Here in Romans 13, the word for deacons is used of them several times (Rom. 13:4). The ruler is therefore an appointed, delegated, and deputized servant.

10: Civil disobedience is required when matters of worship and the gospel are concerned. “But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18). “Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

11: Civil disobedience is lawful in other areas as well. David honored Saul (1 Sam. 24:5), but did not turn himself in (1 Sam. 24:22). Neither did Peter turn himself in (Acts 12:11), or Paul for that matter (2 Cor. 11:32-33). Examples could be multiplied.

12: Civil government is covenantal, and has a double covenantal nature. It involves God, the magistrate, and the people (2 Chron. 23: 16).

13: No human authority, civil magistrates included, can be absolute. God alone has absolute authority; man’s authority is always limited and bounded. This is what Nebuchadnezzar confessed—when his sanity returned (Dan. 4:35).

14: Not everything that is legal is lawful (Rev. 13:17).

15: Faithful believers will often be accused of lawlessness and treason. Ahab was the troubler of Israel, and so that is what he accused Elijah of being (1 Kings 18:17). But the cause of the trouble is the problem; the solution is not the problem (2 Chron. 23:13).

16: The Bible teaches the principle of the “consent of the governed.” Rehoboam was elected to be king (1 Kings 12:1), and he was no anomaly.

17: The lot of the people and the character of their rulers is linked together. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn” (Prov. 29:2).

18: Resistance of tyranny is not the same thing as resistance of the established civil order. Jehoida defended the throne by removing someone from it (2 Chron. 23:11).

19: Lesser magistrates obeyed Jehoida, and they were right to do so (2 Chron. 23:1-3).

20. We must care what company our rulers keep. Panders, whores, flatterers and “other mushrooms of the court” are to be despised. “Take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall be established in righteousness” (Prov. 25:5).

21: And last, Christian history matters. Included in our definition of “the powers that be” (Rom. 13:1) must be things like: the Constitution, the will of the people, the lesser magistrates, and the balances of powers.

This is an exhortation by Pastor Doug Wilson.  Seems quite significant for this generation.  Here is an excerpt, you can click the link to read it in it’s entirety along with comments…

When our Lord was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, He answered with Scripture, as we all know. Three times He was tested, and each time He replied in the words of Deuteronomy. But this is sometimes misunderstood. We tend to think that Jesus was quoting Scripture at the devil, as though the devil ought to start obeying it. But this was not His intent. When the Lord cited the words of Moses, each time it was because He would have been disobeying the text of Scripture if He had followed the suggestion of the tempter.

And this, in its turn, shows us the Lord’s attitude toward Scripture—what He believed the authority of Scripture to be, with regard to Him. We know that Jesus was obedient to the will of God (as seen in His prayer at Gethsemane), but we sometimes miss the fact that Jesus obeyed the Bible. In the wilderness, Jesus was not relying on a hidden, mysterious hot line to the Father that only He had. No, He bowed His head and His heart and refused to do what was wrong, as wrong was determined and settled by the sacred text.

http://www.dougwils.com/index.asp?Action=Anchor&CategoryID=1&BlogID=7139

The following is a great post on creationism among other things by Doug Wilson. (this is a link to the actual article http://bit.ly/6Gwns)

As I continue to reflect on the state of things in the UK, I wanted to post something that might be a tad provocative, and by this, I don’t mean provocative to those who are currently agitating for the ordination of sea urchins, or whatever it is they are doing these days. Those folks have the bit in their teeth and are beyond provocation.

I want to post something that might be a tad provocative to those who are fighting the good fight, taking a stand, contending for the faith once delivered, and so on. My point is a simple one. In all forms of culture war, strategic defeats that are ongoing are invariably the result of previous strategic defeats, no longer recognized as such.

Here is the drill. Something is held by all, beyond question. An innovation shows up, and is denounced by some and tolerated by most. Those who denounce it say that if this continues to be tolerated, on the grounds that he who says A must say B, we will soon be facing innovation B. And innovation B is, at the time when innovation A is still fresh, unthinkable. “Not B” is currently held by all, beyond question. But sure enough, just like it was a train staying on schedule, B shows up, and is denounced by some and tolerated by most. And so the church in a nation slowly ratchets herself downwards.

But by the time you are in real trouble — at K, say — if someone were to suggest a return to A, the thing comes across as the ultimate in bad manners, flat earthism, and moss-backed troglodytism. K is the new A, and nobody wants to say the alphabet backwards. The most ardent conservative in the current fray wants to get back to G, the ways things were when his mama was a child. He has heard stories.

But there is an internal logic to these things, whatever we agree (for political reasons) to tolerate as within the pale. We may work out a compromise and all shake hands in our new conservative coalition — “the last letter we will say is H.”

And so I introduce my subject, which is that of young earth creationism. Now if the reaction here was to slap the forehead and say, “Oh, no, not that,” I would plead with you to reread the first part of this thing. And to hear me out.

For my part, I will help you in trying to hear me out by stipulating something right up front. I have no problem granting that the first chapters of Genesis are highly stylized and poetic, and that they have many literary layers. Of course. And I will add to this the outrageous notion that many historical events have been recorded in poetry. They were recorded in poetry and with literary embellishment because they happened and because they were important.

I will go a step further. I don’t believe that God was the clodhopping workman, throwing things together however He did, and then the literary touch was added by man as he told the story. No — the literary structures are built into the world itself, and not just in the text. God’s artistry poured forth as He created, and all our art can do is imitate that. The literary structures are in the text because the text mimics the world.

That said, the real issue is one of authority. Do we at all grant any authority to our contemporary scientists when it comes to the exegesis of the first chapters of Genesis? Should the exegete feel any pressure to come up with the “right answer” so that he may continue to be academically respectable? Now of course every conservative Christian knows that the right answer is to say that Genesis stands alone, and that we ought not to be accommodating ourselves to the science of the day. But then a bunch of us add, “It just happens that the text of Genesis makes room for an old earth. If it didn’t I would resist the dictates of science to my last breath. I am not giving way to the pressures of scientism at all.”

But that is not exactly true. The thing about zeitgeist pressure is that so much of it is invisible. For example, let me grant for the sake of argument that Genesis says nothing whatever about the creation being six thousand years ago. Neither does it say anything about it being six billion years ago, or whatever the current orthodoxy is. (They have changed the catechism various times since I was a child. This is how we know the catechism is factual and something that must be trusted.) Now, since we have agreed that Genesis says nothing about when, where does this old earth business come from? There are other logical options. The earth could be older, that’s one. But it could be ten million years old. It could be young, in the six to ten thousand year range, but not because Genesis says so. It just happens to have been that way. The earth could be eternal and uncreated. The objection to this would be that this collides with creatio ex nihilo, a central Christian doctrine, but this is only a provisional objection. We haven’t gotten to Q yet, and when we do, we have plenty of scholars who will do to created what we already let them do to day. But the most fun option is that removal of time references in Genesis allows us to believe that the earth is way younger than that — say about three thousand years old. I know that this runs some of the genealogies back before the world, and makes Abraham a mythic figure, but who takes genealogies literally? And why does no one take the fun option when it would be so much fun?

The fact that the default assumption among so many evangelicals is that of an old earth, given a non-literal Genesis, demonstrates that the school marm of contemporary science is standing here in the classroom with us, ruler in hand, ready to rap our knuckles if we say something silly or biblical. She doesn’t mind if we say that we paying no attention to her, so long as we don’t put down the wrong answer. She is very quiet as she watches us do our exegesis.

In short, the time debates in Genesis are really time debates over the state of the Church in the next fifty years. The chronologies of Genesis are really about the chronologies that will be lived by our grandchildren, and their children after them.

And here is how all this applies to the UK. Your circumstances are far more dire than ours, and the contemporary follies that are being seriously advanced are in the U, V, W range. Pick one of the great satirists your island has produced, a Jonathan Swift, say, and ask what he would be able to do with the material that your newspapers are recording daily. Why is this? Why are things in this condition? Why is it so hard to mount a rally? Why can’t you get enough traction in order to fight back effectively?

The reason is (to mix metaphors) that all your letters are slippery. Every previous place where the Church once stood, virtually no one is currently standing. And those few who do stand there are very cautious about admitting it publicly — for fear of getting pummeled for it by fellow conservatives. Conservatives tag along behind the secularists, trying to retard their rate of speed, and yet conservatives themselves are careful to close behind them each gate as they pass through it. They are preventing all temptations to a reactionary fundamentalism — as though that were the real threat over there. You have another kind of fundamentalism that you need to watch out for — the Islamic variety — and your ability to stand up to that will be directly connected to your willingness to go back to Christian first principles.

Now I am not urging you to adopt a truncated, know-nothing fundamentalism. But I am urging you to adopt something that every learned solon, cleric or poobah on your island will call fundamentalism. If you aren’t accused of fundamentalism, you aren’t doing your job. Mark it — there is a difference between fighting and surrendering slowly.

We are plagued with problems here the States, and I am not trying to pretend that we are not facing our own grim dangers. We are. But for all that, one of the central reasons why evangelicalism in the United States is so full of beans is also found in this. We have millions of Christians here who are still maintaining that the issues surrounding A are important. They do it in all kinds of ways — ranging from silly and uneducated to learned and urbane — but they do it. They believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And ideas have consequences.

So do I believe that this is how God created the world? You bet. And when the secularist shakes his head over my obtuseness, and turns away in despair, I hasten to tell him that I also believe in Noah’s Flood. His eyes widen. And then I say that it is a point of no small significance for me that there be a giraffe involved, with his head and neck sticking out of the window. “You need to be medicated,” he says. And then I tell him that the flannel graph from which I learned all these things was a direct lineal descendant of the two flannel graphs that Noah took with him on the ark.

“You serious?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “That part’s a joke.”

http://www.dougwils.com