The onslaught of thin-skinned small-l liberalism, Modernism, in the Church presently to determine the rationalistic future of Christianity now mutates into late twentieth century, early twenty-first century Postmodernism with its baffling relativistic values difficult to evade.
• Strengths of Neo-Conservatism mislead into revolts of disobedience against Christ Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom.
• Lay armies of the Islam moving into every country put Christianity on the defensive.
• Phoenix-like, Nazism draws renewed popularity from a generation unfamiliar with its hateful destruction and death.
• The Religious Right flies its political flag only over reactionary battles, discrediting the name of the Lord.
Furthermore, proponents of society at large pride themselves on secular and multicultural political systems, liberal democracies. With foundational values changed into the religiosities of multiculturalism to accommodate all, everyone must honor religious aspirations, each with its distinctive demands involving a host of reactive communities. The rise of the secular state pushes the lordship of Jesus Christ into a corner, all the while with patronizing intent seeking to please religious communities with some sort of equal status—as if political legislation may dominate the Lord of heaven and earth, and determine the place of religion in public life.
These and more rebellious turbulences depress, make uncomfortable, in fact, question Christ’s claims to headship in the Church and lordship over the earth. Worse, each at ground-level revolution presents a pleasant face and offers friendship: assimilate and ameliorate tension by focusing on our vision of the future. Each such hole of lamentation dark with fatal confidence holds up freedom from the Christ and underpins the roaming rights of human autonomy.
For many of the Church, hearts grow colder; amidst circling enmities, love of neighbors in a missionary way and on a local scale slides away. Enough is enough, and therefore the old way into covetousness on its unstable ground takes over. Cross-carrying? No, self-serving! As numb devotion immerses in complacency, more fall asleep in church, so much the wiser than the Christ; on slow drifts into conformity with the world and unstoppable in reprobation, they lock into every enemy force. Rather than love for church neighbors manifested by holding the Christ first and high through doing the Commandments, social, financial, and political ambitions offer a nice as well as ravishing environment in which all care for themselves and get along driven by cumbersome forms of toleration. This other eschatology, however, since long ago and in each generation still breaks off from the main road. Primary care for oneself and a few choice good works for neighbors and friends produce a lukewarm sort of civil religion—Christianity on the outside, revolution in a fury on the inside.
In every generation, as the world’s hatred for the Christ manifests itself always the same; with hustling and bustling in design, the pressure is on against the Church doing the new commandment, “Love one another.” John 13:34–35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 15:12, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” This love for one another that Jesus drew from the Old Testament and reinitiated within the Twelve he applied to the entire Church all through the centuries and millennia of his one thousand-year reign—until the Parousia. By this neighbor love, he demonstrates his mighty agape in and for the Church. On a directly personal front, John 14:21, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” This agape separates the Church from the world’s multiform ideological hates. Christ’s all-consuming love for the Church and this all-consuming love of the Church for neighbors manifest the humorless difference between the Church and the world. Repetitious proclamation of this love sharpens discipleship and penetrates hearts of flesh with reformation.
As Jesus took salvific suffering obediently upon himself for the Church, unrestricted manifestation of his church-saving work, so too on the way ahead the Twelve took up and congregations take up whatever persecution Jesus Christ deems necessary to the glory of the Father.
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By the entire in the world/not of the world paradox, the Son of God, the LORD God, at the covenant reformation with Abraham separated the Church from the nations and the ideologies/idolatries. However, throughout the Old Testament dispensation, the Church chafing to be comfortable in the world identified with and bowed before the expansionist idols of the times. During the Middle Ages, the Church dominated the political processes, bearing witness to the spirit of the Roman Empire. As recent as the twentieth century, those who claimed they follow the Lord Jesus, Savior, nestled comfortably in Western culture, fearful of being perceived different, which marks in every generation the dark side of Church History. Nevertheless, at the end of his ministry, notably at the Passover celebration with the Twelve, Jesus reasserted the Church’s calling to be in the world, but never of the world. To this day, all in Christ confront and live this paradox.
2–4
Exod 5:22–6:27 (6:10–13)
“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the people of Israel go out of his land.’ But Moses said to the LORD, ‘Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?’ But the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a charge to the people of Israel and to Pharaoh king of Egypt to bring the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt.”
IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD
A FREEDOM-AND-SLAVERY PARADOX
The LORD, Savior, whom God the Spirit, Luke 1:35, later revealed as God the Son, executed Israel’s release from Egyptian slavery, thereby accomplishing a prophecy he granted Abraham, Gen 15:13–14. During the Exodus from out of the house of bondage, the LORD, God Almighty, Exod 6:3, recreated for the full force of salvation his dominion over heaven and earth, all of which he brought to bear only on Abraham’s numerous descendants. Throughout, the LORD persevered for and in Israel’s freedom from slavery, however much the sacrilegious Pharaoh and even Israel shamefully balked at his omnipotent grace. When hell-bent Egypt and the people of the covenant confused freedom with slavery, the LORD God revealed a paradox—freedom in slavery—for the liberation of the Old Testament Church at that time.
Much later, by mystifying slavery with freedom, Caesarianism suppressed the Church; at the same time, Pharisaism and Sadduceism confined the Savior’s own in a legal perversion of liberty, the Tradition of the Elders. During the Middle Ages, Scholasticism oppressed the Church with another cunning design. More recently, the Enlightenment and French Revolution infatuation stifled the faith of the Church, relegating Christ Jesus to private opinion. Now, secularism aided by humanism and Postmodernism strangles the Faith by touting freedom from the Lord and Savior. As at the time of the Exodus, the Lord Jesus Christ, almighty over heaven and earth, always perseveres to release his people from a freedom actually slavery and for a slavery actually freedom.
New generations of Christ in the tangible Church caught by the ageless in the world/not of the world paradox confront this eschatological perplexity between freedom and slavery. In the Exodus, as the paramount work of liberation in the Old Testament dispensation, the LORD revealed for all unsettled skeptics his perseverance in recreating the Church.
REPETITIONS OF A COMMAND
Egypt, dominant in the lapsed world, expected all people equally ensnared in the world to submit to its tyranny, a degenerate enough fantasy, specifically the yoke of slavery for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The reigning Pharaoh resisted the Exodus to the death, determined
