The Gospel, Corruption, and “How should we then live?”
This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ in four parts:
We have a Holy, creator God who is perfect, just, and loving.
We are fallen, broken, sinful, self-serving, deceitful, and have wicked hearts. Because of that we are doomed to be separated from God.
Despite our unworthiness, God pursues us until our last breath, becoming a man, walking with us on earth, living a perfect life in service to us, dying for our sins, and resurrecting Himself to show us that He has conquered sin, death, and hell itself, simply because of His love for us.
When we turn from our sin and selfishness, accept God's grace, and give our lives to Christ, we are forgiven by God. Not only for our individual sins, but our sinful nature. This results in a life of obedience and repentance, being joined to God for eternity, and His promises to live with us and make Himself known to us.
Why are my first words on this podcast the Gospel? Because this corrupt world is in desperate need of a plumb line. A standard of truth, love, and actions. And this is the true plumb line by which I will be measuring everything we discuss from here on out. This is the God-declared Truth, and the place where standards begin.
Christianity is the dominant world religious belief, with a reported 2.38 billion professing adherents out of more than 7 billion people. If you are one of my regular readers, you know that I am a professing Christian.
If so many, including me, profess Christ, then why are we so surprised at corruption?
When it boils down to examining political, medical, media, church, individual, or any kind of corruption, why are so many Christians constantly skeptical of it?
The second point of the Gospel is that we are ALL corrupt, fallen, broken, sinful, selfish, and following our own interests. In fact, when we discuss the flaws of people, both Christians and non-Christians describe them as a product of “human nature,” or part of the “human condition.” We recognize instinctively that, “Nobody is perfect.”
Those who believe the Gospel should never be surprised at corruption as it is the base nature of all humans. They should never be skeptical of claims that government agencies try to circumvent accountability mechanisms in order to take unfair or illegal advantage of their position to serve their own interests. The response to the accusation that a wealthy, powerful, or famous individual is abusing their position should be, “Might be. What is your evidence?”
God flat out tells us in Ecclesiastes 5:8:
“If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them.”
God Himself describes the structures of corrupt systems, and tells us we are not to be surprised. We are to expect it.
What should not be the response of any believer to a corruption claim is, “You are a conspiracy theorist.” The response is not only intellectually lazy, intentionally malicious, and unloving, it is also a denial of the basic tenet of the Gospel that man is fallen. It is to call God a liar when He says that all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. It makes the absurd claim that some humans are incorruptible. None of us are.
There is no distinction between sinners and non-sinners. We are all sinners. In fact, the population of the world can be put into one of two categories, Sinners, or Repentant Sinners.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and some of those sinners happily keep on sinning, but some live a life of repentance.
The Bible defines repentance as a condition of the heart, that results in the following actions:
Numbers 5:5-7
“And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 6 “Speak to the people of Israel, When a man or woman commits any of the sins that people commit by breaking faith with the Lord, and that person realizes his guilt, 7 he shall confess his sin that he has committed. And he shall make full restitution for his wrong, adding a fifth to it and giving it to him to whom he did the wrong.”
This is the way we taught this passage to our young children:
When you realize that you have done something wrong, either because your conscience tells you so, or someone confronts you on your wrongdoing:
Stop doing it.
Admit to what you did wrong.
Clean up your mess, and leave it 20% better than before you made the mess in the first place.
If you stole, stop stealing, admit that you stole it, and pay it back with 20% interest.
If you lied, stop lying, tell the truth, and make it 20% better for the victim than it was before the lie.
If you were cruel, turn cruelty to love, admit to your viciousness, and heal the target of your malice to the point that they are healthier than they were before you savaged them.
I am convinced that the 20% added fee in reparations both vindicates and heals the victim. Repentance brings both sinner and victim out of darkness, shifts the unfair burden to the rightful owner, the sinner, and begins to set things right in the world. There is no such thing as true justice in the on this side of heaven, but repentance is the first step in the path toward justice. It brings truth, it set things right, and it can set upright fallen individuals, communities, institutions, industries, and countries.
Think about that thing that has really injured you. The huge scar that you bear because an uncaring unaccountable, capricious or vindictive individual left you with a burden that was not yours to bear. What would it do for you if they showed up in your life again, admitted that they wronged you, both to you and to anyone else impacted by their sin, and set about the task of cleaning up the mess they made in your life?
What if they decided to make your life a little better than it was before their selfish act?
I have thought about this with my son's vaccine injury. What if the doctors who did this to him showed up at my door and said, “You were right. We harmed him and we can't live with the guilt. We have a plan to try to heal him and give you back what has been stolen from your family for the last 18 years.” It is a fantasy that always leaves me in tears.
That is what God calls us to do when we harm someone.
And it does not just begin to heal the injured. It also helps the sinner unburden himself of his sin, and become accountable not to sin in this way again. A man who has committed acts of repentance, and now holds himself accountable to repent of all wrong doing, knows that he will simply place a far heavier burden on himself in his recidivism than he would have had if he simply resisted the temptation to sin in the first place.
Repentance creates a cycle of self accountability.
So true repentance is always expensive. At a minimum, it hurts one's pride. At a maximum, it can sentence some to the death penalty.
Which is why so few do it.
But repentance is THE thing that is required by the Gospel to come into relationship with God. It is the first mark of a Christian. It is the ongoing mark of a Christian. God grants repentance to his children as a gift. So if you see a professing Christian that lives a life of even partial disobedience, (as all Christians ultimately do) but you never see acts of repentance arising from humility and love for others, do you see a believer in Christ, or are you seeing someone who professes a faith that they do not actually posses?
God has said that we will know a Christian by their good works, and by their love for their brother. The first commandment is to love God, and loving God produces a desire to obey God. The second commandment is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. “Human nature” results in sinning against others on a semi-regular basis. Thus, those who are repeatedly sinning, while failing to admit to that sin and set things right, show us that they do not love God, nor do they love others enough to do right by the injured when they cause them harm.
So in our discussion of corruption, from our position at the foot of the cross, with the Gospel being our plumb line of truth, we must start with an acceptance of the idea that corruption is everywhere.
Those who believe in Christ must face the fact that we are constantly in need of correcting ourselves as we live our daily lives.
We have to face the fact that there are those who see no need to repent of even serious crime. Ever.
Many of those individuals have become successful in politics and industry. And while they have hearts that are evil, so do we. Our first response to them is often disbelief, outrage, haughtiness, and hatred. They have become oppressors that will do whatever they think they can get away with doing. Ire and disgust at them is a natural response.
It is almost always my response.
But God has called me to love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me. He has told me not to celebrate when my enemies fall. So I am committed to becoming someone who is obedient in these difficult commands.
So the question becomes, what does that look like in the age of the public – private partnership, which is simply the new term to describe government – pharmaceutical fascism? When people, even children, are left to die from a disease that has inexpensive and easily accessed prevention and treatments, in order to sell pharmaceutical products that are unavoidably unsafe, and may even have negative efficacy, how does one obey God in his command to love such an enemy?
How do we respond to the horribleness that we are watching, and not make things worse in our response?
What I am asking is a very old question. It was most succinctly put by Francis Schaeffer in his 1974 works, “How Should We Then Live?”
Schaeffer, in his book and documentary series made at the intersection of the civil rights era and the sexual revolution, runs through world history and points out that “there is nothing new under the sun.” He notes that in all difficult times in world history, the question and challenge remain the same.
"There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted in what people think. And what they think will determine how they act. There is violence and a breakdown in society up to the point in which it's unsafe to walk through the streets in many of the cities of the world. On the other hand, there is a danger of an increasing authoritarianism to meet the threat of chaos in our own countries, and internationally. Should we despair, and give in? If not, how should we then live?”
So in this series, Ginger Taylor, In Many Words, we will take up Schaeffer's question and his challenge. He noted that the drift from truth and morality ends in social collapse. While some of us have understood this fascist threat for the last decade or more, it has now become crystal clear to half of the population as the increasing corruption, deception, and authoritarianism has come into plain view in the age of Corona, Pandemic, and the Great Reset.
The answer to the question “How should we then live?” IS the Gospel:
It is to understand that we have a creator God who is perfect, just and loving. That we are fallen, small, and broken. That God pursues us to our last breath and longs to draw us into His shelter like chicks under his wing. That the chief end of man is not success in (insert worldly pursuit here), but to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. And to respond to this understanding by entering into relationship with Christ, obeying Him, and repenting as we go.
Thus our journey in facing the oppressive evil in the world today, is to first humble ourselves, throw ourselves on God's loving mercy, and realize that the only thing that stands between us and being Fauci, is God's grace.
This has been Ginger Taylor, In Many Words.
The Gospel, Corruption, and “How Should We Then Live?”