Christian Ethics in a World of Confusion-Session 2

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When we ended last time we talked about how, when it comes to Christian ethics, everything really comes down to questions of identity and of inheritance. There are ways in which we see this played out, even in the non-Christian culture at large. Say for example you are talking to someone who had moved from Portland, Oregon, to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then to Washington DC, and the cultures between these three cities. The way you could define each of these cities could be on the basis of the first question that somebody asks you when you come into town.

In Portland, it's, what's your hobby? What do you like to do? In Fayetteville, it's, have you found a church home? In Washington DC, it's, who do you work for? And so, when someone is asking you the question, "Who do you work for?" they're really asking you more than just, "Tell me what you're doing right now." They're asking you the question, essentially, who are you? If you're somebody who's working for a really progressive Democrat, that tells me something about who you are ideologically.

If you're somebody who works for a really conservative Republican, that generally tells me the direction that you're going. When you tell me what it is that you're doing, that can tell me a little bit about your life plan, about how you see yourself, about your ambition. That question really is at the heart of all of the decisions that you're going to be making, who do you work for? And behind that, the more important question, who are you and where is it that you're going?

That's what's going on around you all the time. That's one of the reasons why, when you come to a biblical understanding of the Christian life and of ethics, there are some things that would make immediate sense.

Proverbs 26:17 ESV

17 Whoever meddles in a quarrel not his own is like one who takes a passing dog by the ears.

You think of some of the Proverbs that would make immediate sense, "Don't get involved in someone else's dispute, because that's the equivalent of taking a dog by the ears." You don't have to have the Holy Spirit to recognize. I've seen that happen. I don't want that to happen to me.

But there are many other things that when you come into the New Testament and the Old as well, you realize these are things that seem to make no sense at all. If you really understand what Jesus is saying about

Matthew 5:4 ESV

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Luke 6:22–23 ESV

22 “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

Those are things, if we didn't know that Jesus is saying them, and we didn't know somehow, culturally, that these are things that we ought to revere, we would say these sound insane to us.

But that's actually what Jesus is driving at throughout the New Testament, is to bring about the kind of crisis where people realize the strangeness of what it is that he's actually calling us too. "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you can have no life in you." I mean, think about how horribly shocking, cult-leader-sounding, offensive that would be to the people that are there at the seaside, including Jesus's own disciples who say, "We're freaked out by this. We're wanting to leave right now, but we don't know where else to go."

What Jesus is consistently doing is seeking through the Spirit to bring about the kind of crisis where we genuinely know and understand how different the pattern of the way of the cross is from our natural born social Darwinism that we have, where we're constantly wanting to judge ourselves and we're constantly wanting to judge other people on the basis of power. That can be power, in a huge sense, in terms of political or economic power, or that can be power in a very small sense of who is controlling the conversation in the cubicles at the three-person, three-employee workplace. It's all the same quest for power.

An understanding of Christian ethics, though, comes in and says when we're confronted with all of these various decisions, there are a number of levels that we have to keep in mind.

And the first of those is what is called the Christic level.

Christic

Colossians 1:16 ESV

16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.

Other than the fact that Christ is God and the creator of the universe. What else does this verse tell us?

We are living in a universe that not only is created with purpose, but we're living in a universe in which everything is patterned after Jesus Christ.

"All things are created," Paul says, "for him through him and by him." Ephesians 1 is saying to us that there is a mystery at the heart of the universe, and the mystery is that God is summing up all things in Jesus Christ. And so, the sorts of decisions that we're making, if God has designed a universe that's patterned after Jesus Christ, that reveals something about the fundamental core of His character in Jesus Christ, then we're not going to have some area where we're cordoned off from the gospel, because all of the decisions that we're making, in some way or other, are dealing with the revelation of God in Christ, who it is that God is in Christ Jesus.

If we're being conformed then into the image of Christ, which is what the Spirit of holiness does. This is actually a complicated endeavor rather than simply saying, "I want to be like Jesus," which reduces everything down to an index card that you can just read and look over. Jesus, as revealed in the gospels, is strikingly complicated, in a way that is frustrating and often mystifying to the people who are with him all the time. You have someone, when everyone else is panicking, seems to be the most decaffeinated person on the planet.

The boat's about to capsize, everyone's screaming, "We're about to drown." And Jesus says, "I'm trying to sleep. Why are you waking me up?" Then in other instances, when everyone else is asleep, Jesus is sweating blood and crying out into the sky. This is a complicated figure. The life of Christ that the spirit is living through you is going to end up complicated as well.

Kingdom

The second level is the kingdom level. What Jesus says that he Is doing is announcing and embodying the kingdom of God, and teaches us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," which means that many of the decisions that we're going to be making will have to be made in terms of a long-term sense of ourselves.

By long term, I mean trillions of years. This is the issue that Jesus consistently talking about with the disciples. They're wanting to argue about who's the greatest, who's the best, who's going to have this role, and who's going to have that role, and Jesus coming in saying, "Don't you know that the first will be last and the last will be first?" What Jesus is saying is you don't have a long enough perspective of your lives.

Several years ago, I read this a business leader who was writing with words of advice to business leaders, and one of them was, "Always be nice to the interns." It wasn't because this was somebody with a special sense of compassion for the interns. He says, "Always be nice to the interns because you never know whether one of those interns will skyrocket past you on the org chart, and one day you will be accountable to one of those former interns. And so, you want to be kind to them on the way up so that they will be kind to you on the way down."

In a very real sense, that is exactly what Jesus is saying when he says the meek shall inherit the earth. And so, the idea of seeing my life in terms of the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, a hundred years, is remarkably shortsighted if in fact, I have a resurrection life that is going to extend out into eternity, and if in fact, everything that is happening in my life right now is preparing me to rule and to reign with Christ. So this is not the end all and be all. This is important, but it's important as a kind of kindergarten preparing me for the main event, having to understand where you fit in the life cycle here.

Then there's what is called ecclesial level,

Eccesial

Besides sharing the Gospel and bringing people into the Kingdom of God. What other purpose(s) does the Church serve?

If Jesus is right, and I think he is, the church is being shaped and formed as a sign to the rulers and authorities of the triumph of the kingdom of God. If the Spirit works to sanctify us through the life of the church, then that means that many of the most important questions that we have to face right now have to do with our lives together in the church, even when those things do not seem in our cultural ecosystem, to be of most importance and relevance.

Go to virtually any congregation in the country and go in and see, what is it that raises people's blood pressure? What is it that causes people to become passionate? Typically, that has to do with politics. It has to do with politics at the barest, intuitive, lizard brain sort of way of arguing with one another. Why is that the case? It's the case because those things seem more real than other questions. Those things are important. But if the gospel is true, then we're being shaped and formed within the church for the rule and reign of God.

So many of the most important questions that are facing us are things we're not even thinking about, which is why the New Testament spends a lot of time dealing with, for instance, in James 2, when you have Roman empire hostile to Christianity, you have false teachers all over the place. You have a church that could be collapsing at any minute, and James writes about seating arrangements and fashion. Why? "Don't bring the rich person and say, 'You sit here,' and say to the poor person, 'You sit back there.'" Why? Don't you know that God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?

Doesn't seem important whether or not you sit somewhere, someone in a particular place. It even doesn't seem to make rational sense. If you're planting a church in Washington DC and Jeff Bezos visits, you're not going to say, "We've run out of room. You can sit in our overflow room that's that's over there." You're not going to do that because you're going to think, "If Jeff Bezos get saved, then the sort of influence and witness that he is going to have for the kingdom is incalculable. And if the founder and owner of Amazon not only gets saved, but starts tithing, just think of the advance of missionary movement around the world."

The scripture says to think that way is shortsighted because the woman who can barely speak English, who is cleaning toilets and is faithful to Christ actually is higher on the cosmic org chart than the very influential and visibly powerful person. The church is shaping this. That then bleeds down into questions of personal ethics.

Personal

What are the habits that you are putting into place in your own life in order to seek and to follow Christ?

In doing that, we recognize the ways that we have to have one another, because we are constantly running a communications shop for ourselves, and constantly doing damage control for ourselves, and talking ourselves into ways that we can justify ourselves, so that as time goes on, as we start becoming habitually involved in things, then initially you get involved in something that you shouldn't. There's sometimes initially the sense of alarm that takes place. That alarm starts to subside over time.

What happens is without even thinking about it, what we start saying to ourselves is exactly what the prophets are talking about in the Old Testament when they say, the reaction is God does not see, God does not know. I'm escaping with this, therefore I'm going to continue doing this to the degree that it starts to become even normal for me.

And then, finally,

Social

How are we called to live together in societies and in networks of people? Christian with the Non-christian. Beyond bringing individuals to Christ.

Now, sometimes what you're going to have is some Christians who will emphasize social ethics, not emphasize personal ethics. And sometimes you're going to have Christians who will come in and emphasize personal ethics, and they won't talk about issues of social ethics. They'll say, "We don't talk about that. You just talking about how it is that you're supposed to live before Christ, but don't talk about these issues of social life."

The Bible just doesn't do that. The Bible fits together the personal and the social right together. "Those who oppress the poor and are involved in sexual immorality," denounced by Isaiah in a single in a single line. James, in the book of James, is talking about the control of the tongue and about the way that people are treating the workers on their land. Those two things go together.

Also, because if we're those who are called consistently to repentance and faith, to turning away from ourselves and turning toward the way of the cross and toward the way of Christ, that means not only the things that we do by ourselves, but also the things that we do together. Joseph's brothers can't say, "Well, you can't interrogate what we're doing in throwing our brother into the pit and selling him into slavery, because this is a political act. We're working together." No. They're working together in something that is unrighteous and something that is sin.

So when we're talking about the way of the cross, that means that we have decisions that we have to make in all of these areas, and those issues are not always simple. And so, sometimes you will have situations, whether in ecclesial, personal, social ethics, where you say, "These are issues that are completely black and white." Should you torture infants? No. We know that we're able to say that. Thus sayeth the Lord on that.

There are going to be other issues where there are going to be certain principles that are going to be biblically revealed, but we don't necessarily all come down on the same place as to how those things are to be applied. And so, you think about, questions of whether or not, for parents thinking through questions of, "Well, should I give my child an iPhone?" or what sort of school and education should I give it to my child? There are biblical principles for making those sorts of decisions, but there's not a list of rules in scripture.

If we come in and make a list of rules, "Age 15 is the age for the iPhone," then you're speaking with an authority that scripture has not given to you in a way that actually negates the rest of the Word of God. So there are going to be a lot of things that are fitting in this middle category where we need one another. And sometimes, even when we come down on opposite places of those things, we have to be the people who are making those decisions in the right way, which means that we're constantly examining as we're going for, "Am I putting to death the self? Am I walking in the way of Christ? Am I thinking this through with prayer and with supplication and with self denial? Am I paying attention to the accumulated wisdom of the church?"

Sometimes I think that it is a better situation for someone who makes a completely different decision than I would make on one of these murkier issues, but has gotten to that decision the right way, better than the person who makes the decision that I would say, "That's exactly what I would do," but who gets there thoughtlessly. Because the one who has struggled through in the first instance is actually being shaped and prepared for future habits and future decisions that are going to come down the road.

As we're doing that, recognizing and knowing that there are, again, spiritual realities all around you, meaning that there are principalities and powers that are specifically and personally watching you, if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, and specifically and personally want to take you down, if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, and specifically and personally are watching for those points of vulnerability that you have and are also watching for what it is that you desire and you want, and will be willing to give you those things at the expense of the cross.

As long as you will walk toward them away from the way of the cross, then you are walking in a way that ultimately leads to destruction. The issue, in terms of spiritual warfare, is not just what decision you're making in all of these things. It's the question of whether or not you'd rather be magnified than crucified, whether you see your identity hidden in Christ so that you're freed from the kind of fear that says, "I have to protect myself by any means necessary," that says, "The worst thing can possibly happen to me has already happened."

That's not losing my job. That's not having somebody walking out on me in a relationship. That's not getting cancer. It's being crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem under the curse of the law. That's already happened to me. That's over. The best thing that could possibly happen to me is not a stellar career, or fame, or riches. The best thing that can happen to me is being raised from the dead to newness of life, seated at the right hand of the Father, and being given an inheritance of everything in the created universe. That has already happened to me too in my life than is hidden in Jesus Christ.

As long as you're not seeing that, then the devil doesn't mind if your values are good. The devil doesn't mind if your moral theories are good. The devil doesn't mind if your principles are right side up, as long as your crosses are upside down. So when we're thinking about the issue of ethics, what we're really talking about is the cross.

Adapted from: Christian Ethics with Russell Moore

https://erlc.com/resource-library/capitol-conversations-episodes/christian-ethics-with-russell-moore-part-one/