This post was first published during November 2019. –ed.
Antipathy toward God’s Word inherently resides in the hearts of all sinners. Scripture is viewed as outdated, irrelevant, and primitive. It’s regarded as an ancient book of suspect origin that is beneath enlightened society. This antipathy can even be present in those within the church.
If there is any doubt about this, it is worth asking why popular evangelicalism’s greatest fear is being out of sync with the culture. Pastors and leaders so chase the culture that its trends show up in their churches. They treat this pursuit as a necessary evangelistic strategy. But the only way to be in sync with the culture is to diminish the presence of the Word of God, because unregenerate culture will always be fundamentally and irreconcilably incompatible with the truth of God. By catering to the unchurched or to the unconverted in the church, evangelicalism has been hijacked by legions of carnal spin doctors seeking to convince the world that Christians can be just as inclusive, pluralistic, and open-minded as any postmodern, politically correct worldling.
However, true biblical Christianity requires a denial of every worldly value and behavior, and Christians must be willing to make a commitment to the Word of God, with a full understanding of the implications of doing so. Jesus plainly tells the disciples in John 15:19 that the world will hate them because they are not of this world. God has chosen believers out of the world, and the world hates them. In Luke 6:26, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”
Why is the world so fixed in its animosity toward the truth of God? Jesus says in John 7:7, “The world . . . hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil.” Contempt for Scripture is not intellectual; it’s moral. As the Lord explained to Nicodemus, “Men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). How tragic for the church to seek to accommodate that worldly affection, since it is impossible by any human method to overcome the sinner’s resistance to the truth and the gospel (2 Corinthians 3:14). The only time the church has made any spiritual impact on the world is when the people of God have stood firm and have refused to compromise, boldly proclaiming the truth in the face of the world’s hostility. In the end, seeking cultural relevance will only result in obsolescence, since tomorrow’s generation will inevitably renounce today’s fads and philosophies.
In the face of ever-changing cultural trends, the church needs to boldly proclaim the eternal relevance and evergreen applicability of the Word of God. In particular, Christians must embrace and exalt six truths about Scripture: its objectivity, rationality, veracity, authority, incompatibility, and timelessness. These six characteristics help us understand the essential nature of God’s Word and help us better minister to a sinful world in desperate need of Scripture’s life-transforming truth. And we’ll examine all of them in the days ahead.
(Adapted from Final Word)
