WAITING FOR THE BUTCHER

Arthur W. Pink in his Exposition of the Gospel of John wrote, “God will never have it forgotten that the Cross is the basis of all blessing.” God’s Law, as we have it in the Ten Commandments and in the Sermon on on the Mount is something else that God would never have forgotten. But solid, ongoing preaching and teaching relative to the Law of God and the Cross of Christ have steadily declined as subject matter for America’s pulpits over the last many decades until it has become almost non-existent. (Thank God for the exceptions to this, but they appear to be few and far between).

Because the Law and the Cross have been mostly replaced as sermon subject matter with “everything but” the Law and the Cross we have the situation described by Dr. Harold O. J. Brown [1933-2007] who earned four degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School, ranging from biochemistry to church history. He said, “The structure of American society is being demolished brick by brick. Within a few short years, Americans will have reached the ‘liberty’ desired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the abolition of every particular dependency. This is what Hannah Arendt called ‘the atomistic mass’, a precondition for the establishment of totalitarianism. But the American body politic remains supine, like a fat sow, occasionally twitching or flicking her tail at the pricks of the insects but doing nothing to evade the approach of the butcher.” (I would only add to the words, “the American body politic” above, the words “and most of America’s churches.”)