Prophetic Weeping, Part 1

Prophetic Weeping, Part 1
Wednesday, August 25, 2021 by Dr. James W. Walraven

The other day a friend suggested a particular website to me, saying that I’d likely find it of interest. I did. The author of the website was engaging in Christian apologetics (old definition: giving an answer) and being very blunt and forthright.

But something about that website troubled me. After reflecting on it, it dawned on me that it was the overall tone of the author that concerned me. In our current run-amok culture, we need, at times, to be blunt. But at the same time, is our tone strident, or even worse, loveless?

What is our attitude towards those who biblically appear to be proclaiming a false gospel? What do we think about those who we believe are leading others astray, and more to the point, those being led astray? These aren’t idle questions. Many of my own entries in the “Thoughts for Today” series, including the one just completed, deal with these issues. That series dealt with the NAR Cult, the false Bible version “The Passion Translation,” and ongoing troubling trends in the Southern Baptist Convention.

The difficulty is, if our tone is strident-especially if it comes across as loveless-we are in danger of becoming what 1 Corinthians 13 describes as a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. What we can be saying might be spot-on accurate, but all people hear is noise. In a way it reminds me of the stereotyped image of an unkempt man with a cardboard sign yelling, “Repent,” on a crowded sidewalk, while the crowds walk around him, totally ignoring him. That message is vitally important but is being proclaimed in a way that no one hears it.

A possible rejoinder is, “They’d reject anyway since most people love darkness, since their deeds are evil.” Biblically, that is true. But how we say what we say matters. If, as God through John declares, that the world will know we are Jesus’s disciples by our love for one another (granted Jesus is speaking of a believer’s love for other believers), if our public proclamations are loveless, it doesn’t help.

To restate the issue, even if most will reject the call to repent from their sin, to wake up and see how they’ve been deceived (those who proclaim “wokeness” are biblically speaking, among the most deceived), how do we go about it?

In Revelation 2, God commends the church at Ephesus for their perseverance, and for finding the false apostles false. Not only that, they also persevered. Nevertheless, God then warns them that they’d left their first love and needed to repent. That loss of love most likely related to their love of God. But could that loss of love have permeated other areas? It Ephesians 1, Paul prayed that they would come to truly know the depth of God’s love (Ephesians 3:14–19). They were not complete, something was missing (see also the prayer in Ephesians 1:16–21).

The question is, what about us? Is there something off about the way we proclaim what is true? It is not enough to find false teachers false and to soldier on, persevering. Is there a solid example and biblical role model we can follow? We will examine that question in the next post.

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