Revelation 19:1-5

March 14, 2021

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 18:00 in the audio file.

Or, Praise to the Blood Avenger

Series: Just Conquer Part 50

A few days ago I came across this observation about the necessity of principles from Abraham Kuyper from his inaugural sermon as pastor to the church in Amsterdam, 1870:

[A]nyone entering a house in ordinary times is not thinking about the foundation on which it rests; so also in Jesus’ church there can be times when people dwell together and labor together while hardly bothering themselves about any principles. But in times like these that we are now experiencing, now when in every area the foundations are being undermined, now when everything is pressing down to the depths and people are proceeding restlessly to pry the deepest principles loose—now in these times it would be all too naïve, all too negligent for people to sidestep the issue of principles any longer. (68-69)

There are any number of principles that we Christians need to remember and rehearse in times like these, 150 years after Kuyper. Unlike the defensive (and debatable usefulness) of masks, principles are like stepping into the fresh air refreshing us against the poison of propaganda. Like dipping the tip of our staffs in honey after a long day of battle (cf. 1 Samuel 14:29, 43), principles brighten our eyes and renew our energy for training our kids. Among foundational principles, those that we must not sidestep but plant our feet firmly on, is the joist-principle of transcendent judgment.

We are the species known as homo sapiens, rational man. It could be better argued that we should be known as homo adorans, worshipping man. Based on how we treat each other, perhaps we should be called homo judgypants, or homo iudex to keep the Latin pattern. We are litigious, but only talking like lawyers if we can’t sit on the judge’s bench in the black robe banging the gavel with both hands. This is, in one way, a result of being made in the image of God who is a God of law. But after the fall of man into spiritual death we are petty and perjurers and are peaking out from under Justice’s blindfold to find a scapegoat for our own guilt. Whatever we know, it must be someone else’s bad.

Left to human standards, we are not going back to leaving each other alone. Social Justice Warriors and mask police may have other names in the future and be self-righteous about other issues, but the judgypants gene is dominant. There have always been Pharisees and church ladies, thanking God that they are “not like other men” (Luke 18:11).

It’s one of the reasons that Dante’s Inferno is such a longstanding and cross-cultural guilty-pleasure. You don’t need to know a tenth of the actual Italian history to revel in an imaginative theater of bad guys getting what they deserve, or at least being entertained by Dante’s inventive punishments.

Solomon wrote about life “under the sun,” an intentionally non-transcendent phrase, that men see so many other men not paying for their sins or crimes, or the sentence isn’t executed quickly (Ecclesiastes 8:11), and it emboldens more wrongdoing, including the evil of false judgments, name-calling and reputation-ruining and sometimes life-taking.

One of the first-principles, the built-in gun-safe full of Bibles principles, is that we live in a world governed by a superior Judge. The judge-ness of this Judge is not His only attribute, but He cannot be other than judge. The Judge judged the serpent, the woman, and the man in the garden (Genesis 3). The Judge will judge the sailors, the merchants, the musicians, the bakers, the electricians, and the kings in the great city (Revelation 18). With a hat tip to Francis Schaeffer we might say: He is there and He is not sightless; He sees.

The Lord claimed vengeance as His in the law of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:35). This principle still applied in Ro[...]