Jeremiah – Confident.Faith

Καιρὸς τοῦ φιλῆσαι καὶ καιρὸς τοῦ μισῆσαι· καιρὸς πολέμου καὶ καιρὸς εἰρήνης.

You will usually see this rendered into English as ‘There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.’, which is not inaccurate, but it is misleading for the reader who does not know the difference between English “time” and Greek “καιρός” (a term we have actually just imported directly into English). Greek certainly has a word that is truly the equivalent of our time, but it is not καιρός; it is χρόνος, from which we get such words as chronological and chronometer. Καιρός is something more than mere time. And so, permit me to provide a better English translation: ‘There exists a due season for (or to) love and a due season for (or to) hate; a due season for war and a due season for peace.’ I trust we are all familiar enough with English to recognize that “due season” is a set term that may mean anything from a moment up to an era, or even eternity; “due season” is simply our notion of καιρός, and it is, in fact, used to translate καιρός in some translations of Scripture:

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

(that is, indeed, καιρός there rendered “due season”).

Love and hatred are centrally important concepts in Scripture, and few things are more abused by modern pastors and ‘exegetes’. In the false conception of Christianity that so many advance or defend these days, we have no enemies and we are to love everyone and hate no one. What would these moderns say to Jesus Who called Peter “Satan” in today’s Gospel reading, or to Paul who instructs us in today’s Epistle reading to “abhor what is evil”? You cannot have love without hate (at least not in this world). If you do not hate that which threatens that which and those whom you love, then you do not truly love. The Lord God hates the devil, sin, and sinners. Would these ‘moderns’ accuse God Himself of error? And it is abject nonsense to contend that something that is sin when men do it is not sin simply because God is doing it instead; moral relativism corrupts the soul and the mind.

The truth is far different from what these men would like to get you to believe. In truth, you do have enemies and you are commanded to hate. One of the tricks employed most frequently by the enemy is conflation. If his minions can convince you that two unlike or distinct things are identical or that a term with multiple senses is univocal, then he wins a great victory without having to alter a single letter of the text; equivocation and eisegesis are powerful weapons indeed. Conflation is exactly what we have here with “enemy”. English, for better or worse, does not distinguish (at least not by using a different word) between different kinds of enemies. Latin has inimicus and hostis: I am to forgive inimici mei — my personal enemies. Greek has ἐχθρός and πολέμιος: I am to forgive ἐχθροί μου — my personal enemies. I cannot forgive the hostis, the πολέμιος — the public enemy —, for he is not my enemy in the personal sense. We are commanded to forgive our personal enemies, not public enemies. It takes only one example to both make this obvious and destroy all opposition to such clear truth: ‘Have you forgiven Satan?’ If the opponent says no, then he has agreed that some enemies must not be forgiven (and thereby cedes the entire argument); if your opponent says yes, then you ask him if he believes himself more merciful and loving than God (Who has most certainly not forgiven Satan). Our enemies’ positions are so very easily defeated, and yet many fall for their lies and their tricks.

Ultimately, these enemies are antinomians or even nomoclasts — haters, despisers, and destroyers of God’s perfect Law. If God commands you to hate, then who are you to tell Him that He is wrong? Do you know better than God? Are you more just than He? You may gain the approval of the world if you deny that Christians must hate, but perhaps our Gospel reading has something to say about the man who gains the world by compromising the things of God and a related thing about what that will surely cost him. When the Christ returns in His glory with the angels He will recompense all for their deeds in this life. What do you suppose He will do to those who lied about His Nature and attempted to lead His sheep astray? There exists an outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Our Epistle reading for today could not be more clear about this matter:

Let love be genuine: Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

The Greek, of course, has no punctuation, but, in English, there should surely be a colon after the command “Let love be genuine”, for the balance of the verse is how we are to do this: We must not only “hold fast to what is good”, but we must also “abhor what is evil”. The Greek word there that is translated “abhor” does, much the same as the English, mean hate. This verse does not merely command you to hate; it also tells you that you cannot love if you do not hate. Our English translations rightly employ a semicolon here: These are two parts of, or even two ways to express, the same thought. I personally find it extremely unlikely that Paul was not thinking of Ecclesiastes when he wrote this part of his letter. Our ESV editors added a number of footnotes:

Seek out what is fine and honorable, and not what is base, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God who rules all, shall be with you, even in the manner you yourselves have declared: “We have hated the base things and loved the good.” Restore judgment in the gates, that the Lord, the God who rules all, may show pity to those who remain of Joseph.

I did not set before my eyes a thing beside the law;

those who do transgressions I hated.

A crooked heart did not cling to me;

as the evil one was turning aside from me, I did not know him.

You who love the Lord, hate evil.

The Lord guards the souls of His pious ones;

He will draw them out from the hand of sinners.

and these are good, but they should have also included Ecclesiastes 3:8:

There is a due season to love and a due season to hate;

there is a due season for war and a due season for peace.

If the Ecclesiast can say, in the Spirit, that there is a time for war and hatred, then Christians surely cannot assert in good conscience that we are to love, forgive, and be at peace with all men. What does Paul say in our Epistle reading?

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

If we were intended to live at peace with all men, then Paul would not have included a caveat; if it is necessary to include “if possible”, then there exists at least the possibility that it will prove impossible to live at peace with some men.

Tell me: Has it proven possible to live at peace with all men? Was peace possible with the Jews that persecuted the Early Church? Was peace possible with Sodom and Gomorrah? Was peace possible with the Mohammedans that invaded Europe and plagued the Medieval Church? Was peace possible for Abraham when barbarians kidnapped Lot? Is peace possible today with the wicked Jews, Muslims, and Hindus? God commanded His people to exterminate His enemies in Canaan. They failed and ceased to be His people. God does not change. Incidentally, when the Ancient Israelites failed to obey God and destroy the peoples He commanded them to destroy, He let their lands be overrun by foreigners, including those they had failed to destroy. Again: God does not change.

And so let us return to Ecclesiastes: There is a time for love and peace, and there is a time for hatred and war. You must ask yourself if you believe you are in the former or in the latter. When you look around, does it seem like we are in a time of love, unity, and peace or does it seem like we are in a time of hate, division, and war? Do you think that if we were to throw down our weapons, our enemies would choose to live with us in peace? Where peace is not possible, you must prepare for war.

To the Greek reader, καιρός did not simply mean ‘a good time’ to do something; rather, it implied something much greater: A kairotic moment was not merely the right time to act; it was a moment that demanded action, and to fail to act was seen as foolish, disastrous, or even wicked. A wise man is one who understands the times, one who neither forces an action out of season nor fails to seize the kairotic moment when it arrives. Speeches, campaigns, battles, and much else are governed by kairotic moments that are seized or missed. In the words of the Psalmist:

Every pious man will offer prayer to You [for this] in a season that is fitting; / yet in a flood of many waters they will not come near him.

The prayers of the pious man shield him from disaster. In the words of Paul (and Isaiah):

“In a kairotic moment, I listened to you,

and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

God offers to men the free gift of salvation — behold, the kairotic moment! — and He does so according to His good time and plan — behold, the day of salvation! —, and some men seize this lifeline and are drawn into the Ark that is the Church and some men reject Christ’s outstretched hand and are swept away by the floodwaters. Death waits for no man, and men who ‘plan’ to confess on their deathbeds often find God has scheduled their departure earlier than they expected:

Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?

The Lord God is patient, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, but opportunities for mortals to repent are not infinite. Tempt not the Lord; miss not καιρός.

Christianity is a religion of peace: By, through, and for the sake of Christ, we have peace with God and adoption as sons; via the certainty of our Election, confirmed and sealed in the waters of Baptism, we are at peace with our own mortality and the inevitability of death; due to the promises of God, we are at peace in this life, even when matters seem bleak or hopeless. Christianity is a religion of war: From the Garden onward, God and His camp have been at war with Satan and his; every single day, every single Christian wages a personal war against the temptations of the flesh, the world, and the devil; and the children of God here in time, the Church Militant, wage war against the enemies of God. Our forefathers in the faith understood their duties to God and man when they drove the Saracen hordes from Europe and pursued the vile heathens back to their lands across the sea — lands that were once, and will be again, Christian; we find ourselves today in a worse position than they — these are not times for peace. Jehu understood his duties to God and man when he looked upon the wicked practices of Ahab and set about to purge the worship of Baal, Asherah, and other demons from his lands; we find ourselves in a worse position than he, for abortion surely outranks child sacrifice and fornication and pornography surely outrank temple prostitution — it is not a time for peace. Our ancestors from the Roman Empire onward, were surely acting in accord with their duties to both God and man when they suppressed, oppressed, persecuted, expelled, and certainly did not tolerate the wicked Jews; we find ourselves in a worse position today, for, while the Jews continue their wicked opposition to the Christ and their genocidal campaign against all mankind, our institutions (to include our government) are even more thoroughly captured and more deeply corrupt than those of nearly any past era — it is not a time for peace. If the words of the Lord God in Ecclesiastes are true, then there exists a time for hatred and war; if the words of the Lord God spoken by Paul in today’s Epistle reading are true, then we are commanded to hate that which is evil. It is my contention and my firm belief that it requires only the most minimal — even remedial — sort of spiritual discernment, or even merely natural human wisdom according to reason, to recognize that we now live in a time of war.

To live in a time of war and call it a time of peace is to betray both God and man, to participate in the wicked shout of ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace. To find yourself in a kairotic moment that demands war and to not only fail to seize upon and pursue it but to go so far as to run in the opposite direction and seek after an impossible peace is to commit a sin worse than Jonah’s, to be a fool, a coward, and a traitor.

I want to make absolutely certain that I have been completely clear about the necessary exegesis of the passage from Ecclesiastes: God does not say there ‘may’ be a time for hatred and war; He says in no uncertain terms that there will be times for hatred and war; in fact, this is so certain that He employs the simple present to state it as bare fact: There is a time for hatred and there is a time for war. And of our passage from Romans: You cannot have a genuine love without both holding fast to what is good and hating what is evil. If the Christian life is one that involves love (and it most certainly is), then so, too, must it necessarily involve hatred.

It may help you, in dealing with these matters, to think of yourself as a soldier in God’s army, and so you are, for you are a member of the Church Militant; as a soldier, you are not at liberty to throw down your weapons and declare the enemy forgiven — it is not your place to do so. Your rightful Lord and Commander gets to declare who is a friend and who is a foe. Your duty is to follow orders and hold the line. Whatever calls you have been given and whatever tasks have been set before you, it is your duty to love your own as dearly as God loves us, to forgive your personal enemies because God has forgiven us, to oppose the enemies of God and His children with all you can muster, and to remain loyal with all that you are.

Amen.

Persecution has not been the universal experience of all Christians at all times in all places; there have been periods of peace, prosperity, and tranquility. (That these have virtually always been under the aegis of a Christian State with an established Church should not go without mention, but it will have to be a passing one today.) And yet, persecution has often been the fate of Christians down through the centuries (or even ages, if we want to include such men as Abel and Noah). And the existence of a supposedly Christian State is no perfect guarantee against persecution — Luther was persecuted by an Emperor and a pope, both of whom claimed to be Christian. Today, our government would not be called Christian by any but the most delusional of men, but Satan is never content; having virtually complete his conquest of the various Western governments and their attached or aligned institutions, he turned his attention to the churches decades ago (centuries ago, in some obvious cases). This should surprise no one; hear the words of our Lord from today’s Gospel reading:

»Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.«

Does our Lord speak of persecution by the State or some other such authority? No, not even (exclusively, anyway) in the portion of this passage immediately before today’s reading, where He speaks of being “dragged before governors and kings”. He speaks, instead, of a more personal sort of betrayal. Our Lord was certainly persecuted and murdered by the Jewish authorities (and the Jewish people generally), but He was also betrayed by Judas, His former friend; it is that sort of personal betrayal of which Jesus speaks in this passage. Despite the parallelism, we should not limit our understanding of what Jesus means when He says ‘brother’ (or ‘child’ and ‘parent’, for that matter) to the familial; what is in view here is every sort of intimate or personal betrayal, and that certainly includes all those who are brothers by ways other than blood — close friends, brothers-in-law, brothers-in-arms, brothers-in-Christ. And that last category is certainly Satans’s focus today.

Mercifully, most of you are not in a position to hear many, and certainly not most, of the stories of all the ways our churches are betraying so very many men today (and it is mostly [relatively] young men who are being betrayed), but I am in a position to hear them. And I do not think for a second that the faithless men pushing for expulsion, excommunication, and blacklisting (among many other forms of persecution) would hesitate to use the State to literally execute (which is to say murder) the men they are persecuting, if they thought the State would cooperate. In fact, such persecutors and slanderers and blasphemers have engaged in attempted murder: doxxing and false reports to law enforcement. If such ‘men’ were not so cowardly (itself a grievous sin), then they would certainly have taken up arms themselves and murdered the men they have persecuted; and they would have firmly believed that they were rendering service to God in doing so. Of course, their assessment would have been half true: They would, indeed, have been rendering service to their god, who is most certainly not the Lord God.

The very persecution of which Jesus warns in this passage is rampant in the churches. In fact, things are so bad these days that it would be accurate to say that we are in a period of widespread persecution, and — more importantly — we can ‘use’ that persecution as an indication of who is faithful and who is faithless: In times of faithlessness and persecution, those who are not persecuted are not faithful. If you have never suffered for the faith, then I encourage you to examine yourself — and particularly you men, for cowardice, which is to say a lack of courage or manliness, is damnable sin. For most, such suffering need not be the sort of ‘grand’ or high-profile persecution that has been inflicted on some of us; for many, suffering for the faith will take a more ‘mundane’ form: lost friends, estranged family, perhaps some other social or economic consequences. The point is that Satan, for the moment, controls the board, and a faith that he ignores is a faith that is in some way lacking. We do not live in a time of a Christian ruler and a faithful established Church under him; rather, we live in a time of a wicked government, a pervasively evil bureaucracy that invades almost every facet of our lives, and a nearly universal apostasy among the so-called churches; under such circumstances, the Christian should not — and the Christian will not — expect to escape persecution. You will suffer for the faith. You may not be martyred — even Luther died of old age, but both the Emperor and the pope sought his head for many years, and we, unlike Luther, do not have faithful German princes to hide, provide for, and protect us. We can certainly rely upon God, but not all saints escaped the lions. If you must go the lions, then to the lions you must go.

The Christian proclamation is one of eternal comfort, not one of temporal comfort. Temporal peace relies upon having a righteous, competent, and powerful State; that is a valid and important consideration for Christian men, but it is not the core concern of the Christian faith. Whether the king is righteous or wicked, whether the culture is Christian or not, whether it will cost you nothing or everything, you must confess Christ and Him crucified in both your words and your deeds. A faith that produces no good works is a dead faith, and it is only a living faith that saves. Or do you think that the Christ so often employed plant metaphors idly? As any gardener (or keeper of houseplants, at least) will tell you: Living plants always grow, and healthy fruit tree always bear fruit.

Learn the lesson of the fig tree: It was not the season for figs, which certainly ‘excuses’ the fig tree, but the Christ did not curse the tree as punishment of the tree, but as a lesson for you: There are no ‘seasons’ for the Christian faith; you must produce fruit in season and out. There will be no excuse or defense on Judgement Day that you lived under a wicked State or in a wicked culture or that you ‘had to’ do this or that. The Christians of the Early Church went to the lions rather than deny the Real Presence. That is the minimum to remain faithful. ‘But it was not the season for figs.’ ‘Depart from Me, for I never knew you.’

We can ask the Lord why us and why now — certainly righteous Job did so —, but after we pray or lament, we stand up and carry on. Here, perhaps, we should thank the Lord God that we are sons and daughters of Japheth, for it has always been in the nature of our race to rise from the ashes, to endure, to carry on, to rebuild. Our people have endured great hardships and suffered great calamities in centuries past, but we have, by the grace of God, always risen to the challenge and the occasion; we are here today because our ancestors did not fail and, one day, our far-distant sons and daughters will say the same of us. It is a tragedy and a crime that our forefathers in the preceding handful of generations squandered, failed to maintain, and destroyed so much that was entrusted to their care, but we cannot change the past — only the future is mutable. We must do what they failed to do; we must be like the tiny handful of faithful kings who ruled Old Testament Israel — we must repent in sackcloth and ashes. And yet repentance alone is not enough, for talk is cheap; yes, God demands our repentance, including of the sins of our fathers — ‘both we and our fathers have sinned’ —, but true repentance is not just words but also actions. We must not only denounce and turn from the evils both of the past and of our present, but we must also seek to destroy them. What does it even mean to renounce the worship of Baal if his high places and his priests remain? What does it mean to renounce the worship of Astarte if her perversions (such as prostitution and pornography) and her shrines (such as strip clubs) remain? What does it mean to renounce the worship of Moloch if abortion ‘clinics’ remain and abortionists go unpunished? What does it mean to denounce the worship of Saturn (Satan) if his synagogues, his mosques, and his false priests remain? “Who is with the Lord? Let him come to me!”

We must put to death the weak and decadent and easy faith that has masqueraded as ‘Christianity’ for the better part of a century. The Christian religion is not weak; the Christian religion is not easy; the Christian religion is not passive or pacifist, cowardly or craven, supine or submissive, inactive or indolent or inconsequential; the Christian religion is not ‘tolerant’. Do you think God will praise you for your ‘tolerance’ or reward you for your ‘restraint’ if you restrain your hand from opposing His enemies or tolerate those who blaspheme His Name?

»Maledictus qui facit opus Domini fraudulenter et maledictus qui prohibet gladium suum a sanguine.«

»Accursed is the one who does the work of the Lord carelessly, keeping back his dagger from bloodshed.«

In the waters of Holy Baptism you died to sin, death, and the devil, and you were raised to new life in Jesus Christ to fight sin, death, and the devil. You are part of the Church Triumphant with regard to eternity, coram Deo (with respect to God), and every time you participate in the Divine Service, but you are also part of the Church Militant with regard to the temporal, coram mundo (with respect to the world), and every single day you yet draw breath on this Earth in this Creation. You are a soldier in a war that has been raging since the Garden, and will continue raging until the Christ returns to claim every crown of every earthly kingdom and cast each and every one of His enemies into eternal conscious torment. Does that sound like a weak or a passive or an effeminate religion to you? The ‘Christianity’ of the world and of too many churches is a damnable and damning counterfeit. After centuries of learning from his mistakes and his defeats, Satan realized that it is far, far better to subvert the churches than to try to sell a competing religion; certainly, he still does both, but the latter pays greater dividends and he enjoys it far more. To keep the goats wandering aimlessly is one thing, but to lead the sheep astray is quite another. I do not envy the false pastors, teachers, and leaders their appointment in God’s tribunal on Judgement Day. It will mean nothing for them to plead Christ when they never knew Him and He never knew them. “Depart from Me.” is the last thing they will hear, and it will echo for eternity. Do not pity them — it is not our place to pity the enemies of God, but only to affirm that His judgements are righteous and just.

That which comforts is Gospel and that which accuses and condemns is Law: For the impenitent and the unbelieving goats, there is only Law; for the penitent and believing sheep, there is only Gospel. For the unbelieving and false ‘Christian’, eternity is a monstrous threat and a terrible promise; for the true Christian, eternity is our greatest hope and God’s promise secured and sealed to us in our Baptism and confirmed each and every time we partake of the Christ’s body and blood in His Supper. To the beloved son or daughter, every word from our Father is reassurance, comfort, and love, for even though He disciplines those whom He loves, we know that everything He does is for our good; to the damned, every word from God is a fearful promise of unending wrath, for nothing good awaits the impenitent.

In this life, you will have — you must have, under present circumstances — persecution and suffering, for those are marks of the true Christian the same as good works, but such things are nothing compared to the infinite good that God has prepared for us. And yet we must not permit eternity to become an excuse for inaction or indifference — both marks of a false ‘Christian’ with a dead faith; rather, we must meet the challenges of each day, firmly relying on God and faithfully pursuing our vocation and executing our duties. It matters not if you are a king, a prince, a shoemaker, a magistrate, a homemaker, or any of a thousand other things God has ordained for man to do under the Sun. You are to do your duty diligently and faithfully, never forgetting that your good works for family, neighbor, and nation are how you serve God — they are the very good works that God prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. Do not be the slothful servant who hides his talent in the ground or the faithless soldier who keeps back his sword from blood.

The world wants you to be a weak, worthless, unprofitable ‘Christian’; what God demands is something far different. So you must rise to the occasion, the same as our ancestors have always done. Whatever persecution may come, we will, by the grace of God, endure and overcome it. And when we have overcome the persecution, we will, again by the grace of God, turn and destroy it, so that future generations may know the peace and tranquility that did not fall to us. This we owe to God and this we will do for our sons and our sons’ sons.

God with us.

Amen.