day no. 17,089: the state of the family

“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.” — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The household is the primary building block of all human progress and God's design for its dominion of the earth. A man is given a wife and a plot of land and told to be fruitful and to multiply. That means making more people and cultivating more land until all of it is dominated by the image of God. 

The State exists in order to ensure men play fair as they bump into one another. The State is the deacon of God's wrath according to Romans 13 and as such, it is given the sword in order to adjudicate justice when one man violate's another man's life, liberty, or property. Justice ensures that men are free to live and move and have their being in God's good world according to His good Word for everyone and His unique call for each individual. That largely reduces to being able to live on your land with your family without hearing from or having to do anything for or with the local magistrate. A good government’s aim is to let its people live in peace and quiet, interfering only when some won't let others live without leaving well enough alone.

day no. 17,088: noble things are difficult

“If we are going to live as disciples of Jesus, we have to remember that all noble things are difficult. The Christian life is gloriously difficult, but the difficulty of it does not make us faint and cave in, it rouses us up to overcome.” — Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

No one is a Christian by accident. No one comes to faith and stays faithful because they could not help it. There is no such thing as cruise control Christianity. You cannot set it and forget it. There is no self-driving vehicles of faith. It takes intention. No one trips into Heaven. No one falls into righteousness. You cannot slip into sanctification the way you can into sin. Dying to your self is not your default. Carrying our own crosses does not come naturally to us.

Part of what makes noble things noble is how rare they are. They are not noble because they are rare per se, they are rare because nobility is hard work and hard work is too hard for most. The easy path is what makes men and rivers crooked. The straight and narrow never caves to the pressure to broaden its horizons. As a result, the flow of traffic on the right path does not often create a traffic jam. That is why those on the right path have all the fun of putting the pedal to the metal without any of the problems of multiple car pile ups.

The Christian faith is one of uncommon grit in a world of common grace.

day no. 17,087: no one hates a woman like other women

"Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

A woman does not need to be the best cook in the world, but she should be the best cook in her home. She does not need to be the most beautiful woman in the world, but she should try to be as beautiful as she can be in her own right according to what her husband finds most attractive about her. She does not need to be the best blogger in her friend group, but she should be her husband and children's favorite mom blog.

Too many women get catty with one another because they are trying to win bragging rights from one another without respect to the men in their lives who actually have the authority to hand out blue ribbons. 

No one hates a woman like other women.

A wife is not called to be a better wife than the one next door because she doesn't live next door. A wife is suited to her husband and to her house. The only way she can be better is by asking her husband what else he needs or seeing where her own household could improve. She may borrow ideas from another wife on how to improve her own household or how to better serve her own husband, but not in order to best her neighbor. They are running their respective races on separate tracks. They could not beat the other to the finish line because it is not a timed event.

Yet, women often insist on competing with one another without respect to their own husband's judgment. They post in order to impress their friends or tp be the envy of Instagram, but they ignore their own people. They throw shade at another's woman's cake recipe in order to gain a spotlight for their own. They are often competing with each other over things their husbands do not give a fig about.

No one hates a woman like other women.

day no. 17,086: old guard neutrality and new earth exclusivity

"The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation. It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose its balance any more than they. It differed because the old system was one of many religions under one government, while the new was one of many governments under one religion.” — G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem

The old guard was a system that tried to accommodate many religions under one government. The myth of magisterial neutrality was alive and well and wanted to help all the religious inclined to just get along so that they, the civil magistrate, could just keep their jobs and not spend most of their time refereeing arguments between obscure doctrines they didn't care much about. 

Christendom introduced a new system. One that suggested we try to accommodate apostates and heretics under one religion. Christ is King and come along quietly. That meant, you were free to reject Christ in your heart, but you could not reject His reign. You could be a devotee of Allah, but you could not hold public office with that private conviction.

The old guard is alive and well. Secular neutrality will always make its pitch for being the place where everyone can COEXIST. But that is merely to make the claim that all religions are false. Christendom is the claim that at least one of those religions is true. The rub comes in its insistence that it also the ONLY one that is true. Everyone, however, can only coexist under Christ in a sense. Religious freedom, i.e. freedom of conscience, is a uniquely Christian value. Christendom does not force anyone to profess something they do not believe, but it does forbid anyone who tramples the blood of Jesus underfoot to hold positions of power and influence in the government. The Church has persecuted people's conscience's before, but when they did so, they were wrong. Why? Because Christ forbids. So, I agree with the atheists and unbelievers who say that the Church has gotten this wrong before, but I ask them to identify whose standard it is why which they were wrong to do that. That person, the standard, is the one, true God and His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

1 Corinthians 15:24-26

Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Pluralism is not a plan. The gods will not just all get along. Christ is King. Every enemy will be destroyed by conversion or submission. His footstool will not leave anyone or anything out. He will not fail to conquer someone or something. Everything is the Lord's and everyone is called to repent.

day no. 17,085: always and never

“To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as the oppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonable help for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords, and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all.” — G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem

Justice means evaluating each man according to his character. A man's character can be and certainly often is impacted by the culture in which he was catechized. Certain places produce certain types of people, but no person can be fairly evaluated solely based on where they came from. A man tends to speak with the accent of his people, but he doesn't have to per se. This is true whether it works in his favor or to his deficit. 

A man cannot be presumed to be innocent or guilty simply because of his skin color, gender, place of birth, or religion. A Brit may be more likely to be guilty of bad teeth, but the fact that he is British alone does not guarantee that his chompers will be wonky. Certain peoples have certain besetting sins, of course, but none is so beset that it cannot be overcome by the Spirit. Conversely, certain peoples have certain besetting virtues, but none is so beset that it must appear, especially when the man in question is doing his damnedest to keep it from growing up and out of him.

Leviticus 19:15

Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.

A fair shake does not favor the rich or the poor for their riches or poverty respectively, but neither does it penalize the rich or the poor for their respective bank balance or brokeness. It may take those facts into account as they are relevant to the charges at hand, but they cannot, on their own, account for innocence or guilt.

“All generalizations are dangerous!" someone might say. "Even that one?" one might respond.

When Jesus condemned the Pharisees in Matthew 23, He didn’t pause to point out the exceptions, though there certainly were some, and He had met with one over midnight oil. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, but He was exempt from the accusations of Jesus’ generalization. He was exceptional precisely because he agreed with the generalization and differentiated himself from it. He did not throw shade at Jesus for throwing him under the bus, he recognized the validity of Christ's accusation and came forward as one wanting to be made clean of it.

“When Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), ‘All chairs are quite different,’ he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them ‘all chairs.’” — G.K. Chesterton, The Suicide of Thought

All that to say, you cannot say someone is guilty because he is a Jew, but neither, and especially nowadays, you cannot say someone is innocent because he is a Jew. In our time, we have to be careful to define what we mean by "Jew." If we say all Jews live in Israel, that excludes all other kinds of Jews who don't. If we say all Jews believe in the Talmud, that excludes all other kinds of Jews who don't. To Chesterton's point, all chairs cannot be entirely different if they are all chairs, but that is because chair is more clearly defined than Jews is.

day no. 17,084: brutalitarian

"If comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous—which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, 'l Flog the brutes!' or who tells you with innocent obscenity ‘what he would do’ with a certain man—always supposing the man’s hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful.” — G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles 

The brutalitarian is always rough with people in theory and often hiding from people in reality. Social media has only exacerbated this type of behavior by giving this type of a person a platform where they can be as rough as they like with actual people in a simulated environment without ever having to be in the same physical room as another tangible person.

"Two things to remember in life. Take care of your thoughts when you are alone, and take care of your words when you are with people." — Anonymous

Ideas have consequences, but ideas do not knock on our front door. Ideas do not come over for dinner or ask to talk to us after service. Ideas do not text us in the middle of the night or ask us to help them move this weekend. Ideas do not take our orders or leave their blinkers on in traffic. People have ideas, but they are rarely one idea incarnate. They have all kinds of ideas about all kinds of things and those ideas influence them, of course, but when you interact with the person, you are not interacting with any particular idea in isolation. The online option has changed all that, however. People are still people, but it is now possible to isolate certain ideas in them when posting or replying to them. Instead of sitting across from them and their ideas over a pot roast, we are able to roast them over the airwaves for their ideas.