[NOTE: This item expresses the views of the individual to whom the item is ascribed and does not necessarily reflect the position of the WRF as a whole.]

Our world has changed.  Not very long ago almost everyone agreed that killing babies in the womb was terribly wrong, that homosexuality was not God’s way, and that sex belonged inside marriage.  They were sure some things were right and others wrong.

  People did the unacceptable things but not openly.  But the gospel sometimes didn’t seem totally necessary, because if you kept to the straight and narrow that had to be good enough.  Jesus worked as moral example.

Those changes are enormous.  ‘If it works for me’ seems to be enough today.  To call something sinful is to be intrusive and judgmental, about the worst thing you can do.  Jesus was in favor of ‘love’ and everyone should figure out for himself what that means. 

Is all that better or worse for the climate into which we are called to bring the gospel?  The old culture was more ‘decent’ but could easily lead to self-righteousness.  Christians could focus on ‘if you were to die tonight’ without saying much about how we can live to please God if you don’t die that soon.  Justification was what we heard about, and transformation of life was a mysterious second-blessing thing.  Now we see a lot more: that sanctification is bundled into the gospel from the beginning, that Christ’s resurrection goes along with his cross, that everything flows from union with Christ.  (We’re still working to understand how that works with justification and our forgiveness, but it’s getting clearer).

This is what that means: today’s rejection of God is more comprehensive and evil than ever, but we’re learning that Jesus and his gospel are more comprehensive too, bigger and better than we used to think.  Now we have more for ourselves, and more to give to others.

That transforms the way we give the gospel, including in high-tech apologetics.  It’s not long ago that ’Scottish common-sense’ seemed to work: whatever esoteric philosophers may say, in ordinary life everyone knows that the world makes sense, hence the gospel makes sense; maybe Germans follow Kant and put religion in some other corner than the rest of life, but we know better.  But today we know that common-sense doesn’t work any more, that in a world where everything is up for grabs common-sense is extinct. Bigger-picture ‘transcendental’ apologetics, as in the thinking of people in my world (Clark, Van Til, Frame, Edgar, Oliphint, Meek) makes more sense than ever.  Jesus is not an add-on to good thinking, but rather without him nothing at all has any meaning and sense.  In this dark skeptical world the gospel shines brighter than ever—it has to!

We see better than others the collapse of the West.  Should we talk with them about that first, before we show Jesus to them?  I’ve been pondering ‘preparation for grace’ for years, now helped by Beeke and Smalley’s Prepared for Grace by Grace.  Will Christ as your ‘answer’ make any sense if you didn’t know how big your needy question was?  Or, is it this way: now that I know Jesus, I can grasp how much I’ve always needed him?  Or is it both, in an ongoing way all through heaven?  At any rate, for ourselves and for the others in our lives the gospel has become very big, overcoming the darkness in the culture and in our own lives. 

That’s what we should talk about, much bigger than a pat formula, even a justification one.  Jesus is our sacrifice for sin, and he is our defender, and he is our hope.  Without the icy despair all around us and threatening to be in us, our testimony about Jesus would be much smaller, wouldn’t it?  But how can we possibly say anything at all helpful into this world?  How? With constant intentional prayer, of course.  Without that despair in this life we could have forgotten that, but not now.  That’s a piece of what the Lord is doing for us right now, in ways we didn’t understand before.