This is a bonus article in the series on our need as Christians for political and cultural awareness. We have noticed that we need a basic, yet solid, understanding of the society we live in if we want to (1) avoid the sins that our culture subtly and not-so-subtly promotes, (2) address those sins in the lives of our brothers, and (3) adequately proclaim the gospel of the Lord Jesus to those who have not yet received it, calling them to repent. But all along, we were reminded of another fact: as Christians, we need to know God’s word. If we have an understanding of the society, we live in and yet do not know what God thinks about that society then we will be merely batting at a piñata blindfolded. God’s word removes that blindfold, allowing us to see the metaphorical piñata for what it is. That means that our foundation for rightly avoiding sin, addressing sin, and proclaiming the gospel ultimately comes from a knowledge of God’s word. In this post, we will consider our need for God’s word.
The Foundation
In each of the examples we looked at in the three previous posts, we noticed the necessity of God’s word for addressing the evil influences of the culture. We saw that Daniel needed to be aware of the kind of food the king was going to feed him, but he only knew the food was unclean because he knew God’s word. We saw that Samuel recognized the wickedness of Israel’s request for a king because he knew what the kings around them were like, but he only knew those kings were evil because of how God describes a righteous king. We saw Paul proclaim the gospel to polytheists, he knew they were polytheists; because he paid attention to the culture around him, but he knew that polytheism was wrong because of God’s revelation. In each of these examples, cultural awareness was important, but knowledge of God’s word was necessary for recognizing the error and responding properly. We need to know God’s word if we want to respond properly, because it provides us with an understanding of things like truth, goodness, and beauty.
God’s word proves a stable foundation from which we can know right and wrong, and this is the very idea that is found in the first Psalm. In Psalm 1, the blessed man is compared to the wicked. The blessed man is blessed because he delights in God’s Torah (often translated as “law”), which practically looked like “meditating” upon it day and night (Ps 1:2). The idea of meditating here in Psalm 1 is not at all like the idea of meditating in popular culture today, where people cross their legs and empty their minds. The word here carries the idea of reciting quietly, literally “murmuring.” This is the act of reading God’s word and reciting it so that it deeply impacts our lives, and we can see this is the case because the person who meditates on the Torah is described as a flourishing tree (Ps 1:3). But the wicked are not like this strong tree; they instead are like chaff – chaff is the light seed casing of grains like wheat – and so they are blown all about (Ps 1:4). The difference is that the wicked do not meditate upon God’s word day and night, so they have no sure and steady stream of wisdom to draw from (Prov 2:6). If we want to know what is good, and true, and beautiful, we must go to the source of such things, namely the Lord, who has spoken for us in the Scriptures.
Paul made a complementary point in Phil 4:8-9 when he talked about thoughts and actions. He encouraged the Philippians, and by extension all Christians, to think about what is true, dignified, right, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent (Phil 4:8). This is gospel-mindedness, and it is what naturally occurs when you spend day and night meditating on God’s word. The Scriptures are all about the Triune God they reveal; who or what is more true, dignified, right, pure, lovely, commendable, or excellent than Him or what He has to say to us (see Heb 6:18; Rev 4:11; Deut 32:3-4; 1 John 3:3; Ps 8:1; etc.)? The answer is nothing and no one. A large part of the book of Philippians is devoted to the idea of adopting the thoughts and actions of Christ (Phil 2:5). And as we saw in Psalm 1, an essential way of doing this is meditating upon God’s word (it should be noted that Paul focuses on godly role models in Philippians). In the next verse, Paul moves to action, because our actions flow from our thoughts (Phil 4:9). This is why Paul elsewhere says, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect” (Rom 12:2). The point is that we must know the truth in order to act in a way pleasing to God.
The point of this series has not been to suggest we should spend our whole day learning what the people around us do and how they think, but that we should spend some time if it does not happen naturally. First, let me suggest that this should happen naturally if we really are associating with the lost people of the world, as we should be (1 Cor 5:9-10). Some of us just don’t get enough natural interaction with the people of the world because of our jobs or life circumstances, so we might have to spend a little time finding out what is motivating the people in the culture around us. What I hope everyone has seen is our desperate need to spend time in God’s word. By thinking and dwelling upon that which is true and good, we will be able to spot the false and evil. It is easy to spot the counterfeit when you know for sure what the authentic thing looks like. And this is the point, the point of this whole series: some of us need to spend time learning about the sinful world around us, but all of us need to spend time learning God’s word.