The temptation to completely detach from the culture and the world around us is real, especially as America becomes more and more detached from a morality rooted in Scripture. But as Christians, we need to be generally aware of the philosophies of this present age (1) to avoid the sins of the culture, (2) to address the sins of the culture, (3) to adequately announce the gospel. In the first part of this series, we thought about avoiding sin. In that post, we thought about our need to personally avoid sin, but in this post, we will turn our attention to others, particularly those we have some kind of influence over, especially those who claim to be a Christian.

To Address Sin

            It is not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone is a teacher. You might be a formal teacher and lead a Sunday school class, you might be a parent (Eph 6:4), or you might just have a few people who look up to you. But teaching can also happen between peers, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the issue of judging others, with the main point being that we should not judge hypocritically (Matt 7:1-5). He is specifically speaking about judging your “brother,” a term used throughout Matthew’s Gospel to refer to followers of Jesus (see Matt 25:40). This is someone who is a fellow Christian – you’re of the same status as them. The point of judging the brother is to remove the speck from his eye, namely the sin in his life. Jesus teaches further on this idea in Matthew 18:15, where He discusses addressing a brother’s sin. The point of the confrontation is to “reprove,” or “correct” (traditionally translated as “show him his fault”); this is a redemptive teaching opportunity from one believer to another.

            Reproof is the sort of teaching that gives you a chance to remind your brother “that friendship with the world is hostility toward God” (Jam 4:4). When James talks about “friendship with the world,” he is using “world” to speak about the desires, influences, and structures of a culture; it is the ethos of this fallen world, an ethos opposed to God. And when he talks about “friendship,” he is talking about the kind of flirtatious relationship that an adulterous woman might have with a man who is not her husband. James is speaking about being more attracted to an enticing, yet evil, culture than God’s good ways. “Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world sets himself as an enemy of God” (Jam 4:4). We need to be able to teach and reprove an erring brother by helping him to realize the worldliness of sin, and remind him that he is called to something greater (Jam 4:7-10).

            To adequately address sin, we need a knowledge of God’s word and at least general knowledge of the world. We need God’s word because, in it, we are clearly taught what is acutely good and bad (Ps 119:1, 9, 105). We need a general knowledge of a culture so that we will more quickly see and address the sinful choices that often subtly creep in from the outside (e.g. Gal 2:12; 1 Thess 4:5). During one Sunday on a family vacation, we decided we were going to go worship at a nearby church. We briefly looked at some websites from some nearby churches and decided without too much research. The sermon was from Genesis 3 and I quickly realized that this “pastor” did not understand the opening chapters of Genesis as revealing historical events. My theological education, which had exposed me to diverse theologically liberal views of various Bible passages, had allowed me to spot the subtle yet clear diversion from a historical-grammatical interpretation of the text early on in the sermon. Later, I found out that the rest of my family realized there was something wrong with the sermon only after the “pastor” clearly contradicted Paul’s teaching in Rom 5:12-21. My family knew God’s word, so they knew that “through one man sin entered into the world,” and that man was Adam, and that event is recorded in Genesis 3 (Rom 5:12, 14). However, they did not know how theological liberals talked, so they only recognized the error when the view being presented was stated outright. The point of the story is that an awareness of worldly ideas, the language that accompanies them, and their justifications allow us to catch sin’s influence early on and address it more effectively both in our own thinking and in others’.

            The prophets in the Bible were sent essentially to address sin in rebellious Israel and the nations more generally. An early example of a prophet’s cultural awareness assisting him in his recognition of sin can be seen in 1 Samuel. When Samuel was old, he decided to appoint his sons as judges over the people; the only problem is that Samuel’s sons were not like him (1 Sam 8:1-3). This led the elders of Israel to ask for Samuel to appoint a king over them (1 Sam 8:4-5). Samuel sees the people’s request as evil (1 Sam 8:6). This might catch the reader by surprise; first, because Samuel’s sons would not have made good leaders, and second, because Moses prophesied that Israel would eventually get a king over them (Deut 17:14-15). But Samuel’s judgment was correct; this was an evil request because the people were ultimately rejecting God as their king (1 Sam 8:7-8). After Samuel recites a long list of disadvantages of having a king who is not God the Messiah (1 Sam 8:10-18), we, the readers, get to clearly see what Samuel saw and what God knew: that the people did not want a king like the one Moses describes in Deut 17:14-20 – they wanted to be like the world, and they were content with a worldly king. “No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations” (1 Sam 8:19b-20a). Their request was to be like the world around them; this was only an evil request because the world around them was evil. The people were not looking for a righteous man who would diligently study God’s word and would not view himself as greater than them; they just wanted to be like the nations around them with a self-serving king to protect them.

             We need to be people who care enough for our brothers that we seek to help them flee from worldliness (Jude 1:20-23). Being aware of the kind of thinking and actions that accompany this worldliness is helpful in our fight against sin. We need to know what the worldly kingdoms are like when our brothers suggest that we should become like them, and we need to know God’s word well enough to know that we should not be like them. We all need to spend time thinking about God’s word (Ps 1:1-3), but we also need to pay attention to what is going on around us.