Neither identity politics nor social structures can save.
My salvation is not constructed by humans.
Find out why by watching our Truth in Two (full text below).
#10 in our series on how culture appropriates Hebraic-Christian words.
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Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
I was in trouble. Again. When you teach the Bible, no matter the setting, someone is bound to be upset. This time, folks were upset by my drawing on the board. I drew a coffin with a stick figure that had x’d out eyes, indicating death. Above the coffin I drew a cloud, my general representation of God. I was explaining regeneration, what Christians call a second birth, to be made alive again. My biblical text was familiar to many: Ephesians 2:1-10. God in His Word explains that we are dead in our sins and can only be made alive by the one-time gifts of faith and grace given by God for our salvation, our sin eradicated. Well, some pastors in the community took issue. They said we exercise faith to believe, God’s grace is then given. But my diagram indicated what the text explains. Two arrows came from the cloud, one labeled faith, the other, grace. Our ability to believe (faith) and the overcoming of our sin (grace) are both from God.
Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, I am in trouble again. My culture dictates that my regeneration, my new life, is dependent upon not grace, but works. I must confess to new orthodoxies, new teachings, new belief systems. My culture now wants me to bow before other altars. Some say, I must bow before the belief of identity politics. Others might want me to confess the sin of my ethnicity. Still more say I must accept communism as an acceptable system of government, ignoring communism’s historic failures. No identity, ethnicity, nor political structure can provide regeneration.
God’s regeneration is being made new, or as Jesus said in John 3, being born again. Only God through Jesus can make alive a person who is spiritually dead. Next to that coffin on the board, I drew a smiling person. And you are looking at him now. For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, president of the Comenius Institute, no longer dead in my sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.