Wet-Noodle Christians

I listened to a sermon by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Romans 13. In it, he describes a conversation he had with a younger minister who was a pacifist. This minister told MLJ that Christians should never resist or take a stand because Jesus didn’t do that. MLJ said this is one of the quickest ways to show that you don’t understand Christ’s atoning death. When he asked the younger minister about his studies on the atonement, the minister smiled sheepishly and said he had gotten to seminary just after they completed that section and hadn’t studied it.

MLJ reminds us that the atonement is a unique event in human history. No human is called to do that again because none of us can. Only Christ can die as the atoning sacrifice, the Lamb of God. And even then, he rose in victory and is now overcoming his enemies as he rules at the right hand of God the Father.

We have been in an era of what I call the “wet-noodle Christians,” who were willing to hand over everything to their conquerors because of this mistaken pacifism. I have an article out today in The Blaze about this:

The left spent decades teaching believers that public conviction was immoral, divisive, and dangerous. Too many Christians bought the lie.

A particular species of Christian now flourishes in America. I call him the “wet noodle Christian.”

He is easy to recognize. He attends Bible studies, laments the moral collapse of the nation over coffee after church, and speaks with deep concern about the culture. But ask whether Christians should publicly oppose evil or contend for the moral direction of society, and he recoils as though you had proposed human sacrifice.

“Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” he says.

Or: “The world is supposed to get worse anyway.”

Or, with special confidence: “Jesus told us to turn the other cheek.”

He says all this as though Christian ethics can be reduced to the consistency of warm pudding.

This attitude springs partly from biblical illiteracy, partly from a successful Marxist strategy, and entirely from sin.

Biblical confusion

Christians often invoke the crucifixion as though Christ’s death requires believers to become passive spectators while evil marches through every institution of society. That confuses the unique work of Christ with the ordinary duties of Christians.

Christ’s death was the once-for-all atoning sacrifice of the Lamb of God. No Christian is called to redeem the world by offering himself as a substitute for sin. That office belongs to Christ alone. Nor did Christ go unwillingly or by force.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus rebuked sin, denounced hypocrisy, drove money changers from the temple with a whip, and told adulteresses to stop sinning. Hardly the behavior of a celestial yoga instructor murmuring therapeutic affirmations beside a Himalayan stream.

When Jesus taught believers to turn the other cheek, he addressed personal vengeance, not civilizational surrender. The command restrains sinful retaliation. It does not abolish justice, civil authority, or moral responsibility.

The same Christ who taught mercy also stands behind Romans 13, where the civil magistrate bears the sword as a minister of God against evil. The same Jesus appears in Psalm 2 as the enthroned king while rebellious rulers “take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed.”

The biblical picture is one of advance, not retreat.

In the Great Commission, Jesus does not tell Christians to preserve their private religious feelings until death mercifully arrives. He commands them to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that he has commanded.

One searches the text in vain for the line: “Go therefore and quietly lose every institution while avoiding conflict.”

And here the second problem appears: Marxists understood the wet noodle instinct long before many Christians did.

Marxist subversion

For roughly 70 years, leftist media, academic institutions, and entertainment industries have carefully catechized Christians into believing that public Christianity is somehow immoral.

Christians were told that bringing moral convictions into public life is divisive. They were taught that the First Amendment requires a functionally atheist public square, though this alleged neutrality somehow never excludes progressive secular dogmas. The Christian could privately believe whatever he wished, provided he kept it quarantined like a contagious disease.

Meanwhile, the left marched through the institutions with all the subtlety of Sherman marching through Georgia.

For the rest, here is the link:

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-wet-noodle-christians-surrendered-america-to-marxists