Today the Christian has the sense of fighting on one front, then another opens up, and if one is not careful, one can devote all one’s energies to a series of battles and be weighed down by a foreboding that one is not really winning any significant wars. The fact is, of course, that everything is intertwined. We are used to that in considering the fruit of the Spirit. Paul writes: ‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’ (Gal.5:22-23a). We are meant to notice that Paul does not use the plural – ‘fruits’ – but the singular. We are not meant to possess all the gifts that the Holy Spirit sovereignly bestows (see 1 Cor.12:28-30), but if we are Christians, we are to possess all the ninefold fruit of the Spirit in some measure. If we have love to some divine degree, we also have a measure of joy and peace, and the rest. It makes little sense, for example, to possess kindness but not goodness. They are all intertwined.
Despite the fact that Paul uses the plural in writing of the ‘works of the flesh’ (sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies in Gal.5:19-21), it is clear that these too are intertwined. Back in 1982, Francis Schaeffer analysed the situation in the USA: ‘The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality – each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in world view – that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole.’
We see this over and over. The pro-abortion slogan of the 1960s was ‘I have a right to do what I like with my own body.’ It was always a superficial and unrealistic approach to life (or death, to be more accurate). It was not trotted out on other issues, like wearing seat belts or smoking. The obvious retort to this whole approach is that if in the sexual area, one is permitted to live however one wishes, that will surely spill over into other areas of life. If we unleash the passions in a selfish way, that is not going to stop at some arbitrary but supposedly convenient place. Once the genie of sin is let out of the bottle, it is by no means easy to put it back in.
The early feminists saw life in terms of a battle between the sexes, and they combined this with the pro-abortion slogan cited above. This invariably meant that they misdiagnosed problems which emerged. Abortion played into the hands of promiscuous men, and in India and China the population balance has become skewed because millions of baby girls are aborted. But the feminists, for the most part, have maintained a decided silence. On issues like domestic violence and pornography, it is not unusual for feminists to blame sexism, and claim that these are the result of a male hatred for women. Of course, everybody knows that it is nothing of the kind. Domestic violence and pornography result from males’ giving in to violent and destructive lusts i.e. thinking they can do what they like, which is rather reminiscent of the pro-abortion slogan.
Christian beliefs and practices fit together as a coherent whole. Among other things, Christians believe that God exists, that He has spoken in His commandments, that He will judge the whole world, and that we have the obligation to live in such a way as to please Him. The gospel of free grace is cradled within that framework. If people reject that framework, the result will be what we see now – a lurching from crusade to another, declaring that some things are good and other things are evil, but without having much idea as to why these things are so. As a result, the very principles that are promoted in one area have to be curbed in another, and so the falsehood continues. Freedom becomes chaos, and order becomes coercion. Everything is intertwined, but only Christianity makes for a harmonious whole.
Peter Barnes