One of the keynote speakers at Friday’s FAMiLY Leadership Summit was Dr. Tony Evans. Evans delivered a message of urgency to those in attendance.
He opened by referencing 2 Chronicles and the wrath of God. In the Bible passage, it is clear that God caused distress. This was the theme of Evans’ talk.
“If God is your problem, it doesn’t matter who you elect,” Evans said. “If God is your problem, it doesn’t matter what policies you put in place. If God is your problem, it doesn’t matter what kind of economic structures you facilitate. If God is your problem, only God is your solution.”
In the Old Testament, Evans said God displayed an “active wrath” that was directly displayed from heaven into history through the worldwide flood, the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah, the earth opening up for Korah, etc.
“Over and over again you see this direct expression of the anger of God against the sinfulness of mankind,” Evans said.
But after the death of Jesus, the relationship shifted. Now the wrath of God is passive.
“Divine abandonment,” Evans said. “God releases you to life without Him. When God releases an individual, family, city, state, culture, nation to life without him that vacuum is filled with chaos and confusion. So all the confusion that you are seeing today is what it looks like when a people, when a society is experiencing the passive wrath of God leading to the devolution of civilization.”
The breakdown of the family, racial strife and an inability to cope with one’s own self-definition are all examples.
“You are watching what happens when God, like a person holding a leash with the dog and letting the leash go so the dog runs wild, God allows people and societies to run wild when they no longer want to retain the knowledge of God.”
The lack of a true God led to the demise of society. He discussed idolatry — such as skin color and politics.
“While God is not color blind, neither is he blinded by color,” Evans said. “When we have elevated the color of one’s skin to give it deified dignity then what we have done is create an idol of race and allowed for there to be division of race.”
It is incorrect to label someone a black Christian or a white Christian because Christian, Evans said, should be the adjective, not the noun.
“People have decided it’s more important to be a Democrat than Christian or Republican than Christian as though God rides the backs of donkeys or elephants,” he said.
Then he talked at length about pastors not being bold in the pulpit.
“A mist in the pulpit will always become a fog in the pew,” he said.
Should the church engage the culture and lead a “radical return to truth,” things will turn.
“Truth is an absolute standard by which reality is measured,” Evans said. “There are two answers to every question — God’s answers and everybody else’s. And everybody else is wrong. God has spoken and He has not studdered.
“What we have today is far too many of our pulpits have acquiesced to the culture rather than declare the truth. Today, unfortunately, the Bible is treated far too often like the Queen of England. The Queen of England has high honor, she just has no authority. She makes no rules, makes no laws but she gets plenty of prestige. Too many people, too many pulpits, the Word of God is held in high honor, it just has no authority. It doesn’t get to make final decisions about life, marriage, gender, divorce, culture, race as though God has been silent.”
Evans said anyone who approaches him with a life that is falling apart will be relayed passages from the same book for their problem regardless of the problem — the Bible. And if that person is a legislator, there is one key thing not to do.
“What you don’t do is change books,” he said. “Far too often people have changed books. God is the author of civil government.”
The church must be relevant in the culture and it must be spoken into the culture, but it cannot be “coated” with the culture.
“The bottom line is the closer God — the God of the Bible — is to an environment, the more ordered the environment will become,” he said. “The further God is from the environment, the more chaotic the environment will be. So the whole idea is to get God back on the front page of the environment in an appropriate way to demonstrate the healing way of the land.”
The solution isn’t overly complicated as Evans quoted 2 Chronicles 15:4.
“In their distress, they sought the Lord God of Israel and He let them find Him,” Evans said. “God lets things get bad enough long enough until His people wake up to put Him back in the place where He deserves to be. He is waiting on the church to properly, bibliocentrically and righteously and justly engage the culture to bring Him back to the place he should have never been booted out of in the first place. And He does it through creating distress.
“All of this madness in the culture has created an opportunity for the church like we have never seen because He’s shown the inability of politics, of social structures — He’s shown that none of them can answer this because it’s caused by Him.”
Now is the time for Christians, like so many others in the culture Evans said, to “come out of the closet.”
It is time for God’s people to go public.
