Dennis Prager recently had a lot of good things to say about the Ten Commandments, highlighting the stupidity of the West in its hurry to tear them down and remove any trace of them.

There is only one solution to the world’s problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth.

It is 3,000 years old.

And it is known as the Ten Commandments.

Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.

If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear.
Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.

You can read his rundown on the Ten here. He concludes:

There is only one way to achieve a great society, and it is not by creating a massive state that doles out other citizens’ money. It is by cultivating citizens who try to live by these Ten Commandments. They are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago.

At the centre of Western society in its greatest moments was a church that not only promoted the Ten Commandments, but a church that preached the gospel of grace. A moral, just society, however imperfect, is an outflow of the preaching of the gospel. And however imperfectly it is preached, Jesus is there.

Prager can lament the scrapping of the Law of Moses all he likes, but the real issue is a deeper one. Non-Christian conservatism is at best nostalgia and at worst flogging a dead horse. The only thing that will turn our society around, and back to Moses, is the Spirit of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So keep telling people about Jesus.

Is it a bad thing?

“The sooner God destroys the world of evangelical gnosticism, the sooner authentic Christian churches can begin to do what we are called upon to do.”

James Jordan makes some good observations about evangelicalism in Obama as Fool.

And Doug Wilson has comments here:

“There are (at least) two kinds of disasters. One is when an asteroid lands on the most beautiful albaster-gleamy city we have. This is disaster straight up. Then there is the disaster revelatory — it was a disaster all along, and now we know about it… The coming evangelical collapse will be the disaster revelatory.”

God periodically shakes the Land so that the trash falls away. We need to read our Old Testaments.

Stop Asking Me

I gave kudos to iMonk for getting pretty much global recognition for his “death of Evangelicalism” piece, right? So credit where credit’s due and all that.

Many of you have e-mailed me to ask, “yeah, but what do you think about the essay?” Look: I’m not going to take the bait. The truth is that Michael and I get along pretty good as long as we don’t talk about things we blog about, and I’m really intent on keeping it that way as I have no free time to speak of.

That said, here’s what Doug Wilson thinks about that essay, and I would endorse without comment Doug’s affirmations and denials.

The problem is not that there’s too much conservatism: it’s that there’s a lot of unfounded, flabby conservatism running around with plastic fishes attached to it rather than a robust, young, and dangerous conservatism riding around on the fat, noisy Harley which is the Gospel.1

Now there’s an image.

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1 http://centuri0n.blogspot.com/2009/03/stop-asking-me.html

The life that Christ has called us into is a life that is not just everlasting in duration. The eternal life that He welcomes us into is qualitative. Jesus says that He is the resurrection and the life, and that life is one that the Holy Spirit weaves us into. This affects the texture and the breadth of our lives — or it is intended to. Our natural resistance to this is one the things that God deals with in us.

We want to walk with our heads down, as though we were walking along a railroad track, keeping our balance there, we don’t want to live expansively, the way a Christian ought to live. We forget that God is sovereign over all things, and we forget that He is the God of dangers, the God of adventures, the God of the unexpected. The wrong kind of concern for safety, for security, for a life of predictable and cozy conservatism is, at the end of the day, a form of idolatry.

Think of it this way. Remember this exhortation as you understand the tasks before you — your vocation, your family life, your worship of God. Everyone here will live the entire length of their lives. Everyone lives until their dying day. All of us go the appointed distance. But not all of us live the width of our lives.

Doug Wilson, www.dougwils.com