The Ground of Christian Resistance

One of the blessings we have as Christians is the opportunity to stand against evil. As the gangrene of relativism continues to rot out the soul of Western civilization, the ability to stand against evil is crumbling. Where western sensibilities still line up with God’s Word, it’s purely accidental and rarely intentional. People can given no coherent account for why certain acts are evil. And so it is not surprising that this designation is beginning to fade out of popular use. Now, we are hearing that certain acts and beliefs are “extreme” or “barbaric” or “backward” but rarely evil, rarely wicked.

At the heart of relativism is guilt and shame and fear. Relativism is the philosophical front for avoiding personal sin, personal evil. And this is why we cannot confront evil with anything approaching courage because honesty demands that we be consistent, and who’s to say that you might not find yourself in the same situation? So people careen between extremes of outrage and apathy, neither grounded to a coherent, rational account of good and evil.

But the ground of Christian resistance against all evil is the ground of forgiveness. In Jesus Christ, God confronts all sin with His justice and mercy. Unbelief runs from God’s justice because it wants to find its own solution, because it knows that justice will reveal our hearts. And it does. But God’s justice reveals our diseased hearts in order to give us new ones. God’s justice cuts us open, but His mercy heals.

We stand against evil because we know evil. We know the evil of our own hearts. We know the evil that nailed our Lord Jesus to the cross. And we know the goodness and beauty of forgiveness. We stand against all evil because it is treason against the goodness and beauty of the God who made us, and we know because we were traitors and we have been received back as sons.