A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
Another excellent, timely title from Erwin Lutzer. He writes not so much to reclaim the culture but to reclaim the church that too often can be shamed into silence by today’s pressures, or, worse, compromising submission. This is from pages 38-39:
A Wasp, a Knife, and a Horrid Discovery
In one of George Orwell’s essays we are given a graphic image of human lostness. He describes a wasp that was “sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man.”
Everything might seem normal among us. We have our homes, our vocations, and our salaries. Like the wasp, we are content because we still have elections, we still have courts. We still have a congress and a president. We are still able to preach the gospel in our churches. But recently we have faced a health pandemic, an economic crisis, and heightened racial conflict amid political wrangling and increased polarization. The underbelly of our nation is being eaten away and, like Orwell’s wasp, we might nor recognize our true condition until we wake up and realize our wings have been severed. The America we thought we knew is no more. And our churches have accepted these changes with little more than a whimper.
We are in a firestorm for the future of America. But more importantly, we are in a firestorm within our churches, some of which have already substituted culture in the place of the gospel. I want to inspire us to have the courage to walk toward the fire and not run away from the flames. God has brought us to this cultural moment, and our future cannot be taken for granted. As has been said, “In a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Let us determine that we will not be shamed into silence or inaction. We will speak, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the book of Daniel, let us resolve that we will not bow.