Stay Focused on Righteousness
People will take sides for or against you based not on facts or logic but often how they assume you are aligned. Often, those positions are based on politics, and you are categorized as “for us or against us” regardless of what you communicate.
- Mark R. Rushdoony
It became a standard joke last year that 2021 was a year to forget and that there would be little nostalgia at its passing away. Yet, 2022 is shaping up to be ugly in its own right.
A few days ago, I had a conversation about the politicization of society. People will take sides for or against you based not on facts or logic but often how they assume you are aligned. Often, those positions are based on politics, and you are categorized as “for us or against us” regardless of what you communicate.
Man is a creature, so his thinking is derivative. Even when he rebels against his Creator, man only imitates God’s categories of thought and substitutes something in its place. Instead of thinking God’s thoughts after Him, man in rebellion twists those thoughts into something perverse.
The Bible presents man as a moral being. That is his created context, and in rebellion he must live in terms of a moral code. In his defiance of God, however, his new morality becomes a perversion of God’s. This brings us to 2022.
This is an election year and our cultural conflict will make it a very intense battle because man’s great concern today is in not his faith but the political arena. How one stands on masks, vaccine mandates, CO2 emissions, the border, or election laws has become more than politics. It is now a moral arena, and one in which an unpopular opinion can result in a moral condemnation by strangers, an attack with no room for grace or mercy. The new moral ethic of our statist era is often unforgivingly brutal.
There is most definitely a moral accountability in the political arena as in every other aspect of our being, but we must stay focused on our accountability being to God, not man. Men will try to usurp God’s categories and call good evil and evil good. Men must claim the moral high ground so they use the language of Scripture to declare men evil and equate their own stance as righteous. At no time in our lives has this trend been more pronounced than it is today.
Stay focused on the righteousness of God and His moral standard and you won’t be intimidated by evil men who claim to be angels of light.
- Mark R. Rushdoony
Mark R. Rushdoony graduated from Los Angeles Baptist College (now The Master’s College) with a B.A. in history in 1975 and was ordained to the ministry in 1995.
He taught junior and senior high classes in history, Bible, civics and economics at a Christian school in Virginia for three years before joining the staff of Chalcedon in 1978. He was the Director of Chalcedon Christian School for 14 years while teaching full time. He also helped tutor all of his children through high school.
In 1998, he became the President of Chalcedon and Ross House Books, and, more recently another publishing arm, Storehouse Press. Chalcedon and its subsidiaries publish many titles plus CDs, mp3s, and an extensive online archive at www.chalcedon.edu. His biography of his father will be published later this year (2024).
He has written scores of articles for Chalcedon’s publications, both the Chalcedon Report and Faith for all of Life. He was a contributing author to The Great Christian Revolution (1991). He has spoken at numerous conferences and churches in the U.S. and abroad.
Mark Rushdoony has lived in Vallecito, California, since 1978. His wife, Darlene, and he have been married since 1976. His youngest son still resides with him. He has three married children and nine grandchildren.