Issues Versus Foundations

Our world is swamped by discussion of issues, and this focus on issues is by design. It is a focus that ensures that no solution for the issues will be found. Once we grasp what an issue actually is, we’ll see that issues have to be resolved at another level entirely: a level beneath the issue that modern man has no interest in discussing.

For the fact remains that an “issue” is something that comes forth from another thing. It is the visible result of something else that lies, often hidden, underneath it … sometimes, several levels underneath it. We read of the woman who had “an issue of blood” for twelve years, or the water that issued out from the temple (Ezek. 47:1). Issues, in effect, are actually symptoms, and usually superficial ones at that. The core problem, the actual cause, is glanced over while men agitate over the surface of reality. 

If men don’t deal with the determining causes, they will be perpetually swamped by issues. The more issues we’re awash in, the less that men care about core causes: they’re too busy swatting at the effects to bother with foundational causes. The few that acknowledge the causes sing a song of despair: we can’t possibly deal with such deep-rooted causes, so we need to be busy alleviating the issues radiating from the problem to reduce suffering. 

But this pragmatic counsel, focused on expedience, fails to see how cause and effect are bound up in one another covenantally. The first steps toward dealing with the cause will send more meaningful, lasting relief of the negative effects than the cheap Band-Aids we’re hellbent on applying in lieu of dealing with our core problems. We want to vanquish the effects of covenantal disobedience without ever considering faithfulness to the covenant.

When men deal only with issues, they ensure round-the-clock crises in their world, because the root cause is still actively generating covenantal sanctions upon man in his rebellion. Christians, of all people, should be actively securing the blessings of His covenant in the way the covenant prescribes. Humanists refuse to see a God behind a binding covenant with creation, so they have no basis to expect results from obeying that “imaginary” God’s laws. But why do so many Christians adopt the view that God no longer governs according to His Own Word? The salt has lost its savor.

A Faulty Focus

In the television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth there is a fictional encounter between a group of zealots and two of Christ’s disciples, Judas Iscariot and Simon the Zealot (who once belonged to the group they’re speaking to). The zealots have no interest in Jesus Christ apart from exploiting His political value as a figurehead. Simon’s view that Christ has come that Israel may be “reborn from within” falls on deaf ears, and both disciples are warned to stay out of the zealots’ way. Judas, remembering the words of John the Baptist, tells Simon, “The Baptist was right. Before kingdoms can change, men must change.” 

Setting aside that the screenplay puts these noncanonical words in Judas’s mouth, we should still mark well the truth in them. Men want to change their kingdoms without themselves being changed. Men today side with the view of the zealots, demanding institutional change (even if by force) but not demanding morally changed men.

But today, men are actually willing to change other men by coercion. Far too many twentieth-century regimes used genocide as a tool of state, and we’ve not seen the end of this. So the mantra has morphed into “I need the kingdom to change, and I need you to change, but I do not need to change.” This is, of course, the recipe for hypocrisy, and the world is ruled by hypocrites who draw power from the general hypocrisy of the populace. To deflect responsibility, the focus of ruler and ruled alike is upon surface issues. 

Anyone who points out our culpability, like an R. J. Rushdoony, is bitterly hated. Such men of God point out the root causes and implicate all of us in their perpetuation, and in the collective attempt to hide from responsibility. Note the indictment in Rushdoony’s Larceny in the Heart, whereby inflation (the debauching of currency) is approved by the people because they can pay off debts in cheaper dollars, thus defrauding the lenders. We are the authors of our own destruction, and anyone who points this out is supremely unwelcome … in fact, he becomes our enemy for telling the truth about us, for exposing and reproving our deeds.

In all such cases, the men of God pull back the curtains on the underlying problems that men would rather keep under wraps. And these problems invariably bear the stamp of covenantal disobedience, and often covenantal ignorance as well. Our leaders prefer we remain ignorant of the covenantal foundations of reality, of how the world works, so they turn up the volume on the issues that we’re being inundated with from all sides. 

The Dangers of Man’s Expedience

Leaders like Caiaphas pride themselves on being masters of the political chessboard. He understood what political expedience looked like, and how to achieve it. In this case, his sense of expedience extended to the murder of Israel’s own Messiah (John 11:49-10). “Christ’s presence is an issue for us and for the Romans, so He should be blotted out to restore the status quo.” Under biblical morality, one can never argue that the ends justify the means, for God proscribes all of reality by His law-word. 

But Caiaphas was speaking to like-minded men, to men who had no regard for the actual covenant they were to uphold. They were functional atheists and rewrote their ethics to conform to godless pragmatism. “We hold all the cards and therefore we must play them pragmatically.” God holds no cards in this view – which, ironically, is the exact opposite of the truth. God actually holds all the cards, and the expedience of Caiaphas sounded the death knell for Israel for murdering its own Messiah.

An expedient, pragmatic approach to today’s issues simply perpetuates those issues. Such an approach throws gasoline on the fire. Smug “realists” will learn, too late, that God will confound the wisdom of the wise. All who neglect the foundational covenants upon which our world is erected are doomed to suffer the sanctions of those covenants. Outside of biblical faith, there can only be a conflict of interests. Christianity, in its fullness, is the only foundation, providing the only path forward, that delivers a harmony of interests between men. When men act pragmatically rather than biblically, they give us a conflict society, and they benefit from that conflict by exploiting it. We have been fools for neglecting the foundations, and thus complicit in the conflict between men that this neglect has fostered.

Raising Up The Foundations

To summarize, there are several layers to the onion of reality. For the Christian, we start with the triune God Himself as the principal layer, acknowledging the personal dimension here (versus the impersonal world that humanistic man imagines). The next layer up are His covenants, where mediation between man and man, and man and creation, are anchored. Above that are various causes that arise out of either covenant-keeping or covenant-breaking, and the top layer is where the effects stemming from those causes, the issues and crises of the world, spew up. All attempts to solve crises and issues that fail to dig any deeper than that topmost layer are doomed to worsen the problem, because the actual problems are never, ever addressed. And this suits man just fine as he hides from God in God’s own universe, not realizing how covenantal sanctions will overtake him (as Deuteronomy 28:15 and Romans 1:18 inform us).

This is what is meant when we say that today’s problems don’t have political solutions, they only have moral solutions, and since man rejects those, he fumbles and flails in the cesspool of politics. He has no interest in the difficult work of rebuilding foundations that have rotted on his watch, and on the watch of his predecessors. Man wants a quick fix, but quick fixes actually worsen things. They confirm man in his moral rebellion against his Maker and King. The quick fix of politics never ceases to seduce men who want to believe the world can change while they do not have to change – especially in the moral dimension.

We often comment that the visionary prediction of Isaiah 58:12 involves very hard work: “And they that shall be of Thee shall raise up the foundations of many generations…” Raising up foundations that will last (because they’re built on the Rock, not the sand) in a world committed to building more towers of Babel at breakneck speed is like excavating with a teaspoon. But God will prosper this work: such foundations will last for “many generations” when built God’s way, on God’s covenant, relying on God’s promises. 

Issues are like siren songs that call sailors to their deaths. The focus needs to be on “restoring the paths to dwell in,” the “straight paths” that honor the covenant, that self-consciously build upon God’s covenants, that focus on foundations to build new structures upward through the higher layers of reality. That is the way to invest in the kingdom that cannot be moved. That means we must not grow weary of revisiting these foundational considerations, as the moral dimension of the universe is the one that actually matters, humanistic smoke and mirrors notwithstanding. Let God’s enemies fling dust in rage that we won’t dance when they pipe, that we, like Nehemiah, won’t come down from the wall for wasteful chit-chat with Sanballat and Tobias. 

To set the tone for such a return to basics in this issue of Arise and Build, we are publishing a brief study on the basics of applying covenantal considerations within a domestic financial framework. We think it worth the risk to publish something that might be old news to some readers, insofar as it might be an important new reframing for other readers. There is nothing wrong with checking our bearings once in a while, because there is nothing so common for man than to learn that he’s been drifting off course, ever so subtly, over time. 

We’re pleased to introduce a writer who may be new to our readership, but who has worked tirelessly and sacrificially behind the scenes at Chalcedon for quite a few years. When the kinds of foundational basics that Kyle Shepherd speaks of become common coin among Christians, we can expect to see more stability in God’s Kingdom as its light penetrates the darkness, for the sake of our children and our children’s children. We begin by being faithful in small things. The rest shall follow.