Andy Stanley and Beto O’Rourke have beckoned us recently to consider an untethered walk through the chasms of darkness that are the contemporary world.
“Participants in the new covenant are not required to obey any of the commandments found in the first part of their Bibles,” Stanley has opined. “Participants in the new covenant are expected to obey the single command Jesus issued as part of his new covenant: as I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
The strong principles that have kept civilization from spinning off into chaos are, according to Andy Stanley, apparently applicable only to non-Christians. This presumes that those in new covenant relationship with God through Christ have gone beyond the need for the tethering power of the Law. There is a whiff of Gnosticism here: a special elite exists above the Law because those in the new covenant no longer need the restraint.
As a new covenant-follower of Jesus Christ since 1956 and a pastor since 1973 I have observed neither personally nor in the pastoral counseling room that we can unhook from the Decalogue.
I appreciate Andy Stanley’s call to the highest, and understand first-hand the extravagance of God’s grace, but also comprehend why Proverbs 22:28 warns that we should not move the “ancient boundary which your fathers have set.”
People in Jesus Christ and the new covenant are positionally perfect, and therefore have no fear of the judgment. However, in the grit of life in the rancid atmosphere of the fallen world, the flesh still needs restraint.
And so do nations, midst the spiritual, intellectual, political upheaval of our time.
Which brings us to Andy Stanley’s partner on the untethered spacewalk.
Beto O’Rourke, as a faithful left-progressive who eschews dogmatism except for the creeds of the progressivist cause, thinks the nation itself may need to cast off the tether of constitutional principles.
Reading Stanley’s words, and a recent Washington Post interview with O’Rourke, made me think of imaginary astronauts trying to maneuver outside the space station without the tethers that keep them from becoming human satellites in perpetual free-float around the earth.
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Wallace Henley
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