Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon text is found in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. 1 Corinthians chapter 1. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God and Sosthenes our brother to the church of God which is at Corinth to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus that you were enriched in everything by him in all utterance and all knowledge even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you so that you come short in no gift eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ who will also confirm you to the end that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now I plead with you brethren by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that you may be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it has been declared to me concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you.

Now I say this that each of you says, I am of Paul, or I am of Apollos, or I am of Cephas, or I am of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized no one of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest any of you should say that I had baptized in my own name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas. Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other, for Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, that the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For since in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

For Jews request a sign and Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified. To the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of this world to put to shame the wise. And God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty. And the base things of the world, and the things which are despised, God has chosen, and the things which are not to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence.

But of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, that as it is written, he who glories, let him glory in the Lord.

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Let’s pray. Father, we do glory in your mighty name. We thank you, Father, that we like Paul and these Corinthians are called by you, set apart, Father, for your service, incorporated into the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and therefore owned by him. Bless us today as we hear our Savior’s word. Give us the good news of our redemption and salvation through his mighty acts on the cross and in his resurrection.

And give us, Lord God, an understanding of this text, that there be no divisions in the context of this church. And that we also, Lord God, take the implications of this text with us into our discussions this week about our election in Jesus name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom which cannot be divided. Amen.

Please be seated. I love the song we just sang, verse three. “Thou art a port protected from storms that round us rise. A garden intersected by the streams of paradise. Thou art a cooling fountain in life’s dry dreary sand. From thee like Pisgah’s mountain we view our promised land.”

The picture today at the front of the order of worship is an artist rendering of Moses on Pisgah Mountain seeing but not being able to enter into the promised land, but seeing it from afar. God showing it to him where God’s people were headed. We’re trying to think through the implications of what the scriptures say in terms of how we’re to seek the peace of the city where God has placed us.

And we said that of course in our day and age there is more dry and dearness to the land around us because it’s increasingly less Christian and as a result it isn’t as refreshing as what it could be. We cannot turn this around in our lifetime. Just as the exiles in Jeremiah’s day were to seek the peace, they were also to have children. And they were told explicitly seventy years is going to be accomplished here. So you got to think multigenerationally in terms of the future.

And we’re trying to understand this command to seek the peace. What is that goal? What does it look like from Pisgah Mountain where we stand where we probably won’t be able to attain it in our lifetime, but what’s the goal that we’re supposed to be moving forward? What is peace as defined in terms of civil legislation for instance? And then what mechanisms do we use to achieve that? How do we seek the peace? What do we do? You got to know where you’re going. You got to know the ways, the means that God has given you to get there.

Now, I mentioned last week that from the technical sense of the term, we’re theocrats. God rules. And so the vision we see of the future, the dream that we have of a promised land that we will not most of us be able to enter into is a civil government explicitly conscious of its dependence upon the Lord Jesus Christ and his reign. That’s what we attain to. We don’t attain to some sort of neutral civil government.

And we differentiated that from the way people normally think of theocracy today where in the Islamic faith, the church as an institution rules the civil arena. We don’t believe that. The scriptures make two different sets of powers and authorities in terms of what we’re talking about here, the church and the state. And the state is informed by the church and by the religion of Christ and particularly by those people that occupy the positions of the state, but the church doesn’t rule. That’s an ecclesiocracy.

There’s also a difference in mechanism. Islam attempts to produce conversion primarily through force. Submission. To submit is what Islam means. And while there’s a kind of a Christianized version in much of Islam today where it’s really kind of more just moral teachings, in its origins and in its radical adherence, it is a religion that the mechanism they’re trying to achieve ecclesiocracy by is force, is the sword conversion at the point of the sword. Whereas our mechanism is to speak the truth into this world and as God’s presence is seen in that then things will happen in the world. The psalms say that the nations of the earth will become submissive when they hear the words of God, not when he cuts them to pieces ultimately, but his word is what transforms the world and his word goes forth from his people as a refreshing, cooling drink of water in a hot dry land.

And so if we speak the word of God into the public arena, this is the mechanism. Of course, the voting thing is there too, but we speak the word of God and its implication into the public arena and we trust that God will take care of the rest of it by his power and by his might. Our obligation is to be faithful. So it’s a different goal than Islam and a very radically different mechanism as well. We’re trying to convince people that this is the best kind of laws you can have. Just like Deuteronomy said, these are wise laws, great laws, and most people will come to that as we speak them forth.

The problem isn’t that it’s not a good message. The problem is the message has been stifled in our day and age by some sort of supposed neutrality on the part of political governments and institutions from God’s word. And as I said last week, theonomy is about theocracy. It was nothing new to say the moral law is binding upon Reformed people. Everybody knew that. But what was new was that the law itself is, as the Bible tells us in the New Testament in Hebrews, the law of God at that time, its specific legislation in the time of Moses was a standard of perfect justice for that situation. How could we see it as anything other than that? That was what God said you should do. So in that particular time, that defines justice as what it should look like.

We are today increasingly, or almost totally in our culture, the results of Western civilization, which says that rationality and reason is the way we determine what’s good and bad, not the revealed word of God. Well, the scriptures tell us very explicitly in Isaiah 8:19 and 20 that there’s no truth apart from God’s word. Verse 20 says, “To the law and to the testimony, if they don’t speak according to this word, it’s because there is no light in them.” We don’t want to rely upon our rationality and our reason. Ultimately, we want to bring our reason subject to the thoughts of Jesus Christ in his word. We want to say what does he tell us in the word and then build our systems of thought and understanding based upon that because there’s no other light. That’s the only place light can be found, as the law and the testimony.

So as we think about how we’re going to vote, how civil structure should be organized and as we seek the peace of the city where God has placed us, we have to look to the word of God and its implications. That’s what we’re to do. We see Pisgah Mountain. We have a dim understanding of it. You know, you begin a process and you’re not quite sure everything works together, but you sort of know what it looks like out there. The scriptures give us this understanding of the relationship of God’s word to our structures. And that’s what we’re going to continue on today is to talk about the relevance of God’s word.

Remember that we’re told that we have to mature into this understanding of God’s word. In Judges 21:25, we read, “In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” Well, that’s where we’re at today primarily. People are doing what’s right in their own eyes, eyes of reason and rationality. We’re trying to turn that freighter around and look at what God’s law says, not what our reason and rationality tell us, but what might work best in terms of civil governance. But it’s a process. It’s a multigenerational process.

Hebrews 5 says that solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. By reason of use, senses exercised to discern good and evil. We’re not going to know it all in the short term. You got to be obedient and faithful to the things that God reveals and he’ll give us more knowledge. We’ll mature into a more thorough knowledge of what it is.

Okay. So I wanted to reference quickly—I didn’t do this last week and I was told people wished I had—these references. We said last week that for instance, one of the ballot measures is changing our voting age in school board elections from 21 to 18. And we said, well, I’ll pick an age. What age should we pick by which people become of the age of majority in which they can begin to exercise the right of the franchise?

And what we said was that in the Old Testament in a repeated number of references, 20 is that age. For instance, in Exodus 30:14, he’s told the number. Everyone included among those who are numbered from 20 years old and above shall give an offering to the Lord. Now there the specific thing going on is the census is given and this is the people that have to give the poll tax, so to speak, a head tax to the Lord.

And this is referenced in other portions of the Old Testament as well. Some people think this is the primary mechanism for funding the national government—a head tax. So not a percentage of income but a fixed amount for every adult. And we’re told here that this head tax, whatever it is, that atonement money—it’s another word for it—is to be given for everyone 20 and above. So this may have relationship to war. It may not. It may be a head tax. It may not be. It may be, as I said, the implication is that an atonement or covering for men. And what does that mean? We’re not sure and good people disagree. But the point is that particular kind of tax, that flat tax, whatever it was used for, that atonement money was levied on adults 20 and older. So 20 was the age of maturation.

This is repeated in Exodus 38:26. “Beka for each man that is half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary for everyone included in the numbering from 20 years old and above.”

In Leviticus 27 it talks about redeeming people for that you vowed or there’s a redemption price put upon individual people, different for men and women, different for older people and younger people. And there the age is 20 to 60. I think it’s 60 shekels if a man is five to 20, then I think it’s 20 shekels—less valuation placed to it. And again, whatever the valuation is, the point is that the break the scriptures give us is at the age of 20 where now they’re numbered with the adults, 20 to 60 years of age. They’re numbered with the adults for purposes of the valuation of a person in terms of oath, so poll tax, atonement covering, oath being redeemed. In 27 all take 20 as the year of maturation.

Again in Numbers 1:2, “Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel by their families by their father’s houses according to the number of males every male individually from 20 years old and above, all who are able to go to war.” So here specifically is the requirement linking 20 years of age with the ability to go to war. So we’ve got three different usages now of the 20-year-old age of majority: both for going to war, for evaluation purposes in terms of becoming a full adult instead of a child, and also for the purposes of the head tax, poll tax, atonement money—whatever that was, it was reckoned on those who were 20 years and above.

So over and over again the scriptures give us this age of 20 as the age of maturity. The families are numbered by their father’s households according to the number of males from 20 years old and above. So a family itself is defined as a person 20 years old and above. Here at RCC at our constitution, a person is defined as a head of a household who can vote when he attains to the age of 20, whether he’s living with his parents or not. That’s not the nexus of privilege or responsibility in the Bible. It’s how old he is. At 20, he’s regarded as an adult male.

So there are all these references in the scriptures to 20-year-olds being the mark of maturation and the mark at which people are attaining to the age of majority and we would say that’s probably the right age to have voting done as well. Additionally in the scriptures, the people that died off in the wilderness—right, the people that weren’t going to get to go in to see the promised land and be part of it—we read that the carcasses of you which have complained against Moses shall fall in the wilderness. All of you who are numbered according to your entire number from 20 years old and above. So again, the 20-year-olds are seen as having, you know, culpability as it were. And those guys 20 years old and above, they’re the ones who are going to die off. So they’re part of a generation because they’ve attained to the age of maturation or adulthood.

So we could go on, but the point is that over and over again the age of 20 is given as the age of majority. And so if we’re going to have to think about when is a person an adult in the sense of being able to vote, probably 20 is the right way to do it. That’s what we do at RCC and that’s what we recommend for civil magistrate as well.

It’s interesting. There was a ballot measure to let young people become office holders in our state legislature several years ago, I think down to the age of 18 or 21 or something. And we opposed it because we also read in various places in scripture—and I have the references on your outline—that it’s not till they were 25 or 30 that they could actually serve.

Oh, one other thing by the way: there’s also a citation in Chronicles that the Levites were numbered again from ages of 20 and up. So now who belongs to the adult priestly cast, so to speak, the Levitical group, are those who are 20 and up. So another mark of maturation. But there’s a difference with actually serving. We read in Numbers 4:2 and 3, “Take a census of the sons of Kohath from among the children of Levi by their families by their father’s house. From 30 years old and above, even to 50 years old, all who enter the service to do the work in the tabernacle of meeting.”

So here, while they’re 20, they’re regarded as Levites. It’s not till they’re 30 that the Kohathites can actually do their work and then they have to retire at 50. While the Kohathites—this was in the time of the tabernacle of meeting, a lot of carrying heavy things around. And I told my family once I turned 50, I didn’t have to carry anything heavy anymore based on this text. So you don’t do heavy lifting anymore when you turn 50. But you can’t even begin to get into that active service of carrying around the temple, the tabernacle stuff until you’re 30.

So there’s a different age there, and they were numbered at the age of 30. And then another reference tells us—let’s see where is this? This is in Numbers 8:23 and 24. “Then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, this is what pertains to the Levites: from 25 years old and above one may enter to perform service in the work of the tabernacle of meeting.”

So here it seems like at 25, probably what’s happening is they’re becoming assistants or apprentices but they’re able enter into the work of the ministry in terms of the tabernacle. So 20 the age of maturation, 25 or maybe 30 seems like the biblical age for actually serving in office in more of an authoritative capacity.

Now there’s an example where we sort of look at biblical evidence. How did it work? Doesn’t mean we’re going to cut and paste from there, but it does mean it should inform us. And if we’re going to pick an age, we ought to pick an age that the Bible seems to put before us, which is 20.

So we talked about that last week in terms of the ballot measure and voting. Last week we talked also about ballot measures 56 and 59 in terms of taxation. And I put a few little points on your outline that I mentioned last week, but I thought it’d be good to put down and remind us of. You know, when you look at taxation, we always think of taxation with representation, but representation is just a means of consent.

So in terms of taxation, you have this idea of people consenting to tax as part of the American legal process. And the reason why you need people’s consent to tax them is that people are seen as free and responsible moral beings. Christ has set us free. We’re not owned by the civil government. This is a modern idea that there even is some sort of civil government. It’s really an idea, the state.

There’s no state. There’s people that serve in state offices. There are tax farmers. There are tax collectors. There are people that do certain things. But there’s no abstract notion. Well, there is an abstract notion. There’s no metaphysical reality to the state. We think of that in our day and age. It’s become sort of the government. If you talk about the government’s going to do this or the government’s going to do that, do you think of the family? No. Do you think of the church? Probably not. You think of the marketplace? No. You think of schools? No. You think of the civil government. Its claim to itself in the minds of most people, it is the government and everything else is subordinated to the civil government. That’s a modern concept, a very modern concept, and it’s certainly not accurate biblically. There’s all kinds of governments between the individual and the centralized authority.

So this idea of the state, and that’s government, and everything else isn’t government—that’s all messed up. It fails to acknowledge that we’re free citizens. Okay? Christ has set us free. He gives us civil structures that declare that we’re free and responsible and therefore taxation has to be with consent. It can’t just be, you know, the state can’t exert a claim to own everything in the world, including everything that you have.

Consent implies freedom and responsibility. Consent involves a contractual relationship. The state’s going to do something in return for your taxes—a contractual relationship. Consent also involves representation as a means. Okay, so that’s good. But when representation becomes so broad and abstract as a bunch of statistics and numbers of people voting, you sort of lose the idea of representation and you’ve certainly begun to move away from the idea of consent.

Consent requires clarity and price. And I gave this example last week of Leicester under Norman rule where they accepted taxation upon houses with gabled windows in exchange for jury trials instead of trial by ordeal. So if you think of that, this contractual obligation has to have some clarity to it and a fixed price to it.

Contrast that now to what we have in terms of taxation. The tax monies go into some kind of general fund that you have no idea what it’s going to go for, right? There’s no clarity in terms of what’s going to happen to your taxes. You may get some kind of pie chart about where it all goes, but it’s all commingled into some huge fund. And no matter what, if you want to not do things over here, well, it just pushes money in from over on this side. So there’s no clarity anymore of what these taxes are doing and what you’re consenting to in terms of the relationship.

Okay? We’ve lost clarity. We’ve lost a biblical understanding of what taxes were, limited in the part of the civil government that the government isn’t the only government. And we have this idea of clarity and a particular price for a particular benefit. And all that’s kind of gone away. It’s just a mishmash where the state everything is confused. Everything is anonymous and the state just exerts ownership over all that you have.

That’s unusual in terms of the development of the American political system. That’s not normal. Anglo-Saxon law built upon the case laws of the Old Testament developed this system of consent. And we’ve kind of moved away from that. And when you move away from that, taxation has taken on a radically perverse nature.

Now, when the Democratic candidate for president promises middle class tax cuts and then you look at his actual plan, he’s not talking about tax cuts. He’s talking about giving checks to people who don’t pay taxes. Now, I think 40% of the American people don’t pay any federal income tax. That number has been growing over the years. What is taxation?

Taxation’s a mechanism now. One of its primary purposes is to redistribute wealth, to take away from people that have more money and give it to people that don’t. And they call it a tax cut when you’re going to send somebody a check who never paid any income tax to the federal government at all.

So taxation in terms of consent of the people being taxed, you know, if you’re going to have consent of people being taxed, you wouldn’t have people voting on it that aren’t taxed. That’s not consent. That’s envy. That’s the guy who says I want what that guy’s got and I can either try to steal it from him or if I can’t get it, I want his money taken away from him at least. That’s where we’ve moved to now.

And so when you know, when the ballot measure 56 in Oregon attempts to make it easier to pass one of the worst of taxes, property taxes. Property is important in the Bible. We’ll talk more about that in a few weeks, but there’s no property tax in the Bible. There was a head tax. There was a tithe tax taken by the king. That might have been legitimate, but the property tax is one of the worst taxes. And when Measure 56 attempts to let small amounts of people vote on that—again, you know who should vote on property tax measures? Property owners, the ones that are being taxed. Seems that’s consent.

So in any event, 56 is a bad measure because the legislature wants to make it easier to pass top property taxes and it’s about as far away from consent of the majority of the people as you can get. It would allow small percentages of people voting to determine to raise property taxes for everybody else. Right now, the law says in terms of property taxes, you got to at least have most of the people show up to vote before you can say you’ve got consent.

And as I mentioned last week, Measure 59 is one we approve. I approve of it because it wants it gives you a deduction for all the taxes you pay on your federal income taxes. You don’t have to pay state taxes on the federal taxes you pay. You make a hundred bucks, you give the federal government $10 in taxes and if Measure 59 passes, you only got to pay state taxes on the 90 bucks you had left after the feds took their cut of their taxes from you.

Right now, you got a hundred bucks. The feds tax you at $10, you got $90, but the state taxes you on the $100 and they’ll take another 10% of what you didn’t even get all of because you had taxes going on. So and again, the reason why they justify that is because most people don’t pay federal taxes. And so people that don’t pay federal taxes, of course they want rich people to pay more federal and state taxes. And so that’s why we have this kind of strange law we have that needs to be changed through Measure 59 to make taxation only on what the income you actually receive after the federal government has taken their share.

Increasingly what we have in American government is statism and envy. Political action is true religion when the state claims ownership over everything as God. And that’s what God warned his people against. When they don’t have a king, when we don’t recognize King Jesus, God in his grace gives us more radical kings to exercise authority over us so that we’ll repent of that sin and turn to him.

All right, let’s talk now about there’s a ballot measure that would radically restructure elections in Oregon. And instead of a Democratic and a Republican primary every spring or every other spring, it would make one open primary. Anybody can put their names in there, different parties. You can have a party affiliation or not. And the top two vote getters run and they then are on the November ballot and nobody else is on the November ballot. No minor party candidates. Just the top two vote getters. Could be both Democrats, could be both Republicans, whatever it is. It’s an open primary, but there’s only a single primary.

Now probably—so I want to talk about this and get into it by way of looking at what the Bible says about partisanship, party spirit. There’s a number of references that kind of warn us against this, but I want to kind of take 1 Corinthians 1 and talk about this because that’s clearly what’s going on.

In a moment, we’ll talk about the fact that Paul is worried. He’s concerned that party spirit—people that are identified themselves with one person or another and thus with one party or group and another—this is starting to happen in Corinth. And I want to talk about it now.

Notice the way Paul addresses this though. First of all, through the assertion of God’s sovereignty. Look at 1 Corinthians 1. Now we’ll spend some time here. Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God. Okay. Paul starts off. He’s going to attack party spirit and he starts off by asserting God’s sovereignty over everything. We’re not here because we chose to be here. We’re here because God chose us. Okay? So his assertion of the sovereignty of God is part of his mechanism of trying to teach them the way they should think of things.

To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. So he talks about himself being the object of God’s sovereignty and he says your position as saints is because God has sovereignly called you. So with all who in every place call on the name of our Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And he reminds them right away that peace comes from the grace of God given to us.

Now he’s going to talk to them about how they don’t have peace. They have the beginnings at least of contention and strife. And so the way you get to peace and not partisan, you know, bickering and party spirits in a church or a community is by recognizing the grace of God. So he stresses God’s sovereignty and then he talks about the relationship of that sovereignty to us being grace and that grace is what creates peace. Peace is the right ordering of relationships. He wants to call them to be unified. And to do that he calls them to the sovereignty of God and its application to them through grace.

And so verse four says then in verse four, I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus. So they didn’t get any of this stuff. He says you were endowed with in everything by him in all utterance and all knowledge even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you so that you come short in no gift eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he’s saying you got a lot of good things going on but remember that whatever you have came as a gift from God’s grace from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this isn’t just throwaway lines at the beginning of the epistle. The whole epistle is about the divisions primarily. That’s what it’s mostly about. And what he’s telling him right away is significant to it. If we want to avoid, you know, party politics in the church or party politics in the civil state or party politics in our neighborhoods or our families even, if we want to avoid that partisanship and bickering that happens, then this is the way to get there—to listen to Paul’s argument: the sovereignty of God, the grace of God which creates the giftings in us and that leads to peace and unity.

Then he addresses their party strike. And look at the way he does it. Again, no throwaway words. Now I plead with you, brethren. So he’s being respectful. He’s not chastising them. He’s not beating them over the head, but he’s coming alongside of them to address a problem specifically and openly. You know, it’s interesting the party spirit. Of course, you get a lot of talking behind everybody’s back when people are, you know, I’m of this guy, I’m in his camp, and I’m in this camp. Everybody starts talking behind everybody else’s back and nothing is clear and open. And Paul is very open. He says, “I plead with you. I’ve got reports from some people, names the household of Chloe. I hear this about you.” He’s not hiding anything. He’s not beating around the bush. He goes right at the problem.

I plead with you, brethren. Again, what does he stress? Their commonality is being part of the family of Jesus Christ. They’re all brethren. And if they would remember that, they wouldn’t have given way so easily to these party spirits. I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Did you notice, you know, that this pleading is not on the basis of rationality or reason. It’s on the basis of the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. Did you notice how often in these first few verses that whole designation the name Lord Jesus Christ—this is what he says. He pleads them in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is calling on his authority being totally based not in himself or his own wisdom but in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he’s calling them brethren but he’s reminding them that he is speaking authoritatively on the word of the one whom that has called them as his own.

So party spirit. Then he pleads with them that they all speak the same thing, that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. Some commentators say, well, he does it in reverse order. He talks about speaking the same things, but we can only get there if we have a common understanding of things and then a common discernment or judgment of things, which he gets to there. He wants them to have the same understanding or mind. He wants them to have the same judgment or discernment and they say well you know really he puts the first thing there but it’s the result of these other things.

I don’t think so. I think he starts with speaking the truth speaking one word speaking in a united fashion because we are not first and foremost, you know, homo sapien. We are homo adorans—we’re men who worship God and that worship transforms us and makes our thinking different. So, he doesn’t—we don’t wait for our kids to work it all out, think through the thing, come up with proper discernments before we make sure they talk in a polite fashion. We don’t do that. And neither does he. He tells them at first, the answer to your divisions is to speak the same thing.

Now he wants them to have the same understanding and come up with a common discernment of what different aspects they’re talking about in the church, but he commands them first to speak the same thing. Act like what you really are. You really are brothers, one of the other. You’re really united. Now act that way. And you know, if people would just do this, they always say, “Oh, I’d be a hypocrite if I acted that way if I don’t feel like it.” No, no. You’d be what God says you’re supposed to be. Then the truth is that you’re a Christian and you should act like a Christian. When you don’t act like a Christian, you’re really being a liar about who you really are. You’re really being a hypocrite when you act bad because your ultimate identity now is brothers and those who are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

So he tells them, you got divisions going on and you need to speak the truth as a way of taking care of this problem. Then as I said, he also wants them, of course, to be fitted together. He wants them to be perfectly joined together. This is like piecing a bone piece back together, a medical kind of terminology. And so there’s an understanding here, as Paul will give us later in this epistle, of unity and diversity. The unity that they’re going to have is not through a loss of their individuality, but it’s seeing their individuality in the context of the greater working of the body. Right? So we’re not to become one thing only with no differentiation. We’re pieces of a puzzle put together. We’re individual pieces, but we’re pieces that are to act in the context of unity.

For it has been declared to me concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you. And you say, “I’m of Paul. I’m of Cephas. I’m Apollos.” So now, who are these groups? Well, some people think he’s just using artificial names, but I think these probably were really names. And one thing it shows us is that party spirit isn’t necessarily the result of the leader of the party. Paul didn’t want anybody to identify themselves with him as opposed to other Christians. Cephas didn’t. Apollos was a good guy. So it’s Lord, protect me from my followers. Again, you know, if you got Rushdoonies, it’s not because Rushdoony wanted followers. If you got people that, you know, believe everything Doug Wilson says, it’s not because Doug Wilson’s at fault. It’s easy to take that tack, but it’s wrong here.

What it tells us is these people are claiming they’re of Paul, but clearly Paul is saying, “Ah, I didn’t teach you that.” They have party spirit though. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles. Apollos was an Alexandrian Jew, very bright, kind of like a James B. Jordan kind of, you know, deep thinker sort of guy, you know, and symbolic typology. You know, the Alexandrian school had the whole typological thing down and then some, but he’s really bright and all that stuff. And Paul is sort of seen as the apostle to the Gentiles. Then you got Cephas who is Jewish. Now, they’re all Jewish. Some people have read into this that what we got going on is the whole Jew gentile distinction and problem. Maybe. I don’t think so. I think something else is going on. But in any event, they have party politics.

Now he doesn’t say this is really bad at the church. He addresses it as an incipient problem and before we make application to our political parties in Oregon. It’s good for us to hear the caution here to us, right? It’s easy to become imbued with party spirit in the context of any group and the church is not an exception. The church also will have temptations to do this. You know, private schools are notoriously, you know, prone—not because the school’s at fault just like Paul was at fault—but its adherents can become a we’re KA, we’re of the KA group, we’re of this group, you know, we’re of this person. It’s easy to have these different factions start to take on a level of party spirit that’s quite destructive of unity and left unchecked could produce a real problem.

Now I used KA not because I think it is a problem, but I’m just saying that’s an example of how in many churches, private schools and the contentions that come with them can develop into this kind of party spirit, you know, because schools generally in our country had this kind of pride of school and stuff against all the other schools and that sort of a thing. And church politics is not unusual. It’s very usual for people to fall into camps. I kind of like this guy. I kind of like this guy. I team up in this way and I’m against that what they’re doing over there. And Paul warns them against this and he tells them that really what you’re doing is trying to divide Jesus Christ who is not dividable.

He says, “You were baptized in the name of you were not baptized in the name of Paul.” So then he says, “Well, I baptized some of you, but I didn’t really stress it.” So the point is Paul is addressing this contention. He’s telling them to speak in terms of unity and he’s warning them about the dangers of division.

And then the other thing he does from beginning to end of this epistle is talk about the supremacy of Jesus Christ. And that’s what he says now. He says that the cross of Jesus Christ should not be made of no effect and the divisions of this can make the cross of Christ of no effect for those particular people. He mentions Christ 10 times uses the term Christ 10 times in the first 10 verses.

What people need to hear when they’re starting to develop party spirit is the supremacy of Jesus Christ. King Jesus Christ is king. Jesus is savior, the savior king. They need to hear about that. He’s the one we’re serving, not these individual people that we’re kind of partying up with and teaming up with against other people. One of the cures to party spirit is the assertion of the crown rights of Jesus Christ. And if there’s one thing that the political parties in America need, it’s the assertion of the crown rights of Jesus Christ as supreme over who they are.

And when a party casts that off, it is bound then to exercise itself in the sort of party politics that people are getting quite sick of in the context of our country legitimately. So now there’s attempts for change and new people going to this and that and doing new things but until people submit to the kingship of Jesus Christ we will have party spirit all the day. That’s what it’ll have. So the supremacy of Jesus Christ is one of the central messages for Paul to combat the party spirit and the supremacy of Christ’s word particularly—again it’s not reason that he’s bringing to them. There is reason and rationality to it but ultimately it’s the supremacy of King Jesus and what his word says. Very applicable to how we talk about and think through how we’re going to vote everything else in life—the supremacy of Christ in his word as opposed to autonomous reason.

And then I read the rest of the chapter because what he goes on to talk about is wisdom. It’s kind of odd. You know, he goes on to start talking about, you know, how God has made the wisdom of this world foolish. Message of the cross is foolish to those who are perishing. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of the age? Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of the world? And then he says, “The Jews request a sign, but Greeks seek after wisdom. And the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, not to the Gentiles, but to the Greeks.” And he says that in opposition to this, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

So he gets into this long dissertation about the wisdom of the world as opposed to the wisdom of God. Now it could be, and then he says, “You weren’t wise. You were the recipients of God’s grace.” Now it could be that what he’s saying is that you know, you’re thinking it’s wise to pit yourself against somebody else and that’s all he’s talking about—his talking about their foolishness.

But I think that probably what’s happening here is Paul is contrasting the wisdom of Jesus Christ in this last half of the chapter with the wisdom of Greek philosophy and politics. This is why he attacks the wisdom of the world, the wisdom of the Greeks, all that stuff. The Greeks believed in an ultimate dialectic, an ultimate duality to the world. And so to them, conflict of interests was part of the process of development and progress. Okay.

So Greek political thought, you know, has to do with this kind of conflict thing and political parties developed in the context of this in America when Greek philosophy and thought forms in terms of government were resurrected in the founding of our country. This country became more and more, you know, moving toward political parties. Political parties reflect an understanding of a basic conflict of interest in the world as opposed to what could be called the harmony of interests in the world. Okay? And this kind of political philosophy has its roots in an understanding of basic conflict in the world, a duality—whether it’s, you know, whatever those two things are that are fighting against each other. That’s sort of what’s going on here.

So I think what Paul is saying is he’s correcting the Corinthians for bringing into their—what we could say church—political philosophy the idea that, you know, antagonistic parties to one another are necessary to keep the whole thing on track. And they weren’t just falling into this because of the flesh. They were actually falling into this because the wisdom of the world at that time was this kind of combative nature, this understanding that the world is not basically harmonious, but the world is basically in conflict with one another. And Paul concludes this section by quoting from Jeremiah.

As it is written, he who glories, let him glory in the Lord. That’s taken from the book of Jeremiah. And Jeremiah—it’s taken specifically from Jeremiah chapter 9 where Jeremiah is talking about a lamentation for the captivity and exile, the death of Zion that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of months. And what Jeremiah is saying is this is what leads to exile: boasting in our own abilities, boasting in our riches, boasting in our wisdom, boasting in our strength. This is what led to the exile.

So if we’re going to work our way out of the exile, we’re going to do it with an acknowledgement of God’s grace to us and a submission to his glory, not ours. Let him that boasts glory in this: that he understands and knows me, God says, that I am the Lord. So you know what he’s doing, I think, is equipping his people in Jeremiah not to adopt the philosophies of the people where he’ll place them in exile, but rather to see that those philosophies are going to be erroneous and lead them into problems. And that’s what the Corinthians were doing. They were being led into problems of thinking there’s an ultimate conflict of interest.

Now there is conflict in the world but it’s not metaphysical. In other words, there’s nothing built into the universe that is essentially conflict. Conflict comes as a result of moral choices. Now we know this: that the world has an essential harmony of interest because God on the sixth day saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. God declared there is a harmony of interests in the world. It’s all very good. Okay. Who is the one who said no?

So there’s actually a conflict of interest going on here at the basic level of the creation. That would be Satan. Satan comes along to Eve and he says, “Well, no, in actuality, I know you’ve been taught that everything’s good and everything’s harmonious and you’re at peace here. But in actuality, conflict of interest is ultimate, not harmony of interest. Because the God who made you, he gave you that law not to eat that stuff just ’cause he doesn’t want you to be like himself.”

Satan planted the idea of the conflict of interests. This became the genesis of fallen man. The genesis of fallen man is the belief in conflict of interest between himself and God. It is unnatural to rebel in that way against God. But that’s what man does. Man tortures himself as R.J. Rushdoony writes in his “Warfare and Rebellion Against God.” But it’s not a metaphysical truth. It’s a moral problem that he’s got because he believed the lie. He believed the lie that conflict of interest is the way to get progress in the world.

And the scriptures say no, there is an ultimate harmony of interest because God has created everything. Everything is good. Party politics. Some corporations, you know, this is the whole idea is conflict of interest. You keep different groups fighting with each other and the whole thing will get better. And some churches try to run themselves that way. Well, you got different things going on. You know, it’s a perversion of the notion of checks and balances. Checks and balances just means it takes good people to see things from different perspectives to make good decisions. When that’s perverted through the fallen idea, that’s perverted into the idea of conflict of interest.

This is the modern world—believes ultimately in this kind of conflict of interest. It’s not, you know, it’s not outside of their philosophy for the Democrats and the Republicans to lie about each other. That’s not unusual. That’s built into the system now of the political parties because they see themselves in the context of this ultimate conflict of interest. Whether they know it or not, they’re all Marxian.

You know, Marx taught that progress happens through thesis and antithesis, which produces synthesis. So he believes that there’s an ultimate conflict of interest. And when you enter into that warfare, that’s when you make progress. The synthesis comes and that becomes the new thesis. There’s another antithesis. Conflict is essential. So Marx saw conflict as essential to the world and how you get progress. He was demonic to the core. Demonic to the core.

Now Marx was contemporary with Darwin and Darwin put out this book and Marx and Engels got really excited about it. Well, this is it. This is in the natural world just what we’ve been saying in the philosophical or political world, so said Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels believed that Darwin had given them the same truth given to the world the same truth as they had done with their philosophy.

Marx wrote to Engels in 1860. He said, “This is the book Origin of the Species which contains the basis in natural history for our view.” Okay? Because you know Darwin taught that this inevitable conflict people, you know, these species fight. They’re all fighting for domination. The end result is this evolutionary model. And so Marx saw it in that way.

In a letter, Marx then wrote to Lassalle, who was another socialist in 1861, right after the book came out, he said, “Darwin’s book is very important serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” So Marx taught this class struggle and he saw that class struggle being articulated by Darwin in the context of evolution. So an evolutionary mindset is a belief in the ultimate conflict of interests as being essential for progress. Marx taught class struggle as important and necessary. Conflict of interest produces progress.

And what do we have today? We’ve got classes of people struggling. We got the left and the right. You know, that goes back to the French Revolution. When the king called the Estates General together, the king would sit up here and on his right hand, his favored powerful hand, that’s where the nobles sat. And on the left hand, that’s where the average people’s representatives sat, the egalitarians. These people were always trying to level everything. And these people were trying to, you know, work—well, some of them weren’t, but some were in their fallen state trying to work against the poor people.

So left and right, you know, those terms come to us from political theory that’s that’s really has at its heart conflict of interest. We need a left, we need a right. One of our pastors, great pastor, says, “You need a like two wings of the plane, otherwise you don’t fly straight.” I’m sure he wasn’t self-conscious about that, but ultimately that’s saying there needs to be conflict of interest and that through that conflict progress happens.

Well, that’s what they were doing in Corinth. They were importing into the church the idea that what we really need is separate parties here to compete against one another and that’ll produce the synthesis, the good deal in progress. I think that’s what they were doing. I think Paul is writing specifically against Greek philosophical and political philosophy infiltrated into the church. Why wouldn’t it? That’s where they lived. It’s just like today. We think the same way.

And so we think, you know, we don’t like it when, you know, three different people I heard this week—Susan Sarandon, some guy on the floor of the United States House, some other woman—all said, you know, Sarah Palin was a governor, of course, and she kind of made fun of Barack Obama being a community organizer. And all three of them said that Jesus was a community organizer like Barack, and the governor, Pontius Pilot, was a governor.

So they equate Sarah Palin with Pontius Pilate. That really offends us, of course. But what they’re doing is they’re working out this principle of conflict of interest. And we do the same thing. The people on the right do the same thing. They look at Barack Obama and he made some line about lipstick on a pig. And I don’t necessarily think we should jump to the conclusion that he was picturing Sarah Palin as a pig. Now, his audience did. They started, you know, hoot and hollering. He should have recognized, uh oh, we got some problems here. But apparently wasn’t that quick on the stump. But there’s no reason for us to jump to the conclusion and then promote to everybody that, you know, Obama is a horrible guy. He’s treating a woman like a pig.

But that’s what political parties do, right? Particularly in our day and age. The political parties are out to destroy each other. That’s because they represent conflict of interest, not this mutual harmony of interests based upon a Christian view of the world.

So that brings us to Measure 65. Right. So Measure 65 says, “Well, you know, we’re just going to have one primary.” Do you know that your tax dollars pay for the Democratic Party primary every two years? And did you know that your taxes also pay for the Republican party primary? Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you? Seems odd to me. Why are my taxes providing for a private party’s primary process? That seems weird. And it furthers this whole conflict of interest, party spirit, partisanship.

You know the Bible—there’s verse after verse after verse about not showing partiality, not being partisan, not having party spirit. All that stuff is spoken against in the scriptures. And yet most of us, me included, when we fall into these political seasons, we tend to get very partisan about things. And what’s important now is not the particular candidate. What’s important is the party, the Republican party itself.

So we got a problem and Measure 65 attempts to do something about that by changing that—by no more party primaries paid for by tax dollars. One primary in which all these candidates can run, top go into the fall election. Much to commend it. George Washington warned about political parties in his farewell address. Rose Lord talked to me about this. He says this: “It serves to yet being the idea of emerging political party system that party system serves to distract the public councils and infeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms.”

He warned us. Ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one against another. It opens the doors to foreign influence and corruption. Can we read Clinton administration? Thus, the policy and the will of one country is subjected to the policy and will of another. Washington said, “Stay away from the party system. It’s going to be bad for you. It’s going to get, it’ll be conflict of interest time.” Washington was the last president not elected on a party basis. The very next election was, you know, a party guy. The parties then became part of our political structure from then on.

So Measure 65 has a lot of good things to commend it. You know, the party stuff I read says, “Well, you know, you don’t want this because then it’ll be a personality contest instead of really based on the issues that the party platform will tell us.” Well, the candidates could give two hoots about the party platform. There’s no discipline within any of these parties. Number one, and number two, in the Bible, when you elect officers of the state or of the church, it doesn’t talk about their position on issues. It talks about them being wise, understanding, just men.

Now justice is defined by a standard. The issues aren’t irrelevant in what people think about them. But ultimately, it’s a good thing that we vote for candidates, not for a party platform, because that’s what God says. When we vote for people, we should vote for individuals.

Now I don’t actually recommend a yes vote on Measure 65 in spite of all these things I’ve just said because it is so new and novel and can have so many unintended consequences. Washington state is doing pretty much the same thing starting this year. So I think it’s wise—we’re to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. It’s wise to see how it plays out before making a radical change, but be open to something that attacks the idea of the two-party system.

The third party guys say, “Well, means we won’t get on the ballot in November.” So what? So what? What third party candidate has ever won on the ballot in November? None of them. They’re doing the same thing as the other parties. They’re perpetuating themselves and their income stream through the state process and the kind of publicity they can get through being put on the general ballot.

I mean, I’m not—Political parties of themselves are bad. If we’re going to have a political party, the only one that we should have, I think according to an application of 1 Corinthians 1, is a Christian party. Jesus Christ is not divided. A Christian party, you know, it’s political parties become false communions, false communities. People look upon themselves. It’s an attempt to build a commonality, a community, a neighborhood, so to speak, apart from what 1 Corinthians tells us is the only source of peace: the grace of God through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Every other party exalts itself against God. In Holland, the Christians formed the Anti-Revolutionary Party because any party that’s not explicitly Christian is in revolution against God. Why? Because they’re following the ethical philosophy of the serpent who said that conflict of interest is the basic truth of reality and we say no. The basic truth of reality is the harmony of interest. God created all things good. God has brought us back to himself through the personal work of Jesus Christ. We believe in the harmony of interests.

Same thing with trade unions. The other ballot measure I mentioned today is Measure 64. Right now unions can collect funds using state taxpayer financed equipment and labor time to collect dues for unions which turn around then and use those dues to pay for political processes. Your taxes are supporting people that probably in many cases are lobbying with your tax dollars against what you would like to have happen.

And so Measure 64 tries to get rid of that. And so 64 I think should be supported. It says that you know your people can write a check to you if they want but you can’t use the taxpayer subsidized payroll system to collect dues for political purposes and that seems eminently reasonable. Trade unions are another illustration of the conflict of interest philosophy, right? It’s an attempt to build community on a class—worker guys as opposed to management guys.

I was listening to some of the coverage of the Boeing strike and I heard some labor leader and all the people were mad at the labor union labor leaders saying brothers, sisters, brothers, sisters trying to calm them down. See, that’s false brotherhood, false sisterhood. Paul gives us the source of all true community and brotherhood: the Lord Jesus Christ. The trade union movement is the result of Marxism, this inevitable class struggle that goes on.

And I’m not saying management didn’t screw up and help create the labor system, labor unions. I think they did. But the point is it’s solidified. It’s stratified a permanent conflict of interests that is built into these relationships. Not can be overcome. I think that Boeing has gone a long way toward having harmonious relationships with unions and for the betterment of the country and company. But for the most part, unions represent the same idea of conflict of interest. And certainly tax dollars shouldn’t be used to pay to subsidize union political action. 64, if passed, will take care of that.

I mentioned that, you know, we can have refreshment in exile. A couple weeks ago, I talked about refreshment. And refreshment, unlike the modern idea of refreshment, doesn’t come in isolation typically from community. Refreshment comes in community getting together with one another particularly on the Lord’s day. We sang about that—this port protected and these streams of refreshment that are ours through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Well, the church can be a source of unrefreshment where it gathers too. The kind of party spirit that was beginning to manifest itself in the Corinthian church is anti-refreshment. Right now, when you come to church, you see a bunch of people you’re kind of ticked off at and you’re joined up in sides against them. You don’t have things resolved.

So God says that true community is found in the harmony of interests as we recognize each other as brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus Christ. Pride is the great factor that produces contention and dissension among people. You know, Proverbs 6 says this: “There’s six things, yea seven that are abomination to the Lord: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among the brethren.”

Now that’s a chiasm at the very heart is the middle—is the heart that makes bad plans. On either side of that, you got hands and feet doing bad things. On either side of that, you got a lying tongue and a false witness that speaks lies. These are clearly paired up. This is clearly a chiastic structure and the beginning and the end is a proud look and someone who sows contention among the brothers.

Paul knew that pride had to be attacked directly through the assertion of the sovereignty of God and his grace to his people because pride was what created party spirit. And in fact, party spirit kindles pride rather than knocking pride down. When pride infects a church, a community, a political process, what we get is the opposite of refreshment. What we get is an American population increasingly turned off to even thinking about government because of the conflict of interests that’s built into the two-party system. And the end result has not been refreshing to God’s people.

God says, “Come together today, understand what community is in the person of Jesus Christ and then try to extend that community in the context of your own neighborhood and the political process ultimately therein. He says is found refreshment.”

Let’s pray.

Father we thank you for the refreshment that dwelling in the context of the saints, humble gracious ones, Lord God gracious to each other because they’ve been shown grace by you. We thank you for the wonders of community life and the beauty of it and the refreshment of it. Help us Lord God each individually to turn away from this party spirit this week. Help us not to be swept up into the conflict of interest theology that’s being spread in our political process for the next couple of months particularly.

Help us not to follow the devil believing that somehow there’s conflict between us and you built into the universe but help us to believe your word, your covenant of peace to us spoken through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.