Greetings and welcome to the God's Word is Life podcast for the week of November 5th.
This is Pastor Mark Anderson.
Thank you very much for joining me here today.
The violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior that has poured into the streets of America,
Western Europe, and other places in the last month are focused on concern for the Palestinian
cause.
There's actually a lot more going on here, which has widespread implications for life
in the Western world, certainly, and also in other places.
Before I comment on that, I'd like to make an observation about what Martin Luther called
the doctrine of the two kingdoms because it's pertinent to my comments later.
Luther talked about the kingdom on the right and the kingdom on the left.
And it works like this in simple terms.
On the one hand, on the kingdom on the right, God uses all forms of law in all societies
to make society as civil as possible and to restrain evil.
If you think about it, every society, whether it's a simple society to a very sophisticated
civilization, they all have legal systems to provide civil order and to restrain evil.
It's common throughout the world.
On the other hand, Luther wanted to say there's a kingdom on the left, and that is that unique
kingdom that God uses to implement the gospel of Jesus Christ, the proclamation of the forgiveness
of sins in which, to use Luther's words, God calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies
a people in faith through Christ.
Both kingdoms have their place, but they're not the same.
We believe that there will be no kingdom of God established in this world through the
implementation of the law.
There will be no fully realized heaven on earth here when everybody finally falls in
line.
The kingdom of God will be realized in a new creation that God alone will bring.
In the meantime, societies are free to establish flexible laws that bring about as just and
peaceful a world as possible, and that requires a lot of flexibility and patience in working
through this legal problem that always exists.
The Islamic religions see things differently.
Their ideal world is one where every person submits to the absolutes of the revealed word
of God in Sharia law.
Through all the word, Islam actually means submission.
And while Islam is not monolithic and they have their groups just like Christianity does
and other religions do, a vast majority of Muslims certainly are not gun-wielding terrorists.
Both of them are to cause concern across the world.
Those who claim that a law is a God of peace need to have a conversation, it seems to me,
with those hundreds of thousands of other Muslims across the world who are quite willing
to take up arms and commit violent acts and provocations in the name of the God of peace.
Modern societies today are losing confidence in themselves and the Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian
moral order that is stood beneath our civilization.
The erosion of this confidence, to some extent, has been the deliberate effort and work of
some of the institutions of the Western world.
So it's no accident that it's taken root and it's starting to bear its evil fruit.
But the new religion of the West, which we can characterize broadly as equity, pluralism,
toleration, and inclusion, are weak when they, when stood up against the religious confidence
of Islam.
Europe is discovering this and other parts of the world are discovering this as well.
Muslims are convinced of their superiority.
With a legalistic certainty, they claim to have received the final and ultimate word
from God about, well, everything.
And it's simply a fact that many Muslims live very uneasily in cultures where Islam is not
religiously, politically, and culturally dominant.
For they make no distinction between sacred and sectarian law.
There is no kingdom on the left and kingdom on the right.
Secular law is flexible and adapts.
Sharia law is inflexible, enduring, permitting no irony, no criticism.
It is immovable and untouchable.
And so Islam presses on, barely tolerating, in many cases, what to them is ultimately
intolerable, the non-Islamic world in all its forms and expressions.
If Islam is defined a place in the West, difficult questions really ought to be asked.
And those questions ought to be asked at the ground level where you and I live among our
neighbors, Muslim and non-Muslim neighbors.
These are important questions to discuss, it seems to me.
For example, can Islam affirm the political and cultural inheritance of the West?
Freedom of speech, freedom of association and religion.
Can Islam learn to put religious law in a category apart from secular law?
Can Islam absorb criticism, even what it sees as blasphemy, for the sake of a diverse and
pluralistic society?
Can Islam turn from its rigid legalisms toward a more tolerant, flexible posture?
In the current atmosphere of Western self-loathing and appeasement, whether these questions will
be asked with any real seriousness, well, it's an open question.
Nevertheless, as citizens of the West, Christian or otherwise, it seems to me that it is an
obligation upon us to do so.
Now as Christian people, we have the joy and obligation of reaching out to our neighbors,
Islamic and otherwise, with the gospel of an authentic peace, the peace that comes through
that forgiveness that is in Jesus Christ, that proclamation of that good word of the
Kingdom on the left.
Forgiveness, after all, is a far more potent force than the resentments and harsh, inflexible
bigotries that drive much of the Islamic cause and all forms of legalisms.
This hard task of living and proclaiming the more excellent way of love and forgiveness
in Christ is the genius and power of the Christian faith.
For that faith is not fueled by the demand to conform to brittle legalisms or resentful,
envious political ideologies, but the resilient, gracious and merciful love of the living God
we know in Jesus Christ.
Thank you for joining me today for this podcast.
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of the website.
I really enjoy hearing from you.
There will be another podcast up next week and in the meantime, you are welcome to browse
the content here on the site and as I say, we really appreciate hearing from you.
If you want to reach out, that would be great.
So until next time, God bless you and grace to you.