When Times Are Chaotic, Does It Mean That God Has Abandoned Us?

As I am writing this, America is in the grip of chaos. America has been shaken by understandable protests over the police killings of black people. In most places, those protests have wound down, but there a few cities, such as Portland, OR, which still see a lot of property damage and some violence. At the same time, we face the attack of the coronavirus. In some states, hospitals are at capacity, yet we still see a death toll which has surpassed one-hundred fifty-thousand.

Why are these things happening? Where is God as we face these things?

Well, we can be glad that God is where He has always been,on His throne. He is no less in control during days of chaos that He was when our society was at its most placid.

So, does that mean that there is no spiritual dimension to these circumstances? I would definitely not suggest that! Rather, it is not God who has failed us. I think that it is the organized church which has failed.

When Jesus gave us the Great Commission, He gave us a step that most Christians ignore: "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:20). We are fine with making disciples and baptizing them. In fact, there are even some mission organizations that proudly state that they do no more than that. But the command of Jesus did not stop there. In fact, even in those first two clauses, many Christians make a false assumption, equating "making disciples" with "making converts." Of course, a person must be converted first, but he is not then a disciple. Rather, it is the third clause that makes a convert into a disciple, for a disciple will obey all that Jesus has commanded us.

I place the blame for the chaos not on President Trump or on Democrats, as culpable as they may be. Rather I blame the pietists and dispensationalists in the American church. The pietist defines his faith as just a private relationship between himself and Jesus. He never intends for his private religion to have an impact on the world - and it doesn't. The dispensationalist (and I am using the term in its classical sense, such as seen in Scofield's Bible) denies the validity of God's Law in today's world. If anything, he might replace it with rules, such as hairlength for men. But they never notice that the Great Commission says nothing about obeying the rules of men; the obedience which is commanded is to what Jesus commanded.

Where are those commands? The answer is easy: all of Scripture was mediated to its authors by Jesus (see, for example, Exodus 20:2, , Luke 24:27, and I Peter 1:11). It is the same moral law (not the ceremonial law) which was proclaimed to Israel by Moses. Jesus is the author of the Ten Commandments, and He is no schizophrenic, teaching one morality today and a different one tomorrow, contrary to the claims of the dispensationalist. And it is because the dispensationalist has deprived American society of these guiding moral principles that men now act like lawless animals. And it is because the pietist leaves his faith in the closet that the church provides no solution to a crumbling society. God has not abandoned us; the American church has abandoned God.