It became a standard joke last year that 2021 was a year to forget and that there would be little nostalgia at its passing away. Yet, 2022 is shaping up to be ugly in its own right.

A few days ago, I had a conversation about the politicization of society. People will take sides for or against you based not on facts or logic but often how they assume you are aligned. Often, those positions are based on politics, and you are categorized as “for us or against us” regardless of what you communicate.

Man is a creature, so his thinking is derivative. Even when he rebels against his Creator, man only imitates God’s categories of thought and substitutes something in its place. Instead of thinking God’s thoughts after Him, man in rebellion twists those thoughts into something perverse.

The Bible presents man as a moral being. That is his created context, and in rebellion he must live in terms of a moral code. In his defiance of God, however, his new morality becomes a perversion of God’s. This brings us to 2022.

This is an election year and our cultural conflict will make it a very intense battle because man’s great concern today is in not his faith but the political arena. How one stands on masks, vaccine mandates, CO2 emissions, the border, or election laws has become more than politics. It is now a moral arena, and one in which an unpopular opinion can result in a moral condemnation by strangers, an attack with no room for grace or mercy. The new moral ethic of our statist era is often unforgivingly brutal.

There is most definitely a moral accountability in the political arena as in every other aspect of our being, but we must stay focused on our accountability being to God, not man. Men will try to usurp God’s categories and call good evil and evil good. Men must claim the moral high ground so they use the language of Scripture to declare men evil and equate their own stance as righteous. At no time in our lives has this trend been more pronounced than it is today.

Stay focused on the righteousness of God and His moral standard and you won’t be intimidated by evil men who claim to be angels of light.

*Article originally posted on Chalcedon.edu

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R.J. Rushdoony

(1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.” He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.