(This article is published on SharperIron.org)

Some time ago I had a long talk and walk with an older, godly, academic separatist about the history of separatism. By separatist, I mean someone who separates not only from apostasy but also separates from those who do not separate from apostasy. (I am being vague on the timing and details as the conversation was a friendly courtesy to me.)

About an hour or so into our talk, I played my rhetorical trump card—the original word for Pharisee means separatist. It cut him deep. And for first time we moved from theory to life. I looked into the eyes of a godly, thoughtful man and recognized the truth of what he next said with tears welling up in his eyes, “I am not trying to be a Pharisee; I am just trying to serve Jesus.”

I backpedalled a bit and tried to draw out the sting of my words. We recovered the emotional balance of the conversation and moved on. Yet the Holy Spirit has used the conversation and the moment of deeply hurting a servant of my Lord as a helpful reminder to speak and write carefully on this issue.

When I became a pastor about 7 years ago, I held to a rejection of all holidays in the Sunday morning service. And I came to this conclusion from three, I hope, godly influences: the first was to not wield a coercive authority over a tender and biblically informed conscience in obedience to Scripture (Rom. 14:21) at a required meeting of the church. The second was responding to open idolatry in evangelical church services that I had attended, and the inability of the pastors of these churches to comprehend that what they were doing was idolatrous. The third was a desire to conform my practice to the Spirit inspired practice of the godly throughout history.

The difficulty or the tension that I see in this now is: first, that as an elder my authority to select the text is coercive. I force the members and attenders at my church to celebrate the nativity of Christ when the text requires it or the resurrection, or accession. This authority was given to me by God to be used in wisdom. I think it would be a sin for me to spend 20 years preaching on say Esther though it is in my authority as an elder to do so. My authority in this regard includes preaching topical sermons on Sunday morning or selecting particular texts for the health of the congregation based on events outside of the church.

The point that I am reaching towards is that Andover Baptist, our church, has a church calendar. Outside events, my vacation—scheduled by the way around historical church or secular holidays and providentially my birthday—illnesses, theological events, and the like, all influence what is preached on. Often times while the text is selected sequentially the application is driven by current events as well.

Luke 20:27-33—There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”

In the Jewish world of Jesus’ day, the Sadducees were the most skeptical. Their understanding of the Old Testament focused on the “literal” or normal meaning of the words (cf. The Problem of Literalism: Spinoza) and prioritized the first five books as more authoritative then the rest of the Old Testament.

Their method of interpreting the Bible lead them to “deny that there is a resurrection” (Luke 20:27) and reject angels and spirits (Acts 23:8). We are informed by the Pharisee and Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37- c. 100) that they rejected the “belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades,” and the sovereignty of God (The Wars of the Jews, 2.8.14).

Christians speak much of the armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:13-15). The armor of  God prepares us “to withstand in the evil day” (v. 13) and  “extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (v. 16).

Yet Christians forget that the Bible teaches that Satan has “armor in which he trusted” (Luke 11:22). Satan has a faith or a system of beliefs which protects from God. And he shares these beliefs with his spiritual children. Satan’s defense mechanisms range from bold proclamation of atheism (Psalm 10:4), to magical spells (Isa. 47:9), to misinterpreting the Bible for a sinful earthly advantage (Mark 10:7-13) and self-righteousness (Luke 18:10-13) before God. For his followers, for instance the Pharisees, it includes spiritual disciplines like prayer (Matt. 6:5) and fasting (v. 16), and reading and applying the Bible (Mark 12:24; Matt. 9:13).

The belt of lies, the breastplate of wickedness, shield of disbelief, and a heart of stone all defend Satan and his followers from comprehending their doom and repenting. Satan’s armor functions as an explanation of spiritual and earthly events that defends against the witness of nature, the conscience, the Spirit, and God’s Word.

"But neither to the good angels do these things, except as far as God commands, nor do the evil ones do them wrongfully, except as far as He righteously permits. For the malignity of the wicked one makes his own will wrongful; but the power to do so, he receives rightfully, whether for his own punishment, or, in the case of others, for the punishment of the wicked, or for the praise of the good." Augustine, On the Trinity, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), pg 61, 3.8.13.

If God punishes willing sin with sin and purifies the saved through suffering, God is then just in empowering and maintaining the conditions whereby sin can exist so that willing sin can be punished and the saved purified. In both the case of the sinner and the righteous something good is happening, because the wicked are being punished by sinning and the righteous are purified by being sinned against.

God’s justice requires that he only empower or maintain that which is good and empowering sinners to sin is their punishment and is therefore just. By empowering we (Augustine and I) don’t mean direct action but energizing or maintaining the conditions whereby Satan or a wicked person can act. God establishes the good by grace (unmerited Divine intervention for good) and allows evil by withdrawing grace. God softens the heart with grace and justly hardens the heart by withdrawing grace.

The folk wisdom proverb, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” requires us first to identify the difference between the baby and the bathwater. So let’s begin by considering how to separate the baby and bathwater in childrearing books.

Every book I mentioned has some really helpful things: Tedd Tripp’s aiming for the heart in discipline is manna from heaven; Baby Wise teaches that infants need a structure besides their wants, MacArthur and Beeke’s commonsense applications are often helpful. The problem is placing their wisdom into your situation and recognizing the limits of their suggestions and interpretation.

The Bathwater in Shepherding a Child’s Heart

Let’s start with an example from Tedd Tripp under his terrible-sounding category of emotional privation. As far as I can ascertain, “emotional privation” is the isolation and temporary withdraw of communication, fellowship, and comfort by an authority figure until repentance occurs. Tripp describes it in a family this way:

[The parents] place their misbehaving daughter in a chair alone in the middle of the living room for a specified period of time. As long as the child is being punished in the chair, no one in the family may speak to her or have any contact with her. She is isolated from the family. . . This approach is not only cruel, but ineffective in addressing the heart biblically. This young girl is not learning to understand her behavior biblically. . . . What she is learning is to avoid the emotional privation of being on the chair. Her heart is being trained, but not to know and love God. She is being trained to respond to the crippling fear of emotional privation (65).