I listened to this sermon today on my run. From Nathan Bayly at Christ the Word in Toledo. Brothers, I was convicted. Do I love my countrymen? Here? In America? In Bloomington? Am I so focused on the evils of our day that I’ve forgotten the Savior’s love for the work of his hands? Whether Proud Boys or Pride Parades or Politicking Pastors or just ordinary Christians who want answers, do I love my countrymen? Too often, I have to admit, the answer is no.
I despise them. For their faithlessness (like I’m such a bastion of courage). For their degeneracy (forgetting Jesus rescued me from that not my own godliness). For their arrogance (cause I’m so humble). For the ignorance (back to the arrogance point). Jesus was/is incarnate God, and he looked at the people with compassion. And I dare to despise his creatures…
Yes, Jesus was blistering against the Pharisees, but he also wept over Jerusalem. Yes, Jesus stoutly rebuked the disciples for their lack of faith, but he also wept with Mary and Martha over Lazarus’ body. Do we, Reformed Christians in the US, love our countrymen?
As for the subject of Christian Nationalism, whether you’re potentially supportive of it or adamantly opposed to it, I would exhort you - yes, I chose my words carefully there - to read the epilogue to Stephen Wolfe’s Case. Yes, his natural theology is sloppy, and yes his use of redemptive ontology applied to the nation is - at best - confused, but if we can read that epilogue without both raging with Wolfe against the sins of our land in our day and weeping with the Savior’s compassion for the multitudes, then maybe the beam of lovelessness in our eye is obscuring our view of the speck in the Nationalists’.
Matthew 14.14, When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.