Church of Christ at Broadmoor

To maximize the chances of engaging and meeting as many brethren as possible, we often park where most of the members will pass us to enter and exit the church building. As Mark was waiting for me to exit, who happened to pass by the van but our dear friends, Flora and David Tant, who’d often come to our congregation in Oregon to visit family, and in 2005, David had invited Mark to come to Roswell, Georgia to hold a meeting. That meeting years ago went well, despite a sudden ice storm making us homebound together for a couple of days and also despite the only occurrence in Mark’s preaching career that after beginning a sermon, he experienced, let’s say “a reversal of fortune” necessitating his excusing himself to go into the bathroom to “shout groceries”, if you know what I mean. It’s times like these that tend to knit hearts together as we face the unexpected — and that it did!

We were glad to hear that the Broadmoor congregation was making good use of David’s talents and we were happily surprised to have landed the evening he was slated to give what we often call “the invitation” — which, for those new to the concept, is in essence a checking in to see if anyone present is needing spiritual support to either begin their Christian life or start afresh in their commitment to their Lord.

It was a full house on the evening of our visit and felt very much full of life — especially with some 80 children happily enjoying one another’s company. It was also interesting that, rather than having a full-time preacher, several men of the congregation rotated the voluntary task of teaching and preaching. This is certainly a biblical option and seemed to open up for the congregation the opportunity to financially support a remarkable number of preachers outside their own congregation. Broadmoor was so friendly that several families offered to let us plug our van in at their house for as long as we needed. 

The week before our visit, I had been working on writing a transcript for a live internet program to be recorded the Thursday night following our Wednesday night Broadmoor visit. The topic of this program was the lethal nature of moral relativity — the very problem in the first few chapters of the Book of Judges which the congregation was also slated to study the night of our visit. 

At the beginning of class, we noted the almost limitless potential of ancient Israel, followed by the death spiral that occurred among the unfaithful where moral relativity ruled the day as “...everyone did what was right in his own eyes”(Judges 21:25).  Over and over again, throughout the Book of Judges, Israel cycled through serving the Lord, then falling into sin/idolatry, which led to their being enslaved by their enemies, until finally they’d cry out to the Lord. Next, God would raise up a judge who would deliver Israel again from her oppressors, but then the nation would fall back into sin/idolatry again — only worse than ever. 

While we live in a spiritual kingdom and thus our warfare is not physical, that is, not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12-13), there remain some clear parallels within our spiritual struggles and the souls of those living during the times of the Judges. We aren’t expected to knock down physical idols as Israel was, but we are to essentially take a metaphorical baseball bat to the man-made idol of false teachings pushed by the enemies of truth, including the mother of many lies: moral relativity. 

Long story short, the collapse of the nation of ancient Israel started when Israel got too busy settling physically into their “new place” to diligently teach their children (Deuteronomy 6:7) the moral absolutes that prevent spiritual and sometimes physical death. That continued long enough that they no longer knew God or what He had done for them as a people (2:10). Instead of removing their enemies who were deluded and entrapped in idolatry, they coexisted with them, and slowly over time, eventually embraced the darkness to which they were continually exposed, to the point of even marrying off their children to these foreign idol worshipers (3:6). It’s exactly the same reasons why we’ve landed where we are today in a culture where moral relativity is a cherished, worshiped idol in our culture. Why does this happen?  Simply put, humans can’t enjoy living hedonistically if they feel guilty. The only thing to do then, in order to ensure that everyone can fully enjoy the passing pleasures of darkness, is to collectively pretend that there is no God, or that God has never spoken, or that He doesn’t mean what He says. The new “good news” then, is that the behaviors God calls evil are actually good, and the behaviors God calls good, are actually evil. In essence, we, as a culture, are acting out the children’s story of “The Emperor's New Clothes” where liars tell the King only “intelligent people” can see the kind of special clothes they’ve crafted for him. Everyone goes along with the lie for fear of being considered “unintelligent”, until during the parade as the King passes by, a child is the only one honest and humble enough to ask the obvious question, “Why is the King naked?”

You’ve likely lived long enough to see with your own eyes what happens on a national level when the “to each their own'' philosophy reigns; that is, when mankind creates his own truth rather than following the truth in God’s Word. Mankind, living by his own standards of right and wrong, will, for starters, move some to collide airplanes into the World Trade Center, and others to create gas chambers in an attempt to create a Master Race, and still others to bomb a Ukrainian maternity hospital. 

The enemy, during the times of the Judges, had something the children of Israel did not have. Granted, the children of Israel had the God they could call on at any moment Who had, on numerous occasions, proven Himself trustworthy to protect them, often to the point of setting aside the laws of nature, but the enemy? The enemy had chariots of iron (1:19) — nine hundred in fact, by chapter four. And “How on earth do you go up against that?” they thought.

Maybe you go up against iron chariots the same way you’d go up against today’s countless rainbow bullies in universities and schools, the entertainment industry, various corporations, and even sometimes federal and local government, which I’m told at present is beginning to have mandatory sensitivity training (de-sensitivity training, truth be told) wherein crossdressers come in to demonstrate to employees how, essentially, evil is good and that “the Emperor has new clothes”.  Maybe you battle against these iron chariots by speaking up at every opportunity, come what may. Maybe, when possible, you only yoke yourself to employers, educators, or frequent businesses that are more supportive of God’s absolute moral laws. Maybe you still show up on election day to stand up and be counted even when you don’t like your choices, to at least vote against the most evil candidate, and in this way be used by God to keep as much darkness at bay as is in your power.

Or maybe you do what David Tant did when we went out to lunch the day after our visit to Broadmoor. Mark and I were grilling both David and Flora for all the wisdom we could glean during our short time together when, suddenly, David stopped our conversation for something more pressing— something that fights moral relativity at a root level. He asked our young waiter, “May I ask you something?... What's the purpose of life? … Do you believe in God? … The scriptures give us a foundation to build our lives upon, you know. If you share your email address with me, I’d love to send you some information”. We certainly also change the world by offering God’s wisdom to one soul at a time, in our generation.