The Army of God: the Church

© 2008 Carl Wells. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/18/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4389-0835-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-0742-5 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Sleeping Through

the War

Chapter 4

God Defeats

Some Wicked Armies

Chapter 5

God Defeats Another Wicked Army

Chapter 8

Attributes of

a Good Soldier

Chapter 9

The Place of Children in the Army of God

Appendix Two

Conquering the United States for Jesus

Christ in the 21st Century—a 12 Point Program

Footnotes

Grateful Acknowledgments

Select Bibliography

This book is dedicated to the memory of R. J. Rushdoony with respect, admiration, love.

For day by day men came to David to help him, until there was a great army like the army of God.

1 Chronicles 12:22

Introduction

The LORD will go forth like a warrior,

He will arouse His zeal like a man of war.

He will utter a shout, yes, He will raise a war cry.

He will prevail against His enemies.

Isaiah 42:13

‘The LORD is a warrior’ (Ex. 15:3). The God of the Bible is commander-in-chief of an army, and the army of God is not an army to be trifled with lightly. David’s army daily grew in strength until it became a great army like the army of God (1 Chron. 12:22). God’s army is great.

The Bible, the inerrant word of God, uses many metaphors for the church. The church is the body of Christ (Rom. 12:4-5; Eph. 1:22-23; Col. 1:18), living stones being built into a spiritual house (1 Pet. 2:4-8), sheep needing the shepherd Christ (Mk. 6:34, etc.), a family (Lk. 8:21), the bride of Christ (Jn. 3:29; Eph. 5:25-27; Rev. 21:2), the temple of the living God (1 Cor. 3:16-17; 2 Cor. 6:16).

That barely scratches the surface. God’s people are salt (Matt. 5:13), light (Matt. 5:14-16), a vineyard (Isa. 5:1-7), good trees (Matt. 7:17), wheat (Matt. 3:12), a delightful plant (Isa. 5:7), a city set on a hill (Matt. 5:14).

All of these metaphors, or figures of speech—there are plenty of others!—were put there for a reason, by God (2 Tim. 3:16-17), and all of them are useful to explore in depth.

So I am not claiming that the church is described only as an army, nor am I claiming that the church as an army is the Bible’s central metaphor for the church. It is one of many. No one metaphor can fully explain the church. We need all of the Bible’s teaching, not one unbalanced part of it.

Nevertheless, we do need to remember that the church is God’s army. We need to remember, because we have forgotten. In our day, the notion that the church is an army has been largely lost. We are no longer going Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war. We wouldn’t dare form a Salvation Army in our era, as William Booth did in 1865 (the name came in 1878); Salvation Theater Troupe would be more our style.

Military imagery seems strange to us. It shouldn’t; it’s in the Bible. In fact the Bible is drenched with it, and we miss seeing it because 1/most of us aren’t reading the Bible very much in the first place; and 2/when we do read the Bible our preconceptions cause us to miss much of what the Bible is saying. This book, then, is an attempt to remind us that the church—Christ’s body, His bride, His family, His sheep, His building, His temple—is also Christ’s army. And is—at least potentially, if not yet in fact—His conquering army.

Because God is a warrior, but He is more: He is ‘A victorious warrior’ (Zeph. 3:17). The LORD . . . will prevail against His enemies (Isa. 42:13).

Chapter 1

Sleeping Through

the War

But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down, and fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.

Jonah 1:5-6

The United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century is an immense spiritual battlefield. Good and evil are at war in every sphere of life, and evil is winning a lot of battles.

Our laws permit the murder of unborn children. By late 2008, about fifty million had been murdered since Roe vs. Wade, 1973. The number rises daily, as I write.

Our public schools and universities are the seminaries in which evangelistic humanism captures the souls of our nation’s children and young adults.

Our popular culture is to a large extent a sewer, triumphantly trumpeting forth the hatred of God and the hatred of anything faintly resembling biblical morality. Love is lust, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and any behavior is permissible.*

Our politicians are hired to steal from one segment of the public, to give to another.

Our people—adults, children—can’t think.

Knowledge of the Bible’s teaching is almost non-existent, in a land in which Bibles are easily obtained.

People—rich, poor, middle class—just live, mindlessly. Eventually they die, and suffer eternal death. Man in his pomp, yet without understanding,/Is like the beasts that perish (Ps. 49:20).

Christians who really believe the Bible are compared to terrorists who fly planes into buildings and murder thousands of people; the basic intolerant attitude, we are told, is the same in both groups.*

Two vast, powerful armies are in the field. The humanist generals, allies of Satan, are determined to triumph. They want to eradicate every lingering influence of the Christian faith.

Few of the humanists are self-consciously aware of why they hate Christianity. They tell themselves that they hate Christianity because Christianity is intolerant, anti-intellectual, anti-woman, bigoted, anti-scientific, etc.

But they really hate Christianity because they hate God. God in His word says to all of us that we are wicked and that to escape the eternal death our sins deserve, we must come to God on His terms: through the blood of His Son Jesus Christ (Acts 4:10-12; Rom. 3:21-26; Heb. 10:1-10, etc.). Lip service won’t do. We must put aside our wicked behavior—which God defines, we don’t—and engage in the behavior God prescribes in the Bible.

A God making such a radical a demand cannot be ignored: He must be hated, or we must surrender to Him.* The humanists, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18), have chosen to hate God. Naturally they hate His religion (Christianity) and despise His people. Humanists want to be free. They want to do their own thing, not God’s thing. I did it my way, sang Frank Sinatra. Yes, he did. Is he sorry now?

Humanist leaders know, instinctively, that the warfare is to the death. Everything is at stake, every day. They may proceed slowly, at times, temporarily bowing to what will be acceptable among the Neanderthal masses still partially besotted by lingering influences of Christianity. But they will advance their agenda when they get the chance.

Humanist behavior is, I believe, instinctive rather than self-conscious. These are not thoughtful, honest people, or they wouldn’t be humanists. The God of the Bible is plainly, obviously, the true creator and savior God. To deny this takes immense self-deception. They must suppress the truth, ignoring what is obvious to the meanest intelligence (Rom. 1:18-23), as Bertie Wooster might say. As the great Baptist evangelist Rolfe Barnard said, there will be no honest people in hell. Honest people admit that the Bible is true, admit that their own sins are real, and confess their need for the savior Jesus Christ. Humanists, then, strategize instinctively, rather than self-consciously. There may be a few self-conscious exceptions, but they are rare.

Among most people, no thought whatsoever is taking place. Most of our non-Christian people are eclecticists, grasping an idea from here and from there, with no real basis for believing anything. Listen to or read man-in-the-street interviews, or ask someone who they’re voting for and why, if you doubt me. Our non-Christian non-leaders are mostly just drifting. They work—sometimes very intelligently and productively—they procreate, they live and enjoy life. Some of them are fun to be with; some are not. They are bright or dull, in probably precisely the same proportions as are Christians. They—some of them, at least—frequently do things that we admire. But they very rarely try to think. Life just is, for them, to be accepted and used, with no thought for the source of that life, or for how life extends into eternity.

The humanist army is incalculably vast. Its intellectual vanguard controls most of the news media, whether newspapers, television, or radio, in the country. The humanist vanguard controls most of education, whether private or public. Humanists provide most of the art—books, magazines, television shows, movies, music, painting, and so on—whether of low, middle, or high cultural aspiration, and all of this is of great practical influence. Our elected rulers, and our judges, are mostly humanists.

The humanist army, then, is armed to the teeth, and putting their lives on the line every day, in this warfare to the death.

Opposed to the vast humanist army is another army, and it too is vast in numbers. The American Christian Church is one hundred fifty million strong!*

Let’s cautiously approach the camp of this vast Christian multitude.

Here is a sentry, powerfully armed with the the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph. 6:17). That sword looks sharp—the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb. 4:12)—stand well clear of the sentry.

The sentry seems to be . . . sleeping. Let’s not wake him; someone awakened suddenly might be dangerous. Let’s walk down the line and try another sentry. There’s one. Hmm. Unfortunately, he seems to be sleeping too.

Seven or eight sleeping sentries later, we finally decided to wake up one of them. Hey! You! Sentry! Sir! Hey! Whoo! Whoo! Wake up!

Hnh? Huh? What? What is it? Why are you bothering me?

What do you mean? I said. You’re a sentry. You’re a watchman (Ezek. 33:7), put here to warn your brothers when danger approaches. There’s a war going on!

A war! Nonsense! What war?

Are you joking? We’re in a great spiritual war for the soul of our nation. Every Christian is needed.

‘A great spiritual war’! What drivel! There’s freedom of religion in the United States. You’re a troublemaker. Go away. I need my rest, he replied.

The vast majority of the American Christian church is sleeping through the war. We are God’s army, but most of us don’t even know that there is a war going on.

This is not an exaggeration. For most American Christians, ‘tomorrow will be like today, only more so’ (Isa. 56:12). The enemy has almost captured and destroyed our nation, and we have yet to notice that there is a war going on.

Nevertheless, we are God’s army. Let’s examine the characteristics of that army, as we are currently composed.

We are a whining army. Our problems are always the fault of the other guy, never our own fault. Humanists control the media, we complain. But few of us support or read the superb Christian newsmagazine World. Our Christian radio is a barren desert, devoid of thought. They won’t let us have prayer in the public schools. They teach evolution in the public schools. Why do we have our children in the humanist seminaries, the public schools, in the first place? Apparently we are everlastingly surprised that the humanists would attempt to evangelize our children into the humanist religious faith, instead of facing up the obvious fact that of course humanists will be humanists. Leopards don’t change their spots (Jer. 13:23). Our politicians are doing very bad things. But many Christians don’t vote, and many Christians, when they do vote, vote for pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, semi-socialists. Television is terrible. But we watch it. And watch it. And watch it. Taxes are outrageously high. They’re high because we Christians have been willing to dip our hands into the pockets of our neighbors, as we vote in support of many programs which transfer money from one segment of society to another.

We are an intentionally ignorant army. We are not more naturally stupid than the general populace, but we sit down determined to know nothing, and we succeed. We won’t read books. We won’t even read our army’s manual, the Bible—leaving aside for the moment the question of whether we want to follow the manual’s rules. Instead, we watch television, the opium of the messes, which we know to be mostly at best a waste of time. One day our grandchildren will ask us, What did you do in the war for the United States, Grandpa? Most of us will have to answer honestly, I watched television.

We are a morally compromised army. We divorce and fornicate in just about the same percentages as does the humanist army.

We are an AWOL—absent without leave—army. We are frequently absent from church. We can’t even get to Sunday school on time. We wouldn’t dream of being late for work, or late for a movie, a ballgame, or for our favorite television show. But for Sunday school and church—if we get there at all—we wander in at any time we feel like.

We are a thieving army. We steal from our commander-in-chief. Despite the fact that we live in the most prosperous country in the history of the world, and despite that fact that Christians as a group have prospered greatly, we refuse to tithe (pay 10%) to the church of our commander-in-chief, despite the Bible’s clear teaching on the subject (Lev. 27:30; Num. 18:24-28; Deut. 14:22; Mal. 3:8-10; Matt. 23:23). A recent survey cited in the Christian newsmagazine World showed that American Protestants were giving, in 1999, only 2.6% of their increase to the church.*

We are a disobedient army. We ignore God’s laws, in every area of our lives.

We are a lying army. Our leaders lie to us, refusing to preach the whole counsel of God, and for that they will one day answer to the commander-in-chief. But God’s people ‘love it so!’ (Jer. 5:31). We will not endure sound doctrine, but want to have our ears tickled, and we accumulate teachers in accordance with our own desires (2 Tim. 4:3). We lie to the believers in our midst, and we lie to the non-believers among us, making it more difficult for everyone to understand their duty to God.

We are a traitorous army. Many of the men and women listed as members of God’s army are in fact not Christians at all. Countless others have been converted, but bring forth so little godly fruit as to be salt which has lost its savor, good for little more than to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men (Matt. 5:13).

The American Christian church is an immense army that doesn’t know its own strength. It is, moreover, a sleeping army. When it wakes up briefly to feed its belly with food and its mind with mindless television, it is a whining, intentionally ignorant, immoral, AWOL, disobedient, thieving, lying, traitorous army. No wonder the humanists despise us; well they should.

In recent decades it has become fashionable in some Christian circles to blame the humanists for our nation’s woes. In fact, the woes of the United States are completely, one hundred percent, the fault of the American Christian church. An army of one hundred fifty million should be unconquerable. The humanists sense this, uneasily. Even as they despise us, they fret about what would happen if the sleepers awoke. They know they dare not let down their humanist evangelism for a moment, and they will not; the war is to the death.

The Christians haven’t even figured out that there is a war going on. And if there is, they are committed to sleeping through it.

But what if the sleeping army wakes, and calls on its God?

Chapter 2

The Army of God

Thou hast given a banner to those who fear Thee,

That it may be displayed because of the truth. [Selah.

Psalm 60:4

The army of God, the church of Jesus Christ, is a very unique army. It is an army that bears no physical weapons. Its soldiers are not just healthy men of weapon bearing age, but also women, and also children. Old men and old women, who could perhaps