Proverbs 22:28 — “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

The command to not remove ancient landmarks condenses something Moses told the Israelites as they prepared to enter the promised land. In Deuteronomy Moses tells the Nation of Israel what God expects of them once they have entered, conquered, and taken possession of the land: Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess (19:14).

The command in Deuteronomy 19 and Proverbs 22:28 deters greedy neighbors, especially in a society that lacked the convenience of modern surveying equipment and satellite imaging. They needed physical landmarks in a way that modern man doesn’t. Today if a couple of farmers or ranchers have a dispute about where a property-line is they can refer to a plat map; in antiquity that luxury didn’t exist. Today we can refer to a map, but in antiquity they would have taken stones, stacked them into a physical landmark/monument, and going forward folks could appeal to the ancient landmark if they were trying to figure out where the property-line was. Moving the ancient landmarks would have been a real temptation; Moses was not addressing some hypothetical scenario. God knows how our crooked hearts operate. God knows that dark hearts love to steal when they think they can get away with it.

The Nation of Israel was a type and figure of Christ’s Kingdom. Christ is the Eternal-Creator King and the entire world is His. So, consider this: when Christians go around and tell folks to stop being a Mormon or stop being a Muslim, to repent and be converted, one of things that is implicit in that call to repent/be converted is that all of creation is God’s! Therefore, indirectly we are telling people to stop trying to (re)move the ancient landmarks with their phony-religion. Man is a type of ancient landmark; we were created in the image of God. Human nature is an ancient landmark; our creature-hood is a property line–it communicates “all this creature-stuff is the Creator’s.”

When somebody tries to be an atheist, or tries to be a Mormon, or tries to be a Muslim, what they are doing is trying to move an ancient landmark: they are trying to take their sins and stack them together into a little mountain of rocks and appeal to that sin-landmark and say, “Ha! This human is not made in the image of the Triune God!” Or they try to take their bricks and build a building and say, “Ha! This little patch of dirt on the corner of such-and-such a road is not part of the Kingdom of Heaven! It is part of make-believe-Mormon land!” But they are wrong. Dead, dead wrong. They can attempt to move the landmark of man with their sin, but that doesn’t alter God’s ownership (Creatorship) over all of creation.

The Triune Lord created this world. Not Allah. Not Joseph Smith’s God. And this world was certainly not created by the atheist’s depersonalized goddess “Reason.” And when the Triune Lord created this world he placed at the thematic center of this world a mountain with four rivers running down, and on top of that mountain was a garden called Eden; and then God put Adam and Eve in that garden. And you know what that mountain-garden with man and woman in it was? It was the ancientest of ancient-landmarks; basically a landmark that God put in place to communicate to Satan and all the fallen demons that not only was all of Heaven His, but so too the terrestrial ball with humans that bore the divine image.

But Satan came and tempted the woman and man. They rebelled and their rebellion was a form of moving an ancient landmark. They were attempting to steal glory from God! Greedy hands said, “Don’t care what God says, gonna take that that fruit God said was off-limits. Don’t care where the fence is, if I want something on the other side, well, then I’m just going to pick up the fencepost and scoot it over and take it! Try and stop me.”

But God did stop us. If you refuse righteousness, you will be unrighteous. If you refuse to walk in the light, then you will abide in darkness. If you cast off life, then all that is left is death. Adam and Eve thought they could move the ancient landmark; they thought they could gain more by attempting to be like God, by attempting to usurp God’s glory. They tried to move an ancient landmark, casting off creaturely obedience in exchange for rebellion, and when they did they corrupted themselves with sin. Their rebellion ruined their ethical nature. Figurative real estate increased, i.e. they gained knowledge of what fruit tasted like from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but the acquisition also turned them into sinners. What did Christ say about such acquisitions? Mark 8:36, For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

So, do not be a thief; do not move ancient landmarks. Do not steal temporal or physical things. But also do not move spiritual ancient landmarks in an attempt to steal God’s Glory. Do not attempt to move the ancient landmark that man is a creature made in God’s image. Therefore, put on humility. Be humble before the ancient landmarks. Be humble before the Creator by embracing your creature-hood. Be humble before your Lord Jesus; he took on the ancient landmark of human flesh in order to move the landmark back to its origin. Adam moved it with sin and because of sin we couldn’t move it back, but Christ was righteous and he came and dealt with the sin and moved the landmark of human nature back to where it began, back to righteousness! And if you are in Christ then your human nature has been restored to the ancient landmark.

“Words are not simply adequate for the divine purpose in preaching; they are the divinely sanctioned means of achieving that purpose” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 59).

From the Billings Gazette: “Council Defeats NDO by 6-5 Count”

You can view the proposed NDO that was defeated here.

On my desk there is a manuscript from 1987 for use at Calvin Theological Seminary; it is an Introduction to Systematic Theology – 411 Prolegomena by Fred H. Klooster. Including the Appendices it is just over 300 pages in length.

Consider this: “Preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can go on for only so long before you lose your audience.” (Jeffrey Stout)

“Preaching is powerful because of the message it communicates (1 Cor. 1:21)” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 59).

When I was young my mother would read out loud the Cooper Kids Adventures books by Frank Peretti. I remember pacing back and forth on the hardwood floors behind the couch in our living room while my mother read suspenseful parts of the stories; periodically she would ask me if I was okay. I loved it–“Keep reading, keep reading” I would plea. She always acquiesced.

Jesus Christ said “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” But we live in a time when people (both non-Christians and Christians) oftentimes give more time and thought-and-consideration, while standing in the check-out line at Wal-Mart, as to whether or not to purchase an extended-warranty on their newest electronic gadget, than the time and thought-and-consideration they give for their soul. And so in this sense, our priorities are severely upside down.

We invest the majority of our time in things of little importance, and, regarding things pertaining to the eternal, our investments are small, while our deductions are large.

But why is this? For starters: we are sinful, and not only sinful, but Totally Depraved. Sin affects everything: our mind, our thoughts, our hearts, our desires. So, we desire and care for the temporal and short-term over the eternal. Additionally, we live in a society that does not encourage long-term thought; it does not engender thinking about one’s own soul. As the saying goes, it is difficult to swim against the current.

One thing we need to acknowledge is that American Pragmatism is the engine driving much of American Culture; by-and-large our society cares about the short-term and immediate over-and-against the ethical and eternal. We are, sadly, a ready-made and instantaneous-results infatuated culture. We want solutions now! for the problems we are faced with. (“I want the baby! Not the labor pains!”) And whether or not they are genuine solutions are irrelevant so long as we can get over the current hump-of-a-problem. And if the new solutions create future problems, then so-be-it. The attitude is: we’ll just cross that bridge when we get to it.

The danger of pragmatism is that it works . . . sorta. You can “get by” with pragmatic policies; in fact, you may even be really good at it–you may gain the whole world–but if you did so without the fear of the Lord, if you did so without righteousness, that is, without having God’s law written on your heart by the Holy Ghost, if you did so with the relativistic attitude that, “My duty is to do whatever it takes to make things work, to accomplish the thing I feel is important to accomplish,” then it simply means, in the final analysis, that you are not concerned with truth; you are not concerned with your soul; you are not concerned with God’s glory. And sadly, this means in the end, as J.C. Ryle put it, hell will be the truth you know best.

This sort of pragmatism is antithetical to Christian-living. We don’t just do “whatever works” – and we certainly aren’t relativists – we don’t believe that the thing you’re supposed to do is different than the thing I’m supposed to do because your truth is your truth and my truth is mine. Christians, contrary to pragmatic and relativistic thought, believe that God has revealed to us what is true, and revealed to us what is ethical–what is wrong and right, what we may or may not do. These soul-sensibilities, which are derived from Scripture, they are, as one author says somewhere, the thingamajigs that provide the shape of our souls. These holy thingamajigs, aka Scriptural sensibilities, will run counter-clock-wise against the ticking-time-bomb of pragmatism. Pragmatism is disinterested in Scripture, and this is its downfall; pragmatism, in the final analysis, is not interested in listening, only doing . . . but the deeds of pragmatism are done without a moral rudder, and the results are disastrous, not only for culture, not only for a society, but even more tragically, the results are disastrous and damning for many souls.

And how often do we find ourselves operating with pragmatic sensibilities? In our relationships? Interacting with a spouse, or disciplining and raising our children? We care more about what works rather than what God says in Scripture. And sure: we balance a budget, we paid down the mortgage, we stayed married all of life, and the kids grew up to be basically normal . . . but if we didn’t do it according to Scripture, if we didn’t do it while waiting before the Word and listening to God, if we gained the world but in the process lost our souls, then what profit is it?

“Viewed as a whole, firstly, the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins” (Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope in Western Literature, xi).