Up until now, we have not been wielding the two-edged sword of the Spirit, law and gospel, to contend against the powers facing us. Our action has looked the same as the secular activism around us as we seek conversations with dialogue partners rather than proclaiming the word of life. We are peddling all the same grievances as the pagans, baptizing their hashtags as our own, wooing them with our cloying sweetness of tongue.

In a famed passage of Scripture, the author of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is “a time to keep silence” (Ecc. 3:7). As our nation reels from the effects of the pandemic, protests, riots, and unjust killings, many Christian leaders have recognized the importance of listening compassionately. We are to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). When Job’s friends visited him in his grief, they sat silent for a full week.

But in the same breath, Solomon also reminds us that there is a time to speak (v. 7, again). What of the present time in which we live? Should the church stay silent or speak? And what should we say?

Consider the example of our Lord. The same Jesus, who by his Spirit inspired the instruction in Romans 12 to weep with fellow believers who weep, also evoked such public ire from the elite of his day that he lamented: “But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn’” (Matt. 11:16-17, ESV).

If we imitate Christ’s example, neither will we always be able to march with the world’s tune. When we fast, they’ll say we have a demon like John the Baptist; when we feast, they’ll call us gluttons (vv. 18-19). Rather than matching the culture’s dirges in timbre and pitch, we are instead to tune our instruments to our Lord’s will. The result will be that we, like wisdom, will be justified by our fruits (v. 20).

In the present hour, sympathy is not enough. We cannot wait for permission to preach the gospel. We must exercise our Lord’s principled contrarianism. In the present hour, sympathy is not enough, because our nation needs a full dose of Jesus, pronto.

The Situation

These deep, tectonic society rumblings have formed a tsunami of moral capital in favor of godless ideologies, movements, and cultural forces suddenly now emboldened in their crusade against the church of Jesus Christ, their scapegoat for society’s sins. So, we find ourselves in an era in which it is expedient to condemn racial inequality, police brutality, and so forth—vitally important issues—while the high places of anarchic organizing, critical theory, and identity politics remain standing.

Because there is both a time to be silent and a time to speak, for the Christian, there is no tension between showing compassion and condemning sin in all its hideous manifestations.

Believers have the privilege of being painfully honest about our own warts. Our position as justified sinners before God allows us to be radically candid about tour failures on issues of ethnicity, economics, government, partiality, and justice. Christians are free to admit that we really are far worse than the pundits say. We are the ones, after all, with the doctrine of total depravity.

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