The ROad Less Traveled
By Matt Watson
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
The church has two possible courses. By the church, I mean you, not your pastor, not a committee, you, a member of the saints that gather at a particular time and location. Like the last lines of Robert Frost’s poem, there are two courses. One is less traveled, and taking it makes all the difference.
Judges 10 illustrates this for us. In just a few verses, God raises good men who are faithful to him and take the course less traveled. They lead their people to be faithful to God, and they have 45 years (a whole generation) of peace. But then in the back half of the chapter, the people yet again rebel from God, and choose a different path, sinking deeper into their idolatry.
And so it is with the church today. Not just the church in San Antonio, America, or the West, but the whole world; each will need to make a choice.
Path A: Syncretism
When the church succumbs to the seduction of syncretism, it becomes a false church. Syncretism is an attempt to mix beliefs from different religions, philosophies, and world views. Unlike Romans 12, they are conformed to the world rather than transforming it. They exchange the truth of God for a lie and become deluded in their thinking (Rom 1:21-23). How do they do this? Through syncretism, mixing the religion of God with the world's religions.
The Romans, for example, adopted new pantheons of gods from the regions they conquered. They made worshiping the various gods part of their national identity and even considered their emperor as divine. The Romans required a pinch of incense to be cast into their sacrificial fires in honor and worship of the emperor. It was their Pledge of Allegiance. That’s why they didn’t understand why Jews, and then Christians, refused to do this. To the Romans, it was a patriotic duty, an activity that wished well for the whole community. Therefore to them, the Christians were unloving, intolerant, and were threats to national security by refusing to offer these sacrifices.
Israel prefigured this pluralistic theology way before Rome was founded. We read:
“The people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines. And they forsook the Lord and did not serve him. ”
They were no longer just worshiping Baal and Ashtaroth, but added a whole rainbow flag of other gods from their neighbors, further forsaking the one true God. They mixed them in like a child mixes different flavors at the coke machine. “Two is one, and one is none” became their religious confession. It was a loving thing to do, to be neighborly and nice to the nations around them. It was tolerant and winsome.
And God smoked them for it:
“So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the Ammonites, and they crushed and oppressed the people of Israel that year. For eighteen years they oppressed all the people of Israel who were beyond the Jordan in the land of the Amorites, which is in Gilead. And the Ammonites crossed the Jordan to fight also against Judah and against Benjamin and against the house of Ephraim, so that Israel was severely distressed.”
Syncretism is a problem every missionary tries to avoid when preaching the gospel to unreached people groups: the combination of the old ways with the new. That was Boniface’s challenge when he came to Saxony to preach the gospel and found the people there mixing their worship of Thor with Jesus. He knew the only way to divide the false from the true, was to cut out the false altogether, which he did by cutting down Thor’s tree and building a church out of it.
That challenge is the same for those today whom God has sent out in his cities, for the scattered churches who proclaim his name to their neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family. We too must make sure we avoid the preaching of the true gospel being diluted with the false religions of our culture
How might the church choose the path of syncretism? By mixing the culture’s gods into the worship of the one true God. By denying his Word, will, and ways. Churches who uphold The Sparkle Creed instead of the Apostles' Creed (I wish I was making that up), as well as those who disregard God’s Word on marriage, sex, biology, gender roles, and child sacrifice, have rejected God’s Word. Likewise, those who divorce without biblical cause, commit adultery, are gluttons, and inordinately prioritize work and profit over family, have also rejected God's Word.
That is why we need to interpret everything we do through the lens of Scripture, not our culture or desires.
So that’s one path.
Path B: Confessional Stewardship
The church that continues to confess Christ, that remains covenantally faithful to the King, is the true church. This church transforms culture, rather than conforms to it. They renew their minds by interpreting their experiences through God’s Word, rather than God’s Word through their experiences.
This means that they reject that which the culture holds up as gods, but in so doing, they risk being labeled as intolerant bigots who don’t worship the god of love.
We have mostly examples of bad judges (and later, bad kings) in the Bible. Barak and Gideon were timid men, but God still used them, while Abimelech was a hothead who murdered his family. Tola and Jair are examples of great judges, with each getting just a few verses between them in Judges 10. They don’t have battles to win; they are peacetime judges. They are simply two men who picked up the torch when it was their turn and led the people faithfully, and quietly, to the Lord.
They didn’t cave to ungodly ambition, nor did they grow lazy and let false worship sneak back into the routine of things in their lives. They stood firm with God, and God blessed them and the people with a generation of peace. They chose the path of confessional stewardship.
It is a false dichotomy to say that if the church remains confessional to Christ, then things will always go well for them. Sometimes God gives us times of peace and sometimes he gives us times of war, but in everything, there is a season (Eccl 3:1-8). So we won't always have peace. The world hates the true bride of Christ because it hates Christ.
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. ”
How might the church choose the path of confessional stewardship? By standing firm in the truth and the true faith (Eph 6:14; 1 Pet 1:13), teaching sound doctrine (2 Tim 4:2-4), and not letting worldly philosophies creep in (Col 2:8).
Church, steward what God has given you, whether in peacetime or war, with thanksgiving and joy. Do not stop making disciples by evangelizing the lost, baptizing them in the name of the Lord, and discipling them by teaching them to obey the Word. Remember what God has done; he is covenantally faithful even when we forget to be. Live a life of worship in every domain God gives you. Multiply, don’t decrease.
That’s the other path, and the one less traveled. But that is the path our Lord commands us to take.
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
The narrowness of Christ’s gate is exclusive to anyone who wants to do things their own way. They use the wide gate. The true bride of Christ cannot find her husband down that road, for he isn’t there, he is on way less traveled.
This article was originally published by Matthew Watson with Awake! Put on strength!, and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.