The They-Just-Talk-About Dodge (Dodge #1 in the Dodge Series)

If I'm a chronic liar, I want to change the subject from lying. It's a minor issue. What's important is the gospel, justification by faith, bodily resurrection, and the deity of Christ. If you even bring up lying, it's obvious that you are not interested in the deep doctrines of God. In the way that you bring up lying you are actually devaluing the gospel and, therefore, cheapening it. By cheapening as you are, by talking about lying, you are actually guilty of something far more serious than lying. You've distorted the gospel. So there, we're off the subject of lying now.

The lying isn't just about lying. It's about God, about displeasing Him, about not living the gospel, and about abusing God's grace. It relates to all those, so-called, major doctrines. If someone is into pornography, he might also be into all the major doctrines, reading about them deeply, and regularly talking about them. I've seen this. A man could sit and read three deep theological books while his wife is out working to bring home the bacon. He can't keep a job because that doesn't interest him so much.

I'm an expository preacher. I preach books, preach through them, all their verses. I preach the vast, heavy doctrines of the Bible when I preach through all the passages of scripture. But I will find myself talking about those areas most in which someone is having trouble, like how he's treating his wife. Paul does the same kind of thing. For instance, when Paul writes the Thessalonian church, of all the things he would choose to talk about to a church where he left after three weeks? The way they went about acquiring or obtaining a wife or a husband (1 Thess 4:1-9). Meddlesome, huh? Really missing the majors.

The they-just-talk-about pants and versions and bad music is nothing more than a dodge. It would be like Nadab and Abihu criticizing someone for bringing up the subject of the recipe for the altar of incense. They both died for messing with the ingredients. On this blog, I write most about those areas that people are not hearing about in evangelicalism and from which fundamentalism has mostly departed or is at least slipping. That means, of course, that I don't think about salvation, God, my sermons I prepare for my church, or heaven. At least that's got to be what it means when I bring those subjects up all the time. I think of nothing else; that's just got to be what it is.

And pants are not really about pants. They are about God's design and the roles of men and women, keeping the distinctions. And that's about God. That's theology. And the version issue is not really the version issue. It's about the inerrancy and authority of the Bible. And that relates to all the other doctrines, including the so-called deep and important ones. I heard someone on an evangelical radio program recently mock men preaching against music with a "beat in it." That's, by the way, typical of the reforming fundamentalists or the young fundamentalists. It's also a lie. Nobody preaches against music having a beat. That's ridiculous. But again, the music issue is about worship of God, and what is more important than whether God will be worshiped? Someone can make these types of issues sound like they're not important, but that doesn't mean they're not.

What's really important for you is that area where you are disobedient or that doctrine where you don't believe right. What's important to you is the teaching of scripture from which you have strayed. If someone deals with that issue, it's no wonder that you would want them to change the subject. And there is no wonder that you don't think it's an important doctrine. The nature of preaching, and you see this in the epistles, is to deal more with where people are off, then only repeating what they already know and where they are on.

It's pretty easy to see why it is that certain issues today are controversial and disliked---the pants issue, the version issue, the dress issue, the movie issue, and the music issue. Those are places where Christians have clashed with the world. Now churches have just taken the characteristics of the world and those professing Christians don't want to hear about it. So they use the "they-just-talk-about" dodge. They dodge having to hear about it with their "aren't there more important doctrines?" argument. It's a red herring, a smokescreen. It doesn't fool God. God still sees it and knows it.

What I'm saying is please let go of this excuse. That's all it is. And it doesn't work. We're either doing what God says or we're not. We're believing what He said or we're not. And if we're not, we need to hear about it.