Proper 23
Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Mark 10:17-31
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I.
Everyone is saying this election is make or break.
You can say that whether you are liberal.
“Our democracy is on the ballot!”
You can say it if you’re a conservative.
“This is the last election before one-party rule becomes a reality.”
But this is propaganda.
Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” by which he meant that the “medium, not the content, shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”1
What this means is that elections are not organic events.
These associations — Democrat, Republican — are not naturally occurring groups such as you would find in nature in a grouping of species, a pack of wolves, for example, or cluster of associated plants and animals in a local eco-system.
Elections a means of social control.
You may think you act freely, as an individual with agency, when you go into the voting booth, but the entire experience has been engineered, the outcomes predetermined.
This is what propaganda is.
Writing about the French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul, Substack author and podcaster, Kruptos (not his real name), writes:
Propaganda is primarily about shaping your will towards action, the actions the propagandist has selected for you. He is not as worried that you think correctly, as long as you act correctly. He doesn’t care if you walk around burdened with cognitive dissonance, as long as you do what he wants.2
II.
Today’s readings are talking about the grace needed for salvation.
Put another way, the grace needed survive in (and, ultimately, to escape from) a system of total control, a system in which the mechanism of that control is propaganda.
From Mark 1:1 we know that Jesus is in Judea, taking a long route to get to Jerusalem, where you could say He has “a date with destiny.”
It also means He is moving closer to the temple complex itself, where He will challenge the beating heart of Jewish propaganda and control.
A similar context is present in Amos. A remnant of faithful Jews ekes out an existence under a system of total control. As Amos 5:15 advises:
“Therefore he who is prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.”
The key point is that God’s remnant will be saved through obedience to God’s law.
In other words, the “system” is not total. There is a chink in the armor, something that can make the propaganda machine sputter, choke, and fall apart.
It is called God’s law.
A man comes and asks Jesus about this law.
Mark 10:17:
Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Jesus answers in Mark 10:19, “You know the commandments….” and then He recites the decalogue, another name for the Ten Commandments.
The man tells Jesus that he has observed all these since his youth.
Jesus replies that he lacks one thing, treasure in heaven. All of his wealth is generated by the system, as the result of propaganda, which is a means of controlling how people act.
In Luke 18:18 we are told the man is a ruler, likely a member of the Sanhedrin, a hereditary office.
In Matthew 19:20 we are told that he is young, so his wealth is indeed inherited, not having had time to earn his riches on his own.
Jesus directs the man to something beyond the system, to another course of action not pre-determined by it.
Mark 10:21:
You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.
The man is sorry because everything he is and all that he owns is the result of the system. His world is a closed world.
The irony is that had the man the man obeyed Jesus’ direction and divested himself himself, he would have saved himself (and perhaps some of his wealth) when Jerusalem was destroyed 40 years later by the Roman armies.
In addition to functioning as the place of sacrifice and worship the temple in those days also acted as the central bank.
The rich young ruler’s wealth was literally on deposit in the temple, and when that temple was destroyed, his wealth was destroyed along with it.3
This is why Jesus says in Mark 10:25:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Socialists and progressives usually interpret this to mean that Jesus is saying rich people are bad and money is evil.
But what it really means is that anyone who is invested heavily in the system and relies on propaganda to control the outcomes that generate his wealth, such people will have a very hard time seeing beyond their closed world.
As Upton Sinclair, novelist, social reformer, and one-time gubernatorial candidate for California, once said:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
The rich young ruler’s wealth and social standing depends on not understanding Jesus’ warning to “get out of Dodge” which, in this case, means Jerusalem before the Romans destroy it.
The man wants security (something we all want) and the system of propaganda and control that he is part of guarantees his security, so he thinks.
So, he tries to moralize his situation. He asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
To which Jesus replies by reciting the second table of the law:
Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.
But Jesus added a commandment. Those of you who memorized and remember your Ten Commandments know that “Do not defraud” is not on that list.
Jesus is pronouncing judgment on the system of control and the propaganda that supports it by which the rich young man gained his wealth.
This was a system of tax farming, what Jesus calls “Corban” in Mark 7:11.
Wealth was extracted by means of what Jesus calls the “tradition” (Mark 7:9, 13), a kind of propaganda that controlled how people acted, and that wealth was given to the temple treasury instead of to the people to whom God said it was due, like elderly parents.
We know that tax farming was commonplace from the confession and repentance of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:8:
And Zacchae′us stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.
When Jesus says “go, sell what you have, and give to the poor,” He is saying return this confiscated wealth to the very people who were defrauded.
In a total system governed by propaganda, such as the one the rich young ruler found himself in — such as the one we live in today — the only way to win is through obedience to God’s law.
God’s word is counterpropaganda and, therefore, a grave threat to the system.
Mark 10:19, “You know the commandments….”
These commandments come from God who alone is good.
When we do good, we wage an insurgency against Satan and his attempt to envelope us in a total system of wickedness.
As the “remnant of Joseph” we need to “hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate” and pray that “it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious” to all of us who are stuck in this impossible situation, facing what seem like impossible choices this election season.
III.
Things seem impossible because we think goodness originates in us.
Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man begins with an odd exchange.
In Mark 10:17 the man says to Jesus:
“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
To which Jesus responds in verse 18:
“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
I said before that the man wanted to moralize his situation.
He thinks goodness originates in man, specifically in himself.
His rationale goes something like this: If I am good man and am doing well, how much better will I be if learn a few tricks from this even better man, this “Good teacher”?
What is required, however, is not more self-justification (after all, the self-justified are never quite sure if they are justified enough) but obedience to God’s law.
Here’s thing, moralizing, what we sometimes call being “holier than thou” or Pharisaical is nothing more than a way of being obedient to the system — we call it virtue signaling today — but God calls us to the much harder task of being obedient to His word.
Mark 10:20:
“Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.”
The man signals his virtue to the “Good teacher.”
But the good teacher is none other than the incarnate law-word of God who speaks a new decree, “Do not defraud.”
It might seem that an obedience sufficient to please God is impossible.
The disciples in Mark 10:26 certainly thought so. They ask:
“Then who can be saved?”
To which Jesus replies in Mark 10:27:
“With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.”
IV.
In Jesus goodness originates both in God and in man.
The meaning of Mark 10:26-27 is that what is impossible for man alone becomes possible when the God-with-man (Immanuel) makes His home among us.
Christ becomes inconsequential in death. Satan thinks he has won. His propaganda is complete. He has achieved his total system.
However, through the Son’s obedience to the Father’s will, the “it may be” of Amos 5:15 comes to pass.
Christ is restored to life and the remnant is saved by and with and because of Him.
This means that for us, our security is guaranteed by heaven, where it is kept safe for us allowing us to be obedient to God on earth, despite hardship, suffering, and death.
In Mark 10:28 Peter says:
“Lo, we have left everything and followed you.”
To which Jesus replies:
“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time… and in the age to come eternal life.”
Paul is even more explicit in 2 Timothy 4:8 where he speaks of a “crown of righteousness” that is on deposit for him heaven.
Think of it is as kind of safe-deposit box that no one can access, not even you by your sins, to steal the righteousness that God will give you by faith in His Son (Acts 3:16).
V.
Now we can resist the system of totalizing and totalitarian propaganda that threatens to envelop us this and every election season.
As long as you have access to the Bible you have access to a counter narrative that Satan’s regime does not want you to hear. His system is not complete or closed as long as this very large crack in it remains.
The best thing Satan does is get you to not read your Bibles or get you to listen to preachers who will explain it away and not applying it in meaningful ways.
That word is applied today in three simple ways from Amos.
First, “seek God and live.” Amos 5:6. This is not a call to pietism or to some vague notion called spirituality. This is a call to seek God in His revealed word and live by what you read there.
Second, be prudent. Amos 5:13:
“Therefore he who is prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.”
Realistically, the Christian has three options in an evil situation.4
First, peaceful resistance, using the instruments of law; non-violent protests, petitions, lobbying your elected officials, etc.
I read somewhere that 30 or 40 million Christians, according to a Barna survey, don’t plan to vote this November.5 That’s not prudent. That’s not using the tools that are at your disposal.
Second, emigration to another church or another country; America used to be the place people fled from totalitarianism but now you see people moving from blue to red states. It’s called the “great sort.”
Third, obedience, but with the full awareness that you are obeying to preserve order and the safety of your community. Churches facing heavy persecution in places like China or Iran often find they have no other choice but to obey the wicked who are over them, but they obey because God has placed the wicked where they are, not because they endorse the wicked. We lived through something like this during Covid.
The last application from Amos 5:15:
Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
Who wins the Oval Office is fairly inconsequential.
As the progressive left has shown, it’s who wins the school board seats, who runs the local public library, and who the district attorney is that matters.
Christians can influence these outcomes far more easily than they can sway national races.
Organize your churches. Organize your congregations. Run for local office. Vote for local office. It may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to His remnant in our day too.
Let us pray:
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Preached on October 13, 2024 at Scarsdale Community Baptist Church, Scarsdale, New York.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” American Quarterly 16, no. 4: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711172.
κρῠπτός. 2024. “Propaganda: It’s Not What You Think.” Seekingthehiddenthing.com. Seeking the Hidden Thing. October 7, 2024. https://www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/p/propaganda-its-not-what-you-think?publication_id=1673613&post_id=149823209.
Jerry Bowyer, The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics (S.l.: FIDELIS, 2022), 60.
See: Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North, The Institutes of Biblical Law: A CHALCEDON STUDY (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973), 620.
George Barna, “104 Million People of Faith-Including 32 Million Christian Regular Churchgoers-Projected to Abstain from Voting in November,” George Barna, accessed October 13, 2024, https://georgebarna.com/2024/10/104-million-people-of-faithincluding-32-million-christian-regular-churchgoersprojected-to-abstain-from-voting-in-november/.
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