Way back in my teenage years I read the voluminous book Battle Cry by Leon Uris. It was a long read but offered an insight into the minds of marines whose lives were intertwined with one another during WWII. The bible uses battle imagery in the book of Ephesians 6 to encourage followers of the Lord Jesus Christ to be clothed in the Armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, and the helmet of salvation. We have become slothful and failed to don our equipment and thus we are reaping what we have sown (or not sown) in the surreal world we live in. But do we, as Christians, have a battle cry, something to screech before the charge? Apparently, according to Krysten and Keith Getty in their song “O Church Arise” we do, and it is “LOVE”.
We sang this song recently at church and I was excited to read about the battle Christians face to “stand against the devil’s lies” and to “face trials on every side”. But then to sing our battle cry is “LOVE”??? I don’t know what bible they are reading but this is not what Jesus (or John the Baptist) cries out. The song then continues in a very stirring fashion with foes crushed beneath our feet and with Christ we stand in Glory, but then says, “see the cross, where love and mercy meet”. What a let down and what deception! If the Christian battle cry was “LOVE” we would be no different than the pagans. And to say the meeting place for love and mercy is the cross denies the atonement—Jesus’ propitiation for our sins. This is moralistic therapeutic deism at its best.
What changes would I make, you ask? Our battle cry is “REPENT”! These are the first recorded words of Jesus as he started out on his ministry and they are the words of the voice crying in the wilderness, John the Baptist. Our problem in this world is not a lack of love, but an anemic view of our own condition of sin. This is what we must come to understand—we are separated from our Creator because of our sin, not because we do not love. And the cross is the place where justice and mercy meet. Our sins must be paid for, there is no escaping that fact. The only question is, who is going to pay?
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14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Ephesians 2:14-22
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