They Will Not Be Convinced Even if Someone Rises from the Dead

I’ve been considering Christian Nationalism of late in the context of Luke 16:19-31, in which Jesus tells the gripping parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Lazarus was a desperate beggar covered in sores, stationed outside the gate of the rich man, who lived a life of luxury. Both men died. Angels carried Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom, while the rich man was relegated to the fires of Hades. Now it was the rich man who was the desperate beggar, pleading with Abraham to have Lazarus dip his finger into water and come to cool his tongue, as he was in agony in the flames. When Abraham told him that wasn’t possible, the rich man asked for something else:

“‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

The rich man believed that some spectacular sign would convince his faithless brothers to repent and get right with the Lord, even though the brothers didn’t listen to God’s Word as it was made known through Moses and the Prophets. And as Abraham pointed out, if the brothers didn’t believe in the Lord based on the words of Moses and the Prophets, no dramatic sign would make any difference in their hearts. After all, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and that didn’t make everyone in Jesus’ day a believer. Even more to the point, the resurrection of Jesus Himself didn’t make everyone a believer!

It is just a fact that people with stubborn, immovable souls don’t listen to God or His prophets – not then, and not now. It doesn’t matter how much hard evidence for the historic Christian faith you lay out in front of these kinds of people. It doesn’t matter how great your apologetic argument may be when talking to them. Their hearts are hardened. And when your heart is hardened, you don’t listen – indeed, won’t listen -- to the warnings of Scripture about sin, judgment or hell. Extraordinary signs, therefore, would have no further effect on them.

I’ve been pondering this parable in light of Christian Nationalism, because I believe that its adherents and cowardly enablers have some of the hardest hearts and most stubborn souls I’ve ever encountered, and that’s an amazing thing when you consider that they actually claim to represent God in the public square.

For starters: These are not Christian men who are full of love or exhibiting any passion at all for fulfilling the Great Commission.

Over the past three years, I’ve never seen any of them show any genuine love for God in anything they say on social media or in their podcast/webcast world. The Lord is rarely even mentioned, except when they use His name or quote verses to try to wound the “enemies” outside their tribe. And they have a lot of well-defined enemies, like non-whites, Jews, Muslims, atheists, women, Democrats, academics, old-fashioned journalists, premillennial dispensationalists, Reagan conservatives and certainly every stripe of critic of Christian Nationalism. It almost becomes comical as they display a kind of Elijah-esque “I alone am left” mentality, except instead of exhibiting the faithfulness of God’s prophets like Elijah, they boast with the same faithless shame that we see in the false prophets.

But they don’t see that. They can’t see it, because they’re swimming in it, and they won’t listen to anyone who points it out.

And I’m not just talking about the main men who’ve been pushing Christian Nationalism — the men I’ve long critiqued — such as William Wolfe, Stephen Wolfe, Josh Abbotoy, Nate Fischer, Joel Webbon, Doug Wilson, Brian Sauve, Eric Conn, C. Jay Engel, Andrew Isker, Dusty Deevers, et al.

They’re not the only problem here; they’re just the top tier of men who are the problem. The men who enable the men above are to blame for this movement, as well. The Southern Baptist “conservative” leaders who joined the advisory board at American Reformer’s “assumed name,” The Center for Baptist Leadership, for instance – men like Jon Whitehead and Tom Ascol. Though Ascol finally left the board recently, he appears to be as tied to Christian Nationalism as ever. He’s never repented for calling his critics “homosexuals” in Greek and setting up a private X group to make fun of them, either.

And then you have the guys like the ones who’ve appeared as speakers at Joel Webbon’s conferences and still won’t fully denounce him. How hard is it, really, to distance yourself from Joel Webbon?

All these guys have seen the overwhelming evidence that this is an evil, unbiblical movement and a movement that will stain the church for years, once it’s finally uprooted, but they don’t care enough about that to rebuke its pushers or follow the biblical instruction to have nothing to do with divisive men. Are they cowards, who put the desire for the clicks and likes of Christian Nationalist adherents above biblical truth? Or are they just mere stubborn souls, deaf to the Word of God? In the end, the fine distinctions don’t really matter. The answer is yes.

Then you have a second, even-lower tier of enablers – the Christian men who will take to X to rebuke more obscure, little-known Christian Nationalists but will never rebuke the Big Names whom they know are directly behind the lower-tier guys and made them who they are.

These enablers are the ones who feign “confusion” and start doing desperate tap dances of excuses when privately confronted with a line like: “Quit merely going after this lower-tier guy no one knows, and please start exposing the Big Name who you know helped launch this lower-tier guy and is still tied to him.”

But these second-tier enablers don’t want to lose the Internet clicks of the people who like that Big Name, so on they go, enabling away. Yet Jesus warned us clearly about sinful tolerance in Revelation 2, telling the church at Thyatira:

“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.”

It just has to be stressed that more than three years after Canon Press did its launch of Stephen Wolfe’s book, Christian Nationalism remains an angry, petulant movement filled with stubborn souls, unrepentant hearts and itching ears — and the problem isn’t merely confined to its Big Names.

Many faithful Christians have warned all these men of their sin with the Word of God, over and over and over. They’re not listening. They do not have ears to hear.

This is, above everything else, a movement marked by spiritual death.

Maybe a final, dramatic split of the GOP amid an impending MAGA implosion and the surging of the Left back to dominant power in Washington after the November mid-terms will wake them up. Maybe they’ll finally say, “We were wrong! So wrong! We repent of our white supremacism, our antisemitism, our racism, our pride and the terrible hatred we’ve shown toward the Lord and so many of our neighbors!”

But let’s not kid ourselves. That’s about as likely as Abraham sending a resurrected man to the Highland Rim project.