@TheJasonHHoward
Thank you to @TheJasonHHoward and all the sponsors that help make his giftcard giveaways possible. Your contributions and generosity equipped me with the training sessions, apparel and equipment I needed to help me prepare for my senior year of basketball. One last ride! 🧡🖤View quoted post on X
I really didn't want to do this, but you raised the stakes to this level...🤦🏾♂️View quoted post on X
This statement is a poorly polished, snagged tooth rhetorical move, and a theological house of cards that collapses under its own weight once you look at the text.
Peter’s sword in Gethsemane was wrong for a very specific reason. Jesus rebukes him not with a general “earthly power is always the enemy of the gospel,” but with the necessity of the cross itself:
•“Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (John 18:11)
•“How then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” (Matt. 26:54)
•“Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matt. 26:53)
Peter was trying to interrupt the redemptive plan. The arrest was the doorway to the atonement. That is not a transferable principle that any use of earthly power by Christians puts something ahead of the cross. It is a unique moment in redemptive history. Treating it as a blanket prohibition on political engagement, just laws, or Christian influence in a nation’s life is a category error.
Your statement also runs on a strawman of what most people mean by “Christian Nationalism.” It assumes the position is “use the sword (or the state) to stop or replace the work of the cross.” That is not the actual argument of serious versions of this view.
The usual claim is narrower: nations exist under God, the magistrate bears the sword for justice (Rom. 13), and a people may rightly order their public life in ways that acknowledge the moral order God has revealed rather than pretending the state is religiously neutral. That is not the same thing as Peter swinging his sword to keep Jesus off the cross.
Jesus himself distinguished the means of his kingdom’s advance in that hour from the ordinary role of civil authority. He told the disciples to buy swords earlier that night (Luke 22:36), then forbade their use in Gethsemane because the time and purpose were wrong.
The sword has a place; it just did not have a place in opposing the cup.
Romans 13 still stands: the civil authority is God’s servant, and it does not bear the sword in vain. Collapsing those distinctions into any earthly power undermines the gospel is not careful theology; it is a slogan.
I do believe there is temptation to put power ahead of the cross. It is real.
But so is the opposite temptation: to spiritualize the public square into irrelevance and call the resulting silence faithfulness.
This argument only works if you define every form of Christian political engagement as the first temptation and then cite Gethsemane as proof.
That is why it feels artful and still reads as a strawman once the actual text and the actual claim are on the table.
Most people using the term are arguing about the magistrate’s role under God, the legitimacy of moral order in public law, or the possibility that a people may acknowledge the Christian heritage that shaped their institutions. They are not claiming the state should swing a sword at Malchus to keep the Messiah off the cross. Or assume the sword over the gospel. Equating the two is either willful misrepresentation or an inability to distinguish basic categories.
What makes it especially poor is that this comes from circles that advertise themselves as rigorous about exegesis and rhetoric. This move is neither. It is a slogan that borrows the emotional force of the cross while ignoring the actual teaching of the passage, the rest of the New Testament’s treatment of civil authority (Rom. 13), and the distinction Jesus himself draws between the means of his kingdom in that hour and the ordinary function of the sword.
This statement is not profound. It is lazy, and the pretension to care makes the laziness more obvious.
The claim is tidy, and tidy claims usually have a way of slipping past the very ordinance they pretend to honor, the way a perfectly set table can leave everyone still hungry.View quoted post on X
God never handed the magistrate the keys of the kingdom; He never asked the sword to do the Spirit’s work of giving new hearts. But He also never left the unregenerate without a governor. Those are not the same instrument, and confusing them has never produced either revival or order.
Civil authority exists, by the plain appointment of God, to do precisely what the post dismisses: to make unregenerate people behave more morally in their external conduct.
Romans 13 does not sketch a voluntary society of the redeemed; it describes a sword bearing servant set over a mixed population for the punishment of evil and the praise of good.
The Noahic ordinance already required the blood of the murderer at the hand of man long before Sinai and long after the flood. The law of Moses applied its civil sanctions to the stranger within the gates as readily as to the native. None of this was an attempt to force faith. It was an attempt to restrain the lawless, the very purpose 1 Timothy 1:8–10 assigns to the law.
There is a difference between the church’s keys and the magistrate’s sword, and collapsing them produces either a sacral state or a lawless one. The gospel alone gives new hearts. The magistrate, by contrast, is given for the common good of the old ones, so that the quiet life the church is commanded to pray for might actually be possible. To call that arrangement a solution God never gave is to read the ordinance of civil government out of the text and then complain that nothing remains to restrain moral decay.
The sin is real. The restraint was always part of the design: ordinary, imperfect, and necessary, like bread that keeps a household from starving while the feast of the kingdom is still being prepared or the leaven is getting into the lump.
The negligence here is frustrating and brings clearity to why we are in the state we are in. We are ignorant of Scripture.
Over 80 million Christians eligible to vote did not vote on November 3rd, while 98% of all adult muslims voted.View quoted post on X
