Wine, Women, Song… and War
From Wine, Women and Song, James B. Jordan lectures, Biblical Horizons Conference 2010:
“[Wine, women and song] are three things which are essential characteristics of the New Covenant glory which the Church has done a bad job of affirming over the centuries, and are three things which are hated by Islam. Islam is the scourge of Christendom, and a mirror of Christendom. It’s as if all the mistakes the Church makes are magnified in Islam or in some way directly perverted in Islam. Then, there is a fourth characteristic of the New Creation order: holy war.
These are areas in which the church has continually failed to be what God intends, and so there must be something important these things. So, somebody must not want us to think about them.
We have failed to treat worship as liturgical warfare. Worship has been everything but liturgical warfare. The book of Revelation is seen as a bunch of fantasy predictions, or something else, but the last thing it is seen as is a training manual for liturgical warfare. The book describes a worship service in heaven in which warfare is going on, conducted by angels as a model for what the Church is supposed to do. A minute ago, we prayed, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Obviously, that means worship on earth as it is done in heaven. But when we look at worship in heaven, it doesn’t bear much resemblance to what we do in practice…
I don’t think we really believe that when we worship, demons are driven away. And the more closely we worship in the way the Bible describes, the more the principalities and powers will be cast down. The Church has operated much more by sight than by faith in this area.”
