by Keith Bassham
Drought, fires, and violence have fueled news headlines this past month. All we need is a swarm of locusts to make our day near-apocalyptic, and the political noise may be a reasonable substitute for locusts in my way of thinking.
Weather, thankfully, can change, and fires can be extinguished, and elections will come later in the fall, but the continuing brokenness in the hearts of the children of Adam ensures that the violence, be it in the form of terror, war, or revenge, whether random and senseless, or carefully targeted and committed in the name of a deity, will not cease on its own.
Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation?
do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?
Yea, in heart ye work wickedness;
ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.
The wicked are estranged from the womb:
they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. (Psalm 58:1-3)
The whole idea of salvation is deliverance. Deliverance from what, you may ask? That would depend. For a drowning person, deliverance would be a matter of getting back on something firm and breathing air. For a person unjustly accused and imprisoned, deliverance would be freedom and getting a good name back. For one who is being held at gunpoint, deliverance would be a rescue and restoration of peace and safety.
These are all fairly good metaphors for salvation in the biblical sense, but texts such as the Psalm above also indicate we need deliverance from ourselves, and our wicked hearts, and our sin, our tendency to “go astray as soon as they be born.” The deliverance is available in the gospel of course, and as our Articles of Faith declare,
… being deeply convicted of our guilt, danger and helplessness, and of the way of salvation by Christ, we turn to God with unfeigned contrition, confession and supplication for mercy; at the same time heartily receiving the Lord Jesus Christ and openly confessing Him as our only and all-sufficient Savior. (Article XII)
The Baptist Bible Fellowship has been and continues to be committed to reaching, rescuing, and delivering all we can with the gospel. That is the reason for the Fellowship, for our churches, for our missionaries, for our colleges, for our church planting ministries, and for the Tribune. We know the only power on earth that can overcome the violence of our hearts and deliver us from ourselves is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Reports from and about our missionaries are included in each issue of the Tribune, but annually we devote nearly an entire issue to missions. This year, we have expanded Global Partners a bit with some give and take about churches and the missionaries they send. In the BBF, missionaries are not denominational employees, but members of churches sent out deliberately and prayerfully by those churches. Here we get a closer look at the mechanics.