Obedience Is Not a Place to Hide

You know the picture even if you have never gone looking for it. White mantle, red cross on the shoulder, a man who has given up money and comfort and a wife, standing a watch nobody thanked him for. It is a good picture. I use it. It is most of the reason this site is called what it is called.

Now put the same mantle on a different man.

It is winter in what is now Latvia, sometime in the 1230s. The cross on his shoulder is the same cross. The vows he took are the same vows, poverty and chastity and obedience, sworn in front of a priest, meant with his whole chest. He is standing in a village that did not ask for him. The people in front of him are going to be baptized today, and the reason they are going to be baptized today is that he is holding a sword and they are not.

He is not a cynic. That is the part I need you to sit with. He is not a mercenary who found religion useful, and he is not laughing about it later. He believes he is doing the work of God in a dark place, and when he prays that night he is not lying.

Same cross. Same vows. Same God, as far as he knows.

The job description

Every one of the military orders ran on the same arrangement, and it is worth saying plainly because it sounds reasonable right up until you see what it does.

Serve God. Obey your master. Your master obeys the order. The order answers to Rome. And whether these particular people, in this particular village, should be put to the sword today has already been settled somewhere above you by men who are closer to God than you are.

So it is not your question.

That is the whole machine, and notice what it gives a man. It does not give him permission exactly. It gives him something better. It gives him the ability to do a terrible thing and remain, in his own mind, a good and obedient servant. Somebody else carries the weight of whether it was right. He only carries whether he obeyed.

Jesus said this was coming. He said it about people who would think they were doing God a favor.

"They will make you outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God." (John 16:2)

Read that again slowly, because we usually read it as a verse about persecution and skip the sentence inside it. He is not describing men who know they are wicked. He is describing men who think they are serving. That is the category. Sincere, devout, certain, and killing His people while they do it.

And then He tells you what is actually wrong with them: "These things they will do because they have not known the Father or Me." (John 16:3)

Not that they were insufficiently obedient. That they did not know Him. A man can be perfectly obedient to a chain of command and not know God at all, and the obedience will feel exactly like faith the entire time.

The horror is the sincerity

We get this backwards constantly. When we picture religious violence we picture a hypocrite, a man in a robe who does not believe a word of it, using God as a coat. That man exists and he is a real problem.

But he is not the dangerous one.

The dangerous one meant it. The dangerous one prayed before he went out. The dangerous one would have died for the thing he was wrong about, and some of them did, which is exactly why we admire them from a distance. Courage is not evidence. A man can be brave and devout and disciplined and generous to the poor and still be standing in a village with a sword, doing something God never asked him to do, because somebody above him said God asked for it and he never once opened the question himself.

The Templars I will defend more than most. They were founded to guard a road. Pilgrims were being robbed and murdered on the way up from the coast and nine men decided to do something about it, and for a long stretch that is what they did, and they were destroyed at the end by a king who owed them money rather than by anything they had coming.

The Baltic is harder. Two centuries of converting people at swordpoint and calling it mission. I am not going to pretend that was the same thing as guarding a road, and I am not interested in the version of Christian history where we only keep the parts that look good on a flag.

You do not have a pope

Here is where a post like this usually goes, and here is where I am not taking it.

The easy version blames Rome. Papal authority, a man claiming to speak for God, the whole apparatus, and then you and I close the tab feeling fine, because neither of us takes orders from a pope. That version is history with a villain in it. It costs you nothing.

The mechanism was never the pope. The mechanism is that a man will pay almost anything to have the hard question answered for him.

You feel it. I feel it. There is a specific relief in finding someone who is certain, who has clearly thought about it more than you have, who says the difficult thing with no wobble in his voice, and handing him the weight. It is restful. It feels like humility. Sometimes it even is.

And you do not need a cathedral for it.

You need a pastor who has never been contradicted out loud in fifteen years. You need a podcast you have listened to for six hundred hours, whose host you would not describe as your teacher but whose positions you can recite faster than your own. You need a men's group where the loudest man is always right, and where the cost of asking a second question is that everybody looks at you. You need a writer you trust so completely that when he says a thing you find out what you think by reading it.

That is the same machine. Nobody had to claim to speak for God. He just had to be the one who never sounds unsure.

The part where I have to be fair

Now I have to hand you the other half, because if I stop here I have written a permission slip for a man to submit to nobody and call it discernment, and that man is not free. He is just unaccountable, and he is usually insufferable.

Scripture is not squeamish about authority.

"Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account." (Hebrews 13:17)

That is not a suggestion and it is not addressed to a committee. Obey. Submit. And look at the reason it gives, because the reason is the good part. They keep watch over your souls. A real elder is not a man collecting compliance. He is a man who has taken responsibility for you and will answer for how he handled it. That is a gift and most men do not have one, and the man who cannot receive it is not strong, he is alone.

So this is not a case against submission. It is a case against a counterfeit of it.

The line, and it is not blurry

Submission and outsourcing look identical from the outside. Both men do what they are told. The difference is entirely in whether the man still has his own conscience in the room, and Scripture draws that line about as clearly as it draws anything.

The Bereans got a compliment for checking. "Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so." (Acts 17:11) Read who they were checking. Paul. An apostle, preaching in their own town, and going home to see whether he had it right is the behavior Luke calls noble.

Paul told a whole church to do it to him. "But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good;" (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

And then there is the one that should end the argument in any church that reads it.

"But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned." (Galatians 2:11)

Cephas is Peter. Peter, who walked with Jesus. Peter, who preached at Pentecost. Paul corrected him over a real failure, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to put it in the Bible so that nobody could ever claim their position puts them past correction. If Peter was not above it, your guy is not above it, and neither am I.

Be careful what you take from that, though, because men take the wrong thing from it constantly. Paul was an apostle correcting another apostle. Those two were peers, on a doctrinal matter that was already playing out in front of the whole church and was already doing damage there. That is not a template for standing up in the middle of a service to correct your elder about something he said in point two. What the passage establishes is that no man's office puts him beyond correction. It does not tell you the venue, and the venue matters more than most men want it to.

Then the sentence that settles who is holding the bag.

"So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God." (Romans 14:12)

Of himself. Not of his pastor. Not of the man who told him it was fine. Paul says it again to the Corinthians and does not soften it: "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad." (2 Corinthians 5:10)

There is no line on that day for men who were following orders. It has been tried in courtrooms and it does not work there either.

And in the middle of a chapter about disputed matters, where Paul is being as generous as he ever gets about honest disagreement, he still will not let a man skip the work: "Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind." (Romans 14:5) Not convinced by his own mind. Not answerable only to his own mind. Convinced, in it. You have to actually get there.

I will be straight with you about that verse. Romans 14 is dealing with disputed matters, food and days and the things brothers are allowed to land differently on, and I am carrying its principle a little wider than its subject. I think it carries, because the reason Paul gives is about the man and not about the menu. But you should know I am extending it rather than just reading it off the page, and if that is the only leg my argument stood on I would not lean this hard. It is not. The Bereans and Antioch and the judgment seat are doing the heavy work.

What this looks like on a Wednesday

Not dramatic. It never is.

Your pastor says something from the pulpit and it sits crooked with you. Not heresy. Just crooked. You go home and you look it up, in context, all of it, and one of three things happens. He was right and you learned something. He was right and you found out you had been carrying an assumption you never examined. Or he was wrong, and now you have to decide what a man does with that.

The man who has outsourced his conscience never gets to option three, because he never opens the book. Checking would feel like disloyalty. That is worth noticing about yourself, and it is worth being careful with, because it cuts two ways.

Sometimes that feeling means the relationship has gone wrong and you are not allowed to look. Sometimes it means your pride does not enjoy being wrong, and you would rather call the discomfort a red flag than admit what it actually is. Those are different diseases and they feel identical from the inside.

So do not diagnose your church off one uncomfortable feeling. Diagnose it off a pattern, over time, on more than one subject, with more than one person. A man who leaves every church he has ever been in has found the common factor and refused to look at it.

And when you do find something crooked, the answer is almost never to burn the place down. Go to him. Privately, actually curious, actually willing to be the one who is wrong. A healthy man will meet you there.

Say he does not. Say you go in with a real question, asked kindly, and he takes it as an attack.

Do not make that one afternoon your verdict. Men have bad days, and a pastor who is buried under three funerals and a budget meeting can snap at a good question and be sorry about it Thursday. Give it room. Watch whether it becomes a pattern, whether other men have the same experience, whether anybody in that building is ever allowed to be told anything. If there are other elders, this is exactly what they are for, so use them, and go about the reaction rather than the doctrine.

And if it is a pattern, then you know something real about where you are standing, and you found it out over a small thing instead of over a large one. What you do then is a bigger conversation than this post, and it is one to have with your wife and with men who know you, not with an article and a phone at eleven at night.

That is why you do it now, on the crooked sentence, when nothing is at stake. Nobody develops the ability to ask a hard question on the day the hard question actually matters.

Why I keep the mantle anyway

I have thought about whether to stop using this imagery, and I am not going to.

Because the picture is not wrong. A man who takes a vow and stands a post in the cold that nobody is watching, who owns less so he can carry more, who is dangerous in the direction of the people trying to get past him: that man is worth wanting to be. The failure was never the discipline. Discipline is not what marched into the Baltic.

What marched into the Baltic was a man who had been relieved of the duty to ask.

So keep the mantle. Keep the watch, keep the vows, keep the early mornings and the hard schedule and the willingness to stand where it costs you. And keep the one thing those men handed up the chain, because it was never theirs to hand over and it is not yours either. You will answer for what you did. You, by name, for your own deeds, in a body you actually walked around in.

"Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching..." (1 Timothy 4:16). To yourself first. Paul wrote that to a pastor, which means even the man doing the teaching does not get to coast on the fact that he is the one holding the microphone.

A man under authority still owns his conscience. A man who has handed it over is not submitted. He has been absolved, and he will find out on that day that the absolution was not real and the account was always his.

Go find out if it is true

Think of the last thing you believe strongly that you did not arrive at yourself. You know the one. You could argue it right now, and if somebody asked you where it came from you would say a name instead of a passage.

Go find out if it is true.

Open the book, read the whole chapter around it, and see whether the thing you would defend at a table full of men is actually there. If it is, you now own it instead of renting it, and it will hold weight it could not hold before.

And if it is not there, you have just found out something about your own house while it is still quiet, which is the best time and the only time a man ever gets to fix anything cheaply.