The Risk of Obedience Vs. the Risk of Inaction

In several conversations with friends about Abolition, it has come up that we are at risk of “judging” and it is often pointed out what our Lord, his brother, and his apostles said about judging others.  Now the proper understanding of what kind of judging the Lord was warning against has been dealt with elsewhere, yet even with a proper understanding of the sin of judging in mind, I’ve never brushed aside the concern when my brothers and sisters have brought it up.  I agree, it IS a risk.

Yet to live is to risk. In God’s appointed order time pushes us on, through crossroad after crossroad where we must take risks in order to obey, and when we reach the Celestial City, we will not be asked how studiously we avoided risks.  This applies even to risks of sin. To avoid risk is not to avoid sin.  In Galatians 6:1, Paul directs us to risk sin in order to help a brother.  Every act of obedience carries with it a risk of sin.  The risk is unavoidable, and we aren’t too busy ourselves avoiding it.  We are to obey with open eyes, watching ourselves lest we be tempted.

If we fear the Master, thinking Him a hard man, he will try us by our own words and ask why we did not invest his gifts in the necessary risks, risking failure to give him a return.  There will be, he has told us, those who come cringing out holding the gift returned, unrisked, unprofitable.  He may well say to them on that day:

“I gave you a task, I have you my Truth, my Spirit, my gifts, and you did not use them to pray with your every action that my Father’s will would be done on earth as in heaven; you did not use them to cry out against murder and mayhem, to follow your master in driving out Beelzebub and destroying his works.”

Action, obedience, is risky.  Our judgment is never guaranteed to be perfect – it is true that with crying out against murder and oppression comes the risk of sin, yet not to do this comes with risk as well! A great and terrible risk: to neglect the command to love our neighbor as ourselves, to fail to take into account the weightier matters of the law. 

There is something further. I suspect that what prompts so many to point out the risk taken by abolitionists is not a genuine fear of the possibility of unrighteous judging.  I am afraid that it might be something less noble, less spiritual – that it might be the fear of man, the fear of contradicting the spirit of the age and facing a dragon’s wrath.  They know that the dragon only pursues those who keep the commandments of God as well as the testimony of Jesus (Rev. 12:7), and this makes them not very eager to keep those commands. 

In short, I am afraid that this is in many cases nothing but cowardice.  Now I sympathize with those who fear man, I have felt that fear myself.  We are commanded to have mercy on those who doubt.  Yet we are, at the end of the day, not those who shrink back and are destroyed - but those who believe and are saved.  The coward has no lasting refuge in inaction; we know this and have a sobering warning from our Lord.  Turn to the twenty-first chapter of Revelation and read; in the list of those who have not conquered, the cowardly who shrunk so studiously from risk and the fear of public scorn will have the reward for their great care: their portion in the lake of fire, along with the faithless, the detestable, murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars.

And what of those who risked, watching themselves to remain unstained yet always striving towards the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, keeping His word? “The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.”