This lesson begins by warning against a minimalist view of God that leaves gaps in preaching and teaching—gaps the culture will gladly fill. When the church stops treating God as “Holy, holy, holy,” it drags Him down from the transcendent to the familiar, and a secular mindset takes root. Once truth, beauty, goodness, and justice are defined subjectively rather than by the God who is their source, society enters a race to the bottom that eventually swallows even “conservatism,” because conservatism without Christ is built on expediency, not principle, and therefore preserves nothing. The remedy is to recover the biblical God and, by doing so, recover biblical definitions of justice, goodness, and truth.

Justice is introduced as “receiving what you deserve,” but our culture—and often the church—assumes man is mostly good, which dulls the ser ...