We’ve seen a lot of craziness at the U.S. Capitol these last few years, from the events of January 6 to Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.) becoming more based than 95% of the Republican Party. But one demonic day of testimony this week may have reached a crescendo of crazy.
Three presidents of once-renowned institutions of higher learning testified under oath on Capitol Hill their combined refusal to denounce calls for the genocide of Jews. Meanwhile, just down the hall, a woman was testifying it was the duty of her fellow women to learn to lose gracefully to men impersonating women, who are stealing their opportunities and usurping their locker rooms.
And hell was belly-laughing at us the entire time.
This is not exactly the stuff of a shining city on a hill. It’s more like secretions from a deep, dark pit. According to legend, Benjamin Franklin said the framers of our Constitution were giving us a “republic — if you can keep it.” It’s becoming painfully — and tragically — obvious that we can’t.
Let’s rip the band-aid off this festering wound, shall we?
The American Revolution was driven by a belief that only God is God and the king is not. That requires also recognizing that we, the people, aren’t God, either.
I saw a quote a while back that the problem with the American church is that no one wants to arrest or kill its pastors any more. Yet I’m not sure how many of our suburban mega-palaces that claim to preach Christ are really any form of threat to the spirit of the age whatsoever. That doesn’t mean they’re all heretics, but it does mean that they have practiced a form of theological reductionism that makes “drag queen story hour is a blessing of liberty” as likely a worldview outcome as anything else.
What kind of moral destiny can we possibly have when serious discipleship seems to happen only by accident?
Ridley Scott’s new “Napoleon” film depicts the more than 41,000 people who were imprisoned by Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. That doesn’t even count the thousands of people — mostly royalty or church officials — who were sent to the guillotine. But then, after tearing down the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and putting up a statue of the goddess of reason instead, the French revolutionaries were toppled in fairly short historical order because they had become even worse than the regime they replaced.
The state as god versus vox populi was a schizophrenic bloodbath. How’s that for a moral destiny? Two sides who think they have nothing in common with each other to the point of death but who are identical in the area that matters most.
They each lacked a reverential fear of God.
On the right these days, we are fond of reminding the left that the state is not God. But we need to remember that neither is the mob. Being driven by polls of reactionary masses is no more righteous than being mired in a swamp of faceless bureaucrats. For each, in their own unique way, is made up of the same kind of people.
Sinners. Because that’s what each of us is.
The scriptures say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The fear spoken of here is of the reverential variety, not the cowering kind. Jesus speaks to this at the end of the parable of the talents. In response to a servant who took the talent given to him and, out of cowering fear of failure, did nothing with it, Christ proclaims, “Depart from me, you wicked servant, into the den of iniquity.”
Instead, what the servant was supposed to fear was wasting the opportunity to maximize the talent bestowed upon him by the talent-giver. That talent was given for a reason. It was meant to be exploited. It was meant to befulfilled. Thus, it would be a sin not to do so. For in wasting such a gift from your master, you have declared yourself to be nothing less than an ingrate – which the dictionary defines as “an ungrateful person.”
We are here.
But we didn’t have to be. Our revolt against the king was driven neither by “power to the people” nor a “people’s revolution.” It was driven by a belief that only God is God and the king is not. That requires also recognizing that we, the people, aren’t God, either, by the way.
However, while the left was turning its collective back on God, many of us on the right took Him for granted. We pursued seekers harder than Him. We chased after dueling idols of believing God can only work through selling out to a political party that hates us or that God wouldn’t want us to get our hands dirty with politics at all. We sought cultural relevancy rather than transformation. We even tried to be nicer than God, and now we have a woke pope and a Southern Baptist Convention full of soft woke pastors. Defeat is legion.
There is a way out. In the final book of the Bible, Christ shows us the way: “Repent and return to doing the works you did at first.”
And then He warns us what will happen if we do not: “I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.”
Last one out, turn out the lights.