Monday, February 23, 2015
432 - Perfectly Understandable
Spirituality Column #432
February 24, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
February 24, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
Perfectly
Understandable
By Bob Walters
Most of the
time in this space I prefer to write about Christ rather than Christians because
Christ is perfect. Christians are not.
While Christian
flaws are rampant, it’s hard to find anyone possessing even the most elemental
familiarity with Jesus along with an ember’s worth of faith and understanding
who would say, “Y’know, that Jesus fellow was really a bad guy with a lot of
bad ideas.”
The recent
historical mega exceptions are folks like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao,
etc. Their rabid followers saw in these secular
leaders a mistaken truth and supposed salvation that in reality only resides
with God the Father, Son and Spirit.
Even then, the problem wasn’t that these guys made specific war on Jesus
Christ – although an argument can be made that they did – but that each of
these 20th century Hall of Fame mass murderers thought their political
and power ambitions were superior to any other social construct, including the
freedom provided in Jesus Christ.
Like the Roman magistrates who were
led by the Jewish leaders to see Jesus as a threat to 1st century Roman
sovereignty, these 20th century killers were not solely focused on
eradicating Jesus; they simply didn’t want the competition – Christian freedom,
for instance – suborning their earthly, dictatorial authority.
Certainly, we
don’t have to commit genocide to give great aid and comfort to mayhem’s great
champion, Satan. Rather, just replace
the truth and wisdom of Christ with one’s own fleshly and hence intellectually limited
cocktail of morality, relativity, appetites and “being a good person.” Voila,
one’s place is secured among Satan’s pantheon of fallen humanity perceiving truth
existing not in the Bible, not in the Church, not in the love of Jesus Christ
and certainly not in the ultimate judgment and justice of God, but in
perdition’s darkened mirror.
With a
society-wide, burgeoning majority of secular, liberal, “my religion is no
religion” academic pontificators, judicial reconstructionists, social justice devotees
and self-help evangelists, modern America bears an alarming though perfectly
understandable, societal, macro-miscomprehension of divine values.
We worry
about radical Islam, which has a religious position of “Jihad” somewhat akin to
the aforementioned “Hall of Fame” – “Jihad” seeks to eradicate anyone who is
not them. Radical Islam gives us great
discomfort but, so far anyway, hasn’t produced nearly the body count of the
past century’s largest secular killers.
Whoever may
want to remind us Christians of our historical imperfections, I get it. But the great present-day threat to American
freedom is neither medieval Christianity nor modern Islam; it is secularism’s stupid
indifference to Christ.
Gaining Christ – humbly,
intellectually and reverently – alone secures human freedom.
That’s the lesson of history.
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