Moved

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College Time

Two of my kids went off to college this month, one to his senior year, and one to his freshman year. Over their last two weeks at home, I keenly felt, not stress, exactly, but pressure to make the most of the rapidly dwindling time. So we took walks, played board games, watched movies, went to church, got into discussions about software development and politics and literature and video games and theology. I’m not certain to what extent my sons felt the same about their impending departure. (As Michael Gerson observed about sending his eldest to college, “He is experiencing the adjustments that come with beginnings. His life is starting for real. I have begun the long letting go. Put another way: He has a wonderful future in which my part naturally diminishes. I have no possible future that is better without him close.”) But we immensely enjoyed the family time together.

However, I’m not sure if the pressure of those last two weeks is entirely rational. Eighteen years times fifty-two-point-something weeks per year makes 938 weeks, if your child leaves for college on their eighteenth birthday. Who’s to say that the last two weeks are more valuable than, say, week 537? In reality, all time with people whom we love and who bring us joy is a gift from God; that just may not be at the forefront of your mind when you’re on week 537 and college seems so far off.

In reality, even 938 weeks is less than it may seem. Paul Graham writes,

Life actually is short. Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.

And that’s without invoking the countless clichés about telling people you love them now because tomorrow may be too late, people can be gone before you know it, treasure your moments because you never know what the future may bring, etc.; these are no less true for being clichés.

If I’m not careful, these trains of thought can produce, not just pressure, but stress. Time is slipping away! Don’t waste it! Optimize, organize, plan, develop habits and routines and life hacks! Make the most of every week, day, hour! Make sure you have no regrets!

There’s wisdom here - we should be good stewards of all the blessings that God has given us, including time - but I’m not sure that this attitude of carefully scrimping and spending a finite resource is intended to be how we live as children of God. It’s a scarcity mindset - what we have is all we have, so use it carefully, because when it’s gone, it’s gone - but we serve a God of abundance, who loves us and chooses to abundantly shower blessings upon us. The Bible has plenty to say about the wisdom of recognizing our limited time in this life (Ps 90:10-12, James 4:14, Eph 5:16), but it also talks about spending our time richly enjoying the blessings of family (Eccl 9:9), food (Eccl 9:7), work (Eccl 2:24-25), and worship (Ps 84:10). I should prefer to drink deeply of God’s blessings now than worry about when they’ll pass.

And, ultimately, our time isn’t so limited after all. As C.S. Lewis observes,

[We] hope finally to emerge, if not altogether from time (that might not suit our humanity) at any rate from the tyranny, the unilinear poverty, of time, to ride it not to be ridden by it, and so to cure that always aching wound (‘the wound man was born for’)… For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist” (Rev. 21:4), because he has arranged all eternity with us in order to have enough time to show us his love (Eph. 2:6-7).

Mistborn Evangelion

I don’t often write about specific works of fiction. It’s hard to analyze a book or movie in a way that’s compelling to someone who hasn’t read or seen it, and the find-your-audience blogging experts would say that reducing your audience from “people who are interested in an amateur theologian and software developer’s wandering thoughts” to “people who are interested in those wandering thoughts and have any idea about what novel he’s referencing” is perhaps a mistake. But the nice thing about having a blog is that I’m free to occasionally wander wherever I like, and I’ve been reading some good books lately, so here we go.

Spoilers for the first two Mistborn books and “Neon Genesis Evanglion” follow.

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I recently finished the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson. Although he’s not extremely well known in broader culture, Sanderson is one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world and a prolific author, with over thirty novels to his name. The Mistborn series follows Vin, a young thief who grew up on the streets, as she falls in with a group of rebels, helps overthrow a tyrannical ruler, and discovers her own magical powers. As a fantasy series, it has many of the standard fantasy tropes: an immortal evil overlord, a carefully explained system of magical abilities, mysterious prophecies, centuries of backstory, and unearthly creatures.

It’s all fun and well-written, but the fantasy tropes aren’t what kept me thinking once the book was done - rather, it’s Vin’s relationship with a young nobleman, Elend, with whom she falls in love. Vin and Elend could hardly be more different. She grew up on the streets; he’s the son of the most powerful noble family in the empire. He’s an academic; she acts on instinct. Her life forced her to focus on practicality and survival; he’s an amateur philosopher and an idealist. Vin can use her magical abilities to become absolutely deadly in a fight; Elend can barely hold a sword. As the plot develops, they become responsible for a fledgling kingdom; Vin puts her talents to use at night, spying, keeping watch, and eliminating threats, while Elend spends his time politicking, drafting laws, and making speeches.

As their relationship progresses, neither of them think they’re right for the other. Elend contrasts his ivory tower philosophies with Vin’s resourcefulness and growing magical abilities and thinks she doesn’t need him; Vin thinks that Elend should have someone who can more properly fit into society and that she deserves to be alone in the shadows. The various mundane and supernatural threats that they face continually pressure them and force them to deal with them individually, and since neither can manage to talk openly about their concerns, the stresses and gaps and unknowns are filled in with insecurities and fears.

In spite of this, they come to love each other; toward the end of the book, they’re married in a brief, spur-of-the-moment ceremony, as Vin is getting stitched up after being wounded in her latest magic-empowered fight. When Elend asks a mutual friend, Sazed, for advice, Sazed tells him how to think about their differences:

At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different. Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose. (p. 427)

Vin has serious trust issues. Her mentally ill mother killed her sister. Vin’s brother taught her life on the streets by telling her that everyone, even him, would eventually leave her - and he did. To survive, she fell in with various thieves’ gangs, where stronger members would frequently beat, assault, or steal from weaker members such as her. (The fact that Vin can have any kind of healthy emotional life is perhaps as fantastical as the book’s magic, especially when centuries of rule by an immortal evil overlord did not allow for the development of trauma-informed therapy.) Much of her relationship with Elend, then, involves learning to trust him, and much of the reason she falls in love with him is that he’s unwavering in his trust of her. It’s impossible for her to guarantee that he would never betray her - yet she finally concludes that “she’d rather trust him and be wrong than deal with the worry of mistrust.”

While Vin’s and Elend’s relationship progresses (and armies invade and conspiracies transpire and omens portend and so forth - this is a fantasy novel, after all), their friend Sazed goes through struggles of his own. He’s a Keeper - a member of an order of scholars who’ve dedicated themselves to preserving the world’s lore during the dark age of the evil overlord’s reign. Sazed’s specialty is religions; he’s memorized three hundred of them, because he believes that these beliefs and stories have value. When questioned as to how he can promote these religions, despite their mutual contradictions, he explains that they represent hope - hope that there is something greater than humanity, hope that better times will come in the future. However, despite his scholarship and wisdom, his quiet strength, and the support he offers his friends, events in the book leave him shattered; although he believed in hope as an abstract concept, there was nothing concrete in any of the three hundred religions that could give him comfort.

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Love, marriage, trust, hope - none of these are new topics, and all have been dealt with by numerous philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and self-help books. So, from one perspective, we don’t really need a popular fantasy novel presenting its take on things. But God has given us both emotion and reason. (As Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”) And art and stories can touch emotions in a way that propositional truths may not; art is art because it shows something true about life, and sometimes showing is worth more than telling. (This may be part of the reason that God himself so often communicates through stories and parables.)

During The Well of Ascension, Vin has the opportunity to pursue a relationship with someone more like her, another magic-empowered outsider, but she eventually decides to place her trust in her key-and-lock relationship with Elend. And it is a relationship of trust - she has to accept that, however much the street-scarred survivor in her wants to ensure that she will never be hurt again, she cannot guarantee that, and she loves him anyway. The trust that Vin and Elend place in each other allows them to find strength when the abstract belief of Sazed fails.

This all has me thinking about our relationship with God. Christianity is, at its heart, a relationship with a Person, not a system of belief in abstract concepts. Christians often talk about the God-shaped hole in each of us. Blaise Pascal, again:

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. (Pensées VII (425))

We may try to fill this hole with things on earth - for example, with relationships with those just like us - rather than looking toward the lock-and-key relationship with the Creator who seeks to relate to us. (This of course stretches the metaphor - a key and lock are created for each other, but God in no way depends upon us. I appreciate the poetry of the image regardless.)

It also illustrates something of the nature of faith. We talk at length about the importance of faith, what it means to have faith that’s accompanied by works, the relationship between faith and doubt, why God allows for faith rather than arranging for certainty, and so on. All of these are good and valuable discussions, but at the simplest level, faith is trust in a Person. Faith and doubt coexist because sin-scarred survivors such as ourselves can never guarantee that another person won’t hurt us - many of our doubts are fundamentally relational rather than intellectual. (If God is real and loves me, why doesn’t he act as I expect him to? Why am I still hurting? Why is the world still hurting?) Faith comes when, in spite of this, we choose to trust in One who is unwavering in his love toward us.

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Thinking about Pascal’s “empty print and trace,” the God-shaped hole that we attempt to fill with shallow relationships with each other, reminds me of “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a 1990s Japanese anime. One of the most popular anime ever, it tells the story of Shinji Ikari, an asocial Japanese 14-year-old, who’s drafted along with other teenagers to pilot giant robots in defense of Earth against invading alien monstrosities, dubbed “angels.” He does so as a member of Nerv, a UN-backed paramilitary group led by Shinji’s absentee father, Gendo. “Neon Genesis Evangelion” is a short series (26 episodes, 24 minutes each - anime is more likely than American television to tell a story and wrap up) but dense, with psychological drama, conspiracies within conspiracies, Jewish Kabbalah references, and critical elements of backstory and motivation that are merely hinted at. For example, Nerv’s motto (which is never directly referenced in the show but is visible onscreen as part of their logo) is “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” This quote from the 19th century poem “Pippa’s Song” sounds inspiring, but as the series unfolds, it becomes clear that Nerv considers God to have abandoned humanity, just as Nerv’s leader Gendo has abandoned his son, Shinji, leaving Nerv to play God on its own.

Early in the series, Shinji is introduced to the concept of “the hedgehog’s dilemma” - porcupines want to be close to each other, but when they try to do so, they only hurt each other. This becomes a recurring metaphor - humans seek to fill their emptiness with each other, desperately seeking the approval of others, yet they repeatedly hurt each other in the process.

Despite the show’s at times bizarre religious references, this theme ends up sounding quite Christian. Without our Father (in Christian terms, in rebellion against God), yet created for relationship and needing love, we try to fill our emptiness with each other. In the science-fiction anime world of “Evangelion,” this takes the form of a conspiratorial project to psychically meld humanity’s minds together; in real life, it can take the form of the distractions of entertainment, pleasure, work, or it can take the form of seeking relationships with others just like us, longing for someone we can trust and yet hurting each other like hedgehogs, instead of trusting in our relationship with our Father and accepting his love.

You Have to Surrender

Jeremiah is a weird book.

It’s the longest book of the Bible (by word count - Psalms has more chapters, but they’re shorter - and if you split Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles into two books each, as our English Bibles do). Jeremiah’s ministry was long, hard, and discouraging - he began prophesying while he was perhaps still a teenager, during the reign of King Josiah of Judah, and prophesied through the next four kings. He saw the collapse of the Assyrian empire, the victory of the Babylonian empire over Egypt that cemented its status as the dominant power in the Near East, the fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to my Old Testament professor in college, he preached for forty years and never saw a single convert. This is perhaps hyperbole - the book of Jeremiah talks about a handful of connections in the priesthood and royal court who supported him, plus his scribe Baruch - but his impact on Judah within his day was seemingly negligible. After the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, he couldn’t even keep his countrymen from taking him against his will to Egypt, in an attempt to avoid Babylonian reprisals. He repeatedly clashed with prophets and priests and suffered repeatedly for it - betrayed by his own family (Jer 12:6), flogged and thrown in the stocks (Jer 20:1-2), put on trial after being nearly killed by a mob (Jer 26:1-24), banned from visiting the temple (Jer 36:5), falsely accused of defecting to Babylon (Jer 37:12-14), flogged and imprisoned (Jer 37:15), thrown in a dry well to die (Jer 38:1-6), rescued, and re-imprisoned, and only freed after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem.

The book of Jeremiah is also quite intimate in describing Jeremiah’s own relationship with God. Several times throughout the book, he complains to the Lord (Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-4; 15:10-21; 17:12-18; 18:18-23, 20:7-18). The book is complex to read; it’s a mixture of prophecies, prayers, and narratives of Jeremiah’s life, often not in chronological order, forcing the reader to keep the various Judahite kings straight in their head as prophecies and stories jump back and forth.

It contains several striking, even shocking, passages. Jeremiah’s complaints to God. (“Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me. Now I have become a constant laughingstock… Sometimes I think, ‘I will make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger anymore.’ But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it… Cursed be the day I was born!… Why did I ever come forth from my mother’s womb? All I experience is trouble and grief, and I spend my days in shame” (Jer 20:7,9,14,18)). God’s denying Jeremiah of the normal (and socially expected) activities of marriage, mourning, and celebrating (Jer 16:1-9), as a lived parable of the desolation that was coming to Judah. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for his fellow Judahites (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11, 15:1), because of the depths of their sin - when would we expect God to not want us to pray for someone? One of the most shocking, though, is Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to Babylon.

Let’s put this in historical context. Israel and Judah were small countries, positioned between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and desert to the east, and so they formed a major trade route between the north and south. The golden age of David and Solomon, when they were militarily ascendant over their neighbors, enriched by trade, and internationally esteemed, were long past; instead, they were a pawn in struggles between Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon to the north. By Jeremiah’s day, the kingdom of Israel had already fallen to the Assyrians, who also very nearly conquered Judah during the reign of Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, and now the kingdom of Judah feared imminent destruction from Babylon.

In the midst of this, Jeremiah sent messages to the surrounding countries:

The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to give your masters this message: “I made the earth and the people and animals on it by my mighty power and great strength, and I give it to whomever I see fit. I have at this time placed all these nations of yours under the power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I have even made all the wild animals subject to him. All nations must serve him and his son and grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then many nations and great kings will in turn subjugate Babylon… Things will go better for the nation that submits to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon and is subject to him. I will leave that nation in its native land. Its people can continue to farm it and live in it. I, the Lord, affirm it!” (Jer. 27:4-7, 11)

And to the king and people of Judah:

Submit to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon. Be subject to him and his people. Then you will continue to live. There is no reason why you and your people should die in war or from starvation or disease. That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation that will not be subject to the king of Babylon. ‘Do not listen to the prophets who are telling you that you do not need to serve the king of Babylon. For they are prophesying lies to you. For I, the Lord, affirm that I did not send them.’ (Jer. 27:12-15)

From a human perspective - this doesn’t sound good. It’d be like Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, or George W. Bush after 9/11, saying, “Welp, they got us good; we shouldn’t suffer war or hardship or disease in trying to fight back.” Except that analogy probably still misses the force of Jeremiah’s words, because our independence and existence as a nation hadn’t been meaningfully threatened since 1865. Perhaps it would be more like a preacher in Kyiv standing up and declaring that Vladimir Putin is God’s servant and Ukraine needed to peacefully surrender to him, but that’s okay, because God would later judge Putin, too. Or William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, a fascist, Nazi propagandist, and former British soldier who broadcast to the UK during World War 2 and was executed for treason after its end.

It’s no wonder the authorities in Jeremiah’s day didn’t like him.

While Jeremiah was telling those in Judah and resisted Babylon that God was going to judge them, he wrote to those Jews who had already been carried into exile to tell them that God would take care of them:

’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper…

‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise to you and restore you to your homeland. For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’ (Jer 29:5-7, 10-11)

How do we interpret such passages? Is this just an interesting bit of Old Testament history, yet another instance of God judging a faithless people, or is there more that we can learn? Jeremiah 29:11 is a wonderful promise to those in exile, and God’s faithfulness to those in exile gives us reason to trust that he has a plan to care for us today, but yanking that verse out of context as if it were given verbatim to us fails to do justice to how challenging Jeremiah’s instruction to his contemporaries was and how starkly it went against the religious understanding of his day. As we look at the political, social, and cultural struggles of the 21st century American church, is there anything we can apply from Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to the pagan forces of his day and seek their prosperity, rather than fight?

Many evangelical churches are currently struggling with questions of whether, and to what extent, we should get involved and fight in the political, social, and cultural issues that are dividing America. Full disclosure: I have definite opinions - and definite concerns - about how we’re engaging here. So there may be a temptation for me to take these passages from Jeremiah and use them as proof texts to support my side of the debate. But I’m no prophet - it would be as big a mistake for me to use Jeremiah’s history as evidence that I’m right as it was for the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day to use the history of God protecting Israel as evidence that Jeremiah was wrong. Instead, I’d like to list some things that we can learn from Jeremiah and encourage us to work through how they can help us in our current challenges.

God is often less concerned with external religion and political power than we are.

Solomon’s temple was a magnificent structure, the culmination of the preparatory work of the exodus and tabernacle, the fulfillment of prophecies and plans of David and Solomon, the manifestation of his presence among his people (1 Ki 8:27-29), and a place to make God’s glory and fame known to the surrounding nations (1 Ki 8:41-43) - yet Nebuchadnezzar, acting as God’s servant, burned it down and looted all of its furnishings. In fact, God was willing to quite literally burn the entire political, national, and religious system of his people to the ground if it allowed him to reform his people into a remnant that was faithful to him.

True religion needs to touch every aspect of our lives.

Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah started his ministry, started numerous reforms to remove idolatry and refocus Judah’s religious practices on the Lord. He removed idols, desecrated and tore down pagan altars, repaired the temple, renewed the covenant, and organized a national Passover celebration. Kings and Chronicles speak very highly of him (2 Ki 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). However, Jeremiah’s struggles suggest that these reforms were often merely surface-level - the people followed the structures and practices of their religion without it changing their behavior and hearts.

The Lord said to Jeremiah: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s temple and proclaim this message: ’Listen to the Lord’s message, all you people of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the Lord. The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Change the way you have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to continue to live in this land. Stop putting your confidence in the false belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here!” You must change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat one another fairly. Stop oppressing resident foreigners who live in your land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. If you stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this land that I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession.

“’But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false belief that will not deliver you. You steal. You murder. You commit adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal. You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known. Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on doing all those hateful sins! 11 Do you think this temple I have claimed as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I have seen for myself what you have done! says the Lord. (Jer 7:1-11)

(This kind of preaching no doubt explains why Jeremiah was eventually prohibited from going to the temple.)

This passage is well-known to Christians because Jesus quoted it when he cleansed the temple during the week leading up to his arrest. We typically understand “a den of robbers” to mean simply that the people inside the temple were robbing others, but Jeremiah’s charge is more pointed than that: the religious practitioners were treating the temple as a hideout or refuge in between their forays into immorality, a place where they could find security and comfort while they lived their daily lives however they wanted. They tried to follow the Lord and worship him - but they also didn’t want to give up pursuing other gods.

As followers of God, our beliefs and formal religious practices are important - but so are our choices to act with integrity, seek justice, and avoid any idol that’s put alongside God.

Faithfulness - successfully following God - may not look like what we think of as success.

Contrary to the expectations of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it was the exiles, not those who remained in the Promised Land, whom God was using to reform his people. Jeremiah’s own ministry was long, hard, and disappointing, with little to show for it in his day. In the view of the religious leaders, he was dangerous and opposed to God. And yet, looking back now, “Bible students consider Jeremiah to be one of the foremost OT prophets. With good reason he has been called a sublime figure… Highest praise has been given him; in fact, he has been credited with the survival of his people after the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., a veritable savior of the Jews” (Charles L. Feinberg, Expositor’s Bible Commentary). More importantly, God loved him, challenged him, encouraged him, and took care of him, even in the midst of his complaints (Jer 15:19-21).

It’s easy for us to think that church growth, compliments from others, popular support in elections and polls and news media, and the like are evidence that we’re doing good, but Jeremiah’s life shows that following God may bring none of that.

Be careful when saying what God wants.

The book of Jeremiah describes how priests and false prophets repeatedly opposed Jeremiah, and it names several of them: Pashhur son of Immer, Hananiah son of Azzur, Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of Maaseiah. However, it says very little about their motives. Maybe they were con artists, deliberately lying for prestige or financial gain. Maybe they were deceived by spiritual forces, like Ahab’s prophets were (1 Ki 22:20-22). Maybe they started out intending to speak truly but gradually twisted their message into what people wanted to hear - social media clickbait and “doing it for the likes” create powerful incentives today to say whatever will get the desired emotional reactions out of your friends and followers, but the underlying temptations aren’t new.

And maybe some of the false prophets truly believed they were speaking God’s truth. Maybe they said God would deliver Judah from Babylon because they rightly remembered and retold God’s promises to take care of his people and God’s deliverance of his people in the past - but, if so, they were forgetting that promise and protection was only part of God’s message to his people, that holiness and accountability also must be included, and that God’s sovereign plan means he may have purposes and priorities broader than they could see.

One odd dynamic of the past few years has been the number of self-proclaimed Christian prophets who’ve confidently declared what God was doing and would do in American national politics and the 2020 election. Many of these predictions proved false. Even in less charismatic streams of Christianity, churches and families have been divided by confident proclamations of which candidates and political causes God wants us to support. We should seek to understand what God is doing - but any beliefs about what God intends with current events and predictions about the future should never contradict or distract from the simple, hard work of recognizing the holiness that God wants from us (both individually and as his people), practicing love in unity for each other, and trusting that God will take of us and protect us through (not necessarily from) whatever happens.

Leaders’ character matters. The sins of the past matter.

The book of Jeremiah has only one mention of Manasseh, the grandfather of King Josiah: “I will make all the people in all the kingdoms of the world horrified at what has happened to them because of what Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem” (Jer 15:4). However, the books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign at length:

He did evil in the sight of the Lord and committed the same horrible sins practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out before the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he set up altars for Baal and made an Asherah pole just as King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky and worshiped them. He built altars in the Lord’s temple, about which the Lord had said, “Jerusalem will be my home.” In the two courtyards of the Lord’s temple he built altars for all the stars in the sky. He passed his son through the fire and practiced divination and omen reading. He set up a ritual pit to conjure up underworld spirits and appointed magicians to supervise it. He did a great amount of evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. He put an idol of Asherah he had made in the temple, about which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon, “This temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will be my permanent home”… Manasseh misled [Israel] so that they sinned more than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed from before the Israelites… Furthermore Manasseh killed so many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to end, in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight of the Lord. (2 Ki 21:2-7, 9, 16)

As narrated by Kings and Chronicles, Manasseh was almost single-handedly responsible for the Babylonian exile; God announced a final judgment on Judah through his prophets during Manasseh’s reign, and he never relented (2 Ki 21:10-15). The reforms of Manasseh’s grandson Josiah, during Jeremiah’s youth, were valuable but brought only a temporary reprieve (2 Ki 22:18-10). Jeremiah’s command to surrender comes because, by then, the fall of Judah was inevitable; all that his contemporaries could do was influence how hard and how fast the fall would come.

As American individualists in one of the most prosperous and powerful countries in history, we like to think ourselves responsible for our own actions and outcomes and the masters of our own fates. There are deep, important questions about the interplay between present responsibility and consequences of the past (compare, for example, Deut 5:9 and Jer 15:4 to Deut 24:16 and Jer 31:29-30). But Jeremiah’s example suggests that there may be times when, instead of fighting, we may need to accept current events, consider the sins of our collective past (for example, American sins of violence, greed, and racism), and repent and grow.

Even when opposing sin and pronouncing judgment, love others and weep.

Jeremiah gave harsh proclamations against the sin and superficial religion of Judah - and yet, in spite of that, and in spite of God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for Judah in light of the coming judgment (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11-12), he still prayed for them:

Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny.
It is not in their power to determine what will happen to them.
Correct us, Lord, but only in due measure.
Do not punish us in anger, or you will reduce us to nothing. (Jer 10:23-24)

And this is no rote, checklist-style prayer; Jeremiah identifies with the people he’s proclaiming judgment against and who opposed and persecuted him, and he weeps over them:

I wish that my head were a well full of water
and my eyes were a fountain full of tears!
If they were, I could cry day and night
for those of my dear people who have been killed. (Jer 9:1)

In fact, God himself laments over the people:

I will now purify them in the fires of affliction and test them.
The wickedness of my dear people has left me no choice.
What else can I do? (Jer 9:7)

It’s easy to fall into us-versus-them thinking - any of our opponents, anyone doing wrong, are first and foremost enemies to be defeated, agents of evil, rather than fellow humans with whom we live in community. Jeremiah risked his life opposing evil, but he also recognized his ties to his people, and he never stopped loving. God opposes and judges evil, but he never stops loving.

There is always hope.

Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, God instructed him to buy a field in his hometown of Anathoth. This was just a year or two before Jerusalem fell to Babylon; Jerusalem was already under siege at the time, and Jeremiah was under arrest for his conflicts with Judah’s leadership. Jeremiah explains the reason for buying the field: “For the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land’” (Jer 32:15).

Investing in real estate at a time like this would seem highly questionable; it would be like our Kyiv preacher saying that Putin is God’s servant and that Ukraine should surrender to him, but then while in prison proceeding to invest in property in the war-ravaged Mariupol in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. After the land purchase, God speaks to Jeremiah, promising that, in spite of his judgment for centuries of Israelite sin,

I will bring them back to this place and allow them to live here in safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them a single-minded purpose to live in a way that always shows respect for me. They will want to do that for their own good and the good of the children who descend from them. I will make a lasting covenant with them that I will never stop doing good to them. I will fill their hearts and minds with respect for me so that they will never again turn away from me. I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and wholeheartedly plant them firmly in the land. (Jer 32:37-41)

Much of our contemporary rhetoric and dialogue about American politics and the church in America has an almost apocalyptic flavor: if this election doesn’t go the way we think it should, or this cultural trend or that political agenda isn’t reversed, our country and churches are doomed. This rhetoric seems overblown (it’s not the first time we’ve feared an outcome of an election), but it may actually be the case; Judah in Jeremiah’s day was doomed. But God remains faithful to his promises; the gates of hell will not prevail against his church; he is still our God, and we are still his people.

God’s presence and deliverance may not look like we expect.

Everyone in Jerusalem had no doubt grown up hearing of the Lord’s miraculous deliverance from the Assyrian invasion, during the reign of King Hezekiah, when God killed 185,000 of their soldiers overnight (1 Ki 19). This may have contributed to their confidence that they should fight against the Babylonian invasion - but that was not God’s plan.

And yet, God remained faithful to his people, preserving and purifying them and calling them back to him, at a time when many nations and tribes dissolved and were absorbed into conquering empires. And countless believers since then have drawn comfort from God’s promise to the exiles: “I know what I have planned for you… I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope” (Jer 29:11).

Jeremiah himself had no doubt grown up hearing of prophets like Elijah, who opposed idolatry and immorality with fire from heaven and supernatural strength and miraculous victories, untouchable by any human opposition - but that was not God’s plan for Jeremiah.

And yet, in spite of the persecution and hardships, God was with Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I chose you. Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5). “I, the Lord, hereby promise to make you as strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and all the people of the land. They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you, for I will be with you to rescue you” (Jer 1:18-19).

It’s easy, and natural, to look for God in the miraculous, in clear-cut confrontations of good and evil, in displays of power, in victory. But God often chooses to act through human circumstances, through loss, by being with us through defeat rather than guaranteeing temporal victory, by proving his faithfulness and comfort in spite of the bad, rather than simply removing the bad.

At Easter, God himself “surrendered” to evil, taking upon himself the worst evil that humanity could deal out, rather than simply wielding power against it as he did in the days of Hezekiah and Elijah. And, in doing so, he defeated evil and death for all time, showing once again his love and faithfulness.

You Have to Fight

“If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. You have to fight.”

Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture, and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday cups.

There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m more interested in the implication that we haven’t fought, that we have somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights, music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games, blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism, critical race theory, and K-Mart selling Playboy.

And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example, evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous “booze” sermon in Boston, Massachusetts:

It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.

The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of this world to come.

It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty, and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.

His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in 1917.

In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip Yancey writes in Soul Survivor of growing up in Atlanta:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native of my own Atlanta, whom the Atlanta Journal regularly accused of “inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)

During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we maintained only a loose affiliation…

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all black students…

The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,” making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…

If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).

Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church (“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away from the faith as a result.

Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop, with very mixed results.

Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are significantly lower than they used to be — 60% lower in 2020 than in 1980. (However, the fact that this decline in crime rates can be credibly attributed to the removal of lead paint, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to the broader culture.)

Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.

Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays, and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized in the name of following God.

And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - over 140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, not to mention the damage done to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.

What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled culture to go our way?

Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “I, unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice - in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church, eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real spiritual harm.)

But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether our own churches and families and children will be able to remain faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.

Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces (Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels (Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb. 12:1).

Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.

Bible Stories

Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at the lives of David, Saul, and Solomon, but it’s worth a closer look.

There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and (as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest), we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” - George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans, we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.

Bible stories aren’t just history, but they are history, and they can help fulfill all of these roles.

Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm 95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb 11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of faith.

This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time. However, it’s possible to overdo this. In Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,

As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was because I had not preached Christ! (p. 16)

He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories only for moral lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.

Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.

This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate. Russell Moore writes,

New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”

Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level. Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.

Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a part of God’s people now.

Or, as Rich Mullins put it more poetically in “Sometimes by Step,”

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me

Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God himself. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes teaching a Bible college class.

This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian. “Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out, some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a relationship with Christ.”

We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit, but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.

1. A guy would have to get to know her.

I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)

To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk, and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him - through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with this relationship.

This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational, story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me more than any corporate training could.

And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God - much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories. Russell Moore, again:

When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad that’s over?”

It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.

And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.

Stating the Obvious

At the risk of stating the obvious, Nero was not a nice man.

The fifth emperor of Rome, Nero reigned from AD 54 to AD 68. He had a widespread reputation for being “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched” (Wikipedia). He killed his mother and has been suspected or accused of killing his first wife, second wife (although this is questioned by modern historians), and step-brother. After his second wife’s death in AD 65, he had a young man who resembled his second wife castrated, married him, and started treating him as a woman. He was believed to have started the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64; after the fire, he rebuilt Rome, including a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), funded by heavy taxation and devaluing the Roman currency. After the fire, he was said to have tortured and killed Christians, perhaps blaming them for the fire, and had some early Christians burned alive. Later tradition said that Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded during Nero’s persecutions. When political winds finally turned against Nero (due in part to a rebellion against his taxation), he fled to a villa outside of Rome. He planned to commit suicide, lamenting, “What an artist dies in me.” He ultimately could not go through with the deed and instead forced his secretary to kill him.

Nero remained infamous after his death; a legend soon arose that he had survived and would return to conquer his enemies and lead Rome. At least three impostors, claiming to be Nero, organized rebellions, and the belief in Nero’s return, called the Nero Revividus legend, persisted in some places for centuries. Some scholars believe that Revelation’s beast from the sea, which received a lethal wound but was healed (Rev. 13:3), is an allusion to Nero Revividus. (John, or the Spirit through John, could have easily chosen imagery and metaphors that would be familiar and vivid to John’s first leaders.)

This forms the backdrop for 1 Peter, which evangelical scholars believe was perhaps written sometime around AD 62-64. In 1 Pe 2:13-17, Peter writes:

Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king as supreme or to governors as those he commissions to punish wrongdoers and praise those who do good. For God wants you to silence the ignorance of foolish people by doing good. Live as free people, not using your freedom as a pretext for evil, but as God’s slaves. Honor all people, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the king.

Notice what Peter does not say: “Honor the king, as long as he isn’t tyrannical, self-indulgent, or debauched.” “Be subject to the king, unless he starts fires and blames you for it.” “Honor the king under normal circumstances, but if he starts killing family members or burning people alive, feel free to verbally attack him.” 1 Peter may have been written before Nero’s persecutions started, but even then, Nero’s character wasn’t the sort that an observant Jewish Christian would approve of. And, if Nero’s persecutions would have changed things, it’s hard to imagine Peter’s inspired instruction not including that caveat.

I think of this sometimes when I see a “Let’s go, Brandon!” sign or dip my toes in the constant stream of political jokes, memes, and insults on Facebook or Twitter. Because, if Peter didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the king, unless he’s a self-indulgent, debauched tyrant,” he certainly didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the ruler, unless he’s a senile socialist” - or an orange-skinned grifter, or a closeted Muslim from Kenya, or an American idiot, to cover a sampling of the insults from the last twenty years of American presidential politics.

This doesn’t mean that we automatically obey those in power. Peter earlier said that, if forced to choose between God and humanity, he would obey God (Acts 5:29). And this doesn’t mean that we can never criticize those in power. Even in this passage, Peter speaks of “the ignorance of foolish people,” and John the Baptist and Jesus both have pointed criticism for political leaders (Mt 14:4, Lk 13:32). And there may even be a place for vivid or even inflammatory language; both Jesus and Paul did that if the issues they were addressing are important enough (e.g., Mt 23:27, Gal 5:12). But I’m not nearly as wise or mature as Jesus or Paul. And I also notice that the New Testament speakers’ most pointed criticisms are reserved for people claiming to be members of the religious community - those who claim to share with us a higher standard, whose actions are causing genuine spiritual danger to fellow believers. I’m afraid that many of our political memes, jokes, commentary, and slogans aren’t about offering a moral challenge or applying God’s standards or protecting fellow believers. They too often feel like just complaining, venting our spleen about situations we have limited ability to change, bonding with those who share our views by tearing down those who don’t.

Does this mean that there’s never a place for political humor? I’m not sure. Satire is a powerful tool. Humor can be healthy (especially if we’re poking fun at ourselves or those in our faction), and it can be a useful coping mechanism. And I certainly have laughed and shared the occasional critical joke. But, even if it’s not inherently wrong, I’m not sure that our constant stream of negative political humor and commentary is spiritually or psychologically healthy. If our fundamental mentality is to be one of honoring and respecting those in authority, it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the attitudes I see on Facebook and Twitter. And I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s warning in Mere Christianity about loving our enemies:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it; we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. (p. 91)

I’m not a fan of Joe Biden. I have from time to time complained about him. But this message from him happened to pop up in my Twitter feed sometime around Easter last year:

As we reflect today on Christ’s Resurrection, we are reminded that with faith, hope, and love — even death can be defeated. From our family to yours, we wish you hope, health, joy, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding. Happy Easter and may God bless and keep you.

This was an important reminder to me - regardless of what I think of the leadership and policies of Biden (or Trump, or Obama, or Bush), what’s far more important is whether they and I are following Christ. Paul writes about this in 2 Cor 5:15, in talking about what it means to live for Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (ESV). Regarding our political leaders as partisan allies or enemies, as the butts of our jokes or as a means to the end of punishing our foes, is regarding them according to the flesh. Instead, let’s give them the same honor and respect that Peter gave Nero, while continuing to live as ambassadors of Christ.