Introduction
What I would like to do is to bring the good news of the grace of God to those in the grip of our current imbecilities, but I would also ask you to give me a moment to warm to the subject.
What we have been seeing in our American streets over the last few weeks is an intersectional mashup. It has been the meeting place where stupidity, envy, hatred, ignorance and folly have all met up to do a little showing off. They all wanted to do a little flexing for the orc-girls.
The folly has reached the point where it is now throwing bricks and setting fires, and because it has thus drawn this kind of marked attention to itself, we may now make out a number of the more significant contributing factors.
We are talking about the ache of fatherlessness, meeting up with a generation that was drugged instead of educated, meeting up with white guilt and envy, meeting up with black shame and envy, meeting up with suffocating paternalism from the state, meeting up with overweening incompetence from the state, and all conspiring to fill the room with fumes, there to await the death of George Floyd.
Only One Way Out
And so our situation is comparable to that poor woman in the gospels.
“And had suffered many things from many physicians. She had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse.”
Mark 5:26 (NKJV)
The more we appeal to our experts, the worse everything gets. The more money we spend, the worse everything gets. And you can count on our politicians to get out there in front of all of this, so that they may insist on the necessary reforms, but never forget that all the things they need to fix are the result of all their previous reforms.
“I stood in line/Down at the County Hall/I heard a man say, “We’re gonna build/Some new apartments for y’all”/And everybody wanna know/Yes, they wanna know/Why I’m singing the blues.”
B.B. King, Why I Sing the Blues
And the white boy reformer, filled as he is with pure thoughts, grand ideas, and paternalistic pride, is mystified by all of this. And that is because he needs Jesus, just like everybody else. Everybody needs saving, and we really should start with our saviors.
So we are in the grip of our folly. Folly has us by the throat, and no one can breathe. Now a fool can be saved from his folly, about which more in a minute, but a fool cannot evolve out of his folly. Nothing will serve but a new man.
“Though you grind a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, Yet his foolishness will not depart from him.”
Proverbs 27:22 (NKJV)
When God Deals in Ironies
I know that you are a black activist, and a hard left radical, and so you never read this blog. The only reason you are reading it now is because you are obliquely acquainted with some sob sister evangelical, one of those reconciliation-mongers, who shared it with you so that he might score some righteousness-points by empathizing together with you, and grieving with you over the fact that there are still people like me out there. That’s why he gave it to you.
But the reason God arranged for all this is that He wanted you to hear the straight gospel from an admirer of Stonewall Jackson, so that you could repent of your sins, which are many, and trust in Christ, who will forgive them all. This is so that when you die you might go to Heaven and there join with the innumerable multitude as they surround the throne in a praising throng. And there God will arrange for you to be shoulder to shoulder with Robert E. Lee. That’s why this is all happening. God loves irony.
There are those who would say that someone with my politics can’t really have the best interests of his black enemies in view. To which I would say, watch. And they would say someone with my view of the reconciliation industry can’t really love the sob sisters. To which I would say, watch.
What that Gospel Is
Before naming the sins that must be repented, I want to be clear about the content of the only message that can extricate anyone from any of these sins. Jesus Christ, who was almost certainly a different color from you, died on the cross in accordance with the will of His Father, who is no color at all. Christ died on the cross so that I and numerous others might be given a commission to proclaim it to you, telling you what it means. I means that we are authorized to make you an offer. If you repent of your sins, and believe in the one who was stretched out on that gibbet, He will forgive you for every last one of those sins.
God took the sins of all His people, the sins that He hates so much, and which unbelieving reformers pretend to hate so much, placed them on the shoulders of His Son, and there poured out His wrath on all of them. This means that when Jesus died, those sins died with Him. This means that anyone can turn to Him and be forgiven. This offer of forgiveness and cleansing is extended to all, without partiality. God forgives white bigots and black rioters.
And He can do this because three days after His crucifixion, God raised Him from the dead, in order to fulfill the promise of Scripture, and to establish Him as the Lord over every tribe. We must believe in his sacrificial death, and accept our justification in His resurrection, and then acknowledge that He, and He alone, is Lord. This means that every black tribe is ruled by a man who is not black, and every white tribe is ruled by a Jew. It is time for everybody to deal with it.
An Invitation
Every sinner must repent, red and yellow, black and white. They must not dare to cast sidelong glances at other sinners, wondering if they are comparatively more righteous. All of us are corrupt enough to be thrown headlong into Hell, and no injustice done.
In the balances of Heaven, there is only the gift of salvation and the wages of damnation. And when the wages of damnation arrive on that great Pay Day, nobody will be looking over anybody’s shoulder, trying to figure out what they got.
The only reason for making any kind of differentiation here is to help those who must repent of the sin of hypocrisy. They must learn to frame their comparisons in a truer light. And so, for those who are chanting “Black Lives Matter,” when they ought to be chanting “All Black Lives Matter,” including the unborn and David Dorn within the circle of their concern, the thing they must repent of is the lying and the fakery and the hypocrisy and the blame-shifting.
More needs to be said. To be continued.