Black Lies Matter

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Introduction

Would you rather I had said that all lies matter? I will explain the hypocrisy shortly, but in the meantime, as a matter of fact, I have done such a thing before. But nobody listened to me at that time, and so now the country is either burning down or falling apart. Isn’t that what you wanted?

You don’t get to perpetrate six tons of injustice because you are impatient over the slow delivery of six ounces of justice. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. And you don’t get to pretend that its all on the same level because both were numbered as six units of something. The difference actually lies in the tons and ounces.

Some Needed Clarity, Right Up Front

Black lies matter, not because they are black, but because they are lies. White lies matter for the same reason and in the same way. White lies and black lies don’t use separate bathrooms — they actually live in the same sewage lagoon. And I have been reliably informed that there have been times when Asians have lied, and that’s bad also.

Every human being, all shades, not found in Christ, is a liar from the cradle (Ps. 58:3), especially the Cretans (Tit. 1:12). Every human being, again all shades, born again into Christ, is summoned to stop the inveterate lying (Col. 3:9), now that we have put off the old man with his evil practices. God becomes the Father of all who believe, but where does that leave the rest outside of Christ? The devil is the father of us all (John 8:44a), and he is also the father of all lies (John 8:44b).

And so do you know what that makes us? This means that all these little lying orc-runts running around the place must be our brothers and sisters. They come in all colors too. There are black little ankle-biters and white little yard apes and yellow little curtain climbers, and all of them have these obnoxious snouts that stick up in the air, as much as to say, “We are much better than those other aforementioned orc-runts.” My snotty, sin-encrusted snout is a decidedly superior color to all those others. Color is what makes all the difference. I am a proud little piggy, and the very heart of my superiority lies in how my skin reflects and/or absorbs the rays of the sun. If you are not impressed with my trick, I can do it for you again tomorrow.

There may be some readers who are irate at having been tricked into reading this far. “Yes, nice try, but your headline read ‘black lies matter.’ You were singling blacks out.” Yes, I did do that, and you can call it click-bait if you want. But that is not what Lady Wisdom calls it when she walks through the streets of a burned-out city, pleading with fools to come and sit down at her banquet (Prov. 1:20-23). I said black lies matter because black lies are currently the ones that have free access to the microphone. And in order to come to the banquet, v. 23 says that they have to turn and repent at the reproof. So here is the opportunity.

If you object to me singling out black lies, aren’t you really objecting to your own arbitrary and ever-changing standards? You’re the ones who manufacture those rubber yard sticks. And you’re the ones who made them so stretchy. Two months ago it had to be “black lives matter,” and now you are the soul of bigotry if you won’t say “black trans lives matter.” And whatever it is you are getting the crowds to yell later this afternoon will be proof positive, if you dare yell it a year from now, that you are a white supremacist. The revolution devours her own, and the fact that you can’t see that is a key part of your blindness.

Isn’t it your rule now that the rules have to be arbitrary? Didn’t you insist that we abandon the pursuit of a color-blind and objective justice? Aren’t we all veering back into the hot pursuit of partiality? I mean, God hates partiality (1 Tim. 5:21; James 3:17), and our generation hates God, and so doesn’t it follow that we must love what He hates? Doesn’t that mean we must love rigged and partial judgments, and fix it by calling it social justice?

But once we are committed to the principle of partiality, then who are you to say what others are partial to? Maybe they prefer the supercilious stupidity of preening over their white skin, be it ever so white as King Uzziah’s leprous forehead, over against your supercilious stupidity in preening over your black skin, be it ever so black as the Earl of Hell’s riding boots. Nothing to be proud of in either case.

The heart of sinful man is more than willing to be conceited over any color whatever in our Jumbo-Sized Crayola Box, provided it is his own color. But he then ignores the fact that every last crayon in there is busted, and all of the paper is frayed, and all of the points are blunted. Each crayon is the same color it was coming out of the factory, but everything else about each one is a mess.

You will fare better as you continue reading this post if you fix your mind on this one truth. The Lord abhors unequal weights and measures (Prov. 20:10). So just pick your standard, and let us then try to live by it. If Derek Chavin represents all whites, then Jussie Smollett represents all blacks. If Milton Friedman represents all whites, then Walter Williams represents all blacks. But if culpability for crimes committed is to be assigned on an individual basis, as the Almighty requires (Eze. 18:20), then we need to hold just and honest trials first before assigning any penalty to an individual. And nobody gets to burn down a city while they are waiting for the trial.

Behold, I will show you are more excellent way.

No Noose Is Good Noose

If you are a normal person, you are not being reasoned with in this meltdown of a year. Rather, you are being badgered, hectored, bullied, taunted, browbeaten, tormented, and baited. These people are trying to turn this nation into a coast-to-coast compulsory North Vietnamese Self-Examination Session, and as someone might say in the Western, right before the gunfight, “deal me out.”

You, my friend, never picked cotton, and I never cracked a whip over you while you weren’t doing so. I have not traced my ancestry back far enough to know whether any of my forebears were slave owners, but with human history being the kind of tangled and sorry mess it was, the chances are pretty good that some of them were slave owners, some were slave traders, and that some were slaves. The same thing goes for you. You and I are both descended from a long line of sin.

We are covered in blood girl, you know our forefathers were slaves
Let us hope they’ve found mercy in their bone-filled graves.

Dylan, Precious Angel

To this, the charge comes back immediately that I must be deeply racist because I cannot even see my own racism. I cannot see the problem with “systemic racism,” as it is now called. The problem here is that this is a sin against Marx, not a sin against Christ. What I am urging here is not a sin at all. It is the message of salvation from sin. It is straight gospel.

I have needed forgiveness from God for many things, over many years. But not once have I needed to be forgiven for what you call “privilege” and what the Bible calls “blessing.” If you are an envious Marxist, it is a sin for somebody else to have more than you do. But I have not been baptized into Marx, and I don’t believe any of that stuff. Repent of the blessings that God has given me? You can call it checking my privilege; the Scriptures would call it ingratitude.

You want me to feel bad over the fact that God has been very, very kind to me? Try something else. That one is not going to work. I am more than willing to repent of my unkindness to God, but when you ask me to repent of God’s kindness to me, that seems more than a little bizarre. Even more bizarre is the fact that many professing Christians have fallen for this twisted altar call. This is one sick revival meeting — with a preacher who looks like he is almost ready to bite you, with scriptures teeming with bitter envy on every page, and with a message overflowing with spite.

The Moral Equivalence Juke Move

If you are an evangelical moderate, you do not live in the high mountain meadows of God’s grace, but you are not yet dwelling in that fetid swamp of pure bolshevik malice. You live in lowland evangelicalism, where the grass is green but it squelches under your feet when you walk, and your shoes are always wet. And from time to time you cast longing looks over at the swamp, wondering if there is anything you might, in humility, learn from them, like how to build your house on poles.

You are not quite ready to man the barricades of revolution with them, but your sympathies are somehow there with them. This means that they are currently trying to make you feel quite judicious because you feel like this is a “faults on both sides” kind of thing. You know, there must be a basic moral equivalence between the two sides.

But I would like to ask you to sit down and think this through. It won’t take but thirty seconds of your time. Is there really a moral equivalence between burning down a city, on the one hand, and imagining that a pull-down garage door rope is a threatening noose on the other? You really think there is a moral equivalence between indiscriminate rioting and isolated and faked hate crimes?

To this kind of thing, the angry reply comes that I am leaving out of the picture all the problems with systemic racism, white supremacy, and microaggressions. A microaggression, for those just joining us, is when you threaten a NASCAR driver named Bubba Wallace with a micro-noose.

I know there is real white racism out there — I have encountered it, and fought it. But those tiny enclaves of real racism are not what is driving these riots. If it were, there would be no need to manufacture “incidents.” A garage door pull? Seriously? Racism in the 21st century is a lot like COVID-19 in that a bunch of the cases appear to be asymptomatic.

Our problem is not blacks and whites, but rather commies and non-commies. You can tell that this commie lust for leveling is the real problem because of what happens when you point out that you do not violate God’s law when it comes to your treatment of blacks. You hire them. You befriend them. You go to church with them and take the Lord’s Supper together with them. You sing together with them. But that’s never going to be good enough for them. They want you to purge yourselves of all that invisible racism in your system, the racism that has to be there. They have been told that it must be there, by their prophet with the evil eye. Their message has no hope, no grace, no forgiveness, no kindness, no love, and no peace. Their message is green and cancerous. Reject it. Walk away. Have nothing to do with it. If your pastor’s messages are starting to appear green and cancerous around the edges, inquire about it, once, or maybe twice. Then, as the saying goes, put an egg in your shoe and beat it.

A Warp Spasm of Righteousness

One thing that can be said about a riot, or any enthusiastic mob action like pulling over a statue of some deceased white guy, is that it is exhilarating. The adrenaline flows and if the slogans on the placards are to be believed, the cause is really, really righteous. We are talking about something that feels like genuine moral superiority. And everybody is yelling, and the crowd is surging back and forth, and the riot control cops look just like the bad guys in the movies you watch.

But there are some problems. This feels like righteousness, but measured in the scales of the Temple it is entirely bogus. Your leader up there, the one who has pressured three different girlfriends to get abortions, is someone who has murdered three more black lives than I have. Come to speak of it, the same thing is true of that line of cops over there. All of them have killed three fewer black people than your angry, brick-throwing leader has.

“Yes, but we are marching because Black Lives Matter.” I see. And how many black people have your Black Lives matter riots killed so far? Are you keeping track? Do you know any of their names? How many black livelihoods did your helpful riots burn down?

This whole movement is a burning sulfurous sink of iniquity, corruption, and hypocrisy.

When the Last Day comes, and the earth and sky flee away, and you come before the throne of God, shivering and naked, and all the lies are dumped in a pile in front of you, what then? All the lies you believed when you shouldn’t have. All the lies you told to yourself. All the lies you and your friends told one another. All the lies you told the media, ever eager to spread them for you. Here’s a sample: “If a cop in Minneapolis kills someone in his custody, then I have a right to take a pair of sneakers from a store in Atlanta, and to beat the shopkeeper if he objects. And to call you a racist if you point out the insanity of my reasoning processes.” How are you going to feel about it when the angel with the plastic gloves picks that one up by one end, and holds it up for you to look at closely?

This kind of “righteousness” is like a junior high boy lifting some ten pound weights a few times, and then flexing in his bedroom mirror. Not the real thing. Vanity is not the same thing as muscle.

All this feeling of righteousness is nothing more than bumptious crowd excitement, but when you come into the presence of the great Jehovah, it is all going to melt away like the dew on the top of a brick kiln.

Pumping your fist in the middle of a yelling, angry crowd is like trying to make your guilt go away by taking cocaine. Whenever you come back from your little excursion, there is your guilt sitting there, staring at you. If you are a white, young, upper middle class Antifa punk, and you are out on the streets because you hate your father, who works for the Chamber of Commerce back home, your sin is that you are breaking the fifth commandment, and breaking it quite egregiously. That kind of hatred is straight from the devil. If you are a black man who has abandoned three of his children, and had two others killed, then you are a worse human being than the guy whose statue you are currently trying to topple.

And yet you feel righteous. But the reason you feel that way goes back to that pattern of lying we addressed earlier. It is not true.

You Knew There Had to be Gospel Coming, Right?

So the problem is sin, and that problem is resident in the heart of Everyman. The problem is human wickedness. Our problem is systemic, but it is systemic rebellion against God, not systemic racism. The problem is our hatred of God. And when I say “our,” I am referring to every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve. Nobody gets a bye because they had ancestors who were mistreated — because all of us have ancestors who played the role of oppressor, and all of us have had ancestors who were grossly mistreated. How does that provide us with any good reason for remaining in our sins? Why should that let us off?

Each man and every woman oozes and overflows with the liquid corruption of his own sin, and each one of us is standing there in the slop. Apart from Christ, all of us will have to appear before God in that condition. Not one of us is able to deliver ourselves from the quicksand of our envious lusts. Every mouth in every face, regardless of the color of that face, tells nothing but self-justifying lies.

Black rioters need to get saved. White rioters need to be born again. Moderate evangelicals need to be converted also, because they justify appalling behavior so long as the ostensible goal is “Happy Thoughts of Uplift.” Intersectionality must be repented of. Critical theory must be abandoned with loathing. God hates it and so should you. Socialism is a sin, a bad one. Egalitarianism smells like sulfur. Black Lives Matter is an organization crammed full of bloated and rancid hypocrisy. Repent, all of you.

Fortunately, all those who are in the grip of these lies and lusts can be saved. Any of them. All of them. But they have to stop telling themselves lies, which is to say, they must repent. They have to stop because a minister of grace commanded them to repent in the strong name of Jesus. This Jesus was crucified for the sins of the world, was laid in the grave with all those sins on top of Him, and then came back from the dead with all those sins left forever behind Him. He came back to life, and they didn’t. In His resurrection, He triumphed over every tribal and ethnic enmity known to man, especially including yours. Whatever vain excuse we might use to justify hating a fellow image-bearer, with color being among the silliest, He threw down with His crimson victory.

If your sins are black like soot, that does not matter. If they are white like leprosy, that does not matter either. The only thing that matters is the color of the blood that covers them.