Okay, Okay . . . All Right, Already

Introduction

In a world full of turmoil, bombings, wars, ethnic strife, and dictatorial oppression, a hot controversy erupted last week over American Eagle’s ad campaign, one that featured a pun involving “good jeans” and the body of sexpot Sydney Sweeney.

To be frank, there was quite a bit to enjoy in the spectacle. One was the commies going nuts over the ad campaign, acting as though being blonde and attractive and white were an incipient war crime, as though the next stop was likely to be an invasion of Belgium. So that was a treat. The second treat was imagining the ad execs who thought up the campaign, who were being soundly chastised, crying, as the saying goes, all the way to the bank. The blow back against American Eagle was a wall of noise from the left, and no displeasure was registered in the value of their stock at all. Quite the reverse. So the behavior of ad execs on the way to said bank needs to be jotted down as a pleasant thought experiment. And then the third thing to enjoy was the sight of the general public simply not caring about any form of political correctness at all. All the woke checks are bouncing now. It seems that there is a broad consensus that has grown up around George Carlin’s observation that political correctness is just fascism masquerading as manners. So it seems that pretty everybody is on to that game by now, and have decided to quit playing it.

At the same time . . . and yet . . . modesty and decorum . . . biblical teaching . . . let us be frank, you and I . . .

A number of Christians—knowing that we were not put into this world for pleasure alone—found themselves playing teeter totter in their souls for a bit. They enjoyed the spectacle as much as anybody, and yet, at the end of the day, is there anything about the sexpot aspect of this whole affair that should give Christians pause? Does outraging the woke automatically cover a multitude of sins? Because American Eagle did not cover an adequate amount of skin? The distinctions involved between covering sin and covering skin are no bagatelle. And surely there must be more to righteousness than making feminists angry. Atonement should be so easy.

It is as though you were watching a football game, and at half time they interviewed a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, skimpy outfit and all. They interviewed her because in the second quarter an errant punt had resulted in her being bonked on the head with a football. But, she hastened to assure everyone watching, she was quite all right, and for that she gave all the glory to Jesus. “Some of the girls on the squad are part of our weekly prayer group, and they rushed right over and prayed for me.”

Um . . . even if our good friend Henry doesn’t have questions about testimony-time in an outfit like that, his wife sure does. And if Henry has his wits about him, he will make a point of acting like he has the exact same questions about this questionable form of evangelical witness that his wife does. “Precisely,” he will say. “I was about to say the same thing myself.” Apparently lying about his admiration for cheerleaders is a lesser sin than upsetting the wife, but let us not get distracted.

And so getting something edifying out of this entire episode might be like trying to get something nutritious out a couple of sticks of cotton candy, so . . . wish me luck. I run the risk of being misunderstood, but why stop now?

Moral or Moralistic?

The scribes and Pharisees who brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus were being moralistic, not moral (John 8:1-11). They were certainly filled with hot indignation, and they had rocks in their hands to prove it—but they also had rocks for hearts. Jesus wrote in the dust on the Temple floor, reprising a few elements from the trial of jealousy in Numbers 5:11-31. That was a trial that put the accusing husband on the hook as well. So Jesus writes on the ground. What did He write? I believe it was something to do with the charge, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” He then said the famous words, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). What sin? Any sin at all? No, I believe He was referring to the sin under discussion, the sin of sexual immorality. The whole thing had been a set up to trap Jesus . . . they caught her in the very act of adultery, and did so without catching the guy, which is hard to do. And another significant detail is that the accusers all sidled away, John tells us, beginning with the oldest. They had remembered a few items in their browser history that would interfere with their throwing arm.

So we need to begin by distinguishing being moral from being moralistic.

First, a man who is truly moral, whose sanctification is grounded in grace, will turn away from sin because it really is distasteful to him. He says no to such things because the grace of God has taught him to say no to worldly passions (Tit. 2:11-12, NIV). This is all of grace, nothing but grace. C.S. Lewis has a wonderful description of what this sort of grace tastes like.

To this first man, “good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings” are not grace and gospel, but rather condemnation and law, the “cold clatter of morality.”

What is the second man like? A moralistic man might turn away from the exact same sin, but his repudiation of it is a weird mixture of malice and envy. For various reasons, he can’t go there . . . but he sure wishes that he could. He has scruples, and fears, and lots of envy. At the same time, he can’t admit to himself that this is what he actually wants, and so he stuffs that desire down deep using the pitchfork of righteous indignation to hold it under.

But there was a reason why Jesus taught us to get the beam out of our own eye before attempting eye surgery on others (Matt. 7:3). There was a reason why Paul taught us that when we go to correct a brother, the one who is spiritual should do so (Gal. 6:1), and also a reason he should take care that he is considering what temptations might be coming at him in the course of the admonition.

But then, third, we come to an ordinary Christian, a regenerate man, one in whom the spirit and the flesh are at war (Gal. 5:17). His internal battle is one that occupies two levels. The first level of his internal fight is between his desire to serve God and to love his wife, on the one hand, and his desire to go look at that Sydney Sweeney meme a bit longer than he should on the other. That is the first level—the obvious level. This is the obvious temptation, and nobody here is arguing that this obvious temptation need not be resisted.

But the second level is not the battle between the spirit and the flesh, but rather between the spirit and the spiritual flesh—the battle between the moral and the moralistic. This is the temptation to fall into the sin of the second man, becoming, without realizing it, a moralizer. The first battle is between don’t look at her over against but I want to look at her. The second battle is between don’t look at her over against I want to look down on people who get to look at her.

What Are Eye Beams Made Out Of?

I earlier referring to the famous teaching that Jesus gave us, when He said that we shouldn’t attempt to get a speck out of someone else’s eye when we have a log or a beam in our own eye. Now this instruction would certainly apply if someone were rebuking someone for a particular sin and the one rebuking was guilty of the exact same sin, only at much more serious levels. Say a teen-aged son was caught browsing a lingerie web site, and his father, who was brought in by mom to admonish his son, had a serious and very dank porn problem himself. What would that be? That would be a speck and a beam, with both of them made out of the same material—a speck of wood and a beam of wood.

But it is very easy to miss the force of the Lord’s teaching by forgetting that the sin of the rebuked and the sin of the one rebuking might be of an entirely different nature. They might not be made out of the same thing. The speck might be grit and the beam be a log of wood.

Say a teen-aged girl is immodestly dressed and gets rebuked by one of the senior church ladies. Because the girl’s t-shirt really is way too tight, and because the one admonishing her is scarcely identifiable as female at all, it is blithely assumed that the Matthew 7 scenario doesn’t really come into it. But what is the beam made out of here? Is it possible that the one bringing the admonition is jealous over the fact that this girl, only seventeen, has already turned hundreds of heads, and the church lady never turned anyone’s head in her life? Anyone who brusquely dismisses this possibility doesn’t know how envy works, and how envy is a master of disguise. They don’t know how human beings tick. The desire the young girl has to be looked at is obvious, and is right there on the surface. The desire the church lady has to be looked at was buried deep, years ago, right next to her heart.

I said that envy is a master of disguise. That is, this sin was a master of disguise until the sexual egalitarians got a hold of it.

The great spiritual value in this whole Sydney Sweeney thing is that the left set the whole thing up by dragging this particular sin of leveling envy out into the open, out where pretty much anybody can see it now. Their dogged insistence that “every body is beach body ready” is ludicrous on the face of it. Um, no. That is not the case. And to insist on such demented things makes the envious side of it grease fire obvious. Not only is it not the case, but trying to insist that it is the case, and savagely punishing anyone who maintains that one person might be more attractive than another is Orwellian. And I am not using hyperbole here. It really is Orwellian—it is wicked. Not only has Oceania always been at war with Eastasia, now she has decided to become a swimsuit model. Not only has she decided this, she has decreed that the whole world must applaud her as “stunning and brave and beautiful.”

The value of this moment is that a lot of people are giving that bizarre notion—by far the most dangerous thing—the raspberry.

Out on the Skinny Branches

But by this point, I might have some good people worried.

“Surely you are not saying that Sydney Sweeney displaying her wares like that is acceptable behavior?” Correct, I am not saying that. That ad campaign really was immodest. No disagreement from me. I can note another thing that is funny about all this is how Christians have adjusted their definitions and expectations. We have seen the ad campaign, we have discovered that Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I have seen a video of her exercising her Second Amendment rights, tearing it up at a gun range, and no, this is not the harbinger of revival.

But nevertheless . . . we are still talking about a cultural moment that should have revealed to us which is the speck and which is the log. And the ordinary joy over the whole affair that was displayed by Babylon Bee-type Christians shows that ordinary Christians do have more scriptural horse-sense than do the types who specialize in big-thinks.

All the mainstream so-called “respectable” voices that denounced Sweeney and the ad campaign as white supremacy, or Nazi-coded, are representative of a worldview outlook that is radically diseased. Sydney Sweeney has nice breasts and is apparently too aware of that fact, and is willing to prove it to way more people than she should. That’s a problem, and her mother should have a talk with her.

But the people railing against her are the kind of people who want to scratch out the eyes of everyone in the world—so that they can remake that world and then tell grotesque lies to all of us who are now blind about what a wonderful world they have refashioned for us.

And if you can’t see that it is because they already succeeded in scratching out your eyes.

Let’s Bring Jesus Into It

Now I know that there are some Christians who will argue that I am somehow “minimizing sin,” or “justifying immodesty.” They consequently think that statements like the above are unhelpful in the extreme. I am likely to be misconstrued and misunderstood. But tell me, you who know the law, what did Jesus mean by this?

Prostitutes enter into the kingdom before the most respected theologians of the day? Is it not inflammatory to say that cheesecake models, Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, high-end courtesans, and street walkers enter into the kingdom of God before the keynote speaker at the Annual Christianity Today Fundraising Banquet? That doesn’t sound very Christ-like, does it? That’s right, it doesn’t . . . but only because of our dogged tendency to run the difficult sayings of Jesus through a complicated system of pietistic filters.

And so I do not say this as a dogmatic claim. I merely allow for the possibility that Sydney Sweeney is closer to the kingdom than is the diversity officer at Wheaton College, the one with the purple hair and septum ring.