On Walking Along the Balance Beam of, You Know, Balance

Introduction

I was recently interviewed by Religion News Service and by some friends at New Founding, and in both interviews the same issue came up. As a consequence, it naturally occurred to me to bring it up here again. These things bear repeating, I don’t mind it, and it is helpful to you (Phil. 3:1).

The Balance Beam Itself

Here is the basic principle. I take it as axiomatic that in times like ours it is necessary for faithful ministers of the gospel to be accused by the left of racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and puppy-kicking. If you are in ministry, and you are not accused of such things, at a bare minimum, you should start praying about it. “Lord, am I missing something?”

The other side of the same principle is that the accusations need to be a genuine slander. They need to be false.

So there it is in a nutshell. The accusations thrown at your head need to be piled up around your feet, and there should be a goodly amount of them, and when you look down you need to see a broken collection of lying oddments. So there are two parts to this. The accusations need to be thrown at you, and the accusations need to be false.

If you have been promoted to the privileged place of being lied about, the spirit of glory rests on you. But the lies really need to be lies, and the reason for the reproach needs to be the name of Christ, and not a matter of you dabbling in genuine evildoing.

But There Is a Snare Here

There are good men out there who have learned that they need to take abuse for the sake of Christ. But they do not yet see the glory in it, and they have not yet learned the divine art of Thomas Watson would have called “not caring.” When the accusations are thrown, they hasten to prove to their accusers that these are false accusations. But there is a snare.

Now answers are fully appropriate as a tactical matter. You do want to run an inventory with God, and ask Him to search and try you, to see if there be any wicked way in you (Ps. 139:23-24). You also should be prepared to answer the slanders for the sake of the people of God, a number of whom were unsettled by the accusations, or who have to field questions about it themselves from family members, and who don’t know what to say. So there is nothing wrong with having answers available for those who are interested in actually hearing an answer.

So what is the snare? The snare comes when you find yourself trying to persuade the accuser, and you are doing this because you assume that the accuser is coming after you in good faith. But accusations of this nature are never made in good faith, and if you are personally affronted by the accusation, and you start trying to persuade some Internet troll that just because you are anti-woke doesn’t mean that your heart is a seething hotbed of white supremacy, you need to sit down and meditate on this point for a spell. You need to save your breath for walking uphill. You need to save your breath for cooling your porridge.

If you feel “stung” by one of these taunts, and you turn to answer them, as though answering them is even a possibility, what you are doing is taking this particular tar baby upstairs to the bathroom, and giving it a bath in olive oil. Nothing you are doing is going to make anything better, not even a little bit.

And somebody is going to say that this tar baby reference is problematic because it comes from the Br’er Rabbit stories written by Joel Chandler Harris, a white guy who dared to appropriate black traditions and slave dialect, but which was nonetheless memorialized by the miscreants at Disney in Song of the South, a sin for which they are still trying to atone, and I think I may have lost the thread here. Okay, right. If somebody says that I can’t use tar baby references, I am going to tar baby reference even harder.

I do this because accusations from the left are not being made in good faith. If I am notified that someone over in the left field bleachers is concerned about my evident white supremacy, the expression on my face will resemble that of the Buddha when contemplating a lotus blossom.

One More Snare

The left loves to argue on the basis of associations. They can prove your white supremacy by doing the Kevin Bacon thing. “You blurbed a book that was written by somebody whose brother once attended a Klan rally. So don’t you need to do more to denounce this kind of thing?” And the answer to that is no. I have written two books on race relations already, and have turned in the manuscript for a third one. How many do I have to write before you stop asking me to dance to your tune? The reason my denunciations don’t win me any virtue points with them is because my denunciations are grounded in the absolute authority of Jehovah’s law/word. And that is the very thing they are running from. And I write these sorts of books, not to answer answer the left, which would be but to yell at the moon, but rather to teach the people of God. I am seeking to protect and equip the saints, not dance to the tune of sinners.

Denunciations grounded in the hurt feelings of an oppressed class are nothing but intellectual fertilizer for the growth and nurture of commie weirdos. Denunciations grounded in Scripture remind us all of a day that is coming, when God will judge the thoughts and intents of every heart.

When tumultuous times get to the level of discord that the left is trying hard to create, and the nation divides into hard red and bitter blue, as we have done, there will be unsavory types on your side of that divide. Count on it. What matters is that—before God—you have done whatever you can to keep the black-pilled out of your officer corps. You don’t want that kind of diseased mind in leadership, not at all. You do this by punching right, as necessary.

But you don’t ever punch right in order to win accolades from the left. They are not going to give you that anyhow. Don’t forget that you earlier learned the lesson of not caring what they think. You punch right because you are keeping diseased minds out of your leadership, and you are doing this because diseased minds make lousy decisions. They wreck things. You are doing it because God requires it.

Okay, One More Snare

So you are coming to the realization that you have to take a stand, and you have to do it on the basis of God’s Word. To your left will be woke Christians, those who have gone over to the enemy. Woke Christians are the quislings. In between you and the woke Christians are those the Christians who are still orthodox, but who feel bad about not being woke. They are not part of the left, but they are steered by the left. They aren’t doing bad things, which is good, but they have not yet entered the good fight, which is bad. They are the ones who think that you should answer the accusations of the left, believing the accusations to be good faith accusations. But we covered this earlier, and they are not. A tad bit closer to you are those who are fighting the good fight, and are being accused of all kinds of things, indicating their very real faithfulness, but who have not yet learned the Buddha/lotus blossom thing. But enough about Owen Strachan. To your right are a motley assemblage of midwits and assorted others who have learned the importance of not giving a rip what the left says about ethnic issues, but have not yet learned the importance of what God says about them. They will look at you suspiciously as something of a compromiser, a ditherer, a friend of Mr. Halfways, and in the pay of Mossad. Just laugh. They will come around when the fecal matter hits the rotating cooling device. And over beyond them are the black-pilled Nietzscheans, with whom you have nothing to do.