The Revolution Will (Still) Not Be Televised

Introduction

Back in the day, 1970 to be precise, a gent named Gil Scott-Heron released a spoken-word piece with the title that I referenced above—The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The phrase caught on and spread, and came to mean that the establishment media is kind of duddy, when you think about it, and is really not able to capture the raw energy of the street. The street is where the action is.

Now whatever Scott-Heron’s particular intentions and applications were, I think there is a universal principle here that we should pay some attention to. The phrase sounds like something Bill Ayers would say, but just as Saul Alinsky articulated certain principles for his commie activists that are just as applicable for conservatives to use, so also here. There is room for some repurposing here.

But since 1970, things have changed, have they not? The media has exploded into hundreds of functional pieces, and is a lot faster than it used to be, and this might lead some to believe that, well, actually, the revolution will be televised. There used to be the big lumbering newspapers, the Post and the Times, and there used to be three big networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. That is where you would go for your evening news, and then Walter Cronkite would tell you “that’s the way it is.” But today I would not be a bit surprised if our new coffee maker had a built-in news feed on the side of it.

This media explosion has created an expectation that there will always be footage. If anything remarkable happens, anywhere in the world, we all quickly turn to our devices, with anticipation that we will be able to see it all unfold. So surely, we think, something as important as the revolution will be captured by somebody.

The Actual Revolution

The only transformative event that Christians should be looking for would be more properly called a reformation and revival, and not a revolution. Christians are reformational, not revolutionary. The revolutionaries are essentially impatient (“When do we want it?” “Now!”), and Christians should not be that way at all. As Christopher Dawson put it, the church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient. We are the yeast in the loaf, not the fire in the oven.

But with that said, we still recognize that what Christians are praying and working for would certainly strike the secular world as revolutionary, and quite as scary as any revolution. And I would argue that this point about “not being televised” applies to our reformation as much as it does to any revolution.

Where Such Things Come From

The reason the reformation will not be televised is that it will be a work of the Spirit, and the Spirit cannot be televised. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8, NKJV). So the Lord Jesus taught us that the wind blows wherever and however it wants to. The Greek word for Spirit, and for breath, and for wind, is all the same word—pneuma.

Nicodemus had been puzzled by what Jesus had said earlier about being born again, and then Jesus makes this comment about the wind to him. Nicodemus then asks how any of this could possibly be the case (v. 9). Jesus then admonishes him. You are a teacher in Israel, and you don’t know about this? The implication is that what Jesus was talking about, whatever it was, was plainly in the Old Testament, and that the rabbis like Nicodemus should have been expected to know about it.

So what was Jesus expecting him to know? He was speaking to a teacher in Israel. What prophecy about the Spirit and new life had been made about Israel? Why should Nicodemus have known about this?

Remember Ezekiel’s vision of the valley filled with dry bones. God had promised that breath would come upon them (Eze. 37:5). So Ezekiel prophesied, and the bones all came together, but still no breath (v. 8). Then the prophet was told to prophesy to the wind (v. 9). The word for wind here in Hebrew is ruah, and it is the OT equivalent of the NT pneuma. Ezekiel is told to say to the wind, “Thus saith the Lord God; come from the four winds, O breath, and breath upon these slain, that they may live” (v. 9). Inspired by the Spirit, Ezekiel was told to command the Spirit. Prophesy to the wind, to the Spirit. Prophesy to the breath.

The four winds. So we are talking about the wind from everywhere, meaning the Spirit is everywhere, and you cannot see where He is coming from or where it is going. The only way we can know anything whatever about the Spirit’s doings is if God tells us. But if He tells us, then we ought to know, as the rabbis should have known.  

Now an eschatological wind cannot be locked up in a room, or captured in a bottle. It cannot be limited to one place, or to just one nation. You cannot take pictures of it, and so His work will not be televised. This is a four winds situation, the Spirit coming from every direction. And who is it that performs this? It is the Spirit of the living God, the one who comes in response to the declaration of the Word of God. Ezekiel prophesies to the wind.  So as we declare the promises of God, the guarantees of God, the sureties of God, the earnest payments of God, what does He do? What does He do when we prophesy to the wind? He fulfills His Word. The wind comes.

This is what every evangelical minister is called to do as he ascends into the pulpit.

What You Can See

Even though you cannot televise the wind, you can get footage of trees swaying, and branches on the ground, and leaves blowing down the street. You can certainly see some of the effects of the wind. Hundreds of volumes have been written about the great Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, but not one volume on how the Spirit did it.

So we should give ourselves over to the work that we can see, to the duties before us, and consider them to be the effects of the Spirit’s presence. And what sorts of things do I mean. The first is the reverent worship of God on the Lord’s Day. Weekly covenant renewal worship is the main thing, the main spring of everything else. This should flow over into the simplicity of Christian obedience and application. The one who hears the Word without doing it deceives himself. This includes the bedrock lesson of learning how to confess sin. There will be a widespread acceptance of biblically assigned roles for the two sexes. Husbands will love their wives as the head loves the body, and the wives will respect and honor their husbands, as the body does the head. Christian education for Christian kids is a given. New families will form in a way that honors the old families, meaning that courtship will be normal again. As a result of robust worship, and thoroughgoing Christian education, musical literacy will come up alongside ordinary literacy, and as a result of that, there will be a wonderful recovery of psalm singing. Hospitality will take deep root, and Christians will know what it is like to be in one another’s homes, and the result will be the koinonia of a tightly-knit Christian fellowship. Truth will be valued over manners, a sunny cynicism will become prevalent, and there will be an explosion of Chestertonian Calvinism.

This will be happening on the ground, in all kinds of places. Very little of it will be televised. Bits and pieces of it will be, which leads to my final point.

Invisible Obedience, Disobedience in the Spotlight

Jesus teaches us a couple of principles that embrace two poles, and only the Spirit of God can enable us to hang on to both poles. Here they are:

And then, just a little bit later in the same sermon, He says this:

In the first instance He says that we are a light on a hill, a light that cannot be hidden. Some carnal hearts seize on this, and they start to showboat with their sanctity. That would be an example of seizing just one pole. The other extreme would be the fellow who insists on being humbler than the Sermon on the Mount, which is quite a trick. He is willing to do good deeds in secret, but he is loath to let the Father who sees in secret reward him openly.

The Internet is an enormous blessing from God. Let me say that again—the Internet is an enormous blessing from God. But almost all of the good it does is invisible. This is because the good it does lies in the application, and godly application is almost always offline. A family starts to work through all the resources on Canon Plus, and the only online indication of this is that Canon has one more subscriber. But as they put what they are learning into practice, the husband starts sacrificing himself in imitation of Christ, the wife starts to honor and respect him, and the children start to thrive as they are being taught and instructed in terms of God’s Word. And none of that is televised—even though the cumulative impact of that happening across the country will be enormous.

But the Internet is also a display case for impudence and disobedience. While there are certainly those who seek out the darkness to disobey in secret (e.g. a porn habit), there is something about being online that makes all the moths want to take another run at the light bulb. We live in narcissistic times, and we are dealing with a pandemic of an online lack of self-awareness. The Germans have an apt word for what happens when this kind of thing is going on. The word is fremdschämen, which refers to vicarious embarrassment. It is being embarrassed for someone who ought to be embarrassed for themselves, but somehow isn’t being. As we can see on a daily basis, there are professing Christians whose idea of the Christian life is on full display on X, and they appear to be entirely unaware of the fact that their Christian walk, testimony and life is in tatters.

All in the name of Jesus—clouds without water, trees without fruit, foam on the surface of an angry surging sea, black asteroids.

The Internet is a place where obedience sinks to the bottom, and impudence floats to the top.

So here is the bottom line, and let the reader understand. If you want your righteousness to shine before men, it must sink to the bottom. It needs to be lived out in private first, in your family and among your people. Sanctity cannot be created with an Instagram filter. Courage cannot be manufactured with a blustering meme. Historical ignorance cannot be propped up with AI.

If you want to be an influencer, the journey must begin by realizing what an awful word that is.