Christ and Tyre Nichols

Let me start with the contrarians. There are a lot of contrarians in 21st century America who enjoy pushing back against conventional wisdom, hoping to be right.

They scream that if Tyre Nichols had not run from the police, he’d still be alive. How do you know? Have you seen the video? They held the man’s arms down while demanding he raise his hands to surrender, and they beat him to death. Are you sure he’d still be alive?

To be sure, yes, it probably would have increased his chances, but can you really say with a straight face that this man would be alive? He was stopped for reckless driving, and they beat him to death.

What is happening right now is the people who’ve embraced a pagan, secular worldview are running the intersectional gamut. The police, all black, were actually agents of white supremacy.

This thinking is pagan, secular, and worldly. They posit, based on Marxist-derived post-modern intersectionalism that there are two groups of people: the oppressor and the oppressed. They then decide that when the oppressed behave like the oppressor, the oppressed are just unleashing their own pent-up anger with their own oppression and accidentally or otherwise act as agents of the oppressor.

So the five black police officers attacking the black man are agents of white supremacy because the five serve as police, a position derived from white supremacy. So through them, white supremacy flows. They are both victims and victimizers.

If this sounds silly to you, you should understand that this is the same worldview that posits the narcissus flower grows on river banks because Narcissus was so in love with himself that the gods turned him into a flower when he saw his reflection beside the river bank.

It is a mythology that cannot explain why the narcissus might grow in a field and not by a river bank. The pagan, secular worldview of post-modern intersectionalism has a view of justice that is flawed out of the gate.

The Memphis police are led by a black woman. The majority of the city is black. The majority of the City Council is black. The police officers are black. The victim is black. But it is white supremacy because policing is a product of white supremacy, and Uranus is in zenith up your butt or some such.

If it turns out there is a personal connection that caused this, white supremacy is out the window, and so too is the intersectional explanation for justice.

What does not change is this.

Christ is King. We live in a fallen world. Fallen sinners are sinful. Often, fallen sinners in positions of power exert their sin through that power on others. The police officer sinners beat and killed the sinner who is the victim. All are in the fallen world, and Jesus weeps.

The Christian worldview explains the power dynamic in ways that will be consistent, regardless of future facts. Sinners sinned, and an innocent man died. We live in a fallen world.

But in this fallen world, justice can still roll like a river. The other sinners can stand up for righteousness and will. The five police officers will be prosecuted for murder and, if found guilty, go to prison to serve out their days surrounded by men they put in prison. Irony will laugh. Justice will prevail

Our system is a flawed system administered by sinners. No one can bring Tyre Nichols back to life. But the system of justice can avenge him and make right as much wrong as the system allows.

For the contrarians, watch the film. There is no justice there. There is sin and horror and abuse as a man lay dying, crying for his mother.

We cannot make right what was wrongfully done to Tyre Nichols. But we can avenge him through a justice system that is currently working. And we can resist the urge to adopt pagan sensibilities about intersectional justice and twist it to make black oppressors agents of white supremacy in order to advance an agenda premised on race and racial grievance where it does not fit.

Instead, we can commit ourselves to recognizing a wrong and seeking justice in Jesus’s name.