More Important Things

My confession this morning is that it is frustrating for me to restrain myself from writing about politics this week. There is news. I have thoughts. Some of you would be mad at those thoughts. But I’ve got them. I also have five hours of radio a day where I can get them out, so I don’t need to do it here.

And that’s the funny thing.

I’m honestly not that important and while I appreciate so many of you subscribe to this email, by making myself write about more important things than politics and viruses, it helps me recalibrate myself. I have a wife and kids to keep me humble, but this process I engage in every year does the same for me.

Last night, I was preparing all the content for my Good Friday show. On radio, every Good Friday, I do there what I do here this week — no politics. It is a show for worship and it is a show I do for myself, not the audience. I hope you might consider worshipping together with me on Friday. From 9am to noon eastern time and then from 7pm to 10pm eastern time, I’ll be walking through life, exploring deeper issues, and trying to relate the world to theology, which has been called the science seeking contentment.

In preparing for the show last night, I was pondering truth and what it means and how people sometimes want to bend it or look at it so narrowly that they only see part of the truth as the full truth. This came up because, and this is not to get political, I see a new trend among some on the right to try to downplay deaths from this virus ravaging the world.

The death toll in the United States is at 3% for those who get the disease. Globally, it is 5%. The latest rage point on social media is that doctors are counting deaths to include those who die with the disease, but do not die of the disease. That is a lot like saying we should not say Jesus died from crucifixion because he actually died on the cross from suffocation. Nor should we say the person who got shot died of gun violence, but of heart failure.

There is nothing wrong with questioning experts. In fact, it is helpful to ask tough and meaningful questions. It is helpful to demand answers. It is helpful to challenge conventional wisdom because sometimes conventional wisdom is not right. But it is overwhelmingly ridiculous to take true things and define them narrowly just to win arguments or to build cases on faulty presumptions.

So many people in the world wish to revise, rewrite, and upend things they do not like and they all do so with a common aim — they are starting at the outcome they want and working backwards to skew other issues to ensure we arrive at that outcome.

When the atheist starts from the presumption that Jesus did not rise again from the dead, guess what he is going to find when he looks at the evidence and research? When the Muslim decides the Christian God is a false god, guess what he will find when he works backwards? Actually, in that case, it is amazing how many people wind up converting. It is what makes Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ, so amazing. He dove into the evidence and came away a believer in the same way so many Islamic scholars and atheist scholars dive in to prove the Bible is wrong and come up for air as believers.

I know there are people who are desperate to get the economy going again and get people out of their houses, but to do so they are spending their time undermining universally accepted ideas on how to count mortality and do epidemiological modeling and then undermining world renown doctors and experts all through googling and a willful desire to get a foreordained outcome.

There really is not a lot of difference between that and the Matthew Vines effort from a few years ago. Vines is a gay rights activist who was desperate to prove the Bible did not consider homosexuality a sin. He started from that premise and worked backwards. In his book, God and the Gay Christian, he basically argued that 2000 years of Christian thinkers had gotten it all wrong and he got it right. Turns out all those commonly used terms and ideas based on Greek in the New Testament were wrong or twisted, but he could untwist them.

When one starts with an outcome and works backward, it is remarkable how often one gets to that outcome.

Contrast him with the real courage of Joshua Harris. Harris wrote a book on courtship and led a massive church. But he too decided he needed to try to make Christianity fit with homosexuality. Instead of working from that outcome, he plowed through the Old Testament to the New and concluded that Christianity really is not compatible with homosexuality. So he abandoned the faith instead of trying to twist it into something it was not. Mourn the loss, but we should admire his intellectual honesty and courage to abandon a career and platform because of that honesty.

That, ultimately, is what we should get from Holy Week — courage and honesty. Christianity is not compatible with the world and truth should be grasped fully, not in snapshot.

The most disappointing thing about this global pandemic crisis is seeing people who claim not to be hyperpartisan viewing this crisis as a way to confirm all their prior thoughts. If you hated the President before the crisis, you will hate him even more now. If you loved him, you will love him even more now. If you thought he could do nothing right, you’ll give him no credit for acting properly. If you thought he could do no wrong, you’ll offer up no criticism of things he did wrong.

When a pandemic cannot get you to question prior preconceived notions, the problem is you.

And there we find the cross.

1,984 years ago or so, a nobody in Jerusalem got executed by the local Roman governor. Hundreds of others met the same fate as that guy. Some of them were more notable and more prominent in society. Some of them claimed to be the messiah too.

But this one guy and only this one guy, for some reason, is still worshipped 2000 years later. While other religions have fallen by the wayside, his number of followers is still growing globally with the same shared text all have had in common for 2000 years. No one worships Zeus any more, but today there are more Christians in China than all of North America and the numbers keep growing.

The cross should make you question everything. It should make you realize there is a real truth, real accountability, and a real God in charge of all things with a real plan. We don’t need to work backwards to prove or disprove truth or arrive at conclusions we wanted. In fact, the cross forces us to abandon a lot of things we want.

Ultimately, that is what matters. The bellyaching, complaining, fighting, and blame of day to day politics matters very little in the grand scheme of things. Jesus matters and the path God puts us on matters, not the path we want to follow to get to the end we want. We don’t know what is at the end except when we get there, we then cross to a new and more real eternity.