Neither. I get the issue. I’ve heard the arguments on both sides. Those who are zealous to affirm that all lives matter seem to hear in “Black lives matter” that non-black lives don’t matter. They in turn seem to hear, “In order to be a decent human being you have to embrace the rhetoric and the tactics of that organization known as “Black Lives Matter.” Those who are zealous to affirm that black lives matter, on the other hand, seem to hear when others retort that “All lives matter” a denial not only that black lives matter, but a denial of the pain and fear they have experienced as a mistreated minority.
The good news is that everyone on all sides of this struggle is wrong. Black lives don’t matter, not because the lives are black, but because no lives matter. Which means all lives don’t matter. More good news- this, no lives matter- is not just true, but is a conclusion that is inescapable whether you are a Christian or an atheist.
First, the atheist. Why must the atheist conclude that no lives matter? Because matter can’t matter. If all there is is a physical universe that came to pass by random and meaningless forces then all that is is meaningless. If humans, whatever skin tone, are the result of the intersection of time, energy and chance, and will end in nothingness, from whence comes this meaning? How could we possibly matter if all we are is matter? There is, if there is no God, no moral injustice in people of one skin tone oppressing people of another, no moral injustice of some people stealing or destroying the property of other people, no moral injustice of any kind if there is no transcendent moral standard. If there is no transcendent anything, there can be no transcendent moral standard, no law we are all beholden too. There is just meaningless, individual preference.
The Christian, however, affirms such a standard. The Christian acknowledges that there is a transcendent God who has revealed to us a transcendent law, a law we are all obligated to obey. That law requires of us that we treat all men with dignity. It forbids racial vainglory. It commands equality before the law. So then why must the Christian say no lives matter? Because we are commanded to treat all men with dignity not because men have dignity in themselves, but because they have been gifted with dignity. We, all of us, have had it bestowed on us, stamped upon us. It is His image in us, the imago dei where the real value lies. His image is what matters.
And His image has been given to George Floyd. It’s been given to Derek Chauvin. It’s been given to David Dorn, Ahmaud Arbery, Greg and Travis McMichael, and to Breonna Taylor. It was given to every person killed in the midst of our civil unrest and every person killed by Covid-19. And God’s image was given to the more than 60 million unborn babies that have been legally executed in this country in less than fifty years.
Our value, our dignity is not grounded in us. Apart from His grace we are the kind of people who chase down people and shoot them, the kind of people to kneel on a man’s neck for over eight minutes, the kind of people who break into a woman’s home and shoot her. We’re the kind of people who loot and murder. We’re the kind of people who hire assassins to kill our own unborn children. Our lives don’t matter. They are, before the heavenly tribunal, forfeit from before we were born. What matters is the life of the one innocent Man who was put to death. But death could not hold Him. Apart from His perfect life, atoning death, vindicating resurrection and ongoing reign, nothing matters.
There is real poverty in the world, more than we would care to admit. Jesus, after all, told us that the poor would always be with us. But just as all Israel are not Israel, so all the poor are not truly poor. The true poor are those who on a given day face the real prospect of not being able to produce more calories than they consume. They are the truly hungry, the truly naked, the truly thirsty. They are not, on the other hand, those who buy store brand cereal, purchase their clothes at the local Goodwill store, or who can’t afford a daily sugar and bitter beans concoction from the local Starbucks.
The faux poor are those who merely feel poor. This feeling creeps upon us when we find a gap not between how many calories we consume and how many we burn, but between the lifestyle we believe is our due and the lifestyle our production allows. Or to put it more simply, feeling poor is the result of wanting more than we have, more often than wanting more than we need. It matters not whether we measure our wages in thousands or billions. What matters is the gap.
The Christian, of course, ought never to go through this hardship. First, we are called to daily ask God for our bread. We are to ask confident that our Father will not give us a stone. We know that we have what we have not because of chance, but because our God reigns. More important still, even if we are not given sufficient calories to make it to the next day, we have been given the Pearl of great price. Christians are the richest of all.
Jesus reminds us in the Sermon on the Mount to consider the lilies of the field. We are not to be anxious about what we will eat, what we will drink or what we will wear. The Gentiles, Jesus tells us, seek after these things. But we are called to seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness. And all these things will be added to us. The point here isn’t that the Gentiles get all the good stuff, while we have to learn to be satisfied with abstract things like the kingdom of God. Jesus is instead expressing the answer to Augustine’s problem who mourned, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in Thee.” Jesus is telling us to store treasure in heaven, which is the only treasure that satisfies.
In light of this we ought not be surprised at the depression that weighs down the world around us. They are spiritually poor, rather than poor in spirit. That is, they have nothing of value. Their accumulated stuff amounts to striving after the wind. They miss that they deserve nothing. They miss that all that they have has been given, the common grace of God. (We simply have to find better language for this reality. It is true enough that this grace is given to all men, that He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. It is true in turn that this grace isn’t as astonishing as the grace He gives to His elect. But it is still amazing grace. God is shockingly, not commonly, good to His enemies.) They look at the world as a random collision of time, space and energy, and so see what they do have as an accident. They can no more give thanks for the food on their table than they can for the rain that falls. The bankruptcy of evolution isn’t just that is deracinates the dignity of man, but that it destroys our ability to give thanks. Remember how Paul sums up the universal problem of the sinfulness of man, “For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him” (Romans 1:21).
What separates the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent isn’t that the former receive the grace of God while the latter do not. The difference is that the former have been given this grace- the ability to give thanks to God for all that He has provided. This in turn directs us toward the cure for our own spiritual depression. We do not need to have our circumstances changed. We do not need another lecture on sound thinking. What we need is to give thanks.
This in turn is how we wage war against the seed of the serpent. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual. Is there anything more spiritual than a heart filled with gratitude to God? Is there anything more potent than joy? Is there anything greater than love? This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. As we do so we will change our souls. As we do so we will change our families. As we do so we will change our churches. As we do so we will change the world. If we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, the good news isn’t that all these things will be added to us. The good news is that we will find the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And having found this, we have found joy at His right hand forevermore.
How do you know you’re getting better? The answer may well be a potent clue in determining just how sick you are. A miser, for instance, judges his health precisely by how much wealth he has managed to hoard, the very sickness from which he suffers. An anorexic measures his health by how thin he is, how well he is practicing the folly from which he suffers. A scholar judges his health by the size of his library, or how many letters dangle after his name, again indicating the illness rather than the health. One need not, however, find oneself in such unusual company to find much the same problem.
The issue isn’t, of course, health per se but our growth in grace. How do we measure spiritual maturation? If we think spiritual maturity is roughly equal to greater and greater theological precision, as I spent decades believing, we understand neither theology nor spiritual maturity. If we think spiritual maturity is roughly equal to greater and greater success in avoiding the really bad sins, the ones that involve pleasure of one sort or another, then we understand neither temptation, nor spiritual maturity.
It is, of course, a good thing to study theology. It is a good thing as well to fight off temptation. But theology teaches us that we have desperately deceitful hearts. And the greatest temptation we face is always to think too highly of ourselves. Ironically, the more sound we are in our theology, the more we think lowly of ourselves. King David, for instance, was a man after God’s own heart not because he successfully fought off temptation in the case of Bathsheba, but because in response to his sin, he penned Psalm 51.
Which means in turn that the more sick, or rather sinful we understand ourselves to be, the more healthy, or rather spiritually mature, we may well be. John adds this symptom as well. He argues throughout his first epistle that what separates the children of God from the sons of the devil is this, that we have love one for another. What defines us vis a vis the world around us is that we love our brothers in Christ, while they hate us, and each other.
These two symptoms, however, come together in the end. The more conscious we are of our own sins, the less conscious we are of the sins of our brothers. The more aware we are that our hearts are deceitful, the less likely we are to trust our judgmental judgments against our brothers, the more likely we are to think no evil as love calls us to do in I Corinthians 13. As we own our sin, remembering of course that in Christ we are beloved of the Father, then we better love the rest of those who in Christ are beloved of the Father, our brothers and sisters.
Want to know how well you are? Look at your neighbor in the pew. Is your first thought, “How can I be expected to be gracious to someone like that?” Or is it instead, “How astonishing that they should be so gracious to me, a sinner!” And after you fail this test, repent, believe, and ask for the grace to know your sin more and to love your brother more.
Stupid pride. The doctrine of total depravity affirms, among other things, that the impact of the fall hits us on all fronts. It is not just our wills that are fallen, but every faculty we possess, including our faculty of thinking. We err in our thinking because we are the children of Adam. While I’m willing to concede that it is possible to err without falling into sin, I would argue however that errors are a fruit of sin. I don’t confess before the Lord the typos I am prone to. But I believe I would not be prone to them had I not been born a sinner. This does not mean, of course, that to be a non-sinner makes one omniscient. There is, after all, a great difference between not knowing everything, and knowing what just isn’t so.
That we can err without falling into sin, however, doesn’t mean that sin never contributes to our errors. In fact I suspect our sin impacts our thinking far more than we like to confess. In part because we don’t like to confess. We not only don’t like to confess doing wrong, we don’t like to confess being wrong. To acknowledge error, even if that error is not in itself sinful hurts us right where it counts, in our pride. We often fall into error by believing what we want to believe. We stay in that error; we double down when we refuse to acknowledge we were wrong in the first place.
This afflicts us not just individually but corporately. That is, I not only want to be right, but want to be in the right crowd. We’re a tribal people and are quick to not only believe what our tribe believes, but to believe that what other tribes believe is not just wrong but stupid. It’s one thing to admit that I was wrong about this or that. It’s another to admit that not only was I wrong, but so were my ancestors, my heroes, all those closest to me.
If the problem is pride, and it is, the solution is humility. We’re not called to a skepticism disguised as humility, where we refuse to make any assertions, where we proudly claim to know nothing can be known. Instead we’re called to be bold about the truth and humble about ourselves. We’re called to not conflate the Scripture itself and our understanding of it. We’re called to listen like children and to check like Bereans.
Jesus has promised us that the Spirit will lead us into all truth (John 16:13). This must not lead us to affirm that we now have all truth. If He is leading us there it must mean that we’re not there yet. If we insist we’ve already arrived we won’t move, and plant ourselves in our ignorance.
His Word is truth. It tells us we yet struggle with sin, in our hearts and in our minds. He, however, has promised to conquer all His and our enemies, including our foolish pride. He is washing us with His Word. And He will finish what He has begun in us.
The rumbles have already begun, between churches and states, churches and churches, church members and other church members. There has been no Olly, Olly oxen free opening all churches of all sizes in all jurisdictions. There has been increasing impatience driven by genuine skepticism over the dangers involved in the pandemic on the one hand and genuine health fears on the other and genuine concern over governmental overreach on the one hand and a genuine commitment to submit to the governing authorities on the other. Those who insist on meeting are deemed selfish and uncaring by those who think we should not. Those who think we should not are deemed to have bowed the knee to Caesar and to have denied the Lordship of Christ by those who think we should be meeting. I may be a fool but I am not fool enough to think I can settle those disputes. I’m not going to try.
I am, however, making a plea that those churches that are not meeting face to face would not take a slight and subtle further step away from community by not meeting at the same time. I get the low cost convenience of the thing. We’re already putting the service online. Click one more button and now it’s there for those who missed it, or want to watch it later. Who wouldn’t want to make that available? And, if that decision has already been made, and we can better ensure against technical hiccups by recording in advance what we’ll put online, why wouldn’t we?
Because this radically increases the disunity of the body we’re already suffering through by not meeting together in space. It moves us from doing something together, to merely watching the same show. It is not time travel, but it is time shifting. It turns our gathering together to worship, even from our own homes, into deciding what time we will “watch” worship this week. How am I to join into the earnest prayers of my pastor if I know he prayed them hours, or days ago? How will I hear a sermon speaking to me when I not only wasn’t at the place it was given, but wasn’t at the time it was given? When my local body cannot meet together in space, they are still my local body. I can feel their sorrow, for they are just around the corner. We are together going through this hardship. If, however, my local body doesn’t meet together in time, I’ve lost a second point of connection. I’m alone.
Is it less convenient to make sure you get to the church on time? Of course it is. Would it be nice to get some extra sleep and log on in the afternoon or evening? Of course it would be. Is something lost, something intangible but still real, something amorphous but nevertheless powerful? Yes. Just like something is lost when we add services, creating temporal church splits. Please don’t hear me saying you are in sin if you watch the service later, or film the service earlier. Please do hear me saying that it might be better to do neither, but to hold on to whatever unity and togetherness we can.
