They are coming for us. We have reached a cultural tipping point wherein many of the convictions of Christians, things once universally held, that right and wrong are real and we are all often wrong, that men are men and women women, that it takes one and only one of each to make a marriage, that Frederick Douglas was an honorable man, are not only a minority report but are treasonous lies that must be punished. Once respectable, sometimes even begrudgingly admired, the church of Jesus Christ looks to the world like a conglomeration of rapacious Nazis on the one hand and craven Quislings on the other. When we disagree with the fevered folly of snowflake victimology we’re Adolph Eichmann. When we grovel and parade our woke credentials we’re Neville Chamberlain. How then should we live?
Faithfully, in the light of the gospel. When God sent Nebuchadneezar to destroy His temple He was not destroying the true faith. He was tearing down idols. When God sends us Cultural Marxism as our regnant folly He is doing exactly the same thing. We won’t, we can’t avoid the train wreck for one simple reason- because God sent it for us. And He sent it because He loves us.
He loves us too much to leave us still clutching our household gods. He will rip from our fingers our cultural respectability. He will wrench from our grip our social standing. He will burn to the ground our totems of personal peace and affluence. Our calling is to let go, and to praise the wonders of His grace, to thank Him for being so good to us. The Good Shepherd chasing down His lost sheep may just look like wolves at our door.
To live faithfully we must be willing to be hated by the enemies we love. We must sacrifice our standing and embrace our kneeling. We must stop defending our honor and start proclaiming His glory. We must tell those who will drag us into the social coliseum as spectacle to feed their bloodlust how they too can have peace with the living God. We must, in short, heed and embrace the words of Jesus.
Our Lord, our hope, our King told us that we are blessed when all men persecute us for His name’s sake. How can we do anything but rejoice over this strange turn of events? How can we see it as anything other than blessing pouring out of the windows of heaven? The gospel not only tells us, and the world, how we might have peace with the God we so bitterly offend, it also tells us that the kingdom has come. Our culture’s sprint to Gomorrah isn’t proof that such isn’t so, but proof that it has come. The hatred we experience from them is the love we experience from Him, powerfully reminding us we must love only Him.
If we must weep let us not weep for what we have lost. Let us instead weep for the lost. The mad are to be pitied more than feared, as we remember that such once were we. He rescued us. May He rescue them.
