A look at the messiahs we often run after, and how this is missing the mission.
https://twitter.com/departied
Episode Resources:
David French: Christian Political Ethics are Upside Down
Kari Lake and "BDE"
More Kari Lake
The Young Turks Response to BDE
Lauren Boebert, AR-15s, and awful theology
Matt LaBash - Jesus Wept
In God We Trust Signs in Public Schools
Pew Survey: Declining Church Affiliation
DW Interview of Rick Wilson (quoted from around 4:30 mark)
Image: In God We Trust on the Gallows
A look at the messiahs we often run after, and how this is missing the mission.
https://twitter.com/departied
Episode Resources:
David French: Christian Political Ethics are Upside Down
Kari Lake and "BDE"
More Kari Lake
The Young Turks Response to BDE
Lauren Boebert, AR-15s, and awful theology
Matt LaBash - Jesus Wept
In God We Trust Signs in Public Schools
Pew Survey: Declining Church Affiliation
DW Interview of Rick Wilson (quoted from around 4:30 mark)
Image: In God We Trust on the Gallows
Hi, my name is Bill and I am a man without a party. Welcome to the Departied podcast. This is a place for those of you who may currently be politically homeless, but who haven’t forgotten your true home. Welcome in.
Season 3, Episode 3: Messiahs
Part 1 - Mixed Up
One thing that’s difficult about producing a podcast that’s at least somewhat driven by current events, especially if you’re trying to do a decent job at it and have day job, school and family obligations that you’re also trying to do a decent job at, is that sometimes current events move too fast. That’s been happening a lot recently, and it’s one reason I am several weeks out from my last episode. For a while I thought about devoting an episode to the recent executed FBI search warrant on Trump’s resort at Mar a Lago. But that situation is still developing and probably will be for a while. Maybe it’s a big deal? On the other hand, maybe someone listening to this podcast in a year will think “what Mar a Lago search warrant?” I don’t know.
So I will only say one thing about that incident - I don’t like calling it a “raid” because it was a formal and legally approved search warrant and, from what I’ve heard, it was executed with a minimum of drama. But the main thing I noticed when the news came out is that, without any exceptions I can find, the Republican party, both the base and the leaders, exploded in rage over it. Without knowing anything about the search warrant at all, Republican leaders were already shouting about a rogue FBI, with some even calling for the FBI to be disbanded. I kind of wish everyone would slow their roll, but we are not living through a “slow your roll” era, are we? Hearing the “law and order” party that supposedly “backs the blue” calling for the defunding of our federal police force seems kind of mixed up to me. The irony of it all will bury you alive.
They exploded in rage, whether sincerely or strategically, because of the long-standing persecution narrative that has been adopted by many of them. If their leader is being investigated, there’s no chance it’s because he did anything wrong. It has to be rogue elements of the so-called “deep state”. The chance that he might have done something illegal hasn’t entered their minds, because legal and illegal are judicial and even moral concepts, and the Republican party has been discipled way beyond those ideas. I always thought the rule of law, the fact that we’re a nation of laws, not men, were bedrock principles. So I’m a little mixed up myself by this thermonuclear response to a legally obtained search warrant.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. And I want to zoom out a bit and talk about a bigger issue. One that gets to the heart of the whole reason I’m doing this podcast.
Things have gotten a bit mixed up, haven’t they? We have back the blue people essentially shouting “defund the police” I’ve also seen more democrats and liberals recently calling for the rule of law, morals, and decency. It feels like the foundations have shifted. But I think where I’ve seen the biggest mix-up has been in many corners of the evangelical Christian world. We’ve gotten mixed up in what our mission is, and we’ve allowed things that have no place in church to be mixed into our faith. I find this really disturbing.
David French, in a recent Dispatch article, put it this way:
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/christian-political-ethics-are-upside?utm_medium=email
"Christian young people are often taught that they should be countercultural. The youth group version of that admonition goes something like this: When the world is profane, your speech is clean. When the world is drunk, you are sober. When the world is promiscuous, you are chaste. How do you know we’re Christian? We don’t cuss, drink, or have premarital sex.
But the call to counterculture is much more comprehensive. When the world is greedy, you are generous. When the world is cruel, you are kind. When the world is fearful, you are faithful. When the world is proud, you are humble. How do you know we’re Christian, by our love.
Yes, we say. Yes to all of this. Right until the moment when we think that our kindness, our faithfulness, or our humility carries with it a concrete political cost. We think we know what’s just, and we can’t do justice without power.
And so, in our arrogance, we think we know better than God. We can’t let kindness or humility stand in the way of justice. Yet we’re sowing the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. The world’s most-Christian advanced nation is tearing itself apart, and its millions of believers bear much of the blame."
You may have heard of Kari Lake. She’s a politician running for Governor of Arizona who was complimenting Florida Governor Ron Desantis at a Turning Point USA conference recently:
“I’ll tell you what he’s got... I don’t know if you’ve heard of this but he’s got BDE. Everybody know what that means? Ask your kids about it later,” she added
She then compared Mr DeSantis to the 45th president: “He’s got the same kind of BDE that president Trump has.”
“And frankly, he has the same kind of BDE that we want all of our elected leaders to have.”
This is a family podcast, and so I can’t just straight up tell you what “BDE” means. But I can give you some clues. It’s an acronym, the B stands for “Big”, the E stands for “Energy”, and the D refers to a man's private parts.
Here’s more about Kari Lake from a July Washington Post article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/29/kari-lake-voting/
“Lake, a former longtime local TV anchor, has repeatedly said she does not recognize Joe Biden as the nation’s legitimate president. Had she been governor in 2020, Lake has said she would not have fulfilled her legal duty to certify Arizona’s election results, a maneuver that could have disenfranchised the votes of hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who cast their ballots for Biden and plunged the state deeper into the realm of election denialism.”
She says that she would have refused to certify the 2020 election. This would have nullified the votes of hundreds of thousands of voters in her state of Arizona. As I’ve said recently, refusing to concede and inciting the violence on January 6th in an attempt to hold on to power is the worst violation of the oath of office that a President has committed in my lifetime, and perhaps ever. But Kari Lake is a big believer in that BDE move.
Kari Lake also describes herself as a committed Christian. Her campaign bio leads with the words “faith courage truth". Yet her message seems to me to be mixing a devotion to the truth with a commitment to a lie, and mixing the pure character we are called to with vulgarity used to score political points (regarding her BDE comment, the Turning point crowd loved it) . . . well, I don’t want to judge her, but I don’t get it.
Philippians 2:14-15 in the Bible says - 14 Do everything without grumbling and arguing, 15 so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world
It was weird for me to watch Cenk Uyger and Anna Kasparian of the left-wing you tube channel, the Young Turks - and my apologies for how I pronounced their names - comment on Kari Lake’s statement. They used a decent amount of coded language to explain what BDE means, and expressed just a little bit of shock that Kari Lake went there. They pointed out that Kari Lake also asked the crowd to ask their kids to tell them what BDE means. Anna and Cenk are not Christians. And you could argue that their shock may have been feigned, cynical and politically motivated. But as Christians, we are supposed to shine, blameless and pure in the midst of a crooked and perverted generation. We’re not supposed to be crooked and perverted ourselves. Being lectured on moral behavior by non-believers, and knowing the non believers are right . . .
To me this seems mixed up.
My guess is Kari Lake will win her race and be the next Governor of Arizona. November 2024, and possibly the months following, will be very interesting if Arizona votes for the Democrat again for President. Or for any other Democrat in any national or statewide race.
Then there is this report from the Hill from June 17.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) last week at a Christian conference joked that Jesus didn’t have enough AR-15 rifles to “keep his government from killing him.”
“On Twitter, a lot of the little Twitter trolls, they like to say, ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15, how many AR-15s do you think Jesus would’ve had?” Boebert said.
She continued: “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”
. . .
Boebert delivered her speech at the 2022 Family Camp Meeting’s “All Things Are Possible” conference in Colorado Springs.
To their credit, a lot of Christians pointed out to Boebert how antithetical to the mission of Jesus the idea of him defending himself from crucifixion with an AR-15 is. But she'll probably get sent back to Congress in 2022 on a wave of votes from evangelicals. Trolling liberals and even non Trumpy Christians like me is part of her job description, or maybe her whole job description, and she's very, very good at that. I mean, I'm talking about her right now, which is what she wants.
A little blasphemy and gross misuse of Jesus as a prop for the gun culture may be regretful, but there are real enemies to fight. Right?
Part 2 - Zealot
So many enemies. Many in our country now are fearful and angry. This is not surprising, because in our 24 by7 news cycle and never-ending social media doom-scrolling, there is a lot of competition for clicks and eyeballs, and it’s been a long-standing truism in politics and media that fear, anger and hatred are monetizable. Who wants to talk about boring things like monetary policy, tax rates, and - let’s be honest - loving our neighbor when we can do something much more fun, such as engage in a twilight existential struggle against the forces of evil?
Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, says this:
Success in politics, which means the accumulation of power, doesn’t come, in our day, through proposing a more equitable tax policy or working to lower the deficit. It comes from convincing your voters that you are protecting them from the forces of evil. This is a common refrain in the modern Trumpian Republican party - they (whoever they are - woke liberals, immigrants, liberal college professors, environmentalists, LGBTQ people) are coming for you, and [insert name of conservative champion here] is the only thing standing in their way.
I’m not discounting the fact that there are a lot of trends that are troubling in our culture, things I didn’t sign up for. But it seems really backwards, in my view, to attack these trends with politics. Politics is downstream of culture. The Obergefell decision that made gay marriage legal in every state wasn’t decided because Barak Obama got elected in 2008. It was decided because our culture came to the tipping point of significant support for gay marriage. For those distressed that the Biblical view of marriage did not prevail, the failure wasn’t in our get out the vote efforts. It might however, have something to do with the evangelical church's own failures regarding the sanctity of marriage. You can look at the divorce statistics in the evangelical church for yourself.
What were we doing while the culture slipped away from us? Perhaps we were failing to live up to our own standards. And we were spending a lot of time becoming zealots for causes that basically amounted to fighting our battles backwards.
There was a group in ancient Israel called the zealots. The Encyclopedia Britannica says this about the zealots (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zealot):
Zealot, member of a Jewish sect noted for its uncompromising opposition to pagan Rome and the polytheism it professed. The Zealots were an aggressive political party whose concern for the national and religious life of the Jewish people led them to despise even Jews who sought peace and conciliation with the Roman authorities. A census of Galilee ordered by Rome in AD 6 spurred the Zealots to rally the populace to noncompliance on the grounds that agreement was an implicit acknowledgment by Jews of the right of pagans to rule their nation. Side note: this was the very same Roman census which led Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.
Extremists among the Zealots turned to terrorism and assassination and became known as Sicarii (Greek sikarioi, “dagger men”). They frequented public places with hidden daggers to strike down persons friendly to Rome.
One of Jesus’s disciples is named Simon the Zealot. There’s not a lot said about him in the gospels. I’ve always found it fascinating how many of Jesus’ disciples had nicknames, and I like to think he came with them. James and John were called the “Sons of thunder”. Thomas was called “the twin”; some people think because he may have looked like Jesus. Simon Bar-Jonah, the one in Jesus’s inner circle, was called Peter, which means “the Rock”. The other Simon, the more obscure Simon, was called “The Zealot”. Scholars are divided on whether this means he was a member of the Zealots. It could just mean that he was enthusiastic for Jesus, but I like to think that Jesus chose his twelve followers to include guys like Matthew, who collected taxes for the Romans, and Simon the Zealot, who had a sword in his belt that he had been trained to use on guys like Matthew. What a beautiful picture of the Gospel. Another clue is that at one point, toward the end of Jesus incarnation, right before the crucifixion, an inventory of weapons was taken and it included two swords. One was obviously Simon Peter’s, because the Gospels record that he used it to cut off the ear of one of the attackers during Jesus’s arrest. The Gospel of Luke records that Jesus put a stop to the swordplay and healed the ear of the man wounded by Simon Peter.
The morning after his arrest, on the day of his crucifixion, Jesus was interrogated by the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate. In the Gospel of John chapter eighteen it’s recorded that Pilate asked Jesus if he considered himself a king. Jesus replied this way “My kingdom is not of this world, If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, so that I wouldn’t be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Remember, on the night of Jesus’s arrest, the disciples had two swords. One was Simon Peter’s. Who had the other sword? I like to think the other sword belonged to Simon the Zealot. It was the weapon he had been trained to use against the Roman pagans. He did not use it during Jesus’s arrest. He didn’t use it because he had been discipled by Jesus into a better way, into Jesus’s way.
But we are drawn to earthly champions, earthly saviors, earthly fighters, aren’t we? The people we listen to, the ones who disciple us on the radio and cable news and websites and social media have us angry and afraid, and our fists are up. Matt Labash put it this way in a November 2021 substack: “the problem with cocked-fisted Christianity is that it often over-emphasizes the fists, and underemphasizes the Christianity.” (https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/jesus-wept)
The Zealots in ancient Israel had their fists and their swords cocked. But they did not save Israel. Israel was ended by the Romans in 70AD in a brutal war, and many of the Zealots met their end in a terrible mass suicide of over 900 people at a place called Masada. https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Masada
Simon the Zealot wasn't with them. While the Bible is silent regarding his fate, Church tradition has it that he was martyrd in Persia after having spread the Gospel in Egypt. Simon had been discipled and changed by Jesus. He knew where his true home was. When you've committed yourself to the true Messiah, false Messiahs lose their power to lead you astray.
Part 3 - Messiah
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/texas-schools-god-signs-17379357.php
There’s a new state law in Texas that says that public schools can display “In God we Trust” signs in the school provided the signs are privately donated. That’s nice. We get excited about little victories such as this, but I'm increasingly concerned that we're missing the point.
In a culture in which the church was actually being the church, spreading the Gospel, bringing people into the Kingdom of God, feeding the hungry, helping the poor, helping women in crisis pregnancies, taking care of babies, spending time with the lonely, helping people with their addictions, and many other things like this … in other words, in a culture where the church is physically embodying Jesus and helping people know, in their hearts, their minds, their emotions, their full stomaches and paid bills, that God is trustworthy, we wouldn't have to pass laws and regulations that let schools put "in God we trust" on their walls.
Before I go any further, I know two things - number one: many, maybe most churches devote a good amount of their time doing all the things I listed above, and more. I have maga voting friends who do these kinds of things all the time, so I'm not trying to overgeneralize. And two, I personally don't give nearly enough of my time and treasure doing these things. I am not here to be a judge to anyone. But perhaps the main thing I'm on about in this whole podcast project, is that we have been divided on this, mixed up, and have, in our evangelical church culture, spent huge percentages of our time, money, energy, and passion fighting worldly battles with the worldly weapons of politics, social media, anger, hate, and … unfortunately … hypocrisy. It’s the "we're at war' mentality. When you're at war you don't have to be Moral. Everything goes. We've been fighting a culture war for decades. I would suggest we've been fighting it in the wrong way, using the weapons of the world instead of the power of the Gospel. Let me ask you, does it feel like we're winning? Are we winning becaue Roe got overturned, and some laws against wokeness - whatever that is -have been passed, and now Texas schools can hang donated "in God we trust" posters on their walls?
Does our culture know that we trust God? Do we live like we do? When something is true and everyone can see it in how you live, you normally don’t have to tattoo it on your walls.
More importantly, Is the culture coming back to God?
Maybe what we've been trying to do isn't working. To me it seems like we're just doubling down. There was a time we thought that by championing family values, being the "family values" party, by, at least in theory, electing people of good character, we would win. But sometime in the early twenty teens we realized that people of good character don't fight dirty enough to win, so we needed to go a different way. We started finding our champions in people with, as Kari Lake would say, BDE.
I still don't think we're winning. Do you?
How did we lose the culture? Well, it’s complicated, and a story of many decades. But it has accelerated with the loss of our credibility. You can’t preach decency and then argue, post, fight and vote indecently, no matter what noble ends you think you’re trying to achieve. It’s a losing game. What we haven't won is the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. Regarding the pro life battle, it's possible, maybe, that the supreme court is going to outright ban abortion. It could happen. Or maybe people will vote red for other reasons and abortion will be banned by GOP dominated state legislatures. That's already happening. But there hasn’t been a general election since Roe was overturned.
But recently, the very red state of Kansas put an amendment to their constitution up for popular vote. The amendment was to ban abortion. The proposed amendment was rejected by Kansas voters 59% to 41%. https://www.npr.org/sections/2022-live-primary-election-race-results/2022/08/02/1115317596/kansas-voters-abortion-legal-reject-constitutional-amendment
It lost badly. I'm going to tell you why I think that happened. We've been winning some electoral battles. Through Mitch McConnell's hook or crook we got the holy grail, a conservative majority on the supreme court. We overturned Roe versus Wade. But surveys indicate that the percentage of our population that is churched is shrinking. Pew reports that the number of Americans unaffiliated with a religion went from 16% in 2007 to 26% in 2019. That’s a ten percent swing, or about 33 million people. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/)
Are we winning?
Kansas may have been an anomaly. But here's my point: I hope I’m wrong but it is likely that the overturning of Roe won't end up being the victory many hoped for, if what we're really wanting is the saving of the lives of the unborn. Because the culture remains as it's always been - deeply ambivalent about abortion, not on board with either a full ban or abortion on demand through nine months. Being a church with a clarity of moral conviction and a respected and heeded moral voice in the culture sure would be great right now. In other words, having the moral high ground would, in actuality, save a lot of unborn lives. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that the culture was all Christian. But if they were looking at us and seeing us as lights, shining like the stars in a world that is often dark, they might listen more. And if they saw us as more of a help in dark times, when the bills are unpaid and the pregnancy is unplanned, that would help too. And this is not to discount all the good work many churches are doing in this area. But as a people we’ve mixed our good works with political works that are increasingly not good, and we’ve split our resources - time, money, effort, and passion, between Kingdom of God work and our own desires for very temporary and imperfect political kingdoms, headed by very temporary and very imperfect political leaders. There is a cost to this.
In my experience nothing builds a culture of life like bringing people into the kingdom of God and helping them become fully devoted followers of Jesus. While many in the church continue that good work, far too much attention, passion, money and effort has been spent in the last forty or fifty years trying to change our culture into one that looks more Christian through raw, political power. Even with recent wins, most Christians I know don’t feel like we’re “winning” the culture. A few years ago I began to ask myself why. I’ve developed a nagging suspicion that we’re fighting the wrong battles, in the wrong way.
Pro-life has a wider definition for me now than it did ten years ago. It includes protecting the unborn, certainly. They are the most vulnerable members of the human family and they deserve to live. But it also includes, I don’t know, taking reasonable precautions during a once in a century public health crisis. And it also includes, at the minimum, not fetishizing weapons of war whose only purpose is to kill other human beings.
And it includes caring about people’s eternal life. And this is where the heartbreak sets in for me. The evangelical church in the United States is losing people at a rapid pace. There is an entire generation of young people who are looking at us, the Xers and Boomers, and wondering if we believe in anything besides power. We preached honor and decency and character and purity and the dangers of situational ethics to them for decades, only to jettison those values at the voting booth, on social media, and around the dinner table for the guy who promised to give us judges. And he did. He did give us judges. And I”m not saying that’s all bad. But the reason we want judges is because we’re getting hammered in the culture wars and we think Supreme Court decisions will stop the bleeding. But this is all downstream of culture.
Political strategist Rick Wilson, being interviewed by the German public broadcasting network DW, said this See 4:30 forward. https://youtu.be/rYVkqARFpQU
“A meaningful fraction of the Republican base is that evangelical, nationalist, populist cohort, and they believe they are going to win the culture war and they are going to make homosexuality go away make the LGBTQ community vanish by regulating them out of existence”
In other words, we're going to pass laws allowing schools to hang "in God we trust" signs on their walls and somehow that will make more people trust God.
I did see "in God we trust" scrawled on an important edifice near the Capital building in Washington DC recently, actually. Well, I saw a picture of it at least. It was scrawled on the gallows erected to hang Mike Pence on January 6.
"In God we trust" on the gallows https://twitter.com/AndrewLSeidel/status/1370356199355510786?t=vIa-j04pn0HL9liWoLjs1Q&s=19
Are we winning? Are more people trusting God?
The people living in Roman occupied Palestine in Jesus' day wanted to trust God. It was hard though. They needed a champion. They looked back to the time when they had kings. They hadn't known that for a long time. They had been under the oppression of evil worldly empires for hundreds of years - the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and now the Romans. And if you think woke liberals, AOC and Joe Biden are making your life hard, you don't know what hard is. It was terrible. They had no rights, they were taxed without representation, abused, and they could lose their lands or even their lives at the whim of the Roman occupiers. Those accused of crimes were in danger of dying under the most gruesome torture you can imagine, crucifixion. It was an art the Romans were very, very good at.
The Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Bible's Old Testament, spoke of a Messiah, which means "anointed one". The Messiah was going to be great, and he was going to bring Israel back to where it had been before. Even better than it had been before. Israel was going to be great again.
Hundreds of years before Jesus showed up, there was a prophet named Isaiah who spoke about the annointed one, the Messiah. His words can be read today, in the Old Testament in the book that bears his name, along side a number of other prophets, many of whom also spoke of the Messiah. Isaiah’s picture of him is interesting. For example, in Isaiah chapter 42 he says this:
This is my servant; I strengthen him, this is my chosen one; I delight in him. I have put my Spirit on him; he will bring justice to the nations. He will not cry out or shout or make his voice heard in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoldering wick; he will faithfully bring justice.
Isaiah goes on to say that the Messiah will be a light to the nations, to
“open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those sitting in darkness from the prison house.”
This image is of a Messiah who will not be loud, but will be gentle - so much so that he won’t break a bruised reed or extinguish a smoldering wick. In chapter 53 of Isaiah the Messiah is portrayed not as a strong, dynamic leader but as a suffering servant, not someone majestic, but someone despised and rejected and killed on our behalf, carrying our sins
Near the end of his prophecy, Isaiah wrote this passage, which Jesus quoted in the synagog early in his ministry.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18-19
Jesus told the people who heard him quote this passage that Isaiah was writing about him; that he was the fulfillment of this prophecy. They got mad at him, in part because he didn't look the way they expected the Messiah to look..
The Hebrews especially their spiritual leaders, knew these prophecies. And during the Roman occupation, Into their midst comes this man named Jesus, a gifted teacher and miracle worker. In one event that is reported in all four Gospels, Jesus even multiplied a couple loaves and a few fish to feed thousands of people. In our society, where many of us are trying to eat less so we can lose weight, we often miss the importance of that. A leader who could literally multiply bread would be very, very handy in a revolution. You can read in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John how they tried to make him king right then and there. Perhaps this was the Messiah!
Jesus disappointed many of them, however. He would withdraw when people tried to make him a King.
Toward the end of his earthly ministry, he said this to a questioning crowd (John 12):
31 Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be cast out. 32 As for me, if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:31-32)
On June 1, 2020, law enforcement officers cleared people protesting the death of George Floyd from Lafayette square with tear gas and other riot control tactics. They did this to create a safe perimeter for President Donald Trump to walk over to Saint John’s church. While he was there he had photographers take pictures of him, stern faced and standing erect, lifting up a Bible he never reads. A lot of his followers thought this was awesome, the move of someone with some real BDE.
The contrast crushes me. When Jesus said he was going to be lifted up, it wasn’t what you might think, it wasn’t that he would be lifted up in victory on the shoulders of his countrymen, or lifted up on a throne. He was going to be lifted up on a cross. Because that’s what the real Messiah does; he gives himself. We miss this! We think we will win by showing our power; by clearing the field of our enemies and lifting up a Bible, with the idea that somehow a culture that doesn’t believe the Bible will submit to our power. That’s not how it works. Jesus gave himself, lifted up on a cross. For all the world it looked like the Romans and his Jewish adversaries had won. But he defeated death and rose from the grave on the third day. And as a result, his disciples, no longer fearful and angry, but joyful, spread the word of his Kingdom, of the defeat of death the repentance and cleansing from sin and a new command to love God and neighbor, including loving even our enemies. They spread this message all over the Roman empire, and scripture records that they were accused of turning the world upside down.
But it’s we who are upside down when we walk outside his way. We can lay down our weapons, pointed at earthly enemies, because he has told us to love them and do good to them. We can stop our striving and come to him. His Kingdom doesn't have to be made great again. It is eternally great, defined by how God defines greatness. The mission he has for us is way more fulfilling, way more exciting, way, way more long-lasting, and - frankly - way more fun than the depressing and increasingly disgusting world of modern American politics.
We have a Messiah. We have a king. His name is Jesus. Let's quit settling for vastly unworthy substitutes. I don’t know why we would want any other Messiah.
As always, thanks for listening to this podcast. You could do a lot of things with your time and I’m grateful you have allowed me to share my thoughts with you. By the way, I’m back on twitter after a long hiatus. My twitter handle is @departied.
I’d like to leave you with some verses from Isaiah’s description of the Messiah in Isaiah 53:
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was. He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised, and we didn’t value him. Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains; but we in turn regarded him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds. We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.
God bless