The Blinding Stupidity of the Smart
I was reminded this weekend of the television show, The West Wing. In one episode, the U.S. president executes a withering word assault on a Christian radio personality. At the close of his assault, the president snarls that the Christian wrongly assumed that the White House meeting was the monthly gathering of the ignorant tight-ass club. Obviously, only idiotic no-fun fools take the Bible literally.
A similar slap at Bible-believing Christians was thrown in at the tail-end of an otherwise insightful December 13 New York Post article about the primary cause of Islamic terror: ‘They’re so nice,’ until they get religion and want to kill us. http://nypost.com/2015/12/13/theyre-so-nice-until-they-get-religion-and-want-to-kill-us/
It is self-evident and obvious that Islam has a terrorism problem, despite the willful blindness of politicians and most of the media. In contrast, Christianity has no terrorism problem. Nor does Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism have a terrorism problem. It’s become axiomatic that the more devoted a Muslim is to the tenets of Islam, the more likely that person is to be violent. That conclusion comes from the obvious facts of hundreds of Islamic killings in San Bernardino, Paris (twice), Chattanooga, Boston, London and many other locales around the world. That conclusion also comes from experts in the FBI and from several organizations that have researched Islamic terror. Despite these obvious facts, many continue to suppress the truth, ala Romans 1:18.
And, to perpetuate the lie that all religions struggle to contain so-called extremists, many continue to suppress and misrepresent the history and tenets of Christianity. That episode from The West Wing ridiculed Christians who believe that homosexuality violates God’s natural law and God’s mandates for human sexuality as revealed in the Bible. Among other things, the president in that episode bloviates about wanting to sell his daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7) and mockingly asks whether he should have a staff member executed for working on the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14). That president’s assault against the Christian’s beliefs about homosexuality could stand as a poster-sample of the biblical ignorance of our anti-Christian cultural elites. That president obviously never studied or gave even a slight thought to the relationship of Old Testament law, culture and practice to the New Testament’s teaching of Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and freedom from the law. Homosexuality is judged wrong in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. And Jesus specifically referred to marriage as assumed to be between a man and a woman (Matthew 19:4-6). Marital alternatives are assumed to be so outrageous that they do not even warrant a mention to be rejected in the Scriptures.
Ignorant school-boy mocking both from the president in The West Wing and from those who hate the biblical Christ do not change the truth. The Bible obviously is to be interpreted literally where it is meant to be interpreted literally. The Bible uses historical record, the writings of prophets and kings, and letters from church leaders to inform and to teach. It uses poetry, parables, metaphors, similes, sarcasm, hyperbole . . . all to lead the reader to a clear understanding of the Lord’s character and the Lord’s ways and the Lord's demands.
It’s painfully outrageous that so many mock the Scriptures and the tenets of Christianity while at the same time revelling in complete, willful blindness to the primary cause of so much of the world’s terrorism. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—who is a Muslim—argued early in 2015 that Islam must reform. Islam, he said, must stop being a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. He’s right, but don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Best to get shrewd as a serpent about all of this. Otherwise, we might hear really smart people say something like, You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule. Isaiah 3:6.
