Jesus Is Lord
These are hard times to be a Christian. Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been de rigueur in polite circles of the modern world to mock Christianity for its “superstition” and “intolerance,“ all the while holding over Christians the purported obligation to be “nice.”
“You wouldn't want to hurt peoples’ feelings, would you?,” Christians are asked when they insist that Jesus is the way—and the only way—to the Father (John 14:6). “Why would you impose your religion on us?”
Well, that is rather the point. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. There isn’t another way if you want to escape from the coils of sin that have ensnared humanity since the Fall.
Do you want to see God? Do you want your face to shine like Moses’s after speaking with the Lord on the mountain? (Exodus 34:29-35) Then don’t kid yourselves: you won’t get there by building a better machine or tweaking your physiology with chemicals.
Even more to the point, you won’t get there by getting rich or enslaving other human beings to do your will. You won’t get there by lying, cheating, stealing, committing adultery, or coveting your neighbor’s stuff. And you won't get there by murdering your own children, like Saturn, or sacrificing them to your career.
You won’t get there by revenge. You won’t get there by shaming other people into saying things the way you want them to be said. You won’t get there by crying on camera about how much you are hurting because of something somebody else said or did and demanding they feel the way you want them to (SSH gamma alert!).
And you definitely won't get there by denying Jesus is Lord so as not to hurt somebody else's feelings.
How do Christians know this? Because Jesus told us so.
Jesus is not simply our teacher. He is also our fight-master, and he taught us how to face such verbal and emotional attacks. The rules are simple, if hard to follow without a certain amount of practice.
Turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39). Meaning: if someone insults you by slapping you on the face, do not respond by getting angry or emotional. Do not use your emotional response as a weapon or rise to their provocation. Stay calm, and know that Jesus is the truth.
Reject false binaries (Matthew 22). Meaning: if someone comes to test you by presenting hypotheticals or framing a question in a way that it admits only a single answer ("Say yes or no!"), recognize the framing as itself the test, such that answering it at all is to grant the premise of the questioner (e.g. “Do you believe that the creation account in Genesis is literally true? Answer only yes or no!”). Stay calm, and know that Jesus is the way.
Pray for your enemies (Matthew 5:44, 27:35). Meaning: refuse the temptation to take revenge. Human history without Christ is one long saga of feuds and revenge-taking—just look at the way the barbarian conquerors of the Roman Empire behaved (see chapters 5-7 of the Shorter Cambridge Medieval History: Vol. 1 for details). Those who do not study history are doomed to pretend that their side was always the Good Guys, and the other side deserved killing. Stay calm, and know that Jesus is the life.
Christians are not supposed to be nice. We are supposed to be able to resist getting sucked into Satan’s temptations to bow down and worship him, rather than Jesus Christ Our Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3; Romans 10:9-13; Philippians 2:11). But, of course, Satan has had the whole of human history to practice tempting us, which means we need Jesus’s help.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us, sinners.
