The Write Place

In the past week since the Olympics opening, we have learned a lot, good, bad and ugly. The opening ceremony, if you happened to miss it included a parody of the Last Supper (admitted by the source) that involved songs about nudity and the presence of a small child. They tried to take the gold medal in blasphemy, and they succeeded.

Their response has been a weak “apology” laced with the affectation error. The claim is that it was Dionysius and it’s one or the other, as if people never tried to replace Jesus with pagan, fleeting pleasures. That’s not the only two options, they know this and just hope you don’t. It is a depiction of a Bacchanalian feast, and overlaid onto the Last Supper. While the Olympics apologized, the “artist” (we can’t call him that) has not. The reality is simple, they pushed where they thought they would get away with it and we caught them.

Some of them are still honest at least.

The response in defense was “we want to make everyone feel represented.”

Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance,” Descamps said. “Looking at the result of the polls that we shared, we believe that this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

Anne Descamps

If you have been paying attention over the years, this should be familiar to you. There was no Christian representation because they don’t mean what they say.

They mean everyone but the Christians and it flows the simple fact that you are either a pantheist or believe in the God of the bible. If there is no separate creator, then the creation is it’s creation making it all the divine.

They do not want diversity or “tolerance.” They want uniformity because they believe this world is all there is. Diversity to them is an allusion, the more unity in the midst of “diversity” the closer we all are to experiencing the oneness of all things.

The tolerance they offer is the suppression of the old norms and the imposing of new ones. All they seek is the celebration of their sin under a faux virtue.

They weren’t making fun of a mere painting, but of the historical even and individual it was depicting.

Whether we should be upset that Jesus is depicted at all misses the point. There can be two wrongs, (I don’t hold to it being a second commandment violation myself) but they were mocking the reality not just the artistic representation.

When people do the same to the crucifixion for example, they are still mocking Christ himself.

I have taken to praying “God save us from the Christians.”

The pushback from Christians has been successful, but also at times internal. The glut of those condemning any of those defending the honor of their own risen Lord is astounding.

Refusing to call sin sin enables it to continue. Calling it for what it is, and taking right offense is loving to your enemy, for how else will they know it is such?
We have confused nicety and kindness with mere emotion. Is letting Christ be blasphemed nicety or kindness to him? Or even to those who are suffering the consequences of their sin? If you think they are not today, let us note the sexual depravity of the individuals involved. Men who pretend to be women, at least one woman who sexually acts like a man, all of whom advocate their favorite sins.
This rule of kindness, an 11th commandment that perverts the law, would place Elijah, David, Paul, Peter, John the Baptist, Jesus and many others in the camp of “sinner” for taking seriously the sin in front of them. The Psalms for example, are loaded with “unchristian” and “offensive” speech because the church has mistaken the command to kindness as a command to weakness.

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?

And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

I hate them with complete hatred;

I count them my enemies.

Psalm 139:21-22

What about our kindness to God or our love for him when he is insulted?

We have enemies, if we pretend we do not we lie. If we continue to mistake peace for quiet, we are truly the enemies of lost sinners as we leave them unchallenged in their road to hell. If they are truly the enemies of God’s people, it is because they are first enemies of God.

Don’t tell me you really think the Golden Bull was also a coincidence, or okay because it’s pagan

Do these people look like they believe in the wrath of God? If Christians don’t rediscover the wrath of God, neither will the unbelieving world we are called to witness to. Few Christians truly do understand it, beyond some foreign concept mitigated by “love your neighbor” or “love your enemies” mistaken for remain silent. You cannot have the justice of God without the wrath of God, and you cannot have forgiveness, or the Gospel without it.

¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility ¹⁵ by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, ¹⁶ and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

Ephesians 2:14-16

If the hostility needed to be killed, then it must have first existed as a very present reality.

The world does not know they are vessels of wrath, actively under the condemnation of a holy and just God now. Worse yet, Christians refuse to say so, if they even know of it at all. Far too many do not, leaving it all to the final judgment on the last day.

God will not be mocked

We should have been indignant two hundred years ago when the first “modernists” brought their empty barbarism into the church. Instead, Churches championed “inclusivity” and persecuted those who fought back, all in the name of unity.

Oh! commend me to the man who talks like Jesus, who will not for the world suffer corrupt communications to come out of his mouth. I know what people will say of you if you are like this: they will say you are straight-laced, and that you will not throw much life into company. Others will call you mean-spirited. Oh, my brethren! bold-hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards. They will admonish you not to be singular, but you can tell them that it is no folly to be singular, when to be singular is to be right.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Elon Musk recently tweeted “Christianity has become toothless.” Sadly Christianity has mistaken having teeth for impiety. He is right, which becomes all the more irritating when we have the sword that cuts bone and marrow.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Hebrews 4:12

Yet we refuse to use it or adhere to it, for the strange delusion that Christ is merely a lamb and never a lion. He demands that faithfulness from us to take offense at vile things. Offence at sin is the height of piety.

The world is gaslighting, both on what they did and concerning the Christian response. That is merely to be expected, after all those who hate Christ hate the truth. What is not to be tolerated is Christians being so obsessed with being “kind” that they are cruel, above all else to the risen king of all the earth.

There’s only one way Christ’s enemies have any success, and that is by compromising the Christians. We saw this in the “Modernist/Fundamentalist” controversy that ended in withdrawal from evangelicals and the apostasy of the Mainline. We saw it also with the buying of Evangelical pastors (Shepherds for sale by Megan Basham). We’ve seen it in Pietism’s damnable feminization of the faith and the Great Awakenings emphasis on unity that resulted in calls to unity at all costs (the dogmas of the faith be damned). Perhaps worst of all, has been the loss of the kingship of Christ. We need, and are called to, respond to sin with disgust and a call to repentance. The church is called now as in every age, to proclaim her risen king. That calling means taking offense at offensive things, publicly and without hesitation. If Christian’s fight, we always win in the end. If we do not we renege on our calling.

Now is a time to fight.

“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent”

― John Calvin