The hard part about picking between bitter and better is not the words. The hard part is believing them. The hard part is looking at a landscape of pain that sometimes stretches out as far as our eyes can see and still believing that this path that says “better” can actually, really, truly bring us to a better reality somewhere beyond the horizon of our sight.

There may only be one letter between bitter and better, but like street signs on the same post, the two words point us in opposite directions. And these signposts are planted firmly, with the same two arrows, at every difficult junction we face on the road of life. No matter how well we may have chosen in the past, or how poorly, the same choice always presents itself all over again: will we let the difficulties of life make us better? Or bitter?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? One choice is literally named “better.” So that’s clearly the choice we’ll always make. Right? Why would we willingly choose to travel a bitter road when a better option is always available to us? The answer is this: we don’t always believe the signposts.
Sometimes our lives become so difficult or our relationships get so messy that we think bitter is the better road. We become convinced that we are entitled to bitterness, that our sufferings have earned us a right to travel where others dare not tread. We may even feel that we must travel that road—
Read More
Related Posts:

Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title: “Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”

What follows might sound quite strange to many Christians, but ALL God’s people today ARE called to have a prophetic ministry, and ALL God’s people today ARE called to be engaged in resistance thinking – and action. The only reason this sounds alarming and foreign is because we have moved so far away from New Testament Christianity.
The idea that we should have a prophetic voice and lifestyle, and that we should be actively resisting the ungodly culture all around us is really just basic Christianity 101. But it is a sign of the times that such basics sound radical and even revolutionary to most Christians – at least in the West.
I could cite countless believers from over the past two millennia who have spoken about such matters, but let me refer to just one: an 80-year-old Christian that I just highlighted in an article yesterday: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/14/notable-christians-os-guinness/
Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title:
“Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”
As to prophets, he says this: “We might distinguish capital-P ‘Prophets’ from small-p ‘prophets.’ The former are those, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who have heard a direct, explicit, supernatural word from God and can legitimately say, ‘This is the word of the Lord.’ The latter are those who interpret their life and times from a biblical perspective and therefore ‘read the signs of the times’ with greater or lesser skill, but never presume the authority and infallibility of ‘This is the word of the Lord’.”
He also explains that the notion of “resistance thinking” is adapted from a 1945 essay by C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”. I dug it out from his God in the Dock, where Lewis said this:
“Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is made only into a resisting material.”
So the Christian is to be a prophetic voice and resist the world and its wayward direction. But Christians resist the world and its wrong paths because we want something better of the world:
“A vital secret of the church’s power and glory in history lies in its calling to be ‘against the world, for the world.’ C. S. Lewis calls this the ‘two-edged character’ of the Christian faith.
Read More
Related Posts:

How do we not lose our evangelical souls in the Middle East? While we will not always agree on how to carry out our responsibilities in the public and political spheres, one thing we must commit to is equally critiquing all parties involved in a conflict…Yes, Israel policies have sometimes increased Palestinian suffering and have been injurious but Arab governments themselves have also contributed to this situation—Egypt has closed their own borders and tunnels to Gaza and has kept aid from getting in.  And so has Hamas, who hid their soldiers at Al Shifa hospital, and who Palestinians themselves accuse of gross mismanagement, corruption and violence towards anyone who opposes them.

The current war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas continues to ratchet up heat surrounding the most polarizing issue in our world today.  As Christians observing all this, our response can sometimes produce more heat than light but recently published articles like this one are well-intentioned attempts to navigate through difficult and complex current events.
Most Christians would agree that the events in the Middle East are more than political and military engagements—indeed, they also engage, at their core, moral questions concerning violence, justice and power.  But the difficulty for Christians—and where the debate really lies—is the movement from moral principles to public policy.  Suddenly, biblical principles struggle to shine with their eternal clarity as they bog down in the muck of a sinful world.  A complicated issue is made more complicated as a result.
Some have rightly argued that Dispensational theology—a recent invention in two millennia of theological reflection—has given rise to a carte blanche treatment of modern Israel and its policies towards Palestinians and Arabs.  If the modern, political state of Israel is indeed the prophetic outcome of the Scriptures, it makes sense to prejudicially side with the eternal victors as a moral “right.”  But modern, secular Israel is not a fulfillment of prophecy and Christians should be rebuked for embracing a position so poorly supported in the Scriptures themselves while ignoring or minimizing the plight of non-Jews made in His image that have suffered greatly throughout the Middle East.
But woe to Christians and anyone else who swing the pendulum so far the other way that they generate further confusion.  And because there is currently so much misinformation lobbed at us regarding Israel, it deserves an informed response. It has been argued, for instance, that because Zionism—the 19th century movement to create a homeland for Jews that eventually culminated in the establishment of Israel in 1948—is a secular enterprise, “Orthodox” and “Torah Jews” are even today opposed to the State of Israel as a secular, political entity.  This is proclaimed as evidence that Zionism, despite its current success, isn’t supported by religious Judaism but the facts do not bear that out.
While many Orthodox Jews did oppose Zionism before World War II, the Holocaust changed all that.  And just three years ago, Pew Research noted that support for the state of Israel is actually strongest among Orthodox Jews.
Another common assertion is as follows: when Israel was founded in 1948, Israelis immediately practiced “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” by “forcibly” removing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Arabs from their land (it is also claimed this happened again in 1967).  What isn’t given is proper context—the day after Israel declared its independence, Arab nations surrounding Israel launched a surprise assault in a united effort to sweep the Jews out to the sea (and it was war—in this case the “Six Dar War”—that preceded the 1967 refugee crisis as well).  It also ignores the historical facts that many of those who left did so on their own accord either out of fear of reprisal or because they rejected the possibility of co-existence with Jews.
It is morally troubling when assertions are made in such a way as to place moral blame almost solely on the Jews without understanding context and history.  The pursuit of a homeland is about more than a secular 19th century philosophy but about freedom from constant persecution.  Jews have been a minority for two millennia and wherever they have lived, persecution has followed them like a shadow.
There were the pogroms of 19th century Russia.  There was the Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) of 1941 Baghdad, home to an ancient Jewish community 2500 years old, where Arabs committed barbaric atrocities similar to those perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th towards Israelis.  And of course the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, which did more to unite differing Jewish opinion on Israel than anything else.  Jews have repeatedly been expelled from their lands and have come to Israel not as colonizers but as refugees.  The feeling of being hunted and hated is ever present.
Second, those opposed to Israel often use the “moral equivalency” fallacy.  It goes like this: “A has done bad things but so has B.  So B (in this case, Israel) is no better than A (Hamas).” For example, it has been said “Jews have their own terrorist organizations like Irgun,” ignoring the fact they were dismantled seventy years ago.  Or Israel is accused of genocide (while citing no evidence they are seeking to kill a whole people group) so that they are made to look no better than those seeking to kill them.
No, let us be crystal clear here—Israel is nothing like Hamas.  Let us not forget the charter of Hamas—its “constitution” and guiding document—which set out quite publicly its intention to destroy Israel and Jews when it said, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
We now know that on October 7th—in the largest loss of life of Jews since the Holocaust—Hamas committed beheadings, extreme sexual violence (mutilating sexual organs in addition to rape) and torture (though there are still people, just like the Holocaust deniers before them, who deny this and accuse Jews of fabrication).
It isn’t Israel that seeks to practice genocide (despite those now claiming Israelis are now “Nazis” in this war) but those who oppose them who are committed to obliterating their very existence.
Today, in the U.S and around the world, antisemitism is on the rise.  In the U.S., in the last year alone, incidents of violence, hate speech and similar behavior is up nearly 400% among Jews while anti-Muslim acts have risen only slightly.   The chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the elimination of Israel and its Jews, is chanted freely in the streets by millions worldwide.  College campuses, bastions of far-left politics, have been the scenes of violence towards Jews at places like Harvard and Tulane University while the presidents of Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania, under oath this week in Congressional testimony, couldn’t bring themselves to admit that calling for the genocide of Jews in speech violates codes of conduct and ethics on their campuses.
Meanwhile, on those same campuses, if you “misgender” a trans student, you are guilty of violence and hate towards that student and are then punished.  Such is the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of our times.
So, how do we not lose our evangelical souls in the Middle East? While we will not always agree on how to carry out our responsibilities in the public and political spheres, one thing we must commit to is equally critiquing all parties involved in a conflict (Israel is under a microscope in the global community so we don’t have to wonder if they will be critiqued).  Yes, Israel policies have sometimes increased Palestinian suffering and have been injurious but Arab governments themselves have also contributed to this situation—Egypt has closed their own borders and tunnels to Gaza and has kept aid from getting in.  And so has Hamas, who hid their soldiers at Al Shifa hospital, and who Palestinians themselves accuse of gross mismanagement, corruption and violence towards anyone who opposes them.  We must ensure that we do not create double standards concerning morality.
Violence in the Middle East is intractable, it seems, this side of the New Heavens and New Earth regardless of who perpetrates it. And so as we seek with wisdom to know how to act, we must also pray, “Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!”
Scott Armstrong is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America is Lead Pastor at City Church-Eastside (PCA) in Atlanta, Ga.

Related Posts: