A Holy Defense
How do we prepare ourselves to stand firm and to speak out? It begins with what Peter describes as “sanctify[ing] the Lord God in your hearts” (1 Pet. 3:15). When Christ reigns supreme in our lives, our perspective, our priorities, and our practices will follow His Kingdom cause.
Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks. (1 Peter 3:15)
As I stood peering down at the unobtrusive street marker in Oxford, England it struck me as a portal to history. It’s where in 1555 men known as the Oxford Martyrs had been burned at the stake for refusal to compromise their faith.
The apostle Peter knew something of what it meant to take such a stand. He who had denied Jesus three times would go on to display boldness and courage for the sake of Christ. The book of Acts records Peter being threatened and beaten for the faith. Peter, however, saw these confrontations as occasions to bear witness to the gospel.
Peter urges us in the same manner. “And who is he who will harm you if you become followers of what is good?”
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In a Scrolling World, Are We Numb to the Resurrection’s Shock?
Easter is an annual remembrance of a historical event that’s still being celebrated, arguably on a greater scale than ever, nearly 2,000 years later. That’s because it’s the biggest news story of your life, or any life—even of those who shrug it off or scroll right past it.
Can you remember any top world news headlines from April 9, 2023? What about headlines from April 17, 2022, or April 4, 2021? Probably 2020 was the only Easter in recent memory when you might reme`mber what was happening in the world—but even that will fade from memory sooner than we expect.
What we can remember about Easter last year, and every year going back nearly two millennia, is that scores of Christians across the world confessed, sang about, and celebrated their belief in the deity of a human who actually walked and talked on this earth for a time.
This man is named Jesus. On Easter Sunday every year, people from nearly every nation and language, every class and ethnicity, worship him as Lord. They confess he suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried in first-century Jerusalem; and supernaturally rose from the dead three days later.
Consider how absurd this sounds. Consider how shocking it’d be as a headline if it were reported by some time-traveling newswire service to people in any BC kingdom or culture. We’re talking about the most outrageous headline of the year, and it happens every year: On Easter, a third of the planet’s population honors the day in history when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
It’s an insane headline because it speaks to the fact that, even today—in our modern scientific age—more people than ever believe in a supernatural event that science says cannot happen. The headline’s enduring repetition, year after year for centuries, proves the legitimacy of the event at its center (the resurrection) or highlights a mass delusion of unprecedented scale. Either way, it’s utterly newsworthy.
And yet on this year’s Easter Sunday, any number of soon-to-be-forgotten occurrences will claim “lead story” status in newspapers and newscasts worldwide. Instead of what 2.4 billion Christians claim and celebrate, “Breaking News!” alerts will compel millions to click on infinitely less newsworthy items. More people will probably click on articles about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on Easter Sunday than will read a Gospel account of Jesus’s resurrection. For American college basketball fans, the big news of the day will be which teams made the Final Four.
Why are we numb to the resurrection’s shock and seemingly bored by history’s biggest event? Why does the headline “Billions worship a man who rose from the dead and ascended to heaven” seem like old news that barely registers as a trending topic? Here are a few theories.
1. It’s old in a world obsessed with new.
Part of why the resurrection feels like “old news” is that it is old news, especially in a culture of increasingly short-term memory. Few of us can remember what was newsworthy a week ago, let alone a year or a century or two millennia ago. The digital age has eroded cultural memory and our capacity to think beyond the “now.”
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The Person of the Holy Spirit
As the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit is co-equal with the Father and Son, and yet as a distinct person, the Holy Spirit is the one who regenerates us and guides us into all truth. He doesn’t speak on his own authority but relays the truth. The Holy Spirit is ever illuminating the work of the Son, bringing glory to Christ and declaring the Logos to the church.
Albert Mohler says, “In some evangelical circles the Holy Spirit has faded into the background of our theological interests, leaving us with an anemic view of the Spirit, and subsequently, a deficient relationship with the third member of the Trinity.”
The Bible is not silent regarding the person and work of the Holy Spirit! He appears on the opening page of Scripture (Genesis 1:2) and is seen throughout, most primarily in perfecting & sanctifying the believer.
The Person of the Holy Spirit
John 14:16-17 says, “16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”
Notice with me that Jesus does not say the Spirit of truth is an “it” – but uses the personal pronouns “he” and “Him”. “You know Him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” We would not describe our spouses as “it” – unless we wanted to sleep on the couch. The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal wind, ghost, or force that you can channel or use like Luke Skywalker with enough concentration.
The Holy Spirit of God has knowledge (1 Cor 2:10-11), a will (1 Cor 12:11), a mind (Rom 8:27), He loves (Rom 15:30), reveals (Acts 13:2), intercedes (Romans 8:26), teaches (John 14:26), guides (Acts 16:6-7), can be grieved (Eph 4:30), insulted (Heb 10:29), lied to (Acts 5:3), and blasphemed (Matt 12:31-32). These can all only be referring to a Person.
You can’t grieve or lie to an “it”. You can’t sin against an impersonal thing. No one has ever sinned against their toaster by grabbing a bagel at Panera instead of at home – but countless men have sinned against their wives by committing adultery.
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Evangelical and LGBT+ Ally: Why You Can’t Be Both
As Christians have been pointing out for more than 2,000 years, the reason Jesus never mentioned homosexuality is that his views on sexuality were already so clear that it wasn’t necessary…serious-minded people didn’t argue that Jesus would endorse homosexual relationships, much less same-sex marriage.
“Some words, like strategic castles, are worth defending, and evangelical is among them,” Michael Gerson wrote. “While the term is notoriously difficult to define, it certainly encompasses a ‘born-again’ religious experience, a commitment to the authority of the Bible, and an emphasis on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.”
Gerson wrote those words in an article for The Atlantic in 2018. He ends his essay by saying, “This sets an urgent task for evangelicals: to rescue their faith from its worst leaders.”
Gerson, who previously served as a top aide and speechwriter for George W. Bush and is the author of Heroic Conservatism and coauthor of City of Man (a book edited by Collin Hansen and Tim Keller), has been an evangelical voice in the public square. It’s unfortunate, then, that he now uses arguments about sexuality that contradict Scripture and the church’s historic witness. As he notes, being an evangelical means being committed to the Bible’s authority—a position he seems to have now abandoned.
Has the LGBT+ Movement Harmed Anyone?
During Pride Month, Gerson used his forum in The Washington Post to write about “how the gay rights movement found such stunning success.” The article’s key thesis is that “in the conflict over gay rights, supporters have asserted a compelling view of human dignity, while opponents have struggled to explain how broadening rights harms others.” To support his claim, Gerson provides three examples.
For his first example, Gerson writes, “Some conservatives claimed that gay marriage would somehow weaken the institution of straight marriage. But the evidence that same-sex marriage increases rates of divorce, child poverty or children living in single-parent homes appears nonexistent.” His criteria reveals that he never truly understood the argument for how heterosexual marriages would be weakened by same-sex marriage.
Consider, for example, the issue of the redefinition of marriage. For almost all of human history, marriage has been considered the comprehensive union of man and woman that unites them for the purposes of procreation, family life, and domestic sharing. By simply redefining the term, it automatically devalued the institution.
If Gerson is looking for a more direct harm, he could look at the rise of nonmonogamous relationships. As I wrote nine years ago, being “monogamish” (i.e., when a couple is emotionally intimate only with each other yet engages in sexual infidelities or group sexual activity) has long been considered acceptable, even normative, within homosexual communities. As our nation embraces the acceptance of same-sex marriage, the idea that fidelity isn’t required within marriage has also been increasingly accepted.
A poll taken in 2021 found that the generation of adults most influenced by LGBT+ culture is adopting this view of fidelity. Four in 10 millennials (41 percent) said they’d be interested in having an open relationship. Among millennials who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or other, 52 percent would be interested in open relationships. Among married couples from every generation, 30 percent of husbands would be interested, while fewer wives (21 percent) feel similarly.
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