Owning the Moral High Ground

Owning the Moral High Ground

Brothers, Men’s Ministry tomorrow morning on Zoom, 8-10a. Austin and Spencer Murphy will be leading us. Super easy to join: if you can have your coffee made by 7:59, all you have to do is open your laptop and click. If it was a bad night you can leave your webcam off! Look for the link that went out yesterday from the CPC Office.

I was on the L.A. Times splash page yesterday and saw something I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen from a newspaper: a sincerely condescending introduction to a handful of articles on dealing with coronavirus. The implication in that one little paragraph was that the editors of the L.A. Times were wise and good, and I the reader, customer, and consumer of their product was misguided and possibly malicious. It reminded me of the newish motto of the Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Yes, but what if the editors of the Times are the darkness?

Sunday evening I’d like to continue to look at how Christ brings hope into national moments such as this one — and it isn’t through one class of human being assuming moral and intellectual superiority over another, then imposing their will on that dumber class. Nietzsche saw this coming: once a culture can no longer agree on good and evil, right and wrong, the only recourse is to power. That’s what we’re watching right now: groups of people assuming their own moral superiority and seeking to impose their will on the halfwitted.

The Bible does something very different: it assumes that before God, all humankind is halfwitted. As Paul said to the Athenians, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30). All people are called to repent because all are morally corrupt. The only one standing on the moral high ground is The Risen One, before whom, one day, every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord. Join us for worship Sunday evening in the luxurious setting of our east parking lot.

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