At least six people were murdered and dozens were wounded when terrorists opened fire on civilians at a bus stop in Jerusalem this morning. The two attackers were killed at the scene; Hamas praised the shooting by “two Palestinian resistance fighters.”

This tragedy is especially personal for me on two levels. One is that I have led more than thirty study tours to Israel and love the country and its people. The other is that Ramot Junction, the site of the attack, is located at one of the main entry points to Jerusalem. I have traveled by it many times over the years and know that what happened there could have happened to me and to my fellow travelers.

In other news, Russia launched its largest attack on Ukraine over the weekend since the war began. At least four people were killed, including a two-month-old baby and the child’s mother. Dozens more were injured.

“I am the captain of my soul”

Queen Elizabeth II died on this day in 2022 at the age of ninety-six. Even though she was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, death found her as it will us all (unless Christ returns first).

Our very human fear of that moment is not just the threat of pain and suffering but also our innate dread of the unknown. We fear walking into a dark room or a dark forest, much less a dark future.

So we ignore the fact of human mortality when we can. I didn’t want to write about today’s tragic news from Jerusalem and Ukraine any more than you wanted to read about it. We euphemize death (people don’t die anymore, they merely “pass on”) and we seek to extend our lives through medical means.

When we fear death, we make this world our home and fight tooth and nail to stay here as long as we can. We measure success by temporal standards and drive ourselves to achieve it. And we go through life claiming, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

Therein lies the issue I want to address today.

Liberalism failed because it succeeded

Patrick J. Deneen is a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. In his masterful book Why Liberalism Failed, he describes “liberalism” (from the Latin liber, meaning “free”) as a view that “conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” Over the centuries of its ascent, this view has led many of its followers to jettison everything that constrains individual freedom, including religious dogma, societal mores, and legal strictures.

Whether the topic is abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, or a host of other cultural issues, Western culture has “evolved” to a place of existential freedom in the quest for a temporal utopia.

How is this working for us?

Professor Deneen notes that “some 70 percent of Americans believe that their country is moving in the wrong direction,” while “every institution of government shows declining levels of public trust by the citizenry.” After documenting a plethora of other social ills, he concludes, “Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered.”

Then he draws this surprising lesson: “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” By removing barriers and constraints on human behavior built by religious teaching and legal structures, it has freed us to be our fallen selves. And when my “will to power” collides with yours, conflicts abound, terrorists attack, wars are launched, and the weak are oppressed by the strong.

Being freed from “lifelong slavery”

What is the solution?

The Bible teaches that Jesus died to “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15). We are enslaved to our fear of death unless we are set free by a power greater than death. And no other person in human history demonstrated such power except Jesus Christ.

Muslims venerate the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. I have been to the tomb of Baháu’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í faith, and visited the graves of some of our culture’s greatest heroes, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Winston Churchill and Sir Isaac Newton. None rose physically from the tomb. Even Lazarus and others whom Jesus raised from the dead eventually died again.

Only Jesus demonstrated the power to defeat the grave. Therefore, only he can give that power to us. When we receive the gift of eternal life that he offers all who trust in him, we are freed from “lifelong slavery” to death.

But there’s a downside to the upside.

Those of us who trust in Christ as our Lord know we will “never die” (John 3:16). But we can therefore feel free to pursue whatever we want in this life, secure in the knowledge that Jesus will forgive our sins when we confess them and that nothing we do in this world can keep us from the world to come. We can even believe that our religious activities will earn God’s favor and blessing on the non-religious areas of our lives.

All of this is but a spiritual expression of our fallen “will to power.” Such a compartmentalized way of life makes Jesus a means to our ends. By seeking what we want, we forfeit what he wants for us. This grieves our Father and impoverishes us since the will of an all-knowing, all-loving God is by definition better for us than ours.

“You lead, I follow”

The solution is the simple but transforming decision to “submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7), to “humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6) and to pray with Jesus, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).

In the words of a dear friend whose business and cultural influence spans the globe, it is to pray all through the day, “You lead, I follow.”

Dwight Moody counseled,

“Let God have your life; he can do more with it than you can.”

Do you agree?

Quote for the day:

“Carry the cross patiently, and with perfect submission; and in the end it shall carry you.” —Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471)

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Truth Rising, a documentary developed through a partnership between Focus on the Family and the Colson Center, premieres today at noon EST, and I highly recommend making time to watch it. It’s free to stream and, as its creators describe, the film is “a call to action at a critical time in our culture.”

However, what I appreciated most about the film is that it provides both a realistic assessment of the state of Western civilization as well as reasons for optimism grounded in the fact that God is still at work using his people to offer redemption and hope to a world in desperate need of both.

The documentary begins with Os Guinness—a brilliant author, theologian, and social critic—examining the ways in which other civilizations have declined and fallen in the past to use as comparisons when evaluating the degree to which our current civilization is following in their footsteps. To that end, he outlines how we are at a “civilizational moment,” which he defines as the time when a culture loses touch with the inspiration that created it.

When that moment occurs, he shows how there are really only three options for what comes next:

• Renew the original inspiration
• Replace the original inspiration
• Decline

As made clear by both he and John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host for the second part of the discussion, the original inspiration for Western Civilization is the sense of Judeo-Christian morality that undergirds our most foundational beliefs.

But while Guinness and Stonestreet are equipped to outline that reality by themselves, I appreciate the way they incorporate the views of others in the conversation. Throughout the documentary, they speak with a host of experts who bring unique perspectives and experiences to the discussion that add both context and nuance. And though the contributions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Konstantin Kisin, and others in the first half of the film are excellent, the personal stories of those interviewed by Stonestreet in the latter half often stood out the most.

Why Christians should be a “people of hope”

In the film’s second part, Stonestreet interviews a number of individuals who have been “canceled” or threatened for their beliefs. The accounts of Ayaan Hirsi Ali—who shares more of her story in this part—Jack Philips, Seth Dillon, and others demonstrate how God redeemed the trials they faced in ways that often expanded their ministry while providing opportunities that couldn’t have happened otherwise. They don’t minimize how hard those times were, but they do point to what God has done through them.

Remembering the Lord’s ability to take what man intends for evil and turn it into good is vital when so much of what we see around us tends to draw our focus toward the negative. God does not call us to a naïve ignorance of the problems we face, nor does he permit us to give up on being part of the solution (Matthew 5:13–16). Learning to do both is a key element of living out our identity as Christians.

As Stonestreet describes, “Christians must remember who they are—people of the resurrection, and therefore people of hope.” If our solution to the state of our culture is to hunker down and wait for the world to hit rock bottom, then we’re doing Christianity wrong.

Jesus entered a world with no moral compass outside the vague, philosophical ideas of right and wrong that people were free to disregard. And even in his more immediate context, where the Jewish people still professed—and, typically, lived in accordance with—a desire to please the Lord, their approach to doing so was rooted in the kind of legalism and performative religiosity that was slowly suffocating any chance at a personal, intimate relationship with the Father.

In response, Christ met the people where they were, showed them a better path forward, and then was willing to pay the price for not flinching from God’s truth when it contradicted the culture’s. Now he calls us to do the same.

Fortunately, we don’t have to look very far for the chance to make a difference.

“Secularism let them down”

In our conversation with John Stonestreet on today’s special edition of Faith & Clarity, he makes the point that when he first started teaching on worldview and culture, many of the warning signs like shifting gender norms and postmodernism were theoretical. There were indications, but not necessarily evidence, that this is where our society was headed. That’s no longer the case.

Many of those problems are now present, and they’re having a dramatic impact on the way our civilization functions. Moreover, an ever-increasing part of the population is coming to realize that the secular alternatives just aren’t working.

As John goes on to describe, the reasoning among those who left the church used to be that “the church has let them down. And now we have a whole bunch of young people going back to church, talking about how secularism let them down. So, what an opportunity right now for truth to rise.”

This is truly an exciting time to be a follower of Christ. Many of society’s solutions to humanity’s problems are beginning to crumble. This brings us to the question each of us must answer: Will we help them rebuild on the foundation of God’s truth, or will we sit back and watch as they try in vain to reconstruct those walls on a new set of lies?

When those who have wronged us suffer the consequences of their sins, it can be tempting to find pleasure in their pain. Many of the stories in Truth Rising demonstrate what it looks like to choose a better path, one that is more in line with Christ’s example.

When Jesus looked out on a people who were lost and desperate for something more than the lies and half-truths that defined their culture, he was filled with compassion (Matthew 9:36).

Will the same be true for us? Will it be true for you?

Quote of the day

“There’s something as deep as the human experience goes that we’re missing, so it’s not going to be a political solution, it’s not going to be an economic solution to this. We have to go back to what is true.” —John Stonestreet, Truth Rising

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“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” This is how Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked President Trump his opinion on the online controversy alleging that the president was either dead or about to be.

The root cause was that Mr. Trump had nothing on his public schedule for three days last week. For a person who is so often in the public eye, his lack of visibility was visible evidence for some that something was happening behind the scenes.

He is the oldest person to be elected president and has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition for people his age that often produces the swollen ankles many have noted during his public appearances. But, as the New York Times reports, recent days were different:

On TikTok, influencers with legions of followers surmised that the White House was publishing old photos, suggesting that the president was hidden from view. Reddit threads, one after another, were ablaze with commentary. On X, posts shared by anonymous critics disseminating dubious reports picked up thousands of interactions and shares.

For years, critics of President Biden have questioned his health. Now some are asking similar questions about President Trump. When he responded on Sunday, “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE!” skeptics explained the post as part of the cover-up. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and influential figure on the far-right, asserted on social media, “There is obviously something going on with Trump that the White House is covering up. This is literally Biden 2.”

Believing what we want to believe

For many years, I taught a seminary course titled “Christian Evidences.” We explored in-depth a variety of apologetic issues for which scientific, historical, archaeological, and manuscript evidence are relevant and helpful, including Jesus’ resurrection, the veracity of Scripture, and the plausibility of miracles.

But as I warned my students, evidence must be interpreted and may not be compelling. As an example, I cited the religious authorities’ response to Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead: “The chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus” (John 12:10).

Their reaction to Jesus’ resurrection was similar: rather than trusting him as Messiah and Lord, they fabricated an explanation to keep others from believing in him (Matthew 28:11–15).

All this to say, the postmodern relativism that considers all truth to be personal and subjective is not just a feature of recent times. It is also a symptom of our fallen condition and desire to be our own god (Genesis 3:5). We are all prone to beliefs we want to believe and susceptible to believing only what endorses these beliefs while rejecting what does not.

But when it comes to God, believing our doubts can cause us to doubt our beliefs—to the detriment of our souls.

Losing faith in the American dream

Today’s reflections are prompted by a recent Wall Street Journal report regarding the “American dream” that if you work hard, you will get ahead. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed say this no longer holds true, or never did. Majorities believe the prior generation had an easier time buying a home, starting a business, or being a full-time parent. Majorities also lack confidence that the next generation will be able to purchase a home or save enough for retirement.

Here’s my point: If you believe the American dream is dead, you obviously won’t dream it. Then your fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy as your doubts become reality. This happens in other dimensions of life: If we don’t trust someone to be our friend, we don’t befriend them and thus never learn to trust them. If we don’t trust our doctor enough to take the medicine she prescribes, we never benefit from the medicine and thus have no reason to trust our doctor.

The same holds true for our relationship with our Lord.

As we have been discussing this week, it can be hard to have faith in God when he disappoints us or trust the church when the church hurts us. One response is blind faith that ignores realities and sees only what reinforces its suppositions. As a small boy said when asked to define faith: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

A better response is to examine the evidence as fully and fairly as possible, then take a step beyond it into a relationship that becomes self-validating. I know of no approach to faith in Christ that is more urgent or transforming than this.

When we feel God’s comfort most deeply

God will never ask us to do anything that contradicts his word. This is one reason he calls us to love him with all our “mind” (Matthew 22:37) and to “reason together” with him (Isaiah 1:18). The Bible commends the Berean Christians who “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

But no relationship can be proven before it is experienced. I cannot prove to you that my wife loves me, for example. I can tell you that she tells me she does, but she could be lying. I can point to all the amazing ways she is kind to me, but she could be deceiving me. You would have to experience my marriage to trust it.

The same is true with taking a job, becoming parents, or making any other relational decision: we examine the evidence, then step beyond it into a new reality that verifies itself.

This is especially the case with following Jesus, in part because following him comes at such a price in our fallen world. He warned us, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). In addition, “your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

As a result, we often experience Jesus most fully when such faith is hardest. We feel his comfort most deeply when our grief and suffering are deepest but we trust him despite and because of our pain.

“Let me find thy light in my darkness”

To this end, let’s close with a Puritan prayer a dear friend shared with me this week:

Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.
Lord, in the daytime, stars can be seen from deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine;
let me find thy light in my darkness,
thy life in my death,
thy joy in my sorrow,
thy grace in my sin,
thy riches in my poverty,
thy glory in my valley.

Amen.

Quote for the day:

“Fear can banish faith, but faith can banish fear.” —Billy Graham

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