More than twenty people were killed in a Russian attack on a village in eastern Ukraine this morning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X: “A brutally savage Russian airstrike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Donetsk region. Directly on people. Ordinary civilians. At the very moment when pensions were being disbursed.” His post showed horrific footage of bodies strewn across the ground.

When I saw the news, I admit that it felt like “more of the same.” This terrible war has been going on for more than three years. I have never been to Ukraine and don’t know that I know anyone directly affected by this tragic news.

And yet, far more people died in this morning’s airstrike than were killed in an attack on a bus depot in Jerusalem yesterday, a tragedy that I used to lead the Daily Article and have continued to grieve. My response comes from the fact that I have many friends in Israel, having led dozens of study tours there, and love the land and its people deeply.

Here’s my guess: many in our culture likely viewed the latter as I viewed the former, seeing another attack on Jews in Israel as irrelevant to their lives. Or even worse, they saw the victims of the Palestinian attackers as the villains and the attackers as the victims.

 “One of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack”

One-sided media narratives against the Jewish state have been regularly debunked, but they persist, drowning out reporting that disagrees. As a result, 60 percent of young adults told a recent survey that they favor Hamas (which has been designated a terrorist organization by at least eight nations and the European Union) over Israel.

In addition, recent moves by various governments to recognize a Palestinian state have strengthened Hamas, whose leaders are calling them “one of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack.”

The rise of antisemitism is tragically on display in America as well. According to the American Jewish Committee, attacks on Jews in our country “have reached shocking levels, affecting American Jewish behavior and sense of security like we haven’t witnessed before.” As just one example, a man speaking Hebrew was assaulted recently at the Santa Monica Pier, part of what officials are calling a “deplorable escalation of antisemitism across southern California.”

What explains this escalation?

The “Marvelization of reality”

Paul Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he served as a member of the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In a recent article for The Dispatch, he explains “the problem with framing the Israel-Hamas conflict as one between the powerful and the powerless.”

Dr. Miller perceptively describes the process through which the left came to view Israel as:

• A powerful overlord, with the Palestinians as the heroic resistance.
• A “settler-colonial” state, with the Palestinians as indigenous rebels.
• And “white,” with the Palestinians as their “nonwhite” victims.

As he shows, all three claims are spurious.

• Israel became powerful by defending itself from nations seeking its annihilation. This does not make it an “overlord” or evil by definition.
• It is not a settler-colonial state: it began resettling the land under the Ottoman and British empires and did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine. In fact, the Arab population of historic Palestine grew from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7.4 million today.
• Israel isn’t white or European; an equal number of Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Asia and Africa as from Europe; 20 percent of its population is Arab.

However, as Dr. Miller explains, none of this matters to Israel’s critics. In what he calls the “Marvelization of reality” whereby “we expect reality to conform to the story arcs of fiction,” there’s the protagonist (the Palestinians), the goal (statehood and liberation), and the villain (Israel).

In a complex world, we crave simplicity, with white hats for the good guys and black hats for the bad guys. And to much of America these days, Israel wears the black hat.

From active participants to passive consumers

This “Marvelization of reality” is relevant beyond Israel in ways that speak to our national future.

As author and educator Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the television age turned us from active participants in society into passive consumers of entertaining sound bites. Digital technology exacerbates this trajectory, since we can now watch whatever we want for as long as it entertains us.

Since there is far too much content available for us to consume, we filter it by preconceived biases. And since we don’t produce the content we consume, we are at the mercy of those who do.

This is massively significant for our post-Christian society, which has no objective filter by which to discern truth from falsehood and, in fact, rejects the existence of objective truth itself. But it is just as significant for Christians in such a society.

We can be as secular as our secular friends. According to research by George Barna, about half of those who attend evangelical churches say there is no absolute moral truth and believe people can earn salvation through good works. Only four in ten believe humans are born into sin and need salvation in Christ. We can be swayed by entertainment that normalizes extramarital and same-sex sexual relations. We can evaluate political news through our partisan biases. We can measure success by cultural popularity rather than biblical obedience.

“He will guide you into all the truth”

I can claim that the answer is to view secular culture through the prism of the Bible, but skeptics will assert that this is just as biased as viewing the Bible through the prism of secular culture. After all, the Bible is a book like any other book, subjectively written by flawed people using words that must be subjectively interpreted by flawed people, or so they will say.

Here’s the difference: The Spirit who inspired these words can give us the discernment we need to understand and obey them.

Jesus promised that, in ways no secular person can understand, the Holy Spirit “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Accordingly, “his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie” (1 John 2:27).

Because he literally lives in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), the Spirit can speak to your mind and influence your spirit in ways no one else can. If you “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). As the book of Acts and a plethora of spiritual awakenings across history show, he can empower and direct God’s people to impact their broken culture in transformative ways.

But he can guide only those who will follow. Would the Spirit say you are “in step” with him right now?

If not, why not?

Quote for the day:

“When we have the Holy Spirit, we have all that is needed to be all that God desires us to be.” —A. W. Tozer

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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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