A private funeral service and interment for former First Lady Rosalynn Carter will be held today in Plains, Georgia. Yesterday, a tribute service in Atlanta made national headlines. It was attended by former President Jimmy Carter, now ninety-nine years old and in hospice care, along with President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and former First Ladies Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump.

Mr. Carter was unable to speak at the service, so their daughter, Amy Lynn Carter, read one of his love letters on his behalf. Written seventy-five years ago when he was serving in the Navy, it said in part, “When I see you, I fall in love with you all over again. Does that seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me.”

Watching coverage of yesterday’s service, I found myself pondering all that has happened in Mrs. Carter’s ninety-six years of life. Her husband was the first US president born in a hospital. Penicillin was discovered a year after her birth. She was sixteen years old when the first dialysis machine was built, twenty-eight years of age when the polio vaccine was made available, and forty years old when the first heart transplant was performed.

Now my Apple Watch tracks my blood oxygen, heart rate, time spent asleep, respiratory rate, fitness activities, and wrist temperature. Artificial intelligence and advances in genomics are revolutionizing health care.

However, has our morality kept up with our medicine?

Anti-Israel protesters plan to disrupt Christmas tree lighting

The United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine on this day in 1947. The plan would have created an independent Jewish state and an autonomous nation of Palestine, but Arab leaders rejected the proposal. Hamas’s terrorist invasion of Israel on October 7 and the war it started are just the latest consequences of their rejection.

However, as I noted yesterday, many in the West continue to blame Israel for a conflict Hamas instigated. As postmodern relativism has deluded our culture into embracing “post-truth” subjective ethics, millions of people believe truth to be whatever they believe it to be. Consequently, protesters continue to claim that Israel’s response to Hamas’s atrocities is morally equivalent to those atrocities, if not even more “genocidal.”

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NOTE: I have written a book on the Israel–Hamas war which we are releasing as a free digital download. I invite you to get your copy here.

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For example, anti-Israel protesters calling themselves “Within Our Lifetime” glued themselves to Sixth Avenue during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and splashed red paint all over the New York Public Library flagship, causing $75,000 in damage. Another anti-Israel group shut down the Manhattan Bridge on the holiday weekend. Now anti-Israel demonstrators plan to disrupt the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony this evening.

To those who accuse Israel of genocidal crimes against Palestinians (when it is actually Hamas that seeks the genocide of the Jews), consider the story of Yahya Sinwar. He was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison for attempted murder when his life was saved by brain surgery, reportedly to remove a tumor. He was released in 2011, one of a thousand Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Twelve years later, he masterminded the October 7 invasion that slaughtered more than twelve hundred people in southern Israel.

“Inching ever closer to the abyss”

Telegraph columnist Allister Heath is right: “There is a fundamental, profound moral and legal distinction between deliberately torturing, raping, and exterminating women and children, and the accidental, tragic death of civilians used as human shields as the result of careful, considered action taken by a law-bound army engaged in self-defense.”

Because so many in Western society are rejecting this distinction, Heath warns, “The world is inching ever closer to the abyss, and Hamas’s stooges are helping to drag us into another dark age.”

The rejection of objective truth and morality typified by the current denigration of Israel and the Jewish people tragically deserves Heath’s warning. We live in a culture where 40 percent of people willfully choose to be ignorant of the negative consequences of their actions. Similarly, multitudes are choosing willful ignorance of the realities in Hamas’s war with Israel and a multitude of other consequences resulting from our escalating rejection of biblical morality.

Why is this situation so dire for our future?

“My grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy”

In his 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, Ronald Reagan quoted the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755): “The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principle upon which it was founded.” The “principle” upon which America was founded is the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and thus “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If “truth” is no longer “self-evident” and objective, the equality of all people and the rights that ensue are no longer “self-evident” and objective. And the republic built on those rights is imperiled.

I am praying daily that Americans understand the consequences of rejecting biblical truth and morality before it’s too late. If we admit our spiritual blindness, we can claim God’s promise:  “I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground” (Isaiah 42:16). If we admit our spiritual poverty, we can claim God’s provision: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

And when he does, we become the change our culture needs to see.

Rosalynn Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, said at her tribute service yesterday, “My grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy, her life was a sermon.”

What sermon will your life preach today?

Denison Forum

Casey McIntyre was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2019 and died on November 12, 2023, at just thirty-eight years of age. In the days leading up to her death, she urged friends to donate to a campaign that would cancel the medical debt of strangers. By the time she died, that campaign raised nearly $200,000, enough to pay off nearly $19 million in medical debt. As of today, it has more than tripled its impact.

In all the coverage I have seen of her remarkable impact, no one has taken a contrarian view—nor should they. Just for the sake of objectivity in reporting, someone could question whether the money could be put to better use or whether medical debt should be retired in this way. But Casey’s courageous generosity of spirit was so compelling that her story should be told with the affirmation it has received.

Unfortunately, such moral clarity is in short supply in our “authentic” society.

“The job of the army is to protect the civilians”

Authentic is Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year.” This should not surprise us since it is so often used these days to connote seeking one’s “authentic voice” and “authentic self.” Our relativistic culture assures us that we are what we believe ourselves to be, whether this claim relates to our gender, sexual orientation, or nearly any other identifier. Anyone who disagrees is being intolerant, which is the cardinal sin of our culture, or so we’re told.

The same is now true of others: if you think Israel is committing “genocide” and Hamas’s terrorists are “freedom fighters,” you can join multitudes of demonstrators who agree. This despite the fact that Hamas is unambiguous in its stated desire to completely eradicate the Jews (which is what a “genocide” actually constitutes), while Israel has possessed for decades the military capacity to take Palestinian hostages and yet has never done so.

A dear friend and I were discussing over the weekend the courage of our mutual friend now serving with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. She said of him: “It is hard to grasp such selflessness and devotion to fellow countrymen and complete strangers, knowing that his possible loss of life is real and the impact would be devastating for his own wife and children.”

And yet our friend risks his life every day to free hostages he has never met. His latest text notes, “The most important thing right now is the release of as many hostages as possible.” He explains why: “The job of the army is to protect the civilians, not vice versa.”

Of course, Hamas clearly disagrees as it hides its terrorists behind civilian hostages and other human shields. And yet, its advocates in the West continue to claim that the murderers are the victims of a conflict their atrocities instigated. (For more, download our free ebook, The War in Israel.)

“The worst in the nation had prevailed over the best”

How have we come to such a place of moral confusion and obfuscation?

One answer was explained in an insightful article published on the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy by R. Jordan Prescott, a private contractor working in defense and national security. He notes that many Americans reacted to the president’s tragic death by blaming America. For example, journalist James Reston wrote: “Somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best . . . something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence.”

This reaction led to the narrative that America is itself deeply flawed and violent. According to Prescott, a new “liberalism” emerged that accused our country of “a seemingly inexhaustible list of American sins—greed, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, militarism, and imperialism.”

Their “solution” was to transmute this dogma of collective guilt and identity consciousness into what is often termed “woke” ideology today. Prescott notes that America’s educational institutions have been captured and used to advance this dogma “in direct opposition to the Judeo-Christian premises of the American Creed.”

In this version of reality, truth claims are but tools of societal transformation. Political strategist James Carville spoke for many in his profession: “Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you’re smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is.”

However, a relativistic “morality” that weaponizes truth for political ends and celebrates terrorists who kidnap children has its roots much further back in history than 1963.

“The further away you are from the devil”

Here are the first words spoken by the tempter to the first humans: “Did God actually say . . .” (Genesis 3:1). From then to now, Satan’s first move in his strategy to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10) is to steal, kill, and destroy the truth.

He knows that when “truth is relative,” the truth that Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) becomes just “your” truth or “my” truth. And when we jettison biblical truth and objective morality, we have no compass or map for the journey and are, in the most basic definition of the term, lost.

What is the way forward? Jesus assured us, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Note the order: first we must “abide” in God’s word, which means to think and live biblically. When we obey what we know from Scripture, then and only then are we “truly” Jesus’ disciples. Such holistic obedience positions us to “know the truth” as the Spirit guides us (John 16:13). As we know and live this truth, it will “set us free” (John 8:32).

Such biblical living is what Scripture means when it calls us to “submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7a) so we can “resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (v. 7b). In this way we claim the promise, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (v. 8).

Billy Graham summarized today’s conversation with advice everyone in America needs to hear and heed: “Don’t be deceived by Satan and his lies. Instead, stay close to Christ—because the closer you are to him, the further away you are from the devil.”

How will you “stay close to Christ” today?

Denison Forum