This blog initially appeared on the Stand
“No boys allowed.”
“No girls allowed.”
“Meet at the hideout every day after school.”
Why?
You were only a child. Yet, you were seeking order and predictability through rules.
Why?
I submit to you that you are more than a product of your heredity or your environment. You are created by God and in His image. God made you with a quest for order, government, rules, and predictability. He created you to transcend chaos.
The Genesis account describes the divine creative conversation.
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Genesis 1:26-28 NKJV
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in conversation. Holy Trinity acting as One. “Let us.” Humanity was created in the image of God, male and female, and given the mandate to procreate and dominate over creation.
Imago Dei. Order from chaos. Predictability from randomness. Beauty from blight. Safety from danger. Redemption from sin. God made us in His image.
However, sin tragically entered the picture of human history, the moral character of humanity was blighted. God made the first blood sacrifice in order to cover Adam and Eve with animal skins. And sin was passed down from the first generation of humans to each successive generation. Then, God became flesh to become the once-for-all sacrifice for our sins. Jesus, the sinless Son of God, became the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world.
We were created for order.
Return to the clubhouse hideout with me for a moment. There you are with your friends. You are making your rules. Something within your humanity demands it.
As we grow into adulthood, we resist the control of others’ imposing rules upon us. We rebel against parents. We revolt against governments. We resist the military might of nations. We reject the sexual mores of civilization. We abandon the religious traditions of previous generations that have brought us to the present.
The 1960s are a perfect example of broad-based cultural and moral revolution. The American Baby Boomers cried out, “Down with the system.” They objected to the moral codes of their parents. Rejecting the old morality, they installed a new morality to rule in its place.
But the new morality was just the old immorality.
“Free love.”
“Sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll” became the anthem of a generation.
But when the sinful rebellion was all grown up, it left heartache in its wake. Disease, divorce, fatherlessness, spiraling poverty, and the constant insistence that bad was good and good was bad.
The revolution against righteousness was underway. Humans need order and predictability. When the sacred text of Holy Scripture is rejected as a social and moral compass for a people, a new set of rules must fill its place.
Political correctness stepped forward as the perfect candidate. It offered order while ensuring the flexibility of constantly changing rules.
However, the new rules are simply a rejection of the old rules.
The old morality said, “Sex before marriage was sinful.”
The new morality proclaims, “You only live once. Have as much pleasure as you can.”
Consequences are disregarded at best and concealed by exponential immorality at worst. The results are demonstrated in spiraling disease, divorce, abortion, and fatherlessness.
The old rule said, “Sex is limited to one man with one woman.”
The new morality claims, “If two men love each other and are committed to each other for life, who is the church or the state to deny them true love?”
The social justice warrior advocates for its distorted caricature of fairness, and against all historical and biblical standards of morality and righteousness. Opponents of the social justice agenda are simply enemies who must be destroyed by any means necessary. The social justice warrior takes pride in protests, litigation, publication, destruction of lives, and the assassination of character.
Neo-Marxist social justice warriors attack each “oppressive system” insisting upon revolution as the solution. Demonizing opponents, the social justice agenda vilifies all objectors. It mutes all opposing evidence. It irrationally insists that “What we claim to be true is true simply because we claim it to be true.”
Cyclical reasoning.
The rationality of refutation is never entertained, allowing no alternative dialogue or data. Emotions rule.
Is there anything holy about such assassination of people, character, and culture? Is there anything just about such violently arrogant and anti-rational methodology to correct purported wrongs?
Tragically, when we depart from God’s plan for order we are bound for destruction.
But here is the beauty, the hope, and the wonder within it all. God made us for order. Even when we reject His order, we attempt to create our own order.
Humanity demands predictability. We cannot escape this reality.
Even in our rebellion, and our rejection of truth, we set up our revolutionary notions as if they were true. We respond to our relativistic fabrications as if they created order, predictability, and meaning within our universe.
Our very insistence upon a socially constructed falsehood to which we respond as if it were true, is a continual and constant witness to Creator God who made us in His image.
With our fists raised in rebellion to the heavens, our voices cackling with our proclamations of our distorted and purported truths, we betray even our rebellion, testifying to the reality that He made us for Truth.
God made us for truth. Every time we insist our lies are true, we bear witness to our Creator.
We cannot escape the reality that we are creatures and He is Creator. We are imago Dei.
