God is not a fact. He is truth. You cannot put Him into a box and the Bible certainly doesn’t either. We reduce God to our level when we use terminology designed for science. Science claims the place of God in our hearts and minds and we cannot give it a foothold in theology.
I remember the little fishes on the backs of cars maybe a decade ago. The Christian one that means Jesus Christ, Son of God, Lord and Savior. Then you started to see Darwin fish symbolizing evolution and atheism. Then the Jesus fish eats the Darwin fish then you see Darwin fish eating the Jesus fish. Variations continued in that manner.
We all want to have the last word in a debate, but there is nothing to debate as the existence of God is obvious. The point is there is nothing to win. We need to be real with non-believers about our struggles and not fight them. They will fight us because they know no better. But we know better and should come out in peace.
Jesus had much harder words for the Pharisees than He did for the unbelievers. Jesus dropped out of society to a large degree and unbelievers were drawn to Him. He did not fight them but spent time with them in their homes.
Christ is the Prince of Peace not the god of war. I don’t see where all the anger comes from. I see wrong on both sides of the politics aisle. Neither side will admit they support any evil but this is not believable to people who do not have a political party or who don’t vote.
We need to let the politics go. The Cold War was won and we don’t need to fight China in a nuclear war. Bad things happened socially and politically, in the past few decades, and there were great things that happened as well. We had many wars, made the environment much worse, and we have legalized many vice crimes. On the other hand, we have better legal support for animal rights and people with disabilities.
We built out the Internet which allowed us to reach more people with the Gospel but crime has shifted to the Internet as well. We, Americans, still are the leader by far of the entire world in every measurable category and yet young people continue to think things will get a little worse each year. We are losing jobs and homelessness is increasing although we still have a huge amount of wealth in this country.
We live in a country that essentially cannot be invaded and we are doing well after fighting major wars every decade and losing the peace in every one of them for over 50 years. We are basically indestructible by ordinary or outside measures. But our entire world system is very brittle and can go up any time. We have found that we can now fight wars electronically so no one gets hurt until they start shutting down our electrical grids.
No one is addressing the key problems because they do not anger, scare, or excite us. We are a society of entertainment and the easy road. We could agree on doing some things we all need to do like fix roads, improve Internet security, clean up trash, get homeless people jobs and housing, crack down on fraud and identity theft, and pay for the healthcare of disabled veterans.
Christ does not advocate fascism or communism, democracy or socialism. God wants to rule us directly. We need not fight the battles of this country figuratively or literally. Atheism is not new and it is not new in America. It started centuries ago.
The Church needs so have a vision for the future that we can agree upon. The country cannot agree upon many serious issues whereas the Church cannot agree on whether to wear masks inside. I really don’t care which way we go but many people do not attend church because of this and this needs to stop.
The problems can all be solved within our churches themselves. We are our own worst enemies. We sink ourselves and give up way too easily. We fight and bicker amongst ourselves.
We congratulate ourselves that we have seen the light in the same breath we say all have sinned. We say we want to save the world and yet we have largely given up on our own country. We celebrate Christs compassion and yet we have no appreciation for what our military goes through.
We should be the counter to our culture, not a subset of it. There are people with other views that can be Christians as well. Let us see if we can expand ourselves into categories of people we are less comfortable with.
We need to re-examine whether some things are cultural or Biblical issues. Our culture is fundamentally changing worldwide due to huge technological, ecological, and economic changes and we need to bring the Gospel to this new world culture. We need to see ourselves as entering an entirely different world culture. We need to approach it like we would a new mission field of a world that has never seen the Gospel in their language or adapted to their culture.
We need to bring English speaking Christianity into communion with Spanish speaking churches. We need to bring in churches dominated by other racial or ethnic groups. We need to expand into the Internet world but in a peaceful and low key way.
We should never give up doctrine and we should never accept defeat in evangelism. But we still must make major changes. The virtual world is about to be united with the physical world and we need to adapt and try to get ahead of the curve. Christians need to be more involved in watching technology, social trends, and intellectual discussions but in a way that is mostly about listening rather than debating.