By Selwyn Duke

Abraham Lincoln once said, "I know that God is always on the side of right; my concern is not whether God is on our side but whether or not we are on God’s side." Most who believe in God — and even many of those who see Him as being just a symbol — like to think that they are marching hand in hand with Him when promoting that for which they have passion. But Lincoln’s point is well taken, for I have noticed that this group of people can be divided into two sub-groups: Those who want to be on God’s side, and those who want God on theirs.

This is brought to mind when I hear the not too uncommon and very
contemporary claim that Jesus was a "liberal," a claim that has been
made quite recently in a book written by a very mediocre social
commentator of questionable faith. Of course, most of the people who
embrace this idea don’t really believe that Jesus is divine. But since
others do, they know that convincing Jesus to register as a Democrat or
join the ACLU could possibly bring them a whole new constituency.

C.S. Lewis, the great fantasy writer, philosopher and Christian
apologist, once wrote a very interesting book titled The Screwtape
Letters.  This work is quite unique in that it is written from the
point of view of a demon (which, incidentally, gives it something in
common with the book I mentioned above — wink) named Screwtape, who
counsels an underling named Wormwood on how to best undermine human
civilization. Among his many Machiavellian prescriptions is the
following (I’m paraphrasing): Man must be convinced to attach worldly
labels to Jesus. People can call him the "first communist" or the
"first liberal" or the first this or that — anything at all, as long
as they don’t think about Him first and foremost as being God. 

It’s great advice if you aim to destroy people’s faith and tear down
the walls of Christendom. After all, when you define Jesus as anything
other than God, you have diminished Him. Simply put, a person who thinks
of Him as something other than God isn’t thinking of Him as God. Jesus
said "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (the first and the last); this
tells us that He transcends time and that He is eternal, and then it
certainly follows that he transcends an ideology or philosophy. He also
said "I am the Way, the TRUTH and the Life," and as the Truth He gives
us the template that we should use to shape our ideology; we should not
use our ideology as the template and endeavor to fit the Lord into it.
God puts us in boxes based on what He allows us to do and what roles He
ordains for us. It is not our place to put Him in a box.

Interestingly, I have never heard conservatives proclaim Jesus to be
a "conservative." Of course, liberals would counter that this is
because Jesus didn’t seem to advocate principles that we now regard as
conservative. But I beg to differ.

The real reason is twofold: Firstly, the media and popular culture usually present us with what
could be called "Jesus light," but in reality is not Jesus at all.
Rather, he is an imposter who is the embodiment of a secular/liberal
agenda and filtered Gospels. Secondly and most significantly,
conservatives are much more likely to actually believe that Christ is
God. Consequently, they quite naturally don’t think of Him as anything
else.

What this brings to light is the fact that people who seek to box
and package Jesus betray their own lack of faith. And this group of
people can also be divided into two sub-groups: Political operators and
social activists of various stripes who seek to use Jesus for
propaganda purposes, and those who quite innocently think of Jesus as
something other than God because their faith in Him is non-existent or
lacking. Of course, the latter group comprises a very large number of
people, most of whom are just good everyday folks. However, since many
of them would make no bones about the fact that they don’t believe in
Jesus’ divinity and therefore do regard Him to be merely a worldly
figure, they are very susceptible to specious arguments designed to box
Him in a way that accords with the spirit of the age. So, let’s
investigate the issue.

I want to preface my remarks by saying that I, as should be obvious,
would not attempt to name Jesus after an ideology or philosophy that I
might consider to be my baby. I would be far more likely to name the
baby after Him. I often rally under the banner of conservatism, but
only because I believe that what we now call conservatism is the
mainstream ideology that most closely reflects Christian values.
Moreover, I would only embrace an ideology insofar as it was congruent
with God’s will as it relates to governance, and that ideology makes an
opponent of me when it opposes His will. I want to be on God’s side —
I know I can’t, nor would I seek, to get Him on mine.

Liberals will sometimes buttress their argument that Jesus is one of
them by labeling conservatives as being the modern day version of those
who conspired against Jesus: The Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group
of Jewish religious leaders who believed in strict adherence to Judaic
law. Jesus chastised them for being hypocrites and for acting only on
the letter of the law while completely ignoring its spirit. For, these
leaders would faithfully perform their rituals, make a great show of
their religiosity and admonish others to exhibit a formulaic devotion
to the faith, while at the same time deviating from it when it was
convenient for them to do so.

Liberals’ contention that conservatives are the inheritors of this
group’s modus operandi seems to be based on the notion that
conservatives share their lack of compassion, their hypocrisy and "do
as I say but not as I do" approach. However, I think this begs the
question: What group in our time seems to be enamored of the practice
of rule-making and rule-breaking?

In reality, it is the liberals who
propose a rule in the form of a law as a solution to every perceived
problem. And, like the Pharisees, they will violate their own rules when
it pleases them. Why, these are the people who tell us that there are
no absolutes, ergo all standards are negotiable. This belief is what
enables them to tell us with a straight face that judges can interpret
our Constitution to suit the times because it is a "living document."

Liberals’ contempt for standards is a corollary of the
moral relativism that is so often espoused by them, and the latter is
completely antithetical to what Christ propounded. After all, Jesus did
emphasize the spirit of the law, but He never said that this spirit was
negotiable. If it were, Jesus wouldn’t have ridiculed the Pharisees,
but rather would have said, "This is the spirit that I live by, but
hey, whatever works for you." No, Jesus was speaking of something real
and specific, something immutable and eternal, when He spoke of the
spirit. It’s the unchanging spirit of the real thing called the law,
not the mercurial spirit of a different real thing called an
individual’s emotional realm. Also, as I pointed out before, Christ
said "I am the Way, [and] the Truth  . . . "; He didn’t say a Truth.
Contrast this with the oft-uttered liberal sentiments, "That is your
truth, someone else’s might be different," "Truth is relative" and
"What is Truth?" By the way, do you know who else posed this question?
Pontius Pilate did — right before he condemned Jesus to death.

And what of the nature of Jesus’ teachings? Well, liberals like to
point out that Jesus preached love, charity, compassion and
forgiveness, implying that their ideology has a monopoly on those
qualities. It’s as if they believe that conservatives are opposed to
these virtues. But, correct me if I’m wrong, I never heard a
conservative say that love is a bad thing; "Yeah, we really need less
love in this world."

In reality, conservatives only differ on what they
believe love dictates — on what they believe constitutes genuine
love. For instance, they tend to recognize that true love means giving
your fellow man what he needs, not necessarily what he wants.
Conservatives also believe in charity, only, we know that it doesn’t
mean giving a person the shirt off someone else’s back. We know that
anyone with a good heart has compassion, but we don’t believe that
telling someone who’s hurtling down a road toward Perdition that he
should stay the course if he enjoys the scenery qualifies as such. And
we cherish forgiveness as much as anyone, but we know that it doesn’t
obviate worldly punishment. If it did, we’d have to empty out the
prisons. In fact, I suspect that forgiveness must be characteristic of
conservatives — how else could they tolerate liberals?

Now, from the general to the specific: Let’s investigate this
further by examining a few elements of Scripture. Two Bible quotations
that have found favor with liberals are "Let he who is without sin cast
the first stone" and "Do not judge lest you be judged." Both of these
statements are often used by liberals to discourage people from
rendering value judgments they find unpalatable.

Now, Jesus said the
former when he happened upon an angry mob that was about to administer
to a woman the prescribed punishment for adultery: Stoning. But what is
seldom mentioned is that after deterring the would-be executioners from
visiting that horrible fate on the victim, Jesus said, "Go in peace,
woman, and sin no more." This tells us very clearly that judgment
comes into play, because labeling something as a sin is a judgment.
The latter quotation is a prohibition against judging hypocritically
and unjustly. This is why elsewhere in the New Testament we are
counseled to "judge righteously."

Another favorite of liberals is "Turn
the other cheek," which is often used to discredit the idea of just war
and is misunderstood to be an endorsement of pacifism. What this
dictate actually refers to is that we shouldn’t act out of a spirit of
vindictiveness. In other words, use proportionate force to thwart evil
if and when necessary, but proceed out of a sense of justice and a
desire to protect the innocent and preserve the good — don’t do it to
simply get even.

Another mistake that liberals make is that they read these stories
and quotations, notice that Jesus prescribed leniency and then assume
He is one of them because they do the same. What eludes them is
context; they lack perspective because they only view things through
the prism of our age. In the times in which Jesus walked the Earth
draconian punishments were the order of the day. He prescribed leniency
because man was too harsh, but in an age characterized by
permissiveness, He would do just the opposite. This is because since
Jesus is Truth, He is the true center, so when society veers too far off
the mark in any direction He beckons us to come back into the light. To
use today’s political terminology (which didn’t exist in Biblical
times), when we gravitate too far toward the right, He is to the left of
us and asks us to move left; when society veers too far left, He is to
the right of us and asks us to move right.

Of course, since most
liberals don’t believe that Absolute Truth exists, they don’t believe
that there could be such a true center. They might say that Jesus is
just a "wise man." But even then, since different ages are
characterized by different moral failings — different characteristic
spiritual diseases, if you will —  would a sage prescribe the same
cures in every age?

Lastly, I don’t know of any conservative who has
proposed a "Stoning for Adultery Act." The fact of the matter is that
we all agree that the kinds of punishments that were administered in
the days of yore were disproportionate, to say the least. The
difference is conservatives also understand that Jesus probably
wouldn’t support a system that bestows upon convicts the right to sue
the government because they got creamy peanut butter instead of
crunchy or to have a sex-change operation at taxpayers’ expense.

Then there’s the issue that dovetails with this, which is that
liberals sometimes consider Jesus to be one of their kindred spirits
because they labor under the illusion that He always sought to move
people’s hearts in what we now call the liberal direction. In reality,
nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, consider the
issue of human sexuality. More than most anything else, liberals are
characterized by their very libertine sexual mores, and they constantly
endeavor to widen the parameters that govern sexuality. This lies in
stark contrast to what Jesus said, for every solitary word He
uttered about sexuality served to narrow the parameters governing it.
It is a fact: Jesus did absolutely nothing to inure people to sexual
behaviors that were considered untoward. And this lies in stark
contrast to the behavior of liberals, who now have even gone so far as
to advocate the governmental sanction of homosexual unions.

As to this, liberals are often quick to point out that while homosexual behavior is
condemned in the Old Testament, Jesus had nary a word to say about it.
However, Jesus never meant for the default standard to be that Old
Testament moral law would be considered to be null and void unless He
said otherwise. Rather, He meant for us to assume that such law was
completely valid and that we were enjoined to abide by it unless He
said otherwise. This is why Jesus said, "I have not come to destroy the
law, but to fulfill it."

Moreover, to reiterate what I just said, not only did Jesus not
rescind such prohibitions, He actually expanded them. For one thing, He
said that a man could only have one wife and that you could not get a
divorce, unless your spouse had committed adultery. He said, "A man who
divorces his wife makes an adulterer out of her."

And then there is
what should be the stake through the heart of the liberals’ argument —
the thing that Jesus said that could not be outdone even by a Puritan
straight from 1650’s Massachusetts. To whit: Not only did Jesus tell us
that we had to be chaste in deed and word, but also in thought  He told
us that even entertaining lustful ideas was wrong. He said, "You have
heard the Commandment, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But what I say
to you is, anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed
adultery with her in his thoughts." Any questions?

The desire to justify one’s behavior and passions is human nature,
and there are many groups that try to press God into service for their
cause. Some of these people are convinced that God wants them to
destroy the western world, while others simply believe that God wants
them to destroy the values that created that western world. Many of
these people reduce God to just a vehicle through which they can
promote their agenda, and religion to just a game that "enlightened"
folks like themselves can compete in for control of the masses. As for
the sincere among us, we would do well to ask ourselves a question: Would I want to be on God’s side, or, would I want Him on mine? ‘Tis a
point to ponder.