Today, an unusual intersection.
It’s Pastor Andy Stanley vs. Bill Maher.
Pastor Stanley’s sermon today was about how to deal with mean people. Not bad people but mean people.
And Bill Maher, in his rant last Friday, talked about communism and woke and how they tried to change human nature by screaming at it.
Two great wise men that I follow avidly.
Stanley’s premise is that in life we have three choices.
We can return evil for good, evil for evil, or good for evil.
We all know the first option—evil people who do not have a spark of humanity in them. To them, it’s all about their needs and they would do anything to get it, and the rest of mankind be damned.
The second option, evil for evil, is the old Hammurabi code—a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye.
It’s ancient wisdom and seemed to have worked well.
Because if your detractors know that whatever they perpetrate on you will be returned in kind, they may be a little more hesitant in doing it.
And the third option is exactly what Maher was talking about—it’s against human nature. You can scream at it all you want but it won’t work.
It’s what communism tried to do, to appeal to man’s better instincts and we know how that worked out.
The third option is the central message of Jesus. It’s the ‘turn the other cheek’ approach to evil.
It’s beautiful in theory and it makes you feel good and warm inside.
But as a practical doctrine, it has failed miserably because nobody follows it.
And a good thing too.
Imagine if all the evil tyrants throughout history had been rewarded with the other cheek.
Where would we be today?
So-called ‘good’ teachers like Pastor Stanley preach the third option because it appears to give them the moral high ground.
Deep in their heart, they probably know it has no basis in reality, but they still preach it because it’s a beautiful message to preach on a beautiful Sunday morning.
Philip Hii 