Failure to Communicate

If you’ve ever talked to a cult member, such as a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness, then you know the importance of defining terms. That’s because Christian cults use the same biblical words as Christians, but they redefine key concepts. For instance, Mormons claim to believe in salvation “by grace through faith in Jesus Christ,” while refining grace to mean the opposite of “unmerited favor.” Even their conception of Jesus is different.  And if you don’t understand that they’re redefining concepts while using the same words, you’ll find yourself frustrated at your inability to communicate the truth to them.

Now, moving from lesser to greater, most people in 21st-century American culture do the same thing. They’ll talk about concepts like love & justice, but define them very differently than the way the Bible does. (Frankly, many people in our churches don’t understand the biblical definitions of love & justice.)

This explains why some complain that Christians are unloving when they don’t affirm homosexual relationships or transgender identities, or when we say that people of other religions aren’t right with God. Some will even accuse Christians of being hypocrites because, if Jesus taught us to “love our neighbors as ourselves, then why do you Christians want to deprive your neighbor of happiness by not affirming their lifestyle choices/identities?

Yet, the love that Jesus commanded is not about “working to make your neighbor happy by affirming their perceived identities or choices.” For one, happiness is not the defining quality of love. Happiness often accompanies the type of love that Jesus commands, but not necessarily in the short run. And secondly, Jesus’ brotherly love does not center on validating individual feelings because subjective desires are not the measure of goodness and truth. 

When Jesus tells us to “love our neighbors as ourselves,” this kind of love is about working to ensure goodness & truth in the lives of others. This definition is consistent with biblical love. The culture’s conception of love as “working to ensure the happiness of the individual” is not. 

The historic Christian understanding of love is grounded in the idea that goodness & truth are knowable because God has revealed them to us and recorded them for us in the Bible. Biblical love measures situations, actions, and attitudes by God’s word and works to bring about what’s good & true as determined by God. It does not assist in the pursuit of sin. To do so would be to facilitate the pursuit of spiritual harm—the very opposite of love. 

On the other hand, having rejected the Bible as God’s word (and having rejected the idea that we can know God’s truth with any practical certainty), our culture has lost its measuring stick for determining goodness & truth. Goodness & truth have been relegated to the realm of opinion rather than objective facts. Because of this, our culture has replaced “the pursuit of goodness & truth” with “the pursuit of happiness,” where happiness is found in the nearly unfettered pursuit of the individual’s subjective desires. 

In short, the biblical love that Jesus commands requires us to “work to bring about goodness & truth in the life of others” where goodness & truth are defined by God in His word. Whereas the cultural definition of love is about “ensuring the happiness of others” because objective goodness & truth have been lost to the cultural rejection of God’s word. 

When you reject God’s word, you’re left only with brute survival, feelings, and opinions. 

But it’s not just love; justice is another key concept that’s been redefined by our culture. According to the Bible, justice is the right and impartial treatment of others as measured by a proper standard. One must first discover what is right and good to determine the just course of action. 

Biblical justice starts by using God’s word to determine what is right and good. Psalm 19:7–9 (ESV) says,

The law of the Lord is perfect . . .  the testimony of the Lord is sure . . . the precepts of the Lord are right . . . the commandment of the Lord is pure . . . the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

Therefore, if you want to measure an action to determine whether it’s good, righteous, and just, test it using God’s word. And treat every individual equally under God’s law.   

But when the culture gives up access to God’s word by rejecting the Bible, it must substitute another standard to measure actions & behavior. Wokeism/Cultural Marxism is the force that is jockeying to replace Judeo-Christian values in our culture now. 

Equity is the measure of justice for Cultural Marxism. Whereas the Bible says that justice requires the law to be applied equally to rich & poor alike (Leviticus 19:15), equity disagrees. If a poor person commits a crime against a rich man, biblical justice says that the poor man should be punished for his crime. 

But that’s not necessarily the case if equity is the governing standard of justice. According to equity, if the poor man is part of a social minority group, and if failing to punish the poor minority will contribute to evening out the number of poor minorities in jail (in comparison to those in the majority), then it may be just to give the guilty party a pass (even if the rich man suffers at the hand of the poor man through no fault of his own). According to the standard of equity, justice is NOT primarily concerned with the individual. It’s concerned with the equality of outcome for groups. 

Once again, the biblical concept of justice and the cultural concept are not the same. 

And if you don’t understand the difference between these two conceptions of love & justice, you’ll likely find yourself frustrated and unable to effectively communicate Jesus’ message to non-Christians. 

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Rich Hoyer is the Senior Minister of Calvary Christian Church in Sellersburg, IN.  He is also the author of So You Think You Understand Christianity? Teaching Christianity to a Culture that Saturated with Misconceptions.