Several years ago I was the guest of a friend on an elk hunt in Wyoming. It was an eight hour ride on horseback through mountains and meadows to get to the base camp. There were places on that ride, to and from the camp, where you held the reins very lightly and let the horse "do his thing". A wrong step to the right or left could plunge the horse and you to your deaths.
I think of this when I read of people who call themselves "evangelical Christians" taking positions clearly contrary to biblical teaching on such things as same sex relationships and marriage. They are plunging off a spiritual cliff and risk the loss of their souls and the souls of their followers. They are plunging off to the left. Someone like me faces the danger of plunging off to the right.
The men who crucified Jesus plunged off to the right. The group known as the Pharisees began as a movement to defend the Law of Moses and all of what we call the Old Testament. They plunged off the cliff because they closed their eyes to a large body of Scripture about the Messiah being a suffering Servant. They also closed their eyes to other Scripture, Jesus said, about God desiring mercy more than sacrifice.
But let's go back for a moment to the people going off the left side. Their movement, if I can call it that, goes back at least to the 1970's with leaders like Jim Wallis who founded Sojourners, and the popular speaker Tony Compollo. I would include Ron Sider who wrote the book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. When speaking at churches Wallis would hold up a Bible that had been cut to shreds and accuse his white, middle class Protestant audience of cutting out of the Bible everything about helping the poor. Compollo said similar things, even claiming that all the poor of the world, regardless of what they believed or did, were automatically the 'brothers of Christ'. He was confronted by a group of evangelical theologians for this and backed off somewhat.
These three men, and many others, allowed their sincere compassion to blind them to the truth about the actual causes of poverty since the 1960's. They embraced badly discredited economic policies of forcible redistribution of wealth. So, you can see why they were sometimes called Marxists. Their irrational compassion led them into a form of man-centeredness or humanism. The poor were made into an idol which, in turn, has led them to support the most anti-God and anti-Christ politicians and political platforms of modern times. To better understand the errors of men like this I strongly recommend two books: Toxic Charity and Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulation.
This distorted sense of compassion and man-centeredness has also led at least two of these men to support same sex marriage. They had genuine compassion for people struggling with same sex attractions. But their remedy for the pains of these people was, in effect, "go ahead and sin; grace will abound". They are being followed in their plunge off the cliff by some other high profile "evangelicals". Surveys indicate that around one third of people under 40 who consider themselves to be evangelicals and an alarmingly high number over the age of 40 are jumping off this same cliff. What was unthinkable just a few years ago is now a growing movement among people who call Jesus Lord. Will they someday hear from Him the words, "depart from me you who practice lawlessness"?
But, it is also possible to go over a cliff on the right side. "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (I John 4:8) Reading this and Jesus' parable about Lazarus and the rich man, gives me a sense of holy fear. That story in Luke 16 was not given, as we were often told, for the purpose of describing hell. It was given to tell me that if I say I love God but refuse to help someone hurting within arm's reach of me, then I am a lost soul. It warns me lest I reject compassion just because some may have a twisted and irrational kind. It cautions me against all kinds of smugness and arrogance. Watching those who are plunging off the cliff to the left warns me against following the spirit of this age, whether that wind is blowing toward the left or the right.
Back to the elk hunt. To the best of my knowledge no horse and rider ever went off one of those cliffs. The only accident I know of was when the friend who took me on the hunt was thrown by his horse onto a boulder in the midst of a stream. We learned a year later that horse had a history of things like that. By the mercy of God my friend survived. What do you and I learn from that episode? -- the value of a dependable horse! And how about this: if Jesus is compared to both a lion and a lamb would it also be fair to say that, like a dependable horse, He, through the Holy Spirit, is carrying us? I don't know about you but I'm going to let Him navigate the cliff of living in this dangerous moment of history. I know where He is taking me and I know He will get me there.
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