14 March 2024 John 5:31-47
Government needs Jesus. Government needs Jesus to keep the system from collapsing. Every day. Government depends on Jesus. It has for a long time.
In communities all over America, urban and rural, rich and poor, the needy are fed and clothed and housed largely because of local initiatives to help them. Take those local initiatives away, and government would not be able to pick up the slack. There would be widespread reductions in the amount of available help, which would inevitably lead to widespread increases in crime and protest, which would inevitably lead to unstable governments. Those local initiatives have been providing the help that keeps the peace all over America, and those local initiatives are almost entirely supported by people of faith.
Government depends on Jesus. It has for a long time.
The institutions that people trust the most all over America depend on Jesus. Hospitals, schools, and universities are the institutions that people depend on to sustain their health, and give them the skills they need to live beyond poverty and hopelessness. It is not possible to explain the emergence and continued existence of hospitals and schools apart from the Christians who first conceived, and built, and still sustain them. Public education emerged because of Christians, and today public education continues to exist because six million school children are taught every day at private Christian or parochial schools. If those schools did not exist, public education would have to expand by over 12% immediately, an expansion that is widely considered impossible. It would lead immediately to drastically diminished opportunities for the urban and rural poor, to say nothing of the instability in state and local governments that would inevitably accompany such an attempted expansion.
Government depends on Jesus. It has for a long time.
Look at any of the things that have afflicted us over the generations – tyranny and slavery, poverty and disease, anxiety, depression and suicide, and trace those problems back to their source. In every case you will find people trying to replace Jesus with someone or something else as the highest good. The diseased gender ideologies of these days, which millions of young people have uncritically adopted through their equally uncritical immersion in social media, have led to massive increases in mental illness – anxiety, depression, suicidal ideations and suicide attempts are at levels never seen before. Not surprisingly, this has happened at the same time that young people have said in record numbers that they don’t need religion, don’t want religion, have no religious affiliation, views that are swimming against the very hard tide of centuries of insistent religiosity. These attempts to replace God as the highest good have failed in such spectacular fashion that even podcasters like Joe Rogan, who attracts millions of listeners daily, are now saying out loud, “We need Jesus. If Jesus were to come back, now would be a good time.”
The values that have built all the things we trust, that have fed, educated and healed us, that have identified the defects in our common life and corrected them, are all values that began with Jesus and are affirmed in the Bible. We can understand neither the good nor the evil of these days – we can’t recognize the goodness of the good or the wickedness of the evil – apart from Jesus and the witness to Him in the Bible.
“The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me” (John 5:18).
We have been depending on Jesus for a really long time. Perhaps we need to say that out loud. Again.
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