TOSS THE MAGIC MARKERS

Peanuts has something to teach us about post-modernism—the belief that each determines his own truth and morality. From cobwebby, faulty memory I recall this strip: Linus, holding a bow and arrow, stands before a backyard fence with several targets drawn on it. Amazingly, the bulls-eye of each target has an arrow in its exact center. One of the characters, I forget which, walking up on Linus, marvelingly asks, “How do you do that?” Linus replies, “Oh, it’s easy. Just watch.” Linus pulls back on his bow and releases an arrow at the fence. With a thud, the arrow buries its head on a target-less area. Linus then walks to the fence with magic markers and draws a bulls-eye around his arrow and then concentric circles around the bulls-eye producing a target with the arrow perfectly in its center. Post-modernists take this liberty. They say their belief needs no justifying, and then they go about justifying it. They ascertain what it is they want to believe and how they want to live based solely on their own opinions, inclinations, desires, etc. Then, they construct aphorisms and arguments around that belief as if their choice of behavior and being is perfectly justifiable, reasonable, moral, and acceptable. I have been shocked at how many professed Christians, particularly Millennials, embrace behavior that the Bible and Church for centuries have called sin and then seek to justify their Scripture-defying behavior using the secular post-modernists’ manner of nebulous reasoning. The arguments are the same. The platitudes are the same. The talking points are the same. They want to choose their own morality and then claim it has hit a target of moral unassailability and acceptability. They attempt to draw around their belief and behavior concentric circles using Biblical language and concepts, such as “love” and “compassion.” They appeal to out-of-context Biblical phrases such as “Judge not,” and “God is doing a new thing.” They ignore the original intention of Scripture and contort it to mean whatever would accommodate their belief. Recently, I listened as a transgender justified his/her choices and behavior with accounts of his/her walk and encounters with God. Increasingly, people choose premarital cohabitation, gender-transitioning, and homosexuality but want to insist that their choice is acceptable to God, permitted by Scripture, harmonious to Christian faith. We do have the prerogative to choose how we live and what we believe; we do not have the prerogative to draw our own target. We don’t because God has already drawn the target on the fence. The loosed arrow of my choice is judged by whether it hits the bulls-eye of His target. Truth is, even with the greatest desire to live God’s way one many times misses the mark of God’s target: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” (Rom 3:23). But, even that is reassuring: Accepting God’s target as set, unchangeable, unalterable, the shooter knows when his arrow misses the target and knows when it hits. There is a security to having absolutes. Accepting God’s absolutes, when one misses God’s target, he doesn’t set about to redraw the target to accommodate his arrow. He seeks to make the adjustments to calibrate the trajectory of his life to the bulls-eye of God’s standard. I would rather aim for and miss what I know is God’s target than to live my life as I please and draw my own target around it claiming my life has been acceptable, pleasing, when it’s been anything but. The target is already drawn. Toss the magic markers.

TOSS THE MAGIC MARKERS

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