Holy Humor?

HOLY HUMOR?

 

 

There are internet sites which photoshop pictures of all sorts. This picture is one of them. It depicts President Obama kissing Prime Minister Cameron. We should expect this kind of demeaning humor which emanates from a heart of hatred. Those who photoshop President Obama would never do the same to President Bush and vice versa. This kind of self serving carnality should be beneath a follower of Jesus Christ regardless of how he feels about the spiritual status and the policies of President Obama.

A picture like this also exposes a hatred for gay people by mocking and deriding them. It has become a fashionable sport these days among evangelicals who burn the Bible in favor of conservative politics.

Please remove “Honor the King” and all of I Cor. 13 from your Bible if you believe this kind of humor is holy and acceptable before God. I love to laugh and I believe a sense of humor is a good thing. However I can see right through this kind of hatred which attempts to camouflage itself under the guise of humor. If we as believers ever hope to share the gospel with sinners we cannot mock them.

 

Let us say a family moved in next door to you. They seemed religious however you believed they were not born again. They seemed very nice. They were a family of four with a husband and wife and two well behaved daughters. Yes, they had unbiblical views about morality and the path to eternal life. Now let us suppose you began praying for them and asked God to use you and your family to lead them to a saving knowledge of Christ.

What would you expect God to say to you? How would God lead you in light of Holy Scripture. Would you be led to verbally and publicly assault your neighbors? Would you spread demeaning jokes about them to saved and unsaved alike? Would you call them names like antichrist or demons? Would you gather up a group of friends and attempt to have the entire neighborhood pressure them out of the neighborhood? Would you draw pictures of the husband with devil’s horns protruding from his head? Is that how you believe God might lead you?

And if you actually did all those things I suggested, could you really go to church and worship God? Could you be an intercessor for that family on one hand and be a caustic hater on the other? Could you really suggest you loved that family with the love of Christ? And given the nature of your speech and actions, could you really contend that you believe Jesus died for that family? And are you suggesting that you were much better than are they before you were saved? So you are judging people by the description of their sins rather than the weight of their sin before a Holy God, whose weight equaled your own?

 

I hope the things I suggested seemed ludicrous to you and completely unchristlike. But let us pretend that same family was named Barak, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha. “Oh, that would be different because he is the president not just some ordinary neighbor.” Oh? So you are a respecter of persons and you feel you have carte blanche to act unbecoming if the lost person is important? Do you know why you feel that way? It is because politics has seeped into your Christian life and you have become blind to the teachings of Jesus. And your speech and behavior is not done in a closet and completely out of the sight of others. You know why? Because when you speak and feel like you do you receive a sense of affirmation both from your religious and political clique, as well as a sense of self affirmation.

There is a term for that kind of affirmation.

It is called self righteousness, or more succinctly…sin.