The gospel turns everything upside down – it is the first who are last and the last who are first; the humble are exalted and those who exalt themselves are humbled; and we die to self in order to find our life. It is not what we would expect, and is all part of what it means to be members of a counter-kingdom. Another example of this concerns the way the Bible expects the Christian to combine hard-headedness with soft-heartedness.
In the Bible, faith is never represented as gullibility. Quite the reverse, those who are noble examine the Scriptures to test truth claims that are made (Acts 17:11). We are not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits to see whether they are from God (1 John 4:1). Test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thess.5:21). Sometimes this use of the mind can go astray as when Job and the Psalmist questioned the way that God was ordering the universe (Job; Ps.73). In the New Testament the disciples were not quick to believe in the resurrection of Christ. They only came to believe as the last option, when all other possible explanations had been found wanting (e.g. Luke 24:1-12; John 20:24-29). Yet the overall impression is certainly that God is not well-pleased with airy-fairy naivety. As the Proverb puts it: ‘The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps’ (Prov.14:15). So a hard head is not out of place in the kingdom of God.
Yet it is to go hand-in-hand with a compassionate heart. When Jesus saw the crowds, He had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd (Matt.9:36). That is compassion for their souls. We are also meant to be compassionate towards those who are suffering in any way, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear. ‘Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and He will repay him for his deed’ (Prov.19:17). Kindness and gentleness are fruit that the Spirit yields in the lives of those with saving faith in Christ (Gal.5:22-23). So a hard head is to go with a soft heart.
With the general apostasy from the faith, we have increasingly seen this reversed. Hearts have been hardened (Mark 3:5; Eph.4:18). When Dan Savage, who is paraded in the media as an anti-bullying sex expert, was asked on Q & A on 4 November 2013 what was the most dangerous idea that would actually help society, he replied that he had always been pro-choice but that there were too many [blasphemous expletive] people in the world so abortion should be mandatory for the next thirty years. Even some of the obsequious ABC audience – and its smirking presenter – seemed to be rather shocked. The next day Savage tried to make out that he was joking.
It would be difficult to top this for hardness of heart, but Andrew Webster, the Chief Sports Writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, did his best to at least equal it so far as soft-headedness is concerned. Having been promoted to the front page, he revealed that he was homosexual and that his life had been saved by hearing Justice Michael Kirby pronounce that nothing is impossible to the human spirit. Leave aside the acceptance of an unnatural and decadent lifestyle, this was a philosophy so vacuous and unrealistic as to be embarrassing. Yet the letters page the next day was laudatory in the extreme with regard to this word of inspiration for daily living. One would think that to tell parents of a child with cancer, for example, that nothing is impossible to the human spirit is so out of place as to be cruel.
A week later and it was announced that Yoko Ono had launched her War is Over! (if you want it) exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At first glance, this might simply strike one as just one more exhibition of rather odd art. Visitors are encouraged to write their hopes on slips of paper and attach them to the Wish Tree for Sydney. In Play It By Trust, two people play with an all-white chess set. Apparently all this is the work of five decades, and it took almost four years to get it all ready for the Sydney exhibition. Ever the peace child, Yoko Ono declared: ‘I’m sure we’ll keep changing and one day, very quickly, we’ll have heaven on Earth and we will create that.’ Utopian hallucinations have a certain charm, one might concede, but they add little to our understanding of how to live in this fallen and dangerous world.
The Christian is to seek to combine a hard head with a soft heart, while the unbelieving world increasingly seems addicted to a soft head and a hard heart.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes