Things Go Better With God

Yesterday’s football game between Texas and Tennessee was a barn burner.  It also featured the most vulgar, public taunt/celebration I have personally ever witnessed in football.  It resulted in an unsportsmanlike penalty, but after a few plays, the player, who admittedly had a great game, was put back in.  Forgive me while I sound like an old curmudgeon, but in my day no coach would have ever tolerated it – the player would have been done for the game if not the season.  The post-game presser (the link sadly contains video of the offense – perpetuating the vulgarity) was full of apologies and excuses, but they are pretty lame – from the player and the coach.  But then, shamefully, collegiate athletics aren’t really an educational adjunct about character formation anymore, are they.

In the latest edition of Imprimis, Jonathon Turley defends the Supreme Court and provides the best short summary of the difference between the American and French revolutions I have ever read:

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

Whether it be football games or political revolutions, things just go better with God.  Please note, this is not about Christianity – this is about the simple understanding that there is a Creator; a divine that places expectations upon us and that holds us accountable to those expectation.  Without God we are accountable only to ourselves and so winning overrides decency while terror is unleashed in the name of democracy.  God is not a belief, He is a necessity.

The question, “Where did God go?” should be on everyone’s lips.  But it is not.  God still boldly sits on a throne at the center of everything, but we ignore Him.  Our churches tell the world He is a benevolent caregiver there to make them feel better about themselves – even when they are vulgar or homicidal.  Oh sure, lots of preachers will decry the vulgarity in yesterday’s game and few would support the French revolution, but they would be sure to remind us that God still loves the vulgar players and the revolutionaries.

God does, in fact, love such people – but He remains willing to punish them – because His greatest concern is making them into good people, not making them feel good about who they are.  God acknowledges that who they are needs to be better than what it is right now.  He’d rather make them better with a carrot than a stick, but He’ll use the stick if that is what is called for.  Love does not settle for good enough.

Things go better with God because God makes each of us better.  Too bad we have forgotten that.  Too bad churches have forgotten that.