One of the things I’ve noticed recently is how myopic and narrow-minded people have become about everything. I mean, if you have an opinion about anything, someone out there wants to rake you over the coals for it. Don’t like animals? Someone hates you for that. Love animals? Someone else hates you for that. Doesn’t matter what you think, somebody is ready and willing to vehemently disagree.
But where did this come from? I’m old enough that I can remember things weren’t always this way. Why is everyone suddenly enraged about the stupidest little things? Why aren’t people’s well-established opinions respected at all any more? Why does anyone else even care what I eat, or wear, or think?
Simply put, I think it’s because people have been trained to hyperfocus their anger. The current generation is the product of decades of targeted marketing, social media, and manufactured outrage. They think small. Their focus is small.
I think what’s happened is that when people realized that the World’s problems were bigger than they could handle, they hyper-focused on one thing they would become champions for. And they will defend it to the death.
Most people’s minds aren’t big enough to grasp how massive-scale immigration (for example) affects a host country. But they can focus on a single person’s struggle, so they blow the entire thing up based on the tiny little piece of information they have. They’re approaching a nation-wide problem with a single-person argument. You can see this by the way they discuss it: “Immigration restriction is wrong, because it would negatively impact this specific person who wants to immigrate!” They never address how it impacts the rest of the citizens already there, they won’t discuss how it impacts the state or nation’s budget, and they cannot grasp the problem on that large of a scale. Small minds and small thinking can’t solve big problems.
You see this mindset trotted out for any major political issue. But you also see it used when people want to justify something in Scripture that isn’t consistent with what we know about God’s nature from other scripture.
We see this in modern times by teachers like Andy Stanley and Bill Johnson. They both deliberately pull scripture from parts of the New Testament that they like, and say “now the old doesn’t matter, Jesus is all you need.”
Stanley says “We need to unhitch our faith from the Old Testament.”
If we focus only on Jesus without the lens of the Old Testament, then we don’t really understand who Christ is or why He came. That’s thinking myopically. That’s thinking about the Word Made Flesh, who has been in existence since before time itself, through the lens of only about 3 years. You won’t see the big picture. And God’s redemption plan is much bigger than that. God has been revealing Himself all along, it didn’t suddenly begin with Christ’s birth.
Johnson says “There are things that are true, and there are things that are more true. God’s judgement is true- but God’s love is more true.”
No. Johnson is extremely wrong in this matter, because by saying God’s love is greater (or more true) than His judgement, he’s saying that the judgement for my sin was lessened. And who took the judgement for my sin? Jesus.
By saying God’s love is greater than His judgement, he’s lessening the severity of what Christ paid for us. And without the millennia of sacrifices laid out in the Old Testament, how will we ever understand what it meant for Christ to become the sacrifice for us? How can we understand God’s holiness without seeing Israel punished time and time again for disrespecting God’s law?
I would challenge you, intelligent reader, to think bigger. Don’t hyperfocus on simplistic solutions to very complex problems. Don’t ignore centuries of doctrine, scripture, political history, or socio-economic precedent for a quick stab at your “15 minutes of fame.” Sure, there are itching ears who want to hear that. But they’re small-minded too.
Don’t settle for small: think big, because God is big, and we were made in His image.