This is in-group/out-group signaling.
The distinction between the two photos isn’t accidental. In the image on the left, she presents as a heterosexual white woman. In the image on the right, she presents as more visibly LGBTQ.
The contrast is doing the moral work for their tribe.
It signals which version of her they would consider fully human. The version that is more worthy of empathy, dignity, and protection.
And it reveals their indifference to brutality and murder when the victim is considered in the outgroup.
Now imagine if there was someone who died as the propitiation for our sins, Who imparts His holiness and righteousness onto us, making us spotless before God, His blood washing us clean.
Imagine
“It’s evil they allowed their child a chance at life and he was born whole and loved for his entire life. They should have inserted a pipe into his skull and sucked out his brains before cutting him up into pieces and forced his mother to birthing the dismembered parts”
Church father Justin Martyr (AD 100–165) named four major challenges to Christians:
1. sexual immorality
2. wealth
3. magic
4. ethnic hatred
Sub technology for magic and little has changed in almost 2,000 years.
(@DrewDyck via @RedeemJustin)
We WILL get it even if we don’t ask for it.
We will get it through how it changes our culture and the relationships we are inextricably linked to.
We will get it through a child or spouse who becomes addicted, & through declining marriage and birth rates to AI mistresses.
Paul Williams doesn’t realize it but he just acknowledged a core fact we use to argue for the resurrection. If no one was expecting the Messiah to die & rise then no one would have invented such a story. It wasn’t in the background knowledge. Therefore, the theory that Jesus rose from the dead better explains this, than the theory that the resurrection was made up. Thank you, @freemonotheist for helping us make the case that Jesus rose from the dead.
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It's another great day to tune out distractions, fill your heart with the love of Christ and the hope of heaven, and then look to serve others and meet needs around you.
My latest on Substack is a bit more personal. I wrote about what I have always called 'my greatest fear' - the passing of time. In the piece, I've called it "time-sickness." Only Jesus could heal my terminal condition.
Maybe it will help you too.
Typological hermeneutics:
In 1 & 2 Kings, the stories of the kings—mostly bad, some good—end with the question, “are the rest of his deeds not recorded in the chronicles of the kings?”
John’s Gospel ends with a statement: all the books in the world couldn’t contain his deeds.
Because I believe in the real, Spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper (Christ and his benefits are communicated to believers by means of the Holy Spirit when they partake in faith), I believe it happens no matter what people say is (or is not) happening in the Supper.