Better Than the World’s Best
Another June has passed: the month that has somehow come to be devoted to corporations and organizations proudly proclaiming their approval and celebration of what leads the list of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:19 and is the culmination of the debased descent detailed in Romans 1.
For many, it is hard to grasp how so much has shifted so quickly. Those who now unashamedly label certain perspectives as bigoted once held those same views. It all seems so foreign, perplexing, and absurd that it is hard to even know what to say.
Yet the opposite is increasingly true for the generation that has grown up as this has been unfolding. It’s hard to know why anyone would say that there is anything wrong with what our culture constantly portrays as good. Love is love. Be your authentic self. Y’all means y’all. What could be wrong with such things?
How are Christians to address what is celebrated by our culture but condemned by God? If you say anything, you risk your words being reduced to a caricatured, stilted, and intrusively prohibitive, Karen-esque finger-wagging message of “you shouldn’t do that.” To the world, our God is oppressive and arbitrarily restrictive. Where the Bible presents God as giving, gracious, and good, the world portrays him as a cosmic killjoy.
In the creation account of Genesis 1-2, only one thing is declared not good. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). God himself remedies this by crafting woman out of man, creating a couple that perfectly complements one another. In the logic of Genesis 2:24, two become one in marriage because of this design in their origins. “Therefore…they shall become one flesh.” No other relationship brings two people closer together: emotionally, experientially, spiritually, and physically.
To this couple – and to every married couple since – God has given an indescribable gift that is the climactic expression and culmination of their union where their metaphysical oneness becomes a literal-physical oneness out of which comes new life! What does it say about God that this act, reserved for the one-flesh bond of marriage, that literally explodes into life is, at the same time, the one act that is the height of human pleasure? Love, marriage, and new life are inseparably mingled together and in the center of where they all meet is this God-designed and God-given experience of exhilaration. What an incredible gift! How is it possible to say to this that God is a killjoy? All of this is from the mind of God and freely given to us by the hand of God. It is beyond ironic that this pleasure from the creator would be twisted and distorted by the created while he is mocked and rejected as if he were withholding something.
This world proudly celebrates the removal of all restraint as what’s best. But scripture paints a better picture of freedom. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17). And in Galatians 5, the Spirit of the Lord is at work in those who have been set free by the gospel producing fruit in contrast to the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-24).
What we have in creation and what we have as a new creation is better than the world’s best. The more we are convinced of this, the more we will “walk by the Spirit, and…not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). And the more we live by the Spirit, the more equipped we will be to call the world to something better. Jesus is better than the world’s best.
~ Andy Barker grew up in Boston, Ma. and relocated to Charlotte in 2008. He currently serves as an elder at LIFE Fellowship. He and his wife Melanie have five children and have attended LIFE Fellowship for ten years.