With all eyes on a certain Chinese balloon last week and the lies that evolved to cover for it, most of us missed other things that were going on that week.
The quiet departure of a Gitmo Al Qaeda detainee to Belize, for one example. Biden’s participation in the newly-revised National Prayer Breakfast for another.
It’s the prayer breakfast that I want to bring our attention to in this story.
The full transcript of Joe’s official remarks are available on the White House website, but there are a few lines I would like to specifically highlight.
Joe Biden, like so many public figures and politicians in our day, is more than happy to lean into beloved traditions when they suit him, so long as they can be transmogrified into something that can be shoehorned into the fashions and ideas of the day.
Here, you are seeing an aw-shucks folksiness in Joe’s invocation of familiar passages of Scripture only to wrench them out of their context to give them an alien meaning so that they may fit into the language and worldview of the secular colonialist left.
For example, after returning to some of his well-worn (or dog-eared if you are less charitable in your view of it) touchstones about his childhood yarns, the people he has known, a reference to Senator Coons, and an enumeration of various societal ills, he invoked familiar verses, only to deny their correct meaning in the very next breath:
We know that faith and history teach us however dark the night, “joy cometh in the morning.”
And that joy comes when we apply the commandments of Scripture. “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, and all thy soul. And “Love thy neighbor as thy self.” That’s the hardest one I think. At least it’s hardest here. Didn’t use to be as hard. I’ve been here a long time, but it seems to be getting harder. It’s easy to say; it’s hard to do.
But in that commandment lies the essence of faith. Loving our neighbors is also part of the essence of the American promise. A promise that comes with a new Congress that is more diverse and more different and more — more religions, more races, more co- — more diversity than ever before in our history: people of all faiths, some people of no faith; gay, straight; immigrant, Native American. Differences that express the infinite creativity of God who is able to see His reflection in countless ways in different people.
The commands of scripture that Joe so casually referenced were not taken from the Koran, nor from Sanskrit. Joe is invoking the words of Jesus Christ himself.
In that quote, Jesus took the entirety of Scripture, Old and New Testament, and, in answer to a question about ‘the greatest commandment’ gave a beautifully succinct answer that encapsulated all of the other commands.
Love the Lord Thy God. (He described how that was to be well and truly done.)
And love thy neighbor as thyself.
Without missing a beat, Biden, who is showing himself in this very speech to be a failed Christian, used the words of Jesus to preach a message of Universalism where every God and no God is equally good in the eyes of God.
If anyone truly believes that is what Jesus meant by love the LORD thy God, they’ve clearly flunked out of Sunday School.
He made us to be different people, cultures, and languages, true enough. But that does nothing to diminish the Biblical imperative that there is only One God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.
And in saying that all the law and the prophets hang on those two commandments, that includes the Ten Commandments, specifically:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
Jesus himself underscores the point that there is a right and a wrong way to worship God:
“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
We are not here ‘primarily’ for other people. That comes second, after the First and Greatest commandment.
In the very same message in which Biden called us to be ‘doers of the word’ (i.e. Christian gospel) he invites us to worship foreign gods and ultimately endorses a Secularized version of Unitarianism.
The Apostle Paul held out a warning for such people:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
Friends don’t let friends half-ass their faith like Biden.
If you know someone who needs their faith to be anchored in the great truths of scripture… put this in their hands and watch it change their lives.
Better still get a group of friends together with it at a men’s Bible study and watch it ignite them.
The Wildman Devotional: A 50 Day Devotional for Men
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