Some of Us Don't Quite Get Him, Though
How pop virtue signaling does not a faithful, obedient or fruitful church, disciple or servant of the Lord make.
Even though Super Bowl LVIII was only a month ago, with the speed, timing and rate with which the stuff that happens these days is presented to us by the powers and authorities of the sinful world system, it feels like it may as well have been last year.
Which is funny, because at nearly the same time last year, we took a look at what then was considered a “scandalous controversy” by the Mark of Cain cult, who were up in apoplectic arms about how and why somebody “dared” to show an ad about the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, during the Super Bowl.
We took a close look at what all the hubbub was about in “The Dangers of Hit-and-Miss Missionary Work;” and we came to some well-reasoned, Word-of-God-based and Holy Spirit-led conclusions about the ad and the organization behind it, He Gets Us.
To remind us of how we characterized their effort then—and to put what we’re going to discuss today in its proper context—here’s what we concluded:
“He Gets Us has a noble intention... But the way they’ve chosen to approach their outreach from a marketing-appeal perspective, plays a dangerous game and walks a precarious line between godliness and the risk of false teaching that doesn’t lead anybody to the Lord or to salvation into eternal life; but through mistaken, incomplete, unclear, inaccurate understanding, only makes potential believers ripe for being led astray—by the wolves in sheep’s clothing who wait behind every tree, bush, blade of grass and yes, many pulpits, too—into a deadly, spiritually fatal lie... All that said, for every soul that because of He Gets Us, eventually does make it to a true relationship with God the Father through the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, it’s not an unworthy fishing expedition... Except for the ones who—because of bad bait or a weak line—will get away.”
Well, they’re at it again.
During Super Bowl LVIII, the He Gets Us people dropped their latest effort: an ad that focuses on the Lord Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet, as recounted in John 13:1-17. This year’s ad is another montage sequence of shots similar to last year’s production; these ones all appearing to be strictly AI-generated in that creepy “too-real-for-real” AI way, and depict scenes with various people washing the feet of various people, in pairings that appear to be designed to reflect the nebula of what we’ve come to know as “woke ideology.”
The overt message is an ostensibly worthy spiritual one: “Jesus washed feet and taught love and acceptance, so that’s what we all should do.”
The covert message, buried in the subtext expressed in the emotionally-gripping imagery, is along the lines of the politically ideological bent we’re by now used to seeing coming down on us from the morally-high horses of the virtue-signaling industry: “The ‘privileged’ are bound to serve the traditionally-marginalized and to validate them as they are.”
Exemplifying precisely what our conclusions told us about He Gets Us and their efforts: cherry-picking episodes, passages or verses from the Gospels that can be easily attached to a particular socio-political ideology, when they’re employed in a spiritually and scripturally semantic vacuum completely hoovered of all their true spiritual and scriptural context and meaning.
The effect of doing so in distorting the truth of God’s word, is what we described in the citation of our conclusions from last year. How they’re doing it this time with this year’s ad, is what we’re going to look at now.
Before we do, let’s put that in its proper context by outlining the general point before we get to the specific example of it we’re discussing here now.
“I tell you this so that no one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments…” Colossians 2:4
Last month, actor, director, producer, Democrat political activist and chronic TDS sufferer, Rob Reiner, at the time plugging his soon-to-be box-office dud God & Country (which grossed a sad $38,415 over its extended-weekend, national release on Feb. 16-18), expounded about the Lord Yeshua’s faith in an interview with Newsweek:
“[T]his movement that they have here seems completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was about peace and love and helping thy neighbor and those less fortunate than ourselves... And I thought that was something that we should all aspire to. So to me this movement is going totally opposite the teachings of Jesus.”
Reiner’s talking about the politically active conservative Christians in America his movie just bashes for its 1hr30mins’ running time, from a political perspective as a political enemy of theirs. What he says about them isn’t entirely out of line, though, and I agree with some of it in a strictly spiritual and scriptural extent; which is precisely what I was doing when we reviewed Michael L. Brown’s The Political Seduction of the Church: How Millions Of American Christians Have Confused Politics with the Gospel, in a Substack from Jan. 2023.
But we’re not talking politics here, which is all Rob Reiner’s about with this. He should really stick to making entertaining movies, most of which are very good. We’re talking about how people in general—and influential people with a public profile that reaches millions, specifically—who have seriously limited understandings of the Lord Jesus, Holy Scripture and the complex spiritual meaning and dynamics of the faith with which God’s grace brings salvation to the world... so often make public pronouncements presuming to comprehensively encapsulate the entirety of a spiritual system designed by God and developed as an expression in the world over thousands of years...
By fixating on a single passage or verse or spiritual principle that in and of itself may be true, but that also by itself in no way can be made to express the totality of what the apostle Paul calls the “whole counsel of God” in Acts 20:27; or the entire complexity of the Lord’s faith in general.
So this doesn’t quickly runaway-freight-train into a theological dissertation, let’s cut to the chase: nobody can pick out a single aspect of the Lord’s teachings, like “Love your neighbor,” for example, and then say: “Jesus says be nice to one another and knowing that’s enough to make me both a follower and an expert in understanding what the Lord’s faith is all about.”
There’s “a little” more to the Lord Yeshua and his faith—and to being a sincere believer and follower of his—than a talking point.
The general idea is that we can’t take a single aspect of the Lord or his faith and think that because it comports with our own proudly imagined, worldly understanding of ourselves, that somehow means we’re on board with Jesus, he’s all in with us, we’re saved and we understand everything there is to understand about the Lord’s faith and God’s word down to every last jot of it.
There’s “a little” more to the Lord Yeshua and his faith—and to understanding the immeasurable complexity of God’s word—than a talking point.
And just like simply reducing all of Jesus and all of God’s word down to “Be nice to your neighbor” doesn’t make one a believer and follower, it also doesn’t do any favors in making others who are equally unaware of God’s truth, believe that’s all there is to Jesus, his faith, and most importantly, to the salvation into eternal life and from eternal judgment, to which that faith leads.
And that’s exactly what this new “Washing Feet” ad from the He Gets Us people is doing as an example of what we’ve just said.
He Gets Us… But Do We Get Him?
The ad has—I’ll be charitable and cast all wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing suspicions aside for the moment—the good intention of telling people Jesus washed the disciples’ feet as an act of service; which in itself is correct.
What’s not correct is to explicitly indicate that’s all there is to it and stop there.
Because beyond setting the example of a good servant, the Lord Yeshua was doing much more with that act than just showing an example. What he was also doing was providing the instruction consistent with his whole body of teaching, that entrance into the kingdom of God isn’t just “I believe!” and we’re in. The washing of the feet of sinners by the sinless Son of God is also symbolic of the fact that it’s through God’s grace—and the blood of the man who was about to be slaughtered for the sacrifice that brings us that grace—that the sinner is saved in the first place; and that it’s only through God’s grace the sins of the sinner can be washed away and the sinner be made clean and acceptable in the kingdom of heaven.
And so not only are we bound by the Lord’s faith to serve our fellow men and women; we’re also bound by that same faith to encourage them to embrace the kingdom of God by believing in the Lord, yes, but not only. The sincere and complete follower of the Lord is also characterized by the repentance of their sins and their sinful lifestyle; by submitting completely to the direction of God’s word and his will and, most importantly; by obeying his commands. One of which is, yes, to believe; but others of which include: “Repent!” “Submit!” and “Obey!”
“I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance... Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near... Unless you repent, you too will all perish,” the Lord Yeshua tells us in Luke 5:32, Matthew 3:2, 4:17 and Luke 13:3. “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” This is what Peter told the 3000 he baptized in the first public act of his ministry in Jerusalem on the Pentecost after the Lord Yeshua’s ascension.
And so, furthermore, convincing people to think all they have to do to be saved by Jesus is be nice to people, does them the disservice of making them believe they can be all right with God and “get into heaven” if all they do is pick a cherry out of the Cliff Notes version of the faith, without reading the whole book and playing by all of its rules.
It doesn’t do any favors to people unaware of God’s truth, to portray the Lord Yeshua as just a nice guy who was nice to people, without telling them of the Good News and encouraging them to believe the truth that the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, is the Son of God who came to earth to redeem the world from its sinfulness, was crucified and resurrected by God the Father...
And is coming back soon to finish in the world the job he finished on the cross.
It also doesn’t do them any favors to make it appear, as the He Gets Us “Washing Feet” ad does, that salvation in the Lord Jesus ends at “I believe,” and doesn’t include by spiritual and scriptural necessity the evidence of our faith that’s made manifest in the repenting of our sins, the total submission to God’s word and his will for our lives, and the obeying of his commands.
So the faithful and obedient believer in the Lord Jesus doesn’t just wash people’s feet as an act of service or kindness to them; and that act of service or kindness alone doesn’t in and of itself make a faithful and obedient believer out of us.
We’re not called by the Lord to just be nice to people and accept them and their sinfulness just the way they are; because God himself doesn’t welcome us and our sinfulness into his faith just the way we are.
He accepts everybody just the way we are—that’s the measure of his immeasurable grace.
Yeshua loves and accepts us despite—not because of—the sinners that we are.
But he doesn’t expect us to remain just the way we are, either.
In fact, he demands we change, and the word “repentance” itself involves that change by definition. The change that makes us alter our attitude towards our sinfulness and reject it in favor of living according to God’s will, word and commands. We can’t stay the same sinful way we were—whether that was our greed, or pride, or lustful sexual immorality or whatever—and consider ourselves faithful and obedient. And if we can’t be faithful and obedient, then we don’t really believe, do we? Because the Lord himself and God’s word all over the place tells us that’s the case.
1 John 3:6: “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.”
Romans 6:1-2: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
Galatians 5:13: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh...”
Also, in the same way we can’t just let that slide in ourselves and expect to be sanctified by the Lord who initially accepts us just the way we once were, we also can’t let others slide with that, either, without encouraging them by example, instruction, exhortation and love, to repent of their sins, submit to God’s word and obey his will.
Ezekiel 33:8-9, 11, 19: “When I say to the wicked, ‘You wicked person, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade them from their ways, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood. But if you do warn the wicked person to turn from their ways and they do not do so, they will die for their sin, though you yourself will be saved... Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live…’ And if a wicked person turns away from their wickedness and does what is just and right, they will live by doing so.”
So following the Messiah’s example and being kind to our neighbors and rendering them service is really nothing more than a nice gesture, if it isn’t accompanied by the real change in us and in others that comes with first believing in the Lord Yeshua; and then by repenting, submitting, and obeying ourselves, while encouraging others by our example, to do so, too.
Washing a sinner’s feet without encouraging them to repent, submit to and obey God’s word and will does nothing more for the sinner than what they can get at their nearest pedicure spa. Washing a sinner’s feet without drawing them away from their sin and to the Lord, and in fact, accepting them as they are in their sinfulness without encouraging them to abandon that sinfulness, is a validation of sinfulness, not an act of obedient faithfulness.
And presenting the Lord’s faith and God’s word to the world in any way that does any of that—no matter how well-intentioned we may say we are—is a misrepresentation of the Lord’s faith and God’s word.
Misrepresenting God’s word is misrepresenting its meaning. Misrepresenting its meaning is misrepresenting the faith that meaning is there to generate.
Misrepresenting the faith is misrepresenting the Lord who gave his earthly life and let his innocent, sinless blood be spilled in order to activate that faith.
And that doesn’t save anybody.
(Photo Credits: HeGetsUs.com; ConnectUsFund.org;)
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