Do you ever find yourself a bit fearful or even feel a tinge of guilt when you go through airport security? It’s as if you are as surprised as the TSA to find that there are no explosives in your baggage. What is that? I think it has to do with all the flashy uniforms and the whole production, it’s security theater and it even has you fooled about yourself. In reality you should be upset at the false accusations. Every minute someone spends searching you, an innocent person, is time and money they could be spending, or not spending on actual threats. We should be upset, not surprised at our own innocence.
The TSA boasts over a 95% failure rate. Good Job boys!
The same applies and even worse in social situations. We don’t really have as much respect for false accusations as we should. False accusations can destroy lives, families and fortunes. But today we throw them out like they are politically correct bird seed, at a wedding, because there are no consequences. In Old Testament Law and even our traditional British Common Law system, false accusations carried the same penalty the accused would have received had they been found guilty. This puts a damper on the countless false rape charges, or the few which have reached national fame like the Duke Lacrosse case or the Rolling Stone fake rape story. Many lives have been destroyed by these accusations, while the accuser just walks away, or even writes a book. This is injustice, we should be upset.
Accusations are aplenty. Especially for anyone who dares to call themselves a Christian and attempts to live like it. People are always trying to diminish Christianity, so they don’t have to confess and bow down themselves, by throwing out accusations. It happens to the Church at large and Christians individually. And meek and mild Christians that we are these days, we put up with it. We continually examine ourselves as if we really were guilty of every last thing anyone could throw at us, and probably more. Now there is nothing wrong with holding the light of the Word up to your life and making adjustments where you don’t match up. But that should be done at the behest of diligent study, or Christian friends, or Church leadership, not the world. What do they know, they are wandering in darkness? We shouldn’t let them set the standard, even though they look flashy and respectable in their worldling outfits, even though there are a lot of them. We should be upset at the false accusations. We have the light of the Spirit living within us, we are remade.
There are some annoying clichés about the accusation revealing the accuser more than the one he points at. It really is true. The person any of us know best is ourselves, that is our frame of reference. As the Oracle said to Neo, “you can’t look past the choices you don’t understand”. If someone does something that is morally superior to what you can understand, often your only response is to accuse them of doing what you would do, which is evil. Your limitations keep you from appreciating that they are better than you could imagine. This is the problem Jesus often had. Even Peter tried to correct Jesus when he said he would soon die(Matthew 16:21-23). Peter couldn’t conceive of a world where dying would mean the salvation of the world. So he concluded that Jesus was in error. This is why training the imagination is so important, it is the key to empathy, it is the tool of humility.
I have noticed another type of accusation, not based on the self but on members of the opposite sex. Close relationships can leave a deep impression on us when they fall apart. This can leave us accusing future significant others of the things our exes did. These are difficult to overcome and makes you realize the value of virginity and a cultural system that protects it. Our system of casual, frequent break ups only makes this worse.
The unimaginative world is left to accuse. We can put our lives on display, and we should never have actual baseis for accusation, though we sin, we should always repent, but we should not be always on the defensive. We have every right to confront the world with it’s sin, and to show them the Light of God’s Word. Some will see it and be changed, others will respect it as something they don’t understand, but others will reject it, and turn the accusations on you. They see working diligently and joyfully to fulfill the commands of God as hard silly and legalistic. Often the charge is hypocrisy. Which is really what they are doing. It is not hypocrisy to hold a standard higher than you can meet, it is hypocrisy to hold everyone else to a standard that you don’t’ hold yourself to. Which is exactly what the world does to Christianity. The world we now live in is one with unparalleled prosperity. We enjoy freedom from disease and much hardship, an end of slavery and countless hours of leisure. Effects which don’t just end at the border of the West but extend to much of the world. This was the world built by the hard work and sacrifice of Christians, obeying the Word of God. And now they want to nit pick and throw things back in our face, based on the standard given to them by Christians. While they go on living in their sin. We can’t let them get away with it. We should not be ashamed of spreading the gospel and living it in every area of life, including the public square. We are engaged in a task they can’t possibly understand. Of course we should try to help them understand whenever possible, “give an account for the hope that is in us I Peter 3:15“. But in a post-Christian world, like the one we find ourselves in the bitter immunity to Christianity is great, and we shouldn’t be so surprised to find that we are not terrorists. We are the Salvation of the World.