Víctor Chininin Buele

In case you are not familiar with my usual points: I do not support Vice President Biden. I will not call President Trump’s lack of observable fruit of repentance moral flaws. I do not believe it is morally neutral to think that secularism and scientism are not religions. And true freedom of religion and speech, not to say common sense, love, and compassion, are there to help us better our arguments and lives by being challenged where we need to be challenged and grow. That is, we can’t just call any and everyone the worst human being on earth for holding a divergent position than our own.

With that said, there is hardly anything to celebrate in America this weekend. The last four years brought plenty of devastation, and the next four years will also bring plenty of devastation.

This is a season of judgment, of living the results of what we have sown. We cannot possibly walk out of this one smelling like roses. We have been injecting young minds throughout the nation and the globe with the idea that there is no such thing as truth. Only to have this brilliant observation, the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, proven to be worthless in front of our very eyes as we have seen lie after lie play out in our very own handheld screens. The President and the media, the not-the-mainstream-media media, the establishment and the opposition, the Republicans and the Democrats have asked us to not believe what we see, hear, and think. We have asked ourselves not to believe what we see, hear, and think. We have killed our consciences.

At the end of the story, we don’t like the challenge of truth because it exposes us. Every claim has an answer.

We are a highly pragmatic society. We prop up little gods because we want what we want, and they promise to give it to us faster, sooner, and better than the other god. Both parties have grossly overlooked obvious sin in the lives of the candidates. Both are liars. It is documented that Vice President Biden lied about his education. It is not fake videos. It actually happened, and he could not become president back then because of that. But today, it has been washed away and not by repentance. I need not waste my time writing about President Trump in this department as they are sites live right now showing statistics about this. And frustrated fact checkers showing their homework to the country, jumping up and down, trying it in bold, red letters, catchy videos without even beginning to make a dent. It just doesn’t register, like when the five year old boy tries desperately to show his mom that he can jump from the roof down to the bushes without breaking a bone. Watch me, mom! Watch, watch, watch! Or I may actually have to jump…

We hate direct questions because we can’t fudge with them. When we take down the lies we tell ourselves to justify the things that we do, we know we have been exposed, so we work feverishly to keep the covers on, no matter what the cost may be. We are expert lawyers at making poor excuses sound like sophisticated legal, scientific, and irrefutable arguments.

Murder becomes a euphemism. Immorality becomes flaw. Fornication and betrayal become an affair. Lawlessness becomes peaceful protesting. Lying becomes hyperbole. Abuse becomes tone. Prejudice becomes inclusiveness of all but that kind over there, those ones are evil. Sin becomes tolerance. Tolerance becomes permissiveness. Racism permeates our hearts.

We want the right to not be told we are wrong. We want the right to not hear the truth that we are sinners in desperate need of grace. We want the right to not have to amend our ways. We demand change in the streets, but we abhor it for our own hearts.

I had a physics teacher who used to say, “Cadets, you love to play and wallow in the mud of your youthful arrogance.” That’s us. Please, let us live in here. It’s nice. This is not mud, how dare you, bigot, to say this is mud? Go to the priest on the internet, perhaps wearing a white coat, who will show you the chemical composition of this material I’m wallowing in to be gold. Yes, the finest gold, the best gold, tremendous gold. Sad!

Reading Isaiah 1 this morning was difficult. I have absolute confidence in the absolute truth that God is in the business of redeeming a sinful but repentant people to Christlikeness. But to repent, we have to hear both the bad news and the good news. Yes, it is worse than you admit it is. You are worse than you want to show. But Jesus Christ came into the world for you, to live the perfect life you can never live, to make atonement for your sins, all of them, the vilest, the Trump-like ones even. Because you know when you look at yourself in the mirror, the orange color is there in your skin, too. What you hate in him, you desperately try to hide in you. And it is vile. That’s why the cross is so vile. It was an abomination. The Son of God became an abomination because we are a walking abominations, and for Him to be just, truly just, not Brett Kavanaugh kind of just or Sonia Sotomayor kind of just, He must also be the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. He died and rose again. Unbelievable as it sounds, test the evidence, run it through the principles of historiography. But ultimately, He must give eyes to see and ears to hear. There is hope, true hope, glorious hope, eternal hope of a better country, of a better patria. Turn. Now. Turn. You don’t have to believe the lies of the flesh, the world, and the devil. You can know truth, and you can have life and life abundantly that transcends the feeble circumstances that surround us.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

Isaiah 1:16-18

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