Let the Shepherd Lead

Every day, I try to spend at least fifteen minutes during my devotional reading a book that will challenge me to think as a pastor and Christian. For the past few months I have been reading Rosaria Butterfield’s book Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age. On page 264 she says this “I realized that night that the Christian life is a life of binaries.”

Ten to twenty years ago the only time that I had heard of the word binary was on Star Trek when they talked about binary stars. Over these intervening years what a war has been waged upon the idea that there is any binary that is legitimate, much less good. Yet Christianity is cheerfully binary.

Peter R. Jones, an author of Christian philosophy, uses the word Two-ism to argues that this distinctive is uniquely a Christian philosophy and doctrine. One-ism celebrates unity to the extent that the goal of philosophy, spirituality, sexuality, and culture is to destroy all distinctions. Two-ism makes the point that God is outside of creation and thus distinctives are important and designed by God.

But let’s just for a moment think about how a binary can be cheerful. The tyranny of sameness defines the culture of our world. Pressure not to be different promises to cancel or crush those who will not affirm and celebrate the sin and suffering of this world. Rather than explore why we believe certain things might be wrong, we are told to sin until our consciences no longer bother us.

The cheerful reality of the Christian binary is simply that better is possible. In Christ, we can and should be different from the sin and suffering so prevalent in this world. The more tender we are to Christ, the more distinct we will become from this world. Even when we are crushed and cancelled by this world, believers are awakened to a new reality: Cheerful bliss does not come from sameness, but from realizing that our God celebrates our unique creation by Himself and redeems us in Christ that we might make a distinct contribution to His kingdom (Ephesians 2:8-10).