Beware Illustrations that Only Work in One Language

Back in the early days of this blog, I published several articles in both English and Spanish. That's why the title of this site is Bilingual Bible Blog (even though I rarely post articles in both languages any more, due to limited time available to devote to writing the same article twice).

But something I've seen going around recently on social media recently prompted me to think in bilingual terms. Here is the meme that had been circulating:

The thought expressed here is a nice, sentimental devotional idea. But it doesn't work universally.

Screwtape Gets Us

My Dearest Wormwood,

The Enemy's followers are always coming up with new ways to try to spread their message and take people away from our side. With each new advance in human media technology, while some of them will balk at its use, claiming it comes from the depths of our domain, others will find a use for it in their efforts to enlist more people in their cause. 

To defeat the Christians in their attempt to use media and technology to recruit more people for the Enemy's side, a direct frontal assault is not as effective as it used to be. While some of our captives will still pay heed to our denials of any validity to the Enemy's message, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep humans thinking on a purely naturalistic level. Our propaganda campaign with the "New Atheism" of the past generation, rather than convincing more people that the only thing that mattered was physical life, backfired, ultimately having the opposite effect. While people may not have converted to the other side, many individuals did end up thinking more about eternal matters, and some of them defected from our ranks. It's better for us if humans stay completely in the dark about the eternal component of their existence.

Book Review: Strange Religion by Nijay Gupta

I recently read Dr. Nijay K. Gupta's latest book, Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling. This book is a very readable account of what stood out about early Christians in the Roman Empire and set them apart from the cultural norms of the society that surrounded them. Gupta takes rigorously researched academic material and presents it in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in learning about early Christianity, with plenty of relatable analogies and illustrations that help the reader create a vivid mental picture of what was going on in the first century. 

Do All Lost People Hate Jesus?

The day after Super Bowl LVIII (and the He Gets Us ad that ran during the game), someone posted the following on Facebook:

Lost people hate the real Jesus. I did when I was lost, and the Bible states that everyone else that’s lost does as well. If anyone preaches a socially accepted Jesus, they’re not preaching the true Christ, they’re actually preaching an anti-christ who appears as an angel of light, but is actually sinful, wicked, and affirming of sin, destruction, and exists to make people feel good about who they are and whatever they do.

Along with that text, they shared this screen capture from Shane Pruitt's X (Twitter) account: