A Florida fool

I have avoided saying anything about that fool with matches in Florida but now that the day has come and gone, I thought I would pass on some observations.

In the aftermath of the “will he/will he not” Quran burning fiasco that elevated a crackpot to the level of a prophet we rarely see outside of Punxsutawney Phil, many people are providing all manner of post-mortems on what happened (or didn’t as the case may be). A lot of these center on the idea that we (i.e. America, Christians, etc.) were afraid of offending Islam and that we were collectively bullied into calling for “pastor” Jones to cancel the Quran burning.

I can’t speak for others but I am not concerned about “offending Islam” at all. Quite the contrary, I fully expect that the Gospel will be offensive to many people and that in fact it is completely in character with faithful Gospel proclamation to expect that it will lead to offense, persecution and often even death. So it is not the offense of the Gospel I and others were concerned with but instead it was a completely different sort of offense. It was the offense to the teaching of Scripture to engage in this sort of tawdry showmanship and blatant act of ignorant hatred in the name of Christ. It was also a case where the offense of the cross that tells sinners that they stand condemned without Jesus is replaced with offensiveness of the most banal kind. Jesus responded to the hatred of those who were His enemies by dying on a cross for them, reconciling them to the Father by His love and His blood. Jesus didn’t burn Caesar in effigy, He died meekly. Burning a Quran does nothing to thwart Islam or promote the cause of America or the Gospel (two polar opposites that Mr. Jones and far too many others cannot distinguish between).

The only upside to this whole sordid affair was the near universal condemnation of it by the church. We as God’s people have suffered far too many fools for far too long but in this case we finally see the church united to condemn a man who was seeking to exalt himself and bring shame to the cross of Christ.

If Mr. Jones really wants to take a courageous stand for the Gospel against Islam, he should pack up and go where Muslims are and be a witness to them, loving them even when they hate and persecute him in return and perhaps even being willing to lay down his life for the sake of the Gospel instead of pandering to the most base emotions of fear and hatred in the misguided name of religious nationalism.