Twice a Day Is Not Enough

As those who do their utmost to follow Christ, we can often fall into the trap of being so rightfully appalled by something fundamentally evil that we swerve into the ditch of something else that is, if we truly think about it, just as evil.

“Oh, sure,” you may hear a young man essentially say, “Andrew Tate may advocate serial adultery, polygyny, and sexual assault—but at least he’s against homosexuality and the transgender movement!” Meanwhile, you may overhear from a young woman something akin to, “Yeah, Leticia Padua might reduce marriage to nothing more than a means of financial gain and encourage women toward deception and narcissism—but at least she knows that a man should provide for his wife!”

In effect, they are saying, “Look, I understand that this broken clock is forever stuck at 12:15—but it’s just so right twice a day, when it actually is 12:15, that I feel like it should get some credit, you know?”

Are we so justly appalled by “the Left” that we are willing to excuse the immorality of “the Right”? Or so willing to find common cause with influential people that we give them credit without considering the price of associating with them? If so, we are more political than Christian, for the Bible clearly instructs us to “do according to all the law… do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left” (Joshua 1:7). Truly, “narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14).

Even if we’re aware that a modern influencer “says some wrong things,” we should not gloss over them. God commands us, “Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil” (Romans 12:9). That includes evil that pays lip service to “love and tolerance” and evil that pays lip service to “tradition and family values.” Yes, that lip service might sound attractive, and a true statement is true regardless of who says it—but that doesn’t mean we should excuse the immorality of the source, or “sweep it under the rug.” Whatever value may be gained from making our point will be far outweighed by the price we pay for our poor choice of “association.”

Here’s an example. While the number of people who would concur is rapidly shrinking, odds are that you, as a reader of Tomorrow’s World, wholeheartedly agree that God is the ultimate judge of what is virtuous or wicked. That being so, you would probably agree with this statement: “The judgment whether a people is virtuous or not virtuous can hardly be passed by a human being. That should be left to God.”

It comes as quite a surprise, then, to learn that the writer of that sentence was a particularly infamous man named Adolf Hitler. While the statement remains true, would a rational, moral person even dare use it to argue that Hitler was worth admiration in any way? Of course not—and you might think it goes without saying, were it not for the current state of modern discourse and the ease with which public opinion can be led to misconstrue our choice of quotes. At most, one would simply acknowledge the truth of a statement that Hitler just so happened to have written. Perhaps we would then, chuckling nervously, repeat a centuries-old phrase by saying, “Hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

Yet an immense number of people, including many who call themselves Christians, barely choose to acknowledge the obviously broken nature of the clocks they willingly follow. We absolutely should be disgusted by all things LGBTQ+ and give no quarter to radical feminism—but if we find ourselves thinking that, for example, violent misogyny and rampant heterosexual fornication are somehow more acceptable to God by comparison, or even that they are excusable as long as the opposite ditch remains clear, then in the words of C.S. Lewis, “That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one” (Mere Christianity, 1952, p. 100).

A broken clock is unreliable and should not be consulted, no matter what time it permanently reads. Instead, let’s live by the clock that is never fast, never slow, and right 1,440 minutes out of every day—God’s word, the Bible, which veers neither to the right nor to the left.

To learn more about the sure foundation of knowledge God offers, why not try enrolling in the Tomorrow’s World Bible Study Course? This 24-lesson course is readily available, with straightforward questions and scriptural studies that will help you understand the Bible’s most important topics. It is available right here, in print or online.