Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 162nd episode. This episode is the beginning of a new project for the podcast. Now don’t worry, I’m still going to do my normal exposition of Scripture episodes regularly. But as my listenership continues to expand I want to increase my engagement with all of you. I’m going to do this by taking your questions and dedicating entire episodes to answering each one. So I want you to pause this episode and visit mhbpodcast.com/social. There’s a form on that page for sending me a private message. I want you to use that form to send your questions. I will record your questions in my database and your episode will come out in the future. If you want email notifications of new episodes then enter your email address at the bottom of the page and click Follow The MHB Podcast. This is a free service which will include you on the podcast mailing list.
These episodes are not a simple Q&A where the speaker will answer 10 or 20 questions at a time. This is something where I’m going to dive very deep into each question. So your question will make up the entire topic of a whole episode. I think it’s best to explore questions rather than simply answering them. Exploring questions and diving deep requires some patience but it often yields the greatest result. The world is complicated and low-resolution thinking makes you very vulnerable to being captivated by ideology. Low-resolution ideology will hurt you because it will lead you on paths which are inconsistent with actual reality and this will cause you to fall into a ditch. It’s like having an inaccurate map.
To explore a question properly one must explore as many sides of it as possible. We want to avoid the temptation to make straw-man misrepresentations of the perspectives we disagree with. This kind of thinking is incredibly difficult because it’s like allowing two enemies to have a war inside your head. But there are a couple reasons why you should always make the best case for your opponents argument rather than misrepresenting it. The first reason is that you might be wrong – and making a genuine effort to understand your opponent’s thoughts will show you the areas of your own thinking which you need to fix. Then you can be less wrong and being less wrong means you will experience less self-inflicted, needless suffering as a consequence of ignorance. The second reason is that if you’re constantly cutting down straw-man misrepresentations of your opponent’s argument then you’ll never really be able to strengthen your own. What good is it to spar with a mere shadow of your opponent rather than the real thing? If you make the best possible case for your opponent’s perspective and your argument is still better then you know you have a killer argument.
So we’re going to explore as many dimensions of each question as we can and we’re really going to think things through. The first question is what this episode is named after: should you trust Christians? Is it safe to trust Christians? Should Christians be trusted any more than human beings who are outside of the faith? If we decide to trust Christians, is it the same kind of trust we offer up to God Himself? Or is there a way to trust Christians which is more appropriate considering their finite nature and their proclivity to sin? This question is particularly relevant with all the news of prominent Christian figures falling from grace. When the sins of famous Christians are found out it often damages the faith of those who revered them. I’m being very intentional with my words when I say revered. The problem has less to do with loving someone and more to do with idolizing them. You can choose to love people while maintaining your understanding that all people are fallen in nature. I know this because Jesus loves us and we are fallen in nature.
When we talk about whether or not it is wise to trust Christians, the first distinction we need to make clear is that we aren’t discussing whether or not to love Christians. We have an explicit command from God to love our neighbor whether they are Christians or not. But love doesn’t always imply trust when it comes to shortcomings. Consider the fact that you love your child or your pet. You might love your child or your pet more than you love anyone else in the world – but you don’t trust your child or your pet to cross a six-lane highway. The fact that you don’t trust your child or your pet to cross the highway doesn’t diminish the depth of your love for them at all – it just means you’re wise enough to see the limitations of your child’s or your pet’s frame. When it comes to sin and righteousness you should be viewing human beings in a similar way. All of us are at different points in our journey of sanctification and all of us are like small children when compared to the perfect holy righteousness of Jesus Christ.
This fact doesn’t give us free license to sin whenever and however we want. But it does remind you of why it’s a very bad idea to invest your faith in a fallen human being. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone while bearing in mind their sin might hurt you. Indeed to love anyone in this world at all is to make your own heart vulnerable by virtue of the fact that all of us die. To love anyone or anything means sacrificing yourself to a brokenhearted crucifixion when that loved one is hurt, gets sick, passes away, or betrays you. The only way to preserve yourself from this crucifixion is to refuse to love at all. But the fact that Jesus didn’t save Himself from His own crucifixion tells us that love is worth the sacrifice. If you choose not to love, you’ll escape one form of pain by hardening your heart and making yourself invulnerable to grief or betrayal, but you’ll miss out on the best part of life and one of the the only parts of life which transcends into eternity. Because God is love.
We’re beginning to see some distinctions between loving a person and trusting a person – but that doesn’t mean these two things are entirely separate either. It’s impossible to love someone who you don’t trust. That’s one of the reasons why betrayal hurts so much more when it comes at the hand of someone you love – because you also trusted them. In this manner trust is also one of the defining differences between the various people you choose to love. You might love your neighbors in the sense that you’d help them when they’re in need, but you probably don’t trust your neighbors as much as you trust your spouse. You trust your spouse more than your trust your neighbor because you have a deeper history with your spouse and based on this history you’ve determined he or she is worthy of the trust you’ve extended.
This idea of being worthy of trust is crucial to determining whether or not we should trust Christians. A common mistake people make is thinking Christians are inherently better than non-Christians. I call this a mistake because Christians are operating with the same fallen nature as everyone else. The Christian worldview presupposes the human heart is desperately wicked and prone to sin when it is absent of the Spirit of God. This means every human heart has the capacity for wickedness including the hearts of Christians. Remember, this fact doesn’t make wickedness permissible, it simply opens your eyes to the reality of the human condition. We know that limitation causes decreased amounts of trust because of the analogy we used with your child or your pet. Your child and your pet have limitations and these limitations prevent you from trusting them with projects like crossing a six-lane highway. When it comes to trusting Christians – or any human being for that matter – we must always keep these limitations in mind. All of us are struggling under the limitations that come with existence as finite beings.
The moment you idolize someone and begin to think of them as a god then you become blind to that person’s limitations. This blindness can result in you extending an unreasonable measure of trust to them. There’s nothing morally wrong with your child or your pet which makes them untrustworthy to cross the highway. Your inability to trust them stems directly from their infirmities. But if you falsely assume a person has no infirmities or limitations then all of a sudden every transgression this person commits becomes an egregious moral failure in your eyes. The smallest mistakes or flaws in the person begin to feel like personal betrayals of your trust. One of the keys to having healthy relationships with people is understanding that every single person has ugliness about them if you look closely enough. This accurate understanding of human nature will guard your heart against developing expectations of people or of a person which are inconsistent with reality.
There’s only one person in whom you can safely place all of your faith and trust and that person is Jesus Christ Himself. Christ has no limitations or infirmities and so He is fully capable of keeping every single letter of His word and His promises. God is also perfect in His holiness so He will never commit a moral transgression. It’s okay to trust Christians and other human beings but you should never trust anyone to the same degree that you trust in God. The moment you begin to view another person as god is the moment you commit idolatry and risk severe heartbreak.
If you can’t trust people in the same way you trust God and if you’re required to trust people at least a little bit in order to have a functional relationship with them then how do you go about this work? I think the answer involves a separation of ideas from people. There are plenty of brilliant Christian philosophers and teachers who have committed sins and fallen short of the glory of God. Scripture says all human beings have fallen short of the glory of God. But these sins do not invalidate the truthfulness of a particular idea even if the idea is declared or taught by an unrepentant sinner. Bad people can teach valuable and truthful ideas. If you’re able to see the value and truthfulness of an idea even when it is preached by someone who tends to lie, then you should also be able to separate the bad things this person says or does from his or her own identity. We can’t allow our worst moments to define who we are or else all of us would be destined for destruction. The essence of forgiveness is not the permission of sin. The essence of forgiveness is choosing to see the image of God which is stamped onto the person who committed the sin – and then encouraging the best in that person to fulfil his or her potential.
Should we trust Christians and should we trust other people? I think it’s okay to trust someone as long as you never idolize them. The moment you idolize the person you shut your eyes to his or her weaknesses and you open yourself up to what will feel like betrayal when this person slips. The only One deserving of our full faith and trust is Jesus Christ and He is also the only one who can handle it perfectly. You have to be able to trust people in order to have functional relationships with them but this trust should always come with the understanding that your person is not perfect. All people have some degree of ugliness about them if you examine them closely enough. The best way to navigate trusting God with all of your faith and trusting humans in accordance with their limitations is to realize the value and truthfulness of an idea even when it’s taught by a wicked person. A person is not completely made up of his or her sins and a true idea remains true even when presented by a broken individual. This separation of ideas from people will make it much easier for you to extend grace to others when they make big mistakes or choose evil actions. You won’t define them by their worst ideas or darkest moments but instead you will support the best potential inside of them which is the very image of God borne by their spirit. That is the essence of grace and that is the essence of forgiveness. As Christians we should strive to extend mercy and forgiveness to others because Christ Himself has been merciful and He has forgiven us.
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