I Had No Desire To Write About This
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, a day our nation has set aside to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. I was happy as a pastor to let the day go by without comment. As far as I am concerned, our culture (the world) can celebrate whomever they want for whatever reason they want, and I do not feel the need to comment on it. 1 John 2:15 says, “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (Legacy Standard Bible). I do not love the culture, I do not need to protect the culture, I do not need to be a “culture warrior”, the culture belongs to the world, it is not of the Father, and I am content to let the world be, well, the world.
Yesterday, however, our national association (GARBC) posted a social media post on Facebook with King’s picture on it and referenced MLK Day. When our association, who is supposed to represent me and our church, speaks on an issue, especially one of which I believe the church should not associate with, now I can no longer remain silent. To be fair, the wording of the post was fairly benign, calling people to love others because they are made in the image of God and referencing Mark 12:31. There was nothing about civil rights or social justice on the post, and this does not mean our association is going woke. The question is, though, why post anything with King’s image on it at all? Why would we associate with this man in any form or way? Why make the conscious choice to put a post out there referencing MLK Day in the first place? What was the pressing need to present anything that may seem like we are approving of this man, especially in light of the following three points.
Point number one, we are an association of churches founded on common beliefs based on God’s Word. King denied our common beliefs, outright. He denied the Deity of Jesus, denied the virgin birth, denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and denied the inerrancy and infallibility of the Scriptures. In other words, King was not in our faith. Yet our association felt the necessity to put out a post without any clarification of what I hope would be our strong, vehement disagreement of King on these issues. Why would our association want to associate itself with man who was, in many senses, a complete heretic and denied the things that we hold most dear in this life?
Point number two, while King may have said some wonderful, true things, his closest confidants continued his movement afterward to bring forward all kinds of cultural rot that Christians are now appalled by. John Lewis said that King influenced him more than any other man, and Lewis claimed that gay rights (read gay marriage) were a natural outgrowth of the civil rights movement. He was a huge advocate of the LGBTQ movement, and make no mistake, King would have gone down that same road. King’s wife, Coretta, has also been a big supporter of what has been termed “gay civil rights”. This all has now been used to work for transgender rights in our culture. King’s legacy is much more than civil rights or equal rights when it comes to color of skin, and has been used to further special rights for those who practice sin in our culture. Why would our association want to associate itself in any way with such a man?
Point number three, King’s life was one of unrepentant sexual immorality and demonstrated a callousness toward women in demeaning them through his treatment of them and other’s treatment of them. FBI recordings (we can argue the morality of these too, I am not in favor) reveal that King had committed adultery with 40 women, as well as watched another man rape a woman and laughed about it. As much as people might want to associate King with justice and mercy, the reality seems to be that he was what Jesus called a hypocrite, a whitewashed tomb. People think he was for the oppressed, when he himself was clearly an unrepentant oppressor. He was clean on the outside but inside was full of filth. Why would our association want to associate in any way with a man who acted in a way similar to the people whom Jesus condemned publicly while He was here on earth? Why would we want to associate with someone in any way who was so wicked and vile?
Some might argue that King did some good. The sum of any man is not all evil or good from a human standpoint, I fully recognize that.
Some might argue that King did some good. The sum of any man is not all evil or good from a human standpoint, I fully recognize that. My point is not that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not do anything positive in his lifetime, my point is that he is a man that I do not wish to associate with as a church, as a pastor, or as an association of churches. When the association speaks, it is speaking for the churches in that association, and I expect better than this from associations to which I belong. Is there not enough doctrine and theology that we could be posting about, encouraging people toward, or are we so desperate to seem relevant that we have to put pictures of people who deny the very foundations of our faith so that people feel we are relevant?
Let me say this clearly, I had no desire to write about Martin Luther King, not this year, not last year, not ever. I believed it was best to just let MLK Day pass by without comment. One reason I believed that was that the name of King stirs up so many emotions and feelings that very few people are truly interested in the truth. Exhibit A for that would be a response on the Facebook post to a comment where I posted an article simply directing to truth about MLK, and a woman who has no idea who I am accused me of not being loving in a passive-aggressive way. It is very difficult to talk honestly about a man who so many revere without full knowledge of who he is. Having said that, since the GARBC decided to take a different tact and associate with MLK, and in a sense chose to associate me and my church with him, I believe I needed to write about this.
I am calling for better discernment from our association, and I will be sending a link to this blog to our national representative asking for his response. I would love to hear from the association what their reasons were for posting this. I would love to hear their response to the point I make here. I am not looking for them to simply take the post down, I am looking for answers to why we lack such discernment at the national level. I may write an additional blog including his response if he does respond.
For more information on MLK and civil rights, I commend Virgil Walker to you and his articles from G3. Virgil is a man who loves the Lord and is passionate for truth in all things. Here is his article on MLK, https://g3min.org/whats-the-truth-about-martin-luther-king-jr/
EDIT: I received a very gracious response from our national rep (David Strope) responding that he had similar concerns and is removing the post, and expressed his sorrow. He believes that it was a marketing firm that put this out on our behalf without edit or approval and is looking into it. I am extremely thankful for his swift response and shared concern.
