Josh Duggar is Not Our Standard

If you’re looking to discredit Christianity, you’re going to have to do a lot better than point to the failings of the followers of Christ. Josh Duggar, of 19 Kids and Counting fame, who was recently outed as a user of the adultery promoting website Ashley Madison, is simply the latest in a long line of public Christians caught failing to “practice what he preached.”

Christianity isn’t about what Josh Duggar, Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham, James Dobson, myself, or anyone else did or will do. It isn’t about what we’ve said or will say. Christianity is in the words and deeds of one man alone: Jesus Christ.

Christ is our standard. He is The Standard. And we’ve ALL fallen short.

However, the failings of the followers of Jesus do not undo one single eternal truth spoken by God. In spite of the desire of many on the left to use the sin of Mr. Duggar (and other such incidents, the next of which will also soon be plastered all over the liberal media) as an opportunity to disparage Christianity and Christian conservative values (all the while furthering the perverse agenda of liberalism), whether marriage, money, sex, creation, life in the womb, and the like—God has the final say on these and all such matters.

Tellingly, after the hack attack, Ashley Madison said: “This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities.

“The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world.”

It seems that the moralizers at Ashley Madison have appointed themselves “moral judge, juror, and executioner” when it comes to thieves. In other words, at AshleyMadison.com “thievery” is bad, but adultery by “freethinking people” is okay. So again we see the self-contradictory attempts by liberals at raising their own system of “values.”

Further demonstrating this self-contradictory thinking—along with demonstrating why psychology is more witchcraft than science—Laurie Essig at Psychology Today just doesn’t understand why the hackers “would need to attack a site that is fairly honest about what's going on as opposed to every other dating site where people are lying through their teeth.”

“More importantly,” she adds, “this sort of sexual prudery should not pass for some sort of activism when there are some serious liars on the interwebs.” (“Interwebs?” I have to admit, Ms. Essig’s lame attempt at humor was, at first, lost on me.) She ends her piece by concluding that the Ashley Madison hackers are “the least heroic…hactiprudes who released the personal data of 37,000,000 people just trying to get laid without lying.”

Because of course, everyone using the Ashley Madison site as a means to commit adultery was completely honest with all of their intentions and information. (What a dolt!) So along with thievery, “lying through their teeth” is also completely unacceptable to the adultery apologists.

Again, as C.S. Lewis put it, “There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies,’ all consist of fragments from [Natural Law] itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to [Natural Law] and to it alone such validity as they possess.”

In other words, it is folly to lament the actions of liars and thieves all the while promoting and profiting from adultery. The same Law Giver who reveals that theft and lying is wrong also tells us that fornication and adultery are wrong.

Make no mistake about it, if you are a Christian living out your faith in any meaningful way at all, you have made yourself a target. The spiritual forces of evil who seek to “kill, steal, and destroy” are anxious for your demise. In the hyper-sexed culture in which we live, this often means attacks in the sexual realm. (In his public confession, Mr. Duggar also admitted to an addiction to “interweb” pornography.)

With so many eager to harm the cause of Christ, be sure that your sin will find you out. (And will enthusiastically be used against you.) Whether our sins are public or not, God knows it all. As Franklin Graham said to the Ashley Madison users, “I have news for all those worried cheaters out there wringing their hands — God already knew! His holy Word says, ‘Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account’ (Hebrews 4:13). Times may have changed, but God's laws and standards never change — all sin has a price.”

Thank God someone paid the price for us all.

Copyright 2015, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com