The picture that you see is of a bollard that was hit by a reversing vehicle. It is located at a supermarket, an articulated lorry delivering fresh food was just about to reverse into its delivery bay when a smaller truck, belonging to a laundry, entered the car park and noticing that the other vehicle’s reversing lights were on concentrated avoiding the other vehicle’s route the driver omitted to notice the bollard behind him. In trying to avoid one danger he ran into another resulting in a loud bang. Just like a golfer who hit a ball into a bunker on the right-hand side of the fairway last time he played a hole, over compensates and lands in a bunker on the left instead.

Equally, in Christian circles we can react against one danger by falling into a trap on the other side. For instance, many unbelievers will come up with an argument that Jesus was just a man; so in order to counter that we stress the divine nature of Jesus. The danger then becomes that we play down His humanity when He lived on earth, then it becomes questionable as to whether Jesus was capable of being the “suffering servant” who “bore our iniquities.” We need balance. In fact throughout the history of the Church one of Satan’s favourite strategies is to spread a spurious claim about Christians or the Church. In the early centuries it was claimed that communion services were orgies because they were often referred as “love feasts.” The problem with these claims is that in trying to correct them we are in danger of over correcting them and fall into some other trap like that van driver. The problem is that in spending time and effort countering false accusations we are not proclaiming the truth of the gospel itself. The fact is that Paul was misunderstood when he preached the gospel of grace when his critics claimed he was teaching that it was OK to sin so that God’s grace could abound. It has been argued that the Gospel has not been preached right if there is no possibility of somebody making that mistake. We have to be careful that we do not compromise the truth just because somebody might misunderstand it.

David Rose, 2019.