I praise God for the 95 years former South African President and moral icon Nelson Mandela walked among us. Very, very few human beings have demonstrated the courage, integrity, and decency that this man did, and the irenic spirit with which he treated those in South Africa who imprisoned him for 27 years is as close a picture of Christ as we’re likely to see on this earth.
Because I live in Moscow, Idaho, home to paleo-Confederates, “constitutionalists,” defenders of slavery, and Libertarians who try mightily, and unsuccessfully, to defend their execrable ideas with Scripture, I’m sure we’ll hear about the Biblical righteousness of the Afrikaners who were not only Mandela’s enemies, but who, in their practice of apartheid, kept African Blacks oppressed in their own homeland. We’ll be told, with pompous assurance and warped appeals to history, that the Dutch Calvinist colonizers were sent by God to rule the Blacks and institute the vicious racism of apartheid, and undoubtedly this lesson will be accompanied by a rebuke and a reminder that only Godless liberalism and the simpering sentimentalism it engenders would elevate Mandela as a model of non-violent peace-making and justice-seeking, rather than a rabble-rouser who should’ve just been “Biblically content” for him and his people to be second-class citizens in their own homeland.
I pray you won’t be confused. If you know anything at all about the character of Jesus Christ, you won’t be. If you’ve been taught by Doug Wilson, though, well . . . you wouldn’t know moral greatness if it knocked on your door. (Revelation 3:20)