In my blog post yesterday, I wondered if John Piper would be willing to repent of his transgression of the ninth commandment sixteen months ago, when he jumped on the anti-Zimmerman bandwagon to score a few cheap piety points before all the facts were in. One of my friends actually took the links for my articles, posted them on John Piper’s Facebook page, and asked him directly if he’d like to repent of his article. While my friend did not receive a direct response, Piper did double down twelve hours later by reposting a link to his article, saying, “What I wrote about the the death of Trayvon Martin 16 months ago is strikingly what I still want to say.” This repost kicked off something of a firestorm on Piper’s wall with many people siding against him. It’s kind of funny when someone dislikes you so much that he’s willing to publicly embarrass himself just to spite you.
Piper not only reposted his own article from sixteen months ago, but also posted a link to an article published yesterday by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman affair. Before John Piper reposted and reaffirmed his article proving his disregard for the ninth commandment, one could have feebly argued that perhaps Piper was acting in good faith, but he just didn’t have all the facts yet. Even this weak defense cannot be offered for Mohler’s horrendous article. All the facts are in, and yet Mohler still chooses to just flat-out lie. The article takes the tone of “the talk” which John Derbyshire so artfully countered (and was fired for) last year. Excerpts from Mohler’s article:
The fact is that George Zimmerman was the only witness to what happened on February 26, 2012. Trayvon Martin was dead, and there were no other witnesses to the event.
Apparently this guy is invisible to the “only Zimmerman and God” crowd.
Trayvon Martin was killed, however, not by another African-American young male, but by a man who in a 911 call declared Trayvon was suspicious and out of place and then rejected the police dispatcher’s order to stop following him.
Police dispatchers cannot give orders, and the one speaking to Zimmerman did not give an order. They have to counsel inaction to avoid lawsuits.
The photos of Trayvon Martin shown to the world show a normal, happy, 17-year-old boy. A boy who had been living with his mother, but had been sent to be with his father after an incident in school. In other words, a 17-year-old boy who not only was in the right place, but for a very right reason–so that he could be watched over by his father.
Not only is this a blatant lie, but it makes no sense. Having dealt drugs and used them, and having been implicated in a jewelry theft ring, the man with Twitter handle “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA” was suspended from school for ten days and sent to live with his father – this is somehow admirable? No one who has seen the pictures from Trayvon’s social media accounts can honestly argue that he was a normal seventeen-year-old boy, at least by white standards. If Mohler wants to use ghetto black standards, then sure, Trayvon was normal; but he needed to make that explicit, because that completely changes and derails his article.
A smiling 17-year-old boy who had gone to a convenience store to buy a soft drink and a snack was shot to death, and we will never know exactly how or why.
To buy the ingredients to make the drug cocktail Lean. And “smiling”? Remember: Zimmerman never smiles. Only Trayvon smiled.
May God watch over every single [young black man], for they, starting with Trayvon Martin, belong to all of us.
How about Zimmerman? Do he and all the other men doing community service “belong to all of us” too? I guess that doesn’t fit Mohler’s narrative though.
Now, contrast Piper’s and Mohler’s articles with one posted by Doug Wilson today. While I would quibble with him on a couple points – the unhistorical, or at least incomplete, picture of lynching and the assumption that suspicion of blacks is unwarranted – it is, on the whole, miles above the drivel of Piper and Mohler. Contrasted to the fanatical ethnomasochism in Piper’s and Mohler’s articles, Wilson’s article is very even-handed, pastorally focusing on the importance of the rule of law and counseling against unfair and hypocritical rushes to judgement.
Because of the nature of the question, I am not going to ask for a show of hands here, but I am going to ask you to be brutally honest with yourself. You don’t have to tell anybody how you answered this thought experiment. You are the owner of a jewelry shop in a city, the kind of shop that has bars on the windows, and a buzzer lock to let people in on a case-by-case basis. It is five minutes until closing and a solitary individual shows up at the door. Do you buzz them in? You might say, it depends. Great. On what? Be honest, and whatever your answer is, be sure that you stop condemning others for doing in public what you would do in private.
Piper and Mohler should give it a read.
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