Normal is broke

In Ephesians 5.3-14 Paul tells Christians to walk as children of light. He tells us we were once darkness, but we are now light in the Lord. He tells us we must not participate in the patterns of behavior prevalent in our culture.

This is really hard to do, because we’re surrounded by folks who live without God in view. They don’t take God into account when thinking, for example, about sexuality (Ephesians 5.3-4). Christians can easily take on the thinking of the wider culture (see 1 Corinthians!).

Not long ago, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine about popular financial guru Dave Ramsey. The article said that in his seminars emphasizing financial responsibility, Ramsey frequently talks about ‘being weird,’ by which he means making good financial decisions. He then always uses the aphorism ‘Normal is broke.’ He means that the ways most people have of doing things financially are way off.

This phrase ‘Normal is broke’ perfectly captures the Christian perspective on many things all around us. Because this world has been infected by sin, because Satan can be described as the god of this world, normal is broke. What is normal for many people around us is not correct — it is broke.

This truth is beautifully illustrated in C.S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. The protagonist Ransom is pondering the naturally continent and monogamous hross species on another planet: ‘Among the hrossa, anyway, it was obvious that unlimited breeding and promiscuity were as rare as the rarest perversions. At last it dawned upon him that it was not they, but his own species, that were the puzzle. That the hrossa should have such instincts was mildly surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the hrossa so closely resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were so deplorably different? What was the history of Man?’

Yes, we are the puzzle! We’re the ones who are broke.

If normal is broke, where we can look for a new standard, a perfect standard? Answer: Jesus. When we look to Jesus and his life and death and resurrection, we see the in-breaking of the world as it was meant to be, and as it one day will be. Here’s the way Tom Wright says it: ‘…the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or the theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.’

Our call as Christians is to walk as children of light — in other words, to live the ‘new normal,’ the reality ushered in by the risen, exalted Jesus (Ephesians 5.14).

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Apr 11, 04:16 PM