How Should Christians Respond to the Olympics 2024 Opening Ceremony?

Heathen's gonna heave, am I right? This phrase, or the sentiment it carries, has been used frequently of late regarding the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics, which was featured in the Holy Nope episode 361.

Responding to the Olympics Without Christian Disengagement

In this video, we must address this phrase, then I want to discuss if it really was the Lord's Supper being depicted, or Dionysus, then I want us to consider what the scripture says about what Christians should hate, and finally, to finish, we'll look at what we should actually do about all of this.

Heathen's gonna heave is a fun saying, but it has been used too often in the last couple weeks since the debacle at the Olympics to simply seek to correct other Christians saying that we should not be surprised by this behavior.

Well, I don't know any Christians who are surprised by this stuff, but I do think it is unfair to characterize other Christians' zeal for the honor of Christ among the nations as some weak form of surprise or shock.

The common sentiment is that this is just what lost people do, so we shouldn't worry about it, many saying all we can do is pray for them. I reject this. The pastor posted a good note to self that we all ought to heave.

You're not disgusted enough, you're not outraged enough, you're not jealous for the holiness of God, you lack zeal. It seems many Western Christians are frogs boiling in a pot, desensitized to the rampant wickedness of the day.

Heathen's gonna heave is no excuse for Christian disengagement, and while we ought to pray for these precious souls, you can do more than pray. But let's consider what actually the heathens were heaving about.

Was the Opening Ceremony a Parody of the Lord's Supper?

Was it really the Last Supper? The opening shot is unmistakable. It looks like a parody of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Christians and non-Christians alike unified around discrediting the outrage of Christian response to this scene.

It was a runway and not a table. The details were too off. Many bought the lie that because the blue smurf demon made an entrance, it couldn't possibly have been a blasphemous parody of the Lord's institution of the supper.

The lie that you are buying is that it must be one or the other. Blasphemy and disrespect was clear even to unbelievers who took to Twitter to decry the spectacle. The morbidly obese individual in the middle, Barbara Butch, posted the picture on her Instagram quote, the gay New Testament sliced over da Vinci's painting.

Other professing Christians protested that we shouldn't be upset because the painting is wrong in itself and the painter was an immoral man. But the heathens heathing don't know the difference. Second commandment violations are not the main issue at hand and the point is that this was a clear assault on core Christian values.

Also it's super gross. After massive backlash online, officials confirmed that it was indeed a parody and sought to placate the outrage by insisting that they had the best of intentions, offering the excuse that the Last Supper scene has been parodied by others in the past.

This event sparked a conversation among Christians about what our attitude should be towards the people involved in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Those who say we should not hate anything at all ever, that hate is unchristian, must not love anything either.

I would never trust a man who does not hate because I could never trust a man who does not love. The more you love what is good, the more you will hate what is evil. What should Christians love and what should we hate?

Loving Enemies While Hating Evil

We approach this question wrongly by assuming that we are such simple creatures that we can only do one or the other at any given time. Jesus tells us plainly in Matthew 5 .44 that we should love our enemies, even those who persecute us.

We need to understand that Jesus is not giving a new law here in his Sermon on the Mount but is contrasting the true spirit of the law with the unrighteous interpretations and applications of the religious leaders.

Therefore, the law of God revealed to us in the Old Testament rightly understood and instructs the people of God to love her enemies. If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey wandering away, you shall surely return it to him.

If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying helpless under its load, you shall refrain from leaving it to him. You shall surely release it with him. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I am the Lord. There is no discontinuity between testaments regarding the moral law of God. But there is this little thing that's very inconvenient for love-only Christians called the imprecatory Psalms.

An imprecation is a curse. An example is found in Psalm 139. O that you would slay the wicked, O God! Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed! For they speak against you wickedly, and your enemies take your name in vain.

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with the utmost hatred. They have become my enemies. Are Christians supposed to hate the wicked?

Or is that just one of those Old Testament things that doesn't apply to us? What we need to understand about imprecations is that they are calls for God to deal justly with wicked men, for God to curse them.

They are not appeals to God for permission to carry out a vigilante style of justice. Now, pay attention to this. These imprecatory Psalms have their foundation in the Gospel itself. Whenever the psalmist pins an imprecation, it is hearkening back to the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, 1 -3.

Now the Lord said to Abram, Go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you. And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great.

And so you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. God promises that he will curse those who curse the covenant people of God.

So there is promised imprecation in this text, which Paul refers to in Galatians 3 -8 as the Gospel being preached to Abraham. How can that be? Well, the Gospel is God's gracious promise to save his people through Christ, the Redeemer.

With that kind of blessing to the people of God, there are likewise those who justly remain under the curse of sin. So imprecations are founded upon the promise of the Gospel. What is involved in the good news is that God will vindicate his people in the destruction of her enemies, who are also his enemies.

And what's more, imprecations are not exclusive to the Old Testament. In Galatians 1 -8 -9, Paul imprecates false teachers who distort the Gospel, writing, let them be accursed. Other instances abound in the New Testament.

Imprecation is for the church today. My church regularly sings Psalm 139, and we don't skip over verses 21 and 22 because it is just as well inspired in authoritative scripture for our benefit and for our use.

If you'd like a follow-up breakdown on imprecatory psalms and their proper use in the church today, let me know in the comments below. If we go back to Psalm 139, we encounter a word that many bristle against.

That is the word hate. Christians are not so simple creatures that we are only capable of hate or love at any given time. We need to understand that just as imprecations themselves are not personal and vindictive, neither is the hate that is mentioned within them.

See for David and the people of Israel, they so identified with Yahweh in covenant relationship that when God was attacked, they were attacked. The church's enemies are God's enemies. So it is an appeal to heaven that is left to the wisdom and power of heaven to deal justly with the wicked through the appropriate means.

It does not express a desire to take matters into our own hands. Stephen Lawson writes,.

Let me start all over again.

Hold on.

Motivated by fiery zeal for God's glory, the imprecatory psalms invoke His wrath and judgment upon His enemies. These psalms cry out for the righteousness to be vindicated by God punishing the wicked.

No, that's not it either. What's the matter with me? I'm going to do it one more time.

Hold on.

Not righteousness, Steve.

OK.

Righteous. Righteous.

Here it is.

Motivated by fiery zeal for God's glory, the imprecatory psalms invoke His wrath and judgment upon His enemies. These psalms cry out for the righteous to be vindicated by God punishing the wicked. And these provocative works are found a plea for the curses of God upon those who rise up against Him.

The psalmist calls upon the Lord to punish the wicked and defend him as he carries out God's work in the midst of his persecutors. And if you don't understand that, listen more carefully, say, hello, hello, do you have.

Ears?

OK, you should be listening to this.

Zeal, Love, and the Image of God

So it is from this posture of hating what God hates, stemming from a zeal for His honor among the nations, that we are capable and called to both hate and love the wicked. Our capacity for this is ours by virtue of our being created in the image of God, who has both set His salvific love upon His elect in Christ before the foundation of the world, all while there is real wrath abiding upon the elect person until the atoning work of Christ is applied to them by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.

There is also God's benevolent love towards all humanity, while He likewise hates all evildoers and is angry with the wicked every day. Let's turn now to what we as Christians should do when we see a spectacle the size of the Olympics making an assault on the honor of Christ.

I want to offer a gentle rebuke to all of the silly gooses who took what I said about contending against God's enemies and went from zero to 100 with it. You went from pacifism to jihad, asking if I'm saying that we should start cutting off people's heads.

Really dumb comments that I think betrays a passive, pietistic mentality that is so afraid of conflict and causing offense that nothing is ever attempted for the cause of Christ. Turning immediately to cutting off heads and blowing ourselves up betrays an effeminate fear of confrontation so that you can't help but muddy the waters of the conversation with these kinds of silly goose remarks.

I mean, I'm glad Christians didn't have that mentality when it came to the abolition of slavery as if our only duty is to have a morning quiet time and it's not for us to be concerned with what the world does because heathens gonna heath.

No, rather we see Jesus consumed with zeal as he sees his Father and God dishonored in the temple. And you might say, well, that was in the temple and not in the world. And what you need to understand about the Garden of Eden and the tabernacle in the temple is that they are theologically pregnant microcosms of the cosmos.

God's glory will fill the earth. The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof. That's why Paul, when he is in Athens and sees the rampant idolatry, does not say to himself, well, I'm not going to be surprised by this because that's just the world acting.

Like the world.

Rather, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols. So if you are a Christian who decided for whatever reason to be unbothered by your Lord being mocked on the world stage, ask yourself, where is my zeal?

We are not called to pursue violence nor the execution of personal vengeance. So what can we do? Well, firstly, imagine if the 2 .4 billion professing Christians stood by the biblical conviction and refused to watch the Olympics.

Would be quite a statement. In fact, it was the outrage expressed online that led to the backpedaling by the officials. That's a good thing. But what about Matthew 5 .39 where Jesus instructs us to turn the other cheek?

This verse was brought up a bunch to justify Christian disengagement. But a text without its context is a pretext for a proof text. Matthew 5 is talking about personal offense. If someone does something to me, I will not retaliate.

As Paul says elsewhere, when reviled, we bless. If I were to fly to France and start preaching outside the Olympics and the blue smurf demon came and slapped me in the face or someone else spat upon me, I would not return fire but would continue to love him by calling him to repentance and faith in Christ.

Matthew 5 is not dealing with the response of the church at large to the nation's mocking.

God.

Practical Christian Response: Prayer, Church, Evangelism, and Politics

Now, you may not be able to do anything about the Olympics directly besides boycotting it, but if you have any zeal, this whole thing ought to stir you at an individual and local level. So let's start on the personal level and expand outward.

Yes, you should be zealous to pray for these people. The wickedness on display ought to stir you to pray more faithfully. It should provoke you to more faithfully leading your family to worship. In other words, one of the most effective weapons of spiritual warfare that you can wage against the power of evil in this age is to go to church and have babies.

Commit yourself to being set apart from the world and to loving God's church. A lot of people miss it in John 13 when Jesus says that the world will know that we are his disciples. They misused the verse to say that the world will know that we are his disciples by our love for the world, but it actually says that the world will know us by our love for one another.

Commit yourself to this on a personal and local level and you will be playing your part in the cosmic conflict in which you are involved. What you can also do is engage in the work of evangelism. Evangelize your neighbors and your enemies.

When evil seeks to infiltrate your community through things like sexual immorality, stand as a local church against such things by proclaiming God's law and God's grace towards sinners in Christ. Finally, Christians can be much more assertive about righteousness in the political sphere.

If Christians would simply insist upon their disapproval of his wicked policies regarding abortion, for example, instead of apologizing for him, righteous legislation might be secured under Donald Trump.

When the congregation I'm in fellowship with sing Psalm 2 during worship, we mean it. When we sing, We mean those words, and not to sing them in our own echo chamber, but to bring them to bear upon our government.

So to all the people asking, well what can we do? I summon you to spiritual warfare, but not the kind of silliness featured on my channel. Real spiritual warfare, the way to obey Ephesians 6 and put on the full armor of God and take up the sword of the Spirit, to wage warfare against the principalities and powers, is to obey chapters 1 -5, because being unbothered by this is a holy no