A 100 MILLION DOLLAR Ad Campaign For JESUS?!

He Gets Us as a $100 Million Ad Campaign for Jesus

Hey guys, Colin here, and welcome back to Fight For Truth, the channel where we bring you Christian commentary about the things that matter. In today's video, we're going to be talking about He Gets Us.

Now, He Gets Us is a campaign for Jesus that is reportedly funded with over $100 million, and it's primarily an ad campaign. According to their website, quote, He Gets Us is a campaign designed to create cultural change in the way people think about Jesus and His relevance in our lives, end quote.

Essentially, the idea is that the Church has, to one degree or another, misrepresented Jesus as an uptight religious man who was judgmental and called people out all the time. And this ad campaign is going to fix the culture's misrepresentation of Jesus by instead presenting, quote, the authentic Jesus as He's depicted in the Bible.

They don't outright admit all of this on the front end, but you'll see what I mean when you watch the video. So here, we're going to watch a clip from He Gets Us and ask the question, do they represent the authentic Jesus of the Bible?

The first video we'll be watching is The Rebel, and it has over 24 million views at the time of recording. This is almost completely due to the fact that this organization used their enormous amounts of money to put this video in front of people using YouTube ads.

And this is the reason why, despite having several videos with millions and millions of views, they still only have 7 .7 thousand subscribers. In any case, here's the first clip from The Rebel. Watch this.

A rebel took to the streets.

He recruited others to join him. They quit their jobs, left their families, and swore allegiance to him.

The Rebel Imagery and the False Jesus of Cultural Relevance

So, here we see that Jesus was apparently a groundbreaking rebel. And He Gets Us uses certain imagery to depict this. We have a gentleman with sunglasses on and a hoodie, sporting a prominent neck tattoo and a tattoo under his eye for good measure.

This apparently gives us an idea about the type of rebel that Jesus supposedly was. Effectively, they're saying this. Jesus was sort of like a rebel with a neck tattoo in the inner city recruiting members to His cause.

The only problem is that this is a caricature of a false Jesus. Nowhere in Scripture was Jesus described as having this inner-city bad-boy attitude and not caring about societal norms with regard to how He dressed.

He's not described that way, and we shouldn't fill in those blanks. That's simply not in the Bible. This is an undertone being broadcasted by He Gets Us, but it's certainly not biblical. But He Gets Us is very careful to make most of their statements here implied.

They don't come right out and give you a real theological position to grapple with, because if they did that, we would see how unbiblical their worldview truly is. And it seems that they don't want this.

So with that said, watch the next clip.

They roamed the hood, challenged authority, and made a lot of people uneasy.

So here they say that Jesus and His followers, quote, roamed the hood. Again, they are painting a picture of Jesus and His disciples, painting them out to be inner-city buddies who put on their hoodies and roamed the streets nonchalantly.

But is this true or accurate? Is it forthcoming to say that Jesus and His followers, quote, roamed the hood? Essentially, they're taking an ancient group of Hebrew men and trying to view them through a modern American inner-city cultural lens.

The result is a convoluted mess. This conjures up images of loitering and generally being unoccupied with any specific task. But that is not true of Jesus or His disciples. They had a very particular task at hand, and they weren't nonchalantly roaming the hood.

They preached the coming of the Kingdom of God. Now, this isn't to say that they couldn't have gone for a leisurely walk down the street. We're just not given that as a description of the ministry of Jesus in Scripture, especially not as a main focus.

Matthew 4 .17 gives us insight into the ministry of Jesus from the very beginning, when it says, quote, From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. So Jesus walked on streets, to be sure.

But saying that Jesus, quote, roamed the hood falls well short of the biblical focus, the biblical description. He preached repentance and had a purpose given to Him by His Father. This is not best explained or described by using the intentionally vague and, frankly, provocative phrase, Jesus was a rebel who roamed the hood.

You see, if your goal is to give people a true grasp on what Jesus came to do and who He was, this isn't it. But being intentionally vague is what He Gets Us is all about. But let's talk about the next part of the clip, where it says that they, quote, challenged authority.

And the image that pops up is that of a boy in a hoodie jumping over a fence. In other words, the image has a flavor of trespassing to it. That's what it seems to be depicting intentionally. If you're jumping over a fence in order to challenge authority, what else would you be doing?

So here's a question. Is this really an accurate depiction of the ministry of Jesus? Is this a good example of what Jesus might have done, even metaphorically speaking? Obviously not. In fact, we have a very good idea of what Jesus said and did regarding civil authority.

Once, Jesus was directly asked if people should challenge authority by, say, not paying taxes. In Matthew 22, 21, He says this, quote, Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

Jesus was not challenging authority willy-nilly because He felt like it and because He enjoyed it. He was challenging specifically the authority of the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees who were leading His sheep astray.

He wasn't roaming the hood looking for authority to challenge in general. He was preaching the truth to Israel and denying unbiblical authority by virtue of being the Son of God Himself and having complete authority.

To compare that to a kid hopping a fence and to a group of kids skateboarding down the street, it's asinine and misleading beyond belief. But just after this, the video says that Jesus and His followers, quote, made a lot of people uneasy.

And of course, this is the picture that they put up. Some kid hops a fence in his hoodie, and here we have two middle-aged white Karens looking into the distance with their phones, ready to call the cops and maybe the manager too.

I'm not sure what they think they've proven successfully here. I guess next time you see a kid in a hoodie jumping over the fence of your gated community, have no fear and don't call the cops. That kid might be Jesus.

Again, this whole ad campaign is so misleading, so underhanded. But speaking of absurd and ridiculous videos, watch this next clip. Challenged authority. It made a lot of people uneasy.

Community leaders feared them. Religious leaders abhorred them. Law enforcement labeled them outlaws. We have to shut them down, they said. Get them off the streets. Protect our communities from these troublemakers.

Community Leaders, Religious Leaders, and Law Enforcement in the He Gets Us Clip

So again, we have more politically and culturally charged photos. Where have we seen that before? Kids walking down the street in their hoodies and their streetwear, some guy in his car with sunglasses on, and then my personal favorite.

The end of the clip says on behalf of the seemingly judgmental world, quote, we need to protect our communities from these troublemakers. And then this image pops up. A young man with braided long hair, a tank top, chain around his neck, tattoos on his arms, as well as one under his eye.

And once again, they're not making any direct statements, are they? They're making implications. And this gives them plausible deniability. If you call them out for making an inaccurate depiction of Jesus, they can just respond.

They can just say, but we never said that specifically. We just made a vague statement and put up a picture. You're the one who's connecting the dots. I think you're reading into this. But it's not hard to see what they're trying to do.

Apparently to them, Jesus was some kind of young man with long hair and a tattoo on his face. That's the equivalent of what Jesus was in his culture to them. The caption of the video says, quote, Jesus knew how it felt to be falsely judged.

The only problem with this is that Jesus wasn't being falsely judged due to his rugged or countercultural outward appearance. Nowhere do we see that in Scripture. And unlike this video, Jesus actually said what he believed out loud.

And that's why people falsely accused him and judged him and hated him. Not because he was dressing in a countercultural, provocative way that the baby boomers just didn't like. No, in John 10, 30, Jesus says, quote, I and the Father are one.

And in response, quote, the Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus claimed unity with the Father as the Son of God. And the religious leaders didn't like this because they were theologically and morally corrupt.

It had nothing to do with Jesus being a rugged, trendy guy wearing his street clothes that made him look different from other people. The whole video is a cultural statement made by innuendo and undertones, and they think it's too ambiguous to be called out.

But here we are in this video doing just that because it's unbiblical. They're intentionally presenting the ministry of Jesus with imagery that doesn't pertain to it. They're trying to make a cultural statement, but certainly not an accurate biblical one.

So with that, let's watch the next clip. Check this out.

Protect our communities from these troublemakers. But they weren't part of a gang spreading hate and terror. They were spreading love.

The Video's Message About Love Without Repentance or Truth

So here we are, at the end of the video, and what have we learned about Jesus? Well, He was a super cool guy roaming the hood, challenging authority with his group of friends, making all the neighborhood Karens uncomfortable because they were so closed-minded that they misjudged Him.

The whole thing is intentionally framed to be culturally relevant, rather than a direct presentation of real biblical truth. It's meant to be provocative, clever, vague, but not clear and descriptive.

And as a result, we have this weird amalgamation of clips and images that tell us basically nothing about the biblical Jesus. In what way was He a rebel? Why didn't the religious authorities like Him?

What did Jesus actually teach when He was walking the streets, or as they would like to say, roaming the hood? What do unbelievers watching this video need to actually know about Jesus? Well, the closest we get to a so-called answer is that Jesus was, quote, spreading love.

Nothing about sin, nothing about repentance, nothing about hell, nothing about law. All we have is the vague idea that Jesus was a rebel of love who, quote, roamed the hood. The irony is that this video was supposed to be a public relations campaign that told you something about Jesus.

In other words, it's supposed to tell you something accurate about a particular person in a clear, understandable way. Instead, we were given an unclear and, frankly, inaccurate portrayal of Jesus that offers far more questions than it did answers.

But remember, Jesus told His people how to spread the message about Him. Jesus told the Church how we ought to represent Him to the world. Matthew 28, 28 says, quote, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

This is what Jesus told us to do, how to represent Him to the world. Preach the authority of Christ, repentance from sin, belief in the Gospel, the loving kindness and holy wrath of God, the following of His Word and all of its commands, etc.

So here's a question. Does that video from He Gets Us bring us any closer to that goal? Obviously not. Do videos like the one we just watched bring us any closer to understanding the biblical Jesus and His overarching mission given to the Church?

No. And again, the irony is that this is supposed to help the culture understand Jesus. But the culture already sees Him this way, as a vaguely loving philosopher guy and a Middle Eastern hippie who was really into love and all that stuff.

The real issue is that people don't know what Jesus actually taught and what was meant when He said to love God and to love your neighbor. And of course, these are things that they didn't actually present in the video.

Jesus didn't command us to use trendy ads to spread a vague message of love and roaming the hood while you challenge authority. He told us, among other things, to quote, teach them to observe all that He had commanded.

Thus, we can see that He Gets Us is not a PR campaign for the real authentic biblical Jesus. It's an unbiblical collection of vague and meaningless phrases that misrepresent Jesus to the world in the name of being culturally relevant.

It's nothing more than an expensive piece of Jesus fan fiction that substitutes money for actual substance. And rather than confronting the biggest issues in the evangelical world, it serves as a perfect example of all of them in action.

Rather than refuting a false Jesus and presenting the true one, they give us yet another false Christ to add to the list. He Gets Us is unbiblical, unhelpful, and Christians should stand against it wholeheartedly.

Let's represent Christ the way He actually told us to, using His Word as our guide. Don't let phony ads like this get you down. They're just a blip on the radar. Hold fast to Christ and His Word and His Gospel, and know that these are the real forces for transformation in the world.

I pray that this has been a blessing to you, and please know that this video isn't meant as a sinful attack, but rather as a biblical critique. And let's pray for those who are involved with He Gets Us that they would stop this false propaganda by God's grace and turn to the truth of God's Word.

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