The Chapel I attended as a teenager in Rhiwderin near Newport, South Wales boasted a rather fascinating member of the congregation. His name was Bert Entwistle. Bert had a wonderful baritone voice and sang in local choirs. But that wasn’t the thing that made him such an intriguing figure to my teenage friends and me. It was his son we were especially interested in. For John Entwistle was bass guitar player with The Who. Bert kindly arranged for us to have a signed photo of the bassist. The band have just announced their farewell tour, some sixty years since forming in the mid-1960s. Although only singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townsend are still in the land of the living.
One of The Who’s best known songs is ‘Won't Get Fooled Again’, released in 1971. The air was full of revolution in the previous decade. Young people were busy throwing off the old order of deference and restraint. They demanded a less inhibited and more equal society. ‘Free love’ and all that. The heady idealism of that time had begun to peter out in 70s. In ‘Wont Won't Get Fooled Again’, Daltrey belts out Townsend’s disillusioned commentary, ‘Things look just the same, and history ain’t changed’. At the climax of the song he roars, ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’
That’s the trouble with revolutions. The old order may be overthrown, but the new lot aren’t necessarily a whole lot better. Which is the basic lesson of George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell had Soviet Russia firmly in his sights. The October Revolution may have got rid of the Tsar’s corrupt regime, but you’d hardly call Stalin’s Russia a bastion of justice, equality and freedom. Similarly with the so-called ‘Woke Revolution’. The intention may have been good, to champion the cause of the oppressed and marginalised. But once the Woke Revolutionaries gained cultural power and influence, they soon became dab hands at doing a bit of oppressing themselves. In a now notorious case, Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her professorship at the University of Sussex for daring to insist that being a woman has something to do with biology.
Well, earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ refer to biological sex, not gender identity. Even senior politicians who seemed a tad confused about the details of male and female anatomy now accept this common-sense judgement.
But why is it that even the most idealistic people who believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ often end up acting in a pretty brutal way? Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg put his finger on it when commenting on why the internet seems to spew out so much fake news and other vile stuff, “This is the awful truth: we like misinformation, we like lurid headlines, we like gossip, we like mischief, we like people saying critical things of each other.” Clegg added, “We are not nice. Human beings are not always nice and never ever have been.” What Clegg calls “not nice” the Bible calls “sin”. That is our wilful tendency to defy God and do damage to others.
That’s why revolutions fail, and the new bosses soon become
as bad as the old ones they removed. Accepting the Bible’s realistic account of
human nature will help ensure we won’t get fooled again by people who promise
sweeping change. The problem of sin is one what we cannot resolve on our own.
That is why God sent his Son Jesus into our broken world. He came to rescue us
from sin by dying upon the cross in our place and being raised from the dead.
By faith in Jesus we can be forgiven and receive power to live a new life. The 'Christian Revolution' is based not on human efforts to remodel the world, but
the life-transforming grace of God: "
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