If you frequent social media, you may well have seen posts or tweets about current events that are tagged #staywoke. Woke is a slang term that eased into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE). In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, “I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.”
‘Woke’ is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness, and for something people link to Social Justice. It is a discussion at least as old as the Garden when Adam and Eve had a choice to listen to God or Satan.
Gen 3:1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”
This continued even in the argument between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Adams fundamentally had little trust of his fellow man because all are sinners and fall short of the Glory of God.[1] On the other hand, Jefferson maximized his faith in men with input into “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” Interestingly, that French document was essentially a ‘copy and paste’ of the American Constitution but the French version was not about life, nor given to a moral people. The difference is that Adams used the Constitution to protect life, endowed by our creator as a gift. Jefferson wanted to maximize freedom… but when taken to the logical extreme, that often destroys innocent life. Today, Social Justice people would normally call Jefferson, ‘Righteous’ and ‘Woke,’ but they are too busy trying to tear down his statues and the Jefferson Memorial rather than understanding a historical character of like mind.
My problem is the anchoring of that expression to fallen, imperfect human minds driven by imperfect, fallen, human agendas…. Many founded on fear. The Devil is a liar from the beginning and too many who profess God but embrace the world around us, its death culture, and fear based reasoning, strive to lock all of us in tyranny. To make that work, people shoe-horn God into a package of their personal crafting, dispute the relevance of the Bible, and like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, create their own religion. Today, they do that at the speed of light on the Internet, creating a virtual smorgasbord of of any dish that suite their appetite in the moment.
Here’s my challenge at the outset: The ONLY one in all creation who is truly WOKE is our God, Creator, and Savior who came from beyond space time to the earth as a man named, Jesus. Think on that. Think outside the box of your own crafting.
Across our lives, we see churches, governments, media, political parties, and movements that are full of people who emotionally transcend logic, thinking they are WOKE with truth in their grasp… Because emotion feels good, as opposed to the hard work of logic. Emotion based folks (most of us) often fail to understand how the pathologies of the world are destroying them. Ben Shapiro’s book title sums it up, Facts don’t Care about your Feelings. In our modern culture, I get it that non-Christians think Christians are opinionated, illogical, lack compassion, don’t value them, serve up bitter dishes of condemnation, and so on. On the other hand, Christains often roll their eyes, close their church doors, and enclave themselves away from culture and non-Christians as much as they can.[2] Until, like the Soviet Union, the equivalent of the KGB comes knocking.
We want to pull back the curtain and step with Christians and non-Christians into the Holy of Holies of the most WOKE being in creation… The Creator of the Universe. Our Prayer is that God will open your eyes to the most beautiful love story of all time. To do that, we will build a framework across the Scarlet Thread of History, Language, Culture, Geography… and Science… to challenge readers into faith that transcends even the current Tsunamis of ideas crashing against all of us.
[1] Romans 5: 12
[2] Larkin, David, Un-Christian – Awesome book that documents this problem.