Jordan, LeBron, and Jesus

Stephen A. Smith accidentally said something revealing in one of the endless televised debates about LeBron James and Michael Jordan over the last month: 

“As long as I’m living and breathing, and I’ve got breathe in my body, and I got a voice, and I got vocal cords, you will me hear say LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.”

To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future of the NBA, imagine an Air Jordan stomping on the face of every great young player -- forever. The present must always pay homage to the past. Michael Jordan is the Greatest Of All Time. The discussion is over. He dominated the toughest era in league history. The NBA isn’t what it was. It will never be that way again. 

People like Stephen A. talk about him in the same way the Apostle John talks about Jesus. Replace a few words and this could be on First Take: 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. 

-- 1 John 1:1-4 

Someone who lived through Jordan’s prime knows that being greater than him is about much more than checking a few boxes. Stephen A. has said he doesn’t care if LeBron wins six or even seven championships. It still wouldn’t be enough. He’s not invincible. Not like MJ. 

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer people like him in a position to really understand that. The people who saw Jordan in the flesh are all getting older. They won’t always be around to tell us about him. 

Jordan vs. LeBron is basketball’s version of Jay Leno vs. Conan O’Brien. People cared about which comedian would host an irrelevant TV show because the two represented something more than themselves. Conan was a Generation Xer who waited his turn while the Baby Boomer hung onto the job well past when he should have retired. Leno was the Baby Boomer getting rushed out the door for a fresher face even though he was still on top of the game. 

Stephen A. (53) is four years younger than Jordan (57). When he’s talking about MJ, he’s really talking about himself. What happened in the 90s matters. He matters. It’s the cry of a man screaming into a void and hoping to hear breath in his lungs. 

The same thing is happening when Nick Wright (36) talks about LeBron (35). Wright was six when Jordan beat the Bad Boy Pistons. He missed that era of that NBA. But what happened in the 2010s matters too. Why are we so sure that the game was better 30 years ago? Just because the people who were around back then say so? 

LeBron, like so many other Millenials, is being judged by historical standards that aren’t relevant to his life. The league is different than in Jordan’s day. The rules are different. The two barely even play the same sport. No one is winning a title in 2020 running the Triangle Offense. Saying LeBron could never be as great as Jordan because he needed to team up with other stars is like saying a modern college student could never be as great as one from the 1960s because he needed to take out loans to pay his tuition. Times have changed. 

Jordan had his time. And that time is over and is never coming back. LeBron has his time now. It will end too. For all people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, and the flower fades. (Isaiah 40:6-8) 

There’s a reason few people bring up Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell in GOAT conversations anymore. Russell won his first NBA title in 1957. A 12-year old who watched that live would be 75 in 2020. Most of the people who watched with him are dead. A 12-year old who watched Jordan win his first title in 1991 is 41 in 2020. He might still think that Jordan is the GOAT when he’s 75 in 2054. Do you think people will still listen? Do you think they will still care? 

Calling anyone the GOAT at anything is fairly ridiculous. Who are any of us to say? Stephen A. is right in the sense that you can’t really judge something unless you saw it for yourself. Only a basketball fan who had watched the game faithfully since the 1950s is really qualified to speak on it. There aren’t many of those folks left. And I don’t see any of them on TV. The span of human history goes back thousands and thousands of years. No one was around for all of it. All we can really say is who was the greatest in a particular era. 

But that’s not enough. We don’t want to be confined to a particular era when making those judgments because we don’t want to think about lives being confined to a particular era. God has put a desire for eternity on the human heart. And yet we can never fulfill it. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) 

Art (and sport is a subsection of art) is an attempt to do so. People write songs and make movies for the same reason they drew animals on the walls of caves. It’s why Jay Z made a song called Young Forever. It’s why Martin Scorcese and Robert DeNiro made The Irishman. That’s a movie about a bunch of old men reliving the 1960s one last time, using digital effects to pretend that they are younger than they are, and trying to make the cultural figures from their youth relevant to a modern audience. But Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t matter to anyone not in the AARP. And, if we’re being honest, neither does JFK. 

Soon enough, no one will care that this country ever existed. Americans have trouble grappling with our societal mortality because we are raised to believe that the United States is the culmination of history. Everything built toward the moment where the Founding Fathers founded a republic on the idea that all men are created equal and deserved the chance to rule themselves. That dream must never die. But, of course, it will. Nothing lasts forever. 

We think that the end of the U.S. means the end of the world when really it is just the end of our world. There’s a lot of talk about how the future of our democracy is at stake in this election. Maybe that’s true. But our democracy was always going to end one day. Life will go on. The world will keep spinning. People will still be born, fall in love, have kids, get old, and die. Oceans rise and empires fall. Nothing ever really changes. There is nothing new under the sun. 

There is only one name that will last forever and it’s not Michael Jordan. And there’s only one idea that will last forever and it’s not The American Dream. There’s a through line running through human history that you can find if you have eyes to see: 

But as I consider this shifting and odd variety of customs and beliefs in different ages, I find in one corner of the world a peculiar people, separated from all other peoples of the earth, who are the most ancient of all and whose history is earlier by several centuries than the oldest histories we have. 

I find this great and numerous people descended from one man, worshipping one God, and living according to a law which they claim to have received from his hand. They maintain that they are the only people in the world to whom God has revealed his mysteries; that all men are corrupt and in disgrace with God, that they have all been abandoned to their senses and their own minds; and that this is the reason for the strange aberrations and continual changes of religions and customs among them, whereas these people remain unshakeable in their conduct; but that God will not leave the other peoples forever in darkness, that a Redeemer will come, for all; that they are in the world to proclaim him to men; that they have been expressly created to be the forerunners and heralds of this great coming, and to call all peoples to unite with them in looking forward to this Redeemer. 

-- Blaine Pascal

Isaiah 29

Isaiah called everything before it happened. If you read the Book of Isaiah in 700 BC, you would have been prepared for every major geopolitical event in the ancient Middle East over the next few hundred years, as well as the way Christianity would change the world.

But few of his peers listened. Isaiah explained why in Chapter 29: 

The Lord has brought over you a deep sleep; He has sealed your eyes (the prophets); he has covered your heads (the seers). 

For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. And if you give the scroll to someone who can read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” 

Or if you give the scroll to someone who cannot read, and say, “Read this, please”, they will answer, “I don’t know how to read.” 

— Isaiah 29:10-12 

According to Isaiah, God seals the minds of non-believers to prevent them from knowing the truth. The people of Judah had turned away from God, ignoring His commands and living by their own rules. This was their punishment: 

He said, “Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; Be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the hearts of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their ears, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” 

— Isaiah 6:9-10 

So why say anything at all? Because what Isaiah was saying wasn’t for their benefit. It was all for the people who came after them who would be able to understand his prophecies with the benefit of hindsight. God was calling His own shot. He was leaving the evidence of His hand in world events for anyone who cared enough to investigate: 

 “Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare us to the things that come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods.” 

— Isaiah 41:22-23 

But people who don’t want to believe in God can always find ways to ignore what is right in front of them. There’s no question that the Book of Isaiah contains predictions of future events that no mortal human being could have made on their own. Even the historical scholarship recognizes that. But rather than acknowledge the hand of God in its creation, they created a byzantine conspiracy theory where several Isaiahs (if not dozens) worked together over hundreds of years to falsify a work of “prophesy”. 

And what’s their proof? The fact that no one living in Judah in 700 BC should have been able to so accurately describe what would happen in Babylon and Persia in 500 BC! In other words, they are assuming their own conclusions and calling it science. 

Science is the foundation of the way Americans understand the world. We don’t believe anything that isn’t first proven in a scientific paper. That’s why there are so many studies that try to prove things that used to be called “common sense.” You aren’t allowed to draw conclusions from your lived experience, or benefit from the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of human society. Those people weren’t “modern”. They hadn’t been Enlightened yet. Where were their iPhones!? 

But the deeper mysteries of the human condition cannot be answered by the scientific method. Why do we exist? How should we live our lives? And what happens to us after we die? 

 

There is no way to design a controlled experiment in a lab to prove or not prove the existence of God. It's the same with any other metaphysical claim. That is why most Americans don't really have firm religious beliefs. They will tell you they believe in love or progress or that they are spiritual but not religious or that they are open-minded about supernatural claims. 

The problem is that there are still some things you have to take on faith. Human beings have to live by first principles because the world is too complicated for us to understand without them:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked in child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror [emphasis added]; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 

— 1 Corinthians 13:10-12 

There's a reason that these are the some of the first lines in the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident [emphasis added], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Imagine trying to design a scientific experiment to prove whether or not all men are created equal. It's absurd. That's not something you can prove. You just accept that it's true and work from there. It's the same thing with God. 

Christianity is like any other belief system. It has a lot of claims that have to be taken on faith. Either Jesus rose from the grave or he didn’t. None of us were there to say what actually happened. Either his sacrifice on the cross was an adequate substitute for our sins or it wasn’t. None of us can die and report back. There is a veil that stands between us and true knowledge of the universe. Either it will be broken when we die or it won’t.

Modern skeptics have made fun of some of those unfalsifiable claims by creating a religion they call The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Their point is that you can't prove or disprove the existence of a FSM that exists in space anymore than you can the Christian God.

It's a fair point. There's nothing stopping anyone from believing in a spaghetti monster. But it doesn't prove quite as much as they think. 

Choosing to believe in something means choosing to accept its assumptions about the world. So instead of asking someone to disprove a flying spaghetti monster, you have to ask yourself what it means to believe in it. What does it tell us about the world? What does it say about how we should live our lives? In other words -- what are its first principles? 

This is the idea behind the analogy of the "red pill" and the "blue pill" in The Matrix. Taking a "pill" is like accepting the first principles of a belief system. You just swallow them on faith and they change the way you look at the world around you.

There's a certain point on the road to God where you have to walk by faith instead of sight. It's only when you choose to believe in God that everything else makes sense. But you have to make that choice with your heart, not your head. You have to swallow the pill and see where it takes you. That's too much for modern people who think they can figure out the world on their own. They don't need to believe in fairy tales. They don't have to accept the limitations of the human condition.

That's what Isaiah means when he says non-believers are "blinded" from the truth. They made the wrong choice about what to believe. Do that and you might just end up worshipping spaghetti: 

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.

- Romans 1:21-23

Isaiah 28

God made a deal with the people of Israel. He made them His people and gave them a land of milk and honey. All they had to do in return was follow a list of rules in the Old Testament. Doing that would create a holy kingdom that would bless not only themselves but the whole world. 

But instead of changing the world, the world changed them. They didn’t want to live by a different standard than everyone else. They wanted to be just like everyone else. Who was God to tell them what to do? Isaiah describes how they viewed His commands: 

“Who is it he is trying to teach? To whom is he explaining his message? To children weaned from their milk, to those just taken from the breast? For it is: Do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that; a little here, a little there.” 

— Isaiah 28:9-10 

He spent most of his life warning his countrymen about what would happen if they didn't change. They had turned what was supposed to be God’s kingdom on earth into an evil and unjust society. What had been given them could just as easily be taken away. If they wouldn’t list to warnings through prophets like Isaiah, God would send messengers like the Assyrians: 

Very well them, with foreign lips and strange tongues God will speak to this people, To whom he said, “This is the resting place, let the weary rest;” and “This is the place of repose” — but they would not listen. 

So then, the word of the Lord to them will become: Do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that; a little here, a little there — So that as they go they will fall backward; they will be injured and captured. 

— Isaiah 28:11-13 

Isaiah uses the metaphor of the vineyard to describe God’s relationship with His chosen people. His vineyard (Israel) has gone bad so He would tear it down and start over. The new one would be much different. It would be a different kind of society based on a different set of rules: 

“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who relies on it will never be stricken with panic. I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line; hail will sweep away your refuge, the lie, and water will overflow your hiding place.” 

— Isaiah 28:16-17 

The Messiah would be the cornerstone of God’s new kingdom on Earth. Under the old system, the Jewish people earned their righteousness by following The Law and sacrificed animals to atone for the times they broke it. The Messiah would be the sacrifice under the new system. His righteousness would cover the sins of God’s people: 

“But he was pierce for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” 

— Isaiah 53:5-6 

It’s not possible for mankind to save ourselves. The history of Israel in the Old Testament is proof of that. So is the state of our world today. That’s why the new system that God was setting up wouldn’t depend on the righteousness of man. We would no longer have to do anything to earn our salvation. We could just accept the gift we had been given. 

That logic applies to more than just God's people. The word of God would no longer be limited to one group in one corner of the world. The Messiah would invite everyone in and expand the blessing originally given to Abraham and his descendants to the entire world. Isaiah compares God’s people to a childless woman who would be unexpectedly blessed with offspring:

“Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the Lord. 

“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in desolate cities.”  

— Isaiah 54:1-3 

Put it all together and you can see that the most important pieces of Christian theology are in a book written 700 years before Jesus was born. It’s almost as if God had planned this whole thing from the beginning! That’s why Jesus read a passage from the Book of Isaiah (61:1-2) when he announces the beginning of his public ministry (Luke 4:17-21). 

It all makes more sense when you look at it backwards. The time that we spend on this world is a tiny portion of a much larger picture. It's impossible for any of us to understand history as it is happening. The consequences of our own decisions and broader societal trends can play out hundreds of years after our deaths. 

What that means is that the only way to understand history is to read it back to front instead of front to back. There's a lot of stuff written in 2020 about what will happen in 2024. But we don't know who will be right because we can't predict the future. The only thing that we can do is read what was written in 2016 about what will happen in 2020. Better yet -- read stuff written in 2010 or 2000. Who was right about what would happen? Who was wrong? What were the thought process behind those predictions about the world? 

Don't read about the present to know about the future. Read the past to know about the present. The people who were right before are more likely to be right again. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results, as any stockbroker will tell you. But it's all we have to go on.

I first started paying attention to the news when I was in high school and college in the middle of the 2000s. The first story that I really followed closely was the second war in Iraq. The people pushing us to invade Iraq believed that Saddam Hussein was a danger to world peace, that he was building weapons of mass destruction that could be given to third parties, and that removing him from power would be the first step in a chain reaction that would permanently change the political structures in the Middle East. 

As it turns out, none of that was true. That's pretty obvious now that we have 15 years to evaluate those predictions. 

So why does that matter now? Because if the same people who said we should invade Iraq make new predictions about the future, we can remember what they said before and ask them what will be different this time. Maybe the holes in their worldview that were exposed by their failures in Iraq will be exposed again if we follow their advice. What have they learned from what went wrong last time? There's no way to "win" an argument about the future. But you can win one about the past because everyone has access to the same information. 

The past has the only answers that you can rely on. It’s always easier to lie about what will happen in the future than what has happened in the past. 

One of the best lines from "Game of Thrones" comes from what happens in the North after the Red Wedding. It would take too long to explain the context if you haven't watched the show so just know that the North was a group of people who were betrayed at the Red Wedding. Years after the fact, people in the North would end every toast by saying "The North Remembers". Memory is power. No matter how much you lie to us now, no matter how much you want to put the past in the past, do not forget that we have not forgotten. We remember.

Revenge is not a Christian concept. But remembering is. You have to remember what was said to you before. If you do not forget then you cannot be lied to. And if you cannot be lied to than you cannot be controlled. Don't let other people tell you what happened. Remember it for yourself. 

Christians have to know our history. We were right before which should give us confidence that will be right again. You can't prove that a prediction about the future will be correct. What you can do is prove that predictions in the past about the present were correct. 

Everything that happened in the Book of Isaiah is part of the historical record. His predictions about the past were proven accurate. The people of 700 BC didn’t have the benefit of seeing history from back to front. The just had to take Isaiah at his word. 

We have the benefit of hindsight to know that he was right. Isaiah told people what the new deal between God and Man would be. And then that new deal came to pass. It’s almost as if he was a messenger from a divine being who knew what would happen.