update for 07 May 2025
Jeremey Sarber’s domain, jeremysarber.com, now points to a newsletter hosted by Substack. Given that Substack is and has always been a Nazi bar, I don’t recommend going there.
In the meantime, I have updated links to specific posts on his former website to retrieve versions from the Wayback Machine. I have also made a number of revisions and additions to the text below, and hopefully cleaned it up a bit.
Judge not, that you may not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye? Or how sayest thou to thy brother: Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
While looking for more websites to add to my collection, I came across Jeremy Sarber’s website, On Life & Scripture. He’s a Reformed Baptist and is thus an adherent of a Calvinist strain of Christianity that contains elements I find even more distasteful1 than I do Christianity in general.
Nevertheless, I was thinking of adding his website to my blogroll. His site is clean and well-designed, and I had found myself mostly in agreement with his post “Christians, we’re called to be peacemakers”.
However, he soon follows this post with “The mission field is decorated with rainbow flags”, in which he writes:
God’s glory was on display everywhere we looked — majestic mountains, rivers, waterfalls, the open skies. And yet, the local population seemed to suppress the eternal power and divine nature behind it all. Every shop in town was draped in rainbows. Even their churches joined in the blatant defiance of God’s law and created order by waving rainbow flags. I suppose the irony is lost on them. See Genesis 9:12-16.
His reference involves the rainbow as a symbol of God’s promise that he will never again send a flood to destroy all life, incidentally. What irony queer people and queer-welcoming churches putting out rainbow flags are supposed to find is unclear to me. Nor do I care to speculate as to his feelings and opinions on transgender people. I suspect he would call them abominations, all the while willfully ignorant of the possibility that God might recoil from the hate She finds in his heart and find him abominable in Her sight.
His post only gets worse from here. I get it. As a particular sort of Christian, Jeremy Sarber seems to feel obligated to inveigh against queerness. Nevertheless, the following troubled me.
The godlessness of never-ending pride displays tempted me to pray, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). But I thought twice. I knew Christ would be quick to rebuke me as he did John and James. The better part of me realized I was walking through the mission field. Trampling potential crops can only stunt their growth.
He visits a city that is not his home, accuses them of godlessness, and calls it a “mission field”. By this usage he appears to believe that the people whose city he is visiting are somehow ignorant of God and that remedying this situation is somehow Sarber’s problem.
I cannot help but wonder: does Jeremy Sarber not see his own sanctimony? Does he not see his own self-righteousness? Does he not see his own godlessness? Or does the beam in his eye obscure his vision?
Never mind that Sarber may well be conflating his own prejudice and distaste for sexualities that he personally finds unappealing or outright disgusting with God’s will. This makes him the sort of man of the cloth bands like Genesis and Ghost condemn in songs like “Jesus He Knows Me”. What really bugs me is his certitude and his belief that he has the ability or the right to tell these people, who he has never met, that they are wrong for living as they do or worshiping as they do.
Is this how Christians witness?
If so, no wonder Friedrich Nietzsche was moved to write, in epigram 104 of Beyond Good and Evil, that, It is not their love for men but the impotence of their love for men which hinders the Christians of today from—burning us.
Worst, to me, is the following toward the end:
As Christians, our aim should be facilitating repentance, not destroying would-be converts.
Where in the everloving fuck did Jesus H. Christ say anything about “facilitating repentance”? Unless I’m misreading my namesake Gospel, he said there where only two commandments:
Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets.
This tells me everything I need to know about Jeremy Sarber and how he sees people who don’t worship his God his way. They are not autonomous human beings to him, people who live, feel, and think as they do for their own reasons and are ends in themselves. Instead, such people are to Sarber nothing but souls to be won for his image of Christ. They are to him nothing but the means to his own ends, existing to serve his idea of the glory of God.
I doubt he’ll read this. Even if he did, I doubt he would consider what he has read. I suspect he would summarily dismiss my words because I am not a pastor or a funeral chaplain, never attended divinity school, and was never even fully educated as a Roman Catholic.
I do not even consider myself a Christian. Nevertheless, if I believed God existed and were inclined to answer my prayers with anything but silent indifference, I would ask that the holy spirit whisper in Jeremy Sarber’s ear whenever he seethes in righteous anger at the sight of a rainbow flag and remind him: “These too are God’s children, and what you do to the least of them you do to Him.”
He judges, despite Christ’s warning against judgment in the quote from the Gospel of Matthew with which I began this post. Of course, I too am judging him, but as I mentioned before I am not a Christian. Nevertheless, if the Devil can quote Scripture to suit his purpose then I see no reason not to do the same. Therefore, I shall close with another choice bit from my namesake apostle:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them. Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven: but he that doth the will of my Father who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have not we prophesied in thy name, and cast out devils in thy name, and done many miracles in thy name? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity.
Given a chance to speak to Jeremy Sarber in person, I would advise him to see to the beam in his eye lest he prove himself by his words and deeds a false prophet and a worker of iniquity. He should not be placing greater emphasis on the Pentateuch and epistles of Paul than he does on the teachings attributed to Jesus Christ in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
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It’s mainly the doctrine of total depravity that offends me. God supposedly made us, and blames us for not being what he wants us to be. If we are not the potter, but the potter’s clay, then what kind of potter blames the clay for his own failure?
However, I also have reservations about unconditional election and irresistable grace. According to these, I could be a tyrant, a mass murderer, a serial rapist, and a billionaire and God might still have decided that I am one of the elect. Moreover, according to the doctrine of irresistable grace, if God decides that I am among the elect, then there’s nothing I can do about it.
I can’t help but think that Calvinism makes Christianity pointless. Why should I live according to some other human being’s idea of a “proper” life if God will do as he pleases and decide to “save” me anyway?↩︎