Something Different: A Book Report

Nathan Blake has a book report at The Federalist concerning a book by Sohrab Ahmari about Ahmari's conversion to Christianity entitled Sohrab Ahmari Offers A Compelling Tale of an Unlikely Christian Conversion. Have I read the book? Not yet, but I am getting it based on this book report. The thing that compels me to read this book is this:

Despite the distraction of these inter-denominational quarrels, Ahmari’s testimony emphasizes what Christians have in common. The truths about God and man that he had learned through experience and instruction became a living reality for him. The heart of Christianity is the person of Jesus, for “only the self-sacrificial love of God could make right what was crooked in human nature.” Jesus is not reducible to a moral teacher, political liberator, or any other human attempt at a solution. Rather, “Jesus was God, come to bring God and reconcile man to him.”

The younger Ahmari play-acted at saving the world through revolution. The older Ahmari realized that the real problem of the human condition is not poor political or economic organization, but sin, his first of all.

Ahmari is a political commentator—and a good one—but his hope is now elsewhere. Without God, mankind will plunge headlong into Hell. “I had already accepted the Fall as the most penetrating account of what ailed the world and me…who else but the self-sacrificing God-Man could set right what had gone wrong in the Garden? None other. Nothing and no one else worked. Only Christ Jesus.”

This is what a true faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior teaches those who believe. The fundamental problems facing this country is sin, mine most of all. Whether the guns and their place in society, or the abortion debate, or education, prison reform, or...whatever...the problem is our sinfulness. The solution is Jesus. The belief that we, ourselves can fix things with laws, and more laws, is part of our sinful nature. It is realizing that we can really do nothing, only God can only God can fix our brokenness. Adding law to law, making things more illegaler can not actually fix anything.

Note that I am not saying that laws are useless, or that politicians have no use whatsoever.  Laws serve to convict us, just as the realization that we are convicted by the 10 commandments.  If our laws are in line with God's law, then they are good.  To the extent that laws are not in line with God's law, we are on dangerous ground.  Everything is ultimately in God's hands, and it is only to the extent we operate through Him that we can accomplish anything in His world.

Ahmari was raised in Iran, under the mullahs.  But, when confronted with the Truth:

There was now urgency to his knowledge that “our Lord’s gift of radical absolution on the Cross was the only thing capable of repairing the brokenness in me and around me.”

He realized that this is the most important thing, that everything else pales in comparison. That is the effect He had on me when He chose me. That is how I recognize it when I see it.