Righteous Ridicule

Posted on March 22, 2026 by jamesq

Every now and then, somebody will ask whether ridicule has any place in righteous living. I always tell them the same thing: Well, if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s probably safe for the rest of us.

Righteous ridicule isn’t cruelty. It’s not punching down. It’s not making sport of the weak. It’s the old‑fashioned, plainspoken way of shining a light on nonsense so folks can see what they’re stepping in. It’s the moral equivalent of tapping a man on the shoulder and saying, “Say listen… you might want to check your shoes.”

If you want a master class in righteous ridicule, open Matthew 23. Jesus didn’t whisper. He called the religious elites “blind guides,” “whitewashed tombs,” and “a brood of vipers.” That wasn’t name‑calling for sport. It was moral diagnosis. When hypocrisy gets thick enough to cut with a butter knife, a little ridicule is the only tool sharp enough to slice through it.

And that wasn’t the only time. When He told the mourners that Jairus’ daughter was only sleeping, they laughed at Him—so He raised the girl and sent their laughter home humbled. When His hometown crowd dismissed Him as “just the carpenter’s son,” He let their ridicule expose their own blindness. When Simon the Pharisee silently mocked Him for letting a sinful woman touch His feet, Jesus answered with a parable that turned the ridicule back on the ridiculer.

So what’s the value of righteous ridicule?

It clears the air. It punctures pretension. It exposes the powerful when they hide behind robes, titles, and committees. It reminds the public that truth doesn’t need a marketing department. And it gives ordinary folks permission to stop pretending that nonsense is wisdom just because it comes with a seal and a podium.

Mocking the weak is bullying. Mocking the powerful is accountability. And mocking hypocrisy is sometimes the only way to get the truth past people’s defenses. That’s why Jesus used it. That’s why the prophets used it. And that’s why any honest teacher of natural law keeps it in the toolbox.

Righteous ridicule isn’t about being mean. It’s about being clear. And in a world that runs on illusion, clarity is the rarest kindness of all.

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Losing Life to Find It

Posted on March 12, 2026 by jamesq

Every now and then, a line of Scripture cuts through the noise of modern life like a freight train rolling through a quiet town at midnight. Matthew 16:25–26 is one of those lines. Jesus doesn’t ease into the subject. He doesn’t warm up the crowd. He just lays it out there:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it… What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

That’s not poetry. That’s not philosophy. That’s a man telling the truth as plainly as it can be told. And if you’ve spent any time with Solomon’s writings in Ecclesiastes, you’ll notice the two of them—Jesus and Solomon—meet each other on the same road, even though they walked it a thousand years apart.

Solomon, with all his wealth, wisdom, and worldly success, came to a conclusion that sounds like it could have been printed right alongside the Sermon on the Mount: everything under the sun is vanity. You can stack up gold, build monuments, chase pleasure, and gather applause, but none of it fills the empty place inside a man. Solomon tried it all, and he wrote the report so the rest of us wouldn’t have to repeat the experiment.

Jesus, in His usual fashion, goes straight to the heart of the matter. He says the real danger isn’t losing your life. The real danger is wasting it. A man can spend his whole lifetime polishing his image, padding his bank account, and protecting his comfort, only to discover he traded away the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose—his soul.

Solomon would nod his head at that. He spent a lifetime learning that the value of life isn’t measured in what you gather, but in what you become. Jesus takes that same truth and sharpens it: the only life worth having is the one you’re willing to give away.

Both men—one a king, the other a carpenter—arrive at the same conclusion. Life is not something you clutch. It’s something you surrender. Solomon says everything else is chasing the wind. Jesus says everything else is losing your soul.

And if you listen closely, you can hear Jesus echoing Himself from other places in the Gospels. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” “The last shall be first.” “Whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” It’s the same theme, played in different keys. The man who tries to build his own kingdom ends up with nothing. The man who hands his life over to God ends up with everything that matters.

Natural Law fits right into this. The truth is simple: you can’t violate reality and come out ahead. A life spent chasing illusions ends in disappointment. A life aligned with truth—truth about God, truth about yourself, truth about what life is for—ends in peace. Jesus and Solomon both understood that long before modern folks started trying to outsmart the universe.

So the question Jesus asked two thousand years ago still stands on Main Street today: What good is it to gain the whole world if you lose yourself in the process? Solomon tried gaining the world. Jesus offered losing it.

Because He Lives and the Journey Through Death to Life

Posted on February 18, 2026 by jamesq

When Jesus spoke, He didn’t waste words. He gave us pictures we could understand. One of the clearest is this one from Matthew 19:24: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” That’s a strong image. You can almost see that poor camel trying to squeeze through a sewing needle. It’s meant to make us stop and think.

Then Jesus said something else in John 12:25: “If you love your life, you’ll lose it. If you hate your life in this world, you’ll keep it for the life of the coming age.” Now, Jesus wasn’t telling us to walk around angry or bitter. In His language, “hate” didn’t mean the hot emotion we think of today. It meant letting go—refusing to cling to this world as if it’s all we’ve got.

Put these two teachings together and the message becomes clear. To enter God’s kingdom, a person has to see that the world, by itself, can’t give anything that lasts. It can offer comfort, success, applause, and a little excitement, but none of that carries over into eternity. It’s like holding sand in your hand—the tighter you squeeze, the faster it slips away.

Now think about someone who has done well in life. Maybe they’ve built a business, earned respect, or gathered up all the things the world says matter. There’s nothing wrong with hard work or success. But success can make it harder to see the truth Jesus is pointing to. When life has treated you kindly, it’s easy to believe the world is solid and dependable. It’s easy to think, “Well, things are going fine for me. Why question it?”

That’s why Jesus said the rich man has a tougher time. Not because God is against wealth, but because comfort can blind us. When everything is going our way, we don’t feel the need to look deeper. We don’t feel the need to ask what really matters. We don’t feel the need to loosen our grip on this world.

But Jesus is inviting us to do exactly that—to loosen our grip. To see that the world is temporary, and that real life, lasting life, comes from God alone. When we stop clinging to the world, the heart opens. The way becomes wider. And suddenly that camel-and-needle picture doesn’t seem so impossible anymore.

Jesus wasn’t trying to scare us. He was trying to free us. He was saying, “Don’t let this world hold you so tightly that you miss the life I’m offering.” And that’s a message every one of us—young or old, rich or poor—can take to heart.