The wisest book in the Bible has a question for our culture war

By David Zuccolotto, Op-ed Contributor

(Republished from The Christian Post – christianpost.com)

I was watching a war movie about the beaches of Normandy, from my comfortable chair, not a landing craft. It was June 6, 1944. Roughly 4,400 Allied soldiers died before the sun went down.

My life felt small. How could any private tragedy overshadow the lives lost in defeating Hitler? But were the stories I carried really a lesser suffering?

Thirty-five years as a clinical psychologist have filled a room in my memory that I can’t close. My first patient: a boy kidnapped and abused for years before his captor was caught. A woman recalling the neighbor who raped her at night while she lay unable to move. A father weeping over his 10-year-old daughter, killed in a car accident. And all the people I call my “I just found out” people — I just found out I have Parkinson’s. My husband has cancer. My grandson overdosed. Stories I have carried for years.

And then there’s the paradox beneath it all.  An orange sunset over a beach full of families. Dogs chasing frisbees into the waves. A wedding day, the first dance. A child’s first steps and the laugh that follows. The stranger who runs into a burning building and the father who brings home a puppy for his daughter’s fifth birthday — both are the joy of love. Love is never too small or too big.

Neither, it turns out, is suffering. That’s the paradox that won’t let us go.

How do I complain about my car needing a new engine, or my child’s flu, when whole nations go hungry and war tears through villages half a world away? In Heaven, are tragedies graded on a scale — a 10 for a starving child, a one for a broken engine? If anyone would know, it’s the God who has stood on both ends of it.

How does God go from riding into battle with King David, where 40,000 men were killed, to rescuing a woman caught in adultery and condemning the religious leaders of Jesus’s time for withholding mercy? How does Christ go from the cross — “Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing” — to the rider John described in the book of Revelation: Christ returning on horseback, robe dripping with blood, riding into a battle that ends the world, with the lost cast into everlasting judgment?

How do we live inside a story this large? Who has the wisdom to hold love and tragedy, mercy and war, in the same hand without being torn apart?

For me, part of the answer is in Ecclesiastes:

At first glance, this sounds obvious — of course life has seasons. But look closer, and something sharper emerges: Yes, you understand the seasons. But do you know how to live inside them?

War and peace are not the same season, so do you know when it’s time to fight — and just as surely, when the fighting has to stop? Weeping and laughter aren’t the same season either, so do you spend the hours marked for laughter still weeping over a tragedy that already happened, or one that hasn’t happened yet? There’s a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing — so do you keep embracing a toxic relationship when the season is calling not for an embrace but a boundary? Are you the old man who lived through a season of breaking down — through war, through suffering — but who now, in a season of building, knows exactly how to get down on the floor the moment his grandchild walks in? And silence has its hour, just as speech does — so do you stay quiet when the season is asking you to speak: to show up at the funeral, to sit with someone in their suffering, to give up your day for a neighbor just home from chemo?

And knowing the season is only half the battle. The deeper question is whether you know what it demands — the right thought, the right action, the right weapon. The fight it takes to stand against a Hitler is not the fight it takes to survive a Tuesday buried under bills and a kid who won’t stop crying. Do you know which battle you’re in? Do you know when to let go of the small irritations — the traffic, the tone of a text — and save your strength for the war that actually matters? Do you have the wisdom to stop straining out the gnat while you swallow the camel —  mastering the trivial while missing the thing that was never small to begin with?

Look at what we’ve made the center of the national stage. Legislatures don’t debate it — they go to war over it, as if the fate of the republic hinges on a locker room. School boards collapse into shouting matches. Families split down the middle at Thanksgiving. The most powerful, wealthiest, most educated civilization in human history has narrowed its moral imagination down to a bathroom door and a basketball roster and called it the fight of our time. Every hashtag becomes a flag. Every ruling becomes a referendum on who gets to exist.

This is what we’ve decided is worth splitting churches over — not sin, not the ancient wound in the human soul, not the fracture that’s been bleeding since Eden, but who uses which bathroom. And almost no one on either side of the barricade is asking the one question with enough weight to actually end it.

That’s the wisdom the moment demands: the discernment to tell the difference, the depth to hold the balance. Maybe the greatest battle of our generation isn’t the one we think we’re fighting. Maybe it’s the question beneath every other question: what does it mean to be human? And here we are, standing over one of the darkest, most beautiful stories ever told — sin, a broken world, an identity fractured in the garden and still unhealed — and the deepest we can manage to ask is whether a man should play basketball in a women’s league, what a woman even is, and who gets to use which bathroom. That’s the wisdom of our age.

Is there utopia at the end of that rainbow?

Perhaps that is why Scripture sounds so urgent now. “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Not when the culture finally settles its arguments. Not when our side wins. Not when history bends the direction we hoped. Now. Paul writes, “The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber” (Romans 13:11). And when we awaken, the question is not whether we have mastered every controversy of our age, but whether we have learned to hear the voice of God above it. Jesus reduced that question to something simpler and far more demanding: “If you love me, keep my commands” (John 14:15). John turns that into a test: “We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands” (1 John 2:3).

Perhaps we have spent too much of this brief life staring at the wrong battlefield — straining at every gnat while the real war goes unfought.

The night is passing. The hour has come. And while the world shouts itself hoarse over the question of the moment, God is still asking the question of eternity, the one He has always asked: Do you know Me? Do you know My Word? Will you do My will? We may never get a season this ripe to answer — the noise this loud, the hour this late. So let this be the season. Now is the time to return to the Word of God. Now is the time to seek His will. Now is the time to follow Him. Not when the world grows quiet. Now.

Dr. David Zuccolotto is a former pastor and clinical psychologist. For 35 years he has worked for hospitals, addiction treatment centers, outpatient clinics and private practice. He is the author of The Love of God: A 70 Day Journey of Forgiveness.