He Gets Us, but do we get Him?
The He Gets Us advertising campaign was launched in 2022 in order to “reintroduce” Jesus to the masses—especially to young people. It was focused on the sensibilities and values of western culture, and focused on things like compassion, identity, pain, and “radical forgiveness.” The founder of Hobby Lobby spent over $100 million on the campaign and there were many others. Many on the left called the campaign a conservative political plot, which it clearly was not. In fact, the campaign managed to anger people on the left and right politically.
I do not condemn those who are trying to get the gospel to the masses and I applaud their dedication and financial sacrifice in an effort to accomplish this task. The problem is Jesus and the gospel have to be shared in a purely biblical way. It does damage to the message to repackage Jesus for marketing purposes.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10)
I get the thought process. There is a generation out there that is broken, lonely, and self-doubting. Their parents and grandparents raised them in godless, dysfunctional families far removed from the solid family units of previous generations. This generation loves the victim identity and longs to be understood even though it does not understand itself.
Yes, Jesus gets them. He understands them. He has always understood them. That is not the problem. It’s that they do not understand Him. They have no concept of who God is, and let me give you a hint—He is not like us.
God is holy, not cuddly.
That was not the message of the He Gets Us campaign, but it is so foundational to an understanding of God, Jesus, and the gospel, that you truly cannot grasp the real gospel without it. God is holy. He hates sin (yes), and He is terrifying. Yes, I said terrifying. Teachers do violence to the Bible when they define the “fear of God” as a reverence or respect for God. Certainly, the word includes the latter two ideas, but the meaning of the Old Testament term is fear or terror.
God appeared to various biblical characters. The clearer the view of Him they got, the more terrifying He appeared. Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look upon God (Exodus 3:6). Isaiah was terrified and was instantly made acutely aware of his own sinfulness (Isaiah 6:5). People had the same reaction when they saw Jesus in His glory. John (Revelation 1:17) fell terrified at His feet as dead. In Revelation 19:11-21 the image of our Lord is powerful and He is deadly to His enemies.
God is not only holy, He is just.
“He gets us” in the everyday vernacular intimates that not only does someone understand us, that person will also cut us some slack and not be so tough on us. This is a misrepresentation not only of God but also of Jesus. God is just. He will punish all sin and sinners (Romans 1:18, 2:5-8). This is not just God’s choice, it is an expression of who He is, His very nature.
God is also loving, but His love bends to His holiness and justice.
John 3:16 is in the Bible, but we cannot understand the breadth or depth of His love by just seeing Him as one who gets me and lets me slide. He understands the ugliness of who I am more deeply than I can possibly imagine. And we are all so much more flawed than we know. It isn’t just that He still likes us. He loves us, so much so that Jesus came and lived among us and died on the cross for us. This fact is an offense to the self-righteous who cannot admit their own moral inadequacy, but to those of us who have gotten a glimpse of His glory and justice, it is breathtaking in its wonder and beauty.
It is only a God who is far above us who can show us His grace.
Thomas Spurgeon said this,
Love may exist between equals, or it may rise to those above us, or flow down to those in any way beneath us. But grace, from its nature, has only one direction it can take. GRACE ALWAYS FLOWS DOWN. Grace is love, indeed, but it is love to creatures humbling itself [sic]. A king’s love to his equals, or his own royal house, is love; but his love to his subjects is called grace.1
The problem with “He gets us” and the idea of grace is that it makes so much of Jesus being one of us, at the expense of the submission we must show to Him and the fact that He is our Lord and Master. Jesus understands us, and He experienced the lowliness of humanity, but He is also King, Master, and Lord, and one day every knee will bow to Him—every one—including mine. Jesus will never be our buddy.
Yes. He gets us, but we will never have a relationship with Him until we get Him.
For more information on how you can share Christ with others starting with a knowledge of Him, I would encourage you to message us here in the comments section, or you can go to exchangemessage.org to download an app or see an app that will show you how to know Christ, or share Christ with others. We would dearly love to speak with you to answer questions and pray with you.
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- Thomas Spurgeon, “Salvation by Grace,” in The Fundamentals, Vol. III, (edited by R. A. Torrey and others, 1917) reprinted by Baker, 2000, p. 112. [↩]