Five centuries ago the famous Protestant reformer John Calvin insightfully observed that “man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” What Calvin was driving at is the fallen human instinct to make an idol of almost anything to preferentially worship other than God. And to make matters even more deceptive, mankind will go so far as to give these idols created out of their own imaginations the name of God.

For example, how many times has someone said, “The Jesus I know would never condemn [insert someone living in unrepentant sin]”? That statement exposes an individual who likely unwittingly views himself as the definer of who Jesus is, and in so doing exposes the fact that his “Jesus” is nothing more than an idol created from his own imagination.

Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis argued that people are confronted with a choice when it comes to answering the question of who Jesus is:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. … You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Yet that “good teacher” business is exactly the position current Western secular culture has relegated Jesus to so as to avoid His inherent deific authority over literally everything.

The reality of the world is defined by the One who created the world and, according to Scripture, Jesus is the One who created everything. Of course, if Jesus is the Creator, then mankind is ultimately answerable to Him. But as is painfully evident, the world en masse isn’t interested in submitting to His authority.

Christianity is primarily responsible for shaping Western culture. The ideal that each individual human being has inherent value is thanks to Scripture’s teaching that mankind, unlike the rest of the animal world, was uniquely created in the image of God. America’s Founding Fathers acknowledged this reality in recognizing that mankind has been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The trouble is that over recent decades, Americans’ increasing embrace of secularism has steadily eroded our culture’s commitment and faith in those foundational principles that undergird and make possible our system of self-governance. Indeed, Christians have increasingly lamented this loss of “faith” and have warned of dire consequences for the nation.

Thus, in seeking to reach out to a growing number of secular non-believing Americans to invite them to believe in Christ, some Christians have employed a type of worldly-centered evangelism that has been dubbed the “seeker-friendly movement.” This type of evangelism seeks to make Christianity, and more specifically Jesus, more palatable to a secular world.

One of the latest examples of this seeker-friendly or worldly-friendly Christianity is the “He Gets Us” campaign. Its website states: “We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life.”

To do this, the organization has produced a number of ads, two of which were featured during the Super Bowl. The ads employ a series of black-and-white images associated with a specific theme, such as children helping each other or people engaged in heated disagreements, which are then followed by a brief statement such as “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults” or “Jesus loved the people we hate.” The ads end with the tag line, “He gets us.” According to the organization, the ad campaign, on which millions of dollars have been spent, is aimed to appeal to people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical.” In other words, seeker friendly.

Unfortunately, these ads end up being more Christian-lite or scripturally adjacent rather than presenting a biblically consistent Gospel message. In once sense, the effort is more of an appeal to embrace a new kind of cultural Christianity that avoids the decidedly unpopular aspects of the Gospel message — the call to repentance from sin and faith in Christ alone for salvation.

Indeed, Christ warned His followers that rather than embrace them, the world would hate them because it first hated Him. The Apostle Paul urged Christians not to conform to the pattern of this world but rather to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, in their thinking. Christians are to follow Christ and His teachings as delineated in Scripture. They are to be both hearers and doers of the word of God.

Given the world’s animosity toward Jesus, there always has been a temptation for Christians to water down the Gospel message in the vain attempt to make it less offensive to unrepentant sinners. While the Gospel is the greatest news ever shared, the hope of full forgiveness of sin and eternity in Heaven, which is freely offered to anyone no matter their race, sex, or station in life, is also an exclusive message. It’s Jesus or nothing. There is no other way to eternity in Heaven.

The “He Gets Us” campaign intentionally shies away from this presentation of Jesus. As a result, Jesus is presented as an example for humanity to aspire to, or an ideal to admire. But He’s not being presented as the Scripture states. God came in flesh to call people to repent from their sin and rebellion against His rule, and to turn and follow Him in everything. And in doing so they will find true joy and eternal life.