Episode
No White Hats
- Published
- Dec 15, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 126
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- https://remsenbible.substack.com/p/no-white-hats
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Summary
No White Hats 2 Samuel 19; Remsen Bible Fellowship; 10/30/2022 Introduction I grew up watching a lot of B-movie cowboy films from the 1930s. We were huge John Wayne fans in our house, and while most people know him from roles in movies like McLintock!, The Searchers, or True Grit, we were familiar with a whole extra section of his catalog. Randy Rides Alone, Blue Steel, and Riders of Destiny were some of the ones we matched time and again. One of the interesting things about those John Waybe movies is that they often broke the mold of 1930s cowboy movies in this important respect: the good guy often wears a black hat. If you turn on a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers film from the next decade you’ll notice that all the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. This simple costume device removed all question of who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. Just look at the hat. And while movies don’t use that particular device anymore, our society still does. We want to split people into two groups. Good and Evil. There’s a sense in which God does divide people in such a way. Except the grouping goes like this: Evil (this includes everyone, including you and your team) and Good (which includes the Triune God. That’s it.). So good and evil actually aren’t the most helpful distinctions when trying to discern people. Rather, instead of trying to throw a label on a person and pretending to then know everything about them, we ought to try and understand people in our lives, and the characters in the stories we read, based on the actions and the fruit of their lives. And those actions and fruit can change from situation to situation, and they can change over time. What we find out in the Bible is that there really aren’t a bunch or white hats and black hats. Or maybe we…