As I write this Duke and Carolina are about to square off at the Dean Dome for the first of their two annual regular season basketball slugfests. Leading up to the game a Duke student went undercover—donning a Carolina sweatshirt—traveled the 8 miles between Durham and Chapel Hill, and interviewed some UNC students who claimed to be big Tar Heel basketball fans. He asked them if they believe Grayson Allen and Brandon Ingram would lead the Tar Heels to victory, and was met with enthusiastic responses. A couple of the students even went into some detail on their thoughts of why these two star players would help Carolina win.
The only problem? Grayson Allen and Brandon Ingram play for Duke (as UVA fans can, with great consternation, attest). The interview’s best moment came when the intrepid correspondent asked about the campus-wide respect at Carolina for Christian Laettner, and the students talked about how much they personally—and all Carolina fans—respect him, as the reporter turned to the camera and smirked.
Now for those who may not know, Laettner is a Duke alum, widely viewed as one of the most despised college basketball players of all time. There’s even an ESPN documentary called
I Hate Christian Laettner. No player in the history of the intense Duke-Carolina rivalry is reviled more in Chapel Hill than is Christian Laettner, and it’s been more than 20 years since he played. So a UNC student spouting about how he’s respected there had to have Dean Smith spinning in his grave.
As I watched the interview I couldn’t help but think of 1 Peter 5:8:
“Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
You know that reporter went all over UNC’s campus looking for people he could make look bad on camera. And we’ll never know how many people he tried to interview who weren’t fooled and never made it to the final edit. But several were—and did. And thanks to the wonder of the internet they’ll have to deal with the shame for the rest of their life. No matter what they do, they’ll never live that down. They’ll be at a reunion 20 years from now and somebody will pull out his phone and say, “Hey everybody, remember when Joe pretended he knew about basketball and embarrassed the entire university? Here, look!”
Every one of us has been ambushed by Satan at some point. And to be honest, we’ve had a lot of times where he didn’t even have to ambush us to make us fall—we went like lemmings to the sea. But fortunately we have the ability to have the guilt of our sins washed away forever—never to be held against us again. That’s the great news of Easter: Jesus took our sins on Himself and they’re gone for good. He never brings them up or holds them against us. It’s as if we’ve never sinned. In fact, that’s what the word justified means: “Declared not guilty, as if we had never committed the sin.” We may remember at times; Satan may bring it up; but Jesus never does. As far as He’s concerned, it never happened. His sacrifice on the cross made that possible.
Hopefully the students on the video have friends who are forgiving. But just in case, I hope one of them is a Computer Science major and can discover a way to erase the video from existence. Otherwise they’d better transfer to Duke and pretend they were a plant!
