Washington's war

Presidency | The father of our country fought against his impulses | Marvin Olasky

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Many pastors have noted the importance of seeing Jesus as fully God but also fully man, fully physical in every way—but some Christians still get embarrassed contemplating Christ as fully a baby and doing all the physical things that babies do. Their delicacy is theologically wrong but psychologically understandable.

We should give less slack to those who think of George Washington as a monument, perpetually frozen-faced as in Gilbert Stuart paintings. The danger of taking seriously the "I cannot tell a lie" fables about Washington's childhood is that we might deify him as sinless. But the "cannot" is also not fair to Washington, because the most impressive thing about him is that he had strong tendencies to sin, as do we all, but he fought them more successfully than most of us do.