Last week we reviewed two lessons for Christians from the life of Founder, patriot, president and prodigy Thomas Jefferson, as drawn from the biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Let’s move right into lesson 3:

• No grudge, no matter how severe, is too deeply held to overcome. Anyone in public life will make his or her fair share of enemies, and that was the case for Jefferson. The unity and desire for liberty that brought the Founding Fathers together prior to the Revolution was short-lived. Sharp divisions about the nature and scope of the new federal government in particular led to the best of friends becoming the worst of political enemies – most famously, Jefferson and his formerly close ally as members of the Continental Congress and diplomats, and predecessor as president, John Adams. Their arguments are of less consequence than the results – the kind of ugly dissension and estrangement we see taking place in our own families and churches on a regular basis today. 

The two went years without speaking after the bitter presidential election that saw Jefferson win the presidency. Adams was one of only four presidents who refused to attend the swearing-in of the succeeding chief executive. The most recent: Donald Trump. So, if you want a taste of the enmity that arose between Adams and Jefferson, think of the bitter divide between Trump and Biden in our last election cycle. 

Yet after retiring from public life, Jefferson and Adams mended their broken relationship when, through the encouragement of fellow Founder Benjamin Rush, Jefferson reached out to Adams. As they rekindled their friendship, they exchanged more than 300 letters over the remainder of their lives. 

At times, Jefferson and Adams both acknowledged how they differed. But Adams concluded that it was pointless even to bring such matters up, because the two men, who had shared so many life experiences, had so much in common. 

Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” The reason we can forgive others is because Christ has forgiven us. Friend, I have noticed in my own life that the older I get, the harder it is to forgive people that do me wrong. I do not want to become a bitter old man that keeps a score of grudges in my back pocket about how many people have done me wrong. 

How do we avoid such a development? By looking to Christ. He is worthy of our obedience to His many commands to forgive one another (70 times 7!). If unregenerate men like Jefferson and Adams (who also rejected the divinity of Christ and became a Unitarian) can forgive and forget – or at least just forget – why can’t the people of God do that?

• Finally, vast knowledge does not lead a person to the Christian faith.  As mentioned earlier, there was no subject that Jefferson could not engage intelligently with in private conversation with his visitors. According to the Monticello official website, he had three different libraries in his life. The first one burned in a fire. The second one had 6500 books which became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. The third was developed during his retirement and reached over more than 1600 volumes. 

One thing is for sure: This dude was a reader! Yet though Jefferson was a brilliant, well-versed man and a lifelong Episcopalian churchgoer whose funeral was conducted from the Book of Common Prayer, he was not a follower of Jesus Christ. The idea of Christ’s divinity was unthinkable to this renowned intellect, and he repudiated the supernatural elements of the Bible. Rather, he believed so deeply that the highest religious expression in the world was found in the “ethic” and moralism of Christianity that he edited the Gospels into what became known as the “Jefferson Bible” that included Jesus's teachings but removed His miracles. He said later in life that if he would start a religion, he would take and emphasize all the best elements from all faiths. 

But the reality of the Christian faith is that you cannot have Jesus’s moral teachings without His controversial statements and most of all, His divine being and works. The authors of the Bible believed in those elements of the faith, having witnessed them with their own eyes, and died professing the divinity of Christ and that He rose again from the dead. 

In contrast, Jefferson died in unbelief, because to a solely rational mind such as his, the cross is foolishness and folly. 1 Corinthians 1:21 says, “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” As followers of Jesus, we must not seek to make Christianity palatable as Jefferson sought to do. However, we must preach Christ as clearly as possible and let the Holy Spirit do the work in the hearts of those who hear it. 

While these musings of Jefferson have encompassed as many (or more) negatives as positives, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with this volume on the life of this Founding Father. His story, on the one hand, is unique because he was so gifted and his accomplishments touched so many. 

Yet in the end, his life was like everyone else’s: full of pleasures, sufferings, and glaring inconsistencies. Most importantly, Jefferson faced the same choice all of us do: whether or not to believe in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and in believing to receive life in His Name.

Which brings us to the greatest lesson of all: although this brilliant but flawed man did not seek the Divine Christ, we must! Seek him while he may be found. 

Soli Deo Gloria