Marvel’s Thunderbolts: Mental Health and the Death Spiral

 Re-watching Marvel‘s Thunderbolts movie for the first time. What a great movie. When they originally announced this cast, I wasn’t really interested. But they proved me wrong and knocked it out out of the park. 

The only thing missing is a major one, and it’s the most important thing of all. And that’s Jesus. The movie did a beautiful job addressing mental health issues. But without God’s love, brought to its fullness in the work of Christ and brought to application by the Holy Spirit, wrestling with mental health issues is a pointless spiral, winding around and around until one’s life is over. It serves no purpose, and does nothing fruitful in the end.

America’s Christian Founding

 Evangelicals - “This country was founded by Christians.”

Yes. Of course, none were Dispensationalists, because that theology wasn’t invented yet. No Pre-Trib Rapture believers among them. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution came from Anglican/Episcopalian backgrounds, which meant robes, liturgy, infant baptism, catechisms and confessions, pre-written prayers - a whole list of things that Evangelicals count as unbiblical and terrible. A huge chunk of them were Calvinists, which meant predestination, something else a lot of Evangelicals consider heresy. Many came from denominations that believed that God gives salvation through the sacraments, and not just through the preaching of the Word alone.

For many, there is a whole history of the Church that Christ established that they know nothing about. And the only right approach to it is to seek to learn about it, with humility. It may very well be that your little corner of that broader Church has a few things wrong.

The Victorious King Returns: On 1Thessalonians 4:13-18

 The Dispensationalist just assumes that since the saints meet Jesus in the air, then that means they all turn around and go back to heaven. But 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 doesn’t say that, and there is no passage in Scripture that does. They simply assume it. But what’s happening in that passage is the illustration of a king returning to His kingdom, victorious in battle, and His loyal subjects going out to greet Him as He returns. They all then celebrate His coming, and return with Him into the city. They don’t then all leave to go somewhere else. The same imagery is used in Jesus’s procession into Jerusalem the week before His crucifixion. To miss the classical imagery is to misunderstand the flow of events.

When False Gods Win

 The Muslim Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor of New York, and the Muslim call to prayer is being sounded out loud in the streets of New York. Just as in London, the religion of the descendants of Ishmael seeks to drown out the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Byzantium, having become Constantinople, becomes Istanbul.

Pretty soon Leftists are going to be wishing to hear church bells again. Shut out the one true God to make room for vapid secularism, and eventually something worse, invaders with their false religion, will overrun you and conquer you, enslaving you to them. There is no middle ground that will sustain. It  is either the table of Christ or the table of demons. There is no neutrality.

As the spiritual heirs of Jacob, we need more men wrestling with God, men who then will not fear to meet Esau when the day comes.

Fundamentalism, Dispensationalism, and the Damage Done

 Praying the Sinner’s Prayer (which isn’t in Scripture) over and over again. Getting baptized multiple times because you were afraid you weren’t sincere enough or even really saved the times before that. Afraid you were a “Carnal Christian” and that there was some secret sin you had committed, which you didn’t know about or couldn’t remember and therefore couldn’t confess, hindering your prayers and your fellowship with God, leaving you separated from Him and His help. The biggest concern you had that week was the guilt you had over listening to some secular music. If you’re “really spiritual”, wouldn’t you want to listen to Christian music instead? But not Contemporary Christian music, because it sounded like the Devil’s music. And then people leave the Church altogether, burnt out and traumatized for life. And the Fundamentalists go on as if no one is to blame or nothing happened. “Well, it’s the end times, you know. People will fall away. It certainly isn’t something we did.”

Dispensationalism’s Half-Gospel

 11 He came to His own [Israel], and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. - John 1

14 What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! 15 For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” 16 So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. - Romans 9

When Paul gets to Romans 9-11, he does not suddenly stop talking about the Gospel and start talking about the end times or something else. The divorcing of soteriology from eschatology is our doing, not his. It is our Modernistic, atomistic proclivities in action. For Paul, it is all salvation.

Salvation is by God’s sovereign choice in election, not our choice or action. And He has chosen both Jews and Gentiles to be in one family. Gentiles began seeking Israel’s God very early in the era before Christ, even in Israel’s departure from Egypt. But in Christ, the curtain of the Temple was torn completely open, for both Jew and Gentile to have full access to God.

This uniting of Jew and Gentile is as much “the Gospel”, by the way the New Testament defines it, as is Jesus’s death and resurrection.

And so I can’t say that Dispensationalism is heretical on the Gospel. Christ’s death, His resurrection, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved - on the necessary basics, Dispensationalism preaches what is required. But in maintaining some future revisiting of the Old Covenant in Israel, those things which the New Testament says Christ has abolished in His death, and in maintaining some future division between Jew and Gentile, Dispensationalism does not define “The Gospel” as the New Testament does.

Slavery, Voluntary of Otherwise

Totalitarianism is the order of the day, for any and all who have a modicum of power.

Businesses can’t just use machines; they need people. So the goal is to crush as much of your humanity as is necessary to keep you bound and still useful. And so the world increasingly pushes toward the factory model, starting in the government schools and going beyond that into the working world. It was true with the Prussian model of education. But currently the fascination is with how this mentality has been expanded upon in China. And that’s where non-stop inescapable surveillance and the social credit system have been spreading through the West in the worlds of governance, schooling, and business. Religion is still allowed, though it must be kept in check, because as Marx said, it is the opiate of the masses. If religion keeps you drugged and still useful, all the better.

As Mickey Rourke’s character, the Russian Ivan Vanko, said in Iron Man 2, “people make problem”. And so the only people they want are those who are less than fully human.

The Postmillennial Rapture

 “The separation spoken of by premillenniallists - the Rapture - is not in accord with the parables of the kingdom [Matt. 13:24-30]. The Rapture comes at the end of time. The ‘wheat’ cannot be removed from the field until that final day, when we are caught up to meet Christ in the clouds (1 Thess. 4:17). There is indeed a Rapture, but it comes at the end of time - when the reapers (angels) harvest the wheat and the tares. There is a Rapture, but it is a postmillennial Rapture.” - David Chilton, Days of Vengeance, pg. 635. Notice that the gathering of the tares precedes the gathering of the wheat in Matt.13:30, in clear contrast with the Dispensationalist notion of the Rapture. The unrighteous are gathered first, not the righteous. And this occurs in one single gathering at the end of history.

Bethel and Hillsong

 More can be accomplished with God through prayer than through boycotts, and I wonder if those who spend their time decrying Bethel and Hillsong actually spend any time praying for the people in those movements. Are you wanting God to close those churches down, just so the people in those movements can be scattered to other churches? Why not just ask God to bring them to repentance and more orthodox theology?

No Sympathy for Obama

 I haven’t seen the video that the president posted, and I might not. But with all the evil and destruction that the Obamas have promoted and caused through the years, my sympathies are nil. Barack in particular should be convicted for his crimes, and be made to pay the penalty. And given where he’s going when the Lord finally takes him from this world, he should see being convicted as mercy.