The Tyrant’s Tools

 Controlling a populace as a tyrant:

Get neighbors to snitch on each other. Call it “accountability.”

Offer them incentives to do so, and/or enforce punishments if they don’t. If you offer incentives, make them just out of reach.

Turn people against each other in so doing. Destroy families, friendships, and any other healthy relationships, and so prevent them from forming and growing. 

Maintain complete control through fear.

Crush free thought.

Governments, businesses, HOA’s - all sorts of organizations do it, and people don’t realize how it affects them.

“Friendship is a fifth column against the State. The government doesn’t even want you to have friends.” - Rod Rosenbladt

Israel as the Church

 So there’s the claim often made by Dispensationalists that there is no place in the Old Testament or the New in which “Israel” means “the Church”.

“Ekklesia”, which is the Greek word used in the New Testament for the Church, is used in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, to refer to Israel. So there’s one bit of historical data. Beyond that, the repeated problem I have seen in Dispensationalism, and Evangelicalism more broadly, is missing the forest for the trees. It’s a matter of translating words and interpreting verses while simply not being able to understand the broader passages or follow the flow of argument that, say Paul for instance in this case, is making. It’s basically not being able to read a book or a piece of text and follow what the author is getting at. If you can’t understand context, you can’t understand text. And outside of the Dispensational issue, all of your preaching and teaching is going to suffer, even when teaching the basics of the Christian life from Scripture, if you have this problem.

And then there’s the whole issue of being so dogmatically committed to a position that you could never entertain the possibility that you’ve been wrong. That’s another problem in itself, one that is very common as well.

The New Age Masquerade

 The United States - and really, the West as a whole - is largely run by female (feminist) middle managers, who follow the irresistible sinful urge to emasculate any males under their auspices.

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Saul turned away from Yahweh and toward the witch at Endor when he fell out of favor with God due to his unrepentant sin.

This is an eternal principle. People are spiritual by nature, and if they are persisting in unrepentant sin but long for something spiritual, they will turn to anything but God and Biblical Christianity - which, really, just means false religions behind which stand the demonic. The endless sales of crystals and Eckhart Tolle books are really about young women who don’t want to give up living with their boyfriends.

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I’ve worked with a lot of women through the years. The most common fig leaf I’ve encountered? “We are living together. But it’s because we know we’re meant to be together and we’re going to get married.”

Me: “When’s the wedding?”

Them: “Oh, we haven’t picked a date yet. We’ll know when the time is right.”

The Obstacles to True Catholicity

 Why, a friend asks on social media elsewhere, do we divide over baptism, rather than things abundantly addressed in Scripture, like patriarchal leadership in the home, and headcoverings? The context was a suggestion that nondenominational churches are truly “catholic”, in that they try to set aside unnecessary divisions between believers. But anybody who knows history, I would suggest, knows that this is always a failed experiment. Here’s my response, which I’m posting here as well so as to get more mileage out of it.

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You see baptism in the Gospels, see it talked about in the epistles, and you see baptism after baptism in Acts. So I would disagree with the idea that it isn’t a major issue. You also have baptism in many texts, and head coverings only in one - though that’s not to suggest the latter isn’t important.

I’ll add too that I grew up in a group that emphasized male headship and head coverings - the Plymouth Brethren. I was at church multiple times a week. I was involved in multiple ministries. I heard more sermons on 1 Corinthians 11 than I could possibly remember. And yet I was well into adulthood before I understood justification by faith alone, because nobody taught it. The teachers, who were all laymen, didn’t know how to tackle the soteriological texts. Lots of practical, last-half-of-the-epistles teaching, very little or none from the first halves of the epistles. None of them knew Greek or Hebrew, and they had no regard for or knowledge of the historic Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Reformed approaches to soteriology.

The Plymouth Brethren started with the stated intention of meeting simply in the Lord’s name, around the Lord’s table, apart from denominational distinctions. But pretty quickly they developed Dispensationalism, about which they became dogmatic. They developed factions over church government - the closed or exclusive set under John Nelson Darby, versus the open group associated with George Muller. The two men became heatedly opposed to one another and never reconciled before their deaths. Darby’s group wouldn’t let Christians from other groups break bread with them, but Muller’s group would. If a person in one group unknowingly fellowshipped with somebody in the other group, their own group would excommunicate them, even if they were one of the founding fathers of that group. Darby allowed for household baptisms, whereas the Muller group didn’t.

Darby, incidentally, taught against the idea of the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to the believer in salvation. If I was to say that to a modern Plymouth Brethren person, they would be uncomprehending. They would think I was speaking Latin to them.

But hey, they have all agreed on male headship and head coverings.

If people are going to be taking God and His Word seriously, division in a fallen world is going to take place sometimes. The goal should be to try to mortify our own sin, so that it doesn’t get in the way. Still, there has to be an understanding of what issues are primary, secondary, and tertiary, or else any Christian group will go off the rails. We won’t even always get that right. But it won’t help to be unrealistic about what’s achievable.

The Civilization that Didn’t Die

 It was clear to anybody listening that the Trump administration, in its conflict with Iran, was being very particular in its targets. Certain targets were being avoided and saved in case Iran absolutely refused to cooperate. Those end of the line targets were the bridges and power plants, as the major infrastructure. We were told this outright a couple of weeks ago.

Over the weekend, the president, because of Iran refusing passage through the Straight of Hormuz, threatened their infrastructure again, the bridges and power plants. Destroy the infrastructure, destroy the civilization. And because Iran was attacking our civilization by keeping oil from us, Trump threatened theirs.

Then move forward to the president’s statement yesterday about the destruction of a civilization. Trump was not planning on bombing Iran’s civilians. That wasn’t what he was saying at all, and anyone following his train of thought and the flow of events knew this. His point was the same - if we take out your infrastructure, mass casualties on the level of civilization collapse will be the result. It would be a literal case of bombing a people back into the Dark Ages. And even though he didn’t want to do that, it’s America first, and he had a duty to America. His modus operandi is always to threaten worse than he plans or desires to do, but to always hold on to the possibility that the worst might be necessary. And in such a situation, one must have the will to do it.

He is very thoughtful, deliberate, and methodical about what he does. Those who continue to believe he is just crazy will never really understand.

The Slavery of the Developed World

 They’ve tried eliminating automobile ownership, instead pushing for all “public” (I.e. government) transit. If you do “own” a vehicle, they want you to pay on it forever so that it’s a long-term uncancelleable rental until it breaks down. They want to be able to charge you a monthly fee to use certain features. And they want to be able to shut it down remotely at will without your consent. 

In certain vehicles, like John Deere combines, they want you to never actually own the vehicle, and they don’t want you to be able to repair it yourself.

In video games now, they want to charge you constantly for access to certain features.

They’ve tried pushing a clothes for rent service, to keep you dependent on them to clothe yourself.

They want you to be trapped in a regular food delivery service of preplanned meals, rather than figuring out how to cook like an adult.

Buying a house is now outrageous. They want perpetual renters.

They want you living on plots too small to grow your own food.

They don’t want you to eat meat. They’d rather you ate their preprocessed garbage.

If they can keep you busy and exhausted, you won’t have the time and energy to think for yourself, question or resist their authority, or do anything to improve your life and escape their grasp.

They don’t want strong, moral, independently thinking individuals. They want weak, malleable workers.

They don’t want private ownership. They want slaves.

I don’t have a problem with corporations at all. But I do have a problem with slavers.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

 Watching The Greatest Story Ever Told. It was made with a cast of Hollywood stars - Charlotte Heston, Robert Blake, Sydney Poitier, Angela Lansbury, Telly Savalas as Pilate, John Wayne as the centurion at the Cross. With all the sins of Hollywood at the time, the weight of Christian culture still remained, and the film, with all its faults, had the gravitas appropriate to our Lord’s life and death.

But I wouldn’t trust Hollywood to make a film like it today. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, most actors at least had a Christian upbringing they couldn’t quite escape, no matter how much they strayed. The mainline churches still carried influence as well, for good or ill. 

The fall of Hollywood was inevitable, though. The sixties revolution just brought to the front of the stage what had been going on for decades behind the curtain, and gave it justification.

It’s easier to tear down than it is to build, and the losses are great. Hopefully future generations of Americans in entertainment can recover what has been lost over the past sixty years.