Israel and Palestine

 I’ve watched the debate among Americans over Israel and Palestine for years, concerning which side wears the white hats, and which side wears the black. Everybody is so sure they know, and everybody is certain the other side is the one committing atrocities, and that despite most individuals never having set foot on the continent or having the inside information they think they do. It never seems to occur to anybody that maybe each party, in fact every party involved, is guilty of some terrible things. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

It was interesting to listen to the mainstream news reporting on Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack when it happened. At first, the media reported that Hamas had attacked an outdoor rave in Israel. But, realizing that everybody knew what a rave meant - Jewish people attacked while high and sleeping with people they weren’t married to - “rave” got changed to “music festival”. At that time I happened across a video of the event prior to the attack. A rather prominent statue of the Buddha at the event was hard to ignore. But, Hamas is evil. On that we all agree.

Does Israel somewhat have America by the nape of the neck? Maybe, but nobody has proven it to me yet. I do know, though, that relationships of all types are usually more complicated and intertwined than that. Simple minds settle on simple explanations. And yet Scripture says, “in understanding, be men.”

You are Here

WWII recovery =>

Mission creep =>

American imperialism =>

A world that hates America =>

Globalist imperialism under George Bush Sr. =>

Blowback in the form of 9/11 =>

More imperialism under George W. Bush =>

An America with an increasingly guilty conscience elects a racially diverse globalist Marxist named Barack Obama =>

Obama opens the borders, increases the socialism of the State, and stokes internal strife, creating chaos =>

America elects a strongman who is unable to stop the chaos =>

The oligarchy steals an election and puts a puppet king, Joe Biden, in the presidency =>

The oligarchy spits on its predecessor opponents led by the Bushes by letting their imperialism fail dramatically =>

Competing unbelieving, anti-Christian, and incompetent parties fight for the rule of a crumbling empire, while it continues to be assaulted from both inside and out (you are here)

The above was originally written in September of 2024. The one modification I would make would be to acknowledge the degree that the current administration is blatantly Christian. God has been merciful to us in this. We have much to be grateful for.

Yet we are living at the end of an empire, which like Rome is crumbling slowly. The system is broken when you have its enemies as legislators. And Trump is one of the strongmen at the end of the empire, held up by the people as its savior.

Which, incidentally, Loki is at the end of Loki season two. I know the real intellectuals will appreciate a Marvel reference. See my reference to season one and Machiavelli a few months back.

Real freedom, reserved rights, requires individual responsibility. And we have gradually cast that off, abandoning freedom in Christ for the slavery of sin.

Defending the Administration’s Actions

 To connect the dots with the past couple of weeks…you have a somewhat loose international system involving Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China, for years carrying out illegal activity against targets within the borders of western nations. And one such set of activities involves those nations working with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs and people across our borders with Mexico and Canada. Their goal is the destruction of the U.S. as a sovereign state, and the destruction of our people, which they have been doing successfully. Is this in part blowback for our illicit international meddling? Yes. Oil in the Middle East, western secular globalist ambitions, etc. The ongoing Ukraine situation is due to NATO beating on Putin’s front door to force western economic and cultural control on Russia. Putin is evil, but we are hardly any better. His reactions have some grounding in reality. The same thing was true with Assad in Syria. He protected Christians, while the UK is currently imprisoning people who criticize Islam on social media. The US for years has knowingly allowed transgender people to come here as refugees from Muslim countries where their lives were supposedly in danger because of their perversion. And our relevant government organizations have openly said so on their social media accounts. We have invited the evil here with fanfare, and given it our tax dollars. But while the west’s evil is true, allowing the destruction of our own society isn’t a reasonable response. Our self-defense is the right response. And what Trump has been doing, while it may seem to be offensive, is actually defensive. The war was already going on. And that would be my response to those who may think I am abandoning my generally antiwar, libertarian principles. I am still opposed to the traditional Neocon regime change practice. Hopefully President Trump will stand by his word, and let Iran pick their new leaders. And hopefully they will choose wisely.

In Purgatory with Madame Web

 I’m forcing myself to watch “Madame Web” once through, over however many sessions it takes. Doing this during Lent is probably appropriate, now that I think about it. I’m about halfway through. I should be fully sanctified and in a state of sinless perfection by the time I’m done.

I’ll give them this. They show you exactly what it would look like if four of the most shallow women you’ve ever met were to find themselves on the run from a guy in a spider costume. So, points for accuracy.

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.