Lux Lucet

“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those who are in the midst of her depart, and let not those who are in the country enter her.”

    – Luke 21:20-21

Last week we looked at the third of three case studies in prepping from the Old Testament, Joseph, Prime Minister of Egypt. The other two case studies were the accounts of Noah and the end of the world as he knew it and Lot’s narrow escape from Sodom. This week, I’d like to turn our attention to the New Testament and in particular to the teaching of Jesus himself that relate to the subject of prepping.

But before turning to Jesus’ teachings on prepping, it’s worth taking a little time to review the events in the financial markets last week. The general title for this series The Ongoing Financial Crisis of 2008, because it is the contention of this author that the crisis which manifested itself that year, sometimes referred to as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), has never gone away. Rather, the symptoms only were treated by massive money printing by the world’s leading central banks and other financial fakery, a great deal of which probably is still kept under wraps by the powers that shouldn’t be.

The first event from last week I’d like to look at was the New York Fed’s (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most prominent of the Fed’s regional banks) bailing out the overnight Repo market to the tune of $53 billion late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, September 17th and 18th. Now you may be asking, “So just what is the overnight Repo and why should I even care?” Good questions.

Investopedia defines a Repurchase Agreement (Repo) as, “a form of short-term borrowing for dealers in government securities. In the case of a repo, a dealer sells government securities to investors, usually on an overnight basis, and buys them back the following day…Repos are typically used to raise short-term capital…Classified as a money-market instrument, a repurchase agreement functions in effect as a short-term, collateral-backed, interest-bearing loan. The buyer acts as a short-term lender, while the seller acts as a short-term borrower. The securities being sold are the collateral.”

For most of us, the repo market is a fairly obscure corner of the financial system, something that runs in the background. But what happened overnight while most of us slept was a sudden spike in the repo interest rate, which the week before had been 2.29%, but shot up to 10% before the Fed stepped in. As CNN reported, this was the first time the fed had to bail out the overnight repo market since late 2008, which just happened to be the height of the financial crisis.

The Fed conducted further bailouts on Wednesday night and Thursday night.

Finally, on Friday the Fed announced that it would conduct daily repurchasing operations through October 10.

One big takeaway from operation repo is that market forces want to take interest rates higher, which is exactly the opposite of what the Fed wants to have happen.

Which brings me to the second event of note in the financial markets last week, the Fed’s announcement that it was lowing interest rates by 0.25%. This is the second such announcement in the past two months, the previous one coming at the end of July.

Many mainstream commentators are confused by the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates. The reason is that lowing interest rates is something central banks do when the economy is struggling, but the official line is that the American economy is doing great and has never been better. Why is this?

Think of interest rates as the price of money. If the economy is doing well, this means businesses are borrowing to expand their facilities to keep up with demand, consumers and taking out car and home loans. And what happens when demand for a thing increases? All other things equal, the price goes up. With respect to demand for loans, this means that interest rates go up.

The opposite is the case when the economy is doing poorly. There is little demand from businesses to expand, so there is little demand for business loans. Consumers don’t have the income to support car an home loans, so they too are unable to take on debt to fund these purchases. When demand for money decreases, its price, that is to say the interest rate, tends to drop.

This is where the confusion comes in. Donald Trump is out there telling the whole world that the American economy is doing great, while at the same time forcefully arguing for lower interest rates. The Fed’s decision to lower rates strongly suggests that the economy is not doing as well as the Trump administration would like you to believe. Taken together with the Fed’s needing to bail out the repo market, lower interest rates are another data point suggesting an oncoming recession.

A third item of note from last week was the return of talk about a not too far off return to Quantitative Easing (QE) from none other than Fed Chairman Jay Powell. In plain English, QE is simply massive money printing (aka counterfeiting) by central banks to buy assets no one else wants to keep interest rates under control. First employed during as an emergency during the 2008 crisis, QE is now being seriously discussed in public. Question: If the economy really is as great as the powers that shouldn’t be want us to believe, why is the Fed talking about bringing back QE?

In the opinion of this writer, the three items mentioned above – the Fed’s bailout of the repo market, it’s decision to lower interest rates, and talk about QE – strongly suggest the Fed is worried about major problems in the financial system, perhaps even a financial crisis, just around the corner and strongly suggest what the Fed will do to combat those problems: print money.

So, what are Christians to make of all this? The most logical conclusion is that we are, in fact, facing a major financial storm and we need to rig for heavy weather. That is to say, we need to get prepared and to stay prepared. All which brings us back to where we started, the teachings of Christ on the subject of prepping.

Jesus Christ on Prepping

Though it’s not often discussed in prepping circles, or even, for that matter, in specifically Christian circles, Jesus had a remarkable amount to say about prepping. Let’s look at what he had to say.

The Olivet Discourse

Amazed at Jesus response that the magnificent temple in Jerusalem would be leveled to the ground, the disciples asked him for a sign of the coming destruction. During his extended answer, Jesus told his hearers that when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies, they needed to, as we might say today, get out of Dodge. “Flee to the mountains,” he told them, “and let not those who are in the country enter her.”

To what event was Christ referring with his comments? The most reasonable application was the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus in AD 70, and event that was around forty years in the future at the time of Christ’s warning.

One important prepping lesson we can take from these words is that sometimes it’s necessary to leave the comforts of home to preserve our lives in a crisis. This can be any crisis, not just a military invasion.

As a teenager, I remember the 1980 eruption – more like explosion – of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. According to this article from National Geographic, there had been warning signs of a coming eruption for about two months prior to the event in the form of earthquakes. When law enforcement warned lodge owner Harry Truman to evacuate, he famously refused to leave his property. When the mountain exploded on Sunday morning, May 18 1980, he and his lodge on Spirit Lake were instantly buried under 200 feet of avalanche debris. As National Geographic put it, “Not a sign of them was ever found again.”

Now one can have a certain amount of sympathy for Truman’s position. He was 83 years old at the time and had owned his lodge for 50 years. It is understandable why someone who’s lived in a place for so long may dig in his heels are refuse to leave. But still, he died needlessly. A wiser decision would have been to get out of harm’s way. Life is a precious thing, a gift of God. It is a sin to treat it lightly. If we can prevent our own death simply by removing ourselves from an obviously dangerous situation, we have an obligation to do so.

The Tower Builder and the Warrior King – Lessons in Prudence

In Luke 14, Jesus warned those who thought to follow him that they should first consider the cost of doing so. He illustrated cost counting with two examples, one a man thinking of building a tower, and the other a king considering going to battle. Although the immediate point of Jesus’ parables was to get people to consider the cost of being his disciple, there is, I think, a broader lesson we can take from them, namely, the importance of prudent judgment.

Asked Jesus, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he had enough to finish it – lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ ” Ouch. You don’t want to be that guy. Likewise, Christ said of the king, “Or what king, going to make way against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace.”

In both circumstances, the would be builder and the king, it appears that the deliberations Christ commends are not in any way related to supernatural prophecy, but rather ordinary human means of counting the costs. Perhaps the builder looks at the cost of materials and labor and compare that to what he has in savings or can reasonably expect to be able to borrow and pay back. Maybe the king considers the skill and loyalty of his soldiers, their equipment and his own or his commanders’ ability to lead in battle.

In like fashion, we need to be able to make a realistic assessment of our circumstances and take prudent action to limit our exposure to risk. Do we live in a place where hurricanes are likely? Better think about having some plywood handy to board up those windows and an evacuation plan. Live in tornado alley? You need a place to shelter from a twister. Do you face, as I think we in the West all do, financial crisis and social and political unrest? Christ’s parables of the builder and of the king imply that you must consider how you’re going to respond.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins

In Matthew 25, Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to ten virgins preparing to meet the bridegroom. Five of them, we are told, are wise, while five of them are foolish. The five foolish virgins took lamps but no oil for them, while the wise ones had both lamps and oil to burn. When the bridegroom showed up at a late hour, the foolish virgins asked the wise for oil, and the wise refused them, telling the foolish ones to go and buy some. By the time the foolish virgins had returned with the oil for their lamps, the wedding had taken place and the door was permanently shut against them.

There are a few lessons preppers can take from this parable. First, half-hearted measures may be of little value. This is not to say that we have to build some sort of doomsday bunker and wait around for the end of the world as we know it. Not at all. But we do need to use some good sense when we prep. What good does it do us if we have the latest high tech tactical LED flashlights that can beam Morse Code signals into outer space lack the batteries to power them? What if we have food but no way to cook it? What if we have gold and silver to preserve our wealth through a financial reset but don’t have some cash handy to make basic purchases in a crisis? Sometimes we think prepping is all about making complex plans and building up heroic stockpiles of stuff, but many times it just about doing basic things such as making sure you take oil along with your lamp.

A second lesson for preppers is to get ready and to stay ready. I first started to think about prepping during the 2008 financial crisis. In the fall of that year, while the stock market was selling off hard, at the same time we had a windstorm in Cincinnati that knocked out power to the whole metro area. Power was out at my house for four days. Others had it even worse. These events were eleven years ago this month, and were really the catalyst to get me started on prepping.

So here I sit all this time later and no financial crisis or natural disaster has hit. Have I been a fool? I’d be less than honest were I to tell you that the thought had never occurred to me. Maybe I should just forget the whole prepping thing and go live life as if nothing bad could ever happen. I could do that, but I’m convinced that would be foolish. Just as Christ’s delayed (from our perspective) second coming has given many a false sense of security, so too has the long delayed second act of the financial crisis convinced many that it never will come at all. But the warning signs of a financial crisis are becoming more obvious by the day, and despite the best efforts of the politicians and central bankers to indefinitely push the day of reckoning out into the future, there’s going to come a time when the can no longer can be kicked and it’s going to be 2008 all over again. Only worse.

A third lesson is don’t depend on the kindness of strangers, do your own prepping. When the five foolish virgins asked the wise for oil, the wise refused them, telling the foolish to go and buy their own. The parable tells us that it was midnight, so it’s hard to see how there would have been any place open for the foolish to go quickly. Do your own prepping and do it well in advance, so you’re not caught at a critical time without the things you need.

Fourth, the critical moment can come quickly, without warning. The passage tells us that the bridegroom was delayed in his coming and all ten virgins had fallen asleep. But the wise, having made their preparations in advance were ready at a moment’s notice.

In closing his parable, Jesus put it this way, “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.” In like fashion, we know neither the day nor the hour when our preparations may be needed.

Closing Thoughts

As Scripturalists, it is imperative that we test all our ideas against what the Bible teaches. The main purpose of this and the prior three posts in this series has been to test the idea of prepping to find out if there is any Scriptural support for it. This answer, in the opinion of this author, is a resounding yes. Although it has not been my purpose to exhaust all the Bible has to say on prepping, the four case studies we have done – Noah, Lot, Joseph and the teachings of Christ – show that without a doubt the Bible not only supports prepping, but may even require it of believers.

In his sovereignty, God has brought about many calamities among the nations of men. One of the great advantages of studying this history of calamites in the Bible is that, not only do we have an accurate record of what took place, but we have, at least in some cases, God’s infallible explanation of why God brought these disasters about. We don’t have to speculate why God destroyed the world by water in the days of Noah, it was the wickedness of man that invited his judgment. Likewise with Sodom and Gomorrah. In the New Testament, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans was predicted due to unbelief.

From these instances and from other passages in Scripture, we can draw the more general conclusion that God punishes nations for their unbelief and moral depravity. If that’s the case, and it is, we Christians who live in the West in the early 21st century must take heed to what the Bible says on this point if we are to protect our lives and the lives of our loved ones.

We live in a day when the world is quickly losing its mind all around us. Considering just the financial aspect of the modern West, it’s a complete disaster. We have fraudulent debt based, central bank issued fiat currencies that must be continually debased just to keep the system going. Debt at the personal, corporate and governmental levels has exploded and shows no signs of stopping.

Looking at the moral climate, it is shocking to this author how much worse things have gotten even in the past thirty years. It wasn’t very long ago that homosexuality was considered sinful and not something one talked about in polite company. Now, we have same sex marriage everywhere and anyone who speaks against it, that person is considered to be the one who has the problem. In America, an open, same sex married homosexual is making a serious run for president. If God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their sin, how much more will he judge us who have far more knowledge of his will than the men of those cities?

But however bad things get, Christians have the comfort of knowing they serve a merciful God. He is our Father in heaven and has promised to protect and to provide for his people. Of all people, we can face the coming hard times with the confidence first, that God is firmly in control of whatever happens and second that he will provide to us the means to face it.

My goal in writing is not to scare believers, but to encourage them to think seriously about the financial, social and political problems we face and to prepare themselves accordingly. I have a firm conviction that, not only are hard times coming, but also that we as Christian can use them to witness to the goodness and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. But for us to be effective witnesses in tough times, we must ourselves be ready. Or ask yourself, what kind of witnesses would we be if, when the financial crisis really gets going, we’re just as panicked and just as broke as the unbelievers around us? God forbid that should ever be the case.

With this in mind, I’d like to take this series in a different direction next week by offering some practical advice on just what believers can do to get ready for the challenges I believe we all will face in the coming years.