Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. Isaiah 1:7
“…because of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities.”
Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p.53
If you’re a Christian, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and their enablers hate you and want to see you dead.
Seriously.
Why do they hate you and want to see you dead? Because you’re the last line of defense keeping them from attaining their goals of culture hegemony, political power and the economic transformation of the United States.
So who are their enablers? Just about every mainstream cultural, educational, political and business institution in the United States. Yes, when it comes to Civil War 2.0, the fix is in, and you, Christian, are the target.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. Isaiah 1:7
“…because of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities.”
Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p.53
“‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’“ So wrote Ernest Hemmingway in his novel The Sun Also Rises.
Although Hemmingway’s book was a work fiction, what he said about bankruptcy is a phenomenon many of us have seen in real life. Individuals and organizations that appear to be in robust financial health experience sudden financial collapse.
Perhaps the poster child for sudden financial ruin is Lehman Brothers, a famous 150-year-old Wall Street investment bank. Having earned record profits during the height of the real estate bubble from 2005-2007, early in the morning on Monday, September 15,2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers to this day is still the largest bankruptcy in American history.
Gradually, then suddenly. That same pattern can be seen in the Scriptures as well. In Deuteronomy 32:35 we read, “Their foot shall slide in due time.” Some will recognize this as the text on which Jonathan Edwards based his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Wrote Edwards,
It [the saying “their foot shall slide in due time”] implies, that they were always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once without warning: Which is also expressed in ‘Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction: How are they brought into desolation as in a moment? (Psalm 73:18-19).
Sodom and Gomorrah met with destruction in a single day.
After centuries of rebellion against God, Jerusalem was sacked in a single day.
In Daniel’s time, the mighty city of Babylon was overthrown in a single day.
In Revelation, the voice from heaven prophesies that the destruction of Babylon the Great will come in a single day. The kings of the earth are said to lament her destruction, crying out, “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come” (Revelation 18:10).
In all of these cases, the sudden final destruction was really the end result of a process that had been going on for many years.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers, Isaiah 1:7
“…because of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities.”
Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p.53
“Major Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy” was the way Business Insider reported the findings of a 2014 Princeton University peer-reviewed study of American politics. In it, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page concluded, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
Since this is a Scripturalist blog dedicated to the proposition that the Bible alone furnishes us with knowledge, readers may question why this author would cite a secular, empirical study to make a point about the state of American politics in the early 21st century. One reason for doing so is that, while this study reflects the opinion of its authors, he believes that their opinion is an accurate reflection, politically speaking, of the state of affairs in this nation. Opinion, while not knowledge – knowledge is always true – nevertheless can be both true and useful.
If this study is right, and the author is persuaded that it is, the United States, founded as a republic, has devolved into a vulgar oligarchy, which is defined as, “a government in which a small group exercise control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Why has this happened? John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers put it this way, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams was, of course, right. Paper restraints are wholly inadequate to hold back sinful man’s desire – and this desire is found both among those who would govern and those who are governed – for big government. If the American people do not believe in constitutional capitalism, the political and economic expression of Christianity, then there is nothing to stop the nation from devolving into some form of authoritarianism.
Now it may be worth pausing for a moment to explain that the common understanding of the term “religious” in Adams time meant “Protestant.” The population of the American colonies at the time of the revolution was 98% Protestant, and it was this sort of religion that the framers had in mind. Today, it is common for people to understand by “religion” or “religious” that the framers of the Constitution were referring to all religions – e.g. Romanism, Judaism, Islam. But these three medieval religions are incapable of creating or sustaining a free society. It is Christianity as expressed in the 66 books of the Bible and systematized during the 16th century Protestant Reformation, that alone provides the necessary ideas needed to constrain government to its proper, limited role of punishing evil doers and rewarding the good.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers, Isaiah 1:7
“…because of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities.”
Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p.53
Just yesterday, we celebrated the 244th anniversary of America’s independence from Great Britain, while, ironically enough, a substantial portion of the country found itself under house arrest due to dictates from various government officials. It’s almost as if we’ve come full circle.
Actually, it seems as if we’ve come more than full circle. Government was much smaller, and the tax and regulatory burdens were much less, under British colonial rule than they are now under own home-grown government. This is not to suggest that it was wrong to have fought the Revolutionary War, but it does say something about how far America has drifted from its limited government roots.
What has been the cause of this political sea change?
In his Forward to Gordon Clark’s A Cristian View of Men and Things, John Robbins explained it this way, “A Christian View of Men and Things presents the argument that the West is disappearing because Christianity, on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared in the West.”
It needs to be pointed out there that when Clark and Robbins speak of “Christianity,” they are talking about the plain statements and logical implications of the 66 Books of the Bible, the centerpiece of which is the doctrine of Justification by Faith (Belief) Alone. That is to say, they are talking about the Biblical Christianity of the Protestant Reformation.
There are other systems of thought that claim to be Christianity, Roman Catholicism for example, but which are not Christian, because they teach that sinful man in some sense is able to put God in his debt, as if salvation were the rightful wages of the sinner’s good works. These other systems are, in fact, not Christian at all, and their growing presence in the United States and elsewhere in the West are the collapse of the West.
Western Civilization is rapidly disappearing from the face of the Earth, yet almost no one, even among those who lament its disappearance, understand, as did Gordon Clark and John Robbins, the connection between the disappearance of Christianity and that of Western Civilization.
Writing about the Northern Kingdom in his day, the prophet Hosea commented, “Aliens have devoured his [Ephraim’s] strength, but he does not know it; yes, gray hairs are here and there on him, yet he does not know it. The kings and rulers of the Northern Kingdom, for which Ephraim was another name, lacked the discernment to realize the precarious position of the nation and to see that its collapse was nigh. Some scholars believe Hosea wrote from about 750 BC until just a few years before the dissolution of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the capital city of Samaria and took the inhabitants of the nation into captivity.
So why did the Northern Kingdom fall to Assyria? That is a very simple question to answer, one requiring no speculation: “[T]hey left all the commandments of the LORD their God” (2 Kings 17:16). It was because of this that “the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight” (2 Kings 17:18).
It is this author’s contention that we in the West, the heirs of the Reformation, are in a position not entirely different from that of ancient Israel. We have forsaken the Lord our God, his law and his gospel, and have followed after strange gods, which are not gods at all, but the work of the vain imaginations of men’s sinful hearts. John Robbins put it like this, “the collapse of the West can be viewed as the collapse of the of the attempted Thomistic (Roman Catholic) synthesis of human philosophy and Christ, and the West’s fatal choosing of non-Christian philosophy, not Christ” (A Christian View of Men and Things, 12).
It’s one thing to read about the collapse of the Hebrew Republic as documented in the pages of the Old Testament, or even about the collapse of the Roman Empire as recounted by Edward Gibbon. It’s altogether another thing when the civilization in collapse is your own and you have the opportunity to watch it live streamed in high definition.
In the opinion of this author, it is high time that American Christians, and Christians in other nations of the West, face the reality of the situation we are in, as unpleasant as it is, and prepare themselves for the likely further collapse of the West.
Lux Lucet 