Lux Lucet

For one, there’s the Covid tyranny. A brother I know who lives in Australia has told me how bad things are where he lives. He can’t go to church. If he goes into a store, he must have his phone scanned or write his name on a list. If someone who was in the store is later diagnosed with Covid, the contract tracers dutifully pull the records to see who else was in the store around the same time. Anyone who shows up on that list is sent an email saying he must quarantine in his home for two weeks. Here’s a fuller list of the Covid tyranny being inflicted on Australians.

If you’re unfortunate enough to live in New York or certain other large cities, you’re being subjected to vaccine mandates just to go do normal things like a normal person.  Some cities are mandating that certain city employees either get the dangerous and ineffective Covid inoculation or get fired.  Philadelphia is graciously giving unvaccinated city employees the option of double masking, as if breathing were somehow optional.

The Democrats want to put all unvaccinated Americans on the No-Fly list as if they were terrorists, which is, in fact, the way the Democratic vax tyrants see them. 

Combined with the deliberate silencing of competent, opposing voices on social media shows for all the world to see that Americans are living under a creeping Covid tyranny.     

Then there’s the scourge of Critical Race Theory (CRT), that has swept all before it.  It’s getting hard to find a major corporation, university, media outlet or government official who hasn’t bowed the knee to this modern-day Baal.  As the outstanding 2019 statement on CRT by the American Council of Christian Churches notes, Critical Theory, of which CRT is an offshoot, teaches two false gospels depending on the group to which a person belongs.  If you’re a victim, a member one of the oppressed groups, blessed art thou!  You have an original righteousness that can’t be taken away.  But if you’re from an oppressor group – white, Christian men, for example – you’re the devil incarnate and cursed be thy name!  Your fate is, “a life of penance involving endless apologies, reparations, affirmative actions, and silent listening to ‘marginalized’ groups, as well as the mortification of all purported ‘microaggression’ of sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, cigenderism, colonialism, misogyny, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity.” 

For what it’s worth, I took the Intersectionality Score Calculator and scored a “4.”  I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that this makes me a very, very bad person indeed.  The only thing that saved me from getting a “1” is the fact that I’m old and not all that rich. 

Let’s see, ah yes, then there’s the LGBT movement that has eaten up what’s left of our culture after the CRT folks have had their cut.  Things have gotten to the point where if you see some guy in a dress and think it’s odd, well, you’re the one who has the problem.  It can’t be the guy in the dress.  He’s a sacred object and above reproach. 

Immigration?  Various groups united in their hatred of America’s historic core population, Christianity, political and economic liberty, and national sovereignty have ganged up to flood America with an increasingly diverse and needy influx of immigrants, all which Americans are simply supposed to welcome with outstretched wallets.  “Do your duty, fork it over, and shut up,” is the message from our rulers to anyone who objects to any of this.    

Then there’s the ongoing financial crisis.  The Federal Reserve is printing money at a furious pace to ensure that favored markets – stocks, bonds, real estate, and oil – stay elevated, while allowing unfavored markets such and gold and silver to be suppressed.  If the Fed were to stop printing, our financial system would collapse overnight. 

Congress is poised to pass a spending bill in the amount of $3.5 trillion dollars, which will put further pressure on the dollar and result in rising prices for all Americans.   What’s worse, the money will be wasted on unconstitutional and immoral programs, making the government bigger and more powerful, while destroying liberty and impoverishing the American people. 

Our foreign policy, an ongoing disaster for over a century, just hit a new low with the botched pull-out from Afghanistan.  Many people consider it one of, if not the greatest, foreign policy embarrassment in our history.  In truth, it’s not the pull out that’s the embarrassment.  It’s the fact that America waged an unchristian, unconstitutional, and unnecessary war in Afghanistan resulting in countless deaths and wasting fantastic sums of money in the process.  If our policy makers had only stood on the Christian foreign policy of our founders – stay out of foreign wars – none of this carnage would have happened. 

Many people have speculated, not without reason, that the black eye America received with the pull-out has seriously hurt this nation’s standing in the eyes of the world and could result in a drastic decline in American power internationally.

And what about the overt lawlessness taking places in Portland and other areas where Antifa is allowed free reign to terrorize citizens?  Good is called evil, and evil is called good.  Woe to public officials who allow this to go on! 

There.  That’s a pretty depressing list.  And, doubtless, I’ve left off some things.  But I think the reader should get the point by now.  If you live in America, or any other Western nation, there’s a whole lot of bad news out there and almost nothing good happening to speak of. 

So, what do we do as Christians?  Hang our heads?  Go around saying “woe to us!”  Retreat into some monastery of our own making? 

Well, there is certainly room for weeping in the Christian life.  Not for nothing is Jeremiah known as the weeping prophet.  And he had good reason to weep.  His nation was being destroyed by Babylon and he had to witness the destruction with his own eyes. 

I have a hard time imagining Jeremiah’s utter devastation at watching the Babylonian army level Jerusalem and burn the temple.

But yet, each and every day you and I see something like that as we watch our nation, our civilization being destroyed a bit more every day.  Our liberties are trampled underfoot, tent cities grow, drugs, violence, and obscenity.

So yes, there is room for Christians to weep for their country.  Some of that is good and necessary.

But weeping isn’t the whole of what Christians are called to do.

We’re called, as Jesus said, to be salt and to be light.  That’s our job description.

And that’s our job, not just when thing are going well, but most and especially when they are not.

Paul wrote that all things work together for good, to those who love God and are called according to his purpose.  If you’re in Christ, that means you!

I don’t propose to know all the reasons why God has put you and me in our current situation, a time and place where we’re bearing daily witness to a civilizational collapse.  There are times when I wish I could have lived in a different era.  But I don’t and you don’t. 

We live here in the Year of Our Lord 2021.

And if you believe what the Bible teaches about God’s sovereignty, you and I do not live when and where we do by accident. 

We have a calling, a job before us.

And that job is to show Christ to a lost and dying world.  One filled with all manner of perverse philosophies – Marxism, feminism, homosexualism, Critical Race Theory, Keynesianism, humanism, and the like. 

It may sound strange to say this, but one could argue that you and I are greatly honored by God to have such an opportunity before us to speak the truth. 

If we lived in a more Christian era, the need for Christian soldiers might not have seemed so pressing.  But we live in a rapidly degenerating situation that cries out for God’s people to take a stand for truth. 

Goliath was a scary opponent who terrorized Israel’s entire army with his threats.  But if he hadn’t been such an intimidating opponent, David’s victory would not have been so glorious. 

In like fashion, you and I face intimidating opponents, one’s who are too powerful for us to fight on our own. 

But like David, we don’t fight in our own strength.  Rather, we are called to put on the whole armor of God and take the fight to the enemy thereby.  

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul noted that all Scripture is breathed out by God is profitable for “reproof, correction, for instruction in righteousness.”  And this is how we take the fight to the enemy, we destroy his false ideas by reproving, correcting, and instructing, not only believers, but unbelievers in the truth of God’s revealed Word. 

As I think is quite clear, there is a great deal of reproving, correcting, and instructing that needs to be done. Far more than can be done by any one man, be he ever so wise, energetic, and brave.

What does this mean for you and me?

In a word, opportunity.

You and I, we live in an empire of lies, some of which I’ve briefly chronicled above.  Our job is to be salt and light, and by God’s grace and the preaching and application of his Word to strengthen the brethren and to bring others to Christ. 

The Lord has set before us a race.  Let us run it with endurance, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

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