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Posts Tagged ‘Collapse of the West’

Reformation Day Thoughts, Part 2: Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There Is Liberty

Posted in The Reformation, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Martin Luther as Hercules Germanicus by Hans Holbein, 1523. “In the picture, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Lyra already lay bludgeoned to death at his feet and the German inquisitor, Jacob van Hoogstraaten was about to receive his fatal stroke. Suspended from a ring in Luther’s nose was the figure of Pope Leo X,” The Reformation Room.

Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

  • 2 Corinthians 3:17

“Then the children of Israel…forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.  And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel. So He delivered them into the hands of plunderers who despoiled them; and He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies” (Judges 2:11,13-14).

It’s often been noted that Israel under the judges went through a number of cycles of faith in the Word of God prosperity, followed by unbelief, leading to bondage to foreign powers, followed by repentance, and finally deliverance from oppression.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this cycle is the close connection between belief and liberty, on one hand, and unbelief and oppression on the other.  The passage just quoted from Judges is a good illustration of this principle. 

Put another way, spiritual liberty, faith in the Lord, leads to political and economic liberty.  Rejecting the Word of God produces slavery both political and economic. 

Put still another way, spiritual liberty leads to political and economic liberty, spiritual bondage to political and economic bondage. 

Not only did this pattern hold true in ancient Israel, it also holds true today.  It was the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone that spiritually freed the people of the nations to which the Reformation came from the bondage of sin and guilt.  And those same nations were the very ones to become the freest states on earth politically as well as the most prosperous.  

In his booklet Christ & Civilization, John Robbins noted this patter, writing,

Martin Luther’s courageous rejection of – in the name of written revelation, logic, and freedom – of this faith-works religion laid the necessary theological foundation for the emergence of a free, humane, and civilized society from the ancient and medieval paganism of Christendom. The result was religious freedom and her daughters: political, civil, and economic freedom (38).

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.  First spiritually, then in other ways politically and economically. 

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I Am the First, and I Am the Last: A Christian Response to the Ongoing Covid Tyranny

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on August 1, 2021| 3 Comments »

Masker and Vaxxer in Chief, Jesuit trained Dr. Anthony Fauci.

I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.

  • Isaiah 44:6

“I just can’t believe it’s come to this.”  I find myself saying that a lot lately. 

In some ways, that’s an odd statement for me to make.  After all, I’m a Christian and know the Scriptures.  I know who the prince of this world is, and I know how the Lord has wrought destruction on disobedient people throughout the history recorded for us in the Bible.  Even a cursory reading of secular history shows that liberty is a precious thing most fleeting. 

When I think of my writing over the past several years, the theme of decline and fall, especially the decline and fall of the formerly Christian West, seems always at the forefront of my mind. 

And yet for all that, I still find myself shocked when I read the headlines and see the evil of the Covid tyranny unfolding all around me.

When word first began to spread concerning the novel coronavirus last January, I was suspicious but didn’t know fully what to think.  Could this be a serious, naturally occurring pandemic, or is there something more at work. 

In March of 2020, my employer went 100% work from home, and arrangement that still obtains to this day.  At that same time, the lockdowns began, and this helped bring things into focus for me.  You don’t lockdown healthy people.  That’s one of the first rules of dealing with epidemics.  In Leviticus 13, we read God’s prescription for dealing with outbreaks of disease.  If someone thought he had a skin disease, he was to show himself to the priest.  Depending on the condition, the priest was to follow a particular course of examination.  At the end, the priest either would proclaim the person clean or unclean.  If the diagnosis was unclean, that person was to go outside the camp. 

But note well, it was only sick people who were quarantined, and that only after the due process of examination by the priest.  There was no provision in the law of Moses to lockdown all Israel in the hope of preventing the spread of leprosy or any other disease. The law of Moses was individualistic and was concerned with identifying conditions pertaining to individuals.  The law of tyrants is collective.  Collectivists don’t see individuals; they see the masses. 

Another point worth making is that it was through a process of self-examination that anyone would go to a priest as a possible leper.  There was no state-enforced leprosy screening program in Israel.  One went to a priest for examination on one’s own.  This eliminates the idea of forced testing that has been loudly advocated by many Covid tyrants.

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In the Beginning, Part 12: Series Conclusion

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology, tagged , , , , , on May 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

  • Genesis 1:1

“Is there any good news?” That was a text a friend sent me a few months back.  My answer to him was something like, “not really.”

As a Christian, I know full well that there is good news in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that all who believe in him are justified and accepted as righteous in the sight of God.  That promise never changes no matter what the headlines say.

But if we look strictly at the headlines concerning the events of the day, there has been very little good news at all for nearly a year and a half.  In truth, the bad news has been pouring in for a long time, but it seems to have gone next level since early 2020. 

The Covid hoax – I say hoax not in the sense that no one died of Covid-19, but in the sense that the wildly overstated danger of this disease was used to crush political, economic and religious liberty in what appears to be a world-wide orchestrated event to centralize power among the globalist elite – the BLM hoax – we’ve been lectured for what seems like forever that America is hopelessly racist and that racist police unfairly target black Americans, but there is little evidence to support these statements and much to contradict them; yes, black Americans have higher rates of incarceration than other groups but that is because of the uncomfortable fact that they commit a wildly disproportionate amount of violent crime – and the 2020 election hoax – we were told in no uncertain terms that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure in history, while at the same time anyone who pointed out glaring irregularities in the election was dismisses as a QAnon conspiracy theorist and deplatformed from social media – all worked together to make 2020 a uniquely depressing year for those of us who lover liberty and truth. 

And the knock-on effects of those hoaxes are still with us in 2021 and likely will continue to be with us in the foreseeable future. 

At the very least, these hoaxes are examples of false witness bearing, a violation of the ninth commandment.  Which law, although not formally committed to writing at the time of the events in Genesis 1-11, was nevertheless in effect. 

The three hoaxes listed above are certainly not the only hoaxes Americans are subjected to daily.  We must not omit the transgender hoax in which we taught to accept that men really can become women and women really can become men.  And if you don’t believe it, well, very bad things are in store for you.

And we’re not yet done with hoaxes.  As if all the above weren’t enough, now the major news networks are pushing UFO’s. It’s almost as if a there’s a concerted effort to distract people.

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