Category Archives: Deception

A Novel Situation

Some time back I was asked to read a new Christian fantasy novel for the purpose of possibly endorsing it.

I have a general policy of not doing this, because it always ends up taking a lot of time away from my WIP, mostly because of the angst and mental distraction these efforts stir up in me. I’m very picky about my reading, especially when it comes to Christian works, and unfortunately I often find myself at odds with the doctrines presented.

I tell myself that many people would just set that aside and if they liked the story in general would go ahead and endorse it. I tell myself I should do that as well. It’s not my job to run around setting people straight in regards to their supposed doctrinal deficiencies.  And many times there are things in the story that I like. Can’t I just overlook the parts I don’t?

Yes, if I were simply reading the piece for pleasure. But to put my name on it in an endorsement? Therein lies the rub.

My own purpose in writing in the fantasy genre is to illuminate spiritual truth, particularly as regards the Angelic Conflict, one of the least studied, least understood, and, I think, least believed of Christian doctrines. Of course, the conflict itself and the way it’s carried out – primarily by deception – guarantees its true nature will not be well-known, or even believed. Of all doctrines it has been most distorted and/or buried. And that comes as no surprise since the kingdom of darkness works hard to do just that.

One might argue that in a fantasy novel, where good and evil are often set against one another in a rough parallel to the angelic conflict, what matters most is the characters and their actions, the plot and the world, not the specifics of explanation for the battle or the parameters for the set-up of the fantasy novel’s world…

Except… that’s kind of the whole point of writing a fantasy, in my view.

The world we live in and its parameters are based upon the angelic conflict. Understanding this conflict changes one’s perception of God, of man, of the work of Christ on the Cross, who He is, what His purpose is, who we are as part of His Church, and what is going on around us every day.

We are constantly bombarded with the lies of the kingdom of darkness, because as even human advertisers and propagandizers  will tell you, that is the way to change people’s thinking; or to keep their thinking from changing, depending on your objective.

Worse, even as believers in Christ each of us still has a sin nature, that part of us that is drawn to those lies, always ready to latch onto them. Indeed, for most of us, God is hard at work stripping away the lies so He can replace them with truth.

The lies have power and I believe we who have learned to see them, are not to simply ignore them, skipping over them as if they don’t matter… I believe God holds us accountable for our actions in regards to them.

So, in regards to the novel in question, I hit a spot that was, in my understanding, completely wrong.  I reacted. I wrote at length in the notebook I keep when reading books. I paced about the house, asking God what I was to do.

Was I being arrogant? Making a big deal out of nothing? Should I just set this aside and move on? I’d like to help the author and the publisher and the field of Christian fantasy in general. Maybe the parts I read didn’t mean what I thought they meant. Maybe the author didn’t mean any more by them than just to provide an explanation for the storyline. Most people aren’t even going to think twice about it or even take note I’m sure. Surely I was just being too rigid and inflexible.

But this is an outright insult to my Lord and Savior! Even if it was done unknowingly. How can I put my name on it as recommending it, when it does that? How can I put my name on it before the angels who are watching?

Well, that was Saturday.

Sunday morning I awoke double-minded as ever. Surely it was enough to have seen the false concepts, but I needn’t be militant about it, right?

As I drove to church I asked the Lord for answers. What was I to do about endorsing this novel? “You know how weak and easily confused I get,” I told Him. “I don’t want to make a stand when no stand is required. Please make it clear to me.”

So then maybe an hour or so later, about halfway through the message, which was on discernment – how God goes about developing in us the ability to see with spiritual eyes instead of natural eyes – Pastor John said, “So I’m faced with a novel situation. Will I trust this (new) person’s standards or my own?”

A novel situation? Pastor John rarely uses this word, and Sunday it leapt out at me. Yes I knew he meant “new” situation, but the personal double entendre was clearly from the Holy Spirit.

Not long after that, Pastor said, “There’s more going on here than meets the eye. Angels are checking out how you treat the Word.” He’d not mentioned angels in some time. Yet I’d thought of them the night before.  “They’re with you here, in class,” he said, “and outside of class, rubbernecking to see how (what you learn here) is working in your life…”

Then he quoted I Th 5:20, (Wuest translation): “Stop counting as nothing the divine revelations from the pulpit.”

And elaborated: “This is talking about when you know the Holy Spirit is pointing out truth from the Word, but you ignore it. With discernment it’s great to see the truth in a situation, but then it calls upon us to make decision about how to apply it.”

Could the message have been any more pointed to my situation? Yes. It could:

“We are to cultivate the ability and practice of examining everything carefully…to determine what’s true and false.” Examing everything. Carefully.”

Then he had us go to 2 John, pointing out as we turned there, that the various letters of the New Testament are addressed  differently, some to the church in general, some to specific congregations, some to individuals like Titus and Timothy.

This one was addressed to “the chosen lady.”  The chosen lady???

And in it, the Apostle tells her, “Don’t let false teachers into your house.” (vs 10)

“These are people,” said Pastor John, “who go out and try to teach what they think is right but don’t check with the Word. ‘Do not receive him into your house and do not give him a joyful welcome. For the one who welcomes him, participates in his evil deeds.’”

“When you’ve discerned something to be bad in your life,” said Pastor, “you’re to actively hold back from it.”

So. I had my answer. Not the one I wanted, but clearly my answer, nonetheless.

He could have talked about loving the brethren, putting the needs of others before your own, treating everyone in grace, not being legalistic and self-righteous… But he did not. And I do not believe that was “coincidence.”

Latest, Most Detailed Timeline on Events in Benghazi

Well, I was going to talk a bit about our trip to the White Mountains today, but decided to put it off in favor of the accounting I just finished reading on the State Department’s official webpage (“Office of the Spokesperson”) regarding a blow-by-blow  (or “tick-tock” as the State Department official put it)  of the events of  the night of September 11 in Benghazi. This is a transcript of a “Background Conference Call With Senior State Department Officials” given to various invited news reporters back on Oct 9 which  has apparently just been released to the public.

It’s somewhat long, but it’s fascinating and so intense it reads like a Brad Thor novel. I highly recommend taking the time to read it all.

It also makes very clear 1) there was NO protest, unless you can call an all out armed attack on a US diplomatic compound a “protest;” 2) it was definitely preplanned (and it seems very likely, at least to me, that the perpetrators were specifically trying to murder the ambassador); and 3) the president knew exactly what was happening and that it wasn’t a protest about a movie since the security officer in the Tactical Operations Center on the compound had the White House on the phone from the moment the attack began — despite VP Biden’s claims to the contrary in that debate last week.

At the end of the two State Department Senior officials’ recounting, during the Q&A period, one of them, when asked if they should have prepared for such an event, said,

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL NUMBER TWO: It is difficult to answer hypothetical questions, but let me just put it this way. The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented. There had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya – Tripoli, Benghazi, or elsewhere – in the time that we had been there. And so it is unprecedented. In fact, it would be very, very hard to find a precedent for an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.

You can, and should read the entire transcript HERE. It will be very much worth your time.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”  ~ Mt 7:15

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Here are some typical pictures of wolves in sheep’s clothing:

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And here is a picture of what wolves in sheep’s clothing REALLY look like:

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 You will know them by their fruits, not their looks. Not their personalities or mannerisms, not by the way they talk nor even many of the words they say some  cases… It may take a lot of time for fruits to be manifested. Hence the need to be well-schooled in the Word of God, lest we be taken in by their big brown eyes, sweet faces and soft, fluffy wool.

“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thron bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit.” ~ Mt 7:16,17

A Self-Made “Man”

 

I thought I was done with my musings on the nature of Satan for the moment, but some of the comments on previous posts, plus my discovery of this last bit of excerpt from Chafer’s book Satan, has convinced me there’s at least one more post to do on this subject.

Maybe I’m misreading things, but people seem very reluctant to admit that Satan could possibly want to build and order and do “good” things. Several commenters keep coming back to him as ruiner, render, devourer.

I have no argument with that. In the end that’s exactly what he is. Right now that’s exactly how he feels toward God, God’s plan and ways and God’s people.

He’s the roaring lion walking about seeking someone (in context, some believer in Christ) to devour …

But what exactly does “devour” mean. After all, he’s not a literal lion. So how might he go about devouring?

In the context of the verse where this appears (1 Pe 5:8), the believer has just been told to humble himself, to cast all his anxiety on the Lord, to be of sober spirit (not letting emotions get the best of him) and to be on the alert because his enemy the devil is on the prowl seeking to devour him.

Since Rev 12:10 says that Satan is in heaven accusing the brethren day and night before the throne, and since he is a creature who can only be in one place at a time, clearly this roaring lion is not Satan himself, at least in the vast majority of cases.

Instead it would be his minions and the world system he has devised. The word for “devour” — katapino — means to drink down, swallow down, devour.

When you drink or swallow or devour something, it becomes a part of you. Its original form is broken down, changed to other things and assimilated into the body. That is, it becomes part of the body. So the believer’s thinking — because the spiritual battle we’re in is all about thought, the source of action — and motivation and way of living — is drunk down, swallowed up, changed to something else.

Changed to the system of thought the world advances, one that exalts self and opposes God, though it may not always be obvious that’s what it’s doing. Because very often it includes God, the Bible and even Jesus Christ in its subtle methods of exalting self and opposing God. That’s the nature of a counterfeit, to include as much truth as possible into the lie, because the more it looks and sounds like the real thing, the more people will be deceived.

Consider Chafer’s observations regarding Satan:

“His own terrible sin before God would not be condemned in the eyes of the world, for it is that which they most idealize and praise.

In his sin he aspired to that which is highest, and proposed to realize his ideal by his own self-sufficiency and strength.

Are those not worthy goals in our world today? Aren’t we forever being told, even as Christians, that we must strive for excellence and offered myriad ways of doing so in our own strength? Don’t we have and venerate all sorts of competitions to determine who is most excellent? (Especially now that Olympics Season has begun!)

Chafer continues:

“True, he has lowered his Creator, in his own mind, to a level where he supposes himself to be in legitimate competition with Him, both for authority over other beings and for their worship.

“Yet this unholy ambition and disregard for the Creator is a most commendable thing according to the standards of the Satanic order (ie, the present world system).

“In the language of the world, Satan is simply “self made” and every element of his attitude toward his Creator is, as a principle of life, both commended and practiced by the world.

“Though hiding himself, Satan has had the satisfaction, under limitations, of governing the affairs of men; and the delight, to a large extent, of receiving their worship.

If people — including Believers in Christ — are admiring and living by his ideas and his values, then they are essentially worshipping him even if they don’t realize it. And in that regard they have been “devoured”.

 

 

Satan is Not God — and it Irks Him

Over the weekend I received a comment on my post last week Demonism or the Depravity of Man? from a reader that raised a good point and which I’d like to address.

My reader said this in regards to the post:

“I can agree with you that people have a very misguided view of the innate goodness of man.

I’d have to disagree with Chafer about Satan. In John 8:44, Jesus says to the Jews, “You belong to your father the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. …” They wanted to carry out the desires of the devil and indeed they did most brutally murder him. That doesn’t sound like “And certainly he does not prompt them; for they are the natural fruit of an unrestrained fallen nature…”

Man is depraved and therefore a useful tool to carry out the devil’s desires.”

In my original post I was pointing out that contemporary portrayals of Satan and demons as vile, murderous beings bent only on gross evil and the torment of hapless souls were not accurate. To do so, I used some quotes from a book called Satan by Lewis Sperry Chafer.

But I see from the above-quoted comment that there is more to the matter than I discussed, and that Chafer has presented.

I think the best encapsulation of Satan’s nature now is that he is consumed with exalting himself and attacking God. He hates God and wants to do anything he can to thwart His will and plans. Satan wanted desperately to get our Lord to sin before he reached the cross, or, failing that, to kill Him outright before He could do the work He’d come to do. Because once Jesus Christ reached the cross and bore the sins of the world, it was over for Satan, although it’s clear he’s still in denial about that fact.

Currently he also attacks Christians, in whom God lives, in any way He can. He might use a religion to do that, such as Islam, whose Koran instructs its followers to kill Christians.  Or he might choose to do whatever he can to mess up their service and their witness, either by thwarting them, persecuting them, even killing them, or by drawing them away from truth with a counterfeit and duping them. These latter mostly involve the nice guy Satan, or, in light of having just watched The Incredible Hulk, how about the Bruce Banner version?

As he sees his time coming to an end however, (particularly in the Tribulation period), he will abandon his outwardly respectable veneer and show himself for the monster that he is, so unhinged he’ll order his minions to attack the very grass of the field, just because God made it.

Which would be the huge green guy version, going about roaring and smashing things in his rage.

This is all in Chafer’s book; he is not saying Satan never indulges in gross and immoral sins, just that he has given us a skewed view of his personality and his purposes. A view that sees him as gross and immoral and not only incapable of producing any of the good things in the world, incapable of even liking the good things.

I think he does like the good things, just as long as he doesn’t have to acknowledge them as coming from God. In fact, I think he even sees himself as good and right, someone who truly wants  to make everything in the world work well, because it reflects well on him as the leader. His goal is to be like God, as I’ve said, and thus to show himself able to do everything God can do. And before sin appeared, God’s kingdom was righteous and well-ordered.

But Satan isn’t God. So when things don’t go as he likes — as they inevitably will — he’ll throw a fit, and do whatever his deranged nature prompts in the midst of his fury. [Back to The Hulk again]. For now, being restrained by the hand of God, he cannot act freely, but during the Tribulation, when that hand of restraint is removed, and he grows more and more desperate to accomplish his goals, his true nature will be revealed.

Muslim Brotherhood

The other day I came across an article  on Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Paper’s blog by Raymond Ibrahim, whom I’ve  cited here before. This time he was writing about Cordoba House, the infamous 13 story mosque a group of probably Saudi-funded muslims want to build on a site two blocks from Ground Zero.

Given the muslims’ propensity for building holy structures over the top of other religions’ destroyed but sacred sites (eg, the Dome of the Rock built over the old Jewish Temple in Jerusalem), I cannot think their selection of location for this newest project to be mere expedience or coincidence. No, I have to believe it’s deliberate — a “trophy mosque” as one pundit put it — particularly in light of  taqiyya which I also learned about from Ibrahim (and blogged about here.) Taqiyya is the muslim “doctrine” that it’s okay (even a duty)  to lie to infidels if they are in a position of power and you, as a muslim, are not. According to the Koran and the consensus of Koranic scholars, faithful muslims are even obliged to be friendly with the infidels, to enter into peace treaties and so on, but only until they gain the upper hand. Then they are to demand the Infidel convert or smash him “with their clenched fists,” to borrow from a quote by Dmitrii Z. Manuilskii, of the Lenin School of Political Warfare, Moscow, made in 1931 .

I don’t doubt that many muslims really are peaceful and friendly and “moderate”, but only because, as with many Christians, they aren’t all that committed to their faith, or to knowing what it teaches, or think they can be committed without knowing. But given what I know of the Koran and this element of taqiyya — knowing their “bible” commands them to be deceptive in this regard; and to make Islam the religion of the world, by force if necessary — does make it more difficult to trust…

Now comes (to me anyway) a new bit of information. In his recent article about the Cordoba House project, Raymond Ibrahim suggests it might actually be counterproductive to Islamists in the same way that 911 was — because it will get people thinking and talking about Islam and Jihad and that newly sparked interest will move them to investigate. And in investigating they will uncover information  (like the doctrine/practice of taqiyya) that will not be conducive to Islamist goals…

In fact, his article did just that for me, because he brought up the Muslim Brotherhood, which I’d not heard of before, an organization that includes Al Qaeda and Hamas and many, many others. He references an article in the Dallas News  in Sept 2007 by Rod Dreher describing a 1991 document the Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect’s home in Virginia.

This “explanatory memorandum,” as it’s titled, outlines the “strategic goal” for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here’s the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

I’ve just in the last few months noted a couple of new books about this slow, under-the-radar takeover, but haven’t read them yet. Thus I was surprised to pick up a relatively new novel by Brad Thor (The Last Patriot) (first time I’ve read this author) and about a third of the way through, here is the Muslim Brotherhood deeply involved in the plot.  It’s just like Communism back in the Cold War.

Actually, it’s a perfect picture of how Satan and the kingdom of darkness work… deception, the slow wearing away, exploiting weaknesses…

You can read the entire article HERE.

The Torah of Liberalism

The “Torah” of Liberalism. So is titled the final chapter of the book Why are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz, which I mentioned in my last post.

 Throughout the book, he has laid out a brief history of the Jews in Europe and the US, detailing the terrible treatment they received at the hands of the conservative religious folks of their day, the absurd beliefs of the latter (eg, that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian children because they need their blood to celebrate their Passover; or that the Jews started the plague by poisoning local wells) and the nasty treatment these sorts of beliefs produced, examples of which I gave yesterday.

Then came the Enlightenment in France, when resident intellectuals challenged the religious status quo and began to talk about equality of men, whether they accepted Christian doctrine or did not. As science began to take over as the religion of choice among the intellectuals, the Jews gravitated to them, even though in many ways they required as much of a shift from Jewish beliefs as Christian conversion did. Though many of these atheistic intellectuals (like Voltaire) expressed anti-semitic sentiments from time to time, that was ignored (much as it is today) because of these peoples’ antipathy toward Christianity as well as their promotion of equality.

Thanks to the Enlightenment, the Jews were released from their ghettos and allowed to join society as regular people, though they really didn’t find true freedom and prosperity until they came to the United States where their lot improved fantastically, also as I mentioned yesterday. Podhoretz continues to follow their political journey through the last century, and specifically through the run of presidents since and including FDR, the latter seen as something of a Messiah figure to them.

Throughout this time they consistently allies with the Democrat Party, partly because of how it carried on Enlightenment ideas, partly because it was in opposition to conservative Christianity, which as I said, terrified them, and partly because many of them had emigrated from Eastern Europe as devotees of Marxism (Ironically, Karl Marx was a Jew, but both his parents converted to Lutheranism before he was six). There was also an involvement in labor unions, which Podhoretz traces, so the contributing factors are varied. In any case, they were so committed to the communist/socialist/liberal viewpoint that it was practically impossible to consider any other.  One lifelong Democrat was quoted as saying he was sure his right arm would shrivel up and fall off if he ever dared pull the voting lever for a Republican.

Reagan made some inroads in this area after the disaster of the Carter administration, but the ground was lost by George H.W. Bush whose policies with regard to Israel were very negative… Even though more and incidents of antisemitism were erupting on the left and more and more support for Israel was blooming on the right, the Jews continued to be Liberal… and so we come to the final chapter which was the most surprising of all: “The Torah of Liberalism.”

Having exchanged a belief in the God of their Fathers for the supposedly nonsuperstitious and “scientific” Marxism, they were befuddled when that turned out not to work so well even as capitalism after WWII “began producing wealth on a previously unimaginable scale that surpassed even the rosiest utopian dreams of Marxist theory” (to say nothing of the complete collapse of the Soviet Union). Unable to go back to God, or to keep on with Marxism, they moved through a series of downgrades — first to social democracy, then to American liberalism. According to Podhoretz, “To most American Jews, liberalism is not…merely a necessary component of Jewishness; it is the very essence of being a Jew… a religion in its own right, complete with its own catechism and its own dogmas and, Tertullian-like, obdurately resistant to facts that undermine its claims and promises.”

In other words, in the face of facts to the contrary, some rely upon denial to maintain their belief system. That’s bad enough. Worse are the ones who defend their  position by claiming that their liberal faith is ‘the new Torah’  — “and,” says Podhoretz, “in the most literal sense of pursuing tikkum olam, the ‘repair of the world,’ a concept that (with the scantiest of justifications from the sacred texts) they have singled out as the essence of Judaism.”

Podhoretz then quotes the publisher’s description of a recent collection of Jewish essays entitled Righteous Indignation:

“In this ground breaking volume, leading rabbis, intellectuals, and activists explore the relationship between Judaism and social justice, drawing on ancient and modern sources of wisdom. The contributors argue that American Jewry must… dedicate itself to systemic change in the United States, Israel and throughout the world.”

Specific “justice issues” addressed in the essays include “eradicating war, global warming, health care, gay rights and domestic violence,” and amazingly, in every case the “teachings of Judaism” turn out to be right in line with these issues and the systematic change liberals are devoted to making.

“Repair of the world?”  This was the first I’d ever heard of such a thing. How weird that the Jews would throw off their old beliefs in the God of their fathers and the promises He made to Abraham, Moses, David… about the Millennial reign of their king, who will indeed repair the world… only to try to reproduce it on their own. In fact, in an earlier part of the book he mentions how they saw communism as the means of actually making a world where there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but everyone equal. That is, they see Liberalism as the means of bringing in the Millennium — without having to wait for their King.

And that just blew me away.

Irony of the Veil

I woke up this morning thinking about the message in the song performed by the Flotilla Choir, all the lies flying around about the “peace activists” being peaceful, the Israeli’s being brutal, and so forth. The truth is obvious to anyone who wants to see it, but as Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out recently, many, many people — practically the whole world, don’t want to see that. They jump on the bandwagon that “Israel is guilty until Israel is proven guilty” with eagerness and great conviction. Don’t bother us with the facts. We have no need of them.

The irony in it is that this same attitude was practiced by the Pharisees of Jesus’s day with regard to His position as their prophesied Messiah. He did miracles, He taught with authority, using the Scriptures, He argued them into silence because they had no words with which to respond. He fulfilled something like 600 prophesies of the coming Messiah, and yet they, the most knowledgeable of all the Jews when it came to the Scriptures, didn’t see it. Instead of going to those Scriptures and looking at the prophecies and how the elements of His life and person matched up, they preferred to accuse Him, test Him, argue with Him, insult Him, discredit Him, and ultimately kill Him. When He told them the truth, they became enraged. When people said they thought he was the Prophet, they’d fixate on one element — “Surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee, is He? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” (Jn 7:41,42)

How hard could it have been to find out that He had indeed been born in Bethlehem (Micah 5?2), and gone to Egypt and been called out of it (Hos 11:1) and now from Nazareth, a Nazarene (Is 11:1 branch = Naytser) These are the scripture experts, the ones who supposedly had memorized the whole thing down to the least jot and tittle.

But they refused to see. The Word says they had a veil over their eyes — the veil of negative volition. (2 Co 3:14)

And even as they were not interested in facts, only in believing their own lies in those days, so they are now. I recently read a fascinating book called Why Are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz, who is editor of the conservative political magazine Commentary. In the book, Podhoretz poses the question of why, despite the fact that the Conservatives are now unquestionably the side of the political spectrum that most faithfully and even adamantly supports the Jews and Israel, the Jews themselves remain steadfastly liberal. Refusing to see the Anti-Semitism of the left, they dismiss it with the idea that the liberals don’t mean it, or in the case of antagonism toward the state of Israel (which not all of them support), by agreeing with Israel’s critics.

The very first thing Podhoretz brings out is that the main reason Jews aren’t Conservative is because they are terrified of Christians. Terrified that should they ever come to power that they will forge a new state church that will begin anew all the persecutions the Jews have endured over the last two thousand years and only recently escaped. Even though it was socialist/Nazi Germany and communist Soviet Union though administered the greatest attacks against the Jews in history. And were the most recent to do so.

I’m not saying that Christianity as an institution (as a religion, really — and I don’t believe that true Christianity IS a religion) hasn’t had its dark days with regard to how it’s treated the Jews, but nothing it did was ever so dark as what went down under those two “liberal” or “progressive” regimes in Europe.

The book traces the fascinating if necessarily brief story of the Jew’s history in Western Europe and the US, because that history is definitely part of their reasoning for siding against Christians. But history isn’t all of it. Many of the Liberal Jews have the same unreasoning, illogical, irrational, hard-hearted antagonism toward  Christianity as their Muslim/Arab enemies have toward them.

And I find that ironic.

More on the book tomorrow (If I get back from my mother’s cancer treatments with a reasonable amount of time left in my day… unlike last week)

Flotilla Choir

I know I’ve not been posting much of late… the Las Vegas trip wiped me out. And after that I spent some time resting, being alone, refilling the well. Even started back to work on Sky, and then a bunch of stuff happened this week that I’ll post about later.

For now, I’ve been following the whole “botched raid” of the Israeli Defense Force on the “peace activist” Turkish Love Boat, coming only to break through the Israeli blockade in order to bring potatoes and dollies to the poor suffering Palestinians in Gaza (I saw an Al Jazeera video on that aspect). How the poor souls — nearly all men, that I could see — were so packed into the ship they had to sleep on deck in the open air, and the toilets couldn’t handle them all, and worse -AGH! — the kitchen on the ship was too small to service 600 people and some had to go 48 hours between hot meals. Oh, the suffering.

Anyway, one thing struck me as I watched and read and listened to it all (including video taken by the IDF of the actual operation, which shows clearly who the aggressors were), especially the instant reaction of the whole world in condemning Israel almost before anything went down.  (One piece I read cited David Hazony of Commentary Magazine saying he’d spoken with a senior producer of a major news network in the US who said he’d received “a well-phrased press release from the office of [PA spokesman] Saeb Erekat,” one the producer received at 4:36 a.m Monday. Making it obvious the thing had been prepared beforehand.  And illustrating the truth of the title of the piece, a quote from Churchill that “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on”)  What struck me, though, was how clear it is to anyone who wants to see that Israel has a supernatural enemy.

I mean, what’s the deal about Israel? There are hundreds of millions of Arabs and multiple Arab states vs 7 million Jews and one Jewish state. The Arabs have vast oil resources from which they derive great wealth, whereas the Jews have none. Why, in the eyes of the UN, can Russia and China and North Korea commit all manner of atrocities and provocations and go almost unnoticed whereas Israel can hardly blink correctly?  As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said recently (today? Yesterday?)  “Israel is guilty until proven guilty.” It goes beyond men and nations. It goes to the enemy of God, Satan himself.

But that’s not my subject here. Because tonight Power Line Blog put up a new video produced by the “Flotilla Choir” — a song routine called “We Con the World.” I think it’s hysterical. But I do have something of a frame of reference. They have interspersed actual video from journalists on the ship showing the “peace activists” readying their knives, sticks, pipes and sling shots and from the IDF (the one I mentioned earlier)

I’m not sure who the Flotilla Choir is, though I do know that Caroline Glick, cited as the editor,  is the senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post and a senior fellow for Middle East Affairs at the Center for Security Policy… Ah, I just Googled “who is Flotilla Choir” and came up with the answer. It’s an Israeli TV show called Latma TV  “like Saturday Night Live only funnier.” Yeah, I’d agree.

Secular Legalism

So, to continue my analysis of where I’ve been, the day after I wrote the journal entry I posted yesterday I got up early — about twenty minutes to 7 and went into the office, got focused about 7:20am  and worked for 45 minutes. Then I went to Wikipedia to find out about the Year of Jubilee and from there began reading Chuck Norris’s website. There was a link to it. Apparently he has a “Friend of the Jews Man of the Year” Award, and that’s what caught my eye. It had nothing to do with anything I was doing, but I’ve been a Chuck Norris fan for decades — used to watch all his movies, and even Walker, Texas Ranger until it got too cornball to watch.

Ahem. So. I got distracted. Most likely because though I read through all my notes and cards, I ended up more confused than ever. All I seemed to do was generate more questions and arrays of possible answers, as I detailed in an earlier blog post. That’s really okay, and really pretty much the way it always is when I’m writing, but I tend to forget that. Instead of waiting patiently for things to open up, I get agitated and start blaming myself. Instead of relying wholly and moment by moment on God, it becomes  my responsibility to wrestle all  this stuff into order and come up with a solution. And because I’m spending my time on that and getting nowhere, home duties are undone and now I can condemn myself for those as well.

It’s all a big… test? No, more of an obstacle I think. God’s withholding progress for His reasons, which are good and are not all about me,. But the withholding is also a form of training.  To remind me to see all deviations from what I had planned or hoped as coming directly from God’s hand, reminding me that it’s not My plan or my kingdom but His. That He is God, not me. I’m the servant. I’m reliant on Him.

And it’s when I have to wait that I forget that. (okay, I probably forget that even faster when I don’t have to wait). I think I’m not reliant on Him, but that He’s relying on me to do my part. (yuck!) He is not relying on me. He’s either doing this book or He’s not and I must await his direction. Patiently, without agitation, anxiety or self-flagellation, fully confident He has all under control. Including me. It will come when He’s decreed and all my thrashing and turmoil and self-condemnation won’t change it.

Recently in Bible Class we were warned against the cosmic systems’ attempts to insert legalism into our lives/souls. Satan’s prowling about like a lion, looking for someone to devour in this way. Legalism is where you want to do it your way. You have your own plan and you’re going to follow that. I would say there’s a lot of legalism and religious tendencies in all of us that He has to reveal and strip away. This whole fixation I have on working and accomplishing, not wasting my time, on making the right choices, being disciplined… plus the cloud of frustration and guilt that comes over me as a result of it all… It’s disgusting. It’s debilitating. It’s certainly not freedom. I believe it’s secular legalism… It’s not God I’m really striving to serve, it’s my idea of what is “right.” Working and accomplishing and not wasting my time and making right choices, being disciplined all seem right. But they’re mostly about me. And they’re very much about slavery.

Here’s a quote from a class from several months ago that I recently found: 

Unrealistic expectations toward self invariably produce frustrations that distract us from the word and destroy the true focus of the Christian life: occupation with Jesus Christ, NOT self.

And another. 

Never put yourself into a position where you feel you have responsibility and accountability toward man.

And “man” includes self. I do this all the time. I make myself responsible and accountable to my self. My goals. My standards. And half the time those goals and standards are ridiculous…

So how do I get out of this? I asked the Lord. Do I just have to wait for you to do the work?

Yes. But I believe He has been doing it.

And this post is already way longer than I’d anticipated, so I’ll save the first of the two articles He led me to for tomorrow…