Still Hoping God will Give Us Recovery of the Nation and the Church

 The Lord sent George Whitefield to America a few decades before the American Revoluition, and his impact on the nation that was ultimately formed is considered by most historians to be enormous.  Eric Metaxas in his little book, If Youi Can Keep It, treats it as the essential consolidating culturual influence that made the new nation possible, a nation based on self-government, something that had never existed in the world to that point, a nation without a king or other despot, a nation of laws that could only be held together by what the main founders considered to be a religious and moral poeople.  As John Adams, the form of government they crafted was inadquate for anyother kind of people.  

I keep coming back to this but never feel I've said it enough or even appreciated it enough myself.  It is frighteningly clear that we are no longer such a nation, that we once were, as attested pricipally by Alexis De Toqueville, but no longer are.  Relgious and moral?  You've got to be kidding.  Of course we aren't and that's the way it should be, we don't need any of that nonsense in order to be America, in order to have the freedoms we were given, of course not.  We're good enough just as we are, rotten to the core as we are.

But the signs are pretty clear these days that we are headed toward a totalitarian tyhranny and in fact are already in the beginning phase of such atyranny, almost already a police state, in which we are not allowed to speak as we will unless we speak what the powers want us to speak.  We are to be censored and cancelled if we oppose them, and they are many, very  mamany.  Not just in the government, but in businesses and coroporations that can just pull our jobs out from under us, and on social media who can just pull us off the platform and silence us.  Here and there people are being thrown in jail, some pastors in Canada a few years agov for opposing the vaccine mandate there, and now we've got this horrendous jailing of people who committed nothing more than walking around the building getting slapped with long sentences in one of the worst jails in the country.   And on trumped up invented crimes they wnat to do the same to our ex president.  It's all partisan, it's all political, it's all done by the left against the right.  Sure it could be a different order I suppose, but at this time that's what it is, left against right and with a ferocious power and astonishing level of hatred and malice.  

Justice is corrupted, all normal ethics and morals are corrupted, that's the only way this could be happening as it is.  Satan succeeded in corrupting the nation, the people of the nation, and buidling up his stronghold on the left, and that's what is happening to our once free nation.  

ric Metaxas wrote another book, Letter to the American Church, in which he exhorts the church to fight for America against these trends.  I haven't read it yet, can't get the aubible version yhet but I hope I will soon.  He's one who thinks we still have a chance to reclaim our heritage.  I hope he's right.  Well, I'm sure he's right about the method.  I'm not so sure that the Church will rise to the occasion.

Another powerful voice that could make a huge difference if people read him in the numbers he deserves to be read, is Mark Levin, in his latest book, The Democrat Party Hates America.  It's just out and early responses show that it has th epower to change minds toward a reclaiming of what we have lost.  I haven't read this one yet either though I've heard a lot of it discussed on Levin's radio show and hope to get to hear an audible version soon.  It sounds like a real game changer if it gets the audience it needs.

And all this needs to be buttressed by prayer, prayer, prayer and more prayter.  Oh God have mercy on us, we don't deserve it, we've let this nation come under the power of evil forces, oh give us the ability to raise our voices in the mnillions for Your help now, change us, lead us to repentance, wake us up and save our nation.  Oh yes you promised that if we give up our wickedness and call on Your name you will heal our land.  You told Solomon that back when he dedicated his emple some three thousand years ago but we know it is for us too.

God raises up people of His own wise choice to bring about the changes He is willing to bless us with.  he did that with Whitefield before the revolution and He may be doing it now with Metaxas and Levin and no doubt others.  Jan Markell is probably another I just realized.  But now I'm thinking of one Ijust head, a new talk by Rosaria Butterfield titled Five Lies of Our American Christian Age in which she dismantels the gay rights and transgender corruption through biblical revelation.  Definitely a voice for such a time as this.  Metaxas to call the Church to rise up against the evils, Levin to show us the evil we are fighting so we know what we are to fight, Rosaria to identify one of the biggest strongholds we are up against and equip us with God's weapons against it.

I also like Glenn Loury and his cohort Johhnn McWhorter as fighters of the fight against the cuoprruptions  in this case the Woke stuff, the attempt to destroy the country by racial racial divisiveness and insanity.  I just heard one from a year or so ago titled The Golden Age of Black Heterodoxy in which they lay out some of the terms of the fight.  Well, now that I think about it, I liked that discussion but now I'm not sure it's thebest one for this purpose.  Oh well.  It's a good one anyway and they are always in one way or another attacking the craziness about racie and that is a huge stronghold in today's battle.

But I keep coming back to the formula about a moral and religious people as the foundation for the kind of governm,ent Washington and Adams and jefferson and Frankloin and Paine and others gave us.  We need somewho to reinstate the biblical mindset in this country and so far I don't see that midset as such on the agenda even thoguh I see many trends as listed above that would feed into it.  We need a George Whitefield or somebody or many somebodieies who can bring the gospel back to this natuion.

And as usual, yes we may be at the door of CHrist's return, the Rapture of the CHurch and the Great Tribuoation , the Great Reset in which world totalitarianism under the Antichrist will reign for seven years, and noe n of this recoveriy I'm talking about will have a chance to come about.  May be .  I don't know.    But I have to rmention it.

Rosaria makes clear just how corrupted the churches have becoming, capitulating to the leftist trends that are the cause of our destructon. That has to be overthrown.  Levin makdes it clear that he Democrat Party is who wholly corrupt the whole thing needs to be thrown out.  it's a lot to ask but then God is the God of the impossible.

Biarre new technologies, and demons too

 Over the last year or so I've found out more than I ever wanted to know about Artificial Intelligence and other technologies that carry some pretty portentous possibilities as they get more deveoped and refined, which is happening at a scary pace these days, according to those involvled in it.

It's almost too bizarre to mention, but they claim, some websites claim, some scientists claim, that there is technology that can read our thoughts and implant thoughts in our minds.  Yeah I know, way over the top but even if I don't want to believe it I'm afraid the sincerity of the reports I've found is hard to deny.  Scary stuff.  This kind of thing always suggests demons to me since I know that demons CAN do such things, implant thoughts at least, perhaps read some thoughts.  I've avoidied learning much about demonology because it's so creepy and scary but sometimes I wish I knew more about it.  I've thought for a long time that there is probably a lot of phenomena in this world being ascribed to normal physical or mental sources thta is really caused by demons.  I'm certain of the that in the case of the credible UFO reports.  No wayu any of that can be explained in terms of the physical universe.  It has to have a spiritual origina and what is that but a demonic origin.  Jacquesx Vallee who is not a Christian, arrived at the conclusion that these UFOs don'tbehave like anything in the physical world but do fit much of the folklore of the world, which means they belong to another dimension and not to they phyhsical world.

But technology that can implant thoughts in our minds?  If that isis really possible it gets awfully confusing since I know demons can certainly do that.  hwo would we be able to tell thedifference?  And there are some who see all this sophisticated stuff as occurring in some relation to the demonic.  I don't know how to put it all together but the whole thing is alarming and threatening of something unwelcome coming on the planet.    

Swarms of insect sized drones that can attack and kill people?  All sorts of insects from large to tiny.  Some take pictures, most take pictures but some can carry weaponse of various sorts, even needles to inject us with something or other, or things that can explode and other stuff that gives me the shakes.  For some reason I imagine arming myself with a ping pong paddle.  It's got a hard surface and could bat the things out of the air and perhaps do them some real harm.  Not a tennis racquet, that would only bounce them to some distance, not necessrily hurt them.  But a massive swarm would probably be impossible to deal with.  

I've seen videos of these things, I know they are real, and I suppose here may be more sophisticated version of them thatn those that we can find on  You tube.  Saw a demonstration of a very impressive "fireworks" display done completely by dorones, a thousand of them I belive they said.  Pictures in the sky, the usual exploding pretty displays and all that.  If they can control the things to that degree, make them  do that kind of precision s precision work, wow.  And what if AI is involved in this and reallyh does acquire self=programming powers?  Ow.

And there could still be demons involved in all this too.  Why not.  They are always there and always hating the human race so they have to have a role in it.  At least Christians know we can call on the name of the LORD to protect us, but unbelievers are unprotected.

If It Depends on Moral Virtue Then How Can It e Reinstated?

 Well, God could send us a George Whitefield or something like that.  It would take a supernatural event to make the kind of difference that is needed.  That's what I'm thinking anyway.  I don't see how you reinstate any kind of moral foundation without that sort of power behind it.  People love their fallenness to o much.

It figures of course that we are at the threshhold of the very last days, just a step over and we're into it, the church raptured if the pre trib scenriou is accurated, and the rest of humanity left to suffer mightily for their sins.  

If we are that close to the end it makes no sense tht we could ahve any kind of renewal or revival that would take us back to our moral foundations.  Unless, it just cooccurred to me, for the purpose of reaping a greater harvest than we would without it.  That is, right now the church, the believers, seem a very small number compared to what we could be or have been not too long ago even.  A revival would bring many into the church and then we'd have a lot more in the rapture.

But just focusing on what it would take to take America back to the condidtion described by De Toqueville and envisioned by the founds as necessitating a strong moral people, moral and eligious people, just in an dfor itself.  Just to imagine that much, what would it take?  

I was thinking the essential thing is the Fear of the LORD.  What is that but the sense in the individual that there is a God who is watching and who judges our thoughts and deeds on the basis of His moral law.  That's what he fear of the LORD is all about, keeping the individual afraid of deviating from a righteous response in every situation because God is real and Hell is real.  

That's what we've lost.

How can a travesty of the Law Prevail so easily in this country?

 I don't get it.  Hosw is it that a governor of a state, this Michelle Grisham of New Mexico in this case, can make a decree that violates the sewcond amendment, which is obvious on the face of it to everyone, but it has to go into effect in spite of that and we have to wait for some process or other to unfold before rthe amendment can be reinstated, some legal process.  Meanwhile for the duration the amendment is suspended.  How can that be?  

The same sort of thing is happening right and left these days.  Lawsuits are brought against Trump for instance that I know becuase I know what happened in the original case as it unfolded in the news, that they are bogus cases, tha for instance he was not trying to overthrow an election, he was protesting what he considered to be the illegitimacy of the election, and that was obvious at the time, yet we have to acc3ept this bogus lawsuit, and let it determine how things play out during an election year during which these cases are nothing but interference with the election process, waiting for this ponderous bogus legal situation to play itself out on some program or other that is only a mockery of justice.  Why?  How is it that these theings can happen?

The Constitution, the second amendment, is actually suspended for the duration of the governor's decree.  Actually suspended.  Her law must be obeyed over the Constitution, endorced by the police that are in the power of the state.  How can this be?  How can it be?  We are without the second amendment in New Mexico?  At least that particular expreession of it?  How can that be?  All it takes is some ignorant or malicious official to make a decree and the whole foundation of our government is dissoved?  That's the way it seemjs.  And there is no redress, no immediate recress anyway.  It has to be treated as leigtimate law?  The suspension of the Constitition has to be treated as legitimate law?  What on earth is going on here?

And now I think of the Covid nightmare.  They tell us to mask up although the science says that masks don't prevent tghe virus from being spread through them.  Still we have to bobey this utterly insane law because it has been decreed by some power or other in office.  We have to obey it because it is enforced by police power.  how can this be?  And they can mandate the vaccine for some people in some places and that has to be obeyed too because there are other ways of enforcing it, usch as the threat of losing a job.  Or being denied access to some business or insititution.  

Yes this is totalitarianism and it is being pushed on us these days.  So what are we talking about, the failiure of thta virtue the founders said was necessary to our kind of republic?  We've lost the moral foundation and now we are getting the only possible result, evil or ignorant people make a lwa and push us all around at their whim and we can't do anything about it?  

Saved and Unsaved

 John MacArthur has a talk titled "What's Wrong With Everybody?" about the current miserable state of affairs we're all living through so very unhappily..  He makes the distinc ction between saved and unsaved, the redeemed and the fallen nature into which we are all born and remain until we are saved if that is to be our destiny.  It's a dramatic difference he describes, not the usual rather vague distinction that leaves us scrambling to figure out of if we're saved or not. 

AIt's hard to recognize the difference because even when we are saved we still have the "old man" or fallen nature in us and are still capable of falling into our old sins.  Neverteless we do have the new life in us, which is what salvation is, which is what redemption is, a real transformation, a new birth out of a state of what is called death into the life of god.  Because of our believing the gospel we have this new life planted in us, god Himself has come to live in us.  I think of a couple of book titles:  Man the Dwelling Place of God, and The Life of God in the Soul of Man.  That's what salvartion is.  

I'd been thinking about the Burning Man event and how it is such a concentrated distilled essence of fallennness, the fallennness into which we are all born but without most of the usual restrains socieity puts on us.  At least in some departments of sin, mostly the sexual.   One way I am persuaded of my own salvation is through the recognition that I used to share in those \\\\the mentality that seeks those experiences.  Even if I can still fall into them from time to time, and I don't know if that's even true any more, but even so it's clear to me that that is no longer my mindset.  

When I became a believer, God became the most intensely attractive center of all delights and desires.  For long periods He eclipsed every other interest.  But the world and the flesh can still take over and when my focus changed to wore wordldly concerns such as politics and even the debates about creation versus evolution, my mind got drawn back into those old sources of pleasure.  Still, when I picked up the Bible, or heard it preached or heard a powerful devotional message, something in me would just melt, I'd "pant after God" and experience that other level of my being at least for that moment.  

It is a dramatic transformation, a massive transformation as MacArthur puts it.  It's not always at the forefront of our experinece but it is of such a diffdrent nature it has to be described as radically other than the experiences of this world and the flesh we start out so accustomed to.  A radical difference, a radical transfomrmation.    And the things of this world can be distressing in ways beyond even the distress everybody else is feeling these days.   

the world is not always a perfect reflection of fallenness.  There are restraints in place through laws, police agencies and the like, and people do seem to have a moral code, at least in some places at some times.  Certainly in America in the early years, as the Founders often affirmed was the reason we could be trusted with the fragile rule of the sort of republic they crafted for us.  eric Metaxas describes this early mentality, how for instance Alexis deToqueville saw us as a very religious nation, which was our strength.  

Well, fallenness has since then certainly reasserted its own nature over us and we are now headed into a police state, which is the only possible outcome when the people have lost the moral foundation that controls us individually.    that kind of moral self control is possible with an education toward that end, which was powerful in the days following the Great Awakening under Georlge Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and lasted maybe a century and a half until the Sixcties, oh yes the Sixties, brought it all crashing down.  We are no longer America.  Without that moral foundation we can't be.  Metaxas makes that point clearly.  Deuoquevill e saw it.  Can we get it back?

Itg's probably tgoo late, but on the other hand, there is nothing else worth doing,.

Staggering Statistics on Women in the Clergy

 John MacArthur lays them out in what I suppose is a recent sermon although of course I can't see anything that would tell me when it was given so I don't know how recent.  Anyway he says some fifty percent of Masters of Divilinty students or graduates in the seminaries these days are women.  That's pretty staggering.  I don't remember the other numbers but in the twenties I think for women actually pastoring churches and so on and so forth.  Of course this is a heresy.  He says that many evangelicals, eighty something percent I think, are OK with a woman pastor.  What sort of evangelicals are these?  Do they not know what scripture has to say about it, or do they and deny it?

As always I come back to my theme of the woman's head covering.  I really don't know if it can be said to be the starting place of this fall into feminimism, I don't, but I think it must be somewhere back there at the beginning of it.  I suppose the Marxist influence might be the general starting place.  But abandoning the practice of covering the head in church continues to strike me as a pretty big deal.  It was practiced for almost the entire tewo millennia since Christ and abandoned only in the mid twetnties century.  

On eaxtremely flimsty grounds.  Yet men like MacArthur accept those grounds.  Why?  Because of the credentials of the man who wrote the essay that has become the foundation for all of this?  The idea that Paul wasn't really dtalking aboutg aliteral head covering that all women should adopt, but about cultrual practices that distingtuish women from men, the head covering being one of those in his time.  Thomsas Shriner made this his artubument against the head cove3ring in his very influential essay and ever since then that's been the abiding perspective and women gave up covering their heads in church.  Except for a very few churches that insist that no, Payl really was talking about a literal head covering.  Rare churches indeepd.  Marginalized you could say.

I spent quite a bit of time studying the question and came to the conclusion that Paul meant a literal head covering.  And myu pastor told me that binds me own consience to wear a head covering, which is fine, but of course I think if it's true then I'm certainly not the only one who should be wearing a head covering in church.  

And I think it's pimportant.  Maybe very very important.  Look, the passage, First Corinthians Eleven, two to sixteen, is about the literal human head, the head that sits on stop of the shoulders.  It is treated in that passage as a symbol of authoirty, the person's authority.  God is Authority over Christ, Christi is authority over men, Men are authority over womehn.  That's the worder of what is known as "headship."  There's the literal word "head."  This is not about femininity syjmbols, this is about the head and about the hierarchy of headship or suthority granted by God.  It is called a Creation Ordinance, like Marriage, something given by God at the very beginning of the creation.  We reject Gay Marriage because of the creation ordinance that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, but e ignore the ordinance that gives man the headship position over the womahn.  

I always come back to a particular simple point:  we require men to remove their headgear when they come into church, on the basis of this very passage of scripture which says mmen's heads should be uncovered, but we no longer require the other part of that passage, that women's heads are to be covered.  

I wish men like MacArthur would rethink it instad of falling bak on Shrinkers analysis, which has all sorts of flaws in it part from the central mistake of renying the importnt of the head as such, and I've written about those flaws in my blog on the subject, Hidden Glory.  

It is not treated as importnat by some I've talked to, as a trivial thing even if I'm right, but it can't be trivila if it's a creation ordinanyc of God, and isn't it glaringly obvious that it has implications galore for the position of women in the clergy that MacArthur is lamenting?  Isn't that just downstream of the abandonment of the head covering?  

There are a million things that the church needs to straighten out these days so why focus on this one?  The Lord is probably coming back before we could get to any of them with any effet anyway.  True, unfortunatley.   But shouldn't we be about the business of getting it right no matter what?  

So Many Signs in Place Already but So Many Still unsaved

 There are people, many people I'm afriad, tht I'm still hoping will be saved before the Lord returns, but since I see no movement in that direction and I'm feeling pretty exhausted I sometimes just wish He would come immediately and put an end it it all.  Then I feel guilty, as if I'm abandoning all those people I want to be saved.  Yes it is up to Him, He knows those He will save and when and I shouldn't give myself any credit for any of i, maybe blame but not creit.  

Anyway I'm hoping again for a soon rapture.  I may not understand all the parts of the arguemtnt from the pre trib side, I still have questions about how it all fits together, but since no other system answers those questions either and the pre trib scenario has a lot going for  it, I simply want it to be true and i want the Lord to come back as soon as possible.  I can't persuade anyone of anything, it's up to Him.  I have to let go of it all.  

Jan Markell's latest Understanding the Times radio show is full of good pointers to the signs of the times, some interesting stuff about what really happened on Maui iss one, and she gets back to the UFO deception as explanation for the rapture when it comes.  A rehearsal of some of the most depresing trends in our time as well, yes really depressing stuff.  Come soon, very soon, Lord Jesus.