Child Soldiers

 We were born into a "culture war".  I don't really want to be a part of it, but the more I just try and do my own thing, mind  my own business, the more clear it is that I can't evade being a part of society and that society's problems are my problems.  Of course in the American Culture War, there is no issue so electric as abortion.  The recent decision the Supreme Court made in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, a decision that I think was a good one by the way whether it turns out to be the spark that starts the next civil war or not, has kicked the hornet's nest like few things have in a long time.  Sort of all the problems are bundled together in this one: Life vs. Death, Free, Popular, and Local Representative Democracy vs. Centralized, Unelected, Unaccountable Tyranny, Judaeo-Christian Morality vs. what I can only call Satanic or Molechian morality.  Both sides feel that in this decision the ground shifted beneath their feet, that there has been a great victory or a great defeat, and the strategies that led to it are being endlessly analyzed.  But is that true?  In the war for the salvation of our nation's soul, has a move really been made towards salvation?

    Whenever one questions the received wisdom, it is a good idea to say what things you do not intend to question, what things you consider solid and reliable.  So first, I would like to say that there is no doubt in my mind that, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."  I do not intend to question or deny that preventing murder, particularly the murder of innocents is a laudable thing, and a prevention of a stain on the public conscience, if such a thing exists.  But here's the thing.  Will any shifting of ground, any movement of collective morality, and the national window of acceptable behavior, will any such movement affect the position of any individual as he or she stands before the Lord?  As Kierkegaard put it, each of us must stand as an individual alone before Christ and the call is to be transparently ourselves in His Presence, to confess not merely our sin but our Self, and it is not clear to me that any change in the culture, any victory in the culture war will change the way that this plays out for a single soul.  If our participation in this war is unavoidable, and I promise you no one has tried harder to be an island separate from the concerns of society than myself and Cheyenne but the fight keeps showing up at our humble little doorstep.  So, I say, if we cannot avoid participating let us focus on those fights which actually will win the war.  So, what are those fights which are worth winning?  

The Beast from the Potomac Swamp is insistent on enslaving all men, both at home and abroad, such that the only men who remain free are those who are not men at all, and the only women who remain free are the twisted priestesses of its own cult.  The Beast's army is child soldiers, indoctrinated since birth, preferably raised by the state, fed from the beast's own hand, never having known the love of father or mother except for the drag queens who read them stories, conditioned to be terrified at the thought of marriage and family and protected from it by the chemical castration that turns them into their "true selves", like Sauron's orcs produced by twisted experiments on the Elves.  Their thoughts policed at all times by the carrot and stick of Big Tech's Social Credit system, their bodies addicted to antidepressants and unable to survive without boosters in their arms and stimmy checks in their bank accounts.  These, to use their own description of themselves, "Paid Protesters" hide behind their black umbrellas fiercely protective of the shadow's of anonymity which they are conditioned to believe protect them and their paymasters.  But namelessness is more than just a shield for these sad children, it is not just that we do not know their names, they are entirely nameless.  Their master's don't want to know their name, and really keep them at the greatest possible distance that they may deny any connection with them.  They themselves do not know their names, do not know who they are, where they have come from or where they are going.  It is great blasphemy in their church to call them by the names that they once had, their names are called 'deadnames', these faceless children of darkness.  They float alone on a digital sea, only tethered to our world by a cell phone which is to them all of their friends, in it they find acceptance, and love such as they know it, it is their employment, their teacher, their tether to this world but more than that their hope for a new world, where they might be made not in the image of their Enemy but according to their own imagination.

These are not the worst enemies that the church has ever faced.  But they may well be the most miserable, the saddest most hopeless buncha pagans to ever hurl their bodies against the bulwark of Western Civilization.  We must fight them to protect our homes and our families, but we must also pity them because they are children.  Their history is that they have never known the love of a father and mother and their future mapped out by their masters is to never know the love of wife and children.  They are children because they are prevented from becoming men and women, stunted at every turn, in their bodies, their intellects, their emotions.  And for anyone who hasn't gotten the memo, the left has solved the problem of teenage promiscuity and teen pregnancy, today's teens all live in mortal terror of the opposite sex particularly in the context of heterosexual relationships and an 'internet girlfriend' needs no chaperone to remain chaste.  Their minds are not developed enough to perceive the pitiful contradictions in their dogmas, but they always support the Current Thing.  Yes, when we look on the Antifas, the Antifascists who come and go at the bidding of the Nazis who have infiltrated and seized the American left, they are our enemies, stunted, frustrated, enemies who only want to break something, preferably something beautiful and clean and innocent, who only want to break something on their way to the oblivion that they hope for.  They hate us.  And they hate their masters.  And they hate themselves.  They hate Heaven and the righteous God who reigns.  But most of all they hate the fact that that God crawled through the mud of human life and remained clean.  They hate the man who suffered more than they will suffer, who's body was marred even more than theirs and yet remained, and remains even now, committed to healing this broken world and still insists that life is worth living and death is worth dying.  They hate the one who voluntarily endured all of the tortures that they have been subjected to.  As far as I can tell, that is what the people are like who are actually burning our cities, intimidating our officials, assaulting our people.  And in that light, I think it is clear that no decision by a court will have a real effect on this war.  What can a judge do when they see humanity as a cancer on their Goddess?  How can we not say, "What fellowship can Christ have with Belial?"  The monstrous force that drives the Federal Government has engineered a generation that is only prepared to make one contribution to society, enslaving those who do not conform and destroying all that those who came before have made.  And when the last statue is torn down there will remain no one capable of making another, except maybe a shapeless, unbeautiful, howl of misery carved into stone, and isn't that probably how the Baals were brought into this world in the first place?

When we consider what our people have become, especially the children, we can't overlook the absence of the church in our society.  Most of us can remember a state of affairs where our local church was involved in our lives and our community.  That's the way it was when I was a child, admittedly in the most deeply rural part of Southwest Georgia, and I have always been puzzled by what happened.  The modern church seems utterly disconnected.  The church too, is nameless.  Shorn of the denominational names that once proclaimed at least to those with understanding what their creeds were, shorn of the names of the streets and cities where they are which once tied them to a real place and real suffering people.  They are now merely, The Grove, or The Shelter, or The Anchor, or Christ Place, or Free Chapel, coming from nowhere and going to nowhere.  Nothing that they do seems meaningful.  It is easy to blame it on their social work or lack thereof according to your preference.  It is easy to blame the destruction of the family and the atomisation of society, the loss of real community and the million and one planned and engineered fake forms of community that have sprang up.  The church has been split into either holding on to a past that is gone or embracing the forms of the culture around them, forms which are empty of significance like the culture that produced them and make the Christianity that embraces them just another channel to flip past or stop on for a minute, a video clip to watch until you get it and then click on the next one.  But here is the secret, none of those failings would matter in the slightest if the church was providing real communion with Christ and if they had a Gospel that was truly Good News.  The problem goes deeper than the song selection, it goes deeper than the carpet or color of the drapes.  The problem goes deeper than when the church meets or what the place we meet is like.  It goes deeper than what social work we engage in.  The problem, the one and only real obstacle to casting the evil out of our country is one that I can't see that anyone is working on: finding something that is Good News to the Children, not just Good News to the happy, bright, loved, intelligent Covenant Children, but Gospel to the nihilistic child soldiers of Antifa.

What is Good News to someone who hates life, not just the circumstances of their life but the fact that they are alive?  One who wishes they had never been born is not that attracted to a promise of eternal life.  Perhaps the cleverest step our enemy has taken in this war is their elevation of victim status.  There is no better inoculation against seeing yourself as a sinner than seeing yourself as a victim.  A victim is by definition not the perpetrator, read any modern literature, watch a recent Disney movie, and you will discover that you only thought that the lady who wants to murder puppies to make a new coat is a bad guy, she actually had a hard childhood that justifies it all.  The evil fairy who cursed the princess actually did it because she had a forbidden love for the princess and wanted her for herself, which makes it all alright.  Modern stories have no choice but to rehabilitate and justify the villains though because the heroes are even worse.  The only type of hero that they permit themselves is the victim who grows stronger than her, their, xer, attacker and obtains revenge. What forgiveness of sin is sought by those whose sin is not merely justified but worn as a badge of honor?  I have read several stories lately about the young girls who are convinced to "transition" into sexless freaks, those who mutilated themselves and came to regret it and this intersectionality, this hierarchy of victim status, is a major driving force.  The innocent, young white girl who is facing the normal difficulties of teenage life and is attracted to boys is 'privileged' and not allowed to speak or think about her suffering but must consume herself in supporting, being an ally to those who occupy a higher rank in the Church of Victims.  But if this same girl merely begins to toy with the idea that she might be a he then she immediately gains a right to speak, her suffering is no longer the scorned suffering of the privileged but the exalted suffering of the Victim, letting her friends call her by masculine pronouns or a boy's name pays off immediately with no cost, she can even double up by keeping her attraction to boys now that they are 'other boys', and instead of being a privileged heterosexual girl she can become a victimized homosexual man cruelly trapped in the body of a beautiful young woman, and her normal feeling of being displaced in her body as it transforms from a girl to a woman becomes the dystopian horror of being a gay man trapped in his female body that is taking him further and further from his true self.  It's a win-win right up to the point where she chops her tits off and staples a wang on to herself.  

So, after an overlong introduction, we finally get to some scripture, the 9th chapter of Acts right at the beginning,

Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

I said that the Child Soldiers of the Federal Swampbeast are not the worst enemies the church has ever faced,  the worst enemy was a Pharisee among Pharisees, of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised the 8th day, as concerns the Law perfect, a relentless foe, a man of piercing logic and genius, one capable of looking down on his pain and suffering with scorn as a small obstacle in the way of his goals, a man whose principles were inviolable, not accessible to compromise or flexibility.  The church has probably never had so fearsome an enemy as that crook-backed, bald, little Jew known to history as Saul of Tarsus.

As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”  And he said, “Who are You, Lord?”  Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads.”  So he, trembling and astonished, said, “Lord, what do You want me to do?”

 It was hard for Saul to kick against the goads, the nagging suspicions in his mind about the People of the Way, who had not yet begun to be called Christians. Although they made these extraordinary and unsupportable claims about the Messiah, claims which the Sanhedrin, that Paragon of Truth, had rejected as Disinformation, the Christians that he was pursuing were not your typical cultist zealots.  He watched Stephen die, he consented to his death, and that was the first time that the Risen Lord, at the Right Hand of God appeared in the presence of Saul and I can't help but wander if he saw a few gleams of that light and could never quite pretend that he didn't.  And then he orchestrated the death of others like Stephen, gathering whatever evidence was needed, bringing the soldiers to the churches, filling out the forms, getting some good throwing stones piled up at appropriate places and making sure some good stone throwers were on hand, then he found a clean spot for them to leave their coats and protected their things while they did the stoning that his principles told him must be done but the goads, the spurs, the doubts in his mind and the memory of the light he saw reflected in Stephen's eyes wouldn't let him participate in more directly.  In all this, the fervent prayer of righteous Stephen, that the sin of his murder would be forgiven, exercised an invisible control over Saul's life, a pull, a goad, out of the path that his dogmas laid out for him.  

Then the Lord said to him, “Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”  And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one. Then Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw no one. But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

One thing that is rarely considered in this story, is how the Christians of Damascus took all of this.  It seems to me from what follows that at least a part of this story was circulating amongst them within a day or two of the events.  How happy they must have been; how vindicated they must have felt at the news that the Lord of Heaven and Earth had stood up on their behalf.  I can't help but think that days before they must have been praying that Jesus would protect them from the approaching destroyer, and how pleased they must have been at the news that by a special judgment, where the comparatively innocent fellow travelers were spared, and only the Chief of Sinners was singled out for this punishment.  If there was a Sunday during the time of Saul's blindness I am sure every sermon was about the appropriateness of this man, who couldn't see how special the Damascus Christians were, being struck blind, that the genius behind their suffering had to be led around like an idiot, and that instead of them suffering in jail, it was Saul who couldn't eat or drink even though the food was set before him.  And, earlier I said that we ought to pity the Child Soldiers of Antifa, in truth, I think that we are called to do more, at least when the time arrives. 

Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and to him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias.”  And he said, “Here I am, Lord.”  So the Lord said to him, “Arise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. And in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him, so that he might receive his sight.” 

If it wasn't enough of a season for miracles when the persecutor was struck down from on high, now this Ananias was really having a good day, well up to a point.  The Lord Himself singled him out, by name, for this very special mission.  You can almost see him happily taking notes, "right Straight St, house of Judas, got it got it, ask for Saul of Ta, Saul of Ta, wait a minute Lord..."  

Then Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to Your saints in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on Your name.” 

'I get that you are the Lord and omniscient and that kind of thing, but maybe you don't realise who this cat is.  You really did a bangup job putting him out of commission, everybody is talking about how awesome you are. I'll praise you all day for that, just praise praise praise.  So, um, why  would we ever, ever want to heal this guy.'  So, we all know how this turns out.  Somebody knocks on his door, 'Mr. Saul, are you up for a visitor.'  'No, I don't want no damn visitor'  'He says it is important, says you are expecting him.'  'Expecting him?  I don't know who this guy is but I guess maybe he hasn't heard what happened to me, but how is it that you, the servant in this house, haven't heard that I am blind and seriously messed up?  My business is sort of on hold.  No.  No, scratch that my business is canceled.'  'Sorry Mr. Ananias he won't see you.'  And Saul's blind ass knocks down the door trying to catch him when he hears the name from his vision.  That's such a great detail that Christ told him exactly how his healing was gonna happen and even the name of the dude who was gonna do it.  There is really a whole story in those few words.

I said, on Pentecost, that our only hope is that the Lord will call for us someone to fight this fight for us.  And the Lord will call the person he chooses, when He chooses, without regard to what I, or you, or anybody thinks.  And I certainly won't pretend to be privy to any of that.  You know, there is so much talk about a second civil war, another time when brothers become enemies.  But I can't help but think that the deep down, secret weapon that our enemy can't comprehend and certainly can't defend against is that Good News which turns our enemies into brothers.  Chris said not long ago that there is not much you can say that is Good News to a Nihilist, to someone that believes that this world is unreal and that all that we do is meaningless.  My answer to that is this, Our opponents are not nihilists by conviction, they did not come to believe life is meaningless as the result of a process of deductions or based on some principle.  They are nihilists of hope, they do not so much believe that life is unreal and meaningless as hope that it is.  They hope that the world is not real because the world has used them as pawns, they hope that life is meaningless because everything tells them that if life has meaning it is a horrible meaning, they hope that there is no objective morality because they do not wish to be condemned, they hope that there is no life after this one because they don't like this life.  They have sought to be nothing and nameless because they have not seen anything good that they can be.  They, I think, remain hopeful but their hopes are of such a poor and stunted character that we can't recognize them.

Who is it that can win the culture war?  It is the Damascus Christians, the helpless targets in the crosshairs of a pitiless, unrelenting foe.  How much more than Conquerors are they?  It is Ananias, delivering the Gospel and himself into the hands of the enemy.  I don't know yet, how to give Good News to our enemy, maybe I can't, maybe we can't.  But their receiving that Gospel is the only way that this war ends.  And if we can't do the job, then they must pursue us down the Damascus Road until they encounter the White Horse on whose back the Gospel goes out over the whole earth, His name is Faithful and True and from His mouth goes a sharp sword, that divides Paul from Saul and will give the nameless children a new name that we don't yet know.

But the Lord said to him(Ananias), “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how many things he must suffer for My name’s sake.”  And Ananias went his way and entered the house; and laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized.  So when he had received food, he was strengthened. Then Saul spent some days with the disciples at Damascus.  Immediately he preached the Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God.  Then all who heard were amazed, and said, “Is this not he who destroyed those who called on this name in Jerusalem, and has come here for that purpose, so that he might bring them bound to the chief priests?”  But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus, proving that this Jesus is the Christ.

 When we pray to be delivered from this evil time that is upon us, let's not forget to pray for the drag queens who read to our children, let's not forget to pray for the public school teachers who groom the next generation of abuse victims, let's not forget to pray for the fat, ugly miserable dyke Priestesses of Molech who are forming mobs to demand their filthy god's right to our children, let's not forget to pray for the mad scientists who create superviruses and cures that are worse than the diseases, let's not forget to pray for billionaires who scheme to transcend humanity and turn the rest of us into their domestic slaves, let's not forget to pray for federal agents and deep state bureaucrats who have turned Washington against We the People, and above all let's not forget to pray for their victims that they have turned into anonymous pawns in their war against us.  And when we pray, let's not set our sights too low.