The original title to my blog (not just this post) was “Just Passing Through.” It was meant to be a religious statement, taken from a song commonly attributed to Albert Brumley:
This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through.
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door,
and I can’t feel at home in this world any more.
It hearkens to a previous era in American Protestant religion. While I know those in academia had changed their minds much earlier, and big churches with big programs had already moved with them, I can recall when the big shift in thinking began showing up in the little churches where I spent most of my time back in the mid-1970s. Up until that time, the adult leadership of those churches were pretty other-worldly. That is, they really didn’t expect much from this world, and knew things wouldn’t be good until they were in Heaven.
Songs like the one above were very popular, and these folks could recall when there weren’t even many American flags visible in those little country church houses. When politics got any mention, folks were typically old-line rural Democrats. Those days are gone. It’s not as if things were all sweet and dreamy all the time; you can corrupt anything involving humans. Nor do I find fewer genuine caring souls in the modern here-n-now generation. The problem is not the power of God to work in human hearts, but the overall thrust of thinking which contributes to the vast foolishness of Dispensationalism.
During my college years at Oklahoma Baptist University (I graduated in 1978), it was trendy and popular to say something like this: “If all this Bible stuff were simply a fantasy, I still believe living by Christian ethics is the best life one can have.” What a stinking bucket of manure! If all this is false, we have no power to live; we are just fooling ourselves. The underlying lie, the greatest threat to Christian faith since it all began, is that we can accomplish anything useful by human talent and intelligence. This is the basic idiocy behind the likes of Rick Warren and most of what passes for emerging church.
It is merely the latest manifestation of all that was wrong with the Crusades, the Inquisition and every other horror blasphemously attributed to Christ’s teaching. Today we have millions of feverish Christian Zionists demanding the slaughter of Muslims. They deny the words, but it’s what they hope to see. Draping the US flag over the Cross denies the very reason for the Cross, and Jesus died in vain. Most certainly it denies the power which took away the stone from the door of His tomb. If politics were a good way of doing things, Jesus would have embraced the Devil’s offer to proclaim Himself the political messiah everyone wanted.
So here’s another prophetic message from God for you American Christians: You blew it. You had a chance to keep America back from presumptuous sin, but you dove in head first yourself. When you decided God was running for office in US politics, and bought into the blasphemous arrogance that America was somehow God’s own nation, you nailed Jesus the Cross again. The reason our nation is such a horrible place to live is because you started meddling in the politics, and decided to support one party over another. You people are the reason American morals are filthy hedonism, the reason our taxes are soaring and our economy dying; you are the reason God allows so many natural disasters, and more you won’t believe until you see them. It’s all because of you and your fake religion of politics. Guess what? Everything you hate about the political situation today is God’s wrath on you. It’s all going in the toilet, and God is sponsoring it.
The One World government you fear and hate will come. The worst oppressions you can imagine will descend upon the land, along with starvation, natural disasters, diseases both natural and manmade, and more evil than you ever dreamed possible. You asked for it, and if you now decide to resist, you will be fighting God Himself. When they come demanding your children for use as soldiers to enforce martial law on behalf of the Antichrist, God will not hear your cries, because it is you who have thrown them into the arms of Molech.
The one last hope for a precious few of you is to embrace the otherworldly viewpoint. When you realize all this stuff you fight for does not matter, that it’s all futile and senseless, and only feeds the Kingdom of Darkness you claim to despise, then you’ll be free. Perhaps then, if you learn enough fast enough, you can claim the last few shreds of God’s promises for this realm of existence. No, not my particular brand of Christian Mysticism, but an end to your clinging to Western Civilization, to Aristotelian epistemology, and the intellectual lies that this world matters at all.
Can’t do it? Enjoy your sorrow, because tribulation is already here, and you won’t be raptured out of it.
