Tribulation Preparation

The saints of God will tribulate.

Jesus warned that the same forces nailing Him to the Cross would not allow us to follow Him without some resistance. It’s not enough that those forces are within us to varying degrees, but that we face a whole world hostile to His message. At the very minimum we are embracing a serious insult to the human assumption that we can overcome all obstacles to make our world as we see fit. Not only can we not do that, but it’s simply not worth trying.

The paradox of God’s revelation is that we most certainly do know how to make the most of this world while it is under the Fall. And we shall surely find ourselves driven to obey that vision of doing what actually works. But the whole motive is not to make the world better, but to make our passage through it as glorious for His name as possible. The dispute is primarily a matter of what is in our human best interest.

This is also what drives most of us out of organized religion. It’s not that organizing is wrong, but we can scarcely get anyone to understand how the Bible says we should organize, much less find anyone doing it right. Virtually every “church” you can find is determined to ignore what God said is the right way of doing church, even as they proclaim so loudly to be the one best fulfillment of that revelation they ignore.

My assertion that organized Christian religion is captive to Western Civilization, and that said civilization is morally vile from the very foundation, is not easily placed where most of the captives can grasp it. Only briefly did I ever believe my vision could catch on with church folks. The resistance was brutal. A few folks let slip their violent anger, an urge to torture and kill me, for daring to challenge the orthodoxy. It was only institutional restraint that kept them from acting on it. I was shocked at the time, but from where I sit today it makes perfect sense within the context. As with Hellenism’s effect on Old Testament religion, so Aristotelian assumptions make modern Christian religion more likely to find other ways to crucify dissenters.

I submit that we will see the heat turned up even higher as the social order degrades further. That we are facing bad times is obvious. We need not indulge in the popular fear mongering to recognize that things are coming apart. A human governing institution that is flexible and sane is so rare today as to be remarkable. We are at the end of our civilization, so we should expect turmoil. It won’t come all at once with anything like a clean break. This stuff trails off over centuries. Stop and think about what politics look like in every place today that stands over the ruins of previous empires and civilizations. The story of how each one came apart serves to indicate what we are facing.

A genuine bond of love will remain through serious testing, but I think many of us will be shocked at who turns against us because there never was any real communion in the first place. Commitments become crystal clear when the price of commitment goes up. We are in a morally inflationary spiral, so we will soon see what really matters to those around us. We will also have to decide what that person in the mirror really values, too.

One of the things I’ve blathered most about in the past few years was the urgent need to reevaluate how we do religion. If you think church politics is ugly now, wait until you see what happens when budgets and control become difficult for the folks at the top. Those who value the human manifestation most will make the most anti-spiritual decisions you can imagine. By developing a spiritual discernment about such things, we see more quickly when it’s time to move on.

We aggravate our own tribulation in this world by forgetting what it’s all about, that we are pursuing the interests of another world entirely.