God is not silent, but His voice can be hard to discern.
We can’t turn back the tides of human civilization. God allows certain things to go in certain directions according to His own inscrutable and ineffable plans. However, He has revealed more than enough to those determined to understand. I am at peace with my progress in that direction and I’d like to share it with you in some hope you’ll find your own peace.
We are at a crucial turning point in the human story. I’ll use a concrete example to indicate something much broader.
The US Army has announced troop cuts of 40,000 and a reduction of around 17,000 civilian employees. This is on top of the other planned reductions based on the sequestration already in place — automatic budget cuts that kick in if Congress fails to hash out a more specific plan. The sequestration would mean an additional 30,000 troops lost just from the Army alone. Some say this announcement is designed to scare the average American voter into demanding Congress “do something” about the defense budget reductions.
That should be obviously true, but I say it’s also part of a longer term plan to shift more and more operations into the mercenary contracts. Since the reductions will, on paper at least, reduce the forces below the minimum required for the missions they have or will have mandated, it will mean the necessity of letting out more military contracts to cover the mission gaps. Thus, big defense contractors will supply personnel for an increasing number of deployments. These contractors are seldom under direct military control. They are handled more or less like allied forces, with some kind of coordination starting at the top, and rules applied down the chain for coordination on the ground — in theory, at least.
Trust me: The defense contractors would love to take over the whole thing. So far as I can tell, in the long run it’s actually cheaper for the government to go that route. For example, there is no Veterans’ Administration involvement in the mercenaries, which is easily one of the most expensive add-on costs for keeping a standing military. As you may have heard, US military veteran care is a scandalous failure already. I suspect part of the noise in the news about the vast number of veterans mishandled by the VA is another part of the effort to steer us all to the idea of relying on a more flexible mercenary force where the human element is no longer part of the budgeting process.
We don’t have room here to explore how the commercial defense industry treats mercenaries because it varies wildly, depending on multiple factors. My point is that larger strategic decisions are increasingly steered by the commercial military industry. To suggest that they are lobbying for such changes is a ludicrous understatement.
And the broader point is to indicate how more and more of what we face as our government is nothing even vaguely resembling democratic policy. There’s noting in this that reflects the considered will of the people. Global government has already morphed into a mere expression of commercial imperatives. The plutocrats are about the wealth, and political power is just the means. There is a certain amount of salesmanship at work, but that’s hardly any correlation to the original concept of offering some kind of moral guidance through leadership and statesmanship.
Think about the way this has morphed. In ancient times your government was your family. By degrees government has become farther and farther separated from us. Now we are on the verge of government that responds to us as mere data. Only what shows up on that computer screen makes any difference at all to them.
The coming tribulation will be quite mundane when contrasted with all the mythology. The plutocrats are steering the culture, too. We are highly conditioned by films like Take Shelter to expect that the coming crisis will be utterly disorienting and devastating to all we know. They love John’s Revelation, so long as folks take it literally. The idea is to keep us fearfully glancing about so that we don’t notice the more mundane changes in the system that structures our lives. By the way, dystopian movies and books about living under a corporate government are also bunkum. It won’t be like that, either. Neither should you expect a world defined by ideas presented in the Terminator movie franchise (think SkyNet), nor anything that removes vast stretches of human population.
All of that nonsense is based on Western intellectual biases. God is not constrained by such assumptions. To have any hope of predicting the future, you first have to understand God’s Word and the intellectual assumptions in which it was packaged. Of particular interest is realizing that Satan gains little from the death of the wicked. Western Christian visions of Hell are not from the Bible, but rooted in a mixture of various heathen mythologies. Satan will end up in eternal damnation, too, and not as the ruler. He gains most from human misery while we live, and willingly disposes of us when he’s gotten all he can. We don’t have a language for describing how that works, but my point is that predictions of mass human exterminations are a fear factor use by the Devil, not his actual wish. If anything, he’s frustrated by human mortality.
Again, this world is the trap. Prolonging our time here is where Satan profits, so the nightmare is any effort to make life longer without God’s blessings. A long life arising from obedience to God is another matter entirely. Satan intends to make us focus on the apparent effects without the fundamental commitment. That means perverting and faking everything God does in this world, keeping us from any hope of understanding how to embrace the character of God and seeing the moral fabric in Creation. Look for the plutocrats to seek ways of artificially making life longer and more tightly controlled for their personal profit — and only the controls necessary for profit. They’ll get plenty of things wrong and changes will come when some lackey is able to convince them for the sake of their profits. Things like thought control are a fake threat, a tool they would use only if they believed it would bring profit.
Perhaps now you understand why I believe the coming civilization can be characterized as the Network Civilization. I’m convinced that the plutocrats see a vast global cellphone network as the best means to control for the sake of profit. For now, that network depends entirely on the Internet, so they are looking for ways to control that, too. God alone knows how that will turn out, but that He has an interest is utterly certain. Satan’s only creativity is in creatively perverting what God has revealed. The vast delusion we call “Western Civilization” has run its course. God was able to keep His truth alive despite the smothering intellectual atmosphere. Satan has some limited permission to steer things on a new course of deception, trying his best to capture as much of human existence as possible. God will continue to assert His sovereign limitations on things.
He will not be silenced in His own Creation.
