Have you been watching it?
Humans are inherently nomadic, though our fallen nature prefers a sedentary existence. As population has grown over the centuries in habitable areas, our fundamental design is causing trouble.
Western Civilization has done some useful things, but most of those serve as seeds of its destruction. Meanwhile, fundamentals have always been evil. A part of rejecting revelation has been making so much of real estate versus community. In Scripture, dominion is first and foremost a matter of influence over human activity, with the intent that we play shepherd in those things for which God has called us, while leaving other issues to the volition of the folks involved.
The fundamental question here is not trying to paint our inherent tendencies too much as good or evil in simplistic markings. Real life is full of contrasting and even contradictory valuations on a particular thing from different levels of view. The same thing can be good, bad or neutral as you adjust the contextual examination. Our nomadic nature simply is. That it is manifests mostly strongly in males is also a fact of life. God calls us to the field of endeavor and then makes us long for home and hearth with those we love. It’s how things are supposed to be. It’s symbolized by the image of going hunting and having a good time doing stuff that isn’t appropriate at home, then bringing home the meat.
Women feel a strong attachment to building the home and keeping the hearth warm. They tend to be reflexively good at what goes into that, even if the social structure alienates the instincts so that they produce the most bizarre behavior. The same can be said of male instincts. A critical element in the gospel is learning how all of this was explained and predicted in the Scripture.
In this context, Satan’s mission is herd thinner. That is, his activities prey on the morally weak. That’s his job, assigned by God. You don’t have to understand — you can’t understand the whys and wherefores, only the fact. Act on the truth within in your grasp. We who are morally strong don’t get lost in the perverted mix of nonsense.
On earth at this time in human existence, The Cult is by far the strongest and best servant of Satan’s plans. Having first built an overwhelming false norm of sedentary existence through the fundamental Western mythology, various kinds of threats are then hurled. A simple way of viewing these threats is as a perversion of shalom. In terms of the burden shalom places on us, a primary manifestation is social stability. Thus, we could say the Laws of God demand that we seek social stability, though not on just any terms. We seek shalom in terms of promoting God’s character. Examples of shalom as the result of His divine Presence would typically be prosperity, health and safety. Please notice that we were supposed to receive those things from God as nomads. God delivers according to the promises of His Word, not according to our Western reasoning based on some heathen mythology. The Cult is provoking a very chaotic and miserable migration.
You’ve seen it in how folks have been herded from Central America into the US. A complex set of factors draws those most likely to cause trouble, if not from a criminal orientation, then from the simple vast cultural distance. It’s reached a fever pitch in the past few years. The same is going on in Europe right now, with an invasion from the Middle East.
I want you to see how diabolical this is. We are designed to be tribal; we really do need to live among our own kind. There has to be a place where we can let our guards down among those whose behavior is in some way predictable and comfortable. The particular elements aren’t the point; it’s the effect on our souls. We need that safe space to get naked, as it were, or we cannot orient on anything that matters. Taking that away makes us internally chaotic and living from the most basal and degraded lusts of the flesh. We cannot begin to negotiate our way to shalom if we can’t take the time to face our God in those long moments of contemplation necessary to push aside the fleshly fears. But the West has reduced that tribal setting to the nuclear family home, and then is trying to take that away.
So our natural moral defense of living in a tribal community is long gone, and the single-family home life we all demand by cultural reflex has never been sufficient to withstand much of anything. We haven’t built an existence consistent with God’s Word, and most of us have no way to even build a desire for it. It takes a couple of generations to break up all the bad mental habits, and nobody has invested enough effort to make that happen because by various means it is flatly illegal to do so in most Western jurisdictions.
What’s left? The moral community of faith is all we have. And as the chaos cuts closer and closer to the bone, we have to rely ever more on what’s inside of us as individuals. We must build a vast supply of internal shalom that overwhelms the chaos of the context. We must move more and more of our awareness into that higher realm that doesn’t depend on human circumstances.
We have to stand above where we can observe with a moral clarity so that our divine duty is painfully obvious in each context.
