Shepherd’s Wrath

What follows is a blatant rejection of social standards.

It’s no secret that I despise Western society. This is not some kind of perverse self-hatred. Were that the case, I would still be acting by Western assumptions about reality as some kind of activist. That’s where you get crazy campaigners and mad bombers. No, this is a long and deeply considered rejection after having studied the whole issue academically for years. The shape of my rejection and the resulting plan of action will be anti-Western in itself.

This is challenging, because I’m still feeling my way along. Aside from bits and pieces of insight, no one else that I know of pursues a comprehensive vision of pulling away from Western Civilization. They don’t look at the underlying sickness; they don’t go back to examine the very foundation on which it stands. It’s one thing when someone disputes the details with me, but I find myself too often confronted with people using a distinctly Western approach to the discussion of how to depart Western mythology. Sometimes their arguments only sharpen my understanding. Too often, I find myself sucked into the vortex.

This is not the City of God; it is not built on the rock of truth. Most of what I’ve seen people doing simply tries to rebuild little portions of this big lie. Renovation won’t help when your city is built on sand, and asserting that sand is stone won’t turn grit into granite. I try to flee, but I’m catching hell every step of the way from people trying to drag me back inside. Sometimes I miscalculate how to escape their grasp. Complicating things is that I still have to do business inside this rotting swamp. I am not Jonah and this is not a penitent Nineveh. Nonetheless, I retain the prophetic mission calling to warn the residents to flee before it collapses.

It gets uncomfortable at times. English doesn’t offer the repertoire of expression for talking about the fallen nature separate from the mortal coil. That’s in part because Western thinking makes no such distinction. It requires a mystical turn of mind and our entire civilization rejects that before the discussion even starts. So I’ll tell you that it can be messy even when I don’t walk away with any sense of guilt from some bad experiences. At the same time, it may take some work to regain my sense of peace because of the jarring discontinuity that grates on my shepherd’s sense of protective justice.

The body is wired for anger; it’s hard to summon all the resources to strike at predators without some sense of wrath. Our society cannot accept the idea of justified anger except under the strictest controls of official sanction from the ruling class. Our culture is schizophrenic about that. We talk bad about the ruling class, but create a new one by vesting people with authority that allows them to deny personal accountability. We permit anger and wrath only when we imagine it is exercised in selfless defense of some bogus ideal of defending our system and our “way of life.” This is a blatant rejection of what God says about such things. Personal anger is not a sin because everything is personal. God holds individuals accountable even when they hide behind some imaginary shield of objectivity. Truth is not objective; truth is the Person of God or it’s a lie. It’s God nature that He deals with us in terms of personal feudal grants of dominion.

Even if you get a little confused about the boundaries of your God-given domain, you should never be ashamed at feeling anger and wrath toward the evil others do. Using harsh words, dramatic demonstrations, yelling and general intimidation — these are socially unacceptable in most cases, yet are very godly nonetheless. Our society instinctively throws all of that into the bucket labeled “childish.” They insist that dramatic displays of dislike are “violence” and inherently evil because it didn’t take place under official cover.

Yet the biblical moral requirement is that we separate that moment of loud objection from any actual physical act of violence. When something in your heart (AKA your convictions) crosses that line from idiocy to real danger, you know instinctively that the anger turns to ice. It’s not a berserker’s rage; it’s purposeful. Western society denies such is even possible. Western mythology insists it is always rage. Take a look at the perverse manipulative psychology behind the so-called “anger management” courses. They deny that there is a God, and deny that He can work through the righteous anger of men and women who defend what He gave them. Those courses assume, and sometimes assert in manipulative language, that you are property of the state. However, the term “society” is often inserted in place of “the state.”

The New Testament says we should not lose sleep over feeling anger (Ephesians 4:26). This presumes you understand that the anger reflex is not a curse of the Fall, but that our fallen nature can lead us into false anger. Passionate displays and so-called “abusive language” are not evil in themselves. There most certainly is a petty and childish kind of anger, and it’s a paradox of Western society that actually cultivates that, but you are supposed to do it with cutting words and lawsuits. You’re supposed to get the state to exercise its wrath for you by proper invocation, and though we make a facade of denying it, you’re supposed to use whatever means of political pressure you can dream up to include bribery. We call it “lobbying.” God calls it “oppression” because everything is personal; that is God’s Law.

There are no easy answers, but if anything keeps you awake at night, it should not be any false sense of shame about being angry and letting people know about it. You might lose sleep because someone manipulated you into assuming dominion over something God didn’t place in your hands, but that’s a separate matter. Turn the disquiet over to your heart for clarification of boundaries and sooner or later you will regain your sense of peace with God.