God Doesn’t Play Games

Something has been cooking in the back of my soul for a couple of days. I expect it will spin off several posts, but the first one is this: I’m living in a miracle marriage.

No one has to tell me how bad it can be. Years serving in both formal and informal pastoral roles has shown me any number of unhealthy marriages. To this day, there are a handful that I still find incomprehensible. How do people live like that?

Then I stumbled across the men’s Red Pill movement. Finally, someone was able to articulate a lot of what I sensed but couldn’t formulate. The single biggest revelation was the use of Game Theory in social sciences. It’s by far more scientific than almost every clinical study I’ve seen, not to mention a lot of theoretical stuff. It allowed me to organize and describe both male and female human nature.

But the one thing that has always disappointed me? Virtually nobody writes about the Red Pill revelations as it tends to reflect ancient Hebrew culture. It’s not that the Red Pill lore is biblical, but that it tends to parallel what Scripture says; the assumptions tend to overlap. What to do with what we learn from it is where I take issue with most of the Red Pill stuff out there.

On Jack’s blog I’ve become pretty alienated from the rest of those who comment. All I had to do was assert that faith and a sense of calling was sufficient to answer all the woes of marital relations. It might still be work, but God’s power to overcome fallen human sinful tendencies is sufficient to answer all our needs. He still does miracles today.

I’ll even grant that some people are destined for a bad marriage as part of God’s ineffable planning in some of His servants’ lives. Recall Hosea, whom God commanded to marry a whore. But then look at how Hosea’s faith made it possible for him to handle all the sorrows that arose from that.

The fixation of so very many “Christians” on the outcomes is a major flaw in religion. The Bible says be faithful and let God steer the ship. Stop trying to create rules by which you secure some particular outcome, and somehow find Bible verses that appear to support this or that man-made rule. The issue is not the outcomes, but the faith that carries you through it.

My calling and my radical faith commitment in my youth went a long way to setting me up for such a fine marriage. Most of the men commenting on Jack’s blog don’t even believe it’s possible to have what I have. It’s not that Veloyce is so very perfect (and Lord knows I’m not) but that we share a faith commitment. We both bring to this marriage a sense of divine calling, something that sees us through the situations arising from a very imperfect world.

Let me reiterate: It’s commitment and calling, two edges of the same sword. The majority seem to ignore this, even when Jack bluntly echoes what I say about it. Rules will provide some useful guidelines, but they can’t be treated as on par with Biblical Law. They are not; they are most certainly man-made.

I don’t even dare talk about the heart-led way with those guys on Jack’s blog. They would choke; they’ve already ridiculed me enough on the issue of faith and calling. That’s the real issue between Veloyce and I — we were both heart-led before we even knew what to call it. We both came into this marriage able to commune with nature. We could hear the songs of Creation, the music of the natural flora and fauna around us. We could sense things our minds could never understand.

I refuse to accept the notion that this isn’t for everyone. I remain utterly certain it’s built into human nature itself. I’ve met tens of thousands of Christians in my life, and very few can even swallow the idea. Oddly, I’ve run into a substantial number of pagans who rely on it. This is part of what gives shape to my conviction that it’s a common human capacity.

My convictions tell me that this teaching is going to open new doors as tribulation grows around us. My convictions also tell me, by the way, that Ben Davidson and Suspicious Observers are essentially correct but that God isn’t going do another Noahic destruction of the human race anytime soon.

I’m utterly convinced the Lord wants this message to go forth, and that we won’t be wasting our breath telling others. Yes, plenty of death and destruction are coming, but this is not the end of everything we know. God isn’t playing games with those of us He called to teach the Radix Fidem way. Some of us shall live to see this message spread to a substantial number of souls.

This is our answer to life, the universe and everything.