Your Next Move

We are all heavily influenced by fiction. There have been a great many games, movies and TV shows depicting a nightmare world that simply cannot exist. Americans in particular are deeply taken by horror fiction. None of that stuff is even remotely possible, but we instinctively believe in it as society.

It’s fiction, folks. I know we have an instinct to read it back into the Bible, but the apocalypse prophecies seldom describe sudden catastrophic changes. While those do happen, they are not the dominant characteristic of how God’s wrath works. Jesus warned about the Roman Siege of Jerusalem several decades before it happened, and it should have encouraged His followers to start making plans to migrate out of the city, but too many didn’t.

Basic principle of biblical mysticism: Everything God does in this fallen world is packaged in plausible deniability. God works to capture our hearts, not our minds. The capture of the mind is up to us; it’s our duty to rein in the flesh once He empowers us. Learn to see with your heart, not your five fleshly senses and reason. The senses will lie, both by ignoring the rips in the moral fabric as well as expecting moral consequences to be severe and immediate. God does not spank like a human parent.

I’ve tried to warn about this in the past: The term “economic collapse” seldom matches our fleshly imagination. What it refers to are general trends that reduce the availability of luxuries in the context of what we can afford. It’s not raw prices, but the availability at comparative costs in terms of our labor. Do you realize that most economic collapse goes unnoticed by the people on the ground? They simply adapt and often don’t fully realize what’s happening, because it’s incremental.

We used to go to shopping malls and hang out for hours because that was where we learned about new products at the higher end of hedonistic comfort. Now we look at them online and the malls are closing. It didn’t change our individual comfort level too much, but it meant that folks who worked in the malls now have other jobs, often related to the part of the economy that grew.

Much of what you and I consumed over the past few decades has changed. If you are old enough, you may remember rumbles about off-shoring manufacturing. Everything is made in China, Korea, Indonesia, etc. at much cheaper prices. It was relatively sudden, but it wasn’t literally overnight. Now we are having political conflicts with the countries where that production was moved. Prices are higher for several different reasons. It hasn’t stopped the trade, but it signals a coming shift in what will be available and at what relative cost.

Consider the price of cigarettes. I can recall when people complained that if they ever hit $1.00, they would stop smoking. Those same people are lighting up different brands that aren’t as high quality (and are more toxic) and paying around $5.00 per pack. That’s how it works.

The whole thing is spread across a vast range of products and services. Inflation is pretty high right now, but people resist changing their habits. They will make incremental changes in their consumption without paying much attention. They are conditioned to see it as another inconvenience, in which they are always under siege by invisible powers, and yet their habits have suffered only small, incremental changes.

They are taught to do that. They are taught to define the meaning of the word “problem” in certain ways that exclude them from noticing the evil our rulers are doing. TPTB have been moving the boundaries steadily, slowly, incrementally toward their goals, while hiding it all in plain sight. They have been conditioning our moral sensibilities for more than a century. People two hundred years ago would have risen up in arms over the things we take for granted today.

That’s part of the plan, part of how Satan leads his minions. Most of them don’t even know he’s in charge of their careers. The few who rise to the top do so because they are either catastrophically blind to moral truth or because they have embraced moral depravity. Whatever it takes to keep you on his team, that’s what Satan will offer.

If I really believed a catastrophic collapse was coming all at once, would it have been sane to buy a new car and commit to six years of payments? Do you think I have been ignoring my own words written here on this blog? Don’t read into my warnings the imagery of fiction. We are in a moral decline, and there are certain things that come with that. Most people will never notice. They will keep acting as if nothing has changed.

It is not that the external economic situation forces me to stock up on certain things. It’s that the moral choices I must make will restrict my access to certain goods in the future. Did that not come across?

We are moving to digital currencies; we are almost there. It will enable controls over our economic activity that would shock us right now, but the change will come slowly so as to keep average folks from noticing. Buy certain necessities now before their policies interfere.

Did you notice the mandates to take the vaxx? Have you noticed the mandates that force you to buy “greener” motor vehicles? Have you noticed how some segment of America is now excluded from using the same online services everyone takes for granted? What part of all that noise really matters? How does it matter? Some of the herding is visible, but plenty of it is hidden. It’s a mixture of things that keep you from paying attention to what really matters.

Let me make this more personal. My income is entirely controlled by the federal government. If there was an official divorce of states seceding from federal control, I would lose that income. I’m just one of hundreds of thousands in my own state. Do you think my state government wants to deal with all those federal pensioners in their midst who suddenly have no income at all? No, the state government will try to finesse the situation, seizing back some control without having to formally break from the Union of States. Lots of state governments are thinking about this the same way. It will take some years yet before they are forced to make those hard choices.

But at the same time, the federal policy has made things very painful for individuals. Want to serve in the military? You’ll be forced to endure DEI religion, a form of pagan idolatry. At what point does God say you must stop? It’s on you individually. Daniel had to draw lines that risked his life, yet he served until old age because God wanted him in the government. Joseph engaged in pagan rituals under Pharaoh because God called him to do so, but New Testament Christians refused to toss a pinch of incense on the flames at the imperial shrines to Caesar, and were persecuted for it.

You as an individual will find yourself under convictions that will put you in hard situations. Most of us will pay a heavy price in one way or another, and there will be plenty of specific variations between us as believers. What we should see coming is first and foremost a moral collapse, but that it will echo for each of us in economic and social problems. We will face exclusions that will be catastrophic individually. For us, the whole world has changed. Whether or not it affects the rest of humanity is another issue. They aren’t likely to notice.

Yes, a broad and painful collapse is coming for them, but you and I will feel it in the moral sphere far earlier. Our obedience puts us on the leading edge of what will hit them later. Our challenges will come in waves over the coming years. The reason you need a stock of canned goods, and not a warehouse full, is so you don’t panic when some policy shift forces you to make some hard choices that your non-covenant neighbors don’t have to make. You’ll need some time to see the hand of God clearly, and that stock of canned goods will reduce your human panic. You’ll have room to pray and consider your next move.