If this is your first visit here, you’ll probably struggle with a lot of catching up to do. This post is specifically for my virtual parish here, but the whole world is welcome to come and read it.
Sometimes I think I know how the Apostle John must have felt there on Patmos. I’m not locked away behind prison bars and neither was he, but my choices for travel are highly circumscribed by the context, as were his. For some years I’ve been in a kind of exile away from the things I would really prefer to be doing. What keeps me away is not a stretch of sea, but the vast ocean of difference between what God called me to do and what mainstream Christian churches can tolerate. Meanwhile, I really can’t get a regular job to distract me from this sense of isolation. At least, I haven’t gotten a viable job offer so far (something I can do without aggravating my old injuries). So I’m just marking time here for fifteen years or so and now, here I am on the Lord’s day and I hear His voice speaking to me.
Unlike John, I have no particular need to use the Hebrew imagery as an extended parable. I’ll do my best to write in more clinical terms. I’ll fail, but somewhere between my failure and your own moral awareness, perhaps the Lord can use our desire for His glory.
His glory is the only purpose we have for living in this Fallen Realm. The Eden narrative plainly indicates we weren’t designed for this fallen state, but to commune with Him directly. That was His intention, but the plan got off track. So we cannot partake of the Tree of Life until we pass through that Flaming Sword. The whole rest of the Bible explains the meaning of that image of the Flaming Sword. In the cultural context of the Bible, it refers to divine justice slicing away our sin.
Not once does God try to explain to us what all of this means eternally. Our spiritual standing before Him is something we each could know for ourselves, but not a one of us can explain how we know. Nor does God try to explain how He decided, only that our eternal fate was fixed before He made each of us. Even that doesn’t really make sense, except that it puts our focus back on what we can do in this fallen state for the one thing He does explain: His glory in us.
I’ve tried to explain many times that our Enemy in this is not what most Christians think about him. You can use the WordPress search function and see what I’ve written about the proper understanding of Satan and how God uses him. For now I’ll summarize: From the very start, Satan lost his created position by trying to consume some of God’s glory on himself. So as part of his punishment, it’s now his job as God’s Lictor and Jailer to keep trying to consume that glory out of our lives. Satan doesn’t want to own your soul; he wants to steal your share of God’s glory. By consuming your shalom he darkens the glory of the Lord’s Name. He’s a moral black hole. Satan is our Enemy with that titular capital “E” but he is not God’s enemy. He is God’s servant.
All of the people Satan uses are the lower-case “e” enemies who are actually victims of the Enemy, too. In trying to understand what John wrote and what I want to write, you need to get the focus off the individuals who make it difficult for us to revel in God’s glory. Antichrist is not a person but an influence. Focus on the forces of Darkness that use those individuals. That’s why I used the term “Foul Winds” a couple of weeks ago. Think of it as moral influences working through human agencies, both individually and in groups.
Regular readers know that I often refer to Western Civilization as a reference for the foul moral winds blowing across the entire world. It’s a dominant force that holds vast billions in its grip. It’s not a concrete object, but an influence that blinds humans to the truth, a “spirit of Antichrist.” When I tell you it’s largely a mixture of Germanic Tribal mythology and Greco-Roman heathen cultural influences, I’m still leaving out a powerful catalyst that made such a blend possible. You see, it was largely the existing official church hierarchy in the remains of the Roman Empire that consciously chose to mix the two. It’s a fairly complicated tale. The tale bears telling only because it has relevance for the near future in terms of your moral grasp.
We have to step back some to get there. It’s a matter of historical record that the dominant thread of Hebrew religious leadership abandoned their ancient Hebrew intellectual roots and adopted some elements of Hellenism. That is, they reassessed the religion of Moses, already quite poorly understood, in terms of Greek rational analysis. The result was a false religion that bears only superficial resemblance to the Covenant of Moses, and a false image of God that was confined to their bastardized logic. A major element of Jesus’ ministry was correcting this radical shift away from God’s revelation. You can see how that turned out. In the end, God judged that what was left of the Nation of Israel had abrogated their end of the Covenant and it no longer included them. From the Resurrection forward, only those who embraced the teaching of Jesus were granted any status on this earth as “God’s people.”
So Satan stepped up and adopted those Jews who refused to follow their Messiah. They became his special people on the earth. Not in the sense of concrete objects, but he used those willing to obey him as tools by which he intended to ramp up his mission of sucking down God’s glory into the inky depths of whatever passes for his fallen angel’s soul.
And boy, did they get to work for him. Eventually the Pharisees hijacked the existing institutions completely and whatever it meant to be a Judean in the Roman Empire meant you were some flavor of Pharisee. No, it’s not as if they consciously adopted Satan as their god, but how else would you talk about them? The New Testament refers to the Synagogue of Satan. At any rate, in Church History we have this vast coordinated effort by a number of rabbis to hijack all the churches, and we call them collectively the Judaizers. Paul’s letters give us little glimpses of their efforts, the tactics and such. Other writings not included in the Bible canon refer to it, as well. What most Church History scholars won’t tell you is that the Judaizers pretty much succeeded.
That is, whatever continued through the centuries as the visible institution of organized Christianity became captivated by the peculiar logic of Pharisaism in approaching Scripture. That business of “propositional truth” is from the Pharisees. For quite some time the church leadership denied that it was Greek philosophical reasoning until some priest named Thomas Aquinas made it acceptable to admit it. But his teaching didn’t really change much, since the church had for centuries already become Hellenized and hung up on materialism. They were compromised long before when Constantine seduced them into human political concerns. So in order to keep their political influence alive, the church hierarchy made it a point to understand how the invading German tribes viewed the world and simply blended it into their already compromised heathen Roman outlook. The long-term result was what we now have as Western Civilization, which bears the stamp of Judaized Christianity.
Don’t go out and join forces with David Duke, okay? He might be on the fringes of libertarian and conservative political philosophy, but they all share a continuing religious devotion to Western Civilization. While Dr. Duke does have some facts straight when he says there is a certain group of folks trying to take over the world, he misses the whole point. All he really wants is to pretend we can turn the clock back to resurrect the glory of European culture, which culture was indirectly the result of influences he now castigates.
How do you describe an evil cabal taking over the world, when any wording we choose has already been hijacked before we decide to talk about it? That’s how crazy this whole thing is. Satan is crafty, the Bible warns, and he has taught his servants well. They have built a vast matrix of bat-shit madness around themselves so that you never quite know who they are.
We don’t need to know who they are. We need only see how they work and what their general intentions are. The tribulation now falling upon us this very day owes much to their planning.
