Chasing His Peace

You have nothing to lose by trusting in the Lord.

It’s funny how that statement seems mundane to so many mainstream Christians. I’ve seen it first hand, and I’m sure you have, too: It becomes a part of the ritual mantra that resides outside of one’s personal reality because religion is kept in a separate compartment from the rest of life. That’s what Western Christianity does, killing genuine faith by making it just another cerebral category of human endeavor.

A small example I like to use is cleaning up the litter around my apartment, dropped by other residents or visitors. When the maintenance guys come out in the morning with the trash bucket, their motive is entirely different. They pick up trash; I seek to bring healing to the environment. They aren’t bad guys, but they don’t do what I do and I can deal with that just fine. I am a part of God’s Creation, and it’s a part of me. My actions help everyone involved in ways they cannot grasp. By standing with God in obeying His revelation, and hearing His call and His claim on my soul, I enter more closely into His free offering to all mankind. I’m a little closer to what Adam was doing in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. I bring healing a little closer to the folks around me.

That’s not so different from what I strive to do on this blog — I want to vivify the healing hand of God in this world. I’m looking at events around me and seeking ways to obey the calling of God on my life. I can’t pretend to know everything; I don’t address issues for which He has not equipped me. But for the things I do sense an understanding in my heart, I prophesy of what His living moral character — the Spirit of His Son — says to things I can handle. So I’m picking up the crap people drop so I can contribute my part to making room for God to provide His promises.

I have a strong moral confidence when I talk about politics, for example. I’ve studied it academically in the Social Sciences and I’ve studied it in my heart through moral revelation and prayer. It’s not that I pretend to have answers for your choices, but that I can see the hand of God at work in human history. There’s no prescription except to tell you: Pray that God shows you His calling and what He requires you do in playing your part in His glorious revelation. I try to point out what I see God doing because I have full confidence that if I get some detail wrong, your heart will know and your internal reaction will, in itself, serve as a revelation of His will for you. Even my failures can serve to shine the light of truth if my heart is committed to Him. Accurate or mistaken in my grasp, I cannot remain silent.

I am eager to see His truth revealed. Depending on how well connected folks are to His truth, that could mean blessing or wrath. Even the verbal distinction between blessing and wrath is artificial; getting more truth is a blessing even when it hurts because we have shed some lies that are too tightly attached. Thus, the same prayer for His glory revealed means a prayer for an awful lot of wrath on those who don’t serve Him. And because I cannot serve Him without being deeply involved in the world around me, that means I’ll experience some human suffering when His wrath falls on others. At all costs, may His glory shine in me!

Don’t get lost. There’s one kind of wrath when folks riot in Charlotte, NC. Of course, the majority of rioters arrested are from out of state. They were paid and transported into town just for this event. This is not a local protest of any kind, but a manufactured crisis meant to distract from more important events. It’s not hard to find examples of the same sorrows handled properly in other places. In Charlotte an armed black man was shot by a black policeman. In Tulsa, OK, an unarmed black man was shot by a white police officer, but the protest was peaceful (and the officer was arrested eventually). I suppose the difference is that Soros doesn’t have that many friends in Tulsa.

I’m not sure what to make of all the noise coming from the alternative news sites about another kind of wrath. It’s something just as phony as the protests in Charlotte, but it’s something on a different level entirely — assassinations of public figures. The claim is that, in just a few days from now, there will be at least an attempt on the life of Trump and/or Clinton. As best I can tell, the claim comes from multiple independent sources. It could still be a big lie, but I suspect there’s some substance behind it. We should hardly be surprised; anyone paying attention to the news could have predicted this some months ago. It’s the timing that seems to be an issue here, a sort of “October Surprise” that we read about in election commentary so often.

But regardless of what my mind says about all of that, my heart says, “Don’t worry.” Whatever happens will not justify the drama everyone else invests in it. It matters little whose faces we see during the actual voting; certain trends will not change. The clash between the globalists versus the nationalists is not going to fade with the death of either/both candidates. And if the globalists start winning in any way, there will be a bloody revolt by the nationalists. Nationalism is surging all over the world, so we should expect some kind of right-wing fascist backlash here in the US.

Part of it is simply the natural human response to the economic and social instability resulting from abusive financial policies. The past few decades have seen the wealthy engaging in heedless willful plunder of everyone else. The mechanism is mostly a matter of excessively easy credit coupled with legislation that forces the productive classes to spend more than they would voluntarily do. Mere hedonistic enticement wasn’t enough, so the cost of living was artificially boosted by hugely expensive government mandates. On top of confiscatory taxation, we were all forced to give more money to the wealthy who produced nothing at all. And the wealthy ran with that money and invested it in each other’s unproductive businesses and in making debt both easier and more necessary just to live.

And now we have this incomprehensible notional debt that actually means nothing at all, but serves to keep us all enslaved. But it’s on the verge of breaking because the kind of blood-sucking it takes to keep it working has sucked it all dry. There’s nothing left to feed back into the debt system, so it’s going to collapse. We all know it on some level, and it makes everyone nervous and twitchy. It means folks will overreact to disturbances in the last little bit of shambling stability they think they have. And the most popular instinctive response is a kind of hyper-law-n-order crackdown, and that makes fascism likely.

That’s because the world is dominated by a Western materialism. When stuff is all you have, losing your stuff is a serious crisis, and it’s worth making someone else bleed to protect whatever little you might have. So we are headed for some turmoil.

But we call it “tribulation” because there’s a lot more to this than a cerebral social science analysis. In the midst of all this we see God rising up to destroy Western Civilization because it has run its course. What follows will probably be worse in many ways, but it will surely be different. The transition cannot be made easy; humans are intransigent about their sins. We who seek to live by a higher moral level of existence start out repenting of our sins, and we become otherworldly in the midst of a worldly crisis. We see it from an entirely different angle. People are running around trying to salvage their worldly existence and we are trying to run away from all of that and closer to God.

God says again and again that He is in control and that anyone who seeks His glory will find it. Strive to stand closer to Him in the midst of this rough stuff. Whatever that costs us — whatever we have to abandon to pull back from this world — is not worth much against the shalom He offers.