I am starting to experience a new logical fallacy. Who knew? I want to call it the “I’m a Unique Individual” fallacy. It’s really quite common. No mater what arguments you bring up it will never be enough because they think they can undercut it by some nuance of a nuance, that no one has ever though up before, because the world has never see the likes of their modern evolved genius. Or they just try to disassociate themselves from every institution and line of reasoning that has eve existed, simply because it existed, it’s in the past, and now they are so unique and special that you must be wrong.
It also manifests itself as just writing off anything written that wasn’t written just for them. Because they are so unique they deserve a unique discussion. So any generalization or message not catered to them is immediately shot down. Except for the generalization that they are always right.
I think it comes from modern coddling.

For those of you who still read, actual books, I have found that this essay is not as easily available as it should be.  Thought not quite as beautiful as my first edition, ink forcefully stamped into the lightly textured page, it will suffice for what it is, as well as a number of recent incarnations of this type of lying.  I find that multiplied words about humility to disguise arrogance are popular.  Or quoting blogs that quote blogs, that all go back to some hack just making stuff up.  Such is human nature.  It is well developed character that must fight back.  Belloc has this character, he is blunt, he knows more than you, you will meet him in heaven.  Now shut up and listen.

IT is pleasant to consider the various forms of lying, because that study manifests the creative ingenuity of man and at the same time affords the diverting spectacle of the dupe. That kind of lying which, of the lesser sorts, has amused me most is the use of the foot-note in modern history.

It began with no intention of lying at all. The first modest foot-note was an occasional reinforcement of argument in the text. The writer could not break his narrative ; he had said something unusual ; he wanted his reader to accept it ; and so he said, in little, ” If you doubt this, look up my authority so and so.” That was the age of innocence. Then came the serpent, or rather a whole brood of them.

The first big man I can find introducing the first considerable serpent is Gibbon. He still uses the foot-note legitimately as the occasional reinforcement of a highly challengeable statement, but he also brings in new features.

I do not know if he is original in this. I should doubt it, for he had not an original mind, but was essentially a copier of the contemporary French writers and a pupil of Voltaire’s. But, anyhow, Gibbon’s is the first considerable work in which I find the beginnings of the earliest vices or corruptions of the foot-note. The first of these is much the gravest, and I must confess no one has used it so well as Gibbon ; he had genius here as in much else. It is the use of the foot-note to take in the plain man, the ordinary reader. Gibbon abounds in this use.

His favorite way of doing this is to make a false statement in the text and then to qualify it in the foot-note in such words that the learned cannot quarrel with him, while the unlearned are thoroughly deceived. He tells you in the text that the thing was so certainly, when he very well knows that it was not, and that if there is a scrap of evidence for it, that evidence is bad. Then he puts in a foot-note, a qualification of what he has just said in the text, so that the critic who really knows the subject has to admit that Gibbon knew it too. As though I should write ” The Russians marched through England in 1914,” and then put a foot-note, ” But see the later criticisms of this story in the accurate and fanatical Jones.” At other times Gibbon bamboozles the ordinary reader by a reference which looks learned and is inane ; so that your plain man says, ” Well, I cannot look up all these old books, but this great man has evidently done so.” A first-rate example of both these tricks combined in Gibbon is the famous falsehood he propagated about poor St. George, of whom. Heaven be witness, little enough¹ is known without having false stories foisted upon him. You will find it in his twenty-third chapter, where he puts forward the absurd statement that St. George was identical with George of Cappadocia, the corrupt and disgraceful bacon-contractor and the opponent of St. Athanasius.

This particular, classical example of the Evil Foot-Note is worth quoting. Here are the words :² ” The infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England.”

And here is the foot-note :This transformation is not given as absolutely certain but as extremely probable. See Longucruana, Tom. I, p. 194.

That foot-note at once ” hedges ” — modifies the falsehood in the text and assumes peculiar and recondite learning. That long title ” Longueruana ” sounds like the devil and all! You will be surprised to hear that the reference is to a rubbishy book of guess-work, with no pretence to historical value, run together by a Frenchman of the eighteenth century ; from this Frenchman did Gibbon take the absurdity of St. George originating with George of Cappadocia. I was at the pains of looking this up — perhaps the first, and certainly the last, of my generation to do so.

Another vice of the foot-note (equally illustrated in that lie of Gibbon’s about St. George) is what I may call its use as the ” foot-note of exception.” It is universal to-day. You say something which is false and then you quote in a foot-note one or more authorities supporting it. Anyone can do it : and if the reader is reasonably ignorant of the subject the trick always succeeds. Thus, one might say that the earth was flat and put in a foot-note two or three references to the flat-earth pamphlets of which I have a little collection at home. I am told that a wealthy lady, the widow of a brewer, supported the Flat-Earth society which published these tracts and that upon her death it collapsed. It may be so.

The next step of the foot-note in iniquity was when it became a mask. Who started this I know not, but I should imagine that the great German school which remodelled history in the nineteenth century was to blame. At any rate their successors the French are now infinitely worse. I have seen a book purporting to be a history in which of every page not more than a quarter was text, and the rest a dreary regiment of references. There is no doubt at all about the motives, mixed though they are. There is the desire of the fool to say, ” Though I can’t digest the evidence, yet I know it. Here it is.” There is the desire of the timid man to throw up fortification. There is the desire of the pedant to show other pedants as well as the general reader (who, by the way, has almost given up reading such things, they have become so dull) that he also has been in Arcadia.

I notice that when anything is published without such foot-notes, the professional critic — himself a foot-noter of the deepest dye — accuses the author of romancing. If you put in details of the weather, of dress and all the rest of it, minutely gathered from any amount of reading, but refuse to spoil a vivid narrative with the snobbery and charlatanism of these perpetual references, the opponent takes it for granted that you have not kept your notes and cannot answer him ; and indeed, as a rule, you have not kept your notes and you cannot answer him.

For the most part, these enormous, foolish, ill-motived accretions are honest enough in their actual references, for the greater part of our modern historians who use them are so incapable of judgment and so lacking in style, so averse from what Rossetti called ” fundamental brainwork,” that they have not the power to do more than shovel all their notes on you in a lump and call it history. But now and then this temptation to humbug produces its natural result, and the references are false.

The late Mr. Andrew Lang used to say that the writer who writes under the pseudonym of ” Anatole France ” must have had his foot-notes for his Life of Joan of Arc done by contract. The idea opens up a wide horizon. A man of name would sit down to write a general history of something of which he had a smattering, and would then turn it over to a poor man who would hack for him in the British Museum and find references — and they could always be found — for pretty well any statement he had chosen to make.

At any rate, in this particular case of Anatole France’s Joan of Arc Andrew Lang amply proved that the writer had never read his original authorities, though he quoted them in heaps.

And that reminds me of another foot-note vice (the subject is a perfect jungle of vices !), which is the habit of copying other people’s foot-notes, I did it myself when I was young ; I was lured into it by Oxford and I ask pardon of God and man. It is very common, and a little ingenuity will hide one’s tracks. A learned man who was also civilized and ironical — but much too sparing in wine — told me once this amusing story.

He was reading up an economic question, and he found himself perpetually referred to a pamphlet of the late seventeenth century wherein was a certain economic statement upon the point of his research. Book after book referred him to this supposed statement, but he being, as I have said, a learned, civilized, and ironical man (though too sparing in wine) concluded from his general knowledge — and very few learned men have general knowledge — that, in the words of the Old Kent Road murderer, ” There must be some mistake.” He couldn’t believe any seventeenth-century pamphlet had said what this oft-quoted pamphlet vas made responsible for.

He proceeded to look up the pamphlet, the references to which followed him about like a dog through all his research. He found there were two copies — and only two. One was in a certain public library, the other in a rich man’s house. The public library was far off, and the rich man was nearer by — an hour’s journey in the train. So he wrote to the rich man and asked him whether he might look at this pamphlet in the library which his ancestors had accumulated, but to which the rich man had added nothing, being indeed indifferent to reading and writing. The rich man very politely answered that his library had unfortunately been burnt down, and that the pamphlet had been burnt with it. Whereupon the learned man was at the pains of taking a long journey to consult the copy kept in the public library. He discovered two things : (a) that the copy had never been used at all — it was uncut ; (6) that the references always given had hardly any relation to the actual text. Then did he, as is the habit of all really learned people, go and waste a universe of energy in working out the textual criticism of the corruption, and he proved that the last time anyone had, with his own eyes, really seen that particular passage, instead of merely pretending that he had seen it, was in the year 1738 — far too long ago I Ever since then the reference had been first corrupted and then copied and recopied its corrupted form by the University charlatans.

But I myself have had a similar experience (as the silent man said when his host had described at enormous length his adventure with the tiger). I was pursued for years by a monstrous piece of nonsense about some Papal Bull forbidding chemical research : and the foot-note followed that lie. It was from Avignon that the thing was supposed to have come. It seemed to me about as probable as that Napoleon the Third should have forbidden the polka. At last — God knows how unwillingly ! — I looked the original Bull up in the big collection printed at Lyons. It was as I had suspected. The Bull had nothing whatever to do with chemical experiments. It said not a word against the honest man who produces a poison or an explosive mixture to the greater happiness of the race. It left the whole world free to pour one colourless liquid into another colourless liquid and astonish the polytechnic with their fumes. What it did say was that if anybody went about collecting lead and brass under the promise of secretly turning them into silver and gold, that man was a liar and must pay a huge fine, and that those whom he had gulled must have their metal restored to them — which seems sound enough.

Here you will say to me what is said to every reformer : ” What would you put in its place if you killed the little foot-note, all so delicate and compact ? How could you replace it ? How can we know that the historian is telling the truth unless he gives us his references ? It is true that it prevents history from being properly written and makes it, to-day, unreadable. It is true that it has become charlatan and therefore historically almost useless. But you must have some guarantee of original authority. How will you make sure of it ? ”

I should answer, let a man put his foot-notes in very small print indeed at the end of a volume, and, if necessary, let him give specimens rather than a complete list. For instance, let a man who writes history as it should be written — with all the physical details in evidence, the weather, the dress, colours, everything — write on for the pleasure of his reader and not for his critic. But let him take sections here and there, and in an appendix show the critic how it is being done. Let him keep his notes and challenge criticism. I think he will be secure. He will not be secure from the anger of those who cannot write clearly, let alone vividly, and who have never in their lives been able to resurrect the past, but he will be secure from their destructive effect.

1. I should have said, nothing. [↩]
2. This is a good opportunity, observe : — Gibbon, Dec. and Fall of Rom. Emp. Ed. 1831 (Cassell), Cap. XXIII, Par. 27, n. 125. Does it not look impressive ? [↩]

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” -G. K. C.

You shouldn’t have to take more than a couple of steps outside of a movie theater to realize that this is a place worth fighting for.  And to fight is to sacrifice.  Unfortunately, this is not apparent to a lot of people these days.  Because evil isn’t just, over there, it’s here too.  And not just in the sense that we are all fallen, that we all have sin, but it is deliberate and more pronounced in some.  Some people don’t appreciate good when it is right in front of their face, and some people actively fight for evil, right here in the good old U. S. A..

Chesterton said that what’s important about a myth or legend isn’t what it says about the person, but what it says about the people who hold onto that myth.  Every story is a partial story, it isn’t a complete tape recording it is a picture, painted with words, an art.  Every man who walks this earth has flaws, but there truly are great men.  Only a fool spends his life destroying these men or telling stories about their flaws.  It’s not important if every detail of the movie is an exact replica of the life of Kyle.  Of course ugly parts were passed over and his achievements were glorified.  America loves the book version of Chris Kyle, America loves the movie version of Chris Kyle and that’s not a bad thing.  Because we become like our heroes.

In the sixties movies about the wonders of free and open sex were aplenty, like The Graduate.  Adultery was actually illegal in California at the time!  And soon after it wasn’t, and soon free and open sex were everywhere.  In the eighties Van Halen was Hot for Teacher, and today you can read about female teachers having sex with their students almost daily.  When you idolize bad ideals, you get bad people.  Is it really so bad to lift up a man for his remarkable accomplishments, even if he was very flawed?  I don’t think so.  Our children need role models.  I wonder how many of these critics would like to have the entire force of the media picking through their lives with a fine tooth comb.  Which is why we still know nothing of Obama’s past.  It has been erased by strong arming and bribes.  Those who mock traditional heroes, make a mockery of themselves, they have heroes too, just the wrong kind of heroes.  Heroes such as Clinton or Kennedy, no one even bothers to cover up their evil, they just lower the standards.  And so today often sex isn’t sex and lying and sleeping around are fine. Because too many people picked bad heroes.

There are many heroes in the Bible.  Abraham, Issac and Jacob, Moses and Elijah, or David.  I remember mentioning that these men were ‘righteous’ to a friend and he was making fun of me because these man had flaws.  I pointed out that it wasn’t I who called them righteous, but scripture itself.  They are also called “a man after God’s own heart” and “men of faith”.   Their flaws should be a warning, but that should not overshadow the importance of remembering their greatness.

So, just what does this movie say about our culture?  First of all it says that we are divided.  There are a lot of people who hate this movie and a lot more who love it.  Of the latter, it says that they love someone willing to get up off the couch of their own selfish life, and protect the innocent.  It says that they love someone who has sex before marriage. Ok America you get a fail on this one.  It says that they love someone who is willing to stare evil in the face and deal with it.  It says that they love someone who is very good at what he does.  It says that they love someone who gives up what he loves for his family.  It says that we realize that excellence is the result of hard work and trials.  It says that we have a place for the Bible even if it’s only in our breast pocket. It says that we would love it if the Middle East would spend their afternoons watching movies instead of living like barbarians and trying to kill us.

But there is the other side, the evil within.  Their heroes are Woodward and Bernstein, the iconoclasts.  Because we all know there is nothing good in this world.  Well, except for whatever you feel like.  Their heroes are similar to the hero of the Middle East, the Prophet.  A bloodthirsty, lazy, caveman, coward, polygamist, who married into money and fell into fame by a scheme so good it could have only been made possible by Satan himself.  No I’m not talking about our Secretary of State, John Kerry, I’m talking about Muhammed. Hollywood and academia love this type of hero.  Which is why the Tsarnaev brothers didn’t really stand out at Harvard.  Hollywood spends most of their time trying to destroy the heroes of middle America like Kyle.  But they are not without their own heroes, men like Castro, Che, Mao, Marx, Darwin, and even Lucifer himself.  As Bill Ayers, hero mentor of both Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, dedicated his book to Lucifer.  Ok you can have your Michael Moore.  We are quite happy with Clint Eastwood and his myth.  Someday our kids will give their lives to protect the lazy bastard children of your hollywood academia.

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. –Mark 9:2

That should be all we need to call to mind other mountains in scripture.  Mountains are very important, they are where you meet God.  Jerusalem is often referred to as a mountain.  It too is where God’s people meet God.  Other details in the story should connect this with another prophet who went up a mountain to talk to God, Moses (Exodus 32-34).  Jesus became radiant white and a cloud came over them and from it the voice of God. Moses too became radiant, and his face shone even after leaving the mountain.  God also spoke to Moses from a cloud. And as if that wasn’t blatant enough Jesus and his disciples actually met Moses.

Raphael, The Transfiguration.

Peter wasn’t that far off in wanting to build tents or tabernacle with God on this mountain. The first time we see Abraham climbs up a mountain he pitches a tent and builds an alter to the Lord(Genesis 12:8).  Moses had done something similar, he had been on the mountain so long the people were getting anxious.  And after all God had set up his people on the mountain of Moriah in Jerusalem, around his temple.  Camping out with God is a good thing.  But this time is different.  Mountains and God had often been instances of death.  Elijah  plus God on the mountain equalled a bunch of dead false prophets, via fire from heaven.  When Moses went up the mountain he came down to find the people worshiping a golden calf and 3000 of the false leaders were killed.  I always thought it was interesting that Aaron doesn’t seem to get any of the blame.  He blames the people for their unbelief.

So, it’s interesting that in Mark they weren’t allowed to camp, but they come down the mountain to a kerfuffle.  The people and the leaders are in disarray.  This time only the demon is defeated, the people are spared, but Jesus criticizes them for their unbelief.  ““O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me”  Then the boy is healed, not killed.  This is a different kind of kingdom, than they were expecting.  This is a kingdom fighting spiritual war.  Jesus comes down the mountain and instead of leading Israel to fight the Philistines and conquer the land.  He enters the land and conquers a demon, one of many during his ministry.  And just as the people were afraid to enter the land flowing with milk and honey, so too are they afraid to take care of the demon.  It is very similar.  I gave you this land, just go take it.  I gave you power to move mountains now do it.  Mark doesn’t focus on any sin the disciples might have been guilty of, as Matthew does.  You could almost take the last line of the story as saying, you can’t fix the hearts of all the people, you just have to pray for them.  And so we learn that even if the leaders are faithful it doesn’t matter, if the people have no faith.

We, the church, are about a slightly different work than the people of Israel. But it is still about the hearts of the people.  It should be remembered that the faithless generation Jesus criticized was judged.  About 40 years later the emperor Titus marched into Jerusalem and packed off the articles of the temple.  Every person who clung to the old order and fought for the glory and restoration of the temple in Jerusalem was killed, down to the last man at Masada.  While the church heeded Jesus message (Mark 13:14) and they fled to the hills and lived to fight another day.  They worship at a new temple, the body of Christ (John 2:19).

What if we all started training all the children of the next generation in a different language?  From now on all the schools are teaching only in Russian.  You know there are the standard reasons, Russia is the future, says someone with some fancy title.  Russian is statistically something, bla bla bla. At some point there is going to be a battle between the old timers who speak English and their damn kids who now speak Russian.  That’s just the reality.  Groups of people need unifying language, instances of different languages, are cause for division.  Oh sure you can carry out the daily business of government in one language and translate it, or alternate or some such.  But it really doesn’t work.  At some point you have to pick a language.

No I didn’t make it up. This is real from some sort of ministry training site.

The funny thing is we are literally doing this in our country.  We are raising up a huge population of people in Spanish.  But the church has also done this with the language of worship.  We scuttled off all our little ones during the service so they wouldn’t interrupt the taping of the sermon with their beautiful cacophony of little voices.  Then we scuttled them off in junior high and high school, to their hip praise bands and messages catered specifically to them.  Then in college we scuttled them off again.  Oh aren’t they so cute.  With their rock music and their progressive, contemporary dumbed-down messages.  But then they got a little older and they wanted back into the main service.  And they didn’t want adult fodder, they wanted their special pre-formed chicken nuggets.  And now the battle is being waged in churches across this land.  The leadership of old has built disunity, they have encouraged schism.  Oh sure you could have ‘traditional’ services in the morning and ‘contemporary’ services in the evening.  Really you just have two churches that meet under one roof.  Or you could alternate each week, but eventually there will be a division.

I remember noticing this as I was growing up.  You had fun camp songs for camp and youth group and then adult songs in church.  I always wanted to be an adult, which I still believe is actually the point of raising children, so I was always waiting for my peers to grow up and become adults.  It never happened, and what did happen was that the adults all started acting more like kids.  The message was dumbed down and the standard for music became,  about how it attracted the young people.  This is bad.  These young people never spent time learning how to be adults, because they were always off by themselves, with some ‘leader’ slightly older than themselves, teaching them to love being children.  And if your church doesn’t cater to them they will take their ball and go on a Journey to a church that will.

The same is true of our culture at large.  A few years ago I went back to college again.  The first core class was a sit-in-a-circle and dialogue Kool-Aid party, about how your parents and every Judeo-Christian is completely wrong.  Embrace our new atheism or else!  So I left, I’m sick of paying people to lie to me.  This is semi-rural Montana.  Do you think the ‘Universities’ in the rest of the country are teaching traditional values?  No, they are teaching the next generation a different language.  The post-Christian language of warm fuzzy socialist utopias.  This has been going on for a few generations and so you have and will continue to have battles.  Occupy Wall Street, comes to mind.  And it is a joke.  Little children unable to cope with a real world where six foot children with three degrees in anti-Christian b. s. , have a rough go of it.  The conflict will continue.  And I might actually put my money on Putin’s Russia.

It seems to me that the first thing we need to do is train our children to be adults.  Stop catering to them and feeding the mentality that every generation is supposed to rebel.  Civilization is quite the opposite, what distinguishes us from the animals is that we can pass on wisdom and achieve more every generation.  But we have instead become animals, too stupid to pass on the rich wisdom of the ages.  We can’t pride ourselves in how much we destroy and then expect civilization to continue.  Of course there will be many challenges in dealing with the perpetual children we have already created, but we need to stop the bleeding.

Second we need to stop feeding the culture of academia.  Why do seminaries accept pagan education as a prerequisite?  Why are the few remaining orthodox colleges selling out more each day? Why do missions organizations and churches look at secular academic credentials before character and faith credentials?  We need to stop pretending it is doing anyone any good.  Like Christian reformers of many generations we need to separate ourselves and behave like the God of the Universe told us to behave.  Don’t let the idolators of the world teach your children another language.  Teach them to conform to the living God.  Build your own schools, the world’s system will fall apart and they will come running.  The same way they flock to this country.  It has happened many times before.

So stop sewing division, and plant some unity.  Unite your children with the vast wealth of wisdom historic Christians have to offer.  It will be difficult, admitting that you are not all you could be.  It will be difficult growing up yourself.  But by the grace of God, this is what we are called to do.  We are a people of light to the world.  We shouldn’t be following their silly ideas of multiculturalism and agnosticism.   We should be eating meat and not sucking at the tit of academia for all the godless drivel they spew. We should be following the commands of Almighty God and emulating the life of his Son.

I was sparked by this sermon:  https://www.christkirk.com/sermon/state-of-the-church-2014/

There are so many false religions and crazy philosophies out there these days.  And then there are just plain crazy people.  I could go on all day about the Catholics, Charismatics, or Mormons, but I think I will just attack straight up crazy today.  According to wikipedia “Grandiose delusions are principally a subtype of delusional disorder that occurs in patients suffering from a wide range of mental illnesses”.  Oh thanks that helps a lot, sounds like the average sinner to me.  But these really are funny, people actually think they are famous, or some sort of royalty, or even the King of England!   Can you believe that?

I’m not sure I believe that, but I do believe that the heart of man is deceitfully wicked.  And I’m not sure how this weeks sermon unveiled that or pushed anyone towards something better, towards Christ.  Bashing the false religions of the world is a little strange but “think on the things of heaven” and then ending there seemed quite vapid, quite crazy.  The best parts of the story were cut out.  What does it mean to think about heavenly things?  What about facing the glaring reality that we can’t do it, without Christ?

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well- fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings;
incense is an abomination to me.  Isaiah 1:11-13

God did say this to his people, but to portray them as perfect outward conformity with internal deadness is crazy.  Though I have heard it may times.   All it takes is a little context, they may have been doing these things, but they were ignoring the majority of the law.  They offered sacrifices, to Yahweh, but he was just one of many in their pantheon.  And their lives reflected this chaos, it wasn’t just a secret heart issue that was on display or in need of remedy.  They needed different actions, real, external actions. Keep reading verse sixteen.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow’s cause

This is a list of things to do.  Of course they couldn’t do it without the grace of God.  Of course it’s representative and not exhaustive, but it is a list.  And neither can we have a correct heart or a correct focus without Jesus. But if we have the Spirit we should act like it externally.  It’s not just about theoretical, abstract beliefs.  This is how God’s people should act.

Paul seems to be always pushing this point.  In Colossians it is made very clear.  He does say we should “set our minds on the things above and not the things below”, but it is in the middle of the book.  The things of earth are a reality, it was no mystery to them. What is the context?  Paul is suffering, they are being persecuted, there are false teachers lying to them and making up rules about food, and there are countless temptations to sin.  It’s not much different from today.  And the temptation to live as if this was all there was, is real to us.  So then Paul says, “set your minds on the things above”.  What are the things above?  Christ.  And how did he get above?  He died.  Your baptism was a picture of that, if you want to be raised on high, to heaven, you must die.  Get your desires and worries and all the selfishness of this world, out of the way.

What is Christ doing on high, in glory?  He is reigning as a king on his throne.  We don’t have the best view of kings these days.  But we still look to our political leaders to provide good things for us. The ideal king of the Old Testament was a sacrificial, humble leader who applied his wisdom to accomplish the list Isaiah used above.  Christ, the perfect king is reigning on high. And Paul says “we will also appear with him in glory.”  We are sons of the king people!  That crazy guy above, who thought he was the King of England, was closer to sanity than many Christians.  We are royalty in heaven despite what it looks like here on earth.  So act like it!  The news this very day is full of stories of British royalty who are not acting like it.  The press loves it, but it is a great shame to our sister nation.  Prince Harry is always running around with scantily clad women and now it looks like Prince Andrew is abusing young girls.  They are not acting like royalty, they are giving their country a bad name.  This is what it looks like when Christians act like the world.  We give our king, Jesus, a bad name.

So Paul goes on.  We are royalty, we have been given a position we didn’t deserve or earn, so act like it.  He gives us a list.  He doesn’t just end with “think about heaven in 2015,[corny guitar solo] bye”.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. . . But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, . . .

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye- service, as people- pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.

Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison— that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.
Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person

This is how the heirs of the King are supposed to act.  So go and make your king proud.  It’s a privilege.  Don’t let it end with a theory.  Don’t throw up your hands and call me a legalist.  Love him because he first loved you.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again:If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.  -Paul and Apostle of Jesus the Christ, to the Churches of Galatia

We Christians have become very generous these days when it comes to making every concession for every false view.  We can’t explain anything without a dozen caveats about all the people who have other views.  But why should we?  I think it amounts to little more than faux humility and actually giving evil a foothold.  Christendom is the most fun humans have ever had on this planet and we are letting the pos-Christians ruin it with their skepticism.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’

This is how it all began, this is how it always begins.  Just question the way things are.  Roll it around on your tongue a little bit.  Get comfortable with it.  Then “make your own choice.”  This is the way evil works.  Yet today we have glorified this as the highest form of good. It’s “thinking outside the box”, “being an individual”, “standing on your own two feet”, “being a thinker and not a follower” and on and on.  Now of course we should question the ways of men, many of them are wrong and need to change.  But we shouldn’t question the truth of scripture, as passed down to us through the Church. Don’t question the Gospel, even if an angel from heaven tells you otherwise.

I was recently listening to sermons by Martin Lloyd Jones from the 50s and he was speaking of Paul’s words in Romans, “I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me”(Romans 7:9)  As soon as I heard the law, and realized there was another option I wanted that option.  Jones mentioned the issue of sex education, which goes that far back.  He said the moderns want all this sex education because they think the problem is a lack of education  Really sex education just leads to more sin.  And he has been proven true.  As Margaret Sanger and the founders of Planned Parenthood knew, sex talk leads to more sex.  Just like the now dying D.A.R.E. program.  Kids are taught all kinds of ways to abuse their body, things that they would never have thought of.  A running joke in my family, was “if you sniff spray paint make sure it’s the clear kind so it doesn’t show.” Oh, ok thank you D.A.R.E..

And so we do the same thing with Creation.  God said he created the Universe in six days.  But even the most staunch Creationist thinks that you should still teach evolution.  That is where the scale has been shifted.  On the extreme Christian side is teaching both, on the pagan world side, is to not even mention Creation, and if it’s brought up you smack it down with punishment or ridicule.  This is a sure way to lose a battle.  Which is why Christians are being pushed further and further into the corner.  Why should we study this crazy theory by a hack who wasn’t even a scientist?  A theory which by his own words had not been validated.  Remember how you were taught that earthworms eat the dirt as they pass through it and then poop it out?  Well everyone believe that for a hundred years until someone actually did some science.  Kelly Dorgan found that the worms actually form a point and push their way through the soil.  So how is it that people believed this for so long?  Because it’s another theory, that Darwin just made up.  And you don’t question Darwin.  Though it’s fine to question God. “Did God really say?”

Now similar questions are leading to the destruction of the basics of humanity.  Can I choose my own gender?  Did God really say I was born a male?  And so the trail of evil begins.  And leads to the chaos we see around us.  Did God really say marriage was between a man and a woman? Did God really say you can’t have sex with animals?  Did God really say you can’t kill yourself?

I hear it a lot in the news.  “The controversial subject of” whatever, fill-in-the blank.  Even thought the subject is something as obvious as gravity, it has now become controversial because some lunatic thinks gravity is an elaborate conspiracy by the Christians to send us back to the ‘Dark Ages’.  This is how the progressive, Democrats have operated for generations.  Present a position that is so far out and insane that your insane left position looks like the middle, moderate position.  As Obama usually does it “some folks think this”, “but most scientists/economists/smart people agree, it’s really my way”.

I hear it a lot in sermons or lectures about theology or especially seminary classes.  The seminaries were taken over by liberal theology, beginning at the end of the Civil War.  You can find a degreed ‘expert’ on the Bible who will deny almost any of the established orthodoxy of the faith.  And, we spend all this time entertaining their skeptical lies?  Why?  Does it make us look more fair?  I submit it only introduces the next generation to a minutia of wrong opinions.  And most of the people we send to be educated these days get caught up in one or more of these falsehoods.  The academy is gravely ill, beyond the point of being repaired from within.  I think we need to stop honoring their positions as legitimate.  Why carry around all this endless baggage of detailed lists of all the errors that we could fall into?  Why not just study the truth, as it is plainly stated in Scripture?  Why not teach the basics of thinking and communication? When we are confronted with the various lies we will be able to apply them to the standard and find them wanting.  We could make actual academic progress, which might actually strengthen the Church.  We need to make a break as the Reformers did as the Puritans did.  We _________ stand for the scriptures, plain and simple.  We don’t care what you think, and we are going to prove that our way is correct by separating ourselves from you.  In a few generations you people will be trying to escape your tyrannical squalor and crawling over the fence to where we have been blessed for, following our Lord Jesus the Christ.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

La Cigale, The Grashopper, Jules Lefebvre, c. 1872.

A grasshopper that had spent it’s whole summer lounging on the beach, was almost dying with hunger when winter came.  So the grasshopper went to some nearby ants, and asked them for some of the food they had stored up, by working hard all summer.  “What did you do all summer?” they asked.  “Well I spent most of it hitting bitches and hoes and getting wasted, except for a few weeks I was in jail.” “Oh you did,” they said, “well now you can go clubbing”.  Then the grasshopper got mad.  It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t get any food. “Doesn’t everyone deserve food?”  So he started a philosophy glorifying the strife of the grasshoppers as caused by ant oppression. He changed his name to Jesse J. Locust and he continued his begging and immoral lifestyle while the movement for the ‘emancipation’ of the grasshoppers grew.  Though most of the grasshoppers were in jail, eventually one of them was elected president.  Then one day an ant shot a grasshopper while he was trying to steal some of his catnip.  This made the grasshoppers very angry.  Jesse flew in with his swarm and the grasshopper mobs started destroying everything.  The ant who killed the grasshopper was not charged and the swarms escalated.  But then it got cold and they went home. No one learned anything and the hard work of the ants and even some grasshopper converts, was destroyed all the more.

Provide today for tomorrow, in philosophy and food.

On this holiday week I would like to take the time to complain.  Yes I know, not exactly a change for me, but I think it is an important topic to clarify.  I want to complain about all the people who say you should always be thankful for everything all the time.  I want to be thankful for people who stand up and complain, at the proper time.  It is easy to turn the complex wisdom of the Scripture into platitudes that apply to everything.  But that’s not how it works.  God doesn’t require you to go beyond what you are able, but we all have brains and we are supposed to use them.  This should be simple, but sin makes it complex, we corrupt everything.  And so it takes complex thinking to unravel the sin mess.  Simple platitudes don’t fare well against complex sin.

Ah, how warm and fuzzy. If only it were that simple.

Complaining can be a good thing.  God asks us to cry out to him and there are countless instances in scripture of God’s people crying out to him and God hears their cry and changes something (Exodus 2).  The whole Exodus story begins with the people crying out to God against their Egyptian oppressors.  And God heard them and rescued them.  We should remember that God had used the Egyptians to save the people of Israel (or literally Israel, another name for Jacob) from famine.  Joseph said it was good. Genesis 50:20.  Yet a little later the people of Israel are complaining against their Egyptian rulers.  We can’t just make inspirational posters with simplistic formulas for every situation.  Egypt which was once good under Joseph, had become evil.  As the beginning of Exodus tells us.  Egypt became afraid of Israel because they were multiplying, and so they kept repressing them more and more.  Their complaints were justified.  We need to be on the right side of what God is doing.  There was a time when Egypt was the savior, and a time when they were the tyrant.  The same is possible with any institution, be it King George III’s government or the Catholic Church in 1517.  Those under the blessing of God have a responsibility to be thankful, those under tyranny have a responsibility to replace lawlessness with order.  Early on Pharaoh recognized the blessing of God upon Joseph, and so he promoted him and was blessed.  Later as the Israelites were blessed with lots of children, Pharoah didn’t recognize that blessing, he wanted to keep them down and have some free labor.

And that gets to the purpose or the motivation.  There is a lot of confusion these days about what is evil or bad.  It is so crazy that damaging someones’ delicate sensibilities is now the highest evil.  Motivation is key.  If you verbally attack someone because they did something to you and you are trying to get back at them, that is sin, because you are just looking out for yourself.  If you tell someone they have committed a wrong in some way and you haul them before the proper authorities for justice to be done, that is good, even if they are innocent.  The first person is selfish, the second is concerned for the law of good or the good of society.  The same works with complaining.  Addressing a complaint to the proper person, which is the person who did it, then up the chain if they don’t respond, is good (Matthew 18).  Groaning about how bad things are for the sake of getting other people on your side, or because you can’t control your tongue, is bad.  English seems to have a lack of words for these two things.  Perhaps we could distinguish ‘whining’ from ‘making a petition’.

I think in the area of complaining this simplistic view has led to complacency in almost everything and even pacifism.  We just let whatever happens happen, without a word or thought.  There is a religion with a god like this, it’s not Christianity it’s Muhhamedanism.  Or you might just call it laziness.  The God of Christianity, has a real relationship with his people.  He really wants to hear our problems, and he want’s us to boldly ask for them to change, sometimes.  And if we don’t get it right away, and our cause is just, we should still keep asking until we change or the situation changes (Luke 18 1-14).  We are called to minister to a broken world, but complacently letting it fall apart is not ministering, it’s withholding the light, it’s depriving the world of the preserving power of salt. It’s stupid.

A good pastor should be complaining all the time. He should see the problems in his flock and address them.  That is good preaching.  If he is not addressing the problems of his flock he is meerly playing the us-vs-them game as he attacks other people.  These are bad complaints.  You can tell by evaluating their purpose.  So what the Catholics or the Charismatics did this or that?  Why point that out?  What are we doing?  Get the log out of our own eye.  Protect the flock from the wolves in it’s midst, beware the sidelong glance with other flocks.   He should also be aware of other tyrants trying to force their way on his flock, and he should hold them accountable.  We see in Exodus the improper response to the blessings God was pouring out on Israel.  Pharaoh, wanted to repress the people. The same thing happens today.  Obama want’s to repress the blessings God has given to the west, or whitey as his pastor might say.  This is because he is a jealous tyrant, just like Pharaoh.  This often happens to God’s people, they are blessed and everyone wants a piece.  “It’s not fair.”  Actually it is fair.  God’s people are blessed for their faithfulness.  And people who encourage the murder of innocent children and the furthering of sexual deviancy, are not blessed.

But a pastor shouldn’t be doing it for his own comfort or ease.  Moses was God’s appointed instrument, but even he tried to do things in the wrong way at the wrong time, as he killed and Egyptian (Exodus 2:11-14), so God sent him into the wilderness for 40 years to cool off until the time was right. Then later the people were complaining, apparently rightly, and God sent them water from a rock Exodus 20. But Moses was upset and struck the rock instead of speaking to it, as a result he was the one punished.  He was not allowed to enter the promised land. Sometimes even the right leaders, are doing it wrong, and need correction.

History can teach us much on the subject.  The people of the thirteen colonies in America had the highest biblical literacy, and probably the highest percentage of faithful Christians, of any nation ever.  They were mostly Puritans who came over here seeking to spread the Gospel and establish a Christian community for all the world to see, a city on a hill.  And they did, and they were blessed for it.  Fifty of the fifty-five signers of the Constitution were faithful, trinitarian, Christians.  And a similar number for the Declaration of Independence, which was a list of complaints against George III.  He saw this people being blessed and he wanted some of the action.  He was a corrupt tyrant(of course he was nothing to the tyrants we have today). The people rightly objected.  They sought every legal measure, possible. They waited patiently. They prayed.  Then things escalated.  They threw the taxed tea in the harbor.  Nothing else was touched, unlike the mess we have going on in Ferguson.  The Pastors were the ones leading the charge to hold the King accountable for his lawlessness.  They were called the Black Robed Regiment.  It was a principle which that godly people knew very well, it was a doctrine they carried in the notes of their Geneva Bibles.  Notes written by Calvin expounding on the scripture.  It was the theology of the duty of lower magistrates/leaders to stand up to the tyranny of upper magistrates/leaders. Then they told the king they were leaving.  He didn’t like that very much and he started a war.  As a result the Colonists, won.  They won more law and order. It is clear God was on their side, and their cause was just, even though they complained.

Shortly after that another ‘revolution’ began in France.  It was not based on forming a more godly, or a more lawful society.  It was formed by mobs of people griping and wining against God, and actually spitting in His face.  They actually sought to overthrow the 7 day week because it was based on traditional Christianity.  It was all about selfishness.  And as a result, all of the original leaders were killed by the mob they incited, the cult to madame guillotine. France has never recovered. To this day they are a chaotic malaise, soon to be overtaken by multiculturalism, as they were by the germans time and again.  This is very similar to the rioting in Ferguson.  Where is the evidence that these people can take care of themselves?  If you won’t govern yourself, God will send a government to stop the evil (Romans 13).

There is a time and a way to complain.  And there there is a time to be thankful.  And both need to be precise.  Don’t just thank God generically.  How would your spouse like it if you just told them you loved them like a lame generic praise song?  Tell them specifically.  Tell God specifically.  And if you have a problem with something he is doing tell him specifically.  And if your brother sins against you, let it go, unless it is a larger issue affecting many people.  Think these things through.  Don’t forget to complain when you can change something for the better.  For his will on earth as it is in heaven.

Further Reading:

The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, Friedrich Gentz 

Rules for Reformers, Douglas Wilson