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Every year at Christmas and Easter we find these two traditional holidays condemned by a pair of unusual bedfellows. On the one hand, the rabid secular enemies of Christ say these holidays are hateful relics of the past that only serve to exclude non-believers. Now that we all believe in diversity and inclusion we must exclude these totally Christian days from our observance.
On the other hand we find the most pious and fundamental Christians condemning Christian observance of these days as pagan observances and forms of idolatry. In particular we are told the celebrating Easter is worshipping the pagan goddess Ishtar.
Indeed I used to hold this latter position myself and wouldn’t even have a Christmas tree in my house for fear of idolatry.
Now I’ve changed my mind.
History is complicated. Did the early Christians take essentially pagan observances and try to Christianize them? Was this a grave, compromising mistake? Or were the so-called pagan observances themselves corruptions of an earlier Noahic set of observances meant to honor God and His plan for history? Are we incorporating something that is wholly pagan, or just recapturing what was God’s in the first place?
I think it was Dennis Praeger who shed some light on this when he said that the history of these aspects of culture is not as important as what they mean in our culture right now. Right now, Christmas and Easter are reminders of our Christian roots, and right now the enemies of Christ and His Church are trying to eliminate or corrupt (again) these observances in an effort to suppress the knowledge of God in our land. And IMHO those Christians getting worked up about supposed pagan roots are the same ones who want to escape from cultural engagement and hide in shrinking Christian enclaves until Jesus comes and takes us out of this place.
So I say engage the culture head on and celebrate the resurrection of our Lord this Easter Sunday!

Bodies were still warm following the horrific mass killings in an Aurora Colorado theatre on July 20^th when pundits right and left started opining on the Second Amendment and gun control.  It has become a predictable event for the same opinions and arguments to be put forth almost instantly whenever one of these spectacular criminal acts occurs.  The left begins calling for more gun control while the right points out the need for citizens to be armed to protect themselves from such criminals.  The political forces more or less balance and nothing much comes of it.

This might be an occasion to review the words of the Second Amendment and think about them a little deeper than we usually do.  The Second Amendment says,

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The right wing tends to focus on the second phrase about the right of the people to keep and bear arms not being infringed.  The left wing counters by noting that the first phrase puts this right in the context of a “well regulated militia,” which they equate with the National Guard.  The right wing comes back by pointing out that the law establishing the National Guard specifically says it is not the militia of the Second Amendment.

The left’s reading in effect changes the amendment to say that “the right of the government to be armed shall not be infringed by the government.”  The right’s reading practically says “the right of individuals to keep and bear arms shall be unregulated.” 

Now I am a Millennial Life Member of the NRA and generally define the right end of any political spectrum, but I must say that neither of these readings seems satisfactory and neither rings completely true to the text.  The left’s view tends toward tyranny while the right’s view tends toward anarchy.

Let’s focus on the idea behind the first phrase, that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.  The idea seems to be that a state needs an ultimate armed power to secure itself against internal and external threats, and that a free state must rely on a citizen militia rather than a standing army or large militarized police force for this power.  If the state must rely on its citizens for the power it can hardly use the power to oppress the citizens.

None of our fifty states has a “well regulated militia” in this sense.  All rely on large militarized police forces and semi-professional National Guard for their security.  If a well regulated militia is in fact necessary for the security of a free state, then none of our fifty states are free as the Founders understood the term.  I think this fact is a symptom of our underlying departure from the kind of “free people” the founders had in mind.

NRA types think individuals having guns is a necessary and sufficient condition for maintaining freedom.  As Christians we understand that the true necessary condition for legal, economic and political freedom is spiritual freedom in Christ.  Spiritual freedom in Christ comes from dying to our petty self-lives and living in His purpose and calling for our lives.  Today we are very much into a do-it-yourself kind of pick and choose Christianity.  We select a Church to “go to” the same way we may pick a restaurant.  This consumer style “Christianity Lite” becomes an aspect of our self-lives like our house or our car.  It is culturally weak as evidenced by our nation’s drift away from Christian norms.  It produces a spiritual atmosphere in our communities where crazy things like today’s shooting happen with greater frequency.

As a result we are not free on the inside, and as evidenced by the fact that the militia is now a dead idea, not what the Founders would call free on the outside either.  Before we look to gun control or packing heat as the path to peace and safety we should look to re-centering our lives on Christ.

Comes now a proposed law by the energizer bunny of mischief, California

Mark Leno

 State Senator Mark Leno, speeding its way through the legislature; a proposal that would allow judges to assign more than two people of any gender as the legal parents of any given child.

The linked article quotes one Ellen Pontac, a Davis gay-rights activist, who said she and her wife, Shelly Bailes, each had two children when they began their relationship 38 years ago. She understands how someone can function as a child’s parent but accrue no legal rights. Government should accommodate changing times, according to her. “I just think that people should be able to create their own lives,” she said.

This desire of rebellious man to redefine God’s created order in their own terms, to act as the de-facto “god” of their own little universes is not new.  It has been going on a long time under a theory known as “Legal Positivism.”  It’s just that now the folly of legal positivism is finally taking us into Bizarro World.

Legal Positivism is the theory that there is no cosmic right and wrong, no Natural Law to be discovered, no Law of God for us to obey.  There is only whatever law man invents through his political processes.  And I do mean “whatever.”  Each of us has our own little private exceptions we want to take to God’s Law.  The problem is, so does everyone else.  This way lays anarchy and its twin sister, tyranny.  If there is no limit on what individuals can do then there is no limit on what government can do to individuals either.

The reason legal positivism has become the underlying theory of our legal system is the abandonment of God’s Law by the Church.  The liberal Church views the New Testament as having done away with the moral requirement of the Old Testament Law in favor of softer values like tolerance and equality.  The conservative Church is similarly uncomfortable with any favorable mention of God’s Moral Law because they identify it with “legalism,” the doctrine of salvation through law instead of grace.  But in fact the moral Law of God and the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ are not in conflict.  Rather they are in complete harmony if properly understood.    As Romans 8:4 puts it, “the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) a.k.a. “ObamaCare” has elicited a variety of responses.  Rick Santorum calls it “the worst of all outcomes.”  He points out that the same self-aggrandizing principle with which President Obama ignores the Court’s Arizona ruling is one he will use to stretch the law even further by regulation and Executive Order.  The law Joe Biden famously called a “BFD” is indeed a major move of America in the socialist direction.

GOPAC Chairman Frank Donatelli, Dick Morris, Michael Reagan and others point out that this will energize Republicans to fight even harder for a victory in November.  We shouldn’t have to rely on the Court to save us from ourselves.  The Constitution may not be a suicide pact, but neither can it save a suicidal people from themselves.

On the business front, small businesses will face additional costs and unknown impacts as regulators in HHS fill in the blanks in the law.  The economy, already struggling, should experience this as another hit and further weaken between now and November.  This of course should help Romney.

The issueof the HHS mandate that requires Church related institutions to provide abortion drugs, sterilization, and birth control benefits now remains a big campaign issue.  Had the court struck down the law it might have become moot.

Here is a commentary by Hugh Hewitt. 

John Eastman of Chapman University was highly critical of Chief Justice Roberts’ reasoning in justifying the AHCA as a “tax.”  He wrote:

“Also critical to this line of reasoning is that the tax is not a direct tax.  Otherwise, it would be unconstitutional because not apportioned according to population, as the Constitution requires for direct taxes.  Chief Justice Robert’s argument on that critical point is conclusory–only about a page or so–and confused.  If it is not a direct tax, it must be an excise or an income tax, and it quite obviously is neither.  But Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t explain what it is; he just asserts that it is not a direct tax.”

I am left with this thought, which also applies to a lot of arguments about whether Obama is Constitutionally qualified to be President and a host of other questions.  If the Constitution is dead in the hearts and minds of the American people then it doesn’t matter what it says.  People will just ignore its provisions whenever they have enough office holders in the right positions in government to do so.  Clearly abortion and sodomy are not rights to be found in the written document, but that did not prevent the court from willfully “finding” them hidden between the lines.  Neither same sex marriage or any marriage for that matter is mentioned in the written document.  But we all know that will have nothing to do with the Court’s ruling on that subject.

The Constitution is dead in the hearts and minds of most Americans because so few preachers understand the relationship between God and human government, and how thinking about that relationship led to the Constitution in the first place.  I cover this history and thinking in some detail in my book.  For now, the possibility of turning America around from its path of destruction and of making the first step in that direction this November is in the hands of those few Americans who know their God and their own history.

The following is from a letter I sent to the Orange County Register on OWS:

The OC Reister’s Letters to the Editor last Saturday in support of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement illustrate the fundamental problem in their thinking.  The whole complaint is over growing income inequality, and their only proposed solution is redistribution of income and wealth by the government. They assume that growing income inequality must be due to some wrongdoing without specifying the wrongdoing.  Yet income disparity may result either from legitimate effort or from wrongdoing.  The OWS folks do not care.  They just want it all redistributed.

In truth, income inequality has many causes.  We must identify those that involve wrongdoing or stupid policies and correct these things without punishing people for hard work, saving, and right living.  Here are some specific examples of wrongful policies which manifest as income inequality that should be corrected:

1.) Manipulation of the money supply by the Fed.  The Fed should maintain a steady value of the dollar.

2.) Privatizing profit and socializing risk through schemes like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

3.) Regulatory capture by entrenched interests.

4.) A tort system operated by lawyers primarily for the benefit of lawyers.

Allowing specific unjust practices to continue and trying to fix things with income transfer after the fact will just make things worse.  Two wrongs do not make a right.

The Occupy Wall Street mobs provide a perfect example of a standard tactic of the Lawless Left which we must all understand.  This tactic is to use lawless people in “top” positions like city councils and the courts, and “bottom” groups such as criminals and political mobs, to put pressure on the law abiding middle for concessions.  The lawless individuals at the top such as Mayor Bloomberg and the ACLU prevent law enforcement from enforcing the law against their allied mobs, making life miserable for the people just trying to earn a living and raise their families. Then they pressure the law abiding to give up something to get a little peace, such as more taxes or incremental loss of liberty.  Then they repeat the tactic until they have achieved the power they want.

A very obvious example is gun control.  The criminal use of guns is tolerated with light punishment and revolving door justice to expose the public to violence and the fear of violence.  Any act of self-defense is punished harshly.  The harried public is then sold a loss of their own right to own guns for self-defense as the only answer to the (government sanctioned) criminal use of guns.  They guy who just murdered eight people in Seal Beach gave up meekly, knowing he will never have to face justice.  The Lawless Left at the top will protect him.  The incident will instead be leveraged to push for further disarming of the law abiding.

Another example can be seen in a case where the attempt to control gang activity by a local school is slapped down as “racial profiling” by the ACLU and the other usual suspects.  Another is how we have to be subjected to invasive body searches to fly an airplane because common sense profiling of passengers used successfully by Israel and other countries is prohibited by the lawyers of the Lawless Left.

We are in a particularly dangerous time since the current assault on the law abiding is being unanimously supported by the President and his Party.  They are not playing games.  Fearing electoral backlash next November, they are trying to create a situation justifying “emergency” powers.  Whether they can succeed is another matter.  Their hope, as mentioned by an MSNBC energumen today is for another ‘Kent State” where their mob can provoke a policeman or victimized citizen to over-react and shoot one of their criminal allies.  Then the mob can “justifiably” riot, creating the pretext for the state of emergency.

The reason the game goes on is because the law abiding are intimidated by name calling and guilt manipulation.  No one is intimidated as easily as our RINO type political leaders and sappy clergy.  So we lack the leadership we need to push back.

Add to this the fact that we are often compromised by our own collaboration with the lawless left in accepting public handouts and benefits of various kinds.  Most of the workers having their daily commute blocked by Bloomberg’s mobs will still vote for Bloomberg because they are on the take one way or another.

To effectively resist this tactic, several things are required:

• Recognize the tactic when you see it.
• Don’t be tricked into over-reacting and playing into their hands.
• Understand that you do not resist a spirit of lawlessness by giving in to it yourself.
• Give your support to strong pastors and strong political leaders who will stand up for the law abiding in spite of being demonized by the press as “too extreme” or “out of the main stream.”  Withhold your support from the girly-men.

Get the second edition of EMPIRE here.

The second edition of my book “EMPIRE, The coming Christian conquest of the World” is now available.  I have added material including group study guide questions, pictures and graphics, and new appendices on “Salvation” and “The Church.”  The price has also been dropped to $7.

As I look at our confused political landscape I am more convinced than ever that the root cause of our troubles is a defective view of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  The Church is under the influence of a “dualistic” view that sees Jesus as having nothing to do with government or political affairs.  This results in a compartmentalized view of reality where the Church and maybe the family is in the “God-Zone” while government, business and everything else is in the “no-God-Zone.”  I believe this accounts for much of the lamentable tendency we have seen of young people falling away from the Church after leaving home.  God and the Church just have little to do with “real life.”

EMPIRE is my attempt to expose and correct this error.  In EMPIRE I expound on the doctrine of the total Lordship of Jesus Christ, his rule over both the natural and supernatural world, and the necessity for all men and nations to honor him.  EMPIRE provides a brief “History of the World in Three Easy Lessons” showing how Christ’s kingdom has been conquering the world throughout history and will continue to do so with or without our help.  Contemporary issues including economics and international relations are tackled in a section called ‘What a Conquered World will look like” and a specific agenda for Church action in light of these truths is spelled out.

So buy a copy and mull it over.  At present only the hard copy version is available.  An E-Book version will follow soon.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, my wife and I were in bed at a hotel in Palm Springs.  There was a message light on our phone and I pushed the button to retrieve the message.  It was from the hotel saying something like “During this difficult time for us all we want you to know our staff is here to help you with anything you need.”  I had no idea what they were talking about, so I turned on the TV.  There were the reporters and there was the footage of the towers coming down after being hit by airplanes.  I couldn’t believe that airplanes hitting a skyscraper could cause it to collapse like that.  I knew the Empire State Building had been hit by a much smaller plane many years ago with little damage.

Soon the announcers were describing how this had been a terrorist attack and no accident.  Two thoughts came immediately to mind.  First, that this would make America know how the Israelis feel about terrorism, and second, Proverbs 16:7 :

“When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”

America has certainly been going out of its way to make sure her ways displease the Lord now for many years.  Was this a sign that God was lifting his hand of protection from us?

In 1 Kings 11 we are told about how Solomon, after having been blessed of God like no man before him “loved many foreign women,” even from among nations concerning which God had forbidden marriage, and that he “held fast to them in love.”  These wives turned him to follow their gods and turned his heart from fully following the Lord as his father David had done.  As a result we are told that the Lord raised up enemies against Solomon, including Hadad the Edomite, Rezon son of Eliada, who ruled in Aram (Syria), and Jeroboam son of Nebat, one of Solomon’s officials who rebelled and took the ten northern tribes away from Solomon’s son Rehoboam.

Today our lives are still upended and our freedoms compromised by the threat of terrorism.  China’s economic and military power is on the rise, while ours and that of our European allies are in dramatic decline.  Our costly successes in Iraq and Afghanistan seem shaky as we withdraw our troops.  Iran continues to expand its influence in the region and its march toward acquiring nuclear weapons.  We respond by legalizing homosexual conduct in our military and cutting our defense budget.  Egypt and Turkey, once close allies, move toward the Islamist side.  Oh, and sympathizing with Israel over terror?  Not so much anymore.  More like the reverse.

Ten years after 9/11 where are we?  We face economic and military decline with the chance of conflict growing in the Middle East and East Asia.  We are a divided people continuing to drift away from God.  If 9/11 was supposed to be a wakeup call from God, did we just roll over and go back to sleep?  What will it take for us to wake up?

“Not even God himself could sink this ship.”

– Employee of the White Star Line, at the launch of the Titanic, May 31, 1911

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad“

– from the Greek play Medea by Euripides

            As it turned out, the confidence of the White Star employee regarding his ship’s ability to defy God was misplaced.  Is America’s confidence that it can defy the laws of God with impunity similarly misinformed?  No, it’s worse.

            The difference between the Titanic and the current financial situation facing America is that the Titanic’s crew was merely reckless for travelling at high speeds through iceberg infested waters at night.  They did not actually see the iceberg until it was too late to take effective action.  At least when they saw it they tried to avoid it.  America has seen the iceberg of insolvency for many years, and has not only ignored it but increased speed toward it.  Furthermore, this has been done with all passengers on deck looking at it and loudly insisting that the captain maintain course and increase speed.

            Our on-books debt is almost equal to our total national income.  Our budget plan is to run trillion dollar deficits forever.  But this is our little “ice cube” problem.  Our off-books debt, consisting of our promises to pay “entitlements” such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various public pensions is much worse.  If we were to have enough money in the bank today to cover this future stream of expenses the amount would be somewhere between five and ten times our national income.  The actual amount we have set aside is zero.  This is our iceberg problem.

            Nonetheless, the recent debt ceiling deal that created a “super committee” includes a provision to automatically slash defense and non-entitlement domestic spending by something like $1.2 trillion over ten years if the super committee cannot come up with something better.  The design of the committee means it will either deadlock or raise taxes.  In this economy, raising taxes will probably reduce federal income through reduced growth.  For Tom McClintock’s thorough but depressing take on the deal read here.

            So even after the great Tea Party rebellion of 2010 the balance of political power is still one that will let illegitimate entitlement spending devour the legitimate functions of government.

            What will the metaphor of “hitting the iceberg” look like in real life?  Here are the general features we can expect:

1. The economy will slow and unemployment will rise.
2. Government services will be cut back.
3. Social disorder and crime will increase, over whelming the underfunded police, courts, and prisons.  Something like in London.
4. Pressure will grow to soak the rich, not only of income but of assets.
5. Defense will be crippled and rogue nations and terrorists will be emboldened.
6. America’s credit rating will be cut to junk.
7. The dollar will cease to be the international currency.  There is no viable replacement on the horizon.  International trade will shrink.
8. Polarization will increase.  Local areas may start being under the control of local government and non-government entities.
9. At some point the federal government will resort to serious inflation, followed by a replacement of the “old dollar” with the “new dollar” to steal the money out of your pocket and bank accounts.

10.  The ability to do business internationally and within our borders will be severely impacted by all of this disorder, resulting in a massive reduction in living standards world-wide.

11.  Radical political groups will emerge as the established power centers lose all credibility and legitimacy.

None of this is good, and none of it to be hoped for, any more than running into an iceberg just to punish the captain for being a bad captain is.  But it is hard to see any other scenario.

Many Christians are counting on being raptured out of this kind of situation.  I wouldn’t count on it.  I think the Church is responsible for this calamity for its refusal to stand up for the Word of God, its compromising with the world, and its fantasy world escapism.  One example: Abortion was “legalized” in 1973.  Since then, less than 1% of pastors and churches have said one word or lifted one finger to resist this travesty and stand up for justice.  Innocent blood pollutes a land and brings divine judgment.  “Memo to file” opposition to abortion does not cut it.

At this point the question that emerges is what the individual can do to hopefully weather the storm.  It is important for there to be a core of people who preserve both some assets and the right values and ideas if we are to emerge o the other side.  Let me suggest a mental framework of three big things we each must do:

Get right with God.  In a time of divine judgment you will want your prayers to be heard.  You can have all the guns and gold you want, but it is God’s protection that will matter.

Work on your relationships.  When the formal systems break down it is the informal ones that remain.  When the police do not show up to save you from rioters you will want your neighbors to stand together.  Patch up, expand and maintain your relationships with family, church members, neighbors, and business relations.

Get your act together.  You do not want to bring unnecessary baggage into a tough situation.  Work, hard, save money, and pay off debt.  Make sure you are the last employee your boss would ever let go.  Have a decent reserve of cash, food and emergency supplies on hand.  You don’t want to run out of food or medicine (or ammunition) when the streets are unsafe.

R. Albert Mohler, president of the Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky, has a thoughtful article on why so many Americans support gay marriage.  Mohler describes how certain world views which have gained acceptance over the years set us up to see gay marriage, an oxymoron, as making perfect sense.  The three ways of looking at things he describes are:

A Progressive Theory of History – in which history is moving in a “liberating” direction.  First we freed the slaves, then gave women the vote, then had civil rights for blacks and women and everyone else, so why not liberate the persecuted gays?

Radical Individualism – wherein the needs of the individual to be him or her self and do their own thing outweighs their obligation to others.  As for God, surely He wants us to be happy.

Moral Autonomy – what is right for you is not necessarily right for me.  There is no absolute right and wrong, or if there is one, we have no way of knowing it.

Mohler points out that these complimentary ways of thinking have become widespread, even influencing the thinking of most Christians, and that gay rights activists have skillfully framed their arguments in terms of these principles.  His main point is that Christians think that way also and thus cannot make a strong counter-argument.

This description of the way things have progressed brings to mind the passage in Romans 1 where because men chose to abandon the knowledge of God, God gave them over to gross immorality.  Acceptance of this three part world view constitutes a rejection of godly thinking.  Without godly thinking, how can there be godly conduct?

But Mohler’s article is also an example of the many articles written that describe how we are losing the culture without explaining why.  Why would a Church of great numbers, commissioned by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit, be so powerless?  Three possibilities come to mind:

1. God is not as powerful as the devil.
2. These are the end times in which God has ordained that we lose until Jesus rends the skies and comes back to fix things.
3. The Church is blowing it somehow such that God is not willing to help us until we get right.

I vote for number 3.

The measure of the Church or of any church in particular is how faithfully does she testify concerning the question “who is Jesus?”  Jesus will wage war on behalf of  His Church when she is bearing faithful witness concerning Him to the world.  A compromised or defective witness?  Not so much.

With few exceptions, the Church in America preaches the doctrine of the partial Lordship of Jesus, in which He is the Lord of your life and the Church, but not Ruler of the Kings of the earth (Rev1:8).  We accept the proposition that human governments should be pluralistic and free to make law contrary to God’s moral law.  We call this rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

But everything belongs to God, including Caesar, who is His minister (Rom 13).  Civil government is obliged to conform its laws to the moral law of God or suffer judgement.  And the Church is obliged to point this out without fear or favor.  In other words, the Church is to preach the comprehensive Lordship of Jesus rather than just a partial Lordship. 

As long as the Church fails to bear full witness to who Jesus is, things will indeed continue to get worse and we will keep losing the culture.  But if we repent of our error and begin to preach a comprehensive gospel, if we give faithful testimony to the King God has set on His Holy Hill (PS 2), then we can expect Him to come to our aid and fight our battles.  Things are not destined to get worse and worse.  It is up to us.