Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Unlikely Champions



This is from the blog Homeward Bound:

What does it say about the current crop of spiritual leaders when a billionaire playboy former reality television star turned president is more vocal about being pro-life than most of them? What does it say about the current state of the church when a man who is largely deemed as unsavory by the pearl clutching self-righteous among us, is more resolute in his defense of the unborn than those who ought to be their loudest defenders?

If the shepherds are too busy sheering the sheep and selling the wool to see that their flocks are being buffeted on all sides, then maybe, just maybe, the sheep ought to be grateful for the sheepdog standing between them and the wolves instead of pointing out how unseemly he looks, or how violent he acts.

In case you’ve never seen a sheepdog fight a wolf, the sheepdog can be just as vicious as the wolf, but one is trying to butcher the sheep while the other is doing his best to protect them. If we judge the viciousness without taking into account the intent, then all we will see is two animals tearing at each other, locked in a heated fight for supremacy. There is no moral equivalence between the wolf and the sheepdog. One is fighting to protect life; the other is fighting to snuff it out.

Sure, I would prefer for the shepherds to do their job and protect the sheep from the wolves, but since they seem to be too busy making sure they’ve got enough shekels squirreled away for ten lifetimes instead of keeping the sheep safe, I sure am thankful that the sheepdog is around, mangy and misunderstood as he might be. 

In case you missed it, the sheepdog threw down the gauntlet in no uncertain terms during his state of the union address, and asked congress to pass legislation prohibiting the late term abortion of babies who can feel pain in a mother’s womb.

Just when the wolves thought they could feast to their hearts’ content, just when they thought they’d routed the sheep while the shepherds were sleeping, here comes the orange haired sheepdog, and howls so boldly that it sets the wolves back on their heels.

Sometimes the champion we need doesn’t look like the champion we wanted, or what we imagined our champion would be. Instead of a strapping young preacher with a baritone voice and a penchant for quoting long dead philosophers, we get a 72-year-old man who is getting a bit soft around the middle, and has ample baggage from a life lived in the public eye.

Personally, I don’t care about the packaging. All I care about is whether or not he is willing to stand between the sheep and the wolves, and give as good as he gets. I am utterly mystified that there are still some within the church that expect a fight to the death to be G rated, absent claw marks and torn flesh, absent spilled blood and gaping wounds.

“Don’t mind us trying to pass legislation that would allow for the murder of a baby after it’s been born; look at how crass the orange haired sheepdog is.”

Make no mistake. This is, without equivocation a fight to the death, and it is a fight worth fighting because of what’s at stake. Will we descend into barbarism, an orgy of hedonism and nihilism wherein we cheer the murder of the newly born, or will we defend those who cannot defend themselves, and speak up for those who have no voice?

I don’t know about you, but between the orange haired sheepdog doing his best to protect the sanctity of life, and the hell-hound that would have gloried and celebrated the murder of the innocent with a glee reserved for the soulless and demented, I am glad we have the sheepdog.  Unlikely a champion as he might be, I do believe few if any others would have possessed the steel spine required to do what he just did. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

New York Deathscape
A Disciple of Christ
Conspiring Against President Trump

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

A Failed Coup

President Donald Trump

This is from the blog nebraskaenergyobserver:

Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness reminds us that for the last three years, we have been living through something unique in American History, an attempted coup against the legitimately elected President, by the bureaucracy. With the help, of course, of the so-called news media, and much of the coastal elite. Here’s VDH:
[T]he illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.
So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.
Preparing the Battlefield
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president. 
The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.
In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.
All through the 2016 campaign and during the first two years of the Trump presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal adjudicators of press coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump—a landmark bias that continues today.
Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in advance.
Some contract “journalists” apparently were paid directly by Fusion GPS—created by former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall Street Journal and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post—to spread lurid stories from the dossier. Others more refined like Christiane Amanpour and James Rutenberg had argued for a new journalistic ethos that partisan coverage was certainly justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed existential threat to The Truth. Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016: “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”
But as far as most of America is concerned, they do, and all concerned will, I think, pay a price for their foolishness. If they don’t, well America will change, and not for the better. There are two years left of Trump’s first term, it’s time to clean house.

And there is a hell of a lot of trash needing to be taken out. It’s time to begin, now that we can all see the dim outline of the beast, slouching across the horizon.

Hard to improve on VDH’s ending, so I won’t even try.
In sum, the Left and the administrative state, in concert with the media, after failing to stop the Trump campaign, regrouped. They ginned up a media-induced public hysteria, with the residue of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s illegal opposition research, and manipulated it to put in place a special counsel, stocked with partisans.
Then, not thugs in sunglasses and epaulettes, not oligarchs in private jets, not shaggy would-be Marxists, but sanctimonious arrogant bureaucrats in suits and ties used their government agencies to seek to overturn the 2016 election, abort a presidency, and subvert the U.S. Constitution. And they did all that and more on the premise that they were our moral superiors and had uniquely divine rights to destroy a presidency that they loathed.
Shame on all these failed conspirators and their abettors, and may these immoral people finally earn a long deserved legal and moral reckoning.
I fear that we may, with Yeats, see an awful vision.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Monday, February 11, 2019

Obedience and the Tree of Life



This is from the blog A Word in Season:

“Blessed are they that do his commandments,
that they may have right to the tree of life,
and may enter in through the gates into the city.”

Revelation 22:14


Obedience to the will of God is the revelation of His Lordship. Calling upon His Name and then walking in the stubbornness of our own ways is labelled iniquity in the New Testament. Iniquity simply means “self-will”. It is the unbroken, undisciplined and unconquered will of one who claims to be a follower of Christ and yet exhibits all of the traits of the first Adam. We live in a day of a false gospel, a declaration that by simply naming the name of Jesus we have full access to all the promises of God, such is not the truth.

The message of Jesus to the seven churches in the Book of Revelation is consistent… “I know thy works…” It is in what we do wherein we reveal the nature and the spirit in which we walk.

“And why call ye me, Lord, Lord,
and do not the things which I say?”
Luke 6:46


Jesus follows this powerful question with the “Parable of the Houses” being built upon rock and upon the sand.

“Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.

But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.”
Luke 6:47-49


How few realize that it is in doing His will wherein the deep foundation of the house is laid! It is in the doing where we discover the true nature of all that we are and run to Him for grace. His will is in itself the very foundation of our salvation. In His will we are confronted with our own stubbornness and we are met with the full knowing of our own weakness and folly. His Will is the cross upon which the horror of self is crucified. They who hear only never come to terms with their true self, they live in a world of teachings, confessions and religious talk without ever venturing into the land of truth. It is WHEN the flood comes that the foundation is discovered and the verity of an individual’s true nature is revealed.

Obedience brings us to the need of the true grace of God, it is no longer a sentient, a catch phrase or a religious cliché; it is the means by which our hearts find the power to submit to His ways and walk in them.

Through disobedience man lost the right and the access to the Tree of Life and it is through the wonder and life of the Son (as expressed in a life of obedience) we gain the right to the Tree of Life and are able to partake of its life giving fruit.

“Blessed are they that do his commandments,
that they may have right to the tree of life,
and may enter in through the gates into the city.”
Revelation 22:14


Brian Troxel

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Kierkegaard: "how highly do you value God's Word?"

Soren Kierkegaard, 1813-1855

This is from the blog Dover Beach:

“…how highly do you value God’s Word? Imagine a lover who has received a letter from his beloved. I assume that God’s Word is just as precious to you as this letter is to the lover. I assume that you read and think you ought to read God’s Word in the same way the lover reads this letter. Yet you perhaps say, ‘Yes, but Scripture is written in a foreign language.’ Let us assume, then, that this letter from the beloved is written in a language that the lover does not understand. But let us assume that there is no one around who can translate it for him. Perhaps he would not even want any such help lest a stranger be initiated into his secrets. What does he do? He takes a dictionary, begins to spell his way through the letter, looks up every word in order to obtain a translation. Now let us imagine that, as he sits there busy with his task, an acquaintance comes in. He knows that the letter has come, because he sees it lying there, and says, ‘So, you are reading a letter from your beloved.’ What do you think the other will say? He answers, ‘Have you gone mad? Do you think this is reading a letter from my beloved! No, my friend, I am sitting here toiling… with a dictionary to get it translated. At times I am ready to explode with impatience; the blood rushes to my head, and I would just as soon hurl the dictionary on the floor – and you call that reading! You must be joking! No, thank God, as soon as I am finished with the translation I shall read my beloved’s letter; that is something altogether different.’… All the scholarly preliminaries were regarded as nothing but a necessary evil so that he could come to the point – of reading the letter from his beloved… Let us assume that this letter contained not only an expression of affection, but also a wish, something the beloved wanted her lover to do… the lover… he is off at once to fulfill his beloved’s wish… think of God’s Word. When you read it in a scholarly way, with a dictionary or a commentary, then you are not reading God’s Word… If you happen to be a scholar, then please see to it that even with all your learned reading you do not forget to read God’s Word. If you are not a scholar, rejoice! Be glad that you can listen to God’s address right away! And if in the listening you hear a wish, a command, an order, then – remember the lover! – off with you at once to do what it asks.”

--Soren Kierkegaard

_____


This is my comment:

We read the Scriptures in faith: faith in God, not faith in our intellects. Or we could say that the Lord uses our intellects to read the Bible and uses the Holy Ghost to give us spiritual understanding. The Bible is spiritual–it is inspired by the Holy Ghost. We must read the Bible, so that the Holy Ghost can engraft the Scriptures into our spirit. 

I John 2: 27: “But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.”

The Scriptures engrafted into our spirit is fertile ground; the Scriptures engrafted into our brain is death.  Head knowledge kills; Holy Ghost knowledge (revelation knowledge) gives live.

II Corinthians 3: 6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

The Spiritual Man
Man Reasons, but God Reveals
Physical Sight and Spiritual Sight