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September-October 2004

           

The federal government's commission investigating the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington issued its report on the incident, and after citing several reasons why it happened, recommended a number of reforms to prevent any such future catastrophe.

Among the considerations were rooting out the terrorist sanctuaries, strengthening long-term international commitments, implementing a centralized citizen identification system, countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, improving checkpoint screening, unifying strategic intelligence operational planning, and strengthening the FBI and other homeland defenders. There were dozens of other such recommendations and strategies, all very good and wholesome things. But distinctly missing from the list was the one thing that would do the trick.

One thing:

           

“Urge people in every nation, culture, ethnicity and religion to abandon their futile attempts at self-righteousness, humbly repent and follow the one Savior, Jesus Christ.  It is only by His blood can we be cleansed of our sin—really, in contemporary terms: our feeble but abjectly destructive desires to clutch and hold and have things that don’t belong to us at the cost of our neighbor’s lives.  We are all murderers at heart.  Really, if every one of us turned to Him and loved another as He wants us to, all these recommendations would be moot.”

           

Well, why don’t they write that in the report?

It is simple.

It is because the federal government is the Agency of Cain. If it even hinted at such a thing, it would make itself irrelevant. Not only won’t it do it, it can’t do it, for from the beginning the first authoritative governor, Cain, was hidden from the Lord, so the federal government simply does not have a clue about the power and impact—nor the mercy and grace—of Jesus Christ. He is a wholly foreign ruler. In their allegiance to the Superior General, federal agents must carry out his orders, however unwittingly, and that means confiscating billions more of the Catholicists’ value (dollars) and demanding many more gallons of their blood (lives), all under the glorious banner of “homeland security.”

 

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November-December 2004

 

As the presidential election deadline neared this year, many ministers and church leaders frantically deprecated the estimated four million evangelicals who did not vote in the 2000 election. To drive the point home they said things like, “My church has 600 members. That is the very number that can swing a whole election! And the 2004 version is so important!”

This was usually expressed with the intent to get people to vote Republican since the Republican candidate has cornered all the major moral issues (even though they couldn't actually say that because the government told them they can’t). Then the Democrat evangelicals stridently screeched about neglect of the poor and brashly made their opposition felt at the polling booth. Indeed it is not as much whether one is evangelical that determines who one votes for but what income one has. An evangelical low-income person is—surprise!—more likely to vote for a Democrat.

When the nation chose the more values-oriented Republican candidate on November 2nd, those ministers and church leaders praised God that the good wholesome Christian guy got in. Never mind that his duty to carry out the agenda of Cain makes all the sanctimonious swagger extraordinarily moot. And then there were the Democrat faithful, incensed that this war-mongering, poor-ignoring oaf gets another four years. Never mind that the very same duty obligates him to kick Caesar-wannabes all over the yard and keep the deprived in a comfortable state of covetousness.

The religious covert operative is gleeful—ah, the joy of a raging culture war in full bloom. All polling activity is one of the grander showcases for social posturing, with vast amounts of spiritual and emotional violence spewed at one another in honor of Marduk Christ.

The good Catholicist who smiles after punching the ballot pretends to be convinced that his one overriding concern is the same as the favored candidate’s, all for the glorious cause of ramming good things into our gut, of course. In reality, he conceals his expansive bewilderment about whether or not it means anything when “so much is at stake.” This is not necessarily troublesome—he’s actually voting on behalf of prolonging the war. It is just that he wants to have the edge for this one night.

Condemnation feels so good. It is so enticing, so tantalizing. To immerse oneself in it, to seethe and steam and rage rage against the dying of that night. But then there's still more World to perfect—if we lose the vote against the other guy today, well, goodie, we get to wage the war all over again tomorrow. With so many of God’s crusaders to do it all with, it is splendidly delicious.

Those four million evangelicals who don’t vote... It could be they’re just as much a part of the Catholicist Nation as any one else. Striving and railing and affecting and manipulating and walking arm-in-arm with the Company’s men as with anyone else—it’s just they’re not in the polling booth.

Or…

Do they actually know something about the Jesus of Scripture and the World System pact He’s asked them to let alone?

Do they really know Him?

Could it be?

 

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January-February 2005 

    

On November 2nd, 2004, California voters did something I thought was the coup de gräce for my case that people are wildly deceived. They voted to spend $6 billion to harvest embryos for instrumental medical purposes. I considered this a horrifically foolish move for a number of reasons. Embryos are human beings by all biological, ethical, and spiritual standards; $6 billion is a prohibitively large sum for a deficit-riddled state to spend on something that private business concerns could easily finance themselves; and adult stem cells such as those derived from umbilical cord tissue have shown much greater promise for the purposes of curing and healing diseases.

How on earth could so many be so hoodwinked into this? As I wept for the millions of lives that will be sacrificed for this ignominious cause, it struck me…

That’s just it.

 

Sacrifice.

 

It’s all about the desire for human sacrifice in a reprobate population that has long discarded ceremonial temple animal sacrifice and discounted The One sacrifice—that of God Himself to ransom the world from its evildoing.

What is the deal with sacrifice? It’s easy, it has to do with the most plainly attested-to fact of life: people sin. They sin so horrendously they must do one of two things: (1) pay the penalty for their sin themselves, and in a Catholicist society this means some form of penance, or (2) accept the atonement of a substitute—meaning another assumes the penalty for the wage of sin to be paid, which is nothing less than death. Everyone knows this instinctively, but because most refuse to acknowledge it cognitively, a vast buffet of activities is available for shame mollification.

The only certain, final, fully and eternally efficacious atonement is in Jesus Christ, and by being God, He is the only one capable of this. For those who will not accept the saving work of Christ, their sin remains, and they must get a substitute atonement from somewhere else. And since that “somewhere else” is tremendously deficient as a full saving work, no one single sacrifice for those in the Catholicist Nation is adequate.

They must keep sacrificing.

Their gods must be persistently pleased—some of whom are certainly people like Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve, celebrities with such sway in selling embryonic human sacrifice that they have genuinely become idols. In fact, the actual worship of these individuals isn't directed at them, but at their marketed images, their icons—for even though Reeve is dead, his deftly constructed personage lives on forever as the bold champion of his grand Catholicist cause.

 

So, when examined carefully, it is not surprising at all. People in idolatry do what their gods demand. Deceived or not, it's what they do. And what a convenient way to have human sacrifice than to do it with little, harmless, glob-of-cells-the-size-of-the-head-of-a-pin, insignificant tiny embryonic

 

Human beings           

 

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March-April 2005

 

When one sees a disheveled elderly person on the street, ruffling through the trash for food, it may not be a radically novel idea that the thing to do is to offer him a hand, a meal, a home. What is noteworthy is that there are a number of ways to follow through on this.

One may extend help right then and there. The problem with this approach is that it may provide relief for the moment, and doesn’t quite account for the enabling quality of the charity. In other words, more than likely it encourages the benefactor to forsake the things he must do to take basic care of himself, except to the extent that he spends his life endlessly seeking other such sustenance nibbles.

Another way is to invite the needy into community, a place where people live to love another. Here individuals join to accomplish communitarian goals utilizing the gifts of their talents to ensure that all are cared for. The brutal fact about this condition is that it only comes when all stakeholders wholly trust in the One Lord and Savior to guide their charity, and follow Him by reading His word and gathering for prayer and worship. The simple reason this is the only environment where one is truly cared for is that because He loved them by dying for them, He now cherishes them in abundant abiding relationship and they know that.

 

These two approaches may seem like no-brainers, but the World System as it is has rejected both of these options, for any number of reasons—the most significant of which is that the World System must have its own way of caring for another. It does this by administering Cain’s program of providing for the destitute: intentional striving to be good for the purpose of earning the exploiter’s favor, paternalistically enshrining government as caregiver, impelling younger citizens with guilt and shame to appropriate income (payroll taxes) for Caesar to manage their lives in what is actually a protection racket Ponzi scheme.

Every single word on Social Security issued by the pundits of the Catholicist Nation is about fixing it. The seasoned Catholicist offering a solution is one through whom Cain still speaks about being his brother’s keeper. Numbers are thrown about—percentages of tax increases, benefit cuts, budget concerns, future estimates, and on and on and on. One thing they all share is the abject reality of impoverished lives in the Nation beholden to Cain. Should the Catholicist do something as radical as recommending to do away with it altogether, he must still replace it with a plan that sustains Caesar’s proprietary claim on their value—Social Security by another name.

President Bush engenders the declared affection of all conservative stripes by working on “privatizing” Social Security, but his program is just as Catholicist as the rest of them. The president is always in every way the dutiful agent of Cain, tendering more institutional absolution (however innovative)—telling people what they must do so that he may manage their fears and shame and evildoing. His plan is just one of the myriad options that the World’s people leaf through, rigorously pondering all of them except the one that actually works.

 

Scripture boldly details that alternate option. The Shalom Community approach described quite succinctly in Acts 2 entails complete abandonment to the One who loves enough to truly rescue an individual from slavery to the System. It embraces the understanding that Social Security is a wonderful option for those who insist on living in fear and working in drudgery, and still insists on the gracious extension of the hand that is His freedom to those who may just take the step to come out of it. The question is then,

Where is this church?

You know, the one ungrafted to the World? The one that is that genuinely integrated group of people who actually revel in taking care of His own?  The one where they are loving one another as “living sacrifices” with no need to hoard and guard and suspect and exact, no need for compromising contracts with the World because Jesus is 100% capable of providing all things? The one with all joyously working together—to instruct and to learn, to sow and to reap, to give and to receive, to build and to grow and to do all great things out of His pleasure and then to praise Him from whom it all comes?

Quite a radical departure from Social Security. Quite a departure such a church would be.

It is not hard to see. In Social Security, as in all World System programs, there is poverty.

In Him, there is abundance.

 

The only thing is that we have to want it, and the only way that can happen is if we want Him.

 

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May-June 2005

           

On Sunday, April 17th, Rick Warren of Purpose Driven Life fame gathered 30,000 devotees in Angels Stadium to celebrate 25 years of Saddleback, his thriving megachurch in Lake Forest, California. I don’t know much about what happened, except that there was some singing, some speaking, some baptizing,

…and two other things of note.

 

At some point, for some period of time, at least some of those present held up signs displaying the words “Whatever It Takes.” It could've been the whole stadium for all I know; I've only got the photograph to go on. When I contemplated the image, I presumed these Christians were expressing their commitment to really really really do what God says.

Really?

I thought about what one of those sign-wavers would say if I asked, “‘Whatever it takes?’ Does that mean you’d urge your church to jettison its 501c3 obligation so you may end your contract with the World System, and then fully appropriate all that God has for you to do exactly what it is that would change the world?”

I am under no delusion that the answer would invariably be either “Huh?” —certainly from the rank-and-file, or “It’s not that big a thing” —most likely from the leadership.

 The second item of note was the introduction of the very thing that Warren expects the faithful would do “whatever it takes” to do, namely his radical new plan called P.E.A.C.E: mobilizing small groups from hundreds of thousands of churches to adopt villages around the globe equipped with the “five smooth stones” of (P) Planting Churches, (E) Equipping Leaders, (A) Assisting the Poor, (C) Caring for the Sick, and (E) Educating the Next Generation.

 

All this is fine and dandy, it is just that this program has been going good for centuries. Sorry Rick, nothing new about it. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church is, and always has been on the forefront of P.E.A.C.E. activities to get more recruits for service in the Catholicist Nation. The Jesuits are experts at this kind of thing.

How wonderful that there are indeed so many poor, disadvantaged, and foolish people that we get to rescue. I mean, really, what would we do if, heaven forbid, no one was poor, disadvantaged, or foolish ever again? We can’t have that. So let’s just get all inspired at a mega-rally to do boffo things for people worse off than us—but, um, let’s not do too much or we’d have nothing to do later. I mean, really, if we could heal the sick with Jesus’ power like He said we could, then, goodness, we’d get bored, so let’s just care for them. And let’s be sure that when we see a poor person, we get all sympathetic and assist them in their misery—we don’t want them to dismiss our magnanimity so readily, now.

 

Has anyone ever thought seriously about taking out all that stuff completely? Ending the destitution and the exploitation doesn’t mean we can’t have robust purpose, vibrant relationships, and magnificent accomplishments for His kingdom. It just means we won’t do it as an adjunct division of the Romanist hegemony that incessantly enables sinful behavior for its constituents to get a high from codependent interactions that feed the destruction of their souls.

The avowed Christian working in an institution contractually tied to Babylon who says, “I’ll do whatever it takes” is lying. He won’t. He’ll only do enough to keep the game going.

Wait, you’re right, really. I shouldn’t presume. All these people may indeed be saying, honestly, that they will do whatever it takes. They may indeed be doing all they very-well can to keep people enslaved to the World System, administering the yoke of the law—perpetuating the mitigation of their sin without telling them how to get out of it altogether (and by Whom).

Yes. That’s the Ministry of Condemnation, doing whatever it takes. That’s good, that ministry. It’s good for an accurate assessment of the real problem: the wicked heart in each man and woman. But that gets real old, and real painful after a while. A nifty church program just won’t make that go away, for anyone, exploiter and exploited alike.

Thing is, when will those in the Ministry of Reconciliation be as committed?  The only reason God allows condemners to hang around is so those they encounter will turn to a reconciler.

Want to be the reconciler who does whatever it takes?

 

Give your heart to Christ so He can heal it. See, when you know you're actually truly loved, then they know you mean business when you love. If you’ve done that, if you're His and you want to really do what it takes, then

Get out of the System. End those contracts. There are a number of them, but two critical ones are first the declaration as a non-resident alien or assumption of government employment presuming taxable income, and second the church’s non-profit incorporation of the fellowship community. Both bind the believer to the World. Both give to Caesar what is God’s.

 

Want to do “Whatever It Takes”? Really?

Show Him that.

And then behold the hand of the Lord. It'll make this Rick Warren stuff look like piddle.

 

The Hand of the Lord  |  Contracts with the World   |   The 501c3 Obligation

 

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July-August 2005

 

The other night a friend and I saw the film Batman Begins, a fantastic allegory of the Catholicist Nation. As the character played by Katie Holmes drives Bruce Wayne through Gotham City, she describes the city’s power brokerage as keeping “the bad people rich and the good people scared.” This illumines the most significant theme of the film, and arguably the most telling characteristic of the Catholicist Nation:

 

Fear.

 

As a boy Bruce Wayne is introduced to searing fear, attacked by flying bats while trapped in an old dark well. He later agonizes that this abiding fear contributed to the death of his parents, both shot before his eyes. As a young man he immerses himself in a particularly severe penance, during which time he interacts with a group of highly skilled, monastically trained warriors known as the League of the Shadow.

At the conclusion of his stay, the League informs him that their immediate goal is to wipe out the entire population of Gotham City. Because of their pronounced evildoing, its citizens have been condemned to destruction. Wayne objects and resigns, but with all codependent engagements, terminating his involvement requires some degree of inflicted discomfort. Indeed, just after the League arrives in Gotham, its knights crash a lavish Wayne function and torch his home, leaving him to die. He escapes, becomes Batman, and commences an effort to stop the League from succeeding.

As a messiah figure, he reflects the universal theme of the desire that someone rescue them from their sin—from their fear. But the film’s approach is a common one in Catholicized society. Bad guys scheme to do horrible things, and a good guy struggling with bad things himself attempts to save everyone from the bad guys, and in many cases, from themselves. The torment of the hero's “own demons” makes it particularly sublime, and is a key part of the classic Greek thematic archetype—it’s been around for centuries.

The League’s solution to the presence of evil is to put an end to their lives altogether, and to accomplish this they plot to poison the people’s minds with an insanity inhalant, enticing all to murder one another. Batman’s alternative is to valiantly defend them from the menacing League by zipping around on wires and kickboxing a lot of bad guys. It is all great fun. There is a serious problem with the classic Catholicist approach, however.

Regrettably, the League is right.

 

People are condemned. They are indicted by their very own moral crimes, their sin that damages, sabotages, manipulates, destroys—just generally lays waste to all good things. The League should be doing what it does. Oh that a Batman could just smack League warriors all over the yard and we can go on about our business. But, ahem, our business is sin. What is so harrowing about it all is that exposed as such, the Catholicist shrugs and says, “Such is life.” And then he goes on fearing.

The League is a profound metaphor, really, for the real-life operation that has already poisoned society, and as such contributes greatly to its destruction. The real-life League then completes the scenario by extending some kind of intoxicating absolution to keep us immersed in some kind of rabid activity to ameliorate our shame. 

Really, it’d be nice if we could join Batman in his cause to make the World right. It’s universal: How we all want to just get at those bad people and stop them from hurting us and our loved ones. But we can’t. Why? It isn’t just that the bad people is us, it is also that we are so accustomed to using the World’s methods to set things right. What really happens to rich bad people who start getting remorseful? They get persuaded to stay on the payroll. What really happens to scared good people who start getting courageous? They get marginalized, dismissed, labeled vain and frivolous.

 

Hey, the World is the World.

 

In the Kingdom is freedom.

 

The real-life Messiah doesn't rescue us by merely kicking League butt. He can't, that's the World's way. He does it by submitting to death and taking the penalty for our sin Himself, and asking that we then walk with Him out of that World altogether.

It should be pointed out that in the film, the League of the Shadow has operatives working in positions of great authority to be sure all the instruments are in place for the destruction of Gotham. This is just like it is in real life. Furthermore, throughout much of the film exactly who they are working for is a mystery. This individual turns out to be a powerfully-aligned, spiritually-attuned, ascended Sun-Tzuan general/guru-type who runs the whole operation seamlessly, effortlessly, masterfully. Just like in real life.

Is this nothing other than a graphically lucid portrait of the Jesuit Order? Doing exactly what it is assigned to do as expert operatives in the ministry of condemnation? Counting on people to continue to destroy themselves so it can maintain its legitimacy as the militia of Cain? Serving a kindly, erudite, insidiously shrewd commander they affectionately call "Father General"?

There it is, doing its job dutifully. There, you can see it if you just look, it's getting as many as it can to live out the full glory of the World, mobilizing timid, anxious, desperate people—the more gallant their tikkun struggles are, the better.

 

God's way is to send His ambassadors to be holy and living sacrifices, loving one another even to death. They are called to pair up taking no bag, no extra sandals, and to move about in the Worldfinding the homes of those who have a desire for genuine reconciliation with God, for peace, for joy, for full deliverance from that body of despair. What is so phenomenalwell, really, it shouldn't be so surprising, but in a society so Catholicized it can be a bit tough to seeis that the militia can’t touch His ministers because by the blood of Jesus Christ they’re not sinners under that notice of condemnation.

They are the ones assigned to complete God's scenario.

They're out there, I know it. But I think some of them are still afraid of bats. I dunno.

 

Gotta get with the One who’s beaten the fear.

 

And it isn’t Batman.

 

Reconcilers

 

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This page was originally posted by David Beck at yourownjesus.net on November 1, 2004