THE TWIST

 C. S. Lewis wrote a brilliant book which he said was his most difficult to author. He called it "The Screwtape Letters" about which he said that he had to think backwards. The book is about one senior demon (Screwtape) advising a junior inexperienced demon (Wormwood) on how to deal with Christians, those people Screwtape describes as having "gone over to the Enemy." Writing such a book was wearing on the author as we can easily imagine. 

One piece of counsel Screwtape offers Wormwood, who's also his nephew, concerns something rampant in the church today.

 Screwtape writes. “On the other hand, we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means.” This would amount to using Christianity

A means toward what? Preferably toward personal advancement, Screwtape writes, “but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice.” He continues:

“The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop. Fortunately, it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner.”

"The Screwtape Letters" was published in that great year in American history, 1942, and as you can tell in the above paragraph, it's much more apropos now than back when. Televangelists promote Christianity as a means to more corpulent bank accounts, ever-flourishing health, and upward mobility. Their church services become pep rallies to get up and go out to live your best life now. 

In the book, Screwtape advises his young ward to influence men to work toward a Utopia on earth, something impossible since God placed an angel with a flaming sword at Eden's gate, thus preventing mankind from getting back to Paradise in a fallen state. The message is a clear warning to those who’d be tempted to use the Gospel to build utopias here on Earth. Isn't that what the social justice warriors are trying to do and, sad to say, many churches and Christian authors are caving in to them.

SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN DENMARK

 

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” That's from the great Shakespeare himself in one of the most famous pieces of literature: "Hamlet."

That was said as Horatio and Hamlet see the ghost of Hamlet’s father beckoning to his son. Hamlet’s father had been king and was murdered by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius.

When the ghost beckons Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus try to prevent Hamlet from following the apparition, afraid of what harm might come to him.

The comment about something's being “rotten in Denmark” was a summary of the corruption under Claudius’s rule in the home of the Danes.

The next line, which is never included when someone uses the phrase today, paints a picture of faith: he says, “Heaven will direct it," that is, "We should let God take care of it.”

Something is rotten in Denmark when it comes to an American experiment which began in July 1963, also tried in other countries--that experiment has failed. Now the results are in: American education, public and private, has failed. The experiment, still on-going, is that we can educate without morality and expect good results. 

What's the evidence of failure? William Jeynes, a Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach with graduate degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, has listed the evidence of the rottenness:

Academic achievement has plummeted, including SAT scores

Increased rate of out-of-wedlock births

 Increase in illegal drug use

 Increase in juvenile crime

 Deterioration of school behavior

We might add that an American university should provide the parents of all prospective students the following guarantee: "In less than four years at our school we will teach your child to hate his country." It's only fair to state the sticker price of the education they offer upfront since the old folks at home are going to be slicing a financial vein in their savings so their child(ren) can gain such an education.

The fetid smell wafting from the groves of academe` has a historical antecedent as stated by Tova Friedman,  a survivor of the Holocaust. She said, "Education without morality is completely worthless. Hitler and the whole war was orchestrated by very intelligent people, they were psychologists, lawyers, doctors, scientists & engineers. The people on top where excellent thinkers."

C. S. Lewis wrote: "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil."

Here's a testimony from a former teacher (there are a lot of former teachers these days because they couldn't stop or stand the stench): "Having taught in the state’s public school system for the past six years, I can attest to the fact that moral values have deteriorated since I left the teaching profession in 1980 to enter the insurance business. Cheating is not only rampant, but all too often is not viewed as morally wrong."

Just how bad is it? "The Oregon Education Department has announced that teaching that there is one right answer in math [is wrong}. (Aside from the fact that my grades in any given math course would have vastly improved under this dictum, something is truly wrong in Denmark.)

Another example from history, this one from East Germany before the fall of the wall: Esther is a 13 year-old girl who came home from school crying. Esther is a straight A student, top of her class in everything. When asked, "Why are you crying?" she said, "Because I can't go to school anymore." 

She explained, saying that there's going to be a parade tomorrow and we're all to stand beneath the huge head of Karl Marx and swear an oath to the state. (Sounds like something eerily akin to Daniel 3). She said that she told the teacher she was not going to swear such an oath. The teacher told her that she would be forced to quit school and go to work in a slipper factory.  

What's going on? In schools and all over the place in the West, there's enormous pressure to keep the practice of Christianity private. This also applies to any talk about God in public. In schools, public and private, God talk is forbidden so let's call it what it is and let's call what happened to the 13 year old what is it: intellectual murder. It's nothing short of the tyranny of the mind. 

Something is rotten in Denmark. We're in Denmark.  

 

Dr. SEUSS

CBS News reports that "Six Dr. Seuss books — including 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street' and 'If I Ran the Zoo' — will stop being published because of insensitive imagery," the business that preserves and protects the author's legacy said. "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong," Dr. Seuss Enterprises Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author's and illustrator's birthday.

The other books affected are "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!," and "The Cat's Quizzer." This move has been in the works since last year as "Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists in the field as part of our review process. We then worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles," it said.

eBay has jumped into the mix by preventing the resale of the six Dr. Seuss books discontinued this week by the late author’s publisher.

“At eBay, we have a strict policy against hate and discrimination to ensure our platform remains a safe, trusted and inclusive environment for our global community of buyers and sellers," spokeswoman Parmita Choudhury told the Washington Examiner’s Haley Victory Smith.

 But then there's a best-selling book in which evil lives. When that book went on sale after 70 years of lurking in its deserved pit of darkness, it sold 85,000 copies in one country alone, staying on the best-seller list for 35 consecutive weeks. The book was so evil that at one time 12,000,000 copies had been burned. 

Its evil has been translated into at least 16 languages — including Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. In April 2017, the Japanese government approved its use in their schools, classifying it as "teaching material."

 When it was first published, some literary critics called it "rambling nonsense." Almost every page of that book singles out for hatred and demonization one miniscule group of people that comprise less than 1% of the world's population.

The book with evil between its covers is Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Its  distribution was ubiquitous in Germany; every couple received a free copy at their marriage ceremony; from 1925 to summer 1945, it sold over 12 million copies and was translated into more than a dozen languages, including a braille edition for blind Germans.

In the book, Hitler wrote that the Jews were bent on destroying the Gentile world and were controlling everything behind the scenes. World Jewry, Hitler claimed, was responsible for every thing he didn't like. He believed and wrote that the Jews were a disease on the body of the human race, sub-human, vermin fit only to be extinguished.

But here's the thing: until eBay comes to its senses, you can't purchase Dr. Seuss. You can buy Mein Kampf.

 

SORRY, I DON'T HAVE TIME

 A university professor is encouraging a student to get down and do some in-depth, super-serious Bible study, telling him that an hour on Sunday isn't enough. He admonished him, saying, "Three hours of continuous study, i. e. at one sitting, is a good start."

The student objected, saying, "I don't have time." 

Not to be put off, the professor asks him to keep a record of how much time he spends on Facebook and other social media for one week, then come back and tell him he doesn't have the time.

I thought about that challenge and remembered a 2016 study I'd read and saved a few months ago, but before you read and think about it, beware for reasons that will be evident. The stats are most likely worse today in 2021.

The lifespan of the average person is 78 years and in that average lifetime you will spend:

11,762 days looking at a digital screen which equals 41% of your life.

8, 521 days sitting which equals 29.7% of your life. 

1,951 days socializing with others which equals 6.8% of your life.

98 days exercising which equals 0.69% of your life.

1.5 years looking for lost items.

6 years waiting in lines. 

You will receive 1,000 advertising messages a day.

In that amount of time, you could run the circumference of the earth 2.2 times.

Every day is precious; why waste it on things that are of little value? Most live their lives committing murder; just killing time. 

The moral? Psalm 90:12.

 

 

LET'S DO SOME COMPARING

 
There are courses in college offered called “Comparative Religion.” Comparative religion "is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices, themes, and impacts (including migration) of the world's religions." That's a mouthful directly out of a college catalogue.  

Odds are that a person taking such a course emerges liberalized or even hostile to Christianity. But let’s do a little comparing together of the the one true God of the Jews and the gods of their ancient neighbors.

The Baals of Syria and Mesopotamia were local deities who man made happy if he went about sacrificing his fellow men. In the words of one historian, the Baals were at one and the same time arbitrary and dreadful objects of worship.

Let’s compare the never-ending supply of  the gods of Egypt with the One true God and the Bible, and in the words of Russell Kirk, we find that the Egyptian gods were, in his words, lunatics.

Going over to Greece, their gods were personified forces of nature nobody would think of imitating. Besides that, ancient Israel’s contemporaries deified their rulers; the Jews never turned David or Solomon into gods.

When it came to living out their beliefs, the pagans had their temple prostitutes. It was part of their worship. The gods of Greece and Rome were indifferent to justice and righteousness. They laid down no ethical standards; they were too busy sinning themselves.  

Comparing the Romans at worship, with the Israelites, the Romans had their lares and penates--they were groups of deities who protected the family and the Roman state. Although different, the Lares and Penates were often worshiped together at household shrines. Each family had their own particular lares and penates as objects of worship not to be angered. (In the movie, "The Gladiator," the hero of the film had his little wooden statues with him and those were the lares and penates of his family.)

 Considered spirits of the dead, the lares guarded homes, crossroads, and the city. Every Roman family had its own guardian, to protect the household and ensure that the family line didn't die out.

But the God of Israel was no force of nature or relegated to a single clan. Yahweh had an ethical relationship with the nation of Israel who made eternal covenants with His people. He forbade them to make a molten image of Him. When the Roman army crashed through Jerusalem in 70 AD and rampaged into the Temple, they tore away the veil and entered the Holy of Holies. It was then they were surprised to find no golden images of Israel’s God. That was different.

Rather than ferocious and capricious, Jehovah was kind to His people when they lived according to His Law. He loved them. But no worshiper of Zeus, Astart, Baal, or Molech thought of those gods as the author of any law for man, nor believed that such a one could be loved. Their gods made no covenants.

To live in a pagan world was to live in a world of chance and accidents because their gods were whimsical. They gave no principles or rules for living. They did as they pleased with human beings with no thought of justice, right, or wrong.

Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet who was writing his verse between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer of "The Iliad" fame. Hesiod summed up the ancient religions when he wrote about the chief of the Greek gods:

"Zeus rules the world and with resistless sway
Takes back tomorrow what he grants today."

Comparison? There is no comparison.

AMERICA AT PLAY

 Satan is involving America, its leaders, its elites, its celebrities, its politicians, its opinion makers, its ordinary chaps, and its journalists in his game called, "Let's Pretend." And many are now at play in what's becoming our national sport. 

Let's call the sport, "Let's Pretend." We’re living in a let’s-pretend-culture. For example—let’s all pretend that if a male says he’s a female, we're all to pretend he is, although his DNA and all other scientific evidence says he's not. 

And, according to the rules of the game, we're to  pretend that such a contention is normal, that we shouldn't bat so much as one eyelash. If boys want to compete against girls in next month’s track meet, let’s pretend that’s fair and all's well to the extent that if you're a father and your daughter is on the track team, if you take her out of the competition and go home, then something's wrong with you because of your bigoted and hateful attitudes, so you should be ashamed of yourself. 

Let's also pretend that we can hit delete on the creation account described in Genesis 1-2 and instead, indoctrinate children from K-12 with evolution and there won't be any untoward repercussions from that replacement.

If a scholar says there are 50+ sexes, let’s pretend there are, even though DNA says there are two. While we’re at it, let’s pretend socialism and communism are much better systems than capitalism. Let’s pretend that Stalin and Mao didn’t kill all those millions and if they did, let’s pretend those murders were necessary to achieve a utopia that, according to the rules of the game, we have to pretend exists out there somewhere. 

Let's pretend that there's no absolute truth even though there is, as evidenced by the absolute pronouncements by those who don't believe in absolute truth, such as, "A woman has a right to choose." That's erroneous, but it's stated as if it were absolute truth. That' about as absolute as you can get, but we notice that they never finish the sentence and say ". . . to kill a baby." They don't finish the sentence because that would be too distasteful and would cast a new light on the debate.

We’re living in an era in which our elected and appointed emperors have no clothes, but let’s pretend they’re fully clothed in sartorial splendor and they're in their right minds as they make insane pronouncements such as "The University of Pennsylvania Dental School should create a fund to identify bias in dentistry." What? Wait. What in the world is going on? The university dutifully obeyed and played the Let's Pretend game.

And then there’s the deeper problem: it’s the idea that everybody must be forced to to play the Let's Pretend game or else. We're passing laws to ensure everyone participates. Or else they face the consequences of ruination politically, educationally, financially, and vocationally which is the latest version of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace of fire for anyone who refused to bow before that image. 

The Let's Pretend game continues unabated; no end in sight. The rules are set up that way; the game must go on and on and on. We need some Shadrachs, Meshachs, and Abed-negos to stand ramrod straight and say, "No!"

LEGALISTS OUT OF CONTROL: HAMMER AND TONGS

 To many believers today, the fact that the Bible teaches a different way of giving for us than that of Israel under the shadow of Mt. Sinai is a new thought, but there it is in plain sight, in black and white in II Corinthians 9:7, "Each one must do just as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." 

While under the Mosaic Law, there was no "as he decides in his own heart;" the Law made the decision: 10% of their income which was a flat income tax for the Jews. Then there's I Corinthians 16:2 in which Paul gives further instructions: "On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save as he may prosper, so that no collections need to be made when I come." 

Couple those texts with Romans 6:14, "For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under the Law but under grace," and lo and behold, the tithing system has been abolished! (Some may seek to use this new method of grace giving to excuse their "no-giving," but that's a perversion of the truth, which is another subject.) 

But legalism is a difficult beast to control. Fallen man carries on an illicit love affair with rules, traditionalism, regulations, and laws so that he may inflate his life's resume with pride. And then there's the legalist, armed with hammer and tongs who's flat-out out of scriptural control. One Bible teacher on a foreign mission field reports just such rampaging beasts of legalism.

With hammer and tongs, these pastors go after their congregations hurling soteriological threats from the pulpit into the defenseless pews. How so? They stand behind their pulpits and connect tithing with the gospel, telling their congregants that if they tithe, they keep their salvation, but if they do not tithe, they lose it. By this, the legalist in sheep's clothing guarantees himself a full stomach and an overflowing offering plate. 

But they don't leave it there. They instruct their listeners that tithing will bring them the coveted trio: wealth, happiness, and prosperity. Wait. What? That sounds familiar, very familiar. It's what we hear from television, radio, and CD presentations of the good life that awaits those who give to this, that, and the other ministries. 

It's what we read in the "Your Best Life Now books," and as we play the new "Best Life Now Board Game which "enables players to step beyond the one-on-one nature of the book[s] and feel, touch, and live [the] 7 Steps To Living At Your Full Potential with your friends and family. Your Best Life Now: The Game is an entertaining and educational way to take inventory of yourself and accountability of your actions." It's for 2-6 players, age 16 and above and will take an hour of your time. (It can be yours for $27.95.)

The imposition of tithing for keeping your salvation upon the unwary smacks of John Tetzel's sales of indulgences to help finance the bondage system of the Roman Catholic system; it was Tetzel who promised, "As soon as the coins clink in the money chest, the souls of those for whom the indulgences had been purchased would fly out of purgatory."

The saying is old but true, the more things change, the more they stay the same.