STEPS TO TYRANNY

 1932 saw the publication of what many consider a masterpiece of literature and that book is still with us today. It's a science fiction novel of a new world, a totalitarian world, and hence the title, "Brave New World." In the introductory chapters, Aldous Huxley describes the various ways the totalitarians produced the brave new world and kept it under their control. We'll examine some of them..

The book begins in medias res; in the middle of things: the totalitarians are firmly entrenched and in control. One of them is showing a group of his students the ropes of how they keep the society under their iron fist. He takes them to a place where there were a large group of very, very young children. In front of the children were many, many books, all of them just lying there in no particular order or organization. 

The children, being children, start to do what children do: they crawl over to the books and begin to touch, handle, pick them up, open them, then crumple or tear the pages. Something suddenly hits them. What the children don't know is that beneath their feet is a broad strip designed to convey an electric current and when triggered, the children experience an unpleasant pain of voltage, just enough to inflict pain.

The children drop the books and recoil, moving away from them. This procedure is repetitive, day after day. The purpose is to ingrain in the children a life-long aversion to books.

Another means of control was to abolish anything familial. In the brave new world, the word and concept of a father was unknown. Over time, nobody had ever known heard of a father. The people were taught that there used to be fathers, the world was full of them and therefore, full of misery. 

There used to be mothers, brothers, and sisters along with uncles and aunts. But families were deemed obscene so the words, mother, father, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister were removed from the dictionary and therefore from memory. Now everyone belonged to everyone else.The government had classified monogamy as evil, a relic in the used-to-be, that is, "BF." Those are two letters that bring us to another totalitarian tool.

In the brave new world, the totalitarians developed a new dating system in which every event was BF or AF. Gone were BC and AD. BF stood for "Before Ford" and AF meant "After Ford." These were references to Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile. Along with no more BC or AD, the one copy of the Bible in the brave new world was locked away in the headquarters of the supreme controller.  

Going back to the children, there was another thing the controlling class of elites did: they encouraged hedonism along with erotic play. When these and other tools were combined, the brave new world was born. It was a world in which they viewed any difference as a threat to society and so, everybody must be conditioned to conform by a thousand and a thousand more repetitions of slogans and experiences. 

The repeated motto of the brave new world was, "Community Identity Stability." Community is the first word because the good of the community was more important than anything else. Identity is important because you are allowed to be an individual within the community guidelines. Stability is what makes you happy in the brave new world.

You'll find "Brave New World" in the fiction section of your local library. But does any of the above sound familiar in 2021?

 

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF A BLINDED MIND

 II Corinthians 4:3-4: "And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they will not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." From this verse, we see that there is a worldwide conspiracy in motion: Satan and his minions are at work to keep the unbelievers of the human race blinded to the accurate gospel as recorded in I Corinthians 15.

One might ask, "If God selected those in eternity past who would be forever consigned to hell, why is Satan at work blinding the minds of men, since they're pre-selected to go there anyway? His blinding accomplishes nothing. That's a good question and one that bedevils the Calvinist, but not one we're going to consider. Instead, we're going to reflect upon how Lucifer does this blinding. Of course, there's more than one way, but we're going to put Scripture with Scripture and consider only one avenue in one particular case; the case of one Jewish  man and one particular Jewish grandfather. 

Let's begin with a text, something Jesus said to a group of unbelievers: "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. . . . Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies." Christ is throwing this hand grenade into the midst of a group of those Jews who were all riled up against Him. He never sought to flatter them nor court their favor. 

In Jesus' statement, He gives us a bit of satanology: Satan is a liar--he told the first one on the planet, so he's the birther of the lie. His lie was that the human being could be God and decide for himself what was right and what was wrong. Let's couple that with how he blinds the minds of men: he lies. And this brings us to that aforementioned Jewish man and his aforementioned Jewish grandfather. 

The Jewish man, let's call him Joe Cephus and let's put him in Brooklyn, USA. Joe is from a religious family and is close to his grandfather, having a great respect for the father of his father. They have a Bible in their home, what we would call the "Old Testament," but of course, no New Testament. And this is where the lie surfaces and Joe's grandfather tells it. 

Whenever Joe raises a question about the New Testament or even when he doesn't mention it, his grandfather is on the spot to tell him, "Stay away from it, don't read it, any of it." By this, his grandfather is doing two things, one intentional and the other inadvertent. The first thing he's deliberately doing is causing his grandson to ask a question: "Why?" And he's eager to answer. 

He tells him, "Because it's a book about how to persecute and kill Jews!" Wait. What? Persecute and kill Jews?! Where did that come from? It came right out of II Corinthians 4:3-4 -- the conspiracy to blind the minds of the unbeliever, Jew and Gentile. It came from the father of lies and that lie will do nicely to blind Joe's mind to the gospel.In Joe's mind, it must be a terrible book.

But, unbeknownst to the grandfather, by his stern dictum, "STAY AWAY FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT," he had switched on Joe's curiosity which meant that Joe just had to read it. And that's what he did. You tell Joe not to do something and he'll move heaven and earth, swim every river, and climb every mountain to do it.

As he starts to read it, the first thing he notices is that the focus of the New Testament is on a Jew and that the Jews are the authors of it.Then he sees that those Jewish authors quote his Old Testament, the Bible in his home also written by Jews, and they're quoting it favorably, even authoritatively. As he reads on, the sees that the Christians aren't persecuting and killing the Jews, it's the other way around in the book of Acts. Then he reads that Paul, a Jew, wrote, "I could wish myself accursed if it would mean that my kinsman according to the flesh would be saved."In addition he could find no instructions in the books of the New Testament on how to persecute and kill Jews. As he reads more and more, the veil begins to lift. Joe trusts Jesus, saying with Thomas, "My Lord and my God."The power of the Old and New Testaments has destroyed the lie.

This raises a  question for the unbeliever: what lie(s) have you believed about the Bible and the Jew on whom it focuses? Dispel the lies and find the truth by doing what Joe did: read it.

CHOOSE TODAY

 In Joshua's farewell address to Israel, he made an iconic statement that continues to echo down the millennia of human history: "Choose for yourselves today whom you will serve:. . . as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” 

And just who is this Lord? We find the answer in the Bible:

• Psalm 36:7. How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
• Psalm 109:26.  Help me, LORD my God; save me according to your unfailing love. ...
• 1 Corinthians 13:13.  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
• 1 John 4:9-10.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ...
• Zephaniah 3:17. The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. ...
• John  3:16: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  
• Romans 5:8: But God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
• I John 1:19: We love because He first loved us.

What kind of love is God's love? The New Testament defines it: "Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. ⁵ It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, ⁶ it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; ⁷ it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." (I Corinthians 13)

Then we find that God is merciful:

Ephesians 2:4-5: But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, ⁵ even when we were dead ^[a]in our wrongdoings, made us alive together ^[b]with Christ (by grace you have been saved),

 Deuteronomy 4:31: For the Lord your God is a compassionate God; He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them.  

Titus 3:5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,

The upshot of all these verses is that God loves the human race so much that He would rather die than condemn a person to hell. And that's exactly what He did.

Now let's compare all those verses with another choice--Calvinism's God: Calvin said  "Now...he [God] arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction." 

From this we would conclude that in some mysterious, secret way, somehow God is "glorified" by condemning people to hell before they were ever born who had no  choice in the matter, who were doomed from the womb, and who were born so spiritually dead that it was impossible for them to understand the gospel. And this God is glorified by torturing those billions and billions of  people in hell forever? One author asked, "What kind of love is this?"

Let's use an analogy: a person raise puppies for the sole purpose of torturing them. Let's say he decides that he's going to torture four out of every five of them. He'll keep one out of every 5 for his preferred pet. Before they are ever born, he's decreed, decided, and determined that such is the purpose of all but one of every five. 80% are foreordained to such a fate. In what way does that glorify him? Is it any wonder that the description of such a God as that has led people into atheism? 

Which description of God sounds like it comes right out of the Bible? Does Calvin's portrayal? The answer is so obvious, there's no need to insult your intelligence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ...

  1 John 4:19 ESV / 8 helpful votes

  We love because he first loved us.

 

FLEEING AFGHANISTAN

 We have seen what oppression looks like. It looks like the chaos of thousands of men, women, and children running into an airport in Afghanistan. As some run, they carry babies and small children. 

We have seen what oppression looks like: It looks like the chaos of people trying to climb on the outside of planes, holding onto its wings or whatever they can grab hold of even when its speeding down the runway and taking off into the Afghan sky. 

We have seen what oppression looks like. It looks like the chaos of women handing their babies across barbed wire and into the the arms of American soldiers. It looks like masses of desperate human beings jamming themselves into an airport waving thousands of passports that they believe will get them onto a plane, any plane going anywhere away from the chaos. Oppression looks like the fear on the faces of hundreds and hundreds more in hiding who know that men with guns to shoot and kill them are coming and men with blades to behead them are searching for them door to door. 

But does the horrified observer know what they're running from and running to? Do those involved in the chaos have any idea what they're really running from and to? 

When we dig deeply to the roots of the from and the to, a clear picture emerges. The thousands are fleeing an announcement by those taking over the country: "The guiding light of the Afghan rule will be Sharia." and Sharia is Islam's legal system, derived from the Quran. 

So there it is: they're running from the imposition of the Quran as Islam's legal system. Let's shorten that to say that they're running from the Quran, but let's go further and ask the "to" question: what are they hanging on to planes and handing their babies over barbed wire to get to?

They are desperately trying to get to a country whose heritage is Bible-soaked. They couldn't articulate it, but that's what's been happening. They are running from the Quran to get to the Bible.