While it may seem that the world is
becoming an increasingly bleak place, I submit that Hope abounds! It’s easy to be consumed with anxiety and
fear over the incessant drumbeat of bad news throughout the world. News outlets seem to be almost gleeful as
they announce the latest brutal winter/spring storm, then follow it up with yet
another atrocity committed by ISIS or one of the other terrorist groups
competing for world attention by trying to outdo one another, upping the ante
week after week. One group beheads 21
men, a few days later another group kills 40, and the following week yet
another splinter group guns down 147 Christians on a college campus.
Meanwhile back in America, we continue
to cut the Defense Department budget, we make dangerous concessions to Iran to
save face after months of failed diplomacy.
Our Justice Department occupies its time investigating ‘civil rights’
offenses against transsexuals in prison who are denied injections to maintain
their altered appearance, while refusing to review Hillary Clinton’s illegal
destruction of public records. The Obama
administration is using the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) to file
lawsuits against religious organizations for refusal to pay for
abortion-inducing drugs, despite having lost several pivotal cases that went
all the way to the Supreme Court. I
guess they’re so busy using the Justice Department to enforce the new
administrative laws they’ve put on the books, that they simply don’t have the
time nor the will to enforce actual laws passed by Congress, such as the
immigrations laws, or the voter-rights laws, both of which they claim they can
ignore under the principle of “prosecutorial discretion,” just like they
refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act until they could get it
overturned by the Supreme Court.
Every presidency is characterized by a
theme or ‘doctrine.’ In my opinion the ‘Obama
doctrine’ will be known as “The Obama non-enforcement doctrine.” Imagine if this precedent were carried on by
all future presidents. What would be the
point of having laws if the president could simply ignore the ones he dislikes? A Republican president could simply ignore
environmental laws, tax laws, and whatever else conflicted with his personal
agenda. Moreover, what would be the
point of having a constitution if it were to be regarded as merely a guideline,
rather than a guiding principle? If this
were to be the case, we should change the Presidential oath of office to omit
the part where the newly elected president swears to “uphold the constitution…
and the laws of the United States of America.”
This ostensible lawlessness stems from
the modern trend that has its roots in philosophical existentialism. If one accepts the maxim that there is no
obligation to follow the precepts of natural law (which is the basis for our
Constitution), because every person has the ‘right’ to determine what is right
and what is wrong for themselves, then the only thing standing between anarchy
and order is the might of government to impose its will on people. When Hobbes wrote “The Leviathan” he proposed the need for a massive bureaucracy
comprised of super-smart people who would then tell everybody else what to do,
because his underlying assumption was that everyone selfishly only cares about
themselves. When our founding fathers
wrote the constitution, they were well aware of the pitfalls of bureaucracy and
their primary goal was to protect people from government intrusion. They set up our form of government as a means
of preventing abuse of power by diluting it among the branches of government
with checks and balances that are now routinely thwarted or ignored. Madison, Jefferson, et al, could never have
imagined that the United States government would become so powerful and have
set up the massive bureaucracy ushered in by FDR when he set up the powerful
cabinet departments and gave them the power to write administrative laws
without congressional oversight.
All this points to the decline of our
once great Republic, as it inches inexorably toward becoming a socialist state,
similar to those in Europe where government makes up half or more of the GNP,
and the state controls every aspect of life. So what in the world might this have to do
with Easter? The Jews in Jesus’ time
were living under the repression of Rome, and hoping for a Messiah who would
lead them out of the darkness of suppression and restore their once great
nation, freeing them from Rome’s domination.
What they got instead was the Messiah who had been foretold with amazing
accuracy in numerous prophecies and in the Psalms. Leading up to Easter, we heard many of these
prophecies from Isaiah who foretold a ‘suffering servant’ who would suffer and
die at the hands of his enemies, but who would mysteriously, “rule forever.” The many prophecies were so precise that they
uncannily described Jesus’ torture and death, even down to His last moments on
the cross when they broke tradition by not breaking his bones, and cast lots
for His garments, even as Jesus Himself quoted Psalm 31 just before dying.
Jesus did not conquer the Romans by
establishing an earthly kingdom or a political movement. Instead, He accepted the very worst the world
can do to a person. They mocked Him,
tortured Him, stripped Him of dignity, humiliated Him, and to make sure He was
eliminated, killed Him publicly in a show of merciless and brutal power. All of this He accepted… then simply rose
again from the dead. He demonstrated
once and for all time that no matter how bad things get in this life, God
prevails. No one can destroy our spirit
or our eternal life. This is the really ‘Good
News!” Jesus did not seek to avoid
confrontation or death, He accepted it, suffered the worst the world can throw
at anyone, and then rose above it.
If you’ve been a reader of my blogs,
you know that I believe in chaos theory. Throughout history all the major changes
affecting earth, biology, humanity, and civilization, are marked by a process
whereby things get progressively worse, trending toward entropy or
collapse. Then suddenly, something happens
that changes everything: new species emerge; old civilizations disappear and
are replaced by new ones. This is an
iterative (repeating) process in which ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ I believe that the chaos we are currently experiencing,
the declining morals of our country, the shifting balance of power coming about
as ethic Europeans slowly commit civilizational genocide while Mid-Eastern
groups grow in numbers and influence, are all signs of impending chaos. I don’t have a clue what might trigger the
next major change that resets the balance of power. It might be the emergence of a leader like
George Washington, who more than anyone else was responsible for winning the
Revolutionary War and setting up our Republic, despite all odds to the contrary. It might be something more dramatic like a
worldwide crisis. But I do know that no
matter how bad things get, God will prevail.
He will keep His promises to us, no matter how horrible things may seem
to be, and regardless of what we may have to suffer. In the end, God’s will, (not mans’) will
prevail; and if we respond to His invitation, He and He alone will save us and
allow us to participate in His Resurrection for all eternity.
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