They Are Worthy!

And I heard the Angel of the Waters saying: Righteous art Thou, who art and who wast, O Holy One, because Thou didst judge these things;

for they poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and Thou hast given them blood to drink: They are worthy!

Revelation 16:5-6, from David Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance

An extended discussion of these verses by David Chilton follows:

There is, therefore, an “Angel of the Waters” (in terms of St. John’s zodiacal progression, this is presumably the cherub of the fourth quarter, Aquarius);[1] he, along with all of God’s personal creation, rejoices in God’s righteous government of the world. God’s strict justice, summarized in the principle of lex talionis, is evidenced in this judgment; the punishment fits the crime. They poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and Thou hast given them blood to drink. As we have seen, the characteristic crime of Israel was always the murder of the prophets (cf. 2 Chron. 36:15-16; Luke 13:33-34; Acts 7:52): Jesus named this fact as the specific reason why the blood of the righteous would be poured out in judgment upon that generation (Matt. 23:31-36).

The Angel of the Waters concludes with an interesting statement: By the apostates’ shedding of blood, they are worthy! This is a deliberate parallel to the message of the New Song: “Worthy art Thou to take the Book, and to break its seals; for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase us for God with Thy blood” (5:9). Just as the Lamb received His reward on the basis of the blood He shed, so these persecutors have now received the just recompense for their bloodshed.

God had once promised the oppressed of Israel that He would render to their enemies according to their evil works:

I will feed your oppressors with their own flesh,

And they will become drunk with their own blood as with sweet wine;

And all flesh will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior,
And your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. (Isa. 49:26)

This has, as usual, become reversed: Now it is Israel, the Persecutor par excellence, that will be forced to drink its own blood and devour its own flesh. This was true in much more than a figurative sense: As God had foretold through Moses (Deut. 28:53-57), during the siege of Jerusalem the Israelites actually became cannibals; mothers literally ate their own children.[2] Because they shed the blood of the saints, God gives them their own blood to drink (cf. 17:6; 18:24).

---

[1] The mention of the Angel of the Waters also serves as another of the many subtle connections between the Book of Revelation and St. John’s Gospel; see John 5:3-4.

[2] See Josephus, The Jewish War, vi.iii,3-4.

David Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance, page 401-402

Isaiah 49:26 has come about more than once in history, as God smashes the armies of His enemies. The destruction of the Era of European Dominance in a frenzy of suicidal slaughter marks only the most obvious repetition of this Divine Ruling.

But when it comes to the eating of your own flesh in today’s world, I would point more to abortion than anything else. Sure, the Chinese excelled in this: but so did many East Asians and Europeans…and Black Americans.

That’s the thing about the Shining Sword of God: it has two edges.

Even the original ruling of Isaiah against the enemies of Israel eventually returned to crush the nation of Israel itself to the ground, once it decided to despise Christ in favour of Caesar.

The Angel of the Waters concludes with an interesting statement: By the apostates’ shedding of blood, they are worthy!

God — and His senior servants! — are capable of levels of mocking sarcasm that I, with a fairly sarcastic personality myself, can only cringe before.

Again, I strongly advise not getting on God’s bad side.

A Model Citizen is Rewarded

Lessons:

• This woman had three sons: for many women today, this is a luxury that they will never have.
  • Even three sons — or three billion dollars, for that matter — cannot protect you, if God stands against you. God comes first.
  • A son full of filial piety to his mother can not protect her, and her love cannot bring him back. Men cannot save you.
    • A quick note on the greatest form of idolatry in all of human history. Surprisingly, it isn’t Beast-worship, exalting power, money & control (as described in Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance, chapters 12 & 13, which discusses Revelation 12 & 13)
      
      It’s the worship of family: placing mother and father, blood and kin, above the very commandments of God himself.
      
      He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. — Matthew 10:37

• Note that the woman is angry, because the country is rich which she, an obedient servant of the State, is poor. Don’t trust the Beast to keep its promises.
  • The scary thing is, God is very likely to hear this unbeliever’s cry over injustice, lies, and broken promises. And by the time He is done, this old woman will soon have an entire nation to share in her poverty.
    
    And to share in her distinct lack of a future.
    
    Divine Vengeance is easy.
    Divine Forgiveness, Healing, Restitution: these things are HARD.
    Costly and rare beyond imagination.
    Costly enough that only the blood of Christ can secure them.

Summary:

The world will be inherited by those who love God, and despise the Beast.

Those who love the Beast, and hate God, will be disinherited. In time, and on earth.

Those who place blood and kin above God will also have be disinherited.
Regardless of how many strong sons they may have for a time.

Learn the hard lessons other people paid for.

Do better than they did.

Fear the Lord.

---

Quote from The Place of Biblical Law in Society

—<Quote Begins>—

The law of God thus is a charter and constitution for a decentralized society in which the basic powers of government are exercised by God’s covenant people in their self-government in every sphere, in their families, their vocations, the tithe agencies they create to minister to a variety of social problems and needs, and so on.

It cannot be stressed too heavily that social financing is a necessity. If God’s covenant people do not provide it, then the state must and will. The present welfare state is in part due to the dereliction of Christians who have withdrawn the faith into the inner life of man. In those cultures where the state does not fund social services, brigandage takes over rapidly as the needy seize what they need: eighteenth-century England, for example, is evidence of this, and the death penalty for as many as two hundred plus offenses could not keep the hungry from stealing.

Wherever the Christian community abandons its necessary task of government and help, other forces take it over. Our Lord teaches us something we often do not choose to remember, that service is power:

25. … Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

26. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

27. And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:

28. Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Matt. 20:25–28)

The word in verse 26 translated as “minister” is diakonos, servant, and in verse 27, “servant” translates doulos, slave, servant. Our Lord is emphatic: service is power, and the Gentiles fail to recognize this and so substitute the exercise of brute force for service. Today, however, the ungodly have borrowed from the church things the church often forgets, namely, that service is power. Hence, the modern state has created an unprecedented form of power by taking over the church’s diaconal services.

—<Quote Ends>—

“Fear the Lord” does not only apply to individuals and families.

It applies to nations, too.

(Some say that it EVEN APPLIES TO CHURCHES! *Gasp*)

Starting Over

If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”

T. S. Eliot

Christian Reconstruction is going to be a long process.

I don’t think there will be many centuries of barbarism, though: perhaps a century or two.

Rebuilding begins when the idol of the day, the State, is gone… from the hearts of Christians.

Black and white alike.

Covenantal Guilt

Whenever I hear white Americans say “my family had nothing to do with slavery so why should I apologize” I think of Willy Brandt.

Willy Brandt was Germany’s Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. In 1970, he made an historic visit to Poland. Brandt came to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto—an open-air walled prison where the Nazis forced Jews to live before “liquidating” it in 1943. Brandt came to acknowledge Germany’s culpability in the murder of 3 million Polish Jews—90% of the country’s Jewish population and nearly half of the 6 million Jews killed and burned to ash by the Nazis.

Brandt was there to lay a wreath. But as he approached the memorial, he fell to his knees in anguish. It was an act of deep humility and courage. At the time, there were older Germans who hated it. Who saw it as a sign of weakness. Brandt’s gesture could not bring back 6 million murdered Jews or the millions of European civilians also murdered. But it was the beginning of Germany’s true reckoning with the past.

It’s important to add that Willy Brandt fled Nazi Germany as a young man and survived the war in hiding as a dissident. He was a marked man by the Nazis often escaping capture and death. So if anyone had an excuse to say “I’m not responsible for what my country did”—it was him. But Brandt understood that he was part of a society that committed mass murder on an unimaginable scale. And he had to act.

Brandt knelt in Warsaw a few years before I was born. But as a descendant of victims, I remember learning about what he did—even as a child. It wasn’t going to erase the past…but it was a start toward reconciliation and building a more just society

As a boy in the early 1980s, I remember my parents had friends in their 40s (close to my age today) who had numbers tattooed on their arms. Holocaust survivors. They were young and vibrant. I remember that. And by that time, their trauma had been recognized by much of the world. It didn’t change their pain and the nightmares of their lived experiences but also they knew that their suffering had been acknowledged. That matters.

Germany is an imperfect country. I know. I lived there. But the average German knows and understands the details and legacy of the mass murder and persecution their forbears committed. German schoolchildren visit the remains of death camps. There are monuments to the murdered Jews of Europe across the country. There are national days of mourning. You’d be hard pressed to find a public monument to any Nazi. In fact you won’t because they are not allowed.

Now imagine in the US, we have monuments to men who fought a war to preserve the institutionalized terrorization and enslavement of African Americans. Every day, millions of African Americans in cities throughout the US pass those statues. It’s not just a reminder of their oppression. But a reminder of their country’s failure to reckon with the past.

In Germany, there are still racist and anti-Semitic people. That exists around the world. No society is immune. But expressing pro-Nazi views or denying the cruelty of their Nazi past is culturally unacceptable—and in some cases, illegal. It means that—as a general rule—German society has been able to develop into a healthier and more just society.

Does every German like it? No. There are plenty who bitterly resent the fact that their national institutions memorialize the murdered Jews of Europe. But they are a distinct minority of people whose voices are roundly condemned and quashed. Because Germany knows that hatred—at the end of the day—is self corroding. It is bad for Germany.

Most schoolchildren in the United States still do not learn that “plantations” were concentration camps where terror, rape, assault and brutal family separation took place. They do not learn about the generations of families ripped apart at the snap of a finger. Or the immense wealth that was created and passed on (to this day) by people who benefited from the free labor of enslaved humans. And that for more than 100 years after the civil war, African Americans continued to be terrorized by the state apparatus.

I believe if more white Americans understood these and so many other horrors of the black experience in America—and truly committed ourselves to a reckoning—with both real and symbolic reparations—our country would become stronger, more just, healthier and prouder.

Guy Raz,
June 18, 2020.

The above is a repost from Bojidar Marinov

Do I believe that White Americans will acknowledge their covenantal guilt, to the level of bringing down those public Confederate statues, and ending unjust treatment before the law?

Sure.

After it’s too late. When it doesn’t matter anymore. When their power over others is gone, and the State that they control is just a pile of busted ruins.

Well, maybe some local white and black people in a given neighbourhood, town,or country might work something good out. Not enough to save the country — it’s just too far gone for that — but enough to save their neighbours, black and white (and Latino and Asian and Indian).

This would be a good thing, indeed. Small victories count.

We Love Dialogue!

We Can’t Have ‘National Dialogues’ If People Get Fired For Talking Honestly

No one outside conservative media can criticize Black Lives Matter without being fired or ostracized, so how can we expect the average American to chime in for a productive dialogue?

— From The Federalist

Our Masters don’t want dialogue.

What they want, is for the Right Sort to speak, and the Wrong Sort to say how great the Right Sort are – and how worthless the Wrong Sort are.

It is to be hoped that this cant of “Dialogue! Dialogue!” will finally be dropped, and the far more honest cry of “Obey! Obey!” will rise to take its place.

An Apology for the Climate Scare

Located here: On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

From the article:

—<Quote Begins>—

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as expert reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat—humankind’s biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
• The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

{…snip…}

half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

 And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

• Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
• 100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 percent to 50 percent
• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
• Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 percent
• Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
• “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 percent more emissions
• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism.

—<Quote Ends>—

My response:

• It look long enough.
  • Actually, I am surprised that there would ever be an apology for anything. I was assuming that the entire movement would simply, seemlessly shift to some other frantic ideological power’n’control mania: like, say, COVID-19 isolation enforcement.
• That’s a lot of time and money wasted, on some worthless crusade.
• That’s a lot of reputations and careers destroyed, on some worthless crusade.
• Exactly when will all the government regulations established to fight “global warming” get revoked and annulled?
  • “Never” is the correct guess. Apologies or no, regrets or no, the laws stay as written, and the theft and lost of freedom remains. Only the effective bankruptcy, delegitimization and (controlled and peaceful) breakup of the of the state will break the chains, and only self-governance under God at a culture-wide scale will insure continued liberty and justice in the long haul..
    
    Note that the vast majority of humanity dislike change, and will prefer to keep things as they are, however unjust and evil. “Oppression, lies, stability, and bureaucratic accountability are better than liberty, truth, change, and personal responsibility.”

But God is not interested in the self-interested goals of men.

I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him.

Ezekiel 21:27, King James Version

Problems With Proteins

From Uncommon Descent, Could the public be starting to get enough information to see through Darwinism?

(I added the links lost in the original UD post)

—<Quote Begins>—

At one time, a Darwinian sneer sufficed for an argument:

In the past, the general public lacked the technical knowledge to decipher the science underlying the evidence for protein rarity, so they were powerless to see past the critics’ smoke and mirrors (see here, here, and here).  Fortunately, a straightforward analysis of the research by protein expert Dan Tawfik (see here, here, and here) not only confirms and generalizes Axe’s results, but is much more accessible to the public. Tawfik’s research on β-lactamase yielded results that almost perfectly confirm Axe’s rarity estimate. In addition, the former’s research and research on the HisA enzyme demonstrate that randomly altering less than 2 percent of the enzymes’ amino acids disables them over half of the time. And, altering 10 percent will disable them nearly 100 percent of the time. In contrast, altering 2 percent of a paragraph written in English is usually barely noticeable, and altering 10 percent still leaves a paragraph largely readable. Therefore, protein sequences are often far rarer than readable English sentences, so they are even more difficult to generate by chance. 

Brian Miller, “Mistakes Our Critics Make: Protein Rarity” at Evolution News and Science Today:

It’s not that the public has become smarter but the discussion has gone on for so long that Darwinians can’t get away with just sneering. And their hats don’t have many rabbits left either.

—<Quote Ends>—

The good old days, where jargon and verbiage and appeals to authority, draw to a close.

Also, check out the links here:

In previous articles, I demonstrated how substantial quantities of biological information cannot emerge through any natural process (see here and here), and I described how such information points to intelligent design. Now, I am addressing the mistakes typically made by critics who challenge these claims (see here, here, here, and here). See my post yesterday, here, on misapplying information theory. 

A second category of errors relates to arguments against the conclusion that the information content of many proteins is vastly greater than what any undirected process could generate. Most of the critiques are aimed at the research of Douglas Axe that estimated the rarity of amino acid sequences corresponding to a section of a functional β-lactamase enzyme. Many of the attacks result from the skeptics’ failure to properly understand Axe’s 2004 article in the Journal of Molecular Biology or the underlying science. 

Brian Miller, “Mistakes Our Critics Make: Protein Rarity” at Evolution News and Science Today:

As usual: if you have an a priori (“presuppositional”) commitment to evolution and atheism, then evolution MUST be true, however much it flies into the face of known science, statistics, and logic.

But if you don’t have a preset faith commitment…

(“Anti-faith commitment”?

“Pro-tenure commitment”?

well, at least

“Anti-supernatural creator commitment”! )

…then the evidence for evolution is looking rather more threadbare by the month.

Toppling Statues

Quora: If in America a crowd can bring down a statue of Columbus or the generals of the South without legal consequences, can the same thing be done with the statue of Martin Luther King? In other words, does this set a dangerous precedent?

Lee Ballentine, surrealist, poet, engineer, six time Top Writer on Quora.

You mean like this statue of King was?

Or this one?

Or maybe this one?

Dozens, perhaps hundreds of statues of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have been toppled, beheaded, or otherwise defaced all over the world. And in the United States. This has been happening for decades. A Dutch museum actually gathered a few of them together for an exhibition.

Rarely or never is anyone prosecuted for this vandalism.

13 statues beheaded, broken or stolen

Statue of Martin Luther King Jr. (Houston) – Wikipedia

ADDENDUM

I have been reminded that Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee lived long lives. After the war, Lee was honored as the president of a college, was wined and dined at the White House, and died in his 60s surrounded by family and friends. Statues of him were the least of his honors.

Martin Luther King, the man himself, was assassinated at age 39. He had public attention but few honors in America in his lifetime, despite his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. His greatest honor is the high regard in which he is held all over the world, by so many people.

History and Legacy

Martin Luther King Jr. has some serious spiritual & personality flaws.

But he did A LOT MORE for the Will of God — “actual equality before the law!” — oppressed Americans (who God has His eye on), humanity as a whole, and (via his pacifism) even the general peace and security of the United States, than the slaveholding Southern military officer core ever did.

Far less blood and unjust pain on his hands. Far more freedom and liberty, by the power of his words.

Yes, like King David, Martin’s hands are not clean. But I would not tear down his statues, either lawlessly or by lawful means.

In the end, he was a man who did some public good – even great! – works, and some private wickedness. A life to consider and contemplate, not erase from history.

And a reproof to believing conservative Christians.

God wisely choose to bring Martin Luther King Jr. — warts and all — to prominence and leadership, as he was willing to do what all those hundreds or thousands of clean-living, doctrinally correct conservative Christian pastors and religious leaders refused to do for generations: bring justice to the oppressed.

Seeing all those destroyed statues of Martin Luther King Jr., I suggest that said conservative Christians STILL have not learned their lesson.

And all that crying over the the busted statues of white heroes — Confederate and otherwise — isn’t really helping the Conservative cause. Did they really think that they could silently destroy one aspect of American history — one of the better parts, too! — without the rest of American history coming under threat?

More Fires Next Time

The riots are over, but I’m pretty sure that nothing has been learned. Eventually – in an even poorer economy, under a government with even less legitimacy – there will be another explosion of riots over some different instance of police brutality.

Again, they will be permitted to burn in black neighbourhoods, destroying more black wealth, and driving black entrepreneurs to relocate out of the ghettos, pronto.

Again, they will be stomped on when the riots threaten the homes of liberal politicians (See: Seattle) and middle-class neighbourhoods.

They will be better organized and directed by various leftist revolutionaries than they were this year. Maybe a politician’s home will be torched, perhaps one or two middle-class neighbourhoods will be destroyed before they are forcefully ended by men with guns.

And so it will go, until the welfare cheques end.

That’s when the Bad Times will kick in. When there are no more treats to reward obedience, and only sticks to compel it.

FAR wiser for poor Black Americans to get a free education from the Khan Academy (and not the worthless, lawless public schools given to them!), get into a good trade, and get out of the ghetto.

“But where’s the Democratic votes in that? Better to keep them dependent on the welfare rolls, always stress how powerless they would be without us to protect them, and enjoy the secure vote bank their fear, powerlessness, and resentment guarantees.”

From Judah to China

World Victory…
AFTER Perseverance and Trials

I’m working on Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance, and I hope to post a bit more of his work in a week or two. But, there is something that is worth noting now:

—<Quote from The Days of Vengeance>—
—<pages 223-4>—

St. John’s vision of the redeemed world reveals the inescapable outcome of Christ’s Ascension, the consummation of Paradise: They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; neither shall the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the Throne shall be their Shepherd, and shall guide them to the springs of the Water of Life; and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes. We noted earlier the Father’s words to the Son from Isaiah 49, giving the promise of the salvation of the world as well as Israel. The passage continues:

I will keep You and give You for a covenant of the people,
To restore the land, to make them inherit the desolate heritages;
Saying to those who are bound: Go forth!
To those who are in darkness: Show yourselves!
Along the roads they will feed,
And their pasture will be on all bare heights.
They will not hunger or thirst,
Neither will the scorching heat or sun strike them down;
For He who has compassion on them will lead them,
And will guide them to springs of water.
And I will make all My mountains a road,
And My highways will be raised up.
Behold, these shall come from afar,
And lo, these will come from the north and from the west,
And these from the land of Sinim [China].
Shout for joy, O heavens! And rejoice, O earth!
For the LORD has comforted His people,
And will have compassion on His afflicted. (Isa. 49:8-13)

The churches of the first century were on the brink of the greatest Tribulation of all time. Many would lose their lives, their families, their possessions. But St. John writes to tell the churches that the Tribulation is not a death, but a Birth (cf. Matt. 24:8), the prelude to the establishment of the worldwide Kingdom of Christ. He shows them the scene on the other side: the inevitable victory celebration.


In Nero’s Circus Maximus, the scene of his bloody and revolting slaughters of Christians – by wild beasts, by crucifixion, by fire and sword – there stood a great stone obelisk, silent witness to the valiant conduct of those brave saints who endured tribulation and counted all things as loss for the sake of Christ. The bestial Nero and his henchmen have long since passed from the scene to their eternal reward, but the Obelisk still stands, now in the center of the great square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. Chiseled on its base are these words, taken from the overcoming martyrs’ hymn of triumph:

CHRISTUS VINCIT
CHRISTUS REONAT
CHRISTUS IMPERAT

– which is, being interpreted: Christ is conquering; Christ is reigning; Christ rules over all.

—<Quote Ends>—

Pain and trial faces the believer today: but, outside of North Korea and certain Islamic nations, we do not face crucifixions or wild beasts. Job loss, religious discrimination/Jim Crow II and social exclusion from the Right Circles is a more common outcome.

Whatever.

And as the physical dangers diminish, Christ’s Kingdom expands, but in the real world and via the “imitation kingdoms” – Islam, the Secularist Democracy, and the Marxist states – that claim to bring about Christian goals of peace and justice, but without that distasteful Christianity.

Over time, people will reject the sterile and shoddy imitations, and choose the Real Thing.

Moses

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king’s commandment.

By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter;

Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season;

Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward.

By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.

Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them.

Hebrews 11:23-28, King James Version

If Moses stuck with the pleasures of sin for a season, he may well have enjoyed a comfortable life as a prince, died with riches in comfort, and then be utterly forgotten by history.

And, perhaps, utterly forgotten by God as well. “Another total waste, fit only for burning.”

But Moses turned from the way of Esau, rejecting immediate pleasures for long-term victory.

A wise man, that. A man we should imitate.

Whale Evolution

The Original:

Meanwhile, from Unwary Darwinists Swallowed Whole by Seemingly Unthreatening Whale Video: The Rebuttal

Sometimes, it’s worth the Christian’s time to get into the gritty details. Sometimes it isn’t.

Know your opponent and his goals; know your goals, strengths, and weaknesses; and know the battlefield.