I imagine that there are a lot of theories as to when England's collapse began as there are theories as to the beginning of our spiralling downward. I'll give mine here on when the die was cast, so to speak, in England; it was in April of 1888. To read anything written by the great London preacher of the 19th century... Charles Haddon Spurgeon... is to be taken in by his all-consuming love for God and exalting of the Lord Jesus. His sermons were read all over the world at the time and even today his name is revered in many denominations all throughout America. A biography on Charles Spurgeon would be a great place to start if you want to learn more of the Christian church before the modern age began to take its toll. And I'll recommend one book, The Forgotten Spurgeon by Iain Murray published by Banner Of Truth.
I've read a lot on what was known as the Downgrade Controversy but I'll use preacher, author and publisher Errol Hulse as a primary source in this post. Doctrinal Christianity was fading in the late 1800s as what was sometimes called 'new thought' entered the seminaries and pulpits of England. Calvinism remained in the confessions of many churches but those confessions were ignored. As Hulse wrote "The emphasis in the churches was on evangelism, missions and practical social work." He called what ensued a 'theological vacuum.' Without adherence to creeds and rigorous study of their own faith, people simply thought out their own doctrines as to what they thought they should be.
Spurgeon was a Baptist and the main Baptist body of the day, the Baptist Union, was filled with many men who came to faith through the preaching of this great man, and many of those preachers were trained in his school. Spurgeon's church belonged to the Baptist Union. His ministry's magazine, the Sword and Trowel, did not sit back and let this Downgrade continue without a fight; this from its writers, "Germany was made unbelieving by her preachers, and England is following in her track. The consequences of preaching 'another gospel' in the form of 'modern thought' was catastrophic." It then went on to describe the dwindling attendance in the churches.
Spurgeon withdrew his church from the Baptist Union which in turn felt it had to respond in kind. This took place at a general assembly of the Baptist Union. A motion was made to, in effect, censure Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Here is Hulse's description of it from a witness of the event "The chairman called for a show of hands for the motion of censure. A forest of hands went up. "Against", called the chairman. (Oakley) testified that he did not see any hands but history records that there were seven. Without any announcement of numbers the vast assembly broke out into tumultuous cheering, and cheering and cheering yet. From some of the older men their pent-up hostility found vent; from many of the younger men wild resistance to any 'obscurantist trammels', as they said, broke loose. It was a strange seen. I viewed it almost in tears. I stood near a 'Spurgeon's man' whom I knew very well. Mr. Spurgeon had welcomed him from a low position. He went almost wild with delight at the censure of this great and generous master. I say it was a strange scene, that that vast assembly should be so outrageously delighted at the condemnation of the greatest, noblest and the grandest leader of the faith.....It was reported that the vote was 2000 to 7 against CHS"
The Downgrade Controversy took its toll and Charles Spurgeon died a few years after this censure, fighting the 'Downgrade' to the end. About ten years ago my wife, son and I visited Spurgeon's church in the Elephant and Castle section of London and heard a sermon that Spurgeon himself would have delighted in. I think that there is something to glean from what happened to the 'Prince of Preachers.' His own brother, a minister himself, voted for the censure! Scripture is clear in that many who profess Christ will react even more vociferously against Christians in the Last Days. Prepare for this if these be those days for it's something that we would not normally envision. Circumstances have a way of arising, that cannot possibly be foreseen, that make possible that which no one would believe possible beforehand. If censure celebrated with clamor could happen to Charles Spurgeon for defending the gospel in a civilized culture where God had not yet been evicted what would the reactions be in an uncivilized culture that mocks God, a culture that we live in right now?
I'll add a past post here:
This from December of 2011:
How are we to explain it? At one moment the people were laying palm branches before the approaching colt that carried Jesus into Jerusalem, shouting "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," and only a few days later they shouted "Crucify, crucify him!" Or were they the same people? Luke describes the first as his "disciples," and the second as the "chief priests, rulers and the people." Is this not the dichotomy of the people of this world from that day to the present? I remember watching an awards ceremony (probably the Tonys) on television in the mid-eighties where there were two musical performances, one after the other. The scene effected me enough to recall and relate it many times since. My memory on the specifics is not that clear but I do remember a gospel themed performance from a large choir. Certainly it must have been related to one of the nominees. It was a powerful ensemble performance and the audience was enthusiastic in its response. Then came the second performance. What I remember about it was the very wild theme as if from a Mardi Gras or a Brazilian festival. Again, the power of the music was displayed and the audience responded in kind. I felt that I had witnessed a spiritual battle right before me on the television screen. It astounded me that two themes of such opposite polarity where presented next to each other. Certainly, some cheered only for the gospel ensemble, others cheered only for the wild festival-like performance, while still others cheered for both, oblivious to the clash of messages.
Who may have won that battle...I don't know, but it became etched in my own mind. Not all Christians are consumed with passion for knowing Christ, nor awestruck by the majesty and radiance of the Risen Lord nor do they cling to His Word as more valuable than gold and more precious than pearls, but many do. Not all of those that are lost and unredeemed grit their teeth in hate at the mere mention of Jesus Christ, but some do, while the lukewarm in the middle are often confused as to what all the fuss is about. The Israel of the Old Testament either sang praises and danced to its God or they killed the prophets sent by Him. Even today, we are conflicted not only between nations, but withinnations, even at times within ourselves. There is no safety in trying to avoid the battle between God and those who oppose Him. The only safety is in shouting salvation and glory and power belong to our God!... to the only righteous king... and the only true God!
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Monday, December 29, 2014
Brother Rove's Traveling Salvation Show
The following was originally posted in June of 2012, a few months before the general election. It appeared that Barack Obama was destined to be a one-term president until the elites of the Republican Party put their show on the road. Ignoring their base once again today, they had vigorously and connivingly worked against good, sound and honorable men and women who had the audacity to challenge their own incumbents.
June 2012
It wasn't supposed to go like this. Not only was the deck stacked but there were aces up sleeves and no rules to follow. How could it miss, for Barack Obama would appoint cabinet members and they in turn would rule, often beyond the limits of their authority, with strict adherence to Obama's wishes... and the Czars...twenty to thirty new cabinet level operatives, many of whom had no accountability to the United States Congress... and two Supreme Court seats filled through a political culture that was partying in the afterglow of a coronation? Surely the media would stay on board and the indoctrination centers (a.k.a. universities) would encourage more than enough frolicking to discourage any real examination leading to legitimate protest. This President gig was to be easy! Golf a little, party a little, sign an executive order, golf some more. No, it wasn't supposed to collapse as a house of cards...but it is! It's now become apparent to many that one has to actually know something about something in order to be President of the United States. Even the Obama Girl recognizes that the emperor has no clothes. Our allies now know what they are dealing with but more importantly our enemies are fully aware that one must strike while the iron is hot. Folks, it is every bit as bad as this....and more!
But Lo! What light through yonder window breaks? It's an old fashioned revival as Brother Rove's Travelling Salvation Show is offering Mitt Romney's Magical Elixir brought in by Conestoga wagon. It removes taxes, grows hair (look at Mitt's for proof,) cures the gout, builds muscles and balances bodily humors (Tea Party Bile, Social Conservative Phlegm and Choleric Libertarian Paranoia.) He guarantees that this cure-all tonic, if imbibed today, will last at least until November 6th! That's all that's needed folks for then it is back to business as usual! Take this tonic and you'll get a job! Mix it in with a liter of soda pop and you will feel free as a bird. Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies on this coming hot August night in Tampa.
God seems to have left us to our own devices for that is what we wanted...no... demanded. I used to cringe when our Pittsburgh Penguin play-by-play announcer shouted "Hallelujah Hollywood" after a goal and I do the same with Neil Diamond's lyrics in Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show for that hallowed word means praise Yahweh. Therein is our only hope and we trifle with it, ignore it, and seek our own salvation on our own terms. Guest preachers fill the Sunday morning pulpits of Meet The Press and Face The Nation. Wisdom has abandoned us, replaced by Rasmussen polls. How bleak is our future! How rudderless we have become even as a tempest of Biblical proportions builds in the East!
June 2012
It wasn't supposed to go like this. Not only was the deck stacked but there were aces up sleeves and no rules to follow. How could it miss, for Barack Obama would appoint cabinet members and they in turn would rule, often beyond the limits of their authority, with strict adherence to Obama's wishes... and the Czars...twenty to thirty new cabinet level operatives, many of whom had no accountability to the United States Congress... and two Supreme Court seats filled through a political culture that was partying in the afterglow of a coronation? Surely the media would stay on board and the indoctrination centers (a.k.a. universities) would encourage more than enough frolicking to discourage any real examination leading to legitimate protest. This President gig was to be easy! Golf a little, party a little, sign an executive order, golf some more. No, it wasn't supposed to collapse as a house of cards...but it is! It's now become apparent to many that one has to actually know something about something in order to be President of the United States. Even the Obama Girl recognizes that the emperor has no clothes. Our allies now know what they are dealing with but more importantly our enemies are fully aware that one must strike while the iron is hot. Folks, it is every bit as bad as this....and more!
But Lo! What light through yonder window breaks? It's an old fashioned revival as Brother Rove's Travelling Salvation Show is offering Mitt Romney's Magical Elixir brought in by Conestoga wagon. It removes taxes, grows hair (look at Mitt's for proof,) cures the gout, builds muscles and balances bodily humors (Tea Party Bile, Social Conservative Phlegm and Choleric Libertarian Paranoia.) He guarantees that this cure-all tonic, if imbibed today, will last at least until November 6th! That's all that's needed folks for then it is back to business as usual! Take this tonic and you'll get a job! Mix it in with a liter of soda pop and you will feel free as a bird. Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies on this coming hot August night in Tampa.
God seems to have left us to our own devices for that is what we wanted...no... demanded. I used to cringe when our Pittsburgh Penguin play-by-play announcer shouted "Hallelujah Hollywood" after a goal and I do the same with Neil Diamond's lyrics in Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show for that hallowed word means praise Yahweh. Therein is our only hope and we trifle with it, ignore it, and seek our own salvation on our own terms. Guest preachers fill the Sunday morning pulpits of Meet The Press and Face The Nation. Wisdom has abandoned us, replaced by Rasmussen polls. How bleak is our future! How rudderless we have become even as a tempest of Biblical proportions builds in the East!
Thursday, December 25, 2014
The Proclamation Of Our Congress....1863
We have been to the Gettysburg battlefield more times than I
can remember and I've written about that time period in America's
history quite a few times in these posts. In my short novel titled Isaac
Crockett that you can read at www.isaaccrockett.blogspot.com I had a whole chapter where the title character visits the battlefield
to reflect on the courage of the men on both sides of that battle and
apply that to his own life. There is more than a few things I put in
that novella that came from my own life. One of my favorite possessions
is a battlefield artifact that I bought. It's a small plain metal cross
with a broken loop that once attached it to a chain. It was picked up on
Pickett's Charge in the early 1900s. I sometimes hold it in my hand and
think about another believer in Christ who probably wore that as he
ascended that hill.
The following is taken from Abrahamlincolnonline.org. In my original post was the entire Proclamation appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer but I'm condensing it here in order to highlight certain parts:
March 3, 1863.....introduced to the Senate by Senator James Harlan:
"....Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by resolution requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation. And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins, and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.......We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven, We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.....and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness...."
We have a few today in our Congress who could sign on to a proclamation like this and a dung pile of them who would run the other way quick. The following is a limited timeline of the days preceding and following that Proclamation:
December of 1862.............The Union army suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
March 2, 1863...................The U. S. Senate introduces a Resolution for a National Day of Prayer.
March 3, 1863...................The Senate adopts the Resolution.
March 30, 1863.................President Lincoln signs it.
April 30, 1863...................National Day of Prayer and Humiliation is observed.
April 30 to May 6, 1863...The Union suffers a crushing defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
May 10, 1863....................Stonewall Jackson dies from injuries sustained at Chancellorsville.
July 1-3, 1863...................The Union army is victorious at Gettysburg, the tide of the war is turned.
The above resolution was a legitimate plea for mercy from God and not a political ploy. The humility is obvious and should be humbling to us today if we would permit it. God will raise nations and He will cause them to fall....all according to His purposes. Whether it was Napoleon or Jackson, or America in past wars, or America today, God's will shall be done and all to his glory, and that 'will' may not be what we might expect. Another defeat for the Union began on the very day of prayer and humiliation. Many may have expected a victory. Stonewall Jackson accepted his fate as God's will, for that is all he would ever want! Even if we as a people would humble ourselves before God over our own "presumptuous sins' our immediate future may be bleak but we would know this for sure.... that His will shall be done, it shall be to His glory, and we will forever praise Him for that.
The following is taken from Abrahamlincolnonline.org. In my original post was the entire Proclamation appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer but I'm condensing it here in order to highlight certain parts:
March 3, 1863.....introduced to the Senate by Senator James Harlan:
"....Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by resolution requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation. And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins, and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.......We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven, We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.....and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness...."
We have a few today in our Congress who could sign on to a proclamation like this and a dung pile of them who would run the other way quick. The following is a limited timeline of the days preceding and following that Proclamation:
December of 1862.............The Union army suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
March 2, 1863...................The U. S. Senate introduces a Resolution for a National Day of Prayer.
March 3, 1863...................The Senate adopts the Resolution.
March 30, 1863.................President Lincoln signs it.
April 30, 1863...................National Day of Prayer and Humiliation is observed.
April 30 to May 6, 1863...The Union suffers a crushing defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
May 10, 1863....................Stonewall Jackson dies from injuries sustained at Chancellorsville.
July 1-3, 1863...................The Union army is victorious at Gettysburg, the tide of the war is turned.
The above resolution was a legitimate plea for mercy from God and not a political ploy. The humility is obvious and should be humbling to us today if we would permit it. God will raise nations and He will cause them to fall....all according to His purposes. Whether it was Napoleon or Jackson, or America in past wars, or America today, God's will shall be done and all to his glory, and that 'will' may not be what we might expect. Another defeat for the Union began on the very day of prayer and humiliation. Many may have expected a victory. Stonewall Jackson accepted his fate as God's will, for that is all he would ever want! Even if we as a people would humble ourselves before God over our own "presumptuous sins' our immediate future may be bleak but we would know this for sure.... that His will shall be done, it shall be to His glory, and we will forever praise Him for that.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Exodus: Gods And Kings
What interests me most is that you have three movies released this
year, each with a major actor, and all three films depict God's power in
response to a rebellious world. Today I saw Exodus: Gods And Kings with Christian Bale as that major actor. The other two movies were Noah with Russell Crowe and Left Behind with Nicolas Cage.
By his own admission the director has no belief in the verity of the story of a Hebrew baby saved amidst the reeds and bulrushes to be a prince in Pharaoh's Egypt. No belief, so he was free to embellish, to imagine and to deny, and he did, with great gusto. There were too many discrepancies from the Bible to mention. Well, I'll mention a few. There was indeed a burning bush and Moses was....laying down before it.....but the ground was not shown to be holy and even if it would have been, the Moses of this film would have shown no interest or belief in it. A voice did not emanate from the bush, rather a child appeared, supposedly God, who gave Moses instructions throughout the film. The child did not seem holy either, a little impish in fact.
There was no covenant mentioned between the Hebrews who had been slaves for four-hundred years and their God and no particular importance, other than protecting the Hebrew first-born, in the blood on the doorposts that would become Passover, and certainly not even a hint that Moses and the Passover would point to Jesus Christ, without whom the world, Pharaoh and Moses would not even exist! Moses was rebellious at most and skeptical at least to the child's commands throughout most of the film. He chiseled the Ten Commandments himself, somewhat irritated by the child's dictation. Other than these things it was a great movie!
I read some of the reviews before going and really didn't have any great desire to see it but I'm glad that I did. It was anything but boring. The plagues were filmed in a continuous fast-paced sequence and the special effects were intense. The Red Sea was more 'shifted' than 'divided' but the result was the same as in God's Word. What about these differences, omissions and additions to the Bible? Didn't they bother me? Yes they did. God was not honored, but He may speak here to the recesses of the unbeliever's mind. This God that the world ignores did indeed bring a flood upon the whole world and He brought plagues upon Pharaoh that pale in comparison to what this world will experience prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ! These two films about Noah and Moses were certainly not made for the Christian....they were not meant to illustrate a Holy God, but what they did for many, that was unintended, was bring to mind childhood memories from church or Sunday School lessons, memories now refreshed as this world follows the Bible's prophesies of chaos, violence, hatred and unbelief. Memories that may come to mind one last time as God moves again, not on a movie screen but on television newscasts.
What also amazed me in all three of these movies being released this year is that as violence engulfs this world, as arrogance and atheism rule and as the hatred for the Jews and Israel abounds, Hollywood gives us very good depictions of God's judgements. There is no gospel in the two major movies and little in Left Behind but there is law. Since lawlessness is our forte today, we are reminded again, those who either see or read of these films, that God's judgement has never been stayed apart from His will, nor will they ever be! Surely some if not many squirmed in their seats.
There were two scenes of intimacy between Moses and his wife Zipporah but very much unlike Hollywood they ended before they began, I treated the wedding night of Isaac and Anne in my short novel in the very same way. If our son were a pre-teen he certainly would not have been permitted to see Exodus, Gods And Kings and when he came of age he would have had two long (142 minutes for the film) sitting periods, one for the movie and one beforehand for my lecture!
By his own admission the director has no belief in the verity of the story of a Hebrew baby saved amidst the reeds and bulrushes to be a prince in Pharaoh's Egypt. No belief, so he was free to embellish, to imagine and to deny, and he did, with great gusto. There were too many discrepancies from the Bible to mention. Well, I'll mention a few. There was indeed a burning bush and Moses was....laying down before it.....but the ground was not shown to be holy and even if it would have been, the Moses of this film would have shown no interest or belief in it. A voice did not emanate from the bush, rather a child appeared, supposedly God, who gave Moses instructions throughout the film. The child did not seem holy either, a little impish in fact.
There was no covenant mentioned between the Hebrews who had been slaves for four-hundred years and their God and no particular importance, other than protecting the Hebrew first-born, in the blood on the doorposts that would become Passover, and certainly not even a hint that Moses and the Passover would point to Jesus Christ, without whom the world, Pharaoh and Moses would not even exist! Moses was rebellious at most and skeptical at least to the child's commands throughout most of the film. He chiseled the Ten Commandments himself, somewhat irritated by the child's dictation. Other than these things it was a great movie!
I read some of the reviews before going and really didn't have any great desire to see it but I'm glad that I did. It was anything but boring. The plagues were filmed in a continuous fast-paced sequence and the special effects were intense. The Red Sea was more 'shifted' than 'divided' but the result was the same as in God's Word. What about these differences, omissions and additions to the Bible? Didn't they bother me? Yes they did. God was not honored, but He may speak here to the recesses of the unbeliever's mind. This God that the world ignores did indeed bring a flood upon the whole world and He brought plagues upon Pharaoh that pale in comparison to what this world will experience prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ! These two films about Noah and Moses were certainly not made for the Christian....they were not meant to illustrate a Holy God, but what they did for many, that was unintended, was bring to mind childhood memories from church or Sunday School lessons, memories now refreshed as this world follows the Bible's prophesies of chaos, violence, hatred and unbelief. Memories that may come to mind one last time as God moves again, not on a movie screen but on television newscasts.
What also amazed me in all three of these movies being released this year is that as violence engulfs this world, as arrogance and atheism rule and as the hatred for the Jews and Israel abounds, Hollywood gives us very good depictions of God's judgements. There is no gospel in the two major movies and little in Left Behind but there is law. Since lawlessness is our forte today, we are reminded again, those who either see or read of these films, that God's judgement has never been stayed apart from His will, nor will they ever be! Surely some if not many squirmed in their seats.
There were two scenes of intimacy between Moses and his wife Zipporah but very much unlike Hollywood they ended before they began, I treated the wedding night of Isaac and Anne in my short novel in the very same way. If our son were a pre-teen he certainly would not have been permitted to see Exodus, Gods And Kings and when he came of age he would have had two long (142 minutes for the film) sitting periods, one for the movie and one beforehand for my lecture!
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Doubly Dangerous
The following post, Battle Stations, is from this past January. Below it is a book review on Paul Kengor's Dupes first posted in February of 2013. As I write this the Dow Jones Industrials sits at 18,000. The Dow is not as a belt or suspenders. It holds up nothing. In this instance it's a cummerbund that hides the bulging shirt puffs above the belt, trust me-I'm an expert on bulging shirt puffs above the belt, which makes this doubly dangerous, for we are overextended, choking on our debt and loving every minute of it, oblivious to a world coming apart at the seams and an America whose grand old flag has 'made in China' stitched into it.
Battle Stations
Barack Obama used the phrase "all hands on deck" in a Cabinet meeting today. I titled a post All Hands On Deck a few years ago. Let me go one step further here....Battle Stations! To the Christian, if you are not on your knees in prayer and tears often throughout each and every day then you cannot possibly be aware of what is transpiring in our nation at this time! No Christian theology supports letting evil continue without at least pleading for God's intervention. Communism is evil and we are in the midst of an attempted takeover in America. We're experiencing a textbook example of how communism divides, bribes and lies. In our case it is in taking advantage of a people who are, to paraphrase the title of Neil Postman's classic book, amusing themselves to death. We are going gaga over grown men playing football while communists are ripping our Constitution to shreds. That Constitution is the foundation of our law and without law anarchy follows.....and horror! Battle stations!
Here is a direct quote from our ....president.... in that meeting, "We're not going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help they need. I've got a pen and I've got a phone.....and I can use that pen to sign executive actions and administrative actions..." Friends, he doesn't care for Americans...of any color. He proved that in Benghazi, with Fast and Furious, with the unending exemptions in his abomination of health care reform, with our decaying national defense, with bailouts that hurt the other 99%, in leading a life of the rich and famous while our nation crumbles, in completing the destruction of a political party that once did actually care for the welfare of Americans, in enticing the elites of the other party to join in the madness, in destroying business and politicizing education and the military while attacking the marriage covenant. Our children will now live in a society that at every level mocks God and His Word and He will not let us go unpunished for this!
Barack Obama knows very well that the ruse has been uncovered. His statement today proves that it is just a race to the finish. There is nothing left for him other than to continue to destroy America and hope the adulation he craves returns in the form that Lenin and Stalin received as they set the standard for tyranny and totalitarianism. Prayer is our only hope at this point. Fortitude as a result of that prayer is our battle station.
Communism....Under New Management
Communism is a dialectic in the Hegelian sense. It changes outwardly to survive inwardly. It is alive and thriving in our country, the very least representative being the Communist Party USA. It can call itself an American patriot or anything else. It feeds on the uniformed, the malcontent, the miscreant and the self-indulgent. Its only enemy is God.
I have to remind myself every once in a while that the average American today does not know a whole lot about communism. At times it's almost as if it is seen as nothing but a conspiracy theory, as if it never really existed and as if over a hundred million people were never murdered under it. Communism lies, it kills, it terrorizes, it threatens and carries out those threats. It's godless, it dupes and cons people...whole peoples and when it attains power through coercion and deception it lowers the boom...no more promises for there is no need to give them for it now has total control and will henceforth dictate everything....to everybody!
Every facet of our society is unraveling before our very eyes. Emil Mazey, a twentieth century labor leader, is reported to have paraphrased the older proverb known as the duck test when he said the following..."I can't prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck,, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks- I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck." Are you willing to read the evidence of how Communism has worked, is working, and even as of now...winning, in America? Read the book that is reviewed in the following blog first published on September 15th of 2011 and then try to defend this administration.
September 15, 2011
The relationship between the American Progressive and Communism has always been a dysfunctional one, the Progressive longing for someone to look to as a hero and the Communist not only abusing that adulation but sneering at those so gullible as to think that there is anything compassionate or caring about them. The Communist knew the extraordinary weaknesses of the liberal American mind and had taken advantage of it from the beginning, for a century now! It has a new face today, hiding behind a semi-capitalist veil, for it retreated and reinvented its outward appearance.
This generation will never be able to say that they were not told, not warned, for the evidence is everywhere if only we would look. I've reported on more than a dozen outstanding books on the deteriorating condition of our nation and its causes in this blog of almost three (over five) years but none of secular content more needed than the one I put before you today. I do not believe that any liberal can read this book and not be concerned that they may have been duped. One might very well read a chapter and then throw the book away, or skim it and not accept its message but if one reads this book through they will view our political landscape differently. The title of the book is Dupes, How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century.
I'm very familiar with the author for I had read a few of his previous books and I admired him as a Professor of Political Science at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, one of America's finest colleges. This is a monumentally important work written with clarity, and systematized in such a way to take the reader on a trip through American history and awaken the reader in the process. Professor Kengor filleted the meat of Communist propaganda so expertly as to expose the rotten flesh and release the stench that permeates liberal politics, higher education and the mainstream media. You have to read this book...if you care about America. A blurb from Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute says the same thing: "Face it. You are going to have to read this book." Why...so that you can show your knowledge of Communism in some future conversation? No, rather that you can read it and weep and hopefully sound your own alarm in that future conversation. In another blurb, Fred Barnes wrote that it left him "amazed and a bit frightened." The Weekly Standard's Barnes has been sounding an alarm for decades yet it still made him a bit frightened!
Reading the book was a culmination of research that I had already been doing, that the Communist has reappeared in America in a new guise, and yet I was dumbfounded by the volume of evidence and not a little disappointed in being reminded of my own history of being duped in the late 1970s. Kengor is going to take you back to September of 1919 in Chicago where Communism first began its assault on the American mind. You will see the essence of class hatred in it from its beginnings and recognize the tactic from the Left today. You will see one celebrity or person of note after another taken in by the lies, many waking up later angry and indignant. Even the most ardent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt will have to reassess that admiration as Roosevelt was taken in by Uncle Joe Stalin thanks to the leftists all around him. Read and weep at how much of our media was not only taken in but even today ridicules those who are not duped. Will they have the character to admit they were wrong, if and when they also awaken, as many of their predecessors did? You will see heroes and you will see buffoons who were, and are, very useful idiots for Communism, and too many who were out-and-out traitors. You will see how Hollywood was used and many of the biggest names duped. Compare this to the stars of today while you read. And you will see Ronald Reagan as a liberal Democrat and head of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, admittedly himself duped for a time, and recognize his courage and greatness on display even then! No one made this man and he was no late bloomer.
Communism has a new face but the essence remains the same, for God is still banished and revolutions are still started, as despicably as ever, through hatred and propaganda. Lying is as common as breathing. One class is pitted against another. Educators are still sought for their influence on the youth. Unions are still infiltrated as are the arts. College students are intellectually brutalized and the news media is still wooed with dreams that they might actually be more important than the news they report. The SDS mentality (Students for a Democratic Society) that the Communist so effectively used against our military's efforts in Vietnam is alive in many of its former leaders who have grown up, quite naturally, to become college and university professors, and in the case of Bill Ayers, prepare their comrades, and those they mentor, to run for elective office, even the presidency. Communism is alive but not well because it can only remain beneath the surface for so long until the rains of tyranny expose the caskets of dead ideas, tyrants and false promises. Paul Kengor lays it out very clearly for the reader how lies told about George Bush's intentions is Iraq and how accusations of a warmongering, racist, America that has lured the college student, the idle and the malcontent over the past thirty years, are just reheated deceptions dusted off from older Communist scripts where only the names have changed.
Who is Frank Marshall Davis and why was the media silent on this Communist mentor to our current President? Why is Jimmy Carter still a dupe? How was Edward Kennedy, who I had volunteered for, one of the biggest dupes of all? One need not be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party to be a Communist as Kengor points out, and one can think of themselves as a patriot and yet be a prize dupe! Kengor says that they will continue to call us scare mongers and McCarthyite fanatics but this is just another tried and true tactic from the bowels of Moscow's Comintern. He concludes his book with these thoughts: "The most mordant irony for the liberals who lend cover is that while they laugh at the anti-Communists, they seem to have no idea that the loudest howls have always emanated from the Communists who take them as dupes: gullible fools to be used to advance the Communist cause."
Professor's Kengor's follow up book is more specific to Barack Obama. Its title is The Communist, Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.
The following post, Battle Stations, is from this past January. Below it is a book review on Paul Kengor's Dupes first posted in February of 2013. As I write this the Dow Jones Industrials sits at 18,000. The Dow is not as a belt or suspenders. It holds up nothing. In this instance it's a cummerbund that hides the bulging shirt puffs above the belt, trust me-I'm an expert on bulging shirt puffs above the belt, which makes this doubly dangerous, for we are overextended, choking on our debt and loving every minute of it, oblivious to a world coming apart at the seams and an America whose grand old flag has 'made in China' stitched into it.
Battle Stations
Barack Obama used the phrase "all hands on deck" in a Cabinet meeting today. I titled a post All Hands On Deck a few years ago. Let me go one step further here....Battle Stations! To the Christian, if you are not on your knees in prayer and tears often throughout each and every day then you cannot possibly be aware of what is transpiring in our nation at this time! No Christian theology supports letting evil continue without at least pleading for God's intervention. Communism is evil and we are in the midst of an attempted takeover in America. We're experiencing a textbook example of how communism divides, bribes and lies. In our case it is in taking advantage of a people who are, to paraphrase the title of Neil Postman's classic book, amusing themselves to death. We are going gaga over grown men playing football while communists are ripping our Constitution to shreds. That Constitution is the foundation of our law and without law anarchy follows.....and horror! Battle stations!
Here is a direct quote from our ....president.... in that meeting, "We're not going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help they need. I've got a pen and I've got a phone.....and I can use that pen to sign executive actions and administrative actions..." Friends, he doesn't care for Americans...of any color. He proved that in Benghazi, with Fast and Furious, with the unending exemptions in his abomination of health care reform, with our decaying national defense, with bailouts that hurt the other 99%, in leading a life of the rich and famous while our nation crumbles, in completing the destruction of a political party that once did actually care for the welfare of Americans, in enticing the elites of the other party to join in the madness, in destroying business and politicizing education and the military while attacking the marriage covenant. Our children will now live in a society that at every level mocks God and His Word and He will not let us go unpunished for this!
Barack Obama knows very well that the ruse has been uncovered. His statement today proves that it is just a race to the finish. There is nothing left for him other than to continue to destroy America and hope the adulation he craves returns in the form that Lenin and Stalin received as they set the standard for tyranny and totalitarianism. Prayer is our only hope at this point. Fortitude as a result of that prayer is our battle station.
Communism....Under New Management
Communism is a dialectic in the Hegelian sense. It changes outwardly to survive inwardly. It is alive and thriving in our country, the very least representative being the Communist Party USA. It can call itself an American patriot or anything else. It feeds on the uniformed, the malcontent, the miscreant and the self-indulgent. Its only enemy is God.
I have to remind myself every once in a while that the average American today does not know a whole lot about communism. At times it's almost as if it is seen as nothing but a conspiracy theory, as if it never really existed and as if over a hundred million people were never murdered under it. Communism lies, it kills, it terrorizes, it threatens and carries out those threats. It's godless, it dupes and cons people...whole peoples and when it attains power through coercion and deception it lowers the boom...no more promises for there is no need to give them for it now has total control and will henceforth dictate everything....to everybody!
Every facet of our society is unraveling before our very eyes. Emil Mazey, a twentieth century labor leader, is reported to have paraphrased the older proverb known as the duck test when he said the following..."I can't prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck,, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks- I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck." Are you willing to read the evidence of how Communism has worked, is working, and even as of now...winning, in America? Read the book that is reviewed in the following blog first published on September 15th of 2011 and then try to defend this administration.
September 15, 2011
The relationship between the American Progressive and Communism has always been a dysfunctional one, the Progressive longing for someone to look to as a hero and the Communist not only abusing that adulation but sneering at those so gullible as to think that there is anything compassionate or caring about them. The Communist knew the extraordinary weaknesses of the liberal American mind and had taken advantage of it from the beginning, for a century now! It has a new face today, hiding behind a semi-capitalist veil, for it retreated and reinvented its outward appearance.
This generation will never be able to say that they were not told, not warned, for the evidence is everywhere if only we would look. I've reported on more than a dozen outstanding books on the deteriorating condition of our nation and its causes in this blog of almost three (over five) years but none of secular content more needed than the one I put before you today. I do not believe that any liberal can read this book and not be concerned that they may have been duped. One might very well read a chapter and then throw the book away, or skim it and not accept its message but if one reads this book through they will view our political landscape differently. The title of the book is Dupes, How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century.
I'm very familiar with the author for I had read a few of his previous books and I admired him as a Professor of Political Science at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, one of America's finest colleges. This is a monumentally important work written with clarity, and systematized in such a way to take the reader on a trip through American history and awaken the reader in the process. Professor Kengor filleted the meat of Communist propaganda so expertly as to expose the rotten flesh and release the stench that permeates liberal politics, higher education and the mainstream media. You have to read this book...if you care about America. A blurb from Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute says the same thing: "Face it. You are going to have to read this book." Why...so that you can show your knowledge of Communism in some future conversation? No, rather that you can read it and weep and hopefully sound your own alarm in that future conversation. In another blurb, Fred Barnes wrote that it left him "amazed and a bit frightened." The Weekly Standard's Barnes has been sounding an alarm for decades yet it still made him a bit frightened!
Reading the book was a culmination of research that I had already been doing, that the Communist has reappeared in America in a new guise, and yet I was dumbfounded by the volume of evidence and not a little disappointed in being reminded of my own history of being duped in the late 1970s. Kengor is going to take you back to September of 1919 in Chicago where Communism first began its assault on the American mind. You will see the essence of class hatred in it from its beginnings and recognize the tactic from the Left today. You will see one celebrity or person of note after another taken in by the lies, many waking up later angry and indignant. Even the most ardent admirer of Franklin Roosevelt will have to reassess that admiration as Roosevelt was taken in by Uncle Joe Stalin thanks to the leftists all around him. Read and weep at how much of our media was not only taken in but even today ridicules those who are not duped. Will they have the character to admit they were wrong, if and when they also awaken, as many of their predecessors did? You will see heroes and you will see buffoons who were, and are, very useful idiots for Communism, and too many who were out-and-out traitors. You will see how Hollywood was used and many of the biggest names duped. Compare this to the stars of today while you read. And you will see Ronald Reagan as a liberal Democrat and head of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, admittedly himself duped for a time, and recognize his courage and greatness on display even then! No one made this man and he was no late bloomer.
Communism has a new face but the essence remains the same, for God is still banished and revolutions are still started, as despicably as ever, through hatred and propaganda. Lying is as common as breathing. One class is pitted against another. Educators are still sought for their influence on the youth. Unions are still infiltrated as are the arts. College students are intellectually brutalized and the news media is still wooed with dreams that they might actually be more important than the news they report. The SDS mentality (Students for a Democratic Society) that the Communist so effectively used against our military's efforts in Vietnam is alive in many of its former leaders who have grown up, quite naturally, to become college and university professors, and in the case of Bill Ayers, prepare their comrades, and those they mentor, to run for elective office, even the presidency. Communism is alive but not well because it can only remain beneath the surface for so long until the rains of tyranny expose the caskets of dead ideas, tyrants and false promises. Paul Kengor lays it out very clearly for the reader how lies told about George Bush's intentions is Iraq and how accusations of a warmongering, racist, America that has lured the college student, the idle and the malcontent over the past thirty years, are just reheated deceptions dusted off from older Communist scripts where only the names have changed.
Who is Frank Marshall Davis and why was the media silent on this Communist mentor to our current President? Why is Jimmy Carter still a dupe? How was Edward Kennedy, who I had volunteered for, one of the biggest dupes of all? One need not be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party to be a Communist as Kengor points out, and one can think of themselves as a patriot and yet be a prize dupe! Kengor says that they will continue to call us scare mongers and McCarthyite fanatics but this is just another tried and true tactic from the bowels of Moscow's Comintern. He concludes his book with these thoughts: "The most mordant irony for the liberals who lend cover is that while they laugh at the anti-Communists, they seem to have no idea that the loudest howls have always emanated from the Communists who take them as dupes: gullible fools to be used to advance the Communist cause."
Professor's Kengor's follow up book is more specific to Barack Obama. Its title is The Communist, Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Tempests And Doldrums
May God have mercy upon our nation. From small vessels bearing
cramped pilgrims we developed into an empire. We surpassed every empire
this world has ever seen in not only power and might but in knowledge
and scientific skills. More than that even as God used us a conduit for
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every corner of the earth. We fought Him
all along the way, this is true, but we were a very large piece in His
grand design and he would use His rod and His staff on many occasions to
both chastise us and to gently but forcefully bring us back.
As I sit here in my study and pause, my eyes lift to a photograph on canvas on the wall in front of me. The camera is on the teak deck. The thin rails give the impression of a much older vessel. I stare right into the sea as billowing waves heave the ship at about a 40 degree list. Clouds dominate the sky but the sun found an opening as the shutter was clicked. In the foreground, barley visible, are rolling hills where possibly a safe harbor awaits. I look at this photo often and wonder in awe at the power of God's seas and the safe harbor of His grace.
We in America are on a ship. It may as well be anchored in Boston Harbor next to the USS Constitution for it no longer guards our freedoms and liberties. I've related this story before. Fifteen years ago, sitting in a classroom of mostly younger fellow members of our cohort working for a degree in Higher Education, we were discussing the issues of the day as they related to colleges and universities. I remember standing up for emphasis and warning that a division was coming within America. Two different peoples were emerging, two different methods for thinking, two opposing opinions on what truth is and what it is not. If anyone agreed they did not speak up but unfortunately I was right. Our American Creed is not even a memory. Our heritage is almost spat upon. Our traditions are deemed useless in a world that mocks God.
As it often seems to happen as I write, the XM radio plays something that relates to the topic at hand and in this instance it's classical music and Edward Elgar's Coronation March written for the coronation of Great Britain's King George V in 1911. There is no pomp and circumstance in this piece. The music seems to roll along with the hills and the ship in my photograph. 1911! A new century was underway, a century that would hurl England into two World Wars within three decades. Bombed.....but never into submission......no, it would lose in other ways, even as we are losing now.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers, had warned them but they would not listen. Their pulpits were not vigilant and the gospel was being modernized. Today, over a century later, England is surrendering. Surrendering to confusion. Awash in chaos, their heritage trampled underfoot by foreigners who take advantage of a malnourished liberal tradition; they fight back but there is no Churchill to rally them, no Thatcher to prod them and face down the enemy's threats and lies, and although many faithful preachers-no Spurgeon...Ryle...or Martyn Lloyd-Jones to call down fire from on high on their (our) arrogance!
Some see the world today as simply a new paradigm, that the world will go on. Others see it as progress but all the evidence, if allowed to be submitted, shows a crumbling Western Civilization.... puzzle pieces added almost every day where a picture of our future is beginning to appear. It's one of a dystopian society ruled by Herbert Spencer's 'survival of the fittest' and birthed by Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. In the background, behind the robotic movements and hollow faces of the people, above the gay-colored storefronts that have absolutely nothing to sell that can enliven that people or that can inform, and movie theaters with films that preach the chimera of a nation adapting without God, is an onrushing sandstorm obliterating all vision and discernment....a tsunami that sucks in the surf before it exposing a soft underbelly of a nation that once acknowledged, reverenced and relied upon its benefactor and at least tried to navigate by His written Word.
Twelve hours from now men and women will fill the pulpits of America. Well-exercised healthy specimens, pastors of the First Church of the Fit and Buff, tolerant of everything except that written Word; they will smile and preach peace oblivious to two previous millennia of pulpits that extolled the glories of Christ, warned of hellfire and offered salvation bought on a bloody cross.
Not all pulpits have decayed. Many of God's ministers shed tears throughout the week and reach out as if to grab the hem of the cloak of their Saviour seeking power from on high to awaken those given into their charge. Seeking a revival, even a reformation and seeking mercy, their work is not in vain. Christians in America are as strong and faithful as they ever were but far, far fewer in percentages. Almost isolated, often ridiculed, sometimes persecuted, they sense that the King of Kings is mounted, that His mighty angels are silent, awaiting the voice of thunder that beckons them forward. May God have mercy upon America. May He use us one last time, according to His will, for His purposes....and for His glory alone!
As I sit here in my study and pause, my eyes lift to a photograph on canvas on the wall in front of me. The camera is on the teak deck. The thin rails give the impression of a much older vessel. I stare right into the sea as billowing waves heave the ship at about a 40 degree list. Clouds dominate the sky but the sun found an opening as the shutter was clicked. In the foreground, barley visible, are rolling hills where possibly a safe harbor awaits. I look at this photo often and wonder in awe at the power of God's seas and the safe harbor of His grace.
We in America are on a ship. It may as well be anchored in Boston Harbor next to the USS Constitution for it no longer guards our freedoms and liberties. I've related this story before. Fifteen years ago, sitting in a classroom of mostly younger fellow members of our cohort working for a degree in Higher Education, we were discussing the issues of the day as they related to colleges and universities. I remember standing up for emphasis and warning that a division was coming within America. Two different peoples were emerging, two different methods for thinking, two opposing opinions on what truth is and what it is not. If anyone agreed they did not speak up but unfortunately I was right. Our American Creed is not even a memory. Our heritage is almost spat upon. Our traditions are deemed useless in a world that mocks God.
As it often seems to happen as I write, the XM radio plays something that relates to the topic at hand and in this instance it's classical music and Edward Elgar's Coronation March written for the coronation of Great Britain's King George V in 1911. There is no pomp and circumstance in this piece. The music seems to roll along with the hills and the ship in my photograph. 1911! A new century was underway, a century that would hurl England into two World Wars within three decades. Bombed.....but never into submission......no, it would lose in other ways, even as we are losing now.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers, had warned them but they would not listen. Their pulpits were not vigilant and the gospel was being modernized. Today, over a century later, England is surrendering. Surrendering to confusion. Awash in chaos, their heritage trampled underfoot by foreigners who take advantage of a malnourished liberal tradition; they fight back but there is no Churchill to rally them, no Thatcher to prod them and face down the enemy's threats and lies, and although many faithful preachers-no Spurgeon...Ryle...or Martyn Lloyd-Jones to call down fire from on high on their (our) arrogance!
Some see the world today as simply a new paradigm, that the world will go on. Others see it as progress but all the evidence, if allowed to be submitted, shows a crumbling Western Civilization.... puzzle pieces added almost every day where a picture of our future is beginning to appear. It's one of a dystopian society ruled by Herbert Spencer's 'survival of the fittest' and birthed by Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. In the background, behind the robotic movements and hollow faces of the people, above the gay-colored storefronts that have absolutely nothing to sell that can enliven that people or that can inform, and movie theaters with films that preach the chimera of a nation adapting without God, is an onrushing sandstorm obliterating all vision and discernment....a tsunami that sucks in the surf before it exposing a soft underbelly of a nation that once acknowledged, reverenced and relied upon its benefactor and at least tried to navigate by His written Word.
Twelve hours from now men and women will fill the pulpits of America. Well-exercised healthy specimens, pastors of the First Church of the Fit and Buff, tolerant of everything except that written Word; they will smile and preach peace oblivious to two previous millennia of pulpits that extolled the glories of Christ, warned of hellfire and offered salvation bought on a bloody cross.
Not all pulpits have decayed. Many of God's ministers shed tears throughout the week and reach out as if to grab the hem of the cloak of their Saviour seeking power from on high to awaken those given into their charge. Seeking a revival, even a reformation and seeking mercy, their work is not in vain. Christians in America are as strong and faithful as they ever were but far, far fewer in percentages. Almost isolated, often ridiculed, sometimes persecuted, they sense that the King of Kings is mounted, that His mighty angels are silent, awaiting the voice of thunder that beckons them forward. May God have mercy upon America. May He use us one last time, according to His will, for His purposes....and for His glory alone!
Friday, December 12, 2014
Barack And Boehner In The Funnies
G. R. O. S. S.------- Get Rid Of Slimy ConservativeS
It was a family matter.....not politics.....really. I had saved a section of the newspaper from June of 1994. Well, just today I pulled it out of a box for reference and before putting it back noticed that the comics were on the back page. At the top of the page was Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, so I read it. When I finished I turned to my wife and said, "This is going in my blog!"
Calvin and Hobbes form a club....G. R. O. S. S.--- Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS. Hobbes says "I get to be president! I get to be president!" Calvin shoots back "Oh, no you don't. This whole club was my idea. So I get to be president." Hobbes thinks it over..."OK, then I get to be king and tyrant." and Calvin, seeing he has been out maneuvered responds "Hey, no! That's what I want to be. You can You can be president!"
My mind went straight to Barack Obama and John Boehner's relationship! Most likely Barack Obama read the comic in 1994 for he was then a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School and judging from watching him destroy our constitution for six years, it's apparent that he must have spent a lot of his time reading the comics while there.
It was a family matter.....not politics.....really. I had saved a section of the newspaper from June of 1994. Well, just today I pulled it out of a box for reference and before putting it back noticed that the comics were on the back page. At the top of the page was Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, so I read it. When I finished I turned to my wife and said, "This is going in my blog!"
Calvin and Hobbes form a club....G. R. O. S. S.--- Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS. Hobbes says "I get to be president! I get to be president!" Calvin shoots back "Oh, no you don't. This whole club was my idea. So I get to be president." Hobbes thinks it over..."OK, then I get to be king and tyrant." and Calvin, seeing he has been out maneuvered responds "Hey, no! That's what I want to be. You can You can be president!"
My mind went straight to Barack Obama and John Boehner's relationship! Most likely Barack Obama read the comic in 1994 for he was then a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School and judging from watching him destroy our constitution for six years, it's apparent that he must have spent a lot of his time reading the comics while there.
Impeach.....Boehner
In the run-up to this last election, conservative friends were all excited and making occasional comments on the looming Republican victory. These comments were met by a blank stare from me. There were five good Republican Senate candidates and about the same number of good House candidates trying to get into the Congress. A big victory would give Boehner and McConnell an excuse to say how they had something to do with it and to continue their 'scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' relationship with our would-be king. John Boehner has to go, and if the last week does not convince you of that then nothing will. Barack Obama is waiting for a crisis to consolidate power even more. We will need strong leadership in our Congress when that happens!
Impeach.....Boehner
I do not know what procedures that the House of Representatives have in place to remove a House Speaker. It's probably not impeachment. I only use the word because it does convey a message......you are out! John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both secured their leadership positions for the 114th Congress before conservatives stopped celebrating the November election. There's not enough space between Republican elites and Democrats to slide a copy of the Affordable Care Act between them. Neither man can grasp that this nation is about to implode. Neither realizes that they are but terracotta soldiers alive only as chess pieces in a game of thrones.
There is something that has to be done before this new congress is seated and that is to put an end to Barack Obama's 'speech from the throne' more commonly known as the State of the Union address. As I have written about many times in these posts, this speech to the full Congress is not required. What is required in the Constitution is that the president gives an annual report. Thomas Jefferson wouldn't give this address in front of the Congress for he did think it too close to England's 'Speech from the Throne.'
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell give lip service to conservatives, use stalling tactics and offer up an occasional law suit while Barack Obama and his cadre of leftists spy and lie so many times that it no longer shocks anyone.
Two days after I posted similar thoughts last December John Boehner gave this invitation....."....we welcome an opportunity to hear your ideas, particularly for putting Americans back to work. It's my honor to invite you to speak before a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 in the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol Building."
Would it be impossible to remove the reigning Speaker of the House if he once again lays out the red carpet for Barack Obama? No, unlikely yes but so was our independence from England. John Hancock couldn't sign the Declaration of Independence in bold enough letters to let that king know that America meant business and refusing to allow this dog and pony show to continue would send the message to the American people that this is not just politics, this is a new Declaration of Independence!
The Earl Of Boehner......Redux
In the beginning of the English Civil War the Earl of Manchester was Oliver Cromwell's superior. Cromwell considered him slow, indecisive and lacking enthusiasm in opposing the tyranny and incompetence of the king. Manchester, for his part, was more concerned with Oliver Cromwell recruiting men of 'low birth' for his army....uh, that would be men like me. Cromwell's philosophy was different as shown here in a quote from a letter to others in the Parliamentary forces, "I beseech you be careful what Captains of Horse you choose....a few honest men are better than numbers....If you choose godly honest men to be Captains of Horse, honest men will follow them."
The 1970 film Cromwell starred Richard Harris as Oliver Cromwell and it depicted a confrontation between these two men. The Earl of Manchester was delaying in his charge against the king's Cavaliers. Incensed, Cromwell rode up to him and promised something like this "Manchester, I am going defeat this king's army, even if I have to go through you first!"
The following is a post from last year:
The Republican Party And Its Discontents
Why would the elites of the Republican Party use 'a scorched earth policy in the war on its base? Conservatives have been the largest block in the party since the early eighties. It's been a stabilizing force, a breath of fresh air and a taste of sanity in a world run amok, not to mention the primary reason for many Republican victories. Ronald Reagan was a part of it, the leader...yes, but also a part of it. It's by far the most passionate and dedicated block.
What may have precipitated the turn on the conservatives is that they began to see just what the establishment wing of the Republican Party really is. Angelo Codevilla is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University. His opinion is that the Republican Party operates as nothing more than "junior members of America's single ruling party...the UniParty," and that there is little difference between them and the Democrats. He is absolutely right!
Politics has blinded these elites as to the level of danger that our nation is in. They talked a good game for so long that they have come to believe the power of their own verbiage and loquacity..... thus conservatives have become expendable. They'll be replaced with deserters from the Democrats, independents and anyone else who the elites can promise something to.....emulating the same essential strategy as those Democrats who they oppose before the cameras but hobnob with in the sanctity of their inner rooms.....and surely conservatives wouldn't really go far away and let Hillary become president!
Well, they are as wrong as they could possibly be. Their very first mistake is that they believe that they themselves matter. Our problems in America are far beyond legislative fixes and the Republican Party does not have the wherewithal or the dedication to stop the hemorrhaging in our nation and society even if there was a remedy. So with either the Republican elites in charge or Hillary.... America unravels. The threat of Hillary Clinton is moot.
Their next mistake was to think that conservatives will eventually fall in line. We have been burned badly. Our nation is collapsing before us. Barbarians are at the gate and inside the gate, even inside the beltway.
In the trailer for the film Noah, Russell Crowe playing Noah defiantly answers the leader of an approaching horde who mocks him for attempting to stop them all by his self with.... "I am not alone." Silly me, I thought he was referring to God at his side but he was talking about the fallen angels....fallen angels... who would help him. (Please see my March 30th review of Noah)
Well, Mr. Boehner...and Mr. McCain...and Mr. Mitchell....and Mr. Graham....and Mr. Rove...and Mr. Bush.....we are not alone either. We are Americans who trust in their God and recognize His hand in all of creation, His omniscience and omnipotence in forming this people, His power in sustaining us though we often strayed far away, and also His warnings to us after years and years and years of our increasingly ignoring Him..... the continuance of which you are advocating..... your third and most egregious mistake. You have become impervious to common sense, to wisdom or to any light in your darkened halls of power.
America's future does not lie in these elections that the Republican Party is selling more than its birthright for; and the winners of these elections will have no power that God does not permit and no wisdom that God does not give, for His purposes and to His glory! Our duty is to elect God-fearing leaders and pray for God's mercy knowing that His will is perfect, and that it may or may not include the United States of America as a source of stability in the world or even an entity in itself.
Celebrate your polling figures all that you want. Rally your corporate execs and political professionals. We'll celebrate a risen Savior and a returning King. Yes, we'll follow Luther's advice to 'plant a tree,' to continue to work, even if we knew for certain that Jesus was returning the very next day, but you might want to take notice of Oliver Cromwell's words to the 'establishment' of his day in:
"I had rather a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else."
Impeach.....Boehner
I do not know what procedures that the House of Representatives have in place to remove a House Speaker. It's probably not impeachment. I only use the word because it does convey a message......you are out! John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both secured their leadership positions for the 114th Congress before conservatives stopped celebrating the November election. There's not enough space between Republican elites and Democrats to slide a copy of the Affordable Care Act between them. Neither man can grasp that this nation is about to implode. Neither realizes that they are but terracotta soldiers alive only as chess pieces in a game of thrones.
There is something that has to be done before this new congress is seated and that is to put an end to Barack Obama's 'speech from the throne' more commonly known as the State of the Union address. As I have written about many times in these posts, this speech to the full Congress is not required. What is required in the Constitution is that the president gives an annual report. Thomas Jefferson wouldn't give this address in front of the Congress for he did think it too close to England's 'Speech from the Throne.'
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell give lip service to conservatives, use stalling tactics and offer up an occasional law suit while Barack Obama and his cadre of leftists spy and lie so many times that it no longer shocks anyone.
Two days after I posted similar thoughts last December John Boehner gave this invitation....."....we welcome an opportunity to hear your ideas, particularly for putting Americans back to work. It's my honor to invite you to speak before a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 in the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol Building."
Would it be impossible to remove the reigning Speaker of the House if he once again lays out the red carpet for Barack Obama? No, unlikely yes but so was our independence from England. John Hancock couldn't sign the Declaration of Independence in bold enough letters to let that king know that America meant business and refusing to allow this dog and pony show to continue would send the message to the American people that this is not just politics, this is a new Declaration of Independence!
The Earl Of Boehner......Redux
In the beginning of the English Civil War the Earl of Manchester was Oliver Cromwell's superior. Cromwell considered him slow, indecisive and lacking enthusiasm in opposing the tyranny and incompetence of the king. Manchester, for his part, was more concerned with Oliver Cromwell recruiting men of 'low birth' for his army....uh, that would be men like me. Cromwell's philosophy was different as shown here in a quote from a letter to others in the Parliamentary forces, "I beseech you be careful what Captains of Horse you choose....a few honest men are better than numbers....If you choose godly honest men to be Captains of Horse, honest men will follow them."
The 1970 film Cromwell starred Richard Harris as Oliver Cromwell and it depicted a confrontation between these two men. The Earl of Manchester was delaying in his charge against the king's Cavaliers. Incensed, Cromwell rode up to him and promised something like this "Manchester, I am going defeat this king's army, even if I have to go through you first!"
The following is a post from last year:
The Republican Party And Its Discontents
Why would the elites of the Republican Party use 'a scorched earth policy in the war on its base? Conservatives have been the largest block in the party since the early eighties. It's been a stabilizing force, a breath of fresh air and a taste of sanity in a world run amok, not to mention the primary reason for many Republican victories. Ronald Reagan was a part of it, the leader...yes, but also a part of it. It's by far the most passionate and dedicated block.
What may have precipitated the turn on the conservatives is that they began to see just what the establishment wing of the Republican Party really is. Angelo Codevilla is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University. His opinion is that the Republican Party operates as nothing more than "junior members of America's single ruling party...the UniParty," and that there is little difference between them and the Democrats. He is absolutely right!
Politics has blinded these elites as to the level of danger that our nation is in. They talked a good game for so long that they have come to believe the power of their own verbiage and loquacity..... thus conservatives have become expendable. They'll be replaced with deserters from the Democrats, independents and anyone else who the elites can promise something to.....emulating the same essential strategy as those Democrats who they oppose before the cameras but hobnob with in the sanctity of their inner rooms.....and surely conservatives wouldn't really go far away and let Hillary become president!
Well, they are as wrong as they could possibly be. Their very first mistake is that they believe that they themselves matter. Our problems in America are far beyond legislative fixes and the Republican Party does not have the wherewithal or the dedication to stop the hemorrhaging in our nation and society even if there was a remedy. So with either the Republican elites in charge or Hillary.... America unravels. The threat of Hillary Clinton is moot.
Their next mistake was to think that conservatives will eventually fall in line. We have been burned badly. Our nation is collapsing before us. Barbarians are at the gate and inside the gate, even inside the beltway.
In the trailer for the film Noah, Russell Crowe playing Noah defiantly answers the leader of an approaching horde who mocks him for attempting to stop them all by his self with.... "I am not alone." Silly me, I thought he was referring to God at his side but he was talking about the fallen angels....fallen angels... who would help him. (Please see my March 30th review of Noah)
Well, Mr. Boehner...and Mr. McCain...and Mr. Mitchell....and Mr. Graham....and Mr. Rove...and Mr. Bush.....we are not alone either. We are Americans who trust in their God and recognize His hand in all of creation, His omniscience and omnipotence in forming this people, His power in sustaining us though we often strayed far away, and also His warnings to us after years and years and years of our increasingly ignoring Him..... the continuance of which you are advocating..... your third and most egregious mistake. You have become impervious to common sense, to wisdom or to any light in your darkened halls of power.
America's future does not lie in these elections that the Republican Party is selling more than its birthright for; and the winners of these elections will have no power that God does not permit and no wisdom that God does not give, for His purposes and to His glory! Our duty is to elect God-fearing leaders and pray for God's mercy knowing that His will is perfect, and that it may or may not include the United States of America as a source of stability in the world or even an entity in itself.
Celebrate your polling figures all that you want. Rally your corporate execs and political professionals. We'll celebrate a risen Savior and a returning King. Yes, we'll follow Luther's advice to 'plant a tree,' to continue to work, even if we knew for certain that Jesus was returning the very next day, but you might want to take notice of Oliver Cromwell's words to the 'establishment' of his day in:
"I had rather a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else."
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Today Is The Day.....Redux
We have no one to blame but ourselves. We let it happen. Some are more
to blame than others but no one is left unscathed. They came in waving
their diplomas given to them by the Wizard of Oz and we let them set the
coarse for teaching our children. They tapped us on the shoulder
getting our attention long enough to tell us that God was dead and we
ignored them and went back to watching our sports. They told us that a
pre-born child was only a fetus so we let them kill as many as they
wanted. They taught in our universities that there is no truth....and
then told us that that was the truth, said that there is no good and no
bad, no right and no wrong, and that if we agree... that's good, but if
we disagree... that's bad, if we follow...that's right and if we
don't...that's wrong. They called us intolerant as they swept away
piecemeal our identity as a nation through courts whose judges they had
strategically placed into position while we naively thought that
politics could save us.
Meanwhile we opened the gates wide as they dragged in the Trojan Horse with the colossal hologram of Barack Obama sitting atop it saying "peace...peace." The barbarians slithered out of the seeming abyss of its belly and began to take apart our Constitution and destroy the American family. They lie as easily as they breath.
We now sit here and watch as hardly a day goes by without another assault upon sanity, another mockery of law, another battering ram thrust upon our bulwarks....from the inside, another swing of the ax laid to our moorings and another pyre constructed of old books and documents and histories and pews and pulpits, readied to lay upon it our Constitution and be lit by the fires of hell.
We knew more than our parents and they knew more than their parents and they knew more than theirs. The final result of this antithesis of wisdom has produced the 140 character text, the tweet, that tests the limits of our analytical skills.
O where to go to when we finally see how far we have fallen, when we gag at the stench that permeates our very being, when we sob when we think of the future of our children and clench our fists in anger as we look into a mirror and see nothing....absolutely nothing.
Well, we're not there yet. We haven't hit bottom, but we will. We aren't gagging because we have been conditioned to savor the fetid stench of communism, and why look into a mirror when one has Facebook!
Many have penciled in God for late in life, an insurance policy to be purchased upon retirement. How foolish, yet how perfectly inlaid into the urn awaiting our ashes. Look around and see the house that we have constructed where Jesus Christ is no longer the cornerstone, where His Word is packed away in the basement in a box labelled...'books.' Today is the day to humble ourselves before God, to kneel and weep at the foot of the cross, for there is no guarantee of tomorrow, not for individuals or for nations.
Meanwhile we opened the gates wide as they dragged in the Trojan Horse with the colossal hologram of Barack Obama sitting atop it saying "peace...peace." The barbarians slithered out of the seeming abyss of its belly and began to take apart our Constitution and destroy the American family. They lie as easily as they breath.
We now sit here and watch as hardly a day goes by without another assault upon sanity, another mockery of law, another battering ram thrust upon our bulwarks....from the inside, another swing of the ax laid to our moorings and another pyre constructed of old books and documents and histories and pews and pulpits, readied to lay upon it our Constitution and be lit by the fires of hell.
We knew more than our parents and they knew more than their parents and they knew more than theirs. The final result of this antithesis of wisdom has produced the 140 character text, the tweet, that tests the limits of our analytical skills.
O where to go to when we finally see how far we have fallen, when we gag at the stench that permeates our very being, when we sob when we think of the future of our children and clench our fists in anger as we look into a mirror and see nothing....absolutely nothing.
Well, we're not there yet. We haven't hit bottom, but we will. We aren't gagging because we have been conditioned to savor the fetid stench of communism, and why look into a mirror when one has Facebook!
Many have penciled in God for late in life, an insurance policy to be purchased upon retirement. How foolish, yet how perfectly inlaid into the urn awaiting our ashes. Look around and see the house that we have constructed where Jesus Christ is no longer the cornerstone, where His Word is packed away in the basement in a box labelled...'books.' Today is the day to humble ourselves before God, to kneel and weep at the foot of the cross, for there is no guarantee of tomorrow, not for individuals or for nations.
Monday, December 8, 2014
Odds And Ends.....Redux
The depth and the breadth of the assault on America is almost beyond
comprehension. The global warming threats are tied in as is the long
sought after New World Order, as are the multitudinous efforts by Barack
Obama to weaken our military, our middle class and our constitutional
republic itself. Right now there is a major and effective effort to
weaken our chief source of accurate and penetrating information.....that
being conservative talk radio. In the midst of this maelstrom,
communism is alive and well! Willing dupes are everywhere. The
only....only....hope for America.... is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ!
The following was a post from last month:
Odds And Ends......September, 2014
If it were possible to give odds on whether America survives its enemies and itself they would be very very low. I mentioned the new book The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport in a recent post and there is a part near the end where the Czar and his family were under house arrest in Tobolsk and the revolutionary guards voted amongst themselves not to wear epaulettes , "thereby putting everyone on the new, socialist, level playing field." If there was ever a sorrier bunch than these dupes who actually believed the pious words of Lenin and his cohorts then, well it would have to be those today who are dupes to the same power mongering ideology.
Class warfare is a means to an end. It is a tool that when sharpened and honed to the degree that when rebellion, anarchy and chaos ensues it has served its purpose and those who thought that justice, equality and fairness were actually the goals are doomed to live out their lives in complete subjugation and slavery to the ones that used and abused them.
Class warfare is impotent against the Gospel of Jesus Christ for when a man first sees himself in rebellion against a Holy God he seeks mercy instead of justice and dispenses fairness and equality instead of demanding it. No, in human terms the odds are extremely low that we in America will prevail against such an insidious farce being perpetrated on the American public today but there is no such thing as 'odds' with God, and in the end, should He will it to have mercy upon us and move upon our collective hearts and minds in repentance there is no power on earth capable of stopping it.
Odds And Ends......September, 2014
If it were possible to give odds on whether America survives its enemies and itself they would be very very low. I mentioned the new book The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport in a recent post and there is a part near the end where the Czar and his family were under house arrest in Tobolsk and the revolutionary guards voted amongst themselves not to wear epaulettes , "thereby putting everyone on the new, socialist, level playing field." If there was ever a sorrier bunch than these dupes who actually believed the pious words of Lenin and his cohorts then, well it would have to be those today who are dupes to the same power mongering ideology.
Class warfare is a means to an end. It is a tool that when sharpened and honed to the degree that when rebellion, anarchy and chaos ensues it has served its purpose and those who thought that justice, equality and fairness were actually the goals are doomed to live out their lives in complete subjugation and slavery to the ones that used and abused them.
Class warfare is impotent against the Gospel of Jesus Christ for when a man first sees himself in rebellion against a Holy God he seeks mercy instead of justice and dispenses fairness and equality instead of demanding it. No, in human terms the odds are extremely low that we in America will prevail against such an insidious farce being perpetrated on the American public today but there is no such thing as 'odds' with God, and in the end, should He will it to have mercy upon us and move upon our collective hearts and minds in repentance there is no power on earth capable of stopping it.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Fire By Night
David Wilkerson was a Pentecostal preacher with the Assemblies of God who in 1958 saw a Life Magazine article about some brutal teenage gang members in New York city, this from his church in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, and was utterly compelled to go to the Big Apple to rescue, with the gospel of Jesus Christ, as many of these wayward teens as he could. Out of this passion came Teen Challenge, books, movies and decades of evangelistic outreaches around the world culminating in his pastoring Times Square Church on Broadway.
That is about when he came into my life. I had been a Christian for only a few years when somehow, I can't remember exactly how, I became acquainted with his pulpit ministry from New York City and soon listened to and owned over 100 of his sermons. The cassettes are still in my basement today. David Wilkerson's and British evangelist Leonard Ravenhill's writings exposed me to something new. In my limited knowledge I knew it only to be related somehow to the English Puritans but I also new that there was something special there. In retrospect after reading a new biography on David Wilkerson by his son Gary (David Wilkerson: The Cross, the Switchblade, and the Man Who Believed),, I think that he also was only on the distant periphery of the Puritans. I would disagree with most of his particular theology but that is not the point I'm trying to make here.
I've written about Reverend Wilkerson before but he himself is not really the topic of this post either. That topic is more the....David Wilkersons....in life that we read about in books. Men, or women, who are so aggressive in their passions that they accomplish much where others sit and watch, possibly partake of or maybe even criticize. I've noticed something in these folks whether they be great generals or great anythings, which I'll refer to in a little bit. But back to Reverend Wilkerson. In the beginning of his ministry, he had only himself and his immediate family to worry about. He had entire control of his actions and was alone responsible for the outcome. This is fertile ground for genius. This was Stonewall Jackson in his Valley Campaign, and again in his brilliant flanking movement at Chancellorsville. This was Churchill as he strengthened the resolve of the British people while they were being bombed. This was Jefferson in the leading up to the American Revolution, this was Washington crossing the Delaware. This was Reagan as his pure patriotism lifted a nation.
Charles Spurgeon, as great as he was, was actually censored by his denomination later in life, by others who could not keep up with him. The same could be said for the great intellect and Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen. Luther was at his finest when the battle was raging. Bunyan wrote his classic while in jail but Napoleon could not even win with a winning hand later in life at Waterloo. Robert E. Lee could not duplicate his previous magic at Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant only had his moments when everything depended on it. It goes on and on....as I see it anyway.
So I ponder what I have come to see over the years and am convinced that when that all-consuming passion is there, when nothing matters but doing what is right, when no one else will stand up, or has any vision, then it is your time. Fear not what man will say about you but fear what God will say when you have to answer for the 'talents' given you that molder in the ground.
There's another lesson as I see it, and it must be almost impossible to see when you are in the midst of the battle, when the fire on deck and in your heart is raging. It seems that God calls most of these great individuals....for a time.....when they are needed most. To presume that one's 'genius' will last forever is to attempt to take God out of the equation. Did not Solomon himself do this? There are exceptions of course and none more obvious than the Apostle Paul, but to the rest....play the part given to you to the best of your ability, and if God should need you again, He has a way of making it very clear who is calling.
David Wilkerson 1931-2011
As an interesting anecdote, it turns out that Reverend Wilkerson was raised in a small Western Pennsylvania town where I lived for`a summer with my Aunt's family after moving to Pittsburgh in 1962. His family home was one block away from my aunt's. His future wife was from a small town a few miles away that my mother and I soon moved to and where I grew up. I passed David Wilkerson's father's church dozens if not hundreds of times in those years.
That is about when he came into my life. I had been a Christian for only a few years when somehow, I can't remember exactly how, I became acquainted with his pulpit ministry from New York City and soon listened to and owned over 100 of his sermons. The cassettes are still in my basement today. David Wilkerson's and British evangelist Leonard Ravenhill's writings exposed me to something new. In my limited knowledge I knew it only to be related somehow to the English Puritans but I also new that there was something special there. In retrospect after reading a new biography on David Wilkerson by his son Gary (David Wilkerson: The Cross, the Switchblade, and the Man Who Believed),, I think that he also was only on the distant periphery of the Puritans. I would disagree with most of his particular theology but that is not the point I'm trying to make here.
I've written about Reverend Wilkerson before but he himself is not really the topic of this post either. That topic is more the....David Wilkersons....in life that we read about in books. Men, or women, who are so aggressive in their passions that they accomplish much where others sit and watch, possibly partake of or maybe even criticize. I've noticed something in these folks whether they be great generals or great anythings, which I'll refer to in a little bit. But back to Reverend Wilkerson. In the beginning of his ministry, he had only himself and his immediate family to worry about. He had entire control of his actions and was alone responsible for the outcome. This is fertile ground for genius. This was Stonewall Jackson in his Valley Campaign, and again in his brilliant flanking movement at Chancellorsville. This was Churchill as he strengthened the resolve of the British people while they were being bombed. This was Jefferson in the leading up to the American Revolution, this was Washington crossing the Delaware. This was Reagan as his pure patriotism lifted a nation.
Charles Spurgeon, as great as he was, was actually censored by his denomination later in life, by others who could not keep up with him. The same could be said for the great intellect and Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen. Luther was at his finest when the battle was raging. Bunyan wrote his classic while in jail but Napoleon could not even win with a winning hand later in life at Waterloo. Robert E. Lee could not duplicate his previous magic at Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant only had his moments when everything depended on it. It goes on and on....as I see it anyway.
So I ponder what I have come to see over the years and am convinced that when that all-consuming passion is there, when nothing matters but doing what is right, when no one else will stand up, or has any vision, then it is your time. Fear not what man will say about you but fear what God will say when you have to answer for the 'talents' given you that molder in the ground.
There's another lesson as I see it, and it must be almost impossible to see when you are in the midst of the battle, when the fire on deck and in your heart is raging. It seems that God calls most of these great individuals....for a time.....when they are needed most. To presume that one's 'genius' will last forever is to attempt to take God out of the equation. Did not Solomon himself do this? There are exceptions of course and none more obvious than the Apostle Paul, but to the rest....play the part given to you to the best of your ability, and if God should need you again, He has a way of making it very clear who is calling.
David Wilkerson 1931-2011
As an interesting anecdote, it turns out that Reverend Wilkerson was raised in a small Western Pennsylvania town where I lived for`a summer with my Aunt's family after moving to Pittsburgh in 1962. His family home was one block away from my aunt's. His future wife was from a small town a few miles away that my mother and I soon moved to and where I grew up. I passed David Wilkerson's father's church dozens if not hundreds of times in those years.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Your Service Is Needed Again!
I've wanted to broach this subject for quite some time but it was always a little bit too daunting to attempt it. It has to do with American military veterans who served with distinction in any of the various wars our country has been involved in but particularly Vietnam. I have written about them often in these posts of six years. Just today my wife was at a baby shower and the young husband was there. I told her to make sure that she told him that I said 'thank-you for your service!" I had sent him a package of books while he was in Iraq. These men are some of the creme de la creme of American youth as our Vietnam heroes were of ours. There should be no doubt of my appreciation to all of our veterans from all wars, but when they get to be thirty-forty-fifty-sixty years old I hope that they still have it in them to enlist or show up at that draft board one more time, for we need men like that today in a different type of battle, a different war zone. There are no parades for these men, no medals and no honor as being courageous. They are the God fearing men who know that our country is in the process of being overthrown and have shown up for a second time in defense of it.
There are no incoming rockets in this war, no firefights, no surface to air missiles seeking out the aircraft they are piloting. The dangers are less physical and more subtle. Embarrassment, discouragement, failure and ridicule are some of the things most often faced. These same men who waded through rice paddies with an M-16 on their shoulder do not have as clear a picture of the service that their country needs of them today. In reality, war has never ended, it just changed battlefields, changed enemies, changed uniforms and changed weaponry, but the essentials of war are still there, the nation is reeling from enemy attacks from within and without.
To these men I would say this: where once you had to learn the M-16 inside and out, today you have to learn the Constitution. Whereas you once had an assignment given to you, today you have to figure out yourself where you are needed most. To the Vietnam veteran, I know what you came home to.... often a cold shoulder, often ignored, often even ridiculed. It will not be too dissimilar today. It's once again not a popular struggle. Many if not most people don't even know that there is an enemy out there not to mention one one real close by. Once again you are called upon to sacrifice time and comfort while many of your friends go on with their lives oblivious to the dangers to their nation.
To the Christian, you should already know that serving Christ is being a soldier in His army. Only this time you should never experience lingering doubts as to why you are there, no second guessing whether the critics might be right. And there is also no doubt that the victory is not only certain, it is already accomplished. You have your sword and you shield, your helmet and your armour, and a king that has never lost a battle and will never lose a battle. Not only is the Christian soldier needed to proclaim the Gospel, they are needed to ensure that the priorities are in giving praise and allegiance to Jesus Christ and not merely to freedom and liberty however noble they may be. They are the vanguard with which all of the other armies are useless unless they realize this.
So to these men who have shown up a second time, I thank-you once again for your service, and may God give you the strength needed, for much will be required.
There are no incoming rockets in this war, no firefights, no surface to air missiles seeking out the aircraft they are piloting. The dangers are less physical and more subtle. Embarrassment, discouragement, failure and ridicule are some of the things most often faced. These same men who waded through rice paddies with an M-16 on their shoulder do not have as clear a picture of the service that their country needs of them today. In reality, war has never ended, it just changed battlefields, changed enemies, changed uniforms and changed weaponry, but the essentials of war are still there, the nation is reeling from enemy attacks from within and without.
To these men I would say this: where once you had to learn the M-16 inside and out, today you have to learn the Constitution. Whereas you once had an assignment given to you, today you have to figure out yourself where you are needed most. To the Vietnam veteran, I know what you came home to.... often a cold shoulder, often ignored, often even ridiculed. It will not be too dissimilar today. It's once again not a popular struggle. Many if not most people don't even know that there is an enemy out there not to mention one one real close by. Once again you are called upon to sacrifice time and comfort while many of your friends go on with their lives oblivious to the dangers to their nation.
To the Christian, you should already know that serving Christ is being a soldier in His army. Only this time you should never experience lingering doubts as to why you are there, no second guessing whether the critics might be right. And there is also no doubt that the victory is not only certain, it is already accomplished. You have your sword and you shield, your helmet and your armour, and a king that has never lost a battle and will never lose a battle. Not only is the Christian soldier needed to proclaim the Gospel, they are needed to ensure that the priorities are in giving praise and allegiance to Jesus Christ and not merely to freedom and liberty however noble they may be. They are the vanguard with which all of the other armies are useless unless they realize this.
So to these men who have shown up a second time, I thank-you once again for your service, and may God give you the strength needed, for much will be required.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Coronations
My dear British brethren, what a history you have! What a heritage! And what troubles you have today, as do we! An article from your MailOnline began with this "Prince Charles's coronation service should be opened with a reading from the Koran, a senior Church of England bishop said yesterday. The gesture would be a 'creative act of accommodation' to make Muslims feel 'embraced' by the nation....." I don't know what's going on over there with your royal family. I'm too busy trying to keep our royal families, the Bushes and Clintons, from another coronation and dealing with our present King. All I can say is 'Long Live the Queen!' The following is a post from May of 2011:
Rule Britannia
A BBC report by Mark Mardell titled Obama's Historic Speech Fails To Soar described our President's speech to both of your Houses of Parliament at Westminster Hall as an "ideal place" for an American President to speak but wrote that "it was flat and lacked soaring passion." He further wondered why sometimes Obama is a "tremendous orator" and sometimes he "just can't pull it off." Well Mr. Mardell, and any Brits who may happen to stop by, let me clue you in, if he doesn't use a teleprompter...what you see is what you get.
Barack Obama is a product of the media and a culture that watches Dancing With The Stars while its country and the future of its children totter are on the brink. He is a community activist in way over his head as evidenced by chaotic at best, and devastatingly destructive at worst, Middle-East and foreign policy. His economic policy was designed only to peak around November of 2012, long enough for a second term election victory. He parties and golfs and travels to Europe occasionally to rekindle the syndrome that blinded America in 2008. He was mentored by Leftists and groomed by radicals who long ago deciphered the combination to success in American politics as this... deception and a coalition of self-seekers and malcontents.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to our Congress and we heard an intelligent, informed, determined and honest world leader's speech. Absent was the teleprompter, the carefully fashioned defensive words, the meaningless phrases specifically crafted so as not to take attention away from that real reason for a speech...a photo op. President Obama, in speaking to your Parliament on the bond between America and Britain, probably had to force these words out, for the first thing he did in the Oval Office was send back to you a bust of Winston Churchill.
I wonder if you find my words disturbing? Well come over here and travel around as Alexis de Tocqueville did and you will see the discontent and apoplexy at having found ourselves in this situation. We are trying to find another Ronald Reagan...honest we are. I have visited your country twice before and walked the streets once bombed by the Luftwaffe and thought about your Finest Hour. I walked the halls and lawns of Cambridge thinking about the Puritans who were most responsible for the foundation of faith our Founding Fathers built upon. I sat listening to the gospel preached from the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant and Castle from whose pulpit Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached to the world. I witnessed an Easter Sunday evangelization event at Trafalgar Square. I gazed for many more than a few moments at statues of Churchill, Cromwell, Montgomery and Nelson. I saw my own surname placarded on a wall at the Tower Of London as it is at George Washington's birthplace. Speaking of a bond between America and Britain is superfluous to me. I don't need the reminder for it's embedded in my psyche. Don't give in or give up Brits, but give the world another Churchill or Thatcher!
Rule Britannia
A BBC report by Mark Mardell titled Obama's Historic Speech Fails To Soar described our President's speech to both of your Houses of Parliament at Westminster Hall as an "ideal place" for an American President to speak but wrote that "it was flat and lacked soaring passion." He further wondered why sometimes Obama is a "tremendous orator" and sometimes he "just can't pull it off." Well Mr. Mardell, and any Brits who may happen to stop by, let me clue you in, if he doesn't use a teleprompter...what you see is what you get.
Barack Obama is a product of the media and a culture that watches Dancing With The Stars while its country and the future of its children totter are on the brink. He is a community activist in way over his head as evidenced by chaotic at best, and devastatingly destructive at worst, Middle-East and foreign policy. His economic policy was designed only to peak around November of 2012, long enough for a second term election victory. He parties and golfs and travels to Europe occasionally to rekindle the syndrome that blinded America in 2008. He was mentored by Leftists and groomed by radicals who long ago deciphered the combination to success in American politics as this... deception and a coalition of self-seekers and malcontents.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to our Congress and we heard an intelligent, informed, determined and honest world leader's speech. Absent was the teleprompter, the carefully fashioned defensive words, the meaningless phrases specifically crafted so as not to take attention away from that real reason for a speech...a photo op. President Obama, in speaking to your Parliament on the bond between America and Britain, probably had to force these words out, for the first thing he did in the Oval Office was send back to you a bust of Winston Churchill.
I wonder if you find my words disturbing? Well come over here and travel around as Alexis de Tocqueville did and you will see the discontent and apoplexy at having found ourselves in this situation. We are trying to find another Ronald Reagan...honest we are. I have visited your country twice before and walked the streets once bombed by the Luftwaffe and thought about your Finest Hour. I walked the halls and lawns of Cambridge thinking about the Puritans who were most responsible for the foundation of faith our Founding Fathers built upon. I sat listening to the gospel preached from the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant and Castle from whose pulpit Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached to the world. I witnessed an Easter Sunday evangelization event at Trafalgar Square. I gazed for many more than a few moments at statues of Churchill, Cromwell, Montgomery and Nelson. I saw my own surname placarded on a wall at the Tower Of London as it is at George Washington's birthplace. Speaking of a bond between America and Britain is superfluous to me. I don't need the reminder for it's embedded in my psyche. Don't give in or give up Brits, but give the world another Churchill or Thatcher!
Saturday, November 29, 2014
America Expiring
The following post is from October of 2011:
America Expiring
Tomorrow morning, throughout much of America and possibly even most of it's churches, ordained ministers will either climb into pulpits or stand behind lecterns to lead congregations in "worship" services. The original Hebrew and Greek will be deployed in some as well as pastoral helps of various kinds but mostly it will be a Christian variation of Oprah presented to the worshippers. Expensive sound systems will enliven the atmosphere and the results of lessens in elocution will be on display. The name of Jesus will be heard a few to a number of times, mostly as part of the message where the congregation can apply WWJD to their own life. Songs will be sung and either the choir or soloists will be given polite applause. It may be "pot luck" Sunday where little if any of the Christian faith will be discussed at the meal and after the services each person will shake the hands of the minister before they leave the church building, dutifully fulfilling the "rite of worship" and leaving them free to enjoy the football game or gather with family, confident that God's generous blessings of such activities has been earned for at least another week.
Meanwhile, the nation gasps for breath, wounded and bleeding, while wolves slowly pace back and forth looking for the right moment of total defenselessness to move in on their prey.
When a church has grown through invitations such as or similar to these: "A friendly, loving congregation" or "Come grow with us" the ensuing sermons must therefore fit the invitation or charges of "bait and switch" will follow and the sanctuary will need a swinging door. Neither these ministers, nor their congregations, know the folly they are engaged in for they either have nothing to compare it to or their one experience with a church that actually preached Christ crucified showed them exactly where they do not want to be.
As de Tocqueville strongly implied, the strength of America was in it's pulpits and conversely today our weakness emanates from there too. God has given us foolish leaders; He is purposely allowing our defenses to decay and our prosperity to whither. He is giving us what we want and may not let us see that it was "fool's gold" that we mined until it is too late. Our one hope is in Him extending mercy to us one more time but imagine that as a Republican platform!
There indeed was a great fish that swallowed a man only to vomit him alive on a shore, and that man went on to give a warning to Nineveh, the America of it's day. That nation heeded the warning but years later another man was sent to Nineveh and this time not with a warning but a proclamation of impending judgment. Our prayer today, in America, should be "God let us hear from Jonah and not Nahum but if it be Nahum, give us strength to go on."
There are many warnings today that a Trojan Horse has come into the church but others think that those who spend their time warning are to be pitied for they miss the blessings that God is so desirous to give. My response to this is that the real blessing is knowing the extent of His mercies to us and the real pity is in the Christian church that adamantly refuses to even consider that it may be a Laodicean church. It was that word "Laodicean" that a young American of Indian descent, Kavya Shivashankar, won the National Spelling Bee with in May of 2009. The definition she was given was "lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics." Sit back and be satisfied with the state of the church and the church of state if you want but if you truly listen, there is a crescendo in a dirge rising over this land that we once loved, once protected and once attributed to the blessings of Almighty God.
Note: www.refnet.fm is 24/7 Internet radio and a valuable resource to anyone interested.
I'm adding this post from last year. This farce needs to be cancelled and they need to act upon it soon.
Just Send Over The Report
The 2014 State Of The Union Address is scheduled for Tuesday January 28th. For the past few years I wrote a post in advance of that speech calling for Republicans to use that opportunity to protest by either refusing to applaud anything said from that throne or even better... to refuse to attend. I hope to bring this post back regularly, should the Lord will it, over the next month. Please think ahead on this! Barack Obama, the man who is systematically and deceptively tearing this nation apart, both within and without, will once again take advantage of the State Of The Union address and, with the media concealing everything about him and revealing none of his schemes, will take over all of the main networks to give him yet another opportunity to deceive those who do not really care what he is doing as long as he fulfills his bargain and gives them what they want for themselves. The Establishment brand of Republican will grumble for the cameras but have a good time afterwards. We should suspend this speech until such time that we have a president, either Democrat, Republican or another party, who we can at least trust his/her words. Even then the pomp and circumstance of this speech should be done away with forever.
America Expiring
Tomorrow morning, throughout much of America and possibly even most of it's churches, ordained ministers will either climb into pulpits or stand behind lecterns to lead congregations in "worship" services. The original Hebrew and Greek will be deployed in some as well as pastoral helps of various kinds but mostly it will be a Christian variation of Oprah presented to the worshippers. Expensive sound systems will enliven the atmosphere and the results of lessens in elocution will be on display. The name of Jesus will be heard a few to a number of times, mostly as part of the message where the congregation can apply WWJD to their own life. Songs will be sung and either the choir or soloists will be given polite applause. It may be "pot luck" Sunday where little if any of the Christian faith will be discussed at the meal and after the services each person will shake the hands of the minister before they leave the church building, dutifully fulfilling the "rite of worship" and leaving them free to enjoy the football game or gather with family, confident that God's generous blessings of such activities has been earned for at least another week.
Meanwhile, the nation gasps for breath, wounded and bleeding, while wolves slowly pace back and forth looking for the right moment of total defenselessness to move in on their prey.
When a church has grown through invitations such as or similar to these: "A friendly, loving congregation" or "Come grow with us" the ensuing sermons must therefore fit the invitation or charges of "bait and switch" will follow and the sanctuary will need a swinging door. Neither these ministers, nor their congregations, know the folly they are engaged in for they either have nothing to compare it to or their one experience with a church that actually preached Christ crucified showed them exactly where they do not want to be.
As de Tocqueville strongly implied, the strength of America was in it's pulpits and conversely today our weakness emanates from there too. God has given us foolish leaders; He is purposely allowing our defenses to decay and our prosperity to whither. He is giving us what we want and may not let us see that it was "fool's gold" that we mined until it is too late. Our one hope is in Him extending mercy to us one more time but imagine that as a Republican platform!
There indeed was a great fish that swallowed a man only to vomit him alive on a shore, and that man went on to give a warning to Nineveh, the America of it's day. That nation heeded the warning but years later another man was sent to Nineveh and this time not with a warning but a proclamation of impending judgment. Our prayer today, in America, should be "God let us hear from Jonah and not Nahum but if it be Nahum, give us strength to go on."
There are many warnings today that a Trojan Horse has come into the church but others think that those who spend their time warning are to be pitied for they miss the blessings that God is so desirous to give. My response to this is that the real blessing is knowing the extent of His mercies to us and the real pity is in the Christian church that adamantly refuses to even consider that it may be a Laodicean church. It was that word "Laodicean" that a young American of Indian descent, Kavya Shivashankar, won the National Spelling Bee with in May of 2009. The definition she was given was "lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics." Sit back and be satisfied with the state of the church and the church of state if you want but if you truly listen, there is a crescendo in a dirge rising over this land that we once loved, once protected and once attributed to the blessings of Almighty God.
Note: www.refnet.fm is 24/7 Internet radio and a valuable resource to anyone interested.
I'm adding this post from last year. This farce needs to be cancelled and they need to act upon it soon.
Just Send Over The Report
The 2014 State Of The Union Address is scheduled for Tuesday January 28th. For the past few years I wrote a post in advance of that speech calling for Republicans to use that opportunity to protest by either refusing to applaud anything said from that throne or even better... to refuse to attend. I hope to bring this post back regularly, should the Lord will it, over the next month. Please think ahead on this! Barack Obama, the man who is systematically and deceptively tearing this nation apart, both within and without, will once again take advantage of the State Of The Union address and, with the media concealing everything about him and revealing none of his schemes, will take over all of the main networks to give him yet another opportunity to deceive those who do not really care what he is doing as long as he fulfills his bargain and gives them what they want for themselves. The Establishment brand of Republican will grumble for the cameras but have a good time afterwards. We should suspend this speech until such time that we have a president, either Democrat, Republican or another party, who we can at least trust his/her words. Even then the pomp and circumstance of this speech should be done away with forever.
Article II, Section 3 of our Constitution states of our President, He
shall from time to time give to Congress Information of the State of
the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall
judge necessary and expedient. The President is not required to
appear in person and give a speech. In fact, President Thomas Jefferson
refused to give this report as a speech for he considered it too close
to the Speech from the Throne in the monarchical traditions.
We are ten months past the last State of the Union address where Barack
Obama was feted with applause once again but we are now openly in the
midst of a coup where every day, every hour, every minute, even every
second, more Americans are becoming aware of it.
I'll give one very recent quote from a Democrat Senator on Harry Reid's new filibuster rule..."There's no reason that changing this to majority rule on appointments will create ill will.....people of good will find ways to work together here." In a way he is right. The filibuster change alone would not be enough to demand an open rebellion, but add to that a purge within the military, a consigliore in the Justice Department, disdain for allies and subservience to enemies, golfing and shooting hoops while America sinks in the muck and mire of a politicized everything, czars directing whole agencies in scripts out of Atlas Shrugged and enough lying and spying to choke uncle Joe Stalin himself.....yes, add to this filibuster cohorts in the media marching in lockstep, judges sent out to do what armies could never do, domestic military preparations to control an unwilling citizenry and bribes in the form of dispensations to the biggest lie of all....the Affordable Healthcare Act.....and it is more than enough and way past time that Republicans formally refuse to shake the hand that shreds our Constitution.
Note: Two days after this post John Boehner invited Barack Obama to give the State Of The Union Address on January 28th with these words: "....we welcome an opportunity to hear your ideas, particularly for putting Americans back to work. It's my honor to invite you to speak before a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 in the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol Building."
I'll give one very recent quote from a Democrat Senator on Harry Reid's new filibuster rule..."There's no reason that changing this to majority rule on appointments will create ill will.....people of good will find ways to work together here." In a way he is right. The filibuster change alone would not be enough to demand an open rebellion, but add to that a purge within the military, a consigliore in the Justice Department, disdain for allies and subservience to enemies, golfing and shooting hoops while America sinks in the muck and mire of a politicized everything, czars directing whole agencies in scripts out of Atlas Shrugged and enough lying and spying to choke uncle Joe Stalin himself.....yes, add to this filibuster cohorts in the media marching in lockstep, judges sent out to do what armies could never do, domestic military preparations to control an unwilling citizenry and bribes in the form of dispensations to the biggest lie of all....the Affordable Healthcare Act.....and it is more than enough and way past time that Republicans formally refuse to shake the hand that shreds our Constitution.
Note: Two days after this post John Boehner invited Barack Obama to give the State Of The Union Address on January 28th with these words: "....we welcome an opportunity to hear your ideas, particularly for putting Americans back to work. It's my honor to invite you to speak before a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 in the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol Building."
Friday, November 28, 2014
'By The Book....Writers On Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review'
The jacket blurb puts it this way : "For the reader, By The Book is a way to invite sixty-five of the most interesting guests into your world. It's a book party not to be missed." By The Book , Writers On Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review is the title of a new book edited by Pamela Paul whose title, By The Book, is itself taken from a weekly feature of the New York Times Book Review. It
is a compilation of sixty-five interviews with various authors and
literary figures. They are simple questions, often the same questions,
and if you happen to recognize some of the interviewees then you might
be interested in their answers.
It was only missing one thing........me......an interview with Special Dog. I'm sure it was just an oversight. I mean if you interview Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, then Special Dog would be the obvious next choice wouldn't it? It couldn't be the weird name.....Special Dog.....because Sting is in there. I mean.....Sting.....what the heck kind of name is that? So, what I'll do here is write down questions to me and the answers and then put the piece of paper in the book, probably between the interviews of E. L. Doctorow and Arnold Schwarzenegger (I think they stretched it putting him in there) and return it to the library and maybe it will catch on. So here we go:
What book is on your nightstand right now?
Special Dog: You know, I never read in bed. I mean when my head hits that pillow then I'm out! How about the end table next to my Lazy Boy? Will that do? OK, the book is Rebel Yell, the Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S. C. Gwynne. I never thought I'd say it but a new book took the place of Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend by James L. Robertson as the definitive work on the Confederate general and America's most aggressive military leader.
Which of the books you've written is your favorite?
Special Dog: That's easy, I only wrote one book. It doesn't have a name though, I kind of just refer to it as Isaac Crockett. Its never been published. I couldn't figure out the directions for sending in a manuscript. So it's on the world wide web at isaaccrockett.blogspot.com. I am at work on a sequel though and have one chapter finished..
What was the last book that made you cry?
Special Dog: It doesn't have a name, I just refer to it as Isaac Crockett.
What was the last book that made you laugh?
Special Dog: Uh....same book. I reread it about once every month because its so good!
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Special Dog: Well my answer is.....any writer that is dead and can answer questions is who I would want to meet! What kind of question is that? Or, are you asking me what writer I would want to meet if I were dead or alive? If I were dead I don't care who I would....'meet.' Now If I were alive, as in fact I am alive, I would like to meet Pamela Paul and ask her why she did not include me in her book and would she consider adding me to a future printing?
What's the one book you wish someone else would write?
Special Dog: Wow, that's a profound question. Did you ask anyone else this question? Gee, I don't know........this one would be interesting though......."How I Screwed Up the United States of America and the World, Ruined Race Relations, Advanced Communism, Stabbed Israel in the Back, Established the American Record for Appointing the Most Incompetent Losers to Posts they had no Business Being In and Did it all Without Anyone Knowing the First Thing About Me Other Than Sound Bites Given Out by My Handlers, and Got in over 200 Rounds of
Golf in the Process. by Barack Hussein Obama.' I would want that book signed....and then analyzed by a handwriting expert for any abnormal psychological traits.
What's the last book you read?
Special Dog: That's a silly question.....By The Book, Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the New York Times Book Review.
What's the greatest book that you have ever read, and why?
Special Dog: The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. That's easy, a mender of pots and pans-a simple tinker, writes a book from jail where he was put for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and that book goes on to be the greatest selling book in the English language next to the Bible. Yeah, it's the greatest book that I ever read, and Charles Spurgeon read it 100 times so he might have agreed.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Special Dog: Well, first of all no one requires this president to do anything, not the Constitution, not the law and not his own conscience. The closest thing to anyone who could require him to do anything would be the designers of this Manchurian President. But.....to go along with your question as if things were indeed normal......my answer would be....Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, by Paul Kengor.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Special Dog: Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell,The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (also interviewed in your book), the Catechism of the Catholic Church, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo, Four Blood Moons by John Hagee and The Harbinger by Rabbi Jonathan Cahn and the Book Of Mormon by Joseph Smith.
You can bring three books to a desert island, Which do you choose?
Special Dog: How To Survive on a Deserted Island by Tim O'Shei, Coconut Cures by Bruce Fife and How To Sell Tropical Real Estate by Samsian Coedes.
What's the best love story that you've ever read?
Special Dog: The Bible, It's also the best mystery book, the best poetry book, the best history book, the best biography (man), the best psychology book, the best philosophy book, the best economics book, the best health book and the best current events book.
One final question. What do you plan to read next?
Special Dog: Probably tomorrow morning's newspaper. Or do you mean...what book..do I plan on reading next... after Isaac Crockett that is? I don't have the slightest idea! Probably whatever cover font grabs my attention at Barnes and Noble
It was only missing one thing........me......an interview with Special Dog. I'm sure it was just an oversight. I mean if you interview Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, then Special Dog would be the obvious next choice wouldn't it? It couldn't be the weird name.....Special Dog.....because Sting is in there. I mean.....Sting.....what the heck kind of name is that? So, what I'll do here is write down questions to me and the answers and then put the piece of paper in the book, probably between the interviews of E. L. Doctorow and Arnold Schwarzenegger (I think they stretched it putting him in there) and return it to the library and maybe it will catch on. So here we go:
What book is on your nightstand right now?
Special Dog: You know, I never read in bed. I mean when my head hits that pillow then I'm out! How about the end table next to my Lazy Boy? Will that do? OK, the book is Rebel Yell, the Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S. C. Gwynne. I never thought I'd say it but a new book took the place of Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend by James L. Robertson as the definitive work on the Confederate general and America's most aggressive military leader.
Which of the books you've written is your favorite?
Special Dog: That's easy, I only wrote one book. It doesn't have a name though, I kind of just refer to it as Isaac Crockett. Its never been published. I couldn't figure out the directions for sending in a manuscript. So it's on the world wide web at isaaccrockett.blogspot.com. I am at work on a sequel though and have one chapter finished..
What was the last book that made you cry?
Special Dog: It doesn't have a name, I just refer to it as Isaac Crockett.
What was the last book that made you laugh?
Special Dog: Uh....same book. I reread it about once every month because its so good!
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Special Dog: Well my answer is.....any writer that is dead and can answer questions is who I would want to meet! What kind of question is that? Or, are you asking me what writer I would want to meet if I were dead or alive? If I were dead I don't care who I would....'meet.' Now If I were alive, as in fact I am alive, I would like to meet Pamela Paul and ask her why she did not include me in her book and would she consider adding me to a future printing?
What's the one book you wish someone else would write?
Special Dog: Wow, that's a profound question. Did you ask anyone else this question? Gee, I don't know........this one would be interesting though......."How I Screwed Up the United States of America and the World, Ruined Race Relations, Advanced Communism, Stabbed Israel in the Back, Established the American Record for Appointing the Most Incompetent Losers to Posts they had no Business Being In and Did it all Without Anyone Knowing the First Thing About Me Other Than Sound Bites Given Out by My Handlers, and Got in over 200 Rounds of
Golf in the Process. by Barack Hussein Obama.' I would want that book signed....and then analyzed by a handwriting expert for any abnormal psychological traits.
What's the last book you read?
Special Dog: That's a silly question.....By The Book, Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the New York Times Book Review.
What's the greatest book that you have ever read, and why?
Special Dog: The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. That's easy, a mender of pots and pans-a simple tinker, writes a book from jail where he was put for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and that book goes on to be the greatest selling book in the English language next to the Bible. Yeah, it's the greatest book that I ever read, and Charles Spurgeon read it 100 times so he might have agreed.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Special Dog: Well, first of all no one requires this president to do anything, not the Constitution, not the law and not his own conscience. The closest thing to anyone who could require him to do anything would be the designers of this Manchurian President. But.....to go along with your question as if things were indeed normal......my answer would be....Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, by Paul Kengor.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Special Dog: Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell,The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (also interviewed in your book), the Catechism of the Catholic Church, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo, Four Blood Moons by John Hagee and The Harbinger by Rabbi Jonathan Cahn and the Book Of Mormon by Joseph Smith.
You can bring three books to a desert island, Which do you choose?
Special Dog: How To Survive on a Deserted Island by Tim O'Shei, Coconut Cures by Bruce Fife and How To Sell Tropical Real Estate by Samsian Coedes.
What's the best love story that you've ever read?
Special Dog: The Bible, It's also the best mystery book, the best poetry book, the best history book, the best biography (man), the best psychology book, the best philosophy book, the best economics book, the best health book and the best current events book.
One final question. What do you plan to read next?
Special Dog: Probably tomorrow morning's newspaper. Or do you mean...what book..do I plan on reading next... after Isaac Crockett that is? I don't have the slightest idea! Probably whatever cover font grabs my attention at Barnes and Noble
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving............November, 2011
Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite day of the year. There's no gift exchanges, blessings though such things are, to divert attention from the day, and no pagan bush to drag into the house to be decorated. There are no myths involved, in fact the historical testimony is so strong that even the revisionists have a hard time trying to distort it. As I write this, today's Wall Street Journal is beside me. Every year since 1961 on this day before Thanksgiving their top editorial has been a reprint of the beginning of a first-hand chronicle of the Plymouth Colony's voyage and arrival in their new land. This is part of the heritage that elements of our society are systematically trying to erase.
One particular day has since been set apart for Americans to corporately and individually give thanks to God for blessings bestowed. Taking advantage of this opportunity, here are some of the things that I am thankful for: I'm thankful that God took a twelve year old boy from a broken home and planted him in an apartment on a modest street amidst fine and decent fellows who would become new friends. I'm thankful that he permitted me to attend a very good high school, rich in tradition and academics, where I would at least experience, although hardly partake in, a scholarly atmosphere, and also how He somehow provided tuition. I'm thankful that in my immaturity He gave me the wisdom to join the army and had mercy on me even as I abused the needed maturing process. I'm thankful for a college degree even though my interests were far more social than academic, and that while working at the university I would meet my future wife. I'm thankful for her patience, love and being my best friend. I'm thankful for thirty-three years of employment from one company and the friends and coworkers there. I'm thankful that God instilled in me, somewhat later in life, an insatiable desire to read, to study and to analyze. I'm thankful that in 1982 He had mercy on the lowest of the low, loved the most unlovable and redeemed the least worthy of it. I'm thankful for the gift of a son who I have watched grow far beyond my own intellectual capabilities and do so without the path of rebellion that I chose. I'm thankful for the perfect match of a wonderful young Christian woman to be his wife.
I'm thankful for failures.... for they make it impossible for me to think that I am something that I am not. I'm thankful that after I fall down, He gives me strength to get up. I'm thankful for heroes, particularly of the Christian faith but also of our nation, for their lives are blueprints that can be deciphered for at least an attempt to emulate. I'm thankful for faithful pastors and the sweet fellowship of other beneficiaries of God's redemption. I'm thankful for a house and a home for our son as he grew up, with loving family all around. I'm thankful for automobiles and money in the bank to keep them running. I'm thankful for vision to see this beautiful world, for taste to enjoy tomorrow's meal (Lord willing,) for the hearing of the preached Word and of music and voices, for feeling....both physical and emotional, and for discerning aromas of both warnings and pleasure. I'm thankful that there is no sixth sense, that our knowledge of the future comes not from ESP but from such as the ESV (English Standard Version of God's written word to us.) I'm thankful for being born an American, for freedom and liberty, but even more so for the opportunity to show gratitude for the efforts of those who sacrificed for those freedoms and liberties and, although in an insignificant way, to pick up the banner they once held aloft. I'm thankful for my weaknesses for they give opportunity for God to show His strength. I am thankful most of all that God reached into humanity to adopt a multitude as His family and that He opened my own eyes to see... first myself, and then the cross of Calvary, the empty tomb and the clouds in which Jesus both ascended and will return. I'm thankful for angels all around us. I'm thankful that even though we play no part whatsoever in the salvation of another that we are painted into the picture to the glory of God alone. I'm thankful that, in the same vein, we can pray for the salvation of others and rejoice with them. I'm thankful for many books but especially one, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the last stanza of a song within which reads:
Hobgoblin, nor fowl fiend,
Can daunt his spirit;
He knows, he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He'll fear not what men say,
He'll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Walk In The Spring Rain......Redux
As bad as the scenario painted in the following post from three
years ago is, it would be like a walk in the spring rain compared to
what we face today.
Post Tenebras Lux.......November 20, 2011
How does one go about getting the attention of the average American on issues such as appear in these posts? Well, let's start to answer that by identifying those issues. On July the 4th, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed and so began the Great American Experiment. Two-hundred and thirty five years later a new declaration is being signed onto, one that voids the first, one that has Karl Marx hoof prints all over it.
The majority of the American church is inflicted with one of three illnesses: total liberal heresy in denial of the gospel itself, or off on tangents and doctrinal fads that at the very least make the true proclamation of the gospel ineffective if even understood at all, or so watered-down in identity and doctrine as to make it a place where almost anyone in this nation can saunter in, and under the nondiverse and intolerant shroud of cultural diversity and radical tolerance covering the corpse of truth, have absolutely no objections, pangs of guilt or fear of punishment from what they hear from the pulpit.
Homosexuality directly challenges God on television, philosophy in film, and greed in business. pride in academia, feminism in the home and narcissism in our free time. Should a child survive the pre-born sacrifice of abortion, he or she must navigate a world increasingly at enmity with God. The coup de' gras of the socialist/Marxist/globalist assault on America has been with the concept of "law." That which has kept us from chaos is today too often in the hands of those who do not revere it. The Robert Borks are being replaced by the Elena Kagans.
These are some of the issues, now how does one go about getting people's attention? Well, there's good and bad news here. Let me start with the bad news; one cannot get their attention. In fairness to them, they would have to sneeze while changing radio stations, and sneeze just as the dial was positioned on talk radio, inadvertently giving them the opportunity to hear some morsel of legitimate news, information and warning; and even then, would they listen? The original condition of every man, women and child on this earth is that of desiring autonomy and pursuing self-exaltation, and few were more cemented into it than I once was.
The good news? Nations rise and nations fall according to God's will! We are in darkness today in the United States of America but surely the Reformation mottoes of Post Tenebras Lux (after darkness, light) and Soli Deo Gloria (to God alone be glory) offer us hope in remembrance of those who have gone before us and how God has dispelled darkness before. If this blog informs anyone in a way which causes them to inquire into their fallen condition and then seek God's mercy it will be entirely His doing, according to His will and to His glory alone. If it doesn't, then the fewer that read these posts...the better.
Post Tenebras Lux.......November 20, 2011
How does one go about getting the attention of the average American on issues such as appear in these posts? Well, let's start to answer that by identifying those issues. On July the 4th, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed and so began the Great American Experiment. Two-hundred and thirty five years later a new declaration is being signed onto, one that voids the first, one that has Karl Marx hoof prints all over it.
The majority of the American church is inflicted with one of three illnesses: total liberal heresy in denial of the gospel itself, or off on tangents and doctrinal fads that at the very least make the true proclamation of the gospel ineffective if even understood at all, or so watered-down in identity and doctrine as to make it a place where almost anyone in this nation can saunter in, and under the nondiverse and intolerant shroud of cultural diversity and radical tolerance covering the corpse of truth, have absolutely no objections, pangs of guilt or fear of punishment from what they hear from the pulpit.
Homosexuality directly challenges God on television, philosophy in film, and greed in business. pride in academia, feminism in the home and narcissism in our free time. Should a child survive the pre-born sacrifice of abortion, he or she must navigate a world increasingly at enmity with God. The coup de' gras of the socialist/Marxist/globalist assault on America has been with the concept of "law." That which has kept us from chaos is today too often in the hands of those who do not revere it. The Robert Borks are being replaced by the Elena Kagans.
These are some of the issues, now how does one go about getting people's attention? Well, there's good and bad news here. Let me start with the bad news; one cannot get their attention. In fairness to them, they would have to sneeze while changing radio stations, and sneeze just as the dial was positioned on talk radio, inadvertently giving them the opportunity to hear some morsel of legitimate news, information and warning; and even then, would they listen? The original condition of every man, women and child on this earth is that of desiring autonomy and pursuing self-exaltation, and few were more cemented into it than I once was.
The good news? Nations rise and nations fall according to God's will! We are in darkness today in the United States of America but surely the Reformation mottoes of Post Tenebras Lux (after darkness, light) and Soli Deo Gloria (to God alone be glory) offer us hope in remembrance of those who have gone before us and how God has dispelled darkness before. If this blog informs anyone in a way which causes them to inquire into their fallen condition and then seek God's mercy it will be entirely His doing, according to His will and to His glory alone. If it doesn't, then the fewer that read these posts...the better.
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