The War On Christmas - NOT

There is alot of talk these days about the War On Christmas; various media personalities have made pronouncements about this growing assault on any public display or acknowledgement of a "religious celebration" which elevates one religion over all others. Well, if you are one of those who is concerned about this "War," I want to set your minds at ease by telling you that there is NO War on Christmas.

There IS a war which we need to be aware of and focus our attention on; it is a WAR ON CHRISTIANITY which is in reality a WAR on Christ. This conflict has been going on for quite some time, a couple of thousand years to be exact.

This war is being waged by unbelievers and ersatz (I always wanted to use that word) believers who deny that Christ is only Lord and authority of mankind. There ostensible goal is to have Christ and any expression of Christianity in the public square to to be excluded. They claim that the 1st Amendment not only grants "freedom of religion," but "freedom FROM religion." One of the primary proponents of this view is a purported Presbyterian pastor who is head of The Freedom of Religion Foundation.

The underlying presupposition of these opponents is, unfortunately, shared by many avowed Christians, is that we are bound by a "higher" standard than the Bible. We are bound by a standard of FAIRNESS which controls how we may express our beliefs and, ultimately, what we can believe.

Opponents object to any expression of Christian belief as diminishing the standing of other belief systems on the assertion that Christianity alone is true and that Christ alone is true. As an aside, we should observe that if it were not for the celebration of Christmas, there would be no holiday season. Do they really contend that we would all be saying Happy Holidays based on Chanukah, or Kwanzaa or other comic book celebration.

It is only the teachings of Christ and the application by Christians in society of His teaching that we have Freedom of religion. No other religion teaches of establishes tolerance of other religions.

So, settle down and stop worrying about the demise of Christmas. Where we need to concentrate our efforts is in the defense of Christ against all enemies foreign and domestic. We must arm ourselves with the weapons of spiritual warfare, which are not carnal but might to the pulling down of strongholds.

Making America Great Again

" For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Eph. 6:12 KJV

In the final analysis, America (and the rest of the world) consists of two types of people, i.e. regenerate and unregenerate. All other divisions are superficial and but a reflection of the persons membership in the one of the two fundamental classes.

As Christians, we have a hard time remembering this. As a result, we too often find ourselves aligning with individuals or groups with which we have no real connection, because they appear to endorse a position with which we are in agreement. We align with "pro-life" groups because they oppose abortion. But our opposition to infanticide is exclusively biblical. Infant killing is wrong only because God commanded us not to murder. All other reasons, the long term effect on the mother's health, etc. can be no part in our opposition.

This goes for all of our advocacy for or against a particular social or political issue, whether marriage equality, immigration, education, health-care, etc. We may oppose government funded/controlled  health care because of practical reasons, but if there were no practical problems, we must still oppose it because it, like most government social programs, is based on theft, and theft is forbidden by God and we MUST declare this to be our reason.

While we may seek to influence public policy, our fundamental task is making disciples of all nations. This means we must primarily be engaged in the proclamation of the gospel and subsequent disciplining of believers. This begins with a declaration of God's absolute law and a call for repentance. Primarily, this is the work of the church. This role of the church cannot be fulfilled by a man or political affiliation. Neither Franklin Graham nor the Tea Party will do.

Our participation in public discourse must be biblical. That means that the church must teach its members to think biblicaly in public as well as private issues. Our founders were able to accomplish the great achievement of establishing a constitutional republic because the people had been taught to think "govern-mentally" by the colonial clergy. Until our pulpits are once again occupied by pastors capable of providing such instruction, the church will not have a profound effect on society. As long as the world views the gospel through the prism of the self-centered message delivered by television preachers, they will never look to the church for leadership.

De Tocqueville declared that America is great because America is good. Chesterton declared the America was a Nation with the soul of a church. Whatever success Donald Trump may have in reforming certain policies, America will never be great again until America is good again. Let us pray that is may be so and let us labor to see it so.

Barry, We Hardly Knew Ye, or What Will A Man Give In Exchange for His Soul?

After enduring eight long years of the inexplicable behavior of the artist formerly known as Barack Hussein Obama, I have developed an hypothesis; what we have been observing is a man without a soul. Note,  I don't mean a soul in the biblical sense (although they are related); rather I mean a man who does not know himself. Obama has spent his whole life trying to discover who he is.

His identity crisis began in childhood. He was the product of man with whom he would have very little contact while was growing up, and a woman who had other things on her mind and without the equipment to raise a son who's identity was confusing from the cradle.

Contrary to popular myth, Barack Obama is not the first African American president - for the simple reason that he is not African American. In a less PC time, he would have been called a mulatto. His identification with his father's African roots was a political choice, not a racial necessity. He could as easily have claimed his mother's white heritage. His attempt to identify with the suffering and alienation of the descendants of American slavery was, and is, a sham based on hear-say.

After being abandoned by his father before he had an opportunity to form any meaningful connection, he was whisked away to Indonesia where he be was assigned the identity of Barry Soetoro, adopted son of Lolo Soetoro. The significant similarity between the two "fathers," was that they were both Muslim - an identify that Barack accepted until it became politically inconvenient.

At some point in his childhood, he was shipped off to live with his maternal grandparents in Kansas. Like most "white folks," they knew little or nothing about the African identity of his father which would occupy much of his later search for an identity. They also knew nothing of the "African American" experience and could not transmit any knowledge of such to their grandson.

After a privileged education at two exclusive American universities, about which little is known because his academic records are sealed, he emerged as an erstwhile, radicalized Black activist. He adopted Chicago as his territory and assumed the occupation of "community organizer" as a way to establish standing in the area (Barry, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a community organizer, Mommy)  How a young man with a middle-class, privileged upbringing wound up in this situation can only be understood as the actions of a man trying to create a persona.

Somewhere in his Chicago adventure, he identified with a radical, Liberation Theology oriented church and "became" a Christian. His claim that he never heard his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, engaging in his frequent anti-American diatribes, is feasible only if he wasn't listening; a very real possibility for a man who wasn't there to learn but to be seen.

It was also during this time that he met and married Michele Robinson, a university educated young woman raised in a prosperous, suburban family who, in spite of the advantages she experienced, was never proud of her country.

His organizing experience paid off when he was elected to the Illinois state Senate, partially by having other candidates eliminated from the ballot. His tenure in the state legislature was uneventful, characterized by frequent votes of "present," a tactic designed to avoid identification with any position which might require an explanation. This lackluster beginning was followed by his election to the US Senate, a position for which he was neither qualified nor temperamentally suited.

What he was suited for was talking, not listening. During testimony at a hearing of one of the Senate committees to which he had been assigned, he turned to one of his staff seated behind and handed him a note reading "just shoot me now." Clearly not an auspicious beginning for participation in the nations highest deliberative legislative chamber. His slide into political oblivion was halted when he was plucked from the realm of obscurity by John Kerry to deliver a keynote speech at the 2004 Democrat Convention. This appearance launched him into a realm of notoriety that might otherwise have been impossible.

Oprah pronounced him "Brilliant," and four years later, this unknown, untested young man with the strange (and troubling) name not only defeated Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democrat nominee, but longtime American hero, Senator John McCain for the white house; and the rest, as they say is history. Or is it?

With the exception of a failed attempt to establish national health-care, Obama's roster of White House achievements is sparse. This is what one might expect from a man who doesn't know who he is and is dependent on others for ideas with which to identify. Given his persona non-existia, it is not surprising that issues like producing a birth-certificate and other records of education and experience emerged during his career.

During and subsequent to the recent election cycle, Obama made frequent reference to his legacy. He urged the election of Mrs. Clinton as a way of validating his term of office. The problem was that there was no legacy with which the American people could identify. Mature, self-assured people do not talk about their legacy; that is for historians. People who are self-aware speak about what they believe and why people should support them.

Ultimately, Barack Obama cannot be understood from a political or social perspective. He can only be understood when he is examined by the authority of scripture. He is a man unique in contemporary experience. He was and remains unknown to the people among whom he lives and to the people who elected him.

He is a man without a soul.

Say, Who Was That Masked Woman Anyway?

Few Jeopardy contestants would recognize the names Norma Jeane Mortensen , Leonard Slye or Clayton Moore, but even Cliff Claven knows the names Marilyn Monroe, Roy Rogers, and The Lone Ranger. In fact, both sets of names are the same people.

The first three are the real names while the last three are the characters they became. They did not start out as these characters, but they adopted them and played the part for the rest of their lives. We could also cite Samuel Clemens who became Mark Twain and Marion Mitchell Morrison who became known the world over as John Wayne

I am concerned here with a more current example of role playing; one that has immediate significance for all of us. I refer, of course to the character Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary Rodham is as much a character as any of those named above.

Something happened to Hillary Rodham that transformed her from a Goldwater Girl into a campus radical. I am not astute enough to identify the time or the event that accomplished this change, but it became apparent not only in her views but in her deportment (there was a book written several years ago entitled "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham;" I’d never read it; perhaps the author has a b3ette3r explanation for the change) It is only important for us to understand that Hillary Rodham abandoned her middle-class life and became Hillary Radical. Whatever force accomplished this change, everything that Hillary did or said afterward was in pursuit of fulfilling her new role as Hillary Radical.

It is likely, as with many of her generation that Hillary did not understand the experience herself. For many of us, it was identification with an individual (I spent years trying to get my hair to behave like Bobby Kennedy's), or opposition to a particular issue such as the Viet Nam War, or just a general estrangement from middle-class America as the result of university experience and exposure the radical professors.

Hillary Radical does not believe in anything except a vision of herself as rescuer. She does not believe in liberty or justice or human rights or any of the other "causes" she espouses in her persona. That is why she can lie and cheat and steal and never be bothered by a conscience, because Hillary Radical has no conscience; characters have no conscience unless the author creates one. Hillary Radical does not know what she belies, until the author puts the words in her mouth.

The point is nobody knows who Hillary is, including Hillary. To elect her or any other person with such an indeterminate character would be to betray all that America represents

Perhaps someday a future Shakespeare will write a play called "Hillary Millhouse," for this American story is surely as much a tragedy as any of the histories the Bard ever penned. It will become an even greater tragedy if she becomes president.

Obama's Muslim, er ah, Christian Faith

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then candidate Barrack Obama remarked during an interview that his opponent John McCain had not commented on his (Obama’s) Muslim faith.

Obama did not realize his misstatement until the interviewer Chris Wallace said “you mean your Christian faith. Obama agreed with Wallace’s correction. The flub was observed by some commentators, but like his other misstatements there was no enduring fallout.

The question remains, why would anyone make such a mistake? One can understand, for instance, Obama’s error in stating that he had been to 57 states. But it’s different when it comes to one’s religious beliefs. After all, he had been a member of Jeremiah Wright’s church for some 20 years and was a self-styled Christian. This was certainly more than a slip of the tongue.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Obama embarked on his “apologize to Islam tour.” He “announced” that America was not a Christian nation. He did not clarify what he meant by this announcement. Of course, America was not and never had been a Christian nation in any formal legal sense. It certainly had been a Christian nation in terms of its philosophy and political orientation.

The president apparently thought he had sufficiently circumcised the nations Christian heritage and turned his attention from apologizing to Muslims for the barbaric treatment they had received at the hand of their American oppressors, to apologizing for, i.e., defending Islam.

In the face of continuing violence by Muslim terrorists, he declared that their actions were not the result of Islamic beliefs but were the actions of those who perverted the true teachings of Islam. In a recent statement, he even declared that Islam had always played an important role in the life of America, even from the founding. What this role was he did not say.

There was a “made-for tv” movie sometime in the 80s concerning the Roman army’s assault on a band of renegade Jews at the mountain-top fortress at Masada. After engaging in every atrocity imaginable, including launching Jewish prisoners from catapults, the Roman general, portrayed by Peter O’Toole declared to the leader of the Jewish renegades, Peter Strauss, during a clandestine meeting down the mountain, that “this is not Rome.” After repeating this phrase for the second time, Strauss stated how absurd this was in light of the fact that it was the Romans who were committing the outrages.

Well, it seems to me that the president is engaging in a similar case of verbal legerdemain. In the face of continued violence against Christian culture by confessed Muslim terrorists, Obama continually denies that they are acts of terror or, at least they are not motivated by a genuine understanding of the Prophet’s teachings. What the president hopes to gain by this denial in the face of indisputable fact is difficult to understand. Difficult perhaps, but not impossible.

Some time ago, I wrote a piece entitled "Our First Post-Modern President or Why Obama Can't Lie" Without re-posting the entire essay (please read), my point was to explain how Obama’s frequent misrepresentations could not be understood in the traditional sense of lying (ala Bill and Hillary), but in the context of the Post-modern paradigm that controls most of popular intellectual discourse, viz truth is not a fixed set of propositions but is determined by the context in which claims are asserted. In this case, Obama is not lying; he is simply declaring the truth from a different perspective. He is not trying to deny or hide the facts; rather he is creating truth by his statements. Thus, the terrorists are not Islamic, regardless of how often they declare their allegiance to Allah and the Prophet, because they cannot be. In short, he is engaging in the rebellion against God’s authority that has characterized human behavior since Eve overthrew God’s judgment for her own.

Most Christians are not interested in such matters and so continue to misinterpret the conflict in which they are engaged. Obama is not speaking the truth and must be challenged’ of his words. The problem is not Obama’s errant world-view, a world-view that is clearly anti-Christian, but the failure of Christians to think and act as followers of Christ. As Christians, we can only declare Islam to be what it is, an anti-Christian, pagan religion.

We should hope and pray for a Christian of sufficient courage and standing to challenge Obama’s defense of this false religion in the face of “his Christian faith.”

Saving America - A Prescription For Reclaiming Christian Culture

"Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you." 2 Cor 6:17

"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."

 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." Matt. 5:13 & 16

America is in trouble; that is not in question. The question is, what can/should we as Christians do to solve the problem. That question can be answered in one word - Separation. Separation is the essence of holiness. It should be the measure by which we live and the foundation of our involvement in society.

God's plan for Israel was Separation from the world in which they lived: they were to be a peculiar people, totally different from the nations around them. It was their constant failure to be separated that was the cause of His judgement.

America was founded by separatists. The Pilgrims had separated themselves from the corrupt church/state system under which they lived in England. Their reason for relocating to America was not, as the state schools teach, for religious freedom - they had that in Holland. Their purpose was to establish a social and political system based on distinctly Christian/biblical principles. Without this commitment, they would never have been able to endure the hardships they faced in their new home.

True holiness/separation begins in the heart. Our unwillingness to be truly separate is an indication that our hearts are not as they should be - "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." The following are offered as a beginning.

Separate from the world's indoctrination system - get your kids out of the state schools. If Christians would withdraw their children en masse, it would have an incalculable impact on the culture. Not only would it remove a huge number of students who would, hopefully, receive a truly Christian education, but it would be a tremendous witness to the world. 

This question should settle the matter for all true Christians: Would the Jews have allowed the Philistines to educate their children? 

If we are unwilling to do such a small thing, do we really imagine that we will be willing to do great things when they are required of us. If we say we are unable to do this, we are saying that God is unable to provide what is necessary to carry out his will. The primary option should be parent directed home education, but every church that has a building could operate a day school. Tuition could be free or minimal to cover expenses. 

Separate from the world's amusements. If one phrase can be used to describe American culture, it is "entertainment obsessed." This obsession is present in virtually every area of our daily experience - even pastors make references to sports in their sermons; Billy Graham features athletes at his crusades. It is characterized by the amount of time and money that are spent on motion pictures, television, sports and the manner in which we assign celebrity status to entertainers and athletes. Most Christians know all about the current movies; they know which teams are in the playoffs; they even know the latest doings of the Kardasian family.

Separate from the world's economic system - consumerism. Get out of debt; do not incur additional debt. Be content with what we have. Lay up treasures in heaven, not on earth.

Separate from the world's political expectations - stop looking for a savior. Christians display the same expectation as the pagan element in our society, i.e. we must find the right person to lead us into the right way (preferably without requiring any work on our part). We argue over which candidate can solve our problems. This mindset dishonors the Lord we claim to serve.

Separate from the world's military mentality. The founders were afraid of a standing army; they knew the damage that such a force could pose to liberty and the tendency toward "meddling" that it encouraged. Our nation has been in almost a constant state of conflict since the second world war - none of it has been for national defense. 

Citizens should only engage in armed conflict when the life of the nation is at state. No concern for "national interest" justifies a Christian engaging in war. It is proper to honor those who serve to protect their country, but it is improper to glorify and celebrate war, and to teach our children that military service is to be pursued.

Separate from the world's support system. Christ never intended for his people to live in isolation; the church was to be a physical community, not merely a gathering place for infrequent worship. The book of Acts describes a people who were united around a common purpose; the sharing characterized by the church at Jerusalem following Pentecost was only possible because of the fellowship and community they shared.

There are, no doubt, additional areas where Christians could be separate; these are offered as a beginning. 

Ultimately, the saving of America is in God's hands. The question is whether we have the will to try.

Hillary is not the only one.

"If we say we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" 1 John 1:8

Hillary Clinton's recent assertion that she "has not lied," and doesn't believe that she "would lie," reveals one or both of two things:

1          If she really believes what she is saying, she is a self-deceived fool.

2.         If she does not believe what she is saying, she is lying and the truth is not in her.

In either case, it should be clear that she cannot be trusted and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the White House (or your house).

My point, however, is not to expose Hillary's duplicity; she is doing an adequate job of that. My point is that Christians need to start evaluating political issues in biblical categories, not as Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, Socialist or Capitalist, etc. Until we start doing that, we are not qualified to choose a president or a dog catcher.

How can we hope to solve our government spending problems without understanding the nature of the problem. Government debt is a form of theft, in violation of the 8th commandment. No amount of political discussion or debate will alter this fact. Socialism - government "redistribution of wealth" is motivated by a violation ofr the 10th commandment.

There is a lot of talk about Christians being "salt and light," be we have not spoken clearly, biblically on these and other issues and contribute to the confusion and darkness. We have no other authority for objecting to bad policies. If we look for other grounds for objection, we are denying the authority of God's word over every area of life.

During the Revolution period, the Americans had a phrase they used to oppose the unlawful British policies; "No King but Jesus." It's time for Christians to renew this declaration, but first, they must understand it.