Archive for the 'Religion' Category

“I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.” – Revelation 3:8

When God sets before a man an open door, that door cannot be shut. Conversely, when God closes a door, no man can open it.

Revelation 3:8 has a very specific context, but we are not in error to draw out a broader application. The works of God, that is, the ministries of His faithful, are the topic.

God’s ways are better. His timing is best. There is no sin that cannot be forgiven and no shame that cannot be covered by the blood of Jesus Christ.

The faithful who do His works and keep His name are indeed rewarded with the means, mode, and opportunity to bring glory to His holy name. Our Lord declares it to be so in Luke 12:48, “…for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required…” and so it is.

When the Lord Jesus Christ fills a man’s heart with the desire to teach His word, to evangelize His holy name, to witness of Him to the lost, to preach His kingdom, and to minister among the saints, He will not be denied.

Indeed, means, mode, and opportunity to bring glory unto the Father should be the heart’s desire of every soul that is forgiven of their sin by the blood of Jesus Christ and begotten again by the power of His resurrection. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation.

Not just firearms, but weapons of all kinds necessary to defend life and liberty.  This is our claim.  But not everyone sees it that way.

Quoting from the email I received from this group, “Constitutional Carry is the simple concept that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t need to pay a tax and get permission from their sheriff to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms.”

I laughed aloud when I read this email. Who knew God had given us the right to own guns? I mean, chapter and verse, please. God didn’t have anything to do with the U.S. Constitution, no matter how hard you want to try to do the mental gymnastics to say so. The Constitution is a creation of mankind, period. It is a great document, but it isn’t the Holy Scriptures, nor is it divinely inspired, so let’s back off of that bit of hyperbole.

And therein lies one of the principle bits of propaganda you will see in regards to many issues in the political arena. God is not into politics, nor politicians, nor even the political entities we call nations except, perhaps, the nation of Israel, the only group of people he ever promised a piece of land to call their own.

American politicians today, and probably for all the time we have been a nation, have tried to co-opt God to make him on the side of one political party or another or to have God endorse some act the nation was attempting to do on the domestic or world stage. Here is a free tip: You can be on God’s side by doing the work of God’s kingdom, but don’t believe for a minute you can bring God onto your side to endorse the works of man. It doesn’t work that way.

We can agree that trying to co-opt God is an improper project.  Rather, we need to be on God’s side, and His side is found in the Holy Writ.  So you’ve laid down the gauntlet, and we’ll respond.

To begin with, it’s a bit more complicated than “chapter and verse please.”  Let’s start our discussion with The Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.6: ““The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.”

The clearest right to own weapons also invokes a duty.  John Calvin, commenting on commandment and prohibition, observes the following.

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

Simply put, thou shall not take life unjustly also means thou shall defend innocent life.  The clearest right (and thus command) is to be found right in the moral law given to all men everywhere.  These are corollaries, and it is inescapable.  Furthermore, to claim agreement with this and then deny either someone else or yourself the weapons necessary to effect that defense of innocent life is insulting to the Almighty.  The thief may express agreement with the commandment not to steal, but that rings hollow when he then takes your possessions.

But if you wish for more direct evidence of ownership of weapons in the Scriptures, look no further than what Jesus commanded in Luke 22:36.  Let’s look at the cultural context for a moment.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

In this passage, Jesus is quite literally ordering His disciples to ignore the Roman laws and disobey them, buy weapons, and be ready to use them.  He is turning His disciples into lawbreakers for the sake of having self defense.

There are more passages to which we may turn, but these will suffice for now.  So, Mr. Cosby, you may get letters which are incomplete accounts of the Scriptural mandate to be prepared for defense of the innocent, but those are merely letters.  They don’t mean such an account cannot be made.

You might want to seek out a little more theological training before you make those bold statements that you called … what was it … hyperbole.

The second amendment didn’t come from God, and God doesn’t need it.  He alone grants rights and duties.  However, it doesn’t end there.  The constitution is a covenant, and for understanding this we may turn to “Lawful Oaths and Vows” also in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

It is a terrible thing to break a lawful oath or vow, cosmic treason against God’s laws, but we’ll leave that for another time and let you ruminate on what we’ve said thus far.

Please let us know if you need anything else.

PJM.

Florida hospitals, like the Mayo Clinic, have a COVID protocol for their patients with the Bat-Stew Flu, and ivermectin isn’t part of it. Balbona is a big believer in ivermectin. He alleges he has saved “dozens and dozens” of people suffering from the Chinese Sneeze using the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) recommendations, with a few modifications based on each patient. The FLCCC treatment calls for, in part, ivermectin.

But hospitals receive federal money for treating COVID patients IF they use treatments outlined in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Ivermectin isn’t a part of that treatment.

Families have gone to court hoping a judge will side with them and allow ivermectin to be used with their loved ones, most of whom are seriously ill (death panels, anyone?). Sometimes that works out. When it doesn’t, some have resorted to sneaking ivermectin into hospitals and administering it themselves.

An anonymous woman recently contacted Dr. Balbona regarding her husband who was hospitalized with COVID.

“The husband was very ill,” Dr. Balbona told the Epoch Times. “He’s in his 50s, a big strong guy. She called me desperate because they [the hospital] gave him remdesivir and she made them stop it, and he started getting worse and worse. And his oxygen demand went up.”

Balbona told the woman he could care for her husband once she got him out of the hospital. He wrote her prescriptions for the meds she would need. She filled them out, snuck them into the hospital, and gave them to her husband. That was on Friday. By Tuesday he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital.

“The people who snuck in the ivermectin, they are scared to death,” Balbona stated. “She is sure that the government is going to find out who she is and possibly arrest her for giving medications not approved by the hospital.”

“I did it,” the anonymous woman told Dr. Balbona. “I knew it was wrong. I don’t know what the penalties are. What could they do to me?”

Did you catch the bolded section?  This is one big reason doctors and hospital administrations are so reluctant to use Ivermectin, along with the fact that state boards will take their license.  This is about money – money from the FedGov, and money for hospitals and big Pharma.

The woman’s sentiments are ridiculous to the point of absurdity.  “I knew it was wrong.”  What part was wrong – saving the life of her husband?  Using an unapproved treatment?  Who disapproves, and do they have the best interest of her husband at heart?  Does she owe the truth to her enemies?  Did she ponder any of these questions?

This redounds to awful education and training, and could possibly be the fault of her church.  If you want to understand just how bad teaching is today, find a Christian and ask him or her the following question: “Was Rahab’s lie a sin?”

Even the biblical commentaries dance around this issue to the point of absurdity.  “Well, the lie was a sin, but God used it for good … ” Blah Blah Blah.

Balderdash and poppycock and nonsense and blather and rubbish and stupid pastors.

Rushdoony deals with this in The Institutes of Biblical Law.  Among other things, he says “There is not the slightest hint anywhere in the Bible that any aspect of her defense of the Hebrew spies is in some way suspect … legalism runs deep in the rebellious hearts of men.”

Her deception of the hospital was an act of faith, it saved her husband, it was approved by God, and like Rahab, her lie was justified.  Her enemies didn’t deserve the truth.

Just stop with the notions that she owed fealty to the government over her husband’s medical care.  She didn’t, and her actions weren’t “wrong,” as she put it.

And please, please, please people, leave poor churches and get sound theological training.

David Codrea.

The very first sentence is an admission of the utter failure of every fraudulent infringement Feuer — and the L.A. government he has been a prominent part of for decades — have mandated by diktat in the name of “gun safety.” Not only has the state of California attained the highest “gun laws” grade from both the Brady Campaign and the Giffords gun-grab groups but Feuer and every person he submitted his latest citizen disarmament scheme to has built a powerful political career on Second Amendment subversion.

If their edicts really did work, why is there “increasing gun violence”? Isn’t proposing new prohibitions not only a masked admission that none of them have, and that the violence monopolist will never have enough until they have it all? And what do we call those whose control is total?

Violence has been around since the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, and will be with us until the Lord returns.  The fault isn’t the implement.

The implement could be rocks, sticks, hammers or pitchforks.  No one addresses the root cause because they don’t believe in God, the only one who can solve these problems.

The solution is found in family and church, when those institutions bow their knee to King Jesus.  The solution to problems almost never is founded in the state.  The state only makes things worse.

News from North Carolina.

A Bible quote painted in the hall of one North Carolina law enforcement agency has ignited a very public spat between a Christian county sheriff and the national Freedom from Religion Foundation.

The foundation is demanding the New Testament quote be removed and hints legal action could follow.

The sheriff of Columbus County posted an equally pointed statement on Facebook saying he intends for it to stay.

“I am not scared of much, but I am afraid of burning in Hell,” Sheriff Jody Greene says in the post.

“The Freedom from Religion Foundation, mocks Christians’ fear of burning in Hell. According to their Facebook page, they have a contest for the Unabashed Atheist/Nonbeliever of the Week. … It is time, past time, to stand up. So let me be clear, I will not waiver on my stance and Christian beliefs.”

Philippians 4:13 is at the center of the controversy: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

Foundation officials say “a concerned citizen” informed them Greene had the quote prominently displayed at his office in Whiteville. The town is about 115 miles south of downtown Raleigh.

Greene has an “obligation to provide all citizens with an environment free from religious endorsement by removing this exclusionary display,” foundation officials said in a Dec. 14 news release.

“The Columbus County Sheriff’s Office must serve all citizens equally, whether Christian or non-Christian,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says in the release. “A blatantly Christian message in a law enforcement division sends a message of exclusion.”

Those folks are so droll, and cowardly too.

Any system of law requires an undergirding philosophy.  If it isn’t Christianity, it will be utilitarianism, or instrumentalism, or whatever.  I’ve studied them in Philosophy and History of the Christian Church.  This is historically a Christian nation, even if it isn’t today.

If the atheists weren’t cowards, they would put their views into the marketplace of ideas where they would fail under the weight of irrationality.  But they are afraid of that, so they try to get the state to bully people like this Sheriff.

Hey listen, moron.  This is easy.  The Christian message is exclusive because God is exclusive.  He has said you are separated from Him by your sin, in need of a savior to give a propitiatory atonement, and that only His Son, truly God and truly man, can suffice for that sacrifice.  There is no other way.  You must bow your knee to King Jesus.  If you do not, you will suffer for eternity.

See?  Now that’s not so hard – doing a little truth-telling and teaching.  What are you afraid of, atheists?  Why are you so scared of a passage of Scripture?

Pathetic news.

The Supreme Court on Monday permitted a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in New York that doesn’t include a religious exemption, the latest instance in which the nation’s highest court has declined to wade into the issue of vaccination requirements imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

New York state imposed the vaccine mandate for health care workers in August. The policy allows for medical exemptions but not those based on religious objections. An earlier religious exemption to the requirement expired last month.

The Supreme Court was considering two emergency challenges to that mandate and decided to allow the law to stand in both of them. In each case, three conservatives – Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – said they would have supported temporarily halting enforcement of the mandate.

“Sometimes dissenting religious beliefs can seem strange and bewildering. In times of crisis, this puzzlement can evolve into fear and anger,” Gorsuch wrote in dissenting from the decision to not block the mandate’s enforcement.

“One can only hope today’s ruling will not be the final chapter in this grim story,” he continued. “Cases like this one may serve as cautionary tales for those who follow. But how many more reminders do we need that ‘the Constitution is not to be obeyed or disobeyed as the circumstances of a particular crisis . . . may suggest’?”

Nurses, doctors and other health care workers asserted in a lawsuit that the lack of a religious exemption violated their First Amendment right to practice religion. The objections centered on the use fetal cells from abortions in the vaccines’ development.

That means Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh were opposed to stepping in front of the mandate and stopping it.

Pathetic.

Eternity calls them.  We will all answer for our sins.

Loathsome, she is.

Justice Sotomayor made some awful comments in the discussion when she compared unborn babies to dead people.

She argued that the notion of fetal pain is “not founded in science at all” — a claim which has been debunked.

Sotomayor compared fetal pain to involuntary spasms in brain dead people, specifically talking about dead people whose feet have moved.

Alexandra DeSanctis hit the nail on the head when she said, “It says a lot about Roe that one of its defenders on the Court is defending the decision by comparing an unborn child to a dead body.”

She is callous, grotesque, loathsome, awful, terrible, hideous, shameless, revulsive, vile, repugnant and foul.  The stench of immorality of people like her will fill the smoke of hell.

It was bound to happen.  Most of the American Church is already utterly irrelevant, having declared that they no longer believe in the infallibility of Scripture, the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, the substitutionary atonement, and other necessary doctrines to be considered relevant and orthodox.  After defenestrating doctrine, they picked up parity in income as their raison d’être.  In other words, they adopted full orbed Marxism.

The Salvation Army has followed suit.

The Salvation Army wants its white donors to give it more than just money this Christmas season. Its leadership is also demanding they apologize for being racist.

It’s part of a push by the Christian charitable organization to embrace the ideas of Black Lives Matter, an activist group working to, among other things, “dismantle white privilege” and “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

The Salvation Army’s Alexandria-based leadership has created an “International Social Justice Commission” which has developed and released a “resource” to educate its white donors, volunteers and employees called Let’s Talk about Racism. It asserts Christianity is institutionally racist, calling for white Christians to repent and offer “a sincere apology” to blacks for being “antagonistic.. to black people or the culture, values and interests of the black community.”

“Many have come to believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racism is very real for our brothers and sisters who are refused jobs and housing, denied basic rights and brutalized and oppressed simply because of the color of their skin,” one lesson explains. “There is an urgent need for Christians to evaluate racist attitudes and practices in light of our faith, and to live faithfully in today’s world.”

Here is one response, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Entitled An Open Letter to The Salvation Army, Koukl prefaces the post by informing TSA that he is terminating his monthly donations and directing them to another organization. Koukl is also the founder and president of the Stand to Reason, a non-profit religious organization that “trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith and to make an even-handed defense for classical Christianity.”

“There is a massive number of academics—Black and white, Christian and non-Christian, atheist and theist—who have raised the alarm against the aggressive indoctrination and, frankly, bullying of CRT—not to mention the racial essentialism inherent in the view, the false witness it bears against virtuous people, and the general destruction it continues to wreak on race relations in this country. CRT has set us back 50 years,” he continued.

[ … ]

General Brian Peddle, CEO of The Salvation Army announced the initiative in February through a video in which he said “it examines racism through the lens of scripture, church and world history and guides gracious discussions about overcoming the damage racism has inflicted upon our world and yes, on our Salvation Army.”

“As we anticipate having courageous conversations about race please join me in working toward a world in which all people feel included, valued and loved on Earth just as they are in heaven,” Peddle stated in the one-minute video.

[ … ]

“Repentance solely for the fact that you’re white, we don’t think that’s very productive,” Xu told Newsweek, who also noted that 60 percent of those served by The Salvation Army are from ethnic minority communities. That’s a statistic he told Newsweek he discovered by talking to Commissioner and TSA National Commander Kenneth G. Hodder.

“Here’s the thing with the SA that’s so crazy—these people spend their entire lives serving the poor,” said Xu. “There is absolutely no reason to even suggest or insinuate repentance for their supposed complicity in racism.”

“I have a real problem with that website and the resources that are suggested readings—to my mind they do not accord with what I’ve seen at the SA,” said Theroux, who has spent more than 25 years in a governing role.

“They’re silly notions that are not going to resolve the disparate conditions of people.” Rather, Theroux said there are concerted actions people can take rather than “spending a lot of time and effort in training or gnashing of teeth.”

“I don’t think it advances real solutions and real solutions are needed,” added Theroux. “Jargon like systemic racism and whiteness being a sin is a smokescreen for correctly diagnosing the problems and addressing them in a meaningful way that will resolve them.”

You see?  Even responses to the Salvation Army are poor.  And note again that the Salvation Army wants people to feel as loved on earth as they are in heaven.  This is universalism and it is false doctrine.  If a man is not saved by grace, through faith, he is not loved in heaven.  He will suffer eternal damnation.

So here is the proper response.

This false doctrine is in vogue everywhere, from unattenuated Marxism (Marx was an atheist and is in hell today), to black liberation theology (James Cone, who was an unbeliever), to it’s disinfected and cleaned up white man version by N. T. Wright.  Tom Wright teaches warmed over Wesleyanism, but replaces the doctrine that you can lose your salvation and need to be able to say “I don’t drink, smoke or chew or date girls who do” (thus you partner with God in your salvation) with the doctrine that justification is based on the “life lived” (rather than now through the shed blood and substitutionary atonement of Christ).  Rather than chewing tobacco, Tom Wright is concerned with whether you help the poor and erase disparate incomes.

It’s all heresy.

The Gospel isn’t about disparate conditions of people.  That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The Gospel isn’t about finding what’s productive in your estimation.

The Gospel isn’t about diagnosing what man thinks are his problems.

The Gospel is about teaching man his real problems.

He is lost.  He is a sinner because he has violated the laws of a Holy God and thus committed cosmic treason.  He cannot save himself.  He is dead, and dead men don’t approach God.  God redeems His own by sending the Holy Spirit to quicken their hearts and receive Christ.  Salvation is of by grace, through faith.  Man is justified only through the shed blood of the ultimate substitutionary atonement, the death of Christ.  He is assured of the resurrection because of the resurrection of Christ.  He is assured of ultimate and final victory because of the ascension of Christ to the Father.

Any further discussion of things he does after salvation is because a man loves his Lord and shows the fruit of faith; works are not the cause of justification.  All real problems are so because God says they are, not because man says so.  Proper world and life view is based on the Scripture, and only on the Scripture.

Your income, or the income of someone else, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you’re saved, or how you should treat them.  God is no respecter of persons.  He is the creator of the universe, and His only begotten Son is truly God and truly man, the only savior and way to the Father.

That is the Gospel.

Nothing that was said by the Salvation Army even approaches that, and thus they have become a sinful organization.

Refrain from giving them your hard earned money.  Save it for those in need around you – friends who have lost work, church members, missions, and so forth.

Ignorance from Vox Day.

And while I am as skeptical as any atheist about those whose demono-calvinism interprets every unfortunate or unpleasant event as being the result of evil intervention in their lives – you know what I mean, the sort of individual who requests an exorcism because “I feel a little blue today” and believes the Lego brick he stepped on the night before was personally placed there by the Prince of Hell – there is a very strong stench of sulfur about literally everything related to both Covid and the vaxxes.

Good Lord.  This is so messy it’s hard to know where to begin.

First, I don’t know a single Calvinist who has ever requested an exorcism because “I feel a little blue today,” or for any other reason.  And Calvinists are neither Roman Catholics nor Pentecostals.

Second, Calvinists don’t interpret every unfortunate or unpleasant event as a result of evil intervention in our lives.  In fact, quite the contrary.  “Father fortune” and “Lady Luck” are evil notions, and the Holy Scriptures do not countenance notions of causation from unknown sources.

“For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not yet been done, saying, “My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure.” Isaiah 46:9-10.  “We have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,” Ephesians 1:11.

To be sure, God does allow His children to suffer for a period of time when they make poor choices, but always to their benefit.

“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose,” Romans 8:28.

While we agree with him that there is something very wrong with the Vax, he sounds like a high school freshman when trying to write about things theological.

He says, ” … you know what I mean.”  No, I don’t know what you mean.  Nothing you said makes any sense at all.  It’s a mish mash of confusion, ignorance and poor writing.  It might be wise for him to steer clear of the more complex issues and focus on things he can understand.

Or so he seems to think.  Via Vox Day.

My point is this: Don’t be enslaved by fear of man. Don’t be enslaved by the fear of breaking ranks with ideological allies. The old name for this is peer pressure. You are free.

You have considered the risk of COVID as you watch hundreds of thousands of people die.
You have considered the short- and long-term risks of the vaccines as you watch millions get the shots.
You have compared the frequency of hospitalizations and deaths of those with and without vaccines.
You have thought hard about the implications of fetal cell lines in the production and testing of the vaccines.
You have rejoiced at the increasing evidence that natural immunity, developed after recovering from COVID, is as effective as vaccination immunity.
You have pondered the likelihood and unlikelihood of conspiratorial conjectures.

Your conscience is increasingly clear. It says, “Get vaccinated.” But there is this niggling fear of looking left wing, or progressive, or Democratic, or compromised, or woke!

So, my message to such folks is this: “The children are free!”

Yes.  It’s just that simple.  Don’t worry about the “implications” of the use of aborted babies (he calls them fetal cell lines).  The term fetus is Latin for baby.  It’s enough to say that you’ve “thought hard” about it.

It’s one thing to say you didn’t know.  It’s entirely a different thing to know and say merely that you “thought hard” about it.

I thought hard about it too and came to an utterly different conclusion.  I am also free.