Have you ever considered yourself to be an enemy of God? If not, you may be doing it wrong.
To paraphrase another R.C. Sproul quote, in this world we will surely have enemies, but we certainly do not want God to be one of them. If you happen to be involved in the hyper competitive business world, or feel led to enter into the combat zone of politics, you will inevitably find yourself with a few enemies, even if your are a soft-spoken non-confrontational Type B personality )click(
like myself!
As Christians, we are commanded to love our neighbor, but even if you manage to pull that off 100% of the time, you may still be distressed to discover in your orbit someone who despises you, and dreams of your failure. But fret not, it's normal! In fact, Jesus himself said that you will be hated because of your devotion to Him in both Matthew 10:22 & John 15:18-21. So, try as we might, we are bound to fail in our efforts to please everyone. It cannot be done, and therefore should not be something that we live in fear of.
But fear is a good and necessary thing to live with. Fear is healthy, at least if it’s a healthy fear.
It’s not a matter of whether we fear, but which. Or rather WHO we fear.
Many modern Christians (lovebunnies) recoil at the idea of fearing God, but I believe that fear is requisite to living in this fallen world. And the Bible backs this up, more than once:
“The FEAR of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” - Proverbs 9:10-12
The fear referenced in this proverb is more akin to reverence, and is not about walking around constantly “being afraid” of a boogeyman, but rather acknowledging God’s authority, power and wisdom in every aspect of your life. Every single one, and not just on Sundays. We should fear disappointing the Lord with the depravity of our thoughts, and more acutely, our tendency to exclude Him from our daily meanderings.
Many of you have heard the metaphor that we all are born with a “God-sized hole in our hearts”. I agree with this notion, but I also believe that the Designer made human nature equipped with an inescapable need to fear something. He wants us to fear Him; specifically to fear sinning against Him. Of course His grace is limitless, and shall always be available to the repentant sinner. But what about our unacknowledged sin? If you consider yourself a Christian, you should fear this.
“The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers”- Psalms 5:4-5
This Psalm states that God, our loving and perfect Yahweh, hates all evildoers.
Yikes!
I saw a sign on one of those small business changeable signboards today that read “God & Jesus love all people”, but I thought about the above Psalm and wondered, “Does He tho?” It’s really none of my business who God loves or hates, but it is certainly in my supreme interest to know that God doesn’t hate me. Eternal vigilance is the key.
I’ve been known, a time or two, to attack and likely make enemies of political people in this Substack as a byproduct of my polemic style writing that I have felt led to engage in lo these past couple years. It doesn’t bring me any joy - well, except for the Lil PP article, that one was fun - to tear people down or put a target on my back just for the sake of being bombastic in hopes that my peeps will start chimping out in solidarity. Instead, the heart of my motivations is the pursuit of Truth, and Obedience to my maker. If I have offended Him, then I tremble in fear. The haters & losers I fear little to none.
ANXIETY
The rise of Atheism in America, which coincidentally corresponds to the abandonment of any real fear or reverence of God, hasn't resulted in people living with an absence of fear. In fact, fear has evolved into what we now call anxiety, which has interestingly become an extremely lucrative source of perpetual income for the pharmaceutical industry.
The fear of the Lord has been updated to a fear of, well….everything else.
A quick internet search provided this tidbit:
And, it's getting worse….
As you can see in the chart above, the trends in America are showing that as we become a less religious people, our anxiety grows. Anxiety is the new religion.
STATE OF FEAR
The thoroughly enjoyable late author Michael Critchon, Harvard-educated medical doctor, creator of the E.R. tv series, and writer of Jurassic Park, along with many other novels, wrote my personal favorite in 2004 called “State of Fear”. According to Grok, “Michael Crichton wrote State of Fear (published in 2004) primarily to express his skepticism about the scientific consensus on global warming and to critique what he saw as the politicization of science, particularly in the environmental movement.”
Michael’s gift for creating novels that translated easily to movies provided him with an extensive foray into the overwhelmingly liberal and heathen world of Hollywood. What he took away from that experience was that “Global Warming”, the mother of “Climate Change”, was widely becoming what looked like a religion to many of its most ardent activists.
Also from Grok: He believed climate science had been co-opted by a “politico-legal-media” complex. This complex, Crichton argued, used fear-inducing terms like “crisis” and “catastrophe” to maintain social control and secure funding, especially after the Cold War ended. He compared this to the military-industrial complex, suggesting environmental organizations exaggerated threats for their own gain.
I agree.
Around the time of the release of what would be his most controversial book, Critchon gave a few speeches about this subject, which he took a lot of flack for from those in the climate crisis industry. Notably, in his speech in 2003, before the release of his book, titled “Aliens cause global warming”, he made a statement that seems more true than ever today: “Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists... a perfect 21st-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
BLASPHEMOUS WORLD
For most of my life pretty much everyone, even in popular culture, was worried about offending “the man upstairs”. Now cynicism, sacrilege and outright demonic tributes are pervasive throughout music, social media, and film. The very last thing I would ever watch on TV would be the Oscars or the Grammys. The idea of getting any amount of entertainment out of witnessing well dressed, facially reconstructed soulless vampires gleefully displaying no fear of the Great I AM, while outright celebrating debauchery and demon worship is repulsive to me.
While it is true that we now occupy a space on the human timeline of peak technology, comfort, and convenience, endless variety of bread & circuses, cheap luxury, and widespread lack of want, it is also unavoidably obvious that we live in the most anti-Christ culture in American history. Many of our fellow believers have reacted to this reality with a defeatist bunker mentality; living in total fear of being ostracized for their beliefs, bullied into submission of acceptance of everything they hold sacred being queered up and hollowed out, and seduced by self-proclaimed “prophets” on churchy Youtube channels telling them that we are in fact in the END TIMES. This is FEAR PORN, my friends, and should be rejected by Christians. The enemy wants us to cower in fear as we doomscroll through our social media apps lamenting the state of our world.
But as we all agree, the enemy is a liar, and a thief of our joy and contentment.
My friend Dan is right now preparing for his mission trip to downtown SIoux Falls tomorrow to witness and document the satanic idol worshipping event that has become an annual thing, sadly, of which I refer to as the Proud Gays parade. Of course Dan has a reasonable amount of fear for what he is about to embark upon, visiting such an anti-Christ celebration in his own town. Certainly it would be much easier for him to give in to this fear, make a reasonable calculation that it may not be worth getting assaulted over by what is bound to be an aggressively hedonistic crowd with no tolerance for truly Christian ideology. I say truly, because there will be at this parade several local so-called “churches” setup with booths advertising the absurd fact that their congregation has willfully abandoned any semblance of condemnation towards sexual sin. Even this fact would lead many believers to give into the oppressing feeling of doom at the state of our debauched world right now. But Dan has prioritized his fears, biblically, and not according to modern standards.
He fears the Lord, above all else, and obedience is best cure for that.
Totally agree that all of the fear porn has made anxiety the new religion! So many sheep keep worshipping at the altar of the wolves and not enough sheep dogs yet!
If only those sheep could see that the wolves are almost always trying to protect their money and power with the fear they are constantly pushing out through all the propaganda! Good news is more and more people everyday are walking away from listening to or watching the media that has been co-opted and only survives because of the advertising dollars being spent by the wolves as an insurance policy to protect their true motives and actions from being exposed.
Thanks to social media and things like Substack the sheep dogs can shed light on the darkness and are pulling more and more sheep everyday from the religion of anxiety.
As much as many of us thought social media would be the final nail in the coffin of our productivity we can now see that even though way to much time is spent admiring it that same social media is actually the saving grace that society needs to get the other side of the story out so that people can make up their own minds.
Can not trust any polling out there but the one that is a true gauge of what the people are really thinking! In every state the pendulum has swung to large increases in voter registrations away from the Democrat party toward the Republican Party! (If you want proof of this just follow Captain K on Substack to get his almost monthly report of voter registrations) The middle class is finally figuring out the Democrat party has never done anything but talk about helping the middle class. The elites and the corporations have figured out (thanks to Covid) that more regulations can actually be a good thing to drive their small business competion out of business. Small businesses can not afford to pay lawyers to help them circumvent those regulations. Remember who got to stay open during the lockdowns?
The elites and the corporations who have always donated and voted republican have made the switch. The good news is there are way more people who don’t fall in the elite category. In closing those who have not seen the light yet you can really pat yourself on the back because you are now helping to support the very group of people that you despised in the first place.
I appreciate the New Century Version wording of Proverbs 9:10a. "Wisdom begins with respect for the Lord,".
When you respect someone, likely because of past inciteful experiences, you take what they say seriously. As you state and your chart shows, Chris, a decrease in respect for who God is and what He says (the Bible) has measurable deleterious effects on people and, thus, society.
History, past and current, is replete with examples of what happens to societies that respect, or don't, the Living God and His instructions for our well-being.