Author: jetbrane

Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief:

Isaiah 53:10a

The Hebrew word (Qal) “pleased” here means, “To incline to, to bend, to be pleased with, desire.” The word clearly communicates the idea of willful intent driven by a happy desire. There is no sense of regret or recrimination. The Father was pleased to bruise the Son.

Now understand this pleasure of the Father in bruising the Son is a pleasure as seen in the context of what could be argued as the greatest cosmic injustice ever to be seen in the chronicles of the history of man. Here, we find the innocent and morally perfect God-Man being offered up as a sacrifice and in all that the Father is pleased with this bruising that is assigned to His agency. The Father is pleased with His bruising of the Son.

Now, in retrospect, we understand that the Father was pleased with that bruising because in that bruising of the Son the Father’s character as Holy and Just are sustained and His character as merciful and loving are demonstrated. Further, the Father is pleased because in His bruising of the Son, His name is glorified inasmuch as His character is seen as perfect as it never ceased nor ceases to be, sin is seen as consequential as it always was promised, and His people are atoned for.

Now, if the Sovereign Father was pleased with His bruising of the Son, can there be any other action of our sovereign God with which He is not pleased?

I bring this up in the face of those who want to suggest that God is sad about the Wuhan pestilence that we are currently experiencing, as if God is a spectator of an event He is helpless to alter. Indeed, if the Father was pleased to bruise the Son how much more must the Father be to have bruised with the Wuhan virus? If somehow you have missed it this is a greater to lesser argument.

Yes, God is pleased with what is happening now with the Wuhan virus, just as He was pleased with smiting Sodom and Gomorrah, just as He was pleased with the fall in the Garden, just as He was pleased with smiting Egypt during the Exodus, just as He was pleased with Rome’s descent on Jerusalem in AD 70, just as he was pleased with bruising the Son. There is nothing that God does that He is not pleased with.

That God has done the Wuhan virus is indisputable given the teaching of the Scripture,

Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? (Amos 3:6b)

I form light and create darkness; I bring prosperity and create calamity. I, the LORD, do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)

But he (Job) said unto her (his wife), Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? (Job 2:10)

So, what we have established so far is that,

a.) If God was pleased to bruise the Son then He is pleased in everything else He does.

b.) Everything that happens is what God does.

Let us consider next if it is possible for God to both be pleased in doing what he does while lamenting over what happens? I bring this up because Christianity was represented in TIME magazine by Dr. N. T. Wright who emphasized God’s lamenting over the Wuhan virus at the price of giving up God’s sovereignty and God being pleased to bruise us with Wuhan. Dr. Wright’s God brings us back to the Open Theist God who is good for sitting down next to the suffering and crying with them about their hardships but who, excelling at lamenting, sucks at being able to do anything about your problems. Dr. Wright’s motto might be something like,

Times may be tough
Times may be gritty
But God has limits
Though He sure takes pity

This is not to say that God doesn’t lament. It is to say that if God laments His lament is not inconsistent with His pleasure in bruising us with Wuhan. There are times when God bruises and laments simultaneously.

When I was a child I had a bad go with impetago. At that time the recommendation for the disease was to scrub the wounds till they bled and then apply a medicine on the wounds after the scrubbing. My recollection is my father would hold me down so that my mother could scrub my wounds. My recollection is also that my Mother was weeping — weeping because she could observe how much pain her child was in from this scrubbing routine — while she was scrubbing my wounds. She was lamenting though it pleased her to bruise me. Lamenting and being pleased to wound me were not inconsistent.

In the same way God can be both pleased to ordain both the disease and the cure while lamenting with His people of the necessity of the wounding.

Also, we have to consider that

But since you rejected me when I called and no one gave heed when I stretched out my hand, since you ignored all my advice and would not accept my rebuke, I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when calamity overtakes you. (Proverbs 1:24-26)

The LORD does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths. He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses. He struck down the firstborn of Egypt, the firstborn of men and animals. He sent his signs and wonders into your midst, O Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants. He struck down many nations and killed mighty kings Sihon king of the Amorites, Og king of Bashan and all the kings of Canaan. (Psalm 135:6-11)

There are times when God belly laughs when the wicked perish since what the wicked are receiving is the just deserts of their wickedness. Would any of us not delight in the destruction of a serial murderer? Would any of us not delighted in the destruction of a Stalin or a Mao or Pol Pot or a Castro? All who are outside of Jesus Christ who are perishing from the Wuhan virus results in God being delighted. After all, He had warned them to repent or they would “perish in the way.”

Speaking of repentance brings us then to a further point in this brief essay.

There was a time in our history when our Christian father’s understood that such visitations of pestilence such as we are now experiencing with the Wuhan virus were times wherein God’s people especially needed to repent. Such times were for the proverbial sackcloth and ashes. This would be preached from pulpits. Assemblies would be called for the purpose of public repentance. God’s people understood then that “Judgment begins in the household of God,” and believing that they set about a season of repentance.

For example, during the Pequot war (1637-1637) when the Pequot Indians attacked Boston, the area ministers called a synod to ask: “What are the evils which have called the judgment of God upon us? What is to be done to reform these evils?” The Boston area clergy did not search for sinners to whom they could ascribe blame. Rather, they asked what they themselves had done to test God. They assumed the need for their repentance.

And why wouldn’t they? This need to repent in light of tragedy seems to be the point of Jesus at the tower in Siloam incident.

Luke 13 There were present at that season some who told Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ² And Jesus answered and said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? ³ I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. ⁴ Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? ⁵ I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”

There is never a time that is not a good time for repentance as Luther reminded us in theses #1 of his 95 thesis,

“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

however, in times of crises the need for repentance is perhaps even more necessary if we are to take the example of our Reformed forefathers as precedent.

We should understand that there was a reason why our fathers in Christ immediately moved to repentance when crisis was at hand. The reason was that unlike us they believed that the world was God’s world and that everything that happened in this world was an effect behind which God was the cause. They believed in God’s personal providence. They believed that God was involved in the affairs of men, and so unlike moderns they did not just chalk up “natural disasters” to nature. They saw the finger of God in what today we refer to as “natural disasters.” For them God was the ultimate cause and as such the ultimate cause must be considered in any and every event and so they would cry out to God for relief, while at the same time teaching that God’s ways are altogether just.

Of course, the danger in this kind of thinking is the ever present temptation to say with authority and certainty, “this is that.” There is a danger among certain clergy to step forth as the spokesman of God and say the reason we are experiencing this earthquake, or this flood, or this pestilence is that the wicked are committing this or that particular sin. To be sure we can always speak truly enough by saying things such as “just as God justly judged Sodom so He is justly judging America and the world,” or “If God is just then His justice is unquestioned in judging a world where the judicially innocent are tortured and murdered.” However, this kind of speech, apart from considering our own need to repent for our own sins come across more as “I told you so” then the prophet who is laboring over his people’s sin.

Having said all the above, I close by offering the caveat that I’m not convinced that the Wuhan Virus is all that the doomsayers are saying that it is. Personally I’m more concerned about the death and mayhem that will come from the result of what looks to be largely manufactured crisis. I’m more concerned by the liberties lost as a result of the Tyrant-State gone wild.

But even if that happens … it will be the case that God was pleased to bruise us by means of the Tyrant-State

“No doubt this knowledge and wisdom (which Paul speaks of in his corpus) in all their extent and explications do not simply coincide with faith; they are not gifts that, as it were, are ready to hand: they (knowledge and wisdom) must be discovered, traced, and investigated with all the saints and all generations. For the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge are more than be comprehended by one man, one church, and, — we may add to this — one generation.”

Herman Ridderbos
Paul — p. 245

Perhaps the greatest indicator of the anti-Christ nature of the contemporary visible Church in the West today is its delight in being stupid. Read the quote again. Characteristic of every Christian and every Church in one degree or another should be knowledge and wisdom and yet we throw knowledge and wisdom overboard for experience and emotion.

Why do we do that? Because of egalitarianism. We want everyone to be equal in the Church and if knowledge and wisdom were seen as signs of sanctification then clearly not everyone would be equal. BUT if we get rid of wisdom and knowledge as harbingers of sanctification and instead embrace experience and emotion then all Christians can be equally sanctified. Everybody can gin up some emotion and regale you about their experience.

This provides explanatory power to why the celibate sodomites in the Church no longer want to talk about Scripture, Doctrine, or theology but instead have taught their people, “Just tell your stories.”

Question for Doug — “Do you have warnings or encouragements related to interracial marriages?”

“I want to begin by objecting to the phrase ‘interracial.’ I’ll begin there. I think the question is really talking about inter-ethnic marriage. There is only one race. The human race. And so I think races — the whole concept of races — is problematic. The one human race is divided by language. divided by culture, divided by tribes, divided by history. There are many things that divide us.”

Doug Wilson
Minister — CREC

It’s amazing to me that putatively educated people can say things like what Doug Wilson says in light of the hard concrete realities that laugh at their statements as presented in this USA Today article.

https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2019/05/29/family-3-year-old-leukemia-plead-bone-marrow-transplant-donor/1203940001/

This USA Today article is about a little girl (Aliani) who needs a bone marrow transplant. I quote the article in defiance of Wilson’s pastoral professional malpractice as on display in the Wilson video.

“In order for bone marrow transplants to have the highest rate of success, the donor and the recipient need to be of the same ethnic and racial background. The challenge for Ailani, who is half black and half white, is that the majority of prospective donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program, which operates Be The Match, are white. 

“It’s difficult for any (multiracial) person to find a match on the registry,” Schatz said, explaining that while white people have a 77% chance of finding a perfect match on the registry, people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds have much lower odds.

Latinos, for instance, have a 46% chance of finding a match, and blacks have a 23% chance of a match, according to Schatz.

She didn’t know how likely it is to find a multiracial match though the registry, only that the chances are even lower for people like Ailani, whose life now depends on it.

In light of this reality how do people like Wilson and others offer up with a straight face that race does not exist or is a social construct? In point of fact in light of the reality of Aliani and people like her Wilson is showing himself an unworthy Shepherd when he advises people that there is no such thing as race. Can’t you just hear Aliani’s parents saying to the Doctors and to their family members upon receiving the shattering news that finding a bone marrow donor match for Aliani would be especially difficult since Aliani was a mixed race child, “But Rev. Wilson told us that race did not exist before we decided to get married?”

And Aliani is just one example that overturns Wilson. There are diseases also that focus their wreckage on particular races over and above other races. Further, Pharmaceutical companies develop medicines that are especially designed to profit one race vis-a-vis other races. Whole books have been written to substantiate that different races tend to different IQ abilities. (See Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve”). To suggest that races don’t exist is irresponsible, ignorant, and a clear indicator that someone has given into the politically correct zeitgeist.

There can be no doubt that it is true that all people belong to the human race. However that does not mean that within the one human race as species, varying sub-species don’t exist — each fully human, each Image Bearers of God, but each a distinct expression of the one human race. And together communicating the idea of the One and the Many character of God. Further, within these sub-species there exist different ethnicity, tribes, and families.

Wilson mentions the things that divide us, but note that none of those things that divide us, per Wilson, are genetic. It’s almost as if Wilson is denying that genetic differences exist. Such a position borders on Gnosticism. Forgive me for bringing that up but there is so much Gnosticism in the Church today that it needs to be mentioned.

Rev. Wilson’s position fits well with the the cultural Marxist vision which embraces the idea of all colors bleeding into one, which in turn has a very Genesis 11 Babel feel about it.

“As an MIT PhD in biological engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, the #coranvirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!”

Dr. V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai

“If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.”

Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis

C. F. Rehnborg Professor in disease prevention in the school of medicine, professor of medicine, of health research and policy (Epidemiology) and by courtesy, of statistics and of biomedical data science and of Statistics; co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.

Ioannidis’s 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”[10] has been the most downloaded technical paper from the journal PLoS Medicine and is considered foundational to the field of metascience.[18] Ioannidis wrote that “a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance.”

What Dr. Ioannidis is telling us in the quote in bold relief is a proverb that Mark Twain popularized (though he didn’t originate it) is that when it comes to lying there are three types, (a) liars, (b) damned liars, and (c) statisticians. I am convinced that we have fallen into the hands of all three in this Wuhan virus scare with the statisticians doing the most harm.

In the midst of this Wuhan scare people have forgotten that facts are not neutral. They have forgotten that facts always come nestled in a set of organic relationships with other unspoken yet controlling facts. We are being given all kinds of facts complete with dramatic numbers of death totals from the Wuhan virus but what do we know of those statistician who are shoveling those facts? Dr’s Fauci, and Birx, who are the putative experts guiding the White House response to the Wuhan virus both are people from the constellation of the left. Does anybody pause to ask how their pre-theoretical ideological commitments are driving their “scientific” conclusions? Has Trump consulted chaps like Dr. Ioannidis and Dr. Ayyaduri to offset the fear-porn mongering of Dr’s Fauci and Brix?

And in this context what are we to think of the well respected British epidemiologist Dr. Neil Ferguson who at the outset insisted that Britain would suffer 500,000 deaths from the Wuhan virus only recently to have re-adjusted that figure downwards to 20,000 deaths? This Brit epidemiologist was to the Brits what Fauci has been to the Americans and now all of a sudden he says, “whoops,” regarding his model?

The fact is that all of these people, with their “facts” regarding the impact of the Wuhan virus are only as good as the Worldview and theology that is driving their reason for selecting the facts that they select. Their statistical models are only as good as the assumptions that inform their models and those assumptions are only as good as the Worldview and Theology that are basis for those assumptions.

So, before we embrace any expert pertaining to the Wuhan virus we should know something about their ideological pre-commitments. We should investigate what reasons they may have for gerrymandering their statistical models.

Really, why should we believe anything coming from the FEDS or any leftist news source? Why should we give credence to any information coming out of China or Iran?

Honestly…. what we know is just this much,

1.) There is a virus
2.) It is having an impact
3.) That impact is NOT uniform in the differing nations it lands in
4.) At least a part of all this is the Globalist media has an agenda to put an end to the rise of the nationalist-populist impulse which is challenging their New World Order plans for hegemony.

We also know that the projected numbers are all over the map and hardly constitute what we call “science.” This may be the black plague. It may be merely the swine flu. I don’t know. You don’t know. Clearly, the experts don’t know. They are all projecting and speculating. It is at least possible that we have been “H. G. Wells’ed.” You remember H. G. Wells and his “War of the Worlds,” which created a panic because given the way it was reported over the airwaves people really believed that they were being invaded by aliens. This Wuhan Virus may be our H. G. Wells moment.

So, before we continue to hyperventilate that this Wuhan virus may be the end of the world as we know it, we need to step back, take a deep breath, and ask ourselves “cui-bono,” (who benefits) from all this panic and fear-mongering.

Of course … the panic has already begun and so who knows where we end up but wherever we end up it is quite possible we will end up there more because of mass hysteria than because of the Wuhan virus. There are other games afoot here than the world being sick. Those possibilities include,

1.) Medical Martial Law implemented to the end of overthrowing our Constitutional liberties.

2.) Shifting from the dollar being the World’s reserve currency to the Yuan becoming the World’s reserve currency.

3.) Precursor event to the rise of a new globalism. (See former Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s article in TIME magazine as well as recent comments by former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.)

Whatever is the consequence of this Wuhan virus scare you can be sure that the Wuhan virus was merely a pretext to set off a far grander vision of some kind of New World.

In the above two links the New York Times reveals that it is a bilious publication fit only for lining cat litter boxes, stuffing into the toes of the boots of poor children to make their over-sized boots fit, and for specializing in agitprop for the New World Order it so feverishly desires to see foisted upon the plebes of the world. If one wants to know what the Screwtapes, Slobgobs, and Wormwoods of the world are thinking the “Slimes” is a window into their un-souls. Otherwise reading the New York Times is like reading the diary of psychopathic serial killer.

In the first article linked above we get to hear from the “Does Everyone Know I’m Important,” Dr. Russell Moore. This man is a Baptist minister who would run over and then back over his own mother in order to have an op-ed in the New York Slimes.

I don’t like Moore because he is a leader of the Cultural Marxism Christianity school of thought. Here is a man who as a representative of Southern Baptists filed an amicus brief before a court to support the building of Mosques. “Bright” is not the word I would use for Dr. Moore. Moore has been so wrong on so many issues that a good model for knowing what to think is to think just the opposite of what Russell Moore thinks.

In the article Moore defends the value of all human life. All well and good but he does so without citing the voices that are calling for letting Grandpa and Grandma die from the Wuhan virus. Moore gives us platitudes that include, “we cannot coldly make decisions as to how many people we are willing to lose since ‘we are all going to die of something,’” and yet, whether Dr. Moore likes it or not if we are in a situation where decisions have to be made about who is treated and who is not treated — because there are not enough resources to treat everybody — then decisions like this (whether coldly or warmly made) have to be made. Has Dr. Moore never heard of the concept of “triage?”

Dr. Moore also doesn’t seem able to take into consideration how many people could well die if we were to slip into a full blown economic depression. Certainly in the decision making matrix concerning how the Wuhan virus is handled this has to be a consideration as well in terms of when to open up the American economy. Would Dr. Moore save tens of thousands of lives now at the cost of scores of tens of thousands of lives lost later because we kept the economy closed so as to save those tens of thousands of lives?

It is not that I don’t agree with Dr. Moore’s high view of life. I insist, like Dr. Moore, that every life — young or old, infirm or healthy, broken or whole — are Image Bearers of God and should be esteemed and valued as such. What I disagree with Dr. Moore over is his pietistic crapola that somehow thinks that offering up sentimental platitudes answers the necessarily hard questions that a triage situation presents to those who are having to do the triage.

Dr. Moore wrote an article that made him feel good about himself but offered absolutely nothing of substance of how to deal with the predicament that our Wuhan times presents us. Dr. Moore healed the wounds of people lightly. Which is to say he did not heal them at all.

In the second article we find a “woman” (Katherine Stewart) whose worldview is anti-Christian to the core only to find out she hates Christians. Imagine that. The frustrating thing about the whole article though is most of the people she puts in the dock as Christian have more in common with animism than they have in common with historic Christianity. It’s like reading someone giving the reasons for why they hate animists and then concluding that “Christians are stupid.” She complains about the “science denialism of Trump’s ultraconservative religious allies,” while being clueless that nearly all of the “Christians” she puts in the dock wouldn’t even be recognized as Christians by those Christians who have a clue about what orthodox Christianity means.

Secondly, that dear Katherine affirms the un-scientific assertion of anthropogenic climate change proves that she is the very dingbat that she is accusing others of being. She finds fault with 19th Century Theologian R. L. Dabney’s claim that physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,”  all the while proving Dabney’s point by being an adherent of anthropogenic climate change. (She had to get Dabney’s name in the article in order to give the article gravitas. You see, R. L. Dabney was a supporter of slavery. Arrrrgggghhhh…. hide the children.) Katherine proves for us here that Dabney was correct. It is the case that many times physical sciences are nothing but “theories of unbelief,” as embraced by various and sundry children, feminist writers, and God haters.

Our dear Katherine slanders the Cornwall Alliance without providing a shred of evidence that they are whack-a-doodles. Then she melds legitimate organizations like the Cornwall-Alliance with Pentecostals who really are whack-a-doodles. Katherine gives us men like Guillermo Maldonado, Rodney Howard-Brown (self advertised as “The Holy Ghost Bartender,”) and Tony Spell (he of magic handkerchief fame) thus suggesting that these flim-flam mystics are considered Christian by anybody besides other flim-flam mystics. Ms. Stewart thus subtly creates a “guilt by association” column. Most Christians I personally know don’t want anything to do with the Pentecostal wing(nut) branch of Christianity.

Katherine then goes on to complain that, “Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.” On this score we would note that “experts” too often are, as Dabney rightly pointed out, merely giving us “theories of unbelief.” How many of the Wuhan models, touching on how the pestilence will spread, of the so-called “experts” have been correct? And Trump has been very explicit about saying that he understands Hydroxychloroquine is not proven but that he is hopeful. Has Katy something against being hopeful?

Ms. Stewart’s full on bile on the subject of Christianity is revealed when she denounces Trump’s once expressed desire to open the country by Easter. It is the very mention of Easter that finds her screeching like a cat who has been doused in petrol and set on fire. How dare the President mention the Christian high day as associated with public policy?

This woman is not only a hater of Christianity, but she is also a hater of science, and a proponent of the New World Order. She is a whack-job of the first order. She wouldn’t know a fact if it made a nest in her amply sized nose.

The fact that the New York Times would print this pablum is just about what we have come to expect from the Newspaper whose motto is, “All the shite that’s fit to print.”