A Brief Meditation on Ecclesiastes 7:13

Consider the work of God

For who can make straight what He has made crooked.
Ecclesiastes 7:13

1.) Note that God is ascribed the power of making matters crooked. Clearly a statement of God’s sovereignty.

2.) Christians often are guilty in history of rushing in to make straight what God has decreed to be crooked and as such find themselves to be fighting against God.

3.) Note that God is not absent from the crooked things in the world. Things or matters are not crooked by fate, chance, or any other impersonal abstraction. God is personally present in all things … both crooked and straight

4.) Coming as this does in the context of wisdom, the appeal seems to be for the wise to show their wisdom by being able to discern what in God’s work he has made crooked.

May God give us the wisdom to rightly discern.

On This Day; Potpourri of Quotes and Insights Over The Years From the Pastor’s Study

A.) Memorial Day began in Georgia in 1866 to honor the Confederate dead who gave their lives for their people. Of course, many dead Yankees were mercenaries from Europe who couldn’t possibly give their lives for their people.

B.) Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord.  II Chronicles 19:2
Well, doesn’t that just throw a wrench into refugeeism and illegal immigration?

C.) Q. 82. Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God?

A. No mere man, since the fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the commandments of God, but doth daily break them in thought, word, and deed.
__________
I break God’s commandments every day in thought, word, and deed. Lord Christ… thank you for your Grace and Mercy.

D.)  “We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before. In order to defeat Germany and Japan we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China – which now confront us in a nuclear-weapon era. Poland was not saved … Much of our Western culture was destroyed. We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives … It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man.”

Charles Lindbergh
circa 1970

E.) “Neither because Christ is the way to life, is the practice of Christian piety therefore not the way to life. Christ is the way to life…The practice of Christian piety is the way to life…It is certain indeed that the true Christian lives to Christ, that is, to his glory: but it does not follow from thence that he does nothing for his own advantage…In fine, it is not inconsistent to do something from this principle, because we live, and to the end, that we may live…And though he requires us to love him above all, yet he does not command that all love to ourselves be entirely banished.”

Herman Witsius

F.) Whether it was Justinian in the 6th century, Alfred the Great in the 9th Century, William of Salisbury in the 12th century, or William Blackstone in the 18th century — they all pointed to the law of God as that higher law which all men and all government of men are accountable.

G.) I’ve often prayed for awakening. Now having been given the grace to see through the illusion just a wee bit — the illusion that “the yet to be awakened” do not yet see-through — now I pray for Faith to keep the faith, wisdom to know what must be done, and for patience in the face of what seems to be overwhelming resistance to awakening in general.

H.) The War of Northern Aggression was not about slavery. The Spanish American War was not about the sinking of the Maine. WWI was not about making the world safe for Democracy or a war to end all wars. WW II was not about ridding the world of tyrannical governments. Vietnam was not about stopping the Domino effect, and the Gulf War was never about Weapons of Mass destruction. Anybody notice a pattern here?

I.) Understanding history boils down to two basic principles:
1. Whoever controls the past controls the future.
2. Whoever controls the present controls the past.
Did Orwell teach us nothing?

J.) I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

Major General Smedley Butler
Two Time Winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

K.) Learned today from a minister that Genesis doesn’t mean that God actually took a “mud doll” and breathed life into it. It only means that God created. Genesis doesn’t have to do w/ the “How,” but only the “that.” We simply must make room for science if we are to be taken seriously as Christians. Lord, it was easier to be an Ehud or a Phinehas.

Once someone starts down that Deconstructionist path, the Framework Hypothesis, Gap Theory, and every other textual criticism seem perfectly reasonable — a bible devoid of the Christian God.

L.) (2011) My 21 y/o Anna works at Beaners. Recently, she engaged in a conversation w/ a customer. The subject turned to Anna & Homeschool. Many questions followed & Anna handled them deftly & w/ enthusiasm. Finally this retired school teacher, after an extended conversation with my perky interactive daughter said … “But I worry about the lack of socialization that you homeschool children suffer.”

Are these people brain dead?

M.) (2010) You can now look forward to the Government managing your health care the way it is now managing the BP Oil Spill. It never ceases to amaze me that after the constant and repeated failures of government in performing the tasks that they’ve been Constitutionally assigned that idiots still think … “Hey, I know … let’s let the government take over health care.”

Well, they are presently pumping mud cement through a tube under high pressure directly into the oil hole, making your comparison to what the government is doing to us with health care quite apt. My advice when dealing with the government is to remain seated at all times.

Revelation Before Reason

Naked Reason cannot rebuild Christian civilization.

No, there must first be a pre-theoretical revelational commitment that is anchored in the testimony of the Scriptures in order for reason to be reasonable and in order for reason to be of usage in rebuilding Christendom.

Well… it is not only Christians who understand that putatively naked reason cannot provide answers. It is also the case that many non-Christians get that point also. This explains our turn to the non-rational and the irrational. Pagan Intellectuals have for decades now have understood that there is no rational reason for rationality.

As of late, we have been deluged with the philosophy of postmodernism which boldly says things like what was recently said by a Syracuse University philosophy and religion professor Prof. John Caputo who critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a “white male Euro-Christian construction.”

Given its emphasis on first principles and abstract thought, it may be tempting to view academic philosophy as a turf where the race of participants matters little, but Caputo says that’s entirely untrue. In fact, race is of central importance, and it’s proven by the mundane phrases philosophers use. Captuo offered that the supposed “reason” underlying philosophy is just another form of white privilege … or something of that nature.

So, academia in many cases is proudly touting that reason and logic are themselves socially constructed, and being socially constructed they (logic and reason) are used by white people to be oppressors. And as this is becoming a watchword among academia it teaches us again that reason alone will not rebuild Christendom.

Three More Facts Regarding the Noble Savage

Fact — Indians were not egalitarian. Indian females were routinely bought and sold as “wives.” Indian females performed all physical labor. including wood gathering, slaughtering of animals, packing up the Teepees for migration, primitive gardening, and food storage. Indian females were packhorses when needed carrying huge loads. In this context, Female Indians became mothers as young as 13 and were responsible for child-rearing. Rarely did Indian females live past 35 years of age.

Fact — American Indians were members of a stone-age culture with no written languages, no written law, no use of the wheel, and no domesticated animals until the Spanish introduced to them horses and sheep. They practiced agriculture w/o the use of a simple wooden plow and until the Spanish introduced wool and the loom in the American Southwest no Indian tribes produced cloth, not even the Navaho and Hopi.
Fact — Most American Indian tribes were exceedingly immoral, buying and swapping wives like so many beads at the slightest whim. Venereal disease was rampant.

A Small Glossary — CRT, White Fragility, Equity, White Privilege, Systemic Racism

Britannica: “Critical race theory (CRT) , is an intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially Africa Americans.”

This statement makes the White race guilty for the black race’s general failures as to academic excellence, standard of living equality, job equality, salary equality, and social acceptance as equals in majority White societies. It views all these failures as being the result of the socially constructed White man oppressing and keeping the socially constructed black man down.

Equity teaches the only way to right this historic wrong is for the socially constructed white man to give up this previous sinful privilege and accept a current matching discrimination against him from the socially constructed black man to make up for the putative historic discrimination that the socially constructed black man faced in previous years. Equity holds that the socially constructed white man must be kept down until the socially constructed man can catch up. Equity needs to be distinguished from the idea of equality. Equity does not believe in equality except as equality is defined in light of equity. Equality, politically speaking, means everyone gets a seat at the table. Equity teaches that whites should not get a seat at the table since they putatively have had so many seats at the table in the past. Political equality itself, with all its set-asides, quotas, and score enhancements was always a mistake. Equity, however, is a bridge beyond equality. If you are a white person and you vote for someone touting equity you are either a moron or a self-hater because equity explicitly teaches that you, as a socially constructed white man, will never be given the opportunities to advance because your ancestors had the good life and now it is a person of colors turn. So, even if they are less qualified than you are, they will be given the job, the placement, the position until at some unspecific time in the future all peoples are at the same level of accomplishment.

White fragility happens when biological white men and women say this whole scam is monkey fecal matter. The disagreement by White people is listed by those who champion CRT  as White Fragility. White people are “fragile” because they can’t handle the truth and so object. The scam here is clear. If you agree with CRT then that proves CRT is right. If you disagree with CRT then your white fragility proves CRT is right. Heads I win. Tails you lose. It’s a gamed theory.

 

White privilege in this worldview is the systemic advantage that has accrued to white people simply because they are white. The theory goes that because you were born socially constructed white you automatically had advantages that were not fair because other non-white people didn’t have those advantages and so were disadvantaged. For example, a white person may have grown up in a family that loved and nurtured them. Whereas a black person may have grown up in a family that treated him badly. That White person because of that has white privilege that isn’t fair to the black person. Plus, keep in mind in that example, that it was because of systemic racism that the socially constructed black person’s family was less than what it might have otherwise been.

Systemic racism posits that a social order can be racist even if no individual in that social order is racist. As such the socially constructed white people groups can be racist even if no socially constructed white individual is. This means that the whole social order of countries predominantly built by whites works so as to disadvantage and discriminate against people of color. Critical Race theory works to expose that advantage and offers solutions such as societal-wide “Equity” in order to offset that prior advantage.

Notice in all of this that equality/equity is arrived at, at the price of Liberty. Liberty and equality/equity can never exist together. One always cancels out the other. If there is a regime of equity people will not be free to pursue what they want and become what they want. This is because equality/equity will limit and circumscribe that ability. Similarly, liberty means that people will not be equal or have equity because liberty presupposes that people are not equal and will advance or not upon the basis of merit and drive. Two realities not allowed in an equality/equity social order.