|
March-April 2010 |
 |
|
_________________________________________________________________________ |

“We are
slaves today, slaves in the land you gave our forefathers so they could eat its
fruit and the other good things it produces. Because of our sins, its abundant
harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us. They rule over our bodies and
our cattle as they please. We are in great distress.”
This verse describes the benighted condition of
Israel as they were slipping out from under the divinely instituted oppression
of Babylon. While God used the empire as an instrument of judgment, the piercing
confessional prayer of Nehemiah makes clear the truth of the people’s
complicity.
Biblical scholars like to emphasize that
pronouncements about a historical event and God’s consideration of that event
should apply only to that specific instance, but I must say this is indeed a
circumstance that could just as easily elucidate the present distress today. The
people and places have changed, but it is really not much different.
The critical part of that verse for the purpose
of answering the question “What to do?” is in the distress, for distress too
heavy is always confronted quite dramatically.
The Society’s task is to exploit that distress
for World System advantage. Those not sworn or contracted with that system will
endure the distress for all its profundity, and summarily ask God to share with
them His perspective on what to do, as the Israelites did.
Those obligated to the World will be seduced by
the Society’s proficient designs, and no better place to see the deft
manipulation of distress is in the bowels of the financial world. As
victims of institutional value extraction sink through the quicksand, gulping
for air and heaving for life, they listen attentively to what is streamed
through the World’s megaphone. The content generally spews out in one of two
ways.
1. “We’re making progress, things aren’t so bad, cheer
up it could be worse.”
2. “Those liars, let’s go get ’em, they’ve done wrong,
let’s teach ’em a lesson.”
World inhabitants then go about their lives trying to
make sense of the two messages. Which one is it? Few are able to confidently
answer the core question here:
Are things good or are they bad, and what will be
the answer to this question tomorrow?
I like this quote from Franklin Raines, former
Chairman and CEO of the disgraced mortgage broker Fannie Mae. It goes a long way
to getting at what’s really happening. Back when he was being grilled about the
GSE (and long before the 2008 subprime meltdown) he said,
“Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions
of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements. Yet there
remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our
underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher
mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”
This appears to be a wholesome boast about the federal
government’s kindness in helping down and out people get homes. But the
underlying meaning is much more significant. Tell me, isn’t he really just
saying this?
“We’ve been making it easier for the World System to
provide capital for people, replacing their own families and communities. Yet
too many of them are worthless or simply have so much of their productive value
systematically hacked off that our exploiters must charge them higher prices.”
Whatever is said about this capital movement or that
one, the question will always come around to “Is it worth it, really—will the
people we’re investing in pay off?” There are indeed only two ways to answer
that question, one is by the Kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ who moves those
beholden to Him to love with a love that sows bountiful riches of all kinds into
communities.
The other way is the World way, and it always involves
human sacrifice.
This is indeed the heart of the matter.
Christ sacrificed Himself so others would follow and
crucify themselves to Him, sacrificing themselves out of their love for one
another.
Cain sacrificed another, his own brother, and set the
standard for what all those without Christ must do so they get any gratification
they can. It is nothing other than sacrificing others.
Furthermore, those who do see it for what it is and
itch to rail against “the exploiters” (often more pleasantly euphemized as “the
system”) should also know a difficult truth. Human sacrifice is legal,
constitutional, institutional, and wholly endorsed and sustained by the World.
There isn’t a single thing one can do to end it, at least temporally.
Many will likely say this is an insane exaggeration,
that speaking of something as eccentrically peculiar as human sacrifice
is naively melodramatic. I just don’t think they’ve been looking closely enough.
Or maybe they have and they’re just part of the program—just waiting to get
their cut, with a beaming smile and a modest portion proudly awarded the Boy’s
Club and Red Cross.
I could belch numbers here for you, but often they're
turgidly incomprehensible. Here’s a pretty easy one though. By some estimates
unfunded liabilities of the federal government are surpassing $100 trillion.
That means the feds promise to hand out this amount of money to the country’s
people and they don’t exactly have that amount right now. It amounts to $1
million per household, again a sum it says it will give us at some point later
whenever that is. Where is it getting money for that? The average household
earns $50,000 a year. So then, if we do the math, are we to presume that each
small family unit is getting $1 million, and drawing on $50,000 to pay for it?
I hear constantly about how foolish our leaders are,
sometimes even how contemptibly reprehensible their behavior is. Why the
frustration? These numbers make it clear that they’re merely doing precisely
what human sacrificers demand of them. The value extractors are not just
powerful government people, they’re everyone contracted with Cain’s
legacy. I can’t help but think that all the snarling is just echo chamber noise
emanating from the precision instrumentation of the Society.
How many times can one hear “They’re robbing Peter to
pay Paul!” before getting thoroughly jaded? How many different ways can someone
grouse to get people’s attention? Here’s a sample of it from Charles Goyette’s
recent primer The Dollar Meltdown: “How may power best be exploited and
aggrandized? Who is to be bailed out, and who is to be plundered for it? Who is
to be subsidized, who penalized? Who shall be taxed and who shall be paid?”
The fact is this is standard procedure for all
World inhabitants at every wealth and income level. Everyone is looking
to hack off something from someone else. It means little to say Americanists
should know better in a country as great as the U-S-of-A, because the Society
has simply covered the distress with vanilla frosting and made the bellicosity
of “getting ours” more palatable.
Matthew Stewart spends most of his excellent expose
The Management Myth ripping modern business management a new asshole, and
just before he offers the standard blithering about how we need to just damn-it
be better people in whatever supposedly novel way he thinks, he starts to get at
what’s really happening. He writes:
“The shareholder-value model had induced executives to
engage in asset stripping—destroying the long-term productive potential of a
corporation for the sake of short-term stock market gains. At a more general
level, the dogma implicitly favors a similar kind of asset stripping for society
at large—a demolition of the trust on which society is founded. The business
schools do no worse than train their students in subjects that do not exist;
they also prepare them to become destructive members of society.”
Did you catch that? Did you see the key term in there,
mentioned twice.
Asset stripping.
Much like value extraction, I must say.
Which is what human sacrifice is all about.
I thought I’d add one more nifty evidence while we’re
at it, one I came across just the other day. It was perfect. I had to include it
here, something we all know about but I don’t believe we consider seriously
enough.
Vampires.
I happened to barely catch the end of National Public
Radio’s All Things Considered, and Margot Adler had a piece about the
popular vampire. Not just the vampire, which is a classic metaphor for the human
sacrificer, but the popular vampire.
It seems high profile showcases like The
Twilight Saga, Moonlight, and True Blood have made
vampires not only perversely attractive but downright respectable. They’ve
donned the mantle of heroic protagonist, and Adler’s main thrust is that the
drama is so compelling because as they struggle with their insidiously
predatory nature, they have this endearing drive to be substantively
moral.
Umm… yeah.
Sounds like the Catholicist Nation to me.
“Oh, come on,” I can hear it now. “Vampires. Pshaw. A
wild figment of fantasy—get out of here with your daft ideas about human
sacrificers.”
Well, Adler’s own concluding words were along the
lines of “We’re all vampires after all.” Her words, not mine. "They really are
us" was the phrasing to be exact.
We’re all just vampires.
To rephrase a well-known biblical verse, “For whoever
wants to feverishly clutch his own life will take the life-blood of others yet
in the end still lose his life, but whoever gives up human sacrifice and accepts
Christ’s shed blood for them will have his life saved. What good is it to gain
all the stuff acquired by other’s blood, yet give up his soul? How can offering
up anything from value stripping be worth one’s own soul bought by Christ and His sacrificial
love?” (For those who chafe at such liberties taken with Scripture, the exact
verse is cited in the notes below.)
Yes, it is indeed the firmly unequivocal premise of
this website that
·
Human sacrifice
is a veritable and quite commonplace reality.
·
It is carried
out regularly and habitually by all who do not have The Son.
·
Those who ask
Caesar to be their lord will be provided the standard service of its full
enablement.
·
Caesar’s
operatives in the service of Cain’s legacy will use the most skillfully executed
arts of deception to keep it viable.
·
God allows it
in as much as it is part of His footstool, functioning to
ultimately steer
people away from it into Christ’s arms, or fulfill His purposes until the last day, or both.
·
Those who say
they’re Christ’s but sign binding pacts with Caesar designating his lordship
over their affairs are merely enlisting with the World and doing its work.
·
Many of those
Christians are simply fully immersed Catholicists sworn to do Caesar’s
legitimate work and are nowhere near the Kingdom.
·
Often those
individuals work in the highest levels of the World administering powerful political, ecclesiastical, and commercial
enterprises that are all about human sacrifice.
The only way out is complete abandonment to the
Jesus Christ of Scripture.
One dead giveaway that someone is really just toeing
the line of a World operative is the hoarse screeching about how much the liars
are getting away with and how awful the coming train wreck will be. Their only
solution is something akin to the Second American Revolution.
“We need to rise up, people!” they will shout. “We
need to take this country back!” they’ll holler. The latest wave of “tea
parties” is symptomatic of this phenomenon.
But what will be wrought?
Nothing but the very thing human sacrificers slobber
over.
More blood.
In closing I must add that it is the personal desire
of this follower of Christ to link up with others who insightfully see this
biblical truth and have a genuine desire to act on it in the limitless power
of the Holy Spirit.
If you look at what comes right after the ninth
chapter of Nehemiah with which I opened this piece, you’ll note that
no fewer than 36 top leaders of the nation of Israel make a bold, firm decision
to do exactly what God has asked them to do for worshipping Him in Spirit and in
Truth.
When will there be as many doing so today?
It isn’t about forming a new church. It isn’t about
adopting a provocative new name for a boffo new Christian kind of thing. It
isn’t even about starting a spectacular new movement that just ends up a World
subdivision anyway when its devotees procure the World’s attractive services.
It’s about nothing but humbly doing just what God told us to
do in His word.
And yes, I do believe that does involve really
actually truly getting together—in physical proximity with one another, not just
in cyberspace—and talking about His things as He says they
are. It explicitly requires meeting and discussing and making real commitments—in formal settings no
less—among people who are wise and influential and have a full heart for Christ
and His Kingdom.
That’s what was going on in the tenth chapter
of Nehemiah. It happened successfully at that time to vibrantly nourish the
nation of Israel through which Christ would come.
Now that Christ has arrived and we have the Holy
Spirit permanently dwelling in our hearts, doing this now should be a snap.
Yes it does involve full understanding of the nature
of human sacrifice.
And it does involve what to do with that
understanding.
And then it is simple…
Watch God blow us away.
Oh, yeah, that does sound rather abrupt. "Blow us
away..." Yes, that can be taken two different ways.
I guess it depends on whether you're watching it from the World or
from the Kingdom.
***
|
Notes:
-
While
the Society mentioned in the piece could certainly be considered
the whole of the World's social influence, it does represent a
specific organization that is most instrumental in forming that
influence. More about it is here.
-
Human
sacrifice does not necessarily terminate life in an instance. It
often takes years, and this is the essence of enslavement
of every sort. A rough
sketch of human sacrifice is
here. Other home page pieces I wrote to elaborate on these
phenomena are here
and here. Biblical exposition
for it starts in the fourth chapter of Genesis.
-
Margot
Adler's piece on popular vampires is
here. The story was broadcast on National Public Radio February 18, 2010.
-
GSE is
the commonly used acronym for "government sponsored enterprise,"
an entity that tends to take foolhardy risks because it knows it
will benefit from any success yet expect taxpayers to pay
handsomely for its spectacular failures.
-
The key
way Christian churches become accomplices to human sacrifice and
as such keep their congregants dismissively ignorant about it is here. A
previous home page piece
elaborates a bit on Caesar's Arts, particularly with regards to
"asset stripping."
-
Some
thoughts about how a worship assembly may go about being
completely sold out to Christ are here.
How an individual may become "de-Catholicized" and leave
the horror of human sacrifice is here. More detail about how church bodies may do this is
here, and for businesses,
here.
-
If you'd
like to read about Nehemiah's prayer and the full commitment the
people made in response to these leaders' contrition and call to
action, you can go to it
here. The link is to the first chapter of Nehemiah for you
to get the full context leading to chapters nine and ten. One of
the most amazing things about the book of Nehemiah is that its theme
is one of the most profound metaphors for extraordinarily strong
boundaries protecting Christ followers from the pollution of the
World, namely that of the rebuilding of the wall around
Jerusalem.
-
The
verse about the choice between saving or losing one's life is
Mark 8:35-36. The exact reading of the verse is
"For whoever
wants to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the
gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole
world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange
for his soul?"
|
***
Site map for more features, articles,
and links.
Your Own Jesus
The Catholicist Nation
A Letter to a College Student
|
A Letter to
a Church Pastor
To best identify the
characteristics of the church attached to the Catholicist Nation and to
understand Christ's response to it, please read carefully both of Paul's
letters to the Corinthians.
Previous home page piece (January-February
2010) |
Archives
|
Wonderful Matters
|
The Latest in the Webzine (March
2010): It was three years ago this month that the gentleman who
moved me to see clearly what's really going on in the World passed away.
I consider him the best explainer I've every encountered, much like
Philip was an explainer to the Ethiopian eunuch in the eighth chapter of
Acts. I have a page with links to his works, and I'd like to direct you
to it here. I've also compiled a person
index, which will help you locate where individuals of note and their ideas are addressed. |
The home page essay above
was written by David Beck and was posted on this site
February 28, 2010
The website The
Catholicist Nation at yourownjesus.net was originally uploaded by
David Beck on August 3, 2004
|