What Is Missing?

We hear of a new scandal every day.  Our government is going all 1984 on us.  Persecution for the Christian faith is undoubtedly not far behind.

Have you noticed what is missing?

There is a ridiculously obvious absence of outrage or even real concern by our elected representatives.  They passed the laws that enable this totalitarian shift, and they have no concern for us.  They apparently see themselves as insulated from the effects of this change in policy.

I recognize the few voices of concern, and that the Pravda-esque Media immediately dives into the effort to marginalize those who speak out, but there are too few speaking.  Apparently, free-enteprise and a representative republic (for the people, or the people and by the people) is only for small countries and pre-industrialized civilizations.  Once you get too big or too prosperous, shameless socialism and oppression is required. 

The Democrats have taken the lead in finally bringing us to a state-controlled, socialist society.  The Republicans are taking us there too, but first they have to run against the way things are before they acquiesce to the need to put us serfs back in our place.  Thank-you congress for undoing the Revolutionary war and bringing us back to the monarchy.

It does get a little tiring now and then to watch those we elect to preserve our liberties betraying us.

Mendacity as a Virtue

Here is another sign that our society is collapsing: Mendacity is now proclaimed as a virtue.  Mendacity is defined as the tendency to lie, or lying itself.  People have always lied, throughout history.  For much of this nation’s history, deliberate deceit has been considered a bad thing.  In modern America, it is now considered a virtue.  Oh, not by everyone, just by the leaders and shapers of public opinion (such as the media) and such.  Mendacity is a good thing.

It was probably growing for a long time unnoticed.  Every politician knows that a little deceit is a powerful campaign tool.  It began to flower when Bill Clinton was president.  When he boldly lied about his relations with that female intern, the media gushed over how well he lied and how useful a lie could be.  Articles even appeared in various publications about how lying was good, useful, profitable, and healthy at times.

Today, politicians, particularly the president, can openly and boldly say things that are easily demonstrable as lies not only without being challenged on the deceit, but being applauded for saying that which is false as though it were true.  Advocates for various political agendas can, if the goal is “politically correct”, openly say things that are false to advance their agenda without fear of being challenged.  Their patent lies will be cited, quoted, and rehearsed by the media and others who would endorse their cause.  Challenging the veracity of such obvious deception is attacked as an assault on the speaker, or adherence to outdated ideas, or *gasp!* fundamentalism of some sort.

Public policy is now being formulated on the basis of mendacity.  The ten percent of the population that pays eighty percent of the taxes paid in this country are still not paying their “fair share”.  The fifty percent of the population who pay less than five percent of the taxes are overburdened.  The mentally ill individual that misuses a firearm tragically is evidence that the average, law-abiding citizen should have his or her second amendment rights curtailed.  The cooling of the earth over the last two decades is proof of “global warming”.  The dramatic increase in the world population of polar bears is evidence that they are endangered.  The erosion of our economy, with higher unemployment, fewer (by millions) in the workforce, and a deep decline in average incomes in our nation is cited as evidence of nearly robust recovery from a recession even though marked by failures of businesses and banks on a scale not seen in America in over fifty years.  And the massive increase in the deficit of this nation is proof that we are not spending too much, . . . somehow.

Politicians lie to get elected and then lie to explain their nearly inexplicable actions.  Media personalities misrepresent the positions of politicians and other public figures – and their own statements of the past – depending on whether they wish to advance or hinder the work of those public figures about which they report.  What is a virtue for one is a sin for another.  The double standard is breath-taking.  Criminal activity by some hardly merits mention, but taking a sip of water during a speech is proof of some cosmic failure in another.  Even when they acknowledge a lie, they may often marvel at how effective it has been, without correcting it or decrying the deceit. For such people, mendacity is a virtue to be admired rather than a failure or character flaw.

I could expand this post by a discussion of false doctrine and unfaithful church practices that are being advanced, but it would make this post much longer.  Suffice it to say that those who are charged with defending the truth often do not, and those who should know better follow the crowd rather than the Lord in their teachings.  There are some faithful, but far too few.  This is the one place where deceit is to be expected.  The Lord promised us that it would be so.  It is not a good thing, but it is a mark of the times and of the truth of the prophecies that such things (and such people) would happen.

No society can stand for long without reality as its foundation.  No political system can endure the embrace of the lie for long.  The Church alone can stand in such an environment, and that only because God is control and will not allow His Church to disappear completely.  The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  Deceit will inevitably destroy such a society, however, because no one will know what to stand for, or where true value lies.  Perhaps that is the reason for the adoption of mendacity as a virtue.  The goal may well be the dissolution of our nation as it exists and the establishment of something other.  If things don’t change, I suspect the great American experiment with freedom and democratic ideals is over, and although it was a great success, it has been manipulated into failure in the end.

May God have mercy on us all.

The Time Is Right

I am wrestling with a cold.  I am too sick to do anything productive, so I was looking at various things that popped up in Google -- articles and blogs and the like.  I saw nothing enormously good, so it was a reasonable sick-time activity.

I noticed a number of pieces, blogs and such, that focused on spiritual sounding topics from a non-spiritual perspective.  One listed twelve rules of a personal philosophy about how to become a better you.  Another observed the tendency of people in our modern world to invent things to be distressed about: Zombies, phony apocalypses, potential but unlikely disasters and the like.  One writer saw the problem as boredom.  Another saw it as a flaw in human nature.  Many of the articles sounded like Christian writings of our era, only struggling to not sound Christian.

The sense I came away from the articles (as a group) with was how the world really needs what Christ has provided.  One article actually used a progression of something like 'malady -repentance - redemption'.  There was no mention of Christ or how this closely followed the sin-repentance-redemption of the Christian Gospel.  But the world around us is trying to make sense of what only God can explain.  They want a self-improvement program that echoes what the Gospel teaches us about our conduct as His people.  They are bored with this decaying world and need something to focus them and lead them through to a salvation of some sort.  They need the Law and the Gospel, they just don't know it, and they don't want the misrepresentations that so many religious bodies advance instead of the Gospel.

Jesus had it right, and it is still true today: The fields are white unto harvest.  Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into the fields.

Without a thought

The sorrowful events at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, have inspired a new and ferocious round of calls for "gun control", by which they generally mean dis-allowing the Second Amendment and taking all guns from law-abiding citizens everywhere.

The events at the school are terrible.  They are, however, no worse than the Benghazi murders, except in scale.  They are no more of a tragedy (and no less!) than any of the murders that take place routinely in this country.  The sad fact is that if the  gunman had no access to firearms, he could still kill.  The progress of this twisted soul was aided by the legal requirement that no law-abiding person in that place have a gun, unless he or she might be a police officer -- which apparently was not present at the school.  There was no one who could have effectively responded to the evil-doer with the gun.  That requirement is part of the agenda of those who now use these unfortunate deaths to promote further gun-control.

Scale doesn't actually justify calling this a tragedy.  For each family involved, it is a horror and great sorrow, but for mankind, or even for this nation, hardly a tragedy.  The events in Newton equal about ten minutes worth of our daily average of abortions; all children, all helpless, all murdered, deliberately, by a heartless killer.  The only real difference is that the killer in abortion has the apparent complicity of the mother of the child.  But the roughly 4,000 that die each day in abortion is surely a greater tragedy than those twenty murdered children.

Except, abortion is defended as a "right" and celebrated by many of the same people who now cry out for the disarming of the decent, law-abiding people who had nothing whatever to do with the murderous rampage of that sick man.  One Democrat politician in New York, a member of Congress, was refreshingly honest about it, saying that we need to "exploit" these shootings to advance the gun-control agenda.  Apparently, this is not a tragedy, it is an opportunity.

Do not misconstrue my remarks: I feel great compassion towards those who suffered a loss in this shooting.  For the families involved it is a tragedy.  We would only compound it if we were to withdraw from Americans yet more liberties as a response to this event, and disarm those who obey the law in the face of those, well-armed, who disregard the law and have evil intent toward the innocent.

Let us pray for those who suffered loss, and let us approach the issues before us rationally and not merely on the emotion of the moment.

No Wonder

The election board certifies the results of an election while admitting that the number of ballots cast was 141% of the registered voters.  In another state, President Obama records 100% of the votes in 56 precincts -- a feat rarely accomplished by dictators.  These are just two of the stories circulating on the internet news sites interested in reporting the truth.

It is clear that there is massive and repeated voter fraud, seemingly always in favor of the Democrat candidates, and there is hardly a peep.  Democracies die of such injuries.  What sorrow at seeing the deliberate destruction of our nation by our citizens, and overseen by those who were charged with preventing it and protecting us!

The Election

The election has locked the United States into socialism.  The newly re-elected president has already shut down oil drilling in the west.  He appears to be set on a course of deconstructing the nation into a second-rate third-world country.  The many groups that conspired to achieve this end will go down with the rest of us.  That is the single consolation in this mess.

Democrats have proven themselves the successors to the communist party - as the communist party has already said publicly.  They have no loyalty except to being elected and controlling power.  That the route they have chosen will unravel the "great experiment" that once was America means nothing to them.  They won the election.  They manipulated the electorate - deceitfully but effectively.  That is all that they care about.

The Republicans are already scrambling to surrender their convictions and go along with the flow, once again, to the detriment of the people, is one of the reasons I could never support them.  They say one thing and do what ever the Democrats tell them to.  Pathetic and miserable politicians.  The sad thing is that there are few representatives of the people in Washington.  Just rich people fighting over the scraps of power and wealth, while the rest of us go down the toilet.

By the time a change of power in Washington is possible, policies will be set in stone, and there will be only one opinion, shaded to be sure, but socialist and third-world.  I am delighted that I got to live in America while it was America.  I am saddened that I lived long enough to see it pass away.  I imagine that there is a special place reserved in hell for the media.  They betrayed us all and their own fundamental values to battle for the re-election of The President.  That reservation in hell is probably not true, but it is a comforting thought to entertain as I weather the bitter disappointment of seeing capitalism rejected and socialism embraced by the majority of this nation, and their (the Media's) willing betrayal of us all to that end.

"Trust not in princes."  That is what the Bible says.  I place my hope and comfort in the Lord.  The politics of man simply demonstrate his venality.  Still, the world has lost a wonderful thing, and the date its demise may be marked is November 6, 2012.

I have come to really dislike politics.  I cannot bring myself to vote for the "winning" side and voting for the losing ballot each election is really depressing.

Does Being Lutheran Matter Any Longer?

A number of fine posts have appeared addressing the question of whether being a Lutheran matters any longer or not.  The answers, and the clarification sought by Pastor Wilken, are excellent. Still, the question is not fully addressed until one understands that the question is actually, "Does truth matter any longer?", or "Does it really matter if one is a Christian any longer?".

One senses a reluctance in certain quarters to identify the Lutheran confession with truth, or the Lutheran faith with the Christian faith.  But what else is it?  If our confession is not the truth, why do we stand on it?  As one wise (and inspired) man once wrote, ". . . what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?  Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?  Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?"  And, if there is a difference between the Lutheran faith and the Christian faith, that the two may be distinguished as readily as many seem to do, why do we cling to that which is not fully or truly Christian?


No, Lutheran is Christian, and Christian is Lutheran, whether one bears the label or not.  To the degree that one's faith departs from true Lutheranism, ones faith also departs from the Christian faith.  Clever and sophistic evasions of this confession abound, but the truth of the matter is that if we cannot make that confession, we ought not to call ourselves Lutheran, and ought not to seek to cling to the Lutheran faith because the failure to be able to clearly confess this truth is to manifest that one is not really Lutheran, or one does not believe themselves and their faith to be fully and honestly Christian.

Now, this is not necessarily the approach to discussing the faith that I would recommend for outreach, but it surely a reasonable approach to teaching the faith to those who also call themselves "Lutheran".  People need to learn first about the faith before they will be ready to confront the reality of the counterfeits of the faith and the distortions of it that abound in the world.  But, if those who are charged with teaching the faith cannot readily confess the truth of what they teach, and say clearly that their faith IS the Christian faith and those confessions that disagree have disagreed with historic Christianity, who will?  And, what does their refusal to say so say about them?

Are there Christians outside of what is called "The Lutheran Church"?  I believe so, and surely hope so, but they hold a Lutheran confession to the extent that their confession is Christian.  I will also admit that everyone who calls themselves a Lutheran may not truly be a Lutheran.  That is sad, but it is also one of the logical conclusions of this post.  Those believers who do not call themselves Lutheran may hate the name, "Lutheran", but if they believe in Jesus Christ, and trust in His grace and hope for the blessings of the Gospel - like forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, all by grace - then they hold to the Lutheran, and therefore the Christian, faith. 

There is no real distinction between Christian and Lutheran, except, perhaps, the labels one chooses to apply to oneself.