Let’s begin this essay by examining a well known Bible passage—Matthew 5:13-16, with two versions--one from my favorite 1599 Geneva Bible (Super Titled in italics) and one from the New International Version (Sub-Titled in regular type):
Verse 13 - “Ye are the salt of the world; but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
Verse 14 - Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill, cannot be hid. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.
Verse 15 - Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.
Verse 16 - Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in Heaven.” In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your
good deeds and praise your Father in Heaven.”
It’s reassuring that though the translations are almost 400 years apart, they say essentially the same thing. The first question to arise in my mind is just who was our LORD referring to as “salt” and “light”? Could He have been referring to his “children”—those of us who call ourselves Christians? I believe so. But therein lies my concern, and more than a touch of ‘self guilt’. Are all of us who call ourselves “Christians” really the salt and light of our country, as Christians have struggled to be through history, or are we in the process of being “trampled” (figuratively for some of us—literally for many Christians throughout the world) by men—by “spiritual wickedness in high places”, by the followers of Satan, because we have lost our “saltiness”, our determination to do good deeds and resist the evil one? More disturbingly, are we letting ourselves be “trampled” by the enemies of God and by those whose agendas include destroying this great but imperfect Constitutional Republic bequeathed to us by our Founders, and denying Christians the freedom to worship our LORD and Savior openly?
I increasingly ponder whether or not we Americans have lost our spirit of resistance—our resolve to battle the forces of evil. More to the point, have we—generically—ever had that spirit? At one time our ancestors surely did, and they threw their British overlords out and formed a new nation. But that was then, and this is now, as the saying goes. It’s the “now” that concerns me, because if ever a “spirit of resistance” was needed by that portion of the American people who still honor the Constitutional Republic given to us by our Godly and determined ancestors, it is needed now. Whether we as patriots and constitutionalists have sufficient “resistance genes” in our hearts and souls to preserve the U.S. as a still-free nation remains to be seen.
Does our “light” of service to our Heavenly Father shine brightly, or have we purposely hidden it under our “security bowl” out of fear or indifference? As I have written previously, and still believe, it appears that for far too long we as Christians and God-fearing people have withdrawn into the familiar security of our churches and into our own “Christian sub-culture” (yes, I’m ashamed to admit, Christians are now a ‘sub-culture’ in the United States) and have left our society and our country—which were once at least God-fearing if not totally Christian—adrift to fend for themselves. Reading Matthew 5:13-16, it seems clear that abandoning the fight to Satan and his minions is not what our LORD called us to do. So, Why have we Christians allowed this to happen? Why haven’t we been doing that which our LORD and Savior expects us to do? Why do we stand condemned by our timidity? Why, as the late, great patriot and servant of God, Rev. D. James Kennedy (1930-2007) once noted, is “the greatest sin of the Christian church today the sin of doing NOTHING?” WHY?
I’ve long espoused the values of our historic Judeo-Christian, Western civilization. We in the western world have never been perfect and never will be, for there are not now nor ever have been “perfect” people except for One—and our ancestors crucified Him. But Western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian Biblical underpinnings and beliefs that arose, at least partly, out of historic Judaism is the high mark of mankind’s epic journey out of the darkness of tyranny and the rule by tribal leaders, despotic kings, and assorted brutal warlords and vicious tyrants that has characterized our species right from our beginnings.
It is unarguable that without Christianity mankind would already have degenerated into various tribal entities with the blood feuds, warfare, brutality, and fanaticism common to those kinds of societies, and which we see causing misery and death in various parts of our world this very day. Even with the influence of traditional Christian values in our country since its founding, and in much of the rest of Planet Earth for many centuries, we can see the obvious degeneration of our western culture, and of our American society, from its relatively slow pace as far back as our post-colonial beginnings to its rapid pace in today’s world. As the old saying reminds us: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. Today I’m beginning to have serious doubts that our “spirits” are willing to mount an effective resistance against the Satanic evils and corruptions that are threatening to engulf all of us, and condemn mankind to a technological “dark age” where the “spirit of resistance” has been totally quelled by the frightening power of a collectivist “one world” state.
Some of the deliberately ignorant and morally ambivalent among us believe that this societal change is good for us, since it frees us from those “outdated” moral absolutes of the past, and from the “superstitious” teachings of Christianity, and “opens our minds” to a host of non-Biblical and non-Christian mendacities and Satanic “theories” (which they call truth) regarding human relations and mankind’s origins. (Should our increasingly post-Christian society succumb once again to violence and chaos and the rule of tyrants, I predict that those anti-Christian “scoffers”, to their great surprise, will be the first ones to be sent to a gulag, or shot by their masters in “The New World Order”!)
I have long contended that the degeneration of our cultural underpinnings and the rapid disintegration of our society is the DIRECT RESULT of the indifferent attitudes of large numbers of Christians AND their pastors in recent decades toward the unchecked growth of all government, the unconstitutional power grab by the unelected oligarchy of our increasingly powerful federal judiciary, and our corresponding loss of freedom a little slice at a time over a period much longer than any of us have been alive. I plead guilty to having been in this camp for many years. It’s a “comfortable” one with lots of distractions and fellow Americans who practice the ever popular “eat, drink, and be merry” life style, while all the while pretending to be concerned patriots. Without any doubt, many Christians and Jews and their pastors, priests, ministers and rabbis have surrendered the high ground of our admittedly always imperfect civilization to our Satanic enemies, and have concentrated in our churches and synagogues, for the most part over the past century or so, in meeting, eating, and retreating, and believing, probably unwisely, that the “walls” of our places of worship will protect us from the results of our indifference. As history has amply proved, and as the recent anti-Christian “close the churches” attacks by posturing morons who call themselves “governors” and sinister unconstitutional federal authorities amply demonstrated during the recent Covid-19 Chinese Bio-Attack, the deliberate “plandemic”, they won’t protect us! Only real faith will!
I ask the question of my fellow Christians: Does your pastor preach Christ FIRST, and Him crucified and risen, and of the need for individual repentance and salvation, and then the regeneration of our society and the preservation of our precious heritage of freedom for which our forefathers and mothers sacrificed so much to pass down the long corridors of time to us? If your pastor doesn’t preach this concept of “God (first) and Country (second)” (along the lines of the stalwart “Black Robed Regiment” active prior to our first Revolutionary War), why not? If those of us who are “called by His name” have so callously surrendered our heritage to the ungodly, and much of the Christian world appears to be willingly doing so, then who is to blame for this sad state? Are not both our Christian leaders AND the Christian laity responsible for having capitulated to disobedience, fear, political correctness, indifference, and lack of knowledge? Are we to conveniently blame Satan’s minions for doing what “their father”, the evil one, commands them to do, while WE who call ourselves Christians, or at least “God fearing” people, let ourselves and our culture go to Hell and perish over our refusal to do what OUR Father commands us to do?
To change our society, and arrest its continued spiritual and cultural degradation, we must first change ourselves, must we not? This is a process of a “one at a time” conversion to Christianity, or a rededication to the whole counsel of God’s Word. But a real Christian must be a good citizen who is concerned about the preservation of freedom and honest and limited government in his society. At least that’s what I believe, but I know that some Christians put little or no priority in fighting for our historic free and Christian culture, and they apparently think that since they are only “Pilgrims” passing through this brief time on Earth, why be concerned over what form of government one lives under? (A concept that is foreign to my thinking).
But our Christian responsibility goes beyond just knowledge and repentance---we must also be preservers (the “salt”) of what is good, and eliminators of what is bad, especially in our own lives and in our own families—not usually an easy task. Unfortunately, in today’s America we have far too many Christians who, as I said above, seem to believe that they are merely “pilgrims” in this world, and care little about what happens to our civilization and our precious Constitutional freedoms, and to the people who will come after us, since they are only “passing through” this world and prefer not to get their hands dirty or their minds distracted in trying to stand for righteousness and a humane society wherein Constitutional freedoms are valued and protected (the original Mayflower Pilgrims surely did NOT believe that). Some of them won’t even vote in our nation’s elections! Incredibly, some who call themselves “Christians” seem to care little about whether they or their descendants live in the light of freedom or in the darkness of tyranny, for they have surrendered to the unbiblical “Abandonment Theology”. Regrettably, I increasingly think of them with many bad thoughts, summed up in one word: COWARDS!
Sadly, the attitude of Christian “surrender” begins in the pulpits of our nation. As Don Wildmon, of the American Family Association, reminded us many years ago, there is “a deafening silence” from most of those pulpits in America. Our nation is coming apart due to unbridled abortions (hopefully greatly reduced with the recent Supreme Court ruling that has set the “baby murdering world” ablaze), child pornography, human trafficking and prostitution (especially of CHILDREN), media mockery of Christians, increasing rates of suicides among our teenagers and our military veterans, alcoholism, drug addiction of all kinds, skyrocketing divorce rates, increasing rapes of our women, widespread pornography, gang violence in our cities, degenerate music, and the cultural and demographic suicide of our nation as we welcome into our midst hordes of unvetted and ignorant and diseased illegals and the adherents of the false and Satanic pseudo-religion of Islam. But despite all of this, the vast majority of the pulpits of America are SILENT about this slow death—this national suicide-- of our nation and our culture.
The anti-Americans who support The Klan of New Bolsheviks (i.e. Democrat Party) may be responsible for fomenting and encouraging much of this cultural ROT over recent generations, but we—the Christians and conservatives and Americanists of the nation—have stood silent far too long, wringing our hands and telling each other that we’ll have to “pray about it”, as the Marxist Black Lives Matter and AntiFa vermin from the pit of Hell run rampant in our cities and on our streets, intimidating and killing the defenseless, destroying private and public property, instilling fear among our people, and threatening all who will not “bend the knee” to them with their criminality and their Marxist/collectivist/Democrat inspired HATE.
Why are you silent, Mr. Pastor? Why are you silent, you who sit in the pews? Why? Have you been rendered useless by your “lack of knowledge”? Are you so paralyzed by fear that you refuse to act—refuse to resist the death of all that our ancestors struggled so long and so painfully to give to us? That your own ancestors—perhaps your own parents—worked so hard to accomplish in a free land that once promised endless opportunities to succeed? Do you despise freedom so much—do you resist responsibility so callously—have you concentrated on ‘going along to get along’ so long—have you so surrendered to the vile and despicable “wokeness” and “gender identification” stupidity that are smothering all of us in national mediocrity that you have nothing left in your hearts and souls regarding the preservation of the freedoms those Americans who came before us struggled, and bled, and sacrificed, and died to send down the ages to us?
One organization in today’s America that is dedicated to encouraging our pastors, and all Christians to inform themselves, stand up and speak out is called RECOVER AMERICA ACTION (501(c)4), based in Houston, Texas, and founded in 2018 by Pastor Dr. Rick Scarborogh. They believe that if even a minority of the pastors and their churches in a community would boldly step forward—would remove their light from under the bowl—we could really change our culture for the better. Isn’t it time for Americans who love our country as it once was and might be again, to stand together and proclaim: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH? Yes, it is. Now is NOT the time to surrender to the cowardice of “wokeism”, to our fear of “offending” our fellow citizens by not catering to their “gender” sickness, to our ridiculous fear of being “cancelled” from that useless time-wasting activity known as “social media”, to our fear of instigating the possibly violent reactions of our fellow citizens against us. NOW is the time to boldly proclaim and stand for truth, to resist—peacefully if possible—the attacks against Christians and Patriots that are becoming increasingly apparent in our society, and which will continue in exponentially increasing rates if the Christians and patriots of America continue to do nothing to RESIST!
Long ago, a great Christian patriot named Patrick Henry, one of my heroes, said it well:
“Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men. It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated (corrupted or debased) state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”
These words are as true today as when Patrick Henry first spoke them. Will we, the Christians and Jews and Patriots of today, and our pastors, priests, and rabbis burn Henry’s words into our minds and determine to break the chains that our own home-grown progressive “masters” have been fastening onto Americans for over a century? To remain “a nation of free men” we must, because the alternative, as Patrick Henry will forever remind us, “is incompatible with freedom”!
