Facing the future as a Christian

 

When President Trump lost the election for a second term and I in frustration unfriended some friends on Facebook I felt a certain freedom. But it was the kind of freedom the Israelites must have felt walking on dry ground with towering waves on both sides. Only faith in a sovereign Lord would keep you going step after step.

To be clear I unfriended some friends because after pushing and pushing into the realm of awful conspiracies in order to make it okay to tell others they weren’t true Christians or they had blood on their hands, the friends then insisted it was not trumpers who invaded the United States Capitol but Black Lives Matter and/or Antifa. I also unfriended them because I realized they were making all others enemies. It wasn’t that some Democrats were left leaning and some desiring a socialist government, but they consider all Democrats communists/Marxists. How many times have I seen a picture of President Biden with the communist flag draped under his face?

I still love them, still pray for them, but they have headed so far into the darkness that prayer and silence on my part is probably the only way. (I was becoming a troll.) And in the clarity of the moment I have some thoughts about the future of orthodox Christianity in the United States.

First are some very personal thoughts which entail my own walk with Christ. In sorting
through all of the reading material on Twitter and Facebook I have discovered that some pro-life sites are lifting up some of the same conspiracy theories as my Facebook friends. So I am busy scouting out groups that are truly pro-life. That is, they are pro-life from the womb to the tomb. And they include anti-racism and the needs of the poor and immigrants in their concerns. I recently posted two videos on Facebook from sites that embrace that fullness of Christian compassion. See Pro-Life and Civil Rights: Loving Our Unborn Neighbors - Karen Ellis and “What Does it Mean to be Pro-life?”

But still I see the problems that are entangled within the progressive movement which are unbiblical and as deadly as the conspiracies of the far right. That is why I see this particular time for orthodox Christians as a time of walking on dry land with towering walls of water on both sides. Already it is clear that both abortion and unrestrained sexual desires will plague the future but the biggest concern for orthodox Christians will be, and must be, fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ.

That fidelity means not embracing the lies and immorality of the far right which includes generous doses of anti-Semitism, paganism, materialism and idolatry and not embracing the immorality and lies of the left which include lies about the worthiness of human life in all of its stages and relationships. Christians cannot embrace the murder of the unborn, the tearing apart of immigrant families, the hatred of the other, the mutilation of childhood’s innocence, the redefinition of marriage, the blood libels against Jews and others.

It isn’t an easy road ahead but we have the promises of God. I love the way that Karl Barth put it in his little book Theological Existence Today, written as the Confessing Church was forming during the early Nazi years:

Within the Church it is agreed that God “upholds all things by the Word of His power” (Hebrews i. 3): that He supplies answer to every question, that He allows righteousness to experience all anxieties, that He sustains all that he has made, and leads it to its truest end, that no thing can subsist and flourish without His Word.

So the Church, Christ’s disciples, the orthodox Christians in the United States have the word of God, have the good Shepherd leading and caring for them, yes in the midst of anxieties and even perplexities. We will persevere and flourish in His care.   

But you, beloved building yourselves upon your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.

And have mercy on some, who are doubting;

Save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh.  (Jude 20-23)

Christian don’t walk down that road, not even in its shadow: QAnon and anti-Semitism

 

Picture taken by Ethan McHenry

After writing an article for Christian Research Journal on an anti-Semitic and racist movement called “Christian Identity” I told a friend that I wasn’t going to major on that topic because I found their literature  so ugly. I had no desire to delve into that kind of material anymore. But of course God doesn’t always agree with our personal plans. Just a few years later as an evangelical in the Presbyterian Church (USA) I found myself constantly writing about a group in the denomination who were both progressive and extremely anti-Semitic. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network even published glossy booklets with such ideas as most of the people in Israel are not ancestors of ancient Israel but descendants of an Eastern European tribe.

And now, out of the PCUSA and belonging to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, I see once again, but in a greater way, an anti-Semitic movement growing across the United States. It is part of the QAnon movement I have already written about in, Q and the cross of Jesus. In that article I do mention that there is potential for the movement to become anti-Semitic. But now after exploring some videos that, “Home Congregations,” a QAnon site, has recently linked to, I see that their anti-Semitism is equal to the Nazis of Germany.[1]

The first video, authored by Janet Ossebaard, a Dutch conspiracy theorist, attempts to go back in history and show where those who are supposedly controlling history originated. The narrator of this weird story eventually points to the, Ashkenazim, those Jewish groups who eventually immigrated to Germany as well as other parts of Europe. The narrator instead of connecting them to Abraham, like the PCUSA group mentioned above, connects them to an Eastern European group the Khazars. The Khazars, in reality first converted to Judaism and then to Greek Orthodoxy and are not genetically linked to the Jewish people.  But this is one of the bigger lies of many anti-Semites, that the people who died in the Holocaust and settled the modern State of Israel are not really Jews. Rather the anti-Semite insists they are a group of people who infiltrated nations with their greed and desire to control the world.

But these videos get weirder because the narrator using every
conspiracy theory possible connects the Jesuits to the Free Masons after having connected them to the Knights Templers. And somehow in all of that the Illuminati also gets connected to all of them—they all merge together. And then comes the forth video that begins with the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which is allegedly a group of Jewish elders getting together and planning how to conquer the world.

All of this undergirds the lies about Jews controlling the nations, financing wars, turning Russia into a communist empire, causing the great depression, manipulating political parties, and encouraging the Nazis. (Hitler is said, by the anti-Semite, to actually be a Rothschild.) And today, connected to QAnon these same lies are about how this group, the merged Ashkenazim, mason, Illuminati, are in charge of the “Deep State,” the Democrats, Hollywood, and the old blood libel that all of these groups in thrall to their masters are kidnapping children for sex and drinking their blood for its life energy.

Christian don’t walk down that road, not even in its shadow.

Don’t become attached to any of the lies, the conspiracy theories, not even the election conspiracies. Darkness and evil are behind all of it. If you embrace one lie, you will be guilty of abetting anti-Semites. The father of lies must be laughing at the Church in the United States. We have forgotten our Lord and because of it souls are being lost, human lives are being lost, truth is being trampled on the ground. Remember when such lies were told in the 1920’s and 30’s the end was the horrible deaths of six million Jews plus many, many others. Let’s not walk this awful bloody road again.

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[1] Here is the page the links are on: The Great Awakening – Home Congregations- Worldwide, and here is the site where the videos are: THE SEQUEL TO THE FALL OF THE CABAL - PART 1 (bitchute.com)