Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

7 Encouraging Words 

In Case 2016 Has Got You Down

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

So the best thing to do is assume that if you have any sense in your head at all, you are reluctant even to turn on the news anymore. “How could they possibly have made things worse?” seems like it ought to be a rhetorical question. But every single night they are up to the challenge, and they produce actual answers to that question. And you wonder to yourself . . . this somehow seems different than how postmillennialism came across in the books. So if any part of this applies to you, and 2016 has in some measure got you down, read on.

1. Jesus Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father almost two thousand years ago. He was given universal dominion, was enthroned there and invited to remain seated until all His enemies were fashioned into His footstool. That process is inexorable and ongoing.
   
   
2. Reality is not optional, and cannot be undone by any legislative device, court decision, or scribblings out of a regulatory agency. The way things are remain the way things are, and your great grandchildren will live in a world where things have remained the way things are. Particular men, specific nations, and named generations can lose their minds, but the world never does.
   
   
3. Attempts to reverse or remake reality are necessarily suicidal, suicidal by definition. Those who undertake such a task are necessarily undertaking their own destruction. They are suicide bombers who blow themselves up in their own workshop.
   
   
4. In the long run, stupidity never works.
   
   
5. You are not the only one. There are at least 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal. They remain for the same reason that you have remained, which is that God has reserved them to Himself. When God does things like this He does so for a purpose, which is the manifestation of His glorious grace.
   
   
6. God loves cliffhangers. Abraham walked off the mountain with Isaac and with relieved tears in his eyes. Miriam danced beside a sea full of corpses. When the Lord releases us from our captivity, we will be like those who dream. God loves cliffhangers, and the history of the church is the process of Him teaching us how to love cliffhangers too. God is teaching us to understand eucatastrophe, and to love what we have come to understand.
   
   
7. So what did the great Jehovah say when He saw Pharaoh and all his armed host. He said, “I will be get me honor upon Pharaoh, and the horse he rode in on.”

“And I, behold, I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, and they shall follow them: and I will get me honour upon Pharaoh, and upon all his host, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen” (Ex. 14:17).