Daily Devotional

Strive Strenuously to Return

"I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee."
Isaiah 44:22

Charles H. Spurgeon

Attentively observe the instructive similitude: our sins are like a cloud. As clouds are of many shapes and shades, so are our transgressions. As clouds obscure the light of the sun, and darken the landscape beneath, so do our sins hide from us the light of Jehovah's face, and cause us to sit in the shadow of death. They are earth-born things, and rise from the miry places of our nature; and when so collected that their measure is full, they threaten us with storm and tempest. Alas! that, unlike clouds, our sins yield us no genial showers, but rather threaten to deluge us with a fiery flood of destruction. O ye black clouds of sin, how can it be fair weather with our souls while ye remain?

Let our joyful eye dwell upon the notable act of divine mercy--"blotting out." God himself appears upon the scene, and in divine benignity, instead of manifesting his anger, reveals his grace: he at once and forever effectually removes the mischief, not by blowing away the cloud, but by blotting it out from existence once for all. Against the justified man no sin remains, the great transaction of the cross has eternally removed his transgressions from him. On Calvary's summit the great deed, by which the sin of all the chosen was forever put away, was completely and effectually performed.

Practically let us obey the gracious command, "return unto me." Why should pardoned sinners live at a distance from their God? If we have been forgiven all our sins, let no legal fear withhold us from the boldest access to our Lord. Let backslidings be bemoaned, but let us not persevere in them. To the greatest possible nearness of communion with the Lord, let us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, strive mightily to return. O Lord, this night restore us!

The Triumph of the Left

We're All Marxists Now

In his book, The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens describes and and seeks to explain how there is no longer any substantial ideological debates in the UK.  Rather there is an ideological consensus, shared by both "left" and "right".  That consensus is nurtured in the bosoms and minds of an elitist few who now dominate the Labour and Conservative parties.

Hitchens illustrates this situation by contrasting the UK with Russia.

Russia is no longer an ideological state, externally or internally.  It no longer seeks global power, and in some ways is less interested in the minds of its citizens than are "Western" countries which demand increasing obedience to the formulas of political correctness.  In Russia you may hold what private opinions you like.  Just do not challenge the state.  In Britain, your private opinions may be reported to the authorities and get you into trouble, even if you believe your actions are part of normal life and you have not wish to challenge the state.  This paradox is one of the most alarming facts about the modern world, and is unfortunately too little understood.  . . .

Here as everywhere else in the formerly anti-Marxist "West", the supposedly beaten Left have become the establishment.  The Left and their utopian ideas dominate the civil service, the arts, broadcasting, the academy, the bench of bishops, the courts and the police.

They now censor (and censure) speech and thought, through the formulas of political correctness.  They place narrower limits on the speech and writing of others than the Lord Chamberlain ever did on the London stage.  At the same time they dispense with any rules that might get in their own way.  A liberal will defend to the death your right to disagree with her.  Disagree with her, and she will call the police. [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning (London: Continuum, , 2009) p. viii, ix.]

The same realities hold true in New Zealand--with one major difference.

Business People Dangerous When It Comes to Politics

Banal Business Naivete

Stephen Franks
February 14th, 2015

Few business people are good at democratic politics. They expect what works in business to work in democracy. They’re frustrated by the messy necessity to maintain a working consensus, by multiple conflicting objectives, and by the unreliability of delegates.

They think that if only the right people were in charge, the best structures and systems would be like those in business, where everyone accepts single prevailing decisions from nominated rulers, and he who pays, rules.
Business people who get embroiled in politics commonly hate it so much they eject before they flame out. Those who survive and learn may be small in number but they are among the best we have, and we owe them a lot for their patience.

Many good business people are equally hopeless in assessing policy. I could not count the number of times I’ve heard the idiocy that the Resource Management Act ("RMA") is a good law, with nothing seriously wrong with it except how it is administered by council people who are stupid or wrongly motivated. These business defenders have no idea that they’ve just explained exactly why the RMA is  so badly conceived and written as to besmirch the rule of law.

Daily Devotional

Better Than Money, Sex, and Power

Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. (Hebrews 10:35)

John Piper

We need to ponder the superiority of God as our great reward over all that the world has to offer. If we don’t, we will love the world like everyone else and live like every one else.

So take the things that drive the world and ponder how much better and more abiding God is. Take money or sex or power and think about them in relation to death. Death will take away every one of them. If that is what you live for, you won't get much, and what you get, you lose.

But God's treasure is abiding. It lasts. It goes beyond death. It’s better than money because God owns all the money and he is our Father. “All things are yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23).

It's better than sex. Jesus never had sexual relations, and he was the most full and complete human that ever will exist. Sex is a shadow — an image — of a greater reality, of a relationship and pleasure that will make sex seem like a yawn.

The reward of God is better than power. There is no greater human power than to be a child of the Almighty God. “Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3).

And so it goes on and on. Everything the world has to offer, God is better and more abiding.
There is no comparison. God wins — every time. The question is: will we have him? Will we wake up from the trance of this stupefying world and see and believe and rejoice and love?

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Terrible Deeds

Horses for Courses

President Obama took an opportunity recently to lecture Christians about "getting on high horses" from which to criticize Islam and Islamic extremism.  There was a good deal of  violence and depredation in the history of Christianity, he solemnly hectored.

President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians "in the name of Christ."  "Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."  "So it is not unique to one group or one religion," Obama said. "There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."

Wow.  Glad we have got that straight.

Except that poor ol' Pressie Obama learnt his history in the arms of Edward Said and Marxist historians who were more in love with their abstract ideology than with actual history.  (Said taught at Columbia, Obama's old school, developing a theory of Western interaction with the Middle East, known as Orientalism.) Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly one which pillories imperialism, colonialism, and oppression as a Western disease.  The Crusades and the Inquisition, eh.  That's where Christian evils were equivalent to the present depredations of ISIS.

Back to the Future

The Revival of the Nixon Doctrine

Here is an interesting piece on the Truman versus the Nixon doctrines on US Foreign Policy.  It argues that not by intention, but by neglect and incompetence, Obama has moved the US from the previously revived Truman Doctrine under Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton and the Bushes to adopt, de facto, the Nixon Doctrine.  It appears there is something to be said in behalf of benign neglect.

The World Is Figuring Out How to Fight ISIS

No Thanks to Obama

by Virgil 
8 Feb 2015
BreitbartNews

Yes, it’s unfortunate that the US has a president, Barack Obama, who consistently sees things from the Muslim point of view.  Even the Obamaphilic reporter Juliet Eilperin, writing for the Obamaphilic Washington Post, had to admit, “President Obama has never been one to go easy on America.”  With a pro-Muslim commander-in-chief, and with the administration insisting that “climate change” is the greatest threat we face, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the villainous Islamic State is on the march in the Middle East.

That’s the bad news.  And yet, paradoxically, there’s also some good news.  Moreover, the good news points to a new kind of better strategy for the US—or, more precisely, to the revival of a successful old strategy.

Daily Devotional

Better Persons

"He shall save his people from their sins."
Matthew 1:21

Charles H. Spurgeon

Many persons, if they are asked what they understand by salvation, will reply, "Being saved from hell and taken to heaven." This is one result of salvation, but it is not one tithe of what is contained in that boon.

It is true our Lord Jesus Christ does redeem all his people from the wrath to come; he saves them from the fearful condemnation which their sins had brought upon them; but his triumph is far more complete than this. He saves his people "from their sins." Oh! sweet deliverance from our worst foes. Where Christ works a saving work, he casts Satan from his throne, and will not let him be master any longer.

No man is a true Christian if sin reigns in his mortal body. Sin will be in us--it will never be utterly expelled till the spirit enters glory; but it will never have dominion. There will be a striving for dominion--a lusting against the new law and the new spirit which God has implanted--but sin will never get the upper hand so as to be absolute monarch of our nature. Christ will be Master of the heart, and sin must be mortified. The Lion of the tribe of Judah shall prevail, and the dragon shall be cast out.

Professor! is sin subdued in you? If your life is unholy your heart is unchanged, and if your heart is unchanged you are an unsaved person. If the Saviour has not sanctified you, renewed you, given you a hatred of sin and a love of holiness, he has done nothing in you of a saving character.

The grace which does not make a man better than others is a worthless counterfeit. Christ saves his people, not in their sins, but from them. "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord." "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." If not saved from sin, how shall we hope to be counted among his people. Lord, save me now from all evil, and enable me to honour my Saviour.

Public Swamps, Politicians, and Their Cronies

The Dangers of Mates Having a Drink Together

Crony capitalism is a despicable thing.  It occurs when government sidles up to businesses to offer favours and rewards not available to competitors if they will do the government's bidding.  It's a "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours" situation.  Publicly it's sold as a "win-win" for all.  The reverse also occurs.  Businesses sidle up to government to lobby for contracts and benefices.  The quid pro quo is often support in the form of funds for political campaigns or, worse, money in the back pockets of politicians.

All governments and politicians, of whatever stripe (ideologically left, right, and centre) are susceptible to such corruption.  Power corrupts.  Businessmen and private capital are entirely corruptible when they get close to power.  Politicians are already well down the track, their hubris driving them on.

The only way to resist the invasion of such rodents gnawing at the body politic is to maintain a high wall of separation between politicians and the decision makers who will decide which contracts and tenders will be awarded to whom.

The Great Divide

Two Parents, Radically Unalike

The word misanthrope used to refer to someone who hated the human race.  Under the delicate touch of feminist ideology the term has morphed into a sexist perspective, referring to someone who hates males.  Dana at Patterico describes the case of one who is truly--and literally--misanthropic.

The answer to the question “What makes a good man?” depends on who you are asking. For one ardent feminist named Lana, her answer would unarguably be that to suggest a man could be good is itself a contradiction in terms and thus, the question is moot. Never the terms shall meet. Because of her misandry, Lana refused to allow her baby boy entry into the world where he would have had the opportunity to prove his mother wrong:

Daily Devotional

God is Love

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person.

If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often some- thing quite different: they really mean ‘Love is God’. They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’. They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a [static] person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Sourced from BibleGateway.

Nothing Here, Move Along

Equivocating to Save Face

One of the most puerile of all informal fallacies is the fallacy of equivocation.  A protagonist attempts to advance his argument by wilfully (or mistakenly) changing the meaning of key terms, thus failing miserably in the attempt to prove his case.  Here is an example: "all banks are beside rivers; therefore, the financial institution where I deposit my money is beside a river."

Political partisans are notorious for this kind of verbal legerdemain.  We were treated to the ignominious spectacle recently when someone had the temerity to suggest that Islamic enclaves in various European countries had created "no-go zones" for the rest of the population.  The resulting brouhaha and explosions of self-righteous umbrage were worthy of Krakatoa.    Fox News staff were forced to retract and apologize for allowing interviewees to utter such tosh without correcting them on the spot.  The Mayor of Paris insisted that nothing even resembling no-go zones existed in France.  A complete and utter fabrication, she fulminated.

But the fallacy of (wilful) equivocation was at work again.  The Mayor of Paris and her attendant Greek chorus were insisting that nowhere in France was there to be found a spot where one would be confronted with barbed wire, fifteen foot tall electrified fences, barricades and tank traps with armed guards at gates, and signs on the gates saying: "Islamic Only Zone.  All Infidels Forbidden Entry."  On this basis, one may safely conclude that Islamic No-Go Zones indeed do not exist in France, nor in the Seychelles, nor in Mecca, nor on the moon.

Bon Mots

 He Thought It an Impertinence, Sir

The story is recounted of Benjamin Jowett, when he was Master of Balliol College in Oxford.  Apparently someone asked him at dinner, "Dr. Jowett, we would like to know what your opinion of God is," to which he is said to have replied, "I should think it a great impertinence were I to express my opinion about God.  The only constant anxiety of my life is to know what is Gods' opinion of me."  [Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2014), p.374.]

Daily Devotional

Gladly Not God

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength! (Psalm 96:7)

John Piper

Here’s what I think would be some of what’s included in a full experience of what the psalmist calls for when he says, “Ascribe [=give] to the Lord strength.”

First, by God’s grace, we give attention to God and see that he is strong. We give heed to his strength. Then we give our approval to the greatness of his strength. We give due regard to its worth.  We find his strength to be wonderful. But what makes this wonder a “giving” kind of wonder is that we are especially glad that the greatness of the strength is his and not ours.

We feel a profound fitness in the fact that he is infinitely strong and not us. We love the fact that this is so. We do not envy God for his strength. We are not covetous of his power. We are full of joy that all strength is his. Everything in us rejoices to go out to behold this power, as if we had arrived at the celebration of the victory of a distance runner who had beaten us in the race, and we found our greatest joy in admiring his strength, rather than resenting our loss.

A Very Simple Document

A Treaty of Perpetual Umbrage and Grievance

Usually around this time of the year, when Waitangi Day rolls around in New Zealand, we end up with a couple or more posts on the crass historical revisionism which makes the Treaty of Waitangi a wax nose twisted into the shape of a pig's snout.

Dr Don Brash was asked to speak-in-reply to Dr Gareth Morgan's attempt to push the latest revisionist nonsense about the Treaty of Waitangi--our founding national document.  (Incidentally, both the good doctor's are qualified in economics, not history.  Nevertheless, both are modern men, opinionated, and able to argue a case.)

As expected, Don Brash got little to no air time in the media; what little comment was pejorative.  Gareth Morgan, whose cause c'elebre changes by the month, got plenty of coverage.  What is even more telling is that Don Brash is always framed negatively by the media and the Commentariat which suggests he may be saying something worth hearing.  Some years back he gave an address which catapulted him into political popularity to the extent that he almost won the following national election.  That speech directly attacked the modernist idea that Maori had special privileges in New Zealand.  There was an outpouring of popular support for Brash over this issue, not the least due to the fact that he spoke not with incendiary rhetoric, but laid out some pretty cogent arguments.

Letter From the UK (About Multi-Culti Britain)

Multi-Cultural England

Are You Feeling The Progressive Diversity Yet?

by Simon Kent 
6 Feb 2015
BreitbartLondon

Have a look around. Go on. See if you can recognise the country you live in.

Take a quick shufti at the all welcome, multi-culti, hail-fellow-well-met, step right in, pull up a pew and make yourself at home England you may have been lucky enough to have grown up in.

What better time to pause and reflect as we celebrate 800 years of the primacy of Magna Carta; exult in its written guarantees that curb the power of authoritarian rule, define the limits on taxation, ensure the right to trial by jury and guarantee the rule of law for all. No exceptions. We’re rubbing along quite nicely, don’t you think? Or not. Depends on where you’re looking and how you feel about the conceit of state-imposed multiculturalism.

Rotherham might be a suitable place to start.

This past week we have been treated (if that’s the word I’m looking for) to the news that years of failure by Labour’s Rotherham borough council to fully discharge its duties has seen more than 1500 young girls sexually abused, tortured and prostituted for financial gain by men of Pakistani heritage. The evidence is contained in a damning official report by Louise Casey that concluded police had failed to pursue Pakistani perpetrators for fear of “offending the community”.

Talk about having our noses rubbed in the sacred cause of racial diversity.

Daily Devotional

Poor Weak Prayers

"Praying always."
Ephesians 6:18

C. H. Spurgeon

What multitudes of prayers we have put up from the first moment when we learned to pray. Our first prayer was a prayer for ourselves; we asked that God would have mercy upon us, and blot out our sin. He heard us. But when he had blotted out our sins like a cloud, then we had more prayers for ourselves. We have had to pray for sanctifying grace, for constraining and restraining grace; we have been led to crave for a fresh assurance of faith, for the comfortable application of the promise, for deliverance in the hour of temptation, for help in the time of duty, and for succour in the day of trial.

We have been compelled to go to God for our souls, as constant beggars asking for everything. Bear witness, children of God, you have never been able to get anything for your souls elsewhere. All the bread your soul has eaten has come down from heaven, and all the water of which it has drank has flowed from the living rock--Christ Jesus the Lord. Your soul has never grown rich in itself; it has always been a pensioner upon the daily bounty of God; and hence your prayers have ascended to heaven for a range of spiritual mercies all but infinite. Your wants were innumerable, and therefore the supplies have been infinitely great, and your prayers have been as varied as the mercies have been countless.

Then have you not cause to say, "I love the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplication"? For as your prayers have been many, so also have been God's answers to them. He has heard you in the day of trouble, has strengthened you, and helped you, even when you dishonoured him by trembling and doubting at the mercy-seat. Remember this, and let it fill your heart with gratitude to God, who has thus graciously heard your poor weak prayers. "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits."

More Faux Outrage

Appalling Ignorance.  Beyond Appalling.

A local blogger posted the following fulmination:

UK Police lose the plot

February 12th, 2015 at 7:00 am by David Farrar The Independent reports:

A police force was forced to apologise today after one of its officers told a newsagent to hand over the names of four people in the name of community cohesion, after they bought a commemorative edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Wiltshire police confirmed that it had deleted the names of the buyers from its system, which were collected after officers toured shops warning newsagents to be vigilant during an “assessment of community tensions” in the sleepy market town following the attacks in the French capital in January.

Appalling. Beyond appalling. You buy Charlie Hebdo and the UK Police put you on a watch list. The Police officers in question should transfer to Saudi Arabia.

Hat Tip: No Right

Sounds really bad.  That's the way the media portrayed it in the UK.  But here is the Wiltshire Police statement:

Letter From the UK (About a Sinister Court)

A 'sinister court’ mocks justice again

The workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection are a national scandal 

Christopher Booker

The Telegraph

31 January, 2015

[We have published several pieces recently on the decline of civil liberties in the UK, and the stirrings of an authoritarian state.  Christopher Booker writes of another instance of Leviathan stirring to life. Ed.]

My article on January 3, headlined “The most sinister court in Britain strikes yet again”, has for the past month been the “Most Viewed” Comment item on the Telegraph website. Its theme was the workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection, which has only recently begun to emerge from the shadows – that’s thanks to the stalwart efforts of our top family judge, Lord Justice Munby, to lift something of the suffocating veil of secrecy shrouding the courts over which he now presides.

My report centred on the astonishing treatment of Kathleen Danby, a 72-year-old grandmother, who first hit the headlines last year when it was revealed that – two months earlier – she had been sentenced in her absence to three months in prison by Judge Martin Cardinal, for breaking an injunction by hugging her granddaughter who had run away from “care” 170 times.

Daily Devotional

Losing One's Life

TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, with whom Lewis shares an insight from The Great Divorce (Chapter 9), which he is writing at the time: On the utter truth of losing one’s life to save it (with another word about Charles Williams).

C. S. Lewis

25 May 1944
Thanks for your letter. I too was delighted with our meeting. About the past, and nothing being lost, the point is that ‘He who loses his life shall save it’ [Matthew 10:39] is totally true, true on every level. Everything we crucify will rise again: nothing we try to hold onto will be left us.

I wrote the other day ‘Good and evil when they attain their full stature are retrospective. That is why, at the end of all things, the damned will say we were always in Hell, and the blessed we have never lived anywhere but in heaven.’ Do you agree?

You’re right about C.W. He has an undisciplined mind and sometimes admits into his theology ideas whose proper place is in his romances. What keeps him right is his love of which (and I have now known him long) he radiates more than any man I know. . . . Continue to pray for me as I do for you.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II
Compiled in Yours, Jack
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Family Letters 1905-1931. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.  Sourced from BibleGateway.

How Has It Come to This?

Not On Our Watch

Closing down local bodies and running them by commissioners appointed by central government is rare, but it does happen from time to time. Often it is due to financial mismanagement.  Other occasions have been due to council infighting leading to dysfunctional decision-making.  We suspect that when the UK government recently closed down Rotherham Council, it was due to a reason never before seen.

The hegemony of political correctness and the religion of multi-culturalism in that council led to a reign predatory terror by gangs of Pakistani youth upon vulnerable children.  The council turned a blind eye, lest it be guilty of racism, or, worse,  be in violation of the ultimate social ethic of multi-culturalism.  Caught up in the evil were police commanders and police bureaucrats, politicians, and social workers. 

Rotherham Council Closed Down Following Sexual Abuse Failure

by Andre Walker 
4 Feb 2015
BreitbartLondon

The Government  has closed down ‘dysfunctional’ Rotherham Council until an election can be held in 2016, with all powers currently held by the council’s Cabinet to be transferred to Commissioners answerable to the Secretary of State for Local Government.

Eric Pickles [Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government] made the announcement at the House of Commons today, after Rotherham was shown to have failed to protect children from being sexually abused by organised gangs from the town’s Kashmiri Pakistani community.  The Council has fourteen days to write to Pickles should they wish to object to the plan to bring in the five commissioners. He said he was taking the steps because the council was “seriously failing the people of Rotherham, and particularly the most vulnerable”.

Pickles said that he was minded to appoint the commissioners to replace the “wholly dysfunctional cabinet”. This means that all executive power currently held by democratically elected councillors would pass to the appointed officials if he presses ahead, which is all but guaranteed.  In forcing the council to accept a full ‘all out’ election of councillors in 2016 he claimed he would restore “pride” and “local accountability” to the borough. This is likely to make UKIP a serious contender to win the council, but in any case it is now unlikely democracy will be restored until that election is successfully completed.

Pickles claimed the current council leadership was opposed to democracy as it regularly cracked down on whistleblowers. He said senior managers had created an “unhealthy climate where people are afraid to speak out because they have seen the consequences for those who do.” Pickles said his plan would “put an end to the councils on going failure” and to “restore good local governance to Rotherham”.

Hilary Benn for Labour said it was time for Rotherham to “accept the truth” that they had failed to protect children. He said the “process of healing” could not take place until that happened. During the debate the Rotherham Cabinet announced they would all resign.

Rotherham Council was exposed as having failed to protect as many as 2000 victims from Muslim grooming gangs. They stand accused of refusing to stop the abuse of young white girls by Muslim men for fear of being accused of racism.

Austerity?

Not Seen Anything Yet

Michael Lewis has had a sterling career as a premier finance-sector-skewer.  He has popped more bubbles than most.  Memorable and significant as diagnoses and explanations of "what really went on" include: Liars Poker, The Big Short, and Flash Boys. One is always left with the overwhelming impression that the modern Western financial system is out of control, that fear and greed dominate the sector, and that it cannot continue. 

Lewis has penned a lengthy essay upon Greece, published in Vanity Fair in 2010.  Once again the truth is beyond belief.  Here are some highlights:

Firstly, the size of the debt back in 2010

Daily Devotional

Five Ways Affliction Helps

Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word. (Psalm 119:67)

John Piper

This verse shows that God sends affliction to help us learn his word. We should ask how affliction helps us understand God’s word and keep it.

There are innumerable answers, as there are innumerable experiences. But here are five:

1. Affliction takes the glibness of life away and makes us more serious so that our mindset is more in tune with the seriousness of God’s word.


2. Affliction knocks worldly props from under us and forces us to rely more on God, which brings us more in tune with the aim of the word.


3. Affliction makes us search the Scriptures with greater desperation for help, rather than treating it as marginal to life.


4. Affliction brings us into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings so that we fellowship more closely with him and see the world more readily through his eyes.


5. Affliction mortifies deceitful and distracting fleshly desires, and so brings us into a more spiritual frame which fits God’s word more.

May the Holy Spirit give us grace to not begrudge the pedagogy of God.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Here We Stand . . .

. . . We Can Do No Other

---

Richard John Neuhaus:

We contend, and we contend relentlessly, for the dignity of the human person, of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, destined from eternity for eternity—every human person, no matter how weak or how strong, no matter how young or how old, no matter how productive or how burdensome, no matter how welcome or how inconvenient. Nobody is a nobody; nobody is unwanted. All are wanted by God, and therefore to be respected, protected, and cherished by us.

We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until all the elderly who have run life’s course are protected against despair and abandonment, protected by the rule of law and the bonds of love. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person—of every human person.

Against the encroaching shadows of the culture of death, against forces commanding immense power and wealth, against the perverse doctrine that a woman’s dignity depends upon her right to destroy her child, against what St. Paul calls the principalities and powers of the present time, this convention renews our resolve that we shall not weary, we shall not rest, until the culture of life is reflected in the rule of law and lived in the law of love.

---

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Silly, "Enlightened" Women)

Enlightening the Silly Women

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

February 7, 2015

The path of feminism has been a straight one, like the flight of an arrow. It has gone straight from women’s liberation to handcuffs by the bed. You’ve come a long way, baby.

Those whose ideas about individual sexual liberty are formed best while galloping with the herd are in for a real treat this Valentine’s Day. 50 Shades of Grey is due to be released to a breathless audience of sexual goobers. And that, incidentally, is no small feat — it is somewhat difficult for mouth breathers to be breathless like that.

Here on the right you may see that the Vermont Teddy Bear company has even gotten in on the action, manufacturing a gray little teddy bear with a sharp silk necktie and handcuffs. Nothing says “be my Valentine” like a little gray teddy bear with twisted desires. I was provoked by this image to go and watch the trailer for 50 Shades, which I did as my pastoral duty. The stupid, it burns.

In that trailer, Anastasia Steele, a mousy little nobody, asks Christian Grey, a demented but steely-eyed business magnate, to “enlighten” her. What does that mean? I will tell you what it means! It means that some dim bulb winds up tied to a bed! Yay!

Yay? This is consensual, right? Well, says the secularist eroti-despot, whip in hand, “I can tell you that for now if it makes you feel any better. We just do the consensual rape fantasies now as a catechetical preparation for the real thing later.”

Daily Devotional

Indebted to What?

"Therefore, brethren, we are debtors."
Romans 8:12

Charles H. Spurgeon

As God's creatures, we are all debtors to him: to obey him with all our body, and soul, and strength. Having broken his commandments, as we all have, we are debtors to his justice, and we owe to him a vast amount which we are not able to pay.

But of the Christian it can be said that he does not owe God's justice anything, for Christ has paid the debt his people owed; for this reason the believer owes the more to love. I am a debtor to God's grace and forgiving mercy; but I am no debtor to his justice, for he will never accuse me of a debt already paid. Christ said, "It is finished!" and by that he meant, that whatever his people owed was wiped away forever from the book of remembrance. Christ, to the uttermost, has satisfied divine justice; the account is settled; the handwriting is nailed to the cross; the receipt is given, and we are debtors to God's justice no longer.

But then, because we are not debtors to our Lord in that sense, we become ten times more debtors to God than we should have been otherwise.

Revenue Problems

It's a Strange, Strange World

Imagine for a minute a bizarre parallel universe in which institutions of government were so perverse they refused to do things on the grounds they did not have sufficient funds.  Free libraries for citizens?  Yeah, that would be wonderful, but--Nah, we can't afford it.  Next.  Clearly such behaviour would indicate derangement by all concerned.

Consequently, in our more sane world, local government has never let a lack of money stand in the way of new spending projects.  That's what all government exist for, right?  To spend more of other peoples' money.  It was completely predictable, therefore, that as the pressure group, Local Government New Zealand (representing local and municipal governments in New Zealand) recently faced up to the unexpected crisis of no-money-left, it would come up with an equally unexpected solution.  More money, please.  They have thought long and hard about how local governments can extract more money out of the citizens to pay for all the big-spending, wonderful ideas and plans local governments are so adept at creating. 

Local government has a revenue problem, not a spending problem--or so we are told.  Ratepayers (that is, property owners) have reached the limits of their ability to pay more. There are murmurings of rates revolts.  So now, local councils want new ways to tax and extract money citizens' money.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Until Someone Unsettles It

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

2 February, 2015

The creation account in Genesis is read in different ways. It would be easy therefore, to jump right into the Genesis text and show that I read it in one of those different ways.

I do read it in one of those different ways, and bringing out arguments accordingly would be easy. Before getting to my main set of points, let me give just one example. All sides agree that the Hebrew word for day — yom — admits of different meanings, just as the English word day does. For example, I could say, “Back in my grandfather’s day, he was a champion at picking corn, and, while it was day, could average ten bushels a day.”

Now several things are true about this. One is that my grandfather really was a champion at picking corn, but that is another story for another time. The second thing is that day has three different meanings in the course of just one sentence. Day first means time, “in my grandfather’s time.” Second, it means “while the sun was up,” day as opposed to night. And third, it meant “twenty-hour increments,” Tuesday and then Wednesday, and so on.

But the third thing to note about this is that for native speakers of English, the different uses of day do not throw us in a state of consternation. We pick up on all kinds of contextual clues that enable us to tell what is going on.

Daily Devotional

The Forgiveness Cycle

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation. (Luke 11:4)

John Piper

Who forgives whom first?

• “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” (Luke 11:4)
• “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” (Colossians 3:13)

When Jesus teaches us to pray that God forgive us “for we ourselves forgive,” he is not saying that the first move in forgiveness was our move. Rather, it goes like this: God forgave us when we believed in Christ (Acts 10:43). Then, from this broken, joyful, grateful, hopeful, experience of being forgiven, we offer forgiveness to others.

This signifies that we have been savingly forgiven. That is, our forgiving others shows that we have faith; we are united to Christ; we are indwelt by the Spirit.

But we still sin (1 John 1:8, 10). So we still turn to God for fresh applications of the work of Christ on our behalf — fresh applications of forgiveness. We cannot do this with any confidence if we are harboring an unforgiving spirit (Matthew 18:23–35).

That’s why Jesus says we ask for forgiveness because we are forgiving. This is like saying: “Father, continue to extend to me the mercies purchased by Christ because by these mercies I forsake vengeance and extend to others what you have extended to me.”

May you know God’s forgiveness afresh today, and may that grace overflow in your heart in forgiveness toward others.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Misplaced Responsibity

It's Everyone Else's Fault

The politics of guilt and pity have a lot to answer for.  It's a national plague.  The modern phenomenon of culture-wide guilt and pity arises out of the world-view of egalitarianism.  In this wretched perspective anyone who is less well off, or less wealthy than oneself is an object of pity.  They are the deprived, the suffering, and the afflicted--worthy objects of our compassion.

The welling up of pity assuages the guilt which is also the product of egalitarianism.  The prevailing idea of egalitarianism is that if someone has less, the cause of their deprivation is that others have more.  The pie is fixed in size.  There are only so many pieces to go around.  If someone has a smaller piece than others, it is because others have unjustly seized bigger pieces. 

The politics of guilt and pity lead to one outcome.  A demand that the state "do more" and rule, regulate, and intervene to ensure the greediness of the guilty is compensated by the government, which will "do something" for the deprived.  Hence, in this way, guilt and pity are perfectly reconciled.  Except they are not.  The pity was false to begin with.  As false as the guilt.  Both are products of a madcap and bizarre egalitarianism, which is one of the stupidist notions ever to afflict the most stupid of stupid people.  The escalating of the "problem" to the government to rule, regulate, and fix puts salve on both the guilt and pity feelings.  But the problem was false to begin with.  The "solutions" are equally false. 

Below is an illustration of guilt and pity at work.  Lauren Priestley tells us how a young mum has been hard hit by the housing shortage.

Chesterton Explains How Unbelief Drove Him to Belief

The Absurdity of the Rationalist Mind

In a delightful essay entitled, "The Paradoxes of Christianity", G. K. Chesterton describes how he was provoked into becoming a Christian by reading the rationalist attacks upon it.

I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying about; . . . .  I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. . . . Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the freethinkers unsettled the mind.  They do.  They unsettled mine horribly.  The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished reading Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.  As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought  broke across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."  I was in a dreadful way.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 288.]