Category Archives: Bible

The Plight of Esther

Fasting before a difficult, "confrontational" decision is important

In the Book of Esther (more about it here), we find that a mighty official called Haman wants all the Jews in the Persian empire exterminated. The only way to save them is to make the king aware of this. The only person who could do this is the queen, Esther, whose Jewish origins she has so far kept secret.

When her uncle Mordecai, who lives in Susa, where the king and queen reside, begs Esther to go to the king, she says:

“All the king’s officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned the king has but one law: that they be put to death unless the king extends the gold scepter to them and spares their lives. But thirty days have passed since I was called to go to the king.” (Esther 4:11)

Mordecai then says these remarkable words:

“Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (4:13,14)

Esther then agrees to go ahead with her dangerous mission, but makes this important condition:

“Go, gather together all the Jews who are in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my attendants will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.” (4:16)

Today, when the churches consider how to move forward in a culture increasingly hostile to them, they should consider Esther’s plight. And consider fasting before they make a move. (Of course, the churches in the West are nowhere near the plight of the Jews in the book of Esther – yet. However, there are also varying levels of fasting to choose from.)

Jordan Peterson on Canada and the West in general

In this 25 minute video interview with a journalist from the Telegraph, he says, among other things, that the predictors of “left-wing authoritarianism” are: 1. low verbal intelligence, 2. being a woman, 3. having feminine traits, 4. having taken part in a “political correctness” course.

The traits of such people are the “dark tetrad”: 1. narcissism, 2. Machiavellianism, 3. psychopathy and 4. sadism,

There is always a small number of psychopaths, about 3 percent, in every society. If they rise to 5 percent, people realise there is a problem (“we have to beat back the snakes”) and they beat them back. If they fall to 1 percent, people lose their guard and become “too nice”, which the psychopaths exploit, so they grow back again to 3 or more percent.

We’re in a post-Christian era. He also talks about Covid, climate change and “group rights” (which are an oxymoron because there is no such thing as group responsibilities).

Jeremiah 2:11-13

Has a nation ever changed its gods?
    (Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their glorious God
    for worthless idols.
12 Be appalled at this, you heavens,
    and shudder with great horror,”
declares the Lord.
13 “My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
    the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
    broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

(Source: NIV)

The Problem With Environmentalists

They have succumbed to fear-mongering and a psychological urge to "return to Eden"

The disagreement I have with environmentalists is, I think, on two levels.

The first level is the propagandistic level, the relentless, baseless fearmongering. For example the General Secretary of the UN, António Guterres, proclaiming last month that the “era of global boiling has arrived”.

That attempt to create a panic “meme”, spread throughout the world by a sickeningly compliant media, is, on the face of it, beyond ridiculous. What will they say next year, or next decade? Maybe this: “Earth has now reached the aggregate phase of plasma”.

How does the spreading of these kinds of memes tally with the most frequently repeated commandment in the Bible, namely “do not be afraid”?

The other level also has deeply religious connotations. On the deepest level, environmentalists appeal to the “urge to go back to Eden”. Psychologically speaking the “unwillingness to grow up”. That appears a bit harsh as a statement. However, state education and media pronouncements are designed to see in “Big Brother” or rather “Big Daddy”, the state and the corporations it is living in symbiotic relationship with, as the only saviour. No other God allowed, and no individual thinking and research either.

Succumbing to this trend is an expression of the fear of responsibility, responsibility which was given to us by God before the Fall, to “fill the earth and govern it” (Gen 1:28, other translations say: “subdue it”, or, as the Amplified Bible writes: “subjugate it [putting it under your power]”). Governing entails responsibility. To whom? Ultimately to God.

Environmentalists however don’t tend to think that way. Or if they do, they like to appeal to the government (i.e. Caesar) to sort out what they consider to be a problem. Instead of doing it themselves. They pass on the responsibility to the government. Thereby rendering to Caesar what in truth is God’s. Empowering Caesar in a way contrary to what Jesus commanded.

In Genesis 2:15, it says (again in the Amplified Bible): “So the Lord God took the man [He had made] and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” Note that “cultivate” precedes “keep”. That means, again, taming nature and making it amenable for human use.

In other words: We are not to “retreat” to Eden (impossible anyway according to Genesis 3:24). Attempts to do so will cause no end of troubles. That’s not “fearmongering”, that’s a statement aligned with the commandment to “fear God” (e.g. 1 Peter 2:17). We were not even meant to remain in Eden before the Fall (at least, not exclusively), but to venture out into the world and govern and cultivate it. For what purpose? To be, as the image of God, the cultivators of nature – under God’s guidance and commandments – and stewards of the resulting Kingdom of God.

In other words, instead of retreating to Eden, which is conceptually at the heart of environmentalism, we are to progress towards the Kingdom of God. One of the central commandments of God which enables us to do exactly that is of course “thou shalt not steal”. This is a commandment we are progressively, institutionally breaking on a massive scale: The progressive abrogation of private property through taxes (way beyond the tithe), regulation and inflation.

Private property rights is the main instrument with which humans can exert their stewardship under God. The manifold stealing of theses rights is what lies at the heart of our environmental problems. But it is this root, this economic, institutional and not least spiritual root, that the institutions committing the infringements are loath to address, because they profit from continuing with their infringements. Most environmentalists appear to be totally oblivious of this root problem. Or, if they are aware of it, they are silent about it for reasons that may sometimes even be nefarious.

It is interesting to note that it is often the biologists who want to do the retreating and the economists who want to do the progressing. This was exemplified by the bet that the economist Julian Simons arranged with the enviromento-alarmist biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Here’s an article about it. To quote from it:

To make his case, Simon published an article in Social Science Quarterly that taunted Paul Ehrlich, the main proponent of imminent doom, into taking a bet on their respective views. If population growth was outpacing the finite quantity of resources, the prices of key resources should (theoretically) be rising. If prices increased, then Ehrlich would be vindicated. If not, Simon would be. Ehrlich chose five resource prices and bet on their trends over a decade. Simon won the debate, as all five commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) declined in the wager period of 1980 to 1990. 

(Ehrlich then offered a counter-bet which Simon rejected, for good reasons. Read about it in the above linked article.)

I think this disagreement between a biologist and an economist is almost archetypal. I think so because biologists argue from the point of view of nature, and economists from the point of view of humans.

Economists also are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses, which may entail more than just monetary costs and benefits. Which is why the world should listen more to Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician who has emerged from the environmentalist movement saying that, while he believes human made climate change is happening, it is “not the end of the world“. He even explains how a rising temperature will actually save lives and that there are much more pressing problems we could and should solve and which we could do with much less effort and thus save – human – lives.

It’s no wonder most people are not aware of positions like Lomborg’s. They have been essentially frozen out of the debate. Which is one of the reasons I became instantly suspicious when I saw how the media handled the Covid pandemic and started pushing for “solutions” which served a nefarious agenda, while obviously ignoring a proper cost-benefit analysis of the promoted measures.

I had seen it all before, in relative “slow motion”, during the preceding decades of climate debate and policies. I continue to see it now.

Totalitarianism Begins With Censorship

Principles of what a free society means are being redefined by collectivists.

Article by Barry Brownstein.

Excerpts:

Consider this essay: “Don’t COVID Vaccine Mandates Actually Promote Freedom?” [See link in the original.] Medical ethicists Kyle Ferguson and Arthur Caplan argue, “Those who oppose cracking down on the unvaccinated are getting it all wrong.” Ferguson and Caplan are sure their opponents have a “flawed view of freedom.” They argue “Passports and mandates are hardly ‘strong-arm tactics.’ These strategies are better seen as liberty inducers. They bring about freedom rather than deplete it.”

They add, “a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign will liberate us — as individuals and as a collective — from the callous grip of a pandemic that just won’t seem to end.” Orwell’s “Party” proclaimed in 1984 that “Freedom is slavery.” Ferguson and Caplan come close to arguing “Slavery is freedom.”

Ferguson and Caplan assure us that the enlightenment view of “the unbound individual” is outdated. They want to reimagine freedom as communal, starting with “the individual’s participation in a community and the kind of community in which the individual lives.” 

[. . .]

For some, flowery visions of the common good have always been seductive. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observes that even well-meaning people will ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends,” why shouldn’t the system “be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

Hayek challenges the axiomatic belief that wise people can tell others what the common good is. He explains why there is no such thing as the common good: “The welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less or more. The welfare of the people, like the happiness of a man, depends upon a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

Here’s the crucial question: Who decides what the “common good” is? With what authority?

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James Macgregor Burns recounts in his book Fire and Light how Rousseau’s ideas of the general will led to the brutality of his disciple Robespierre. Like Hayek, Burns explains that there can be no agreement about the common good. Claiming to rule by the common good inevitably leads to excesses. Robespierre and the other eleven men who made up the Committee of Public Safety ruled France with “unlimited power” and “terror.”

Burns explains what Rousseau did not understand: “Peaceful and democratic conflict [is] crucial to the achievement of freedom.” Instead, Rousseau imagined, like Ferguson and Caplan “a new society filled with good citizens… working selflessly and with identical minds for the common good.”

Rousseau’s ideas are mantras for censors. In Rousseau’s world, there would be no pesky “long debates, dissensions and tumult” impeding implementation of the common good.

[. . .]

We can never make the best of “imperfect material” when those posing as having superior knowledge are allowed to coerce others. Hayek writes, “What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.” In other words, choose to be directed by the limited power of Dr. Fauci’s mind or choose a free society’s virtually unlimited and unpredictable power.

Let’s put this together. Health collectivists, behaving like Jacobins, are sure there is one best way; they believe they are the arbiter of truth. Cloaking themselves in the holy robes of the augur of the common good, dissent is not to be tolerated. The end to the pandemic requires not that we follow the collectivists but that we are free to consider different perspectives and discover in the course of an uncoerced social process what really works.

Continue reading here.

And/or watch this 10-minute video here.

Final thoughts: What scares many people into the arms of authoritarians and collectivists is precisely the “unlimited and unpredictable power” of a “free society”. That is why God sent us the commandments. They give us a framework that limits the “unlimited” power and channels it into more “predictable” developments. Not only are we free to do anything within the framework of those commandments, He says. He also promises an abundance of blessings if we adhere to them.

(P.S.: Joseph Boot, in his book “The Mission of God“, writes: “Formerly, when the incoming President of the United States took the oath of office it was done, not on a closed Bible, but on a Bible opened to Deuteronomy 28, invoking the blessings and cursings of the law for obedience or disobedience.” Unfortunately, Boot doesn’t tell us “when” this “formerly” time was. But if it’s true, it’s significant nonetheless, as he continues: “All this reveals the fact that biblical law has had a continuous history as an object of relevance and study that makes it unique amongst ancient legal systems, and gives it a ‘claim to historical influence unmatched by any other legal system of antiquity.'”)

The Religion of Statism

From the book: 'The Mission of Gd', by Joseph Boot

From chapter 4 of Boot’s book:

“The Puritan missiologist, however, is neither a retreatist pacifist nor a neo-Marxist, but believes in the necessity of civil government, qualified by the biblical conviction that the state only has abiding legitimacy where it surrenders to its limited God-ordained role as minister (diaconate) of justice in terms of God’s authority (Rom. 13:4)

[. . .]

“As soon as the state steps outside this sphere it plays God and offers every form of counterfeiting of the Word of God. [. . .] Such a state will be judged by God and once a state commands what God forbids, if Christ is truly Lord, then the Christian has to religious duty to resist. [Emphasis in the original.]

[. . .]

By moving outside its God-ordained sphere, the state thus progressively destroys localism and with it, liberty, as it asserts a messianic (saving) role for itself in the centralized politics of power that exists to serve itself. This is done by attaching to itself the prerogatives of God. It is fascinating to observe in this regard that the theological categories of God’s word are inescapable to all people, and if denied to God are typically transferred to the individual (anarchism) or the state (totalitarianism). When examined through theological lenses, statism involves a pretending to deity by offering everything from usurped sovereignty and law (in terms of human autonomy and positivistic law-making), to providence (cradle-to-grave security through state welfarism), predestination (by social science and planning), incarnation (by the implementing of man’s ‘word’ and idea), atonement (via political reparations, payments, and the politics of guilt), salvation (through a growing world order) and judgement (by threatened environmental and social catastrophe for disobedience) and thus a counterfeit kingdom – the dream of Babel.

Why do the nations rebel?

Psalm 2 appears to be a comment on the Tower of Babel

Psalm 2:

1 Why do the nations conspire[a]
    and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth rise up
    and the rulers band together
    against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
3 “Let us break their chains
    and throw off their shackles.”

4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
    the Lord scoffs at them.
5 He rebukes them in his anger
    and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
6 “I have installed my king
    on Zion, my holy mountain.”

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
    today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
    and I will make the nations your inheritance,
    the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron[b];
    you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

10 Therefore, you kings, be wise;
    be warned, you rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear
    and celebrate his rule with trembling.
12 Kiss his son, or he will be angry
    and your way will lead to your destruction,
for his wrath can flare up in a moment.
    Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Footnotes

  1. Psalm 2:1 Hebrew; Septuagint rage
  2. Psalm 2:9 Or will rule them with an iron scepter (see Septuagint and Syriac)

The men who joined David

When he was being persecuted by King Saul

All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander. About four hundred men were with him [David].

1 Samuel 22:2

Then he wrote, in Psalm 31:24

Be strong and take heart,
    all you who hope in the Lord.