This Land Isn’t Your Land, Especially if You’re Mexican

In prayer this morning, I felt nausea again. I started thinking about Woody Guthrie. I believe God was directing my attention back to him. When I think about the indifference I used to feel with regard to Guthrie, I feel like someone gave me poison. All my life, people tried to make be think Guthrie was a sweet guy who wrote upbeat songs. In reality, he was dark and angry, and he was an enemy of God. I can’t believe schoolteachers made me sing his ridiculous anti-God anthem. Schools were already insane when I was a kid. Worse than I have realized.

Guthrie was an atheist, and he was against Christianity. There are apologists who claim otherwise, but that’s just part of the left’s sick effort to lay claim to the church in order to destroy it.

Here’s something Guthrie wrote: “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in.” Sounds nice, right? The Bible says God is love. But it also says he is a God of justice. Furthermore, it says he is a humanoid being who sits on a throne in heaven, and it says he gets angry and kills people, sometimes by the millions. God is love, but not everything that feels like love is God.

When you say, “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in,” you are expressly denying the God of the Bible, because he is more than that.

Here are the words that follow the quote above:

The books of the holy bible never say but one time just exactly what God is [not true], and in those three little words it pours out a hundred million college educations and says, God Is Love.

And that is the only real definite answer to ten thousand wild queries and questions that I my own self tossed at my bible. That is the only really sensible, easy, honest, warm, plain, quick and clear answer I found – when I was ready to throw so-called fearful cowardly thieving poisoning religion out my trash door, it was those three words that made not only religion, but also several other sorts of superstitious fears and hatreds in me meet one very quick death.

Pretty clear.

Guthrie claimed he thought about Jesus all the time. That probably is not true, and if it were true, it would not make him a Christian.

Leftists love to try to own Christ. They say he was a homosexual, even though he supported the Jewish law, which describes homosexuality as an abomination. They say he was a socialist, in spite of the commandment against coveting. They say Christianity is only about being nice to people, in spite of the overwhelmingly negative nature of Jesus’s remarks about humanity. Meanwhile, they deny the existence of Satan and hell. They deny the existence of heaven. They seem to think Jesus was a deluded sissy who ran around teaching pacifism and mindless approval. They think he was wrong about God, but right about being nice. The left’s Jesus is a straw messiah. You can’t get redeeming blood out of straw.

If Jesus was wrong about God, why should we listen to him about being nice? A wrong Jesus would have no more authority than Stuart Smalley. He wouldn’t be an authority figure. He would be ridiculous, like Rod McKuen or Leo Buscaglia.

I learned something else about Guthrie: his twisted song about America contained verses we don’t teach our kids. Look:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie was a communist, and that explains the first stanza above. Attacks on property rights were very important to union organizers trying to force their way onto company properties in order to recruit. Laws were made, to force property owners to let them in.

The second verse is another of his attacks on Christianity. “If God is so wonderful, why is there suffering?” Never mind our utter failure to cooperate with God.

In the early 20th century, God gave man a huge gift. He poured his Holy Spirit out on a bunch of believers in a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. They began speaking in tongues. They got a taste of the power of the early church. What happened afterward? America rejected the gift. The Azusa Street miracle produced a wave of Holy Spirit evangelism which gave rise to the charismatic movement, but what percentage of American Christians listened? Very small. Even today, the message of the Holy Spirit is generally rejected, and the churches that accept it are mainly concerned with money. They are run by greedy idiots, and the people in the pews are greedy, too. The movement never became what it should have.

The Azusa Street Revival occurred between 1906 and 1915. It petered out. Then we had a pretty rough century. We had 2 world wars, a depression, 2 failed wars in Asia, and the spiritual cancer of the 1960’s. The 1960’s were Satan’s revival, and unlike Azusa Street, this revival succeeded. It’s 2018, and we still live in the culture of the 1960’s.

P.J. O’Rourke said something interesting. He visited a university decades after the Sixties, and he he saw kids who still dressed and acted like Sixties students. He understood how strange that was. It would have been like going to a university in the Fifties and seeing kids wearing raccoon coats and listening to Jelly Roll Morton. It shows what the Sixties did to us. They never ended.

The last century was rough, but it wasn’t because we didn’t have socialism or because we believed God would help us. It was because we hated God and rejected him. We hate him now more than ever.

Here’s another song Guthrie and his kind used to sing. The name is “Long-Haired Preachers” or “The Preacher and the Slave.” It will make you sick, if you have any kind of feeling for God:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet

Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and Pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

And the starvation army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you are on the bum

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell

Workingmen of all countries unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain

Last Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

That’s more like it. That’s more honest. You can teach kids that “This Land is Your Land” is a good song, because the limited version they learn omits the anti-God business, but the song above lays it all right out there: “Give up God, and you will prosper.”

When this song is sung, you’re supposed to chant, “That’s a lie,” between verses, until you get to the last 2 verses, which celebrate carnal effort. At the end of those verses, you shout, “That’s no lie!”

So faith in God is a lie, to leftists. Nothing new there.

How can anyone hate the Salvation Army? It’s an organization that has helped save countless people, not just from damnation, but from things like alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, and poverty.

It’s the craziest thing. God has increased the numbers of his children by sending preachers around, and he has used hymns to get his point across. In Guthrie’s time, Satan used preachers, too, and they used music. They went to migrant camps and preached atheism, covetousness, violence, and the victim mentality the left is famous for. Never say Satan doesn’t have preachers.

The Azusa Street Revival failed, but Guthrie’s God-hating socialist revival worked. We never learned how to be blessed by God. We learned how to carry signs and take things from other people.

I feel like I understand the world better than ever, and it’s not pleasant. I see why God is exasperated. Nothing he does for us works. We rejected him in Adam’s time. We rejected the laws of Moses. We rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus comes down personally, to reign in the Messianic Age, we will reject him again, even without curses and problems to complain about. It does not matter what God does. We will always reject him. No wonder he’s going to destroy the world. Everyone, even God, reaches a point where he says, “Enough.”

You can’t talk to victimhood junkies about God. You have to get close to God in order to see how right he is, and they hate him so much, they won’t accept the milk, let alone the meat. They won’t hear him. They won’t give him a try. They want to have all of their problems fixed, right now, without any type of repentance or accountability. Giving them blessings would be like giving a fortune to a 2-year-old. It would just make things worse.

I wonder what it will look like, when people reject Jesus during the Messianic Age. It’s hard to believe anyone could be that stupid, but we know it will happen. It’s hard to believe Adam and Eve rejected God, or that the Jews rejected him after seeing the pillar of fire and cloud. It’s hard to believe when another person misses the obvious, but we’re doing it right now, and we think we’re the smartest people who ever lived.

There are reasons for failure and suffering. It’s not random. It’s not caused by rich people who hoard an imaginary cache of golden eggs. Kill the rich, pass out their money, and what do you get? Poor people who have one great Saturday night and then return immediately to poverty. Poverty isn’t just a lack of wealth. It’s a lack of the inner qualities that draw wealth. Money doesn’t give you those qualities. Trash with cash is still trash.

America is disgusting. We are ungrateful and spoiled. We bite the hand that feeds us all day, every day. Eventually we will be presented with bills.

Lukewarmness is poisoning us. We think we please God while we keep one foot in the Sixties. That’s not possible.

I feel queasy because of what God is teaching me, but I appreciate it. Medicine doesn’t have to taste good. I am very disturbed by what I see around me and inside me, but thank God I’m able to see it.