It’s Inevitable

I have that peculiar sensation again. I wrote about it last week. I feel as though I’m winning my battles. As though I have broken through some sort of threshold. When I had this feeling last Monday, I hoped it would never go away. It waned to some degree, which worried me. But it seems to return. I wish I knew another Christian who had experienced the same thing, so I could ask about it.

I am so glad my life has changed. It could not have happened at a better time. Well, that’s wrong. It would have been better if it had happened when I was two. But I believe the human race is headed in the direction of trial and difficulty, and it would have been very bad had I not come around before we reached this precipice.

I suppose it’s provincial of me to say the human race is headed for problems. In most countries, misery and failure are normal. Take a look at a world map, pick a location at random, and ask yourself what life is like there. South and Central America? Poverty, crime, endemic corruption, extreme politics, and a stifling caste system. China? Oppression, brutality, and low wages. Africa? Don’t get me started. India? The only nice thing you can say about it is that a lot of Africans wish they lived as well as Indians. It may be that we’re moving toward a global crisis, but in most places, it’s hard to tell a crisis from the usual run of luck. What’s unusual is that America is getting sucked into it. Usually, this country is an oasis.

America-bashers don’t get it. They squirm and seethe when patriots praise this abundantly blessed nation, and when we claim God is the source of our affluence. But we’re right. This country is a preview of heaven; it was raised up to serve God. For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve had stability, peace on our own soil, unparalleled freedom, and a level of prosperity very few nations could approach. God has gone beyond mere generosity and patience. He has spoiled us. And we are responding not with gratitude, but by becoming a nation of tattooed and pierced self-worshipers.

We did it all ourselves! Thanks, but no thanks, God. We obviously don’t need your help. Things are going swell, so we’d rather do our own thing. We’re so powerful and so in charge of our own destinies, we can take drugs and sleep around and experiment with humanism and atheism and weird, chic religions, while remaining prosperous and strong. We can have socialism as well as wealth and freedom, even though no other nation has ever managed it. We’re EMPOWERED. We can do anything. We don’t need your help, because we have something way better: self-esteem. Who needs Moses or Jesus when you have Anthony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle?

That’s not how life works. The universe has a ruler, and it has laws. God and believers contribute to the supply of power and harmony in the universe, and everyone else depletes it. It’s a spiritual welfare state, and when things get bad enough, the rolls get purged. I am very grateful that my thick skull is absorbing that, so I can set myself aside and get out of the current, before our country hits the rapids. I wish I could say I figured it out on my own, but it had to be beaten into me. I don’t know if believers will be spared the turmoil that looms, but I do know that God makes problems easier to bear.

I feel like I’m accumulating spiritual tools, and I have to wonder what purpose this armament is supposed to serve. Is it intended to be used in the course of ordinary life, or is there an especially tough job ahead? Given a choice between fighting or facing peace in an overarmed state, I’d choose the latter. I would hate to see this country descend into a three-dimensional remake of East of Eden, complete with the false hope of the simplistic God-hater Marx as messiah.

In the past, our problems seemed to take care of themselves. Pretty well, anyway. Now they seem to be unwilling to go away and unresponsive to our best efforts to tame them. My explanation: God has always limited our misfortunes and ordered our lives for us, and when He chooses to stop, the result is entropy. The humanist explanation is just like the party line of the socialist apologists: we can fix it; we just need another try.

I don’t think we’re smart enough to fix or even understand really big social problems. I think the orderly, peaceful way life usually proceeds in the US is due to divine supervision, period. I think God co-wrote the Constitution. I believe He quietly prevents catastrophe after catastrophe. And we are inviting Him to stop. If we’re ever truly on our own, our best efforts will yield nothing but grief. And without God, even apparent success is eventually revealed to be failure.

I am thinking about these things because it’s Rosh Hashanah, and our financial institutions are in big trouble, and we are contemplating electing a socialist whose advisors caused the problems we are having now. Christians like to say they don’t live under the law of the Old Testament, but the Jewish holidays are eternal. They still mean something. And Rosh Hashanah is about choices. Sometimes people are supernaturally compelled to make choices that will lead to misery. I hope that’s not the situation in this election. I hope we still have a chance to put John McCain and Sarah Palin in the White House and move farther from, not closer to, godless, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian Europe.