God Turns Arrows into Gifts

I don’t get a lot of hostile comments any more, but I got one the other day. When you get nonsensical, angry comments with fake email addresses, you have to wonder if they come from people you know. People who sit on boiling resentment every day but never confront you.

There were a couple of truly miserable people among my law school acquaintances. People who were petty enough to read my blog every day long after I dropped them and went on with life. I heard from them. I also got a drunken comment from an angry relative after I wrote a piece in which I discussed the racism and insincere leftism of some of my relations. I told the truth about them, and what I said was important and useful, so I don’t feel all that bad. My relative died young, so he’s not reading my blog.

The commenter I heard from recently responded to a piece in which I told how disturbed I was to look back and see the kind of person I used to be. I didn’t say I had since been perfected. I said I expected to be disturbed in the future if I looked back at things I write now. The commenter said I had not changed and that I was more self-righteous than ever.

That mystified me, because I knew it was not true. I can see disagreeing with me about my positions. I can see criticizing me because I’m not always consistent. Sometimes I write more like the old me, and sometimes less. Saying I’m more self-righteous than I used to be doesn’t make much sense.

Last night, I was thinking about it, and I remembered something: to many people, anyone who offers any kind of moral judgment is self-righteous. They don’t know what the term means. They think anybody who criticizes any type of sin is self-righteous.

We hear this all the time from leftists and uninformed Christians. They misquote Matthew 7. Even the atheists. “Judge not!”, they like to say, like that’s the entire Bible. But Matthew 7 doesn’t really say that. If you say, “Judge not,” you mislead, because there is more to the chapter.

In Matthew 7, Yeshua told us to judge ourselves before giving others vital constructive criticism. He told us to remove the beams from our eyes, and then we would be able to remove the specks from other people’s eyes. He expected us to give other people correction. Otherwise, the passage makes no sense and runs too long.

Satan is a slanderer. “Devil” literally means “slanderer.” A slanderer is a person who makes false accusations. False accusations are incredibly popular among leftists. People who are against Christianity are leftists, even if they’re politically conservative. They are leftists in the supernatural. Satan was the first leftist. He stood up and rebelled against the divinely-imparted authority of his betters. Every human leftist, political or spiritual, is descended from him.

This weekend, leftists surrounded the White House and rioted. They battered the police. One put on a Hamas headband and waved a plastic replica of Joe Biden’s head, covered with what one hopes was fake blood. It was a call for assassination. They were shouting slanders, blaming the Jews for antisemitic violence of a type that was actually worse than typical Nazi activity. They slandered America and Joe Biden, blaming them for the Palestinian-caused war deaths of Palestinians.

Leftists have literally turned slandering white people into a profession. Universities pay people to help students and professors slander white people. BLM is a slander machine, and its witch founders have become wealthy in a few years, taking money from donations.

Satan hates correction, because it restores order and allows people who are corrected to be blessed and saved. For this reason, he has taught his children to slander and harm everyone who corrects. That includes everyone who testifies. The powerful Jews of the time of Yeshua conspired to murder Lazarus for the crime of being resurrected. His presence was testimony to their errors and corruption.

If you have good intentions, and you try to be humble, and you point out sin in order to help people, you can expect to be called self-righteous in an absurd and mindless kind of way. It’s a way to put you on the defensive and turn you into the topic of discussion. It’s deflection. It helps people avoid life-saving reproof.

Many sinners feel they’re being put on trial when you mention their sins, so they put you on trial instead. This is how Yeshua and the prophets died.

It’s projection. Satan is the king of projection. He invented negative campaigning. He doesn’t just tell you he’s warm and fuzzy and brilliant, and that he will be a better savior than Yeshua. He tells you Yeshua is vicious and uncaring, and he says his followers are all hypocrites and sadists who get off on controlling other people unjustly.

It works very well. Even 2,000 years after Satan was defeated on the cross, most people, including many Christians, still go to hell, and they serve Satan, only, while they live. And many Christians are intimidated into silence.

As for me, however bad I may still be, I am definitely less self-righteous than I used to be. I often lie awake at night talking to God about how contemptible I am, based on what I am without him. Sometimes I think about things I said and did, and part of me wishes I had never existed. I wish I could start over with a clean slate. I may be forgiven, but what happened, happened. It can never be undone.

I may be more critical of sin than I was, but I am definitely less self-righteous. Whatever the motivation for the comment was, it wasn’t an increase in my self-righteousness. I know what I was, and I know what I am now.

I was raised very badly. I was left ignorant. My parents were immature, and they didn’t know God. My parents did a great job of ruining me, and instead of seeing the problem as an adult and trying to fix it, I doubled down. I was truly their son.

My dad was far and away the most successful of my grandfather’s sons-in-law, and I have relatives who will never accept any complaints about my parents simply because my sister and I had more than they did. It’s a little odd when this kind of thing comes from an aunt, since the father of my aunts was richer than my dad, and my grandfather helped two inept sons-in-law a great, great deal with their careers, which still did not amount to much.

My criticism of my parents is true, though. My dad was not just an atheist for most of his life; he was a childish, angry, vengeful atheist. He didn’t just fail to teach me about God; he taught me that God and Christians were ridiculous. My mother was loving and unselfish, and she battled my abusive father for me, but she was also rebellious and emotional, and she didn’t introduce me to God, which was her most important responsibility.

Often, my parents knew they were doing wrong. I can’t pretend that isn’t true.

If I had to guess at a number, I would say I learned over 95% of the useful things I know from God himself, my own experience, and people other than my parents. This is why I did so many stupid things and sabotaged myself over and over. I still fight bad habits my parents taught me.

When I was young, I thought I was the smartest person around, and that I should “listen to my gut,” “listen to my heart,” and emulate famous people who went to hell. I was proud of thinking for myself; I didn’t know thinking for yourself leads to damnation. I was proud of my exceedingly backward Eastern Kentucky culture, even though many people there were childish, emotional, vindictive, selfish, rude, violent, extremely racist, underdeveloped, uninterested in education, stubborn, and proud of drunkenness.

Southerners are generally very polite and considerate, and somehow, I never noticed that people were not like that in Eastern Kentucky. They were not like the kind, gentle, slow-to-anger people here in Northern Florida. As critical as I have been of Eastern Kentucky, I never thought about this until recently. The South isn’t a monolith.

I come from a disguised white ghetto, and other than the parts of me God has changed, I am ghetto. Trashy. I used to think of myself as a person God took on because I was somewhat better than other people. Boy, was I wrong about that. Thinking I was better was the thing that made me worse than other people.

I thought I was a victim, but I wasn’t. Not after I became an adult and failed to change. If you persist in thinking you’re a victim, you’re going to go to hell. You’re going to rationalize doing terrible things to other people and failing to grow up. Look at Palestinians. Not just Hamas. Muslim Palestinians as a whole. They teach 4-year-olds to murder Jews, in schools financed by the United Nations.

Ghetto.

Slanders can be useful. They can motivate you to investigate them and see if there is any truth to them. If you find any, you may be able to improve. Even if you don’t, you are likely to be reminded of your real faults, and that’s helpful.

That being said, I will continue to exclude dishonest, manipulative people from my life. Limiting your circle to constructive Christians is a source of peace and growth.