Vine And Fig Tree

Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

~Micah 4:4

This used to be an ideal in America. The whole idea of the New World, the frontier, was that everyone could have their plot and live free from slave-masters and bosses and tyrants and kings, and whether they succeeded or not was dependent on their own hard work and the blessings of G-d.

What has happened to us since then? Do you have your own vine and fig tree? Do you even want one?

Some small business owners may raise their hand and say "I've got one! I've got my own vine and fig tree! Or at least I own my own business, and no one is my boss!"

Well, no you don't have one. As the poor unfortunate restaurant owners and owners of many small businesses have discovered in the current coronavirus crisis, your lives are just as much at the mercy of this disturbed and chaotic human system as the wage slave. Indeed, some wage slaves are doing very well right now, as wage slaves go. Grocery stockers and cashiers and many health care workers have more work than they have time to do. Many small business owners are looking for convenient ledges to jump off of.

The human economic, social and political system is disturbed and wicked. DO NOT rely upon it. How many times do you need to be told to put Babylon and Egypt behind your backs, you double-minded? Make Haste From Babylon. But people love the idols of Babylon and Egypt. They love the fleshpots of the city.

When the Bible refers to vines and fig trees, it means literally food-bearing plants. My favorite modern parable is from the Great Depression. In the Great Depression there was the Dust Bowl, which was a legit environmental catastrophe. On the whole though, in the rest of the country and world, did apples cease to grow on apple trees? Did wheat cease to ripen in the fields? No, there was still plenty of food, for those growing it. The Great Depression was a human catastrophe of human systems.

For those small farmers who managed to avoid that plague of humanity, debt, and owned their own land and house, their children barely knew there WAS a Depression. They still ate. They still had a roof over their heads. Maybe they had to darn their socks not replace them, but they were probably doing that anyway. They had their own vine and fig tree.

Those farmers who were interested in making a killing not a living and who were deep in debt, they lost their farms. They gambled on a productive year and profitable markets, and they lost.

Indeed there was probably some poor unfortunate living in the Great Depression who starved to death literally surrounded by food, because they did not know what it looked like outside of a grocery store. How much more would that be the case today!

You may think that owning your own business, you are no slave and you take orders from no one, but you are wrong. You are not the masters of your destinies. You cannot even live, unless the chaotic corrupt human system makes it possible for you to do so.

Suppose even that you are fabulously wealthy, in cold hard cash sitting in bank deposits. No debt. How much are you the master of your own fate then? Well, more so than the vast majority of people, sure, but what is that money? It's just numbers on a computer. Nothing physical backs it up, there is no land or gold behind it. It's just numbers to which people have ascribed value. Suppose, as happened in Weimar Germany, suddenly it takes a million dollars to buy an egg? What is your money good for then? It was just a castle of smoke that vanished with the wind. Money has no value unless people agree that it does. It is the ultimate pyramid scheme. I get you to give me your real labor or products, and I give you a piece of paper that has numbers on it. It is worth nothing, except what the vast majority of people say it is worth. That is what the value of the U.S. Dollar really is: no more or less than what the world says it is worth. And fortunately people love them some U.S. Dollars right now, but there is no guarantee that they always will.

And of course, when things go to hell as indeed they must, what will the starving crowd be clamoring for? "Save me, FatherMotherGovernment. Save me, synthetic god that men have made. Save me, golden calf." Communism, or statism of some other stripe. Some new slavery, some new serfdom. The end of freedom, even if it comes with full bellies.

No thanks, I already have a FATHER. I already have a G-d, the real One G-d. From His hand I receive all things.

Land, Knowledge, Health, Strength and Faith are the signs of true wealth, but the providence of a merciful G-d is your only true wealth, for how will you get the others without that?

FROM HIS HAND I gain use of all these things: health, strength, knowledge. From His mercy alone.

Sadly, you cannot fully own land because of the satanic property tax. In which you never truly own what you own. Still, you are better off owning land and figuring out how to make your tax payment, than you are paying rent and groceries and utilities without a job or a business if the human system collapses again. Which inevitably it must.

Your own vine and fig tree is the biblical ideal, that you can gain your food and everything you need from your own land, yourself. You are serf to no man, no corporation. You are living on G-d's bounty, not Man's dole or the vagaries of the human system. Thomas Jefferson, not a particularly godly man, said that the backbone of the Republic was the yeoman farmer, the man who was master of his own fate because he owned his own land and grew his own food and thus was beholden to none. He was right.

But who wants their vine and fig tree now? Who would even know what to do with them if they had them? How many truly want their freedom, and how many will gamble with the human system or bend the knee to the synthetic god? Most will do the latter, and thus the false god they made will become stronger and stronger, and freedom fade from the world.

But for me and my house, we serve the Lord.