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| Daniele Crespi's Pieta |
The world is about to change forever.
Can you feel it?
No I am not talking just about the election, impending travesty though that is. No, the world we knew is going away forever and it's never coming back. Potential presidential puppet Harris says we should look forward not back. Well we should wish we could turn back a page or 10 pages, but we're not gonna. No, this despicable "revolution," if you can call something led by the most powerful a revolution, is triumphant even if she loses, which we should earnestly pray she does. But regardless, the world we've known is over. The world is changing, and not for the better.
When G-d told Noah that He was going to destroy the world with water, He didn't say go out amongst the evil in their evil cities and preach to them. He said "build an Ark." All of those Woke evil doers believe in what they believe in just as strongly as I believe in what I believe in, because that IS their religion. We live in a post-evangelism world. We live in a "build an Ark" world now.
Sometimes G-d tells people to do things that need doing. Sometimes though you can't do anything. Sometimes G-d just says, "be my witness." Witness it with Me. After all, G-d has to see every terrible thing in the whole world. If we are G-d's family, how can we say we should be protected from seeing it, too?
Sometimes that is our cross in life, to see. I think it is mine, or one of mine anyway.
A boy gets swept off a roof in a hurricane begging Jesus to save him, and he drowns. A lot of people would say, "why didn't G-d save that pious boy?"
They don't ask, "why didn't Jesus step down off the cross?" However precious that boy was, and he was, Jesus was more so. He was G-d's Son. Why didn't he step down off the cross? Because suffering and dying is what we do here. Even him. I'll die, you'll die, Jesus died, that boy died. And all these are or will be real deaths. But that doesn't have to be the end of the story.
I was watching a movie, just some dumb movie, and I had the strong feeling that G-d was sitting there watching it with me. And we have to see what He has to see. Every death, every disease, and worse, all the evil in all the hearts in the whole world. The evil that could murder a baby. The evil that could start a war. The evil that people could lead other people intentionally into sin: the sin of gender confusion, the sins of sexual deviance (and there are many kinds, adultery and divorce too,) We like to quote Jesus saying that if you cause one of these little ones to stumble, it's better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and be tossed in the sea. But before the millstone-tossing comes the straight fact of it: people lead other people astray intentionally into paths of sin and death. First we have to see it. And see all the rest of it.
Witness it with Him. Witness it like Mary had to witness her child getting horribly murdered. Witness it like G-d had to witness His only Son the same. He didn't call Jesus down off the cross. He left him there. Jesus died like all men die, except worse than most.
We are entering a time when we will have to see many terrible things, and you will feel like you are all alone and nobody else sees the madness and they will think you mad for seeing it. But if you are with G-d, you are not alone. You may be led up to a cross and crucified on it, but you are witnessed. G-d sees it. If you are G-d's, G-d is with you even if you too hang on a cross. As all Christians must.
I was watching "Silent Service," an old TV series about the US submarine corps in WW2. And of course it was all portrayed very heroically, and it was heroic I suppose. To the extent war ever is. No doubting the Axis was evil. And of course it was the Forties when men were men, and nobody wanted to show themselves afraid, and nobody wanted to let down the team.
But as I was looking at those depictions of men at the helm or loading torpedoes or even baking biscuits, and I thought to myself, "they must have been terrified." For sure I would have been. Everyone knew what the Japanese thought of prisoners. Prisoners were playthings for their sadistic will, sometimes they just tied bricks to their feet and tossed them over, or beheaded them, or tortured them, or if you were lucky they would just starve and work you to death. You see them there, doing their jobs, going through all the motions of happy warriors, and you know in their heart of hearts they are saying, "what fresh new hell comes next?" Will we start diving uncontrollably and get crushed, will we get blown up with a depth charge, will a shell smash into the hull and smash us to bits, or will we have to surface and surrender and throw ourselves on the not-at-all tender mercies of the Japanese?
And at least they had some variation in their modes of death or torment. Some Japanese housewife and mother in Tokyo was no doubt brewing tea with her baby in tow when incendiaries from American B-29's burned the whole fucking city to ashes and killed 100,000 people. She would have had no input in it whatever. It was just her time and her baby's time to burn alive. She just happened to live in Tokyo. I am not saying it was wrong to do it. If it had been my decision to make, I would likely have done the same. I am saying that it happened, and you can't diminish the horror of it. Before you file it away in some nice safe little corner of your brain where you can safely disregard it, you have to see it. Just like He has to see it.
That's what I am, a witness. The time of prophets is over, prophets presume that there is anyone around tender-hearted enough to hear what they are saying. This is the time of witnesses.
