The Tsar of Heaven

https://youtu.be/6dc0l9tkQPU

Can a mighty and stern Emperor be a devoted family man? Alexander III whose coronation this march celebrates was very fierce in repressing dissent. But he was indeed a devoted husband and father. What is this to me? Can the God of Heaven, Tsar and Autocrat, Terrible Judge of All, be love itself? His Imperium, his monarchic rule and his judgements are non negotiable for me. Is love compatible with this? Yes, and this is how I first saw this: Alexander III, called the Peacemaker ( in Russian  the name is Mirodvoryets) is a picture of this, in his own small way, and believing this, that One can be a stern monarch and a loving father, is a goal of mine.

Why do I call God Almighty Tsar of Heaven? The Tsars of Russia were absolute monarchs. autocrats. They owned all the land and everyone and everything  in it. They were answerable to none but God Hinself.

God is all these things but answerable to none as there is of course no God above Hin that he should account to this one.

Of course there are differences. God's rule, like that of  the Tsars, is personal but in the hands of a madman like Ivan Grozni - Ivan the Terrible - this is corruption and disaster. But the difference is not the constitution of his rule but his character.

Ferocious in His judgements yet His word offers free amnesty to all who seek Him personally and His motication for doing so is something I have never been able to believe in the nearly 40 years of being a christian, whihc motivation is named in John 3:16.

But He gives images to aid, and this image of Alexander III is part of His personalized aid to me

A Working Holiday Weekend

If you will picture the scene. It was either 1979 or 1980  - I can't remember which - making me  an early twenties something. I was a music student at university studying composition back in the days when I wanted to compose symphonies. I was madly in love, my very first adult love, with a fellow music student. But of course the answer was no. It always has been  no.

One of our lecturers asked our class out to a holiday home of his, a bach in New Zealand parlance,  to do some gardening and help out around the place one weekend in return for some good company - i always liked this man -  one Graham Hollobon, and bed and board.

Heartbroken due to being love lorn I went and did some hard labour hoping to drown my sorrows in work. After all, and I am being ironical here," Arbeit" does "macht frei." But of course the slavery here was of my own imposition, not that of my friend and lecturer nor any staff member of student of Canterbury University in my salad days.

But the thing I remembered most from this distant working weekend was that in his lounge one day I opened a Time magazine and of course went to the religion section, and read some piece of heretical trash and of course was angry. What it was totally escapes me. It may have been about the papacy given that John Paul II,  who I, rejecting the imposture of bishops of Rome adopting what amounts to throne names,  still call Karol Woytila, was only recently elected. But it may not have been.

Mr H said something the essence of which I never forgot, and the point of my posting this here, namely that religious fanatics - but i don't recall his using such a hurtful word as fanatic though it was true -  will look forsomething to be angry at, and will go to, as in this instance,  religious articles in magazines with the intention of being angry at it.

He was absolutely right. I do not know if I ever thanked hin for this insight .  I don't even know if he is still alive, it being some 37 or 38 years ago whereby I could thank him for it now.

Biut I never forgot it.

Loving nothing in any truly spiritual fashion - my love for the young woman I mention here, given my maturity of lack thereof in christ,  was not spiritual - I could only signal my virtue, if only to myself, by finding something to hate. I could only fill the emptiness of a life already backslidden from Christ with in a year or two of my conversion, with ungodly anger at something to hate

And something to hate is to be found  in superabundance.

This I see time and time again among all manner of social justice activists and unfortunately among Christians. Secular haters may have no alternative, but we who profess Christ do and it shows our backsliding or immaturity that we Christians are no different for all our lies, and in telling lies about ourselves we are past masters, about our live for the lost

How's This For a Paradox?

Indeed, and as I grow more and more convinced that paradox is God's calling card I place this one before you.

If I am to ever love my neighbour there is one belief I must be rid of.

And that is?

Belief in Man. Note the capitalization. Believing in Man is not to love Man,  nor men, that is to say individual persons, nor even your neighbour. It is the worship of an image,  which is of course idealized and thus idolatrous, both for this idealization  and for it being worshipped at all. After all how many do you know who profess great love for the human race  but cannot get on with the people they live with on a  day to day basis? 


Moreover, in fact, this belief in Man is such that  various stripe of humanists  hold that for the Utopia to come mass murder is the necessary order of the day. And all because they believe in Man and want to improve the race. After all what else is to be done with those who cannot or will not agree with the Utopian vision of the fantic who wasnts to impose it?  And even in those not so extreme, well, for example, in  ordinary politics, all of which professes to believ in this very thing, centuries of effort  has got nowhere. The human experiment has failed. Only die hards who refuse to face cold hard evidence refuse to face this.

Of course there is a belief in Man that is far less high minded or presumptuous. It is called having faith in human nature. It is deemed necessary for all civility and a decent life, and loss of it is bemonaned often enough. But as one who has trusted in men all my life and who has the scars of betrayal, usually inadvertent but often enough deliberately vicious, I can only say that trusting in human nature is disastrous. Of course most people think it necessary as it is, to be sure, all they have. As for misanthropism, that bitterness comes from a continuing trust held in the face of the evidence that it is not trustworthy, despite, I submit, all angry disclaimers to the contrary. True freedom is not mistrust in men, but a cheerful realization that they are not overall any real help when the chips are down. Of course all people need to thrust something or some One. We are made that way. Enter the Holy Spirit of Christ, but the most trustwothy is not trusted by us and this  out of our own fear of his holy warath against sin or in proud belief we can or should save ourselves, or even, sometimes, if we are mad enough, and I was. we mistrust Him for both reasons

As for loving my neighbour, well who is my neighbour?

This question was answered in scripture where Jesus, being asked this selfsame question, told the story of the Samaritan. The neighbour was an ememy of his own people, for Jews and Samaritans loathed each other.


Now of course I have been opposed to humanisam in principle for decades. But what I speak of is  here is the lurking emotional reality in the core of my own sinful heart.

This has always been resistant to such small things as words, and it is this inner reality that makes hypocrites of all of us who determine to find out and do the right thing

This inner state  cannot be rooted out by human determination and God will certainly not aid us in our efforts so to do, for if he really did aid us  thus  He would owe an apology to the Phariaees and every serious monk who broke his health in a futile endeavour

I do not love my neighbour for I do not love God; and I do not love God, as seen in my spontaneous actions and careless words - not in anything i ever forced, the which was only hypocrisy - because my hearts is full of idols, including belief in, well,  what I mentioned at the cery start of this little vignette::  Man

As in absolutely everything else in the christian life this comes down to the individual's personal relationship with the Holy Spirit of Christ for I can and do assert with increasing confidence that there is no life changing repentance, such as the New Covenant offers and indeed commmands, without it

The Greens and I

This is a facebook post from a yeart ago, a sketch of my position which i may elaborate on if I see fit:

Given that global warming has ceased and was not caused by men, and given that the science saying so is valid despite the cries of those opposed to it, given all these things I have lost all respect for the so called Greens. Green does not mean a party that respects human life or people because after all the Nazis were green. They were even anti smoking long before anyone else .

Green is an agrarian fantasy which conveniently overlooks the lives of those who lived in pre industrial societies which were nasty, brutal and short. Indeed the earth can only support the population it now has because of industrial and post industrial technology. This Malthus was dimly aware of when he predicted doom without knowing what industry and science could do. Agrarians must necessarily want to reduce the population by 90 percent, back to a level that is "sustainable" in agrarian terms.

So, as one critic said, they are melons: green on the outside red on the inside, or they are green as they are too yellow to call themselves red. Naturally I deplore any political party, in my country the the NZ Labour party, wanting to get into bed with such dangerous dreamers just as I deplore the self righteousness of the Green saying that those who care for the environment must therefore green.

Why do I take them to be genocidal as well as fantasists? The technologies touted by them are inefficient. They deplore fracking and despise nuclear technology, which is , like it or not the only way to produce cheap energy in abundance. And note: the increase in lifespan cm can be directly linked to the increase in energy production. So they must therefore want to reduce he population by a great amount. Think about it. Do you want to return to the medieval period. a peasant in a mud hut dead before the age of 40?

I find it very revealing that the founder of Greenpeaces, one of the few Patrick Moore's to achieve prominence - and not to be confiused with the astronomer, left the  movement in disgust  as it had become anti human, regarding man as a plague on the earth.

As to why I hold that Global Warming is not man made and has in fact stopped there is a host of evidence out there on the net for any who cares to google the subject .

I have come to the conclusion that any movement which has become mainstream enough to be noticed by politicians and religious people is already debased. I have sympathy with those who fear pollution. But carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant. And Global Warming is a separate issue fmro pollution. Thus the conservationist message has become mainstream and given its full embrace of the absurdity which is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, it is debased.

Do you want to be taxed into the stone age, to dutifully cut carbon dioxide emissions in the devout superstition that it is a poillutant, only to have a volcanic eruption spew forth more CO2 than man has ever produced in his entire history?

By all means tackle environmental issues, but let us not be sidetracked by pseudoscience and what amounts to bad faith religion which  relies on fallacuious appeals to authority and seeks to defy science itself by silencing dissent rather than rationally refuting it and subjecting itself to skeptical scrutiny.

Those who hold that globsal warming continues and was man made show all the hallmarks of bad faith

Reflections of NZ's National War Memorial Day

In my country today, 25th April, is our national war memorial day. Much patriotic claptrap will be spouted which I wil studiously ignore if I notice any at all. Below are some of my reflections on it all

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When footsoldiers in a gangland turf war are killed no one thinks to honour them. But when the gangs are nations though the quarrels between them are no less absurd than the former  and moreover the violence is infinitely greater we are expected to roll over and call these dead heroes. Not me. It is blasphemy to liken the death of those engaged in the criminal enterprise which is war to the sacrifice of Christ; and it is idolatry to subscribe to that empowering vice of war, patriotism. The nations will be done away with on the return of Christ but each individual will still exist, either with Him or in some other realm. As C S Lewis said. when human souls outlive nations which is more valuable? And until then they are, as Isaiah the Prophet said, merely drops in the bucket. Indeed nations were created after the Tower of Babl incidient as ameans to keep human energies dissipated  lest in uniting real evil walk the world, which will happen in the days of the Antichrist

I am a good citizen only because my God, Jesus Christ, would have me refrain from discrediting His ongoing work by bad behaviour on my part. No nation has the right to claim my heart and mind and as nations have become a religion substitute I hold that the giving of my heart and mind to a nation is the sin of idolatry. The nation that I am merely a member of my accident of birth - my citizenshup is in heaven and  I am a foreigner on this earth (scripture reference to be offered..)  the world will only receive my outward conformity, until they require that I openly defy the Law of God and then they have  a problem. But not me. So l will not be partaking in orgy of self congratulation which is Anzac Day. The fact is when they say "lest we forget," in investing the whole event with an air of sacred sacrifice, honour and loyaliy they have already forgotten the true lessons of war - the squalor, the filth, the obscenity, the utter stupidity and the waste. Thus having not ony forgotten but wilfully ignored the true lessons of war they will of course happen again

My Political Progress

I started life as a Leftist and continued as such for the bulk of my life.

I recently came across as Black American conservative by name of Thomas Sowell. He made a lot of sense but of course what was unsaid, as with all political pundits, is what shows his error - and this on both sides. That is to say each side is very good at pointing out the errors and abuses of the other, but nary a word about their own. Yet I am a generous man: when two sides call the other names I will agree with everyone so see both as being as bad as the other.

But I must agree with Sowell that the function of government is to enforce contracts and maintain civil order. In parenthesis I would add that I at this time regard Welfare as a device for maintaining order. Starving people do riot. Let us not be so deluded as to think that Governments act out of compassion.  Bread and Circuses was always the means and the motive. Nanny State is really Big Brother in drag.

Yet I hold that  anything more  than the above listed as functions of government, being social engineering, is coercive, verges on totalitarianism and is arrogant as well as presumptuous insofar as such measures were decreed by the Left and not the people at large. For in trying to make Man good the Left can only corece Man into being - ie pretending to be - what he is not.

So my enchantment with the Left is breaking down. This video of Sowell did not cause this, but only aided it. I have come to the conclusion after decades of religious legalism that law does not work, indeed excessive legislation is a symptom, not the cure, of the lawlessness it covers

So before any think I am becoming a Rightist, to either condemn or applaud,  let me assure you, the enchantment with Sowell broke when I saw a video of him saying Obama was a Leftist. Being Bush-lite the self styled Great White Hope was nothing of the sort.

And even if I see the Left as Looney - increasingly so - I am not about to join the opposite faction that is bent on imposing its will. I will move to what I increasingly view as the proper christian line- apolitical, the Church standing outside the process and rebuking it prophetically - both side - if the Holy Spirits leads

The Problem of Evil

Some time ago I responded to the question of the problem of evil  by rebuking the implicit self righteous of  the very raising of it. This position I still hold. But the implication may have been gotten that I had no answer to the problem of evil itself, or that I was avoiding the question. This is not the case, so I give an answer here, from a previous post elsewhere.

FWD

the question of why a good God allows evil like the Holocaust came up on an Arts and Letters Daily web page. This was my reply

I will answer the question as to why a good God allows the evil. But the answer is not acceptable to modern man. Man is evil and in rebellion to God. Therefore if necessary God will let man drink the cup of his own rebellion to the bitter dregs. God allows us freedom, and in our depravity we abuse it to promulgate holocausts and the vile like thereof. Most questionings arise, in my opinion from self righteousness. When the Biblical answer is that evil people abuse each other constantly, and respond with hatred to such, or feign forgiveness, and when we are all evil, we cannot blame God for our refusing to seek Him and repent of the very evil he will permit us to enact to its bitter endpoint as a means of showing to us who refuse all other rebuke what we are really made of. With the Holocaust the genie of human nature as it really is was let out of the bottle. This is Man at his most naked. We are this way for we are in rebellion to Him. Do we complain about the freedom we abuse? Do we expect him to magically stop us every time we break his Law even down to the smallest flickering of lust after my neighbour's wife? Or do we seek Him to acknowledge that we abuse the freedom that is intrinsic to His purpose.

We want to reject God, so he will let us go to the endpoint of this that some may see the vileness for what it is and cry to Him for mercy

Some truths hurt not because they are painful in themselves , but because we absolutely refuse them.

END FWD

I will amplify here further

This  above speaks of evil that men ourselves do. As to natural disasters and the general decay and fallenness of the earth, where they are not direct judgements  (itself a notion that modern man finds offensive) I hold them to be indicators that something is amiss and that man should seek for answers. For were the earth still a paradise  we would take this state as some kind of divine endorsement of our behaviour. So we long for peace and have stress and decay. Our inner discontent - for what greedy person is ever content? - is mirrored by decay in the creation, that we may know that our inner discontent is of some real basis.

Thus where evil is disaster or calamity, or even the fact that the gloss is taken off the creation, this God is the author of, as it says in Isaiah 45 - for he is the author of this kind of evil, and He does it to spur men to seek Him. Where we would rest in ungodly rest He would allow discomfort to prompt us to seek them, but he only tears to heal and would amplify our restlessness  that we seek the Sabbath rest of Christ.

Evil is not a problem which disproves the God of Israel. It is the sins of men let to go to their bitter fullness that some might repent, or it is the cursing of the earth that we may know something is amiss  where depraved consciences might think otherwise.

Thus it is only a depraved conscience that blames God for evil for it refuses the freedom of will He hold in such deep esteem that he would damn those who in freedom refuse his grace for the final time  rather than force a phony repentance