Posted on 12/31/2006 8:41:18 AM PST by Gamecock
"Tribulation" is such a relative term, when you get right down to it.
Over the decades, I've lost track of how many people have assured me that we ("they"?) will be "spared" from "the tribulation" -- "taken up", as it were, "before things get really bad."
Well, be that as it may, I do have a benchmark for a level of "tribulation" that God has established to be something He has NOT prevented His people from having to endure.
In fact, over the ages, it's happened repeatedly, on average, perhaps once per generation, somewhere in the world (and in many cases, nearly everywhere in the "civilized" world).
From the Romans and their lion-feed-fests to the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust, God's people have had to endure unspeakable horror.
Now, maybe "THE (Great) Tribulation" will be something even WORSE than those "other" tribulations. But frankly I take no comfort in that.
To tell me that, well, there's nothing to prevent us from having to endure something along the lines of the Romans, or the Inquistion, or the Holocaust -- but, we WILL be spared the "really" bad stuff, I mean, hey, get real. How much worse can it really get? On an individual basis?
When your family is destroyed, when you are slowly tortured to death, by "human" monstered skilled in the practice of prolonged torture... hey, that's bad enough, plenty bad enough. To be "spared" from something "worse", is of zero consolation.
But then, there's a subtle undercurrent, often embraced, yet rarely voiced, which goes something along the lines of, "God would NEVER let AMERICAN Christians go through the REALLY bad stuff!"
That's what I politely term "whistling past the graveyard" -- a variation on the "It CAN'T happen HERE!" theme.
It's nonsense, with absolutely no scriptural foundation.
Or, are we to accept the idea that, "In Christ there is no East or West... but, there IS 'them', versus us AMERICAN Christians"?
No, I don't think so.
OK, so maybe we'll all be "taken up" before things are bad, really really bad -- but, we have an established benchmark of the kind of "bad" that DOESN'T approach "that" level of bad. And I don't think that's any comfort to anyone who thinks it through rationally.
What relevance does this have to the topic at hand? Oh, probably little to none. It's just that when I see people explaining how they're gonna get "Raptured" before things get really bad, I feel obligated to point out just HOW bad "less" than "really" bad really IS.
Scary times ping.
Here's something else we need to remind everyone. Fox News has not identified their free publicity of Rick Warren with disclosure that the parent company News Corporation owns both Fox News and Warren's publisher, Zondervan.
Whoa!
Creepy on wheels!
I remember the days when Zondervan was a Christian publishing house, before they got absorbed by secular corporations. Seems like that's getting to be SOP for Christian "companies" these days.
Seems like I don't think very much of the practice.
Murdoch made his money in the English tabloids, which are so "out there" that they make the American tabloids look like the Old Farmer's Almanac by comparison. They'd probably have to be sold "behind the counter", in "plain brown wrapper" if sold in this country, if you get my drift.
There is a not very subtle irony in the spectacle of a guy who's involved in what might be called soft-core porn, also being at the helm of a "Christian" imprint.
Sad, very sad. And in a certain sense, frightening.
I wasn't even aware of the ownership connection until someone here at FreeRepublic said something about it. Now it makes sense that recently they have been doing TV specials on Fox News featuring Rick Warren and his books. Talk about cheap conflicts of interest. At least CBS discloses their own conflicts.
I am very disappointed in the Fox News downward spiral of late. They are adding liberal Democrat panelists (attractive blondes, I might add).
See #496, #497 and #499.
Or, as a friend said to me many many years ago, "Jesus ate with the junkies, but he didn't shoot-up with them."
(Or as I sometimes put it, "Paul become like a Jew with the Jews, a Greek with the Greeks, but he didn't become like a heathen with the heathens. No babies tossed into a burning Moloch "just to be like those folks and win their attention.")
"You mean, "How can we fool 'em today?" Sounds more like Clinton to me. Or Romney. (Is Giuliani waffling or denying his previous statements? I thought he was an in-your-face liberal.)
Warren is something of a "disciple" of Joseph Schumpeter, AKA "The Father of Creative Destruction", and Peter F. Drucker, one of Schumpeter's followers.
Wow, "Post-Capitalist Society", now isn't that special.
Creative Destruction
[snips]
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer.
...
It must be organized for innovation; and innovation, as the Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) said, is "creative destruction." It must be organized for systematic abandonment of the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable--whether products, services, and processes, human and social relationships, skills, or organizations themselves.Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society,
p. 57
Everyone still feelin' all warm 'n cuddly inside 'bout that good ol' boy?
Nice tactic, I must admit. Being able to convince millions that he's "jes' fo'ks", simply by wearing a hick costume (and as a genuine hick, I resent it! :) -- now that's impressive! Particularly while Mr. Feelgood Hick is actually very much in-tune with some very insidious academic "thinkers".
The "systematic abandonment of the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable--whether products, services, and processes, human and social relationships, skills, or organizations themselves."
Remember those words. This is what you are seeing, in Hawaiian shirt "stealth" mode.
Such "people skills" have not been seen since the age of... Bill Clinton.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/decemberweb-only/151-53.0.html
WARREN: One thing that I learned from Peter Drucker
is a concept that he got from Joseph Schumpeter. He
talked about systematic abandonment. Systematic abandonment
means you intentionally stop stuff in order to start
something new. The way Jesus would say it: You've got
to prune the branches so there's more fruit. Anybody
who has roses, and I grow roses, knows that you have
to cut the roses back or they can't grow for the next season.
You have to cut back and then they grow to the next phase.
Good post!
Food for thought.
I think you may be correct.
Very important point, and if anyone forgets how easily these charlatans can fool too many people, we need to remind them at every opportunity.
And if you want to talk "fruit", I can supply numerous cites of churches torn asunder, lives -- lives of decent people -- in upheaval, and other evidence of "systematic abandonment"-cum-"creative destruction" fitting Schumpeter's model to a tee -- the literal tearing down of societal structures, in order to build a new order.
I'm not really sure you want to go there (with "there" being the effort to portray Warren's "fruit" as being something other than that which is promulgated by Schumpeter and company).
I'd like to say, "Go ahead, try me, I've got all night, and plenty of resource materials," but the fact is, I don't. (I don't have all night, that is. I'm dog-tired and getting over a really wicked bout of flu. I do have plenty of resource materials, though, and I'd be more than glad to "share with the class", but as I said, I don't think you really want to go there.)
I will leave you with this thought (from 1 Tim 5:22): "Lay hands on no man suddenly," (i.e., don't go endorsing someone before you really know who and what he is).
"Lay hands on no man suddenly." Not even if "he's a real sweet 'jes' fo'ks' type of harmless lovable fuzzball in a Hawaiian shirt." Not even if "everyone else is doing it, and you'd feel silly being seen as doubting such a 'Mighty Man of God.'" Not even if "he's sold millions of books, and every secular authority in the land is in love with the guy." Not even if "his program has been installed in thousands of churches."
And finally, not even if you will be ostracized if you do NOT "go with the flow." And that, I submit, may be the hardest "not even if" of them all for anyone to handle in this day and age.
Offtopic, but it brings to mind Murdock supporting Hillary at a fundraiser this past summer. Things are definitely not what they may seem.
RE: Creative Destruction
Seems to me Jesus does His best building up when we are "broken".
And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.
Matthew 21:44
I have long found Christ to be practical.
He fed the 5,000 rather than the conventional thing, after all.
There is a time to be fussy about detail.
Don't touch the Ark of The Covenant!
Don't eat blood--though one might imagine a situation where St Paul would not ask about such and eat it prayerfull to The Glory of God given his exhortation about not always asking if something had been offered to idols.
Obey the 10 Commandments.
Forgive others.
Love God wholly.
Love others as one's self.
Do unto others.
But even in all these very core beliefs, doctrines, practices . . . there's typically tons of ambguity in many situations as to how to apply them and which to apply first etc.
St Paul seems to indicae clearly that Holy Spirit is to be our guide in such matters AND that we are not to brow beat one another with our own private interpretations of what the higher priority is.
God is Holy.
He's NOT prissy.
God is Holy--and His ways are beyond finding out and yet He seems to be more practical and have tons more horse sense than generations of pharisees put together.
Sometimes THE MOST LOVING THING is a 2 X 4 upside the head.
But TYPICALLY, the most Loving Biblical thing is what the average person would consider Loving. Not too complicated.
To the religious rulers of 2,000 years ago, Christ compromised their understanding of the current Gospel wholesale.
Opinion, bias, perspective, blindness, denial etc. contaminate notions of what it means to compromise the Gospel quite a LOT, imho.
I have seen NO evidence that RW is an abomination.
I've HEARD OF NO evidence that comes close to that.
I've read tons of trash hereon that is largely folks wailing about him not measuring up to their prissy notions of what constitutes Christianity.
I'm underwhelmed. I don't find such rigid narrow notions very Biblical. Actually, I find them more unBiblical than RW's stuff.
Yes, we ought to be ready to refute wholesale error and charlatanism.
But we also are to be reluctant to label someone such unless and until abundantly proven so.
The naysayers have not met that criteria, to me, by a long ways, so far.
I think you've gotten the facts more than a little twisted.
The drug stuff was not as some portrayed it, as I recall.
And her ministry to him was robust, God led and effective--largely because of and through RW's book.
No, I don't think she dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's according to other people's specifications. But she did good and as God led her to and someone was transformed by Holy Spirit as a result. Not bad for someone who was not all that mature in terms of years in The Lord, as I recall.
All the angels rejoiced in heaven over the results of her PDL facilitated ministry. And all the RW bashers, Jr Accusers rent their clothes and wailed self-righteous accusations. Color me underwhelmed.
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