Category: Theological Thoughts

2020 has not been a disgraceful year, nor the pandemic year, but the year of our Lord who rules over disgrace and pandemics. Jesus rules over viruses, vultures, and vegetarians. Our attempts to frustrate 2020 from the goodness of God is like Job silently receiving 84 direct questions from the Creator and in the end, relinquishing his supposed authority to define reality using God’s terms.

This was the year to speak prophetically about a lot of things. Some of us dared early on to state some things that were quite obvious but neglected and rejected by many. I stand by all of it with even greater enthusiasm today than in early March. In my estimation, my assertions all came true, and the faithful will still reap the fruits of persistence and determination in 2021.

For many of us, the responsibilities increased a hundred-fold, and we felt the weight of it like glory pressing and molding us. We walked by faith through all these months trusting God to take whatever was happening and make something beautiful out of it. And that he did!

I often say that when things don’t make sense to us, it’s a sign that behind the mysterious veil of heaven is a Mastermind bringing to pass his purposes flawlessly and timely. And that last point is worth considering. God’s timing carries with it the accuracy of a thousand arrows. This came to me this morning shooting with my boys and realizing that my lack of precision is a sure sign that God’s arrows never miss…not even once. Whatever comes to pass comes to pass and that too comes to pass without the slightest deviation to the left or the right. No matter how windy it is, God does not need a scope. He is eternally precise.

In a couple of hours, I will be officiating another wedding. Prior to that, we had several joyful Advent and Christmas parties–the kind that leaves you speechless for lack of superlatives. I am always struck by how people can ask “how did last night’s event go” while expecting someone like me to simply say, “It went fine!” But how can human beings carry their lives so flippantly? If these humans beings, as C.S. Lewis so aptly states, shall one day “be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship,” how can we be so cavalier about being in the presence of such people? No. “It’s fine” is not enough for me. Officiating and witnessing a wedding between a godly man and a godly woman is not just a “fine event,” it’s the superlative of superlatives. We should struggle to explain what happened because it’s something more glorious than we can ever fathom. Perhaps that’s the reason people can only say, “fine”– they simply lack the vocabulary.

I am praying 2021 is the year of superlatives; a year where human beings, especially the new human race made in the Second Adam, have to fumble their way through describing their blessings; a year where we all learn to look at the world around us with the awe it deserves and to see life with the hopefulness it offers.

To be really honest: I will miss 2020! I will miss its repertoire of opportunities to serve and laugh while the world went insane. I know there were swords and famines and death and demons all around these last 365 days, but what I also know for certain is that it was the year of our Lord twenty-twenty and the cumulative glory of it will live on in the next 365 days. Farewell, blessed year!

Richard Wilbanks is the man! At the age of 74, he saw a need and dove into it. The caveat is that he had a cigar in his mouth the whole time. This man deserves our congratulations and Dr Jordan B Peterson should talk about him in his next book as the ideal lobster.

In case you haven’t seen it, Richard had a puppy named Gunner, a three-month-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel that he loves. On a short walk in the backyard pond, his small spaniel was dragged by the jaws of an alligator; a common scene in Florida, but not the scene that little fella was expecting, neither his master.

As his canine years were about to come to an end, Richard jumps in the pond, sticks his hands under the water and brings back with him Gunner, whose little body is attached to the jaws of the alligator. With the energy of a cigar aficionado, Mr. Wilbanks parted his puppy from the enthusiastic gator and brought him to safety. Purchase: hands were “chewed up” and he had to get a tetanus shot from the doctor and Gunner lived to taste another bone! Ah, the price of heroism!

From heroes to scoundrels, we now go to Maryland, whose governor explicitly says that we have “no constitutional right to walk around without a mask.” I am going to assume here that this guy wouldn’t dive into a pond to rescue a puppy from an alligator. It’s just my speculation, but I am willing to bet .20 of a Bitcoin on it.

Is this the kind of Constitutional wisdom you expected from our elected officials in this country? Did you really expect these men to put the first amendment right next to mask-wearing and sum those up and conclude as he did? Many didn’t see that coming, unless you saw that coming, and then you are no longer surprised. Imposition from the top is a mastery of the Left, which is why we need to be really thinking about how elections have consequences and consequences breed election victors. But, we will pick this back up around September of 2024!

As the saying goes, “Never let a crisis go to waster!” My, oh my, has this crisis been redeemed! And speaking of alligators, Just as an example from the land of the Alligator man, Steve Irwin, Australia’s national carrier Qantas will require future international travelers to prove they have been vaccinated against Covid-19 before flying. How about a visit to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park or the Sydney Opera House? Make sure your shots are in order, kids!

And just like that we have gone from 5 to 35 miles over the speed limit of liberty! Americans have managed for too long to explore the blessings of local police by going five miles over the liberty limit. But our officials are speeding their way into liberty oblivion! As I said in yesterday’s missive, liberty is how we view life. If abandoning its boundaries is our goal, then we lose our Western values one by one.

From Maryland to Australia, we now come to this Thursday’s festivities. Thanksgiving is about to be regulated like it’s nobody’s business ’cause were this up to the Left power structures, “nobody” would be celebrating it, which leads to my last piece of opination served with cranberries and apple pie.

Suicide rates have increased dramatically, depression, loneliness, domestic abuse, and all the other post-Genesis 3 dangers of this world. And let us not forget our dear grandparents and great-grandparents whose lives we treasure and whose memories linger each year until we renew ourselves with them again…at Thanksgiving! It came to my attention yesterday that the Left loves to praise victims. #metoo, and all the other #toos‘ out there are the result of the Left’s agenda to protect those who suffer, the broken, the lonely, the bullied and all other woes of men. But now, in many states, Thanksgiving is bring monitored by statist stormtroopers who are bent on not seeing 80-year-old grandma meet her new great grand-daughter. Do you see the contradiction? It is better for grandma to experience this Thanksgiving alone (though it may be her last), then for her to see her grand and great-grandchildren by suffering the infinitesimal risk of catching COVID. Those who once were ardent supporters of the weak and lonely, now defend the COVID-risk factor over the weak and lonely.

Let’s be honest: the reason the opportunity to see your beloved is taken out of your hand and given to some bureaucrat who could care less about the bonds of affection you have built is because power structures–largely built by un-christian hands–would rather make that decision for you.

So, I encourage you, be a Richard Wilbanks! Use his example as a metaphor for the good. Jump in the pond for the thing you love; keep the jaws of the statists away from puppies, thanksgiving pies, Uncle Joe, Grandma Betty, and even your weird cousins. Be wise, judicious, but bold and willing to get your hands chewed up for the cause of good and ol’ fashioned liberty!

Just recently a well-known figure told us that we should avoid our returning college students like the plague. “Keep him locked in the garage if you must have him home,” she said. I confess that such parental affection moves me to tears. Of course, the rationale is built on the back of famous phrases like, “Love your neighbor,” “protect grandma,” “keep CNN relevant,” and other such lines.

And now, there is an entire new propaganda machine that has picked up steam under the Biden banner which says that a true leader makes lock-downs national. If Chicago has to do it, then Pace, Fl. has to as well. Oh, and let us not forget that the leader of the WHO said just recently that there will be no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future. How long? We don’t know, except that for these scholars, a day is as a thousand years.

Add to this plethora of good news that churches are shutting down again, and pastors are being put in that uncomfortable position of closing their doors for as long as it takes to please the CDC gods. For many of our esteemed theological leaders who said, “Follow the guidelines, follow the guidelines,” to other esteemed theological followers, well they did! And they did for a really long time. And now just as they thought the darkness was making way for the sunshine, gatherings of 20 or more are once again going to be shunned, Thanksgiving turkeys are going to extend their life-span by another 365 days, and singing must be muzzled. I guess if you have for this long given your right hand to the magistrates to dictate your worship practices, you might as well give your left hand, and let’s start with the first three toes on the left foot as well.

I do not want to minimize for pastors around the country. I know there are genuine men debating vigorously these issues with their leadership, and I know that churches are divided over this, and I am saddened by every story I hear. But I also know that for too many, early on they gave an inch and the WHO–not the band–took several miles of real estate. MacArthur was right all along.

Let me stress the same thing I have for over nine months: absence from worship is not something you can make up on the first Sunday once this thing is over. It’s something most will never get back in a lifetime. Why? Assuming you are a good churchman, because the habits of good worship is built over time. To get to point B, you need a consistent dose of point A for a sustained period of time. Getting back to worship is not like making up a late test. You have actually missed nine-months’ worth of tests and that accumulated knowledge will take years to recover.

When we allow the government to enter our buildings and re-direct our attention to their liturgy, we have given them access to the holy. We have given them our pulpits and our pews. When they tell us not to sing, they are not telling us to not sing at all, but they are telling us to sing their songs. I dare say what we are witnessing is the greatest single distortion of the good I have seen in my lifetime. If we didn’t think we could hang on under the Trump administration, an administration who used phrases like, “worship is essential,” wait until Grandpa Joe gets in. Boy, does he have a wonderful plan for your life, and your church, and your liberties.

There is an entirely new society of social and economic conservatives. In the broad conservative world, young voices like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Dan Crenshaw and others have functioned as persuasive encyclopedias for the movement and are bringing in a host of new young voices into conservatism. And though I want more than they want, at least we know that these wish to preserve the vestiges of truth in our culture and breathe the Judeo-Christian air. They want freedom of speech which includes the right to make fun of Allysa Milano’s theatrics.

Now, where do we go from here? Let me begin by where we should not go.

We should not go to Kamala-land no matter how affordable her health plan is. We should not go to Grandpa Joe’s new transition plan for the country. I can guarantee you that the only thing he wants to heal is your stupid brain, conservatives! Conservative, heal thyself with some Biden therapy.

Recent speeches from Biden appealing for unity are shameful. A man who is eager to lock down the country again over COVID, whose party is zealous to elevate LGBTQ values into society, who has committed themselves to a campaign against the rights of the unborn, and who affirms that the West needs to be torn down and make way for a new liberalized pluralism where everyone can speak, except those who embrace those Western values of biblical marriage and the objectivity of truth; there is no conceivable universe where a Christian individual shaped by the values of the Western tradition of Augustine, Luther and Calvin can join forces with the Left. Unless, of course, they are also eager to woke their way into the movement and creep into our churches to disorient us from our cherished values.

We had a couple visit our church recently from Texas. They moved there and were excited to find a healthy congregation. After visiting three conservative Presbyterian churches and one conservative independent church, they discovered that the main chorus of these congregations are the ethics of BLM and the moral skepticism of REVOICE. Combine those two forces and you have yourself a congregation that is ready to embrace James Cone over Augustine.

I have spoken about trajectories before, and I have said with the conviction of a crying new-born who is fully certain that he wants food and whose parents at 2am are not skeptical at all of his claims, that the voices leading you ecclesiastically are the voices that will take you either towards Augustine or towards those leading opinions who wish to abolish the West in exchange for an equitable society. And by “equitable” secularism means necessarily that everyone deserves honor unless he/she defends the exclusive claims of King Jesus.

We know where not to go, but where do we go? I would like to argue tomorrow for an “ecclesiastical conservatism.” The phrase doesn’t come easily off our tongues, but again, we are now in a phase of history where we need big words and big actions to crush silly ideologies. I will develop this soon, but the gist of it is that we need to re-unite our Western ethics with the ecclesiology that gave secular leaders high blood pressure and Queen Elizabeth nightmares anytime she would put the words John+Knox together.

I am not asking you to join in exchange for an Arturo Fuente, but I am asking you to consider it personally whether you are here in Pensacola or the suburb of Austin, TX: Consider whether it’s time to take some serious action as an individual, family member and churchman. Consider whether you have tolerated too much of that thing you thought innocuous, but now it’s stuck in your throat giving you little breathing room. Consider whether it’s time to change the scenery. There is always time to re-think things and change, but you must make room to consider the other thing first.

Someone once said that conspiracy theories are stupid. To be honest, that someone was me, and to be honest I didn’t think through that quote too profoundly. I just made it up. I made it up as quick as those additional ballots for Biden people are finding. But again I don’t want to sound like there is something sinister happening in Nevada or Georgia or Pennsylvania. And those three states were randomly picked from a hat.

It has come to my attention on this second pre-election results thingy that Trump is not going down without a fight. “Captain Orange,” as I gently call him, is taking all his friends with him to every major court in the country, including that one where Amy Coney Barrett is currently enjoying her stay. It’s not over until some fat person sings, and that fat person may be our mildly obese president. We need to buckle up and let lawyers do that thing they do: lawyering.

I like to remind my readers that we are not at the stage of comparing any of this to third world countries. Why not? because certain countries have a tendency to assassinate opposing candidates and do their evil deeds in public. So, at this point, we may be operating as a second world country, the sort of nebulous one somewhere in-between Narnia and Mordor.

The good news is that the GOP kept the Senate and had some unexpected gains in the House. I was reminded that some time ago Nate Silver predicted the Dems gaining 13 seats in the Senate. The Senate!! That didn’t age well, but neither did the season of polling. Whatever they do next, they need the kind of guidance meteorologists have here in Florida. Pollsters need to remind themselves that the margin is not give-or-take 3%, but give-or-take “we are probably wrong.” But someone has to pay the bills, so these guys will continue to make a living selling panic and fear as a commodity.

And speaking of Fox News, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume for the sake of charity that they were simply being predictive in a Nostradamus kind of way about Arizona. Well, they were wrong to do so when other leftist outlets were saying, “Take it easy!” And that says a lot. When Rachel Maddow is acting like a patient observer and Fox News is playing Balaam on TV, things are really weird. I don’t have a word to describe, but to make one up, it’s conspiratorial.

Now, I don’t think we should apply the Levitical regulations for false prophets, but I do think we need brand new outlets of information to shape our perspective. I suggest book studies and hospitality as an alternative news outlet. Your friend down the street or next to you in the pew is bound to be a lot better informed of things than what is out there in the cable world, because at least your friend gains nothing in lying to you, but the media gains ad money, and your brain. Like any means of communication, whatever consumes your eyes, consumes your worldview. It’s time to start thinking outside the box, or the tube, or whatever the kids call it these days.

And finally, I want to encourage you to pray for our nation. Since our prayers are fairly along party lines, let me encourage you to give this BCP prayer a shot while things come to some conclusion. Hear us, O Lord!

Lord God Almighty, you have made all the peoples of the earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and in peace: Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This is my post before the final count, and as of now, 2:40 Central, it is safe to say that Kanye will not be our president. An eye for an eye and a ye for a ye. Still, these last 18 hours have been rather amusing for at least three reasons:

First, what has become clear in Trump’s win in Florida is that minorities (you’re welcome!) are a lot more independent than the demigods of politics imagined. The reason Hispanic-Americans turned Miami-Dade County into a vast tango party is because these individuals are not easily dominated by identity politics. Think about it: some of these amigos fled the Castro regime, adventured their way in tiny boats to save themselves from tyranny; others escaped savage socialist systems and when they hear Biden say “Progressive” they think “No, no, señor, no mas!” The vast majority come legally through the system which is incredibly complex and money-draining. When they arrive in these great lands, they work their bodies to sheer weary-dom and come home to large house parties where they enjoy the fruits of their labors and children.

In my first year of marriage, I worked with a 65-year old Mexican man whose work ethic was physically superior to my 23-year old self. He never complained and enjoyed a 15-minute power nap that rejuvenated his body for another fours hours. That man saved his money (every penny) and sought the good of his community. Now, do we really think they are saying, “Give me Biden or give me death!” Nay. They are eager for a candidate who will ensure that their work ethic is rewarded and that they get back as much as possible from their well-earned labors and preserves some vestiges of their traditionalism.

Second, the landslide “pipe-dream” was a metaphor for how out of touch the punditry is and how much Nate Silver needs to shave his beard, which incidentally is a metaphor for “silly predictions.” We are now at a place where distrusting big media should be a default position for the average American. When they say jump you should say, “how low?” These guys are in general more interested in projecting strength with their virtual Nimbus 2,000 models. FOX, CNN, ABC, ACDC are all variations of that same stupid song Lady Gaga sang.

We need alternative platforms that are de-centralized and we need the deep dark web with the Joe Rogans’ and Shapiros’ leading the way to a long-form conversation format every night with a nice bourbon and a Cohiba made by those Cuban hermanos in Miami. At the same time, don’t abandon the conversation. Don’t let the liberals keep Facebook and Twitter and control the conversation. Stay in these platforms until we are kicked out forcefully. Keep pressing the claims of Jesus in every conceivable and available big platform. I do not, and I repeat, do not! believe in moving our voices away once and for all. We need to be wherever we can make the most noise. This means we need to be more strategic and bolder in the way we shape our conversations here. We need more married couples showing baby pictures, more married couples kissing one another, more 3D ultrasounds, more Bible verses, more sermon links, more good podcasts advertised, more pastors sharing their hearts with their flocks, more good news about food and hearty Christendom.

Finally, and as controversial as a fun Thanksgiving party in California, is that whether Trump wins or loses, the country is certainly not in favor of lock-downs for life as models of conformity. The country is not on the side of seeing Europe as a paradigm for the world. The reason this ongoing election results shocked so many is because everyone assumed that the Biden shut-down strategy was a win-win. But at least half the country believed that life in all its beauty is not meant for a monastic revolution. No, rather half, and I dare say at least 70% of the country is ready to move on and attack life as if it should be something lived and not hidden.

MacArthur was right all along and all the local church pastors who viewed this entire thing as a big charade and who sought to wisely move things along one hymn at a time. The virus was not the charade, but the response to the virus was as silly as a country clown. In my estimation, Gov. DeSantis showed the country how to fight without fear and the results showed that. But the lesson here is that we are not going to be fooled again.

Whatever transpires in the next few hours in Pennsylvania (oh, hello Arizona!) doesn’t show the whole picture. The whole picture is a lot more complex and the lessons from this election are a lot more eclectic. We should read the times well, learn, digest these lessons, and look forward to the first Sunday after the election.

Starting with a new and hearty rendition of Supplanter, a song based on Genesis 25, Jamie inaugurates his 21st album with a burst of energy. Christians often complain about the lack of good Christian music for daily enjoyment and edification, but in the far-away land of Grande Prairie, Alberta, Jamie has been singing the same faithful melodic and biblical line for a long time.

This is not your typical music covered by a vast array of repetitive lines to fill space. Jamie fills the space with substantive biblical language in order to indoctrinate us musically through the divine words of Yahweh. And the indoctrination is sweet, creative, and plain ol’ fun. I’m on my third listen and keep remembering new things from the insightful re-telling of the musical story.

The beauty of this entire album is just how much you learn about stories that are largely forgotten in the evangelical scene, but now receive a fresh anointing in the Soles’ soul-shaped lyrics. The stories tie together classic themes from Genesis 25-32 focusing on the Jacob narratives uniting the sacred themes of the text into a beautiful Jacobian tapestry. One is led into a final benediction only after he’s heard the stories of weddings and wrestling matches enough to shape our biblical imagination in a lasting way.

Bring out the kids to play and watch the adults sing along to the dynamic tunes and catchy rhythms of Jamie’s music. Do your family a favor and download Supplanter!