Our Christian Comfort Level

Alas, ours is not a perfect world, particularly in the eyes of Christians. Yet, unlike in the early days of Christianity, pagan rulers are not feeding us to lions for the amusement of the masses. We live for the most part in relative comfort and prosperity. Unlike the chaotic time of the French Revolution, priests are not being guillotined in the streets and the Pope remains as secure in the Vatican as any other world leader. However, we Christians of today face a crisis every bit as real and deadly as any faced by the Roman martyrs or the French counterrevolutionaries, and unless we resolve to let our comfort level fall a bit, the situation could yet grow even worse.

Christians are often ridiculed as the preachers of doom and gloom, yet such would not be necessary if those in the past had been properly heeded. As Jesus truly said, we have not even learned to tell the time. I truly believe the end to be near at hand, and this is when the spiritual warfare becomes the ugliest. This is when the gloves are coming off and the final demonic offensive begins. Legitimacy has been forgotten, traditional authority is deposed or ignored and Christ is being torn from our lives piece by piece by the secularists in power.

According to Scripture, toward the end of time God said He would loose Satan for a season among us. People can debate the interpretations of this, but I put it forward for consideration that perhaps this "season" was none other than the recent 20th Century. That may sound a bit outrageous, but think about this: more Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other in world history. Catholics were slaughtered by the Communists in Mexico, in republican Spain, along with Lutherans and other Christian dissenters in Nazi Germany and throughout missions in Africa, China, and Vietnam. Greek Orthodox Christians were massacred by the millions in Soviet Russia, yet most history books seem to leave this out. At the beginning of the 20th Century the only republics in Europe were France and Switzerland, and indeed the republic remained almost exclusively a government of the Americas alone. Today, less than a dozen remain in Europe and the rest of the world is even more depleted. And the fact should not be overlooked, that every time a monarchy was replaced by a republic, the recognized place of God in the leadership of each country was cast aside. Authority, which was once held to rightly descend from God alone, was now taken from nothing more than popular opinion.

Royal Families that had reigned for centuries, such as the Hapsburgs and Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottoman Turks, all fell in the 20th Century. The Chinese were united under an emperor for thousands of years and yet, in 1911, all of that was wiped away and deemed never to return. In the 20th Century, in the United States alone, 33 million children have been exterminated by abortion. We have seen a rise in secularism, in genocide, in hatred of all things spiritual and the elevation of decadence the likes of which the world has never seen. Naturally, there has always been sin in the world, yet, today, even in the Christian community, as in no time in the past; we are not just struggling with sin, but more and more deciding that what was once a sin is no longer one. In short, we have in fact begun to "call good evil, and evil good; put darkness for light and light for darkness". There has always been evil, but everyone knew it was evil, whereas today, evils such as promiscuity is called good, even necessary for a healthy lifestyle, and goods such as abstaining from every appearance of evil is called evil, under names like intolerance.

That, my friends, is what I find the most frightening. Not so much that all of these things are going on, but that the definition of proper behavior is being so thoroughly rewritten that people who commit such great sins actually believe they are being good citizens. Personal freedom has been elevated to the point that many, many people consider it a mother's right to kill the child inside her, while anyone who argues in the defense of that helpless life, is demonized as trying to take away a "woman's right to choose". In our modern society, taking away the right of one person to act immorally is now considered the greatest "sin" of all. Many Christians allow this to happen, simply because they have come to accept the great liberal lie: that the will of the people is the voice of God, and most would find it very uncomfortable in this day and age to argue that someone does not have the right to do something. More Christians might oppose homosexuality were it not for the fact that they would be labeled as intolerant homophobes for doing so. They might stand up for their own faith more often if they were not afraid of offending someone who chooses to worship Allah, Siva, Buddha or "the unnamed god". It is much more comfortable to just "go with the flow".

Consider as well that, at the beginning of the 20th Century, we had not advanced very far beyond the musket, the horse and buggy and sailing ships. Yet, by World War I, cavalrymen armed with Napoleonic lances fought alongside machine guns, tanks and poison gas. While supplies moved by horse-drawn wagons, fighter planes battled each other in the skies and submarines preyed upon ships from beneath the waves. Only a couple of decades later, in World War II, we suddenly had guided missiles, jet aircraft and the atomic bomb. Not many years later, we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of destroying all life on earth eight times, we have seen the emergence of the internet, micro technology and the computer revolution all in a short 100-year span. Keep in mind that prior to the 20th Century, people wore the same basic style of cloths and fought with the same basic type of weapons for hundreds of years before anything new was slowly developed. On the battlefield, the flintlock musket was the standard weapon for centuries; sometimes the very same pattern was used from the early 1700's until the mid 1800's.

Can all of these drastic changes in so short a span of time be pure coincidence? Is it merely by chance that such dramatic revolutions in everything from technology, to behavior, to fashion, to government and even religion could all happen in the same century? Personally, I find it highly doubtful. Not only are these coincidences far too large in number, they also all serve the same goal, which is the confusion of Christian traditions and ultimately the loss of civilization itself. We have already seen how greatly established standards of right and wrong have been changed. For evidence of this, one need look no farther than the legitimist camp. Once upon a time, when loyalty to kings was based on the descent of power from God, legitimacy was the single most important factor for any monarchy. Yet, today French legitimists, Carlists, Jacobites and all the rest, are dismissed entirely. The reason behind this is that, when you get down to it, the sacred aspect of authority has been lost. Democracy a.k.a. popular opinion, is now the standard by which proper and improper, successful and unsuccessful, legitimate and illegitimate governments are judged. Everything has worked together to take the emphasis off of God and place it on the deification of the "self". In short, it all comes down to a single lie, a single wicked lust, the original and still #1 sin in the universe: the desire to take the place of God.        The situation seems hopeless, but God has said, with just a little faith we can cause the very mountains to move. Therefore, I believe things can improve, but in order to do so, Christians must determine to hold steadfast to sound doctrine and make up their minds to be very uncomfortable in the name of their religion. Only a global, spiritual as well as temporal, counterrevolution can put us all back on track. As mentioned above though, first we must reeducate the world to know that "counterrevolution" is actually a good thing. See what I mean......