Bully’s Blog

I saw in my dream, that the Interpreter took Christian by the hand again, and led him into a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage. Now the man seemed very sad. He sat with his eyes looking down to the ground, and his hands folded together, and he sighed as if his heart would break.

Then said Christian, “Who is this?”

“Talk with him and see,” said the Interpreter.

“What used you to be?” asked Christian.

“I was once a flourishing professor, both in my own eyes, and also in the eyes of others,” answered the man. “I was on my way, as I thought, to the Celestial City and I was confident that I would get there.”

“But what did you do to bring yourself to this condition?” Christian asked.

“I failed to keep watch,” the man replied. “I followed the pleasures of this world, which promised me all manner of delights. But they proved to be an empty bubble. And now I am shut up in this iron cage—a man of despair who can’t get out.”

No further explanations were given. No one said who put him there. But the Interpreter whispered to Christian:

“Bear well in mind what you have seen.” [1]

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Another thought related to the ideas in Behind Closed Doors.

The whole aim of the construction process, whether in sex, foetal development, education, business, art, music, family or state government, is the ultimate revelation of a mature glory. We are given the opportunity to create, and that involves certain God-given freedoms. If the freedoms are abused, what we construct for ourselves is a cage. Lust is a cage. A dysfunctional family or state is a cage. Enforced egalitarian socio-economics is a cage. Undisciplined children are a cage.

Jesus laid down His life for this world, and the freedoms of western culture have been a direct outcome. In its final stages, we have rebelliously inverted each of these freedoms (including the economic ones) and turned both our Christian protection (including our God-given wealth) and Christian mandate into a cage. Ancient Israel did the same. Why does this inversion process seem such a logical path for fallen human nature?

Doug Wilson writes that a free market can only function when it consists of free men. Our culture has experienced all the benefits that flow from the Sanctuary. Free men built a free culture. But people are no longer self-governed (sacrilege in the Sanctuary) so the government becomes the answer to all our problems. People are less generous, so government takes control of charity. Parents fail to govern their children, so the nanny state installs cameras to make sure the kids eat properly and go to bed on time (in the UK, apparently). It is mature Christian freedoms maintained by coercion for a nation of juvenile delinquents.

We have cut ourselves off from the Sanctuary, so we have to manufacture the benefits. Without the miraculous personal, social and economic input of the Spirit of God, the only way to do this is to cannibalise what God has built and shift things around so it looks like something is still happening. We are too greedy and immature to manage a vibrant free market, so we will have our free market snap frozen or kept on life support with counterfeit wealth. God lets the Egyptians take our golden shields so, instead of learning our lesson, we pitch in and make bronze ones (1 Kings 14:27). God gave us technologies to make today’s harvest easier, and we greedily use them to pillage the environment of tomorrow’s crops. This is not growth. The Living Jesus is shut out of every area of life, and we have replaced Him with a bloodless wax dummy. Amazing what we can do with Photoshop and plastic surgery. Our Christendom was real but now it’s just CGI.

We expected sweet water from a bitter spring. Our answer? Pump it through a water purifier, the spin doctors behind the mass media, teaching in public schools and masquerading as university lecturers, bishops and politicians. Just like the Jews who could no longer cast out demons after the coming of Christ, they fill the air with words but without the Book their words are impotent.

We even voted for these words, words like Hope and Change (deliverance), waited expectantly in the Delivery room around the swollen belly, and all we got was a long-winded fart, a burst bubble.

“As a woman with child is in pain and cries out in her pangs, when she draws near the time of her delivery, so have we been in Your sight, O Lord. We have been with child, we have been in pain; We have, as it were, brought forth wind; We have not accomplished any deliverance in the earth, nor have the inhabitants of the world fallen.”  Isaiah 26:17-18.

There are two kinds of wind in the Scriptures, and we have grieved the Wind/Breath/Spirit of life. Instead of the godly government of the Incense Altar, our sex, foetal development, education, business, art, music, family and state government are sulphur in God’s nostrils. It is the Altar of the Abyss.[2]

With God’s help, our imperfect forefathers built a kingdom of silver and gold. There’s nothing wrong with silver and gold until you use them to build a cage instead of a Tabernacle. Freedom maintained by coercion is not freedom, which is why the solution is not political, right or left [3], but a return to worship in Spirit and Truth.

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[1] Picture and text from Dangerous Journey, The Story of Pilgrim’s Progress.
[2] See articles on this biblical theme here.
[3] The Right wants to maintain a free market without free men, which necessitates continued environmental rape, a desperate attempt to resurrect the past, and bloodshed overseas. The Left wants to maintain freedom by coercion, theft, and bloodshed in the delivery room. Without God’s input, both must resort to some sort of cannibalism to manufacture a future that deliberately leaves Him out of the picture. Fortunately, because of their very nature, these attempts never last long, and Christianity will triumph again and again. Widow Babel always eats her kids.