“…blood and fire and vapor of smoke.”

The Bible teaches us that flesh is temporary. This is bad news for those who distrust God. Flesh is all they have.

Throughout the millennia, families and tribes have recited the genealogies of their past, and struggled to produce children enough to secure for their culture a future. The bloodline of unseen ancestors and bright-eyed offspring, past and future, was reinforced, thread by thread, in stories around the fires of now. This wasn’t the romantic picture so often painted for us. The struggle for cultural survival also involved blood and fire outside the camp.

In his book It’s Not The End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, David P. Goldman states that in the ancient world a continual state of conflict would account for a loss of two per cent of the population every year, and that this would also explain the proliferation of languages and dialects. He writes that even in Christianity’s darkest hours (which were simply tribalism on a greater scale), it failed to kill a small fraction of the proportion that routinely and normally fell in primitive warfare. He quotes Nicholas Wade:

Even in the harshest possible environments, where it was a struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another… casualty rates were enormous, not the least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent’s society.

Of course, we see this same emphasis in the Old Testament. The blessings of abundant offspring pronounced in Deuteronomy 28 sound strange to Western ears. I believe demographic decline may change that for us.

Goldman’s point is that the “primitive authenticity” taught in modern Western institutions is a fraud. In an attempt to avoid further damage to the environment, our children are being indoctrinated with the idea that aboriginal cultures worldwide, left to themselves, would have been self-sustaining, perhaps indefinitely, in an eternal cycle of life and death.

You have noticed that everything an Indian does in a circle,
and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles,
and everything and everything tries to be round.

In the old days all our power came to us from the sacred hoop
of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people
flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop,
and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace
and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain and the north
with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This
knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion.

Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle.
The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball
and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.
Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.
The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle.
The moon does the same and both are round.
Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing
and always come back again to where they were.

The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is
in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the
nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle,
the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit
meant for us to hatch our children.

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 1863-1950

European migration had devastating effects upon tribal peoples around the world. Colonists committed many atrocities, but our children are taught that the cultures in the lands they invaded were somehow pristine, natural, balanced.

But these “eternal cycles” were a downward spiral. The gradual degradation of ancient cultures and the loss of even primitive skills within these cultures has been well-documented. Paganism moves in circles, but if the fact of sin and the necessity of redemption are rejected, there is no eternity, not even a carnal “cultural” one. A civilization is a corporate Man. All men die. All civilizations die.

There is a great deal of wisdom in native American culture. Huguenot adventurer Jean de Lery had great admiration for the natives, who seemed to be more virtuous than Europeans. In many ways the native American worldview is more Biblical than that of modern Christians. But it is a worldview trapped in amber. History has a habit of leaving our “timeless truths” in the dust.

History certainly moves in cycles, but there is regress or there is progress. Culture moves only forwards or backwards. All the indigenous cultures of the world, at the point they had reached when white men arrived, were “backward,” but backwardness is not a solid state. Life was a constant battle to avoid extinction. We can learn from the wisdom of any culture, including the tribal ones, but left to themselves, indigenous cultures would have continued to degenerate to the point of oblivion.

The idea of growth, progress and dominion is a Christian one. The Biblical history moves from family, to tribe, to people, to nation, to kingdom, to empire. When the enormous granite wheels of empire came into contact with the slowing spinning tops of tribal life, there could be no “cog wheel” correspondence. The results were tragic.

Before our white brothers arrived
to make us civilized men,
we didn’t have any kind of prison.
Because of this, we had no delinquents.
Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.
We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us
there were no thieves.
When someone was so poor
that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket,
he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.
We were too uncivilized
to give great importance to private property.
We didn’t know any kind of money
and consequently,
the value of a human being
was not determined by his wealth.
We had no written laws laid down,
no lawyers, no politicians,
therefore we were not able
to cheat and swindle one another.
We were really in bad shape
before the white men arrived
and I don’t know how to explain
how we were able to manage
without these fundamental things
that (so they tell us) are so necessary
for a civilized society.

John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota – 1903-1976

When “modernity” arrived, it was most certainly destructive. Things changed forever. There was no way back then, and there is no way back now. Despite the best efforts of tribal elders, attempts to revive and maintain the ancient animisms has resulted in little more than nostalgia and tourist exhibits.

After a backlash by indigenous Australian cultures in the 1970s against the Christian missions, and a return to animism, many Aboriginal leaders are faced with the reality that this was a backward step for their people. Whatever the crimes of the colonists, and whatever the excesses of the missions, the Christianity they brought with them forces any culture, any people, to grow up. It calls us from animistic childhood to adulthood. There is a judicial maturity forced upon us. In many cases, indigenous people were not ready. But a return to the “childish things” of animism is rendered impossible. The Gospel destroys tribal divisions. Once the Gospel wakes you up, the Dreamtime is over.

John Lame Deer certainly makes a case against civilization, but he is judging civilization through eyes opened by civilization. Worse, he is looking through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia. John Wesley made a survey of human societies to see if any had overcome the effects of sin. Thomas C. Oden writes:

Among native American cultures with whom he had some immediate experience, [Wesley] observed as evidence of sin their constant intertribal warfare. He was especially disturbed by their practice of torturing defenseless victims. As one of the few English writers of his day who had actually spent time in the immediate environment of native American Indians, Wesley did not share the distantly conceived inflated picture of the noble savage that prevailed among enlightened French literati of the 18th century. Wesley punctured this picture mercilessly, providing a graphic depiction of how these natives were as deeply embedded in sin as the avaricious colonial British. [1]

Life was precious if it was the life of your own tribe. In truth, life was cheap. Tribes were cultures bent on self-preservation through self-destruction in bloody rivalries. David Goldman believes this fraud of primitive authenticity, the modern nature worship of environmental “animism,” is the environmentalist projecting his own presentiment of death onto the natural world.

Fear for the irreversible destruction of the natural world … substitutes for the death anxiety of the individual. Post-Christian Westerners confound their own sense of mortality with the vulnerability of the natural world. Sadly, it is not the end of the world. It is just the end of you. [2]

There is a perverse logic to this projection. The world is a world of flesh, and the flesh of the world and the flesh of Man are bound together by Covenant. Flesh is all that the godless have, and Greens believe their flesh is a cancer upon the flesh of the world. But the Word tells us that Man and World are bound together for a purpose. The process of discovery is also a process of self-discovery. For those who do trust God, flesh is temporary as a caterpillar is temporary. Contrary to the lunacy of hyperpreterism, Man and World are bound together for redemption.

The fear of mortality, individual and cultural, is a “drawing back” from God’s desires for us. This is a lesson that Christendom failed to learn, and the factor which subsequently tore it apart. Goldman observes that many minor cultures facing extinction found cultural transcendence in Christianity. Their failure to leave pagan superstitions entirely behind perpetuated the old fractures. This led to a desire for nationalistic transcendence in a Christian veil. Every European culture considered itself to be “the eternal people” to some degree. The American experiment worked because the old paganisms and nationalisms were deliberately left behind.

For all its flaws and fecklessness, America remains in the eyes of its people an attempt to order a nation according to divine law rather than human custom, such that all who wish to live under divine law may abandon their ethnicity and make themselves Americans. [3]

America is unique. It is not a redeemed culture but a melting pot of cultures. For Americans to backslide, they had to invent somewhere to slide, hence the liberal agenda and its historical revisionism (including naturalism). It is a manufactured pagan past disguised as a future.

America is not eternal. To keep His promises, God cannot allow it to be. The American vision is fading, but only for the sake of greater glory. The unmistakable success of the American experiment reveals it to be a microcosm for the future of the world—all nations submitting willingly to the Divine Law. All God’s darlings end up on the altar. There is no eternal people.

Worship yourself and you will become the God that failed. That is the epitaph for most of the world’s peoples, who fought for their place in the sun and are now dying slowly of their own disappointment. Satanic laughter accompanies them to their long sleep in the dust. “Life was made for a god!” the devil says, “and now that you know that your own self-worship involved a case of mistaken identity, why live?” More than ever, Franz Rosenzweig’s formulation applies: The Jews, by their persistence through the millennia, stand surety to God’s promise to the rest of humankind. And that is why Israel is so precious. The state of Israel may or may not be a light unto the nations; it may or may not be the cleverest, the most cultured, or the most humane of all nations. But the Jewish people in their national life are a unique living repository of the hopes of all peoples. If the implacable grudge that the dying bear against the living succeeds in destroying this state, mankind’s store of hope will be reduced by an irreplaceable margin. [4]

Goldman believes the Jews are an eternal people, but he overlooks the deliberate obsolescence of flesh. There cannot be an eternal people, not according to the flesh. Israel is flesh, blood. Goldman’s God is a god of the past, a Yahweh trapped in amber. Judaism remains as an antidote to gnosticism for Christianity, as Goldman observes. But Israel’s testimony remains as Lot’s wife remained, a white, leprous memorial to a judgment in the past. Israel will pass away, unprotected by the once dominant Christian nations who drew her under their wings.

Flesh is not transcendent. Flesh was designed to be transcended by fire. Israel, and indeed America, will be transcended. The promised child—European Christendom, the American vision, the hope of Israel, and even the Federal Vision—is ever offered on Mount Moriah for the sake of greater promises. All nations are destined for a larger melting pot, a hotter fire. Every tribe, every circumcision, every culture, every nation, every tongue, every familial baptism, every distinction founded on the old birth, is doomed. Hidden in every cultural and lingual extinction, every brutal war, every abundance, every natural disaster, every economic collapse, every trade agreement, every technological advancement, is the leaven of the gospel. The yeast that continues to consume and assimilate every other culture, every blood, ancient or modern, is the fire from the unseen mountain, the Spirit of Christ, poured out at Pentecost. Here is the eternal people.

__________________________________
[1] Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity, p. 163.
[2] David P. Goldman, It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You, p. 85.
[3] Goldman, p. 183.
[4] Goldman, p. 372.

See also Global Glass Ceiling.

“What if your gospel-preaching pastor is not as good as one of the great orators of our day? Is it time to sell the house, pack up the family, and change churches? No, I don’t think so. But what should you do?”

Steve Burchett gives us five suggestions, and includes this observation:

“…if your pastor is (honestly) dull, but he preaches the truth faithfully, a little statement I once heard might be helpful for you to remember: ‘The mature worshiper is easily edified.’ When hearing lackluster (even if biblical) preaching, immature worshipers will typically not listen to the message because they wish the messenger was more exciting. Conversely, mature worshipers eagerly receive the truth as it is proclaimed, even if it sounds like the preacher is reading a phone book.”

When Your Preacher Is Not John Piper   HT: Albert Garlando

“The necessary practice of theology is the Spirit’s invitation to the Church to ‘divide up’ and take an increasing possession of the Bible. The very mind of God is part of our glorious inheritance.”

Much of the material in God’s Kitchen (both the book and the reality) requires some understanding of the Bible Matrix, so I have included a chapter at the beginning with many of the charts from the previous books, and a couple of new ones.

They include:

1. Creation
2. Feasts
3. Dominion
4. Sacrifice
5. Tabernacle
6. Covenant
7. Work
8. Eating
9. Food Laws
10. Law of Moses
11. Law of Christ
12. Sex
13. Gestation
14. History

Here’s Eating, Sex and Gestation for the members. From now on, you’ll never be able to eat, have sex or gestate without thinking about these as future-oriented Covenantal rites from the hand of the Father.

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Jesus’ words in John 14:23 follow the blueprint for His work in God’s people in the 40 years between AD30 and AD70.

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Last week, Peter Leithart commented on an interview with Professor Simon Conway Morris. I sent the link to my expert friend, Tas Walker, and he has discussed it a little less briefly:

Paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, of Burgess Shale fame, says that examination of the fossil evidence demands a radical rewriting of evolution. Why so?

In an interview with the University of Cambridge’s alumni magazine (Issue 65, Lent 2012, pp. 32–35) Conway Morris says it’s because of “convergence”.

That’s the tendency of very different organisms to evolve similar solutions to biological problems. He wrote of this phenomenon extensively in his 2003 book Life’s Solution.

Conway Morris illustrates with the “camera eye”—“the kind of eye which you are using to read this feature.” That eye comprises a lens suspended between two fluid-filled chambers.

Conway Morris points to the octopus, which:

“has a camera eye which is remarkably similar to our own. … And yet we know that the octopus belongs to an invertebrate group called the cephalopod molluscs, evolutionarily very distant indeed from the chordates to which we belong.

“The common ancient ancestor of molluscs and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.”

Or, as the interview explained, “evolution has converged on a solution.”

Convergence is a simple word used to hide evidence for design. Convergence means that the Creator used similar designs for similar functions in unrelated creatures.

The interview continues:

“Most biologists agree that convergence is a common occurrence; but Conway Morris goes a step further, believing that evolution converges on the best possible solution, rather than on a best fit, random solution.”

Conway Morris says his discussion of convergence has lead many commentators to accuse him of being a creationist—something he finds amusing, but says is rubbish.

Of course, Conway Morris has to distance himself from creation explanations because scientific institutions have been taken over by a philosophy of naturalism. They are committed to finding naturalistic solutions. No matter what evidence is found, creation is forbidden. Anyone advocating a creationist solution will likely lose their job (see Expelled).

Conway Morris concludes that “the manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we’ve failed to identify.”

Failed to identify! 150 years of evolutionary research but its basic principle has not been identified? It’s amusing how our intelligent, academic culture is confounded by the clear, simple evidence for design in the living world.

And they will continue to be confounded so long as they refuse to allow a Divine foot in the door.

Further Reading
Review of Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (pdf) by Simon Conway Morris, in which he deals extensively with convergence.

There is a fundamental principle of dominion in the Bible:
dominion through service. This principle is understood well by the
modern welfare State. The politicians and planners recognize that
the agency that supplies charity in the name of the people will
gain the allegiance of the people. So, they “serve.” And so they
gain dominion…

Unfortunately, Christians have not understood this link between charity and authority. They have time and again fallen into
the trap that snared Ahaz: alliances with the enemy.

Someone must be in charge. There is no escape from responsibility.
When people are needy, or fearful, or desperate, they seek
protection. Who will give it to them? And what will the protector,
the benefactor, ask in return?

This is why the question of the responsibility for charity is ultimately
a question of authority. And this is why the issue of charity
is such a volatile issue. At stake is ultimate control over the society.
For that men will go to war.

Thus, the battle for the control over charity is very similar to a
military campaign. And God’s people are warned repeatedly by
God: make no alliance with foreign gods. Make no alliances with
the enemy.

George Grant, “In the Shadow of Plenty”, pp. 40-41

“Idolatry is the Bible Matrix rendered impotent.”

You get out of life only what you put in, or so the saying goes. According to the Bible Matrix, you are supposed to get out more than you put in.

The single grain of wheat that dies is supposed to bring an abundant harvest. A life is given to God in the faith that He will take what is given and turn it into an increase. This is also found in the Covenant pattern: “Who’s the boss?; who’s His representative?; what do I have to do?; what do I get?; and, what’s next? Obedience brings plunder; disobedience brings plagues. [1]

Idolatry is the Bible Matrix rendered impotent. It is a poker machine that never pays out, a Covenant foolishly made with a god who cannot produce the goods. In our day, this is all the -isms mentioned the other day (and see Ray Sutton on ethics versus magic in his book, That You May Prosper, quoted in Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.) It is men giving their all for tinpot men and tinsel ideologies that inevitably fail them. And shame them.

In the days of Jeremiah, it was lives and livestock given to tinpot gods. Instead of the sacrifices covering the people (as in The Day of Coverings, Atonement), that they might stand before God with heads lifted high, and minister to the world, the people would lie down, covered in shame. Peter Leithart writes:

Toward the end of a polemic against Judah’s idolatry, which occupies every hill and mountain and leafy tree, Jeremiah makes this comment: “the shameful thing has consumed the labor of our fathers since our youth, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters” (Jeremiah 3:24). “Shameful thing” is bosheth, which could mean, abstractly, “shame.”  Jeremiah follows with an exhortation to “lie down in our shame, and let our humiliation cover us” (v. 25).  Shame is clearly an effect of idolatry. But in Jeremiah 11:3, the same word refers to an idol for which Judah sets up altars and to which they burn incense. In 3:24, the context supports the NASB translation as “shameful thing,” the shameful idol that causes shame.

Devotion to the shameful thing not only causes shame, but impoverishment.  Quite literally, idols eat (‘akal) our labor and its products. All the time invested in raising sheep, oxen, goats literally goes up in flames when offered to a nothing.  Sons and daughters pass through the fire, and all the invested hopes and energies are consumed. For Scripture, the same things offered to Yahweh are glorified and multiplied; not shame but glory is the product of sacrificing our labor to Him.

Our idols are as insatiable as ancient ones: Addictions, for instance, consume money, time, energy, life, children, marriages – and for what? The only product is humiliation.

Perhaps the prophet deliberately used the ambiguity of shame/shameful thing. [2] They would lie down in their idols, a slumber that was not God’s rest.

Lives offered to Christ bring a plunder for God that is eternal, even if the results are not seen in this generation or even in this life. We can offer him our “flocks and herds,” our sons and daughters, and our very lives, and see an increase of 30, 60 or 100 fold. Not only will we not be ashamed when we stand before Him, but He removes our shame now. The power of the accuser is the stigma of sin. In Christ, prostitutes and publicans, and even failed disciples, can lift up their heads, and minister to the nations. Jesus paid it all (mercy), and He keeps paying out (grace).

Creation – Transcendence – Sabbath
‘You shall call Me, “My Father,”
And not turn away from Me.’

Division – Hierarchy – Passover
Surely, as a wife treacherously departs from her husband,
So have you dealt treacherously with Me,
O house of Israel,” says the Lord.

Ascension – Ethics 1 – Firstfruits
A voice was heard on the desolate heights,
Weeping and supplications of the children of Israel.

Testing – Ethics 2 – Pentecost
For they have perverted their way;
They have forgotten the Lord their God.

Maturity – Ethics 3 – Trumpets
“Return, you backsliding children,
And I will heal your backslidings.”
…..“Indeed we do come to You,
…..For You are the Lord our God.
……….Truly, in vain is salvation hoped for from the hills,
……….And from the multitude of mountains;
……………Truly, in the Lord our God
……………Is the salvation of Israel.
……….For shame has devoured
……….The labor of our fathers from our youth—
…..Their flocks and their herds,
…..Their sons and their daughters.
(No Succession)

Conquest – Sanctions – Atonement
We lie down in our shame,
And our reproach covers us.
For we have sinned against the Lord our God,
We and our fathers,
From our youth even to this day,
And have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.”

There is no stanza 7 in this speech, no rest, no glory. Shameless Israel was devoured by shame.

_______________________________
[1] See Golden Emerods.
[2] For the prophets, language with a double meaning was a veiled blade. Ambiguous use of a word, done rightly, is the two-edged dagger of Ehud. In fact, Ehud announced that he had a dabar for Eglon, a Hebrew word which means “word,” or “thing.” Turns out it was a double-edged word, a physical “thing” that was not void. The blade went in and the machine paid out.

Having never been much interested in understanding Islam, it has been helpful to read David P. Goldman’s take on it. He is Jewish, (his glowing comments concerning modern Israel are a dead giveaway), but he is surprisingly objective concerning Christianity and Islam.

In the more circumspect of his recent books, he observes that the decisive difference between Judeo-Christianity and Islam cannot be found by arguing about the amount of violence in their respective histories. Their disparate characters are exposed somewhere closer to home:

…traditional society is incompatible organically with the first principle of law in modern liberal democracy: The state wields the monopoly of violence. Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the deeply ingrained notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of the family may employ violent compulsion just as the state does. [1]

His comparison of the Judeo-Christian worldview with Islam is very telling.

…we reviewed Islam’s deep roots in tribal society. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, in which every individual participates directly in the covenant with God, Islam retains the hierarchy of pre-biblical traditional society, in which the head of a family is a miniature head of state. If the Muslim womb is closing because of a failure of faith, we must look more deeply at the faith that has failed in its encounter with modernity.

Judaism and its daughter-religion Christianity sought to distinguish themselves from paganism. But what does “paganism” actually mean? In Franz Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion, the animal ties of common ancestry define the pagan order. Individuality in the Judeo-Christian sense is inconceivable, for every member of society must bear the same identity of blood and soil as every other member, and the single member of society can be nothing other than an expression of collective blood and collective will. For this reason every institution of pagan society, emphatically including family and clan, must collapse into the totality. Here is how Rosenzweig described the absence of individuality in pre-modern society:

In the thoroughly organized State, the State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State. The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.

As we have seen, the family is a miniature clan, the clan is a miniature tribe, and the tribe is a miniature nation. All the layers of society stand in relation to each other like nested Russian dolls, identical except for their size.

Ancient Israel, and later Christianity, constituted an alternative to pagan social order. The covenant between Abraham and the biblical God applies not only to the Hebrew nation but to every individual member of that nation. Through his covenant, God establishes the rights of every individual — emphatically including the weakest members of society — beyond the claims of tribe and clan, and provides laws, judgments, and ordinances which stand above the whim of any human magistrate or chieftain. No longer can the Roman paterfamilias command the death of his own children in the little empire of his home; the covenant protects every member of society directly. And no longer can a husband be justified in beating his wife because he acts with the legal authority of a head of state in miniature, as in Sura 4:34.

It is common to speak loosely of “three Abrahamic religions” and assume an underlying commonality among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But the defining experience of Judaism and Christianity is alien to Islam. That is the love of a personal God. The founding premise of Judaism is that God’s love for Abraham, “God’s lover,” extends by covenant to each and everyone of his descendants, as well as those who are adopted into Israel by conversion. Christianity proposes to extend this grace to all who believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Each morning, the observant Jew enacts a wedding ceremony with God, forming a wedding band with the leather strap of his phylacteries and reciting the words of Hosea: “And I shall espouse you to Me eternally; I shall espouse you in mercy and lovingkindness, in righteousness and justice, and you shall know The Lord.” The personal God of Judaism who loves the faithful soul with the ardor of the Divine Lover in the Song of Songs is unimaginable in Islam, for Allah does not condescend to enter into a relationship of love with mere mortals. Allah cannot bind himself to covenants that he himself cannot alter out of love for his Chosen people, as the biblical God did with Abraham and his descendants; much less can Allah become incarnate as a human being, as Christians believe God did, to offer salvation to all humankind.

Jews and Christians worship a God who cannot be like them, for their God is perfect and incapable of doing evil. For Christians, the incarnate God Jesus Christ is without sin. God is thus wholly Other, for we are imperfect: frail, mortal, and prone to sin. God does nothing without a reason, and his reasons always are good, even if they surpass our understanding.

Allah, by contrast, is beyond good and evil. His cosmic caprice determines everything, and if he so wishes he can make us commit acts of evil, even the ultimate evil of idolatry. Covenant is a concept alien to Islam. For by definition a God of covenants places a limit on his own power and enters into a partnership with a human society. Unlike YHWH of the Hebrews, the all-transcendent Allah does not stoop to make agreements with mere human beings.

Allah usually is described as “absolutely transcendent” but in comparison to the God of the Bible, he is rather more like us. That is what Rosenzweig meant when he called Islam a pagan parody of Judaism and Christianity, and Allah the “colorful panoply of the pagan Olympus rolled up into one,” that is, “a monistic paganism.” Rosenzweig’s use of the term “paganism” is not a reproach but a diagnosis. There is a pagan purpose to the reconfiguration of Christian and Jewish concepts in the Koran: the election of the Arabs in place of the Jews, as Professor Kalisch explains.

__________________________
[1] David P. Goldman, It’s Not The End of the World, It’s Just The End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, p. 261.
[2] David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), pp. 141-143

“Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates—indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere—in the Muslim world. The world’s population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the twenty-first century, by far the worst decline in human history.” [1]

So writes David P. Goldman in the introduction to his recent book, How Civilisations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too).

Goldman observes that the economic crisis in Europe is at root a demographic crisis, and the demographic crisis is a crisis of faith.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation. [2]

The secularization of Europe is tragic, but the loss of faith and subsequent demographic decline in the Muslim world is news to me. What’s interesting is that not only have the birthrates among Muslim immigrants in European countries (except Great Britain) fallen to current European levels within one or two generations, the birthrates in Muslim states are also falling dramatically.

Islam is a pagan parody of Judeo-Christian religion, says Franz Rozenzweig. But how does Islam respond to the encroachment of the modern world?

In Europe, a decline in religious faith underlies its demographic decline… In the footsteps of Western Europe, Islam also faces a crisis of faith that will bring about a demographic catastrophe in the middle of the present century. Given the prominence of what Westerners call “Islamic fundamentalism,” it seems odd to speak of a crisis of faith in the Islamic world. Striking statistical evidence supports this conclusion…

Although the Muslim birthrate today is the world’s second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birthrate of any other culture… The demographic position of the Islamic world has set a catastrophe in motion. It is hard enough for rich nations to care for a growing elderly population, but it is impossible for poor nations to do so. If America faces discomfort, and Europe faces crisis, Muslim countries face breakdown. [3]

Demographic decline due to literacy and modernity is not really news, even in Muslim nations. What is news is that this process is occurring in Islamic nations at a rate that is dumbfounding the experts. Muslim nations currently have a relatively young population, but that population is not having children. In response to the onslaught of modernity, this “suicide of Islam” is a titanic version of the self-immolation of an endangered tribe.

If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences. [4]

The political and religious leaders of these Muslim states are aware of the problem. Where the West is pessimistic, these nations are panicking. Faced with poverty and, in some cases, starvation, it is likely they will become not less dangerous but more so. Goldman’s take on the recent Arab revolutions is eye-opening.

Despite the desperate efforts of political and religious leaders, Islam’s response to modernity has been not only a sudden demographic decline, but in many cases a descent into self-destructive behavior.

The underside of Islam’s demographic freeze is an appalling breakdown of traditional mores… Under the facade of radical Islam, Iran suffers from an eruption of social pathologies such as drug addiction and prostitution on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West. It appears than Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay. A spiritual malaise has overcome Iran despite the best efforts of the totalitarian Islamists. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed. [5]

This statement is shocking enough, but Goldman’s evidence and breakdown of the problem is not only heart-rending, it exposes the Islamic hypocrisy for what it is — an impotent Phariseeism.

__________________________
[1] How Civilisations Die, p. ix
[2] How Civilisations Die, p. xxii
[3] David P. Goldman, It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, pp. 280-284.
[4] How Civilisations Die, p. 1
[5] How Civilisations Die, p. 45-46.

By evil age, I do not mean the “terrible twos,” or even terrible teens. Many Christians believe they are living in the “evil age” Paul refers to in Galatians 1. They are wrong.

Paul, an apostle
(Creation – Initiation)

(not from men nor through man,
(Division – Delegation)

but through Jesus Christ
(Ascension – Presentation [Firstfruits])

and God the Father
(Testing – Purification [Rulers])

who raised Him from the dead),
(Maturity – Transformation – Trumpets)

and all the brethren who are with me,
(Conquest – Vindication – Atonement)

To the churches of Galatia:
(Glorification – Representation – Booths)

Grace to you and peace
(Ark – Sabbath)

from God the Father
(Veil – Passover)

and our Lord Jesus Christ,
(Altar & Table – Firstfruits)

who gave Himself for our sins,
(Lampstand – Pentecost)

that He might deliver us from this present evil age,
(Incense Altar – Trumpets)

according to the will of our God and Father,
(Mediators – Atonement ["Pass-through"])

to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
(Shekinah – Booths)

Firstly, Paul aligns their deliverance with the first resurrection, that is, the entry of the Firstfruits Church, along with the Old Covenant saints, into the heavenly country. This occurred some time between the middle and end of the Jewish War. These saints in God’s court called down the Covenant curses upon the city, just as Daniel called them down from his seat in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. This deliverance has past.

The second stanza seems to highlight the Tabernacle more than the other matrix strands, and this allows us to see the seven seals here as well. The fifth seal is the martyred saints under the Altar (from memory, James Jordan thinks it’s the Incense Altar and Peter Leithart recently commented that it was the Bronze Altar due to the blood splashed around its base. They are basically the same Altar. The first is the Adamic body, the natural body, and the second is the Evian body, the spiritual body: ashes and smoke. One sits “above” the other).

Secondly, it’s clear that Jesus believed the last generation of Israel-according-to-the-flesh was an evil time. The Veil between Jew and Gentile had grown irreparably old and was ready to pass away (and as a side note, notice the beautiful symmetry in stanza 2 [bolded]). The face of the Father was about to be revealed to the Old Covenant saints and the New Covenant Firstfruits. Galatians is also a fractal, so where stanza 1 is the Initiation of Paul’s letter, stanza 2 concerns Delegation, the Veil as the robe of Greater Joseph.

Dispensationalists, amillennials and historic premillennials do not believe this current age will see a growth in righteousness. But Jesus was postmillennial. He tore down the Veil, then He tore down the Temple, casting them away like an egg shell to allow a new age. But what is an age, biblically defined?

It’s probably best to swap “age” for “era.” The term seems to mean a Covenant administration. All the Old Covenants were cut “inside” each other, Noah within Adam, Abraham within Noah, etc., God cutting deeper and deeper into Adam till He found the righteous rib, the Christ. Each of these Covenant administrations was an age, but together they were all Adamic, flesh without indwelling Spirit (except for a few exemplary prototypes, such as David).

Amillennials generally aren’t preterists, so all the AD70 warnings are mistakenly applied to our future. This is where they get all their dark expectations from. They are mistaken.

This age is Evian. No cutting required, except for hearts. It’s about binding up, joining, networking, uniting by the Spirit. Eve is about multiplication, growth. So things can only get better and bigger as the nations are transformed and united in Christ. This age is no utopia, but neither is any construction process. And, like yeast, the kingdom of light grows better in the dark. As with any good story, the clues are piling up and the denouement is coming.

The passage of time has a habit of exposing people and ideas for what they are. Every false -ism (Naturalism, Communism, Socialism, Islamism, Zionism, Secularism, etc.) that gets exposed and debunked is one more lie we are very unlikely to fall for again, one less magic trick in Jannes and Jambres’ repertoire. Sure, some mistakes get repeated, but we do learn. This process of cutting away is incredibly costly, but the only one being corporately “circumcised” in the flesh in this age is the devil. It’s only an evil age for Satan. Like Peter’s wolf, the more he struggles, the tighter gets the rope, or in this case, the chain. It must be terribly humiliating for him, and it’s only going to get worse. As with the cross, every blow he strikes turns into a victory for the Church.

As the wheels eventually come off every other philosophy and the Church watches them crash and burn, the gospel of Christ is vindicated and shines in greater and greater glory. Slow and steady…

See also Circumcision and Apocalypse.