7 Threats: (#3) The Loss of the Noble Male & the Rise of False, Malevolent Compassion

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Nothing is judged more severely by our culture today than assertions of biblical male and female absolutes. It may be possible that we are in the final progression of God giving our culture up to first “sexual impurity” then “shameful lusts” and finally a “depraved mind”. And throughout all of this, true human sexuality has been the prime target. The enemy turns everything on its head, evil is good, good is evil, and truth is exchanged for a lie.

This exchange is found most deeply in the attack on human sexuality, for it strikes us at our core. God designed the human being as male and female, created for a relationship, and each with unique purposes. And yet, this forms the focus of our current controversies. Ponder how many of our burning issues are rooted in a contrary view of God’s design: pornography, abortion, adultery and unmarried sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, LGBTQIA+, transgenderism, pansexuality, personal pronouns, gender dysphoria and identity, etc. Additionally, we have human sexuality issues that are being used as political and social hammers such as male toxicity, #MeToo, ERA, pay equality, gender roles and quotas, glass ceilings, harassment and so on. Human sexuality is at the core of all of this and nothing seems to provoke a more visceral hostility. 

But we must stay true to the Word of God or we are lost in a fickle sea of emotions and power struggles for control and significance.  Of the critical forces aligning themselves in our culture today, this may well be the most perilous of all, for when we mess with man’s fundamental design, everything becomes radically skewed.

This threat has now become a pervasive belief that penetrates virtually every aspect of our culture. I suppose we could call it “the feminization of society” but that both wrongly implies a negative about true femininity and it would fall woefully short in terms of communicating the depths of this deep menace to our culture. 

When God describes the downfall of Nineveh, Babylon and Egypt, there is a nearly identical declaration for each: they had “become like women”. Here is the passage from Nahum, concerning the fall of Nineveh: 

Behold, your troops
    are women in your midst.
The gates of your land
    are wide open to your enemies;
    fire has devoured your bars. Nahum 3:13

This is not a denigration of women, but rather a condemnation of the feminization of men and its consequences. Thompson’s Chain Reference lists all of these passages under the title “effeminacy”. The peril to the city or nation is clear. It is no longer being guarded or protected; its gates are left open for the enemy to plunder. 

This is a most serious threat. When a culture rejects truth and righteousness, it has a disastrous effect upon the role of the male and the female. This, in turn, has a disastrous effect upon the culture.

Let’s examine it.

We must first never forget how foundational the diversity of male and female is to the human race. This is the design of God, creating them the same in essence, yet so very diverse in their personhood[1].

The Noble Male is driven by two engines, as on a train. The first engine is truth, righteousness and wisdom; the second is grace and compassion. He is primarily driven by a zeal for truth and righteousness, but it is tethered by grace and compassion.

The Virtuous Female is driven by the same two engines, but they are in reverse order. She is driven first by grace and compassion, but this is tethered by truth, righteousness and wisdom. 

She is, therefore, not given to unwise actions propelled solely by her grace and compassion. 

He is, therefore, not led by some cold and heartless logic, but by a gracious and compassionate wisdom.

The Noble Male has been made to protect and defend. He is built for this. He protects and defends that which is good and true. He gives his life for the noble cause. He stands on the deck of the sinking Titanic having gotten women and children into the scarce lifeboats. He falls on a live grenade to save the lives of others. He rushes into a burning building to save those trapped inside. He goes to the stake for truth and righteousness.

The Virtuous Woman has been made to nurture and comfort. She is built for this. She nurtures and comforts that which is good and true. She is the Virtuous Woman of Proverbs 31, a champion in commerce, strong and knowing that her grace and compassion must be guided by wisdom and truth. Not long ago I had the privilege of hearing Governor Reynolds of Iowa and Governor Noem of South Dakota. These are Virtuous Women. Would that we had 48 more of them!

However, when a culture rejects God and absolute truth, when it casts off the Meta-narrative of God, then the Noble Male and the Virtuous Female are stripped of their divine compass. The Noble Male loses his primary role and the Virtuous Female loses her tether. 

The male no longer sees anything beyond himself worth defending or protecting and he descends into either the self-centered buffoon or the selfish brute. 

The self-centered buffoon cares only for himself, abandons his family physically or otherwise, absorbs himself in drinking, sports, video games and other selfish pursuits. He is depicted for us in much of our entertainment today from “Everyone Loves Raymond” to the cartoon “Zits” to the children’s books, “The Berenstain Bears”, where Papa bear is a buffoonish cub in an adult body and Mama bear is always the wise one, rolling her eyes at Papa bear. When this dawned on me, I stopped reading them to my children. 

The selfish brute has been found in every tyrant known to history. It is found in today’s ISIS and in the gangs that roam our streets and in the beast that beats his wife or girlfriend. When a culture loses the Noble Male, it is headed for the very same end into which Babylon and Ninevah collapsed.

When truth is lost, the female’s primary role becomes untethered and she begins to nurture and comfort in unwise or even evil ways. This is a false compassion, and a malevolent compassion. It is the heart of the threat before us.

We know that power, untethered from truth and righteousness, can become catastrophically evil. We have seen this throughout history and today. But few consider what happens when compassion is also untethered from truth and righteousness. We wrongfully think that all compassion is right and good. It is not. In fact, it can bring a family or culture to ruin.

These roles of the Noble Male and the Virtuous Female were meant to be complementary. The Noble Male may want to kick the baby bird out of the nest in April, but the Virtuous Female may see he needs another month. By the end of May, however, they both kick him out.

But there are larger implications here. At the cultural level, some of the social spheres themselves carry these same distinctions.

The State, for example, is a protect and defend institution. It punishes evil and condones what is good. It protects its citizens from the theft of their property and defends them from foreign enemies. It defends the freedom of its citizens to be fruitful according to their work and initiative. It allows them to fail, learn from those failures and then pick themselves up and press on. But not so in our feminized culture. The State has now tipped from protect and defend to nurture and comfort. We demand that it feed us, clothe us, care for us. It becomes the Nanny State. Out of “compassion”, if someone fails, the Nanny State will rush in, put them back in the nest and they become a ward of the State. This follows with a host of “compassionate” laws and policies to keep anyone from hurting themselves or suffering from any bad consequences of their actions. Virtually every bill that is passed today is primarily a nurture and comfort bill that will ultimately destroy the wards and enlarge the State. All of this is pressed onward by our new prime ethic of “compassion” and cheered on by feminized men attempting to outdo each other by their “nurture and comfort” character and proposals. 

These, however, are mostly driven by malevolent compassion and false grace. Star Parker writes often of how this malevolent compassion has destroyed the black family. Welfare programs that paid women for more babies (as long as they weren’t married) were offered under the guise of kind-heartedness yet produced horrible consequences and served no one except to garner power to the State. The economic crash of 2008 was driven primarily by “compassion” policies that granted so many unwise loans that the entire house of cards came tumbling down. False compassion pretends to care for the unemployed by paying them so much to not work that they end up not working. These are not driven by truth and wisdom, but by emotional compassion that ends up in no good. 

It is this false, malevolent compassion that is behind everything from giving needles to addicts, to defunding police in favor of community services, to being squeamish about border security. It drives minimum wage laws that result in loss of jobs. It is behind growing soft on crime and behind transforming our military into more and more of a humanitarian service.

The Church is inherently a protect and defend institution as well. Paul states that it is the “pillar of truth”. But now it is tipped more to the nurture and comfort side and we desire “smooth words”. We want to be comforted and entertained on Sunday mornings.

The Family can also be devastated by this. We have already mentioned the ruinous results of malevolent state policies, but if inside the home, even one with both a mom and dad, the nurture and comfort of children isn’t balanced with wisdom and truth and righteousness, then we can raise coddled, dysfunctional, adult children, who cannot handle anything contrary in their lives. Obstacles and bumps throw them into emotional turmoil and depression—even suicide.

Even the sphere of labor is now desperate to signal how “compassionate” it is in a thousand different ways, most of them also unbridled by true wisdom. 

The notion of “malevolent” compassion is difficult for us because we think that all compassionate thoughts, feelings and actions are good. But we need to rethink this. In the beginning, Satan faked a benevolent heart toward an oppressed Eve. But it was all a lie. Judas feigned a benevolent heart for the poor, but the Scripture tells us he really was after the money for himself. The emotion of compassion arises in me when I see a homeless person. But if I give into that emotion without the balance of wisdom and truth, I can act in a way that is detrimental to him. We are inundated with this ploy constantly. Someone is paraded out in front of us, in video or print, and the plea is based totally on compassion. It tugs at our heart. But we must always balance that emotion with wisdom and truth or we might be guilty of supporting something malevolent. This is what the Scripture calls us to when it says:

For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. 2 Thessalonians 3:10

Unbridled compassion would scream at this command and call it hateful or something similar. But the truly wise and compassionate heart sees this one’s true good is found, not in coddling, but being graciously firm.

Let me close us with a story from a dear friend. When he was young, he had gotten himself onto the wrong path, hanging out with the wrong kind of people and sneaking it all behind his parent’s backs. One Friday night he got caught and was going to have to spend the weekend in jail until he could go before the judge on Monday. He called his mom, knowing that she would bail him out. But to his horror, his dad answered. When he told his dad what had happened and laid out his sad story about being in this horrible jail, his dad told him he would see him Monday. My friend told me that his weekend in jail turned his life around. He is a very successful businessman today with a wonderful wife and family. This wouldn’t have happened under unbridled compassion.

The greatest danger and bottom line, of course, is that malevolent compassion destroys our ability to see evil as evil, both personally and culturally. It blinds us. Sexual depravity is no longer seen through the eyes of wisdom and truth, but through the wringing hands of unbridled compassion. We coddle evil and that which is ultimately harmful to people because we are led to believe it is “compassionate” and “caring”.

Our gates are wide open, but it is the Remnant that understands what true grace and compassion should look like; it understands the truth of God and His righteousness and the wisdom that must be displayed in the midst of this storm. 

May God give us the grace to become Noble Men and Virtuous Women and raise our children to be the same.

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[1] We cannot in our short space do justice to this and I commend to you the excellent and classic work “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” by Grudem and Piper.

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24
When Infants Invade Adult Bodies
On Election Day, at lunchtime, I was at a park in Colorado Springs. On one corner of the park sits one of our big high schools. It was a nice day (normal for the Springs) and the students filled the park, several making out lying on the grass. On the opposite corner stood a young man, conservatively dressed, holding an American flag and a Trump sign. He had a radio on the ground, not very loud, but playing a conservative talk show. I sat at a bench near the young man because I was curious about what I saw happening. As the students walked by, they shouted obscenities at him and Trump. I am not willing to repeat any of it, suffice to say it was as filthy and vile as you can get. Some spit toward him. As it was getting close to the end of their lunch hour, a group gathered in front of him and pummeled him with profanity and obscene gestures. One girl was screaming at him. I suppose even worse was that after they would shout their obscenities, they would then howl in laughter pointing at him as if he were a joke. Of course, in the world of child-like behavior, this is considered the cruelest of all taunts… to make another seem like a worthless outcast… insignificant scum. Although I couldn’t hear what the young man was saying, he remained calm and would sometimes turn and wave at cars that would supportively “beep-beep” as they drove by. As I write this, I’m not sure if I was right or wrong to not jump into the middle of it. I was committed to offer help if it looked like it was going to escalate beyond words, but for now it was free-speech being played out, though admittedly disgusting. After the lunch crowd had returned to their classrooms, I approached the young man and our conversation went something like this: “Students were pretty rough on you.” “Yeah. A lot of nasty stuff.” “I’m impressed you remained calm through all of it.” “Well, I kept telling them that obscenities didn’t add to the conversation and just encouraged any of them to simply enter into a civil discussion with me.” “I’m sorry they didn’t do that.” “Me too. I really wish we could just talk about the issues like adults.” I think it was the “adult” word that helped frame some of this for me. I had, indeed, witnessed deep immaturity, with its pure emotional spewing and little to no rational thought. I don’t go to the park all the time, but I’m there enough to occasionally hear their conversations. I remember one of the first times, next to a group of high school girls, in which I was dumbfounded at the filth of their language. I spent over 20 years in the military, and I’d never heard anything that matched it. Where does this come from? My heart sank as I experienced what was happening Tuesday. It was quite scary, actually, because I was not only looking at such deep expressions of hate and loathing, but I was also looking at the generation that is going to replace us all. It didn’t look good. We woke this morning to the continued news that there are protests all around the country. Some have become violent and destructive. Interestingly, the chants of the protestors are much like those I heard in the park… quite childish, selfish and filled with hatred. Where is all of this coming from? In the park, my first thoughts were to put the blame on the high school that was right on the corner, thinking that this was coming from their classrooms. But then something dawned on me after reading the list of “tweets” that went out from Hollywood and TV and music “stars”. They were all saying the same things, in “star” lingo, of course, but just as childish. This is Cher’s mature tweet on the election: “Trump will never be more than a toilet…” Andy Cohen (along with all the other late-night talk show hosts): “Did we just elect a snake oil salesman and his wicked court of terror…?” Snoop Dogg: “The worst day in America: 9/11. The second worst day: 11/9.” Really? Worse than the Civil War? Worse than the trail of tears? Worse that Kennedy’s assassination… or Pearl Harbor or the stock market crash in 1929? This is the mindless mantra of our “entertainment” empire. And it is here we find the prime tutor of our children. The average teen consumes 9 hours a day of entertainment on their smartphone or TV. You may want to reread that or say it over to yourself: 9 hours per day of smartphone/TV entertainment. This domain of music, rap, video, shows, comedy, movies and gaming is cultivating a mind that is filled with sex, violence, obscene language and destructive ideas. It numbs them towards a true reality. It strips them of common sense. It erects in their heart, mind and soul a virtual world of all-about-me and my pleasure. And if things don’t go my way, I throw my tantrums. I call people names. I stomp my feet and chant emotional non-sense. And I demand. Like the 3-year-old girl I saw the other day stomping her feet, screaming at her mother, demanding her own way. For 9 hours a day, our youth live in a non-real world where lyrics and scripts and rap words rhythmically and cinematically draw them into believing that the virtual world of the entertainment empire is the world we all ought to live in… the world we WANT to live in. It seduces. It hypnotizes. It frames a worldview that is totally self-centered and hedonistic. And it is totally irrational. It spews out the most hateful and vile stuff. It beats up people, destroys property, flips off the world and then smugly chants “love trumps hate”. It is the la-la land of infants demanding to get their own way in their self-defined, virtual world. The problem is that the infants are increasingly in adult bodies with lots of power. Our addiction to entertainment will continue to stunt our culture's maturity. We must wean ourselves and our kids. Here is what troubles me most, however. Immaturity, when it doesn’t get its way, will often erupt into a “make you pay” rage. I sense that is what we are seeing. But I fear it is only the beginning. We are going to be treated to a host of "See what you made me do!" and "This is all your fault!" and "You'll be sorry!" acts and situations and new stories and personal stories, ad infinitim. Brace yourselves, for the revenge of self-centered infants who live in adult bodies and carry great wealth and power can, and will be, be scary.   
7
The True State of Our Union
Our President will offer, on Tuesday, his State of the Union address. However, it will most likely not be a true state of our nation, but rather another political posturing speech, just like we have heard for years, from both Republicans and Democrats. This is unfortunate, for our nation needs a true, honest assessment of where we are as a culture. It is in that spirit I offer my humble perspective. This is what I would wish for the President to say as he stands before Congress and the American people: ... To the people of this great country, I offer to you my honest assessment of the state of our nation…and it is not good. We are greatly blessed in America. We have abundant resources, rich farmland, and beauty beyond description: from the Grand Canyon to our waterfalls, from our mountains to our coastlands. We have been blessed with great people: people who have come here from all the nations of the earth, seeking the American dream. They have been hard working, good people, courageous in the face of trials and heroic in the face of enemies. We have been blessed with more than we can enumerate. And, I suppose, the Hollywood and political style would have us gush and fawn over each other in our lofty positions and applaud all kinds of supposed accomplishments as if these blessings come from our own making. It would be in keeping with most of our recent State of the Union addresses to therefore give you a long list of all the grand things that the Federal government needs to do for the American people and to smile and look into the camera and assure them that we are taking good care of them...and things are going quite well. But they are not. We are not healthy… Nor are we strong. In fact, I believe we are now, more than ever before in the life of this nation, vulnerable to destruction. This has not come as the result of an external power or force. It has not come from our current war with terrorism. I do not speak of our military might, but I speak of the state of this nation’s soul. We hang over a perilous ledge…at best, we are sliding into an insignificant oblivion. We are in a state of decay…we are rotting away from within. We have succumbed to a deep selfishness. It is eating away at our character, our strength and our core like an aggressive, unchecked cancer. Despite all the current cries for secularization, we were founded with a clear belief that the health of this nation would rest upon two foundations: religion and morality[1]. This was not to be understood that religious particulars would be legislated, but that we, as a nation, recognized the fundamental existence of God and His declaration of things that were right and things that were wrong, and that the citizenry would then govern themselves according to those transcendent laws. It was this self-government that allowed for a minimum of civil-government and therefore a maximum of personal freedom…freedom to work hard and to enjoy the fruit of one’s labor…to use that fruit and selfless efforts to raise a family and to aid one’s neighbor in distress. This was the American dream. In our great foolishness, we have now discarded those foundations. We have traded self-government for self-indulgence. We have traded transcendent Truth for self-centered identity and self-centered lust. The desires of the heart now trump any notion of divine righteousness. We have tossed aside these critical Foundations…Foundations that for years sustained and propelled us into being the greatest nation in the world. Now we chase the mirage and illusion of self-gratification and false notions that right and wrong are determined by the individual…by man himself. And these false notions are now supported and propagated by all the centers of influence in our culture: Hollywood, media, academia and even the President, the Supreme Court and Congress. And, as with every lie and deceit, its promises are false. Instead of selfishness bringing us happiness and pleasure, it reaps us strife and groaning. In the end, a self-centered culture is a hateful and violent culture…a culture seething with the seeds of its own destruction. Our cities teeter on the brink of bursting into riots and flames. We can no longer stroll safely at night on our streets. Our families are no longer secure in their homes. Our children are no longer safe in their schools. Our pursuit of selfishness and hedonism has brought the true state of our nation to one that is filled with violence. We lead the world in crime. We commit approximately 10 million crimes every year…nearly 26,000 every day[2]. No other nation comes close to us. Every day we murder 40 people and rape 320[3]. As such, we also lead the world in incarcerations. Of all the prisoners in the world, we account for 25% of them. Our prisons are overflowing[4]. The backbone of our culture, our families, are in serious trouble. For every 7 marriages this year, there will be nearly 4 divorces.[5] And when we have babies, fewer are within the security and nourishment of a mother and father. Half of our first babies are born to unwed mothers; a third of our children live without a father[6]; if you are a black baby conceived in this nation, the odds are greater that you will be aborted than that you will be born alive[7]. Since 1973, we have killed 55 million of our babies, about a million a year, and we abort more of our offspring every single day than the terrorists murdered in the World Trade towers on 9/11[8]. The true state of our Union should cause us to weep. We lead the world in producing pornography. 90% of the world’s pornography comes from our nation[9]. We are sexually addicted and obsessed. Our movies and music and media are awash in what was once considered sinful and vile. The state of our nation is truly shameful. We have lost our sense of morality and it is costing us dearly. Try to imagine this next statistic: in one year, we will contract 20 million sexually transmitted infections. That’s 54,000 people infected every day…a fourth of them are teenagers.[10] This is well beyond a level that we should label as an epidemic and plague—but we don’t speak of these things because it would dampen our lust for sexual freedom and reduce ticket sales at the theater. We are the world’s leading user of illegal drugs[11]. Approximately one in ten of us is addicted to alcohol or drugs[12]. Every day, our drinking and driving snuffs out the lives of 28 human beings[13]. We spend $50 billion federal dollars every year fighting illegal drugs while we spend $100 billion a year using them[14]. We are a nation of self-centered addicts. Our drug and alcohol addictions lead the world, but they are nothing compared to the astounding percentage of our people who have sexual addictions…people who are addicted to pornography or addicted to gambling or video games or other pathologies that have a death grip upon us, destroying our lives, our families and our fruitfulness. This, too, is a national epidemic. We are sinking fast into mental numbness and dumbness as well. Out of the top 22 developed countries, our upcoming millennial generation ranks dead last in math, dead last in problem solving, and near dead last in literacy. This is a continual decline over decades. After four years of college, our Millennials score no better than high school seniors in Japan or Finland or the Netherlands. Researchers call our Millennial scores “abysmal”[15]. Instead, our teens consume nearly 9 hours a day of entertainment on smartphones or TV[16]. By the time they are 18, our children will have witnessed approximately 400,000 murders on TV and by the age of 21, they will have spent 10,000 hours playing video games[17]. Even the future state of our nation does not look promising. We adults aren’t much different. We average nearly 6 hours a day in front of the television…a big screen TV that is most likely on a credit card. Our personal consumer debt is over $2.5 trillion. The average family owes $16,000 in credit card debt. Our students owe $1.3 trillion in school loans[18]. But the biggest runaway spending is found in Washington. The Federal debt is beyond imagination. Our debt has gone from $7.3 trillion in 2004 to over $18.8 trillion today with no sign of slowing down. This debt is now higher than our GDP—the total of ALL the goods and services produced in our country. We pay almost $230 billion a year in interest on that debt. The debt load on every taxpayer in America is now over $157,000[19]. But, in reality, the $18.8 trillion debt is a phony number. The real debt is found in our unfunded obligations, obligations to pay things in the future like Social Security and Medicare. This is the real debt of our nation. We currently have unfunded liabilities that total over $100 trillion dollars….a debt load of $1 million dollars for every taxpayer in our nation[20]. It is more than the total of the ENTIRE world’s output. This debt is beyond understanding. It is a house of cards awaiting a puff of wind to blow it down. Are we so blind that we cannot see any of this? Despite the political posturing, we have fewer people in the workforce today than in 2000. We play with numbers to keep a respectable unemployment figure by moving millions of people into a growing pool of what we call “not in the labor force”…currently over 90 million[21], but the reality is that many of them are of working age who desire to be employed full-time but the jobs are not there. That may partially come from the fact that we also have the largest trade deficit in the entire world[22] and that our high corporate tax rate is causing businesses and jobs to move to other countries[23]. All of this is transforming our nation into an ever-increasing welfare state. Over half of our people receive redistribution benefits from the Federal government. Few Americans are saving wisely and 76% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, which means over three-fourths of our nation are loaded with debt and are one paycheck away from financial disaster.[24] How can we be so foolish? We are increasingly becoming a nation of dependents and wards of the State. We are becoming slaves to a Federal Beast that grows without restraint. The power and reach of the Federal government has become unrecognizable by our founding standards. The President and Supreme Court craft laws in defiance of the Constitution. The President thumbs his nose at the Constitution’s requirement to get Senate approval for foreign treaties. [I can guarantee that the President’s State of the Union that will be delivered Tuesday will be filled with political posturing, back patting, and that everything proposed will lead to a larger and more powerful Federal Beast. And in so doing, our people will descend deeper and deeper into dependent wards, and with it, our productivity will continue to shrivel and dry up.] And in all of this, we simply turn a blind eye and go back to our TVs and smartphones…because we are addicted to our self-centeredness. Our military has increasingly been stripped of any notion of Absolute truth…a military that was once feared by enemies, but cheered by the liberated French. Why? Because they carried a belief in an absolute moral foundation. No longer. Our military academies and military services have become a playground for social policies and political correctness and there is growing list of incidents that are creating a very “hostile” environment for the religious freedom of military members in order to crush the notion of Transcendent Truth....leaving only "State" truth.[25] Nothing should frighten us more than to think that we would desire to build a military or police force that believes truth lies within their own heart or within whatever orders are handed down from the State…that might is what makes right. We have an enemy that has attacked our homeland and yet we are too squeamish to label the worldview behind it. We cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge the existence of evil nor the existence of sin because to do so is to acknowledge a Transcendent truth that exists beyond our self-centered fantasy. Instead, we look for environmental causes of evil behavior and point a finger at guns while we ignore the violence and sex and hedonism in our movies and music. Hollywood or the media is never held accountable, nor the educational system or public policies that continue to destroy our families and our culture. And we are back to the heart of the issue. For the true State of the Union lies here, in the selfish casting off of the Transcendent for the temporary; seeking our hedonistic pleasure for today while selling our souls and our future. Do not be fooled. Selfishness eventually spawns hatred and violence. If you do not affirm me, I will spew such animosity toward you that you will be swept away with its fury. If you do not bake me an affirming cake, we will destroy your bakery. If you do not take affirming photographs, we will destroy your studio. If you do not allow a man who identifies as female to use the women’s restroom, the state of Washington will now shut down your business. If you do not affirm my self-selected gender identity with the proper pronoun, New York will now prosecute and fine you a quarter of a million dollars. Our selfishness has reached the level of stark absurdity…backed by legal and political tyranny. Somewhere in all of this, the founding generation must be shaking their heads in disbelief at what is happening to this nation. Our selfishness and rejection of absolute Truth is sucking us into a monstrous whirlpool that leads downward to utter darkness. We are committing cultural and national suicide and yet we continue to affirm and gush over each other and party while the nation crumbles beneath our feet. Does anyone care enough to fight this? Does anyone care enough to stand?...to stand for what is right…for what is true…for what is good? The Governors of the States must stand against the tyranny of the Federal Beast, but it must be the people who will stand and say no to the path that we tread. For the true State of the Union, which hangs by a thread, can be changed only if the people demand a change. But the change must begin within. If we continue to pursue our pleasure and entertainment, if we continue to abdicate our responsibility for the health of our families and this nation, if we continue to allow Hollywood and academia and the media and the Government to lead us down this path, then we, as a nation, are going to die. And the death may come in a night…it may come so swiftly that the world will stand in awe at our downfall. But health will not come over night. We live in a fallen world where you catch diseases quickly, but you don’t catch health. You can fall and break a bone instantly, but healing it takes a lot of time. If we are to regain our health, if we are to restore what is broken, it will require the courage and strength and long-term commitment of the people…if we still have the character to do so. It will come by first falling to our knees in repentance before the God who made us…the God who gave us a land flowing with milk and honey…the God who has sustained us through war and countless trials…the God before whom we now stand and shake our fist in His face. It will come by an examination of our personal lives and the pathologies that infest our social systems. It will come by both individual and national commitments to that which is True. And it will come by a sustained walk of turning back to the God to whom we owe all things…to the God who can reduce us to rubble with one puff of His breath. And if we do not, may God have mercy on us and our children. ... Though the state of our Union is perilous, Remnant, there is a reason why we remain. It is for this time that we have been preserved. May we stand for Truth in the times in which we live. Pray, dear Remnant, for repentance, Tuesdays, noon eastern.   [1] https://truthencounter.x362.com/resources/1247/the-foundations-of-the-united-states?tagid=3548 [2] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/browse-by/national-data [3] ibid [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Stateseration_rate [5] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm [6] http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/03/22/the-real-reason-the-american-dream-is-unraveling/ [7] http://www.blackgenocide.org/black.html [8] http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/03/22/the-real-reason-the-american-dream-is-unraveling/ [9] http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/12/internet-pornography-stats/ [10] http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats14/std-trends-508.pdf [11] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-leads-the-world-in-illegal-drug-use/ [12] http://www.drugfree.org/new-data-show-millions-of-americans-with-alcohol-and-drug-addiction-could-benefit-from-health-care-r/ [13] http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html [14] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/07/how-much-do-americans-really-spend-drugs-each-year [15] http://www.ets.org/s/research/30079/index.html [16] https://www.commonsensemedia.org/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-infographic# [17]http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/reports/stateindustryviolence/main.asp [18] http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html [19] http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html [20] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/ [21] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/LNU05000000.txt [22] http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/historical/gands.pdf [23] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/08/economist-explains-9 [24] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/ [25] http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=106938