The eternal and lasting hope of the Christian is the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Death, for the Christian, is the blink of the eye. We close our eyes in death and open them to see the face of Jesus the Returning King.

Time ceases at death. The soul is not sleeping in death although death is referred to as sleep throughout scripture. The dead in Christ are not in storage waiting for Resurrection Day. Death is analogous to sleep in that we are unconscious to the passage of time in sleep.

Time is not a fixture of God. Time is a creation of God. He created time when he created matter. He says of himself, “I was, I am, I am to come.” God sits outside of his creation and thus he sits outside of time.

I do not fully understand the physics of time. But I’ve learned enough to know that it can be sped up, slowed down, and turned back on itself. The way I envision death is that we all live on a timeline that begins with our conception and (in our present existence) ends at our death. But something happens to that timeline at death: it leaves its plane and loops to that point in time when Christ returns to raise his chosen ones. We are, in some sense, transported through time to the Resurrection. We fall asleep and awaken in new bodies at the voice of our returning king.

The beauty of this is that, as it is written in the 11th chapter of Hebrews, all of God’s redeemed, from Abel to the last believer on earth are made perfect in our new bodies simultaneously. No one is going on before and waiting impatiently for the redemption of the rest. We close our eyes in death individually and in time; we open our eyes in resurrection simultaneously and in eternity. Awesome!

Materialism as a philosophy says that all material things have material causes. This is only partially true. While the material is material-caused, the spiritual can alter the material state. Thus a demon-controlled individual may have a material cause to his schizophrenia or drug addiction that is the result of demonic action.

Truth is the one essential element of life beyond the here and now. In answer to Jesus’ claim that he is the Truth, Pontius Pilate asks sarcastically, “What is Truth?”

He may have meant that to say, “Can truth ever be known? I doubt it!”, but that’s a question whose answer is the difference between life and death.

I am retired and thus, by definition, I have too much time on my hands! I listen to NPR (because I despise advertising) and read several newspapers almost daily. As I listen and read, that one overarching question I ask is, “Who is this who is telling me these things? And why should I believe him/her?”

The longer I live the more convinced I become that no one is an objective witness or dispassionate observer. We all come to every event, every fragment of information, every word spoken and every letter written with the filter of our life experience and education, the influence of friend, mentor, and, yes, foe fixed firmly in place. When life presents us with a series of either/or-s, we are forced to choose either – or, and that choice is the product of every experience we have had prior.

So, when I listen or read, I really want to know what filters the reporter/commentator has in place. I want to know if he/she is married (biblically speaking) and how frequently does she/he change beds, and does he/she have children. I want to know if he/she is same sex attracted. Where was she/he born and what was the structure of the family of origin? Where was she/he educated and what major (if any) was pursued? Does he/she attend church/synagogue/mosque/temple regularly, and if so, what denomination or theological orientation? (I really should just follow traditional language usage and use the male pronoun as the collective pronoun for humanity just as the Hebrew text uses “adam” as both the name of the male and the name of the race. This he/she stuff gets old quickly and using plural pronouns when the singular is required is a violation of the very principle of truth I wish to uphold!)

Now the Washington Post doesn’t have a chart on the contributor to its pages showing us WHO that person really is. It doesn’t answer any of my questions that will enable me to determine the believability of the writer. So I have to look at the literary structure and word choice to get an inkling of the writer’s prejudices. Does he confuse the language using terms like cisgender, or does he call a man in drag a transwoman and use feminine pronouns when referencing him? Does he call the lesbian partner of a woman her wife? Does he differentiate between rape and a pat on the butt, or is everything called, “sexual assault”? Does he call a murder an incident of gun violence when the instrument of death is a gun, but does not call a murder where the instrument of death is a knife an incident of knife violence?

If a reporter wants to focus on the evil of the weapon rather than the evil of the perpetrator, we should know that that reporter is not telling the truth and indeed may not even know what truth is. It is true that a high velocity projectile was used to kill someone, but neither the projectile nor its launcher is responsible for the death resultant. The cause of death is the evil in the heart of the murderer and not the instrument used to murder.

We can apply the same principles to anything the papers’ owners/editors want us to believe. Are they telling the truth about the President? Brexit? The French Yellow Vests? The Climate? Afghanistan? Syria? Ocasio-Cortez?

What is Truth? I don’t think any of us know with absolute certainty – none of us possess the divine attribute of omniscience, but if we are to be honest with ourselves and our fellow travelers on life’s journey, we should seek diligently for an objective standard by which to measure our beliefs and then strive to bring our thoughts into line with that standard. And I believe that standard to be the Word of God both inscripturated in the Bible and lived in Jesus Christ. And that’s the TRUTH!

I don’t know who first made the accusation, it had to have come from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, that those who listened to Luther and Zwingli and Calvin had exchanged the Bishop of Rome for a “Paper Pope.” They had traded the ex cathedra dictates of popes and councils for a new religious authority: Sola Scriptura, the bible alone.

Sola Scriptura is the uniquely Protestant Christian belief that there is no rule of faith and practice for humanity other than the uniquely inspired, God-breathed writings of the prophets encapsulated within the bindings of that unique book, the Bible. (Yes, I used “unique” or “uniquely” three times in that sentence. I wanted to emphasize the “only-ness” of the Reformation Sola.) Now this doesn’t mean that the bible can be used as some divinely bestowed rule book – yes, there are rules within it: Don’t Murder; Don’t Worship Your Genitalia; Don’t Take What’s Not Yours, and so forth – it is a record of God’s dealings with the human race during a long period of time in this distant past. We are to bring every facet of learning and reason to bear as we study it. But our learning and reason cannot come to a rightful conclusion contrary to what it plainly reveals.

Please note, I did say, “Plainly reveals.” There are many things in the bible that are not clear. Some things are clouded by the changes of language and culture. We ask, does this word mean this or does it mean that? And sometimes the answer is, no one knows for sure. But for the really important things, things like: Is there a Supreme Being who created all things? Why is there evil in the world? Why do we die? Can we live again? How am I to treat my neighbor? Who is Jesus? You know, the really important questions that keep us awake at night, for those questions there is clear revelation in the bible. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, the answers are: Yes; Because our first ancestors chose to listen to a creature rather than the Creator; Because life is conditional on staying connected to its Origin; Yes; As I would like to be treated; and, God who became one of us so that we could become one with him.

So, for me, a Protestant Christian, I was caught by surprise this morning when the secular thought leaders in the media got all ecstatic that the Pope had changed Roman Catholic dogma to state that execution for capital crimes was contrary to Roman Catholic belief. (They do get giddy when some religious “authority” says or does something that comports with current secular thought. And they declare him starkraving mad when he goes the contrary.) Now there is nothing intrinsicly wrong with changing your mind on a doctrine. You can have firm beliefs on something that given time and further study you come to conclusion that your first thoughts (or second thoughts, or third thoughts) on the subject were wrong and now you have a better understanding and a different opinion. But where the scripture is clear there can be no deviation or change.

The bible says God created the universe. I can’t say he didn’t. We can discuss all day and into next year what the text means when it says he created everything, but when someone steps outside the text to say he did not create, then the discussion ceases and we go our separate ways. So, where the bible is clear, so must I be. We can talk, even argue over the meaning of the text, but never over the truthfulness of the text.

God gave a universal command for all of humanity recorded in Genesis chapter 9, verse 6, that those who take another human life (with the implication of “for either profit or pleasure”.) must have their lives taken from them – no exceptions. Murderers must die at the hands of the living. So the Pope is wrong. We can have a reasonable and rational discussion on the application of the death penalty in modern society, and I would agree that the American system of execution is an abomination, but the text is the text and it is irrevocable.

Everyone knows the the metaphor of The Frog in the Pot. It has been said (falsely, I am informed) that a frog placed in hot water will immediately jump to safety whilst one placed in tepid water and gradually warmed will linger in the froggy jacuzzi until its strength is sapped and it perishes. Well, true or not, I like the metaphor because it accurately describes the human condition as we can observe it.

Acceptable decline, be it physical, intellectual, economic, influential, or moral, does not happen overnight. Sudden change is noted, and if seen as threatening, reacted to. We call those events, “wake-up calls.” 9/11 was a wake-up call. Islamic assaults on western civilization have been going on since Mohammed. America’s first experience with them was the Barbary pirates capturing American merchantmen in the Mediterranean shipping lanes in the early 19th century. In fact we date the birth of American naval policy to those assaults. We even get the phrase, “the shores of Tripoli,” in the Marine Corps hymn from our battles there. But 9/11 did what scores of earlier incidents had failed to do: it shocked Americans into action. It is a perfect Frog in the Pot analogy: a slow rise in Islamic activity produces no response; a swift rise produces all-out war.

The last American election was in large part a response to a rapid change in our national understanding of morality and its place in public life. There is nothing new under the sun; what was will be. We have not experienced a single social change that has not been in process for generations. A brief historical survey can place the seeds of change in our own revolution from British rule. Our forefathers, physical or otherwise, WERE revolutionaries. It wasn’t just the oppression of king and parliament they were casting aside. They were creating a new society based on new views of individualism rather than oligarchy and collectivism.

Now this new freedom from state control was checked by a strong religious community. A protestant Christianity rooted in the English Reformation set the moral standards for the new Americans beyond which but few, and then only in secret, dared violate. Oh, there were the artists and entertainers who flaunted society’s standards, but their social status was but slightly above whores and innkeepers, and when they got too flagrant in their flaunting of social restraints, they were punished. Yet each flaunting of social norms raised the temperature of the pot ever so slightly. Their writings and actings put the “I wonder?” into the minds of the standard bearers of society.

With nationhood came the push west and its consequent separation of the more free-thinking pioneers from their more settled east coast relatives. New utopian experiments cropped up all over western New York and on into the territories. They tried everything from the celibacy of the Shakers to the group marriages of the Oneidans. New religions cropped up to replace the stagnancy of the old. The Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Dispensationalists, the Christian Scientists, the Pentecostals, and many others, trace their origins to this new-found freedom in this new nation.

Then came the American Civil War, the bloodiest and most heartless conflict America has ever experienced. It overturned the entire American social order. It ended a century of southern state dominance of American political life. It devastated the southern states, reducing them to a level of poverty from which they are yet emerging even now, 150 years later. Many veterans of that war fled the devastation of their homes and headed west. We can only imagine the level of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those war veterans! Those men and that army that overwhelmed the Plains Indians and massacred them when they “got in the way”; those violent men who formed the legend of the American West with their hard drinking and hard fighting were the men who, many of them yet boys, had stood almost toe to toe and fired volleys of minie balls into the other’s ranks. (BTW, I loved Gunsmoke as a kid. I was well into adulthood before I realized Miss Kitty was a prostitute and a madam! 😦 )

That Civil War also reduced the religious certainty of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful God to a smoldering wick. How could one believe in a Sovereign God who rules all things in accordance to his divine will and yet experience this devastation of home and body? It should come as no surprise that from this questioning despair we get the rise of modern theological liberalism. The church’s answer was, “You can’t!” The book that teaches that certainty must certainly be false.

I hope you’re not tiring of this little historical sketch because there is more to come. We get the incomprehensible horror of the War to End All Wars. What the American Civil War produced on a national level, WWI produced on the international: Nation states created and abolished; millions of young men massacred by industrial warfare and incompetent leadership; the mass migration of peoples; despair, disillusionment, and a collective abandonment of all certainty by thinking people everywhere.

Now you take the catastrophe that was this war for so many, couple it with the rise of modern psychology and psychiatry, the continued dominance of religious liberalism, “modern” economic theories like communism, and the atheistic origins theories of Darwin and others, and you get the disillusionment of the Roaring 20’s, the abandonment of reality in art, harmony in music, truth in literature, and moral certitude in society.

This is the world that gave us the death-dealing -isms we know so well: Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Feminism. Every one of them is a reaction to the failure of the old ways of thinking and doing. If there is no God-way, then it’s every person for him/herself. If you don’t like the old norms – cast them aside! Your ways are as good, as right, as true as any other.

And so we have the rise of the LGBTQ movement and its demand to be, not just treated with tolerance, but treated as just an equally valid expression of human identification as the old, pre-modern, religion-based view of human identity and origins. What I believe myself to be is what is regardless millennia of thought and experience.

And this brings us back to the last election.The Obama administration, the Supreme Court, and the media moguls raised the temperature in the pot too quickly. The vast hinterland of America had not completely absorbed the radically changing views of the urban dwellers. Oh, they had absorbed quite a bit: they love Ellen and Elton, George, the soft porn of the Kardashians and Victoria’s Secret, the harder porn of Games of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black, and the hard-core porn free and private on the internet. (If you don’t believe that to be a problem, just look at the rise of sexual impotence in Teens and 20’s men.) The mindless pursuit of pleasure is as common in flyover country as elsewhere. The opioid epidemic doesn’t grow out of despair, it is just a side-effect of pleasure’s pursuit. But, middle America wasn’t quite ready to publicly embrace their secret sins. Their candidate was by no means a righteous knight in shining armor! He was a boorish lout who was about as far from being a paragon of virtue as one could be, and the Christianity he was espousing was that modern parody of biblical Christianity: the Prosperity Gospel of name it and claim it. But at least he said he was going to turn the heat down on the pot and Make America Great Again.

Politicians are a generally ignorant bunch who assume the American people are even more ignorant than they. And because they manage to get elected and re-elected, Scott Adams, the cartoonist, must be close to true when he said, “You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.” This is especially true in matters of war and peace. The Pols reduce complex issues to sound bites and yell, “Ban all Muslims!” and “Islam is a religion of peace!” Only the deluded or disinterested would believe either the Trumps or the Bush/Obama/Clintons of this world to be giving them a rational, well-examined explanation of the current state of world affairs.

Now, for the purposes of this essay, I am going to assume the statistic that 80% of all Muslims just want to get along and that only 4% (with 16% in their amen corner) are eager to kill or reduce to dhimmitude the non-believers as the guarantor of approval by their god is correct. So you can take comfort, if you are a secular or a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu, only 64 million Muslims out of a population of 1.6 billion what to either kill or convert you. (In America that figure would be only 160 thousand out of our Muslim population of 4 million.) These figures strike me as a bit on the high side, but then they probably include those young children who are being indoctrinated by their mothers and fathers to grow up to be jihadis as well as those who are too old to be much of a threat.

We’ve got to step back and take the long view if we’re to understand the who, what and why of the current Islamist threat to civilization as we know it. Modern Islamism can be traced back to the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The Ottomans, for all their weaknesses and failings, were the Kingdom of Islam on earth – they were, if you will, the Muslim version of the Holy Roman Empire (which was holy and roman in name only). The Ottomans provided a sense of place for Muslims throughout Asia and southern Europe. In them, Muslims had their proof of being “someone.”

Yes, I know I am simplifying history. Yes, there was a second caliphate that ruled the Iberian Peninsula 711 to the time of Columbus when the Spanish and Portuguese drove out their Muslim conquerors. And, yes, there were Muslim empires to the east in India and as far as Indonesia, but these are not central to our modern predicament.

Anyway, the Ottomans chose the losing side in WWI. They sided with the Germans in the hope of regaining their European territories, and with the defeat of the Axis came the death of their empiric hopes. The Ottoman Empire collapsed and was fractured into the pieces we now recognize at the Balkans, Turkey, Armenia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, etc. And a number of those pieces were claimed and ruled under League of Nations mandates by the victorious European powers, namely France and Britain.

The caliphates, for all their excesses and failings, were believed by their subjects to be of divine authority. They traced their right to rule to the Koran or to Mohammed and the people accepted that to be legitimate authority. The end of the caliphate meant the end of legitimate rule and the authority of the occupying governments and their totalitarian successors was never recognized as being anything other than a “might makes right” type of rule that needed to be replaced with a new and legitimate caliphate.

By now you are asking, “What does any of this have to do with Zionism and the Jews; that being the first part of this essay’s title?” Well, I have been searching to find an analogy that fits the present situation with understanding the relationship between Islam and Islamism and the best one I can find is the birth and advancement of modern Zionism in all its expressions.

Identifiable minority groups within a population are always pitched upon the dilemma of assimilate or separate. Such was the state of the Jewish people in Europe in the late 19th century. In much of western Europe Jews were losing their identity as Jews. The had become, for the most part, secular, and found themselves marrying into the larger population and being accepted as members of the community. Yes, there was always an undercurrent of antisemitism as some within the broader population resented their social ascendency, a resentment that was always being fueled by exploitive politicians. And there were always those Jews who did not want to assimilate, who wanted to maintain their distinctive identity, and who maintained that distinctiveness by living in self-imposed ghettos, dressing in readily identifiable ways, wearing their hair and beards in certain styles, and naming their children in ways that would keep their identity clear to all.

The Jews living in eastern Europe did not have those options. The predominant ethnic groups would not allow the Jews to assimilate, and enforced their differentness by rule and regulation – along with occasional pogroms to keep them in their place.

So, to address the European situation for Jews in the late 19th century, the modern zionist movement was born. Zion is an alternate name for Jerusalem, and zionism is a “back to Jerusalem” movement. The leaders of zionism feared both the assimilation of secular Jews into the larger society (and the consequent loss of their Jewishness) and the persecution of Jews when they identified as such. They wanted to establish secular Jewish communities in the land of Palestine, their ancestral homeland, a Palestine that was then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

This tension between assimilation and exclusion intensified in the early 20th century and the Zionist voice became more strident in the Jewish community. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the defeat of the Axis in WWI, the aforementioned mandates came into play. The British got Palestine and Egypt, and Palestine became the focal point of tensions between the occupiers, the residents, and the migrants. As the pace of Jewish immigration picked up after the war and after the British published a position paper acknowledging the right of return for the Jewish Diaspora to Palestine, the locals began to resent the prosperity and industry of the newcomers. The Jews were transforming a desert waste into an oasis and displacing the Arab population in the process.

The Arab rose up in armed revolt against the British and against the Jewish settlements in the later 1930s. The anti-semites were pounding the drum throughout Europe with major movements not only in Germany, but in Britain, France, Poland, and elsewhere across the continent. This anti-semitism brought pressure to emigrate from Europe, and the flood of immigrants into Palestine exacerbated the tensions there.

In response to the Arab uprising and the subsequent British restriction of Jewish immigration, the Jewish settlements formed self-defense units. The largest of these was the Haganah, the establishment armed force made up mostly of secular, western Europeans. The Haganah cooperated with the British in keeping the peace in Palestine, and even though British anti-semitism and interests kept them from fully embracing the Haganah, they did not see a need to suppress it.

Then came World War II and the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in Europe. This slaughter convinced many within the Zionist movement that it was not sufficient to have Jewish settlements in Palestine. What was needed was a Jewish State, Eretz Israel, a place for Jews to call home. Zionism had already birthed what we would call terrorist groups under the umbrella of self-defense. Principal among them were the Irgun (The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) under Menachem Begin who later became Prime Minister of Israel, a group principly focused on the defense of the Jewish settlements against the Arabs, and  Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), commonly known as the Stern Gang, a leader of which, Yitzhak Shamir, became Prime Minister as well, which was fighting to overthrow the British mandate in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state. With the Holocaust and European (and American) Jew-hatred even after the war (the British kept the Jews of the concentration and extermination camps imprisoned even after the war in order to placate their Arab constituents). As the British turned away shiploads of Holocaust survivors from landing in Palestine and interning many of them in concentration camps in Malta (and as the United States restricted Jewish immigration), Irgun and Lehi began making war on the British in the Mandate. Given the power differential between the British and the Jewish self-defense forces, they resorted to unconventional warfare. They terrorized the British to encourage them to allow Jewish immigration into Palestine, to release their fellow Jews interned in Germany and elsewhere, and ultimately to decide holding onto Palestine was not worth the effort.

Irgun bombed British military headquarters in the King David Hotel, and Lehi assassinated the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and both organizations hit the British military whenever they could identify a weak point. Finally, in 1948, the British agreed to withdraw (having heavily armed their Arab clients) leaving Palestine to its war between Arab and Jew. To the shock of the British and the Arabs, the Jews won and the Nation of Israel was established.

Now let’s draw the parallels. By no means were all Jews Zionists, in fact only a minority were and they were often actively resisted by the so-called mainstream of Judaism, but all Zionists were Jews. They felt they had a legitimate claim on a Jewish homeland, and given that the land of Israel was their ancestral bequeath, they felt they had the moral high ground in reestablishing the state of Israel in territorial Palestine. Not only did they think it right to have a homeland under Jewish rule, they believed it to be an imperative. Without a Jewish homeland, they stood in constant risk of future Holocausts.

It appears to me that the current Islamist thrust is strikingly similar. Not every Muslim is an Islamist, but every Islamist is a Muslim. The goal of Al Qaeda and ISIS (the Muslim equivalent of Irgun and Lehi) is the establishment of a legitimate Islamic caliphate in their historical homeland. And their terrorist acts, be they in New York on 9/11, Paris, San Bernardino, Boston, London, or wherever they can find a weakness and a public relations opportunity, are designed to convince those powers that are maintaining what the Islamists consider illegitimate governments in the Middle East that it is not worth their while to continue doing so. They are a threat to the West only in so far as the West finds it in its economic interest to impose its will on that region of the world.

I have a Facebook friend who, whenever I make a comment about the devolution of morality in America, always responds with the obvious fact that America is not now, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation. He’s right.

The issue is not whether America should be a Christian nation or not. The issue is whether America (in her citizenry) recognizes the sovereignty of the Lord GOD over the affairs of all the nations be they atheistic, Islamic, secular, or whatever. To say (and believe) that God is sovereign is to believe that the Creator of the universe has established immutable laws by which his universe is governed. So we have laws of gravity, laws of thermodynamics, in fact laws that govern even the minutest aspect of the physical universe. And what applies to the physical applies to the arena of right and wrong, good and evil, righteous and sinful.

A nation that recognizes God’s sovereignty is NOT a theocracy. In this present age, only the Church is or can be a theocracy. Theocracy implies that there are nations that have a special status with God, and we know where that has gotten us in history. Be it the abuses of the Papacy during the centuries from the “Christianization” of Rome in the early centuries AD to the Reformation, or the present Islamic Republic of Iran, theocracies that are lacking the Theos are really just autocracies in theocratic drag.

So, no, no rational thinker is trying to turn America into a theocratic Christian nation. What I and others are doing is simply stating the obvious: if there is a sovereign God, he has the absolute right to set the standards for behavior both public and private, and that he can and does impose rightful penalties for the disregard of those standards, up to and including eliminating from the roster of nations those peoples who attempt to overthrow the not-overthrowable sovereignty of God.

When a people, through its legislative, executive, and judicial processes says, “Do murder, Do commit adultery, Do steal, Do bear false witness, or Do covet, lust, and desire that which is not yours,” they are attempting the impossible and exposing themselves and their posterity to the dire results of disregarding natural law. This is not Christianity which is salvation of sinners by grace through faith in the Christ who died for our sins and was raised for our justification for the glory of God alone – this salvation revealed to us through the scripture and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. This merely living Coram Deo.