Why Settle for the Lesser Evil? (Sample Chapter from “Stupid Elephant Tricks – The Other Progressive Party’s War on Christianity”)

© 2011, 2012 Scott Alan Buss – All Rights Reserved.

The following sample chapter – all of Chapter 1 – is taken from the just-released book, Stupid Elephant Tricks – The Other Progressive Party’s War on Christianity. If you like it, please pass along this link to anyone else you know who might me interested and inspired by the message of this book. Thank you for your prayers, patience, and support!

For more excerpts and to address any formatting issues with this one (blog posts/emails can sometimes be thoroughly mangled in transit), please feel free to head on over to www.FireBreathingChristians.com. There is a lot of info on Stupid Elephant Tricks posted there, along with clips and previews from this month’s other R3V Press release, Satan’s Jackass – The Progressive Party’s War on Christianity.

That said, and without further delay, here’s your sneak peek at Chapter 1, “Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?”:

WHY SETTLE FOR THE LESSER EVIL?

THE SLAVERY AND STUPIDITY OF SECULAR STANDARDS

“No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith, for if he becomes President, he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths. [Loud applause] I believe that every faith that I’ve encountered draws its adherents closer to god.”[1]

Mitt Romney

(bold emphasis added)

                                                                                                                 .

“Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

                                                                                                                  .

“Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?”

Now there’s a campaign slogan you don’t see every day, at least not yet. But there it was, all decked out in red, white, and blue; proudly planted on the bobbing back bumper of the little Nissan pickup in front of me. “Cthulhu for President” was the headlining banner above the peculiarly provocative tagline.

   Cthulhu (pronounced: kuh-THOO-loo…I think), for those of you (no doubt happily) unaware of the name, is the moniker given to a dark, malevolent force of supernatural terror in a series of horror stories first penned by H.P. Lovecraft back in the late ’20s. Often described along the lines of “…an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature…. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”[2], Mr. Cthulhu certainly had the look to go with the bad attitude and mission.

Somewhere between his intro in 1928 and the 2000 presidential campaign, enthusiastic Lovecraft and/or Cthulhu fans took (what can only be hoped to be) a tongue-in-cheek approach to the “pulpy, tentacle headed” doom-bringer in question and did what Americans do so well so naturally: They happily (and profitably) took on the mission of marketing their favorite force of darkness in every way imaginable and then some.

There were “funny” Cthulhu t-shirts. There were tasty Cthulhu candies. There were even adorable(?) little Cthulhu Beanie Baby style plushies. And then there was the ongoing “presidential campaign”, with shirts, slogans, and…bumper stickers. Bumper stickers like the one rolling along ahead of me a few cycles back.

While I’ve not bothered to check on the latest incarnation of Cthulhu for President in the present election cycle, one can only assume that he and his handlers are at it again, and happily so. Whatever terrible thing that may or may not say about our culture’s condition, now, more than ever, the “Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?” line seems worthy of serious consideration, even if its tentacle-headed advocate does not.

Incredibly, sadly, and incredibly sadly, professing Christians in America have not only managed to validate at least a substantial portion of something as idiotic as the Cthulhu campaign for high office, they have also managed to confirm the strategic observations of another pop-culture bad guy wannabe. When the Dark Helmet character (a Darth Vader knock-off) in Mel Brook’s Spaceballs flick (a Star Wars knock-off) announced confidently that, “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”, he hit the nail on the head…so long as “good” is described by secular standards…which is exactly how most politically active professing Christians define it in practice these days. It is this shift toward secular pragmatism and secular standards of goodness in American Christendom that has made the question “Why settle for the lesser evil?” so sadly relevant today.

   In agreeing to measure the goodness or rightness of anything, much less the political leadership of our nation, by any standard other than God’s, we have made a compelling case for “choosing the lesser evil” and have, in doing so, proven that our “good” is, in fact, dumb. Frighteningly dumb. As Christians, we are supposed to know and advocate explicitly God-centered goodness as the only true sort of goodness to be found, but, in practice – particularly political practice – we simply do not believe this to be true.

We. Are. Dumb.

And unlike the kind of dumb that you might be able to laugh at in Spaceballs or a Cthulhu presidential campaign (not that I necessarily recommend either, mind you), ours is a form of willful stupidity that is far more dangerous and far more destructive, in part  because it is God’s own people who are often perpetuating this decidedly ungodly approach to life in His name.

We’ve become “politically savvy” Christians who know how to play the game to win! And just look at all of the “winning” we’ve experienced with this approach: We murder roughly a million innocent children each year, mostly for convenience; we tax young workers to support the Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes in the form of ever expanding and long-known-to-be-unsustainable entitlement programs; we are on the cusp of formally exalting homosexuality – which God hates – as a legitimate and honorable “lifestyle”, and we are witnessing at this very moment  our comically unbiblical and unconstitutional statist system make its final, lumbering lunge toward much more formally tyrannical approaches in every realm given up to its dominion.

   And many of these progressive wonders have been won by us in His name as we have done everything we can see (and have been told) to do by the forces of secularly defined progress within conservative, libertarian, and Republican political circles. Where once we would at least pretend to seek God enough to insist that our candidates profess to be actual, orthodox Christians, we now find that to be more than negotiable.

After all, we have to win, right? We must beat Obama! That is our supreme goal…our ultimate challenge…our clear and present idol.

It is this idol, in various incarnations, that has been used very effectively and for a very long time by the enemy. In our embrace of this idol, we have abandoned our duty to truth and its Author and we have surrendered our one and only supernatural hope of actually winning “the culture war” or any other conflict of consequence. In agreeing with a godless culture that God is not the necessary explicit center for all good things, we have joined, in a very real sense, something even worse the “Cthulhu for President” campaign.

American Christians now fiercely believe and vigorously campaign for the “lesser” evil, and, in doing so, we do exactly that for which the greatest evil hopes. After all, if it’s not hard to imagine how pleased a Cthulhu or a Dark Helmet type might be at the prospect of directing his enemy’s future by simply presenting multiple evils from which that supposed “good guy” preemptively agrees to choose, then how much more so should we understand the very real delight of Satan at the prospect of manipulating America’s professing Christians in precisely the same manner?

Apparently, all the devil need do is hold out an Obama or a Clinton or a Carter in his left hand whenever he desires for American Christians to select whatever and whomever he chooses to offer up in his right. And professing Christians in America have, for quite some time now, been all too happy to play along. We just seem to love dancing to the “less evil” tune, no matter how obviously unbiblical it is or how much wreckage accumulates in its ever-lengthening, ever-widening, and ever-deepening wake.

   The Christian response to the political question, “Why choose the lesser evil?” should not be an explanation as to why said lesser evil should be chosen. The Christian response to this biblically ridiculous question should be something along the lines of:

Why choose any evil?

Or, as Charles Spurgeon famously and wisely recommended: “Of two evils, choose neither.”

Those of us who are Christians have been bought with a price. We are His slaves where once we were slaves to sin. Our breaths, our heartbeats, our actions and our votes are His property. We will answer to Him for how we spend every one of them.

This is the blessed reality that should inform our every thought and action, and this is the only hope that we have as we consider our calling and placement in a culture so vividly aligned with that described in the book of Romans:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

   Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served thecreature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

   For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

   And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. [3]

In response to such clear and present realities, we will often see and hear our brothers and sisters in Christ cite promises and verses from elsewhere in the Word, including, quite frequently, the matchlessly comforting and inspiring words of 2 Chronicles 7:14:

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

But what if the God who has made this perfect promise has also clearly defined the humility mentioned in the passage? What if He has made plain that we are to be humble by submitting to His will completely? What if He has also made plain that anything less than complete submission to Him in such a manner is not humility at all, no matter how much we might like to imagine or spin or pretend otherwise. What if He has lovingly warned His children that failure to submit to His clearly revealed will is always the precise opposite of God-glorifying personal humility. It is always God-hating, self-centered pride.

Pride is the fuel of all man-centered pragmatism, and man-centered pragmatism has most certainly come to define, in many ways and on every front, the prevailing political attitudes of the vast majority of professing Christians in America.

But take heart!

There is hope.

Perfect hope.

Supernatural hope.

But do we want that hope? Will we humble ourselves as He defines humility and requires it of His people?

Or will we continue to pragmatically play the game  and dance to the tune that His enemy (and ours) has so happily arranged and offered up to us? Will we work and fight and pray for the sock puppet on the right simply because he is soooooo much “less evil” than the one on the left?  Or will we finally come to the place of agreement with Scripture and Spurgeon, who both exhort, “Of two evils, choose neither.”

While Cthulhu is a fiction, the perils of this age are anything but. In the hills of modern progressive America, there be dragons…real dragons…home grown, pragmatically nurtured, and ultimately lethal creatures bent on the pursuit of anything and everything but the explicit will of God…all in the name of progress, of course.

Our only real hope to slay these dragons lies on the other side of our proper understanding and application of what He describes as “the Sword of Truth” – His perfect Word.

What if the whole key to the nightmare situation in which we have placed ourselves really is simple, complete submission to God, as He has defined it so lovingly and so clearly in His Word? The belief that this is indeed the case will be a guiding principle of this book, and the encouragement of fellow believers to pursue that calling will be a central goal.

When we are led, by His grace, to submit to Him completely as He has commanded us to do  – and only when we do so – all truly good things really do become possible. Only through the supernaturally inspired and inspiring submission that He has provided can we actually claim otherwise unimaginable and impossible victories throughout the American cultural landscape…one slain dragon and one saved person at a time.

So man up, grab your Sword, seek and submit to His will in all things, and prep for a real fight! No evil is to be spared; lesser, greater, or any in-between. The hunt is on.

---

[1] Politico, 12.14.11 – http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70416.html)

[2] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

[3] Romans 1:18-32

© 2011, 2012 Scott Alan Buss – All Rights Reserved.

For more excerpts and other cool things, head on over to www.FireBreathingChristians.com.

Thank you!

Reformation>Revival>Revolution (1 of 3)

You say you want a revolution

Well you know

We all wanna change the world…

~ The Beatles

 

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

~ Jesus (the real one) 

 

Everybody wants a revolution. They sure seem to, anyway.

Nike wants one. Apple wants one. Chick-fil-A even wants one.

Every two years, the party out of power wants one.

Sexuality always wants one. The body count on that one stands somewhere north of 41,000,000 (and counting) in America alone. And that’s just the death toll on one of multiple fronts, mind you. Talk about a revolutionary war with casualties…

Fashion, technology, cars, video games, music, literature, film…even politics, sex, spirituality, and religion. Perpetual revolution is the way of the world. Revolution for the sake of revolution. Change for the sake of change. Movement without purpose or direction based on the notion that it always beats standing firm.

Revolution is popular, and we love popular. So it is that we must love revolution.

It’s hip. It’s cool. It’s serious, too. And the way that the whole revolution concept manages to cover everything from the hip and trendy to the serious and profound tells us something about its inherent power, scope, and appeal as an idea.

Yeah, everybody wants a revolution, and they all want you to join in.

Any self-respecting revolutionary lives to recruit, and these days they are programmed to do just that on behalf of the perpetual revolution machine that is popular culture. There’s always a new style, sound, and feel to pitch, and producers of the pitch are counting on their properly programmed pawns to do the work of spreading the latest and greatest good news of the millisecond where the most recently culturally coronated cool game, band, diet, look, sound, or thought is concerned.

It’s all about networking, don’t ya know. Oddly enough, most of those doing the bidding of ”revolutionaries” like The Beatles, Sony, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue don’t know. They have no idea how, why, when, where, or even that they have been so thoroughly programmed. They simply hear, obey, and regurgitate. They are defined by the world and they live accordingly. They “just do it”.  And the “it” in question is: advertise.

They do it on their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. They do it in their phone conversations and around the table when they bother to sit down and eat. They do it in the car with friends and at restaurants. They do this evangelical pop-culturist routine pretty much all the time. It’s who they are and what they’ve become, all by design.

You see, these pop-culture programmed little revolutionaries are inherently evangelical.

And, for a long time now, evangelicals have been very revolutionary. Only in a bad way.

The styles and modes of revolution practiced by most of evangelicalism in America over the past several decades have, for the most part, been expressions of open rebellion against biblical truth.

American Churchianity has been swept up, chewed up, and spit out by a secular culture that is very pleased with the resultant transformation of adversary into ally. The church has been conformed to the world she was commissioned to transform.

Where once we were known for Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, we are now known for Joel Osteen and Rick Warren. Where once our society was led and shaped by those with a high view of God and His Word, we are now inspired by any of a million different leaders heading as fast as they can in their million different directions from truth.

We now live in a supposedly Christian nation utterly dominated by fundamentally anti-Christian characters and concepts. From Flu Shot Jesus and The Artists Formerly Known as The Emergent Church to “Best Life Now” Carnal Christianity and Purpose Driven Evangelicalism, American Churchianity has largely abandoned the truth of Scripture as its guiding light and has subsequently stumbled down every dark alley towards which she has been nudged by her enemy.

A Mr. Potato Jesus brand of name-it-and-claim-it, man-centered spirituality and religion on demand has taken hold.

Welcome to the Progressive cultural and religious revolution!

We’ve revolutionized education.

We’ve revolutionized sexuality.

We’ve revolutionized family.

And right about now we’re revolutionizing economics.

So we see that, for much of the time since the American Revolution, major revolutions in America haven’t gone very well from a biblical perspective. They’ve been, for the most part, vehicles for decline and darkness in a land that once cherished truth, understood the nature of true liberty, and exalted the one true God of biblical Christianity.

So is revolution always a bad thing, then?

Nope.

Not at all.

It’s just that, like almost anything wicked little fallen people get their hands on, we are very prone to mess it up.

The bad news is that we’ve managed to do just that, both with great intensity and over a long stretch of time. America has been radically changed, one individual at a time, from a God-fearing, Scripture-loving, magnificently blessed bright and shining light in a world of darkness, to a hollowed out husk on the verge of death by a thousand suicidal decisions born of a thousand suicidal delusions.

The good news is that Jesus is God.

And He saves.

He saves people. One at a time.

These people make up families, towns, cities, states, and nations.

These people make up movements, too.

They start revolutions.

And, make no mistake, this is precisely what is happening…right here…right now…

C.S. Lewis put it this way:

 

“Enemy-occupied territory – that’s what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

 

The call has gone out. The command has been given.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

The ultimate insurrection is now underway.

 And it’s gonna be good!

…to be continued in “Reformation>Revival>Revolution (2 of 3)” - to be posted soon…

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By the grace of God, I’ve been given what seems to be nothing short of a miraculous opportunity through the good folks at WorldNetDaily and WND Books. My book, Fire Breathing Christians: The Transformative Power of the Common Believer, has just been listed at Amazon and, Lord willing, will be released on September 14. My aim with this work is to encourage just the sort of Reformation, Revival and Revolution that has been touched upon in these three blog posts. This is truly an amazing opportunity to bring a Christ-centered approach to the culture war that has ravaged America. Your prayers are coveted as I go about the risky business of tackling scores of the most serious issues in what will surely be a controversy inspiring manner. I am new to all of this, so please pray that I might be granted the ever-elusive perfect combo of boldness and grace (and basic competence, too…yeah, that would be nice).

As the long pre-release ramping up process rolls along, I’d appreciate it if you’d check out the listing of the book, read through the summary below and, if you have any thoughts (good, bad, or anywhere in between), please feel free to shoot me an email. I will read ‘em all and do my best to respond, though it may take a little time.

If you know of anyone who would be interested in this message, please forward it on to them. In this age of instant communication and networking, your help with this particular piece of revolution marketing can accomplish far more good than you probably realize. That said, please do not randomly send this info, blanket email folks, or anything like that. Only send this on to those whom you have very good reason to believe would enjoy and be encouraged by the themes in Fire Breathing Christians. This whole “Fire Breathing” deal is going to be annoying enough to folks on the other side of that coin. We don’t want or need to add unnecessarily to that offense.

I have no idea at this point whether it will be used or not, but, in order to help you get a better feel for the book, here’s an advance look at the copy that I submitted for the back/inside cover.  (All written material copyright 2010, S.A. Buss) :

___________________________________

Fire Breathing Christians is a pew-to-pulpit plea for reformation, revival, and revolution. The church has been infiltrated, redefined, and led down a path to man-made, man-centered religion and spirituality. A Mr. Potato Jesus brand of pick-and-choose truth now dominates the church.

In its postmodern abandonment and purpose-driven surrender of the Gospel’s essential penetrating edge, American Churchianity has exchanged the perfect, supernaturally forged Sword of Truth for an endless supply of flimsy, pathetic little man-made sporks. In strict theological terms, this is known as “really dumb”.  And “really dangerous”.

In a bold call to Christ-centered culture warfare, Fire Breathing Christians encourages and equips Common Believers to identify and overcome every enemy of the Gospel, including: 

• Progressive Religion – Postmodernism’s war on biblical truth has a gang of giggling, happily heretical allies in The Artists Formerly Known as The Emergent Church.
• Progressive Politics – The man-centered “social gospel” is built upon a foundation of Christ-less hope and Christ-less change. This anti-Gospel is the engine that powers the Progressive political movement.
• Purpose Driven Evangelism – In its embrace of Flu Shot Jesus and Carnal Christianity for the sake of secular appeal, American Churchianity has largely assumed the role of warm and friendly escort to Hell.
• The Goat Driven Church – Through its purpose driven business model and “Best Life Now” appeals to greed and narcissism, American Churchianity has been occupied, defined, and dominated by the anti-Christian “goat”.
• Compulsory “Charity” – Once its voluntary aspect is removed, Christian charity is murdered. Compulsory charity is a biblical oxymoron, but it is a required step down the Progressive path to socialism.
• Murder for Convenience – Where Nazi Germany murdered millions for horrific reasons, Progressive America has one-upped her super-state sister by murdering tens of millions of the most innocent for mere convenience.

In every vital area of consideration, Fire Breathing Christians points directly towards the only solution with the power to save a person, a nation, a culture, or a world:

The whole, undiluted Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is the banner under which we must formulate every strategy and fight every battle. This is our source of true hope, peace, and joy. This is the banner that we must restore as our guiding standard in all things. This is our Reformation…our Revival…our Revolution…

We were made for such a time as this.

___________________________________

Thank you for taking the time to read and prayerfully consider these things. Your thoughts, support, and especially your prayers are coveted! Together, Lord willing, we will see great positive change in this wounded culture as we swim deep, make waves, and endeavor to exalt the whole, undiluted Gospel of Jesus Christ as the essential first solution to any problem facing any individual, city, or nation. This is the message of Fire Breathing Christians.

Soli Deo Gloria…and let’s roll!

SAB

www.FireBreathingChristian.com

__________________________________________________________________________

Copyright 2010 S.A. Buss – Feel free to re-post this piece, but only with the copyright included and a link to Fire Breathing Christian whenever possible. Thank you!

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Obama Administration Shock, Awe and Anger…at U.S. General Stanley McChrystal

In an article appearing in today’s Telegraph, advisors close to President Obama were said to be “shocked and angered” by a recent speech given by General Stanley McChrystal.

“The relationship between President Barack Obama and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan has been put under severe strain by Gen Stanley McChrystal’s comments on strategy for the war.

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.”

One can only assume that General McChrystal is, at this point, not likely to be found joining with the Obama Youth song and praise sessions sweeping the nation’s state-controlled gradeschools.

Whatever one might think of this exchange, we can all be thankful that The One finally managed to squeeze in some face time with the general managing what Obama himself described during the presidential campaign as a conflict where victory is vital to the national security interests of the United States. While it is clear that, from Obama’s perspective, the Afghan war situation is not as important as was the Chicago bid to host the 2016 Olympics, at least it rated 25 minutes of focus.

 

Copyright 2009 S.A. Buss – Feel free to re-post this piece, but only with the copyright included and a link to Fire Breathing Christian whenever possible. Thank you!

Subscribe to FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN!

Support FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN by:

and Thank you for your support!

For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss

Candy Christianity: A Kinder, Gentler God (Part 2 of 4)

 

Continued from “Candy Christianity: The Counterfeit Gospel of the American Church” (Part 1 of 4)

“Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.”

Acts 12:23 (ESV)

“I hope you have become nauseated with the tawdry entertainment that passes for the true worship of God in many of our churches and, like the saints of the past, are longing for more of the deep truths of the inerrant Word of God.”

James Montgomery Boice

As the origin and object of all that is good, He alone is worthy of glory. The harmony here is both apparent and essential to Christianity. If we believe that God is the author and objective of every good thing, then it is impossible to conceive of a valid justification for the assignment of glory – any glory – to anyone other than Him. He is the beginning and the end – the alpha and omega – of all that is good.

Enter: Pride. The hand that claims honor for any self outside of Him; the wide and welcoming gateway through which all other evil marches.

We are intensely prideful selves by fallen natural inclination. We yearn for significance. We desire glory. We have seen His glory and acted upon that desire.

As pride-filled and sinful men and women, ours is a relentless thirst for self-significance. This self-significance requires self-glorification. In a mad quest for validation of our selves, we’ve sought to make His sovereignty our possession and plaything. We’ve mocked His holiness. We’ve turned from His perfect love.

We’ve become pirates and pretenders seizing upon His honor.

We are the thieves who’ve sought to steal His glory and in doing so have instead transformed our great and beautiful adventure into a terrible, dark tragedy. At the end of the day, we’ve each stolen nothing but our own happiness, peace, joy and even life itself.

This is the price of the theft of His glory.

Though it was our intent to pilfer His prestige, we’ve only managed to secure a pirate’s nightmare payload of fool’s gold: Crushed spirits, soft bodies, weak minds, rudderless families, sterile churches, a crumbling nation and a depraved culture are but a few of the more spectacular gems that we’ve managed to acquire.

What a deal!

Who said crime didn’t pay?

Indeed, such thievery does pay. It pays in death: the death of a body, the death of a mind, the death of a spirit, a church, a culture and a nation. In choosing to rob our God and mock His holiness, we have chosen death in every way and at every level.

As we rob Him of glory, we rob ourselves of life. As He is given glory, we are given life. Peace, joy, happiness and fulfillment in any true, lasting sense can only be known when God is given glory. So it is that our attempted theft has stolen only hope from our future.

But what we have intended for evil, He will use for good. He always does.

This is sovereignty.

This is perfection.

This is love.

It never could have been any other way.

With all praise and thanks to Him, let us now prayerfully and thoughtfully consider the wicked path that we have chosen and from which He has saved us.

“God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.”

Blaise Pascal

“Any view of the human will that destroys the biblical view of human responsibility is seriously defective. Any view of the human will that destroys the biblical view of God’s character is even worse.”

RC Sproul

“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.”

CS Lewis

Our will has spoken.

With great enthusiasm we’ve exchanged the perfect, sovereign, holy God for something much more comfortable. Something warm, fuzzy, fluid and kind. Something we can wrap our minds around and to which we can relate. Something sensible. Something less intimidating.

A kinder, gentler god is just what we wanted – exactly what our hearts desired – and now we have him.

He is not sovereign. We are, at least practically speaking, and practicality is the bottom line with this god and his people.

His word is not holy. We pick, choose, spin and distort his recorded pronouncements without hesitation or shame. We’ll go as far as to attribute our own words and thoughts directly to him, printing them out neatly and signing his name at the bottom as a sort of unintended punch line.

His name is not holy. We print it on t-shirts, bumper stickers and posters, shoe-horning it into every Madison Avenue spun secular mold imaginable. He must be sold, after all, and what better way to accomplish this noble task than to cloak him in counterfeit Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein and McDonald’s logos?

If we could dip him in chocolate and put a bow on his head, we surely would. Anything to entice the poor, lost sinner to choose wisely, of course.

All’s fair in love, war and evangelism.

Holiness can be compromised. Sovereignty can be explained away. The rebellious will be made to feel welcome, warm and even cherished.

Once this wonderful, harmonious relationship is established, there’s nothing left to rebel against, is there? What could be more perfect!

This permissive god will be adored and we will carry his message of respectful inclusion to the four corners of the earth. We’ll exhaust and embrace every option as we spread his name and his oh-so-marketable brand of love throughout creation.

We will attach his name to any secular enterprise, from the benign and banal to the vulgar and vile. This god is sure to be gratified every time someone picks up a copy of “Girls Gone Wild, Bible Style”[1] from their local church coffee shop and book store.

After all, sex sells and we’re all about the numbers.

Numbers, numbers, numbers!

Numbers are good. Numbers are success. Numbers are the goal. Size matters most. More is always better, and ever-increasing quantity is this god’s given mission.

Hitting those targets, filling those pews, selling those tickets, books, albums and god-wear have become favored ways of spreading his seeker-sensitive message. With such great effort made towards secular accommodation, the counterfeit kingdom has grown at a frightening clip.

As this fiction-founded faith snakes its way into congregations and pulpits, the church body begins to rot from within. The bridge we’ve built to a God hating culture is now overrun by enemy forces eagerly seeking our destruction and happy to accept our helping hands in the process.

In countless ways we have forsaken His kingdom for the kingdom of the age. We have forsaken holiness. We have forsaken Him.

Our kingdom has come. Predictably, it is little more in overall quality than a well-landscaped subdivision of Sodom. We are cuddling and nurturing a world of God-haters. With the sovereign, holy Christ removed from its center, ours is a philosophy doomed to spread death to all it touches – all with a warm, happy smile, of course.

We’ve lost our way and are leading the world accordingly. We’ve hit the dimmer switch where brightness is needed most, we’ve smiled and shrugged at profound deviations from truth and sought to avoid conflict at any and all cost – and make no mistake, the price of this aversion to confrontation has been enormous in scope and catastrophic in nature. We’ve taken the Neville Chamberlain approach to dealing with the enemy and our enemy is quite pleased.

We are determined to be liked; adored even. The god of our age is a staunch advocate of a Barney the Dinosaur approach to life, and you can be sure that he is appreciative of our compliance. Hand in glove with this guiding principle, every worldly standard of goodness, kindness and warmth seems to have been coddled, appeased and accommodated.

We have accepted and subsequently fostered the notion that God can be known without being feared, and this was the first crucial step toward our replacing Him entirely with the kinder, gentler god we’ve come to support if not consciously embrace.

Amazingly, the notion of a god who is “Savior but not Lord” has gained currency in the church. Lost entirely is the concept of our slavery to Christ. We have been bought with a price. We are His. Consequently, we are to seek and submit to His will completely and joyfully. His sovereign lordship requires this of us.

Of course, this Sovereign Lord is incompatible with the spirit of the age. That spirit inspires and permeates the counterfeit kingdom. We have come to perpetuate this favored perspective of the enemy through our flight from the essence of lordship.

Continued in: “Candy Christianity: The Devil’s Favorite Flavor” (Part 3 of 3)

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[1] Girls Gone Wild, Bible Style CD set. Sold in 2007 at North Point Church (Assemblies of God) in Springfield, Missouri.

Copyright 2009 S.A. Buss – Feel free to re-post this piece, but only with the copyright included and a link to Fire Breathing Christian whenever possible. Thank you!

See also: “Everybody Expects…the Liberal Inquisition!” at http://firebreathingchristian.com in the Article Archives.

See also: “Create a Godless Nation? YES! WE! CAN!” at http://firebreathingchristian.com in the Article Archives.

Subscribe to FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN!

Support FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN by:

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For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss

Candy Christianity: The Devil’s Favorite Flavor (Part 3 of 4)

Continued from “Candy Christianity: A Kinder, Gentler God” (Part 2 of 4) – Copyright 2009 S.A. Buss

The god of this permissive kingdom is not necessarily to be feared. He is neither holy nor sovereign. He is open to interpretation and just as open to your input. He changes and grows. He is the author of many truths. Many paths lead to him. He will be your savior if you feel the need for one, but he need never be your lord.

And he absolutely loves “Girls Gone Wild, Bible Style”.

This shining savior is the bright and morning star; the prince of the power of the air. He is the spirit that works through and towards disobedience. He is the father of lies.

He reviles the sovereign and holy God. He is a murderer from the beginning and a thief of God’s glory. It must come as no surprise that he would so delight in making us accomplices in the plundering of God’s honor. In accepting his invitation, we’ve brought a wide smile to the face of the enemy.

As he smiles, hope always fades. Hope for any good thing cannot exist apart from the sovereign, holy God who is so despised by this rebellious world and its temporary ruler.

This is what the theft of our Lord’s glory has wrought.

We’ve trampled His holiness, dismissed His sovereignty and made every attempt possible to claim His glory as our own.

All in the name of Christ.

We’ve succumbed to our fallen nature, once again becoming god-lovers and God-haters. By human standards we have judged the God of scripture and found Him wanting.

While we may have discarded Him, we may take eternal comfort in the fact that He, by His sovereign grace, has chosen not to repay the favor.

Our perfect, sovereign and holy God has a plan. It is a flawless plan. He clings to us even now, as we have carefully, thoughtfully and diligently sown the seeds and cultivated the path of our own destruction.

“The unregenerate world of sinners despises the Holy Spirit, ‘because it seeth him not.’”

Charles Spurgeon

“And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil.”

John 3:19 (NLT)

Up is down. Down is up.

True wisdom is foolishness to the world.

True love has been substituted with a pale imitation that knows nothing of discipline and depth. Most congregations are hand fed a watery mix of pop psychology and feel-good, non-confrontational religion while the world burns around them.

The favored myths of the enemy now course through our veins. We have co-opted, assimilated and repackaged each and every one of them for Christian consumption, and the result has been the fermentation of an increasingly Christ-less, and therefore impotent, Christianity.

All by design.

The myths of neutrality and mediocrity have rendered our lives virtually indistinguishable from the God-hating population of a fallen creation. The myths of ease and independent personal ability have us spinning our wheels at the bottom of the pit, digging only deeper down, perpetually inspired by the ridiculous notion that we can do even the slightest good thing apart from Him.

With but one step back from the sovereign Lord of creation, we’ve managed to acquire every bit of freedom that our fallen wills could have ever hoped for and much, much more.

Our birthright as sons and daughters of the King has been sold, or, more accurately, given away. At least that was our intent.

Most thankfully, in this instance and in the ultimate sense our intent is of no account.

No matter the level of betrayal, idiocy or stupidity we demonstrate as we persist in catering to the standards of a world that hates the God we claim to love, He is faithful and utterly undeterred. The sovereign creator and ruler of the universe has a plan. It is perfect in all ways, at all times and for all people. It cannot be thwarted, compromised or even ever-so-slightly adjusted by the will of demons, angels or men.

Continued in “God’s Call to War: Fire Breathing Christianity” (Part 4 of 4)

Copyright 2009 S.A. Buss – Feel free to re-post this piece, but only with the copyright included and a link to Fire Breathing Christian whenever possible. Thank you!

See also: “Everybody Expects…the Liberal Inquisition!” at http://firebreathingchristian.com in the Article Archives.

See also: “Create a Godless Nation? YES! WE! CAN!” at http://firebreathingchristian.com in the Article Archives.

Subscribe to FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN!

Support FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN by:

and Thank you for your support!

For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss

Washington: Can You Hear Us Now?

What a difference a day makes. A day when somewhere around two million strong decide to march on the nation’s capitol, that is.

As the masses mobilized, the Statist media went into a tizzy and liberal activist from coast to coast scurried about trying to tag the millions of liberty-loving American protesters as everything from unenlightened and reactionary to hateful and (of course) racist.

With the ACORN/Child-Prostitution story largely ignored by Statist media, Americans taking to the streets of Washington DC were targeted for special treatment.

There is a silver lining to this dark moment in the history of American media, however. A very large silver lining.

As the Tea Party in DC rolled on and similar events unfolded across the nation, there was a growing sense among pro-liberty activists that  State-dominated media, while certainly a problem and pain in many ways, no longer mattered nearly as much as it once had.

This week’s wildly successful launch of BigGovernment.com, which came roaring out of the gate by breaking the ACORN “Child-Prostitute Organizing” story, was but the latest rallying point for a Constitution-loving conservative movement that has hit high gear and has the leftist beltway crowd coming unglued.

The once-silent majority has clearly found its voice.

Not bad for a bunch of backward, ignorant racists.

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For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss

 

The Day the Left Stood Still

In the morning hours of September 11th, 2001, America changed.

For many of the nation’s people, the change was permanent. It was forever. For others, those of the perpetual “move on” mantra, the transformative events of that day were to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

They posed a unique sort of political problem that simply had to be overcome if their agenda was to be advanced.

As we mourn and remember on this anniversary of that tragic moment in America’s past, let us pray to the God whose perfect Word inspired the foundation of this, the greatest nation in human history. Let us pray to Him for guidance. Let us pray to Him for mercy. Let us thank Him for His grace.

And let us pray that we never forget.

May the God who raised American civilization to heights of success not previously known in all of His creation now empower and embolden His people to remember…and to fight.

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For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss

Create a Godless Nation? YES! WE! CAN!

 

When I was a boy, I developed a keen interest in World War II history, particularly the European theater. The unparalleled scale and drama of that tumultuous time captivated me. I can remember as a fourth grader purposefully seeking out every book on the subject made available in the public and school libraries and absorbing them with an intensity that certainly would have served me well were I to have applied it to the areas of study that were actually assigned to me in those early days. This infatuation grew over time and blossomed into a deep, relentless sort of fascination that has held sway to this very day. 

I often wondered what it must have been like to live in Germany in the 1930s during the ascent of the political savior Adolf Hitler. I pondered the dire economic situation, the crushed national pride, and the desperate longing for restoration to greatness that had permeated the nation’s psyche and paved the way for its enthusiastic embrace of a messiah. How wonderful must it have been to see one’s cherished homeland redeemed and restored to prominence all through the iron will and masterful execution of one great man!

I also found it intriguing to imagine what life might have been like on the allied side of the fence in late 1941 and early 1942 as the black forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were on the march with the wind at their backs. Nation after nation had fallen under the relentlessly advancing jackboot of fascism in Europe and it surely must have seemed then as though the ultimate victory of evil was something frighteningly close to inevitable. The world was coming to an end.

What must it have been like to awake from this horror having achieved what once seemed to be an impossible triumph over evil only to find the ensuing rapture and thrill of victory so profoundly tainted by the unfathomable revelations that were to follow? Those first post-war glimpses into the minds and souls of brothers and sisters in the Third Reich must surely have inspired a dread on par with and quite possibly worse than the nightmarish prospect that had loomed over the collective consciousness of the allied powers during the darkest nights of 1941.

In reading of and grappling with these heavy things, two predictable, recurring questions perplexed me to a point so far beyond frustration that I resigned myself at an early age to the notion that these answers were simply not to be known. They were not to be had. These were sure to be eternal mysteries for any rational mind, since to believe otherwise would be to acknowledge a logic or sensibility of some sort that would or could somehow make sense of it all and therefore bring to the table a form of justifying rationale.

Yet this resignation could not silence the questions.

How?

Why?

How could such a thing as Hitler’s Nazism rise to dominance in a once Christian nation on the very cutting edge of civilization?

Why would an imminently rational, scientifically inclined people come to embrace a worldview so overtly evil and utterly devoid of positive philosophical substance?

How could a people so renowned for their intellect and work ethic find themselves so completely enslaved to group-think and plunged into oblivion?

Why did sharp minded men become programmable lemmings?

How did the purpose of life come to require the pursuit of death?

Why did the most vile and vulgar sorts of evil become such beautiful things?

How?

Why?

These are questions that I contemplated over and again in endless forms for many years. These are questions that I no longer ask.

As a man now in my thirties, I have no need for them. At long last, I have found the answers.

The people of Martin Luther’s Reformation became the nation of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in much the same way that the people of the American Revolution have become the nation of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can [insert whatever you like here]!”

Today holds all of the answers to what I once considered the dark mystery of history that was Nazi Germany.

I now know how it is that a nation flush with pride over its technological advancement and material accomplishment can enthusiastically surrender its humanity for the sake of bettering mankind. I now know that it is a relatively simple and easy thing to define the inconvenient or unattractive life out of existence figuratively and rhetorically so that it might one day be done away with literally. I now know that a nation that is Christian in name only is no farther from hellish barbarism than that which openly professes allegiance to a pagan god or no god at all.

The reason for these once illusory keys coming into focus and grasp is perhaps the most terrifying part of it all, in that the reason is reasonable.

It is logical.

It makes sense.

Perfect sense.

However impossible this may have seemed in my youth, I now know that the paths of historic Germany and contemporary America are founded on a solid, clear and powerful line of logic. It all begins with one simple, all-encompassing and worldview defining principle:

There is no God.

 

If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It’ll either be megalomania or erotomania; the drive for power or the drive for pleasure.

Malcolm Muggeridge

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See also: “Embrace the Marxist Rebellion Against God? YES! WE! CAN!”

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For more, please visit the FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN BLOGWIRE or head on over to the full FIRE BREATHING CHRISTIAN WEBSITE – Copyright 2009 S.A.Buss