Living in Hell
What’s the most important thing in the world to you?
You might know the book answer to that, but what matters most is what motivates you in your general behavior. It should be shalom – peace with God. He has revealed that the only genuine good in this world is His covenant. Whenever you pursue anything else, you are giving allegiance to a false deity.
When most men get married, the instinct for social preservation takes over. Suddenly it becomes important to maintain social stability in order to protect the family. The man is ready to start building a life. If something happens to threaten it, taking any or all of that away, he’s ready to kill. This is all by instinct.
The problem is that society is already a threat. Our society and government are largely hostile to peace with God. Instead, our society adheres to a mythology about what is good and right. That mythology is internally inconsistent and deeply hypocritical. American society proclaims things that are simply not true. Under the surface, society is just looking for a chance to poach on every man’s domain. While the laws proclaim the common good of security, the enforcement typically fails.
In a covenant community, we bring all of this to the surface. Men are supposed to know that they are building a covenant life, not the socially approved system that keeps us vulnerable to plunder. We strive to build a conscious awareness that our world is hostile to the Covenant. We look for ways to withdraw from society to protect what God has provided. We want peace with God, knowing that the price of that peace is hostility to the world.
In America, a covenant man seeks first and foremost peace with God. He knows that anything he builds physically and materially is always at risk from the world around him. He invests himself in the task of building a life here by the Word of the Covenant, not according to common assumptions. The real issue is shalom, not the trappings of what is normal under the Covenant. That way, when the world steals away his material domain, he doesn’t die inside.
When the world seduces your wife, drawing her away into slavery to human desires, and the law gives her all your material possessions to take with her, along with your children, it can destroy everything you have worked to build. You feel like you need to destroy the world in return. Failing that, you are internally destroyed.
Notice the symbolism of my terminology here? That’s from the Bible.
God says He will judge the nations, including America. Not a single nation is under the Covenant, so all nations are judged from time to time according to God’s inscrutable plans. His promise to pour out His wrath on countries like ours is not according to our American conceptions of justice. The “destruction” God brings seldom meets our reasonable expectations.
The Devil wants all humans dead. Failing that, he delights in human suffering, so great is his spite for us. He knows that the best thing in this world for us is to walk in the Covenant. He has zero control over where we go after we die, but the one thing he can control is our human existence, if we let him. The most destructive power in this world is the power to degrade. That’s what Satan offers; it’s all he has for us. He’s God’s punisher, and that punishment is increasing the distance from the sweetness of the Covenant and shalom.
When God hands us over to Satan for punishment, that means we lose all sense of peace. The current wave of wrath coming down from Heaven will remove what few moral barriers we’ve had in the past. We cannot imagine the depravity that is coming. By itself, this is a horrifying affliction.
In due time, that degradation will reap a more literal destruction. That’s simply how it works. Do not look for something dramatic to wipe out all the sorrow Americans bring to themselves until farther down the road. Rather, look for that internal rot to get worse; look for that kind of “destruction” first, because the fruit is not yet ripe for literal destruction. How long did God put up with Sodom and Gomorrah?
The warning of divine wrath comes to covenant people according to the terms of the Covenant. For us, “destruction” means primarily a greater distance from divine revelation. America is not Sodom and Gomorrah just yet; this country has some work to do in Satan’s slavery. Words cannot express what’s coming. Everything will become more thoroughly perverted, and that includes the economy and government policy. It will be painful enough in material and physical terms, but don’t get hung up on the literal meaning.
The real pain was depicted in John’s Revelation of men crawling under rocks and gnawing their own tongues in misery. It’s symbolic. Have you ever encountered someone who realizes they are enslaved by their fleshly desires? They weep and moan as they go to commit their sins again. They have no power to resist the demands of the flesh. Only the Covenant grants this power, and they have rejected that.
The Covenant alone – nothing else will rescue you from that degrading slavery of the flesh. Your peace with God is the one and only thing that should occupy your efforts to build a future. The Covenant is the whole thing and the only thing. The world takes away everything else, but it cannot touch the Covenant. If you are invested into anything less, you are living in Hell already.