/CONT/   #

CHAPTER III

AUTOCRATIC FORMS OF GOVERNMENT WITHIN THE CHURCH

PREPARE THE WAY FOR ANTICHRIST 
IT SHALL NOT BE SO AMONG YOU

The fact is, however, Jesus promoted no such hierarchical 
scheme of things. Jesus taught the EXACT opposite. He said,

"Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. 
"BUT IT SHALL NOT BE SO AMONG YOU: but whosoever will be great 
among you, LET HIM BE YOUR MINISTER (i.e., servant); "And 
whosoever will be chief among you, LET HIM BE YOUR SERVANT 
(i.e., slave): "Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered 
unto (i.e., served), but to minister (i.e., serve), and to give 
his life a ransom for many." (Matt. 20:25-28)  

Indeed, instead of teaching that Christians should be dependent 
on an outward chain-of-command, Jesus said,  

"... ye need not that any man teach you: but ... the same anointing 
teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie [i.e., the 
same anointing (which is truth and no lie) teaches all of you the 
same things]. (I John 2:27)  

And exactly what is this anointing? Jesus said that it is -

"... the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father 
will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring 
all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." 
(John 14:26)  

And again, Jesus said,

"But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from 
the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the 
Father, he shall testify of me ..." (John 15:26)  

GOD WANTS TO RULE IN OUR HEARTS

God's will is that He should rule over us directly IN OUR HEARTS; 
that their should be no intermediaries between us and Him - AND 
THAT IS PRECISELY WHY THE HOLY SPIRIT WAS GIVEN.  

JESUS DWELLS IN OUR HEARTS in the Person of the Holy Spirit! 
- IN ALL OF OUR HEARTS, and this is what makes Christianity so 
different from all the other religions of the world! This is what 
makes Christianity so REVOLUTIONARY! So WONDERFUL! This is why 
Peter can speak of the "priesthood of ALL believers" (I Peter 2:9).  

Sadly, however, the great truth of the "priesthood of ALL believers" 
which evangelicalism did so much to recover in the Nineteenth and 
early Twentieth centuries is today more "dead doctrine" than it is 
reality - a teaching "more honored in the breach than in the 
keeping."  

Instead, most Christians in today's church have been taught to 
just sit quietly in their chairs (pews) week after week while 
the "paid professionals" teach and otherwise function. What a 
shame that people who today call themselves "evangelical" can 
put up with such a system, let alone encourage and teach it.  

But the people love their "kings." Why? - because they want to 
shirk their responsibilities before God. In other words, instead 
of picking up these responsibilities for themselves, they prefer 
to hand them over to someone else who will do the work for them 
(whether that means taking responsibility for their children's 
spiritual upbringing, studying the Word for themselves, counseling 
one another, etc.) - even if it means accepting a tyranny over 
themselves as a result.  

Isn't that the great lesson of 1 Samuel 8:4-22? Isn't that what 
the people wanted when they demanded of Samuel a king - EVEN AFTER 
SAMUEL HAD "REHEARSED" IN FRONT OF THEM THE KIND OF TYRANNY THAT 
WOULD RESULT?  

The fact is, in the end (at least in this world), "kings" become 
tyrants - whether they exercise temporal power or religious power. 
It is as inevitable as the sun rising in the east; that is exactly 
why God told Samuel to "... show them the manner of ... king(s) that 
shall reign over them." He knew the heart of man; He knew what 
eventually would happen.  

CHRISTIANS PREFER AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP

AND THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING TODAY! CHRISTIANS DON'T WANT TO TAKE 
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEMSELVES; THEY WANT TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO, SO 
THEY PREFER AUTOCRACY; THEY PREFER A "KING." AS A RESULT, THEY 
HAVE BECOME, AS IAN KERSHAW PUTS IT, "READY-MADE TERRAIN" for a 
new Hitler - a "fertile field," so to speak, that lends itself 
easily to the nourishment of a belief in autocracy; one that is 
predisposed towards a disdain for the concepts of democracy - all 
essential predispositions of mind necessary to the emergence of a 
RESITIUTOR ORBIS or world-ruler; in other words, the Antichrist.  

Again I say, stop and think for a moment how ironic all this is! 
The very people through whom the concept of the Antichrist was made 
known to the world (and against whom they have warned the world 
for more than two millennia) turn out to be the very people who, 
in the end, will present him to the world.  

Now that's DECEPTION! That's real and total DECEPTION! - so that 
the prophecy is fulfilled in them which says that in that day -  
"... the very elect should be deceived" (Matt. 24:24).

CHAPTER IV

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC WAYS OF THINKING SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE CULTURE 
HOW WIDESPREAD IS THIS THREAT?  

So what does all this mean? - it means that unbeknownst (or at 
least unrecognized) by most observers in our society, we have 
two very important segments of our culture - i.e., the business 
community and the Christian community - that are predisposed 
AGAINST democracy - i.e., to a mindset that is inclined in favor 
of autocratic ways of governing, and are, as a result, "READY-MADE 
TERRAIN" for the appearance of the Antichrist.  

How great a threat does all this pose to us? We can get an idea by 
measuring how large a portion of our population identifies itself 
with this segment of our society. The liberal Jewish organization B'nai 
Brith, no friend to conservative Christianity, and, as a result, not 
an organization that would be much given to over-estimating the 
strength of the conservative Christian community, believes that 
conservative Christians - i.e., that portion of the Christian 
community that embraces the idea of returning the nation to 
"Christ and the church" (and, ipso facto, to messianic concepts 
of leadership) - now encompass close to ONE-THIRD of the entire 
population of the United States. This figure includes those 
Catholics who have "gone over" to this kind of thinking. That 
would include 90 percent of church- going evangelical Protestants, 
and close to 60 percent of church-going Catholics. Now think about 
that! - that's ONE-THIRD of the entire U.S. population (again, 
according to B'! nai Brith) - quite a feat for a movement that 
less than twenty-five years ago constituted nothing more than 
a small blip on the nation's political radar.  

Some would say, that's only one-third of the population. Yes, 
that's true. BUT WHEN THIS ONE-THIRD OF THE POPULATION IS REINFORCED 
BY THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY [WITH ALL ITS MONEY AND INFLUENCE (AND 
WHICH - LIKE THE COUNTRY'S RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY - IS PREDISPOSITIONED 
TO A BELIEF IN AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP)], THEN YOU MAY VERY WELL HAVE 
A "WINNING" COMBINATION! 
And this is especially true when one understands that it isn't as 
if the one-third of the population that constitutes the "New Christian 
Right" is opposed by the remaining two-thirds of the population. That 
isn't the case at all. The Religious Right, in fact, is vigorously 
opposed by only the so-called "hard Left" (i.e., hard core feminists, 
the gay and lesbian community, the minority community, the entertainment 
community, the liberal Jewish community, those still given to socialist 
ways of thinking, the so-called intellectual community, etc.) - which, 
like the Christian community, constitutes about one-third of the 
population. This leaves the remaining one-third of the populace 
"in play" and "up for grabs" - AND IF THAT'S THE CASE,
THE RELIGIOUS 
RIGHT IS IN A VERY GOOD POSITION TO "CARRY THE DAY," ESPECIALLY IN 
LIGHT OF THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.  

THE GRIM CADENCE OF WAR

The truth is, since the events of September 11th, this movement - 
i.e., THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT - has been advancing with all the grim 
cadence of warfare (that's what all the flag-waving and superficial 
patriotism of today is all about), and as it expands, it is enveloping 
ever more of the population in its absolutist thinking; and the so-
called "War on Terrorism" is only adding to the movement's growth. 
 
This is pretty frightening when one considers the naked militancy 
that is being employed to move the Christian Right forward - the 
kind that denounces church / state separation as "religious 
cleansing," "a socialist myth," and "a lie of the
left." Before 
the events of September 11th, this kind of talk would have been 
denounced by the press; that's no longer the case. Indeed, such 
former mouthpieces of liberalism as CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the 
New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. are now actually 
helping to propel such thinking forward.  

/CONT/

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