The Human Battle

Dear friends on the right: No, half the country is NOT suddenly OK with you and fellow Americans being carted off to gulags.

Dear friends on the left: No, half this country is NOT suddenly irredeemably racist, white supremacist and full of bigoted hate.

We are all being lied to. All of us, on both sides.  This is why we can’t have conversations anymore. Both sides are having their ears whispered into with horrible lies about people on the other side. People who are family, on the other side. People who used to be best friends, on the other side. Long time business associates, classmates, acquaintances, your hairdresser – on the other side.

Forget the fantastical lies you are hearing about them. What do you KNOW about them? Forget that they are a Trump supporter or a Biden voter. Who are they beyond that? That’s not all they are. Is that all YOU are?

Don’t say you must have never really known them. You did. You are just being gaslit. You need to get back to reality and back to listening without screaming. We all do. None of this is real. It all started in 2020 sometime and continues, unfortunately. But we need to get off this ride NOW.

We’ve all seen how toxic social media and the 24 hour news cycle has become. It is a never ending vortex of click bait and attention hounding, exponentially feeding into itself until it becomes a panic ridden frenzy of fear, rage and horror in your soul, haunting you 24/7 for months and months until you feel there is no getting out alive…

I have heard many times that this is a spiritual battle and that is 100% correct. It is a battle for your spirit and for the spirit of the American people, but also for the human spirit of the world. For this is not a uniquely American battle. It is the same battle that has been fought spiritually throughout the ages. It is the human battle. And yes, it is a political one, but maybe not in the way you think.

This battle is bigger than Trump or Biden or Republican or Democrat. This is the age old battle over power. This is the battle for The Ring. Freedom v Authority. Power v The People. Big v Small. Evil v The Underdog. But the battlefield is messy. Which side you align with politically largely dictates who you perceive the good or bad players to be. But we ALL think we’re the good guy. We all want to be on the side of good. Most of us anyway. We are all the protagonist in our own story. That’s true for everyone, including your former best friend. Your estranged brother. They have their reasons for feeling the way they do. So do you. Give them grace. They’ve been lied to. So have you. We all need to rediscover truth together, without all the noise.

I’ve long felt that much of the Bible and of prophecy is allegory and trying to make sense of the world in spiritual terms where absolute terms make no sense. Who can fully understand the mind and motivations of every actor on the stage shaping world events? Taken as a whole, human behavior develops patterns. It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. That’s because human nature is a real thing. People behave in semi-predictable ways when we look at macros, at big pictures. Maybe that’s why prophecy works…

Maybe the prophecy of the anti-christ and of tribulation and mark of the beast and authoritarian control is just… another thing that rhymes. What if it has happened many times? And will happen many more times… Can you imagine living through WWII and the holocaust and that NOT being the End Times? It was the end for a lot of people. For 6 million Jews….

What if we have imagined the great rapture as being taken up to glory in the clouds by a triumphant Jesus returning to save us all…. When in reality, Jesus took his faithful home in the clouds of the crematoriums? And in the killing fields of Cambodia? And in the gulags of Russia? Et cetera, et cetera… Is that depressing? Or hopeful in some way? Maybe its both.

But how could Hitler NOT be an anti-christ and a beast?

I would submit that he was. He was not the first and he will not be the last for he is merely a product of human nature when it lusts for power, is filled with hate and gets its wish. And how many blood-thirsty dictators and emperors has history seen fulfill this prophecy? Are you waiting for someone worse than Caligula? Vlad the Impaler? Bloody Mary? Caesar? Genghis Khan? Napoleon Bonapart? Lenin? Stalin? Pol Pot? Maybe the truth is there is an antichrist for every time and place in history. We will have ours, and perhaps we should be prepared that maybe the next democide, like the last, IS the rapture, for us…

A horrifying thought for someone like me raised on Christian fairytales… but maybe. History is full of people misinterpreting prophecy because they didn’t like what they saw in it…

But haven’t we seen the mark of the beast over and over in currency with the king’s face on it? You cannot do commerce without it… Now credit cards and bank accounts. Regulated by the empire’s government and when you lose access to the system, you starve. How is that not the mark of the beast? What more are we waiting for? It is all here, and has been here over and over again throughout time.

What did Jesus say about Caesar’s currency? Did He say to shun it and starve? Go off grid? His attitude seemed to be to co-exist with Caesar as well as you can. But He, too, died a martyr, so we know Caesar will eventually come for us.

But there is hope for humanity as well.

If you really believe, as I do about central planning and the markets, you know the authoritarians are doomed to fail every time. EVERY time.

Austrian economics teaches that the market is so beautifully complex and mysterious that no one person and no central committee of planners can ever be smart enough to know what the price of a banana should be. Only the market as a whole can discover that.

This is the battle of humanity. The people who lust for and gain power will try to determine the price for that banana. They will try to control bananas and the humans who want to eat them. They will inevitably end up with warehouses full of rotting bananas and starving people, but starving people will find a way. The market will find a way.

The tragedy is bananas will indeed rot and people will indeed starve. People will die at the hands of dictatorial central planners, but not all of them. Humanity has ALWAYS found ways to throw off the bonds of the beasts that would starve them and find their way again.

It is divine and it is hopeful. We will be OK. Authoritarianism is once again breathing down our necks and we can expect to be bruised and battered. But we will not be extinguished. We will rise again and reclaim our human birthright.  And someday we will be raptured into freedom again.

This is the cycle humanity continually goes through. Tribulation to rapture to tribulation again. This is the constant of the human condition.

What should you then do?  You should try to talk to your brother again and tell him you love him. You should tell him that all this other nonsense doesn’t matter as much as the bond you have for each other. You should “render unto Caesar” and realize that beasts are gonna beast because that’s what they do, and while the beasts were beasting in Jesus’s day He said to love. Love God, love one another, but just love.

The good news is that is all it takes to achieve spiritual victory in this life.

The bad news is you can never vanquish over evil, only God can do that. People try, but usually only end up committing more evil. Ghandi and MLK, Jr understood that. It seems weak, but it is actually incredibly brave to not attempt to fight the violence of the state with more violence, but with peace and love. With vulnerability. Because the clickbait and the attention hounds become instantly on your side when you’re the vulnerable, peaceful one. And that is the way. It may be your way to heaven at the end of a spear, but. If that is what we are called to, that is what we must accept. And we can know that it is all part of the divine human battle.