Jerusalem cannot be engineered, but Babylon can be.

Yesterday I wrote how anger can be legitimate, how we will rage and grieve. But then Christ confronts us with the fullness of the law. To treat a person with contempt. to allow hatred, to let anger fester is called sin. Some may say this is hyperbole: I think not.

We are allowed emotions. Grief, anger, rage, desire hunger. Augustine pointed out that sins are in effect taking what is natural and moving it out of its place and order: so if our anger becomes hatred, our rage contempt, our Grief the isolation of despair and our desire and hunger lust and gluttony we are no longer controlling our emotions, but letting our emotions control us.

Amazing how one gets drawn into arguments on Twitter. A little remark, then a great sucking vortex.

— Malcolm Pollack (@mtpollack) September 13, 2014

So Christ moves to saying that the acts driven by these things are faults. The words, once said, damage and kill.

For me this is a challenge: I come from a house where political and religious arguments are a recreation. Where most if not all topics were allowed: where one would argue. When I was an adolescent, my father at times would switch to my side and say “Well the better argument would be….” and show me how to construct such things. It was safe: in part because we had a basic agreement about the gospel, and I knew that if Dad asked me to do something it was my duty to do so, but it allowed me to develop the intellectual muscles needed to subvert that Babylon which was an education run by the first generation of radicals, starting to destroy the NZ state education system.

I thank my father for those skills: they have been passed on to my sons, who in this fallen age need them.
But let us never forget that our enemy is human, and God desires their salvation as greatly as he desires ours.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

(Matthew 5:21-26 ESV)

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. And he called out with a mighty voice,

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”

Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,

“Come out of her, my people,
lest you take part in her sins,
lest you share in her plagues;
for her sins are heaped high as heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.
Pay her back as she herself has paid back others,
and repay her double for her deeds;
mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.
As she glorified herself and lived in luxury,
so give her a like measure of torment and mourning,
since in her heart she says,
‘I sit as a queen,
I am no widow,
and mourning I shall never see.’
For this reason her plagues will come in a single day,
death and mourning and famine,
and she will be burned up with fire;
for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.”

(Revelation 18:1-8 ESV)

One always has to be careful when looking at Revelations. It is truth, but disguised in metaphor: the dynamic of a feminist society, where women consider themselves queens, eternal, perpetually loved, and without the need to grieve or mourn makes me consider the elites within the West: The immorality of such is obvious. But that may not be Babylon in prophecy.

However, I would suggest that the metaphor applies still. To deny the sadness of this life is a great error: to think that one can never mourn if you have the correct psychopharmacology; never age if you have the correct surgeon, diet and gym and be loved regardless of what you do is the message fed to women over and over.

A bright Moon shares the spotlight with a small #aurora pic.twitter.com/aDhlii41az

— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) September 13, 2014

This is an error. We have made great strides in our technology — I’m using what is now a stable blogging platform that did not exist five years ago, a computer that has more power than NASA had when they went to the moon, and most of the day it’s just getting music of spotify. But we cannot make an aurora. Our best and greatest art cannot match the glory within nature.

So what does it mean to not be part of the elite? What does it mean to come out of them? It may be that when a society goes pagan (or Islamic, which in effect is the same thing) the hostility is such that we will have to, like the Jews, flee. And that is, in general, the beginning of the end game for that society.

The civil magistrate has a role in our society: to protect the nation from the outsider who will invade and destroy, and provide the courts to administer justice. [And little more, in my view]. When the state tries to tell us that things are becoming perfect, that we can indeed make a Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land, they are instead building a Babylon, and from the ancient ideas of Babylon, that we can indeed control our life, paganism grows as if in a field shut off from growing crops.

And that is the state we are in. We need to limit our engagement with this state. And we may have to flee.