I’m not that superstitious, and not that sure about patterns. If I was, I would be thinking my city is under the punishment of God. For we have had a small earthquake this week (4.6: did not damage) and then 160 mm (that is five inches) of rain in one day, which has done damage. The lower parts of Dunedin are below sea level, and they flooded.
Perhaps we are under judgement. We have turned away from sound doctrine, and embraced that which is wrong. Or it may be the consequences of living on a geologically unstable rock that sticks out of the southern ocean, where the storms rotate around the world, blocked only by New Zealand (which is a drowned continent) and a peninsula sticking out of South America.
However, we are told to appoint judges, and to discern carefully, and provide justice.
“You shall appoint judges and officers in all your towns that the LORD your God is giving you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
We need judges. We need to discriminate. We need to decide between good and better, and more frequently between evil and more evil. The role of the courts and state is to engender that basic trust that allows all to function in a society. And, as the elite try to make a fundamental transformation of our society, that is break down.
Problems with the government in turn reverberate within all the legal constructs that are dependent on the government to survive: namely, the employer that signs your paycheck, the university administration that signs your diploma, and the beat cops that patrol your streets. When states begin to deteriorate, everything that depends upon state guarantees begins to lose coherence and predictability as well.
One of the main roles that the modern state performs is that it at least theoretically backstops all contracts, which makes it easier to do business with strangers and near-strangers. As that critical role becomes more theory and less practice, direct, unmediated trust becomes more critical for getting anything done. This means that it becomes more important to defect your primary loyalty to some combination of your family, ethnic group, religious affiliation, and quite probably gang or local business affiliation. This process is common within all collapsing states and need not be cause for all that much mourning, although it is cause for alarm.
Trust is a scarce resource, probably the scarcest resource in a society becoming increasingly chaotic, and it’s also crucial for constructing anything of consequence. Rather than having that resource provided to you for ‘free’ as an entitlement that comes with your birth certificate, you have to build it for yourself or pay in to an alternative network to gain access to it.
What we should expect to see is a contraction in the above-ground, official society, and a growth in the underground, unofficial society in which the work of actual survival can take place. Attempting to extract resources from the official network will become harder and less consistent, while extracting resources from the occluded networks will become easier and more profitable.
The choice is a lot easier today than it was in, say, 1980, when the trade-offs were less clear and the risks were higher. Now, participating in the official world, following the official advice, will bankrupt you more often than not, and leave you permanently frustrated with how much effort goes in for so little reward. Hybrid strategies in failing states can also be effective, as you keep one front for the official world, while keeping another operation underground.
What the entryists and the SJW forget is that judgment is a needed function within society. we need to judge disputes. We need to do this with impartiality, without bribes, without reference to the tribe or status of the person. We need to ignore the level of disability. We cannot change our judgment because of race or creed or sex or simple dislike of the person. We must judge correctly.
A doctor must judge what is the correct diagnosis.
An engineer must judge what is the correct solution to the problem — in Dunedin, how to rebuild retaining walls and stop slips: in Christchurch, how to build on land that is partially stable (or not to build on this land at all).
But note one thing. Christ will bring true justice to the elect. Fear it, for it will be terrible. Under true justice, we will all be found wanting. And we all know that: which is why those ideologies that push the blame to the Jews or the Illuminati or to white heterosexual males are so seductive.
But listen to this white heterosexual male. It is your own sin that will damn you: I have enough of my own. You cannot damn me when I’m already heading to hell.
But for the work of Christ on the Cross. So on this day of flood and earthquake, let us praise God. The damage is to buildings. They can be fixed. Not the death of peoples, that cannot be recalled back.