When I was in Sydney this week I passed a church: the Christian Isrealites. They are an interesting bunch, but faithful. The service last week (I was not there: come on, I’m reformed) had this posted as the hymn.

Mankind has diverged from God and people follow their own desires

· God showed us how to live, but mankind was unable to follow the lifestyle set out in the Law

· God will make a new Covenant in the Latter Days, based on Obedience to His life-style through love

· Romans points out that we can be reconciled to God either through forgiveness of our sins, or obedience through God’s Power

· Jesus had to come to pave the way for reconciliation of mankind with God

· Let us look beyond the baby at Christmas to the returning King, and seek to be ready for His Glory to be shown to the World again

I like quirky churches and the querulous faithful. It is worth noting that this church was builded two years after New Zealand joined the British Empire: the Maori were first preached to in 1815. By the end of the Victorian period, almost all the nations of the world had mission stations preaching the word. The final tribes are being found.

For when the gospel has been preached to all nations the end will come. But that is a prerequisite, not a condition that starts the final days. No one knows when the final day or hour is. And, here, the Christian Israelites may be in error.

Haggai 2:1-9

¹In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying: ²Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say, ³Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? ⁴Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, ⁵according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear. ⁶For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; ⁷and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. ⁸The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. ⁹The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.

Matthew 24:1-14

¹As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. ²Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

³When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” ⁴Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. ⁵For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. ⁶And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. ⁷For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: ⁸all this is but the beginning of the birthpangs.

⁹“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. ¹⁰Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. ¹¹And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. ¹²And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. ¹³But the one who endures to the end will be saved. ¹⁴And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.”

I believe that the word of God is living and active, and is relevant at all ages and at all times. I have been reading the bible fairly regularly since my teenage years. It is new: all great books, read over periods, will resonate with the changes in your life, but the bible is different.

It shows error. It gives warnings and corrections. And we can see the outworkings of our society in our reactions to this. So, since it is Saturday, three quotes, three responses.

The first is Russian: to hold to the church as a shelter, and claim that Russia, the Rodina is Holy. To take the times of poverty, when the temple is ruined, and recall Haggai: there will be a restoration, for the nations of the world are unchanged.

Yes, you can touch and count all the noses you want. You can cite all the surveys you can find that tell us that only a minority of Russians still identify with the Orthodox Church. But you can’t explain away the fact that throughout her millennial history, the rulers of Russia have always depended upon this very same institution for their legitimacy and support. Even Stalin had to acknowledge this in his time of deepest danger from the West. And that is what Orthodoxy has always delivered; protection from the West.

Throughout every age, in the face of every threat (and opportunity) to their nation, the rulers and people of Russia have always taken their final refuge in the Russian Church. Regardless of how many actually attended church each Sunday, regardless of the relationship between the throne and altar, and in spite of any hostilities between the people and the Patriarchs, one thing has remained constant. Refuge in the Church. Vlad Putin is no exception. Patriarch Kyrill has the keys to that Church. So, be nice, Vlad. Be nice.

So when my friend says that Greco-Russian Orthodoxy is simply an interesting but historically anachronistic detail of Russia history today, and that by extension, religion is only a small (and not the decisive) factor in the life of most nations today, he is whistling past the graveyard. How can I say this? Simple. It’s because the abandonment of a religion is a theological move in and of itself. Even atheism is a religion. Religion is everywhere. Even if you can’t see it.

Do I need to remind anyone that the greatest weakness of the West is theological in nature? And that the danger the West faces had its origins in the long-standing opposition of the Orthodox towards Holy Rome that culminated in 1962, in the form of Vatican II?

The second is Catholic. The worship of reason is a peculiarity of the Catholic, and they shaped the West: the Protestants are still Catholic in the sense Augustine was, just injected in a different manner. I would disagree with the author on one point: Aquinas was never arbitrary. Popes have been. Calvin was never arbitrary. But the Geneva Council was. For the other part of the West is this: we know we are all fallen.

Catholicism values reason highly, and never makes arbitrary assertions. So if a view dealing with the things of this world is fundamentally at odds with the Faith, it’s going to be at odds with natural law and reason as well. In our time such views usually take the form of secular ideologies that promise hope and change but deliver an anti-utopia. Such views can reasonably be called anti-ideals.

Thought works its way toward overall coherence, so if you’re insistently wrong on one basic point the effects creep into all aspects of how you view things. If you hold to a political anti-ideal you’ll likely also accept an anti-theology—a hardcore socialist or Mussolini-style fascist, for example, is unlikely to be theologically orthodox or even take the Faith seriously. The same holds for other combinations: a religious error like subjectivism naturally leads to political errors like secular progressivism and the philosophically irrationalist view that 2+2 can equal 5.

All of which is a problem, because public life and high-end thought today are dominated by anti-ideals and anti-philosophies. The thought of those now counted as experts is dominated by naturalism, the view that only natural forces and laws operate in the world, and mainstream public life by technocracy, the view that the purpose of social order is maximum preference satisfaction consistent with efficiency, stability, and manageability.

These views are focused, narrow, and effective as immediate means of power. They are also intolerant. They’re good for winning wars or producing lots of consumer goods, but ruthlessly exclude alternatives as aside the point and not worth considering. People who hold them know what makes sense to them but find other views comprehensible only by reference to stupidity or moral vice.

And finally we have the post modern. They see the British Israelites as weird, and to be fair, they are. But they conflate that with the Catholic, the Orthodox and have never considered that the previous generations have anything to teach. It matters not. They are in a Jacobin death spiral. Their model is Lady Macbeth, but, unsaid, is that they do not know her fate, for Shakespeare is a dead white male who must never be read.

No liberal of the female sex has a right to scream ‘sexual harassment.’ By embracing feminism she has left her humanity and her rights as a woman behind. Why should I or any male be concerned about the alleged sexual harassment of feminist harpies who welcome Moslem and black rapists into our nations while screaming about the sexual harassment of the pornographic actresses in Hollywood? The Victorian maiden and mother has a right to be protected from sexual harassment in word or deed. The modern feminists have no such rights. If we accord them any rights or sympathy, we are supporting the continual reign of terror of our modern legions of Lady Macbeths.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, your murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, “Hold, hold!”

The feminists, who rule in state and church, do not express themselves as poetically as Lady Macbeth, but her doctrine is their doctrine. I ask you – can a people who teach their young women the ethos of Lady Macbeth survive as a people? Of course they can’t. And that is what the devil wants. He does not want the white Christ-bearing race to survive.

Madeline Albright, with Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton at her side, told an audience of women that any woman who voted for Trump deserved a “special place in hell.” Leaving aside the hypocrisy of a woman who doesn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead invoking an eternal hell for sinners, let’s look at the meaning of Albright’s statement. Whatever you might think of Trump, he has become, in the sick, distorted minds of the liberals, the symbol of the white Christian resistance to liberalism. So it follows that any woman who is still woman enough to support a white Christian male is damned. It’s ironic that feminists invoke the devil in order to condemn women who support what the feminists perceive to be a white Christian counterattack, because it is the feminists, not the white Christians, who are in lock-step with the devil.

the question we are facing is this: do we turn? For if there is further delay, it is so that people can refurn to Christ, as individuals, as families and as nations. Two of the nations that have rapidly growing churches — Russia and China — were militant atheists when I was born, and I am not that old.

And the Jacobite storms always end, because society realises that way lies destruction.

So do not be of the elite of the West, and do not be like them