Bruce Charlton had a post recently about how the great majority of people are sleeping through the tremendous changes that are currently taking place, changes that have been prepared for over several decades but which are now actually happening. He makes the point that people seem happy to live in a world of lies or the Big Lie because they fear the responsibility and commitment that acknowledging this would demand.
The radical change of thought required to see through the spiritual corruption of the present day does indeed ask a lot of anyone. It means a fundamental reevaluation of everything. It means rejecting ground that had seemed solid and advancing into new territory which is often shrouded in mists. The mists may clear from time to time and we may be granted a vision of a new and glorious land but then they close in again. It is natural to feel fear and doubt and to want to retreat to the security of the familiar, but to do this is increasingly going to mean turning a blind eye to reality.
Most people don't want to wake up because that would mean accepting we live in a world in which everything is out of kilter with reality, and not just randomly but deliberately made so. It really means coming to terms with the fact of evil. But we don't believe in evil because we don't believe in good, and we don't believe in good, not real good, because we don't believe in God. There is no good without God but when there is this God-given good that means there is also evil. This is a fact of life. This does not mean a dualistic world in which good and evil have equal power. Evil is just the denial or rejection of good and has no substantial creative reality other than that. But it does have that limited reality.
When you stir a pond with a stick all the muck comes to the surface. This is what is happening now. Evil is being allowed its way for a while, and for two reasons, I think. One, to clean it out of the system it must be expressed. Maybe it's like lancing a boil. And two, its predominance constitutes a real test of human souls. Will they perceive it for what it is and stand against it, even if that is only internally? Or while they go along with it for personal advantage or simply because not to do so requires too great an effort? Through laziness or cowardice. Will they wake up to it or will they just let it have its way because not to do so demands more of them, whether in terms of sacrifice or intellectual effort or spiritual commitment, than they are prepared to give?
Today evil is being done through people who may not be recognisably evil in themselves but who are not properly focused on the real good. This is the great test of our time because if you aren't actively oriented towards the real good, you will be swept up by evil. If you don't consciously reject evil, it will ensnare you.
Unfortunately, it seems that so far most people don't want to wake up and so I'm afraid that things will undoubtedly get worse before they get better. It's up to those of us who do see through the lies to provide good examples so that others can follow further down the line. We must not just condemn the evil (note to self!) but live and proclaim the good. After all, the evil is irrelevant. It is the good that matters. The Good News remains what it has been for 2,000 years. It is the glory of the resurrection in Christ that we should be focussing on not just the deviant wickedness of these days.
7 comments:
I can understand why people don't want to wake up, because they are awakening to a gathering nightmare in which all the powerful people in this world are out to crush them; and the sources of support or possible resistance (such as churches) have all-but gone. To the mass of Godless, indeed not Christian, people it must seem that almost anything is preferable to living life on that basis. It's bad enough for Christians! - and we are all prone to lapses and doubts, from time to time. Nonetheless, if we choose to live by lies, we are making the choice of damnation - so there is no way out of it.
The lack of any viable external support is a big problem but, as you have often said, this means we have to fall back on ourself and on an inner connection to God. The fact that this is what is required says to me that we are ready to do that which doesn't mean it will be easy. But it is possible.
There has never been a time when most people want to 'wake up', a term used by spiritual seekers in the East more commonly in reference to Enlightenment. And if they do, such as briefly in the 1970s, it is coated with a lot of status-seeking dross.
It's always a bit pretentious to claim to have some kind of 'waking up' insight since all spiritual systems claim the same. Can one wake up to Yoga, Buddhism, and Christianity's differing and contradictory views at the same time?
Each points the finger at the other as somehow missing something.
Christianity in my lifetime has been the least likely religion to be claimed as a 'waking up' religion. It was roundly criticized for being too into social control, and institutionalized religion - not mystical insight.
Apparently Christians wonder why some don't wake up to the Gospel when Jesus Himself in the Parable of the Sower said such knowledge can be snatched away by S. !
If that is so it has nothing to do with what people want or don't want - there is always some higher force at work.
Historically anything to do with societal change has always involved elites fighting each other. There is never a true uprising of 'the people'.
Do you have a personal definition of Christianity or Christians that is clarifying?
I notice in exploring the Bible and meeting Christians there is a great deal of thinking other people who call themselves Christians are not 'real' Christians. Each branch is a cult to the other.
From reading your blog and Bruce Charlton's this kind of distinction includes all Western political leaders who claim they are Christian but who apparently are not, the Pope, and almost all church leaders and most of the laity.
I notice Bruce, and Mormonism, is attacked on some blogs as being Not Christian also.
In real life I meet people who say they are Christian and their primary goal seems to be to threaten people with fear saying there are earthquakes so you must have Christ ASAP.
But Christ didn't say that.
I even ran into Jehovah's Witnesses who try to claim the Bible somehow involves global Warming. So they are using the secular world's fake political issues and lying that the Bible says anything about it.
When you say Christians who do you mean?
When I talk of waking up here it is in the context of waking up to the reality of the current world situation and how it is engineered for spiritual destruction.
I take your point about Christians and how Christianity can mean different things to different people. For me it is what Jesus said it was which is entry into a higher, greater, reality through him. Not just believing in him but actually being him, absorbing his life through the heart.
@William. "waking up to the reality of the current world situation". This really is getting extraordinary.
We are so obviously here-and-now living in a totalitarian dictatorship, which intervenes in almost every aspect of our lives by casual, every changing, diktat (not even laws) - and furthermore the rulers are telling us that they intend the situation should be permanent: e.g. that most travel will be stopped, that private cars will be phased-out very soon, that *most* jobs will be deleted (as 'inessential'), that sports, culture, education*, most health services are being abolished etc.
Yet not only have people not moticed what has happened, but they stotly refuse to believe the rulers when they tell us that not only is it permanent, but more of the same stuff is planned!
On the one hand, people are utterly credulous about what is in the news today, and about the explanations given for ever-more and ever-more-harshly enforced, surveillance and oppression; yet on the other they refuse to believe the people who control the news who are repeatedly telling us about the kind of world they are working towards.
I honestly don't really know what to make of this - but it is clear that people will put themselves through the most extraordinary and convoluted mental gymnastics, rather than simply perceive what has already happened to us, and simply believe those in power when they are telling us their plans.
There is a selective blindness and selective credulity at work which seems calculated to lead to the worst possible outcomes - both spiritual and temporal.
*wrt education. I know a student at Cambridge who has not seen one single member of academic staff face to face, through the students entire first term of first year. This time in 2019, any Cambridge don or student would have said that the *special* thing about the place was weekly, individual, face to face, 'supervisions'. Suddenly abolished. Suddenly a 'Cambridge education' - both work And leisure - means sitting in a college room watching a computer screen. Yet everybody carrys-on as if nothing important had essentially changed...
I can only agree, Bruce. Part of the problem is that the media has successfully created the idea of conspiracy theorists so that anyone who points out what is happening can just be dismissed as a crazy eccentric with a bee in his bonnet. People simply cannot grasp the magnitude of what is going on because they still trust the establishment but that is mostly because they don't know what else to do or where else to turn. That is why we really do need a solid religion or faith in God, something to provide the rock that is otherwise lacking.
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