We are to Die to Self to Live for Christ

 I have two today, both from the American Thinker. Both deal with similar themes, the purpose for which we were created:  the fight against evil.

First up is a piece by Anthony J. DeBlasi entitled A War You Don't Hear About. DeBlasi is talking of course about the war of Good vs. Evil. As DeBlasi makes very clear, we humans are called to be God's soldiers in the fight against the Devil. And while it is sometimes actual violent warfare, more often, and for most of us most of the time, we are fighting, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Deblasi starts off his piece in a similar vein:

An old hymn that religious progressives deleted from their hymnals was “Onward Christian Solders.” The war it called upon was not against other nations, as in the Left’s campaigns for “regime change,” but against spiritual principalities of evil that wage war on humanity. In the language of the Christian faithful, the fight was against Satan.

The spiritual fight against evil referred to has no date or political origin and is ongoing. Before I go on, some background notes…

When God was swept aside for strictly political action against evil, as in France in 1789, later in England, then in Russia (1917), finally in America after the world wars, this alarmed not only those who sang the old hymns in church and who today are called “conservative” but the faithful and morally principled of every religious orientation. Expressed in the “supernatural” terminology common to Christian laymen, “Satan invaded the West,” including its churches. It was in other words apparent that Christianity had been assaulted in a major way by the very forces of evil against humanity that people have fought since the beginning of time.

It was Christianity that civilized Europe and taught people how to propagate good will and wellbeing from ground up and top down of the social order, a requisite of human life that today’s media-certified “good guys” seem ready to demolish. It could be said, in the same “biblical” language cited above, that a church vacated by God was occupied by the devil who, according to many a theologian, even made it to the Vatican.

What is relevant in any language is that retreat from the Church’s teachings on reforming the self is “good news” only for Christians-in-Name-Only and others who have been ignoring God, consciously or not. The folk who have always taken sacred scripture seriously -- how else is holy scripture to be taken? -- continue to rebel against the inevitable decay of civil order and the emergence of evil in our midst.

It has become clear to everyone everywhere that the United States has lost the moral high ground because we have lost our morality. We are no longer great because we are no longer good.  We must boot out, to the best of our abilities, the evil in each one of us, in order to chase the Devil out of our churches, then out of our government. We are called to this work. As DeBlasi notes, it is a constant struggle, because we have all sinned and fallen short of the mark.

Which brings me to the second post today, by J. B. Shurk entitled Finding Meaning and Courage in Holy Week. Jesus by His death and resurrection, shows us the Way to fight the evil living amongst us, ready to take advantage of our human weaknesses to strike. Shurk starts off:

Along with Christians around the world this time of year, I find myself thinking about Christ's crucifixion. Struggling to understand His sacrifice for our sins is an important part of comprehending our human relationship with the Almighty.

We are made in God's image, so within each of us is something divine. That which is divine is infinitely complex and eternal, yet we are bound by relatively simple, finite lives. I think this struggle between what is temporary and what is immortal causes deep conflict within us all, and we feel that conflict daily as we struggle with good and evil, virtue and sin.

Shurk believes that the Left has given up on Christ and instead embraced the evil. Where Christ ordered Satan to get behind him, the Left has instead been led by Satan. But Shurk goes further to diagnose the fault in the conservative position as well. We conservatives find much government action to be over reach, instead we argue for individual action. But this too, in God's eyes is over reach. We must find the right balance, and this can only be done by looking critically into the life of Christ:

The reason so many of the political left today embrace "ends justify the means" tactics such as disinformation and censorship is, I believe, because they have given up on Christ, virtue, and truth. A society that is encouraged to think critically, value wisdom and virtue, and embrace redemption has nothing to fear from the bombardment of false narratives that surround us daily. A society that cannot distinguish lies from truth and will not elevate virtue over sin, however, produces mindless beasts posing as men.

There's a fuzzy line between making everything about yourself and failing to realize that your faults or problems are indistinguishable from the ones you see in others. It's tough to operate as an individual without becoming so selfish that you ignore perspective. Ego and empathy can be two sides of the same coin. And for a lot of today's "woke warriors," the ones not intentionally embracing evil, I think they've become so lost in the meaninglessness of their lives that their capacity for empathy has been eaten away entirely by ego.

The final lesson for Christians is of course, courage. For we are not put on earth for our own amusement, but rather we are on a mission. We are to die to our old selves so that we can live for Christ. That means taking the focus off our selves, and putting it onto others.

Please read both articles, and if I have had any influence, read Paul's Letter to the Romans. Luther considered this to be the best summary of Christian belief.  Meanwhile, I am off to Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.