Naming the Balrog

Yesterday I was listening to the Glenn Beck program while driving out to Elizabeth City, NC. Glenn and company reviewed a litany of the troubles and chaos currently plaguing the United States. He almost called out the name of he who is causing the chaos. I yelled at the for radio Glenn, name him, but he did not. Later, I was speaking with a member of the team, a woman and a Baptist (bless her heart) who thinks Glenn doesn't know. She could name him, of course. So could I. And I think Glenn knows too, for any recovering alcoholic has come up against him, if not seen him face to face. It is only by surrendering to God's mercy each day that an alcoholic can hope to remain sober.

It was with this backdrop that I read Deana Chadwell's piece at the American Thinker yesterday evening entitled Beating the Balrog. The Balrog for those who are not familiar with the "Lord of the Rings" by C. S. Lewis, is the beast fought by Gandolf in the mines of Moria. In the novel, Gandolf died fighting the Balrog, just so you know.

Time was when we could look at our political differences and see those differences as just a wrinkle in the cloth of society. We could look at our religious variances as mere quirks -- most people recognized God in one way or another. No more. Something really dreadful is happening. We are not experiencing ordinary variations in opinion; we’re experiencing war in every area of our society. We can no longer “agree to disagree” and expect our society to be there when we wake up in the morning. We’ve slid into a Tolkeinesque nightmare deep in the mines of Moria. There is a way out, but we’re going to have to fight the Balrog to get there.

One of the first principles of warfare is “know your enemy.” Who (not what) is this Balrog? The Democrat party? -- key Democrats, those with the loudest, most influential voices, have largely succumbed to the temptations of power and unrestrained sex, to the easiness of dreaming up their own set of values -- ones they can easily excel at -- tolerance, inclusiveness, and diversity. The leadership of that party completely believe that the end justifies the means – any means at all, including the killing of babies, the undoing of the family, the wrecking of businesses, the destruction of an economy, the demolition of a child’s education, to say nothing of cheating to win elections.

I recall the introduction C.S. Lewis wrote for his novel The Screwtape Letters. In that essay he discusses the concept of Satan, the Father of Lies. He addresses a misconception that has plagued humanity from the get-go -- that Satan is God’s arch-nemesis, God’s equal antagonist, but Lewis points out something about the archangel-gone-bad -- that Satan, for all his ill-gotten power, for all his beauty (Yes, Satan is beautiful.), for all his brilliance, is still just a creature. God, on the other hand, created all the heavens and the earth, as well as all the angels. No other entity is the equal of the three members of the Trinity. We must remember that so as not to become despondent.

 And there it is.  Deana Chadwell has named the actual enemy, Satan, or Lucifer or the other names by which he is known including Baal and Moloch. Even more, though, and Christians should know this, God has already won. The Devil can only do what God allows, and he allows it, if he does, to improve us, to make us so that we can be with Him. We need to surrender to God's mercy every day. Too often, we think that because we are relatively wealthy, we can take care of ourselves. But we only live because of God's good graces.

My point is this: God is perfection, Satan is a mere creature who has run amuck. His arrogance has blinded him to the impossibility of his rebellion succeeding, and we’re caught right in the middle of his final, last-ditch offensive.

What we are seeing is evil so strong that it’s almost bubbling up out of the ground. The pivotal evidence is the way we are treating children. The Left likes to talk about “systemic racism,” but I argue that what we’re truly seeing is systemic, Satanic, child abuse. If we don’t rip children limb-from-limb from the womb (and sell their body parts), we raise many of them in households where they are ill-fed, ignored by parents too busy to really pay attention, and too secular to take them to church. We send them off to government schools that have failed horridly (A third of our children cannot read at grade level, then we lock them out of their schools, where they at least had friends. Then we have stuck them with an overload of questionable vaccines, and now we have allowed sexualization at an alarming pace culminating in the schools getting involved in grooming young children for sex with adults and, even worse, sexual mutilation without parental consent. This is not just human evil. We’ve gone back to the time of Baal and Moloch, idols that demanded human -- i.e. child -- sacrifice.

Interestingly, God can operate in the physical world, indeed he has. When Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God walked through the garden looking for Adam. He came to Abraham to announce Abraham would have a son in his old age. The second person of the Holy Trinity came and lived among us, suffered with us, was tempted as we are and died like we do. You could say this is God's world, and we only live in it.  By contrast, Satan can only operate in this world by influencing people to do his will.

Yes, I think we’re face-to-face, as was Gandalf, with the terrifying Balrog. He’s taken the appearance of power-hungry government officials, of liberal schoolteachers, of money-hungry doctors and pharmaceutical companies. He looks like militant Islamic fanatics, like pimps and child rapists. He looks like the drug-infested, the slovenly, the lazy. It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be one particular group organizing all this Satanic nastiness -- though it is also fascinating that the Democrat agenda lines up well with the demonic. How many pro-life Satanists are there? How many against euthanasia? How many anti-gay, anti-molesters are also in the Satanist camp? I would venture there are none. There are communists (a Satanic system if there ever was one), anarchists, racists, college professors, media people, medical folk, corporate giants, and those indulging a variety of perversions -- and they’ve all sold their souls simultaneously creating a perfect storm.

A society can only stand so much chaos, so much evil. We can’t really help the rest of the world, but we should have the ability as American citizens to correct our itinerary and do away with this many-headed monster that is about to eat us alive. Because this is such a multifaceted problem it has to have many concurrent solutions. We -- millions of us -- have to start locally and small. We can invite friends over to see documentaries like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules. We can show up for school board meetings -- over and over and over again, as necessary. We can file lawsuits, write letters to the editor, go to church -- one that will actually teach something true. We can join or form conservative groups, start a school or homeschool our children. We can learn our history, start a prayer group, talk to people and stand up for what we know is right. We will have to expect to offend some people, but it’s either that or we, our children, our grandchildren will live (if they live) in abject misery. Look at the misery that is already overwhelming our kids -- a recent study of teenage girls found that 30% had contemplated suicide.

As Ms. Chadwell points out, we can win this if we are on God's side. In this season of Lent, it is good to remember that God has already won on Easter Sunday 2000 years ago. We just have to keep fighting the good fight until the last day.