Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast.  They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast.  They will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.”

• Revelation 17:12-14

I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge.  And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God.  They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands.  They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.  (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.)  This is the first resurrection.  Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection.  The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

• Revelation 20:4-6

“At the moment then of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ – to their irrational impulses.  Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners, and, through them, all humanity.  Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, at the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.  Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion.  All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals.  We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.  What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever.  If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao the mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness.  Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.
“…  From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light.  We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them. …
“The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man.  Not that the word Man is necessarily a pure abstraction.  In the Tao itself, as long as we remain in it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever beauties and dignities of application.  But the moment we step outside and disregard the Tao as a mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared.”

• C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

To fit this with yesterday’s post, Where This All Started, I could have used the title “… and Where This Ends.”

But I do not possess a great oracle to say this is the end.  Only God the Father knows the time.

I intended to write so much more in yesterday’s post, but I was led in the direction taken.

Here are a few thoughts that I did not include.

Why has LGBTQ+ been celebrated?  It is a personal afront to Biblical teaching that calls it sin.  The attack is against sin itself, a test as to whether we will stand firm with God or become part of the increasing wave of wokeness.

Why is the nuclear family under attack?  If we destroy the concept of earthly fathers and mothers, we blur the definition of our Heavenly Father or, in time, even characterize our Heavenly Father as a horrible beast.  Their goal is not just to eliminate the fifth Commandment.  Their goal is to eliminate the first five Commandments.

Why is evolution taught in schools and why do people think about pet parenting instead of pet ownership? Oddly, they have the same root. If we are not created in God’s image, just a more evolved species, then we are not specially made by God in His image. God did not set us apart in His Creation and say “very good: while everything else was simply “good.” Indeed, we have no soul. We do not live forever. All these things stem from evolution, meaning we just evolved rather than being created in God’s image. And with that, we are no different than the other animals, so why not be a parent of a dog or a goldfish? It is demeaning to fatherhood and motherhood, but it is also demeaning to our soul that will live beyond death. Do not buy into this at all, and call your dog a dog, not your child. Treat it well, but do not get crazy with it.

Why is segregation becoming a popular notion and Critical Race Theory being taught?  To increase our awareness that there are people of various colors (as if we could not see that other people do not look like us) and we must treat them differently rather than to unite as members of one race, the human race. It brings up old wounds, not to let them heal, but to make them fester.

And what of these old wounds? Should they not be forgiven and forgotten, generations ago? The Cancel Culture is trying to totally destroy the notion of forgiveness – not just so that we can get along with our neighbors, but to destroy the notion that a God could be so loving as to send His Son to the world so that if we believed in Him, we would be FORGIVEN. Maybe one of the most direct attacks on Christianity and one of the most dangerous when God says that if we do not forgive, He will not forgive us. Yes, God even wants us to forgive the attacks against us, but to remain firm in our beliefs.

Why is abortion all about one specific choice?  It is an attack on two of the remaining Commandments (considering the first half “destroyed” by destroying the roles of mothers and fathers… The Commandments? Not to kill and not to commit adultery.  Many denominations have no problem when there is a medical emergency and both the unborn child and the mother will die unless the abortion takes place.  But as for unwanted pregnancies, those can be with or without consent.  There is less agreement about rape.  In a way, I was not wanted by my mother, and abortion was not available at the time – plus the moral and social stigma.  My father wanted more children, and beyond that explanation, it gets complicated.  But this issue is a real problem for me.  If a choice had been available and socially acceptable, would I be here writing this?

There is the problem with abstinence that seems to be an off limits topic.  The Commandment of not committing adultery has flown the coop.  So, let’s have another Commandment about not killing go with it to cover up for the unwanted side effects of the other sin.

The agenda of the Woke generation is not out of thin air.  To borrow a modern military term, it is a surgical, planned, tactical maneuver.  It is an attack on the Judeo-Christian values.  The Counter Culture played with the idea in the 60s, possibly too stoned to carry it through, but they are part of the grandparents of today.  The Woke Culture comes heavily armed and ready for battle.  And its source is just like yesterday’s origin of the modern movement within the world’s governments, Satan.

I had read many quotes from The Abolition of Man, but I had never read the book, nor had I ever learned what the book was about. Until now.

The book is a single lecture by C. S. Lewis.  The subtitle, in the seventeenth printing (the copy I purchased) is “How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality.”  But he starts off by attacking a textbook that he calls The Green Book by Gaius and Titius.  The real book, an English textbook published in 1939 and used with the upper form of British students of that time, was written by two people, neither named Gaius nor Titius.  Lewis’ rancor was in that they taught feelings and objective descriptions interchangeably.  Was the motive of the authors to destroy the concept of feelings and thoughts about a subject or was their motive to destroy the concept of objective truth?  Or maybe I think like a philosopher too much, as C. S. Lewis does in his lecture.

Now, decades after The Green Book was originally published, both concepts (our thoughts and feeling and the existence of objective truth) are under direct attack, not just an indirect attack by sloppy (or possibly devilishly shrewd) authors.  Satan uses accidental efforts on Man’s part as easily as those meant for evil intent.

With our Woke agenda, we have dismantled the Ten Commandments.  We have simply written off the entire Bible as out of date and full of errors (although it is not out of date and no “contradiction” in the Bible can stand up to intelligent scrutiny).  We have done as Lewis said in the lecture, we have stepped outside the Tao, and we run the risk of no rewards of the natural order of things, such as beauty and dignity.

And as for the Tao, Lewis defines it in the lecture as being the natural order of things.  While Taoism is similar, Lewis is not converting to Taoism.  He is simply using the word to avoid any connection in the lecture to Christianity.  He even mentions that he is a deist, specifically a Christian, but this lecture was written to be neutral.

That neutrality statement was tongue in cheek in that there are many parallels with End Times prophecies.  And for the person who has his interest aroused, a third of the book is scripture and other quotes to back up what Lewis says in the lecture.  Yet, his logical argument throughout the lecture does not use Christian terms nor does the lecture attempt to compare anything to Christian values. He makes an excellent point about our vain attempts at creating our own morality using logical argument alone. He leaves it to the audience, or the reader of the book, to dig deeper and find the only true answer in Christ Jesus.

Lewis provides a cogent argument that when we “conquer” Nature, we do so just to “conquer” it, but in the end, Nature will have conquered us, lured us into her trap.  Satan uses every trick, and he invented dirty tricks lower than anything that you or I might hesitate in using.

And how is it that no one seems to wish a compromise, not even a polite discussion?  No!!  They will not even listen, shouting down the opposition.  Eric Metaxas was interviewed by Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer before the COVID lockdown, when things were more sane than they are now.  Metaxas suggested that social media, that thing that many thought brought people together, is tearing everyone apart.

Metaxas first mentioned his experience with Twitter and Facebook.  He said that it was horrible how people would comment on something he wrote. Their comments would portray extreme hatred, and it was obvious that they never read what he had posted.  It was like they needed to kick a dog, and they went online and kicked a few metaphorical dogs.  In the old days, according to Metaxas, when you felt like that, you had to go find a dog and kick it.  (Please, I am not suggesting doing that, but my son and I both gently nudged their overactive puppy with our feet while my wife and I visited.  No harm to the dog and maybe the dog learned something. … Nope, doubt it, one dumb puppy.  She regressed while we were there and for a week or two after on things she was starting to learn.  Maybe firstly having her schedule disrupted and then missing those old people that she had fun irritating.)

Then Metaxas built upon the kicking of dogs.  He said that when someone was abused by their father, as an example, they would go online and find other people who were similarly abused.  As they cranked up each other’s anger toward fatherhood, they then meet a Christian that talks about his Heavenly Father loving them, and these father haters go into attack mode.  They cannot conceive of a loving father when all their online friends (and do they have any real ones?) are people who had bad fathers.  To them, fathers are evil.  Thus, the gulf between one idea and another gets wider rather than social media drawing people together.  And that applies to every issue.

When this introduction to new ideas in the world happened in the Middle East through social media and the political unrest led to dictators being overthrown, the world was loving it.  But when the unrest is in your town or on your block, not so much.  Besides, most of the changes in regimes have led to few freedoms, just new dictators.

But the same conclusion can be drawn from yesterday.  Satan lost when Jesus died on the cross and then arose from the dead.  This is Satan’s End Game.  With Jesus Christ, there is victory.  Satan can only offer lies, wishful thinking, and eternal torment.

Are we abolishing mankind?  Hmmmm, maybe we are, but… Whatever it is, we are getting there on our own steam, but God has promised to be faithful to His own, those who love Him and wish to be more like Jesus, believing and trusting in Him.  We have a guarantee; we will be with Jesus forever.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.