By Paul Gordon Collier
Where fear reigns, love dies. Where love dies, tyrants bloom. This, my friends, is where we are in America, and even the world. But why is terror the new rule of law in the land? Is it because we picked bad leaders?
Is it because of viruses or racists or sexual deviants? Whatever reason you might believe fear reigns and tyranny blooms, I am here to suggest to you perhaps the reason is this, where the Word of God is not in the hearts of the people, the false accuser prevails to entice man to want to define Good and Evil for himself.
The less we know God’s justice, found in the full text of the Word of God, not just the choice precepts, the more we invent our own justice, like “social” justice, where the white race becomes Jesus and the devil in one race, one part feigning laying down their power for the good of the inferior People of Color (the POC) while they offer up as a sacrifice the other part, the devil, for crimes their fathers may or may not have committed.
That’s just the perverse version of the gospel that has emerged in America (and other parts of the world as well, especially Canada and Britian). The white race is Abraxas, the God of Good and Evil, and the POC is still the pawn in the white race’s battle with itself, an anti-Christ gospel.
The gospel is in all of us, for He has made everything beautiful in its time, also, he has placed eternity into man’s heart yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
When we daily meditate on the Word, that gospel image that emerges within us, to be manifest in the spirit we move through as we interact with the world, the place between heaven and earth, will be closer and closer to the true gospel of the Kingdom of God.
When we don’t daily meditate on the Word, or worse, meditate on false Christs, the image that emerges within us, to be manifest in the spirit we move through as we interact with the world, will be closer and closer to anti-Christ until it eventually becomes an outright enemy of the true ecumenical church (like the social justice church has become, calling evil good and good evil).
I believe that the lack of biblical literacy is the barometer of a nation. Where the true gospel prevails, fear of death and suffering fade, for Christ has conquered death, and suffering is our opportunity to testify to the glory of God, to praise him in the storm.
That true gospel is first and foremost the living out of the good news that Christ, who walked the earth as both God and man, died on a cross, a sin offering burned outside the camp, as atonement for our sins, and three days later he rose, the tomb was empty, for Christ had conquered death.
That gospel is in every nook and cranny of the Word of God, from Genesis to Revelation. The structuring of the Word itself trains the mind to think more like God and less like man. The daily meditating on scripture is urged throughout scripture, with Psalm 119 being the capstone of that calling, an invitation to walk in the Word more completely by meditating on it daily.
Christ testified for himself (Luke 24) after he rose from the dead, when he walked with the men to Emmaus, using the Law and the Prophets and the whole of scripture to witness the Messiah’s coming, which He fulfilled. It is the whole of scripture where false prophets become poison to the ear, not honey to an ear hungry to turn God into themselves.
In Isaiah 28 we see what precept upon precept brings, a haughty people who imagine themselves wiser than God, but who fall, stumbling over their own haughtiness.
“And the word of the Lord will be to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little, that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken. “ – Isaiah 28:13
The living out of the Word, the most important part, where we fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, begins with the daily meditating on the Word, to walk through the Word regularly to take in the full structure of the gospel, which is the whole of scripture.
A biblically literate people would most likely feel compelled to go through the whole of scripture at least 3 times a year just to keep that script in their bones, but not for self-righteous reasons, not to be holy, but because one realizes how powerful it is, through the Holy Sprit, to have in your mind the wisdom of the mind of God, even in shadow, for the unfolding of the Word gives light, it gives understanding to the simple (Psalm 119:130).
From that wisdom, disciples will make disciples and fulfill the Great Commandment, to love one another as Christ loves us and as we love ourselves; and the Great Commission, to Make Disciples of All Nations and to preach the gospel to ALL of creation, including the people, the mountains, the rivers, and the living things of the land.
A biblically literate people have a whole Kingdom civilization in their head that allows them to effectively be instant fellow citizens in the shared nation wherever two or more are gathered. Whole institutions can instantly flow from the fellowship of such a people, institutions fortified with Kingdom DNA. Our governance models are in our heads, ready to be mutually shared to equip our fellowship work we do together.
With translation apps, biblically literate, God-fearing Christians who speak Han Chinese can instantly fellowship and build Kingdom structures with biblically literate, God-fearing Christians who speak Ugandan more effectively than most fellow Americans can do with one another today.
Whatever your cultural influence where you live, biblical culture will flow within you, making you a dual citizen, one to the nation you were most likely born in, an earthly citizenship with spiritual ramifications, and the second to the Christian nation you were reborn into, a spiritual citizenship with material ramifications.
As a matter off fact, I would wager the deepest fellowship connection that can be made will be between two or more biblically literate God-fearing people. If two siblings, even twins, grew up together and inherited the same earthly culture, but one of them chose to meditate on the Word in the fear and love of the Lord and the other didn’t, the biblically literate sibling would have far more in common with the biblically literate stranger from a radically different earthly culture than they would with their non-biblically literate twin.
Where the true gospel is allowed to be meditated on daily, and IS meditated on daily (consensually, not compulsively), peace will prevail and the poor, the elderly, the widows, the orphans, the prisoners, the animals, the land, will be served by righteous hands.
I don’t believe a truly biblically literate nation of any major scale has ever existed. Rather, at best, we had people who were “CliffsNotes literate” biblically, but coercively. Yet even that had powerful peace-making, flourishing effects.
I believe part of the unfolding of the gospel is the increased understanding the body gains through our disunity (with each part demonstrating righteousness and unrighteousness in the patterns their beliefs create) in how to better fellowship to make “better” disciples able and willing to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
Cross-pollination of ideas (without attempts at syncretism) are sure to make each major branch stronger, and each grow closer to the diverse expression of the true church, especially were biblical literacy in all the major branches prevails.
I believe the missing element of the whole of the Christian nation, ecumenically, across all major divisions, is the lack of thorough biblical literacy among the laity, a biblical literacy that emerges consensually, not one that is imposed by the state.
I believe a people raised in the Word, who can visualize its structure from Genesis to Revelation, will possess a spirit through which the rise of the fear of the Lord will accompany the fading of the fear of death and suffering. Within such space, tyrants will find less and less fuel to throw onto small fires (for there will always be the poor among us, and vanity will not cease to have her children).
There will come a nation, then nations, in the decades, centuries to come, that will demonstrate the fruit of a nation dominated by biblically literate, God-fearing peoples, still filled with diverse explorations of the Word of God through the major Christian divisions and subdivisions that mostly exist today.
Where the true gospel reigns, fear of death and suffering fade. Where fear of death and suffering fade, fear itself fades. Where fear fades, love prevails, the kind of love that Christ demonstrated to us when he walked the earth as both the son of Adam and the son of God.
Where the love of God reigns in the heart of the people, false accusers, from which tyrants bloom, have little audience to hear their false accusations built on some scintilla of truth.
