“And he said, Hearken ye all Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and thou, King Jehoshaphat: Thus saith the Lord unto you, Fear you not, neither be afraid for this great multitude: FOR THE BATTLE IS NOT YOURS, BUT GOD’S” (2nd Chronicles 20:15-17; 1599 Geneva Bible).
ARE WE STILL WILLING TO “OBEY GOD” BY RESISTING TYRANNY?
For those of you who are unaware, the 1599 Geneva Bible was the Bible used by our PILGRIM Forefathers and Mothers (they didn’t trust the recently published 1611 King James Version because they disliked King James--i.e. they disapproved of his “suspected” homosexual proclivities, and his allegiance to The Church of England, with its “anti-Calvinist” inclinations—the Geneva Bible is full of helpful “margin notes”, and is strongly “Calvinist” in its teachings, both of which King James disapproved). It was read and preached from during the dangerous and tedious 66-day Atlantic voyage from England to the New World during the harsh fall of 1620. It’s the “original” Bible I prefer to use.
Many of us know the history of the great struggles that these Pilgrim men and women endured over the next few years in order to “obey God by resisting tyranny”. They really did “put their money (and their lives) where their mouths were”. They had tried for decades to reform, or purify, the existing Church of England, to which all of them, by English law, were FORCED to belong. Eventually this band of a few hundred souls—basically ONE single church congregation---concluded that reforming the Church of England was impossible and, after a sojourn of twelve years in Holland (to escape the persecution perpetrated upon them by King James’ political supporters in England and by the ecclesiastical “bullies” of the established Church of England), a number of them volunteered to be the first of Pastor John Robinson’s congregation (in Leiden, Holland) to venture to The New World and, in obedience to what they perceived to be God’s will, begin a colony faithful to His Word. And so, after overcoming many challenges, including the arrests by the English authorities of all of their women and children who were planning on sailing on the Mayflower (and who were eventually released), they did. We American Christians and patriots would do well, in this foreboding-appearing year of 2024, to follow their examples and determine that we are NOT going to capitulate to the authoritative repression that “our” government is intent on forcing upon all of us.
FOLLOWING GOD’S CALL CAME AT A HIGH COST
Fast forward to today’s world. 403 years have elapsed since Plymouth Colony’s beginning in November of 1620. The tiny colony of “New Plimouth” (original spelling) has grown into a huge nation of over 330 million people (at least 20 to 30 million of whom (probably more) are here ILLEGALLY). I fear, though, that our Pilgrim Forefathers would have great difficulty in recognizing among today’s American people the basic principles that motivated them, principles that they lived (and died) to defend. So why, we might ask, did these Pilgrims—not all of who were Christians , and all of who were “imperfect” people--- do what they did?
Did they make these sacrifices simply for the purpose of self-gratification or vanity or trying to make themselves appear “holier” than their countrymen? I don’t think that’s what motivated them. I believe that they were sincerely trying to honor their Savior, Jesus, and obey His Word as they struggled for 12 years to live for Him in a relatively free but religiously diverse and overly tolerant nation (Holland) that increasingly was making it culturally and Scripturally difficult to do what they believed God required them to do—a nation that they realized was corrupting many of their young people. Why did God call these Pilgrims (or at least the Christians among them) to follow Him at such a cost, considering that about half of them died of sickness and starvation before the colony’s first year had elapsed? As Paul reminds us in the Word, and as they assured their contemporaries, they were not especially wise—they surely were not “influential” in their world—and to those around them in their homeland they were nothing special and were often perceived as “Separatist troublemakers”.
But as has so often happened in history, where faithful men and women have chosen to BATTLE on God’s side, their Heavenly Father chose the “foolish things”—the weak people of that age and time—to shame those who thought they were too “wise” to believe in Him. God chose both faithful and unfaithful people—believers and unbelievers-- to serve His purposes and shame the strong and arrogant who had tyrannized them for decades in their English homeland. God chose the lowly and despised people of their world to change that world. In this, these Pilgrims eventually “saw the defeat of (their) adversaries, and (their) ears heard the rout of (their) wicked foes” (Psalm 92:11).
Obviously these Pilgrims came to this New World for religious and even political freedom, concepts which were somewhat foreign to the people of that day, and indeed were concepts that these Pilgrims themselves found difficult to extend without reservation to later arriving colonists with different religious doctrines who came among them (as I said earlier, they were ‘imperfect’ people----the same as those of us who live today). And although the 1620 Pilgrims of Plymouth came out of the same “Puritan” religious persuasions as did the “Puritans” who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony around Boston in 1630, they were not as “puritanical”, as we use that term today, and were somewhat more accepting of newcomers whose religious beliefs were not totally in conformity with theirs.
DO WE REALLY VALUE “FREEDOM”?
In recent times, some have questioned whether the price that they paid for their freedom was too high—i.e. was the price higher than the ultimate value that they, and eventually we, through them, received? Good question. Is the “price” of freedom higher than the value received? Is the battle that we, as Christians or people of faith, choose to fight on God’s side too overwhelming for us, or are we to rely on God’s Word that assures us that “…if God be for us, who can be against us”? (Romans 8:31). What price can be placed on the freedom to worship God in our own way (or not to do so), without the threat of being destroyed by the State? What value should we place on our ability to travel virtually anywhere we please, freely and without having to seek permission from some scurvy collectivist bureaucrat? (At least not yet!)
Of what value is our ability to speak our own minds to our neighbors and fellow citizens, face-to-face or in the press or electronic media, for most of our nation’s history, without the threat (at least until recently, thanks to Comrades Obama and Biden) of government agents of tyranny coming to our door to arrest us for disagreeing with the politically correct group think of our day? Sadly, we all know that “free speech” is not as “free” today as it once was, in the nation that once valued that right so highly that many of its citizens proudly proclaimed that they would die to protect their own, or some other person’s, right to speak his/her mind without fearing retaliation from some authoritarian bully from some government agency.
Sadly, the willing proponents of tyranny and GOV THINK have already entrenched themselves on most of the college and university campuses of our nation (which have become vast training grounds for hate, political correctness, pronoun absurdities, violence, vitriol, “woke-ism”, anti-Semitism, anti-conservatism, and anti-Americanism), and the First Amendment right of “free speech” no longer applies in the vast majority of these centers of academic non-thought, who have surrendered in slavish obeisance to that vile “woke-ness” and “correct” pronoun enforcement and rigid speech control, as well as, in many of them, the disgusting anti-Semitism and pro-Islamic extremism that we see among the contaminated mobs of young people who are being taught to hate what made America great, and to demonstrate for what is destroying our nation. I heard just recently that at least half of our “Generation Z” young people think we have too much freedom and would prefer to live in a more “authoritarian” system. What dunderheads they have become!
WARNING: If you send your children to one of these “Institutes of Induced Marxism”, which you should NOT do, don’t be surprised to discover that before they are graduated, with a probably mostly useless degree and deeply in debt—(them and/or you)-- they have turned AGAINST YOU and all of the political, religious, moral, and social values that you struggled to inculcate in them as they were growing up). To send your young people to these institutions of deceit and brainwashing is to DESTROY THEM, possibly for life! Need I remind you that if the youth of a nation are destroyed morally, spiritually, intellectually, and patriotically, that nation is as good as destroyed already?
Comrade Biden and his paid goons from the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. are now being used to INTIMIDATE and harass the American people—particularly the conservatives and “Trump Supporters” among them, to be silent and not to espouse their sincerely held beliefs. So I ask you, my fellow countrymen, as I’m sure the Pilgrims and other patriots who faced the might of religious or military or governmental tyranny throughout history, asked themselves---what value is freedom at all? As I have written previously, all of us must now and forever decide that in our minds, for freedom is a concept that exists ONLY as we will it to exist. If we lose the will we most assuredly will lose the freedom, for that is an inviolable “principle” of human existence. That choice is forever in our own hands!
Today, we are in year 4 of the widely despised and increasingly feared, anti-American and pro-Marxist Biden Administration. Our “President” and his progressive and Marxist supporters are openly admitting how much they despise the Constitutional Republic bequeathed to us by our Founding Generation, and especially how much they HATE the system of FREE ENTERPRISE that it enables, and that made it the most free and the most prosperous nation, for the largest number of its citizens, in history. Tragically, the increasing enmity of the powerful and all-too-often subversive “political class” in the U.S. against the God-inspired freedoms codified in our U.S. Constitution has been going on at least since the days of President Andrew Jackson, and became a strong anti-constitutional, pro-socialist/pro-communist force in America beginning in the late 1840’s, when America was flooded with hordes of defeated communist revolutionaries escaping from their failed “communist revolutions” in France and Germany in 1847-1848. Unfortunately many of them ultimately ended up in positions of power in “our” government and ESPECIALLY in the U.S. Army, prior to the “Uncivil War”, as Mike Scruggs refers to that sad and violent illegal incursion by one country’s armed forces into the affairs of a totally separate country’s government.
That “enmity”, much of it IMPORTED into American society by these radical outsiders, culminated in that totally evil and deliberately manufactured 1861 to 1865 “Non-Civil” war between the northern and southern portions of the U.S. (that had become by that time two separate nations with their own governments and constitutions)---a war designed to destroy, if possible, or at least severely erode the very Constitution that was written by Christian and/or God-fearing Patriots to provide the greatest degree of freedom and economic well-being that could be experienced by any people on Earth---a war that should NEVER have been permitted by people of good will and real Christian values to have occurred! The constitutional liberties of all Americans took a severe blow before, during, and especially after that “Uncivil War”, from which our constitutional republican system has NEVER totally recovered!
LARGE AND INTIMIDATING GOVERNMENT IS NOT A RECENT PHENOMENON
And that SAME ENMITY which caused that dastardly war continues to spew its collectivist venom among Americans today, aided and abetted by the same lying snakes of collectivism that fomented such hatred among the people of the North and the South so long ago! Only the “names” have changed from those days until now; the evil philosophy of Marxism and love of big and ever-bigger and more intimidating government lives on from its “rebirth” in the 1840’s until this very day when all Americans are in danger of being overwhelmed by it.
The paid whores of the “main stream media”—the servants of the “god” of this age—seemingly have blinded the minds of half of our countrymen, who seem to prefer to live in Marxist/socialist/tyrannical darkness, who now tell us that we in the U.S. have “too much freedom”! However, as difficult as it may be, those of us who walk “in the light” of knowledge and truth need to show compassion and patience to our blinded countrymen for as long as we are able to do so, for in the past some of US also walked in that same darkness! This is why our purpose MUST be to educate them, show them the truth, help guide their paths not only unto salvation and eternal life, if necessary, but into the political freedom that vast numbers of Christians and Patriots sacrificed everything to send down the corridors of time to us. That is what the patriots of The John Birch Society—<JBS.org> (and other patriot groups as well) endeavor to do.
GOD’S PEOPLE HAVE OFTEN BEEN “HARD PRESSED” BUT NEVER CRUSHED
As Psalm 112:4 reminds us: “Even in darkness light dawns for the upright, for those who are gracious and compassionate and righteous”. WE must be that “light” for those who still walk in the darkness engendered by the minions of the Evil One! WE must be those “gracious and compassionate and righteous” ones who take the hands of our unseeing fellow citizens and lead them into the Light of Liberty! Not someone else. US! You and I! ESPECIALLY if we call ourselves “People of Faith” and patriots! In this new year of 2024 that will be one of the most important things we can do, for the darkness of false belief, of Satanically induced alternative religious philosophies, of Marxist-inspired hate and repression perpetrated against all of us, will only get much worse in the days ahead if we, the American people whose very land and freedoms are being slowly stripped away from us, just sit on our butts and do nothing except complain.
Was God truly on the “side” of our Pilgrim fore parents? I know He was. They knew it also. Just like Americans who came after them, they were often hard pressed on every side, but they were not crushed. They were often perplexed and confused, but He never abandoned them to despair. For decades they were persecuted in their native land (just as WE who are “People of Faith” and “patriots” are enduring increasing persecutions), but they were never forsaken by the One who loved them and gave Himself for them. God’s Grace was always sufficient for them, as it should be for those of us who today are called by His name. For the sake of their Savior those Pilgrims “boasted” of their many weaknesses so that Jesus’ Power could rest on them. For the sake of their Savior they delighted in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, and in many difficulties. And those who proclaim their faith and their patriotism have experienced the same even in our present day! To deny that fact is to live in deliberately welcomed darkness and ignorance!
We who today battle, with the blessings of our God, for the preservation of our Judeo-Christian culture and our Constitutional Republic can do NO less! We cannot turn our gaze away from the corruption—the sin—the evil—the mendacity engendered by the present-day followers of “Ba’al”, who are now all around us! Who is on our side? GOD IS IF WE ARE REAL PEOPLE OF FAITH, BUT SATAN IS IF WE AREN’T! So I leave you with a final question: In this new year of 2024, whose side are YOU on? If you don’t know, you had better decide, and soon!
