20 June 2022
Granted, there are different types of personalities among men. You are what you are when it comes to certain things. I'm one of those who, upon reaching a certain level of maturity, realized that I really didn't care about people's feelings. I can be sensitive to them; I do have a large measure of empathy. But at the same time, it's an awareness that registers only in terms of knowing what I have to wade through when I know I must do something folks won't like. It is by no means a brake on my choices. What I believe I must do is what I will do.
The same goes with writing. I know what I must say. I might take into consideration the resistance to something in terms of how I present it, but nothing is going to hinder me saying what God tells me to say.
For men in particular, conviction is something we simply must learn in order to be men. If you lack my personality type (flouting convention most of the time), that doesn't excuse you from the manly obligation to know what God demands of you. It simply means you will be more selective about the conventions you challenge, and how you do it. But the potent sense of being driven by moral necessity is inherent in being a man.
There are times and places when it will be necessary to run over someone else. There are times and places in which, even if you aren't very good at it, you must fight someone who violates what God demands of you. The problem is not you, nor with God, but that there will always be people who oppose for reasons they may never even understand.
This notion that violence has no place in Christian service is a lie from Hell. It's a misreading of the New Testament, a false notion inserted back into it, particularly in the act of translating ancient Hebrew thinking into English language. You can be as reluctant as you believe you must, but if you honestly believe that no man should ever be violent without some kind of government badge, then you do not belong to the Covenant.
Do you forget that Jesus cracked a whip? Notice that it was a very limited case, because His calling and mission didn't include violence. To our knowledge, it was the only context where He was violent. That's the whole point. His government wanted to argue about the authority He had to do that, but He dodged the question. He didn't need a human-appointed badge of authority. He was a man of the Word, and that was the source of His authority. This is what Paul means in Romans 13, where having addressed the issue of our moral reluctance to resistance, he starts in verse 8 "spiritualizing" what he just said in the previous verses. God has priorities.
When you encounter such a horrific injustice as the priesthood crowding out the Gentile worshipers in their greed to run a racket, you may have to act forcefully in order to fulfill the Great Commission. This business of denigrating violence in toto is a feminist/communist thing. That ideology designed to make everyone falsely subservient so that females can dominate males by government policy. It's also a part of communist theory, in that there can be no opposition to the state on any grounds. Yes, that means Jewish elite have a lot to do with it. According to Christ, there can be grounds for private violence, after all. If there are no grounds for private violence, then you cannot follow Christ.
Vigilantism is not a sin if Christ did it. We can talk about how easy it is to have vigilantism go off the cliff and become evil, but it's just a tool in itself, like guns. It is not the author of evil. Evil rises in the intersection of Satan and human nature. You'll do far more evil by making vigilantism illegal. Females, communists and Jews want government to protect them when they do evil, so that there is no resistance. The problem here is what theory we have for defining what is justice.
The Jewish leadership would not have complained if Jesus had whipped a few Gentiles He caught stealing from the stalls in the Temple Bazaar. The system was corrupted against the Word of God. So is any form of government and social structure that isn't eastern feudal and tribal. There's nothing wrong with typically going along with the flow, as long as you don't drown yourself in it when your convictions start trying to warn you about something. You need to discern where you have to draw the lines so as not to get sucked into the whirlpool.
You must be able to see that there are contexts in which the feelings of people around you are their own problems, not yours. Otherwise, you can't consider yourself a man.
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