The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. John 10.10a

Do you look around at the world, and read it through this Dominical teaching of our Lord Jesus? I do. I have experienced this destruction both personally and at large (as I observe the world “out there”). I’m not really sure if most Christian people at a concrete level read the world this way anymore; I’m afraid most Christians, even Christians who affirm the reality of spiritual entities like the devil and his minions, have been taken over by the materialist consumerism the Western world is shaped by. And yet this is the reality according to Jesus. The ‘thief’ is not satisfied unless he can steal, kill, and destroy; this destruction is all around us. Oh yes, we have normalized, functionalized, and sanctified much of this havoc, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is indeed destructive and deleterious just the same.

When I look out at the socio-political landscape currently all I see is the devil’s imprints all over it. The world has been set on fire by lies, deception, death, and destruction, and yet somehow we bear up under it, even as Christians, as if this is just the norm of history that we must flow along with. We simply bow down to the idea that history is this great dialectic of transformation and deification wherein we are sacramentalized and given the grace of the material world insofar as that has been conquered and manipulated by the scientists and their technology. The technology is the Great Hope; the ‘magic’ being used to transport the human species from our past glory to a new glory of overcoming the material world; making the material world our sanctuary for human flourishing; and the end for all that is holy. Typically such mastery and worship of the material world, if we were to frame it ‘spiritually,’ would be understood as occultic. In biblical history it would be Baal worship, with Moloch worship on its heels. And yet this is where we are, primarily, in the world today. The Enlightenment was a demonic coup wherein the angel of light tricked humanity into thinking it had evolved beyond its primitive ancestors, thus becoming like gods, through material mastery, and techno actualization, resulting in a telos wherein the human spirit has become the Holy Spirit.

All I am trying to do with this post is to ‘re-enchant’ our spiritual imaginaries in such a way that they are clicking with the imaginary and reality that Jesus provided us with in His Self-revelation of the triune God, and the world this God sustains by the Word of His Power. It is a complex world that He alone is prime over and for. In this world, there is a serpentine slitherer who is seeking to destroy the very very good re-creation of God in Jesus Christ. Of course he has failed, but with the wake God has allowed him to have, in this ‘current evil age,’ he and his cohort are attempting to reverse what Jesus the Viktor has won in the resurrection. But this is the world the Christian inhabits. It is a world where apocalyptic struggle is being executed in such way that if the Christian does not have their biblical spectacles on they will completely misread the spiritually feral nature of the whole happening. We shouldn’t read things, politically, as if those are ethereal and abstract from what I am referring to; indeed, the Kingdom of Christ is a full-bodied and embodied/physical reality; the resurrection says so. As such, insofar as the Enemy seeks to thwart the Kingdom of Christ by mimicking it in his own dark and dilettante way, he too seeks to penetrate physical realities and engineer them in such a way that they might appear to be fully under his control. As we look out at the world, because of the swath God has given the loser devil in this in-between time, it might look like to us, and to him, like he is winning; but the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has already said: NEIN.

I am writing this as a personal pep-talk. These are the sorts of thoughts running through my mind as we continue to experience the Twilight Zone we are currently inhabiting. Jesus is King.

I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. John 10.10b