Know your threats
There are three common ways that a tyrannical government deals with a male threat:
Harness
Pacify
Destroy
A good example in Scripture is Pharaoh. He attempts to both pacify and harness through hard labor (Exodus 1:8-14). We also can detect the strong cultural influence of the Egyptians in the idolatry in the Exodus generation; reeducation, whether direct or indirect, is an excellent way of pacifying and harnessing a people.
When Pharaoh’s efforts fail, he moves on to step 3, and tries to have the male babies killed (v. 22).
All three of these methods reoccur throughout the biblical history:
The Philistines sought to pacify Samson through Delilah (Judges 16:5).
The Babylonians reeducated the Israelite noblemen to serve the king (Daniel 1).
Herod tried to kill Christ by slaughtering the innocent (Matthew 2).
You may also notice that these steps follow a kind of progression. It is not that they always follow one after another. But harnessing men is much more useful to an evil patriarchy than merely pacifying them; and if pacification does become necessary, well, it’s a lot easier to destroy weak men with glassy eyes than strong men who see it coming.
All three of these methods are at work in the current war on men. But pay special attention, in our climate, to how evil rulers will use women against the men who threaten them:
Satan used Eve against Adam
Pharaoh tried to use the midwives against the sons of Israel
The Philistines used Delilah against Samson
The most widespread form of this tactic today?
Porn.
What should we expect for the West going into 2021?
We are not prophets, but let us give our educated guess by backing up and looking at what those who were prophets have written for our instruction. There is a relevant pattern that we find repeatedly in the history of redemption, which breaks into two forks:
Failure of commission. The obvious example is Adam, who is given the commission of rulership, is tested unto death, and fails. The result is that his commission must be passed to his sons, and he dies.
Success of commission. The obvious example is Jesus, who is given Adam’s commission, is tested unto death, and does not fail. The result is that his commission is vindicated, and he receives eternal life and rule, which he shares with all those who participate in him by covenant.
This pattern plays out repeatedly in Scripture, where God gives a people a commission, tests them, and in the test they either try to get out under their own power…or they submit to suffering and death, and are then raised up again.
By faith Abraham offered up Isaac, believing he would receive him back from the dead (and, notably, by faith Isaac submitted, being a man at the time).
By faith Daniel submitted to the lion’s den, and was delivered (not so for his enemies).
By faithlessness, Israel as a nation relied on the strength of their neighbors rather than Yahweh, and was eventually destroyed.
The basic issue is one of faith versus faithlessness.
What does this have to do with us? Well, God is a God of patterns. The West was founded on Christian ideals, accepting, as it were, the commission of Christendom—the Great Commission. But it has acted faithlessly, abandoning those ideals in favor of the strength of man. What remains of the church is now being tested by God…but what has our response been (we speak in general).
It has been to shut down worship, double down on defying God’s laws, and looking to the state for salvation—instead of openly worshiping as an act of faith, renewing our prophetic witness to our nation about what God requires, and trusting him for deliverance.
So what will the result be?
Destruction.
But the pattern doesn’t end at destruction. Adam had his commission stripped from him; he doesn’t do anything after Genesis 1…except have sons who take up his commission. Israel failed; it doesn’t do anything after AD 70…except give way to the church, who takes up its commission.
Because God is a God of grace, when his people fail, they fail as a precursor to something greater. We know the final outcome for creation is Revelation 11:15: the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our God, and of his Anointed. Christendom has failed many times, and each time it has risen out of the ashes a little better than before. God is slowly sanctifying the world, and he sanctifies it the same way he sanctifies individuals: through painful arcs of discipline (Hebrews 12:11).
So what is going to happen in the short term? If we understand God’s patterns correctly, the west is going to turn to rubble—probably within our lifetimes. It’s like sawing off a branch from a tree. The sawing takes a long time, but once you hit the critical point, the snap is really fast. That seems to be how these things go. The deterioration is imperceptible enough that everyone thinks society will keep on going—and then suddenly the end comes. Few people see it coming until it’s too late.
So in our view, faithful Christian men should be preparing. We need to build strong local communities that can weather some kind of societal collapse, and we need to assume that collapse will be absolutely calamitous, so that we really are prepared—even if the collapse is much milder. If you want peace, prepare for war.
More than this, however, we need to train up our children to be warriors. We need to set before them the mission of rebuilding by making disciples and baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything that the Lord Jesus commands. This is spiritual warfare; the promise that the assembled armies of God will indeed storm the grave and rob it through the resurrection offered by Jesus (Matthew 16:18). This starts at the local level, but it works all the way up to the entire nation. So we need to be thinking multi-generationally. The Lord will preserve his church, and he will build his church, and he will accomplish the purpose he has given to his church, so even if things are dark in our times, and in our children’s times, we should be teaching them to expect that if they train up their own children in the fear and nurture of the Lord, they can build something glorious. They can be the founders of a new Christendom, under the guidance of their fathers, who were guided by us.
A wise and righteous man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children—and even the wealth of sinners is laid up for the just (Proverbs 13:22; cf. Exodus 12:36). That’s what we need to be focusing on. Forget all this revolutionary nonsense. The reason we are where we are, with all rule collapsing, where the center cannot hold, is because all rule is founded on self-rule. For the center of a society to hold, the center within its men must hold. The problem is that we cannot rule ourselves, and so God is removing everything that flows from that. He who is faithful in little will be given charge of much. So we need to learn to rule our own spirits, to stop being like cities without walls (Proverbs 25:28), if want to build actual cities with walls that we are capable of ruling.
Stop focusing on stuff that’s far away, which you cannot change, which is at best hard to make sense of, and at worst fabricated to demoralize you. Start focusing on local things you actually can change, starting with yourself.
As a man goes, so goes his household; as a household goes, so goes the church; and as the church goes, so goes society.
A reader shares his Air Force take on “trust the plan”:
Your saying on “trust the plan” reminds me of a saying that we have as Air Force fighter pilots: “hope is not a valid tactic”. When training to fight the enemy, we debrief every flight and analyze every action we took in the course of the training engagement. Often times the line of reasoning you will hear from a young flight leader is: “I was hoping it would work out”. If they say that in the debrief, they are chastised and told never to do that again by their instructor. If their wing and a prayer worked, find a way to replicate it and make it part of your habit patterns. if it was a one off success due to the circumstances of the situation, don’t expect to replicate that action with much success again. I thought it might be a helpful anecdote when preparing any thoughts in regards to the “trust the plan” mentality, “hope is not a valid tactic” (remember, this is speaking in a strictly execution mentally, not a lack of hope in God’s Providence and Sovereignty).
We’ve noticed that progressives use a “plod, sprint, plod” strategy.
They slowly erode systems (plod), and when those systems finally fail, they seize the opportunity to grab power and install new systems (sprint).
Once they have a major victory, they back off and go back to eroding new systems (plod).
“Plod, sprint, plod” slowly boils the frog and uses a “shock and awe” tactic to stun the frog before boiling it again.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
It’s a good strategy. We should steal it, except instead of eroding systems, we should be purifying them with the fire of the gospel.
As you think about moving forward, remember that one of the most insidious ways you will be tempted into failure is not something as obvious as porn or food or video games or binge-watching trash.
It will be the temptation to be a nice guy.
Every fiber of our culture strains to conform you into a nice guy. But the Spirit of God strains to conform you into the image of the Lord Jesus.
A nice guy is harmless, emasculated, effeminate, because he seeks above all to be agreeable. Jesus is dangerous, meek, and gentle. These things are not alike. Jesus is a warrior king (dangerous) whose power is perfectly subordinated to the good of his people (meek), and whose response is always proportionate to the situation (gentle).
A nice guy fears what men, and especially women, think of him. Jesus, as a man, fears God alone.
Christian men should be dangerous, meek, and gentle, fearing God.
Christian nice guys are liars about Jesus. They lie about who he is by acting the opposite of his character while bearing his name.
The responses to our question last week about whether we should slow down these emails was surprisingly vigorous. Thank you to everyone who encouraged us to keep sending them weekly. As you can see, we are doing that.
Faithfully,
Michael & Bnonn