In our effort to demonstrate “charity toward all” (stated in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address), we’ve run off the road, into the ditch, through a culvert, and into a slough, mired down in quicksand. We’ve considered freedom of speech to extend to perversion and the right to mislead our youth into a morass of perversions heretofore unimagined. How? How did love become hate labeled as love?
It seems to me we haven’t taken God seriously nor have we thought it important to stand firm, sword of the Spirit in hand. Rather, we’ve figured God was in His heaven, all was right with the world, and we didn’t need to worry too much about battles in the spiritual or physical. We imagined the idols of the Old Testament as something that distracts us; something like food or money or social media rather than actual statues of Moloch, Baal, and Ishtar (Starbucks, anyone?).
But did you know there’s a Baphomet at the Arkansas State Capitol Building – or at least there was in 2018? Michigan and Iowa followed suit. Recently the statue called “Witness” using the shape of a goat horns on its head was installed at the University of Houston in Texas. A gold statue honoring abortion! Imagine that. You don’t have to imagine anything when you understand that abortions are a form of child sacrifice. But someone cleaned up the language, sold it as compassion, and we approved the despicable. Baphomet is an idol of a goat – a hermaphrodite goat. (Allow me to point you back to the aforementioned morass of perversions.) It’s used in idolatrous worship. It’s interesting to find the azazel goat, the goat carrying sin out into the desert described in Leviticus 16, embraced. Our culture encourages us to do just that: embrace the sin. Lookee there! We’re already finding an answer to the question posed in my first paragraph.
The first time I heard the term GOAT (greatest of all time) used for a football game , I wondered why they came up with that anacronym. After all, it’s not true. For us to designate a most valuable player, for instance, “greatest of all time” and then to use that term again and yet again erases its meaning. Of all time precludes multiple times. Who decided to slip goat into sports? You think that’s a crazy statement? Pay closer attention. Satan plays the long game. If he doesn’t get you to sell your soul to him like Katy Perry and Bob Dillon or more people than we want to imagine did, he’ll wait for your children or grandchildren. He’ll familiarize you with words and pictures until they seem innocuous.
And Lucifer has his grip on the entertainment industry that has been willingly used as a tool. Who doesn’t love a catchy tune with memorable lyrics? Or a riveting movie? The entertainment industry has been useful – very useful – extremely useful in slowly changing attitudes and perspectives. In the words of Curtis Bowers, we are being entertained to death. And the victims aren’t limited to those simply watching entertainment. Just ask Ryan Garcia.
The azazel goat didn’t go out into the desert this time. It is walking around all over the place. Our schools, libraries, business, entertainment, media, and yes, even some churches are embracing sin in order to show love. But it’s not love. It’s hate with a love label. Telling a child to undergo surgery to purportedly change his or her sex, won’t change their sex. It will just deform them. Telling someone who has been lonely or abused or just plain confused that they can live a contented life as a homosexual isn’t love. Have you read Revelation 22 or I Corinthians 6 lately? Truth can prick both the hearer and the person speaking it, but it’s a lot less harsh than letting them burn. Encouraging people to embrace Jesus is far more loving than leaving them to perish.
Conservatives and, perhaps more to the point, Christians face a choice: whether to reclaim civilization and base its laws on objective, absolute moral good or to kid themselves that they’re making a shrewd compromise while everything they hold dear is suppressed, shattered, and stripped away. Liberty is a fine thing, but it’s not something the ideologies antithetical to the West do or will respect. They will use it to seek and gain ascendancy and then pry it from the cold, dead fingers of the fools they conquer. Unless someone stands up against them.
The GOAT? Those who embrace that path will end up in the desert eventually. Until then, and at personal risk, we each must pick a lane. We must demonstrate real charity, real love, and not the false version that purports to be truer than the real thing.
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/activities/handout-a-abraham-lincolns-second-inaugural-address; verse of poetry Pippa Passes by Robert Browning; https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/17/a-satanic-idols-long-road-to-arkansas/ ; https://spectator.org/which-way-western-man-satanic-idols-or-christian-morality/ ; https://texasrighttolife.com/satanic-abortion-statue-coming-to-houston-february-28/ ; https://rumble.com/v4hlzmw-conversations-that-matter-communists-using-music-and-entertainment-to-subve.html ; Image: robin-gaillot-drevon-qRnh-zosks4-unsplash.jpg; https://www.britannica.com/topic/Baphomet ;https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/bible-study/why-satan-shows-up-as-a-goat-in-scripture.html; https://youtu.be/DL2-j42L_hs?si=b-e1LmaSwrM5njnG; https://youtu.be/jNn72qnp6kI?si=fs2vCs-kHxeXFd10