smoke & mirrors (the nashville statement)
From the beginning of man, Satan has done well to twist the words of God, to mask a greater truth. The American experiment, however distorted in practice, was set with an ideal in mind. It was also founded with blood money.
The raging culture wars have always sought to point out something that was the demise of this country: alcohol, feminism, drugs, promiscuity, same-sex marriage. But this has been smoke and mirrors by the enemy to distract us from our original sin of racism. The refusal to acknowledge this is listening to the whispering lies of Satan. It is Adam pointing to Eve, reducing his own complicity in sin by blaming another; it is trying to remove the speck out of our neighbor’s eye with a log in our own.
America is in need of nothing less than an exorcism from a 400-year old demon of white supremacy, and the principalities and powers that have lurked in the darkness are being repeatedly exposed to the light. Howling, irrational, self-destructive, they act out as the demons did in the man possessed by a legion, just before they were cast out, and the land itself quakes beneath this cosmic conflict. We have stirred up ancient principalities that seek to divide, and to devour. Fear of anyone/anything that we deem “other” is not a peripheral feature around the Trump phenomenon, but is rather it’s central, galvanizing energy—the very character of this demonic force is blame and accusation. The very reason that old racially charged markers of “history and heritage” are suddenly in the limelight—that signs of our oldest conflicts are smack dab in the middle of a contemporary conflict—is precisely because we are in the midst of a decisively spiritual battle.
- Jonathan Martin, Our Resistance, is Repentance (on the Nashville Statement, and Most Everything Else)
The voices that were complicit in this statement have pronounced heretical Trinitarian belief – subjugating the Son and castrating the Spirit.
Those we can’t trust for orthodoxy on the Trinity can’t be trusted when it comes to morality.
Fight on. Father, have mercy on us. Jesus, come. Holy Spirit, guide us.