I have had a couple of windows open the last couple of days in order to post about them. one political and one theological. here we go.
first the political:
I believe it is crucial to understand that it doesn’t matter if the people engineering a collectivist state have sinister motives or not. In fact, the belief that their intentions make a difference is incredibly dangerous. It’s related to the catechism of the faculty-lounge Marxist, which holds that communism and fascism only failed because bad people were in charge of them.
…It doesn’t matter if this is his sincere belief, spoken straight from the heart. His health-care plan was still an awful idea that united the country in opposition against the increasingly thuggish and arrogant methods he used to advance it. Those methods are integral to the collectivist enterprise. It will always become thuggish and arrogant, because when all virtue resides in the State, those who oppose the growth of the State become villains by definition. Consider the President’s assessment of his Republican opponents:
My hope was a year ago today when I was being sworn in that reversing that process was going to be easier partly because we were entering into a crisis situation and I thought that the urgency of the moment would allow us to join together and make common cause. That hasn’t happened. Some of it, frankly, is I think a strategic decision that was made on the side of the opposition that… I think that some of it had to do with a sense that the best political strategy was to simply say no.
Here, in a nutshell, is the heads-we-win, tails-you-lose mentality that keeps the State plodding blindly forward, crushing a formerly vibrant economy beneath it. If you don’t answer Obama’s trillion-dollar health-care plan with your own trillion-dollar program, you’re an obstructionist – not an opponent to be debated, but an obstacle to be swept aside.
emphasis added.
next the theological:
We know that, as believers, we are chosen from before the foundation of the world. We also know that God loves the whole world and desires all men to be saved. We know that whosoever will may come and that if we don’t share Christ with people then there is no other way they can be saved. How all that fits together might really stretch our minds, but in trying to resolve the tension we must not neglect the things that have been clearly revealed (Deut 29:29).
In other words… It is clearly our responsibility to share the message of Christ and our failure has eternal consequences for people (Acts 20:28). Yet, God also wants me to know, and be blessed by the fact, that I have been loved from all eternity and that was not conditioned on any merit or action of my own.
How both truths fit together may be one of the “secret” things (Deut 29:29) that belongs to God. We can ponder and write books about it, but the “paradox” should never keep us from obeying what has been revealed. Our responsibility to choose Christ and to share Christ; our responsibility to is rejoice in the security that comes from knowing we are foreloved from all eternity. Failure to do either because we can’t resolve the tension would be sin.
emphasis added.
go read the rest of both of these. There is some good stuff out there on the interwebs.