Tag: church

Playing Chess With the Beast

~ Jim ~ Leave a comment

Where Trust Belongs

Christians are called to place their trust — their faith — in God and in the finished work of Jesus, and nowhere else. This is not merely a private spiritual preference. It is a claim with public consequences, because trust is exactly the thing that worldly powers most want from us. The book of Revelation gives sustained attention to this problem. It depicts misplaced trust in several forms and warns the church against being drawn into any of them.

How This Essay Reads Revelation

A word about method, since it shapes everything that follows. This essay reads Revelation primarily through an idealist lens: the book portrays recurring, trans-historical patterns of empire and faithful resistance rather than a single coded timetable of end-times events. On the passages in view here, that lens does not so much contradict the other major approaches as relocate their insight. Where a preterist reader sees first-century Rome and a futurist reader sees a coming world order, the idealist sees the same spiritual dynamic surfacing wherever empire demands ultimate allegiance — in the first century, in whatever is still to come, and in the present. The claim is not that this administration is the fulfillment of Revelation. It is that Revelation describes a pattern, and the pattern is legible now.

Read this way, Revelation is a portrait of an ongoing conflict. On one side stands worldly empire: the accumulated structures of power, wealth, violence, and exploitation. On the other stands the way of the Lamb — the kingdom of God, embodied in His true church, present and at work in the world now. The book is a way of seeing the present clearly.

Counterfeit Devotion

In chapters 12 and 13, three figures appear in sequence: the dragon, the beast from the sea, and the beast from the land. Together they function as a counterfeit of divine authority — a parody meant to be mistaken for the real thing, receiving and redirecting the devotion that belongs to God alone. Interpreters have drawn the parallels in various ways, and the exact one-to-one mapping is less important than the overall movement: an evil power, working through an evil agent, sustained by a third figure whose entire job is to manufacture belief.

That third figure is the one to watch. Later in Revelation the second beast is given a name — the false prophet — and the name states its function. Where the Spirit of God empowers witnesses to tell the truth about God, the false prophet produces and circulates a lie about the beast, and it does so persuasively, with signs impressive enough to convince. What it asks for on the beast’s behalf is worship, and worship is a broad category. It includes adoration, but also trust, allegiance, the placing of one’s hope, the extension of unlimited good faith, and finally the surrender of one’s own judgment.

Ancient Cult, Modern Forms

In the first century this dynamic took the concrete shape of the imperial cult — incense offered, temples built, oaths sworn. But trust and devotion take different shapes in different cultures, and the absence of literal altars does not mean the absence of the thing they served. Today the same function is performed by state and party propaganda, by media ecosystems engineered to manufacture loyalty, by the machinery of celebrity, and by religious voices willing to lend divine sanction to political power. The ritual changes; the mechanism is constant. Something in every culture works to persuade people that a particular power deserves their confidence without condition.

Why This Argument Applies Now

A general warning is easy to nod along to and easy to ignore. So it is worth being explicit about why the warning has particular force at this moment, and — just as important — about what would make it not apply. Two conditions stand in the background of everything that follows.

The first is the decline of Christianity in America. The causes and the character of that decline are debated; the reality of it is not. A faith losing its cultural footing is a faith under temptation to secure its position by other means, and one of the oldest of those means is to attach itself to political power.

The second is the exceptional nature of the current administration. This is not the ordinary claim that a president one dislikes is bad. It is a claim about kind rather than degree. By a wide range of measures, this administration is stressing the constitutional and legal system far beyond the normal variation we see between presidents. Two features illustrate the point. First, deception has become a routine instrument of governance on a scale that has prompted dedicated efforts to track it — a different thing from the ordinary and expected dishonesty of politicians. Second, since the autumn of 2025 the administration has carried out scores of lethal military strikes on vessels it labels narco-trafficking boats, killing well over a hundred people without arrest, charge, or trial. The administration defends these strikes as lawful; a substantial majority of international-law scholars and human-rights organizations describe them as extrajudicial killings that violate both domestic and international law. Reasonable people can weigh these facts differently, but very few who are informed about the present would call this administration simply business as usual. Notably, the factual claim here is one that many of the administration’s own supporters would grant: that these are extraordinary times is not really in dispute among those paying attention, even where the significance of them is. The disagreement that matters is not about whether the moment is unusual but about what the church should conclude from it.

Here is the point of naming these conditions. Were either absent — were the church not visibly compromised, or were this an administration within the normal range of variation between presidents — the argument of this essay would not hold for this moment. It is the conjunction of the two that invites the analysis, and it is the conjunction that could, in principle, dissolve it. That is what keeps this from being a machine that condemns whatever it is pointed at.

Where the Line Falls

The warning in Revelation is not against trust as such. Some measure of trust in leaders is not only reasonable but unavoidable; a society in which no one could be relied upon for anything would not function. The warning is against a specific mutation of trust, and two markers indicate when that mutation has occurred.

The first is trust that persists through evidence that should have damaged it. When something happens that ought to break confidence, or at least seriously call it into question, and confidence is undisturbed, the relationship has changed character. It is no longer a judgment about a person; it has become a commitment held independently of the person’s conduct.

The second is allegiance declared in advance. When people announce that their support is fixed regardless of what the future holds, they have removed the possibility of assessment. Whatever that is, it is no longer ordinary political trust.

An Example

A version of this is visible in American politics today. When people say that a particular leader “is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers,” the claim is usually this: actions that appear irrational, incompetent, reckless, or plainly wrong only appear that way because a deeper strategy is at work that observers cannot see. The leader is, in all things, working for the country’s good, and can be relied upon to produce a good outcome even when the present is unintelligible.

I do not want to overstate what this phrase, by itself, proves. Often it is hyperbole, or tribal signaling, or ordinary motivated reasoning — the sort of thing people say about a politician they like, without meaning very much by it. It is not, on its own, the mark of the beast. But taken seriously and held consistently, it has a particular and troubling structure: it converts every possible piece of evidence into confirmation. Successes prove the strategy; failures prove the strategy was subtler than we realized. Nothing is allowed to count against it. A posture with no exit is precisely the posture that cannot be tested — and that is what makes it dangerous, whoever it happens to be directed toward.

Testing the Spirits

Scripture does not treat this kind of confidence as a virtue. The instruction is to test everything and hold fast to what is good, and to test the spirits, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. Discernment is presented as ongoing work, not a settled disposition one can adopt once and be done with. Declining to be skeptical in the face of what looks wrong is not loyalty and not charity; it is the setting-down of a real duty. In a democracy the setting-down is more serious, not less, because citizens bear genuine responsibility for what is done in their name. To keep extending confidence past the point where the evidence has withdrawn it is to place in a human power the kind of trust that is meant for God.

Conclusion: Come Out of Her

Revelation was not written to help its readers identify villains at a safe distance. Its warning about the false prophet lands first on the people hearing it — on what we are willing to excuse, what we defend past the point of honesty, and where we have quietly transferred to a human power a confidence that belongs to God alone.

Later in the book, a voice from heaven issues a command that names the task directly: “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins.” Babylon, in this reading, is not a city on a map but the whole worldly system of power and wealth that sets itself up as an object of trust — and the sobering thing about the command is its audience. It is addressed to God’s people, which assumes that God’s people can be inside Babylon without noticing. The letter to a compromised church is not “resist the empire out there.” It is “come out — because you are further in than you think.” Scripture returns to this danger again and again: the people of God are perpetually tempted to become enmeshed in the systems they were called to be distinct from.

That is what this essay is finally about. None of it calls for withdrawal from public life, and none of it calls for cynicism. Christians can and should vote, argue, organize, and serve. What it calls for is that our trust stay conditional, revisable, and honest — the kind of trust that remains capable of being disappointed. A faith that cannot be disappointed by a politician is no longer political loyalty; it has become devotion, and devotion of that kind has an object it was never meant to have.

The standard has to be held evenly, and the temptation belongs to no single party. But holding it evenly is not the same as refusing to name a particular case, and the present moment — a church losing its footing, an administration straining the system past its ordinary limits — is one in which the pattern is unusually visible. Pastoral gentleness is needed for people caught in it; it always is. But gentleness is not the whole of what these times ask for. They also ask for the older and harder thing that Revelation itself models: a prophetic voice willing to say to its own people, plainly, that it is time to come out.

Hope for These Lukewarm Times

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To many people today, the church in the West — and especially in the United States — isn’t working. Whether it’s declining attendance, a society losing interest in Christianity altogether, or an American way of life that seems increasingly post-Christian, something seems wrong. The book of Revelation names this condition in its letter to the Laodiceans: lukewarm. That letter frames Jesus’ call to the church in a way that leaves room for personal response, and it’s where much of my own searching began.

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The Religion of Mammon

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One way to understand the spiritual lukewarmness of the contemporary church is to examine it against the backdrop of the society it inhabits. That society is largely the product of its history, and tracing that history reveals a pattern of changes that carry real spiritual weight — changes not merely in religion or politics, but in how we order our deepest priorities.

The tension between faith and money is, of course, nothing new. Jesus warned plainly that no one can serve two masters. Paul went further, identifying greed — the elevation of money above all else — as a form of idolatry (Colossians 3:5). And Revelation’s portrait of Babylon situates the excesses of commerce at the very heart of worldly evil, framing the conflict between money-driven systems and the love-and-witness mission of the church as one of the defining fault lines of history. This is ancient ground. What is worth examining is how modern America has navigated it — and how decisively it seems to have chosen a side.

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Trump’s Satanic Tactics

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It is said that actions speak louder than words, and Jesus made this clear when He taught that people could be known by their fruit. This is a sobering observation to make about the current administration, because many of its actions align with those that are associated with Satan in the Bible. If we are taught to look for the fruits of the Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control – but our leaders exhibit different fruits – death, fear, lying, and greed – what does that say about the spirit behind them?

Consider these examples:

Satan is described as one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy — an agent of death (John 10:10, Hebrews 2:14–15). While every administration has made decisions that resulted in loss of life, the scale and nature of recent policy changes have provoked widespread public outcry for their apparent needlessness and avoidability. Cuts to PEPFAR funding have resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Extrajudicial executions of alleged “narcoterrorists” have proceeded without due process. Blatant calls for the assassination of foreign leaders have been made publicly. High-pressure immigration policies have contributed to the deaths of innocent people. And cuts of over 90% to the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office — made just before airstrikes killed nearly 200 civilian children — reflect a stunning disregard for human life. Unprecedented, avoidable death has become a defining feature of this administration.

Scripture is clear that the spirit we have received is not one of fear (2 Timothy 1:7), and that perfect love drives fear out (1 John 4:18). Satan, by contrast, uses fear of death and loss to manipulate and control (Hebrews 2:15). The current administration has made fear a primary instrument of governance: threatening to cut funding unless DEI programs are eliminated, issuing military threats against sovereign nations to impose its agenda, pressuring media companies with the threat of blocked mergers, threatening political opponents with unwarranted prosecution, and moving to revoke broadcast licenses of outlets that report unfavorably. The consistent pattern is coercion through intimidation.

Jesus identified Satan as “the father of lies” and said that there is no truth in him (John 8:44). The current administration has become widely associated with a willingness to state things that are demonstrably false — a pattern so consistent that it has been systematically documented by multiple independent fact-checking organizations, and there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to Trump’s false statements. This is not ordinary political spin. It is a settled disposition toward falsehood.

Paul calls greed a form of idolatry (Colossians 3:5, Ephesians 5:5) — the worship of wealth in place of God. The current president has openly described himself as greedy, and his conduct has borne that out: leveraging his position for personal financial gain through the cryptocurrency market, accepting extravagant gifts from foreign entities, and pursuing displays of opulence such as the lavish redecorating of the Oval Office and the demolition of a historically significant portion of the White House to construct a ballroom.

None of these characteristics are new, of course. Deception, greed, manipulation through fear, disregard for human life — these have always been present in human governance, and in human hearts. What is different now is the scale and the openness. These things are no longer hidden or carefully managed. They are displayed, even celebrated. In that sense, the current moment may be spiritually instructive: not merely as a political crisis, but as a kind of revelation — an unveiling of forces that have long been at work beneath the surface.

In addition to the tactics themselves, many associate the current administration with God – claiming that Trump is doing God’s will in the things that he is accomplishing. However, God does not work this way. These are not the tactics of the Holy Spirit, and claiming that they are is a form of blasphemy – speaking lies about God. The church today needs to be very clear about this, and let people know that these tactics do not represent the fruit of the Holy Spirit, but of the spirit of Satan.

(Note : This is a modified version of my previous post, used for sharing in a particular context.)

Naming the Darkness: A Biblical Look at the Present Moment

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One of the recurring themes of this blog is the apparent lukewarmness of the Western church, the growing spiritual darkness of Western society, and the relationship between them. One way to explore this is to look at specific cultural and political examples through a Biblical lens — not primarily as political commentary, but as spiritual diagnosis.

Whatever one’s views of the current administration, it has done something revealing: it has brought certain patterns of darkness into the open. Behaviors that in previous eras were hidden, excused, or quietly tolerated in people’s hearts are now on full public display. And many of these behaviors are ones that Scripture specifically associates with Satan. That is worth paying attention to.

Satan is described as one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy — an agent of death (John 10:10, Hebrews 2:14–15). While every administration has made decisions that resulted in loss of life, the scale and nature of recent policy changes have provoked widespread public outcry for their apparent needlessness and avoidability. Cuts to PEPFAR funding have resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Extrajudicial executions of alleged “narcoterrorists” have proceeded without due process. Blatant calls for the assassination of foreign leaders have been made publicly. High-pressure immigration policies have contributed to the deaths of innocent people. And cuts of over 90% to the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office — made just before airstrikes killed nearly 200 civilian children — reflect a stunning disregard for human life. Unprecedented, avoidable death has become a defining feature of this administration.

Scripture is clear that the spirit we have received is not one of fear (2 Timothy 1:7), and that perfect love drives fear out (1 John 4:18). Satan, by contrast, uses fear of death and loss to manipulate and control (Hebrews 2:15). The current administration has made fear a primary instrument of governance: threatening to cut funding unless DEI programs are eliminated, issuing military threats against sovereign nations to impose its agenda, pressuring media companies with the threat of blocked mergers, and moving to revoke broadcast licenses of outlets that report unfavorably. The consistent pattern is coercion through intimidation.

Jesus identified Satan as “the father of lies” and said that there is no truth in him (John 8:44). The current administration has become widely associated with a willingness to state things that are demonstrably false — a pattern so consistent that it has been systematically documented by multiple independent fact-checking organizations, and there is a Wikipedia page devoted to Trump’s false statements. This is not ordinary political spin. It is a settled disposition toward falsehood.

Paul calls greed a form of idolatry (Colossians 3:5, Ephesians 5:5) — the worship of wealth in place of God. The current president has openly described himself as greedy, and his conduct has borne that out: leveraging his position for personal financial gain through the cryptocurrency market (reportedly to the tune of billions of dollars), accepting extravagant gifts from foreign entities, and pursuing displays of opulence such as the lavish redecorating of the Oval Office and the demolition of a historically significant portion of the White House to construct a ballroom.

It is worth noting that none of these characteristics are new. Deception, greed, the manipulation of fear, disregard for human life — these have always been present in human governance, and in human hearts. What is different now is the scale and the openness. These things are no longer hidden or carefully managed. They are displayed, even celebrated. In that sense, the current moment may be spiritually instructive: not merely as a political crisis, but as a kind of revelation — an unveiling of forces that have long been at work beneath the surface of Western culture. For the church, the appropriate response is not partisan outrage but spiritual sobriety, renewed intercession, and a fresh reckoning with what it means to bear witness to a different Kingdom in a society that is showing its spiritual hand.

Finding Kingdom Hope Beyond Empire

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The church today seems lukewarm, a description that was given to the church in Laodicea, one of the seven churches in Revelation: lots of activity, but ultimately ineffective. I’m not the only one making this observation. Much has been written about the decline of Christianity in the global West, especially in America, and the possible solutions. While some claim a revival is underway, many disagree, and the evidence suggests the church remains lukewarm.

This blog reflects my intention to dig into these issues from new perspectives. The Laodiceans’ lukewarmness stemmed from reliance on self and worldly things — part of a pattern of compromise with the world that runs through all seven letters. This theme is central to Revelation and remains a challenge the church faces today.

Although references to Revelation in contemporary commentary are increasingly common, they typically focus on one particular aspect at a time. I see an opportunity for broader exploration. Revelation depicts the conflict between worldly systems and God’s way, between empire and kingdom, between the way of the beast and the way of the Lamb.

My approach, drawn from Revelation, involves four steps: understanding dangerous trends in today’s world, examining how Revelation and Scripture address them, identifying how the church is being challenged, and seeking faithful responses.

Consider, for example, how greed may be endemic to our economic systems. Given Scripture’s strident opposition to greed, we should be wary of its influence today, especially in subtle forms. Similarly, some thinkers have identified social cycles related to the rise and fall of empires throughout history, including patterns like the “great awakenings” that have occurred multiple times in America. These frameworks can help us understand large-scale trends in spiritual terms.

Even a cursory examination reveals dangers that mirror those in Revelation: dependence on worldly systems instead of God, allegiance to earthly powers over God’s sovereignty, false witness about God, the exaltation of commerce over humanity itself. These dangers are as present today as they were two thousand years ago.

Yet Revelation also highlights the church’s role in providing hope and rescue from the inevitable problems of increasing evil. There are multiple calls for the church to avoid entanglement with these forces, to come out before it’s too late, and to fulfill its mission of witnessing to the truth. Through obedience to God’s call for love and witness, the Kingdom can be manifested against evil.

The letter to Laodicea, though addressed to a congregation and depicting Jesus challenging the group, ends with an invitation to individual response. It is with this perspective that I seek understanding.

Pride and the Things of This World

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President Trump’s pattern of renaming public institutions and government programs after himself — from the U.S. Institute of Peace to the Kennedy Center, from a new class of battleships to prescription drug benefits and children’s savings accounts — seems to offer a good contemporary illustration of what the Bible calls “the pride of life.” In warning against loving “the things of the world,” the Apostle John identifies a spiritual danger that transcends any era: the human temptation to seek immortality and significance through the perpetuation of one’s own name. This self-glorifying impulse, which transforms public institutions meant to serve the common good into monuments to individual ego, exemplifies the kind of worldly vanity that Biblical teaching warns against.

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Kingdom of Love

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It often seems that people approach Scripture through different lenses. Some see it as a form of legalistic instruction manual. Others see it as a historical document. To anyone trying to understand the fundamental truths revealed in the Bible, it can seem confusing. In trying to do this myself, I noticed that Jesus basically states what all of Scripture is all about and, with that in mind, it’s clear throughout the rest of the Bible.

In several places, Jesus stated that all the “law and the prophets”, essentially all of Scripture, can be summed up by loving God with our whole being and loving others as we love ourselves. Love God and love others. In other words, the fundamental lesson of Scripture, at least according to Jesus, is to love. His statement implies that, when we try to understand anything in the Bible, we should look at it through this lens.

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Diversity and the Ends of the Earth

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I recently watched a video1 in which the speaker described diversity as something harmful—likening it to poison or cancer. His argument was that diversity “doesn’t work” in contexts like marriage or business because communication breaks down. But what he ultimately described wasn’t a failure of diversity; it was a failure of communication.

Yes, some kinds of diversity—such as speaking different languages—can create significant challenges. But that’s not what most conversations about diversity are actually addressing. Instead, they focus on differences of race, culture, citizenship, religion, and more. And while language can play a role, these issues must be understood within the broader context of human relationships and how we choose to engage one another.

The speaker in the video also appealed to Christian identity as if Christian sameness should be the foundation of unity—yet he offered no Scriptural grounding for this view. No teachings of Jesus. No reference to the overarching story of God’s people. Only personal opinion.

That disconnect made me curious to revisit what the Bible actually shows us about diversity.

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The Paradox of Christian Nationalism: When Law and Grace Collide

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At the heart of American democracy lies a foundational principle: the rule of law. The United States operates under a constitutional framework where no individual—not even the president—stands above the law. This commitment distinguishes our republic from monarchies and dictatorships, establishing a system where every citizen, regardless of status or power, is equally bound by legal standards. This framework has proven essential to maintaining ordered liberty and protecting individual rights.

Christianity, by contrast, centers on something fundamentally different: relationship rather than regulation. The Christian faith emphasizes a personal connection with God that then naturally produces transformed behavior—what Scripture calls “good fruit.” This is a crucial distinction: good works flow from relationship, not the other way around. Many Christians express this as the doctrine that we are not “saved by works”—that no amount of rule-following can establish or earn our standing with God. The relationship precedes and produces the behavior, not vice versa.

This principle appears most clearly in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where he vigorously opposed those who insisted that adherence to Jewish ceremonial law was necessary for salvation. While Paul’s immediate concern was a specific set of religious regulations, the underlying principle extends far beyond that historical context: legalistic compliance cannot create spiritual life. Authentic faith transforms from the inside out, not from the outside in.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Christians are exempt from civil law. Believers are called to be model citizens, obeying legitimate governmental authority as an expression of obedience to God. But this obedience is an outflow of an already-established relationship with God, not the means of creating one. The motivation differs entirely from legalism: Christians obey laws not to earn divine favor, but because they already possess it.

Christians have also historically engaged with legal systems to advance human flourishing. The abolition of slavery, efforts to care for the poor and the establishment of social safety nets, child labor laws, civil rights protections—these required legislative action, and Christians often led these efforts. Since Christ calls his followers to demonstrate God’s love through tangible care for others (the call to love one’s neighbor), pursuing just laws becomes a natural expression of faith. This engagement with law is about loving neighbors, not achieving salvation.

These two frameworks—American constitutional law and Christian theology—occupy separate spheres. The United States is built on the rule of law, and Christians rightly work within this legal system to serve others and promote justice. Yet this civic involvement remains categorically distinct from the gospel message of grace.

Christian nationalism, however, collapses these separate categories, fusing them in ways that distort both. It seeks to encode specific theological positions into civil law, transforming doctrinal beliefs into legally mandated behavior. Gender ideology becomes enforced through legislation. Public display of religious texts like the Ten Commandments becomes a legal requirement. Public prayer becomes a governmental function.

While proponents may not explicitly claim these measures “save” anyone, the practical effect reinforces a fundamentally legalistic message: that proper behavior and outward conformity define authentic Christianity. The public rhetoric surrounding these efforts often confirms this, emphasizing moral compliance as the marker of genuine faith. People absorb the implicit message that Christianity is primarily about following the right rules, displaying the right symbols, and enforcing the right behaviors on society.

This tendency appears most clearly in Christian nationalism’s heavy reliance on Old Testament law and its preoccupation with behavioral compliance as the measure of right standing with God. The Old Testament economy indeed operated under a legal framework where obedience to detailed regulations governed Israel’s covenant relationship with God. But this was always intended as a temporary system pointing toward something better. Christian theology teaches that Christ fulfilled this legal system, ushering in a new covenant based on faith and grace rather than law. Yet Christian nationalism frequently gravitates back toward Old Testament categories, emphasizing legal codes, punishments, and external conformity over internal transformation and grace.

The consequences of this conflation are serious and multifaceted. First, it systematically corrupts the Christian message itself, gradually shifting the faith from a gospel of grace to a burden of legalism. People inside the church begin to believe that Christianity is fundamentally about correct behavior and political alignment rather than about transformation through relationship with God. The message that drew people to faith in the first place—that God offers freely what we could never earn—gets obscured beneath layers of cultural and political requirements.
Second, this approach profoundly alienates those outside the faith. When Christianity becomes identified with political power, legal coercion, and cultural warfare, it creates barriers that make the actual message of grace nearly impossible to hear. Non-Christians see a religion that seems primarily concerned with control rather than love, with winning rather than serving, with power rather than humility. This cultural Christianity drives people away from the very message that might genuinely transform their lives.

The tragic irony is that Christian nationalism, despite its stated goal of advancing Christian faith and values, actually undermines both. By substituting legal enforcement for spiritual transformation, it produces neither true justice nor genuine faith. By collapsing law and grace into a single framework, it distorts both. And by alienating both believers and non-believers from the authentic gospel message, it works directly against the faith’s true mission.

Continue reading “The Paradox of Christian Nationalism: When Law and Grace Collide” →