The One Benefit of the Mueller Investigation
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the U.S. intelligence community and the Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees announced that no evidence exists of collusion between President Trump and Russia.
Are we therefore also to conclude that after spending $30-$35 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money on the investigation, Special Counsel Mueller didn’t see the validity of looking into the perfidy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or Bruce Ohr?
Yet one benefit did spring from Mueller’s investigation. As the putative “guardians of truth,” the news media are no longer deemed fair, balanced and impartial. Instead, they are now looked upon as forces in league with the political left, striving for ideological supremacy and control of the public square.
It’s a sad commentary when print media, broadcast journalism and social media networks are crestfallen that the 45th president of the United States is not a foreign spy. And that while they gave the most guileful person to have ever run for president a free pass.
A quick update: When President Barack Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, Democrat-appointed judges controlled just one of the 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals. When he left office on Jan. 17, 2017, Democrat-appointed judges controlled 9 of the 13. As of today, Republican-appointed judges by the Trump administration have flipped one and tied up one. At this moment, Republican appointees control the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Circuits, with the 11th Circuit being evenly split between Republican and Democrat appointees. That leaves seven of the 13 Federal Courts of Appeals under Democrat control. The take-home point here is that Christians lose if they don’t learn to play the long game.
The court’s configuration is of supreme importance because of the fact that Democrats favor abortion, same-sex intercourse and marriage, infanticide, euthanasia, all-powerful and ever-present government, transgender bathrooms and coercive redistribution of wealth. The ethical and political points of view of Democrat-appointed judges tend to advance secular notions, values, politics and legislation to be codified into law, which deeply affect the culture.
The urgency of the hour is for the church to counter the theological heresy foisted over the last 100 years upon American Christendom, aptly exemplified by the eschatological maxim “You don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.” To quote Dr. Archie P. Jones: “[America’s founders] did not turn civil government, the making, enforcement and adjudication of laws, over to Satan and those who serve him. They did not surrender the ministry of civil government to those who are in rebellion against God.”
However, the rebound of the Christian signature in the culture will require a different church model than the one employed over the last century. We must return to a Scripture-based culture. This will require a new type of leader, different from contemporary progressive Christian leadership captured and absorbed by “social justice,” an ideology insidiously inserted into the church by the left.
As a quick reply in plain English to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and wannabe socialists of the 116th Congress, the following: “equality usually suggests fairness, equity, or the equitable; but what is equitable is often not to give people the same portions, but rather to give what is proportionate to the efforts of each.” (“Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is,” The Heritage Foundation, Report Poverty and Inequality, heritage.org).
This is a hard concept to grasp for Millennial and Gen Z generations, due to the fact that secular education and the bureaucratic state have become their sole purveyors of truth. The American Founding Fathers introduced a different model, based upon Scripture and enunciated clearly by the Apostle Paul, “If anyone will not work, neither let him eat.”
The modern church’s fixation with budgets, buildings and bodies in the seats has centered church life inside the “meeting house.” It is a model that has been tried and found wanting. If our children, and their children, are to experience liberty and freedom, the once biblically based culture will have to be reestablished step by step in the public square.
Ed Silvoso’s Ekklesia: Rediscovering God’s Instrument for Global Transformation provides a template. Three institutions shaped the life and culture of the ancient Jewish people: the temple, the synagogue and the ekklesia. The temple and synagogue were religious; the ekklesia was secular.
The ekklesia, Jesus instructed, is to operate in the rough and tumble of the culture. Warning in Matthew 16:6b to “Take heed and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” Christ signaled the predicament now facing contemporary Christianity: business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, medicine, family and religion [being] turned over to those in rebellion against God.
Jesus made a commitment. The ekklesia, He said, those leavening the marketplace, “The gates of Hades shall not prevail [against them]” (Matt. 16:18b).
What a wonderful God.
The church has to break out from behind the four walls of the “meeting place” and reestablish itself in the public square if America is to survive. Christians have reached the point where they either reinstate a virtuous culture or lose their liberty.
God be thanked that Gideons and Rahabs are now beginning to stand.
