I held off posting this message until after Christmas because its metaphoric image would not be pleasant for some. In the image, I saw a cow that had been slaughtered and hung up to bleed out prior to butchering and eventual consumption. 

The interpretation of the image was that of our nation and the message of the Church in the process of being butchered. In an actual butchering process, cattle are stunned unconscious, and then hung up by their hind legs. Their throats are cut and they die from exsanguination – the loss of their life’s blood. After death, they are butchered, packaged, and sent off to the market to waiting consumers.

Our minds have been stunned by the false hopes of politics and compromised politicians and by theologies birthed by human reasoning that were not present in the earliest expressions of the Church. In the Church, this is the promise of a spiritual ejection that takes us up and away from the tribulation and suffering that will take place in the future. In the United States, we no longer have two political parties. We have a uni-party made up of individuals who use the power of their political office to gain wealth and influence. They are being controlled by global alliances with agendas not loyal to any national ideology. These influencers have a global agenda hidden from undiscerning eyes. The Church has been left uninformed for the most part unable to know how to function as a person of faith in times of tribulation or sudden social change. Many believers would not know how to live if true tribulation came.

A great majority of the culture and the Church have been stunned in preparation for intellectual and spiritual slaughter. The stunning of our minds is necessary to begin the butchering process. An ongoing renewal of our minds can prevent this if we are willing to not allow our faith to be reduced to political bickering or demonic fantasies offered by compromised theologians who tell us the original blueprint of God for His creation is somehow flawed and open for human reinterpretation. 

Our politicians in America just passed a spending bill made up of 4,000 pages totaling over 1 trillion dollars of expenditures. No one was able to read the bill in time before it was rushed to passing to the glee of its creators and their influence peddlers. As a nation, the debt clock tells us we are approaching the 32 trillion dollar mark of debt, a debt even our great-great-great grandchildren will never be able to pay off. We have been stunned by such numbers. We are a numbed nation. Any politician who voiced opposition to the latest spending bill was in jeopardy of losing clout within their own ranks. The same butchering happens when people of faith are so stunned by deception that they are willing to violate the integrity of Scripture and mock any pastor who preaches a challenging message that warns people of what is taking place hoping to awaken them from the effects of a stunning delusion.

Our only hope is to discover where we have placed our hope. If our hope is placed outside the person of Jesus Christ, the process of our compromise will put us next in line for slaughter. Is our hope in the outcome of the 2024 election or the promises of a political party, or the resolution of what some have considered as rigged elections – something both political parties have contested for decades? Has our hope been placed in an interpretation of the “end times” that carries a requirement for our lockstep obedience to a particular version of systematic theology or some “new” understanding of human sexuality?

A remnant is saying no to any path that leads toward the slaughterhouse of their faith. They see a stun gun being raised and used to stun their sense of discernment and reasoning. They are choosing to jump over the rails of the corrals of assumption and run away from death toward a life of truth. Those who jump the rails of these corrals will be labeled as rebels, or worse, be punished relationally, socially, and economically for their disobedience when they take a stand against a protocol of spiritual and cultural death. The term “Wake Up!” has become a worn warning, but it has never been truer than it is today.