Inflatable Christian Fools the Enemy
Thanks for the cover, Aaron!
Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap. -Psalm 69
In WW2, the allies created a bunch of inflatable tanks and staged them around the theater of war. The deception helped divert German attention from the real attack at Normandy.
Likewise, the Lord of Hosts uses deception to fool the enemy. He used animal hides upon Jacob to fool Isaac into doing the right thing. He tricked Haman into attending a fatal dinner party by appealing to his pride. He hardened the hearts of unbelieving Israel to the point that they murdered him, which spelled the endgame for Satan.
The Lord allows certain men to become puffed up with their sense of importance and promulgate false doctrine. They then serve as an inflatable decoy. The current faddish version of Christian nationalism is one such decoy. It is a movement by people who have the appearance of godliness, but deny its power.
Recently a man named Aaron Renn became famous as a Christian nationalist by claiming that being a Christian used to be respectable in the USA from the 1960s until a few years ago. This time of respectability he called “positive world”. Then, suddenly, some bad supreme court decisions marked a new era, in which being a Christian was no longer respectable. He called this “the negative world”.
This pitch played perfectly to the set of glory loving Christians who think that God’s purposes are thwarted when rulers become hostile to Christianity. They pine for the days when rulers pay lip service to Christ and everything is nice and peaceful for believers and they can “get things done”. They want to be at peace and have no serious resistance. Thus they set a trap for themselves with their nostalgia and they become sycophants of lying tyrants who advertise themselves as friends of Christians.
By contrast, the bible teaches that things really get done when everybody hates Christians and persecute them. In fact, the final judgment of Jerusalem was accomplished when the blood of God’s people was spilled out by such persecutors, then pressed in God’s winepress. Then God made the unbelievers drink the blood, which sent them to hell and resulted in victory for God’s people.
To illustrate
A man named Martin Luther King once confronted the comfortable Christians in the USA and demanded from God’s word that they stop hating their brothers. The comfortable, tyrannical white Christians lived in Renn’s “positive world”, while the persecuted, hated, black Christians lived in Renn’s “negative world”.
Renn replied, “they didn’t suffer because they were Christians. They suffered because they were black.” Which would have been quite a surprise to King.
Renn is the judicial representative of the man in 2nd Timothy which Paul warns against. He is swollen with conceit. His position superficially has an appearance of godliness, but denies the power of godliness.
How does it deny the power of godliness? Because the power of godliness consists in suffering, not ease nor freedom from societal interference. Renn’s stunning failure to recognize King’s suffering as Christian, despite King’s own confession, reveals Renn to be a rank idolator of the worst sort: the kind of man who seeks to justify himself and define away who his neighbor is.
The decoy
Thankfully, the enemy is just as swollen with conceit as the inflatable Christian. He focuses on such puffed up nonsense, calls attention to it, and marshalls all his power against it. He leads people to mistakenly believe that Renn represents true Christianity. Thus, many enemies of Christ focus their power on attacking inflatable Christians like Renn and the nationalist movement.
Meanwhile, God’s people are busy making headway against the enemy, executing their own Operation Overlord. And these true Christians are able to identify the faddish nationalists as Judas and prophesy against them, protecting the sheep from their influence.
For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.
Avoid such people. - Paul