6-26-23<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the Age of Grievance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
People these days are eager to assert claims about the hurts they suffer, the wrongs committed against them, the compensations they are owed. In this land of plenty. During this period of prosperity, despite blips on the economic graphs. \u201cI know my rights!!!\u201d yell protesters in street riots \u2013 even when most them do not know or understand the status of laws and statutes. “Rights” versus “wrongs” they might commit themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People these days are not happy unless they complain. And, too often, about bogus complanints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this litigious society, lawyers stand ready to monetize the wrongs you think you have suffered, or have been convinced that you have suffered. Rather than moral palliatives, the \u201csolutions\u201d always translate to money, not explanations or apologies or corrections. Actual, direct damages cease to be legitimate justifications for picking others\u2019 pockets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Slavery Reparations movement that first flourished in the Radical \u201860s has blossomed again in our day. Formulas for how much money contemporary Black people should be paid by White people \u2013 all non-Blacks, essentially \u2013 are calculated. Brazenly, the enormous sums are \u201cdue\u201d to brothers and sisters who were not slaves (obviously) but also to those whose ancestors did not live in slave-era America. Or cannot substantiate their bloodlines. Or do not \u201csuffer\u201d any related effects. Proponents in California, with pens poised over other citizens\u2019 checkbooks, dismiss these points as irrelevancies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Similarly, the \u201cHolocaust,\u201d past which fewer and fewer people are alive, has partly become a Reparations movement. Dr Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived Nazi concentration camps, has written a book, The Holocaust Industry<\/em>, in which he documents his claims that \u201ca repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters\u201d routinely engage in virtual blackmail-by-PR campaigns. He documents the flow of money to \u201clawyers and institutional actors\u201d instead of putative survivors. Yet TV commercials depict starving Jews today, even supposedly in Israel itself, pleading for money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So forth and so on. It seems like every group on the landscape is aggrieved; every mendicant may choose a reason to whine — like \u201cPin the tail on the guilty,\u201d down to virtual blindfolds. It begins with \u201churt feelings\u201d of invented groups and genders; and ends with threats of arrest if you do not surrender yourself to the Compassion Police. And it ends with transforming your value system, if you let them; and ponying up money. The paradigm is common these days. Every aggrieved person and every assembled group climbs aboard the bandwagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost<\/em> every person and group, that is. It is still safe in America and the post-Christian West, to be prejudiced against Christians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With increasing rapidity, followers of Jesus are proscribed, ridiculed, sanctioned, silenced, and discriminated against. By governmental laws and regulations and court decisions, Christians are becoming second-class citizens. In popular media they can be criticized as, say, Jews or Muslims or homosexuals cannot be. In government schools and on state media, many perverted ideas once regarded as taboos are endorsed, even encouraged \u2013 while Christian ideas, traditions, expressions, even innocent decorations are forbidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So forth and so on. Yet \u2013 unlike every other group of whiners across the spectrum \u2013 Christians are not seeking Reparations. Grievances are not new; for two thousand years Christians have been persecuted. The blood of martyrs has soaked many a soil; and still today there is prejudice and abuse of believers, all around the world. Have Christians committed sins too, through history? Yes, against some groups filing grievances today. But are Christians demanding Reparations for old grievances?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer, generally, is no; and the reason, specifically, is this: For all the promises of peace and the assurances of Heaven\u2026 the Lord Jesus Christ told His followers \u2013 us \u2013 that persecution will come. We are to expect resistance, opposition, and tribulation in this world. We should not be surprised by hatred. The world hated Him first, after all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We have been told that believers might be \u201ctrouble\u201d in their households. Friends and family might actually despise us. The Jesus you see in paintings, standing amidst the lilies? That same Jesus told us He comes with a sword. He told us about the things we must be prepared to put aside \u2013 to sacrifice, but also to endure \u2013 if we follow Him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus died on the cross to fulfill His mission, taking upon Himself the sin-punishments we deserve. But He did not<\/em> free us from the rejections and persecutions He experienced.<\/em> In fact He not only predicted such treatment\u2026 He virtually promised <\/em>it. It will come. If it doesn\u2019t\u2026 perhaps we are not doing our job as Christians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who will save us? Surely not the government: we are seeing that. The churches? No: remember that it was religious people who demanded that Jesus be crucified; the religious Establishment. Remember that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Christian\u2019s \u201cReparation\u201d will not come in this world, in our lifetimes. It cannot. We should be suspicious if it is offered. Our Reparation \u2013 our rewards \u2013 can be earned now (and only by His Grace, not our works) but realized only in Glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n