A NIGHTTIME KNOCK ON THE DOOR
by Jeemes Akers
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Commmunist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
Martin Niemoeller
The inner city.
Streets racked with violent political and racial protests.
Citizens still reeling and weakened by the aftereffects of the worst pandemic in a century.
A ruinous country-wide economic collapse beginning to unfold.
Previous moral and sexual standards in freefall.
A knock on the door.
In the middle of the night.
A 22-year-old answers the door.
He is shot in the face and beaten.
A former felon and street organizer fallen.
In the days after his death, the young man is made an unlikely hero for a cause.
Looting, rioting, street violence and mayhem follows.
His image becomes celebrated everywhere by those seeking to capitalize on the unrest.
The media quickly sensationalizes the death to push political narratives.
Good citizens—and even the local police—too intimidated by thugs in the street to take a stand against the violence.
Even churches, eager to outdo others in a quest for political correctness, follow suit.
Too few willing to stand on scripture to arrest the darkening madness descending upon their communities.
Too few willing to shout “Enough is enough!”
2020?
No.
The incident cited above took place on January 14, 1929.
Did it take place in Minneapolis, New York, Seattle or Atlanta?
No.
It happened in the Friedrichshain district of a Berlin city borough.
Was the victim named George Floyd or Breonna Taylor?
No.
The victim’s name was Horst Wessel (Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel).
Wessel—son of a well-known preacher, enthusiastic disciple of Adolf Hitler, part-time paramilitary thug and felon, pimp for his prostitute girlfriend, law student and avid anti-Semitic literature reader—was killed by a group of communist party hirelings.
Wessel’s death, and subsequent well-publicized funeral, were capitalized on by German propaganda master Joseph Goebbels to elevate the image of the slain street-fighter to a leader of the martyred dead. Large placards bearing Wessel’s picture were plastered throughout the major cities of Germany. Wessel’s name was frequently evoked on Goebbels’ radio broadcasts—the newest media forum and roughly equivalent to today’s social media platforms in terms of outreach and influence—to mobilize the Nazi faithful.
Young people throughout Germany began singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied (Song).
Before long, the true agenda became obvious: out in the woods, eager young National Socialists sang the Horst Wessel song and burned copies of the Bible on great fires. First, Communists, gypsies and the mentally incapacitated were rounded up. (Indeed, the first victim of the Nazi oppression was the notion of the sacredness of life.) Then political opponents, beginning with Social Democrats and trade unionists, were intimidated and subsequently eliminated. Throughout the process, Jews were systematically rounded up and exterminated in the nightmarish Holocaust.
At the same time, most German church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for their excesses might prove personally risky—held their tongues.
In those days, it was only politically acceptable Aryan lives that mattered.
Today, we are being told that Black Lives—and apparently only black lives—Matter. To suggest that all lives matter equally is to be deemed racially insensitive. Walmart has bowed to the pressure and no longer will carry “All Lives Matter” t-shirts. Since when did it become politically insensitive to say that all lives matter equally?
Is that really what Martin Luther King taught?
Are we actually supposed to close our eyes to the mindless anarchy in the streets, the excess arson and looting, the idiocy of Seattle’s CHAZ and the CHOP, protests for the sake of protesting and the toppling of historic statues?
Does this belching hatred in any way lift up the name and senseless death of George Floyd?
No.
No more than Joseph Goebbels seizing on the unfortunate death of Horst Wessel and manipulating his misfortune into a cause celeb for dark political agendas.
Are we being duped today, just as the Germans were in the 1930s?
Are we living through the largest media-orchestrated disinformation campaign and hoax in history? Sometimes I wonder.
The true agenda of those angry youths in the streets and the leftist billionaires often funding them—sooner or later—becomes exposed. Recently, controversial black social justice activist Shaun King took to Twitter to demand that all statues of Jesus Christ (portraying him as a “white European”) should be torn down as a “form of white supremacy.” To begin with, Jesus Christ as a Middle East Jew was certainly not a white Caucasian. But that is hardly the point: what we are seeing is a basic hatred for Jesus Christ and biblical standards of behavior.
As Pastor Gary points out: in the United States today, we have a “sin” problem rather than “skin” problem.
The truth is one that neither the far-left nor the far-right wants to hear: Jesus Christ and the unlimited future He offers to those that follow Him, is absolutely color-blind.
As I have said before: if Jesus Christ is placed at the core of social justice efforts, then true and meaningful reforms take place; if you push human-centered social justice efforts to replace Jesus Christ, then you will have chaos, confusion, self-aggrandizement, and incomplete (and unsatisfactory) results.
As I began writing this article, we were spending a couple weeks with my mom and dad in Springboro, Ohio. We were trying to give my sisters a break.
Life goes on …
While we were there, just a few houses up on the same street my folks live, we saw a phalanx of strobe lights and emergency vehicles. A six-year-old boy had accidently shot himself to death with his grandma’s shotgun. Such a tragedy. Last night, Imogene and I walked through the neighborhood and ran across a baseball game: two teams of eleven-year-olds playing on the field, while behind the backstop 50-or-so parents and grandparents cheered them on. It was so good to hear the sounds of batted balls and watching the kids run the bases. I had almost forgot what normal summertime looked and sounded like.
There were no masks to be seen.
I know that rubs some of you the wrong way.
Last week, one of Imogene’s former teaching colleagues sent her a video of a prophetic dream by a pastor in rural Kentucky. The video is now making its rounds through fundamentalist Christian communities. The pastor—Dana Coverstone—saw (in a dream) the calendar month November 2020 on the wall. It was smashed to bits by a huge fist. During that month, he also saw unprecedented violence in our country’s streets, Washington D.C. and other major cities aflame, civil war, vultures circling over large cities, churches ransacked, the US mint no longer making coins and the government no longer printing small paper currency and, most troubling to me, Chinese, Russian and blue-helmeted UN troops securing urban districts.
Others in the past, such as David Wilkerson, have voiced similar warnings.
Sigh.
Pastor Coverstone’s message for believers: brace yourselves for what is coming!
A follow-up video by Pastor Coverstone described a dream where voracious wolves, whipped into a frenzy by dark forces, began attacking churches and pastors in the pulpits. In the dream, believers attending church were beaten and pelted with stones, with the angry masses being led by former congregants offended by the message of sin and its consequences.
Coverstone’s prophecy spread like wildfire through some circles. Immediately, it was widely and publicly panned by a group of “prophets” who have been delivering a more positive, feel-good message; they insist that we are standing on the threshold of a nationwide revival.
As if all that we now are experiencing will somehow go away.
Really?
No one wants to confront the reality of bad news over the horizon.
But alas, there is really nothing new under the sun.
In the Old Testament, the Prophet Jeremiah cried out to the people that if sin continued in the land, and the practice of worshipping idols continued unabated, God’s judgement would fall. A group of prophets, eager to placate the king and ruling elites, said just the opposite: God loved them so much He would never exact a judgement on the land, and not to worry—good times were coming. God’s answer?
“Then the Lord said to me [Jeremiah], The [false] prophets prophesy lies
in My name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, nor have I spoken to them. They prophesy to you a false or pretended vision, a worthless divination [conjuring or practicing magic, trying to draw forth the responses supposed to be given by idols], and the deceit of their own minds.
Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the [false] prophets who prophesy in My name—although I did not send them—and who say, Sword and famine shall not be in this land: By sword and famine shall those prophets be consumed.
And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem, victims of famine and sword; and they shall have none to bury them— them, their wives, their sons, and their daughters. For I will pour out their wickedness upon them [and not on their false teachers only, for the people could not have been deceived except by their own consent].
That last paragraph really tugs at my spirt.
Most of us simply close our eyes to the aggressive perversions, the filth on television and social media, the spirit of disunity being promoted everywhere around us, and the misapplication of justice in our land. The churches, for their part, have responded with a deafening silence (even as Governor Gavin Newsom in California bans indoor church services, and before that, singing in churches).
Do we really think we’ll be able to throw somebody else under the bus when things fall apart?
As I was mulling over all of this, a close friend—and very influential in his own right—sent me a dated video of a senior Russian intelligence officer, Yuri Bezmenov, who had defected to the United States. Bezmenov described in detail a program of ideological subversion to undermine the United States and ultimately change our perception of reality. The program unfolded in four stages: demoralization (a long, carefully orchestrated plan to penetrate educational systems with leftist ideologies while not permitting counterarguments); destabilization (a two-to-five year period in which leftist-oriented violence using discontented domestic audiences—both my friend and I agree that we are currently in this phase); crisis (a very short, intense phase to topple existing institutions); and, finally a period of “normalization” and tutelage where many of yesterday’s dissidents will be eliminated. He insists we are involved in a systemic battle pitting a variety of enemies against a system of freedom, constitutional rights and economic capitalism. “This is what will happen in the US if you allow all the ‘smucks’ within the country to bring it to crisis.” This deterioration is accelerated by a lack of moral standards. The time bomb is ticking. What was his motive? In Bezmenov’s words, the U.S is the last bastion of freedom: “there is no place else to defect to.”
Is all this poppycock?
The pitiful warnings of an old dinosaur out of touch with the reality of social change?
Do none of the rest of you sense the urgency of the moment?
I told my students at the College of the Ozarks several months ago that we are at war and nobody seems to recognize it. And let me add a little tidbit: all of us who love this country, and the way of life we so cherish, are losing the battle because we are not engaging in the fight.
What we have witnessed over the last six months in this country, many of us who have served this country faithfully in war and in peacetime would have thought impossible.
I encourage each of you to love those closest to you as if there is no tomorrow.
Because, my friend, our tomorrows are disappearing.
And by all means, draw closer in relationship to the person of Jesus Christ.
… and brace yourselves for what is coming.
Our pastor closed his message (on the Sermon on the Mount) this past Sunday with a quote from the noted Anglican theologian John Robert Stott (1921-2011). I will paraphrase what he said and hope I capture the essence of the quote:
When the house is dark, empty and cold … we don’t blame the house.
We ask: “Where is the light?”
When the meat starts to turn bad because of a natural decaying process … we don’t blame the meat.
Instead we ask: “Where is the salt?”
When the culture around us turns evil because of human sin … we don’t blame society.
Rather we ask: “Where is the church?”
