Originally written Jan 21, 2021 By Brandon Durham
Yesterday, Joe Biden was installed as President. As the inaugural proceedings got under way in our nation’s capital, I, myself, was thousands of miles away, driving the rural back roads of East Texas, when suddenly, I happened upon a bald eagle perched on the side of the road! Eagle sightings are quite rare around here. I can remember 1 or 2 sightings in all my years, and never have I seen a bald eagle this close, in the wild! As I cruised by our nation’s noble bird, it flew away, clutching a dead carcass!
Now, I do not believe in omens. I am not superstitious. I’m not even a little “stitious.” (Couldn’t resist.) But I do believe in a good metaphor, and think this one’s an eagle on a par 4. Hopefully, I can keep it in the fairway.
Four years ago, a strange bird, named Trump, took office, with promises of “draining the swamp.” This sounded really good to conservatives, including us non-woke Christians. We rallied, with high hopes, around insolent Trump, willing him to do something the “nice guys” seemed incapable of doing—run the smooth-talking swamp monsters smooth out of town. In a word; we hoped the eagle would carry away the dead carcass! If we’re honest, many of us were clutching this fantasy down to the wire, hoping Trump had some ace up his feathers, to catch the wicked in their own trap. I get it. I was taught to “play till the buzzer sounds,” too. And Trump is a fighter. For many, it almost seemed unpatriotic to not stand with him until the last.
Trump did a lot of good for our nation. He grew our economy (twice, counting post-shutdown). He kept us out of foreign conflict. He was extraordinarily “pro-life” and “pro-religious freedom.” He served blacks and minorities well; signed prison reform, increased funding to black colleges, and brought black and minority unemployment down to historic lows. Not bad for a “racist.” Trump crushed the “PC” culture, helped expose Mainstream Media & Big Tech tyrants as propagandists, and smoked out all the woke whiney weenies of evangelicalism. We ought to praise God, and be grateful for all the good accomplished by President Trump and his administration, in the face of relentless attacks and deception by the deep state and their propaganda arms. It was a good run.
And I won’t deny, it would have been glorious, yesterday (at the Inauguration), if President-elect Biden & Commie Harris, along with the Clintons, Obama, the House, the Senate, the FBI, Twitter, Facebook, Google, George Soros, et al, had been rounded up on national T.V. and herded into the “paddy wagon” by 25,000 troops, (to be tried for treason) as Trump took the stage and Garth Brooks sang, “Amazing Grace.” Harris could have broken the glass ceiling as the first woman VP-elect to go to prison. And everyone who’s been banned on social media said, “Amen.”
But it didn’t happen. As it turns out, the left has too many friends in high places. Trump has been trumped. And while we’ll likely never know the extent of the cheating that took place, including with Dominion Voting, one thing is clear; the Socialist, Marxist Left has taken dominion; and to prove they’re in charge, they’re censuring anyone who doesn’t use a “library voice” to challenge their legitimacy.
In short, yesterday, we watched as the dead, rotting carcass of a godless regime sunk its claws into our feathers, to drag our nation further into the gutter than ever before. Everything good Trump did via executive order will now be undone with a stroke of Biden’s pen. The legal ground gained, to protect the unborn, will be torn from us. The LGB-Cutie-+ sexual revolt will molest like never before. The economy is about to be mugged in a back alley by a thug named Socialism. And freedom of speech will be largely relegated to speakeasies like Gab and a faithful remnant of churches that aren’t drunk on CRT like it’s love potion # 9.
And that brings me to the point of this metaphor; while it’s part of our Christian duty to concern ourselves with politics and those who rule over us, such can never be our ultimate hope! The cross (gospel), and not the eagle (politics), is our ultimate hope for carrying away the rotting carcass (national sins) festering with the putrid smell of death in our land. Four more years of Trump would not have been enough to drain the swamp. And that’s because, buried beneath the trash heap of our political landscape lies the real problem—America itself is a rotting corpse of unbelief and moral decay. As the saying goes; politics are downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from worship. In short, the heart of the problem is the problem of America’s heart!
There’s no masking the ugly truth—Americans have rejected the God in whose image we are made, and have consequently been saddled with tyrants of our own making. Francis Schaeffer warned that humanism, “having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state." Our idolatrous generation has adopted many false religions; most notably “statism” & “scientism.” (the deification of state & science.)
In the name of “protecting our public witness,” the American church has gone along to get along for far too long! The average pastor, steeped in the unprincipled pragmatism of their seminary training, lacks the spine to drop the hammer on CRT, LGBQT, feminism, statism, “good-ole-boy-ism” and all the other damnable beliefs which set themselves up against the knowledge of God; nor do these well-credentialed pastors have the courage & conviction to call parents NOT to send their kids to godless government schools to be catechized—in the name of science, tolerance, and diversity—to hate God. And the reason most pastors don’t tell the truth on these matters, in most churches, is because they’d lose their jobs faster than Trump lost his lead on election night. I lost mine.
So here we are. The Trump Train got derailed, and the Biden Bus is headed off a cliff. There will be more pressure than ever to “get on board.” David Chilton writes, in Paradise Restored, “Our primary response to persecution and oppression must not be political. That is to put our trust in the State. The Church’s primary response to persecution must be liturgical (worship). We must pray about it, personally, in families, and in the organized, corporate worship of the Church, whose officers are divinely empowered to bring judgments.” To quote Randy Travis, now is the time to “cling to the father and his holy name, and don’t go riding on that long black train.”
Jesus, and not Cesar, is Lord. His Kingdom is here, and now, and he won’t stop till all of his enemies are put under his feet. The message of Christ is, “repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Don’t get caught on the wrong side of eternity. Only Christ has a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and a will that cannot be thwarted. Christ said he would build his church, and the gates of hell would not prevail. Chilton, again, writes, “We must stop acting as if we are forever destined to be a sub-culture. We are destined for dominion; we should straighten up and start acting like it. Our life and worship should reflect our expectation of dominion and our increasing capacity for responsibility. we should not see ourselves as lonely outposts surrounded by an increasingly hostile world; that is to bear false witness against God. The truth is just the opposite of that. It is the devil who is on the run, it is paganism which is doomed to extinction. Christianity is ultimately the dominant culture, predestined to be the final and universal religion. The Church will fill the earth.”
2021 can be a historic year, to the glory of God, where the church goes on offense, and rocks hell on its heels. It starts with getting on your knees. Men, take the lead. Repent. Dust off your Bibles. Find a gutsy, non-woke, Bible-believing church that will discipline you for sin, and feed your family when you get fired or arrested for defying tyrants. Plug in. Move if you must. Pull your kids out of public school before they lose their soul. Raise them in the fear, admonition, and joy of the Lord. Sing loudly. Fight the good fight. And, by all means, ruffle some feathers.