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Say those who own everything
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
- Prepare your outside work, Make it fit for yourself in the field; And afterward build your house. (Proverbs 24:27)
The question, “what is truth?” has been successfully answered. It was answered millenniums ago. The Greek word for “truth” is aletheia, which refers to “divine revelation” and is related to a word that literally means “what can’t be hidden.” Should we be giving any serious consideration to someone who says, “Your truth is not my truth?” The short answer is no. The truth we’re talking about is the true truth. Christians should know that we have a personal relationship with this truth. God—in the person of the Jesus Christ, says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” is the very truth that can’t be hidden, denied, or defeated.
Knowing the truth as divine revelation allows those who can trust in something more than their eyes or ears, have a distinct advantage over those who deny the reality of divine revelation. Using our God-given diffuse authority should encourage the informed believer to warn of the abuse of concentrated authority. One feature of that abuse is the loss of transparency.
Christians who know the truth when the rest of us don’t, have the responsibility and the obligation to speak truth to power.
I believe that too many of us today are ignorant—even oblivious—of the reality we are facing.
We’re expected to process an unprecedented flood of information, but we have not availed ourselves of the opportunity to fully know the truth, only trusting those who control the narratives. We think we know who to believe, but do we really? For Christians, there is no excuse to allow others to live in darkness—like the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s “Republic.” [https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/education-and-platos-allegory-of-the-cave-bf7471260c50]
Ultimately, the truth will set us free eternally, but while we’re still here, how now shall we live without truth? Take for example this story:
In reviewing the book, “Against the Great Reset,” edited by Michael Walsh, and available on Amazon, Darryl Cooper reveals this truth: In 2016, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Danish Social Democrat Member of Parliament, Ida Auken, was advertising her vision of centralized property ownership. In the essay she predicts, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” It is unlikely to be a coincidence that in the same year, the World Economic Forum, (WEF) published a video to extol its Great Reset program, using those very words. The video, “The Great Reset,” went viral that same year, and this was how many of us heard the phrase for the first time. In a hilarious display of irony, The Anti-Defamation League—hoping to demean and silence anyone alarmed by the video—then campaigned to denounce “The Great Reset Conspiracy” on a web Page that still features a screenshot from the WEF’s very same video, “The Great Reset” where it appeared big block letters. See: [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/conspiracy-theory-conspiracy-fact/]
As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.
Auken (pictured) and the WEF is very serious about depriving ownership to people who want to own things—like homes, cars, and businesses for example—and who might object to anyone trying to prevent them from doing so. Specifically, people in America object to collectivism. It appears that the word collectivism is quietly and subtly being redefined. The online editors of Indeed weigh in with, “Collectivist culture is when a community focuses on the group’s needs by working together as opposed to focusing on individual needs. A common example of a collectivist group is a family. Families typically work together to help each other survive and thrive.” Hopefully there is more to a family than that definition. [https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/collectivism-work-culture#:~:text=Collectivist%20culture%20is%20when%20a,each%20other%20survive%20and%20thrive.]
Traditionally, this has been the accepted definition: “Collectivism is a political theory associated with communism. More broadly, it is the idea that people should prioritize the good of society over the welfare of the individual.” [https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/collectivism]
Going further, the definition states, “In a collectivist system, power should be in the hands of the people as a whole, not in the hands of a few powerful folks. Collectivism is the opposite of individualism. Ideally, in a collectivist society, decisions benefit all the people. This is a difficult idea to put into practice, as seen in the attempted collectivist society of Soviet communism.”
Simply put, with communism and collectivism, individual property rights really can’t and usually don’t exist. What does scripture teach us about property and investing?
- “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.” (Matthew 25:14-18 ESV)
There are two important aspects of this parable that some might miss. The first is, for the two servants who were given more than the third servant, it was likely their desire to invest the talents—each worth the equivalent of 20 years of wages—because the master believed his trust in them garnered their love and respect enough to act as if the talents were their own. The servant who resented his master and hid the treasure, deserved his scorn and harsh judgement. Good stewardship and investing can be seen as biblical. The other, more subtle clue for our purposes here is Marx’s appropriation of the phrase, “…to each according to his ability,” when he wrote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs]
Jack MacPherrin, writing in the The Epoch Times, details how large national banks have been granted property and ownership rights over our own property rights with a cynical take on collectivism. “Under UCC Article 8, protected creditors of securities intermediaries-such as the world’s largest banks-are given priority ownership to security entitlements if they use customer assets as collateral. What this means is that if your broker were to go bankrupt, the broker’s secured creditors would be given priority over what you thought was your security entitlement. You would become an “unsecured creditor,” and your claim to your securities would be at the very back of the line. In the event of a wide-scale financial crash, millions of investors could lose everything to those secured creditors.” Millions of small of small investors will lose their life savings while the big bankers are protected through bad legislation.
This is the granular reality of the divine revelation of “what can’t be hidden.” There is no excuse to live in a dark cave… unless we don’t know that’s where we are. The light of the divine revelation is the truth; the truth in the here and now—the light that leads to paradise. The truth may well be that these are days of Noah and the days Elijah, who will come, “…to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” (Malachi 3:24) While we are here now, our children, our family, our friends, our nation must see what the political leaders and wealthy oligarchs are doing to keep all of us in the dark.
WePhoto by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash
