Written by S.M. White |
Saturday, March 5, 2022
The battle today is not so much with others, but it’s between our own ears. In our own minds. Fighting to not fear, but to trust the Lord, to move forward with a clear conscience, and be faithful to what the Lord says is true. Like the brave Ukrainian president, we Christians should be willing to stand with no pomp, or favor, or with the world not on our side at all, and say what’s true.

Fear of death, fear of government, fear of mandates, fear of vaccines, fear of anti-vaxers, fear of no income, fear of loss of wealth, fear of what other people will think, fear of growing old, fear of war spilling over, fear of the future, fear of being rejected, fear for your health, fear for loved ones, fear of the culture, fear of missing out, fear of elections, fear of terrorism, fear of abduction, fear of abuse, fear of being exposed, fear of being canceled, fear of peers, fear of making a wrong decision, fear of too much success, fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of global warming, fear of losing power, fear of queers, fear of bad influencers, fear of losing your church, fear of losing your sight, fear of losing your hearing, fear of losing your mind, fear of the unknown, fear of the decline of culture, fear of bad monetary policy, fear of guns, fear of white nationalists, fear of Marxists, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. It’s the air we breathe today. Everything is about fear. It’s what’s for breakfast.
Fear paralyzes us and makes us do crazy things. I can tell you this that even those with all the power and money, they fear the most. Justin Trudeau is a man acting out of fear. He is imposing tyranny out of abject fear that his worldview narrative is falling apart, and that is what most of these authoritarians in control are doing also. They’re afraid of being exposed as wrong, blamed for something, or their side losing, and so they spread fear and control people like little chess pieces, even ruining lives, because they fear.
I believe that it’s possible that even Putin is doing this act of aggression against Ukraine out of fear. If we pay attention to the things he has said for years, he sees what looks like the West falling apart with postmodernism creating all kinds of crazy behaviors, and he has argued for years that Christendom is the key to the survival of a culture and a nation. There is a big rift right now in the Russian Orthodox church, and Ukraine holds the city that is sort of like their Jerusalem.
I believe that he wants control just like Trudeau does, and Kiev, where the Russian Orthodox church was founded. It was founded in 988 after Vladimer of the Rus having been converted to Christianity through a marriage to the Christian Emperor Basil II’s sister had everyone in the city gather at the river Dnieper for a mass baptism.
In 2019 the Ukrainian part of the Russian Orthodox church declared independence from the rest, and the Russian Orthodox church based in Russia rejected this independence, and declared it was still part of the churches “canonical territory”. So, if Putin will have a legacy of restoring Christendom in our day against the rise of the Godless post-modernism in the rest of the West, he must unite the church and its holy seat must be seen as Moscow.
This is I think, one of the biggest motives of this war. He made a flimsy argument to the corruption and neo-Nazification of the governing authorities in Ukraine (which both Ukraine and Russia are regarded as the 2 most corrupt nations in Europe).
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Written by S. M. White |
Monday, November 29, 2021
Our hope of eternal life is secured. Heaven is secured by Christ, whom Paul calls the last Adam (1Cor 15:24). By His obedience and sacrifice, Christ has secured eternal life and the heavenly rest that Adam failed to secure. This is good news for all who rest their faith on Him.

I think one of the hardest sells for us Christians to make to unbelieving world is the fall of all mankind in Adam as our representative. Why, over simply eating a fruit from a tree was there such a fall, such a curse?
I actually agree that if it was just a simple touching of a tree or a little bite of fruit, it seems excessive. But if we look at the biblical text it was far more than that. It was a complete betrayal of God, and an agreement with the deceiving enemy. It was a failure to do what he should do and a taking and doing what he should not do.
To understand the scope of the sin we need look no further than the biblical text itself, but not just at the text of the event itself, but the greater context of the environment, situation and duty Adam had in the garden that shows this was much more than an issue of intemperance. Which is exactly the point that John Calvin makes:
We must, therefore, look deeper than sensual intemperance. The prohibition to touch the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil was a trial of obedience (obedientiae examen), that Adam, by observing it, might prove his willing submission to the command of God (Institutes,2.1.4)
Calvin points out that Adam’s situation was that he was undergoing a “trial”. It was a “trial of obedience”.  We know that in Romans 5, Paul tells us that Adam was a type of the one to come (Christ) -Romans 5:14.
We can understand a lot more about how this was a trial by looking at a the testing that Jesus went through in the wilderness in Matthew 4. Immediately at the start of Jesus ministry he is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. How this parallels with Adams’ temptation is not a coincidence, but this is actually at the heart of Christ’s mission on earth. Christ is the promised Seed of the woman, and this battle with Satan is exactly what Christ came to succeed at where Adam failed.
We may note that Christ came into a fallen world, into a harsh wilderness instead of a safe garden, and with intense suffering and hunger instead of a full stomach. He endures, he succeeds, and does what Adam should have done. He faced the tempter three times! Each time, Christ obeyed God. Instead of agreeing with the tempter, Christ vindicated God, and sent the serpent way! This is what Adam should have done.
If we look earlier in Genesis we see that in Genesis 1:27-30 that God made Adam in His own image, and gave him dominion over everything. Adam was God’s great creation, created above the rest of the creation on earth and given dominion over it. He had a job to do.
God also put the Tree of Life in the garden along with establishing the Sabbath rest. These are signs relating to eternal life, a rest or competition of the probationary trial and entry into consummation.
We see the environment of the trial of obedience starting with Genesis 2:15, which most of our English translations don’t do a good job of translating the word “keep it” in relation to the garden.
The Hebrew word “shamar” there is actually better translated to “guard”. It’s used that way in Genesis 3:24 describing the action of the cherubim with the flaming sword that turned every way to “shamar” (guard) the way to the tree of life. Adam should have guarded the garden from the invading serpent.
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