Christ is King!

It is Holy Week.  We are entering the Paschal Triduum, which begins with the remembrance of the Last Supper in the evening of Maundy Thursday and ends with the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the morning of Easter Sunday.   In between we are taken through the climax and culmination of Jesus Christ’s vicarious redemptive suffering on our behalf in the remembrance of His Crucifixion on Good Friday and through the intermediate period between His Death and Resurrection on Holy Saturday in which to His followers on earth all appeared lost as His body lay in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea while in the unseen world His Triumph had begun the moment He commended His Spirit to His Father and entered Death’s realm of Hell not as Death’s captive but as his Conqueror.   Holy Week began, as it always does, with Palm Sunday, in which was commemorated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah.  In this event Jesus presented Himself openly to Jerusalem and by extension the nation of Israel as the promised Messiah, the Son of David, and He was initially accepted as such by a crowd that was expecting the Messiah to save their nation from its political yoke and was not ready to truly accept a Messiah Who had come to save them and all the other nations of the world as well from their true oppressors – Sin, Death, and the Devil.   By the end of the week the same crowd that had shouted “Hosanna” and “Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord” as He rode into town was crying “Crucify Him” and mocking Him as He carried His cross down the Via Doloroso towards Calvary.

 

A strange controversy started up on Palm Sunday this year over the expression “Christ is King”.   The controversy apparently began among American neoconservatives in connection with the parting of ways of popular commentator Candace Owens and The Daily Wire, the neoconservative media organization founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing.  This estrangement seems to have something to do with Mr. Shapiro’s unwillingness to accept anything less than 100% support for everything the state of Israel does from Christians and conservatives.   When I first heard mention of the controversy I paid it little attention as I assumed that it had something to do with American neoconservatism’s obsession with democracy and republicanism and that they were blasphemously demanding that Jesus Christ abdicate His throne at the Father’s right hand and run for the office of President of the Universe in a popular election or some such nonsense.  Later, I learned that when Candace Owens had tweeted, or whatever the term is now that that platform has changed its name, “Christ is King” on Palm Sunday, her former colleagues accused her of sending out an anti-Semitic “dog whistle.”  The reasoning, if it can be called that, behind this accusation, is very similar to that employed by the type of organizations who gave us the expression “dog whistle.”   It goes like this: Person X is a bad person.  Person X said Y.  Therefore everyone who says Y is a bad person like Person X.   This is, of course, an example of what in formal logic is called the association fallacy.   If they were to refrain from using it, groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network would have very little to say.   Replace “Person X” with “Nick Fuentes” and “Y” with “Christ is King” and you have the substance, as it were, of the accusation against Owens.

 

This controversy quickly grew beyond the confines of the circles in which it originated, as these things tend to do.  Presumably, for many if not most of those who jumped in on the “Christ is King” debate it was little more than a way of voting for who they liked better, Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro.   It was appalling, however, to see how many people considered to be conservative Christian leaders began regurgitating the fallacious reasoning that Owens’ accusers borrowed from the ADL et al., in some cases even if they carefully avoided joining the condemnation of Owens.

 

St. Paul provides us with an example of how to handle a situation where someone is preaching Christian truth for what we suspect to be unworthy motives:

 

Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will:  The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds: But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.  What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.  For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. (Phil. 1:15-19).

 

Christ is King.   Indeed, even if we were talking about the title rather than the Person, this would be true.   Christ is from the Greek word for “anointed”, which translates the Hebrew word that is Anglicized as “Messiah” which also means “anointed”.   This title was bestowed upon Him for Whom ancient Israel looked  because that Person was to be the Promised Son of David, that is, the King Who would inherit the throne of David are rule forever.   That Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of God, is that very Promised King, is the confession of St. Peter (Mt. 16:16) that secured from the Lord the promise that upon this rock He would build His Church and it is also the belief to which everlasting life is promised (John 20:31).   This is not a secondary or peripheral doctrine.   It is the central Christian truth.   All true Christians believe and confess this truth.   To deny it, to deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Promised King, to deny that Christ is come in the flesh, is the spirit of what the New Testament calls antichrist. (1 Jn. 2:22)

 

In the second chapter of the same epistle in which St. Paul rejoiced that “whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached” he gives an account of the temporal mission of Jesus Christ from His humiliation to His exaltation:

 

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;  And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:10-11)

 

Every tongue will one day confess that Jesus Christ is Lord which is another way of saying that Christ is King.   Either one will willingly and joyfully confess this in faith in this transitory life or one will acknowledge it along with his own ruin when he is brought before the Judge he rejected in life and made to give account.

 

There is no room for anyone to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when you say it” much less to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when so-and-so says it, and when you say it I suspect you are saying it like so-and-so.”   Christ is King, He is Sovereign over all the Universe, and we are to rejoice whenever this is proclaimed regardless of what we think of the person who says it or suspect about that person’s motives.   Otherwise, we would be saying that we consider whatever we find objectionable in this person to be more important than the truth that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.   The other truths confessed in the ancient Creeds are just as important, but nobody is taking exception to “Christ is King” over anything having to do with any of these.  

 

Indeed, it is even worse than a case of idolatrously elevating a lesser matter above the central truth of Christ’s Kingship.   Those who claim “Christ is King” to be an anti-Semitic dog whistle – remember, that if you hear dog whistles that makes you the dog – are in effect allowing a religion to which rejection of Jesus as Christ is fundamental to tell Christians that we are not allowed to confess a central tenet of our faith, the very tenet that divides Christiana from Jews, because it is offensive to them and their religion.   Such dictates cannot be submitted to without betraying the faith and the Lord and Saviour Who purchased us with His own Blood.

 

I wish you all a most blessed and holy Paschal Triduum.

 

Christ is King!

 

Captain Airhead Looks in the Mirror and Sees an Idiot and Thinks He is Looking out the Window at all Canadians

 

In the last few weeks as Captain Airhead and his Grit minions have been on the defensive concerning their carbon tax and its upcoming scheduled increase they have given us cause more than once to ask the question of just how stupid they think Canadians are.   Take, for one example, the terminology with which they choose to frame the matter.  If you have tortured your ears by listening to them on the matter for more than a few seconds you will have undoubtedly heard the expression “price on pollution” umpteen million times. 

 

That sounds good, doesn’t it?  

 

They are making people pay for pollution.  That sounds like they are fining people for dumping garbage, sewage, and chemicals into the lakes and rivers or for producing the kind of toxic air quality that can be found primarily in large cities of the Third World.  The “price on pollution”, however, refers to a tax on the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.   The emission of carbon dioxide is not pollution because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but an essential component of the atmosphere.   Anybody with the most basic of scientific knowledge will be aware that human beings and other animal life take in oxygen when they breathe and breathe out carbon dioxide, which in turn is taken in by plant life that converts it to its use and gives off oxygen.

 

The Liberals must think Canadians are as ignorant of math as they seem to assume them to be of science.   They have been claiming that most Canadians receive more in carbon tax rebates than they pay in the carbon tax itself.   This is, of course, not true, and only a moron would think it to be true.  While governments are prone to spend more than they receive in revenue – the present Liberal government more than any other – the idea of a specific tax that comes with a rebate that exceeds what the tax takes in is ridiculous.   Perhaps you have seen the recent exchange between the evil ditz who is Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister and Minister of Finance and the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in which, having characterized the Conservative demand that the increase in the carbon tax be scrapped as a “cut” to the support Canadians receive from the government in the form of the carbon tax rebates, she said “that’s $1,800 Alberta families won’t get, that’s $1,120 Ontario families won’t get.”   The Conservative leader responded with the observation that according to the parliamentary budget officer “the carbon tax will cost Alberta families $2,943.”  Poilievre then aptly compared this to the actions of a bank robber who “thinks he’s virtuous because he tips the teller on the way out the door.”

 

The carbon tax costs households a lot more than just what they pay out directly on the purchase of energy.  Whenever they go to the grocery store to buy food the price they pay will include the carbon tax paid on the fuel needed to get that food from the farm to the distributor and from the distributor to the store and however many addition transportation steps there may be along the way.  The same, of course, is true of anything else the family buys at the store.   It is difficult to imagine any other single item a tax on which would produce a higher compound cost.   The carbon tax is not the only factor contributing to the inflation that has created an affordability crisis in Canada, but it is also not the only factor for which Captain Airhead and his cronies are responsible.  Indeed, everything they do looks like it was done because they weighed all their options and chose the one that would make life least affordable for the average Canadian.   The housing crisis is largely due to their insane policy of trying to bring as many immigrants and refugees into the country as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of economic, employment, and housing considerations.   It is starting to look like their even more insane policy of making it as quick and easy as possible for Canadians to get a doctor to murder them, euphemistically dubbed MAID – Medical Assistance in Dying – was designed to provide Canadians with a way to opt out of living with the hellish consequences of their misgoverning.   

 

These progressive nincompoops – and being a nincompoop, pronounced with extra stress on the last syllable, is a prerequisite for being a progressive – justify all of this with the words “climate change.”   This is their single biggest display of contempt for the knowledge and intelligence of the ordinary Canadian.  The idea that government should be fighting climate change rests upon the assumption that climate change is a bad thing.  Try telling that to people who lived through the end of an ice age.   You won’t be able to, of course, because the last ice age ended about halfway through the Victorian era but if someone from then were still alive to answer you they would testify that global warming was the best thing that ever happened to them.  The earth’s climate is not now nor has it ever been an unchanging constant.   It is the height of human hubris to think a) that it is all due to our activity and/or b) that we have the power to prevent or control it.   The sane and humble approach to climate change is to observe how the climate is changing to, note among the changes those which will make life easier and be thankful for them, and to note those that will make life more difficult and figure out how best to adjust ourselves so as to live with them.   That is far more sensible than acting like a cartoonish supervillain and trying to bend the world’s climate to our will no matter how many others the happiness and perhaps lives of whom we have to sacrifice in order so to do.

 

Mercifully, Canadians do not appear to be remotely as stupid as the progressives think them to be.  The approval rating of Captain Airhead and the Grits has gone the way of the Titanic and the defectors are not jumping on board the NDP ship which has sprung a leak from which the socialists are attempting to salvage the boat by bailing out the water with a sieve.  Judging from the defeat of the Conservatives motion for a no confidence vote yesterday we are likely going to have to wait for this session of Parliament to come to full term before we see the next Dominion Election.   The longer we have to wait, however, the sicker of both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal we will all become, and the greater their inevitable fall.

Thermidor is on its way.   May the Lord hasten its coming.