Des Griffin's Newsletter - November / December 2008
To subscribe: e-mail Des Griffin at alert@midnightmessenger.com
 Dear Friends:
As we approach the end of any year, it is always a good thing to take “stock” (or inventory) of what we — individually and collectively — are all about, where we’re “at” and where we’re headed. To say that we live in “perilous times” (II Timothy 3:1) in an understatement. In some cases it might, in a sense, be said that “men’s hearts are failing them for fear, and for looking after the things that are coming upon the earth” (Luke 21:26). For many, it may appear that insoluble problems are descending upon them from every point of the compass. Hundreds of thousands are losing their homes. Even more are losing their jobs and are facing imminent bankruptcy. Things look bleak. This is not the “America” they were led to believe in — an America which, like the legendary “promised land,” would always be “flowing with milk and honey.” Many are unable to comprehend why they are surrounded by so many social and economic “weeds” and “thistles.” Millions find themselves in the midst of what appears to be a barren wilderness — a location which promises little if any real hope for the future. As a result of recent events, countless thousands are staggering blindly through that wilderness hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
About 25 years ago your editor was pondering the national and world scenes as they then existed. He wondered why so many apparently bright, intelligent people were so “blind,” so oblivious to the reality of what was happening to our nation. The masses were so wrapped up in their own fantasy worlds they seemed “unreachable.” He was puzzled, perplexed. Even after writing Fourth Reich of the Rich (1976) and Descent Into Slavery? (1980) — which basically explained the causes for the effects unfolding on the national and international scenes at that time — he still didn’t understand why the average person couldn’t “see” the flashing warning signs or “hear” the alarms signals that should have been clearly audible to anyone with an understanding of history. It didn’t seem to make sense.
Around that time, he stumbled over a document that grabbed his attention, made sense, and added a vitally important insight that had been missing from his overall worldview. It was an essay titled Encouraging the Remnant. Written by Albert J. Nock (1877-1945), it pointed out a fundamental reality that is totally unrecognized by all but a few.
Nock mentioned a conversation he had had in the early 1930s with a “very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation.” This individual declared that he had “a mission to the masses” and “was called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the populace. What do you think?”
Nock, a well-known author, wrote that, “Naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe.” Instead of giving his highly intelligent acquaintance an answer that might have been deemed appropriate or “politically correct,” he zeroed in on historical precedent. Nock may have remembered philosopher
George Santayana’s off-repeated observation, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” Instead of answering directly, Nock “referred him to the story of Isaiah.... The prophet’s career began at the end of King Uzziah’s reign, say about 740 B.C. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however — like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens ... — where, at the end, the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.
“In the year of Uzziah’s death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come: ‘Tell them what a worthless lot they are,’ He said. ‘Tell them what is wrong, and why, and what’s going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong, and keep giving it to them.
“‘I suppose I ought to tell you,’ He added, ‘that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out of it with your life.’
“Isaiah had been willing to take on the job. In fact, he had asked for it. But the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it?”
“‘Ah,’ the Lord said, ‘you do not get the point. There is a remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone to the dogs, they are the ones that will come back and build up a new society. Meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off and set about it.’”
Later in the essay, Albert Nock illustrates the folly of any honest person, such as the prophet Isaiah, even considering the possibility of seeking mass acceptance and support.
“Currently, society is filled with individuals who strive for mass acceptance, mass approval. One can find them in every field: politics, media, religion. Such individuals take great care to put [their] doctrine in such a shape as will capture the masses’ attention and interest. The main problem with this [mass-man] approach is its reaction on the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunistic sophistication of one’s doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as possible. This means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit... If a writer, you aim at getting many readers... If a reformer, many converts, and so on. But as you see all sides, in the realization of all these desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities ... that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and the desires that prompt it, turn their back on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.
“Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen. Anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen.
“The Remnant only want the best you have, whatever that might be. Give them that and they are satisfied... In a sense, nevertheless, as I said, it is not a rewarding job. A prophet to the Remnant will not grow purse-proud from the returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it... .
“All this and much more of the same lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses. It is, and must be, part of the general technique of getting the mass-man’s ear... The prophet to the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids. Not only so, but if they find him employing such aids, it is ten to one they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off.
“The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting an estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that found him or where they are, or how many. They do not write and tell him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions of a roadside signpost — that is, with very little thought about the signpost, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but without very serious thought about the directions.” (The full text of Albert Nock’s essay is found in Storming the Gates of Hell, pgs. 183-190).
MISSING DIMENSION
The reality of what Albert Nock had written was truly profound. It was a “missing dimension” that helped fill in some of the “holes” that still existed in this writer’s developing worldview. It made perfect sense, and served to connect many of the remaining “dots” in how he viewed the world in which he lived. In addition, it helped add even more power and understanding to the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are only certain people who, by the sovereign grace of the Creator God, have been given “eyes to see and ears to hear.” As Jesus said to his disciples whom he had called, “[I]t is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them (others who, “seeing see not, and hearing hear not”) it is not given” (Matthew 13:11,13). Without that divinely ordained spiritual gift of discernment, peoples’ minds are “blind” and “deaf” to spiritual reality. This is the result of the spiritual death that came about as a consequence of Adam’s rebellion and disobedience (Genesis 2:17). As a result, being spiritually dead, “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned” (I Corinthians 2:14). “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (I Corinthians 1:18). Since the time of Adam all his descendants, with the single exception of Jesus, have been spiritually “dead in [their] trespasses and sins” — “walk[ing] according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air that now works in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 1:1,2). That “prince” or ruler is Satan, elsewhere identified as “the god of this world [who] has blinded the eyes of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ ... should shine upon them (II Corinthians 4:4). Only the risen Lord Jesus Christ, the one by whom “all things were made, and without [whom] was nothing made that was made” (John 1:2), can break that Satanic bondage and “quicken” or make spiritually alive those who were “dead in [their] trespasses and sins.”
Even as the Apostle Paul wrote to the “saints” or “chosen” ones who comprised the first-century church at Ephesus, “But God who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved), And has raised us up together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: ... For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: It is the gift of God; Not of works lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:4-10).
SPIRITUAL LIGHT AND TRUTH DEMONIZED
Particularly in today’s “sophisticated” world of the early 21st Century spiritual light and truth are rare commodities. They are demonized on every front. Many “run scared”when confronted with the possibility of having to make moral judgments. They have unwittingly swallowed the Satanic lie that everyone can be their own “god” and make up their own rules as they go through life. They are constantly told that their variety of “truth” has as much validity as the multitude of other personally-held “truths” of the people around them. There is no such thing as “absolutes.” Everything is said to be “relative.” To hold any other view is deemed “judgmental,” “bigoted” and “narrowminded.” Such “fanatics” must be shunned.
The declaration of the Lord Jesus Christ that he is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6), is laughed to scorn by those who are recognized as “leaders” in American society today. Such an “ridiculously archaic” idea is considered beneath the dignity of most. The same overview holds sway in most other former Bible-believing nations. For example, writing recently in the British paper, The Guardian, George Monbiot sneered at the few “gibbering numbskulls” and “screaming ignoramuses” in American politics who hold some fundamentalist Bible beliefs. He asked how, in a society where “learning is a grave political disadvantage, ... was this allowed to happen?” It’s a “desperate joke ... outrageous and utterly insane.” Monbiot’s convenient scapegoat for what he, with his own perceived intellectual superiority, sees as the root of the problem is of course “religion.” In America, “one theme is both familiar and clear: religion — in particular fundamentalist religion — makes you stupid. The US is the only country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.”
In other words, it’s those gibbering numbskulls, those screaming ignoramuses, those dumb, stupid Bible-believing fundamentalist morons who are (allegedly) at the heart and core of most of America’s problems. A way must obviously be found to purge American society of such a mentally disruptive scourge. Only then will America be able to rise to its true potential.
Though not declared in such straightforward terms, that’s the clear message that is written “between the lines.” Clearly ignored is the fact that it was those biblically-based laws and principles that formed the foundation upon which the American Republic was based. Destroy that biblical foundation (which the Pilgrims knew would result in America becoming “as a city on a hill ... with the eyes of all people upon us” — John Winthrop), and America sinks to or below the level of most of the other God-rejecting “secular” nations with which it is surrounded in the world.
Looking around American society in 2008, we see that destructive process at work. To paraphrase a scriptural truth, “Even as [Americans] did not like to retain God in their knowledge [educational system], God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Romans 1: 28). Webster defines “repro- bate” as, “not enduring proof or trial; not of standard purity or fineness... Abandoned to sin; lost to virtue or grace.” What we see happening to our once great nation is the result of reprobate thinking. The United States is in the final stages of disintegration. It’s cracking, crumbling and falling apart before our very eyes.
Why? Yet another reason: “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather that light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3:19-21).
MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY
How interested are you, personally, in learning the truth about yourself and the world in which you live? At Midnight Messenger we take that responsibility very seriously. A recent letter from a subscriber in Birmingham, England, indicates that we are enjoying some success: “A note to say how much I appreciate Midnight Messenger. It is a strange thing isn’t it. The contents are largely bad news, but we enjoy reading it. I guess it is the satisfaction of reading the truth even when it is unpleasant....”
As we are about to enter another year, let’s not squander our time with irrelevancies that have no substance. “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good” (I Thessalonians 5:21). Spiritually speaking, no other foundation can any man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 3:11). He is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Remember that Truth is the most valuable commodity (“thing of use or advantage to mankind”) that we can possess. Value it above everything else. Have a safe holiday season and a wonderful 2009.
Best Wishes
Des Griffin
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