Author: David Crump

Author, Speaker, Retired Biblical Studies & Theology Professor & Pastor, Passionate Falconer, H-D Chopper Rider, Fumbling Disciple Who Loves Jesus Christ

Cheap Grace, Judgment, and the Glory of God

Yep, this is a long one. But I hope you will read it in stages, if not all in one sitting, and seriously consider the Biblical evidence undergirding my argument.

Thanks for your patience. I pray that my readers will be challenged and edified, to use an old fashioned word. And share this with your church leaders, if need be.

Now, let’s think about Cheap Grace, Judgment, and the Glory of God.

This past Tuesday provided an opportunity for me to reflect on the all-too-common tendency within the American church for teachers to avoid any mention of divine judgment with the same determination exhibited by a maniacal, bug-eyed cat as it panics at the sight of a soapy bathtub.

Yet, for anyone who pays attention to Scripture, it should be clear that acknowledging the looming inevitability of God’s condemnation of the sin in our lives – yes, a final judgment for every follower of Jesus Christ as well as for the rest of humanity – is the only way forward for anyone hoping to grasp the magnitude and meaning of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross.

If there is no threat of judgment, then why must Jesus die? That is the heart of the issue.

Without a straightforward explanation of why God judges universal human rebellion, a rebelliousness which everyone must own up to eventually, whether in this life or the next, it is impossible to understand the blood-curdling “injustice” of the Father’s holy judgment executed against an innocent, sinless Galilean at Calvary.

Far too many church-goers are suckled at the teats of cheap grace, even as they speak admiringly of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s heroism and pass around lightly worn, rarely read copies of his masterwork, The Cost of Discipleship. But the fact is, a cheap misappropriation of God’s grace – if God’s grace is ever truly appropriated at all – is the only brand of faith available when its significance is divorced from the holiness of God and the imperative of judgment.

The reason for the Western church’s love affair with cheap grace is simple.

The Impostor of Therapeutic Religion

American Christianity has become a mercilessly cheerful, feel-good brand of therapeutic religion. The average church service is meticulously orchestrated and stage managed as a place where no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable, for any reason at all. The projection of a unilateral, universal standard of approval – not of appropriate acceptance, mind you, but of blanket approval – is a therapeutic demand of the many professional pastor/therapists teaching from our pulpits.

Philip Rieff explained America’s new religious reality years ago in his prescient book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. Exploring the rising dominance of psychotherapy in Western society, Rieff observes the West’s thorough-going rejection of such ancient religious values as self-denial, sacrificial obedience, acts of penance, and the confession of true guilt born of personal sin. As a result:

“Western man [sic] could be free at last from an authority [i.e., the historic Christian church and the biblical gospel of Christ] depending upon (the individual’s) sense of sin. Even now, sin is all but incomprehensible to [Western society] inasmuch as the moral demand system [that is, Western culture] no longer generates powerful inclinations toward obedience or faith, nor feelings of guilt when those inclinations are over-ridden by others for which sin is the ancient name” (209-210).

Tragically, in a vain attempt to maintain its “relevance” and attract new members, the Christian church drinks deeply from the same therapeutic fountains and then goes skinny dipping with the same therapeutic sharks that are drugging and devouring the rest of Western society. Rather than behave as the gatekeepers they are called to be, too many church leaders make themselves indistinguishable from the practical atheists (whether religious or not) who trace their therapeutic, or “pastoral,” credentials back to Freud.

As I observe the consistently glib presentation of the Lord’s Supper in our Protestant churches – and no, I am not referring to an absence of “liturgy,” however one defines it, but to the remarkably unserious way in which the sacrament is typically wedged into a tight service schedule and then presented in a manner that barely touches upon the terrible redemptive drama of sin, judgment, and grace found at its heart – I am reminded of Rieff’s summary of another churchman’s defense of therapeutic Christianity:

“Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience…What then should churchmen do? Become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution – under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic” (215).

Rieff concludes, “Both East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically, to the gospel of self-fulfillment.”

Before leaving this issue, I recently attended a communion service in a mid-western Reformed church. As the pastor offered the two elements to his congregants, no mention was made of the broken body or the shed blood of Jesus. Instead, the bread and the wine were described as the beneficial products, the fruit, of God’s good creation, given to us by the Creator to sustain our lives.

I seriously considered walking out rather than listen to such pretentious, blasphemous, therapeutic drivel.

Naturally, many will object to being tarred with the therapeutic brush. But I will return to the opening of this article and submit as exhibit A in my defense of Rieff’s argument the simple fact that precious few congregations are ever made to confront these two essential, Biblical truths: 1) that divine judgment lies at the heart of the New Testament gospel (for without divine judgment there is no gospel), and 2) that the ultimate purpose for every believer’s redemption is not the forgiveness of his or her sins but the magnification of God’s glory.

In other words, the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ is, in fact, the most anti-Western, anti-cultural, anti-therapeutic (in the contemporary sense of the word) message in the world. And it always has been.

No, Christians Are Not Delivered from Divine Judgment

First, every Christian must rid him/herself of the pervasive misconception that faith in Jesus’ sacrificial work on the cross will deliver us from eventual judgement. It won’t.

Jesus himself warns the disciples, and anyone else listening, that public shame and embarrassment, that is, future judgment, awaits us all when God eventually reveals our secret, hidden acts of wickedness for all to see and to hear:

For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore, consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them. (Luke 8:17-18)

Consider carefully, indeed. I don’t know how else to read Jesus’ words except to understand that all of my sin, beginning with my many secret sins, will be publicly exposed on Judgment Day. Everyone will know the full measure of my guilt.

No sinful act, malicious thought, or evil intention will remain hidden when God’s righteous eternity finally swallows up our fallen temporality. For our holy God intends one day to lay it all bare for public viewing. And He has an important reason for doing this, which I will explore below.

The apostle Paul also anticipates “the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares” (Romans 2:16). Notice that the assurance of future judgment is an integral feature of Paul’s gospel! (For example, see Acts 17:30-31; 28:25-27; Rom 2:1-12). Paul also repeats Jesus’ warning about supposedly “secret” sins never remaining secret before God. Furthermore, the context of Paul’s statement offers no room for distinctions between believers vs. unbelievers. No. The Father’s impending judgment will apply to everyone, equally. No exceptions. And anyone who imagines they are explaining the gospel of Christ while failing to explain the inevitable judgment of God is not sharing Paul’s gospel. Period. Full stop.

Paul also compares that Day of Judgment to a house fire that will burn through everyone’s home, revealing the truth about everyone’s life. Every secret is revealed:

…their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Corinthians 3:13-15)

I will have more to say about this passage before I conclude.

And finally, we have 2 Corinthians 5:10:

For we must ALL appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good OR BAD.

The Books Will Be Opened

A common theme in ancient Jewish literature depicts the Last Judgment as the final balancing of God’s heavenly account books. “The books” are opened. God has been keeping an exhaustive record, throughout all of human history, preserving a heavenly balance sheet of every righteous and unrighteous act or thought performed or harbored by every human being who has ever lived.

No one is exempt.

Recall the New Testament’s lengthiest description of Judgment Day in the book of Revelation 20:11-15:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

We must honestly confront the words in this text.

Each and every person, without exception, will be judged by God according to “what they had done.” Of course, everyone’s account will fall short. When judged according to “what we have done,” no one’s life proves satisfactory or acceptable to the Holy One.

This reckoning with the heavenly books proves once and for all that everyone falls short of God’s righteous expectations. No one is righteous, no not one. Everyone deserves eternal punishment in the lake of fire, including those who have cast their lot with the crucified, resurrected Savior, Jesus Christ.

Even the faithful who receive some measure of reward for their episodic obedience to Jesus – remember Paul’s words about the rewards for obedience surviving the fire of judgment in 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 – still deserve to be separated from God. For no human accomplishments, not even the most righteous acts of the saintliest of saints, can outweigh the overwhelming, immoral landslide of selfish, wicked decisions made by fallen people. And that includes you and me.

But there is a ray of hope.

For there is another book on display – the Book of Life. The pages of this book are not filled with lists of human actions but only with lists of names. And these names are written not with ink but with the shed blood of the crucified, resurrected Lamb of God.

This contrast between the multiple books issuing unremitting, universal judgment vs. the one book securing eternal redemption for everyone whose name is written in the blood of the Lamb is an extraordinarily powerful image. We must interpret this image clearly. Observe that even the redeemed, whose names are inscribed by Christ’s own steady, nail-pierced hand into the Lamb’s book of life, have been judged as deserving eternal damnation by the biographies of wickedness recorded in the previously opened books of works.

But the appearance of the Book of Life explains the difference between judgment and condemnation, for while everyone is judged to be a failure, not everyone is condemned to eternal punishment.

It does not matter how many rewards a Christian eventually receives from the Father. A towering mountain of glittering rewards would never be meritorious enough to rescue a guilty sinner, however saintly, from the lake of fire. No one will ever stand before Christ and say, “I deserve to be here with you because of the many good things I did in your name. Look here, don’t these rewards – from you, by the way! – prove it?” But, then, that is surely one of the damnable thoughts already judged when the multiple books of works were first opened!

I suspect that this very thought is harbored by many of us church-goers because we are all sinners and this is the way sinners think, even if only intermittently. After all, isn’t it a modern, therapeutic mandate to believe in ourselves, to love ourselves, to pump ourselves up by imagining that we can achieve anything when we put our mind to it? Isn’t self-actualization the result of forgiveness?

Insights Brought Only by God’s Judgment

Our heavenly Father, however, appears to be fully intent upon using His Day of Final Judgment to drive home the divine perspective on Christ’s crucifixion, and to make it apparent before the angels, demons, and all humanity.

I cannot point to any one Biblical text that draws together these various streams of theology and puts them all together coherently. But I do believe that my following conclusions are the necessary results of various lines of teaching scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments:

This heavenly moment of moral unmasking and divine accounting will, for the very first time, open the eyes of all humanity to see the Truth of Christ’s sacrifice as the Father had always intended.

For the first time, I will see, feel, and own for myself the full weight, ugliness, destructive power, and wretched blasphemy of the parasitic, destructive thing called SIN as it infects God’s creation and my personal life

For the first time, I will thoroughly understand how horribly deserving I am of God’s condemnation and unending punishment for my sinfulness. I will finally see how deeply offensive, even repulsive, my wickedness has always been to the Holy One enthroned in heaven.

I will finally understand the magnitude of God’s unending grace and mercy as He patiently withheld his judgment from me throughout a frequently rebellious lifetime that so richly deserved His daily condemnation. I will finally begin to appreciate the magnitude of God’s love, care, and patience.

I will finally know something of the full measure of guilt, shame, and condemnation that Christ took onto his own shoulders as he hung from that cross at Calvary. I will begin to see the horror that must have erupted within Jesus’ own being as the perfect, sinless Son of God not only experienced the penalty of his Father’s judgment on human sin but also appropriated the guilt and shame of wicked, human rebellion as his very own, causing the Father to turned his back on His one and only Son.

I will finally understand how and why the crucified, resurrected Jesus is the only mediator between myself and the Father, and how absolutely naïve, ignorant, rebellious, and repugnant is every alternative proposal for a “meaningful religious experience.”

I will finally grasp the incomparable sacrifice made by our heavenly Father when He devised this plan to execute his perfect, eternal Son in order to expiate, to propitiate, the raging, rebellious, blasphemies emanating from the noxious disobedience of every sinner who has ever lived.

The long-suffering patience, care, concern, mercy, devotion, commitment, fidelity, love, and grace of God the Father will finally become apparent to all, blinding the legions of fallen humanity with the brilliance God’s true glory. And all of humanity, including me, will finally give this Savior God the full measure of praise, adoration, and glory that He has always deserved, but never received…until now.

Even condemned unbelievers will glorify God for his righteousness and the fairness of his judgments as they are taken away into the lake of fire. And the demons in hell will welcome them as they all praise the goodness and justice of God together.

God Saves Us to Glorify Himself

Now we are finally at a place where we can appreciate the second biblical truth I promised above as a prerequisite for uprooting the Western malaise of popular, therapeutic religion.

The ultimate purpose of the Father’s gift of salvation in Christ is not the forgiveness of our sins but God’s glorification of Himself. Human redemption is first and foremost about the majesty of the Redeemer, not the good fortune of the redeemed.

Yes, guilty sinners find cleansing and reconciliation through God’s gift of grace available in Jesus. The forgiveness of sin is obviously an important priority in the plan of salvation. But ultimately even this gracious benefit of salvation finally works to recruit us into the army of saved sinners who will spend eternity exalting the glory of their Savior God.

The Old Testament, specifically the book of Exodus, begins this important theme as Israel’s Holy, Redeemer God, Yahweh, rescues His chosen people from their Egyptian slavery. Even as Yahweh promises to rescue Israel, He warns that He will harden Pharaoh’s heart, ensuring that Pharaoh will fight against Israel’s release. In other words, God deliberately creates obstacles to obstruct the accomplishment of His own redemptive plan!

Why would God do such a thing?

The answer: In order to make room for God’s glorification of Himself.

Pharaoh’s hardheartedness gives Yahweh the opportunity to perform His ten mighty acts, beginning with the Nile River turning to blood and finishing with the deaths of the first born on Passover night. Yahweh explains Himself by saying: I will harden Pharaoh’s heart…so that I gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD (Exod. 14:4); I will gain glory through Pharaoh (Exod. 14:17); The Egyptians will know that I am the LORD when I gain glory through Pharaoh (Exod. 14:18).

Yes, God dearly wants to rescue his suffering people. But beyond that, redemption’s ultimate goal is the fulfilment of God’s holy desire to “gain glory for Himself.”

No prophet explores this theme more thoroughly than Ezekiel.

Ezekiel proclaimed God’s message to the scattered people of southern Israel, known as Judah, explaining to them why they had been destroyed by the Babylonians and why God was going to restore their fortunes by returning them to their homeland. God’s explanations are not what we would expect:

I had concern for my holy name (says the LORD), which the people of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone. Therefore, say to the Israelites, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes. (Ezek. 36:21-23)

Similar explanations recur throughout the book. I urge you to read the prophet Ezekiel and look for them sometime.

God punished Judah for its rebellion and sent the people into Babylonian exile in order to protect the “holiness of His name.” Now, God says that He will soon rescue Judah from their captivity, but their coming deliverance is not something He is doing for them as much as it is something that God is doing for Himself.

“I am not saving you for your sake, people of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name,” says the LORD.

In other words, our Savior God keeps his promises, first and foremost, so everyone can know that God always keeps his promises. And, oh yes, by the way, we get the added benefit of knowing that we can trust in God’s faithfulness as a result, BUT that is a secondary benefit of God’s faithfulness. The primary benefit is God’s final exaltation, his glorification by all of creation as The Supreme, Holy Promise Keeper.

Personal Salvation is Intended to Glorify God

Ezekiel’s theological evaluation of Israel’s deliverance from Babylonian exile is no less true for the gift of God’s one and only Son and the final revelation of God’s holiness and justice at the Final Judgment. Our heavenly Father sacrificed his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, in order to glorify himself as the one and only merciful, gracious, redeemer God who willingly suffered on behalf of his people.

The fact that all those who have faith in Jesus will receive the forgiveness of their sins is gravy, folks. Pure, gracious gravy dripping over the edges of God’s spacious banqueting table. But the main meal is God’s exaltation.

We are not the centerpiece of God’s story. God is. And ALL of God’s works, but especially Jesus’ suffering on the cross, eventually point back to the Father and find their fulfilment in him as they glorify HIM.

But, of course, none of this is particularly therapeutic.

In fact, many find it deeply offensive. Doesn’t this perspective paint God as the supreme ego-maniac, a heavenly narcissist sitting on his preposterously ostentatious throne demanding that everyone kiss his ring? What type of God stages history in such a way as to make everything point back to him as some kind of heavenly hotshot?

Alternatively, we have the people, including Christians, who make jokes about how boring heaven will be if we are expected to sing never-ending praises to God for all eternity. How mind-numbingly inconceivable that would be!

In fact, such unimaginative, banal, and ultimately ego-centric protests – for they really are protests against God’s nature, not questions in search of clarification – reveal several things:

that we have no concept of what it means for God to be God;

that we have no concept of what it means for God to be Holy;

that we have no concept of what it means for us to be guilty sinners;

that we have no concept of what it meant for Jesus to suffer and die as our substitute on the cross;

that we have no concept of what it means to be a sinner saved by God’s gift of grace.

For only on the day of Final Judgment will all these pressing, existential, spiritual concerns be made clear. And only then will we all sing with full-throated adoration that it is only right, and true, and just, that the ultimate goal of our salvation has never been the forgiveness of our sins, but has always been the magnification of the glory, honor, worship, and praise of the eternal, holy Savior God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who devoted themselves to the redemption, not only of humanity, but of the entire creation.

In that moment, we will praise God for issuing his judgment over our fallen lives because it was only through his revelation of judgment that the scales fell from our eyes, allowing us to see the Truth of who we are in the presence of the Holy One.

Only then will we be equipped enthusiastically to join with the angels in singing:

“‘Holy, holy, holy

is the Lord God Almighty,’

who was, and is, and is to come.”

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.”

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!”

“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”

As Israel Claims It only Acts in Self-Defense, It Is a Good Time to Remember the Deir Yassin Massacre

Dina Elmuti retells her grandmother’s story of fleeing the massacre by Israeli troops of well over 100 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948.

Fatima Radwan on a visit to Deir Yassin in 2015. Photo by Dina Elmuti 

Many Israeli historians insist that the massacre never happened.

Elmuti’s grandmother says otherwise. She is living testament to the inhumanity of war, whether it is a Jewish war against Arabs or an Arab war against Israelis.

Below is an excerpt from Elmuti’s article at the Electronic Intifada. It’s entitled “Deir Yassin Makes a Mockery of Israel’s ‘Never Again” Pledge.”

As Israeli security forces continue to ravage the people of the West Bank, now is a good time to remember what happened at Deir Yassin.

. . . Earlier that same morning, my great-grandmother, Aziza, and her oldest daughter, Rifka who was 13 at the time, went to the village bakery to bake bread. That was something they did each morning as their homes were not equipped with ovens.

My grandmother, nearly 10, and her five younger siblings remained at home.

A tribute to child survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre; Fatima Radwan is pictured in the middle of the top left row. Photo by Dina Elmuti

Inside the bakery, my great-grandmother and great aunt witnessed a horrific scene that continues to haunt me. My grandmother often shared this story with us because she believed it was our responsibility to never forget.

While holding villagers in the bakery hostage, Zionist soldiers ordered the baker, Hussein al-Shareef from the town of Lydd, to throw his son Abdul Rauf into the burning oven. After refusing, the soldiers knocked Hussein to the ground and proceeded to throw Abdul Rauf into the oven while his father watched.

“Follow your son. He needs you there,” said one of the soldiers before throwing Hussein in next.

These are among scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history. Yet, this memory often remains too controversial to share.

Telling it challenges the myths that Israel has manufactured.

Following the gruesome scene, soldiers took the captive villagers and paraded them through the streets of Jerusalem. That is how Zionist forces celebrated their “victory” in Deir Yassin.

Upon returning to the village, the male villagers were lined up against the stone quarry wall and executed. Bodies riddled with bullets were then dumped into a mass grave and set aflame.

Approximately 110 villagers were massacred. Untold hours of human life, gone up in flames. . . 

You can read the entire article here.

How Would You Respond?

The escalating violence instigated by the Israeli military in the West Bank continues unabated.

The numbers of dead, wounded, and arrested Palestinians far exceeds the number of Israeli civilians killed last week in Israel. But this is par for the course.

Israel’s vengeance against the undifferentiated “mass” of neighboring Palestinians always far exceeds the damage done by isolated acts of Palestinian violence.

God intended to curb the ancient urges for Israelite vengeance with his rule of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Modern Israel, however, has kicked that rule to the curb.

Israel now insists on a dead body for an eye, or five of their dead or injured for one of ours.

The two videos below are only a tiny portion of the many available reports that western, corporate media deliberately ignore.

I challenge you to ask yourself, How would you respond to such treatment?

When Will Israel’s Jewish Citizens Uniformly Condemn Their Country’s Institutionalized Terrorism Against Palestinians?

The recent flurry of seemingly random shootings committed by Palestinian men in Israel has spurred a new wave of demands that Palestinian leaders “condemn these acts of terrorism” against innocent Israeli civilians.

Naturally, every Christian should certainly condemn these acts of violence and grieve with the victims’ families.

However, as I mention in my book, Like Birds in a Cage, such attacks are extremely rare. Their rarity is especially noteworthy when we recall that millions of Palestinians are subjected to Israel’s state-sponsored terrorism on a daily basis throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

For those of us who follow this story, it is not unusual to read weekly accounts about Israeli soldiers demolishing Palestinian homes and property, cutting down family olive groves, or  attacking, beating, arresting, and shooting Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and old men.

What amazes me about Palestinians in Israel/Palestine is how docile they remain in the face of Israel’s unrelieved terrorist campaign against them.

Below are excerpts from two recent pieces in Haaretz newspaper written by the Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Click on the titles to read the entire articles.

Hass and Levy speak for the small minority of Israeli Jews who faithfully cultivate a humanitarian conscience, seeing Palestinians as fellow human beings equal to themselves.

First, Hass’ article, “For the Palestinians in the West Bank, It’s an Exception, Not a ‘Terror Wave” (all emphasis in mine):

While the Palestinian public understands the attackers’ motives, the vast majority does not choose this path, which does not advance their cause, and has reservations about targeting civilians. But condemnation? Let Israelis first condemn the violence they exercise against Palestinians.

The three acts of murder-suicide perpetrated by four Palestinians — from both sides of the Green Line — in less than two weeks only highlight the absence of a leading political Palestinian body, employing a single, clear and unifying strategy. The attacks reflect internal divisions and the painful awareness of Palestinian weakness and inability to act in the face of Israel’s might. On the other hand, the fact that so few choose this route, despite its availability, indicates a broader political understanding that such attacks do not further the Palestinian cause.

The vast majority is voting with its feet: it knows that individual wolf attacks driven by despair or revenge have not, are not and will not achieve a thing. They won’t change the balance of power. The Palestinian public in the West Bank understands this without being thus directed from above, without open public discourse on the topic and while its political organizations, mainly those of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, are at their lowest point in terms of power and public confidence — and are in conflict and competition with one another more than ever before.

Every Palestinian, on both sides of the Green Line, has many reasons to wish that Israelis feel pain, because it’s they and not only their government that are responsible for the Palestinians’ predicament. It’s likely that this was the desire of the four suicide-murderers — regardless of their background, family circumstances or individual character. Israelis immediately know, since there is an entire apparatus disseminating such information, which attacker had been arrested previously, after which attack candy were handed out and next to which assailant’s house young people celebrated (with total disrespect for the family’s pain). But Israelis, on the whole, are not interested in the extent to which Israel, and they themselves, as its citizens, constantly and for many decades have been harming Palestinians, as individuals and as a people.

This huge gap between specific knowledge and willful lack of knowledge is sufficient to explain why the Palestinian public in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is indifferent to the recent attacks by individuals, whether committed by Israeli citizens or West Bank residents, and is not obeying Israeli demands to condemn the murders. What is noteworthy is not that the attackers have escaped the Shin Bet’s attention, but that despite their understanding for the assailants’ motives, the vast majority of Palestinians do not choose to take this route.

Thousands of Palestinians without a work permit openly enter Israel every day through the multiple gaps in the separation fence. This has been going on for years, with the full knowledge of the army and police. As everyone knows, there are ample weapons and ammunition among the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. These two facts could have engendered many more revenge attacks by individuals that could not be discovered in advance, both by Palestinian citizens of Israel and by West Bank residents. Even if copycats crop up in the coming weeks, like the screwdriver attack on Thursday, for Palestinians, the number of these attacks pales in comparison to the extent of the injustice Israel inflicts on them, and its systematic nature.

Every Palestinian has good reason to desire cracking the false normalcy enjoyed by Jewish citizens, who by and large ignore the fact that their state is acting tirelessly, day and night, to dispossess more Palestinians from their lands and their collective, historical rights as a people and society. In order to achieve this goal, Israel maintains a continuous regime of oppression. 
Second is an excerpt from Gideon Levy’s piece entitled “The Palestinian Perspective on the Terror Attack.”
Raad Hazem was born on Kaf Tet B’November, 1993 – November 29, the date of the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Mandatory Palestine. He was born into the hope of the Oslo Accords and grew up in the catastrophe of Operation Defensive Shield. He was nine when the Israeli tanks invaded his refugee camp, destroyed its center and killed 56 of its inhabitants. This boy saw in the streets bodies that could not be buried until the army left, tanks that crushed the homes and cars of residents whose lives were wretched and a bulldozer that flattened the camp and “turned it into Teddy Stadium” – the home field of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team, whose most vocal supporters are the notoriously anti-Arab La Familia group – as the digger’s driver bragged.

“Raad” means thunder in Arabic. On Thursday evening he sat on a bench on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street for 20 minutes before he stood up and began shooting at people around his age who were enjoying happy hour at Ilka Bar. In the picture that was posted later he looks handsome; in a different picture, in which he clutches two rifles, he appears enraged and frightening. Hazem killed Tomer Morad, a mechanical engineering student; Eytam Magini, a computer science, psychology and neuroscience student; and Barak Lufan, a former Olympic athlete and the head coach of Israel’s national kayak team. All of them, like him, were young men.

It’s hard to imagine better casting for this story. No one can know for sure what went through his head, but we can assume that Hazem wanted to live the lives of his victims. He didn’t have even the smallest chance. He, too, would have wanted to study neuroscience or mechanical engineering, or to coach kayaking. He too would have wanted a happy hour. He would have wanted to serve in the military, like them, maybe even in an elite unit whose members boast about it. But he was born into a reality from which it’s impossible to escape into the worlds of his victims on Dizengoff. He couldn’t even get to Dizengoff the direct way, imprisoned as he was in his refugee camp, prohibited from entering Israel. He probably never saw the sea, and certainly not a kayak. Instead, he saw soldiers invading his camp almost nightly, mistreating and humiliating its residents, and members of his parents’ generation fighting and dying with courage and determination that have become iconic. There is no place as militant, armed and brave as the Jenin refugee camp.
The bench on Dizengoff was removed by security forces after the attack, in order to collect physical evidence of the man who had sat on it, when he was still unknown. But no DNA analysis can tell his story, just as a thousand police officers couldn’t find him when he was on the adjoining street. Police, Border Police, Shin Bet security service, Sayeret Matkal, Shaldag, Yamam, Yasam, Lotar and all the other military forces will never extinguish the fire of this struggle. All of these organizations, which train for years for exactly this moment, whose budgets exceed those of the health and education systems together, are no match for one resolute descendant of refugees in the moment of truth.

It was a mirror image that could have been from a movie. Young people from the same country, sitting across from each other: the so-called stranger on the public bench, tense and agitated, facing locals in a bar on Thursday evening. In the days preceding the terrible night friends of the guys in the bar, soldiers and Border Policemen, killed five young people in his refugee camp, and now he sets out to kill them indiscriminately.

The people facing him are the characters he would like to be, with the life he would like to live, the freedom and the opportunities he too would like to have. He wants to make his existence known and say: If I don’t have that life, those rights, you who sit in the bar facing me will also never have them. That’s the whole story. On top of it one can build piles of intelligence and weapons, punishment and deterrence, theories about bloodthirstiness and moral judgment, about murder and killing, war plans, operations and fences. In the end, that’s the story. This and no other. Nothing can beat it.

US Pentagon Says that There is No Evidence that Russia is Intentionally Targeting Civilians

At Consortium News Joe Lauria describes the ongoing battle that has broken out between the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress over America’s military posture towards Russia.

The Pentagon. photo by Joe Lauria

Guess which agency is fighting the hardest to avoid an all-out war with the nuclear-armed Russian Bear — yep, the military guys at the Pentagon.

Because, as crazy as they may be at times, those military professionals know stuff.

They know about the consequences of nuclear war.

Below is an excerpt from Lauria’s article titled “Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War with Russia.”

To summarize its conclusion — don’t believe the official, mainstream narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine. No, Russia is not losing. No, Russia is not targeting civilians. No, Russia is not currently planning to flatten Ukraine.

Below is an excerpt (emphasis is mine):

. . . But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

The article says:

“As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.’”

A second retired U.S. Air Force officer says:

“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe. I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”

These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible. . . 

Read the entire article here.

The US Has Thrown Ukraine Under the Russian Bus, Just as It Did to Afghanistan

The Carter administration was very candid about its intentions for the people of Afghanistan in 1979: Draw the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam-like quagmire in order to drain its resources just as the war in Indo-China had drained America.

During a candid interview with a French newspaper in 1998, president Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explained the American strategy (emphasis mine):

Brzezinski revealed the truth to the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998: “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Asked by the interviewer if he now regretted anything, Brzezinski replied, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” (Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 15-21, 1998)

Caitlin Johnstone explains how and why current US actions suggest that the Biden administration has been manipulating Ukraine in the same ways the US previously manipulated Afghanistan.

Her article is entitled “More Evidence that the US is Trying to Prolong this War.” I have excerpted the article below. You can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above (all emphasis in mine):

The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.

So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this. . . 

. . . The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. . . 

On US Censorship and Our Arming of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Yes, the US government engages in censorship just like the Russians. But, of course, the US corporate media will never admit to such things.

Of course, anti-war voices have been censored for a long time in this country. That’s why all of my favorite journalists work for independent news outlets and are never heard from on the major networks.

However, recently the censorship has become worse. Now independent reporting is being attacked wherever it appears. The video below offers two stories in one. First, independent journalist Abby Martin describes the erasure from the internet of the video archive from her old show “Breaking the Set” on RT television.

If you don’t think our government censors the news, listen to her story. She is not the only one who has experienced it recently.

Secondly, Aaron Mate discusses the role of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukrainian national guard, as well as the influence of Nazi politicians in the Ukrainian government.

But, of course, the average American has no idea that we are supplying military weapons to a government that arms Nazis without hesitation. That’s because of CENSORSHIP.

Mate’s report on Ukrainian Nazis begins at the 20 minute mark.

Martin begins to tell her story of censorship at the 29 minute mark.

Col. Douglas Macgregor Offers Important Insights into the War in Ukraine

Former top Pentagon advisor retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor was recently interviewed by journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate at The Grayzone.

The Colonel offers a VERY different perspective on the war in Ukraine, Russia, Putin, NATO, and the US role in this conflict than you will ever hear from the monolithic, pro-war, propaganda machine called “news” in this country.

Colonel Macgregor’s interview takes up the first 60 minutes of this two hour video. Max and Aaron discuss the issues in the second hour.

I strongly encourage you to listen to the Colonel’s words. If only Biden were listening…

See the Image of God Shine Brightly in Abby Martin

Our current American moment offers an glaring example of the corporate media’s power to generate, manipulate. and circumscribe public opinion.

If it’s not broadcast on the news, then it does not exist. Corporate editors at CNN, Fox, or whichever newsroom decide what we will care about today.

They only show us what they want us to see, knowing full well that the average American will never look any further than the edited images her favorite news channel shows to her.

The network news room also decides how we will think and feel about the events they have selected for us to see that day. We are all constantly being manipulated by the big business arms of major media outlets.

Tragically, the conservative wing of the Christian church is among the most  easily manipulated because we confine ourselves to the most narrow, like-minded sources of information — Fox News and whichever “Christian” TV and/or radio stations we prefer, all of which are promotional arms of the Republican party.

Thus are we manicured, buffed, groomed, trimmed, and made to fit into the preconstructed box of conventional, American nationalism — including Christian nationalism.

This box guarantees that America always wears the white hat while America’s enemies (as defined by the American government and its communication stooges) always wear the black hats.

Yet, that brand of patriotic, nationalistic identity is as far removed from life in the kingdom of God as is the east from the west, or as far as heaven is removed from hell.

Yet, the wisdom available by way of God’s Image within us, an Image with which every human being is equally endowed, still shines brightly in many.

Anyone who has followed this blog knows how much I admire the investigative journalism of Abby Martin. Her program The Empire Files has long provided a wide-ranging, independent, internationalist perspective on world events. The very perspective that US corporate media will never provide.

Abby was recently interviewed by The Real News Network — another independent outlet I highly recommend — to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the role played by the US and NATO in fostering this conflict.

I suspect that Abby is an atheist or agnostic, although I don’t know for sure. However, her humanistic moral compass points to true north. The following excerpt from her interview provides the most “Christian” analysis that I have yet to hear about America’s relationship to the war in Ukraine.

Abby begins by reminding everyone of the many bombs dropped regularly by the US and our allies around the world every day. The map below was drawn up yesterday. How many Americans are mourning for the brown and black bombing victims in Syria, Yemen, or Somalia?

I’ll tell you:  few, if any.

The media ensures that our national heartache is very narrowly circumscribed, limited to only the “worthy victims” that the US government identifies as the victims of “our enemies.”

It also should be noted that these worthy victims are also white Europeans. People who look like us. That is a large part of what makes them “worthy.”

Ukrainians are not like the brown and black “hoards” fleeing as displaced refugees from the homelands that the US and its allies have demolished in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Those poor people are “unworthy victims” who deserve to be turned away at the border.

What condemnable, wicked rubbish is fed to us by our corporate masters under the label “news.”

And oh how completely we condemn ourselves by surrendering our loyalty to the deceitful siren songs of national pride and foreign policy preferences.

Now, please watch as Abby Martin reflects more of the mind of Christ regarding world affairs than I have ever heard from the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aUFTsnbvSA

The Full Story on Ukraine is Being Withheld from the American People, Part 3

I have decided to shift gears in this third part of this series about US propaganda and the Russian attack on Ukraine

American “news” rarely if ever mention the economic factors that have moved both Ukraine and Russia into their current hostilities.

The manipulative intentions of the European Union (together with NATO) , the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank are central to aggravating the relationship between these two countries.

My eyes first began to be opened to these issues years ago when I first decided that I needed to be better informed about US foreign policy. Two books were crucial to that formative education. The first was, John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, with a new second edition called The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Perkins tells his story of working for the CIA throughout Latin America on behalf of American corporations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. It’s a mind-boggling account of how the CIA works on behalf of US corporate powerbrokers by forcing 3rd world governments into perpetual indebtedness.

The second book was David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.  Talbot traces the origins of the CIA and the formative role played by US corporations in shaping its “mission” around the world.

Rather than explaining more myself, below are 3 conversations, or 3 parts

Journalist Bryce Greene

of a single conversation, with journalist Bryce Greene, a reporter for F.A.I.R. Media Watch discussing the importance of America’s enforcement of neo-liberal economics via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) throughout the world — including the European Union:

The third installment below is called “The History of US Intervention (in Russia and Ukraine)”