HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 28, 2024 – Just because God’s justice is unavoidable doesn’t mean you have to like it.

Jesus didn’t want to be crucified. Even at the 11^th hour, he tried to find a way to wriggle out of it. When he finally accepted that no other option was on the table, he bowed and powered through it. But that doesn’t mean he wanted it or liked what was happening to him. Agreeing with God’s justice and realizing it’s unavoidable doesn’t mean you have to like it. You’d have to be a sadist or a masochist to like it. You just don’t fight against it.

Former Christendom is devolving into a strange hybrid of Babylon and Sodom. It’s a spiritual and cultural disaster everywhere you look with no reprieve but in the Kingdom. I hate living in this hybrid, but I also know that it’s God’s justice, so I have no intention of fighting it. You can’t have whole nations turning their backs on God and then expect life to be grand. It doesn’t work that way. You turn your back on God, he’ll accept it and leave you to the demons that you’ve chosen. Because if you turn your back on God, there’s nothing left but the demons.

I’ve recently returned the city after nearly three years of living in rural areas. I never thought I’d live in a city again, but here I am. You go where you’re called. In the city, the curses Moses warned us about in Deuteronomy 28 are more obvious than they were in the country. Everywhere I look, there’s decay and disintegration without the softening effects of a breathtaking view. Everywhere, born-and-bred Canadians have become strangers in their own land.

I will not fight this, not the way that people here are starting to fight it through protests and boycotts and publicly voicing their outrage. You can’t stop the rot and the invasion because they’re earned rewards: what was done is done and cannot be undone. You can’t stop the delivery of earned rewards, but you can slow their impact with a different kind of fighting – the kind that Jesus taught us. The stand-your-ground kind of fighting. The treat-others-as-you-want-to-be-treated tactical offense.

I don’t like what’s happening to the place I used to call home, even though I understand why it’s happening. Yet understanding why it’s happening doesn’t make it any more palatable to me. Some days I have to work very, very hard at accepting that the rot and disintegration are earned rewards. Like Jesus in the hours before his execution, I try to find another way around the inevitable, and God lets me try. My unvoiced anger is a natural and healthy response to what lies before me; if I weren’t angered by what I see, I wouldn’t be God’s child. How can you look at the way things are and not be angry? The way things are is God’s justice playing out in real time, the delivery of the curses foretold in scripture.

My anger is not with God.

I am reminded of the holy angels written about in Revelation and elsewhere who very cooly behold and describe the horrors unfolding before them as God delivers his Judgement. Rather than rushing to save the “victims” or tearing at their robes and moaning “Why? Why?”, the angels stare the rot straight in the face without flinching. Some of them even participate in delivering God’s Judgement.

Jesus never fought against the earned rewards of his people. His battle was solely with those who misrepresented God and his Word. The Roman occupation and all the horrors it unleashed was an earned reward. The demonic occupation today and all the horrors it’s unleashing is likewise an earned reward. Nothing and no-one can convince me otherwise.

There’ll either be suffering now or suffering later, but you can’t imagine there won’t be any suffering or that no penance is required.

I would rather have the suffering now and get it over with.

But I don’t have to like it.