You cannot follow both Jesus Christ and Donald Trump

The first murder I ever witnessed was when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. I was just a kid, old enough to know I had witnessed a murder, but young enough to be unable to really understand the full and final implications of that fact. 

My understanding that death was forever, that when someone died they were absolutely, permanently gone and wiped away from this earthly existence, was forming in my understanding, but it still wasn’t fully there. Even now, after a lifetime of seeing death and coming close to it myself, I grapple with the hard reality of it. 

My precious baby sister died last spring and even at this ripe old age and after having buried a whole generation of the people who formed the world that shaped me, I have to remind myself that she is really, truly, forever gone. To paraphrase words that King David used when his infant son died, I will go to her, but she can’t come to me. 

Life is transient and fragile. Death is final and absolute. 

When we die, we go into another dimension of existence that none of us fully understands. We see it, as St Paul said, through a glass darkly. There are glimmerings all around us; hints, and things that go bump in the night, visions of the other world that dying people sometimes share with those of us who are still here. But we don’t know. 

What we do know is that one moment a person is here, and the next they are gone, wiped away, forever. 

Death’s certainty, its unpredictability, its finality: Those are sobering things. 

We cherish our lives and try to extend them by watching our diets, exercising, and undergoing painful medical procedures. 

We make every effort to hide our personal progression through life to death from the rest of the world by dying our hair, undergoing facelifts, using botox and “dressing young.” Some of this is vanity, but a large part of it is driven by the larger culture’s fear of death and its subsequent discrimination against anyone who shows too many signs of aging.

At the same time that we’ve become a culture that is obsessed with turning our faces away from the sobering truth of our own mortality, we have also become a culture that is obsessed with exalting murder, wanton killing and killers. 

When we say someone is a “killer,” it’s a compliment. We mean that he’s tough, ruthless and mindlessly aggressive in gaining any advantage over his opponents. We are saying that this is someone who crushes those who oppose him into the dust without any consideration of compassion or morals. 

When we call someone in business, sports and politics “a killer,” we say it with admiration. We weren’t always like this, but we have become a people who admire brutality, cheating and violence and have contempt for compassion, tenderness and fair play. We may go to church, but our values are essentially Anti-Christ.   

Our entertainment is equally obsessed with killing. The most successful franchises in the movies, and on cable and streaming in the past decades have glorified serial killers and mafia thugs who exercise the human power to take life at their own pleasure and convenience and get away with it. These murderers are depicted as attractive, and in a profoundly twisted way, moral. 

The writers and actors who create these entertainments use all their considerable talents to make them sympathetic characters that the audience identifies with and roots for. These “franchises” that are built on the glorification of murder and evil are wildly popular. They bring fame to their “stars” and huge profits to the investors who back them.

The churches have failed abysmally in teaching Christian morality. Whole denominations have thrown over the Gospels in favor of a power and money driven ballot box “salvation” that has led us away from heaven and straight to the edge of the abyss where we are now standing. 

Fallen religious leaders have bowed down before an obvious moral degenerate who is beginning to look like he may also be criminally insane and allowed him to use their churches to repudiate everything that Christ taught. What is worse, they do this in the name of Christ. 

Nothing ever happens in a vacuum, and this is no exception. Our churches have fallen in line with demonic, billionaire-funded political gods. The larger culture has been teaching nihilism, amorality and violence through the communication and teaching powers of some of our most gifted artists for decades. We didn’t lose our faith. It has been taken from us. 

Satan has been coming at us from a lot of directions. In fact, it almost seems as if he’s been coming at us from all directions. This coordinated, long-term attack has borne fruit. 

I don’t know how bad things are going to get. I know that we are at the mercy of a Mad King and a useless Republican-controlled Congress who will not stand up to him. I know that a corrupt Supreme Court tossed out the Constitution and made the Mad King above the law. 

I have believed for many years now, that if this evil man got the kind of power he now possesses, that a lot of people were going to die. I think he has the will, and thanks to the Supreme Court, a handful of greed-driven, spiritually dead billionaires, and a political party that has become as immoral as the Mad King himself, he has the power to kill millions of people. 

As Christians, we have a moral responsibility to stand up to this homicidal evil in whatever ways we can. 

Don’t obfuscate and complicate this so you can create a phony excuse for yourself that you think makes it right for you to continue to support the Mad King and what he is doing. Don’t tell yourself self-excusing lies so that you can stroll past Lazarus without feeling uncomfortable about doing it. 

Do not participate, even at a remove, in the murder of innocent people by a lawless government. 

If there ever was a time to take reality on reality’s terms, this is it. 

You cannot follow both Jesus Christ and Donald Trump. You cannot do it. 

Donald Trump is on the road that leads to hell. If he keeps on like this and does not repent and change — and it would be a 180 degree turn about if he actually did it — he is going to go to hell. 

You can’t change him. 

But you can decide whether or not you want to go to hell with him. 

The Mad King’s Gestapo has started murdering people. This last week, ICE murdered a woman in Minneapolis, another man in Oregon and severely wounded a third man. They threatened unarmed members of Congress with pepper spray and pointed rifles at them while the House Members were trying to perform their official duty of inspecting a federal ICE facility in their district. 

The Mad King, his entire regime and all of right wing media have lied and lied and lied to cover up these murders and allow them to continue. That’s Third Reich territory. It’s history repeating itself with a rhyme.

I saw a murder for the first time 62 years ago when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television. Sadly, I’ve seen a lot of murders since. 

I’ve also seen murder and murderers become glorified and glamorized by our entertainment industry. 

Now, I am witnessing the President of the United States and his henchmen lie and bully and use the Justice Department in an attempt to justify the murder of American citizens by government brown shirt thugs and shut down any attempt to bring the murderers to justice. 

I don’t know how far down things are going to go. I think it could get bad. I believe that if the Mad King is not stopped, a lot of innocent people are going to die. 

I have no doubt that every Christian in America today is called by God to resist this evil. 

Note: I will go to her, but she can’t come to me is a paraphrase of 2 Samuel 12: 33. through a glass darkly is from 1 Corinthians 13: 12.