Liberty vs. tyranny, and the supernatural

Paul of England writes:

I've been reading The Devil In History

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Devil-History-Communism-Twentieth/dp/0520239725

That's a book C put us onto last year. It's very good, quite academic in tone but not overly. What is very clear, and it comes through in the first pages, is that Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Ceausescu. (I suppose there are others) all of them owed everything to Lenin. Not merely the imagined ideological pretense but the legitimized violence for the defence and protection of the mystical body of the state. That whole Mao thing is replication. They embalmed Lenin, his body is still on display today. You can go to Red Square and have your own Bolshevik religious experience at the Lenin sarcophagus. That's what all these types do, become false (death) gods. What's interesting with all these types is their desperate need to create a Year Zero - Pol Pot could be added to the list. Death is just what they do.

There are a ton of youtube video's out there. some interesting old footage of Russia ...

Curiously and almost an aside, one theme I find especially interesting from that period of Russian history is the Former People. These Year zero concepts invent former people as a necessary means of legitimizing their existence.

I see it also in the effect of Modernism in art and poetry in 1912 - it so utterly wipes the slate that there are a bunch of people that are left with no relevance whatsoever. Victorian poetry for example, so flabby and sentimental and dead. It happens at lesser levels (think 70's prog rock after the Sex Pistols). It's a fascinating theme - I see parallels to this everywhere. This isn't to say that a former person is finished but culturally they are left with nowhere to go. Bougoureau would be a good example, in art. It took a 100 years for his work to surface and reconnect.

There's more to this than art and politics though. C Influence has that exact same effect. It took everything to get there and then none of what went before has any weight anymore, the whole force and purpose changes The Contact is transcedent. I think of Bunyan's Christian leaving the village. He is already regenerated and no more of the village.

Former people caught out by the devil's force in the world Vs former people who left the world (if still in it) to fight for His Glory. We are all former people.

I respond:

And remember why this subject is so interesting. It's because in this fallen world it's easier to see the supernatural when it manifests as evil than to see the supernatural when it manifests as good. And we crave to see the supernatural. We want to know what's beyond and that there is a beyond.

An example of seeing the supernatural manifest as good is when a person truly gets saved supernaturally from an accident. If you've been there you've been there. If your particular case is imagination then so be it. Not everybody's is.

Also just getting saved as in salvation. Regeneration is a supernatural act of God effected by the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.

But anyway...

Another thing I thought of reading your email is this: The Book of Revelation tells us there is a false trinity that counterfeits the real Trinity. The Dragon (Devil), the Beast, and the False Prophet.

You mentioned how all these totalitarian movements invoked the name of Lenin. Lenin is the Dragon behind it all. He represents the Devil on earth in this case. The Beast is all the totalitarian collectivist states with their soul-killing machinery of tyranny, ultimately existing to provide human suffering and human death to feed as sacrifice to the Kingdom of Satan. And the False Prophet(s) are the Stalins, the Hitlers (who learned his game from Marxists), the Maos, the Pol Pots, the Castros, and all the wannabees.

Vern Poythress' the Returning King is very good on these things, counterfeit and so forth:

http://www.frame-poythress.org/ebooks/the-returning-king/

That page is the HTML book in full, but I downloaded the page and sent it to my Kindle and lo and behold it reads and is formatted just like a book. Only illustrations and links link back to the web page. - C.

And, a further note:

Also, this subject is the subject of liberty vs. tyranny, and it is foundational. For understanding and discernment, but also...

If you have *any* trace of sympathy for the Devil left in you *it will show in your politics* (even if you have long ago accepted orthodox - Apostolic/Reformation era - biblical teaching). *And*: if you are still prone to fear the world more than God (easy to do for any of us granted) it too will show in your politics.

Not saying everybody has to have the same political opinion to a 't', but you can see the general outline here.

This is just another subject your email made me think of... - C.