[Hanging Orchids, redux, 2009 JA Van Devender]
Location: Longwood Gardens, Pa.
Joshua 1:8 (NKJV)
8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. ....
The news "out there" is pretty hum-drum which I take to mean that the forces of insanity are behind closed doors conspiring on how to further proceed with the dissolution of civilization. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek and continue to hope that "House of Cards" is more fiction than fact... sometimes it's best just not to think too much about these things.
But what to do to fill the time? Certainly various work related tasks loom... like the crashing surf on a "lee shore" which means that some action has to be taken soon, but what about these moments?
Joshua certainly had tasks to face, things to do, places to go, people to command, arms to take up, discipline to establish, provisions to arrange, intelligence to gather and a host of other activities that required his personal attention. It's interesting that God did not simply say - "Joshua, what are you doing just sitting here... get out there and slay those Canaanites." It is passing curious that His specific instructions were for Joshua to meditate on God's Word day and night... as if those moments would not be stretched to the breaking point with pressing matters. After all, this was war. But God views things differently than we do most often and this was certainly one of those occasions.
Martin Luther once remarked, I forget where, that "I have so much to do today that I will have to spend twice as long in prayer" (or words to that effect). I think God's instructions to Joshua had a parallel intent. We can deal with the stuff that we face haphazardly or we can deal with it wisely. That statement might not be precisely logical, but it generally conveys the point. We can jump in the river and swim without noticing which way the water is flowing or we can view the river with some perspective and enter the water with a greater confidence that we are not going to be bashed against the rapids. So it is with our lives.
God's Word is not now, and never has been, only concerned with future blessed-ness. It is concerned with human flourishing in covenant with God unto the end of God's glory and man's delight. Therefore it is directed toward the "now" of our lives, perhaps first and foremost, to the end that our "now" is lived in terms of our "then" of the future, yes and amen, but "now" as the focus. Therefore it is only to be expected that it is permeated with examples, narrative, propositional truth, poetry, commands, percepts and hints, about how our lives are to be directed toward the end of human flourishing.
Jacob, in a sense, faced the daunting prospect of having to burn Canaan down to the ground in order to redeem it. That bears some thinking ... meditation... understanding. His every action, in order to be efficiently productive toward that end, had to be undertaken in light of God's strategic guidance in His Word. So it is with our lives and we are far more blessed than He.
God has progressivly revealed HIs will throughout the ages and we ride the crest of His fullest revelation of His will and His purposes. We see the world through the lens of Jesus Christ, the crucified One, who as our resurrected Lord, is busy fulfilling the type that Joshua's life embodied. He is busily engaged in war against the principalities and dominions that stain and pervert His rightful realm and we are, under Him, engaged in the day to day skirmishes and prolonged sieges which characterize that war. How can we flourish or pursue human flourishing without understanding His strategy, His tactics, His vision for how that flourishing is to be understood and attained?
What ever we face today, you and I, has present and eternal significance. We may be called to boldness or perseverance or both. We may be called to decisive action or mere probing, tentative investigations to determine the landscape and dispositions that face us. We may be called to build up or tear down, to rejoice with or cry with, to pray all day or only a portion of it, to turn the other cheek or draw our sword... how are we to discern which course or manner to embrace?
Here is where discernment is required in order to flourish and to pursue flourishing and no where can such discernment be attained apart from meditating on God's Word... living with it... chewing on it... thinking about it... carrying it with us and having it frame our immediate as well as our overall life.
God's wisdom is this: His will shall be done... we can undertake to go with His flow or strike out on our own or trust our own devices and wisdom. The end will be the same... the degree of flourishing and joy and confidence we experience in the process will depend on whether we have sought His wisdom first or learned it through the hard lessons we encounter.
Joshua's efforts and Israel's accomplishments in the conquest of the promised land left much to be desired. They started strong and finished wearily and incompletely... their entire future was essentially determined by these few early years. One can easily understand that what they had to learn was that doing it God's way is the only hope we have of flourishing under His rule.
Perhaps that thought might guide us today... in whatever it is that awaits.
And The Logic Is?????
[image: Closed Barn Doors, 2009, JA Van Devender]
Nehemiah 4:17 (NKJV)
17 Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens, loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon.
It is somewhat ironic that we are facing the centennial year remembrance of the "war to end all wars" even as we seem to be retracing the steps that proved the futility of that analysis.
Chuck Hagel, who is obviously following his marching orders, is pushing for a radical, demoralizing reduction in our armed forces and notably the US Army. He plans to take us back to pre-WWII levels of manning while conceding that : "We are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies and in space can no longer be taken for granted." [quote taken from HERE] I have zero confidence in this decision, whether considered from economic, political or strategic perspectives. I am convinced that it is a political maneuver that further shifts the conversation away from the manifest failures of the past six years to the economic idea of "balancing the budget", a project that has not been promoted by the current ruling powers in any significant sense. It puts conservatives in the difficult postion of arguing "against budget cuts" when they are at the expense of all that wasteful, bloated military-industrial evil empire. It seems clear to me that it also is not only acceptable, but desirable, to some that the United States sink to parity, or even sub-parity, with other major powers. I doubt there are any laudable motives behind this also.
What is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this decision though is that it is being justified on "economic grounds." At a time when the United States is facing historic lows in the ratio of working age citizens actually holding a job and earning an income, this plan seeks to dump another 40-60 thousand men and women onto the job market. Perhaps no other expenditure of Federal funds returns so much on investment as our military provides. At a time when the Government is seeking to raise minimum wage, and provide "kick-start" infusions of cash into the economy, to stir sales and create jobs, the sheer idiocy of taking money out of the hands of useful citizen soldiers and their families, appears not only illogical but idiotic. Those military salaries are spent mostly in the economy... there is a reason why states compete for military bases and defense contracts. This is so blatantly counter-productive that I cannot understand how any responsible leader would contemplate such a move in such a "down" economy.
That is not to argue that "more military spending is better" without constraint... it is possible, as the history of the Soviet Union proves, to have the military budget so out of proportion to other expenditures that it does not allow any other flexibility. There is a balance required that is determined by strategic considerations as well as overall economic/ national economy. A nation like Switzerland may have strategic considerations that call for a significant military, hemmed in as she is by other powers, but her national economy simply cannot provide for one, under any circumstance.
So, there must be a balance, but the current economic debacle facing our country is not driven by the size of our military, it has been driven by the economic and political failures in other areas. I do not agree with the manner in which we have diminished our military presence and activities in the Middle East, but I can see the logic of ending our participation in the conflict. We have fought and fought well and it is time for the military to be pulled back. Pulling back and dismantling are two different things.
I believe that we are in a period of international uncertainty that is more dangerous than any time since the 1930's. Even the Cold-War, with all its paranoia, was less scary than this. I think there is a greater threat for a nuclear event of some sort now than during the Cuban Missile crisis. The political structures and economic relations are so tenuous that I think that military / political adventurism is almost inevitable. It was the weakness of those nations which became the allies which left them with few options to deal with the resurgent fascist states and was cause for contempt by those states' leaders. Imbalanced weakness is the corollary to imbalanced strength and historically precedes instability that ends in massive bloodshed.
There is no guarantee that a funded military would prevent adventurism when faced with ideological fanaticism... but it does limit the options that such fanaticism can exercise. I hate the terrorist activities that burden this world... but I hate the idea of direct national conflict even more. It is, in the long run, strategically better to ensure that the largest threat we face is localized though widely dispersed terrorist strikes than to face, say, a threatened invasion of Taiwan or the Ukraine or Israel. It is sheer foolishness to think that there will never again be a large scale military conflict. Nothing in the passage of time has ever given any warrant for such a conclusion. Becoming too weak to fight a major war is one of the most certain ways to make such a war attractive to potential enemies.
Nehemiah faced a significant challenge. His purpose was to defend Jerusalem so that she could prosper. To accomplish both goals he had to tell his citizens to build with one hand and hold their weapon in the other.
This two-pronged approach is what we need now. There are many ways to bring about fiscal solvency in our economy. Unproductive expenditures need to be cut. Paying non-productive citizens and aliens diminishes the capitalistic imperatives for seeking a job. Firing productive military men and women and curtailing defense expenditures in such a drastic manner appears to me to be a deadly, disastrous policy.
Posted by Gadfly on February 25, 2014 at 09:39 AM in Commentary, Culture, Movies, etc., Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)
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