By Jesse Jost

There is a wealthy cabal of elite who believe the masses are too stupid to govern themselves and need to be governed by a world dictatorship. This group hates democracy and plans to take over by planting seeds of discord, and fostering hate between the races and classes of people.

They seek to control the media, manipulate politics, and rig elections.

They plan to also control the world by releasing disease, conjuring up recessions, and assassinating heads of state. Their key to controlling people is to spread non-stop fear because a terrified people are easy to control.

Sound familiar? No, I did find out about this group on Facebook or YouTube.

These points were allegedly taken from the leaked minutes of this secret group that had the power to start world wars and destroy economies.

It was written over one hundred years ago in a best seller called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The secret elite supposedly responsible for such evil world domination, it claimed, were Jewish businessmen.

The book was first released in Russia in the early 1900’s and when it became eerily prophetic after World War 1 and the Spanish flu and the chaos of the era, it became a bestseller.

Henry Ford became a huge fan of this book and its theories. So did a young Adolf Hitler who used these conspiracy theories to stir hate toward the Jews. He warned that if people did not wake up to the Jewish problem and take action, everyone would become the Jews’ slaves in their new world order.

Of course, the book turned out to be fake, plagiarized from novels written in the mid 1800’s. But the ideas it contained turned out to be lethal and helped create fear and stir hatred toward the Jews and led to millions of them being burned in the gas chambers.

By Jesse Jost

It’s fascinating to me the contrast between the big objective world out there, and our individual private experience of it.

Everyone wakes up to a different experience of the same world. We see things from different perspectives, and have different emotional reactions and interpretations of similar events.

Sometimes the outside world is filled with prosperity and peace and vibrant growth, while the private world can be filled with pain, anxiety, and depression.

In 2017, the reports from the outside world seemed mostly positive, but our private world was falling apart as we dealt with a whooping cough outbreak in our community, with a new born in the house. There were lumps and cancer tests, and hardest of all, a brand new diagnoses of type 1 diabetes in our five year old son. This completely turned our life upside and gave it a big shake.

Conversely in 2020, when the outside news was filled with death, ventilators, job loss, political upheaval, and riots, our private world was serene with extra cuddles and local family adventures and exceptionally good health.

The quality of our private world does not just depend on the immediate circumstances, though; it is also affected by our daily habits, attitudes and thought patterns.

By Jesse Jost

Have you ever stopped to think about how many wrong beliefs you might currently have?

 We can be wrong in our judgement of other people: Some have worse character than we assess, other people have more virtue than meets the eye.

We can be faulty in our memories of the past, and very wrong in our predictions of the future.

We can be in error in our views of God and our interpretations of the Bible.

We can have wrong beliefs about what will make us happy and what is truly meaningful.

We can be wrong in our interpretation of causation, with many theories about how the world works that may be way off.

We can be wrong in our understanding of health and nutrition and medicine.

The crazy thing is that while we can fully accept that other people have their heads full of wrong beliefs, it is almost impossible to accept that we are in error!

It Feels so Right!

This past year many North Americans have had a first taste of having civil rights, protected in our charters of freedoms, taken away. There is strong disagreement about whether the threat of disease justified the government removing these rights.

This has raised difficult questions for believers about when to obey our authorities and when to resist.

It’s easy to apply the commands in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 about obeying every ordinance of man when it comes to laws against stealing or murder.

But what do you do in the grey areas when the government mandates make it challenging to fulfill other biblical commands like hospitality or gathering for worship?

Obviously it is a complex issue, but what might the Bible suggest as a short answer to the question of when to obey and when might it be okay to disobey?

If you look at the context, the chapters before and after the biblical injunctions to obey earthly authorities, you see two prerequisites to these commands:

By Jesse Jost

The most insidious thing about hate is that while it’s relatively easy to spot in our enemy, from the inside, our own hate doesn’t feel like hate. It doesn’t feel evil. In fact it feels like a desire for justice, a passion for purity, and a desire to rid culture of immorality. It can even feel like a desire for God’s glory.

Hate hijacks noble desires, which make it a destructive force, and cause its carrier to become immune to the conviction of the conscience. It’s why people full of hate feel so righteous as they cause church splits, civil wars, abuse on minorities, and even genocide.

We all despise hate in other people, and obviously want to be motivated by love. But when hate feels so righteous, how can we test to see if we are truly being motivated by love and holiness, and not just hate and pride and self-will?

Here are four biblical tests:

By Jesse Jost

How do you get people to plug their ears to the cries of a suffering people? How do you get young men to march children and grandparents to their deaths? You encourage a spirit of hate that dehumanizes the other.

The only way a human can cope with killing and torturing another human, is to refuse to look at the other’s humanity and see them instead as an animal, a social menace, or a threat to personal safety.

The apostle John wrote that he who hates his brother is a murderer. Jesus warned of the danger of anger and hate by comparing them to committing murder in the heart.

Hate reduces our view of other people to a label or a one-dimensional threat to the causes that are important to us.

When viewed through the lens of hate, other humans are no longer thinking, feeling individuals, with dreams and hurts and insecurities. They are instead problems that need to be fixed or dangers that need to be quarantined or eliminated.

None of us would ever let hate so infect our hearts that we would commit genocide… right?

Hate doesn’t start with murder. It starts with a subtle irritation toward those with differences in opinion.

By Jesse Jost

This past year has been so difficult because we have been cut off, to varying degrees, from in person fellowship and human touch and real life community.

We are desperate for human contact. Without it, we turn to the substitute of social media.

It has been wonderful to see babies being born, and cute stories and embarrassing moments. These good things from social media have been a gift.

But among the positives, have been the way social media has stirred up so much fear and frustration.

People feel frustrated that they can’t make more of a difference in the real world right now, so they turn to social media activism. At least we can bring awareness to the problem, they feel.

Awareness is such a vital first step to solving problems and injustice. It used to be that you were blissfully living your life, and someone would show you a graphic image of a slave ship. You were shocked. You woke up to the problem. You wanted to make a difference. You could take real action.

The problem today is the non-stop bombardment of social media activism. As I scroll through my facebook and twitter feed, I see activism about global warming and the need to reduce emissions, I see activism warning me that global warming is a hoax and part of an agenda to reduce human population.

By Jesse Jost

I want to be clear up front that the church needs to gather. We are commanded to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. We desperately need fellowship and communion with other believers. We need their encouragement and exhortations. We need their example and listening ear.

However, I am concerned by the idea that we are only the faithful church when we are packing out a building on Sunday morning. Assembling can take many forms, and where even two or three are gathered in His name, Jesus blesses it.

There are places in the world where the church is unable to meet in large groups in public buildings. Have they stopped being the church? If there comes a time in North America when churches are not allowed to meet at all in public buildings, will the church cease to exist?

For years it has bothered me that for many in North America, “church” has been reduced to a building or a ritual we do once a week.

In the New Testament Church is the community of the Bride of Christ. The emphasis is on relationships in the body, and how the individual members serve each other during the week, and live out their Kingdom mandates.