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: