Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 49
Serpentine

1/ It’s not cool to say that Trump – or anyone else – is evil. Jesus says, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Let God judge our inner character.

2/ However, we can discern evil tactics, the kind the evil one uses. Take another look at the Fall. [In what follows, I’m drawing heavily from Nicky Gumble’s “What About Evil?’]

3/ In the beginning, creation is good. God calls everything good.

Once the man and the woman are together, God visits them daily & invites them to enjoy each other and the garden.

4/ He forbids only the food from one tree, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil –lest you die.” (Gen 2:16-17)

5/ What’s up with that? God wants us to choose. The human calling is to be that part of physical creation capable of consciously returning God’s love. And for that to happen, we must be free, for love that is compelled instantly dies.

6/ So what God wants, in this story, is for the man and the woman to choose to come to Him and let Him be in charge of judging who’s evil and who’s good. When we take on the task of judging each other’s inner worth we kill each other.

7/ Enter the crafty serpent.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’” (Gen 3:1)

8/ The serpent begins by getting them to doubt what they heard God say: “Did God really say . . ?” Doubting is ok, but doubting their own experience of hearing God was crazy-making.

9/ The serpent then exaggerates the rule God laid down to protect us. “You may not eat of ONE tree”… becomes, in the serpent’s telling, “You may not eat of ANY tree.”

10/ Next, the serpent, having implanted the vision of God-as-spoilsport, now proceeds to deny the penalty and to further insult the intentions of God: “You will not surely die. God knows that if you eat that fruit, you will become like Him.”

11/ The talking serpent is the image of evil. He’s a model demagogue.
To review the way of evil:
[A] Get people to doubt their own experience.
[B] Deny consequences of violating boundaries.

12/ [C] Pit people against one another and the God who loves them. (The serpent gets Adam and Eve to blame one another and to be scared of God.)

13/ Watch Trump:

[A] Get us to doubt our own senses. It’s not just that Trump denies what he did. It’s that he denies our experience of watching him do it. Check out his grotesque mocking of a handicapped person...

14/ .. and then his flat-out lie that he had not done so. This is crazy-making. The serpent is the champion of fake news.

15/ [B] Deny the consequences of breaking God’s instructions. “When you’re a star you can get away with anything; you can grab them by the p***y.” Involved in all Trump's proposals to congress – health care, tax policy --

16/-- are denials of consequences. But consequences come from actions, no matter what the con man says.

17/ [C] Pit people against each other and against the God who loves them.

Right now we citizens hate one another based on how we feel about Trump.

18/ Long term Trump will greatly damage the outreach of the white Evangelical church. No decent, liberty-loving, rational person will want to associate with any religious group dumb enough to enable this would-be tyrant.

19/ Jesus called Satan the Father of Lies. I don’t say Trump is Satan. But he is pretty reptilian. And he lies a lot. We have elected a man who uses the devil’s tactics to govern America.