Unmanageable Men: Building a Conscience That Won’t Bow to Cultural Compliance

4,472 words, 24 minutes read time.

If you came here looking for a safe, sanitized Sunday school lesson, a soft motivational pep talk, or a digital pat on the back to justify a lukewarm life, close this tab right now. This isn’t a playground. It’s an operational briefing for a spiritual insurgency.

In our first briefing, “The Forge of Truth: Reclaiming the Biblical Mandate for Iron-Clad Manhood,“ we exposed how the modern world tries to castrate biblical masculinity by replacing raw truth with soft, therapeutic self-help. We laid down the reality that true manhood isn’t inherited; it is hammered out in the fires of repentance and severe biblical discipline.

Then, in “The Heavy Cost of Carrying a Cross,” we looked square at the staggering price of true discipleship. We traced the bloody ledger of the global persecuted church—from the labor camps of North Korea to the burned villages of Nigeria—and confronted the terrifying reality that a centralized world system is actively engineering a compliant, one-world religion. We challenged you with a brutal question: When the system tightens the economic and social screws, will you carry the heavy weight of the Cross, or will you take the easy exit?

Now, we take the next step. It’s time to move from understanding the threat to executing the counter-strategy.

The architects of the modern world don’t need to drag you away in iron chains to enslave you. They have built a much cleaner, more confortable, more efficient cage.

They just quietly rewrite your cultural default settings—downloading approved language into your mouth and encoding approved thinking into your brain—until you are entirely house-broken, cultural-approved, and easily managed by their new societal system. They have weaponized your desperate addiction to comfort, your terror of an awkward boardroom meeting, and your craving for worldly validation. The goal? To turn you into a spineless, deeply compliant asset of a shifting, hostile landscape.

But the early disciples didn’t survive the tyrannical machinery of the Roman Empire by negotiating with it, hiding in the shadows, or throwing temper tantrums on the internet. They survived because they were forged into a lethal, spiritual phalanx by a King who broke the power of the grave.

We aren’t here to ask for your permission or ease you into the shallow water. You are already deployed on the frontlines of a cosmic war. This is your training manual. Take it or leave it.

The AI Trap: The New Tower of Digital Babel

Let’s look the newest enemy squarely in the eye. The ultimate frontier of cultural conditioning isn’t just corporate media or corrupt politicians; it is the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence.

The technocrats aren’t just building smarter search engines; they are engineering the ultimate digital umbilical cord. They are designing a system to write your thoughts, manage your schedule, anticipate your desires, and eliminate every single ounce of human friction from your daily existence.

It is a velvet trap. A man who cannot rule his own gut or conquer his own phone will effortlessly bend his knee to whatever entity controls his comfort. If you are addicted to digital convenience, the global machine owns you.

When an algorithmic matrix completely manages your reality, you voluntarily outsource your mind to Babylon. The AI models deployed by centralized mega-corporations are deeply programmed with the world’s ideological speech codes and compromised morals. The moment you cannot function without a digital entity predicting your next move, that entity holds absolute leverage over your life. If the system decides your orthodox biblical convictions are “non-compliant,” they won’t need to send a SWAT team to your door—they will simply flip a switch and turn off your access to the infrastructure required to live.

To survive this, you must become entirely unmanageable. Here is how we train.

Break the Dopamine Leash

If you are enslaved to your physical appetites and dependent on immediate digital validation, you are a security liability to the Kingdom. You will capitulate the moment your comforts are threatened. Let’s be ruthlessly honest: the enemy doesn’t need a spiritual super-weapon to neutralize you; he just needs to keep your dopamine receptors saturated. A man who twitches if his phone doesn’t buzz every ninety seconds is completely house-broken. A man who numbs his exhaustion with mindless video scrolling, binge-watching, and synthetic validation cannot be trusted when the line must be held under heavy fire. The Apostle Paul didn’t shadowbox with the culture; he fought his own biology, declaring

“I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”

If the global machine controls the valve to your convenience, comfort, and emotional validation, it owns your allegiance.

To counter this, you are executing an immediate tactical blackout. You will choose three non-negotiable days a week to completely sever mindless scrolling, secular media consumption, and passive entertainment. This means no background noise, no curated feeds, and no synthetic escapes. Simultaneously, you must understand that tactical fasting is not a generic, one-size-fits-all formula. For some, it means shutting the gate on food. For others, particularly those managing severe physical or biological limitations, it means a relentless, unyielding fast of the eyes and the mind. True spiritual weight is not measured on a food scale; it is forged by refusing to let your appetites—whether for comfort, validation, or distraction—dictate your allegiance. As Philippians 3:19 warns, we cannot be like those whose “end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.” If your physical frame requires strict biological management to stay in the fight, lock that down as an operational necessity, and shift the fury of your discipline to your attention span.

You cannot leave a house swept and empty, or seven demons worse than the first will move in to occupy the void. You do not just subtract the poison; you aggressively flood the vacuum with Kingdom weight. When you strip away the digital noise, you replace it with heavy, intentional analog friction.

Instead of reaching for a screen when you wake up, you open a heavy, leather-bound Bible and force your eyes to labor over the text, internalizing Joshua 1:8, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it.” Instead of listening to a podcast while you drive or work out, you weaponize that silence, turning your mind into an active altar of raw, unedited prayer and heavy intercession for your family, fulfilling the mandate to “pray without ceasing” from 1 Thessalonians 5:17. Instead of zoning out on a couch at the end of the day, you sit across from your wife, look her in the eye, and ask about her soul. You gather your children, put a physical copy of the Scriptures in their hands, and lead them through relentless, deep theological catechesis, obeying Deuteronomy 6:7 by teaching them diligently to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You replace mindless consumption with manual production. You build things with your hands, you study hard history and deep theology that stretches your intellect, and you physically train your body until your flesh learns to submit to your spirit. You are replacing the easy, synthetic lubrication of the matrix with the sweat, dirt, and heavy timber of the Cross.

Treat your attention like ammunition. When the urge strikes to reach for the phone out of boredom or discomfort, you pivot directly into these manual, high-stakes assignments. If physical cravings or bodily weaknesses flare up, you look at that discomfort and use it as an immediate trigger to pray for the persecuted remnant overseas. You are intentionally reintroducing severe, muscle-building friction into an overly coddled life, standing firm on Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

The objective here is absolute self-mastery. When you can look at your own mind—your own neurological urges—and command them to shut up and obey, you strip the culture of its primary hook. You cannot be blackmailed by a system if you have already voluntarily starved out the things it offers and replaced them with an unshakeable, interior Kingdom infrastructure. You must kill your appetite for worldly approval and digital dependence before you have the structural integrity to stand entirely outside their societal system.

Kill the Vocabulary of Babylon

The culture manages your mind by engineering your vocabulary. The moment you adopt their sanitized speech codes, their culturally-approved definitions, and their therapeutic framing of reality, you have already unconditionally surrendered the territory. One of the greatest historical campaigns to completely neuter modern manhood was the rollout of political correctness—a systematic engineering project where words are weaponized and definitions are constantly shifted so that no one knows what anything means anymore.

Make no mistake: this is calculated political warfare, and honestly, it is being played by the technocrats and cultural elites for pure sport. They treat the engineering of human language like a game, amused by how quickly they can force the masses to dance to a new tune. They want to see how fast they can make you pivot, testing their power by watching you scramble to keep up with rules they intend to break tomorrow. This endless, rapid-fire manipulation of language leaves you feeling actively gaslighted by your own culture. What is mandated as absolute, enlightened truth today is banned as dangerous tomorrow. Basic biological realities and timeless moral truths are treated as entirely fluid, a playground for their narrative games, designed to keep everyone in a state of perpetual disorientation, second-guessing their own sanity and moral compass.

Look closely at the linguistic circus they have created. In a desperate bid to mask reality, they force society onto an endless treadmill of changing definitions. A person with no place to live was once called homeless, then shifted to transient, then upgraded to the unhoused, and is now rebranded as a neighbor experiencing homelessness. A person struggling in poverty was moved from underprivileged to disadvantaged, then to marginalized, and now to systemically under-resourced. Even those entering a country outside the legal framework have been dragged through the political cycle, morphing from illegal immigrant to undocumented worker to justice-impacted migrant.

The elites do not invent these terms to solve the underlying human suffering; they invent them to see if they can force you to repeat them.

By muddying the water with these three-word bureaucratic euphemisms, the architects of this new societal system try to force you to rely on their shifting consensus rather than objective reality. They have taken the holy, distinct, and beautiful designs of God for identity, family, and humanity, and buried them under state-sanctioned, ever-shifting definitions. This isn’t just a political debate; it is a spiritual tragedy. The enemy is actively scrambling the language to keep hurting, broken people trapped in confusion, using them as collateral damage in a game of cultural supremacy, keeping them far away from the healing and transforming power of the Creator. If we adopt the system’s hollow, shifting vocabulary, we become complicit in the very sport that is destroying them, and we lose the ability to point people to true freedom.

Even worse, this linguistic compromising agent has leaked directly into the modern church lobby. Men have been conditioned to use soft, corporate, therapeutic vocabulary to describe cosmic, spiritual realities. We no longer preach against sin—the very thing that separates mankind from a holy God—and instead gently discuss “brokenness” or “personal setbacks.” We no longer warn against rebellion; we offer advice on “navigating poor choices.” This is Babylon at its finest. When Daniel was exiled to the empire, they aggressively changed his name, his diet, and his education to force a new identity on him, but he utterly refused to let the King’s language rewrite his allegiance to God. Isaiah 5:20 throws down a devastating warning against this entire linguistic psy-op, declaring, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” If you use the enemy’s dictionary, you cannot defend God’s truth.

The command is straightforward: you must stop playing their game, reject their vocabulary, and ruthlessly de-program your speech. We do not casually navigate “toxic environments” or try to handle “difficult people” at work; we stand firm against spiritual wickedness as commanded in Ephesians 6:12. We do not coddle our insecurities or claim we are struggling with “imposter syndrome” or “social anxiety”; we repent of the fear of man, remembering the razor-sharp warning of Proverbs 29:25 that “the fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” We do not outsource our thinking, our communication, or our study of the text to a sanitized AI prompt; we sweat over the truth ourselves, digging into the analog dirt of the Word. You must speak with the unedited, sharp clarity of the prophets, anchoring yourself in Malachi 3:6, where the Almighty declares, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.”

The objective here is absolute cognitive and spiritual sovereignty. By speaking and writing the uncompromised language of Holy Scripture, you rewire your mind to see the world through the lens of God’s dominance, not the system’s propaganda. You don’t hold the line out of malice or a desire to attack those who are lost in the confusion; you hold the line because people cannot be rescued by a guide who is playing the same game as the captors. When reality inside the matrix begins to dissolve, you anchor your mind to the eternal, unmoving rock of God’s Word. You say what is true, you call evil exactly what it is, and you stand immovably sane so you can point a broken world to the King who makes all things new.

Lock Down the Outpost

The global system targets your children and uses your financial stability as blackmail to force your compliance. They know an isolated consumer unit will capitulate the second his family’s integration into the secular playground is threatened. The architects of this culture understand that if they can hold your livelihood hostage, they can make you compromise your convictions between the hours of nine and five. If they can capture the minds of your children through state-sponsored algorithms and educational conditioning, they don’t even need to worry about you—because they have already stolen the next generation. We are already witnessing families bravely withdrawing their children from the public system, seeking refuge in Christian Co-ops and homeschool networks for damn good reasons. But do not fool yourself into thinking the elites will just sit back and let you build a parallel generation in peace.

The battle lines are shifting rapidly, and the onslaught against a parent’s divine authority has already begun. Look at the legislative warfare playing out in the West. In places like Washington state, bureaucratic machinery has actively worked to strip away a parent’s right to even be notified about their child’s medical and mental health interventions at school. Look at how state school boards and local governments have fought to enforce secret notification policies, intentionally concealing a child’s psychological state from their own mother and father. Step across the ocean, and the trap is already sprung. In Germany and Sweden, elective home education has been effectively criminalized, with heavily armed police literally seizing children from Christian families like the Wunderlichs to prevent the formation of “parallel societies.” In the United Kingdom, the new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is tightening the noose, using mandatory registries and forced state home visits to monitor alternative thinking out of existence.

If you think this is just a modern, civilized bureaucratic disagreement, you are blind to the historical nature of spiritual warfare. When you look at the raw, blood-soaked battlefields where Sam Childers—the Machine Gun Preacher—has spent decades fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army in Sudan and Uganda, you see the exact same demonic blueprint stripped of its Western, societal approved compliant veneer. The signature tactic of that horrific militia was to kidnap young children, put a weapon in their hands, point a gun at their heads, and force them to murder their own parents. The warlords knew that if they could force a child to break the most sacred bond of human design, that child’s identity would be completely shattered, leaving them entirely compliant, house-broken assets of a monstrous system. The machine always uses the exact same strategy, whether through the barrel of an AK-47 in a jungle or a soft, therapeutic legal policy in a Western classroom: sever the child from the authority of the father and mother, erase their heritage, and claim their soul for the system.

The command is an immediate operational shift: your home is no longer a passive amusement park; it is a locked spiritual garrison. You must establish daily, non-negotiable family worship. You must shut down the digital static, open a physical, leather-bound Bible, turn the pages, and read the unadulterated text with your bare eyes to your family. You must force your children’s brains to memorize Scripture so it is burned into an un-cancellable sanctuary inside their minds, a sanctuary no tech company can delete, no school board can rewrite, and no government can confiscate. This fulfills the ancient charge of Deuteronomy 6:6-7, which mandates, “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.” Furthermore, you must aggressively build alternative, parallel networks. You secure your local economy, integrate deeply with serious, battle-tested believers, and master tangible, analog skills. You stop relying entirely on a centralized, fragile digital grid and start building a real-world infrastructure that can withstand social, legal, and economic pressure.

You must step into the role of the spiritual guardian, executing the blueprint of Joshua 24:15, where the commander stood before a compromising nation and declared, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” This means your home becomes a production center for righteousness, not a consumption center for Babylon. You train your family to expect cultural friction rather than fearing it. You teach your children that being excluded from the secular playground isn’t a defeat; it is proof of their citizenship in a higher Kingdom.

The objective here is total household and spiritual self-sufficiency. When your wife and children are deeply anchored in the bedrock of the Kingdom of God, the enemy completely loses his primary avenue for psychological blackmail. When you are no longer terrified of losing your seat at the culture’s table because your household already has its own table, you become entirely unmanageable. You protect the outpost, you guard the legacy, and you raise children who know exactly who they are, standing completely immune to the re-education camps of a dying world.

Lock the Shield-Wall

The societal machine thrives on atomization. It isolates the individual, detaches the family from a true community, and leaves the modern man standing entirely alone in his digital silo, easy prey for narrative enforcement and economic blackmail. The enemy hunts in isolation. The system relies entirely on social exile, making you feel completely alone in your convictions so that you will choose the safety of silence. They have systematically dismantled the ancient, local, and organic networks of masculine brotherhood, replacing them with superficial online interactions, corporate networking groups, and soft, country-club church lobbies where men exchange pleasantries but never share their scars, their ammunition, or their burdens. You cannot fight a digital matrix alone on a screen; you need real, blood-and-sweat brotherhood to survive the coming pressure.

The command is an immediate tactical realignment: you are entering the Phalanx Protocol. You must ruthlessly eliminate the illusion of Lone Ranger Christianity, step out of the casual, comfortable church lobbies, and form a high-accountability fireteam of raw, unvarnished men. This means you do not just occupy a seat on Sunday mornings; you actively forge a localized, battle-tested shield-wall with other serious, sovereign believers who share your unyielding allegiance to the Word of God. You need a brotherhood that knows your deepest flaws, guards your blind spots, and explicitly vows to carry your weight when the economic or legal trap snaps shut. Look real men in the eye, meet in the physical world, and establish networks to trade goods, share skills, and back each other up without relying on a centralized digital grid. This directly executes the mandate of Ecclesiastes 4:12, which warns, “Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” If a brother’s livelihood is threatened by the corporate machine for refusing to bow to Babylon’s speech codes, the local phalanx steps in to hold his line, secure his family, and protect his outpost.

You must lock shields with men who understand the gravity of the hour, standing firm on the battlefield described in Hebrews 10:24-25, which commands us to “consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” This isn’t a social club; it is a defensive pact. When the cultural pressure intensifies and the legal or financial screws are tightened against orthodox families, the men in your phalanx do not retreat into their own comfort—they move toward the sound of the gunfire. If a brother is targeted, his fight becomes the whole wall’s fight. You train together, you study the Word together, and you raise your children alongside one another, creating an environment where your legacy is reinforced by the strength of the men standing to your left and your right.

The objective here is unbreakable alignment and collective spiritual resilience. A single soldier is easily picked off; a locked shield-wall is a tank. When a network of sovereign, Bible-believing households locks its shields together in a local community, they create a territory that the societal machine simply cannot digest. You strip the culture of its power to isolate and destroy you because you are no longer a solitary target. When you know that if you get fired, canceled, or targeted for the truth, ten other battle-tested men will instantly step in to feed your family and hold the line, your fear of man dies permanently, replaced by the reality of Proverbs 29:25. When your attention is mastered, your speech is de-programmed, your home is garrisoned, and your shield-wall is locked, you become entirely un-cancellable. You stand immovably secure in the truth, holding the line for your family and your brothers, until the King returns to claim His ultimate victory over the kingdoms of this world.

The Line in the Dirt

The forge is hot, and the line has been drawn. We are not trying to create loud, angry keyboard warriors who vent their frustrations into the void of social media; we are forging quiet, dangerous, untamable disciples who are entirely unmanageable by cultural conditioning and digital dependence. We are building men who do not need to shout because their lives possess structural density.

But let this serve as an absolute, final warning to a blind and decaying society. Do not mistake our quiet resolve for weakness, and do not forget the heavy cost of carrying a cross. History leaves a legacy of blood, and that blood is never forgotten by the Creator. Look closely at the cosmic ledger. In the fifth seal of Revelation 6:9-11, the Apostle John saw under the heavenly altar the conscious, un-blanked souls of those who had been violently slaughtered for the word of God and the testimony they maintained. They were given white robes and told to rest until the number of their fellow servants was complete.

This exact, terrifying reality is mirrored and amplified in the ancient, apocalyptic pages of the book of Enoch, where the souls of the righteous martyrs cry out at the very gates of heaven, bringing their lawsuit directly to the Almighty against the lawless violence of earthly empires. Those martyrs are not gone; they are actively protected under the very throne of God, and their blood is screaming for cosmic justice day and night. The system thinks it can bury its casualties in the dirt of history, but God has gathered them into His inner chambers, and the trap is about to snap shut on the oppressors.

Look the system dead in the eye, step onto your front porch, and slam your boot into the dirt. Throw your absolute contempt directly in the face of their fraudulent empire. Look your King in the face and receive your orders.

We are completely done playing by your rules, and we owe this collapsing kingdom nothing. Go ahead—bring your bureaucratic threats to our front door. Bring your corporate contracts, your shifting definitions, and your legal traps. You can seize our bank accounts, but we will cultivate the earth with our bare hands. You can strip our worldly status, but we will build real-world, analog networks that you cannot touch, regulate, or cancel. You can lock our physical bodies in a cell, but you will have to look us in the eye and physically drag us out of the outposts we are guarding. Our allegiance belongs exclusively to the Sovereign Lord who broke the back of death and walked out of the cemetery—and we stand here with our heads held high, giving your entire system the absolute, uncompromising rejection it deserves. You simply do not possess enough physical or spiritual leverage to make our knees bend. We aren’t backing up a single inch.

Call to Action

The line has been drawn, the blueprint is in your hands, and the stakes could not be higher. You now know how the system manipulates your attention, compromises your language, targets your children, and attempts to isolate you from a true, battle-tested brotherhood. Knowing the strategy of the enemy means nothing if you remain passive in the trenches.

True sovereignty requires immediate, aggressive action. You must choose today whether you will remain a house-broken asset of a dying culture or step into the role of an untamable disciple of the King.

Here is your immediate operational mandate:

• Master Your Attention: Ruthlessly starve out the digital noise, kill the mindless scrolling, and reclaim the visual real estate of your mind.
  
• De-Program Your Speech: Reject the sanitized, ever-shifting vocabulary of political correctness. Speak the uncompromised, razor-sharp language of objective truth and Holy Scripture.
  
• Garrison Your Home: Shut down the digital static in your living room. Open a physical, leather-bound Bible, read it to your family with your bare eyes, and burn the Word into the minds of your children.
  
• Lock the Shield-Wall: Step out of the comfortable church lobbies. Look real men in the eye, form a high-accountability fireteam, and build a local, analog network that can withstand economic and legal pressure.

Look the system dead in the eye and watch it blink. Look your King in the face and receive your orders.

Drop your tactical field report below. Where have you noticed yourself or the men around you relying too heavily on digital convenience and cultural conditioning? What is one tactical change you are going to execute within the next twenty-four hours to pull back your sovereignty and hold the line?

The forge is hot. Stand up, plant your boots, and sound off in the comments below.

D. Bryan King

Sources

• European Court of Human Rights: Case of Wunderlich v. Germany (No. 18925/15)
• ADF International: Daniel and Bianca Samson v. Sweden Case Application
• Gov.Wales: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Statutory Provisions
• UK Department for Education: Overview of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
• Wikipedia: Sam Childers (The Machine Gun Preacher) Profile
• Wikipedia: Machine Gun Preacher (Biopic and Historical Context)
• European Centre for Law and Justice: Analysis of Wunderlich v. Germany
• Strasbourg Observers: Wunderlich v. Germany Enforcing Compulsory Schooling
• Home School Legal Defense Association: Swedish Supreme Court Customary Rulings
• Apple TV: Machine Gun Preacher Documentary and True Story Overview
• Bible Gateway: Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (Scriptural Mandate for Family Worship)
• Bible Gateway: Joshua 24:15 (The Household Declaration of Sovereignty)
• Bible Gateway: Ecclesiastes 4:12 (The Threefold Cord Shield-Wall Principle)
• Bible Gateway: Hebrews 10:24-25 (Assembling of the Fireteam Command)
• Bible Gateway: Proverbs 29:25 (The Snare of the Fear of Man)
• Bible Gateway: Isaiah 5:20 (Woe to Those Who Invert Language)
• Bible Gateway: Malachi 3:6 (The Unchanging Nature of the Divine Text)
• Bible Gateway: Ephesians 6:12 (Wrestling Against Spiritual Wickedness)
• Bible Gateway: Revelation 6:9-11 (The Fifth Seal and Souls Under the Altar)
• Bible Gateway: Revelation 12:11 (Conquering the Matrix Through Testimony)

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author. The information provided is based on personal research, experience, and understanding of the subject matter at the time of writing. Readers should consult relevant experts or authorities for specific guidance related to their unique situations.

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Parenting isn’t about perfection, it’s about consistency. When you feel like you’re repeating yourself, remember: every reminder is a seed of faith. 🌱 Keep teaching, praying, and loving, God sees it all.

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“Prone to Wander…”: Forsaking the Way

https://youtu.be/UwRJJTrhNtU

Psalm 91:1-2 They who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, abide under the shadow of the Almighty. They shall say to Abba God, “You are my refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust.”

Introduction

One of my most favorite hymns is, “Come Thou Fount” (a hymn that shows up in our current season of music. Of the three verses, the third is my absolute favorite.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart; O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.[1]

As I mentioned on the evening of Ash Wednesday, the prophet Joel brings us to the brink and asks us to take a deep, long, hard look in the mirror. The reality is, while we may not think about it often, we are prone to wonder from God. If it helps, please know that I am all too aware of my tendency to want to wander from God, the God whom I love, the God who saved me from myself for others, the God who has given me life, love, and liberation from sin and from human made, harmful mythologies and ideologies. So, if you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this or are feeling that type of shame that leads to condemnation and hiding, don’t worry… you aren’t alone; I’m right there with you.

Sometimes we wander because we forsake the way. There are two types of ways we wander because we forsake. Sometimes, it’s intentional. We’re done. It’s too hard. We just can’t. Sometimes the demand is too great, so we stop participating and we give up. We opt for something easier, something with more give, something with more personal reward seen by others and, more importantly, approved by others. Think about times you’ve tried to “self-differentiate” and the system pulled you back in being stronger and more dominant than your meager efforts—it’s easier to just give up and give in, go back and pick up where you left off, dismissing the work you’ve done thus far. Even uncomfortable and toxic systems can be comfortable even if detrimental. The human mind prefers comfort and ease to the hard work of embarking on something new. I saw a meme once that said the nervous system prefers a familiar hell to an unknown heaven.

Sometimes, though, our forsaking the way is slower and not as intentional. It’s more like forgetting to follow true north and then, OMG, here I am, and I don’t know where this “here” is. neglected to double check, assuming we knew exactly what we were doing and where we were going. And then, nope. This is best expressed when we slide away from our spiritual traditions because of the banality that is caused when tradition becomes traditionalism and boringly oppressive unto death. Blah, blah, blah, I know all of this. So, we stop listening, stop paying attention because we’re convinced we know the what, how, who, when, where, etc. Eventually we are allured away to something sparkly and new, something different and exciting, something that makes us feel special and unique. Yet, by the time that allure and shine has worn off we realize we are nowhere near where we should be; we’ve strayed and in straying we’ve forsaken the way.

We are prone to forsake because we are prone to wander from our God of love.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

“‘So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ You shall set [the basket of first fruits] down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.”

According to Moses, Israelites are ”to make annual pilgrimage to the central sanctuary, bringing the first fruits of the harvest, to thank God for the land’s bounty.”[2] Upon bringing the basket of first fruits of harvest, the Israelite is to recite a short history summarizing the main events bringing Israel to where they are now; it is a confession of faith and is the verbal adherence to the first command of the Decalogue.[3] According to Moses, the Israelite bringing the basket of first fruit concludes their confession of faith with an acknowledgement that even the items they carry in as an offering are an offering dependent on God; even this bounty is not of my own doing. (As we say at the start of the Eucharist, “For all things come of you, o God…”) Finally, the Israelites are to take everything and throw a massive celebration to honor the coming of the harvest season, to honor God and God’s faithfulness, and, notably, to honor those who have nothing. According to what Moses has offered us here, there is no division between those who brought offerings and those who did not. Here, in this moment, there are no lines drawn in the sand; mercy and solidarity triumph over tribalism and productivism. God’s reign is experienced in the midst of the kingdom of humanity.[4]

So here we are in an interesting spot in the book of Deuteronomy; one that doesn’t really have “Lent” written all over it. So, first, let’s go back just a skosh. Right around chapter 14, Moses (using traditional authorial language) reviews all the laws again. (That’s what the name of the book means: Second Law or Law Again.) Moses details all that is entailed in the Decalogue; this task is finished at the end of chapter 25.[5] Before that? Well, a few (fun!) things, right before the recapping of the Law there is a hefty section on the blessings and curses for adhering to the law and the need for Israel to stay pure and focused on God (chapters 6.5-13). The beginning of chapter 6 is my favorite: the greatest Commandment. Chapter 5 is the quick version of the Decalogue much like the one that appeared in Exodus. Chapter 4 is Moses’s command for obedience to God (one of his final ones considering he’ll die at the end of the book). And chapters 1-3 are a retelling of major events of Israel’s history up until that point.

So, when in chapter 26—the “‘Concluding liturgies’” portion[6]— Moses turns to speak of giving the first fruits to the priest and scripts out a response for each person bringing their basket of fruits to the priest, it’s in response to all that has come before. In other words, it’s a confirmation of the covenant that has just been laid out for the children of Israel.[7] It’s also an offering of praise and thanksgiving for deliverance from enemies and for occupation of the land promised long-ago to Abraham.[8] All this to say, chapter 26 is about Israel NOT forgetting and forsaking the who of “Who let the captives out…”[9] Just as the first commandment of the Decalogue is, “‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me,’” (Ex. 20:2-3), this commandment not only aligns the remaining nine to it but is a declaration that Israel must always remember who liberated them from Egypt. In remembering this, everything else falls into place. And, according to our text, this remembrance is to extend to God and the neighbor: [10] the Levites (priests), the orphans, widows and strangers. For Israel and according to Moses, to remember God’s love for Israel is to love others, especially the disenfranchised, unpropertied, the “have-nots.”[11]

Conclusion

None of what is in this passage on Deuteronomy is about Israel forsaking the way and giving up. In fact, it’s all about Israel remembering, remembering intimately, and celebrating and preforming that remembrance. Truly, it’s not about them giving up at all. But here’s the thing, the bulk of Deuteronomy is about asking Israel to exhorting Israel to stay with God, to keep their eyes on God, and walk with God thus walk with their neighbor and correct the wrongs in the world. But why? Why is God, through Moses, telling all this to Israel and, actually, “telling them again”? Because, well, Israel had a history of forgetting and giving up and wandering away. I say this not only because I’ve read the book; I say this because literally a few moments outside of the great liberation from captivity through the wet ground of the parted Red Sea, Israel was ready to drop it all and go back to Egypt so they could have leeks. Whether intentional or unintentionally, Israel will begin to forsake God, to forget, and to wander away from their God whom they love and thus to also forsake and wander away from their neighbor. Israel will get caught up between the allure of the sparkle and shine of the kingdom of humanity (the power and privilege) and forsake God and their neighbor, the stranger, the oppressed, those dependent on help. They will forsake God and God’s way because it grows too difficult and comes with little earthly reward. Moses knows this, God knows this.

So it is with us. And as we go through this first week of lent, let us consider our times of forsaking because we’ve forgotten the good story, became bored of God’s good Word, or because it was too hard, too uncomfortable, too weird, ugly, blech. As wonderful and miraculous as we are, we are fleshy, meat creatures prone to wander. The good news is, God knows this, and God comes to do something about it.

[1] https://hymnary.org/text/come_thou_fount_of_every_blessing

[2] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 423.

[3] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 424. vv. 8-9 “The thanksgiving prayer recited by the pilgrim provides a precis of the main narrative line of the Pentateuch and Joshua (the ‘Hexateuch’). For that reason, the verses have been seen by some scholars as an ancient confession of faith, or creed, that is olde than its present context. Strikingly, this summary of the main events of Israel’s religious history makes no mention of the revelation of law at Sinai/Horeb. The same is true for many similar confessions in the Bible…”

[4] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 424. v. 11 “Enjoy” “or rejoice” “specifically in a festive meal consumed at the central sanctuary…which must include the Levite and the stranger for whose benefit (along with other disadvantaged groups) the following law is directed.” The law in v. 12

[5] LW 9:254

[6] Bernard M. Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 423.

[7] LW 9:254 This portion “confirms the covenant between God and the Children of Israel.”

[8] LW 9:254

[9] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 423-424. V. 5 “This verse is deployed in the Passover Haggadah (just following the section on the Fours Sons) in a famous passage that emphasizes God’s miraculous sparing of Israel from a long line of persecutors, beginning with Laban’s attack on Jacob (Gen. 31).”

[10] LW 9:254 “So he also treats the tithes to be paid every three years, teaching that they are to be given to the Levites, the orphans, the widows, and the strangers, with the affirmation that they are a fulfillment of the work of love.”

[11] LW 9:255 “… it denotes the confession of faith and the thanksgiving of the righteousness the sprit, where we acknowledge at the same time that the Lord has freed us from great evils to which we have been subjected, and that we have accepted many good things by faith. But bringing of tithes denotes that we are wholly given to the service of the neighbor through love…”

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