Fear Not, Stand Firm, and See the Salvation of the Lord

One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes has to be the one where he talks about sincerely well-intentioned tyranny, and how it’s just the worst.

As Lewis writes:

“The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

This is where we’re at, ladies and gentlemen.

Did I leave anyone out? If I did, you can trust the protectors of every coddled fee-fee will prove the worthiness of the above snippet from Clive Staple.

Yet maybe Lewis was giving the moral busybodies too much credit. He suggested there is such a thing as those who smother and starve us in the name of protecting. I am not so generous, nor so trusting.

To be fair, there is always the possibility the most prominent virtue signalmen in our day are lying, and that they know it. What would Machiavelli do? Or how about Marx, or Alinsky? For that matter, what would the fox “guarding” the hen house do? And who does he really stand watch for the sake of?

Then again, a better question is what God will do. Consider Pharaoh, shrewd as can be, like putty in the hands of the Master. And whoever Egypt’s overlord equivalent is in our day, hopefully we are Israel with Moses, being led to the Promised Land, albeit taking the scenic route along the way.

My goodness, how the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and against Yahweh their God who had so delivered them, and was in the process of executing a yet-greater redemption of His people. What did Moses tell them in Exodus 14:14?

“Yahweh will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”

That is, in context, when the alternative was their complaining, and asking stupid questions about whether there were no graves in Egypt that they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, they were kindly told to stow it and watch the Lord’s deliverance.

So here we are, and if those are our only two choices, we also should elect to be fools who are esteemed wise when we keep silent, rather than opening our mouths and removing all doubt.

On the other hand, if our choices are to keep silent or else speak up to say what is true and good, to argue in defense of the downtrodden and oppressed, to warn those who are being led away to the slaughter, to brainstorm ideas that would come to a good rather than bad end – in that case, I say we should not keep so quiet; and it won’t necessarily be contentment and godliness if we do anyway.

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