I gotta have my orange juice.

James Jordan points out that we commonly misread Matthew 28:

This is the actual command of the Great Commission: Disciple all nations. Jesus might have said, “disciple the world,” but that might have implied that nations are to disappear. He might have said, “disciple individuals” or “families,” but that might have implied that nations as such are not to be discipled. The phrase “disciple the all nations” clearly means the whole world, and embraces individuals and families as well.

This has a number of implications for us. First, we ought to have faith that this is something the church can accomplish, because all authority has been given to Jesus. Second, we ought to have faith that this is something the church will accomplish, because all authority has been given to Jesus. Third, the church is always already discipling the nations. Duane Garner observes that:

God has placed His Church in a position of leadership over the world and has ordered things in such a way that the Church is set at the vanguard of culture and society. The world sits down-stream from the Church so that whatever we pour in the water up here flows out into the world way down there, for better or for worse.

See also James Jordan’s further comments on the principle that the church is the center and ruler of the world. One of our contemporary failures has to do with narrowing our understanding of God’s work in the world from one of dominion, conquest, and redemption to focus exclusively on redemption.

You know that when the world bows in glad unison to the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, Aslan has them right where he wants them. It is a good time to pray that God will send bad dreams, and wise counselors, to people in positions of power and authority around the world.

In this week’s issue of The Theopolitan, Peter Leithart briefly reviews Kyle Pasewark’s A Theology of Power. He writes that:

Power isn’t domination but, for Luther, God’s power is His “communication of efficacy” (198). . . [God] exercises power by empowering. . . Power as “communication of efficacy” is more coherent than power as external domination or the ability to do what one wills. Power-as-domination is ultimately self-contradictory.

The primary purpose of power and authority and rule are to beget and bestow power and authority and rule. This is an apt summary of parenting, pastoring, and even rightly exercised political power:

So Judah and Israel dwelt in security,
each one beneath his vine and beneath his fig tree,
from Dan to Be’er–Sheva,
all the days of Shelomo (1 Kings 5:5, Everett Fox, Hebrew numbering, emphasis added)

Alex is thinking about the ‘rona here, but this is true at many more levels:

From the father of an 11-year-old girl in NYC who has begun having mask-related panic attacks: “We’re starting to look at homes in Florida to try to get out of NY as soon as possible.”

A city that destroys its children destroys itself. pic.twitter.com/4iY0XdFymo

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 21, 2021

It seems that we may be in the process of adjusting PCR cycle counts downward. You heard it here first, folks: a joint Nobel Prize in Medicine for Biden and Fauci for extraordinary efforts to “eradicate” the ‘rona.

You should follow Jack Posobiec.

"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers." ~G K Chesterton

— Steven Wedgeworth (@Wedgetweets) January 23, 2021