Carl Wells Books

I am discussing phrases that have entertained me over the years. We are ready for number 7.

7/”It is what it is.”

This is a fairly new phrase, I think. It is also controversial. Rat, the wonderful anti-hero of the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine,” despises this phrase and considers it meaningless. He ranted against it in one “Pearls” strip.

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/07/04

Who am I to disagree the gifted and thoughtful Rat? Well, I just have to take my chances. It hadn’t occurred to me that the phrase was considered meaningless. To me it has always seemed that the meaning was clear. To me the phrase seems to be saying, “Reality really does exist. We won’t pretend otherwise.” When we come upon a hard fact, instead of fibbing to ourselves, we have the option to admit the hard fact exists. Such honesty is admirable, especially in an era when lying is so prominent. So I have always thought that “It is what it is” represents a commitment to truth.

8/”Who could have guessed?”

The answer to that being, in many cases, almost anyone with a lick of common sense. This phrase is another one which resonates in our dishonest age. Here are two examples of how the phrase can be used.

A/The welfare state encourages people not to work, and destroys millions of lives as a result. “Who could have guessed?” Anyone who knew human nature could predict what would happen, so the question is satirical.

B/The U.S. involves itself in an open-ended war in Afghanistan trying to create a liberal humanist “democracy” which doesn’t fit well with the country’s Muslim consensus. Result: death and disaster for all concerned, as well as enormous financial loss. “Who could have guessed?” Reality-based (or even semi-based) people knew from the start, of course, that it was a doomed project.

This is a phrase which comes in handy time after time, because the people around us, especially the “elite” Powers That Be, are committed to living in a fantasy world. Bless their hearts, they get to run the country and destroy Christian civilization, so surely they won’t begrudge us occasionally saying, “Who could have guessed?”

Another version of the same idea is the shorter, but just as entertaining, “Who knew?” Again, everyone knew or could have known.

9/”You’ll thank me later.”

This is often uttered by the obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk in the hit TV show “Monk,” which ran for eight seasons and is readily available as a DVD set. It is quite an enjoyable show.

Of course, no one ever thanks Monk later, because what he is requesting is invariably unreasonable. It seems to me that this phrase can be effectively and humorously used by all of us, as we try to persuade people that our requests are sensible. Which sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t.

10/”Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

This phrase encourages us not to get overly upset by the situation at hand. We’ve all experienced the discomfort of having our underwear (male version for males, and female version for females, hopefully) bunch up. We should not give in and let the wad continue; we can straighten out our underwear.

The use of the female version of underwear, in the phrase, instead of the male version, can be seen as an insult to the female race. Thus this phrase is probably completely incorrect politically, and I am a mean person for allowing myself to be entertained by the phrase. I plead guilty as charged. But admit it, it wouldn’t be as funny using the male version in the phrase.

11/”Thou art the man!”

We know the origin of this sentence. It comes from the Bible. It is from 2 Samuel 12:7. What happened was, King David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. The prophet Nathan found out about this (perhaps was told by God), and God sent Nathan to David. Nathan told David a parable in which a rich man slaughtered a poor man’s beloved ewe. David was very angry with the behavior of the rich man and said that he deserved to die.

Nathan told him, “Thou art the man!” In short, David was the equivalent of the rich man in the parable. It was the powerful and rich King David who had seduced Uriah’s wife. Then, to top things off, David had also had Uriah murdered. David finally recognized his sin at this late date, but only after Nathan’s presentation to him. The whole sordid story is covered in two chapters of the Bible, 2 Samuel 11-12.

It is fascinating how the intelligent David was so blind to his own iniquity. He was furiously angry with the fictional rich man, but had not drawn the connection to his own behavior. Nathan had to tell him straight out, “Thou art the man!”

This is a warning to us. We are often blind to our own wrongdoing. How many times will God have to tell us, “Thou art the man!” before we learn to avoid the comment by refusing to sin?

13/”It’s better than a poke in the eye with a hot stick.”

I learned this phrase from my father. I’m sure he made no claim to have created it. It expresses a common sense response to a situation which is far from ideal, but not too bad on the whole. It is an encouragement to look on the bright side, to be grateful for the blessings we receive.

I often use this phrase when evaluating the results of the professional golfers I follow. Very often they will win relatively small amounts of money in golf tournaments. One might win $8,000.00, when a few shots’ better play would have allowed him to win serious money in the range of $30,000.00 to $50,000.00. In such a situation, it behooves us to recognize that winning $8K is not exactly a terrible thing for four days’ work. “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a hot stick.” By a wide margin.

In fact, much of what we experience is life is better than a poke in the eye with a hot stick.

13/”The Fuhrer remains calm and confident.”

I owe this entertaining phrase to my brother. Approximately 40 years ago he was reading about Germany at the end of World War II. Things were going really badly in the war, and the end was near. But the German radio propaganda remained consistently upbeat. One thing they told the masses was, “The Fuhrer remains calm and confident.”

A few weeks or days later the calm and confident Fuhrer blew his own brains out in order to avoid being captured by the Soviet Union.

My brother told me about his discovery of that delicious phrase, and I have treasured it ever since.

The potential applications are endless, in our life both personal and public.

14/”See you later, alligator; after while, crocodile.”

I don’t know if Bill Haley and the Comets created this phrase, but they made it famous in 1956. Here is the song:

Our family has never lost track of this phrase. When leaving, we might just say, “Alligator.” Or perhaps, feeling adventurous, “Crocodile.”

15/”A tie is like kicking your sister.”

This is a play on the more famous phrase, “A tie is like kissing your sister.” The idea being that a tie is not very satisfactory. Kissing one’s sister is not as satisfactory as kissing a female who is not one’s sister. The phrase was created by a football coach who didn’t like the idea of a game ending in a tie. Winning was what was really enjoyable.

Somehow I was inspired to create a variation on the famous phrase. It just came to me one day, many decades ago. I suppose in a way it reflects my own favorable attitude toward ties. A tie may not be complete success, but it isn’t all that bad either–it’s better than a poke in the eye with a hot stick–when compared with a loss.

Kicking your sister may not be ideal, but it has its charms, especially if one is frustrated with one’s sister.

Unfortunately, “A tie is like kicking your sister” has never caught on worldwide, but it is not too late for the world to make amends and begin using it often. Just remember that you heard it here first, so that I can have my quarter hour of fame.

That concludes part II of phrases which have entertained me. I hope there will be a part III next week.

Today I begin a series on phrases that have entertained me over the years. Most are full sentences, but some are just a few words.

When I first came up with the idea, I wrote down a small number of phrases. But as the weeks have unfolded, many more phrases gradually came to mind. By now I have a large handful, with more still being added now and then.

The phrases are in no particular order, but I will save my most favorite phrase for the last one of all. The phrases are numbered for my enjoyment. I will discuss each phrase, and explain why I find it entertaining. This of course runs the risk of taking a pitchfork to a souffle. But I’m willing to take that risk. At the worst it will allow me to fill up a several part series with enough words to ease my conscience that I have given the American reading masses enough written product for the day.

1/”Death is nature’s way of telling us to slow down.”

I have heard this for many decades, but it never loses its entertainment value for me. Who first came up with the sentence is uncertain, but possibly it is a Dutch proverb.

What makes this so funny is the contrast between slowing down and the finality of death. Yes, when you have died, you have truly learned to slow down. Nature may be inarticulate in verbally telling us to slow down, but nature is not thereby stymied. Nature finds a way to tell us what she needs to tell us about slowing down. The way she tells us is death. Now will you slow down? Probably.

2/”Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.”

It is possible that the origin of this phrase is in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson–in a somewhat different form. The baseball pitcher Preacher Roe also said something similar.

We’ve all heard that you win some, and you lose some. That’s quite true about life. but the phrase under consideration adds a different and hilarious spin to that idea. If the bear gets you, that is more than just a defeat. That is complete disaster. If you doubt me, go grizzly bear hunting with just an optimistic attitude and a hickory switch. If you find a grizzly, you have to kill him or he will kill you. If you’re having an exceptionally good day, you’ll only be maimed for life. So the optimistic “Sometimes you get the bear” is not balanced by a minor defeat; it is balanced by the bear getting you and that is horrific. To me that is very funny.

3/”Democrat, Democrat, sittin’ on a fence, tryin’ to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.”

I know approximately when I first heard this. It must have been sometime in the 1950s. It was spoken to me by my father. It was a phrase he remembered from his boyhood. Since he was born in 1920, he must have first heard the phrase either sometime in the 1920s or 1930s.

I have tried to find this phrase on the Internet, but so far have not succeeded. It may have had wide currency at one time (or not!) but it seems to be forgotten by now.

What makes this phrase so remarkable is that it fit the Democratic Party perfectly well in the 1920s or 1930s, and it fits the Democratic Party perfectly well in the 2010s and 2020s. The Democratic Party continues to try to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. They will go on trying until the world comes to an end or the party comes to an end, whichever comes first. (At least they should be commended for their consistency.) What they really succeed in doing, of course, is to make a dollar buy about fifteen cents’ worth of goods.

It is only fair to note that by now they have convinced almost everyone, including those in the national Republican Party, that a dollar really can be made out of fifteen cents.

4/”Is this a great country, or what?!”

This is a relatively new phrase, added to our national conversation only in the last 20 or 30 years. I think the phrase can actually be used two ways. It can be an enthusiastic way of expressing admiration for how the U.S. is organized. But it can also be used ironically. Something ridiculous is going on, so one says “Is this a great country, or what?!”

I suppose it is possible that the phrase was only created for irony, and is only used in an ironic sense. That is probably the most likely explanation. But I have my doubts. I would not be surprised to find that someone has used the phrase in a straightforward way, commending the greatness of the U.S. For myself, I use the phrase in an ironic sense when I use it, which I do often.

5/”The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

I can remember the (possible) first time I heard this phrase. It was used by my Uncle Ed, to describe what had happened when Grandma Wells took all 26 points in a game of hearts. That meant 26 points were added to everyone’s score except Grandma’s. Excellent for her, except that that meant that one or more of her opponents went over 100, ending the game with Grandma still not a winner because someone else had a lower overall point total than she did. So my Uncle Ed said, “The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

Unfortunately we did not have the option in our card game, for Grandma to subtract 26 points from her score. In later years we added that sensible option. So, looking back, I think Grandma got cheated, and if we had been playing by reasonable rules, her successful operation would have been successful only, with no failure at all.

There seem to be lots of times in this world when the operation is a success, but the patient dies. Let’s list just two examples arising out of our wars.

In the Civil War, the North defeated the seceding South. For the North and supposedly for the country as a whole, the operation was a success. But the patient died. The republic died, replaced by the empire. 625,000 to 700,000 people died, also. Quite a successful operation, with the minor caveat that the patient, as well as hundreds of thousands of people, died.

In World War I, the U.S. intervened in 1917 and helped the Allies prevail. The operation was a success. But European Christian civilization was dead, its execution aided by the untimely intervention of the U.S. (We also lost 116,000 dead peons from our army, but who cares about them?) The patient died. We–the world as a whole and the U.S.–have never recovered from World War I. But our operation was a wonderful success, and Woodrow Wilson is still a hero to many for getting us into the war. That the patient died? Why sweat the small details?

6/”I’d rather owe you than try to beat you out of it.”

I first heard this from one of my father’s friends. He liked to put a humorous twist on things, and this was one of his best phrases. I am not claiming that the phrase was original with him. But he used it, and it was funny then and it is funny now.

The humor comes in because owing someone and not paying them what you owe them, is just the same as beating someone out of the money you owe them. So to claim that you are only owing someone rather than trying to beat them out of what you owe, is ridiculous. It still makes me chuckle. I use the phrase often, when I have a financial debt to my family members. I would rather owe them than try to beat them out of it.

Well, that is part I on phrases that I find entertaining. I hope to continue with part II next week.

The United States is having some real problems, and those problems are likely to get worse before they get better. Our elite Deep State leaders are enemies of God, of truth, of freedom, of civilization, and our Christian/conservative/pagan masses are prepared to sleep through the immediate future and keep on sleeping for as long as it takes to not change the situation. “This is not going to end well,” is the phrase that comes to mind.

But, wild-eyed optimist that I am, I want to point out that we still have some great economic blessings in the U.S. Lots and lots of things we like and use are still incredibly cheap in the U.S. and A., and we need to be aware of how great a thing that is. After naming some very cheap things I will name some things which are in the middle range of expense, and then some things that are still very costly.

Before we start listing almost free things, I want to quote from a blog post I made on Nov. 10, 2016. Here is Theodore Dalrymple in Cuba.

“And old people in particular are inclined to murmur jabon (soap) as you pass, in the hope that you might have some of this rare and precious commodity to give away. When the first old lady came up to me and said jabon, I thought she was mad; but she was only the
the first of many.” (p. 182)

This was a quote from Our Culture, What’s Left of It, by Theodore Dalrymple, the gifted English essayist. The essay in which this anecdote appears was originally published in 2002.

Did you get that? People in Cuba were having a hard time getting soap, and thus would approach Mr. Dalrymple on the street and murmur the word soap! Hoping the foreign person would be able to help them out.

That warns us of what socialism can lead to. We aren’t there yet, thank heaven.

Soap is one of the things that is almost free in the U.S. Go into any Dollar Tree, and you can get three bars of excellent soap for $1.00 plus tax. (Full disclosure: I own Dollar Tree stock. Buy at Dollar Tree, and you will help make me even more wealthy than I already am.)

Almost anybody can get a job at the minimum wage ($7.25 per hour in much of the U.S., including my beloved country of Indiana). So for about one seventh of an hour’s work, an ordinary person can buy enough bars of soap to keep him clean for weeks or months. In Cuba, it wasn’t that way at all. Soap was incredibly difficult to get. I don’t know if the situation has improved there, is the same, or worse.

Here are some things that are almost free in the U.S. All toiletry items are almost free. Soap is not the only one. Toothpaste, shampoo, razors, shaving lotion, skin lotion, deodorant, and on and on, can all be purchased for $1.00 plus tax. One seventh of an hour’s work buys a large supply of any one of the items mentioned, and of many others. Dish detergent for $1.00. Laundry detergent for $1.00–enough laundry detergent to run 32 loads of wash.

Pens and paper are almost free. Recently I saw 12 pens for a dollar, at Dollar Tree. These were good Bic Round Stic pens with black ink. If I had the talent, I could write four or five best sellers in longhand, for under $10.00 total in cost of pen and paper. Then I could type them up, using the electricity on my computer–about which see the next paragraph below.

Electricity is not free, of course. The electric bill can still be significant for most of us. But when we put the cost of electricity in perspective, it turns out to be almost free. I totaled up the amount I paid for electricity in the year 2020. It turns out that I was paying about $2.49 a day for electricity. For one hour’s work at minimum wage, I can have almost three full days of electricity. I can have hot running water, keep my refrigerator running, have lights on whenever I want them, watch DVDs on my television, have the Internet come into my home, and type up my masterpieces mentioned above, for a mere pittance. Louis XIV would be envious of me.

Heat and air conditioning are almost free. I have natural gas heat and natural gas air conditioning. I keep the winter heat low compared to most people, but in the summer I keep the air conditioning cooler than most people do. Despite the latter fact, my natural gas bill is about 85 cents a day on the average.

Grocery prices rise and will continue to do so, because our merry band of pranksters at the Federal Reserve, encouraged by their Deep State fellow parasites, insist on printing money out of thin air. (We let them, of course.) Even so, food is almost free. My current weekly cost for groceries is $28.07–up from $26.47 in 2020. So I am spending about $4.01 per day to eat. I am in no danger of wasting away. I am about 35 pounds over my best running weight. What? Okay, sure, suddenly you care about details? So, yes, it is much closer to 47 pounds over, rather than 35 over. Are you happy now?

Learning is almost free. You can buy plenty of books for mostly low cost, or can borrow them for free at the library. Inter-library loan allows you to get even difficult to find books. Nothing is stopping anyone in the United States from being a profoundly educated scholar on any topic you can name. The books are almost free; all we have to apply is the time and determination to add to our knowledge via reading.

Entertainment is almost free. The library has lots of DVDs, and can obtain others via inter-library loan.

So summarizing, lots of things are almost free in the U.S. By working a little bit, we can earn enough money to pay for stuff we need and want. It wouldn’t be good for us to have everything given to us. It is wonderful that we can work and earn the stuff we buy.

I’ll briefly list a few things that are in the middle range of cost. They are not by any means almost free, but they are also not horribly expensive. Clothing, travel, dining out, water and sewer and trash pickup, big item appliances such as refrigerator, stove, furnace, washer, dryer, are all in the middle range of expense. Even in some of these cases, they can veer over into the almost free category. Order judiciously when you dine out, and the cost can be minuscule. Clothing can be almost free for many of us; I would put clothing in the almost free category in my own case. Water and sewer might also be in the almost free category, if one is careful in his use of water. Unfortunately in my town, expensive trash pickup is forced upon us by law. We can’t be trusted to arrange for our own trash pickup, apparently. Such small tyrannies are an indication that the U.S. is in trouble morally. We acquiesce in small tyrannies, and pretty soon bigger ones come.

There are some things we pay for which are in the very expensive range.

Housing is very expensive. It takes planning and saving to be able to afford a home. Or renting can take a significant bite out of your paycheck.

Vehicles are expensive. The degree of expense can be horrific. Buying relatively inexpensive used cars is one way to limit the vehicle expense.

Medical care and medical insurance are very expensive. The cost ratchets up the more the U.S. government gets involved. Who could have guessed?

Taxes are very expensive. This can vary per person. My own property taxes are not onerous. Other people, with more expensive housing in more expensive areas, pay enormous property taxes. But when I say taxes are very expensive, I am thinking of the sum total of all types of taxes. All of us pay a lot in taxes.

Official education is expensive. Schools and colleges cost a lot. Learning (see nine paragraphs above) need not be expensive, but official education is expensive. We pay for it whether we use it or not. I hate public schools, public universities. I believe they are profoundly outside the responsibility of limited government, and should not exist. But I have to pay for these monstrosities anyway. So do you.

The defense budget is expensive. If we posit a population of about 330,000,000, and see what the cost is for each person, of our defense budget, we find that the cost is enormous. The current defense budget is 715 billion dollars. That works out to a cost of $2,166.00 per person. So for a family of two parents with three children, your share of the defense budget is $10,830.00. Completely reasonable. We are bordered on the north by the raving maniac warmongering Canadians, and on the south by the military colossus Mexico. On the east we have just one tiny ocean protecting us from Europe, and on the west we have another tiny ocean protecting us from China. No wonder each person has to pay $2,166.00 to defend the U.S. from invasion. What’s that? We are being invaded “peacefully” from the south, and the U.S. does not do anything to stop it? Maybe we need to spend more for our defense budget! Thanks for the helpful information; we’ll increase the defense budget next year.

Warfare is expensive. We don’t protect our own borders from invasion, but we go off to Iran and Afghanistan to fight wars which end up costing enormous sums. See my blog post “Afghanistan exit” for July 29, 2021 for information on what that can mean in dollars.

So there we have a sort of summary of our financial situation. Some things are enormously expensive, and for the most part they are things in which the U.S. government is involved. Remove government involvement, and costs would plunge dramatically. No silly war in Afghanistan, for example, would mean zero cost of paying for a silly war in Afghanistan.

Some of the things in the expensive category can be managed by saving and planning. Housing and vehicle expense can be huge, but the expenditure of intelligence and humble self-control can keep expenses restrained. Instead of buying a $30,000.00 new vehicle, one could buy two used vehicles for $3,000.00 to $5,000.00 each. Instead of insisting on living in housing above one’s income, one could settle for less expensive housing and then upgrade it by gradual renovation.

The optimistic point made at the beginning still holds. Many, many things in the U.S. are still almost free. We can buy pens, and soap, for a pittance. And we can buy many other things for almost nothing. I am grateful that this is true.

Allow me to introduce you to Joe Six-Pack Christian. Joe was one of the 120 brethren gathered shortly after the death of Jesus Christ (Acts 1:15). Peter spoke at that meeting (Acts 1:15-26), and Joe was one of the 120 to whom he spoke.

Joe was also the world’s first dispensationalist. Joe got in on the ground floor. He was the first one to realize that Jesus Christ was coming back soon, in visible power. He was the first to realize that Christians were going to be raptured out of the earth, prior to Christ’s visible return. Joe was on the theological cutting edge. He understood that the things he was predicting were going to happen very soon, probably within his lifetime.

I wonder what Joe would say now, about all that. About 2,020 years have passed, and the things Joe was predicting have not yet happened.

Let’s do some math, keeping to round numbers for my benefit, since I’m not really very good in math. There were about 7,794,000,000 people in the world in 2020. About 2,382,000,000 people self-identified as Christians. That is about 30% of the world population claiming to be Christian.

So, in the approximately 2,020 years since a tiny band of 120 people gathered to hear Peter speak about their situation, the church has grown to be a fairly large group totaling 2,382,000,000. Over 2,020 years, that is an average increase of 1,179,000 per year.

Of course no one claims that during the first year after Christ’s death, that 1,179,000 people became committed Christians. No, the 1,179,000 represents only the average number of Christians added to the church over 2,020 years. It is a large number, but it did not happen in a steady, year by year manner. There has been large growth, but it took a lot of time for momentum to build.

Let’s look on the dark side, however. How many of the 2.382 billion people really are truly regenerated Christians? Most of us would agree that the church is fully of unconverted people. A few years ago I asked a large handful of people–people whom I had reason to hope were Christians–what percentage of the American church they believed to be truly regenerated, truly converted. Their answers averaged out to about 30%. My own guess had been 40%, so you can see I was a wild-eyed optimist, but my guess was not entered into the math. 30% converted out of professing Christians is a dismal percentage, but I suspect it is very close to being correct. All we have to do is to go into Christians churches in the U.S. and we soon realize that many professing Christians are clueless, and have never truly been converted. Grim. But reality exists, and we have to deal with it.

So now how many Christians are there in the world? 30% of 2,382,000,000 works out to be 714,600,000 people. So that is well over 700 million people. That is not a patch on 2.382 billion, but it is still a large number. Over 2,020 years, that works out to an average increase of 353,760 people per year. Not close to 1,179,000,000 Christians added per year as we came up with when we ran the math on professing Christians, but not a number to be sneezed at, either.

I wonder what Joe would say to all this math. What would he say now about his prediction that Christians were going to be raptured out of this difficult world, and that Jesus Christ was coming back, probably within Joe’s lifetime, in visible power? Joe has been in heaven perhaps as long as 2,000 years, and his prediction has still not come true.

Joe lacked perspective. What we need to consider is, what if we too are in the early church? Joe did not understand that the year 2021 would come around, and people would still be living in an ongoing world history. What would Joe say if he could see us now? I think that Joe, being an honest person if confused, would readily admit he had been wrong. I am sure that in heaven, Joe long ago realized that somehow he got it wrong, and faced up to his wrongness in a straightforward manner.

Joe didn’t know it at the time, but he was in the early church. The church existed long before Joe lived, of course, if we go back to repentant Adam and Eve, or to Abraham. But let’s just agree for the sake of argument that the church possessing the full knowledge of Jesus Christ began only after our Savior lived and died.

What if we too are in the early church? What if you and I, perhaps with Joe as our companion, visit the earth in the year 32021–30,000 years from now? If time and history are still going, we will at that point have to admit that we too, with Joe, were in the early church. Joe was in the slightly earlier church that we were, but another 30,000 years will have passed since you and I flourished.

Rapturing believers out of a difficult world? This is not how God acts. Look at world history. There have been two specific instances of God taking living people to be with Him and not putting them back on the earth–Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). Both incidents took place in Old Testament times. Granted, there may have been other instances in which God has taken living people to heaven and kept them there, and if so we simply don’t know about those instances. But such incidents must have been few, if they have happened.

If we agree that Paul was taken to heaven for a period of time when he first became an apostle, we know that he was returned to the earth to live out his allotted time.

God doesn’t give the people of His church a ride to heaven out of the dangers of this world. Yes, He may indeed work supernatural interventions to protect and rescue individuals out of difficult situations. I suspect that has happened to many of us, and I could list at least three incidents (three or thirty-three?) in my own life that make me think He might indeed have acted to keep me alive or uncrippled. But that is quite different from Him rapturing tens of millions of people off the earth. That ain’t going to happen. God does not work like that.

What He does is build His church slowly over time. Actually, I’m joking. There is nothing slow about adding an average of 353,760 true believers to His church for 2,020 years! From a band of 120 probably worried people, to 714,600,000 Christians, in only slightly over 2,000 years! (Come to think of it, we are probably just about as worried as the original 120 may have been!)

Our temptation is always to lack perspective. Joe Six-Pack Christian lacked perspective, when he broached his unbiblical dispensational theology in the first years after Christ’s death. But we too often fall into the same temptation to which Joe fell.

And by no means is it only dispensational believers who lack perspective. I think all of us, whatever our theological orientation, quickly lose perspective. Joe was in the early church. We too, I would guess, are in the early church. Possibly we are in the very early church. 30,000 years from now Christians may look back on us and wonder if we had running water. (Well, some of us did, in the U.S., at least, but some other parts of the world were still struggling to get clean water.)

If there are 714,600,000 true Christians in the world, why is the world such a difficult place? Why are so many wretched things happening?

We are in the early church in terms of time. We are also in the early church in terms of the quality of our theological insight and in terms of our practical behavior. When we want to do God’s will, our theological insight will improve along with our behavior (John 7:17).

We seem not to have come very far in 2,020 years. But our numbers have grown dramatically. We may have many thousands of years to work on the quality of our behavior. Any one of us can take a personal step forward in faithful behavior, without waiting for the herd to follow. If we do, that will help in our small corner of the world, even if the help seems minuscule.

God is not going to rapture us out of our problems. We caused the problems by our pietist, antinomian (disobedient), dispensational, amillennial ways of thinking and acting. He expects us to solve our problems–with His constant help, of course. His zeal assures that His kingdom will increase as the centuries unfold (Isaiah 9:7). He intends to use our heartfelt obedience as part of the means by which He builds His kingdom on earth. He will do the heavy lifting, but we have our part to play as well, as we seek to obey Him in love.

Raptured out of our problems? Smaptured! We, like Joe Six-Pack Christian, are in the early church. Joe, if he could speak to us from his place in heaven, would tell us to get to work building God’s kingdom on earth.

Get to work doing what? Well, for a start, educate our children at our own expense, tithe, show up at church on time every week, vote to protect our neighbor’s property, pay our bills on time and pay back our bankruptcies, show love to a child in a difficult home situation. We could go on and on. The ways we can help God build His kingdom are countless. This is not rocket science. We all know enough solid theology to make a start. The way to do a thing is to do it, as Bishop Ryle taught us.