2 Thessalonians 2
In 2 Thessalonians 2, the unveiling of the lawless one brings about the second coming of Jesus who slays him with the breath of his mouth (which is to say the precision of his poetry). The devil’s full incarnation is the bait that draws Jesus back into the world. This is happening right now as the prophets are being forced to step up by the egregious crimes of the lawless one the Christian fascists elected to represent them.
Jesus is resurrected into every prophet who refuses to keep their head down and takes up their cross to stand for justice and overthrow the devil. The uglier the devil’s reign grows, the bolder the prophets will testify and the more fully the lamb will be resurrected into them. There will be no excuse for those who close their ears to the prophets because their testimony will soon be everywhere. The final judgment of western civilization is coming quickly.
There is going to be a new type of street preacher in the meltdown of our Christian fascist dystopia: one who proclaims jubilee for the poor and the final judgment of the rich, calling for the crucified lambs to be enthroned to judge over all of us and guide us into the age of restful feasting that will come about through the final collapse of the age of grasping and striving that forces us into our great repentance.
Judgment is coming for the rich and all who have enabled their greed. They have run out of scapegoats to blame. When the collapse forces us to abandon our selfish ways of life to survive through neighborly love, none of the old lies will work on the people. As the prophets weave our words together like spiderwebs, there will be no place for the lies to land.
In the chaos of the collapse that is coming, everyone will show their true colors, and when it is over, no one will be able to plead innocence. Those who do not stand with the crucified lambs will be reckoned as loyal to the beast. The crucified will be vindicated and the wicked will be damned forever as their legacy is imprinted permanently into human consciousness just like Judas Iscariot and Marcus Junius Brutus and Adolf Hitler and Rafael Trujillo and Kim Jong Un.
That is what eternal punishment means: to be always remembered as the villains of history. Death doesn’t erase our memory; there is no escape from history; the dead witness it all unfold, all of the results of their choices in subsequent generations. Heaven is not an afterlife of lobotomized forgetting; it is the fury of our ancestors’ longing to make love reign on earth now. And those of us who align ourselves with their divine conspiracy are citizens of heaven in this lifetime.
What the wicked don’t understand is that truth always overruns every attempt to control the story. History cannot be snuffed out by Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk no matter how much they manipulate the algorithm and try to criminalize “woke” social awareness.
Our great grandchildren will know them as the villains who enabled the most corrupt president in the history of our country whose permanent gift to humanity is to expose the lawlessness of those who claim the mantle of law and order.
Nobody of even modest intelligence has believed the official story in a long time. As the prophets deepen our obedience to the truth, it will become impossible to suppress our tongues of fire. We are about to see a great repentance burst forth that will be unlike any of the fake revivals of the past 250 years in this land soaked in the blood of Jesus’ lynching.
The great repentance will not be based on what a self-righteous asshole like Franklin Graham says about America’s moral degradation. We do not need to repent of overthrowing the authority of the white man and his puritanical moralism that excuses him of loving his neighbor. The great repentance will be based on the testimony of those who have been crucified to pay for our nation’s sins.
For it is in seeing how we destroy real people’s lives that we can determine exactly what sin to repent for. Sin is any behavior that falls short of being perfectly loving; its gravity is measured by its impact on people who are more precious to God than any abstract notion of glory attained by making humans follow a book of rules.
Labeling others’ behaviors and identities as “sin” in order to avoid the responsibility of loving your neighbor is the greatest sin of all: scapegoating, which is the way we crucify Jesus in the bodies of people who do not deserve to be punished for our nation’s sins.
One day the Christians will see how they have crucified our savior with his praise on their lips and they will weep over the sin they never recognized for a long time. The prophets will not rest until the blasphemy of the church has been owned and atoned so that the saints in heaven no longer have to wail at the desolation of their legacy.
The day of the Lord is coming. Woe to all the self-deluded devils who forced the lamb to come back and destroy them with the breath of his mouth. It is never too late to repent. How glorious to be remembered through the centuries as one whose late defection from the mob of the beast was what tilted the victory to the lambs?
But the lambs are the ones whose memory we will treasure. I have known many already. If you asked me who is the second coming of Jesus, my list of candidates is long and it grows every time I meet a young brown woman who obeys the truth no matter what it costs her.
I have met so many divine daughters whose sandals I am unworthy to untie. The new Jerusalem will be their legacy. They will lead us out of the city of war and into the city of peace. The next age will belong to them and the religions that are built upon their testimony.