The Trap To Capture Superboy, And Us

Written around the end of May 2007--

"He dies for lack of discipline, and because of his
great folly he is lost." -- Proverbs 5:23

"A prudent man sees danger and hides himself; but
the simple go on, and suffer for it." --Proverbs 22:3


Long ago, before they had the competition of Marvel
Comics to force them to do better, DC Comics tolerated
some awfully mediocre storywriting from their staff.
Nonetheless, one scene from those years of blah plotlines
sticks in my mind as having been clever.

It was in a Superboy comic. The young Lex Luthor, already
up to no good, constructed a cage that was made partly out
of kryptonite, with lead sleeves to prevent the kryptonite
from making itself known too soon by sight or feel. The
kryptonite would only be uncovered, and its harmful effect
unleashed, if someone stepped inside. Since no force at his
command could compel Superboy to enter the cage, Lex relied
on Superboy to fall victim to curiosity. So, having placed
the cage where the super-victim would find it only after
Lex was well away from its vicinity, Lex left a sign on
its open door, saying simply:

"TRAP TO CAPTURE SUPERBOY.
ENTER HERE, PLEASE."

And enter it Superboy did, only to find his powers drained
by a sudden surge of kryptonite radiation. I forget just how
Superboy survived that blunder and lived to become Superman;
but the lesson of the self-announced trap has stuck with me.

A study of history will impress you with the tragic fact that
many of the great calamities were breathtakingly avoidable.
It would have been so easy to build the Titanic with complete
anti-flooding compartmentalization, instead of only the partial
barriers which in the crisis failed to contain the incoming water.
It would have been so easy for the leaders of Europe to look at
Mein Kampf and say to themselves, "By Jove, that Hitler chap
really does intend to conquer us!" It ought to be just as easy
for present-day European leaders to listen to the recordings
obtained of routine sermons in European and Middle Eastern
mosques, and say to themselves, "Those imams really DO
intend to impose Islam and Sharia law on all of us by violence
and fear!" But people keep walking into the kryptonite cage.

I've said in my recent columns that I anticipate evil taking
a different line once Islamic terrorism has exhausted itself (or
has been annihilated in the Gog-Magog event from the Book
of Ezekiel). And the preparation being made for that new line
to succeed is going on right in front of us. The kryptonite cage
we are being invited to come and be caught in is the cage of
PASSIVE DEPENDENCY ON CENTRAL AUTHORITY.
Since I began by remembering comic books from my youth,
let's look at another phenomenon of youth. For everyone who
has a driver's license: wasn't it a great liberation, didn't it make
a huge difference, when you became able to drive on your own,
no longer depending on your bicycle or your parents to drive
you to places? In the first year of owning your own car, would
you have wanted to go back to having Mommy chauffeur you?
Even for Americans who know nothing about Patrick Henry
or John Paul Jones or Francis Scott Key, this kind of personal
recollection of the value of liberty should count for something
--should make people wary and hesitant about going in the
opposite direction, toward helpless clienthood. And can it be
that Americans have completely forgotten what was the evil of
all evils that our Founding Fathers fought against?
It was the evil of a government which could take anything
away from us, and impose any burden upon us, without ever
having to answer to us.

Now, think: what would you say is going on when all of the
following trends are occurring at the same time?

-- The federal government steadily increasing its meddling
with local school boards nationwide, encouraging uniformity of
subject matter in all public schools.

-- Christians being threatened with gagging and censorship
through "hate speech" laws, though hate-speech prohibition
is NEVER applied to stop Christian-bashers in the media.

-- Embryonic stem-cell research, whose acceptance MUST
reinforce the attitude of individual human lives being expendable,
still being touted even when it has already been proven that
benefits can be gained from other stem-cell research methods
which don't kill innocent babies to get the cells.

-- Leftwing politicians keeping up the pressure to confiscate
all privately-owned firearms, even though those politicians all
KNOW that violent crime is consistently reduced when honest
citizens are allowed to carry guns for self-defense.

-- Financial institutions trying to move us toward a "cashless
economy," one in which no purchase can be made that is not put
into a database, until the very act of buying something is like
being forced to testify against yourself in court.

-- The establishment news media trying to make our brave
and honorable military servicemembers look bad when they
uphold America's interests, but helping the United Nations to
cover up its appallingly bad handling of "peacekeeping" tasks,
trying to help legitimize the U.N. as a world government with a
right even to tax all ocean shipping.

-- Voices periodically being raised to advocate more central
control over health care, as when the Clintons formerly supported
the idea of commanding all medical schools that they must follow
a quota system regarding how many students were allowed to
study each specialty.

-- The Democratic Party wanting to raise our taxes again,
while at the same time trying (in the name of "lobbying reform")
to close off the channels by which citizens can acquire information
about new legislation that affects our legal rights.

-- A vast portion of the American population blindly accepting
every new erosion of our self-determination as free citizens, in
the belief that government handouts justify everything.

All of these trends point toward making us more vulnerable
to coercive control by a rule-from-the-top-down authority,
with federal authority preferred over local authority, and global
monopoly government preferred over our federal government.
The centralizers always promise us great benefits in return for
our submission to ever-greater intrusions upon our personal
independence; but when they have all the power in their hands,
just how are we going to compel them to keep their promises?
Once inside the kryptonite cage, we won't have a lot of assets
left with which to bargain with Lex Luthor.

How much we can do against this trend essentially depends
on how close we are to THE End Times. Although, as I have
just been saying, the wrongness of excessive central control
is maddeningly self-evident, it is entirely a different question
to foresee when we will run up against that final excessive
central power which has to be allowed to prevail for a time in
God's plan. Consider this: in Revelation 13:7 we are told that
the Antichrist will be allowed to "make war on the saints and
conquer them." Christians alive at that time (or "Tribulation
Saints," depending on your eschatology) surely would have to
know that the Antichrist can't be defeated by human efforts;
yet this verse appears to predict that at one stage they will be
resisting him all the same, and will be overcome by force. It
seems to me that, knowing global dictatorship to be wrong in
principle, these end-time believers will already be resisting
it before the Antichrist assumes command of it, and God will
approve of them in principle even though His apocalyptic
plans require Him to let them be vanquished--the fact of
the saints being vanquished probably serving as one sign
that the Antichrist is now on the scene.

The fallen heroes of this last resistance will have their
satisfaction, their payback, when Jesus comes back to Earth,
NOT any longer as passive Lamb but as avenging Lion, and
the villains find out that they have no kryptonite that works
against Him. This promised moment is foreshadowed in John
Milton's "Paradise Lost," when the Puritan poet imagines
the pre-incarnate Jesus taking over the crushing of Satan's
original rebellion in Heaven. Jesus thanks and commends the
righteous angels for faithfully fighting the corrupted angels
--but, in Milton's imagining of the scene, says that it is
appropriate for Him to finish the action Himself:

"That they may have their wish, to try with Me
In battle which the stronger proves, they all,
Or I alone against them, since by strength
They measure all, of other excellence
Not emulous, nor care who them excels;
Nor other strife with them do I vouchsafe."

Inspiring words, for me at least. But it still remains for us
to discern what WE are to do meanwhile. To this tricky but
urgent question I say that, since government is increasingly
trying to be worshipped as God, we are increasingly obligated
in conscience to tell government, "No, actually, no, you're not."

There will be much diversity in the ways God calls different
Christians to resist the centralizing trend. A favorite notion of
mine--first brought to my attention long ago by an elderly
Christian gentleman, whose name I seem to recall as Bennett
Griggs--is a different kind of "cashless economy" from the
ruthlessly-monitored model the international banks wish to
foist upon us. I refer to BARTER NETWORKS: that's right,
my tutoring your children in math for your fixing my car. This
does have the merit of being a nonviolent form of resistance.

You who read these words may have ideas of your own.
God knows, we don't need one monolithic central authority
micromanaging all efforts to resist the monolithic central
authority. But resist we must. We may in our lifetimes be
forcibly shoved into the cage, but God would not have us
WALK in of our own foolish accord.


Yours for Jesus and America,

Joseph R. Ravitts