“25 Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. 26 And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”; 27  “and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” 28 As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. 29 For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. 30 For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, 31 so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. 32 For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all. 33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! 34  “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” 35  “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:25-36 ESV)

The cipher called Knowledge butts heads with coping: all Man’s experience is hasty and unelaborated, non-abstracted, the proverbial “step back” is outside of our control. Jesus gave some sort of “step back”, proposing answers to questions we were sleepwalking and unaware even of our status of Questioning. We were unaware what we needed, only that Something had to give.

Something was knocking at the door. Something was forlorn, diminishing, pushing Downward: our lives were scraping by and ennui At Large. Jesus talked about a Lifestyle or Response that began with the unheard of: His time and presence for our hand-holding first steps, and indeed, the Marriage Covenant of the Lamb means His presence for all our lives long.

Strange days, then, the cipher of Knowledge, to be positioned High and Lifted up, where we can see the strange compromises and the flailing Efforts to do it our way. Our determined, headstrong, maniacal, and bull-headed Way. It isn’t so much that we are in dastardly and hated sins, as it is that we are sinning by the pedantic or obtuse Fact of not better knowing Him.

There is nothing therefore but Pity for the sinner, because her or his excesses are like a child’s play or cry, like a long project whose conclusion was an existential “I am”. “I think, therefore I am”. Cogito etc., ergo and more, sum, the Be All and End All of the debate.

Belligerence, then, is a tempest Maintained, Managed, Mundane to some but mainly Oxygen for the one under sail, for the soldier or sailor or pilot or troops: there are Hierarchies and Levels of “knowledge”, and the lifestyles of some—in the trenches, in the barracks, in the Submission Routines—stay closer to Knowledge. Keep up a gambit called Awareness. March to a drumbeat called Certainty. We are innocent and Certain, that to be taken out of our comfort zones, this is to Taste of the eternal. It is to free-fall but trust-fall, because His mud-splattered Eyes are strangely Aware above and beyond what is desired. We desire lies, sweet lies, but He patiently holds the hand as the mud is wiped away. We nervously wonder, why get into the business of Truth when the simulacra and illusion was more familiar?

Familiar, yes, but sinful to maintain the illusion when at once the Truth is made known. Our sins… they are not ways that the pewsitter resents the “sinner” who indulges, rather our sins our pitiable and macabre, ways we fail to make the existential Leap: I think, therefore I am. Ways we fail to accept Christ for us and We His people, sadly restrained yes by sins, boring and pedantic, but Sins nonetheless. Today, our belligerence is aimed at the unknowable plausible Excuses. Our antagonism is with no Man but with dastardly satanic cult. It is with the ways cult forms and reforms, and our personal Jesus “gang”, “cult” if you like, is anything but such cynical names: it is a Religion, made proper because it gives the distant Gaze to the soldiers’ eyes, it gives the perfunctorial Decisiveness to the soldiers’ ramblings, meanderings, perusals. Some people… some are Enlightened, not all is a stoic mess of middling notions or affections. Some people… they are Destined and Engaged with truth most difficult but tolerable because He holds our hands, He who went to the Cross, He who saw through the mild and severe Demons in each and every one whom He met.