Going to the Dogs

“They are all silent dogs; they cannot bark, dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber.”

Our late Shih Tzu was not a silent dog, but he was probably as close as you’ll ever get. He almost never barked, and when he did, about the most you’d get from him was a polite, solitary “Arf.” If you didn’t respond to that, you were on your own.

A non-barking dog is world’s greatest pet when you live in an apartment and want to maintain some sort of decent relationship with your neighbors. But our little guy would not have made much of a watchdog.

Sheepdogs and House Pets

Isaiah has much to say about the watchmen of Israel, the nation’s leaders. He could hardly help but notice the similarity between them and certain members of the animal kingdom:

“All you beasts of the field, come to devour — all you beasts in the forest. His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge; they are all silent dogs; they cannot bark, dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber. The dogs have a mighty appetite; they never have enough. But they are shepherds who have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, each to his own gain, one and all. ‘Come,’ they say, ‘let me get wine; let us fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.’ ”

Sheepdogs and house pets are judged by different standards. In the case of the latter, the fewer barks and bites the better. If a pet wants to sleep all day, that’s just fine; we give them homes to make them happy, or at least I do. But a sheepdog who loves to slumber is useless at the job for which he was bred and bought. The purpose of having a sheepdog is to watch over sheep and make sure predators do not devour them undetected and undefended.

The leaders of Israel were useless for four reasons: they were self-involved, unaware of their environment, overindulged and unable to react. They could not sound the alarm when a pack of wolves started leaping the walls of the fold for several reasons, the most obvious of which was that they were fast asleep on the job. But even if they had been able to detect a threat, they would probably still have been useless at alerting or defending the sheep because they were incapable of rousing themselves to action and too out of shape to pose any credible challenge to predators.

Tomorrow Will Be Like This Day

How did the leaders of Israel end up like this anyway? The answer is ideological.

A house pet can afford to be a philosophical uniformitarian: “Tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.” Unless it is the annual trip to the vet or the final send-off, this is probably the case. For the average pet pup, 364 days out of 365 will involve a brisk walk around the neighborhood, a bit of capering in the back yard, a little lap time, three square meals and maybe a few stray pizza toppings if all goes well. What’s not to like about tomorrow if all our experience leads us to believe that’s how it will shake out?

Life for a sheepdog is a different story. Experiences vary. The job of protecting sheep requires a catastrophist mentality. Tomorrow may not be like today, because tomorrow may bring wolves. If the sheep could see inside a good sheepdog’s head, they would probably compare him to the conspiracy theorists about whom even the Christian media is always complaining. Never mind the admonition that you might cry wolf once too often, a good watchdog always expects wolves at the gate, and he’s ready to deal with the worst life can bring about. His ears twitch constantly, and he’s sniffing the air for the least sign of danger. When he barks, it means something, even if nobody’s listening.

Leadership in 2024

Evangelical leaders, wake up. Tomorrow will not be like this day. I’m not a sheepdog, let alone a prophet, but even I can see what’s coming, and coming fast. In Canada and the US at least, woke ideology from public school through university is transforming children from Christian families into miserable, confused little monsters, our sons into confidence-free, desperately lonely girly-men and our daughters into self-indulgent tyrants defined by their lunatic impulses rather than godly character. Get them out of the system now, and teach them at home before their brains and characters are turned to sludge. Parents, take those Disney movies and hurl them in the trash. Everything Disney is evil to the bone, and only those living decades in the past could miss it.

More bad news. Those from this generation who make it through to adulthood with their brains and values relatively functional are going to school to equip themselves for jobs woke ideology will shortly render impossible for Christians to perform without moral compromise. We need to be raising a generation of in-demand laborers who can operate independently of institutions, offices and human resources departments, whose services are critical to a functioning society and who can trade these skills on the black market if and when our faith puts them out of favor in the job market. Instead, we are raising a generation of accredited bureaucrats, administrators, paper pushers and go-along-to-get-alongs because that’s where the money was made two generations ago. I hope these kids show some character and surprise me in the crunch, but I’m not feeling overly confident.

Mortgages and Investments

Again, I say, wake up. Tomorrow will not be like this day. Today, young Christian families can carry personal debt at relatively low interest rates in order to live in a nice house, take an annual vacation and a drive a van as soon as the third child is on the way. But folks, an economic crash is coming that will make all previous market corrections in our lifetimes look like a walk in the park. Every Christian should be working toward a debt-free state with any investments we hold as broadly diversified as possible. Everyone knows this is coming. The only question is how soon.

To make it worse, elders who approve mortgage debt for churches in this environment are sleeping on the job. They are saying tomorrow will be like this day, when I can all but guarantee you tomorrow the level of giving in your local congregation is going to fall off a cliff. Your tax breaks are going away and your congregants are going to be scrambling to keep their own homes, not filling the offering tray to pay for that new gym. If you mortgage it, your church is going to lose it. Wake up!

The Surveillance State

Persecution-wise, COVID-19 was the merest trial run for what’s coming. We are a couple of political moves away from a church that meets in homes, if it can even manage that; from a surveillance state that uses our online history to track us down, out us, ostracize us, prevent us from working and intimidate us into silence. Meanwhile, we are all walking around carrying GPSs on our persons as if that’s perfectly normal, addicted to uploading size-optimized photos of our meals, kids and vacations, and waiting eagerly for the next thumbs up from our equally-addicted social media pals.

Where are the elders who recognize our political system is completely broken, that the rule of law is dead and that polite, demure conservatism has conserved nothing? Where are the sheepdogs barking out that even a host of Trumps and Poilievres cannot get us out of this mess we have gotten ourselves into? Where are the plans for how the shepherds will minister to their sheep in an environment where an obvious public testimony for Christ will get you hauled away in the back of a police van?

The Sound of the Wolf Pack

Tomorrow will not be like this day. Maybe the trumpet will have sounded and the church will have gone home and it won’t matter. But maybe it will. In the meantime, where are all the sheepdogs barking? All I hear is the cry of the wolf pack getting closer.

Do we really have nothing but house pets running the show?