The Most Expensive Fish Hook in History

Welcome to my new subscribers, this one is for you.

*I shamelessly stole this image and the farmer conversation from RevealedEye because it inspired me. Hopefully by promoting him on my page i wont get sued. lol*

Activist: “The water usage for beef is obscene. Thousands of litres per kilogram.”

Farmer: “That’s rainfall.”

Activist: “What?”

Farmer: “The figure includes all the rain that falls on the pasture. The cows drink from the stream. The rain falls whether there’s a cow here or not.”

Activist: “It’s still water consumption.”

Farmer: “Should I stop the rain falling on my field?”

Activist: “Grow crops instead. More efficient.”

Farmer: “This is a 35-degree slope in the Welsh hills. Show me the crop.”

Activist: “Technology...”

Farmer: “To make tractors climb mountains?”

Activist: “There must be a solution.”

Farmer: “There is. It’s called a cow.”

Activist: [checks phone]

I want you to notice something about that exchange before we go any further.

The activist was not stupid. She was not lazy. She was not, as far as anyone could tell, a bad person. She cared. The passion was real. The intention was good. She had shown up, done her homework, or at least she had read the summary of someone else’s homework, carefully prepared by people who needed her to reach exactly the conclusions she reached.

The problem was not her heart. The problem was her purpose.

She had a “borrowed” one.

* * *

Shane Willard taught me to read Hebrew the way the ancients drew it, as pictures before it was letters, stories before it was sounds. In that older tongue, every word is a small comic strip, a sequence of images that tells you not just what a thing is but what it does. The word for sin (iniquity), read that way, tells a story. “The thing that catches your eye and draws you in, and once it has your eye it has you surrounded, and the authority over your life shifts.” Behold what you have become.

I have never heard a better description of how sin actually works.

There is a mechanism running through Western culture that deserves more attention than it gets, and it is this: a person without a genuine, rooted, satisfying purpose is the most manageable person on earth. The hunger for meaning is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, possibly second only to the hunger for love. And a person who has not found genuine purpose will reach for counterfeit purpose the way a drowning man reaches for a life jacket. He does not inspect the stitching. He grabs. THIS need for purpose is how gangs or cults recruit, and how ideologies recruit as well, think communism or Islam. Then add in the Loneliness factor, the sense of community, feeling apart of something bigger then yourself. Then there is the group think and the tribalism… But the hook could take any of these forms and often uses many of them all at once.

The social engineers understand this social engineering science better than the schoolteachers who implement their curriculum, better than the journalists who distribute their messaging, better perhaps than the politicians who fund the whole operation. Because the social engineers are not stupid people. They are, in fact, extremely clever people doing an extremely deliberate thing. The madness of crowds by Douglas Murry does a good job exploring this.

They are manufacturing purpose. Capturing hearts and minds. In bulk. For export.

First you find someone with a good heart and no anchor. Then you show them something that deserves their empathy, something cute and vulnerable, big-eyed and defenseless, trembling in a cold cage, and before the image has faded you have yourself another Peta-crusader. The passion was already there. You just gave it a direction. You handed them a hook and called it a cause.

* * *

Here is a partial list of hooks, offered without judgment on the concern inside them, because that is not my point:

Save the whales. End systemic racism. Smash the patriarchy. Protect trans kids. Rewild the countryside. Decolonize the curriculum. Stop the glaciers from melting. (And yes, stop the cows from farting away the ozone layer, which is a real sentence that real adults have said with real conviction at real conferences with real catering budgets.) Eat the rich. Eat local. Eat bugs. Eat rats. They canned them and just spelled rats backwards, which is either brilliant marketing or a confession. Stop eating. Your body, your choice. Their body, apparently also your choice.

Every one of those hooks has a genuine concern somewhere inside it. I am not saying the fish is rotten. I am saying the hook is the point.

Because here is what a well-made hook does. It gives you something that feels like purpose, something large enough to channel your passion, urgent enough to justify your anger, noble enough to silence the voice that whispers at three in the morning that you are not sure what any of this is actually for. And the cause must be complex enough to retain its members: fundraising, a definable enemy, dogma, lifestyle change, rallies, a layered and labyrinthine architecture of grievance that keeps you too busy to ask whether the building was worth constructing.

And so you press in. You donate. You march. You post. You argue with farmers on the internet about rainfall.

And the nagging does not stop.

So you press in harder. The cause becomes the identity. The identity becomes the tribe. The tribe becomes the whole world. Anyone who questions the cause is questioning you, personally, at the level of your soul, because at this point the cause IS your soul. You have sublet your interior life to an ideology, and the ideology is not a gentle tenant.

And still the nagging does not stop.

Because it cannot. Not this way. Not with this.

* * *

Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician and theologian, was approximately four hundred years ahead of his time on most things. He put it this way: there is a God-shaped hole in the heart of every person, and it cannot be filled by anything other than God. So, knowing this hole exists, what do the social engineers do? The pull God out of the schools and replace His with “random chance” and a total void of purpose and meaning. Now that creates an easily manipulated public. All we have to do now is give them a cause and a sob story. Or tell them they are victims and they can discover why like a choose your own adventure book. They will hunt for something to fill the God shaped hole and the social engineers simply choose whats on the buffet to control the options. Do you think that the public would have come up with climate change rather then Pesticides, pollution, GMO crops, government bailouts, rampant spending, the federal reserve… or other more pressing matters?

That is not a metaphor dressed up as theology. That is a structural observation. Pascal was describing an engineering problem.

The hole has a specific shape. You can fill it with causes and movements and crusades and the warm, righteous glow of being on the correct side of history. You can pack it with passion and outrage and the satisfaction of a well-attended rally. You can line it with a thousand fish hooks and still none of them fit. They are the wrong shape.

And this is the tragic thing, not the funny thing, about the activist checking her phone at the end of that conversation. She was not wrong to want something worth giving herself to. That longing is one of the most honourable things about her. She was not wrong to feel that the world has problems worth solving. It does. She was not even entirely wrong about the cows, depending on which cows we are talking about.

She was simply operating on the assumption that the hole inside her could be filled from the outside. By effort. By cause. By accumulating enough righteous deeds on the correct side of enough important arguments. Poor poor Gretta Thunberg… It is cruel to call them useful idiots… but they are being used.

And the people who sold her the fish hook knew that when they threw it. They need her to keep reaching. A satisfied person is a useless activist. A full soul does not need a cause to feel complete. The mechanism requires the hunger to stay sharp, so they have every incentive to make sure it never satisfies.

* * *

So what does fill it?

You hear the question everywhere once you start listening for it. Belle sings it pacing the streets of her provincial town: there must be more than this. Every second song on the radio is a variation on the same cry, dressed in different chords, aimed at a different face, but underneath it the same ache, the same hollow, the same unanswered question. It is the heart cry of every generation that ever lived, and it has never once been answered by a march or a manifesto.

Pascal knew what it needed. The ancient Hebrews drew it into their alphabet. And a Welsh farmer standing on a thirty-five degree slope in the rain, talking to someone who had stopped listening, was living proof that the wrong answer, however passionate and however loud, is still the wrong answer.

The right answer is not a cause. It is the fulfillment of your purpose, you were DESIGNED for a fulfilling relationship. But there are rules. Because designs follow rules. And an economy. Let me share my understanding of how this works.

The currency of that economy is love. The structure requires choice. And the only transaction that has ever actually filled the hole is not a transaction at all…

The Economy of Love

Why the currency of love cannot be earned, compelled, or manufactured

There is a question that cuts beneath every serious argument about God, salvation, and human dignity. It is not a theological question first. It is a structural one.

What are the conditions required for love to exist?

Not what love feels like. Not what love costs. Not what love produces. What must be true about a relationship before love can be present in it at all, rather than something that merely resembles love from the outside?

I want to suggest one condition that is non-negotiable. One structural requirement without which love cannot exist, regardless of how warm the feeling, how sincere the devotion, how consistent the behavior.

Choice.

Not the feeling of warmth toward someone. Not loyalty or obedience or devotion. Those things can be produced by programming. A thermostat is loyal to its setting. A river is obedient to gravity. Neither of them loves anything. For something to qualify as love, the one doing the loving must have been genuinely free to not love. For love to be possible so mush rejection be possible.

The Currency

Every economy requires a currency. The currency of love is giving, or sacrifice. and that sacrifice may not be taken it must be received.

Sacrifice alone is not enough. A soldier pushed onto a grenade is not a hero. He is a victim. The sacrifice must be freely given, or it is loss without love. The choice must precede the cost, or the cost proves nothing.

But freely given sacrifice is still only one side of the equation. It describes what love costs and how it is spent. It does not describe the full economy.

Every economy also requires a receiver. And the receiving must be as free as the giving.

The full economy of love is giving and receiving. Freely given. Voluntarily received.

This distinction matters more than it might appear, because it reveals the fundamental difference between two irreconcilable approaches to salvation. There is the economy of love, which is giving and receiving. And there is its counterfeit, which is buying and selling.

Two Economies

In the economy of buying and selling, the relationship is a transaction. You perform. God pays out. You bring your deeds to the counter and hope the balance tips in your favor. The exchange is the whole relationship. When the transaction is complete both parties walk away. There is no love in a transaction. When you buy something you do not love the store. When you sell something you do not love the buyer.

Every works righteousness system is built on this economy. The specific mechanisms differ. The ledger looks different from tradition to tradition. But the structure is identical. Human performance creates a debt that God is obligated to honor. Salvation is the payout on a sufficient deposit of righteous deeds. This is buying Gods favor, and it is “Simony”, Named after Simon the sorcerer who was cursed in the Bible for trying to buy Gods love with money.

The problem is not merely theological. It is structural. A transaction has no love in it by definition, because love cannot be purchased. The moment money changes hands a gift becomes a product. The moment performance becomes the basis of acceptance, what you have is not a relationship. It is a contract.

In the economy of giving and receiving, the entire structure is different. The gift precedes the response. The love is prior to the performance. The father in the parable of the prodigal son, does not wait to see if the returning son has cleaned himself up before he runs to embrace his son. He runs while the boy is still a great way off, still smelling of the far country, before a single word of the sons rehearsed speech has been delivered.

Paul states the economy plainly in Ephesians 2:8. By grace through faith, not of works, so that no one can boast. He is not making a theological fine point. He is describing the structure. You cannot boast about a gift. Boasting only makes sense in a transaction where you brought something to the table. In the economy of giving and receiving you brought nothing. You only opened your hands.

What Free Will Protects

This is where the question of choice becomes unavoidable.

If God creates human beings who cannot ultimately resist His will, who are guided or misguided by sovereign decree with no genuine alternative, then what He receives from them is not love. It is output. A program running as written.

You cannot love someone into loving you back. Not because love is weak, but because compelled love is not love. It is compliance. The economy requires two willing parties. One to give freely and one to receive freely.

Now consider what the devil’s sin reveals.

Every tradition agrees the devil sinned. But ask the structural question: was the devil following God’s will or rebelling against it?

If the devil was following God’s will, then what the devil did was not sin. It was obedience. You cannot sin by doing what God compelled you to do. Sin is rebellion by definition. And rebellion requires a will that is genuinely free to comply or refuse.

The devil’s sin therefore proves free will. Not just for the devil. For every human being who has ever stood at a crossroads between obedience and refusal. If the devil could genuinely refuse God, then the structure God built into creation includes real refusal as a real option. For everyone.

That is not a flaw in the design. It is the whole point of it.

Why would God build a creation where refusal is possible? Where He can be rejected, wounded, ignored, replaced? Where creatures He loves can spend entire lifetimes walking away from Him?

Because He wanted something that could not be manufactured.

He wanted to be chosen.

Not obeyed. Not programmed. Not compelled. Chosen. By creatures who had every option available and turned toward Him anyway. That is the only way love enters the picture. And God, who is love, built a universe where love was possible. Which required building a universe where its refusal was also possible.

The garden was not a test of obedience. It was the architecture of love.

Where Calvinism Goes Wrong

The same structural problem that corrupts works righteousness corrupts the doctrine of double predestination, and the corruption runs in the opposite direction.

Works righteousness makes the human being the active party who earns God’s response. Double predestination makes God the active party who determines the human being’s eternal outcome before that human being exists. Both eliminate the genuine choice that love requires. One removes it from God’s side of the ledger. The other removes it from ours.

The Calvinist system in its hardest form teaches that God creates specific individuals with the predetermined intention of damning them, makes no provision for their salvation, and then holds them accountable for failing to believe. He commands them in scripture to repent. He holds them responsible for rejecting what was never available to them.

First John 4:8 says God is love. Not that God is loving. Not that God possesses the attribute of love. That God IS love. It is the substance of His being, not a characteristic He exhibits. A God whose essential nature is love cannot simultaneously create people for the purpose of their destruction. Those two things cannot occupy the same being.

Second Peter 3:9 says God is not willing that any should perish. Ezekiel 33:11 says God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. John 3:16 says God so loved the world. Not the elect extracted from the world. The world.

A God who predestines specific people to damnation before they draw breath cannot simultaneously take no pleasure in their death. He cannot be not-willing that any should perish while having decreed that many shall. He cannot so love the world while having withheld the provision of love from most of it.

The economy of love requires that the giving be free. Double predestination makes the giving conditional on a decree made before the recipient existed. That is not a gift. That is a performance staged for a predetermined audience.

The Protection Racket

There is a third distortion worth naming, one that is rarely examined because it is hidden inside a system that presents itself as the ultimate expression of submission to God.

Islam presents itself structurally as total surrender. The word itself means submission. The entire framework is built around the absolute sovereignty of Allah and the complete obligation of the creature to obey. On the surface it appears to be the most theologically humble of the major traditions, the one that most thoroughly eliminates human pretension before a transcendent God.

But classical Islamic soteriology contains a mechanism that quietly inverts the entire power structure it claims to uphold.

On the Day of Judgment, the believing Muslim’s good deeds are placed on the mizan, the scales. If they are sufficient, Paradise is the outcome. The deeds create a claim. God is obligated to honor the claim. The faithful Muslim can, in classical formulation, hold God accountable to the debt God owes him for a life of obedience.

Read that again carefully.

The God who is so transcendent that He cannot be called Father. So sovereign that He guides and misguides by pure decree. So exalted that no prophet has ever seen His face. That same God can be cornered on the last day by a man with a sufficient pile of deeds and made to pay what He owes.

That is not submission. It is a transaction dressed in the language of submission. The economy is buying and selling with theological vocabulary laid over the top. And it contains the same structural impossibility as every other transactional system: you cannot love someone into loving you back, and you cannot purchase what can only be given.

The prodigal son did not come home with a ledger. He came home with nothing, hoping for mercy he knew he did not deserve. The father ran before the speech was finished. No debt was settled. No scales were balanced. The robe and the ring and the feast were not payment for services rendered.

They were a gift from a father who had been watching the road.

What the Economy Requires

Every argument about salvation eventually comes back to the same structural question: what kind of economy are you living inside?

If it is a transaction, then God’s love for you is conditional on your performance. He loves what you bring Him. Your standing before Him is a function of what you have deposited. The relationship is a contract and you are always one bad quarter away from default.

If it is giving and receiving, then God loved you before you brought anything. The gift was given while you were still in the far country. The sacrifice was freely made before you turned around and started walking home. You bring nothing to the counter because there is no counter. There is only a father watching a road and running the moment he sees you coming.

That is not a subtle difference in theological emphasis. It is two completely different Gods.

One can be earned. One cannot.

One can be obligated. One cannot.

One loves you because of what you do. One loves you because of what He is.

The cross is the argument. God spent the currency of love in full, freely, for the whole world, before anyone had done anything to deserve it. Romans 5:8 states the economy without ambiguity: God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not after we had accumulated sufficient merit. While we were still sinners.

That is not a transaction. That is a gift from a God whose essential nature is love, given freely, available to anyone willing to receive it.

The only thing it requires is the one thing love has always required.

A choice.

A.C. Rosenthal

acrosenthal.com