Good morning and hello friends,
This article is one installment of a multipart series. Be sure to check out my site for previous segments of this series. It will make more sense if you read them in order.
The first installment contained Chapters 1-3. This one contains Chapters 10-12.
Chapter 10: The Unmixable Kingdoms
A quiet truth has been pressing on me, one that changes everything about how we walk here. We are citizens of a different country. We hold passports from heaven, yet we live as foreigners in a land that is not our home. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul wrote (Philippians 3:20 ESV). Until we feel the concrete reality of that, we will forever be confused about our posture toward the world.
Two kingdoms exist. The kingdom of love in heaven, ruled by Christ, and the kingdom of darkness, ruled by the “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4 ESV). They are neither allies or negotiating partners. They are fundamentally, irreconcilably opposed. God’s kingdom has its own laws, its own values, its own King. To be born into it is to have your entire outlook recalibrated. You no longer see the world’s issues through the lens of politics or national interest. You see them through the lens of a subject of God, our King and our Savior, Christ Jesus. We see each other as image bearers of the one true God.
Here is the fracture point, the place where we so often compromise. We try to mix the two. We pay lip service to being “not of the world,” yet we dive headlong into its systems, its spectacles, its wars of influence. We think we can be a little bit political, a little bit nationalistic, a little bit immersed in the world’s ways, and still remain pure citizens of the Kingdom. History shouts that this is impossible.
Look at the pattern, starting with Constantine. When the Roman emperor favored the church, showering it with public funds and political power, many Christians saw opportunity. Some good came, gladiatorial games ended, abortion was outlawed. But what was lost? The church lost its distinct witness. Within decades, Christians who once refused to bear the sword were now killing pagans, and then killing each other, in the name of Christ. They traded the radical, enemy-loving ethic of Jesus for the power to persecute. They accepted the world’s paintbrush and were colored by it. “What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14 ESV).
This is the heart of the deception. We believe we can enter the world’s systems of power, its governments, its political battles, to be “light” and “influence.” But the influence flows the other way. The system is designed to assimilate you. Can a Christian president turn the other cheek in foreign policy? Can a Christian judge refuse to pass judgment on a person’s character, only on monetary matters? The moment you swear the oath, salute the flag, or wield the sword of the state, you have put on the uniform of a different kingdom. You have agreed to play by its rules, which are, by necessity, the rules of force, retribution, and temporal power.
Jesus was explicit: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36 ESV). His servants did not fight for Rome. They refused to declare “Caesar is Lord” because they had already declared “Jesus is Lord.” That confession got them killed. It also kept them pure.
The early Christians were so different they were called “enemies of the human race.” They would not serve in the army. They would not take each other to court. They would not attend the violent, immoral spectacles. They returned good for evil. This was their testimony. This was the smell of their foreign citizenship.
When we chase political power to enact Christian morality, we make the same bargain Constantine offered. We accept a little worldly corruption in exchange for a little worldly good. We get a society that might look cleaner on the surface, but we get a church that has been hollowed out from within. We get Christians who fight wars, sue each other, and persecute dissenters, all while claiming the name of Jesus.
Our calling is not to rule the kingdoms of this earth. Our calling is to live as faithful ambassadors of the kingdom to come. Our weapon is not the ballot or the sword. It is the gospel, lived out in a community of people who love their enemies, pray for their persecutors, and trust that God alone is the avenger. Our politics is the politics of the Sermon on the Mount. Our nationalism is for the New Jerusalem.
To be in the world but not of it is not a metaphor. It is a daily, costly choice to live by a different set of laws. It is to look at the machinery of human government and say, “That is not my kingdom. My King rules from a different hill.” It is to withdraw our hope from the ceaseless churn of elections and revolutions and place it solely in the One who said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5 ESV).
Our task is not to fix Babylon. It is to come out of her, lest we take part in her sins and share in her plagues (Revelation 18:4 ESV). Our task is to be the church, the called-out ones, a colony of heaven planted in the soil of a dying world, showing by our peculiar, peaceable, enemy-loving lives that there is another way, another King, and another kingdom.
Vote according to your values with the understanding that others will do the same and that’s OK. Regardless of outcomes, God is never surprised or caught off guard, He is the Author.
A Moment in the Workshop
Where have you been tempted to blend your Kingdom citizenship with an earthly allegiance? A political party? A national identity? A cultural tribe? Ask yourself: If I removed this allegiance tomorrow, would my faith still stand? If the answer is “yes, but it would feel like losing a limb,” you have found the place where the kingdoms have mixed.
Chapter 11: The Antichrist in the Mirror
We are a people obsessed with signs. We read the headlines through the lens of Revelation, scanning the geopolitical stage for the rise of a beast, parsing speeches for the mark of the beast, decoding economic systems for the number of the beast. We hold our binoculars up, straining our eyes toward the horizon, vigilant tourists on a field trip through the end times. Is it the president? The tech visionary? The cultural icon? We whisper the possibilities, feeling a strange mix of dread and self-congratulation for our discernment.
All the while, the real rebellion is brewing in the one place we refuse to look.
It is here, in the quiet of my own chest. In the rising heat of my own thoughts. It is the internal antichrist, the one who sets up a throne in the center of my own being. Its name is Pride and self-righteousness. And its primary mission is not to conquer nations, but to obscure my vision so completely that I would welcome the conqueror with open arms, believing him a savior.
The Scripture warns of a coming one, “the man of lawlessness… who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 ESV). We picture a throne in a rebuilt Jerusalem, a figure on a global screen. We miss the quieter, more insidious coup. Pride is the antichrist spirit that does the same thing within the temple of my own heart. It opposes God’s will. It exalts myself. It takes a seat on the throne of my affections and proclaims, “My will be done.”
This is the diabolical genius of it. The spirit of antichrist is not a foreign invader. It is a homegrown usurper. It uses my own voice. It dresses in the clothes of my righteous causes, my doctrinal correctness, my spiritual discernment. It whispers that my anger is holy indignation. It convinces me my ambition is godly zeal. It paints my stubbornness as steadfast faith. It is the log in my own eye, so massive it blocks all light, yet it feels like a part of my face. “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3 ESV). I cannot recognize the antichrist “out there” because I am in full communion with his spirit “in here.”
Pride is the original anti-anointing. Christ emptied Himself. Pride fills me with self. Christ took the form of a servant. Pride demands to be served. Christ submitted to the will of the Father. Pride elevates my will to the place of self-authorship. Every act of pride is a small, daily rehearsal for welcoming the ultimate counterfeit. It is the conditioning of my palate to prefer the taste of my own authority over the bread of heaven.
This is why the warnings are so dire. It is not that the external Antichrist will be so cleverly disguised. It is that I will be so thoroughly blinded. My internal compass will be broken. My ability to discern light from darkness will be short-circuited by the very darkness I have been hosting. When the great deception arrives, offering peace, unity, and salvation on his terms, how will I know it is a lie? If I have spent a lifetime making peace with the little lies of my own superiority, my own rightness, my own centrality, the big lie will feel like truth finally recognized.
The Antichrist will not appeal to our humility. He will appeal to our pride. He will not ask us to kneel to a monster, but to stand tall as part of a glorious, final solution. He will offer to vindicate all our grievances, to elevate our tribe, to finally give us the recognition, the safety, the supremacy we feel we deserve. He will not look like a dragon to the one who has been nursing a serpent in his own bosom. He will look like a deliverer.
The preparation for recognizing the beast is not more prophecy charts. It is ruthless self-examination. It is the daily, painful practice of kneeling before the true Christ and asking Him to reveal the antichrist within. It is praying the prayer of the Psalmist with actual fear: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23-24 ESV).
It means looking for pride not in its cartoonish forms of arrogance, but in its pious disguises.
The pride of being right about a doctrine, while forgetting the love that is the greater command.
The pride of seeing the world’s sin clearly, while being blind to my own critical spirit.
The pride of my spiritual discipline, which quietly judges the weaker brother.
The pride of my suffering, which I wear as a badge of honor rather than a tool for empathy.
The pride of my independence, my ability to handle things, my quiet refusal to need the body of Christ.
This internal war is the real frontline. The battle for the soul of the world will be won or lost in the thousand small surrenders of my will to His. Each time I choose humility over being heard, service over status, forgiveness over being right, I am deposing the antichrist within. I am cleansing the temple of my heart so that when the ultimate false christ steps onto the world stage, his voice will ring hollow in a soul that has learned to recognize and reject the echo of its own pride.
We must put down the binoculars for a moment. We must turn the lens inward. The most dangerous antichrist is not the one we fear will control the world. It is the one we have already allowed to control our hearts. Defeat that one, and the other loses his power over us. We will see him for what he is: a pathetic imitation, a cheap copy of the rebellion we have already, by grace, begun to dismantle within ourselves.
Humility is not about thinking less of ourselves. It is about thinking about ourselves less.
A Moment in the Workshop
What is the last thing you were “right” about that you enjoyed being right about a little too much? Where has your discernment become a source of quiet superiority? Ask the Psalmist’s prayer with actual fear today: “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any grievous way in me.” Then wait. He will answer.
Chapter 12: The Wound and the Worship: Where Cults Are Born
(Source: “The Wound and the Worship: Where Cults Are Born, A reflection on John Brusseau’s diagnosis of our misplaced trust and the desert where God reclaims it.”)
Sometimes you encounter another’s words that feel pulled straight from your own silent observations of the world. A piece by a writer named John Brusseau had that effect on me. It cracked open something I had been circling for months, a question that haunts anyone who has walked away from a system only to feel the gravitational pull of another one: Why do we keep giving our allegiance to human saviors?
I have distilled his argument below, in my own terms, to process it more deeply. But the tapestry is his. I am only pulling threads.
We have forgotten how to spot the poison in the well. We point to the cult leader, the charismatic figure devouring his followers, and we cluck our tongues. We blame the lack of denominations, the absence of bylaws and oversight committees. We build taller fences, draft stricter policies, and sleep soundly, believing the beast is outside the gate.
We are wrong. The beast is not outside. It is inside the human heart. It is the same beast in the leader and the led. This is not just a warning about them. It is a mirror for us.
The Wound That Creates the Tyrant
The cult of personality does not begin with a monster. It begins with a wound. A soul, brutalized in its earliest hours, learns one terrible lesson: it has no value. From that abyss grows a desperate, tyrannical need to be proven wrong. To be worshipped. To be the source, the savior, the singular answer. This person does not set out to deceive. They are driven by a terror only adoration can soothe.
This is the emotional architecture beneath every controlling leader. A person who was traumatically abused as a child, with a kind of trauma that left them feeling susceptible to horrific brutality because they were of no value, sees the need to be viewed as valuable rise to a place of tyranny in their life. This need manifests as a desire for others to worship them. Nothing less than worship will do. Often it manifests as them posing as some kind of savior figure, a mediator between God and man, or between some ideal and man. They pose as the one true source of what we humans want. And because they are the one true source, we are left with the practical necessity of valuing them greatly.
The greater the trauma, the greater the power to pose as a savior. You can see how an entire community can become demented around such a person. These people have the power to pose as a solution to unresolved human issues and cravings. That power is commensurate with the terror of being further brutalized within their heart. The wound is the engine. The worship is the fuel.
The Culture That Creates the Follower
But a wound alone is not enough. It requires a culture ready to be infected. And we have built that culture.
We have, as John writes, watered down the scandalous wine of grace with the flat water of self-righteous legalism. We say we believe we are saved by faith alone, but we live as if we are sustained by performance alone. We preach “Jesus paid it all” on Sunday, and on Monday we trust our own grit to overcome our sin, our own strategies to secure our provision, our own wisdom to interpret our worth.
This is the apostasy. The great falling away. It is not a rejection of doctrine. It is a slow, quiet transfer of trust. From the nail-pierced hands of Christ to our own.
When we no longer believe Jesus’ atonement renders us as acceptable to God as He is, we stop believing God can fix the moral damage in us. And then shame takes up residence in our hearts. Shame is an existential threat. It is a very serious issue. In the face of carrying this existential threat, a person who craves our worship can come along and pose as a solution to this shame. And because we have stopped trusting God to resolve our shame, we cling passionately to a visible human posing as the answer.
We cling to them not because we are fools, but because we are starving. We have ceased to believe the bread of heaven is sufficient, so we grasp for the crumbs of human approval.
This is not a problem “out there.” It is a condition within. In our own hearts. How often have we, in our fear, looked for a man to follow? A voice to explain it all? A system to guarantee our safety? This is the soil where the cult grows.
The Two Options
To trust in God to solve our issues, or to trust in our own human strength, which is what the Bible refers to as “the flesh”, are really the only two options available to our species. The Bible is, from its first pages to the last, diametrically opposed to trusting our human strength to resolve those issues.
And here is the critical distinction John makes, one the institutional church has largely missed: The biblical worldview does not essentially juxtapose morality with immorality. The rest of the human race does that. The Bible instead juxtaposes having a connection with God via trusting in His loving forgiveness, with a self-righteous, hypocritical relationship with God based on legalistic, performance-based acceptance.
We all know the Christian dogma on faith versus works, yet we, with a straight face, preach that we must rely on human willpower and persistence to overcome our moral issues and render ourselves acceptable to God. And because this is the very opposite worldview of the Bible that we profess to hold precious, we dress our self-righteous self-trust in fabulously sneaky sophistry. And most of us never see the contradiction.
It is in this spiritual condition, this loss of trust in God’s forgiving love, this apostasy, that the personality cult figure rises to a place of tyranny over groups of people. To suggest that personality cults arise only because people have left denominational systems is actually to promote the circumstances that lead to cults of personality. It implies we cannot trust God to forgive us effectively or to govern our damaged human condition by His loving Spirit. It implies that we must trust in our human organizations to do that. This is a collective version of our loss of trust in God’s forgiveness. And it promotes the rise of shame and the cult figures who sweep in to feast on souls plagued by shame.
The Mechanism of the Wound in All of Us
This dynamic is not limited to leaders and followers. It operates in every human heart.
We are born to a species that no longer trusts God to love us completely, and therefore cannot trust Him to provide for us all we will need. Those two things are fundamentally connected in our psychology. So we see our instinctual desires, to fit in, to be productive, to be safe, to be moral, to understand, to prosper, and because we do not feel loved completely by God, we cannot trust Him to care about these needs. We are driven by the fear that these desires will not be fulfilled, and so we fixate on gratifying them ourselves. We make gods out of the gratification of these desires.
This renders the pursuit selfish. The selfishness renders us hurtful to others. We will choose to gratify our need to fit in with our peers at the expense of our family. We will place our position above their well-being, and they will experience us not loving them fully. The same scenario unfolds with every instinctual desire God created in us. Because we do not know God loves us enough to completely accept us and highly value us, we cannot trust Him to care about our needs, and therefore we make ourselves the source, and do so out of fear, which is what renders those desires immoral, selfish, and hurtful.
This is why the cult leader’s offer is so magnetic. He steps into the gap our distrust has created and offers what we stopped trusting God to give.
The Cure: The Desert
John names the cure, and it is not a better system. It is the desert. The wilderness. It is God, in His fierce mercy, taking us to a place where our resources fail. Where our strategies crumble. Where our willpower runs dry. He strips away the things we trusted instead of Him. The job. The reputation. The health. The plan. The comfort. He leaves us with nothing but the crushing, beautiful necessity of relying on Him alone.
God does two things to transform a human. First, He shows us He forgives our sins completely and thereby makes us want to do His will, which is to love as He loves. And then He purges our trust in our own human strength by taking us through painful situations, suffering with Christ that is essentially Him taking away the parts of us we trust in instead of Him, so that we can be freed to trust Him and thus do His will.
It is very painful when He takes us out into the proverbial desert of our lives, where all of our human resources are stripped from us, and we practically have to trust Him because our go-to’s are no longer there. This is the suffering that God uses to purify our trust in Him. And as James says, whatsoever is not of trust in God is sin. If we cannot trust God to be the source of what we need, we turn to ourselves to be the source, and it is that which renders us selfish and hurtful.
“Looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2 ESV). Our path is the same. We endure the cross of our own insufficiency. We despise the shame that tells us to scramble back to our own devices. We let the things we leaned on be taken, so we can learn to lean on Him.
The Coming Test
The global cult of personality is coming. The toxic effects of our species’ delusional self-righteousness are bringing human society to cataclysmic destruction. The Antichrist will not be a cartoon villain. He will be the ultimate answer to humanity’s accumulated shame, the final, desperate refuge for a species that has rejected the forgiveness of God. He will be everything we think we want. He will offer the validation, the safety, the cures, the purpose we stopped trusting God to provide. In the face of terrifying destruction, most people will be seduced by history’s greatest personality cult figure.
The only vaccine is the wilderness now. The surrender now. The confession now: “Lord, I have trusted in my own strength. I have sought life from every source but You. Forgive me. Take me into the desert if You must. Strip me of every crutch. Leave me with nothing but Your promise, so that I might have everything in You.”
The Real Defense
The defense against the cult leader is not a tighter doctrine. It is not a better denominational structure. It is not more policies and oversight committees. It is a heart so utterly satisfied in the finished work of Christ, so thoroughly weaned from the need for human approval, that it has nothing left for a counterfeit savior to offer. It already has one.
The diagnosis is in our mirror. The prescription is in our surrender.
To avoid getting seduced by the coming figure, you can do something very simple. You can humble yourself right now before God and confess your imperfect trust in His loving forgiveness, and ask Him to perfect your trust in His love. And humbly ask Him to grant you the peace of mind and the courage to endure the suffering He will deploy to do that perfecting.
Jesus told us: “I am the vine. You are the branches. Make your life in me, and you will bear much fruit.” The equation He gives us is that if we make our lives based on His atonement, we will bear much fruit. He does not tell us that if we only have our sense of what constitutes moral behavior restored, we will bear the fruit of loving as God loves. And yet, we waste so much time fussing and fighting over whose version of morality is accurate, is biblical, is of God.
The cult does not begin with the leader. It begins with the wound. And we all carry one. The question is not whether we are vulnerable. We are. The question is where we take our vulnerability: to the feet of a man who promises to heal it, or to the cross of the God who already has.
A Moment in the Workshop
Who have you looked to, consciously or unconsciously, as a “mediator” between you and God? A pastor, a podcast host, an author, a system? Not as a teacher, teachers are gifts. But as the source. The one whose approval you needed to feel accepted by God. Name them. Then bring that need to the only Mediator who can actually carry it: Christ Himself.
Be sure to use the below links to be notified when the next installment hits the newstands.
That is all, and thank you for reading.
If you enjoy Faith In The Fast Lane, I would be incredibly grateful for your support. Consider using one or more of the links below.
You can also find me on other social media platforms using the below links.
On X (formerly Twitter) : Shashue Monrauch on X
On YouTube: Shashue Monrauch on YouTube
On Instagram: Shashue Monrauch on IG
On NOSTR:
Shashue npub1ldn7g28j6rc49gmmyh2yk4z8y688hhuuzgs2v5q2erz784cegshs6427d0
Thanks for your time and support.
Shashue Monrauch