For years, many of us thought we knew who the frog in the pot was. We thought it was the MAGA faithful. We thought they were the ones being slowly boiled by lies, propaganda, and grievances.
We watched the temperature rise and told ourselves they would wake up before it was too late. What has become painfully clear is this: we were wrong. We were the ones in the pot the whole time, adjusting to the heat we should have recognized as danger.
For nearly ten years, the temperature has been rising. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Slowly enough that we adapted. Slowly enough that we normalized what should never have been normal.
Scripture has always warned us that deception rarely announces itself with force but creeps in quietly, until hearts grow dull and truth is choked out (Matthew 13:22). We felt something was wrong in our bodies and in our conversations. We sensed the tension, the anger, the unease.
But we kept telling ourselves it was just politics, just noise, just another election cycle. We felt it, but we did not yet understand it.
We were already at war, not in theory but in cost. In families divided, in trust eroded, in neighbors turned into threats, in truth treated as optional.
We were already at war in the way cruelty became casual, in the way lies were rewarded, and in the way violence stopped shocking us. Scripture reminds us that when truth stumbles in the streets, injustice does not stay contained (Isaiah 59:14).
This is not a war we wanted. We wanted a more perfect union. We wanted disagreement without dehumanization, politics without violence, and change without fear. We wanted to argue, vote, build, and belong together. Scripture calls peacemakers blessed, not warmongers (Matthew 5:9).
But peace cannot survive when one side abandons truth and embraces domination. Naming this a war is not choosing it. It is acknowledging that it was brought to us while we were still trying to live together.
The Civil War never truly ended. It paused and reshaped itself.
It traded uniforms for rhetoric and battlefields for courtrooms, media platforms, and rallies. The same struggle over power, hierarchy, and whose lives matter never resolved.
As before, it is the poor who are sent forward as foot soldiers, while the powerful whisper from safety, convincing them that their enemy is not the one exploiting them, but the one struggling right beside them.
That permission came long ago. When Donald Trump said during his first campaign that he could shoot someone and get away with it, many dismissed it as bravado or humor.
But Scripture tells us that words are never neutral, that the mouth reveals the heart, and that death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21). Violence always announces itself before it arrives.
Words soften the ground long before blood spills onto it. Thorns do not choke truth overnight. They do it slowly, quietly, until growth becomes impossible (Matthew 13:22). We ignored the smoke because the flames had not yet reached us.
January 6 was not an accident or an aberration. It was not merely a protest that went too far. It was a battle. We called it an insurrection, and it was. But it was also something older and deeper.
It was war. The gallows erected on the Capitol grounds were real. The hanging noose was real. The chants were real. The intent was real. Scripture warns us what happens when people call evil good and good evil, when darkness is dressed up as light (Isaiah 5:20).
When those who carried out that violence were later pardoned, they were not simply forgiven. They were affirmed as warriors, not criminals.
Still, many of us told ourselves it was over. We told ourselves the institutions had held, and democracy had survived. We told ourselves the fever had broken. What we failed to see was that the war never stopped.
It simply changed tactics. It raged through obstruction, vengeance, and relentless sabotage of anything that attempted to function for the common good. Scripture cautions us not to mistake delay for repentance or silence for peace (Ecclesiastes 8:11).
Then came the shot. That shot should have been heard around this country as a warning. Not as a triumph. Not as a victory. It should have been recognized as the unmistakable sound of war reaching one of our own. Instead, too many celebrated it.
Too many called it righteous. Too many treated it as proof that the fight was being won. A bullet fired in war was mistaken for a banner of victory, and that sickness revealed how far the deception had already spread. Jesus warned us that those who live by the sword will perish by the sword (Matthew 26:52).
Only now do many of us truly see it. That bullet was not the beginning. It was the confirmation. It revealed that we were not watching a conflict from a safe distance. We were standing inside it. We had been inside it for years without fully understanding where we were or what it was costing us.
What we are witnessing now is not governance. It is a conquest. The targeting of federal institutions, the intimidation of the financial system, and the stripping away of guardrails are not policy disagreements. They are attempts to seize control. This is what war looks like when it wears a suit and speaks in procedural language.
This is why the financial system is now in the crosshairs. Going after the Federal Reserve and its leadership is not about reform or accountability. It is about control. Every authoritarian movement eventually targets the institutions that stabilize money, credit, and trust, because whoever controls the financial system controls the nation’s breathing.
Scripture warns that dishonest scales and manipulated systems are an abomination, because they quietly steal from the many to secure power for the few (Proverbs 11:1). This is not economic policy. It is a wartime move to bend the nation’s financial spine so resistance becomes unaffordable.
The actions of ICE are not about safety. They are about fear. Minneapolis is not being singled out by accident. It is vengeance. It is the deliberate lighting of a match in a place already soaked with historical injustice.
It is a punishment aimed at a governor, a state, and a city that dared to resist. This is how internal war spreads, one tinderbox at a time.
Blue states are not targeted because they are corrupt. They are targeted because they care. They fund the nation. They protect the vulnerable. And Trump understands that the fastest way to punish those states is to punish the poor, the immigrant, the sick, and the elderly.
Punish the least of these, and you enrage those who love them, while preserving the power of those who see them as expendable (Amos 8:4; Matthew 25:40).
These are the battlefields of this war. The blue states. The cities. The places that generate much of the nation’s wealth fund federal programs, and subsidize red states that depend on that support.
These are the states already paying the bills, already carrying the economic weight of the country, and yet they are the ones being singled out for rapid investigations, federal pressure, and punitive action.
This is not equal enforcement. It is selective aggression. The hand that feeds is being punished, not because it has failed the nation, but because it refuses to kneel.
Scripture has long warned against rulers who exploit the labor of some while turning power against them to secure obedience (Habakkuk 2:12).
This strategy is not subtle. It is coercion. It is the logic of a kidnapper who knows exactly where to apply pressure. They attack the least of these because they believe we will cave if our most vulnerable are harmed.
They treat the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the marginalized as leverage, as if they were hostages taken to force compliance. Scripture has always warned us about those who plan evil in their beds and use suffering as a bargaining chip, believing fear will secure what love never could (Micah 2:1–2).
And this is where martial law enters the picture, not as a last resort, but as their desired outcome. Escalation in blue states, the provocation of unrest, and the declaration of emergency are not failures of leadership. They are conditions. Chaos is cultivated so extraordinary powers can be justified.
Civil authority can be overridden. Normal democratic processes can be suspended. Scripture warns of rulers who seek to wear down the people and rule through fear rather than justice (Daniel 7:25).
The purpose of martial law in this strategy is power. When an emergency is declared, elections can be delayed, nullified, or rendered meaningless. Loyalists can be installed. Courts can be sidelined. What cannot be secured at the ballot box can be taken by decree.
History teaches us that emergency rule is rarely used to restore democracy, but often to replace it. This is not about safety. It is about permanence.
And this is where the Gospel stands in sharp contrast. God did not threaten humanity by harming a child. God did not coerce obedience by targeting the vulnerable. God gave God’s own child. Not to punish the world, but to save it.
Not as leverage, but as love poured out freely (John 3:16; Romans 5:8). That story cannot be understood by those who have rewritten faith into dominance and mercy into weakness.
They imagine God as a strongman who takes hostages, while the Gospel reveals a God who absorbs suffering rather than inflicts it. They claim Jesus, but they reject the heart of the story they invoke.
This is why investigations are launched without merit, and threats replace dialogue. This is why loyalty to one man is demanded over loyalty to the Constitution.
When a decorated military astronaut like Mark Kelly is punished for refusing to bow, that is not politics. That is war. Jesus warned us about rulers who lord power over others and call it greatness (Luke 22:25–26).
Even the displays of wealth tell the story. Ballrooms, gold, and excess stand in sharp contrast to stripped public systems and communities told to endure. This is not the people’s house being restored. It is a palace being claimed. Scripture has always condemned shepherds who feed themselves while the flock starves (Ezekiel 34:2).
The most sobering truth is this. We have been in the pot for a long time. The water warmed slowly, and we adjusted to it. We rationalized it. We told ourselves it could not happen here. That is how boiling works. That is how thorns take over a field. That is how war hides until it no longer needs to.
Now we see it, and seeing carries responsibility. What we can no longer claim is ignorance. What we can no longer afford is adjustment. The temperature is no longer rising quietly. The pot is boiling, and pretending otherwise is no longer a survival. It is surrender.
This is still not a war we want. We know what war does to souls, to families, to truth, and to the fabric of a people. War is hell because it deforms everything it touches, even those who believe they are fighting for good. Scripture does not glorify war.
It grieves it. God’s heart bends toward peace, toward justice without bloodshed, toward swords beaten into plowshares rather than raised in triumph (Isaiah 2:4).
But Scripture is also honest that evil left unnamed does not dissolve on its own. Recognizing this as war is not an embrace of violence. It is a refusal to let violence pretend it is something else.
War does not end by pretending it never existed. It ends when enough people are willing to name it honestly and refuse to participate in its lies. We cannot go back to the way things were before this war, because that ground was already compromised. But we can move forward wiser, clearer, and more faithful than we have been in a long time.
Jesus never promised comfort in times like these. Jesus promised truth. And truth, once seen, cannot be unseen. If we are willing to wake up, to stand firm, to protect the vulnerable, and to refuse fear as our guide, then this war does not get the final word. Love does. Justice does. And the slow, courageous work of rebuilding together does.
That work begins by seeing clearly. It continues by standing together. And it ends not in victory over one another, but in the long, faithful labour of becoming a people who will not let this happen again.
P.S. While we see the war rising all around us and recognize that it has been building for years, we are not calling for war now or at any time.
In fact, we are calling for those engaged in war to stop. Stop. We are calling for a spiritual revival, a revival of unity, peace, and love, grounded in Scripture and in the teachings of Jesus.
A revival that calls those intent on harming their neighbours back into God’s fold, because loving our neighbours is how we love God, the very God this country claims to love.
