This is What Holiness Looks Like

CALGARY PASTOR ARTHUR PAWLOWSKY deserves the Matt. 5:11 award —for his incredible courage in standing up to a government that tried to shut down his Christian church in Canada on Easter Sunday.  If you check out his Instagram page, at @arthurpawlowskicalgary, this is a man who truly has the heart of Christ — a missionary having served in Africa, he feeds the hungry, helps the homeless, serves the poor, inspires the downtrodden and gives courage to the hopeless, all in the name of Jesus.  He has not shut down his Calvary based church at the behest of a tyrannical government, and apparently it has made the power-mad bureaucrats there quite angry, their health department bureaucrats especially.

arthurpawlowskicalgary

On May 8, 2021, Calgary police arrested the 48 year old pastor, and dragged him by his arms handcuffed behind his back to be placed into jail.  All for worshipping God and inspiring others to do the same.

My understanding is that Canada is not a Communist country, but the actions of the government there are shocking.  This sort of thing is happening all around the world, and laws protecting the rights of the people are being ignored without consequence in the face of arbitrary edicts by leaders who use Covid as an excuse to trample on civil rights.

But history repeats itself. This sort of thing has happened before.  In fact, I attended a conference several years ago that was designed for those in the law enforcement and court related fields.  It was entitled “What You Do Matters; Lessons from the Holocaust.”

The creators of the conference thought it was important to let people know that what happened in WW2 Germany was not all that unusual.  It was surprisingly something that could just as easily happen to us today.   The course cautioned law enforcement and told them how the Holocaust happened because they knew that LE could be complicit in the tyranny of a runaway government in the blink of an eye.  And they knew we’d never believe it.

I appreciated the lessons, but I truly didn’t believe that what happened in Germany could happen today.  We were too civilized, our laws too entrenched, our rights too elucidated and set in stone to be shaken so easily.  Law enforcement and the justice system could never do such things to the people whom they were meant to serve and protect.  We would never even be the “good Germans” who allowed it all to happen without saying a word.  We weren’t capable of that sort of evil.

But now look at what has happened.  In Germany the  Reichstand Fire was the first domino.  It resulted in an emergency decree that crushed everyone’s civil rights and made dictators out of low level bureaucrats. The progression from civility to horror occurred over a very short few years.  Today, Covid is our Reichstad, prompting never ending “emergency decrees” that give unbelievable power to unworthy people, and unfortunately we seem to be following the same trajectory.

It is scary to think where this will end.  Will we have our own concentration camps for Christians and freedom lovers and those who refuse to get an experimental vaccine passport that tracks and controls us all?   That appears to be our future.

I wonder how many of the officers who were dragging that poor man so roughly ever attended church before or ever believed deeply in the reason for going?  If history is repeating itself right now, there may actually have been a few.  And at another time they may have not believed (just as we didn’t)  that they could be capable of doing what they did to a saint today.

I think I need to start posting excerpts from the manual that I kept from that old course, to show how easy it was to go from civilization to tyranny.  But perhaps we all already know by what we’ve seen this year.

May God bless this holy man and protect our world from evil! Please help us, dear Lord, and help dear Pastor Pawlowski! May we once again be able to say we are a nation — a world—blessed because our God is the Lord.

Also see @news.rebel and saveartur dot com