In the last few weeks I have been encouraged by some things that seem to be happening in the Church of the United States of America. I see adds in the paper from Billy Graham, and I have heard three wonderful sermons from three great men of God on the elections that are currently going on in our country. Dr. David Jeremiah brought tears to my eyes as I listened to his message, and John MacArthur's message was wonderful too. Yesterday I heard another message from our own Pastor Odle on this subject that was great and worth listening to again. It was on the 8th of October 2008 that I wrote a paper on the subject of where we as a nation could be heading and it is that paper that I want to put on this blog. I realize that my true intent in writing the posts on this blog are to cause believers to grow in the Lord, and that is still the purpose of the blog, but I have a desire to put this paper that I wrote in 2008 here.
HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE
I would
suppose that many may not agree with what I am about to write, but I am not
writing this to start a debate, as there have been enough of them going on in
this country over the last few weeks, but I am writing this because I have not
heard the things put in a way that I want to put them. The title has to do with the position that
the United States of America finds itself in at this time in our history, and I
am not speaking only of the financial problems that face our nation, but I am
speaking of the choice of candidates that are running for the office of
President and Vice-President at this time in our history. I want to look at this race as a culmination
of things that have been going on in our
country for a long time, and I believe that the major issue that faces this
country is the lack of morality that is prevalent in our nation today, and has
been for a lengthy period of time.
How did we
get to the place in our wonderful country that we live in that would even think
of electing a President with the credentials of Barack Husain Obama? If this man would have run the same race that
he is running in the 1960’s he would have been viewed as someone who was
mentally unstable, but that was then and this is now.
I have said
for sometime now that I truly believe that God is judging America, and I am not
the only one who has said this. Billy
Graham said the same thing in the 1980’s when he told one of his audiences that
if God did not judge America that He would have to apologize to Sodom and
Gomorrah. This was back when the gays
were still in the closet and not demanding their rights as they are now.
I wish to
say that I was born in the late 1940’s and grew up in the 1960’s when great
change began to happen in our land. I
did not go to college, but started working for an Auto Company two weeks after
graduation from high school. In January
of 1974 the biggest change that any person could ever have happen to them
happened to me, and that was I became a born-again Christian. I will be brief about this but what I do want
to say is that my life was turned 180 degrees on that late winter day in a town
near Orlando Florida and has never been the same since. The Lord Jesus Christ used Bible Prophecy to
get my attention and I have been studying about it from time to time since that
day in 1974. I have also studied the
Bible in other areas and what it says about God’s judgment and have tried to
understand how all of this works out and I plan to write more about this later
on. There are some authors and Pastors
that I have listened to in order to help me to understand what the Bible says
about different subjects. I would like
to mention that the former Pastor in the church that I have attended since
1978, Dr. Jack Jacobs, has had a great influence on my life from 1986 until he
went home to be with his Lord in April of 2007.
I read from Warren Wiersbe’s books most every day of my life, and Dr.
David Jeremiah is someone else that I have listened to and read books by
him. The first author that I read after
becoming a believer was Hal Lindsey and it was while listening to his messages
on tape that God began to do His work of grace in my life.
I want to
begin by mentioning some things that happened in our country that have helped
us to get to where we are at this time.
I have already spoken about the unrest that went on in the 1960’s, how
protests against the war in Vietnam were going on and how immorality really
took off during that decade. In 1973 Roe
vs. Wade happened that made the killing of unborn babies in this country legal,
legal in the site of the US government, but certainly not right in the sight of
God. Since that time there have been
over 40 million babies killed in the wombs of women in this country, some were
killed because they were the wrong sex, some were killed because it was
inconvenient to have a child at this time.
Some were killed because the parents knew that there was a “defect” in
their unborn child.
I think that
the next major thing that happened was this whole gay rites issue. The Bible is very clear on this in different
areas of it. “26 For this reason God gave
them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function
for that which is unnatural, 27 and in
the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and
burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent
acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” This phrase “God gave them over” is something
that Paul used a number of times in this first chapter of Romans, where these
verses came from, and it is a downward spiral of steps in either a person or a
nation, and the step of homosexuality is at the bottom of the steps. Some have said that AIDS is a punishment from
God. All I will say about this is that
if all people practiced what the Bible has to say about sex and who to have it
with there never would have been a problem with AIDS. God’s Laws are to protect people not to rain
on their parade, so to speak.
There is one
last step in this downward spiral, and that is found in Genesis 12: 1-3. “1
¶ Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go
forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house,
To the land which I will show you;
2
And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your
name great; And so you shall be a blessing;
3
And I will bless those who
bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the
families of the earth will be blessed." I have heard
it said that you can chart the rise and fall of all the major empires in the
world by the way they treat the nation of Israel, and also that the people of
Israel have stood at the graves of all who have tried to conquer them and who
have persecuted them simply because of who they are. There is no doubt that this is of the devil,
for he has always hated the children of Israel.
“1 ¶ A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman
clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve
stars; 2 and she was with child; and she
*cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth. 3 Then
another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven
heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. 4 And
his tail *swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the
earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so
that when she gave birth he might devour her child. 5 And
she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a
rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to His throne.” This
passage shows that Satan is behind all of the anti-Semitism in the world, but
the good news is that he will not succeed.
Now I would
like to think about when prayer was taken out of all public schools and not
only prayer was taken out but it is forbidden to teach about creationism in
schools today. If a person who teaches
in a school or college even publishes a paper citing their views on creationism
they will be punished for doing so. The
movie “Expelled” is all about this happening to people who dared to speak their
mind on creationism.
Let’s take an
honest look at the public schools in our country, all of the killing that has
gone on there, and in the case of Columbine School in Colorado the victims were
all believers in Jesus Christ and they were killed for their faith. People wonder why God would allow all of the
violence to go on in our schools when years back God was basically kicked out
of public schools so why blame or ask God about all of this. As far as the possibility of Darwinism I have
read that the probability of that happening is the same probability of the
unabridged dictionary being made in a print shop explosion.
Now we in
this country have kicked God out of our schools, we have made it legal to
murder unborn babies because we care of the woman’s right, and not the unborn
babies rights, we have begin to tolerate gays and even want to give them the
same rights as married couples and then we wonder why our country is in the
position to believe the lies of Barak Husain Obama. Think of it just seven years ago our
buildings in New York and Washington DC were ran into with air planes that were
piloted by Muslins and now we have a person with three Muslin names getting
rave reviews by the so called media and people are falling all over him and
children are singing songs to him like some sort of god.
I must
mention another reason that we are in the shape that we are in and that is the
true Church in this country has not done the things that it should have been
doing, and I include myself as part of this problem. Government is not the answer to all the
problems in this country, but God is and many believers have forgotten that and
believed that if the right man, the believing man was in the White House that
all of our problems would be solved and there they can put their life on cruise
control. One of the things that I
believe that the Church in our country has been lazy about is prayer. “2Ch
7:14 If my people, which are called by
my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from
their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin,
and will heal their land.” God spoke
these words to the children of Israel before they were attacked by the Babylonians,
which happened in 586 BC because they did not heed to these words of God. What will happen to this country if we do not
get serious about prayer? One other
thing that I will mention that seems to be a great problem with not only
myself, but with the church in this country is that a lot of the members of the
church are in it for what they can get out of it, that is that they are not
interested in knowing the God who created this universe for who He is, but want
to know what it is that He can do for them.
The Church has always grown through times of persecution, and there are
people today that think that it is not too far off from happening in our
country, and some even think that it will be accelerated if Obama becomes
President. As I think about that it
could be something that would cause the Church to get down on our knees and
begin again to act like the people we are suppose to be.
I want to
move on to a different way of explaining how we got to where we are in this
country, and that is to write about Bible Prophecy. There are many prophecies written about the
first coming of Jesus Christ and it has been said that if all the things that
God said would happen to Him that did happen to Him, things like where He was
born, where He was raised, how He would die, how long He would be in the grave
and many other things, that the odds of this happening would be like spreading
silver dollars all over the state of Texas six feet high and asking someone to
find a certain silver dollar out of all of them. When God writes prophecy in His Word it is as
if it already happened.
God has a plan for this world and that plan
will come to completion no matter what will happen. Evil will not stop it, and there is plenty of
evil in the world. Men will not stop it,
nor will the devil stop it. If it is
true like many scholars say that the US is not mentioned in the end time
prophecies then something will have to happen to make it not as prevailing in
this world, and this does not mean that there will not be people who are
responsible for what happens to it, and will have to answer to their Creator.
God has not
told us everything that will happen in this world, but He has written how it
will end and that is recorded mostly in the book of Revelations. I have read many scholars who have written on
the end times and none of them speak that the US will be involved. Israel is the key nation in the end times
along with the revised Roman Empire. I
believe that China is also involved in the last battle that will take place in
the land of Israel. I would like to
write about what I believe is one of the key passages on the end times and that
comes from the book of Daniel, the ninth chapter and verses twenty-four to
twenty-seven. The background for this
chapter is that Daniel was living in Babylon as he was taken captive when
Israel was attacked by Nebuchandnezzar who took some of the choice people of
Judah to Babylon. Daniel was reading
from Jeremiah the prophet in chapter twenty-five and verse eleven, “This whole land will be a desolation and a
horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.” Jeremiah was speaking of Israel and that they
would be in captivity for seventy years in Babylonian. Daniel began to pray and wondered what will
happen to them after the seventy years were up because that time was fast
approaching. God sent the angel Gabriel
to answer Daniel’s prayer. I will try
and summaries what was told to Daniel.
The best way to understand the timing of this prophecy is to think of it
as a giant stop watch with 490 years on it that starts at a certain time and
stops at a certain time with seven years left on it, that will again start at a
certain event and then stop at the second coming of Christ to this earth, which
will be in the midst of the battle of Armageddon. Sir Robert Anderson who
worked for Scotland Yards in the early 1900’s wrote a book on this prophecy
entitled “The Coming Prince.” The coming
prince is not the Lord Jesus Christ, but who the Bible calls the Antichrist. God, through Gabriel, tells Daniel that there
are certain things that have to be done in this time period of 490 years and
one of the things that will happen is the death of Jesus Christ. Sir Robert Anderson, along with other
Biblical scholars explains that the 70 weeks in Daniel are actually weeks of
years as the Jewish people had weeks of days and also weeks of years, and this
is weeks of years in this chapter, and the 70 weeks is actually 490 years. As I said earlier the 490 years is broken up
into actually three divisions, the first one is 49 years, in which the city and
the temple will be build, and the second is 434 years in which the Messiah will
be “cut off,” or killed. The total is
483 years, which leaves 7 years of this prophecy. “26 "Then after the sixty-two weeks the
Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is
to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a
flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.” The part that I want to focus in on from this
verse is “the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the
sanctuary.” History tells us that it was
Titus and the Roman Legions who destroyed the city of Jerusalem along the
temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. The next
verse tells more of what this “prince” will do, “27 "And he will make a
firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will
put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations
will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that
is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate." The one week here refers to the last year in
this prophecy and it will start with the “prince” or Antichrist making a seven
year covenant with the nation of Israel so that they can worship in their
rebuilt temple, but will break that covenant with them half way through
it. What will happen during these seven
years is detailed in chapters six through nineteen of the book of Revelations. As I stated earlier that Israel is the key to
understand end time prophecy and in May of 1948 the nation of Israel was born
again in the land where it was in before due partly to the six million Jews
killed in the Second World War. One must
also look at the continent of Europe and the new money that they have there,
the Euro. The continent of Europe is
back together again even though the Nursery Rime “Humpty Dumpty” said it will
never happen, for it was written about the Roman Empire never to be put
together again. China can have an army
of one hundred million men, and in the book of Revelations it speaks of an army
of that size coming from the kings of the east.
Israel is surrounded by enemies on all sides. One more thing about Israel, and that is that
the prophet Ezekiel says that there will be a number of nations which ban
together in the latter days that will come to Israel to attack her and the
reason is that she has something that they want. Now God says that he will destroy these
nations by a miracle from Him, but what does Israel have that would bring her
enemies down to attack her. This is my
opinion, but not only my opinion, and it surely could be wrong, but it could be
oil that brings these nations against Israel.
Oil in Israel! Is this a joke?
Well there have been people exploring in Israel for oil for sometime now
and there is a belief that there is a vast amount of oil there to be found, so
yes oil could be what draws these nations to ban against Israel. In today’s email (10-08-08) I received an
email from Zion Oil saying that they will begin to drill at another site very
soon.
As I write
this paper the countries in Europe are turning very much liberal in their
politics and seemed to turn out in great numbers when Obama went to visit this
past summer. The reason I say this is
because they seem very ready for someone to lead them and I am not saying that
he is the one who will do it, but that they seem ripe for another dictator,
probably not all of them but they sure seemed to enjoy it when he went to
Europe. There are many problems that
face our world today and if someone could be a charismatic person that would
seem to have all of the answers many would be willing to follow him.
I want
to make a few more points on why America is believing the lies of the far left,
and how they are hearing these lies.
Sean Hannity, a conservative talk show host and co-host of Hannity and
Colmes says most every day on his show that 2008 is the year the media in this
nation died. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN are all
pro Obama stations and this is not the way that the media started out in this
country. Fox News Network is the only
one out there on TV that gives a “fair and balanced” report of the news and
they are criticized for it all of the time by the left in our country. Rush Limbaugh, another conservative talk show
host says that the biggest problem in our country when it comes to politics is
that the people in our country are too lazy to get the information that they
need in order to make a wise choice. You could say that they are kind of like
sheep who listen to the media and follow them where ever they go even to their
own destruction.
After doing
some study in the Biblical book of Leviticus I want to go back to the sexual
problems that we face as a nation. God
gives the rules for who to have sexual intercourse with and who not to in His
Word as I stated before, but he also give the consequences for not following
these laws too. I have stated that the
Laws of God are for the benefit of those who follow them. Think of it this way, the law of gravity is
something that everyone knows and you don’t have to jump of a fifty story
building to understand the consequences of not following the law of
gravity. It takes longer to understand
what will happen to a person who does not follow the laws of God to understand
the consequences of not following them.
Let’s take the commandment “Thou shall not murder,” and if we were
living in the USA in the 1950’s and murdered a person you would quickly be
judged for your crime and then put to death, however in today’s world there are
so many appeals that a person can be in prison for a very long time before he
is ever executed, and then in some states he may never be executed. “Because
the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts
of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil.” This quote is from Ecclesiastes 8:11 and
Solomon is saying that if a person goes out and commits a crime and is not
quickly punished for it then the rest of the nation will see this and go out
and do the same crime if they know that justice is so slow. I heard a story of a man who had committed a
lot of murders and finally go caught and was asked why he never murdered
someone in Virginia and he replied that there was a death penalty in
Virginia. This goes along to what
Solomon is saying, as this man’s heart was given fully to do evil. There is a man in Ohio who is suppose to be
executed for killing two college girls in 1986, that is 22 years ago and now
because he got so fat eating prison food he says that it will be inhumane to
kill him because they won’t be able to find a vein to put the drug in him to
execute him. What about the two girls
that he killed does someone think that was a humane thing to do? Sorry for getting off the track about sexual
laws, but I did think that this was necessary to write about. Let’s look at a couple of verses in Leviticus
18 to get a flavor for some of the laws that God has put in His Word about
sexual intercourse: “1 ¶ The LORD said to Moses,
2 "Speak to the Israelites and say
to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. 3 You must not do as they do in Egypt, where
you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I
am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. The laws and practices that God goes on to
tell Moses are some of the practices that were going on in Egypt, where Israel
just came from and in Canaan where they were to go. Some of the things that were going on in
Canaan were very bad and because Israel was suppose to be a light in a dark
world God did not want them to follow these practices.
I now want
to tie in the punishment that the nations of Canaan were going to get because
of the gross immoral life style that they lived. I will begin by looking at a few verse from
Genesis fifteen. God is speaking to
Abram here and is about to make a covenant with him telling him where his
offspring will live and when they will live there. This is still a vial covenant with the nation
of Israel to this day: “12 Now when the sun was going down, a deep
sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon
him. 13
God said to Abram, ‘Know for certain that your descendants will be
strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and
oppressed four hundred years. 14 "But I will also judge the nation whom
they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. 15
"As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be
buried at a good old age. 16 "Then in the fourth generation they will
return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.’” God is telling Abram that even though he and
Sari do not have any children, and they are past the time when they can have a
child that God will give them a child and then there will be many children born
to Abrahams offspring, and then they will end up in Egypt and that they will be
mistreated for four hundred years, but God will not leave the Egyptians
unpunished for how they treated Israel or for their immoral life style, for the
worshiping of idols, for all ten of the judgments that God did on Egypt were
against their gods. God says in verse
sixteen that when Israel comes back to the land where Abram was, the land that
God will give them, that God will punish those in that land. God says that the reason that He is waiting
four hundred years is because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet
complete. Their cup of sin is not yet
full, but it will be full in four hundred years. God does not delight in punishing people or
nations, but God is just and God is holy, and so sin must be punished. There will be a day coming when God’s wrath
will be complete, “Then I saw in heaven
another significant event, and it was great and marvelous. Seven angels were
holding the seven last plagues, which would bring God’s wrath to completion.” (NLT)
This verse in Revelations 15:1 says that God’s wrath will be complete
after the seventh angel pours out his bowl onto the earth. My question is how close are we here in the
USA to having our sins filled in heaven as it says about the Amorites and
before that Sodom and Gomorrah, and even when God punished Israel in 722 BC,
and Judah in 586 BC?
One last
thing before I close and that is that just as God’s wrath will be complete for
this world after the seventh bowl is thrown on the earth as described above,
God’s wrath was taken out on Jesus Christ and before He died He said “It is finished,”
and that word in the Greek language is tel-eh’-o and this word was stamped on a
persons papers after he was let out of prison, meaning that his punished was
paid in full, just as Jesus paid the punished for all who believe in Him alone
for their salvation. The wrath of God is
complete for them also.
PS. There is probably
much more that I could have written about, but I hope that I have hit the most
important points and this will be helpful to all who read it.
PSS. I wish to quote
from a book written by Dr. Warren Wiersbe.
The book is a commentary on the book of Leviticus and is entitled “Be
Holy.” The section that he is committing
on in from the 20th chapter of Leviticus, which discusses the
penalties that God, gave for the breaking of certain laws that He has already
given. At the end of the section on
Leviticus 20 Dr. Wiersbe writes this:
“God’s moral law is the revelation of His holy will for humanity, and individuals
and nations cant despise God’s law and escape judgment.
“Over two centuries
ago, the American patriot Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes
on the State of Virginia, ‘Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect
that God is just.’
“Sober words
for us to reflect on today.”
