Monday, December 30, 2019

Is America Going the Same way As Babylon (Dan. 5)

Do to the business of this day, as we work on funeral arangaments for my 102 year old father-in-law I want to use a Spiritual Diary from July of 2013.


SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/23/2013 9:30 AM
            Today’s Spiritual Diary will be different than the regular SD that I do each day as I wrote in yesterday’s SD that I want to take some excerpts from the sermon that John MacArthur preached on the fifth chapter of Daniel.  At the end of this message that he did in 1980 he compared some of the sins that were committed in the latter days of the Babylonian Empire with the sins that are being committed at that time in our country, and there are some that we can add to this list in the year 2013. 
Excerpts from “Divine Graffiti: The End of an Empire”
            “First of all verses 1-4.  ‘I see the sin of drunkenness.’  Do you see it there? When he was drunk it all really began to happen.  Cyrus had had it all.  All except Babylon.  And Babylon looked to be unassailable.  And so in a drunken stupor of debauchery, they though themselves impregnable.
            “By the way, you might like to know that in the same place, in the same city of Babylon, in the very same palace, 200 years later, Alexander the Great, undefeated by all the armies of the world, died in his own vomit in a drunken stupor. It wasn’t just Belshazzar.  Alcohol had destroyed many rulers.  It’s destroying some in our own country.
            “Drunkenness:  We have millions of drunks in this country.  Our leaders are drunken, as well as our people.  In the United States, there’s a death from auto accidents due to alcohol every 11 minutes and an injury every 18 seconds.  We are a drunken nation.
            “Secondly, pleasure madness.  They were having a party while the end of the world was a few hours away.  They didn’t understand how serious it was.  Pleasure mad, crazy about entertainment wives, and concubines, and sex, and dancing, and drinking, and feeding themselves.
            “And here we are in the same kind of condition; Sports, and movies, and TV, and shows, and sex, and restaurants, and on, and on.  And we spend billions and billions on these things. 
            “Thirdly, immorality:  The worship of the Canaanite gods involved sexual perversion and sexual stimulation that I would not speak of.  Archaeologists have discovered artifacts in the digs around Babylon that have engraved on them pornographic pictures from this era.  They had their pornography.
            “But I don’t think it could be any worse than what we have in America.
            “Fourthly, this society was destroyed because of its idolatry. They were worshipping all their manmade gods and blatantly rejecting the true God. There were thousands of deities that cluttered their culture.  And we have the same thing.  We have zillions of false Christs, false messiahs, religious phonies, cults and occults, gods of sex, and money, and things and pleasure, and education.  And we have literally crowded God out of our whole country, except for vestiges here and there of those who really know Him.  7/23/2013 11:30 PM
“Fifthly, Blasphemy:  This nation was destroyed because of blasphemy.  It wasn’t enough to reject a blasphemed God, they mocked God.  You can’t believe how fearful a thing that is.  I couldn’t conceive of doing that.  And yet we produce movies like Brian, which is a spoof Jesus Christ that makes him into some kind of a clown and superstar.  Monty Python’s Jesus is a sick joke.  Is a sick joke mocking God.  We mock God with our empty prayers before congressional meetings and football games. (In 2013 we will get into trouble by praying at a football game.)  We mock God with religious charlatans who use His holy name to get rich and fill the needs of their empty egos.
Sixthly, I believe America is characterized like Babylon was of willful rejection.  No nation that I know of in history of the church has had any greater opportunity to hear the gospel than this nation.  Isn’t that true?  It was founded for Christian freedom.  We have heard it but we don’t care about it.  We’re not interested.  It is a willful rejection.  And over in verses 18-22, Daniel said to Belshazzar, ‘You know all the facts about how God revealed Himself to Nebuchadnezzar.  You know the whole story.  And you willingly sin against light.’  ‘To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not to him it is sin.’  We got churches all over this country on every block and all the way down the streets of this country.  In every little town, there are churches and they are empty, and they are liberal.  And schools are pumping out people denying the Word of God supposed to pastor those churches.  We are turning our backs, willfully rejecting the very thing we know to be true.  No nation ever had greater opportunity than America.  And I’m fast believing that no nation every turned its back on it, either, as severly as we have.  We don’t learn anything from history.  How foolish.
“Seventh, another problem that I see in this particular thing is unrelieved guilt.  This country, this Babylonian society was basically ridden with guilt.  Because sin brings guilt.  And know what?  The king saw the writing on the wall and his countenance was changed.  His thoughts were. ‘And the joints of his lions were loosed,’ and verse 6, ‘And his knees smashed together.’  Why?  Now if you and I were here and all of a sudden we saw some writing on the wall, we might say, hey, the Lord is giving a message.  But that would only be because we know the Lord and we have a secure heart.  But if we were a bunch of ungodly people in the midst of an orgy and supernatural fingers started to write a message, we’d react a little differently.  The reason they reacted the way they did was because their guilt convicted them, you see? 
“We interpret everything that happens to us according to our consciences.  And conscience makes a coward of us all.  The enemy on the inside condemned them like Adam and Eve.
“Our nation is so guilt ridden it’s unbelievable.  We’re literally ridden with guilt.  Never have there been so many psychiatrists, psychologist, counselors, mental illness, alcohol, drugs, misery, sorrow, suicide. It’s all over the place, because we are totally unrelieved in our guilt.
“Eight, America’s characterized by greed and impure motives, and that’s what was part of the destruction of Babylon.  In verse 7, he says, ‘I’ll give you gold, and I’ll give you scarlet, and I’ll make you the third ruler in the kingdom,’ and in verse 17, he says it to Daniel.  Verse 16 ‘I’ll give you all this stuff,’ and Daniel says, ‘I could care less.’
“Number nine: Materialism. Power was equated with your clothes and your gold, the decadence of living for prestige and riches.  I don’t think there’s even been a country in the history of the world to know the wealth of America for such a long period of time spread over so many people.  There are wealthier people in the Arab states, but the mass of people don’t really experience that.  We are wealthy and we are decadent.
“Number ten:  Another thing that struck me about this was their confidence in human security, their confidence in human security.  Did you notice that they were having this feast because they thought their city was impregnable?  What could happen to them?”
MacArthur goes on to speak of how we have a similar mind set in our country because of our military strength, but after 911 we should realize that we are venerable. 
“Another thing that hit me in this passage that is indicative of a dying society is corrupt leadership.  (If you listen to the news today you will hear of things like the IRS scandal, the cover-up in Libya, and other scandals that have actually fallen on deaf ears.”  What were all these princes doing getting just as drunk as the king?  Corrupt leadership, and all the soothsayers, and the Chaldeans, and the magicians had absolutely no help.  They couldn’t give them an answer.  The whole bunch of them were as drunk, and immoral, and as inept, as everybody else.
“Can I throw in another thing?  I read one author this week who said on of the problems with Belshazzar was that he wasn’t as good as his father.  He wasn’t as good as his adoptive father, Nabonidus, and he wasn’t as good as his father or grandfather, Nebuchadnezzar.  I told you in our last study (chapter 4 of Daniel), that I think Nebuchadnezzar became a believer.  Remember that?  But there’s a big gap from Nebuchadnezzar to Belshazzar.  And it illustrated to me the decline of the family.  I see that in America, too.  Where is the Godly seed?  Where is the righteous generation?
“A last one:  And this is the sum of it.  What made Babylon fall? Pride.  Verse 22, ‘You didn’t humble your heart.  You didn’t humble your heart.’  Pride.  Listen to this:  ‘At the feast of Belshazzar and 1,000 of his lords, whild they drank from golden vessels as they book of truth records, in the night, as they reveled in the royar palace hall, they were seized with consternation at the hand  upon the wall.  See the brave captive Daniel as he stood before the throng and rebuked the haughty monarch for his mighty deeds of wrong.  As he read out the writing, it was the doom of one and all, for the kingdom was finished said the hand upon the wall.  Se the faith, and zeal, and courage that would dare to do the right which the spirit gave to Daniel this the secret of his might.  In his home in Judea, a captive in its hall, he still understood the writing of his God upon the wall.’  See our deeds are recorded, there’s a hand that’s writing now.  Sinner, give your heart to Jesus, to His royal mandate vow.  For the day is approaching, it must come to one and all when a sinner’s condemnation will be written on the wall.  The message that I have for you tonight is this:  Sin brings destruction.  We started with Ezekiel 18:10, and we finished with it:  ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die.’  Be it a man, woman, be it a nation.  Doom is inevitable in the world as it gets worse and worse.  The Bible promises that those who put their faith in Jesus Christ shall escape the wrath to come, shall be delivered from the hour of tribulation.  Shall be saved from judgment and taken to heaven.”
One of the reason for this blog it to get the message of salvation through Jesus Christ out to those who read the posts on it, and I also pray that believers who read this will grow in grace and the knowledge of Jesus Christ our Lord, and the last reason I write what I write is to spark holy revival in the hearts of believer who read this so that they too can tell others of the Good News of the Gospel.
7/23/2013 12:30 PM   



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