Text: Ephesians 1:3-12; 3:1-6
Introduction: During the Cold War the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was the international belief that said that as long as there is parity in nuclear weapons and missiles the world would be safe from a nuclear war because everybody would be afraid to use them. It set off an arms race that had people in so much fear that we actually had “duck and cover” drills in public schools. It also set off a plethora of cheap sci-fi movies in the 1950s with World War 3 scenarios where the last surviving humans are trying to escape the radiation that has turned other people into monsters.
The most serious and realistic of these was a 1959 film called On the Beach that starred Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. The plot in this story had the entire northern hemisphere destroyed by a nuclear holocaust, and the only survivors on earth were in Australia waiting for the radiation to blow their way. It was a serious consideration of what the world might have been like, and there were no monsters.
I saw the movie on television when I was about eight or nine years old. We saw it at my dad’s place. I asked my dad’s wife if it was true about the nuclear weapons. Oh, yes, she assured me. There are weapons that could destroy the whole world right now. I went to bed in fear for several nights after that thinking the world could be destroyed at any minute, until I asked my mother about it and she gave me a better explanation.
A lot of people think a nuclear war such as this would be Armageddon. In 2003 as the US was preparing to invade Iraq critics were warning that it could bring about Armageddon. This all comes from a misunderstanding that Armageddon might be a World War 3 nuclear holocaust that ends the world. That’s not what it is, and nothing that happens now will bring it about.
The Battle of Armageddon takes place at the end of the Tribulation period described in Revelation 16:16. When it happens, if you’re a Christian, you don’t have to worry about it. If you have been born again by receiving Christ as your Savior, you will have been raptured out seven years earlier and will be coming with Christ in the air on the winning side. At Armageddon the armies of the world will gather to defy the Lord and fight against His return, and in a moment they will be destroyed. We don’t have to worry about Armageddon.
We do believe we are in the end times. In the last three weeks we’ve been looking at the signs. The only clue as to the time frame for the Lord’s return is Israel being restored to their land. That happened in 1948. Everything else that has happened since then only serves to give us more perspective as to the meaning of things we see in the Book of Revelation. Next week we are going to look at the Tribulation period described in Revelation 5-19. Today we are considering Dispensationalism. I referred to this idea in the first message in this series, and today I will try to explain it.
I. Two Theological constructs: Covenantal and Dispensational.
There are two basic theological systems that have come down to us in our day. The first is Covenant Theology. A covenant can be described as a structure by which the biblical text organizes itself. The reformer, John Calvin, formed this system five hundred years ago. It is followed mostly by Presbyterian and Reformed Churches today.
Theologically a covenant is an agreement that brings about a relationship of commitment between God and His people. There were several covenants made during the Old Testament times. The first was the Adamic Covenant between God and the first man. There was also a covenant with Noah after the flood. The Abrahamic Covenant promised to make a nation of Abraham’s descendants. There are several others including the Davidic Covenant, which guaranteed the perpetuity of David’s House. When Christ returns He will rule from the Throne of David.
Covenant Theology, however, is based on a system of only three major covenants, Works, Grace, and Redemption. The Works Covenant represents the past, Grace represents the present, and Redemption the future. It relies on an allegorical (symbolic) interpretation of Scripture and believes the New Testament Church succeeded Israel as God’s chosen people.
A dispensation is an administration or a system of management. The Greek word can also be translated as stewardship. In theology a dispensation is the divine administration of a period of time. It recognizes divinely appointed ages ordained by God to order the affairs of the world. It is an evangelical futurist biblical interpretation that sees God relating to man in different ways under different covenants in historical periods. It gives us a perspective of history and how it relates to the Bible and God.
There are two primary distinctives in dispensationalism: 1) a consistently literal interpretation of the Scripture, especially Bible prophecy, and 2) a distinction between Israel and the church in God’s program.
The Dispensational concept was written out by a Scottish theologian named John Darby in the 1830s, and promoted by C.I. Schofield in his reference Bible in the 20th century. Thus it has received much criticism from Covenant theologians for being a “new” doctrine only recently formulated and therefore discredited. We might say the same thing about Covenant Theology since it was only invented during the Reformation, and there is no scriptural or historical precedence for any similar teaching prior to that time.
However, as we have seen in our text the word “dispensation” is found in the Bible. The Greek word is translated “dispensation” four times, and is also translated “stewardship” three other times in the New Testament. And, for example, John made a contrast between the Age of the Law and the Age of Grace in John 1:17.
The concept of dispensations has been found in the writings of several theologians through the centuries dating back as early as Irenaeus in the second century, and Augustine, considered by many to be the greatest of all Catholic theologians, in the fifth century. Three hundred years ago the hymn writer, Isaac Watts, who was also a pastor and theologian, developed a chart of theological divisions in history. It is true that Dispensationalism as a theological study has only been recently fully developed, but previous attempts have been made, and it is only with Israel back in their homeland that the concept can now be fully understood.
II. Three reasons why the literal view of Dispensationalism is the best way to read the Scripture.
The three reasons why the literal view of Dispensationalism is the best way to look at Scripture are philosophical, biblical, and practical.
It is the best way philosophically because the purpose of language itself requires that we interpret words literally. Words have meaning and should be taken for what they mean, not for some spiritual explanation. For example, suppose I were to tell you “I am going to the mall this week.” Now I’ve been to the mall last week and many times before, but you wouldn’t look at my statement and say, Well, he fulfilled that prophecy last week, so there must be some other spiritual meaning to it that refers to the last time he went. You wouldn’t say that, you would take me literally at my word.
So why then, as Covenant theology does, should we take the Book of Revelation, a book full of prophetic events that have never yet happened, and say that it has some spiritual meaning that was fulfilled with the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70? If you can discount Revelation as a literal book, what other books might you decide are just spiritually speaking? John also wrote the Gospel of John. Should it also be taken as just an allegory? And who has the authority to choose? If you can decide one portion of Scripture is spiritual and not literal, what is to stop me from thinking another passage is just spiritual? Which one of us would be right? Before long we would have the entire Bible relegated to symbolism and we’d have no basis to believe anything.
This is what the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons do. Anything in the Bible that does not fit their theology they determine to be only a spiritual symbol. Why should we follow a theological practice that is based on the same fallacies of cult theologies? Now understand that there is a lot of symbolism in Revelation, but there is a literal meaning to each of the symbols, and it is all future. That is the only consistent way to look at Scripture.
Dispensationalism is the best way biblically because every prophecy concerning Jesus Christ in the Old Testament was fulfilled literally. Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, the thirty pieces of silver, His sayings on the cross, and His resurrection occurred exactly and literally as the Old Testament predicted. There is no non-literal fulfillment of these prophecies in the New Testament. This argues strongly for the literal method. If the literal method is not used in studying and interpreting the Scriptures, there is no objective standard by which to understand the Bible.
The third reason is the practicality of a literal interpretation. If the Bible is taken literally, there is only one way it can be interpreted and there is no confusion. If the literal method is not used in studying the Scriptures, then every person would be able to interpret the Bible as he saw fit. Biblical interpretation would devolve into “what this passage says to me...” instead of “the Bible says....” Sadly, this is the case in much of what is called interpretation today.
Some of you know there has been a lot of controversy about Bob Jones University recently. Many people are not satisfied with the way they have handled it. I was in a conversation with one graduate who said that God spoke to her through a verse in Isaiah that she should get her Congressman and Senators involved in holding BJU accountable. First, she doesn’t understand the American Constitutional principle of separation of church and state, which is designed to keep the government out of Christian business. More importantly, she doesn’t understand the hermeneutics of biblical interpretation. You cannot take one verse at random out of the context in which it is written and claim a personal message from God. 2 Peter 1:20 clearly refutes that idea. There is no Scripture of any private interpretation, it says.
By the way, I am on the same side of the argument as this friend of mine. I don’t think BJU has adequately handled the problem, but her method is not right. The literal interpretation of Scripture is the only consistent way to interpret Scripture.
III. Basic beliefs of Dispensationalism.
Before we look at the dispensations, there are four basic beliefs that dispensationalists hold that will help to understand the system. One is that there are two distinct peoples in God’s economy: Israel and the Church. The second is that the church has not replaced Israel. God’s promises to Israel (Abrahamic Covenant) have not been transferred to the church. Third, while God is now focusing His attention on the Church, He will focus again on Israel in the millennial kingdom.
The fourth is that salvation has always been by faith. People were saved by faith in God in the Old Testament era, not by works as Covenant Theology suggests. People are saved by faith in the Son of God in the New Testament, which is merely a more specific identification of God since the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one.
IV. Seven Dispensational periods seen in Scripture.
There are seven dispensational periods that give historical perspective to the Scripture and give us an understanding of how God has worked with people through the ages. So let’s examine each one.
1. The Age of Innocence (Genesis 1-3:7).
This first dispensation lasted from the creation to the fall of man into sin, sometime before 4,000 BC. The world was in perfection. Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with God. God’s commands for them were to replenish the earth with children; subdue the earth (farm it, plant crops, use the natural resources of the land), have dominion over the animals, care for the garden, and do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This dispensation was short lived and ended with Adam’s disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit.
2. The Age of Conscience (Genesis 3:8-8).
By counting genealogies we see this period lasted about 1656 years from sometime before 4,000 BC to around 2550 BC. In this age there is no church or government to hold anyone accountable for the way they live. It was up to man’s conscience.
Now there are some things we do need to read into the Scripture a little. For example, Cain and Abel offered sacrifices. Abel’s was accepted, but Cain’s was rejected because it wasn’t a blood sacrifice. How were they to know that? Obviously God told Adam what would be required and he passed it on to his sons. One was obedient and one rebelled according to their consciences. It demonstrates what man will do when left to his own machinations.
We hear all the time people crying out for more laws or policies to reduce crime and bring about peace. If we level the economic playing field; if we eliminate poverty; if we get rid of guns; if the government takes care of us! These will never work. Socialist ideas will never bring about peace. They won’t because they leave God out of the equation. All the evolutionary talk about man improving himself and making a better world is blind narcissism. Man without God always descends into moral wickedness and depravity.
The two most important aspects of this dispensation are the curse of sin and the promise of a Savior (Genesis 3:15). The age ended with the destruction of all mankind by flood. Only Noah and his family survived.
3. Age of Human Government (Genesis 9-11).
There were many changes in the world after the flood in both the natural world and the animal kingdom. The earth apparently tilted on its axis, a result of the floodwaters, and we have the beginning of seasons. Animals suddenly became wild and feared man. There were also two important changes concerning man. One, he was allowed to eat meat, and capital punishment was established (Genesis 9:1-3). This at least implied human government, and it wouldn’t take long before the world saw its first government, which turned out to be a dictatorship, and a rather evil one at that.
God gave Noah the promise never again to destroy the earth by flood and signed it with the rainbow. Then He told Noah to replenish the earth. Apparently God wanted men to scatter and subdue many lands around the world, but man didn’t disperse. Instead he built a tower at Babel to honor the greatness of man, and their solidarity and pride in rebellion against God. In response God confused the languages and forced the people to scatter into different language groups and the beginning of nations. The age lasted about 400 years and ended with the call of Abraham.
4. The Age of Promise (Genesis 12-Exodus 19).
Man’s conscience failed to hold him accountable, and the establishment of government to hold men accountable also failed. So after confusing the languages and scattering the people around the world God determined to work through one man and his family, rather than through human governments.
God made a covenant with Abraham in which He promised Abraham that his descendants would become a great nation. In Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed. This was fulfilled in Christ and salvation being made available to the entire world. He also gave Abraham the promise of a homeland, which included all of present day Palestine, but stretched from the Nile River to the Euphrates. The sign of the covenant was to be circumcision, and it was repeated to Isaac and Jacob, but was confined to the Hebrew people only. In other words, it was not transferrable to the Church. This period began with the call of Abraham, and lasted nearly 700 years until the Exodus from Egypt.
5. The Age of the Law (Exodus 20-the end of the Gospels).
At the end of the last dispensation, Jacob and his sons were down in Egypt to escape a famine. They remained there 430 years (Exodus 12:40) until God called Moses to lead them out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and down to Mt. Sinai. There, God gave Moses the Law.
From this point on God would deal with the Jewish nation through the Law and by His presence in the Ark of the Covenant. Priests in the lineage of Levi directed Temple worship. Further communication would come through the prophets. This Age of the Law lasted from about 1491 BC when Moses received the Law until about AD 31 when Christ rose from the grave.
At one time during David and Solomon’s reigns Israel occupied or controlled most of the territory God had deeded to them. But due to disobedience and continued rebellion, the kingdom first split into two, and then the Jews in both kingdoms were conquered, in 722 BC by the Assyrians, and 586 BC by the Babylonians, and were scattered. They were brought together and briefly were an independent nation from 175-63 BC, but then they were conquered by Rome and were enslaved when Christ was born. It was the Roman governor Pontius Pilate that condemned Jesus to the cross.
The Age of the Law ended with Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross for our sins and His resurrection from the grave. Christ did not destroy the Law, but fulfilled the purpose of the Law. The Law was a schoolmaster convincing the world of sin. It offered temporary atonement through blood sacrifices, but it was all a picture of the perfect sacrifice that came in Jesus Christ. His perfect redemption fulfilled the Law.
6. The Age of Grace (Acts 1-Revelation 19).
The Age of Grace began with the death and resurrection of Christ. Some suggest it began with the Lord’s Supper the night before the crucifixion. God’s grace is extended worldwide to both Jews and Gentiles. Man’s responsibility in this age is to believe in Christ (John 3:18). In this age born again believers have the advantage of the Holy Spirit dwelling in their hearts (John 14:16-26) and sealing them until the day of Redemption (Ephesians 4:30).
This is the age we are living in right now. It is our privilege not to be any longer under the Law, but to have liberty of conscience in our daily walk with Christ. However, liberty is not to be seen as an excuse for licentiousness. We are to live under the conviction and leading of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and make sound decisions based on the will of God, and not our own. We are to be holy as Christ is holy. We are to think thoughts that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and full of good report. We are to walk worthy of the Lord.
God gave the Church one command for this age: we are to be witnesses for Him in Jerusalem, in Judea, and in Samaria, and in the farthest regions of the earth (Acts 1:8). This age has lasted now nearly 2,000 years, and nobody knows when it will end, but we do believe we are in the last days before the Rapture.
When we are called out in the Rapture, an antichrist will ascend to world power for a seven-year period. God’s wrath of judgment will be poured out on the world at that time, but even though the Holy Spirit will not be present, God’s grace will be. Many will be saved as they oppose the antichrist and trust the Lord. This Age of Grace will end with the Second Coming of Christ.
7. The Age of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ (Revelation 19-20).
The return of Christ will fulfill the last of the messianic prophecies concerning Him and His reign on the earth. The Jewish nation will be redeemed and Christ will sit on the Throne of David in Jerusalem. The subjects of this kingdom will be those Jews plus all Gentiles who refused the Mark of the Beast and accepted Christ, and survived the Tribulation period. No unsaved person will be allowed to enter this kingdom. Satan will be bound for a thousand years in a bottomless pit (Revelation 20:2-3)
The reign of Christ will be one of complete peace and prosperity. The world will blossom once again like the Garden of Eden. The animal kingdom will again be subdued and at peace with mankind. The wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the goat, the lion and the calf will dwell together (Isaiah 11). The lame will leap as a deer, the dumb will sing, the blind will see and the deaf will hear (Isaiah 35). It will be a perfect world.
Then at the end of the millennium, Satan will be let loose for a brief time to gather a final army of malcontents and will be defeated. As the Millennial Kingdom ends, an eternal Kingdom begins (Revelation 21-22).
Conclusion: These are the seven dispensations that we believe most adequately explain the way God has worked among men since the creation. They give us a spiritual perspective on history that is consistent with a literal interpretation of Scripture. And because Scripture has been fulfilled literally in the past, we have sure confidence that all prophetic utterances concerning the future will also be fulfilled literally. This is our great hope. The Lord will one day come for us. He has given us many clues to suggest we are in the last days before the Rapture takes place.
This is not the time to sit down and become complacent or despair at the world’s condition. It is the time to get busy telling people about Christ, about our hope for the future, and how they can have it too.
Monday, July 27, 2015
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Signs of the Times: The Prophetic Discourse
Text: Matthew 24:3-14, I Thessalonians 4:13-18.
Introduction: Back in 1987 there was a woman with a frame shop out along the National Highway by the Kalayaan Gate to the Subic Bay Metro Authority. (It used to be the back gate for the US Navy base.) She did good work and I had a number of pictures framed there. She was a Christian and always had her radio on a Christian station playing music or listening to preachers. Unfortunately she began to listen to some cultic guy who predicted that the Lord was coming back sometime in late 1987. She began warning everybody, her customers and neighbors, and sold everything and closed her business.
On the appointed day she woke up happy and excited, waiting confidently for the trumpet sound expecting to get raptured. By noon when nothing had happened she began to get a little nervous, and as the day went on she was really worried. In the evening she began crying and wailing out loud. One of her neighbors heard her praying, “Lord please come now or I’ll be so embarrassed.” That’s why we don’t set dates!
If you watched the news this week you know the US finally concluded a treaty with Iran over its nuclear program. Actually, the Obama administration surrendered. Iran is now on tract to become a powerful player in the end time scenario. Remember last time we talked about the alignment of nations for a great battle that will occur at the beginning of the Tribulation period. Ezekiel 38 and 39 describe the battle and the nations involved. They include the kings of the far north, generally assumed to be Russia, as well as the entire area of Armenia and Asia Minor, and Ethiopia, which we showed has a treaty agreement with Russia, as well as Libya, Egypt and Persia, which is modern day Iran. With an ascendant Iran supporting terrorist activities all over the region it becomes clear that a nuclear Iran will be a powerful enemy of Israel.
A lot of people ask whether or not America is in prophecy for the last days. The direct answer is no. You cannot find any kind of reference to America in the Scripture. At the same time you can’t discard America from the end time scenario. The antichrist will rise at the head of a European empire and will control a world that has a nuclear Russia and China. How is he going to do that from Europe?
I’ll tell you how. Prophecy preachers have often said that America will have to decline and even turn on Israel before all this can happen. We actually see that happening now, but even with a weakened America, Europe doesn’t have the firepower to confront Russia or China on its own. So, where does America fit in? NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization connects the United States to Europe in a defense pact. With the rise of the antichrist America will be a subservient nation as far as leadership, influence and foreign policy goes, but it will have the military muscle to back the antichrist in his bid to rule the world. So in that respect, I would say America will have a big part to play in the end times, but only as it is connected to the antichrist. But the direct answer to the US being in prophecy is that it is not found in the Scripture.
Here’s something else I saw this week. Obama said something recently that since he hasn’t been assassinated and he was re-elected that he is fulfilling God’s purpose in being the president of the United States. It’s an incredible statement for its effrontery, but ironically he is right, only not in the way he assumes. He is so full of himself that he thinks it is God’s will for him to carry out his anti-Christian agenda. I wonder which god he is talking about?
The reality is, if he’s fulfilling God’s plan it’s because he’s bringing America down to its knees militarily and influentially on the world stage, turning us into a third world country, weakening our resolve, corrupting our morals and preparing the US to submit to the rule of the antichrist. In that respect he is fulfilling God’s plan. It’s not something he should be proud of by any means. He is disgracing the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
I. The Last Prophetic Discourse of Christ (Matthew 24).
In the first two verses of this chapter Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple his disciples ask him three questions. When will this happen? What will be the sign He is coming to be King? Is there a sign to indicate the end of the world?
Now remember at the end of the Church Age, the Lord is going to rapture out all of the believers in Christ, that is, everyone who has received Christ as their personal Savior. This event will happen seven years at least prior to the Second Coming when Christ will set up His earthly kingdom. All of the signs that Jesus then gave to His disciples in the following verses pertain to the Second Coming.
Now the Covenant theologians, Presbyterians and Reformed Churches, believe all this was fulfilled in A.D. 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed. But if you read on through this passage, and compare it with the Book of Revelation, there is no way it could have been fulfilled in A.D. 70 unless this is all an allegory, and has no literal meaning. We reject that, because Baptists are literalists, but this passage in Matthew 24 is still controversial, even among Baptists.
Some refer to this as a “Kingdom” text. They believe everything Jesus has spoken about here will happen after the Rapture and is pointing to the Second Coming. Then about a hundred years ago C.I. Schofield wrote out a systematic study Bible that became popular among many Baptists for over half a century. He divided the text at verse 14. Everything before that was pre-Rapture, but everything after was Tribulation. Verse 15 on couldn’t be anything else. The Abomination of Desolation takes place halfway into the Tribulation period, so at the very least everything after verse 14 must be during the Tribulation.
I think there is a credible argument for both. Jesus is telling the disciples what to watch for to signify the Lord’s coming. But all the things He mentions in verses 3-14 have been happening for the last 1900 years. And they will continue, and I think even as we are seeing that they will become more frequent, and after we are raptured they will continue at an even faster pace until verse 15, and still continue to grow until the Second Coming.
II. What Signs Did Jesus Give Us? (24:5-14).
John warned us in I John 4:3 not to be fooled by antichrists, and said there are already many antichrists in the world. This was around A.D. 90. It didn’t take long for false messiahs to come along trying to capitalize on the Christian religion by presenting themselves as Christ. Jesus also gave us warning in verse 5.
In the second century there was a Jewish man, Simon bar Kokhba, who led a revolt against Rome, claiming he was Christ. He was killed in A.D. 135. Another Jew, Solomon Molcho, converted and was baptized a Catholic in Spain. But when he declared himself to be Christ he was burned in the Inquisition in 1532.
Ann Lee, an early leader of the Shakers, in 1772 claimed to be the female incarnation of Christ. There was even a Mormon antichrist. Arnold Potter in 1870 claimed to be the Lord returned and became known as the “Potter Christ” to the Mormons.
In the 1930s the Rastafarian movement began by claiming that Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was Christ. Selassie didn’t claim it, but this group claimed it for him.
In the 1970s the Korean messiah, Sun Myung Moon, claimed to be Christ returned. His followers were called Moonies, and were found everywhere, often in airports where they were always hitting people up for money. The movement faded away when Moon was arrested for tax evasion.
Jim Jones and the People’s Temple made news in Guyana in 1978 when, after murdering a US congressman, 900 followers of Jones drank poisoned Kool-Aid and died. Another maniacal leader, David Koresh, claimed to be Christ and led a following known as the Branch Davidians. They were all burned to death in an FBI raid that went bad in 1993.
In Kenya there is a cult called the Legend Maria. I don’t remember the founder’s name, but back in about 1993 he began to teach that he was Christ returned. A religion grew around him, his followers wearing either blue or purple robes, but about 1996 he got sick and died. But before he passed away he said he would rise from the grave in three days. His followers waited by the graveside in vain, but it did not weaken their belief. To this day they still do pilgrimages to the site, where they crawl on their knees for over a mile to see the grave, still waiting for him to rise.
Right now in Australia is a man called Alan John Miller who claims to be Christ. His wife, Mary Luck, claims to be Mary Magdalene.
Now these are only a few, but there have been hundreds of people claiming to be Christ since Jesus ascended back to heaven. All of them have been false, and all others until the Rapture will also be false. You know how you can tell if someone claiming to be Christ is an antichrist? It’s simple. If you are born again, and someone comes saying he is Christ returned and you are still here, he isn’t Christ.
In verses 6-7 we read of wars, rumors of wars, and nation rising against nation. The thing is, there have always been wars, and interestingly enough, most of the largest, bloodiest of all wars have taken place on the smallest continent, Europe. There was a general peace during the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) that lasted for 200 years until about A.D. 200. But Rome had an internal civil war in A.D. 311, and then faced constant battles with the barbarian tribes, the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths, until they finally succumbed in 476.
The rise of Islam in the 600s brought war from Arabia all across the Middle East and North Africa and into Spain. At the Battle of Tours in 732 the Muslim expansion was halted, and in 1492, the same year Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sent Columbus across the ocean on a historic venture, they launched an attack against Islam to drive it out of Spain.
In the eleventh century the Crusades began and were waged for 200 years. Then in 1241 Genghis Kahn’s Golden Horde rode from Mongolia across Russia to Hungary and conquered most of Eastern Europe. In the 1400s Europe fought the Hundred Years War. It was a series of separate conflicts, but it took a hundred years before they were resolved. Then in 1618-1648 the Thirty Years War was fought the same way.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Britain and France waged the French and Indian Wars that stretched from the American colonies to India. Then Napoleon conquered all of Europe all the way to Moscow before the cold winters defeated his army. Besides the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and the Austro-Prussian War devastated Europe in the 19th century.
And then came the 20th; World War I, World War 2, the Cold War fought in places like Korea and Vietnam, and then the Gulf War. All along there have been numerous smaller scale tribal wars including genocides all over Africa, and now we have the War on Terror.
The point is there have always been wars, but the last century saw an expansion of wars at an unprecedented scale. World War 2 killed more people than all the previous wars in the history of the world combined. And then suddenly there was peace.
In 1991, US President George H.W. Bush put together a coalition of 90 some nations to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. While the Soviet Union and China didn’t approve, they both said they would not interfere. The war was over in 100 days and the US pulled its troops out of the Iraq. By the end of the year the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War was over, and there was a brief period where there were no major conflicts going on in the world. It was man’s best effort to bring about world peace since Cain killed Abel. Doors for missionaries to penetrate areas of the world that had always been closed were wide open. But the peace only lasted a few months. Genocide broke out in the Balkans and Somalia, and two decades later there are conflicts in so many places that the world is more unstable and unsecure now than it has been at any time since WW 2.
Jesus also mentioned famines, earthquakes and pestilences. These have always been around on a smaller scale. Malaria, yellow fever and cholera have been a scourge across many continents. Today it’s AIDS. It was an undersea earthquake in 2005 that sent the tsunami across the Indian Ocean and killed 230,000 people. There have also been volcanoes, but it does seem that volcanic activity in the last 30 years or more has been increasing. But all these, Jesus said in verse eight, are the beginning of sorrows.
Efforts to exterminate the Jews have gone on since Jerusalem was destroyed, culminating in Hitler’s Final Solution that killed six of nine million Jews in Europe in WW 2. And now Iran has vowed to destroy Israel and when they get a nuclear weapon it could become a real possibility.
Christian persecution has also been ramped up at unprecedented levels in the last few years. ISIS is even crucifying children for their faith in Jesus Christ. All of this has been going on for two millennia, but when the Tribulation begins it’s going to get worse.
III. The Abomination of Desolation (Daniel 9:24-27).
In Daniel 9 we are introduced to a prophetic timetable of 70 weeks of years that would begin with a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. After 69 weeks, or 483 years, the Messiah would be cut off. The Persian king, Artaxerxes, gave this decree to the priest, Ezra, sometime in the 450s B.C. Christ was then crucified around A.D. 29-31. The 70th week, however, did not immediately follow.
Inserted between the 69th and 70th weeks is the Church Age, which we are in now. This 70th week will begin with the rise of the antichrist who will negotiate a seven-year treaty with Israel. But in the middle of the week, at three and a half years, he will break the treaty and begin a holocaust against the Jews like the world has never yet seen. Jesus warns the Jews in Matthew 24:15-16 that when this event happens they should immediately run for their lives.
Revelation 12:6 then says there is a place in the Wilderness where they will flee, a place that God has prepared and apparently will keep hidden from the antichrist’s forces seeking them. It also gives them the final clue as to the Lord’s coming. Twelve hundred sixty days, or three and a half years following this Abomination of Desolation, the Lord will return to establish His kingdom on earth, and to rescue these remaining Jews, as well as all who have been converted and have survived the Tribulation period.
Where does that put us today? The only sign we know concerning a time frame for the Second Coming is Israel restored in its land, which happened in 1948. All the things we have discussed today have been going on since Christ ascended into heaven, and will continue with increasing frequency as we near the end of the Age. But the Rapture will take place at least seven years before the return of the Lord.
IV. The Rapture of the Church (I Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Our hope for the Rapture is found in verses 13-14. Those who are trusting Christ as Savior have no need to sorrow at death, as do the unsaved. Our faith rests in the death and resurrection of Christ. The fact that He rose from the grave in His own power is the proof that He can raise us to glory when the time comes.
The Lord will descend from heaven with a shout. I’ve always wondered about that. It almost seems to undignified for God to shout out like an athlete or a warrior going into battle. It seems to me that the ones shouting may be all those who are coming with Him. All of the dead in Christ, whose spirits are in heaven now, will be coming back with Christ riding on white horses. My guess is they are the ones who will be shouting in triumph as they descend to conquer the earth.
There is also the voice of the archangel. Michael is the only archangel named, and is the first ranked angel in heaven. He will probably be leading the charge and the shout. And then there is the trump of God. Armies have used trumpets since ancient times to send signals to their troops. This was particularly true with the US Cavalry in the old west. But I wonder if in this case instead of blowing the charge, the trumpet might be playing the Hallelujah Chorus.
At that point the dead in Christ rise first. The remains of all those whose spirits are there in heaven are going to be resurrected to be reunited in the air. It doesn’t matter if they are broken and decayed bones or scattered ashes, God will reconstitute them, and you don’t have to worry about how you will look. You’ll be more perfectly beautiful than you ever have been before. It is then after the graves have been emptied, that we who are alive here on earth will be caught up to join them in the air.
Paul also writes about this moment in I Corinthians 15:51-52. At this moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed into a glorified, perfect, eternal body. This corruptible flesh will become incorruptible. No more sore muscles or aching bones. No more scrapes and bruises. No more thirst or hunger. No disease, no weakness or fatigue. Everything will be perfect.
Now there is still a controversy about when this will happen in light of the Tribulation period. Covenant theologians tend to dismiss the Rapture as an independent event. Some believe that if we are called out literally, that it will happen at the same time as the Second Coming. In other words, it is called a post-tribulational Rapture. There are also some who believe, based on Matthew 24:15, in a mid-tribulational Rapture. They believe we will go through the first half of the Tribulation, and then be called out at about the same time as the Abomination of Desolation.
The correct view, however, is a pre-tribulational Rapture, and I’ll show you why. When Paul wrote this first letter to the Thessalonians, a lot of people became concerned that this Rapture was going to happen immediately and they had many questions. Paul wrote the second letter to answer those concerns. In the second chapter he gives a clue as to the timing of the Rapture in comparison with the seven-year Tribulation period.
In verses 6-7 reference is made to the Holy Spirit and His work as the “Restrainer.” It is the Holy Spirit in verse 6 that keeps the antichrist from rising to power before his time, but in verse 7 the Holy Spirit is taken out of the way. The only reason that the world today is not already in complete chaos is because of the work of the Holy Spirit holding it back. The only real and lasting good in the world is the result of Christian influence.
Where is the Holy Spirit today? He dwells in the hearts of believers who He has sealed for eternity (Ephesians 4:30). When the Rapture takes place, the Christians are removed. Since we are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, He also is removed. It is only then in verse 8 that the Wicked, Lawless One, the man of sin, the son of perdition (v. 3) will be revealed. The antichrist will not come onto the scene as a world leader until after we are gone, so the only scriptural conclusion we can make is a pre-tribulational Rapture.
Conclusion:
I remember back in the 60s and 70s hearing preachers talking about current events and wondering at all the earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, and other calamities how much it sounded like this description given by Christ in Matthew 24. But we have seen as the years have passed that these things are still happening with more and more frequency. We see an increase in persecution against Christians and Muslim nations openly threatening to destroy Israel. This deal with Iran over nuclear power, if the US Senate passes it, offers no hope for any peaceful resolution to world affairs. I think we can see more clearly now than ever that the Rapture is imminent.
At the same time, we are not down to the last man yet, like Noah. As morally wicked as our cultures have become we still do not have entire cities or countries of gays wearying themselves to have relationships with every stranger in their borders. As difficult as it is becoming in some places, we still have freedom in much of the world to preach the Gospel.
What does this tell us? Simply this: we need to be ready and watching because the shout and the trump could come at any moment, but until it does we have to occupy until He comes. We have to continue to engage people with the Gospel. We need to continue to be involved in our governments and current affairs to influence our leaders in a godly way. We can’t sit down and wait like the woman at the frame shop. We must continue to serve the Lord until the day He comes and calls us out.
Are you ready for that day to come?
Introduction: Back in 1987 there was a woman with a frame shop out along the National Highway by the Kalayaan Gate to the Subic Bay Metro Authority. (It used to be the back gate for the US Navy base.) She did good work and I had a number of pictures framed there. She was a Christian and always had her radio on a Christian station playing music or listening to preachers. Unfortunately she began to listen to some cultic guy who predicted that the Lord was coming back sometime in late 1987. She began warning everybody, her customers and neighbors, and sold everything and closed her business.
On the appointed day she woke up happy and excited, waiting confidently for the trumpet sound expecting to get raptured. By noon when nothing had happened she began to get a little nervous, and as the day went on she was really worried. In the evening she began crying and wailing out loud. One of her neighbors heard her praying, “Lord please come now or I’ll be so embarrassed.” That’s why we don’t set dates!
If you watched the news this week you know the US finally concluded a treaty with Iran over its nuclear program. Actually, the Obama administration surrendered. Iran is now on tract to become a powerful player in the end time scenario. Remember last time we talked about the alignment of nations for a great battle that will occur at the beginning of the Tribulation period. Ezekiel 38 and 39 describe the battle and the nations involved. They include the kings of the far north, generally assumed to be Russia, as well as the entire area of Armenia and Asia Minor, and Ethiopia, which we showed has a treaty agreement with Russia, as well as Libya, Egypt and Persia, which is modern day Iran. With an ascendant Iran supporting terrorist activities all over the region it becomes clear that a nuclear Iran will be a powerful enemy of Israel.
A lot of people ask whether or not America is in prophecy for the last days. The direct answer is no. You cannot find any kind of reference to America in the Scripture. At the same time you can’t discard America from the end time scenario. The antichrist will rise at the head of a European empire and will control a world that has a nuclear Russia and China. How is he going to do that from Europe?
I’ll tell you how. Prophecy preachers have often said that America will have to decline and even turn on Israel before all this can happen. We actually see that happening now, but even with a weakened America, Europe doesn’t have the firepower to confront Russia or China on its own. So, where does America fit in? NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization connects the United States to Europe in a defense pact. With the rise of the antichrist America will be a subservient nation as far as leadership, influence and foreign policy goes, but it will have the military muscle to back the antichrist in his bid to rule the world. So in that respect, I would say America will have a big part to play in the end times, but only as it is connected to the antichrist. But the direct answer to the US being in prophecy is that it is not found in the Scripture.
Here’s something else I saw this week. Obama said something recently that since he hasn’t been assassinated and he was re-elected that he is fulfilling God’s purpose in being the president of the United States. It’s an incredible statement for its effrontery, but ironically he is right, only not in the way he assumes. He is so full of himself that he thinks it is God’s will for him to carry out his anti-Christian agenda. I wonder which god he is talking about?
The reality is, if he’s fulfilling God’s plan it’s because he’s bringing America down to its knees militarily and influentially on the world stage, turning us into a third world country, weakening our resolve, corrupting our morals and preparing the US to submit to the rule of the antichrist. In that respect he is fulfilling God’s plan. It’s not something he should be proud of by any means. He is disgracing the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
I. The Last Prophetic Discourse of Christ (Matthew 24).
In the first two verses of this chapter Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple his disciples ask him three questions. When will this happen? What will be the sign He is coming to be King? Is there a sign to indicate the end of the world?
Now remember at the end of the Church Age, the Lord is going to rapture out all of the believers in Christ, that is, everyone who has received Christ as their personal Savior. This event will happen seven years at least prior to the Second Coming when Christ will set up His earthly kingdom. All of the signs that Jesus then gave to His disciples in the following verses pertain to the Second Coming.
Now the Covenant theologians, Presbyterians and Reformed Churches, believe all this was fulfilled in A.D. 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed. But if you read on through this passage, and compare it with the Book of Revelation, there is no way it could have been fulfilled in A.D. 70 unless this is all an allegory, and has no literal meaning. We reject that, because Baptists are literalists, but this passage in Matthew 24 is still controversial, even among Baptists.
Some refer to this as a “Kingdom” text. They believe everything Jesus has spoken about here will happen after the Rapture and is pointing to the Second Coming. Then about a hundred years ago C.I. Schofield wrote out a systematic study Bible that became popular among many Baptists for over half a century. He divided the text at verse 14. Everything before that was pre-Rapture, but everything after was Tribulation. Verse 15 on couldn’t be anything else. The Abomination of Desolation takes place halfway into the Tribulation period, so at the very least everything after verse 14 must be during the Tribulation.
I think there is a credible argument for both. Jesus is telling the disciples what to watch for to signify the Lord’s coming. But all the things He mentions in verses 3-14 have been happening for the last 1900 years. And they will continue, and I think even as we are seeing that they will become more frequent, and after we are raptured they will continue at an even faster pace until verse 15, and still continue to grow until the Second Coming.
II. What Signs Did Jesus Give Us? (24:5-14).
John warned us in I John 4:3 not to be fooled by antichrists, and said there are already many antichrists in the world. This was around A.D. 90. It didn’t take long for false messiahs to come along trying to capitalize on the Christian religion by presenting themselves as Christ. Jesus also gave us warning in verse 5.
In the second century there was a Jewish man, Simon bar Kokhba, who led a revolt against Rome, claiming he was Christ. He was killed in A.D. 135. Another Jew, Solomon Molcho, converted and was baptized a Catholic in Spain. But when he declared himself to be Christ he was burned in the Inquisition in 1532.
Ann Lee, an early leader of the Shakers, in 1772 claimed to be the female incarnation of Christ. There was even a Mormon antichrist. Arnold Potter in 1870 claimed to be the Lord returned and became known as the “Potter Christ” to the Mormons.
In the 1930s the Rastafarian movement began by claiming that Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was Christ. Selassie didn’t claim it, but this group claimed it for him.
In the 1970s the Korean messiah, Sun Myung Moon, claimed to be Christ returned. His followers were called Moonies, and were found everywhere, often in airports where they were always hitting people up for money. The movement faded away when Moon was arrested for tax evasion.
Jim Jones and the People’s Temple made news in Guyana in 1978 when, after murdering a US congressman, 900 followers of Jones drank poisoned Kool-Aid and died. Another maniacal leader, David Koresh, claimed to be Christ and led a following known as the Branch Davidians. They were all burned to death in an FBI raid that went bad in 1993.
In Kenya there is a cult called the Legend Maria. I don’t remember the founder’s name, but back in about 1993 he began to teach that he was Christ returned. A religion grew around him, his followers wearing either blue or purple robes, but about 1996 he got sick and died. But before he passed away he said he would rise from the grave in three days. His followers waited by the graveside in vain, but it did not weaken their belief. To this day they still do pilgrimages to the site, where they crawl on their knees for over a mile to see the grave, still waiting for him to rise.
Right now in Australia is a man called Alan John Miller who claims to be Christ. His wife, Mary Luck, claims to be Mary Magdalene.
Now these are only a few, but there have been hundreds of people claiming to be Christ since Jesus ascended back to heaven. All of them have been false, and all others until the Rapture will also be false. You know how you can tell if someone claiming to be Christ is an antichrist? It’s simple. If you are born again, and someone comes saying he is Christ returned and you are still here, he isn’t Christ.
In verses 6-7 we read of wars, rumors of wars, and nation rising against nation. The thing is, there have always been wars, and interestingly enough, most of the largest, bloodiest of all wars have taken place on the smallest continent, Europe. There was a general peace during the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) that lasted for 200 years until about A.D. 200. But Rome had an internal civil war in A.D. 311, and then faced constant battles with the barbarian tribes, the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths, until they finally succumbed in 476.
The rise of Islam in the 600s brought war from Arabia all across the Middle East and North Africa and into Spain. At the Battle of Tours in 732 the Muslim expansion was halted, and in 1492, the same year Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sent Columbus across the ocean on a historic venture, they launched an attack against Islam to drive it out of Spain.
In the eleventh century the Crusades began and were waged for 200 years. Then in 1241 Genghis Kahn’s Golden Horde rode from Mongolia across Russia to Hungary and conquered most of Eastern Europe. In the 1400s Europe fought the Hundred Years War. It was a series of separate conflicts, but it took a hundred years before they were resolved. Then in 1618-1648 the Thirty Years War was fought the same way.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Britain and France waged the French and Indian Wars that stretched from the American colonies to India. Then Napoleon conquered all of Europe all the way to Moscow before the cold winters defeated his army. Besides the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and the Austro-Prussian War devastated Europe in the 19th century.
And then came the 20th; World War I, World War 2, the Cold War fought in places like Korea and Vietnam, and then the Gulf War. All along there have been numerous smaller scale tribal wars including genocides all over Africa, and now we have the War on Terror.
The point is there have always been wars, but the last century saw an expansion of wars at an unprecedented scale. World War 2 killed more people than all the previous wars in the history of the world combined. And then suddenly there was peace.
In 1991, US President George H.W. Bush put together a coalition of 90 some nations to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. While the Soviet Union and China didn’t approve, they both said they would not interfere. The war was over in 100 days and the US pulled its troops out of the Iraq. By the end of the year the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War was over, and there was a brief period where there were no major conflicts going on in the world. It was man’s best effort to bring about world peace since Cain killed Abel. Doors for missionaries to penetrate areas of the world that had always been closed were wide open. But the peace only lasted a few months. Genocide broke out in the Balkans and Somalia, and two decades later there are conflicts in so many places that the world is more unstable and unsecure now than it has been at any time since WW 2.
Jesus also mentioned famines, earthquakes and pestilences. These have always been around on a smaller scale. Malaria, yellow fever and cholera have been a scourge across many continents. Today it’s AIDS. It was an undersea earthquake in 2005 that sent the tsunami across the Indian Ocean and killed 230,000 people. There have also been volcanoes, but it does seem that volcanic activity in the last 30 years or more has been increasing. But all these, Jesus said in verse eight, are the beginning of sorrows.
Efforts to exterminate the Jews have gone on since Jerusalem was destroyed, culminating in Hitler’s Final Solution that killed six of nine million Jews in Europe in WW 2. And now Iran has vowed to destroy Israel and when they get a nuclear weapon it could become a real possibility.
Christian persecution has also been ramped up at unprecedented levels in the last few years. ISIS is even crucifying children for their faith in Jesus Christ. All of this has been going on for two millennia, but when the Tribulation begins it’s going to get worse.
III. The Abomination of Desolation (Daniel 9:24-27).
In Daniel 9 we are introduced to a prophetic timetable of 70 weeks of years that would begin with a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. After 69 weeks, or 483 years, the Messiah would be cut off. The Persian king, Artaxerxes, gave this decree to the priest, Ezra, sometime in the 450s B.C. Christ was then crucified around A.D. 29-31. The 70th week, however, did not immediately follow.
Inserted between the 69th and 70th weeks is the Church Age, which we are in now. This 70th week will begin with the rise of the antichrist who will negotiate a seven-year treaty with Israel. But in the middle of the week, at three and a half years, he will break the treaty and begin a holocaust against the Jews like the world has never yet seen. Jesus warns the Jews in Matthew 24:15-16 that when this event happens they should immediately run for their lives.
Revelation 12:6 then says there is a place in the Wilderness where they will flee, a place that God has prepared and apparently will keep hidden from the antichrist’s forces seeking them. It also gives them the final clue as to the Lord’s coming. Twelve hundred sixty days, or three and a half years following this Abomination of Desolation, the Lord will return to establish His kingdom on earth, and to rescue these remaining Jews, as well as all who have been converted and have survived the Tribulation period.
Where does that put us today? The only sign we know concerning a time frame for the Second Coming is Israel restored in its land, which happened in 1948. All the things we have discussed today have been going on since Christ ascended into heaven, and will continue with increasing frequency as we near the end of the Age. But the Rapture will take place at least seven years before the return of the Lord.
IV. The Rapture of the Church (I Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Our hope for the Rapture is found in verses 13-14. Those who are trusting Christ as Savior have no need to sorrow at death, as do the unsaved. Our faith rests in the death and resurrection of Christ. The fact that He rose from the grave in His own power is the proof that He can raise us to glory when the time comes.
The Lord will descend from heaven with a shout. I’ve always wondered about that. It almost seems to undignified for God to shout out like an athlete or a warrior going into battle. It seems to me that the ones shouting may be all those who are coming with Him. All of the dead in Christ, whose spirits are in heaven now, will be coming back with Christ riding on white horses. My guess is they are the ones who will be shouting in triumph as they descend to conquer the earth.
There is also the voice of the archangel. Michael is the only archangel named, and is the first ranked angel in heaven. He will probably be leading the charge and the shout. And then there is the trump of God. Armies have used trumpets since ancient times to send signals to their troops. This was particularly true with the US Cavalry in the old west. But I wonder if in this case instead of blowing the charge, the trumpet might be playing the Hallelujah Chorus.
At that point the dead in Christ rise first. The remains of all those whose spirits are there in heaven are going to be resurrected to be reunited in the air. It doesn’t matter if they are broken and decayed bones or scattered ashes, God will reconstitute them, and you don’t have to worry about how you will look. You’ll be more perfectly beautiful than you ever have been before. It is then after the graves have been emptied, that we who are alive here on earth will be caught up to join them in the air.
Paul also writes about this moment in I Corinthians 15:51-52. At this moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed into a glorified, perfect, eternal body. This corruptible flesh will become incorruptible. No more sore muscles or aching bones. No more scrapes and bruises. No more thirst or hunger. No disease, no weakness or fatigue. Everything will be perfect.
Now there is still a controversy about when this will happen in light of the Tribulation period. Covenant theologians tend to dismiss the Rapture as an independent event. Some believe that if we are called out literally, that it will happen at the same time as the Second Coming. In other words, it is called a post-tribulational Rapture. There are also some who believe, based on Matthew 24:15, in a mid-tribulational Rapture. They believe we will go through the first half of the Tribulation, and then be called out at about the same time as the Abomination of Desolation.
The correct view, however, is a pre-tribulational Rapture, and I’ll show you why. When Paul wrote this first letter to the Thessalonians, a lot of people became concerned that this Rapture was going to happen immediately and they had many questions. Paul wrote the second letter to answer those concerns. In the second chapter he gives a clue as to the timing of the Rapture in comparison with the seven-year Tribulation period.
In verses 6-7 reference is made to the Holy Spirit and His work as the “Restrainer.” It is the Holy Spirit in verse 6 that keeps the antichrist from rising to power before his time, but in verse 7 the Holy Spirit is taken out of the way. The only reason that the world today is not already in complete chaos is because of the work of the Holy Spirit holding it back. The only real and lasting good in the world is the result of Christian influence.
Where is the Holy Spirit today? He dwells in the hearts of believers who He has sealed for eternity (Ephesians 4:30). When the Rapture takes place, the Christians are removed. Since we are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, He also is removed. It is only then in verse 8 that the Wicked, Lawless One, the man of sin, the son of perdition (v. 3) will be revealed. The antichrist will not come onto the scene as a world leader until after we are gone, so the only scriptural conclusion we can make is a pre-tribulational Rapture.
Conclusion:
I remember back in the 60s and 70s hearing preachers talking about current events and wondering at all the earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, and other calamities how much it sounded like this description given by Christ in Matthew 24. But we have seen as the years have passed that these things are still happening with more and more frequency. We see an increase in persecution against Christians and Muslim nations openly threatening to destroy Israel. This deal with Iran over nuclear power, if the US Senate passes it, offers no hope for any peaceful resolution to world affairs. I think we can see more clearly now than ever that the Rapture is imminent.
At the same time, we are not down to the last man yet, like Noah. As morally wicked as our cultures have become we still do not have entire cities or countries of gays wearying themselves to have relationships with every stranger in their borders. As difficult as it is becoming in some places, we still have freedom in much of the world to preach the Gospel.
What does this tell us? Simply this: we need to be ready and watching because the shout and the trump could come at any moment, but until it does we have to occupy until He comes. We have to continue to engage people with the Gospel. We need to continue to be involved in our governments and current affairs to influence our leaders in a godly way. We can’t sit down and wait like the woman at the frame shop. We must continue to serve the Lord until the day He comes and calls us out.
Are you ready for that day to come?
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Confederate Flag
Megyn Kelly has a great program called The Kelly File on Fox News. She's hard hitting and unafraid to stand up to liberal apologists. I watch her when I can and always enjoy her conservative, tell-it-like-it-is perspective. She also has a blog on which she recently posted a long diatribe against Abraham Lincoln in order to argue in favor of keeping Confederate flags flying. Interestingly enough, I am in agreement with her sentiments about the flag, but she could have made the point without this irrational rag on Lincoln. I've posted her article here as far as it went. It suddenly cut off on the website and I wasn't able to find the finish of it. With it I've posted my rebuttal. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that someone as intelligent and articulate as Kelly would put out something as poorly written as this. It's lengthy, but here it is for your perusal. Let me know what you think. Since this blog apparently doesn't allow for colors I've written my answers in italics so there is no question where my comments begin and end.
POSTED ON JULY 9, 2015 BY MEGYN KELLY
The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that what we see happening in the United States today is an apt illustration of why the Confederate flag was raised in the first place. What we see materializing before our very eyes is tyranny: tyranny over the freedom of expression, tyranny over the freedom of association, tyranny over the freedom of speech, and tyranny over the freedom of conscience.
Yes, we are seeing tyranny materializing before our eyes, but there is no comparison with what is happening in the United States today with what happened prior to the Civil War. The issue in the early 1800s was cotton and the slave industry used to produce it. The tariff of abominations concerned the trade of cotton overseas, but affected nobody’s freedom. The abolitionist movement in the North agitated to end slavery, but nobody ever denied a southerner freedom of expression, association, speech or conscience. Attempts to help slaves escape through the Underground Railroad were met with the Supreme Court Dred Scott decision forcing all freed slaves caught in the North to be returned to their owners. That is hardly tyranny.
In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a prophet. He said if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant debt as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” No truer words were ever spoken.
Yes, truer words have been spoken. Confederate veterans were never subject to derision. They were actually treated with respect at the surrenders. When the war was over veterans on both sides were honored for their valor. Fifty years after Gettysburg at one of the last reunions Union and Confederate veterans sat side by side and shook hands. When the war was over Northern teachers did not invade the South to teach in all their schools. Authors on both sides of the conflict have written plenty of books to argue their case and nobody has prevented southern apologists from being published. The problem in public school education today is that the issue has been too simplified and not well discussed.
History revisionists flooded America’s public schools with Northern propaganda about the people who attempted to secede from the United States, characterizing them as racists, extremists, radicals, hatemongers, traitors, etc. You know, the same way that people in our federal government and news media attempt to characterize Christians, patriots, war veterans, constitutionalists, et al. today.
This is a straw man argument. The liberal attack against Christianity today does not compare with any characterization of southerners as racists, extremists, radicals, hatemongers or traitors. Christians today don’t own slaves. Christians don’t advocate whipping, beating, cutting off toes or any type of violence on rebellious slaves. Christians today are called racist and hatemongers for having scriptural convictions against homosexuality, for opposing abortion, and for opposing the welfare state that is bankrupting the country.
Southerners owned slaves. Southerners whipped, beat, cut off toes, and separated families without any consideration for their feelings. If that isn’t racist and hateful, then nothing is. (Not all slave owners treated their slaves this way; Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for example, but many of them did treat their slaves this way.) Slave auctions were humiliating, cruel, horrible events. No Christian today is espousing anything that is in any way like that. To compare the denial of First Amendment rights of Christians today because of their conscientious, religious beliefs, or patriots because of their love of country and the Constitution with the movement to end a hideous, racist practice defended by southerners is farcical.
Folks, please understand that the only people in 1861 who believed that states did NOT have the right to secede were Abraham Lincoln and his radical Republicans. To say that southern states did not have the right to secede from the United States is to say that the thirteen colonies did not have the right to secede from Great Britain. One cannot be right and the other wrong. If one is right, both are right. How can we celebrate our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then turn around and condemn the Declaration of Independence of the Confederacy in 1861? Talk about hypocrisy!
This paragraph is based on two false assumptions; first, that Lincoln and the Radical Republicans were the only ones denying states the right to secede, and second, that the right to declare independence from England equals the right to secede from the Union. Both do not have to be right, and both are not right.
The Constitution begins, “We the People of the United States, in order to Form a more perfect Union....” It’s not a union if you can walk away from it. There were many who held that argument from 1789 all the way to 1860. The 1830 Webster-Hayne debate over nullification hinged on the right to secede. Webster destroyed Haynes arguments in the debate. He, Henry Clay, and many others were a voice for union for over fifty years, as was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina until it became more convenient for him to switch sides.
The problems of the colonists were myriad. Their free trade overseas was restricted and they were being taxed excessively, and without representation, to pay for the Crown’s foreign wars. British troops were quartered in colonial homes without compensating the owners. They were confiscating weapons and powder, which the colonists desperately needed for their own protection. And as a final insult, in November 1775, the King decreed the Prohibitory Act, which stated that the colonies had been put out from under Crown protection. Essentially, the King set the colonists free, and left an occupying army in their homes. You can read it all in the Declaration of Independence. That’s a far cry from the secessionist argument in 1861. Furthermore, the Declaration acknowledged that all men are created equal, but as Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855, it was practically read to say that all men are created equal except for the Negroes. To celebrate the Declaration of Independence while owning slaves or defending the practice of slavery is hypocrisy!
In fact, southern states were not the only states that talked about secession. After the southern states seceded, the State of Maryland fully intended to join them. In September of 1861, Lincoln sent federal troops to the State capital and seized the legislature by force in order to prevent them from voting. Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested Democrats and anyone else who believed in secession. A special furlough was granted to Maryland troops so they could go home and vote against secession. Judges who tried to inquire into the phony elections were arrested and thrown into military prisons. There is your great “emancipator,” folks.
The State of Maryland was a border state that sent troops to both sides during the war. It was up for grabs which way the state may have gone if it had voted on secession. If it had gone to the South, Washington City would have been completely surrounded by states in rebellion. That’s the key to Lincoln’s actions. The South had already rebelled. The Battle of Bull Run had already been fought. A war was on. Part of Lincoln’s strategy for winning the war was to hold onto the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. Maryland’s case was the most precarious, and it had to be done.
The Constitution allows for the suspension of habeas corpus in case of Rebellion or Invasion when the public safety requires it. What do you think the Civil War was? It was a rebellion, and public safety was endangered. The first deaths by hostile action in the war took place on April 19, 1861 when a mob of Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore attacked a Massachusetts militia that was on its way to Washington. The break down of law and order to include murder certainly endangered the public safety.
And before the South seceded, several northern states had also threatened secession. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had threatened secession as far back as James Madison’s administration. In addition, the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were threatening secession during the first half of the nineteenth century–long before the southern states even considered such a thing.
More than that, all of New England threatened to secede in 1807 during Jefferson’s administration, at which time John C. Calhoun was one of the most adamant opponents of secession.
People say constantly that Lincoln “saved” the Union. Lincoln didn’t save the Union; he subjugated the Union. There is a huge difference. A union that is not voluntary is not a union. Does a man have a right to force a woman to marry him or to force a woman to stay married to him? In the eyes of God, a union of husband and wife is far superior to a union of states. If God recognizes the right of husbands and wives to separate (and He does), to try and suggest that states do not have the right to lawfully (under Natural and divine right) separate is the most preposterous proposition imaginable.
Wrong. Lincoln did preserve the Union. We are one nation today because of Lincoln. Every state in the Union, Southern, Northern, or Western has the same rights under the Constitution that every other state has. No state or group of states is subjugating any other state or group of states. Yes, the Obama administration and federal bureaucracies are stepping on the rights of the people and the states, but it is an equal opportunity tyranny. Everyone is being oppressed equally. Southern states are not being singled out. (Obviously I’m against this and not defending it!)
In 1789 the Union was voluntary, but this comparison with marriage is another straw man. God didn’t recognize the “right” of anybody to divorce. He only allowed it in cases that involved adultery (Matthew 19:7-9), in other words, because of sin. So if you’re going to play that game, I suggest that the one who was holding and abusing the free rights of men because of their skin color was the partner in sin. In that case, the attempt at a divorce by the South would not have been recognized as legitimate. The point is this is a foolish argument to make. It doesn’t hold water.
People say that Lincoln freed the slaves. Lincoln did NOT free a single slave. But what he did do was enslave free men. His so-called Emancipation Proclamation had NO AUTHORITY in the southern states, as they had separated into another country. Imagine a President today signing a proclamation to free folks in, say, China or Saudi Arabia. He would be laughed out of Washington. Lincoln had no authority over the Confederate States of America, and he knew it.
This is another false argument. I am honestly surprised that Megyn Kelly could be this irrational. Obviously no president would proclaim people free in China or anywhere else. It’s a false comparison. The question here is whether or not the Confederacy was actually an independent nation. The Civil War was in progress, but the North did not recognize it as a legitimate government. Neither did any other nation in the world. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war maneuver. Lincoln turned what had been a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery, and by taking that moral high ground no foreign power would recognize the Confederacy.
Do you not find it interesting that Lincoln’s proclamation did NOT free a single slave in the United States, the country in which he DID have authority? That’s right. The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately ignored slavery in the North. Do you not realize that when Lincoln signed his proclamation, there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army? Check it out.
One of those northern slaveholders was General (and later U.S. President) Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, he maintained possession of his slaves even after the War Between the States concluded. Recall that his counterpart, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, freed his slaves BEFORE hostilities between North and South ever broke out. When asked why he refused to free his slaves, Grant said: “Good help is hard to find these days.”
It’s hard to answer these two paragraphs without going into a long, tedious recalling of events, but this argument is likewise absurd. Lincoln made his position on slavery clear in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and in his Cooper Union speech in 1860. He was against slavery, and opposed to the spread of slavery into the territories and future states. He publicly declared he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed because he had no constitutional power to do so. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure. In it he declared the slaves in the states still in rebellion to be freed. That he was unable to do anything about it until the states surrendered doesn’t make any difference. He did not free the slaves in the Border States because he wanted to keep them in the Union and was not about to do something to weaken that position. As for checking out slave owners in the north how about some documentation to help us find the information? Most Northern States had abolished slavery long before 1860. So the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t have to address them.
Yes, Lee owned slaves. He got them from his father-in-law. When his father-in-law died in 1856 he freed them. He also said when the war was over that it was a good thing that slavery was ended. Grant also got his slaves from his father-in-law, but he only managed them while he looked after the family farm. They were not his to sell or free. He only owned one himself. He bought a slave named William Jones from his father-in-law. In 1859, at a time when Grant's store failed and he was about to go bankrupt, he set his slave free, even though he desperately could have used the money if he had sold him. Paints a little different picture doesn’t it?
The institution of slavery did not end until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.
Speaking of the 13th Amendment, did you know that Lincoln authored his own 13th Amendment? It is the only amendment to the Constitution ever proposed by a sitting U.S. President. Here is Lincoln’s proposed amendment: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person’s held to labor or service by laws of said State.”
You read it right. Lincoln proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution PRESERVING the institution of slavery. This proposed amendment was written in March of 1861, a month BEFORE the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Once again, Lincoln was doing everything he could to keep the Southern States in the Union. He pled with them over and again to understand he had no plan to interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed. He believed that the intention of the Founding Fathers was to let slavery die out on its own, and in the interest of preserving the Union he was willing to let it happen that way. Let that sink in. Lincoln was a Constitutionalist. He had no plan of treading on the rights of any state, but he did have an oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, which at least implies the preservation of the Union. He also made that clear in his First Inaugural Address.
The State of South Carolina was particularly incensed at the tariffs enacted in 1828 and 1832. The Tariff of 1828 was disdainfully called “The Tariff of Abominations” by the State of South Carolina. Accordingly, the South Carolina legislature declared that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were “unauthorized by the constitution of the United States.”
Think, folks: why would the southern states secede from the Union over slavery when President Abraham Lincoln had offered an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the PRESERVATION of slavery? That makes no sense. If the issue was predominantly slavery, all the South needed to do was to go along with Lincoln; and his proposed 13th Amendment would have permanently preserved slavery among the southern (and northern) states. Does that sound like a body of people who were willing to lose hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield over saving slavery? What nonsense!
Exactly. That is the question. Why would they do it? It didn’t make any sense. But that’s what happened, and to deny that slavery had anything to do with it is plain ignorance. The entire Southern economy was based on slave labor. The tariffs that were abominations ran the price of cotton up on world markets, which in turn hurt the slave industry. Did you never hear of King Cotton? The cotton crop depended on slaves. High tariffs made it difficult for slave owners to keep their slaves and operate their plantations on slave labor.
Furthermore, after Lincoln was elected, a group of Secessionist Commissioners crisscrossed the South stirring up crowds and legislatures by declaring that Lincoln was going to end slavery and therefore the only option was to secede. They drummed up support for secession and their whole argument was slavery. It was after the war when the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, made the case that the war was over State’s Rights. It is true. It was about states' rights, but the only right they were willing to fight for was the right to own slaves.
The problem was Lincoln wanted the southern states to pay the Union a 40% tariff on their exports. The South considered this outrageous and refused to pay. By the time hostilities broke out in 1861, the South was paying up to, and perhaps exceeding, 70% of the nation’s taxes. Before the war, the South was very prosperous and productive. And Washington, D.C., kept raising the taxes and tariffs on them. You know, the way Washington, D.C., keeps raising the taxes on prosperous American citizens today.
There is no argument with this point; Washington keeps raising taxes on prosperous Americans today. As for the South paying 70% of the nation’s taxes in 1861, that’s a little hard to swallow. There were 22 million Americans in the North, and only 5 million non-slaves in the South. One fifth of the population paying 70% of the taxes? Documentation?
Before the war the South was prosperous and productive, yes. But what most people don’t realize is that cotton depletes the soil of minerals faster than other cash crops, and by 1860 many in the South were producing less as the soil became less fertile. They were looking for new places to go with their slave labor to plant cotton. That’s why Lincoln’s purpose of preventing the spread of slavery to the territories was anathema to them. Lincoln said he would do nothing about slavery where it existed because he had no constitutional authority to do so. But he did believe he could prevent it from spreading because the intent of the Founders was to let slavery die a slow death on its own. Many, even southerners, believed that in another ten years the institution of slavery would have been too costly and not productive enough to sustain. Lincoln was determined to let that happen. That’s what made the South willing to fight to the death for State's Rights. It all had to do with slavery and it was irrational.
This is much the same story of the way the colonies refused to pay the demanded tariffs of the British Crown–albeit the tariffs of the Crown were MUCH lower than those demanded by Lincoln. Lincoln’s proposed 13th Amendment was an attempt to entice the South into paying the tariffs by being willing to permanently ensconce the institution of slavery into the Constitution. AND THE SOUTH SAID NO!
No, it’s not even close to the same story. The colonists’ complaint was that they were taxed with no one to represent them in Parliament. Remember the battle cry? “No taxation without representation.” The South had Representatives and two Senators from each state in Congress to represent them. There is no comparison.
In addition, the Congressional Record of the United States forever obliterates the notion that the North fought the War Between the States over slavery. Read it for yourself. This resolution was passed unanimously in the U.S. Congress on July 23, 1861: “The War is waged by the government of the United States not in the spirit of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions of the states, but to defend and protect the Union.”
What could be clearer? The U.S. Congress declared that the war against the South was NOT an attempt to overthrow or interfere with the “institutions” of the states, but to keep the Union intact (by force). The “institutions” implied most certainly included the institution of slavery.
Hear it loudly and clearly: Lincoln’s war against the South had NOTHING to do with ending slavery–so said the U.S. Congress by unanimous resolution in 1861.
Abraham Lincoln, himself, said it was NEVER his intention to end the institution of slavery. In a letter to Alexander Stevens, who later became the Vice President of the Confederacy, Lincoln wrote this: “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
Again, what could be clearer? Lincoln, himself, said the southern states had nothing to fear from him in regard to abolishing slavery.
Hear Lincoln again: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” He also said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.”
So? Granted. That’s not even contested. Lincoln said in his first inaugural that he had a constitutional oath to preserve the Union. Obviously that’s what the North went to war for. Slavery became an issue as a war measure. The South went to war over State’s Rights, or so they said after the war was over. The inescapable truth, however, is that the only State’s Right they were willing to go to war over was the right to slavery. Every other issue they had problems with could have been resolved in Congress. In fact, if they had left well enough alone, the slavery problem would have ended in its own time as the cotton industry became less and less lucrative.
The idea that the Confederate flag (actually, there were five of them) stood for racism, bigotry, hatred, and slavery is just so much hogwash. In fact, if one truly wants to discover who the racist was in 1861, just read the words of Mr. Lincoln.
On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invited a group of black people to the White House. In his address to them, he told them of his plans to colonize them all back to Africa. Listen to what he told these folks: “Why should the people of your race be colonized and where? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. You here are freemen, I suppose? Perhaps you have been long free, or all your lives. Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of our race.”
Did you hear what Lincoln said? He said that black people would NEVER be equal with white people–even if they all obtained their freedom from slavery. If that isn’t a racist statement, I’ve never heard one.
That’s just plain unfair and it’s unreasonable. The majority of white people in the nation likely were not in favor of citizenship for the freedmen. The point Lincoln was trying to make was simply that because they lacked education and opportunity, and since racial prejudice would still be high when they were freed, they would not be on an equal standing with white people. They would be at a disadvantage when they were free. They would suddenly not have a place to live, and they would have no money to sustain them, and since the vast majority of them were still in the racist South they would likely have a hard time getting employment.
Lincoln’s statement above is not isolated. In Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln said in a speech: “I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on social or political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white.”
Again, I think Lincoln was just trying to face the reality of the times. It says nothing about him being a racist.
Ladies and gentlemen, in his own words, Abraham Lincoln declared himself to be a white supremacist. Why don’t our history books and news media tell the American people the truth about Lincoln and about the War Between the States?
Well, at this point this diatribe against Lincoln is becoming irrational as well as audacious. The end result of the war, regardless of how Lincoln prosecuted it, preserved the Union, which was his primary goal, and a secondary benefit was that it freed the slaves. To smear Lincoln as a white supremacist when 395,000 families in the South owned 3.9 million slaves, and included such stalwarts of hatred as Bedford Forest, who founded the Ku Klux Klan, is yellow journalism at its best and far below the standard of excellence we have come to expect from Megyn Kelly.
It’s simple: if people would study the meanings and history of the flag, symbols, and statues of the Confederacy and Confederate leaders, they might begin to awaken to the tyrannical policies of Washington, D.C., that precluded southern independence–policies that have only escalated since the defeat of the Confederacy–and they might have a notion to again resist.
They could more likely come to this conclusion by studying the Constitution and taking note of how it is being trampled on by Obama.
By the time Lincoln penned his Emancipation Proclamation, the war had been going on for two years without resolution. In fact, the North was losing the war. Even though the South was outmanned and out-equipped, the genius of the southern generals and fighting acumen of the southern men had put the northern armies on their heels. Many people in the North never saw the legitimacy of Lincoln’s war in the first place, and many of them actively campaigned against it. These people were affectionately called “Copperheads” by people in the South.
Lincoln penned his proclamation 17 months after Ft. Sumter and issued it three months later. Northern fighting men had as much acumen as southern soldiers; they just didn’t have good leadership early in the war, at least not in the East.
I urge you to watch Ron Maxwell’s accurate depiction of those people in the North who favored the southern cause as depicted in his motion picture, “Copperhead.” For that matter, I consider his movie “Gods And Generals” to be the greatest “Civil War” movie ever made. It is the most accurate and fairest depiction of Confederate General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson ever produced. In my opinion, actor Stephen Lang should have received an Oscar for his performance as General Jackson. But, can you imagine?
I’ve seen God’s and Generals and I agree. It is excellent.
That’s another thing: the war fought from 1861 to 1865 was NOT a “civil war.” Civil war suggests two sides fighting for control of the same capital and country. The South didn’t want to take over Washington, D.C., no more than their forebears wanted to take over London. They wanted to separate from Washington, D.C., just as America’s Founding Fathers wanted to separate from Great Britain. The proper names for that war are either, “The War Between the States” or, “The War of Southern Independence,” or, more fittingly, “The War of Northern Aggression.”
True, it was not by strict definition a “civil war,” but Kelly seems to forget that the South fired the first shot. A more fitting name might be “The War of Southern Rebellion.”
Had the South wanted to take over Washington, D.C., they could have done so with the very first battle of the “Civil War.” When Lincoln ordered federal troops to invade Virginia in the First Battle of Manassas (called the “First Battle …
Well, what I’ve seen of this email makes me want to see the rest of it, but this is as far as it goes and I can't find the rest of it, so I’ll have to stop. I do find it interesting, however, that those who defend the racist slave policy of the South often refer to Bull Run as the first battle of the war. The first battle took place at Ft. Sumpter when a ragtag southern army under the command of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard attacked the Federal installation. The first shot was fired by a South Carolina firebrand representative named Edmund Ruffin.
To tell you the truth I’m disappointed at this rant by Megyn Kelly. She pulls out all the plugs to sound just like a liberal journalist and make a revisionist historical argument by slamming Lincoln and Grant as white supremacist racists, while saying nothing about the hundreds of thousands of slave owners including nearly everybody in the Confederate government. That’s the same tactic leftists use when they blame Christians for the Crusades and immediately blame every terrorist act on right-wing extremists while giving a pass to Muslim terrorists. And for what? To call for the raising of the Confederate flag? She could have done that without this tirade.
Ironically, I agree with Kelly that we ought not lower Confederate flags. Taking them down is a symbolic gesture that accomplishes nothing but drive racism and encourage more foolishness from simple-minded people who have nothing better to do than be offended. The Confederate flag exists as a reminder of a period of time in our history and it hurts nothing and nobody.
POSTED ON JULY 9, 2015 BY MEGYN KELLY
The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that what we see happening in the United States today is an apt illustration of why the Confederate flag was raised in the first place. What we see materializing before our very eyes is tyranny: tyranny over the freedom of expression, tyranny over the freedom of association, tyranny over the freedom of speech, and tyranny over the freedom of conscience.
Yes, we are seeing tyranny materializing before our eyes, but there is no comparison with what is happening in the United States today with what happened prior to the Civil War. The issue in the early 1800s was cotton and the slave industry used to produce it. The tariff of abominations concerned the trade of cotton overseas, but affected nobody’s freedom. The abolitionist movement in the North agitated to end slavery, but nobody ever denied a southerner freedom of expression, association, speech or conscience. Attempts to help slaves escape through the Underground Railroad were met with the Supreme Court Dred Scott decision forcing all freed slaves caught in the North to be returned to their owners. That is hardly tyranny.
In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a prophet. He said if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant debt as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” No truer words were ever spoken.
Yes, truer words have been spoken. Confederate veterans were never subject to derision. They were actually treated with respect at the surrenders. When the war was over veterans on both sides were honored for their valor. Fifty years after Gettysburg at one of the last reunions Union and Confederate veterans sat side by side and shook hands. When the war was over Northern teachers did not invade the South to teach in all their schools. Authors on both sides of the conflict have written plenty of books to argue their case and nobody has prevented southern apologists from being published. The problem in public school education today is that the issue has been too simplified and not well discussed.
History revisionists flooded America’s public schools with Northern propaganda about the people who attempted to secede from the United States, characterizing them as racists, extremists, radicals, hatemongers, traitors, etc. You know, the same way that people in our federal government and news media attempt to characterize Christians, patriots, war veterans, constitutionalists, et al. today.
This is a straw man argument. The liberal attack against Christianity today does not compare with any characterization of southerners as racists, extremists, radicals, hatemongers or traitors. Christians today don’t own slaves. Christians don’t advocate whipping, beating, cutting off toes or any type of violence on rebellious slaves. Christians today are called racist and hatemongers for having scriptural convictions against homosexuality, for opposing abortion, and for opposing the welfare state that is bankrupting the country.
Southerners owned slaves. Southerners whipped, beat, cut off toes, and separated families without any consideration for their feelings. If that isn’t racist and hateful, then nothing is. (Not all slave owners treated their slaves this way; Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for example, but many of them did treat their slaves this way.) Slave auctions were humiliating, cruel, horrible events. No Christian today is espousing anything that is in any way like that. To compare the denial of First Amendment rights of Christians today because of their conscientious, religious beliefs, or patriots because of their love of country and the Constitution with the movement to end a hideous, racist practice defended by southerners is farcical.
Folks, please understand that the only people in 1861 who believed that states did NOT have the right to secede were Abraham Lincoln and his radical Republicans. To say that southern states did not have the right to secede from the United States is to say that the thirteen colonies did not have the right to secede from Great Britain. One cannot be right and the other wrong. If one is right, both are right. How can we celebrate our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then turn around and condemn the Declaration of Independence of the Confederacy in 1861? Talk about hypocrisy!
This paragraph is based on two false assumptions; first, that Lincoln and the Radical Republicans were the only ones denying states the right to secede, and second, that the right to declare independence from England equals the right to secede from the Union. Both do not have to be right, and both are not right.
The Constitution begins, “We the People of the United States, in order to Form a more perfect Union....” It’s not a union if you can walk away from it. There were many who held that argument from 1789 all the way to 1860. The 1830 Webster-Hayne debate over nullification hinged on the right to secede. Webster destroyed Haynes arguments in the debate. He, Henry Clay, and many others were a voice for union for over fifty years, as was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina until it became more convenient for him to switch sides.
The problems of the colonists were myriad. Their free trade overseas was restricted and they were being taxed excessively, and without representation, to pay for the Crown’s foreign wars. British troops were quartered in colonial homes without compensating the owners. They were confiscating weapons and powder, which the colonists desperately needed for their own protection. And as a final insult, in November 1775, the King decreed the Prohibitory Act, which stated that the colonies had been put out from under Crown protection. Essentially, the King set the colonists free, and left an occupying army in their homes. You can read it all in the Declaration of Independence. That’s a far cry from the secessionist argument in 1861. Furthermore, the Declaration acknowledged that all men are created equal, but as Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855, it was practically read to say that all men are created equal except for the Negroes. To celebrate the Declaration of Independence while owning slaves or defending the practice of slavery is hypocrisy!
In fact, southern states were not the only states that talked about secession. After the southern states seceded, the State of Maryland fully intended to join them. In September of 1861, Lincoln sent federal troops to the State capital and seized the legislature by force in order to prevent them from voting. Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested Democrats and anyone else who believed in secession. A special furlough was granted to Maryland troops so they could go home and vote against secession. Judges who tried to inquire into the phony elections were arrested and thrown into military prisons. There is your great “emancipator,” folks.
The State of Maryland was a border state that sent troops to both sides during the war. It was up for grabs which way the state may have gone if it had voted on secession. If it had gone to the South, Washington City would have been completely surrounded by states in rebellion. That’s the key to Lincoln’s actions. The South had already rebelled. The Battle of Bull Run had already been fought. A war was on. Part of Lincoln’s strategy for winning the war was to hold onto the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. Maryland’s case was the most precarious, and it had to be done.
The Constitution allows for the suspension of habeas corpus in case of Rebellion or Invasion when the public safety requires it. What do you think the Civil War was? It was a rebellion, and public safety was endangered. The first deaths by hostile action in the war took place on April 19, 1861 when a mob of Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore attacked a Massachusetts militia that was on its way to Washington. The break down of law and order to include murder certainly endangered the public safety.
And before the South seceded, several northern states had also threatened secession. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had threatened secession as far back as James Madison’s administration. In addition, the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were threatening secession during the first half of the nineteenth century–long before the southern states even considered such a thing.
More than that, all of New England threatened to secede in 1807 during Jefferson’s administration, at which time John C. Calhoun was one of the most adamant opponents of secession.
People say constantly that Lincoln “saved” the Union. Lincoln didn’t save the Union; he subjugated the Union. There is a huge difference. A union that is not voluntary is not a union. Does a man have a right to force a woman to marry him or to force a woman to stay married to him? In the eyes of God, a union of husband and wife is far superior to a union of states. If God recognizes the right of husbands and wives to separate (and He does), to try and suggest that states do not have the right to lawfully (under Natural and divine right) separate is the most preposterous proposition imaginable.
Wrong. Lincoln did preserve the Union. We are one nation today because of Lincoln. Every state in the Union, Southern, Northern, or Western has the same rights under the Constitution that every other state has. No state or group of states is subjugating any other state or group of states. Yes, the Obama administration and federal bureaucracies are stepping on the rights of the people and the states, but it is an equal opportunity tyranny. Everyone is being oppressed equally. Southern states are not being singled out. (Obviously I’m against this and not defending it!)
In 1789 the Union was voluntary, but this comparison with marriage is another straw man. God didn’t recognize the “right” of anybody to divorce. He only allowed it in cases that involved adultery (Matthew 19:7-9), in other words, because of sin. So if you’re going to play that game, I suggest that the one who was holding and abusing the free rights of men because of their skin color was the partner in sin. In that case, the attempt at a divorce by the South would not have been recognized as legitimate. The point is this is a foolish argument to make. It doesn’t hold water.
People say that Lincoln freed the slaves. Lincoln did NOT free a single slave. But what he did do was enslave free men. His so-called Emancipation Proclamation had NO AUTHORITY in the southern states, as they had separated into another country. Imagine a President today signing a proclamation to free folks in, say, China or Saudi Arabia. He would be laughed out of Washington. Lincoln had no authority over the Confederate States of America, and he knew it.
This is another false argument. I am honestly surprised that Megyn Kelly could be this irrational. Obviously no president would proclaim people free in China or anywhere else. It’s a false comparison. The question here is whether or not the Confederacy was actually an independent nation. The Civil War was in progress, but the North did not recognize it as a legitimate government. Neither did any other nation in the world. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war maneuver. Lincoln turned what had been a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery, and by taking that moral high ground no foreign power would recognize the Confederacy.
Do you not find it interesting that Lincoln’s proclamation did NOT free a single slave in the United States, the country in which he DID have authority? That’s right. The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately ignored slavery in the North. Do you not realize that when Lincoln signed his proclamation, there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army? Check it out.
One of those northern slaveholders was General (and later U.S. President) Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, he maintained possession of his slaves even after the War Between the States concluded. Recall that his counterpart, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, freed his slaves BEFORE hostilities between North and South ever broke out. When asked why he refused to free his slaves, Grant said: “Good help is hard to find these days.”
It’s hard to answer these two paragraphs without going into a long, tedious recalling of events, but this argument is likewise absurd. Lincoln made his position on slavery clear in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and in his Cooper Union speech in 1860. He was against slavery, and opposed to the spread of slavery into the territories and future states. He publicly declared he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed because he had no constitutional power to do so. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure. In it he declared the slaves in the states still in rebellion to be freed. That he was unable to do anything about it until the states surrendered doesn’t make any difference. He did not free the slaves in the Border States because he wanted to keep them in the Union and was not about to do something to weaken that position. As for checking out slave owners in the north how about some documentation to help us find the information? Most Northern States had abolished slavery long before 1860. So the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t have to address them.
Yes, Lee owned slaves. He got them from his father-in-law. When his father-in-law died in 1856 he freed them. He also said when the war was over that it was a good thing that slavery was ended. Grant also got his slaves from his father-in-law, but he only managed them while he looked after the family farm. They were not his to sell or free. He only owned one himself. He bought a slave named William Jones from his father-in-law. In 1859, at a time when Grant's store failed and he was about to go bankrupt, he set his slave free, even though he desperately could have used the money if he had sold him. Paints a little different picture doesn’t it?
The institution of slavery did not end until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.
Speaking of the 13th Amendment, did you know that Lincoln authored his own 13th Amendment? It is the only amendment to the Constitution ever proposed by a sitting U.S. President. Here is Lincoln’s proposed amendment: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person’s held to labor or service by laws of said State.”
You read it right. Lincoln proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution PRESERVING the institution of slavery. This proposed amendment was written in March of 1861, a month BEFORE the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Once again, Lincoln was doing everything he could to keep the Southern States in the Union. He pled with them over and again to understand he had no plan to interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed. He believed that the intention of the Founding Fathers was to let slavery die out on its own, and in the interest of preserving the Union he was willing to let it happen that way. Let that sink in. Lincoln was a Constitutionalist. He had no plan of treading on the rights of any state, but he did have an oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, which at least implies the preservation of the Union. He also made that clear in his First Inaugural Address.
The State of South Carolina was particularly incensed at the tariffs enacted in 1828 and 1832. The Tariff of 1828 was disdainfully called “The Tariff of Abominations” by the State of South Carolina. Accordingly, the South Carolina legislature declared that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were “unauthorized by the constitution of the United States.”
Think, folks: why would the southern states secede from the Union over slavery when President Abraham Lincoln had offered an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the PRESERVATION of slavery? That makes no sense. If the issue was predominantly slavery, all the South needed to do was to go along with Lincoln; and his proposed 13th Amendment would have permanently preserved slavery among the southern (and northern) states. Does that sound like a body of people who were willing to lose hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield over saving slavery? What nonsense!
Exactly. That is the question. Why would they do it? It didn’t make any sense. But that’s what happened, and to deny that slavery had anything to do with it is plain ignorance. The entire Southern economy was based on slave labor. The tariffs that were abominations ran the price of cotton up on world markets, which in turn hurt the slave industry. Did you never hear of King Cotton? The cotton crop depended on slaves. High tariffs made it difficult for slave owners to keep their slaves and operate their plantations on slave labor.
Furthermore, after Lincoln was elected, a group of Secessionist Commissioners crisscrossed the South stirring up crowds and legislatures by declaring that Lincoln was going to end slavery and therefore the only option was to secede. They drummed up support for secession and their whole argument was slavery. It was after the war when the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, made the case that the war was over State’s Rights. It is true. It was about states' rights, but the only right they were willing to fight for was the right to own slaves.
The problem was Lincoln wanted the southern states to pay the Union a 40% tariff on their exports. The South considered this outrageous and refused to pay. By the time hostilities broke out in 1861, the South was paying up to, and perhaps exceeding, 70% of the nation’s taxes. Before the war, the South was very prosperous and productive. And Washington, D.C., kept raising the taxes and tariffs on them. You know, the way Washington, D.C., keeps raising the taxes on prosperous American citizens today.
There is no argument with this point; Washington keeps raising taxes on prosperous Americans today. As for the South paying 70% of the nation’s taxes in 1861, that’s a little hard to swallow. There were 22 million Americans in the North, and only 5 million non-slaves in the South. One fifth of the population paying 70% of the taxes? Documentation?
Before the war the South was prosperous and productive, yes. But what most people don’t realize is that cotton depletes the soil of minerals faster than other cash crops, and by 1860 many in the South were producing less as the soil became less fertile. They were looking for new places to go with their slave labor to plant cotton. That’s why Lincoln’s purpose of preventing the spread of slavery to the territories was anathema to them. Lincoln said he would do nothing about slavery where it existed because he had no constitutional authority to do so. But he did believe he could prevent it from spreading because the intent of the Founders was to let slavery die a slow death on its own. Many, even southerners, believed that in another ten years the institution of slavery would have been too costly and not productive enough to sustain. Lincoln was determined to let that happen. That’s what made the South willing to fight to the death for State's Rights. It all had to do with slavery and it was irrational.
This is much the same story of the way the colonies refused to pay the demanded tariffs of the British Crown–albeit the tariffs of the Crown were MUCH lower than those demanded by Lincoln. Lincoln’s proposed 13th Amendment was an attempt to entice the South into paying the tariffs by being willing to permanently ensconce the institution of slavery into the Constitution. AND THE SOUTH SAID NO!
No, it’s not even close to the same story. The colonists’ complaint was that they were taxed with no one to represent them in Parliament. Remember the battle cry? “No taxation without representation.” The South had Representatives and two Senators from each state in Congress to represent them. There is no comparison.
In addition, the Congressional Record of the United States forever obliterates the notion that the North fought the War Between the States over slavery. Read it for yourself. This resolution was passed unanimously in the U.S. Congress on July 23, 1861: “The War is waged by the government of the United States not in the spirit of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions of the states, but to defend and protect the Union.”
What could be clearer? The U.S. Congress declared that the war against the South was NOT an attempt to overthrow or interfere with the “institutions” of the states, but to keep the Union intact (by force). The “institutions” implied most certainly included the institution of slavery.
Hear it loudly and clearly: Lincoln’s war against the South had NOTHING to do with ending slavery–so said the U.S. Congress by unanimous resolution in 1861.
Abraham Lincoln, himself, said it was NEVER his intention to end the institution of slavery. In a letter to Alexander Stevens, who later became the Vice President of the Confederacy, Lincoln wrote this: “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
Again, what could be clearer? Lincoln, himself, said the southern states had nothing to fear from him in regard to abolishing slavery.
Hear Lincoln again: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” He also said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.”
So? Granted. That’s not even contested. Lincoln said in his first inaugural that he had a constitutional oath to preserve the Union. Obviously that’s what the North went to war for. Slavery became an issue as a war measure. The South went to war over State’s Rights, or so they said after the war was over. The inescapable truth, however, is that the only State’s Right they were willing to go to war over was the right to slavery. Every other issue they had problems with could have been resolved in Congress. In fact, if they had left well enough alone, the slavery problem would have ended in its own time as the cotton industry became less and less lucrative.
The idea that the Confederate flag (actually, there were five of them) stood for racism, bigotry, hatred, and slavery is just so much hogwash. In fact, if one truly wants to discover who the racist was in 1861, just read the words of Mr. Lincoln.
On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invited a group of black people to the White House. In his address to them, he told them of his plans to colonize them all back to Africa. Listen to what he told these folks: “Why should the people of your race be colonized and where? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. You here are freemen, I suppose? Perhaps you have been long free, or all your lives. Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of our race.”
Did you hear what Lincoln said? He said that black people would NEVER be equal with white people–even if they all obtained their freedom from slavery. If that isn’t a racist statement, I’ve never heard one.
That’s just plain unfair and it’s unreasonable. The majority of white people in the nation likely were not in favor of citizenship for the freedmen. The point Lincoln was trying to make was simply that because they lacked education and opportunity, and since racial prejudice would still be high when they were freed, they would not be on an equal standing with white people. They would be at a disadvantage when they were free. They would suddenly not have a place to live, and they would have no money to sustain them, and since the vast majority of them were still in the racist South they would likely have a hard time getting employment.
Lincoln’s statement above is not isolated. In Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln said in a speech: “I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on social or political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white.”
Again, I think Lincoln was just trying to face the reality of the times. It says nothing about him being a racist.
Ladies and gentlemen, in his own words, Abraham Lincoln declared himself to be a white supremacist. Why don’t our history books and news media tell the American people the truth about Lincoln and about the War Between the States?
Well, at this point this diatribe against Lincoln is becoming irrational as well as audacious. The end result of the war, regardless of how Lincoln prosecuted it, preserved the Union, which was his primary goal, and a secondary benefit was that it freed the slaves. To smear Lincoln as a white supremacist when 395,000 families in the South owned 3.9 million slaves, and included such stalwarts of hatred as Bedford Forest, who founded the Ku Klux Klan, is yellow journalism at its best and far below the standard of excellence we have come to expect from Megyn Kelly.
It’s simple: if people would study the meanings and history of the flag, symbols, and statues of the Confederacy and Confederate leaders, they might begin to awaken to the tyrannical policies of Washington, D.C., that precluded southern independence–policies that have only escalated since the defeat of the Confederacy–and they might have a notion to again resist.
They could more likely come to this conclusion by studying the Constitution and taking note of how it is being trampled on by Obama.
By the time Lincoln penned his Emancipation Proclamation, the war had been going on for two years without resolution. In fact, the North was losing the war. Even though the South was outmanned and out-equipped, the genius of the southern generals and fighting acumen of the southern men had put the northern armies on their heels. Many people in the North never saw the legitimacy of Lincoln’s war in the first place, and many of them actively campaigned against it. These people were affectionately called “Copperheads” by people in the South.
Lincoln penned his proclamation 17 months after Ft. Sumter and issued it three months later. Northern fighting men had as much acumen as southern soldiers; they just didn’t have good leadership early in the war, at least not in the East.
I urge you to watch Ron Maxwell’s accurate depiction of those people in the North who favored the southern cause as depicted in his motion picture, “Copperhead.” For that matter, I consider his movie “Gods And Generals” to be the greatest “Civil War” movie ever made. It is the most accurate and fairest depiction of Confederate General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson ever produced. In my opinion, actor Stephen Lang should have received an Oscar for his performance as General Jackson. But, can you imagine?
I’ve seen God’s and Generals and I agree. It is excellent.
That’s another thing: the war fought from 1861 to 1865 was NOT a “civil war.” Civil war suggests two sides fighting for control of the same capital and country. The South didn’t want to take over Washington, D.C., no more than their forebears wanted to take over London. They wanted to separate from Washington, D.C., just as America’s Founding Fathers wanted to separate from Great Britain. The proper names for that war are either, “The War Between the States” or, “The War of Southern Independence,” or, more fittingly, “The War of Northern Aggression.”
True, it was not by strict definition a “civil war,” but Kelly seems to forget that the South fired the first shot. A more fitting name might be “The War of Southern Rebellion.”
Had the South wanted to take over Washington, D.C., they could have done so with the very first battle of the “Civil War.” When Lincoln ordered federal troops to invade Virginia in the First Battle of Manassas (called the “First Battle …
Well, what I’ve seen of this email makes me want to see the rest of it, but this is as far as it goes and I can't find the rest of it, so I’ll have to stop. I do find it interesting, however, that those who defend the racist slave policy of the South often refer to Bull Run as the first battle of the war. The first battle took place at Ft. Sumpter when a ragtag southern army under the command of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard attacked the Federal installation. The first shot was fired by a South Carolina firebrand representative named Edmund Ruffin.
To tell you the truth I’m disappointed at this rant by Megyn Kelly. She pulls out all the plugs to sound just like a liberal journalist and make a revisionist historical argument by slamming Lincoln and Grant as white supremacist racists, while saying nothing about the hundreds of thousands of slave owners including nearly everybody in the Confederate government. That’s the same tactic leftists use when they blame Christians for the Crusades and immediately blame every terrorist act on right-wing extremists while giving a pass to Muslim terrorists. And for what? To call for the raising of the Confederate flag? She could have done that without this tirade.
Ironically, I agree with Kelly that we ought not lower Confederate flags. Taking them down is a symbolic gesture that accomplishes nothing but drive racism and encourage more foolishness from simple-minded people who have nothing better to do than be offended. The Confederate flag exists as a reminder of a period of time in our history and it hurts nothing and nobody.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Public Education
I just got an email from Missouri Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill asking my opinion on what Congress should do to fix elementary and secondary education. Here's my answer:
Keep Congress out of it. Everything you've tried from Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Common Core has been a disaster. Lowering SAT standards doesn't make children more intelligent. The Department of Education is nothing but a union that cares nothing about education and everything about tenure. It's a left-wing anti-Christian, anti-Constitution, propaganda mill, and it needs to be shut down.
Children need to learn the truth about our history; Thanksgiving was about thanking God not the Indians; the Founding Fathers were primarily Christians; God was in all of their correspondence and documents; students should be allowed to read what the Founders wrote; all fifty state Constitutions mention something about God and/or the Christian faith, students should be aware of that. Christianity shouldn't be forced on anybody, but an honest reading of our history should not be denied. Children need to learn how to read. Public education has failed to do the job. Children need to learn math the old-fashioned way, not by the Common Core obfuscation of simple methods.
The best thing Congress can do is give parents vouchers to put their kids in the schools they want them in. Parents have a better idea of the kind of education their children need than out of touch bureaucrats in Washington.
Keep Congress out of it. Everything you've tried from Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Common Core has been a disaster. Lowering SAT standards doesn't make children more intelligent. The Department of Education is nothing but a union that cares nothing about education and everything about tenure. It's a left-wing anti-Christian, anti-Constitution, propaganda mill, and it needs to be shut down.
Children need to learn the truth about our history; Thanksgiving was about thanking God not the Indians; the Founding Fathers were primarily Christians; God was in all of their correspondence and documents; students should be allowed to read what the Founders wrote; all fifty state Constitutions mention something about God and/or the Christian faith, students should be aware of that. Christianity shouldn't be forced on anybody, but an honest reading of our history should not be denied. Children need to learn how to read. Public education has failed to do the job. Children need to learn math the old-fashioned way, not by the Common Core obfuscation of simple methods.
The best thing Congress can do is give parents vouchers to put their kids in the schools they want them in. Parents have a better idea of the kind of education their children need than out of touch bureaucrats in Washington.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
The Stupidest Idiot on the Planet
After pledging to defeat ISIS Obama announced a plan to reduce the Army by 40,000 personnel, a move that will also cost 17,000 civilian employees their jobs. In a press conference he said he had met with 30 defense officials and they concluded:
The strong consensus is that in order for us to succeed long-term in this fight against [ISIS], we have to develop local security forces that can sustain progress.
What in the blazes is he talking about? He pulled all of our troops out without any kind of contingency force to help with security, even though the Iraqi government had asked for it. He curtailed any progress that was being made and now has lost it all. So what progress is he referring to? It's not a matter of sustaining progress, it's a matter of starting over and rebuilding what he threw away by pulling US troops out too soon. His rush to declare he ended a war and make himself sound like some kind of a hero has made a mockery of the 4,000 lives lost fighting to gain Iraq's freedom and make it a democratic nation. This disaster is his doing.
He then said:
It is not enough for us to simply send in American troops to temporarily set back organizations like [ISIS], but then as soon as we leave see that void filled again by extremists.
Hold the horses. Did you catch that? This is exactly what President Bush warned us about while he was still president. Now after more than six years of blaming everything in the world on Bush, did Obama just concede that President Bush was right all along? Pulling the troops out too early is exactly what Obama did and the terrorists rushed in just like Bush said they would. But what’s Obama's answer to the problem? He’s going to cut 40,000 more troops out of the army! How is that going to fill the void?
Oh, yeah, I forgot. He’s going to fill the void with better ideas. He’s going to talk ISIS out of their wicked, violent, murderous ways, the same way he got Iran to the table to talk them out of their nuclear weapon plans. Did you see where the Iraqi negotiator yelled at Kerry? He warned Kerry, "Don't threaten Iran." Yeah, talk is cheap, and the better ideas apparently aren't working.
Obama said he would fundamentally change America and he’s doing it. He is destroying America with the support of leftists and uneducated, unthinking, liberal Democrats, and with the spineless, cowardly Republicans who offer no resistance. This dismantling of America is either by a narcissistic, incompetent nincompoop, elected by an undiscerning, greedy, immoral public, or it is by design, in which case Obama is Saul Alinsky’s most brilliant student. But if this is by design one still has to wonder what is Obama’s end game?
With all his Muslim sympathies, one can’t help wonder if he is trying to help bring in the last worldwide Muslim caliphate. And if he is where does he think he’s going to fit into that scenario? In a Muslim caliphate the gay loving, same-sex marriage supporting Obama would be thrown off a tall building, in which case he’s the stupidest idiot on the planet.
The strong consensus is that in order for us to succeed long-term in this fight against [ISIS], we have to develop local security forces that can sustain progress.
What in the blazes is he talking about? He pulled all of our troops out without any kind of contingency force to help with security, even though the Iraqi government had asked for it. He curtailed any progress that was being made and now has lost it all. So what progress is he referring to? It's not a matter of sustaining progress, it's a matter of starting over and rebuilding what he threw away by pulling US troops out too soon. His rush to declare he ended a war and make himself sound like some kind of a hero has made a mockery of the 4,000 lives lost fighting to gain Iraq's freedom and make it a democratic nation. This disaster is his doing.
He then said:
It is not enough for us to simply send in American troops to temporarily set back organizations like [ISIS], but then as soon as we leave see that void filled again by extremists.
Hold the horses. Did you catch that? This is exactly what President Bush warned us about while he was still president. Now after more than six years of blaming everything in the world on Bush, did Obama just concede that President Bush was right all along? Pulling the troops out too early is exactly what Obama did and the terrorists rushed in just like Bush said they would. But what’s Obama's answer to the problem? He’s going to cut 40,000 more troops out of the army! How is that going to fill the void?
Oh, yeah, I forgot. He’s going to fill the void with better ideas. He’s going to talk ISIS out of their wicked, violent, murderous ways, the same way he got Iran to the table to talk them out of their nuclear weapon plans. Did you see where the Iraqi negotiator yelled at Kerry? He warned Kerry, "Don't threaten Iran." Yeah, talk is cheap, and the better ideas apparently aren't working.
Obama said he would fundamentally change America and he’s doing it. He is destroying America with the support of leftists and uneducated, unthinking, liberal Democrats, and with the spineless, cowardly Republicans who offer no resistance. This dismantling of America is either by a narcissistic, incompetent nincompoop, elected by an undiscerning, greedy, immoral public, or it is by design, in which case Obama is Saul Alinsky’s most brilliant student. But if this is by design one still has to wonder what is Obama’s end game?
With all his Muslim sympathies, one can’t help wonder if he is trying to help bring in the last worldwide Muslim caliphate. And if he is where does he think he’s going to fit into that scenario? In a Muslim caliphate the gay loving, same-sex marriage supporting Obama would be thrown off a tall building, in which case he’s the stupidest idiot on the planet.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Signs of the End Times: Modern Clues
Text: Matthew 24:36-44
Introduction: The return of Christ is an event Christians have been watching for since the time Christ ascended into heaven in Acts 1:9. Jesus warned us to be ready in Mt. 24:44, and Paul told us of an event we call the Rapture in I Thess. 4, in which Christians will be snatched out of this world and taken up to heaven. It was not until the early 1800s that this belief was written out in a systematic theological study, but it has been a foundational belief of Baptists since the first century. The question is, how close are we?
Many have tried to predict a date for the Lord’s return. William Miller, a Baptist preacher, declared it would be in October of 1843. When it didn’t happen he refigured the date to October 1844. When the Lord didn’t come he was a broken man, but Baptists continued to teach the soon return of the Lord. Others tried to set dates.
Charles Taze Russell founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses and predicted that the Millennial Kingdom of Christ would begin in 1874, and then again in 1914. In 1914 World War 1 broke out and the JW’s declared it the fulfillment of Russell’s prophecy. They actually believe that Jesus, in spirit form, is living in their headquarters in Brooklyn, New York right now. Of course, you can’t talk to Him, and nothing that has happened since 1914 has given us any reason to believe that we are in the millennial reign of Christ. The earth is not at perfect peace, all the sick are not healed, cripples do not leap like deer, and the world is not a garden as described in Isaiah 11 and 35. We lived in Africa for 14 years and I can assure you lions are not lying down with lambs.
When World War 2 broke out some pre-millennial theologians began to wonder if that wasn’t the beginning of the Tribulation period, and since they were still here if they hadn’t somehow misinterpreted the Scripture about a pre-Tribulational rapture. But when the Nazis and the Japanese were defeated they realized they had not missed anything doctrinally. When Israel was restored to its homeland in 1948 it became clear once again that the Lord was still fulfilling biblical prophecy and that the last prophecy prior to the return of the Lord had finally been fulfilled with the emergence of the Jewish state.
Since the establishment of Israel prophetic teaching has been a hot topic among Baptists, Pentecostals and Evangelicals. The imminency of the Rapture has been of primary interest to serious churchgoers and Bible students. Prophetic conferences are going on all the time all across the United States.
In 1991 Saddam Hussein led Iraq to invade Kuwait, which resulted in the First Gulf War. Hussein claimed he was Nebuchadnezzar reincarnated and declared that he was going to rebuild Babylon to its ancient splendor. Immediately many so-called prophecy experts started changing their tunes. Mystery Babylon in Revelation 17:5 and 18:2, 10, 21, has long been considered by Baptists and Protestants to be a reference to Rome. Suddenly the prophecy preachers started teaching that while chapter 17 was still Rome, chapter 18 was a reference to the real Babylon and that Hussein was going to rebuild Babylon and that by the time of the Tribulation period it would become the commercial center of the world.
This sudden change of opinion by so many was surprising. If the Bible is consistent and our doctrine true, why should we suddenly change direction over a single incident without first thinking it through? Figure it out. Even if Saddam Hussein hadn’t been overthrown, it would have taken years just to rebuild Babylon, but to move the center of the commercial world from New York City to Babylon would have taken more than just rebuilding the city. Iraq would have had to become a world power in economics while the U.S. declined, and even then for that to take place would take decades, if not the entire century, and that’s if everything was peaceful and prosperous. But you have to wonder, what does Iraq have to offer that would draw the world’s economic markets to Babylon? And look what happened after 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on not only America’s, but on the world’s commercial markets. And what happened? We dug out and rebuilt, and New York is still the commercial center of the world.
And now after the Second Gulf War, Hussein is gone, and after all the efforts of the Bush Administration to create an independent free Iraq, Obama has thrown it all away by pulling U.S. troops out too soon, and the Iraqi government has been controlled by Iran, and is in danger of falling to ISIS. But these prophecy experts won’t back down and still refer to Revelation 18 as literal Babylon. If that’s the case, we might as well get ready for the long haul because the Rapture is not imminent if we have to wait for Babylon to be rebuilt and become the commercial center of the world.
The truth is, we don’t have to worry about it because that is not a requirement for the Lord’s return. I do think, however, that we need to be watching, and if we are watching, we will see signs of things happening around us that point inevitably to the conclusion that the Rapture is near. I think also, however, that we need to be careful about what we say and how we say it so that we don’t come off sounding like we are setting dates, or setting expectations too high.
I used to talk to Jonathan when he was young about why we had to serve the Lord while there is still time because He is coming. One day Jonathan said in a rather sad tone, I’ll probably never get to grow up anyway because the Lord is coming. I realized then I was emphasizing it too much. Sure the Lord could come at any moment, but we have to live like He’s not coming at all. We still have to occupy till He comes.
The Lord will come when He is ready, regardless of what the critics say. In fact, if you’ve ever heard someone mocking Christians for our belief in a returning Savior, that in itself is a proof that He is coming. Peter wrote about those who say, “Where is the sign of His coming?” and concluded that they are willfully ignorant of the truth (2 Peter 3:4-5). They also prove him to be right. Ironically, as we pointed out last time, some religious leaders also mock the idea of the Rapture, but that doesn’t change anything. Paul gave us very specific details about the event, and the only way we can ignore it is to come up with some spiritual meaning for it. For one, I’ve never heard anyone give a spiritualized meaning for the Rapture, and two, once you go down that slippery slope there’s no stopping. If the Rapture is spiritually speaking, what else is spiritually speaking, and who decides? Anybody who does not believe the Rapture is literal does not take the Bible literally.
I think also we need to be careful how we present our information. I remember hearing preachers when I was a teenager back in the 1960s talking about how sinful the United States was becoming. They would say things like, “I believe someday God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah for what He allows to go on unpunished in our day.” It sounded real spiritual, but it wasn’t scriptural, and for all that it wasn’t spiritual either.
First of all, God doesn’t have to apologize for anything. His decisions are perfect. Now I know that these men were speaking figuratively to try and point out the wickedness of our society, but that leads to the second point; what we see going on today is so increasingly worse than anything we ever imagined in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, that they don’t even compare. Even with the so-called sexual revolution going on in American culture in the 60s, we were a virtuous society compared with what we are today.
Let’s give it some perspective. Regardless of how loud and influential the gay community is, it is still only 2.5% of the American population, and even with the support of Democrats, liberal media and the courts, we still don’t have entire cities of gay people demanding to have sexual relations with every stranger who visits those cities. As wicked as things are, we still haven’t sunk that low. It may not be long, but we aren’t there yet.
In fact, there are so many technological advances that have taken place in the last fifty years, as well as an alignment of nations that when we look back we can’t help but think the world wasn’t really ready for the Rapture to take place until now. Now, Jesus told them to be ready, and Christians have always looked at the return of the Lord as being imminent, but we really had nothing to go by to show it was near until Israel was reborn in 1948. What that should tell us is that we should be more and more excited as we see certain events take place because it is getting near. The question is are there any other clues that could be telling us how near the return of the Lord is? Well, let’s look at a few things.
I. Modern technological and worldwide developments.
1. The Mark of the Beast, 666, is foretold in Revelation 13:16-18. It comes in the form of either a stamp on the hand or in the forehead. In order to buy or sell in the antichrist’s world you have to have one of these marks. The question has always been what kind of a mark is he going to put on your skin? I remember as a young boy not understanding all this the first time I heard it in Sunday School, but thinking that if I was in that situation, I sure wouldn’t want it on my forehead. Of course, it's not something that any believer in Christ has to worry about because we won't be here.
Then somebody came up with the bar code method of pricing objects in stores. Suddenly it became popular to talk about again. This bar code was supposedly based on a code, which used a different arrangement of six stripes three times. Then reading credit cards by this same method using an electric eye made sense of it. Another advancement was electronic ankle bracelet monitoring devices that can be used to track criminals or pets, and even your young children. But then they came up with the definitive answer: A microchip that could be planted under the skin. It’s no longer a mystery.
2. Another question that long puzzled preachers was the two witnesses in Revelation 11:9. They have power to call down fire from heaven, and for three years they preach the Gospel to every corner of the earth. Finally they are killed and the whole world sees it.
Over time some clues began to filter in that would give us hope in understanding the passage. First Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. Now a message could be sent by wire. Cables were even dropped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Then along came the wireless and Teletype. No longer did the messages have to be in code. Then came the radio. But even as much as that helped the message spread, it still didn’t allow for people to be able to see the two dead bodies. When photography was invented in 1826 it began to make sense that people worldwide could see it, but even a picture taken then could take weeks to be spread around the globe and according to Revelation the bodies were only going to be lying in the street for three days before they would be miraculously raised up to heaven.
Then came television, which broadcast a picture right into your home, and then with satellite technology a picture could be broadcast around the world in only a few seconds. But the problem remained; televisions are big and bulky, and everybody doesn’t have one. When my wife was a little girl her family didn’t have a television. She and her cousin would go to a neighbor’s that did have TV, and stand outside the window and look in to watch. Now days almost everybody in advanced countries has TVs, but there are still people in the bush, the jungles and the mountains without this technology.
Then came the personal home computer. The Internet today is the most commonly used forum for socializing and passing news. There are Internet cafes everywhere for people who don’t own a PC, and laptops make it possible to carry your computer with you. But even with laptops and Internet cafes sometimes a computer can be too big and bulky to carry all around everywhere to keep up on the news. Then the technology took one more leap forward. Cell phones, I-pads, and I-phones. Now you can reach anybody from almost anywhere in the world at anytime, and they have Internet connections as well. And everybody has one. Little kids have them. Tribal people in the bush in Africa have them. Aetas up here in the jungles have them. Everybody has a cell phone. When the day comes for the two witnesses to be seen, the message will go out by cell phone and in a matter of minutes everybody on earth is going to see it. For the first time in history some of Revelation begins to make sense.
3. Next let us consider the alignment of the nations.
In Daniel chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a great image of a king with a head of gold, shoulders of silver, waste of brass, and legs, feet and toes of iron and clay. In the next couple of weeks we are going to discuss this image so we won’t dwell on it now. But briefly it represents a historical progress of nations ending with a “revived Roman Empire” that will be crushed by Christ at His return.
The revived Roman Empire has ten toes that theologians have long taken to represent ten nations. The groundwork for this revived empire was laid in 1957 with the creation of the European Economic Community, otherwise known as the European Union. When ten countries, all in Western Europe had joined some were thinking the ten toes had been fulfilled. But then the iron curtain came down and countries from the east began to join. There were two legs in Nebuchadnezzar’s image, and the Roman Empire had been divided between east and west in AD 313, so it made sense that half of the toes should come from the east, but now there were more than ten toes. On January 1, 2002 ten of the 12 nations of the EU adopted the euro as a monetary system. The EU has since grown to 25 nations and includes both eastern and western European nations. The Roman Empire at its peak around the second century AD stretched from England across Europe to Turkey, Syria and Palestine, and across North Africa.
The EU today includes Western Europe, Scandinavia,and much of Eastern Europe. Its borders don’t quite match the borders of the old Roman Empire, and it doesn't include the Balkans or North Africa.
So how do the ten toes plus the Middle East and North Africa fit into this picture? In September 2009, the EU signed a treaty in which it created a rotating leadership among the member nations. Prophecy evangelist Jimmy DeYoung claimed that this treaty created ten districts out of the EU, which is the answer to the ten toes. Except that the treaty did not create ten districts, and the existing EU does not fill all of the old Roman Empire borders. I looked up the treaty on the Internet and found that the ten districts DeYoung was talking about is a proposal for future expansion, which will include the Middle East and North Africa. What it means is that the stage is set for a single government to administrate all of Europe and North Africa, which would probably come together very quickly if in response to some kind of worldwide crisis.
4. Interestingly enough, this past week Greece defaulted on its national debt payment and has been removed as a participant in the euro. Does this mean the infrastructure for the Revived Roman Empire is crumbling? I don’t think so. Great Britain, by the way, also does not participate in using the euro, although it is a recognized currency around the world. For example, when you travel to Kenya, at the airport you can purchase your tourist visa by using dollars, pounds, or euros (but not Kenya shillings!).
Revelation 13:16-17 seems to indicate that the antichrist will solve a worldwide economic crisis when he comes to power. With Greece defaulting, could it be the beginning of a chain reaction across Europe with other nations defaulting after Greece?
It remains to be seen, but the commercial center of the world today is New York City. The world’s economy is based on the U.S. dollar, although some nations, like China, are starting to back away from it. The U.S. national debt is today over 18 trillion dollars. By the time the next president is elected it will be over 20 trillion dollars. The U.S. economy right now has almost reached a tipping point. When it gets to the point where the debt payment is higher than incoming revenue, the economy will collapse. And if the U.S. defaults on its debts to several nations around the world, it will likely create a devastating international economic crisis, just the kind of situation that the antichrist is projected to rescue the world from when he comes to power. We are standing on the brink of just such an international financial crisis right now.
5. The question then is with this much information available to us, and our ability to decipher it from the scripture, how will so many people be duped when the antichrist comes? If you’ve read the Left Behind series or seen the videos you might have an idea that there are some who will figure it out and stand up against the antichrist. But that’s not what the Bible teaches. For those who have never heard, there will be a great awakening when the Gospel is preached by the 144,000 witnesses of Revelation 14 in every corner of the earth.
But for those who have lived in so-called Christian nations, where the Gospel has been freely preached, for those who have heard an had opportunity to accept the Lord and rejected Him, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11 says they will be given over to delusions to believe the lies of the antichrist. To be honest, this isn’t even hard to believe. People already believe in evolution without question. Hollywood movies and TV shows have inundated the public with end of the world scenarios, ghosts, vampires, zombies and aliens. And believe it or not there are undiscerning, uneducated people who believe this stuff.
When Obama was elected president in the United States there were people calling him the messiah and savior. Nearly everything out of his mouth is a lie, yet at least 40% of the US population, including educated politicians and journalists, believe him, and many more without any critical thinking have sold their souls to him because of their political agenda. These people are already blinded by their own deceit. They’ll have no problem believing the antichrist when he takes control.
But for those who may have the power of discernment, if they have rejected Christ and are still here after the Rapture, they will be given delusions to believe the lie.
6. Ezekiel 38-39 describes a great battle that will apparently take place at the beginning of the Tribulation period. In it all the kingdoms to the north will attack Israel.
Two of the nations mentioned are Gog and Magog. It is not really known who these names represent, although through the centuries many scholars have suggested they represent Russia. These kingdoms will have a coalition that will include Mizraim (Egypt), Put (Libya) and Cush (Ethiopia).
Now Egypt and Libya were long time allies of the USSR, but back in the late 1970s, Soviet agents were trying to undermine the government of Anwar Sadat and he through them out. Following the Camp David Accords, Egypt became the closest ally to the United States in the Middle East next to Israel. But that all went away with the Muslim Spring a couple of years ago. The Obama administration turned its back on Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, and backed the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood that overthrew him. But after a year of what Obama called a Democratic government, the Egyptians grew tired of the terrorist government trying to force Sharia law on them and overthrew the Brotherhood. Now Egypt stands alone, with the US having turned its back on her. She is open and ripe for a new relationship with Russia should the time come.
More significantly at the moment, on December 3, 2001, Russia and Ethiopia signed a mutual cooperation agreement. Now Ethiopia would be a small player in any invasion of Palestine, but the important thing to notice is they are in league with the Russians, just as Ezekiel had foretold.
7. Revelation 13:15 says that the Beast (the antichrist) will have the power to give life to an image of himself. This will be an incredible event that will have the world in awe. Through the centuries many scholars have believed that Satan will by then have attained the power to give life. How else could it be explained except as a slight of hand.
Actually, that’s probably what it will be. Satan has no power to create or give life. He has the power to inflict disease and even death apparently (Job 2:6), but only with God’s permission, but there is no evidence that he can actually create life.
For centuries this was a mystery, but not anymore. There are actually several plausible explanations. In the last 60 years or so the development of robotics has made all of this possible. Robotic arms put cars together on assembly lines now, as well as many other types of production, and companies are working on and continually improving humanoid types of robots.
When I was in flight school in 1984 I was selected to be a part of an experimental group flying a carrier-landing simulator. The simulator was located at NAS Jacksonville, Florida. A group of us went down for several days and when we were through we had a day to spare so we went to the Epcot Center at Disney World. There was a program in an auditorium that looked like Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the outside. On the stage they had a program with three players, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, discussing the writing of the Declaration of Independence. As I recall, Franklin sat at the table when in walked Adams and Jefferson. Then Franklin got up and walked to the center of the stage to make a speech.
So what? So, they were all freestanding, self-balanced robots. No strings attached. They walked, turned, made motions, and their lips moved while talking, on their own. Now they were obviously programed, and there was a sound track for their voices. They were slow and deliberate as they moved so they did not look realistic. But the amazing thing was, they were moving unaided. That was over 30 years ago. I imagine that same technology today could be much more realistic.
Think about it. They now have prosthetic arms and hands for wounded warriors that react to the mental thought of the person they are attached to. So far they can only open and close fingers, but it allows them to pick things up. All of these things are steps in the production of robotics that someday could very well end up being like the android Data on Star Trek; the Next Generation.
There is also the possibility of holographic images. What they can do now is project a light source that shows the image of a person. It is ghostly in nature and can be seen through, but what if some day they are able to project such an image that looks solid? That technology may not be that far off.
Then there is a third possibility. If you ever watched American Idol, you might remember that they had a segment every year called American Idol Gives Back. They raised money by the millions to take to slum areas in various parts of the world to try and help poor people. One year they actually visited the Kibera Slum in Nairobi, and Simon Cowell very sadly said that it was unbelievable.
In 2009 on their give back episode they had a special duet that they advertised for weeks. Celine Dion would be one singer, but the other was a surprise guest. When the moment arrived the backdrop on the stage opened and out of a very bright light walked the two singers and when they reached center stage and the light came up, Celine’s male counterpart was Elvis Presley. It was absolutely phenomenal and unbelievable. But it was a very clever slight of hand. They had an Elvis impersonator who knew all the exact moves that Elvis made when he sang. He sang next to Celine and lip-sinced the music. On TV whenever the camera was from the side or behind it was the impersonator so that they could look at each other and react to each other. But whenever there was a front shot they used footage of Elvis Presley. Now the audience in the auditorium new what was happening, but on big I-mac screens they could see what the world saw. It looked just like Elvis raised from the dead doing a duet with Celine Dion.
Now I don’t know if any of these methods might be what the antichrist will use, but it suggest to us that he will have no problem fooling the world about having the power to bring an image, a statue of himself, to life. The technology to fool the world, especially the lesser-educated third world areas of the world, is there.
8. Third I’d like to consider Revelation 6:12-14. Try to imagine John in AD 95 trying to describe 20th century events that the Lord was revealing to him. These were things he had no understanding of and could not possibly have known how to accurately describe them. Now he reports of an earthquake that will make islands disappear and mountains fall. Back in 2005 the Indonesian earthquake sent a tsunami across the Indian Ocean that killed over 230,000 people. It was massive. South of India is an island nation known as the Maldives. The Maldives islands are so small that the average elevation of the islands is only a few feet. When the tsunami passed over them every island was under a couple of feet of water until it receded. Now because of their location they didn’t get the big wave crashing on the beach, but they were totally flooded.
But earthquakes themselves don’t cause the sun to black out or the moon to turn to blood. Some of you here remember Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. Here is a picture of the first eruption on June 12. It’s taken from Clark Air Base. I have pictures of that taken from Subic and from the air as we scrambled to get some airplanes evacuated after it erupted. Unfortunately they’re all at home in the States. But you remember that eruption. There were earthquakes that went on constantly all day. On June 15th when the big one erupted, it blocked out the sun and put the entire region in total darkness for 36 hours. There’s a possibility if you have multiple volcanic eruptions going on.
But how about the moon turning red? And what about the stars falling from the sky? We have meteor coming into the atmosphere every day, and occasionally a meteor shower. These are mostly burned up and if you ever see one at night it’s just a streak across the sky and then it’s gone. But this doesn’t explain stars falling.
Well let’s think about it. About 700 years ago the Chinese invented gunpowder. Then about 500 years ago the Spanish invented the first musket type of guns. Guns have advanced to very rapid-fire precise weapons in our day. Then they also invented cannons that shot cannon balls, and then artillery that shoots shells, but then with the invention of the airplane came aerial bombs. But a 2,000-pound bomb would never make an explosion big enough to make the sun turn red or block out the sun.
That is until 1945. When the atomic bomb was developed and dropped on Hiroshima we entered the nuclear age. There are some prophecy teachers such as Hal Lindsey that believe these verses are describing a nuclear holocaust. A nuclear bomb can block out the sun and make the moon look red. Many atomic explosions have these strings of debris falling off to the sides of the clouds. That could have looked like stars falling to John. Or what about if there is a nuclear exchange someday? The MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction of the Cold War. A rain of scores of nuclear missiles hurtling to the earth may have looked to John like stars falling from the skies. Of course you know I’m just surmising and there is a point to this, but one more.
John describes the fig tree shaken by a mighty wind. You know the most of the destruction done in a nuclear explosion is not in the intense heat at the center of the explosion, but in the shock wave that spreads out for miles with such force that it knocks everything down.
And one last thought. He describes the heavens opening like a scroll. This last picture is a hydrogen bomb explosion. It meets that description. The heavens seem to open up like a window while the fireball rises up through it.
Are these the things John saw in his vision? We don’t really know. What we do know is that what he saw was very terrible. In chapter 8:1, an angel showed John a Little Book, and after he read it, he told John not to write it down. Certain things were apparently so horrible that God didn’t want John to even write about it. Perhaps it was even more difficult to describe than what he has done.
I don’t know, but the point is this. If what he is describing is a man made phenomenon, we are at an age where all of these phenomenons can be explained and explained quite well. And what that tells us is that there is almost nothing that has to be developed in order for an antichrist world kingdom to be put in place. As never before we are at a place where we should be considering that the Rapture of the saints is imminent. The only thing keeping the Lord from calling us out at any moment is His timing.
These are some of the modern developments that give us perspective concerning the Lord’s return. They help us understand how things described in the Bible could take place. Now let’s consider the moral conditions of our day.
II. As in the days of Noah (Matthew 24:37-38, Luke 17:26).
Jesus said of Noah’s day that the people were eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, essentially they were having a continual party. The implication is that they were taking multiple wives committing adultery and all kinds of immorality. Genesis 6:3 says that they took wives of all they chose, likely including incest and a whole list of other perversions. They lived in a pornographic world and were unconcerned about God or the consequences of their sin. It was an extremely violent society; murder and rape were probably indicative of their lifestyle (Genesis 6:11). Their wickedness was so great that their thoughts were constantly evil (Genesis 6:5). But it was not just that they had bad thoughts, it was that they never had a good thought. The entire world was corrupt (Genesis 6:12), except for Noah (Genesis 6:8).
Jesus also made the comparison of Lot in Luke 17:28-30. Lot, a righteous man, had vexed his soul living in Sodom, and went about his life completely unconcerned about the will of God. Sodom was a city totally given over to sexual depravity. When the two angels came to rescue Lot and his family the men of the city “wearied themselves” (Genesis 19:11), they wore themselves out, trying to break into Lot’s house to have homosexual relations with the angels, even after the angels blinded them. Their desire was so heinous, that even after Lot offered them his two maiden daughters, they rejected them to get at the angels who were in the form of men.
Lot tried to reason with them but they were without tolerance for Lot’s opinion against them, and threatened him harm. Has there ever been a time when the world is closer to Sodom and Gomorrah than it is now?
In 1987 my Navy squadron was deployed to Thailand and we stayed in a hotel in Pataya Beach and had a driver to take us to the airfield each day. In his van he had several travel and tourist magazines. Thailand is known for being the place in the Far East for sex, and these magazines were full of advertisements for sexual entertainment, but what we noticed was that there were more ads for homosexual sex than normal. One of the pilots mentioned this country must be more than half gay.
In the Philippines for decades gays have been winked at as being different. They are common in the entertainment industry and many are just a satire of themselves, yet people treat them as if everything is okay. In this strongly Catholic country there is a crisis of morality. But it’s worse with all the transgenders. They are everywhere. The Pemberton-Laude trial was in the news again this week. An American after cheap sex wound up with a transgender and apparently killed him. It’s a monumental tragedy, but indicative of where the world is today.
The US Supreme Court decision last week now forces gay marriage on all fifty states. It’s a tyrannical, unconstitutional ruling that is opening the door for gays to flaunt themselves in front of the whole public. But the gay agenda doesn’t just stop at marriage. They are intolerant of any dissenting opinion to their lifestyle. If you oppose it they call you a homophobe, racist, hateful and intolerant. Yet not even a week had passed since the decision before the gays started demanding that churches be denied tax-exempt status. They are demanding that the Bible be changed to allow their lifestyle and that preachers stop preaching against the sin of homosexuality.
Even so, we are a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, even from Thailand. The US gay population is only 2.5%, but its influence is great and many non-homosexuals in the country support them. We may not be far from becoming like Sodom, but we aren’t there yet. Things in this world could still become a whole lot more wicked.
In fact, Jesus questioned in Luke 18:8 whether there would be any believers left when He returns. This is an incredible statement. There was only one faithful man and his family left in the world when God sent the flood. There was only one believing, but compromised man and his family left in Sodom when fire rained down from heaven. In both cases the people at the time were given an opportunity to escape. Noah preached for a hundred years before the flood came. Lot vexed his soul in Sodom, but when the angels came he had one last chance to warn his family and neighbors before he was taken out of the city and judgment fell.
Conclusion: How does that compare to where we are today? We aren’t down to the last man or family yet. Before this worldwide judgment, which is known as the Great Tribulation, falls on the earth, those believers who are left are going to be raptured out of this world to be with the Lord. We saw last week that the only prophecy about the time frame for the Rapture is the establishment of Israel as a nation back in their land. That happened in 1948.
The Bible also gives us a description of several events and situations, which will also take place in the end times, and today we have seen how those events will be able to take place, something we’ve never known with certainty before. Now the return of the Lord at the Second Coming will take place after the seven year Great Tribulation period, but the Rapture will take place before the antichrist rises to power and before the seven year Great Tribulation. So what does that tell us?
Simply this: All of these signs are indicative of the world condition when the Lord returns to set up His kingdom, but the Rapture will happen at least seven years before that. Now I don’t know if that blessed hope will be today, next year, ten years from now or twenty. What I do know is, everything is in place. The only thing holding back the Rapture right now that I can see is, when comparing with the days of Noah and Lot, that the world isn’t wicked enough yet. You mean it could get worse? I’m afraid it could and I’m afraid it will.
What that means is that we need to be stronger than ever in our faith and walk, and taking every opportunity we can to try to reach people for Christ while there is still time. From what we can see we believe the time is close, but close in God’s timeframe could be many, many years away yet. We need to be ready, but we also need to occupy until He comes. It’s not time to go sit on a mountain and wait. It’s time to be busy about the Lord’s work. The question is, are you ready? If you are, are you watching?
Introduction: The return of Christ is an event Christians have been watching for since the time Christ ascended into heaven in Acts 1:9. Jesus warned us to be ready in Mt. 24:44, and Paul told us of an event we call the Rapture in I Thess. 4, in which Christians will be snatched out of this world and taken up to heaven. It was not until the early 1800s that this belief was written out in a systematic theological study, but it has been a foundational belief of Baptists since the first century. The question is, how close are we?
Many have tried to predict a date for the Lord’s return. William Miller, a Baptist preacher, declared it would be in October of 1843. When it didn’t happen he refigured the date to October 1844. When the Lord didn’t come he was a broken man, but Baptists continued to teach the soon return of the Lord. Others tried to set dates.
Charles Taze Russell founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses and predicted that the Millennial Kingdom of Christ would begin in 1874, and then again in 1914. In 1914 World War 1 broke out and the JW’s declared it the fulfillment of Russell’s prophecy. They actually believe that Jesus, in spirit form, is living in their headquarters in Brooklyn, New York right now. Of course, you can’t talk to Him, and nothing that has happened since 1914 has given us any reason to believe that we are in the millennial reign of Christ. The earth is not at perfect peace, all the sick are not healed, cripples do not leap like deer, and the world is not a garden as described in Isaiah 11 and 35. We lived in Africa for 14 years and I can assure you lions are not lying down with lambs.
When World War 2 broke out some pre-millennial theologians began to wonder if that wasn’t the beginning of the Tribulation period, and since they were still here if they hadn’t somehow misinterpreted the Scripture about a pre-Tribulational rapture. But when the Nazis and the Japanese were defeated they realized they had not missed anything doctrinally. When Israel was restored to its homeland in 1948 it became clear once again that the Lord was still fulfilling biblical prophecy and that the last prophecy prior to the return of the Lord had finally been fulfilled with the emergence of the Jewish state.
Since the establishment of Israel prophetic teaching has been a hot topic among Baptists, Pentecostals and Evangelicals. The imminency of the Rapture has been of primary interest to serious churchgoers and Bible students. Prophetic conferences are going on all the time all across the United States.
In 1991 Saddam Hussein led Iraq to invade Kuwait, which resulted in the First Gulf War. Hussein claimed he was Nebuchadnezzar reincarnated and declared that he was going to rebuild Babylon to its ancient splendor. Immediately many so-called prophecy experts started changing their tunes. Mystery Babylon in Revelation 17:5 and 18:2, 10, 21, has long been considered by Baptists and Protestants to be a reference to Rome. Suddenly the prophecy preachers started teaching that while chapter 17 was still Rome, chapter 18 was a reference to the real Babylon and that Hussein was going to rebuild Babylon and that by the time of the Tribulation period it would become the commercial center of the world.
This sudden change of opinion by so many was surprising. If the Bible is consistent and our doctrine true, why should we suddenly change direction over a single incident without first thinking it through? Figure it out. Even if Saddam Hussein hadn’t been overthrown, it would have taken years just to rebuild Babylon, but to move the center of the commercial world from New York City to Babylon would have taken more than just rebuilding the city. Iraq would have had to become a world power in economics while the U.S. declined, and even then for that to take place would take decades, if not the entire century, and that’s if everything was peaceful and prosperous. But you have to wonder, what does Iraq have to offer that would draw the world’s economic markets to Babylon? And look what happened after 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on not only America’s, but on the world’s commercial markets. And what happened? We dug out and rebuilt, and New York is still the commercial center of the world.
And now after the Second Gulf War, Hussein is gone, and after all the efforts of the Bush Administration to create an independent free Iraq, Obama has thrown it all away by pulling U.S. troops out too soon, and the Iraqi government has been controlled by Iran, and is in danger of falling to ISIS. But these prophecy experts won’t back down and still refer to Revelation 18 as literal Babylon. If that’s the case, we might as well get ready for the long haul because the Rapture is not imminent if we have to wait for Babylon to be rebuilt and become the commercial center of the world.
The truth is, we don’t have to worry about it because that is not a requirement for the Lord’s return. I do think, however, that we need to be watching, and if we are watching, we will see signs of things happening around us that point inevitably to the conclusion that the Rapture is near. I think also, however, that we need to be careful about what we say and how we say it so that we don’t come off sounding like we are setting dates, or setting expectations too high.
I used to talk to Jonathan when he was young about why we had to serve the Lord while there is still time because He is coming. One day Jonathan said in a rather sad tone, I’ll probably never get to grow up anyway because the Lord is coming. I realized then I was emphasizing it too much. Sure the Lord could come at any moment, but we have to live like He’s not coming at all. We still have to occupy till He comes.
The Lord will come when He is ready, regardless of what the critics say. In fact, if you’ve ever heard someone mocking Christians for our belief in a returning Savior, that in itself is a proof that He is coming. Peter wrote about those who say, “Where is the sign of His coming?” and concluded that they are willfully ignorant of the truth (2 Peter 3:4-5). They also prove him to be right. Ironically, as we pointed out last time, some religious leaders also mock the idea of the Rapture, but that doesn’t change anything. Paul gave us very specific details about the event, and the only way we can ignore it is to come up with some spiritual meaning for it. For one, I’ve never heard anyone give a spiritualized meaning for the Rapture, and two, once you go down that slippery slope there’s no stopping. If the Rapture is spiritually speaking, what else is spiritually speaking, and who decides? Anybody who does not believe the Rapture is literal does not take the Bible literally.
I think also we need to be careful how we present our information. I remember hearing preachers when I was a teenager back in the 1960s talking about how sinful the United States was becoming. They would say things like, “I believe someday God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah for what He allows to go on unpunished in our day.” It sounded real spiritual, but it wasn’t scriptural, and for all that it wasn’t spiritual either.
First of all, God doesn’t have to apologize for anything. His decisions are perfect. Now I know that these men were speaking figuratively to try and point out the wickedness of our society, but that leads to the second point; what we see going on today is so increasingly worse than anything we ever imagined in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, that they don’t even compare. Even with the so-called sexual revolution going on in American culture in the 60s, we were a virtuous society compared with what we are today.
Let’s give it some perspective. Regardless of how loud and influential the gay community is, it is still only 2.5% of the American population, and even with the support of Democrats, liberal media and the courts, we still don’t have entire cities of gay people demanding to have sexual relations with every stranger who visits those cities. As wicked as things are, we still haven’t sunk that low. It may not be long, but we aren’t there yet.
In fact, there are so many technological advances that have taken place in the last fifty years, as well as an alignment of nations that when we look back we can’t help but think the world wasn’t really ready for the Rapture to take place until now. Now, Jesus told them to be ready, and Christians have always looked at the return of the Lord as being imminent, but we really had nothing to go by to show it was near until Israel was reborn in 1948. What that should tell us is that we should be more and more excited as we see certain events take place because it is getting near. The question is are there any other clues that could be telling us how near the return of the Lord is? Well, let’s look at a few things.
I. Modern technological and worldwide developments.
1. The Mark of the Beast, 666, is foretold in Revelation 13:16-18. It comes in the form of either a stamp on the hand or in the forehead. In order to buy or sell in the antichrist’s world you have to have one of these marks. The question has always been what kind of a mark is he going to put on your skin? I remember as a young boy not understanding all this the first time I heard it in Sunday School, but thinking that if I was in that situation, I sure wouldn’t want it on my forehead. Of course, it's not something that any believer in Christ has to worry about because we won't be here.
Then somebody came up with the bar code method of pricing objects in stores. Suddenly it became popular to talk about again. This bar code was supposedly based on a code, which used a different arrangement of six stripes three times. Then reading credit cards by this same method using an electric eye made sense of it. Another advancement was electronic ankle bracelet monitoring devices that can be used to track criminals or pets, and even your young children. But then they came up with the definitive answer: A microchip that could be planted under the skin. It’s no longer a mystery.
2. Another question that long puzzled preachers was the two witnesses in Revelation 11:9. They have power to call down fire from heaven, and for three years they preach the Gospel to every corner of the earth. Finally they are killed and the whole world sees it.
Over time some clues began to filter in that would give us hope in understanding the passage. First Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. Now a message could be sent by wire. Cables were even dropped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Then along came the wireless and Teletype. No longer did the messages have to be in code. Then came the radio. But even as much as that helped the message spread, it still didn’t allow for people to be able to see the two dead bodies. When photography was invented in 1826 it began to make sense that people worldwide could see it, but even a picture taken then could take weeks to be spread around the globe and according to Revelation the bodies were only going to be lying in the street for three days before they would be miraculously raised up to heaven.
Then came television, which broadcast a picture right into your home, and then with satellite technology a picture could be broadcast around the world in only a few seconds. But the problem remained; televisions are big and bulky, and everybody doesn’t have one. When my wife was a little girl her family didn’t have a television. She and her cousin would go to a neighbor’s that did have TV, and stand outside the window and look in to watch. Now days almost everybody in advanced countries has TVs, but there are still people in the bush, the jungles and the mountains without this technology.
Then came the personal home computer. The Internet today is the most commonly used forum for socializing and passing news. There are Internet cafes everywhere for people who don’t own a PC, and laptops make it possible to carry your computer with you. But even with laptops and Internet cafes sometimes a computer can be too big and bulky to carry all around everywhere to keep up on the news. Then the technology took one more leap forward. Cell phones, I-pads, and I-phones. Now you can reach anybody from almost anywhere in the world at anytime, and they have Internet connections as well. And everybody has one. Little kids have them. Tribal people in the bush in Africa have them. Aetas up here in the jungles have them. Everybody has a cell phone. When the day comes for the two witnesses to be seen, the message will go out by cell phone and in a matter of minutes everybody on earth is going to see it. For the first time in history some of Revelation begins to make sense.
3. Next let us consider the alignment of the nations.
In Daniel chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a great image of a king with a head of gold, shoulders of silver, waste of brass, and legs, feet and toes of iron and clay. In the next couple of weeks we are going to discuss this image so we won’t dwell on it now. But briefly it represents a historical progress of nations ending with a “revived Roman Empire” that will be crushed by Christ at His return.
The revived Roman Empire has ten toes that theologians have long taken to represent ten nations. The groundwork for this revived empire was laid in 1957 with the creation of the European Economic Community, otherwise known as the European Union. When ten countries, all in Western Europe had joined some were thinking the ten toes had been fulfilled. But then the iron curtain came down and countries from the east began to join. There were two legs in Nebuchadnezzar’s image, and the Roman Empire had been divided between east and west in AD 313, so it made sense that half of the toes should come from the east, but now there were more than ten toes. On January 1, 2002 ten of the 12 nations of the EU adopted the euro as a monetary system. The EU has since grown to 25 nations and includes both eastern and western European nations. The Roman Empire at its peak around the second century AD stretched from England across Europe to Turkey, Syria and Palestine, and across North Africa.
The EU today includes Western Europe, Scandinavia,and much of Eastern Europe. Its borders don’t quite match the borders of the old Roman Empire, and it doesn't include the Balkans or North Africa.
So how do the ten toes plus the Middle East and North Africa fit into this picture? In September 2009, the EU signed a treaty in which it created a rotating leadership among the member nations. Prophecy evangelist Jimmy DeYoung claimed that this treaty created ten districts out of the EU, which is the answer to the ten toes. Except that the treaty did not create ten districts, and the existing EU does not fill all of the old Roman Empire borders. I looked up the treaty on the Internet and found that the ten districts DeYoung was talking about is a proposal for future expansion, which will include the Middle East and North Africa. What it means is that the stage is set for a single government to administrate all of Europe and North Africa, which would probably come together very quickly if in response to some kind of worldwide crisis.
4. Interestingly enough, this past week Greece defaulted on its national debt payment and has been removed as a participant in the euro. Does this mean the infrastructure for the Revived Roman Empire is crumbling? I don’t think so. Great Britain, by the way, also does not participate in using the euro, although it is a recognized currency around the world. For example, when you travel to Kenya, at the airport you can purchase your tourist visa by using dollars, pounds, or euros (but not Kenya shillings!).
Revelation 13:16-17 seems to indicate that the antichrist will solve a worldwide economic crisis when he comes to power. With Greece defaulting, could it be the beginning of a chain reaction across Europe with other nations defaulting after Greece?
It remains to be seen, but the commercial center of the world today is New York City. The world’s economy is based on the U.S. dollar, although some nations, like China, are starting to back away from it. The U.S. national debt is today over 18 trillion dollars. By the time the next president is elected it will be over 20 trillion dollars. The U.S. economy right now has almost reached a tipping point. When it gets to the point where the debt payment is higher than incoming revenue, the economy will collapse. And if the U.S. defaults on its debts to several nations around the world, it will likely create a devastating international economic crisis, just the kind of situation that the antichrist is projected to rescue the world from when he comes to power. We are standing on the brink of just such an international financial crisis right now.
5. The question then is with this much information available to us, and our ability to decipher it from the scripture, how will so many people be duped when the antichrist comes? If you’ve read the Left Behind series or seen the videos you might have an idea that there are some who will figure it out and stand up against the antichrist. But that’s not what the Bible teaches. For those who have never heard, there will be a great awakening when the Gospel is preached by the 144,000 witnesses of Revelation 14 in every corner of the earth.
But for those who have lived in so-called Christian nations, where the Gospel has been freely preached, for those who have heard an had opportunity to accept the Lord and rejected Him, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11 says they will be given over to delusions to believe the lies of the antichrist. To be honest, this isn’t even hard to believe. People already believe in evolution without question. Hollywood movies and TV shows have inundated the public with end of the world scenarios, ghosts, vampires, zombies and aliens. And believe it or not there are undiscerning, uneducated people who believe this stuff.
When Obama was elected president in the United States there were people calling him the messiah and savior. Nearly everything out of his mouth is a lie, yet at least 40% of the US population, including educated politicians and journalists, believe him, and many more without any critical thinking have sold their souls to him because of their political agenda. These people are already blinded by their own deceit. They’ll have no problem believing the antichrist when he takes control.
But for those who may have the power of discernment, if they have rejected Christ and are still here after the Rapture, they will be given delusions to believe the lie.
6. Ezekiel 38-39 describes a great battle that will apparently take place at the beginning of the Tribulation period. In it all the kingdoms to the north will attack Israel.
Two of the nations mentioned are Gog and Magog. It is not really known who these names represent, although through the centuries many scholars have suggested they represent Russia. These kingdoms will have a coalition that will include Mizraim (Egypt), Put (Libya) and Cush (Ethiopia).
Now Egypt and Libya were long time allies of the USSR, but back in the late 1970s, Soviet agents were trying to undermine the government of Anwar Sadat and he through them out. Following the Camp David Accords, Egypt became the closest ally to the United States in the Middle East next to Israel. But that all went away with the Muslim Spring a couple of years ago. The Obama administration turned its back on Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, and backed the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood that overthrew him. But after a year of what Obama called a Democratic government, the Egyptians grew tired of the terrorist government trying to force Sharia law on them and overthrew the Brotherhood. Now Egypt stands alone, with the US having turned its back on her. She is open and ripe for a new relationship with Russia should the time come.
More significantly at the moment, on December 3, 2001, Russia and Ethiopia signed a mutual cooperation agreement. Now Ethiopia would be a small player in any invasion of Palestine, but the important thing to notice is they are in league with the Russians, just as Ezekiel had foretold.
7. Revelation 13:15 says that the Beast (the antichrist) will have the power to give life to an image of himself. This will be an incredible event that will have the world in awe. Through the centuries many scholars have believed that Satan will by then have attained the power to give life. How else could it be explained except as a slight of hand.
Actually, that’s probably what it will be. Satan has no power to create or give life. He has the power to inflict disease and even death apparently (Job 2:6), but only with God’s permission, but there is no evidence that he can actually create life.
For centuries this was a mystery, but not anymore. There are actually several plausible explanations. In the last 60 years or so the development of robotics has made all of this possible. Robotic arms put cars together on assembly lines now, as well as many other types of production, and companies are working on and continually improving humanoid types of robots.
When I was in flight school in 1984 I was selected to be a part of an experimental group flying a carrier-landing simulator. The simulator was located at NAS Jacksonville, Florida. A group of us went down for several days and when we were through we had a day to spare so we went to the Epcot Center at Disney World. There was a program in an auditorium that looked like Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the outside. On the stage they had a program with three players, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, discussing the writing of the Declaration of Independence. As I recall, Franklin sat at the table when in walked Adams and Jefferson. Then Franklin got up and walked to the center of the stage to make a speech.
So what? So, they were all freestanding, self-balanced robots. No strings attached. They walked, turned, made motions, and their lips moved while talking, on their own. Now they were obviously programed, and there was a sound track for their voices. They were slow and deliberate as they moved so they did not look realistic. But the amazing thing was, they were moving unaided. That was over 30 years ago. I imagine that same technology today could be much more realistic.
Think about it. They now have prosthetic arms and hands for wounded warriors that react to the mental thought of the person they are attached to. So far they can only open and close fingers, but it allows them to pick things up. All of these things are steps in the production of robotics that someday could very well end up being like the android Data on Star Trek; the Next Generation.
There is also the possibility of holographic images. What they can do now is project a light source that shows the image of a person. It is ghostly in nature and can be seen through, but what if some day they are able to project such an image that looks solid? That technology may not be that far off.
Then there is a third possibility. If you ever watched American Idol, you might remember that they had a segment every year called American Idol Gives Back. They raised money by the millions to take to slum areas in various parts of the world to try and help poor people. One year they actually visited the Kibera Slum in Nairobi, and Simon Cowell very sadly said that it was unbelievable.
In 2009 on their give back episode they had a special duet that they advertised for weeks. Celine Dion would be one singer, but the other was a surprise guest. When the moment arrived the backdrop on the stage opened and out of a very bright light walked the two singers and when they reached center stage and the light came up, Celine’s male counterpart was Elvis Presley. It was absolutely phenomenal and unbelievable. But it was a very clever slight of hand. They had an Elvis impersonator who knew all the exact moves that Elvis made when he sang. He sang next to Celine and lip-sinced the music. On TV whenever the camera was from the side or behind it was the impersonator so that they could look at each other and react to each other. But whenever there was a front shot they used footage of Elvis Presley. Now the audience in the auditorium new what was happening, but on big I-mac screens they could see what the world saw. It looked just like Elvis raised from the dead doing a duet with Celine Dion.
Now I don’t know if any of these methods might be what the antichrist will use, but it suggest to us that he will have no problem fooling the world about having the power to bring an image, a statue of himself, to life. The technology to fool the world, especially the lesser-educated third world areas of the world, is there.
8. Third I’d like to consider Revelation 6:12-14. Try to imagine John in AD 95 trying to describe 20th century events that the Lord was revealing to him. These were things he had no understanding of and could not possibly have known how to accurately describe them. Now he reports of an earthquake that will make islands disappear and mountains fall. Back in 2005 the Indonesian earthquake sent a tsunami across the Indian Ocean that killed over 230,000 people. It was massive. South of India is an island nation known as the Maldives. The Maldives islands are so small that the average elevation of the islands is only a few feet. When the tsunami passed over them every island was under a couple of feet of water until it receded. Now because of their location they didn’t get the big wave crashing on the beach, but they were totally flooded.
But earthquakes themselves don’t cause the sun to black out or the moon to turn to blood. Some of you here remember Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. Here is a picture of the first eruption on June 12. It’s taken from Clark Air Base. I have pictures of that taken from Subic and from the air as we scrambled to get some airplanes evacuated after it erupted. Unfortunately they’re all at home in the States. But you remember that eruption. There were earthquakes that went on constantly all day. On June 15th when the big one erupted, it blocked out the sun and put the entire region in total darkness for 36 hours. There’s a possibility if you have multiple volcanic eruptions going on.
But how about the moon turning red? And what about the stars falling from the sky? We have meteor coming into the atmosphere every day, and occasionally a meteor shower. These are mostly burned up and if you ever see one at night it’s just a streak across the sky and then it’s gone. But this doesn’t explain stars falling.
Well let’s think about it. About 700 years ago the Chinese invented gunpowder. Then about 500 years ago the Spanish invented the first musket type of guns. Guns have advanced to very rapid-fire precise weapons in our day. Then they also invented cannons that shot cannon balls, and then artillery that shoots shells, but then with the invention of the airplane came aerial bombs. But a 2,000-pound bomb would never make an explosion big enough to make the sun turn red or block out the sun.
That is until 1945. When the atomic bomb was developed and dropped on Hiroshima we entered the nuclear age. There are some prophecy teachers such as Hal Lindsey that believe these verses are describing a nuclear holocaust. A nuclear bomb can block out the sun and make the moon look red. Many atomic explosions have these strings of debris falling off to the sides of the clouds. That could have looked like stars falling to John. Or what about if there is a nuclear exchange someday? The MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction of the Cold War. A rain of scores of nuclear missiles hurtling to the earth may have looked to John like stars falling from the skies. Of course you know I’m just surmising and there is a point to this, but one more.
John describes the fig tree shaken by a mighty wind. You know the most of the destruction done in a nuclear explosion is not in the intense heat at the center of the explosion, but in the shock wave that spreads out for miles with such force that it knocks everything down.
And one last thought. He describes the heavens opening like a scroll. This last picture is a hydrogen bomb explosion. It meets that description. The heavens seem to open up like a window while the fireball rises up through it.
Are these the things John saw in his vision? We don’t really know. What we do know is that what he saw was very terrible. In chapter 8:1, an angel showed John a Little Book, and after he read it, he told John not to write it down. Certain things were apparently so horrible that God didn’t want John to even write about it. Perhaps it was even more difficult to describe than what he has done.
I don’t know, but the point is this. If what he is describing is a man made phenomenon, we are at an age where all of these phenomenons can be explained and explained quite well. And what that tells us is that there is almost nothing that has to be developed in order for an antichrist world kingdom to be put in place. As never before we are at a place where we should be considering that the Rapture of the saints is imminent. The only thing keeping the Lord from calling us out at any moment is His timing.
These are some of the modern developments that give us perspective concerning the Lord’s return. They help us understand how things described in the Bible could take place. Now let’s consider the moral conditions of our day.
II. As in the days of Noah (Matthew 24:37-38, Luke 17:26).
Jesus said of Noah’s day that the people were eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, essentially they were having a continual party. The implication is that they were taking multiple wives committing adultery and all kinds of immorality. Genesis 6:3 says that they took wives of all they chose, likely including incest and a whole list of other perversions. They lived in a pornographic world and were unconcerned about God or the consequences of their sin. It was an extremely violent society; murder and rape were probably indicative of their lifestyle (Genesis 6:11). Their wickedness was so great that their thoughts were constantly evil (Genesis 6:5). But it was not just that they had bad thoughts, it was that they never had a good thought. The entire world was corrupt (Genesis 6:12), except for Noah (Genesis 6:8).
Jesus also made the comparison of Lot in Luke 17:28-30. Lot, a righteous man, had vexed his soul living in Sodom, and went about his life completely unconcerned about the will of God. Sodom was a city totally given over to sexual depravity. When the two angels came to rescue Lot and his family the men of the city “wearied themselves” (Genesis 19:11), they wore themselves out, trying to break into Lot’s house to have homosexual relations with the angels, even after the angels blinded them. Their desire was so heinous, that even after Lot offered them his two maiden daughters, they rejected them to get at the angels who were in the form of men.
Lot tried to reason with them but they were without tolerance for Lot’s opinion against them, and threatened him harm. Has there ever been a time when the world is closer to Sodom and Gomorrah than it is now?
In 1987 my Navy squadron was deployed to Thailand and we stayed in a hotel in Pataya Beach and had a driver to take us to the airfield each day. In his van he had several travel and tourist magazines. Thailand is known for being the place in the Far East for sex, and these magazines were full of advertisements for sexual entertainment, but what we noticed was that there were more ads for homosexual sex than normal. One of the pilots mentioned this country must be more than half gay.
In the Philippines for decades gays have been winked at as being different. They are common in the entertainment industry and many are just a satire of themselves, yet people treat them as if everything is okay. In this strongly Catholic country there is a crisis of morality. But it’s worse with all the transgenders. They are everywhere. The Pemberton-Laude trial was in the news again this week. An American after cheap sex wound up with a transgender and apparently killed him. It’s a monumental tragedy, but indicative of where the world is today.
The US Supreme Court decision last week now forces gay marriage on all fifty states. It’s a tyrannical, unconstitutional ruling that is opening the door for gays to flaunt themselves in front of the whole public. But the gay agenda doesn’t just stop at marriage. They are intolerant of any dissenting opinion to their lifestyle. If you oppose it they call you a homophobe, racist, hateful and intolerant. Yet not even a week had passed since the decision before the gays started demanding that churches be denied tax-exempt status. They are demanding that the Bible be changed to allow their lifestyle and that preachers stop preaching against the sin of homosexuality.
Even so, we are a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, even from Thailand. The US gay population is only 2.5%, but its influence is great and many non-homosexuals in the country support them. We may not be far from becoming like Sodom, but we aren’t there yet. Things in this world could still become a whole lot more wicked.
In fact, Jesus questioned in Luke 18:8 whether there would be any believers left when He returns. This is an incredible statement. There was only one faithful man and his family left in the world when God sent the flood. There was only one believing, but compromised man and his family left in Sodom when fire rained down from heaven. In both cases the people at the time were given an opportunity to escape. Noah preached for a hundred years before the flood came. Lot vexed his soul in Sodom, but when the angels came he had one last chance to warn his family and neighbors before he was taken out of the city and judgment fell.
Conclusion: How does that compare to where we are today? We aren’t down to the last man or family yet. Before this worldwide judgment, which is known as the Great Tribulation, falls on the earth, those believers who are left are going to be raptured out of this world to be with the Lord. We saw last week that the only prophecy about the time frame for the Rapture is the establishment of Israel as a nation back in their land. That happened in 1948.
The Bible also gives us a description of several events and situations, which will also take place in the end times, and today we have seen how those events will be able to take place, something we’ve never known with certainty before. Now the return of the Lord at the Second Coming will take place after the seven year Great Tribulation period, but the Rapture will take place before the antichrist rises to power and before the seven year Great Tribulation. So what does that tell us?
Simply this: All of these signs are indicative of the world condition when the Lord returns to set up His kingdom, but the Rapture will happen at least seven years before that. Now I don’t know if that blessed hope will be today, next year, ten years from now or twenty. What I do know is, everything is in place. The only thing holding back the Rapture right now that I can see is, when comparing with the days of Noah and Lot, that the world isn’t wicked enough yet. You mean it could get worse? I’m afraid it could and I’m afraid it will.
What that means is that we need to be stronger than ever in our faith and walk, and taking every opportunity we can to try to reach people for Christ while there is still time. From what we can see we believe the time is close, but close in God’s timeframe could be many, many years away yet. We need to be ready, but we also need to occupy until He comes. It’s not time to go sit on a mountain and wait. It’s time to be busy about the Lord’s work. The question is, are you ready? If you are, are you watching?
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