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?
Thursday, July 23, 2015
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?
Friday, July 3, 2015
Signs of the Times, The Place of Israel
Eschatology is the study of the end times. I taught the subject several times at the college in Kenya, and I’ve preached on the Rapture, but I’ve never preached an entire series on the subject. So, last Sunday I started a series, and I thought I would write out the first message for your perusal. For extra reading I recommend to you Dr. David Jeremiah’s book, What In the World Is Going On? from which I have taken some of this information. Recent events, such as the US Supreme Court decision last Friday on gay marriage cause us to wonder how much longer the Lord will wait before calling us out. I hope this series will help give some perspective.
Signs Of The End Times
The Place of Israel
Text: Matthew 24:44.
Introduction: We are living in a day when people are obsessed with the end times. Every time there is an international crisis the question is asked will this lead us to Armageddon? Hollywood produces dozens of movies every year about end of the world scenarios, zombies, vampires, demons and aliens. Climate change fanatics tell us we are destroying the earth. Al Gore predicted the end of the world in 2016 if the US didn’t sign the Kyoto Accords. The US didn’t sign. Does that mean we only have a year to go?
The issue is further confused by end time preachers who set dates for the Rapture. The most recent was Harold Camping in Oakland, California who predicted May 21, 2011, and then refigured it October 21, 2011. Many of his followers had sold everything to travel across the country to warn people, but on October 22, they were disappointed. I sent an email out to everyone on my list asking if anyone had been raptured!
In the 1970s Hal Lindsay popularized end times teaching with his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. More recently evangelist Jimmy DeYoung has renewed interest in the subject. John Hagee has taught on the Rapture many times in his church. Perhaps you’ve seen him on TBN. He puts big charts on the platform and teaches through them. If you are not familiar with eschatology, which is the study of the end times, these charts can be confusing. This is one of Hagee’s charts about the Tribulation period.
Then there is Jack Van Impe, who is a one-subject preacher, the Rapture of the saints. He finds evidence in every event on a weekly basis to prove the Rapture is coming at any moment. He doesn’t set dates, so he says, but he has tried on several occasions to pinpoint a time frame for the Rapture. In 2001 he proclaimed that the Lord had revealed to him that it must come between 2002 and 2012. But hardly had he made that prediction when he had another revelation in 2004 saying that the Lord had revealed to him that the Rapture would take place by the end of 2018. Can we expect that to happen?
Based on the 70 weeks of Daniel in Daniel 9, and compared with I Thessalonians 4, I Corinthians 15:51, and Revelation, we believe in a system of theology called Dispensationalism, which specifically focuses on a pre-Tribulational Rapture.
Around 540 BC Daniel predicted a period of 70 weeks of years that would begin with a decree from the king of Persia to rebuild Jerusalem. That decree was given to Ezra around 458 BC, and was completed by Nehemiah in 445 BC. When 69 of those weeks had passed, the Messiah would be cut off. The time frame coincides with the crucifixion of Christ.
The 70th week has been on hold during the Church Age, which began with Christ. It will begin after the Rapture takes place. When we talk about the end times most people are interested in knowing what are the signs that lead up to the Rapture, and the Second Coming of Christ. When will they take place? Are they at the same time or separate? We believe that the Rapture of the saints, when Christ will call all of the believers out of this world, will take place seven years prior to Christ actually coming to establish His millennial kingdom.
An opposing view, held by Presbyterian and Reformed churches, is called Covenant Theology. It claims that the New Testament church is the extension of Old Testament Israel, and that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, rather Christians are. Leading covenant theologians like Hank Hannegraph and Gary DeMars mock Dispensationalism, which is the Baptist belief, as a discredited theology that was only invented 170 years ago. We might also say the same thing about Covenant Theology because it was only invented during the Reformation 500 years ago. Therefore, if we depend on the argument of time, Covenant Theology is no more valid than Dispensationalism.
The argument of time does not actually disprove Dispensationalism. The Greek word translated “dispensation” is found four times in the KJV New Testament (I Cor. 9:17, Eph. 1:10; 3:2, Col. 1:25). The word means to administer or manage something. It is translated three other times in the New Testament as “stewardship.” The term is also found several times in the works of medieval theologians, but the modern revival of the teaching began with a Scottish theologian, John Darby, around 1830. In its biblical usage a dispensation is the administration of a period of time in history.
There are seven dispensational periods beginning with Adam and Eve in the Age of Innocence. We are now in the sixth, the Church Age. The Millennial Kingdom will be the seventh and last dispensation.
Dispensationalism depends on the literal interpretation of Scripture. Hannegraph and DeMars will tell you they believe in a literal translation, but then immediately contradict themselves by making the entire Book of Revelation an allegory that was fulfilled in the year AD 70. Of course that can only be possible if they take some spiritual meaning out of the book and not literal. When Hannegraph was asked about the thousand-year reign of Christ on his radio program, The Bible Answer Man, he made comparisons to Peter’s comment in 2 Peter 3:8, that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, and concluded that the Millennial Kingdom is not literal. Clearly they do not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
We do believe in a literal interpretation. We believe that if the 69 weeks of Daniel came true, and they did, that the 70th week will also come to pass when God is ready. We believe that Paul was not writing about some spiritual heart moving event when he wrote that we shall be caught up to be with the Lord in the air in I Thessalonians 4. We also believe that the 70th week will be the Tribulation period taught in Revelation 5-18, followed by the return of the Lord to the earth and the Millennial Kingdom of Christ.
The question then is, how close are we to the Rapture of the saints described in I Thessalonians 4? Are there signs and wonders that we can point to that tell us it is close? Can we set a date or a time frame when we believe it will happen? Since World War 2 Baptists have been sounding the clarion call that the Rapture is imminent.
As we have seen events unfolding, particularly now with ISIS creating a murderous Islamic state in the Middle East, the persecution of Christians increasing, an intolerance of Christianity growing in the United States and elsewhere, with the increase in sin, particularly homosexuality, and the total turning away from God by formerly Christian nations, can we say for certain we are in the last days? Is there any prophecy that gives us a clue to the time of the Rapture?
First, let us understand two things: 1. We are not setting a date for the Lord’s return. Jesus told the Apostles in Acts 1:7, it was not for them to know the time or season. And 2. There is only one prophecy that gives us any clue as to the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Everything else may help us understand the time, but only one prophecy gives us a clue as to the time. That’s what we are going to look at today.
I. The Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12:1-7; 13:14-17).
In Genesis 12 God called Abraham and told him to separate from his family and move to a place which He would show him. He made a covenant with Abraham, which is known as the Abrahamic Covenant. In this covenant God made four unconditional promises to Abraham.
First he told Abraham that He would bless him. This promise was only partly fulfilled in Abraham’s lifetime. Abraham was likely the wealthiest man in all of Palestine at the time as he had 318 servants that he trained to use weapons of war (Genesis 14:14). But this promise also extended to his descendants. When Solomon was king of Israel, the Queen of Sheba came to see the grandeur of Jerusalem she declared that the half had not even been told her (I Kings 10:7). No kingdom in history has ever owned the wealth that Solomon had. The temple, completely inlaid with gold, was likely the most magnificent building ever built in history (I Kings 6).
But God’s blessings didn’t end there. Jews throughout history have been among the leaders in education, science, literature and economics. From 1901 to 2013 there had been 855 individual Nobel prizes awarded. Of those 193, 22.6%, were awarded to Jews.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/29/richard-dawkins-perplexed-by-high-number-of-jewish-nobel-prize-winners/#
Atheist Richard Dawkins was perplexed by these numbers and could find no explanation for it. The answer is that God has blessed the Jews, in spite of the persecutions and pogroms that have been launched against them through the centuries.
Second, God promised to make Abraham’s descendants a great nation. Again, in spite of efforts to eliminate the Jews through the centuries, efforts like no other people have ever faced, today Israel is the strongest nation in the Middle East. Israel has a population of 8.2 million, of which 6.2 million are Jews, and there are some 9 million Jews living around the world outside of Israel. The Jews make up only 1/3 of one percent of the world’s population, but Mark Twain said of the Jews in 1899, “the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.”
Third, God promised to make Abraham a blessing to all people, and he has been. Through Abraham’s descendants came the Old Testament Law, the Savior, and the way of salvation, which is free to all men through Jesus Christ.
Fourth, God promised to bless those who bless Israel. The United States is the only nation to fully support Israel in the world today, and the U.S. has been blessed like no other nation in history has ever been blessed. Now the argument could be made that God has blessed us because of our Christian foundation and God-honoring Founders, and that may be true. But America’s borders have always been open to Jewish immigrants, and while other nations have persecuted the Jews, there has never been a government-sanctioned persecution of any kind against the Jewish people.
God’s judgment has fallen upon all nations that have ever oppressed the Jews, from ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Syria and Rome, to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. None of these nations, ancient or modern, exist today. Of course there is a Germany, but it is not Nazi. Even Great Britain has suffered for turning its back on the Jews. At the beginning of World War 2 the British Empire was the largest in the world and had been for 150 years. It was the British that had helped to establish the modern Jewish state, but as soon as Israel was recognized by the United Nations, Britain walked away and offered no help in the Jewish struggle against their Arab neighbors. The result was that in only 15 years the mighty British Empire crumbled.
The second part of the Abrahamic Covenant involved the Promised Land (Genesis 15:18-21). God told Abraham wherever he walked and as far as he could see would be the inheritance of his descendants, and then He delineated the borders. In this part of the covenant the word land means land here on the earth. It is not a spiritual reference to heaven. It is also an everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:7-8). The land will always be Israel’s land. No matter how loud the Palestinians shout about a homeland and non-existent heritage, the land belongs to Israel. The borders run from the Nile River to the Euphrates and includes Egypt, the Sinai, Jerusalem (Jebusites), the Hittites (eastern Turkey), and includes Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
You can see from this map just how small a portion of this land Israel holds today. And actually, this map is not quite accurate. The Hittite Empire before 1200 BC included most of Eastern Turkey, so the northern border goes much higher than is depicted here. Compare this with the extent of David’s and Solomon’s Kingdom from about 1015 to 975 BC. David had only conquered or controlled about 40% of the total, but this is the inheritance the Jews will have during the Millennial Kingdom.
II. The Scattering of the Jews.
The question then is what happened? Why have the Jews never occupied or controlled all of their Promised Land? Moses warned Israel that if they ever turned away from God into idolatry that God would scatter them (Deuteronomy 4:27). That’s exactly what happened.
Solomon was the wisest man that ever lived. He wrote Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, yet he never learned from his own wisdom. He collected 700 wives and 300 concubines and they turned his heart away from the Lord to the point that at the end of his life he was leading Israel into idolatry. The result was a civil war that divided the kingdom in two. Ten tribes in the north became known as Israel, while two tribes in the south became known as Judah.
Israel turned away from God immediately and by 722 BC the Assyrians overthrew the kingdom and scattered the Jews all over their empire. Judah had a few good kings and revivals mixed into their history, but they finally rebelled against God as well and in 586 BC the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and scattered the remaining Jews.
The Babylonian empire fell to the Persians and in 536 BC a decree by Cyrus the Persian allowed the Jews to begin returning to their homeland (Ezra 1). They remained in their land and won their independence from the Syrians in 175 BC, but 112 years later they were conquered by Rome. This was the beginning of the fullness of the times for Christ’s birth, but in AD 70 the Jews tried to throw off their yoke of bondage and were defeated by the Roman general, Titus, who leveled Jerusalem, and once again scattered the Jews.
Jewish communities have existed all across the Middle East to Persia, in Africa in Ethiopia, in Russia and all over Europe. They were persecuted severely for centuries, but the rise of the Nazis in Germany brought the worst persecution of all, the Holocaust. In 1933 there were 9 million Jews in Europe; in 1945 there were only 3 million.
Then suddenly, after being without a homeland for 1900 years, the Jews became a nation again. They are the only people in history to have been so decimated and scattered for so long to be reconstituted as a nation.
III. Rebirth of the Nation of Israel.
The return of the Jews to their homeland in Israel was prophesied several times in the Old Testament. Isaiah 11:11 says the remnant will be recovered. Isaiah 43:3-6 says they will be brought back from every direction. In Ezekiel 36-37 is the Valley of the Dry Bones vision showing that the nation will come alive again, and in Amos 9:14-15 it says that once they are returned they will never be removed again.
How this came about is primarily the due to the accomplishment of Chaim Weismann. Since the invention of gunpowder weapons had used a black powder that left heavy smoke and could blind the armies on a battlefield. In 1904 Weismann invented a smokeless powder, which gave the British an advantage on the battlefield.
The Ottoman Empire had held Palestine for over 500 years, but in World War 1 the British defeated the Ottomans and took control Palestine. Then in 1917, as a thank you to Weismann, the Balfour Declaration was issued declaring the intent of reestablishing a Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, Israel was recognized by the United Nations, but not before U.S. President Harry Truman cast the deciding vote, against the advice of his closest advisors including General George Marshall. Truman was a Baptist, and in spite of his problem with foul language, he understood the importance of Israel and would not turn his back on the new nation.
IV. Prophetic significance to the End Times (Matthew 24:32-35).
In Matthew 24 Jesus gave His longest and last discourse on the end times. In verse 32, He referred to the fig tree. Whenever the fig tree is mentioned in prophetic writing in the Scripture it is a reference to Israel. When you see Israel is in its homeland the time is near. This generation, He said, will see the coming of the Lord.
This verse has often been misunderstood. Critics often point to this passage to prove Jesus got it wrong. I’ve heard preachers as well teach that it meant that the return of the Lord is imminent and could have happened in that generation if God had intended. But that’s not what Jesus said. The generation He was talking about was the one that saw Israel in its land, the implication being that they had been out of it again.
I’m going to go out on a limb here because Baptists have always taught that the Rapture has always been imminent. I don’t think it has been. I imagine that the first century believers likely thought that Jesus was going to come back in their lifetime, so for them it was imminent. But once Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews no longer had a homeland that changed, and the return of the Lord was not imminent for 19 centuries. But that changed on May 14, 1948. Since Israel has been restored as a nation we can definitely say that the return of the Lord, especially the Rapture, is imminent.
Conclusion: A biblical generation was generally considered to be 40 years. That would have been 1988 and is long passed. Van Impe used a formula from a passage in Jeremiah to suggest a generation is 70 years, and that’s how he came up with 2018. Don’t put any faith in that. It may be that the Lord will come before then, maybe not. Depending on how events in the world turn it could be some years. There is no specific definition in the Bible of a generation. To use the Van Impe model we might conclude from Genesis 6:3 that a generation is 120 years, which would mean Christ’s coming could still be 53 years away. Considering current affairs in the world I don’t think it will be that long. There is no way of knowing a specific date, but we do know that since May 14, 1948, the return of the Lord is imminent. It could come at any time.
Next week we will look at more specific details including the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and see how events in the world and modern technology can help us understand how events described in Revelation may take place, and how the nations are aligning for the antichrist. The thing we need to learn is to be ready because Jesus will come when we don’t expect Him (Matthew 24:44). Are you watching? Are you ready?
Signs Of The End Times
The Place of Israel
Text: Matthew 24:44.
Introduction: We are living in a day when people are obsessed with the end times. Every time there is an international crisis the question is asked will this lead us to Armageddon? Hollywood produces dozens of movies every year about end of the world scenarios, zombies, vampires, demons and aliens. Climate change fanatics tell us we are destroying the earth. Al Gore predicted the end of the world in 2016 if the US didn’t sign the Kyoto Accords. The US didn’t sign. Does that mean we only have a year to go?
The issue is further confused by end time preachers who set dates for the Rapture. The most recent was Harold Camping in Oakland, California who predicted May 21, 2011, and then refigured it October 21, 2011. Many of his followers had sold everything to travel across the country to warn people, but on October 22, they were disappointed. I sent an email out to everyone on my list asking if anyone had been raptured!
In the 1970s Hal Lindsay popularized end times teaching with his book, The Late Great Planet Earth. More recently evangelist Jimmy DeYoung has renewed interest in the subject. John Hagee has taught on the Rapture many times in his church. Perhaps you’ve seen him on TBN. He puts big charts on the platform and teaches through them. If you are not familiar with eschatology, which is the study of the end times, these charts can be confusing. This is one of Hagee’s charts about the Tribulation period.
Then there is Jack Van Impe, who is a one-subject preacher, the Rapture of the saints. He finds evidence in every event on a weekly basis to prove the Rapture is coming at any moment. He doesn’t set dates, so he says, but he has tried on several occasions to pinpoint a time frame for the Rapture. In 2001 he proclaimed that the Lord had revealed to him that it must come between 2002 and 2012. But hardly had he made that prediction when he had another revelation in 2004 saying that the Lord had revealed to him that the Rapture would take place by the end of 2018. Can we expect that to happen?
Based on the 70 weeks of Daniel in Daniel 9, and compared with I Thessalonians 4, I Corinthians 15:51, and Revelation, we believe in a system of theology called Dispensationalism, which specifically focuses on a pre-Tribulational Rapture.
Around 540 BC Daniel predicted a period of 70 weeks of years that would begin with a decree from the king of Persia to rebuild Jerusalem. That decree was given to Ezra around 458 BC, and was completed by Nehemiah in 445 BC. When 69 of those weeks had passed, the Messiah would be cut off. The time frame coincides with the crucifixion of Christ.
The 70th week has been on hold during the Church Age, which began with Christ. It will begin after the Rapture takes place. When we talk about the end times most people are interested in knowing what are the signs that lead up to the Rapture, and the Second Coming of Christ. When will they take place? Are they at the same time or separate? We believe that the Rapture of the saints, when Christ will call all of the believers out of this world, will take place seven years prior to Christ actually coming to establish His millennial kingdom.
An opposing view, held by Presbyterian and Reformed churches, is called Covenant Theology. It claims that the New Testament church is the extension of Old Testament Israel, and that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, rather Christians are. Leading covenant theologians like Hank Hannegraph and Gary DeMars mock Dispensationalism, which is the Baptist belief, as a discredited theology that was only invented 170 years ago. We might also say the same thing about Covenant Theology because it was only invented during the Reformation 500 years ago. Therefore, if we depend on the argument of time, Covenant Theology is no more valid than Dispensationalism.
The argument of time does not actually disprove Dispensationalism. The Greek word translated “dispensation” is found four times in the KJV New Testament (I Cor. 9:17, Eph. 1:10; 3:2, Col. 1:25). The word means to administer or manage something. It is translated three other times in the New Testament as “stewardship.” The term is also found several times in the works of medieval theologians, but the modern revival of the teaching began with a Scottish theologian, John Darby, around 1830. In its biblical usage a dispensation is the administration of a period of time in history.
There are seven dispensational periods beginning with Adam and Eve in the Age of Innocence. We are now in the sixth, the Church Age. The Millennial Kingdom will be the seventh and last dispensation.
Dispensationalism depends on the literal interpretation of Scripture. Hannegraph and DeMars will tell you they believe in a literal translation, but then immediately contradict themselves by making the entire Book of Revelation an allegory that was fulfilled in the year AD 70. Of course that can only be possible if they take some spiritual meaning out of the book and not literal. When Hannegraph was asked about the thousand-year reign of Christ on his radio program, The Bible Answer Man, he made comparisons to Peter’s comment in 2 Peter 3:8, that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, and concluded that the Millennial Kingdom is not literal. Clearly they do not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
We do believe in a literal interpretation. We believe that if the 69 weeks of Daniel came true, and they did, that the 70th week will also come to pass when God is ready. We believe that Paul was not writing about some spiritual heart moving event when he wrote that we shall be caught up to be with the Lord in the air in I Thessalonians 4. We also believe that the 70th week will be the Tribulation period taught in Revelation 5-18, followed by the return of the Lord to the earth and the Millennial Kingdom of Christ.
The question then is, how close are we to the Rapture of the saints described in I Thessalonians 4? Are there signs and wonders that we can point to that tell us it is close? Can we set a date or a time frame when we believe it will happen? Since World War 2 Baptists have been sounding the clarion call that the Rapture is imminent.
As we have seen events unfolding, particularly now with ISIS creating a murderous Islamic state in the Middle East, the persecution of Christians increasing, an intolerance of Christianity growing in the United States and elsewhere, with the increase in sin, particularly homosexuality, and the total turning away from God by formerly Christian nations, can we say for certain we are in the last days? Is there any prophecy that gives us a clue to the time of the Rapture?
First, let us understand two things: 1. We are not setting a date for the Lord’s return. Jesus told the Apostles in Acts 1:7, it was not for them to know the time or season. And 2. There is only one prophecy that gives us any clue as to the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Everything else may help us understand the time, but only one prophecy gives us a clue as to the time. That’s what we are going to look at today.
I. The Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12:1-7; 13:14-17).
In Genesis 12 God called Abraham and told him to separate from his family and move to a place which He would show him. He made a covenant with Abraham, which is known as the Abrahamic Covenant. In this covenant God made four unconditional promises to Abraham.
First he told Abraham that He would bless him. This promise was only partly fulfilled in Abraham’s lifetime. Abraham was likely the wealthiest man in all of Palestine at the time as he had 318 servants that he trained to use weapons of war (Genesis 14:14). But this promise also extended to his descendants. When Solomon was king of Israel, the Queen of Sheba came to see the grandeur of Jerusalem she declared that the half had not even been told her (I Kings 10:7). No kingdom in history has ever owned the wealth that Solomon had. The temple, completely inlaid with gold, was likely the most magnificent building ever built in history (I Kings 6).
But God’s blessings didn’t end there. Jews throughout history have been among the leaders in education, science, literature and economics. From 1901 to 2013 there had been 855 individual Nobel prizes awarded. Of those 193, 22.6%, were awarded to Jews.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/29/richard-dawkins-perplexed-by-high-number-of-jewish-nobel-prize-winners/#
Atheist Richard Dawkins was perplexed by these numbers and could find no explanation for it. The answer is that God has blessed the Jews, in spite of the persecutions and pogroms that have been launched against them through the centuries.
Second, God promised to make Abraham’s descendants a great nation. Again, in spite of efforts to eliminate the Jews through the centuries, efforts like no other people have ever faced, today Israel is the strongest nation in the Middle East. Israel has a population of 8.2 million, of which 6.2 million are Jews, and there are some 9 million Jews living around the world outside of Israel. The Jews make up only 1/3 of one percent of the world’s population, but Mark Twain said of the Jews in 1899, “the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.”
Third, God promised to make Abraham a blessing to all people, and he has been. Through Abraham’s descendants came the Old Testament Law, the Savior, and the way of salvation, which is free to all men through Jesus Christ.
Fourth, God promised to bless those who bless Israel. The United States is the only nation to fully support Israel in the world today, and the U.S. has been blessed like no other nation in history has ever been blessed. Now the argument could be made that God has blessed us because of our Christian foundation and God-honoring Founders, and that may be true. But America’s borders have always been open to Jewish immigrants, and while other nations have persecuted the Jews, there has never been a government-sanctioned persecution of any kind against the Jewish people.
God’s judgment has fallen upon all nations that have ever oppressed the Jews, from ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Syria and Rome, to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. None of these nations, ancient or modern, exist today. Of course there is a Germany, but it is not Nazi. Even Great Britain has suffered for turning its back on the Jews. At the beginning of World War 2 the British Empire was the largest in the world and had been for 150 years. It was the British that had helped to establish the modern Jewish state, but as soon as Israel was recognized by the United Nations, Britain walked away and offered no help in the Jewish struggle against their Arab neighbors. The result was that in only 15 years the mighty British Empire crumbled.
The second part of the Abrahamic Covenant involved the Promised Land (Genesis 15:18-21). God told Abraham wherever he walked and as far as he could see would be the inheritance of his descendants, and then He delineated the borders. In this part of the covenant the word land means land here on the earth. It is not a spiritual reference to heaven. It is also an everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:7-8). The land will always be Israel’s land. No matter how loud the Palestinians shout about a homeland and non-existent heritage, the land belongs to Israel. The borders run from the Nile River to the Euphrates and includes Egypt, the Sinai, Jerusalem (Jebusites), the Hittites (eastern Turkey), and includes Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
You can see from this map just how small a portion of this land Israel holds today. And actually, this map is not quite accurate. The Hittite Empire before 1200 BC included most of Eastern Turkey, so the northern border goes much higher than is depicted here. Compare this with the extent of David’s and Solomon’s Kingdom from about 1015 to 975 BC. David had only conquered or controlled about 40% of the total, but this is the inheritance the Jews will have during the Millennial Kingdom.
II. The Scattering of the Jews.
The question then is what happened? Why have the Jews never occupied or controlled all of their Promised Land? Moses warned Israel that if they ever turned away from God into idolatry that God would scatter them (Deuteronomy 4:27). That’s exactly what happened.
Solomon was the wisest man that ever lived. He wrote Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, yet he never learned from his own wisdom. He collected 700 wives and 300 concubines and they turned his heart away from the Lord to the point that at the end of his life he was leading Israel into idolatry. The result was a civil war that divided the kingdom in two. Ten tribes in the north became known as Israel, while two tribes in the south became known as Judah.
Israel turned away from God immediately and by 722 BC the Assyrians overthrew the kingdom and scattered the Jews all over their empire. Judah had a few good kings and revivals mixed into their history, but they finally rebelled against God as well and in 586 BC the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and scattered the remaining Jews.
The Babylonian empire fell to the Persians and in 536 BC a decree by Cyrus the Persian allowed the Jews to begin returning to their homeland (Ezra 1). They remained in their land and won their independence from the Syrians in 175 BC, but 112 years later they were conquered by Rome. This was the beginning of the fullness of the times for Christ’s birth, but in AD 70 the Jews tried to throw off their yoke of bondage and were defeated by the Roman general, Titus, who leveled Jerusalem, and once again scattered the Jews.
Jewish communities have existed all across the Middle East to Persia, in Africa in Ethiopia, in Russia and all over Europe. They were persecuted severely for centuries, but the rise of the Nazis in Germany brought the worst persecution of all, the Holocaust. In 1933 there were 9 million Jews in Europe; in 1945 there were only 3 million.
Then suddenly, after being without a homeland for 1900 years, the Jews became a nation again. They are the only people in history to have been so decimated and scattered for so long to be reconstituted as a nation.
III. Rebirth of the Nation of Israel.
The return of the Jews to their homeland in Israel was prophesied several times in the Old Testament. Isaiah 11:11 says the remnant will be recovered. Isaiah 43:3-6 says they will be brought back from every direction. In Ezekiel 36-37 is the Valley of the Dry Bones vision showing that the nation will come alive again, and in Amos 9:14-15 it says that once they are returned they will never be removed again.
How this came about is primarily the due to the accomplishment of Chaim Weismann. Since the invention of gunpowder weapons had used a black powder that left heavy smoke and could blind the armies on a battlefield. In 1904 Weismann invented a smokeless powder, which gave the British an advantage on the battlefield.
The Ottoman Empire had held Palestine for over 500 years, but in World War 1 the British defeated the Ottomans and took control Palestine. Then in 1917, as a thank you to Weismann, the Balfour Declaration was issued declaring the intent of reestablishing a Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, Israel was recognized by the United Nations, but not before U.S. President Harry Truman cast the deciding vote, against the advice of his closest advisors including General George Marshall. Truman was a Baptist, and in spite of his problem with foul language, he understood the importance of Israel and would not turn his back on the new nation.
IV. Prophetic significance to the End Times (Matthew 24:32-35).
In Matthew 24 Jesus gave His longest and last discourse on the end times. In verse 32, He referred to the fig tree. Whenever the fig tree is mentioned in prophetic writing in the Scripture it is a reference to Israel. When you see Israel is in its homeland the time is near. This generation, He said, will see the coming of the Lord.
This verse has often been misunderstood. Critics often point to this passage to prove Jesus got it wrong. I’ve heard preachers as well teach that it meant that the return of the Lord is imminent and could have happened in that generation if God had intended. But that’s not what Jesus said. The generation He was talking about was the one that saw Israel in its land, the implication being that they had been out of it again.
I’m going to go out on a limb here because Baptists have always taught that the Rapture has always been imminent. I don’t think it has been. I imagine that the first century believers likely thought that Jesus was going to come back in their lifetime, so for them it was imminent. But once Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews no longer had a homeland that changed, and the return of the Lord was not imminent for 19 centuries. But that changed on May 14, 1948. Since Israel has been restored as a nation we can definitely say that the return of the Lord, especially the Rapture, is imminent.
Conclusion: A biblical generation was generally considered to be 40 years. That would have been 1988 and is long passed. Van Impe used a formula from a passage in Jeremiah to suggest a generation is 70 years, and that’s how he came up with 2018. Don’t put any faith in that. It may be that the Lord will come before then, maybe not. Depending on how events in the world turn it could be some years. There is no specific definition in the Bible of a generation. To use the Van Impe model we might conclude from Genesis 6:3 that a generation is 120 years, which would mean Christ’s coming could still be 53 years away. Considering current affairs in the world I don’t think it will be that long. There is no way of knowing a specific date, but we do know that since May 14, 1948, the return of the Lord is imminent. It could come at any time.
Next week we will look at more specific details including the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and see how events in the world and modern technology can help us understand how events described in Revelation may take place, and how the nations are aligning for the antichrist. The thing we need to learn is to be ready because Jesus will come when we don’t expect Him (Matthew 24:44). Are you watching? Are you ready?
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