God Is Real. And The World’s Treatment Of Israel Is All The Proof You Need That Satan Is Real

I believe in God.  Now, that in and of itself is a pure no-brainer.  It is literally the abominable fool who denies it, according to God’s Word in Psalm 14:1-3.  It is not faith to believe in God, merely a matter of sheer common sense.  Romans 1:18-20 makes this point abundantly clear:

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.  For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.  For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.  Professing to be wise, they became fools…”

James 2:19 clearly points out that mere intellectual assent to God’s reality is nothing:

“You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder.”

Thus the struggle of faith is not in believing that God exists; that is literally a thing to be taken for granted.  Rather the struggle of faith is to realize that the Creator of the universe and everything in it is truly good and truly loves you and has a beautiful plan for your life.  Sometimes that doesn’t seem so obvious – particularly when we see the evil in the world – and that is when we must practice faith.

“Faith” is trust.  We’re facing a difficult situation, things don’t seem to be going well, and we make the decision and the commitment to trust God.

That aspect of faith emerges in Hebrews 11:1, which states “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  It’s not just heaven I haven’t seen; I haven’t seen what God will do in my life the rest of today.

What about the devil?  Is it hard to believe in the reality of the devil?

Not when I look at the way the world is judging Israel and taking the side of the terrorists who have intentionally burrowed themselves into the population so as to kill as many of their own people as possible while they try to murder as many Jews as possible, it isn’t.

It’s an interesting thing, evil.  I remember reading an influential article by the former mistress of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger about what she described as the banality of evil.  What does it mean to be banal?  It means to be trivial, obvious, predictable, to be devoid of originality.  There’s a boring “been there, seen that” aspect to evil.  And Hannah Arendt was making this point not about something mundane, like the man who urinates all over a public toilet seat and leaves his filthy mess for someone else to clean up, but rather the Final Solution of the Holocaust.

The men who carried out the Holocaust weren’t monsters with blood dripping off their fangs; they were bureaucrats who carried out sterile-sounding government policies.  Jews were declared to be non-human – precisely the way babies in the womb are to this day – and were regarded in official government language basically as a disposal dilemma that could be resolved with the application of bureaucracy.  You could read the Nazi documents and it wouldn’t be that much different from reading how the Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S. is attempting to dispose of some toxin that is polluting a river.  Only in this case the “river” was Europe and the “toxin” was Jews.  And sterile bureaucrats sterilely carried out sterile policies in such a manner that producing millions of corpses was a boring, commonplace industrial activity.

Hannah Arendt was pointing out that thousands and thousands of faceless bureaucrats and functionaries somehow all played their trivial, unimaginative, boring roles that collectively resulted in an evil so monstrous that the primary reason it is denied to this day is because it is simply too astonishingly horrifying to believe it actually happened in our modern, civilized age.  But of course it DID happen.  And how could something that evil have happened when none of the people who carried it out had the fangs of vampires or the claws of werewolves?

I submit that there is something transcendent about evil just as there is something transcendent about good.  Just as there is good that proves that there is a Higher God – because no human being could act so selflessly, so compassionately on his or her own, there is a similar quality about evil, such that there is evil that defies all reasonable capacity to explain it.

I’ll put it this way: as stupid, as blind and as depraved as humans are, there are some things that simply beyond human evil.  To wit: people cannot possibly be this stupid, this blind, this depraved on their own.  There has to be a superhuman will involved to twist us into such a depth of mindboggling stupidity, blindness and depravity.

I look at how fools condemn Israel in their fight against a Hamas organization that literally publically states its intention to murder every Jew on earth according to Article 7 of their charter and I realize that no human mind can possibly be this stupid, this blind and this depraved on its own.

Let me provide a specific, concrete example.  When Nancy Pelosi said:

“And we have to confer with the Qataris, who have told me over and over again that Hamas is a humanitarian organization. Mbe they could use their influence to–”

I contend that as a human being created in the image of a intelligent, aware, moral God that she is simply not capable of being that stupid, that blind and that depraved on her own to believe what came out of her own mouth.  There has to be a devil at work to produce that degree of unreality.

Just as I contend that when the senior spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi’s “humanitarian organization” urged the Palestinian people to serve as human shields –

The [Hamas] Ministry of the Interior and National Security calls on our honorable people in all parts of the [Gaza] Strip to ignore the warnings [to vacate areas near rocket launching sites before Israel bombs them] that are being disseminated by the Israeli occupation through manifestos and phone messages, as these are part of a psychological war meant to sow confusion on the [Palestinian] home front, in light of the [Israeli] enemy’s security failure and its confusion and bewilderment.”

[Facebook page of Hamas Ministry of Interior spokesman Iyad Al-Buzum,
July 12, 2014]

– there simply has to be a Satan to delude a man to say such an incredible thing and there has to a Satan to delude mothers and fathers to allow their children to die as human shields for the cause of terror.

As I quoted from the Los Angeles Times Hamas intentionally and deliberately built a vast terrorist tunnel complex right under hospitals, schools and mosques as well as the most densely populated residential neighborhoods on earth in order to intentionally and deliberately force Israel to kill as many helpless civilians as possible in response to Hamas’ thousands of brutally inhuman rocket attacks:

Troops operating in and near Gaza have tracked 36 tunnels with dozens of access points, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi said Wednesday, as the Israeli offensive in Gaza entered its fourth week. Miles of passageways, many stocked with weapons and reinforced against explosions from above, pass near or directly beneath schools, mosques and hospitals, threading their way under some of the most densely populated terrain on Earth. — Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2014

Many of those tunnels have entrances directly TO the mosques, the hospitals, the schools such that Hamas fighters can use those “positions” to attack Israel with deadly weapons fire and then retreat safely and expose the helpless Palestinian civilians to death that Hamas and their tools cynically exploit as propaganda.

Hamas and its stooges such as Nancy Pelosi cannot be that callous, that stupid, that blind or that depraved all on their own.  It simply defies human ability to be that callous, that stupid, that blind and that depraved.  Human hearts and minds simply weren’t made for that.

Israel cares so much more about trying to prevent the deaths of helpless Palestinian civilians that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority or for that matter the Palestinian people themselves it is beyond unreal.  One side is trying to protect their citizens; the other side is trying to kill as many of their own people as possible merely so they can point at the other side and cry, “Look what they did!”  One side tries desperately to warn every Palestinian of an impending attack even down to the level of trying to call each home (and it is mindboggling what an organizational effort Israel must pursue to do such a thing) before an attack; the other side is ordering civilians to remain in their homes so they will be killed.

But which side is being condemned by the world?

It defies belief.  There is simply no way in this world what is happening can possibly be happening.  But it’s happening.

There is a Satan.  How Israel is being condemned and demonized while the most evil organization on the planet is enabled to continue intentionally exploiting its own people as human shields proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt to anyone capable of wisdom.

2 Corinthians 4:4 says “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  That god is Satan.  And he and his demons are alive and well and working to blind every human being on earth.

There is simply no other rational explanation for what we are seeing.

God’s Word prophetically declared the resurrection of Israel from the graveyard of history in Ezekiel chapter 37.  The Bible went so far as to declare that Israel would literally be created in one day.  That happened exactly according to God’s Word in Isaiah 66:8 on May 14, 1948 by an act of the United Nations in response to the horror of the Holocaust.  And God’s Word also declared repeatedly that every single nation on earth would be against Israel.  We have now already seen that come to pass, as well.  And we know that it will only grow worse.

I become dismayed as I see evil prevailing while the few righteous people can seemingly do nothing to prevent it.  I and those who have the illumination of the Holy Spirit can see the world moving toward the worship of the beast all around us; yet we can do nothing to prevent it as more and more human beings are being deluded by Satan to make the choice to burn in hell and literally take their whole world to hell with them.  But God knew that it would happen and foretold it to His people.  And events are unfolding in these last days exactly according to His Word given to us millennia ago.

God’s Word according to 2 Thessalonians 2:3 puts it quite clearly:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.

God told us – guaranteed us – that the world would turn radically evil and rebel against God, God’s people and God’s righteousness in the last days just before the Antichrist came.  And that’s where we are, folks.

There is a God.  There is a Satan.  The players in this drama for sovereignty over the human race are real.  And the drama of the struggle is foretold in the prophecies of Scripture.

I am on the Lord’s side, as was Joshua before me.  In spite of the banality – the commonplace, trivial, obvious, predictable, even boring in its nearly all-encompassing nature – of evil, God will prevail in this struggle as He declared in His Word.

 

 

 

‘Crazy Claims About Death Panels’ Sadly Not Crazy At All

Are you familiar with the phrase, “the banality of evil”?  The opening paragraph in the Wikipedia article on the subject summarizes the concept quite well:

The banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Again and again, we have seen great evils inflicted by governments upon their people.  And we want to find monsters, because that’s who we want to believe would alone be capable of such monstrous evil.  But again and again, we find ordinary people – faceless bureaucrats performing faceless functions – had carried out what we later realize were monstrous deeds with a blithe acceptance of the premises of their government’s policies.

One of the reasons that these policies – later correctly described as “evil” – were allowed to begin, develop, build momentum, and ultimately turn monstrous is because too many people dismissed the possibility that such evil could ever happen.  “Our government would never do such a thing.”

Only it did.  It’s happened too many times before, and it will happen again.

With that introduction, let us look at the ubiquitously mocked term, “death panels.”  Nothing like that could ever actually happen.  Right?

Wrong.  If you go to Europe, it’s happening right now.  And the same sort of quasi-socialist liberals who want to create government health care here were created it there.

Terminally ill grandmother ‘left to starve’ by doctors

Hazel Fenton, an 80-year-old grandmother who was placed under a controversial care plan and left to “starve to death” after doctors identified her as being terminally ill, only recovered after the intervention of her daughter.

By Richard Savill
Published: 10:30PM BST 11 Oct 2009

Hazel Fenton pictured with her daughter Christine Ball Photo: ANDREW HASSON

Mrs Fenton, from East Sussex, is still alive and “happy” nine months after doctors declared she would only survive for days, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding, her daughter, Christine Ball, said.

“Without my persistence and pressure I know my mother would be dead now,” she added.

Mrs Fenton, a former private school house mother, had been placed on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) scheme, which was originally developed as a way to care for cancer patients towards the end of their lives.

However, there has been recent criticism that not only cancer patients but others with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS scheme.

Last month six prominent British doctors and health care professionals wrote to The Daily Telegraph, expressing concern that some patients were being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patents and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, it has been argued.

Miss Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital, Hastings, East Sussex, on Jan 11, said she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Miss Ball, 42, a carer, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Mrs Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Mrs Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was “astonished” when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.

On Jan 19, Mrs Fenton’s 80th birthday, Mrs Ball said her mother had lost “an awful lot of weight” but was feeling better, and told her she “didn’t want to die”.

But it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding, Miss Ball said.

Mrs Ball said the fight to save her mother had been made harder by the Mental Capacity Act. “I was told that we had no rights, and food and hydration were classed as treatment, which meant they had the right to withhold feeding. It gave a doctor the power to play god with my mother’s life,” she said.

Mrs Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home near her daughter’s home.

A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust said: “Patients’ needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”

At the same scripted event in which White House aides handed out white coats to create a propaganda moment, Barack Obama recently said:

“We have now been debating this issue of health insurance reform for months,” Obama said.  “We have listened to every charge and every counter-charge — from the crazy claims about death panels to misleading warnings about a government takeover of our health care system.”

Death panels.  Crazy, right?  Nothing like that could ever happen here.

Unless it occurs to you to stop and THINK, and ask yourself why you would think that corrupt House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel – or the Democrats who refuse to hold him accountable for his crimes – would be so much better than British liberals.

Provide your case that they are only evil over there in Britain, but our big government liberals here are ontologically good, and simply incapable of creating a system that would grow and degenerate until it tries to starve human beings to death.

There are all kinds of things going on in the United Kingdom and in Continental Europe that will very quickly be going on here, too, because too many of us just shut our minds off to the banality of evil that we have already seen time and time again.

And it’s already going on here.  Right now.  Under the very sort of medical system that Barack Obama wants to impose across the nation.

Take the story of Barbara Wagner, who was condemned to die by her state government medical system.  They denied her the drugs she needed to save her life, but agreed to pay for her to be euthanized.  Some faceless liberal bureaucrats “who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal” decided that Barbara Wagner’s life was not worth saving, but only worth taking.

The banality of evil.  Coming soon to a hospital or a doctor’s office near you.

And right now, Democrats are trying to expand the banality of evil.

The Wall Street Journal exposed that ObamaCare will cut essential cardiology and oncology care in order to lower the cost of the health system:

In President Obama’s Washington, medical specialists are slightly more popular than the H1N1 virus. Compared to bread-and-butter primary care doctors, specialists cost more to train and make more use of expensive procedures and technology—and therefore cost the government more money. Even so, the quiet war Democrats are waging on specialists is astonishing.

From Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’s health-care bill to changes the Administration is pushing in Medicare, Democrats are systematically attacking specific medical fields like cardiology and oncology. With almost no scrutiny, they’re trying to engineer a “cheaper” system so that government can afford to buy health care for all—even if the price is fewer and less innovative ways of extending and improving lives.

And the results of such measures and others will be a holocaust of the elderly.  With all measures undertaken in the spirit of bureaucratic efficiency:

The Congressional majority wants to pay for its $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bills with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare. This cut will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30%. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 1% of Medicare cuts will come from eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.

The assault against seniors began with the stimulus package in February.  Slipped into the bill was substantial funding for comparative effectiveness research, which is generally code for limiting care based on the patient’s age.  Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years (called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients.

It is also highly relevant that Medicare denies treatment at a rate of more than double any private insurer’s average right now.  Is government care the thing you should most trust, or the thing you should most fear?

When Barack Obama mocks “the crazy claims about death panels,” it is ultimately up to you have to ask yourself just how much you implicitly trust the government to take care of you even when it is in the bureaucrats’ economic interests to allow you to die.  And it is up to you to decide if history is incapable of repeating itself.