Why I Am A Christian And Believe The Bible Is The Literal Inspired Word Of God

There is simply so much to contemplate in these words from the Apostle and leader of Jesus’ Disciples, St. Peter, that I urge everyone to consider:

For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes when he received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to him, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.”  We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.

Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts.  Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.  — 2 Peter 1:16-21

What grabs me about this passage (which I have memorized because it is so powerful to me) is the eyewitness account from a disciple how had the unique opportunity to see “the Word of God” (see John 1:1-18 to see another close disciple of Christ literally call Jesus “the Word”) alive and in Incarnate in the flesh.  Peter is zooming in on one experience related in the Gospels, when James, John and Peter himself saw Jesus transfigured into glory (Matthew 17:1–9, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28–36).  And Moses, representing the Law (see John 1:17 as an example), and Elijah, representing the Prophets (Malachi 4:5 cf. Matthew 17:11-13), were sent from heaven as a witness to this glorification of Jesus before these men’s very eyes.

It sends chills down my spine.  And I have no doubt in my mind that it continued to send chills down Peter’s spine every single time he thought about that moment for the rest of his life until he himself was crucified as a martyr in testimony of his Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus, under Emperor Nero in 64 AD.

Listen to what this man who testified to his faith in his very own blood had to say: he was not making up a bunch of fables or fairy tales: he himself saw everything he writes about and he saw it in the company of other men who saw the same things alongside him.  You keep seeing the witness verbs: “We saw.”  “With our own eyes.”  “We ourselves heard that voice.”  “When we were with him.”

They saw it with their own eyes and they heard it with their own ears and they touched it with their own hands.  St. John – another Apostle and Disciple of Christ who also personally witnessed and experienced the Transfiguration of Jesus with Peter, said the following:

We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life.  This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us.  We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.  We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.  — 1 John 1:1-4

Again, St. John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 13:25, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20), again and again pointed to what he had personally witnessed and experienced: “W proclaim to you the One … whom we have heard and seen.”  “We saw Him with our own eyes and touched Him with our own hands.”  “This One who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen Him.”

Everything that Jesus did and said was publicly witnessed, especially by His Disciples, who Jesus commissioned as His witnesses.  They were there.  They lived it.  They saw it and heard it and touched it.  John recorded that Thomas literally put his fingers in the holes that remained in Jesus’ wrists and ankles following His Resurrection (John 20:19-28).

It is a FACT of history that all of the Disciples of Jesus, save old John – who himself was tortured and suffered scrounging for existence as a slave-laborer in the mines of an island prison – sealed the truth of their testimony in their own blood.  Why was it not John’s fate to die as a martyr?  Maybe because he was the one that Jesus commissioned to take care of His mother, Mary, when he said the words, “Woman, behold your son.”  And to “the disciple whom He loved” the words, “Behold your mother” (John 19:26-27).  But it was ultimately St. John alone, the youngest of the Disciples during the public Ministry of Jesus on earth, who lived on as the final apostolic link to the unbreakable chain of the Testimony of the Church to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, from the dead, and of the New Life in Christ that was available to any who would call on the Name of the LORD Jesus so they could experience the Resurrection Life of Jesus for themselves.

We know that people can sincerely believe something that turns out not to be true.  And yes, there are even people who would be willing to die for what turns out to be a lie.  I submit that every Islamic terrorist who blows himself up so he can kill as many innocent people as possible, believing that he will go straight to Paradise and enjoy the carnal affections of seventy virgins, fall under this category.

I remember watching the theologically-liberal series, “From Jesus to Christ” on PBS.  But even the theological-liberal New Testament scholars that the series heavily relied on all unanimously acknowledged “that his disciples really and with absolute conviction saw him again afterwards.”  St. Peter continued to proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead AS A FACT THAT HE HAD WITNESSED for more than thirty years until his own death.  St. John continued to proclaim the FACT of the Resurrection THAT HE HAD PERSONALLY SEEN, HEARD AND TOUCHED for something on the order of seventy years after the Crucifixion of Jesus until his own death around 100 AD.

What makes the Disciples – who of course were also true martyrs who died as witnesses rather as than mass murderers who died killing innocent people – categorically different is the fact that they PERSONALLY saw and PERSONALLY experienced and PERSONALLY heard and PERSONALLY touched Jesus after His Resurrection from the dead.  They PERSONALLY were there to experience all the key events FIRSTHAND.

They really, sincerely, with absolute conviction believed the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And my point is that there was absolutely NO POSSIBLE WAY they could have been mistaken.

Let me get back to the Transfiguration of Jesus, for example.  Jesus took Peter, James and John with Him.  They were all there to see the Transfiguration of Jesus and experience it for themselves.  And afterward, they clearly would have been saying to one another, “Did you just see what I saw?”  And “What did YOU see?”  And they were easily able to verify that it had really, truly happened, that they were NOT having a hallucination, for the very simple reason that three people cannot have the same hallucination, the same exact departure from reality, at the same time.  Three witnesses saw the same thing.  They verified it to one another.  It happened.  It wasn’t just a “clever story.”  It was real.  Real enough to be willing to live for.  Real enough to be willing to die for after having lived your entire life completely transformed by that they each saw with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, and touched with their own hands.

Twelve ordinary, uneducated men from a conquered backwater Roman province rocked the world with “what they had heard, what they had seen with their eyes, what they beheld and their hands handled, concerning the Word of Life,” as John put it in the opening verse of his first epistle.  Think also about the key early followers of Jesus: think of James the Just, the brother of Jesus.  Not only had James not believed in Jesus or His ministry while it was popular to do so, but James had actually believed that Jesus was out of His mind.  I just ask you: what would it take for you to believe that your brother was in fact GOD?  I mean, just imagine being the parents: “Mom, my brother is saying He’s God again!”  “Stop telling James you’re God, Jesus!”  “But I Am that I Am!”  “MOM!”  Seriously: imagine what had to happen to bring James to his knees before Jesus: first of all, it required a post-Resurrection appearance, which Paul describes in what is very clearly an EARLY Christian creed found in 1 Corinthians 15 dated to within five years of the Resurrection by historians: “Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles” (vs. 7).   James had to realize upon self-reflection how Jesus had lived His entire life in moral perfection.  And James believed that his half-brother (James’ father was Joseph; Jesus’ Father was God) truly was God Incarnate.  And he believed.  James became the leader of the early church in Jerusalem.  James came to be known by the nickname “Camel Knees” because of the large calluses on his knees that he developed from spending long hours on his knees in prayer – to his Brother.  Again, imagine the personal transformation that had to occur!  James was murdered about AD 62 in a mob riot incited by the Sanhedrin.  He gave his LIFE in his faith in his Brother.  Imagine that!  Add to the mix Saul of Tarsus.  Saul was a rabid Pharisee in the very spirit of the rabid Sanhedrin that murdered James.  He went out breathing fire and hate in his desire to destroy what he viewed as a terrible, blasphemous heresy against his beloved Judaism as men and women began increasingly worshiping One named Jesus they claimed was the Messiah of Israel.  Saul went out on the Road to Damascus to hunt down Christians and put them in chains; somehow, he amazingly BECAME a Christian when he heard the very Jesus he was trying to eradicate speak to him and strike him blind until another Christian came to heal this Persecutor of the Church.  Paul, after having suffered a LIFETIME of suffering for His Lord whom he once tried to exterminate from history, died as a martyr in testimony to his absolute faith in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the World.

How do you explain these men???

Now, allow me to return to 1 Peter 1:16-21 and enter into evidence the additional witness of Moses and Elijah, and what their appearance on the Mount of Transfiguration meant: as I already pointed out, Moses represented the Law, and Elijah represented the Prophets.  In other words, they represented the Scriptures, the Word of God as it had been handed down to God’s people from Adam and Eve until Jesus’ day.

Take some time, please, to just scroll down the list of the hundreds of prophecies from the Law and the Prophets that Jesus literally fulfilled in His First Advent when He came as the Suffering Servant, to die as the Lamb of God in fulfillment of the penalty in the Law for the sins of the world.

Those prophecies clearly present 456 identifying characteristics of what the Messiah would be like. And the mathematical odds of one man fulfilling just EIGHT of them is one chance in ten with seventeen zeroes after it, or less than one chance in a quadrillion.  Pretty good job for 32 men who mostly never even TALKED to one another, let alone in any way, shape or form conspired.

Over forty men who wrote over a period of over 2,000 years.  And yet it marvelously, miraculously tells one story: the story of the fall of the human race, and the story of the Creator God who ultimately became a man Himself in order to take our sins upon Himself and save us.

Let’s do some comparison for the sake of contrast: how many men wrote the Qur’an?  One.  His name was Muhammad.  How many other men could independently verify that Muhammad wasn’t making up a whole bunch of stories?  Zero.  Muhammad was alone in a cave called Hira the first time he allegedly received the dictation of the Qur’an by an angel that Muhammad had already heard about from the Jews who frequently came along the Arabian trading routes.  At no time during any of Muhammad’s revelations do we ever find that anyone else was present.

If you want to trust a sacred Book, which one should you trust?  Particularly given the fact that Muhammad clearly pirated large portions of the rival sacred Book: he couldn’t even find his own angel; he had to steal one from the Jews.  He couldn’t even invent his own patriarch, he had to pirate Abraham from the Jews and warp their account to reject Isaac and make Ishmael the hero in blatant contradiction of what the original account presented in Genesis chapters 15 through 18.  And if you read the excellent work, “The Truth About Muhammad,” you will find that, amazingly, every single time Muhammad wanted to do something to advance his own interest, he would somehow have a revelation from Allah that let him have whatever he wanted.  There were dozens of these “convenient surahs,” but the most infamous of them were the so-called “Satanic Verses” that allowed Muhammad to receive one “revelation” that allowed allies to have their own gods in order to secure their alliance against a common enemy, only to then receive a completely contradictory “revelation” when the first “revelation” became inconvenient for Muhammad.  It’s kind of like me promising I’ll give you a billion dollars if you risk your life fighting for me, and then I receive a revelation from God after you’ve fought and won my war for me declaring that I don’t have to pay you a dime.  Whenever Muhammad wanted something, he could mysteriously soon afterward have a surah “revealed” to him that justified his doing or taking or murdering or marrying whatever he wanted.

The same is true of the Book of Mormon.  One guy wrote it.  Initially, there were three so-called “witnesses” that claimed they had seen the “golden plates” that Smith said he used to write the Book of Mormon.  Such that:

The Three Witnesses were a group of three early leaders of the Latter Day Saint movement who wrote in a statement of 1830 that an angel had shown them the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon and that they had heard God’s voice testifying that the book had been translated by the power of God

The Three Witnesses were Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer, whose joint testimony, in conjunction with a separate statement by Eight Witnesses, has been printed with nearly every edition of the Book of Mormon since its first publication in 1830. All three witnesses eventually broke with Smith and were excommunicated from the church.^[1] In 1838, Joseph Smith called Cowdery, Harris, and Whitmer “too mean to mention; and we had liked to have forgotten them.”^[2]

Some “witnesses.”

The Mormon Church still disgracefully calls them “the Three Witnesses.”  I call them “False Witnesses.” As history does to anyone who looks into their “testimony.”

You ultimately find, if you bother to do the research, that while the so-called “witnesses” (both the three and the eight) testified that they had “seen” the golden plates. But they actually only “saw” them “by faith.”

I suppose I could point out that at least Joseph Smith managed to find some so-called “witnesses” who at least initially claimed to be able to verify that Smith wasn’t full of bovine feces, which makes his book vastly superior to Muhammad’s in that regard.  And at least Joseph Smith managed to invent his own angel, rather than merely pirating one from the Bible, as Muhammad had.  The problem is that all of Joseph Smith’s primary “witnesses” were bogus and ended up being excommunicated from the church their “witness” had given birth to.  And then there is the unfortunate fact that Joseph Smith was a convicted fraud and con-man before he suddenly became a “prophet.”

That is NOT the way the Bible is.  Not at ALL.  There are layers upon layers of interlocking sources.  As examples from the Old Testament period, Ruth was written contemporaneously with Judges.  So you have writers who didn’t even know each other authenticating one another.  The Pentateuch covered the period written in Job.  During the period of 2 Samuel, David was writing his Psalms.  And we can learn more from both sources about the other from each.  As we get into the Books of Kings, we’ve got all kinds of interlocking sources: we’ve got 1 and 2 Chronicles, Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Obadiah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Jeremiah and Lamentations all during that same period.  All these different biblical writers giving us accounts that never contradict one another the way Muhammad frequently contradicted Muhammad.  Daniel and Ezekiel wrote during the same basic period of time.  Ezra, Esther, Haggai, and Zachariah were written over the same period of time.  Nehemiah and Malachi were written over the same period of time.

The same is true of the New Testament, only we have even MORE corroboration.  How many Gospels, how many accounts of the life of Jesus, how many perspectives, do we have?  We’ve got FOUR.  We’ve got St. Matthew, we’ve got St. Paul, we’ve got St. Luke, we’ve got St. Peter, we’ve got St. John, we’ve got St. James, we’ve got St. Jude, we’ve got the writer of Hebrews, all writing about the same Gospel over the same period of time.  And they NEVER contradict one another when their writings are closely studied in full context.  The deeper you get, the more the harmony.  Which is an amazing, and literally miraculous thing.

And the Bible has been called “God’s Anvil,” because it has stood the test of time as critics have tried to pound away at it for millennia.  No book has been more read.  No book has been more attacked.  The Bible has withstood everything ever hurled by hell against it.  The atheist Voltaire sneered, “In no more than one hundred years, intellects like mine will make the Bible disappear.” But within fifty years of his own death, Voltaire’s own printing press was used to churn out BIBLES for people hungry to devour the Word of God.  That is why no Book has ever changed more hearts and transformed more lives.

Again, for the sake of contrast, try that with the Qur’an.  Salmon Rushdie pointed out the sordid history of the self-refutation of Muhammad as a prophet of God, and he was rewarded with a fatwa on his life as a result.  And they recently reinstated it just to make sure we know they’re still out to murder him.  Think of the sneering liberals who mock the Bible and Christians who would NEVER DARE do the same thing to the Qur’an and Muslims – because they are cowards and because they know that Muslims would murder them whereas Christians will only pray for them.  My point is that the Bible has withstood 2,000 years of hateful, demonic attack and unrelenting criticism from unbelievers that would have long-since destroyed any book that was NOT from God.  And the Bible didn’t survive by murdering and massacring its intellectual and moral opponents the way the Qur’an has.

The New York Times Best Seller List never mentions the Bible.  That is because The Bible refutes absolutely everything liberalism stands for.  But the Bible is every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year, year-after-year, century-after-century, the best-selling Book on planet EARTH.  NOTHING ELSE even comes CLOSE to it.  More than FIVE BILLION Bibles have been sold, according to Guinness World Records.

At this point I can throw in the incredible uniqueness of Jesus.  There has NEVER been in ALL the history of the world ANYONE like Him.  Today, every major religion on earth has tried to claim Him, co-opt Him, make Jesus theirs: not only the obvious Christianity, but Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etcetera.  This is not true of ANY other religious figure from ANY other religion.  Jesus is UNIVERSAL.  And it is fitting that He would be so: because He alone is the Savior of the whole world, in fulfillment of the Scriptures and demonstrated by His Empty Tomb where every other religion has a corpse for a founder.

So let me get back to where I began, with 2 Peter 1:16-21.  Peter witnessed, along with James and John – with Moses and Elijah representing the testimony of the Law and the Prophets of the Deity and Ministry of Jesus of Nazareth – the Transfiguration of Christ.  And Peter, reflecting on that day, writes:

Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place—until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts.  Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.  — 2 Peter 1:19-21

Peter is pointing out what the great historian and careful researcher St. Luke pointed out in his Gospel when he wrote of two disciples experience when they unknowingly encountered the Resurrected Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.  They had been talking to one another about all of the events that had taken place since Jesus’ arrest and public execution and Jesus – His identity concealed from them – began walking with them as they walked along the road.  Jesus asked them, “What are you guys talking about?”  And they incredulously asked Jesus, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?” (Luke 24:18).  Jesus asked, “What things?”  And they told Him, culminating in this:

And some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just exactly as the women also had said: but Him [Jesus] they did not see.

And He said to them, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!  Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”  And beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.  — Luke 24:24-27

And again when Jesus appeared to the eleven Disciples and Jesus ate with them and told them:

“These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, “This it is written that the Christ should suffer and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.”  — Luke 24:44-48

I’ve already provided a link to the hundreds of prophecies that Jesus would have explained to them how He fulfilled in His birth, His ministry, His sacrificial death as the Lamb of God in atonement for the sins of the world and His glorious resurrection.

That’s what Peter is describing.  He saw the prophetic Word of the Scripture come alive right before his very eyes, his very ears, his very hands.  The Scriptures are a lamp in a dark place that shine our way straight to Christ and to His salvation from sin into a new birth through regeneration and a new life through sanctification.

There are times in my mind when something occurs to me and I conclude based on my experience, based on my reasoning, based on my intuition, that something is going to happen.  That’s NOT what the prophets did.  Peter – a prophet and writer of Scripture through divine inspiration himself – specifically says that prophets DON’T write from their own understanding of what they happen to think, or from any human initiative or intuition.  NO, Peter says very plainly, these prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

So Peter had Jesus Himself teach him about how the Scriptures prophesied His coming and precisely detail what He would do when He came.  Hundreds of prophecies fulfilled; 456 identifying characteristics described.  And Peter – who also witnessed the Resurrected Jesus after having seen His dead body – saw the prophetic Word made more sure.

More sure than anything in this world.

I am now watching with amazement the last days prophecies unerringly coming to pass.  I read the Scriptures in Ezekiel about the coming war of Gog-Magog, in which Russia and Iran lead a confederation of nations that would ultimately all become Muslim attack Israel.  I have now witnessed for the first time in history, I believe, both Russia AND Iran in Syria, RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO ISRAEL.  We are seeing the last days clock zooming toward Armageddon because of the abject demonic foolishness of the Obama presidency, make no mistake.

All the political coalitions are in place that the Bible amazingly described 2,600 years ago.  China’s way across the mighty Euphrates River has not merely been cleared, it has literally been PAVED as a network of concrete dams literally allows them to shut off one of the mightiest rivers on earth.  And not only cross the river but use it as their HIGHWAY to Armageddon.

Is the passage of Revelation 6:14, detailing the opening days of the period that will soon befall a wicked humanity when “The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up,” was that merely symbolic?  Not when you consider that that is PRECISELY what a nuclear warhead looks like when it is detonated.  And God’s Word prophetically saw that day coming 2,000 years BEFORE THE FIRST HUMAN EVEN DREAMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF A NUCLEAR WEAPON.

Just as God’s word wasn’t merely being “allegorical” or “symbolic” when it described an army of 200 million soldiers from the east – PRECISELY WHERE SUCH A VAST ARMY WOULD COME TODAY – when at the time this prophecy was given there weren’t 200 million human beings on the entire planet.

Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies of His First Advent LITERALLY.  He wasn’t symbolically born of a virgin; He didn’t allegorically rise from the dead.  It is fools from hell who deny the literal Word of God.  And in the same way, we are watching the prophecies of the end times and the Second Advent culminating in Jesus Christ coming as King of kings and Lord of lords being fulfilled LITERALLY.  And that is made sure just as sure as the fact that Russia and Iran are not “symbolically” in Syria immediately north of Israel.

Even if you’ve got nothing else, ESPECIALLY if you’ve got nothing else in this world, you can COUNT on the Scriptures.  that is because “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

And you can count on Jesus, the Word whom the Word of God heralded from the first chapters of the Book of Genesis straight through the Scarlet Thread that runs through the entire Bible.

Maranatha, Lord Jesus.  How I long to see you, my dear Friend Who sticks by me closer than a brother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bible TOLD Us Perilous Times Would Come: Obama Reaches Iran Nuclear Deal Threatening Israel With Armageddon On Eve Of Blood Moon

I wrote about the blood moons and Israel last year when Israel was embroiled in crisis during the two prophetic blood moons that we saw in 2014:

Four Blood Moons: The Beginning Of The End? Israel Invades Hamas After Over 1,200 Terrorist Rockets And Two Broken Cease Fires

But another year, another demon-possessed madman advancing Satan’s agenda: this time the “deal” to give Iran nuclear weapons.

And Obama and his Stooge of State John Kerry have reached this “deal” on the eve of yet another blood moon.

God told us that He put His signs in the heavens.

As the Word of God declares:

“The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.” (Joel 3:4)

And the heavens are proclaiming against us as witnesses that judgment is at hand and when it comes, WATCH OUT.  The blood moons are one of those signs heralding divine judgment.

As we speak, John Kerry has just announced that he and his Israel-despising president Obama have reached a deal with Iran (that of course the details of which they won’t release).  I don’t even have to ask the question whether any “inspections” of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will include their nuclear sites in North Korea and Syria.  (It is open source information that Iran has been housing a “special commodity” (weapons grade uranium) in North Korea that their fellow rabid fascist regime gave them in exchange for oil).  Because I know they won’t.  Because Obama thinks of Israel and America the same way I think of Obama: and I think Obama is a truly wicked man who deserves to burn in hell forever.

Obama is giving Iran hegemony over the Middle East on multiple fronts, as he grants them the prestige of being appeased by desperate Americans, as he grants them everything they want to possess a nuclear weapon on their timetable as soon as they have the reliable ballistic missiles they need to make nuclear weapons useful, as he helps them to generate a powerful economy that will dominate the region by protecting Iran from Republicans and even Democrats who can’t impose sanctions over a president hell-bent determined to shelter Iran.

A country that is as oil-rich as Iran very clearly doesn’t need nuclear power for energy and anybody who thinks otherwise is clearly too foolish not to be demon-possessed.  And in the same way, ballistic missiles without a nuclear program is rather like having Bluetooth without having a wireless device – because what the hell are you going to put on your ICBM that you spent so much time and money developing???

It’s as obvious as the signs in the heavens that Iran is working toward nuclear weapons; but these fascist fools aren’t looking at the sky, either, are they???

Meanwhile, even as Obama desperately seeks to appease Iran into a “peace in our time” nuclear deal that Iran will violate without a second thought the moment it is in their interest to do so, realize that Iran continues even as we give up the farm as our negotiation strategy to be the world’s largest terrorist threat and defeat America and American interests.  We are helpless in Yemen because Iran is stabbing us in the heart there even as Obama gives Iran hegemony over the Iraq America worked so hard and at such a dear cost to liberate.

Here we are: presented by another blood moon sign from God as Obama and Kerry boast about their wonderful “deal” with Iran in spite of the fact that Iran has NEVER negotiated in good faith, in spite of the fact that the Ayatollah has again and again stated that Iran won’t budge on its nuclear plan – he said so repeatedly in 2013 (and see here), in 2014, and yes just recently this year of 2015 (and see here) – in addition to saying “Death to America!” even as the nuke talks were taking place.   And we know that the top general of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is the second most powerful entity in Iran after the Ayatollah said that “wiping Israel off the map is non-negotiable.”

Obama is perfectly happy to negotiate with Iran; it is only the Republicans, Israel, Netanyahu, and anybody who doesn’t have a demon screaming in their skulls – that Obama WON’T negotiate with.

I would rather be a roach than a Democrat, as one day you miserable fools will stand before God as flames of fiery wrath pour out of the wheels of His chariot throne and you stutter and stammer and claim that you didn’t know.  And the fire will pour out blue with heat and God’s voice will roar that He put His sign in the very heavens above you and all you could do was stare at them with your cow eyes while you followed the wicked fool you chose as your leader like the stupidest and most depraved sheep who ever lived.

Update, July 15, 2015: For what it’s worth, the terrible deal that Israel is bitterly denouncing was just agreed to by Obama yesterday.  The Senate will have sixty days to examine this deal, followed by a vote which will require a veto-proof majority to kill.  Which puts us right smack in the middle of the next blood moon cycle, which will reach its zenith on September 28, 2015.

 

Race Is Rising Against Race Just As Jesus Said It Would In These Last Days. Democrats Say ‘Amen’ Unable To See That Jesus Said It As A BAD Thing.

Jesus’ warning in Luke 21:10 in its original Greek:

Τότε ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς, Ἐγερθήσεται ἔθνος ἐπ’ ἔθνος καὶ βασιλεία ἐπὶ βασιλείαν

It’s that word “ἔθνος” that stands out.  The direct English translation is “ethnic group” or “race”: race shall rise against race and kingdom against kingdom.

You can see this race hatred developing all over the world; surely the Holocaust of the Jews in the 1940s was a form of “race rising against race.”  During the Clinton years we saw two incredibly ugly examples: in Bosnia with its “ethnic cleansing” and of course in Rwanda and Burundi in Africa as the Hutu race murdered some 1 million Tutsis in an ogre of blood and violence.  We know that through the 1980s and 1990s Saddam Hussein was using genocide against the Kurds.  God only knows how many have perished in Darfur.  And we see it today all across the world in example after example.

It’s always easier to see these genocides in hindsight because the international community always throws a smokescreen over genocides while they are being committed.  As an example in Rwanda, the United Nations tortured the English language to avoid using the term “genocide” no matter how obviously genocidal the murder campaign was.  Why?  Because if the U.N. had used the word “genocide” it would have been compelled by its charter to involve itself.  And they wanted to stay as far away from actually DOING anything as they possibly could.  Because the United Nations has degenerated into a force for evil rather than a force for good in the world.

But I don’t want to talk about race rising against race in the world.  I want to talk about what is going on in America.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, we had this description of Obama’s promise from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?

I cited that back in 2009 when I was pointing out THE BRUTE FACT that Barack Obama was a cynical liar and demagogue right from the very start of his presidency.

As I document, Obama never once EVER tried to live up to his cynical lies.  He never tried to reach out or reconcile and he certainly never made any successful attempt to EVER accomplish any bipartisan legislation.  Rather, he demagogued and demonized and slandered his opponents.

Obama raged to an audience of Hispanics that they should “punish your enemies” – referring to white people and Republicans.  Because that’s the way Obama views the world.

During the campaign Obama sent his vice president out to threaten blacks that if they didn’t vote for him Mitt Romney and Republicans would “put y’all back in chains.”

Obama’s successful message: race, race race.  Rise up.  Punish your enemies.  And if you DON’T vote race white people will put you back in the chains of slavery.

Many have pointed out that Obama had a unique opportunity after his election in 2008 to actually try to do what he promised.  But he never once so much as TRIED.  And many have said that Obama would have an opportunity now to soften his race-baiting, class-warfare, war against women, fearmongering style of endless campaigning in the name of governance.  But you can already pretty clearly see that he won’t do any such thing any more than he did after falsely promising it in 2008.

What we’re seeing used against critics of UN Ambassador Susan Rice – who went on all five major Sunday morning political programs and repeatedly said something that was obviously factually untrue the day she said it – is telling:

As Republicans criticize U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, some members of Congress are suggesting that racism and sexism may be behind the attack.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., says that the attacks on Rice have gone beyond her job performance. When asked about Rice on CNN’s Starting Point on Tuesday, Clyburn said that words like “lazy” and “incompetent,” which have been used to describe black members of the administration, including Rice and President Obama himself, are reminiscent of language used to undermine minorities in decades past.

“You know, these are code words,” Clyburn said. “We heard them during the campaign. During this recent campaign, we heard Senator Sununu calling our president lazy, incompetent—these kinds of terms that those of us, especially those of us who were grown and raised in the South, we would hear these little words and phrases all of our lives, and we’d get insulted by them.”

A Republican was the first to appoint African-Americans to the office of secretary of State — the highest-ranking appointed position in a presidential administration. President George W. Bush named Colin Powell to the job, followed by Condoleezza Rice.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have attacked Rice in recent weeks for her Sunday show appearances in the days  following the terrorist attack in Libya that killed four Americans,  criticizing her for not going further to label the assault a terrorist act. On Monday, 97 House  Republicans sent a letter to President Obama saying that Rice is unfit to  succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The administration has said that Rice was simply using talking points supplied by the intelligence community during her television appearances.

Last week, Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, the new chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, also suggested that the attacks on Rice go beyond her job performance.

“It is a shame that any time something goes wrong, they pick on women and minorities. I have a real issue with that,” Fudge said. “For you who are haters, as the young people say, your hate is going nowhere. Just go on and hate on, but look in the mirror and hate yourself, not the people that do this work.”

I want you to notice that Republicans were IMMEDIATELY FULLY AWARE that what Susan Rice said was simply factually untrue.  I certainly was – as I documented by the link to my own article above.  But a lie was her line and it was Obama’s line.  It was already obvious that she was saying things that were lies the moment she said them.  Conservatives erupted the very moment she spoke and they were right and she and those who took the Obama position were wrong.

We now know that the CIA issued a report IMMEDIATELY that documented that what Susan Rice would come out days later was a lie.  And we know that some Obama-appointed political operative altered that report in order to perpetuate the lie that Obama had killed bin Laden and by extension had therefore mortally wounded al Qaeda so he could get reelected.

We know that Susan Rice participated in that lie.  If she willingly participated, she is morally unfit for ANY job in the administration, let alone Secretary of State.  If she unwillingly was duped, then we can similarly know that her judgment is so piss poor that she is unqualified for any job in the administration, let alone Secretary of State.

But Obama and his thugs have a “narrative”: if you criticize a black person for any reason under the sun, YOU ARE A RACIST.  If you criticize a woman for any reason under the sun, no matter how much documentation you have to support your criticism, you are a misogynist.  And of course if said woman happens to be black, you are a racist misogynist, aren’t you?  And it frankly doesn’t matter that the last Republicans to hold executive power appointed the first black person to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State and the first black woman as the Secretary of State.  And it frankly doesn’t matter how many black people Republicans appoint; they will ALWAYS be racist by definition because Obama WANTS them to be racist by definition and that is how he operates through his race-baiting thugs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Barack Obama and James Clyburn have Martin Luther King’s words, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” embossed in gold lettering on their urinals.  Because they piss on those words every single day.

It is impossible to offer any criticism of the content of a black person’s character today.  Why?  Because of the color of their skin.  THAT’S all that matters to the Obamas and the Clyburns of the world and the content of character be damned.

Obama won politically with that garbage, just as the Antichrist will win politically one day very soon and just as Adolf Hitler won politically.  Like Obama in the present, the Antichrist of the future and the Hitler of the past win politically because they were skilled at exploiting lies and concealing truth.

We’re going to see America collapse.  We’re going to see that within a very few years from now.  And we will immediately see racial violence in the streets of America unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  Why will that happen?  because black people will believe Obama’s lies that they must “punish their enemies” lest said “enemies” put them back in chains; and because whites will realize that neither right nor reason have anything to do with political debate anymore, and they must fight and kill to save the lives of their children.  And if they depend on reason they will be destroyed by rhetoric in a world that is very clearly dead-set on worshiping the coming beast.

Jesus’ last days prophecy is going to come to pass.  Just as Jesus said.  And all you have to do is see the rhetoric that is being applied today to understand how America will melt down tomorrow.

The beast is coming.

What I want you to be able to understand is that the very-soon-to-be-history presented in Bible prophecy is directly related to what we are shaping TODAY.  The leader that the American people have chosen is sowing the wind and he will reap the whirlwind to the mass suffering of the people who put him in power.

Why I’m Getting Out Of Politics After This Election And What I Plan To Do With This Blog Beginning On November 7

One way or another, I am going to get out of day-to-day political blogging after this election.

I’ve said it before.  All the way back on April 29, 2009, I said to someone in replying to a comment:

I never intended to remain in political blogging this long.  I thought I’d blog through the election, do my best to prevent this country from choosing this terrible man, and stop.

But it’s just been one outrage piled on top of another – so many you literally can’t cover them all.  And I demand that there be a record of these outrages.

In April of this year, I wrote:

Whether Obama wins or whether Romney wins, I’m getting out of politics after this election. I’ll continue to blog, but I’ll be done with politics.

If Obama wins, frankly Obama’s God damn America will deserve whatever hell it descends into. I will have done the best I could do trying to warn people that Obama is leading us to hell, and if he gets re-elected I will be done with warnings. I’ll warn you while you’re pouring gasoline on yourself; I’ll warn you when you strike a match; but when you set yourself on fire you’re on your own. If Romney wins, I’m frankly just not going to carry water for him. I’ll vote for him as the lesser of two evils, but he’s not exactly the guy I’m going to spend the next four years carrying water for.

So I hope no one thinks that this announcement implies that I think Obama’s going to win and can’t face liberals anymore and blah, blah, blah.

Basically, my reasoning is this: if Obama is reelected, I did everything I could to try to warn you fools.  And if a nation is foolish enough to reelect a president with the record of failure that Barack Obama has now accumulated, well, that is a nation that is immune to wisdom or warning and my conscience is clean as I shake the dust of the coming economic implosion off my feet and ride off into the sunset.  On the other hand, if Mitt Romney is elected, well, his entire history (contrary to liberals’ demonization of him) is that of a moderate RINO and while he’s got the singular virtue of being “far better than Obama,” he’s not someone I want to devote thousands of hours carrying water for.  If Sarah Palin were president, if Herman Cain were president, well, maybe I’d buckle the armor back on and keep fighting for them.

There is a personal cost for an evangelical Christian conservative to dive into political blogging.  Politics is by its very nature an angry place.  It very quickly becomes mud wrestling.  And it was simply never a place that I wanted to spend my life fighting in.  I certainly don’t want to keep dealing with fools and I certainly don’t want to keep screaming at people every day.

What got me into blogging to begin with?  I saw those Jeremiah Wright sermon tapes – “No, no, no!  NOT God bless America!  God DAMN America!” – and I knew that Barack Obama was truly an evil man to have spent 23 years of his life in that Marxist, racist, anti-American hellhole and then climbing out of that toxic nest of demons and dusting himself off only when it became convenient to his political charade.  I had a vision of America under the leadership of this evil man; and sadly enough it looked very much like what I now see all around me today.  In some ways it’s not as terrible as I feared it would be, and in other ways it’s five times worse than I feared it would be.

I got into political blogging with the intent of 1) preserving a record of what Obama did to America, because the mainstream media refuses to do it and quickly purges the few things they DO print; 2) to try to explain both liberalism and conservatism so that people can see why the former is depraved and the latter is the best worldview for a moral and free people; and 3) to provide arguments and document the facts as I present them to try to help those who have their own arguments with their own circles of influence.

Let me just say that the future does not look bright for America, even if Romney wins.  Yes, we have a $16 trillion debt, and yes, Obama has piled on $6 trillion of that debt in only four years after the hypocrite demonized Bush for adding $4 trillion over eight years.  But that isn’t anything close to our real debt.  Our real debt is over $222 trillion and skyrocketing.

But even THAT isn’t our real debt, because our real debt is that more-than-$222 trillion-and-skyrocketing figure PLUS the debt of our states.  California alone has an unfunded liberal union pension gap of $500 billion.  And Illinois alone has an unfunded liberal union pension gap of $210 billion.  And we are seeing deadbeat states that cannot pay their debts and we are seeing cities going bankrupt.

Our real debt would be impossible to estimate even if all the liberal politicians who have bankrupted their jurisdictions at every level would honestly account for what they did.  And rest assured they never will until after it’s too late.

The Bible tells us in Revelation chapter six that the beast, the Antichrist, is coming.  We find that a global economic collapse is coming; we find that in the midst of this ghastly global landscape there will be famine and plagues and war and mass death.  And what we literally see is this big government false messiah called “the beast” riding in on a white horse to save the day.  And the world will literally worship him for his “deliverance” as he steps in with one plan of action after another.  They will so worship him that they will allow him to take over the world political system and the economic activity of every single human being on earth.

It is amazing how badly things are going in America and how little reporting is being done on how badly things are going.  The labor participation rate has plummeted every single year under Obama and is now at a more than 31-year low (i.e., worse than it EVER was under Bush).  In fact, if we measured unemployment by the labor participation rate that Bush handed off to Obama, our unemployment rate would be 11.6% now rather than dropping to 8.1% because we refuse to measure the millions of discouraged workers who have abandoned hope of finding a job.  For every job Obama “adds,” there are FOUR workers who drop out of the workforce.  There are 4 million fewer jobs than there were when Obama took office, in spite of the fact that 4 million Americans turn 18 and thus “age in” to the work force every single year.  Last year new start-up businesses were at the lowest level EVER measured in the 25-year history of recording that statistic; this year new start-up businesses plunged by another 24%.  And the median household income has plunged 8.2% under Obama’s failed leadership.  And, amazingly, household incomes have dropped TWICE as much under Obama as they did during the 2008 recession, just to document what a horrible job Obama has done since.  And with statistics such as the 13.2% plunge in durable goods in one month – which is the biggest drop since January 2009 – there is no reason to think things are going to get better under Obama’s policies.

If Obama is reelected, we are going to go on a ride to hell as a nation:

Only there will be no going back up this time.

And yes, if you want to give the above picture a racial element, it is also true that blacks and Hispanics and college graduates and young people and women and those groups that have most supported Obama have fared the WORST under his failed policies.  It’s almost as if Obama is saying, “I hurt you bad these last four years; vote for me again and I will finish you off and kill you dead in my next four years.”  And his supporters are saying, “Thank you, messiah!  It’s what we deserve!”

If the media fairly and accurately reported the truth, Obama wouldn’t have a chance.  But our media has descended into shocking levels of dishonest propaganda.  And bad people always choose to believe lies.  And if there are more bad people than good people now in America, we will vote for hell and we will get the hell that we voted for once and for all this time.

Things are also going terribly for Europe.  If America goes, Europe goes, and vice versa.

And if you look at China, things aren’t going nearly as well (see also here) as the false facade that they – like the Obama media – have plastered over their “news” coverage.  And if China goes down hill, well, whose going to keep buying our increasingly worthless debt???

This world has chosen socialism; and socialism is a cancer.  It is a cancer on morality and it is a cancer on economic health.  When people say as a nation that they deserve other people’s money and that they are willing to attack job creators to rob them, you get fewer and fewer jobs and all that really gets “redistributed” is pain and misery.

So the beast is coming.  As I’ve said over and over and over again on this blog.

If Obama is president on January 20, 2013, we’re going to get the beast in short order; if Romney is president, we may have a few more years as he slows (but does not stop) the collapse.

Mitt Romney may well win.  But what has he shown in his past that indicates that he will stand up and fight for the radical changes this nation will need to survive?  Obviously, I hope I’m wrong in my estimation of Romney; I hope that he wins and that his is the “second Reagan presidency” we so desperately need.  And as I’ve said before I would crawl out of my death-bed across broken glass to vote for Mitt Romney and vote OUT Obama.

America could very well collapse in the next few years.  When it happens it will happen fast; “economic experts” will assure the people on the mainstream media that everything will be fine the evening before, and then the people will wake up to find out that their country has literally collapsed under their feet while they slept.  But when I consider the structural, fiscal, economic realities facing America, I simply cannot understand how it could possibly survive for 20 years given our pathological refusal to rise up and solve our problems in the powerful manner that we need in order to have any chance at long-term national survival.

I believe that a true conservative president and a true conservative Congress could stop the collapse by having the courage to ignore the media lies and doing what is necessary to save America.  But I also believe that American people are now past the point where they are willing to do the right thing even to save their own lives.  Instead, we’ll keep voting ourselves more benefits until we reach the collapse-stage that Europe is in, and then we’ll riot over the necessary austerity measures that would take away some of our benefits.  Until the depression when nation after nation collapses into total anarchy as Revelation chapter 6 describes and the beast comes riding in.

When the beast takes over the government, he will be a man who seems to have all the answers.  His policies will seem to take the world back from the brink that failed leaders like Obama brought us to.  But in just a few years, the Antichrist will go from promising a Utopia to delivering a literal hell on earth.  And when the REAL Messiah, Jesus Christ, returns as King of kings and as Lord of lords as the Bible describes, it will be to prevent the planet from literally destroying itself.

That’s the direction I will be taking this blog in.  While I will continue to interact with current political events, it will largely be as part of an effort to inform readers about the message of Bible prophecy and how the events we keep seeing are bringing the world closer and closer to the last days scenario so accurately foretold in Scripture.  In addition to that, I will also simply be returning more to my Christian theology roots and writing about the faith.

As a student and teacher of Bible prophecy, I DO believe in what is frequently derided as “newspaper prophecy.”  That is, I believe that when the events described in Bible prophecy are fulfilled, they will be fulfilled in a way that a person at the time would read in a good newspaper.  The thing is, if you don’t understand the Bible, and economics, and politics, and military issues, you will most likely use the wrong newspaper and thus get your understanding of prophecy wrong.  As a simple illustration of what I’m trying to convey here, consider that many people believed during World War I and World War II that they were living in the last days when (as we obviously know now) they weren’t.  On the one hand, it was true that somebody during those periods could have read their Bible and read their newspapers, and seen things in their newspapers that very much seemed to be described in their Bibles.  But on the other hand, there was one singularly critical event that had not yet happened – the rebirth of the state of Israel as prophesied in Ezekiel 37 – that should have told believers that, no, they were not yet in the last days.  The Tribulation described in Revelation begins with the nation of Israel signing a 7-Year peace covenant with the Antichrist.  And since Israel did not yet exist during World War I or World War II, a biblically-understanding Christian could know that as bad as things were, we were not yet in the last days.  You need to be able to understand your Bible and match it to the what is going on in the world to accurately understand where we are in Bible prophecy.

At the same time, you need to be able to understand what is going on in the world and then match it to the Bible to understand where we are in Bible prophecy, as well.  For example, Christian scholar Dr. Grant Jeffrey wrote a book titled, Final Warning: Economic Collapse and the Coming World Government.  Chapter 14 of that book was titled, “The Coming Economic Collapse.”  And writing back in 1995, the man just nailed the 2008 collapse – which is by no means finished with us.  He understood that the dangerous derivatives market and what we were doing with mortgages could trigger a massive collapse just as occurred 13 years later and which is still undermining the economy today (unless you think we’re free and clear and there’s nothing but blue economic skies now).

The world is now a house of cards that could collapse at any time more than it has ever been.  Weapons of mass destruction, modern technology and incredibly complex financial trading did not make the world less like the world described in Revelation; it made it MORE like the world described in Revelation.  Think about the mark of the beast as just one example of what I’m talking about.  The beast is coming and he is coming soon.  And I plan to write a lot more about what the Bible has to say about the last days and why I believe we are in them after this election.

I’m sure I’ll lose some readers as I take this blog in a different direction.  Maybe I’ll lose a lot of readers.  Obviously, I hope I’ll gain other readers, but my primary goal is simply to stand up for my faith and for what I believe and to be true to the vision that I believe God gave me.

Atheist Country Japan Smashed By Tsunami

That headline is a deliberate provoker.  But please let me explain why I used that headline before you erupt one way or another.

First of all, Japan is in fact one of the most atheistic countries in the world:

And Japan certainly got hit with a monsterous tsunami:

As I write this, I hear that there are 88,000 people missing in Japan.

So there is little question that the title for this article is factually completely accurate.

But is Japan’s unbelief the reason why Japan just got hit with an awful tsunami?

My answer is, “How on earth should I know?”

God doesn’t explain to me why He does a lot of things.  I think He figures I’m too dumb to understand His infinite mind and the infinite complexity of His plan for an incredibly complex world filled with going on 7 billion souls.  And He’s probably right.

I am familiar with Christian “leaders” (I put that in quotes because neither of these men are on my list of Christian leaders) such as Jerry Falwall or Pat Robertson have essentially stated that acts of human destruction such as 9/11 or acts of natural destruction such as Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans were acts of divine judgment for homosexuality.

And they might have been such judgment for such sin, I suppose.  But I doubt if God told Falwell or Robertson any more than He told me.  For one thing, if these men were acting as God’s prophets, God would have told them BEFORE the disasters happened in order to forewarn the people to repent.  That’s the rather clear prophetic pattern of Scripture.  That’s kind of what makes it “prophetic.”

Me?  I don’t pray for God’s destructive violence to destroy my ideological or religious enemies.  Let me explain why.

In a word, I don’t want God to ruthlessly punish others for their sins for fear that God will ruthlessly punish me for mine.  You see, it turns out that I’m not perfect either.

That’s part of a detailed solution to the so-called “problem of evil.”  When the human race fell into sin (as recorded in Genesis), it affected the entire created order (see Romans 8:22).  Evil has become part of the human condition.  And there are literally billions of degrees of evil in the world.  And – unless He destroys the whole world (as He has done and as He will one day do again) – just where is God supposed to draw the line?

What we tend to want is for God to judge everyone who is at least slightly more evil than we are.  But why should that be God’s standard?  But maybe God should obliterate you and all of your family and friends, too.  It’s His universe, after all; not yours.  You don’t get to make the rules in God’s universe.

There’s an interesting passage from Jesus in Luke 13:1-5:

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

There is no question: God sovereingly rules over the universe.  And we know that God judges the nations and individual people for sin (see Romans 3).  But only rarely – as recorded even in Scripture (e.g. Psalm 73, why do the wicked prosper?) – do we know the details.

We also know that God is patient.  We know from the Old Testament that God will literally wait hundreds of years before He brings judgment.  And we know from the New Testament (2 Peter 3:9) that God is patient, not wanting any to perish.

We also know that God often holds His sons and daughters by faith to a much higher account (Hebrews 12:5-11).  Just as a good Christian father may not concern himself with other people’s children, but his own had better tow the line.

We will never know this side of eternity why many terrible things happen.  Or why God judged this nation or that individual and spared another.

But we certainly can look upon a great diaster and pause in our own lives to take a look at ourselves and at our own nation, and tremble.  Because what happened to “them” can easily overtake “us” – whoever “they” are or “we” are.  And we all of us need to be ready to meet our Maker.

If we all lived as though death were a postential heartbeat away, I do believe we would live in a much better world.

I look at the many major earthquakes and the disasters they are causing as a sign that we are truly in the last days.  Jesus told us in Matthew 24:7 that ethnic groups (the word is “ethnos”) would rise against ethnic groups, and that there would be famines and earthquakes erupting all over.  And in verse 8 He spoke of them as birth pangs, meaning that as the end came, they would get more and more severe. 

There are certainly famines and fears of famines galore.  That is one of the key realities behind the massive unrest in the Middle East (see also here).

It is a fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was at most one major earthquake a year.  Now there are “big ones” erupting all over creation.  There was another huge and deadly earthquake just last month in New Zealand.  And we’re even seeing a rash of earthquake activity in the midwest(see also here).

Jesus also spoke of great catastrophic signs in the waves (e.g. tsunamis) in Luke.  And in Luke 21:8 Jesus said, “Now when you see these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Bottom line: we ought to be looking around, and we ought to be straightening up and flying right.  And if you are a perfect, sinless human being, good for you; but if you have ever sinned so much as once in your life, if you have ever once violated even your own conscience and standard, let alone a perfect, holy God’s, you had better fall at the feet of the one Savior for the human race (John 14:6) and embrace the Lamb of God (John 1:29-34).

Let me provide my own parable to explain a powerful biblical reality.  It’s called the ants on the elephant’s back:

Two ants of different species happen to bump into each other as they crawl across the back of a huge bull elephant.  The larger ant says to the smaller one, “I can’t help by notice I’m larger than you.  That means that I’m closer to being the same size as the elephant we’re crawling on than you.”  Well, in a way, that larger ant is right; but his comparison is nevertheless utterly ridiculous.  Why?  Because the elephant is so enormous compared to the size of either ant – let alone the amount of difference between the ants’ sizes – that a comparison is meaningless.  And that’s the way it is with human righteousness and God’s righteousness.  Billy Graham is considerably more righteous than, say, a Skid Row bum.  But the difference in their personal degress of righteousness is as nothing compared to the awesome holiness and perfection of God.  And you might think you’re better than someone else.  You might even be right.  But you are comparing yourself to the wrong subject.

When we stand before God, we will answer to how we compared to the righteousness of God.  “Be holy, as I am holy” (Leviticus 20:26, 1 Peter 1:13-16), God told us.  And just as we bear His perfect image (Genesis 1:26-27), we bear the responsibility to living up to His perfect character.

Only Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life (Hebrws 4:14-15).  Even the Quran affirms this (Quran 40:55; 48:1-2).  Jesus, fully God, God the Son, assumed a human nature and lived a perfect life on earth.  And He died for our sins so that we could have His perfection by faith.  He became our substitute.  That’s what “Lamb of God” means.

You need that gift of divine grace.  I need that gift of divine grace.  And the people of Japan desperately need it today.

I pray for those who are in Japan.  I pray for their deliverance from both the tsunami and from their unbelief.  And I will join with many other Christians who will send relief to the Japanese people, with prayers that they will look not at me, but at the Jesus who changed my heart and my life, and inspired me to give to others.

Update: I have since written an article entitled, “The Three Fingers Pointing Back At Atheists When Atheists Point A Finger At Christians About Evil And Judgment.”

The Crisis In Egypt, The Future And Bible Prophecy

If the crisis occurring now in Egypt had instead occurred during George Bush’s watch, you can rest assured that the entirety of the mainstream media would have been asking, “Why didn’t the administration know this was coming?”  “How was this not a massive intelligence failure?”  And they would have characterized the Egyptian crisis as a failure of American leadership.

Conservatives like me have taken the attitude, “Do Unto Obama What Liberals Did Unto Bush.”  You find that the ideology out of power can drag down a president one bloody chunk of meat at a time.   Which was precisely what liberals did to Bush for eight unrelenting years.

As a conservative blogwarrior, what I would ordinarily want to do is take an event like the building collapse of the Egyptian government, link it to Obama, and blame his failure of leadership.  That’s what the liberals did on a daily basis to George Bush, and as much as the left decries the very tactic they developed and used to such advantage, it works.

And I CAN link this to Obama.  It was OBAMA’S regime that has been secretly backing Egyptian rebels, who literally set this whole firestorm in motion.  This support began during the period of transition, when Bush was on his way out and Obama was on his way in, and continued under Obama’s thumb.  And the American response to the Egyptian crisis has been nothing short of a fiasco:  Obama’s vice president Joe Biden said that Mubarak isn’t a dictator.  Which means he should stay.  But then Obama’s secretary of state Hillary Clinton says there needs to be an orderly transition of power, which means that he should go.  And then Obama’s press secretary says that the U.S. isn’t taking sides, when in fact the U.S. is incoherently taking sides first one way and then the other, basically as the wind blows.

Right wingers basically have all the evidence they need to throw out the bomb that Obama has been working to undermine US ally Mubarak in order to enable the Muslim Brotherhood to take over strategically vital Egypt.  And that he is even now undermining any coherent American effort to restore order.

And the thing about propaganda is that you can turn out to be completely wrong, but if people believe you at the time, you win, because those people turn against the leader(s) you’re seeking to undermine – and it’s hard to win them back.  And if you throw up enough blame, some of it is bound to stick.

All that said…

While I’m a political conservative, I’m not JUST a political conservative.  Unlike political liberals, who are secular humanists whose religion is big government – and for whom government is the only answer to the problems of man – politics is NOT the only solution to the world’s problems for me.  I also have Jesus Christ and the Scriptures that He came to fulfill.

And what the Scriptures say are more important to me than my opinions about Obama or even my limited government conservative political ideology.

With that said, I will NOT play the game of the political ideologue, using the latest crisis to denounce the current administration’s mishandling and predicting doom as a result of the president’s incompetence.

I will try to state what the Scriptures say about a strategically incredibly important nation that is nearly as ancient as man himself.

And so I am going to say that, as a student of Scripture and of Bible prophecy, I believe that Egypt will ultimately turn out okay.  Rather than point to the unrest in Egypt and denounce Obama for the horrors that will surely follow – as I would do if I were simply operating as a conservative ideologue and blogwarrior – I am stating my belief that Egypt won’t turn out like Iran.

Now why do I say that?

Because of the book of Ezekiel chapters 38-39.

Ezekiel 38 and 39 describes a list of seemingly obscure names of nations bearing their sixth century BC names.  Scholars can trace those ancient names and pair them with peoples and nations of today.  What we learn is that in the future, in the last days, a vast army of what are today Islamic countries led by Russia and Iran will launch a surprise attack against Israel.  And that God Himself will divinely and supernaturally intervene on Israel’s behalf.

Two things are significant: 1) the names of the nations on the list.  Why?  Because except for Russia – a key ally to Islamic regimes – every nation on the list is today a Muslim nation with animosity toward Israel; and 2) the names of the nations that are not on the list.

Joel Rosenberg became famous understanding this.  As just one example, Rosenberg wrote a “last days” novel.  Because he understood that Iraq (ancient Babylon) was not mentioned as one of the nations that would join the Russian-Iran-led coalition to attack Israel, Rosenberg “killed off” Saddam Hussein – whom he rightly understood would have participated in such an invasion.  And how did he do it?  By having America take him out after a terrorist flew a plane into an American building.  And he wrote this nine months prior to the 9/11 attack.

He writes in an interesting article that explains the book of Ezekiel and Bible prophecy:

It should be noted that conspicuously absent from the list is Egypt and Iraq (typically referred to in Scripture as Babylon or Mesapotamia). This is noteworthy since Ezekiel was writing the prophecy in the City of Babylon, in the heart of Iraq. We would have to expect, then, that neither Egypt nor Iraq will participate. Egypt, of course, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Iraq is now so engrossed in its own internal struggles that it would be unlikely to join a coalition to destroy Israel in the next few years. We are, therefore, living in the first window in human history in which neither of these historic enemies of the Jewish people are likely to be involved in the next major Middle East war.

This isn’t the first article in which I make mention of Egypt and Iraq and their role in the future according to Bible prophecy, for the record.

Now, I don’t cite Joel Rosenberg because he’s a “prophet.”  Nor would he want me to do so.  Rather, I cite him because he has a rock-solid understanding of Bible prophecy and because he has concretely demonstrated that his understanding of the Bible makes him prescient of otherwise obscure and constantly-changing modern times events.

Prior to Anwar Sadat’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 (for which he was murdered), Egypt had fought Israel during the 1948 war; it had fought Israel in 1956; it had fought Israel again in 1967; and it had fought Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

What is happening now in Egypt – with riots and violence and deaths and looting and vigilantes – is terrifying.  But somehow Egypt will end up with a government that will continue to be at peace with Israel.  Which means it won’t ultimately be controlled by terrorists or jihadist regimes.  We can’t know what will happen in the very near term, but overall, the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood will not end up in control of Egypt.  And up to this point, thank God, there has been a conspicuous absence of Israeli and American flag burnings in Egypt.

Frightening things are happening in the Middle East.  Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and Egypt are spiraling out of control as we speak.  Iran is one the verge of having The Bomb, and the world will become a very different place after this terrorism-sponsoring rogue regime feels it can act with impunity.  And the fact that Iran is Shiite will force many Sunni nations to develop nuclear weapons of their own in a terrifying arms race in the craziest place in the world.  And, of course, North Korea has committed several acts of war against its South Korean counterpart.

Jesus said that in the last days there would be wars and rumors of wars.  He described “birth pangs” in which each wave would be more painful than the last.  And while there have ALWAYS been wars, what we would see would be a level above anything the past has witnessed.  After two thousand years of relative peace, we had World War I, World War II, the Cold War (of which the Korean War and the Vietnam War were part), and now fighting that has at once gone to the “biblical world” (Iraq – Operations Desert Storm and then Desert Fox – as well as Afghanistan) even as it has spread to the rest of the world in an unprecedented way via terrorism.

And we aint seen nothin’ yet.  Soon there will come the Antichrist, also called the beast, who will come promising peace and prosperity, and who will come to rule the world, but who will in reality turn into the devil incarnate.  And those who are left on the earth will find war and ruin and death such as the world has never witnessed in all of its history.

It all sounds terrifying.  And of course it IS terrifying.  But I don’t have to be afraid.

First of all, I believe that God is in control.  And that God protects and delivers His people.  Second, I believe in the Rapture of the saints prior to the wrath of God.

What is God’s purpose for allowing such terrible events to befall mankind?  Why does God permit the coming of the beast?  Because mankind is in a stage in which it denies God and even claims that belief in God is creating all the problems in the world.  This powerful global secular humanist movement says that mankind is on the verge of greatness and that if the intolerant Christians could only be removed, humanity could attain that greatness.  And God will give them their chance.  He will remove all those who believe in His Son, and give the world its chance to govern itself without Him.  And what we will see instead of the Utopia these secularists have always described will be literal hell on earth.

And Jesus Christ will ultimately return to earth as King of kings and as Lord of lords just in time to prevent mankind from totally destroying itself as all the armies of the world gather at a place known as Armageddon.

It is THIS King of kings whose government I trust in; and no other.

The Book of Daniel says, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4).  Knowledge has exploded as no other period in human history has ever seen, and yet we run to and fro in panic and uncertainty more than at any other time.

You don’t have to be afraid.  There is a God who knows the end from the beginning.  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own [or the expert’s] understanding, and rest assured that ultimately the government of the world will be upon the shoulders of the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6-7).