sermonette: Sodom and Egypt

The Culture of Israel
John W. Ritenbaugh
Given 03-May-03; Sermon #610s; 20 minutes

Description: (show)

I want you to turn to Revelation 11.

Revelation 11:8 And their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.

I do not think any one of us has a doubt as to what city is being referred to here, but just in case you have not thought this through, it is the city of Jerusalem. That is where Christ was crucified, and spiritually in the mind of God, it is associated with Sodom and with Egypt; both of them vile places.

Sodom's particular brand of vileness seems to focus on those things which are sexual in nature. There is a great deal of immorality associated with Jerusalem. And then Egypt is associated with slavery. It is a type of the world. It is where Israel was held in slavery. It is where they were freed from. And so, the association there is slavery.

So we have, at least figuratively, vileness and slavery associated with the city of Jerusalem.

There is another type, and that is in the city of Jerusalem itself. God very frequently uses the city to represent the entire nation. And so we can expand the application of this one verse from the city of Jerusalem; just like here in the United States, writers, journalists, newsmen, they will say Washington said this or Washington said that, and we automatically understand that Washington is speaking for the entire nation.

Well, that is how God is using Jerusalem here, that the entire nation is Sodom and Egypt. It is a nation that is filled with vileness and with slavery—slavery to sin, slavery to Satan.

Now, I want to expand this out just a bit further. Because I think for those to whom I am speaking right now, we would tend to associate this with the United States of America because we live here, we know what we are seeing on television news, reading in the newspapers, and so we know that these things are going on in the United States. But you will notice Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. And so these things are not going on just in the United States, they are going on in the rest of Israel. So we can expand this out to Canada, South Africa, Australia, and all of the Israelitish people who are in northwestern Europe as well.

I think that you might be aware, but if you are not the murder rate in Britain now is higher than it is in the United States. Your chances of being mugged in London are higher than they are in any American city. Things are getting bad everywhere. Americans are almost being surpassed by other Israelite nations, at least in certain areas. Sexual sins, I think, have always been associated, not so much with the United States (yes, it is bad here), but how about the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden and Denmark, where things are really loose.

I know the very first time that Richard and I went to Europe together, we were in Amsterdam. We went up to the second floor of the hotel that we were in, and there was a picture of a bare-breasted woman. I mean, right out in the hotel, and I thought, “Wow! We’re prudes in the United States by comparison to this.” And a little bit earlier than this, my sister-in-law, who returned from London, came with a picture that she took out of the London Times. It was right in the newspaper of that movie star, Bridget Nielsen, bare-breasted, right out on the beach in England. So, the titles of Sodom and Egypt fit very well, not just for the city of Jerusalem but for anywhere in Israel.

Now last week I talked to you about an article that I had read by Walter Williams. He was making a kind of a humorous comparison between Michael Jordan and himself, and he could not understand why Michael might make more money than he does. He initially said, “Well, it’s because he’s better looking” than Walter Williams is, but then of course he analyzed it, and broke down in simple terminology so that we can understand why Michael Jordan makes more money than Walter Williams. Walter Williams has a doctorate degree. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University, which is really important because he is teaching the younger generation about economics. And by comparison, all Michael Jordan does is bounce a ball up and down on a court and put it through a steel hoop. And yet Michael Jordan is making about $32 million a year, and Walter Williams says he is only making less than 0.1% of what Michael Jordan does. But the reason, he said, is because Michael Jordan is doing things that the public wants to spend money on. And so the public is very willing to spend money to go see Michael Jordan play basketball. And then because Michael Jordan is so influential in the public, then manufacturers hire him to be their face, their representative, their agent out in the public, and they pay Michael Jordan tremendous amounts of money for that. Tiger Woods is another one.

But these two men do not stand alone because there are a great number of them. You know, around this part of the world, why, Dale Earnhardt's name was gold for companies, corporations, to invest in him to be their representative. And I dare say that, in a sense, he made more money from that than he did from racing, being a company representative.

That is why those people became wealthy. The public is willing to spend their money on the product that these people represent. They would rather spend it on Dale Earnhardt, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, et al, than they would on Walter Williams, or you and me.

This week there was an article that David cut out from the Internet. Very interesting because it was written by a Brit who was in the United States, apparently in Los Angeles, and he is a journalist writing for the Manchester Guardian. You will find this, I think, something that you are aware of, at least generally, but maybe you are not aware of how big this article about it is in the United States of America. The title of the article is, “With porn [pornography], and pot [marijuana] outstripping corn [the kind you eat], America's black economy [it does not mean racial black here, it means the black market, or that economy which is not on the surface, but rather it is under the surface, but huge], is flying high.”

Now, here is the overall economy in the United States. It is in kind of a depression. It is not really a depression, but at least it has declined for quite a bit over the last several years. The opening paragraph says, “Marijuana, pornography, and illegal labor [three areas of the black economy] have created a hidden market in the United States which now accounts for as much as 10% of the American economy according to the study—listen to this!—as a cash crop.”

Do you know what the biggest cash crop is in South Carolina? It is trees. Loblolly pine is the biggest cash crop in South Carolina. But as a cash crop, marijuana is believed to have outstripped maize, which is what the British call corn, and hardcore porn revenue is equal to Hollywood's domestic box office takings.

You know how big the entertainment industry is in Hollywood, its capital city, its tentacles reach out worldwide. American movies go everywhere, drawing in money from India, from Pakistan, from Africa, France, anywhere. And yet the pornographic industry in Hollywood is greater than all of those studios out there, you know, United Artists and Universal; and all of those put together do not equal the amount of money that pornography is pulling in.

Now what I am going to tell you is not in this article, but I have read it elsewhere. The pornographic industry in the United States is bigger than not only the movies, we will say the legitimate movies, but it is bigger than baseball, football, basketball, and the movies all put together! Bigger than Michael Jordan, bigger than Tiger Woods, bigger than the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, all of them put together is overwhelmed by the pornographic industry. Despite laws that punish marijuana cultivation more strictly than murder in some states, Americans spend more on illegal drugs than on cigarettes, and despite official disapproval of pornography, the United States leads the world in the export of explicit sex videos, according to “Reefer Madness, Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Market,” by Eric Slaughter. No aspect of farming has grown faster in the United States over the past three decades than marijuana, with one-third of the public over the age of 12 having smoked the drug.

While the nation's largest legal cash crop—corn—produces revenues of about $19 billion, plausible estimates for the value of marijuana crops reach 25 billion. You know, when you go out in the Midwest, and you are going through Illinois and Iowa and Kansas, you see field after field after field, mile after mile of corn, but the marijuana crop is bigger.

Slaughter writes,

Although popular stereotypes depict marijuana growers as aging hippies living in Northern California or Hawaii, the majority of the marijuana now cultivated domestically is grown in the nation's midsection, a swath running from the Appalachians west to the Great Plains. And throughout this marijuana belt, drug fortunes are being made by farmers who often seem to have stepped from a page of an old Saturday Evening Post magazine. Some of the most expensive crops are grown indoors on the West Coast using advanced scientific methods, but the American heartlands account for the largest volume. Some estimates suggest three million Americans grow marijuana. . .

Three million Americans are growing marijuana!

Now he goes on to say, “. . . mostly for their own, and their friends' use, but between 100,000 and 200,000 are doing so for a living.”

Are we rotten or what? From the top of our head to the soles of our feet, we have hundreds of thousands of people who are living two lives. Maybe we should say millions of people who are living two lives. On the outside, like he said, they look like good upstanding American citizens in their bib overalls driving their tractor, or whatever. But in the second life, they are crooks. They are participating in an economy that is just under the surface. It is illegal. But they are thriving on it.

Now listen to this: We will go on to pornography. Americans spend more money at strip clubs than Broadway (just think of all of the theaters there are in New York City) and regional theaters (so we add now to what is in New York City to places like Charlotte and Raleigh, Greensboro and Greenville, and Columbia and on and on), and orchestra performances (you start putting all of the city symphony orchestras and things like that together), combined. Are we perverted or what?

The industry has mushroomed since the 70s when a federal study found that it was worth a little more than $10 million dollars (not billion dollars, million dollars). The United States leads the world in pornography. About 211 new pornographic films are produced every week. Two hundred eleven seems like that is about equal for the whole legitimate Hollywood for a whole year. I believe that I saw a figure not too long ago that the figure for the major Hollywood studios for the entire year was something like 270 films. Now here is 211 every week! The Los Angeles area is the center of the film boom, and many of those in the trade are otherwise respectable citizens.

The Internet has provided a fresh and profitable outlet. In 1997, about 22,000 porn websites existed. Now the number is closer to 300,000 and growing. He then goes on to talk about the illegal farm workers. Just one part of the illegal labor market in the United States, and I think all of you who are holding jobs, and so forth realize what impact it is having upon you. And it is very interesting that there are outcries in the newspapers and in magazines virtually every week, every month, people want the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) to do something about this. The INS’ hands are tied by businessmen who on the outside are legitimate, but they are breaking American laws because it is cheaper to hire the illegals than it is to hire an American.

So we are being destroyed from within. There is absolutely no doubt about it, and God legitimately calls the Israelite people, Sodom, and Egypt.