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sermon: Hope to the End (Part One)


John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 03-Oct-16; Sermon #1344B; 74 minutes

Description: (show)

People everywhere seem frazzled, distressed, and terrified as a dark, evil, sinister force seems to be engulfing the world. The continued angst from dealing with this continual pathogenic zeitgeist threatens to render all of us into a state of hopelessness, apathy, depression, with absolutely no reason to ever expect a positive outcome. The church must forcefully deal with this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness or it too will succumb to this terrifying vortex of despair. We live in the same kind of cultural milieu as Noah before the world perished in the Great Flood. Over the past few centuries, and especially the last 70 or 80 years, the 'liberal', 'progressive' humanist philosophers and educators have successfully hi-jacked the minds of our populace, steering them totally clear from any reliance upon God by poisoning their minds with the patently illogical theory of evolution, forced upon unwary, naïve minds as fact and truth. The Day of Trumpets militates against this foolishness by restoring hope for the establishment of God's Kingdom which will permanently terminate decay, sin, and death. As God's called-out ones, we are fish swimming against a violent current, compelled to turn to God and keep His Commandments when the rest of the world rejects Him. As God gave the original Promised Land to Jacob's children, He also gave the North American continent (largely virgin territory) to the descendants of Jacob. In 240 years, we have indulged in affluence, but forgetting its Provider.




My sermon is going to deal with the present and past as to how in the world we ever got into this mess here in the United States of America. I am concerned about it because we have to deal with it. That is our challenge over the next several years.

Mike Adams, who calls himself the Health Ranger and is the editor of the Natural News website, stated the following about the American mental state in an article first posted on May 18, 2016 (then re-posted it because apparently it got a lot of hits, on August 31, or September 1). I will quote fairly extensively from what he says here:

I’ve heard from many people that feel a great sense of uncertainty about what’s ahead for our world, our nation, and even our own families. Many are frightened by what they see as a vast chasm of uncertainty. Others feel a sense of helplessness from being trapped in their daily commitments with seemingly no practical way to escape their jobs, their cities, or their financial limitations.

Within the whole of this article he believes that there is a positive aspect to this so it is not entirely a curse. To him this rather dismal assessment simply means that there are people who are indeed aware that we may have reached a critical juncture in the history of this nation, or even perhaps the entire world. They need direction for their thinking processes.

I agree that he is on the right track if the people get accurate advice, but he also said, “Many people are frazzled, depressed, and confused about what is happening in the world and they feel hopeless.” A moment later he states, “There is a dark destructive force that has taken over many institutions and governments.” It is said within a context as though this dark destructive force is the cause of the hopelessness.

Hopelessness is a key word to the purpose of this sermon, so I decided to do a little bit of research on the word hopelessness to see what the dictionary had to say it is. I am going to compare it to things that hopelessness generates. You may be more aware of what it generates than actually what the word itself means. Hopelessness is a judgment, an evaluation that gives no reason for expectations of a positive outcome of one’s desires. It describes a situation giving no reason for success. The situation is hopeless.

Depending upon the context that the word hopeless appears in it is associated with synonyms of effects. You may not say, “I feel hopeless,” but you may be on the path, or already feeling what I am going to tell you in your heart of hearts.

Hopelessness is associated with despair, being forlorn, despondent, apathetic, downcast, gloomy, miserable, dejected, sad. These are things that hopelessness produces, these are fruits of hopelessness. The situation is irreparable, pointless, impossible, impractical, beyond hope, disheartened, disparaging, depressing. It makes one pessimistic, melancholy, unpromising, vain, heartbroken, forlorn. This is only a partial list of terms that are produced from a sense of hopelessness.

My concern is that the church must not just live within this mess that Mike Adams is describing, but deal with its imposing attitudes on a daily basis without allowing it to strike us down! There is the danger for you and me right now. Not allowing it to strike us down, carried away with the feelings of the world.

My concern also is that God has clearly determined that we must live in the same world, and that we can be influenced by the attitudes we are surrounded by. Though Christian we do not live and work in an impenetrable bubble that shields us from anything disagreeable. We hear and see the same news reports, we read the same newspapers, we rub shoulders with the American public when we shop, and conduct our business affairs.

We are living in circumstances similar in many ways to what Noah and his family faced, and thus the challenges for us reside in this question: Will we be caught up in the threatening depression, confusion, and sense of hopelessness as the people around us?

Here is a reality. Those outside the church are living their lives guided by their world view, they make choices in life depending upon what they believe, even as we do. I have no hope that their world views will change for the better. What that means is, life will worsen, we are going downhill. I do not see any reason to hope that their world view is going to change, therefore the quality of life will worsen along with the rest of the world, unless we put a stop to it.

According to Mike Adams, his observation is, some people are outright angry, others feel fearful and threatened, uncertain, and hopelessness is certainly part of what is in their world view. At best their world view regarding morality is blurry and unfocused, they do not know what truth is. This is because evolutionists have effectively persuaded many people not to consider the existence of God as an important factor in their lives.

Much of the population is uneducated regarding morality on the street. There is nobody formally teaching them, they just pick it up from their acquaintances—at work, play, school. So much of the population is ‘educated’ regarding morality on the street, as the saying goes, through movies and common practices, rather than churches. The churches have seriously declined as being effective teachers of right and wrong, in the public’s eyes.

Their teachings persuade people to put far, far too much reliance upon men. That is one of the reasons this election period is so hot this year with a lot of accusations, acrimony, pain, being tossed here and there, because one party and the other party both want to get their person elected. They are not electing a godly person, somebody who is going to save us from our sins, that is going to halt the decline in morality and spirituality. They are putting their trust in a man or woman. Their reliance is not on God, they do not say we have to turn back to God.

Where does that leave us? I will tell you where it leaves us. We are fish swimming against the current. We are having to fight the decline that is continuing on in these nations, especially morally and spiritually. Today we are observing the Day of Trumpets, which along with the Feast of Tabernacles (that begins in two weeks), teaches us those truths that give our world view much of its focus and upon which much of our hope resides.

We are not the only ones that are involved in this searching. If we can humanize the creation, it too is looking for relief from what it is going through. It is hard to believe that the non-living creation can actually ‘think’ something, but that is what the apostle says.

Romans 8:24-25 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.

The hope that comes to us from the Day of Trumpets and the hope that comes to us from the return of Jesus Christ, some of that hope is in the establishment of the Kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead, and life lived functioning under the rule of God.

Hope is a constant expectation of an unseen reality, that is why Paul said if we hope for what we do not see as soon as we see it we do not need hope anymore. So hope is a constant expectation of an unseen reality. Some of that hope is in some of the things I mentioned to you, so we wait with positive expectation for those things (the return of Jesus Christ and so forth).

The challenge for us is whether our hope will hold its motivations to carry us through the strongly negative, anti-God influences the world is attacking us with. It is an aggressive attacking. Even the churches are not putting any emphasis at all on the expectation of Christ’s return. The people running for office are not mentioning God very much either, they are not looking to God to uphold us.

Please turn to Deuteronomy 8. There is a loose connection in our time in history between the church, as a body of people within the United States of America, and the Israelites of Deuteronomy 8. These Israelites with whom God was speaking through Moses were one month from settling in a land capable of producing great prosperity. The lessons of history are important if those lessons are known, taught, and applied in people’s lives.

Deuteronomy 8:6-13 Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, that flow out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey; a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing; a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper. When you have eaten and are full, then you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you. Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments, His judgments, and His statues which I command you today, lest—when you have eaten and are full, and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them; and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied; when your heart is lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, in which were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty land where there was no water; who brought water for you out of the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which you fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do you good in the end.

When this land was settled and established as a nation it was on virtually virgin territory, as though it had been held in reserve by our Creator for just this moment in history. That was not an accident, it was deliberately planned by God. There is a loose connection here between the Israelites in Deuteronomy 8, and us today. This land was founded on virgin territory that was capable of producing tremendous wealth, wealth like the world had never experienced before in its entire history. We got the benefit of that.

Have we kept God's commandments? We obviously have not! This nation was established by people who sincerely but imperfectly believed in the Creator and His divine laws. In fact one of the founders, John Adams, stated that our Constitution was made only for a Christian people. He was implying that non-Christians could not live up to the Constitution’s high standards. The nation was founded right in the very midst of the Protestant Reformation by men and women deeply effected in a positive way by the Reformation. Their beliefs were not perfect but virtually all the good that they had right has been squandered because of the loss of the founders' vision, and the failure to rightly and zealously keep the Creator’s way that was understood.

They were only one month from going into the land. It is interesting that God admonishes the Israelites here in Deuteronomy 8 regarding the fact that He was settling them in a land that was capable of producing a great deal of affluence. The warning is to you and me. Affluence is a distraction difficult to resist. God even warned that it might produce forgetfulness of the Giver of those gifts, and it did. Because the practical reason is, affluence tends to create opportunity to forget God and dependence upon Him and replace them with dependence upon the affluence. That is exactly what happened.

As the opening of this message showed by means of a brief overview from Mike Adams, we seem to be on the verge of reaping the whirlwind created by our nation’s citizens casual, careless, and at times openly anti-God behavior.

This is the beginning of what I think might turn out to be a three-part sermon. I plan to give the next two parts during the Feast. My focus in this sermon involves negotiating the times we are living in without falling victim to the attitude, the zeitgeist supercharging the world around us. Zeitgeist is the spirit of the times, the intellectual and moral tendencies that characterize an age.

We can see what characterizes this age spiritually and morally. There is an awful lot of intellectuality around and they put a spin on this stuff. But that is exactly what you do not want to get caught up in—the spin. That is why I have been going into these things regarding political correctness. They put a spin on things and it means something entirely different from what it does to an average person, but they are trying to force these things on us in order to grab control of our minds so that they can push us in the direction that they want to go in, rather than toward God.

In this sermon I want to give us some direction from God's Word that supplies truth about where we are as a nation, what caused it to be in this despicable circumstance, and what we must do so that we do not crash along with the world. What I have determined from what you might be able to pick up so far, my concern is that we do not get washed away by the spirit of the times that we are living in. It is very attractive in many cases, it is very appealing to human nature, but it is not God’s truth, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Matthew 24:6-8 “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. [God has willed that we must live through this. He wants us to show Him that we really want to spend all eternity with Him, and to know His ways.] For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.”

As an overview of what is going on in our world, the simple, plain truth is that we are living within and thus feeling some of the effects of Jesus’ prophecies here in Matthew 24. This is going to be a worldwide event, there is no escaping it. These things are being fulfilled before our very eyes, and life's pressures will continue intensifying.

Its effects are the major external realities that we are going to have to deal with. They must not be avoided because God has willed for us to live within what is happening. How might we judge whether we are being affected by the world's ways? That is why I gave the terms for hopelessness at the beginning. We might not say it is hopeless but we may feel one of the characteristics that it produces and not be realizing what we are saying.

Consider this: if you are standing on a railroad track in the middle of the night, and you can see the headlights of a train barreling down the tracks at a hundred miles an hour, would you make efforts to get off the tracks? That may seem clear but in some ways that is what we live in, and what we are living in is that obvious once you have Matthew 24 in mind. Jesus said, this is going to happen, you are going to have to live with it, you are going to have to endure it, you are going to have to, with God's help, overcome it so that it does not have the effect of pulling us away.

Jeremiah 30:1-7 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, “Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel, saying: ‘Write in a book for yourself all the words that I have spoken to you. 'For behold the days are coming,' says the Lord, 'that I will bring back from captivity My people Israel and Judah,’ says the Lord. ‘And I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.’ ” Now these are the words that the Lord spoke concerning Israel and Judah. “For thus says the Lord: ‘We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask now, and see, whether a man is ever in labor with child? So why do I see every man with hands on his loins like a woman in labor, and all faces turned pale? Alas! For that day is great, so that none is like it. . .' "

The worst time in the history of mankind! No other time in history as bad. God is requiring a great deal of us. Remember, Jesus said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” “I am the same yesterday, today, and forever,” “without Me you can do nothing.” That is where our faith has to be, our reliance has to be, our trust has to be, and if we want to keep those things we need to keep close to Him.

Jeremiah 30:7-10 . . . and it is the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it. For it shall come to pass in that day,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘that I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds; foreigners shall no more enslave them. But they shall serve the Lord their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up for them. Therefore do not fear, O My servant Jacob,’ says the Lord, ‘nor be dismayed, O Israel; for behold, I will save you from afar, and your seed from the land of their captivity. Jacob shall return, have rest and quiet, and no one shall make him afraid.’”

I will touch on this prophecy first, especially in terms of why this applies to us. It is very clear that the fulfillment of this is going to take place at the return of Jesus Christ. We are not close to that yet, the fulfillment of this prophecy is pretty far ahead of us yet, years ahead. There is no doubt that the Western world, including the United States, is squirming within what can easily be interpreted as a self-inflicted turmoil produced largely by a truly severe decline in general morality of its own citizens.

It is not entirely self-inflicted, however, there remains educated and thinking citizens in whom there still resides a love of country, and they are genuinely concerned by how far their nation has fallen from being in the land of free and home of the brave. Most of these people are older people, people who are over 60 years, who are really concerned because they can compare what it is like now with the way it used to be when we really were a land of the free and home of the brave. We had the whole word beating a path to the United States of America to share in the wealth, they wanted to be a part of it. We are attractive to people, but that is gone now. Now we are pointed out to the rest of the world as the leaders in immorality. Things have really changed.

There are two elements pointing as to why this prophecy should be taken seriously by us. First, it applies to both Israel and Judah together as one. This is important to the second point. Both are to be rescued at the same time, we are falling together but we are going to rescued at the same time. This prophecy involves the entire Israelitish nations, not just the United States. Britain, Dutch, Belgians, French, etc., it involves both nations.

Second element (it is an historical one), Jeremiah preached to Judah over three hundred years following Israel and Judah splitting into two nations. Israel never returned from any captivity to the land God gave to their fathers. The Jews did return. Therefore fulfillment of this prophecy still lies ahead. This prophecy covers our time, the time leading up to what the prophecy is telling us—the end time. Calendar timewise, the fulfillment of this prophecy follows Christ’s return. This prophecy speaks of a people being rescued from a captivity. This captivity needs further explanation because even now we are already being held captive, in our own land.

The captivity in these scriptures is pictured in a foreign land beyond the borders of present day Palestine. Here is an intriguing aspect that needs to be considered: it is that we are no longer anywhere near as free as we used to be. Please turn to Judges 6. It describes a captivity that happened while the book of Judges was being written.

Judges 6:1-7 [The Living Bible] Then the people of Israel began once again to worship other gods, and once again the Lord let their enemies harass them. This time it was the people of Midian for seven years. The Midianites were so cruel that the Israelis took to the mountains, living in caves and dens [These people are captive in their own nation. I am drawing a parallel here. We are in the process of being taken captive in our own nation before Jeremiah 10, ever comes to pass.]. When they planted their seed, marauders from Midian, Amalek, and other neighboring nations came and destroyed their crops and plundered their countryside, as far away as Gaza, leaving nothing to eat, and taking away all of their sheep [their livelihood], oxen, donkeys [as well as what the ground produced]. These enemy hordes arrived on droves of camels too numerous to count and stayed until the land was completely stripped and devastated. So Israel was reduced to abject poverty because of the Midianites. Then at last the people of Israel began to cry out to the Lord for help.

What we see here in Judges is a devastating picture of Israelites held captive in their own land by foreigners. I am not sure who wrote Judges but I believe that Jewish tradition assigns it to Samuel. Whoever the author, he describes an uncontrolled invasion as being like locust devastating Israel's wealth, and driving the Israelites into poverty. That was the price that God exacted for Israel's idolatry.

Here is a reality that is unfolding before our very eyes. This modern Israelitish nation [the US] has been invaded with the aid of our own president, who along with his administration has his own agenda he is striving to achieve.

In terms of number of invaders involved in his open borders and amnesty programs, the invasions of European nations that you have seen on TV news are puny in scope compared to what happened to ancient Israel and what is happening right now, here in the United States of America.

You saw on TV them opening the gates and tens of thousands, maybe a couple of million people streamed over the borders into Europe, into Israelitish nations. Our president greatly desires to grant amnesty to both legals and illegals and thus voting rights to all of those participants in this present invasion.

This is a totally self-centered move by this administration. This nation has never in its history had to endure such a thing. It is driving us apart, according to the U.S. English Inc., which is an organization fighting to make English as America's official language. According to them there are a staggering thirty million people in America who can barely speak a sentence in English! At the same time the administration has managed to place on Congress’ docket to vote on a bill making absolutely certain English never becomes America's official language. There is major division being served right at the very top.

One of the things the administration desires is to create confusion to hide the totality of the takeover that is taking place. Another organization, I did not write it down, they are trying to force the government to close the borders and control the wild immigration underway. These people have printed the following:

I will give you a United States government official figure. As of December 2015, there was a record sixty-one million adult and children—legal and illegal—immigrants here in the United States. Today it is higher but I was unable to get an official government figure for right now.

Even though normal American citizens are 81.4 % of the nation’s total population, one in five children born in the United States is now the child of an immigrant. That means that 18.6% of our total population is producing 80% of all new births. Have we been invaded or what? It did not take an army with guns, all it took was open doors and an invitation to share in the wealth that the United States is producing as a handout.

The immigrants are out-birthing Americans by a staggering amount. Meanwhile there are twenty-three million unemployed Americans. Another figure from the immigration is perhaps most shocking of all in this era of uncontrolled borders. In many months, in recent years of this out-of-control immigration, is that 100% of the net gain in number of working people age (someone above the age of 16), has gone entirely to the legal and illegal immigrants. That is staggering! They are not saying they are taking every job, but the population is increasing that they are able to take every job.

I am old enough to remember, and actually lived in this nation when we were truly a free people in our own land compared to what now exists. Do you recall me quoting an article written by former president Jimmy Carter? I quote him because he was a president and because he is somebody to be listened to. He said, “We no longer live in a free nation.” That is quite an admission from a former Democrat. He said in that article we are being governed by an elitist group and that some in that group are not necessarily elected representatives.

In addition, another well known commentator, Paul Craig Roberts, who I believe was president Reagan's secretary of the treasury, said, “The American's citizenry is now a nation of serfs.” Do you know what a serf is? A slave. They are not chained to anything, they are a slave, a person who is bound to an estate, a corporation, no longer free. He belongs to the corporation.

So many liberties have been taken away and regulations governing life are so extensive and so cramping that we now cannot even be sure which bathroom to use without being reprimanded for going to the wrong one. This is how silly this is. Everything depends on how one feels about himself. Men, if you feel you are a woman, you are a woman. Ladies, if you feel you are a man, you are a man. That is how weird we have become, yet people are going for it like somebody opened the door of prison.

I recall reading that Abraham Lincoln stated in the late 1850s, as this nation was headed toward civil war, that, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedom it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” As a nation we seem to have lost our common sense and we have had forced upon us a way of life foreign to what we formerly had and continued to live for two hundred years. What has happened?

I Samuel 8:1-21 Now it came to pass when Samuel was old that he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beersheba. But his sons did not walk in his ways; they turned aside after dishonest gain, they took bribes, and perverted justice. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” So Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day—with which they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. Now therefore, heed their voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and show them the behavior of the king who will reign over them.” So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king. And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. [Notice the loss of liberties that these people had to endure.] He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots [they are working for somebody else]. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants [by means of taxes]. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep, and you will be his servants. And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.” Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel and they said, “No, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he repeated them in the hearing of the Lord. So the Lord said to Samuel, “Heed their voice, and make them a king.” And Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Every man go to his city.”

Consider the things that I just said that are happening here in the United States of America—a foreign way has been subtly forced upon us by a people calling themselves Americans. A way of life commonly associated with the Gentile nations, those nations who do not have the close association that the Israelites had with God through His Book. The close association is based within the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The change did not come on us suddenly. It is as though these invaders stealthy crept in like a cancer gradually eating away at the nation’s vitals, through godless carnal miseducation until they now control virtually every aspect of government, corporate power, economy, education, and religion. Thus today, even though the geographical location of this nation did not budge one inch from where it has been since the beginning, nor has a foreign army penetrated its shores, yet living in it is now much like living in a foreign land to many of us older folks.

It is though a poisonous fog is hanging over the nation and that has so greatly affected our thinking processes that we no longer live by the common sense values that previously established us to live and prosper in harmony.

Judges 10:6-7 Then the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Baals and the Ashtoreths, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; and they forsook the Lord and did not serve Him. So the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel; and He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and into the hands of the people of Ammon. [Mexico, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere, He sold us into the hands of these people.]

Jeremiah 30:8 "For it came to pass in that day," says the Lord of host, "that I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds; foreigners shall no more enslave them."

You realize that is what is happening to us. We are being pulled into slavery. On September 18, 2016, our president spoke before the U.N. General assembly. I have a summary of what he said. This was clipped from a website by the name of End Times, it is religious oriented. The author who wrote the article was one Geoffrey Ridder, and his article appeared on September 20. I will not read you to whole article, I just want you to see what this headline says. It says, “Obama at the United Nations Calls for America to be Bound by International Laws.” That is a direct appeal by our president for us to be even more worldly than we are now and to be bound not by the laws of God, but by the laws of the world.

This situation is being worked right from the top. The way I conclude is what we are seeing are the operations of the Beast. Without negotiations he and his group of people are forcing this on the most powerful nation in the world and they are getting away with it without a shot being fired against any of them. We are now being held hostage in our own nation.

In biblical terminology he is saying his desire for the future of the United States of America is that we become even more like the Gentiles, not a nation more godly. So the Beast power of the book of Revelation is imposing its system on the Western world, and we are not collapsing alone—Britain is collapsing with us. They are the two primary targets, maybe the Dutch, and the French as well, because they are the most powerful of the Israelitish nations in the Western world besides the United States and Canada.

What is a conclusion that we can reach at this time? We are in principle repeating what our forefathers did. Life goes on but a disturbing, edgy, anxiety has moved in and taken virtual control as the dominant influence in life. Like a fog hanging over us irritating us so that we do not know what is going on. Thus instead of living in a state of liberty we live competitively, fearfully fighting one another to maintain some measure of control of our life. What has happened is directly tied to the central theme of that long string of commentaries that I gave to you week after week. I did that deliberately because I wanted you to come to understand that this thing that is happening to us now has been going on for six, seven, eight hundred years, they have been building toward this point in this history.

Of course when they started they did not know that there would be a United States of America, Canada, or England, but Satan knew that something was coming. He moved his operatives to put it into the minds of people things that were going to be necessary to sneak this right in against us so that we will collapse from within. He is not dumb. That is why I began the series all the way back in the 1200s, when universities began to form and began to pick out philosophers who greatly effected the minds of the Western people.

The Israelitish people who were living in those nations, many of whom eventually ended up in the United States and had massive influence on our universities, they in turn had massive influence on the students going through there. Now it is all the way down to kindergarten.

Those commentaries were focused ever-so-briefly on the influential philosophers who, led by the great deceiver, taught and persuaded the leadership of the Western world by means of small increments to abandon any loyalty that we might have possessed to the Creator. What must we do?

I Timothy 6:20-21 O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge—by professing it some have strayed concerning the faith. Grace be with you. Amen.

Those of you who are older might recall seeing Nikita Khrushchev on television news pounding the heel of his handheld shoe on a desk during a United Nations meeting in New York City, defiantly asserting to the Americans who were in the room, “We will bury you!” while he pounded on the desk with all the vigor and energy he could bring.

Russia all by itself is not accomplishing this, and yet it is happening in a way we never expected at that time. We expected the Russians to come with billions of troops behind tanks. They did not have that up their sleeve at all. They were going to deceive us in our thinking, they have just about got us buried by turning us away from God. That process began all the way back in the ‘30s. Actually before that economically, in 1910 those people began to subvert the economy of the United States of America.

I do not know if any of you remember Al Smith, a very popular Democrat. He had one fault, he was Catholic. He ran for president in 1928, and was defeated by Herbert Hoover. Within five years, Al Smith, who at the time was head of the Democratic Party in the United States, was so frustrated, so upset, so angry at what was going on in the Democratic Party that he just dropped out. He did not leave the United States. He just quit because he saw the direction they were headed was evil and bad and he would have nothing to do with it.

By the time Khrushchev did what he did (that was the 1950s), the subversion was well under way—the anti-God spiritual conversion. What is it like now? We find ourselves living in the moral detritus of an educational war spawned by the master destroyer in his attempts to destroy the people and the nation on earth most closely associated with the Creator. I mean the Israelitish nations who like a prodigal son have wasted their inheritance.

What resulted from this war is the abandonment of the revelation given in God's Word as being the foundation and source of education in every facet of life. Instead we have accepted the discoveries of human knowledge (science) falsely so called, as being the seed bed and soil of Western Civilization.

The guiding principles cobbled together by the founders of this nation were not perfectly aligned with the Creator’s Word, but they were close enough that they provided a way of life that helped the citizenry here rise to become the envy of the world in terms of prosperity. Immigrants flocked here. My own ancestors came from southern Germany. They came here with a huge number of Germans who came here because they wanted to get in on it too. Those Germans were probably Israelites who came here at the forcing of God to fill a quota of the number of people that He wanted here.

The immigrants flocked here to share in it, but roughly eighty years ago we began turning our backs wholesale on the original guidance and thus began our plummeting descent into what now exists as this nation’s moral standards.



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