July 27
Twittering Time Away
It’s hard to imagine that there once was a time when it was almost impossible for the average person to own a copy of the Holy Bible. Until the invention of the printing press, each Bible had to be transcribed by hand.
Today, I have dozens of Bibles around the house. You can go to a dollar store and find piles of Bibles that were mass-produced in China. For a buck, you can also buy a digital copy of the Bible. I have a text file of the Bible that I can email to anyone around the world. It's amazing to think that my Bible file would only take three seconds to transmit to someone with a cable modem. During the Middle Ages, it would have taken take three years to produce the same text for someone wealthy enough to afford one.
Over the course of time, we have gone from information resources being rare to them being in amazing abundance. In fact, I think we are now drowning in a sea of data. The internet has become a vast wasteland of trivial or useless garbage.
If you type the name “Jesus Christ” into a search engine, you will receive, as I did in Yahoo, 179 million results. There are some good links, but many are harmful. The Mormon cult alone has four links in the top twenty listings.
I've always thought the best plan of operation for any Christian website is to assess what value content will have the moment after the rapture. I would say that 80 percent of the information on the average prophecy site would become useless after the rapture. Most prophetic domains devote most of their space to news and issues with a temporary importance.
One of Satan's main strategies in the destruction of men's souls is to simply stall for time. Because people are born in a lost state, the devil knows that he wins by default. By causing Christians to waste time, he can achieve victory.
Christians who have the desire to be about the Lord's work need to ask themselves, "Am I actually doing something productive?" I've seen all kinds of examples of folks engaged in trivial activity.
At least twice a month for the past five years, a woman named Mary Sullivan has been sending me and several leading figures in prophecy a forty-page email that attacks the pretrib rapture. I'm sure none of the other people on her list ever bother to read her manifesto.
The lack of priorities is another problem. I was once told about a woman who spends vast amounts of time on the internet posting news stories and running a message board. While she was cruising the internet nonstop, her daughter tried to commit suicide. I don't know the details of situation, but the incident had no effect on her internet activity.
Social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter are key examples of misspent energy. I would single out Twitter as the leader of the pack. I've seen dozens of Christian sites incorporate Twitter into their web activity, and I can't recall one that posted anything meaningful. Most “Tweets,” as they are called, are just a log of what someone has done somewhere else on the ‘net. An example for RR would be, "I updated Nearing Midnight,” "I updated the Rapture Index," or "I added new articles to the site." I think the demise of Twitter will be the mass realization that nobody cares about the mundane activities of people’s lives.
This week, I found a great example of the fruits that spring from the productive use of time. A woman emailed me about the leader of an end-time cult. She asked me if I had any information on Irvin Baxter. Before I could reply to her, she had sent me another email, saying, "I sent you an email earlier about Irvin Baxter and his study on end-time prophecies. Interestingly enough, I typed in his name on Google and came upon the section of your site that has talked about him."
I long ago realized that one reason RR has been so successful is that so many Christians are wasting time. In the case of the woman who was looking for information on Baxter, there should have been a dozen apologetic sites with more detailed information ahead of us on the Google search results. These sites don't exist because most believers are focused on pursuits of trivial importance.
I firmly believe that if you pray long enough and hard enough for someone to come to faith in Christ, your intercession will eventually work. Unfortunately, it may take many years to achieve this goal. The time may come when there is not enough time. It may take ten years to lead your stubborn brother to the Lord. But if the Lord is coming two years from now, you’re eight years too late. Time is an important commodity, so don't be twittering it away.
-- Todd
American President, International Community in Dangerous End-Times Game
Barack Hussein Obama, along with other leaders of the international community, is pushing and pulling Israel toward decisions by Israeli leaders that will assure the eventuation of the time God's prophetic Word calls "Jacob's trouble" (Jeremiah 30:7). It is an effort guaranteed to cause all nations involved to be "cut to pieces," according to Zechariah, the Old Testament prophet: "And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it" (Zechariah 12:3).
Any observer of the headlines today, with God's prophetic Word as a prism through which to look in discerning the times, can understand how quickly things are setting up for the Tribulation. No leader is more observably at the helm in steering the world toward the seventieth week of Daniel (Daniel 9:26–27) than the American president. His administration is on the fastest track possible in attempting to force the U.S. into the new world order configuration so long dreamed of by the humanists-elite.
In the seven months since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has moved the country from its envy-of-the-world free-market system; he has gathered under his socialistic wing of control America's banking industry and automobile industry; and he has his eyes set on putting the nation's entire health industry under his absolute authority. Additionally, he is aiming toward as quickly as possible binding America's citizenry under global environmental controls that will forever put Americans under energy prices that will make it impossible to maintain a lifestyle anything like Americans have been used to living. His projected multi-trillion dollar deficits would mortgage the financial futures of American's progeny forever.
Yet, in terms of the dangers presented by these changes this president plans for the U.S., his and the other world leaders' dealings with Israel at present far exceed the insane actions just mentioned.
France demands that Israel stop the building of homes for Jewish citizens in East Jerusalem. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, in letting France's demand be known, said Tuesday, July 21, "The Israeli ambassador in Washington was summoned and the ambassador in Paris has now been summoned to the Foreign Ministry..."
The Obama administration is leading the way for other world leaders to follow in forcing Israeli citizens to give up property in Jerusalem, which God calls the "apple of His eye."
France’s bold move, coupled with increasingly harsh criticism of Israel by Russia, have strengthened U.S. President Barack Obama’s determination to enforce his demands that Israel stop construction for Jews. American officials said that the building activity is a negative factor on negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Neither the State Department nor the White House has commented whether its demands extend to construction for Arabs...
The apparent restriction on Jews in effect would remove from negotiations the status of eastern Jerusalem, which was restored to the Jewish State in the Six-Day War forty-two years ago. Hundreds of buildings in the area are owned by Jews who were forced to leave their homes under the British Mandate and during the War of Independence in 1948... (Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, “Worldwide Coalition: Media Putting Israel in Corner,” Israel National News, July 22, 2009).
President Obama calls the Jewish settlements illegitimate and demands that the Jews be cleared from East Jerusalem so the Palestinians can be settled there. The approximately three hundred thousand Jewish people living there are the hold-up to getting agreements necessary to move forward with the "Roadmap to Peace" effort. Moving these people will, he avers, make it possible to move forward for a peace he intends to hammer out with the same dazzling speed with which he has tried to bring America into new-world-order compliance.
There is an explosive dynamic building in the matter of America and the rest of the world powers-that-be making demands on Israel.
[Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu told the Cabinet this week that Israel has complete sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and decides issues such as building permits. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon declared on Tuesday, “Israel will continue to operate in accordance with its vital national interests... Our right to rule and develop Jerusalem is irrefutable" (Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, “US Policy: Jews in Eastern Jerusalem are Unwanted ‘Settlers,’” Israel National News, July 22, 2009).
The opposition to U.S. and international comunity leaders wanting to bully Israel doesn't end there. Even liberal Likud members like Intelligence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who is one of the most dovish members of the Knesset—having been in favor of giving up the Golan Heights for peace—was irate over the demands.
Meridor proclaims that former President George Bush's informal commitment not to uproot the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem should be honored. But, Mr. Obama has declared that the agreement was never a formal one, thus does not have to be fulfilled.
In my view, this bit of subterfuge displayed by the Obama administration is but a foreshadowing of things the Jewish leadership—who will ultimately sign the covenant made with death and hell of Isaiah Chapter 28—can expect. For America and all nations of the world, such luciferically spawned dealings with God's chosen people, in my opinion, constitute a dangerous game of brinkmanship beyond calculation. The result will be Armageddon (Joel 3:2).
--Terry
