Nearing Midnight

Commentary on world events that relate to Bible prophecy and on Rapture Ready issues world events.

Sep 14, 2009
The UN Takes the Lead
In the past few months, the United Nations has taken a very active role in managing the affairs of the global community. The UN has been filling a role left vacant by the Cold War superpowers. Gone are the days when the USSR and America had the globe divided into two main camps of influence. The Soviet system is totally defunct, and the U.S. seems to lack the respect and authority it once had on the world stage.
President Barack Obama is pursuing a strategy that calls for greater cooperation between the U.S. and the United Nations. Later this month, he will become the first American president to chair its fifteen-member Security Council.
The Obama administration claims to be changing from the previous administration's cowboy strategy that used the world body principally to endorse its own unilateral policies. The new plan would have the U.S. working exclusively through the UN on issues of global importance.
Our image problem is not that the world hates us because we act alone. Nations hate us because they loathe our values. We stand for freedom and they don’t. Our support of Israel has gotten us into more trouble than anything. Kissing up to the Arab bloc is not going to change our stand with them. The only way to please them is to abandon Israel.
The topic for the session of the council on September 24 is nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament–one of several global challenges that the U.S. now wants to see addressed at a multinational level. Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs will be a key focus of the meeting.
The hope is to make the UN the world’s policeman. George H. Bush started us down this path when he went to the UN for authorization to carry out the first Gulf War. Obama is pushing America deeper into this stew of collective thinking. It no longer matters what is in America's best interest. We now have to find common ground with people on the other side of the globe.
The UN would also like to be the center for dealing with financial crises. The Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development recommended that the dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced by establishing a new currency. It said in a report that UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members.
China, India, Brazil, and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency. Of course, this plan would spell the death of the dollar. With the U.S. loaded down with a massive debt load, the idea of a new currency is gaining ground.
People seem to have forgotten the decades of ineptitude that made the UN a yackfest laughing stock. If it wasn’t for American money and manpower, the UN would have long ago collapsed as an organization. The only UN accomplishment that stands out in my mind is how the general assembly could be depended on to issue a condemnation of Israel every time it defended itself from Arab aggression.
All I see is the same UN when I read news reports about Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi planning to make his first visit to the General Assembly. There is still blood on his hands from the Lockerbie bombing that killed over two hundred people. I doubt Gaddafi is coming to New York to pledge he will never again engage in terrorism.
Students of Bible prophecy should know that the emergence of any global body is a red flag for the end time's nearness. Someday, the Antichrist will have total control over the global population. I don't think he will achieve this task as head of the UN. The Bible says the Beast of Revelation will come out of Europe. His rise to power could greatly benefit from a strong UN and a U.S. that is reduced to the status of team player.
I predict this new UN leadership will only compound the world’s ills. It takes a strong military leader to bring any type of peace to the world. Even in the case of the Antichrist, the peace he brings will only be temporary. There will never be true peace until the Prince of Peace (Jesus Christ) comes to setup the eternal kingdom.

-- Todd

Rapture Near: Part I
"How near do you think the rapture might be?" This or similar questions issue from people, both believers in Christ and nonbelievers. The queries come during question-and-answer sessions at prophecy conferences, and from interviewers such as my History Channel interviewer last June during filming for a series of documentaries on prophecy.
Despite innate skepticism, even within believers, one senses that there flows just beneath the surface of decorum in posing the question a visceral trepidation that there will be such a thing as "the rapture." While those who attend prophecy conferences and secular media types seem genuinely to want an opinion on how near the rapture is, there is almost zero interest in that great event within Christ's church in general. This singular reality is, by itself, a factor worth examination while contemplating the question: "How near do you think the rapture might be?" More about that in due course.
To begin considering matters involved, the question can't be adequately entertained to any degree of understanding without analyzing our strange times—this bordering-on-bizarre generation that Jesus himself was most likely prophesying in the Olivet Discourse and other places in Scripture.
America presently has a collective nervous twitch. Worry about the diseased economy is the instigator of the societal surface spasms. Uncertainty about what direction—and how quickly—will be movement into the changes President Barack Obama promised and is trying to deliver has, rather than put minds at ease, caused a form of national schizophrenia. The schism separates Americans in crucial areas of politics and morality, which are in most aspects inextricably linked.
Those divisions threaten to raise the national temperature to a fever pitch. There is a sense that, as radio talk-show host Glen Beck says, a powerful crisis event lurks in the immediate future. It will be the crisis, Beck believes, that will cause government to snap its voracious, all-consuming, lust-to control jaws shut on liberty.
So, it is more than a matter of curiosity that leads me to think upon the many issues and events swirling about this generation that seem almost certainly of biblically prophetic significance. This, while there is the obvious disconnect of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the most part, from those foreboding issues and events that are everywhere we look.
Pocketbook issues almost always lead the way with the adult American citizen. This is a fact, whether talking about those who produce income or those who don't. And, therein lies much of the division in America today. The great political—and cultural—schism, like it or not, is provably engendered and perpetuated by those who work, pay taxes, and contribute to the nation's economic progress, versus those who don't work, but receive the taxpayer-funded largesse of growing government that is devoted to taking care of and growing exponentially its voter base from cradle to grave. This is not to say society—particularly private charity—should neglect the truly needy, those who can't work because of physical or mental incapacity.
Cynical? If so, it is cynicism steeped in provable statistics, the presentation of which isn't the thrust of this essay. Such thought—at least in a general sense—is necessary, however, in order to understand the role the riches of this fallen world play in setting up today's prophetic alignment and the nearness of the rapture.
The wallet issue that is front and center—that is most intensely focused on—is the “healthcare for everyone” debate. Universal coverage so that no person will go without healthcare is the proclaimed great concern the politicians parade before the sycophantic mainstream media microphones and cameras. But, in the cabals of behind-the-scenes power politics, it is ever-increasing governmental control—not equitable health care for all Americans—that many within government seek. Congressional leaders, as we know, have not been leading the way en masse to give everyone the same premium healthcare system they themselves enjoy.
Control, then, is the operative word in thinking on the question: "How near might be the rapture?" Control of economy, of monetary matters, is the thrust that impels human leaderships within government toward the time of absolute power that will corrupt absolutely. The Antichrist regime is the ultimate government that lurks in the dark haze of the prophetic future.
Glen Beck, although I'm convinced he hasn't a clue of what will be the true crisis that will fling open the gate to enslavement, is on the mark in sensing that there hovers an unprecedented moment of crisis somewhere just ahead. That crisis will with unbelievable swiftness sweep everyone into its vortex of soul-rending calamity.
Next week, we will look more deeply into how near the rapture might be.
Terry