6 Jun 2022

Published on: by RR7 Category:Nearing Midnight

May – A Month of Murder

Mass Murder events have become so common in America that most of them are not reported as national news. There have been 233 mass shootings this year in the U.S., per data collected by the Gun Violence Archive. The archive characterizes a mass shooting as four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter.

In the last year, 12 major cities have hit all-time homicide records. The liberal media wants to cover for the Biden administration, so it turns a blind eye to most of the carnage. The month of May was so bad that it is impossible to ignore the fact that something very wrong is taking place in our nation.

On May 14, an 18-year-old white man shot and killed 10 people and injured three others at a supermarket in a predominantly Black area, authorities said. Eleven of the victims are Black. Authorities say the suspect was motivated by racial hate.

On May 15, at least one person was killed and five wounded — including four critically injured — after a shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, California, the sheriff’s department said. David Chou, 68, of Las Vegas, Nevada, was named as the suspect. The attacker was a Chinese man that was motivated by hatred for Taiwan, where he was born after his family was forced from mainland China when the Communists prevailed in a civil war that ended in 1949.

On May 24 in Uvalde, Texas, Salvador Ramos shot his grandmother and then traveled to Robb Elementary School, where he killed 19 children and two teachers. The gunman’s rampage lasted 77 minutes, and police found as many as 1,657 rounds of ammunition and 60 magazines in his possession after he was shot dead.

Since the Memorial weekend finished out the month, it was a given that a large number of people would be shot in Chicago. Sure enough, at least 52 people were shot and 10 were killed in separate shootings across the windy city.

The left’s sole answer to mass murder events is gun control. If we prevent people from buying guns, they think the problem will be solved. There are more firearms in the U.S. than there are citizens. Many third-world nations have far greater restrictions on guns, and they outpace us in gun-related crime.

There is one popular legal proposal that would seem to show promise: it would offer incentives for states to pass “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who are mentally ill. I would be all for this measure, but I know the left’s agenda. I agree that crazy people shouldn’t have access to guns. Once we start putting restrictions on the mentally ill, the left can change the definition of who qualifies as needing to be red-flagged.

Libertarian podcaster Joe Rogan recently warned of the dangers of giving in to the current gun control mob:

“I don’t think it’s wise to take all the guns away from people and give all the power to the government. We see how they are with an armed populace; they still have a tendency towards totalitarianism. And the more increased power and control you have over people, the easier it is for them to do what they do. And it’s a natural inclination, when you’re a person in power, to try to hold more power and acquire more power.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has also warned how dangerous it would be to surrender to anti-Second Amendment campaigners:

Speaking at the NRA conference in Houston this past weekend, Cruz stated, “It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil.”

“It’s far less comfortable to ask why despair and isolation and violent hatred is so prevalent in America,” he further urged, adding that “the elites who dominate our culture” are intent on pushing the idea that “firearms lie at the root of the problem.”

Cruz continued, “Tragedies like the events of this week are a mirror forcing us to ask hard questions, demanding that we see where our culture is failing – looking at broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance, social media bullying, violent online content, desensitizing the act of murder in video games, chronic isolation, prescription drug and opioid abuse. And their collective effects on the psyche of young Americans is both complicated and multifaceted.”

“It’s a lot easier to moralize about guns and to shriek about those you disagree with politically, but it’s never been about guns,” the Senator further declared.

“Taking guns away from these responsible Americans will not make them safer, nor will it make our nation more secure,” Cruz said, adding that “In an age where elites embrace defunding the police, when homelessness runs rampant, when gangs dominate entire communities, and when radical district attorneys refuse to prosecute violent crime in cities across America, rarely has the Second Amendment been more necessary to secure the rights of our fellow citizens.”

About 100 years ago, you could walk into a pharmacy and freely purchase heroin and cocaine. You could then go to a hardware store and buy cases of dynamite. Today, it’s unthinkable to have these products for sale. What allowed them to be easily accessible is that there was a moral foundation that prevented most people from doing evil things with them.

I remember, in my teenage years, most dry goods stores sold cans of gunpowder. If Amazon and Walmart existed back then, you could buy gunpowder from them with no questions asked. Today, you have to go to a few specialty sites to purchase gunpowder. We can’t openly sell gunpowder because too many people would use it to make bombs. If our nation continues to descend into depravity, we may have to restrict the sale of knives.

It is very disturbing that all these mass murder events have failed to cause people to question the moral health of our nation. The vast majority of times when a shooter kills more than a dozen people, they generally end up dead. When they wake up in hell, there is no rewind button. It chills me to the bone to understand that these murderers suddenly realize they made the ultimate mistake and they are doomed for all eternity to suffer for their crime. I Praise God for providing us with grace that saves us from our sinful nature.

“But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8).

–Todd

Antichrist Spirit and Women

Today’s commentary is written in somewhat of a circumspect way. That is, it is offered with the cautionary note that the meaning I have a question about within the Scripture I will in due course reflect upon could be off the mark. Still, I believe that there is good evidence–swiftly growing evidence—that the perspective offered here likely has at least a due amount of, if not validity, at least a degree of credibility.

Looking from the vantage of my soon to be eighty years on the planet, the changes we’ve witnessed in our culture have been amazing. But from the year of my birth, 1942, until 1963 or so, the transition was relatively without societal disruption.

We had the constant fears associated with nuclear threat during the Cold War. There was the integration/segregation upheaval in 1957 and forward. But, again for the most part, it was a smoothly humming along culture and society in America.

Then, from 1963 onward, the American experience lurched from crisis to crisis, from protest to rioting. Then came the beginning of the development of national schizophrenia. And you and I have witnessed a volcanic eruption of upside-down cultural and societal thinking and behavior leading to this very moment.

Think of it…those of the leftist ideology go into an insane rage, shouting that the constitutional right to own guns must be destroyed for the children’s sake–so the children’s health and right to live is no longer threatened. Those of the same leftist ideology champion wholeheartedly the murder of 2,700 babies per day through abortion.

They say that people can be whatever sex they want to be–rather than how they come into the world gender-wise. They have inculcated even the youngest among us to think this way. If parents object to schools having this insane curriculum, the FBI of our nation gets involved—not to grab the culprits who are teaching our kids this madness, but to threaten the objecting parents as being domestic terrorists.

We have transvestites telling stories to kindergartners, seducing the little ones with stories of how alternate lifestyles are preferable over what was formerly the norm.

They give awards and trophies to men who compete against women in women’s sports and beat their women opponents by a mile, setting records in the women’s sports.

They are more and more saying adults can have sexual relations with children—that this is more natural than adults refraining from such activity.

They declare that men can have babies–that is, they can birth babies from their own bodies, the same as women give birth to babies.

And this is where I jump off into speculative prophecy that might or might not be on the mark. To me, the postulation, as I said, has, if not validity, at least credibility.

America and the world have gone insane–and just in the past decade or less, it has seemed to have made the leap into absolute depravity. We are now under the last-days oppression of the spirit of Antichrist. Of this, there is no doubt. This isn’t speculation. This is observable to any believer in Jesus Christ who seeks true discernment. We are seeing the way paved for that “man of sin, the son of perdition” to step onto the stage of history.

I believe we can discern this ever-increasing influence and imposition of the Antichrist spirit, in part, by considering the latest war on women.

That war, sparked and fueled by the Antichrist spirit, began, I believe, in those 1960s I mentioned earlier. The feminist movement, while purporting to be to win women greater standing and respect, instead inflicted upon the gender degradation and decline.

And now we see an intensification of the war taking place. I present the following as evidence.

These changes are just the latest example of the ongoing colonization of British healthcare by the transgender movement.

It has been a truly weird experience to watch women being pushed, inch by inch, out of spaces once reserved for them as the transgender movement advances through the culture. In order to ensure that men claiming to be women feel at home in their farcical appropriated womanhood, an entire dictionary of terminology has sprung up to replace the word “woman” and any other word that might indicate that women are … well, women. Thus, we now have “birthing persons.” “Pregnant people.” Women are “menstruators.”

Feminists have been forced to watch their erasure with some measure of horror — but if they protest, they are told they are TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary-Radical-Feminists, which means feminists who do not consider biological men in dresses to be their sisters) and shouted down — sometimes with violence, almost always with ugly threats.

And so it continues. In the UK, where gender ideology spread faster than Covid, the official advice on the websites of the National Health Service (NHS) have begun to excise the word “women” wherever it can be found. According to reportage by the Daily Mail, it is now “missing from the landing pages of three sections explaining cancers only found in biological women.” Information concerning ovarian, womb, and cervix cancers have been disassociated with “women” — despite the fact that only women suffer from these cancers…

These changes are just the latest example of the ongoing colonization of the NHS by the transgender movement—recently, NHS hospitals have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on gender neutral bathrooms, and midwifery students as Edinburgh Napier “were being taught biological men could get pregnant and trans men could give birth even if they have a penis … In a coursebook that has since been revised, trainee midwives were given detailed instructions on how to treat a male-to-female trans person during childbirth.

That’s impossible, of course, just as it is impossible for a man to give birth or contract cervical cancer. But none of that matters — only the feelings of trans activists matter now. (“UK healthcare system removes the word ‘woman’ from webpages about womb and ovarian cancer,” Jonathon Van Maronm, LifeSite News, April 26, 2022)

And here is my prophetic pondering on the matter of the war on women that is obviously ratcheting up at this time so near Antichrist’s coming on the scene.

I’ve always wondered over what is meant in the following Scripture, with regard to the reference to women.

Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all. (Daniel 11: 37)

It is obvious that there is an attack on the God-created matter of gender (“male and female, He created them”–Genesis 1:27). Particularly, we have witnessed an assault on the importance of the female gender. My intellectual curiosity, and even more my spiritual intuition, leads me to ask whether this reference to women by the prophet Daniel (that Antichrist has no desire for women) is perhaps, in part, wrapped up in the war on women we are experiencing in these closing days of the age.

In God’s holy eyes, men and women have equal standing. Each has a divine purpose. Heaven is, and will be in the future, populated by men and women who are absolutely magnificent in every respect. (I have personally seen them, but won’t go into that again here.)

To be part of that glorious place Jesus has prepared for all who are prophetically destined to live there for eternity, in magnificent, new, perfect bodies, here is the only requirement:

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9–10)

—Terry

Misconceptions In Prophecy, Part 2 :: By Ron Ferguson

Published on: by RR7 Category:General Articles

Part 2 here continues the series in prophetic subjects that I find are illogical and wrong. This is no attack on anyone who sees things differently (if they are supported biblically) but are matters that do concern me because I see error in the interpretations. In this Part 2, I am doing two Misconceptions only, and they continue from the previous three.

[MISCONCEPTION 4]. THE TWO FUTURE WITNESSES ARE MOSES AND ELIJAH.

We refer here to Revelation chapter 11, where God sends two witnesses exactly halfway through the Tribulation to perform their ministry right through the second half of three and a half years (42 months of “prophetic months” of 30 days each – 1,260 days).

Here is part of that account:

{{Revelation 11:3-6 “I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth.’ These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone desires to harm them, fire proceeds out of their mouth(s) and devours their enemies, and if anyone would desire to harm them, in this manner he must be killed. These have the power to shut up the sky, in order that rain may not fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to smite the earth with every plague, as often as they desire.”}} (NASB and throughout)

The ministry of these prophets is unique, for they are prophets of 100% judgment. Prophets of judgment will be fitting in the period they are assigned to. I do not need to recall all of the chapter 11 account but do wish to give this verse – {{Revelation 11:7 “When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will make war with them, and overcome them and kill them.”}}

These two prophets pass through death and resurrection.

For 42 months, they were invincible, but then God withdraws their invulnerability, and they were overcome.

God did that because their ministry was complete, and He is calling them home. Mind you, they were already “home” before they came to earth. This means that only 3 people ever came directly from heaven to earth to minister for the LORD – the Lord Jesus and these two witnesses.

Now having looked at their work very briefly, we ask the question, “What are the identities of these men?” In the past, it was generally thought they would be Moses and Elijah, but in more recent times, more students of prophecy identify Enoch and Elijah. It was said to be Moses because of the expression, “The Law and the Prophets,” with Moses representing the Law, and Elijah, the Prophets – {{Matthew 7:12 “Therefore, however you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”}}

That reason is so flawed and exegetically indefensible. You just cannot make quantum leaps like that. However, that is not the reason for rejecting Moses. This is the clear reason why we would reject Moses – {{Hebrews 9:27 “Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment.”}} Death is the appointment everyone has to keep because of sin (except the living who are raptured). Moses died, clearly written in the Bible. {{Deuteronomy 34:5-7 “Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor, but no man knows his burial place to this day. Although Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died, his eye was not dim, nor his vigour abated.”}}

It is appointed to men to die once, NOT TWICE. That just won’t happen, so Moses is absolutely ruled out as one of the witnesses of Revelation 11. Enoch is the only man in the history of the world who has never died, along with Elijah.

{{Genesis 5:23-24 “All the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”}} Because of sin, Enoch has an appointment to keep with death.

It is fitting that Enoch will be a prophet in the coming time, for like Elijah, he was a prophet of judgment – {{Jude 1:14-15 “About these also, Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied saying, ‘Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones Jude 1:15 to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.'”}} (even though the quote comes from the apocryphal “Book of Enoch”). I love the use of “ungodly” in the above verse.

Some believe these prophets come at the beginning of the Tribulation, for the first half. There is even a thought that when Antichrist kills them, then he rises to power. That can’t be correct. The two witnesses are God’s final testimony to the world, and then the end comes. That will be enough. The two prophets will be Enoch and Elijah, not Moses and Elijah. End of the matter.

[MISCONCEPTION 5].

THE 200 MILLION FROM REVELATION 9 ARE EARTHLY SOLDIERS. To be frank, I do not know how anyone can confuse this matter, but it is confused and has been for ages because I once heard it in my teens and believed it then before I knew better. Let’s look into it.

It is commonly believed that these 200 million represent the soldiers from the east (kings of the east) in an invasion force, said to be Chinese or Asian. That is not correct, and people saying that need to look at the matter, and we will do that now. I hate for people to be misled, and there is no reason for it. We must be diligent and open the Bible and STUDY the relevant sections. I will quote the passage in full:

{{Revelation 9:13-19 “The sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, one saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, ‘Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.’ And the four angels who had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year were released so that they might kill a third of mankind. The number of the armies of the horsemen was two hundred million. I heard the number of them.

“This is how I saw in the vision the horses and those who sat on them: the riders had breastplates the colour of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone, and the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths proceed fire and smoke and brimstone. A third of mankind was killed by these three plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which proceeded out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents and have heads and with them they do harm.”}}

This judgment plague comes from the sounding of the 6th trumpet. The judgments have been getting worse since the opening of the first seal, and if the wars all over the earth and famine and pestilences of the second, third, and fourth rider of the seal judgments were not bad enough, then we have this one here which is horrific.

Why is this great misconception of an eastern army of 200 million soldiers still being taught by people?

The first reason is a great confusion over the mention of “Euphrates.” In Revelation, the word Euphrates is used twice, here in verse 14 above and later on in {{Revelation 16:12 – “The sixth angel poured out his bowl upon the great river, the Euphrates, and its water was dried up, that the way might be prepared for the kings from the east.”}} The first Euphrates is a trumpet judgment, and the second is a bowl judgment. They are absolutely unrelated and have no connection to each other in time or substance. I will speak on that matter later.

There are 4 angels bound in the vicinity of the great Euphrates. They are there today, bound and waiting, and have been there for ages because of this wording, {{“who had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year.”}} These are not good angels, for good angels are never bound. These are evil and powerful demonic beings, fallen angels, who are bound because they are too evil to be let loose in the world, so God has confined them in bonds.

When they are released, they will turn the world into chaos and terror more than any of these apocalyptic movies try to do. They will command 200 million demons bent on destroying mankind. Their mission, if it can be called that under the permissive hand of God, will result in the death of one-third of people on earth, that is, of one-third of those remaining, because it is possible at this stage in Revelation that maybe half the world’s population has already perished.

They are called armies of the horsemen because they are under the control of the 4 evil, strong demons as they go to war against people worldwide. In his vision, John describes them this way – {{Revelation 9:17 “This is how I saw in the vision the horses and those who sat on them: the riders had breastplates the colour of fire, and of hyacinth and of brimstone, and the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths proceed fire and smoke and brimstone.”}} (I have never seen a Chinaman spitting fire, smoke, and brimstone from his mouth!)

The demons had the form of horses and riders, which also fits the concept of a demonic army advancing. In the previous judgment in chapter 9, there is a somewhat similar vision of another demonic army where the description is this: {{Revelation 9:7 “The appearance of the locusts was like horses prepared for battle; and on their heads, as it were, crowns like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men.”}} The heads of locusts and horses are similar when you look carefully at them, and the idea of locusts goes back to Joel as they advanced in judgment upon Israel.

God used the locusts in Joel’s time; here, He uses locusts/horses, demonic and cruel.

The description of these demons in our passage noted the following:

(a). The riders had breastplates the colour of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone.

(b). The heads of the horses are like the heads of lions.

(c). Out of their mouths proceed fire and smoke and brimstone.

That description is apt because it is associated with the way they kill people – {{Revelation 9:18 “A third of mankind was killed by these three plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which proceeded out of their mouths.”}}

The last verse in the description speaks of their tails. {{Revelation 9:19 “For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents and have heads, and with them they do harm.”}} It says power is also in their tails that are like serpents but with heads, and they do harm with their tails also. These are horrible demons. No wonder God locked them away, and they will be released only for a short time. But in that short time, 200 million demons kill one-third of all mankind who still survive after all the preceding plagues. Just note, they killed all over the world and were not advancing towards Israel to battle God’s Jews. In other words, these have NOTHING to do with the kings of the east moving to Armageddon.

That is about all I want to say about these demons, so let us get back to the Euphrates. The first one we just did; the second one is where the Euphrates will dry up to allow passage for the kings of the east. {{Revelation 16:12 “The sixth angel poured out his bowl upon the great river, the Euphrates, and its water was dried up, that the way might be prepared for the kings from the east.”}}

This one is leading to Armageddon, for straight after that verse, we read {{Revelation 16:13-14, “I saw coming out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs; for they are spirits of demons, performing signs, which go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them together for the war of the great day of God, the Almighty.”}} That is when the whole world is summonsed for the great battle of their defeat.

I am sure it is most clearly seen that the 200 million are NOT Asian, or kings of the east, or soldiers but are the most vile demonic beings. I hope, too, that it can be seen the two references to the Euphrates River are absolutely disconnected. I cannot understand why people are misleading others in that matter. So many have died that there is no way an army of men of 200 million could be raised, and even if it happened, it would be logistically impossible to control and move and perform. No, by the time of Armageddon, the world’s population will be small.

Just to finish with, a careful reading of Revelation will reveal that a lot more than half the world’s population has perished; when you count chapter 16, it is even a whole lot more (in just two accounts, one-fourth perish, then one-third). By the time you come to Armageddon, the earth’s population is drastically smaller, very much weakened from all the plagues, so the armies are quite small and possibly not too well equipped.

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PRAYER THANKS

A few of you know I was to have an ear operation to correct a badly perforated eardrum that was causing all sorts of problems. It turned out to be major surgery that took the ENT specialist surgeon much longer than anticipated, as the whole middle ear was infected and scarred. It took a long time to clean all that (many washes and cutting the scar tissue), and then he cut a piece of bone away to deal with more infection behind the ear. Then he severed the eardrum, grafted a patch on the back of it (taken from the ear canal), and stitched the eardrum back into place.

He was happy with it, but it will be a time before I know the success. The graft-taking has an 80% chance of success. As for my hearing, that was almost gone; we wait and see, but the Lord is faithful. Thank you to those who knew about this and prayed. God bless you.

We had to drive 280 miles to a private hospital in Townsville because the local State-run hospital in my city would not do it – had no interest. That is just part of the collapse of our traditional values in society.

(Queensland Health is in utter crisis.)

ronaldf@aapt.net.au