Trust in The Lord :: By Nathele Graham

Published on: by RR7 Category:General Articles, Ron & Nathele Graham

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6).

David wrote many psalms, and each one shows that he depended upon God. When he faced trouble and persecution, his faith would not be weakened. We need to learn from his faith.

“[[To the chief Musician, a psalm of David.]] In the LORD I put my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?” (Psalm 11:1).

This Psalm begins with a statement that every Christian needs to take to heart. Put your trust in God. Life throws out many problems, and situations can scare us, but if we put our trust in the Lord, we will have a foundation for making correct decisions. David was being persecuted and his friends advised him to run for the hills. David trusted the Lord, so running away wasn’t an option. Persecution always separates the strong from the weak, and David was strong because his strength was in the Lord.

“The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower” (Psalm 18:2).

Is God your strength? Do you trust Him, or have you put your faith in human understanding? Draw your strength from God. He will never fail. David would not be swayed from his faith in God, and he refused to run and hide. Stand strong, brothers and sisters. Our strength is in Jesus Christ, not in this evil world.

“For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart” (Psalm 11:2).

There were wicked people in David’s time, just as there are wicked people today. Need I name names? Satan has always given ammunition to people who are willing to work his will. He gives them fiery darts to fling at us, and his weapons will increase in size and power as his evil is allowed to control people. Satan’s arrows are propelled by people who act as his bow… by those who have rejected God’s truth for Satan’s lies. His favorite targets are Christians. His goal is to destroy our faith. God has given Christians weapons, and we need to stand and fight.

“Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked” (Ephesians 6:16).

Will you allow Satan’s fiery darts to cause you to run and take shelter in enemy territory? If your faith is in the Lord, then you have a shield of protection. Study God’s word and apply it to your life. In that way, you’ll learn to depend upon the shield of faith. Study prophecy, and you’ll understand what’s happening today and will make decisions based upon your faith instead of irrationally following Satanic lies.

“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).

Foundations are extremely important to the support of a building. If the foundation cracks, then the building will begin to sag and fall. The liberal masses, led by Satan, are attempting to destroy the foundations of God’s truth. They undermine Biblical authority by mocking God’s covenant of marriage, by forcing the lie of evolution to be taught in schools, and they’re hacking away at the foundations of America by ignoring our Constitution. God will not hold back His wrath forever.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

God will pour out His wrath on all who have rejected and mock Jesus Christ as they promote sin and unrighteousness. Christians have given in and believed the lies of the secular world, and the foundations of morality have disintegrated. Truth has morphed into a lie.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things” (Romans 1:22-23).

Because Christians have allowed the foundations of truth to be corrupted, God has allowed evil to grow strong. That evil is manifest in sin.

“Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves” (Romans 1:24).

Marriage between a man and a woman is a sacred covenant… a basic foundation of humanity. The liberals have destroyed the foundation of marriage and bring Scripture into question. God says not to kill, but abortion kills babies. Those little bodies are used to make vaccines, which we allow to be shot into our own bodies, and the result is disaster. Health problems, such as ADHD, food allergies, autism, and other major illness is the result. What can the righteous do? We can keep our faith strong and not be swayed by Satan’s fiery darts. God’s truth is the only truth. Stand on His word.

“The LORD is in his holy temple, the LORD’S throne is in heaven: his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men” (Psalm 11:4).

The Lord is on his throne, and we get a peek at that throne in Isaiah chapter 6 and Revelation chapters 4 and 5. Both Isaiah and John saw incredible sights in Heaven. Living creatures surround the throne, which praised Him day and night. What a glorious sight to see! Christians will see that sight. What John saw was after the Rapture, and there were 24 elders before the throne, which weren’t there when Isaiah had his experience.

“And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold” (Revelation 4:4).

The elders represent Christians. I look forward to the day when I’m before that throne praising my Lord and Saviour. The glory and splendor described there is what Jesus left in order to come to Earth to purchase our redemption. When He gave His life for me, He put His own blood in the holy temple that’s also in Heaven.

“For it the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13-14).

When things get frightening and Satan seems to be winning the battle, remember that God is on His throne, and His eyes see everything and will judge the wicked. Be sure you’ve accepted His sacrifice before you stand before Him. You want the righteousness of Jesus Christ to cover you.

“The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth” (Psalm 11:5).

David was known as a man after God’s heart. That doesn’t mean he never sinned, but it does mean that he was repentant of his sins. He had his share of testing and trying, but everyone is tested at times. Our attitude in those trials can make us stronger or cause us to grow weak in our faith. God doesn’t ignore the plight of those of us who walk in His ways but is always with us. On the other hand, the wicked will be made to pay for their wickedness. They have the chance to repent of their sin and accept Jesus for salvation, but they need to let go of their hatred, sin, and wickedness. There’s only one way to be forgiven of sin and find salvation.

“I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:5).

No matter how wicked you’ve been, forgiveness is waiting for you if you repent and ask to be forgiven. Only Jesus can forgive your sin. Turn to Him and turn away from wickedness.

“Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup” (Psalm 11:6).

So often it seems as if wicked people who are ruled by Satan are winning. They hold high political offices and seem to have everything money can buy. Very soon, the wicked will be judged. Fire and brimstone will just be a portion of what will be rained upon the earth and upon everyone who has rejected Christ. God’s wrath will be poured out upon all who have followed Satan. Prior to the Tribulation, Christians will be Raptured. While we are around God’s throne, all Hell will be happening on Earth. This is a blessing for Christians, but God doesn’t want anyone to face those final seven years. God wants us to witness to the lost now. It’s our commission, directly given by Jesus, to spread the Gospel.

“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15).

Wicked people can turn to Jesus for salvation, but they have to hear the Gospel. Brothers and sisters, spread the Gospel.

“For the righteous LORD loveth righteousness; and his countenance doth behold the upright” (Psalm 11:7).

This fact guided David. He knew that God saw his actions, and he desired to please His Lord. When he stumbled, he went to the Lord and asked forgiveness. As Christians, we need to guard our ways. Our righteousness is only through Jesus Christ.

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Without Him we are as wicked as the worst sinner you can think of. If you’ve accepted Christ, His righteousness has been imparted to you. Out of gratitude you need to serve Him; out of gratitude you need to share the Gospel.

We must remember that the enemy we fight isn’t people. The enemy is Satan and his minions.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

Study the verses which follow and understand the spiritual weapons which God has given us. Put on God’s armor and do not take it off. As Christians, we know the supernatural world is very real. We serve God and know that He is supernatural and completely good, but Scripture tells us of the dark side of the supernatural world where demonic entities dwell. If allowed, they influence people to do wickedness, just as the Holy Spirit will influence people to do God’s will. As Christians, our fight is against satanic powers, and our battle is lost if we fight without the power of the Holy Spirit. Don’t flee as a bird from the fight, but put your trust in the Lord.

The world is falling apart. America has been dealt a hard blow from Satan. Those who serve Satan tolerate everything except God’s truth. Christian values are being sorely tested, and our faith is being challenged. Study Scripture, including prophecy. Satan has taken control of the weak-minded, and he will continue to attack the righteous. David would not be swayed from his conviction that the Lord was where he placed his trust. Our strength is in Jesus Christ, not in this evil world.

God bless you all,

Nathele Graham

twotug@embarqmail.com

www.straitandnarrowministry.com

ron@straitandnarrowministry.com

Ron and Nathele Graham’s previous commentaries archived at https://www.raptureready.com/featured/graham/graham.html

All original scripture is “theopneustos,” God-breathed.

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Dreadnought Dispensationalism :: By Jeffrey Ady

Published on: by RR7 Category:General Articles

THE DECEMBER 7, 1941, ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR, just a dozen miles as the crow flies from where I sit writing this, has often been decried as the “end of the Dreadnought era.” Most naval historians have agreed over the years, saying that, at that point in time, the aircraft carrier had rendered the battleship obsolete.

Yet it was the USS Missouri [BB63] that fired the first shot in the initial assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq not quite 50 years later. The last operational battlewagon, the Missouri, combined 16-inch guns and cruise missiles in a historic rebuke to half a century of naval theory.

Why “Dreadnought Dispensationalism”? Why bring together these concepts? Let’s review each in turn, and then bring them back together in a wonderful application to the tumultuous days in which we now live.

The Dreadnoughts

  1. W. Dickie noted in a December 1918 Pacific Marine Review article that “it is… a curious fact that our modern dreadnoughts are practically the same dimensions as Noah’s Ark, only with sharper ends” [Pacific Marine Review, December 1918, p. 109]. This observation has been made as well by R.A. Burt in British Battleships 1919-1945; Burt tells the story of the British Admiralty’s rather unexpected but wonderfully reassuring finding that, when using the Genesis Ark’s dimensions in designing the Dreadnought class battleships, they found the vessels to possess excellent seakeeping qualities—particularly important as these heavy ships bore dense loads under myriad challenges.

The new warship design’s stability, armor, and formidable weaponry gave rise to the very concept of “dreadnought” as synonymous with early-20th-century battleships—afraid of nothing, needing to fear nothing, free to forge ahead boldly even in the roughest of seas and against the most determined foes.

But a new generation of military strategists, especially in the run-up to the second World War, argued that battleships were outdated; air power was the new capital asset in naval warfighting.

That doctrine has survived to this day, albeit with additions, most notably theater information acquisition and management and multiple asset interoperability. The very few battleships that escaped the scrapyards (or served as targets for modern ordnance and their delivery platforms) now survive as museums.

But their successors—including and especially Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers and their international peers—have carried the legacy of battleships into the 21st century as task-force-backbone and flag-level surface combatants without equal. Their modern capabilities dwarf what was only imagined a century ago. They need fear very little indeed.

Dispensationalism

Dispensationalism, as a doctrine, has a similar history. As do many others, I use the term “dispensationalism” as a conceptual folder for the fundamentalist, literalist, Christian eschatology including a pretribulational rapture and the message that we are now in the last days.

Not much investigation is needed to establish that dispensationalism dates from the Gospels. In addition, careful study of the Old Testament reveals a few passages that prefigure the manner and purpose of the Church’s exit from the world stage prior to Daniel’s 70th Week. Many well-known OT elements (such as Psalm 23 and 91) yield entirely surprising applications when viewed through a dispensationalist lens. I will detail these applications in a later article.

But a systematic worldview, spanning millennia, intentionally discourages people—especially Christians—from expecting that our Savior can come for us at any moment…perhaps before you finish reading this essay.

At the very least, Dispensationalism is disdained by most ministers, theologians, and lay critics as dusty museum basement material, worthy of classification as an outdated interpretive approach. At worst, Dispensationalism’s very mention stimulates reactions of revulsion, disgust, rage, and—yes—scoffing… by Christians! Weren’t we told this would happen somewhere…?

Yes, in fact: 2 Peter 3 foretells this very development. We are, right now, in those prophesied days. The many warnings of “be sure that no one deceives you” in the Gospels and Epistles seem to have been written with just this in mind.

Air power proponents such as General William “Billy” Mitchell saw battleships as huge, vulnerable, slow and relatively defenseless, and ripe for removal from the battle planning board. Relics from a centuries-old military doctrine that was fundamentally flawed at its core, battleships were seen as too expensive to deploy and maintain, and presented easy targets for a quick takedown from above.

However, the sky was literally the limit for aircraft—except for when they hit the ocean after being shot out of the sky by antiaircraft artillery fire from those very same battleships.

In the same way, literalist Christians interested in eschatology are seen as outdated, zero-altitude (low-level) thinkers, burdened with the heavy machinery of this-age and that-age and this-coming and that-coming and the unclean-as-leprosy belief in an imminent rapture. A social gospel focused on present-life maximization renders Dispensationalism into a too-easily-discounted “pie in the sky” doctrine.

Those criticizing or diminishing these beliefs offer alternative doctrines that soar high, ideas heralding a glorious Church that dominates the world before the Lord can come back (how are we doing with that project, by the way?), or “promising” Christians that they, just like unbelievers, must endure at least part of the Tribulation (and what a promise that is).

“Modern” doctrines… “lighter-than-air” theories, packaged with free rose-colored glasses, and heavier-than-air lies, flying by virtue of windswept canards and foils, tell us that we’re fools for believing that we’ll just “fly away” before the world enters a period during which it heaves and convulses under the judgment of God. “No,” we’re told: The saints will suffer through it, erroneously lumped together with the “those who dwelled on the earth” in Revelation. Categorical thinking, Evangelical-style, with a side of eisegesis. Enjoy your last supper!

But Paul warns us to not be caught up in these “winds” of doctrine (Eph. 4:14-15), tossed about on the sea like corks. The rakish canards employed in “higher criticism,” the lies pushed forward through the burning of black, ugly oil from within the earth (instead of pure olive oil—an intriguing comparison, I think), would have you expect no rescue, no great and miraculous “exfiltration”… “in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye,” before the hammer falls and the antichrist spirit is finally given free rein. And—in these darkening days—that’s an insufferable detraction from the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Jan Markell’s “An Open Door Closes” feature article here on RaptureReady warning of a recent, sudden, and mass turning away from the “blessed hope” is one of the most significant eschatological essays I’ve ever read.

A sobering example of this “turning away” is the tale of Brian Broderson of the Calvary Chapel movement, who—immediately following the death of his mentor, Chuck Smith, one of dispensationism’s most well-known modern advocates—urged Calvary Chapel pastors to abandon the “gloom and doom of eschatology” in order to offer a more positive outreach to Millennials. To the movement’s credit, most Calvary Chapel pastors have chosen instead to stay with Chuck Smith’s wonderful faithfulness to dispensationalism.

Churches need to get back to end-times literacy, strengthen their last-days emphases, and be sure of what they teach. I’ve been teaching and writing on this since 2006. If you are a pastor or minister—as I am—are you promising salvation in Christ across the entire Scriptural arc? Does your “Good News” include an imminent exfiltration for believers as the end of days casts its fell shadow across the entire world?

“Full-spectrum salvation,” for me, includes an imminent rescue from a world that has crashed through the guardrails and is heading over the cliff of globalism and the Great Reset. But the bulk of evangelicalism is evidently in the back seat, if not at the wheel, of that car and its woebegone occupants that is about to crash and burn.

Chasing after abundance in this present life; scampering here and there for the latest spiritual experience and emotionalist sensation; studying and implementing the coolest worship formula that sets the right atmosphere for mass audiences; full-service church centers that cater to every interest and demographic to attract more people; conspiracy theorizing that monetizes outrage and fear, and—yes, even “prepping” for the Tribulation that is soon to break upon the world—are not what the entire corpus of 2 Peter 3 tells us to focus on as of first importance. Read the entire chapter, literally, several times. Resist the conditioned urge to pull out single proof-text verses… and you just may see that you are, in fact, in the Bible.

“Dreadnought Dispensationalism”… Defined

There are still “Dreadnoughts” in the world… stable in the heaving seas of rapidly-mounting prophecy fulfillments that rock our planet at an ever-accelerating pace.

Will you dare to be one of those… who ‘dread nothing’?” This is a question I must ask myself with each new day. By God’s grace I can answer it with a “Yes!”—through the power of His Spirit, on the authority of His Word, yes! And—if I can—you can too.

I pray that you, dear friend, will be awakened to a new and fresh hope that our Father loves you, and that He will very soon send His Son for you, so that we will all be brought together by the Son in our Father’s House, led through the gates of that Great City in triumphant praise. Though we have sought Him with tears—for quite some time—I write now to offer His comfort. His promises are for you, and are about to be fulfilled!

John 14:1-4 (Amplified Bible):

“Do not let your heart be troubled [afraid, cowardly]. Believe [confidently] in God and trust in Him [have faith, hold on to it, rely on it, keep going and], believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have told you, because I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and I will take you to Myself, so that where I am you may be also. And [to the place] where I am going, you know the way.”

Jeffrey Ady, Ph.D.

January 13, 2021