(Isaiah 37-38; Philippians 3)

For those who think they plot and perform their evil in secret, I have news for them. God sees it all. They believe that their ways are higher than God’s – can you imagine? From time immemorial, man has chosen his own way of living and decided he has no accountability to the God of creation. If such people believe in a creator God, they may consider Him as was once portrayed like the old watchmaker. He made the watch, wound it up, then set it to run without any further involvement in its operation. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Those who live in this delusion at some point learn how wrong they are!

We find an example of this when the king of Assyria besieged Jerusalem. This pagan nation – one of the fiercest and most feared throughout history – had already destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. Now it was coming against Hezekiah and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. If Hezekiah had been like all the apostate rulers of Israel in the north, Judah would likely have fallen at this time. However, Hezekiah was one of a handful of kings who worshiped Yahweh and honored Him. That made all the difference in the world.

The Assyrian king, Sennacherib, sent his chief military commander, identified as the Rabshakeh, to mock Hezekiah and his trust in Yahweh. It’s easy to understand how the Assyrians might think Hezekiah’s God was no different from any other. All the peoples whom Assyria invaded and destroyed had their own gods that proved worthless. Even Israel’s Northern Kingdom, in Assyria’s eyes, presumably followed the same God as Judah. Of course, that wasn’t actually the case. Israel had long ago fallen deeply into apostasy and had no use for Yahweh. This was the fatal error that Sennacherib made in attacking Judah.

After the Rabshakeh delivered his message of scorn against the God of Israel, and Hezekiah appealed to Him for mercy for His people, Yahweh answered through the prophet Isaiah. What He said is worth the price of admission. It’s marvelous and classic.

Isaiah reported back to Hezekiah God’s own Words, in which He directly addressed the king of Assyria. First, look at Isaiah 37:23-24:

“Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel! By your servants you have mocked the Lord….”

Yahweh says to this heathen king, ‘You’ve ridiculed the wrong God.’ Indeed, he has.

The Holy One of Israel goes on in Isaiah 37:26:

“Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should make fortified cities crash into heaps of ruins….”

Sennacherib thought that his idea to invade Judah and besiege Jerusalem was something he’d conceived on his own and was part of his brilliant strategy of conquest. This is why God laughs at the nations (Psalm 2). They think they are separate from God and not under His supervision. He may not be their territorial god, per se, as their own gods were, like Nisroch was in Assyria’s case (Isaiah 37:38), but Yahweh was and is sovereign and above every one of these pretender gods. This foolish king of Assyria who thought he could take down a nation protected by Yahweh was only following the plan that He already had foreseen and thus could thwart.

In fact, God is like that proverbial fly on the wall in the king’s chambers as Isaiah 37:28 says:

“I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against me.”

Nothing that Assyria considered through its various hostilities was a secret from the Lord. Not one thought or plan the king and his advisors made was hidden from Him.

As a result, so as to keep Judah safe, Yahweh declared about Sennacherib in Isaiah 37:29:

“Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come to my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.”

This came to pass. God caused the Assyrian king to pull away from Judah. Yahweh distracted him and caused the angel of the Lord to suddenly kill 185,000 of his troops overnight in a devastating blow. God’s Word came to pass.

What can we take away from this today so many years removed? God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). He sees and knows every scheme of the enemy. What we’re experiencing in these current latter days is no surprise to God. In His foreknowledge, He saw long ago what the evil cabal of globalist elites determined to do to rule the world. He conveyed the enemy’s plans through the prophets and gave them to us in His written Word. We already know the end because God has shown it to us.

Will things in the world get worse and worse? Will people be deceived? Will depravity rule the hearts of man? Will there be wars and rumors of war? Will there be natural disasters like at no other time in history? Will all these signs converge near the end of days? Absolutely!

Should anything going on around us be a surprise if we diligently read God’s Word and believe what it says? Of course not. But that’s a problem, isn’t it? How many in the church actually know the Word of God and believe it?

I came across a passage in a book recently that I loved because of its implications. Here it is:

But equally amazing was that, when it came, the future the prophets foresaw (and here I have in mind the NT) actually followed the plan the prophets had laid out for it. When the future came at a specific time and place, there were people waiting for it. There were those, like Simeon and Anna, who understood it in terms of the OT prophetic vision. In other words, the prophet’s vision was such that it preserved and carried with it a people who both understood the prophets and were there waiting for the fulfillment of their vision.

By falling in line with that vision, the NT writers show that they accepted the OT not only as pre-interpreted, but they also were in fundamental agreement with its interpretation. That interpretation, we can see, began long before the time of its fulfillment. (The Messiah and The Hebrew Bible by John H. Sailhamer)

This author is saying that in the prophetic future that God foresaw, He also prepared certain people to understand what was coming and to be ready to act upon that knowledge.

How is this relevant? Who is it that looks for a literal fulfillment of both the coming Tribulation and the sooner coming of Jesus in the clouds to snatch away true believers prior to those awful days? It is we whom God has prepared through our belief that the notion of a pre-Tribulation Rapture is the truth. I believe that God has given us a greater understanding of what is to come – that He already spoke of in His Word – than those who do not embrace a pre-Trib Rapture view.

Because of this, we have the means to perhaps endure the blows coming against us with greater fortitude than those who don’t accept this truth. We grieve at the lawlessness and the atrocities we witness, yet we know that before these things rise to an unimaginable level, the Lord will remove us to the shelter of His house in heaven.

Just like God told Hezekiah not to worry, that He would take care of His people, so we have God’s Word that He will take care of us today. In the meantime, we need to obediently do what we’re supposed to so as to accomplish our final tasks.

We need not fret and be anxious. All this that is going on around us is in the sovereign plan of God. He’s got everything under control, and we can rest in peace because of this. Just as God moved and delivered Jerusalem from destruction from the huge Assyrian army, so He will move and deliver us from the terrible things to come by removing us from the earth before they occur.

Let’s trust God that He knows what He’s doing. How much easier will it be to get through these dark days knowing that He’s coming for us very soon?

[Author Note: Briefly, I want to set the stage for you as to the nature of most of my articles in this season. Each year I read the Bible through completely at least once – that has been my practice since I came to the Lord in 2005. I remain astounded at what God has done in my life because of that discipline! Each day I read from both the Old and New Testaments. I choose a verse from one of those passages and write my commentary and reflection based on that. In the title of my article, you’ll see the verse I chose. In addition, you’ll see the reading for that day if you’d like to follow along with greater context.]

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Gary W. Ritter is a lay pastor, Bible teacher, and prolific author. His Whirlwind Series comprises three books: Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind, and There Is A Time. These books are contained in the collected volume of the Whirlwind Omnibus. Gary has been given the Christian Redemptive Fiction award for three novels: The Tattooed Cat, Alien Revelation, and for his collaboration with Terry James in writing The Minion Protocols, the third book in James’ Second Coming Chronicles.

Earlier this year, Gary released a four-volume set of Awaken Bible Study Notes that comment verse-by-verse through Scripture from a Biblical prophetic lens. He is currently editing a sequel to Alien Revelation called Alien Zombie Plague, which he plans to release later in the fall of 2021. Recently, Gary wrote a novella for the new Kindle Vella platform. That story is called Tribulation Rising: Seal Judgments – The Coming Apocalypse. This seven-part short work can be found at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099Z462WD.

Each day this year, Gary has been writing commentary and reflections based on his reading through the Bible in a year. The intent in all his writings is to bring a strong Christian witness to what people read. You can see all his books and blog articles and reach him at his website:www.GaryRitter.com or his Facebook Author page: https://www.facebook.com/gritter3390. You can also see his older video Bible teachings on his Gary Ritter YouTube channel – look for the fish symbol, and more recently on Rumble on his Awaken Bible Prophecy channel: https://rumble.com/c/c-783217.

 

It was God’s will that Donald Trump was not elected. It was not my will nor that of the majority of writers who contribute to RR that Biden was elected. We all want stability and decency, so before the American election, we knew that an incompetent Biden presidency would be all the way downhill for anything that connected with honesty, competence, decency, righteous control, and, well, just plain common sense! We all knew that his election would usher in a great and increasing evil. I have seen it in my nation, so the USA was not going to be spared.

Last year on RR, a poem of mine was published in 7 parts, “The Mystery of Iniquity.” The poem itself was 8,800 words long, and with the footnotes, it ran to 23,000 words. In it, I examined the origin of evil with Satan’s fall and the progression of wickedness right to the present day. It closed with Satan’s final defeat and his end in the lake of fire. You will find it easily in a search on RR for my name. It was based on the verse from the KJV that used the term “mystery of iniquity,” but I posted the passage from the NASB, which uses “the mystery of lawlessness.”

2Thessalonians 2:7-9, “for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way, and then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming, that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders….”

When Paul wrote this, he realized that the insidious working of Satan, the leaven, was already working in the world to implement his purpose.

Satan corrupted the church from the time of Constantine to the unbelievable abuses by the Roman Catholic church through the Middle Ages and beyond, with maybe one million being subjected to torture and burning at the stake and other forms of execution.

I have recently been reading that in Miller’s Church History, and it is also accurately recorded in Fox’s Book of Martyrs.” And just yesterday, I read the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France (24 August 1572) where up to 100,000 Huguenots (French protestants) were murdered at the instigation of the Jezebel Queen mother of France, Catherine de Medici; King Charles IX (he was 9 years old and manipulated by his mother); Pope Pius V; and Philip II of Spain. It was a vile deception that trapped the Huguenots, and they were murdered in a blood lust. The description was, “The streets of Paris flowed with human blood, and the savage ferocity of the Catholics knew no bounds.”

On the fourth day, when the fury of the assassins had become satiated and the Huguenots were for the most part slain, there fell a dead silence on the streets of Paris. The priests now followed the tragic scene with a play. On that Thursday, ankle-deep in blood, the clergy celebrated an extraordinary jubilee and made a general procession to keep up the excitement. The pulpits also re-echoed with thanksgiving, and a medal was struck with this legend, “Piety has awakened justice.”

Bodies were piled up outside doors, and the rivers were full of dead saints all along the banks and out to sea. This was only one example of hundreds or thousands that could be cited. Queen Mary of England had thousands burnt at the stake all over England in an effort to wipe out all “heresy and heretics” from England, to establish a Papal kingdom, sometimes with 30 being burnt at once at the stake, together in a fire. This is the hatred and cruelty of Satan. King Henry VIII was no better. That is what happens when lawlessness prevails.

When Satan can’t corrupt a certain group of Christians, he launches horrible persecution against them. What happened also in Roman times was so inhumane. It is unbelievable what one human being could do to another, but it is Satan’s empowerment of his own agents that does that. They are all in hell today and deserve to be there. Eusebius documents many of these horrific atrocities. Lawlessness at work, in league with murder and hate.

Let us return to the mystery of iniquity/lawlessness. Throughout the ages, we have seen lawlessness everywhere, a rule of the mob without law. I saw it when Donald Trump won the election and also in the BLM protests. There was rioting all over, especially from one ethnic group in particular, with shops broken into, pillaged and burnt. I saw videos with those lawless people running from shops ladened up with electrical goods and whatever they could carry. We are a lawless society, and it is getting worse. Anyone who says it is not increasing is deluded.

Lawlessness means “without law.” This may mean without the accepted law of government, without the law of society, without legislated law, but most of all, it means without the law of God. All lawlessness is sin, and sin is lawlessness (1John 3:4) and comes from the lawless one who was cast out of heaven. In the 1960s, there was what I could call “tame lawlessness,” but today, it is the ever-increasing lawlessness of violence.

The United States has a lawless government. So do many other nations. When the leaders of governments do not acknowledge God, even hate God as some Australian State Governments do, then they embark on lawlessness, so on that path where they find themselves, they have a traveling companion with the right instructions who shows up the path as light. That companion is the disguised “angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), the evil one of deception who is their guide into chaos. Those who deliberately reject the Lord are pursuing lawlessness, irrespective of what they think. Their minds are darkened, and the true way they cannot see, only the way Satan leads them.

I will just repeat a part of the quote from earlier – “for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way, and then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth….” Satan continues to work and grows stronger continually. We can expect more and more lawlessness and departure from God in our present time, and I think it will grow exponentially. In fact, I am quite taken aback by the way wickedness has increased so rapidly in the past five years.

Vaccine mandates are wicked because they suggest what will be, in principle one day, the mark of the beast. Children’s gender and sexuality, once sacred, is now perverted by the awful destructive policies of the far left. Unborn babies are destroyed before they reach birth, and the filthy perversion of homosexuality has horribly distorted marriage. Evolution, with all its godless overtones and survival of the fittest in the law of the human jungle, opposes everything God instituted for the care of every human being.

Can you imagine for one second what this world would be like if it was not for the Holy Spirit, who, like a gigantic dam wall, is holding back the great flood of wickedness about to swamp the world?

Paul calls the Holy Spirit the Restrainer, though he does not state it fully; we know what he means. The Rapture is what separates our present vile world from an incredibly inconceivable filthy wickedness from hell itself that is going to come. Let us never cease to be thankful to the Lord who has already delivered us in this evil world and will deliver us from the evil to come. No wonder we say, “Come, Lord Jesus, come!” In reading others of the writers on RR, a lot of us have this feeling (or conviction or considered opinion) that the Rapture could well be before 2030, but that is NOT date-setting.

When the Church is raptured, then the human man of lawlessness will be revealed. He will inherit all the wickedness that swamps the world, and he will love it. He will be like a pig in mud. Thank you, Lord, for the ministry of the Holy Spirit in this world right now and His protection over us.

There is another point in lawlessness that is designed to weaken nations. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Australia was invaded by Boat People, mainly from Moslem countries and Sri Lanka. Billions were spent on them, and still is, and now a number of them make trouble. The USA is having its own invasion from the south with increased lawlessness. France is herding all the refugees across the English Channel into England, and some of the reason is revenge for the UK leaving the EU. That is lawlessness.

I want to go back to the opening paragraph of this article and this in particular – “It was God’s will that Donald Trump was not elected.” Before the election, we did not know what the outcome would be, but now (barring the cheating), we look in retrospect, and we have to conclude God did not want Donald Trump elected. The critical question out of all this is, “Why?” We have to think hard about that, and although I do not have a solid answer, I do have one.

I think the election of Trump would have stayed the progressing evil that is overtaking the USA. What that means is that God has opened the gate so all that is unclean might have greater access to American society. Understand that what I said is not confined at all to the USA. It is now widespread. Rightly or wrongly, I think it was in the four Trump years that God gave the last chance to the USA for repentance.

How are we to understand all that in the light of everything we see in the world? Well, the time has come! Come for what purpose?

We are at the end of the Church Age, and the finishing line is in sight. It is now time for evil to race full steam ahead, and that is what it is doing. In like manner, God allowed the virus, even though its origins were from genetic manipulation from the vile CCP for biological warfare. The virus confused and weakened the nations (except China) and impelled them to policies of restriction and draconian measures. It became the hotbed of anti-God legislation. I have another article on the Great Reset that links with the virus.

Evil now is unhindered, but with Trump, it may have been stayed for the term. You may not agree with me, but that is the way we try to see the unfolding of world events. We can only conjecture on the available evidence at the time.

If that is all true, then we must accept that the finishing line is in sight. It is still possible that God may give a reprieve to the United States, but that will not happen unless there is national repentance. Personally, I think the western world has long passed that opportunity. The mystery of iniquity/lawlessness is maturing before our eyes, but it reaches full maturity in the Tribulation. Another reason I think the Rapture is close.

We all know that there is a wide variance of writers and themes on RR, and I guess we all have among them ones we relate to more than others. Today, I looked at one I have not read much in the past, and after considering what he was saying, for the most part, he could have been writing about Australia in the examples he gave. The parallels were considerable. That article was “I am Here to Tell You the Truth” by Rob Pue.

The astounding thing is that, up until this year, maybe last year, Australia was years behind in following the laws and programs and behavior of the USA. No longer. It is uncanny that both nations are doing the same thing at the same time. Why is this? I don’t know. Maybe part of the Great Reset or globalization. The world is becoming one. The prince and power of the air certainly has followers in all governments and has rounded them up.

May we never look at the signs of the times more than we are looking forward to the Lord’s coming for His Church. To do so would be depressing, but to look to our blessed Saviour is invigorating and joyful. We have tribulation in the world, but we have peace and joy in the Lord.

God bless you, each one.

ronaldf@aapt.net.au