General Articles

Sheep Among the Wolves :: By Sean Gooding

Published on: by RR7

Matthew 10:16-26

“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. 17 But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues. 18 You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. 19 But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; 20 for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.

21 Now brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. 22 And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved. 23 When they persecute you in this city, flee to another. For assuredly, I say to you, you will not have gone through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes. 24 A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for a disciple that he be like his teacher, and a servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they call those of his household! 26 Therefore do not fear them. For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.”

We live in dangerous times. It is becoming more and more dangerous to be a free thinker, and especially if you are a free thinker and a Christian, the dangers are mounting. In the chapter that this text is taken from, Jesus selects his 12 apostles and sends them out to the people of Israel to tell them the Good News, the Gospel, the Messiah has come. But Jesus does not send them out blindly and unprepared. He warns them that the vast majority of the people they are going to are wolves; they normally kill sheep. But in this case, it is the sheep’s job to rescue the wolves from an eternity in Hell. It is the sheep’s job to tell the wolf how to be a sheep. It is the sheep’s job to tell the wolf about the salvation that takes it from being the predator to being the prey.

Wow, what a daunting task! When we get that, it can help us to understand why it takes a work of the Holy Spirit to transform someone. All we do is tell the truth; the Holy Spirit helps them see it. If He does not, then the Gospel sounds like nonsense. What person in their right mind wants to be the sheep when they can be the wolf? Only the Holy Spirit can make this make sense.

We live in a difficult time where truth is very subjective, or at least people say that – ‘What is true for you may not be true for me.’ They are convinced that they have their own truth and that we all have to accept it. This conditioning started a long time ago. The idea of questioning clearly stated truths, as Satan did in the Garden with Eve, has laid the foundation to where we can hear what we know to be a lie, and we say nothing. Maybe that is their truth, even if we know it is a lie, and we base our lives on people’s feelings rather than truth. Then we get mad at the truth-tellers; they are mean, and they don’t really love like Jesus, we say.

Yet Jesus was the bluntest truth-teller to ever walk the planet. He confronted truth over feelings all the time and stated the truth no matter who was offended, even His own disciples. He taught them that truth was more important than life and wealth; it was more important than fame and freedom. Truth is important because God is truth; He is the absolute standard of truth, and if we tolerate lies, we put man’s word ahead of God’s.

Romans 3:4-8 “Certainly not! Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: ‘That You may be justified in Your words, and may overcome when You are judged.’ 5 But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? (I speak as a man.) 6 Certainly not! For then how will God judge the world? 7 For if the truth of God has increased through my lie to His glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner? 8 And why not say, ‘Let us do evil that good may come’? —as we are slanderously reported and as some affirm that we say. Their condemnation is just.”

When we get to this in the book of Romans, Paul is a seasoned missionary; he has encountered false religion and false logic everywhere. He has to come to grips with the falsehoods of the Pharisaical life he was living when Jesus met him. When Jesus met him, Paul was a wolf going to kill the sheep, Jesus’ sheep. But when he met Jesus, he stopped being a wolf and became a sheep. He then spent the rest of his life being chased by wolves, his former peers and others. But Paul never regretted being a sheep. Paul was adamant that God’s words were and are true and that any of man’s words that contradict God’s words are lies.

In the past 18 months or so, we have seen how easy it is for lies to take hold of the whole world. Let me deal with a few things. COVID is a real disease; no one in their right mind questions that. We are learning more and more that there is a good chance it was man-made, a sad state of affairs; but as they say, ‘it is what it is.’ We have had very, very conflicting messages about the disease, the treatments, the vaccines, and the effect of these vaccines. We have had conflicting messages about the wearing of masks and even distancing.

I have a dear friend that will not let his son go into another person’s home. Apparently, the disease does not go out; it is a homebody. We have been encouraged, then bribed, and now threatened about the vaccines, and there are serious conflicting reports about the protection that they give. Over the past 18 months, these conflicting reports have caused serious economic issues; our governments have used the COVID mess to spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave. They have amassed debts that our great-grandchildren will be paying. The ruling elite have grown richer and the masses poorer by far. We bankrupted ‘mom and pop’ stores and grew the profits of the mega-stores. This was deliberate and calculated. They need dependent people whose only relief is from the government.

Over the past 18 months, truth has been censored, and anyone who dares asks what or why or how is dangerous and trying to kill everyone. We are not. People are dying both with and without COVID, both with and without the vaccines, and we are not allowed to ask any questions. Let me be clear; if you want to get the vaccine, then do so. I will take you to the place to get one or two, or the booster shot or shots. But no one should be forced to take a vaccine that is highly suspect as to its ability to work. But what I want to really get at is the idea of truth.

Jesus warned the men he sent out that truth would be the dividing factor in their lives. The truth would cause serious division in their lives and, in particular, their families. Their enemies will be right in their own homes.

Matthew 10:21-22 “Now brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. 22 And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake.”

When people have become accustomed to living by lies, and the lies are not allowed to be challenged, like the ‘fact’ checkers and all the trouble people get in for asking logical questions, then people begin to turn on each other. In this pandemic, I have seen families destroyed, neighbors have called the police on their fellow neighbors, and friends have been separated. Churches have split over meeting or not meeting, masks or no mask, singing or no singing.

What a mess! But we can see how easy and how quickly people will turn on each other. People will shame you and call the authorities on you. Your own people, and they do it in the name of safety – ‘We are just trying the keep everyone safe. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, then do it for the children, do it for the elderly, find an excuse, but just follow along and obey. Stop thinking, stop asking questions, and stop making obvious observations.’

Once again, if you want to follow along, I will not bug you. I wear a mask so as not to cause too much panic in the people around me. Most of the people I hang out with do the same. They are not convinced of the validity of the masks; it is just easier to wear one than being confronted by hysterical people, and it has happened to me more than once.

What we have learned is that it does not take much for your loved ones in both your human and spiritual families to turn on you if you don’t follow suit. Now, as we get closer and closer to the return of Jesus, the idea of truth will become more and more fluid, and the idea that Jesus is the Only Way will become hated more and more. Soon, as Jesus said, the most dangerous people in your lives and mine will be in our home and church families.

Sadly, we are seeing an exodus from the truth of God. Many Christian ‘celebrities’ are wishy-washy about the whole transgendered issues, the homosexual issues, and many other areas where the Bible makes clear statements. They are making it harder and harder to state the truth. It is not loving to tell lies. It is hateful. Love requires the truth. But we are being told that love requires us to lie, tolerate lies, and be a party to lies. Jesus would have been hated and killed; oh wait, that is just what happened, and He tells us at the end of our text that we should expect the same treatment if we speak the truth.

Lastly, we can see how they will get the whole world to take the mark of the beast. NO, the COVID vaccine is not the mark, but we can see the framework. People are so desperate to get back to ‘normal,’ they will do anything, including taking a vaccine that has a lot of questions around it. By the time people get to Revelation 13, and they are hungry, thirsty, and desperate, they will gladly take the mark so they can buy and sell. But the truth people, those that know Jesus, will say no, normal is not worth the lie, and there will be a line drawn in the sand. The government will threaten death or take the mark. We are not there yet, but we can see how it can be done.

The world is setting up for the return of Jesus. The framework is in place for the Messiah to return and rule the world from Jerusalem. Are you ready? Are you saved? Have you trusted Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection and your only salvation? God will not accept anyone who is not saved by Jesus. That is the truth.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

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China’s Plan to Be King of the East :: By Jack Kinsella

Published on: by RR7

Chinese civilization and culture date back 4,500 years. The Chinese have never been aggressive conquerors of other nations or people, but they have a history of being extremely aggressive in defense of their country and the imperial control of Chinese territory and peoples.

The annexing of Tibet, the military campaigns against India in the 1970s, and intervention in the Korean War in the 1950s were further manifestations of the Great Wall syndrome dating to 200 B.C. It’s been observed that if you stuck a two by four into the ground in China, the next morning there’d be a wall around it.

During the ’90s, the Clinton administration tried to 1) recruit China as a strategic ally, but the strategy failed while Chinese agents 2) gleefully looted U.S. national secrets, 3) influenced the U.S. national election of 1996, 4) got a pesky missile guidance problem fixed, 5) arranged to have a laundry list of technology waivers granted; and then, as soon as a new administration took office, forced down a U.S. plane and took its crew captive.

Within hours, there were walls around the EP-3 spy plane, there were walls around the crew, and by the time Beijing released it to us, the Chinese had stripped the plane clean of technology so they could build a wall around their airspace too.

China doesn’t want a friendship with the West or a strategic alliance with Washington; the 90’s détente was an excuse to plunder the U.S. for fun and profit while learning as much as possible for use in China’s next Great Wall.

China plans an Asian Common Market that would give member countries – including China, preference over countries outside the bloc.

China envisions an Asian Common Market that included the Middle East, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Asia, exclude Japan, suck in South Korea, and in the view of the planners in Beijing, ensure Chinese prosperity at a time of increased tensions with Washington.

To this end, China has been conducting a quiet but persistent diplomacy designed to wean the countries of the region away from their “dependence” on the United States.

Beijing has only been partly successful among the ASEAN states (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Most of them don’t trust China any more than they do the United States, and in many instances, less.

But the “anti-hegemony” rhetoric of Chinese diplomats has been having an increasing response in the Middle East. There, significant elements of the professional and ruling elites are looking to ways of reducing their exposure in Western financial markets. China presents an attractive alternative.

China’s move toward Iran is not aimed at expanding China’s empire, but instead at widening one of its walls. Beijing sees in Iran the ideal country to replicate its North Korea/Pakistan strategy.

By creating nuclear and missile capabilities artificially in unstable, potentially aggressive neighbors, Beijing can divert the attention of the United States to these problem states and away from China.

It’s a policy that has worked for two decades and has resulted in China being nearly surrounded with a buffer zone of nuclear states friendly only to Beijing. China’s new Nuclear Great Wall.

Assessment

When the apostles were first beginning to spread the Good News of Jesus into the world, the Holy Spirit instructed them not to preach the word of God in Asia.

“Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia” (Acts 16:6).

As a consequence, the initial thrust of Christianity as it spread across the earth went toward the west rather than the east. This had profound implications for the future, not the least of which was the fact that Christianity thereafter would be seen as a western institution and be identified closely with western government.

History shows that this has been the course that the message of the Gospel has taken as it has been preached across the world. It started in the Middle East and spread north and west throughout Europe while its eastern course was blocked and thwarted.

Five hundred years ago, Columbus brought Christianity to the Western Hemisphere, where it began to spread across the American continent (Jer.25:22). Today, it is sweeping across eastern Asia, coming, like the sun, full circle around the globe.

Modern China is home to one of the fastest-growing underground church movements in history, as the Word of God continues to follow the path of the sun, from east to west, but the Bible says that the light of truth goes out during the Tribulation period.

John says that the four spirits bound at the Euphrates River will be unbound in the last days to prepare the way for the kings of the east.

It is from this river that the ‘night’ of Satan bursts its eastern boundaries and moves west, proceeding westward from there to take away what light of God yet remains in the west.

The invasion of the West by the forces of the East is one of the most significant events of the last days. From its earliest pages, the Bible has consistently predicted that the final destruction of Babylon will come with the rise to power of the Prince of Persia (2 Chron. 36:20).

The ultimate Prince of Persia is still to come.

At the head of an army greater than any the world has ever seen, this ranting madman from the North will overthrow the power of the western world and, in his rampage, destroy the entire earth. In that disaster, a third of the human race will die in warfare alone (Rev.9:14).

The army which will inflict this terror on the planet will number 200 million soldiers (Rev. 9:16). Their battle colors, according to the Bible, will be blue, orange-red, and yellow (Rev. 9:17).

John said that in the van of this army, demon spirits would issue “out of the jaws” of the dragon, calling the entire world to the battlefields that prelude and surround Armageddon (Rev. 6:13).

China’s one-child policy resulted in way more young men than young women, so China’s standing army of 200 million is an army of frustrated and jumpy young men without much hope of a family life apart from the state.

China is extending its reach into Iran, even as it seeks ways to drive the West back over to its side of the Euphrates.

Jesus said, “And when these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

This was written by Jack Kinsella on June 7, 2003. He went to be with the Lord on March 14, 2013.

His articles can be found in the Omega Letter archives at this link.