The Perils of Being Perpetually Offended

Our nation has reached a point where it is a hair trigger away from chaos. A host of liberal groups is constantly looking for something they can take offense to. Nearly about 60% of the news today is about what the writer thinks is wrong with the world. One Yahoo news story questioned why was Trump drinking a glass of water in an odd manner. On the same page, another story had an Atlanta megachurch pastor apologizing for saying that people might find ‘white blessing’ more palatable than ‘white privilege.’

The thought police have now taken down Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. My one-time favorite syrup will no longer have the iconic image and name of Aunt Jemima. PepsiCo Inc declared they are changing the name and the brand of the pancake mix and syrup because it has a “racist history.” The logo of the more than 130-year-old brand features an African American woman named after a character from 19th century minstrel shows. The offensive caricature is rooted in a stereotype of a friendly black woman working as a servant or a nanny for a white family.

Uncle Ben’s owner Mars is planning to change the rice maker’s “brand identity.” In a statement on its website, Mars wrote that “now is the right time to evolve the Uncle Ben’s brand, including its visual brand identity, which we will do.” “We don’t yet know what the exact changes and timing will be, but we are evaluating all possibilities,” Mars added.

The ever-expanding Cultural Revolution has Kellogg’s cereal boxes under its demented scrutiny. Fiona Onasanya, a former British Labor Party MP who became only the second person in history to be kicked out of Parliament by their own voters using a recall petition, has called on Kellogg’s to justify why Rice Krispies is represented with “three white boys” while the Coco Pops mascot is a monkey.

I’m guessing that Colonel Sanders will be next on the chopping block. His southern image will soon be viewed as too much of a reminder of the slaving-holding plantation owners. The investors of all companies that use a surname will need to pray that their company is not linked to ancestors with troubling racial views.

People have become fanatical in America over perceived racial strife. A man wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe casually walking his dog near a freeway in Vilas County, Wisconsin, caused a national stir. The incident prompted multiple phone calls to the police. The local sheriff’s office said passersby spotted Charles Michael Booth “walking his dog, wearing a Ku Klux Klan shirt, drinking a beer, and waving at traffic.”

Because Booth was walking on a country road, it’s not in anybody’s particular neighborhood. “It should not have bothered anybody. “I realize that that may be offensive to some people, but it’s not a crime,” said the officer.

But the president of the Dane County NAACP chapter insists that Booth’s “terrorist act” was intended to intimidate others. “[Booth] intended to project what I believe to be white supremacist behaviors by wearing this garb,” Gregory Jones told the Journal Sentinel. “It is intended to create fear among people – even people who are not of color. [Vilas County residents] should be mindful and be willing to stand up and say this is not acceptable in our country at all.”

We are never going to restore racial harmony to our nation if it only takes one wrongful death to trigger fresh riots. There is no systemic discrimination at work in America. George Floyd died because of one cop’s act of stupidity.

People have become so insane with hate, they don’t realize that they are the bigots. An event called ‘An Evening with Cancelled Women’ was due to feature a number of women who had been disinvited from public engagements due to objections from people who disagree with their viewpoints. But it was itself cancelled – due to objections from people who disagree with their viewpoints.

I think this world was a far better place before platforms like Twitter and Facebook came along. These social media sites are destroying the very fabric of democracy, destroying the very fabric of human relationships and peddling in an addictive drug called anger. Instigators know they can attract people to their platform and control if they get them mad enough.

One possible way to defuse that perpetual offense cycle is a hugely negative consequence of the violence. Already a dangerous profession, truckers, who value their lives more than the cargo they haul, have been heard on the CDLLife app calling for a nationwide moratorium of delivering goods until the riots stop. To understand why truckers are rejecting deliveries to certain cities, last week 1,212 users of the trucking app responded to the poll, with 79% saying they will not deliver loads to lawless cities.

“No cops = more violence and targeted robbing,” Scott Cuellar wrote.

“No, I will not deliver to an area with a disbanded police department. My life matters, and I do this for my family,” wrote Casnpaper.

“I just turned down a load from Miami to St Paul paying $3,800; my life matters more than any other,” wrote Carlos Barreras.

“Nope, no load is worth my life,” wrote Eddie Bean.

The perils of being perpetually offended are that you eventually lose contact with reality. Everyone else is wrong, and no amount of evidence will change your mind. At that point, our society seems doomed to self-destruction. The Word of God clearly says that the time for repentance is a limited window.

“So I gave them up to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices” (Psalm 81:12).

“Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves” (Romans 1:24).

–Todd

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Our America-centric Perspective

America stands at the center of all the strangeness that has enveloped this moment in history. There is no other way to say it that fits the circumstance in which we find ourselves. At least there is no way to say it that I, myself, can offer.

This is what is meant by the title of the commentary.

It is true that the COVID-19 pandemic affects the entire world of humanity, not just the US. It is true that there is economic turmoil not just here, but in every nation on earth. It is true that there is violence based upon racial strife breaking out in major cities around the world, not just in America. But all of these things seem to center in and around, and stem from, this nation.

Perhaps it is just a matter of perspective. Maybe its nationalistic myopia from which I suffer in considering all we are enduring. But I don’t think so.

America, as we have looked at many times, is the holdup to the globalist agenda hatched in the high places of wickedness by the powers and principalities, both human and demonic. My thoughts are stronger than ever in this regard in considering things from our America-centric prophetic perspective.

The most crucial presidential election yet, in my opinion, looms just ahead. One cannot just sense, but see—through minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour actions by the enraged—assaults from every angle against America as founded that the above perspective is the right vantage from which to draw conclusions.

It is the right perspective, not in the geopolitical sense of “right” vs “left,” but the right perspective from the standpoint of what the Bible says about what is coming.

And what is coming is a regime so different from what we have known that it is unimaginable that it could ever happen in the minds of average Americans. It will be a regime that will produce, as Jesus put it, a time of tribulation “such as never was, nor will ever be.” It will be a beast regime—that of the man who will be Antichrist.

The question we who teach, preach, and write about Bible prophecy get practically every time there is a forum for questions and answers is something like: “What about America—is it in Bible prophecy?”

The answer is “No, America isn’t mentioned by name in Bible prophecy.” But, it is always appropriate to follow up with: “However, America is certainly in prophecy in the sense of being among the nations foretold to influence the course of human history while the end of the age approaches and the Tribulation looms.” We can say that, because here we are, right in the mix of things moving the world toward the climax of human history.  And, are they ever moving!

With this nation at the black heart of all the satanically inspired rage, hatred, and determination to bring America down so globalist plans can proceed, I can’t accept that I’m being America-centric unnecessarily. This nation is in the middle of a war, an end-times war in which I believe the Lord Himself intervened miraculously in the 2016 presidential election.

I have no answers to the war’s outcome in the short term. We do know that the globalists will get their “New World Order” at some point. But for now, the battle rages, and the very fact that it does is most encouraging. God is still in the middle of the fight, and there is no better side to be on than that of the omnipotent Creator of all things.  

America, A Golden Cup

Again, is the name “America” given anywhere in Scripture? Of course not. But, the influence this nation has exerted since coming to its full bloom as earth’s greatest superpower in history makes it a prophetic nation. The Creator of all things continues to use America in His mighty hand to accomplish two very distinctive, supernatural purposes. As a matter of fact, the United States, in my view, has an overwhelming presence in Bible prophecy.

Its place is at the very heart of the end times things we see developing—matters we see unfolding in daily, even hourly, news reports. In this sense, I believe God is speaking of America—in type, if not by name, when His Word tells us the following:

Babylon [hath been] a golden cup in the LORD’S hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad. (Jeremiah 51:7).

Certainly, the United States of America has been a “golden cup” in the Lord’s hand. No other nation of modern vintage can come close to claiming that achievement.

Some nations of Europe were formative in bringing forth Christianity into the world, thus shedding a degree of gospel light into a world of sin-darkness. But it is America that, despite its great shortcomings and more recent degeneration, has been a shining beacon, reflecting from that golden cup in God’s hand.

Being the first nation in spreading to the whole world the gospel message that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross makes possible the only way to redemption for lost mankind is a feat no other country can claim. This, ultimately, has been done not by the offices, or under the auspices of American ingenuity, but by the omniscience and the omnipotence of the One holding the “golden cup.”

It is God’s grace and mercy that has put America as a beacon of God’s light upon that mountain of gospel dissemination. God’s providence gave this nation the industrial and technological genius—a fact that is denied, or that is so taken for granted today.

Israel the Real Target

No matter the other exigencies of the hour, it is Israel that is the true target of Satan and his minions in the high places of Ephesians 6: 12. The violent organization Black Lives Matter, despite the media trying to make it look like a force for righteousness in correcting past wrongs, is an anti-Semitic evil based upon so-called liberation theology. We heard the thrust of that theology when Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor in Chicago, told God to God D**** America before the presidential election of 2008.

It is Israel that Satan is aiming at, ultimately. Bible prophecy culminates first with Antichrist declaring himself God in the temple in Jerusalem. He next leads an attack on Jerusalem when he is let out of the bottomless pit at the end of the millennial reign of Christ.

Israel, America’s Saving Grace

This brings us to America’s second reason for existence—toward the purpose of accomplishing God’s great prophetic plan. In my view, this use of the phenomenally powerful American nation is among the most profound indicators we can find that America, indeed, is in prophecy. And, I believe that our nation being in prophecy includes God using it to be midwife in Israel’s modern birth into the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob those thousands of years ago.

President Donald J. Trump has been a friend to Israel like no president since Harry S. Truman. This was a stark change from the anger and disrespect with which the Obama administration treated God’s chosen nation.

Genesis 12:1–3 is still in effect. I have to believe that this counts significantly in God’s great economy for explaining why both Mr. Trump and America continue to survive the most horrendous spiritual/supernatural assault yet endured on an American president and this nation.

So, all things considered, it is permitted to be America-centric in the matter of peering into Bible prophecy on the immediate horizon, I am convinced. Continue to pray the prayer of 2 Chronicles 7:14 and to hold fast to Titus 2:13 and Luke 21:28. Our redemption is drawing near.

–Terry

***Another major documentary request from Terry James***

We ask our RR family to let us know anyone of your family or aquaintence still living who was part of U.S. forces or other armed services which liberated the Nazi death  camps. Here are details from my friend Dr. Thomas Horn.

Briefly, SkyWatch TV, SkyWatch Films and Defender Publishing plan to produce a documentary, a section of which will focus on WW2 and Hitler’s Final Solution. We would like to include an interview(s) with armed services personnel who liberated survivors of the Nazi death camps.  If anybody happens to know any such persons or organization you could put us in contact with, we plan to start production this summer and would like to make contact and details very soon.

Dr. Thomas Horn

SkyWatch TV

417-723-0610

Or write to me, Terry, at

Wtjames1@swbell.net

They Are Serious About Defunding the Police

Politicians and City councils are joining calls to “defund the police.” Last week, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department. The City Council’s decision follows those of several other high-profile partners, including Minneapolis Public Schools, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation, to sever longstanding ties with the MPD.

Since George Floyd’s killing and the protests that ensued, officials in Los Angeles and New York City have called for making deep cuts to police budgets and reallocating those funds for education, affordable housing, and other social services.

There has been no clear indication that the officer that killed Floyd did so because he was black. Since Democrats have controlled Minneapolis for generations, how can there still be systemic racism? “Minneapolis has been under Democratic control since 1978. Chicago has been under Democratic control for 89 years; its present mayor is a black woman. Philadelphia has had Democratic mayors for 68 years; three of its last five mayors have been black men. Six of the last seven Atlanta, Ga., mayoral administrations were led by black Democratic mayors, and the present mayor is a black woman.

This latest ploy by the left is so crazy, the people proposing it don’t even know how to defend it. A reporter on CNN asked an advocate of this crazy plan, “What do you do if a thief is trying to break into your house?” She replied that the homeowner should contemplate their white privilege. It’s nice for his woman to assume that all home robberies are by black people, but what if a white guy is kicking your front door in? Another woman put together a video that suggested medical drug and counseling services if you get raped.

Moderate voices seem to be fading with escalating demands that leaders demonstrate an allegiance by denouncing the values that have long defined our nation. The news media is driving out anyone who shows a moderate view.

Stan Wischnowski, the now former lead editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned over a headline titled “Buildings Matter, Too,” which detailed the destructive nature of social unrest on the city’s local economy over the police killing of an unarmed black man.

The headline drew immediate backlash from readers and staffers. The Inquirer issued an apology for a “horribly wrong” decision to publish the headline about looting and burning down buildings on the margins of protests. In its apology piece, The Inquirer said:

“The Philadelphia Inquirer published a headline in Tuesday’s edition that was deeply offensive. We should not have printed it. We’re sorry, and regret that we did. We also know that an apology on its own is not sufficient. The headline accompanied a story on the future of Philadelphia’s buildings and civic infrastructure in the aftermath of this week’s protests. The headline offensively riffed on the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested an equivalence between the loss of buildings and the lives of black Americans. That is unacceptable.”

The New York Times pushed out editor James Bennet because he ran an op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., suggesting American soldiers should be used to quell protests and violence.

The breathing of mercury vapor fumes must be a new fad. The introduction of this toxic element to the nervous system would be the only natural way to account for the sudden increase in racial craziness. The reason is the powers of darkness have taken over people’s minds at will.

In Dallas, the well-known statue of a Texas Ranger has been removed because an article in D Magazine referred to racist history connected to the rangers. USA Today reported on the possibility that TV cop shows, from “Dragnet” to “NYPD Blue” to “Law & Order” must be taken off the air now, so as not to glorify police work. The show “Cops” was cancelled after running for 31 years.

In London, England, a statue of Abraham Lincoln was vandalized by BLM people who don’t know their history. The left has been very crafty in making people think that Lincoln fought for the South. I guess he freed the slaves and got an assassin’s bullet in the back of the head for nothing.

I do not think the Ku Klux Klan exits anymore. If the organization was active, it would express outrage over the idea of defunding the police. The Klan probably died because Satan found the liberal agenda a far great killing machine for members of the black race.

There were 18 recorded murders by the University of Chicago Crime Lab for May 31, 2020: the single-most violent day in six decades, the Chicago Sun-Times recently reported. Since the Crime Lab numbers go back only to 1961, it was an all-time record. If gangs don’t have to worry about looking over their shoulder for a cop, the blood would run like rivers in the streets.

If we get rid of the police, some force will be required to ensure the peace. I’ve had some people write me to say that Antifa and Black Lives Matter are taking over their neighborhood. We are quickly going to have no-go zones all over America.

I follow actor James Woods on Twitter, and he listed all the police officers who died in the line of duty in 2020. We are in a very sad state when people who sacrifice their lives for the common good are reviled and people who loot and destroy property are campaigned as heroes. We know that we are near to the end of the Church age when society becomes so demented it totally inverses the natural perception of good and evil.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20).

–Todd

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Racial Strife in Prophecy

I remember as a teenager my dad telling me that Papa (his father, whom we grandchildren called “Daddy James”) said that one day there would be a great racial war in America. My grandfather, who was, among many other things, a school teacher and Pentecostal preacher in south Arkansas, apparently was well known in the region and was sought out for his opinion and advice by politicians and many others. His assessment was that the treatment being given black people would one day come back to haunt the nation.

I heard the story many times from my father and from others within our family on the James side. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the memories of those stories at age fifteen, even during the 1957 integration crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

That crisis seemed to sort of work itself out, with a lot of help from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a national guard that the president took out from under the command of Governor Orval Faubus.

As a tenth grader, the racial things just didn’t register very strongly with me. There was complete segregation at the time in my hometown, and Benton High School seemed a continent away from the epicenter of the great controversy of integration vs segregation—although my high school was no more than twenty-five miles from Central High in Little Rock.

The current racial crisis, as I view it as a septuagenarian, finally brings into focus the forward thinker man Daddy James apparently was…

I don’t know how much Bible prophecy played into his thinking. I just knew him when I was a teenager. He died in 1958 and, to me, he was kind of a grumpy old guy with thick, white, tousled hair and white, bushy eyebrows. He was a big, burly, man who sat around at 80-something and grumbled in curmudgeon fashion at us youngsters whenever we tried to get into his violin case in one corner of the room where his favorite chair sat. He was a gifted musician and artist.

I have to think, now, that his observations were somewhat inspired. I’ve always been told that Daddy James was a genius, with few social graces—of which he didn’t wish to indulge, at any rate, because he was inwardly turned.

He was quite the Bible student, family and friends said. This makes me wonder whether Bible prophecy played deeply into his pontification during the rare times he cared to wax eloquent on America’s future racial problems.

Whether he possessed a degree of prescience I don’t know. But here we are, and there is a great racial divide that could break into a civil war of sorts. This especially since of the most volatile areas of the country have governors and mayors who are thinking about defunding police departments, and even about completely doing away with them, in order to correct wrongs done to the black race.

Certainly corrections need to be made in ways that would assure that racial profiling and bigotry are not allowed within police departments. What happened to George Floyd should never be allowed to happen again. But it will. It is inevitable. Whether through deliberate, hate-filled racial bigotry or simply a completely lawful act by a law enforcement official to apprehend someone suspected of a criminal act, it will happen again.

There are always going to be lawbreakers, and there are always going to be bigots. As the saying goes, you can’t legislate morality. You can make laws to enforce compliance, but only God can change spiritual hearts. He does so through the saving of souls one individual at a time.

To want to defund law enforcement is nothing short of insanity, unless we want complete anarchy to rule. And one being does indeed want this scenario.

Satan, of course, is the personage stirring the pot of racial hatreds. He and his minions, both demonic and human, are active. Their chief aim is to bring America into the globalist order for the wind-up of the age, to establish his man, Antichrist, on the platform of control Lucifer the fallen one wants.

Satan’s hatred for humanity is infinitely greater than the leftists’ hatred for President Donald Trump. And this president is the target at the center of this crisis—the one I guess Gideon Johnson James—Daddy James—somehow foresaw.

Or maybe he just took the Word of Jesus, Himself, and extrapolated the evil that he perceived to be on its way to become an incendiary bomb that would explode near the time Christ would return.

I kind of sense that Daddy James read the following and cogitated quite a bit on the things within.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. (Matthew 24:7)

It is stunning, regarding Jesus’ prophecy here. We are experiencing these very symptoms of things the Lord foretold for the very end of the age. They are part of the convergence we have been experiencing for some time during these past several years.

He said there will be famines, meaning famines of unusual dimension and cause. Jesus always spoke in terms that indicated things He prophesied will be far beyond normal levels.

The African continent and some Asian and other areas are experiencing a likelihood of growing famine. This growing probability of famine is the result of the second thing Jesus said in this prophetic verse. There is pestilence. Pestilence in the form of disease runs rampant in those areas of the world mentioned. And, as we know, pestilence in the form of the Wuhan virus is running rampant throughout the world as well.

But, beyond this, pestilence in the form of locust swarms, and even swarms of deadly hornets, the likes of which haven’t been seen since ancient times, are denuding the agricultural lands that feed the populations affected.

All the while the famines and pestilences are devastating broad swaths of the world, the great human plague is developing that has at its center bigotry and racial hatred.

Jesus foretold that “nation shall rise against nation.”

The Greek word for “nation,” here, as we have seen before, is ethnos. This means “ethnic,” of course…race—i.e., races will rise up against other races.

Perhaps my grandfather didn’t have the gift of prophecy—certainly not in the sense of Old and New Testament prophets. There is no such gift today. One thing sure, though, our Lord did and does have that ability. It sure appears He was foretelling this very moment of racial strife.

This is, I believe, all to remind those of us who truly believe every Word in the Bible that His call to us must be near indeed.

For when you see all these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your head, for your redemption draws near. (Luke 21: 28)

—Terry