Nearing Midnight

March 28, 2016

Published on: by RR2

nm“Allahu Akbar” Strikes Again

Last Tuesday, I was up late at night looking at the news, and I suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the Dow futures—while at the same time gold was spiking higher. My immediate thought was that the followers of Islam had struck somewhere in the world. Then I saw this headline: “Deadly Bombing Rocks Brussels Airport” which confirmed my suspicion.

Islamic terrorists had pummeled the airport and a subway station killing more than 31 people and injuring over 200. The terror group, Islamic State, proudly claimed responsibility for the carnage

Belgian authorities were shockingly unprepared for the attacks. The general view was that their nation is immune to violence. Only two short months ago, Brussels officials were so confident that they were free from terrorism, they ran an advertisement ridiculing the idea that the city is a center of Islamic radicalism.

VisitBrussels, the city’s tourism department, crafted the #CallBrussels campaign in an effort to disassociate the city with Islamic terror after residents were linked to the November 2015, Paris attacks and other extremist plots.

The citizens of Europe are locked in an endless cycle of terrorism because they refuse to deal with the root cause of the problem. Islam operates like a deadly virus. It invades host nations; it multiplies rapidly; it takes over urban areas and kills without remorse.

Officials have told the Associated Press that ISIS has trained at least 400 fighters to target Europe in deadly waves of attacks. Terror cells like the ones that struck Brussels are free to choose the time, place and method for maximum murder and chaos.

A few days ago, I saw footage of a 60 Minutes crew being attacked by Muslims in Sweden. Ironically, the crew that was attacked had gone there to create pro-migrant propaganda piece. The Muslims were so demonically despicable in their behavior, the reporters were unable to put a positive spin on the situation. Here is a link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42jpuXJPk0w

I don’t see how it is possible for ISIS to have a capital city after claiming responsibility for the Belgian attack. Raqqa, Syria should have been carpet-bombed after the carnage in Paris. Instead, we dropped a few bombs on the city, and then declared (a false) victory. Meanwhile, the flag of ISIS has spread all over the Middle East.

The liberal media fails miserably at describing the truly evil nature of these Islamic terrorist attacks. The two bombers at the airport sought out the largest grouping of people. When they screamed “Allahu Akbar” and pushed their detonators, they knew their bombs would send out a cloud of nails and screws that would rip into the flesh of everyone standing around them.

If the press would do their work honestly, those who hold to the Islamic faith would have been shamed back to the deserts of the Middle East long before this latest attack.

Rather than going after the Islamic terrorists, we light up buildings in colors to show our support for the victims, and we can’t even properly pull off that stupid token act. The One World Trade Center in New York was supposed to have its spire lit in the colors of the Belgian flag—red, yellow and black.

Instead, the spire was lit in red, white and blue as night fell on Manhattan. Since we no longer remember what happened to the twin buildings that once stood in place of One World Trade Center, the irony of the mishap is lost to most people.

There would be far less bloodshed if our leaders read and understood the Bible. In Genesis, we are told that there is a spiritual conflict between Abraham’s two sons. Isaac would be the son of the promise and Ishmael would be cursed as a “wild ass” of a man with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him.

“The Angel: ‘Return to your mistress and act as you should, for I will make you into a great nation. Yes, you are pregnant and your baby will be a son, and you are to name him Ishmael (‘God hears’), because God has heard your woes. This son of yours will be a wild one—free and untamed as a wild ass! He will be against everyone, and everyone will feel the same toward him. But he will live near the rest of his kin’” (Genesis 16:11-12 TLB).

–Todd

nmWorld Catching Its Breath

Despite such terroristic actions such as witnessed in Brussels this week just past, like it does from time to time while lurching toward the end of this troubled age, the world, prophetically speaking, seems to be pausing to catch its breath.We’ve sometimes called it a “lull” because prophetic progression appears to be on hold. It’s kind of like in the south when a severe springtime storm is about to produce a big tornado. Everything gets eerily still.

What is actually happening, I’m told, is that the big super-cell thunderhead is sucking the surrounding atmosphere into its building vortex. All turns a greenish-yellow color and not a leaf is rustling.

One of the mistakes we who observe things on a global scale with regard to Bible prophecy make is to view things too much from our American perspective, I think. Things seem to be whirling around us, but the larger picture presents a different view.

You hear the rumbling and see the lightning flashing on the black horizon, but all is perfectly still, as if the complexion of the earth has taken on a sickly pallor. It seems that this humanistic system is holding its collective breath in somewhat of a perceived pause in these scary moments.

Presidential politics right now in the U.S., on the other hand, are anything but eerily calm. For example, the campaign rhetoric and vitriol are raw rough and tumble. Americans who see things through a strictly political prism believe this is a storm we are in–one that will determine where our world will be torn apart, depending upon who wins the presidency. The atmosphere is turbulent. We are in the midst of a terrible, national storm with the nation’s future at stake.

That might all be true, but on a global basis, thinking in terms of Bible prophecy, there seems to this eschatological weather observer to be an environment surrounding us with an ominous pallor that harbors far greater lethality. There portends within the building storm clouds far greater dangers than those given off by the political winds that are whipping us all into a frenzy here in America. Internationally, the powers and principalities of Ephesians 6: 12 are working quietly behind the scenes. They are striving as hard as ever before to bring about that great, end-times tornado the Lord terms Tribulation.

One can sense, if spiritually attuned to the pre-storm goings-on, the very corruptive atmosphere of fallen man being drawn into the coming Tribulation vortex. Yet there seems to be for the moment an eerie calm, despite evidence everywhere one looks of brewing trouble.

The president of the United States is reportedly working with the United Nations to bring about a two-state solution to the “Palestinian-Israeli problem” before he leaves office. Israel, itself, remains basically in a lull, while looking in every direction at a storm that is gathering against it. Russia and its headstrong president are making strange, unanticipated withdrawal gestures and movements in and around Syria and other entrant points to the Middle East. North Korea blusters ahead with nuclear and missile tests, actions intended to threaten it’s immediate neighbor, South Korea, and the rest of us as well. China builds islands in international waters then claims them as their territory, while building military bases upon the newly formed land to threaten anyone who dares question its intentions.

Iran continues to silently work on a nuclear program that it no doubt thinks will one day be used against the Great Satan and the little Satan–the U.S. and Israel.

The world’s building economic disaster expands by the hour like an embolism within the human brain. The silent bubble could erupt explosively at any time, bringing the global, financial catastrophe many fear.

Agents of the Father of Lies work feverishly and incessantly to implant within the fallen minds of mankind that Christianity is a viper’s nest of hatred. Just to our northern border, Canada’s supreme judicial body has ruled in a number of cases that biblical text can be construed as hate speech that must not and will not be tolerated. One pastor spent 10 years and more than $200,000 to finally get a reversal of such a charge against him. Americans would be foolish to assume that such a devilish invasion of evil jurisprudence isn’t in Satan’s plans for this nation. As a matter of fact, we’ve already experienced such evil at some level. The cases involving the homosexual agenda and bakeries and flower shops that refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages come to mind.

All of the above and much more give evidence of the very atmosphere of liberty we have enjoyed since the country’s founding being sucked into the building thunderhead that will produce the greatest storm in human history.

While the world catches its breath, the power of the storm continues to build. Satan seems as if he will have his way against all of humanity in this great destructive era that now rumbles upon earth’s angry horizon.

But, Jesus said: These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)

The Lord promised the believer who is alive at the time this end-times storm threatens:

Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. (Revelation 3:10)

It is altogether fitting and appropriate to echo the words of John the revelator: “Even so, come Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20b).

–Terry

March 21, 2016

Published on: by RR2

nmThe Silent Crime Wave

The city of Chicago has had a huge spike in violent crime. Already since January, more than 100 people have been murdered in the city—which is more than double the number of homicides that occurred in the same time period in 2014 and 2015.

The upsurge in the murder rate is a direct result of a meltdown of law and order in our society. Police in Chicago made 30 percent fewer arrests in the early part of this year, compared to last year. Street stops are also down more than 80 percent so far this year.

Since the release of a video showing the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, there has been a media war against law enforcement. If a person of the “wrong” color is shot on video by a white officer, the press automatically slant their reports to blame the police. Since no cop wants to be on that next video, they now avoid high-crime areas.

“Well, morale is poor, to describe it in one word,” says Dean Angelo Sr., president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. “It’s probably the lowest I’ve seen in my career.”

The low moral for police is a nationwide problem. The polling of more than 6,000 of the New York City Police Department’s roughly 24,000 rank-and-file revealed a resounding lack of passion for the job, with cops on average rating morale at just 2.49 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Ninety-six percent of cops also said that relations between them and the communities they patrol have gotten worse. Nearly 90 percent of cops polled said they would quit the NYPD if they were offered a higher-paying job in law enforcement elsewhere; 86 percent said they would not recommend the job to family members.

While the nation is rotting from the inside out, energy is wasted on grievances that are of increasingly trivial importance. For example, Harvard Law School has had the same seal for 234 years. Suddenly, the school has decided to replace the seal because it was once used by a slave owner. Harvard has also made the truly bizarre move of banning the usage of the word “master” from its job titles.

The liberal media is a key source of the problem. It is incredibly diabolical for them to suppress the news of massive bloodshed. When the murder rate doubles, and the press is able to create an illusion of normalcy, we are clearly in the grip of something truly evil.

Black youths are killing themselves in such high numbers that they are actually reducing the black population of America. You would think this is the plan of white supremacist groups. In fact, it is the work of liberals like, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who have driven the police out—while they turn a blind eye to the carnage-inflicted on the people they claim to represent.

A crisis in L.A. of dead bodies piling up is so out-of-control it has caused the Los Angeles County coroner to quit his job. With a backlog of 180 bodies, Mark Fajardo, abruptly announced his resignation after two years as the city’s top medical examiner.

We are headed for much bigger problems if something is not done to restore sanity. When crime gets so bad that even the lies can’t cover it up, people will turn to an authoritarian power for a solution. I have long thought that lawlessness will be used by the enemy to take over America. As the nation falls into chaos, a strong-willed leader will come along to restore order.

As long as we leave God out of any solution, we are doomed to continue this slide into anarchy.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Romans 1:28).

–Todd

nmAntichrist Near

Once upon a time I wrote in an early draft of a book manuscript about the spirit of Antichrist as given in the Bible. It was more or less a question positing whether this passage might have something to do with anti-Semitism to some extent. Here is the Scripture.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 John 4:1-3)

My cogitation revolved around whether the words:”in the flesh” might somehow include/involve the fact that Jesus came into the world through Jewish ” flesh.” After all, Christ came into the world through the Jewish race. Satan has always wanted to have the world deny that the Jew has any special place in God’s plan for humanity.

The Jew has been hunted and hated throughout history. Adolf Hitler said the Jew is sub-human, and much of the communist world would agree with the Nazi thought in that regard, history shows. They were mistreated–brutally–by Stalin and subsequent dictators and held as the scapegoat for all problems the dictators themselves created and perpetuated. This is still going on in our time in Russia and other places. Anti-Semitism is on the grow in virulence and scope in Europe in a way that has not been seen since pre-Nazi Germany.

Islamist hatred is not only on the grow as violently as at any time in history, it is accepted with hardly an objection by the rest of the world. Our own president, in my view, is culpable in looking the other way as burgeoning anti-Semitism explodes around the world. As I was saying, I wrote in the manuscript about this question–and it was in an inquiring, speculative tone, intended as mere examination, not as adamant postulation. I wondered if denying that Christ came in Jewish flesh somehow figured into the matter of anti-Semitism, because Antichrist, himself, will certainly champion great hatred for God’s chosen people.

Bible prophecy is replete with foretellings of how Antichrist will persecute and murder those of the Jewish race during the Tribulation–i.e., might denial that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” mean, in part at least, that the Antichrist spirit has at its core hatred for the Jew because that is the “flesh” through which God chose to usher His only begotten Son into this fallen world?

This went over not at all well at the publisher with whom I was under contract to do the book. I was told this was false teaching–or as I recall, that was the tone and threat I inferred the response to mean. The words were rather strongly put that I must cut that portion or they couldn’t be a part of such heresy. Well, again, that was how I interpreted the charge and subsequent threat.

Someone at the publishing house had a quite sensitive spot which I had obviously touched, not able to understand that I wasn’t challenging the standard take on what constitutes ”the spirit of antichrist.” I know that the meaning is, primarily, that there is a visceral denial among those of this lost world that God came to earth in the flesh to die for the sin of mankind and to redeem mankind. Still, He did enter this world through the Jewish flesh.

I find the fact that Christians who truly have a pre-Trib, pre-Millennial view of Bible prophecy seem the only core entity that doesn’t display animus for Israel. Most of the world sees Israel as the cause of the problems with regard to the so-called Palestinian question. That the Jewish state is illegitimate, and the illegal occupier of land belonging to the Palestinian people, is the never-ceasing mantra. Those who aren’t openly hostile to Israel either give nods of approval to those who say Israel is the problem or say nothing at all as that nation is verbally pounded and hounded from every quarter.

So-called Christian organizations–even those churches claiming to be evangelicals–join in the satanic stream-of-consciousness insistence that Israel no longer is inheritor of God’s promises made to that people. These enthusiastically join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction” (BDS) movement in their denial that the Jews are God’s chosen people.

Okay, I might be way off the mark in my ruminations about the Jewish race–about Israel–being a part of John’s warning in this antichrist spirit passage. But, the Jews are indeed being hated today like throughout all of history. That anti-Semitism is on the rise can’t be denied by anyone other than those who are cerebrally incapable of realizing it, or who are liars.

Every indicator points to the likelihood that the one called Antichrist is about to step out of the shadows of this rising hatred and into the spotlight for doing his dastardly deeds against God’s chosen people, the Jews.

Thankfully, born-again believers will have to exit the world stage first. The antichrist spirit so prevalent today is proof-positive that the time of that exiting–the Rapture– must be near indeed.

–Terry