Our nation and the nations of the world have throughout recent history been on a collective course of anti-God thinking. It seems they’ve arrived at the same time at the destination to which such a course couldn’t do other than lead.

The COVID-19 or coronavirus is but the vehicle that has brought us swiftly to the end of this journey into madness. Every national governing body and the people they either rule with authoritarian dictatorship or govern democratically are bound tightly by an entity so infinitesimal as to require a microscope to detect it.

A worldwide, altered mindset has fully blossomed. All nations are bound up in fear. It is fear that seems to have a life of its own. It is paralyzing the freedom of action and movement of the most liberty-loving, liberty-endowed people to have lived upon the planet.

Fear is the symptom most manifest in this pandemic that sprang, apparently, from the center of perhaps the world’s most massive dictatorship. The fear continues to grow, not abate, despite all of the many draconian measures foisted on us by bureaucratic “medical experts” entrenched within government. “Shutdown” seems to be what these demand, no matter that this outbreak doesn’t come anywhere near the virulence of the various strains of flu that assault and kill hundreds of thousands each year.

It is, I think, a legitimate pondering to think on Paul’s warning about those who forget God, or turn against the Creator of all things. The apostle, under Holy Spirit direction, has some rather relevant wisdom for our current situation, in my view.

We’ve considered that wisdom many times within these commentaries. We are forewarned that when a person or people turn their thoughts from the governance of God toward doing what is right in their own eyes, the ramifications are dire. The ultimate results are…well, let’s let the Apostle Paul tell us once more:

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, covenantbreakers, 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: 29–32)

We back up to one verse before this list of accusations to see where all the rebelliousness leads.

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. (Romans 1:28)

We think of these chilling, scriptural warnings as applying only to the most egregious sins—in our “looking through a glass darkly” view of things. Homosexual activity is the sin we most associate with God’s condemnation here. But, these represent things much more profound. These are characteristics of the whole of lost, sinful humanity as time progresses deeper into human history. These are, no doubt, things that prompted the Lord to end, then start things again, with the Flood of Noah’s day. These are the characteristics of the generations since that are going to bring about God’s final judgment and wrath during the Tribulation.

Certainly, in one way or the other, this generation exhibits these characteristics so anathema to the God of Heaven. We have witnessed these get worse, just as Paul predicted. “Men and seducers have grown worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.”

I believe just the last five years of the corrupt political process and all attendant to it prove Paul’s prophecy as moving toward fulfillment. The evil manipulations and collusion at the highest levels of America’s supposedly patriotic intelligence agencies make the point vividly and graphically.

The argument could be made that the great fear gripping the nation and the world is the result of pulling away from God at every level. Because of this virus that is nowhere near as virulent as the flu bugs that assault each year, the globe is suffering from a paralysis that has altered normal life as it’s been known to this time.

In effect, the global mindset has been altered. I think this has been done supernaturally. Most now act and interact from what Paul calls in the KJV a “reprobate” mindset. There is, observably, the inability of governments and peoples throughout the world to think straight in this COVID-19 matter. The collective fear that makes everyone act contrary to reason it has brought about is the true contagion that infects the planet. We’re continuing to see the rise of this altered mindset.

God’s prescription for the reprobate mind is as follows:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Isaiah 1:18–20)

 

Among any group of human beings there always arises a bully. We’ve all experienced it since our days in grade school, even in kindergarten.

My wife and I sometimes kept nursery and toddlers in church on Sunday mornings so that the younger parents could enjoy church service without the worry of riding herd on their little ones. I observed the same behavior among the very youngest. There was always one or two who bullied the others—took away toys or did other obnoxious things.

These, of course, didn’t really think or know that they were doing anything wrong. It was just a natural, human trait.

And that’s the problem. The natural thing amongst humans is the part of us that has brought forth the troubles throughout human history.

The natural in this matter stems from the sin nature intrinsic to the fallen, human creation.

“Progressing” up through junior high and beyond the bullying becomes more serious. It is done knowingly and with purpose. The purpose—to lord it over someone else for the bully’s own ego and sense of power and control.

It becomes even more evident in the business world, as people joust and elbow to climb the ladders of success within corporate structures.

Then we come to the arena of politics and government. We have witnessed this in a profound way within the last four years, in my opinion. We are seeing it even now, as far as I’m concerned, in the way the swamp-entrenched medical “experts” within Washington, DC, officialdom have caused the rest of us to completely give up our livelihoods and altered, perhaps permanently, the American way of life.

These have bullied even this president, in my view. They walked into the Oval Office and extorted him with the threat of 2.2 million deaths from the coronavirus, if he didn’t shut down the nation’s close interaction.

I admire Mr. Trump and believe him to be God’s man for the crucial hour so near the end of the age, as many who read our columns know. However, even such a self-confident, “Make America Great Again”president like Donald Trump is intimidated by the “experts” saying that 2.2 million Americans will likely die unless he follows their “expert” advice.

Now, I sense he is realizing the mistake of listening to the veiled intimidation and is trying to finesse America’s way out of this national economic nightmare. The doctors still hold the intimidating authority, though. To me, it is obvious in the way these “authorities,” through using barely comprehensible medical jargon, step to the microphones and coyly contradict the president’s words about starting the nation back up.

So the bullying continues even within this so-called pandemic.

Bullying has been, of course, powerfully manifested by nations throughout history.

The ancient rulers of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and all the rest literally beat their subjects and nations around them if those victims didn’t comply with the bully-rulers’ demands. This is seen in modern times by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and even lesser tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and many, many others.

To my way of observation, today’s most pronounced national bully is China. This monstrous dictatorship from the far reaches of the Orient has, through accident or deliberate perpetration, shown itself to be clearly the leading bully on the international block.

China is now seen as the prime culprit in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. They almost certainly, according to intelligence services from the UK and America, deliberately unleashed the disease after it, most likely, accidentally escaped biological laboratories near the Chinese city of Wuhan.

It is thought that the dictator-leadership of China determined that since it escaped, they would keep the fact from other nations—particularly from the Western nations, so their economy wouldn’t be the only one to catastrophically suffer if and when the pandemic developed—as it did.

Intelligence sources accuse Chinese President Xi Jinping of rounding up perhaps millions of coronavirus-infected Chinese people and having them murdered so that the disease wouldn’t appear to be so widespread in that country. This, of course, is the sort of thing that world-class dictators do.

We remember the more than 30 million murdered in the Stalin purges and more than 60 million killed in the genocide by Mao tse-Tung in the so-called Cultural Revolution.

So, the bullying by geopolitical tyrants continues—and in a big way. The following excerpt makes the case.

China is continuing to under-report the true levels of deaths from Covid-19, national security officials in London and Washington believe.

But European officials are wary about directly challenging China over the figures, sources told the BBC. That concern also extends to confronting Beijing over an information campaign to improve its standing and distract from blame in the crisis…

Governments in Europe have been wary of engaging in a diplomatic row with China at a sensitive time. One UK official, who like others declined to speak on the record, said there was a “nervousness” about confronting China and that relations were “delicate”. (Gordon Corera, “Coronavirus: Europe ‘wary of confronting China over deaths,’” BBC News, 23 April 2020)

Clearly, there are leaders in the European Union who are afraid to confront China. Governments and presidential administrations have shied away from confrontation from this behemoth state because of its feared military power and influence. Those same governments and administrations have given the Chinese dictators ever-increasing latitude to form and shape trade deals that have given the Chinese communists billions of dollars to build one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

Bullies must be confronted, and the United States now has a commander-in-chief who is doing exactly that. For the second time recently, American warships have sailed through the sensitive area known as the Taiwan Strait. This is an expanse of waters that separate the tiny island nation of Taiwan from mainland communist China.

The communist regimes in the mainland have always considered Taiwan to belong to China. It is an illegitimate government that rules in Taiwan, the Chinese government continues to declare, because rebels (in their view) broke away from China and fled to Formosa (the name of Taiwan at the time). The Chinese communists have been threatening since that break from mainland China to invade and take the people of free Taiwan back into their regime.

Bible prophecy, in my view of it, foretells—without mentioning the name of China—that this demon-possessed bully will be responsible for the deaths of fully one-third of human beings during the time of Tribulation. Almost without question, this evil state will be the king of “the kings of the east.”

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. (Revelation 9:13–16)

And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. (Revelation 16:12)