A Time When Righteous Indignation Against Evildoing Is the Real Evildoing

A while back I mentioned that I've been experiencing a sort of persecution for decades now, which I connect with a sin I committed back before I was a believer. Not a sin that to my mind reaches to a level deserving of such treatment, more an embarrassment, which makes me think there must be a lie somewhere in the rumor that's fueling it all. And the level of persecution is way overkill for a nobody like me. Besides which those I tell about it don't believe me. I admit it's outlandish, I see why they'd think it's just paranoia, but I remain convinced it isn't. The persecution experiences come from many people. Certainly seems like it must be paranoia. But if I see I've misinterpreted something I'm pretty quick to recognize and admit it. That isn't happening with most of these ongoing experiences. Yet why would anyone bother to torment someone like me anyway? Why would the devil bother for that matter? Guess I'm not going to know what it's all about in this lifetime. **************************************************************************************** The Lord has made it clear that His grace is sufficient for me and that is reassuring but I don't always hold on to it and yearn to be rescued from it. These things happen in church too, that's one of the main reasons I no longer have a church. Other reasons have to do with my physical infirmities. ***************************************************************************************** It's also comforting to know that I must belong to the Lord because the devil would be nice to me if I belonged to him. Not that I am able to hold on to this perspective consistently either. If the Rapture happened today would I be in that number? And if I was wouldn't I be used as a reason to discredit the Rapture? They are going to find ways to lie about it anyway, they'd make use of a pariah here, a sinner there, etc. **************************************************************************************** All those "Christians" who didn't get raptured, well doesn't that prove it wasn't God's doing? The devil is very clever, got to give him that. He knows how to lie to great effect. If before the Flood it was violence and corruption of the human gene pool, now it seems to be lies lies and more lies. Very effective too. Good is evil, evil is good, people who are trying to right wrongs are said to be doing the wrongs. I discover that every time I listen to someone like Rachel Maddow, anyone on the Left really. Trump is still their favorite "evildoer" for sure, though he's nothing of the sort, twisting his meaning is just about automatic now. They say he was asking for some kind of unethical action to lend support to his ambitions, when really what he was doing was trying to right a wrong -- in more than one incident, it's kind of a formula now. So clever. ************************************************************************************* But lots of us on the right get the same treatment. Christians are probably particularly targeted by the evil one although his human agents may not be aware of it. The whole thrust of current "liberalism" is nothing but a perverted sort of moralistic fingerpointing. That's really all it amounts to. It's ideologically driven, has no correspondence to any reality whatever. Truly it's got to be the invention of the devil himself. Well, Marx was an actual satanist. Oh yes he was, an actual follower, a devotee of the evil one. So politics today is nothing but lying character assassination couched in pseudopolitical terminology, fake social analysis, lies lies and more lies. That's all there is to it. All in tones of righteous indignation. Lies lies and more lies. If I AM raptured I'd like to think I'd said something that could make it possible for some people who are now in thrall to the lies to see through them. **************************************************************************************** Well, this post certainly took a turn there, didn't it? Should I rewrite it? What's the point of airing my "paranoia" anyway? Well, maybe it will be useful if the rapture does come soon.

There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are Dreamed of in Your Philosophy

Some things in this book The Judgment of the Nephilm I've heard before, but it took this book to provide the convincing evidence of it. Pitterson quotes copiously from the Bible, commentaries, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the writings of ancient historians. (**************************************************************************************** I had heard, for instance, that the human-angel hybrid children of the "sons of God" of Genesis 6 included the "Greek gods," the heroes of the Greek poets such as Homer. "gods" such as Hercules, Achilles, Prometheus, etc. The "Titans." Hard to accept all that as real of course, but they fit the Genesis account of being the offspring of heavenly "gods" and human women, and since I believe the Bible account it lends credence to the Greek gods too. Reference after reference establishes this connection, it's not just a wild supposition. The "myths" were realities. at least based on realities. ************************************************************************************** It's getting rather overwhelming. I'm just past half way through the book and finding out that the Nephilim/giants weren't just occasional occurrences in the Promised Land but dominated it. Tribe after tribe that are listed in scripture Pitterson shows were tribes of giants though scripture doesn't dwell on that fact. It's possible to read it all and get the impression it was just the usual tribes of human beings with the occasional giants here and there. ***************************************************************************************** He's made it clear that it was the corruption of the human gene pool by these Nephilim and their evil ways that was the cause of the Flood. Also the reason for the scorched-earth slaughter of some of the tribes of peoples later, including babies, who would grow up to be Nephilim. Hybrid angel-humans that can't be saved and threaten to destroy all humanity itself. ((************************************************************************************** Some odd phrases are at least becoming clear. Scripture describes Noah as "perfect in his generations" which is an odd way of saying he was a righteous man if that's all it meant. But what it means is that he was completelyhuman, didn't have any Nephilim blood in his ancestry. Wow, woluld I never have figured THAT out. (**************************************************************************************** So how did the Nephilim seed survive the Flood and overrun the Promised Land anyhway? Pitterson traces it to Ham's wife who must have carried it. It was their son Canaan who apparently fathered most of the giants in the land of Canaan. Or all of them, it's not clear yet. (*************************************************************************************** Turns out there are plenty of books by people who DID figure out most of these things, those old commentaries for instance, but for some reason not much is made of it in today's preaching. It's not that the information isn't there, but it does take some sleuthing to bring it out, Giants galore, threatening to overwhelm the bloodline of the Seed of the Woman, the prophesied Messiah. **************************************************************************************** Yikes!

Our Own Tower of Babel in Defiance of God

Still reading the book The Judgment of the Nephilim, and just happened to be in the chapter about Nimrod and the Tower of Babel when I got an email with a link to the new One World Trade Center observatory: ****************************************************************************** https://www.youtube.com/embed/aDIN26yxbnw ****************************************************************************** The tower itself has been open about six years though I'm seeing it for the first time. It's quite an impressive human achievement, which is what makes it an interesting coincidence. ********************************************************************************** The most important thing about the attack on the WTC on 9/11 in my opinio, is that although it was God's judgment against America, a warning shot at least, and to the world as well since it was an icon to the world that was downed, there was no acknowledgment of God in our respose to it, no hint that repentance was in order, except perhaps in a few Christian churches . ****************************************************************************************** Some years ago I got fascinated with Jonathan Cahn's observation of events in New York City after 9/11 that strangely literally echo a passage in the Old Testamewnt about the arrogance of the Israelites in defying God's judgment:

10 The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cutdown, but we will change them into cedars. 11 Therefore the Lord shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him, and join his enemies together;

*************************************************************************************** I argued at length for the specific correspondences between that passage and events in New York City clearly connected with 9/11 and clearly indicative of a spirit of defiance against God, but all I want to say here is that the attitude expressed by Israel as quoted in Isaiah 9:10-11 (and the scriptural "address" is pretty interesting too) is the same attitude America has had about 9/11. "They can't do this to us, we'll just build bigger and better." But of course it's God who is in charge of all things and God who brought judgment on the nation on 9/11. It is God we are defying by building the One World Trade Center to replace the two towers that were destroyed. O foolish nation that trusts in mere human powers and forgets God. ******************************************************************************************** Nimrod and the Tower of Babel also make an interesting connection, since Nimrod is considered to have been the first globalist, who wanted to rule the world instead of just his own nation, making the Ond World Trade Center an interesting echo of that ambition. Like a lot of other things going on these days of course. Globalism is in the air. ******************************************************************************************* So. A reminder. The only way to turn back God's judgements iw repentance.

Book on the Nephilim: The Nature of Angels and Men

Owwwww! This isn't going to be much of a post, more an explosion of feeling: this book I've been reading, The Judgment of the Nephilim by pastor Ryan Pitterson, who is new to me, who was a guest on Jan Markell's Understanding the Times show two weeks ago, this book, this book...is the deepest exegesis of scripture I've run across in a long long time. There is a revelation on nearly every page of it, a bringing-forth of meanings that pass us by in our normal reading of the Bible. Most of us I have to suppose. Which is why God gave us those gifted to be pastors and teachers. ************************************************************************************************ I for one am likely to skim over a passage that isn't completely clear to me, figuring Oh well this is ancient stuff in a foreign language and the Bible is too jam-packed with such mysterious references to spend too much time on any one of them unless it directly pertains to my salvation. Questions are raised in my mind but all I can do is shelve them for later. ********************************************************************************************* Questions. What exactly is meant by "flesh" in the Bible? How can angels fornicate since Jesus tells us there is no marriage in heaven? If they are physically capable of sex why is there no marriage? And why do they always appear as men, never women? If they are able to pass on their "seed" what is that seed anyway, do they have DNA like human DNA that can combine with it in sexual recombination? Apparently so. It is clear that they have some sort of physicality from the many passages where they interact with humans in the Bible, even eat human food. They are usually invisible though, able to manifest in physical form at least and when they do they appear human and are often taken for human. These are some of the questions this book is answering very convincingly, by comparing scripture with scripture which is how we are to read the Bible. *************************************************************************************** I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, already blown away by what it reveals.

Revived Roman Empire, Islam and "Mary"

Something I forgot to add to the last post or the one before. On Jan Markell's radio show her guest pastor Barry Stagner said that during the Tribulation the Church will be out of the way, raptured of course, but also that radical Islam will be out of the way, and I must have missed how he thinks that is going to happen. I may go back and see if he explains it somewhere but whatever he thinks the explanation is I have to disagree. (******************************************************************************* My disagreement is based mostly on Chris Pinto's belief that the papacy has been behind the influx of Muslims into Europe and as far as possibsible so far into the US as well, which he interprets as their plan to use them as the weapon of their revived Inquisition against us "heretics," Protestant Christians as well as others. With a Pope as the final Antichrist and Mystery Babylon as the Harlot Church of Rome along with all the little harlot religions it is incorporating into itself, the Tribulation period will be a revived Inquisition for sure. Throughout the Middle Ages the RCC martyhred some fifty million Protestants or protoProtestants along with some 17 million Jews, Muslims, witches and others (according to Plaisted). Then the Reformation came along and put an end to it for a while but with the Jesuits dedicated to overturning the Reformation they've never stopped plotting to regain their power in the Holy Roman Empire. The RCC itself is regarded as the continuation of the Roman Empire through that era, and that is what will no doubt be revived after the Rapture with the Pope at the helm The Reformation is no doubt the "wound" that will be healed when the revived RCC and its Inquisition resume. ***********************************************************************************&&&&&&& Islam figures into this in more than one way. Some have interpreted Islam as one of the legs of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream as reported in the Book of Daniel, the other being of course the Roman Empire. Islam began at just about the same time as the Bishop of Rome was elevated over all the other bishops to dominate European Christendom as the Holy Roman Empire. Islam and the RCC have been at odds of course but the Pope has been courting them assiduously lately, and Chris Pinto makes the case that Islam will unite with the RCC through "Mary" as they also revere her and many Muslims visit the sites of her supposed appearances. (*********************************************************************************************** So Mystery Babylon will incorporate Islam as wwell and why should they give up their jihad? It expresses essentially the same thing the Inquisition does, the aim of ridding of the world of all "infidels" to establish Islam, in this case the Islam-RCC harlot religion. Through the sword when conversion fails. *********************************************************************************************** It is the worship of "Mary" which has dominated the last few Popes as well as this Jesuit Pope, which apparently also captivates Islam, that gives some credence to the idea that "Mary" is the "Beaast" of Revelation, to be worshipped by the whole world. I think it was Alexander Hislop who suggested this possibility in his book "The Two Babylons."

Why the Rapture Will Be the Trigger for the Tribulation/Day of the LORD, plus other loose ends

Realized I didn't fully appreciate my own thought in the previous post. Seems to me now that since Palm Sunday was the day on which the Seventy Weeks prophecy of Daniel ended at the 69th, leaving one "week" or seven years yet to be fulfilled, and that the same day inaugurated what is known as the Church Age, the day that the seventieth week resumes will be the same day the Church Age comes to an end, and that will be with the Rapture. ***************************************************************************************** Certainly the Rapture IS the ending of the Church Age. And EXACTLY at the end of that same day the seven-year Tribulation or Day of the LORD would begin. That is, there would be no gap, the Rapture WILL be the trigger for the Tribulation because it ends the Church Age so that Daniel's seventy weeks can resume, and there's no room in there for a gap. Not the same day but the next day since the weeks are sequential of course with no overlaps. So if the Rapture occurs in relation to Palm Sunday it would be the day after. God's clock is perfect. ***************************************************************************************** Rosh Hashanah is still my next best favorite for the Rapture. I know they say it could occur at any time and all this fussing I'm doing about dates will come to nothing, which it very well may, but I still do think an event as momentous as the Rapture could very likely occur on God's established calender. We probably won't know the year but it wouldn't hurt to be prepared for any likely date as it comes around every year. ******************************************************************************************* A couple other loose ends from the previous post: If the papacy is the Antichrist as the Reformers and many of their predecessors proved from scripture, then most or all of those signs that identify him in the book of Daniel were already fulfilled when the Bishop of Rome was elevated to Universal Bishop in 606 AD, I don't remember all the scriptural interpretations but I know he displaced three other Bishops which would be the three "kings" of the prophecy. So the final Antichrist, already having fulfilled many of the prophecies, has only a few left to fulfill. ******************************************************************************************* The Roman Church is Mystery Babylonh the Great in the sense that its pagan trappings, the bishop's fish head mitre for instance, and the image of mother and child, all come down originally from the pagan religion of Nimrod and Semiramis. It is THE embodiment of all the satanic religions in history invented by Satan to thwart the true religion of the prophesied Messiah. I'm wondering if there is even a connection back before the Flood to the Nephilim and the relgion of Cain and maybe this book I'm reading will shed light on that.

Rapture and Tribulation Timing Until and Timing Between

So near and yet so far. The Rapture, the End. Right around the corner, any minute even, and yet time goes on and things keep getting worse until you wonder how bad it has to be before God lowers the boom. We're to be anxious for nothing, worried about nothing, just trusting in the LORD, but it's so hard when you know so many family and friends who keep resisting the gospel while time is getting so short. I get overwhelmed with how MUCH people would need to know to get through the Tribulation for instance, people who get saved then I mean of course. They know nothing now, nothing. The timing will be crucial and they don't know to look in the Book of Daniel or the Book of Revelation. I want them to become believers NOW so they don't have tgo deal with all that but so far it's not happening. I don't even know if they will become believers during the Tribulation either, I can only hope that events will be so startling it will force them to rethink things and get saved. ******************************************************************************************** Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Year, years? I know we aren't to know but certain days always hit me as more likely than others because I keep thinking that since all the major evens of the coming of Jesus and the founding of the Church occurred on Jewish high holidays it makes sense that something as momenentous as the Rapture should also be marked by occurring on a special day in the biblical calendar. Of course it's foolish to guess but I'm foolish. The next date that seems likely to me is Palm Sunday, which this year is only a week away, on March 28. And Palm Sunday seems likely because that is the date on which the 69 weeks of Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy ended, with the announcement of Jesus' Messiahship. The full Seventy Weeks wree not fulfillable at that time, putting the seventieth week, or seven years, into the future. Time after that date is known as the Church Age, and when the last or seventieth week of the Seventy Weeks prophecy occurs it will be the last seven years before Jesus returns as Conquering King. We know the seventieth week will encompass the seven-year Tribulation period laid out in the Book of Revelation but we aren't told when it will begin. And since we aren't supposed to know the time I must be wrong about this, it just seems so fitting that since the prophecy left off on Palm Sunday the week before Jesus was crucified, that its last seven years might resume on the same date. Of course even if it did it wouldn't necessarily be this year.... ***************************************************************************************** Scripture tells us believerfs will not be taken by surprise but I don't know for sure what that means since if we have no warning at all it's going to be a surprise no matter when it happens. No warning other than all these signs we are seeing now I mean of course, signs that tell us it is close but not HOW close. Closer than before, but not HOW close. ******************************************************************************************** And the timing is even more complicated when it's not entirely clear whether the signs refer to the time before the Rapture or during the Tribultion. Most of the prophecy ministries these days insist that there will be NO signs before the Rapture, it will be a total surprise so they think the signs will occur during the Tribulation. I tend to see the Rapture as a phase of Jesus' Second Coming so signs could very well anticipate it. We won't know until we know. ******************************************************************************************************** I was just listening to the latest program of Jan Markell's Understanding the Times radio which is about what happens after the Rapture, for those who will be left behind and have to deal with it. As usual it's a good presentation but as usual it's the most popular view that I always differ from on a few points. ********************************************************************************************* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GS7KUa_sXA ******************************************************************************************* In this episode the speaker says how there may be a gap between the Rapture and the First Seal which begins the Tribulation Period, because some things according to the popular view are going to take time. For instance they think the Antichrist will not be revealed until the Tribulation begins, or even not until the midpoint of the Tribulation, and he will have to rise to power and make a covenant with Israel and all that will take time. So there might be a fairly long gap between the Rapture and the Seven Year Day of the LORD or Tribulation period. ********************************************************************************************* Unless the Antichrist is the papacy as the Protestant Reformers and hundreds of their predecessors said he is, using the very same scriptures to identify him as are now used to put off his revelation until after the beginning of the Tribulation. IF the Great Apostasy was the RC Church itself as the Reformers believes, and if the Restrainer that keps the Antichrist's identiy from being revealed was the Caesars as they also believed, then he's been revealed and the Restrainer is not the Holy Spirit. The current Pope needs little extra time. He's already well established as a world figure, he's participated in many international events. The end times religion doesn't need to be formed either, because the Roman Church itself is its foundation and the popes havbeen working for decades to include all the other religions of the world under its umbrella. No doubt some i's need to be dotted and some t's crossed but it looks to me like the stage is fully set already. If the popular scenario is true then it WILL take time, but not if the Reformation was right about the identity of the Antichrist. ********************************************************************************************* Altho8ugh there's nothing in scripture that requires the Rapture to be the trigger for the Tribulation that I know of, it just makes more sense for there to be a solid seven years between the Rapture as the first phase of Jesus' Second Coming and His return aftger the Tribulattion. The Church's time in heaven with Jesus should be a neat seven years just as the timing of the Tribulation is to be a neat seven years. I suspect there is biblical support for this but I'm not sure what it is. There was the idea that the seven years parallels the week a Bridegroom gives to his bride in marriage customs, but since the wedding feast doesn't occur until Jesus' final return this doesn't seem to work out. But I'm probably missing something. ***************************************************************************************** Anyway I'm still going with the Reformation view of the identify of the Antichrist. Time will tell.

A Book About the Giants That Were Born before the Flood

(I did something that caused the formatting of blog posts to revert to an earlier form and I don't know how to fix it and I've forgotten how to use the old form. I can't figure out how to make paragraphs so I'm going to have to use characters to create spaces. Sorry I'm getting more tech challenged every day). ***************************************************************************\ I discovered a new book about the Nephilim of Genesis 6 -- The Judgment of the Nephilim by Ryan Pitterson -- and have the Kindle version on my PC Kindle page. It's a long book and I'm only aboutg a sixth into it, and although it's white on black which helps a great deal my eyes are getting bad enough that it slows me down quite a bit. ***************************************************************************\ Anyway it's a fascinating study of a controversial biblical passage: ********************************************************

Genesis 6:1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

*********************************************************************************************************** It's controversial because it just seems so outlandish that angels and humans would have married, so some claim that "sons of God" doesn't mean angels. However, everywhere else in scripture that's exactly what the phrase means, and Pitterson's book makes use of all the relevant sources to prove it. Outlandish it may be but apparently it actually happened. ************************************************************************* Those were the years just before the Flood and the mingling of the human and angelic seed produeddyced giants, also known as the Nephilim. This is considered to be the reason God brought the Flood on the earth, because this corruption of the human gene pool made them unredeemable. The Messiah was to save human beings, not angels, so that these hybrids made the prophesied salvation impossible. By the time of Noah the corruption was widespread. *****************************************(********************************************** What's particularly fascinating about this study is how he brings out the theme of Satan's ongoing attempts to thwart the prophecy of the Messiah who was to save humanity and defeat Satan. The prophecy was first given to Adam and Eve right after the Fall. Satan had already engineered the Fall, the disobeidence of God by Adam and Eve, because according to Pitterson their being placed in the Garden of Eden usurped Satan's own place there. This was new to me. And after the Fall God promised to send a Redeemer who would save them from their sins. He would "bruise the head" of the serpent, who was Satan, and Satan would bruise His heel. This being a threat to Satan he set out to find a way to make the prophecy unfulfillable. **************************************(**************************************************** His first effort was to corrupt Cain so that as the firstborn son of Adam and Eve he couldn't be the sinless Messiah. When Cain murdered Abel the second candidate for Messiah was out of the way. ****************************** But Adam and Eve kept producing children, and so did Cain in his new location east of Eden. This required a new strategy, so Satan provoked the angels called the Watchers to lust after human women. Creating unredeemable babies would have thwarted the plan of redemption if it spread through the entire human race. *********************************************************************************************************** I hope I have that much right. We know of some later attempts to thwart the messianic promise when Pharoah was provoked to have the firstborn sons of the Israelites killed, and then when the Messiah was born in Bethlehem Herod did the same. ******************************************************************************************** But the book is no doubt going to get far more detailed and interesting in its exploration of the time of the giants, and how it relates to us today since we are very close to Jesus' prophecy of the repeat of the "days of Noah" just before His return.

Musings about racial disparities and what to do about them

I'm just an armchair daydreamer, no earthly good to anyone unless my blogs might have some value and as far as I know they don't. So maybe I'm just writing to myself. Oh I knew there are a few people who read it but I don't know if they are friend or foe, foe meaning people who like to see what the idiots on the other side of issues are saying so they can be armed against them, with answers or just mockery. I don't know, but since there's nothing else I can do these days I go on writing anyway. It's in God's hands. If I'm in His will all is well no matter what. If I'm not, at the moment He's not giving me something else to do anyyway. I spend a lot of time just listening to You Tube videos, about the current social and political situations, some through Christian ministries, also John MacArthur's sermons, but also a scattering of commentaries from here and there. I've been listening to the black point of view quite a bit recently, mostly more or less liberal but anti-Woke, and some of the conservatives like Larry Elder. Although some of them don't completely discount the role of the residual effects of racism and slavery on the continuing economic and cultural disparities between blacks and other groups, they mostly reject solutions such as reparations and are critical of the Woke movement. Most of them point to problems such as fatherlessness and educational deficiencies in the black communities as the main cause of the disparities. Larry Elder points to government interventions as causing more harm than good, such as the minimum wage which deprives unskilled workers of all races of job opportunities. Glenn Loury said on one of his podcasts that he agrees with Malcolm X that the black comkmunities are going to have to solve their own problems. Loury didn't get specific about how that would be done, at least not in that podcast, maybe he does somewhere else but if so I've missed it so far. Anyway, all that is preamble to my own daydreams about some things that could possibly be done within the communities. I admit to total ignorance of what would actually help and I know it's probably empty chutzpah to say anything at all, even offensive. I'm an armchair dilletante, good for nothing. All that said, I have these daydreams. I usually think in terms of the churches getting involved. Black churches but even white churches if God so leads. The first thing I thought of was the ministry of Rosaria Butterfield and her pastor husband who started opening their home to their neighbors for Bible reading and prayer and shared meals, sometimes cookouts, always with an aim to getting to know them and understand their problems. I'll put a link below to one of her talks where she focuses on discovering that a neighbor was running a meth lab. She also goes into her own personal testimony of having been a lesbian professor of English and gay rights activist who got saved after years of hospitality from a pastor and his wife. My thoughts ran far afield of that first inspiration, trying to understand what sorts of problems might be encountered in black neighbor hoods. Gangs are one I know, the murder rate among young black men is scary in cities like chicago. What sort of hospitality could make a dent in that? Since it's probably related to the problem of fatherless homes I had to imagine men stepping in somehow to befriend these kids and try to steer them into something productive. Black men from the churches perhaps. What would it look like? I'm not sure. Cookouts and other kinds of gatherings maybe? Maybe gospel focused -- I remember how pastor David Wilkerson went from his miswest church to New York City to work with the Hispanic gangs there, which he wrote about in his book The Cross and the Switchblade. but if nonChristians got inspired to do something the focus would be different, just focused on the problems of the individual kids. Since deficient education is a problem what about illiteracy. Can that be addressed in some way on the neighborhood level? Simple edcuation around the kitchen table? What about one-on-one mentoring? There's the Big Brother program. Is that in these neibhrohoods? Often efforts that start small can grow into effective programs, but this kind of thing can get too big to be effective, better to keep it on a small local and personal scale I think. A few years ago I heard about a woman in a town near where I live who felt God calling her to help the homeless people in her community, people living in the cheap motels particularly. She would take them a bag of groceries, fix a meal and share it with them to get to know them, then try to find agencies in the community that could help them with various problems, getting a job or whatever. Eventually her personal efforts attracted others until it grow into an agency in its own right. Big enough to remain effective, not too big to become a cold complicated bureaucratic labyrinth. Maybe a useless daydream. I'm in no position to go out and actually DO anything of the sort, all I can do is daydream. I'm too old, I don't get around very well, I'm losing my eyesight, etc etc etc. And besides, I'm white. Although there's no reason whites couldn't also be involved, it's probably best if the majority are black. And if daydreams are useless, oh well. Here's a talk by Rosaria Butterfield about her hospitality ministry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YmZlCvCGJ4 And I also googled "daily life in a black neighborhood and got some interesting hits. The first one is a black guy going into inner city Chicago and interviewing a gang. The second one is about black cultural attitudes that allow others to rip them off.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqgO7-fRiXg&t=21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Hd9gPx5Z8&t=32s Although these ponderings are about the black situation there are certainly problems among all groups of people that could use more neighborly involvment. I was also thinking how much desperation I felt in my own life where some neighborly interest and help might have made a difference. ///////////I must have done something that changed the format so I'm not getting paragraphs and I don't know how to fix it. Sorry.

UFO sightings

 Discussion of UFO phenomena on Jan Markell's Understanding the Times radio show, Pastor Billy Crone discusses his study of UFOs.    He thinks only a very small percentage of supposed sightings are ossibly real UFO phenomena, he mentions that the Vatican has been looking for extraterrstrial life for years, and he believes that it's demonic deception rather than anything related to extraterrestrial life.  As do I.   Apparitions of "Mary" are another demonic deception.

Millions Missing: Who’s to Blame? – Pastor Billy Crone - YouTube

Here's an old post from this blog on the subject of UFOs: 

Faith's Corner: UFOs (watchpraystand.blogspot.com)

Jan Markell's interview gets into all the particular lies promoted by all these demonic entities that need to be recognized and rejected. / Advuce: anyone who encounters an "alien" or an apparition of any kind, a "ghost" or whatnot, can make it go away bgy commanding it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ.

More on Loving Our Enemies

MacArthur pointed out in his sermon on loving our enemies that when Jesus prayed from the cross "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," God answered that prayer in the salvation of the thief on the cross next to him and  the onlooking Centurion who recognized Him  as the Son of God.  

When Stephen prayed for those who were stoning him to death,  that God not lay this sin to their charge, that prayer was answered in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus who was in the crowd that was stoning him.    

I've admired for years those who actually live that way.  You'd think that would be enough to change me but alas I'm a hard case.  I'm thinking of Pastor Josef Tson who was persecuted for his faith in Ceaucescu's Romania, his precious library destroyed, and he himself beaten at periodic interrogations.  He asked his wife to make tea for those who were destroying his library, and he prayed for the interrogator who had him beaten.  

Another wonderful example was Corrie Ten Boom's sister when they were in the concentration camp because they had protected Jews from the Nazis in their home, and the sister -- Betsy? --  I'm not sure of her name, was sick and weak and the Nazi who had charge over the work they were commanded to do was harsh with her for her weakness in doing the work, and I don't remember exactly what she said but it was something that blamed herself for her weakness and more or less apologized to her tormentor.  She died in the camp soon after that.   And after the war when Corrie was speaking somewhere that Nazi who had tormented her sister came up to her aftgerward to say he'd been saved.  Corrie at first didn't even want to shake his hjand but then realized it was what God would have wanted.  The man was saved, and very likely because of the Christian witness of her sister.

  

And another favorite example is the stpry of the young KGB officer who was assigned to break up Christian house meetings in the sixties and seventies, and during one raid a woman prayed out loud that the Lord would forgive him, to which he reacted with rage and lifted his club to hit her, at which point he felt a hand grip his uplifed arm and prevent him from striking her.  There was noone there, just an invisible hand.  He panicked and fled the house, but that was the beginning of his conversion.   He had a torn piece of one of the gospels that did the converting.   (Some years later he made a dramatic escape off a Russian ship on which he was an officer, swam through icy water to the west coast of Canada and for some time lived among Christians there until the KGB caught up to him)_

So here's the ideal.  It can only be built on a deep love of Christ and we need to pray for that first.  But when the Inquisition puts us on the rack we are to pray for our torturers.  When they put us in the iron maiden we are to pray for our torturers.  When they starve us to death we are to pray for our torturers.  When they raise the scimitar to behead us we are to pray for our torturers.  .  

So when they censor us today we are to pray for them.  When they lie and call us racists and white sepremacists we are to pray for them.    That doesn't mean we stop working against their evil policies of course, seeking jjustice, it just means we are to forgive them presonally, as individuals, for they know not what they do. 

God Loves His Enemies and So Must We Love Ours.

This is one of John MacArthur's most powerful sermons.  No, for me at least I think it is THE most powerful he has ever preached.  Becausre i needed to hear it.  I know God says we are to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and I remember to do it from time to time, but not with much fervor or consistency.  I still flare up in anger when I'm lied about or otherwise slighted or put down.  Sometimes I remember to pray for the enemy in those cases too but pretty rarely.  As I listened to this sermon tears were running down my face.  Finally I understand it.  Thank You LORD, thank you John MacArthur.  I don't think I can bgo on forgetting it anyh more.  

Loving Your Enemies as God Does - YouTube

I disocvered people to pray for I never think about, people I do regard as enemies without really acknowledging to myself that I do, but my reaction is to avoid them.  Now I will pray for them and pray that God will give me real desire to pray for them rather than the cursory dutiful prayers I'm likely to fall into.

I'd heard some wrong preaching on this before.  For instance I'd heard the imprecatory prayers in the psalms recommended to Christians as something we can pray against God's enemies.  But MacArthur makes it very clear that those psalms are for particular situations and have nothing to do with the command to us to personally love our personal enemies.  He did a marvelous job of mustering all the scriptures in both Old and New Testaments that exhort us to love our enemies.    I'd always assumed that loving our nieghbor or our enemy didn't mean we have to FEEL love for them simply will the best for them, but I'd heard a preacher contradict that idea and insist we are to feel love for them.  I knew that for me that's impossible, and I wasn't sure that was the correct understanding anyway.  But MacArthur preached that it a love of the will and not of the affections that is meant, agape love, willed beneficence, kindness to all, not the personal felt love.  That makes more sense and I'm grateful to have that cleared up.

The teaching is also general, we are to pray for all sinners, not just our personal enemies.  The hard thing for me, and I don't think I'm alone, is to pray for the leaders who are promoting dangerous and evil social policies these days.  Now I want to pray for them. 

I'm convicted to the core of my lack of love.  Thank You LORD.

Occultism: The Latest Stage of Doctrinal Deviation in the Churches

 Jan Markell's most recent Understanding the Times radio show is about a rise in interest in the occult that is becoming popular even in the churches. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCqRDA5LA5A 

This is certainly another sign of our closeness to the end as the religion of the antichrist will certainly be occultic and satanic.   

The scripture that is quoted to concemn this is 

1 Timothy 4:1-3   Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that in latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils;  Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared with a hot iron;  Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats...

I want to point out about this passage that in context it is clearly referring to the Roman Church with its prohibition against marriage for its priests and prohibition of eating meat, at least on one day a week, and this was part of the scriptural basis for identifying the papacy as the Antichrist according to Luther and perhaps other Reformers.   If you leave out the last verse it has a more general application that also seems appropriate but isn't really what the passage is saying.  The "doctinres of demons" in context appears to point to the doctrines of the Roman Church.   The "falling away" or Great Apostasy that is also taken as a sign of the last days was intrpreted by the Reformers to refer to the doctrines of the RC Church.

HOWEVER, there is no doubt that occultic practices are directly connected to demons and their doctrines, and that we are now seeing a spreading of apostasy in the churches.

Although all this does point to the nearness of the Tribulation period, it can also be seen as the ltest phase in a progression of deviations in the churches that have been accumulating over time, from as far back at least as the rise of Liberal theology in the 19th century, and I keep returning to the idea that we could turn back the coming judgment at least for a time if we reversed the trend.  

That would mean seeking God for undertsanding of where to start, and I think that would likely be by requiring women to resume covering our heads in church.  We require men to be bareheaded on the basis of that same passage of scripture and since we read that literally it makes no sense not to read the requirement for women to be covered also literally.  There may be other places to start but I keep coming back to this as a glaring departure that desperately needs to be rectified.   

If we did that I think we could apready start to see improvement in our spiritual vision, because it's deviations and sins that cloud our spiritual vision.   The attack on biblical inerrancy by the Great Bible Hoax of 1881. also needs to be recoghnized and addreswsed.  And another thing I've been forgetting lately that I'd add is that too many churches are soft on divorce and remarriage and I don't think you can just repent of that without doing something about it, but each case would have to be decided separately.

It seems too much to ask but if God convicted us it could be done.

Another First Time Reaction Video

Maybe THIS is how to save the world (young black guy who shed tears over Pavarotti now reacts to Mozart's Requiem)

Mozart - Requiem REACTION - YouTube

How to Save the World Part 2

 Needed to hear Chris Pinto's recent radio show again, titled Bible Skeptics and Progressive Christian Heresy    NOTR - BIBLE SKEPTICS & PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN HERESY - 3.4.21 - Show Downloads - Noise of Thunder Radio with Chris Pinto

When I manage to have my wits about me, which is iffy these days, I realize that it all comes down to the churches.  We can go on and on about how the nation is being dismantled by evil doctrines, we can document them and lament them but we seem to have no power against them.  We get silenced, our best arguments don't persuade many if any, and i for one think "Oh well, we're doomed, we're under God's judgment, it's all over, the next step is most likely the absolute End Game before Jesus comes back -- the Rapture, the Tribulation, the world rule of the final Antichrist and then the End," .

And that may well be, but as I also say, sometimes i get glimmers of hope that it doesn't have to work out that way... yet.   And that takes me back to the churches which is where it all stands or falls.  We're supposed to be "salt and light" to the world, but if the salt has lost its savor, said Jesus, it is fit only to be trampled under foot.  

Here we have access to the power that runs the universe and we seem to have lost the connection.  We're supposed to be the "Church Militant," (as opposed to the Church Triumphant which is in heaven) but we're more like the Church Impotent, losing ground every day.  We're supposed to be able to do battle with the Principalities and Powers in the heavenlies, we can't even win an argument on earth.  Some of us are personally compromised, but the root problem has to be that the foundations of Christian doctrine and faith are compromised.   Our strength is God's strength and if we've abandoned His word we've lost our "sword of the Spirit."

And the sad thing is that we've abandoned His Word and DON'T KNOW IT.  Chris Pinto gets at this problem very clearly in that radio show.  Just about all the churches have bought into the Great Bible Hoax of 1881, accepted the bogus "scholarship" that identifies two Greek manuscripts as the most ancient ever discovered which has given them an immense authority,  an authority  that has undermined the previous Authoritzed Version, the King James.  As Pinto explains, there is NO evidence whatever for the claim that these manuscripts are so ancient and most authentic.  NONE.    Dean William Burgon protested their elevation in his truly scholarly Revision Revised  but the 1881 revision prevailed.  

Why do lies prevail in the churches?  This is a supernatural thing.  It's the way God's Law works.  If there is already sin in the churches there will be more sin, if there is also doctrinal error in the churches there will be more doctrinal error.  It takes a constant vigilance and constant repentance to overcome these things and we lose the fight by not fighting or not fighting with the right weapons.   In the earlier 19th century the discipline of Textual Criticism had already been compromised and undermined biblical inerrancy, leading to Liberal Christianity.  It was the liberal churches in Germany that capitulated to Hitler.  

The Bible was already in doubt thanks to those earlier trends so that when the Revising Committee that was taken over by Westcott and Hort produced the bogus Greek manuscripts it was taken for legitimate scholarship and we got all the modern Bible translations based on it.  The original objective of the revising committe was to do only the absolutely necessary changes IN THE ENGLISH of the King James Bible to bring it up to date.  Instead W and H introduced these bogus Greek manuscripts and corrupted the whole undertaking to the detriment of the churches ever since.  

I tried to document some of this in my blog on the subject.  Chris Pinto's documentaries on the Bible go into the greatest detail in studying the problem.   The series is "A Lamp in the Dark" and the two that deal with this problem are "Tares Among the Wheat" and "Bridge to Babylon."  

The Greek manuscripts in question are Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.  In this radio show linked above Pinto says Vaticanus has had the most influence on the modern Bibles through the Critical Text on which they are based.  It is known to have appeared in 1475 and there is no evidence whatever of any earlier existence of it, but Westcott and Hort purely speculatively place it back in the fourth century.  Also Sinaiticus which showed up in 1859 and also has no known previous history but has been given the same history that puts it back in the fourth centur4y.  On the basis of this purely speculative reasoning these manuscripts acquired  an authority that overthrew the Greek rexts that undergird the King James Bible that have documentary proof back to the tenth century and testimony much further back than that.   Erasmus considered Vaticanus to be a forgery.  Pinto talks about all this.

The problem with these manuscripts is that they leave out certain well-known passages.  They leave out the last twelve verses of the book of Mark, they leave out John 8 and they leave out Luke 23.   The absence of these passages is taken to represwent the original authentic Greek manuscript because of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  Dean Burgon considered them both to have been tampereed with by early heretics and says the whole Church had known of such tamperings which is why they were rejected.  Westcott and Hort managed to prevail, however, in giving them an undeserved authenticity which now dominates Bible scholarship in the seminaries and is accepted in the churches.

Westcott and Hort made up the theory that the passages left out of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus but present in the Textus Receptus which underlies the King James, were added to the Bible in the early years and are not authentic.  Although this is pure speculation with nothing to support it the idea took hold and now undermines belief in Biblical inerrancy.  Even some who insist on Biblical inerrancy, insist that the Bible is indeed God's Word, such as James White, by accepting that the absense of some passages represents the authentic original Bible, accepts a view that undermines Biblical inerrancy.   And even if they won't admit to this others see how it does and promote it very aggressively.  Chris Pinto starts out his radio show with the teachings of a church in Nashviolle Tennessee which actively says the Bible is not inerrant and is not God's word.  Thanks to Westcott and Hort's bogus manuscripts.

All that needed to be spelled out for the purpose of identifying it as a major way the churches have lost the superntural power we shouild have to be the salt and light in the culture that might be able to put the brakes on the current downslide into complete destruction.  I've noted many times that the churches have not had a genuine revival for many years, and I suspect that the very few places where a revival did occur were churches that had not given up the King James and most likely also where the women covered their heads in church.   I'm guessing but for sure there hasn't been a REAL revival in America probably during the entire last century.  Some pretty odd charismatic "revivals" yes but if you watch some of them on videos I think the lack of genuine Christian doctrine and Chriwstian feeling is clear 

Certainly there are many good pastors and Christians who use one of the revised Bibles who stand by Biblical inerrancy and preach it, but how do they avoid the endless footnotes in those Bibles that cast doubt on those passages not found in the bogus manuscripts which are of coure referred to as the oldest and best?  Althnough they are included in their Bibles for tradition's sake, tradition is all the authenticity they have if Westcott and Hort's theory is believed.

I've argued strenuously for the literal head covering for women based on 2 Corinthians 11, in my blog Hidden Glory and I do think think that itsw abandonment is based on bad Bible exegesis.  Since it is an emblem of God's creation ordinance of the headship of man over woman I don't think this is a trivial thing and that its abandonment is likely one of the doors to other heresies that have undermined the churches over the last century.  

The acceptance of the modern Bibles is another door to heresy.  

So my thesis is that if we want to be restored to the power we should have as God's people these are two major issues we have to reverse and repent of.  

Sure, I'm nobody.  Ask God.

How to Save the World

 I know i'm a broken record to use a dated phrase, I just keep repeating myself.  Into the void too, nobody listening, but even if they were what good would it do?:   Is it too late?:  I think so but then again I get some hope from here and there that it may not be.   America is coming apart, Western Civilzation is being dismantled.  Can it be turned back?  Again I don't think so, judging by all the signs I can see, but again sometimes I hope.  I'm not sure why.  If we're at the very end anyway then the world does have to come apart, that's the prophesied scenario.  Better to get it all over with.  But so many people will be put through such incredible suffering, so many will die, who wants that?   And again, who's listening?  If you reject the Bible as so many do these days what good does it do to talk about 3what the Bible says is going to happen? 

All that's left is hoping it might be of some value WHILE it's all happening to know WHAT is happening.  I write quite a few posts with that in mind.  Family, friends who aren't going to listen now might listen then.  Hard way to do it but better to be beheaded for finally getting the truth than take the mark of the beast and spend an eternity in Hell.

And again there is a way to postpone the inevitable, a way to save America and Western Civilization, but it's not going to happen swo why bother to mention it?   The west abandoned God decades ago.  Our laws have increasingly actually directly embraced what God's Law prohibits.  No society can survive that for long.   Even Christians have had their minds so twisted they think evil is good and good is evil.  

Abortion for instance is aggressively defended as a good and to oppose it is evil, it's supposedly an attack on women, as if killing your baby is a benefit.  They have to deny it's a baby of course.  Or some do.  Some actually say they know it is but it doesn't matter, human lifre is so devalued in this wonderful utopia that is being constructed.

The death penalty even for murder is aggressively opposed as a great evil, even in God's name although scripture itself says it is the just penalty for taken a human life since humanity is made in the image of God. 

Larry Flint died recently and I've heard many people say how he championed a good cause in the name of freedom of speech and that it was truly justice that prevailed in allowing pornopraphy to pollute the culture in the name of that freedom.   That's not what the first amendment was ever for.  Today it's being denied where it should be applied and applied where it should be denied.   Upside down, good for evil and evil for good.

And you'll be denounced as a terrible person if you believe that homosexuality is a sin and gay marriage is a violation of God's Law.   You're a "bigot" and a "hater" for telling the simple truth.   Good for evil and evil for good.

Does anybody even know these days that for a man to dress as a woman or a woman as a man is forbidden in the Bible?  But the society has gone much further than that and is now demanding that we all treat a person according to what sex he or she WANTS to be although there is no way to change the biological facts.   There's some kind of obsession involved that drives such ideas and I don't know where to start to save people from it, but forcing all the rest of society to accept their fantasy is a great evil.

Now we have political leaders justifying stealing and destruction of property as supposedly justice because of past racism.  Racism is certainly a sin in God's eyes as all hatred without a cause is, but the remedy is as much or more of a violation of God's Law than the sin of racism.  The facts when actually recognized belie the whole idea of systemic racism but those facts are suppressed, a dangerous violation of the commandment against lying.  Lying is done every day by the sources of infomration, all in the service of promoting today's favored evil vision for society that they call good.  And nobody is thinking at all about how such violations of God's Law are bringing God's wrath down on the heads of those justifying them and on the society as a whole.  .

Just that short list covers all the Ten Commandments spelled out in the Bible.  Let's see we've got lots of violations of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" which embraces the sexual sins which are rampant in many forms these days.  And there are plenty of violations of "Thou shalt not commit murder" as  Jesus taught murder to include hatred in the heart.  I think many justifications of murder could be found today and all I mentioned was the opposition to the death penalty.   Of course the death penalty itself is called murder, just another case of evil for good, but to oppose it is actually to justify the murders for which it is justice according to God's Law.   Then we've got all this justifying of looting and burning supposedly int he name of justice, violating "Thou shalt not steal" and worse.  Violations of "Thou shalt not bear false witness" has become an everyday practice, and  of "Thou shalt not covet" would hardly be noticed.  

 All that barely begins to describe the enormity of the problem.   All our institutions are undermined by justified violations of God's Law.   How we maintain any social stability at all is the amazing thing.   There are plenty of voices on the right side of these things but the forces of evil have become so powerful it's hard to see how it could be undone.  It's gone on too long, it's become too entrenched.

"Judgment begins at the house of God" is still the place to start.   A radical reformation is needed, and it's needed in the "good" churches no less than the outright heretical and apostate.   Is anyone seeking God to find out where to start?   I could repeat some of my own suppositions but there's really no point.  If the churches got serious about it and prayed about it and sincerely wanted to know all the ways we Christians have offended God anybody's personal guesses aren't necessary.  He'd tell us where we've gone wrong.   

THAT's the solution, the beginning of the solution.  Is that going to happen?

The Poison Brew of the Nineteenth Century Is Choking Us in the 21st.

Many lines of evil are all coming together at once in this fallen world, lines of thought that started over a century ago all coming together to snare the unwary.   The Nineteenth Century brought us a veritable witches' brew of novel theories and ideologies designed to undermine all truth.  And fallen humanity eats it up.  

TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND THE GREAT BIBLE HOAX

Such as the "scholarly" work of Textual Criticism that came out of the Tubingen School in  Germany. That one's huge.  It brought us the lies of Liberal Christianity.  And at the end of the century we got the lies of the promotion of two supposedly recently discovered Greek texts as older and more reliable that became the foundation of a whole slew of new Bibles that have been polluting the churches ever since.  Chris Pinto has a lot to say about it in his documentaries and radio shows.   Here's his most reent radio show on the subject:

 NOTR - BIBLE SKEPTICS & PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN HERESY - 3.4.21 - Noise of Thunder Radio Show - Noise of Thunder Radio with Chris Pinto  

As is often the case some of the best Christian preachers and teachers have embraced this assault on the Bible as if it were respectable scholarship, and prying anyone loose from that perspective appears to be impossible, at least by human means.   I have a whole blog on the subject, "The Great Bible Hoax of 1881" where I try to collect the best arguments, but Chris Pinto goes into it all in far more historical detail.

So sad to see the proliferation of the modern Bible versions in all the churches, which have created a veritable babel in which simple communication is disrupted while despite all the testimony to the contrary by Christian believers the inerrancy of God's word is thrown into doubt.  Listen to this latest radio show by Pinto.  Westcott and Hort's totally made-up "theory" is destroying the biblical basis of Christian theology and faith.

MARX, ANOTHER INGREDIENT IN THE WITCHES' BREW

Then there was Marx who provided the evil ideology that has enragptured so many people in the last few decades, an ideology specifically aimed at the destruction of America and Western Civilization, maybe most popularly in the form of Neo Marxism or Cultural Marxism.  I recently listened to Glenn Loury interviewing James Lindsay who touched on this as one source of Wokeism.  He gets into the subject of Cultural Marxism starting about 41:  

Wokeism's Postmodern Roots | Glenn Loury & James Lindsay - YouTube

The Anti-Racist stuff comes out of this, and Antifa too, and BLM.   It has made its way into the churches also, carried in by the Jesuit-originated (Luigi Tapparelli) Social Justice idea for instance.  And although there's no direct connection that's easy to find that I know of, I'm sure Feminism, which in its current form derives from Cultural Marxism, is the root of the abandonment of the women's head covering in the churches.   

Undo the undeserved reputation of the bogus Bibles, undo the effects of Social Jutice and Marxism, restore the head covering, and we, God's people, might be able to save the churches, save America, even the world.  I mean it, but then I'm just a cockeyed optimist.   

DARWIN, ANOTHER POISON TOAD IN THE WITCHES' BREW

There was also of  course Darwin's influence and the growth of the bogus science he inspired that has a death grip on today's scientists.  Mostly it's window dresswing since they just CALL everything evolution whether it is or not.  When they are discussing current observations of biological facts, various adaptations of interesting creatures around the world perhaps, or even the variants of the corona virus, calling them "evolved," the term is being misused.  At least it is being aggresively appropriated to Darwinian theory which obscures the main point that the theory of evolution is fundamentally not about variants but the idea that over hundredws of millions of years Species eveolved from Species, human beings evolved from fish etc.  Through apes of course.  And so on and so forth. 

But each creature's genome is designed for variation on its own theme as it were.  You will never get anything but a cat from the cat genome, even when altered by mutations, but you can get a whole lot of very insteresting variations of cats.  I think this is intuitively obvious but I've also argued at length that the processes of evolution (variation) themselves reduce genetic diversity, potentially to complete depletion, which makes further evolution impossible.  

A Creationist Explanation of Global Warming

I posted a link to a talk on climate change in the previous post in which the speaker clearly accepts the idea of an ancient earth and the supposed Time Periods of modern geology that undergird evolutionary theory.   He refers for instance to the Cambrian rocks as supposedly demonstrating an atmosphere high in CO2 all those hundreds of millions of years ago.  He also refers to a plant enzyme he says can be traced back hundreds of millions of years.

I don't know if such notions affect the idea of climate change one way or another but of course I reject them as wrong because I accept the Young Earth of biblical calculations.  That means that the rocks in which the fossils are found were deposited by the worldwide Flood some 4300 years ago, which means that whatever evidence of climate might be found in the rocks would point to the climate before the Flood, not to some era hundreds of millions of years ago.    And if it does, that would be very interesting to know too, but mainstream science isn't going to be looking there.

He does mention that he thinks the current warming of the planet is most likely due to the receding of the Little Ice Age thta came to an end in the early 1800s.   I'd figured the whole warming trend goes back to the Flood itself, which would have brought on a major icea age that took millennia to retreat.  It could have extended and retreated in small increments over all that time too, but it makes sense that it all started with a massive cooling after the Flood.  One argument against such views that I have encountered is that the Flood would have generated a great deal of heat that would have fried Noah and his ark, and especially when I get into arguing that the Flood is what caused the splitting and driffing of the continents, which means they had to have drifted apart at a great rate of speed, at least a few feet per day at the begining..   The earth shoujld be a burnt-out cinder if all that happened.

Well later it occurred to me that the heat would have been rapidly evacuated into space, which would have brought on cooling, even a great ice age, even conceivably a "snowball earth"    I've never followed the arguments of the creationists who say that the biblical account puts a "canopy" over the whole planet, which is what rained down for those forty days and nights at the beginning of the Flood.   It would have been canopy of water vapor then, which is also part of the current ceiling of greenhouse tasses being talked about today as so dangerous.   The original canopy's  dissolution nto rain would have exposed more of the atmosphere of the Earth to cold outer space into which all the heat generated by whatever means, a lot of it in the form of evaporation, would have rapidly dissipated, having a drastic cooling effect.  Since science very credibly accounts for an ice age that penetrated very far south all over the world, this outward radiation of heat would explain it nicely.   Then afterward the "canopy" would have been somewhat restored over time from the accumulation of "greenyhouse gasses"  and water vapor as all forms of life expanaded and spread acrossw the world.   Say it took 4300 years and we're now at the end of the warming that caused the recession oI the ONE ice age.   Perhaps with smaller extensions and retreats but overall just one huge ice age. 

Time Periods in Rocks?

But I also keep coming back to the plain absurdity of the idea of the Time Periods which deludes both modern geology and modern biology    This is the absurdity of the idea that there was a Cambrian period of time that corresponds to a layer of sedimentary rock in which an enormous abundance of fossils are found that are interepreted as having lived during that Time Period.  Same idea for the whole stack of sedimentary rocks that climb in straight layers above it.  Why isn't the absurdity of time being divided into slabs of sedimentary rock recognized?   Why?  Different sedimentary rocks stacked one on top of the eother across most of the planet, each with its own set of fossils.   It's so OBVIOUSLY something that could only have happened on some mechanical or physical principle that makes absolutely no sense in terms of vast periods of time.    Oh but they'll defend it to the death while I hold my head in despair.  

Well, this post wandered a fair bit but I think the theme remains intact.  Our modern world is poisoned by a crazy proliferation of false ideas, some coming to fruition in some pretty scary politics.

And the Fascist Politics Concerning Climate Change

Listening to a talk on climate change that disputes the current views on global warming.   He talks about the necessity of CO2 for the health of the planet,  mentions a document signed by hundreds of scientiests that agree there is no climate emergency, which of course is suppressed by the media and Big Tech, and so on,  I feel I need to listen again some time to understand the science issues better but it looks like a good argument.    

How to Think About Climate Change | William Happer - YouTube

Vaccine and Virus Fascist Politics

A couple of links to recent information about the politics of the Coronavirus.  First a very short clip of a woman in Israel talking about the laws mandating the vacciine that are making life miserable for those who distrust it:   Urgent Message from Llana Rachel in Israel - YouTube

Then there's a recent radio show by Christ Pinto on related events, the arrest of a pastor in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, for instance, for his violation of laws supposedly necessary to public health.  He goes on to discuss the role of the Jesuits including the Jesuit influence of Anthony Fauci and Beill and Melinda Gates:   NOTR - JESUITS, CORONAVIRUS & DR. FAUCI - 2.25.21 - Noise of Thunder Radio Show - Noise of Thunder Radio with Chris Pinto

COUNTERFEIT COMPASSION: The Failure of Liberal Economic Policy

Taxes -  Regulations -  Illegal Immigration   -Minimum Wage  -  Environmental Policies   

 Since I'm about as obtuse as it's possible to be about things economic, I'm surprised to find myself understanding a few things and wanting to write about them.   I guess it was the Trump Presidency and the frequent repititions I'd hear about his economic successes, from him and from conservatives, that finally made a few things make sense for the first time.  (No way I'd ever have become a billionaire.)

SO. Reducing taxes and regulations on business brought back businesses that had left the country because of high taxes, allowed those in the country to hire more employees and expand their producion and sales.  

OK so far?  

That reduced the unemployment numbers enormously, the lowest for many years, and most tellingly among minorities.   A great sucdcess one would think.  Conservative economics works, it does what the liberals say they want to do but they actually have the opposite effect,.   Their high taxes drive businesses out of the country or at least force them to cut back on hiring and expansion.  Unemployment goes up.  

There's also a big paradoxical benefit that I'd never heard before:   MORE money flows into the government through taxesw when these policies are in place than when liberal policies are in place.  Cuz the expansion of business bringing more profits means more taxes, not higher taxes, more taxes.  Golly wow, wouldn't you think the liberals would learn a lesson from this?  Why don't they?:  Why is Biden now doing the exact opposite of what Trump showed works?  

Oh I suppose they'll just say it's all a lie.  Sigh.

There are lots of reasons to want to have a protected border but one big one is that illegal immogrants take jobs away from unskilled American workers.   Something I hadn't known was that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration because they took jobs from the members of his Farm Workers union.  So why do liberals want to do this to American labor?   

Another policy that kills jobs for unskilled labor is the minimum wage, so dear to the hearts of liberals.  I understood that such a law forces businesses to cut back, can even drive some out of business altogether, which isn't good for the employment statistics.  Now I've been hearing from some black pundits like Larry Elder how it deprives young blacks of entry level work opportunities, prevents them from finding unskilled work because businesses aren't going to pay such high wages for that work.  These are young people just entering the work force who don't have families to support, most living with their parents.  They need the experience of holding a job more than anything else and are now being deprived of that normal opportunity to learn in order to move up as they acquire skills and work habits.  On a recent You Tube snippet of his show Elder played an old clip of economist Milton Friedman saying that the minimum wage is the most "anti-negro policy ever" or words to that effect. 

You'd think SOME liberals would wake up, wouldn't you?  Or are their motives in fact not what they claim they are? .  

Oh and shutting down that gas pipeline.  Supposed to be better for the environment?  But it turns out it takes thousands of trucks polluting the envornment to transport the gas that had been transported more cleanly in the pipeline.   So implementing regulations they intend to be good for the environment actually increases the carbon footprint so greatly it would be laughable if it were not so painful.  I guess putting all those truck drivers to work is a tgood thing at least.  

And then they shut down our own energy production for similarly wrongheaded good intentions which means the loss of thousands of jobs and the loss of the energy independence Trump had achieved, making us dependent again on foreign oil supply.  

And all that is just NORMAL liberal economic stupidity although it is trending into the Marxist influence that is growing today on the Left..  

LIVING THE CHEAT: We Aren't Animals and This World Is Not All There Is

In this fallen world the Evil One is still Prince and under his rule humanity stumbles around in the dark, accumulating sins against God and suffering the consequences, most mistaking this life for all there is.   

Some even revel in it.  Carl Sagan introduced his 1980 TV series “Cosmos”with this famous line:  “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.  Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us . . . .    We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.“

To which I say a hearty “Bah!  Humbug!”

And then there was Darwin who said  “There is grandeur in this view of life . . .  [that]  from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful  and wonderful have been and are being evolved.”   He does suggest a possible origin by a Creator but since that wouldn’t  be the biblical Creator and today it’s all nothing but chemistry anyway I give it the same Bah-humbug. 

There are clues in life that we were made for something better than a meaningless existence in a vast cold universe of burning rocks, no matter how prettily they twinkle in the night sky.    I’m thinking of the human soul that is deeply affected by, say, Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” as you can see from quite a number of You Tube “First Time Reaction” videos, that I mention in a previous post.    Many things other than music also provoke deep feelings -- yes even the grandeur of the Cosmos and biological life --  but in my own experience it was music that brought this home to me years ago.  I would cry hearing a Mozart symphony, or especially Handel’s Messiah, because it seemed to me that there is nothing in this life that deserves such glorious expression.   How can there be such music when there is no reality to which it corresponds?   How can we be capable of such exalted feelings without anything in reality worthy of them?   

That was before I believed in God of course.  The thing is, once you know that there is nothing in this life that deserves such grand celebrations, that is,  if the Cosmos is all there is and we evolved from fish, it feels like a cheat.   It IS a cheat.  Because if this IS all there is then it is a huge cheat, a sick joke on the human race.  When we are given these pathetic counterfeits of greatness and grandeur as worthy of our deepest feelings it’s like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear as the Proverb puts it.  

Then too, how do we talk ourselves into this common idea that we, these complex creatures what are way overqualified for mere existence in the physical universe, live that empty existence and then just go out like a light?  I don’t know for sure what Dylan Thomas had in mind when he wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but it’s always hit me as a protest against the cheat, the abysmal insult, of the idea of such a meaning-maker being extinguished at death.  Since he calls it a “good” night I’m unsure if he meant that but in my opinion he should have meant it.    

Shakespeare as usual nailed it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 

Absurdly we tell ourselves it’s honest, courageous, grown-up of us to accept this fate as reality itself.    Or we rationalize our complex meaning-making minds as sufficient unto themselves, though merely accidentally coughed up out of the chemical soup of the universe.   Some of us are just weak, it’s understandable if we have to invent a fantasy,  manage to find a meaning in what is only our own solipsistic invention that corresponds to no external reality.   But that’s OK, we’re good at doing that and we should be content with it.  Or something like that.   The great cheat of it can be denied by such rationalizations.    Religion is a crutch and all that.    Where’s the evidence?  they demand.      

Oh to pry even one person loose from these tawdry imitations at life so many of us have taken for granted as our lot.

NO, we are worth far far more than that.   We are an extravagantly over-designed being if the only point of it all is physical and chemical, and our experience of it can be cynically summed up as “Life is hard and then you die.”   We have plenty of pleasures, happiness, fun in this life, and plenty of worthwhile things to do, but we were made for more than the best that is possible here, if the Cosmos is all there is and ever was.

But the biblical God says otherwise:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.  (Genesis 9:6)

And from the hymn “O Holy Night”  -- “Then He appeared and the soul knew its worth.”

 You are an immortal soul.  You are not going to be snuffed out like a candle at death.  You will live on for eternity either in heaven or in hell. 

The Answer as Usual is No, Judgment is Picking Up Steam, Roaring Toward Us Like a Freight Train

 So it's pretty clear, isn't it, that the answer to the title question of the previous post is NO.  Oh we COULD, it's not impossible in principle, it's just impossible given the way people think these days.  Even going back to women's covering our heads in church, which is where I keep thinking it would have to start, is hardly likely, and if that is what would have to happen first none of the rest of it is going to happen.   Oh I still hope and pray for that, I'd love to be proved wrong, but the resistance to that one piece of scripture is adamant in my experience.  They got thtmselves convinced of the culture interpretation.  The author of that interpretation is a Christian of impeccable integrity.  Or they are the Pentecostals who insist on long hair but scorn the covering and do it with withering contempt for any other point of view.   And I got the accusation of "legalist" too of course.  No matter how good the credentials of those who have read it as I now do, no matter how good the reasoning in support ot it, the answer is ...   well, in my experience the answer is mockery and sarcasm.   

God could still turn the tide but it doesn't look like He wants to.   And again, if we don't return to that simple principle of male headship how can we expect to get anywhere on the subject of gay marriage, just to mention the most prominent issue.   Yes it probablly is the linch pin.  It came out of the wagon wheel and the wheel has wobbled on without it but eventually it has to fall off.   It would be SO easy to put it back in.

I like to think it's possible but I always come to the conclusion that it's not, and that means that things are just going to keep getting worse.  And it's getting so bad it's hard to see it as anything other than the looming Finale as I've described it in so many recent posts. 

What an arrogant know-it-all I am! 

Can We Roll Back God's Judgments on America, on the Churches? Head Covering, Reparations?

One of my themes on these blogs has been God's judgment and whether it's possible to stop it once it's begun.  America has been under judgment for decades now, according to many Christian leaders. Although many denied its clear import, some recognized that 9/11 was God's judgment, at least a warning shot of judmgnet to come.  

The biggest reason for judmgnet usually given is abortion, the ongoibng murder of unborn babies into the millions; but America has been proliferating many kinds of sins besides abortion.  Christians want revival, we know we need revival but prayers for revivial have not brought revival, sometimes even very intense focused prayers.  Something is blocking revival, probably some unrecognized sins.  What might they be?  I've spent some time trying to figure that out too.  

It has to start with the churches.  "Judgment begins at the house of God."  We've seen many kinds of apostasies rise up over the last 150 years or so.  These are in churches that call themselves Christian so much as we might like to disown them because we know they aren't really theologically Christian in many cases, their bearing that name implicates us with them.  The prophet Daniel gave us the example of repenting on behalf of the covenant body to which we belong, in his case the nation of Israel.  Although he personally had not committed many of the sins the nation had committed he nevertheless prayed as if he had, and repented for those sins as if they were his own.

The very denial that 9/11 was God's judgmnet is a sign of such apoastasy, the idea being that God wouldn't do such a thing.  If it isn't understood that God is a God who judges sin there is really no point to the gospel itself.  If God doesn't come in judgment there's no point in asking Him for mercy.    If we fail so drastically to understand God's heart, that must open us to judgment.

I also believe the abandonment of the head covering for women is a cause of judgment.  I came to this conclusion from my study of Paul's teaching on the subject in 2 Corinthians 11: 2-16.  The covering  was given up fairly recently partly on the basis of a very badly reasoned essay that imputed the practice Paul was advocating to culture rather than to apostolic authority which is how it had previously been understood.    If we don't honor God's ordinance on the headship of men over women we have no ground for objecting to the violation of God's ordinance of marriage by legalizing gay marriage.  I think this is a very serious point though it is usually dismissed as trivial.  I've even considered that by abandoning the head covering in the churches we are responsible for opening the door to all the violations related to sex and marriage that have been proliferating in the culture for decades now.

Oh, a big one is our use of the National Cathedral for ecumenical prayer.  There is one God and He said clearly in Isaiah that He will not give His glory to another.  Praying to all the gods of all the cultures is NOT acceptable.  We also have national prayer meetings that include other religions.  This is a serious affront to God.

Why should God give us revival if we are not repenting of sins against Him?

Then recently I was listening to Larry Elder on the subject of reparations for black slavery

Why Reparations Will Actually Hurt Black America - YouTube

and he does a good job of showing that the idea is untenable for many reasons, some of them practical such as who qualifies to receive it and who should pay it, considering that most of us don't even have ancestors who were slave owners and much of today's population is descended from people who arrived after the era of slavery.  And so on.   

But then I'd been watching those "First-Time Reaction"  videos of young black people responding to hearing Pavarotti singing for the firwst time.   That led me to watch other videos of other singers doing some famous operatic arias, and especially to look for black opera singers.  I discovered for instance "Three Mo' Tenors" who sing both opera and popular songs.   I also listened to Marian Anderson, probably the first black to be a big star as an opera singer, got curious to know more about her so I looked her up on Wikipedia.

And there I found the story of how she applied for admission to a school and was told by the receptionist "We don't take colored here." or words to that effect.   It reminded me that slavery was over, God judged us for it with the Civil War, but that Jim Crow was something else.  Slavery and racism aren't the same thing.  

I hurt for the insult to Marian Anderson and all thoe who had to endure it for some hundred years after the Civil War.  I began to wonder if that era is part of why we are under God's judgment.  Reparations may not be the answer to it, I don't know, all I know is the question was raised in my mind.   

The churches need to repent of many things, the nation needs to repent, we need to be praying for God's wisdom even about what we need to repent of.   We also have personal sins that need cleansing.  I've personally been under God's chastisement for decades.  I've  fallen into the same sin more than once since then but repented (believe me,, repentance is agony, fear, remorse for undermined Christian witness, remorse for the wounded heart of God) and still the judgment is not lifted.  Most recently He reminded me "My grace is sufficient for you" so that I understand it isn't going to end and I need not only to accept it but to rejoince in it as Paul did with his own "thorn in the flesh."  He wasn't guilty of anything that deserved it, but although I have been guilty God also has other reasons for giving us afflictions.   The point being we've all got a lot to repent of on a lot of levels, and we aren't going to see the situation in America improve until we do it according to God's wisdom.  

It may be that America can't be saved unless we roll back Roe v Wade, roll back that execrable law that bestowed the right of free speech on pornography,  roll back gay marriage, perhaps make some kind of restitution for Jim Crow even;  but since it all has to start at the house of God it may be that none of that will happen until we reinstate the head covering in the churches.  I do keep coming back to that.  It may be the linch pin.  If we fix that it may be easier to fix all the rest as God opens doors.   Sin is not just the cause of judgment but is judgment itself.  The more we sin the more we sin.  Maybe the second step would be cleansing the National Cathedral of the worshippers of Dagon and Baal and their ilk.   And remember, a right understanding of Romans 1 is that homosexuality is itself judgment on idolatry.