Closer and Closer Come the New World Order of the Last Days and Its Antichrist Leader

(Need to inform you that I've had to go through this a few times and edit for typos and clarity.  Sorry I'm so disorganized but I think it's easier to understand now.)

One of the signs, among many underway these days, that we are speeding toward the very last days of planet Earth, is plans in the works to set up a world government.  According to the Book of Revelation such a global government, headed by a man known as the Antichrist, will be in place at least by the midpoint of the seven-year Tribulation period.  There seem to be many events spelled out in Revelation for the Tribulation period already underway these days, as if to give us a heads-up that it is definitely very close.  Although the signs of the last days given by Jesus Christ in His Olivet discourse of Matthew 24 and parallel passages in Mark and Luke, are fulfilled at the beginning of the Tribulation, since it's all about when we are to expect the return of Christ and the first phase of His return is the Rapture of the Church, it makes sense that the signs would be operating before the Rapture as well.  Then in Revelation 6 the same signs become the judgments of God as the first of the seven seals are opened and we see "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse" being sent into the world, bringing  first spiritual deception in the form of a false Christ or antiChrist, ushering in a false peace, then war and famine and death by pestilence among other things.  So begins the outpouring of the wrath of God known as the Day of the Lord in various parts of the Old Testament.  All these things can be seen somewhere or other in the world right now, and a sense of global catastrophe is already brewing.  The formation of a global government has been in the works for decades and now seems to be gaining strength from the global pandemic.

Guess I was preoccupied with unimportant things and missed it, this radio broadcast from Jan Markell's "Understanding the Times" series done at the beginning of May, but God in His mercy didn't let me miss it altogether.    Here she is interviewing Gary Kah who has been following the developments toward The New World Order for decades and sees it shaping up now through the work of Pope Francis.   This of course buttresses my own view of this Pope as at least a major player in the end times, but specifically as a likely candidate for the Antichrist of the Great Tribulation period.  Antichrist would have to be both substitute for Christ and a political leader, which historically happens to describe the papacy already, so the idea isn't at all far-fetched.  The papacy as both religious and political power was once the leader of the western world at least, through the centuries of the "Holy Roman Empire," until Luther and the Protestant Reformation gave it what could have been thought of as a mortal blow.   But the RCC didn't completely die though its power was severely curtailed.  Various Popes since then have presented themselves as some kind of world leader, and Pope Francis is one of the most aggressive about it, as Gary Kah describes him in this radio show.

The papacy itself has a Latin title (VICARIVS FILII DEI) which in itself is a definition of Antichrist ("In the Place of the Son of God,") whose Roman numerals add up  to the infamous number "666," and this particular Pope was elected under odd signs that include a flurry of thirteens and even a 666.   I'll try to remember to find the posts where I lay out these things.  I suppose even such auspicious signs may not identify him as the final Antichrist, though it is hard for me to see how anyone else could come with better qualifications.  Note that IF he should be slated for that role, since he is in his eighties all these events must be very very close.

After Gary Kah the radio program turns to Pastor J.D. Farag who discusses his sense of urgency about these being the very last days before the Rapture, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its likely impetus to the formation of the World Order.

Surely it is at the very door.  The Rapture must be right around the corner, the event that will restart the clock ticking where the prophecy of the Seventy Weeks of Daniel left off-- that was at the end of 69 of those weeks, at the announcement of Jesus the Messiah in Jerusalem on the day we still commemorate as Palm Sunday.   We couold say that Old Testament time came to an end on that day and God's dealings with Israel will then resume to fulfill the last week of Daniel's prophecy, or the seven years of the Tribulation or Day of the Lord, as the Church age comes to an end with the Rapture.    Those who are to go through the following seven-year period have a lot of catching up on biblical prophecy to do.  I pray for faith and courage for all those the Lord will save during that time. . .





Part 1 of the interview of Gary Kah is on this page:   https://www.oneplace.com/ministries/understanding-the-times/listen/the-new-world-order-cries-for-a-savior-816174.html
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Later:
A Sketch of  Biblical History and the Meaning of Salvation

I suppose I really need to say more in order for people who are not familiar with these things to understand what I'm talking about, I do tend to shoot off a post or an email on impulse that hasn't necessarily been written with unbelievers in mind.    And I'm not particularly good at knowing what an unbeliever needs to know either.

All this is based on prophecies in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation which is the last book of the Bible, which describes the very last period of time on Earth.   Overall the Bible is a history of God's doings on Earth starting with His creation of it all.  It chronicles the history of the people of Israel, now the state of Israel, from God's calling of its founder Abraham to be the father of a great people.  It follows the lives of his son Isaac and Isaac's sons Jacob and Esau and Jacob's twelve sons who become the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The story of Adam and Eve precedes all this, their disobedience of God which brought a curse on the human race under which we all are born.  Their disobedience brought the whole Creation under this curse.  They were made to live forever in a paradise of happiness but their disobedience brought evil and death into the originally happy world, which we call the Fall.  We are all born "fallen," inheritors of the original sin of our first parents and all subject to death as a result.

But from the very beginning God promised to send us a Savior from this curse, from this fallen nature or sin nature, and early humanity looked forward to this Savior, who is known as the Messiah.  From time to time the Old Testament reiterates the promise of the Messiah and builds up a view of His character over the centuries of Jewish history.   From these prophecies we know that He will be God Himself and that He will live and suffer as a man.  The book of the prophet Daniel includes a timeline that very precisely points to the time of the Messiah's coming which is quite accurate, counting from a particular decree of a heathen king to the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey which was the announcement of His being the prophesied Messiah.  The following Firday He was crucified and on Sunday, which we know as Easter Sunday,  He rose from the dead.

"Gospel" means "good news" and the good news is that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins, the sin nature we inherit from our ancestors, and all the sins we commit on top of it,  that brings death and ultimately eternity in Hell.  Jesus took our sins on Himself and bore our punishment for them so that we can be spared that punishement.   This is what salvation is,  it is being saved from eternal punishment,  and to have that salvation all you have to do is believe it (though believing it entails a bigger commitment than the word itself conveys, a giving of yourself to Christ)..

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The Rapture is the removal from Earth of those who are saved, to be transported into heaven, an event that is prophesied in the New Testament by the spostle Paul.  It is the event that triggers the Grand Finale of the outpouring of God's wrath in the Day of the LORD/ Great Tribulation followed by Jesus' return to Earth to rule for a thousand years.

From the Rapture on the Church is no longer on the Earth and the following seven years are when God deals with the nation of Israel and the unbelievers who are left on the earth.  Many will become believers during this time, receiving the gospel of salvation.

Is there any refuge from the coming storm?

Surely the Lord's return is close.  How much worse can it get on this miserable planet before God gives the signal and the final countdown begins?  I hate to think it but unfortunately I suppose it could get much worse.  On the other hand we know the Tribulation period which is soon to follow His coming to get His Church is to be the worst possible time on Earth and it won't reach that level until then.  And at that point the Church is not to be present.  Whatever happens now we are all going through it, and it does look like a sort of foreshadowing of the events of the Tribulation as spelled out in Revelation, particularly Revelation 6.

Although in a sense all this is God's judgment on human sinfulness, it is not God's pure outpouring of wrath which defines the Great Tribulation just before the Lord's return to reign on the Earth.   I confess to having some confusion about how to think of the difference.   That is, all disasters are from God in judgment, yet the Day of the Lord or the Great Tribulation is to be the fullest form of it.  Maybe that's the best I can do with it.

Because I have unsaved family and friends I want something to intervene to change the tide of this current wave of evil to give them time to change their minds and come to Christ before the Rapture.  The thought of the misery that awaits them if they are not part of the Rapture is immensely sad.  I pray nevertheless that they will be saved during that time.  Many will die saved at least, and some others will live through the whole catastrophe after becoming believers.

I think it must be close but what if it isn't?   Barring a miracle through God's mercy I don't see how we can prevent what looks like the inevitable train wreck of civilization that has been picking up steam for decades.  The fallenness of this world is racing wildly to its own perfection of evil if it makes sense to put it that way.  I pray and search my imagination for any way to build at least some kind of refuge from it and keep coming up against a dead end.   I guess there's the off-the-grid retreat into wild country for some people, but a refuge for many is what seems unlikely.  Maybe someone with more imagination than I have will come up with a way.

If we are right at the door of the Rapture which itself is the door to the Great Tribulation perhaps such a refuge is also needed, a global refuge in that case but my imagination can't reach beyond the US at the moment.  States opening themselves to refugees, first from the political mess in this nation but then from the events of the last days as spelled out in Revelation.  Some will live through it, which is hard to imagine as you read through the horrors described in that book of the Bible, and God can certainly preserve whomever He chooses to preserve, but perhaps such a refuge would be part of that preservation strategy.

Saving the whole country seems impossible now, meaning a return to anything like what we thought of as normal life seems impossible.  The forces of evil are entrenched and large enough to have their way.    John MacArthur's sermons on the current situation have focused on the breakdown of the usual means of restraining evil in this fallen world, which he sees as four:  conscience, the family, the police and the Church.  Conscience has been undermined by decades of teaching in the universities that justifies the kind of violence we are seeing now;  the family has been directly attacked by the policies of the Left, from abortion to feminism and the undermining of authority;  the police are now directly under attack as the insanity of actually removing them is promoted as a solution to inequities.   And the Church has been so compromised by false doctrines and capitulation to worldliness there is too little of it left to exert itself as salt and light to the culture.  God COULD give us a great revival even now, but would He?

The Liberal Critique of the current insanity is eventually undercut by its own insanity

5:15 pm June 26 update:
I have two different reactions to a podcast by Sam Harris here that need to be sorted out in advance.  On the one hand I strenuously object to his anti-Trump politics to the point that I hardly want to listen to even a few more minutes of what he has to say.  The Leftist mentality is simply infuriating.  HOWEVER, when he gets into the meat of the subject of the current uprising about supposed racist mistreatment by police against blacks he does a great job of showing statistically that the whole idea is wrong.  Something similar happens with Bret Weinstein, that he's very good at this same kind of factual presentation that derails the racist assumption while at the same time expressing political opinions I strongly object to.  So both reactions are in the following.  The important part is the evidence that the accusation of systemit or police racism is false.
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The discovery of Bret Weinstein has led me to other discoveries as I've been gobbling up podcasts such as the Rubin Report and others that encourage hope, meaning hope in there possibly being enough sanity and reasonableness in the world to keep the current situation from becoming the disaster Weinstein thinks it could become.  As do I also think it could, though I'm not entirely sure where he sees the danger coming from, the Maoist character of the uprising itself or what he sees as the inevitable exasperated reaction of armed citizens to put it down in what could become civil war.   

The accusation of systemic American racism has been effectively countered in many of the videos I've seen.  It's a fiction.  It is the typical Leftist way of explaining disparities that have complicated causes that have nothing to do with racism, but the explanation is nevertheless enforced as if it were the truth and anyone who objects is silenced.   I'm not any happier with Weinstein's strangely abstract economic explanation instead of racism though, since it still offers an external excuse for complex causes that need to be addressed in the suffering communities themselves.  Not that the nation couldn't supply help of various sorts in any case.  

So I've been happy to discover that a liberal/leftist can see the madness in the rioting, and generally speaking Sam Harris is another who sees it like it is.  But he is still a liberal/leftist and as I found as I kept listening to Weinstein there's always a point at which I lose any sense of rapport with them.  So, listening to a Sam Harris podcast on these current events is very upsetting.  Although he is able to criticize the protests, he's also doing a marvelous job of demonstrating the insanity on the Left of which he is a part.  

For instance, he's worried about authoritarianism coming from TRUMP!!!!!!.  This is insanity.   There is not one shred of a hint of a clue of any evidence whatever that Trump has any dominating authoritarian impulses whatever.  To his supporters he is a champion of American freedoms.  Obama could be such an authoritarian as he fears, or the Left in general as well with its PC tyranny and fingerpointing at anyone they dislike, to intimidate them into silence and inaction, Communist-style "authoritarianism."  And right now we can see it in the Maoist tactics of this uprising of violence.  Trump SHOULD by now have done something to bring law and order to the situation.   NORMAL "authoritarianism" if you will, the kind any society needs to survive.  Perhaps he too is cowed by the tyrannical tactics of this bogus "movement," I don't know how to explain it otherwise.  Other Presidents have used the military to quell riots and enforce the law, why doesn't he?  I can't explain it.  But his inaction is certainly not authoritarianism.

Earlier in this podcast Harris says the reelection of Trump would be an existential disaster for the nation or something like that -- the word "existential" was in there anyway.   He also said that Trump's Presidency represents such a repudiation of Obama that it SEEMS it must represent white supremacy.  That's certainly a piece of Leftist insanity right there.  Maybe it explains why they have attacked Trump so viciously as a racist from the getgo without the slightest justification, but then what this demonstrates is that the racist mentality is all on the Left.  They can't think in any other terms it seems.  It's all invented by the Marxist mentality that controls today's Left, it's all a big fat lie, but it probably really does describe how they think.

Conservatives DO NOT think that way.  I can agree that Trump's election was a resounding repudiation of Obama, but without a tinge of racism to it.  It's hard to describe the sense of relief and hope we got from Trump's list of campaign promises.  Obama's Marxist anti-American policies were depressing in the extreme, and it was those destructive anti-American policies that led Trump to his MAGA slogan.  Obama was on his way to turning America into a third world swamp, and we wanted desperately for someone to restore us to our genuine inheritance as the greatest power in the world, and the greatest power for GOOD in the world.  That is the hope Trump inspired in us.   But the small minds of the left can't think in such terms,  they have to reduce it to racism or some other ignoble human flaw.  And beyond that they can't see Trump's obvious competence and successes either, they have to hallucinate failure where there is none.

So all that undermines what is otherwise another sane analysis of the dangers of the protests as they've become violent, and in Weinstein's terms Maoist in character.   If they think a Democrat's win in November is going to help that situation they really don't understand anything.

Later:

I sometimes desperately wish for someone to discuss things with, and I mean such things as the liberal view of the protests that is so hopeful while at the same time including so much insanely leftist framework I can't stand it.  But such discussion is impossible as I keep finding out.  No point in going back to EvC where it's always been impossible, no point in bringing it up with liberal friends where I've found out it quickly becomes incendiary even if every effort is made to be as reasonable as possible.  Writing my blog is something I need to do with or without feedback but after a point I do start craving dialogue, and of course I mean sane quiet reasonable dialogue with people on the other side of the political divide, and it's sad to know it can't happen.

Later yet:  What I wrote above about the Sam Harris podcast covered only the first forty minutes or so.  After that he gets into the statistics about police killing men they've arrested and shows that most of them are white, which effectively derails the racist assumption.  I may try to come back and report on the details but I just wanted to say this much for now. The political remarks he made in the part I talk about above that annoyed me so much aren't repeated after that so it's all what I'm happy to see is the liberal sanity I started out wanting to present.

What does MAGA mean?

Mulling over what Weinstein said in the Rogan interview about the MAGA slogan, how the last word "Again" pokes a finger in the eye and was intended to do so.   Whose eye according to him I'm not sure.  But the statement came as sort of a revelation to me, maybe explaining why that slogan is such an offense when to  me and I would suppose to most on my side of the political divide it holds a promise of restoring everything good that America once stood for that it seems to us the Left has been trying to destroy for decades but most determinedly under Obama.

Weinstein says it wasn't great "for everybody" but that it could become great for everybody.  That phrase "for everybody" shows an abysmal lack of understanding of the idea of America's greatness that I find both illuminating and deeply distressing.   Illuminating because I would never have guessed the level of ignorance that finds the slogan offensive and it's good to know if that is the right explanation, and of course distressing because it does show such an abysmal ignorance of American history and America's position in history.   In saying this I don't claim I have such a great education in these things either, I think we've all been deprived of the knowledge we've needed for decades to help fend off the powers of darkness that are trying to destroy us.

America's greatness is in its brilliant conception, it is not about anybody or everybody, it is about the concept of how to govern the flawed fallen human race for the good of all.  and if it had been practiced just as it was conceived it would have been just that...  for everybody.   Whatever the protestors are objecting to it is not America as it was meant to be and always could have been, it is people NOT living according to what it was meant to be.  However, the greatness is in the conception and not what fallen people do with it, though fallen people have been trying to pull it down for a long time now, and all Trump was saying was that we want to restore its original greatness which would be great "for everyone" if practiced as conceived.

A Very Welcome Liberal Voice -- up to a point

It's always exciting to discover people I can agree with.  It's most exciting to find Christians I'd never heard of before who preach a powerful orthodoxy, especially with a deep spiritual experience behind it.   But a strong voice for sanity inour disintegrating crazy world is an exciting thing to find too.  In this case I just discovered a liberal/leftist who is actually sane and sees the dangers in Black Lives Matter and the current uprisings all over the nation.  This is Bret Weinstein who as a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington was attacked some years ago as a supposed racist, which launched him into a whole new life of calling down this insanity, which as he rightly sees it is a threat to civilization itself.

I object to his leftist politics, he's a supporter of Bernie Sanders of all things, oh yikes (he obviously hasn't yet seen the Marxist foundation of all this madness), and he's an evolutionary biologist who has a lot to say from that perspective too, which gives me a case of violent eyeball rolling, but he's got a sane perspective on the current political situation that is enormously refreshing and hope-inspiring.  Besides, even what I object to in his thinking gives him a special credibility he wouldn't have as a right-winger, so I have to be happy about that.  There's hope for him though.  He likies a lot of what Tucker Carlson has to say.   He's no conservative but perhaps he'll get there.  "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged by reality."

Later:  Listening to another interview with Weinstein, a very recent one with Joe Rogan, and now I'm objecting to the way he justifies the actions of BLM as a function of a system, not the racism as the movement thinks of it but a system that somehow perpetuates the effects of slavery.  This is mystification.  I'm sure it sounds reasonable to a person imbued with Marxist logic but just as Marxist logic never touches down on Planet Earth so that one could get an idea of what is being talked about this also remains irritatingly abstract and theoretical and ultimately meaningless.  Besides, how exactly does this economic system single out blacks anyway?  No, sorry, this cannot explain any of what is going on.  But the effect of decades of Marxist indoctrination DOES explain it.  Love your ability to see what's wrong with all this Mr. W, do not think you have a clue about its causes.

People who "feel disenfranchised" or ARE disenfranchised but by a system of economics?  NO!  This is madness in itself.   NO!   Now I'm thinking this would just fan the flames, it's just a version of Marxism and the problem is already caused by Marxist indoctrination.  NO!  The "feeling disenfranchised" is caused BY Marxist indoctrination, the way Marxism creates class conflict by supposedly merely analyzing its presence.  No, this is a Marxist invention the whole thing and it's anti-American, anti-freedom, it's not real, it's a mad theory reified aimed at destroying the best form of government ever invented.

Wow, the more I listen the less I like what he's saying.  He "resents" Trump's slogan about making America great AGAIN because "there are populations for whom it has never been great."   Oh dear, all the work we've done to rectify the wrongs of the past and as usual nothing will ever be enough for the Marxist wrecking ball mentality.   And let's be clear that the "Again" is a reference to the hope of reversing the destructive policies of Obama that were aimed to diminish American greatness and in fact destroy the country, and he did NOTHING for the black community.  Trump did more economically for all minorities than any Democrats ever did.

This is simply a lie.  If anything blacks are the privileged class in the last few decades, not whites since they have been given all sorts of handicaps including Affirmative Action at the expense of ordinary whites..  They have plenty of problems but the cause is not racism, not some ghostly holdover from slavery in the economic system,  and let me bnote that their worst situation is in Democrat-controlled areas.  The cause is at least partly the result of being TOLD they are being mistreated and that the cause is outside themselves and their own communities and their own power to change.

No, this is a bogus analysis Mr. Weinstein.  Oh I agree completely, you are right that this could certainly morph into the next version of Mao's China or Hitler's Germany.  I think that's where it is definitely headed, but no there is no justification for any of it, I will not accept that.  Government has intervened and intervened and intervened and it's only made things worse because the Democrats don't have a clue what is needed or they don't care or they are too busy trying to get power over their political opponents.   They make it impossible for a real education to be had for instance, don't allow vouchers to give parents a choice to remove their children from the hideously bad schools to schools where they could actually get an eduation; they don't do anything about the crime in the black neighborhoods, they'd rather blame the cops, and now they are pushihng this insane solution of taking the police away altogether.  Yes Mr. W opposes that, he has some common sense, yes he sees where this is headed, but I can't accept his ridiculous analysis of the causes.  The kind of thinking that justifies any of this insanity can only make things worse.

His views made me feel better for a while, and I guess he still has some I can appreciate, but overall the whole thing has gone sour.  He's too much a part of the problem himself.

I hope to come back with some links.  But he's not hard to find through Google or You Tube.

MR. PRESIDENT!

Isn't it the President's job to bring order into all this chaos and destruction?   What on earth is holding him up?

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WE NEED LAW AND ORDER NOW!  

STOP THIS MADNESS NOW BEFORE AMERICA IS LOST COMPLETELY!  

THAT'S YOUR JOB!.

MacArthur's Jet Tour of the Book of Revelation, plus Rev 17

John MacArthur did a one-sermon "Jet tour of the Book of Revelation" sketching out the entire book in a little over an hour, which is very helpful for approaching that complicated subject.  I've listened to many of the sermons in his vey lengthy series on Revelation but still have many to go.  Having an overview like this is very helpful.

He doesn't try to identify the Antichrist or even the Harlot Church, which I understand to be the Pope and the Roman Church, as I've spelled out in many posts.  I also believe the "666" is the sum of Roman numerals in a title of the Pope, which I've also argued here, though MacArthur says it means only the number of Man.  Which doesn't tell us which man of course, which I thought was the whole point of giving us such clues.   None of it will be clear until it happens of course.

Added later:  Listening to MacArthur on Revelation 17 done back in the 90s he's talking about how risky it is to try to predict who the Antichrist will be from current events, naming a number of attempts to do that in those years.  And of course he's right so although I favor this current Pope, and have given my reasons for it, I know I may be wrong.  MacArthur mentions that in the early years of Christianity some offered various Popes as the Antichrist, and certainly the Bishop of Rome had been identified as Antichrist by "pope" Gregory on the occasion when Byzantine emperor Phocas made the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop in the year 606 AD.  And I did a post here a while back showing tha the Popes have been identified as Antichrist down the centuries.    Which makes a particular Pope at the right time a very likely candidate for the Final Antichrist of the Tribulation period.  Francis is the current Pope and although he has some stellar qualifications for the role he is also old enough to make it unlikely.   What it means of course is that if he is that final Antichrist all these things would have to unfold rather soon.   Very soon.  If he has the health to live to ninety or more that's still pretty soon.

Chris Pinto I think believes the Antichrist will be a Pope.   As I recall Pinto identifies "the mark of the Beast" as the sign of membership in the Roman Church, which he argues from a historical usage of the idea in reference to the ceremony that brings one into that Church.

Anyway here's MacArthur's jet tour of the book about the final days of Planet Earth:
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Well, now I want to add his sermon on Revelation 17 since the question of the identity of the  Harlot Church has come up here.  He first describes the final Harlot Church, "Mystery Babylon" as an amalgam of all the false religions that come together to form the final World Religion.  Then (around 15:00 on the counter) he does finally identify the Roman Catholic Church as possibly the main form of that final world religion, and quotes Martyn Lloyd Jones who called it Satan's greatest achievement, even greater than Marxism.  He points out that Pope John Paul who was Pope at the time he gave this sermon, was totally devoted to "Mary" and that the RC version of Mary is derived from the religion of Babylon.  (See "The Two Babylons" by Alexander Hislop which traces the history of all the false religions from Babylon to Catholicism).  He goes on to describe all the false doctrine that contradicts Christianity, that may well characterize the final world religion.
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.Added on June 24:  Hm.  Wild thought hit me after hearing MacArthur's latest teaching which is all about the Antichrist..  What if Obama is the final Antichrist?  And Pope Francis the False Prophet?  I could defend the thought, using many bits of information I've collected in earlier posts that show his qualifications for the job, some going back years, but I think I'll just leave it at that for now.