I came to the Lord sometime between December 10, 2003 and January 1, 2004. There were many reasons for my accepting the Truth, (besides the fact that it is the LORD who opens eyes and hearts) but one of them was a long-time curiosity with how the world got started and a dissatisfaction with the secular answer of evolution, Big Bang, and simple chance. During this time of my peak curiosity, I was fortunate to be able to travel the world for ten years. I saw many sunsets, the majestic Alps, active volcanoes, the Northern Lights, myriad exotic animals, the ocean at peace and in turmoil, and I would think, ‘there HAS to be more to it than a Bang…this is all so beautiful and delicately complex.’ In this, the scripture in Romans 1:20 comes into play, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:” Eventually, I clearly saw, and I understood. More important, I believed.
I was reading Acts 27 and the seafaring language was a wonderful reminder of days when I lived on a sailboat. Some days were lazy, drifting along in puffs of wind on a glassy sea. Other days were tempestuous, the sea raging and the boat beating into waves that seemed to grow ever higher. There was one rough overnight passage we made along the coast of New Jersey. When daylight came we saw that the dinghy we’d trailed behind our yacht was missing. The rope had snapped.
It was a disconcerting feeling to be separated from what would need to be our lifeboat if it ever came to that.
I wrote about famine as a judgment from God recently. It is truly saddening to see these things happening because although I glory in His promises coming true it also means suffering and death for many. And death for the unsaved means an eternity away from God, in hell. In that essay I quoted a news article that said, “The striking images of the landscape seem to represent a deceptively simple assessment of the drought: the dirty work of Mother Nature.”
It is the LORD who sends the rain in preparation for the crops. (Psalms 147:8). It is the LORD who sends it to the obedient. (Leviticus 26:4). He appoints seasons in His own authority. (Acts 1:7). “Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” (Acts 14:17) He sends the crops, the seasons and the weather for our benefit, to His glory. He can, and will reverse the process when we fail to thank Him and refuse to acknowledge His authority. That is the spiritual fact.
On a practical level, famine is both biological and social. It occurs to a person individually while it is also happening to all others around the sufferer. And unlike pestilence, where sick people are quarantined, privately sequestered, or are too insentient to socially connect, famine leaves the individual able to share in it with others.
“When starvation becomes a mass experience, the phenomenon is no longer purely biological.” (Robert Dirks, Academia.edu).
Famine is sneaky because the population has no clue that this crop failure will lead to a continual shortage, or that this lack of monsoon rains will lead to a permanent drying-out. It is only after successive storms or failures or absence of expected weather that it become apparent that food will not be coming. By then malnourishment or early stages of starvation may have already set in.
The biological consequences of famine begin with scarcity, move to malnourishment, elevate to starvation, and finish with famine. Starvation happens when the energy demands of the biological unit exceed supply. Technically, starvation begins 4-6 hours after the last meal, when the body has broken down all that will be or is able to be used, and no new food is forthcoming. However since a person living in a healthy culture will then consume more within a reasonable time period after the last meal, the negative effects are not really felt.
After a day or so, though, dehydration, hypoglycemia, and ketosis begin. After 24 hours, there are impacts to the tissues as loss outpaces fat. As starvation continues, exhaustion sets in and there is decreased tolerance for work. People move more slowly and adopt an energy saving posture. “In mobilizing its reserves, the body progressively selects fat over muscle as fuel, allowing life to be sustained for one to three months in acute starvation.” (Dirks).
Things go rapidly downhill from there, with all sorts of nasty things happen to the individual’s biology. And that’s just starvation, not famine. But you can see, it happens quickly. Though drought and famine take a long time to set up, when it hits, the body, mind, and soul shrivel pretty quickly.
I wrote above that in the first few sentences mother nature was blamed, and in addition, war also precipitates famine. War does have a devastating connection with famine. In Revelation 6, first there is war, then there is scarcity, then there is death. Those are Seal Judgments two, three, and four. In history, famine has almost always followed war. As the Red Cross says in discussing humanitarian aid, “the fact must be faced that food aid alone will never eliminate famines nor the suffering they cause. It still falls short of meeting the victims’ needs and appears essentially inadequate to solve their problems.” That’s because there are complex reasons for it that also include war, conflict, and strife.
Famine is destructive to those societies where malnourishment is always present, and soon after initial starvation sets in, financial ruin and disease take over. For some societies, they may at first adapt to conditions that in many cases don’t affect them. There is such a thing as “class famine.” We see in Revelation 6:6 that millions starve, unable to afford more than a loaf of bread even though they worked all day, while in Revelation 18:13 we see that all the while, a hefty trade in food luxuries had been ongoing. (“and cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep…”) There are the very rich and the very poor, and you can bet the very rich will not be affected by famine. The Tribulation’s predicted scarcities will be characterized by class famine.
When famine conditions deepen, the ‘Law of Diversification and Polarization’ comes into play. As Dirks quoted Sorokin, “simply put, this means that catastrophe brings out the best and the worst in people. It exaggerates what is already there.”
Sociological studies show that at first, people share when disaster strikes. As the disaster continues, and/or as supplies run short, sharing ceases. Starvation’s biological effects are that people become exhausted and irritable. Volatile situations erupt. Populations tend to migrate, looking for better conditions. The 1901 Indian Famine Commission called it “unusual wandering.” When adding to that the prophecy that love grows cold (Matthew 24:12), people are unthankful, (2 Timothy 3:2-4) and their thoughts are only evil continuously, (Matthew 24:37, Genesis 6:5) then you can see that violence will soon become the norm just at the time when people are physiologically least able to handle it.
So let me sum up the ivory tower talk: famines have always occurred and will continue to occur, followed by the worst brought out in people who are marauding hither and yon, looking for anything they can steal so they can stay alive. Violence breaks out and a true Darwinian human ‘survival of the fittest’ is played out in front of atheists everywhere, with the starving exhausted falling where they lay in irritable convulsions, dying by degrees while no neighbor cares.
Oh, but Jesus cares. His famines may be one of His sore judgments, yes, but it is to alert rebellious people that He is still in control and He is still holy. His control includes an eternal and infinite love for all His children. He wants you to turn from your carnal thoughts and lifting up of Mother Nature and replace those with perfect thoughts and spiritual infinity in His love. As long as you have not rejected him and slammed the door shut, you can enter the door to heaven by repenting of sins. He is the door and he stands ready to allow all who would believe to enter. (John 10:9)
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7) What is beyond that door? Certainly not war or famine or exhaustion or violence. See what is there:
The Gospel is exclusive: Jesus is the only way. The Gospel is inclusive: any person can accept Jesus as their savior and forgiver of sins. I hope you enter in to His rest, escaping all the Tribulation things and choosing to partake of the Eternal things. What it takes is a prayer to Jesus that you know and understand you’re a sinner, unworthy to enter His realm, and ask Him to forgive those sins. Since He is sinless and died as the sacrifice for your sins, your debt is paid. But you have to ask. Do it soon, my beloved friend. Soon.
I saw an article with an interesting topic on Facebook and I looked it up to see if it was real. It is real. Here is the interesting news. This article is from The Vatican, and since it involves the papacy, I take it to be credible, since they are reporting on themselves. The religion site is being built in United Arab Emirates, known as UAE.
"The Abrahamic Family House, which encloses a synagogue, a church and a mosque in a single complex, and which is scheduled to be inaugurated in 2022, is 20 percent complete, the Higher Committee of Human Fraternity (HCHF) said in a statement on Tuesday. ... Besides the 3 places of worship, the site includes a cultural center that aims to encourage people to exemplify human fraternity and solidarity within a community that cherishes the values of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence, while the unique character of each faith is preserved."
Each faith, meaning Judaism, Christianity (The Roman Catholic version of false Christianity) and Islam. Note that it is illegal for any building in the UAE to display a cross, therefore the church on this site will be devoid of one. It is illegal in UAE to convert from Islam to any other religion, so it remains to be seen how much ‘tolerance’ will be involved.
If you go to the website for this project, which The Vatican reports is 20% finished and will open within a year, you see a photo of how it will look and the architecture is quite beautiful.
The left is the Mosque, the middle is the Church, the right is the Synagogue. This is an artist’s rendering. Source
Interesting. I had not know about these ‘Abraham Accords’ which was the covenant that forms the basis for the building project, with other projects to come. The accords marked the first public normalization of relations between an Arab country and Israel since that of Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, says Wikipedia. The progress of this building site is pretty amazing, because the Accords were only signed in September 2020, one year ago.
Let’s turn to past history and future prophecy for a moment
Jesus often spoke in agricultural parables and allusions, knowing that the farmers, wine producers, wheat gatherers etc would understand. Not much has changed since the ancient days in terms of how wine is made, olives are gathered, wheat is sifted. Today’s layperson, even a city dweller, can understand the simple comparisons He made with gathering wheat as living symbol of gathering His people. But understanding the process of such production does enhance our understanding of the parables and allusions even more. So let’s dig in.
Are you battle weary? Our daily battle as Christians is tiring, isn’t it? We battle our sin. We battle intrusion of other peoples’ sin. We battle false doctrine. We do this daily. There are some bigger battles that crop up, like the one happening at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention on June 15-16. There, a host of like-minded representatives sent from the member churches, called “messengers,” will voice their opposition to Critical Race Theory and Egalitarianism (and its result, women preaching) to the mass who have gathered. The intention is to thwart the liberal drift. A previous battle like this had occurred in 1979-1980, called the Conservative Resurgence. It was an attempt, like the one coming up next week, to re-steer the Convention away from creeping liberalism and toward conservative, more biblical waters.
Six years ago almost to this day, John MacArthur preached the sermon, “Hope for a Doomed Nation“. The doomed nation is America. It was a sermon from the pastor side of him, not the teacher side of him. He did not explain the Bible verse-by-verse. Instead, he was speaking from the heart to his flock about today’s world.
MacArthur has been a Christian all his life and a pastor for 52. He has perspective. His thorough knowledge of the Bible and his pastoral heart give him a unique ability on this world’s stage to see both the past and the future insightfully. The progression of God’s work in giving over a rebellious nation is in full flower for America, and he spoke to his congregation as to why.
He quickly reviewed the tenets of the God-ordained, Holy Spirit enacted restraints put upon the world so it does not self-destruct from sin. Conscience, family, civil law/government and the church are four ways the Spirit restrains sin in the world. In addition, Romans 1 shows what God does to societies when societies leap over those bounds; what happens is sexual revolution, homosexual revolution, then reprobate mind. He said we are in the midst of a judgment he called ‘the wrath of abandonment’, since it can be clearly seen that America has leaped beyond those restraints and God has given us over to those different kinds of perversity. There is an eschatological wrath, and there is an eternal wrath, both of which people are familiar with in the Bible, but the current judgment is neither of those. The eschatological wrath is coming, and we can all agree, that is promised. But the current wrath is the judgment of abandonment. “That one is not coming. We’re in the midst of it,” MacArthur said.
He then listed 12 points that are driving this nation to its terrible demise, a spiritual pathology that is causing us as a nation to run so fast to the cliff. Keep in mind that this powerful sermon was delivered 6 years ago. If you think back to 2015 and all that has happened since then, I think we can see that the Wrath of Abandonment as outlined in Romans 1 is certainly active here in the US. If we couldn’t ‘see’ it before, we can now.
I think any one with discerning, biblical sense can see how far along the prophetic timeline we are. Many people I work with who are of biblical maturity and discernment believe this as well. I know I do.
and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
It might indeed be time for our 245 year old country of America to fall. It seems to me that God has been a moth, working silently and unobserved to fray the garment of our country (Hosea 5:12). The garment dissolves when we open the closet and put it on, full of holes and ragged to the point of disintegration. We are not anything special, certainly if God was a moth to Ephraim – His beloved, set-apart country – he would be the same to any nation that rebels so egregiously.
The sermon ended with Matthew 5:43. Love our enemy. No matter what happens, while we were still enemies, Jesus came down to rescue us, His enemies. So we are to love our enemies because we were them before grace came. The enemy is our mission field.
You’re never more like God than when you love your enemies, because you were one of the enemies God loved. Romans 5:10, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God. Your enemy is your mission field. The world of enemies was God’s mission field. God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son. …
To convert a sinner from his eternal doom is of far greater significance than the deliverance of an entire nation from temporal evil
His speaking of Godly love after 47 minutes of darkness was a Light that was powerful and incisive. Imagine demonstrating that kind of love in this very dark world. It will stand out brightly. Here is the sermon’s ending prayer:
Help us, Lord, to be a force for the gospel in this very, very doomed world. Lord, open up doors for us to preach Christ to perishing souls. Use us, Lord, to call Your own to Yourself. Help us to be faithful in proclaiming the truth and living it out. We’ll thank You, in Christ’s name. Amen.
How do I even think of the Immeasurable and Infinite God, pouring Himself into a human flesh with all its limitations, and living for three decades on this earth? I can’t, it defies the imagination. Even more so, His sacrifice of becoming flesh so He could die for our sins is for all time. He will never go back to being Spirit, but is the once for all sacrifice (Hebrews 10:10) and will remain glorified flesh forever. (Luke 24:36-43).
I wrote this series in 2011, ten years ago. Things are worse now, as we know. Things have worsened exponentially. So I’m bringing back this series for another round in hopes it might help someone in this decade.
I’ve been mulling over some things about apostasy. This is because in the course of my online and real life discernment and encouragement ministry, I see that the essential doctrines of our faith not only are being eroded “out there”, but also “in here”, in Christian places and in people close to me. I am horrified at the depth and breadth of the erosion of what I believed were the obvious givens. I am grieving over the adherence of many people to the destructive heresies.
Believers of the Church Age will not go through the Tribulation. Let’s define the Tribulation period and the word wrath to help understand what this unique event and time period is for. Here are the verses:
The Tribulation’s purpose is stated in Daniel 9:24. God’s purpose for the Tribulation is to accomplish 6 things. It is actually a decree:
the-end-time.org 