We’ve all heard the warning concerning Democracy:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship…
“Largess” need not be referring merely to government handouts. “Largess” may also be in the form of things that were formerly considered immoral. Examples include such things as gambling – which used to be a crime but is now government sponsored and widespread; abortions, which used to be “murder” but is now a woman’s legal right; and gay marriage, recently legalized. At the same time, Christianity, the Bible and prayer, which were common in our public schools until the late ‘50’s, are all legally prohibited.
As Benjamin Franklin warned:
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
The Liberty that Ben Franklin referred to was a good thing, but only when there was a culture that valued individual self control and personal responsibility based on mutually agreed on moral and ethical standards.
Our predominantly Christian heritage gave our culture this gift – that is until the last few decades, and especially until the last few years. Our laws were much fewer and our personal liberties were much greater several decades ago. We had an inner sense of what was good and acceptable to say and do without the need for external, government imposed laws and oppressive “political correctness.”
Christians will often point out the excessive Jewish laws of the Old Testament Scriptures and rail against the Pharisees that promoted and enforced those laws. Newsflash! Our laws now outnumber the old Jewish Law by a factor much greater than 10,000 to one. Shouldn’t we be railing against this, much worse, current excessive “legalism?”
There are two senses to the word “liberty.” The sense given in our nation’s founding was a good thing. Back then liberty meant freedom of choice of belief and practice in an environment of respect, safety and self control. More recently that definition has morphed into a radical extreme. The sense of liberty today is “do whatever you damn well please”; “who are you to tell me what to do”; “judge nothing – tolerate everything”; a pervasive belief that “the moral rules of the past were based on ancient myths – they don’t really apply to anyone today.” Thus we have the negative definition of liberty – an out of control liberty that has transformed our culture into an immoral chaos of rebellion against morality, disrespect toward our nation, increasing lawlessness in our schools and cities, and acceptable perversions that were unthinkable a few years ago. This has become a form of moral and political anarchy.
To counter a portion of this new corrupted version of liberty/anarchy, the left (progressives) shut off any kind of dissent as being “politically incorrect.” That means that if we say, write or do anything that the anarchists find disagreeable, we will be called bigots, haters, various “-phobes”, and generally marginalized. Think of any topic: Sexual morality, affirmative action as government-endorsed discrimination, pro-national borders, gun rights, abortion counseling, smaller government, lower taxes, promoting drug abstinence, nationalism/patriotism. Any and all of these things will bring on a torrent of hate down from the progressive left.
Moral and political anarchy has become Oppression. Jobs and careers will and have been destroyed by our disagreement with the radical “liberty” promoted by the left. Christian bakers and photographers have been the front line victims. It will not stop there. There will be a point, soon coming, where churches and Christian schools will not be able to teach Bible principles that conflict with the radical libertarian left. That is Oppression.
True liberty requires a generally accepted moral foundation. That foundation was Judeo-Christian teachings inherited from our founders. To the extent that moral foundation erodes – and it has in a destructive way - additional laws are required. True liberty diminishes when more laws are forced upon us by government. And this leads to oppression. And the majority wolves in this unintended “democracy” prevails against the sheep.
________________________
Satan is loose in the land. Should you be worried?
The “prince of darkness” struts across the length and breadth of our land with brazen confidence never seen before in the history of our nation. The same is true of his rampage through Europe, the Middle and Far East and everywhere around the globe. The blame for this cannot be placed solely on George Soros…Vladimir Putin…Kim Jong Un…the Ayatollah Khamenei…or on any world dictator. We have mainly ourselves to blame for Satan’s ascendency.
Why is this becoming so much more important now? Because if we don’t make a concerted, nationwide effort to change what we are and what we do, we won’t survive the horrific events Satan has planned for the age in which we live. It’s time to go behind today’s terrible news headlines to examine why evil is so powerful in our world.
At home here, gun violence is massacring Americans in schools—16 school shootings already this year-- and in other public places with shocking frequency and massive devastation. In knee-jerk reactions we blame this staggering violence on gun ownership, or mental disorders, or rage prompted by terrorism, racial hatred, drugs, sexual desire or something else with the power to drive someone to murder.
Any of these things can be subordinate contributors to this mayhem, but there is something far more sinister, vastly more evil, that is causing such terrible events. Our nation is abandoning God, denying His existence, and allowing ourselves to be possessed by the only force that remains when we drive God out of our lives. In greater and greater numbers, we are consciously or unconsciously embracing the greatest evil in the universe: The Devil, Lucifer, himself.
Things seem to be going terribly wrong for this nation with alarming frequency. And it’s mostly our own fault. We’ve given Iran a $150 billion to pacify the greatest supporter of terrorism in the world. The money hasn’t induced that nation to abandon its development of nuclear weapons. Instead it has enabled the ayatollahs to fund massive new terrorism across the Middle East and North Africa. In essence, we have surrendered to the malevolent power that controls the government of Iran.
Losing the battle against our inclination toward evil. In the U.S., in return for our submitting ourselves to liberalism…socialism…atheism… and to other things that are an abomination to God, we’ve allowed ourselves to become passive to the greed and corruption that now plagues our government at all levels. We’ve permitted false promises, blatant lies and outright criminality to control our fate. God demands that governments be fair, honest, just and focused on the wellbeing of their citizens. And when “we the people” allow our government to embrace evil, we become complicit in that evil.
Crime without punishment. We’ve always believed that crime deserves punishment. Yet today, there is virtually no punishment for crimes committed at our highest levels of government. The term punishment has been watered down to mean “accountability,” which means nothing more than the right to point a finger at someone and accuse him or her of a crime, but nothing more. The crimes of the politically influential go unpunished, as in the cases of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, James Comey and Rod Rosenstein to name just a few. A double standard has crept into our justice system, and when this happens the rights of every citizen are in dire jeopardy.God demands consistency in our love for Him and our obedience to His laws. If we are not unwavering in our relations with God, His punishment will surely follow. He also requires nothing less in our observance of the laws we make to govern ourselves. All human law is derived from the will of God, and He expects society to uphold its own laws including appropriate punishment for all offenders.
The need to be worthy of God’s miracles. Only about a week ago, in the Far East, we saw our hopes for peace and cooperation with the rogue government of North Korea nearly destroyed when its murderous leader backed off on his promise to give up his nuclear arsenal and end his threats to annihilate America. Few thought such a deal between Jim Jong Un and President Trump would ever become a reality. Most believed that it would take a miracle to make such an unlikely event happen. They were right. A miracle was needed, and will be needed, if peace talks are ever renewed between the U.S. and North Korea.
Miracles are blessings from God awarded to those who love Him. It’s certain that the abundance of love needed to merit God’s blessing on a summit between North Korea and the U.S, was not there. And so, it appears that God withheld his blessing, at least for now.
If God’s love is unconditional, why would He withhold a blessing that would bring so much good to the world? Much is made of the truth that God is a loving supreme being. But not enough is said about God’s righteous anger at those who reject Him and His love for them. The Bible’s Old Testament is full of instances when God’s anger was manifest against his own chosen people. He devoted Himself to them, but His favor toward them continued only as long as they loved Him and followed His laws.
Good transmogrified [transform, especially in a surprising or magical manner] into evil. Today we’re beset by a monstrous plague of drug addiction, not only to illicit substances such as heroin and fentanyl, but also to legal prescription drugs that are now being vastly overprescribed by thoughtless physicians who care nothing about the ease with which these prescriptions are abused. Misuse of beneficial drugs is delivering an unrelenting death sentence to thousands of people who first used them to relieve pain and suffering, but then succumbed to inevitable death by overdose. Why is this happening so often and so easily? Mainly because we’ve chosen to separate ourselves from God’s intercession when we need it most. Prayer, so little employed today, is the link between our needs and God’s intercession.
God’s loving intercession demands a partnership with his people. It’s been said often, but needs to be said again: “When you draw closer to God, God draws closer to you.” This is one of the most powerful statements about our relationship with God. It is, essentially, a “positive-sum game,” an agreement—as in a covenant with God— where both parties’ needs and concerns are met and satisfied. In other words, we benefit every time we ask something of God in return for giving God what He asks of us.
The whole process of gaining God’s blessings is contained in a simple, but sincere partnership agreement. But too many of us don’t think this way anymore. The growing distractions presented by new technology and new forms of entertainment, that often deny God’s existence and seduce us into violating His laws, are making this partnership almost impossible to initiate or maintain. For too many of us, the concept of a single supreme entity who created and rules over a universe composed of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars appears unbelievable. Some even call it ridiculous. Unfortunately, we fail to understand God because we’re viewing Him through the prism of our finite minds, which cannot comprehend that God’s is an infinite existence where all things are possible whether we understand them or not.
Judeo-Christian beliefs are under attack everywhere in the world, and with increasing intensity here in the United States. We now treat atheism as the moral equivalent of belief in God. We’ve enshrined “relativism” as the concept to embrace when comparing the merits of one culture, one religion, with another. This doctrine says there is no universal, objective and absolute truth; therefore, all cultures and religions are equal. One is no better than another. How can an Islamist philosophy of hate and death be equal in any way to the eternal love and everlasting forgiveness that is at the heart of Christianity? To believe they are equally virtuous is a sin of political correctness that ensures we are deaf, dumb and blind to reality.
Each year we continue to kill hundreds of thousands of unborn children through legal abortions. For our black community, in particular, this taking of life may soon reach the level of genocide. One of the most important traits of a benign nation—one the God would smile upon-- is that it protects the lives and the rights of its weakest citizens…and the weakest of them all are those defenseless babies in the womb waiting to be born.
Prospects look bleak for sustaining a partnership with God. One of the baseline examples of how a large segment of American society has turned away from God occurred in 2012 at the Democrat National Convention when it needed three promptings from the party’s leadership to obtain a vote from attendees to include a plank in their campaign platform that acknowledged the existence of God. Are Democrats the party of the “godless?” If so, we may have little hope as a nation for drawing closer to God.
Dr. David Voas, a professor of human behavior at the University of Essex in England, is convinced that Christianity, which has been steadily losing ground, will never make a comeback in the West. His years of study reveal that a massive secularization is underway in the West. He says only about 50 percent of people in the West believe at all in God…and this percentage has been dropping decade after decade. Since the late 20th century, parents have been less inclined to teach their children about God, and to get them involved in religious practices. Dr. Voas asserts that you have to be raised with religion in order to sustain belief in it throughout your life.
Besides this, Voas contends that there are two other principle reasons why Western societies are abandoning belief in God.: First is that prosperity brings choice. As nations become more prosperous, they lose interest in God. Affluence reduces the number of occasions when a person must plead to God to obtain life’s necessities. We can readily obtain the things we used to pray for. God doesn’t seem so necessary anymore.
Second is that Christianity has become counter-cultural in that, rightly or wrongly, it has suffered from association with sinful activities, such as the much publicized instances of child abuse.
The overwhelming perception in the West is that a great chasm now exists between modern society and the classical reasons why people in the past sought benefits and comfort from religion. It appears that Dr. Voas believes the God-man partnership is done and dead forever. We have irrevocably abandoned Christianity.
The rising specter of “Hell on Earth.” Hidden within Dr. Voas’ statements about the demise of Christianity is a false, or at least an unrealistic, premise that prosperity will continue, unimpeded and unabated, therefore guaranteeing that man no longer needs to call on God for anything. But it’s clear that prosperity ebbs and flows; it is not certain to last.
There is every reason to believe that evil has reached new terrifying heights in our world. Clear evidence of this is in the news reports we see each day. About 80 percent involve negative, frightening events. Might this portend that “Hell on Earth” could be just around the corner?
Here in America, confidence in our government is beginning to rise. But, only because President Trump is delivering on at least some of his promises to bring the nation back to greatness. But we have absolutely no certainty that he will be allowed to continue working for our benefit. The deep state is marshalling all its power to depose both him and Vice President Pence. This cabal’s ultimate goal is to manipulate the U.S. Constitution to place the presidency in the hands of one of the political world’s most obvious abusers of our laws and God’s wishes: Hillary Clinton.
Would God allow this to happen? Our freedom of choice that evolves from God’s love for us allows us to freely choose either good or evil. If we choose an evil such as robbing Donald Trump of his election victory and undoing his accomplishments, God won’t stand in our way. The right choice is always available to us, but it’s essentially up to us to make this choice. Only by seeking God’s assistance through prayer will He guide us to the right decision. Also, we must remember God never ordained that perfection was to rule our world. Only heaven is the true realm of perfection.
But if perfection is not going to happen in our world, there are degrees of rightness and wellbeing that God has made possible for us to achieve. But this depends on the quality of our partnership with Him.
Little time to make things right. Life’s experiences tell us: “If you want to keep on getting what you’re getting, keep on doing what you’re doing.” And so, true partnership with God demands that we change what we’re doing to what God wants us to do. Each of us, through this partnership, determines everything that is good or bad in our world.
If you’re worried that the “end of days” might be upon us, and you recognize that what you’ve done or haven’t done has contributed to Satan’s ascendency, I urge you to pray hard…pray regularly…return to your house of worship and beg God for forgiveness and deliverance. Do it now. There may be precious little time left.
