Understanding the Times

  

Introduction

If this year has shown us nothing else, it has demonstrated how quickly things can turn. How quickly the little routines we like can become disrupted! How quickly the life we consider normal can turn and we have to develop new routines.

We long for life to get back to those normal little routines and until they do, we will be unsettled. We will be anxious. We will be uncertain about what the immediate future holds.

For some people, it has been more than just a mere disruption. It has been catastrophic! For some it’s been one calamity after another. And for others it has been a fight for survival! The longer it takes for things to recover, the more damage that will be done and more people whose disruption turns to catastrophe.

One thing too that this year has brought with it is a sense of urgency that we need to get our spiritual lives in order and be quick about it!

 

 

Sons of Issachar

 

We must be as the sons of Issachar –

 

1Ch 12:32 NKJV

(32)  of the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their command;

 

We too must understand the times to know what we ought to do. What I hope to do today is to bring some understanding of how we got here and instill a sense if immediacy in making our calling and election sure.

 

What has surprised me the most is how far and wide the corruption has been. And it’s been going on for years! It’s been puzzling how so many people seem to be working together to bring this country down.

 

Say what you want about President Trump, I don’t care for his style either, but one thing he’s done is bring to light, to expose what’s been hidden for so long. What has been called, “The Deep State”, these people behind the scenes that want to undermine the American way of life, goes deeper and is more widespread than I would have ever imagined.

 

They’re influence has been so effective that at one point we had Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist in the running for the Leader of the Free World! How does that even happen?

 

Here, in America, the land of the free, the home of the brave. America, who has sacrificed so many of our young men and women to stave off the advance of socialism and communist totalitarian ideology. The fact that Bernie Sanders was even able to mount a campaign and develop a following in America deeply disturbs me.

 

What it means to me is we have failed. It means the older generation has failed to pass on our culture, failed to explain our values to the younger generations.

 

We have built the greatest economic engine and the greatest military force the world has ever known. Yet we have failed to effectively instill our cultural values in our children. We have failed to teach them what makes America different, what makes us a Christian nation. We have laid up for ourselves treasures upon the earth but failed to teach them how to lay up treasure in heaven.

 

Make no mistake, there is evil in this world. We’ve seen it. Somehow, we forgot that. Once the Nazi Marxists were defeated, once the Berlin wall came down and the USSR died, we thought that evil ideology died with it. We didn’t realize we hadn’t vanquished our foes but merely driven them underground.

 

While we were busy building prosperity, we took our eye off the ball. While we focused on materialistic idols, we took our eye off the spiritual. We took our eyes off God. We were no longer vigilant. We were no longer watchful. We allowed the enemy to enter the gates unnoticed and unopposed.

 

Once we defeated our enemies in the physical realm, we forgot that the real battle is in the spiritual realm.

 

Eph 6:12 KJV  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

 

The battle has always been spiritual. And we, as a nation, have laid down our armaments. We’ve let down our guard, and exposed our soft underbellies willingly as the enemy took the long, slow march surreptitiously through our cultural institutions and conquered us intellectually and spiritually from within.

 

How Did This Happen?

Let’s take a look at a few things that might help explain how we got here.

Some of us are old enough to remember Nikita Khrushchev. He was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. Khrushchev vowed to take over America and to do so without firing a shot! He allegedly made this audacious claim while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

“We will take America without firing a shot …. We will BURY YOU! We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism. We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”

We will bury you and we will do it from within.

It’s one of those quotes that everyone knows about but no one can validate. And since it was translated from Russian, there’s some dispute as to what were his exact words. However, it is with a fair amount of certainty that he did say, “We will bury you!” The remainder of his tirade though somewhat lost in translation was true to the spirit of the quote and meant they would destroy us without the need of conventional warfare.

In the year 1984, G. Edward Griffin interviewed a Russian intelligence officer who had defected by the name of Yuri Bezmenov. You may recognize G. Edward Griffin’s name from his famous book exposing the formation of the Federal Reserve called, The Creature from Jekyll Island.

We’ve been there for the Feast and seen the room where they met. I know many of you have too.

Yuri Bezmenov, who now goes by the name Tomas Schuman, told G. Edward Griffin thirty-six years ago how the Communists had planned the demise of Western Civilization, specifically, the United States of America. Bezmenov was a student of the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School, known more appropriately as Critical Theory, is a philosophical and sociological movement spread across many universities around the world. It was originally located at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), attached to the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute was founded in 1923 with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. After 1933, the Institute was moved to the United States where it was welcomed at Columbia University in New York City.

The Marxists in the Frankfurt School thought economic Marxism would take off in industrialized nations like the United States. Instead it proliferated in Third World countries like Russia.

What they didn’t count on and didn’t understand is that the American workers wouldn’t turn on their capitalist bosses because they shared a common bond through their faith in God, in the Bible, and godly family principles. They held common beliefs and cultural traditions. The cultural bond was too strong to overcome.

The Marxists had to rethink their strategy to adopt a plan centered on changing the culture, call this cultural Marxism, employing Hegelian methods.

Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis

They laid out the plan for what they called “the long slow march through the high places” of the culture, namely the institutions. They would infiltrate the colleges and universities, the media, Hollywood, the corporations, and government at the highest levels. They would change the culture from within through small imperceptible incremental changes.

They said they really must destroy three things –the Bible, the Church, and the Family because those are foundational to Western Civilization. The entertainment media was instrumental in that, because they found that if you could get people laughing, you could assert alternative ideals and they would be more readily accepted.

If you can get people laughing at immorality and traditional Judeo-Christian values, you can change their thinking about those things. People hate to be laughed at.

These cultural Marxists propagated their agenda through a process they call – Ideological Subversion. This is the process Yuri Bezmenov outlined for G. Edward Griffin.

"Ideological Subversion" - (active measures, psychological warfare) - the slow process of changing the perception of reality, such that no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. 

 

Get people to second-guess themselves. The Bible calls it being double-minded. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. (James 1:8)

 

It's a brainwashing process in 4 basic stages Bezmenov says:

 

Stage 1: Demoralization (15-20 yrs) - the time it takes to educate one generation of students, exposing them to the ideology of their enemy, Marxist-Leninist ideology has been pumped into the soft heads of 3 generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism and patriotism. This has already been accomplished for 25 years.

 

(This was said in 1984! 25 years earlier would have been 1959 just 3 years after Khrushchev’s threat.)

 

Most of this is done by Americans to Americans thanks to the lack of moral standards. Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information, the facts mean nothing to him. You can take him and show him the concentration camps and he will refuse to believe it. [We’re there now, aren’t we?] You can shower him with facts and he will refuse to believe it until the military boot crashes his ‘face’, then he will understand and not before then.