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.

 

From a scholarly journal published and administered by students of The Institute of World Politics called, "Active Measures" published in the Spring 2013. 

“We rarely use guns to kill people and take their country. The cleanest way

is to blackmail, pervert, bribe, lie and intimidate the POLITICIANS and

the MEDIA, and they will destabilize and disunify their own country for us.

[Jeffrey Epstein’s private island]

Then all we have left to do is to arm the procommunist or simply criminal factions and we have a coup and another “liberated” country. As neat as that.” [Antifa]

 

Stage 2: Destabilization - (2-5 yrs) the subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption. What matters are essentials - economy, foreign relations, defense systems. In 1984, the influence [thus far] of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States has been absolutely fantastic.

 

[This was during the Reagan years, and before the fall of the Berlin wall. The Marxist influence was already “fantastic”.]

 

Stage 3: Crisis - (only up to 6 weeks) it may take only 6 weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. 

[Never let a good crisis go to waste. COVID]

 

With the violent change of power structure and economy you have the next stage.

 

 

Stage 4: Normalization - (may last indefinitely) a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda [“the New Normal”] where you promise the people all kinds of goodies [free health care, free college education, Universal Basic Income] and the paradise on earth, to destabilize the economy, to eliminate the principle of free-market competition, and to put a Big Brother Government in Washington, DC with benevolent dictators. They will promise lots of things. Never mind if the promises are fulfilled or not.

 

Your Leftists in the United States, all these professors and all the beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion, only to destabilize the nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They think that they will come to power. That will never happen of course. They know too much. They get disillusioned when they see Marxist-Leninists come to power. Obviously, they get offended. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.

 

This is not to say that we’re off the hook, that it’s not our fault. This is not to say that because we have an enemy who plotted our destruction and carried it out with some success, that we take no responsibility. We are complicit. We allowed it to happen. We allowed it to happen on our watch.

We let our guard down. We slept. We slumbered. We became rich and increased with goods and became complacent and neglected our spiritual lives and the spiritual needs of our children.

Christ told us to watch. He told us several times to watch our spiritual condition and to not neglect it and let it slip into decadence.

(Matt 24:42, 25:13; Mar 13:37; Luk 12:37, 21:36)

We turned from God and our righteous and just Father had no choice but to remove our hedge of protection.

When Christ came, he freed us from captivity, our enslavement to sin, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. (Luk 4:18)

But we have to do our part. We can’t be hearers of the word only, but doers.

Jas 1:22-25 KJV

(22)  But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

(23)  For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:

(24)  For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

 

[He forgets the word of God he heard in church services and was convicted by them and goes out into the world no different than when he came in. - Between the Altar & the Door, Casting Crowns]

 

(25)  But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty,

 

[God’s Law frees us from the spiritual evil that would harm us. It gives us a spirit of discernment and a standard against which to recognize evil when we see it. It doesn’t square with God’s Law]

 

and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.

 

We each must be diligent to make our own calling and election sure. (2Pet 1:10) This is a personal battle. But we also must live our lives true to the faith and stand in the gap to protect our families from evil. We must ensure the Word of God is taught to our children and the Spirit of the Lord is present in our homes.

2Co 3:17 NKJV  Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

 

We must stand in the gap against the evil spiritual forces that would destroy us. Stop them before they ever enter our gates. However, through our policies, distractions with the cares of this life, and outright negligence we have not done so. Now we see a spiritual invasion we would never have imagined.

 

Lam 4:12 KJV  The kings of the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world, would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy should have entered into the gates of Jerusalem.

 

This speaks of a physical breach and invasion. Now it is a spiritual one.

“The kings of the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world, would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy would have entered the gates of America.”

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

We have not been vigilant. We have not kept the enemy from our gates.

 

Where Are We Now?

 

Looking back in history we discover that nations follow a pattern from the birth of a nation to their eventual demise.

Fred Markert is an expert in the rise and fall of civilizations. He is a trained Marxist and former communist now converted to Christianity. He has spent most of his life studying the lifespans of preeminent civilizations, world superpowers.

He studied 26 superpower civilizations throughout history and the average life span from beginning to end is 238 years.

Government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789

He states there are Six Phases that all nations progress through from birth to their eventual demise.

The Decadence phase is defined as the final stage in the life of a civilization which is due to the decay and breakdown of Religion, Morality, Education, Justice, and Unifying Customs. (cultural)

 

The United States of America is currently in the phase of Late-Decadence.

 

No civilization in history has ever recovered after having reached the Late-Decadence phase.

 

This doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.

 

God told us that He would bless us beyond measure and He has. And He would have continued to do so had we remained faithful.

 

But He warned us that if we ever allowed the blessings and prosperity we enjoyed to go to our head and became complacent, we were at risk of turning away from Him. He was so certain of it He warned Israel through Moses that it would happen. It did and the nation of Israel was split in two, and eventually fell captive to the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

 

And prophecy being dual in nature, it will happen again in the latter days.

 

Deu 31:20 KJV  For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my covenant.

 

Deu 31:29 KJV  For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.

 

 

 

Technology Won't Save Us

 

Dr. Joseph Tainter - Collapse of Complex Societies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

People always say we'll get out of this somehow. We always do. Someone will come up with something that will solve our problems. We're very innovative and technology will always come up with something.

However, after studying U.S. Patent data 50% of the new patents come from outside the U.S. If you want to sell to the U.S., you apply for a U.S. patent. So, it's a very good representation of worldwide innovation.

Technological innovation is reaching the point of diminishing returns. It used to be that one creative individual invented something and filed a patent. Now it takes a research team to come up with something worthy of patenting. The number of innovations per inventor is declining. It takes more people to invent something new. It takes more brain power to invent something. The ratio of effort and brain power to the value of the results is declining. We're at the point of diminishing returns. The effort isn't producing something of sufficient value to warrant the effort it takes. We can no longer rely on science and technology to get us out of the messes we get ourselves into.

Inevitably, complex societies will suddenly simplify, from highly complex to agrarian collapse. Instantly, from businessman to farmer having to rebuild the infrastructure and to live off the land.

The problem is using our hands is a foreign skill.

Generally, only 30-33% of people get a college education but we push all our children to go to college and 56% drop out. They're not suited for college. They'd be better off and so would society if they learned a trade.

76% of our infrastructure is in decay

We need reading, science, math (STEM) to rebuild or maintain society.

Instead we import our engineers from India and China.

When the Roman empire collapsed and they were living among the ruins, they didn’t have the skills to even repair the aqueducts.

We lack the knowledge to maintain our infrastructure. (Hos 4:6)

 

We lack even the ability to concentrate long enough to solve our problems.

---

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr  

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

Ever wonder why we’re so distracted and can’t seem to concentrate on one thing for very long? Nicholas Carr suggests maybe our use of the internet is conditioning our brains to have a shorter attention span incapable of focused contemplative thought.

Tablets and cellphones are destructive to creativity in the brain.

People are losing the ability to think and analyze deeply.

We cannot look to technology to save us.

 

Markert says, only a return to our Judeo-Christian ethics can stop the collapse. That means a spiritual renewal in our country.

 

Dr. Camille Paglia, an academic atheist is calling for religion to be taught in our public schools. Without a re-injection of morality, we have no hope for our civilization.

Even secular scholars are recognizing the importance of church and family.

 

We have a breakdown in the nuclear family - 42% of children in white homes are raised in single-parent homes; 73% in black homes.

 

When young men are raised in a single-parent household they become angry.

 

When young women are raised in a single-parent household they become sexually promiscuous.

 

This is leading to an emotional weakness, a societal weakness. The rage we're seeing in the streets and the rate of unwed pregnancies is evidence.

 

When the collapse of our civilization comes, what does it look like?

 

Markert tells us we'll have some catastrophe like a failure of the electrical grid, a pandemic, or a financial crisis. The recession of 2008 was just a foreshock of the earthquake that's coming.

 

We won't be like a Venezuela (long slow decline), but because we're so dependent on all of our systems and so unable to live without them, without electricity, without running water, without food showing up in the supermarket, our society will tear itself apart very quickly.

 

We’re at the precipice of “cascading failures”. That means that when one of your systems fail, it cascades to cause the failure of the next system and the next, like falling dominos to the point of total collapse.

 

Civilizations, when they collapse, they collapse in one day! You rise and you peak, then fall off a cliff in one day. Suddenly in an instant!

Isa 30:13 KJV  Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.

 

All the enemies that could not take us down while we were strong are going to see this opportunity to take down America.

The only civilization that was not decimated by these enemy powers when they got to their collapse stage was Britain and that was only because the United States extended an umbrella of protection over Britain.

There's no one to extend an umbrella of protection over America. There’s no one who can and we have nowhere else to go. Our enemies will see this as their one chance to come after America.

We're in a dire situation.

If we can have a spiritual renewal, we can turn this around. As things get dark in society hopefully people will start to think in spiritual terms. We're going to have to reach some critical mass of Americans repenting. It can't just be 2%.

We know from the Bible, God will honor repentance but this won’t likely happen on a wholesale national basis. I’m concerned it’s too late. (2Ch 7:14; Jer 18:7-10)

 

 

Average life of a nation is ~238 years, America is at 244

 

Progressives  – Progress in moving us away from God and godly principles

 

June 25, 1962 – Prayer taken out of schools

January 22, 1973 – Roe vs. Wade decision sanctioned the killing of the unborn through abortion

June 26, 2015 – The Obergefell decision for “same-sex” marriage

June 15, 2020 – The Bostock decision that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or identity, transgenderism, is on the same level as race discrimination

 

Dr. Camille Paglia – professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA,  said in an interview with Jordan Peterson that she has identified the very last sign before the imminent collapse of every civilization in history.

 

That is the acceptance of transgenderism.

 

As it was in the days of Lot…

 

Luk 17:28-30 KJV

(28)  Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded;

(29)  But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.

(30)  Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.

 

God’s had it! Our righteous and just Father in Heaven has had enough!

We’ve had our way, and that’s it. The time has come.

 

Now, It’s Time to Get Serious!

 

I don’t know how much longer we have. I don’t know if we have 7 years or 57 years but we need to get our act together very quickly.

We need to be about our Father’s business. Time is drawing short. We need to get our affairs in order.

I know this all sounds very dismal and negative. I hope it serves as a wake-up call.

Draw Near to God and Christ

 

But I have good news for you!

Our Deliverer is coming!

The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Rev 11:5 KJV)

We just need to hang in there! We must draw ever nearer to God and Christ enduring to the end with our eyes fixed on Christ and the Kingdom!

We cannot afford to be distracted any longer by the cares of this life.

Come out and be ye separate! (2Cor 6:17; Rev 18:4; Isa 52:11)

If any of us have been playing at being a disciple of Jesus Christ. It’s time to stop! It’s time to stop playing at being a Christian. It’s time to get serious. We need to decide, are we merely admirers of Jesus Christ or are we true disciples, true followers, willing to die for what we believe?

We need to know and know that we know – Conviction, Commitment, and Courage

I don’t need to tell you what to do. You already know. We’ve sat at the feet of some of the best Bible scholars in the world!

• Bible Study
•  Prayer
• Fasting
• Meditation

Live God’s way of life all the time. Live not by lies. Weary not in well-doing.

Rom 8:35-39 KJV

(35)  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

(36)  As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

(37)  Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

(38)  For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

(39)  Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

We must come together as a family, now more than ever. We must care for each other. Love one another. Pray for one another. Bear each other’s burdens. Share in each other’s joy.

 

Joh 13:34-35 KJV

(34)  A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.

(35)  By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

 

This is how we’ll be known, by our love for each other. There’s safety in being together in brotherly love and unity, in song and spirit.

 

Zebras - Zebras are not camouflaged, lions are grass colored, zebras are black and white. As a herd they become individually unidentifiable. We've always thought of the lion as attacking the weak but actually he attacks the identifiable.

 

A researcher tagged or painted a zebra so he could study it and a lion killed it because he could strategize around how to take it down. If you become individually identifiable you can be singled out but if you remain as part of the herd you blend in and are more difficult to take down. There’s safety in numbers and homogeneity.

 

1Pe 5:8 KJV  Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

 

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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