Category: Uncategorized

GIVING FREEDOM AWAY

I’m toggling between being so disgusted with the attitudes of people that I want to give up caring what happens to the nation… and being determined to not be one of those who stick their heads in the sand and let the godless rabble take over the country and trash it.

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In the blue corner (an old boxing phrase) we have half of the population who, while it suits them, side with the super-biased media and hate their president no matter how successful he is. In the red corner we have those who are just so traditional in their ways that they’re too soft and too polite and honest to play the enemies at their own game, which is getting their own way at any cost-cost to someone else, that is.

Is there any point in caring? Of course, that’s the impression the rabid dogs attempting to take down the president want us to think. No matter that he’s refused to be paid for his 24-7  service to the country, and poured many millions of dollars into his own campaign, and worked for every American-of any color or description: he has to go. Why? Ultimately, I believe, it’s because those at the top of our society, the ones who care so much about the poor that they want to give them your money while holding onto their own millions and their power over us, want to see a world socialist state in which we as individuals would have no power whatsoever except over which TV channel to turn to. They want to trash what America and the West has stood for, which is freedom of thought, conscience and enterprise, and replace it with a boa-constrictor like grip on our money, our words, our thoughts, and on everything we do.

It’s galling to see professing Christians ignoring the entire situation with the empty claim that God’s will will be done. Do they have the same view about thieves breaking into their houses or stealing their credit cards? Of course not-those things are too valuable to be left to “God’s will”.

When the nation falls totally to the globalists who will take away the rights of Christians and silence any witness they have, it will be too late to think about regaining the freedoms won by those who wanted to worship God-the one true God-freely and openly. That God will be replaced by another god, looming on the West’s horizon already.

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THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF THE PRE-TRIBULATION RAPTURE

Having been a proponent of the pre-tribulation rapture as I was for twenty-eight years, its counter-productive or destructive power in the life of the Christian and the Church as a whole is becoming clearer to me all the time…

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There was a time when I looked forward to being raptured, because the rapture was going to happen before anything really nasty happened in my part of the world. In an instant I was going to be in heaven, without hardly having to defend my faith at all. Don’t get me wrong: the rapture, I’m convinced, is a real, Biblical event, and there really is going to be a tribulation. The nation of Israel and the remnant will be the focus of world events for a few years, and the Millennial reign of Jesus Christ will follow. However, having honestly and realistically faced up to all those tricky Bible passages in all their glory and detail, I see things very differently now*.

The little cliched allegory of a live frog being slowly heated up in a pan of water, so that he doesn’t know he’s cooking, is becoming increasingly relevant. We’re all frogs in that pot, while the world around us “heats up”. The very conditions prophesied are becoming more prevalent and pronounced, while we’re still here…on the earth.

Perhaps another cliched but equally unmistakable fact is that if our immediate ancestors-those who lived just a few decades ago, were suddenly transported to our present day they would be mortified by what they would see: gay marriage and almost universal immorality; churches erasing the maleness of God, not to mention the deity of Christ, the rejection of national pride, and far more. Our world is moving quickly towards a global society in which the Christian faith is without doubt going to be squeezed into the shadows by an increasingly hostile liberal elite, while a certain other religion is being escorted to prominence. Once the current US president goes, for whatever reason, the process will escalate, and our world will change radically.

The predicament Israel, the newly reformed Jewish nation, finds itself in just as prophesied, is no less dramatic than it has been, as most of the West outside of Trump and his supports grow in their favor towards the enemies of Israel. The technology necessary to number, monitor and control everyone on earth is available and already at work, as is the propaganda and establishment necessary to herd everyone into the same way of thinking.

In short, the conditions which well-known prophecy teachers have assured us would come about after the rapture, are becoming more and more visible to us…here and now.

As with most debatable issues among humans, Christians generally take one or another of two extreme views and refuse to budge. Either they think that prophesied events are not to be considered and can’t be understood, so ignore them altogether, or they follow what their favorite teacher says to the n’th degree and refuse to even imagine any other view than the pre-tribulation rapture: we’ll all be taken away before anything bad happens to us. Both views are dangerously faulty.

A large percentage of Christians believe that we shouldn’t be engaged in politics; we shouldn’t speak out and upset anyone; we shouldn’t make waves; we shouldn’t say that some things are wrong and some are right… and they vacate the space which generations of freedom-seekers worked and fought for on our behalf, leaving the champions of lawlessness to move in. A majority of evangelical ministers who do care insist on supporting the politically-correct understanding of eschatology, and so fail to alert their people or anyone else to what our Enemy is already working out in our world. They tell us that it’s all unavoidable anyway, and not to worry because before anything serious happens to our society and our nation we’ll all be whisked away to heaven. Never mind the fact that millions of our brothers and sisters in the faith around the world are already suffering persecution without being raptured, because that’s “over there somewhere”: it’ll never happen here.

Apart from a minority of dedicated people who’re engaging in every way they can in our world to preserve what’s left of the Christian free world, the rest of us are in essence handing it over to the kind of people who will happily stand squarely behind the “man of lawlessness”, when he finally makes his debut appearance.

* My new book, “ALL LEFT BEHIND: THE CASE AGAINST THE PRE-TRIBULATION RAPTURE” is available in paperback and e-book on Amazon.

 

 

 

‘BYE FOR NOW, ROY HARGROVE

My introduction to jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove a year ago was bittersweet. I saw him play a great gig with his talented band at “Jazz Alley” in Seattle,  on the same day my first son went off to University to study music performance as a trumpet player….

I know little about the man, but something about the news of his passing yesterday hit me quite hard. He was, it seemed to me, a gentle, warm, witty, modest and very talented man: the kind we need far more of in our troubled world, not less.

The tune/song in the Youtube video here is “Top of My Head”, in which Roy’s faith is beautifully expressed. Thanks Roy. Hope to see you later…

LIFE FROM SOUP…?

Just once in a while, if you’re looking for it, you’ll find a glaring example of double-speak in evolution. You may, if you’re lucky, even catch an earth-shattering admission…

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Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled” is several years old now, and I’ve reviewed it before, but I would still highly recommend it to anyone who’s really seeking some truth. In Expelled Stein exposes some of the strong arm tactics being employed to shut out of science, education and the media anyone who may believe in a Creator or Intelligent Design.

As a brief but amusing review, I want to draw your attention to the most striking part of the movie. Towards the end Stein interviewed the great Richard Dawkins, and gave us all a fabulous glimpse into the mind of one of the world’s leading evolutionists. Dawkins began by reading from his book “The God Delusion”, and proceeded to call the Judeo-Christian God (not Allah, of course) all the names you wouldn’t dare call Adolph Hitler, Ghengis Khan, Jo Stalin, Pol Pott or any other tyrant you can think of.

Then Stein asks Prof. Dawkins (for all of us to see and hear) how the process of the origin of life started. Dawkins replied:

“Nobody knows how it started…we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life”.

Stein: “What was that?”

Prof. Dawkins: “It was the… origin of the first self-replicating molecule.”

Dawkins had just made a gigantic leap from nothing to the first self-replicating molecule, an interesting omission on its own. The conversation continued…

Stein: “Right. And how did that happen?”

Prof. Dawkins: “I’ve told you, we don’t know”

Stein: “So you have no idea how it started?”

Dawkins: “No, no, nor has anybody.”

I’m sure that since the movie Prof Dawkins has determined to be more prepared for pesky God-believers with tricky questions. Anyway, he went on to suggest that some remote and highly evolved civilization out there in space may have “designed a form of life which they then seeded onto perhaps this planet”.

My point is that a man who doggedly fights Creationism and Intelligent Design, and who says that the evidence for evolution on earth is “totally overwhelming”, and who has helped millions of people become convinced that evolution is conclusively proven, was offering his speculation (and not evidence) that life on earth may have been “designed” and “seeded” from somewhere else in the universe. He was also admitting that apart from this neither he, nor anyone else, knows how life began.

If it had indeed been “proven” that life evolved from soup, as hundreds of millions of people have been led to believe, then Prof. Dawkins and all his militant atheist colleagues would be trumpeting the results and demonstrating how it’s done.

A very relevant read on my blog would be the post “Photosynthesis: Fact and Fiction” (see the link below).

https://nickyfisher.com/2018/01/05/photosynthesis-fact-and-fiction/

WHY DOESN’T GOD STOP BAD THINGS FROM HAPPENING?

You stub your toe on a table leg. You passionately address the table, and perhaps even the gods who you may not believe in, with certain derogatory words and accusations which your mother would never have approved of…

You wonder why the gods allowed your throbbing toe to make contact with such a solid object at all. Couldn’t they have moved the table aside one second before contact?

Why does the Biblical God allow us to suffer? Isn’t he a God of love? Why, if He’s omnipresent and omnipotent, isn’t he one step ahead of us, preventing all the terrible things which happen in our world every day? There are a number of answers to this, which none of us like. We can’t know them all, but we can know some of them…

First of all, God created a physical universe for physical beings to live in, and a physical universe must have natural laws to govern it. Why would God create a physical universe, and then negate its natural laws? If you drop a concrete slab, you can be sure that gravity will rapidly draw it with some considerable force and momentum towards your toe, already bruised and throbbing after its connection with the table leg.

We don’t know whether Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were susceptible to concrete slabs dropping on their toes. We do know, however, that once they began to rebel, they were susceptible to anything including death:

“For in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”

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Something happened when Adam disobeyed God, and he began to die, just as God had warned him he would. It took him a long time to die, but die he did, as a direct consequence of his disobedience. His disobedience, and later our own, led to our downfall also. It doesn’t take us so long to die as it took him, because he was still a fresh and extremely healthy creation. We Christians-those of us who believe the Bible-talk about the Fall of man and of nature, at which time humans and all of creation became subject to adverse events and circumstances. When Cain struck down Abel, God didn’t stop him…God let Cain do it. Why did he? Why didn’t God say, “Hey Abel! Look out-your brother has a knife!” Why didn’t he make whatever weapon Cain used turn to dust before it could do the dirty deed?

Since the Fall God has intentionally allowed us to face consequences: consequences of our own actions and of others’ actions; consequences of natural laws such as gravity, and consequences of the fall of nature, so that our bodies degrade and become ill. There can only be one alternative to perfect health forever, and that’s illness, decline and death. God refuses to allow fallen man-in rebellion and disobedience-to live forever, or to live without natural consequences.

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Free will is an amazing gift to us from God, as a vital part of His creation. God wants man to have his own mind and spirit, and to choose to love Him and each other, rather than creating him with robotic compliance. However, free will comes at a price. It’s the driving force behind all the hatred, unrest, unhappiness and evil we see playing out in our world. If God had turned Cain’s weapon to dust before it killed Abel, Cain would no longer have free will. If God froze our tongue moments before we made our feelings clear to someone, in the process hurting them, we would no longer have free will.

In suffering we learn and grow. If there were no consequences to our actions and our words, we would not learn to control them. We would not mature. We would remain like children in our character.

Perhaps the hardest lesson for us all to learn is that it’s God’s will that we suffer, in this world. He-not the devil- instituted the Curse. The Curse is one of those natural laws that God created. It affects all of creation. He’s able to negate those laws when he sees fit (in what we call a “miracle”) but for the most part, it’s His will that we endure suffering. How we respond to that suffering and those challenges is of great interest to God. It’s how God, and everyone else, finds out what we’re really made of. Even Jesus Christ was sent into the wilderness, by the Holy Spirit of God, to be tempted. In the Bible the words “tempt” and “test” are interchangeable.

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To that end, God even allows that rebellious spirit-Satan-to test us. You only need to read the story of Job to see that. Satan is able to afflict us physically and to sorely test us mentally and spiritually-if he receives permission from God to do so. While Satan probably doesn’t afflict all of us directly (he has his own minions) his hateful exploits have devastating affects on our world. But the most important message of Job’s story is that God-and Satan-were vitally interested in how Job would react to his suffering. What was he really like inside? What were his real motives for acting as he did, and for claiming to care about his creator? Did he really love God? Would he maintain his humility before God? Had he really only been following the Lord because life had been rich and trouble-free, or was it because he saw the Lord as his Master, for better or for worse? In marriage our love for our spouse is put to the test and seen for what it really is when we have problems and disagreements, not when all is going well.

God knows that human nature is contrary to His, and that even if He made sure that everything went smoothly for us, we would not feel the need to seek Him. In fact, in many or most cases we humans will only seek God, and humble ourselves to him, when we are suffering or struggling in some way. Somehow, God knows that we grow spiritually under adverse conditions.

Our universe is temporary, and this physical, limited world we live in is a proving ground for all of us. In time, we will be judged for our responses and actions. The most relevant fact that we need to respond positively to is that God has provided his own Son as a sacrifice, so that we can know Him. If we accept God’s gift of his Son, we can escape the limitations of our mortal, temporary bodies in the future, when he will restore all of nature to a state of perfection.