A person I knew asked me once if I agreed that it was selfish of God to expect humans to praise him. I’m not sure how well I answered him at the time, but if I could answer him now, I might say something like this…
God made us. We are His creation, as is everything around us. His power and intelligence are immeasurably beyond anything we can imagine. We are, as Scripture says, “fearfully and wonderfully made”. So much so, that researchers, as clever as they have become, still haven’t and probably never will understand all there is about the human body, brain and mind. His abilities are beyond anything we will ever understand. We praise football players, artists, actors and musicians, who wouldn’t even exist if God had not made us.
God deserves our praise because He sustains us, and gives us mercy. He keeps that star we call the sun in our sky shining, preserving life on the planet. He is incredible in every way. He is fantastic, tremendous, stupendous, awesome, in the fullest sense of all these words, and of many many more. He is actually beyond any word we can utter.
God knows that He is incredible, beautiful, and holy. This isn’t a big-headed sort of knowledge, it’s a recognition of fact. It’s also a recognition that He sustains all things. He wants to share His beauty and holiness with those of us who choose to do so, because it’s the best thing which could happen to Him, and to us. He finds pleasure and joy in our finding pleasure and joy in Him. It’s like the most perfect marriage you could imagine, and then some. In fact, it is the perfect marriage.
Praise, among other things, is an expression of love. If we really love God, we cannot fail to praise Him. Praise serves to put all of our existence into its proper perspective. It’s an acknowledgement that He is far above us, and that we only live and enjoy the blessings we have because He allows it all. It puts our hearts into a right relationship with the One who not only brought us into being, but holds our eternity in His hands.
Praise instils in us a sense of reverence and awe, and yes, fear, of the One who is able to bless us or curse us-to give life or take it away. When we know we have our hearts straight with Him, it gives us an incredible sense of oneness with Him-the most amazing, beautiful being there is or ever will be.
Praise fills us with joy and the sense that all in the universe is well after all. God is in control; there is far more to life than our problems or just what we can see; there is meaning to life, and there is a purpose. There is a future for us. There is such a thing as good, as well as justice…and God is It.
Hi. In part One I discussed the persecution of President Trump, and the condition of our alleged “news” media. I explored the growing understanding that there is a cabal of many in positions of power who think that we voters are irrelevant in the quest for a perfect world. In this second part, I will continue this theme, and attempt to extrapolate and apply it to the book of Revelation. Is what we see happening in the current political battle in the United States at all relevant to Biblical end-time events?
The establishment big-wigs believe they are the experts, in anything, and they know best for us, despite our vote. This has been the view of Marxists and Communists all the way along: in fact, of any form of tyranny. Why do billionaires such as Soros and Ted Turner promote socialism? What do they, who have become rich through capitalism, have to gain from socialism, which in theory forces financial “equality” on everyone? Of course, in their future state, they plan to be exempt from financial equality, just as the elite in any socialist or communist state is. I think they see themselves as being part of that Party which will tell us all how to live, right down to the tiniest detail of our lives-because they know best and we are ignorant. The freedoms America were founded to establish and protect have to go, in order to create that magical, mythical global utopia.
How will it all affect the Christian population? Unbeknown by many, the movement towards a Leftist state is already affecting many Christians. If we didn’t have such organizations as the ACLJ, a law firm which defends people of faith all the way up to the Supreme Court, any public expression of Christian faith might already be banned, because the haters of our faith are hard at work to smother us and ultimately shut us down. To many of those in high position, the Church and evangelicals specifically are to blame for all the ills of society. I myself was told as much by my college tutors: we are to blame for centuries of misogyny, racism, slavery, homophobia, the rich-poor divide, and poverty, among other things.
Some analogies have been drawn between certain Biblical characters and their cultural conditions, and Trump and his own situation. This is not to claim that Trump is at all a Biblical figure or a type, but the similarity between, say, Nehemiah’s situation and Trump’s is remarkable, right down to the vehement opposition to his building of a border wall. I’ve spotted another similar comparison. In the second book of Kings we read that Judah had been ruled by a succession of ungodly kings, leading all the people into idolatry and immorality. Until, that is, Josiah came along (2 Kings 22 to 23:30). He attempted to reverse the rot. It was a “Make Israel Great Again” campaign. For years he worked hard and diligently to fix what had become of the kingdom. However, God had already decided to judge the nation. Nothing, at that point, was going to hold back what was coming upon the land:
“Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger”.
With all that’s happened in the United States and the Western world in recent decades: its slide into gross immorality, its widespread rejection of the Creator, its movement towards globalism (remember-God divided the nations at Babel), the abortion of many millions of babies-is it perhaps now “too late” for the Donald Trumps of the world (and there only seems to be one) to turn things around? Can one man avert what many millions have no intention of averting, as he attempts to fight off all his opposition? It seems to me that even if he’s around for four more years, that fourth year could be the end of the tether for freedom.
How does this all relate to Revelation, and to every one of us who profess faith? Human nature and especially government has always leaned towards corruption and coercion: what’s so different now? Of course I don’t know when the events of Revelation will begin, but there are some clues for us to watch out for. I wrote a few weeks ago about “The Party of the Beast”, and, without any direct finger pointing, discussed the kind of people who will bring to power that one man who, the Bible says, will be the king of all tyrants. Who would love him and help him, as Scripture says a majority will?
I showed that he and his followers will be opposed to the nation of Israel and its possession of Jerusalem, as the Democratic Party is and as President Obama was. The betrayal of recently-rebuilt Israel and its hold on Jerusalem is central and pivotal in Biblical end-time events. I discussed how they will embrace and enforce a global financial and political system which will affect every individual, so bypassing national law and national boundaries, and ending individual liberty. This is consistent with Democratic policy: they want open borders (ie no borders) and they want to empower various agencies and treaties (such as the Paris Accords) which will weaken national sovereignty.
Also in a socialist state, the will of the individual is surrendered for the good of the state as a whole. The beauty of the Constitution is that it protects us against this eventuality-so long as it is implemented. The world according to Antichrist will see no individual liberty, except to commit immorality.
The leader’s manner will be marked by unashamed deception, such as the Democratic and media deception that Trump was a Russian agent. His rule and those who follow him will be totally embracing of gross immorality, just as the Democratic Party embraces all forms of sexuality and now even transgenderism, which God hates. They will be opposed to the Christian Church, which many Democrats have already shown they would be a part of, even forcing Catholic nuns by law to pay for abortions, as Obama did. It’s Democrat-run cities and states which have shut down churches while allowing bars to remain open. Refer to John McArthur’s battle with California in this regard.
In summary: deception, immorality, globalism, open borders, opposition to the true Church, and opposition to Jerusalem being in Israel’s hands. All of these are clear Biblical indicators of the kind of people who will one day take sides with the man the Bible calls “The man of sin”, and who will help to fulfil the forecast contained in Revelation and other Scriptures. Are they warming up for Revelation, or will our modern day Josiah this time succeed in staving off judgment? Will the corruption be held off for four years or a lot more? Only time will tell.
“All’s fair in love, war and politics”, according to an old poem with later augmentation: the three most cut-throat endeavours of mankind! To be sure, politics and the struggle for power has been dirty and aggressive throughout human history, but is there perhaps something different about what’s happening in the current struggle for power in the United States? Since the US is the global superpower, the rest of the world and its balances of power stand to be affected by what happens in the US. What is the struggle leading to? History doesn’t stand still for long: it consists of change, for better or for worse. In this two-part post I will arrive at some answers to these questions. Beware-this is a lengthy essay, and expresses strong political views!
I heard that even in the UK, my country of origin, the BBC has been hiding the scandal which is confirmed by information found on a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son, which is that Joe Biden’s family has been benefitting financially in a big way for decades from his behind-the-scenes dealings with other nations. News corporations in the US worked feverishly for two years, along with a special council, to pin the charge of treason onto Trump, but now they seem totally uninterested in the evidence showing Biden’s financial dealings with China and Ukraine. They’re busy trying to hide this and other stories, and push others out there, sometimes openly expressing their choice of candidates for election. But they also have a way of reporting things in such a way as to promote their choice without making the bias obvious to the many who are too trusting of experts.
People who know the truth tut, complain and whine, but the majority who even become aware of the level of propaganda in news stories are too busy with their lives to realize the import of it all or to do anything about it. It’s a sense of impotence which robs us of our passion in such things: the sense that I as one individual am powerless to change the big picture.
We’ve always known that politicians (many, but not all) feather their own nests at our expense. Trump has proved in a few short years that our manufacturing industries and so our jobs and our wealth didn’t have to go oversees as they did for decades after all. The movement to China and other nations was for the benefit of politicians and their political dealings and their families and chums on both sides, and for the corporations who made use of cheap labour overseas. The unknowing chump who paid for it all was the American and the European taxpayer. Now, at this point in time, the “swamp” as Trump calls it, is attempting to fight Trump’s stand against global governance. For years they told us that we are now inescapably intertwined with other nations, at the cost of our own jobs, prosperity, wealth, and before long, our laws, values, and ultimately our religion. The UK had almost been subsumed by the European Union and its laws, until Brexit occurred.
The fact is that we as a population-the people who do all the hard work and pay taxes and entrust our nations to the “experts”-are being perpetually lied to on a monumental scale, by the very institutions we pay for: government, politicians and so-called “news” media. We thought we lived in the “free” West, where everything is open; where government is there to serve the people; where what the people say matters; where news people are working faithfully to relay all relevant facts and to uncover truth. Instead, what we are allowed to hear and see is being selected or even manufactured in order to promote an agenda; an outcome.
It’s almost considered a tired cliché to call to attention dystopian societies created for novels-Nineteen Eighty Four being perhaps the most notable example-as they relate to current events. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we read of a future one-party state, in which an invisible elite governs perpetually. The masses are drugged and mollified and amused in order to keep them happy enough not to rebel or complain; the traditional family is extinct; total sexual “freedom” is institutionalized, and any person deviating or even being seen to complain or question is dealt with.
As in all dystopian novels, the state controls all “news” outlets, so that what the masses hear is entirely what the leadership wants them to hear-nothing more and nothing less. I submit to you that this is the goal of present-day elitists. Even social media sites are taking sides in the election. There’s an active band of super-rich and super-influential characters who think that they alone are qualified to run the nation and the world, no matter what the masses think or how they vote. In 2016 Donald Trump interrupted their little plan by getting elected.
How else do you explain the extremity of hatred for Trump and his supporters, even before he got elected? The lies, the unaccepted election victory, the failed Russia-collusion smear aided by leaders of America’s own FBI and CIA: the failed impeachment attempt; the global (not just national) vilification; the attempt to foment no less than a race war by labelling Trump and his supporters as white supremacists; the blame for Coronavirus deaths on Trump alone? Never mind reasoned debate to achieve the good of the country-that’s all old hat now. That’s old school: it doesn’t achieve their ends. The gloves are off, and just as Marx himself taught, you’ve got to get mean and dirty to overthrow the system.
The intention is to become as forceful and as deceptive as is necessary, to fool enough of the voters into agreeing, until real elections aren’t needed any more. They’ve provided our drug and our mollification: our “soma”, in the form of entertainment and the stuff we all collect and live for. We have license to commit almost any sexual act our depraved minds can imagine (and the rest is on the way). We have an almost total media monopoly to feed us the “news”-propaganda-we should know (that Trump is an ignorant, tyrannical idiot who’s the puppet of Putin), and we have a global elite, attempting to cement upon us one party rule.
Too extreme a claim, you think? Then why did the last administration and heads of the intelligence agencies, with the aid of the major news corporations, conspire to frame Donald Trump as a traitor and a Russian agent?
Why am I a Christian? How did it come to be? In answer, an entire book could be written, which would have quite a few racy, dramatic, well-thumbed scenes. However, it’s likely that no-one, or almost no-one, would read it in todays racy, well-thumbed, sound-bite world, so instead here’s a brief, somewhat clinical summary.
(Not me-I was nowhere near being that cute!)
I was raised in Britain in a Christian home, and I was a born thinker. I thought deeply about most things from whatever age I was at all conscious of the world. I also suffered acutely from loneliness, particularly as my hard-working and wonderful dad was never at home, and my wonderful mum was preoccupied with housework and TV soap operas.
In my teens I fell in love with a girl, and she seemed equally in love with me, but when she dumped me four years later my world came crashing down. What was life all about? What was the point of it? Was anything worth living for? God didn’t enter my mind here. God seemed far, far away, like my dad was.
I took to drink and drugs. The pub and party life was my church where I found fellowship, conversation and a lot of laughs. I was looking for love, whatever that was, but my second serious relationship with a girl ended the same way as the first. I suffered terribly with rejection, and the drink and drugs got stronger. They numbed the pain, at least for as long as I was high. However, two things had come into my life which turned out to be milestones in my journey to faith. First, the second girl’s mother had taken me to church, mostly against my will, and she herself was the real deal- a warm, kind person. The second influence was a professional musical- “Godspell” which I toured with as a musician. The actors themselves were for the most part hedonistic, but one scene in the show, which I could view clearly from my on-stage vantage point, enacted in an abstract way the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Every night for ten months, as the lead actor, a Christian, died and rose again, my heart was burning inside me. God, I now know, was calling me. Sadly, I continued to get high for another three years, not knowing any other way to cope with life.
By that time, when I wasn’t high I was suffering severely with depression, and I can remember one night calling on God-whoever or whatever God was-to help me. It was just a simple two-worder, but packed with sincerity! Not long after that, the warehouse I worked in found itself short of work, and I was laid off for the Christmas period. I decided to use the time, and some money I had saved for the first time in my life, to go to visit my eldest sister, who lived five thousand miles away in the United States, just to get away from it all for a while.
(Also not me)
What I wasn’t expecting was that she would hook me into attending her church. It may be that the influences I had experienced before helped me to feel safe enough to go along just to please her. There the minister, one Earl Hargis, turned out to also be the real deal. When he preached, my spirit inside me was hugely and deeply aroused, as though God himself was speaking to me: He was. Hargis faithfully relayed the gospel-the good news-of Jesus Christ. That is, that the Son of God came to live among us, and to suffer God’s judgment in our place on the cross. God could then overlook our sin nature, and give us eternal life with Him. On the third day Christ rose from the dead. He will come again to subject the world to himself, and to take us home.
I cannot relate the exact feeling I had when the pastor preached, but God had come for me, and was calling me loudly and clearly. After a month of being so called, I went back to where I was staying one Sunday, got down on my knees, and asked Jesus Christ to save me from my sins, to take over my life, and to change me. The light of God truly came into my life at that point, and very quickly life had meaning and purpose for the first time. The plan of God for me and for the world, which I now realized He had created, made eminent, beautiful sense.
Decades later, I’m still on the same road: the road to eternal life with my God and my saviour, and with all those who’ve heard the call and responded. The road isn’t all strewn with roses, but it’s going in the right direction.
A caution here-not everyone hears the call as loudly as I did: God had to shout to get my attention.
The “unknowns” of evolution are too numerous to list, yet the whole package is pushed upon us as though the concept is beyond question. True science deals with observable, testable certainties: evolution cloaks itself in those certainties in order to appear respectable and equally true…
Evolutionism takes its assertions and sells them to us as proven facts. It hypocritically presents itself as our parent, our originator, our creator, our guide and master. It’s a charlatan, masquerading as our Source, our sustainer and our future.
If we boil down the argument of secular evolutionists against the existence of God, we get something like this:
“We can’t see or detect any supreme being, so obviously he doesn’t exist, and we must proceed with this assumption”.
This is in fact part of the operating mode within secular science: God must be excluded from consideration right from the start, because he’s nowhere to be seen, and he won’t jump to attention when we pull his chain. That’s an interesting position, because the very same people who have adopted this attitude will insist that certain things they cannot see or test or experience “must be” there. Whether or not they are there, the point is that faith is okay for the evolutionist, so long as God is not involved.
For example, the Oort cloud, a proposed cloud of ice and dust far outside the solar system, explains away the problem of comets not all having fizzled away millions of years ago. It hasn’t been seen. You can find plenty of pictures of the Oort cloud, but the problem is that they are all artist’s impressions. “Dark Matter”, also totally unseen and undetectable, is used to explain why galaxies, moving at 6000 kilometres a second, haven’t dispersed, but remain in beautiful clusters throughout the universe. “Dark Energy”, also unseen and a huge mystery to physicists, is invoked to explain why the expansion of the universe is not slowing as it should be according to Big Bang theory, but is instead speeding up.
The UK’s Astronomer Royal, Professor Sir Martin Reece, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, while discussing dark energy, stated this:
“We don’t know why the universe banged, or what banged” (1)
Not only do the greatest scientists and evolutionists in truth not know why or how the universe began, since they are totally unable to re-enact the event (though of course they have elaborate theories) but they also have to conclude that very shortly after that great “singularity” occurred, certain things must have happened which they also know nothing of. The laws of nature must have “changed” for some inexplicable reason, because quantum theory and classical physics do not agree. But they don’t know what changed or how.
I’ve written before, in a post titled “The Must-Haves of Evolution” about some of these speculations, which get passed onto us and our children as proven, indisputable fact. Such “empirical” evidence came into play in a discussion I heard on the subject of photosynthesis, without which we could not be here. It was an intellectual presentation, the panel consisting of highly qualified biologists and educators. Photosynthesis, declared the all-knowing panel, began when single-celled bacteria were “captured” by large inorganic molecules, and conscripted as energy-producing slaves for their new masters. When asked by the program host if they could give an idea of “when” said evolution from bacteria into the necessary chloroplast organelles happened, “within, say, seven hundred million years or so”, one of the expert answers was this:
“…there are no fossils of this kind of thing-to date-in rocks, but it must have happened…” (2)
Chloroplasts are here, and all the vegetation we need, so they “must have” evolved. Isn’t that flawed logic? Doesn’t a conclusion have to be an arrangement of its propositions? Isn’t something missing?
To summarize, there’s no empirical evidence that chloroplasts evolved. It happened only once in earth’s history, say the experts, and it has never been observed. There is no fossil evidence of the alleged two-billion years past transition from single-celled bacteria into chloroplasts. Evolutionists are sure, however, that it “must have happened”.
That “must have” phrase, along with many similar euphemisms, is invoked to bridge the enormous gaps between theory/hypothesis and evidence. There is no evidence to be seen, but it “must have” happened. Conversely, however, God cannot be seen, so he “must not” be there at all. A text book on the evolution of life from non life similarly bridges an enormous gap in one deft leap by invoking the “must have” imperative, demonstrating (on paper) how to easily solve or cover over a giant mystery by adding non-testable elements to the non-observable narrative:
“Once the necessary building blocks were available, how did a living system arise and evolve? Before the appearance of life, simple molecular systems must have existed that subsequently evolved into the complex chemical systems that are characteristic of organism” (“Biochemistry. 5th Edition). (3)
In a movie called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”, released in 2008, Director Ben Stein interviewed none other than Richard Dawkins. Stein asked Professor Dawkins how life began from non-life. Dawkins answered:
“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.”
Notice that Dawkins had just made a gargantuan leap from nothing but chemical soup to the first self-replicating molecule, actually skipping the profound degree of information needed to answer the question, were it even possible.
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.”
So in summary, the great Professor assures us that while they “don’t know” how life evolved from non-life, and that they haven’t seen it happen, they’re pretty sure that it “must have” happened.
The Professor went on to suggest that life may possibly have come from somewhere else in the universe. Here is another bridge which attempts to cross the enormous chasm between non-life and life. Cambridge News discusses one scientist’s book on the theory:
“Extra-terrestrials resembling humans must have evolved on other planets, according to a new book by a Cambridge professor“.
But wait a minute…no-one has any evidence that this happened either! Here is another empty chasm: more snake oil.
Go to the best natural history museum you can find (as I have) and ask to see a series of transitional fossils clearly showing one creature evolving into another: there will be none-just a few bones and some artists impressions. Think carefully about what you are being presented with.
1 IN OUR TIME: “Dark Energy”, with Melvyn Bragg.
2 IN OUR TIME: “Photosynthesis”, with Melvyn Bragg
