By Terry James Rapture Ready
Politicians currently in majority power in the United States government have steered the American ship onto the deadly, rock-strewn shores of economic ruin. They have used the rudder of crises to do this dastardly deed.
They first created, whether unwittingly or deliberately, the so-called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac housing disaster. They, in effect, made it mandatory for lenders to sell homes to buyers who had nowhere near the income or other means to secure the high-priced houses they purchased.
This led to the crisis of banks and other lending institutions facing defaults on payment, thus insolvency and/or bankruptcy in many cases. These banks and institutions were deemed too big to fail, in terms of importance to the national economy. Thus the politicians in charge, who also had the votes in Congress to do so, declared that national and worldwide economic catastrophe was inevitable if huge amounts of money weren't immediately voted to defuse the pending calamity.
The United States has come to the point of national shipwreck by years, even decades, of political chicanery. This scuttling has progressed more swiftly as of late through the federal government taking multi-trillions of dollars from non-existent Treasury funds for bailouts and taking over some private companies, such as General Motors, Chrysler, and several large banks. Government has thereby indentured future generations of American citizens, saddling them with debt that can never be repaid.
Perhaps the following quote by presidential chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been overused:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."But his declaration is quite telling in explaining the otherwise irrationality of this country's being steered through crises mismanagement toward an economic crash. In my view, the whole process is to bring America to European-style socialism, a course that has in effect wrecked - or is in the process of wrecking - all of Europe.
As disturbing as is the crisis America faces in so many areas of the nation's well being, there exists a crisis of infinitely more intense magnitude. Like the worldwide economic and other crises, this one has profound, biblically prophetic import on an even greater scale.
The crisis about which I write is the almost-total blindness the church (born-again believers; see John 3:3) suffers from while America and the nations of planet earth reel and stagger toward the time of Tribulation. America's deliberately directed breakup, and the nations of earth tearing apart in the aftermath of her carnage, as well as the church's deliberately directed, head-in-the-sand blindness, are major parts of the end-times picture. It's Bible prophecy in the final, stage-setting phase.
As stated previously, the blindness of the church constitutes the far more virulent of the crises. That is because the venom it injects is done so in a benign, peaceful, even soothing way by the crisis managers - the religionists who purvey feel-good sophistry. These, like their political counterparts in the case of directing America onto the shoals of destruction, steer the people in their pews toward the inward-turning course of destructive selfism. It is theological mumbo-jumbo that sequesters God's people within do-goodism and feel-goodism and immerses them in a Laodicean-like, financial prosperity gospel.
The words of the resurrected Christ to John are chilling, considering the churches today who fall under the Lord's omniscient, condemning eyes.
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing;" and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. (Rev. 3:15-17)This inward-turning, wealth-oriented false theology is so egregious because it blinds its adherents to the real world around them - a world that needs Jesus Christ. He is the only remedy for the crises the people of earth face. Yet the people in churches, whose leaderships seek to insulate Christians from the realities of the lost, perishing masses, can think only of ways to make their own lives comfortable and entertaining.
Again, this is not to paint all large church bodies with the same broad brush. Many strive to teach and preach absolute truth from God's Holy Word. But the churches that fit the Laodicean mold create the crisis that is far greater than any spawned from political treacheries.
Such false teaching has dumbed down God's people to the point that there is little discernment of the prophetic times - the end times - in which this generation finds itself. These congregants, for example, haven't any idea for the most part that Israel is the key signal of where we are on God's prophetic timeline. Or that the peace process Israel is being pressured to join, trying to force the nation to give up land God gave it to enemies who want to wipe the Jewish state from the earth, is the number-one signal that the Lord is very near the time when He will call the church to Himself in the Rapture.
These haven't a clue - except in the distant, disinterested sense - that Christianity has been invaded by those who make this the time of Jesus' words:
Also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed. (Luke 17:28-30).A recent news item frames the crisis created by the church's inward-turning:
SAN FRANCISCO – Seven pastors who work in the San Francisco Bay area and were barred from serving in the nation's largest Lutheran group because of a policy that required gay clergy to be celibate are being welcomed into the denomination... "It's going to be an extremely glorious and festive ceremony because it's the culmination of decades of work to welcome LGBT people into the ELCA," said Amalia Vagts, executive director of the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, a nonprofit that credentials openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people for ministry. (Sudhin Thanawala, "Evangelical Lutheran Pulpits Welcome Non-celibate Gay Pastors," 7/25/2010).The crisis builds. There comes less and less outcry from the true church of Jesus Christ about the corruption within its ranks. It is a sure sign that the church is abdicating its assigned duty as being the salt and light in this dark, dying world. Jesus said of such a time as this:
Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. (Matt 24:42-44)
Related Links
The Last Days Apostasy of the Church (Part 1) - BPT (Andy Woods) Columnist Dissects White House Econ Policies - CBN What does the Bible say about the prosperity gospel? - GotQuestions.org Standing Against Apostasy (Part 1) - Grace to You (John MacArthur) The American Apocalypse: Is the United States in Bible Prophecy? - Terry James (Book)