Friday, May 13, 2011

Prophecy Article Today: "The Rapture Myth Part 3"- Koinonia House

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In Defenso Fedei:

The Rapture Myth

by John Loeffler World Affairs Editor
  

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[This is the final article of a three-part series on the philosophical and political directions the West is going and what this will mean to the Christian church.]

The Day Is Far Advanced

Our last article, The Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights , detailed the battle for Western culture and religion, through which the church has generally slept. Humanism seized control of Western institutions with the declared goal of dethroning Christianity from its position as the core Western belief. It succeeded! All the battles fought by Christians in the public arena are simply skirmishes in a mop-up action. The church didn't lose the battle; it simply walked off the battlefield.

For centuries, Christian pulpits thundered with sermons expounding the moral issues of the day. They were instrumental in the founding of many of our countries, governments and legal systems. But today, the church has bought the humanistic lie that it should not be involved in the public square - that religion is a personal thing that should not push its values on others - all while humanism aggressively pushed its values on the West. As a result, doing spiritual battle is anathema to a slumbering Western church, which prefers self-help to self-negation. While preening itself as the Church of Philadelphia, it resembles more the Church of Laodicea, having lost its sense of combating organized evil and engaging in a dialectic process which does not allow for definitive "good" or "evil."

Separate! I Dare You!

There is no separation of church and state; never has been, never will be. There is an organic relationship between the two. The values and beliefs of a culture invariably pattern the forms of government and its laws. If a culture is based on the strong religious beliefs of its people, the laws and politics enacted by governments will be guided by that religious conscience. However, if the church abandons the public arena, which it has done in the West, the state will then fill the moral vacuum and dictate to the church how it will believe, act and worship. One of these two institutions will determine what is "good" and "moral." Someone's values will control the field of human action! But while the church cannot force government to do what it believes should happen, government most certainly can dictate to the church what it will make happen-and compel compliance. These two are historically inseparable companions.

Absolutes are Absolutely Dead!

In the West, absolute truth and morality are pass. God is dead or anything we want to make of him, her or it... or maybe he's me! Reasoning has moved from facts to feelings, and diminishing numbers are able to think logically about the core issues of the day. History has been rewritten so that people can't remember the lessons of the past or the greatness of Western heritage. Good things are labeled bad and bad things good. Even liberalism and conservatism have become relative, changing positions. That is why political parties look the same; all have embraced the same relative floating dialectic. Finally, religion is publicly demonized as the cause of all the West's problems and the scourge of Western civilization; unless, of course, it conforms to the new politically correct moral values.

Facing the Status Woe

As we proceed into the new paradigm - a repackaging of the failed evils inherent in both communism and Nazism - history predicts the future with certainty:

1) Since Judeo/Christianity is no longer the controlling paradigm of the West, the gurus of the new socialistic pantheism will call the moral shots, determining which things are "good" and "bad." Everyone will be expected to fall in line.

2) These moral "shots" will invariably conflict with Christian morals and beliefs.

3) As the severe flaws of the new relativistic moral system manifest themselves (and they already have in abundance), increased societal and legal chaos can be expected as a result. (Look at the result of just 40 years of secular control of morality.)

4) In responding to the nonsense, governments will be forced to act in an increasingly invasive, controlling and dominating manner to control the pandemonium and enforce the new paradigm. Since the confessing church is already at odds with the new paradigm, much of the legal "wroth" will invariably be directed at the church. As the conflict increases, Christians experience steadily increasing pressure to conform to the new system and a demonization of those who don't. Gradually, laws and regulations will be drafted to force Christians (and other religions) into conformity with the new morality. This is already happening in all areas of life, from child rearing to freedom of speech to the workplace.

Remember, it takes time for this to develop, but the process is inexorable and unidirectional.

The View from an Old Wineskin

Since the days of the Caesars, the Christian church has confronted this crisis with two modes of reaction: a) stand and suffer or b) compromise and coast, hoping it "blows over." Type A churches suffer much, produce many martyrs, yield much fruit and ultimately are the seed for the next round of growth, when the culture collapses of its own weight. The Confessing Church in Germany, the underground church in the former Soviet bloc, the Catholic Church in Poland, and underground churches in China are examples of this type of church.

Backward Christian Soldiers

Type B churches conform to the system, compromise their beliefs and oftentimes make life miserable for the suffering Type A churches, but become so watered down they are indistinguishable from the culture and are, indeed, generally part of it. In essence, they cease to be salt and light. These churches, such as the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, the German Christian Church in Nazi Germany and the registered churches in China today are examples of this type of church; all in different stages of compromise.

Compromise is a process, not an instantaneous event. It takes time and is seductively easy when a major cultural paradigm change is underway because all the reference points become blurred. Parts of the old paradigm still endure while parts of the new paradigm seem to be compatible with Christianity and even similar. Today's "tolerance" doctrine mimics the Christian doctrine of "love thy neighbor" until one asks what it is we are expected to tolerate.

Historically, when government seeks to control religion, it uses a two-stage plan: 1) co-opt the church into conforming to the new agenda; and 2) once resistance to the new belief system has been eradicated, extinguish the church. This is once again the goal of the new paradigm.

Totalitarian governments have always sought to create a model church that conforms to its dictates. This church is publicly extolled as "good," against which the Biblical churches are demonized as "reactionary," "radical," "extremist" or against the "collective good" or "counter-revolutionary." The pejoratives are different but the essence is the same. This process is well under way in the West today so we know we're on the timeworn trail of difficulty for the Biblical church.

One thing is clear: The churches that intend to survive with their confession of faith intact under the new paradigm will not be "doing church" the way they have done it in the past. But first, they will have to get over the "Rapture Myth."

The Rapture Myth

The Rapture Myth is identical to the doctrine of cheap grace, as detailed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rapture as doctrine is one thing. The Rapture Myth is a distortion of that doctrine, which says the Rapture will spare us from all time of trial, suffering, conflict and the need to do spiritual battle because we aren't going to endure God's wrath in the time of the Tribulation. It never occurs to the Rapture Myth people that we may well endure the world's wrath before Christ returns.

The Rapture Myth takes comfort in the fallacious assumption that there will be no time of trial in the run-up to the Rapture and Tribulation. It comforts itself with a "we're going to be outta here" mentality; not to worry about anything. Just keep teaching the Bible as if the Bible were an end and goal unto itself. It fails to notice that the Bible is a manual for action, not just study, and most definitely not an end in itself. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven consists in power, not words.

Airplanes and Silly Virgins

Planning to take a flight? Any pilot knows that flight planning requires having enough fuel to safely make the entire trip with a generous reserve for emergencies or unexpected situations. Nothing is more sobering than a fuel warning light that pops on when you're in the middle of nowhere. The gospel parable of the foolish virgins is identical. All the virgins had oil in their lamps to start with. It's just that some didn't have enough to go the whole night until the bridegroom came. Those believing in the Rapture Myth may well find themselves out of fuel in a bad way.

History dictates that if the storm ghosts on the horizon continue their rapid approach, a time of trial will be upon us and many will have their faith flagging, wondering where the Rapture is or whether the whole thing was just a giant fairy tale in the first place. Our brothers and sisters from persecuted countries of the 20th century have warned of this. Standing firm in a time of trial requires aggressive action and preparation ahead of time just in case this isn't the immediate end time and a time of testing is coming.

Inflating New Wineskins

The hour is truly more desperate than most Christians understand, but dark times make for great spiritual leaders and a terrific platform for spiritual action. More and more Christians are awakening to the call of preparation. Here are organizing guidelines. Check with the Holy Spirit for His particular battle plan for you.

1) The church must recover its sense of urgency. The day is far advanced and the night is at hand. There is a time of trial coming for the Western church and the Rapture will most likely not get them out of it.

2) The church must recover its belief in the existence of organized evil; not just good and bad individual choices. It must also recover its notion of spiritual warfare -onward,not backward Christian soldiers.

3) The church must understand the worldviews of today and the new paradigm and how Christianity is distinct from that. The Bible can no longer be taught in a vacuum or as a personal implementation item. There is a bigger picture and a bigger battle than just our own personal lives. The Bible must be seen in that context.

4) In understanding the worldviews of the day, the church must once again recover its own understanding of why it believes what it does and what the basis for faith is. The creeds of old were a great asset in this area.

5) The church must begin to train warriors who understand the nature of the battle. This applies specially to young Christians, the majority of whom are lost to the faith upon hitting college.

6) The church must learn from those Christians who have lived through duress in the past, especially the 20th century, and who have emerged with their faith intact. They have much to teach us about the battle skills we will need.

Most of the Biblical adjectives and verbs imply a conflict: contend, run to win, race, stand, fight, resist, defend. "In defenso fidei"1 must once again become the battle cry of the church. The Christian spiritual life is a life of rewarding but often painful sacrifice and dedication; it is a war - not a picnic. Yes, we do win in the end, but many expect to win without participating in the fight. In reality, Paul calls us to suffer with Christ. To quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "When Christ calls a person, he bids him come and die."

What is exciting is that swelling numbers of Christians are awakening to the fact that things are radically wrong and responding to the call for the coming battle. So, soldier, when night falls, where will you be?

 

 

 

 

Prophecy Article Today: "The Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights Part 2"- Koinonia House

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What's Really Going On?

The Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights

by John Loeffler World Affairs Editor
  

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[This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the direction the West is heading and what this will mean to the Christian church.]

Recently the Christian world has been impacted by a rash of end-times novels and movies offering the same recipe:

1) The world is in a political and economic crisis; woe is us!

2) The Middle East is in conflict.

3) Suddenly all sorts of people are "rap-zapped" and disappear.

4) Kapoof! Mr. AC himself appears on the scene, dressed in red Spandex tights with horns and a tail, as obvious as a Christmas cracker. Well, I guess he wears an expensive three-piece suit instead of the tights, but you just know he's got them on underneath.

Mr. AC persecutes post rap-zap believers and requires everyone to get their hand stamped so they can get into Globaland. Finally he proposes his great cure for the world's ills, which - for reasons totally obscure to a thinking mind - are accepted universally without a moment's critical thought by anyone.

There's just one problem with this starched scenario: it lacks subtlety. The Antichrist doesn't wear tights and, traditionally, evil is far more clever and subtle than that. So much so that in the last century whenever it befell a church, the church never saw it coming, even though the clues were always there for anyone who cared to look.

No "world citizen" would ever buy into the things Revelation says will happen without being psychologically prepped for it ahead of time. Perhaps the greatest fallacy of popular "rapture reasoning" is that the Western church will be "out of here" before anything bad befalls it, and this philosophy has become a paralyzing narcotic in the face of rapidly encroaching danger.

Magnum Opus Malum1

 

Right now, Christians are witnessing a tremendous change in Western culture and belief, which is a harbinger of very troubled times to come. The battle for the West began in the wee years of the 20th century, when humanism seized control of academia and declared its goal of dethroning Christianity as the core Western belief system (see our articles in Personal UPDATE, March 1997 and September 2001for background information).

The process continues today as atheistic humanism yields to global socialistic pantheism.2 The changes began first among philosophers and academics, moving into the arts, then into common culture and, finally, as the new disciples came of age, into the legal and political system. Now we are seeing the total conversion of Western society and a march towards a great utopian vision of global governance controlled by socialism. In reality, we are embracing ideas of the past which have resulted in much bloodshed and destruction of civilizations.

The Great Prepping Away

 

For the past 50 years, the West has been slowly unfrozen from its traditional belief systems and tricked into accepting a new belief system, without even realizing that the transition was taking place. We are now being refrozen in the new belief system, without realizing our core beliefs and values have been sacrificed, bit by bit.

  1.  
    • Atheistic government with no influence from religion.
    • Abolition of private property in the name of the common (read soviet or collective) good. This includes abolishing any rights of property inheritance. (This is underway in various stages and countries, utilizing various legal mechanisms. It is by no means complete, but the principle is growing in acceptance.)
    • The populace must be disarmed (for their own safety, of course).
    • Government must maintain control of education and what is taught.
    • Heavy progressive taxation must be ever-increasing (Europe's VAT is perhaps the most abusive), so that government can...
    • Maintain control over its citizens' lives from womb to tomb, including constant surveillance on their activities and private lives. In essence, law is becoming a means of defending government from the populace rather than the populace from government.
  2. 1) The educational system has moved Western culture from a didactic, fact-based system of thought rooted in logic and absolute truth to a dialectic, feeling-based system of thought rooted in constantly changing, non-absolute values. The only mortal sin is failing to believe absolutely that there are no absolutes. (Note the inherent contradiction, but that doesn't seem to stop the politically correct.)

    2) History has been rewritten so that people can't remember the lessons of the past or the greatness of their own heritage (granted that no heritage is perfect). Good things have been called bad and bad things good. Westerners have been subjected to an ever-present demonization of their culture. The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, for example, are said to be the outdated product of dead white slave owners who also slaughtered Indians, rather than one of the most liberating documents of history, along with England's Magna Carta. The British, too, are trading in a 1,000-year tradition of freedom under law as they buy into another one of Europe's attempts at failed socialism.

    3) Communism has been minimized or exalted (despite its being responsible for the slaughter of 100 million people in the 20th century). Capitalism is condemned as a great evil of rich men (despite its record of having provided the most prosperity and freedom for the most people in history).

    4) Important distinctions between cultures have been minimized and all cultures are now said to be of equal value, and all beliefs are said to be of equal value with no way of discerning which values might be better or worse (although history teaches otherwise).

    5) Tolerance has been substituted for love of neighbor and truth. A corollary is the switch from laws based on absolutes to more complex and nebulous laws, which float with current understandings of "good" or "evil," about which there is much debate among the "experts."

    6) Religion has been forced into a corner, being told that it is a personal thing, and it has been prohibited from making any claim to absolute truth or the right to impose itself on the culture.

    7) Science and science alone - with or without ethics and morals - is permitted to make any claim to truth. Science is said to be the salvation of the human race. (Tell that to those who died in the Holocaust's "scientific" gas chambers.)

    8) Socialism has been substituted for capitalism as "democracy" and "free market" decried as evil. In reality this belief system is "Marxism lite," wherein virtually all the major English-speaking countries have accepted the major tenets of Marxism without a struggle, including:

    Hostile, not Neutral

    As we arrive in the 21st century, the prevailing Western paradigm is hostile to traditional monotheistic religions (Christian, Jewish and Muslim), being a mix of atheism and pantheism. It decries belief in absolute truth, including absolute law. It has set itself up as the determiner of "right" and "wrong," even though those change continually. Traditional religious beliefs are being labeled extremist and radical.

    The new system views itself as utopian in nature, above any religion, viewing religion as a major cause of all the world's problems. If we really examine the emerging "new" system, it is merely a recapitulation of old, failed Marxist and occult beliefs with a generous dose of pantheism. Unfortunately we're about to do it again, only this time on a global scale.

    What Does This Mean?

     

    You have but to look at history to know where we will end up. Cultures rejecting God invariably degenerate into wickedness when left to their own devices without a counterbalancing force of religion to stop them.

    The signs of rot are apparent. The West now routinely sacrifices millions of babies annually (to which the Church has voiced only a weak response) and the elderly are next as euthanasia becomes prevalent. Instead of valuing all human life, we will make decisions based on the "quality of life," which will most certainly be decided by persons other than you or I, and which will largely be determined by economic forces and how well your beliefs conform to the current norms. If your life benefits the collective (the "soviet"), you will be permitted to live. If not, adios!

    In a Christian culture, people are generally self-governing, knowing God watches their every move and laws are merely a formal framing of what the people already believe as a group. But in a culture where there are no absolutes, everyone does what he or she wants as long as they can get away with it. This produces chaos. As the chaos brought on by the new belief system increases, freedoms diminish as governments attempt to deal with the chaos. They do this by becoming more and more police-oriented as a plethora of laws is emitted, designed to control the ongoing crisis.

    As government continues to dictate its own atheistic, ever-proliferating standards of conduct and belief, many of these will be unpalatable to the beliefs of orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims. There will be increasing pressure on Christians to conform to the new standards. This pressure will range from social pressure to formalized pressure in the job place, where it may mean jeopardizing a job or promotion to a steadily increasing series of regulations. Finally, as more and more people espousing the new paradigm gain control of the legal process, they will use the mechanism of law to impose their utopian vision on the churches that do not conform. This means fines, penalties, increased taxation or loss of tax-free privileges, even prison sentences - all designed to enforce conformity to the new wisdom, which is currently embodied by the push for the amorphous notion of "tolerance."

    The Diabolical Choice

    In the new system, there is a place for Christianity...as long as it conforms to the new values, which will be forever changing. Religions will not be permitted to: 1) claim they are the only way, 2) have absolute truth of any kind, or 3) attempt to force their belief and value systems on the culture at large (i.e., evangelizing is out!). Those minor considerations aside, religion will be permitted to exist in the new system as a "personal thing," as long as it yields to the prevailing political correctness, which if you hadn't noticed is growing more evil every day.

    Traditionally, churches facing this dilemma have made one of two choices: a) loving defiance and paying the penalty, or b) continual compromise with the prevailing system until it is shameful to even call it a Christian church. As Sabine Wumbrand once remarked, "they are spitting in the face of Christ." In our next installment, we'll see how churches in similar circumstances lived or died.

 

 

 

 

Prophecy Article Today: "What Delicate Balance? Part 1"- Koinonia House

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The Attack on our Rights:

What Delicate Balance? Part 1

by John Loeffler World Affairs Editor
  


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"Freedom is under attack" has been the battle cry since 9/11. Freedom is indeed under attack, but our intelligence sources indicate Osama bin Laden is not the chief culprit. The attacks on 9/11 were on America, not freedom. In reality, freedom has long been under attack by those in the West who have sought to destroy the foundations upon which Western thought, culture and law rest. In its place a new global, pantheistic, and socialist paradigm is seeking hegemony, while its proponents must still give lip service (at least publicly for awhile) to the old one. This stealth attack, mounted steadily for almost a century, represents a far greater threat than any airplane or biological attack, because it is more insidious and many victims do not even recognize they are under assault.

The attack on Western culture began in the halls of academia and has now metastasized to politics, the media and even the Church. Western society has been shoved off a fact-based mode of thought (didactic), rooted in logic, reason and a belief in absolute truth, to a relative (dialectic), constantly-changing system, where there is no knowable truth, where feelings reign supreme and where the outcome justifies the means. Nowhere does this appear more blatantly than in the arena of politics.

The Delicate Balance

Since 9/11, politicians have been speaking of the need to preserve the "delicate balance" between civil rights and the need to respond to terrorism in a time of war. They say this without blinking an eye, oblivious of the fact that the Founding Fathers didn't foresee any kind of "delicate balance" when they wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. They envisioned an impenetrable wall, beyond which government could not go under any circumstances, except as allowed in the Constitution itself.

They have been justified in their viewpoint, since history shows that a delicate balance rapidly becomes a slippery slope, always tipping in favor of ever-increasing government control and away from citizens' rights.

Rights not Privileges

A privilege is something which is granted by the state to its citizens and can be revoked by the state anytime the state sees fit. Rights, on the other hand, are irrevocable conditions possessed by the citizenry, which the state may not revoke for whatever reason. The difference between the two, thanks to leftist indoctrination, is now thoroughly blurred in the Western mind. But this blurring was not a first in the world's history. Satan used it in the Garden of Eden when he engaged Eve in a dialogue and encouraged her to think dialectically: "Did God say...?" God's position was much more didactic: What part of "thou shalt not" don't you understand?

The right to freedom of speech is important because no free society can exist without it. The chief target is the ability to criticize government and its policies, which government has a natural tendency to abhor. Equally, freedom of religion is important because governments have always sought to impose on their citizenry politically correct forms of belief and to oppose anything that would be a competitor. Christians have learned this firsthand through the centuries, since Christianity is always a scandal in any culture to which it goes.

The right to bear arms is essential for three reasons: 1) To protect the homeland from invasion; 2) to defend one's self against criminals or predators; and, 3) to preclude the possibility that government should ever again become tyrannical and attempt to abolish the other rights.

The right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects is critical to a free society, because without it free commerce cannot proceed and government can seek to exercise control over its populace by threatening them with confiscation of their property. Added to this is the provision that warrants be issued for searches, because this prevents government from going on a fishing expedition, trying to find people who are committing crimes. Likewise, a person may not be deprived of property without due process and compensation. The right to trial by jury is important, because it divides responsibility for the outcome among a number of one's peers rather than a tribunal of judges, who could easily be influenced to certain outcomes, especially if their livelihood as judges is dependant on the outcome of various trials. Freedom from double jeopardy is essential, because it places a put-up-or-shut-up burden on government and prevents law enforcement from trying a person over and over and over again until something "sticks."

Rights such as these exist in most of the English-speaking countries today. However, these rights are under brutal assault both from the left and the right.

The Great Paradigm Shift

Currently the West is in an epic power struggle - away from traditional thought and a free society towards a totally socialized, planned society where government controls everything from womb to tomb, including how we believe and worship. Incumbent in this struggle is a move away from national sovereignty and into a "new order" that everyone from Henry Kissinger to Vladmir Putin keeps talking about but never defines publicly what it really means.

In order for the new womb-to-tomb paradigm to be implemented, the old collection of "rights" has to go. But proponents of the new vision face a dilemma, in that they must give lip service to the existing legal structure at the same time they gut these same institutions of their power. So a new process of end-running law has been instituted, which gives the appearance of leaving existing laws in place, while making it impossible to have the usufruct of such laws.

The Great International Blur

How do you abolish laws and rights without directly doing so?

1)Make so many laws regulating a guaranteed right that it is impossible to exercise the right. The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for example, says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. However, there are so many gun laws in some places, it is impossible to carry a weapon without incurring the risk of being charged with a felony. If you're willing to risk years in jail or staggering legal costs, go ahead and exercise your right.

2)Turn over a large amount of "lawmaking" to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies that generate "regulations," which have the force of law but are never voted upon by any accountable lawmaking body. Most of our lawmakers today never read the bills they are passing and there is much mischief in the details.

3)Reinterpret laws to "find" new things in them that were not intended by the original framers of the law. (Remember that under the new paradigm there are no absolutes, so law can be tortured to say whatever we want it to mean.) A chief example of this was the Supreme Court's "discovery" of a woman's right to privacy regarding abortion.

4)Expand a law far beyond what the lawmakers ever intended and what citizens were promised. Drug property forfeiture laws are a prime example, which allow property to be confiscated on the mere accusation (not conviction) that a crime has been committed. Originally, Americans were told that the law would only be used against drug dealers. But within a decade, forfeiture laws had exploded to over a hundred and most did not involve drugs at all. Another example was the use of RICO racketeering laws to prosecute abortion clinic protestors.

5)Stretch or blur jurisdiction or claim jurisdiction where the area is unclear. Courts in Belgium are claiming jurisdiction over what Ariel Sharon did in Lebanon. Spain wanted to try Agosto Pinochet for things he did in Chile. A kangaroo court in the Hague is trying accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, even though the court and the laws did not exist when the crimes were committed and the court has dubious jurisdiction granted by who knows whom?

6)Enforce laws selectively, especially for achieving particular political purposes. While much coverage has been made of the process against Slobodan Milosevic, so far no effort has been made to round up Fidel Castro or Idi Amin (alive and well in Saudi Arabia) for their "crimes against humanity."

7)Turn jurisdiction over to international bodies by means of treaties or other agreements. This process is being used to transfer sovereignty. Most Canadians or Americans would be hard pressed to name even one member on NAFTA's commissions and yet these people make effectively legal decisions affecting commerce and jobs for thousands of people.

8)Use executive orders (U.S.) or ministerial decrees (U.K.) to do end-runs around lawmaking bodies. This can be seen both in actions by Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair in shoving the U.K. deeper into the new "United States of Europe" (aka the European Union), where it will someday lose all of its sovereignty. President Clinton was prolific in his use of executive orders to end-run Congress, especially in the area of non-ratified environmental treaties, but President Bush is striving for next runner-up with his implementation of war tribunals and other things to end-run the civil courts and Congress in a time of so-called (but undeclared) war. As a matter of fact, unknown to most Americans, presidential executive orders have kept a healthy number of official "emergencies" going for years to enable end-runs around Congress in various areas.

This list of end-runs is anything but exhaustive. Frequently, the end-runs are executed in the name of some good or in handling a crisis, and there is invariably much debate among "experts" about each one. However, one pattern is becoming clear: we are systematically gutting the legal structure upon which Western civilization has stood for centuries, and the new proposed order would be unpalatable to most Westerners if they really understood what it meant.

A few years back, a bridge collapsed on a major U.S. highway while traffic was crossing. The structural rot that caused the collapse had been progressing for many years, if not decades. Right down to last second it looked like a bridge and it served a bridge's function. However, when the break finally came, it happened in just moments and swept away all that were relying on it. Caveat lector ! The same rot is occurring to the Western legal system. We'll show you where this is going in our next article, entitled "The Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights."

 

 

 

 

Prophecy Article Today: "The Penalty For Sin"- Jack Kelley


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Jack Kelley


The Penalty For Sin

Q. A good friend and I were talking a while ago, and he brought up the subject of Jesus’ sacrifice.  My friend said that though he believes Jesus died for our sins, he said that Jesus did not pay the penalty for our sins. He said that Jesus had to suffer eternal hell, otherwise the penalty wasn’t met. This is something I had never heard before.  Is he right?

 

A. Spending eternity in Hell is not the penalty for our sins, it’s the consequence of being unable to pay the penalty. The penalty for our sins is the life of a sinless person, the righteous for the unrighteous (1 Peter 3:18).  Jesus agreed to pay the penalty for us, as long as we agreed to let Him.  Because He was sinless, He was qualified to do so. As soon as He gave His life for us we were free. The penalty had been paid, and we were able to avoid the consequences of being unable to pay.

Therefore people don’t go to Hell to pay the penalty for their sins. They go to Hell because they can’t pay the penalty and refused to let Jesus pay it for them.  Even after spending eternity in Hell, they’ll still owe the same penalty as they did on their first day there.

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