What Makes Jesus Unique? No one else made the claims that He did, He is alive...............
All the great religious leaders of history have one thing in common: they are dead. Only one man has risen from a grave never again to taste death. Jesus Christ died, was buried, remained in the grave for 3 days, then was raised to life again.
Jesus is unique. He is the only one proven to be the Son of God because God validated His Kingship and accepted His payment for our sins all with one incredible stroke: He raised Jesus from the dead!
Paul opens his letter to the Romans with this evidence about who Jesus is:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, which He had promised before by His prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. Romans 1:1-4
Because Jesus Christ is very much alive, five things are true right now that wouldn’t be true if He were just another dead religious leader like Confucius, Mohammed or Buddha.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead and is alive…Prayers are answered, We can talk to Jesus 24/7
Comments (2,879)
It's because they're thinking it's not my problem, somebody else can deal with it. I got what I needed out of the deal, not having to put my trash away. And to that attitude, God would say in his law, yeah, but it is your problem because you're part of the community. And if you want the benefits of being part of the community, you have to also embrace the responsibilities of being part of the community. And then God would say, now, stop being a self-centered jerk and go pick up your trash.
Paraphrasing, of course.
So write this down. God's laws require his people to live with consideration toward their community.
God's laws require his people to live with consideration toward their community.
And again, remember, in our context, the community is the church.
It's the church. Verse 35.
If one man's ox hurts another's so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and divide the money from it and the dead ox.
They shall also divide. Or if it was known that the ox tended to thrust in times past and its owner has not kept it confined, he shall surely pay ox for ox and the dead animal shall be his own. Relatively self-explanatory if you look over it again in the Chapter 22.
If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall restore five oxen for an ox and for sheep.
For a sheep.
Now, because this would have been one of the easiest crimes to commit because you could literally eat the evidence, God assigns the significant deterrent of exponential restitution, four fold or five fold restitution, and that is a good idea.
You steal one and it can't be recovered. You owe for back.
You owe five back. I like this a lot, you know, fourfold restitution, let's do some Bible trivia is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke.
When Jesus decides to dine at the house of any guesses, and he guesses Zacchaeus, a little man named Zacchaeus, perhaps to recall the story, Jesus's ministry is thriving.
Everywhere he goes, crowds are gathering.
And there's this man of small stature who's unable to see through or see over the crowd.
But not only that, the crowd doesn't want him to see. They hate his guts because he's a corrupt tax collector. He's employed by the Roman occupiers and he's overcharging everybody on their taxes.
He's defrauding his own people to line his pockets.
And so they're not really big fans. Eventually, Zacchaeus climbs a tree to get a look at Jesus, and then the most incredible thing happens. Jesus looks straight at Zacchaeus and he says, Come down here, Zacchaeus coming to hang out at your house today. We're going to have dinner together. And the people are shocked that Jesus would do this. They're saying this guy can't be for real. He must not know how awful this Zacchaeus guy is. But Zacchaeus welcomes Jesus both into his home and into his heart.
It's implied and so transformed is Zacchaeus by his encounter with Jesus that in Luke eight, it's on your outlines. He says, Look, Lord, I give half of my gifts to the poor. And if I've taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore.
And then you see it four fold. I restore four fold.
You see, what Zacchaeus is doing is he's showing true repentance by repaying people back fourfold. He's acknowledging that under the law, he's stolen from people. He's saying, I recognize that I'm a thief. And so I have to make it right by restoring four fold.
And that's part of what genuine repentance does. So we're going to talk about this.
More genuine repentance says if there's any way I can make restitution for the ways that I've wronged people, I'm going to do that.
He can't see you and he defends his home and his family and he kills you. It is what it is. You made the choice to break into his home at night.
He's allowed to defend his home. He doesn't have to get your identity very different from our Canadian laws, where if someone broke into your home at night, I think you actually have to have a small conversation.
You have to ask them who they are. Do they have any history of mental trauma that could explain their current behavior? And then actually the police laws here are hilarious.
And I'm friends with a lot of police officers. And if you noticed. But the law is there's a law of escalation, where you're allowed to escalate to one degree.
So if a person breaks into your home and they don't have a weapon, you can escalate one degree. That's not to a knife. That would be two degrees.
You can go to a bat of some kind if they don't have a bat and if they have a bat, you can go up to a knife. If they have a knife, then you can go up to a gun. But it's Canada's. You actually have to ask them to hold on a minute while you put in your code, get your gun run 20 feet away the mandatory distance, put your code in your ammo safe, take the ammo out, load the gun, take the ammo, lock off of the gun and then come back to them.
So things are a little bit different here. But that's a practical point. You're learning at church tonight. Someone breaks into your house, you have a knife. They don't have anything you need to say. Hold on. Give me a minute. I need to go find a bat. Just stay where you are. I'll be back in a minute, because in Canada, our greatest concern is generally the criminal. Heaven forbid that we mistreat the criminal who's breaking into somebody's home under God's laws.
He's like, you're breaking into somebody's home at night. He doesn't know why you're there. He doesn't know if you have a weapon. He doesn't know if you're coming to kill his family. The guy's allowed to take care of business.
But interestingly enough, if the homeowner catches you breaking in and it's daytime, there's daylight and you're fully visible, he's not allowed to kill you. Why? Because he can see who you are.
And in that scenario, the idea is that he's going to be able to go to the judge's report, the issue, and they're going to deal with it because the thief's identity is going to be known and the taking of a life is not necessary.
And there's an interesting principle revealed just under the surface here with greater light, with greater illumination, with greater revelation comes greater responsibility.
Would you write this down and we'll talk about it some more? It's not the exact same line from Spider-Man, but it's close.
With greater revelation comes greater responsibility.
With greater revelation comes greater responsibility. And let me tell you how this principle applies to the Christian life.
When we say, God, I want to know your will. Lord, show me what to do in this situation. Show me what your will is in this relationship or or in my career, we are asking God to give us greater revelation. But were he to do that, were he to give us that greater revelation, we would also have greater responsibility and the responsibility we would have as believers is to obey him. And this is why we have to predetermine that we're going to obey God.
If we want to hear from God. We have to predetermine that, we're going to respond to greater revelation if we're asking God to give us greater revelation, if our attitude is Lord, show me your will and then I'll let you know if I want to do it.
And Jesus is saying, I'm standing right in front of them. They're hearing my teaching and they're rejecting all of it. They're just saying, no, no, no. And what Jesus was saying is every time they reject me. They're heaping judgment on themselves because they're going to stand before my father one day and they're going to have to answer for all this revelation they received. And then rejected. And Jesus said, so I'm going to switch to teaching in parables so that those who don't want to understand will not be able to understand and those who want to understand will be able to understand.
Jesus is actually being merciful to those who were rejecting them, rejecting him because he's not piling on them. Greater responsibility for more and more revelation.
The principle is that with greater revelation comes greater responsibility.
And so if we want a greater revelation of Jesus.
We have to be ready to respond to a greater revelation of Jesus, and I would challenge all of us with that very real question. If you're praying for a deeper knowledge of God, you're praying for a greater revelation of God, are you ready to respond to it if he gives it to you?
Or are you going to say, well, I'll weigh and decide what I want to do with that? We would be wise to remember that this is God we're talking about, this is God and God will not always say, yeah, I'll just I'll just let you decide. I'll share my revelation with you and then you can sit there and decide, hmm, it's a little bit insulting to God.
And so a lot of the time when we say God, give me greater revelation and we don't get it, it's because we haven't actually made up our mind already. No matter what it is. Lord, I'm in. I'm going to obey.
I'm going to follow you wherever it leads. Let's continue. It says he. The thief should make full restitution. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold.
The idea is as a slave for his theft.
And I'd have you underline that word restitution there, because as we've already talked about in previous weeks, slavery looked very different. BJ walked us through that a few weeks ago, continuing into verse four.
If the theft is certainly found alive in his hand, whether it is an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall restore double.
Now, I had you underline the word restitution because that's the key concept here. This is one of the major tools that allowed Israeli society to function without prisons.
Can you imagine how great it would be, though, if we had this penalty for theft in our culture today?
If you steal a truck, sell it to a chop shop and get caught. Guess what? You owe the truck's owner for trucks, for trucks. If the truck is recovered and that's still whole, you owe him two trucks. Can't afford to buy them two trucks or four trucks. Guess you're going to have to sell yourself into slavery till you work off that debt you incurred by being a thief. Oh, you're going to sell yourself into slavery with the plan of being a bad slave in a lazy slave while the owner is allowed to beat you to get you in line.
This would be a great, great system because instead of thieves getting endless probation.
We wouldn't see the rampant petty theft that is so prevalent in our society today would solve the problem real fast.
Now, keep this little detail in mind, too. If your daughter or son got into trouble, your family would be expected to settle the matter regardless of how old your son or daughter is. If they couldn't pay the restitution, the victims of the crime were coming to mom and dad. They're coming to the rest of the family. If there's a legal settlement that needs to be handled, the family is responsible if the son or daughter flees and just hightails it out of there.
So let me ask you, what sort of impact do you think that reality would have on parenting? Do you think that maybe it would have made parents care a little bit more, that they they don't raise a brat?
That they raise children who would become positive members of society as opposed to ruining the entire families lives in the future would be very, very different if every set of parents was actually liable legally, financially for their children's actions.
You're not going to raise a brat in that scenario. You'd be like, listen, I got plans to go to Hawaii when I retire and I'm not spending that money on your stupidity.
You see, in Israeli culture, you didn't get to say that's not my problem.
There was individual responsibility and then there was community responsibility.
You were responsible as an individual, but you were also responsible as a community because you were both individually and collectively accountable to God, because you had made the covenant with him, remember, as an individual and as a collective. So write this down. Israeli society assign responsibility to the individual and the community because their covenant with God was both individual and collective.
It's the same as we have in the church. We are individually responsible to God, but as a church, as a collective as well, we are responsible to God. We're responsible to live our individual lives in a way that honors God and we're responsible to run the church in a way that honors God.
And we see this heart throughout the Book of the Covenant, but we also see it reflected in Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, don't we? Who are the bad guys in that parable? It's the guys who walked past the injured man and said, it's not my problem, it's got nothing to do with me. Who's the hero in the parable? It's the Samaritan who did what was right because he understood that his commitment to God made him also responsible to have a commitment to his community.
And again, our equivalent community is the church.
It's the body of believers. We're not supposed to see a brother or sister in the church suffering and say, oh, man, sucks to be them right now.
Glad that's not my problem. Our individual commitment to Jesus comes along with a commitment to his church. So write this down.
I know it's another quick fill in, but it's important the believers community commitment is to his or her church. We have a community commitment to one another as the church.
And then it's worth noting, I'm not going to read it. But I did put it on your outlines. It's worth noting that Numbers five explains what would happen in a third scenario involving theft.
You see if someone committed theft but was then troubled by their conscience.
And they're like, oh, man, I shouldn't have done that. And they want to make things right.
They were to confess and then they were to make it right by giving back to the person what was stolen or the equivalent plus 20 percent.
And we're talking about a full confession, by the way. Not like the man who mailed a check to the CIA for two thousand dollars with a note that read. I've mailed you this check because I cannot sleep at night. My conscience is bothering me. I've defrauded the Canadian government and ripped off the Canadian people for 20 years. Please find enclosed a check for two thousand dollars. I want to make things right. And if I still can't sleep, I'll send the rest.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about a full confession and repentance in this scenario. So to summarize, in the law of Moses, there are three levels to making restitution for theft.
If you steal something and it cannot be recovered, you're going to end up paying back four or five times what you stole.
If you steal something and it is fully recoverable, you're going to pay back double what you stole. If you steal something but confess and repent, you're going to pay back what you stole plus 20 percent. It's a good system. Verse five. If a man causes a field or a vineyard to be grazed and lets lose his animal and it feeds in another man's field, he shall make restitution from the best of his own field and the best of his own vineyard.
We're continuing with this theme of restitution. If I let my animal graze in your field and eat your crops, I'm to make restitution to you from the best of my fields.
Not the leftovers, but the best.
And so the goal was that there was not to be any scenario in which stealing something from someone left the thief better off.
They weren't to be scenarios where you stole something worth a thousand dollars, sold it for five hundred dollars, got caught and got fined a hundred dollars.
There wasn't to be any scenario in which criminal activity benefited the perpetrator. The goal of the law was to make the thief realize that it wasn't worth it. Crazy concept, right?
Verse 8 six. If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that stacked grain standing grain or the field is consumed, he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution. So as they do today, actually still in some types of farming, they would use fire to clear Bush or a field or dead old crops. It was the quickest way to clear a field and if that was done carelessly, the fire could spread to an adjoining field that belonged to somebody else.
And so similar to verse five, the idea is that if that happened, you'd have to make restitution again from the best of your field, or if you didn't have enough, you'd have to buy premium stuff from somebody else and use that.
As I was thinking about this, you play this out in today's culture, the principles behind this.
Here's what it would mean if somebody started a forest fire by being careless, they would be legally bound to seed and replant the entire area.
That ended up burning down because it's all crown land or it's owned by a logging company and so belongs to somebody.
And yes, they would be doing that for the rest of their lives.
But I'll tell you one thing, we wouldn't have careless forest fires ever again.
So we have a fire and maybe risk spending the rest of our lives planting seeds. I'm actually good. It's not that big of a deal was to get a hot dog from 7-Eleven.
So you were responsible to not be careless with fire because it's dangerous. And so the way we think is what's my comfort level with this? God's law was teaching his people to think, how could this potentially affect those around me, is teaching them to think a different way. We're so individualistic in the West.
The tongue is so set among our members. So it's placed in our body so that it defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of nature and is set on fire by hell for every kind of beast and bird of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind.
But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil full of deadly poison. With it, we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude or made in the likeness of God out of the same mouth. Proceed blessing and cursing my brethren. These things ought not to be so. And so I'm just going to make an analogy here to make some practical application. I believe the Old Testament principle of restitution still applies to us today.
I believe that God still expects us to do everything we can to make things right with those we have wronged.
We're not supposed to simply say, well, God's forgiven me. And so you have to as well. I don't have to pay you the rent I owe because Jesus has paid it all. You see, if you're part of the church, then you represent Jesus.
And back here in the Book of the Covenant, the Lord said you're responsible for the way you handle fire and for any damage you cause with it.
In the same way we are responsible for the way that we handle our tongues, we are responsible for any damage we caused by being careless with our words.
I'm talking about gossip, slander, demeaning comments, hurtful speech, untrue words.
When we're guilty of that, we have a responsibility to make it right. If we've slandered someone, we need to go to those we spoke to and apologize to them for speaking that way.
Were to say, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have spoken about that person that way. They didn't deserve to have me talk about them like that.
And when we've spoken wrongly or harshly to someone were to apologize and seek forgiveness, not only that, but were to make restitution.
How do we do that with our words? Well, when we've burned someone's field, so to speak, it needs to be replanted. And when it comes to our words, that means we need to plant the right words into that person's life, if that's an option, we need to speak encouragement, appreciation, affirmation, blessing. We need to build them up again. And here's the key. This is a relational key in marriage, parenting and deep friendship.
The thing about biblical restitution is that it had no time limit. If it took you the rest of your life to make restitution, then it took you the rest of your life. If it took you the rest of your life and you still wouldn't be able to get close to paying it off, then that's what it was.
So if we have the option where to keep trying to make restitution, if you've been careless with your words and wounded your spouse or your child, they may reject you and they may give you a cold response when you first try to speak with them.
They may continue to respond like that for a long time as you work toward restitution. But listen, if you have a field. You're not going to just throw a few seeds and then stand there and go. I guess it's not working. I tried. You're not going to throw some seeds, pour some water and go. I mean, well, if the sea doesn't want to grow, what am I supposed to do? Where I'm going with this is what we love to do, is we love to sometimes try and make restitution with our words, and then when it doesn't work right away, we say, well, I tried their fault now and everything I could do, I'm done.
Again, it takes a lot of work, but if the options available, we got to keep at it. Would you write this down? Biblical restitution has no expiration date. It has no expiration date. Verse 8 seven, if a man delivers to his neighbor money or articles to keep and it is stolen out of the man's house, if the thief is found, he shall pay double. Not only were there no prisons in Israel at this time, there were no banks, no banks.
So if you had to take a trip somewhere you had anything valuable in your house for security's sake, you would simply go and leave it with your neighbors, say, hey, can you watch this for me while I'm away? This was something neighbors did for each other all the time. And as we've already established, if the thief is caught and the goods are recoverable, the thief has to pay back double.
However, Verse 8 if the thief is not found, then the master of the house shall be brought to the judges to see whether he has put his hand into his neighbor's goods for any kind of trespass, whether it concerns an ox, a donkey, a sheep or clothing, or for any kind of lost thing which another claims to be his.
The cause of both parties shall come before the judges and whomever the judges condemn shall pay double to his neighbor.
If the neighbor who's watching the stuff says, yeah, it's a real shame while you were away, you know, somebody stole your stuff. And the thief is not caught. Then the neighbor who was storing the stuff is to be brought before the judges, along with the neighbor whose stuff was stolen. And the judges are going to grill them both to figure out whether there really was theft or whether the neighbor actually stole the stuff.
Yeah, it's too bad somebody stole your stuff from my house, but they didn't take any of your stuff.
No, it's the strangest thing you see in our context. The idea is that if there's a disagreement.
Between a brother and a brother, a sister, a sister, a sister and a brother in the church, that cannot be resolved, this is what's actually supposed to happen.
The parties that are involved in that dispute are to go before the elders of the church and the elders of the church are to act as judges.
Do you know that even in the New Testament, the Bible specifically tells us that believers are not to sue each other in court because it's bad for the reputation of Jesus?
Paul tells believer's he says it is disgraceful, even the idea that two believers would have to go in front of a non-believer to have the nonbelievers settle their dispute. He says it's disgraceful for the reputation of Jesus in the church. We're supposed to settle our issues within the church, with the elders functioning as the equivalent of Israel's judges back in the day because the reputation of Jesus and his church matters. Jesus said the defining mark of the church was to be our love for one another.
And it's not a good look when, in front of nonbelievers, you're in court arguing and suing each other.
It's the absolute opposite of love for one another.
But again, this system can only work and this can only happen in a church if believers are more concerned about being right with God than they are about their legal rights.
Because there may be a situation where you're legally entitled to something, but it's not right in the eyes of God. And so this system only works when you have believers in a church who say, my number one concern is doing this right in the eyes of the Lord. My number one concern is not my legal rights. My number one concern is not getting mine.
So if I'm going away and I say, Hey, can you watch this animal of mine? Can you watch this this little sheep of mine, little fluffy over here.
And when I come back here, like, yeah, too bad Fluffy died of natural causes while you're away or, you know, I come back fluffiest, missing a leg and they say, yeah, just got injured out there in the wild or fluffy is gone. And you say, yeah, Fluffy ran away and nobody saw it happen.
We're both to go before the judges and you're going to swear an oath before the Lord, I'm going to swear an oath before the Lord to tell the truth.
And so if I do that, though, and I say, yes, the Lord sees me, I take an oath before the Lord, I did not eat Fluffy.
I do that when all there is to go on is my word. God says, listen, you got to believers and all there is to go on is their word. You're to take them at their word and you leave the rest to God. And I like this because, again, it's placing faith in the reality that God sees and God knows everything.
Remember what our brother Paul told the Galatians believers?
It's on your outline. He said, do not be deceived. God is not mocked for whatever a man sows that he will also reap. In other words, in a situation like this, God's not going to let justice be mocked.
He says, you take an oath before me and you lie. Don't think you're getting ahead. I'm going to make sure that what goes around comes around
And the same is true in the church today for the sake of unity in the church, when all you have to go on in a situation is the word of another believer, you're to take them at their word and leave the rest to God.
And there's a lesson here. For those of us with certain personality types. And be open to hearing this, because I'm including myself in this group, for those of us with certain personality types, perhaps like me. Your natural tendency is to assume the worst. Your natural tendency is to believe the worst and you fight against that, there's a word for people like you and me in this in the church among believers or to take people at their word. Actually, believe them and trust, hey, if that's not the truth, that that's for God to take care of, that's for God to take care of.
Because perhaps like me, sometimes you think, Lord, Lord, I know only you can see and only you can judge the heart. But I'm here, Lourdes, so you can take a break, I'll I'll I'll take care of this one, I will discern the motives of their heart. I will look into the unseen things and I will judge.
Well, now, here's the principle. Believers in the Bible are called to judge the fruits of other believers within the church.
We are called to judge the external observable actions or the lack thereof, not so that we can be snippy with one another, but so that we can call each other up together to represent Jesus. Well, every time I share this, I say this. This is the great, great, impossible scenario that the world gives to the church. The world says to the church, oh, the church is full of hypocrites. And so we say, well, we're actually going to do what the Bible says.
And the Bible says we are actually to call each other out on our hypocrisy so that we represent Jesus.
Well, then the world says that's so judgmental. How could you do that?
And so the world puts the church in an impossible situation where if we don't actually try to act like Jesus, we're being hypocrites. But if we tell each other in the church to act like Jesus, then we're being judgmental.
And just so you know, the biblical standard is that we are within the church among believers to judge each other in a good way, that we call each other up to actually act like Christians.
Christians are to call other Christians to act like Christians. We don't call non Christians to act like Christians. But again, we can only judge based on what we can see on the outside.
You know, we can say, hey, I saw you before church beating that guy up outside the church.
And I think that was not really Christian behavior for you to do that because you saw something external, external.
But believers are not called to judge the unseen issues of the heart. We don't know a person's motivations. We don't know a person's intentions. Only God sees that stuff. And in this example, there's no way for the one guy to know if his neighbor is lying.
He might suspect he is, but he doesn't know. In the same way, there are many situations in our relationships where something happens and we suspect that we know what's going on, we're like, no, I know what they were thinking.
Trust me. I know. I know. But but we don't know. We don't know. And we can't know. And in those instances, God says, take them at their word, take them at their word, believe the best and leave it to me. If there's justice that needs to be done, God will take care of it. So write this down. When there's no external evidence, believers are to take each other at their word and release the rest to God, release the rest to God.
This is a timely word as well in the age of of social media and texting and instant messaging.
Sure, we've all been in that situation where you get an instant message and you just ascribe a tone to the message by the only one who does it, where you read a message and then you read it with a specific tone and you're like, why are they being so rude?
And you realize there's like 10 different ways you could have read that. You know, you tell us something, I need you to take care of this. And they're like, fine.
And you're like, fine, fine. What is fine mean? And they're really just like, yeah, fine.
Oh, OK. I will judge the unseen motivations of the heart.
But when there's no external evidence where to take each other at our word and just leave the rest to God, do you know that there's never a downside to believing the best about people? It's never a downside to believing the best about people, plenty of downside to believing the worst about people. You have to keep repeatedly pulling your foot out of your own mouth verse 8 /12.
But if in fact it is stolen from him, he shall make restitution to the owner of it. If the animal is stolen because the man was careless and he didn't protect the animal, then he is liable for its loss if it is torn to pieces by a beast, then he shall bring in his evidence and he shall not make good what was torn. So if the animal is killed by a wild animal, the neighbor is to actually bring the carcass as evidence.
And that's to be the end of the matter because it wasn't anybody's fault. But the neighbor can't be like having a toothpick, you know, and he's picking meat out of his teeth and he says, yes, too bad your cow was taken by a wild animal, probably, probably a velociraptor.
There's nothing left.
He has to actually present the evidence, you know, and there can't be knife marks on the evidence where the ribs can't be that type of situation.
Verse 8 fourteen. And if a man borrows anything from his neighbor and it becomes injured or died, the owner of it not being with it, he shall surely make good.
You borrow something from a neighbor and it breaks while you're using it. You make it right. Verse 8 15.
If the owner was with it, he shall not make a good. If it was hired, it came for its higher.
So in other words, say, say I borrow a chainsaw from you, but you're with me in the backyard and you can see that I'm not misusing your chainsaw.
I'm being diligent with it and it just breaks in normal use, then I'm not liable because obviously that was going to happen whether it was you or me using it.
And you're not entitled to a free new chainsaw again, if the same thing happens, if I'm renting something from you and it gets damaged, that's just part of the rental business. There's going to be loss. I'm not liable. That's it for this week.
And so, as I said, we've got kind of a strange collection of different laws. We're going to have one more week in the Book of the Covenant.
And so what I want to ask is just, again, to be open to anything that God might be saying to you tonight, to think on a little bit more.
Maybe there's a relationship where you've said some things you shouldn't say.
And tonight's a reminder that you need to continue to work at speaking words of life and blessing and trying to make restitution there. Maybe there's a reminder tonight to assume the best about people and to take a believer at their word, unless there's external evidence to the contrary. Maybe there's a reminder. That unity and the reputation of Jesus in his church are important, and maybe there's a reminder that, hey, we have a responsibility to think through how our actions affect other people, not just ourselves, that every single person is an image bearer.
They are made by God, they're sacred and they're special.
So with that, let's pray.
Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to be together this evening. And Lord, we do ask that you would just protect the health of your church of the men, women and children who make up this church father, that you would preserve our ability to meet together as your church. And father, we pray and thank you that you have the ability and the desire to meet every need we have. Father, I just lift up right now to you.
Any person in this room feeling anxious, any person feeling stressed by the external situation of the world around us. Father, would you shift our eyes back to heaven and back to you? Because we know that when we're overwhelmed by anxiety from what's going on around us, it's because we've taken our eyes off you and we're looking all around us instead of looking upwards. So, Father, fix our eyes on you.
We ask for peace in the name of Jesus and father, fill us afresh with your love for one another, Lord, maybe, maybe not turn inward to be focused on ourselves right now. But Lord, would you stir loving us to care and love for one another, to check on one another, to care about one another in a greater way, to speak blessing to one another. And Father, thank you that you do speak faithfully through your word and that you are here with us.
You never leave us. You never forsake us. You're with us to the end of the age. We love you so much, Jesus. In your precious name we pray. Amen.
Larry Spargimino...November 17, 2021
“… but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon” (Rev.9:11)
In the past tyrannical governments have not only banned religious messages, but also novels, poems and short stories, along with paintings and other visual art forms that were deemed “anti-government.”
On May 10, 1933 university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books. The works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud went up in flames, alongside works of black-listed American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller. As the ravenous flames lit up the night sky, 40,000 students and adults gave the Nazi salute. This marked the intellectual impoverishment and decline of a great nation and a great people who had contributed immensely to humanity. Is the current wave of censorship against medical and scientific experts who oppose the vaccines a harbinger of the rise of The Antichrist?
Meet The Bully and His Slick Protégé
The Biden vaccine mandate brought grief to freedom-loving Americans by forcing them to make a tragic choice: take a vaccine that a growing number of medical experts condemn, or face: (1) loss of employment, (2) a dishonorable discharge from the military, (3) get rejected for an organ transplant that you need to stay alive, (4) experience a thousand other things that evil minds have planned for resisters.
The Epoch Times (10/7/21) reports that a Colorado hospital has rejected a woman for a kidney transplant after she refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Leilani Lutali received a letter on September 28 informing her that the transplant team at the University of Colorado Hospital decided to designate her “inactive” on the waiting list for transplants.
Neither Lutali, nor her donor, Jaimee Fougner are willing to be vaccinated. Fougner said, “Here I am, willing to be a direct donor to her. It does not affect any other patient on the transplant list. How can I sit here and allow them to murder my friend when I’ve got a perfectly good kidney and can save her life?”
The current censorship in America is a startling reminder of the power of Big Tech over our lives. Censorship affects the news people hear and see, the education their kids receive, and censorship determines the outcome elections. Voters form their opinions of candidates based on what is fed them through the media. Media distortions and lies are currently destroying America far more effectively than any invasion by a hostile nation. President Biden and his heavy-handed leadership will stop at nothing until America is a wasteland of boarded-up businesses and teenagers in need of psychiatric care.
The Real Dr. Fauci
After delivering a lecture via livestream at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Dr. Fauci was asked a question: “How should we approach the value of individual freedom within the context of this global pandemic?” It’s significant how Fauci responded. First, he criticized Fox News and other conservative media outlets. Then he slammed the idea of individual freedom, framing vaccination as one’s highest moral responsibility toward our neighbor. Then Fauci revealed what he really thinks: “I think each of us, particularly in the context of a pandemic that’s killing millions of people, you have got to look at it and say, ‘There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society’” (theblaze.com)
What’s the bottom line in Fauci’s statement? Because we have a pandemic “that is killing millions of people.” Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff under the Obama Administration, gave Fauci’s dirty little secret away when Emanuel said, “Never pass up a good crisis. It’s your opportunity to do what you could not normally do.”
Without a pandemic that’s killing millions of people no on will be willing to surrender their individual liberties. This is why there is the current censorship of materials that disagrees with Dr. Fauci. We can’t have people contradicting the claim that millions more will die. The testimony of credentialed medical experts who support Life-saving meds such as HCQ and Ivermectin must be censored.
Censorship of Materials That Have Anti-Vax Content
On September 29, 2021 Drudge Report blazed the words, “YOUTUBE BANS ALL ‘ANTI-VAX CONTENT.’” This is censorship. The current crisis that the world is experiencing is not about the virus. It is about control. Is Dr. Fauci’s guiding principle “do no harm” or is it just the opposite? This is not ridiculous question. Why is the testimony of so many medical experts who are warning us about the vaccines, being censored, trampled and being ignored? Why are people being taken off a transplant list for not wanting to take a shot that could very well have harmful effects?
Dr. Peter McCullough, who has had many peer-reviewed publications published in top-tier medical journals, warns that the world is “in the middle of a major biological catastrophe.” At an address he gave at the annual fundraiser of the non-profit Michigan for Vaccine Choice, McCullough charged that fraudulent public health officials are pushing experimental “gene-transfer” COVID-19 vaccines that produce the “loaded weapon” of a toxic spike protein.
Emphasizing the importance of safety in medicine, McCullough said it’s “beyond astonishing” that “there has been an injection of a substance into half of Americans’ bodies and there’s yet to be a report to America on safety.” He pointed out that was not the case in 1976 when the government shut down the Swine Flu vaccination campaign after the emergence of 25 deaths and 550 cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. The debate over whether or not they were caused by the vaccine didn’t matter. What mattered was the unexplained deaths that occurred after vaccination. McCullough told his audience, “If you feel tension right now and you feel some emotional distress, and if you feel as if things aren’t going right…I think your perceptions are correct.”
McCullough accused Biden’s top coronavirus adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, of “committing fraud” by declaring there is “no evidence” to support the effectiveness of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19. “Ivermectin is supported by over 60 studies, over 30 clinical trials,” McCullough said. It may be the truth but Baylor University Medical Center fired McCullough in February. Texas A&M College of Medicine, Texas Christian University and University of North Texas Health And Science Center School of Medicine have cut ties with him, accusing him of spreading misinformation. (WND, 10/7/21).
In the continuing struggle between truth and falsehood, truth is persistent and rises from many quarters. The globalcovidsummit.org reports that “Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch continues to express dismay over the way hyrdroxychloroquine has been maligned for political reasons by a pliant media establishment.” COVID-19 can be successfully treated. The Global Covid Summit reports, “Biochemist Martenson: You have nothing to lose with Ivermectin.” Martenson said, “Those who disparage Ivermectin as mere ‘horse dewormer’ probably aren’t doctors.
While more than 10,000 physicians and medical scientists have signed the “Rome Declaration” in protest, many of these individuals have experienced “career threats, character assassination, censorship of scientific papers and research, social media accounts blocked, online search results manipulated, clinical trials and patient observations banned, and their professional history and accomplishments minimized in both academic and mainstream media.” We must not ignore the fact that Dr. Robert Malone, architect of the mRNA vaccine participated in the “Rome Declaration” (globalcovidsummit.org).
This is just the beginning of the final epic struggle between good and evil. Jesus was very much to the point when he said, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44).
In the introduction to his book, Hitler’s Cross, Erwin Lutzer says he wanted to study how Hitler had captured the Christian church:
“I knew that 95 percent of the people in Germany were either Protestant or Catholic. Now I wanted to know why the Christians in Germany did not condemn Hitler with one single unified and courageous voice. I wondered why millions willingly took Hitler’s Hakenkreuz (hooked or broken cross) and superimposed on it the cross of our crucified Redeemer. Only later would I understand the extent to which this confusion of crosses beguiledthe German church and invited the judgment of God” (p. 12).
At the end of the age it is vital that true Christ-followers stand for truth in the power of God. Yes, God inhabits the praises of His people (Ps. 22:3), and the words of the prophet Jeremiah are still true: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jer. 29:11).
What would you think if someone told you that all prophecy has been fulfilled? Moreover, what if that person argues that the Bible does not speak about the future, nor does it even speak about what is happening in today’s world.
You might agree. If you do, you are a preterits. If not, you are a futurist. Preterists believe that the future events so labeled by futurists are really past events. They have all been fulfilled.
What Is Preterism?
There are two kinds of preterists. Full preterists believe that all so-called future events, even the return of Jesus Christ, have already happened. How could you miss it? Partial preterists do believe in a literal, bodily physical return of Jesus Christ, but everything else—the Antichrist, the Great Tribulation, God’s promises to Israel, the Gog-Magog War—have all been completely fulfilled. Barcode technology and the RFID chip have nothing to do with prophecy and should not be viewed as having anything to do with “the Mark of the Beast.”
Preterism has become very popular for two reasons. First, it helps to justify replacement theology. Israel is like every other nation of the world. It has no special future in the plan of God. Lots of nation became sovereign states in the 1940s—Israel did, but so did Pakistan and others. Preterits don’t believe that May 14, 1948, has anything to do with the fulfillment of Bible prophecy.
The second reason why preterism has become popular is because of what preterists often call “last days madness.” Wild predictions, a lack of good biblical exegesis, and plenty of sensationalism have caused a push-back against prophecy. Let’s face it, how many times can you write about “final signs” when it is clear that they are not final. “Final” means “final.” When you are at the airport and you hear, “This is the final call for flight ABC,” you don’t expect any more calls.
Preterit “Time Texts”
Everyone has a text. The preterists have “time texts.” Revelation 1:1 reads: “The revelation of Jesus Christ … to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass.” Preterits take this to mean, “in a very short time, not thousands of years in the future.”
Another time text is Matthew 24:34, “Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” Jesus uttered these words in the first century a.d. The generation on earth when Jesus spoke these words shall not pass until everything in the Olivet Discourse occurs, namely, in the first century a.d.
The preterits understanding of these time texts are problematic—for preterits. I think they are so eager to disprove the existence of prophecy that they pounce on these texts like a hungry fox pouncing on a rabbit.
Preterits generally see “the end” as occurring in a.d. 70 when the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple and slaughtered multitudes of Jews. It was, no doubt, a terrible time, but certainly does not fit Tribulation scriptures unless they are spiritualized. It’s on this basis that full preterits also spiritualize the Second Coming.
Since the destruction of Jerusalem occurred in a.d. 70, preterits have to date the writing of the book of Revelation as pre-a.d. 70, maybe a.d. 66 or a.d. 67. An early date for the book is absolutely necessary for the preterit viewpoint to be valid. Most scholars, however, hold to a much later date for the writing of the book of Revelation, like around a.d. 90. If preterits are wrong here, their whole view collapses. If futurists are wrong and if the book of Revelation was written pre-a.d. 70, futurism does not really lose much. The dating of the book of Revelation is not critical to futurism, but it is to preterism.
I attended a debate between Dr. Mark Hitchcock who argued for the late date and Hank Hanegraaff, “The Bible Answer Man,” who argued for the early date. He believes that the book of Revelation was written during the reign of Emperor Nero (a.d. 37–68), and is the Antichrist of the book of Revelation. The debate occurred at the annual Pre-Tribulatio Study Group Meeting, Dallas, Texas, on December 10, 2007. Several videos of the debate can be accessed on the Internet. Dr. Hitchcock had written his Ph.D. dissertation on the dating of the book of Revelation and made a number of irrefutable points. Dr. Hitchcock told me that he had sent Mr. Hanegraaff a copy of his dissertation several months earlier, but Mr. Hanegraaff, evidently, had not read the dissertation. Here are some of the dangers that I see in the preterist system.
I. Preterism totally ignores how technology has now put the most destructive and frightening prophecies well within reach of the human race. For centuries Christian commentators have had to spiritualize many of the prophecies of the book of Revelation. There was no way that the horrors described in the book of Revelation could literally come to pass. That is no longer true.
Several years ago Richard Abanes wrote End-Time Visions, a book in which he totally discounts the destructive potential of modern warfare and the precarious position of the human race at the present hour. Abanes argues that “there is no significant trend upward … in the number of wars, or their severity or magnitude.”
There is no way this statement can be justified. In recent years, there has been the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. My daughter was in the Air Force and stationed at an ICBM base in Montana. One of those missiles could hit a target the size of a birdhouse on the other side of the world with the equivalent of several million tons of TNT.
Added to this is the fact that though many undeveloped nations do not possess the technology to make and deliver a nuclear warhead, they can, nevertheless, make and deliver bioweapons, the effects of which would also lead to the deaths of millions. Toxins can be sprayed from small aircraft. Such weapons have an appeal to terrorist nations because bioweapons have a delayed action. A lag period, or incubation period—sometimes several hours or even several days—must elapse between the time the victim is exposed to the infectious agent and the actual time symptoms begin to show themselves.
On May 12, 1951, newspapers around the world reported the following: “The explosive equivalent of several million tons of TNT was released here today on the tiny atoll of Eniwetok as scientists of the Atomic Energy Commission detonated the world’s first thermonuclear device—the H-Bomb.”
Technology has changed so many aspects of our lives. In Revelation 11:7–9 we read of the death of the two witnesses. “Their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where our Lord also was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies. …” Modern technology makes that possible, just as it is now possible to view Olympic athletes in Beijing on American TV.
It is the return of Christ to earth that brings about the destruction of the kingdom of man and brings about a new order of things. The Kingdom in its glory will not be established until Christ returns. Hence His return is pre-millennial (Dan. 2:34–35). The Kingdom is not established by a gradual process of infiltration and permeation, but by a sudden and devastating blow. “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war”(see Rev. 19:11–21). Preterists seem to have missed the glory of the Kingdom Age. “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4; 11:6–9; see also Jer. 31:35–37; Ezek. 36:25–32).
III. Preterism has a tendency to minimize the reality of Satanic conflict in the present hour and how it fits the prophetic picture. Revelation 13 delineates future events that line up with this present day. There is an emerging one-world government (vs. 7), an ever increasing effort to centralize all religious expression (vs. 12), and a one-world economy (vs. 17). COVID-19 has promoted the idea of a cashless society because cash is “dirty,” and plastic is safer. Reasonable efforts to close the American borders are ridiculed. The legalization of homosexual marriage, transgenderism, and the collapse of the traditional family is now on fast-forward. We are slipping into national insanity. Those who protest against the destruction of traditional roles are now seen as being on the “lunatic fringe.”
Bible prophecy, as understood from a futurist perspective, gives us great insight into the present times. It reminds us that things are not falling apart but falling into place. Bible prophecy reveals the plan of God and demands our surrender to the God who knows “the end from the beginning,” according to Isaiah 46:10, “and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.”
One of the sad effects of postmodernism, evolutionary historiography, and the godless innovations of man-centered theology, is that it removes the glory and majesty of God. Man becomes a substitute deity. The watering-down of Bible prophecy is one of the casualties of this sad state of affairs. It’s time to let the prophets of old speak. Only when that happens is there hope for true worship and a hell-busting revival. We need to thank God for Bible prophecy, not deny that it even exists.
Larry Spargimino
Dr. Larry Spargimino is co-host of the SWRC broadcast and joined the ministry in 1998. Larry researches and writes books and articles for the ministry, assists on tours, and helps answer listeners' theological questions when they call the ministry. Larry holds a doctorate from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and pastors a local church.
Larry Spargimino
November 8, 2021
Share This Post
Bible prophecy headline news “Death In The City”
In Lamentations we read: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow … all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies” (Lam. 1:1–2). The prophet Jeremiah was mourning the destruction of Jerusalem. He had witnessed the destruction of the city and its temple by Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian armies. Though Jeremiah predicted this would happen, it was, nevertheless, something that caused him great sorrow.
There is another city—actually many other cities—for which we must weep and mourn. They have become sanctuary cities. Their destroyers are radical left-wingers who have turned their cities into garbage heaps of disease and death. In a report by Kira Davis posted on redstate.com, we read:
San Francisco is swiftly moving from one of America’s most beautiful cities to one of America’s most troubled cities. The city struggles with crime and the consequences of illegal immigration after declaring themselves a “sanctuary city.” The transit authorities (BART) recently announced they would stop providing video evidence of violent attacks on public transportation so as not to “bias” citizens against certain ethnic groups.
Most recently, San Francisco has joined Los Angeles and San Diego as three of the major cities that have caused Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency due to a Hepatitis A epidemic currently brewing in each location.
The outbreak can be directly tied to the homeless problem in California, which is only exacerbated by a constant flow of liberal policies that make removing homeless encampments difficult and even allow for the homeless to set up camp in places like the front lawn of Los Angeles City Hall and other public parks.
Citing the ubiquity of human waste, software engineer Jenn Wong has mapped the city’s most “poop-ridden neighborhoods.” Her project, called Human Wasteland, is a pretty exhaustive listing of reports made by emergency 311 calls (yes, there is a 311 fecal alert emergency number) from 2008 to 20015.
European cities were devastated in the mid to late fourteenth century. Although the Bubonic Plague—“the black death”—was spread by fleas on black rats, the rats frequented garbage heaps, such as are appearing in tent cities along bike trails and in parks. The living conditions in both urban and rural communities, along with the lack of proper sanitation, weakened the population and contributed to the casualties. It was common practice for people to use chamber pots which were emptied into open sewers that typically fed into streams and rivers. Historians have noted that displaced people—vagabonds and rootless youths in Medieval towns and cities, i.e., “the homeless”—contributed to the unhealthy conditions. Local and state officials that are encouraging sanctuary status are bringing upon the people they serve a horrific plague of monstrous proportions. Open borders are allowing people to come into the country from faraway places, bringing disease and contagion with them. “Rocket Man” in North Korea can save his missiles and warheads and avoid a war with the United States. The proponents of sanctuary cities and states will soon bring their own form of disaster on America!
The purposes of sanitation is to provide a healthy living environment for everyone, to protect natural resources, such as surface water and groundwater, and to provide safety, security and dignity for people who live together in towns and cities. A growing number of people in California, and elsewhere, are health conscious. They work out, eat right, watch their weight, and try to maintain good health and vigor. Unfortunately, their elected leaders—yes, they’ve put them in office—are working against them.
This growing proliferation of tent cities and an inundation of human fecal matter is creating a situation that looks more and more like what Jesus described in His end-time discourse. In Matthew 24:7 Jesus said, “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and PESTILENCES.” The word “pestilence” is in the plural, suggesting a number of diseases and illnesses created by these unhealthy conditions produced by sanctuary policies. Though many mock biblical standards, the Bible gives explicit instructions regarding health and sanitation. Deuteronomy 23:9–14, in summary, indicates that human excrement needs to be buried outside the city. People need to relieve themselves outside the camp, bring a spade, dig a hole with the spade, and cover the excrement. This is one of the reason that the Israelites were told that they would enjoy a measure of freedom from the diseases that ravaged the camp of the Egyptians. “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God … I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians” (Exod. 15:26).
We need to remember that California is an incubator state. What’s in California will, in a couple of years, be common practice in your neck of the woods. That’s why we have to be alert to the issues that are raised by the concept of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. A sanctuary city is a city where illegal aliens, criminals, and gang members can find sanctuary from federal deportation laws. Pro-sanctuary leaders want to reduce the fear of deportation and possible family breakup among people who are in the country illegally. They believe that such people will be more willing to report crimes, use health and social services, and enroll their children in school. Municipal policies in sanctuary areas include prohibiting police and city employees from questioning people about their immigration status, and refusing requests by federal immigration authorities to detain people.
Sanctuary governments and leaders are lawbreakers. They not only refuse to cooperate with federal law, but actually perpetrate criminal activity. The murder of Kate Steinle on July 1, 2015, made illegal immigration a front-burner issue in the 2016 presidential election. While walking with her father and a friend in the Embarcadero district of San Francisco, Steinle was fatally shot by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times. Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, who initially claimed that he fired at a sea lion with a gun he claims to have found, was only convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was acquitted of all murder and manslaughter charges. President Trump described the verdict as “disgraceful!” Libertarian policies, fueled and energized by political correctness, have allowed evil to multiply with impunity.
Fox News reported on January 17, 2018, that an illegal immigrant began his murder trial for the 2014 killings of two Northern California sheriff’s deputies. The illegal immigrant shouted at the judge and police with a profanity-laced rant, calling a partner of one of the slain officers a “coward.” The prosecutor was recounting the events that led to the death of Sacramento sheriff’s deputy Danny Oliver outside a Sacramento motel in October 2014, and described how Oliver’s partner, Deputy Scott Brown, was able to retreat from the heavy exchange of gunfire. Then, Luis Enrique Monroy Baracamontes, 37, the alleged killer, interrupted the court when he grinned and called Brown a “coward.” Baracamontes began to shout and scream, “I wish I had killed more of the mother- – -s” Then he said, “I will break out soon and I will kill more, kill whoever gets in front of me. There’s no need of a f- – – trial.” In typical liberal fashion, his public defenders tried to enter a plea of not guilty by insanity, and argued that it is unlikely their client will receive a fair trial due to the anti-immigrant sentiment encouraged by President Trump’s hardline stance on immigration.
Sanctuary leaders don’t agree with the law, so they fail to enforce it and protect the people they are sworn to protect. Matthew 24:12 describes what we are seeing: “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” The word iniquity is a translation of the word a-nomos—meaning “lawlessness.” “And because lawlessness shall abound the love of man shall wax cold.”
PJMedia (a conservative news, opinion, and commentary collaborative blog that has set out to challenge mainstream media with a network of citizen-journalists) reports that nearly one in five California residents is poor; that California has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. The state’s generous welfare spending has not only failed to decrease poverty, but it actually seems to have made it worse. Californians are in for another surprise: permanent water rationing is coming to California. According to the California Policy Center, AB 1668 will impose a mandatory limit on water consumption of 55 gallons per person per day. Homeowners will be forced to install retrofit gadgets costing thousands to comply. So, why is California openings its doors to illegals, gang members, and convicted criminals when it can’t even provide for its own law-abiding people?
Larry Spargimino...April 25, 2022
In Part I of this series I shared some of the basic ideas about preterism, and why the view that prophecy has already been fulfilled doesn’t stand up under close scrutiny. In Part II, I want to look closely at some of the scriptures to which preterists appeal. Do they support preterism? I don’t believe so. Let the reader be the judge.
Revelation 1:7—God’s Judgment on Israel in AD 70?
“Behold, he cometh with clouds,” Revelation 1:7 says, “and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him.” “Every eye” and “all kindreds” sound like a big group of people worldwide. The word “kindreds” is a translation of phule, meaning “tribes.” Preterists would say it is a reference to the twelve tribes, but in this text there is no reference to the “twelve tribes.” Rather it is “all tribes.” The same term is used in Rev. 5:9; 7:9; 11:9 and 13:7. It’s a very broad word that defies limitation to Israel, and even the ancient Roman Empire.
Preterists see the reference to “clouds” as a clincher for their case. They say it is a reference to the Divine “Cloud Rider,” a designation for God who has come in judgment upon nations in the historical past. Isaiah 19:1 reads, “Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.” Preterists argue that this happened when the Assyrian king Esarhaddon conquered Egypt in 671 BC and was God’s instrument of judgment upon Egyptian idolatry, as Rome was God’s instrument of judgment on Israel in AD 70.
Preterists have a certain creative flair for novel ideas that are not immediately apparent, but I think they have missed some essentials from the text of the Bible. In Isaiah 19, the Lord is pictured as riding ON the clouds, whereas in Revelation 1:7, the Lord comes WITH clouds. In this Scripture we see a textual parallel with Daniel 7:13: “… and, behold, one like the Son of man came WITH the clouds of heaven.” Verse 14 bristles with kingdom glory and says “his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” Dare we even limit God’s dominion to the Roman world?
Matthew 24:14: Witness to Everyone in Jerusalem, and Then the End?
“And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world (oikumene) for a witness unto all nations (ethnos); and then shall the end come” (Matt. 24:14). Supposedly, “the end” in this verse is the end of the Jewish sacrificial system that occurred with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70. The Gospel witness “in all the world” means “all the Roman world.”
Oikumene does have a range of meanings. Luke 2:1 tells us that “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world (oikumene) should be taxed.” Obviously, this decree did not affect all the people on planet Earth. But oikumene is used in Acts 17:31 in the phrase God “will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained.” This does not mean God will only judge the Roman world of antiquity. The same words can have different meanings, as in the phrase “let the dead bury their dead” (Luke 9:60). Context and meaning helps the reader decide.
Preterits, however, like to give a word the meaning that best suits their system rather than considering context and meaning. This is a real problem with preterism. It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. For example, Romans 1:8 states: “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world” (kosmos). “World,” of course, means the Roman world. However, in a different context the same word “kosmos” cannot be limited to the Roman world.
Big Words in Bible Prophecy
Matthew 24:21 speaks about the horrors of the Great Tribulation. Verse 22 says, “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh (sarx) be saved.” Does this mean “no flesh in Jerusalem”? I doubt it. Sarx is a big word: “Therefore by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight”(Rom. 3:20). Does this mean that “no flesh in Jerusalem will be justified by keeping the law, but everyone else will”? First Corinthians 1:29 is similar: “That no flesh should glory in his presence.” Does this mean that no one living in Jerusalem in AD 70 should glory in God’s presence but everyone else should?
This generation”—Which One?
In Matthew 24:15-21, the Lord Jesus speaks about great trouble for Israel. Jesus speaks about great tribulation and suffering exceeding anything that has been or will ever be (vs. 21). The Lord is revealing how bad things will really get. But He doesn’t stop with that. “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened” (vs. 22).
Preterists believe that in AD 70 God was acting in judgment against Israel. But there is much more taught in the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24. Satan’s future attempt to completely destroy God’s ancient covenant people will fail. Luke 21:24 reads: “…and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, UNTIL the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” The Lord is revealing three things of great importance: (1) Jerusalem’s fall is of a limited duration. It is not final, nor is it complete. (2) There is a period of time when Gentiles will overrun the city and rule over the city and its population. (3) There will be a later time when this situation will be reversed.
In Luke 21:25-26, Jesus talks about celestial and cosmic disruptions that are completely unsettling. Verses 27-28 states: “And THEN shall they SEE [it is visible, not invisible] the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And WHEN these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your REDEMPTION draweth nigh.” Notice it’s “redemption” not destruction and doom.
Verses 27 and 28 remind us of the rapidity with which all of these signs occur. This explains Matthew 24:34: “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” The generation that sees the signs signaling the return of the Lord will endure through it all to see the Lord. When the signs appear, prophetic events will proceed very quickly. There is a stated nearness of the signs to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 4–5 and the Olivet Discourse
In 1 Thessalonians 4:15 the Apostle states: “For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord.” “Lord” is a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. There are several Scriptures in which Paul uses the phrase found above to indicate words and thoughts spoken by Jesus (1 Cor. 7:10-11, 25; 9:14; 11:23-25). We have good reason to believe this is what happened in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11. In other words, the words and thoughts of Jesus in Matthew 24 and other parallel passages appear in 1 Thessalonians 4
Matt. 24:36: “But [peri de] of that day and hour knoweth no man…” 1 Thess. 5:1-2: “But [peri de] of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you…”
Matt. 24:39: “And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” 1 Thess. 5:3: “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them…and they shall not escape.”
There is still much unfulfilled prophecy revealed in the Bible. The Bible is indeed “profitable” in all things, including its prophetic teachings. It is God’s Divinely revealed truth about the end times. I pray that the material in this presentation may encourage the saints and be used in alarming and winning the lost, “for the time is at hand” (Rev. 1:3).
Larry Spargimino
June 20, 2022
Share This Post
Tyrants know that tyranny is not generally popular. Nobody wants an elitist snob ruling over them. Hence tyrants must resort to indoctrination. People who are indoctrinated will tolerate what they would not tolerate before their minds were indoctrinated.
Are our children being indoctrinated? Is that why we are losing more and more of our constitutional freedoms and large segments of our population don’t seem to mind? Is that why China and Russia are raising soldiers who will win wars and we are raising gay pride flags that will make us look like fools?
Why are more and more American men and women no longer joining the military? Why don’t we have pride in our history and a wholesome love for our country?
Statistics reveal trends and certain trends are alarming. Eighty percent of our kids who were raised in church no longer attend church or live a consistently Christian life. The number one reason they have repeatedly given, “The church’s values are not our values.”
That’s no surprise. A good Bible-believing church has not changed its biblically based values but the public schools in America, and some so-called “Christian” schools, have.
As our society and public schools become increasingly more corrupt and anti-God those who attend anti-God schools will find they are increasingly uncomfortable with their church’s values. Parents have raised their kids on the best of diets, brought them to the best of doctors, and then turned them over to the TV and the public school.
I am not condemning all public-school teachers. There are some godly teachers who have a unique calling to work in the public school. However, they are fighting a battle they can’t possibly win. And they are deceiving parents who say, “Mrs. Jones is a good Christian woman and she teaches at the public school. It must be OK.” It’s not. Mrs. Jones does not write the curriculum and she is surrounded by a multitude of teachers who have been indoctrinated in state teachers’ colleges.
Joe Biden is a firm believer in “transgender rights” and recently condemned “conversion therapy,” yet he and his supporters think “Drag Queen Story Hours” in the local public library are harmless. Fortunately, an increasing number of parents are protesting. They don’t want their boys and girls groomed for the gay lifestyle.
Yeonmi Park, a young woman who defected from North Korea, told a Fox News reporter that she is worried freedoms are being lost in America amid what she describes as “the left-wing indoctrination in K-12 schools.”
“This is exactly the dictator’s handbook,” Park said. “It’s Hitler’s youth. Mao’s youth and Kim Il-Sung’s youth. They always go for young children because they have not lived their life long enough to have critical thinking skills. Their brains are very plastic, very malleable, and easy to absorb information and believe it and they are innocent. And big killers who want to seize power from the people, they always mobilize the youth.”
Yes, kids are young and innocent. But what excuse can adult parents give for surrendering their kids to the devil?
Josh Shields
June 17, 2022
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 1 John 4:8
Naomi Judd, Paul Overstreet, and John Barlow Jarvis penned the song “Love Can Build A Bridge” that was released in 1990 and climbed to the top five on the billboard charts in mid-1991. One of the lines in the second verse of this song says, “That love and only love can join the tribes of man.”
Love has never been discussed, debated, chatted, nor tweeted more, and never has it been so far away as right now. We have stood in awe as buildings have been burned, cars overturned, riots formed, out-lash, graffiti and destruction of everything from buildings to our bodies, and all in the name of what? Not love, but greed, voracity, and self-indulgence.
There is a way to join the hearts of man. It is not in acceptance, but repentance. When we as a people lay aside our selfish, egotistical, self-seeking, self-centered, self-regarding ways that only pursue self-gratification and turn from us to Him (GOD), we will find a bridge.
We will find two outstretched arms that carry us from fear to favor, from hate to hope, from sinner to saint. This bridge, the “outstretched arms of Jesus”, spans the gap from the Law to love, from failure to forgiveness, and from reeling to rejoicing. Yes, the bridge of Calvary is the only place where the different tribes, ethnicities, cultures, and colors of humanity can bow a knee and truly find relief, release, and reprieve from wickedness.
So today, let’s join together and take a moment wherever you may be while reading this and ask God to help us to cross the bridge of love, “Calvary”, and walk from judgment to love.
Our prayer for you this week: May God grant you the knowledge, courage, and desire to come to the true understanding of love, a true walk with God.
Josh Shields
Josh Shields and his wife, Janice, founded New Life Church in Berryville, Arkansas in 2011, where he continues to be the residing pastor. He formerly served in different pastoral positions throughout the state of Arkansas and has ministered at various churches, conferences, conventions, and venues throughout the nation. He began his ministry in 1983 at the age of 16, feeling the call at a young age to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He enjoys every opportunity to share Jesus with others through his ministry by speaking, preaching, singing, and writing weekly articles/posts.
Larry Spargimino...February 15, 2022
I am in the process of writing a book on the subject of revival in the last days. I believe that God is changing the world and His people for an end-time harvest. On the front cover we intend to put a photo I took hiking at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Western Colorado several years ago. It’s a picture of a beautiful flower growing out of a sand dune. It portrays what is happening today in places hostile to the Gospel. The beauty and persevering vitality of the Gospel brings revival in hostile settings.
After making my first trip to Pakistan in 2009 and interviewing Joel Rosenberg in that same year on his book, Inside the Revolution: How the Followers of Jihad, Jefferson & Jesus Are Battling to Dominate the Middle East and Transform the World, I came to realize that people are receiving new life in Christ all over the world.
Will Technology Destroy the Gospel In China?
The present government in China is hostile to all religions. Facial recognition technology and an invasive social credit system are onerous, and technology is making it impossible to evade, or so it would seem. Yet the underground church in China is sending out more missionaries to countries in the “10-40 window”—those countries from China westward, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and the other Islamic " nations”—than any other nation. And this is being done in a country where “the walls have ears and the trees have eyes.”
The Chinese State Administration of Religious Affairs recently announced new restrictive measures that will go into effect March 1, 2022. Christian ministries must “not incite subversion or oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership.” This is a mandate that virtually condemns anything and everything in the Bible. How is it possible that the illegal underground church is not only surviving but actually thriving in such a hostile situation?
In his book, China and End-Time Prophecy: How God Is Using the Red Dragon to Fulfill His Ultimate Purposes, Eugene Bach (a pseudonym) writes:
“Pastor Enoch (a pseudonym) … with four other leaders … runs an underground house church of more than four million believers … … is completely off the grid. He doesn’t have email, a website, a Facebook or Twitter account, a private office, or a secretary, and yet he disciples hundreds of leaders every day, hosts daily illegal church services with thousands of believers all over China, and sends out an average of ten new missionaries per month to the most unreached areas of the world” (p. 7).
The Christian community is deeply indebted to Bach. He is an insider who brings first-hand testimony regarding God’s work in the unregistered church. That the underground church could make such amazing advances in a hi-tech modern nation of committed Maoists should be an inspiration to Christians living in 21st century America.
There has been much suffering, and martyrdom in China, but Pastor Zhang Rongligang, probably one of the best-known house church pastors in China, said he believes that the church in China has benefited from the suffering it has experienced.
“Today, the underground house churches in China are not trying to survive. They are unified in the Back to Jerusalem vision, and churches are sending out missionaries into Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and atheist countries around the world. Our church now has missionaries serving in Pakistan, Dubai, India, and many other nations that are hostile to the Gospel. Additionally, our young people are moving into China’s cities in large numbers, but it is not for the purpose of making money. They are moving here to plant churches, to preach the gospel, to raise support for foreign missions, and to send new firebrand believers into the field. I can’t help but feel excited about the future of China and the Chinese church”(Bach, p. 166).
The Cross and the Red Flag
The conference had barely begun when the conditions were violated. A portrait of Chairman Mao Tse-tung was hung behind the pulpit with flags on either side, while several people in the audience were smoking. A blue haze hung in the air. Pastor Wang, who had a gentle and non-confrontational life-style, asked his family to join him for prayer in the pastor’s study. Then he walked down the aisle of the crowded church, removed the portrait of Mao as well as the flags, and calmly walked out. He and his family quickly fled to Hong Kong. (Hattaway, Shandong: The Revival Province, p. 175).
In the 1950s, Communism became more controlling and demanding. The government ordered multitudes of Christians to register and to promise to abide by its rules. Some pastors sought to train their congregations how to handle an interrogation by Party officials. One elderly farmer told his pastor he would respond to the interrogators as the Holy Spirit led him.
The interrogator asked the man, “What has Christianity done for you?” “It made me a better person,” the farmer answered. The official looked at the assembled villagers and asked, “Is that true?” “Yes,” the villagers replied. “His farm used to be the dirtiest and worst in the village, but now it is the best.”
When the farmer was pressed to explain how these changes had occurred, the farmer spoke with conviction and authority. “I was a drunkard and an opium smoker. Nothing could rid me of these two vices, and my farm had been brought to ruin.” The man raised his voice and said, “I accepted Jesus as my Savior, and He changed me. He enabled me to break with both opium and drink” (Hattaway, Shandong, p. 175).
A Century of Struggle
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, churches were being planted in China, souls saved and, in addition, hospitals and schools that were church-based were being built. The early years of the 20th century saw revival break out in Shandong Province, located on the Yellow Sea, across from the Korean Peninsula. It was a dramatic outpouring of God’s Spirit, exceeding every other revival in modern times. But in the late 1930s, the Japanese invasion of China brought great suffering. Japanese soldiers raped and pillaged China (“The Rape of Nanking”). Imperial soldiers tried to convince the Chinese Christians that the Godhead consisted of Father, Son, the Holy Spirit — AND the Japanese emperor. Refusal to accept this theological monstrosity brought torture and death.
Then came the Communist Revolution, the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, his flight to what is now Taiwan, and the rise of Mao. The Japanese invasion and Communism forced the church to go “underground.” These were difficult years, but God was not done with China. Eric Liddell, the Scottish Olympian, had his story told in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. Liddell was born in China of missionary parents and returned to his birthplace despite warnings of imminent danger. Shandong, China’s “Revival Province,” was being overrun by Japanese troops and in a state of chaos. Liddell ministered the Gospel and spent much of his energies helping the wounded, the sick, and the dying. In 1943, Liddell was imprisoned with more than 2,000 other foreigners, including 327 children. He died in 1945 doing what God had called him to do—share the love of Christ in a loveless, hate-filled environment.
A Look In the Past — A Hope for the Future
In the Shandong revival, God used many men and women, Chinese and foreign, as instruments of revival. Dr. C.L. Culpepper, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, Texas, and his wife, Ola, were appointed Southern Baptist missionaries to China in the 1920s. Ola had developed serious eye problems which caused her great pain. On the mission field the Culpeppers met Marie Monsen, a Norwegian evangelical Lutheran. Monsen asked the Culpeppers, “Have you been filled with the Holy Spirit? Have you prayed for the healing of your wife?”
In his book, The Shantung Revival (available online, gospeltruth.net/shantung.htm) Dr. Culpepper says he was not ready for Monsen’s questions. The next morning about 20 people were gathered in the Culpepper home for a prayer meeting. “We felt an electric excitement,” writes Culpepper, “a feeling that God was preparing us for something we had never known before. After praying for several hours we all seemed in a complete spirit of communion.”
They prayed for Ola’s eyesight and had many other petitions. God was evidently present. Two Chinese men who were cooks for the missionary residences were also present. Something wonderful was happening. It was common knowledge that these men had some issue, some grudge, and were never seen together, but during the prayer meeting they both accepted Christ and embraced. There was such joy in the group that they had forgotten all about Ola. What about Ola? She was so excited. Her vision had returned in that eye, and the pain was gone. Culpepper writes, the problem “never returned. We had never known such spiritual joy. The events surrounding those days in Chefoo were the prelude to the great Shantung Revival” (p. 6).
Larry Spargimino, 2021
Dozing Presidents, Woke Generals and an Out-of-Control Medical Bureaucracy
Many are wondering if God has rightly abandoned America. Are we being justly abandoned by God because of our sins? Is the fact that America has been plagued with a variety of problems which seem to have no solution the result of God’s activity? Are we under a futility curse?
God has given warnings about nations that flagrantly disregard His standards, especially a nation that has been richly favored by God, such as Israel. One of the penalties: Futility. “And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you. … And your strength shall be spent in vain …” (Lev. 26:17, 20).
We need to assess contemporary events in the light of Scripture. Romans 15:4 says: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning …” God’s revelations to Israel can be instructive in helping God’s people understand our world today. This should not be surprising. Second Timothy 3:16-17 tells us that all Scripture is inspired by God, and is “profitable.”
George Washington’s Prophecy and President Biden
Following the inauguration of Joe Biden as president, Jonathan Cahn gave a prophetic warning for Biden and America. Cahn began is 13-minute, on-camera video released on social media with the warning George Washington gave during his very first presidential address to the nation: “The propitious smiles of heaven cannot be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right that heaven itself has ordained.” Indeed, how true. Thanks to a sleepy president and “woke” generals, the Taliban is now the fifth most technically-equipped military in the world. They are armed with U.S. equipment that should have been destroyed before we abandoned Afghanistan to unspeakable misery.
Biden’s performance has been disappointing (I am being nice). America is now facing a loss of inalienable rights, runaway inflation, a wide-open southern border, shutting down a U.S. gas pipeline, forced vaccine mandates that can’t be medically justified, a crusade for “transgender rights,” not to mention the latest disaster in Afghanistan. Will our allies ever trust us again? They shouldn’t with Biden as commander-in-chief. Little Taiwan is left shivering in the cold. The Chinese communist behemoth to the west knows that it can trample Taiwan without any resistance from America, other than a presidential frown for good show.
In his prophetic warning, Cahn mentioned the slaughter of the unborn, and then gave a warning to Biden that even made me shudder: “To you, Mr. President, and all who have joined you in this agenda … heed this warning. This day will pass. The applause of men will fade. This administration will inevitably be over. The world will pass away, but you will stand before God and give account. For it is written in His Word that we will each stand before God and give account.”
Dr. Michael Brown, messianic scholar, social commentator, and revivalist, is always soft-spoken and non-abrasive, but even he wrote: “The story of almost 20 years of American involvement in Afghanistan has ended in unmitigated disaster. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a worst-case scenario than the present one (“Ask Dr. Brown,”
How can we ever forget the images of people hoping to escape the country, swarming the runway, and some clinging to departing aircraft during takeoff—sometimes with such disastrous results that their bodies were seen falling from the sky as they evidently could no longer hang on as the plane ascended.
Why did this happen? The Taliban gave control of the airport to Biden, but he refused it. Airport security was put in the hands of the Islamists. At the writing of this column, there are still 24 Sacramento-area students trapped in Afghanistan
Larry Spargimino
June 28, 2021
And hath made of one blood all nations of men (Acts 17:26).
Tensions were high one Saturday in April 2021 when Democrat representative Maxine Waters spoke in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police. Waters said, “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Waters, a highly confrontational figure, sometimes known as “Kerosene Maxine,” was notorious for telling her constituents to follow and hound Trump supporters and make life miserable for them: “Wherever you find them, at the gas station, in restaurants, go right on and harass them.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a different approach for the civil rights movement. Bishop Jim Lowe, senior pastor of the Guiding Light Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and distinguished fellow at the Alabama Policy Institute—where the emphasis is on free markets, limited government, and strong families—believes that the current-day civil rights movement, marked by violent protests, is very different than the civil rights movement of the 1960s under Dr. King’s leadership. Lowe pointed out that King, in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” believed that in any non-violent campaign there are four basic steps to be followed: (1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist, (2) negotiation, (3) self-purification, and (4) direct action (Lowe’s comments can be found at southeastsun.com).
Unfortunately, says Lowe, these steps are lacking in many of today’s protests, many of which turn violent and lead to the destruction of property and businesses in the black community. “In some cases,” says Lowe, “injustice may seem apparent but in reality, it is non-existent. Thus righteousness is not on the side of the protester.”
The second step that Dr. King followed was negotiation. King felt that was extremely important. Lowe points out, however, that today, negotiation does not get very far. Try to negotiate and you are shouted down. Reasonable and helpful discourse is impossible. “Disrespect,” says Lowe “is shown to those who are made in the image of God.”
The third step followed by Dr. King that is completely bypassed today is self-purification. This was a time of personal and intensive self-examination for the leader of the protest. The person needs to be honest with himself and check his motives, his manners, and see if confession to God needs to be made. Does this sound like something the BLM people would do today?
The fourth step recommended by Dr. King is direct action. If the previous three steps have been followed and there is no progress, a peaceful protest is necessary. Dr. King believed in justice and he did not believe in capitulation. He took direct action that was non-violent. Lowe believes that protests should hold a special place for Americans who realize that we have a Bill of Rights to protect the people from the government. Protests have been catalysts for progress for centuries and are essential to the American experiment. Lowe believes that when legislation “with the potential to affect protesting comes up for debate …our representatives should be extremely careful. Any effort, even good intentions to prevent violence, that limits the right to protest or gives law enforcement undue power to restrain or jail citizens exercising their first amendment rights, should be carefully examined.” However, non-violent protests are unacceptable today in the modern civil rights movement. Why is that? Because the issue is never the issue. The revolution is.
Critical Race Theory and Marxism
Marxism was initially built on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristics of industrial societies was an imbalance of power between capitalists (property owners) and workers, an imbalance between the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx said the only answer to this problem is revolution. Workers must rise to power, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist utopia. In other words Marx believed in a Millennium without God.
During the twentieth century a number of governments underwent Marxist-led revolutions that left up to 100 million people dead. The Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and others violently destroyed the existing capitalist structures through mass murder, purges, and gulags. By the mid-1960s, Marxist thinkers in America realized they had no hope of success in a country where the people were happy and successful. A growing and prosperous middle class was enjoying the “American dream.” Fortunately, the civil rights movement of the 1960s led by Dr. King did bring change and justice through peaceful means. It brought the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the Marxists are historically resilient, a social cancer that destroys the host and thereby, ultimately, destroys itself leaving death. Rather than abandon their plans for societal change, Marxist thinkers in America simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1990s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the oppressed based on racial and ethnic categories. For them, the new imbalance of power is between the whites and the non-whites. While Dr. King was looking for a society where people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” BLM makes skin color everything. Tell a BLM supporter that white lives matter too, and you will be in big trouble, maybe even violence.
For some CR theorists, even “white” science is suspect. James Lindsay writes, “Since modern science was predominantly produce by white, Western men, Critical Race Theory views science as a white and Western way of knowing. Critical Race Theory maintains that science encodes and perpetuates ‘white dominance’ and thus isn’t really fitting for black people who inhabit a culture of Blackness” (newdiscourses.com).
CRT is not a unifying movement but thrives on division and social anarchy. It is based on fanning the flames of racial unrest. Several states—Oklahoma, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Tennessee, and others—have drafted bills that ban the teaching of CRT. It is a national tragedy that Democrat lawmakers favor its teaching.
Believe it or not, CRT is not an idea that promotes liberty. It is against the idea of liberty and sees a free society as a way to structure and maintain inequities by convincing racial minorities not to agitate for radical racial identity politics. It is very different than the civil rights movement it incorrectly claims to continue.
Racism is wrong, as is the notion of racial superiority. The idea that whites are superior because they are white is to forget that Hitler and Stalin (as are most American mass murderers) were also white. The whites who made America great did so not because they were white but because of the Judeo-Christian values they held. These are values that are available to anyone and have nothing to do with skin color.
There is an internationalist conspiracy to remove America as a sovereign nation because America is the single most potent opposer to globalism. In his 1991 Bilderberger speech, David Rockefeller made it clear that he and his family are part of a “secret cabal” to overthrow America. And “I am proud of it,” he said. CRT is an effective way to tear down the American Republic and make way for the one-world government of the Antichrist (see Revelation 13). Fortunately many Americans, including notable black Americans, understand.
On April 28, 2021, Senator Tim Scott delivered the Republican response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress. Among other things, Scott who is a black American said, “America is not a racist country.”
Senator Scott said he was blessed “with a praying momma.” He bemoaned the closing of churches during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Becoming a Chrisian transformed my life, but for months too many churches were shut down.” Senator Scott said: “Black, Hispanic, white, and Asian, Republican and Democrat … we are not adversaries. We are family. We are all in this together, and we get to live in the greatest country on earth. … So I am more than hopeful. I am confident that our finest hour has yet to come.”
The world is in desperate straits but, “God is still on the throne and prayer changes things.” Jesus Christ is still saving souls and He hasn’t changed His mind about saving more—“red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.”
Larry Spargimino
July 7, 2022
Share This Post
Roe v. Wade Aftermath – a Lesson From The Ongoing War
While pro-lifers celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade—called by jurists “bad law”—abortion terrorists revealed their murderous rage.
The group Ruth Sent Us published the home addresses of six Supreme Court justices, leading to front-yard protests and threats against the justices and their families and suggested targeting the children of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Another group of pro-abortion thugs, Jane’s Revenge, attacked pro-life pregnancy centers. On June 15 this group published its manifesto promising that the attacks will increase and stated they “find joy” in creating fear and mayhem and promised a “Night of Rage” in which disgruntled abortion activists guaranteed to “unleash hell” and that “anything goes.” “We need to express this madness fully and with ferocity. We need to quit containing ourselves. We need them to be afraid of us.”
As Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel wrote, “Roe may be dead but Jezebel is still alive and well.”
Instead of condemning the senseless and destructive rage, President Biden has fueled the fire by blaming Trump’s pro-life court appointees and claiming that abortion is healthcare. In front of the Supreme Court Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined pro-choice protesters on the day justices debated the constitutionality of a piece of Louisiana legislation titled “Louisiana Unsafe Abortion Protection Act.”
With venom in his voice and a devilish look on his face Schumer yelled, “I want to tell you Neil Gorsuch, and you Brett Kavanaugh, you have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you, if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
The Court was hearing a challenge to a Louisiana law that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, a law opponents said would limit women’s access to abortion in the state.
If any one has ever had any doubts about the legitimacy of the pro-abortion crowd, all doubts should quickly vanish. This is a group that has far exceeded the limits of peaceful discourse and moral propriety.
Courage Is Not For the Faint-hearted
Larry Spargimino.......anuary 19, 2022
“Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions” (Dan. 6:16).
For entertainment and sport, lions were released in the Roman Coliseum, and the audiences cheered and laughed with insane glee, as Christian families were slaughtered and eaten alive by hungry lions. The babies were evidently sweet to the lions’ palettes, because they were the first to be devoured as the screaming mothers hopelessly tried to rescue their children from the ferocious beasts.
The Book of Daniel is, among other things, a book of courage, and has been an inspiration to Christians who have had to endure unbelievable hardship through the centuries at the hands of their tormentors. Jesus was always honest about the cost of following Him. On one occasion a “certain man” said, “Lord, I will follow thee whither soever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head”(Lk. 9:57-58).
Unconditional Obedience and the Way of the Cross
In his book, Church of Cowards: A Wake-up Call To Complacent Christians (Regnery, 2020), Matt Walsh tells the story of a group of Egyptian Christians in buses headed to a monastery in the desert where they were scheduled to have a retreat.
Suddenly, the bus was stopped by armed Islamists who had blocked the roadway. They boarded the bus, pulled all the passengers out of the bus, and lined them up next to the roadway. The passengers were asked two questions: “Are you a Christian?” “Will you abandon Christ and convert to Islam?” When each passenger admitted they are Christians, and refused to convert to Islam, they were shot in the head or in the throat—everyone, men, women and children.
Supposing you were on that bus? You are asked, “Are you a Christian?” Your heart speeds up. Your mind races. The thought flashes through your mind that you only have to utter a single-syllable word, “no,” to escape. A stream of thoughts flash through your mind. The militant who asked you the question is growing impatient and jams the muzzle of the Kalashnikov into your throat. The man draws near to your face. His foul breath is over-whelming. “Are you a Christian?” he snarls…….
Sometimes courage is not demonstrated by standing strong with a gun barrel in your face. It may be demonstrated through prayer and praise in impossible circumstances.
For most of his 18 years in a Chinese Communist labor camp, Pastor George Chen was not called to preach from a pulpit. He found himself standing deep in a prison cesspool every day of the week, shoveling human excrement from 60,000 prisoners to be used for fertilizer.
At first, Pastor Chen abhorred the work, but he soon realized that the revolting stench meant that no guards or other prisoners went near the pit, allowing George to pray and worship God in complete privacy and solitude. Almost every day he sang his favorite hymn, “In the Garden.” He found a sweetness in the air. His environment was transformed into a special place where the Holy Spirit came down as Pastor Chen communed daily with Jesus Christ (asiaharvest.org).
"Your children need their mother.”
Paul Hattaway, originally from New Zealand, has faithfully brought millions of Bibles to Christians living in China. He is intimately acquainted with the house church movement and regarded as a model for suffering Christians. In over thirty years of dodging border guards, his gait is still as quick and silent, as it was when he first began as a courier for God. He was recently a speaker in a home meeting talking about Jesus’ command that we take up our crosses and follow Him.
The guards asked Sister Yuen, “Doesn’t your God want you to take care of your own children? You can return home today, right now. Sign this. Your children need their mother.” The guards gave Sister Yuen a pen, and slipped a sheet of paper between the bars of her cell. This would be a victory for these two guards. The prison chief would surely reward them for getting this stubborn Christian woman to deny that she would follow Jesus any longer.
Sister Yuen took the sheet of paper and quickly wrote a few words on it. She handed it to the guards. They happily took the paper and read what she wrote. Their faces were suddenly contorted with anger. She had written in large letters: JESUS CAN NEVER BE REPLACED! EVEN MY OWN CHILDREN CAN NOT REPLACE JESUS!”
Sister Yuen was sentenced to spend twenty three more years in prison. By the time she was released her two children were adults. They had been raised by the atheist state. She was able to find both her daughter and her son, and was able to reconcile with her daughter who, initially, did not understand why she chose Jesus over her two children. Her son, however, had become a police officer. He was loyal to the Communist Party and did not want to have anything to do with his mother or her God. This, however, is not the end of the story.
Hattaway says that after the presentation that he gave in the home meeting, a Christian couple, well known in the Christian community, angrily approached him and said: “Your story about Sister Yuen is stupid! If we were in that woman’s position, we would have signed the paper. Of course God wanted her to take care of her own children.” Hattaway writes;
“I was astonished that a pair of professing Christians could openly admit that they would willingly deny their faith under pressure, and that they didn’t see anything wrong with that. I asked if they were concerned about the words of Jesus, who said, ‘Whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven’” (Matt. 10:33). (Paul Hattaway, Asian Harvest: An Autobiography, pp. 265-266).
The America We Live In: Orwell’s 1984 Revisited
Orwell’s 1984, is a dystopian novel about a possible future society. The main character, Winston Smith, brings upon himself the rage of the ruling elite by insisting that 2 + 2 = 4, but changes his mind and finally admits that 2 + 2 = 5 after being subjected to extreme torture and an emotional breakdown. Perhaps many American Christians are on the verge of such a breakdown right now.
Today, the party of the ruling elite in America claims that it is the “party of science.” Yet that party holds that there are dozens of genders, that men can menstruate and get pregnant, and that affirming that 2 +2 = 4 is a racist statement. Does the church in America today have the courage to stand strong in such a milieu of madness?
The Underground Church and the Back To Jerusalem Movement
A large segment of the underground church is driven by a vision for world evangelism, especially those nations in the “10-40 window”—Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran… The Back To Jerusalem Movement is sending Chinese missionaries along the ancient Silk Road westward. Starting from Xi’an, China, the Silk Road ends in the city of Antioch, where the term “Christian” was first used (Acts 11:26). The Silk Road was used for both international trade and missionary access until the year 1453, when the Ottoman Empire, under Suleiman, closed it down. With the rise of Islam the fast-moving, hard-fighting armies of Islam dominated the religious landscape of the entire Silk Road.
In his excellent book, China and End-time Prophecy: How God is Using the Red Dragon To Fulfill His Ultimate Purposes (Whitaker House, 2021) Eugene Bach (a pseudonym) describes the amazing missions outreach of Chinese Christians in a hostile environment. Recently two Chinese missionaries seeking to fulfill the Back To Jerusalem vision were martyred by Islamic militants in Pakistan, but not before they had learned the language, won the hearts of the people, and started Bible studies in several areas. Similar reports are coming in from Iran and other “10-40” nations along the Silk Road. Courage is not for the faint-hearted, but not everyone is fainthearted.
Larry Spargimino...Sept. 15, 2021
There are some things that are clearly impossible. Jeremiah the prophet asked, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to doing evil?” (Jer. 13:23). There is something else that is impossible: A communist utopia.
The Scourge of Communism
In all its years, communism has left a trail of murder and mayhem. Communists try to persuade people that communism is the answer, but as people give it a try and want something better, communism turns brutal.
In the book, Why Not Kill Them All? sociologist Daniel Chirot and psychologist Clark McCauley write that especially in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in “the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who should be suppressed because they were objectively and historically wrong.”
This is the uniform conclusion of scholars from a variety of backgrounds.
Rudolph Rummel’s 1994 book, Death by Government, claims that 110 million people were killed by communists from 1900 to 1987.
In 2010, Steven Rosefielde wrote Red Holocaust concerning which he says, “Twentieth and twenty-first century communism is a failed experiment in social engineering that needlessly killed approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more. These high crimes against humanity constitute a Red Holocaust that exceeds the combined carnage of the French Reign of Terror, Ha Shoah [the Nazi-fueled Holocaust], Japan’s Asian holocaust, and all combat deaths in world War I and II combined.”
In a Wikipedia entry titled “Mass killing under communist regimes,” many examples are given to show how communism, and communist leaders, will exterminate the opposition. A vast array of terms have been coined to describe the grisly slaughter of the opposition: “mass killing,” “genocide,” “politicide,” “democide,” “classicide,” “holocaust,” “crimes against humanity,” and many others. A number of authors write that the number of victims of communist regimes has been “extremely extensive and ideologically based.” The Black Book of Communism claims an association between communism and criminality: “Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” Should we be surprised? These people are atheists and have no morality. Life is cheap. Their dialectical ideology is their “god.”
Mao’s Cavalier Attitude Toward Nuclear War and the Death of 300 Million People
The Soviet leaders of the old Cold War era were guided by a degree of moderation, pragmatism and even “moral restraint”—I am speaking in comparative terms—that is not evidenced by China’s leaders today. They are living under the militant shadow of Mao Zedong. In November of 1957, a conference of communist and workers’ parties from around the world was held in Moscow. Mao revealed his heart when he said: “Since our power is so strong, why do we still hold talks with the United States? Just fight! What’s the big deal about nuclear war? There are 2.7 billion people in the world and even if half of them died, another half remained alive. There are 600 million people in China and 300 million will be left. Then what am I afraid of?” (LTC Robert Maginnis, Give Me Liberty, pp. 129–130).
Kind of scary, isn’t it? The death of 300 million people by nuclear war is no big deal, according to Mao. How do you fight an enemy who has no regard for 300 million people? I would suggest a little education. (I am again speaking in figurative terms. Where Mao is, the only education is by divine wrath. There is no graduation) Did he not realize the worldwide effects of a nuclear exchange and its deleterious effects for the next 1,700 years? Probably not. Mao had a dislike for educated people, like doctors and engineers. In the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), Mao revealed his ignorance.
How much of this kind of thinking is in the heads of the shakers and movers in China’s military today? In January of 2019, news.com.au/technology reported that “Beijing has a devastating plan to force the world out of the East and South China Seas—and it could cost the U.S. 10,000 lives. Rear Admiral Lou Yuan told an audience in Shenzhen, that the ongoing disputes over the ownership of the East and South China Seas could be resolved by sinking two of America’s super carriers, each carrying a crew of 5,000. Beijing has annexed several reefs in the South China Sea—territory claimed by several nearby nations—engaging in an enormous geo-engineering project to build artificial islands upon which it has placed heavily fortified airfields and ports.
LTC Robert Maginnis zeroes in on the real issue when he writes: “The U.S. threatens communist China on many fronts, but the worst is truly existential for the communist regime: ideological. America stands for human rights, freedom of speech, and an assortment of liberties—all values and principles that Beijing’s communist tyrants opposed because, should those intangibles become standard fare among the Chinese people, the CCP won’t remain in power” (Give Me Liberty, Not Marxism)
With good reason, China is more worried about America’s Christian writers who speak the truth about China’s antichrist-style government than about America’s military! The military can be shackled by godless leaders in the White House. God’s truth can’t, and it will eventually prevail.
Communism in Latin America and Cuba
According to Daniel DiMartino, writing for economics21.org, Venezuela had one of the most robust economies in the hemisphere until communist leaders Hugo Chavez and later Nicolas Maduro implemented their socialist policies: widespread nationalization of private industry, currency and price controls, and the fiscally irresponsible expansion of welfare programs. The country today is in shambles.
The “woke” crowds and some American leaders on the progressive left—the same ideologues who idolize Mao—have cast Fidel Castro in a favorable light, claiming he brought prosperity and gain to the people of Cuba. But a closer scrutiny shows he was a dictator whose security apparatus controlled and terrorized his people even while dispensing free healthcare and education, a profoundly mixed legacy which has polarized opinion about Castro.
“As other countries in the region turned away from authoritarian rule, only Fidel Castro’s Cuba continued to repress virtually all civil and political rights,” wrote Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. Castro was a dictator who hounded his critics, scorned elections, and ran a brutal police state. Peaceful attempts at democratic reform, such as the Varela project, triggered swift crackdowns, including the so-called Black Spring of 2003.
Yet, Castro is loved by BLM, a pro-Marxist racist organization seeking to divide people and destroy the American republic.
Want proof? Here it is. As reported by Peter Hasson for Fox News, following Castro’s death, a BLM post said: “We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante.” In the post, BLM also expressed gratitude to Castro for harboring Assata Shakur, a convicted cop-killer who fled to Cuba after she escaped from prison in 1979. “As a Black network committed to transformation, we are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us.” This darling of BLM was convicted in the first-degree murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973.
There are several groups in Cuba seeking deliverance from communist oppression, all reported on by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a research and human rights nonprofit devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world. One group that is typical of the struggle against communism in Cuba is the San Isidro Movement, a group of Cuban artists, journalists, and academics formed in 2018 to protest the government’s increased censorship. The group formed as a reaction to Decree 349, a law that sought to require that artistic activity had to be authorized in advance by the Cuban Ministry of Culture. The group took its name from the San Isidro area of Havana where it was formed.
Isn’t this exactly what is happening in America—increasing censorship. I pastored for a while in the Florida Keys. Our church was less than a hundred miles from Havana. Castro was no friend of anyone except those motivated by a satanic ideology that makes sinful man the master of his destiny.
This foolish idea was set forth in National Geographic (April 2017, p. 40): “Like any other species, we are the product of millions of years of evolution. Now we’re taking matters into our own hands.”
We must pray for the billions who are living under the boot of communism, and especially for our country and the growing numbers of deluded individuals who are embracing Marxism. One day the rebellion will end. “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them” (Jude 14–15).
Date:10/11/20
Series: Exodu...Passage: Exodus 20:22-23:19
Speaker: Jeff Thompson
As we prepare to study a section of Exodus known as "The Book of the Covenant", Pastor Jeff shares challenges raised by scholars and walks us through some key concepts to keep in mind when studying Scripture.
And we're going to be getting into a very different kind of message today, we're getting into a section of scripture that has a lot of unique challenges. And so I have to spend a whole message getting you ready for that section of scripture. This is going to be a little bit like a seminary class, but it's going to be an opportunity to learn some valuable principles about how we approach studying the Bible. If you love the Bible or if you're new to the Bible, whatever it is, I'm probably going to say something that's going to make you feel uncomfortable today.
OK, don't cancel me before the message is over, OK? Don't get up in a grand show of disgust at my heresy. Wait and see where it's going. That's just a general good rule when you hear me teach. If you think I'm being heretical, just give me five minutes.
I'll bring it back. I'll get you back. So I just want to give you that heads up. The Book of the Covenant is the term used by scholars to refer to the section of scripture between Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 22, through Exodus, Chapter 23, verse 19.
And the term comes from Exodus 24 seven, which is on your outlines where we are told that Moses took the Book of the Covenant and read in the hearing of the people.
This section of scripture describes civil wars that were followed by the Israelites in order that they might fulfill their covenant with the Lord, wherein they would be his people and he would be their God. In Chapter 19, we read about how the Israelites reached Mount Sinai and God spoke to Moses. The Lord revealed to him the offer of this covenant with Israel. And here's what happened in Exodus 19, also on your outlines. So Moses came and called for the elders of the people and laid before them all these words which the Lord commanded him.
Then all the people answered together and said all that the Lord has spoken, we will do. That was part of the Covenant agreement. The official covenant ceremony is going to come up later, but that's the gist of it. They understood that part of being God's people would include living as God's people. Crazy thought, right? If you're going to call yourself the people of Iowa, you actually have to live in a way that reflects the fact that you're the people of Iowa.
A very obvious point, but one that to this day, a lot of people find very offensive. What do you mean?
Just because I call myself a Christian, I have to live a certain way. That's crazy. Is it? Is it, though? So write this down. The purpose of the Book of the Covenant was to help Israel apply the values of the Ten Commandments to everyday life.
Its purpose was to help Israel apply the values of the Ten Commandments to everyday life. That's the idea. The Ten Commandments speak to every area of life through the values behind them that can be translated to every area of life. Now, I need to let you know that among biblical scholars, the Book of the Covenant is highly controversial and debated for several reasons that I'm going to get into in a minute. And the reason we're going to spend some time talking about this stuff is, again, it's going to teach us some principles about how to study the Bible.