Hello everyone, Michael here, welcoming you to episode number 12 in our multi-part series involving a thorough consideration of the 18th chapter of the book of the Revelation.
This is the Bible Prophecy Masterclass, and in this presentation we will continue our evaluation of America the Beautiful as we take a look at another crucial element of her convoluted ethos, as exhibited by her abhorrent and therefore unbiblical double standard, fleshed out in its implementation of hellish Jim Crow laws driven by hate-filled bigotry, rooted in racist notions of white supremacy and always applied with a force that could be deadly,
which were particularly prevalent in the white American South. Jim Crow and the unrighteous double standards. In the Old Testament, during the administration of the Law of Moses, God made it abundantly clear that His people were to be governed in the main by one set of rules and regulations that was to be equally applicable to any foreigner living among them. That principle set the tone as well for those of us living in this, the church age.
It should therefore have been the guiding light for and the principle that shaped the relationships and social interactions of any people, particularly those who call themselves Christians, as well as the Israelites to whom they were originally given.
Licking its wounds and waving bloody shirts and such following the war to eradicate one evil, the new nation simply rolled over and adopted another in the form of Jim Crow, a hellish practice spanning and filling the gap between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Civil Rights Movement and marches of the 1960s. During the years of Jim Crow, the victorious North soon fell under a spirit of complacency, becoming more and more compliant with white Southern conservative demands.
Its once sympathetic churches, having grown weary of the plight of the African and his struggle for equality, the North social conscience died as it looked the other way, while Southern whites, aided by their churches, freely vented their frustration over their loss of the newly freed Negroes, see again, sidebar below, Francis Swaggart, P. 38. In so many words, even after the war, the general attitude of the South and its churches remained, God and his mission to save souls be damned.
Toward this end, the South terrorized, harassed and disenfranchised the Africans in every way possible, even to the point of much unjustifiable bloodshed, including hangings, for practically any reason, against an otherwise defenseless people. This they would do, unabated for the next 100 years or so, following emancipation, through implementation of a system of laws and regulations known as the Black Codes, see the sidebars below, the Black Codes, and George Wallace, P. 99.
Making matters worse, notwithstanding the findings and pronouncements of Lewis and Clark, see the sidebar below, how wrong they were, P. 100. It was not as if resources and such in the new nation were scarce, or that the land could not support a free people other than the Caucasian races, by no means as history has shown, and continues to show, to this very day.
At the same time as Africans were being brought in and subjected to only the most inhumane treatment as unpaid laborers of the land, men and women of white complexion were being recruited and brought over from all across Europe to people, settle, and to own the new land, through helps that included land grants and land grant colleges that taught them how to farm the land.
In addition, a project proposed by the victorious North, led by a generous Sherman as part of a kind of post-war reparations initiative that would have set aside a sizable track of land along the eastern seaboard, so as to allow the newly freed Negroes to adjust and grow following life as slaves, was soundly and roundly overthrown by angry bigoted southerners.
For a nation professing itself to be Christian, having the hellish past that it has, this type of initiative, a definite biblical principle, much overlooked by white America's Christian community, given its non-applicability to them, would have been not only highly profitable and beneficial to the Africans, but absolutely essential to a demonstration of the reorientation of the thinking of the nation along biblical lines,
and thus, most importantly, for the badly tarnished image and cause of the Christ they had for hundreds of years neglected to serve, biblically. In later years, black middle classes that managed to thrive despite the obstacles of prevailing racism would be viciously attacked and violently destroyed by jealous, hostile mobs of white rednecks in states like Oklahoma, Tulsa, and Florida, Rosemead, if one recalls correctly.
This having been done within full view of the Almighty, and the new nation having failed, or effectively refused to learn from the lessons of the Civil War, set the stage and atone whereby God was once more able to demonstrate before the eyes of all the world the power endemic to His submissive faithful servants, no matter how small their number, no matter how great or how powerful the opposition, as was the case with the nation of Israel's liberation from the oppression of godless Egypt,
so likewise the merciless might of the new nation proved itself no match for the Almighty's matchless determination.
His desire was to see that the African was free from a grossly hypocritical system of injustice, which had seized the blessings of the American territories, allocating them only to themselves, even when, unlike as was the case with the Exodus, that determination was administered in passivity, orchestrated and led by a single preacher in the person of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King did his work in the face of unrelenting hostility, managed and executed by the restless and tireless, white American southern redneck, armed with bullets, the cold sting of powerful water cannon and the ferocious bite of his canine bitches. Thus the shame and the sham of the self-proclaimed godly, self-righteous white American continued unabated. It was driven by worldly concerns, not by true spirituality.
That temporal lust was in turn fueled by a greed and an avaricious appetite for worldly chattels that demanded an unwarranted, unbridled hatred of others to justify a heinous misuse and abuse of their bodies and souls.
Bolstered on the strength and broad shoulders of patent, unbridled racism roughly 20 years after having returned home from pouncing upon and trouncing the evil, unrighteous Hitler, along with the imperialist Hirohito, emperor of the Japanese, that shame and that sham was exposed and lay bare for all the world to see, as an era of some of the worst injustices ever perpetrated by man upon men was brought to an end, though not wiped off the slate in its entirety.
The expose of such blatant national hypocrisy was then, is now, equally a glaring embarrassment to have on the international resume of a nation so blessed, and self-righteous in its own eyes. It was an especially sickening sight before the eyes of the god of all heaven and earth, who the nation, these United States of America, claimed to serve.
In addition, this is an observation which the reviner, king, was able to exploit and use to great advantage in his quest to right, and to end the centuries-old wrongs accorded his people by the self-righteous nation, which based its ideals and ideology on a perverted view of the word of the living god, all men are equal. And they taught in theory, except if they are not white, they taught in practice and do maintain even to this very day.
In point of fact, the recent election of a black man into the ranks of its top leadership at the Southern Baptist Convention does little to convince informed outside observers of any sincere desire on the parts of white Southern Baptists, for instance, to submit entirely to the will of God, i.e. specifically, to embrace all men, black men, as equals.
This convention was, is an overwhelmingly Caucasian evangelistic orchestration originally formulated around the religious ambitions of Southern slave-holding white Celtic farmers, hell-bent on preaching their brand of the gospel around the world, while at the same time maintaining a devilish grip on their slaves, who were simultaneously, deliberately misled and systematically denied the truth of the gospel.
With their churches as segregated today and as bigoted as ever, it might be argued, and that rightly so, that even God Himself cannot get in, behold, I am standing at the door knocking, Jesus said, and is saying to all of His end-times churches. See the sidebar, ambassadors for Christ's servants of the devil. P.100 God cannot stomach, nor does He condone, this type of compromise and hypocrisy, particularly in a people professing themselves to be His.
Understandably, one may well be wondering, still, is all of this alone enough to qualify America as the Babylon in question, as presented in Chapter 18 of the Lord's Revelation? The answer is a resounding most emphatic yes, if only to the degree that it points to, and or underscores the presence of the festering pus of a broader, more heinous sore. A nation of professing Christians, having this kind of legacy, has some profoundly serious underlying theological and spiritual issues.
Reread the preface to this treatise. John's profile for her is certainly very much more detailed.
Nonetheless, one can and must insist that being the hellish institution that it has been since its inception some 400 years ago, whatever its many good points, and or benevolent exterior, built upon a foundation of biblical principles though it was indeed, it can no less easily qualify as a spiritual pariah nation, reclusive, outcast, a pious piranha monstrosity of the sort that God loves to loathe, piranha, flesh-eating fish, with a voracious appetite that will tear into anything.
There is not one element of John's description that does not fit the foot of the United States of America. Today, to a T, remember, God repeatedly reminded the nation of Israel that their selection as the people of God had nothing to do with any supposed righteousness he saw in either them or the nation's leadership. They were, in fact, a despicable people.
Jesus said as much of his churches, Multitudes will be rejected and banished to the eternal flames of the lake of fire, in spite of justifiable claims to a lot of good and noble things they will have done in his name.
All things considered then, in spite of the fact that Christianity has never enjoyed greater freedom at any time in history under any other banner, in any other place on earth, the U.S. in God's eyes is, in fact, somewhat, perhaps very much, akin to the Roman Catholic religious harlot out of whose matrix all the Protestant denominations were birthed. America has a reputation for being a Christian nation, although as a country spiritually, it is not in the least a pleasant sight.
On high, like the church at Sardis, her churches are stone cold. Like the Laodiceans, she, on account of her lukewarm churches, has the relish, the stench, filth, the desirability of puke. He surveys continuously the hearts and minds of all the men and women, churched and unchurched, Christians and non-Christians, of every nationality, of this, unquestionably, the greatest of all nations.
Hence then, when the following, relative to America now in its modernity, is factored into the equation, real possibility begins to emerge upon which to base and build a case for America being John's Babylon the Great, per Revelation 18. As was stated already, relative to the people who inundate the nation, their thoughts, actions, habits, attitudes, etc., etc., regardless of skin color, God cannot possibly be pleased with what he sees in this country.
On both the church and secular sides of the ledger, there may be many good reasons for this, but for sure chief among them on the godless, thankless, secular front would have to be, 1. An increasing publicly displayed anti-God sentiment, and a mounting animosity for all things not religious, mind you, but for all things Christian, often led by governments and courts at all levels, the basis of which owe their very being to, and are rooted in the unseen hand of God acting in its favor.
2. Government court-backed school systems which openly and actively seek constantly, willfully, and intentionally to shield the nation's young from any exposure, on public property, to knowledge of the true and living God. 3. Mounting widely accepted rise in open, publicly displayed sexual immorality, including adultery, fornication, and homosexuality, as well as widespread acceptance of same-sex marriages, both as a way of and as a form of recreation and entertainment.
4. Abortion, extermination, or the outright murder of the innocent unborn, for practically any reason, even after a late-term, live birth.
5. While being perhaps the primary beneficiary of all the knowledge and benefits gleaned and gained over the past 106 years of educational and technological advances, failure and a wanton refusal to acknowledge the evidence of the unseen hand of a supreme, intelligent designer behind and upholding the entirety of the created order, all that makes up our world and universe, hereby denying him the glory and recognition he demands and deserves.
In so doing, the intellectual, secular, non-Christian, American effectively makes himself greater than his maker, doing more in the end to degenerate him and his holy name before the eyes of the watching world than the most backward of utterly pagan nations.
6. Shameless ingratitude to the Almighty. In light of all he has done to make this nation the standout that it is, taking or giving credit to themselves for a work neither they nor any other people could ever have affected on their own, left to their own devices. 7. The entire world looks to her for guidance in the areas of religion and economics, as well as politics. These are the kinds of things that God cannot stand in any people.
Nevertheless, that which makes America a harlot and therefore more so the object of his ire after the order of Babylon the Great, however, is, ironically, yes, the Church, due to its infidelity to the Son and therefore, by extension, their abject failure, refusal in what should have been their role as missionaries to the world in the cause of building the Body of Christ.
It belongs to him. With Bibles aplenty, many wide open in the midst of much quoting, especially in times of trouble or during dark days of uncertainty over the future, it has yet been led, since colonialism, more by secular, worldly concerns than by adherence to the things of God. It is to be presented to him as a portion, all things considered, of all those who make up his bride, some day, and yet he cannot get its attention.
Thus, he cannot get the Churches of the U.S. to submit to his will, without the use of absolute force, akin to the Civil War. See the sidebar below, the reckless, foolish, new nation, P97.
Sidebar Number 1 Armageddon and Brazil Rising Heady, greed-driven industrialists, led chiefly by ravenous profiteers and gluttonous false-profits at the top of the investment banking sector, aided and pampered by poor governmental judgment and or oversight that was non-existent, have landed us in some rough, uncharted waters, at a most dangerous time in the history of mankind and of these United States.
If, as may not have been the case, so much during the Enron-MCI-WorldCom era, the 80s thrift debacles and bailouts, or the engineered fuel crisis of the 70s, if this leaves us near the throw of some reminder of the Great Depression, what might this signal as well in terms of our proximity to Armageddon?
Consider the many and varied assortment of elements of our times that bear simultaneously strange, remarkable, and alarming similarities to those of the Biblical prophets, most notably, perhaps, the Book of the Revelation. As of August 22, 2008, many, if not most, observers and analysts are ready to concede that the Great Melting Pot may well be on its last leg. Much speculation swirls as to where the next great center of power and finance might emerge.
Britain has even been bantered about as a possible contender. Others see China on the pedestal, unlikely as that may be, or maybe not. Again, as of August 22, 2008, NPR radio sang eloquently in tones and overtures extolling exciting prospects regarding a Brazil rising, while at the same time citing, with melancholy, Brazil's counter-melody of many counterbalancing woes, not the least of which is rampant, rabid corruption in government.
Amid many other impressive pluses, CBS's 60 Minutes, led by host Steve Croft, revealed in its 12-12-2010 broadcast that Brazil has surpassed the U.S. as the leading supplier feeding China's ravenous appetite for growth. Other analysts, task observers, point out that Brazil has every ambition to become a global superpower in a very short period of time. God, however, begs to differ. The collapse of Babylon the Great promises to create a void that none can ever fill.
This regurgitates the question, if not a current power, a potentially emerging power, or an old ancient power reborn, who then is this Babylon the Great? Without question, the world is well on the way to Armageddon, but why can't we accurately identify her? Or can't we? Sidebar, Berto, a nation with teeth like swords, what generation of any nation has done more to distance itself from the values, good or bad, of its parents, than have the young of our day?
What generation of men has done, or does more, to trumpet their righteousness as a nation and that of their founding fathers, before God, as the basis for God's blessing upon them, than have the Americans specifically, the white Anglo-Americans? What generation is more prone to remind itself, and to profit more from the notion that war is good for the economy, than do the Americans? Babylon is a warmonger like no other.
War is good for the economy, she beams with assurance, hereby signaling her intent to stay actively involved in battle, somewhere, one way or the other, on one front or another, at whatever the cost. Sidebar, Ner-3, the reckless, foolish new nation. As Christians, students of the word survey the horizons.
When they weigh the events and actions of our times, it becomes increasingly clear that having shot this new nation by its own hand, with its own bullet, having shaken it to its bigoted, egotistical, egocentric core by a hand armed with only a Bible, having thereby exposed its weakness to the eyes of all humanity, God may very well be on the verge of, once more, in these latest of times, shaking the reckless, foolish new nation with its lackadaisical, lackluster, spiritually bankrupt Christians.
This time, his approach will not be in passivity and peace. It is not entirely unlikely, nor is it inconceivable, but that his weapon of choice, intermediate to the ultimate, which brings about our final annihilation as a nation, will without doubt be two groups of people, either of which, without question, he would joyfully write off as hopelessly inferior, namely, the 12 million or so illegal immigrants, supposedly,
predominantly Mexican, who having cleverly, perhaps, seized the moment, at the nation's point of greed and never-ending thirst for something for nothing, i.e., cheap labor, have sought with measurable success to force a change in American politics, government, and constitutions so as to accommodate their being and demands.
The second group stationed and positioned dangerously amongst us within that 12 million, working in concert but independently, is the perpetually angry, hostile, implacable, radical Middle Eastern Muslim, who seeks to dominate the world, by force and by terror, as opposed to, by reason and goodwill, having awakened enough from his centuries-old technological slumber,
only enough to see the advantage of a weakness in America's unquenchable need, and whose unflinching desire is to see the U.S. and Israel obliterated. He has at his disposal, on two fronts, the basis upon which to, eventually, affect that end. 1. Nuclear Generating Stations. All they need is enough centrifuges to spin their waste so as to make bomb-grade plutonium themselves, or to get someone else, like Russia, to sell it to them.
Word is, according to a website news article on Yahoo! recently, European powers like the British, the French, and Germany are considering doing the honors. And 2. Oil with which to finance their ambitions. Iran, a chief player in the deadly, pernicious game of international terrorism, is Dover 2 in exports globally, behind Dover B1 Saudi Arabia.
Sidebar, Noura 4. The Might of America. In reality, it was neither the greatness, nor the toughness of the American, during World War II that got them through that time of global conflict. If the Japanese could ill afford to follow through on their ambition to bring the U.S. to its knees, and under their Emperor's control, Hitler had everything necessary. The world's first and only jet-powered airplane, twice as fast as any propeller-driven fighter, none could touch it or compete with it.
The V-1, and prospective V-9 missile, their take and upgrade to American Robert Goddard's invention and proposal, officially poo-pooed and flatly rejected by the U.S. military. A long-range bomber, having a hang time of 36 hours, flown for 32 hours to within 12 miles of NYC, then back to Germany, undetected by the U.S. military. Thus, he had as well, the element of surprise.
Perhaps, however, the biggest feather in his cap, particularly after driving the British out of Finland, giving him free access to the heavy water he so craved, was Einstein, the Jew. It was his mind, more than that of any other physicist, which served as the key that unlocked the door to thermonuclear energy. Albeit, God be thanked, on American shores as opposed to those of his German homeland.
Not realizing his value and future, Hitler put a $5,000 price tag on his head, payable to anyone bringing him in debt. With all these perks and benefits fully developed and at his disposal, nothing could have stopped him from taking the world he envisioned would one day bow to his master race.
But for their combined bungling and Hitler's inability to predict the future, or to foresee his own destiny, as well as his inability to accurately gauge the usefulness of new ideas and machines at his disposal, America, together with the world at large, would be a totally different place, at this hour, subject once again to the will of foreign powers.
To the might of the US notwithstanding, she virtually aided the enemy through her own propensity for bungling and gross miscalculations and mishandling of intelligence, or information, on a scale as great as that of her mortal enemies, whom, obviously, she completely misjudged.
Sidebar, Yver 5 Francis Swaggart, a recent broadcast aired and heard near Wichita, Calles on August 30, 2013, 10.45 a.m. over the Sun Life Broadcasting Network, run by the Jimmy Swaggart family, illustrates the determination of white Southerners to play down and or justify the evils perpetrated by whites against blacks and others. Blacks are slaves to hatred, all the participants in the program agreed, led by Francis Swaggart, wife of Jimmy Swaggart, that program was Francis and Friends.
She ended the program that Friday with the promise that she would be back on Monday, September 2, 2013, to give the nation and the world a lesson on slavery in America, and in turn, by inference, addressing and straightening out the misnotion of an America founded by white men who suppressed blacks. One of the younger Swaggart's interrupted to interject his authoritative observance of hatred in the eyes and faces of all blacks he saw in attendance at President Obama's inauguration.
Wonder why that hatred was there. In subsequent broadcasts, Mrs. Swaggart and her cast went on to stress her determination and intent to justify, based upon revisionist history or American history rewritten to fit a white Southern worldview. Never to rectify the injustices, she knows that she and the whole of the white South have accorded to Africans and American Indians.
Blacks just need to get over it, she lamented with reference to African America's prevailing determination to seek justice, inferring openly and without equivocation that neither she nor the white Southerner, Christian or otherwise, will ever allow that to be. There were and are no inequities in the educational systems of America based on race, she stated. Having grown up poor, her white skin afforded her no special privileges that were not open to blacks, Hispanics, Indians or Eskimos.
She lied and assured the public around the world. This logic parallels that of the likes of Dr. John MacArthur, voice of the Grace to You broadcast. Contrary to and contradicting Mrs. Swaggart's claim that African Americans have always profited from the same educational opportunities and experiences to which she has been privy, white Southern Christian radio commentator, the late Ben Hayden, based in Chattanooga, TN, commented in his most recent broadcast, Sunday,
11-10-2013, about first-hand observations of patent discrimination and inequity promoted by bigoted whites who saw to it that white schools were equipped with new, up-to-date textbooks, while black, Latino and other minority schools were served only outdated textbooks, hereby ensuring that all minority students were as a whole and as a class. The white schools were not only educated, but also educated, and were also educated, educationally behind, or inferior, to their white counterparts.
Mr. Hayden appears to be one of the few, if not the only white Southern Christian willing and daring enough to step out and speak publicly against the wrongs he knows to have been and other minorities as well. Sidebar number six, the Black Codes. The Black Codes or laws were the backbone of the Jim Crow system. They created a double standard by which white bigots sought to limit and set severe restrictions on the upward mobility of the African,
depriving him of any hope or prospect of excelling, socially, educationally, politically and economically. Thus, the new nation under God, contrary to the express teaching of the Scriptures, such that the people of God, with only the rarest of exceptions, were to have one law for both themselves and for any Gentiles who chose to live among them, sought to operate under two sets of laws, one for whites and one for blacks, each hatched and set in motion by whites only.
Hence, for one century following emancipation, when all men should have been free, the new nation was one of, in God's eyes, the unsightly double standard. In addition, one might well argue that, during those years, before and beyond, white America has tried in vain to endear itself to the service of two masters, one God, the other, Mammon. Clearly Mammon has been their God of choice. Sidebar seven, George Wallace.
This man was an arrogant white Southerner, a fervent racist, a committed bigot and segregationist who was also governor of Alabama in 1963. As such, he made the following statement, as he blocked the door of Foster Auditorium on the campus of the University of Alabama, in defiance of the federal government's efforts to desegregate southern white schools.
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. An oxymoron if ever there was one, given that his own words and actions were cold-hearted, calculated acts of tyranny. Sidebar, how wrong they were. Interestingly, Lewis and Clark are said to have valued the land as worthless, from sea to shining sea.
Modern physicists and scientists as recently as 125 years ago, jointly thumbed their erudite noses at the mere thought of there being substance in the world of the unseen, as of Oros 6, 2013. Much less a God who created everything there is, out of nothing. None saw the basis of all that is substantive and quantifiable as being in the realm where one cannot see, even when their own eyes and empirical evidences were proving otherwise remember.
Successful, prominent men in business and industry jointly concluded in the early days of the 1900s that there was nothing new to be discovered, or that could be invented. There were no new plateaus upon which to climb. The world around us has nothing more to offer, they concluded basically. How much more wrong could an arrogant people so educated have been? Sidebar number 8. Ambassadors for Christ, servants to the devil.
Is it not a striking coincidence that, with the Supreme Holy One of the Jews as its professed God, and His Word as their guide, peaceful resolution within this first of its kind nation, for the eradication of the ignominy of its humiliation of the African through the twin horrors of slavery and later, Jim Crow legislation, could not be reached as much through reason, as by war with itself, or with the ballot as easily as with the bullet.
Still, it could be argued, the problem here for white America may not so much be what was done, as that what was done was perpetrated in the name of God, contrary to what they knew was the will of God by those whose destiny from the time they left England was to be His representatives or ambassadors.
In the New World, a New World that saw them diabolically abandon the will of God, in the face of Almighty God, in favor of serving themselves, putting their interests ahead of His, in order to placate their own greed and thirst for wealth and worldly possessions. Hereby, as in the case of Catholicism, the God of the Bible was and still is subtly, perhaps, yet grossly misrepresented among them. And there you have it, my friends.
We have reached the conclusion of yet another telling and revealing study in the Bible Prophecy Masterclass. Please give us a like and make plans to join us again next time for episode number 13, as we journey through the book, Judgment Day, Volume 1, Prelude to Armageddon, Part 1, The United States of America in Bible Prophecy. Until we meet again on the next podcast, may God richly bless you.