The Five Woes, Beck and Limbaugh

A friend of mine complained recently that God had forgotten to mention the United States in prophecy and could not understand why.  Well I can tell you.  He didn't forget. It's there if you'll read it without the convoluted attempts by theologians to hide what the prophecies really have to say.

Take Habakkuk. Habakkuk's job was to warn the Israelites that a conqueror was coming that would sweep over all and punish God's people for drifting off to worship idols.  Now this was a big deal because idol worship in those days meant more than wearing one glove and a Michael Jackson t-shirt.  The worshipers of Baal and Molech caused the deaths of tens of thousands of worshipers annually about that time - mostly newborn infants in Molech's case.  You can understand why God was sending a punisher.  I believe he's doing it again.  God gave us the United States as a refuge for Christians and other persecuted peoples.

But now we're messing it all up and I believe the punisher is returning, not because God wants us punished, but because since we have taken ourselves out from under God's protection, that's what happens. The old dragon is an opportunistic demon and he's working up to something big, you can feel it in your bones.

Habakkuk in chapter 2 describes what is coming and warns us we'll have to live by faith during this trying time. He describes the coming usurper as a proud man who cannot be satisfied, but heaps up people and nations for his use.  Then in verse 6 Habakkuk describes the weapons that will be used against this power hungry person -  taunting, mockery and ridicule.  Almost as if Habakkuk were predicting the work of folks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who use humor to combat the rising tide of socialism in this country.

Habakkuk lists 5 Woes which describe the tools and methods the conqueror will use to overcome us. 


Woe #1:  Credit
This passage (vs. 6-7), says he will amass wealth by taking it from others and by borrowing it. The passage predicts the creditors grow impatient and will rise up and plunder us. China is watching us with hooded eyes even now.

Woe #2:  Greed
The prophet next says greedy men would seek to protect their wealth by building up high. They will build a safe nest for themselves while lying to and exploiting others. They will work hand in hand with the conquering power while betraying their own in order to secure the safety of their own nest all the while lying to their own families (Supporters?  Followers?  Nations?)  Anybody ever figured out how George Soros, the champion of the new socialism, made money while breaking the Bank of England? Want to bet that he and his ilk have "built their nests on high"?


Woe #3:  Corruption
Here those seeking to enslave the nation build a government on corruption and violence and oppression. There is hardly a single case where a fully socialist government has not used oppression to control its people. Habakkuk also predicts that the Word of the Lord would go to every corner  of the world - as though he'd seen TV, radio and the Internet coming to counter the foe.


Woe #4: Substance abuse and lust
The next woe predicts enslavement through alcohol, drug abuse and lust (pornography?). Those addicted to these practices will be easily enslaved by a conqueror that promises to not only protect these vices, but to remove the shame associated with these deviant behaviors by making them common practice. 


Woe #5:  Idols
The final warning predicts cults of worship around empty symbols. Is it a surprise that one of the top TV shows in America is "American Idol" or that we see blind, cult-like worship around a political figure like this  President, not only by individuals of his party, but by news reporters who extol his virtues while experiencing tingles running up their legs at the sound of his voice. 


Habakkuk prophesied with stunning accuracy, the things that would take down our country.  In the next, chapter, however, he says this:

16. When I heard, my body trembled;

My lips quivered at the voice;

Rottenness entered my bones;

And I trembled in myself,

That I might rest in the day of trouble,

When he comes up to the peopoe,

He will invade them with his troops.

17. Though the fig tree may not blossom,

Nor fruit be on the vines'

Though the labor of the olive may fail

And the fields yield no food';

Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,

And there be no herd in the stalls -

18. Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my Salvation

19. The Lord God is my strength;
He will make my feet like deer's
He will make me walk on mountain heights.

Have courage, friends.  Do not fear.  Though the worst may come upon us, we are still his children and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will stand for us to. 

Does anybody besides me get a thrill watching the news and seeing all the terrible things predicted by the prophets coming true before our eyes?  It only confirms that God has already seen the end and is watching out for us.  Besides, it also means we're going home soon.  

How cool is that?

Tom King - Tyler, TX

God Parted the Red Sea, but the Israelites Had to WALK Through It

I read a frustrated post by a conservative today who lambasted blacks for the plight of their culture.  She was long on criticism and short on sympathy. This attitude among some of our conservative brethren (and sisteren) isn't terribly helpful and reveals a lack of understanding of how the culture became what it is.  Black culture is by no means as homogenized as the Democrats would have you believe. I watch black leaders, both liberal and conservative struggle to find solutions for the obvious problems they face - like broken homes, drug abuse, low education and violence.  What conservative whites need to do is read their Old Testament if they want to discover what we did wrong that helped create the problems faced by our black brothers and sisters.

You heard me right. I said what WE did wrong.

Read the Old Testament. In it there is the clear chronicle of what God did to help a slave race escape from slavery and stand on its own two feet.  It was not easy.  For centuries God struggled with these people as generation after generation tried to drift back into enslavement to one god or another, to one government or another.  Do you remember what God had to do to the Israelites to teach them not to be slaves anymore?  Do you remember what a tough government he set up?  It was so tough, many of us still complain about it to this day.  We refuse to read the Old Testament because it confuses us.  We think God's legal system was too tough on them. And yet, we applaud Rush Limbaugh when he says, "The law is a teacher."
The legal system God set up for the Jews in the aftermath of the Egyptian slavery is the very thing that taught them to be the fiercely independent, self-sufficient race they are today more than 3,000 years later. They fought it, surely. They whined till God let them have a king because they thought they needed an authoritarian government instead of the decentralized (essentially capitalist) system that they had.

God let them pay the price for that. He did not shield them from the consequences of their actions. He expected a high standard of behavior. While the Jews, like any group of humans did not entirely learn the lessons God was teaching, they did learn to be self-sufficient, hard-working and smart. They survived against all odds, living (and thriving) to this day in a tiny bit of land surrounded by people who want them dead and pushed into the sea. When God teaches, the lessons stick!

What we did to the black slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War by marginalizing them, refusing to give them decent education, true equal rights or equal opportunity and then by trying to buy their compliance with freebies from the government was wrong. It treated a whole race like little children. Is it any wonder they face the troubles they do today?

When are we going to acknowledge that our country screwed up in how we handled the 40 years in the desert of the former slaves in our own country. How can we when we're so afraid of a government that is truly tough and fair that some of us won't even look at the Old Testament, much less read it and learn from it.  God did a really good job of liberating one slave race and standing them up on their feet. Maybe it's time we join forces with those in the black community that wish to invite God to do that again for their own race.

The truth is, we could stand a little Old Testament discipline for all Americans, lest we allow ourselves to drift into slavery as the Israelites allowed themselves to do after they moved to Egypt. to escape the famine.

There's a lesson there too. In every handout there are the seeds of slavery. Be careful not to become dependent on them. The Old Testament style of government had a lot of other good ideas like:

1. Limited central authority
2. Tough criminal laws
3. Voluntary taxation to meet national needs as they arose
4. Locally based judicial system
5. Seven year debt holiday (how many people would be able to survive poor financial decisions if that were in place AND how many banks would make bad loans under that system?
6. Small standing army, citizen call up in an emergency

Instead of criticizing, we need to be willing to support those in the black community who are trying to make a difference.  The pastors, the teachers, the community leaders who recognize what has gone wrong and are trying to fix it are understandably confused by so-called conservatives who want to complain about blacks and immigrants, but don't seem willing to help clean up the mess we've caused.


And, yes, I know it's our father's and grandfather's mess, but does that matter.  It's still a mess. It still needs cleaned up and if we're not willing to help out, then we're just part of the problem.  It's time to quit griping about what's wrong with black people and immigrants and start helping those among them that want to improve their communities, put their neighbors to work and instill a little pride, self-respect and self-sufficiency into their kids.


We're part of the solution or we ARE most assuredly, part of the problem.


I'm just sayin'.

Tom King

Katyn II: The Polish People Fear a Repeat of 1940

The people of Poland are in shock and are worried about the Russians again. Saturday's plane crash that killed, not only the president of Poland and his wife, but practically the entire leadership of Poland's military and government, is already being called Katyn II. It is a measure of just how nervous their neighbors make them. If you don't know what Katyn I was, prepare yourself for a string of "interesting" historical coincidences. Given Polish history, the Poles can be forgiven if they find what happened this weekend in the forest near Smolensk eerily parallel to what happened 70 years ago in the forests near Katyn.

It was 1940, Europe was in turmoil and Poland was, unbeknown to most of its citizens, the subject of a secret agreement between Germany and Russia, dividing the country between them. On March 5 1940, Joseph Stalin signed a secret order as brutal as any Hitler ever issued, that led to the capture and mass murder of 22,000 Polish doctors, lawyers and military officers in the forest near Katyn. The crime was so brutal that the German (Goebbels, of all people) was able to use it as propaganda against the Russians. The assassinations decapitated the Polish Army and the leadership of its public service sector as the Germans and Russians prepared to overrun the Polish nation.

The plane crash that took the life of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 95 key Polish government and military leaders is already being publicly called Katyn II by many Poles and one can hardly blame them. The plane was carrying the president and his entourage to a Katyn memorial service on the 70th anniversary of the tragedy.

President Kaczynski and his twin brother, founding members with Lech Walesa of the Polish Solidarity movement have been less than diplomatic with either the Russians or the European Union of late. They've been less than diplomatic with the European Union about its bullying tactics. Suddenly, the troublesome leader is eliminated in a crash that ironically took place at Smolensk, not far from the Katyn Forest. It effectively decapitates the government and brings the opposition party almost instantly to power, at the same time leaving all three Polish military branches without their top leaders, the banking system and much of the Polish civil service. Predictably, the Russians are blaming the crash on the Poles. The newspapers in the states are dismissing Poles who compare the disaster to Katyn "extremists".

It's also a bit unnerving that the day after the crash, news about it is already buried in the back pages of the newspaper behind glowing headlines about how Neville......., I mean Barak Obama is bringing us peace in our time by signing a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the Russians, the upshot of which is that the U.S. is laying down its nukes with few real guarantees that anyone else will lay down theirs. With the stroke of a pen, the U.S., for all practical purposes ceases to be a superpower. Of course, considering that we've got an administration that seems intent on turning us into Albania, it's not surprising.

By the way, be careful looking up the Katyn massacre. In the first two pages of a Google search on the subject last night, more than half of the sites that showed up were fiercely virulent malware sites. I had to flip my computer off at the wall to escape having malware forcibly downloaded to my computer. Odd that the obscure term "Katyn" would suddenly be the keyword for so many malware sites. It's as though someone didn't want people reading that particular bit of history.

I have a friend in Poland. He says everyone is in shock. He mentioned Katyn right away. I think the Poles would do well to reexamine that bit of their history. If the U.S. doesn't stand with Poland on this one, then once again, Poland is all alone. Pray for Poland. They will very likely need it if history is indeed being replayed.

Just one man's opinion.
Tom King