Penny stock

Living and working in Manhattan after 9/11, I noticed how it was sort of like Pandora’s Box got opened that day. Crude, immoral activity suddenly came out of the woodwork. Displays of it appeared in store windows and newspaper ads, not to mention newspaper stories. The mentality seemed to be, “Nobody’s minding the hen house—everybody in charge is just focused on preventing terrorism so live and let live!” The forces of evil had a field day in the city.

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Rev. 6:6 says, “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”

Jordan explains, “Now you’d think ‘Boy, if I could get a loaf of bread for a penny, I’d like that because a penny’s not worth much anymore.’ But that’s not the type of penny being talked about here. The Bible sets up its own definitions and standards.

“A penny in the Bible was a demarcation of money back in Matthew 20 that represented a whole day’s wage. What a man worked for a whole day long, at the end of the day he was paid a penny.

“Enough to have a loaf of bread is going to take a day’s wage. That doesn’t represent depression; that represents inflation. But it represents tough times economically in connection with the Antichrist and the ‘last days’ and there’s tremendous financial difficulties that go on there.

“In Zechariah 8 is a passage that gets quoted a lot. 8:9 says, ‘Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Let your hands be strong, ye that hear in these days these words by the mouth of the prophets, which were in the day that the foundation of the house of the LORD of hosts was laid, that the temple might be built.’

“Zechariah is talking about the destruction of the temple in Israel and it’s being rebuilt, and what was happening there is a prophecy about what’s going to happen to Israel in the days ahead.

“In verse 8:9 is a description of the unemployment statistics in Israel before Israel was restored back to its kingdom and there’s no hire for a man. You couldn’t go out and get a job. There was no job to have. You couldn’t go and hire out your beast. All the commerce and employment was gone and that’s a recession.

“But God’s going to change things for Israel. Verse 11-13 says, ‘But now I will not be unto the residue of this people as in the former days, saith the LORD of hosts.
[12] For the seed shall be prosperous; the vine shall give her fruit, and the ground shall give her increase, and the heavens shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things.
[13] And it shall come to pass, that as ye were a curse among the heathen, O house of Judah, and house of Israel; so will I save you, and ye shall be a blessing: fear not, but let your hands be strong.’

“The blessing is not just a spiritual blessing; it’s a monetary blessing, it’s a prosperity blessing. It’s physical provisions and so forth for the nation.

“My point is God Himself has an economic policy and He has a plan whereby He’s going to take care of recessions and depressions and prosperity in one moment, and famine in another. God’s cure for that is when the Lord Jesus Christ comes back and establishes His kingdom on Planet Earth, He uses the nation Israel to be the nation He intended them to be; to lead the nations of the earth into prosperity.

“So one day all these economic cycles we’re going through will go away but until Jesus comes . . . things are going to get worse before they get better.

“It’s important to understand that even when God describes the kingdom, often He describes it in economic terms. Not just money, but the provisions—food, raiment, blessings, prosperity. It’s all kind of physical economic things.

“The Bible has a lot to say about money, folks. The Bible has a lot to say about economics. That is the use and movement of money. Moral decay in a nation or an individual always catches up with you in economic terms. Whether it’s in you as an individual or whether it’s in a nation as a whole, it always catches up with you.

“The tragedy of our day, when you think of our nation, is we’re witnessing,
at whatever age you are today, the fall of a great era in world history.

“There’s always been a contrast between what goes on in the culture and what the Bible says. I remember when I was young people were talking about how terrible the young people were and how we’re going to ‘hell in a hand basket’ and that you can’t see for the dust . . . well, Dear Abby had a column where she was quoting one of the sages about how bad things were getting and how awful it was going, and then when she got through she signed it Socrates. Now he was a Greek philosopher who lived before Christ and was describing the culture of his day.

“So there’s been a contrast between what goes on in the world and what the Scripture says the Christian life ought to be. But that contrast is far starker today; it’s far more numerous. It’s far more consequential. Far more threatening than in the past and nobody’s missing the effect of the sea change taking place—the deterioration of moral and spiritual values in our culture.”