Floodgates of humanity

I have a new article on Mystery Babylon that I will post tomorrow. In the meantime here is a post from March, 2016:

The world is dissolving, crumbling, divided in every way imaginable.

“America is sort of a mirror to much of what the world is; the idea that our country would somehow be immune to the disintegration is nonsense,” says Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). “Look at the stuff happening on our southern borders, for example.

“A nation without a border--a clearly defined and defendable border--is no longer a nation. They’ll get some of that stuff solved eventually, but when they do it’s going to be so different than what you’re expecting it to be.

“You have to understand something, folks, after the Cold War was over, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, what happened to them? They dissolved and broke up into warring tribal groups.

“Culturally, socially, the thing that was always the cohesive thing in America, the 'melting pot' it was always called . . . by the way, did you know that in American history, from 1924 to 1960, immigration was largely outlawed?

“People have not always just been able to come here. It was strictly regulated, and the kind of thing you see today where just anybody comes; there were only two periods back in the 1800s when that was really the case.

“And the reason for that is we had a culture that understood you needed to be a melting pot where people would come and assimilate into the culture that’s here. Now they don’t do that. They do what they do in the Middle East. It’s the tribal culture. In fact, that’s now the big sociological term; the ‘tribalism.’

*****

“America’s turned into groups of tribes. People like you and me, Bible-believing Christians, we have little tribal culture areas where we live and we’re totally unaware of what’s going on in the other guy’s tribe. Sociologically, that’s a recent phenomenon in the last couple of decades.

“Years ago, when the fundamentalist Christians abandoned the cities . . . what happens is people solve the problems where they are, but now they’re going to try to solve them without truth, and you see that tribal warfare going on all over the planet and it happens here.

“The only place on the planet that CAN be different is in the Body of Christ. In a local assembly, manifesting what the Body of Christ is, you’re not oblivious to it all when you’re out in the world, but among us you’re reconciled in one body, because who I am and who you are in our own resources isn’t the issue. Who we are in Christ is the issue.

“If there’s ever going to be a testimony to that, and you know the heart of the world longs for that, they strive for it, but it’s that Genesis 1 thing. In the beginning, who created? Are you going to create your own world or is God going to create it?

"Most of us want to create our own, and the world you create is going to be one of division and strife because you carry that seed in your heart. But when it’s one God created, then you live in His resources; He reconciled us to God in one body.

*****

“When a culture rejects God’s Word and turns away from it, it winds up with things in its culture that are the antithesis of the way God created it; the opposite of the natural. There was a day when our culture understood that.

“How many of you know what a McGuffey Reader is? It was the standard textbook of the one-room schoolhouse in the 1800s. In 1854, the first McGuffey reader published, had as a text in it—this is what was taught to children:

“ ‘If you can induce a community to doubt the genuineness and authenticity of the Scripture, to hesitate undecided whether there be any such thing as virtue or vice, whether there be an external state of retribution beyond the grave; or whether there exists any such being as God, you have broken down the barriers of moral virtue, and hoisted the flood gates of immorality and crime.’

“That didn’t say you needed to be a Christian, that just said you don’t need to be a part of Romans 1. Isaiah 5:20 says, ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’

“You know what that is; it’s foolishness. You can’t even identify reality. Paul writes in Romans 1:28, ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.’

“There’s the problem. They didn’t want God: ‘I don’t want to think about Him, I don’t want Him around. Don’t talk about Him. We’re going to do it ourselves. Just remove any thought about Him from the culture.’

“They’ve done that in our day. If you’re under 40 years old, you were educated in a system that taught you fundamentally different than the system your parents were educated in.

“That which I read to you a minute ago was a fundamental understanding, and has been one of the fundamental principles of what we call western civilization, but about the time you younger people got into school, the prevailing wisdom of the education system was ‘multiculturalism, egalitarianism, every culture is equal; there’s no right, there’s no wrong.’

“People say, ‘Well, that’s the post-Christian.' You know what that is? That’s ancient paganism! That’s Romans 1. That ain’t nothing new. Everybody talks about modernity and post-modernity and I say, ‘Agh, phft! That’s Romans 1, man. Go back and look at it.’

“You see, to understand what’s going on in the world where we are, there’s the Body of Christ and not Israel’s (time past) program, but the world’s still the world. And when you deal with the world, you’re dealing with Romans 1.

“The result of that, as the end of the chapter reads, ‘Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
[30] Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
[31] Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
[32] Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’

“That’s a neighborhood I’d like to live in?! The coarseness, and the cruelty, and the corruption and the violence, and the abominable sinfulness of that culture didn’t just happen. It came as the direct result of, ‘I don’t want to retain God in my knowledge and I’m going to substitute the lie program, and I’m going to sit down and figure out a way to make my thinking the common thinking.’

“So when you come to the end of Romans 1, you’re at the depths of sin. You don’t only do the things, but you have pleasure in them that do them too. You’re not only a sadist, torturing others; you’re a masochist, torturing yourself, and you’ve reached the depths of sin. Revelation 2 calls it ‘the depths of Satan.’ ”

*****

From Jan. 6, 2021 Sunday evening study at Shorewood Bible Church:

"There's a wave coming through our country and the tipping of that wave was 2020 and you could sense it all year long.

"In the book The Fourth Turning, when they talk about this winter time, they identify about 4-5 different things that could be the tipping point in the fourth turning. You know, you gradually get rid of the fall and there comes a point where you know, 'Okay, cold weather's here.'

"They actually gave a pandemic as one of their suggestions for what could happen. It's almost frightening.

"Our country's been through seven of these cycles. There's a political realignment that takes place. There's a gathering back together out of a fractured culture into a cohesive one. 

"Wintertime lasts until about 2025. The wave has crested and once it tips over then it's just katy bar the door, down the hill you go, as the wave pushes itself over. We're watching that.

"Our country has long ago lost the foundation that it was built on and the next crowd is taking over.

"You need to understand, members of the Body of Christ have been going through economic, social, political persecution like you can't even imagine and like you might fear is coming for you--they've been going through it for decades, for centuries.

"We as Americans have been spared a lot of that because our culture is really been the ripe fruit of the Protestant Reformation, but all that structure is gone. 'If the foundation be destroyed, what shall the righteous do.'

"Our job is to help save people from the wreck; go out and show people what it's like to live through difficult circumstances, not greedily focused on our possessions, but focused on the gospel and the ministry to others God's Word gives us.

"Listen, if there's any nation in the earth that the Adversary would hate it would be America. There's never been, in the 2,000 years of the dispensation of grace, a time when one nation of people has taken the Word of God around the planet as the British and American empires have done in the last couple of hundred years.

"If there's anything that embarrasses the Adversary it's the gospel of grace. If there's anything that enrages him, it's the gospel of grace. If there's anything he can do to stop its propagation, he'd do it. So I can understand why he would make us the 'apple of his eye' as far as indignation.

"Someone said the blood of the martyrs is a seed bed of the spread of the gospel and that will be true."