Lawlessness Leads to Tyranny
If I were to describe the level of lawlessness that we are now seeing in America to a year 2000 audience, they would likely think that was crazy. We don’t just have high crime in our major cities; we are losing the ability to have a functioning society.
In my youth, drugs, gangs, and robbery were the top concerns. Some people didn’t need to worry that much about crime because most of that stuff took place in the bad part of town. Today shoplifting is at such an epidemic level, we may soon see retailers and drug stores become as rare as record and book stores.
I’ve written before about stores closing because thieves are legally allowed to just walk in, fill their bags up with goods, and walk out the front door. On average, thieves are stealing more than 100 million dollars worth of merchandise from our retailers every single day. Since most retailers only make a profit at around 2-3%, they can’t stay in business with this level of theft.
This crisis wasn’t the result of a bad economy. Liberal city leaders rolled back laws that punished shoplifters. In many cities, as long as you only steal a certain dollar amount, you will not be charged with a felony. The few people who are arrested are normally released after being booked, and they never see a day before a judge.
Gangs of professional looters will sweep in on a target and snatch items that can be easily sold on the street. It’s not just the high-end designer clothing that is being targeted. In Connecticut, a group of thieves stole vast quantities of laundry detergent from a store.
The store workers just stood around and watched the crime take place. In a video that someone posted to Twitter, you can hear an employee warning another not to intervene because he will get fired. If the store goes out of business, he’ll still get fired. There was a time when a person would be made employee of the month for stopping the most amount of theft.
I found one news item that said Target had to close several of its bathrooms because people were taking merchandise into the bathroom, taking the item out of its container, and flushing the cardboard or plastic down the toilet. It’s a huge expense to clean out the plumbing. To combat the problem, Target installed mobile baths outside their stores and said they were remodeling the ones inside the store.
If you thought that leaders in these liberal cities would be embarrassed by the looting they’ve triggered, you would be wrong. The people of San Francisco don’t understand the pitfalls of changing the rules that allow people to steal $950 worth of goods at any one time.
The drugstore chain Walgreens recently said it would be closing an additional five stores in the city, bringing the number of shuttered locations to 22 in the past five years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The company has cited “organized retail crime” for the closings. Instead of crying for a crackdown on crime, the news has been met with intense skepticism.
The Chronicle published a story that, citing data from the city’s Police Department, pointed out how one store set to close “had only seven reported shoplifting incidents this year and a total of 23 since 2018.” While it is important to note that not all incidents are reported to police, the five stores being shut down “had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.”
San Francisco’s own leaders have openly questioned the company’s claims. “They are saying [retail theft is] the primary reason, but I also think when a place is not generating revenue, and when they’re saturated — S.F. has a lot of Walgreens locations all over the city — so I do think that there are other factors that come into play,” Mayor London Breed said last week.
Walgreens obviously has a financial reason for closing those 22 stores. If it were me, I would close all my stores in San Francisco just because I would not want to support the most leftist city in America. Walgreens is a corporation that has a financial responsibility to make money for its shareholders. If it’s in a location that is losing money, it needs to stop the bleeding.
In addition to retail theft, there has been an alarming rise in the number of “follow-home robberies.” Apparently, criminals are specifically targeting highly vulnerable people. Once a sufficient target has been identified, the crooks follow the target all the way home before robbing the individual.
In some cases, professional criminals are not just satisfied with robbing people. In Las Vegas, an 82-year-old woman was buried in her backyard, and then the criminals took over her home and her finances.
“After finding her, the decision was made between several people that they were going to dismember her body and bury her,” Metro homicide Lt. Ray Spencer told KLAS-TV. “And then basically drain her finances and sell off her belongings, fraudulently.”
Lucille Payne’s neighbors said that her house appeared empty for years, but the police did not become suspicious of her home until they received a tip this April.
Finding Payne’s body did not take long as “she was not buried very deeply,” Spencer told the news station. “An officer started to move the dirt and found her arm inside a very shallow grave in the backyard,” he said.
In Seattle, the downtown area has become so dangerous that city employees are now being escorted by security guards once they leave work.
King County’s new ‘walking bus’ will debut on November 15, and see council workers based in Downtown Seattle and nearby Pioneer Square escorted to a nearby train station and ferry terminal each evening before being left to continue their commute home.
As our nation reaches the point where it becomes dysfunctional, people will reach the point where they support a vital backlash against crime. Shoplifters may be executed on the spot. When drug crime got bad in the Philippines, the people voted in a president that gave the police freedom to kill drug traffickers on the spot.
The world will soon surrender to a man that will save international problems. Of course, he will be the antichrist, the man who will plunge the planet into World War III. The lawlessness we now see is a clear indicator that the rapture is very near.
“But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Mat. 24:37).
–Todd
Modern Sodom Census
Moving ever deeper into the end of the age, it shouldn’t surprise that signs that we’re “nearing midnight” are manifesting in increasingly profound ways. Seeing those signals proliferating at an alarming rate is nonetheless troubling.
We who watch prophetic progression from the pre-Trib viewpoint are troubled more than most. We’re perturbed by what Bill Koening of “Koenig’s Eye View from the White House” calls “the clueless church.”
Koenig says:
I continue to hear from many Christians that a majority of the church, even evangelicals, have no awareness of the biblical and prophetic significance of these days. The replacement theology part of the church was in the 100 million range according to my 2004 study.
For those of us who are sensitive to these times, this is hard to comprehend. Moreover, many pastors have no understanding of Bible prophecy. In some cases, those who have some understanding don’t want to scare their flock. Others have no interest.
With all this said, only the God of Israel knows how these biblically significant days will play out. (https://www.watch.org/subscribers/koenigs-eye-view/article/83238)
Once again, I sense I almost should apologize for presenting this commentary from the America-centric position. But as the nation that has been for most of its brief life considered Christian, at least in its founding, the fall from that admittedly overstated position demonstrates profound prophetic implication.
Our culture, steeped in its perceived youthfulness, has until its fairly recent past matured in a common-sense way toward full recognition of its Christian heritage. The young adults gravitated toward responsibility in planning their own lives and families. That trajectory changed without a doubt beginning in the 1960s.
National leaders seem to have lost their collective minds during that era—a wickedness that still is herding the nation toward the “reprobate mind” of Romans 1:28. They removed Bible reading and prayer from the public classrooms and have tried since to remove any mention of Jesus Christ from all facets of American life.
How could we expect our youth to continue in the American tradition that started with the country’s founding? How could we expect that, since those responsible for governing in a way that keeps us on the constitutional track the founders gave us have abdicated that responsibility?
Not only have a large number of leaders legislated and enacted anti-God governance, many of these have led by example, in many cases blatantly presenting some of the most hedonistic lifestyles imaginable.
Satan’s blueprint for destroying the nation began to reconstruct America’s national architecture in a big way with the above-mentioned removal of Bible reading and prayer. The result in the 1960s was the loss of the nation’s youthfulness. “Free love” came with the hippies, a young American president was assassinated—as were his brother and a top black minister and civil rights leader. Fifty-something thousand of America’s youth were lost in the bloody Vietnam war.
Although most of today’s Millennial generation know little of that history of fifty years ago, they are its victims. This doesn’t excuse their movement into behavior that rivals the behavior of those who lived during the days of Lot in that wicked city, Sodom. Each individual is responsible for his or her own acceptance or rejection of God’s way—through belief in Jesus Christ, who is the Way (John 14:6).
The point is, a large portion of this Millennial demographic is now well down the pathway that brought God’s judgment in Lot’s day in Sodom.
The following news item is quite disturbing:
While most millennials view Jesus and the Bible as at least “a little positive,” nearly one-third of America’s largest, most educated and misunderstood generation also identify as LGBT, and 75% of them admit to “searching for a sense of purpose in life,” a new report from Arizona Christian University shows.
The report, New Insights into the Generation of Growing Influence: Millennials In America by George Barna, who leads research at Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center, explains in an analysis of the findings that a number of the daunting challenges faced by the generation of 78 million—defined in this report as those born from 1984 through 2002—are deeply connected to their spiritual perspectives.
“For understandable reasons, millions of millennials reject organized religion, or have qualms about religious leaders, and especially about religious people who may prove to be hypocritical. Their experiences, observations and assumptions regarding religion, spiritual beliefs, and faith practices have produced a turbulent spiritual experience,” wrote Barna, who’s also an ACU professor focusing on worldview assessment, development and cultural transformation…
Barna suggested that a solution to the challenges being faced by millennials including their lack of purpose in life can be addressed by shifting worldview.
“Your worldview is the foundation of your decision-making. Every choice you make emerges from your worldview, which serves as the filter through which you experience, observe, imagine, interpret, and respond to reality. And every one of the thousands of choices you make every day have consequences. That means worldview is at the heart of everything we are considering in relation to the well-being and development of the young adult generation,” he wrote.
“Given the centrality of worldview to the human experience, there can be no improvements to the life millennials lead without addressing the fundamental role of worldview,” he explained. “And because worldview is developed and carried out in the competitive marketplace of beliefs and behaviors, think about the pervasive consequences for millennials of rejecting the biblical worldview in favor of other, more popular alternatives.” (“Most millennials like Jesus and the Bible, but 30% identify as LGBT: study,” Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter, 11/4/21)
The nation has taken a nosedive into the cesspool of swamplike societal godlessness. Can we expect the young, with their hormones raging and their zest for constant exhilaration, no matter how it is attained, to be the guardians of the American future?
The church—all born-again believers—has failed in many ways, thus allowing the developments we’re experiencing. There is a way back to godly sensibility. He is the Way, Truth, and Life. His name is Jesus. He is coming soon to call believers to Himself. Meanwhile, let’s do our best to put that name back into our classrooms—and our public as well as private life.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)
–Terry