Sometimes what was not said in the give and take of confrontations Jesus had with people during His ministry had as much or more significance than what was said. Note the exchange with the rich young ruler recorded in Luke 18:18-24 (also in Matthew 19 and Mark 10):

“Now a certain ruler asked Him, saying, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’So Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’ And he said, ‘All these things I have kept from my youth.’

So when Jesus heard these things, He said to him, ‘You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.’

But when he heard this, he became very sorrowful, for he was very rich. And when Jesus saw that he became very sorrowful, He said, ‘How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!’”

What was left out? The first four and the tenth of the Ten Commandments were not addressed…directly. The first four of the ten have to do with a relationship with God and the last one is a catch-all commandment that actually summarizes the issue when all of the others are neglected—a covetous, self-centered elevation above God and anything else. (You shall not covet…)

That thread of belligerent independence underlies the ongoing problem we mortals have, both saved and unsaved—in relation to the sovereignty of God. How many years, months, weeks, days have we spent as believers, even, trying to convince our old nature coming from Adam to be and act righteously? It has never worked. That is the reason Jesus said, “You must be born again!”

When God told Adam and Eve, “eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil and you will die,” they and all future mankind died. First, their spirits died, then, in the course of time, their bodies also. They were dead in their trespasses and sins…forever, unless Someone would come and somehow redeem them from that awful plight.

That rich young ruler was doing all those things in his own ability as a man of mortal flesh. But Paul wrote in Titus 3:5, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.”

Regeneration and renewal—a restoration to a spiritual integrity that meets God’s requirement and is fixed, unchangeable, forever. That eternal offering of the blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus the Christ, makes that possible. John makes it plain in John 6:37-40 that God’s will has made it that way, and who can overcome God’s independent will:

“All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Some may try to pick holes in that declaration and insert themselves into the redemption process, but who would really want to return to the plight of that rich young ruler and not have any relationship with God, Himself. We are talking here about the integrity of God, the Father, and God, the Son. Is their Word good? Is that underlying sovereignty of God what our inner spirit is crying for?

In detention centers around the country where parolees are released into the care of parole officers, it has become evident that no restoration is ever really begun until the parolee recognizes and accepts his own responsibility for his plight. In obvious bitterness and rebellion, the parolee blames someone else for his ongoing problems and why he has gotten to that place.

He will disobey instructions and show up for a lab test having taken drugs in defiance, then claiming, “They are out to get me, to put me under!” When they recognize and accept the fact that for the most part, it was their bad decisions that turned them in the wrong direction, then change begins to happen. Bad associations, bad influences all lay a foundation for those decisions, of course.

Quite likely it is not a coincidence that the first of those nine Blessed Attitudes in Matthew 5:3-12, which sets the stage for a person’s spiritual journey:

“Those who know there is nothing good in themselves are happy, because the holy nation of heaven is theirs” (New Life Version).

Accepting ourselves as what we are apart from the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in our lives opens up our hearts for all that God wants to give us. In balance with Romans 12:3 and Romans 8:32, we can see how God orders the progress of our lives. In Romans 12:3, Paul writes:

“For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.”

While on God’s side of the equation, Paul writes, in Romans 8:32 of the magnitude of possibilities within the sovereignty of God:

“He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?”

The correct order for our lives is shown in that promise Jesus made in Matthew 6:33 after He talked about our inability to serve two masters and listed what God is able to provide for us when we get it figured out:

“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”

It is more than that, though, for just getting those “things” still will not satisfy that longing, the emptiness-like sense of lack that runs like a loose tiger in our hearts sometimes, even with believers. Until we recognize the problem and submit to God’s sovereignty, there will be that empty, unsatisfied, nagging going on inside. That old fisherman, Peter, seemed to have a good handle on that situation when he replied to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

The staggering impact of Hurricane Harvey on America, however, may have a sobering message that “Making America Great Again” in God’s eyes has more to do with the attitude of our hearts toward Him and our neighbors, than it does with “things” that can disappear overnight in a natural disaster. It certainly appears so.

Contact email:  andwegetmercy@gmail.com

Lawlessness Labels Ludicrous Leftists Losers 
(Signs of the Times in Focus)

Without question there is a decided intention to do whatever seems necessary to destroy President Trump and his administration. The obvious fact that the 2016 election was ripped out of the hands of the left in such a surprising turn of events has left that side of the political spectrum in total dismay and extreme anger. The threads of anti-Trump hatred continually surface on both sides of the aisle in Congress and the Senate. The entrenched professional politicians in both camps are enflamed at the meaning, for them, that Donald Trump has vowed to “Drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C.

It is not hard to see how, over the years, there has been a tacit understanding that “they get to have their turn for eight years, then it is our time again.”

The promise of the Republicans about the Obamacare fiasco spells that out. “Give us control of the House, then the Senate, then the White House, and then…then…we will overturn that awful legislation, once and for all,” they promised. Along with that were the crashing sounds of silence for eight years about the efforts of President Obama to destroy the American sovereignty. He was so sure of having done most of that in his drive to “fundamentally transform America” that he confidently muttered, totally out of the context of his conversation, at the Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30, 2016, “The end of the Republic has never looked better!” It was like a word of reassurance to Henry Kissinger, who had rejoiced that he had been elected president in 2008, saying, “He has been primed to lead us into a New World Order.”  Hillary Clinton was set up to complete that long-standing goal of the globalist elite.

There are two words that have made the difference in the direction of history over the centuries:

“But God….”

A man named Donald J.  Trump, an outsider, not one of those anywhere in the swamp, one who could look into it and rub shoulders with its inhabitants as a builder of an empire in real estate without being a part of that inner circle of elite shakers and makers. He had no mission from God burning in his soul; he just saw the hypocrisy and deceitful duplicity that was underlying those whose combined intent was to create a New World Order for their own benefit.

It is no longer a hidden secret that a New World Order is the intension of the global elite. Anyone who wants to learn about it can easily find relevant information about who, what, where and when of that desired goal.  Put simply, it will not be pleasant for many people.

Following are some signs of the times that have been foretold in the Bible and are now being displayed before our eyes almost on a daily basis. And, there is no let-up but an exponential mushrooming of events that allude to end-time developments, if not directly pinpointing them.

When Jesus told us, in Luke 17:26 and following, how it would be when the Son of Man returns He said, “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be then.” He gives us new insight that is not mentioned in the Genesis account of Noah, saying there would be booming activity in the economy and in social life. But in the Genesis account, we are told that “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). And then He instructed Noah to build an ark, (for the judgment of a flood was coming).

We can take Jesus at His Word with great confidence—as it was then, so will it be in the day of His coming. Paul writes that “evil men will become worse and worse” in those last days (2 Timothy 3:13). He told the Thessalonians that the “day of Christ” would not come until first there would come a falling away before the lawless one would appear and proclaim himself as God, demanding that all must worship him (2 Thessalonians 2:2-4).

For a long time I looked on that passage as a reference to believers turning away from the Lord, which is truthful, but it is in reference to the whole of mankind turning away from God and turning toward lawlessness and eventually, into the very arms of that one man of sin and total evil. He will eventually demand that everyone take a mark of solidarity to His purpose. Otherwise, they will be killed, as it is described in Revelation.

There is something different about the protester we see in news videos. Protesters seem to be more openly violent, hateful, threatening. And the mainline media seem to look the other way, especially in regard to the actions and attitudes of those on the left. I recall a time some years ago when I was at a traditional event and two young men got into a fight. It was vicious, mean and animal-like as they grappled and slugged it out. One of them went down and the other began kicking him viciously and with a killer instinct. Others then broke it up, but I was struck with how intentionally brutal their anger motivated them.

A news video of young people engaged in destroying a historical statue in a current event revealed a young man viciously kicking the downed statue with the same kind of anger, it seems, as those two men I told of above. He could not have been much over legal voting age, if that old. The question is obvious, I think. How did he come by that anger, and why did he exhibit such hatred? He was a white man, as well.

These generations of younger people are victims of the goal of dumbing down Americans, it seems, that is threaded in the fabric of plans the New World Order secretly holds. It is rather surprising who is on the list of membership in that organization. It is also surprising that a segment of the governmental body in Washington, D.C. was labeled “The Establishment” during this last election.  They, and the Democratic Party, apparently have a solitary goal of destroying the Trump presidency. For them, draining the swamp means oblivion. It does not matter if America is also destroyed in the process. So where does this make sense in regard to the “times and seasons” to which Bible prophecy is pointing?

In the prophetic words of John in Revelation 13 God essentially says, I will give you a one world government but it will be on My terms and timing, and it will look like the seventh head of a beast. You will have it only for a short time when an eighth head will take over in the hands of one person—the Satan indwelt Antichrist (Revelation 17:10-13).

He will give you much more than you planned for—turmoil, destruction and death. And his destination is that lake of fire that will burn forever and ever. Those who do not want that destiny must seriously consider the alternative offer that Jesus gives—“he who comes to Me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

Think again on what Jesus said in Luke 17. “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the day of the coming of the Son of Man.” God has pulled the nation and the world back from economic oblivion, as it was headed to under Obama’s administration.  The conditions are now ripe for His coming, not only for the economic rebirth, but also in regard to the obvious breakdown of society with nose-to-nose hateful confrontation, injustice and lawlessness.

One event that figures specifically in the timing when the Son of Man comes is the prophecy in Daniel 9:27 that predicts the confirmation of a covenant that would bring peace to Israel and that region for seven years. Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3, “For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, for when they shall say, ‘Peace and safety,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them….”

Bring together the total context that includes 1 Thessalonians 4:16 to 5:4 with the Daniel passage and the details match with the Luke 17:26 and following passage and with current events, and it appears that we are on the brink of that coming of the Son of Man.

Quietly without fanfare, U.S. envoys from the Trump White House are visiting several Middle East nations with the mission of arranging a peace conference that would result in a covenant of peace. (The article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on August 13, but apparently is no longer available on line.) One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to see that accomplished. It may well be the greatest negotiating coup of the century. Its possibility bears watching closely for that cry of “Peace and safety.”

Anyone with an ounce of objectivity can see the blatant display of one-sided justice being played out in the “investigations of Russian collusion by the Trump campaign.” No such concern is evident regarding the very open transgressions of other groups and individuals. High level crime is overlooked, but a mere private citizen had better beware of the least offense. Evilness draws God’s attention; continuance in evil will certainly bring his judgment, and quickly.

How can there be any winners among those who only want to “steal, kill, and destroy?” (See John 10:10.) They are all losers. The winner is God. The losers are the anti-God left, the New World Order promoters and the radical terrorists, by whatever name they call themselves.

Contact email:  andwegetmercy@gmail.com