EndTime Issues ...

Introduction
 
Opposition to Christ and His followers has thrived for nearly 2000 years. It began when Herod attempted to kill the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. Today, greater than 60% of the world’s population of 7.5 billion reside in countries where religious freedom is restricted or denied. An estimate of 505 million individuals risk outright persecution for their faith.

• Respect for Christian religious liberty is especially declining.
• Even in India it has recently been labeled by “Open Doors” as a dangerous nation to worship Jesus.[1]

Anti-Christian bias has now become an acceptable prejudice in American media. In March of 2018, dozens of Muslims were gunned down in two mosques in New Zealand. It became a major international news event. Yet, Christian killings rarely get media coverage.

• In 2017, 4136 Christians were killed for their faith.
• Some being cut into pieces with machetes.

Except for a few alternative news outlets, this was not reported. In sectors of China, governmental officials are going door to door, removing pictures of Jesus and replacing them with pictures of China’s leader. Elsewhere, between January and mid-March 2019, Muslims murdered 1956 people. That didn’t hit the main news.
 
The left-leaning press, and now, as will be shown, the Democrat Party, resents Bible-believing Christians.[2]
 
The Hate (Guilt) Factor
 
Jewish author David Horowitz argues in his new book, Dark Agenda: The war to Destroy Christian America, that the Left wants the United States to be a godless society where religion has no role.
 
Left-wing commentator and comedian Bill Maher said, “Religion must die in order for mankind to live.” He is promoting a “New Atheism” movement.
 
America is moving towards a Marxist-like socialism, as in Russia’s past, when religious teaching was removed, and criticism of atheists was outlawed. There, 100,000 churches were burned, and 95,000 religious leaders were murdered.[3]
 
The reprehensible Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) enjoys a growing endorsement within the government and private corporate America. It has labeled large numbers of conservative and religious organizations as “hate groups.” They are characterized as not being “authoritative” enough for America and being “inaccurate” in their “dealings” with people, as well as hateful. The wide acceptance of SPLC’s “labels” has led to cancelation of advertisers of well-respected conservative radio and television programs because of their error and evil-filled characterization!

• SPLC has hate maps that target Christian and pro-family groups.
• This non-profit (!) agency has become an ideological institution, specializing in smear campaigns against anything that is not “left leaning.”[4] (Incidentally, they are so wealthy they are stashing money in offshore investments.)

As it was in Christ’s day and graphically illustrated at the time of Paul, religious differences are not peacefully accepted or tolerated. There were organized efforts to oppose, even with force, the influence of Christians. Jewish leaders followed Paul to undermine his work and influence. SPLC’s agenda depreciates “all things Christian” and publicly brands them as repugnant. Of Christ Himself we reflect:

• “These adversaries of Christ had no arguments with which to meet the truths He brought home to their consciences. They could only cite their customs and traditions, and these seemed weak and vapid when compared with the arguments Jesus had drawn from the word of God and the unceasing round of nature. Had the rabbis felt any desire to receive light, they would have been convinced that Jesus spoke the truth. But they evaded the points He made …, and sought to stir up anger against Him because He claimed to be equal with God. The fury of the rulers knew no bounds. Had they not feared the people, the priests and rabbis would have slain Jesus on the spot. But the popular sentiment in His favor was strong. Many recognized in Jesus the friend who had healed their diseases and comforted their sorrows, and they justified His healing of the sufferer at Bethesda. So for the time the leaders were obliged to restrain their hatred.”[5]
• Such execration is maturing in the United States.

Last year CNN, with the looming possibility that Vice President Pence might become president, gushed how he was a “Christian supremacist.” Adding:

• “He is a very divisive figure.”
• He would “impose a religiously inspired politics on our country.” Those who don’t share his beliefs “are going to hell.”[6]

Compounding the actions of the secular anti-Christian voices are such pastors as the influential William Barber of North Carolina. He’s a political activist and claims that “conservative faith leaders” are guilty of “theological malpractice.” He cynically criticized any leader who claims the Bible demonizes homosexuality and abortion. He even criticized “religious conservatives” for praying for President Trump in the White House.[7]
 
Spiritual Warfare
 
American cynicism against Christ deepened when secular Harvard professor Steven Pinker asked where God was during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when seventeen were killed.
 
Pinker is against the belief that God interferes with the laws of the universe and that by praying to him we can make the world better. “I think that is a dangerous belief because it’s not true.”
He said that “tragedies like the Florida shooting, ‘Cast doubt on the idea that there is a benevolent shepherd who looks out for human welfare. What was the benevolent shepherd doing while the teenager was massacring his classmates?’”
He then added, “If you’re counting on God to make the world a better place you are probably going to make the world a worse place because he is not listening, and we saw that yesterday.”[8]
 
Few understand what the apostle John meant when in vision he heard a voice in heaven exclaiming: “Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.” Revelation 12:12. “Fearful are the scenes which call forth this exclamation from the heavenly voice. The wrath of Satan increases as his time grows short, and his work of deceit and destruction are accelerating.”[9] Christianity teaches that a real spiritual war is in operation. God is waiting for evil to fully show its true nature. He has also orchestrated events so history’s climatic period will reveal what a group of saints who are fully committed to Him are really like. The world and the universe will then see with precise clarity the differences in their extremes.

• What is really happening? “The Spirit of God with its restraining influence is being withdrawn from the earth. All may learn their lesson from the picture now presented in the condition of things in our world. They may see taking place the signs that Christ foretold.”[10]

• “For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day. But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation. And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:24-29).

Karl Payne, pastor of the Antioch Bible Church near Seattle, WA, wrote, Spiritual Warfare: Christians, Demonization and Deliverance (2011). In it he said that Christians should not be surprised at chaos and evil because Satan loves discord.

• Jesus said: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). He is a Brother in our suffering.
• Jesus illustrated the nature of humanity by labeling His witnesses as “sheep” and those in the world as “wolves” (Matthew 10:16).[11]

Such a “carnivorous spirit” was recently exhibited by columnist and atheist George Will, who made an ugly attack on evangelist Billy Graham just days after he passed away. His was unmistakably anti-Christian mockery. He fed the liberal media’s narrative against all followers of Jesus Christ.[12]
 
Social Media Throttles Christianity
 
The internet giants – Facebook, Twitter and You Tube – have declared war on conservatives with new efforts to shut down their ability to get their messages out. Rush Limbaugh said: “These are pure Stalinists.”

• They now have overwhelming power to bias the news.
• They also have the resources to contact large numbers of people at one time.

Facebook is managed by liberals, with young Mark Zuckerberg at its head. This “power” is so great that there is concern it could swing an election result, quickly create religious bias, set political agendas and even spy on every private communication between individuals.

• This manipulation has already adversely affected conservative agencies like: World Net Daily, The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, and Dennis Prager’s Prager University.
• Social media is not interested in debate or discussion. They think “socialism” is justice, not realizing that it is one step away from “murderous communism.”[13]

Pastor Steven Andrew once had eight million people each month interact with his Christian Facebook page (on which he spent large sums of money). Then he was censored as having “fake news.”

• His audience dropped overnight to 467,000 people.
• Christianity is being silenced! Secular minds are setting the world’s ideological agenda.

This intrusion caused a loss of millions of dollars in donations and a censoring of his Christian witness.[14]
 
Computerized smart home speakers are now in forty million American homes. One can call out questions and quickly get an electronic answer. They can even identify who you are, if given your name. Google Home and Alexa are the dominant technologies in the United States. But – if one asks, “Who is Jesus Christ?” or “Who is Jesus?” the general response is “I’m not sure how to help you with that.”

• The courts took prayer out of schools.
• Christianity is now becoming “politically incorrect.”
• Artificial intelligence (AI) has already become “biased”!

Yet, these “speakers” can identify Buddha, Muhammad and Satan. Google Home has become a major “go-to-source” for information. It can play your music, call your friends and answer almost any question – but is unacquainted with Jesus. Another attack on Christianity.[15]
 
Anti-Christian Politics
 
Democratic Representative Steve Cohen, on behalf of a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives (February 2019), when swearing in witnesses, omitted the last phrase, “So help me God.” Representative Michael Johnson (R–LA) interrupted him with a “parliamentary inquiry” – “I think we left out the phrase “So help me God.” Cohen replied. “We did.”

• Jerrold Nadler (D–NY) shut the discussion down, saying, “We do not have religious tests for office or anything else, and we should let it go at that.”
• “Another Republican House member later weighed in on this issue. Liz Cheney from Wyoming said: ‘It is incredible, but not surprising, that the Democrats would try to remove God from committee proceedings in one of their first acts as the majority. … They really have become the party of Karl Marx.’”[16]

Our rights are inalienable because they are endowed by our Creator. If we don’t believe in the Creator, where are our rights?
 
“In his Farewell Address, George Washington said, ‘Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?’ Take God out of oaths, and they have no real meaning.
 
“Thomas Jefferson asked, ‘Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?’”[17]
 
Franklin Graham asked, “Why has the Democratic Party turned its back on God?” He then answered his own question:

• “Because His standards condemn their sin.”
• “Invoking God” would mean that there is something more powerful than Congress. The Democrats don’t want that!

“Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee [also] said, ‘I think God belongs in religious institutions: in temple, in church, in cathedral, in mosques – but not in Congress.’
 
Franklin Graham responded: “I would say to Rep. Cohen and other politicians, basically what Rep. Garret Graves of LA said – We need more of God, not less! What Rep. Cohen is suggesting is just what Communism did in Eastern Europe and is still doing in places around the world like Cuba. Communism only allows worship inside approved churches [with approved leaders].”[18]
 
Left-Leaning Sin
 
Host Tucker Carlson of Fox News brilliantly observed:
 
“The next time you hear some Democratic politician lecturing you about your moral inferiority, you know that their self-righteousness is usually hiding something.
 
“Hypocrisy isn’t just a feature of modern liberalism. It’s the heart of modern liberalism. Ever wonder how people who advocate for abortion can say they stand for children? How a movement that demonizes an entire race can claim to oppose racism? The same way Al Gore can travel by private jet while trying to ban your SUVs.
 
“They claim that they ‘can’t commit sin if [their] … intentions are pure. And liberals believe their intentions are the purest.’ If that sounds like theology, and not public policy, that’s because it is theology. Modern liberalism is a religious movement. It’s a replacement for the Protestant Christianity that the left worked so hard to undermine and destroy.”[19]
 
Managing editor of World Net Daily and editor of Whistleblower Magazine, David Kupelian notes: “The left, righteously posing as protectors of women, blacks, gays, students, immigrants, the poor and other societal ‘victims’ (while demonizing conservatives and Christians as selfish, racist, anti-science, anti-woman, anti-immigrant and homophobic), in reality is the primary cause of the vast majority of the misery, suffering and injustice it claims to oppose.

“But this should not in any way surprise us. Because if we delve just a little deeper into the subject, we’ll see that the left’s efforts at ‘fundamental transformation’ couldn’t possibly have any other effect on America than to deceive, corrupt, enslave and break millions of human beings – body, mind and soul. And that is because the political and cultural left – I’m talking now about people animated by the worldview, policies, strategies and deepest motivations of people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – simply cannot operate without violating all of the Ten Commandments.
 
“Whether we realize it or not, we are currently reeling under the sustained assault of a 100-year war against Christianity by the forces of atheistic Marxism.
 
“In the end, there’s one inescapable reason Judeo-Christian principles, crystalized in the Ten Commandments, have been singularly successful in the laboratory of world history: They encourage and enable the good and noble side of human nature to flower, and restrain the evil side, whereas Marxism-socialism and the left’s rebellious and immoral political and cultural agenda do exactly the opposite. Whether consciously or not, in its fanatical pursuit of manmade utopia and freedom apart from God, the left elevates and glorifies everything ignoble about human nature – and in the process, persecutes genuine goodness.”[20]
 
Recently, a letter was sent to the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate adamantly opposed to a Democratic bill “poorly named Equality Act.” The letter’s signatures represent tens of millions of Americans. This bill would:

1. Equate one’s sexual conduct with skin color or ethnicity, which would provide legal excuses for immorality.
2. It would “gut” the religious freedom protections in the United States.
3. In the employment non-discrimination provisions, some houses of worship would be barred from ensuring that their leaders and employees would abide by their beliefs. Women who identify as men would have to be accepted as men.
4. It would force religious employers to pay for gender transition insurance.
5. It contains the “right to demand” an abortion.

The bottom line of this egregious bill: Change your faith-based practices or face governmental justice.
 
“Washington watchdog Judicial Watch earlier warned it [this bill] would remove access to all single-sex ‘public multi-stall bathrooms, domestic violence or rape crisis shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, jails, juvenile detention facilities, homeless shelters, locker rooms or group showers.’”
 
Psychologist James Dobson previously warned, “Make no mistake – the so-called Equality Act is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to finish off religious liberty in America once and for all, which ought to be plainly obvious based upon a cursory reading of the First Amendment.” [21]
 
America is close to creating laws that defy one’s conscience! What might happen if congressional laws take on the nature of mandating how one worships (as a backlash)? God has not appointed any man as a conscience for another – but many are assuming that role.
 
“God never forces the will or the conscience; but Satan’s constant resort – to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce – is compulsion by cruelty. Through fear or force he endeavors to rule the conscience and to secure homage to himself. To accomplish this, he works through both religious and secular authorities, moving them to the enforcement of human laws in defiance of the law of God.”[22]
 
The ”far left gestures” are threatening the very fabric this Republic was founded on! Even non-profit organizations would be harmed by this Equality Act. Satan is taking control of powerful American leaders. God’s Spirit is being withdrawn. Demonic behavior is gripping policy decisions. This echoes the text: “He spake as a dragon” (Revelation 13:11).
 
Recently, sympathizing with the alleged hurt feelings of only one atheist student, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that “anything that might resemble a prayer” or addressing God at a board meeting of Chino Valley Unified School District (California) was illegal! This included:

1. The “ceremonial prayer” (legislative prayer) before the meeting.
2. A teacher or board member saying, “God appointed us to be here.” or placing “God before oneself.”

Resistance to Christianity is erupting from unexpected places:

• In Magnolia, Texas, the city council tripled the water bill of its three churches by implementing an “institutional rate.” City Administrator Paul Mendes said that it would allow us to collect monies in “place of taxes or other fees.”
• This is a defacto tax which is prohibited by the Texas Constitution.[23]

In a speech on the House Floor, in a spirit of raw hatred, Muslim Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar accused Christians of imposing their beliefs on society.

• “I’m frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith” (while wearing her hijab witness during her speech).
• She is silent about Shariah-based subjugation of women.[24]

Conclusion
 
Tragically, the tide away from Biblical values guiding America was highlighted by Mark Galli, writer and former managing editor of Christianity Today:

• “I realized that if I never prayed again, that I could still be a very good editor at a Christian publication, and a very good church member at my local parish. I knew how to get along with others, to manage staff, to work with my superiors, to work with fellow church members, and to write on Christian spirituality. But prayer wasn’t necessary to do all that. These other matters were all learned skills that had more or less become good habits. My personal relationship with God really didn’t make any difference.”
• He went on to say: “We’ve learned how to be effective for him [Christ], to the point that we don’t really need him any longer.”[25]

If giant leaders in the Evangelical world find that personal relationship with God unnecessary, what about the non-Christians? These leaders are collectively the majority. And, what impact will the legal recognition of a Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, by the IRS as a tax-exempt organization have on America’s future?[26] Anti-Christian sentiment is fragmenting the bedrock of this country.
 
More than a lack of interest in Christianity has infiltrated American society and churches. Activists with guilt-driven hatred are seeking to dismantle the moral fabric of faith in Christ. Psychologist James Dobson, a member of President Trump’s Faith Advisory Board, recently spoke out: “Defend what has been purchased with the blood of patriots or our religious liberty will be lost.”[27]
 
Defend, also, what Jesus Christ has done and is doing for you. Defend what He can do for others. That opportunity will soon pass. “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6).
 
Bible passages instruct Christians in times such as this to make the most of every opportunity (Colossians 4:4-6), contend for the faith (Jude 3) and have a reasonable answer ready for everyone who asks “to give the reason for the hope that you have” and to do it with “gentleness and respect” (I Peter 3:15).
 

References: