EndTime Issues ... : Restrict and Control

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Restrict and Control
A Test Run?

Introduction

Love permits others the freedom to think, choose, execute ideas and make moral decisions. Within Scripture’s sacred pages a golden thread declares God has that kind of love (I John 4:10). This was originally evident with heaven’s exalted angelic beings.

“When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). Their leader, Lucifer, was full of wisdom, perfect in his ways and noted for his beauty (Ezekiel 28:12-15).
Then “iniquity was found in him” (Ezekiel 28:15). Lucifer chose a path contrary to his Creator.

He had been highly elevated in God’s government. It’s impossible to understand that his final aspiration was: “I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14). At variance with a kingdom based on love, he desired control and power over others.

Lucifer convinced one third of the angels to join him (Revelation 12:4). They exercised their freedom to reject God who gave it – but – consequences followed.
God eventually expelled them from the precincts of heaven (Revelation 12:7-9).

Adam and Eve were given a choice – a test – within those divine principles of love. A beautiful garden home was their dwelling. However, touching and eating of one tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, would have adverse consequences. They failed to remain within the circle of God’s holy mandates and were expelled from their garden home.

The freedom to rebel against the order of love was exercised by much of the antediluvian world. At a defined point in time, God had to destroy that self-destructive society (Genesis 6).

Joshua, that mighty leader of Israel, was keenly aware of the value of choice. As rebellion developed within Israel, he challenged:

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15).

In all these instances, God’s love permitted the free exercise of decision and response. A preference to rebel, however, had devastating consequences, both natural and those set by the Creator. That resistance was out of harmony with the perfect order He created.

A fascinating study of rebellion and selfish logic came from the chief priests and pharisees: “If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation” (John 11:48).
They saw a loss of power and prestige from Jesus’ mounting influence. More than simply restricting His freedom, they sought to kill Him (John 11:50). That would assure their retention of national leadership. The “final solution” to an insurgent is murder.

God’s principles of free choice remain unchanged today. How it is exercised has consequences, yet the individual can choose.

“What shall we say then? is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law” (Romans 7:7a). At variance.
“For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous” (I John 5:13). The solution.
“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). A warning – a promise.

The free exercise of choice is being resisted, even impeded, by many political leaders.

Held Against Reason

The government’s dealing with Covid-19 has destroyed a once-booming economy, created record unemployment, and brought a temporary loss of the basic freedoms inherent in America. This unexpected controlling power is now in the states’ hands. It has exceeded reason and even medical understanding, especially in the blue states. Without major legal challenges, the Constitution is being undermined without the ability to honorably resist. Political leaders are restricting people’s movement, claiming what is essential activity to society, how far apart one should be to another, requiring face masks, forcing shelter-in-place, even developing plans to monitor people’s movements and restricting the assembly of individuals.

None of these curbs have a solid scientific base to prevent the spread of the virus.
Restrictions have come from “pronouncements” by political leaders and some ill-advised physicians, creating fear of sickness and death if their regulations were not followed. Shadowed within those edicts was a litany of non-compliance retributive measures![2]

Thomas Jefferson said: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty” (1743–1826). We have mounting reason to fear the government.

He argued persuasively that the government would respect liberty only if it feared losing power.
If the leaders became tyrannical in their control, they would restrict and coerce.

It is difficult to imagine, in a free society, that over the past few weeks governors of each state, in varying degrees, used police to interfere with personal choice.

These restrictions have been placed on:
Leaving one’s home, except for government-defined “essential services”
Operating personal businesses
Jogging in parks
Patronizing restaurants or clothing stores
Going to church, temple or mosque

“The Founders of America made the profound and indisputable choice of establishing a government dedicated to … liberty over the illusion of safety.

“They embedded that choice in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former states, unequivocally, that no government is legitimate without the consent of the governed and that government’s principal duty is to secure our rights.
“The latter – which expressly protects the right to make personal choices – is the supreme law of the land, and thus all governmental acts are subordinate to it….

“Stated differently, the governments that have interfered with our well-established rights to go about our daily lives as we see fit – taking chances whenever we cross the street, drink a glass of water, bite into food, sit next to a stranger on a train or at a baseball game, or go through a green light in our vehicles – have failed their first obligation, which is to safeguard our freedoms to take those chances.”[3]

When people are told that life and health are at risk, they sensibly bow to restriction of freedom. If they submit because of contrived fear, however, they are held hostage to unproven assumptions. In the Covid-19 policies:

Children are held hostage by not being able to attend school.
America is “locked up” to protect the elderly – the most vulnerable. It should be the opposite. It’s the vulnerable who should be quarantined.

Yet, the 2018 flu season killed 80,000 Americans and the freedom to move and interact wasn’t restricted! Margaret Weis wrote: “You cannot hide from danger. Death floats on the air, creeps through the window, comes with the handshake of a stranger. If we stop living because we fear death, then we have already died.”[4]

“The government claims it’s protecting us from the virus. With the Constitution in lockdown, who’s protecting us from the government?”[5]

“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Daniel Webster[6]

On the pretense and assumed premise that these restraints minimize infection, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two decades on failed preventive efforts.

In 2017 the CDC spent 1.1 billion dollars on chronic disease prevention and health promotion, $285 million on injury prevention and $215 million on environmental health, all concomitantly addressed by other federal agencies!
They have spent little on the preparation for communicable diseases and pandemics. Dealing with Covid-19 appears to be another governmental debacle.

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) spends two times more money on travel than medical supplies for the needy. In December 2019 Taiwan warned the WHO that an alarming coronavirus had been detected. They not only ignored the concern but barred that country from participating in its annual WHO meetings.[7]

What is going wrong? What is happening?

Franklin Graham sounded the alarm: “It’s about control.” Then he warned: The restriction of our rights may not be temporary.[8]

“‘Never before in our history have those who are well been quarantined rather than those who are sick! I don’t want to minimize the fact that the coronavirus is dangerous. We need to take precautions and we need to exercise personal responsibility,’ he continued. ‘But we also need to be cautious before we say yes to every ban proposed and agree to anything that we think might help protect us from the virus, to make sure that we’re not letting go of some of our constitutional rights.’
“‘Our response to the coronavirus pandemic could greatly affect our future and our freedoms,’ he said.”[9]

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said that we are “shredding the Constitution” while enforcing strange quarantine measures.[10]

The perpetually power-hungry Maxine Waters, in response to protestors over restriction of freedom to choose, said: They “should be ashamed” – we don’t want businesses to “open back up!”[11]

That is a declaration of war on small businesses, the backbone of American enterprise.
Her solution was to lend money to tide them over, never admitting that they may never open again. When chaos and helplessness supervene, the elites control everything.

From Great Britain the alarms have also sounded. Former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption cautioned that his country is being turned into a police state. He advised that “There is a difference between law and official instructions. It is the difference between a democracy and a police state,” adding: “Liberty and the rule of law are surely worth something even in the face of a pandemic.”

Lord Sumption’s concerns about civil liberties echo those of conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, one of a growing number of British journalists – suggesting that governments’ policies on the coronavirus is doing more harm than good.

Hitchens was deeply concerned about the “unprecedented curbs on liberties,” which he concluded were “neither a proportionate nor effective answer” to the pandemic.

Amplifying the chaos was the news from Italy that “huge numbers of people are being recorded as having died from the coronavirus who have actually died with the coronavirus.” Their actual deaths were from major heart problems, lung disease, high blood pressure and other causes.

There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes.[12] An expanding awareness of misreporting on death certificates is being noted here in the USA.

Curtailment of Religious Liberty

Perhaps to Christians the insightful view of U.S. Attorney General William Barr relating to the current barriers to assemble (going to church) bears attention:

“‘Militant secularists’ across America long have charged that religious people are ‘imposing’ their views on them.

“I feel today religion is being driven out of the marketplace of ideas and there’s an organized militant secular effort to drive religion out of our lives.

“To me the problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people, it’s the opposite – it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”[13]

Provocative is a similar mindset predicted in Scripture. It states that a mark or characteristic of some beast (nation or power) over a forty-two-month period will shortly make war on the saints (Revelation 13:5, 7) because they have not followed a global ideology (vss. 14, 15).

A similar anti-christian conflict was projected in Daniel 7:21 (cf. 8:10, 11:33, Revelation 6:4, 8, 11:7b, 12:15). Fearful lessons regarding liberty and tyranny are bursting into sight. This is especially true in California, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington State. Is America approaching that Biblical period where freedom will become a restricted commodity?

Attending church has not been seen as an “essential service.”
Obtaining an abortion is.

Fascinating, the most pro-abortionist leaders are the most anti-religious.

Many of the left today have used the pandemic crisis to shut down religious services:

The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, demanded that churches hand over a list of anyone who attended any of their services. When Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel threatened to sue, the city backed down.
The governor of Illinois postulated that church services may need to be banned for a year. This is the same governor who prohibited residents in his state from traveling – while apparently his wife vacationed in Florida.
Overzealous administrators have sought to ban churches from even holding “drive-in” church services, which followed the mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
A Romanian church in Chicago held services on Sunday. Mayor Lightfoot sent tow trucks to haul away the cars of attendees. Many of those members risked their lives to escape Communism – and now this?![14]

Anti-church mandates have become so acute in California that the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice had to warn Governor Newsom that his actions were unconstitutional.

“Laws that do not treat religious activities equally with comparable nonreligious activities are subject to heightened scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment…. Religious gatherings may not be singled out for unequal treatment compared to other nonreligious gatherings that have the same effect on the government’s public health interest, absent the most compelling reasons.”[15]

Politics of Socialism

The government’s restraining actions to the Covid-19 pandemic have been called a “Dry Run” toward socialism and seem to have been a “huge success!”
“We have become part of a mass scale human experiment in government control and it turned out that stripping away our freedom wasn’t all that difficult. Under the guise of concern for our health and well-being, tyrants came out of the woodwork. Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our lives are being destroyed as the left solidifies and expands their oppressive powers.

“We’ve been physically and verbally harassed, threatened, fined, detained, arrested, jailed, and/or placed in forced quarantine. Business licenses have been revoked. Going to work without the permission of the government [became] a crime. So is going to the park or a beach. Children playing together is also in defiance of the government. So is placing flags on the graves of veterans.[16]

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) criticized his Democratic colleagues for using the pandemic to promote socialist governance in the United States.[17]

“Liberals are using the coronavirus as a cover to advance their deconstruction of America without opposition behind the veil of ‘saving lives’ and ‘saving democracy’…. Stopping the coronavirus is not their goal, even though they claim that it is. Killing the spirit of liberty is their primary goal…. People across the United States are being ‘deprived of life, liberty, [and] property, without due process of law.’ People across the United States are being denied the ‘free exercise’ of religion. People across the United States are being denied ‘the freedom of speech.’ People across the United States are being denied peaceable assembly and the right ‘to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”[18]

In many areas where white collar workers are soon to return to their offices, work spacing will be required. Screening will be like airport security check zones with temperature checks and more Plexiglass. “Privacy issues” will be merely a pesky little something to “get through.”[19]

Adding salt to the wounds of curbed liberty was a Catholic leadership piece, “Finding Freedom in a Lockdown: The Common Good and Liberty Don’t have to be at Odds.” It states that freedom was a gift from God – but conditional. What the government has done is for society’s common good. We are truly free when we live for the purpose to love God and our neighbors. “Consenting to obeying the government’s orders, then, can be a way of exercising our freedom and practicing our call to love.”[20] !?

America’s Greatest Mistake

A growing number of physicians and scientists are speaking out against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s restrictive recommendations from the CDC. The issue of remaining at home appears to have had the opposite effect in New York studies. Most people contracted the illness at home.

A six-foot social distancing was based on an “arbitrary suggestion” without any scientific evidence.
Thoughtful physicians are now calling that a pseudoscience restriction.

The closing of schools and parks has no reasonable purpose. Questions as to why restaurants had to be closed is being raised. Letting dangerous criminals out of jail has been insane for fear the Covid-19 pandemic might infiltrate its corridors. Yet, people who have not worn a mask and wanted to work have been incarcerated.[21]

The lockdown of people in virtually every country except Sweden may have been the “greatest mistake in history,” so suggests Dennis Prager, columnist, head of Prager University and talk show host. He’s not alone. A growing number of scientists, world leaders, physicians, epidemiologists and untold millions of people agree. Deceit, immaturity and cowardice seem to have driven so many of the elites who have power.

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in the United States.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation – double last year’s figures. According to WFP Director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three-dozen countries … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).[22]

America now faces an economic disaster. A similar state of affairs brought Nazi Germany into power. It spawned the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Prophecy states, in Revelation 13, that the nature of this country, the United States, will eventually become evil and even “speak” and “act” like a dragon. Have we tiptoed to that threshold? The near future will tell.

The Bible warns that our American freedoms will be curtailed! In the meantime, be ready for any eventuality. Most of all – question: “Is my heart right with God? Has His Spirit brought heaven-born changes into my life? Do I have frequent contact with God through prayer? Has Jesus Christ become my mentor and model?” The future will give us a different reality where we surely will need Him.

     Have you Counted the Cost?

1. There's a line that is drawn by rejecting our lord,
    Where the call of His Spirit is lost,
    And you hurry along with the pleasure-mad throng–
    Have you counted, have you counted the cost

2. You may barter your hope of eternity's morn,
    For a moment of joy at the most,
    For the glitter of sin and the things it will win–
    Have you counted, have you counted the cost? [Chorus]

3. While the door of His mercy is open to you,
    Ere the death of His love you exhaust,
    Won't you come and be healed, won't you whisper, I yield–
    I have counted, I have counted the cost. [Chorus][23]

Chorus:
    Have you counted the cost, if your soul should be lost,
    Tho' you gain the whole world for your own?
    Even now it may be that the line you have crossed,
    Have you counted, have you counted the cost
Author: Arthur J. Hodge

Franklin S. Fowler; Jr.; M.D.
Prophecy Research Initiative – non-profit 501(c)3 © 2020
EndTime Issues…; Number 238; June 4, 2020
Click here to go to PRI’s website: endtimeissues.com

References:
[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/democrats_will_sacrifice_america_to_win_a_presidency.html

[2] https://www.newsmax.com/andrewnapolitano/Govt-Has-Discovered-the-Power-of-Fear-Retribution/2020/05/13/id/967318/

[3] https://www.newsmax.com/andrewnapolitano/Govt-Has-Discovered-the-Power-of-Fear-Retribution/2020/05/13/id/967318/ (emphasis added)

[4] Weis, Margaret; The Soulforge. Quoted Peggy Ryan. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/america_held_hostage.html

[5] Ryan, Peggy, http://origin.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/america_held_hostage.html

[6] Webster, Daniel; libertytree.ca/quotes/Daniel.Webster.Quote.9BFA

[7] Arnn, Larry P. (guest speaker at Hillsdale College); Imprimis, April 22, 2020.

[8] Graham, Franklin; https://www.sermonaudio.com/new_details.asp?ID=53908

[9] https://www.wnd.com/2020/05/control-franklin-graham-sounds-alarm-government-killing-rights/

[10] https://www.foxnews.com/media/huckabee-enforcement-of-quarantines-should-scare-the-daylights-out-of-us

[11] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/05/12/maxine-waters-trump-protesters-should-be-ashamed-we-dont-want-businesses-opened-back-up/

[12] https://www.newsbreak.com/news/0Oaed6pR/delingpole-dissenting-voices-question-police-state-coronavirus-policies