Posted on 12/11/2014 12:59:44 PM PST by Biggirl
How do you square the history of Rome with the idea that a nation’s godliness determines its ups and downs? Rome rose to power and was at its height when it was pagan. The it became Christian and lost it all. How do you account for that?
And how about China. It has existed for thousands of years and has never been Christian. Its rise to world power status in modern times has happened while it has been officially communist and atheist with forced abortions and all the other trappings of its godless ideology. How can that have happened?
Germany is the greatest power in Europe with the world’s third largest economy yet it is probably less Christian now than it has been since it was a bunch of pagans. How do you explain that?
How about the so called Asian tiger nations. Is their advancement due to their being more Christian now?
What about Canada. It’s probably doing better than it ever has. Is that because it’s more Christian now? In fact Canada is probably less Christian than it’s ever been.
I would be happy if there were a strong correlation between the godliness of nations and their risings and fallings but I don’t see this in the data. Instead, I think God has left a whole lot up to us. We basically reap the natural consequences of our actions. It’s the whole free will thing.
Paul’s advice to Timothy is excellent for us today:
1 Timothy 1
“3 As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine,
4 Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.”
Much of the OT that people mistake for end times prophesy was always known (until relatively recently when false teachers misled many) to be prophesy about OT events (thus proving that God’s prophets had offered true prophecy) and about the coming Messiah and his earthly ministry 2,000 years ago, which was the beginning of Christ’s Kingdom on earth - over which Christ reigns today from heaven at the right hand of God.
Note Christ’s own reference to this about himself:
Matthew 22
“41 While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,
42 Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto him, The son of David.
43 He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying,
44 The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool?
45 If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?
46 And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.”
When our Lord was quoting from this Psalm of David:
Psalm 110:1 “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”
Paul’s epistle to Titus:
Titus 3:9 “But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain.”
These types of questions are what Paul was speaking of, trying to prove or predict weighty issues such as the doctrine of salvation or trying to guess when the precise day of the Lord (final judgement) will be, by tracing geneologies.
We must have an understanding of whether prophetic Bible verses are about Christ’s first coming 2,000 years ago or about his second coming to avoid errors in our conclusions about these prophecies.
She's "lost" all right... on practically every page. If the double ash heap of the World Trade Center towers didn't provide a clue, well...
An honest, detailed study of the books of Ecclesiastes and Job provides a lot of understanding of God’s personality and purposes.
They cover the concept that God provides blessings for both the evil and the good.
For example, he provides the blessing of rain, which yields good harvests on both the evil and the good.
Those books tell us that this is not God being unjust, but God being merciful, he gives gifts to those who do not deserve the gifts.
The very salvation of the elect, after all, is not merited by the elect. All fall short of the glory of God, that is, all fallen men would reject God were it not for his Holy Spirit, by his grace, drawing men to his Word. So therefore God would be justified in destroying all, since he has created all, he sustains all through his blessings of bountiful sustenance, and yet all in ungratefulness would reject him their very creator and giver of life to them.
God throughout the Bible, it is very important to keep in mind, makes use of people and nations to effect his will.
In various OT verses we see him raise up evil and wicked nations which then make war on his people, ancient Israel, and defeat them. Why would he do this to his own ? Prosper the wicked and use them to defeat his own ? He does this to chastise his people when they reject him.
All the examples of prosperous or powerful nations that are not godly thus fit into these categories. God does as he will and his ways are unsearchable.
We also see in Job discussion of what of the question of hardships and defeats faced by God’s own, which, since Christ’s resurrection are referred to in the Bible as God’s elect.
Once again, there are many reasons God may have for the suffering of his elect - most notably, of course, being that the greatest honor for a true believer is to die in the name of Christ.
Scoffers will look at the true believer’s death because of their faith which they maintained at the end (like they did of Christ on the cross) and mockingly say that God abandoned them, or that such is proof that God does not exist, when of course in truth, the believer’s unwavering at the end when facing death glorifies God, as God was able to give the believer the strength and faith required to face death and not recant their testimony.
What we do know from the Bible regarding nations is simply that nations that reject God are, in essence, living on borrowed time, that they should not be surprised when the receive temporal judgement.
We also know that in the Bible frequently God appears to be waiting too long, from our feeble human perspective, to punish wicked nations, when actually he is purposely waiting until the nation gets to a point of fulness in their wickedness, so that God’s cup of wrath is then full when he executes his temporal judgement on the nation.
Sometime when he appears to us to be waiting too long, he is being merciful, allowing his elect the blessing of time to come to Christ, which of course, is true in general of his second coming, the day of the Lord, which will be at a time unknowable beforehand by us (like a thief in the night) but certainly when the very last person who is among God’s elect has been converted.
2 Peter 3
“7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
In the preceding verses, Peter thus tells us that ungodly men will most surely face judgement on judgement day, the day of the Lord, but all the Lord’s elect will come to know Christ and be converted prior to that day.
The Apostle also indicates that man’s perspective of time and God’s perspective of time is completely different.
Certainly all men do not know the mind of God as it is unknowable. Men, in their arrogance, think they know so much, but they can’t see how little they do know. And so they look at the freedom to act that they are given, and they discount the evidence of God’s revelation of himself and say that God either does not exist, or amongst misled professing Christians, that God is not in complete control, that God waits to see what we do. Such misled Christians forget that this would mean that God does not know beforehand what we will do, which is not supported anywhere in the Bible and contradicted in many places in the Bible.
Some Christians who are misled by false teachers are really just making an honest mistake; they have been misled. But the Bible tells us that God will not suffer even one of his flock to fail to be saved, that God fully can and fully does save whom he will. All the misled Christian needs to realize is that we must understand there is a difference in viewing the world from man’s perspective than from God’s perspective, which, of course, we can not understand. In the end, we will come to see that every word of the Bible is true, even those Biblical teachings which were previously not understood by men. And in our everyday lives, and in time and history, Christ is victorious, and God’s will be done - though we have the God-given freedom to struggle with all things in our minds and, using our minds, to struggle with our daily life in the world. From our perspective, if we, in our mind, reject the evidence and testimony of the hand of God as we live our lives, we did then indeed from our perspective have the freedom to do so, and we would also be free to accept them. In fact, as fallen men, that is inclination of all men. Therefore God must be the one to save us, against our will, with his Holy Spirit to draw to his Word (Christ) those whom he shows mercy on.
In many regards American public school history teaching and American media keep Americans in the dark about key happenings in the upper echelons of power, so your comments do afford me the opportunity to make a couple more points that readers may find interesting or perhaps have even some stronger emotional reaction.
Regarding recent Asian economic ascendance in the 20th century, this is due to interaction with the West.
From the practical standpoint, there was the involvement with the financial elites of Western banking at the very top of national hierarchy of the various Asian nations.
An example of this is in the following link to a PDF of a scholarly paper which discusses politics and economics of pre-War Japan. This link is at the London School of Economics, one of the elites’ premier universities, so it is no mistake that this pdf is available there. This information must be publicly available in order for the elites to dispel the thought that they act in any conspiratorial way. This is not “secret”, but revealed publicly, so “nothing is being hidden”.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6914/1/Politics_and_the_Economy_in_Pre-War_Japan.pdf
The thorough reader of the first article in this pdf, that of Mr. Smethurst, will note the eerily familiar ring to all the same economic issues and perspectives we hear today coming from the financial elites, their minions and their captive Western media - yet this was all going on a century ago.
Much of it sounds innocuous, but once one gains some familiarity with the standard methods and strategies of elite financial interests throughout the centuries, one comes to understand the significance that the relationships are so well kept out of the teaching of history in the West, dismissed as mere boring banking facts of theories and interest rates, etc. The reader should come to be utterly shocked that the elites have their media minions constantly spew nonsense while the elites are the movers and shakers behind the scense, without whose personal influence, politicial intrigues and financing, there would simply have been no capability or stage set for the precipitation of a global war on the order of WWII.
Another key point is from a Biblical perspective. These financial elites have been closely tied with Christian and Jewish leaderships, and when the Western elites sought to enter Asia, they brought with them Christian missionaries who were completely oblivious to the inner workings of the elites’ financial machinations, of course.
But I think it is essential to note that the wicked elites wound up causing the prosperity of the Asian nations, while the wicked elites also caused the missionaries to spread Christianity in those nations - even though the elites are not godly people at all and simply sought to a) simply Westernize the culture and b) have the Churches used in the mission work available to the elites to make use of. The elites, having over the 20th century greatly taken part in the corruption of Christian churches, nowadays have Churches even more amenable to their agendas than Churches a century ago would ever have imagined being.
An interesting story of missionary work in China is the story of Scotland’s Eric Liddell, told in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqHEYnNSZeA
Oh, of course, in “what the elites sought” in “Westernizing” Asia, of course, was - as in the West - the imposition of a tax/debt slave state of which they were the financiers.
I kind of assumed in my second to last paragraph that the reader would take that as a given, but I think it best to mention it for the sake of clarity.
Remember the 7 year cycles.
2001, Sept 2008 (economic crash),
2015’s comin’
I’ve known for several decades that’s not a quote from scripture.
I interpret it as another way of saying “Get off your backside and get to work”.
It might better be phrased in the negative - “God doesn’t help those who don’t help themselves”.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to change hearts here or just interested in prancing around, Pharisee-like, showing-off how much you think you know.
If it’s the former, you’re failing miserably.
If it’s the latter, you’re succeeding spectacularly.
Before criticizing someone else’s alleged “prancing around” go look at yourself in a mirror.
Yes, the Bible exhorts us to not be slothful.
A search for the word sloth yields 17 occurrences:
https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=sloth&qs_version=KJV
I like this one, describing the lazy person who doesn’t get out of bed very easily, I find it very funny:
Proverbs 26:14 “As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed.”
There’s this hillarious one, sort of sounds like British humor to me, it’s amazing that it’s written so long ago - it tells the “whole story” in one sentence:
Proverbs 22:13 “The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.”
And the Apostle Paul writes:
2 Thessalonians 3:10 “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
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