Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
Even Chuck Norris Is Afraid of Obama’s “One-World Government”
Posted by: Joe Haynes in In the News on October 26th, 2009
Famous movie-star, martial arts expert and political columnist, Chuck Norris, recently wrote a column on WND warning readers about the implications of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Copenhagen this coming December. Bottom line? He’s afraid.
I was in a small-group Bible study this past weekend in which a member expressed similar fears that Obama is working towards a “one world government”. I’ve got to admit that the socialist, even communist, ideology that seems to motivate Obama is scary. And yes, democracy, freedom, national sovereignty (for all nations), opportunity for hard work and religious freedoms, all of these are threatened by what seems to be the agenda of the Copenhagen coference and what sure looks like Obama’s agenda. But why do people give voice to this fear under the label, “one world government”?
The reason, I think, is the wide acceptance of the theological views most popularly expressed in the Left Behind series of novels and movies. The actual perspective is known as “Pre-Tribulational Dispensationalism”. This perspective sees the Bible as teaching a series of dispensations under which God arranges His dealings with humanity throughout history. The “Pre-Tribulational” part of the label refers to the belief that the final dispensation is ushered in by the invisible coming of Christ to Earth just before a world-wide “tribulation” (pre-tribulational) breaks out against Christians.
Very common among writers who hold this view is the belief that the mastermind behind this world-wide tribulation will be a global dictator, the “Antichrist”, and leader of a “one-world government”. The thing of it is that no such “one-world government” is described in Bible prophecy anywhere.
For instance, in Daniel 2, the Bible predicts that starting in about the year 600 BC (2600 years ago), the nation of the Jews will be dominated by a succession of Empires: 1. Babylon, 2. Medo-Persia, 3. Greece, and 4. (though not named) Rome. In that prophecy, the Roman Empire is foreseen to break up into a commonwealth of 10 inferior kingdoms. This happened within about a century-and-a-half of the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. I’ve written in some detail about this already in a previous post. The point is that from the early “Middle Ages” until the present day, that same territory exclusively ruled by the Roman Empire (not the Greek, Medo-Persian, or Babylonian Empires) still included 10 nations.
Daniel 7 adds some detail to this foreview of world history by explaining that a single religious-political ruler will emerge who will have great influence and power over this commonwealth of 10 nations. Revelation 13 also pictures this. We often call this religious-political ruler “the Antichrist”–though he’s not named that in either book of the Bible. But even if we go along with the use of the name, “Antichrist”, we still find no indication whatsoever that he ever is predicted to rule over a “one world government”.
I don’t really care that lots of people believe a “one world government” is coming though they’ve paid very little attention to studying the relevant Bible passages. But I do care that in looking ahead so intently for the emergence of the Boogeyman a great many Christians are blind to the much more serious and close-at-hand threat presented by the real “Antichrist”, the Popes of Rome. It’s not that Christians around the globe are in danger of being persecuted by the Pope. Hardly. It’s that the Gospel message proclaimed by Christians around the globe is constantly attacked by the counterfeit “Christianity” of the Roman Catholic Church, and the self-proclaimed leader of the Christian Faith.
A read through Augustine’s City of God is a more effective vaccine for fuzzy Christian thinking about the distinction between politics and the mission of the Church than Obama’s H1N1 vaccine is for the Swine Flu. Augustine can help Christians to see that our main mission is not to defend religious freedoms and democracy, but to preach the Gospel. We can be good citizens and pray for our political leaders, yes, but when we begin to demonize them we run the risk of being distracted from our mission as the Church of Christ. We can and must pray for and seek the welfare of “The City of Man”, but we are first and foremost citizens of “The City of God.” Therefore, our real enemy is not Obama or the UN or some fictional future leader of a “one world government”. Our real enemy is the enemy of the Gospel. We call him “Satan”, and the counterfeit Christianity we call, “Roman Catholicism” is his pawn (as is every other counterfeit form of Christianity that has spawned from the Roman “church”).
Let’s pray for the success of the Gospel while also doing our part. Let’s also pray for the welfare of the City of Man and the leaders God has set up in it. But let’s not get distracted from our spiritual mission by political science-fiction masquerading as biblical teaching.
By the way, I still love Chuck Norris’ column.
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AOL News Poll: Quarter-Million Voters Doubt Obama’s Birth
Posted by: Joe Haynes in In the Bible, In the News on March 3rd, 2009
An article posted on AOL News introduced readers to what it calls “fringe” element of conservatives, called “Birthers”, who persist in doubting whether Obama was actually born in the USA as he claims. According to the writer this rumour continues to live on in spite of “overwhelming evidence”. I wonder, however, if AOL News expected the kind of response they received? A poll on this story asks a question: “Do you have any doubt about Obama’s eligibility to be president because of his birth status?” The results? One day after the article was first posted (at the time of this post), 501, 655 votes had been registered. Of these half-million voters, 52% said “No” and 48% said “Yes”.
An AOL News Poll, as of March 3 2009
Although the AOL News article spun this story to make “Birthers” (those who doubt Obama’s eligibility to be President because of the “natural born citizen” clause in the US Constitution) appear as a fringe element, unstable, embarassing to other conservatives, and so on, a quarter of a million people who read this article doubt Obama’s eligibility while about the same number had no doubts. The “Birthers” are clearly not a fringe element.
Having now read both sides of the controversy, I now have some serious questions about Obama’s actions. In particular, if he has nothing to hide regarding his status as a natural-born US citizen, then why are his lawyers squashing every attempt to uncover relevant documents? The Certification of Live Birth image released by Obama’s campaign last summer does not, in spite of protests to the contrary, settle the issue. There are questions about its authenticity, yes, but even if it is the real thing it appears that this particular kind of document doesn’t necessarily prove where a person is born even though it looks like it does. The only real proof is an authentic Birth Certificate, such as US citizens have to produce to get a driver’s license. Obama has never yet produced a Birth Certificate for examination.
What does this all have to do with prophecy? In Ezekiel 38:10f, we read about “Gog” (thought by many to be Russia) deciding to invade Israel:
Ezekiel 38:10-15 10 “Thus says the Lord GOD: On that day, thoughts will come into your mind, and you will devise an evil scheme 11 and say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will fall upon the quiet people who dwell securely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having no bars or gates,’ 12 to seize spoil and carry off plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places that are now inhabited, and the people who were gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell at the center of the earth. 13 Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish and all its leaders will say to you, ‘Have you come to seize spoil? Have you assembled your hosts to carry off plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods, to seize great spoil?’ 14 “Therefore, son of man, prophesy, and say to Gog, Thus says the Lord GOD: On that day when my people Israel are dwelling securely, will you not know it? 15 You will come from your place out of the uttermost parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great host, a mighty army.
The point here is that as long as the USA has been a strong protector and ally for Israel, any agressor had to count the cost of taking on not just Israel, but the US as well. But if, in addition to the developing economic crisis in the United States and around the world, there is also a constitutional crisis regarding the basic qualifications of the President, his legitimacy, and the legitimacy of all of his official actions, appointees, commands and so on, would this not completely disable the United States of America as a defender of weaker nations?
How did the USA get to this point? How did a once great nation, established upon biblical values as “One Nation Under God” come to be so divided along idealogical lines so that the population is increasingly polarized between those who hate the President and those who resemble a rock-star’s fan club? Looking deeper than the Obama issue, I suspect that Dr. Dell Tacket of the Truth Project is right in saying that the present crisis is one of worldview. This has led me to recall that the Bible predicted that Satan would employ a worldview in order to influence international leaders to become hostile to Israel.
Revelation 16:13-16 13 And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs. 14 For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty. 15 (“Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!”) 16 And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
The spirit that comes out of the mouth of the dragon, in verse 13, is an ideology, a worldview, based not on the Bible, but on something else. Dr. Oral Collins, in his commentary on Revelation published in 2007, writes,
[The fulfilment of verse 13] must reflect conditions existing… [in] the later 19th century to the present. These spirits are “unclean” in the sense that they are demonic. They promote ideologies that oppose the true Gospel and the People of God. The spirit “from the mouth of the dragon” suggests atheism or some pagan ideology. In the mid-twentieth century many identified it with atheistic communism. Much of this Marxist philosophy still prevails in the institutions of education today. We see this in the prevalent existentialism and relativism of post-modernist philosophy, which rejects absolute truth. Today, we must consider the Satanic spirit of Islam, most noticeable in radical Islam. (The Final Prophecy of Jesus, p. 386)
So what should Christians do? Check out the Truth Project. Write your government representatives so that they hear your voice. And pray.
Not Justice, Not Sovereignty But Prosperity
Posted by: Joe Haynes in In the Bible, In the News on February 24th, 2009
We live in interesting times.
This morning I came across three articles that caught my attention.
The first one was this one about a US Army soldier, currently serving in Iraq, announcing his intention to defy President Obama’s orders and to join a lawsuit demanding that Obama produce documents to prove his eligibility to serve as President of the United States under the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” requirement.
The second one referred to the growing “Tea Party” movement of angry Americans scheduling Boston Tea Party styled protests to condemn Obama’s lets-borrow-obscene-amounts-of-money-in-order-to-get-out-of-debt economic stimulus “plan”. I didn’t know what the Tea Party movement was so I found the video clip that started it all.
The third one was this article in which Dan Gainor vehemently criticized Obama’s destructive policies and revived the old movie quote, “I’m mad as **** and I’m not going to take it anymore!” He called the Tea Party groundswell a “populist rebellion”. But the thing that really caught my attention here wasn’t what the columnist wrote, it was the nearly 6,000 reader comments (at that time) venting anger, frustration, desperation and mabye even sedition.
If one was prone to worry it might appear as if the USA is coming apart at the seams–or at least like that possibility is less unlikely than ever before. And that led me to wonder.
In Ezekiel 38:13, we read this:
Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish and all its leaders will say to you, “Have you come to seize spoil? Have you assembled your hosts to carry off plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods, to seize great spoil?
This unified voice appears to be trans-regional, economy-driven, and more concerned with a threat to prosperity than with basic issues of justice or a nation’s sovereignty. The event this unified voice is protesting is the invasion of the land of Israel by “Gog” and its allies, whom many scholars believe to be some alliance of nations under the leadership of Russia.
Two conditions seem to be necessary in order for this prophecy to come to pass: 1) The USA must become weakened in some way so that fear of US retaliation is not sufficient to deter Russia from invading Israel. 2) International political bodies must come to a point when they are much more concerned with the right to prosperity than with “human rights” like justice or the sovereignty of the State of Israel. This group of diplomatic/economist leaders that raises a mild protest in Ezekiel 38:13 does not exist to promote justice or national sovereignty but prosperity.
When we come to a time when the world political climate reflects these two conditions, perhaps the time will be ripe for a Russian invasion of the Middle East?
