14 Aug 2023

San Francisco Is Digging Its Own Grave

I watched a series of videos by a YouTuber who monitors the financial health of California cities. He went down various streets in San Francisco and showed how nearly every major retailer has left the heart of the city.

Just a few years ago, the city had some of the richest areas in the nation. Market Street was the Broadway of the West Coast. It is a major thoroughfare in San Francisco. It begins at The Embarcadero Plaza in front of the Ferry Building at the northeastern edge of the city and runs southwest through downtown.

Union Square was the teeming commercial hub of the city. Many major hotels and department stores were packed into the area surrounding the actual square. Numerous upscale boutiques, restaurants, nightspots, and galleries occupied the spaces tucked between the larger buildings. At the intersection of Powell and Market streets, tourists have long huddled to view one of the city’s most unique sites, the manual cable car turnaround.

The Embarcadero Plaza must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Only the most luxurious tenants could probably afford the high rents. The whole complex is now almost empty.

Two key things turned San Francisco into a hell hole. The homeless people moved in, and the city allowed people to steal from stores with little or no consequences. The fuel for the bad behavior is drugs. About 90% of people who live on the street are on drugs. Addicts shoot up right in plain view of cops, and they throw the used needle onto the pavement.

One grossest sign of San Francisco’s decline is poop. It is everywhere. Some people have created websites that show areas where people have relieved themselves. I saw one map that showed a poop incident about every 10 feet. It gets regularly cleaned up, but you can’t walk two blocks without stepping on 50 locations where someone has done their business in the past.

Many corporations are part of the problem. Walgreens has reached the point where it does absolutely nothing to stop theft. At first, its employees were allowed to stop criminals. Because of past violent interactions between workers and criminals and resulting lawsuits, employees who attempt to prevent the theft of merchandise will now face termination.

Walgreens has lost a huge amount of money in the San Francisco area. It kept the stores open because of pressure from liberal groups that blame racism as the motivation for closing stores. When you have mobs of black people storming a store and nearly cleaning it out, it’s time to lock the doors for good.

At first, Walgreens was robbed a few times a day. Now they are robbed several times an hour. Some reporters with CNN were amazed to watch a Walgreens get robbed three times within five minutes. They were puzzled why many of the items were padlocked.

I watched local newscasts from Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC, and they were all stumped over why San Francisco was falling apart. The homeless were ignored as being part of the problem; they were the victims of some greater cause. It is difficult for me to understand how someone can be labeled as a victim when one person is brandishing knives at others while another individual is indiscriminately throwing feces in every direction.

Residents are urging the city to take action, as individuals residing in tents on a particular street have obstructed the sidewalk. The department responsible for maintaining order said they can’t do anything. A lawyer for the city said that because these people were “involuntarily homeless,” their taking over public property is not a crime. The times when the city makes it look like they are cleaning up a street are a sham. The homeless pack up their tents and just come back a few hours later.

San Francisco’s homeless crisis is very destructive to law enforcement. Cops don’t bother to do their job because they don’t get any real results. If they arrest someone for a major crime, they’ll be back on the street in short order. When these people are ordered to appear before a judge, most don’t even bother to show up.

If the police can’t do real work, they will pretend to be on the job. One video showed a policeman guarding a Starbucks. One woman had two officers escort her through a drug store; when she tried to drive home, she discovered that someone had blocked her in. She told the two cops, and they got into an argument with the guy who was working on his engine. The guy didn’t listen to the cops because he knew they wouldn’t arrest him.

The worst thing about the situation in San Francisco is that it has become a template that other cities can copy. I think most of the problem is demonic, but the moral implosion is partly the result of monkey see, monkey do. To have a city taken over by homelessness and crime doesn’t require any action. To turn a city into another San Francisco, the citizens can just stop doing anything, and nature will take its course.

The majority of news broadcasts presenting potential resolutions to San Francisco’s decline focused on the involvement of federal assistance. Since the 1960s, we have poured about $3 trillion down a rat hole, which is commonly called the War on Poverty. The real problem with the city is a lack of morality. Every society that has turned its back on godly principles has ended in destruction. There is a slight possibility that revival will sweep over the land. We are so close to the tribulation hour, I think the best option is to pray for the rapture.

“Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today” (Deut. 8:11).

–Todd

Deity and Deception

Wickedness is flooding this generation in America and around the world, as we try to document in these commentaries each week. Our purpose is to make people aware that the stage is being set for the fulfillment of Bible prophecy according to God’s Word. Truth comes only from the mind of a Holy God and is counter to all the deception that is rampant while the seven years of Tribulation draw ever closer.

Jesus said there would come a time near the end of the age when deceivers, even using His name in their declarations, would come on the scene:

“And he said, Take heed that ye be not deceived: for many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them” (Luke 21:8).

There would be a time when deceivers would say their credentials came from Him, the Lord said, in effect. He warned His listeners not to be deluded into thinking their false teaching and false prophecy came from Him. In other places, Jesus said all such deception came from the deceiver’s father, the devil, who is the “father of lies.”

Apart from the actual declaration that there are many ways to salvation other than through Jesus Christ (see John 14:16), I can think of no greater deception than that foisted upon America and the world today than the lies intrinsic within the evil of abortion. This practice sheds the blood of the innocent, one of the things God has stated He hates. As many as sixty-five million unborn children—maybe as many as seventy million by now—have been murdered in the wombs of mothers in America since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

Jesus’ prophecy that there would be deceivers claiming to be speaking and acting at His prompting seems to be manifest glaringly in the following story:

A female pastor who is also a Planned Parenthood advisor delivered a sermon in which she said she felt “God’s presence” when she aborted two pregnancies, and she blasted Evangelicals for their “toxic theology” on the subject.

In a sermon delivered July 9 at The Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters spoke candidly about her own experience with abortion and how she views Scripture through that lens.

Wearing a pink stole emblazoned with the Planned Parenthood logo, Peters opened her message bemoaning the state of pro-life Evangelicalism, with its “talking fetuses, aggressive bumper stickers and saccharine billboards quoting Scripture and invoking God’s wrath.”

Peters, who is also a professor of religious studies and founding director of the Poverty and Social Justice Program at Elon University in North Carolina, referenced the state’s recently passed law banning most abortions after 12 weeks. She said the bill’s passage is an example of Evangelical culture setting the political tone on abortion.

“When it is primarily Catholics and Evangelical Christians who talk about God and faith and abortion, they define the narrative anti-choice Christians have so effectively shaped,” she said…

Peters, invoking the language of decolonization ideology, went on to claim this narrative “has colonized our minds, traumatizing many people with its toxic theology and shaping a culture of stigma and shame that has silenced millions of women and people who have had abortions, erasing their voices, their stories, and their witness from the public sphere.”…

In one of the more shocking moments of the sermon, Peters referred to pre-born life as a “zygote” and criticized the “anti-choice” position that life begins at conception.

She revealed that, as a mother of two, she had previously aborted two other pregnancies.

“I, too, feel that I am known by God in these ways, as a woman who has borne two children. I can affirm that I felt something sacred happening in my gestating body during those pregnancies,” said Peters. “I can also attest that I felt God’s presence with me as I made the decision to end two pregnancies, and I felt no guilt, no shame, no sin.” (Ian M. Giatti, “PCUSA pastor teaches on Psalm 139, says she ‘felt God’s presence,’ ‘no sin’ after 2 abortions Sermon alleges ‘anti-choice’ Evangelicals have ‘colonized our minds’ with ‘toxic theology,'” Christian Post, Rapture Ready News, August 6, 2023)

To be clear, this abominable theology is not the position of the mainline Presbyterian Church. This comes from an offshoot of that denomination which, like in the case of a number of denominations as of late, suffers from what I believe to be apostate incursion. And that satanic incursion was, I believe, part of the Lord Jesus’ warning. The end-times deceivers are declaring their theology comes from God. Jesus, of course, is God, but the deity that inspires such thinking represented in the story of this “pastor” comes not from Him but from the father of lies.

While witnessing the ramping up of such evil, be assured that God will soon judge the wickedness that says He approves of the killing of unborn babies. I’m of the strong conviction that the Lord will make His statement on when life begins by taking every child–even those just conceived—from the earth at that moment of Rapture.

Rather than condemning those who are under this deception, we want to bid them to accept God’s only way to salvation. Thus, the fallen mind that cannot see the truth in the matter of abortion and all other matters antithetical to God’s will can, through a reborn and renewed mind and spirit, know truth from the true Deity in Heaven.

Here is how to come to that salvation:

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:9–10).

—Terry

The post 14 Aug 2023 appeared first on Rapture Ready.