5 Feb 2024

Swimming with Gators

Some time ago, I considered the title Swimming with Gators for a book I was thinking about writing. It would, in my imaginative stage of thoughts, be about politics in America, presented from an end-of-the-age Bible prophecy perspective. The subtitle I had in mind was Staying Alive in the DC Swamp.

I approached a Washington DC insider friend who worked within the US government in a relatively influential position. He liked the title and concept but didn’t at the time want to co-write that book. So the idea just sort of fizzled, as book ideas do more times than not.

Still, the title continued to effervesce and finally has emerged here as a commentary on the end-times stage-setting going on in our nation and around the world.

I guess Lot, Abraham’s nephew, during the days leading up to God’s judgment on the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, would say that he was ”vexed.” At least that’s what the Genesis account says about the only righteous man to be found in the cities at the time. The righteous Lot was, the Bible account says, “vexed from day to day” dwelling among that wicked citizenry.

So I hope this article’s title frames to some extent a similar sense of “vexation” for those of us who desire moral uprightness in our cities and our nation. I believe many do sense that we are surrounded by swamp creatures. Much of our government leadership seems to thrive in creating for the rest of us the kind of swamp-like conditions in which they so lustily swim.

Their jaws are lined with row after row of what I view to be anti-American executive orders and legislative and judicial avarice. They afflict our daily lives by taking self-serving bites out of constitutional governance inspired by God—who, our founders acknowledged, gave us inalienable rights.

It seems, though, that these “gators” we swim with aren’t content to merely deal treacherously with those who are morally upright—particularly with those with Christian values. The DC “swamp,” as it has become known, is determined to, as Barack Obama stated when he was a candidate for president of the United States, “fundamentally transform America.”

His perceived view of America found the nation as a wicked place born of slavery. He set about to change America into a Marxist-socialist model –a type of inculcation under which he was raised. Michelle Obama, the first lady, then told those she was visiting in foreign lands that she was for the first time proud of America –now that her husband was elected to fundamentally change the nation, I presume.

With that transformation underway with a vengeance, the swamp set about to open America’s borders, allowing illegal aliens to flow from every quarter of planet Earth –including young men of military-forces age from places in the Middle East and even from Red China. The year just past set all sorts of records in the illegal invasion of our southern borders. I heard a report that there are now more who have entered illegally just within the years of the Biden administration than entered legally through the migration process in more than sixty years. Perhaps this is the change Mr. Obama envisioned when he made his statement before becoming president.

There are those who applaud this administration’s open-borders policy and who champion a movement to tear down the Statue of Liberty – because, in their view, it represents xenophobia and a symbol of America’s bigoted, racially evil past.

But the even more egregious danger from the swamp creatures in DC, I believe, is viciously underway by the use of developing surveillance technologies being used in conjunction with judicial, third-world tactics to bring about an Orwellian transformation. The following excerpt of a piece dealing with this, I think, informs further.

“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” – George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been 70 years since Orwell – dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm – depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!”- George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick…

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality…

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society. (“The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction,” by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute June 10, 2019)

We are “swimming with gators” as surely as are our representatives we elect do just that. But the “gators” in the American government, as those within the WEF, UN, and all within the Ephesians 6:12 cabal of wickedness in high places are about to bite off more than they can chew.

The Lord Jesus Christ is going to at any moment intervene catastrophically, call all believers to Himself, then drain the swamp this world has become.

Here is how to go to Him when He calls believers to Himself.

“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

Hoofbeats

I purchased Billy Graham’s book, Approaching Hoofbeats, not long after its publication in 1983. I cannot remember all that I thought as I read it forty years ago, but I know the book sparked hope regarding the nearness of the Rapture. As a young pastor at the time, I loved preaching about Bible prophecy and Jesus’ appearing.

As I recently skimmed its chapters, the stark differences between then and now leaped off the pages. Some of the signs that four decades ago seemed so indicative of the nearing Rapture pale by comparison to all that we see today.

The Antichrist Rides

It’s only been in the past six years or so that Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have come out of the shadows and revealed their true intentions to the world. They have invited the news media into their once-secret meetings and revealed their true intention to enslave the world under “Build Back Better,” which is a euphemism for their intent to create a Marxist, totalitarian world government.

I am definitely not suggesting that Klaus Schwab is the coming “man of lawlessness” as Paul describes in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-10. However, he does provide an apt illustration of how the antichrist will gain control of our world under the cloak of promoting peace.

By 1983, I had heard of a group called the “trilateralists” who were pushing for a one-world government at the time. Today, however, the emerging framework for the type of world domination that we read about in the book of Revelation is front and center for everyone to see, yet so few are paying attention to the nearness of the time when the white horse will ride across the earth.

The Threat of Nuclear War

In Approaching Hoofbeats, Evangelist Billy Graham wrote about the threat of a devastating nuclear war, which was a major concern at the time. Today, however, this danger has reached the point where most analysts believe it’s likely to occur in the next few years.

Citing the significant risk for a nuclear war, a group called “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” made headlines on January 23, 2024, by resetting their Doomsday Clock back to ninety seconds before midnight. Below is a quote from their latest press release under a section titled “The Many Dimensions of Nuclear Threat:”

A durable end to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems distant, and the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in that conflict remains a serious possibility. In February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to “suspend” the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). In March, he announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. In June, Sergei Karaganov, an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urged Moscow to consider launching limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe as a way to bring the war in Ukraine to a favorable conclusion.

Today’s world is exceedingly more dangerous than it was in 1983. The prospect of a nuclear war was a possibility back then; now it’s become a matter of when rather than if.

Economic Peril

In January of this year, the national debt level of the United States reached $34 trillion, and by the end of the month, it stood at an astounding 34.1 trillion. With the announcement came the prediction that by March, this number would exceed $35 trillion.

In 1983, the debt reached $1.377 trillion. The current number is not only unsustainable for the future, but it also tells us that the black horse (Revelation 6:5- 6) will soon ride across America and the entire world. The current debt level in America will surely bring economic catastrophe.

The Lord’s restraining hand is the only reason the world has not yet experienced the worst inflation in its history. Twelve years ago, I read books by economic experts who predicted imminent doom for the U.S. economy. Their reasoning was entirely sound but for the patience of the Lord, allowing more time for people to come to faith in Him and thus escape the wrath of the Day of the Lord.

The Pale Horse

A radio interviewer last year asked me if I thought the riders of the Apocalypse were already active in our world. I replied with a firm “no.” First, I’m convinced the Rapture will happen before the Lord Jesus releases the Seal Judgments as recorded in Revelation 6. Second, although there’s violence, pestilence, and a substantial number of deaths occurring in our current world, the totals fall far short of the horrific conditions described in connection with the hoofbeats of the pale horse.

Revelation 6:7-8 says that “over a fourth of the earth” will perish as the result of Jesus opening the Seals. Even considering the disappearance of people at Jesus’ appearing, that’s still a vast number that will likely exceed one and a half billion people. The total death toll that resulted from WWII, which some place as high as seventy-five million, is horrific, of course, but it pales in comparison to what lies ahead.

The time is rapidly approaching when the world will see the fulfillment of all that John both witnessed and wrote about in Revelation 6:1-8. The Bible says that sudden destruction will overwhelm the world after the Rapture (1 Thessalonians 5:1-11).

Though dreadful for those who will hear the hoofbeats in the future, the nearing of this time tells us that Jesus’ appearing is ever so close. We will be in Heaven before Jesus opens the seal judgments described in Revelation 6.

If by chance you are reading this and remain outside of Christ and thus without hope in a world headed for certain judgment, please read my article, Jesus Is the Only Path to Eternal Life. You can know for sure that you will spend eternity in heaven.

-Jonathan

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