The Apocalypse Journals: Volume I

IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER... 
 

• Featured Article: The Apocalypse Journals: Volume I 
• The Escalating International War Against Israel 
• Nearing Midnight: Rapture or Rupture 
• Has The Mystery Been Solved? We Just Got Some New Numbers That Nobody Can Deny
• Daily Jot: Girding against deception 
• Daily Devotion: The Most Important Choices 

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The Apocalypse Journals: Volume I – Pete Garcia - https://www.rev310.net/post/the-apocalypse-journals-volume-i
 
How lonely sits the city
That was full of people!
How like a widow is she,
Who was great among the nations!
The princess among the provinces
Has become a slave!
Lamentations 1:1
 
The thought of ghost towns has been on my mind as of late. Not so much the dilapidated wooden remnants of the old gold and silver prospecting communities scattered about the old American West, but the abandoned cities in the central and eastern United States. Some of these were abandoned when the local steel or paper mill closed down. Others were closed due to some type of pollution or environmental condition making living there unsafe. Whatever the cause, the sight of them left unkempt, and given back over to nature, has always been a source of both fascination and unsettlement to me.
 
I suppose what makes them both simultaneously, is seeing them as a consequential outcropping of both a natural consequence and divine judgment. They are a microcosm of an empire under the judgment of the wrath of abandonment (Romans 1). Like death from a thousand cuts, we collectively become a problem too large to fix, and thus, are discarded altogether. These abandoned places also remind us of our own society's impermanence.
 
On a larger scale, you would think, given the reality that the world is littered with the remains of once-great (and some not-so-great) civilizations, the sight of these would be as commonplace as the remains of dead animals on the road, or fallen trees in the forest. But they're not. They are grown over by nature or remain off the beaten path, bypassed by newer roads. They remain disturbing because they also remind us not just of our own impermanence as a society, but as a species. We are, after all, mortal, finite beings, living in a finite world. Everything we have ever known has had an expiration date. If anything, change is the only constant we have ever known.
 
But it's more than that, isn’t it?
 
I mean, we have the luxury today of looking back through time and seeing all the empires that have come and gone. We feebly attempt to comprehend their existence from a historical-academic perspective, but we can't really know what it was like until it happens to us. What I mean to say is, the end of those civilizations, were not just some adventure in academia. Civilizations end all the time, and their endings, both past, and present were horrifically endured by someone. It wasn't academic for them; it was real life.
 
Consequences and Neglect
 
As part of my professional reading curriculum for the military, I was given the book, Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield some years ago. It was this book that was later made into the blockbuster movie 300 some years later. The story is about the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans making their last stand against the overwhelming hordes of the Persian King Xerxes at the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. While the story is a historically factual book, it is retold in fictional format, making it a “faction” of sorts. The entirety of the story was told by Xeones, who was a captured Greek soldier now serving in Xerxes's court. The most provoking story within this book that impacted me the most was not the famous battle at the 'Hot Gates' (as they were called), but when Xeones' town was sacked. Here was his chilling retelling of that event to King Xerxes.
 
His Majesty has presided over the sack of numberless cities and has no need to hear recounted the details of the week that followed. I will append the observation only, from the horror-benumbed apprehension of a boy shorn at one blow of mother and father, family, clan, tribe and city, that this was the first time my eyes had beheld those sights which experience teaches are common to all battles and all slaughters.
 
This I learned then: there is always fire.
 
An acrid haze hangs in the air night and day, and sulphurous smoke chokes the nostrils. The sun is the color of ash, and black stones litter the road, smoking. Everywhere one looks, some object is afire. Timber, flesh, the earth itself. Even water burns. The pitilessness of flame reinforces the sensation of the gods’ anger, of fate, retribution, deeds done and hell to pay.
 
All is the obverse of what it had been.
 
Things are fallen which had stood upright. Things are free which should be bound, and bound which should be free. Things which had been hoarded in secret now blow and tumble in the open, and those who had hoarded them watch with dull eyes and let them go.
 
Boys have become men and men boys. Slaves now stand free and freemen slaves. Childhood has fled. The knowledge of my mother and father’s slaughter struck me less with grief for them or fear for myself than with the imperative to assume at once their station. Where had I been on the morn of their murder? I had failed them, trotting off on my boyish errand. Why had I not foreseen their peril? Why was I not standing at my father’s shoulder, armed and possessed of a man’s strength, to defend our hearth or die honorably before it, as he and my mother had?
 
Bodies lay in the road. Mostly men, but women and children too, with the same dark blot of fluid sinking into the pitiless dirt. The living trod past them, grief-riven. Everyone was filthy. Many had no shoes. All were fleeing the slave columns and the roundup which would be starting soon. Women carried infants, some of them already dead, while other dazed figures glided past like shades, bearing away some pitifully useless possession, a lamp or a volume of verse. In peacetime the wives of the city walked abroad with necklaces, anklets, rings; now one saw none, or it was secreted somewhere to pay a ferryman’s toll or purchase a heel of stale bread. We encountered people we knew and didn’t recognize them. They didn’t recognize us. Numb reunions were held along roadsides or in corpses, and news was traded of the dead and the soon to be dead.
 
Most piteous of all were the animals. I saw a dog on fire that first morning and ran to snuff his smoking fur with my cloak. He fled, of course; I couldn’t catch him, and Diomache snatched me back with a curse for my foolishness. That dog was the first of many. Horses hamstrung by sword blades, lying on their flanks with their eyes pools of numb horror. Mules with entrails spilling; oxen with javelins in their sides, lowing pitifully yet too terrified to let anyone near to help. These were the most heartbreaking: the poor dumb beasts whose torment was made more pitiful by their lack of faculty to understand it.  - Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (Chapter 17)
 
I found this testimony to be not only very sobering but very real. This was not just the result of warfare in the 5th century B.C.; it was common to war of every age. The consequences of war are always the same- death and destruction. Things are burning and the natural order of things is turned on its head. Having seen the results of war up close and personal, I can (as some of you can also attest to) its perpetual ugliness and utter revulsion to all that is good and wholesome. But war, for all its ugliness, is sometimes unavoidable. John Stuart Mill once wrote-
 
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse."
 
Although violence has been a mainstay of the human condition since the days of Noah, the first organized and recorded battle is found in Genesis 14. Here, Abraham put together 318 of his finest warriors and went to rescue his nephew Lot. So although ugly, some wars are necessary, which lends credence to Mill's quote of man's unwillingness to fight at any cost, which only invites more aggression.
 
In this vein, I suppose the next worse thing other than having your civilization ripped from you quickly, is watching your way of life crumble slowly before your eyes. Like watching something left to rot or rust over a period of days, weeks, months, and years. While the rot and rust always come in varying degrees and stages, it always first begins with neglect.
 
The first victim of neglect is always the nation's moral center. The virtuousness of the moral center almost never comes out of a time of plenty but from the hard times. The hard times are almost always due to calamity, war, or famine. There is a popular, yet fairly accurate meme making the rounds these days that describes the cycle like this:
 
Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times
 
The second victim of neglect is a civilization's religious or ideological beliefs. These ground the moral center into a codified system of rights, wrongs, and laws which are created to deal with both. They give the society or civilization meaning or purpose, and when these become neglected (or not attentively shepherded) they become relaxed, then neglected, and lastly, corrupted.
 
The next victim of neglect is its culture. The culture reflects the moral center and religious beliefs of a nation or kingdom. Who or what does that culture put on a pedestal? The more decadent the culture, the more corrupted both the moral center and its religion become. Decadence always comes in three distinct phases: sexual immorality (hedonism), increased lawlessness, and increased violence.
 
After this, the next victim is its economic power and prosperity, which begin to reflect the cultural rot and the declining moral priorities of a nation. This is where the wrath of abandonment becomes most visibly felt amongst the varying classes. However, one mainstay is usually the same- the poor get poorer, and the wealthy get wealthier, and the divide causes the latter to ignore or exacerbate the problem by not living in reality.
 
The last victim is its military might, which at this point, is usually already strained and then that generation of young men are needlessly squandered in some last-ditch war of desperation to save the kingdom. Once that happens, the people, culture, and language disappear, and its once unique way of life is swallowed up by the tattered pages of history.
 
to be continued.

 


 
The Escalating International War Against Israel – Caroline Glick - https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=5138
 
At the U.N. General Assembly last month, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an "ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry" against Israel.
 
The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing it and its people, was formed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel's right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce its laws and its citizens' rights to their properties and to their very lives.
 
The Council's decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the United Nations has been waging against Israel for the past 50 years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel's foes operate at the United Nations and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.
 
We begin with the United Nations. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the U.N. Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration's chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.
 
The U.N. Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and U.N. staff wasted no time making clear that they intended the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor.
 
Shortly after the HRC was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council's nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss "Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories."
 
Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel, however, wasn't enough to satisfy the HRC's obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council's focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.
 
The council's template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust-denying, terror-sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his U.N. representatives ask for a special session to discuss the "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that every single missile launched against Israel by the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.
 
In short order, the council accedes to the PLO's request and convenes the special session. On cue, the member nations' representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new "commission of inquiry," led and staffed by "independent" investigators, nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.
 
At the end of its "in-depth investigation," the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.
 
This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel: Europe. Every HRC resolution to form a commission of inquiry includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit "testimonies" and "reports" that will substantiate the council's blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil.
 
NGOs registered in Israel, the P.A. and in Western countries answer the council's call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from "testimonies" and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel's inherent venality.
 
These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the United States, nearly every NGO involved in the HRC's witch hunts against Israel would have to register as a foreign agent of European governments. As Knesset member Amichai Chikli put it, "Europe is waging a war against Israel."
 
Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitrit were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe's commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the E.U. embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was canceled at the last moment, citing COVID-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset's parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.
 
The reports the HRC publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for the various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, E.U. member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.
 
This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel: Israel's European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court Justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment's methods for transforming anti-Israel U.N. documents into "law."
 
A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz's campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.
 
As professor Avi Bell from Bar-Ilan University's Law Faculty explains, "The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law."
 
Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as attorney general, he had "thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious."
 
But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, "I couldn't tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted."
 
But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists' homes, Mazuz said that he relied on "the positions of legal scholars" in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
 
"The demolitions cause us international damage," Mazuz said. "Do you think that these things stay here? That they don't come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?"
 
In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel HRC to justify his rulings, which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF, deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.
 
As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of U.N. Security Council resolutions, U.N. actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the HRC, like those of all other U.N. bodies, are political documents without any legal weight.
 
Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public's ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into "law" through their judgments and legal opinions.
 
And this brings us to the HRC's permanent inquisition, whose operations a large majority of U.N. member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly.
 
As professor Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published last week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry's mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel's birth was an original sin which must be undone.
 
The commission is empowered to carry out an "investigation" on the basis of "testimonies" which E.U.-funded anti-Israel groups will supply, describing fraudulent "war crimes" that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The U.N.'s political "courts" in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.
 
Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making "recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem...[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the commission of internationally wrongful acts."
 
A similar statement is made in the resolution's preamble regarding "business enterprises."
 
The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.
 
Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into "law" through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the E.U. bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault.
 


 
Nearing Midnight: Rapture or Rupture – Terry James - https://www.raptureready.com/category/nearing-midnight/
 
Twenty something years ago, Pat Robertson was on his network, Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). I remember him saying in an almost amused, mocking tone that there would be no Rapture of the church. He declared that if that were to happen, it would completely disrupt all of the human condition across the world.
 
Planes would be crashing, cars would be wrecking, trains would run wild, and destruction of every sort would take place in such a moment. That’s not going to happen, he said. There will be no Rapture. He implied rather that there will be a “rupture” of all culture and society across the world. The Tribulation would be the implosion that wrecks everything, rather than the explosion a so-called Rapture would cause.
 
I remember distinctly Pat talking with his then co-host Sheila Walsh, the Scottish Christian broadcaster. As a side note, I presume Sheila has since moved on from agreeing with Mr. Robertson and his dismissing the pre-Trib Rapture “theory,” as he called it. I’ve heard her just within the past year on air with Dr. David Jeremiah, who teaches solidly on the pre-Trib Rapture of the church. She seemed to agree totally with all he said on the prophetic topic.
 
Over the years, there has been banter coming from those who adamantly hold that the pre-Trib Rapture is a myth. These sometimes use the word “rupture” to sneer at the idea of a Rapture, which we believe is Bible truth as taught by the Apostle Paul—and, by the way, by the Lord Jesus as well. He said the following as recorded by the Apostle John.
 
Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:1–3)
 
In these words of the Lord we are told, I’m convinced, the same as the Apostle Paul foretells.
 
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)
 
For all the fun-making against pre-Trib Rapture and those of us who believe it to be the next catastrophic intervention by Christ into human affairs, they can’t erase these powerful promises. That is, they can’t without spiritualizing and allegorizing as they make their case. They have to conclude that neither Jesus nor Paul meant what they said in a literal sense.
 
There is, however, a biblically prophetic passage that speaks, I believe, of a rupture. It is a key prophecy that will take place immediately after the Rapture of the Church. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen this rupture beginning for some time. It will be the tear in the fabric of this world system that will rip civilization the way Mr. Robertson once feared.
 
The prophet Zechariah forewarned of this coming rupture.
 
And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it. (Zechariah 12:3)
 
The prophet is saying here that when the world takes on Jerusalem and Israel–God’s chosen city and nation—it will be a load too heavy to lift. They will be injured severely, or ruptured, in their attempt to remove the city and nation from being in the place where God put them.
 
We’ve seen almost daily leaders from countries surrounding modern Israel declaring they will destroy the tiny Jewish state. Those such as Nasser and Sadat have tried to do so. Israel not only remains, but is now in a stronger position than ever, even though constantly threatened.
 
Antichrist and his juggernaut will finally manage to invade Israel, following all of Israel’s surrounding enemies being destroyed in the Gog-Magog attack of Ezekiel 38 and 39. But the man of sin will, too, be severely injured and ultimately bound in chains and removed to eternal punishment. Israel will become the chief nation of the entire world during the Millennium—Christ’s thousand-year reign on planet earth.
 
Thankfully, all who accept Christ now, this side of the Rapture, will not endure the rupture the whole world will suffer when God again begins dealing with His chosen people, the Jews.
 
Here again is how to avoid being part of that future injury—that rupture—that will condemn the soul to eternity apart from God.
 
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)
 

 


 
Has The Mystery Been Solved? We Just Got Some New Numbers That Nobody Can Deny - by Michael Snyder - http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/has-the-mystery-been-solved-we-just-got-some-new-numbers-that-nobody-can-deny/
 
For months, I have been writing about one of the greatest mysteries that has emerged over the past year. Both in the United States and around the globe, millions of workers seem to have completely disappeared from the system. I wrote major articles about this in September, in October and in December. When this first started happening, it greatly puzzled me, but thanks to some deeply alarming new numbers of things are starting to become a lot clearer. Unfortunately, the news is not good.
 
Just before the pandemic, 152 million Americans were employed, and we have never come close to returning to that level. In fact, despite the fact that companies all over America are absolutely desperate to hire anyone with a pulse, the number of Americans that are employed is sitting at just 148 million. There are literally “help wanted signs” everywhere that you look, and stores are starting to shut down all over the country due to a lack of staff.
 
We have never seen anything like this in all of U.S. history, but it isn’t just happening here.
 
As I have documented in previous articles, we have also been witnessing simultaneous worker shortages in major industrialized nations all over the planet.
 
So why is this happening?
 
Well, it appears that at least part of the answer is that working-age people are dying at an unprecedented rate…
 
The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
 
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
 
When I first read that I was absolutely stunned.
 
I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.
 
According to Davison, the number of deaths that we are witnessing “is just unheard of”…
 
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
 
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.
 
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”
 
The pandemic is certainly a factor, but the article that I just quoted clearly states that “most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths”.
 
Wow.
 
OneAmerica is not a minor player in the life insurance industry. It brings in about 2 billion dollars in revenue annually, and it has been around for more than 140 years…
 
OneAmerica is a major insurance company located in Indianapolis with annual revenue of around $2 billion and total assets of around $74 billion. This is not a fly-by-night internet “insurance” company. OneAmerica is the real deal, selling both individual and group life insurance, and it has data and actuarial tables that go back 145 years. It’s also a progressive company that boasts about “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” right on its home page. In other words, it’s not some “scary” right-wing reactionary firm.
 
So nobody can dispute the credibility of these numbers.
 
And the president of the Indiana Hospital Association has publicly stated that numbers from hospitals all over his state back up what Davison is saying…
 
At the same news conference where Davison spoke, Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said that hospitals across the state are being flooded with patients “with many different conditions,” saying “unfortunately, the average Hoosiers’ health has declined during the pandemic.”
 
In a follow-up call, he said he did not have a breakdown showing why so many people in the state are being hospitalized – for what conditions or ailments. But he said the extraordinarily high death rate quoted by Davison matched what hospitals in the state are seeing.
 
This isn’t just another news story.
 
This is a complete and utter bombshell.
 
If you don’t want to agree with me, perhaps you will agree with one of the most respected medical experts in the entire country. The following comes from his article about these shocking new numbers from Indiana…
 
AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this “service”.
 
We have gotten to a point where there is no excuse for not seeing the truth.
 
Policymakers all over the world need to immediately reverse course, but of course they aren’t going to do that.
 
There is way too much money at stake.
 
Any doubt about how evil our system has become has been completely removed, and anyone that continues to support such a deeply corrupt system is willingly choosing to side with evil.
 
Before I end this article, I want to remind everyone that the leading cause of death worldwide actually has nothing to do with the pandemic at all…
 
Abortion was the leading cause of death globally in 2021, with nearly 43 million unborn babies killed in the womb, according to data provided by Worldometer.
 
As of noon on December 31, 2021, there were 42.6 million abortions performed in the course of the year, Worldometer revealed, while 8.2 million people died from cancer, 5 million from smoking, 1.7 million of HIV/AIDS, 1.3 million from traffic fatalities, and 1 million from suicide.
 
According to Worldometer, 5.4 million people have died from COVID since the pandemic first began.
 
But since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1971, more than 1,500,000,000 babies have been murdered in the womb all over the planet.
 
Our culture has truly become “a culture of death”, and in the end we are going to reap what we have sown.
 
I know that my articles can seem “harsh”, but nobody can deny the harsh reality that vast numbers of people are dying all around us.
 
2020 was a nightmarish year, 2021 was really bad too, and now the stage is set for “2020 too”.
 
The year ahead is really going to be horrifying, but most of you already knew that.

 


 
Daily Jot: Girding against deception - Bill Wilson – www.dailyjot.com
 
There were many ingredients of a worldwide brainwashing program taking place during the COVID hysteria over the last 18 months, many of which continue today. You don’t have to agree on the “why” or “who” behind it, but the truth of the matter is that the entire handling of this contagion resembles the steps toward brainwashing and tyranny. Very similar to the Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors, people all over the world have formed a psychological connection with those who “protect” them from the fear of COVID. This includes the government, medical personnel, the media and others. People are bonded to the narrative rather than the facts.
 
Key elements to brainwashing or creating mass psychosis include isolation, monopolization of perceptions, making compliance easier than resistance, use of media to enforce demands, threats, and fear. During COVID, society was locked down (isolation) for a long period of time. The government, big tech, and the media monopolized the narrative to the point of censuring any opposition. The narrative characterized compliance to simple mandates like wearing a mask as good citizenship. The media reinforced the narrative by emphatically stating any alternative opinions were “misinformation” and labeling people as anti-science. The government has threatened every person’s ability to hold a job if they don’t get the jab. All this fear over a disease that statistically you have a 99% chance of surviving.
 
The effects of this mass psychosis programming separates people from their ability to discern. They are unable to suspend their disbelief of what is happening to them. They get defensive. They refuse to believe the very facts of the truth presented before them. They cannot accept an alternative viewpoint and will aggressively defend their point of view. I have received so many emails telling the stories of how family members, once very close to one another, have been torn apart by disagreement over the fear of COVID and what the government is doing. It has almost become a religious cult. There is no common sense or reasoning. The same facts that demonstrate the fallacies are used to support them.
 
How does one prevent this brainwashing and fear? There are some easy things to do. Turn off the television news and be careful of the videos you watch. The constant bombardment of opinion only contributes to fear and anxiety. Stay informed by reading your news. This way you control the stimulation of senses. Do not submit to fear or the symbols of fear, such as mandates. Learn to discern by reading and absorbing the Bible. Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The word of God, if you receive it in its context, will teach you to discern. Discernment is a weapon against the evil of this day and what it does to the mind.

 


 
Daily Devotion: The Most Important Choices - by Greg Laurie – www.harvest.org
 
But they delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. —Psalm 1:2
 
https://harvest.org/resources/devotion/the-most-important-choices/ - Listen
 
We make numerous choices every day, from what to order at the drive-through to what TV shows to watch to what music or podcasts to listen to. For the most part, those aren’t important choices. But then there are very important choices that we’ll make in life.
 
One choice we make every day is whether to start the day with the Word of God or with social media or something else. Are we going to start the day with prayer, or are we going to start it with worry? Are we going to make time in our schedules to meet with other believers or make other activities a priority instead?
 
Psalm 1 tells us, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night” (verses 1–2 NKJV).
 
The words “blessed” and “happy” are interchangeable. Basically, the Bible is saying that if we want to be happy, there are some things that we shouldn’t do, and there are other things that we should do instead.
 
Don’t walk in ungodly counsel, Psalm 1 tells us, and instead walk in godly counsel. In other words, meditate on (or think about or contemplate) the Word of God. This isn’t referring to the meditation of Eastern mysticism. Rather, to meditate on the Word of God means to ponder or contemplate what the Bible has to say.
 
The Bible tells us that Moses “chose to share the oppression of God’s people instead of enjoying the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:25 NLT). Moses made a choice not to live in the pleasures of sin but to instead identify with God’s people.
 
You make your choices, and your choices make you.

 


 
FROM THE HEART
    
Let Us Make the Short Time We have Left,
Count for ALL of Eternity!

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"Folks, it's all beginning to unravel. America is in more danger of falling than at any time in its history. But I believe Bible prophecy predicts this very decline. From this point on, we believers have to get serious. We are going to face discouragement, disillusionment and, most certainly, persecution in the time between now and the Rapture. But don't be discouraged or disillusioned. The coming turmoil will provide us unrivaled opportunities to share the good news of the Gospel. So be ready to share your faith and your hope with those who need Christ. We still have time to reap a great harvest of souls for God's kingdom!" - Hal Lindsey
 
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"AS YOU SEE THE DAY APPROACHING"
 
 
 
 
If You Died Today, Would You Go To Heaven?
Find out, visit:
www.thegoodtest.net
www.gotquestions.org
www.wayofthemaster.com 
How to know God
 
 
 
DID YOU KNOW?
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Maranatha! (Lord Come Quickly)
 
 "On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand, All other ground is sinking sand."
 
 "Let Us make the short time we have left count for all eternity!"
 
 YBIC-Randy