Does God's Mercy Endure Forever?

In light of the current medical, moral, environmental, and political state of the world, we must ask - "Does God's Mercy Endure Forever?" Is His patience with us perhaps running out?

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

The prophet Jeremiah wrote - "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope for your future. You shall call on Me, and you shall go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You shall seek Me, and find Me, when you shall search for Me with all your heart" (Jer. 29:11-13). This is certainly a very comforting thought: the Lord will always be there if we search for Him with all our heart. But what if we don't?

The context of this chapter tells us about the Israelites being in captivity in Babylon, the false prophets saying that it will all be over soon and they will return to the land of Israel. But Jeremiah told them just the opposite:

"Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, to all the captivity, whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat their fruit. Take wives, and father sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there, and don't be diminished. Seek the welfare of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you shall have peace. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Don't let your prophets who are in your midst, and your diviners, deceive you; neither listen to your dreams which you cause to be dreamed" (verses 4-8)..

In other words, be good citizens right where you are: get married, have children, raise them in the fear of the Lord so that they will get married and have children; otherwise, your population will dwindle away to nothing. Don't be like the pagan Babylonians in their temple prostitution and sex orgies of their pagan religion. This is what "Seek the welfare of the city" means: God's people are responsible for the well-being of the society we live in, not just for our own personal pleasure and self-seeking pursuits.

But the remnant of Jewish people remaining in Israel had a problem: the rich and powerful among them had lent money to the poor, but when the poor couldn't pay off their debts, the lenders enslaved them. This was contrary to the Law of Moses because the Lord had freed them from slavery in Egypt. Here's what Jeremiah wrote about this:

"The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people who were at Jerusalem, to proclaim liberty to them; that every man should let his manservant, and every man his maidservant, who is a Hebrew or a Hebrewess, go free; that no one should make bondservants of them, to wit, of a Jew his brother. All the princes and all the people obeyed, who had entered into the covenant, that everyone should let his manservant, and everyone his maidservant, go free, that none should make bondservants of them any more; they obeyed, and let them go: but afterwards they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return, and brought them into subjection for servants and for handmaids" (ch. 34:8-11).

This sounds remarkably similar to what happened after the U.S. Civil War and the Emanicpation Proclamation, doesn't it? Although the former slaves were technically freed, they became sharecroppers entangled in bondage to the debts owed to their landlords. And today we've dressed it up just a bit by entangling the average working Joe and Jane in educational, credit card, and mortgage debts for all their working lives and sometimes well into retirement.

But even worse, we've allowed our society to slip back into paganism like in ancient Babylonia and the Greco-Roman Empire, whose gods were notorious for their immorality, so the pagan peoples followed the examples of their gods. The main difference in today's neo-paganism is that people nowadays deny the existence of God or gods or demons, which gives free rein to the demons because people have deceived themselves to believe the supernatural doesn't exist (except at Halloween). The sexual perversions of today are very similar to those in New Testament age and in the ancient world:

"With many other words he [Peter] testified, and exhorted them, saying, 'Save yourselves from this perverted generation!'" (Acts 2:40). And St. Paul wrote: "...that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a twisted and perverted generation, among whom you are seen as lights in the world" (Philippians 2:15). Many English translations tone it down a bit, using the word "perverse," but in Greek and other languages the word is clearly "perverted." Homosexuality was common in those days and has returned today. Also, St. Paul wrote:

"For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. For their women changed the natural function into that which is against nature [lesbianism]. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural function of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another [homosexuality], men doing what is inappropriate with men, and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error. Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil habits, secret slanderers" (Romans 1:26-29).

St. John wrote: "The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of the sexual immorality of the earth. And on her forehead a name was written, 'Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of the prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth'" (Revelation 17:4-5) Also, "There will in no way enter into it anything profane, or one who causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life" (ch. 21:27).

Again, quoting St. Paul: "Or don't you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don't be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor extortioners, will inherit the Kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

Also: "Now the works of the flesh are obvious, which are: adultery, sexual immorality, uncleanness, lustfulness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, divisions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, gluttony, and things like these; of which I forewarn you, even as I also forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God" (Galatians 5:19-21).

Also: "But sexual immorality and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be mentioned among you, as becomes saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not appropriate; but rather giving of thanks. Know this for sure, that no sexually immoral or unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God" (Ephesians 5:3-5). These sexual perversions were often called "abominations" in the Old Testament:

"You shall not offer any of your children in sacrifice [abortion and euthanasia] to Molech; neither shall you profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a man, as with a woman [homosexual acts]. That is detestible. You shall not lie with any animal [bestiality] to defile yourself with it; neither shall any woman give herself to an animal, to lie down with it: it is a perversion. Do not defile yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations which I am casting out before you were defiled. The land was defiled: therefore I punished its iniquity, and the land vomitted out her inhabitants. You therefore shall keep My statutes and My ordinances, and shall not do any of these abominations; neither the native-born, nor the stranger who lives as a foreigner among you" (Leviticus 18:22-26).

Notice that "the land vomitted out her inhabitants": does this remind you of all the people fleeing massive fires, hurricanes, and floods these days? It should! Some say that God is always merciful and would never do such a thing. Really? Have they never read the above Scripture, or about Sodom and Gommorah? I refer you also to Deuteronomy 18:9-14; Ezekiel 22:11; and Ezekiel 33:26 for similar references to "abominations." The point is this: the Lord is merciful and long-suffering, but we must never allow ourselves to think this means we can do whatever we please and God will be obligated to just keep on forgiving and forgetting. His mercy is tempered by His justice. Sin bears its bitter fruits and harvest time is coming. What is the answer? How should we respond to the current situation? Here's what the prophet Joel says -

"'Yet even now,' says the Lord, 'turn to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.' Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn to the Lord, your God; for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness [mercy], and relents from sending calamity. ...The threshing floors will be full of wheat, and the vats will overflow with new wine and oil. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the great locust, the grasshopper, and the caterpillar, my great army, which I sent among you. You will have plenty to eat, and be satisfied, and will praise the name of the Lord, your God, who has dealt wondrously with you; and my people will never again be disappointed" (Joel 12-13 & 24-26).

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 24 Oct. 2020.)

 

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Snowflake Totalitarianism

Rod Dreher states in this interview "Could It Happen Here? The Parallels Between Soviet Bloc and Modern US" - "In America, our idea of totalitarianism is conditioned by our memory of the Cold War and Soviet persecution, as well as George Orwell’s '1984.'" But the younger generation has no memory at all of the Cold War – they were born after 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

You can get Dreher's new book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents at Amazon. Dreher's interview continues: "In the Orwellian, Soviet, Stalinist society, the state controlled people by inflicting pain and terror on them. But in the soft totalitarianism that I see coming here, the state will control people - and not only the state, but even more importantly, corporations and institutions like universities will control people by manipulating their access to the economy and to status and to all the markers of middle-class life.

"They won't need the gulags to force conformity on us. We'll do it because we can't stand the idea of losing our jobs. And look, I don't mean to make light of that. It's huge to lose your job, it's massive, but this is how it's going to happen. We see it happening right now.

"Yesterday, I was doing a webinar with J.D. Vance. [He] told me that friends of his who are liberals are already scared to death of what they can and can't say in their workplace. [He said:] 'This is not the state. This is not [President] Donald Trump coming and telling them they can't do that. These are their companies doing it. And this is their fear of victims who have the power to accuse others.' If we ignore the prophetic voices of those who survived communism, we deserve what we get."

Rod Dreher calls this "Soft Totalitarianism" but I prefer to call it "Snowflake Totalitarianism" because western civilization since WW2 has produced three generations of mostly wimpy-whineys who don't know how to handle hardship. When their smartphones lose a cell-tower connection, they panic: they don't know how to cope with it. If someone innocently utters a "trigger phrase" like "But I have several friends who are Afro-American" – they suffer a huge meltdown and scream, "You're a racist!" They're so conditioned by social media and our educational system to think and speak only "politically correct" thoughts lest their Facebook, Twitter, and/or Gmail accounts be shut down or they be blackballed at school. But not only that, they also demand that you and I - normal people - conform to their fantasy world. This is how today's "Cancel Culture" works. Snowflakes melt at normal room temperature, it doesn't take any special heat or pressure for them to melt down.

A few years ago, I referred to Rod Dreher's earlier book The Benedict Option. If I were to write a book like his, I'd probably title it The Discipleship Imperative because it's not just for monastics like St. Benedict and his followers and it's not at all an option. It's imperative: all Christians are called to discipleship! In Acts 11:19-27 we read how the Gospel was spread to Antioch by ordinary believers. This passage closes with the words - "The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." So the question we should ask is - "What were they before they were called Christians?" The answer is obvious, it's right there in the text: they were disciples. All real, true, genuine believers in and followers of Christ are disciples. And so, if you're not a disciple, you're not a real, true, genuine believer in and follower of Christ.

I lived less than a kilometer from the East German border in 1962-64 while in the military, listening to Soviet artilliery practicing just across the border. Then after university, I spent 3.5 years in mission work taking millions of Bibles, New Testaments, and other Christian literature behind the Iron Curtain. We visited Czechoslovakia just a couple of years after the 1968 Soviet invasion. I met Christians whose children were driven insane by the incessant anti-Christian, Marxist indoctrination in the schools there. One of my coworkers spent six months in Moscow's infamous Lubianka Prison being interrogated every day by the KGB until he broke. Several other coworkers spent weeks or months in communist prisons, five were killed behind the Iron Curtain. And I met other fake Christians who had actually "gone over to the other side" and would report me to the secret police, as I learned later. Then my wife and I spent 17 years in the USSR as it fell apart and in Russia. I know our phone lines and email accounts were monitored. So I've personally experienced what Rod Dreher is writing about.

Torture is still going on today in some communist countries: the article "Former Uighur Detention Camp Teacher Describes Interrogations, Screaming, Imprisonments" tells of torture and forced sterilization of Uighurs in today's communist China. But in some countries, the Marxists have used and are using more subtle techniques: Rod Dreher describes how believers suffered in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet era. But that country was not made communist by force; rather, because they had been betrayed by Western diplomats who sold out Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler (British PM Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after concluding the Munich Agreement, proclaimed he had secured "peace in our time."), the Czechs welcomed the "liberating" Red Army at the end of WW2. But then the Soviets began quietly installing "their own people" in the news media, government, police, and military leadership. Before most Czechs realized how they had been deceived and infiltrated, they were living under a Soviet-controlled dictatorship.

And so it happens when "peace in our time," free love, free abortions, free housing, free education, free healthcare, free... free... free... is what the lying politicians, educators, and news media keep pumping into our minds -

"Everyone deceives his neighbor, and does not speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves to commit iniquity. Your habitation is in the midst of deceit; through deceit they refuse to know me, says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord of Hosts, Behold, I will melt them, and try them; for how else should I do, because of the daughter of my people? Their tongue is a deadly arrow; it speaks deceit: one speaks peaceably to his neighbor with his mouth, but in his heart he lays wait for him. Shall I not visit them for these things? says the Lord; shall my soul not be avenged on such a nation as this? For the mountains I will take up a weeping and wailing, and for the pastures of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that no one passes through; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both the birds of the sky and the animals have fled, they are gone." (Ezekiel 9:5-10)

Of course, there's a price to pay when everything's free: after all of the "filthy rich capitalist exploiters" have fled abroad or been executed, after all their industries have been run into the ground, and after all the natural resources have been polluted or plundered, then the government simply resorts to wildly printing so much worthless money that the economy goes belly up and the people begin lying, cheating, and stealing just to survive. We witnessed this first-hand in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. Construction of apartment blocks for "the proletariat" was so sloppy that the buildings were falling apart before they were finished and just after the first people moved in they looked like 100-year-old slums.

If we replaced a burned-out light bulb in the hallway of our apartment building in Russia, it would be stolen and replaced with another burned-out light bulb by the next morning. (There was a joke: why does a burned-out light bulb cost 10 rubles but a new light bulb only cost 5 rubles? Because you can't buy any new light bulbs.) Telephone lines disappeared from the poles so the thieves could sell the copper as scrap metal. Russians would take the windshield wipers, tires and wheels off and the batteries out of their cars each night, or else they would come out the next morning to find their car propped up on bricks, wipers, batteries, tires and wheels missing. An American friend in Moscow bought a new Russian car late one afternoon, planning to install an anti-theft alarm the next day, but the car was stolen the first night! Orphanages were full of disabled children that their parents simply refused to take home from the hospital, or the parents were alcoholics, so these children were malnourished, socially undeveloped, and barely cared for in the orphanages.

But today we in the West think we have everything: an overabundance of food, big homes, air conditioning, nice cars, high-definition color TVs, high-speed internet, a dizzying array of streaming movie services, modern medicine, antibiotics, the Pill, etc., so that when anything goes haywire, we don't know how to cope. This is what you get when you worship the false gods of Socialism and/or materialism -

"I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. She teaches and seduces my servants to commit sexual immorality, and to eat things sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her into a bed, and those who commit adultery with her into great oppression, unless they repent of her works. I will kill her children with Death, and all the churches will know that I am he who searches the minds and hearts" (Revelation 2:20-23).

There are always those nay-sayer pseudo-Christians, even some pastors, who say - "You can believe whatever you want, love whomever you like, and behave however you choose: if you really feel you're a girl although you were born a boy, go ahead and take estrogen injections, have that surgery, and be whatever you want to be, or if you beget a baby with your girlfriend - just get rid of it, go ahead and kill your baby in the womb!" This is the softness of good times and over-ripe liberty that has rotted into license, exactly the sort of thing St. Peter wrote about -

"For, uttering great swelling words of emptiness, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by licentiousness, those who are indeed escaping from those who live in error; promising them liberty, while they themselves are bondservants of corruption; for by whom a man is overcome, by the same is he also brought into bondage" (2 Peter 2:18-19).

Those false promises of liberty lead to servitude and corruption, as I have just described. But there is a way out of this bondage: it's what the glorified Christ proclaimed to the Apostle John about the lukewarm Christians of Laodicia -

"Because you say, 'I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing;' and don't know that you are the wretched one, miserable, poor, blind, and naked; I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich; and white garments, that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten. Be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 2:17-20).

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 10 Oct. 2020.)

 

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