May 8, 2009

The SIGNS of the End-Time

“Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So you also, when you see all these things, KNOW that is near [real beginning of previous verses]—at the doors” (Matthew 24:32-34; Luke 21:29-32)

Dear Brethren,

For the comments this time, I am using an article written by Cal Thomas. He is one of the very few syndicated writers that I have felt is worthwhile reading. Though this particular writing has already been circulated it is well worth reading again. Hopefully its contents will be given both serious and sober thought.

Jesus Christ made known the signs to be watching for of the end-time; and writings such as those in the Pastor’s Comments last week; and this one, as well as others, should enable people on the outside and within the Church to see from their perspective the signs of the end of this country and this age are very close at hand.

It has been said there are none so blind as those who refuse to see even when the facts are presented to them. This idiom clearly makes known why so many in the world and the Church turn their heads away refusing to see where we are in time and what they will be soon facing.

Hopefully and prayerfully the true people in God’s Church are not refusing to see these terrible problems and should know from their studies of their Bibles and the Recorded Works of God’s late apostle this country is soon to reap what it has sown! Otherwise we will also enter into the Great Tribulation and suffer the same horrors of everyone not within the Philadelphia Era of God’s Church. We MUST remain vigilant and try hard to be close to our God if we hope to escape God’s coming judgment on this nation.

Presently in this country we are in the Spring Time of the year and the trees are in full blossom making known summer is almost here. Observing them should enable us to think about what Jesus said about them in reference to the close of this age and the judgment of God on the house of Joseph. Hopefully we are not of those who refuse to see the signs. If we fail—then Scripture makes known our very lives could hang in the balance.

Your brother and servant in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Don Billingsley

Column appeared in the Holland Sentinel (Michigan) July 30, 1996
By Cal Thomas writing for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

America May Have To Appeal To Higher Source To Stop Terror

KALISPELL, Montana

On Sunday-morning talk shows, sophisticated political leaders speak of sophisticated ways to stop sophisticated terrorists from killing and maiming innocent Americans.

On the same Sunday morning in northwestern Montana, an unsophisticated preacher in an unsophisticated church speaks of an unsophisticated reason for the growing turmoil in our country.

The talk-show guests propose solutions rooted in legislation and better metal-detection devices to make us feel safer. The preacher thinks the explanation is simpler and the remedy more profound. He thinks we're beginning to see the judgment of God.

Take your choice, but before dismissing the preacher, consider this. If God is, and if He is holy and just and punishes the disobedient while rewarding those who obey Him, what is there about America that offers us a special dispensation not given the ancient Israelites, with whom He dealt harshly when they were disobedient?

When most people think about judgment (if they think about it at all,) it is all fire and brimstone, earthquakes and falling stars and apocalypse later. But haven't there also been short-term, less cataclysmic judgments that prod people to consider that we might be moving in the wrong direction?

After the abortion of 34 million babies, the mocking of God in our public culture and private lives, the flaunting of those things He calls abominations, the preacher thinks we are fooling ourselves if we take for granted that the protective Hand which guided us safely through our nation's founding and through wars and economic downturns will remain unconditionally in place.

More than six score years ago, another unsophisticated man from Kentucky, suggested a link between the civil War and the judgment of God. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation for a day of national humility, fasting, and prayer.

In trying to rally his countrymen to appeal to a power greater than the Army of the Potomac, the 16th president wrote, "It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance leads to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the lord."

Lincoln, in his simple way, said that nations, like individuals "are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world," adding that the "awful calamity of civil war...may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people."

And then he added, "We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten the gracious hand that has preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness"

We've tried everything else. Why not try Lincoln's way? Perhaps technology and good police work will catch whoever or whatever caused TWA Flight 800 fall from the sky and a pipe bomb to explode at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. But arrests, prosecution, even the death penalty for those involved will not get to the source of our problem if Lincoln and the Montana preacher are right.

One thing to remember. When the early warnings were ignored, God turned up the heat. The Montana preacher said that a nation which remains silent about God soon hear the voice of violence. Sophisticates will dismiss such things as rantings of the ignorant. But the more they fail in their attempts to protect us and worse things get, the more empty their explanations will seem and the more compelling become voices like those of Lincoln and the Montana preacher.

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