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Friday, January 31, 2020

Polarization & Division in America


THE POLARIZATION AND DIVISION IN AMERICA

By Dr. Stephen Jones:  1-30-2020

Blog Post Date:  1-31-2020

America is reaching a major turning point in history. I see it as a culture clash between Mystery Babylon and the New Jerusalem. But that is a biblical perspective. Most people see it in more mundane terms, such as a political conflict.

The nation was culturally unified for a long time, when biblical morality was the accepted norm. But when Babylonian culture was imposed upon the country, beginning with the Roosevelt era in the 1930’s, and then into the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, the nation began to be divided.

In 1976, at the time of our Bicentennial, many Christians began to wake up to the fact that their government and courts had been taken over by those who were trying to change the Christian foundations of America and to introduce so-called “rights” (such as abortion rights and the right to commit adultery) that were never contemplated by our founders. They saw no such "rights" in the Bible.

This division increased steadily until the 1990’s, when President Bill Clinton’s public immorality turned division into polarization. This began to be reflected in the political parties as well, making the whole situation political.

The gay marriage “right” began here in Minnesota after they put to a vote a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. The problem was that if a voter failed to check the “yes” box, his vote was counted as a “no” instead of just treating it as a non-vote. This stacked the deck against the Christians, and the amendment failed to pass. This was then used by other states as a pretext to say that the people favored gay marriage.

After that, of course, came the right to adopt children into a gay marriage “family” and now it is becoming a violation of “rights” to criticize them.
These abuses of God-given rights have served to polarize America even further. Politicization has not alleviated the situation but has only served to make it worse. The Democratic Party has adopted one side of the issue, and the Republicans the other. So now one can hardly take a biblical position without being charged with being “political.” But politics has infringed upon religion, not the other way around.

Some people complain about my “politics,” when in fact, I hold a biblical view. If a political party happens to agree with my view, that does not make me a political supporter. I do not belong to any political party, and I will criticize any party for opposing Christ’s right to rule this earth and to issue His laws. I am an advocate and ambassador of the Kingdom only.
Virginia and West Virginia.

Recently, the state of Virginia has been at the forefront of the modern attempt to destroy the US Constitution, particularly its first and second amendment rights. Babylon’s culture does not fit well with the biblical cultural values that characterize our Constitution. In particular, the constitutional rights are set forth as God-given rights, not state-granted.

The definition of a right has been under attack for a long time, confusing rights with privileges. The Supreme Court has ruled many times that all rights come from God and that governments are instituted to protect those rights. Anything government grants is only a privilege that can be taken away as easily as it was granted. By calling such privileges “rights,” power is transferred from God to the state, and God’s own right as the Creator is usurped.

I oppose all who usurp the rights of God. That is not “politics.” That is the Gospel of the Kingdom, which governments oppose because they want to usurp the place of God Himself. The early church ran afoul of government for refusing to acknowledge them as the highest power on earth; we are no different.

The state of Virginia really began to polarize people by threatening to overthrow the second amendment to the US constitution about the RIGHT to “hold and bear arms.” Governments hate the second amendment, because it threatens their sovereignty and their ability to demand that the people conform to whatever moral standard they choose.

So 90% of the counties with the state of Virginia have now declared themselves to be “gun-sanctuary” counties. These are counties that refuse to enforce the state’s unconstitutional laws. They got this idea from Democrat-controlled cities which have declared themselves to be “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens. In the link below, the green counties are sanctuary counties in Virginia; those marked in black are the counties that support the state’s position.


Now the adjoining state of West Virginia is inviting those sanctuary counties to leave the state of Virginia and join the state of West Virginia!

This history goes back to the Civil War in the 1860’s, where the counties in the northern part of Virginia left to form their own state, which they called West Virginia. Likewise, others on the west side of Virginia left as well, calling their state Kentucky. West Virginia in particular never rescinded its invitation to other counties in the state of Virginia. So now the governor is stating publicly that any county in Virginia that wants to uphold the second amendment rights of the people are welcome to become part of the state of West Virginia.

If any counties take up their offer, there is no doubt that other states will divide as well. There are large parts of New York that could separate from New York City and form their own state of, say, “West New York.” People in California are likely to do the same outside of the main cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. There has been talk for many years already about splitting California into two states, North and South California. But now it seems that the split will be between the Democrat-controlled cities and the countryside.

America’s polarization between two cultures—one biblical, the other Babylonian—even threatens to bring about another Civil War in which whole states may form their own countries. I do not know how far this will go, but the great cultural divide is affecting all of us. We should be aware of these trends and the issues that have caused such divisions. Whatever you do, support the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. I believe that God has brought about these divisions in order to bring provide the setting for the outpouring of the Spirit, and this will bring repentance and reunification under the banner of Jesus Christ.

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

The Battle for the Kingdom


THE BATTLE FOR THE KINGDOM

By Dr. Stephen Jones:  1-21-2020

Blog Post Date: 1-28-2020

When the printing press technology was discovered and put to use in the 1440’s, the first major project was to print an edition of the German Bible in 1452. This changed the world. Up to that time, the Bible had been a closed book, for the church had forbidden that common people should read it apart from a priest interpreting it.

But the printing press changed this forever, and the church found it impossible to contain the Bible’s influence. Men then began to search the Scriptures to find the kind of government that He intended for us to have. They had seen the oppression of the papal system of government, and they rejected that and all other totalitarian forms of government.

Government that Secures the People’s Rights
After two centuries of thought and debate, these ideas formed the basis of a new kind of government in America. Its constitution gave us a Republican form of government where the people themselves were the highest authority under God electing their representatives to serve them. No longer were government officials empowered to rule the people.

John Adams, our second president, said,

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The founders were historians who fully mistrusted the carnal mind of man and who saw from history how ambitious men gravitated to the top in order to gain power. The founders therefore mistrusted human nature and incorporated this mistrust into the American form of government. They divided power into three parts: executive, legislative, and judicial. Over all of these, they put the people themselves, giving them the right to overthrow their own government and replace it if and when it should attempt to seize power from the people.

They also knew that power on paper was an illusion without the power of enforcement. It was one thing to give power to the people; it was another thing to empower the people to maintain that power structure and defend it from the ambitious men they knew would arise in the future.

Shortly after the Constitution itself was adopted (1789), the founders were still unsure that the people had been empowered sufficiently, especially in the area of rights and privileges. For this reason they adopted the “Bill of Rights” (1791), which were ten amendments to the Constitution which set forth the unalienable rights of the people.
Rights, they said, were given by God Himself; whatever government grants is only a privilege and could just as easily be taken away as it saw fit. But in this unique form of government in America, the government was charged with defending and securing the rights of the people. No government had authority to grant rights.

This unique form of government empowered the people over their own government, and the second amendment of the Bill of Rights recognized that power, stating,

"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

In other words, the “security of a free State” was not dependent upon a federal military but upon the arms of the people themselves. This amendment had nothing to do with the right to hunt deer but to keep their own government from usurping power from the people. The founders knew from history that governments had been able to oppress the people on account of their military forces being superior to an unarmed and helpless populace. Once a government achieves such military power, it is free to consolidate more and more power to itself, and soon the people lose their rights and their freedoms.

The founders had already seen how Britain had sent troops to disarm the American people in 1775. That had resulted in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which were precursors to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and to the American Revolution itself.

Why People are the Weak Link
The problem, of course, is that when the people are empowered, there is no guarantee that they themselves will exercise their power with morality, humility, and responsibility. Human nature is, after all, still human nature. That was the weakest link in the chain. Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence gave these fallible people the right to abolish and change their government. So if the people became immoral and demanded sexual freedom, or if they demanded Socialism which inevitably leads to totalitarianism, they had that power as well.

For this reason, one of the first bills that Congress passed was to supply every home with a Bible. They stated firmly that this type of people power would only work if the people as a whole had the type of character advocated in the Scriptures. This was not considered unusual at all, for even the first Supreme Court Justice of the United States was John Jay, who was also the president of the American Bible Society.

In fact, the founders stated that this new form of government was suited only to those of the Christian religion. The Bible had given birth to the American form of government. No other religion had found such government in the pages of their own holy books. Not since the Israelites in their early days in the land of Canaan had a nation been so governed. So President John Quincy Adams said on July 4, 1837:

“The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.”

I showed in my book on The Judges that the Israelites ultimately did what was right in their own eyes (Judges 21:25). Over a period of three centuries, they descended into lawlessness by forsaking their divinely-given Constitution, the Torah. America did the same thing. Hence, just as God put Israel into captivity during the days of the Judges, so also did God finally put America into captivity to an entity known as Mystery Babylon.

The Captivity of Mystery Babylon
Once Babylon took financial control of America through the Federal Reserve Act (1913), they drove the country into bankruptcy in 1933 in order to foreclose on the nation judicially. The next big project was to begin to turn America from a Republic to a Socialist Democracy. In order to do this, they knew that they had to remove all Christian influence from government and to debauch the morals of the people themselves. This they did quite successfully. This was the purpose of the so-called 60’s sexual revolution.

The Federal Government took control of the educational system in order to turn it into a propaganda center. They took the Bible out of school system and outlawed prayer in public schools. Then they stopped teaching Civics, so that the children would no longer have a foundation of knowledge about the original intent of the Constitution and its biblical form of government. The study of history became irrelevant and boring to most students, cutting them off from the lessons of the past.

These changes were not the result of any normal or natural evolution of education. These were deliberate policy changes imposed by our new Babylonian rulers. The overall purpose was to secularize America, not only its government but also its people.

I believe that these Babylonian rulers understood the Bible better than most Christian leaders. They knew from the book of Judges that if they could keep the people lawless, each doing what was right in his own eyes, they might be able to rule the nation (and the whole earth) indefinitely. Why? Because God would not raise up judges to set the people free as long as they failed to repent. Hence, those who hated God had a vested interest in degrading the morals of the people.

As wicked and immoral people flourished, crime increased. With the increase in crime, the people gave the government more and more power to control crime. Gradually, the power of government grew, and the power of the people lessened. Ultimately, we reached the point where in 2007 President Obama officially declared that America “is no longer a Christian nation.”

By saying “no longer,” he admitted that America had been founded as a Christian nation, not that everyone was a Christian, but that its principles of government and laws were based on the Christian understanding of the Bible.

God is still sovereign
The Babylonians were raised up by God Himself, who gave them power only to an appointed time. The same God who brought judgment upon ancient Israel has also brought judgment upon America. The same God who blinded the Israelites for a season has also blinded America for a season. None of this took place outside of His will and control.

That is why the Babylonians will never win in the end. Socialists will not win. Communists will not win. Secularist government will not win. Satanists will not win. Witchcraft will not win. There is an appointed time when God will open the eyes of the people and pour out His Spirit upon the nation and the world. That alone will break the power of Babylon.

In spite of all the Babylonian immorality and Socialist principles inserted into the American form of government under God, they failed in their attempts to disarm the people. The American people have more weapons than all of the world’s armies put together. So in spite of the political changes that transferred power from the people to the State, the people still retained the practical power over their own government.

The Demonstration in Virginia
Today the House, Senate, and Governor’s office in the state of Virginia are all controlled by the Democratic Party, which is now the main party trying to transfer power from the people and give it to the Babylonian government. They are poised to pass a bill to confiscate all weapons in the state of Virginia. However, there has been a backlash from the people themselves who do not want to cede their people power to the State.

On January 20 there was a large demonstration of about 25,000 people at the State Capitol in Richmond, VA. It was a peaceful demonstration, but they let it be known that they would not comply with Virginia’s abolition of their second amendment rights. Most of the counties in Virginia have declared themselves to be gun-sanctuary counties, and the county sheriffs are telling the governor that they will not comply with his unconstitutional usurpation of power.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Babylonian side was planning a false flag incident which they hoped to use as “proof” that all guns should be confiscated. But it appears that the president sent special forces to the scene to enforce the peace and to protect the gun owners. I received this letter from a retired military officer who wrote about this demonstration:

I was glad that the Father did not allow violence to take place in Richmond today. I watched a live stream from home.

I noticed several of the armed men outside the Lobby grounds had the Special Ops look that very few people can discern without having served along side them. They were not normal Militia types. I wonder if the President had them there to keep the Foes from trying anything this time. I was surprised at the number of people armed on the street surrounding the site….

Just a couple of observations from experience with crowd control and military training.

I believe his observation was correct that the president quietly sent them there for their protection and to stop any infiltrators from causing trouble. (I heard that Antifa, our American terrorist organization, had sent 7 busloads of people to the scene to provoke violence, some wearing MAGA hats, pretending they were “pro-Trump extremists.”)

Whatever happened, the demonstration was peaceful, even though thousands carried their weapons to the State Capitol. It was just a reminder to the governor that he lacks the power to force his will upon the people and that they will not submit to his unconstitutional decrees. This is essentially a constitutional crisis.

In the end, however, the only way to regain our freedom is to turn to God. If the people do not repent of their lawlessness, God Himself will become their enemy and will extend their bondage to Mystery Babylon. But I believe that Babylon’s time has ended and that God will indeed pour out His Spirit upon us, so that He may end our captivity.

Further down the road will be the adoption of the Bible as the authoritative document above both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Bible will not only be enforced politically but also judicially, and some of the earlier mistakes in our judicial system will also be corrected (such as the prison system). The law of God will not create righteous people but will be the result of the people demanding the righteousness of God in the nation.

We are totally dependent upon the outpouring of the Holy Spirit for this to happen. In the end, God will rule the earth by His own laws in righteousness. Nothing can stop this. Nothing.