Friend, are you unable to read the Bible, that is, make sense of it? Or do some parts make sense, but others, such as Leviticus or Revelation or Romans seem totally bewildering? Are you desiring to go deeper, or reach a higher ground, spiritually, but your difficulty in comprehending scripture is holding you back? It may well be you need to consider that the Bible is essentially Messianic--that is, it exists to tell you about the Messiah and Savior, and virtually everything in the Bible points to Him. With this understanding, you are on your way to unlocking the scriptures and opening the door to Yeshua--for they are, in truth, a living Person, Jesus (Yeshua), who delights in His Name, the Word (John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
A profile of Ronald D. Ginther will follow his picture.
In the Forties, my older friends tell me, this was the place to be--now it has a lot of the look of Seattle and Bellevue, complete with traffic jams. Unfortunately, with people come problems and higher crime rates. Our crimes are now the same as in the big cities--the "big city" has dumped on us the same miseries and atrocious, "gratuitous" violence as we used to think happened everywhere else but here. It is: "Hello, World!"--whether we like it or not.
Ronald Ginther credits his faith in God to his godly mother (who is his prayer partner too at age 97) and godly father (deceased in a plane crash when he was five years old) and godly grandparents and relatives (who knew and loved Jesus as Savior and Lord even over in old Norway in the 1800s).
The Lord was always near to his family, thanks to this true foundation in the Christian faith going back generations. Yet every individual must make up his or her own mind about Jesus, whether to accept and serve, or whether to run away.
He unwisely resisted grace and put off salvation until he was fifteen, attending a Christian high school in South Dakota. That was a life-changng decision, he found, though he didn't understand it at the time. Ronald Ginther says he has been most richly blessed by the living Word that the Lord has graciously given Him any time he goes to the scriptures. It is God's Word that, more than his secular education at college and university, provides his view of the world, the purpose for our life on earth, and the direction and guidance we individually need to fulfill our purpose and live in a loving way toward others. Everything we need is in Jesus Christ, and everything Jesus Christ is we can find in the Bible. It is up to us to use these resources and with prayer seek a personal Jesus who is waiting for us to call on Him. Those who seek, find. Those who do not seek, do not find. It is really simple, is it not? Feeling overwhelmed? See the song, "God has a Plan for My Life," in the link below the Bible which is your best source of help in time of need!
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock...
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
--But who is that on the other side of you?
Because of this, we are deeply thankful for those few black leaders like the brave Wellington Boone who are speaking out against this hijacking of the Civil Rights Movement and also history and the suffering of the black people under slavery and before they even reached these shores via the infamous slave ships (on which something upwards of 50 million died in transit in the most miserable way). In Washington State, my own state which has been held hostage (even our governor is not legitimate) by far left politicians for many years now, black Church of God in Christ leaders are standing up in the forefront of the churches to help mobilize churches and Christians to fight for traditional marriage and other essential planks of our precious Judaeo-Christian foundations.
This is not a Republican political site (for we greatly admired Democratic leaders such as Sen. Henry Jackson, the late senator from Washington State), but we must name those who are guilty, as to tar others with the same brush would be misleading and unfair. Thus: just now yet another minority is being exploited by the Left--the single women who do not vote, but when they do vote, they vote Democratic. How to exploit them and get them out to vote? Democratic politicos are using sex, yes, sex--for this is the way they have decided will mobilize this important source of potential votes for their agendas for reconstructing America's society and economy along radical liberal lines. I listened to two of them discussing this tactic on the radio, so it is not heresay. Sex sells cars, and most every thing else in consumerist society, so why not the Democratic Party's agenda? Apparently, that is the very thinking going on in the war room of the Clintons.
Now are you sufficiently convinced, as I am, that we are in desperate need of a nation-wide revival, such as Franklin Roosevelt so long ago urged our nation to consider in one of his famous Fireside Chats?--Ed.
"WHAT IS THE STATE OF CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA?" To begin with, for prefatory remarks, let us say Christianity is irrelevant in America. It has slipped outside the mainstream, for a variety of reasons. There are so-called sins of omission and sins of commission, in religious parlance. Well, both categories apply to Christianity's default. I should not blame Christianity, however. Christ had nothing to do with the Crusades, and He certainly has nothing to do with the dereliction of Christians today in American post-modern, post-Christian society. He certainly must be grieved by the disconnect, the great disconnect, between Christians and this society in America. Actually, it is a disconnect in a limited sense, or a specialized sense only, since the churches and the memberships are deeply compromised with the world, not alienated and cast away. We would be far better off if American society would reject us utterly, which it does not. Other than the secular humanist, four-wheeled Axis of Evil--the ACLU and United Christians for Separation of Church and State (sic), NARAL, and Planned Parenthood, not to mention, their iniquitous, confederated organizations--we Christians have gone merrily along with the popular, fashionalbe, politically-correct social-economic tide, and no one has objected. In going with the tide, we have become quite like the other creatures floating alongside, and you really cannot tell anymore who is a Christian and who is not. In fact, most all Americans claim to be Christians, whether they go to church or not! That proves that Americans have bought into the idea you can be a Christian and never darken the door of a church, or say prayer to God, or obey the Ten Commandments (which most of these "Christians" cannot identify).
How did we sink into such a nadir, such a pit? The great Trinity Broadcasting Network and Daystar Television Network, and Pat Robertson's CBN, as well as Focus on the Family and other uncountable Christian radio programs, and Billy Graham crusades, and the 300,000 pulpits and churches--they are in the pit too, thank you, right there with the majority of Americans who consider themselves Christian and going to heaven, all without a real clew of how they will actually get there! It hardly matters how popular any of the televangelists are, or how many millions the Left Behind Series has sold, or that Billy Graham, as just one of a number of world-wide ministries, has preached the gospel to over 200 million people in his lifetime. Popularity for this and that Christian preacher or best-selling writer or Grammy-winning Christian singer has not changed America a whit (some are worship leaders in churches and get as much as 300k a year--three times more than Billy Graham's salary, by the way). The Purpose Driven Life has not changed America, though for a time you saw the book everywhere you went, stacked right along side of Harry Potter in mega-sales. It doesn't matter that Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ swept all records of receipts and numbers at the box office aside for month after month--America was not changed. 9/l1 did not change America either--so how could these lesser events do what the catastrophic destruction of the gigantic Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City, as well as the downing of the commercial jet in Pennysylvania, and the near destruction of the Pentagon by yet another Islamic-terrorist hijacked jet attack, could not do?
First, to know what will change America, we must seek God, and then look at what His Word has to tell us. Yet why are we still floundering, since there are plenty of people who are leading Christians today who cannot give us real answers, without spin, as radio's Bill O'Reilly (which is really "Radio Free America" standing like a lighthouse amidst the leftist-dominated media) likes to describe his programs? Could it be we are deliberately denying the truth, or evading it somehow? I think so--we are evading the truth and also denying it--precisely since the truth is too costly. We might have to change everything, and nobody yet is willing to change everything. We see this is so, because ministries and churches picked up in their irrelevant roles after 9/11 exactly, or almost exactly, where they left off before the first plane struck on that terrible day we did not really take to heart. Not to belabor the point, but Azusa Street's 1906 revival that swept the world with Pentecostalism was celebrated after 9/11--and did it provoke a national revival as hoped? Nope. Azusa's centennial memorial celebration was well orchestrated (actually too well orchestrated, in my impression of it--the leading evangelical and Pentecostal notables were trotted out to speak and perform as I watched, hoping against hope somebody would get real and something real would happen by the Holy Spirit, but...nothing! Tragically, nothing! And, deservedly, it wasn't even noticed--outside of evangelical and Pentecostal circles. Rightly so! It was, as far as America was concerned, a non-event, just as any other event of Christendom is considered a non-event, a matter of completely irrelevance, to mainstream America. I thought afterwards it was a good thing I did not attend the event in Los Angeles, for I would have been so grieved by the anti-climatic religionism that was going on that I would have been forced to cry out in their midst, cry out to God for us all, that He shower His mercy upon us and forgive us, for this wretched charade recalling the truly great, epochal Azusa Street Revival.
It grieves me even now to think of that lost chance--gone forever, it appears! Does anyone out there in the world of the Internet take this cry to heart? It is not my cry only. It is the cry of the Holy Spirit, I believe. Shall we then continue to suck bitter lemons and call them sweet peaches, as churches and pastors lead us like rows of well-trained monkeys to perform and jump through their hoops in our nice, padded sanctuaries where most of the people are solipsists and navel-gazers, intent only on their own spiritual gain, while forgetting the vast, perishing world, with its millions and billions of searching human beings dying without Jesus, plunging into hopeless, Christless graves, all because we have been so concerned about ourselves we have thrown away our chances to reach them with the saving, transforming Gospel?
CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA--HOW IS IT DOING? Hurricanes Rita and Katrina did not change America, though thousands of Louisianians turned to Jesus and made decisions to follow Him outside their stinking, liberal/secular humanist hellhole of Louisiana, all people who would probably have gone to damnation otherwise (but why hadn't the big name minisries and mega-churches reached these people--in their very shadow--that is a question they never address!). Who would want to live in such a place, unless, like Mayor Nagin of "Nola," you had a second, luxurious home for a back-up in a far off state? What will it take for national repentance and revival? you hear again and again from preachers and evangelists. What? Don't these experts know? Are they simpletons? It takes repentance--a change of heart, which takes an act of will, responding obediently to the Word of God. That is just too simple, isn't it? Repentance, based on an act of will, based on the Word of God commanding us to pray, repent, and change our direction by turning our behavior around.
It takes repentance. R-E-P-E-N-T-A-N-C-E--nine letters in all, a word that can save us and our entire nation from its present, implacable foes all bent to destroy us.
But the hitch is: you have to preach the real, unequivocal Gospel based on the Word of God to provoke genuine repentance, or at least set the conditions for it to bloom in a person's heart. I have heard absurd statements, such as: Christ did not condemn anyone, we must not attack sin, or call sin sin, lest we offend anyone we might have reached and brought to Christ. Christ did condemn people, and He also cursed a fig tree so that it withered up and died--did he not? He did not come to do that, of course, and said so--but He did do it! He called a spade a spade--when it was called for--and we have numerous incidents where he did just that. The things he called people who opposed the Gospel of the Kingdom would be unprintable, if given with the force with which they struck the hearers of his own day. Thank God we read the sanitized Gentile versions of the Bible. In Jesus's time, amongst his contemporaries, calling a Pharisee, that seemingly noble scion of Judaistic religion and outstanding exemplar of the Law of Moses to that nation, a "white-washed tomb", and "children of the devil," and "serpents", and all the other things he called them and their coherts, the scribes and lawyers--(for we don't have all the acts and sayings of Jesus, by any means)--was the equivalent of using four letter words and lewd gestures to boot. Oh, the religionists today claim, Jesus did not judge people--He came only to save us and pat us on the back when we reject His word or refuse to obey God's laws. Oh? We are under Grace today, not Law, the religionists claim--which is simply not the case, since the Law is still in effect, according to Jesus Himself Who came to fufill it for us. He threw the money-changers out of the Temple TWICE--and Jesus did not judge? He said to them: "You have made my house a den of robbers", when it was supposed to be a house of prayer. "Robbers"? That wasn't a nice thing to call business people, within the holy Temple's precincts no less! But Jesus spoke the truth--always! Always!
Who is preaching the Gospel today? Surely, the Gospel is being preached today, yet America is not changed. No, my conclusion has to be just the opposite: it is NOT being preached. We have yet to hear the Gospel in America. What we get is a an upbeat, user-friendly, compromised, Americanized Gospel that is so tailored to our lusts and desires and inhibitions and hang-ups and prejudices we scarcely change while condescendingly "accepting Jesus" as our Savior and Lord. Isn't that true? Yes, there are dramatic conversions--we all thrill to see and hear them from the individuals who can give accounts of how they turned from being drug addicts to Christians--but America is not changed. Something is still missing. Something is lacking--the vital missing ingredient that makes all the difference. What could it be? We really need to know, I suggest, if America is ever to change, if there is ever going to be that great spiritual awakening that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (adulterer that he was while in office, with the White House press corps looking the other way, so that he was never forced to face accountability for his adulterous affair!) declared (I believe, from his heart) was so needed in America and which would, in his view, cleanse our nation and society of many great social evils and problems. In the closing days of World War II, in 1945, the great man went down into darkness, perhaps, never seeing that spiritual awakening. Will we join him someday soon, without having seen it too?
We would like to follow up this preface with an article of truly pathetic, doleful state of Christian churches in American society and what possibly we can individually do to change and crawl back to the path of life--by God's grace and mercy, of course.
Now I am fully aware most Christians (should I use quotes for that term?) reject this article out of hand as negative and critical, since it fails their "upbeat" criterion of what is religious and proper. But the truth is being served here, not their religious feelings and misconceptions. I am responsible to God and to His truth, not to these people. I admire Anne Graham Lotz for her statement, "I do not seek to please the audience so they will like me." That is one brave woman of God! I wish to be like her in that respect. Go to a doctor for a diagnosis for why you are feeling so ill, and he will tell you his diagnosis when he is finished. Why? There is no cure if you do not face the truth. Why try to dress up the situation if you have cancer, by telling you that you have a common cold, and there is no reason to be concerned. Why try to treat cancer with cold medicine and pretend that it will be sufficient. Why try to be so "upbeat" and "positive" and completely deceive yourself? Why? The answer has to be: you will die if you deny or evade the truth of the doctor's true diagnosis. We must fact the truth, then, or perish. There is no other alternative or option available. Christ came with the message of Salvation, and the rebellious people rejected his diagnosis of of their sin-sick state, and even rejected the wonderful, complete, free Cure, which was His substitutionary death on the Cross. He is the Great Physician for both body and soul--yet they refused to listen to him, preferring more upbeat doctors of their own choosing, who said, "Don't worry, my dears, your problem is only a common cold. Just do this and that in the Law, and it will go away," while adding, "And by the way, I will take your payment on the temple tax." They were liars, using people for their own profit and advancement. The sin and its penalty did not go away with elaborate ceremonies and guilt-ridden offerings to the Temple. Most all that generation perished and are in hell this very hour suffering indescribable torments. Will we join them? It is our choice. Or will we just barely make it into heaven, by ther "skin of our teeth," saved but never really surrendered to Christ? To turn back to God in repentance, following the Gospel and spreading it to the whole world--it is our choice. We are in the valley of decision.
In my dream today I saw a blackened, stormy landscape, with little light, and a group of people struggling to get away from a hurricane and typhoon of wind and water that was shooting at them from one side of a long, black ridge of rock.
"It contains Bibles from the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, right up to a brand-new translation of Scripture into the Dinka language of Sudan." One manuscript is the Torah in Hebrew (15th-17 century) from a remote synagogue in Kaifeng, China. It is 71 feet long, made of goatskin, and was damaged in a flood that destroyed the city in 1642 and so the ms. extends only to Leviticus.
Another ground-breaking ms. is the Massachusetts Bible (1663), a translation of the Bible into an Algonquin dialect, able to be read by precious few because by then, due to ravages of measles and other endemic diseases, there survived less than twenty literate Algonquin-speaking Indians, yet it is significant because it was the first Bible to be printed in the Americas (again, not in English, but in an Indian language! How is that for diversity and multiculturalism in Christianity?).
Another is England's John Wyclif-inspired English New Testament (circa 1440), coming before the invention of printing.
John Wyclif was persecuted for his work on an English translation, but he believed no sacrifice was not worth it if he could bring the Word of God to the common English people in their own language (the Bible was virtually unread up to his time, for it was the Latin Vulgate that the Catholic Church recognized as its authoritative, official version of the Bible).
Another Society treasure is a portion of the first Bible ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, which revolutionized the world by starting the explosion of knowledge and information. The ABS has four leaves of this priceless Bible, with the red text in the Bible added later by hand after it was printed.
To see and learn more than a bit of of our own Christian heritage in America as well as elsewhere, these and other fascinating, old, even ancient manuscripts, Jewish and Christian, are featured at:
Truly, she was right about that--for if it had been released as planned, it would have come out before the President of Iran's threats against Israel and America, and thus it would not have spoken right to the situation that his infamous, anti-Jewish remarks generated. Here we have God's own response to the President of Iran--and he best take heed, or he will surely go the way of the cursed and despicable Haman in the book of Esther and now in the movie about her.
For a movie that will entertain and challenge everyone, without wondering about the rating--go to the place to get the names of theaters nearest you, and type in your zip code for your area's listing (you are also asked to call local theaters and ask if they will be showing the film called "A Night With the King":
For a bit of fun, draw the design made by the camps of the tribes around the Meeting House and Tabernacle, and you get what? Hint: Jesus died on one! That Cross was what Balaam the prophet saw when he looked down upon the vast encampment of Israel from the mountains of Moab--and he could not curse Israel after seeing the Cross of Christ, though he was paid by an enemy king to do so! He also prophesied of the Coming Star in Israel. Imagine, being part of the encampment of the Cross, yet missing the very meaning of that design by living for self and not for God--that whole generation missed it, through rebellion and resistance to Moses and the Lord, and died in that wilderness needlessly. Only Joshua and Caleb of that evil generation entered into the Promised Land. As scripture says: "Many are called, but few are chosen." and "Will He find faith?"
"Culture Warrior," by Bill O'Reilly (go to www.amazon.com, or any bookstore), which details the unconditional, all-out war being waged against America's Judaeo-Christian foundations by secular progressives (also called secular humanists).
"Smith Wigglesworth," Apostle of Faith, biography by Stanley Howard Frodsham, Radiant Books, Gospel Publishing House, Springfield, Missouri
"George Muller, Man of Faith and Miracles," biography hy Basil Miller, Bethany Fellowship, Dimension Books, Minneapolis, Minnesota
"Tortured for Christ," autobiography of Richard Wurmbrand, Diane Books, Glendale, California
"Hope for Man in a Hopeless World," by Basilea Schlink, Bethany Fellowship, Dimension Books, Minneapolis, Minnesota
"Glory in the Church, the Coming Revival," by Edward E. Hindson, Thomas Nelson Publishers, New York/Nashville
"Czechmate," autobiographical account of imprisonment of author in a communist country for Bible smuggling
"The Everyday Guide to "God," A to Z Listing of God's Attributes, with Scriptures, by Amy Ng Wong, Humble Creek Publisher, Uhricksville, Ohio
"The Complete Book of Bible Lists," by H.L. Willmingon, Tyndale House, Wheaton, Illinois
"God Sent a Man," the story of Joseph, by Carylye B. Haynes, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Washington, D.C.
"Israel Act III," The Bible and the Mideast in prophecy, by Richard Wolff, Tyndale House, Wheaton, Illinois
"Eric Liddell, Pure Gold," biography of the Chariots of Fire Olympic runner turned missionary to China, by David McCasland, Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan
"C.S. Lewis," Heroes of the Faith series biography, by Sam Wellman, Barbour Publishing, Uhrichsville, Ohio
"A Passion for the Impossible," The Life of Lilias Trotter, by Miriam Huffman Rockness, Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan
"Jerusalem Countdown," A Warning to the world, containing a prophetic view of Iran's role in coming world events affecting or centered on Israel, with parallels between Joseph and Jesus tieing in with these events and others of the End-Times, by John Hagee, Frontline (A Strang Company), Lake Mary, Florida
"The Question of Freemasonry," booklet by Ed Decker, P.O. Box 1076, Issaquah, WA 98027 (we cannot guarantee the address, as it is not recent). One Excerpt, quoted in the book from the Masons' holy book that shows us how Masons view Christianity and lumps Christ with the world's religions under Masonry: "Masonry, around whose altars the Christian, the Hebrew, the Moslem, the Brahmin, the followers of Confucius and Zoroaster, can assemble as brethren and unite in prayer to the one God who is above all the Baalim, must needs leave it to each of its initiates to look for the foundation of his faith and hope to the written scriptures of his own religion." (page 226) Note: The word, "Baalim," is simply defined as "false god or idol." The Masonic author has included the God of the Christian in that category [the Baalim].(ED)--from the book, "The Question of Freemasonry," by Ed Decker, including his editorial note. Furthermore, this anti-Christ religion of Masonry isn't content with applying the heathen title of Baalim to Christian faith, but calls the only true Word of God, the Bible, "incomplete." It is claimed by Masons that no Christian knows that it is a mere "collection...of monstrous absurdities." The only thing monstrous and absurd is Masonry! We hope and pray that millions of Americans, servants to this beast of false religion, will have the veil over their eyes stripped away by the truth and be delivered from Satan and be saved. They are even serving as pastors, deacons, elders in churches. However, look at the obits in your local paper. Whenever the deceased person's Mason connections are mentioned, there is almost invariably lacking the peron's church--that person is going into eternity without any church whatsoever! You can see by that exactly where the deceased person put his faith for salvation and eternal life--not in Jesus Christ, but in "23rd degree"-hellish, monstrous horned God of Masonry. This is, by the way, just one of the false cults into which America has fallen a dupe. It begins in the form of a very commendable charitable club, doing much community good, but ends with a commitment and total enslavement to a horned anti-Christ pagan god (at that point the Mason is a 23rd Degree Mason). How do we know? Its "holy" books say so--which few if any beginning Masons know anything about, since it is an extremely well-kept secret. I myslf suspect that this is pagan Celtic religion centered on a horned god, then dressed up by Satan with New Age eclecticism and humanitarian programs in the community, which suits it admirably for the modern mindset that is already inclined that way.
I have in my six decades of lifetime been privileged to read thousands of VERY good books--and I always tried to read the most excellent books--that were not trashy "time-killers" or just for recreational or titillating purposes (including the best-selling self-help, self-oriented potboilers that were not on my list either, due to the fact my day, unlike most other fellow Americans, has only 24 hours, and every minute is precious!). I have just completed reading his book, and it is excellent, so I advise everyone to get it at a bookstore or order it on-line or by telephone. Dr. Mark Gabriel's book order number is: 1-800-225-7977, to order a copy. It is a very busy connection, so please stay on the line, as it it takes time to speak to a representative. Or you may go to the ministry website, Lion and Lamb Ministries.
We as Christians AND Moslems AND Hindus AND Secular-Humanists AND whatever material thing or philosophy or political organization or nation or human being we worship as God in His place must inform ourselves--as the truth concerning God and His Ways is definitely not being given us the common people through most all officials and religious authorities and all of the media and government channels. That is the way it is in this fallen, self-destructing world, and we must seek Jesus for ourselves, and then we will find Him! Jesus promises He will come personally to us, if we make this effort, and reading the right book, preferably the Bible first, will enable us, with His Holy Spirit opening our understanding, to find and understand the One True God and His Son, Jesus (Yeshua, Issa (but the Son of God that Mohammed denies He is).--Ed
It allows its rivals in a limited sense to exist while actively propagandizing and attacking them with the secular-humanist schools, educators, philosphers, government,and media. Freedom is defined as only what secular humanism permits to to be free. Since it holds to no absolute and no Absolute Being or God, secular humanism takes the place of God and issues or denies liberties and freedoms to people in its control. They are "free" to enjoy life only according to the terms set by secular humanism. To know and define what secular humanism is--the greatest evil and tyranny on earth next to absolutist, triumphantist religions, of which Islam is one--we only have to look at the nations ruled by it, namely:WHAT IS SECULAR HUMANISM IN THIS POST-MODERN WORLD? WHY DOES IT APPEAR LIKE A LAMB BUT ATTACK CHRISTIANS AND THOSE WHO SUPPORT TRADITIONAL VALUES WITH THE TEETH OF A LION? Secular Humanism, whose cardinal doctrine of "Tolerance" seems to be an admirable one, ostensively treating everyone equally, is really an anti-God religion that degrades human life to the point of irrelevance in the Universe. Morality in its view is absurd, and turns into amorality and immorality. Meaning becomes meaningless. Absolutes become situational ethics, as changeable as the wind. Secular Humanism does not really tolerate, it must drive out every competing philosophy and annihilate every belief in God. Just because it opens its doors to everything, does not mean it sanctions everything--not at all. Rather, while preaching "Tolerance," it uses that very doctrine to persecute
in the most relentless fashion anyone who for conscience sake disagrees with it being forced on that person.
Did you know that the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana was a thoroughly Christian one (which you could not tell by their lives and their behavior after the ceremony, even excluding the wonderful charitable contributions by Princess Diana)?
The words and songs and prayers of the ceremony in the vast and august chamber of St. Paul's Cathedral 29 July 1981 all testify to the Lordship and Sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. Isn't that a shocker today? Imagine a state grand state ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Congress or the White House testifying to the Lordship and Sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ--without it being compromised by political correctness by adding Muslim clerics and the Dalai Lama to please the New Age and Interfaith crowd that loves to hold its services at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.!
The booklet of the wedding has a wonderful foreward about Christian marriage from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, that is well worth reviewing here in the near future, as it is so good to hear anything uncompromisingly Christian coming forth from top echelons of this secular-humanist-degraded, formerly a superpower-nation:
It is always said that the immigrants are taking only unwanted jobs (unwanted by the nationals), but that is not the case--they will take any job that is unfilled, if and when they can. You cannot prevent their upward mobility as they raise their educational levels, and educated or not they also increase quickly in numbers due to a high birth rate, creating their own economy and lessening their original dependency on the majority cultures and its economy. With numbers, they begin the process of using the election system to put their own people in places of power, and then begin to manage their own special enclaves or unassimilated societies, all with the purpose ultimately of overturning the secular-humanist laws and social organization that was the national system and substituting their own. The process is inevitable, proceeding at a rapid rate, despite attempts by the shrinking secular humanist majority and its government to impede or stop it with various laws and maneuvers.
What secular humanism does not know or tell its people is that they have nothing to live for that is strong enough to defeat a triumphantist religion such as Islam, and "tolerance" is not able to keep secular humanist states from going down to destruction--rather, it is hastening the destruction. Already the Dark Continent spiritually, Europe will become Islamic, ruled by draconian Sheriah law (that ends religious freedom, women's rights, and democracy, plunging that continent back into the Dark Ages)--given time.
Nature has always abhored a vacuum, and secular humanism, ignoring that fact, creates the vacuum Islam is rapidly filling. As for North America, Christianity is losing ground, as Secular Humanism still controls much of the continent and may even strengthen its hold. The same processes that are overcoming a once Christian Europe are working very well here. America too is a failed state, thanks to secular humanism's program. Yet God has shown a number of times that He can overturn such mighty forces of destruction. I do believe He will do so again, in America and Russia, if not in Old Europe.--Ed.
Asia Minor, now called Anatolia, or Turkey, was once Christian, for over a thousand years in fact, since the time of Christ and St. Paul, until it was completely conquered by Muslim Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. Churches, not mosques, predominated. Now it is mosques that predominate in the landscape of Anatolia--but that wasn't the case until after the 7th century, and even as late as the 14th century Christianity was still solidly in place, even with Muslim occupation.
Innumerable times, Arab armies invaded and raided this fervently Christian land, which was the flourishing, rich heartland and homeland of the great Christian empire of the Byzantine Greek Orthodox people--an empire of millions of people and sophisticated, highly civilized cities that for centuries was second to none and was full of scholars, churches, schools, hospitals, and all manner of artistic and architectural glories. How could such a great commonwealth be wiped so utterly from the earth, that you can only find its relics in museums? If you really want to grasp a bit of the magnitude of this, go to Muslim Istanbul, view St. Sophia today that is officially a Museum, and see the glories of what was once the world's greatest church sanctuary--and it was the Mother Church of this Muslim-destroyed empire, captured by a Muslim sultan in 1453 and converted to a Muslim mosque--which has never been returned, by the way, to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, who still resides in the city, his official seat.
Recently, the area was the center of a world controversy, as Pope Benedict XVI's remarks quoting a Byzantine emperor about Mohammed excited riots, even a killing of a nun (others have since been murdered) who cared for precious, neglected Muslim children in Somalia, and angry speeches across the globe. What was it all about? Emperor Manuel of of the Christian empire was talking with a highly urbane Muslim Persian scholar, and he said that Mohammed created an evil by linking religion with violence and force to convert people to it. This was most certainly true to the case (if you have read anything about Mohammed's bloody political venturism and his savage attacks on Arab and Jewish caravans to win plunder, not to mention his attacks on his various enemies in Mecca and elswhere in Arabia during his meteroric rise to power), but it is politically incorrect to say the truth today, as the Pope discovered by the violent reaction in the Muslim nations to his remarks (and how could this remark be known, unless angry mullahs spread it everywhere, through Muslim websites and Muslim media and the Internet, not to mention cellphones--all infidel Western inventions, by the way?).
"The Pope is blaspheming Mohammed the Prophet of Allah, and we are not violent in Islam," the rioting Muslims declared, and so a defenceless nun was most brutally slain as an easy target of their vengefulness, shot down with bullets in her back after years of sacrificial service to Somalian children--children of the poorest people in one of the world's poorest nations.
Emperor Manuel knew what he was talking about, having had to face enormous Muslim armies and their superior military might all his days as emperor. His country had also been beseiged many times in the past by the Star and Crescent of the Arab armies, right up to the walls of his capital, but God has spared his empire again and again--miraculously so, even with the protection of the great triple Walls of Constantinople surrounding the city since the reign of Emperor Theodosius.
But why is no one defending this Christian ruler? "Obscurity" is not a good reason, for the emperor is featured in all the encyclopedias and uncountable books of history. Rather than his "obscurity," it is because it is politically incorrect today to defend ANY Christian, much less a renowned, educated, valiant Christian emperor such as this one, who spoke the plain, unadulterated truth about Mohammed and Islam to a Muslim scholar who also knew the truth about Mohammed, or should have known it. It is the secular-humanist elites who don't know or don't want to acknowledge the truth of history and certainly do not like any mention of Manuel the Christian emperor whatsoever, precisely because he is a very significant authority on Islam, having dealt with Islam, militarily and diplomatically, for all the time of his tenure as emperor in Constantinople.
Islamic mullahs, not many of them well-educated according to Muslims' own opinions about them, simply regard any remark like the Pope's as categorically false and baseless and blasphemous--but educated, honest mullahs know it is the plain truth, though they will suffer greatly from fellow Muslims if they should come out of the closet and say so! Just witness Dr. Mark Gabriel's experience, and read the response to his coming out of the closet!
In a most significant connection with this Asia Minor atlas, you might want to read the "Ballad of Paul and Silas," by Ronald Ginther, for this tells of the epic invasion of Macedonia, the first nation in heathen Europe to be invaded and conquered for Christ by the Gospel preached by the Apostle Paul. Paul's launching point? Troas Alexandria, on the west coast of Asia Minor (and from this beachhead in Philippi, "sleeper cells" of home churches were established in city after city in Greece, which were in turn springboards to Italy and even beyond to Spain!).
Are you an God-fearer, a David the mere shepherd boy, and want to make a difference in this wicked, giant-ruled world? America desperately (what part of DESPERATELY, do we not understand?) needs activists (terrorists with the Gospel of Peace and Salvation only in Christ) who will support what God's truth and values in society. Do you have time for emailing your beliefs and support of what is moral and right to those who are profiting wrongly on what is immoral and wrong? Legislators, businesses, sponsors of lewd TV shows or books, they all urgently need to hear from you as a Christian [I write to my legislators, godless and lying secular-humanists, though they certainly are!--Ed]. I am not asking you to do what I have not been doing myself. We are all called to stand up for the Lord and His commandments, but there is a special way you can make a mark of truth and beauty on this culture instead of it always making an ugly, black, staining mark on you! Be an activist-terrorist for Christ--remembering that you always state the truth IN LOVE, just as He did with the Samaritan woman at the well.