Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Death of a Nation - sermon notes, revised

 

Psalm 9:17  The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.

Philippians 2:21  For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s.

Please forgive me for a little bit of history before I get started.

In April, 1945 the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theater of World War Two operations would begin the Battle of Okinawa. It would last 82 days until the end of June. This battle underscores a point I want to make about American society after World War Two. Understand that in that American culture of the time men did not easily talk about things such as PTSD, which was not recognized until 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association according to the VA website although a formal diagnosis for trauma was created in the 1950s. The horrific combat experiences and what support soldiers, as the horrifically wounded were brought to the rear, saw was not something men were inclined to talk about as freely as they are encouraged to do today, if at all. So the following numbers must have represented the toughest cases as countless numbers suffered, and their families suffered, in silence.

“Roughly 1.3 million American service personnel suffered some kind of psychological setback during World War II. By July 1943, the U.S. Army was discharging ten thousand men each month for psychiatric reasons, and the numbers increased as the war dragged on. During the Battle of Okinawa, fought between late March and the end of June 1945, the Marines suffered twenty thousand psychiatric casualties.”

Childers, Thomas. Soldier From The War Returning (p. 8). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I would assert that there was profound stress placed on the 16 million Americans who served in WW2. This is more than 10% of all Americans at the time. We are talking about staggering social implications for the coming decades.

“The military…was “discharging psychoneurotic veterans at the rate of 10,000 cases a month in late 1943 and in early 1944.” More than 216,000 veterans had been discharged for psychoneuroses by the Army alone.

Childers, Thomas. Soldier From The War Returning (p. 70). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

By the fall of 1945, the Army had already admitted one million men to Army hospitals for treatment as “NPs,” neuropsychiatric casualties.* More than 40 percent of all Army medical discharges were NP cases, and by 1947 more than half the beds in VA hospitals were occupied by men suffering from some sort of psychoneurotic disorder.

Childers, Thomas. Soldier From The War Returning (pp. 231-232). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Newspaper and magazine articles were warning the women at home and families that their returning young men might be damaged and have very special needs and react to civilian life in adverse and hard to understand ways. America was set up for the social chaos that would come and the radical change in American morals, views of authority, and the growing distrust and disrespect of institutions and religion. Many veterans of World War Two suffered horribly back at home with promises unfulfilled and a growing hostility toward them from many of the people back home. Frustrated veterans even fought pitched battles against law enforcement like the Battle of Athens, Tennessee against corrupt police and corrupt local government.

Back home, women had been forced to work in factories and then forced to give up those jobs when men returned from war creating a tension often under the surface of unfulfilled expectations and personal frustration. The car culture and business disrupting the extended family by moving nuclear families around the country created a sense of alienation from each other. Even things like air conditioning brought people off the front porch where they communicated with their neighbors and into the home where a barrage of propaganda from TV and radio had them fixated including biased news reporting that swore it was unbiased. Any semblance of unity and the power of the extended family had to be worked hard to maintain and often lost in the fight. People would only see close relatives at holidays and vacations if they could afford to travel and children often felt like strangers in unfamiliar places as families moved around the country to take advantage of promotions or just better-paying jobs. My point is that you had a country under a great deal of emotional stress starting in the mid to late 1940s.

And we lived under the threat of annihilation in a very possible nuclear war with Soviet Russia.

On top of that social disruption, in spite of our prosperity and power in the world, there was something else hammering and cutting at America’s collective “soul.”

It was the philosophy of communism.

My opinion from my reading is that communism is a modern form of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which began in Ancient Egypt. Very generally speaking Gnosticism has mankind as perfectable on his own, having the divine spark in every man. Ultimately mankind will evolve to a divine state. Gnostics in the early Christian era believed in two creating Gods and that all matter was evil so God could not have come in the form of a real body or died on the Cross. There are elites with special knowledge unavailable to the rest of us and they work behind the scenes. I’ve oversimplified Gnosticism because every religion has Gnostic beliefs of some sort except Bible-believing Christianity. In communism it is understood that through much suffering, bloodshed, and murder mankind, without any God in the picture, will one day evolve to a state where classes don’t exist and man will have become perfect, a communist. There will be no want, no needs not met, and from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. And billions of people will have to die to get there.

John wrote of the Gnostics of his day who denied that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.

 

1John 4:2  Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: 3  And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

 

2John 1:7  For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

The communist is the ultimate Gnostic, not only denying that Christ came in the flesh but that neither He nor God the Father even exist.

Just to remind you communists existed in the ancient world of Plato and Roman philosophers, denying the right to private property and exalting the will of the collective, in that only the state gives you worth and you have no rights or identity apart from the state and the state’s will.

There were groups in such diverse places as Persia and Cromwell’s England who preached communism. But it is the French Revolution that births modern political communism, made it a religion, and uplifted communist principles that resulted in the mass murders of the 20th century misdirecting even such worthwhile efforts as the Civil Rights movement in America.  And the communism that is threatening to bring down America today as beacon of freedom shining in the world can be traced to that event. I refer you to the books Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith by James Billington and The Black Book of Communism Crimes, Terror, and Repression for more detailed analysis. Early communists declared that it was the fullest expression of democracy and that everyone, regardless of interest or understanding or stake in society, needed to vote even if they had to be told who to vote for, and thousands of revolutionaries fled turmoil in Europe to come and infect our country before the Civil War.

I want to make you aware that Democratic congressman Martin Dies who spent some time as the chairman of the House Committee that investigated communists back in the 1930’s and 40s said that there were an estimated 5,000 communists and people of questionable loyalites in the U.S. government at the start of WW2 and many of them were later proven to be outright Soviet agents. After all, it was a Soviet Agent, proven and known, who helped write the UN Charter, the first global communist governmental body. It was a communist agent in our government who dictated the ultimatum to Japan that led to Pearl Harbor and he was later proven to be a Soviet spy wanting to prevent Japan from attacking the Soviet Union rather than us.

But, the real damage was done by those who just were partial to the communist ideals. You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party or an agent of a foreign power to be a communist, little c. They pushed for unions to disrupt the working class which became so powerful and corrupt that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy would write a famous book about the unions called The Enemy Within.

But communists eventually became disenchanted with the prosperous American worker who simply refused to rebel against his “chains” as he was too prosperous. Remember, as the famed Rush Limbaugh said about conservatives, “we want prosperity for everyone,” and as President Donald Trump declared in his second debate with Biden, “success will bring us together.”

Well, prosperity and success for the common American worker in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s did not make them think they needed a revolution, just a pay raise or maybe a bigger home.

So, an influential communist writer and postmodern philosopher named Herbert Marcuse, a member of the prestigious Marxist Frankfort School of Critical Theory, who was one of those communists that worked in our government during World War Two working for the OSS the precursor to the CIA, with dozens of other communist thinkers, and the Office of War Information dispensing propaganda, began writing about a new avenue for Marxists and communists to drive down to tear down this nation and rebuild it in their twisted vision of utopia. The socialist revolution would move from focusing on the working class to focusing on marginalized groups like women who rejected traditional roles, gays, transgender people, and minorities, as well as the environment.

He began preaching a doctrine of the ultimate good in life wasn’t about fulfilling your responsibilities but was to be happy and the only way to be happy was to pursue pleasure. And how could one pursue pleasure if society laid down morals that restricted that pursuit? Through his writings in books like Eros and Civilization and The One-Dimensional Man he became known as the Father of the New Left in the 1960s creating crises to exploit about oppression and the evils of capitalism. The leftist must oppose all that is, called “The Great Refusal”.

The New Left, in the 1960s and 1970s, consisting of Marcuse inspired activists in the Western world campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, radical environmentalism, sexual liberation, feminismgay rightsgender role issues like the transgender movement, and campaigned against drug laws.

The New Left campaigned against the Vietnam War, for instance. Why? Because it was unjust or unfair? No, because we were fighting a communist government. If North Vietnam had a king instead of a communist leader there would have been no problem. They will always protect their own.

While sane people were trying to limit pollution so we had clean air to breathe and clean water to drink the communists were screaming about, first, a new ice age coming because of mankind, then it was global warming, and then when the data supported one and then the other and then neither one they called it climate change and used it to justify government control of every aspect of our lives.

Violent radicals in the 1960s were disconnected from mainstream America, though. Finally, in the 1970s, groups associated with the New Left increasingly became central players in the Democratic Party and thus in mainstream American politics. So, here we are today.

What I’ve told you is right from the leftists’ writings. I didn’t make it up. There is a great documentary on Marcuse from years ago on youtube called simply, “Documentary on Herbert Marcuse (1996). There is another great one called The 60s Radicals America Forgot.

Those radicals from the 1960s had a profound impact on our already damaged society in the 30 years after World War Two. You have so-called Christian couples today thinking it’s okay to shack-up because of the movement’s influence.

Marcuse and the inheritors of the New Left movement have given us Critical Race Theory and the simmering sewage that underlies American society today.

Why have I gone to the trouble of giving you this? Aren’t our problems just spiritual, based on man’s sin nature, his fallen state? Certainly, they are. But there is an army of unwitting revolutionaries out there, many in your own family, some in here even maybe, that would do their part maybe unknowingly to destroy traditional morality, our history, our values, our ability to make a living and support our families, and the very concepts of individual liberty and responsibility to make us dependent on eventually a global communist, totalitarian government.

What is their goal? The academics, the thinkers, the politicians, and the, as we say today, influencers? The ordinary person isn’t thinking of this I am sure. But the influencers are definitely.

Of course the communist goal is to tear down America to the ground; all the institutions, cultural standards, and history and rebuild it in a distorted utopian fantasy which, as we have seen all around the world, always winds up being a totalitarian nightmare.

What do we look for to see the proof of what I am saying?

Judges 17:6  In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

We live in a community, in a nation, among other people. We do not have the privilege or the right to do exactly what we please regardless of the consequences.

There are even people who regard themselves as Conservatives who go on and on about their rights as if they were completely independent of the duties those rights presented. Our Founding Fathers recognized our God given rights as carrying with them fundamental duties that oversee our enjoyment of those rights. I would refer you to Russell Kirk’s great work for any conservative Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Constitution.

How do you know who you are dealing with in regard to these people?

Isaiah 5:20  Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Understand that these people regard their collectivist dream of no private property and equal outcomes for everyone with their elite ruling us as moral and good. They regard you and I as immoral and evil because we have faith in God, believe in good and evil based on the Bible’s principles, and uphold the traditional institutions of our country like marriage and family as sacrosanct. We believe in personal responsibility and accountability and in self-reliance as much as that is possible and NOT being dependent upon a government, local or global. In fact, they believe in all of those ideas as being immoral and racist even. They say so.

In fact, they believe any restrictions on what they want to do as being oppressive and tyrannical. They would have no problem shipping you off to a prison or worse because of who you believe in. Remember what Christ said about the religious elite of His day on earth.

John 16:2  They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.

The communist is really big on bringing up the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Democracy which they purposely call “our Democracy” but they mean different things to them than they do to you.

The head of the Soviet Union, Communist Russia, for thirty years was a bloodthirsty tyrant named Josef Stalin. He also believed in Democracy but it was Democracy-by-proxy where the peoples’ vote was simply a rubber stamp for the rule of an enlightened elite. Just think of the recent Covid epidemic.

Speaking of an elite, a socialist, elected dictator named Adolf Hitler ruled over the first and only successful Fascist government in Germany where free speech was not allowed just like in Soviet Russia and no opposition was permitted as in Soviet Russia and where the people had no rights except those permitted by the state, as in Soviet Russia. Many scholars referred to Soviet Russia as Red Fascism because the end result was the same for the common man, totalitarian rule over every aspect of their lives. It’s all about absolute government control.

In our country today you can’t compromise with these people. The communist philosophy is that there must be continual conflict. It is so much so that any concession you make, any compromise, is not enough, will never be enough, because their goal is not a better country but a total destruction of the country’s institutions, morals, values, and history to create their own twisted version of a better world. Marx acknowledged that there must be perpetual revolution. They constantly move the goalposts.

Like the devil character in Goethe’s Faust they believe that, “Everything that Exists Deserves to Perish.” I heard a speaker even say that at a Transgender Marxism lecture on youtube.

I’m taking this verse out of context because it applies so well here;

2Corinthians 3:17  Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

Under the third-generation New Left doctrine, and yes, it is a religion some of them call Neo-Marxism and some of them call Cultural Marxism things we hold dear like free speech and toleration are emblems of oppression. When they say your spreading the gospel makes them feel unsafe they don’t mean that they are afraid you are going to hit them. What they mean is that anytime someone speaks contrary to what they believe they feel threatened verbally and don’t feel safe. They do not want you to speak unless you parrot their twisted dogma. They will not tolerate you because you are not exactly like them.

There is no point in trying to make sense of them.

The Neo-Marxists that are trying to take over this country don’t want Equal Opportunity, the promise of your founding documents. They want Equal Outcomes, the basis of communism.

The people that are crushing this country don’t want abortion as a right to exercise in a dire and horrible circumstance like rape or incest or a medical condition but what they are demanding at their core is the undiluted right to execute their unborn children for ANY reason or no REASON at all.

They don’t just want clean air and water and as little pollution as possible. They want government, a global government, to tell you how many miles you can drive, what kind of vehicle you can operate, and truthfully if you are limited to driving on certain days and for certain distances in an unreliable battery operated car that might catch fire and explode, the battery of which you will never be able to afford to replace, and they are fine with that.

Broken and old windmill turbines, electric cars and batteries, etc. are more damaging on the environment to create and to dispose of than any imagined benefit will provide.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with God and I am concerned about one of the possible meanings of the last part of this verse.

Revelation 11:18  And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

But so-called green energy as it stands today is not the answer. It is only a more difficult question. And it is not, at its core, about a clean planet but about global domination and control.

We live in a world that is being taken over by communism as its tendrils move across the earth. Even Islamic fundamentalism is a child of Marxist thought. From a book advocating violent overthrow of what the communist considers oppressive government and capitalism I found this;

"The Shite revival of the 1960s and 1970s, which developed into the Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, was based on a revision of Shiite doctrine influenced by Marxism and committed to the ideology of Third World liberation.”

The World Economic Forum, which advocates global governance on their website and who have one of the authors of their agenda, Joe Biden, advocates a Great Reset of the worldwide economy. Klaus Schwab, director of the World Economic Forum, in a podcast in 2020 as I have listened to, advocates what is clearly a worldwide socialist agenda including redistribution of wealth as called for by socialists.

We are called by Christ to do certain things.

Luke 6:31  And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

This is called popularly The Golden Rule and it is fundamental to Christian thinking and behavior. What do the Marxists in today’s society, the communists who have taken over our culture, say? They refer to something they call The Platinum Rule which is supposed to be more valuable and of a higher level of morality and ethics. It briefly says, do unto others as they would want to be done to them.

This wicked philosophy tells you that even if the other person is engaged in a wicked sin you must offer them encouragement in that sin by rendering to them not what Christ wants you to but what they want you to. This means, for example, that you must acknowledge their rejection of the gender they were born into if necessary and that you must avoid at all costs insulting someone with Biblical morality. Even calling someone who was born as a he a he, or him, if they wish they were a her, is considered ideologically unsafe, an insult and a lack of compassion that harms the person, and is, in fact, violence against that person.

Isaiah 59:14  And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.

I have hope for some of these people. Why? Because of how God dealt with me. Your thinking can be changed. As an example when I first became a Christian and attended a Southern Baptist Church I believed that any Bible was a Bible and that the King James was just one of them and maybe not the very best but one that had special historical significance. It only took a heathen, in an internet argument where I had proudly said, “The Bible says,”, to ask me, “Which Bible? They all say different stuff.” From then on as I realized what he said was true and I had no answer, that I had to find out which Bible was authoritative. I had not even considered the question but God spurred me, provoked me to examine Bible manuscript evidence, the writings of the early church fathers, and the history of Bible versions and translating methods. My mind was changed. A pastor in Florida named Peter Ruckman who had undergone a similar experience back in the late 1940s and 50s, was a huge help as he had written extensively on the subject pointing me in certain directions. I was also influenced by a Dr. Gail Riplinger, whose extensive research made it very clear which Bible was God’s Bible. But, I had to do my own research to get where God wanted me to be.

Sometimes a light can go off when we think about a thing in a way we are not used to thinking or if we step away from how we have allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated.

The important thing is that you do not let people just tell you stuff without researching it, praying about it, and thinking about it. Our country and culture has been hurt by passive consumerism. There are passive consumers of medicine, of goods and services, of politics, and, yes, of religion, who just want to be told what to think and don’t care to do any mental work themselves. We are warned, though, in a figure of speech linking culturally believed traits of snakes as crafty and cautious and doves as unthreatening and innocent….

Matthew 10:16  Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

At one time I believed much of what they believed. As an idiot, a 17 year old going far off to college, in one of the biggest mistakes my parents ever made, I believed in every liberal thing that the Vietnam era provided noodle-brained children who thought they were wise and understanding. I didn’t become a conservative thinker until 1992, 15 years after I left that den of iniquity called a university. I know that change of heart is possible and that, as Jesus said in Matthew 19:26, all things are possible with God.

So, let’s pray for those poor, deluded fools who have no more understanding of reality than a rock. Let’s pray for repentance and salvation for them. Let’s pray that God changes hearts and changes minds and saves sinners from Hell. It is God’s desire, in His heart of mercy.

1Timothy 2:4  Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

But, also, we must oppose them politically in every way we can. Your vote matters. Your participation in the political process is of vital importance. Get involved if you can on a local level. Know the Constitution. Understand laws. Be alert and be wise.

Most of all though obey God, do what you need to do to strengthen your family. Know what you believe and as importantly why you believe it. Every man, woman, and child in here should have some idea of why they believe what they believe and, “just because” is not an answer.

I ask you to know who your enemy is, what he or she really wants. For instance, I want to repeat when it comes to abortion you must understand that concerns about allowing it for cases of rape or incest is a smokescreen the communists put up. The issue of abortion for them is about the unalienable right they think they have to kill their unborn at any time for any reason or no reason at all. This radical bodily autonomy, this “I’ll do what I want with my body,” does not extend to you refusing to take an experimental drug as a defense against a Chinese communist bioweapon funded by the U.S. government, however.

I don’t expect or even need anyone to agree with me completely. Whether you disagree with my conclusions or my interpretation of the facts you surely can see that we live in a revolutionary age and in a very desperately dangerous time. I just wish you a walk with Christ that will give you confidence and boldness as you face a hostile world much like the early Christians did.

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