The Apocalypse, An Exposition of the Book of Revelation

I have become so throughly sickened with politics that I have decided to withdraw completely from the whole process. Since I was eighteen years old I have not missed an election. I felt that it was a patriots duty to do his part and get his man elected. It has taken me a long time to learn my lesson, but I have learned it well. Actually this is not the first election I have missed, but they have all been in resent years. This year and forever more I will not contribute to the worlds designs for Peace, Safety, and Prosperity. My sight has come to me slowly, but it has arrived. Although what I see makes me ill, I choose this sight, over blindness. I know what some of you are thinking, if he doesn’t vote then he can’t complain, and you are absolutely right. Should we Christians complain anyway? Are we really entitled to vote, being citizens of a different country? I have found that the Christian vote is nothing more than man playing God. Where does our Peace come from? Is it something that is achieved by voting correctly? or living correctly? My withdrawal is complete, except for what I receive from the internet, no more television, or radio, or newspaper. I love my new freedom.

All the work of the religious right has not accomplished a single thing to improve this world, and evil is winning out after all. Who would have thought that James Dobson would not have influenced enough people to change the world for good by his Focus On The Family? And now he wonders if there will be another generation of the religious right. Who would have imagined twenty years ago that the Moral Majority would become the moral minority? Who would have guessed that D. James Kennedy with his gainsaying for the recovery of righteous America would not have turned the tables on the Devil? None of this has been realized and Satan remains the undisputed Prince of this world. Is it possible that our focus should have been elsewhere, like holiness, and righteousness, and not leading marches on Washington? Is it possible that the great American debacle is the consequences of immoral Christian men preaching a personal peace and prosperity, under the banner of a “better America” instead of preaching the cross and self crucifixion. We have gotten what we deserve and I was part of the problem.

Our enemies do not fear us anymore, why? Because our walls are all crumbled, and our doors burnt; the enemy slips in without resistance, and we “are made a prey.”  What’s to fear from a sleeping drunk? And, if he wakes, he’s not a threat. Our enemies don’t fears us, and our religion is a smoldering heap that stinks.  While modernity fights post modernity they both fall in the ditch. The sixties were a shot fired over our heads, they were a warning of things to come. You had to admire the young people of the sixties, they stood up against the establishment who could give no answers to why things were the way they were. They rejected the advice of there parents who could not answer the question, “why?” and were told that, “if it is good enough for me then it’s good enough for you.” Their offer of personal peace and prosperity, and the American dream, ended in anxious riots and unanswered prayers, and no one told them, why? So, they manufactured their own answers, their own way, but they were wrong, all wrong. Now, my generation is that drunk man, always high on one form of drug or another, and the pendulum has came back again, and still there is no answer. The sixties were riding high on a “consensus” of assumptions, and today there are no assumptions at all left; this generation assumes no truth, no proposition, or absolutes, and really no hope, but what he can achieve or do for himself. The sad thing is that the answer has been there all along and we have missed it, and are missing it still.

Proverbs 16:7 “When a man’s ways please the Lord, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.”

Below is a sermon by Joseph Augustus Seiss, a Lutheran Preacher of days gone by, with a vision for us today. I found his words in an archive on the internet. They are words that ring with force, and echo into the emptiness of our Postmodern world. The pendulum will not always swing, it is predicted. Some chosen generation will see it all stop, and have to deal with the consequences of all that went before them, unless they can see, that the answer is so close.

“Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked—I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see . . . .” (Revelation 3:17-18).
Steve Blackwell

The Apocalypse, An Exposition of the Book of Revelation
“Not yet has the sovereignty of this world become the Lord’s (Ref.   Revelation 11:15:  ‘The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!’).  All earthly governments, principalities, and powers, from the beginning until now, are uniformly represented in the Scriptures as wild beasts, having no lawful owner, and full of destructive savageness and offensive uncleanness.  A lion with eagle’s wings, a bear crunching bones and flesh, a four-winged and four-headed leopard, a nondescript with many horns, dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth to devour and break in pieces; these are the prophetic symbols of the greatest and most lauded of them. (Cf.    Rev. 13:1-2; Daniel 7:2, 7; Rev. 12:3, 9; Dan. 7:8; 11:36; Rev. 17:3; 13:4, 12)

“Even the premiership of Daniel himself in one of them does not alter its general character.  It is but folly and fanaticism for men to talk of Christian states and governments in this world.  Christian and good men may be concerned in their administration, and Christian ideas may sometimes temper their enactments, but earthly states and governments themselves are not Christian, and in the nature of things cannot be.  They are all the products of devastated nature’s wilds, and full of savage nature’s passions and ungodliness.  Fix it as we may, such is the result.  The best-planned institutions and the wisest laws are ever disappointing their framers.  The very law which God Himself promulged from Sinai’s thunder-shaken heights was ‘weak through the flesh,’ and did not serve to keep the Jewish commonwealth from like apostasy to that of other nationalities.  To this hour there is nothing so great a desideratum among men as good and just government, nor another department in which the native evilness and God-antagonizing passions of men are so potent and defiant.

“True, the kingdom is by right the Lord’s.  All authority and power originates with Him and belongs to Him.  Government is His own ordinance.  But since the apostasy of the race to Satan’s standard, usurpation, falsehood, and other powers than the rightful sovereign of men and nations, have held and directed the sway in this world.  Many revolutions have been wrought, and men have labored, and sacrificed, and bled, and died to achieve them, believing that now they would secure the precious boon for which the race has signed and cried for ages; but it was only the turning of the sick man on his bed, who keeps his pain however he may change his place.

“In our day especially people are looking and laboring for a grand jubilee of nations, shaped to popular rule, and compacted by common laws, interests, and creed, in which enlightened ideas shall be the king, and all the world be one (Editor’s Note:  Seiss published his commentary in 1869-1881 in three volumes, but several American libraries give the year of publication as 1865 – all the more astounding since it is penned at the close of the American Civil War); but the result will be only a more horrible beast than any that preceded it, a leopard with bear’s feet and a lion’s mouth, full of heads and horns and names of blasphemy; the very embodiment of hell, whose infamies so outrage High Heaven as to bring the great day of God Almighty upon the world.  No, no; your revolutions, and reforms, and progress of liberal ideas, and overturning of old creeds, and grand conventionalities in revision of the Decalogue, and internationalities for the redemption of the world without Christ, and glorious philosophies ruling out a personal God and exalting self and passion in His place, and all your glittering ideals to which to reconstruct society and relocate the highest interests of man, much as they may promise, and successfully as they may draw the heart and energy of the world after them, are but the nurslings of Satan’s bosom in which this world lies, and the inspirations of his foul breath.

“Dream, and prate, and preach, and glory as men may, the devil is de facto the god and king of this world.  His mantle may be often changed, and every day may exhibit a new garb, but the presiding genius within is still and always the devil, with all his pride, and malice, and spoliating falsities.  And so it will go on, ‘wicked men and seducers waxing worse and worse,’ till the last trumpet sounds.

“But then shall come another order; not developed from below, but enforced with sudden and resistless power from above.  How, we will see when we come to consider the details of ensuing chapters.  Meanwhile, however, the fact itself is sure to the exultant voices in heaven.  God is king, and the sovereignty hath He given to His Son, Jesus Christ.  And having given the world six thousand years in which to choose and settle upon its proper allegiance, and finding after all only an intenser and more malignant apostasy, He causes the final trump to sound, breaks in with His Almightiness, and enforces His rightful dominion.  A kingdom comes which breaks in pieces, and consumes all other kingdoms, and stands forever.  Laws are given to be changed no more.  And the true Anointed reigns on earth in an empire of sinless, deathless life and peace, to the ages of the ages.  The government is changed.” (Joseph Augustus Seiss, 1823-1904, The Apocalypse, An Exposition of the Book of Revelation, Kregel, Inc., Grand Rapids, MI, p. 274.)